Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

During the past year the first results were published from the "Encyclopedia of DNA elements" project ('ENCODE'), revealing that at least 20 percent of the genome, perhaps more, is involved in regulating the expression of its 21,000 protein-encoding genes. The "selfish gene" had its day in the sun, but has now been replaced by the image of a finely tuned genomic system in which each type of gene product cooperates via an intricate networking complex to generate the music of life. The vast array of epigenetic signals whereby genes are switched on or off ensures a steady flow of two-way communication between the genome and its wider environments.

The human as a complex, interactive and highly integrated system might not on the face of it seem a fruitful hunting ground for those who see the genes as pulling the strings of life. Nevertheless, the past year has continued to see a growing love affair between the social sciences and genomics. This is well illustrated by a recent article in Nature entitled: "The anatomy of politics -- from genes to hormone levels, biology may help to shape political behavior." The author writes that "An increasing number of studies suggest that biology can exert a significant influence on political beliefs and behaviors," reporting that "genes could exert a pull on attitudes concerning topics such as abortion, immigration, the death penalty and pacifism." The political scientist John Hibbing is quoted as saying that "...it is difficult to change someone's mind about political issues because their reactions are rooted in their physiology."

Geneticists have highlighted the suspect nature of such claims from a purely scientific perspective. But in our present context it is the way that the genetic results are reported that is most striking. Note the dualist language involved and its assumption of genetic determinism. Genes and physiology are seen as something different from "us" and "our mind," and they seem to be controlling us, so we can't even change our mind. Humans are presented as pawns of their biology, puppets dancing to the tune of their genetic masters.

What has all this to do with the "big idea" concerning human identity that the Imago Dei provides? More, it turns out, than initially meets the eye. The clash of ideas here between theology and science comes not at the level of the science itself, which, in this case, remains ambiguous and disputed, but at the level of the ideological packaging of scientific ideas. To see where the clash comes from, we first need to understand the revolutionary nature of the Imago Dei idea in its original context in the texts of Genesis.

For millennia it was uniquely the pharaoh or the king who was seen as being in the "image of a god" in the polytheistic political systems of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Adad-shum-ussur, a court astrologer and cultic official in the seventh century B.C. royal court of Nineveh, made clear that the Assyrian king Esarhaddon is the very image of Bel (Marduk), the top god of that era:

A (free) man is as the shadow of god, the slave is as the shadow of a (free) man; but the king, he is like unto the (very) image of god.

Richard Middleton provides further examples in his book, The Liberating Image, which describes how the stratified urban society of great cities such as Babylon was structured politically, socially and economically round the king's court and the cultic practices of temple worship of the various polytheistic deities of the city. Social destinies were unchanging because rooted in powerful creation myths. Power was in the hands of the privileged few and true freedom belonged only to the king, for only he was in the image of a powerful god.

Would Hebrew thinkers and writers have been familiar with this idea? Almost certainly, yes, since Israel had significant cultural and economic contact with both Egypt and Mesopotamia over prolonged periods, not least during their periods of exile. So how would the original readers of that wonderful theological essay, Genesis chapter 1, have understood these words?:

Then God said, "Let us make adam [humankind] in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created adam in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [Genesis 1:26-27].

In its historical context, the implications were revolutionary: the kingly and priestly male roles previously allocated to the privileged few by a pantheon of gods were now being delegated instead by the one creator God to the whole of humanity, male and female. In a stroke the entire ruling and priestly structure of Mesopotamian society was delegitimized. The Imago Dei was being democratized and it was now humankind who were to be the significant players in the arena of earthly life, the mandate to rule underlying their new responsibilities. Above all, humanity was set free by the one true God to determine their own destiny, no longer under the yoke of all-powerful dictators, nor under the baleful astrological control of the moon and stars.

Yet, ever since, humans have become experts at re-enslaving themselves, refusing the responsibilities that come with free-choice and submitting instead to narratives of fate and destiny. It seems ironic that today it is not the creation myths of ancient Babylon but the ideological interpretations of biology that provide the narratives of fate, in which genes "pull" humans toward certain political views and people cannot change their minds because their convictions are "rooted in their physiology."

"It's in his or her DNA" is a new phrase becoming increasingly embedded in our language, referring to something that cannot apparently be changed. On Sept. 8, 2012, Brad Pitt was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying that "America is a country founded on guns. It's in our DNA. It's very strange but I feel better having a gun." No it's not in our DNA, Mr. Pitt, either literally or metaphorically. People have choices -- they are the prisoners neither of their genetics, nor of their physiology, nor indeed of their environments. Human beings made in the image of God are free to chart their own destiny in a way that preserves human value and dignity. On that we can leave the last word to Abraham Lincoln: "...nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows" (Aug. 17, 1858).

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive end.

Important scientific theories invite philosophical and theological reflection. Dawkins, Ruse, and Wilson, have described their conclusions. But scientific theories are often compatible with multiple philosophical and religious interpretations. For example, Newton's laws of motion and gravity allow several competing theistic and atheistic interpretations.

To avoid Ruse and Wilson's philosophical conclusion, we need not dispute their scientific hypothesis about how morality evolved. We need only dispute their philosophical extrapolation as to why morality exists. Even if we restrict ourselves to an atheistic worldview, this extrapolation is questionable. Donald MacKay (1965) would call this an example of "the fallacy of nothing but-tery". This is the assertion that a description of something at one level renders other levels of description meaningless. From our everyday experience, we know that a successful description on one level does not invalidate other levels of description. For example. one might assert that a Shakespeare sonnet is "nothing but" ink blots on a page (MacKay 1965). True, one way to describe a sonnet is to precisely specify the page coordinates of every ink blot. This description is valid and complete on its own level; however, one could also analyze the sonnet linguistically, emotionally, socially, historically, and on other levels. If one is programming an inkjet printer, the most important description is in terms of ink blot coordinates. For almost every other purpose in life, however, that is an unimportant level of description. In the same way, a complete evolutionary description of the existence of morality does not necessarily invalidate the truth, utility, or significance of other levels of description of morality.

If we do not restrict ourselves to atheism and instead allow for the existence of a creator, the extrapolation from how morality evolved to why morality exists fails further. Consider an analogy. Suppose an inventor builds a robot which could do a variety of useful things-- mow the lawn, clean the house, grade homework, write book chapters, and so on. One thing this robot can do, given a complete set of spare parts, is build a replica of itself. Whenever the inventor needs another robot, she gives one robot a set of spare parts and has it build a replica of itself. Amongst all the software subroutines within this robot, there is a set of subroutines that govern the robot's self-replication, including the replication of those self-replication subroutines. Would it be correct to say that the purpose of the robot's existence is merely to reproduce those particular self-replication subroutines? Do all of the other software and hardware of the robot--which allow it to mow the lawn, and so on-- merely further the reproductive ends of those self-replication subroutines? At one level, the robot's hardware and software do serve to reproduce those self-replication software routines. At another level of analysis, however, those self-replication software routines serve the robot to produce more copies of itself. At still another level, those self-replication software routines serve the robot's creator. The creator of the robot should get the last world as to which of those levels of description is most important.

In humans, does morality exist to further the reproduction of certain genes, or do those genes exist in order to allow for the production of new human beings who can behave morally? If human beings have a creator, the creator gets the final word on the question of purpose. The mechanism which the creator used to make those genes-- whether de novo or via evolution-- is secondary. The creator's purpose in creating those genes decides the issue.

References

• Dawkins, Richard. 1976. Pp. 1-11 in The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacKay, Donald. 1965. Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe. Chicago: InterVarsity.
• Ruse, Michael, and Edward O. Wilson. 1993. The approach of sociobiology: The evolution of ethics. In Religion and the Natural Sciences, ed. James E. Huchingson. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Javonovich.

If a cadre of outspoken, strong atheists wrote a litmus test for scientists, that might very well be question #1.

"Scientists, if you're not an atheist, you're not doing science right," PZ Myers -- a well-known blogger, biology professor and atheist -- regularly preaches.

But if this is true, then as many as half of scientists are doing science wrong. A 2009 study from the Pew Research Center polled members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Fifty-one percent of respondents reported a belief in a higher power. Does this mean that it's too late for science? Has religion already pillaged the minds of researchers worldwide? No, of course it hasn't.

"It seems to me that we as a society have lately been caught in this false dichotomy where it's either God as the guy with the beard on the cloud or nothing at all," neuroscientist David Eagleman told Discovery News.

Staunch atheists often falsely characterize followers of religion as being "all-in" with their beliefs, opining that they ascribe to the whole creationist, woo-y shebang. "Where's your evidence?" atheists mockingly question. "You can't prove that God exists!" they accuse (correctly). Yet, hypocritically, strict atheists are guilty of the exact same crime: belief without evidence.

"We know too little to commit to a position of strict atheism. [But] we know way too much to commit to any particular religious story," Eagleman said.

Just as it's a leap of faith for a religious person to assert that God incontrovertibly exists, it's an equally large leap for a strict atheist to declare, without question, that God does not exist. As Carl Sagan eloquently explained:

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As this statement applies to science, so does it apply to religion. History is replete with signs that an all-powerful deity may not exist, but such substantiation is nowhere near tantamount to proof -- especially, as Albert Einstein said, in a universe as incomprehensibly vast as our own:

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly.

