Contemporary Philosophical Theology

Charles Taliaferro, Chad Meister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317294429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Contemporary Philosophical Theology, Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister focus on key topics in contemporary philosophical theology within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism. The volume begins with a discussion of key methodological tools available to the philosophical theologian, such as faith and reason, science and religion, revelation and sacred scripture, and authority and tradition. The authors use these tools to explore subjects including language, ineffability, miracles, evil, and the afterlife. They also grapple with applied philosophical theology, including environmental concerns, interreligious dialogue, and the nature and significance of political values. A concluding discussion proposes that philosophical theology can contribute to important reflections and action concerning climate change.

1
Science and Philosophical Theology

Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?

(Job 28: 12)

In the introduction we presented philosophical theology as the practice of philosophy from both the inside and outside of theological traditions. Philosophical theology may be compared to interpersonal relationships. In getting to know another person it would be odd to limit our attention to the person’s external behavior and anatomy; unless our focus is medical (in some very narrow sense), presumably we want to learn of another person’s thinking, emotions, experiences, memories, sensations, values, motives, the reasons for the decisions they make, and so on. In the terms that some philosophers use today, in getting to know another person we want to know what it’s like to be that individual. Learning about ourselves and others involves using a philosophy of some kind insofar as we believe that some facts about people are more important than others. Unless we are podiatrists, shoe retailers, or runners, we rarely begin to get to know someone by deciphering the size of their feet and this is due to our philosophy of persons. If we philosophically believed that the most fundamental aspect of persons is their economic activity, or their ethnicity, or the experience of the first five years of their life, then we would centre our attention on such activities, backgrounds, or early experiences of ourselves and others.

As we begin our practice of investigating theological positions and traditions, it is natural for us to consider our philosophical view of the methods to employ (some of which we referenced in the introduction). It is at this point that we run into a significant challenge: there are some philosophers who think that we should begin with the natural or physical sciences. This need not be disastrous for philosophical theology. Some scholars argue that modern science itself was founded on theological convictions (e.g. that we may expect science to be successful because the cosmos is created and sustained by a rational Creator), and some philosophers today think that the universe exhibits signs of “fine tuning” that provide some evidence of a divine reality. But many philosophers who stress the natural or physical sciences today emphasize their use in establishing a firmly naturalistic worldview that explicitly rejects theism (or the supernatural) at all levels and see the sciences as being the final, autonomous arbitrator for establishing claims to know of reality. More specifically, these philosophers argue that philosophy itself should be subordinate to the natural sciences. In the late twentieth century Willard Van Orman Quine, for example, contended that we should not give primacy to philosophy. He endorsed a form of naturalism that involved the “abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy.”

[Naturalism] sees natural science as an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible but not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and the hypothetical deductive method of doubt.

(Quine 1981, 72)

The hypothetical deductive method involves constructing (or discovering) the laws of nature and being able to explain and predict events via a method in which implications are deduced from an hypothesis and an attempt is made to falsify or confirm the hypothesis. According to Quine, the methods employed in the sciences may be imperfect, but science itself is self-justifying and not in need of any deeper, philosophical justification. What might this treatment of the primacy of the physical or natural sciences mean for philosophical theology?

The great theological traditions involve claims about revelation and reason, different descriptions of God, alternative accounts of God acting on a cosmic scale and in human history, and narratives of such religious entities and experiences as incarnations, avatars, divine love, justice, mercy and forgiveness, reincarnation, life after life, and more. Sometimes in sacred texts, God or the divine is depicted in highly anthropomorphic terms (God has a face and hands; e.g., Exodus 33: 20), while other times God is said to be inscrutable and beyond human knowing (e.g., Romans 11: 33–34). Unfortunately, or fortunately, these multifaceted religious visions face an immediate and potentially overwhelming challenge. Entertaining theological traditions from the inside may be of historical interest in understanding our ancestral past or as expanding our imagination, but, according to some philosophers, it involves entertaining what science has determined to be evident falsehoods.

Some prominent philosophers argue that modern science has discredited all such theological visions. Steven Pinker observes:

To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. … We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayer—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people think there is.

(Pinker 2013)

Pinker’s challenge is borne out of a widespread assumption that the sciences provide us with a clear understanding of physical causation. What that leaves out involves the supposedly “non-physical,” which presumably includes God, the soul, nirvana, and so on.

Let us consider this challenge full on. It is the ultimate external, outsider critique that would brand philosophical theology dead on arrival. This kind of external examination is pictured by Daniel Dennett as a medical operation that might have a good outcome:

Yes, I want to put religion on the examination table. If it is fundamentally benign, as many of its devotees insist, it should emerge just fine; suspicions will be put to rest and we can then concentrate on the few peripheral pathologies that religion, like every other natural phenomenon, falls prey to. If it is not, the sooner we identify the problems clearly the better.

(Dennett 2006, 39)

After his examination of theism, however, Dennett sees the philosopher’s job more in terms of performing an autopsy than engaging in a life-saving operation. But is this a foregone conclusion? Are the major religious traditions akin to corpses, lifeless carcasses decaying within the various cultures of which they are a part? Or are they instead more like life-filled bodies, perhaps in need of some medical assistance now and again, but far from requiring embalming and burial? While we prefer the metaphor of examining religion in the context of a seminar room rather than thinking of religion as a patient or corpse placed on a table for examination, nevertheless these sorts of questions point to the heart of the current science/faith interchange. We intend to tackle them head-on.

