Scientia Dei (Part Four): T.F. Torrance (Second Half)
Noting this
“top-down” explanation gradient, it is key to recall the quote on the
repositioning of natural theology we saw in the last paragraph as saying
“[natural theology] will function as the essential substructure within theological science.” Two major points follow from this. The first, as is very well put by McGrath, is
that “the proper role of theology is to posit that the creative and redemptive being of God is the most fundamental strata
of all reality.”[i] A Christian vision of reality depends upon
seeing all of reality, in its various strata and aspects, through the
interpretive lens of orthodox doctrinal insights, while nonetheless maintaining each strata’s distinctive methods of inquiry:
reductionism can happen by saying things are nothing but higher strata (which can lead to occasionalism) or are nothing but their lowest strata (naive
materialism). All the strata must be
preserved and their order accounted for.
The human scientist and theologian are seen by Torrance as “the priest
of creation, whose office it is to interpret the books of nature written by the
finger of God, to unravel the universe in its marvelous patterns and
symmetries, and to bring it all into orderly articulation in such a way that it
fulfills its proper end as the vast theater of glory in which the Creator is
worshipped and hymned and praised by his creatures.”[ii]
The second
major point is that this reformed natural theology placed within the ambit an
overall theology of revelation offers resonance
between theology and the natural and human sciences, not proof of God’s existence.[iii] This may be disappointing for those who
expected to find something like a form of Intelligent Design in Torrance’s
scientific theology. Yet for Torrance,
not only his Barthian doctrine of God demands that God cannot be proven from the world (improper
methodology transfer between strata) but also his general epistemology[iv]
denies that there is any necessary logical bridge between our concepts and our
experience: we can, for example, understand that our concepts picture the
world, but we cannot picture how our
picturing pictures the world, because automatically this transfers the concept
of a “picture of the world” to a “picture of a picture of the world,” and so
creates an aporia in explanation.[v] We shall go into this in a moment. More to the immediate point, since the
placement of this natural theology is within
positive or revealed theology, that revealed theology is itself assumed: revelation itself is not under inquiry, nor could it be given Torrance and
Barth’s logic.[vi]
At this
juncture of presenting Torrance there is a not unjust question of circularity
in his method. It seems that if
revelation is essentially non-questionable, and natural science is seen, for
the purposes of a natural theology, within
the ambit of the non-questionable revealed theology, it hardly seems remarkable
that Torrance would see convergences of meaning when revealed theology is, to
put it plainly, controlling the whole discussion. Yet this circle is not in reality a vicious
one. Several components of Torrance’s
thought come into play to demonstrate that this is so, and give us a better
overall picture of Torrance’s understanding of theological science and its
relation to the natural sciences.
Torrance
speaks on multiple occasions of what he terms the “social coefficient of
knowledge.”[vii] The difficulty of an already difficult topic
in Torrance’s works is magnified given our so-called “postmodern,” situation
where a phrase like “social coefficient of knowledge” automatically invokes
images along the lines of the relativism wrought by post-structuralism,
deconstructionism, or reader-response theory.
Torrance does not imply cultural relativism however, and in fact the
social coefficient is part of a thoroughgoing realist view of the world.[viii] This concept goes far beyond merely
indicating the parameters of a “research tradition,”[ix]
but is broader, suggesting how epistemology is tied to “a model for
understanding the nature and dynamics of human society and culture.”[x]
Social
coefficients are bred in the interaction of the subjectivity of the knower and
the objective reality of the known. This
is actually a tripartite relation, because not just the subject and the object,
but also the relation between them
that are variables in this equation.[xi] In short the social coefficient, as the
relation of subject and object, is “the theoretical and semantic framework
within which meaning emerges and is sustained.”[xii] While it would take us too far afield to go
into depth, socially mediated cognition for Torrance does not rule out a priori—as it does for Richard Rorty,
for example—the concept of objectivity.