Ultimately, the key is not to be swayed to one extreme or the other -- fundamentalist religion or strict atheism -- but to walk a reasoned middle path. Eagleman believes that path is "possibilianism," the concept of holding multiple beliefs or hypotheses whilst exploring new ideas.

"The goal is to avoid committing to any particular story," Eagleman told Discovery News, "whether that's religious fundamentalism or strict atheism. The goal of possibilianism is to retain the wonder that drives us all into science in the first place and to avoid acting as though we know the answers to things we can't possibly know at the moment."

Strict atheists do the world an incredible service by promoting the scientific method, skepticism, and critical thinking. But they do a disservice by campaigning against religion or touting -- as pure truth -- the non-existence of God, for those actions (especially the latter) are just as unscientific as a blind belief in all aspects of religion.

This summer, a worldwide poll showed that atheism is on the rise and religiosity is on the decline. It is my hope that these "New Atheists" and agnostics won't narrowly focus on denigrating religion, but will instead focus on encouraging open-mindedness and discouraging fundamentalism.

That would surely make the world a more enlightened place.

The script was written by biology student Joy Walters, with help from BioLogos president Darrel Falk.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5

We live in a world driven by the gods of economics, technology and science. Particularly in a time of economic austerity, it is tempting to see the arts or humanities as an optional “extra”—a happy by-product of those true engines of society when they are running smoothly. But in this article we will look at how a biblically informed worldview might turn this perspective on its head, and what the humanities might have to tell us about the present contours of the science and faith conversation.

In his iconic 1959 Rede lecture, “The Two Cultures,” CP Snow noted the dysfunctional relationship between science and the humanities, arguing that the situation is principally the result of our educational system in the West. Ken Arnold, from the medicine and arts focused Wellcome Collection in London, believes that the split continues today, but with the further extension that

In emerging countries . . . amongst the middle classes there is a strong pressure to join the ranks of doctors and scientists and engineers because they see that as the place where future economies are growing. . . . In some ways you could almost begin to feel sorry for the arts and the humanities because they seem to be worth less than the sciences.¹

Is Protestant Christianity also peculiarly prone to such thinking? A skepticism of art in religious spaces as a result of iconoclasm and the reformation, combined with a proud history of the protestant work ethic, economic success, and a profound influence on the history of science, might lead Protestants to be more inclined towards the sciences and technology than to the arts. However, there are more corrosive reasons that science has usurped the humanities in our culture than merely educational or theological bias.

In the early 20th century, logical positivists regarded the humanities as expressions merely of our inner states and desires, but having nothing to do with objective reality. Such imperialistic claims to knowledge denied that other knowledge claims referred to any true reality, and were therefore not really forms of knowledge at all. Bertrand Russell writes,

But if there is a world which is not physical, or not in space-time, it may have a structure which we can never hope to express or to know … Perhaps that is why we know so much physics and so little of anything else.²

Christian scientists are of course very sensitive to this, and work hard to explain that science cannot answer questions of ultimate meaning or the existence of God, which are beyond the scope of science. Often, this line of thinking can be narrow in focus, delineating the limits of the science, and naming those assumptions made by science that cannot be justified empirically. Such arguments can be very fruitful within this narrow context, but we should not be led into thinking that our true perception of reality is limited to such analytic and evidential approaches. There are fields of inquiry that science isn’t able to explain (such as metaphysical judgments, ethics, and beauty), and even our confidence in mathematics— upon which so much of science itself is based—rests upon assumptions that cannot be experimentally demonstrated.

The human condition

Mathematics and the sciences do seem to provide tools by which we are able to perceive the external world and its regularities. However, the arts and humanities, too, are a way of understanding reality, and they tell us less about external reality than the internal human condition. The problem is that the ‘human condition’ seems to have been relegated by many to the realm of mere desire and subjective feeling and, therefore, not reality.

The modernist account of science is that, through our reason, we are somehow able to get outside of nature and describe it objectively. The biblical account, though, has human beings as part of the created order, and so embedded in nature—made from the dust of the earth. Given that, human thought life is also part of the natural world, even despite the fact that it is not best described by the sciences.

The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are part of the created order, as are the poems of Wordsworth, the sculptures of Michaelangelo, and the music of Bach, not to mention children’s nursery rhymes, home decoration, and humming tunes whilst waiting for the bus. As C. S. Lewis wrote, "This is not panache, it is our nature." ³

A little reflection on life reveals something very strange going on here. Somehow, the mythic ‘war’ between science and religion has become the dominant battleground for defending the Christian faith, and competing explanations of the material world are used as apologetic weapons. But the reality is that science plays a peripheral role in our experience of life, not least our life as Christians. Of course that is not to deny the enormous impact of science on the material conditions of our lives, or the prevalence of the products of science. Instead, it is to observe that science plays a facilitatatory role, enabling us to carry out the real core business of our lives, which does not revolve around science. Cars, trains and airplanes are modes of transport to take us to work, or to see family, or go on holiday. Social media provide another way of being in relationship with people. Health services are not an end in themselves, but aim to make people well, so that they can get on with their lives. Why then, when life is not about science, does science dominate our way of thinking about life?

In focusing so much energy on opposing positivism are we not being inadvertently drawn into a positivist way of thinking, that science and material explanations of things are, indeed, our basic reality, what is ultimately true?

A biblical model

“We feel,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” ⁴ Likewise, philosopher Susanne Langer questions any philosophy which claims to be able to explain everything:

Philosophers in every age have attempted to give an account of as much experience as they could. Some have indeed pretended that what they could not explain did not exist; but all the great philosophers have allowed for more than they could explain, and have, therefore, signed beforehand, if not dated, the death-warrant of their philosophies.⁵

Fortunately, the Bible preserves us from total positivist oblivion. There are a great many types of literature represented in the Bible, with the notable exception of scientific writing. If we long to be able to express our deepest emotions, we have the psalms; if we are looking for wise advice, we have the proverbs; if philosophical reflection, Ecclesiastes. There is poetry, song, history, biography, but there is no science. In addition, the Bible refers to the use of the visual arts in, for example, the designs of the tabernacle and temple. The Bible does seem to think the arts and humanities are fundamental for human life, but it doesn’t seem to think that what we think the physical world is constructed of matters much at all.

Do we sometimes read the Bible more like a science textbook than a novel or a poem? Most will agree that each type of literature needs to be read in its own way, but lip-service to that idea notwithstanding, recent arguments prove that it is still possible to read a poem with a scientific mentality—looking out for the ‘facts.’ Is that because we have too high a view of science, or because we have too low a view of the humanities? To say something is poetic is not to declare it ultimately untrue, futile and meaningless—it is to say it is more profound and meaningful and true than many other modes of expression.

According to Langer, part of the problem is the priority that has been accorded to discursive language as the only valid way we have of representing reality to each other. She observes that a study of symbolism shows us that this is actually only one way humans use to abstract from reality, and in fact, the situation even with discursive language isn’t as simple as has been made out. She notes that our sensory organs mediate our perceptions of the world and are already on the job— formulating, framing the world to us—before our cognitive apparatus gets to work. It must be so, or we would not be able to evaluate the importance of the vast array of sensory data we receive and reality would appear as a blur.

A linguistic symbol carries a concept we associate with it, which in turn denotes a reality. In language there is a commonly agreed definition for each word we use, thus enabling communication. But each person also has associations unique to him or her which color any particular concept. Though such personal associations with words are present all at once, they can only be expressed and communicated one at a time, because language is also sequential.

A picture also acts symbolically, though in a different way. Even something as ‘realistic’ as a photograph is likewise a representation of reality and not the reality itself. It also carries with it layers of meaning which reflect the subjective intentions of the person who took the photograph, and opens up for interpretations and associations of the person ‘reading’ the picture. A picture, though, is not sequential. All the information comes at once, and individual blotches of color carry no significance on their own, but only as part of the whole.

No amount of words could ever describe a picture in full. The number of blotches of color and their relations to each other are vast in their complexity, and one could never read words quickly enough to carry the meaning a picture brings in an instant, even if it warrants a far longer period of contemplation. Indeed, though we are only speaking here of visual perception, the same is true of our other sensory inputs, too: they all carry knowledge in quite distinct and profound ways, whilst we, in line with the Greeks, have tended to give sight a special place as the most ‘objective’ of our senses.

As we dig down into empirical science and explore the mechanisms by which sights and sounds and textures are transmitted and processed by the brain, we discover that the meaning of the sense-data which we perceive and which we attempt to describe is likewise profoundly limited by the use of words—much less mathematics—and that our science, as such, represents a tiny fraction of reality.

To suggest, then, that science is the only true way of representing reality—as positivism has done—or to exclude the humanities from our world, leaves us without a proper or even adequate means of expressing the significance we attach to even the most mundane day-to-day activities. Science is very good at describing the regularities of the physical world, but the experience of being human is no less part of the real natural world than are the structure of proteins or the movement of planets, and science does not have the appropriate tools to explore our inner worlds.

Nowadays it seems that Christian cultural life has also too-often failed to fully acknowledge other ways of representing reality than materialist science—ironic because this state of affairs is so at odds with the Bible’s model of using the arts and humanities to profoundly explore the human condition. Perhaps it is time to recover that side of the biblical witness, and remind ourselves that there are more ways of representing the world to each other than positivism has ever dreamt.

