Undeception

Confession: I find less and less about science that thrills me the way it used to.

While I used to – and many people I associate with still do – greet the news of a scientific discovery or advancement with the geeky equivalent of a fist pump, a whoop, and a holler, for me nowadays it’s more like how I feel when a close friend’s child poops in the potty for the first time. Sure, I’m duly glad for the child and happy for her parents, and hopeful about the financial boon attending the chance for my friend to start spending less on diaper purchases. But apart from the notable lack of personal investment in their situation, we parents of older kids know that it’s actually rare indeed that a single deposit in the potty makes the child potty-trained–it may be months before she does it again. There’s satisfaction to be enjoyed at the milestone and what it might mean for the future, but it’s usually premature to declare victory.

This reaction of mine is probably just a phase, as I’m just increasingly unnerved by the triumphalistic fanfares of scientism. A pronounced pro-science movement has sadly been necessitated by resistance to science among Fundamentalist and conservative Evangelical Christians, but overcompensation has yielded an overweening, cultish reverence for science, with its most ardent devotees treating every scientific discovery as a nail in God’s coffin. It’s this that’s driving the growth of the New Atheism movement.

I’m always looking for ways to mitigate this overreaction and to integrate a healthy appreciation for science into a similarly cautious confidence in Christian theology. So when I read this recent (now two-month old) article by James K. A. (aka Jamie) Smith in Christianity Today, “What Galileo’s Telescope Can’t See,” I was happy it added some things to the discussion worth thinking about.

Our sensibility (following the late Robert Webber) should be an “ancient-future” one: The church will find gifts to help it think through postmodern challenges by retrieving the wisdom of ancient Christians. The goal is not to simply repeat ancient formulations while sticking our heads in the sand; rather, the contemporary church—and contemporary Christian scholars—can learn much from the habits of mind that characterized church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine.

The main thrust is that when believers encounter challenging scientific evidence, they shouldn’t close their eyes, cover their ears, and shout their existing theological constructs at the top of the lungs. Rather, we should look to the example of the historical church and learn to “foster the Christian imagination to underwrite more creative approaches.” Smith cites councils such as Chalcedon as having delivered cleverly and creatively derived theological resolutions to science/religion conflicts. The danger Smith is trying to put his finger on more or less amounts to what happens when you pit science and religion opposite one another in a fact fight, in a fashion typical of Western Christianity. He’s arguing that “creative” ways of retooling and upholding earlier agreed-upon beliefs to account for scientific revelations are needed to help heal the science/religion divide.

But I want to shift this a bit: the contentious science/religion divide is only superficially attributable to science offering answers that our theologies have yet to account for. Coming up with clever and henceforth authoritative rationalizations to make sure new data is consistent with what we already believe doesn’t seem all that different from “sticking our heads in the sand” while refusing to admit that this is what we’re doing. This is not a sufficient answer; we must dig a bit further down.

The deeper cause for the rift is trying to use either science or religion as a skeleton key to unlock the answers to both practical and more existential questions. Gould’s NOMA principle is rejected no less by Evangelical Christians than it is by atheists like Jerry Coyne with his fierce denunciation of “accomodationism”. Now, I’m not talking about the dubious apologetic claim about “different kinds of knowing”; I’m referring to “different kinds of questions” which we answer in the most practical ways we can considering the intractability of epistemological indeterminacy. Too many people talk about a “war between science and religion” and in so doing confuse the essentially incidental conflicts between specific scientific data and particular religious beliefs with the more fundamental question of whether science and religion can in theory coexist without falling all over each other trying to better answer the same questions. It’s not, “How do my truth claims need to make way for competing truth claims?” but, “Which kinds of observations are the most useful for which aspects of our lives?”

Science and Religion are portrayed to be in harmony in the Tiffany window “Education” (1890). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I view discovery of more accurate understandings of our physical universe as a (literal) godsend that should if anything highlight that our dependence cannot be on fallible, ever-changing intellectual assumptions, but can only rest on the basis of our faith, which is God Himself. I see the Church, the Bible, and other forms of tradition as candles that serve as guides that focus our life-efforts by teaching us to reject rationalist/positivist pat answers to encounter the meaning of our God-filled universe in the ways of our ancient forebears. Philosophically, scientific inquiry and religious belief stand much more often back-to-back than face-to-face; the latter stance is usually the result either of religion trying to answer (or dismiss) “how” or science trying to answer (or dismiss) “why”.

