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Tom
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| Posted 3/14/2009 10:44 AM (GMT -6) |   | From “The Emergence of Spirit,” by Philip Clayton (September, 2003)
The New Science of Emergence
With this background in place, it’s now possible to state my central argument. It consists of two theses. First, beginning shortly after Newton and continuing until very recently, most of the dominant scientific models left precious little place for the sort of theological connections we have been considering. The explosion of scientific knowledge, the predictive accuracy of mathematical physics, the emergence of evolutionary science based on random variation rather than on purpose, the controlling paradigm of reductionism, the dominance of materialist explanations and assumptions—all of these developments made science-based theological speculations difficult and even, in the eyes of many, impossible. The story of the modern warfare between science and theology has been well told elsewhere (see, among others, the works by John Hedley Brooke) and need not be repeated here.
Let’s focus instead on the more controversial second thesis: the last few decades have brought an important new opening for science-based reflection on the nature of God. This opening lies in the ascendance of the concept of emergence, and more recently in the development of the new field of Emergence Studies. What is this new concept, and why does it so clearly give rise to speculation about God? Finally, assuming that it does, what might one conclude about the nature of God based on the new sciences of emergence?
In one sense it’s a truism to note that things emerge. Once there was no universe and then, after the Big Bang, there was an exploding world of stars and galaxies; once the earth was unpopulated, and later it was teeming with primitive life forms; once there were apes living in trees, and then there were Einstein, Mozart and Ghandi. But the new empirical studies of emergence move far beyond truisms. A growing number of scientists and theorists of science are working to formulate the fundamental laws that explain why cosmic evolution produces more and more complex things and behaviors, perhaps even by necessity. Especially significant for religionists, they are also arguing that the resulting sciences of emergence will break the stranglehold that reductionist explanations have had on science. Attention is turning to what we might call the laws of becoming: the inherent tendency toward an increase in complexity, toward self-organization, and toward the production of new emergent wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. Perhaps, many now suggest, it’s a basic rule or pattern of this universe that it give rise to ever more complex states of affairs, ever new and different emergent realities. (See, among many recent works, Stuart Kauffman’s Investigations and Harold Morowitz’s The Emergence Of Everything.)
The Theological Bottom Line
Assume for a moment that these theorists are right and that it is an inherent feature of our universe to produce new types of entities and new levels of complexity. What might this fact tell us about the existence and the nature of God?
Traditional theology looked backwards; it postulated God as the cause of all things. Emergentist theology looks forwards; it postulates God as the goal toward which all things are heading. Moreover, if God stood at the beginning and designed a universe intended to produce (e.g.) Jesus, then God would have to use deterministic laws to reliably bring about the desired outcomes. Where the deterministic processes, left on their own, are insufficient to produce a theologically acceptable world, God would have to intervene into the natural order, setting aside the original laws in order to bring about a different, non-lawlike outcome. Divine action then becomes the working of miracles, the breaking of laws; and God becomes, paradigmatically, the being whose nature and actions are opposed to Nature. Of the results of this disastrous dualism, the opposition of God and Nature, readers of The Christian Century are well enough aware. By contrast, emergence suggests a very different model of the God-world relationship. On this model God sets in motion a process of ongoing creativity. The laws are not deterministic laws. Instead, they are “stochastic” or probabilistic: although regularities still exist, the exact outcomes are not determined in advance. More and more complex states of affairs arise in the course of natural history through an open-ended process. With the increase in complexity new entities emerge C the classical world out of the quantum world; molecules and chemical processes out of atomic structures; simple living organisms out of complex molecular structures; then, gradually, complex multi-cellular organisms, societies of animals with new emergent properties at the ecosystem level, and, finally, conscious beings who create culture, use symbolic language C and experience the first intimations of transcendence.
Conceived according to the model of emergence, God is no longer the cosmic law giver. Thus the result is a far cry from Calvin’s God who must predestine all outcomes “before the foundation of the world.” Instead, God guides the process of creativity; God and creatures together compose the melodies of the unfolding world, as it were, without pre-ordaining the outcome. Emergentists note that this God must rejoice in the unfolding richness and variety, apparently willing to affirm the openness of the process and the uncertainty of particular outcomes. On this model, God’s finite partners are the sum total of agents in the world, and all join in the process of creation. In Philip Hefner’s beautiful phrase, we become “created co-creators” with God.
