DesCartes Would Approve

Last Lecture: My Thoughts

So we have had our last lecture. The reading from Peters introduced us to a number of sub-divisions of Science and Religion interactions. So we end the semester with a broad perspective of the range of engagement.

The course has looked at a number of sources ranging from the right to the left of evangelicalism in terms of the authors theological position. The intent of the course was never to change the students position just allow the student to speak to their position with some sense of the strengths and weaknesses of their position.

Just like we said when we started:

"All truth is God's truth, no matter where it is found."

Holmes

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

Aristotle

Students have engaged the material differently, some have written amazing journals but have chosen to be silent in class. With a class participation mark of 20% that was a dangerous choice. Some have chosen to participate in the class discussion in reaction to the points discussed but clearly uninformed by what they have read for their journal. Again, a dangerous choice. But then again the course typically works out that way. We learn to live with what was possible under the circumstances.

It seemed that the class rarely came with either a clear feeling for the important points brought up by the sources or how to interpret them. I would often sense in class, that the class was simply waiting to me to tell the class what to think. Another dangerous choice.

There were times that I had to speak rather emphatically on a point discussed in the sources to cause class discussion. Points that I personally might not take. This might have caused some confusion by times but I felt it was necessary.

Your personal position on Science and Religion is crucial as you continue on in your careers even if they are not in science. Your community, both your civil community and your faith community (even if it is just your child asking you why the sky is blue) need you to not only know the content and concepts but also the meaning and value of both Science and Religion. If you fail in this you fail in the whole reason why we have a degree from a liberal arts and science university.

That said, the course will be marked on how well you know the content of the course (faithfully recounting the sources), the concepts of the course (handling the sources) and integration (analysis and reflection informed by the sources).

As I said in yesterday's lecture if there are places in society where you as an individual with a liberal arts and science degree and a faith position will need to address the content, concepts and integration related to this course it will likely be in the following areas:

1) Evolution and the Age of the Earth, while not really covered in this course were the elephants in the room. As I said, while we need to be careful of initial positions (in that in Science were are expected to change initial positions as more data becomes available while in Religion we are often expected to fight to the death to defend a received position) it is something to think about that in the all of the history of Western culture when Religion has fundamentally disagreed on an issue that Science had a well developed database on it was never Science that had to accommodate Religion. In your heads you will need to at least adopt an Aristotelian objectivity as you deal with the faith issues.

2) Environment: Polkinghorne, Peters and Sagan have all identified this one area as an arena where both Science and Religion speak truth to each other. I do not care to identify causes. In my opinion climate change is littered with both false causalities and incorrect predictions. I will say this though: twenty years of climate change evangelical preaching did not change the behaviour of people in any significant way. Only two things in the recent past has dramatically changed people's behaviour to match what the climate-change prophets have told us to do: the spike in gas prices a couple of years ago made us reduce consumption and the ongoing financial collapse. It is my prediction that we have an open window into the correctness of the climate change models concerning anthrogenic greenhouse gases and climate change. There can be no doubt that the financial crisis has forced us to create less CO2 and green house gases. If I am right, in about five years we will know the truth about our role in climate change.

But then again, who cares about causality? What is clear at this point is that climate change is happening. It is also clear, from the climate models that I have read, that Canada will be in a unique position to weather this change. We are blessed with water, space and natural resources. The best decision you ever made was to be born in Canada at the end of the 20th century.

In any event, the world will be coming to Canada hungry, naked and destitute. What will you do?

As an example of the intent of this course if I were in charge of the evangelical community in Canada I would at this point be selling every church and parsonage in the land (we can meet in peoples houses and back yards). I would preach tithing and thrift like they were foundations of the faith. With the money thus freed up I would then proceed to purchase land, lots of land. I would want that land to be isolated, well above sea level, well watered and with decent soil.

Why? Sanctuary and Refuge. Our gift to Canada would be the creation of green, viable self-sustaining communities founded and supported by the Christians that own the property with the direct intention of accommodating environmental refugees in communities where their culture would be respected and they would be given an immediate opportunity to support themselves. We would be able to say to the world ... in our country there are many rooms and we have prepared one for you. This is how Science and Faith speak Truth to each other. Each of us will need to work that out on our own.

3) Ethics and Morality: In your lifetime we will have children born in artificial wombs, clones and drones (clones without consciousness created for spare parts). Our society is not ready for the ethical and moral decisions that it will have to make as Science and Technology race onward.

Your community, your civil community and your faith community will look to you for leadership, to show that you are not afraid to look objectively at disparate positions and make decisions informed by reason and faith. To find some balance between the two and to have the courage of your convictions to speak up when the time comes ... and the time is coming.

