Rocks of Ages, Stephen Jay Gould
Science is a part of God’s work in human history.
The story of human history is the story of the advance of freedom (Hegelian language)
We have known for a long time that we need morality to keep up with the advance of science b/c the more you know, the better you need to be
Religion and science must conflict b/c they are trying to come to an understanding of the same thing, human life, from two different points of view.
Gould wants to divide them so they don’t interfere [but takes everything worth having for science]
Naturalism is almost inevitable given our need to understand the natural world.
One of the scandals of the past is substituting other causes where the natural causes were not understood. God of the gaps.
SJG: two different non-overlapping magisteria and respectful non-interference
SJG: natural world can’t contradict Scripture. if science and religion are in conflict in factual domain, we need to reinterpret our scripture. It must have been allegory or metaphor
SJG: magisterium of ethics and meaning need not invoke religion at all. a la Spinoza. pursue meaning through philosophy and ignore religion
SJG: we work out our own answers and don’t have to accept a set of religious dogmas
SJG: role of true religion is to bring moral contemplation rather than dogma [gag]
SJG: religion does not allow inquiry, doesn’t deal with facts
science deals with sense-perceptible world and theoretical presuppositions
do facts have to be sense-perceptible, or are they whatever is the case?
a property of something is a fact. 8 is divisible by 2. but it’s not sense-perceptible
there is no good reason to think all properties are sense-perceptible
God is not physical, so not producing of those kinds of facts. E.g. God does not have a brain.
Religion is committed to there being a spiritual or non-physical world and some sort of interaction
SJG: Science tries to document factual character of natural world and develop coordinating, explanitive theories
And that’s why religion and science conflict: b/c they deal with the same world [not different, non-overlapping realms]
Science should explain natural things with natural events
[Unfortunately], there are a number of philosophical views that surround this correct def. of science, including no facts other than natural facts
Gould goes back and forth b/t complete naturalism and agnosticism (which says we don’t understand)
defining religion in this way is not going to be useful to anyone who actually believes anything religious
all that’s left is for religion to be the area where we manage our feelings so we can live our life
It might be good to not look for supernatural explanations in science, but not to go on to make claims that there is nothing supernatural [which science cannot prove or disprove. it’s not in the realm of science]
there is an inherent tendency in science toward conflict with religion insofar as religion involves any beliefs about what is true [and science will tend to move beyond its purview to say nothing non-natural is true]
George Santayana: religion is poetry, allegorical, non-factual, expressions of meaning that can be better expressed by moral understanding independent of religion
this view invites religion to cease to exist or transform into something where beliefs are more or less sublime and permanent feelings — someone like that could claim to practice [this eviscerated ‘religion’]
Is there any likelihood that natural world can be explained in natural terms?
Challenging areas:
1. Dependent nature of the phenomenal world. Can’t be infinite causes regressing backwards. Dependent nature of the physical universe and need for something underpinning it that is not dependent.
2. Awareness or consciousness and the awareness of awareness or the consciousness of consciousness. If it weren’t for the fact that we are conscious of our own mental state and able thereby to correlate them with what happens in the brain, we would never know there is such a thing as consciousness [i.e., from just studying the brain itself naturally]
3. Great events and people in history. [This is sort of an extension of the last one in the sense of personality, choices, etc.] Esp. Jesus
4. The power of beauty. Def: sense-manifest goodness. ‘The most embarrassing moment for the atheist is when he wants to give thanks and there’s no one to thank’ — Chesterton
5. Co-working with God. Results beyond your capability
Religion is not opposed to free inquiry. If we have something to hide, perhaps we haven’t understood what our religion is about.
Religion as an authoritative cultural form does try to shut down free inquiry. However, we can’t legitimately critique religion when it ventures into effects of raw humanity. It gets taken over by the human side, and since it’s so powerful it is dragooned into serving sometimes awful ends. [But those kinds of bad human detours can happen to any belief system, including atheism and humanism, etc. The detours happen less with naturalism, but it also has zero moral power, except vestigial religious power which is fading.]
Science does not assign ultimate answers and you will never find the claim that only natural facts exist in a peer-reviewed science book. [You can find it in individual author’s books — Hawking, Gould, Dawkins, ad nauseum — but those aren’t up to scientific standards, though they like to masquerade like they do.]
E=mc^2 is not a statement about all energy. It’s a statement about matter than meets our needs. We have the matter and we need energy.
Religion does try to make ultimate claims, not with theories but with stories designed to give completeness.
When scientists venture into this area they end up with mathematical fictions, pleasing images [the realm of religion].
Spirituality is coming down the road in our culture and it's going to get us all because we have such desperate needs for it. It has no restrictions in terms of truth and reason. It will say all spiritualities are equal b/c they do not deal in the realm of fact. Address issues of meaning, purpose, values, self-worth.
It’s true we need spirituality, but which one is it going to be? When naturalists say this, they just mean something that doesn’t overlap with science that helps us deal with our non-factual lives (values, emotions, etc.)
They say: spirituality is good b/c it meets a deep human need. But anything goes.That area has been cut loose from reality. That’s going to degrade the university system b/c ultimately it is a moral enterprise. It has to be able to answer the question of what is the moral basis of science itself and the academic and intellectual life. That is not a domain of natural facts. It is the domain of feeling and will invariably come under the sway of political forces.
Q&A
Darwin’s theory accounts for the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.
Evolution requires an environment that selects. It cannot account for creation.
Biological order is irrelevant to the argument from design. Even if there’s no life, you still have to explain order.
PoMo is a serious challenge to science and if D has to choose b/t those two, he chooses science
There would not be a conflict b/t science and religion if science restricted itself to its field and didn’t try to explain totalities
But both religion and science have a problem with humility. The conflict is not logically necessary, but it is psychologically inevitable.
Sometime you might like to read the Bible just to look for places where you think nuclear power might have shown up.
Areas of conflict: prayer, resurrection of X, inspiration of Scripture, all of the Apostle’s Creed. Saying science (e.g. the laws of physics) precludes those being true is extremely common. And they further think if it did happen, you can’t explain it with the laws of physics. But if E=mc^2 is something more than just a comment about the energy available in matter (e.g., how energy can become matter), that all sorts of possibilities open up.
There’s no substitute for careful thinking about things and in most cases then criteria will emerge.
[This is manifest in Dallas’ life and teaching.]
Generally speaking, criteria emerge from working the data, from the subject matter. Method must conform to the subject matter. What do the words mean?
No comments:
Post a Comment