Consider, requests today's columnist, Andrew Porter,

"the orderliness of the universe, and many people's anxieties lest the interpretive aspects of that claim expose it to a charge of subjectivity. When claims are made that are as broad and open-ended as the claim that the universe is orderly and intelligible, the most that a scientist can do is point to their fruitfulness, and invite others to accept them on the basis of that fruitfulness."

In this scientific realm, this acceptance is viewed as a pragmatic choice. But as Porter observes,

"that invitation will carry some real challenge, in the light of the history of science. But to misrepresent it as 'objective' empirical proof is not to be responsible but to evade responsibility. The fruitfulness of a good analogy will show itself well enough, and in so doing, it will challenge other people quite sufficiently enough to qualify as responsible. In effect, those who think the world ultimately has no order may be compared with those who trust that it is orderly. We see how both live, how both make sense of the cosmos. And each can be seen in the light of the other. In the end, you have to choose how you want to make sense of the universe."

And this is something that every individual has to do and has done for him- or herself, and it is done ever day as part of the science religion dialogue. For, as Porter notes, the "alert reader will have seen the parallels between the orderliness of the universe and (other) acts of God, for the logic of claims about both is very much the same. Analogies have been drawn in interpretation of the world, and some accept those analogies, but others simply walk away from them. We have stumbled into a practice of interpretation, and it needs to be explored before we go any further."

So, let us explore further.

Today's column is the second in a four-part series that began this past Tuesday (Metanexus: Views 2003.02.11.), and it is comprised of chapters taken from the book By the Waters of Naturalism: Theology Perplexed Among the Sciences (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001: ISBN 1-57910-770-2) by Andrew Porter. And in the excerpts from his book we will bring together two themes that we have been exploring this month on Metanexus: (1) the place of humans in the universe: is it natural? And (2) what is the nature of divine action, a theme that is being explored in a three-part series by Ilia Delio that began yesterday on Metanexus: Views (2002.02.12.).

Today's author, Andrew Porter, is an adjunct faculty member in philosophy of religion at The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.

--Stacey E. Ake

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Subject: By the Waters of Naturalism, Part 2/4 From: Andrew Porter Email: <app@jedp.com>

1.4 Why Objectivity?!

Why the quest for objectivity in acts of God? What would they lack without it? And what is "objectivity," anyway? How did the dichotomy between "objectivity" and "subjectivity" arise? I put them in scarequotes, because it is not entirely obvious what they are, or what they mean.

To say it a little differently, Why, if I can't describe them in terms of a physical formula, are acts of God then "only" in my mind? On the other hand, what is "subjectivity," and what is the problem with it? Why is it not enough?

This is quite a cluster of questions. It will take some unraveling. What I think lies at the bottom of this desire to explain acts of God in the terms of physical theory is a particular way of handling issues of responsibility. It will take some work to dig those issues out, so that they can be seen clearly.

We are a culture that trusts the natural sciences to deliver valid knowledge more reliably than any other human activity or mode of reasoning. The natural sciences enjoy a prestige that is unparalleled. In its more overt forms, this can be turned into a position that is articulated in a few simple claims: Natural science is the only way to get real knowledge, and science knows the world as it really is, exhaustively. There is nothing more to be known than what science knows. All other claims to knowledge are in fact not knowledge at all, but opinion, conjecture, superstition, wishful thinking, or worse. In former days, this position used to be known as "positivism"; today it is called "scientism."

In such a world, theology will have to pass itself off as "just like" the natural sciences, or else what it "knows" is not really knowledge. It has to use the same kind of thinking as the sciences, or forfeit all credibility. What it talks about has to be visible in the same way that physical effects are visible, or else it is not really there at all. It has to be "objective" and not "subjective," and acts of God have to be "objective" in the same way that physical effects are objective.

