Theology and Science - Disambiguation

I like to be clear regarding this project or the other regarding whether or not one is doing science,

philosophy or theology. And we mustn't forget, oh my gosh, religion. And if one is talking about ALL of

these spheres of human concern, in which sphere do they begin their conversation, and, in which do they

end up.

Except for the classical "proofs" by Aquinas and Anselm, and CS Peirce's "Neglected Argument for the

Reality of God," and the Modal Ontological Arguments as crafted by Godel and Hartshorne and then, in

my view, lately and greatly improved by Christopher McHugh, I don't consider much of what is going on,

nowadays, to be natural theology or a natural philosophy of God. There is just not THAT much that one

can say, in my view, about God, using philosophy as a starting point, at least not when methodologically

restricting one's musings to the rubrics of formal argumentation. The same is true for any notions regarding

"ultimate" reality, using either philosophy or science as a starting point. All anyone thus establishes is a

modicum of epistemological parity with alternate worldviews, i.e. elaborate tautologies. I do not dismiss

these enterprises that demonstrate the reasonableness of faith, for some, like me, they have been

indispensable parts of my journey. For most, though, I've been told they don't matter very much. And I trust

what they report and am better and better coming to grasp why. Even then, I've enjoyed many, many

fruitful dialogues with many nonbelievers who do seek such apologetics and we've grown in mutual respect

and understanding and self-understanding.

Worldviews, thankfully, are not mere formal arguments. They represent deeply and profoundly experienced

existential orientations and ultimate concerns. And, if they are authentically re-ligious, they "tie life's

experiences back together" and heal us that we may survive and grow us that we may thrive. If we are not

experiencing both healing and growth, both broadly conceived, well, that's what the Prophets are for! They

remind us that we are to be about the actualization of value.

The interface between science and theology is not terribly interesting, philosophically, unless our project is

to disambiguate their definitions. If it remains interesting, even early in the 21st century, it is only because

so many scientistic and fideistic apologists are arguing past each other, precisely because they've neglected

the work of philosophical disambiguation. [Here I place a "rolling eyes" emoticon.]

Unlike philosophy/natural theology and science, wherein we bracket, best we can, our theology, in a

theology of nature we start with God and see His presence in all things and hear Her siren song from all

places. From a different explanatory stance, we break out in analogy and metaphor, poetry and song,

allegory and parable, joke and koan, story and dance, ritual and sacrament. And we speak of trail dust and

stardust, quarks and supernovae, maidens and sailors, the Cosmic Adventure and the Divine Matrix,

leaping whitetails and creeping lizards, bright indwelling presence and luminous dark nights, hope and love

and faith ...

Science Constrains Theology?

This musing was evoked by some comments made re: the podcast by Fr. George Coyne, S.J. on Science,

Faith and God but, below, I digress too far from the conversation over there and thought it best to keep my

comment there, in that forum, short and more directly on message.

Jack Haught does a good job of describing four prevailing approaches to the science and religion interface:

conflict, contrast, contact, confirmation. Daniel Helminiak describes a hierarchy of --- 1) positivistic 2)

philosophic 3) theistic and 4) theotic --- human foci of concern, each presupposing and constraining the

next.

In this day and age, I am starting to prefer a metaphor of interpenetrating fields of epistemic influence,

which are not necessarily hierarchical but which do represent integrally related hypothetical commitments,

some central or core, some auxiliary or peripheral, each field indeed constrained by the others, none

autonomous. And I suspect they may be isomorphic, or corresponding, to other field-like realities. Such

fields might be scientific, philosophical, theological, spiritual, moral, social, practical, aesthetical,

ecological and such, representing all of the ways humans encounter reality, even nonrationally and prerationally.

The axioms and concepts and values that each epistemic field aspires to actualize are so radically different

that I find it difficult to defend such a relationship between them as being in anyway necessarily linear or

hierarchical. (They might be, but I do not want to try to prove too much.) Each epistemic field is oriented to

a value realization that is apparently governed by its own laws; hence, such fields are "polynomic."

The effect each epistemic field has on the next or the next is variously stronger or weaker and we often

struggle to come to grips with HOW and WHY such may be so even as we observe THAT it is so. For

example, sometimes an aesthetical value purusit of beauty, in the form of symmetry, will aid the physicist

in crafting a better mathematical description of a certain natural phenomenon.

Likely, the foci of human concern, or epistemic fields of value realization, are both autonomous

(polynomic) and integrally related (mutually interpenetrating), because they are mirroring a human reality

that is, at once, both autopoietic (self-organizing) and free, while also otherwise bounded (by other existant

realities) and determined (via genetic limitation, for instance). Those are the attributes of Phil Hefner's

"created co-creators."

I suppose this is why, when we look at Gelpi's Lonerganian conversions --- intellectual, affective, moral,

sociopolitical and religious --- the human spiritual growth trajectory is typically assymetrical, which is to

recognize, for instance, that our intellectual, emotional and moral developments reach different levels of

attainment at different times, quite often seemingly totally independent one of the other. (Some intellectual

giants are emotional idiots and morally underdeveloped, too.)