For Torrance, in fact, “the communal-interpersonal structure of social
existence develops in us the modes of cognition which enable us to engage in objective (!) inquiry and reach
objective results.”[xiii]
For
Torrance reality shapes our thoughts and
habits of thought.[xiv] Thus the social coefficients are themselves
more or less internalized patterns of recognition from our interaction with the
exterior world. Torrance is not a naive
realist here, he does not believe in a necessary or automatic correlation
between how we see reality and how it is.[xv] Torrance is, if anything, hyper-aware of how
mankind can “get in its own way,” as it were, between themselves and the
reality they wish to investigate.[xvi] What Torrance wants to do, following the
philosopher of science Michael Polanyi and Torrance’s own investigations into
early Alexandrian theology, is banish all dualisms between thought and form:
“the one way out of the impasse [of dualism between theory and fact] requires a
theoretic structure which, while affecting our knowledge, is derived from the
intrinsic intelligibility of what we seek to know, and is open to constant
revision through reference to the inner determinations of things as they come
to view in the process of inquiry.”[xvii] What in this quote Torrance references as the
“inner determinations of things,” he often elsewhere refers to as
“onto-relations,” (onto from the
Greek word for “being”) which are defined as “the kind of relation subsisting
between things which is an essential constituent of their being, and without
which they would not be what they are.”[xviii] This concept of onto-relation is used to
overcome dualisms between thought and form, or theory and fact, which pervade
many positivistic forms of philosophy of science ever since its formulation by
the immensely influential Vienna Circle at the turn of the 20th
century. Torrance, in contrast to
positivists like Carnap, believes that observation does not just reveal the
phenomenal surface of things but can also reveal their essential inner
structures (“onto-relations”), a position he attributes to the methodology of
Einstein and Maxwell:
Knowledge is gained not in the flat, as it were, by
reading it off the surface of things, but in a multi-dimensional way in which
we grapple with a range of intelligible structures that spread out far before
us. In our theoretic constructions we
rise through level after level of organized concepts and statements to their
ultimate ontological ground, for our concepts and statements are true only as
they rest in the last resort upon being itself.[xix]
As
our thought forms are shaped by interaction with the world, the social and
linguistic mediation of knowledge has the possibility of not obfuscating but
framing and directing our inquiries according to the nature of that reality
itself. The social-coefficient can be,
so to speak, translucent to the world.[xx] We should not confuse Torrance’s insistence
that there is no logical or causal connection between thought and reality with
the concept that our thoughts do not touch reality. If anything, for Torrance, it implies the exact opposite: that our
understanding and interaction often proceeds by creative non-formalizable leaps
of imagination in the theoretical connection of entities, and the fact that
these theories are nonetheless successful,
indicates that the inner structures of reality themselves often impinge into
our thoughts in deeper and more complex ways which “inspire” a radical
comprehension of these onto-relations.
We not only see here the concept of “stratification,” or multiple deeper
(or “higher” depending on the metaphor of preference) levels of reality we
elaborated on earlier, but all of this is to say that the “social-coefficient”
of knowledge is the continually altered and refined deposit which mediates and
embodies our cumulative a posteriori knowing relation to the
exterior world: it helps us to see what we see, so to speak, by communally
telling us what it is we have already seen.
The
importance of this for the claim of circularity to Torrance’s method—where, as
we saw, revelation controls the interpretive scope of the natural sciences for
a Christian—is based upon how the social-coefficient of knowledge operating in
the development of modern science and even its current day presuppositions in
the west was itself historically
affected by revelation and early Christian theology. What becomes evident is that Torrance’s
resituation of the natural sciences within the context of a revealed theology
is not an artificial gambit designed to favor an interpretive strategy
controlled by orthodox Christian doctrinal insights. Rather, much like John Milbank taught us that
“once, there was no secular,”[xxi]
so too Torrance in his own way is telling us “once, there was no science.”[xxii] And just as Milbank—and others like Alistair
MacIntyre and Charles Taylor—inform us that the rise of the secular that once
was not, was not due to
“disenchantment,” of a world coming to maturity but shifts within the intersecting theological
matrices of Christian doctrinal insights, so too Torrance makes the claim that
modern science, far from theology’s enemy, or a facet of secularization, is
historically and fundamentally indebted
to principles derived from Christian revelation, especially
Niceno-Constantinopolitan theology from the fourth through sixth centuries.[xxiii] These conceptual paradigms or
social-coefficients are not accidental to the scientific program, but “it is
only as the new concepts alter the paradigmatic structures of people’s thought
that science can establish its major advances.”[xxiv]
Let
me briefly summarize these insights so our work with Torrance is not purely
formal. Five distinct claims may be seen
in Torrance’s works.
