Two Matters

1. Evolution in the Political Context Again: A Reference

In the January 11 edition of Inside Higher Ed’s “Views,” one Jason R. Wiles has written a nice piece, “The Huckster’s Artful Dodging on Evolution,” reviews Mike Huckabee’s “record on the teaching of evolution in the public schools — an issue that is not specific to higher education, but that ultimately can have a major impact on science education policy and the nature of intellectual debate in the United States.”

Neatly correlative to that summary of the history of Huckabee on evolution is an equally helpful comment by one R.W. Hoyer, “Why Mike Huckabee Should Not Be President,” presenting us with some pause-provoking data on the views of the American public on the topic. To give you a sense of the latter, Royer tells us that “according to a 1987 Newsweek survey just 700 of 480,000 life and earth scientists (0.14%) assign any credence at all to so-called creation-science, yet 87 million adult Americans (47%) support that perspective.”

I have already, in previous postings, devoted more of my very finite intellectual energy to Huckabee’s views than they deserve, at least on their own intrinsic merits. So I’ll content myself here with just giving you the URL that should take you to the article and comment: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/01/11/wiles.

2. More on Theology and Mathematics: an Epi-Digression

With the matter of the relationship between mathematics and religion or theology on my mind, itself a digression from the matter of the relationship between science and religion or theology that I have been focusing on, I found myself reading a relevant review in the January 13, 2008, The New York Times: Jim Holt’s “Proof,” a review of John Allen Paulos, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (Hill & Wang).

The review’s opening paragraph immediately caught my eye.

A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician walk into a bar. Bartender says, “Any of you believe in God?” Which of the three is most likely to say yes? Answer: the mathematician. Mathematicians believe in God at a rate two and a half times that of biologists, a survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences a decade ago revealed. Admittedly, this rate is not very high in absolute terms. Only 14.6 percent of the mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis (versus 5.5 percent of the biologists).

In my January 2, 2008, posting, “Religious Experience and Mathematical Experience I,” I quoted a statement from the The Mathematical Experience of Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh (p. 111-112) that sees the theologian’s belief in a nonmaterial reality as making it easier for a mathematician to believe in “mathematical objects which are simply one particular kind of nonmaterial object.”

Belief in a nonmaterial reality removes the paradox from the problem of mathematical existence, whether in the mind of God or in some more abstract and less personalized mode. If there is a realm of nonmaterial reality, then there is no difficulty in accepting the reality of mathematical objects which are simply one particular kind of nonmaterial object.

The results of the National Academy of Sciences survey suggest that the reverse may alos be the case: the mathematician’s belief in a nonmaterial reality may make it easier for a theologian to believe in a divine reality which is simply one particular kind of nonmaterial object.

I found Holt’s second paragraph equally arresting, for it bears on the Platonism of many mathematicians, including Davis and Hersh, that I noted in the January 6, 2008, posting, “Mathematical and Theological Realities: Responses to Two Comments.”

But here is something you probably didn’t know. Most mathematicians believe in heaven. Not a heaven with angels, but one populated by the abstract objects they devote themselves to studying: perfect spheres, infinite numbers, the square root of minus one and the like. Moreover, they believe they commune with this realm of timeless entities through a sort of extrasensory perception. Mathematicians who buy into this fantasy are called “Platonists,” since their mathematical heaven resembles the realm of the Good and the True described in Plato’s “Republic.” Some years ago, while giving a lecture to an international audience of elite mathematicians in Berkeley, I asked how many of them were Platonists. About three-quarters raised their hands. So you might say that mathematicians are no strangers to belief in the unseen. (Of course, mathematicians don’t drag their beliefs into the public square, let alone fly planes into buildings.)

Noting, parenthetically, that (Paulos, of course, is a mathematician who does drag his beliefs into the public square), let me go on to use Paulos’s own exposition (on pp. 46-47) to illustrate just how Platonist mathematicians can be.

Another example of creating something, the positive whole numbers, literally out of nothing is the mathematician John von Neuman’s recursive definition of them. Two preliminary notions are needed: The first, the union of two sets A and B, is the set of elements in one or the other or both of the two sets. It is symbolized as A È B. The second, the empty set, is the set with no elements. It is sometimes symbolized by a pair of empty braces: {}. The number 0 von Neuman simply defines to be the empty set. Then he takes the number 1 to be the union of 0 and the set containing 0. The number 2 he takes to be the union of 1 and the set containing 1, and the number 3 he takes to be the union of 2 and the set containing 2, and so on. Each number is thus the union of all its predecessors and derives ultimately from the empty set.

And so on infinitely.

Let me close this post by (1) asking why, if a mathematician can thus define numbers into existence, a theologian cannot similarly define God into existence and (2) stating that I can’t believe that the act of definition is up to the task in either case.

Addendum: The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann) on von Neumann begins:

John von Neumann (Hungarian Margittai Neumann János Lajos) (December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century.

Also, for what it is worth, the article points out that:

Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.

Postscript: I promise to do my best, in the next posting, to get back to the point I was trying to make with Davis and Hersh and the notion of mathematical experience and then, in the next or nearly next one, to return to my discussion of Polkinghorne’approach to science and theology. But I’ve been having so much fun.

