Christianity and the Children of Her Handmaid

Derek of Haligweorc just reposted an old essay of his on the intellectual collision of Christianity and the natural sciences with the preface that he tires of the collision being reconciled by two options: either the rejection of doctrinal orthodoxy or the rejection of the most basic and well-tested hypotheses of the natural sciences. Casual readers might think he was arguing for something on the lines of Gould's much vaunted and much critiqued Non-Overlapping Magisteria, but I think it's fairer to say that he expects Christian doctrine to inform how Christians put science and technology to use. As a reading of Job 38-41 might indicate, God syrely considers natural science and technology to constitute a gradual encroachment on his dominion. Christians understandably might think that there are doctrinal limitations on the extent of that dominion, especially with respect to the dominion of action (as opposed to knowledge unless the act of investigation is itself encroachment). For instance, some of my present research is covered by Job 38:35 (and some of it by other verses), but I'm far more interested in lightning telling me about itself rather than putting it to use myself. I'm rather wary of weather modification, both on practical and theological grounds.

Thus, Derek, I think, expects Christian doctrine and the natural sciences to be complementary magisteria and not merely in morals. It is C.S. Lewis' observation that the miracles of Christ involve the slowing and speeding up of the natural order rather than its distortion or destruction. Water under the proper conditions can become wine. Olive oil not so much. Doctrine and science are at least complementary in this sense. Without "the rules that govern the heavens or [those] that determine the laws of nature on the earth" (Job 38:33), which are the same rules, there would be no room for signs and wonders, for we would have no null hypotheses when faced with a personal and self-revelatory God. There would be no distinction between reproducible and irreproducible phenomena nor between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypotheses. In addition, Christian theology long has recognized analogy or even homology between the Divine Word in Christ, in Scripture, and in Creation. This pseudohypostatic union presupposes a harmony between them. The question of Christian theology at this point in history is not the substance of this proposition but its details.

In some sense, the conflict between Christianity and the natural sciences should not be unexpected. Natural science, as we know it, comes out of two great intellectual stirrings in western Europe: the post-Reformation Enlightenment (Newtonian physics, non-alchemical chemistry, and Linnaean biology) and the post-Revolutionary era (modern physics and evolutionary biology). Newton was one of great early Unitarians and Einstein was a major socialist activist. Their religious and political beliefs integrated well with their physical hypotheses. Newton argued stenuously with Leibniz against the importance of relationship and harmony in physical systems and instead stressed deterministic cause and effect to the extent that the close of Book III of the Principia was one of the great Deist manifestoes. Newton's physics allows a world not continually held in being by "the Love that moves, the sun, the stars" as Dante puts it but one that starts like a pinball machine without any love being required. Einstein's inclination toward socialism familiarized him with egalitarian thinking that suggested there were no privileged reference frames in physics.

Thus, when Christianity subsumed Greco-Roman philosophy by late antiquity, it sowed the seeds of a new philosophy that spurred a great number of viable physical hypotheses and axiomatic principles that shape modern natural science. The so-called central dogma of physics, which my more moderate agnostic and atheist friends will admit is an act of faith, states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. While generally treated as axiomatic, it is so far a very well-proven hypothesis. Yet its initial success depended on another act of faith: one in a God who guaranteed natural law by His almighty power, who had made both the heavens and the earth. This wasn't exactly the majority report in Christian doctrine before Newton, but when presented with evidence of corruption and change in the deep heavens, adaptation was inevitable. And the central dogma of physics is far more harmonious with Christian doctrine than the Aristotelian gradient theories about natural law. The progressive nature of sacred history surely inspired 19th century thermodynamics with its heat death of the universe and forward arrow of time.

In fact, I have seen arguments against the conclusions of the IPCC Reports on a similar basis, that the notion of humans progressively bringing themselves to apocalyptic catastrophe through sin is a doctrinal one, not justified by scientific evidence, which for the authors in question primarily describes cyclical change. The fact that the first head of the IPCC was Sir John Houghton, one of the UK's leading public Evangelicals (Anglican) (and a fine scientist), lends the necessary credence to this particular conspiracy theory. Global warming thus is a Christian Tory plot, which would be funny except that the editorial pages of Britain's newspapers often contain garbled versions of this particular fairy story.

