Professor Kleiner, our token Thomist, sent me an interesting link the other day. It’s a First Things article by Stephen M. Barr, a professor of physics at the University of Delaware and a Catholic. He makes a compelling case that not only is ID bad science, it’s also bad theology.
I think the article is worth reading in full, but here are some representative excerpts:
It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.
The emphasis in early Christian writings was not on complexity, irreducible or otherwise, but on the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in the world that God had made. As science advances, it brings this beautiful order ever more clearly into view.
But whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.
Amen.
For those looking for a book (Kimi’s reading challenge post), Barr has a nice book called ‘Modern Physics and Ancient Faith’.
Once we do away with the wrong-headed contemporary ID movement (hey, something we can all agree on!), the tradition design argument is still on the table. The challenge for the atheist, from the point of view of the more traditional design argument (see Aquinas’ 5th way), is this: how do you explain the orderliness of nature? A condition for the possibility of scientific inquiry is that natural bodies are lawful (predictable, patterned, etc). But how do you explain this lawfulness of nature? Failure to explain this undermines science (as Hume knew). It strikes me that if you want your science to have a claim to knowledge, then you have to be a theist! You can be an atheist if you want, but you strike down the validity of your science when you are!
Dr. Kleiner brings up an interesting argument, but there is something I don’t fully understand. If I can’t trust induction, then how could I come to a knowledge of the existence of God in the first place?
I was sloppy and wanted to clarify. What I meant by “induction” was all our experiences. How do we know that nature is uniform, or that Descartes’s devil isn’t manipulating us?
I don’t have much time here to respond to Mike, but quickly: this is one of Hume’s objections to the argument. I don’t think there is anything in this argument itself that would preclude an “evil genius” or some such thing. All it aims to prove is that there must be some other principle that is the author of the intelligibility of the world.
Aquinas has to (and does) make additional arguments to show that this principle is in fact good, etc. If you look at the Summa, he first proves the existence of God, and then moves on to arguing (from natural reason) that God must be simple, good, perfect, immutable, etc. So, more would need to be said and done.
I don’t fully agree with the Barr’s points, but I do agree that most of the ID arguments can be reduced to “god-of-the-gaps” concepts. The real Intelligent Design to me is that nature (and science’s Theory of Everything — TOE) demonstrates “beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony” — a la Thomas’s 5th proof of god. As Einstein would say, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
To the atheist, nature is a self-creating universe using laws described by TOE. To the theist (thomist in particular), the universe is created in obedence to laws of TOE from the nous (mind) of a law-giver. At this point one is stuck with an unprovable faith choice between a self-creating pantheistic universe or a law-defining creator of a separate material universe. I don’t think there is an evidence that tips the balance between these options.
While the choice Vince presents might be an unprovable one, it strikes me that the God option is much more compelling. Though having said that, obviously not everyone thinks so. Two things:
a) For whatever it is worth, for me personally these kinds of arguments were moving. I moved from being a life-long atheist to being a theist largely (not entirely) because of these arguments from Thomas.
b) Even if the choice here cannot be absolutely determined, one important point I wanted to raise with the article was this: science and religion are not necessarily in conflict. In fact, a big part of the Christian tradition not only can but does embrace scientific inquiry. From my point of view as a Catholic, there is no tension between science and faith.
Popular contemporary atheism has come to view science and faith like oil and water. To be fair, this view has been encouraged, unfortunately, by many Christians. Contemporary ID arguments have only encouraged too. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. There are Christian traditions that have a different understanding of the faith-reason synthesis and they are not properly the targets of this atheist attack.
One other note: Vince is right, Aquinas is basically arguing for nous (a supernatural law giver). This is not an argument for a personal God, much less the personal triune God of Christianity. Aquinas has basically proven a metaphysical principle. I rather suspect that most atheists don’t find themselves all that threatened by something like this, since it might amount to little more than deism. Atheists seem to get more worked up over the personal God of various religious traditions, rather than the ‘god of the philosophers’.
Anyway, Aquinas will have to show that this principle is also the personal God worshipped by Christians – or at least that it is not irrational to think that the two are the same.
