I agree with most of what Michael Hanby says in his Conversation Starter. Like Michael, I’m heartened by recent trajectories of the religion-and-science discourse, most especially by the growing confidence of theologians in grappling with the theological foundations of science. Michael rightly says the scientific revolution was also a theological revolution and is also correct in his general claim that any theory of nature is necessarily a theory of God and nature. Michael’s brief critique of posthumanist technocracy is, as always, penetrating. Like Michael, I want to capitalize on the opening. But I want to press the advantage further than Michael is willing to do. At least I think so.
I wish to pick at his claim that “the rational superiority of theology [does not] consist in its providing better explanations of the dynamics of the natural systems and processes that are the subjects of the various sciences.” A radical distinction between science, theology, and metaphysics enables us to bring theology and metaphysics “more interiorly to bear upon the sciences.” That is, theology doesn’t engage the sciences on their turf as sciences but exhumes and examines their hidden metaphysical and theological assumptions. In particular, creation doesn’t “offer a better explanation of ‘how the world works.’” Instead, creation provides a more adequate account of “what the world is.” Theology rescues reason “from the reductive functionalism of scientific rationality.”
To my ear, this sounds discordant next to Michael’s denial that “divine and natural agency are mutually exclusive forms of causality.” If they’re harmonious, don’t we need to employ both modes to explain the workings of creation? Or, Michael seems to introduce a questionable duality of being and function: Theology confines itself to the former and doesn’t address the latter. Granted that we don’t wish to reduce being to function, why should they be set in this kind of opposition?
Starting from the other end: If Michael is right that scientific discourse is inescapably entwined with metaphysics and theology, it doesn’t really practice a reductively functional form of rationality after all. Indeed, Michael’s characterization of scientific rationality as “reductive,” “functionalist,” and “mechanistic” doesn’t accurately describe how scientific theorizing works. Vern Poythress argues that scientists rely heavily on metaphor: “The distinctiveness of scientific description is largely the distinctiveness of its special species of metaphor, the model,” which is “a controlled metaphor, setting up a detailed correspondence.” But control and detail are matters of degree, so that “there is a continuum . . . between science and poetry.” Applied to nature, “mechanism” is a metaphor, and if engineering can provide the guiding model for how the world works, why can’t theology?[i]
Borrowing the terms of Peter Harrison’s meta-critique of modern science, it seems Michael is willing to leave the territories of religion and science more or less intact, or at least he doesn’t want to demolish the boundary markers. He honors theology as queen of natural science, but he’s wary about letting her meddle in her subjects’ business. I accept the caution, yet I don’t want to reduce theology to a figurehead. Despite what he seems to say in his essay, I don’t think Michael does either. His splendid No God, No Science?[ii] provides several lines of theological argument that violate the strictures he places on theology. His theological account of what the world is bleeds over into a theological account of how things work. I summarize a couple of his own arguments, the better to nudge him a bit.
First, neither ancient philosophy nor modern science can make sense of the uniqueness of individual things. Ancient philosophers believed each thing is what it is because of its form, yet also recognized individual things possess something more than form. Socrates doesn’t fully instantiate the form of humanity, and so, as an individual man, he is less than the form. At the same time, Socrates possesses unique features, and unique combinations of traits, experiences, capacities that aren’t captured by any definition of “man.” Paradoxically, form and individual each surpass the other. How can this be? Pre-Christian metaphysics can’t account for the paradox. Neither can the mechanistic paradigm of modern science, which deals in aggregates and tends to set uniqueness aside entirely.
Michael resolves this puzzle by pointing to the elevation of “person” as a metaphysical category in and after the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. Calling Father, Son, and Spirit “Persons” was, among other things, a way to capture the irreducible uniqueness of each. As God, each Person is infinite in Himself, and yet also each is infinitely different from the others. In the Triune God, we discover the archetype of which the mutual transcendence of form and individual is a created ectype.[iii]
Now, Michael’s argument is about what the world is. But surely this carries implications for the way the world works. Michael affirms as much when he goes on to say that we inhabit a world of continuous novelty, teeming at every moment with fresh instantiations of existing kinds – absolutely unique snowflakes, leaves, roaches, tardigrades, and novel moments in the history of individual creatures. No matter how similar things may be, they’re never interchangeable, not even, Michael argues, clones. Like the uniqueness of the divine Persons, the uniqueness of created beings is infinite; there is a chasm between things that cannot be bridged. A subject-oriented science that takes Trinitarian theology as its guiding model will look very different from a science that loses individuality in its rush to aggregate.