I’m not trying to draw too sharp a distinction between “how” and “why” questions: we’re not looking at two different objects, but merely describing the object differently. As Christians we cannot help believe that God is – somehow – a fundamental part of the “how”, and atheists must be forgiven for believing that a material-only universe must generate its own answers to “why”. What needs to be avoided are the turf wars that result from either side caustically belittling the answer the other side gives from within its own area of expertise. We need more theistic and atheistic representatives to agree to avoid flaunting the boundary line.

Unfortunately, the necessary commitment to letting science’s tentative answers to “how the universe works” questions override our forbears’ answers to those questions is dependent on a much less rigid system of doctrines and a much less hegemonic role of influence over our doctrines coming from the historical theological community than much of Western Christianity will tolerate. But Christianity has never been about giving definitive answers to “how the universe works”, nor even all that much about the “how God works in our universe” question. Christianity supplies us with meaning by instructing us “how to live in God.”

When we find scientific data that steps on our theology’s toes, we have to realize that our theology may well have been camped out on the wrong side of the boundary and withdraw gracefully. But we should also be on the lookout and be willing to hold the line when proponents of scientism make invalid claims to our inheritance. There is much work that can be done from within the demilitarized zone.

My four-year-old was given this worksheet in Sunday School posing the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism for Children. The answer (“God”, duh!) was supposed to be written on the line within the cloud…a shape that my daughter somehow visualized as a sock monkey’s head.

Answer: My ape-like ancestors God

Despite appearances, my daughter was not actually trying to make a statement in favor of common descent; I haven’t even broached that topic with her yet.

But I can’t help dreading some sticky questions coming from her PCA Sunday School teachers if they inferred the same thing I did!

This will be a fairly short post — more of an excuse to rant than anything else. But I’m seriously tired of the common misuse of Occam’s razor.

Occam’s razor merely states that the simplest explanation is the best one. It’s roughly based on a law of logic that maintains that it is fallacious to posit more than what fully accounts for something as part of its explanation. This works extremely well for items of discernible composition: four quarters make a whole, and any more than that is not part of the whole, but something in addition to it.

What I object to is its use as an aesthetic masquerading as a principle of dispassionate logic. Too often people snip things away after unconsciously making assumptions about the composition of the thing being explained. Occam’s razor can easily cut out too much, and without analyzing those assumptions, it will never be noticed.

For instance, it’s often simply accepted that immediate causes and composition sufficiently explain. But that’s an aesthetic, not a precept of rational analysis: sometimes we would like to know more than the structural composition of a thing to understand it. Describing the raw materials is only enough when all you’re looking for is raw materials. But this is why Occam’s razor is useless for grander subjects: it frontloads the endpoint in question, styling the haircut (so to speak) after a preconceived, predetermined pattern. There are assumptions that go into what you think is necessary to explain things, and Occam’s razor is really handy for excising everything other than what you expected to find.

People wielding Occam’s razor to trim away everything but what they find personally interesting is not the same as saying that everything they trim is spurious, bogus, or otherwise worthless. When I walk into my back yard, see a shed that I didn’t know about, and ask my wife, “Where did this shed come from?” and she answers, “I got it from Big Lots,” I am fully enlightened only insofar that I wanted to know only the source of the raw materials. But it doesn’t answer, “Why is it here? Who assembled it? And where did the money used to buy it come from?”

Similarly, theologians and philosophers are always about answering more things than science answers. So when a materialistic scientists announces, “I’ve explained the natural causes of the universe! No need for the God hypothesis anymore!” we can safely say that they have taken Occam’s razor to everything but what most interested them.

And that’s ok–they can do a fine, parsimonious job of explaining that stuff. Just don’t let them try to tell you that there are no other questions worth asking.

