Response to Reviews of A Christian Theology of Science

Abstract

I am delighted and humbled that my exploratory thoughts on a Christian theology of science have received such serious attention from these five remarkable scholars, and in this Modern Theology forum. One could not hope for a more eminent set of reviewers or a more noble forum. What struck me most from the five reviews was how the three metaphysical theologians, on the one hand, and the science-engaged theologian and the historian of modern science and religion, on the other hand, read the book in very different ways. This illustrates to me something of the manner in which the central currents of modern science and religion discourse are struggling to come to terms with the new confidence and visibility of Christian metaphysical theology. Stated the other way around, science and religion discourse has had a pretty happy time over the past century and a half largely ignoring metaphysical theology, and its recent emergence into visibility is perhaps somewhat bewildering to the now eminent and established intellectual traditions that underpin today's mainstream science and religion scholarship. This scholarship largely operates as if traditional metaphysics of any sort—and certainly of the pre-modern theological realist sort—is impossible after Kant, as if ‘science’ and ‘religion’ exist as discrete but perhaps interfaceable domains, as if modern science is obviously an advance on all previous visions of reality, and as if science gives us decisive truths about how things really are—truths that Christian theology must simply adapt to, at whatever doctrinal cost. Peter Harrison and John Perry/D.T. Everhart are profitably questioning aspects of the above-mentioned assumptions, which remain strongly present within the methodologically atheist social sciences1 and populist scientism.2 Yet in large measure, Harrison and Perry/Everhart progress their questions from a stance that has credibility within contemporary science and religion discourse. By ‘within’ I do not mean any compliant conformity, rather I mean that they carefully speak questions to the boundaries and assumptions of that world of discourse with an astute sensitivity to what its status quo can and cannot hear. Acquiring and applying independent but insider-recognized credibility is a complex and demanding enterprise. The historian's approach to modern credibility is interpretive within firmly positive historical categories, and is as non-normative as the aim of historical objectivity allows. The historian, then, can strategically undertake boundary-questioning enterprises—without getting normative or pugnacious—which can be employed to most fruitful effect by a careful, even tacitly theological thinker, like Harrison. As ‘good’ historians refuse to get positionally soiled in first-order meaning disputes, they are polite guests and are usually welcomed inside most of the various academic silos that have developed around the study of both science and religion since the 1960s. The science-engaged theologian likewise works hard to be firmly inside the domain of contemporary scientific and religious credibility. Thinking in theologically credible ways in a manner that is also accepted as scientifically credible, and seeing how the two specialties can mutually profit from each other, is a task that requires great learning and skill. Done well—as John Perry does—science-engaged theology upsets neither science nor religion apple-carts. But if the limits that define the status quo need more than careful re-calibrating, one cannot afford to be overly concerned about status quo credibility. As Thomas Kuhn well explored, the dialectic between paradigm respecters (even as they stretch, question, develop, and adjust the paradigm) and paradigm disrupters is integral to the way Western intellectual history has developed since the time of Copernicus. Philosophical theology—drawing heavily on classical, patristic, and medieval metaphysical sources—questions the prevailing ground rules of modern ‘science and religion’ discourse itself, in large measure from outside of that discourse. This cannot help but be unsettling to experts who have risen to prominence within the current state of knowledge. John Betz, Simon Oliver, and Michael Hanby entirely appreciate what I am trying to do—even if at points I do not do it very well—and see the urgent need for metaphysical theology to be unashamed about thinking in the only categories that are appropriate to it, however disruptive and challenging those categories may be to science and religion scholarship as it presently stands. They support the aim of my work, and they see the pressing need for serious philosophical theology to grapple with the conceptual grounds of how we approach what both science and religion ‘are’. Though they expect my work will induce resistance from the status quo, they are not particularly concerned. The time has come for metaphysical theology to stop worrying if post-Christian cultural scientism likes it or not, and to just do its thing. In contrast, I sense in Peter Harrison and John Perry/D.T. Everhart a certain perplexity as to why my scholarship hardly even connects with the established giants of contemporary science and religion scholarship. There is also in Perry/Everhart a degree of anxiety, and even something approaching offense, regarding my work. The hard work that science-engaged theologians have undertaken to deeply appreciate contemporary scientific knowledge should—and often does—earn them scientific respect. Likewise, respect from the theology community that has been shaped by its engagements with modern science is a hard-won trophy. And certainly Christian scientists, rightly wanting to integrate theology with at least some aspects of their natural philosophy, risk a great deal in their professional circles if they seem in any sense to be reading their modern and facts-grounded science through any sort of irrational and superstitious religious