Two decreases in tension between faith and science

Over the past two hundred years or so, one new tension point arose for the relationship between Christianity and science due to scientific progress—namely, evolution. At the same time, several tension points disappeared due two other instances of scientific progress.

The first instance of this scientific progress was the general abandonment of the Aristotelian eternal world model of the universe with Big Bang cosmology. In the middle ages, Jewish, Islamic and Christian thinkers struggled with the tension between the science/philosophy of the day strongly tending towards a universe that always existed and the theological commitment to a creation a finite amount of time ago. That problem is gone.

The second instance is our scientific understanding of the continuity of organic development from zygote to embryo to infant to adult, which has made quite implausible the old view of discontinuous transition in utero from vegetable to animal to human. This old view was the dominant scientific view of human origins until fairly recently, and it had serious tensions with Christian theology.

The first of these embryological tensions was with Christian moral views about abortion. While traditionally Christians opposed both contraception and abortion, abortion was morally seen as a form of homicide. But on the discontinuous transition view, abortion prior to human ensoulment would only be contraception.

The second embryological tension was a technical problem in Christology. Suppose that in the Incarnation we have the vegetable, mere animal and rational animal sequence. Then Aquinas observes there are two possibilities, neither of which is theologically appealing.

First, it could be that God becomes incarnate as a vegetable or a mere animal. But this seems, as Aquinas says, “unbecoming”. And he seem to be right. The Incarnation reveals to us the person of the Logos, and it would be unbecoming that the Logos become a non-personal being.

Second, it could be that the Incarnation happens only at the beginning of the third stage of development, namely once everything is ready for a rational animal. But then Aquinas says “the whole conception could not be attributed to the Son of God”. Indeed, don’t we even have a tension with the Apostles’ Creed line that Christ “was conceived by the Holy Spirit”? For on this option, Christ was not conceived at all. What was conceived was a vegetable, not Christ. (Indeed, none of us were conceived on this view.) Moreover, one might worry that then there would be a sense in which the flesh of Christ would pre-exist the Incarnation. And that makes it difficult to say that the Word became flesh—for the flesh that Scripture says he “became” would already in a sense have been there, and one can’t become this flesh, since this flesh already has its own identity. (Granted, there may well be some Aristotelian metaphysics one can do to lessen this last worry.)

Aquinas solves the problem by supposing that Christ is conceived fully formed in Mary’s womb, and hence has the rational soul from the first moment of his existence. But this solution is itself problematic. Absent gradual development from a zygote, is this conception at all? If God were to create an adult human either ex nihilo or out of some pre-existing matter, we would not consider that a conception. But neither should we then consider it a conception if God creates a fully-formed fetus, even if he does that out of the pre-existing matter of Mary. So we still have a problem with the Apostles’ creed’s “was conceived by the Holy Spirit”. Moreover, it seems that this deprives Mary of a significant chunk of her motherhood.

But the problem entirely disappears once we think that the human beings begin their existence at conception. Christ is conceived by the Holy Spirit, presumably in that Mary’s ovum is transformed into a zygote by the infinite power of the Holy Spirit, which zygote is the Christ who then grows in utero like we all do.

(Catholics also note that the new scientific understanding of human embryonic development also helps with the doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception—for only a rational being can be immaculately conceived, since original sin or freedom from it can only apply to a rational being.)

YouTube talks on Principle of Sufficient Reason and on the measure problem in cosmology

For most of the week I was at the Santa Cruz Philosophy of Cosmology institute. Thursday I gave a talk on the Principle of Sufficient Reason and on the measure problem in cosmology for multiverses. These talks and many talks by smart people are available here. Click on "Program", then scroll down close to the bottom to Thursday 7/11 if you want mine.

Or just click right here for part 1 and part 2 of my talk on Youtube.

Here are the slides to part 1 (cosmological argument) and part 2 (measure problem).

Philosophy of cosmology blog

The Templeton-funded Philosophy of Cosmology project at Rutgers has a promising blog.

Strangeness

Sometimes I am struck with how "strange" the Christian faith is—it just seems a bit incredible. But this reflection, I think, helps: we have very good reason to think that the correct physics and cosmology is going to be very strange, too. (Even if, and maybe especially if, it turns out to be quite simple and elegant.) What is prior in the order of knowledge is posterior in the order of being, the Aristotelians tell us, and so we would expect the ultimate explanations of reality to be removed from ordinary experience. I always find amusing the story of how St John Chrysostom had to preach against Arian heretics who used arguments like "If God is a Trinity, then God's essence is incomprehensible; but God's essence is comprehensible; hence God is not a Trinity." St John was preaching against the second premise.

The smallness of the universe

[I am now thinking that the following line of argument is probably deeply spiritually mistaken. Or, maybe, the issue is this: It is the universe conceived of naturalistically that is small. But the universe that we in fact inhabit lacks that kind of smallness for it images the glory of God. So perhaps there is still an ad hominem against naturalism in the line of thought.]

Suppose I and a few other people were born and lived on the inner surface of a sphere that was a kilometer in diameter. Walk 3.14 km, and you're back where you started. And that was all. As far as I could tell, things had always been in the sphere more or less the same as far back as one could tell, with a small stable population and a simple, self-contained ecosystem. There is nothing particularly mysterious in this ecosystem, and there even is a little library containing books written by my ancestors which give complete systmes of physics, chemistry and biology that fit with all the data.

I think there is an intuition one might have after one had surveyed this meager habitat: there has to be more to reality than this. This intuition could be bolstered by arguments from design or causation, but I think it could also be a self-standing intuition: this can't be all there is.

Now our universe is bigger than that sphere. But I do not think that sheer size is what makes a difference. When I reflect on my stargazing, instead of thinking of the vastness and mystery of the physical world, I have lately been thinking about a certain kind of smallness that it has. Sure, there are untold numbers of stars arranged in untold numbers of galaxies. But even that one kilometer sphere had untold numbers of grains of dust, and that didn't make it all that large. The universe is physically large relative to us, but it exhibits a lawlike unity, and while there are many stars, they can mostly be classified into a limited number of types and subtypes. And this vast universe is, nonetheless, one that is small enough that we can have all-encompassing cosmological theories—that we can hold it all in our mind. It is true that our present theories are not good enough. But we seem to be making progress.

If this is right, then I think it is possible to have a similar kind of smallness intuition about the universe as a whole: this can't be all there is to reality. Reflecting on the universe as a whole—a whole made up of physical parts, indeed largely made up of parts like electrons, neutrinos and/or electromagnetic fields that are pretty familiar to us—can make the universe seem small to the mind's eye. Not small physically, of course. The relevant kind of conceptual smallness is compatible with the universe having infinite spatial extent. Rather, it is small in some deeper sense, despite all its wonder and glory.

I think this may be a way in which the physical universe proclaims to us that it is not all there is, that it is not self-sufficient, that while great and full of splendor, it is, after all, but an image. And unless it is seen expressly as an image, it will pale to us. For a while one might enjoy looking at the calligraphy in a manuscript. But eventually, unless one starts reading what the text says, the manuscript will probably stop being all that interesting. But once seen as pointing to something greater, indeed something infinite (and not just in the uninteresting spatial sense), then it takes on a new, and deeper splendor, one that shines through that natural splendor that was in danger of fading.