Your thoughts need to be informed by the content and concepts of modern society but there must also be a response from within that is informed by your faith position that speaks to the limits and boundaries of both knowledge and endeavour. It is why you were here.

Take care, I will be praying for you all.

Last Lecture: Science and Religion

In lecture yesterday we discussed the trajectory from atheism to deism and eventually theism observed in several scientist/theologians. Carl Sagan was never on that trajectory and remained an atheist until he died. Sadly, he died and has never been replaced as a spokesperson for the engagement of Science in popular culture. It just hasn't happened.

The essay that we looked was written by Sagan and published by his wife after his death in the book "Billions and Billions". It marked an interesting stage in Sagan's career where he realized that despite a life spent building a trusted public persona he had not been able to touch the core identity and values of the people he was addressing. Thus he began to try to find common ground with the "religious tribe" (as he called them). It must have been frustrating for him but it is revealing when thinking about the interaction of Science and Religion.

That said, those that liked Sagan, liked him alot. Even now, people are mining his words and productions to try to hear him speak once again. The latest in this series is the mash-up of Carl's words from Pale Blue Dot (another book where he discussed his successful attempt to get NASA to turn Voyager around and take one last photo of Earth while it was still visible).

It is worth listening to.

This Will Rock Your Worldview

Of all the things that have happened recently in the interaction of Science and Religion this one has the potential for making a splash in the popular conscience. Most of us are familiar with the broad outlines of the Drake Equation. In short, the equation takes the stunning number of stars out there and uses a series of probability multipliers to determine the number of civilizations out there that are co-incident with our time. The cat fight is in setting the values for the multipliers.

So yesterday, a space telescope was launched that will spend a long, long time looking at one small patch of sky that is rich in stars. By monitoring the brightness of these stars and determining if the variations are periodic, the astronomers can determine the characteristic of the planets that circle the stars. This is not new but the sensitivity of the methods used have gotten finer and finer. We are now at the point where it might be possible to see Earth like planets pass between us and their primary stars.

LINK TO ARTICLE

So why will this rock our worldview? Well, I guess it depends on your thinking. This study should give us a reasonable number for one of the probabilities in the Drake Equation (the number of habitable planets capable of supporting life as we know it). This will edge us further into less speculative thinking about life in the Universe other than us. For some of us theists this thinking may be more of a problem than evolution. What would it mean for us theologically if there were life in other star systems and the meaning of the Fall and Salvation? We might have to start thinking about this.

It is interesting that they call the space telescope Kepler after the famous astronomer Kepler who said that in Science "we are thinking God's thoughts after Him". Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo and there are a number of myths surrounding the relationships between Brahe-Kepler-Galileo. But the reality was that Kepler nailed down the Copernican Universe with Brahe's exceptional data (based on ground based, naked eye observations) and math, with no help from Galileo (or his telescope). I dub this name ironic but also prophetic for this space telescope could in the same way nail down a controversy with simple Baconian observation.

Brooke Week 3: Mechanical Enlightenment

“The theme of Chapter IV is the mechanization of the natural world – that seventeenth century development which has often been seen as a decisive advance on organic models of the cosmos.”(p. 13)

“One of the many ironies in our story is that a model for the universe, which in the seventeenth century was used to affirm God’s sovereignty, was used by the deists of the eighteenth century in their attacks on established religion” (p. 13)

“Isaac Newton saw in the very laws he discovered a proof, not of an absentee clockmaker, but of God’s continued presence in the world” (p. 118)

“The basic postulate of the mechanical philosophies was that nature operates according to mechanical principles, the regularity of which can be expressed in the form of natural laws, ideally formulated in mathematical terms” (p. 119)

“This ability to create two worlds, to relate the real world to an idealized mathematical model, was one of the techniques that made modern science possible” (p. 121)

“For Bacon, as for Boyle and Newton after him, it was simply inconceivable that, from chance distribution and collision of atoms, a wolrd of such order could have been produced - and order that the progress of science was confirming rather than destroying” (p. 125)

“An event could be deemed a miracle if it was not explicable in terms of physical laws.” (p. 127)

“He was not bound by any kind of logical necessity, nor by the laws of nature, for they were simply expressions of the way He normally chose to act.” (p. 134)

“Newton’s conviction that “God was everywhere from eternity” had implications for how space and time were to be conceived. They, too, had become absolute rather than relative contructs. For DesCartes there had been no space without matter; for Newton there was no space without God.” (p. 137)

"It was often said that the test of a good Cartesian was whether he would kick his dog." (p. 141)