Mathematical and Theological Realities: Responses to Two Comments

I have had two very substantial comments bearing on my January 2, 2008, posting, Religious Experience and Mathematical Experience I, the first from Craig Looney and the second from Michael Mascolo. They both deserve fuller responses than I think the comments section is best suited for. In this posting, I will first and more fully respond to Michael’s comments, because I think I see in them a greater difference from my views than I see in Craig’s.

You begin, Michael, by saying:

In my view, an issue arises when Polkinghorne makes reference to a “nonmaterial reality”. It makes it seem as though the object of a discipline has to be a kind of “thing”. Physics and chemistry and biology deal with tangible physical or organic “things” — look: We can see them; mathematics also deals with things, but non-material things.

My response: I don’t think that a reference to a “nonmaterial reality” “makes it seem as though the object of a discipline has to be a kind of ‘thing’, if a “thing” is understood to be a “tangible physical or organic” “thing.” While I think we have every reason to hold that the object of empirico-mathematical science has to be physical, as of the present writing I know of no reason to hold that the object of any discipline whatsoever has to be a kind of physical thing or reality. Were I to be presented with a demonstration that there is a divine being (or reality; the word “thing” doesn’t fit well here), then I’d be perfectly happy with seeing it as the object of a discipline.

 

You next say:

I don’t believe that it is helpful to say that mathematics deals with things. If we want to see sets as “things” or “objects”, at best they are “objects” of consciousness, in the intentional sense — as objects of an act. Mathematics, I would suggest, is constructed through action and symbolic action; I don’t believe it is helpful to say, for example, that mathematicians “discover” sets and groups and all of that as if these words refer to extant realities or non-material forms that exist in the world (or in heaven).

In response, I will quote again the passage from Alfred North Whitehead’s little classic An Introduction to Mathematics (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1948) that I quoted in my November 21, 2007, posting, Further Specification of this Blog’s Philosophical Rationalism, and in which he tells us (p. 2):

The first acquaintance which most people have with mathematics is through arithmetic. That two and two make four is usually taken as the type of a simple mathematical proposition which everyone will have heard of. Arithmetic, therefore, will be a good subject to consider in order to discover, if possible, the most obvious characteristic of the science. Now, the first noticeable fact about arithmetic is that it applies to everything, to tastes and to sounds, to apples and angels, to the ideas of the mind and to the bones of the body. The nature of things is perfectly indifferent, of all things it is true that two and two make four. Thus we write down as the leading characteristic of mathematics that it deals with the properties and ideas which are applicable to things just because they are things, and apart from any particular feelings, or emotions, or sensations. This is what is meant by calling mathematics an abstract science.

That is, at least in the case of classical arithmetic and the classical mathematics that is that arithmetic’s elaboration, the objects of the science are real things, i.e., beings or realities. To take up my own stock example: if I have two and only two pennies in my right front pants pocket and two and only two pennies in my left front pants pocket, if no penny in my right front pants pocket is identical with any penny in my left front pants pocket and vice versa, and if  I have no other pennies, then I have four penies. In this sense, I have no problem with recognizing sets of pennies and in general, sets of things.

 Moreover, given what I have said above, I have no reason to hold that the things that constitute a set have to be physical things; sets of immaterial thoughts, if such thoughts do exist, do not trouble me. I don’t, however, think it necessary to hold that there exist sets over and above the things of which there are sets. Given the four pennies in my pockets just mentioned, there is no need to postulate the existence of sets over and above the pennies, whether the sets would be in in my pockets or in some realm of Platonic idealities. The same is true of numbers: while I have a number of pennies in the one pocket and another number of pennies in the other pocket, there is there is no need to postulate the existence of numbers over and above the pennies, whether in my pockets or in some realm of Platonic idealities.

The pennies constitute and exhaustively constitute the sets and the numbers, just as John and Mary Doe-Smith constitute and exhaustively constitute the couple that is the Doe-Smiths.

You go on to say:

A small thought experiment might help me make my point. (This comes from Piaget). A child is counting pebbles. She counts the pebbles and finds that there are 8. Then, starting with a different pebble, she counts again, and comes up with 8. And then again! She performs three different acts of counting. In yet another constructive act, she then abstracts what is common to all of these acts to construct the idea of conservation of number — the number remains the same despite how one counts them.

I agree that, errors or an addition or subtraction of pebbles aside, the three different acts of counting will yield the same answer. And I agree that the acts of counting are constructive acts, as long as we understand that the construction is not of either the objects being counted or their number, i.e., the number that they constitute; rather, it is the conceptual apparatus, the ideas, by means of which we think and count that the acts construct.

 

I don’t, however, think that she goes on to construct “the idea of conservation of number.” The number remains the same because, well, the number of pebbles remains the same and she counted them correctly all three times.

You then go on to ask:

Is the notion of conservation a property of the world? Of a rational mind? Is it an “object” that exists in Platonic Heaven? I would suggest that the notion of conservation of number is a product of action-on-the-world; it is produced through what Piaget called “reflective abstraction”. Note: I’m not abstracting over objects; I’m abstracting over my actions-on-objects — a crucial difference!