Finally, on the emergence model God does not sit impassively above the process, untouched and unchanged by the vicissitudes of cosmic history. Instead, there must be emergence within God as well. God is affected by the pain of creatures, is genuinely responsive to their calls, acquires experiences as a result of these interactions that were not present beforehand C all ideas familiar to readers of process theology or (to cite only one example) Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. Ultimately, is not such a picture of God closer to the biblical witness than the distant God-above-time of classical philosophical theism?
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Comments? I have a few coming.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/14/2009 10:48 AM (GMT -6) | | Clayton ends this section of the article with “Ultimately, is not such a picture of God closer to the biblical witness than the distant God-above-time of classical philosophical theism?”
In answer I’d have to say, no. This is most definitely NOT closer to the biblical witness. It’s just as dissimilar as the classical picture. It just misses different truths. On a question of 100 points, Calvinists might answer 50 questions incorrectly. Clayton corrects those but answers the other 50 incorrectly and thinks he’s CLOSER to being right. But he’s just as wrong. Just wrong in a different way.
The biblical picture of God has God as an active, engaging, choosing, doing, causing God. God acts in the world. He incarnates. He resurrects. He judges. He blesses. He sends angels. He grants dreams and visions. He pours out his Spirit. He raises the dead, heals the sick. Come on Clayton. At best Clayton’s reconstructed panentheistic naturalism corrects a good deal of what’s wrong with classical theology (read “Calvinism”). But are Calvinism and Clayton’s uninvolved God the only choices? Happily not.
What I don’t’ like is the way he co-opts ‘emergent’ science within this brand of panentheism. But does emergence entail the theological conclusions he makes? I think not. In the end I think Clayton let’s science dictate his theological options.
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/14/2009 9:07 PM (GMT -6) | | | I totally agree with you Tom. And when he says:
On this model God sets in motion a process of ongoing creativity. The laws are not deterministic laws. Instead, they are “stochastic” or probabilistic: although regularities still exist, the exact outcomes are not determined in advance.
he is leaving me without any real understanding of WHAT he thinks God intends. This is the Kenneth Miller approach. Miller wants to say, seemingly, that the problem of evil can only be solved if God did not intend natural evil. Which means that I can't know God intended biological forms if they are susceptible, INEVITABLY, to natural evil (and it seems they are!). But that means that God's ends are literally indeterminant. Which, in turn, means that even morality itself must be a-teleologically understood. Frankly, I have no idea how to make sense of morality apart from theistic teleology. Nor has Miller explained HOW it it is to be done, himself.
These guys always ending up proving too much. Consequently, they end up explaining nothing with respect to what is actually IMPORTANT to humanity. Which is why the average person intuitively lets these kinds of pontifications go in one ear and out the other. Average human beings know that INTELLIGENT, FINAL CAUSES is what is important in explaining reality MEANINGFULLY. We don't want MERE explanations. We want MEANINGFUL explanations. And by meaningful, I mean explanations that actually account for a REAL, RATIONAL moral order.
Most scientistic types get so geeky in their world-views, they seem to forget that moral and normative judgments NEED to be explained. Indeed, such judgments are the MOST important judgments we make. Scientistic minds remind me of those knaive folks who are oblivious to tragedy and natural evil til their own loved ones are seriously harmed or killed. Then, all of a sudden, they decide that God is not benevolent. As if those implications (assuming that argument proves what they think it does) were not implied in the sufferings and deaths of millions of others all around them every single day of their life.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/15/2009 2:34 AM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: But that means that God's ends are literally indeterminant. Which, in turn, means that even morality itself must be a-teleologically understood.
Tom: Exactly. And that's why they have no real eschatology as well.
I remember Miller (in his book) said that God could have intended the emergence of intelligent life forms with whom he could communicate, but the only way to get it was to cast (as he did) a probabilistic net that he could not interfere with, which means God would have had to be willing to accept a creation that didn't really become anything. In fact, 'chances' were it wouldn't become anything like what it did in fact become. God just got VERY lucky.