Notes

1. BBC Radio 4, “The Life Scientific”, Tuesday 25th September 2012.
2. Bertrand Russell, “Philosophy”, New York. W.W.Norton &Co, 1927, page 265, quoted by Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, Harvard University Press, 1979, page 88.
3. C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War Time” in Fernseed and Elephants and other Essays on Christianity, Fontana, 1975, page 28.
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, page 187.
5. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. Harvard University Press, 1979, p 5.

There are several different kinds of arguments that people bring along these lines; I want to talk about just one. So first… the Heidelberg catechism, one of the forms of unity of the church I go to (the Christian Reformed Church), says

Providence is the almighty and ever-present power of God, by which he upholds as with his hand heaven and Earth and all creatures and so rules them, that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty. All things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but from his fatherly hand.

And part of the way it comes to us—not by chance, but from his fatherly hand—part of the way God has designed our world, is that there is a great deal of regularity and dependability in our world. Of course, if it were not for this regularity and dependability, we couldn’t do the things that we actually do. I mean, for example, if I just wanted to walk off the stage—if, for example, all the sudden those stairs over there suddenly turned into a ladder going up—well, that would make it really difficult.

If you are trying to build a house, for example, you have this hammer, but all the sudden the hammer turns in to a goose or a pigeon. Again, that would make things really difficult…or if the nail turned into a worm…or if you get in the car and turn the key and the car turns into a camel, things would be really hard, much harder than they are. This regularity and dependability in our world is an essential condition of our being able to live in the world in which we actually do.

If the world were irregular enough, we would not even be able to live in it, but there are also, according to classical Christianity here (the Heidelberg catechism, for example) there are also special divine actions; sometimes God does things specially. There are miracles in Scripture: the parting of the Red Sea, for example, Jesus walking on water, Jesus changing water into wine. There are miraculous healings: Jesus rising from the dead, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and so on. And according to classical Christians, many of them, perhaps most of them, are special divine actions. God, for example, responds to prayers. He works in the hearts and minds of his children to effect sanctification. There is, what Calvin called, the internal testimony or witness of the Holy Spirit, and there is what Thomas Aquinas called the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. So, these things are all special actions on the part of God. God constantly causes events in the world. Ok, so far fair enough—what is the problem?

Many theologians seem to think there is a science-religion problem here. I don’t think any of the theologians of Biola think this, (I don’t know, but I doubt it) but many theologians do. For example, Rudolf Bultmann says, “The historical method,” which of course he thinks that is the method we should use, “includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. This continuum, furthermore, cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.”

That’s what he says. Alright, there is this continuum that cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural (that would be God) or transcendent powers. So, it is a little bit like the laws of the Medes and Persians. You probably remember Daniel. Daniel was a favorite of King Darius, and well, the other courtiers became jealous of Daniel (they didn’t like it that the king liked him so well). So, they came to the king and said, “Oh king, live forever, we think it would be a great idea if you passed an edict to the effect that you alone can be worshipped. Everybody has to worship you and nothing else.” Well the king thought that over for a minute, and that sounded pretty good to him so he said, “I guess that it is a pretty good idea.” So he made this edict; he made this declaration: “Only King Darius is to be worshipped—no one else, nothing else.”

These courtiers knew that Daniel worshipped God, and they thought probably Daniel would keep right on worshipping God despite this edict. So they were watching Daniel, and he was, in fact, worshipping God. So they came to the king. Now the penalty for worshipping something else was to be thrown into the lion’s den and they said, “Well, king live forever, looks like Daniel has been violating this edict. You have got to throw him in the lion’s den.”

Well, the king didn’t want to do this because he really liked Daniel. He thought this was a miserable way to proceed, and he didn’t want to do it, but then they said to him, “O king live forever, and remember a law of the Medes and Persians cannot be abrogated, even by the king himself.” So once it’s put in place, not even the king himself can change it or abrogate it or go against it.

That is sort of the suggestion that you get here from Bultmann. Bultmann thinks, “Maybe God created the world and set it up in a certain way, but once he did that, not even he can interfere in it”—he uses that word interference—“not even he can do anything in it. He just has to keep hands off.” It is like the law of the Medes and the Persians.

Another theologian who agrees is John Macquarrie, who says,

The way of understanding miracle (and that would be one kind of special divine action) that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to supernatural intervention belongs to the mythological outlook, and cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought. The traditional conception of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world, can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world, and if on some occasion, we are unable to give a complete account of some happening, the scientific conviction is that further research will bring to light further factors in the situation that will turn out to be just as imminent and this worldly as the factors already known.

Ok again, no room there for special action. And the third thinker here, Langdon Gilkey (still another theologian), says something similar, but I will pass. I will not read that one in the interest of saving a little bit of time, but these three theologians, plus many others want to assert that there is something wrong with the idea of God acting in the world, acting in the world in a way that goes beyond creation and sustaining, or creation and holding things in existence. So they think, “Ok, God created the world; God sustains it in existence”…that is ok with them, but anything beyond that, God performing any miracles, raising Jesus from the dead, or for that matter working in somebody’s heart and mind in a special way, that, they say, is a real problem. The question is, what is the problem?

Well, the next little bit here…according to the Christian and theistic idea, God is a person; he has knowledge, loves, and hates. He has aims and ends. He acts on the basis of his knowledge to achieve his ends. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good. Thirdly (noted above by the Heidelberg catechism), God has created the world. Fourth is God conserves and sustains and maintains in being this world he created, but fifth, at least sometimes, God acts in a way going beyond creation and conservation in miracles, but also in his providential guiding of history, his working in the hearts of people, his internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, and so on, and it is with that fifth category that these people have a problem. It is God’s special action in the world—action beyond conservation and creation—and miracles would be an example.

So we might think of these theologians as endorsing what we could call hands off theology. God has got to keep his hands off. God could create the world. God conserves the world, sustains it in being, but he can’t do anything else—that is as far as he could go. It is hands off theology, and Bultmann, even in this context, even talks about interfering. I mean if God did something in the world that would be interfering, which, when you think about it, is a sort of strange thing to say—I mean if God created the world, he is the omnipotent, omniscient, holy, good creator of the world—when you accuse someone of interfering, you are saying they are doing something they should not be doing, right?

So Bultmann thinks if God did something in the world that would be interfering, and he should be ashamed of himself. Ok, now why is this a problem? Their suggestion is that somehow it is contrary to science. It is contrary to science the suggestion that God acts specially in the world. I didn’t read that bit, but Gilkey says, "The causal nexus in space and time which the enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the western mind is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars. Since they participate in the modern world of science, both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else.”

From a presentation sponsored by Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, and delivered February 12, 2012 at EV Free Church, Fullerton, CA. Used by permission.

(Click image for full resolution)

In a Nutshell

In Detail

Introduction

Astronomers and geologists have determined that the universe and Earth are billions of years old. This conclusion is not based on just one measurement or one calculation, but on many types of evidence. Here we will describe just two types of evidence for an old Earth and two types of evidence for an old universe; more types can be found under Further Reading. These methods are largely independent of each other, based on separate observations and arguments, yet all point to a history much longer than 10,000 years. As Christians, we believe that God created the world and that the world declares his glory, so we can’t ignore what nature is telling us about its history.

Age of the Earth from seasonal rings and layers

If you’ve ever seen a horizontal slice of a tree trunk, you’ve seen how a tree forms a new growth ring each year. In years of drought, the tree grows less quickly so the ring is narrower; in good growing seasons the ring is thicker. A tree’s age can be found by simply counting its rings. By comparing the pattern of thick and thin rings to weather records, scientists can verify that the method is accurate. This method can even be used on dead trees that fell in a forest long ago. For example, the last 200 rings in the dead tree might match up with 200 rings early in the life of the living tree, so the two trees together can count back many years. In this way, multiple trees can be used to build a master chronology for a forested region. European oak trees have been used to build a 12,000-year chronology.¹

The annual ice layers in glaciers provide a similar method that goes back much further in history. Each year, snowfall varies throughout the seasons and an annual layer is formed. Like the tree rings, this method can be verified by comparison to historical records for weather, as well as to records of volcanic eruptions around the globe that left thin dust layers on the glaciers. Scientists have drilled ice cores deep into glaciers and found ice that is 123,000 years old in Greenland² and 740,000 years old in Antarctica.³ These annual layers go back much farther than the 10,000 years advocated by the young earth creationists. The Earth must be at least 740,000 years old.

How can an old Earth be reconciled with Genesis? See Scripture Interpretation

Age of the Earth and solar system from radiometric dating

In your high school science classroom, you may have seen a large poster of the periodic table hanging on the wall. The periodic table shows the types of atoms that make up the world around us. An element in the periodic table can come in different flavors called isotopes. Some isotopes are unstable, and over time these isotopes “decay” into isotopes of other elements. For example, Potassium-40 is unstable and decays into Argon-40. As time passes, a rock will have more and more Argon-40 and less and less Potassium-40. Radiometric dating is possible because this decay occurs at a known rate, called the “half-life” of the radioactive element. The half-life is the time that it takes for half the radioactive sample to change from one element into the other.