I was enthralled by Aquinas’s proofs when I first saw them. Sometimes I made big leaps towards the god I desired from these proofs of elevated nous. I generally jumped to a personal Christian god. However, the more I experience the world, it appears to be 99.9999% natural and the Christian god is 0.0001% involved in a personal relationship with me. I hold the non-zero percent just to identify the appropriate doubt that all humans should maintain. To me the religion with a personal god has become thoroughly fideist. G-d seems to be beyond existence or at least beyond my existential self. I can live with that. It is just a bit harder to be a theist. As an evangelical I required blind faith to maintain a conservative ‘Biblical’ faith. Now as a non-aligned creedal Christian I require blinder faith.
The Nous above the universe or the Nous of the Universe still seems reasonable, but Nous seems to be confined to the place just beyond the infinity and the infinitesimal. Elie Wiesel’s “Trial of God” comes to mind. Wiesel watch 3 rabbis gather for a drink and decide to put G-d on trial for the massacre of his people during the holocaust. Their verdict is ‘guilt’. At the end of the trial the eldest rabbi looks up and says that the sun is setting and it is time for evening prayers.
I am certainly do experience the ‘thrownness’ a la Heidegger in this starkly material world. Perhaps my feeling of thrownness is why I enjoyed the article called “Predicate Theology” pointed to below.
Paul Tillich, the former Harvard professor and existential theologian, talked of G-d as a non-being and, instead, as the ground of being. He desired to push G-d back behind the universe beyond the existential. This is like the deist’s creator god, but Tillich has used philosophical sophistry to gussy up G-d. Personal god? I am not so sure. G-d above it all? I believe so, but perhaps I was made with the DNA for that belief.
I am less inclined than Vince to ditch good ole metaphysical theology, but his point is well taken. Even if these arguments work, they prove (to borrow from Jean-Luc Marion) the least interesting thing about God – that He exists. What is much more interesting is that God is love. No argument could ever prove this, this is a movement of faith. I wouldn’t call it “fideism”, but would say that at the end of the day all theology must evolve into praise.
Anyway, I have plenty of sympathies in Vince’s direction (Levinas, Buber, Heidegger, etc). My mentor at Purdue, Cal Schrag, was actually a student and assistant to Tillich for many years. We’ve gone over this ground before on the usuphilosophy blog, but I am a “both-and” guy – I like my pomo/existential theology but think it can be made compatible with a chastised but still deep metaphysical theology.
One interesting note: unlike my own experience, my SHAFT students that seem the most open to theological inquiry find themselves most drawn to ways of Levinas and crew (including, to a degree, John Paul II) and do not seem particularly taken by the Thomistic metaphysics.
Here is a topic for SHAFT. Maybe you could create a new entry on “Predicate Theology”
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/skirball/schulweis-predicatetheology.shtml
Could this be a thoughtful theology for moral atheists? Predicate Theology sounds a bit like something from Emmanuel Levinas.
Hey Dr. Kleiner, how would you recommend an atheist introduce him/herself to the Summa Theologica?
By this I mean, is there a translation / edition / whatever that you’d recommend over others?
Regarding the Summa:
The standard English translation is from the Fathers of the Dominican Province.
You can see the whole thing online at: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/
Trouble is, the Summa itself is some 5000 pages long. A rather large undertaking.
If you want to dip your toes into the Thomistic waters, I would suggest:
1) Chesterton’s very entertaining biography of Thomas, called the “Dumb Ox”. A quick read. It is not a rigorous introduction to Thomas’ philosophy or theology, but is an engaging introduction to the man, his time, and his thought.
2) Since the Summa itself is too much, try an annotated and abridged version. I would recommend one of two books. Both are from Peter Kreeft. In both texts he has abridged the Summa and provided helpful annotations.
a) The Shorter Summa by Peter Kreeft. About 150 pages.
b) The Summa of the Summa by Peter Kreeft. About 600 pages. This is more extensive (in fact, I used this text in a grad level seminar on Thomas).
3) A solid “advanced introduction” secondary source is “A Handbook for Peeping Thomists” by Ralph McInerny.
4) Jumping into Thomas is tough if you do not already know something about Aristotle. For an easy introduction to Aristotle, read “Aristotle for Everybody” by Mortimer Adler. For a more substantive introduction, I cannot recommend highly enough “Aristotle: The Desire to Understand” by Jonathan Lear.
Excellent, thanks!
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