A Thinking Reed

Category: Science and Religion

  • Denis Edwards on new creation: radical transformation and real continuity

    One problem for any Christian eschatology–an underappreciated one, it seems to me–is reconciling it with the rather bleak view of the universe’s future provided to us by modern science. We’re told that our universe will, after billions of years of expansion, either collapse back in on itself in a “big crunch” expand endlessly into an ultimately lifeless, dissipated “heat death.” Neither scenario aligns particularly well with the hope of a “new creation” offered by Christianity.

    In How God Acts Denis Edwards tries to provide an account of that hope that is intelligible in terms of modern science. He says that it is first important to be clear about the limits of theological concepts and language; imagination is indispensable in religion, but we shouldn’t mistake our images of the ultimate destiny of creation for the thing itself. Nevertheless, he ventures that the Christian hope should be seen in terms of a “deification” of the created, material universe. Taking the death and resurrection of Christ as both an analogue and the definitive sign of God’s promise, the destiny of the material universe will be one of both radical change and continuity. Somehow, the material world will be taken up into the life of God. We hope for this because, echoing N.T. Wright, we hope that God will do for the whole universe what he did for Jesus at Easter.

    Edwards emphasizes that we are to see this transformation as entailing real continuity. We shouldn’t think of the new creation as God scrapping the old one and starting over. But what does continuity mean here? We can, perhaps vaguely, understand what it might mean in the case of a human being–we at least think we can understand how a person’s individual self could be preserved even through a radical transformation. But what about the physical cosmos? Edwards suggests that we should think of matter as inherently “transformable” into a new state; it has a potential, as part of its nature, to become something more–and radically different–than what it is. He points out that our tendency is to think of “spirit” as somehow mysterious and “matter” as basically straightforward. But science has revealed, particularly over the last hundred years or so, that the nature of matter is far more mysterious than we thought. Who knows what it might be capable of becoming?

    This sense of continuity, Edwards contends, gives weight to our actions here and now. While the final consummation of all things is definitely God’s action, everything will in some way be preserved in the new creation:

    Our own efforts, our ecological commitments, our struggles for justice, our work for peace, our acts of love, our failures, our own moments of quiet prayer, and our sufferings all have final meaning. Human history and our own personal story matter to God. The Word of God has entered into history for our salvation. History is embraced by God in the Christ-event. In the resurrection, part of our history–the created humanity of Jesus–is already taken into God. We are assured that all of our history has eternal meaning in God. This means that our stories have final significance, as taken up into God and transformed in Christ. (How God Acts, p. 159)

    It seems that both radical transformation and continuity are necessary to make sense of the struggles and suffering that take place in our world. Transformation is required to right the wrongs and wipe away every tear, but without continuity the whole history of the world would look like a pointless waste. Paul’s metaphor of creation “groaning” like a woman in childbirth is apt.

  • Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles

    Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events?

    Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve seen, Edwards follows Aquinas in distinguishing between God as the primary cause–that is, the cause of created beings’ very existence–and creatures as secondary causes, “the patterns of relationship we find in the natural world, everything studied by the sciences, and everything that could ever be studied by the sciences” (How God Acts, p. 81).

    A miracle, for St. Thomas, is an event where there is no secondary cause, but which is brought about by God directly. A miracle, in Thomas’s words, “surpasses the capabilities of nature.” Despite following Thomas’s general metaphysical line, this is a point where Edwards differs: “miracles can be seen as wonderful manifestations of the Spirit that occur through secondary causes” (p. 84).

    To flesh this out, Edwards takes a bit of a detour through the philosophy of science. Miracles are often said to be “violations” of the “laws of nature.” But we can distinguish several meanings of “laws of nature.” It can refer to our theories or intellectual descriptions of the patterns and relationships of nature, but it can also refer to those underlying patterns and relationships themselves. Our theories, at best, imperfectly model the reality they seek to describe, and there are multiple levels of reality–mental, personal, ethical, aesthetic–that are, as yet, not comprehensible under some general law-like description.

