Theology Today - Vol 39, No. 2 - July 1982 - BOOK REVIEW - The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century (Proceedings of a Symposium held at Oxford) & Christian Theology and Scientific Culture & Theology and Science in Mutual Modification

314 - The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century (Proceedings of a Symposium held at Oxford) & Christian Theology and Scientific Culture & Theology and Science in Mutual Modification

The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century
(Proceedings of a Symposium held at Oxford)
Edited by A. R. Peacocke
Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. 309 pp. $25.00.

Christian Theology and Scientific Culture
By Thomas F. Torrance
New York, Oxford University Press, 1981. 144 pp. $13.95.

Theology and Science in Mutual Modification
By Harold P. Nebelsick
New York, Oxford University Press, 1981. 192 pp. $15.95.

Science and theology were born out of the same intellectual crossfertilization, the meeting between ancient Hellenic and Hellenistic thought and that of the ancient Hebrews. Theology came first in time, and so it has often been customary to call theology regina scientiarum and to consider the natural sciences as derivative. Mary Hesse in her summary of the Oxford symposium seems to be taking it that way. If I'm reading her correctly, she seems to be saying that all the questions that bother us about the relation between theology and science will be put right when the Messiah comes, and we will see theology enthroned in glory with the natural sciences perched on her footstool.

I think Wolfhart Pannenberg is correct to say in his response to Hesse's essay that her paper is an interesting and individual contribution to the symposium but not a reflection of what the other participants had to say. Most of them, as well as Torrance and Nebelsick, seem to concede coequal status to both sides in the investigation of reality.

My own metaphor would be not queen and ladies-in-waiting but twins, even siamese twins. In their joint history, which Nebelsick ably lays out in a treatment that is short in space but dense in information, theology and science have affected each other for good and ill, have worked at cross purposes with each other, and have often tried to get away from each other, thus putting terrible strain on their joint umbilical cord. Nevertheless they remain bound together. Indeed they might be seen as an example of a complimentarity in the sense of Niels Bohr. This is a kind of dialectic confrontation in which opposites, or at least seeming incompatibles, are bound together as two sides of the nature of the same thing. The solution is not, as in Hegelian dialectic

some kind of synthesis or amalgamation of thesis and antithesis, but a state in which the transcendent reality holds the two sides of its nature in a kind of dynamic tension. The integrity of both sides is maintained, and although they continually oscillate back and forth, neither manages to drive the other out.

One of the sources of this joint gestation, as more than one of these authors makes plain, is a premise of rationality. Unless we believe that nature moves in orderly ways that are accessible-at least in part-to our intelligence, we can have no science. Unless we believe that God behaves reliably and that some divine things are accessible to our minds, we can have no theology. It would hardly seem necessary to belabor such a point, except that we are in the presence of a movement, namely fundamentalism, that denies it. Fundamentalism tells us that the fossils in the ground are a deception put there by God to test our faith. This proposition denies the rationality of nature and makes God a liar in the same breath. There is no discussion of fundamentalism in any of these books. Perhaps the works were prepared before its most recent resurgence, which seems to have taken the intellectual classes by surprise.

In the first paper of the Oxford symposium, Wolfhart Pannenberg asks some questions. He wants to know how God can act in creation when the world is full of inertial processes. He wants to know what place there is for spirit in the scientific treatment of life. And he wants to know what of the Christian eschatological expectations in a universe that may be open and expanding forever.

In her summary, Hesse treats these questions cavalierly, and Pannenberg complains of it. Pannenberg's questions seem to me to betray a pre-Einsteinian mindset, and that may be one reason Hesse brushes them off. Einstein is regarded by nearly all these people, especially Torrance and Nebelsick, as the great emancipator whose work freed science and theology to seek a new accommodation with each other. (Indeed I thought so, too, even before I began to learn from these authors, but I would add that the work of Bohr is as important or even more important for the emancipation as Einstein's, although Bohr gets less respect from the authors under review.) If Pannenberg's questions are indeed pre-Einsteinian, they merit consideration just for that. Ninety-nine percent of the population is still in a pre-Einsteinian consciousness, and these are the questions they will ask.

It was just Einstein's genius to show that there is no difference between inertial and non-inertial motions. Pannenberg's distinction, between things that go of themselves and things in which God might be able continually to interfere, falls away. The difference between inertial and accelerated (that is, continually interfered with) processes is all in your point of view. Is this then the final expulsion of the "god of the gaps," a popular deity repeatedly deplored in these books?

