Discussion of God & Nature, ed. by David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers
Richard Dawkins noted once that he sees God as a “competing
explanation for facts about the universe and life,”—competing, that is, with
other explanations we now consider under the rubric of scientific description.
Nor does he consider this belief unusual: “This is certainly how God has been
seen by most theologians of the past centuries and by most ordinary religious
people today.”[1] By implication, one could write a history to
prove the point. Many attempts at such a
history in fact have been written, and—with something akin to Dawkins’
presupposition of how “God” is understood lingering in the background—have
narrated the relation of science and Christianity as one of perpetual
warfare. God, we are told, increasingly ran
out of things to do as the scope of our natural knowledge increased: “Christopher Hitchens, whose tongue is
apparently nowhere in his cheek,” writes Conor Cunningham, thinks that “’thanks
to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation
of anything important.’ It would be hard
to construct a more idiotic sentence, at least without a great amount of
concerted effort.”[2] We might be tempted to share Cunningham’s
snark regarding such claims, yet they are held to such an extent that when Time
Magazine asked if God was dead in the 1960’s many would say yes, and that it
was probably a lack of physical exercise that did the Ancient of Days in.
The Church
Militant—as the same story goes—was hardly as lethargic over this same period,
constantly badgering scientific progress by the straightjacket of dogma and
political machination. The burning of
Giardano Bruno, the imprisonment and silencing of Galileo, the legendary
encounter (and besting) of Bishop Wilberforce by T.H. Huxley, the Scopes Trial,
even the initial refusal of churches to affix lightning rods upon its steeples
to protect hapless Bell-Ringers on the grounds that such actions ran the risk
of interfering with God’s providence—all provide a litany of anecdotal
landmarks on the walking tour of history that the “warfare of science and
religion” narrative provides. An equal
yet opposite position (a sort of historiographical example of Newton’s Third
Law), promoted by those like Reijer Hooykaas and Stanly Jaki, argued precisely
to the contrary: the theologico-metaphysical concomitants of Christian belief
in things like creatio ex nihilo, anti-Aristotelian
voluntarism’s emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty, or even the Protestant
de-symbolizing of Scripture (and by extension, the universe), created uniquely propitious
conceptual environments for the flourishing of science. Far from losing ground to science, God
provided its very conditions of possibility.
Calling us down from the azure
heights of historical perspective either of these epic tales seem to afford us,
David Lindberg and Ronald Number’s edited collection of essays God & Nature: Historical Essays on the
Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986) suggests “a complex and diverse interaction [between science
and Christianity] that defies reduction to simple ‘conflict’ or ‘harmony’”
binaries (10). Part of the problem of
either option in the binary is not (merely) that one is too divisive, and the
other too synthetic. Rather in large
part “conflict” or “harmony” as relational terms trade upon working definitions
of the boundaries between science and theology (as the things to be related)
which are anachronistic to the periods under investigation: whose science?
Which theology? To ask regarding either
the conflict or the harmony of science and theology in the Middle Ages, or even
into the 17th century’s “Scientific Revolution” is assuming the
existence of things whose granularity has not yet been historically
established—the ontological objects “science” (largely based on post-Positivist
definitions of empirically established and replicable results) and “theology”
(Dawkin’s idea viz. theology providing pseudo-physical explanatory alternatives to physics and biology,
e.g.) did not yet exist, so to speak, but had to first be invented. As such the essays proceed by and large to
unpack a bewildering array of stories and interactions that were more often
than not between—not science and theology—but different conceptions of science,
or even between differing theologies themselves.
Thus one of the major thematic
emphases of all of the essays in this volume is that: context matters. History is often no respecter of grandiose hypotheses. Take Pierre Simon de la Place’s supposed bon mot to Napolean. When the tiny tyrant asked regarding the
place of God in la Place’s cosmology, la Place replied: “I have no need of that
hypothesis.” Though the apocryphal
saying is not “supported by textual evidence” (256) it nonetheless is entirely
consistent with la Place’s system, and what’s more certainly does not read
friendly toward the theistically inclined. Those who look for conflict between religion
and theology have ample opportunity to find it: “In less than a century, both
celestial mechanics and probability theory had been turned on their heads, they
no longer served … believing in the Deity, but were now put to work to confirm
the brilliance of human effort to penetrate nature’s secrets” (270).
Yet, despite this, la Place’s
exclusion of God is no pure victory for the Warfare metaphor, or for the idea
that the advance of science inevitably requires the subtraction of religious
belief. Rather the God whom la Place
rejected was the Newtonian God who occasionally adjusted orbits and provided an
explanation for the principle of gravitation.
To claim la Place as one of the bright lights for the eventual victory
of secular scientific reason over the credulity of faith has pieces of truth to
it, but it ignores that the grounds and conditions for la Place’s commentary on
the non-necessity of God as a physical hypothesis were themselves historically
grounded by discussions and transmutations made within theology itself. For
earlier Gottfried Leibniz could, for example, reject Newton’s claim (via Newton’s
student Samuel Clarke) that God must be invoked as an explanation for what
maintains the regularity and precision of planetary orbits, and this on theological grounds: namely it impugns
the dignity of the Creator to assume God was not competent enough to create a
perfectly self-sustaining system.