Second, and relatedly, Hanby explores the metaphysics of causality: What does it mean for X to cause Y? On the one hand, causation assumes a shared order within which X and Y exist. At the same time, it assumes a fundamental difference between the two. X is a cause only if it produces a novel something, Y, that is not simply pre-contained in X. Once again, we confront a paradox: Y is wholly dependent on X, yet it cannot be reduced to X. Each new giraffe is caused by a pair of pre-existing giraffes, but each is utterly new. Without this note of novelty, the effect is not an effect at all, but merely an emanation or extension from the cause. Thus a deeper paradox emerges: The cause can only be a cause only if it’s more than itself. But how can a thing surpass itself?
Mechanistic science can’t reckon with this paradox. Since Newton, causation has typically been understood as extrinsic. Each thing is external to every other thing, and one thing operates causally on another by exerting an external force. Aristotle distinguished between natural and violent causation (and motion); an acorn grows to an oak naturally, while the cue ball moves the eight ball violently. Because it assumes things are exterior to one another, mechanistic science treats all causation (and motion) as violent. It’s bumping billiard balls all the way down.
Once again, Trinitarian theology offers a more adequate picture. Within the Triune communion, there is both dependence and novelty. The Father is the fullness of causality, the source and fountain of all. He generates the Son, who is utterly unique, surpassing the Father not in His divine being but as Person. The eternal generation of the Son is not like-produces-like, but something more complex: The Father generates Another who is infinitely identical to, yet simultaneously infinitely unlike, the Source. Trinitarian theology is a metaphysics of love, insofar as love is the coincidence of infinite unity and infinite difference. Thus, in creating, the Triune God produces a world that is genuinely other, not merely an extension of Himself. And the Triune God produces a world of cause and effect that exhibit both continuity and continuous novelty.[iv]
Once again, I want to ask, Doesn’t Michael’s account of causation describe how the world works? And doesn’t it do so more adequately than alternative theories? What kind of scientific investigation might emerge if Queen Theology provided the shaping metaphors and models for cause and effect? Is there a science, as well as a metaphysics, of love? Why not?
Being myself a man of Fundamentalist impulses who never met a Bible he didn’t thump, I want nudge the conversation in a biblical direction. The Bible speaks frequently about what happens in creation. Does it thereby provide insight into the “way the world works”? Does it thereby tread rudely on the terrain science claims as its own? I think so. Let me offer two interconnected illustrations of what I have in mind.
First, in Genesis 1-2, Leviticus 11, and Deuteronomy 14, living things are classified by environment. Creatures that swarm in the seas are “fish,” whether they have to come up for breath or receive oxygen through their gills, whether they lay eggs or give birth to live offspring. Winged creatures that fly across the face of the firmament are “birds,” even if they’re fuzzy as rats. The three genera of creatures inhabit the land are also distinguished by environment: Cattle (behemah) are domesticated animals; beasts of the field (chayyah) are wild animals; and creepers move to and fro across boundaries. This scheme is no less scientific than the modern one. It self-evidently fits our observed experience of the world, more so than the modern system: Children have to un-learn their quite plausible belief that whales are fish. And the biblical classification suggests a framework for biology, one in which organism and environment correlate and are mutually defining.
A second observation on Genesis before drawing further conclusions: According to Genesis 1, both fish and land animals are “living souls” (nephesh chayyah; Genesis 1:21, 24), and Genesis 2 adds birds to this category (2:19, where beasts and birds are brought to Adam as nephesh chayyah). The usage isn’t a fluke. Animals are described as nephesh about 170 times in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis uses the same phrase to describe Adam after Yahweh forms him from dust and breathes life into his nose (2:7). Contrary to a popular Christian view, man isn’t different from animals because he has a soul. That he shares with animals. He’s distinct in being the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28) and in being specially formed and enlivened by the Creator.