Thing is, I like 'emergence'. A lot. I think it can explain a lot. But for Clayton it's a methodology. Can can't do anything outside that.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/15/2009 5:28 AM (GMT -6) | |
More Clayton:
It is easy to formulate several unsatisfactory ways of interpreting the suggestion that God affects the physical world. On the one side, there are problems with supposing that God is constantly performing physical miracles by communicating divine purposes to rocks and plants and animals, thereby directly causing them to behave in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. On the other, if theism is viable, then talk of divine action cannot be purely otiose, merely adding a religious rhetoric to what is better explained in natural terms. Recent work in the religion-science discussion — I think especially of the Vatican/CTNS volumes edited by Bob Russell — suggests a more adequate approach: specific features of the physical world are compatible with, and even best explained by, the creation of that world by God. For example, lawlikeness and regularity reflect the enduring character of God. Big Bang cosmology is fully consistent with the creation of the universe by a conscious intelligence. And the Anthropic Principle, which shows that many variables are “fine-tuned” for the production of intelligent life in a way that would be a priori extremely unlikely, suggests a structuring of the universe for the evolution of consciousness. Note that none of these features depends on an intervention of God into the physical order; yet each does reflect the sort of universe one would expect if the theological picture sketched above were true.
…The missing link in discussions of divine action over the last 40 years or so is biology. Standard Christian accounts of God’s causal activity in pre-human life either clash with evolution (e.g., creationism) or fail to specify a conceptual framework that would make sense of this alleged divine activity. A notable exception are process thinkers such as John Cobb, David Griffin, Lewis Ford, Charles Birch, and Joseph Bracken, among others, who have given the most convincing and robust account of divine agency in the biosphere. The trouble with these accounts, I have argued, is that they do not respond adequately to what we have learned about the emergent structure of the natural world.
By contrast, consider the response developed above. 30 Fundamental physics does not offer any openings for divine influence (with the possible exception of quantum indeterminacy — a debate that I will not reopen today31). If one asks about matter, i.e. about causation prior to the emergence of life, the answer must be that whatever divine input or organization there might have been must have been built in from the beginning. Nothing in our understanding of physics suggests the possibility of subsequent direct divine influence over rocks.
…Yet in biology we found reason to break with a purely materialist view: there is an informational element in biology, involving the role played by form, structure and function, that is crucially different from physics. Moreover, there is some anticipation within the biological order of the kinds of purposes we see fully expressed in mental phenomena. To avoid anthropomorphism, I used the Kantian phrase purposiveness without purpose. If one grants my position on God’s causal role in influencing thought, and grants proto-mentality in the biological sphere, then one would expect to see divine causal agency, appropriately limited, at levels in the natural history of life prior to the emergence of conscious beings. But how is such causal agency to be conceived — especially if, like most theologians in this field, one is committed to avoiding an account that is either interventionist or occasionalist? Theologians today are correct, I believe, in eschewing answers that imagine God introducing a new form of energy into the physical universe or directly causing deviations in the motions of created entities. But if one accepts this limitation, in what sense can God be said to exert a causal influence on or within creation?
The beauty of panentheism is that, if it is right, the energies at work at the physical level are already divine energies, and physical regularities are already expressions of the fundamental constancy of the divine character. Thus panentheism changes the framework: if the world remains within and is permeated by the divine, then it is possible to speak of divine purposes and goals being expressed even at the stage at which there are no other actually conscious agents. Even the lawful behavior of the natural world can now be an expression or manifestation of the divine character or intentionality.
Because physical phenomena do not function with anything we can identify as “focal” or direct purpose, we may speak of them as manifesting only God’s “autonomic agency,” just as the actions of our own bodies are divided between autonomic processes and focal intentions. For the panentheist, the regularities of natural law represent the autonomic or, as it were, habitual operation of divine action apart from God’s specific or focal intentions. By contrast, should God sometimes consciously influence conscious thought processes in humans or other animals, we would speak of these as focal divine actions.
…The idea here is to try to understand what are the distinctive forms of influence or causation that one finds in biology but not in physics or chemistry, and then to ask whether they offer room, in principle, for divine influence. If biological explanations are ultimately nomological (law-based) in the strong way that physical explanations are, then there will be no room for divine influence; if they exhibit causal influences analogous to the way that one thought can (non-nomologically) influence another, then there will be room in principle. (To demonstrate the actuality of divine influence is another matter.)