It certainly seems to be. Isaac Newton introduced the god of the gaps to push the planets back into orbit when they threatened to get out of place, and there was no scientific determinist way in the theory then

current to get them back in. God's activity in the world was to take place in realms where the writ of absolute, determinist, classical science did not run. But over the years, more and more events came under the aegis of scientific determinism, and the god of the gaps became a kind of Christ of the Andes, but one hunted from crag to crag until he had no place left to stand.

However, the Einsteinian revolution has destroyed the absoluteness of classical science. It is possible now to imagine different frames of reference, from each of which the same event takes on different appearances, and it is even possible to imagine completely separate universes with different space-times and different sets of physical laws. Furthermore the physics revolution also destroyed the iron determinism of classical science. This is a point that Einstein would never concede as long as he lived. It was the work of Bohr and the other quantum theorists that revealed a certain inescapable freedom of action in the heart of physical law itself.

None of these different Einsteinian space-times is in any way superior to another. They cannot be defined in terms of one another except circularly. General relativists have long acted as if space-times pointed to something beyond themselves; there seems to be hankering for something to measure them by. Perhaps eternity might serve. Conceived as a state of existence with neither time nor space, absolute simultaneity and absolute ubiquity, that, is, it can be in contact with every point of every conceivable space-time, that is, with every conceivable event. Perhaps this could give us a way of understanding God's sustaining presence in every event that happens. Of course that would necessarily include ordinary events that went according to the rules-albeit rules with built-in freedoms-as well as those that might not.

This view might also give us a handle on eschatology. I borrow here from Edward Schillebeeckx's treatment of the Epistle to the Hebrews (in his book, Christ). Schillebeeckx points out that the author to the Hebrews continually deals with: eschatological questions under two points of view: eternity, in which the eschatological event is already perfected and fully present; and time, in which the event is always coming into being, never finished. Perhaps an explicitly Einsteinian formulation of this analysis would give a clue. Even if the universe is eternal in an Augustinian sense, that is, it contains all possible time, and time from within does not necessarily have an end, we still may be able to have eschatology.

Having driven out the god of the gaps, are we then left with the god of the processes, that is, must we affirm that the sum of natural processes is somehow God? I sincerely hope not. I have made eternity transcendent, and I intend to keep it that way along with most of the people who write in these books. Process theology seems to me a bit like process cheese. It may not be poisonous, but it lacks a good deal of the satisfaction of the real thing, I have to say that Richard Schlegel's essay was disappointing. His careful refusal to allow God personality, consciousness, or will left me wanting to yell: "We can surely do better than this!"

It should be acknowledged, however, that process theology is nature's revenge for the overemphasis on transcendence characteristic of Western theologies. Immanence must be dealt with, especially if we are to interest modern people, but immanence has always been dangerous for Western theologians. That way lies pantheism.

I want to plead for a little moderation in the play of ideas, a little balance. All through Nebelsick's exposition of the history of these questions, I kept thinking that many people had many good ideas, but as soon as somebody got a good idea, it was driven into the ground. It may be a bias born of a quarter century as an Anglican, but I have to say that good ideas should not be carried to extremes. No notion is so good that it's worth going off the deep end for.

That was by way of introduction to Torrance's theology of light. Torrance is certainly balanced and judicious. I think his approach may be justly called sacramental. He begins with natural created light which is normative for relativistic dynamics, and links it to the divine light of God, about which the Scriptures and the church fathers are so eloquent. Created light is not to be confused with divinity, but, on the other hand, it is no mere metaphor or means by which we might learn about God. The connection is more substantive than that. Neither Torrance nor I would say that a laser beam is God, but I think we would agree that at times a laser beam might be a sacrament, just as water or wine can be.

For a physicist-and I think in this context I can call myself one-it is gratifying to see a theologian making positive use of the insights of modern physics. Most often, if note is taken of physical discoveries by theologians, these discoveries become simply limits, another set of boundaries for the god of the gaps. I wonder whether, next time around, Torrance would care to include gluons and the developments of the field theories based on guage symmetry groups in his recension. One of the characteristics of this kind of theologizing - and it may be why it is not often attempted-is that the physicists keep inventing new things to include. It seems it must necessarily be a kind of looseleaf theology.