1.) Understood as the creation of one God who
declared the world good, the universe
is a single but multi-variable
harmony. When man investigates the
cosmos he can expect to find order and not chaos. [xxv] This is in stark contrast to the ancient world which saw order only in the
tiny island refuges of the polis,
surrounded everywhere by cosmic oceans of chaos.[xxvi]
We have become quite deadened to the impact of phrases and concepts like
“natural law,” and think them obvious; this is merely a testament to the power
of the transforming capacity of the Christian ethos and the distance that lay
between us and a world in which the self and society were vulnerable to a
variety of capricious personal and impersonal forces whose arbitrating and
arbitrary whim could hardly be scrutinized by any but the occasional (and
always cryptic) Oracle.
2.) The world, created ex nihilo, is contingent.
This means that, not being an emanation of God or bound to the inertial
limitations of pre-existent matter, the world had a sort of independent, free
existence, yet one which paradoxically had no ground in itself and had to
constantly be upheld by the freedom of God.
This broke both the notions of impersonal deterministic fate, and the
idea of the cyclical universe. We have
become so used to the concept of linear progressive time that we hardly notice
its Christian origins, but it was only with the concept of creatio ex nihilo that “the universe with its built-in
futility…[was] replaced with…a linear view of time moving irreversibly toward
its consummation or end in the purpose of the Creator.”[xxvii]
3.) The universe is contingently intelligible. This again is a stark antithesis to
traditional Greek philosophy, which general thought of intelligibility in terms
of that which was logically necessary.
The incarnation of the Son of God, homoousios
(co-substantial or co-equal) to the Father, meant the intelligibility of the
world was neither arbitrary nor necessary but came to the world in freedom and
hence contingently. Thus the world must
be investigated a posteriori and
according to its nature, rather than through a priori principles. All
modern scientific inquiry is again indebted to this principle.
4.) The doctrine of the Trinity, along with the
Christological controversies of the 5th and 6th
centuries, drastically reformulated the concept of “person,” and personhood.[xxviii] This not only reinforced that the world was
inherently intelligible, because it was founded not by an impersonal power but
the personal Triune God, but along with the sharpening of the definitions of hypostasis which gave a previously
unknown ontological weight to prosopon,
and the Christological reflection on what constitutes “humanity,” the inherent
worth, depth, and complexity of the person latent in the already revolutionary
concept of the Imago Dei that funds
many present day anthropological, psychological, and moral theories was brought
to focus. The root of all Western
humanism is Christianity—it has forgotten its own inner justification.
5.) Nicene theology, as we saw, sharpened the
Christian sense that God has entered into the conditions of our existence so we
may speak of and know Him. Thus our
concepts of God, rather than merely in concepts of our own devising, are
controlled by the reality. This thinking
also led to a revised concept of space and time. Torrance contends that the prevalent
“container concept,” of the universe, an absolute space and time that existed
regardless of the bodies contained within it—not unlike Newton’s absolute
space, which Torrance dislikes as well—was replaced by relational concepts of
time and space. The Son was the place of
the Father on earth, without God being removed from His place. Far from a tertiary ontological medium
between God and world, space became a relationship between bodies—and the space
between God and the world was the space between the meeting of Persons.[xxix]
[i] McGrath, Reality p.228.
[ii] Torrance, Ground and Grammar p.5-6.
[iii] Colyer hypothesizes that the
mitigated apologetic value of resonance instead of proof may suggest that Torrance
regretted later in his career calling this “natural theology,” instead of
merely a “theology of nature.” (How To
Read T.F. Torrance p.194n.187). In
the same way Molnar, who is a staunch defender of the radically anti-natural
theology interpretation of Barth, is a bit grumpy about Torrance’s decision to
call this “natural theology,” instead of a “theology of nature,” (Theologian of the Trinity p.93-99)
because it is, so to speak, an abuse of the normal scope of the phrase and can
lead to misconstrual and misapplication of Torrance’s actual intentions.
[iv] See Colyer, How To Read T.F. Torrance p.322-375.
[v] Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology p.76.
[vi] Not that this revealed
theology is static: our understanding of it may and must always be revised according
to investigation of scripture and our inhabiting of the Christian community the
church and our habits and expressions of worship, as elaborated by Torrance.
[vii] To my knowledge this is
developed specifically in only a few places in his work, even if the concept
manifests itself frequently. For example
see: Torrance, Reality and Scientific
Theology p.98-130; Torrance, The
Mediation of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992) p.1-23 on Israel as a
social-coefficient of knowledge for Christian theology.