…The trouble is that we are only beginning to break free from the dominance of biology by physics (or, rather, the illusory dream of such dominance). Until distinctively biological causation is better understood, theology cannot proceed. Consider the possibilities: biological information seems to exercise a causal role that is emergent (not reducible to physics). Could there be a nonphysical input of information into the biological world as a form of divine influence? Second, the behavior of all biological systems, from genes to complex organisms, is influenced by broader environmental factors; could this provide an opening for a broader sort of “top-down” influence? Third, form or structure is key to biological explanations; could a neo-Aristotelian version of “formal causality” be developed that might be of both biological and theological interest?
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Tom here…
Personally, I don’t see the problem with either interventionist or occassionalist models of divine providence. I don’t go with the hard two-story cosmology that’s traditionally attached to them, but that’s not necessary. All an interventionist really need say is that among the laws that govern the physical world are laws that describe when and how God may act upon/in creation through other than emergentist (probabilistic) means. I know we want to avoid saying we’re “supernaturalists” if that means God is “breaking” laws, etc., every time he acts in the world. I get that. And I want (with Clayton) to say that God’s acting in the world is “natural” to both God and the world. But I just don’t see the problem if we suppose God can act in the world in, if not un-natural ways, at least unusual or uncommon ways (miracles) that are integrous to the laws that govern the physical world. Clayton feels this will collapse before the problem of evil? Why should that be? To suppose there are conditions (determined by God in ordering the initial conditions of creation) under which a benevolent God may intervene in the world is not to say that preventing evil willy nilly just because he wants to is one such condition. Similarly, the integrity of the law-like universe is not jeopardized (as Clayton feels) just because we suppose God can intervene or act in the world under ‘certain’ conditions. Those conditions under which God may act (uncommonly) are a) limited, and b) part of what constitutes the integrity of the natural order.
I just think Clayton lets science tell him what the bible can/can’t mean and what sort of God God is. It’s less a conversation between science & theology and more a ‘talking to’ that theology gets from science.
Give me a Trinitarian (non-Process) panentheistic cosmology that’s biblical (incarnational and interventionist) and which is broadly compatible with what we know about science (without worshipping science).
Let me try this. You and I have bodies through which we express our agency and act upon/in the world in determinate and purposeful ways. Clayton says God can’t exercise his agency similarly because God is spirit. But what if the physical order itself IS God’s body (just speaking analogically, OK?), all the movements of which are order by God’s will (given all the rules of engagement that God established for it from the start). So just as we are free under certain terms and conditions to exercise agency in determinate ways, so would God be free to exercise his agency in the world under the specific terms and conditions. The water in the jugs at Cana of Galilee really DID turn into wine. Clayton would doubtless poopoo this part of the story. That CAN’T happen because science tells him it can’t. It would involve an introduction into creation of additional ‘energy’ and thus break a fundamental scientific rule: the constancy of matter/energy in the universe. That’s a violation of creation, says, Clayton.
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One Love
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| Posted 3/15/2009 7:48 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Clayton says God can’t exercise his agency similarly because God is spirit. But what if the physical order itself IS God’s body (just speaking analogically, OK?), all the movements of which are order by God’s will (given all the rules of engagement that God established for it from the start).
Say it like this. Created space-time is hypostatically linked to God, basically God's Grace for us to receive Him and for God to receive Godself "anew" via Incarnation. The Incarnate Word directly demonstrates this, as the full humanity of Mary's Baby (including his participation in created space-time) was hypostatically linked to God via the Son. The Hypostatic Union. Nesteruk takes this approach rather than saying that the physical order is the embodiment of God in some type of emergent terms.
Nesteruk has it covered. Read Pages 234-235. Start at the paragraph where it says... "What is important in Torrance's arguments.."
What all of it implies is that because space-time itself is necessarily linked to the Rationality of God (as demonstrated by the Incarnation), it is always open to God's will and working.
Get it?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life."
"God in Christ by His Spirit empowers, enables, energizes and enacts all Christian behavior and ministry as the dynamic expression of the life of Jesus Christ. Christianity is Christ. Christian living is the life and character of Jesus Christ lived out through the Christian." -James Fowler Post Edited (One Love) : 3/15/2009 7:55:36 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 3/15/2009 8:04 AM (GMT -6) | | This is what things mean existentially...least as I see it.