Yet on closer examination, science itself does not live up to the sort of "objectivity" that the myth of scientism ascribes to it. In order to get science going at all, it is necessary to make assumptions, and these assumptions can only be called "subjective" from the point of view of scientism. These assumptions command widespread assent today, but they were not at all obvious five hundred years ago. One of them is that the universe is orderly, that it is intelligible. It could be otherwise, as a few science fiction writers have realized, in their imagination of worlds in which magic works and is real. The orderliness of the universe is an assumption that is brought to the posing of problems that can be answered empirically, rather than derived from empirical results. It is not a result of any empirical test.

One can measure the volume of the universe, or its mass, or its age, but it makes no sense to try to "measure" its orderliness or its intelligibility. And this is what is necessary for an empirical claim: if you want to claim that you have determined in an experiment that the universe is "orderly," you have to devise an experiment, with several possible outcomes: some would show the universe to be orderly, some would show it to be disorderly. Age, mass, and volume are just a matter of measuring a number. Orderliness is a much richer concept, but it is also analogical in ways that age, mass, and volume are not. It is so elastic that it is very hard to pin down. "Order" has to be broad enough to encompass all the sciences, not just physics. The natural laws of chemistry and biology, while not contradicting those of physics, are also not reducible to them.

The failure to resolve any one scientific question is not evidence against the orderliness of the universe, but merely evidence that (per- haps) scientists were unimaginative or looking in the wrong place. Failure to resolve a scientific question now is no evidence that it will not be resolved in the future. And success in solving a scientific problem, in explaining one or another natural phenomenon, does not prove that any assumptions about the orderliness of the world are true. The assumption in question is about all the world, and success in explain- ing one phenomenon today does not guarantee success tomorrow in another. In every case of successful explanation in the sciences, the most that one could say is that the assumption of uniformity of laws of physics has born fruit. That does not prove it. And to say that it cannot be proven is not to question its truth, though evidently it appears that way to some people.

Why, then, do some need to believe that the orderliness of the universe is an empirical fact and not an assumption that makes possible empirical questions in the first place? Conceding that it is an assumption seems to be also an admission that it is subjective; the claim that it is empirical would also be a claim that it is objective. If the concept of "order," applied to the universe as a whole, were empirically testable, it would have to be expressible in the naturalistic language of one or another of the natural sciences. It is not. As noticed above, it is an analogical concept so elastic as to defy precise definition.

It is also a concept that presupposes the experience of human efforts to find order in particular naturalistic questions in the history of science. It is thus a concept that has a natural home in historical discourse. It is not a category of explanation within the language used to describe nature in the natural sciences, because it is about that language. It is nevertheless a way of describing nature, of saying something true about nature, but one that transcends the natural sciences. It must, because it is presupposed by those sciences.

Beneath the language of "objectivity" and "subjectivity" there is an issue of responsibility. If a claim is "objective," then I don't have to take responsibility for it, because it is in the equations, or in the empirical measurements. I can therefore responsibly demand assent to it from other people. If the claim is "subjective," then I am totally responsible for it, in the sense that it originates totally with me, but there is no way for such a claim even to challenge other people, much less make a responsible demand for assent from them. Outside of truly empirical questions, this is a very strange notion of responsibility: If I am responsible, I am incapable of responsibly asking agreement from other people! I think this description captures well the psychology of misunderstanding responsibility in cognitive claims, but it is not how things actually work. A better description of responsibility is possible, even for empirical claims.

In empirical claims, we expect a responsible scientist to explain his claims about nature in language that is naturalistic, i.e., just material and efficient causes, without invoking acts of God, magic, "miracles," or final causes. We expect his scholarship to be well informed about the history of previous scholarship in his field. We expect a scientist's claims to be expressed in a way that is open to testing by other investigators. And we know that when he uses uncontrolled or open-ended analogies, he is no longer making empirical claims, but is speaking as a theologian or a poet, even as a philosopher of science -- but no longer as an empirical scientist.