Some isotopes have short half-lives of minutes or years, but Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Radiometric dating requires that one understand the initial ratio of the two elements in a given sample by some means. In this case, Argon-40 is a gas that easily bubbles out and escapes when it is produced in molten rock. Once the rock hardens, however, all the Argon-40 is trapped in the sample, giving us an accurate record of how much Potassium-40 has decayed since that time. So, if we find a rock with equal parts Potassium-40 and Argon-40, we know that half the Potassium-40 has decayed into Argon-40, and that the rock hardened 1.3 billion years ago.⁴

It’s hard to find rocks on the surface of the Earth that have not been altered over time. Most old rocks have been eroded by wind and water or submerged by continental plates. The oldest reliably dated rock formation is in Greenland, where several different isotopes were used to find an age of 3.6 billion years.⁵ Scientists also recently dated zircon grains (which resist erosion) in Western Australia to 4.4 billion years old.⁶ To find older rocks that haven’t been eroded, we need to look beyond Earth. Meteorites are rocks from the solar system that have fallen to Earth recently and haven’t suffered much erosion. Their pristine interiors give an age that dates back to their formation at the beginning of the solar system. Nearly all meteorites have the same radiometric age, 4.56 billion years old.⁷ Thus, the solar system, including the Earth, is about 4,560,000,000 years old.

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ANSWER HERE.

Notes

1. Davis A. Young, ”How Old Is It? How Do We Know? A Review of Dating Methods – Part One: Relative Dating, Absolute Dating, and Non-radiometric Dating” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 58 No 4 (2006), p. 264. (PDF)
2. Roger C. Weins, "Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective", The American Scientific Affiliation (2002). See also North Greenland Ice Core Project Members, “High-resolution Record of Northern Hemisphere Climate Extending into the Last Interglacial Period,” Nature 431 (2004): 147–151, which reports ages back to 123,000 years. (web article)
3. EPICA Community Members, “Eight Glacial Cycles from an Antarctic Ice Core,” Nature 429 (2004): 623–628.
4. Young earth creationists reject radiometric dating methods, including claims that decay rates are not constant. For a critical review, see Randall Isaac “Assessing the RATE Project”, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol 59, no 2, June 2007, p.143-146. (PDF)
5. See Wiens and references therein. (web article)
6. Wilde et al. “Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the earth 4.4 Gyr ago,” Nature (2001) 409, 175-178.
7. See Davis A Young, ”How Old Is It? How Do We Know? A Review of Dating Methods—Part Two: Radiometric Dating: Mineral, Isochron and Concordia Methods” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 59, No 1 (2007) and references therein (PDF)
]]> Sat, 14 Jul 12 05:02:55 -0700 http://biologos.org/blog/naming-the-god-particle?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/naming-the-god-particle?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all? The image above describes an "event" (proton-proton collision) recorded in 2012 with the CMS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. According to CERN, "the event shows characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons, one of which subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers) and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known standard model background processes. ATLAS Experiment © 2012 CERN

Judging from the flurry of headlines over the past week, one might be tempted to think that proof positive of God’s existence (or lack thereof) had just appeared out of a 27-km-tunnel buried beneath the Swiss-French border. This frenzy of news headlines and blog titles hailed the recent news that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has discovered a brand new particle of a mass of 125-126 GeV, which is assumed to be the Higgs boson, or the so-called “God particle.” The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all?

The short answer is “no,” which becomes apparent when one considers the widely-reported story of how it got named. In 1993, Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman, along with science writer Dick Teresi, wrote a book detailing the history of particle physics starting with Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Democritus and culminating with the hunt for the Higgs boson. Until this latest discovery, the Higgs boson was the elusive final missing piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model—a collection of the fundamental particles that constitute our universe and the complex and mathematically-sophisticated relationships between them. Considering how incredibly difficult finding the Higgs boson was proving to be, Lederman wanted to name the book after that “goddamn particle,” according to some of his collaborators. His editor, however, would not allow it and so the name was shortened to “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?” And thus ‘the God particle’ was born, carrying with it more than enough social baggage for such a miniscule particle.



Particle physicist Dr. Zosia Krusberg (at right) is visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vassar College and thinks “the term ‘god particle’ is unfortunate. The Higgs boson is no more (or less) divine or spiritually significant than any other elementary particle within the standard model of particle physics.” It may be fundamental to explaining one of the most basic characteristics of the universe—namely the existence of matter and mass in addition to energy—but “it is no more (or less) important than any other physics principle underlying the Standard Model.”

Last week’s discovery was monumental in that it may have finally provided experimental evidence for the Higgs Mechanism and defined the specific energy of the resulting Higgs boson, but even this “breakthrough” for particle physics leaves many scientific questions unresolved. Finding the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but it does not do away with many other questions and shortcomings of the current state of particle physics, such as the constituent particles of dark matter, a quantum theory of gravity, and other “mathematically subtle problems.” Not to mention that there is still significant work to be done to determine the exact nature of this newly-found particle. According to Dr. Krusberg, this particle might behave just as the Standard Model predicts or it could instead be “a Higgs-like particle that will serve as a gateway into explorations of physics beyond the Standard Model." Krusberg continued, “And I guarantee that it is this latter scenario that most of us are hoping for: physicists love nothing more than discovering the shortcomings of their theories, since this is the first step toward more fundamental theories with even more predictive power!”

No, finding the Higgs boson does not answer all the questions of particle physics, much less lend insight into the existence (or not) of God. For that reason, Dr. Krusberg (like most physicists) bemoans the term ‘God particle’ and insists, “There really is nothing either literally or metaphorically god-like about the Higgs boson.” Indeed, one writer for the British journal The Guardian reached such a point of frustration about the name that he ran a competition for alternatives. The winner was “the champagne flute boson,” ostensibly because the bottom of a champagne bottle is an excellent and oft-used demonstration of the energy potential of the Higgs Mechanism. Or then again, perhaps it is simply because physicists thought that finally finding this shy particle would call for some of the bubbly.

On the other hand, some science writers and scientists can appreciate the ‘educational benefits’ of such a mysterious and controversial name because it attracts the attention of the general public and puts a relatable face on an extremely esoteric physics concept. Krusberg herself admits that “People are naturally drawn to the mysterious and the controversial, providing educators with great teaching opportunities.” But she worries about the larger social implications involved in “mixing the vernacular of physics and spirituality,” not least because such uncritical mixing can lead the non-scientific community to draw conclusions about the authority and reach of science that are not justified.

Understanding that the Higgs boson is not the literal stuff of God and that it does not prove or disprove God’s existence (as the name seems to suggest) extinguishes the fire under any sort of religious outcry. But this does not mean that its discovery is irrelevant to the discussion of science and faith, nor to the Christian community as a whole. As Dr. Krusberg remarks, “The recent discovery of [this] new boson at the LHC perfectly embodies the scientific process at its best (and thereby illustrates to the public why and how science works).” Scientific exploration of nature is not a fool-proof endeavor; healthy skepticism and accountability to a wide community of other researchers are absolutely critical to its success. But such evidence of the power and finesse of well-executed science as we saw last week is a testament to our ability to explore and understand the ‘how’ of the universe. God has equipped humanity with the desire, the intellectual abilities, and the collective will to recognize and explore the cosmic order and beauty of his creation. God has made our home knowable, and has given us the tools and capacities by which to know it.



At left, Cern researchers present their findings to a few hundred of their colleagues in Melbourne, Australia. Image © 2012 CERN

It is valuable, then, for the Christian community to understand and appreciate how science works, in part to recognize that there are many instances in which science and the church work in tandem in order to better understand and better serve the world. But I think there is something else we can draw from the story of the Higgs boson, too. The nickname ‘the God particle’ has touched nerves in religious communities because it implies that science has the ability to prove or disprove divine existence by physical means. Even though the physics community is by no means claiming insight into the divine, it is sometimes assumed by the religious community that scientists view their work as chipping away at God’s existence when they begin to understand something that was previously unknown, or known only “by faith” in esoteric theories and models.

And yet, regardless of motives or metaphysical interpretations, perhaps physicists' search for the Higgs boson is in fact an apt picture of our own search for God. How many times have we stared up at the starry ceiling in times of crisis and prayed fervently for some kind of sign from God to assure us of his presence? And how many times has that much-desired evidence appeared only in retrospect, when we look back to see God’s hand faithfully and elegantly working in ways inscrutable at the time? It took a community of physicists to discern the presence of the Higgs boson. But even so, they could only do so after the fact from the cascade of particle decays it sparked; they could not observe the particle itself directly. In a similar way, though we often do not see the working of God directly, “in the moment,” we still trust in his presence and providence, often depending on friends, family and the community of the church to help us see his hand in hindsight.

So while the discovery of the Higgs boson does not itself explain God, we rejoice at the subtle yet striking new insight we have into God’s creative genius via the Higgs boson and at the way God gives evidence of his faithfulness in the ordered creation itself. Perhaps, however, the greatest insight we can glean from this breakthrough is an analogy for the way God calls us to seek him and find him together, in the community of those who follow his son.

Tomorrow, Baylor University physicist Gerald Cleaver answers the question, "What is the Higgs boson?"



]]> Tue, 10 Jul 12 09:02:29 -0700 Faith Tucker http://biologos.org/blog/what-is-scientism?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/what-is-scientism?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Scientism is a rather strange word, but for reasons that we shall see, a useful one. Though this term has been coined rather recently, it is associated with many other “isms” with long and turbulent histories: materialism, naturalism, reductionism, empiricism, and positivism.

