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The truth in religion
by REVEREND John Polkinghorne, Times Online
The Times Literary Supplement is less than frank about the credentials of John Polkinghorne, the reviewer. He is the REVEREND John Polkinghorne, an ordained Anglican priest, and they should have said so.
Reposted from:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2778493.ece
Substituting science for religion is like swapping a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear
John Cornwell
DARWIN'S ANGEL
An angelic riposte to The God Delusion
171pp. Profile Books. £10.99
978 1 84668 048 9
John Humphrys
IN GOD WE DOUBT
Confessions of a failed atheist
323pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £18.99.
978 0 340 95126 2
Religious belief is currently under heavy fire. Books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others tell us that religion is a corrupting delusion. Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young-earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general. The two books under review aim to make a more temperate contribution to the debate.
John Cornwell has hit on the amusing conceit of writing in the persona of Richard Dawkins's guardian angel, a being, moreover, who had earlier stood in the same relationship to Charles Darwin. The book's tone is gently ironic and its style that of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read. The twenty-one short chapters each consider some claim made in Dawkins's book The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19) and then subject it to reasoned questioning.
Cornwell begins by pointing out that Dawkins makes no serious attempt to engage with the academic discussion of religious thought and practice. His book is "as innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free from false modesty". When it asserts that Jesus' call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews (despite this claim being in clear contradiction to the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan), the only support quoted for this highly questionable statement is a book written by an anaesthesiologist.
Over the centuries, theologians have wrestled with how human language can attempt to speak about the nature of God, emphatically rejecting the idea that the deity is simply an invisible object among the other objects of the world. Yet, as Cornwell points out, the God in whom Dawkins disbelieves is a kind of "Great Science Professor in the Sky", a simplistic notion that any thinking theist would be quick to reject. We are continually told that theology is no proper academic discipline, a conclusion that could only be reached by someone whose knowledge of the subject was comparable to the scientific knowledge displayed by those who write in green ink that "Einstein was wrong".
Dawkins is relentlessly rude about religious believers. They are said to be "malevolent, barking mad, mendacious, deluded" and much more. He cannot have the courtesy to take seriously those of us who are both scientists and believers. Religious education of the young is equated with child abuse. Darwin's angel pertinently asks, "Would you really trade child sexual abuse for being brought up in the religion of your parents?". The tone of contempt – one might almost say hatred – that characterizes many of the assertions in The God Delusion is one of the most disturbing aspects of the book.
In God We Doubt displays much more even-handedness. John Humphrys is respectful of religious belief and the kind of life that often, but not invariably, issues from it, while emphasizing that he is unable himself to accept such belief. His approach is that of one who remains open and questioning about these matters, as indicated by the subtitle of his book, Confessions of a failed atheist. Humphrys writes in the chirpy colloquial style one might expect from a presenter of the Today programme on Radio 4. In fact, the book originated partly from interviews he conducted with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim academic, for the radio, and from the deluge of correspondence that followed.
Humphrys takes very seriously the human experience of conscience, urging us to do some things and to refuse to do others. No doubt, evolutionary thinking offers us some partial understanding of this, with its concepts of kin altruism (protecting the family gene pool) and reciprocal altruism (I'll help you in the expectation that you will help me). Nevertheless, Humphrys rightly sees that these concepts fail to offer insight into the kind of radical altruism which, to use an example he discusses at some length, led Irena Sendlerova repeatedly to risk her life in saving 2,500 Jewish children who were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Humphrys sees ethical intuition as the signal of a transcendent dimension in life, which he values but does not know how to explain from an atheist point of view.
Humphrys believes that the case for God made by the Abrahamic faiths is "riddled with holes". He fails to acknowledge the subtlety and truth-seeking character of theological thought, or to recognize that the care and discrimination exercised in serious biblical studies carries us well beyond a plodding, crypto-literalist approach to the interpretation of Scripture.
Both Dawkins and Humphrys rightly engage with the challenge to theism that is represented by the existence of a world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering. This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Yet there are some arguments, not discussed by either Humphrys or by Dawkins, which offer modest help as theologians struggle with the problems of theodicy. Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other. Humphrys asks why there are not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences. Such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removable by a God who was a bit less callous.
