As one who had only a brief dalliance some years ago with the term non-realism, I am glad that the book safeguards the outlook of those SoF members who, while in sympathy with non-realists, find the term itself negative and unhelpful (Sorry, Don!). I personally like Lloyd Geering’s preference for saying that to use the term “God” is to use symbolic language. I write this, not to promote two camps in the network, but to clarify two legitimately held viewpoints within it. Both can be enriched by the fruitful debate which I hope this book will encourage m Ronald Pearse Why I’m sticking to the Old, Old Story (...because it is a story!) by John Macdonald Smith AMONG THE ITEMS ON THE SoF agenda is that of persuading the church to accept nonrealism as a viable way of being Christian. Here are some thoughts.
I came to accept what subsequently became known as nonrealism in the seventies when I read Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery. If science is but a collection of ad hoc more-or-less inspired guesses about the way the world is put together, then theology as a description of reality is simply unbelievable. If the essential thing about the truth claims of relativity, quantum mechanics and the like is that these are falsifiable then there clearly isn't a one-to-one correspondence between scientific statements and the world they purport to describe. Not one that can be justified, anyway. In that case, the last thing theology could do is describe any sort of state of affairs, for it has been falsified. If science was offering simply the best guess yet in a series of guesses which came from who-knows-where, then a description of the way things are couldn't possibly be given by theology.
The old “warfare” between science and religion crumbled and nobody won.
The “uneasy truce” which followed was a consequence of the fact that neither scientists nor theologians really understood what they were doing. The scientists thought they were applying the method of induction to build up a soundly based body of knowledge without realising that “You either dump the lot or you keep the lot. | kept the lot. Trinity, incarnation, real presence, seven sacraments, miracles, you name it.
Since it wasn’t supposed to be factual, why not?” Hume had demolished the underlying philosophical justification years before, and that what was really going on was the deductive testing of more or less reasonable hypotheses. The theologians banged on about the historical in the New Testament (having forgotten they had abandoned any pretence to it in the case of- Genesis) and their Platonism formed the basis for putatively factual assertions about creation, redemption, grace and so on. This conflict between realisms led, for instance, to modernists denying the virgin birth altogether as an impossibility while Thomists invented the bizarre idea that all of Jesus’ chromosomes somehow arose from a single ovum in Mary while a further miracle ensured the substitution of a Y for an X chromosome. These theological genuflections to a science which didn’t know where it was at either, are recent. Add the inevitable cultural influences on both science and theology and their interpreta- tion, and it isn’t hard to see why this hilarious muddle was more or less inevitable.
I had never been happy with demythologising: for one thing it seemed to imply that whatever it was that got said didn’t mean what it plainly did mean. Appeals to Barthian, Papal or Biblical authority left me cold as ways of copping out on the obligation to exercise the autonomy which I knew I had a duty to exercise. Thomism, and for a number of years I had been a Thomist, was intellectually consistent and very convincing.
Like mathematics it was an elegant way of juggling a symbolism. Dump Platonism and that’s what it is.
My reading of Popper meant dumping the Platonism. Reichenbach had accused Popper of turning science into poetry and there were plenty of people making horrified noises at the idea of losing their metaphysical refuge in induction. But it had to go; science is a kind of poetry and much of the ecstacy over the dubious theory of the Big Bang origin of the cosmos shows it to be. (It is more likely that we live in an infinitely old, infinitely large universe; it’s the theological realists like Stephen Jaki who want to keep the Big Bang). And if science is poetry, so much the more is religion poetry. If science can dump induction, then religion can dump Platonism, for each performs a similar function in gluing a symbolism together into a realist account of “how things are”. That is where I found myself.
At the time I was a parish priest. I shared this with the people who would be able to understand where I was, because I wanted their help. I offered an introduction to the way I was going at a University Lecture Sermon at Exeter and it aroused some interest.
What it meant for me was this. Popper made me see that science is a matter of the deductive testing of theories and hypotheses. These don’t quite come from nowhere but from a culture, a praxis, experience, a milieu. But fundamentally they just happen because there is no inevitability about it. In a somewhat similar fashion, it seemed, a glorious spiritual hypothesis had emerged from a first century culture and had been worked over down the ages until we received it.
As a factual account of reality it was rubbish and however much you trimmed and altered it, it would never be anything else. I was convinced that anybody who altered the Christian faith in that sense, to marry it to the spirit of the age, was only making sure it would be a widow very quickly.
You either dump the lot or you keep the lot. I kept the lot. Trinity, incarnation, real presence, seven sacraments, miracles, you name it. Since it wasn’t supposed to be factual, why not? I suppose I became a sort of late-arrival Catholic modernist.
Sermons got shorter and became incorporated into the symbolism of the Eucharist because it was all symbolism anyway. It was all exactly what we said it is, because we were there, saying so. We had a very beautiful hope-inspiring story about the ultimacy of love; and within that story we had subsidiary stories from the Old and New Testaments which illustrated, not the main story as a story, but its point and purpose in terms of spirituality, sharing and mutual support. It wasn’t perfect and if other people had stories which made money or sex ultimate instead of love, that was their business. When Authority sent silly forms to fill in about numbers of communicants [ binned them - this had nothing to do with the main issue.
The real issue is that I cannot express the things I want to express concerning my feelings at the lot of the millions in the world today or my longing for peace and justice or my anger at hypocrisy Li? photo: The Independent without telling the story. I must tell the story to say what I mean in the way that I mean it, because unlike huffing and puffing or moral exhortation it stimulates the imagination in a unique way. For this reason it is not open to modification or compromise for it stands or falls as a whole. But I am “allowed” to say this because it is a story. As a factual account, modification to the point of abandonment would be inevitable.
I’m reminded of the Bairnsfather cartoon of two World War 1 privates in a shell hole, where one of them is telling the other to “Go and find a better ‘ole”.
But I very much like a quote from Paul van Buren’s essay in Talk of God (Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Macmillan, 1969) who says: “Theology is that activity of men struck by the Biblical story in which they undertake to revise continually the ways in which they say how things are with their present circumstances in the light of how they read that story.” That will do for the moment # John Macdonald Smith is a priest, scientist and author.