Science and Faith within Reason

Reality, Creation, Life and Design

Jaume Navarro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317059103
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Scientists, historians, philosophers and theologians often engage in debates on the limitations and mutual interactions of their respective fields of study. Serious discussions are often overshadowed by the mass-produced popular and semi-popular literature on science and religion, as well as by the political agendas of many of the actors in these debates. For some, reducing religion and science to forms of social discourse is a possible way out from epistemological overlapping between them; yet is there room for religious faith only when science dissolves into one form of social discourse? The religion thus rescued would have neither rational legitimisation nor metaphysical validity, but if both scientific and religious theories try to make absolute claims on all possible aspects of reality then conflict between them seems almost inevitable. In this book leading authors in the field of science and religion, including William Carroll, Steve Fuller, Karl Giberson and Roger Trigg, highlight the oft-neglected and profound philosophical foundations that underlie some of the most frequent questions at the boundary between science and religion: the reality of knowledge, and the notions of creation, life and design. In tune with Mariano Artigas's work, the authors emphasise that these are neither religious nor scientific but serious philosophical questions.

PART I
On Reality

Chapter 1
Ontological Bridges and The Mind of the Universe

Rafael A. Martínez

Introduction: from Science to Nature and God

The Mind of the Universe is the challenging title of one of the more important books written by Mariano Artigas (1938–2005).1 It contains his most complete and systematic attempt to present his ideas on the relationship between religion and science in a wide perspective. The title he chose echoed that of a well-known book on the same topic, Paul Davies’s The Mind of God,2 that in turn quoted the final words of Stephen Hawking’s bestseller A Brief History of Time.3 Artigas’s intention was, nevertheless, very different from Hawking’s. According to the British astrophysicist, science will lead us one day to know ‘the mind of God’. That admits of different interpretations, but all are problematic, at least from a theistic point of view. Does it mean that God’s ideas and thoughts can be fully expressed in plain human concepts, or even in mathematical formulae? Or does it suggest that what we call God is nothing other than the mathematical structure of physical reality?

Both interpretations seem to be related with the very common assumption, often found in recent studies of religion and science, that we must try to express and explain our religious concepts in terms of scientific experience. While this assumption does not necessarily imply denial of the existence of a real, transcendent or supernatural level, it certainly implies that the question of God can only be answered by the use of scientific language and scientific concepts: only experimental science enables us to understand our religious experience, and, therefore, the ultimate meaning of reality and the very mind of God. Artigas’s intention was quite different. He was not trying to discover ‘the mind of God’ through natural science. His purpose was to explore, through a deep reflection on science and nature, what our reason can grasp about the deepest sense of the universe in the hope that this might lead us the better to perceive God as ‘The Mind of the Universe’, i.e. as the source and ultimate origin of the rational dimensions we encounter when trying to understand the physical world.

Artigas borrowed the expression ‘The Mind of the Universe’ from Seneca who, in his Quæstiones naturales asked: ‘What is God? The mind of the universe. What is God? The whole that you see and the whole that you do not see.’4 Fifteen centuries later, the Spanish spiritual writer Luis de Granada used almost the same words to answer the question, ‘What is God?’ Of course, we should not interpret this expression as suggesting that the universe has some kind of ‘personal’ living existence, as in the modern ‘Gaia hypotheses’, or the old platonic ‘anima mundi’, which descends into some kind of pantheism. Artigas clearly distanced himself from the latter and went onto clarify his understanding of the ‘Mind of the Universe’ in saying that, ‘Our universe exhibits rationality, functions by using information, has a certain kind of creativity, and makes the existence of human beings who are rational and creative, possible. All this requires a divine foundation and a participation in God’s creativity.’5

This programme throws up for examination some important points in which Artigas’s views on science and religion diverge from the most common proposals in this field. For him, a harmonic relationship between science and religion could only be the result, first and foremost, of deep reflection on the epistemological features of science, then on the philosophical understanding of nature, and only later on our theological understanding of revelation (theological faith).

These three elements correspond to his three most significant books. In his 1991 Filosofía de la ciencia experimental,6 now translated into English as Knowing Things for Sure,7 he developed quite an original presentation of the nature and value of experimental science. This work was inspired by Evandro Agazzi’s epistemology,8 and strongly influenced by some ideas of Karl Popper, whose work had been one of his main research topics in his early career as a philosopher. Artigas stressed that the most fundamental philosophical traits of science were value, truth and objectivity. His next step was to reformulate the way in which Thomistic philosophy of nature had been traditionally presented, adopting as a starting point the perspective of contemporary science. The result was his La Inteligibilidad de la Naturaleza,9 which I consider his most important philosophical work and the interpretative key to understanding his later involvement in the dialogue between science and religion which culminated in The Mind of the Universe. I will attempt here to build ‘bridges’ between these three aspects of Mariano Artigas’s philosophical work: from his philosophy of science to the Mind of the Universe via his philosophy of nature.

Science as a Human Activity

The starting point of Knowing Things for Sure was a reflection on how science is regarded by some philosophical schools. It was, at the time, very common among contemporary philosophers to adopt a very narrow perspective on the nature of empirical science, emphasizing only some particular aspect of scientific methodology. Following the mainstream positivistic outlook, science was described as a process that gives the best explanation of ‘the given’ from general hypotheses, as a perfectly definable logical structure, or as a reduction of all natural phenomena to only one level of reality (be that atoms, space, genes, or any other reductionism). Others, like Karl Popper, focused on the logic of scientific investigation rather than the logic of discovery. In more recent approaches, science has been identified with the content of a paradigm, with a research programme, with a non-linguistic structure or with a social construction.