Fundamental to the discussion to which both books are seeking to contribute is the relationship between faith and reason. Too often the two have been pitted against each other, as if they were in necessary contradiction. Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin's angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound "as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear".
No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. Dawkins invokes Bertrand Russell's parable of the teapot irrationally claimed to be in unobserved orbit in the solar system. Of course there are no grounds for belief in this piece of celestial crockery, but there are grounds offered for religious belief, though admittedly different people evaluate their persuasiveness differently. Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science. In all realms of human inquiry, the interlacing of experience and interpretation introduces a degree of precariousness into the argument. Yet this does not mean that we cannot attain beliefs sufficiently well motivated to be the basis for rational commitment. In his book on the philosophy of science, Personal Knowlege (1964), Michael Polanyi stated that he was writing in order to explain how (scientifically) he could commit himself to what he believed to be true, while knowing it might be false. That is the human epistemic condition. Recognizing this should encourage caution, but not induce intellectual paralysis. It is in this spirit that the dialogue between science and religion needs to be conducted.
John Polkinghorne was formerly Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and President of Queens' College. His autobiography From Physicist to Priest was published this year.
Reposted from:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2778493.ece
Substituting science for religion is like swapping a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear
John Cornwell
DARWIN'S ANGEL
An angelic riposte to The God Delusion
171pp. Profile Books. £10.99
978 1 84668 048 9
John Humphrys
IN GOD WE DOUBT
Confessions of a failed atheist
323pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £18.99.
978 0 340 95126 2
Religious belief is currently under heavy fire. Books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others tell us that religion is a corrupting delusion. Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young-earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general. The two books under review aim to make a more temperate contribution to the debate.
John Cornwell has hit on the amusing conceit of writing in the persona of Richard Dawkins's guardian angel, a being, moreover, who had earlier stood in the same relationship to Charles Darwin. The book's tone is gently ironic and its style that of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read. The twenty-one short chapters each consider some claim made in Dawkins's book The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19) and then subject it to reasoned questioning.
Cornwell begins by pointing out that Dawkins makes no serious attempt to engage with the academic discussion of religious thought and practice. His book is "as innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free from false modesty". When it asserts that Jesus' call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews (despite this claim being in clear contradiction to the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan), the only support quoted for this highly questionable statement is a book written by an anaesthesiologist.
Over the centuries, theologians have wrestled with how human language can attempt to speak about the nature of God, emphatically rejecting the idea that the deity is simply an invisible object among the other objects of the world. Yet, as Cornwell points out, the God in whom Dawkins disbelieves is a kind of "Great Science Professor in the Sky", a simplistic notion that any thinking theist would be quick to reject. We are continually told that theology is no proper academic discipline, a conclusion that could only be reached by someone whose knowledge of the subject was comparable to the scientific knowledge displayed by those who write in green ink that "Einstein was wrong".
Dawkins is relentlessly rude about religious believers. They are said to be "malevolent, barking mad, mendacious, deluded" and much more. He cannot have the courtesy to take seriously those of us who are both scientists and believers. Religious education of the young is equated with child abuse. Darwin's angel pertinently asks, "Would you really trade child sexual abuse for being brought up in the religion of your parents?". The tone of contempt – one might almost say hatred – that characterizes many of the assertions in The God Delusion is one of the most disturbing aspects of the book.
In God We Doubt displays much more even-handedness. John Humphrys is respectful of religious belief and the kind of life that often, but not invariably, issues from it, while emphasizing that he is unable himself to accept such belief. His approach is that of one who remains open and questioning about these matters, as indicated by the subtitle of his book, Confessions of a failed atheist. Humphrys writes in the chirpy colloquial style one might expect from a presenter of the Today programme on Radio 4. In fact, the book originated partly from interviews he conducted with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim academic, for the radio, and from the deluge of correspondence that followed.