Analogical claims can be held responsible, but questions of responsibility exhibit unique features when one asks about responsible use of analogy. It would beg the question to say that analogy can never be responsible. Clearly, some analogies do challenge, they do make claims on people, and when we acknowledge that an analogy is challenging, we usually credit those who use it with being responsible. Analogies are also notorious for being easy to wriggle out of: someone who doesn't like the claims of an analogy used against him is always free to say, "Those are your analogies," and walk away from them.

Analogies are always claims made by one person on others, they are always made in a community that has some shared experience. An analogy happens when we see one part of life in the light of another. Analogies accordingly have a human element that empirical and "objective" claims appear not to have. That human element is essential; it may not be forgotten or hidden without seriously misunderstanding what analogies mean or how they work. The key feature of responsibility is then not objectivity, but openness to other people's criticism. Human interpretations can be open to criticism.

Let me return to our example, the orderliness of the universe, and many people's anxieties lest the interpretive aspects of that claim expose it to a charge of subjectivity. When claims are made that are as broad and open-ended as the claim that the universe is orderly and intelligible, the most that a scientist can do is point to their fruitfulness, and invite others to accept them on the basis of that fruitfulness. That invitation will carry some real challenge, in the light of the history of science. But to misrepresent it as "objective" empirical proof is not to be responsible but to evade responsibility. The fruitfulness of a good analogy will show itself well enough, and in so doing, it will challenge other people quite sufficiently enough to qualify as responsible. In effect, those who think the world ultimately has no order may be compared with those who trust that it is orderly. We see how both live, how both make sense of the cosmos. And each can be seen in the light of the other. In the end, you have to choose how you want to make sense of the universe.

The alert reader will have seen the parallels between the orderliness of the universe and (other) acts of God, for the logic of claims about both is very much the same. Analogies have been drawn in interpretation of the world, and some accept those analogies, but others simply walk away from them. We have stumbled into a practice of interpretation, and it needs to be explored before we go any further.

If we take the orderliness of the universe as an act of God, it is one that applies equally to all events, equally to all parts of the cosmos. The assumptions people bring to the question of cosmic order determine whether they can find such an order. Those assumptions are not empirical, and so are not "objective." Despite being "subjective," the reality they disclose is not unreal, and is not a figment of human imagination. But it is also a point of deep and apparently unresolvable disagreement, disagreements of the kind that happen between different basic life orientations. These disagreements are open to criticism, and they can be occasions of responsibility. Criticism of basic life orientations proceeds in a different way from criticism of theories within the sciences, which presupposes the orderliness of the universe.

We shall see that the same kind of logic applies when particular events are taken as acts of God. (This is called "Special Providence" in the technical language of theology.) The way to do that is to look at particular events, and since the alleged way that God acts is in physical events that are random, we should look at events that happen by chance. We shall also see, in the end, how disagreements about basic life orientation are handled responsibly.

Chapter 2

Other Possibilities

2.1 Lady Luck, Stern Fate

Look again at the idea that we can find acts of God in quantum fluctuations, impossible to penetrate in human knowledge, sometimes indeterminate, sometimes determined by divine forces that we cannot see. What is there to say that the agent in quantum fluctuations is really God, and not just Lady Luck or stern fate? In the ancient Hellenistic world, these were known as Tyche and heimarmene, and their cult attracted a large following.

The problem is not just that quantum fluctuations do not rescue us from the grasp of "subjectivism" (if it is that), but that they are open to multiple and radically different possible interpretations. Luck and fate really do not count as the same thing as the divine providence of Biblical religion. The difference is not merely that the analogies by which we speak of "actors" (luck, fate, God) are different. The import of events for human beings is different: if the unknown and uncontrollable future is a work of providence, then it brings blessing and life.