All this means that Christ-the-Logos is PERSONALLY in relation to all Creation as the Logos of God, with the Creator Spiritus within him. It, then, follows that the possibility of ACTUALLY being "alone" is impossible. If the Triune God exists, then loneliness (the feeling of being abandoned or alone) can only be lived out from some type of false, despairing perspective that "blocks out" the facticity of God's omnipresence as Spiritus Creator, the Spirit of Love...a perspective that only casts pain and loneliness on oneself. One can only continue this existence by dimming their own sense of the Divine.
Human being can feel abandoned by God and all alone...but it's all in their heads. (Jesus showed us that, right.) Surely, he bore ALL our griefs...
"Surely God was here...and I didn't know it."
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life."
"God in Christ by His Spirit empowers, enables, energizes and enacts all Christian behavior and ministry as the dynamic expression of the life of Jesus Christ. Christianity is Christ. Christian living is the life and character of Jesus Christ lived out through the Christian." -James Fowler | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/15/2009 12:43 PM (GMT -6) | | | Clayton: …The trouble is that we are only beginning to break free from the dominance of biology by physics (or, rather, the illusory dream of such dominance). Until distinctively biological causation is better understood, theology cannot proceed.
Jeff: Here's the thing. The consensus opinion in academe, now, is that humans are teleological, theists, by nature. So the question is, is reality consistent with teleology? Is it not characterized by tENDencies and trENDs? Of course it is! So all that stands in the way of theology and biology is the problem of evil. It has NOTHING to do with anything else. Biologists don't DICTATE metaphysics to anyone but themselves. If they choose to be a-teleological, naturalists, that doesn't obligate me to do so in the least. This man is utterly confused.
Tom: But I just don’t see the problem if we suppose God can act in the world in, if not un-natural ways, at least unusual or uncommon ways (miracles) that are integrous to the laws that govern the physical world. Clayton feels this will collapse before the problem of evil?
Jeff: How, pray tell, does Clayton solve the problem of evil by denying miracles, etc? When I read these guys, it seems as though they don't even understand what the problem of evil IS. The solution proposed by Miller etal doesn't even TOUCH the problem. These people are UTTERLY confused. And this confusion about the problem of evil gives impetus to their scientific speculations. They then think their scientific speculations have the warrant of a logical deduction from well established hypotheses. Whew!
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Tom
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| Posted 3/15/2009 1:17 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: Clayton says God can’t exercise his agency similarly because God is spirit. But what if the physical order itself IS God’s body (just speaking analogically, OK?), all the movements of which are order by God’s will (given all the rules of engagement that God established for it from the start).
D: Say it like this. Created space-time is hypostatically linked to God, basically God's Grace for us to receive Him and for God to receive Godself "anew" via Incarnation. The Incarnate Word directly demonstrates this, as the full humanity of Mary's Baby (including his participation in created space-time) was hypostatically linked to God via the Son. The Hypostatic Union. Nesteruk takes this approach rather than saying that the physical order is the embodiment of God in some type of emergent terms.
Get it?
Tom: Not really. I don’t know what “hypostatically linked” even means. Really. I’ve read and reread Nesteruk. It just doesn’t register anything. “Hypostatically linked” means “personally linked.” And you can only be “personally” linked to other “persons.” What’s SAYING THAT buy us? I’m talking about God acting in non-personal entities as a cause, say, of turning water to wine. How’s God personally linked to the water in the jug and how’s that explain its transformation into wine?
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One Love
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| Posted 3/15/2009 1:21 PM (GMT -6) | | Dang, man. You ain't understanding Nesteruk OR Loder? Throw me a BONE, dawg...
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life."
"God in Christ by His Spirit empowers, enables, energizes and enacts all Christian behavior and ministry as the dynamic expression of the life of Jesus Christ. Christianity is Christ. Christian living is the life and character of Jesus Christ lived out through the Christian." -James Fowler | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 3/15/2009 1:44 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Good points Jeff. I’m glad you’re here.
Clayton: Until distinctively biological causation is better understood, theology cannot proceed.
