No room for God? History, science, metaphysics, and the study of religion

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 495-519

  Gregory, Brad S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149541033     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00472.x     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Tor Egil Førland, "Acts of God? Miracles and Scientific Explanation," History and Theory 47 (December 2008), 483-494 (this issue).
2. Page references are in parentheses. Brad S. Gregory, "The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (December 2006), 132-149.
3. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 90.
4. For just a few recent examples in an enormous literature, see Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2000);
5. Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003);
6. Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur R. Peacocke (Vatican City: Vatican City Observatory, 1995);
7. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006);
8. N. H. Gregersen and J. W. Van Huyssteen, Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998);
9. John F. Haught, Deeper than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003);
10. Joachim Illies, Schöpfung oder Evolution: Ein Naturwissenschaftler zur Menschenwerdung (Zurich: Edition Interfrom, 1979);
11. Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978);
12. R. Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992);
13. Christopher C. Knight, The God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007);
14. Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Harper, 1999);
15. Arthur R. Peacocke, Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith? Selected Essays (Philadelphia and London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004);
16. John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007);
17. Robert John Russell, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008);
18. Keith Ward, Religion and Revelation: A Theology of Revelation in the World's Religions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), esp. 283-343;
19. and Mark W. Worthing, God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).
20. John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 11-30;
21. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2007), 4-8.
22. On chaotic systems in relationship to Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics, see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 6-7, 184-187, 250-251, 314.
23. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory [1999] (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 3 (italics in original).
24. Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality, 92-93.
25. Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law (New York: Basic Books, 2006), esp. 149-159, 221-236.
26. For four different assessments of the character and future prospects of superstring theory, from the most optimistic to the most critical, see Greene, Elegant Universe
27. and idem, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005);
28. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2006);
29. Smolin, Trouble with Physics;
30. and Woit, Not Even Wrong.
31. For the history of this process in elite American public and private universities especially in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
32. and Christian Smith, "Secularizing American Higher Education; The Case of Early American Sociology," in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. idem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 97-159.
33. The antireligious rants of the so-called New Atheists are a recent manifestation in this same history, premised on the same metaphysical assumptions, now metastasized into a shrill ideology fueled by recent culture wars over religion's place in Western public life and the violent realities of militant Islamism around the world. See, for example, Sara Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004);
34. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006; Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2008);
35. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell; Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006);
36. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007);
37. Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, transi. Jeremy Leggatt (New York: Arcade, 2007);
38. and John Allen Paulos, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).
39. For Scotus and Henry of Ghent on this issue, see Stephen Dumont, "Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus," in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Marenbon, in Routledge History of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), III, 291-328 at 307-322.
40. On Occam's univocity as a continuation of Scotus's, see David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 185-193.
41. On Occam's univocity in general, see Armand Maurer, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of Its Principles (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999), 277-292.
42. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 25-31, quotation on 27.
43. Koyré covered much of the same territory and reached a similar conclusion in his classic narrative of the emergence of the Newtonian mechanistic worldview, but without seeing the underlying significance of the nominalists' univocal metaphysics of being. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).
44. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 45-67.
45. R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981).
46. Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom [1896], ed. Bruce Mazlish (New York: Free Press, 1965).
47. The same univocal conception of being was presupposed not only by those thinkers (above all Spinoza) whom Jonathan Israel categorizes as part of the "radical Enlightenment," but also "moderate Enlightenment" thinkers such as Newton and Locke. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
48. For the continuation of the same presuppositions underlying the story in nineteenth-century Britain, see A. N. Wilson, God's Funeral (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999);
49. and for the United States in the nineteenth century, see James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), esp. 141-202.
50. Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 36.
51. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theotogiae, I, q. 3, a. 5;
52. see also Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), 13
53. and much more extensively, for analyses of Aquinas's view of God informed by Wittgenstein and Lonergan, Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 119-170;
54. idem, Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
55. For insightful remarks on the ways in which scientists frequently portray human beings as both evolutionarily unexceptional and yet as the supreme arbiters of morality and human progress, see Eric Cohen, 'The Ends of Science," First Things 167 (November 2006), 26-33.
56. For a convincing critique of Kuhn's antirealist claims and tendency to take the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics as typical of all scientific paradigm shifts, see Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 85-86, 104, 187-209, 268-269.