    The upshot is that so-called miracles may be beyond the laws of nature in the sense that they are not explicable by our currently formulated theories, but may still be intelligible in light of the natural order taken as a whole (if we fully understood it). “This opens up the possibility that miracles may occur though a whole range of secondary causes that our current science cannot yet model or cannot yet model well” (p. 87).

    But if that’s the case, then what makes an event a miracle? Following Karl Rahner, Edwards proposes that a miracles are “signs and manifestations of God’s saving action” (p. 87). To be a miracle, it’s necessary, not that an event be directly brought about by God, but that it be experienced by us as a revelation of God’s grace. For example, in principle, science might come to some understanding of how “prayer, human solidarity, love, or faith can contribute to biological healing,” (p. 89), but that would not detract from the religious significance of such an event.

    It might be useful to compare Edwards’ view with that of another contemporary theologian–Keith Ward, whose book Divine Action is devoted to many of the same problems as Edwards’. Ward would agree with Edwards that miracles are events in which God’s purposes are disclosed to human beings, but he goes further: a miracle can be understood as a sequence of events “which takes physical objects beyond their normal physical realizations, and displays their relation to their spiritual origin and goal” (Divine Action, p. 176).

    Ward argues that contemporary science offers a picture of a universe that is much “looser” and more open than the one offered by, say, deterministic Newtonian physics. The universe, Ward argues, is thus open to being influenced by God: “the whole ‘seamless robe’ picture of nature as a closed causal system is much less compelling than it once may have seemed” (pp. 177-78). In Ward’s view, the universe “is always orientated toward God” as the “purposive causal basis as of the universe itself” (p. 179). Consequently, direct divine action can’t be ruled out.

    This is obviously a complex issue, but there are some considerations that incline me toward Ward’s side of the debate. Edwards is concerned to safeguard the completeness of scientific explanations of phenomena, which, he thinks, requires a closed causal system on the level of creatures. But as Ward points out, miracles and other special divine acts are not the kind of measurable and repeatable events that would fall under general scientific laws or explanations. So, you could theoretically have a “complete” physics without it necessarily excluding divine acts that make a difference to how things go in the world. It therefore seems rash to rule out divine intervention for the sake of preserving a closed causal nexus.

    Secondly, Ward agrees with Edwards that God respects the autonomy of the created order, but that this is not an “unrestricted” autonomy. God will act to bring the divine purposes to fulfillment. “A miracle will be an extraordinary event, improbable in terms of the physical system considered in itself, but fairly probably in the wider context of a spiritual purpose for the whole system” (p. 180). The causal processes of nature are not, in themselves, the final word because the universe as a whole is, by its nature, rooted in and open to its creator (and redeemer).

  • Close encounters of the religious kind

    The Post had an article this morning on a conference being sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences on religious implications of the possible discovery of extra-terrestrial life.

    In principle, I’m not sure most the challenges posed by such a discovery would be all that different from ones we’re already used to. We’re already having to come to terms with the idea that human beings aren’t the center of the cosmos. Why should it be threatening to Christians to think that God, in his overflowing goodness, would want to create other creatures throughout this unimaginably vast universe?

    Similarly, the question of salvation and Christian uniqueness with respect to aliens doesn’t necessarily seem to be tremendously different from the question of Christianity’s relationship to other religions on Earth. The basic options would seem to be (1) that the one incarnation in Jesus is salvifically sufficient for all creatures, (2) that there could be multiple incarnations, or other suitable ways of relating to the divine, for each race of beings, or (3) that alien races aren’t in need of salvation, or at least not in the same way that humans are (C.S. Lewis depicted such an “unfallen” alien race in his Space Trilogy). Interestingly, Lewis proposed that the more likely scenario would be one of humans trying to exploit alien races and that it would be better for all parties concerned if we never came into contact with them.

    Maybe the most challenging scenario would be to encounter races of intelligent aliens who had no religion whatsoever. Christians have been inclined to think that the development of a certain level of intelligence necessarily brings with it the potential for relating to God. But suppose there were aliens who simply lacked this sense or capability, but were otherwise just as intelligent as us (or more intelligent). Would that count as evidence against God’s existence?

    UPDATE: See Caelius Spinator’s thoughts on this at the Monastery of the Remarkable English Martyrs here.

