The False War: Historical Perspectives on Science and Theology
On the cusp of the end of the first
millennia A.D., a figure in monkish robe sat ornamented by firelight as he
hunched over a writing desk with quill and parchment. Not two years before, the line of Charlemagne
had failed. In just nine months a new millennium
would commence, and rumors of the End Times “filled almost the entire
world.” Here every mist threatened to
bring with it the dreaded beasts of Revelation, and every moan of wind may well
have been the brass section of the Heavens warming up. And yet, the notations this monk—an
Archbishop, more precisely—was scribbling in the chiaroscuro of the room were not
apocalyptic musings, nor esoterica theorizing upon the unutterable things St.
Paul refused to speak of in his journey to the Third Heaven. “On the eve of the Apocalypse,” writes Nancy
Marie Brown, “the archbishop of Ravenna and his friend [were in a letter]
discussing the best method for finding the area of a triangle.”[1] This archbishop was Gerbert of Aurillac, soon
to be known as Pope Sylvester II, and to write his history, says Brown “is to
rewrite the history of the Middle Ages.”[2]
To
be more precise, for our purposes it is one example along a path to rewriting a
history that expounds Gerbert’s ages as “dark,” “backward,” “scientifically
illiterate,” or, worse, an epoch where the church was “actively hostile to
science.” While the legend of the “Dark
Ages” has been increasingly exposed as little more than an invention of 18th
century anti-Catholic historiography, the myth itself persists, and often as
the more general trope of a perennial conflict between science and
Christianity. As John Hedley Brooke
argues in his wonderful book Science and
Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, the problem with this metaphor of
warfare organizing our understanding of history is not only the little hiccup
that it is, in fact, a false interpretation.
More troubling—and indeed more pervasive and difficult to trace—anachronistic
notions of science and theology are being smuggled into historical analysis in
ways that seem to retroactively skew the data at hand. It behooves us to ask, then: whose science?
Which theology?
In
asking these questions, Brooke is taking a historiographical tact to analyze
the historical emergence and
invention of discrete category lines of religion and science, and in this way
begins to do for the history of science and religion what many others have done
to deconstruct the history of the emergence of the categories “religion” as
opposed to “secular.”[3] “Conflicts allegedly between science
and religion,” Brooke notes pointedly in the introduction, “[often] turn out to
be between rival scientific interests, or conversely between rival theological
factions.” Even deeper, the very definition of the borderlands between the two
are not historically invariable but at times quite promiscuous; just so “it
would be artificial to ask about the relationship between ‘science’ and
‘religion’ as if modern definitions of their provenance had some timeless
validity” (Brooke, 11). Indeed, in the past
“religious beliefs may have served as a presupposition
of the scientific enterprise” (26). To
return to our friend Gerbert, where the panicked rumors of apocalypse did
nothing to squelch his mathematical curiosity, two-hundred years later Roger
Bacon proposed that one of the benefits to the study of mathematics and
astronomy was that “one could be forewarned of the exact time of [the
antichrist’s] coming” (79). Not an
exhortation one would find in todays textbooks, of course. Yet historically speaking even in
apocalyptic—that most rarefied of religious arenas—the flora and fauna of
science in different ways found space and nutrient to flourish and bloom. Thus of science and religion, a stranger tale
than warfare must be told; a more complex one.
This is the work Brooke sets for himself.
Regarding
the Scientific Revolution, for example, it is often taught that this resulted
in (and was in part caused by) the separation of science from religion. The picture of such a separation is
attractive, he says, because “it conforms to our modern secular perception of
what ought to have happened” (72).
Nested within this idea of separation, however, is the idea that prior
to the revolution science and theology were closely wedded with one another,
but then divorced. “But how closely do
these inferences match the reality?” he asks.