I realize this is a week old, which in the blogosophere can make something quite stale, but I had some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s surprisingly negative review of Peter Enns’ recent The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

Smith’s criticism focuses on Enns’ methodology, which is based on the reasonable belief that we can’t decide what God may have meant by a passage until we know the immediate, contextual meaning of that passage.

On the contrary, says Smith, “The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended.” Smith expects the Church to derive the most appropriate and relevant interpretations of Scripture by basing our interpretation in “worship”, whatever that means, “which will generate meanings…that could never have been intended by [the] human authors,” meanings that are “intended as meanings to be unfolded ‘in front of the text’ by the divine Author.”

The notion that there may be meaning in Scripture above and beyond the original meaning may be a conceivably defensible position (a position I once espoused on this site), but he doesn’t stop there: Smith insists that Enns is wrong to try to recover the meaning of the authors for the original audiences because of the danger of it hindering us from extracting a more appropriate, divinely intended meaning for us. So in reading Genesis, Enns should not expend so much effort in recovering the Ancient Near Eastern context, including relevant literary and archaeological backgrounding. That sort of research is well and good, Smith allows, but it doesn’t tell us what the Bible really means now, because it doesn’t take into account the meaning intended for us as contextualized within the Christian canon:

First of all, the Christian church is not a recipient of the book of Genesis as a discrete unit; we receive the book of Genesis within the Bible and that Bible is received as a whole—as a “canon” of Scripture.  Second, internal to the canon is the conviction that meanings God intends are not constrained by what human authors intended.

Although he puts his preferred hermeneutic in terms of “recontextualizing” Scripture, in essence Smith is wanting to theologize the text before situating it in history, because we are apparently not allowed to come to any conclusions by examining individual texts like Genesis and Romans that make it hard for this recontextualization (which in practice looks like front-loading) to occur.

Because Jamie Smith is no fundamentalist, or even a Chicago style inerrantist, he concedes, “Enns is exactly right to push back on ‘conservative’ or ‘literal’ readings of the Bible that anachronistically impose a ‘journalistic’ sense of ‘history’ on ancient texts.” But in this review specifically he seems uncomfortable with Enns’ claim that Paul and the author Genesis might not have intended the same meaning in their passages on Adam and Eve: “In fact, if it becomes a contest between ‘the authors of Genesis’ [note the scare quotes, presumably to flag Enns' avoidance of "Moses"] and Paul, Enns sides with ‘the original meaning’ of Genesis as the determinative meaning.” Not having read the book but broadly being aware of Enns’ perspective, I doubt that Enns would actually say either is determinative to the subjugation of the other; instead, it is Smith who wants to subjugate the intended message of both “Moses” and Paul to the meaning of the “divine Author”…whatever that might be. (I presume by Smith’s objection to letting Genesis carry its own meaning that he expects that God’s intended meaning happens to correspond more closely to Paul’s.)

But what of Smith’s “divine Author”? Should we put so much energy into finding the original meaning that we miss the message God intended for the Church to receive? My understanding is that Enns would affirm divine authorship in some capacity, although he rightly cautions us to avoid the “priority of the divine” that Smith here advocates.

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of “what God meant” sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with Peter Enns’ incarnational model of Scripture as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God’s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God’s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous “Bible Codes” from a couple years back. It sounds even more like Gnosticism.

But even if God did ordain a higher meaning upon the text, surely we can only hope to find it by first contextualizing and resituating each passage back in its original habitat and going from there. Otherwise the original meaning becomes completely incidental, despite the fact that something much closer to the original meaning than Smith’s canonical reading was the only one actually available to those who canonized it! They canonized the texts for what they were, not for some divine meaning that would override what they were after their canonization.

For these reasons, Jamie Smith’s canonical approach falls far short, and Enns’ approach – by no means uniquely his – of putting the effort into letting the original authors speak for themselves so that we can attempt to interact with each of them on a case-by-case basis handily continues to carry the day.