lens. Christian scientists face considerable guild credibility pressure to present themselves as properly grown up, in Kant's sense, making sure that all declared (optional) religious convictions they have sit firmly within the bounds of credible scientific reason. Thinkers like Perry and organizations for Christians in science like the Faraday Institute do excellent work in upholding the credibility of contemporary religious conviction in the scientific domain. This is an important and worthy task, which is being done with increasing theological discernment. But Perry/Everhart seem to wonder, do I not appreciate what a fragile and precious peace science-engaged theologians and Christians in science have laboriously built up between themselves and the secular scientific establishment over the past half century? Does my root and branch critique of modern science and modern religion risk stirring up conflict? Could it even be that I am trying to revive an entirely futile recent war between science and religion? There is an unease about my work in the John Perry and D.T. Everhart review essay that, I think, reflects broader cultural dynamics grounded in historical tensions between twentieth-century science and religion, and also in the fear of a new era of anti-science epistemic irrationality. Perhaps Perry and Everhart are worried that my metaphysical theology critique of modern science might aid and abet credulous religious fundamentalists and conspiratorial post-truth madness. On the one hand, this is an entirely understandable anxiety as epistemic madness is indeed in the air. The erosion of public truth confidence is part and parcel of our now pervasive habituation in irrational fears, desires, and fantasies, as relentlessly algorithmically primed.3 Alas, the manufacture of a broad array of on-line echo-chambers, each with their own ‘truth’ narratives, now characterizes the Zeitgeist of ‘public’ discourse. But on the other hand, the significant ways in which modern scientism is the most powerful cultural phenomenon leading to apostasy in the church and truth indifference in popular culture should not be overlooked. Before we theologically rush in to uphold scientific truth, we would do well to remember that Western culture's Christian modernity died at the hands of secular scientism.4 Eighteenth-century scientific historiography as applied to biblical hermeneutics,5 combined with faith-occluding rationalist deism and the elevation of ethics above doctrine in nineteenth-century Protestant theology, cannot be underestimated in any account of the demise of Christian modernity. Further, via the great intellectual secularization of the 1860s to the 1960s, modern scientism has now undermined all high truth claims. This high truth vacuum has produced postmodernism in the academy, and in business and politics we have seen the steady rise in spin and projection marketeering concerned more with effectiveness than with truth. This uncomfortable history is seldom explored by upholders of modern scientific truth and its happy coupling with sensible theological orthodoxy. But it is twentieth-century scientism, not reactionary and fundamentalist religion, that is the first cause of our present anti-science and post-truth epistemic hysteria. Religion produced science in the West, and when science was used to undermine Western religion, it destroyed its own truth warrants in the process. To conclude these overarching comments, I think it fair to say that the two sorts of responses to my book in these review essays are both important, and both deserve close and thoughtful examination. Even so, I think the philosophical theologians are engaging with the central concerns of my book. Harrison and Perry/Everhart are doing something else; they are looking at the considerable difficulties that arise when one tries to interface contemporary science and religion scholarship with this philosophical theologian's attempt to image a post-secular and ontologically-grounded theology of science. I will spend most of this essay seeking to engage with the criticisms of John Perry/D.T. Everhart and Peter Harrison, as there is nothing much I need to say regarding the review essays of John Betz, Simon Oliver, and Michael Hanby, other than I find that they see my central concerns and my primary arguments in much the same way that I see them. I will make some comments on Hanby's review by way of tying up my response to Harrison and to Perry/Everhart, but I will first make some brief remarks about the review essays of Betz and Oliver. I am appreciative of the manner in which John Betz so clearly grasps the central aim of my book, namely, its attempt to revive metaphysically-informed theological epistemology and then apply it to natural philosophy. This is exactly correct. Betz's enthusiastic affirmation of the need for deeper and higher epistemic understandings of the meaning of the natural world, which steps back from the artificial modern demarcation of physics from theological metaphysics, is exactly the type of response I hoped my book would stimulate. There is much to be done in this area, and my book leaves much undone, but the more people who are drawing on the rich metaphysically-integrated natural philosophy traditions of patristic and medieval Christian thought, re-situated in the present, the better. I found Simon Oliver's essay profoundly insightful. It is an unusual experience as an author to read a review where the reviewer seems to know better what I am aiming at than I do myself. His questions, his probing of the book's limitations, his suggestions for further thought, and his larger thoughts about how a Christian theology of science might be better pursued bouncing off from my book, were riveting to read (for me). There are a couple of details I could push back on, but in substance, I agree with everything Oliver wrote. My first attempts to respond, point by point, to the many criticisms of John Perry and D.T. Everhart and Peter Harrison took me way over