“Chapter V takes us into the eighteenth century and into that period of the “Enlightenment” when the sciences were hailed as instruments of progress and when institutionalized religion, especially in Catholic countries, was vilified for its superstition and priestcraft.” (p. 13)

“It was often not the natural philosophers themselves, but thinkers with a social or political ax to grind, who transformed the sciences into a secularizing force.” (p. 13)

“If scientific knowledge derived from reflection on ideas that arose ultimately from sense experience, it was tempting to generalize and say that no other mode of knowing was possible” (p. 154)

“An antipathy to voluntarist theologies is evident in Leibniz’s remark that a secure foundation for law is to be found not so much in the divine will as in His intellect, not so much in His power as in His wisdom.” (p. 161)

“Miracles, Leibniz insisted, were to supply the needs of grace not to remedy second rate clockwork.” (p. 162)

“Priestley makes a fascinating study because he personified a set of values that allowed the integration of scientific and industrial progress into a process theology, which promised the eventual triumph of rational Christianity. Progress in science was to be “the means under God of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting and end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as science.”” (p. 180)

“That the Christian religion could be given a rational defense became one of Hume’s principal targets. He did not deny that the universe must have a cause. The question was whether anything could be known about it.” (p. 182)

“The gist of it was that no testimony was sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony was such that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it purported to establish. Defining a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, Hume insisted that there must be a strong antecedent probability against its having occurred. Human testimony, however, was know to be capricious and corruptible” (p. 184)

"He (Wesley) stressed, as before, that his aim was not to account for things, only to describe them." (p. 191)

"The lesson that Wesley's many readers would have absorbed was that a science of nature, not bedeviled by arrogant theorizing, could offer rational support for Christian piety - revealing, as it appeared to do, a marvelous organization and adaptation within the created order." (p. 191)

Brooke Week 4 : Natural Theology and The Science of History

So we complete our time in Brooke who takes us from Pre-history to Modernity. We are now able to agree with Solomon that "there is no new thing under the Sun" but as applied to Science and Faith. We started this section by discussing how a theistic person would view a lightening rod as a challenge to God's sovereignty and complete it with the largely duelist view of a modern, complementary worldview where the developments of Science do not impact issues of faith.

In this week, we start with how the modern worldview provides a completely different historical narrative from the Universe to the mundane. To show how this works we start with a couple of simple questions:

1) If a strict Baconian looks at the following photo as the only evidence for humanity what would that scientist be able to say?

1) If a Cartesian looks at the following photo as the only evidence for humanity what would that scientist be able to say?

We discovered of course that Baconians have a very limited ability to see the obvious. If we then extend this principle to the Universe and the message written for us in the stars then what do we see? Well, this is the Universe as we see it.

If we allow a Cartesian analysis of what we see then we can categorize the stars according to size and history.

Leading us to conclude that if our Sun behaves in any way like the stars in the Universe that are the same size then this is not only the history of our Sun but its future as well. What is amazing in this is that if this model is correct then to form a golf atom in a wedding band the atom would have to have been fused in the heart of one star. That star would have to explode and turn to dust then return to the heart of a second star which then uses it as fuel to form the gold atom and then that star explodes to dust that eventually got collected up into the ball of space debris that formed our Earth. At least two stars. Makes you wonder.

Another thing that makes you wonder is that our view of the Universe is based on what we can see. The fact is that stars closer to us block the view of stars that are farther away. So one year the Hubble Space Telescope was trained on a tiny spot of night sky that was apparently dark. What they discovered was that the tiny black spot was a window past the local stars to the farther stars and this famous photo was collected. It is important to note that the image did not see stars but galaxies of millions, billions, trillions of stars ... all in a window the size of a grain of sand in the night sky.



A cartoonist saw this discovery in this way ...

From My Pictures

And so we see how modern science tells us a history of the universe and the Earth and our job as scientists and theists is to not only understand this information but to develop a worldview that integrates it.

And so we consider how people just like us tried to do this as the world changed under their feet 100 years ago at the beginning of the Modern Era ...

