Accommodationist and Proud of It, Part V: Science and Spirituality

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Today's entry was written by Michael Ruse. Michael Ruse is an author and philosopher of biology well known for his works on the creationism and evolution debate. Though not a believer in God, he takes the position that Christianity and evolution are not incompatible. Ruse's latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, published by Cambridge University Press, argues against the extremes of both creationism and "new atheism".

Intro: This blog post is the fifth entry in a series of excerpts from a recent autobiographical essay by Michael Ruse. The first of these posts can be found here. Between Ruse’s last entry and the excerpt that follows, Ruse’s essay discusses his “second foray into the science and religion field”, which was the publication of his book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle. In it, Ruse compares the philosophies and worldviews of evangelical Christianity and Darwinism. In the excerpt below, Ruse describes his third, and most recent contribution to the science-faith dialogue: Science and Spirituality.

A History of Science

I come to my new book, the third volume of the trilogy on science and religion: Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science. The argument in this book is simple –– indeed so simple I worry that others must have already made it. If they have not made it was it because it is obviously wrong? I shall soon find out. In the first part of the book, I give a historical account of science, showing how up to the time of the Scientific Revolution (16th and 17th centuries) the root metaphor that people used to think about reality was that of the world as an organism. Plato and Aristotle were definitive on this. Physical reality was in some sense living and that, for instance, is why talk of final causes was appropriate. You could ask about the function of a river, because it had to have one. Then came a new metaphor, namely that of the world as a machine. Physical reality was simply dead matter, or not really that, because it had never been living in the first place. I show how this metaphor first conquered physics, then biology (thanks in no small part to Darwin), and final psychology, in the form of the brain as computer sub-metaphor.

Questions We Can’t Ask

With the history done, I turn more philosophical, arguing that metaphors have strengths – they help you to organize things and they have terrific heuristic power – but also limits – there are questions that are not asked. Not just questions not answered, but not even asked. (You can see the influence of Thomas Kuhn here and what he says about paradigms, entities that in later writings he tied intimately to metaphorical thinking.) If I say my love is a red, red rose, I am saying nothing at all about her mathematical abilities – not unable to say, but not even asking about them.

Likewise I argue that the machine metaphor does not ask certain questions, that I insist are nevertheless genuine questions. Included here are why is there something rather than nothing, what is the ultimate basis of morality, what is consciousness (what is sentience), and does it all mean something and in particular does it mean anything to us humans. I don’t think science starts to answer these questions (and there may be more). I think you can be a skeptic on these matters – I just don’t know – but I argue that it is open for the believer, the Christian is what I talk about because that is the religion I know best, to offer solutions. Others don’t have to accept them, but that is their business.

What the Christian cannot do is encroach on the domain of science. That is why I offer no hope to the Creationist, because that position does clash with science. (Expectedly, I don’t have any time for those who would alter science to fit with Creationism.)

I should say that part and parcel of all of this is a strong feeling of discomfort about natural theology, understood in the sense of proving the existence of God through evidence and reason. I don’t think the arguments work but I don’t even want the arguments to work. It is all mixing science and religion in a way I dislike.

Additionally, because ultimately I think that the Christian position has to come down to faith – you believe these things through a kind of self-validating intuition or you don’t – I am with people like Kierkegaard and Barth who don’t like natural theology for theological grounds. They feel that for faith to be faith it must involve an unjustified leap into the unknown. Natural theology tries, illicitly, to put boards across the gap.

Barbour’s Four Divisions

The physicist Ian Barbour has proposed a four-way division of the possible ways in which the science-religion relationship might be construed. The first possibility is that of warfare. Science and religion are at war and that is all there is to the matter. This is the position of the New Atheists, as well as many religious people at the evangelical end of the spectrum. My feeling is that in respects science and religion are at war. You cannot be a Darwinian and a Creationist at the same time. You cannot accept the claims of modern anthropology that the native people of North American came more than ten thousand years ago across the Bering Straits and at the same time accept the Mormon claim that the native people are descended from the lost tribes of Israel.

A major point of my position, however, is that science does not have to be at war with all religion and that it is not necessarily at war with traditional Christianity.

Barbour’s second possibility is that of independence. Science and religion talk about different things and cannot clash. This is often known as the neo-orthodox position because it owes much to the theology of Karl Barth. The most recent major exponent was the late Langdon Gilkey. Obviously at an important level, this is my position. Where I differ from someone like Gould, who also embraced it in his Rocks of Ages, is that I want to give the religious person a great deal more than mere ethical sentiment. I think the Christian can hold to everything that he or she holds dear.

Barbour’s third and fourth positions expect a certain amount of interaction between science and religion. The third allows for dialogue between the two and a certain reaching across. The kinds of knowledge that the two claim may be different but not of such different type (as the independence positions claims) that they cannot overlap. I take it that the person who likes natural theology (the Thomist, for example) embraces this position. The fourth position is full-blooded integration of science and religion. I think someone like Teilhard de Chardin would fall into this category and also the process theologians influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

Obviously I am not a supporter of either of these positions, the fourth particularly. However, I do see the need to negotiate boundaries and for religion to respect science and if need be go with it. I don’t see how you could have a theological position today without in some wise taking evolution into account, for example. So perhaps in a way I do think that the third position is relevant also. The important thing is not to be dominated by Barbour’s categories but to use them for insight. And not to think that it must be one position only and all of the others are wrong.

Ruse's series continues here.