  • The cosmic prodigal son

    I’ve been reading a book called Created from Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism by the late philosopher James Rachels. The thesis is that Darwinism does have far-reaching implications for morality, even if not the ones commonly thought. This is in contrast to those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who tried to erect an insuperable wall between the realm of “values” and scientific fact.

    Rachels’ long opening chapter, in which he reviews Darwin’s life and the basic argument of the Origin of Species, is extremely clear and compelling, and worth the price of the book alone (well, at least in my case—I picked it up used for around five bucks). Subsequent chapters delve into the more properly philosophical argument about how Darwin’s findings might be related to ethics.

    What Rachels is trying to show is that Darwinism pulls the lynchpin of “human dignity” out of our existing moral framework by undermining crucial beliefs that support it. He agrees with many other philosophers that you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”—that is, statements of fact do not logically entail statements of value. But, he argues, our belief in human dignity—by which he means the view that human life is uniquely sacred or valuable—derives its support from certain beliefs about the world and our place in it. Chief among these are one religious belief and one secular philosophical belief: that human beings were specially created (in some sense) in God’s image and that human beings are uniquely rational.

    If, as Rachels believes is the case, Darwinism undermines the grounds for these beliefs, then the corresponding normative belief in human dignity will be undermined, even if it is still logically independent of those beliefs. In other words, we could still retain the belief in human dignity as a sheer judgment of value, but without the supporting beliefs (or some substitute), it’s not clear why we should.

    So why does Rachels think that Darwinism does in fact undermine these beliefs? For the purposes of this post, let’s focus on the imago dei doctrine. According to Rachels, the traditional view that human beings are created in the divine image means that “the world [was] intended to be [humanity’s] habitation, and everything else in it given for [our] enjoyment and use” (p. 86). The evolutionary picture of the world, Rachels contends, undermines this for several reasons. First, there have existed long stretches of time–billions of years, far and away the vast majority of time–where human beings did not exist and the universe got along just fine without us. Second, Darwinian evolution undermines the view that all things in nature have the form they do in order to serve some human purpose; instead, it sees the forms of creatures as an adaptation to their environment. Finally, the path of evolution doesn’t require us to posit a god to explain the emergence of human life; on strictly scientific grounds, we aren’t required to believe that the existence of human beings is anything other than a fortuitious (for us) outcome of a blind process.

    It’s possible, Rachels says, to say that God is the “first cause,” the one who sets up the basic laws of the universe, but whose further intervention isn’t required to explain the emergence and development of life. But even if this is accepted (and he’s not sure that it should be–why not just say that the universe is uncaused?), we’re a long way from the God of the Bible or Judeo-Christian tradition. Such a deistic god doesn’t possess nearly the same religious significance as a more traditional one. At that point, it’s not clear why we’d insist on hanging on the word “god” at all.

    Regular readers are probably not terribly surprised to learn that I have some sympathy with Rachels’ argument. Like much of the best atheist and agnostic thought, Rachels’ argument provides the opportuntiy for a purification of religious thought and for smashing a few idols. And surely one of the great idols of the Christian tradition has been precisely the view that creation was made just for us and all other creatures were given for our enjoyment and use. While there are certainly parts of the Bible that support such a view, modern biblical scholars have pointed out that a “humano-centric” interpretation of the Bible (as distinguished from a theo-centric one) is profoundly distorting.

    The Bible is clear in many passages that creation exists not for our sake, but for the creator’s sake. God creates all that is and calls it “good” (not “good for us”). After the flood in Genesis, God makes a covenant with all flesh, not just with humanity. The Psalms tell us repeatedly that creatures of land, air, and sea praise their creator in their own language, without the mediation of human beings. God’s admonition to Job is that the creator’s purposes encompass far more than parochial human interests. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon praises the mercy and love of the Lord: “you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” Jesus insists that our heavenly Father cares for the lillies of the field and the sparrows of the air. St. Paul contends that “all things” are reconciled in Christ and that the entire creation is groaning for liberation from bondage.