 

 

A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and the scientists are superior to all other men. --Henri de Saint-Simon¹

 

 

 

Scientism is a rather strange word, but for reasons that we shall see, a useful one. Though this term has been coined rather recently, it is associated with many other “isms” with long and turbulent histories: materialism, naturalism, reductionism, empiricism, and positivism. Rather than tangle with each of these concepts separately, we’ll begin with a working definition of scientism and proceed from there.

Historian Richard G. Olson defines scientism as “efforts to extend scientific ideas, methods, practices, and attitudes to matters of human social and political concern.” ² But this formulation is so broad as to render it virtually useless. Philosopher Tom Sorell offers a more precise definition: “Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture.” ³ MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson offers a closely related version, but more extreme: “Science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” ⁴ The latter two definitions are far more precise and will better help us evaluate scientism’s merit.

A History of Scientism

The roots of scientism extend as far back as early 17th century Europe, an era that came to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Up to that point, most scholars had been highly deferential to intellectual tradition, largely a combination of Judeo-Christian scripture and ancient Greek philosophy. But a torrent of new learning during the late Renaissance began to challenge the authority of the ancients, and long-established intellectual foundations began to crack. The Englishman Francis Bacon, the Frenchman Rene Descartes, and the Italian Galileo Galilei spearheaded an international movement proclaiming a new foundation for learning, one that involved careful scrutiny of nature instead of analysis of ancient texts.



Descartes and Bacon used particularly strong rhetoric to carve out space for their new methods. They claimed that by learning how the physical world worked, we could become “masters and possessors of nature.” ⁵ In doing so, humans could overcome hunger through innovations in agriculture, eliminate disease through medical research, and dramatically improve overall quality of life through technology and industry. Ultimately, science would save humans from unnecessary suffering and their self-destructive tendencies. And it promised to achieve these goals in this world, not the afterlife. It was a bold, prophetic vision.

As this new method found great success, the specter of scientism began to emerge. Both Bacon and Descartes elevated the use of reason and logic by denigrating other human faculties such as creativity, memory, and imagination. Bacon’s classification of learning demoted poetry and history to second-class status.⁶ Descartes’ rendering of the entire universe as a giant machine left little room for the arts or other forms of human expression. In one sense, the rhetoric of these visionaries opened great new vistas for intellectual inquiry. But on the other hand, it proposed a vastly narrower range of which human activities were considered worthwhile.

The Enlightenment

A century later, many of the Enlightenment intellectuals continued their love-affair with the power of natural science. They claimed that not only could science enhance the quality of human life, it could even promote moral improvement. The Encyclopedist Denis Diderot aimed to collect, organize, and preserve all human knowledge so that “our children, becoming better instructed, may become at the same time more virtuous and happy.” ⁷ Many of the French philosophes even claimed that science could be a substitute for religion. In fact, during the French Revolution, numerous Catholic churches were converted into “Temples of Reason” and held quasi-religious services for the worship of science.⁸

Positivism

The 19th century witnessed the most powerful and enduring formulation of scientism, a system called positivism. Its founder was August Comte, who built his positive philosophy from a deep commitment to David Hume’s empiricism and skepticism. Comte claimed that the only valid data is acquired through the senses. Nothing was transcendent, and nothing metaphysical could have any claim to validity.⁹ The task of scientists was twofold—first, to demonstrate how all phenomena, including human behavior, are subject to invariable natural laws.¹⁰ Second, they would reduce these natural laws to the smallest possible number, and ultimately unify them under the laws of physics.¹¹

Comte also subsumed all of human intellectual history into a single process which he called the Law of Three Stages. In his view, each branch of knowledge passes through three stages: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, and lastly the scientific or positive state. He believed that through the continual advancement of human understanding, religion would fade away, philosophy and the humanities would be transformed into a naturalistic basis, and all human knowledge would eventually become a product of science. Any ideas outside that realm would be pure fantasy or superstition.

Logical Positivism



Positivism did not lose its appeal in the 20th century. To the contrary, a group known collectively as The Vienna Circle reinvigorated the fundamental tenets of positivism with enhanced symbolic logic and semantic theory. They called their approach, fittingly, logical positivism. In this system, there are only two kinds of meaningful statements: analytic statements (including logic and mathematics), and empirical statements, subject to experimental verification. Anything outside of this framework is an empty concept.¹²

Given its sweeping claims, logical positivism came under heavy scrutiny. Karl Popper pointed out that few statements in science can actually be completely verified. However, a single observation has the potential to invalidate a hypothesis, and even an entire theory. Therefore, he proposed that instead of experimental verification, the principle of falsifiability should demarcate what qualified as science, and by extension, what can qualify as knowledge.¹³

Another weakness of the positivist position is its reliance on a complete distinction between theory and observation. Observations, essential to the empirical approach of science, were claimed by positivists to be brute facts which one could use to establish, evaluate, and compare the theories. However, W.O. Quine pointed out in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” that observations themselves are partly shaped by theory (“theory-laden”).¹⁴ What counts as an observation, how to construct an experiment, and what data you think your instruments are collecting—all require an interpretive theoretical framework. This realization does not deal a death-blow to the practice of science (as some post-modernists like to claim), but it does undermine the positivist claim that science rests entirely on facts, and is thus an indisputable foundation for knowledge.

Scientism of Today

Scientism today is alive and well, as evidenced by the statements of our celebrity scientists:



The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. –Stephen Weinburg, The First Three Minutes

We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little. –E.O. Wilson, Consilience

While these men are certainly entitled to their personal opinions and the freedom to express them, the fact that they make such bold claims in their popular science literature blurs the line between solid, evidence-based science, and rampant philosophical speculation. Whether one agrees with the sentiments of these scientists or not, the result of these public pronouncements has served to alienate a large segment of American society. And that is a serious problem, since scientific research relies heavily upon public support for its funding, and environmental policy is shaped by lawmakers who listen to their constituents. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it would be wise to try a different approach.

Physicist Ian Hutchinson offers an insightful metaphor for the current controversies over science:

The health of science is in fact jeopardized by scientism, not promoted by it. At the very least, scientism provokes a defensive, immunological, aggressive response from other intellectual communities, in return for its own arrogance and intellectual bullyism. It taints science itself by association.¹⁵

Noting that most Americans enthusiastically welcome scientific advancements, particularly those in health care, transportation, and communications, Hutchinson suggests that perhaps what the public is rejecting is not actually science itself, but a worldview that closely aligns itself with science—scientism.¹⁶ By disentangling these two concepts, we have a much better chance for enlisting public support for scientific research than we would by trying to convince millions of people to embrace a materialistic, godless universe in which science is our only remaining hope.

Distinguishing science from scientism

So if science is distinct from scientism, what is it? Science is an activity that seeks to explore the natural world using well-established, clearly-delineated methods. Given the complexity of the universe, from the very big to very small, from inorganic to organic, there is a vast array of scientific disciplines, each with its own specific techniques. The number of different specializations is constantly increasing, leading to more questions and areas of exploration than ever before. Science expands our understanding, rather than limiting it.



Scientism, on the other hand, is a speculative worldview about the ultimate reality of the universe and its meaning. Despite the fact that there are millions of species on our planet, scientism focuses an inordinate amount of its attention on human behavior and beliefs. Rather than working within carefully constructed boundaries and methodologies established by researchers, it broadly generalizes entire fields of academic expertise and dismisses many of them as inferior. With scientism, you will regularly hear explanations that rely on words like “merely”, “only”, “simply”, or “nothing more than”. Scientism restricts human inquiry.

It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can't catch in his nets does not exist.¹⁷ Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.

Notes

1. "Un savant, mes amis, est un homme qui prévoit; c’est par la raison que la science donne le moyen de prédire qu’elle est utile, et que les savants sont supérieurs à tous les autres hommes." Translated into English by Valence Ionescu in The Political Thought of Saint-Simon. Oxford University Press, 1976. Page 76
2. Olson, Richard G. Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2008.
3. Sorell, Tom. Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science. New York: Routledge, 1991.
4. Hutchinson, Ian. Monopolizing Knowledge: A Scientist Refutes Religion-Denying, Reason-Destroying Scientism. Belmont, MA: Fias Publishing, 2011.
5. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method
6. Sorell, p176
7. Sorell, p35
8. Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1988.
9. Zammito, John H. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes : Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
10. This view is a form of strict determinism, and current popularizers of continue to enthusiastically endorse it. Perhaps they are “determined” to do so?
11. This view is a form of extreme reductionism, also widely endorsed by current popularizers of science.
12. Zammito, p8
13. Popper, Karl. Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1959
14. For an extended discussion, read Zammito’s chapter “The Perils of Semantic Ascent: Quine and Post-positivism in the Philosophy of Science” in A Nice Derangement of Epistemes. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
15. Hutchinson, p143
16. Hutchinson, p109
17. Giberson, Karl, and Mariano Artigas. Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists Versus God and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

]]> Mon, 11 Jun 12 05:00:14 -0700 Thomas Burnett http://biologos.org/blog/a-biologists-perspective?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/a-biologists-perspective?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In today's video, Dr. David Finch, a biologist at New York University, discusses his thoughts on both Creationism and the effects of "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins. In today's video, Dr. David Finch, a biologist at New York University, discusses his thoughts on both Creationism and the effects of "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins. Finch voices his frustration that many "seekers of truth" ignore the scientific truth of evolution. He asserts that while Darwin was right about natural selection and the patterns of evolution, he was wrong in regards to genetics--the central mechanism by which biological change occurs. However, evolutionary science did not stop with Darwin, and modern science has made a lot of progress towards understanding how genes work in light of evolution.

