Cosmology Without God?

The Problematic Theology Inherent in Modern Cosmology

David Alcalde

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532636844
  9781532636868
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532636851
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Is God a superfluous hypothesis for modern cosmology? According to the normal understanding of modern science, the answer should be affirmative because modern science is supposed to be free of metaphysical and theological presuppositions. However, despite its self-proclaimed neutrality regarding metaphysics and theology, modern science is full of metaphysical and theological presuppositions. These can be summarized as a mechanistic understanding of nature, a reduction of God to an external agent in competition with natural processes, and creation to a worldly mechanism. These presuppositions are deficient and untenable, and they remain unconscious for the most part in the dialogue between science and theology, making it intellectually impossible because of the reduced notions of God, nature, and creation assumed. Using the coherent and unreduced image of God and nature provided by the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Fr. David Alcalde intends to uncover and criticize the incoherent theological assumptions inherent in a concrete branch of modern science, which is modern cosmology. The author points out the presence of these inadequate theological presuppositions in both the theologians who use modern cosmology to offer scientific proof for the existence of God and the atheistic cosmologists who use their science to reject the idea of God.

1

The Problem of Theological Extrinsicism in Modern Science

Introduction

The goal of this book is to uncover and criticize the theological extrinsicism inherent in modern cosmology. By theological extrinsicism, I mean the deficient theological understanding that conceives of God as an external agent who is in competition with natural processes and of creation as a worldly mechanism. This poor theology is present not only in modern cosmology but also in other branches of modern science, such as biology.13 In fact, modern cosmology suffers from theological extrinsicism because it is a branch of modern science. In other words, the problem of theological extrinsicism is a problem of modern science. The goal of this initial chapter is to demonstrate that theological extrinsicism inheres in modern science. I intend to achieve this goal in a number of steps. I will start by dealing with the concept of modern science. I will show that the advent of modern science brought a revolutionary way of understanding nature and God, based on two pillars: (a) the rejection of scholasticism and (b) the mathematical comprehension of the world. Modern science claims that “science, metaphysics, and theology are essentially ‘outside’ of each other, where their relationship and their respective claims can be adjudicated from the neutral standpoint afforded by the empirical and experimental methods of science.”14 This claim, known as extrinsicism,15 is erroneous for three reasons: (1) It falsifies the concepts of both God and nature. On the one hand, God’s transcendence is lost because God is reduced to an external agent acting on the same level as any natural agent. On the other hand, nature loses its own interiority and unity; it is reduced to a mechanism composed of unrelated parts. The reduction of the image of God and the reduction of the concept of nature are inseparable because they imply each other. (2) It is self-contradictory because it pretends that science is indifferent to metaphysics and theology, but it entails metaphysical and theological ideas. (3) It makes the dialogue between science and theology completely pointless.

In the third section of this chapter, I will examine the faulty theological and metaphysical assumptions present in modern science. In spite of having deficient theological and metaphysical premises, modern scientists tend to pride themselves on having a scientific method that is neutral with regard to metaphysics and theology. This assertion is founded on modern science’s own criterion of epistemological superiority and on modern science’s self-imposed goal of a controlling understanding of nature. In the fourth section, I will argue that there is no such a thing as a neutral science because every understanding of science has theological and metaphysical presuppositions. This is the case because, as we will see, science, metaphysics, and theology are intrinsically related. The affirmation of a neutral science does not dispense with metaphysics and theology. The very act of affirming a metaphysically and theologically free science entails, at least implicitly, metaphysical and theological assumptions that are deficient. In the fifth section, I will criticize the concept of methodological neutrality defended by modern science. This supposed neutrality is self-contradictory and entails problematic extrinsic assumptions, both theological and metaphysical. In the final section of the chapter, I will reveal and criticize different ways that scientists defend the untenable extrinsicism. The different proposals have in common the same flawed metaphysical and theological assumptions: a mechanical understanding of nature and a reduced notion of God.

Modern Science

In this section, I want to deal with the concept of modern science. The adjective modern before the noun science is intended to convey that its historical origin has to be located in modernity.16 Indeed, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the appearance of a new and revolutionary idea of science.17 This new understanding of science, which was named natural philosophy at the time,18 entailed “a radical conceptual shift, which altered the foundations of natural philosophy as practiced for nearly the preceding two thousand years.”19 The radical shift carried out by modern science was built upon the rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy.20 This rejection is clear in one of the programmatic and foundational works of modern science, the Novum Organum Scientiarum, written by Francis Bacon and published in 1620. In this work, Bacon propounded “a system of reasoning to supersede Aristotle’s, suitable for the pursuit of knowledge in the age of science.”21 The new and revolutionary idea of science dismissed the notions of being and substance,22 so important in Aristotelian physics. Modern science also rejected the Aristotelian fourfold causality, and the concept of form ceased to be crucial for the understanding of what a being is.23 All the above makes clear that modern science entails a radical novelty in the understanding of science.24 Because of the intrinsic relation between science, metaphysics, and theology, this novelty in the understanding of science has a corresponding metaphysical novelty. The French philosopher Alexandre Koyré appropriately argued that “the underlying source of revolutionary [scientific] novelty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . was metaphysical and cosmological.”25 According to David Lindberg, “The organic universe of medieval metaphysics and cosmology had been routed by the lifeless machinery of the atomists.”26

In exchange for the purposeful, organized, organic world of Aristotelian natural philosophy, the new metaphysics offered a mechanical world of lifeless matter, unceasing local motion, and random collisions. It stripped away the sensible qualities so central to Aristotelian natural philosophy, offering them second-class citizenship as secondary qualities, or even reducing them to the status of sensory illusions. In place of the explanatory capabilities of form and matter, it offered the size, shape, and motion of invisible corpuscles—elevating local motion to a position of preeminence within the category of change and reducing all causality to efficient and material causality. As for Aristotelian teleology, which discovered purpose within nature, defenders of this new mechanical philosophy substituted the purposes of a creator God, imposed on nature from without. The metaphysics of the mechanical philosophy reverberated through the scientific disciplines of the seventeenth century, transforming the ways of thinking about all manner of subjects.27

The metaphysical change of modern science is clear in Galileo Galilei, “the father of modern physics—indeed, of modern science altogether.”28 The French philosopher and mathematician Olivier Rey defends that Galileo brought a thorough change of the metaphysical framework.29 We could say that this change is encapsulated in the following celebrated passage:

Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.30

In this passage, Galileo “laid down a new program for science by declaring that true philosophy is inscribed in the book of nature, a book written in the language of mathematics, without which it is pointless to try to decipher it.”31 It is important to note that “the mathematical nature...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Problem of Theological Extrinsicism in Modern Science
• Chapter 2: The Doctrine of Creatio ex Nihilo
• Chapter 3: The Theological Extrinsicism of Modern Cosmology
• Bibliography