Each new horizon of each new field of value (epistemic and/or ontic) lifts our vision beyond this value to

the next possible value realization, "transvaluing" our values, and where openness to the Holy Spirit,

implicitly or explicity, obtains, transforming our knowledge with faith, our memory with hope and our will

with love.

So, I offer this as one version of why so many category errors are committed between the value-realization

field of science and that of theology. They influence each other and are integrally related even while they

are otherwise autonomous. But how?

I hesitate to suggest any unidirectionality of influences, such as hierarchical arrangements or even one-way

constraint. Our theological core commitments DO, afterall, make some demands on our philosophical

commitments, such as committing us to metaphysical realism, moral realism and such. Similarly, our

philosophical core commitments DO have normative force on the epistemological rubrics of the scientific

method and empirical observation.

What seems to me to be going on is that these fields influence each other's axiomatic aspects, which is to

say, those apsects that we commit to as self-evident and nonpropositional, even if only provisionally. There

is no "formal relationship" vis a vis logical argumentation at play in nonpropositional elements, which are

often being implicitly presupposed. Often, our tendency to opt for one set of axioms versus another in this

or that field of value realization seems to be governed, rather, by such as aesthetical inclinations, which are

not formalizable, or by such as reductio ad absurdum arguments, which are flawed formal appeals from

ignorance and moreso essentially pragmatic in character.

I am not disvaluing the aesthetic or pragmatic, just distinguishing them from logical and empirical inquiries

and noting their role in the axioms that we choose to govern our different spheres of human concern, our

different fields of value realization.

Once the axioms of our value-realization fields are in place, even if only provisionally, the influence of

these fields might very well get unidirectional, propositionally speaking. This is to suggest that, for

example, in the case at point, propositions of theology will most definitely be constrained by those of

science. And theology will also further be constrained by the normative sciences, which is to say, by the

philosophic. Finally, our theotic commitments, or how we view humanization-deification, or theosis, on our

transformative journeys, will successively be constrained by our other horizons of human concern: theistic,

philosophic and positivistic.

Why are these different value-realization fields polynomic? Why don't the concepts they employ and the

axioms that govern them not line up like pretty maids all in a row ... the empirical, logical, practical, moral,

aesthetical? Or even in only the moral ... the aretaic (virtue ethics), deontological (natural law) and

teleological (consequentialistic)?

Heck if I know.

That's part of the theodicy problem.

At some level, let's say, the beatific, I believe it all fits together, somehow. That's my definition of the

religious: tying it all together, advancing healing and growth/conversion. But it takes an unconditional

commitment because, to all appearances, it doesn't really seem to work together that well. For now, we see

through a glass, darkly ... As Frankl says, either we believe in God in the face of 6 million perishing in the

Holocaust or our faith fails with the death of a single innocent.

that we thus gain descriptive accuracy through negation, while we gain positive descriptive accuracy of

Many people look at this grammar of description and see a paradox. They suggest that if God is literally

Creator and creature? This is to say that they feel like there is a causal joint question still begging,

somehow. How can this Creator, if wholly distinct ontologically from creation, thereby exert any effects,

whatsoever, on the created order?

There is another grammar, however, which is the grammar of reference. And this grammar suggests that we

we have always routinely employed these distinctions (between description and reference) as we've

Where, How and Why?

Answer to these ultimate questions, at the same time, we are by no means suggesting that this Reality is not

dimension, of Arraj's discussion of nonlocality and superluminality, or of formal and final causation ---even

as minimalistically conceived--- in Peirce's triadic semiotic science.

In her paper, A God Adequate for Primate Culture, Nancy R. Howell of the Saint Paul School of Theology

writes about John Haught's evolution-informed approach, http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2001/2001-4.html :

quote:

God, in a theology of evolution, must permit "genuine independence" in creation. Haught's rationale for

such a God rests in divine kenotic love. Love by its very nature cannot compel, and so any God whose very

essence is love should not be expected to overwhelm the world either with a coercively directive "power"

or an annihilating "presence." Indeed, an infinite love must in some sense "absent" or "restrain itself,"

precisely in order to give the world the "space" in which to become something distinct from the creative

love that constitutes it as "other." We should anticipate, therefore, that any universe rooted in an unbounded

love would have some features that appear to us as random or undirected.

There is a tension, then, between our conceptions of some type of causal continuity or interactivity and an

ontological discontinuity between Creator and created. This should not surprise us, however, for

of emergent reality even without the violation of known causal closure dynamics.

As science advances and our metaphysical tautologies gain ever more taut grasps of reality, our kataphatic

God-analogues will become more robustly descriptive and so will our apophatic negations (as we add to

our positivist inventory of not-God-realities). Our references to God can become ever more successful, too,

especially once considering that our God-encounters engage all of our intentional fields (Haught,

Lonergan), our entire person integrally and unfathomably, in a relationship of love, precisely through such

kataphatic. They can nurture each other in a virtuous cycle. Neither the awareness nor the experience yields

vaguely ontological, in maintaining the discontinuity.