Humphrys takes very seriously the human experience of conscience, urging us to do some things and to refuse to do others. No doubt, evolutionary thinking offers us some partial understanding of this, with its concepts of kin altruism (protecting the family gene pool) and reciprocal altruism (I'll help you in the expectation that you will help me). Nevertheless, Humphrys rightly sees that these concepts fail to offer insight into the kind of radical altruism which, to use an example he discusses at some length, led Irena Sendlerova repeatedly to risk her life in saving 2,500 Jewish children who were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Humphrys sees ethical intuition as the signal of a transcendent dimension in life, which he values but does not know how to explain from an atheist point of view.
Humphrys believes that the case for God made by the Abrahamic faiths is "riddled with holes". He fails to acknowledge the subtlety and truth-seeking character of theological thought, or to recognize that the care and discrimination exercised in serious biblical studies carries us well beyond a plodding, crypto-literalist approach to the interpretation of Scripture.
Both Dawkins and Humphrys rightly engage with the challenge to theism that is represented by the existence of a world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering. This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Yet there are some arguments, not discussed by either Humphrys or by Dawkins, which offer modest help as theologians struggle with the problems of theodicy. Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other. Humphrys asks why there are not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences. Such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removable by a God who was a bit less callous.
Fundamental to the discussion to which both books are seeking to contribute is the relationship between faith and reason. Too often the two have been pitted against each other, as if they were in necessary contradiction. Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin's angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound "as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear".
No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. Dawkins invokes Bertrand Russell's parable of the teapot irrationally claimed to be in unobserved orbit in the solar system. Of course there are no grounds for belief in this piece of celestial crockery, but there are grounds offered for religious belief, though admittedly different people evaluate their persuasiveness differently. Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science. In all realms of human inquiry, the interlacing of experience and interpretation introduces a degree of precariousness into the argument. Yet this does not mean that we cannot attain beliefs sufficiently well motivated to be the basis for rational commitment. In his book on the philosophy of science, Personal Knowlege (1964), Michael Polanyi stated that he was writing in order to explain how (scientifically) he could commit himself to what he believed to be true, while knowing it might be false. That is the human epistemic condition. Recognizing this should encourage caution, but not induce intellectual paralysis. It is in this spirit that the dialogue between science and religion needs to be conducted.
John Polkinghorne was formerly Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and President of Queens' College. His autobiography From Physicist to Priest was published this year.
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Posted: Thursday, November 1, 2007 | PermalinkComments 101 - 135 of 135 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers102. Comment #84910 by Veronique on November 4, 2007 at 7:20 am
I don't have a problem with good ideas. Maybe it is the wholesale adoption of the then marketed good idea that I am railing against.I recall that news item where the Dalai Lama was prepared to amend core beliefs based on the findings of science. I am pleased that he appears to be able to adapt core beliefs because science has added to his knowledge of the world about him.
If there were any religious leader to whom I would offer a smile, it would be him. But he is not the problem. Buddhism is the least of our woes, although there is still a simplistic adherence to dogma.
We still have the Abrahamic religions to deal with, and they are far less accommodating to scientific theories, regardless of accumulated evidence and predictive accuracy.
I guess that I have made a blanket denial of anything that smacks of transcendental and superstitious cant. My sister has been a Vipassana Buddhist since 1976. I can't talk to her about normal, common or garden reality because of her spin on it. I am wary of upsetting her. She is far more intelligent than I and yet I see her as being caught in a belief system that flummoxes me. And our relationship consists of dancing around each other trying not to offend and therefore saying nothing of value in what should be a developing understanding of each other. We are in our sixties. Awful, really!! And I can't penetrate it; I don't know how to. She has this idolatry type worship place with a photo of Goenka and other paraphernalia that goes to make up a shrine, in front of which she practices meditative techniques.
I am sorry Steve, maybe my personal circumstance has coloured my views (how unusual:-)).
Love
V
Other Comments by Veronique
103. Comment #84911 by CHeard on November 4, 2007 at 7:20 am
BAEOZ (78)Thanks for the reply and clarifications. I still want to wrangle about one point, though.