As I teased earlier, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and astrophysicist Rodney Holder engaged in a conversation about cosmological origins on Unbelievable over the weekend. It was an entertaining though not altogether surprising debate, confirming my impression of Krauss’s book. I have not read it, but as I always say in these scenarios, reading the book is not a prerequisite for commenting on what the author says is the point and thrust of his own book. This is not a review of the book; it’s a review of some of Krauss’s ideas and his presentation of those ideas, which are presumably not that different from those argued in his book.

But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the real, if you wish, miracle that people seem to think requires the existence of God is that you can create a universe full of stuff, full of stars, planets, humans, remarkable things out of nothing, literally where there were no stars, particle, space, etc. And that particular “miracle” is something that the laws of physics certainly has plausible explanations for.

If this summarized Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing as well as he claims it does, I doubt I would have any major problem with it. I like eliminating the god of the gaps as much as anyone. But Krauss and his New Atheist compadres have bigger ideas for his book than just that.

At one point in the interview he says, ”The key, fascinating thing to try to understand is how we got this amazing universe and how you don’t need a Creator; you don’t need someone to obviate the laws of physics to produce it.” In the book Krauss offers a few variations on how to answer the question of the universe’s origin. This would indeed problematize the cosmological argument, especially when the latter is being used as a proof rather than as a pointer; in science, the more plausible mundane explanations are available to contend with a counter-intuitive explanation, the less likely the counter-intuitive explanation (here, a divine miracle) appears. But Krauss’s interlocutor for this debate was less than convinced that his explanations were compelling enough to make natural theology an entirely superfluous supposition.

Holder, a former priest and a current astrophysicist, argues that in attempting to settle the philosopher’s quandary about the universe’s creation from nothing, Krauss does not properly begin with nothing. Indeed, in the interview, Krauss speaks of this or that conceived pre-Universe state as “approaching” the “philosophers’ nothing“. Holder is not convinced: ”He’s ontologized this nothing.” In one model under consideration, Holder points out that Krauss is not beginning with the absence of anything, but a quantum vaccuum. Krauss did not argue with this point.

Holder then noted that even under an alternative model discussed in the book beginning with an actual “absence of space,” Krauss speaks of this nothing as having properties, which would disqualify that lack of space from being the philosophers’ nothing: “…It has the property of being unstable; it has the property of being able to be acted upon by quantum fields and gravity and so on.”  Krauss objected that those things did not exist in that model: rather, there is a “metaverse” in which there is potential for those things to exist. Rejoined Holder, even the potential is not nothing. The existence of potential is still existence.

This prompted a pointed response from Krauss: “If the universe didn’t have the potential to exist, then how did God create it?” Krauss seemed similarly bothered by the “why? why? why?” question, to which he expected the answer, “turtles all the way down:” that is, if we persist on asking “why this created object?” until we get to an eternal object, we could still always ask “why that eternal object?” And like Dawkins, Krauss maintains that we could do this with the existence of God, as well.

Holder launched into an explanation of God as a necessary being, claiming that most scientists hold that the universe, on the other hand, is contingent. I consider that this difference in types of existence can conceivably be squared with apophatic theology of the Cappadocian variety, which despite on the surface maintaining that God Himself does not exist (and does exist) is really arguing that God has an existence of an altogether different kind than the way we can conceive of existence; He is the very basis for the kind of existence we are familiar with. Holder mentions Hawking’s discussion of what “breathes fire into equations.”

Another point in the book that Krauss wanted to point out is that the laws of physics creating and sustaining the universe could themselves be generated naturally. Holder didn’t repudiate the idea, but he apparently still wants to take it back one more step, asking why these particular laws exist: “So there can be the most wonderful theory, but why is this theory even instantiated?” They did not go far down this road in this discussion, but I wish they had had the time to!

One thing they did have the time to get into was the question of the value of philosophy.

Krauss stated his belief that physics has begun to answer the questions that used to be the domain of theology and philosophy. He argues that the philosophers’ distinction between something and nothing have been shown to be irrelevant distinctions under science’s microscope (note that in answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, Krauss in effect wants to deny the premise of the question). Although he occasionally equivocates on this, it certainly appears as though Krauss wants to bookend Sam Harris’s The End of Faith with The End of Philosophy.