The notion of “action-on-the-world” troubles me, if it means anything other than that in counting the pebbles, she is engaged in a mental acts and the object of her action is the set of pebbles in front of her. If it means that the mental action of counting as such effects a real change in the pebbles or their number, I’ll have to say that that does not correspond to the experience that I have had in counting pennies or pebbles.

And finally you conclude:

And so, mathematics is very much grounded, I would say. It is grounded in the regularities that we find in our actions and symbolic actions. (This, actually is also the case for sciences, but that’s a somewhat different story.)

Mathematics is different from theology!

I agree that “mathematics is very much grounded,” but grounded in the real things, beings, or realities populating the universe, and in our actions only insofar as they too are realities populating the universe.

Now on to you, Craig. You state that:

Theology starts with the existence of “God” (or some supernatural concept) and attempts to understand the world (or parts of it) in terms of this “axiom”. Mathematics (often) starts from axioms and works out the implications to see if anything interesting arises, often with little regard to whether they have any bearing on the “real” world. So theology and mathematics are similar in that they use axioms.

Interestingly enough, in their The Mathematical Experience, Davis and Hersh draw attention to Georg Cantor’s arithmetic of infinite numbers and go on to say:

Mathematics, the, asks us to believe in an infinite set. What does it mean that an infinite set exists? Why should one believe it? In its formal presentation this request is institutionalized by axiomatization. Thus, in Introduction to Set Theory, by Hrbacke and Jech, we read on page 54:

     “Axiom of Infinity: An inductive (i.e. infinite) set exists.”

Compare this against the axiom of God as presented by Maimonides (Misneh Torah, Book I, Chapter 1):

     The basic principle of all basic principles and the only pillar of all the sciences is to realize that there is a First Being who brought every existing thing into being.

They go on to say:

Mathematical axioms have the reputation of being self-evident, but it might seem that the axioms [sic] of infinity and that of God have the same character as far as self-evidence is concerned. Which is mathematics and which is theology?

I think it clear that, if axioms are expected to be self-evident, then the two “axioms” at hand are not really axioms. It would be better to call them postulates. Or, equivalently, we can formulate them as the antecedents of conditional statements such as, say:

If an infinite set N exists, then, for any number of objects M, N + M =  N.

Or:

If a First Being exists, then an ontologically simple being exists.

Unless and until we know that the antecedent conditions are true, our theories are but hypothetical. When and only when we have proofs that, in the one case, there is an infinite set, and, in the other, that there is a First Being, can we have categorical theories, theories, as you say, “bearing on the ‘real’ world.”

Tying my responses to your comments together with my responses to Michael’s: the arithmetics of my pennies and that of her pebbles are, in the terminology that I have just used, categorical and not hypothetical.

Towards a Definition of Religion

I have to confess to and apologize for what has to be, for a self-professed rationalist and a resolute one at that, a grave lapse; I was tempted to say, “a grave sin.” That is, I have been posting to this blog for a couple of months now and have said a number of things about religion without having offered a definition of religion.

That a definition of religion is important is evident. Take, for example, the first amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which I brought up in my December 8^th (Mitt Romney on Faith in America) discussion of Mitt Romney’s speech, “Faith in America.” The amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

As I noted in the earlier posting, the clauses bearing on religion present us with two distinct theses:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

But one can only begin to determine whether or not a law is one respecting an establishment of religion if one knows what a religion is. Similarly, one can only begin to determine whether or not a law is one prohibiting the free exercise of religion if one knows what a religion is.

What the law has to say about the nature of religion is something that I hope to have, and fear that I will have, occasion to delve into in the coming weeks and months. For now I want to post a first draft of a definition and take note in its light of an obvious recalibration of what a resolute rationalist should be thinking of religion.

As for the first draft: a religion is:

(1) a set of beliefs bearing on that which is the primary and/or ultimate reality or mode of reality (or those which are …);

 

(2) a set of correlative attitudes and valuations; and

 

(3) a set of correlative approaches to practice and action.

As for the recalibration: it seems to me that we all, even the resolute rationalists among us and the physicalists or materialists among the resolute rationalists, have such beliefs: an absolute materialist takes physical reality to be the primary and the ultimate reality, prior to and beyond which there is nothing else, and furthermore has a set of correlative attitudes and valuations and a set correlative approaches to practice and action

 It needs to be understood, however, that this recalibration is not a backing away from the rationalism motivating this blog; it remains that my aim is, as I said in my very first posting, “to persuade those readers who might be needing persuasion to adopt the point of view of philosophical rationalism and so to abandon fideism and indeed all forms of willingness to adhere to beliefs out of proportion to the evidence in their favor.” 

That is, rationalism has no dispute with religion as defined above, that is, with rational religion. Its dispute is with fideistic or non-rational religion, which includes among its beliefs, whether explicitly or implicitly, one that says it is permissible to to adhere to a belief out of proportion to the evidence in its favor; indeed, it is typically not just permissible but virtuous or even obligatory to do so.

