These conversations are wonderfully rich. The difficulty in responding is the need to keep it short. For brevity’s sake, I will simply pick up the baton where Peter Harrison has delivered it, and see if I can run the next lap (um… in the opposite direction).
I need to briefly state that in trying to run his own argument against him, I have enormous respect for Peter Harrison as an outstanding scholar in this domain, and as a personal friend. I appreciate fully that what I am going to try here is a bit like a Hobbit picking up a bunch of twigs and taking on Gandalf with his staff. But however unlikely I am to succeed in this enterprise, I think my attempt can contribute to the conversation that Michael Hanby has so excitingly set up, which Peter Leithart so astonishingly extended, and which Peter Harrison has now so sensitively and – certainly in intention – constructively pushed back at.
As I read Peter Harrison’s argument, sociology and history, in reality, are always integral with philosophy (as is, I presume Harrison holds, theology). Yet – I think this is implied in his argument – as science has moved away from justifying its warrants in metaphysical and theological terms, so also has history and sociology. Hence, as a matter of contingently constructed historical and sociological fact, metaphysics and theology no longer speak to the truth warrants of science for a contemporary audience, but sociology and history do. In this context, the “illicit” nature of how science got to be thought of as non-metaphysical and non-theological can now best be revealed to a contemporary audience by means of history and sociology. (That is, functionally post-metaphysical and non-theological history and sociology.) Peter also seems to be saying that the functionally non-metaphysical and non-theological sciences are also quite acceptable, provided one recognizes that the sciences are not even trying to discover Truth in any metaphysical sense.
A significant point needs to be made here at the outset. Peter has, in his own work, demonstrated that the apologetic strategy he recommends works. The ever-growing and justly respectful audience of science and religion interested people who read his books have gained a genuinely richer awareness of the theological and philosophical underpinnings of modern science via his historical scholarship. But this itself is interesting. Peter’s approach (contra Michael’s approach) being ‘true because it works’ – and this is small ‘t’ true, not metaphysical True – is the same sort of “illicit” approach to truth (constructing small ‘t’ truths, as if such constructs are the only truth in town) that the sciences now presume.
I must say that – for myself – it is Peter’s tacitly illicit tendencies in his sensitivity to the theological and philosophical history of the modern sciences that makes his work so refreshing. What I most enjoy about his work is his cunning, such that under the banner of non-theological, non-philosophical, and contingent historical ‘fact’, he smuggles in some genuinely living theology and philosophy! Exactly what philosophy and theology he is smuggling in is always tantalizingly hard to locate, and this is testimony to what an incredibly good smuggler he is. That is, in writing histories of the philosophical and theological developments that gave us – for example – the late nineteenth century territories of science and religion, he does not need to reason from clearly stated philosophical or theological commitments himself, but his own carefully concealed commitments (even if certain features of these commitments may be rather open in some points to himself) are of necessity covertly guiding how he interprets and describes the history he is expounding. Perhaps we could do something of a Kantian transcendental deduction from his books back to Peter’s implied theological and philosophical commitments, if we were perceptive enough. But I think not; in the name of positive descriptions of theological and philosophical developments, he covers his own first commitment tracks very carefully.
Leaving Peter’s own first-order commitments to the side, and accepting his genuine sympathy with Michael’s enterprise, let us zone in a bit on what Peter seems to be recommending as a broader apologetic strategy that Michael would do well to consider.
Peter says that he understands the good sense in what Michael is doing, and he grants the “internal logic” of Michael’s stance, but that to persuade anyone, one has to reach the audience where they are at, and the ‘science and religion’ audience is not going to start from “lofty” metaphysics. So Peter councils a more pragmatic approach that starts with treating the sciences as non-metaphysical activities that do not give us Truth, and that are in no competition with theology and philosophy. I presume Peter is also willing, at least tactically, to buy into this ‘not Truth’ stance in how we think about the nature of contemporary history and sociology.
But can we actually start with ‘lowly’ sociology? That is, how ‘low’ is sociology really?
