WINTER 1991 PAGE 13 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE UPDATING GOD by John MacDonald Smith Plato's vision of this world as an cave in which we only see shadows of enduring realities beyond continues, long past its 'sell-by' date, to haunt religion.
The wistful credulity of a sophisticated age still loves a story - it is no more - about the heavenly interventionist who pulls our chestnuts from the fire. This is fiction, since 'God' does not exist, it seems we have had to invent Him.
The Platonic-Aristotelian cosmology was turned by the Church into the three-decker universe of heaven, hell and earth. God lived 'up there' and connected himself with 'down here' in Jesus. He could not stay for ever so, after the Ascension, Jesus sent the Spirit who, through the apostles and bishops, connects us with Jesus and hence with the Father. This can only be true if the 'other realm' bit is not a fallacy ; otherwise we have simply given ourselves (and God) a problem.
This theology knew how to describe and explain the world ; indeed, it told Galileo not only what the world was like, but also what it ought to be like. But by the time Darwinian evolution was proposed the issues were not so simple. Both sides knew the worse was to come ; and it has.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE In some ways, the Church was too clever for its own good, for its teaching led by a fairly direct route to the ideas of modern science. I am going to show that some key areas in the philosophy of science are in flat contradiction to the religious beliefs which gave them birth and that in consequence it is the latter that require restatement.
A sovereign God is free to create, or not. If He does so, His creation will be both rational and contingent - that is, we shall not be able to predict its character in advance. Hence, the only way to find out what it is like is to take the universe to pieces and see what it looks like. The experimental approach in science is a direct consequence of classical Christianity, but the success of the former does not validate the latter.
In the 'science vs religion' conflicts which followed, few realised that the root of it all was the assumption common to both sides that each provides information about reality. This is not true and is the 'stubborn unlaid ghost' of Platonism still to be reckoned with by religion, which actually gives nobody the facts about anything as we shall see.
The other source of confusion was that until about sixty years ago science also had a multi-decker approach to reality. While theologians thought of God and the world, 'up there' and 'down here', scientists thought of the 'real world' objectively 'out there' which could be described unequivocally by theories and laws 'down here'. There was a one-to-one correspondence between 'the other realm' and the marks we put down on paper 'down here' to explain the goings-on 'out there'. But this is not wholly true and has been abandoned.
HOW DO WE DEFINE ANYTHING ?
Before thinking in more detail about the philosophy of science, there is a related linguistic point worth consideration. How do we define anything, other than in terms of the relationships between some words and other words, or by pointing at an example ?
Language is circular - everything can only be defined by reference to other things, which can only be defined ... and so on. We are forced to play games with the symbols in accordance with the rules in the hope that we are talking sense, that what does follow from which. Even if there is a world 'out there', there is no guarantee that our words actually describe it and we can only know this if we make predictions and the predictions go wrong - here of course, it is a case not of knowing that we know but knowing that we don't.
I am not an expert in comparative religion but I am aware of the extent to which culture influences doctrine. But now go to the other extreme, consider those deliberate reactions to contemporary culture which arise in the various neo-orthodoxies and fundamentalisms in the world. If they are essentially new religions, based on a leap across a cultural gap and expressive of emotional, intellectual and psychological preferences, by what right do we claim that our slightly more rational beliefs are more than functions of characteristics which we have discerned in this world 'down here' ?
PAGE 14 WINTER 1991 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE WHAT CAN SCIENCE TELL US ?
A lot of people think that science is a matter of verifying eternal natural laws. But, where do the laws come from, how do we know them, and how are we going to be sure we have verified them unless we have inspected every case ? Are all swans white ?
No, there are black ones in Australia. Can we rely on it that heat will always pass from hot to cold bodies ?
Somewhere in the universe it may not do so. This is Hume's 'Problem of Induction', solved half a century ago by Sir Karl Popper with the idea that what marks science off from philosophy, mathematics or poetry is that it gives us experimentally falsifiable statements about the world. The philosopher Hans Reichenbach may have protested that to abandon induction would deprive science of the power to decide between the truth and falsity of its ideas, but he offered no way of showing how to protect truth by means of a principle which you know you cannot show to be true. Popper's philosophy of science is borne out by the history of science : it tells us that what our experimental investigations of reality give us is a list of things we have not yet shown we got wrong. Can religion do better ?
Popper also offers a set of "rules for doing science" and among these is the idea that the procedure of demonstrating that we have not got it right yet in science is never ending. Anybody who claims the last word in science has "retired from the game". Might this be true in religion also ? As the British cardinal Francis Gasquet remarked to Pope Pius XI in the 20s, "We are none of us infallible".