Religious Experience and Mathematical Experience I

 In my November 29, 2007, posting, “Theology and Science? What about Philosophy?”, I asked why it was that just the two disciplines of science and theology were being singled out for treatment in John Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology, because I saw two other theories or disciplines that were at least as pertinent to theology as Polkinghorne’s science: philosophy and mathematics. In that posting I argued for the pertinence of philosophy, noting that the title for the work that I would have then written would have been Theology, Philosophy, and Science.  I also said that, in the near future, I would turn to the role of mathematics and noted that the title for the work that would at that time come to my mind would be Theology, Philosophy, Mathematics, and Science. I will at least begin to consider the relationship or relationships that may obtain between mathematics and theology in today’s posting.

As I have noticed at least once or twice in earlier postings, Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology recognizes (p. 18) an important difference between science and theology:

Just as the object of scientific enquiry is the physical world, so the object of theological enquiry is God.

But he also views them as having an equally important similarity (p.20), in that they both “originate in interpreted experience.”

As with science, so even more with theology, the search for verisimilitudinous knowledge is subtle and manifold. Its character is cannot be reduced to a simple, flat description. For both disciplines, critical realism provides a concept that both acknowledges that there is a truth to be found and also recognizes that the finding of that truth is not achievable through the application of some straightforward and specifiable technique. Both disciplines are concerned with the search for motivated belief and their understandings originate in interpreted experience.

I am quite sceptical about the analogy, in particular about the implied thesis, that theologians “encounter” divine reality or somehow experience the divine. For while, as I said in my December 12, 2007, posting, “The Parallelism of Science and Theology,” it is evident in sensory experience that the physical reality of science exists, it is just not evident in sensory experience that a divine reality exists.I do not think, then, that we have a religious or theological experience, from which theology originates, that is analogous to the scientific experience from which science originates. That is the reason why religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam adopt versions of fideism, the thesis that we can have, but only can have, a genuine knowledge of the divine through faith, faith dispensing with evidence.

My reflections on Polkinghorne’s understanding that there is such a religious experience brought to mind a book I read a couple of decades ago, Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh’s The Mathematical Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981). 

The title is significant and I will take up the notion of mathematical experience in a subsequent posting or two, for one might well think that the understanding that Davis and Hersh have of mathematical experience might suggest a way of supporting Polkinghorne’s thesis. In this posting, however, I want to lay some groundwork for that discussion.

Let’s start by taking note that, just as Polkinghorne sees there to be a parallelism between science and theology, so Davis and Hersh (p. 111-112) see there to be one between mathematics and theology or religion, of which theology is the theoretical component. First, they see a similarity between the subject realms of the two disciplines, in that both subject realms are nonmaterial.

Belief in a nonmaterial reality removes the paradox from the problem of mathematical existence, whether in the mind of God or in some more abstract and less personalized mode. If there is a realm of nonmaterial reality, then there is no difficulty in accepting the reality of mathematical objects which are simply one particular kind of nonmaterial object.

For now at least I’ll pass by the “simply” in “simply one particular kind of nonmaterial object” because I wish to enjoy the question that Davis and Hersh go on to ask and the breath-taking answer that they give to it.

So far, we have discussed the intereaction between the discipline of mathematics established religions. We might also ask to what extent does mathematics itself function as a religion. Insofar as the “laws of mathematics” are properties possessed by certain shared concepts, they resemble doctrines of an established church. An intelligent observer, seeing mathematicians at work and listening to them talk, if he himself does not study or learn mathematics, might conclude that they are devotees of exotic sects, pursuers of esoteric keys to the universe.

Then, just as Polkinghorne sees there to be a dissimilarity between science and theology, Davis and Hersh note one between mathematics and theology.

Nonetheless, there is remarkable agreement among mathematicians. While theologians notoriously differ in their assumptions about God, still more in the inferences they draw from these assumptions, mathematics seems to be a totally coherent unity with complete agreement on all important questions; especially with the notion of proof, a procedure by which a proposition about the unseen reality can be established with finality and accepted by all adherents. It can be observed that if a mathematical question has a definite answer, then different mathematicians, using different methods, working in different centuries, will find the same answers.

Seeing mathematics thus enjoying that mode of superiority, Davis and Hersh go on to ask:

Can we conclude that mathematics is a form of religion, and in fact the true religion?

I am not sure how far this was asked with tongue in cheek. But it doesn’t matter, because, whether intentionally or not, they have raised a serious point. That is, if we have made the determination that two disciplines both exist as genuine disciplines, then the question of what relationship or relationships there may be between them arises. And one at least logically possible relationship is that of identity; if the two are not distinct, they are identical. Here, Davis and Hersh have directed our attention to the at least logical possibility that mathematics and the true religion, or true theology, are identical.

If we hold that mathematics is the science of nondivine sets and numbers, while theology is the science of God, we’ll not be inclined to identify the two disciplines. If, however, we hold that sets and numbers are the divine realities, we’ll be inclined to join the ranks of the Pythagoreans and identify mathematics and theology.

To return to science and theology: if we have made the determination that the two disciplines exist both exist as genuine disciplines, then the question of what relationship or relationships there may be between them arises. And one at least logically possible relationship is that of identity; if the two are not distinct, they are identical. Here again, Davis and Hersh have, albeit indirectly, directed our attention to the at least logical possibility that science and theology are identical.