Tom: There he goes. Theology cannot proceed until biological causation is understood?
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Tom: But I just don’t see the problem if we suppose God can act in the world in, if not un-natural ways, at least unusual or uncommon ways (miracles) that are integrous to the laws that govern the physical world. Clayton feels this will collapse before the problem of evil?
Jeff: How, pray tell, does Clayton solve the problem of evil by denying miracles, etc? When I read these guys, it seems as though they don't even understand what the problem of evil IS. The solution proposed by Miller etal doesn't even TOUCH the problem.
Tom: Well, Clayton (and all process theists) argue that if God can intervene at will into creation, that is, if divine action in the world isn’t LIMITED TO the already present laws of nature and emergence, then a benevolent God WOULD do so and there would be no evil.
But I’ve never bought into this objection. It just doesn’t follow that if God can intervene on occasion under given certain rules of engagement that are more relational and teleological, God should be able to wave his magic wand and stop evil. Process folks assume that if God can intervene AT ALL God can just do ANYTHING he’d like. That’s not the case.
The most sever and potentially devastating form of the problem of evil is described really well by Hart in The Doors of the Sea (in response to the Tsunami in Asia years ago). It interacts with Doteoevski’s Brothers Karamazov. Basically, if it’s the case that God need not create at all, then creation is gratuitous. And there can be NO justification for choosing to risk even ONE Zosia gratuitously. Period. I think, again, that Clayton and other process theists would escape this by saying creation isn’t gratuitous. The God-World relationship is necessary and definitive of the being of God. There MUST of metaphysical necessity be a world of becoming. And when you add to this the idea that God can only act via the known law of nature, God’s off the hook when it comes to evil. Can't remember how Hart escapes it. UR is the only way I see of escaping it.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/16/2009 9:26 AM (GMT -6) | | Oh yeah. I thought you knew. Clayton is a well-known process theist (panentheist). He's trinitarian though, so a bit more traditional. But still process.
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/16/2009 9:20 PM (GMT -6) | | Does he believe in a ressurection of Christ's body after his death or the reported signs and wonders of Christ and the apostles? I don't see how he could.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/17/2009 8:58 AM (GMT -6) | | Like Clayton says, Jeff:
"Emergentist theology looks forwards; it postulates God as the goal toward which all things are heading. Moreover, if God stood at the beginning and designed a universe intended to produce (e.g.) Jesus, then God would have to use deterministic laws to reliably bring about the desired outcomes. Where the deterministic processes, left on their own, are insufficient to produce a theologically acceptable world, God would have to intervene into the natural order, setting aside the original laws in order to bring about a different, non-lawlike outcome. Divine action then becomes the working of miracles, the breaking of laws; and God becomes, paradigmatically, the being whose nature and actions are opposed to Nature. Of the results of this disastrous dualism, the opposition of God and Nature...."
Now, I don't think believing that God can and does act in the world in deterministic ways entails a disastrous dualism. Reject Cartesian dualism if you want, but why think that precludes the incarnation, resurrection and eschatology.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/17/2009 12:20 PM (GMT -6) | | Very interesting…
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Jamila: You did kinda use big words and I had a hard time following you - I got the gist , but most of it was a little ‘philosophical’. I get that you think of the mind body problem as part spiritual and more holistic. I don't think there’s anything wrong with that and for the most part I agree. I think that my psych classes in research and methods made me a little skeptical and a lot more scientific and research minded. For example, when you said, “Whether we are more or not is not something laboratory observations of the material world can prove (or disprove).” You are right on! Because we can’t prove or disprove the spiritual realm and spiritual things (principle of falsifiability) it is impossible to argue (debate) the subject.
I guess I've been taught that as a psychologist and a scientist you study only what is observable and testable and you leave the rest for the theologians and philosophers! HA!
Tom: In a way, yeah. But surely it’s a rational, scientific sort of conclusion which admits that which it is not able to explain. Materialists, however, believe that EVERYTHING (choice, love, consciousness, etc.) is explainable in terms of physical determinations of chemicals firing in the brain, that we're REDUCIBLE to just these things.