    Rachels isn’t wrong to see the anthropocentric interpretation as the dominant one in Christian history. This may have been encouraged by a secular philosophy that defined the imago primarily as reason and free will, thus emphasizing the distinction between human beings and other creatures. A more “functionalist” understanding of humanity’s role as caretakers or gardeners of the earth, by contrast, emphasizes our embededness in and responsibility to the rest of creation.

    If this alternate narrative is right, then the evolutionary story can be seen in a different perspective. Human beings are one among millions of species in whom God takes delight. The story of creation is more of an open-ended process than a static, once-and-for-all act, one that gives rise to a multiplicity of beings that reflect some facet of the divine goodness.

    And the creator has many purposes, or many stories to tell. The overarching story is that of God’s overflowing goodness in creating other beings, beings with whom God wishes to share God’s self. Within that story are sub-plots, like that of humanity. Instead of seeing humanity as the jewel of creation, maybe a truer story would be that we are the prodigal son of creation, the ones who go off and squander the riches left to us by our Father. But the Father is constantly calling us back, willing to mend the broken relationship between us so that we can be restored to our proper place in the household. This isn’t a measure of how great we are, but of how great God’s love is.

    I’m not claiming to have solved all the problems evolutionary thought poses for religion (far from it!), but in this case I think a better understanding of the natural world can actually point us to a deeper understanding of our faith. (I’ll likely have more to say about Rachels’ moral project in a later post.)

  • Christians need not apply?

    Following up on the news that Francis Collins has been nominated to head the NIH, Slate has a curious article asking whether Collins is too religious for such a position. The article makes it clear that Collins has impeccable credentials (MD, PhD in physical chemistry, coordinator of the national genome project); not only believes in evolution and its compatibility with Christian faith, but is an outspoken critic of creationism and Intelligent Design; and rejects the idea that human personhood begins at conception and supports stem-cell research. From a liberal point of view, there wouldn’t seem any grounds for worry that Collins would replicate the Bush-era politicization of scientific decisions.

    And yet, the article still manages to spend the majority of its space wringing its hands about Collins’ possible “religious agenda”:

    His passionate defense of religion has earned some harsh criticism. When rumors of the appointment began to circulate in May, University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne blogged, “I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science,” saying he was worried “about how this will affect things like stem-cell research and its funding.” (In fact, Collins is clear on his support of stem-cell research.) Sam Harris was predictably unimpressed with Collins’ ideas. “Most reviewers of The Language of God seem quite overawed by its author’s scientific credentials,” Harris wrote shortly after it was published. “His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind.”

    Harris does not make a genuine attempt to consider the book’s ideas, but he is correct that the philosophy espoused by Collins, which he calls “theistic evolution,” has so far managed to evade sustained and careful scrutiny. Now that he has been chosen as the most important scientific administrator in the country, overseeing $40 billion of grants and programs, the scientific community can be forgiven for a few jitters over exactly where Collins comes down on the inevitable, often glaring contradictions between science and Scripture.

    First off, I find the idea that theistic evolution (TE) has evaded scrutiny pretty bizarre. Theologians and philosophers have been wrestling with the relationship between science and scripture for over a hundred years; just because the American political debate has been myopically focused on evolution vs. creationism doesn’t mean that TE hasn’t received careful scrutiny (which isn’t to suggest it’s free from problems). But more to the point, the central claim of theistic evolution, at least in most forms, is that evolution can be understood on its own terms with reference to natural causes and without explicit reference to God. So, pretty much by definition, it’s hard to see what insidious influence Collins’ faith is supposed to have here.

    The article goes on to say that Collins distinguishes between “unsolved” and “unsolvable” problems: the former are those problems likely to be explicated by future scientific advances, the latter those that remain permanent mysteries of the human condition. (The philosopher Gabriel Marcel made a similar distinction between problems and mysteries.) The piece says that Collins sees the human moral sense as well as the apparent “fine-tuning” of the universe for the emergence of life as mysteries that point to the existence of God, and warns that

    [t]his is the area where Collins’ religion is most in danger of intruding on his science. He believes that it’s possible to see evidence of the divine in things like physics equations or patterns of human behavior. While Collins would never suggest that science could furnish any final proof for the existence of God, he’s fond of mentioning that the Bible occasionally uses the word evidence. That is to say, he thinks the presence of the divine can be directly observed, even if it cannot be measured and tested.