Here is also the place to say that I don't share Nebelsick's extreme horror of natural theology. Outlawing it entirely would cancel an approach to revelation that has proved very profitable for missionary work, if nothing else. I am aware, as Nebelsick recounts, that in Germany natural theology led to Nazism. Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt? Germany is not the whole world, although students of theology might be tempted to think so. In the United States today it is the lopsided transcendentalism of the fundamentalists that threatens to lead us into authoritarianism and to destroy the environment in which we have to live along the way.

Where environmentalism is considered in these books, the authors generally seem to think that the Buddhists have better ideas than the Christians, and even that the Christian attitude has to be negative. Here come those blasted Germans again. Sigurd Daecke in the Oxford symposium brings them forth sorrowfully with all their prooftexts. I

wonder if it would curdle the fundamentalists' milk to know how well they agree with those Germans whose names they use to scare their children into obedience? Daecke suggests in so many words that the Anglican doctrine of the sacramentality of nature would be a corrective to the German attitude.

I do not wish to sling prooftext for prooftext, but there is an incident in which Jesus is rebuked by some Pharisees for the terms in which his disciples praise him. He replies that if his disciples did not praise him, the very stones at the roadside would have to shout. This tells us two things: the stones by the road (let alone cattle and sheep) are not merely scenery against which human beings play out the Heilsgeschichte as Daecke's Germans like to insist; the stones have a role in the Heilsgeschichte. Furthermore the function of Christians (Jesus' disciples) is here seen as being representatives of the stones (and the rest of nature) in the worship of God. Conversely Christians have a priestly function to mediate God (transcendent God) to nature and an obligation to respect nature as a creature of God. God has a purpose for it all. Christians also perform the same priestly function for each other, and that should be a sufficient corrective to the individualism that Nebelsick deplores in the German neo-Protestantism of the nineteenth Century. (Incidentally I thought it was Martin Luther who insisted on the priesthood of all believers.)

The place of Scripture in all this becomes more important now than it may have seemed a few years ago, because of the resurgence of fundamentalism. We have discussed the god of the gaps and the god of the processes. The fundamentalists have a god of the King James Version. As Nebelsick points out, the Scriptures did not fall from heaven. Christians have no Koran. The writing of Jewish and Christian Scriptures is attributed to human beings for whom an historical reality is claimed. The verbum sacramentum mediates God to us-here I recommend Torrance's theology of word, which deals with God's direct communication with people and which complements the immanentism in his theology of light-but Scripture is not God, not even in a genuine leather binding with a marriage certificate in the endpapers.

In these books, only Ernan McMullin deals at length with the role of Scripture, and he takes the conservative and traditional point of view that, the authors of Scripture having been necessarily culture-bound, we can discount statements that represent the way they talked or the way they viewed things in those days. I would go a touch farther. Everyone admits that Scripture was written in an a-scientific age. We cannot expect it then to read like a scientific book as the fundamentalists and some scientists seem to want. Apart from questions of its juridical authority I suggest that the value of Scripture for us is that it is a record of the encounter of the founders of our faith with the God of Sinai and of the Mount of the Resurrection. (Paleontologists can worry about the order in which the species of animals appeared.) As such, it is a testimony to the objective reality of spiritual things.

I think that for this enterprise of dialogue to succeed, the objective reality of spiritual things must be acknowledged and respected. People nowadays seem to have a lot of trouble conceding this. One of my difficulties with Schlegel's essay is his cautious unwillingness to allow God to exist apart from the material order. Process theology seems to be a similar cop-out. Without descending to a Schleiermacherisch subjectivity, I think it is possible to find a common residuum in the numinous experiences of many people and to say that we know something about spiritual things. Holy Scripture as well as later church tradition testify to it. It seems that somehow we can know spiritual things empirically. The question of what we can know and what knowing it means has been lately reopened in physics, and so I make this plea for the objectivity of spirit without fear of being lynched or hounded out of my profession, The physicists have tilled the ground ahead of me. In modern physical theories, the old distinctions between matter and non-matter, the ones that made matter something that would crack your teeth if you bit it, have largely disappeared. Matter, almost matter, and non-matter are treated on an equal footing in modern particle physics. That being so, should spirit be far behind?

For the future of this enterprise a good deal of hope is expressed in these books. The old boundaries have faded away, and a new relationship can now be negotiated. Maybe now we can do better than a non-aggression pact.