But even here there was a further,
subtler change. For earlier Thomas
Aquinas had made much the same claim as Leibniz (for example Summa Contra Gentiles 3.70.6) because
the integrity of secondary causes are themselves to the glory of their Creator;
to evacuate secondary causes of either their regularity or efficacy is
ironically to impugn God’s power, not exalt it.
Yet, Thomas meant this as a metaphysical
claim, where, in the words of Kathryn Tanner, “God’s transcendence
prohibits talk of God’s working with created causality in any way that implies
parity of divine agency and created causality within a common causal nexus or
plane,” since the entirety of created being
is conferred ex nihilo by divine
agency “God’s creative agency extends immediately
to every created being in every respect,” and is not contrasted in a zero-sum
game with finite creaturely agencies.[3] Leibniz, however, was participating in a
theological transition where, though the surface level syntax was shared with Aquinas,
the meaning of their respective views regarding the integrity of creation was
no longer a metaphysical, but an empirical one: “The marvelous contrivances of
nature reinforced orthodox beliefs in the wisdom of the Creator,” writes Roger
Hahn, “further replacing the traditional
views, which had drawn more heavily on metaphysics, by one based on empiricism”
(263, italics added). The debate of
Leibniz with Clarke regarding God’s intervention and correction of the orbits
was not a metaphysical question, rather Leibniz meant the integrity of creation
and God’s relation to it mechanically.
Hence if La Place could say he had
no need for “that hypothesis,” of God for his Nebular theory of cosmic
formation, this statement is not a resolute victory for atheism understood as
the necessary culmination of naturalistic science, but is itself only
understandable as a reactionary statement based within and upon a certain
constellation of theological changes
that increasingly gave its theological pronouncements physical-empirical
meaning. In this way La Place confirms
the hypothesis argued at length by Michael Buckley in his magisterial work At the Origins of Modern Atheism, that
all atheisms which emerged in the Modern period are in fact dialectically
related to the theistic environment they incubated in:
How ironic it is to read in popular
histories of the ‘antagonisms of religion and the rising science.’ That was precisely what the problem was
not! These sciences did not oppose
religious convictions, they supported them.
Indeed, they subsumed theology, and theologians accepted with relief and
gratitude this assumption of religious foundations by Cartesian first
philosophy and Newtonian mechanics.[4]
As such, La
Place’s statement can only be ambiguously read as a victory for “secular
reason,” in the warfare of science and religion, since similar statements
regarding the non-necessity of a mechanically interventionist God could be made
for immediately theological reasons, and in
the fact that the hypothesis of the mechanic God la Place rejected was one that
itself stood in a lengthy line of physical transmogrification of theological
terms for theological reasons (however naïve we may find them in
retrospect). La Place’s blade may cut
Newton’s God, but the God of Aquinas not only escapes unscathed, but may
applaud this destruction of a conceptual idol.
The story
of the Newtonian God’s downfall plays out as well in the post-Darwinian
controversies, which display not only the latent and oft-forgotten theological
dimensions of scientific controversy, but the political and social as
well. For as Margaret Jacob demonstrates
in her essay in God & Nature
(238-255) it was not just the theological and the scientific that mutually
“modified each other over the course of the century,” but the boundaries
between the theological, the political, and the economic were themselves fluid:
Scientists and churchmen alike were
coming to terms with economic and political forces that were new and profoundly
unsettling. Today we use words like capitalism and revolution to describe these forces; in the seventeenth century men
(and some women) spoke of nature and God, of laws spiritual and natural, of
self-interest or greed, of business, and of the necessity for order and harmony
(238). … [As such] the Christianity that spoke most directly to this
post-revolutionary elite was not the rigorous Calvinism of the 1630s and 40s,
which had inspired a generation of revolutionary saints. Rather it was a liberal (at the time one said
‘latitudinarian’) Anglicanism that repudiated predestination, yet continued to
define religion as an individual matter wherein the conscience of the laity
must be respected, and that firmly subordinated church to state, insisting that
bishops serve, not manipulate, the political system (239). …[T]his liberal
Anglicanism [was] basic to Newton … We should hardly be surprised to find the
young Isaac Newton incorporating into his natural philosophy, and hence into
his science, definitions of matter, space, and time that were deeply indebted
to the liberal Anglicanism of Restoration Cambridge. The Newtonian synthesis entered the
eighteenth century as an intellectual construction born in response to the
English Revolution (240).