I don't know who wrote your post, but I do know it wasn't the apostles. A bunch of illiterate Aramaic speakers wouldn't write down gospels in greek or your post in English (especially when they aren't around). That was my poorly attempted point.Seems to me that your argument assumes facts not in evidence, namely, that Jesus's closest followers were illiterate. But that's just a gratuitous assumption. Second-century church tradition has it that "Matthew" was a tax collector and "Luke" was a physician—if so, good shot at both being literate in both Aramaic and Greek (whether the tradition is correct in attaching those names to the gospels is a different matter, and not at all certain, I cheerfully admit). According to the gospels, some of Jesus's apostles were not just "unlettered fishermen," but more like managers in a fishing business—again, a good shot at some degree of literacy. It's equally impossible to demonstrate the apostles' illiteracy as their literacy, at this remove, but it's by no means impossible, nor even really implausible, that a few of Jesus's twelve apostles may have been literate.
Of course, literacy doesn't guarantee accuracy, or inherently counteract gullibility. But I think precision never hurts when thinking about these things.
As for the "rewritings" and "adaptations," sorry if I wasn't quite clear. My point is that it's probably inaccurate to think in terms of a long sequence of rewritings and redactions for the gospels, on the model of the Hebrew biblical documents (which often do show evidence of such a history). It's not as if the immediate authors of the gospels wrote an account without reference to any prophecies, and then later writers inserted those. Rather, the original gospel writers put in the prophecies from the very beginning, and reinterpreted those prophecies with reference to Jesus, and reinterpreted Jesus in light of those prophecies. My point was that these "adaptations" happened in the originals; no "rewritings" required.
Other Comments by CHeard
104. Comment #84912 by CHeard on November 4, 2007 at 7:22 am
Veronique (92)The Gautama Buddha (circa: 563BCE to 483BCE) was different but not by much. His teachings were not committed to writing until about 400 years after his death (yes! he did die; how unusual).Yeah, but he wouldn't stay dead until the Chinese authorities outlawed his reincarnation last month.
Other Comments by CHeard
105. Comment #84914 by Veronique on November 4, 2007 at 7:26 am
Hahaha!Quite right Chris. What an extraordinary display of controlling hubris that was!! LOL
Cheers
V
Other Comments by Veronique
106. Comment #84915 by epeeist on November 4, 2007 at 7:45 am
Comment #84908 by keithNote the three foot pieces of steel sitting on my shoulder. I wouldn't want people to get the idea that I am a weapons fetishist.
What's bellicose (or even pseudo-bellicose) about thinking that 'Zen and the Art of Archery' is thought-provoking? Are there some people on this site who don't like (or pseudo-don't like) Zen?
Both "Narziss and Goldmund" is Christianity with an Apollonic/Dionysian viewpoint.
Does this mean that both characters in the novel is Christianity or that both books, "Narziss" and "Goldmund" is?
This is a case of letting the fingers getting ahead of the brain.
Both "Narziss and Goldmund" and "The Glass Bead Game" are about the conflicts between Apollonian and Dionysian modes of living.
Other Comments by epeeist
107. Comment #84916 by Bonzai on November 4, 2007 at 7:49 am
Re: There is nothing unique in Jesus' moral teaching.The Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu (Mozi) articulated and elaborated on the theme of universal love and brotherhood ("jian-ai)centuries before Jesus. Like Jesus, he also hanged out and identified with the outcasts of society ("Mo" means tattooing marks on criminals' faces for identification and humiliation)
He was a logician, a master engineer and peace maker with some truly revolutionary and throughly modern ideas. At a time when China was a mere collection of warring states he traveled around the country to preach his doctrine of "non aggression" (which was not the same as pacifism as he did believe in self defense), he envisioned a society built on the principle of cooperation, brotherhood and equality. He fleshed out the golden rule and give it a radical interpretation and supply a practical to framework to think about it. He argued. for instance, that the best way to take care of one's parents was to look after all aging parents.
The best part is, he was not an imaginary person. His existence was well established.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi
Other Comments by Bonzai
108. Comment #84917 by epeeist on November 4, 2007 at 7:51 am
Comment #84904 by VeroniqueSomeone has a good idea; then the bureaucracy picks it up and runs with it, manipulating it to fit with the society at large and eventually canonising it in the legal framework. Then the original idea is lost forever within the maze of interpretation.