If we hold that science is the theory of nondivine physical reality, while theology is the science of God, we’ll not be inclined to identify the two disciplines. If, however, we hold that physical reality is the divine reality, we’ll be inclined to join the ranks of the disciples of some Spinoza and identify science and theology.

One last thought, one that I enjoy thinking about even though I am not in the least tempted to go in its direction: if mathematics were to be identical to theology and science too were to be identical to theology and, then, of course, all three would be identical. 

Dr. Ron Paul and the Theory of Evolution

Dr. Ron Paul, a graduate of the Duke University School of Medicine, seemingly has added his name to the list of those of the Republican candidates for president who have stated that they don’t believe in the theory of evolution. (Two of them, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, have of course withdrawn from the race, while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is now a leading contender for the party’s nomination.)  On a YouTube video currently available on the internet, Dr. Paul responded to the question of whether he believed in evolution by answering (in my transcription; I left out the “ers,” the “ahs,” and the most obvious false starts):

Well, at first I thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know, for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter. And I think it’s a theory, there is evolution, and I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory.

 

It really doesn’t bother me, it’s not the most important for me to make the difference in my life to understand the exact workings. I think the creator that I know created us and every one of us and created the universe and the precise time and manner and all, I just don’t think we at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side. So I just don’t, if that were the only issue [inaudible], I would think it’s an interesting discussion, I would think it’s a theological discussion, and I think it’s fine, we can have our [inaudible]. If that were the issue of the day, I wouldn’t be running for public office.

 

Given the recent history of the legal struggles over the teaching of evolution and anti-evolution in public schools and more broadly over the separation of church and state, it should be astonishing that a presidential candidate who has been taken with enough seriousness that he participates in the nationally televised debates can maintain that the issue is not important. Alas, it is not astonishing.

 

All of this is not just a matter of academic debate. Questions of very practical import quickly arise. To point to just one example, would Dr. Paul not support federal funding of research into, say, the development of new antibiotics, needed because bacteria have so evolved that today’s antibiotics are no longer effective against them, on the ground that the scientific theory guiding our understanding of evolution is not compelling?

 

There should be absolutely no need for this kind of discussion; we should be well beyond it as even the old Europe is. The next time that I find myself moved to write on this particular topic, I think I will be ready to propose that our accrediting agencies rule that no one shall be so left behind that they graduate from high school without serious and systematic instruction in the differences between and among science, non-science, and anti-science, with religious non-science and anti-science explicitly included in the coverage.

The YouTube video can be seen at “Ron Paul on Evolution” on the onegoodmove site, at: http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/12/ron_paul_on_evo.html.

Theology and Science in Conflict 1

Continuing my reflections on the relationship or relationships between theology and science, today I take a first look at the now classic typology or classification of the various possible relationships elaborated by Ian Barbour. Though that typology will be of primary importance in the coming postings, the remainder of this posting will focus on the troublesome version of one such possibility that showed up in today’s news.

 

Polkinghorne introduces Barbour’s typology in the following passage (Science and Theology, p. 20):

If science and theology really are, as has been claimed, partners in the great human quest to understand reality, then they are capable of interacting with each other. Ian Barbour has offered a useful classification of the various kinds of interactions that might arise.

To anticipate the topics of some postings to come, the four kinds of interaction are: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Polkinghorne (pp. 20-21) describes the first, that of “conflict,” as one that arises with “totalitarian views of the scope of either science or theology.”

This occurs when either discipline threatens to take over the legitimate concerns of the other. Examples would be scientism (the assertion that the only meaningful questions to ask or possible to answer are scientific questions, thus claiming to abolish theological discourse altogether) or biblical literalism (the assertion that Genesis 1 and 2 provide an account of the origin of the universe and of life to which the scientific story must be made to conform in detail). Such totalitarian views of the scope of either science or theology have scant plausibility, being based on gross oversimplifications of the complexity and range of actual human knowledge and experience.

As we are well aware, both the scientism and the biblical literalism are alive and well; evidently some find them to have more than but “scant plausibility.” Of the two, the former is the much more challenging and will therefore require an extended discussion, one which I will provide in the future, God (?) willing. The latter, biblical literalism, is of comparatively little theoretical significance, but is of acute political significance. Thus the “particularly egregious form of one such possibility that showed up in today’s news” alluded to above.

 

That is, we can read in an article, “Creationist College Advances in Texas,” today’s Inside Higher Ed that:

Texas is fast becoming a key state not only in debates over evolution but over what kind of government scrutiny is important and legitimate when reviewing colleges with particular ideologies.

On Friday, an advisory committee to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board recommended that the state allow the Institute for Creation Research to start offering online master’s degrees in science education. The institute, which has been based in California, where it operates a museum and many programs for people who don’t believe in evolution, is relocating to Dallas, where it hopes to expand its online education offerings.