Jamila: I totally disagree! I don’t see that just because I don’t believe there is a spiritual identity or self that we are simply chemicals…. I see the brain and the things that are possible because of the BRAIN (frontal lobe – reasoning, logic, feelings) as amazing and awesome! I don’t see it as negative, simplistic, or reducible to just these things. I think that’s where we’re seeing things a bit differently – maybe you’re having a hard time seeing the awesome potential and amazing accomplishments of our biological brain as just that. Somehow, a God in heaven needs to be behind it all for there to be some awesomeness and meaningfulness in it.
Tom: Of course, nobody has managed to actually explain all that in physical terms. They just claim that the day will come when we'll be able to do so. But how can I know we’re reducible to just those things if I haven’t yet demonstrated that reduction? I must be assuming on philosophical grounds (not scientific grounds) that we’re reducible to physical determinations. See?
Jamila: I think it’s funny that you use this “they’re just claiming, and can’t prove” argument against science! Everything we believe as fact in this universe is falsifiable and provable. If it’s not, then scientists somewhere are striving to do so. Scientific THEORY has so much more backing it up then religious THEORY. Totally different concepts.
Tom: Methodological naturalism (the assumption that all we observe in the universe must be explainable and reducible to MERELY physical determinations) is a quite UNscientific methodology. Nothing about the empirical sciences tells us that this is the way things are. And there are good reasons to believe that what science cannot explain (self-consciousness, and with it love, ethics, choice, etc.) isn't the sort of things that physics and biology could ever explain. They're categorically unable to do so. So this ought to predispose us, or make the assumption of 'spirit', the DEFAULT assumption.
Jamila: What? Come on! How is this unscientific? EVERYTHING about the empirical sciences tells us this is the way things are! Everything is “reducible” to atoms and even smaller particles than those – light – space – everything is made up of physical matter in some way. I don’t even know where you’re going with this!
I hope I don’t seem angry, because I’m totally not! I’m just getting really into it! I want you to explain to me how and why you think religion and philosophy can tackle and deal with scientific things. They are two separate studies and they see things totally different. It is my belief that they should stay separate.
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Too many open talks around the dinner table growing up. Dang.
They should make psych majors take an introduction to philosophy class.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 3/17/2009 7:35 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: Like Clayton says, Jeff:
"Emergentist theology looks forwards; it postulates God as the goal toward which all things are heading. Moreover, if God stood at the beginning and designed a universe intended to produce (e.g.) Jesus, then God would have to use deterministic laws to reliably bring about the desired outcomes. Where the deterministic processes, left on their own, are insufficient to produce a theologically acceptable world, God would have to intervene into the natural order, setting aside the original laws in order to bring about a different, non-lawlike outcome. Divine action then becomes the working of miracles, the breaking of laws; and God becomes, paradigmatically, the being whose nature and actions are opposed to Nature. Of the results of this disastrous dualism, the opposition of God and Nature...."
Now, I don't think believing that God can and does act in the world in deterministic ways entails a disastrous dualism. Reject Cartesian dualism if you want, but why think that precludes the incarnation, resurrection and eschatology.
Jeff: It doesn't sound to me like he's talking about Cartesian dualism. Sounds to me that he's calling divine intervention into a natural order a kind of dualism. The problem with that is this: there IS no mere natural order. THere IS LFW (i.e., final causes) going on ALL THE TIME. The fact that he doesn't believe that doesn't mean I should stick my head in the sand with him, though.  I'm actually amazed that people PREFER to believe in determinism when our own common sense screams to us that we are free. And how, pray tell, does determinism solve the problem of evil, anyway? I just don't get it. Emergence, if deterministic, doesn't solve a thing. But if emergence is NON-deterministic in the volitional sense, his scientism is dead already.
As for divine intervention, I think scripture makes it clear that divine intervention is done to 1) prolong the project and, in doing so, 2) to redeem for Himself as great and diverse a company of co-regents as possible. In both cases, the idea of DEGREE is involed--no all or nothing telos. All it takes to render these two notions intelligible is the reality that creatures ARE libertarianly free and that they misuse that freedom. These don't seem like absurd notions if trinitarianism is true. I mean, surely SOMETHING in the gospels is historically true of Christ's message. And if so, something like these two notions seem like pretty easy themes to glean from the gospels.
Post Edited (Similtude) : 3/17/2009 8:08:51 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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