    I think the standard that’s being set here is startling. Nearly all religious people see “evidence” of the divine in humanity and in the order of the universe. And nearly all religious people believe that something like direct experience of God is possible. The implication is that virtually any religious person is potentially disqualified from important scientific positions, or at least highly suspect. To be acceptable, is Collins required to be agnostic on all philosophical and religious questions of any significance? (Not to mention, in practical terms, it’s very difficult to see how accepting a modified version of the design argument [i.e., the fine-tuning argument] or suggesting that the human moral sense gives us clues to God’s will would affect the work of a NIH administrator.)

    The problem is the same as the problem with the “new atheists”: a kind of scientific imperialism (or scientism) that thinks all interesting philosophical or religious questions can be settled by empirical demonstration in the narrowest sense (or else are meaningless). It’s the return of the old, discredited logical postivist method where “evidence” is construed in a way that rules out, by definition, reasonable grounds for religious belief.

  • Stumbling blocks

    There’s a good interview with Francis Collins, author of The Language of God, at Books & Culture. This passage in particular struck a chord with me:

    You take both the Bible and evolution seriously. Did the harmony you find between evolution and your faith just come naturally?

    You know, it really did. When I became a believer at 27, the first church I went to was a pretty conservative Methodist church in a little town outside Chapel Hill. I’m sure there were a lot of people in that church who were taking Genesis literally and rejecting evolution.

    But I couldn’t take Genesis literally because I had come to the scientific worldview before I came to the spiritual worldview. I felt that, once I arrived at the sense that God was real and that God was the source of all truth, then, just by definition, there could not be a conflict.

    I returned to church as an adult after abandoning it for most of my teenage years and early-to-mid 20s. And even prior to that my religious education had been fairly minimal. If someone would’ve expected me, at the time I returned to church, to adopt a young earth creationist worldview I would’ve been completely baffled. It would’ve been a literal impossibility. (Fortunately, no one did; that’s liberal Protestantism for you.) Being educated outside of the creationist milieu had effectively inoculated me against any such proposal. It had long ceased to be a live option for me, and I had already learned that alternate readings of the Bible were entirely possible–and held by plenty of great theologians.

    Christians often forget that much of what we talk about, and the language in which we talk about it, is completely and utterly foreign and even unintelligible to people outside the church. To some extent that’s inevitable, and any serious religious conversion will require learning a “second language.” But Christians also need to be careful that we aren’t elevating cultural accretions to the status of essential tenets of the faith (I’d most emphatically include YEC here, but more “sophisticated” mainline versions of Christianity have this problem too). Insisting that converts (or re-verts) adopt such cultural baggage is placing stumbling blocks where they don’t need to be. Sometimes Christians take refuge in the idea that they’re a virtuous remnant holding out for truth against a pagan world; that kind of self-righteousness needs a heavy dose of humble self-examination.

    Incidentally, I see via Brandon that Collins has been nominated by the President to serve as the new director of the National Institutes of Health.

  • Cognitive ethology, the Left, faith, and dominion

    A long but worthwhile essay that to some extent recapitulates the argument made by John Gray in Straw Dogs. Gray’s contention was that the secular Left has largely jettisoned the metaphysics of Christianity but held on to its anthropocentric outlook and belief in a progressive history. Echoing Nietzsche, Gray argues that the scientific, secular outlook undermines, instead of underwriting, humanism.

    The author of this essay, Steve Best, maintains that the Left, even while taking pride in its progressive, enlightened, science-informed views, still has largely ignored the “animal question,” i.e., the fact that science increasingly reveals a continuity between human and non-human animals. Instead, progressives still largely hold on to the old, discredited humanism that posits an unbridgeable chasm between us and the rest of creation.