What does it mean to call an animal a “living soul”? In Genesis 1-2, nepheshim have the power to multiply; they produce fresh instances of themselves, in eggs or through live birth, rather than simply seeds. nephesh implies mobility – nepheshim teem, swarm, fly, walk. Elsewhere, soul is the “organ” of desire (Deuteronomy 12:20; 14:26) and repugnance (Leviticus 26:11, 15). Souls hunger and thirst and are satisfied with food and drink (Proverbs 27:7; Isaiah 55:2). Sexual desire is an expression of soul (Jeremiah 2:24; Ezekiel 23:18). Soul is the center of emotion: Souls grieve (Judges 18:25), rejoice (Psalm 35:9), love (Song of Songs 1:7) and hate (Jeremiah 6:8).
Soul is sometimes the source of higher human capacities. It’s the source of speech (Lamentations 3:24), and the site of knowledge (Psalm 139:14), wisdom (Proverbs 24:14), and thought (Esther 4:13; Proverbs 23:7). Souls respond morally, hearing the voice of Yahweh (Deuteronomy 30:2), guarding His commandments (2 Kings 23:3), and walking before Him (1 Kings 2:4). “Soul” is sometimes linked with “will” and choice (Job 7:15). Soul is the focus of identity. To say “my soul” is simply to say “me” (Genesis 39:6; Numbers 23:10).
Not all of these potencies of soul are evident in animals, but many are, including those we sometimes associate exclusively with human beings. Animals act with intention and purpose.[v] Anyone with a dog knows animals have personalities.[vi] We cultivate personal relationships with our pets, who can learn to respond to names, commands, and affection. Pets, in turn, experience and exhibit affection, enthusiasm, joy. We’re not projecting anthropomorphically when we say our dog is happy to see us; we can tell by his leaps, his tumping tail, his sprays of canine slobber. Since Descartes, modern science has often adopted the opposite assumption: Animals are biological machines that act by instinct, without thought or purpose or will or any semblance of personality. A zoology guided by Genesis would assume from the beginning that it’s dealing with living souls.
Putting those two observations together: In Scripture, creatures are what they are by virtue of inhabiting (or ruling) a particular zone of creation, and, conversely, an environment (sea, land, sky) is what it is by virtue of its inhabitants. Environments are created to serve the organisms that live there and environments are dependent for their flourishing on the actions and purposes of those organisms. A biblical biotheology would thus at least modify Darwinism, which skates so close to environmental determinism that it ignores the integral role of organisms – especially human organisms – in maintaining environments. Scripture impels us to challenge both the “naturalist” tendency to observe organisms outside their environment and the “dissective” imagination that seeks to understand living things by killing and tearing them to pieces. The Bible’s description of the world thus hints at certain directions for scientific theory, and even suggests appropriate methods of investigation.
So, I pose this question (or register this objection) to Michael: Doesn’t Christian theology tell us something, perhaps a great deal, about how the world works? Assuming what theology tells us is true, shouldn’t scientists take notice? May we say “Trinity” and “eternal generation” while formulating scientific theories? Aristotle could say “soul” when writing about the Generation of Animals. May we?
[i] Verb Poythress, “Science as Allegory,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 35.2 (1983), available at Frame-Poythress.org. I am put in mind of Peter Harrison’s discussion of the harmony between order of signs and the order of causes in medieval science and biblical interpretation; The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2017) 55-82.
[ii] Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
[iii] Hanby, No God, No Science? 304-6. Michael sees here the deep source for the later Thomistic distinction between essence and existence.
[iv] Hanby, No God, No Science? 339-344.
[v] See Stephen Talbott, “Evolution and the Purposes of Life,” New Atlantis (2017).
[vi] Cat-owners are excused for their skepticism on this point.