The article goes on to say:

Officials of the Institute for Creation Research could not be reached for comment, but there is extensive information about the institute’s programs on its Web site. The list of courses required for the master of science education includes a number that are fairly standard (“Advanced Educational Psychology” and “Instructional Design,” for example), but also some that are not.“

Advanced Studies in Creationism” features this description: “Scientific study of the creationist and evolutionist cosmologies; origin and history of the universe, of the solar systems, of life, of the various forms of life, and of man and his cultures. Critical analysis of both creation and evolutionary theory using data from paleontology, astronomy, biochemistry, genetics, thermodynamics, statistics, and other sciences. Study of geologic principles and earth history in the light of Creation and the Flood; scientific comparative studies of recent creation; application of principles of Biblical creationism in various fields.”

That language, and other comments made by institute officials, suggest that students would be exposed to the science of evolution. But other material on the institute’s Web site suggests that one could not teach or study at the institute while accepting the overwhelmingly broad scientific consensus about evolution.

Now, from the egregious to the poignant. National Public Radio’s Climate Connections series presented a report this morning on “Worries About Water as Chinese Glacier Retreats.”

The Tibetan plateau has been called “the roof of the world” and “the third pole” for its ice-covered peaks. There, global warming is happening faster than at other, lower altitudes, with serious consequences for hundreds of millions of people. China’s lowest glacier, the Mingyong glacier — an enormous, dirty, craggy mass of ice wedged in a mountain valley 8,900 feet above sea level — is melting. And as it melts, the glacier on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is retreating up the mountain faster than experts can believe.

That the “third pole” is seeing its ice melt is striking and laden with implications. But what also struck me, having reflected on the Institute for Creation Research’s plans, was an “interaction” of religion and science that the article noted but in passing.

The scientists must scramble over the rocky debris, known as the moraine — left behind after the ice has melted — to move closer to the snout, or lower end, of the glacier. Studying this ice mass is extremely difficult because local Tibetans see it as a sacred glacier, and they have banned people from touching or stepping on the ice. That rules out normal scientific practices like removing ice cores and sinking stakes in the ice to measure its retreat. 

The Inside Higher Ed article can be found at:

http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/17/texas.

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog also covers the story, at:

http://chronicle.com/news/article/3644/texas-board-will-consider-letting-creationist-institute-offer-teaching-degrees?at.

 

The Inside Higher Ed article can be found at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17200108.

The Parallelism of Science and Theology

In my November 27^th posting, “Approaching Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology,” I raised three utterly fundamental questions that an active reading of the title of Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology begs to see answered:

What, in Polkinghorne’s book, is science?

What, in Polkinghorne’s book, is theology?

What, in Polkinghorne’s book, is or are the relationship or relationships between science and theology? 

In today’s posting, I’ll take a first look at his answers to these questions, beginning with this concise statement (p. 18) addressing the first two in one fell swoop:

Just as the object of scientific enquiry is the physical world, so the object of theological enquiry is God.

A bit later on (p.20), Polkinghorne has a couple of things to say that bear on the question of the relationship or relationships between science and theology. First, he draws our attention to what he calls the “verisimilitudinous” nature of scientific and theological knowledge.

As with science, so even more with theology, the search for verisimilitudinous knowledge is subtle and manifold. Its character is cannot be reduced to a simple, flat description. For both disciplines, critical realism provides a concept that both acknowledges that there is a truth to be found and also recognizes that the finding of that truth is not achievable through the application of some straightforward and specifiable technique. Both disciplines are concerned with the search for motivated belief and their understandings originate in interpreted experience.

There are a number of expressions used here that need to be unpacked, including “verisimilitudinous knowledge,” “critical realism,” and “interpreted experience.” For the time being, however, I want to dwell a bit on the parallelism that Polkinghorne is drawing between science and theology. They are, he continues, alike in that: 

Both are trying to grasp the significance of their encounters with manifold reality.

That statement sits in the middle of a paragraph that deserves to be read in its entirety.

Science does not have a privileged route of access to knowledge through some superior ‘scientific method’, uniquely its own possession; theology does not have a privileged route of access to knowledge through some ineffable source of unquestionable ‘revelation’, uniquely its own possession. Both are trying to grasp the significance of their encounters with manifold reality. In the case of science, the dimension of reality concerned is that of a physical world that we transcend and that can be put to the experimental test. In the case of theology, it is the reality of God who transcends us and who can be met with only in awe and obedience. Once that distinction is understood, we can perceive the two disciplines to be intellectual cousins under the skin, despite the differences arising from their contrasting subject material.

So one relationship between science and theology is that of similarity, in that both involve an “encounter” with a reality; another is that of dissimilarity in that the two realities are quite different, the one being physical reality and the other being divine reality.

But so placing theology in a relationship of similarity with science does theology no favor, precisely because of the dissimilarity just noted. For the time being, however, I’ll content myself with the following. First, as we are not dealing now with radical skepticism, there is no reason for any argumentation here on behalf of the thesis that scientists “encounter” physical reality. (That I take to be but an alternative way of saying that scientists observe, experience, and experiment with physical reality. This in turn I take to be an essential part of the experiential and experimental method that belongs to science, i.e., empirico-mathematical science, uniquely; it certainly does not belong to mathematics.)

