As we noted in the previous post Plantinga, in his thought-provoking book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, feels evolution has incorrectly been seen as hostile to religious belief (pages 63-64):
The scientific theory of evolution as such is not incompatible with Christian belief; what is incompatible with it is the idea that evolution, natural selection, is unguided. But that idea isn’t part of evolutionary theory as such; it’s instead a metaphysical or theological addition.
Divine Intervention
He covers many aspects of the religion/science problem in his book, including the ‘fine tuning’ hypothesis, ie that the probability of the preconditions for conscious life being so exactly met is vanishingly small, and the argument from design. This is well-trodden territory. I felt it might be more interesting to cherry pick some of the more unusual arguments even at the risk of selling short the power of his overall case. He covers so much ground so thoroughly that it would be impossible to do this book anything like justice. It would be best to take the examples below as an inadequate sample or taster and go direct to the book before judging the quality of his argument as a whole.
A topic he moves to along the way is the question of divine intervention. I am risking doing his case an injustice by only picking up his argument from where he begins to deal with the implications of quantum mechanics, but this kind of selectiveness is unavoidable, I fear (pages 94-95):
If we try to define a miracle as an event that is incompatible with (what we presume, on the basis of the best evidence, to be) laws of nature, then it seems that water changing to wine, a dead man coming back to life, etc. are not miracles because they are not incompatible with QM. But QM does say that they are very, very improbable.
It is a short step from this to his feeling that (page 96) ‘[o]n the “new picture,” therefore—the picture presented by QM—there is no question that special divine action is consistent with science.’
Incidentally, QM has other implications as well that other thinkers have seized upon to undermine the default assumption of naturalism. Take Kelly and Kelly, for example, in their book, Irreducible Mind (page xxii):
. . . advances in physics from Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation to 20th century developments in quantum mechanics and relativity theory have undermined the classical and commonsense conceptions of matter to such an extent that reducibility of mind to matter is anything but straightforward, and hardly a foregone conclusion.
Plantinga, before expanding on the implications of QM, argues that the possibility of divine intervention does not necessarily impact upon our ability to make informed decisions about how to act (page 103):
What’s required for free action is that there be enough regularity for us to know or sensibly conjecture—at least for the most part and with reasonably high probability—what will happen if we freely choose to take a given action. . . . . All that’s required for purposeful free action is reasonable confidence in substantial regularity in the neighborhood of the proposed action. And that’s certainly compatible with God’s sometimes intervening.
However, he is not content to leave the matter there (page 108):
The reasons for supposing God couldn’t or wouldn’t intervene in his creation are weak. But now we must face a more poignant question: what, from the point of view of the new picture, is intervention?
His argument gets rather complicated here and I hope I have condensed it accurately. It seems to me to boil down to the idea that quantum theory supposes that reality collapses at a ‘regular rate’ into a new state, but there is no requirement for this state to be identical with the previous state. There is considerable uncertainty about how frequent this regularity is. I expect I have lost some of his argument’s subtlety somewhere somewhat but I think that is the basic point.
He feels this paves the way for supposing that divine intervention, rather than being the exception, is in fact the normal state of affairs (pages 115-116):
Perhaps, then, all collapse-outcomes (as we might call them) are caused by God. If so, then between collapses, a system evolves according to the Shrödinger equation; but when a collapse occurs, it is divine agency that causes the specific collapse-outcome that ensues. On this view of God’s special action—call it “divine collapse-causation” (“DCC”)—God is always acting specially, that is, always acting in ways that go beyond creation and conservation, thus obviating the problem alleged to lie in his sometimes treating the world in hands-off fashion but other times in a hands-on way.
The freedom in nature to collapse into any form whatsoever paves the way for God’s hand to be free in this respect (pages 116-117):
[I]t is in the nature of physical systems to evolve between collapses according to the Shrödinger equation; it also is in their nature to undergo periodic collapses; but it is not part of their nature to collapse to any particular eigenstate. . . . . Hence, in causing a nature to collapse to a particular eigenstate, God need not constrain it against its nature.
Methodological Naturalism
He goes on to take a careful look at what happens when practitioners of the scientific method, including those who also believe in God, bracket the possibility of religious belief and remove it from their methodological process (page 169).
Consider the fact that many who practice historical Biblical criticism themselves personally accept the whole range of Christian belief, but separate their personal beliefs (as they might put it) from their scripture scholarship; in working at scripture scholarship, they prescind from their theological beliefs; they bracket them, set them aside. Why would they do that? Because they believe an effort to be scientific requires this separation or dissociation. Their thought is that scientific investigation requires thus setting aside theological belief. They accept the methodological naturalism (MN) that is widely thought to characterize science.
This is not the same as the naturalism he attacks, and which we looked at in the previous post. Methodological naturalism is confined to the one area of activity (ibid.):
The methodological naturalist doesn’t necessarily subscribe to ontological naturalism. MN is a proposed condition or constraint on proper science, or the proper practice of science, not a statement about the nature of the universe. . . . “Science neither denies or opposes the supernatural, but ignores the supernatural for methodological reasons.”
He spells out what this means in practice (pages 171-172):
According to MN, furthermore, the data model of a proper scientific theory will not invoke God. . . Secondly, there will also be constraints on the theory itself. . . . according to MN the parameters for a scientific theory are not to include reference to God or any other supernatural agents.
There is a totally unsurprising consequence of this (page 174):
Then the relevant point is that the evidence base of the inquiry in question includes the denial of central Christian (and indeed) theistic beliefs. If so, however, the fact that this inquiry comes to conclusions incompatible with Christian belief would be neither surprising, nor—for Christians—an occasion for consternation or dismay.
It is perhaps worth mentioning here that this a priori exclusion of the spiritual dimension from scientific enquiry may not be sustainable for much longer. The Irreducible Mind points up very clearly how psychology must at some point bring this aspect of reality into its approach. Referring amongst other things to psi phenomena, Edward Kelly writes (page xxviii):
These phenomena we catalogue here are important precisely because they challenge so strongly the current scientific consensus; in accordance with Wind’s principle, they not only invite but should command the attention of anyone seriously interested in the mind.
The prevailing attitude of course in many cases goes far beyond methodological naturalism into the strongest possible form of it (op.cit. page xxvii):
Most critics implicitly – and some, like Hansel, explicitly – take the view that psi phenomena are somehow known a priori to be impossible. In that case one is free to invent any scenario, no matter how far-fetched, to explain away ostensible evidence of psi.
In terms, though, of methodological naturalism alone any conflict is in Plantinga’s view trivial. This leads him to conclude at this point (page 190):
To return to that main line: so far I’ve argued that there is no conflict between Christian belief and evolution; nor is the claim that God acts specially in the world in conflict with science. I’ve gone on to argue that there is indeed conflict between Christian belief and certain areas of evolutionary psychology and historical Biblical criticism; this conflict, however is superficial. So much for conflict; I turn next to concord between Christian belief and science.
But that will have to wait for the next post in this series.
Interesting but I find the dance between theoretical physics and metaphysics a difficult one. Perhaps I lack the music of the spheres that comes with a love of mathematics and the physical sciences to make sense of the arguments. If we believe religious truth to be metaphorical in nature, as you have argued in the past surely the miracle of changing water into wine becomes a redundant question. I will however try to get hold of a copy for review.
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I think what I was trying to tease out, at least some of the time, was how the Manifestations of God speak to us according to our understanding rather than according to the reality to which They have access. Therefore what They say is the closest approximation to that truth They can provide that lies within our grasp. To that extent it may not be literally but symbolically true. However, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is clear in ‘Some Answered Questions’ Section 22, that miracles do literally happen even though they may not seem compelling evidence to those who did not experience them directly:
“The Holy Manifestations are the sources of miracles and the originators of wonderful signs. For Them, any difficult and impracticable thing is possible and easy. For through a supernatural power wonders appear from Them; and by this power, which is beyond nature, They influence the world of nature. From all the Manifestations marvelous things have appeared.
“But in the Holy Books an especial terminology is employed, and for the Manifestations these miracles and wonderful signs have no importance. They do not even wish to mention them. For if we consider miracles a great proof, they are still only proofs and arguments for those who are present when they are performed, and not for those who are absent.”
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