Connections between theology and the sciences can be explored
Mark Vernon explains that John Polkinghorne is not a god of the gaps theist-scientist. He’s a nature is underdetermined theist-scientist. That’s much more sensible, apparently.
…there is a possibility of giving an account of divine action within nature, which is compatible with science. It relies neither upon a God who intervenes outside the usual play of nature, nor seeks low-level causal gaps. Rather, God’s action could be viewed as analogous to top-down, emergent causation – particularly when it implies signs of purpose or intentionality.
He doesn’t explain why “God” is the right name for top-down, emergent causation, or how one is to reconcile that with the familiar “God” of the people who pray to it, but never mind – it’s all worthwhile, because it introduces us to the Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford. I didn’t know there was such a place, and now I do. Guess who has given it money? I bet you can’t.
The Ian Ramsey Centre is part of the Theology Faculty in the University of Oxford. It has the special aim of promoting high quality teaching and research in the exciting field of science and religion. Within the University the Centre runs a regular seminar series, bringing scientists, philosophers and theologians together to explore interests they have in common. The seminars are open to students and informed members of the public. In addition, the Centre sponsors regional conferences to encourage new networks through which connections between theology and the sciences can be explored. International workshops are organised to enhance the quality of courses on science and religion that are taught worldwide.
See, there’s another outfit with global reach.
Of course, one can guess without looking, so you lost the bet. But I do not see how Vernon has shown Polkinghorne to be not a god of the gaps theist-scientist. After all, as he says, so pellucidly: “As Polkinghorne puts it, science has not demonstrated that the universe is “causally closed”.” Vernon tells us that this is not an epistemological gap but an ontological one. However, I have news for Vernon, it’s an epistemological gap too, because, if science does demonstrate that the universe is ‘causally closed’ then the epistemological gap will be close too, as well as the ontological one. If it is not closed now, and can be, that is because there is something that we don’t know, but will know when science has demonstrated that the universe is causally closed. Quite aside from this, it is not obviously how it makes sense to fill this gap with god. So Vernon has scribbled for nothing, unless he actually manages to get ‘theist-scientist’ in circulation.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Thetis. Thetis said: who is the funder? RT @OpheliaBenson Connections between theology and the sciences can be explored http://dlvr.it/2dLTl […]
A God of the gaps is exactly what Polkinghorne proposes – it’s just that the gaps he’s chosen are really really tiny and far less likely to be filled by science than those preferred by the likes of ID proponents.
He likes to refer to the, “transpersonal reality of God.” As far as I can make out, ‘transpersonal’ simply refers to the category of human concepts which have a tangible meaning in life like, “the common good” or “justice” – ‘things’ which have an impact on human lives though they have no physical manifestation.
God certainly fits into this category but that makes God little more than a figment of the imagination which, like other “transpersonally real things” wouldn’t survive the extinction of humanity.
‘Chaos’ and ‘Emergence’ are highly technical terms which Vernon should not waffle about. For example, if leaves are floating downsteam in a turbulent river towards a two-arched bridge, you can’t, in practice, calculate which arch a given leaf will pass through. That’s because changing where a given leaf starts, or its speed of twirling, or the eddies near a particular pebble, by tiny tiny amounts that you can’t, in practice, measure will result in big changes in where the leaf goes a few metres downstream. That’s ‘chaos’. It does not for a moment imply that a supernatural agency chooses which arch to send your leaf through.
Likewise, you can know a lot about the structure of an individual nitrogen molecule. Just from that, you might not work out that the average separation between nitrogen molecules is related to how hard the molecules bang into the side of a flask you put them in, which ’emerges’ as what humans call ‘pressure’, and that variations in that pressure can form waves which human ears hear as ‘sound’. Again, that does not imply for a moment that a supernatural agency is enabling sound.
This is not a ‘god of the gaps’. The gaps aren’t there. And, as Ophelia says, even if they were, it would have nothing to do with (for example) Ratzi’s version of YHWH, which will turn a biscuit into bits of bleeding Jesus if an ordained celibate male intones the correct spell. I can asssure you that the molecular structure of the biscuit will not be affected at all by this top-down causation.
I always find it a bit irritating when people misuse the concept of “emergent behaviour” in order to insert a small god (there’s not exactly enough room for a large one).
The fact that one generally can’t feasibly derive laws of behaviour of an emergent system analytically from the laws of the underlying system does not mean that there’s any sort of gap in causation – you can (in principle at least) look at any part of the emergent process and see that everything is all chugging along fine according to the underlying laws.