Not very, would be the answer expected at this point. It is not that science and theology were
always the best of chums during the Scientific Revolution, but to speak in
simple terms of harmony or divorce is to assume the stability of both science
and theology as domains across this interval of time to such an extent that one
can schematically enumerate their relations without commenting on how the very
boundaries between the two—and not just their extrinsic relations—were often in
flux. The fact is that they reciprocally
modified one another, so that in certain areas in the 17th century,
for example, it is even possible “that the scientific revolution saw an
unprecedented fusion of science with
theology,” and that this was so did not leave either completely untouched but
“[resulted] in a more secular form of piety” (71).
Not
that the separation thesis is wholly implausible: “if we are looking for a separation
of science from religion in the seventeenth century, we shall surely find it”
(75). The problem is rather when a
series of anecdotal, or even broader social trends are abstracted from their
particular contexts and begin to do the work of a general trans-historical hypothesis:
“The difficulty is … however strong in outline [the separation thesis is], the
characterization turns out to be weak in detail.” On the one hand, we must as always pay
attention to how the terms “science” and “religion” are being utilized. We cannot, for example, automatically assume
17th century statements regarding the desirability of the separation
of science and religion plays in a straightforward manner into current
secularization theories of scientific advance, precisely because the domain of
these terms is diachronically fluid:
[These
statements regarding the desirability of the separation of science and
religion] have to be read against a background in which the excesses of an
enchanted universe were straining credulity.
When Francis Bacon, [Robert] Boyle, and others warned against the mixing
of science and religion, they were, in part, reacting against the worst
excesses of Renaissance magic. Thus the
Paracelsians, who boasted that their account of creation as a process of
chemical separation was the only legitimate
interpretation of Genesis, incurred Bacon’s displeasure not only for their
hijacking of the Bible, but also for their implication that knowledge of nature
was in need of Biblical support.
Similarly, for Boyle, there was a sense in which matter had to be
divested of spirits and other inherent powers in order to be seen in proper spiritual light [emphasis added].
… Because the forms of bodies [for example] depended entirely on the will of
God, it was impious, as well as impossible, to construct a science of nature
based on preconceived opinion. This association of empiricism with piety
underlines the difficulty facing theses that affirm a separation of science
from religion in the seventeenth century. (93-95).
Claims
of the separation of religion and science in the 17th century not
only fit uncomfortably what we would
mean by such phrases today, in addition (and as we already in part saw) “even
some of the century’s most notable achievements were presented in theological
terms.” Descartes justified his
principle of linear inertia, for example, by deducing it from God’s
immutability; Leibniz conceived of a seamless continuum of causality in nature
both on the basis of God’s perfection and omnipotence; an infinite universe and
decentralized earth were already championed by Nicholas of Cusa based on the
fact that as omnipresent, God was equidistant from all points in the universe
which conversely could thus have no center in relation to God; Francis Bacon revered
science as a method to regain the dominion over nature Adam lost; J.B. Van
Helmont advocated for empiricism in medicine and attacked the dominance of
formal logic because of God’s absolute power—no one could simply deduce how God
must have made things, for he could
have made them any way He liked, thank you very much—thus we must discover
through investigation what exactly He chose.
This is why Galileo insisted that the “book of nature … had been written
in the language of mathematics. No
amount of theologizing could be a substitute for mathematical analysis” (104). And although the term itself has lost its theological
edge for us, when natural philosophers (what we would today call “scientists”)
spoke of “natural law,” they “were not glibly choosing the metaphor” (26). Laws were expected to be in place even prior
to their discovery because of theological theory: “Laws were the result of a
legislation by an intelligent Deity.” That
the scientific endeavor thought it could proceed at all, that the human mind
could fathom nature and express it mathematically, found its basis in the
assumption that creation expressed God’s mind, and that God’s mind found a
mirror in human ratiocination (29).
How
then, did such a pervasive feeling of conflict arise if the historical records
themselves show a much more variegated story?