I agree with most of what Michael Hanby says in his Conversation Starter. Like Michael, I’m heartened by recent trajectories of the religion-and-science discourse, most especially by the growing confidence of theologians in grappling with the theological foundations of science. Michael rightly says the scientific revolution was also a theological revolution and is also correct in his general claim that any theory of nature is necessarily a theory of God and nature. Michael’s brief critique of posthumanist technocracy is, as always, penetrating. Like Michael, I want to capitalize on the opening. But I want to press the advantage further than Michael is willing to do. At least I think so.
I wish to pick at his claim that “the rational superiority of theology [does not] consist in its providing better explanations of the dynamics of the natural systems and processes that are the subjects of the various sciences.” A radical distinction between science, theology, and metaphysics enables us to bring theology and metaphysics “more interiorly to bear upon the sciences.” That is, theology doesn’t engage the sciences on their turf as sciences but exhumes and examines their hidden metaphysical and theological assumptions. In particular, creation doesn’t “offer a better explanation of ‘how the world works.’” Instead, creation provides a more adequate account of “what the world is.” Theology rescues reason “from the reductive functionalism of scientific rationality.”
To my ear, this sounds discordant next to Michael’s denial that “divine and natural agency are mutually exclusive forms of causality.” If they’re harmonious, don’t we need to employ both modes to explain the workings of creation? Or, Michael seems to introduce a questionable duality of being and function: Theology confines itself to the former and doesn’t address the latter. Granted that we don’t wish to reduce being to function, why should they be set in this kind of opposition?
Starting from the other end: If Michael is right that scientific discourse is inescapably entwined with metaphysics and theology, it doesn’t really practice a reductively functional form of rationality after all. Indeed, Michael’s characterization of scientific rationality as “reductive,” “functionalist,” and “mechanistic” doesn’t accurately describe how scientific theorizing works. Vern Poythress argues that scientists rely heavily on metaphor: “The distinctiveness of scientific description is largely the distinctiveness of its special species of metaphor, the model,” which is “a controlled metaphor, setting up a detailed correspondence.” But control and detail are matters of degree, so that “there is a continuum . . . between science and poetry.” Applied to nature, “mechanism” is a metaphor, and if engineering can provide the guiding model for how the world works, why can’t theology?[i]
Borrowing the terms of Peter Harrison’s meta-critique of modern science, it seems Michael is willing to leave the territories of religion and science more or less intact, or at least he doesn’t want to demolish the boundary markers. He honors theology as queen of natural science, but he’s wary about letting her meddle in her subjects’ business. I accept the caution, yet I don’t want to reduce theology to a figurehead. Despite what he seems to say in his essay, I don’t think Michael does either. His splendid No God, No Science?[ii] provides several lines of theological argument that violate the strictures he places on theology. His theological account of what the world is bleeds over into a theological account of how things work. I summarize a couple of his own arguments, the better to nudge him a bit.
First, neither ancient philosophy nor modern science can make sense of the uniqueness of individual things. Ancient philosophers believed each thing is what it is because of its form, yet also recognized individual things possess something more than form. Socrates doesn’t fully instantiate the form of humanity, and so, as an individual man, he is less than the form. At the same time, Socrates possesses unique features, and unique combinations of traits, experiences, capacities that aren’t captured by any definition of “man.” Paradoxically, form and individual each surpass the other. How can this be? Pre-Christian metaphysics can’t account for the paradox. Neither can the mechanistic paradigm of modern science, which deals in aggregates and tends to set uniqueness aside entirely.
Michael resolves this puzzle by pointing to the elevation of “person” as a metaphysical category in and after the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. Calling Father, Son, and Spirit “Persons” was, among other things, a way to capture the irreducible uniqueness of each. As God, each Person is infinite in Himself, and yet also each is infinitely different from the others. In the Triune God, we discover the archetype of which the mutual transcendence of form and individual is a created ectype.[iii]
Now, Michael’s argument is about what the world is. But surely this carries implications for the way the world works. Michael affirms as much when he goes on to say that we inhabit a world of continuous novelty, teeming at every moment with fresh instantiations of existing kinds – absolutely unique snowflakes, leaves, roaches, tardigrades, and novel moments in the history of individual creatures. No matter how similar things may be, they’re never interchangeable, not even, Michael argues, clones. Like the uniqueness of the divine Persons, the uniqueness of created beings is infinite; there is a chasm between things that cannot be bridged. A subject-oriented science that takes Trinitarian theology as its guiding model will look very different from a science that loses individuality in its rush to aggregate.
