The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Entries in Category |

Science: Does the Sun Rise?

A reader, Mark Kelly, sends along these reflections on the question I raised in a recent First Things column.  The remainder of this post is from Kelly:

“If you ask any modern to visualise the earth, or draw the earth, you will without exception evoke an exterior view of our planet, outside it looking in (or, to be perfectly honest, above it looking down, which is true from whichever direction you look at it if you are outside it). We are used to this mental image of the earth, it is in all our school textbooks, on every television show and in every graphic image of the earth we’ve ever seen, and it is the first image that occurs to us when asked. It is, however, not a human perspective of earth. neither is it one which has been physically glimpsed by all but a handful of men. How interesting that the primary image of the earth in the mind of every modern is actually God’s perspective on the earth not a distinctly human perspective. I find myself wishing that there was a character from Greek mythology who stole the perspective of the gods so I could name this concept after them. how is it that all moderns have an ingrained perspective of the earth that is technically not properly a human perspective? how is it that we instantly imagine ourselves outside the earth looking down on it without thinking?

“This idea seems very much in keeping with the human antagonism toward being underneath, and the desire to ascend beyond human restriction. . .

Continue reading…

Science: Does the Sun Rise?

It’s a couple of days old, but you can find my reflections on this cutting-edge scientific question at http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/10/does-the-sun-rise/peter-j-leithart.  And don’t miss the fun discussion that ensued in the comments.

Science Theology - Trinity: Mathematical modalism

“The Trinity is a mathematical absurdity in the context of a god limited in his operations to just the four dimensions of length, width, height, and time,” writes Hugh Ross (The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God).  To avoid the absurdity, Ross suggests that God exists in multi-dimensional space.  As summarized by John Byl (Divine Challenge: On Matter, Mind, Math & Meaning), Ross argues that we imagine a “two-dimensional creature living on a flat plane.  If a human were to stick three spread fingers through this plane the two-dimensional creature would experience this as three distinct, isolated circles.  Yet, in the higher, three-dimensional world, these three fingers are actually connected to a single body.  Ross conjectures that, in a similar fashion, God’s three Persons might be unified in a single entity in a higher-dimensional space.”

I haven’t confirmed that this is in fact Ross’s argument.  Whether it is his or not, it is about as archetypally modalist an argument as one would want to find – assuming, always, that finding modalist arguments is one’s aim.  Even if it’s not Ross’s argument, it would fit neatly into Ross’s understanding of Genesis and creation.  And it leads me to suspect that there is an implicit modalism lurking behind some accounts of creation.  At the very least, the pattern of argument or thought is parallel: For modalists, there is an unknown God behind the revealed God; for non-literal interpretations of Genesis, there is a creation story lurking behind the revealed story.

Science: Genetic determinism

Ted Peters points out the duplicity of genetic determinism: “The growing myth of genetic determinism blows first in one direction: if we are programmed totally by our DAN< then what we think is human freedom is in fact a delusion.  Then the myth blows the opposite way: if we can apply our best engineering technology to DNA, then we can gain control over nature and guide our own evolutionary future.  The genes determine the future; we want to determine the genes.”

Science Theology - Creation: Mastering nature

In his discussion of the “Baconian project” in his recent Nature and Altering It, Allen Verhey makes the common-sensical, but often ignored, observation that mastery of nature doesn’t necessarily mean improvement: “Knowledge, in Bacon’s view, is power over nature, and the myth is that mastery over nature inevitably brings human wellbeing in its train.”  Despite the recognition that science and technology is sometimes folly, “the mythos persists, establishing an ethos of confidence in technology to remedy our problems, including the problem created by technology.”

Verhey notes that the Baconian myth assumes that “The natural order and natural processes have no dignity of their own; their value is reduced to their utility to humanity.  And nature does not serve humanity ‘naturally.’  Nature threatens to rule and ruin humanity.  The fault that runs through our world and through our lives must finally be located in nature.  In the myth of the Baconian project, nature is the enemy. . . . In this myth technology becomes the faithful savior.”