There are innumerable reasons, but for our purposes we shall focus on a
particularly theological one:
Their
[Andrew Dixon White and John William Draper’s] preconception that, as science
has advanced, phenomena once considered supernatural have yielded to
naturalistic explanation, is not without support. But it assumes a dichotomy between nature and
supernature that oversimplifies the theologies of the past. If a supernatural power was envisaged as
working through, as distinct from interfering with, nature, the antithesis
[between science and theology] would partially collapse. … The significance
given to explanations in terms of natural causes depends on higher-level
assumptions embedded in a broader cultural framework. In the history of Western culture, it has not
simply been a case of nature swallowing supernature. Something had to happen to change the
higher-level assumptions if the conflict between science and religion was to achieve
the self-evident status proclaimed by Draper, White, and their successors
(47-48).
And so the clue: a transformation in
the concepts of God’s interaction with nature occurred that can be indexed by
modifications to the concepts of nature, supernature, God, world, humanity
(etc. …). This is a transition that we
might summarize by David Bentley Hart’s pithy phrasing: “Ontology had been
displaced by cosmology, and cosmology had been reduced to a matter of
mechanics.”[4] Here the curious factor that goes unremarked
in most histories is that the movement toward a relative scientific autonomy
from theology was no self-conscious secular assertion, but emerged largely as a
debate internal to theology itself. On
the one hand there had been in the tradition a sort of hierarchical
“stratification” between theological and physical-kinetic levels of explanation. This distinction between a properly
theological (or metaphysical) and physical explanation, began to collapse,
however, as Divine attributes and activities were given “physical meaning” (99).
Such “transformations of metaphysical
axioms into prescriptions for the natural world were extremely common in early
modern science.” Perhaps the most
bizarre instance of this was Kepler’s transformation of the meaning of the
Trinity as relating to a threefold spherical layout of the cosmos (124). We might also mention the strangely material
and historical form of the Trinity that Thomas Hobbes gave the doctrine, where
the Trinity is meaningful only as an essentially unknowable God is “Personated”
(that is, represented) in turn by Moses, Christ, and the Apostles.[5]
Whatever idiosyncrasy lay in these
two positions, they represent on the whole a much larger trend of transition
from metaphysics to physics; the fact of the matter is that this transition
into mechanism was not automatically a secularization in the sense of a
diminution of religion. Rather, it
occurred within the field of belief,
and mechanism could (initially at least) serve the arguments of piety quite
well. Robert Boyle, for example, saw evidence
for the activity of God precisely through a mechanistic “lens” to read reality;
for as long as the assumption that motion was in no way necessary to the
essence of matter (“for “matter is no less matter, when it rests, than when it
is in motion”) then the mechanical philosophy was evidence for God’s direct
intervention and injection of energy and motion into creation to sustain and
order “so curious an engine” appropriately (180f).
Nor
indeed—again initially—was the mechanistic philosophy quite so readily a
“de-spiritualization” of nature. Given
the newly revived and updated atomistic or corpuscular theory of matter—that
matter is in fact made up of incredibly small fundamental “units” that served
as building blocks for macroscale complexity—led many to find it incredulous
that the sheer number of these little building blocks could self-organize and
perpetuate ordered structure by mere chance.
The most famous example of this would be William Paley’s design
arguments, though Paley for all his brilliance was by no means unique,
inheriting a specific tradition of natural theology focused on design precisely
because the prevalence of mechanism laid inordinate stress on so-called
physico-theology. For others, a spiritual
principle (or many) including but not limited to the will of God was thought be
in play to impose rational order on matter.
Here too, though, physical meaning was accorded to the spiritual in a
way reminiscent to Tertullian’s Stoic idea that all spirit is extremely fine
matter: “the question of which processes should be placed in the
supramechanical [i.e. spiritual-pneumatic] category produced a range of
competing answers, with experimental programs in both pneumatics and chemistry
designed to capture and reproduce the agency of subtle spirits” (182).