The point is here not that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus etc. have not or cannot contribute to the natural sciences or their general intellectual direction. They have and will. The natural sciences owes a debt to the mathematics of Baghdad and the mystics of the Kabbalah. And the originally Christian egalitarianism and ontological universality that consumes the West makes it impossible to say that there is a human being who cannot be a natural scientist. Science is as free and intrinsically human as salvation. But Christian doctrine, by positing a God-created reality and a pseudohypostatic union between the process rather than the substance of the real, was well positioned to create the natural science we know today. Indeed, we are obsessed with the physics of our sacred rites (q.v. transubstantiation) and their resultant chemistry (transubstantiation again, ontological change in Baptism, Holy Orders etc.) like no other religion on earth. Though, of course, some of us would prefer we stop obsessing about these subjects.

One intermediate word about quantum physics: the fundamental idea of quantum physics is the reduction of laws to probabilities at small scales. Derek is right that it is going to take some time for this idea to percolate into our general cognition. If it ever does. As I pointed out to two of my colleagues recently, though, quantum inflation satisfies creation ex nihilo , though creation by quantum inflation is highly troublesome to many because it does not imply God's love, omnipotence, intelligence, or coherence, only His randomness. But after all, this why we have Scripture and the Creeds. See what I mean about complimentary magisteria.

Now we come to how the pseudohypostatic union actually might work. The first solutions involve privileging one entity over the other. Most obvious is Fundamentalist Christianity and its backsliding cousins along the spectrum, which support young earth creationism. They are privileging a particular reading of the Book of Genesis over Creation, not only in attempt to maintain the inerrancy of Scripture but a very narrow soteriology (how does the Fall happen???). Neglecting arguments that scientists are godless frauds, their most interesting arguments posit inconsistencies in special relativity and atomic physics that suggest the central dogma of physics is historically invalid. The laws of physics 6,000 years ago were different than than today. Thus, young earth creationism is not merely a conflict between science and religion but really a complex panoply of doctrinal disputes within Christianity itself. And it would really be helpful if this were more public knowledge. Liberal Christianity often becomes the opposite extreme. I wonder what would happen if I told certain preachers, "I'm a very well-educated scientist, who finds the NT miracles quite plausible if and only if Jesus is the Son of God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Otherwise, I'm quite skeptical."

In the miscellaneous category, we have some conservative Catholics who think that Aristotle is still right, at least on special occasions. Yes, they exist. Or else this article makes no sense whatsoever .

Today, I mentioned in comments at Haligweorc that there were three Anglican options I knew of: John Donne, Joseph Butler, and Alister McGrath. I'm sure there are hints in other theologians of other or similar options, but these were the three that popped into my head. The key works are Donne's Essay on Divinity (note that this is not poetry but still quite poetic in places), Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (required reading for many 19th century American college students, which is why I read it as a student of philosophical curricula of that era), and McGrath's A Scientific Theology (whose epitome, The Science of God I have stuck amidst Bible, BCP, Hymnal, and Bede's Homilies on the Gospels). I don't have suitable access to the first two, though Analogy should be online.

Donne's harmony is a difficult one, possibly because the work seems addressed to particular viewpoints in early Jacobean London. On one hand, he quotes a very many chronologies for the world from a variety of sources (and clearly he hadn't heard of the 9 trillion year Hindu chronologies) but asserts that the Holy Scriptures are reliable in saying that the world began with creation by God. We are not in endless recurrence. But later it seems possible that he only can say there is uncertainty in the age of the Earth because there are inherent uncertainties in the interpretation of the Genesis chronology, for he says that if the numbers in the Bible are not right, we have no confidence in God's promises. My guess is that he is poking fun at an extreme Puritan position without directly angering the Puritans in question, whom he considered too obtuse to get the joke. But this passage appears to be an argument for non-literal interpretation. And if I am right, his general position is that apparent Biblical errancy relative to Creation (and history) must be considered to be of mystical significance.

