Scientia Dei: A Comparison of the Theological Method of Karl Barth, T.F. Torrance, and Wolfhart Pannenberg (Part One)
What follows in these posts is an essay I presented at the 2011 regional ETS conference comparing the methodologies of Barth, Torrance, and Pannenberg. It is admittedly rough (given the profound amount these three have written between them its near impossible!) despite the complexity, but I feel I did an adequate job without turning it into a masters thesis or beyond. Enjoy! And as always constructive comments and questions are welcomed.
I. Introduction
I. Introduction
When we consider what
religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that
the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to
the relations between them.
Alfred
North Whitehead[i]
The materialist who is
convinced that all phenomena arise from electrons and quanta and the like,
controlled by mathematical formulae, must presumably hold the belief that his
wife is a rather elaborate differential equation; but he is probably tactful
enough not to obtrude this opinion in domestic life.
Arthur
Stanley Eddington[ii]
Another source of conviction
in the existence of God connected with reasons and not with feelings, impresses
me as having much more weight. This
follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this
immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far
backwards and far into the future, as the result of blind chance or
necessity. When thus reflecting I feel
compelled to look at a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree
analogous to that of man: and I deserve to be called a Theist.
Charles
Darwin[iii]
If one were
to be of the mischievous sort that enjoys getting an immediate reaction, one
should call theology a science. For
surely to call theology a science, or to use the phrase scientific theology, will quite frequently and immediately divide a
room of listeners much in the same manner I’m sure that the workers at Babel
became so divided: each perhaps thought they
knew what they were talking about as key phrases left their lips, even if no
one else did. There may be as many
concepts and opinions on a scientific theology as there are those who hear of
such a thing. For some this concept—whatever it may mean exactly—is a welcome
one, because, as we have all been indoctrinated to believe since at least grade
school that science is an eminently good
thing, who could object to such an honorable adjective in front of our
endeavors theological? Others might be
more skeptical, believing this scientific theology to be a superficial attempt
to patch over what many take to be the contemporary obsolescence of theology by
borrowing clout from its newer and much healthier (and I shouldn’t hesitate to
add, more well-funded) sibling. Aren’t
science and faith at war with one another?
Isn’t science a discipline built upon empirical verification while
theology, being unprovable in this way, deals in atavistic figments of an
earlier, non scientific consciousness of humankind? Especially with the recent rise of militant
atheism in the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett, others at this
point, having even now heard Stephen Hawking and Victor Stenger declare God
unneeded and unwelcome because the universe made itself thank you very
much—might well believe the combination of science and theology to be merely a
perverse sort of alchemy. And of course
from a perspective of faith, there is the perennial fear that not only with
theology, but now a scientific theology,
we have yet another attempt to stuff God into our convenient boxes, only this
time we will be storming heaven’s gates in our shiny new lab coats, armed to
the teeth with beakers to distill His essence for our curiosity.
Far
from a sophistry however, the presentation of a thoroughly scientific theology—without yet elaborating on what exactly this
phrase indicates—has not only been a distinguished theme in Christian history,[iv]
it was also precisely the method and strategy of two of the 20th
century’s most prolific and heralded theologians—the German Wolfhart Pannenberg
and the Scotsman Thomas Forsyth Torrance.
Both men displayed over the length of their industrious careers a
breathtaking mastery of a diverse array of subjects and fields in order to
produce an interdisciplinary vision for theology that often leaves their
readers overwhelmed at the sheer amount of learning involved. It is strange then that given the similarity
of scope of both men’s interests and their mutual—if somewhat
distinct—commitment to the theme of a scientific
theology, that it is infrequent that the two are held up as dialogue partners.[v] Indeed even though they were apparently aware
of the other’s work, it is only occasionally and even then only tangentially
that one cites the other. This sort of
vague interaction is carried on in much of the secondary literature on both
men, where comparison between their methodologies and their respective
comprehensive visions for the construction and elaboration of a scientific
theological enterprise in relation to other scientific disciplines, including
the philosophy of science, rarely occurs.
Thus it is
the primary hope of this brief presentation of their respective systems to
partially fill this gap by attempting to provide just such a comparison. Along the way, though it falls far outside
the scope of this essay to have any extended discussion on religion and
science, or theology and science per se,
and all the complicated philosophical and theological points which attend to
that debate, these will obviously nonetheless be touched upon
tangentially. Thus though the following
discussion is here primarily to analyze Torrance and Pannenberg, four general,
more or less humble points will emerge in investigating regarding science and
theology:
1.) How one understands God and
His interaction with the world ultimately dictates how one envisions the
relation of science and theology, and vice versa: one’s description of the
conflict (or not) between religion and science, always has an attendant
theology and metaphysics driving it.[vi]
2.) The facile binary distinction
between pure scientific “facts” and irrational religious “faith,” (which is
blind as a bat) or the fairy tale of the history of science and religion as one
of constant warfare from the beginning, or of the “dark ages,” brought on by
Christianity, must be put to an end. The
truth is so much more interesting: we must investigate actual history, on the
one hand, and understand and read actual philosophers of science, on the
other. Both Creationists and
Ultra-Darwinists often don’t seem to be very aware that, yes, philosophy of
science did in fact continue after the 1950’s and Carnap and Ayer did not, in
fact, have the last word. As the Princeton mathematician David Berlinski
(himself no believer) writes regarding the atheist fundamentalists with tongue in
cheek, “A little philosophy, Francis Bacon observed, ‘inclineth man’s mind to
atheism.’ A very little philosophy is
often all that is needed.”[vii] One doesn’t have to be either Christian or a
believer in God to realize that it behooves us, as people of science, to read Popper, Quine, Gadamer,
Kuhn, van Fraassen, Foucault, et al in order to try and get a hold on actual
scientific theorizing.