Of the many outcomes of this “physicalization”
of metaphysical theology, two mutually reinforcing tendencies are important for
our purposes of understanding why nature began to be seen as a competing and
eventually victorious explanation to supernature. The first is that “natural theology [of the
physical sort we briefly described] was not so much destroyed by science as
eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance” (298). We have to be careful what is meant
here. It is not that somehow science
“disproved” God’s activity (though many of its cruder physical theorizations
were rightly discredited). It is rather
that the questions that arose due to assuming design in nature “simply became
too blunt an instrument to yield precise information at the rock face of
research.” This growing sense of
irrelevance came both from within theology and from without. From within, many sensed a sort of inanity at
the lengths many would go to try and correlate every feature of the universe to
some purposeful end. Alfred Russell
Wallace “grew impatient” for example, when some praised the soft-scar on a
coconut as a wise contrivance of design, which allowed the embryonic shoot to
emerge instead of being trapped within.
Far from equating a denial of design with a denial of God, here Wallace
thought the extremity of the design argument insulted God—“it was like praising
an architect for remembering to put a door in his house” (299).
More seriously, specific assumptions
that went into design arguments seemed to forestall the investigative process
by disallowing certain questions to be asked—such as the famous example of
“Darwin’s finches” and the general populations of the Galapagos
archipelago. Each island had distinctive
species that closely resembled those on the other islands and mainland South
America—but not elsewhere. Why? This seemed “too tantalizing a puzzle to be
solved by invoking the will of God” (300).
But again let us be specific with what is meant: design of a
metaphysical sort is not ruled out here, for it is not even in the purview of
the discussion; for “the case for reinterpreting traditional concepts, like
that of form, in mechanical terms,
had been developing over several decades” (176). “Form” no longer meant that something
participated in its ideal archetype, or perhaps an idea in God’s mind or
purpose as in earlier Christian Platonism and Aristotelianism. “Form” now was meant in a purely
physical-chemical sense of composition.
“Design”
as such references a particular sequence of physico-theology that collapsed the
metaphysical into the physical, equating the ability to discern theological
“meaning” in the world with one’s ability to describe an organism exhaustively
in terms of perfect physical pre-adaptation to fit an environment. It was design as perfect pre-adaptation which
were the theories threatened by Darwinian natural selection (377). Whatever he ultimately believed (his deathbed
conversion being another historical fairytale), Darwin himself, even in the
full swing of his theory could at times consider himself a theist. He was, for
example, pleased when the Christian socialist Charles Kingsley said that
“instead of a God who created as if by magic,” he could now embrace a God who
was so wise “He could make all things make themselves” (399). This line by Kingsley (intentional or not)
seems to recall a wonderful image invoked by Thomas Aquinas in his Sententia Super Physicam Liber II
(14.268): “It is clear that nature is a certain kind of divine art impressed
upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give
to timbers that by which they would move themselves to take the form of a
ship.”[6] That things make themselves is no problem for
a theist; it is, however, a problem for a theist who sees God only in a narrowly
defined sequence of designs. For once
those designs can be accounted for in different terms, God seems to become
inconsequential as an explanation.
Thus
transformations from within theology led to attacks from outside it. When matter was discovered to have the power
of movement independent from an organizing soul (when, for example, muscles
removed from the body were shown to automatically contract when given a swift
poke by Albrecht von Haller); or when it was shown that the hydra (a freshwater
polyp) could regenerate itself when cut into pieces—amply confirmed when “a
wave of polyp-chopping swept across Europe” due to extreme curiosity at this
most unexpected trait—matter no longer appeared in need of God’s mechanical
“push” or external design (235). It is
in this intellectual environment, for example, that in 1749
Diderot
shifted his allegiance from a fashionable Deism to a more radical materialism.
… It has been said of Diderot that he was the first modern atheist—both in the
sense of making matter the ceaseless cause of all things, and of rendering the
question of God’s existence a matter of little consequence. His shift from a position in which the only
proof of a transcendent reality came from what the sciences could say of the
organization of nature, to a position in which that last proof was gone, marked
the end of the road for the God of the philosophers (236).
