A Thinking Reed

Month: April 2009

  • A boy and his robot

    From the AV Club: an appreciation of one of my very favorite movies.

  • God and the multiverse

    An interesting article dealing with how some religious believers are dealing with the idea, suggested from some of the more speculative corners of contemporary physics, that our universe is simply one part of a vast “multiverse” (via the First Things blog, I think).

    Among other things, the multiverse hypothesis seems to pose a challenge for certain modern arguments for God’s existence based on the so-called anthropic principle, or the appearance that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. People have suggested that the fact of this apparent fine-tuning provides some kind of evidence for the existence of God (how much evidence is a matter of debate). However, if our universe is just one among many (an infinity?) of actualized universes, then the emergence of a universe fit for life would seem to be inevitalbe, or at least much more likely, without requiring an intelligent creator.

    Interestingly, Arthur Peacocke addressed this issue some time ago in his Gifford Lecutres, collected in his book Theology for a Scientific Age. He argues that you can avoid the multiverse problem by simply taking the argument up a level:

    Whatever the constraints and framework of meta-laws and supervening relations that operate in bringing about the range constituting any postulated ensemble of universes, they must be of such a kind as to enable in one of the universes (this one) the combination of parameters, fundamental constants, etc., to be such that living organisms, including ourselves, could come into existence in some corner of it. So, on this argument, it is as significant that the ensemble of universes should be of such a kind that persons have emerged as it would be if ours were the only universe. (p. 109)

    One possible problem I see with Peacocke’s argument is that it seems to depend on whether the multiverse is supposed to contain all merely physical possibilities (i.e. those universes which are possible given the fundamental “constraints and framework” of the multiverse, whatever those are) or to exhaust all logically possible universes. If the latter, then there would be no anthropic coincidence to explain, since the actually existing multiverse would be the only one that could exist. On the other hand, I’m not sure how we could establish that whatever fundamental framework governs the multiverse was the only logically possible (i.e., self-consistent) one. I also don’t have a terribly firm grasp on what motivates the entire theory, so I’m not sure how its proponents would characterize it given these options.

  • Faith and reason: a follow up

    Jeremy and Jonathan both provided some good comments and helpful pushback on this post. Here are some follow-up thoughts:

    I don’t think I was very successful at doing this, but it’s important to avoid positing a simplistic dichotomy between a monolithic reason and an equally homogeneous “faith” or “revelation.” I don’t assume that we can start from the “view from nowhere.” All our thought about the world is conditioned by our linguistic, social, historical, etc. location.

    But at the same time, it’s oversimplified to suggest that we start from within a single tradition. The truth is, we each belong to multiple overlapping traditions. Or to put it another way, multiple traditions jostle within each one of us. We don’t have a systematic framework that neatly relates and orders the various parts of our knowledge. I’m both a Christian and an heir of Enlightenment humanism and liberalism, among other things.

    What I think we need to do is bring different “truths” — or more precisely parts of the truth — into dialogue with each other. Christian theological claims can shed light on other areas of our knowledge. At the same time, knowledge gained from other sources can challenge our theology.

    I take it that within theology there are more and less central truths. If I had to summarize the Christian vision it would be something like this: A loving creator God who made all that is, who became incarnate, suffered, died and rose again to reconcile us to God, and who is leading all of creation toward fulfillment and redemption. How we come to believe in this central vision is a complex issue, but I take it that it can’t be “proven” in a strict sense, even if reasons for it can be given. (Including “modest” natural theology, various historical considerations, etc.)

    Beyond this there are various theological formulations that attempt to explicate and draw implications from this central vision. But the further you get from the “core” the more contestable your claims become. For instance, Christians have often drawn implications from their theological vision about ethics or the ordering of society which have been challenged from secular sources or from other faith traditions (as well as from dissident voices within the churches). This has led, in at least some cases, to a revision of theology but not an abandonment of the core vision.

    Our traditions or narratives never really manage to encompass all of reality. There’s always some recalcitrant material left over that resists absorption (or abstraction) into any single conceptual scheme or narrative. That’s one of the dangers I see with Lindbeck’s view – that the “biblical narrative” (which is already something of an artifiicial construct) can absorb the world. This also tends to reinforce a highly conservative view of the church, since it’s assumed that the church has the truth and merely needs to bring its light to others.

    The inevitable deficiency in any of our traditions/narratives/conceptual maps is an implication of what I take to be the key insight of a realist view of truth: that the world exists and has a determinate character independent of what we think about it. This ought to induce humility and openness to truth from other quarters.

    For this reason, we have to attend to those other narratives or traditions that people use to understand and navigate the world. Not because there’s some “neutral” ground on which to stand and from which we can dispassionately evaluate them, but because by sympathetically entering into other understandings of the world, we can widen our perspective and gain a distance on our own tradition and its flaws and blind spots. Ideally, this leads to a more complete and truer understanding of reality.

    So, I do need to backpedal somewhat on my previous post. It’s not that I think theological claims need to be tested by “reason,” understood as some context-free God’s-eye way of viewing the world, but that theological claims need to be tested by and brought into dialogue with other truth-claims: the findings of the physical, life, and social sciences, the convictions of movements for social justice, the tenets of other religions, people’s lived experiences, etc. etc. This will be a highly unsystematic process by which we try to bring these various claims into relation and see what kind of light they shed on each other.

    To take one, fairly obvious example, for most of Christian history it was thought, more or less, that the opening chapters of Genesis provided something like a literal account of the creation of the world. This didn’t stop Christians from finding all manner of spiritual value in the rich symbolism of the story, but it was probably assumed that there was a bedrock of historicity. The advent of evolutionary theory, as we well know, called this into question and prompted a re-thinking, at least in many quarters. There are now many Christians, including most of the major denominations, who think that evolutionary theory is compatible with the essentials of Christian faith. The vision was not abandoned, but some of its penumbras were revised or rejected.

    This doesn’t mean that theology will always “lose” in the sense of having its tenets overturned; sometimes we may find that theological claims hold up quite well, other times we may find that they need to be modified or are enriched by this encounter, and other times that they shed considerable new understanding on other areas of our knowledge or practice. I don’t think we can prescribe, a priori, what the outcome will be for any particular case. As Christians, though, we can be confident entering into that encounter, knowing that all truth is God’s truth.