3.) Reductionistic-type
explanations (i.e. consciousness is only brain
states and not actually consciousness, people are only selfish genes and not actually people) alone must be avoided: the days of merely asserting either “God did
it,” or “Natural Selection did it,”
are over. And since I presume my
audience is mostly Christian, I should say the days of our fear of a purely
“natural,” scientific explanation need be put immediately behind us. “After all,” writes the Eastern Orthodox
theologian David Bentley Hart, “it does not logically follow that simply
because religion is natural it cannot become a vehicle for divine truth, or
that it is not in some sense oriented toward ultimate reality…As for [Daniel]
Dennett’s amazing discovery that the ‘natural desire for God’ is in fact a
desire for God that is natural, [should we accept his argument], it amounts to
a revolution not of thought, but only of syntax.”[viii] Thankfully many scientists have recently
affirmed the fact of non-linear interactions and emergent properties which
preserve lower levels but are not reducible to them per se. So theology too, must move beyond discussions
which merely try to awkwardly fit God as one agent among many in the universe,
to find explanatory gaps in reductionist-type explanations in which He might
reside, to an interaction with science which appreciates multiple explanatory
levels, and allows theology and metaphysics to interact on the proper level of certain
forms of science and the philosophy of science.
4.) We must not forget (which
we, myself included, can be prone to in the complexity of discussion) that our
adherence is not to “religion,” in general, or even Creation in particular, but
to the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our acceptance, as Christians, of the
creation narratives follows, and does
not precede, our acceptance of Christ. A
particular reading of Genesis, therefore, cannot
be a fundamental of faith or a matter of orthodoxy for Christians—even if we
can, in fact, argue about the relative legitimacy of this or that
interpretation as part of an overall schema.
Though it can be debated, it should not cause division in fellowship.
[i] Alfred North Whitehead, as
quoted in Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s
Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010) p.280.
[ii] Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
(London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1935) p.327.
[iii] The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New
York: Basic Books, 1958) p.66.
[iv] For an overview on the
history of theology as a science see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science trans. Francis McDonagh
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976) p.7-20; 225-345.
[v] This is made more ironic
when one compares statements of various commentators. For example Daniel W. Hardy, “Thomas F.
Torrance,” in The Modern Theologians: An
Introduction To Christian Theology in The Twentieth Century, Volume I, ed. David F. Ford (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1993) p.71-91 writes: “[Torrance] is virtually unique in the depth of his knowledge of philosophy and
the natural sciences,” (p.71, emphasis mine) while Paul Molnar Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the
Trinity (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009) p.22 cites Christopher
B. Kaiser as saying “If Einstein is the ‘person of the century,’ in the
judgment of secular media, Torrance’s interest is enough to qualify him as
‘theologian of the century,’ in the eyes of many science-minded people.” And of Pannenberg Cornelius Buller The Unity of Nature and History in
Pannenberg’s Theology (Maryland: Littlefield Adams Books, 1996) p.1 writes:
“The scope and brilliance of Pannenberg’s [interdisciplinary] work are almost without contemporary parallel.”
(Emphasis mine) while Stanley Grenz Rediscovering
the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg
Press, 2004) p.88 helpfully quotes Jacqui Stewart on Pannenberg: “the
intellectual seriousness with which [Pannenberg] treats the natural and social
sciences is a feature that distinguishes him from the other major theologians
of the second half of the twentieth century.”
It is precisely the uniqueness of the level and type of engagement
Torrance and Pannenberg represent that seems to make them such good candidates
for comparison, and so odd that such endeavors, to my knowledge, are rare.
[vi] It is a realization and investigation of this that has
been sorely lacking in the science and religion debate, and which is ignored by
both Creationists and Ultra-Darwinists, both of whom have somewhat unduly
hijacked the debate from calmer voices on both sides. It is no accident that Creationists (and some
ID theorists) and Ultra-Darwinists
both often have the same concept of God, they are both children of William
Paley, so to speak. It is merely that
one accepts, and the other rejects, this designer God. But Christian Orthodoxy has long believed in
God as a Creator without the specificities implied by Paley (and post-Paley)
metaphors of “design,” and the attendant manifold of theological and
philosophical positions entailed therein.
Modern Creationism is just that: modern.
And rather than upholding Biblical meaning against the advance of
science this hermeneutical strategy is an implicit capitulation to (outdated,
no less) modernist scientific criterion—a symptom disguised as a cure. A
recovery of Christian tradition and a renewal of the debate along trajectories
they started is in order.
[vii] David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its
Scientific Pretensions (New York: Crown Publishing, 2008) p.2.
[viii] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution
and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) p.7-8.
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