At this point Brooke’s rhetorical
flair at the end of the paragraph uncharacteristically betrays his own
description—for surely this was only the end of the road for the “God of the
philosophers” if this God could be wholly equated with the idea “in which the
only proof of a transcendent reality came from what the sciences could say of the
organization of nature.” Perhaps
Brooke’s rhetoric is making a description from the assumed vantage point of
Diderot? At any rate this equation of
the physico-theology with the whole tradition (whether the opinion of Brooke or
Diderot) transitions us into the second theological point to be made here.
If
the first point was that the road to scientific mechanism was often paved from
within theological discussion—where there was a theological shift that began to
collapse the metaphysical into the physical—the second point is that often this
collapse began to be read back into earlier Christian sources. If, for example, Paley’s design arguments
suffered at the hands of Darwin, so too would Aquinas’ “fifth argument” from
teleology. But this simply is not the
case, and to argue otherwise imports anachronistic assumptions regarding the
mode and scope of historically situated theology. Etienne Gilson makes the point quite well
regarding Paley and Thomas:
But even supposing that we are not mistaken about these
wonders—and mistakes of this kind will happen at times—they never
introduce us to anything better than a kind of chief engineer of the
universe whose power, as astonishing to us as our own is to a savage, remains,
nevertheless, within the human order…It is useless, therefore, to press this
question, and we must pass to [a] second [question]. Just as the
[Thomistic] proof [of God] from movement does not consider God as the Central
Generating Station for the energies of nature, so neither does the proof from
finality consider Him as the Chief Engineer of the whole vast enterprise.
The precise question is this: if there is order, what is the cause of the being
of this order? The celebrated example of the watch-maker misses the
point, unless we leave the plane of making for the plane of creating.
Just as when we observe an artificial arrangement, we infer the existence of an
artificer as the sole conceivable sufficient reason of the arrangement, so also
when we observe over and over, an order between things, we infer the existence
of a supreme orderer. But what we have to consider in this orderer is not
so much the ingenuity displayed in this work, the precise nature too
often, perhaps always, escapes us, but the causality whereby He confers
being on order [emphasis added] …
He is first with respect to the being of the universe, prior to that being, and
consequently also outside it. That, to speak precisely, is why we ought
to say that Christian philosophy essentially excludes all merely physical
proofs of the existence of God, and admits only physico-metaphysical proofs,
that is to say proofs suspended from Being as being.[7]
Brooke
tries to intercept such conflations of modern and pre-modern theology before
they get off the ground: “To treat the traditional ‘proofs’ of God’s existence
as if they were exclusively proofs (and, as such, necessarily failures) is to
miss other roles they played in the religious cultures that had nurtured them”
(285).[8] Again, he appears to overstate a bit—it is
not at all obvious that the proofs as traditionally construed are “necessarily
failures” if taken in the strong sense of demonstrative validity. But that is beside the point to be made here:
Brooke has elsewhere taken up the famous “Kalaam” cosmological argument, and Anselm’s
“ontological argument” as prime examples of how the original contexts of
“theistic proofs” are often overlooked.[9] It behooves us to quote him at length:
Within
the Muslim culture of [Al-Ghazali’s] time, he could take it for granted that
one lived by a sacred text. What then
was the purpose of his argument about origins?
In the last analysis it had to do with how the sacred text was to be read [emphasis added]. The threat came from within Islam itself, from
Shi’ites who were gaining ground politically at the expense of Sunni
‘orthodoxy.’ According to a recent
study, Ghazali had a very specific worry—the insinuation of Greek and
Hellenistic ideas into Islam through the more speculative Shi’ites. These ideas included the Aristotelian notion
of a world that had existed from eternity.
To accept such a view required a non-literal interpretation of the
sacred text. Ghazali turned his face
against these tendencies. What at first
glance looks like a classic theistic proof was actually serving quite a different
purpose. … Ghazali’s project was not the
construction of a natural theology independent of his cultural heritage. He argued about origins in order to protect
that heritage from an enemy within. …[So too] the ontological argument of
Anselm, commonly abstracted as a theistic proof, acquires a different meaning
when relocated into its own place and time—the Benedictine community of Bec in
the eleventh century. For Anselm, God
was a being whose non-existence cannot be conceived. But this was not intended as a piece of
natural theology, independent of faith.