Ultimately, however, Finch remarks that "science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God." To him, those who proselytize atheism under the banner of "science" do a disservice to science. The goal of scientists is to understand the physical world around us, and most scientists go into their labs to discover something wonderful about the world, rather than to comment on the existence of God.

]]> Thu, 29 Mar 12 07:56:30 -0700 David Fitch http://biologos.org/blog/monopolizing-knowledge-part-1-science-and-scientism?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/monopolizing-knowledge-part-1-science-and-scientism?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In his new book Monopolizing Knowledge, physicist Ian Hutchinson engages with the world-view he calls “scientism”: “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge”. “Science is the most remarkable and powerful cultural artifact humankind has ever created. What is more, most people in our society regard science as providing us with knowledge about the natural world that has an unsurpassed claim to reality and truth. That is one reason why I am proud to be a physicist, a part of the scientific enterprise. But increasingly I am dismayed that science is being twisted into something other than what it truly is. It is portrayed as identical to a philosophical doctrine that I call “scientism”. Scientism says, or at least implicitly assumes, that rational knowledge is scientific, and everything else that claims that status of knowledge is just superstition, irrationality, emotion, or nonsense.” (Monopolizing Knowledge, page 1)

In his new book Monopolizing Knowledge (available for purchase now), physicist Ian Hutchinson engages with the world-view he calls “scientism”: “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge” (page vii). In Hutchinson’s eyes, this erroneous world-view is at least indirectly responsible for the apparent friction between science and religion that many see today. In this series (taken from the larger book, which engages the topic in a much fuller and deeper fashion), Hutchinson will attempt to both explain and dismantle “scientism” by examining both what we mean when we say “science”, and how the scientistic worldview oversteps this definition and becomes a philosophical and metaphysical framework. We begin the series with a brief look at the origins of scientism.

Science and Scientism

One of the most visible conflicts in current culture is between “scientism” and religion. Because religious knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, scientism claims (or at least assumes) that it must therefore be inferior. However, there are many other important beliefs, secular as well as religious, which are justified and rational, but not scientific, and therefore marginalized by scientism. And if that is so, then scientism is a ghastly intellectual mistake.

But how could it have come about that this mistake is so widespread, if it is a mistake? The underlying reason is that scientism is confused with science. It is natural for readers without inside knowledge of science to assume that science and scientism are one and the same when many leading scientists and science popularizers often speak and act as if they and thus directly promote this confusion. What is more, several major strands within religion also promote this confusion. On the conservative theological wing, science is often rejected because it is confused with scientism, and on the theologically liberal wing scientism is often adopted for the same reason. Whether rejecting or assimilating, religious believers often confuse science and scientism.

Scientism is, first of all, a philosophy of knowledge. It is an opinion about the way that knowledge can be obtained and justified. However, scientism rapidly becomes much more. It becomes an all-encompassing world-view; a perspective from which all of the questions of life are examined: a grounding presupposition or set of presuppositions which provides the framework by which the world is to be understood. In other words, it is essentially a religious position.

The Origins of Scientism

The word science is used with two completely different meanings; confusing the two has a natural tendency to lead to scientism. The historical meaning comes from the word's Latin root, scientia, which means simply knowledge, and indeed the word science was once used to describe any systematic orderly study of a field of knowledge. In today’s common usage, however, "science" refers to the study of the natural world. The "Encyclopédie" (1751-) of Diderot and D'Alembert¹, a classic embodiment of Enlightenment thought, defines the word science to mean knowledge in general, but then focuses on natural science and technology. This is scientism in its youth. Enlightenment writings helped to insinuate scientism as an unacknowledged presupposition into much of the intellectual climate of the succeeding two centuries. From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), through historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848), and in vestiges even into the mid twentieth century, "science" was held to refer generally to formal, intellectual learning, yet when specific examples of science are cited these are almost all natural science.

Edward Cheney used his preface to the 1898 edition of Macaulay's history² to criticize him as failing to "treat history as a science". Cheney's attitude is rife with scientism - trying to distinguish between `true' scientific historical knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, literature that fails to qualify as science and hence as true knowledge. As president of the American Historical Society, twenty seven years later, Cheney would champion an explicitly scientistic view of the historian's task as to discover law in history, “... natural laws, which we must accept whether we want to or not, ... laws to be accepted and reckoned with as much as the laws of gravitation, or of chemical affinity” ³ The view is not convincing. The supposed distinction between scientific and unscientific history bears no discernible relationship to the methods of the natural sciences. It is mostly a substitution of “scientific” for "correct" for rhetorical effect.

The continued robustness of scientism is surely partly attributable to this terminological confusion. If science means simply knowledge, then scientism is merely tautologically true. End of story. But if science means a particular type of knowledge, as it does today, then it is essential to recognize that meaning and stick to it. In short what we mean by science today is the inheritance of the Scientific Revolution. In later parts of this series, I shall identify two key defining characteristics of science that encapsulate the two emphases crucial to its development: experimental or natural evidence, and mechanical or mathematical explanation. Before I move on to this task, though, let me pause to address some objections to the whole of my explanatory enterprise.

A Few Possible Objections

One objection that might be raised at this stage is to ask why one should restrict the designation science to the inheritors of the Scientific Revolution. After all, the argument goes, surely we should use whatever strategy is available to discover knowledge. My first answer is immediately to point out that this objection is an example of scientism. It confuses knowledge with science and implies that they are one and the same. I am not at all interested in limiting the ways of obtaining knowledge to those avenues that we call “scientific”. I simply want to be clear that, as a matter of historical fact, science as we commonly conceive it had, and has, a distinctive characteristic approach to methods of discovering and knowing. But why insist on this terminology? Here, my second answer is that science has a well-earned prestige and authority precisely because of its success. This prestige is, of course, one driving force behind the desire of many disciplines to be considered sciences. To use the metaphor of the market today, it is a question of "branding".

A second kind of objection is this: suppose we grant that we will use the word science to mean natural science. Doesn't that just mean the study of nature? So shouldn’t"the study of nature" be our working definition of science then? And if it is, why should one limit the scope of science by an identification of its methods? Surely one should use whatever methods are available to study nature.

My answer is this: the main problem with "the study of nature" as a definition of science is that it simply begs the question: what is nature? We tend to think that "nature" is self-evident; but it isn't. Prior to the Scientific Revolution, nature was populated with gods and teleological imperatives, with intention and purpose. Even in 1686, Robert Boyle (of Boyles' Law) identified eight different senses of the word nature⁴. Boyle's purpose was to deplore the use of, the semi-deity that underwrote Aristotle's physics, which the Scientific Revolution was in the process of superceding, and to replace it with the established order or settled course of things. Moreover, even after the Enlightenment, the romantics such as the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that what they were about was the study of nature. Yet no one today would for a moment think to call the poetic understanding of the natural world science. It simply is not adequate to assume that what is meant by nature is obvious.

Instead, I believe, we must use a functional definition of science. Once we have a clear view of what science is, we will have a definition of what we here mean by nature. Nature is what we are studying in natural science. The result of this definition, as we'll see, is entirely consistent with what Boyle was arguing for: the established order or settled course of things.

We will continue this exploration of what we mean by “nature” in the next installment.

Notes

1. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, editors. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. André Le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand, and Antoine-Claude Briasson, Paris, 1751-77.
2. Thomas Babbington (Lord) Macaulay. The History of England from the accession of James the second. G. P. Putnam, New York, 1898.
3. Edward P. Cheyney. Presidential address delivered before the american historical association. American Historical Review, 29 (2): 231-48, 1924.
4. Thomas Birch, editor. Robert Boyle,, The Works. Georg Olms Verlangsuchhandlung, Hildsheim, 1966. Volume 5, p167-9.

]]> Tue, 06 Dec 11 03:59:15 -0800 Ian Hutchinson http://biologos.org/blog/centered-the-language-of-science-and-faith?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/centered-the-language-of-science-and-faith?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In a recent interview with the Sirius XM radio show Centered, Karl Giberson sat down with host Don Belanus to discuss the book The Language of Science and Faith.

In a recent interview with the Sirius XM radio show Centered, Karl Giberson, co-author of BioLogos' The Language of Science and Faith, sat down with host Don Belanus to discuss the book and the interplay between science and faith. Among the topics they cover are what constitute the "genuine questions" of science and faith mentioned in the title and whether the age of the earth should be a top priority for pastors to discuss with their congregations.

