No God, No Science

Theology, Cosmology, Biology

Michael Hanby

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781119230878, 9781405158015
• eBook ISBN: 9781118322000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology presents a work of philosophical theology that retrieves the Christian doctrine of creation from the distortions imposed upon it by positivist science and the Darwinian tradition of evolutionary biology.

• Argues that the doctrine of creation is integral to the intelligibility of the world
• Brings the metaphysics of the Christian doctrine of creation to bear on the nature of science
• Offers a provocative analysis of the theoretical and historical relationship between theology, metaphysics, and science
• Presents an original critique and interpretation of the philosophical meaning of Darwinian biology

Part I

In the Beginning

Yet the very fact that it is the flesh of the Logos become man that ultimately defines the limits of Christian humanism contains the possibility of almost ­explosively extending those limits to what is really a limitless degree. Now we may dare—indeed dare we must—to take up with an all-embracing gesture into this pattern of the Christian man whatever in the long perspectives of history or in the depths of the soul is true and noble in thought and deed. All that is good and true has proceeded from the Logos and has its homing-point in the ­incarnate God, even though this be hidden from us, even though human thought and human good-will may not have perceived it. Every great and noble deed flows from a power which the revealing Logos has shown us to be his own ­special grace…Here is the meaning of those words written by an ancient Christian…‘Christ is the Logos, in whom the whole human race has a portion, and all who have lived according to the Logos are Christians, even though, like Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks, they are accounted godless.’

Hugo Rahner
Greek Myths and Christian Mystery

1

Discourse on Method

In a withering critique of the “evolutionary mysticism” of P. Teilhard de Chardin, the eminent zoologist George Gaylord Simpson lambasted the French Jesuit’s pretense to scientific legitimacy on grounds that all of “Teilhard’s major premises are in fact ­religious, and…his conclusions about evolution derive from those premises and not from scientific premises” (1964: 348). Consequently, and in apparent contrast to premises of the sciences, Simpson alleges that Teilhard discovers nothing in evolution that he has not already presupposed.

I note this episode at the outset of this book not because I hold any brief for Teilhard or any other version of “evolutionary theology”; indeed I take the very ­category to be hopelessly confused for reasons which will eventually become clear. Rather, I recall Simpson’s diatribe because it reflects a naïve view of the nature of ­science and its relation to metaphysics and theology from whose standpoint this book—which necessarily presupposes its own metaphysics in the course of advancing them—is likely to be deeply opposed and even more deeply misunderstood. In this chapter, I shall offer a formal and metaphysical argument, chiefly with respect to the act of scientific knowledge, that this view is false in principle. Thus, this chapter stands somewhat apart and strikes something of a different tone from the rest of the book and may appear metaphysically abstruse to readers of a more scientific and less philosophical bent. Its purpose is to show that there is an irreducibly metaphysical and theological dimension to scientific inquiry that is not obviated by retreat to the ­putative neutrality of scientific method, to explain the metaphysical reasons why this is the case, and to show how a putatively neutral method conceals a questionable ­metaphysics and theology. Once we have established this relation, the question of the relationship between science and theology, creation and evolution, becomes not so much whether theology but which. We will adjudicate this question historically and speculatively in Parts II and III. Nevertheless, in order to avoid misunderstanding and to avoid being accused of a “fault,” which is really only ontological necessity equally binding on the likely opponents of my argument, I wish to depart in advance from the material task of this book to state briefly what I take to be the formal parameters of the relationship of science to metaphysics and theology and some of the implications which follow from it. This exercise is somewhat artificial since my argument actually militates against any final separation of method and substance or form and content. But when thought must begin without any pure starting points, which is to say ­whenever thought begins, we do what we must.

Simpson’s criticism of Teilhard exemplifies what I will call an “extrinsicist” view of the relation between science, metaphysics, and theology. In its most extreme form, the one Simpson appears to hold, the essential difference between scientific and ­metaphysical or theological premises consists in the former’s indifference to, and thus, independence from the latter. At the root of this is a positivism which takes the world as unproblematically—and uninterestingly—given, a standpoint no less metaphysical than the metaphysics it deplores. We will consider the implications of this positivism in subsequent chapters. A milder form of this view would acknowledge that there are metaphysical and perhaps even de facto theological assumptions at the logical and ­historical origins of scientific inquiry, but that these, being essentially external to ­science, can be safely “bracketed out” from the strictly scientific work of testing hypotheses through empirical or experimental methods. The difference between these two positions is minimal, however, for they share in the more basic assumption that, whatever other methodological peculiarities may be proper to its “essence,” science is science not least because its “essence” excludes metaphysics and theology.¹ In other words, it is here at the point of their mutual exclusivity that the distinction, which is really a wall of separation, is to be drawn between science on the one hand, and metaphysics or theology on the other.