John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory makes a powerful argument that social theory – and particularly methodologically atheist and functionally materialist social theory – is inescapably theological. Hence, theology can never be seriously excluded from social theory, and theology is actually the only discipline that can adequately question the theoretical mistakes and unjustifiable assumptions of the secular reason that modern small ‘t’ truth itself relies on.[1]
As a scholar who sometimes plays in the sociology sandpit myself, I am quite familiar with the history of this discipline. Milbank is right. When Kierkegaard is doing a theologically and metaphysically embedded analysis of the role of the print media in Golden Age Denmark (fine theological sociology), this is rather the end of explicitly theological sociology until Milbank. Marx, Durkheim and Weber take sociology in a purportedly post/anti-metaphysical and post/anti-theological direction, and its illuminations are often practically valuable, and have certainly proved serviceable for social, economic, and political engineering. But the meaning of sociological analysis as this meaning relates to the qualitative and transcendent realities in which human societies are embedded – like the common good, soul, justice, flourishing, purpose, spirit, God, love, meaning, beauty, and so on, are – at best, entirely obscure. At worst these meanings are horrible scientistic reductions of human reality. But such a firm ‘unknowing’ (or active disbelief) about the actual reality of the divine Truths of, for example, religion, is itself a metaphysically and theologically framed unknowing.
Milbank points out that secular social theory is illicit – by doing an overtly theologically and philosophically committed history of social theory – and by so doing throws theology right back into the core of social theory. I think Milbank’s strategy works well, and has gained him an audience without conceding to methodological atheism and a functional metaphysical nihilism.[2] When it comes to the history of modern historiography, I do not know this terrain as well, but what I do know about it makes me wonder if it is not history – particularly as applied to biblical interpretation in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century – rather than nineteenth century science that leads the post-metaphysical and post-theological assault on all big ‘t’ Truth in Western modernity. That is, theology falls before science rises. (Peter, of course, would know better than I whether my suspicions about modern historiography are reasonable.)
At this point I am wondering, is history and sociology enough to return theology and metaphysics to being the licit grounds of science, and does – even – Peter actually want them returned?
Keeping any sort of Truth out of science enables the territories of science and religion to be dis-engaged and functionally autonomous from each other. Here – or so it seems to me – ‘science’ that only “makes predictions” and “produce[s] impressive practical affordances” largely floats free not only from metaphysics but from religion, and theology… and reality. Religion that works only in the domain of Truth – though separated from the “epistemic privilege” of science – now also floats ‘free’ from science (and its small ‘t’ truth vision of functional reality) and chases ‘Truth’ that is now irrelevant to the predictions, affordances, and “epistemic prestige of scientific knowledge.” And so, it would seem, the two constructed territories of science and religion persist harmoniously along-side one another by mutually ignoring each other. However (sociologically) there is no actual mutual ignoring as – to quote a non-theological and non-metaphysical historian – the emergence of a scientific culture means that “all cognitive values have been assimilated to scientific ones.”[3] Which is to say religion (and metaphysics and theology) are now only descriptive small ‘t’ truths about what philosophers and theologians believe: the True objects of their explorations have been expunged from all knowledge. Which is to say, theology and philosophy are not even small ‘t’ truth carriers in a culture where “the present epistemic prestige of scientific knowledge” defines the presumed truth categories of history and sociology, and where scientific knowledge is, functionally, the only public truth in town.
As Plotinus and the makers of the Highlander movies seemed to have noticed, in the end, there can only be One (i.e., reality is a unity and therefore must only have One unifying principle). There cannot be any other Truth than small ‘t’ truth (i.e. ‘truth’ functionally becomes “Truth”) in an epistemically authorized life-world that assimilates all other “cognitive values” into its own scientistic small ‘t’ truth terms. Theology, religion, and philosophy, are only true to the extent that their claims are understood in small ‘t’ and practical and predictive terms. Let us be clear, the practical reduction of non-scientific Truth to the terms that the epistemic authority of science recognizes, means that – in their own Truth terms – there is no real philosophy, no real theology, no real religion, other than as purely immanent human meaning constructs with no transcendent remainder. The culturally assumed immanent frame that Charles Taylor describes has redefined theology and metaphysics such that they must (ironically) in reality be small ‘t’ truth constructs.[4] So when we do a non-theological and non-philosophical history and sociology of science and religion, all the ‘facts’ about theology and philosophy that we include are small ‘t’ truths that cannot be True. Thus – as much as Peter smuggles ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology’ into the history of science and religion – Truth never actually appears in his writings. Perhaps Peter is the apophatic Saint Dionysius of modern historiography, or perhaps his pragmatic concessions to what the ears of our life-world-formed hearers can hear, means he fails to tell them the one truth that they need to know; that there can be no knowledge, thought, meaning, or reality, without Truth.
I’m inclined to think that Michael is right, and the only sort of engagement between theology and science that is possible is one done from the direction of the capital ‘t’ Truth of theology to the small ‘t’ truths of the sciences. For I cannot see how you could even really have any capital ‘t’ truth about reality – i.e., any metaphysics, theology, epistemology, or religion… or even the functional validity of small ‘t’ scientific truths for that matter – unless you start with a big ‘t’ and then think about the meaning and value of all small ‘t’s from there. Granted that our best theology and metaphysics is never TRUTH, but unless partial and analogical onto-epistemic images of Truth are considered possible, then theology and metaphysics are meaningless, and what is more of a problem in our life-world, useless (i.e., not small ‘t’ true).