]]> Fri, 18 Nov 11 05:56:02 -0800 Karl Giberson http://biologos.org/blog/lets-not-surrender-science-to-the-secular-world?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/lets-not-surrender-science-to-the-secular-world?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication As much as I sympathize with Giberson and Stephens, I am concerned that one of their central assumptions—that there is a divide between ‘secular knowledge’ and Christian—essentially undermines their very pursuit of a middle ground where the two can be ‘integrated’. I recently read with great interest and sympathy a NY Times Op Ed piece by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens on “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason.” I say ‘interest and sympathy’ first of all because I consider both of the authors brothers in Christ whose friendship I value greatly. Karl in particular has been a teacher and mentor for me, and is the chief person to have sparked my interest in the conversation about science and theology. I say this secondly because I heartily agree with their desire to affirm that science and Christian faith need not be at odds and to reject both the fundamentalism of scientistic atheists like Richard Dawkins, on the one hand, and the fundamentalism of anti-scientific Christians like Ken Ham on the other. And I wish to do this not only because I think both types of fundamentalists are wrong, but also because, as a university educator myself, I am concerned about the number of students who are leaving the church because they feel that they must choose between Christian faith and science! I, like Giberson and Stephens, believe that they do not need to make this choice.

But, as much as I sympathize with Giberson and Stephens, I am concerned that one of their central assumptions—that there is a divide between ‘secular knowledge’ and Christian faith that must be overcome—essentially undermines their very pursuit of a middle ground where the two can be ‘integrated’. Indeed, even to assume that knowledge/science and Christian faith need to be ‘integrated’ seems to me to play right into the hands of the scientistic fundamentalists, to have completely sold them the proverbial farm. Instead, I think a much better and more distinctly Christian case can be made against Christian fundamentalist aversion for science, but before I can make the case, I need to talk more about what I perceive to be the problem with Giberson and Stephens’ call for integration.

To put it succinctly, even to talk about ‘secular knowledge’ and the ‘integration’ of science and faith is to buy into a problematic bifurcation of knowledge. The basic assumption lying behind such a distinction is that the world of knowledge can be divided into two discreet realms. On the one hand we have the world of secular knowledge, the goal of which is pure objectivity, which is governed by reason and humility, and which finds its ideals embodied in the practice of science. On the other we have the world of religion, which has a completely different set of goals and ideals. Religious knowledge is based upon faith, for the goal of religion is fidelity to God, to Jesus Christ, to the Bible as inspired by God and revelatory of God’s truth.

There are multiple problems with this bifurcation of types of knowledge. For one thing, it simply does not match the facts. There is no ‘Christianity’ that stands or ever has stood as a whole against science or reason. Whatever Christianity IS it certainly is an incredibly complex movement, and throughout its history there have been multiple ways that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, science and theology. This is a point I wish to unpack at greater length in a later blog, but for now it is sufficient to say that there has never been any single way that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, much less what faith and reason even mean. So to treat Christianity (if there even can be said to be such a ‘thing’) as a univocal totality is highly problematic.

Same goes for science. Is it truly or purely a secular pursuit? What are we to make, then, of the countless religious individuals who have been scientists and who have made significant contributions to our knowledge of the cosmos? Did they do so only by some kind of compromise between their faith and secular forms of knowledge? Again, the historical evidence would indicate quite the contrary. Take, for example, the Islamic Golden Age of scientific discovery (c. 750-1200). For Medieval Muslims there was no such thing as a secular realm, much less secular reason or knowledge. One of the most vibrant eras of human discovery, medieval Muslim scientists like Avicenna, Algaurizin, and Omar Khayyam made countless important advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and even chemistry because of their faith that the cosmos is the creation of Allah and their conviction that they served their God by coming to understand better the majesty of Allah's handiwork. Indeed, one might say that it was their very rejection of a distinction between faith and reason, religion and science, that spurred on their desire to study and learn about the physical world.

Much the same could be said of scientific endeavors in the ‘Christian’ West up until the last two centuries. Many of the great scientists and nearly all of the great philosophers of medieval Europe were Catholic clerics, including a few popes! And the list of Christians who have made significant contributions to scientific discovery ever since is absolutely eye-popping: Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestly, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Lord Kevlin, Max Planck…to name just a few.

I can, I believe, say with a great sense of confidence that few, if any, of these great Christian scientists understood themselves to be integrating their faith with secular knowledge. In fact, even to talk about secular knowledge or a secular realm is to be somewhat anachronistic, for the very notion of the secular as a kind of non-religious, and therefore supposedly neutral, public sphere is a rather recent construction. Although with roots in both ancient and enlightenment philosophy and practically grounded in the rise of the modern nation state (in the efforts of monarchs to wrest power from religious authorities and later as democratic nations sought to establish religious toleration), the term itself and a full-blown philosophy of secularism did not appear until the mid-19th century.

Of course, secularism is now the name of the game in most nations outside of the Muslim world, even in countries that do still maintain some kind of official ties between state and religion, such as Britain or Norway. But even in such countries there is a considerable functional split between church and state, with faith now understood to be a matter of private, individual preference and practice, and such ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ endeavors as science viewed as features of the public, secular sphere. Aside from the fact that neither science nor any other kind of so-called ‘secular’ thinking has proven to be all that neutral or objective (see, for instance, Stephen L. Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion or just about anything written by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Jerome Ravitz, Paul Feyerabend, and Bruno Latour, among many others), it is easy to see why someone like Giberson or Stephens might presume the distinction between faith (religious) and science (secular): because that is what their audience generally assumes.

But this is exactly the division that we as Christians need to reject as we talk about the relationship between science and faith, and especially when it comes to providing a critique of Christian fundamentalism. Science belongs, I wish to argue, just as much to the church of Christ as it does to some so-called secular realm of knowledge. To treat the conversation otherwise is to give in to both the secular fundamentalists, who wish to see Christians surrender their faith in God for faith in science as the fount of all truth, and the Christian fundamentalists, who fear that any compromise with the secular ultimately amounts to selling out their fidelity to God.

A diverse philosophical and religious movement in the Greco-Roman world that exerted considerable influence on both Christianity and Judaism. Gnostics generally held that the material world was evil and/or filled with ignorance, having been created by a lesser deity than the supreme God. For Gnostics, salvation involved finding freedom from the physical world through the acquisition of secret knowledge (gnosis) revealed directly by God.

A far more appropriate way to criticize the anti-intellectual and anti-scientific positions of Christian fundamentalists is to demonstrate how deeply anti-Christian and anti-biblical these positions truly are. In fact, I wish to argue that these tendencies actually mark the resurgence of the ancient heresy Gnosticism, which was roundly rejected by the Christian church in the first and second centuries. Defining Gnosticism and demonstrating the extent to which Christian fundamentalists are guilty of this heresy will be the central thrust of my next blog.

"I lay it down that all knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by a mental abstraction; and then again, as to its Creator, though He of course in His own Being is infinitely separate from it, and Theology has its departments towards which human knowledge has no relations, yet He has so implicated Himself with it, and taken it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating Him." (John Henry Newman, (1858), "The Idea of a University", p. 50-51)

]]> Wed, 26 Oct 11 02:59:05 -0700 Mark H. Mann http://biologos.org/blog/where-we-come-from-and-who-we-are?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/where-we-come-from-and-who-we-are?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this video, physicist Ard Louis describes that our value and purpose do not come from whether or not we were created by an evolutionary mechanism. Evolution may tell us something about how we were created, but it is not the source of our worth.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, physicist Ard Louis discusses the misconceptions about evolution and what it says about our purpose. A lot of the young earth arguments against evolution, says Louis, can be beneficial to those promoting atheism. According to Louis, both sides are attempting to extract theology from the natural world and wrongly accept the premise that where we come from determines who we are and how we should live. However, that’s not what the Bible tells us; rather, our value comes from God, and God determines who we are and how we should live.

Many understand evolution as a theory underlined by the idea that our existence is purposelessness. But our value and purpose do not come from whether or not we were created by an evolutionary mechanism. Evolution may tell us something about how we were created, but it is not the source of our worth. That worth comes from God.

For more from Ard Louis, be sure to read his white paper for BioLogos.

]]> Wed, 19 Oct 11 08:05:32 -0700 Ard Louis http://biologos.org/blog/evolution-is-god-just-playing-dice?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/evolution-is-god-just-playing-dice?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication With his standard panache, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued strenuously that evolution had no inherent directionality. We are mere accidents; a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree". This article first appeared on The Huffington Post.

"Reply the tape a million times ... and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again" (Stephen Jay Gould from "Wonderful Life", 1989 p. 289, Harvard University Press.).

With his standard panache, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued strenuously that evolution had no inherent directionality. It was a cosmic crapshoot - in no way destined to produce anything complex, self-conscious or human. We are mere accidents; a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree" ("Wonderful Life" p. 291). Highly fortunate indeed! Eons ago, a dinosaur-dominated earth held little promise for mammalian ascendancy (let alone primates or humans). Our distant ancestors might have remained little more than scurrying nuisances nipping at the feet of giants if not for a most unlikely calamity - a massive meteor strike which swept away the dinos and forever altered the earth's bio-saga. Who would have guessed?

Evolution's capricious nature seemed to represent a severe stumbling block for the Abrahamaic religious traditions. In their narrative, humans represented the culmination of God's creative work - the very purpose for creation itself. But evolution is an awfully shoddy way of enacting a divine plan. Gould delighted in annoying the faithful by emphasizing this very point:

"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce" ("The Panda's Thumb", 1980, pp. 20-1).

Theologians, however, were quick to point out that the chance element in evolution was neither new nor necessarily contrary to the Judeo-Christian view of God. Human history was replete with chance; evolution only extended the theme. Moreover, chance allowed for freedom - a virtue high on God's agenda. However theologically sound these retorts may have been, their force was often lost on the average believer. The accidental nature of human existence provided just another reason to reject evolution altogether in order to preserve God's special concern for humanity.

