70 - Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion

Explanation from Physics to Theology:
An Essay in Rationality and Religion
By Philip Clayton
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989. 230 pp. $26.50.

It is a mark of the prestige of natural science in our culture that other disciplines try to wrap themselves in the mantle of its authority by claiming to be scientific. Often, the only argument for such claims is a rather superficial comparison of two disciplines that overemphasizes similarities and completely ignores striking and important points of

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difference. The results of such comparisons usually have about them a distinct air of special pleading. As Philip Clayton notes early on in the book under review, "the literature is replete with over-quick comparisons of science and religion that do painful injustice to both." Clayton, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Williams College, aims at a just and balanced comparison of explanations in science and religion and, for the most part, succeeds in achieving this goal.

In a brief introductory chapter, private explanations, whose only justification is their personal disclosure value, are contrasted with intersubjective explanations, whose warrant is not limited in principle to a specified individual or group of individuals. According to Clayton, good intersubjective religious explanations must make external reference beyond the experience of the individual believer or community, must be true and not merely, for example, enlightening to an individual believer or community, and must be open to and able to withstand rational criticism by anyone who wishes to examine the reasons for and against them. The remaining five chapters are devoted to an exploration of similarities and differences among putatively intersubjective explanations in natural science, social science, philosophy, religion, and theology.

Chapters Two and Three review recent debates among philosophers of science about the nature of explanation in the natural and social sciences. In his discussion of explanation in natural science, Clayton tries to mediate between the position of logical empiricists like Hempel and Nagel who propose abstract formal models of scientific explanation and the position of contextualists like Kuhn and Feyerabend whose emphasis on the historical and pragmatic factors that shape scientific explanation has led critics to object to their relativism. In his discussion of explanation in social science, Clayton attempts to find a middle ground between formalists who suppose that human action is to be explained by subsuming it under laws and antipositivists who argue that the meaning of human action can only be grasped by empathetic understanding. Both chapters are very ambitious. They cover vast tracts of material in brief compass, and so their exposition and criticism of the views being discussed are inevitably sketchy and compressed. They are apt to be tough going for readers not already familiar with recent developments in philosophy of science.

The rather brief treatment of philosophical explanations in Chapter Four is meant to bridge what might otherwise appear to be an enormous gap between science and religion. Clayton maintains that philosophical and religious explanations contrast with scientific explanations in virtue of "their greater generality or depth, their nonempirical nature, their emphasis on systematic coherence and meaningfulness, their reflexive quality."

If students of religion who are not also philosophers of science persevere in their reading, they will find in the two concluding chapters

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of the book much that is both interesting and controversial. Chapter Five argues that one of the functions of religious beliefs is explanatory; Clayton's position is that "the individual beliefs accepted by the believer provide a coherent explanation of the world known to him" (or her, of course). Because there are in our culture coherent alternatives to religious belief, there is a type of contemporary believer, called by Clayton the "secular believer," for whom the rationality of religious explanations is constrained by a requirement that religious beliefs stand in coherent relationships with things from "outside the religious tradition as well, hence with the life-experience of one's nonbelieving peers and with otherwise accepted scientific or ethical truths." This requirement will obviously put pressure on secular believers to revise beliefs inherited from their traditions.

Both a commitment to the intersubjective susceptability to criticism of explanations and sympathy for the position of the contemporary secular believer contribute to shaping the view of theology Clayton advances in Chapter Six. Theology as an academic discipline is defined by the following four characteristics: (1) "theology formulates explanations that should be intersubjectively criticizable"; (2) "the results of research in other disciplines are relevant"; (3) "where basic theological beliefs are disputed by others in the discussion, some warrant must be given for assuming their truth in arguments in the intersubjective explanatory context"; and (4) "theology's claims must be taken as hypothetical in the academic context." Needless to say, each of these claims would be contested by some theologians. I myself find the third of them particularly problematic. If it is a rule of the game that every disputed theological belief must be provided with a warrant, then an infinite regress or a vicious circle of justification looms, and it appears that the theological skeptic can win an easy victory by allowing no theological belief to go undisputed.

Academic specialists, who constitute, I think, the audience for which this book is intended, will doubtless want to quarrel with Clayton over points of detail. It certainly deserves such careful study and criticism. Details apart, it seems to me to suffer from one major structural defect. Clayton does not examine in detail and only occasionally mentions in footnotes explanations in the discipline of history; nor does he discuss explanations in such essentially historical sciences as geology and evolutionary biology. One would expect to find illuminating analogies between explanations in such disciplines and theological explanations, especially those in Christian theology. The great Christian drama of sin and salvation is, after all, a grand historical narrative, among other things, and it seems clear that historical narratives can and sometimes do provide intersubjective explanations. Despite its virtues, then, this book is not a comprehensive study of intersubjective explanations; its title is apt to mislead by suggesting that it covers the entire spectrum of explanation from physics to theology. It is disappointing that Clayton

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did not take advantage of the opportunity to give us a more complete account of the forms of explanation from other disciplines that might cast light on theology.

Philip L. Quinn
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, Indiana