It does not seem to me that sociology and history are enough. Peter holds – in practice, correctly – that to get the ear of an audience in the context in which we are trying to speak, the way in is history and sociology. This way in allows us to point out that philosophy and theology are integral with how we got to think that we don’t need them anymore. So far, so good. But history and sociology as we now practice them are also defined by exactly that post-metaphysical and post-theological defect that the sciences – which have very successfully culturally converted all cognitive values to their own small ‘t’ truth values – themselves display. We are just going round in immanently framed circles if we cannot recover realist metaphysics and realist theology. In order to do that in a science and religion context, I think Michael is right. Metaphysical theology needs to dictate the terms of Truth to science if there is to be any overcoming of the illicit sense of the sufficiency of small ‘t’ truth’s relation to reality that our scientific culture presumes.
Dr Paul Tyson is a Senior Research Fellow and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia.
[1] In this manner, Milbank is a post-secular thinker.
[2] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed., Blackwell: Oxford, 2006, 253. Milbank, sounding quite Kierkegaardian, notes that, “Theology itself purports to give an ultimate narrative, to provide some ultimate depth of description, because the situating of oneself within such a continuing narrative is what it means to belong to the Church, to be a Christian. However, the claim is made by faith, not a reason which seeks foundations. Surrendering this gaze to the various gazes of ‘methodological atheism’ would not prove any temporary submission.”
[3] Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 11. In this amazing book Gaukroger is concerned with how this assimilation happened in rather rarefied intellectual and action-concerned circles leading up to the late seventeenth century, but I think his argument naturally extends to Western culture itself after the “remarkable reversal” of the late nineteenth century that Peter Harrison describes, finally flowering in a decisively post-Christian and post-metaphysical popular culture of Western modernity from around 1964 onwards.
[4] Charles Taylor, of course, thinks we are now looking for new “subtle languages” – music, art, poetry – to replace philosophy and theology now that we have lost a ‘high’ and articulate language of real transcendence, even though we have not lost (and cannot lose) the tantalizing experiences of transcendence.
These conversations are wonderfully rich. The difficulty in responding is the need to keep it short. For brevity’s sake, I will simply pick up the baton where Peter Harrison has delivered it, and see if I can run the next lap (um… in the opposite direction).
I need to briefly state that in trying to run his own argument against him, I have enormous respect for Peter Harrison as an outstanding scholar in this domain, and as a personal friend. I appreciate fully that what I am going to try here is a bit like a Hobbit picking up a bunch of twigs and taking on Gandalf with his staff. But however unlikely I am to succeed in this enterprise, I think my attempt can contribute to the conversation that Michael Hanby has so excitingly set up, which Peter Leithart so astonishingly extended, and which Peter Harrison has now so sensitively and – certainly in intention – constructively pushed back at.
As I read Peter Harrison’s argument, sociology and history, in reality, are always integral with philosophy (as is, I presume Harrison holds, theology). Yet – I think this is implied in his argument – as science has moved away from justifying its warrants in metaphysical and theological terms, so also has history and sociology. Hence, as a matter of contingently constructed historical and sociological fact, metaphysics and theology no longer speak to the truth warrants of science for a contemporary audience, but sociology and history do. In this context, the “illicit” nature of how science got to be thought of as non-metaphysical and non-theological can now best be revealed to a contemporary audience by means of history and sociology. (That is, functionally post-metaphysical and non-theological history and sociology.) Peter also seems to be saying that the functionally non-metaphysical and non-theological sciences are also quite acceptable, provided one recognizes that the sciences are not even trying to discover Truth in any metaphysical sense.
A significant point needs to be made here at the outset. Peter has, in his own work, demonstrated that the apologetic strategy he recommends works. The ever-growing and justly respectful audience of science and religion interested people who read his books have gained a genuinely richer awareness of the theological and philosophical underpinnings of modern science via his historical scholarship. But this itself is interesting. Peter’s approach (contra Michael’s approach) being ‘true because it works’ – and this is small ‘t’ true, not metaphysical True – is the same sort of “illicit” approach to truth (constructing small ‘t’ truths, as if such constructs are the only truth in town) that the sciences now presume.