We have shown that religion is not very informative ; we now go on to see that it is actually not informative at all, in the sense that it is not religion's task to provide information.
INFORMATION AND EXPLANATION The mathematician and astronomer Pierre Laplace, when asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his scheme of things, replied famously "Sir, I do not need this hypothesis." The world made sense without reference to God ; the idea of God is not an explanatory hypothesis. Half a century ago Russell and Whitehead showed that mathematics, previously thought to provide a self-evidently true description of the real world, is in reality a formal symbolism which is not about anything. You can have a lot of fun inventing relationships between marks on paper and seeing what happens when you apply rules to them - but that is what mathematics is about, and if, as is often the case, it has any applicability in physics and chemistry - then this is happenstance.
This is the kind of thing which theology is - a set of symbols linked in a formal way which is of value in ordering events in the real world if you happen to want events ordered in their way. They help to explain things if you want that kind of explanation.
They are not 'about' anything. So much for Plato. To the chorus of "Yes, buts .." which will greet this conclusion I suggest we go to Information Theory, which has played a major part in computer developments over the last thirty years - so if you don't accept this - then throw away your word processor. Is "God exists" a true statement ? Information Theory says it conveys no information. On the other hand, is it an explanatory hypothesis ? Information Theory says that if it could by any possibility be an incorrect statement of fact, then it is informative - but Laplace says that is what it cannot be.
BREAKDOWN OF 'THE REAL WORLD' But what of the 'real world out there' which religion says God saved and science used to think it was exploring. It was the German theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner Werner Heisenberg who, with the invention of quantum mechanics sixty years ago, showed us that we cannot measure- that is, observe - the subatomic world without altering it. It is not as accessible as we thought, for we do not know what it was before we altered it and we cannot be sure what there is afterwards, either, because everything is down to probabilities at this level. What philosophers call 'efficient causality', meaning that X follows from Y, has been abandoned over most of physics. This means that the kind of divine causality which was an important part of older theology is actually directly contradicted by our understanding of subatomic physics.
Nor is this 'real world out there' quite so obvious on the large scale either. The onward march of technology has given us an environmental crisis to add to the nuclear predicament and this human impact on creation has caused the breakdown into crumbling collapse of the objective, real or 'impervious to us' large scale world.
SOME POSSIBILITIES The 'Anthropic (i.e. human) Principle' explores the idea that the universe has to have certain constraints on its structure if carbon based life (that's us, folks) is ever to emerge in it. The argument behind the Principle suggests that in the first instant after the Big Bang, all the laws, ratios and constants that produce eventual human life in the universe had to be arranged with minute accuracy or we wouldn't be here. However, it also has to take account of the WINTER 1991 PAGE 15 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE possibility that being us and not something else we are bound to be selective in our observations. How far does a premodern theology stand up to this, and even more to the seriously considered possibility of the 'eternal' presence of life in the cosmos, involving the evolution of some kind of 'superintelligence' ?
Indeed, this thought may not be a million miles away from an idea of Sir Julian Huxley - he calls it Self-consciously Purposive Evolution - in which he suggests that humanity is on the brink of a new phase of evolutionary development in which the evolutionary process itself becomes self-aware and self-directing.
WHAT ABOUT THEOLOGY ?
Theology is a formal symbolism, unfalsifiable and uninformative. It helps to explain things in reality in the way mathematics does, and it motivates a characteristic attitude to intrinsic values inherent in things, persons and events. It gives rise to stories which express the values and motivate the attitudes.
New stories are needed and among the elements of these some of the following ideas might occur.
Henceforth, 'power and providence' are not attributes of 'God up there' intervening but of ourselves 'down here' acting responsibly. Incarnation can be generalised : God has 'become', human for along with things and events, `God-ness' is recognisable in my neighbour even where that person may be my enemy. The hereafter has become this-worldly, while 'Holy Spirit' symbolises the intricate complex of relationships between us and nature which must be maintained if there is to be a hereafter. The 'creation of the world from nothing' is the work of the human understanding and is necessarily continuous and unfinished. 'God' is a three letter dispensable symbol which summarises the stories and stands in a shorthand way for the values and motivations. It is more descriptive than substantive, for 'God-ness' is attributable to all things, persons and events. However, if a model of God within the story should be required, such a model might be that of cosmic embodied purpose, where the symbol 'God' is seen as the 'self' of which things and events, and in particular, people are the 'body'.
JOHN MACDONALD SMITH lives near Evesham and is Hon. Secretary of Clergy against Nuclear Arms.