Each of these aspects is, indeed, a part of what we call science. Among other things, science implies a method, uses a logical framework, and expresses its findings in structured propositional statements. Can science, however, be legitimately reduced to a single aspect, neglecting or ignoring the rest? Can any reductive approach allow us to understand and explain science? Certainly not. In order to understand science properly, we should avoid reductive approaches. Starting our reflection by considering science to its full extent, we should be open to all dimensions of the scientific enterprise. Each aspect of science, important as it may be, will always be only a part of a much more general picture that we can never fully comprehend. That, of course, should not lead us to despise or neglect any particular approach explored by contemporary philosophers. The logical structure of theories, analysed by the authors of the Vienna Circle and by Karl Popper for instance, or the social and cultural roots of scientific revolutions stressed by Thomas Kuhn or Barry Barnes, are essential contributions to our understanding of science. But sometimes these reductive approaches end up excluding other aspects and preventing a deeper and fuller understanding of science.

It will always be necessary, of course, to choose a starting point for our philosophical analysis of the scientific enterprise, but this should not a priori exclude other aspects or dimensions of science. Artigas suggested that one suitable starting point was to consider science as a ‘human activity’.10 Science is, first of all, one of many ways in which human beings try to engage with the world. In this sense, it runs in parallel with politics, work, art, prayer, and other forms of cultural and social action. Certainly, science should be seen as a very important human activity but not as the only one. At least in some circumstances, it is probably not the most important. But, if at the outset we consider science as a ‘human activity’, we shall find that even before we enter into discussion of the methods or the logical structure of science, we are already considering science as an intentional activity, something that from the very beginning must be characterized as having a truly human meaning. For this reason science may be better defined by the goals that we try to achieve through it, than from a structural or methodological description.

This led Artigas to define science by a twofold approach that expresses its most fundamental goals, both theoretical and practical: (i) the acquisition of knowledge about nature and (ii) a controlled domination.11 Both are equally essential to what we call science. On the one hand, history shows that attempts to understand nature without a real and practical means of checking knowledge empirically may lead to deep philosophical insights, but not to science. On the other hand, empirical technology in itself is not adequate for a real understanding of the natural world, which also calls for discovery of the profound mathematical and logical structures that underlie natural phenomena. An important consequence is that, for this reason, these two aspects should not be treated as separate goals, as if it were possible to reach them independently of each other, but rather as a single aim with two facets. Dominion and control of nature can be attained only by knowledge and, at the same time, knowledge will result from concrete experimental control of reality.

Science, thus defined as a human activity that acquires both knowledge about nature and controlled dominion over it, incorporates two other ‘dimensions’ which speak to the means of attaining these goals.12 First, there is what is normally called loosely scientific method: a complex set of procedures and means by which we formulate theories and submit them to empirical control. Second, there is what Artigas calls the ‘contents’ or ‘results’ of science: a set of theoretical constructs such as concepts, empirical laws, and theories.

These dimensions assist in reaching a broader view of science, one that enables us to treat fairly scientists of the past whose work does not square with the methodological or logical canons of modern epistemology. Moreover, they also facilitate a certain grasp of the fact that science takes part, in some way, in the ‘mystery’ that always surrounds the human person and human activity. Considering science from the point of view of the person leads to a realization that science is first of all a ‘research attitude’ which in Artigas resonates with Popper’s autobiographical Unended Quest.13 The natural world will always represent a source of comprehension, but also a source of questions. Much will be ever out of reach.

The First Bridge: Dimensions of Truth

The consideration of science as a human activity is essential to achieve a fuller comprehension of it, but we should not abandon traditional epistemological questions about scientific method. Mariano Artigas’s proposal is closely related to the ‘realist objectualism’, a position first put forward by Evandro Agazzi,14 which we find summarized in two key ideas in The Mind of the Universe: ‘(1) that in empirical science we must construct the “objects” of our theories, and (2) that following the scientific method we may obtain true knowledge of the reality we explore.’15

With ‘realist objectualism’ Artigas tried to give a metaphysically realistic view of science, while at the same time responding to the many criticisms that ‘scientific realism’ has received in contemporary epistemology. The classical example of the supposed incommensurability between Newtonian mechanics and relativistic physics can help us illustrate this objectualism. Although both theories address a real physical problem, the ‘objects’ considered by them are substantially different. The theoretical entities used in the two cases are defined differently: the Newtonian object is defined as ‘massive points in an absolute space and an absolute time’, whereas only metrical relations to a referential frame define the relativistic object. In both cases we are using an ‘ideal object’ that must be built as a first stage in the formulation of a theory.

Agazzi and Artigas have explained in detail how theories define their own objects by selecting a suitable set of properties and giving their operational definitions in such a way that the theoretical system and all its possible states are clearly defined.16 In this way it becomes possible to avoid some of the logical problems related to empirical validation of the theory since operational definition of the scientific object provides a definite theoretical context in which the verification or falsification process gives a valid result, at least from the logical and pragmatic point of view. It might be said that realist objectualism lies closer to anti-realistic epistemology than to scientific realism. Constructive empiricism, for example, reduces the aim of science to giving us ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction: ‘Science, Faith and Reason’ versus ‘Science and Religion’: The Question of Boundaries
• Part I On Reality
• Part II On Creation
• Part III On Life
• Part IV On Design
• Appendix: Bibliography of Mariano Artigas
• Index