If it is just luck, then it brings what is for the human recipients just chance. It may work out well, but good luck is not something to be grateful for. If it is fate, then it brings necessity, unchangeable, a kind of natural prison. We can ascribe an intention to events, and by analogy personify that intention as fate or luck. But then that intent is whimsy, capricious favor, vindictiveness, or manipulation. Or perhaps in the end, people are used as tools of some invisible and inscrutable purpose that cares nothing for us. In any case, it is not like the intentions of a benevolent parent who wishes what is best for the child, and it is this model of the benevolent father that is the center of the idea of divine providence.

There are abundant contemporary advocates of a basic life orientation that takes human life in the end to be a matter of fate or luck. And there are many who do so with a thoroughly scientific view of the world, working from the best science of our day. Jacques Monod will do as an example; his Chance and Necessity is a classic statement of the position. For chance is just luck, Tyche, and necessity is just fate, heimarmene. Recent popularizers of evolutionary theory such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and others like them have all argued in more or less the same way.

In the ancient world, Leucippus and Democritus are the outstanding examples. Their atomism presents a striking foretelling of modern atomic theory, in which the atoms have in themselves no macroscopic properties, are sub-microscopic, are not generated or destroyed, move in a void according to deterministic causes of blind necessity, rather than plan or purpose. Even the Atomists' cosmos resembles modern astrophysics in some ways. The ultimate desiderata are blind necessity; there is no chance.

There were advocates of a total scientific determinism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is debatable today. Quantum mechanics in physics has made such a stand hard. The story of evolutionary biology has too many things in it that could scarcely be part of any deterministic plot that makes much sense. The impact of an asteroid causing the extinction of the dinosaurs is only the best known example. Events here are deterministic when taken one by one, but there is nothing coherent about them when they are taken all together. In that incoherence there is something like chance, and so the modern equivalent of Tyche appears again.

Today, one frequently hears evolution described in terms of "natural selection." This is an oxymoron: natural selection is like a square circle. In its original home, the word "selection" implies intelligence and purpose, but the adjective "natural" is intended precisely to deny intelligence and purpose. Biologists who speak of natural selection are quite candid in saying so.

If we were to use strictly naturalistic language, then, we could speak only of random speciations and extinctions, and of the dynamics of genetic and ecological fluctuations leading to them. Whenever one hears the phrase "natural selection," one should be aware that something like the ancient Tyche and heimarmene is being invoked. More than just science is happening here. But it is important to emphasize for present purposes that it is a legitimate analogy -- one can speak of fate or fortune (or "natural selection") in the light of physically indeterminate events. When the indeterminacy is "real" and not just lack of information, this language is both a practical analogy and also, more fundamentally, a basic way of looking at the world and human life in it. And if the indeterminacy is ontological, then there is no more basis that I am aware of for attributing the outcome of fluctuations to the God of historical-covenantal religion than to any of the naturalistic objects of human loyalty, such as Tyche, heimarmene, Democritus's atomism, or modern evolutionary natural selection. Or any less basis; it is a matter of interpretation.

I don't want to criticize such positions right now. It is enough to note that they are possible, and that they cannot be ruled out on the ground that science-and-religion harmonizers have set for themselves. For if the indeterminacy in nature is ontological, and truly indeterminate in an irreducible way, then it can be interpreted as the face of Tyche and heimarmene and their modern revivals just as easily as it can be taken as coming from acts of the God of biblical religion.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This publication is hosted by Metanexus Online http://www.metanexus.net. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors.

Metanexus welcomes submissions between 1000 to 3000 words of essays and book reviews that seek to explore and interpret science and religion in original and insightful ways for a general educated audience. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. Please send all inquiries and submissions to . Metanexus consists of a number of topically focused forums (Anthropos, Bios, Cogito, Cosmos, Salus, Sophia, and Techne) and periodic HTML enriched composite digests from each of the lists.

Copyright notice: Except when otherwise noted, articles may be forwarded, quoted, or republished in full with attribution to the author of the column and "Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science ". Republication for commercial purposes in print or electronic format requires the permission of the author. Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Metanexus Institute.

Published   2003.02.13