More importantly, even if you did somehow open a gap in causality to allow for the actions of a god, that still wouldn’t explain the fact that no god of an interventionist, theistic bent is actually doing anything in that gap.
First why is it an exciting field and how exactly does science and religion become a field?
Second if, as so many have claimed, science and religion are different ways of knowing, then what could they have in common? Maybe it comes down to the only thing in common is enjoying a pint after the seminar.
Hmmmm – I wonder how many (new) atheists are informed.
Look, you can’t keep telling us that science and religion are orthogonal and answering different questions while also telling us there exists such a thing as ‘the exciting field of science and religion’.
I keep wondering that too, because I see it called that (‘it’ being the pair) more and more. I suppose the way it does it is by getting money from Templeton.
Seriously: Templeton is pretty much creating this absurd pseudo-field by talking about it and shoveling truckloads of money at it. It drives me nuts. There is no field. It’s like calling chemical engineering and Wicca a field.
Well, if you were intelligent yet continued to hold religious beliefs for whatever reasons – sociocultural, emotional etc. – surely you’d find the idea that you might be able to find a way to diminish the cognitive dissonance just a little bit exciting?
With Templeton money they can probably buy some land and called it ‘The Science and Religion Field’…
With Templeton money they can probably buy some land and called it ‘The Science and Religion Field’
I like that! I can see the picture now, Polkinghorne in the middle, labelled, “John Polkinghorne, esteemed theologist, outstanding in his field.”
Well, there’s such a field as philosophy of religion. One of the things that philosophy of religion studies is whether religion (of various kinds) is compatible with science (whether we mean the robust findings of science so far, or science as a set of methods for rational inquiry). Obviously there’s no consensus within philosophy of religion as to how religion stacks up against science. Many people in the field think the answer is “pretty damn poorly”. I remember being very impressed by Jack (J.J.C.) Smart’s reasons for thinking this, back when I was young, and it’s probably still worth going back to his writings from the 1960s. And there’s plenty of stuff around today to the same effect.
The annoying thing is that we see this spurious “field” of science and religion studies, or whatever it is, being created as a way of taking the issues out of the philosophy departments where are studied by philosophers of religion who are often atheists or religious sceptics (though even that field attracts a disproportionate number of religious believers compared with other areas of philosophy, for reasons that are fairly obvious).
The problem can then be studied by people who have a strong religious bias and can go around proclaiming that they have a scholarly consensus that – ta da! – “Science and religion are compatible!” This then fools nitwits who have never noticed that this other, well-established sub-discipline, philosophy of religion, has been there all the time, with no such consensus at all. E.g. Josh Rosenau totally fell for it recently.
All very cross-making, but I’m not sure what can be done. One thing is to encourage more bright young people into (real) philosophy of religion, which looked like a moribund field at one point but certainly isn’t now. But the effect of that takes time. Sniping from our blogs is another thing that we can do, and I’ll doubtless do some of it myself, but it would be nice to do more.
Obviously, we could do a lot more if we had zillions of dollars behind us. It’s much easier when you have loads of money to set up friendly academic chairs, fund lots of intellectuals who are on your side, get big research grants to the right people, fly folks around to the right places, make it happen that the right books get published and that the right message goes out through the media, and so on. Unlike Templeton, CFI, RDFRS, etc., don’t have loads of money. If they did, I’d be knocking on their door asking them to support my work. Instead, it’s more a matter of me donating small amounts to them when I can (not that I’ve actually given RDFRS anything). The flow goes in the wrong direction.
So, the whole struggle of ideas becomes an uneven one when the money is all with one side. Just what we do about it in the longer term, I don’t know. It would be nice if we had a billionaire or two ready to put up some loot for the cause of reason, but we evidently don’t.
Now and then I wonder whether I should just go and apply for some Templeton money myself, since the Templeton folks are supposed to be so open to research findings that don’t necessarily support theism. But, even apart from ethical issues to do with the effect of lending my name to them, there’s the practical point that I now have too high a profile as a very unTempletonian person.
But I’m starting to wonder about whether some of our younger allies who don’t yet have public profiles should be prepared to do some supping with the devil …
Ophelia (may I?) , I think overstating the influence of Templeton on this matter is unreflective of the facts on the ground. It is certainly uncharacteristic of you to suggest something like the science and religion pairing has been “created” by a 20th century billionaire investor who had an open mind toward the unknown, and saw a need to consider what we know about the divine.