The philosophers and the philosophical points of view to be treated in this chapter vary in terms of the magnitude of their claims. We will be looking at thinkers like Pinker who believe that religion can be dismissed, but he is more reluctant to do away with some things not directly treated as physical phenomena or at least not directly in the domain of the physical sciences. Ultimately our aim in this chapter will be to argue for the primacy of philosophy—thoughts, ideas, concepts, reasoning—as something more basic than science and more friendly to philosophical theology. We believe that Quine’s proposal to supplant philosophy is based on the mistaken view that his proposal is not philosophical. More on this later in the chapter.

We divide this chapter into three sections. The first lays out the challenge made on behalf of contemporary science. The second offers our response. We propose that reflection on contemporary science brings to light reasons why philosophical theology is of such great importance today. In the third section we consider what might be learned in this opening exchange about practicing philosophical theology with depth and insight. We also get prepared to confront in Chapter 2 the next challenge to philosophical theology.

A scientific case against philosophical theology?

The Judeo-Christian Bible and Christian councils, creeds, confessions and catechisms traditionally commence with God as the Creator of all that is. The opening words of the Old Testament, for example, succinctly state that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Apostles’ Creed, widely used for liturgical and catechetical purposes throughout church history, begins with “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” And the Nicene/ Constantinopolitan Creed, which emerged out of the ecumenical Councils of Nicea and Constantinople in 325 and 381 CE, respectively, and is taken by the vast majority of Christians to be a canon of orthodoxy, begins with the declaration: “I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible.”

These proclamations of God as divine Creator starkly contrast with the contentions of many contemporary philosophers and scientists that advances in science have eliminated any role for divine action with respect to the natural world. In their work The Grand Design, for example, physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow argue that the notion of a Creator of the universe is dispensable. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” They go further: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” When later pressed, Hawking elaborated on his view by stating that “One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but science makes God unnecessary” (Hawking 2010).

Similarly, Edward O. Wilson contends that religious belief emerged in prehistory as cooperative colonies of human beings dominated and multiplied, grounding their origination in creation myths that explain all they need about deep history in order to maintain tribal unity. Holding these religious beliefs, he maintains, offers benefits such as peace and stability in times of danger and assurances of divine favor and eternal life. These benefits, though, require submission and obeisance to God, which raise fundamental questions:

Yet let us ask frankly, to whom is such obeisance really directed? Is it to an entity that may have no meaning within reach of the human mind—or may not even exist? Yes, perhaps it really is to God. But perhaps it is to no more than a tribe united by a creation myth. If the latter, religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species. And if that is correct, surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement. Humankind deserves better.

(Wilson 2012, 267)

He goes on to suggest that a better way forward is a new enlightenment in which creation myths and organized religion are replaced by a rationalist morality and the scientific reconstruction of religious belief as an evolutionary biological by-product.

For a number of contemporary philosophers and scientists, including Dennett, Hawking, and Wilson, science and scientific explanations have eliminated any need to posit an active role of a divine reality in the natural world. God is out of a job, as it were, and has been replaced by natural laws. Philosophical theology, on this account, turns out to be the study of a set of false constructs. The tendency by those who affirm such a view is to set up a trenchant dichotomy between naturalism and supernaturalism:

Naturalism on any reading is opposed to supernaturalism … By “supernaturalism” I mean the invocation of an agent or force that somehow stands outside the familiar natural world and whose doings cannot be understood as part of it. Most metaphysical systems of the past included some such agent. A naturalistic conception of the world would be opposed to all of them … Most philosophers for at least one hundred years have been naturalist in the non-supernaturalist sense.

(Stroud 2004, 23)

Once the dichotomy has been established, all alleged realities, claims about causation, and explanations on the side of the supernatural are taken to be false: “No entity or explanation should be accepted whose existence or truth would contradict the laws of nature, insofar as we know them” (De Caro and Voltolini 2010, 71). One of the common convictions that unites most of the thinkers referenced so far is that they are confident that we possess a clear understanding of what it is to be physical and of physical causation and explanations. The strategy is to affirm the common sense and scientifically well-grounded understanding of the physical and to contrast it with the supernatural. Naturalists in modern times have sought to restrict explanations of events to events within the cosmos, leaving to one side the prospects of looking outside the cosmos. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume made a point that resonates with many such naturalists today. If science can explain all things within the cosmos in terms of different cosmic events, why look outside the cosmos for some additional explanation?

But the whole, you say, wants a cause. I answer that the uniting of these parts into a whole … is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the parts.

(Hume 1998, part 9)

In our further exploration of a scientific case against philosophical theology, we consider five philosophers who contend that we have a clearer understanding of what is physical—and an understanding of the outcome of the physical sciences— than we do about experience (including sensory experience), consciousness, and so on. We consider the work of Gilbert Ryle, Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Evan Fales, and Herman Philipse. The first three are cited for their general affirmation of the primacy of the physical over and against the realm of ideas, concepts, thought, and so forth. There is, in each of their claims, a privileging of the physical over and against the realm of mind and ideas. Fales and Philipse drive home a critique of theism and ideas of God that go beyond the physical.

The case of Gilbert Ryle

In the passage that follows, Ryle contrasts the common-sense understanding of the physical as a spatial, public world of causal interaction with the mysterious supposition that there may be something else, a mind, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Science and philosophical theology
• 2 Mystery and philosophical theology
• 3 Pluralism and philosophical theologies
• 4 Reasons and revelations
• 5 Divine attributes
• 6 Good and evil
• 7 Evil and philosophical theology
• 8 Philosophical explorations of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism
• 9 Philosophical theology and open society
• Index