length. To economize my response to these two significant critiques, I have zoned in on seeking to clarify exactly what sort of ‘science and religion’ problem my book is trying to solve. For the problem I am trying to solve is not a historian's or a science-engaged theologian's problem, and this I think is why I find these critiques to be in significant degrees persuasive in the terms given, but also—and more fundamentally—at cross purposes to why I wrote the book. I think the way we now do science and religion is premised on both the notional and the practical isolation of knowing from meaning, and power from truth. And it is moral, metaphysical, teleological, and theological truth that we are attempting to isolate from instrumental power in all domains. In actual reality, however, life is a unity. In reality, then, these isolations are artificial abstractions facilitating certain pragmatic ends and a certain range of commonly assumed and tacitly metaphysical commitments. As Bruno Latour put it, we have never, in reality, been modern. This means that even though we think and then—as ‘best’ as we can—act as if high beliefs and human meanings are only private or unknowable concerns that do not relate directly to objective knowledge or instrumental power, we are actually deluding ourselves about their real separation. Through this collective delusion, a tacit metaphysical realism of public and objectively meaningless instrumental power justifies our notional isolation of privately free meaning from the real business of life. That is, in our social reality we have made immanent power our publicly unifying truth. This, I believe, foists onto us a false tacit metaphysics of immanent power, which is not compatible with any Christian outlook on high truth, just power, or inherently meaningful and transcendently-grounded immanent reality. So the basic problem I am trying to address is how we can notionally and practically re-unite knowledge, meaning, theological truth, and power. Peter Harrison's groundbreaking historical work of showing how we came to construct the territories of science and religion is—as I read it—the history of how knowledge became merely factual, meaning became entirely cultural, truth became post-metaphysical, and religion became a private freedom of belief option that was excluded from public truth and common meaning categories.6 Harrison's account of the ways in which ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are functionally extracted from each other is extremely fascinating, if one has, as I have, an interest in the distinctive notional demarcations and practical fragmentations of post-nineteenth century modernity.7 So I should point out that I am not interested in ‘science’ or ‘religion’ for their own sakes (I am not a science-and-religion scholar). Rather, I am interested in how their territorial distillation and demarcated codependency now structures a powerful range of what I consider to be delusional separations and unrealistic tacit metaphysical commitments within our present life-world. That is, the problem I am trying to solve sits within the scholarly domain of the applied metaphysical theologian, rather than the descriptive and backward-looking domain of the historian, or the cross-disciplinary domain of the science-engaged theologian. Specifically, I am looking for a metaphysically theological approach to knowing and understanding that enables four very different types of illumination categories to, in some measure, integrate. I want to be able to integrate empirical experience, cultural belief, mathematics, and high wisdom under one divinely energized onto-epistemological framework. Such integration—for Christians—would reconfigure the way we look at both science and religion as we now know them, for it is largely science and religion that now holds in place the notional and pragmatic disintegration of knowing/power from meaning/high-truth. As already mentioned, my theologically unified integrative aim means that I am not doing science-engaged theology. Even though no-one of any reasonable education in these matters now treats ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as natural kinds, to do science-engaged theology one largely has to work with ‘science’ as it now is and ‘religion’ as it now is. Working out how the immanent knowledge and instrumental power categories of science might relate to the essential meaning and divine truth categories of religion, without shipwrecking either on the rock of the other, is the complex and delicate (perhaps impossible) challenge of science-engaged theology. Rather than working with the ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as currently conceived (and the exploratory strength of bracketing out the social reality in which we actually live is balanced by the practical weakness—in the short term—of so doing), I have started with the problem of integrating all four illumination categories into one overarching outlook (metaphysical theology). That is, I am precisely not trying to work out how to integrate two very different interpretive systems (science and religion). I know Harrison and Perry/Everhart think I have essentialized and opposed science and religion, but I rhetorically did so in the early chapters of my book precisely in order to drop both categories entirely in chapters five and six, rather than to play one off against the other.8 For I am seeking to find a single Christian theology of natural philosophy which has its own distinctive metaphysical and epistemological signatures, where all four illumination categories together comprise a unity. This is where I locate the difference between ‘a Christian theology of science’ and ‘science-engaged theology’. I think science-engaged theology is a valuable practical enterprise, but it has inherent speculative limitations that I do not wish to be constrained by when trying to think over, from the beginning as it were, the problem of disintegrated illumination categories in