Second, the parallel thesis, that theologians “encounter” divine reality, or that they somehow experience the divine, is one that absolutely needs argumentation, sound argumentation, on its behalf if it is to be accepted. For while it is perfectly evident in sensory experience that physical reality exists, it is just not evident in sensory experience that divine reality exists.

I have not, in reading either Polkinghorne’s Science and Theology or his Science and the Trinity found any such argumentation. I fear that he is in the position of simply having asserted his thesis and not given it the argumentation that it requires; this does not bode well for his view of theology. As I continue, however, in my reading in and reflection on the book at hand and others, I will be on the lookout for the needed argumentation.

Mitt Romney on Faith in America

 

In this posting I will interrupt my review of Polkinghorne’s views on science and religion to take notice of a few points in the speech, “Faith in America,” that Mitt Romney gave on Thursday. Romney takes precedence for the moment, not because of any powers he may have as a scientist or theologian, but because the possibility that he will be the next president of the United States is still a live one.

Romney spoke about the matter of the separation of church and state as follows:

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.

 

I find interesting a comparison of what Romney has to say about the separation of church and state with what Amendment I to the Constitution does. Amendment I reads:

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In the clauses bearing on religion, then, we are presented with two distinct theses:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

 

Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

 

In Romney’s statement we are also presented with two distinct theses:

 

No religion should dictate to the state.

 

The state should not interfere with the free practice of religion.

 

The two sets of distinct theses do not fully coincide. Romney’s second thesis, prohibiting interference in religion, is actually stronger than the Constitution’s second thesis, prohibiting the prohibition of religion; his thesis would certainly imply its. I do not know whether there would be additional church and state problems were “interference” the legally operative word.

 

The two first items are less closely related, though they may be seen to be connected if one adds in a presupposition that the path to a religion’s dictating to the state would pass through the Congress. At any rate, I am very much in favor of the sentiment that “No religion should dictate to the state.”

 

What troubles me is that Romney, in speaking of those un-named persons who “seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God,” has created some straw-men, if I may. These straw-men would indeed be guilty of having taken “the notion of the separation of church and state … well beyond its original meaning.” In fact, any Congressional legislation that would “remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God” would clearly violate the immediately following provisions of Amendment I , which hold that, to state things expressly:

 

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

 

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.

 

The problem with the demolition of straw-men is that it is all too easily taken, and all too often intentionally, to be the demolition of the real, flesh and bones-men to whom the straw-men bear some misleading resemblance.

 

The flesh and bones-men here are those who, in perfect keeping with the clause saying “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” would oppose the state’s making laws “respecting an establishment of religion” and so would oppose any effort at giving legal force to such sentiments as, say, the handy ones “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.”

 

This is classical sophistry at work. And to the degree that it succeeds and the straw-men and the flesh and bones-men are confused with one another, those who, like Romney, confuse them are positioned to go on to make two arguments. The one holds that people who would oppose any effort at giving legal force to such sentiments as, say, “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust,” would in fact “seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God” and thus would indeed be guilty of having taken “the notion of the separation of church and state … well beyond its original meaning.”

 

The other argument holds that those who favor efforts that would give legal force to sentiments like “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust,” would in fact be seeking merely to keep the acknowledgment of God in the public domain and thus would not be guilty of having taken “the notion of the separation of church and state … well beyond its original meaning.”

Some notes in conclusion: the speech’s force relies on ambiguities in its understanding of its central terminology. To take note of what we find in the but two of the speech’s more than forty paragraphs quoted above, there is, for example, the expression, “public domain.” We have to distinguish the public domain, in which the any reasonable understanding of the First amendment would permit an acknowledgement of God, from the legal domain, in which the any reasonable understanding of the First amendment would forbid an acknowledgement of God. The legal domain is only a part of the public domain. To illustrate the difference concretely: while I am perfectly content to have Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc., standing in the public common of my New England town and offering its good citizens religious literature, I reject the right of anyone to have citizens’ taxes paying for a Christmas display, or for an anti-Christmas display, for that matter.

The statement, “It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism,” cries out for its own discussion. I’ll have to content myself here with two points. One is that any “religion of secularism” is a religion in a sense very different from the religions of, say, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. The religion of secularism would as a matter of principle base its theses on reason and evidence, while religions in the latter sense base their central theses, as a matter of principle, on faith, and not on reason and evidence. Another is that we have to distinguish the attempt at persuading, in the public domain, people that the secular path is the path to follow, from any attempt at having Congress establish a “religion of secularism.”

 

Again, the statement, “in God, we do indeed trust,” with its unqualified use of “we”, is either false or, interpreted charitably, ambiguous. If its intent really is to say that “we all” or “all of us” trust in God, then it is false, for those who do not believe that there is a God, and there are at least some such people, certainly do not trust in God. The only way it could be true would be if its intent were somehow to say that “some of us” trust in God. That is a fact well worth noting. As, however, a de facto truth, it has no logic bearing on what is true de jure.

 

Finally, it needs to be understood that, while the Declaration of Independence does make mention of “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” and “Divine Providence,” the Constitution does not. It further needs to be understood that, while the Constitution enjoys legal standing, the Declaration of Independence, for all its historical importance, does not. “We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust” has no constitutional warrant.