Chapter 6: The Fortunes and Functions of Natural Theology
“The object of the chapter is to uncover some of the reasons why this integration of science and religion proved so viable, despite the existence of trenchant critiques. We shall also consider the extent to which a commitment to natural theology affected the scientific enterprise and the extent to which advances in science affected the plausibility of arguments from design. ” (p. 15)

“The idea that divine wisdom could be discerned in nature was attractive in different ways, both to Christian apologists and to deists. Christians found the argument useful in their dialogues with unbelief. It seemed to offer independent proof of a God who they believed had also revealed Himself in the person of Christ. On the other hand, Deists also had reasons for promoting the design argument. The more that could be known of God through rational inference the less perhaps it was necessary to refer to revelation at all” (p. 193)

“For Calvin, any knowledge of God inferred from nature would be distorted, the defective product of a dimmed and fallen intellect. The image could only be rectified by reading nature through the spectacles of Scripture” (p. 195)

“Natural theology flourished in England not because of a peculiar English mentality but because there were social and political circumstances that gave the English Enlightenment a distinctive character” (p. 200)

“… according to Kant, was that no matter how much wise artistry might be displayed in the world, it could never demonstrate the moral wisdom that had to be predicated of God” (p. 205)

“On one level, natural theology was not so much destroyed by science as eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance.” (p. 219)

“Whewell continued to argue that the best explanation for the mind’s capacity to discover scientific truth was that it had been designed for the purpose. As priest and preacher, however he stressed that the way back to God was not through rational considerations. For one thing, that would leave God out of the conversion process; for another it would take insufficient account of the fact that design arguments were really only compelling to those that already believed.” (p. 224)

Chapter 7: Visions of the Past: Religious Belief and the Historical Sciences
“The assumptions made in reconstructing the past were often highly controversial even among naturalists themselves. We shall therefore stress the competition between rival scenarios, in which the political and religious preferences sometimes constituted a hidden agenda. Although there were countless attempts to harmonize these disturbing vistas with biblical texts, they were eventually abandoned – at least among academic theologians – as the methods of historical research were brought to bear on questions of biblical authorship” (p. 14)

“With the emergence of more sophisticated historical scholarship, particularly in Germany, it had already become clear to many Christian intellectuals that adherence to the literal inerrancy of Scripture was no way to present the credentials of Christianity to the modern world.” (p. 231)

“The science of history had created a watershed. One set of presuppositions took one toward a more human, but historically elusive Christ. The other – more traditional – allowed the retention of the Christ of faith, but at the cost of severing ones ties with what Strauss called “our modern world”” (p. 270)

Brooke Week 2: Revolution and Reformation

We looked at Chapters 2 and 3 of Brooke last week and focused on the near co-incident hinges of history called the Scientific Revolution and The Reformation. There were a few notable quotes:

"In Chapter II we address a specific historical problem: The interpretation of those shifts in the understanding of nature that, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, added up to what traditionally been called the Scientific Revolution." (p. 12)

"While it is true that investigations into nature were often subordinate to religious concerns in the late medieval period, it would be mis-leading to imply that they were bound together in am indissoluble complex until they were prized apart in the seventeenth century" (p. 12)

"It is even possible to argue that the scientific revolution saw an unprecedented fusion of science with theology, resulting in more secular forms of piety" (p. 53)

"A reverence for antiquity, though an appropriate stance for theology, was inappropriate for natural philosophy where reason and the senses held sway" (p. 56)

"Strictly speaking, it was impossible to effect a fusion of Christianity with Aristotle - as Aquinas was well aware. In selecting those facets of Aristotle's teaching that he considered illuminating, he was guided by the demands of his faith" (p. 60)

"The problem is, however, that real history rarely conforms to later stereotypes." (p. 64)

"Protestant critics, looking for a religion denuded of magic, would enlist the Bible on their side" (p. 71)

"The search for signs of God in nature had often been based on the assumption that the two books had been written in essentially the same language." (p. 77)

"They imply an earlier fusion, when it is more accurate to speak of subordination. And they imply divorce when what was achieved in the seventeenth century was a differentiation often conducted on theological grounds" (p. 81)

"In Chapter III we raise the question whether parallels can be drawn between the the reform of learning through experimental science and the reform of religion that occurred through the Protestant Reformation" (p. 12)

"While there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that certain Protestant societies were more tolerant toward new scientific learning, the difficulties that arise in testing such generalizations can be formidable." (p. 12)

"If Protestantism was more conducive that Catholicism to the expansion of science, one would expect this to manifest itself in a greater receptivity toward new and controversial ideas" (p. 83)

"True wisdom recognised the limitations of knowledge" (p. 87)

"Calvin's theology, no less than Luther's, illustrates that same capacity within Christianity for self-criticism and renewal" (p. 95)

"Whereas academic philosophers with a vested interest in preserving the Aristotelian world-picture were united against Galileo, there was no such unanimity among his clerical contacts, some of whom gave constructive advice." (p. 101)

"Put another way, puritan values helped to create an audience receptive to programs for the improvement of man's estate." (p. 111)

"The idea of a correlation between a latitudinarian and a scientific mentality can be appealing. They could be bound together by the belief, found in Bacon, that religious controversies were an impediment to science. There could be a suspicion of dogma, whether religious or scientific." (p. 115)