Second, and relatedly, Hanby explores the metaphysics of causality: What does it mean for X to cause Y? On the one hand, causation assumes a shared order within which X and Y exist. At the same time, it assumes a fundamental difference between the two. X is a cause only if it produces a novel something, Y, that is not simply pre-contained in X. Once again, we confront a paradox: Y is wholly dependent on X, yet it cannot be reduced to X. Each new giraffe is caused by a pair of pre-existing giraffes, but each is utterly new. Without this note of novelty, the effect is not an effect at all, but merely an emanation or extension from the cause. Thus a deeper paradox emerges: The cause can only be a cause only if it’s more than itself. But how can a thing surpass itself?
Mechanistic science can’t reckon with this paradox. Since Newton, causation has typically been understood as extrinsic. Each thing is external to every other thing, and one thing operates causally on another by exerting an external force. Aristotle distinguished between natural and violent causation (and motion); an acorn grows to an oak naturally, while the cue ball moves the eight ball violently. Because it assumes things are exterior to one another, mechanistic science treats all causation (and motion) as violent. It’s bumping billiard balls all the way down.
Once again, Trinitarian theology offers a more adequate picture. Within the Triune communion, there is both dependence and novelty. The Father is the fullness of causality, the source and fountain of all. He generates the Son, who is utterly unique, surpassing the Father not in His divine being but as Person. The eternal generation of the Son is not like-produces-like, but something more complex: The Father generates Another who is infinitely identical to, yet simultaneously infinitely unlike, the Source. Trinitarian theology is a metaphysics of love, insofar as love is the coincidence of infinite unity and infinite difference. Thus, in creating, the Triune God produces a world that is genuinely other, not merely an extension of Himself. And the Triune God produces a world of cause and effect that exhibit both continuity and continuous novelty.[iv]
Once again, I want to ask, Doesn’t Michael’s account of causation describe how the world works? And doesn’t it do so more adequately than alternative theories? What kind of scientific investigation might emerge if Queen Theology provided the shaping metaphors and models for cause and effect? Is there a science, as well as a metaphysics, of love? Why not?
Being myself a man of Fundamentalist impulses who never met a Bible he didn’t thump, I want nudge the conversation in a biblical direction. The Bible speaks frequently about what happens in creation. Does it thereby provide insight into the “way the world works”? Does it thereby tread rudely on the terrain science claims as its own? I think so. Let me offer two interconnected illustrations of what I have in mind.
First, in Genesis 1-2, Leviticus 11, and Deuteronomy 14, living things are classified by environment. Creatures that swarm in the seas are “fish,” whether they have to come up for breath or receive oxygen through their gills, whether they lay eggs or give birth to live offspring. Winged creatures that fly across the face of the firmament are “birds,” even if they’re fuzzy as rats. The three genera of creatures inhabit the land are also distinguished by environment: Cattle (behemah) are domesticated animals; beasts of the field (chayyah) are wild animals; and creepers move to and fro across boundaries. This scheme is no less scientific than the modern one. It self-evidently fits our observed experience of the world, more so than the modern system: Children have to un-learn their quite plausible belief that whales are fish. And the biblical classification suggests a framework for biology, one in which organism and environment correlate and are mutually defining.
A second observation on Genesis before drawing further conclusions: According to Genesis 1, both fish and land animals are “living souls” (nephesh chayyah; Genesis 1:21, 24), and Genesis 2 adds birds to this category (2:19, where beasts and birds are brought to Adam as nephesh chayyah). The usage isn’t a fluke. Animals are described as nephesh about 170 times in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis uses the same phrase to describe Adam after Yahweh forms him from dust and breathes life into his nose (2:7). Contrary to a popular Christian view, man isn’t different from animals because he has a soul. That he shares with animals. He’s distinct in being the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28) and in being specially formed and enlivened by the Creator.