It sounds like, “case closed” is the only answer, when it seems to me, that there is a legitimate need for the religious to reform …
Our greatest institutions of higher education have seminaries attached to them, as do all the great centers of learning though out the world, and I can’t think of one that doesn’t “arise” in the context of a faith. So we have this “past” … which as Faulkner said, isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.
Because of this, we will always bear the stamp of our religious origins, one day it will hopefully be invisible like our tail. We have to evolve, and we have to start with what we got. Nature just doesn’t work by “scrapping everything” and starting over, it works by adaptation and evolution. Our continual “Christianity means X” is really silly, especially since we aren’t Christians.
Do we serve self understanding, by denying, or minimizing (as happens here) the role (often powerful) of religion in human lives and communities, or with this “root of all evil” sort of thing. Is there not, a necessity of sitting down with the religious and accepting that they need to come to terms with “reality”?
Every time “we” come up with a new finding, they have to “on board it”, and that unfortunately means that they want to “talk about it”.
Do you agree that we are indeed pushing into areas of ethical difficulty – and science doesn’t tell us what we should do, no matter how much we want to run the is/ought debate. It is not absurd to think of ourselves as children that are joyriding in the planet.
It does us no harm to acknowledge the pain and struggle believers are having with this God thing, even as we pound the living daylights out of them, and pull their DNA apart, and wait to hear how they go on deciding what to do with their children we are keeping frozen in the IVF lab.
Please, none of my militancy :-) on your blog should be taken to mean “shut up”, or shilling for Mooney’s brand of shut up.
Shorter Vernon: because we don’t know the universe with complete precision, therefore your god is possible. No – not a g-d of the g-ps at all.
Ho hum.
Scott,
Religion can’t tell us what to do either – it has no authority to do so. You are missing the point here, as many of us have pointed out – we know things exist that science can’t currently answer – we also know that religion can’t answer them either and most likely never will.
This is nothing new, but unfortunately for the theists, they seem to have lost the argument every time.
To illustrate, and have a good laugh, look here: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm
Where the believers say that the physical sciences are going to lose it in favour of religion, very soon – every few years from 1825 to the present. They don’t seem to have got the message, yet!
Certainly a god of the gaps theology in spite of things. One of the most interesting family of problems in science (and metaphysics, etc.) is understanding how emergence works in various cases (and in general). Also, the bit about “we don’t know if the universe is causally closed” – even if we grant that ludicrous premiss, that’s *explicitly* a gap in knowlege. Oops.
Whether supported by Templeton or not, there is something just a bit alarming about a ‘field of study’ simply labelled ‘science and religion’. It’s attractiveness to those wh0 are religiously committed is fairly obvious, for it tends to place science and religion, epistemologically, at any rate, on a level playing field. Yet, surely, the first requirement for the existence of any such field is to provide some evidence that, epistemologically, religion and science are on all fours, and it is quite clear that this cannot be, or at least has not, been done.
This is not, as Scott suggests, simply being sympathetic to “the pain and struggle believers are having with this God thing.” In fact, suggesting that there is such a field is in fact to short circuit the whole process of coming to terms with the ‘god thing’, without doing the hard philosophical work of determing just what standing, amongst what we might call ‘objective disciplines’ (that is, those that provide reasonably solid grounds for making claims to some kind of objective truth), religion (and its ‘ology’) possess.
Roger Trigg, a philosopher, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Ian T. Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion. He concludes a 1983 paper on religion and relativism with these comments:
Of course, now he is writing things such as Religion in Public Life: Must Faith be Privatised?, and is now working on a book on religion and freedom, with the support of the Templeton Foundation — of course! One wonders if the question of religious truth got lost somewhere along the way, or whether simply making a claim to religious truth is enough to establish its bona fides as a department of human knowledge. Astrologers make claims to truth, but they are not particularly compelling, and, last time I looked, anyway, there was not Department of Astrology at local universities.
Claims have been made in plenty, but there is no acceptable answer to the question of religious truth, but since, as Scott says, seminaries and theological schools are already a part of many educational establishments, this question is prematurely taken to be already answered, and ‘research’ (of all things) is already being done into the relationship of religion and science. There can be no such relationship — aside from questions of religion’s intrusion into spheres where it does not belong, and the effects of that intrusion — unless the prior question of the claim of religion to be dealing with objective truth is answered. To my knowledge it has not been. Roger Trigg and his colleagues must not be permitted to forget the point that Trigg himself made three decades ago about the future of religion being in jeopardy without providing some answer to the question of religion and objectivity, and all Templeton’s (or anyone else’s) money should not be allowed to occlude this basic question.