I must say that – for myself – it is Peter’s tacitly illicit tendencies in his sensitivity to the theological and philosophical history of the modern sciences that makes his work so refreshing. What I most enjoy about his work is his cunning, such that under the banner of non-theological, non-philosophical, and contingent historical ‘fact’, he smuggles in some genuinely living theology and philosophy! Exactly what philosophy and theology he is smuggling in is always tantalizingly hard to locate, and this is testimony to what an incredibly good smuggler he is. That is, in writing histories of the philosophical and theological developments that gave us – for example – the late nineteenth century territories of science and religion, he does not need to reason from clearly stated philosophical or theological commitments himself, but his own carefully concealed commitments (even if certain features of these commitments may be rather open in some points to himself) are of necessity covertly guiding how he interprets and describes the history he is expounding. Perhaps we could do something of a Kantian transcendental deduction from his books back to Peter’s implied theological and philosophical commitments, if we were perceptive enough. But I think not; in the name of positive descriptions of theological and philosophical developments, he covers his own first commitment tracks very carefully.
Leaving Peter’s own first-order commitments to the side, and accepting his genuine sympathy with Michael’s enterprise, let us zone in a bit on what Peter seems to be recommending as a broader apologetic strategy that Michael would do well to consider.
Peter says that he understands the good sense in what Michael is doing, and he grants the “internal logic” of Michael’s stance, but that to persuade anyone, one has to reach the audience where they are at, and the ‘science and religion’ audience is not going to start from “lofty” metaphysics. So Peter councils a more pragmatic approach that starts with treating the sciences as non-metaphysical activities that do not give us Truth, and that are in no competition with theology and philosophy. I presume Peter is also willing, at least tactically, to buy into this ‘not Truth’ stance in how we think about the nature of contemporary history and sociology.
But can we actually start with ‘lowly’ sociology? That is, how ‘low’ is sociology really?
John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory makes a powerful argument that social theory – and particularly methodologically atheist and functionally materialist social theory – is inescapably theological. Hence, theology can never be seriously excluded from social theory, and theology is actually the only discipline that can adequately question the theoretical mistakes and unjustifiable assumptions of the secular reason that modern small ‘t’ truth itself relies on.[1]
As a scholar who sometimes plays in the sociology sandpit myself, I am quite familiar with the history of this discipline. Milbank is right. When Kierkegaard is doing a theologically and metaphysically embedded analysis of the role of the print media in Golden Age Denmark (fine theological sociology), this is rather the end of explicitly theological sociology until Milbank. Marx, Durkheim and Weber take sociology in a purportedly post/anti-metaphysical and post/anti-theological direction, and its illuminations are often practically valuable, and have certainly proved serviceable for social, economic, and political engineering. But the meaning of sociological analysis as this meaning relates to the qualitative and transcendent realities in which human societies are embedded – like the common good, soul, justice, flourishing, purpose, spirit, God, love, meaning, beauty, and so on, are – at best, entirely obscure. At worst these meanings are horrible scientistic reductions of human reality. But such a firm ‘unknowing’ (or active disbelief) about the actual reality of the divine Truths of, for example, religion, is itself a metaphysically and theologically framed unknowing.
Milbank points out that secular social theory is illicit – by doing an overtly theologically and philosophically committed history of social theory – and by so doing throws theology right back into the core of social theory. I think Milbank’s strategy works well, and has gained him an audience without conceding to methodological atheism and a functional metaphysical nihilism.[2] When it comes to the history of modern historiography, I do not know this terrain as well, but what I do know about it makes me wonder if it is not history – particularly as applied to biblical interpretation in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century – rather than nineteenth century science that leads the post-metaphysical and post-theological assault on all big ‘t’ Truth in Western modernity. That is, theology falls before science rises. (Peter, of course, would know better than I whether my suspicions about modern historiography are reasonable.)
At this point I am wondering, is history and sociology enough to return theology and metaphysics to being the licit grounds of science, and does – even – Peter actually want them returned?
Keeping any sort of Truth out of science enables the territories of science and religion to be dis-engaged and functionally autonomous from each other. Here – or so it seems to me – ‘science’ that only “makes predictions” and “produce[s] impressive practical affordances” largely floats free not only from metaphysics but from religion, and theology… and reality. Religion that works only in the domain of Truth – though separated from the “epistemic privilege” of science – now also floats ‘free’ from science (and its small ‘t’ truth vision of functional reality) and chases ‘Truth’ that is now irrelevant to the predictions, affordances, and “epistemic prestige of scientific knowledge.” And so, it would seem, the two constructed territories of science and religion persist harmoniously along-side one another by mutually ignoring each other. However (sociologically) there is no actual mutual ignoring as – to quote a non-theological and non-metaphysical historian – the emergence of a scientific culture means that “all cognitive values have been assimilated to scientific ones.”[3] Which is to say religion (and metaphysics and theology) are now only descriptive small ‘t’ truths about what philosophers and theologians believe: the True objects of their explorations have been expunged from all knowledge. Which is to say, theology and philosophy are not even small ‘t’ truth carriers in a culture where “the present epistemic prestige of scientific knowledge” defines the presumed truth categories of history and sociology, and where scientific knowledge is, functionally, the only public truth in town.