Gould was a talented science writer, but he overplayed evolution's whimsy. Increasingly, science is showing that the evolutionary process has many built in constraints which limit its possibilities and bias its pathways. Take, for example, the ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence - the tendency for highly diverse species to independently evolve similar adaptive (analogous, not homologous) traits. Most of us are familiar with the saber-toothed tiger, the scourge of our hominin ancestors. Less familiar are a group of South American marsupials called the thylacosmilids who independently evolved similar protruding saber-teeth. Convergence can also be seen in a number of specifically human traits. For example, we share a mode of locomotion, bipedalism, with birds, kangaroos, and some dinos. The lateralized and convoluted structure of our brains can also be found in octopi, this despite the fact that vertebrates and cephalopods diverged from one another over 450 million years ago.

In his book "Life's Solution" (2003, Cambridge Press) Cambridge Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris documents scores of examples of convergent evolution from insect body designs to the social systems of dolphins and chimpanzees (both fission-fusion). The important lesson is that there are only a limited number of ways that evolution can solve the adaptive problems posed by the earth's ecosystems. Time and again, evolution stumbles upon the same general design features from which to fashion adaptive traits.

Now add to this the Baldwin effect - an idea originally proposed in 1896 wherein organisms are posited to actively shape their own selective forces. For example, suppose some fairly intelligent primates begin fashioning tools, giving them access to new resources and a competitive advantage over non-tool users. Any genetic predisposition facilitating tool use would also be positively selected.

A severe limitation on Baldwin effects has always been the unpredictability of genetic mutation. For any heritable genetic changes to occur (so the thinking has always been) our tool wielding primate would just have to wait around and hope for a lucky "tool use" mutation to pop up. But maybe not. Two recent books, Jablonka and Lamb's "Evolution in Four Dimensions" (2005 MIT press) and Kirschner and Gerhart's "The Plausibility of Life" (2005, Yale University Press) discuss connections between recent work in genetics and Baldwinian processes. What if the primate's tool use actually raised the probability that a tool-relevant genetic change would take place which could then be passed along to offspring?

Recent genetic research (in a field called epigenetics) shows that experiences occurring over one's lifetime can produce heritable genetic changes. For example, mice exposed to two weeks of environmental enrichment (more social interaction, activity, novel objects to explore) show evidence of enhanced memory function (not surprising). More surprising is that their offspring also show evidence of enhanced memory even though they were never exposed to environmental enrichment (Journal of Neuroscience, 29, p. 1496). Thus, the increased environmental stimulation created a genetic change in the parents that was then transmitted to offspring. This change appears to involved altered patterns of gene regulation (how genes are turned on and off during development). Similar effects have been noted in humans (see European Journal of Human Genetics, 14, p. 159).

Convergence, epigenetic inheritance, and Baldwin effects are only a few of the mechanisms serving as directional constraints on evolution's pathways. In his review of the various factors affecting the evolutionary process, anthropologist Melvin Konner concludes:

"There are no intrinsic driving factors in evolution, but there are intrinsic constraints and canalized paths along which either evolution or development may more easily proceed" ("The Evolution of Childhood," Harvard Press, 2010, p. 59, emphasis in original).

Of course, none of these constraining factors guarantee our arrival on the evolutionary stage. They do, however, raise the odds that in time a complex, rational, self-aware creature capable of entertaining both scientific and religious ideas might emerge.

The more we understand evolution, the less it seems like neither the bogeyman that creationists fear nor the universal God-dissolving acid some atheists crave.

]]> Tue, 11 Oct 11 05:00:54 -0700 Matt J. Rossano http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-3-john-polkinghornes-faith?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-3-john-polkinghornes-faith?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In both his science and his faith commitments, Polkinghorne embraces Michael Polanyi’s thinking: “To commit myself to what I believe to be true, knowing that it may be false.” The following is an except from Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion, a portrait of influential physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. More than just a biography, they hope the book will shed light on the relationship between science and faith by presenting Polkinghorne’s unique story. Last week, we read a bit about Polkinghorne’s transition from the world of physics to the priesthood, and the responses it drew from fellow scientists, especially from fellow colleague and outspoken atheist Stephen Weinberg. Today we look as some of Polkinghorne’s personal views on faith.

John Polkinghorne’s Faith

In both his science and his faith commitments, Polkinghorne embraces Michael Polanyi’s thinking, taken from the chemist/philosopher’s influential book, Personal Knowledge. Polkinghorne summarizes Polanyi’s thinking into this maxim: “To commit myself to what I believe to be true, knowing that it may be false.” Polanyi, a Hungarian philosopher and chemist in the first half of the 1900s, rejected the idea that scientists were purely objective. Scientists were not heretics, as some were claiming at the time, but were part of a community trying to establish beliefs and dogmas, he argued. The scientific community, therefore, was not that different from the religious community. All knowledge is personal, said Polanyi, and observers cannot separate themselves from their backgrounds, experiences and judgments.¹

Steven Weinberg’s (who we introduced in the last excerpt) experience of being raised in a Jewish home and having members of his family die in the Holocaust will, by definition, have an impact on the interpretations he makes in his scientific pursuits, according to Polanyi. Likewise, Polkinghorne’s experience of being raised in an Anglican home and nearly dying as an adult will also have an impact on the interpretations he makes in his scientific pursuits, even if the scientific pursuits are the same. Science gets its great strength from its ability to rise above these limitations and build an objective picture of the world. But it would be a mistake to suppose that science does this perfectly, or to suppose that religion cannot do it at all.

“All human knowing involves perception from a particular point of view, which will offer opportunities for insight but be bounded by its inherent limitations,” Polkinghorne said.

Both science and faith are means by which we seek to understand ultimate realities. But they are different in how they look at those realities and what questions they ask. Polkinghorne likes the homey and quintessentially British example of making a pot of tea: A person observes a kettle of water on a stove and asks “Why is the water in the kettle boiling?”

One answer—the sort provided by a scientist— is that burning gas is creating heat, which raises the temperature of the water to the boiling point. Another answer is that the kettle is boiling on the stove because I am making tea – and would you care to have a cup with me? Both responses are valid and in touch with reality, Polkinghorne says, and they certainly don’t need to cancel one another or even compete. In fact, the two explanations complement each other, providing a more complete picture of the tea-making enterprise, answering more questions, and giving the activity a rich and satisfying description. The two explanations are “friends, not foes” he says.

In One World, Polkinghorne wrote, “Theology and science differ greatly in the nature of the subject of their concern. Yet each is attempting to understand aspects of the way the world is….They are not chalk and cheese, irrational assertion compared with reasonable investigation, as the caricature account would have it.”²

Nor are they identical. There are many ways to see religious principles in everyday life, Polkinghorne believes. “Our goal is an integrated picture of the way the world is,” he continued in One World. “In that picture science and theology, reason and revelation, all find their place. There is indeed revelation of God, in those particular events and understandings preserved in scripture and tradition, but it is not insulated from the critique of reason or from evaluation in association with other forms of insight.”³

Some of the difference between faith and science lies in the motivation for seeking truth . “Religious motivations are more akin to the sort of motivations that lead us to trust our friends; that is they are attained through trusting rather than testing,” he said.

As for the atheists who say these different pursuits of truth cannot travel the same road, Polkinghorne is undaunted. He doesn’t accept their characterization of religion. Many of his colleagues are, to be sure, wary of religion. But that is because they believe that people with faith must believe in what their religious authorities tell them to believe.

“Religious belief isn’t shutting your eyes, gritting your teeth, believing six impossible things before breakfast because the Bible tells you that’s what you must do,” he said at a debate with atheist Steven Weinberg. “It is a search for a motivated belief – a difficult search and different people will reach different conclusions about it. But you don’t have to commit intellectual suicide to be a religious believer; otherwise I wouldn’t be one.”⁴

Notes

1. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974), vii.
2. John Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Faith and Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 36.
3. Ibid., 42.
4. Steven Weinberg and John Polkinghorne: An Exchange.

]]> Fri, 30 Sep 11 05:00:00 -0700 Dean Nelson, Giberson, Karl http://biologos.org/blog/surrogate-arguments?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/surrogate-arguments?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this video, Brian McLaren discusses the idea of surrogate arguments, in which a debate over one thing is really a means for arguing something completely different. According to McClaren, the argument over the age of the earth is one such argument.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, author and pastor Brian McLaren discusses the idea of surrogate arguments, in which a debate over one thing is really a means for arguing something completely different. According to McClaren, the argument over the age of the earth is one such example, in which an apparent scientific debate is actually a discussion over the nature of religious authority and how previous generations have understood how we should interpret the Bible. Such debates can lead to two crises: one of confidence and one of ethics. While some have the confidence to differ with the views of the generation that raised them in the faith, McLaren points out that some are not able to overcome the ethical challenge of differing with grace and love. When this happens, he notes, the end result is damage to the Church and a retrenching of the views of the older generation. Managing the crises well requires courage of convictions while also respecting tradition and maintaining a gracious spirit. Anything less, is not only unwise, it is also unfaithful.

]]> Wed, 21 Sep 11 09:11:52 -0700 Brian McLaren