Here then,
“Christianity and science entered into an alliance addressed to the moral
reality of a market society. … Science and theology, as interpreted by Newton
and his followers, offered a model of the stable, ordered, and providentially
guided universe within which could occur that competition so basic to the
operations of the restrained, yet relatively free, market society”
(242-243). The point here is that, much
as la Place rejected—not God tout court
we might say—but Newton’s God, so too Margaret ends her chapter tellingly:
“Only in the nineteenth century did Darwinism deliver a severe blow, not to
Christianity as such, but to science-supported liberal Anglicanism” (253). In part the debates between Wilberforce and
Huxley over Darwinism are not what we assume: on the religious rejection of
common ancestry and natural selection.
This was present in the debates, of course, but there were broader ideas
at work as well which resulted “not from hostility between progressive science
and regressive theology, but from a shift of authority and prestige … from one
part of the intellectual nation to another, as professionalizing scientists
sought to banish clergymen from science and end their control on education”
(8).
Here,
Darwinism may have killed God—but it was the God of design, stability, control,
that Newtonian science and theology subtended in the market society preferred
by Liberal Anglican Whigs. The Darwinian
revolution upset this not just conceptually, but also by the emerging class of
“scientists” (whom Huxley represented) who wanted to wrest control from Clergy
both by insisting science proceed with a sort of methodological naturalism, and by insisting that the technicality
of their investigations warranted recognition of an expertise isolated to their
profession apart from non-expert Clergymen.
But even here “scientists vs.
Clergy’ is no simple signpost of the Warfare of Science and Religion thesis—for
theologians were on both sides of
this debate: “the first were supporters of organized religion who wished to
maintain a large measure of control over education and to retain religion as a
source of moral and social values. The
second group was the religiously minded sector of the pre-professional
scientific community, which included both clergymen and laymen” (8). As odd as it may seem to use to speak of
theologians being on the side of deposing the hegemony of Clergy from
education, here, as elsewhere, a certain “Baconian compromise” could be struck,
where the “two books” of God (scripture and nature) could be read side by side:
nature “offering illustrations of the divine omnipotence, the true sense of the
Scriptures, and recovery from the noetic effects of the Fall, in exchange for
the freedom of students of nature from harassment by interpreters of biblical
texts” (323). The Warfare metaphor here
breaks completely: to be against the hegemony of anti-Darwinian clergy was to
be for a certain sort of natural theology.
Backing up
from the welter of details, one is struck in these essays by how often we are
controlled by popular historical mythology at an almost subconscious level—by
how the seemingly obvious has obscure origins we have forgotten or
suppressed. Our prejudices are often
ballasted even in terms as seemingly esoteric and removed from our day-to-day
life as believing there was something called “The Dark Ages,” or that the
backwardness of “Medieval” theology was finally overcome by Renaissance
humanism, and eventually the Scientific Revolution itself. We forget that the Scientific
Revolution—though extraordinary—did not spring like Athena from the head of
Zeus, but found many of its concepts pregnant in Scholastic discussions of
logic and mathematics, themselves theologically subtended by discussions
regarding God’s absolute power (49-76).
Indeed, history even surprises with ironies like the fact that our
contemporary Fundamentalists ignore the fact that nearly none of the original
formulators of “The Fundamentals” were literal six-day Creationists—many
embraced either the gap-theory of interpretation, or the day-age interpretation.
To rest solid in one’s presuppositions
is often to be steamrolled by the unexpected twists and turns of historical
investigation.
I think
there are two important points for Systematic Theologians to take from this
volume. The first, is that the complexity
of history, and the historical variations within theology and theological
approaches to science needs to cultivate in us a certain patience and
ecumenicism in regards to how we treat competing theological explanations
regarding origins. Certainly, the theologian
wedded to today’s science may be tomorrow’s widow, but to avoid intelligently
and intentionally engaging in scientific theory is to not often realize we are still wedded to corpses long
cold. Fundamentalisms of our day are
case in point: their “theological purity” against Darwinian science is not
theological by and large, but a theology filtered through an unwavering commitment
to Baconian science. Our theologies are
always in fact, if not in principle, affected by philosophical and scientific
considerations and so it behooves us to bring these out into the open and
discuss them candidly.
The second
important lesson to be learned from this volume for Systematic Theologians is
one that Calvin opened his Institutes with:
the concepts of God and man mutually implicate one another. So too, we might say, do the concepts of God
and nature, as the title to the volume suggests. No longer can we talk in the abstract about “theology
and science,” but we have to understand that in any given period the prevailing
understandings of God and nature mutually implicate and modify one another. In our propensity for grand narratives we can
often overlook subtle yet wide-reaching modifications within the concepts of “theology” and “science,” or “nature” and “God”
that modify the subjects from within, while maintaining a similar surface
syntax—as the examples of Aquinas, Leibniz, and la Place in this essay
themselves suggest. Dawkins may be right
that many have believed God to be a competing scientific hypothesis, but this
is not a natural conclusion of theology, but itself has a history hiding within
it, waiting to be discovered.
[1]
Quoted in John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 17.
[2]
Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 301.
[3]
Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in
Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 94.
[4]
Michael Buckley, At The Origins of Modern
Atheism (New Haven: Yale, 1987), 347.
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