Well, a fun little debate is going on over at Postiive Liberty. It seems kicked off by a post by Ed Brayton over at his blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars where he writes about separating what he terms the compatibilist and incombatalist views between Science and Religion. That is to ask is it compatible? Can one be a scientist and and person of fatih too. (Obviously a great many believing scientists think that the affirmative is not impossible) Mr Brayton takes some (welll deserving umbrage) over those who assert that anyone might be a scientist and a believer without being intellectually dishonest. Timothy Sandefur then follows with two posts (here and here) in which he takes the position that the compatabilists are not “intellectually honest” and their aguments and rhetoric are a PR ploiy to shut up dissent. Jason Kuznicki wades in with an erudite post wherein he redefines the terms of the debate in terms of “Non-overlapping magisterium” (NOMA) instead of compatabilist and incompatablists, which have other definitions in terms of the free-will/determinist debate. Mr Kuznicki rejects the non-overlappingness of the majesteria as religion makes claims, e.g., God Created , and so forth, while science often makes values/moral judgements. Ultimately he feels that the claims religion make on the structure of the universe are ever reatreating and if you retreat to “fideism” then there is no way of selecting between religions, as they are all just an internal faith choice. My two cents follow below the fold.
Augustine in his Confessions writes in my poor paraphrase that God’s creation praises the Creator in part by man’s understanding of it’s working. That is to say, it seems, that for example in our understanding how Quantum tunneling explains some microwave resonances CO2 molecules, that this unfolding of this subtle mystery is part of a worshipful act. That is, that the CO2 and the student join in worship of the Creator in that aha!, wow moment when understanding of how barriers, tunnelling, and uncertainty join to make just one simple peice in the very big puzzle which is the Universe we cavort within. To Mr Sandefur’s claim that the “NOMA/compabilist” position is just “a big PR campaign” urging science, I’d rebut that Augustine predates this debate by just a few moments and Augustine (and perhaps St Paul as well) do not fear what science might uncover but to the contrary encourage it in the strongest terms. Mr Sandefur’s claim that science and Christianity in particular are “automatically” at loggerheads is patently false. It would seem that while some Christians (incorrectly in my view) fear the march of science and what it might contribute to their understanding of the wonder of the world around them, many notable ones do not. Jurgen Moltemann, I’ve also quoted in the past, while pointing out some of the epistomological limitations of Science as practiced today I think would be counted among the notable and established Christian theologians today who would encourage scientific endeavor.
Mr Kuznicki on the other hand, I’d think, misses the main truth claims about the world on which Christianity rests. It isn’t about evolution, which is adiaphora. Take two Christians one believes in literal Creation, one in evolution. They would both almost certainly recongnize the others faith (unless of course other more central theological issues where at stake). But on the issue of interpretation of Genesis 1, this is certainly not central to the Christian faith. The Chalcedon or Nicean creeds do not recapitulate the Genesis creation account for good reason. At the same time, Christianity is not merely “fideism”. It rests on the historical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as the culmination of the story of exile and return of a Hebrew people. Faith is not reatreating, but our understanding of the physical universe and the ways in which we can worship via research expanding rapidly in this age of technology.
Alas, as to the particular questiosn of the Creators involvment in evolution, the book is not likely to be closed in my lifetime as the central questions of a hard mathematical prediictive prescription to calculate the probabilities of the likelihood of the development of a given initial feature set to a target feature set is a hard problem which will be long in solving if at all tractable. And in the absence of such a theory the “disproving” the Creator’s involvement in development is mere conjecture just as much as the insistence that He was involved is as well.
One Response
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Continuing the Discussion