Science and Christian theology 3: Models, analogy, prediction

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

This is the last of three posts on McGrath’s book. The second is here, the first here.

Chapter 7, ‘Analogies, models and mystery: representing a complex reality’, looks further at the use of analogies and models in both science and theology. McGrath examines the way an analogy may be pressed too far, taking as his example the term ‘ransom’ as an encapsulation of Jesus’ life given for sinners (Mark 10:45; 1 Timothy 2:6). A ransom entails a payment, a recipient and a liberation (and more). The New Testament talks of the cross as a payment and as a liberation. Some theologians of the patristic and mediaeval periods added a recipient—the devil—going beyond the New Testament and pushing the analogy to its limits.

Ian T. Ramsey (1915–1972), a British philosopher of religion, addressed the question of how far we can press a (biblical) analogy (see Evans 1971). He comments that for, say, the nature of God, the New Testament uses a range of analogies, such as king, father, shepherd, each denoting an aspect of God’s nature. None is exhaustive, and all are complementary. We would not regard the arbitrary behaviour of some human kings, for example, as an attribute of God, and the image of the shepherd ensures this. Models need to be allowed to interact with each other, Ramsey proposes.

Some models use analogies that are in apparent opposition, like the use of both particles and a wave as models of light, and the idea that Jesus is both truly human and truly divine. The latter arose out of a recognition by theologians like Athanasius that a model of Jesus as simply human (the Ebionite heresy) or as purely divine (the Docetic heresy) was inadequate. Since—Athanasius argued—only God can save humanity, Jesus was divine—God incarnate.

It is here that McGrath finds it legitimate to use the term ‘mystery’. The human capacity to penetrate below the surface of apparent reality is limited. If we insist that the rationality of the cosmos and indeed of God himself conform to human reason, we risk being unable to grasp the ‘counterintuitive patterns of the quantum world’ and the strange doctrine of the Trinity, which Emil Brunner (1889–1966) regarded as a security doctrine (Schutzlehre) to prevent Christians formulating deficient notions of God. As Augustine wrote, si comprehendis, non est Deus (‘if you can get your head round it, it isn’t God’).

Theology does not appear prepackaged in the New Testament. It ‘emerged as a way of thinking about the nature of God and the significance of Jesus Christ,’ writes McGrath. Further, ‘at least some of the fundamental themes of the Christian faith lie beyond reason’s capacity to prove them – such as the existence of God. To use the language of Christian theology: these truths are revealed to us, not made up by us.’ But having been revealed, we check them and discover how well they work.

Chapter 8 is devoted to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as an example of how scientific theories actually function. Darwin made observations of the natural world, and set about finding a theory that would explain these observations, in McGrath’s words, ‘as simply, elegantly and persuasively as possible’. His theory is a textbook case of ‘inference to the best explanation’ (see previous post).

Popular versions of science emphasise the necessity of prediction, yet Darwin knew that this theory did not and could not predict (see Lloyd 2008), as he was offering an account of biological history. At one point the philosopher Karl Popper (1978) suggested that Darwin’s non-predictive theory was not really scientific, a criticism he later retracted. Hitchcock & Sober (2004) continue the discussion of accommodation to a theory vs prediction, and argue that prediction is not always superior.

As mentioned above (in regard to Ch 6) William James held that all human beings need working hypotheses that enable day-to-day operation. He defines faith (see Myers 1986) as ‘belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible.’

The positivist view of science is quite a long way from real scientific practice as exemplified by Darwin. McGrath writes,

Neither Darwin’s theory nor Christian theology can really be said to ‘predict’; they do, however, accommodate what is known about the world, even though both experience points of tension. . . . In the end, some theories die because of their incapacity to deal with … anomalies. Darwin knew this; he also believed his theory would be shown capable of coping with them, even if the final vindication of it lay in the future. Surely the same is true for Christianity, which affirms that currently we see things through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12) but rejoices that we shall one day see them with the clarity found only within the New Jerusalem.

Chapters 9 and 10 are further meditations on the interface between science and theology, focussing on the proposition that theology is able to handle levels of reality that science cannot. McGrath writes:

The basic point I want to make clear is simple: we need both scientific and theological perspectives on human nature. Science can only fill in part of our understanding of ourselves; theology can take things to a new level, helping us with fundamental questions of meaning, identity and purpose. We need to bring both together if we are to enrich our vision of reality, even if that means we have to sort out some border disputes along the way.

McGrath writes,

What moved me decisively away from atheism back in 1971 was a growing conviction that it wasn’t as good at explaining these observations and experiences as Christianity. C. S. Lewis came to a similar conclusion around 1930, reflected in his remark that he was an ‘empirical theist’ who came to believe in God as a result of inductive thinking.

It is not that the world’s order or beauty prove there is a God, but rather that Christian belief makes sense of our world.

Is science the sole determiner of what we can know about nature? One of the most important functions of natural theology is to protest against the radically reduced visions of nature that arise from the movement sometimes known as ‘scientific imperialism’ but now generally as simply ‘scientism’

John Keats (1795–1821) in his 1820 poem ‘Lamia’ was already expressing this concern:

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), an American theologian, reinforced this point in the late 1920s. He ‘believed that modern Western culture had suffered a radical imaginative failure in that it seemed to lack any sense of the role of the “poetic imagination” in the quest for truth, whether theological or scientific.’ (McGrath’s words). It was apparently Niebuhr who invented the term ‘scientism’. It presented itself as presuppositionless, and thus did not acknowledge its own covert assumptions, one of which is that science explains everything.

McGrath begins his conclusion by quoting a letter written to a friend by the novelist Evelyn Waugh after his conversion to Christianity in 1930:

Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.

References

Evans, Donald, 1971. Ian Ramsey on Talk about God. Religious Studies 7:125–40.

Hitchcock, Christopher & Elliott Sober, 2004. Prediction vs. accommodation and the risk of overfitting. British Journal for Philosophy of Science 55:1–34.

Lipton, Peter, 2004. Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd edn. London: Routledge

Lloyd, Elisabeth Anne, 2008. The nature of Darwin’s support for the theory of natural selection. In her Science, politics, and evolution, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Myers, Gerald E., 1986. William James, his life and thought. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 1929. Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Colby.

Popper , Karl R., 1978. Natural Selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica 32:339–55.

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