Science: Science in the making

Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is built around the insight that science is a Janus, one face “ready-made science” with its apparently closed black boxes and the other the face of “science in the making” where we see how boxes get closed, or almost closed.  He describes the procedure of his book by imagining a comic strip:

“We start with a textbook sentence which is devoid of any trace of fabrication, construction or ownership; we then put it in quotation marks, and surround it with a bubble, place it in the mouth of someone who speaks; then we add to this speaking character another character to whom it is speaking; then we place all of them in a specific situation, somewhere in time and space, surrounded by equipment, machines, colleagues; then when the controversy heats up a bit we look at where the disputing people go and what sort of new elements they fetch, recruit or seduce in order to convince their colleagues; then, we see how the people being convinced stop discussing with one another; situations, localisations, even people start being erased; on the last picture we see a new sentence, without any quotation marks, written in a text book similar to the first one we started with in the first picture.”

This is the process of “science in the making,” moving toward the status of “ready-made science.”

Science: Technological Sublime

David Nye points to the fact that experiences of the sublime are not confined to the grand vistas of nature, but are also found in technological and urban civilization.

“A city sounds much different at the top of a skyscraper than on the streets below.  The wind makes on feel more vulnerable out on the open span of a long bridge.  The steam locomotive shook the ground and filled the air with an alien smell of steam, smoke, and sparks; the Saturn rocket did much the same thing on a larger scale.  The strong contrast between the silence of a rocket’s liftoff and the sudden roar that follows a few seconds later is also a vital element in making that spectacle sublime.  The sheer size of the crowd attracted to a technological display further arouses the emotions.  In each event, the human subject feels that the familiar envelope of sensory experience has been rent asunder.”

Science: Let There Be Newton

According to Heidegger’s essay on modern science, Newton’s theory of motion implied eight fundamental metaphysical shifts.  First, because Newton’s theories applied to “every body,” the traditional distinction of heavenly and earthly bodies, and heavenly and earthy motion, “has become obsolete. . . . All natural bodies are essentially of the same kind.”

Second, the priority of circular to linear motion also disappears.  Circular motion is no longer considered a cause – i.e., the moon’s circular motion around the earth as a cause of the earth’s rotation.  Rather, circular motion is an effect that needs to be explained: Why doesn’t the moon fly off from its path in a straight line, since linear motion is natural.

Third, this implies that distinctions in place also disappear: “Place no longer is where the body belongs according to its inner nature, but only a position in relation to other positions.”  Any body can be in any place, and it doesn’t matter.

Continue reading…

Science: Snail explorers

Darwin writes in Descent of Man of a “pair of land-snails . . . one of which was weakly, [placed by a Mr. Lonsdale] into a small and ill-provided garden.  After a short time the strong and healthy individual disappeared, and was traced by its track of slime over a wall into an adjoining well-stocked garden.  Mr. Lonsdale concluded that it had deserted its sickly mate; but, after an absence of twenty-four hours, it returned, and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall.”

Science: Paracats

Ivan Illich (Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health) writes about the unintended effects of insecticides in Borneo: “Insecticides used in villages to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which are resistant.  Geckoes fed on these, became lethargic, and fell prey to cats.  The cats died, rats multiplied, and with rats came the threat of epidemic bubonic plague.”

To stop the dominoes, “the army had to parachute cats into the jungle village.”

Science: Elective Affinity

In an intriguing chapter on modern agriculture in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St), James C. Scott notes that the isolation of a few variables is “a key tenet of experimental science” and “both valuable and necessary to scientific work.”  It also, necessarily, means that scientists see things a certain way.  He quotes a chaos theorist: “There is a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental.  Then you presume that the other things you don’t understand are details.  The assumption is that there are a small number of principles that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state – this is the truly analytic notion – and somehow you put these together in some more complicated  ways when you want to solve more dirty problems.  If you can.”

With regard to agricultural research in particular, Scott argues that “scientific agricultural research has an elective affinity with the agricultural techniques that lie within reach of its powerful methods.”  These are primarily modernist agricultural techniques, measured by yields: “Maximizing the yields of pure-stand crops is one technique where its power can be used to best advantage. . . . The forms of agriculture that conformed to their modernist aesthetic and their politico-administrative interests also happened to fit securely within the perimeter of their professional scientific vocation.”

That is to say: What I don’t catch isn’t fish.

Science: God and science

Eagleton again, explaining the significance of the biblical idea of creation: “Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works.  This is the task of science.  There is thus a curious connection between the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the professional life of Richard Dawkins.  Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job.  It is thus particularly churlish of him to call the existence of his employer into question.”