Inherent in this assumption are two others. The first is that scientific premises are ultimately self-justifying, if only a posteriori. This is to say then that scientific inquiry does not depend upon any form of rationality “higher” than itself but is rather the final basis upon which other forms of rationality, including one’s initial metaphysical assumptions, may ultimately be justified.² Natural science, in brief, is first philosophy which ultimately pulls itself up from the “empirically given” by its own intellectual bootstraps.³ This is the root of Simpson’s complaint as well as the whole contemporary movement, exemplified by Dennett (1995) and others, in which evolutionary biology and pragmatic philosophy collaborate in the “Darwinization of everything” without need of submitting the Darwinian “algorithm” of natural selection to anything more comprehensive or fundamental than itself.⁴ In the most extreme forms of Darwinian absolutism, natural selection is not so much an event within the history of thought, but rather all historical theories are episodes within the sovereign activity of natural selection, a notion which finally severs any link between thought and truth.⁵ Perhaps this is why the “debate” between Darwinians and their religious opponents is so perpetually unedifying and why thinking and sloganeering, education and ignorance are often so readily and willingly confused.

Even in the more benign forms of extrinsicism, metaphysics, to the extent that its presence is acknowledged, is reduced to the status of a hypothesis or a system to be verified or rejected through subsequent scientific analysis which, qua scientific, is essentially free of metaphysics.⁶ (As we shall see, this is an inadequate understanding of the metaphysical relation of the creature to God.)⁷ Science is thought to be capable of grounding itself and justifying its own metaphysical hypotheses on the basis of the second assumption, namely, that the empirical and experimental methods of scientific analysis are ontologically neutral precisely as method, and thus stand essentially outside of metaphysics and theology. This same assumption then allows one to eschew “­scientism” and excessive “reductionism” and to regard these as philosophical ­contaminations extrinsic to “pure” science.⁸ And it even permits one to propose a rapprochement of sorts between science and metaphysics or theology, not by entertaining the possibility of integrating the sciences into a theological view of reality or by supposing that theological truth might qualify scientific knowledge without loss to its scientific character—the extrinsicist view dogmatically prohibits this a priori—but by urging each, as it were, to “mind its own business.”⁹ There are of course important distinctions to be maintained between science, metaphysics, and theology—­distinctions mandated by the doctrine of creation itself. So the notion that philosophy, theology, and science should each stick to its own proper business does indeed contain an important truth. But it is not the whole truth, or rather it is a truth that cannot be adequately comprehended without a good idea of what that business is. There is no question that the sciences enjoy a legitimate autonomy with respect to metaphysics and theology; the question is the meaning and nature of this autonomy. This is ultimately an ontological question.

Talk of “a” normative relation between theology and science is of course fraught with complications. The word “science” conceals a vast array of different and highly specialized theoretical and experimental activities, both within the ever-increasing number of scientific sub-specialties and between them. Those taking an empirical or “sociology of knowledge” approach to the so-called “science–religion dialogue” have therefore developed “models of interaction” based upon the different ways that the science–religion relationship is empirically shown to be operative among the different sciences and in relatively more theoretical and practical applications. This approach entails its own unacknowledged ontological commitments and begs too many ontological questions to be philosophically satisfying, but it is helpful in calling attention to the different complex levels at which the question applies and the concrete obstacles to answering it.¹⁰ Training in the sciences is now so specialized that the vast majority of researchers are isolated from the theoretical genesis of their own ­disciplines, a problem compounded by the fusion of the scientific and technological revolutions and the ostensible parting of ways between a science now largely equated with ­technological prowess and what was once known as “natural philosophy.” As a result, there are many biologists who have never really studied Darwin, physicists with little firsthand acquaintance with Newton, and economists who are unfamiliar with Adam Smith. Where these great architects of modern thought are read, it is largely a matter of mere historical interest, or in the case of Darwinism, of occasionally rubbing the forehead of the talisman for the sake of legitimizing oneself in the eyes of the tribe.¹¹ Yet, each of the sciences gets philosophical as it nears its theoretical source—where it did once regard itself as natural philosophy—because each at its source and in its most comprehensive theoretical articulation embodies an aspiration to ultimacy or ­universality that is simultaneously obscured in the mundane work of the specialist and operative within it. The closer one gets to these original sources, the closer one gets to indispensible assumptions about the meaning of nature, place, body, causation, motion, life, explanation, and truth. In short, one gets closer to the indispensible assumptions about being qua being and therefore being in relation to God that remain axiomatic within science in its more mundane practice at the experimental level. The average researcher in applied physics does not have to think about what an entity, a body, truth, or place is, not because these are irrelevant to his work but because he can take them for granted. That ground will have already been plowed by others.

It is not my intention in this chapter to try to provide an exhaustive account of what the normative relation to metaphysics and theology should look like “in the laboratory,” as it were. Indeed it follows from my theological thesis about the meaning and nature of creation, as well as from my formal account of this relation, that this normative relation can only be discovered from within each of the sciences in question. This is an aspect of their legitima autonomia (Gaudium et Spes, 36). This relation is a function of the intrinsic truth of the world and the way this truth impresses itself on the structure of thought and its objects, not the de jure imposition of extrinsic theological authority which has all but ceased to exist anyway. However, if my formal account of this relation and my material evaluations of its various historical forms are correct and science’s relation to metaphysics and theology is not merely a sociological accident or a heuristic “model” that can be discarded or altered at will but a constitutive, ontological relation, then two consequences follow for any attempt from within the sciences to adequately address this question or to realize this relation.

First, though this relati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for No God, No Science?
• Illuminations: Theory and Religion
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Primary Sources and Translations
• Introduction
• Part I: In the Beginning
• Part II: The Eclipse of the Universe
• Part III: Creation Without Creationism
• Epilogue: Evolution of the Last Men
• Index