our life-world. I cannot go into it here to any great length, but I think Kant is rather the end of the line for the West's complexly integrated single framework of overarching Christian truth.9 Someone like Kierkegaard is still integrating all illumination domains under a single Christian truth horizon in the 1840s,10 but by the 1870s the tide has decisively turned in Thomas Huxley's two-system direction. By the 1870s we are seeing what Harrison calls 'the remarkable reversal'11 where instead of Christian theology being the first interpretive framework of public truth (including natural philosophy), science becomes the increasingly dominant ‘value free’ and ‘objective’ epistemic interpreter of all public ‘truth’ claims, including those of religion. In the late nineteenth century, the West's theologically unified cosmic vision is split in two with public and demonstrable ‘knowledge’ going to science, on the one side, and private speculative ‘belief’ going to religion, on the other. As I see it, the many and various attempts to adapt to this new knowledge/belief bifurcation by philosophers, theologians, and social reformers from the late nineteenth century onward, are both horrifying and yet creatively fertile in various ways. However, if one is seeking to recover an overarching illuminative unity as governed by the first-truth discourse of Christian theology,12 these remarkable reversal adaptations all amount to shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.13 And of course most theologians do not attempt to recover Christian theology as the West's high unifying first truth discourse, as that would be a violation of the (now sacred) autonomy of scientific knowledge, and an unconscionable affront to the freedom of everyone's private religious beliefs. So whilst ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are not real things, as constructs they powerfully shape some of the most primary features of our liberal, secular, and now post-Christian life-world. Considering that my book is trying to find a metaphysically unified theological framework that incorporates all four categories of illumination, I am not looking for just any approach to Christian theological metaphysics as it relates to natural philosophy. I am looking for an approach that either aspires to or theologically presupposes illumination integration. I cannot find one after Kant's post-metaphysical turn, since it effectively cuts all divinely revealed knowledge of reality decisively off from both a priori and a posteriori phenomenological knowledge. So I am just not interested in most of what has largely dominated the theological and philosophical landscapes of Western academia since the Critique of Pure Reason. Furthermore, I do not draw on the West's long Christian Platonist heritage of theological realism simply because it is 'congenial' to me. Rather, as I have argued elsewhere,14 I think core Christian doctrine and theology, and key aspects of Platonist metaphysics, are unified in the truth. Hence, I think Christian Platonism is the only sort of metaphysical approach a Christian can reasonably have that could unify different illumination categories, as I have sought to show in chapter seven of A Christian Theology of Science. Then, critically, I think that whilst the disintegration of Western knowing from meaning, and qualitative truth from instrumental power, has been historically successful, it has also grown up from theologically bad Christian roots. I think Western modernity's underpinning theological mistakes are now proving catastrophic not only culturally but materially as well.15 Continuity with the intellectual and theological traditions that have caused the illuminative disintegration problem in the first place is not going to provide a solution to that problem. Indeed, the main problem with contemporary science and religion as I see it—indebted to John Milbank—is the science and religion dyad's heretical Christian roots.16 Bearing in mind the nature of the problem I am trying to solve, I am not much inclined to apologize for what type of Christian theology of science my book is not. Most of the skeptical observations in relation to my book that come out of Harrison's deep engagement with contemporary history of science and religion scholarship (in which Harrison is justly recognized as a lead thinker), as well as most of the frustration with my book that comes out of Perry's embedding in science-engaged theology (in which Perry's work is justly well recognized), concern what my book has not done, who I have not engaged with, what my book has not tried to do, and how my work can or cannot be characterized as belonging to a conflict discourse that I have no interest in at all. Neither Harrison nor Perry/Everhart seem to seriously wonder if the onto-epistemological framework for unifying disparate illumination categories under a Christian theological umbrella that I put forward might actually work. What I have done, and perhaps even what I am trying to do, just seems strange and unrealistic to them. This, I think, is because ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are their primary scholarly domains, and applied metaphysical theology is my concern. Specifically, I take it that Perry and Everhart's three basic criticisms of my book are that: 1) it is not a good science-engaged theology book (I agree, and never aspired to write one); 2) that I have ignored the past 100 years of philosophy of science and theological thought on science (which I also agree with, though I do not find recent work outside of a reviving Christian realism useful for my purpose, and I do not accept that just because scholarship is recent it has progressed in truth beyond the past); and 3) that there is no practical application of my work to science as we currently practice it (which I also agree with, and do not find problematic; I am trying to envision a different science and a different religion to how we currently do knowledge and understanding, after