 

I found Romney’s speech at:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/12/faith_in_america.html

A Digression: Faith in Science and Faith in Religion

 

In a “Comment” on a December 2nd posting, “Concern Over Scientist’s Support for Intelligent Design Surfaced Before Tenure Vote,” in the “News Blog” of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a respondent identified as Marci wrote, “But I can’t accept that science does not itself rely on many aspects of blind faith.”

 

This follows my having read a November 24th op-ed piece in the New York Times by Paul Davies, the celebrated “scientist-theologian,” entitled “Taking Science on Faith.” He begins the piece by saying:

 

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

 

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

 

Then, after having discussed the need he sees to investigate and finally to explain the order of nature and the fundamental laws of physics, he says:

 

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too.

 

After further discussion, he concludes his essay:

 

In other words, the [physical] laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

 

But this is troubling, because it aids and abets those who, for quite ulterior motives, motives very different from those of Davies, want to denigrate scientific knowledge by putting it on the same epistemological footing as religion. It is also troubling because it based in is a deep equivocation, that of an identification of the faith on which science may be said to depend with the faith on which the orthodox religious, e.g., orthodox Christians, believe themselves to depend.

 

The former may be understood as the faith that scientists have in the judgments of fellow scientists, i.e., in the judgments of fellow humans. This faith is quite provisional; because humans are capable of error, their judgments are always subject either to non-belief if reason and evidence do not support them or to outright rejection if reason and evidence show them to be false. Or it may be understood, as Davies understands it, as the reliance by scientists upon “an unexplained set of physical laws” or, alternatively, an “[un]testable theory of the laws of the universe.”

 

In at least the critical cases, such as, for orthodox Christians, the Trinity, the faith that the believers take themselves to be ultimately relying upon is something quite different. This faith is understood as faith in God’s revelations. Because, they believe, God simply does not err, these critical “revelations” are subject neither to non-belief if reason and evidence do not support them nor to outright rejection, for, they hold, reason and evidence cannot show them to be false.

 

It is not only the case, for orthodox Christianity, that God is the ultimate source of the revelations that the believer accepts in faith. It is also that case that the gracious action of God within the believer, empowering the believer so that he or she is able to accept something in faith, is a necessary condition of a person’s having that faith. This is clear in the First Vatican Council’s definition of faith, as reported by John A. Hardon, S. J., in The Catholic Catechism (p. 35):

 

The Vatican Council said many things about faith, but notably that: Faith is an assent of the mind in co-operation with the will under the influence of grace and a free gift of God; the object or focus of faith is God’s revealed word, and once embraced, God will provide that the true faith will be retained firmly and faithfully and not denied or brought into positive doubt. [The italics are Hardon’s.]

 

That this is the view too of orthodox Protestant Christianity can be seen in, e.g., Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology. An Introduction (Second edition; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 440: “Even faith itself is a gift of God, rather than a human action.”

 

QED: the faith of the scientist is not the faith of the religious believer.

Theology and Science? What about Philosophy? (Cont.)

 

In my last posting, “Theology and Science? What about Philosophy?,” I said that I would show that “Polkinghorne’s perspective actually cannot do without philosophy and that, despite its absence from the title and the first paragraph of his book, philosophy will find a way to creep into his discussion.” I will, it must be said, have to defer a good part of that demonstration as I reread Science and Theology and examine more thoroughly and reflect upon what he has to say on the topic. I will content myself in this posting with the observation that while he seems to be somewhat dismissive of “professional philosophers,” he does not reject philosophy, or it may be “philosophy,” out of hand.

 

Thus, in speaking (p. 15) of “the question of how one hits upon the research programme that will represent the next progressive step [in science],” Polkinghorne tells us:

This was precisely the sort of problem discussed by Michael Polanyi, who was a distinguished physical chemist before he turned to philosophical pursuits. His ideas have largely been neglected by professional philosophers but they resonate with scientists who recognize in Polanyi someone who knew their discipline from within.

 

There is more than a hint here of an argument ad hominem: if you don’t know a discipline from within, i.e., as someone who has (ibid.) served “an apprenticeship in the ‘convivial’ community of scientists,” then your view can be discounted.

 

And, passing to another text, we find him speaking of “critical realism,” the view that the “intertwining of theory and experiment” that characterizes science yields

[U]nique and intellectually satisfying understandings of the physical world of such a kind as to be persuasive that one is actually learning about the nature of things. Yet that is what the history of modern science exemplifies. Critical realism is a philosophical position based on the actual experience of the scientific community, rather than on a claimed abstract necessity that things had to be this way. This basis in experience is why it is the position adopted, consciously or subconsciously, by the overwhelming majority of working scientists, despite the criticisms leveled at it by some of their philosophical colleagues.

 

In other words, he respects the philosophical, or it may be the “philosophical,” reflections of those who, though not necessarily amateur philosphers, are scientists and thus know science “from within.” What I need to reflect upon, as I continue to read and ponder, is whether these reflections are genuinely philosophical, belonging to the autonomous discipline of philosophy, or just “philosophical,” belonging, strictly speaking, to empirico-mathematical science.