What are the implications for the relationship between Creator and created? What bridges the ontological

I seem to recall a discussion by Arraj of deep and dynamic formal fields. And this is from a Thomistic

perspective. There is also the panentheistic, neo-Whiteheadian perspective of Fr. Joe Bracken, who speaks

of the Divine Matrix. It is beyond my competence to reconcile these approaches with one another, much

less with my own semiotic approach. And since my own grasp is rather inchoate it makes it difficult to

translate my intuitions into an accessible form. But I'm going to try anyway.

in God with both the Creator and the created order operating in and through a Divine matrix of interrelated

causes and effects. This could only be accommodated by a Thomistic view that reconceives its ontological

categories more dynamically and not in static, essentialistic identities, for example, seeing the

quote:

Creativity is thus to be understood as immanent within creatures, rather than transcending them and ‘may

aptly be described as “the divine matrix” within which the three divine persons and all their creatures exist

in dynamic interrelation. See this link .

Reconceiving this relationship between God and creatures has implications for how we view original sin

and for theodicy and such. I won't go there for now.

The bottomline is that we experience enough autonomy to be in an authentic (in radical freedom) love

relationship with God and others and enough causal interconnectedness to know that we will subsist,

forever, through, with and in this Divine Matrix.

It may be that a natural mysticism corresponds to a raw awareness of this ineluctably unobtrusive tacit

dimension or matrix. It is with the benefit of special revelation that our contemplation experiences it as

re: Our contemplation reflects on our autonomy. Enlightenment qualifies it as quasi.

Just to be clear, those aspects of contemplation and enlightenment, of course, do not exhaust those rich

human realities.

re: I do not see anything wrong with viewing creation and creatures as quasi-autonomous realities that exist

in God with both the Creator and the created order operating in and through a Divine matrix of interrelated

causes and effects.

To amplify a bit, I have recently been contemplating this panentheist approach with an aim toward

reconciling it with that of Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts. It does not seem to me to be a major

stumbling block for Christian unity, no more than the filioque?

bout Hesychasm

quote:

interpreter in Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. Palamas, the most influential Greek Orthodox

theologian of the Middle Ages, taught that the most effective way to increase our awareness, integrate body

and soul, and open ourselves to God is to attend to our breathing.

In The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, Gregory described the process of pure prayer beyond

words or thoughts or concepts and advised his students what to expect.

The first step is to enter into our own body, not to flee from it. While this is very difficult at the beginning,

with repeated effort in time attention to breathing gathers together the mind that has been dissipated and

produces inner detachment and freedom.

For Palamas, this activity is not itself grace, but he tells us that God works in and through the body and soul

together to communicate supernatural gifts. As long as we have not experienced this transformation, we

believe that the body is always driven by corporeal and material passions.

In language that is at times similar to the Buddhist tradition, Palamas tells us that theoretical knowledge

cannot grasp this transformation. Only experience can convince a person that another form of life, free

Through prayer and the grace of God, every aspect of ourselves is transformed and crowned with virtue.

http://monasticdialog.com/a.php?id=771

quote:

In solitude and retirement the Hesychast repeats the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have

mercy on me, a sinner." The Hesychast prays the Jesus Prayer 'with the heart'—with meaning, with intent,

'for real' (see ontic). He never treats the Jesus Prayer as a string of syllables whose 'surface' or overt verbal

meaning is secondary or unimportant. He considers bare repetition of the Jesus Prayer as a mere string of

syllables, perhaps with a 'mystical' inner meaning beyond the overt verbal meaning, to be worthless or even

dangerous. This emphasis on the actual, real invocation of Jesus Christ marks a divergence from Eastern

forms of meditation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychast

quote:

Orthodox Tradition warns against seeking ecstasy as an end in itself. Hesychasm is a traditional complex of

ascetical practices embedded in the doctrine and practice of the Orthodox Church and intended to purify the

member of the Orthodox Church and to make him ready for an encounter with God that comes to him when

of Hesychast practice are considered secondary and unimportant, even quite dangerous. Moreover, seeking

after unusual 'spiritual' experiences can itself cause great harm, ruining the soul and the mind of the seeker.

Such a seeking after 'spiritual' experiences can lead to spiritual delusion (Ru. prelest, Gr. plani)—the

antonym of sobriety

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychast

an emphasis on freedom here, on increasing freedom, and thereby love. This is very Buddhist in some ways

but differs in being very relational and personal and not, rather, empty.

Now, read here about the distinction between God's essence and energies, and our experience of God's

uncreated energies.

quote:

Excerpt - on Page 3: " ... Their loving presence as personalized relations of uncreated energies of love

surrounds us, permeates us, bathes us constantly in their great loving communication ... "

Excerpt - on Page 61: " ... distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. This is closely

related to his theology of light; for the uncreated energies are energies of light and of love. ... "

Excerpt - " ... to the uncreated energies of God, as well as trinitarian interpretations and the whole project of

process theology. ... "

Excerpt - " ... is solved and the door found in the horizon of immanence: Christianity's disclosure of an

immediate experi- ence of the uncreated energies of a radically transcendent, personal God. Here philosophical

solutions and theological truth coincide: the truth is a Who. Such ... "