Science and Christian theology 2: Imagination, evidence and theory construction

Alister McGrath, 2016. Enriching our vision of reality: Theology and the natural sciences in dialogue. London: SPCK

This is no. 2 of three posts on McGrath’s book. The first is here.

Chapter 5 centres on the similarities between theology and the sciences.

McGrath begins by remarking that our mindset, the framework through which we look at the world, is clearly referenced by Jesus when he said, ‘the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’ (Mark 1:15). Important here is the meaning of the word ‘repentance’, Greek metanoia. It has become restricted in Christian vocabulary. In Greek it meant ‘a radical change of mind’ or ‘a fundamental intellectual reorientation’. Jesus, says McGrath, invites us to

turn away from older habits of thought and action and embrace a new way of thinking and living. Christ is asking his audience for a radical reorientation of their minds and hearts. Repentance is certainly part of this transformation – but there is more to it than this. Repentance does not mean primarily ‘a sense of regret’ but renouncing and abandoning ways of thinking ‘which are not large enough for God’s mystery’. [Norris 2001:197] (my emphasis)

McGrath recalls his own conversion from atheism to Christianity, which he sees as a change of mindset, a metanoia that brought a new ‘way of conceiving the world’.

On the role of the imagination in the sciences, McGrath comments:

… the paradox of empiricism is that while we must begin all our reflections with the data of experience, the task of making sense of this data requires us to posit some things that lie beyond our experience – such as gravity, dark matter and so on. Why? Because the theories we develop to help us make sense of the world often show us that we need to hypothesize hidden or unobservable entities if the things we can see are to fit together in a coherent way. Or to put this more simply: we sometimes need to infer the existence of things we can’t see to help us explain what we can see.

McGrath later comments that when he was studying physics, he lived in a world of quantum mechanics that had its own counterintuitive rationality (he recommends Polkinghorne 2002 as an introduction to the latter). Sir Peter Medawar remarked that public presentations of science disturbingly fail to acknowledge the critical role of imagination. In Surprised by joy C.S. Lewis writes of the opposite pulls of reason and imagination before his conversion:

On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

His return to faith was founded on a sense that he was missing something that would help him make sense of his life and the world.

When McGrath first studied theology, he assumed that the core of Christianity was a set of doctrines like those set out in the Creeds. With time, he recognised that Christian doctrines represent an ‘intellectual formalization of something deeper and more fundamental – the narrative of faith, developed and unfolded in the Christian Bible, with a capacity to capture the imagination as well as engaging the reason.’ This thought, that theology has an imaginative dimension that defies capture in words, has found expression at various times and places. In Dante’s Divine Comedy we read,

From that moment onwards my power of sight exceeded That of speech, which fails at such a vision.

The poet George Herbert (1593–1633) writes about the role of theology in his poem The elixir. It begins

Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see.

and in the next stanza,

A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heav’n espy.

The point McGrath is making here is that, in order to make sense of empirical data, both science and theology make imaginative use of things unseen. He develops the idea that a doctrine is a theological theory, intellectually parallel to a scientific theory. An important aspect of theory-construction and elaboration is the recognition of anomalies, things that don’t fit in. An anomaly sometimes leads to replacement of the old theory by a new one, and McGrath gives a number of excellently explained historical examples of an anomaly leading to theoretical change, not the least being the expansion of Newtonian mechanics by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He suggests that an obvious anomaly in Christian theorising is what C.S. Lewis called ‘the problem of pain’, i.e. the existence of suffering. In Richard Dawkins’ ‘metaphysically expanded version of Darwinism’ pain is unproblematic, yet, says McGrath, suffering clearly is a problem for people. In the light of its vision of a renewed creation, Christianity admits to a sense that this is not the way things are supposed to be, but has an intellectual difficulty in accounting for it: pain is anomalous. The Book of Job addresses this fact: when Job’s comforters can come up with no adequate explanation of his situation, God invites Job to see the big picture of the universe, transcending everything that Job could see from his earthly perspective (on this, see the post on McLeish here). Job still receives no explanation for his suffering, but is left with a sense that there is an answer, even if he cannot fully discern it.

In Chapter 6 McGrath addresses the role of evidence in science. He comments that the criteria scientists use to evaluate evidence are just conventions that have been found to work adequately. He quotes the philosopher of science Joseph Rouse, who writes that there are ‘no generally applicable standards of rational acceptability in science’, but a ‘roughly shared understanding’ of certain procedures reflecting ‘the judgments of a community concerning what is credible and reliable in the context of their ongoing work.’ (Rouse 1996:124). The current

dominant theory of how we decide which theory is best is known as ‘inference to the best explanation’.¹  Basically, this theory lines up the observational evidence and asks how this stacks up in the light of the various ways of explaining it. A number of criteria are generally used to assess these rival theories, including simplicity, degree of fit, fruitfulness and comprehensiveness. Often scientists are forced to make probability judgements – this theory is probably the best.

Thus there is never a ‘proven’ answer in science. In this respect theology and science do not differ.

McGrath writes that one can assess a theory in two ways, asking what reasons there are for suggesting it is true, and how successful it is in interpreting its subject. The first question concerns the evidence that has led to the theory. The second concerns how well it makes sense of reality ‘in effect, inviting us to imagine what the world would look like if the theory was right, and comparing this with what we actually see. Ideally, a theory is both evidenced and evidencing – that is, combining both approaches.’ String theory, for example, is widely regarded as failing on the first criterion.

An issue that has given rise to recent debate between atheists and Christians is whether it is rational to believe in something that lies beyond our experience.

For Christians, God is the best explanation of the world we see around us and what we experience within us. We don’t believe in God because we have abandoned rationality but because we see God as both the source and the ultimate goal of human reason. Most of the great writers of the early church – including Athanasius of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo – made this point.

But Christianity goes beyond this. It argues on the basis of evidence given by the New Testament writers that ‘this God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ; that God became observable in history.’

In the last section of Chapter 6, entitled ‘The rationality of faith’, McGrath cites a number of recent Christian thinkers who have found that their Christianity offers, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ words ‘the only explanation of the universe that is intellectually satisfactory’. These writers also include Simone Weil (1909–1943), C.S Lewis (1898-1963), Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), and G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who wrote, ‘The phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon’ (Chesterton 1903).

McGrath continues,

The whole issue of making sense of reality is deeply embedded within both the natural sciences and the Christian faith. Indeed, if I might offer a personal perspective, one factor that led me decisively away from my youthful atheism to Christianity was my growing realization that the Christian faith made far more sense of what I saw around me and experienced within me than its atheist alternatives.

The psychologist William James (1842–1910) argues in his 1897 essay ‘The will to believe’ that we all need ‘working hypotheses’ to make sense of our experience of the world, hypotheses that are unproven but which we act on because we have found them reliable. Faith is a set of such hypotheses. Everyone, whether or not they are of a faith, has to make judgments that go beyond the evidence available.

McGrath emphasises that the scientific positivism (’scientism’) that is basic to the New Atheism is ‘a severely inadequate account of the scientific method, which fails to do justice to the ambiguity of nature, the provisionality of scientific theories and the fallibility of human judgement.’ It fails to recognise that we make judgments about what we believe by assessing evidence. ‘Christianity, like science, is about motivated belief,’ he concludes.

I cannot prove that rape is wrong; that it is better to love than to hate; that democracy is better than fascism; that there is a God. Neither can anyone else. But I believe that I am right in taking these positions and can give good reasons for asserting that they are properly motivated and justified.

The third (last) post is here.

References

Norris, Kathleen, 2001. Dakota: A spiritual geography. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Polkinghorne, John, 2002. Quantum theory: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.