Science: Climate of Skepticism

A week ago, the First Things web site published a piece of mine on global warming.  See it here:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/02/climate-of-skepticism

Science: End of ends

Descartes aimed for an objective science, not the science of the scholastics.  And that meant, especially, the deletion of final cause from science: “The entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in Physics.”

“Cause” is reduced to efficient cause.  Purposes and ends might be nice for morals and literature.  But they are not scientific, not knowledge strictly speaking.

Science: Empire of science

Bacon distinguishes three “grades of ambition in mankind.”  First, there is the ambition to exert power over one’s native country, but this is  a “vulgar and degenerate” ambition.  More dignity is evident in “those who labor to extend the power of their country and its dominion among men,” though along with dignity there is of course “covetousness.”  The most noble ambition, however, is “to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe,” a “more wholesome and more noble thing than the other two.”  This is the work of art and science.

Bacon is picking up on the biblical theme of dominion in the last of these ambitions, but he links this with an optimism about human uses of power that is not biblical at all: “Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest, and let power be given it: the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion.”  Apparently, the sheer fact of dominion will overcome original sin with the light of reason and religion.  Such is the pure empire of science.

Science: What Mad Pursuit, 2

Steven Hayward (Weekly Standard) has a balanced and thorough analysis of the climate science emails made public a few weeks ago.  Hayward is not a knee-jerk global warming skeptic.  He begins the final paragraph of his piece with “Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future.”  And he, quite rightly, acknowledges that “The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation.”  He recognizes the “distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists” whose public claims have been more cautious.

Instead, he sees the scandal as a particularly egregious revelation of the politicization of science: “What [the emails]reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. . . .

Continue reading…

Science: What Mad Pursuit

Over at the New Atlantis site, Ivan Kenneally gives a brief and damning summary of the contents of emails hacked from University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU).  He writes,

“Perhaps the most damning e-mails concern CRU deputy director Keith Briffa’s analysis of the diameter of tree rings in Yamal, Siberia. That research is a major evidentiary pillar in support of twentieth-century global warming and it helped resurrect Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’ graph of global warming. The scientist largely responsible for challenging Mann’s work, Steve McIntyre, turned his attention to Briffa’s resurrection of it and accused him of cherry-picking samples that would confirm his politically desirable hypothesis.

Continue reading…

Science: End of materialism

A funny thing happened on the way to mapping the genome, says James Le Fanu (Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves).  Humans have 25,000 genes.  That’s enough to get the job done, of course, but scientists were surprised to discover so few.  To transform an egg into a baby, those genes have to “multi-task.”

That’s just the beginning of sorrows.  A fly has 17,000 genes, and so do tiny worms.  Why are the numbers so similar when the organisms are so vastly different.  And vertebrates: Chimps and even mice have a genome that is “virtually interchangeable” with human the human genome.  Good news for Darwinists perhaps; bad news for people who wanted to crack the mystery of living things.

Le Fanu explains the disappointment:

Continue reading…

Science: The Real is the Relational

In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction.  This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical process there are many systems that are of such exquisite sensitivity to the details of their circumstance that they cannot be properly isolated from the effects of their environment.  The slightest disturbance will totally change their future behaviour.”

The discovery of the relationality of the universe might force a re-vision of what we have thought of as the laws of nature: “the detailed character of the laws of nature that we have formulated on the basis of isolatable experimentation is no more than what one might call a ‘downward-emergent’ approximation to some more holistic account of physical reality, so that what we presently believe we know is only really valid in the special circumstances that an effective degree of separation is a good approximation to the situation.”

He sums up with a gloss on Zizioulias: Not “Being as Communion” but “Reality is relational.”

Science: Rational universe

Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy spin-off from that necessity.  The universe has proved to be astonishingly rationally transparent, and the human mind remarkable apt to the comprehension of its structure.  We can penetrate the secrets of the subatomic realm of quarks and gluons, and we can make maps of cosmic curved spacetime, both regimes that have no direct practical impact upon us, and both exhibiting properties that are counterintuitive in relation to our ordinary habits of thought.  Our understanding of the workings of the world greatly exceed anything that could simply be required for human survival.”

Mathematics is a particularly penetrating illustration of the point.  Though “mathematics is pure thought,” yet it enables us to discern the inner structure and beauty of the physical universe.  Polkinghorne quotes Eugene Wigner’s comment about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” and notes that for Wigner mathematics is “a gift that we neither deserved nor understood.”

« Previous Entries in Category |