What does it mean to call an animal a “living soul”? In Genesis 1-2, nepheshim have the power to multiply; they produce fresh instances of themselves, in eggs or through live birth, rather than simply seeds. nephesh implies mobility – nepheshim teem, swarm, fly, walk. Elsewhere, soul is the “organ” of desire (Deuteronomy 12:20; 14:26) and repugnance (Leviticus 26:11, 15). Souls hunger and thirst and are satisfied with food and drink (Proverbs 27:7; Isaiah 55:2). Sexual desire is an expression of soul (Jeremiah 2:24; Ezekiel 23:18). Soul is the center of emotion: Souls grieve (Judges 18:25), rejoice (Psalm 35:9), love (Song of Songs 1:7) and hate (Jeremiah 6:8).
Soul is sometimes the source of higher human capacities. It’s the source of speech (Lamentations 3:24), and the site of knowledge (Psalm 139:14), wisdom (Proverbs 24:14), and thought (Esther 4:13; Proverbs 23:7). Souls respond morally, hearing the voice of Yahweh (Deuteronomy 30:2), guarding His commandments (2 Kings 23:3), and walking before Him (1 Kings 2:4). “Soul” is sometimes linked with “will” and choice (Job 7:15). Soul is the focus of identity. To say “my soul” is simply to say “me” (Genesis 39:6; Numbers 23:10).
Not all of these potencies of soul are evident in animals, but many are, including those we sometimes associate exclusively with human beings. Animals act with intention and purpose.[v] Anyone with a dog knows animals have personalities.[vi] We cultivate personal relationships with our pets, who can learn to respond to names, commands, and affection. Pets, in turn, experience and exhibit affection, enthusiasm, joy. We’re not projecting anthropomorphically when we say our dog is happy to see us; we can tell by his leaps, his tumping tail, his sprays of canine slobber. Since Descartes, modern science has often adopted the opposite assumption: Animals are biological machines that act by instinct, without thought or purpose or will or any semblance of personality. A zoology guided by Genesis would assume from the beginning that it’s dealing with living souls.
Putting those two observations together: In Scripture, creatures are what they are by virtue of inhabiting (or ruling) a particular zone of creation, and, conversely, an environment (sea, land, sky) is what it is by virtue of its inhabitants. Environments are created to serve the organisms that live there and environments are dependent for their flourishing on the actions and purposes of those organisms. A biblical biotheology would thus at least modify Darwinism, which skates so close to environmental determinism that it ignores the integral role of organisms – especially human organisms – in maintaining environments. Scripture impels us to challenge both the “naturalist” tendency to observe organisms outside their environment and the “dissective” imagination that seeks to understand living things by killing and tearing them to pieces. The Bible’s description of the world thus hints at certain directions for scientific theory, and even suggests appropriate methods of investigation.
So, I pose this question (or register this objection) to Michael: Doesn’t Christian theology tell us something, perhaps a great deal, about how the world works? Assuming what theology tells us is true, shouldn’t scientists take notice? May we say “Trinity” and “eternal generation” while formulating scientific theories? Aristotle could say “soul” when writing about the Generation of Animals. May we?
[i] Verb Poythress, “Science as Allegory,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 35.2 (1983), available at Frame-Poythress.org. I am put in mind of Peter Harrison’s discussion of the harmony between order of signs and the order of causes in medieval science and biblical interpretation; The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2017) 55-82.
[ii] Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
[iii] Hanby, No God, No Science? 304-6. Michael sees here the deep source for the later Thomistic distinction between essence and existence.
[iv] Hanby, No God, No Science? 339-344.
[v] See Stephen Talbott, “Evolution and the Purposes of Life,” New Atlantis (2017).
[vi] Cat-owners are excused for their skepticism on this point.
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