57. On the tendency of those espousing atheistic scientism to conflate the hypothesis of methodological naturalism with the implicit or explicit assertion of metaphysical naturalism, see, for example, George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74;
58. R. Douglas Geivett, "The Epistemology of Resurrection Belief," in The Resurrection of Jesus; The Crossan - Wright Debate (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 93-105 at 99-100.
59. Gregory, "Other Confessional History," 138, 140.
60. For just a few examples of works by these scholars, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006);
61. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997);
62. Samuel Byrskog, Story as History - History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (Tübingen: Mohr, 2000);
63. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans, 2003);
64. Birger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2001);
65. John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 3 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1991-2001);
66. Graham N. Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
67. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996).
68. For the classic work about the marginalization of the Bible in Western intellectual culture, see Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974).
69. Jonathan Sheehan has recently argued that the Bible's place in eighteenth-century German and English Protestantism was transformed rather than eclipsed, but he does not examine the assumptions underlying the historical process of its reconstitution as a culturally central rather than religiously authoritative text. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
70. Among recent sophisticated theological reflections on evolutionary biology in relationship to cosmology and physics, see, for example, John F. Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000);
71. idem, Deeper than Darwin;
72. Knight, God of Nature;
73. Peacocke, Evolution: Disguised Friend of Faith?
74. The American writer Flannery O'Connor (not a trained theologian, but an intellectually astute Catholic) put it this way: "I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth." O'Connor, letter to Alfred Corn, May 30, 1962, in The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 476-478 at 477 (my emphasis).
75. The theologian Christoph Schönborn suggests that the overwhelming increase in our knowledge of the natural world compared to what was known to biblical writers actually should make it easier to believe now in God as creator ex nihilo of the universe. Schönborn, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith, ed. Hubert Philip Weber, transi. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 29.
76. In addition to works by these authors already cited previously in the notes, see Arthur R. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming - Natural, Divine and Human, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, and London: SCM Press, 1993);
77. and Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, transi. J. R. Foster [1969] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), esp. 137-161, 171-177, 193-196.
78. idem, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 48-49, 57-75;
79. Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 169-231;
80. and Russell, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega, 110-211.
81. On the context and character of Spinoza's work, see Brad S. Gregory, "Introduction" to Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, transi. Samuel Shirley (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 1-44.
82. See Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), with section ten, "Of Miracles," at 96-116.
83. In the words of Kenneth Miller, a Catholic professor of evolutionary biology at Brown University, a transcendent God who is "present everywhere and at all times could easily act to alter what both physicists and Hollywood call the space-time continuum in ways that profoundly affect events. . . . And God, the Creator of space, time, chance, and indeterminacy, would exercise exactly the degree of control he chooses." Miller, Finding Darwin's God, 242.
84. Interestingly, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics who has been consistently hostile to any religious claims about meaning, purpose, or design derived from the laws of physics, concedes: "I think that in fact my nondesigner argument is eminently falsifiable. All that's needed is a miracle or two." Weinberg, '"A Designer Universe?': An Exchange," in Facing Up, 245.
85. The incident is briefly recounted in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 146-147. On the issue of medieval skepticism about miracle claims, I am grateful for discussions with Steven Justice.
86. Hume, First Enquiry, ed. Buckle, 97.
87. J. Houston, Reported Miracles; A Critique of Hume (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 121-207;
88. C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. 153-156;
89. David Johnson, Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999);
90. John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
91. For a fine recent overview of the complexities involved in the formation of what eventually became the Christian Bible, see Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007).
92. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
93. See also idem, Salvation at Stake, 348-349, 351-352;
94. "Late Medieval Religiosity and the Renaissance of Christian Martyrdom in the Reformation Era," in Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History; Essays Presented to Heiko A, Oberman on His 70th Birthday, ed. Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 379-399 at 399;
95. Catholicism and Historical Research: Confessionalism, Assimilation, or Critique? (Notre Dame, IN: Erasmus Institute, 2005), esp. 10-12;
96. "Christian Reform and Its Discontents," in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 589-604 at 602-603.
97. For a few recent examples by prize-winning historians, see Mark Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
98. George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003);
99. Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006);
100. Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
101. As an example from each of these three categories of the sort of scholarship I have in mind, see Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses;
102. Evans, Historical Christ and Jesus of Faith;
103. and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).