[viii] Two very helpful articles
are Mark Achtemeier, “The Truth of Tradition: Critical Realism in the Thought
of Alasdair MacIntyre and T.F. Torrance,” Scottish
Journal of Theology vol.47, no.2 (1994) p.355-374; Eric G. Flett, “Culture
as a Social Coefficient: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Culture,” Cultural Encounters vol.5, no.1 (2009)
p.53-74.
[ix] Achtemeier, “The Truth of
Tradition,” p.355.
[x] Flett, “Culture as a Social
Coefficient,” p.56.
[xii] Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology p.102.
[xv] This is the judgment of
Hardy, “Thomas F. Torrance,” p.77; Colyer, How
to Read T.F. Torrance p.324; and Molnar, Theologian of the Trinity p.23ff.
It would appear that Torrance is also not purely an “externalist,” in
epistemology, as he often comments that creative and imaginative human
interaction with the world often clarify its very objectivity, which is itself
based in the freedom of God.
[xvi] Torrance, Theological Science p.xiii.
[xvii] Torrance, Transformation and Convergence p.42.
[xviii] Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology
p.43-44.
[xix] Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology p.136.
[xx] Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology p.62-64.
[xxi] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular
Reason 2nd Ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) p.1.
[xxii] This is my phrase, not
Torrance’s. And I should emphasize that
Torrance does not mean that “science”
of a certain sort has existed for
quite some time before Christianity.
What he intends to show is that via insights derived from the Trinity
and the Incarnation, such as the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, science as an a
posteriori discipline that attends to reality in itself, thought to be
unitary and orderly, and given a contingent rationality, are insights that
moved away from Aristotelianism.
Torrance is also quite aware that Christians often did not follow their
own best insights and wedded Christian theology to dualist forms of thought
which reduced the impact of the Christian revolution in thought.
[xxiii] For a few brief examples
see: Torrance, Ground and Grammar, p.44-74; Idem, Divine and Contingent Order ix, p.1-25. In some sense Torrance would be an ally to
the theological project associated with Milbank known as “Radical Orthodoxy,”
though their narratives differ slightly.
Milbank would certainly be in agreement with some of what Torrance says,
and vice versa, however Milbank (and Radical Orthodoxy) and Torrance identify
different heroes and villains in their respective narratives. For example Milbank has high praise for
Augustine while Torrance finds Augustine to be a source of dualist thought in
the west (though in my opinion Torrance is wrong on this and given the time
period in which he wrote, follows a generally negative assessment of Augustine
based on older research); and where Torrance finds the rise of modern science
as more or less completely positive (though Torrance is not naïve on the point
of the ambiguity of science) Radical Orthodoxy identifies a lot of scientific
thought, especially the social sciences, as nihilistic enterprises. For
summaries on the Radical Orthodox movement, its emergence, themes, and relation
to Milbank generally, C.f.: James K. A. Smith Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004) esp pp.1-124, which sets up the more
detailed engagement in the second half of the book; John Milbank, Catherine
Pickstock, Graham Ward eds., Radical
Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999) pp.1-23; Catherine
Pickstock, “Postmodernism,” in The
Blackwell Companion to Political Theology ed. Peter Scott and William T.
Cavanaugh (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); D. Stephen Long, “Radical Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern
Theology ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
pp.126-145. On John Milbank’s work on
nihilism in relation to Nietzsche see a very helpful summary and critique by
David Toole Waiting for Godot in
Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse (CO:
Westview Press, 1998) pp.53-88; c.f. pp.38-42.
[xxiv] Torrance, Ground and Grammar p.48.
[xxvi] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics
of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publshing, 2003) p.125ff. Hart contends this “pagan ontology,” is in
fact repristinated by many postmodern thinkers including Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Foucault, Levinas and Deleuze.
[xxvii] Torrance, Ground and Grammar p.58. As we shall see the concept of linear time is
also attributed by Pannenberg to Judeo-Christianity, though he gets there
through slightly different avenues.
[xxviii] Developed throughout The Trinitarian Faith. A
famous though contested thesis, of course, also of John Zizioulas in Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the
Church (New York, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) and Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York, NY: T&T Clark International, 2007).
[xxix] I am indebted to Molnar’s
excellent summary, Theologian of the
Trinity p.124-135.
Comments