    As a Christian who’s also interested in moving beyond a strictly anthropocentric theology, I come at this from a slightly different angle. On the one hand, the Bible (not to mention simple observation) reveals that we have at least a de facto dominion over the rest of nature: what we do disproportionately affects the rest of the world whether we like it or not. On the other hand, historical Christianity has largely adopted an anthropocentrism that is at odds with the Bible, at least on some readings. For instance, in a brief but interesting book, German theologian Michael Welker argues that a close reading of the opening chapters of Genesis describes a human dominion that privileges human interests but also demands a care for the rest of creation:

    The mandate of dominion aims at nothing less than preserving creation while recognizing and giving pride of place to the interests of human beings. In all the recognizing and privileging of the interests of human beings, the central issue is the preservation of creation in its complex structures of interdependence. The expansion of the human race upon the earth is inseparable from the preservation of the community of solidarity with animals in particular, and inseparable from the caretaking preservation of the community of solidarity with all creatures in general. God judges human beings worthy of this preservation of creation. They are to exercise dominion over creatures by protecting them. Human beings acquire their power and their worth precisely in the process of caretaking. The mandate of dominion according to Genesis 1 means nothing more and nothing less. (Creation and Reality, p. 73, emphasis added)

    Traditionally–and perhaps understandably given humanity’s limited ability to affect the non-human world in the past–Christianity has adopted the view that the rest of the world exists for our sake. There have been debates about whether this is an authentically biblical view or one imported from elsewhere (e.g., classical philosophy). Either way, I believe Christianity has the resources to adapt to new understandings of our place in creation without jettisoning the biblical tradition and the essential tenets of Christian theology.

  • Barr on faith and evolution

    Since I was pretty critical of First Things a couple posts down, it seems only fair to note that Stephen Barr has been writing some excellent posts on Christianity and evolution (see here, here, and here).

  • First Things and climate denialism

    John Schwenkler with an excellent post taking down First Thing‘s resident climate change denialist, Thomas Sieger Derr.

    I’m not sure if I’ve changed or it has, but I used to really enjoy reading FT and was a faithful subscriber for about ten years. It introduced me to a lot of contemporary theology offered at a level that was still relatively accessible to the layperson. In particular, the essays of its former editor, James Nuechterlein, first exposed me to the notion of evangelical catholicity within Lutheranism, an influence in my ultimately joining the Lutheran church.

    Which makes it all the more dispirting to see the magazine descend (further?) into right-wing hackery. Maybe I’m looking back through rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that it used to offer more of a diversity of viewpoints, even while being distinctly conservative. It’s not like there’s some logical connection between traditional Christianity and climate change denialism; surely FT could at least find someone with actual scientific credentials to write about this stuff.

  • Creation’s travail

    To hear some anti-green conservatives tell it, you’d think that nature-worship and radical environmentalism were making major inroads into our society. Of course, the opposite is much closer to the truth: the general attitude toward the natural world that underlies most of our daily activities is one that regards nature as little more than a vast storehouse of resources to be used and a vast sink in which to deposit our waste.

    Still, it’s true that Christians, at any rate, shouldn’t idealize nature in either its benign aspects or its wilder and more threatening ones. There is a strain of deep green thinking that is anti-human and anti-civilization. But Christians should be a bit ambivalent about nature.

    I don’t like to talk about nature as fallen, because that implies that there was a time when it was unfallen. I don’t think modern science permits us to think that, and I don’t think the Bible requires it. Instead, I’d prefer to talk about the created world as being “in travail” (cf. Romans, chapter 8). This implies that nature is good, but is on its way to being consummated by the power and grace of God. Nature doesn’t provide the standard of good and evil, but neither is it to be disregarded for the sake of human interests.

    This view, not incidentally, provides a more solid grounding for compassion and justice for animals than either nature-mysticism or a purely utilitarian attitude toward the natural world. We don’t have to ignore the “red in tooth and claw” aspects of nature in order to recognize that our fellow creatures are caught in a world order that is indifferent to their suffering.

    Yes, trying to intervene in the predator-prey relationship will usually cause more suffering than it alleviates, but we can at least recognize that it does cause innocent suffering and will (please God) be abolished–or at least radically transformed–in the eschaton. How much more, then, does a recognition of nature’s travail provide grounds for not adding to the suffering of God’s innocent creatures by imprisoning them in our institutionalized systems of food production and scientific experimentation?