As Plotinus and the makers of the Highlander movies seemed to have noticed, in the end, there can only be One (i.e., reality is a unity and therefore must only have One unifying principle). There cannot be any other Truth than small ‘t’ truth (i.e. ‘truth’ functionally becomes “Truth”) in an epistemically authorized life-world that assimilates all other “cognitive values” into its own scientistic small ‘t’ truth terms. Theology, religion, and philosophy, are only true to the extent that their claims are understood in small ‘t’ and practical and predictive terms. Let us be clear, the practical reduction of non-scientific Truth to the terms that the epistemic authority of science recognizes, means that – in their own Truth terms – there is no real philosophy, no real theology, no real religion, other than as purely immanent human meaning constructs with no transcendent remainder. The culturally assumed immanent frame that Charles Taylor describes has redefined theology and metaphysics such that they must (ironically) in reality be small ‘t’ truth constructs.[4] So when we do a non-theological and non-philosophical history and sociology of science and religion, all the ‘facts’ about theology and philosophy that we include are small ‘t’ truths that cannot be True. Thus – as much as Peter smuggles ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology’ into the history of science and religion – Truth never actually appears in his writings. Perhaps Peter is the apophatic Saint Dionysius of modern historiography, or perhaps his pragmatic concessions to what the ears of our life-world-formed hearers can hear, means he fails to tell them the one truth that they need to know; that there can be no knowledge, thought, meaning, or reality, without Truth.
I’m inclined to think that Michael is right, and the only sort of engagement between theology and science that is possible is one done from the direction of the capital ‘t’ Truth of theology to the small ‘t’ truths of the sciences. For I cannot see how you could even really have any capital ‘t’ truth about reality – i.e., any metaphysics, theology, epistemology, or religion… or even the functional validity of small ‘t’ scientific truths for that matter – unless you start with a big ‘t’ and then think about the meaning and value of all small ‘t’s from there. Granted that our best theology and metaphysics is never TRUTH, but unless partial and analogical onto-epistemic images of Truth are considered possible, then theology and metaphysics are meaningless, and what is more of a problem in our life-world, useless (i.e., not small ‘t’ true).
It does not seem to me that sociology and history are enough. Peter holds – in practice, correctly – that to get the ear of an audience in the context in which we are trying to speak, the way in is history and sociology. This way in allows us to point out that philosophy and theology are integral with how we got to think that we don’t need them anymore. So far, so good. But history and sociology as we now practice them are also defined by exactly that post-metaphysical and post-theological defect that the sciences – which have very successfully culturally converted all cognitive values to their own small ‘t’ truth values – themselves display. We are just going round in immanently framed circles if we cannot recover realist metaphysics and realist theology. In order to do that in a science and religion context, I think Michael is right. Metaphysical theology needs to dictate the terms of Truth to science if there is to be any overcoming of the illicit sense of the sufficiency of small ‘t’ truth’s relation to reality that our scientific culture presumes.
Dr Paul Tyson is a Senior Research Fellow and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia.
[1] In this manner, Milbank is a post-secular thinker.
[2] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed., Blackwell: Oxford, 2006, 253. Milbank, sounding quite Kierkegaardian, notes that, “Theology itself purports to give an ultimate narrative, to provide some ultimate depth of description, because the situating of oneself within such a continuing narrative is what it means to belong to the Church, to be a Christian. However, the claim is made by faith, not a reason which seeks foundations. Surrendering this gaze to the various gazes of ‘methodological atheism’ would not prove any temporary submission.”
[3] Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 11. In this amazing book Gaukroger is concerned with how this assimilation happened in rather rarefied intellectual and action-concerned circles leading up to the late seventeenth century, but I think his argument naturally extends to Western culture itself after the “remarkable reversal” of the late nineteenth century that Peter Harrison describes, finally flowering in a decisively post-Christian and post-metaphysical popular culture of Western modernity from around 1964 onwards.
[4] Charles Taylor, of course, thinks we are now looking for new “subtle languages” – music, art, poetry – to replace philosophy and theology now that we have lost a ‘high’ and articulate language of real transcendence, even though we have not lost (and cannot lose) the tantalizing experiences of transcendence.
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