all). Harrison has a similar set of concerns with my work, though unlike Perry and Everhart, he does find it 'refreshing' that I am not desperately invested in advancing warmly concordant relations between science and religion. I think Harrison recognizes that there really are profoundly problematic theological implications for the way we have set up science and religion—which perhaps Perry and Everhart do not recognize as clearly—though Harrison cannot see why a Christian Platonist approach to trying to overcome those problems should be so privileged by me. Harrison's main cause of skepticism towards my argument, as far as I can tell, is that my book has not shown how the relationship between Christian Platonist metaphysics and first-order Christian doctrines is as solid and as necessary as I seem to assume. I cannot address those concerns here other than to say that they deserve serious attention. But I am not working in a vacuum. The Ressourcement trajectory, the Radical Orthodoxy trajectory, contemporary Orthodox and also Lutheran metaphysical theology trajectories, and the never-actually-died-off perennial Christian realist metaphysical trajectories, are the frames of thinking out of which I operate.17 For good reasons these frames—until very recently—had very little direct engagement with ‘science and religion’ scholarship,18 or with modern theologians or religious studies scholars explicitly interested in science, or with post-metaphysical and non-foundational philosophies of science. I have to say, since the late nineteenth century ‘science and religion’ has been so dominated by theologians seeking to adapt theology to science, or by conflict warriors on both ‘sides’ with no metaphysical self-awareness, or by the attempt to entirely demarcate the purity of theology from natural knowledge, that it has been an almost impossible field to meaningfully engage for the community of thinkers to which I belong.19 Refreshingly, and at last, Peter Harrison's work has been a meaningful bridge that has now enabled the start of some very serious conversations between historians of ‘science and religion’ and contemporary Christian metaphysical theologians from what I shall call the perennial Christian realist tradition.20 Michael Hanby is an astonishing and powerful thinker in the domain of metaphysical theology as concerned with natural philosophy. I found his review illuminating and provocative on many fronts. His exposition of what I think of as the core ideas and intentions of the book—particularly chapter seven—is entirely resonant with how I see the book. But here, restrained by space, I will concern myself only with his fascinating critique and his passing comment on my use of the term ‘foundational’. Hanby argues that I have reasoned about a viable Christian theology of science, from the stance of the sociology of knowledge, rather than actually performed a Christian theology of science, which should unapologetically reason from within the reality of the intelligibly formed cosmos as spoken into being by the divine Logos. To argue for the ontological and epistemological credibility of a Christian theology of science is to presume to think from outside of that reality, from some Archimedean point beyond of our human experience (as Arendt puts it)21 rather than explicitly reasoning from within the ontological and epistemological first principles of a genuinely Christian (simply true) theology of science. Hanby recognizes that I am tacitly reasoning within a viable Christian metaphysical theology framework, but it is the manner in which I am tacit about this that—intriguingly—concerns both Hanby and Harrison, but for opposite reasons. I think this critique by Hanby is correct. Hanby also correctly discerns why I make this move: it is my apologetic intention to work with the reasoning scope I think will be familiar to the reader, and then try to take the reader on to a traditional Christian realist way of thinking about reality and knowledge, beyond the familiar modern terrain. Hanby argues that the modern science and technology formed mind assumes that demonstrable, mathematical, and practical proofs—as justified in the domain of observable material and energetic reality—are the grounds of any reasoned position on anything at all. This assumption rises from the early modern essence-uninterested22 and utility-infatuated ontology of creation as the voluntarist domain of human power. It is this impoverished and false ontology that grounds the revolt against Aristotle and Plato and gives us the modern scientific age. Hanby is right to hold that the post-Aristotelian modern mind rests on a reductively instrumental ontology of nature which assumes that all valid knowledge is testable (and is only valid as so testable) by means of a mathematical and observation-constructed hypothesis. There are—obviously—tacit theological commitments that ground this functional ontology in early modernity, but the manner in which a metaphysically impoverished and theologically misguided use-and-will defined ontology is normalized by empirically and pragmatically inclined Enlightenment thinkers enables a broad trend in modern philosophy towards dispensing with metaphysical theology altogether by the early twentieth century. The foundations of modern ontology and its epistemology are thus (in a circular manner) hypothetical and only concerned with tangible and manipulable appearances. But, metaphysically speaking, there are no reality foundations here—indeed, no essential reality— because the domain of human instrumental power is only concerned with knowing in order to master and act. Anthropic instrumental egoism here stands (falsely) in the place of reality. To a proper (i.e., genuinely transcendent) metaphysics, foundations are non-anthropic (divine) and un-hypothetical (given). This is where Kierkegaard aligns with Plato and Aristotle. One does not prove foundations, one proves from them. One does not reason to the spiritual realities of faith, one ca