Donne's position is unsatisfactory. Perhaps, AKMA's "Signifying Theology": the epilogue to his recent Faithful Interpretation is most convincing in this respect. AKMA sees harmony between theology and exegesis in Christ, who literally expounds God through every aspect of His life. AKMA has a variety of rather technical and particular things to draw from this insight but what concerns us is this passage:

...but it is the recollection of the unanimous teaching of Scripture, the saints, and reason itself that the Truth transforms lives that acknowledge its truth.

Finally, the signifying practices to which exegesis and theology lend complementary energies may arguably point to a consummation in the church's signifying practice par excellence: the Eucharist, which is 'an essential action,' not 'an isolated presence or merely illustrative symbol.'"

And indeed AKMA's primary inspirations, Maurice de la Taille and the Gospel of John, are good places to look to understand the deep importance of the pseudohypostatic union I keep positing. But the key point is that Donne's position logically might be taken to the extreme that the Gospels (particularly the miracles and the Great Acts of Resurrection and Ascension) are stories about what Jesus meant rather than stories about things that Jesus did that expound His life in God. But AKMA and de la Taille warn us otherwise. If we expect actual encounter with the Living God in our own lives through the conduit to Christ in the sanctuary not made with human hands, we must expect that Jesus' life was filled with genuine encounter between the world and God through mystery and miracle. This is a sentiment as old as the Apostle who warned us, "If Jesus is not risen, then we are most pitiable." But AKMA speaks even more deeply to me.

Butler, writing a hundred years later than Donne post Newton, argues that there is a religion that may be empirically inferred from nature that becomes corrupted by our fallen human nature to the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity. He even reasons out their basic principles such as the immortality of the soul and a future system of rewards and punishments. He then argues that Christianity is the revealed religion most consistent with these natural principles. Butler's general intellectual orientation may appear familiar. Not only is Butler a key part of the natural theological tradition that influenced Darwin and which he only rejected in part. (I have a lovely essay in college on the subject.), but the eventual goal of the Intelligent Design movement is a Butlerian argument, in which mankind is the culmination of a particular kind of designer, whose characteristics may be derived from biological and physical creation, and who is most likely the Christian God (and not Allah or an extraterrestrial or a Mouse and Disco Ball or an entity with Noodly Appendages). The basic argument itself may not be original to Butler. Alister McGrath cites a slightly earlier work of Thomas Tindal in the same vein. But it had many refiners and imitators, including early scientists of importance such as Joseph Priestley and William Whewell.

Butler's position is problematic in that it insists on an empirically derivable religion consistent with Christian truth. It puts too far to the side questions of why such a religion can be recovered in a fallen world, limited both by our own fallenness and the potential fallenness of nature and why Christianity should be harmonious with a religion meant for man before the Fall when the Fall and the Incarnation is generally assumed to change God's original plans for humanity. So far intelligent design has fallen on the central dogma of physics and an inherent notion of divine economy as William Whewell puts it in his Bridgewater Treatise and Darwin quotes,

"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."

Intelligent design still has a theological case to make, not just a scientific one. It must explain why and to what extent the world was punctuated by such insulated interpositions of Divine power before the Fall. It also must explain what role revelation plays in salvation history in this case and how design is maintained in a fallen world, but this juncture brings us to McGrath.

McGrath is a third option and much of the first paragraphs of this essay are shaped by his position, though I held much of it well before I read anything of his. A priest friend of mine in high school was McGrath's student at Wycliffe Hall, but I have had to infer this in later life from an offhand comment that the head of his theological college had two doctorates in theology and (bio)physics. McGrath observes the pseudohypostatic union, "the same divine rationality that that is embedded in creation is embodied in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate [emphasis his]" (q.v. Thomas F. Torrance...or Bonaventure, Augustine, Cappadocian Fathers) and concludes that Christian theology is by first principles required to be in dialogue with the natural sciences. Since he's at Wycliffe Hall, we can assume that the analogy/homology with Scripture is given. (He mentions it every once in a while). And the rest of the work is trying to explain how that dialogue might take place procedurally. Since I am quite exhausted, I'll leave those details to my next entry.

So until next time, the Holy Brothers leave you with U2:

You speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
But I'm waiting on the crumbs from your table