His intention was to guide other monks towards a fuller knowledge of
God. This required the recognition that
God was not only that-than-which-nothing-greater-could-be-thought, but
something greater than which can be thought.[10]
While it is perhaps too much to
therefore describe these arguments as “nondemonstrative” as Brooke does, his
point is generally well taken: the secularization narrative of the triumph of
science and the receding of theology feeds upon glossing over not only the
complex history of the interaction of science and theology (the good, bad,
and—if not ugly—the really, really strange), but ignores that many of these
developments and interactions were due to developments internal to theology
itself. The supercession of science over
theology often occurs only within an implicitly theological horizon either
forgotten or suppressed, which transformed the theological-metaphysical level
of explanation for the physico-theological.
It is inaccurate to describe the scientific revolution as
anti-religious. If anything in much of
its life it was obsessed with religion; it is simply that the mode of that
religion and theology was often changed in the process.
But the fact is that every scientific
endeavor harbors within itself metaphysical commitments. Historically speaking, both the secular and a
purely naturalistic science have to first be “invented” by prior metaphysical
and theological commitments that ramify in a nearly indefinite array of
directions. It is this messy—but
theologically saturated history—to which Brooke has admirably called our
attention. Moreover, with the stories
Brooke tells there can be no neat division between “rational” science and “irrational”
theology—rather to speak of either science or theology is to speak of the more
fundamental mystery of seeking what it is to be human in the world, and to
exist before an infinite and infinitely mysterious God. It is, moreover, a call to caution and sobriety
regarding claims to “investigate” this God. As David Bentley Hart puts so well, to believe in God is not the same as to believe in the current existence of
Saturn, or (to use an example from Richard Dawkins), Leprechauns, a teacup in
perihelion, or a Flying Spaghetti Monster:
Beliefs regarding fairies are beliefs about a certain kind of
object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much
the same intentional shape and rational content as beliefs regarding one’s
neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and
ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular
thing and the totality of all things, the ground of all possibility of anything
at all … God … is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for either
photons or (possible) fairies to exist, and so can be ‘investigated’ only, on
the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and induction and conjecture or, on
the other, by contemplation or sacramental or spiritual experiences. … Evidence
for or against the reality of God, if it is there, saturates every moment of
the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of
consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.[11]
[1] Nancy Marie Brown, The
Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to
the Dark Ages (New York: Basic Books, 2010), our intro paragraph here is
based on the account given on pages 1-4 of Brown’s book. The quote comes at page 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Brooke’s historical method is strikingly parallel, for
example, to William Cavanaugh, The Myth
of Religious Violence: The Invention of a Modern Concept (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009); Brent Nongbri, Before
Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale, 2012); Tomoko
Masuzawa, The Invention of World
Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of
Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), all of whom
in various ways argue that the very concepts of “religion” (as “not secular”)
and “secularism” (as “not religion”) are inventions of the modern West, and
that the pretensions of secularity to have a monopoly on “the rational” are an
illusion based on forgotten or suppressed history that conceals the arbitrary
moments in the construction of an arena to be called “secular” (i.e. “not
religious”).
[4] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2013), 56.
[5] Cf. Philip Dixon, Nice
and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (Bloomsbury:
T&T Clarke, 2003) 75ff.
[6] Quoted in Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get
It Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 151.
[7] Etienne
Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (Indiana: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2009), 78-80.
[8] Cf. as well Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration of
the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,” in
Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral
Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi and
William Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), e.g. 39: “The
medieval project of natural theology was profoundly different from the
Enlightenment project of evidentialist apologetics. It had different goals, presupposed different
convictions, and was evoked by a different situation. It is true that some of the same arguments
occur in both projects; they migrate from one to the other. But our recognition of the identity of the
émigré must not blind us to the fact that he has migrated from one ‘world’ to
another.”
[9] John Hedley Brooke and Geoffery Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of
Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 143ff.
[11] Hart, Experience
of God, 33-34.
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