Many philosophers are up at arms against Krauss for dismissing philosophy as increasingly irrelevant in his empiricist’s world of logical positivism, as he does in this interview (he admits that he “discounted” a recent scathing NY Times review because it was by a philosopher rather than a cosmologist). But this is not just some unfortunate parasite intruding on Krauss’s project. As fellow scientist (and atheist) Sean Carroll judiciously pointed out, this is at the core of Krauss’s project: as stated explicitly in this debate, Krauss believes that physics has demonstrated that the question of why is no longer more scientifically interesting than the question of why flowers differ in color. What Krauss is saying is that answering how, i.e. mechanical explanations, make irrelevant the question why, i.e. the question of meaning or purpose.

We can see the folly of approaching why as a how question in much smaller endeavors. If a man presented to his wife a beautiful oil painting he had created out of a spontaneous act of devotion to her, he would be wronged if she dismissed it as the ultimately meaningless result of oil smeared across canvas. In fact, the more brilliant and beautiful the painting, the more poignant its higher purpose would be to her.

More to the point, if my son were to ask me, “Why do I have to get a painful shot?” and I answered, “Because the needle triggers the pain receptors in your arm,” I have misheard his question as “what makes a shot painful?” rather than “why do I need to undergo this painful shot?” Similarly, answering “why does the universe exist?” as Krauss does is no different than if he had heard the question as “what makes the universe exist?” which of course an entirely different question than the one memorably posed by Leibnitz. Answering how manifestly does not render the question of why irrelevant. It is on this point that I agree with Gould’s NOMA principle: science seeks to answer how where philosophy and theology seek to answer why, and despite all of the efforts of Krauss and special creationists, both disciplines are ill-equipped to answer the other’s question.

This is why I’d be happy enough for Krauss’s book to completely decimate the cosmological argument. I don’t need it. I don’t need God to stand in that gap. But don’t try to tell me that knowing how something is accomplished in any way abolishes any attached purpose or meaning behind it, no matter how brilliantly or exhaustively you explain the how‘s.

There have been a few recent discussions in the blogosphere tangentially related to Lawrence Krauss’s recent book, A Universe from Nothing, including an off-handed post by me and a short one by Eric Reitan. Today’s episode of the Unbelievable radio show promises to be interesting. You can probably expect me to give my thoughts on it once I have a chance to listen to it at the beginning of the week. For now, here’s the episode summary:

Lawrence Krauss is a Cosmologist at Arizona State University who describes himself as an “anti-theist”.  His latest book “A Universe from Nothing“ has received both acclaim and criticism for its attempt to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Debating the issue with Krauss is Rodney Holder, Course director at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. An astrophysicist and priest by background.

In a lively exchange they debate whether Krauss’ “nothing” is “nothing”, fine tuning and multiverses, scientific knowledge, miracles and the usefulness of theology and philosophy.

Most people are familiar with Carl Sagan’s famous declaration that “We are made of star stuff,” if only because of that song from a decade ago. It is often referenced to prove that even stereotypically stodgy, lab-coated scientists can have a sense of awe, an appreciation for intangible aesthetics like beauty, and even the occasional turtleneck sweater. The implication of our unity - solidarity sounds a little too punny – with the building blocks of our material universe on the basis of our common heritage from the Big Bang is a strangely resonating notion that science popularist Lawrence Krauss has recently capitalized on.

Krauss’s version of the motif, now a famous infographic, has gained a lot of recent attention for its having caused an Evangelical backlash against Miley Cyrus when she revealed on Twitter that she found it “Beautiful,” despite Krauss’s snarky materialistic send-up of one of the central ideas of Christianity.

There is indeed undeniable poetry in this. And one mark of a good poet is the ability to find beauty even in the sewage.

Conversely, a good satirist is able to expose a common perception of beauty as hardly more than a misidentification of sewage. To me, this comic from SMBC does a good job of approximating philosophical naturalists’ attempts to synthesize from pure matter the persistent human conviction that the universe has transcendent value, which has traditionally been explained by the belief that reality is comprised of more than merely conveniently-yet-coincidentally arranged atoms: