The Future of Reason, Science and Faith

Following Modernity and Post-Modernity

J. Andrew Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754658825
• eBook ISBN: 9781351889094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Focusing on the history of ideas, this book explores important questions concerning knowledge in relation to philosophy, science, ethics and Christian faith. Kirk contributes to the current debate about the intellectual basis and integrity of Western culture, exploring controversial issues concerning the notions of modernity and post-modernity. Repositioning the Christian faith as a valid dialogue partner with contemporary secular movements in philosophy and ethics, Kirk seeks to show that in 'post-Christian' Europe the Christian faith still possesses intellectual resources worthy to be reckoned with. This book's principal argument is that contemporary Western society faces a cultural crisis. It explores what appears to be an historical enigma, namely the question of why Western intellectual endeavours in philosophy and science seem to have abandoned the search for a source of knowledge able to draw together disparate pieces of information provided by different disciplines. Kirk draws conclusions, particularly in the area of ethical decision-making, from this apparent failure and invites readers to consider Christian theism afresh as a means for the renewal of culture and society.

PART I
Worlds Apart

Chapter One

An Enigma and an Idea

The importance of the case

The discussion which follows will begin to explore a theory, which might help explain a vexing social and cultural enigma which has dogged the history of the West for over 300 years. Like other investigations it will seek to understand and interpret complex evidence, with a view to suggesting a possible solution. Modernity, as an amalgam of intellectual convictions and social change (namely, the confidence in reason alone to discover the truth about the whole of life and the power of technology to alter social patterns and disturb cultural assumptions)¹, has been the main engine that has driven forward historical mutations on a breath-taking scale since the end of the seventeenth century.² Post-modernity has arisen as a theory translated into practice that the modern period has run its course. However, due to the nature of its analysis of the modern project’s apparent failure to live up to its own dreams – in particular the criticism of any interpretative theory that claims a privileged explanation of all the data – it avoids language about the beginning of a new era.

Both modernity and post-modernity, as sets of social phenomena understood within particular theoretical frameworks, shape the contemporary world in both hidden and overt ways. By understanding their respective impacts on society as a whole, it is possible to appreciate why certain beliefs and values became accepted first tentatively as a plausible explanation of changing experiences and later embedded in the collective consciousness of society as self-evidently true. To use the analogy of crime detection, by comprehending the motives of the principal actors in a felony, the detective is able to unravel the plot. Investigations are intended not only to solve the main elements of a mystery but (as for example in the case of a serial rapist) help make the environment a safer place to live in.

The case to be investigated

Within the sweep of several centuries of history, modernity as a distinct, self-conscious, rational process has seemingly turned out to be a digression from a promising, but rather quickly obstructed, intellectual tradition – namely the exploration of the implications of the symmetry of two complementary sources of truth, the word and world of God. Post-modernity, on the other hand, is proving apparently to be not so much an advance on the modern project as a regression to ideas which ostensibly exalt irrational thinking.³ In the midst of a volatile and erratic cultural situation, due to the harmful consequences of both the digression and regression, an unprecedented challenge faces current thinking to retake the threads of a promising beginning and develop them into a contemporary agenda for the renewal of thought and life. This study will seek to test the thesis that mainstream Christian belief, shorn of the temptation to convert itself into an institutional power-base, is the best contender to take on this task. It will endeavour to accomplish this formidable quest by assessing the relevant evidence for its claim to possess superior explanatory and re-creative powers in comparison with major alternatives.

The tools of investigation

In attempting to solve any crime, detectives will come across a number of clues which may begin to identify the perpetrator. Not all the clues give clear evidence. If the criminal is clever enough, he or she may well lay false trails. Often, the crime remains unresolved until a pivotal clue is uncovered. Similarly with an investigation of the causes of a serious assault on the promised dawning of a new era some three centuries ago there are many clues to hand. They are provided by the analytical powers of different disciplines, all of which are important. But the essential clue is still missing. The inability of opinion-formers today to stem the incoming tide of pessimism and apprehension is not easily explained by using the instruments of interpretation fashioned from within the modern project itself. Often, the assumptions on which they are based reflect the problem. They are prone to reject, as inadmissible, the very evidence needed to clear up the enigma of contemporary Western society. The process is equivalent to overlooking, through myopia or prejudice, the key piece of evidence that would resolve the case.

An enquiry, from a Christian perspective, into the significance of the data is not a guarantee of easy solutions; it does not propose a short-cut through difficult terrain nor offer a quick fix at the rub of a lamp. It does, however, provide a standpoint which does not exclude ab initio any explanation which looks like proving fruitful. More particularly, it offers a framework in which to test the conjecture that the harmonious correlation between the word and world of God is a necessary assumption for making sense of the deep intellectual, ethical and spiritual unease apparent today in the cultures which are the result of the project of modernity. To demonstrate that this is the decisive key will require serious, critical investigation.

The abandoned tradition

In brief, the tradition which momentarily promised to come to fruition some 350 years ago suggested that the best hope for authentic human flourishing would come through harnessing the resources of two sources of truth: the word and the world of God. Human beings would understand their true destiny and would be able to enjoy it to the full only as they ‘read’ and lived on the basis of the two ‘books’: the Bible as the record both of God’s action within and interpretation of the whole of reality and the natural world as a source of human nourishment and pleasure. Neither ‘book’ was self-contained as the source of all knowledge and wisdom. Both books had to be opened and read with the other present for cross-referencing. Each needed a commitment of faith, or belief in a particular prior understanding of reality, for the process of reading to make sense.⁴

The subversions of the tradition

Unfortunately, the tradition was swiftly sabotaged from within and distorted from without. Indeed, the existence of the tradition may be more theoretical than real, more of an ideal than anything that can be identified historically as having possessed a self-conscious existence.⁵

From within, the tradition was vandalised by a particularly devastating will-to-power. At around the time of the birth of modern science, the gigantic conflict between the forces of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was still being played out. The ‘territorial tragedy’⁶ of Christianity encountered its nadir in the Thirty Years War, one of the last major attempts to maintain the coercive force and authoritarianism of the religious state over the non-violent compulsion of truth and the authority of conscience. In some instances, this absolutism was also mobilised against the incipient findings of scientific discovery. The enemies of the tradition failed to perceive the nature of genuine Christian freedom,⁷ which, whilst stating that there is an inviolable form given to reality, nevertheless affirms the legitimacy of free investigation and freedom of belief.

From without, the tradition was deformed by the will-to-independence. The humanist impulse, begun in the Renaissance,⁸ was about to embark on its ‘rationalist’ turn provoked by the intellectual project of Descartes.⁹ Autonomous self-reference (the human mind alone as the measure and guarantee of assured knowledge) began its fateful march.

The consequences of subversion – modernity

It was by no means inevitable that the ‘reading of the world’ (the scientific enterprise) should have been conducted independently of, even less in opposition to, the ‘reading of the word’. There are some signs that the destruction caused by the divorce of the two is now being recognised as the result of an unnecessary polemic. For example, the assumptions, methods and conclusions of science raise theological and ethical questions that only sources of knowledge beyond those that science itself supplies can answer satisfactorily, and theology and science share some of the same basic principles of rational enquiry.¹⁰ It seems almost trite to claim today that ‘if God is the source of all truth, there should be a consonance between the right conclusions of human scholarship and theological conclusions based on revelation’.¹¹ And yet the ‘conditional’ of this sentence is precisely what has been, and continues to be, the most basic matter of dispute in Western thought since the seventeenth century.

However, we can only deal with history as it unfolded. The modern project, it is generally recognised, can be traced to the attempt to ground the attainment of indubitable knowledge on irrefutable grounds.¹² To avoid the acids of scepticism and the destabilising effect brought about by radical uncertainty, influential thinkers believed that the process of reasoning needs to be self-validating without having to appeal to authority or depend on faith. It has to be able to generate from itself a set of necessary, self-evident principles which no one could doubt without being self-refuting:

In Descartes’ system, reason first clears away all preconceptions and then elaborates its own first principles, accepting only clear and distinct conceptions which can survive the most rigorous examination … For the system to work, the universe must be modelled on a deductive system, so that what happens in it must be deducible from the laws of its operation and its initial state.¹³

This desire to build, from utterly secure foundations, an incontrovertible body of knowledge about the world which humans inhabit had an emancipatory intent. It was believed that humans had it within their grasp to liberate themselves from all disputable, uncertain and arbitrary beliefs that intrinsically could not validate themselves, in order to build knowledge afresh from non-controversial, universally acceptable, initial postulates. Humanity would come to self-realisation in the struggle ‘to separate truth from falsehood, reason from unreason, fact from fiction’.¹⁴

As well as deductive reasoning from incontrovertible axioms, the inductive proceedings of the scientific method, based on meticulous observation and well-tested hypotheses, seemed to guarantee the fulfilment of the aspiration for incontestable knowledge, of a different order from mere opinion or belief. It had the twin merits of being rationally accessible to anyone who grasped its methods of operating and universal in character, i.e., not contingent on factors (such as culture, situation, personality, upbringing) which could relativise perspectives. Science, it is claimed, more than any other force within history, has the ability to make all equal, since it obeys a logic and set of rules that no-one can control but only submit to.

This approach to knowledge – from a firm foundation building upwards – and the cumulative discoveries provoked by the scientific method suggested an evolutionary, progressive or dialectical dimension to human history.¹⁵ Progress seemed to be the inevitable accompaniment of a rational analysis of human problems in which the causes of the defects of human life could...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Worlds Apart
• Part II: The Arrival of the Modern World
• Part III: The Departure of the Modern World
• Part IV: Imagining Another World
• Glossary of Terms
• Select Bibliography
• Index