A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Asking the right question

In comments to my previous post, John corrected my understanding of Dennett’s views. It’s not, apparently, that Dennett denies that theism is logically compatible with evolution, it’s just that theism doesn’t explain or add anything to our understanding of evolution.

But I’m not sure this is really a bad thing. I’m perfectly content to assume that evolution can be explained entirely with reference to natural processes and that it doesn’t require appeal to an “intelligent designer.” I don’t see any reason that Christians or other theists should fight on that particular hill. After all, there are good theological reasons to think that God imbued created being with the properties to unfold in a certain direction without requiring God’s occasional intervention.

Where I think theists do have something useful to contribute is in stepping back and looking at the broader picture. We know that the possibility for the evolution of life as we know it is tied into the basic properties of the cosmos at a very fundamental level, as revealed by modern physics. Almost as though the universe has a built-in tendency toward evolution. So, we can usefully ask, I think, why the universe has this tendency to give rise to organic life, and to conscious, purposive beings.

Rowan Williams puts it well in his book Tokens of Trust:

Faith doesn’t try and give you an alternative theory about the mechanics of the world; it invites you to take a step further, beyond the nuts and bolts, even beyond the Big Bang, to imagine an activity so unrestricted, so supremely itself, that it depends on nothing and is constantly pouring itself out so that the reality we know depends on it. Creation isn’t a theory about how things started; as St Thomas Aquinas said, it’s a way of seeing everything in relation to God. (p. 37)

I don’t know that asking the question of creation as a whole compels a “theistic” answer, but it locates the question at the right place: at the borders of what we can understand about the processes of the world, the place where explanations internal to the workings of the cosmos break down. Why the laws or processes of the universe are what they are at their most fundamental level doesn’t seem to be a question that can be intelligibly answered by appealing to those laws or processes themselves. Is there something that gives meaning and intelligibility to the whole shooting match? That, I take it, is the right question to ask.

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One response to “Asking the right question”

  1. djeter

    This is from a Michael Behe review of John Haught’s “God After Darwin.” From your interest in the topic here, you might want to check out the book.

    I enjoyed Haught’s “God And The New Atheism,” which deals with Dennet’s views there a lot. Dr. John (Jack) F. Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian and the Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University. His area of expertise is systematic theology, with a special interest in issues of science, cosmology, ecology, and reconciling evolution and religion.

    He graduated from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and subsequently received his PhD in theology from The Catholic University of America in 1970 and was the winner of the 2002 Owen Garrigan Award in Science and Religion and the 2004 Sophia Award for Theological Excellence. He was the chair of Georgetown’s theology department between 1990 and 1995. I think you will really enjoy his writings and it will give you the perpective you will need when thinking about Dennet and the challenges he presents to the faith community.

    Here is Behe:

    “Haught’s basic theological view is the following:
    However, theology may still provide an ultimate explanation of why evolutionary creativity occurs in the spontaneous and self-creative manner it does. For if ultimate reality is conceived of neither as “mindless and impersonal matter,” as materialism sees it, nor simply as an “intelligent designer,” but fundamentally as self-emptying suffering love, we should already anticipate that nature will give every appearance of being in some sense autonomously creative (autopoietic).

    Since it is the nature of love, even at the human level, to refrain from coercive manipulation of others, we should not expect the world that a generous God calls into being to be instantaneously ordered to perfection. Instead, in the presence of the self-restraint befitting an absolutely self-giving love, the world would unfold by responding to the divine allurement at its own pace and in its own particular way. The universe would then be spontaneously self-creative and self-ordering. And its responsiveness to the possibilities for new being offered to it by God would require time, perhaps immense amounts of it. The notion of an enticing and attractive divine humility, therefore, gives us a reasonable metaphysical explanation of the evolutionary process as this manifests itself to contemporary scientific inquiry.

    In Haught’s view we have been much too self-centered in imagining ourselves the goal and pinnacle of creation, disregarding the long pre-biological history of the universe, as well as the history of life on our planet before the arrival of humankind. That long interval is filled with change, striving, and genuine novelty in which God delights. It is also filled with destruction, suffering, and death.

    Although admitting the theological problem of suffering remains, Haught finds that the whole evolutionary picture resonates with the Christian idea of God as self-emptying, suffering love. (Haught’s book is written from a distinctly Christian, and particularly Catholic, viewpoint.) I am not a theologian but, like Haught, am a Roman Catholic and I find this aspect of his vision aesthetically attractive.

    One of his principal themes is a metaphysics of the future, since “it is the ‘coming of God’ in the mode of renewing the future that ultimately explains the novelty in evolution.” Haught faults both materialists, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and intelligent design theorists, such as Phillip Johnson and myself, for holding that the future is in essence contained in the past.

    For the materialists, it is a case of believing that physical laws unfold deterministically or algorithmically throughout time. For design proponents, says Haught, it is the belief in a fixed, static plan in the mind of God. Both of these stances are stultifying in his view because they preclude the occurrence of anything truly new in the world, anything that wasn’t implicitly already there.

    Well, if deterministic laws or algorithms do not account for all of nature, exactly what do they miss? First, says John Haught, they don’t account for the fine-tuning of the universe: “To a good number of scientists today, the initial conditions and fundamental cosmic constants of the universe seem so precisely bent toward the eventual production of carbon, and then life, that they suggest a new basis for natural theology, not in biology but in physics.”

    Indeed, he explicitly states that anthropic coincidences “point toward something like intelligent design [!] at the very foundation of the universe.” Second, deterministic laws don’t account for mind: “materialist evolutionism leaves out any satisfactory account of how or why subjective experience and eventually consciousness entered into the cosmic picture and became so dominant.” Finally, they don’t account for fundamentally new and hierarchical arrangements in nature, such as the formation of molecules from fundamental particles, the formation of ordered metabolisms from separate chemical reactions, the formation of cells, multicellular organisms, and so on up the order of life. Those new events, Haught argues, require information.

    By “information” I mean, in a broad and general sense, the overall ordering of entities-atoms, molecules, cells, genes, etc.-into intelligible forms or arrangements. The term “information,” of course, has more specific and technical definitions in physics and engineering, but these need not concern us here. The point I wish to emphasize here is that the use of the metaphor “information” by scientists today is a transparent indication that they now acknowledge, at least implicitly, that something more is going on in nature and its evolution than simply brute exchanges along the matter-energy continuum.

    Though it is not physically separate, information is logically distinguishable from mass and energy. Information is quietly resident in nature, and in spite of being non-energetic and non-massive, it powerfully patterns subordinate natural elements and routines into hierarchically distinct domains.

    Haught specifically cites the information in DNA as being beyond the laws of chemistry and physics, even though it violates no natural law. To help explain, he adapts an analogy from Michael Polanyi where a hand moves a pen on paper in meaningless scrawls, but then begins to write a coherent sentence.

    Physical continuity remains, but this continuity does not rule out an overriding logical and informational discontinuity. At the level of a purely chemical analysis of the bonding properties of ink and paper nothing new is going on when the informative sentence is introduced suddenly. From the point of view of physical science, things are the same as before. Yet from another kind of perspective, that of a human mind capable of reading written information, there is all the difference in the world.”

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