The point about such institutions as the Oxford Centre for Religion and Science is, I am afraid, that they cut the Gordian knot of the question of religious truth and jump straight to questions which depend for their answer on this precise question. Before religion and science can become a ‘field of study’, there must be some reasonably established answer to the question of whether and in what sense religion can be true. Without this answer the attempt to show a relationship between religion and science is just another example of religious hubris.
Russell, quite…and I keep wondering how Templeton manages to have so much money. They give large sums to truly vast numbers of projects and conferences and people and institutions. Just one investor can pile up that much cash? I don’t get it.
scott, well overstating the influence of Templeton on this matter would be unreflective of the facts on the ground by definition – that’s what overstating means. But I don’t agree that I’m overstating the influence of Templeton. There really are a lot of these religion ‘n’ science thingies popping up everywhere, and it really is the case that when you see one the chances are very good that it gets Templeton money. I think there is a causal relationship there.
Is there “a necessity of sitting down with the religious and accepting that they need to come to terms with “reality”?” I don’t know – I think I’d rather do it standing up.
Maybe the Reason Project, CFI and RDFRS can get together and put a persuasive case to Bill Gates.
I’m not a scientist, and I’m afraid I don’t quite understand Polkinghorne’s hypothesis. Is there a place where he clearly lays it out, and indicates what it predicts, and which observations would support it, and which would not?
After all, if there is an exciting field of science and religion I assume Polkinghorne isn’t just playing another C.S. Lewis-style game of Analogy Making. “Maybe God exists the way you can’t tell the whole from just looking at the parts.” Maybe. Can’t be sure it doesn’t, can we? Can’t be sure what the hell you’re talking about, either. Another benefit: we’re involved in Mystery.
I think that, if you want to make religion scientifically respectable, you have to show why the God hypothesis is the best hypothesis. You have to make a persuasive case to the skeptics. Instead, this whole dodge of Polkinghorne’s looks to me like just another rationalization for not looking too obviously wrong, if you already believe you’re right. That probably conflicts with the scientific demand for intellectual honesty.
He’s a master of equivocation.
In his book, “Science and Christianity” (?) he tries to equate Darwin’s understanding of the evolution of biological complexity with the ‘fathers’ of the early church’s understanding of “the saving power of the death of Christ.”
His point being that Darwin understood without knowing all the facts (Mendelian genetics) so “his understanding outran his knowledge.” Therefore any old twoddle the early fathers came up with was OK, because they didn’t know all the facts either.
For someone who can view “biological complexity” and “the saving power of the death of Christ” as the same kind of thing the idea of a “field of science and religion” is easy.
Sastra, did you see Simon Blackburn’s review of two Polkinghorne books linked in Flashback? It might interest you.
Many people visiting here may be interested in this attempt by the NAS and National Research Council for a national science standard. This is a draft proposal seeking comments. I notice that in their panel of experts they include no philosophers of science. I would probably self-identify as a science educator these days and I have much indebted to individuals on these forums for philosophical clarification. Although definitions of science are important, so are definitions of religion – definitions often get overlooked and cause people to talk past each other especially in the science religion debates. For instance, Einstein often gets cited in support of the pro-accommodationist stance, but he is really just distinguishing is (science) versus ought (religion).
@ Ophelia #24:
Thanks. I wasn’t sure whether I’d already read the review or not, but as soon as I checked it out and saw the delicious bit in the first paragraph about it being “especially fizzy” to be a scientist-theologian in Cambridge, England I knew that yes, I had indeed read it — and then I read it again. I think it would be even more especially fizzy to be Simon Blackburn — or at least, write like him.
Polkinghorne is supposed to be one of the best of the sophisticated apologists out there. I suppose it all looks a lot more convincing if you’re already convinced, but imagining what it would be like if you weren’t. You’d be bowled over. Probably.
I’ve always been puzzled by “theist-deist-scientist” types. What do they think they’re going to find? Out of one side of their mouth, they propose a “top-down” god who displays intelligence. Out of the other side, they say that such a god need not violate science as we know it, and could fit parsimoniously into a naturalist worldview.
Pardon me, but no.
If a god is displaying intelligence and changing anything about the “natural order” of the universe, then it’s almost tautological — he is outside of the natural order of the universe. Which means he invalidates science by adding his own capricious whim to any endeavor he chooses. If a god either cannot or will not ever display capriciousness, then he is not intervening in a way that demonstrates intelligence. So why are we talking of him in those terms?
So it seems to me we’re right back to deism. Which is pointless.