This is more or less exactly what happened to Confucianism.
And to add to the score of ethical systems that were produced pre-Christ, we actually do have one that was written down and from an historical personage. Namely Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics", written about 350BC.
Other Comments by epeeist
109. Comment #84918 by steve99 on November 4, 2007 at 7:55 am
Yeah, but he wouldn't stay dead until the Chinese authorities outlawed his reincarnation last month.
Ah, but Buddhas don't reincarnate.... its only unenlightened people and those pesky Lamas. The Chinese have only put a stop to the unlicensed re-incarnation of Lamas. Very clever of them to manage that, I think.
Other Comments by steve99
110. Comment #84920 by Bonzai on November 4, 2007 at 8:01 am
This is more or less exactly what happened to Confucianism
Confucianism has always been an ideology for the rulers as envisioned by its founder. Confucius himself advocated a class society based on hierarchies with rigidly prescribed social roles. He was upfront about the importance of social control and mass indoctrinations. He also argued that aristocrats and scholars should be given favourable treatments under the law.
Confucianism is quite reactionary in its outlook so not surprisingly it was embraced by the rulers quite early on. I don't think it was drastically perverted through canonization.
Other Comments by Bonzai
112. Comment #84995 by Goldy on November 4, 2007 at 12:56 pm
VinelectricMuslims view their religion as a continuation of an evolving but consistent theme of revelation, several installmnets of a single message handed down to all cultures throughout history. They claim that the theolgoy was corrupted by successive generations and that is why a new wise man was sent to renew the message every so often.
I thought the buck stopped with Mo - no more evolution or continuation. Isn't that why the Bahai are despised?
Other Comments by Goldy
113. Comment #85006 by BAEOZ on November 4, 2007 at 1:28 pm
CHeard:According to the gospels, some of Jesus's apostles were not just "unlettered fishermen,"
Just shows the ignorance of my catholic upbringing. I always got the message that Jesus and his disciples were simple, humble fisher folk who were revolutionizing the world, fighting against the corrupt priestly intelligencia and romans. I didn't pay that much notice though, found it a bit hard to swallow. Though the idea of hell scared the bejebus out of me when I was a child. Funny looking back now.
I accept your argument about the rewriting completey. If you're going to have a propaganda book about a guy who rises from dead, who was forseen. You'd write it that way from the beggining.
Thanks for your comments. :)
Other Comments by BAEOZ
114. Comment #85022 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 2:29 pm
BAEOZI accept your argument about the rewriting completey. If you're going to have a propaganda book about a guy who rises from dead, who was forseen. You'd write it that way from the beggining.
Yes, if they had a central command, and knew what they were doing, neither of which seem to be the case. I suggest you get a copy of B. D. Ehrman's textbook on the history of Christian writings. It's not cheap, but it will take you from a dead start to quite a deep level.
We don't know how much rewriting there was before 300 CE. Probably not so much after about 120 CE, however there were many versions floating around that represented different recollections of the stories told by the early followers, and retold in the small house churches scattered through the lands, long before anything was reduced to writing in Greek.
I suspect there was much more removal of multiple versions than rewriting. Any day someone in the middle east may dig up a jar with one of the versions in it that we have never seen. After 325 CE there was a very active program to destroy any unapproved version. Furthermore, the papyrus used in the first couple of centuries did not hold up well, so things that were not selected to be copied into the later codex forms tended to go to dust anyway.
Other Comments by Quine
115. Comment #85025 by BAEOZ on November 4, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Quine:After 325 CE there was a very active program to destroy any unapproved version.
That was my understanding too. Once a orthodoxy was agreed upon, heterodox scriptures were destroyed. I thought the Catholic Churches list of forbidden books was just a continuation of this project. CHeard will disabuse me of this notion.
[EDIT] The last sentence isn't meant to sound bitter. It's suppossed to be an impish joke. It's hard to get humour to translate into text. Especially if one isn't as humourous as one would like to be ;)
Other Comments by BAEOZ
116. Comment #85029 by Bonzai on November 4, 2007 at 3:13 pm
QuineI suggest you get a copy of B. D. Ehrman's textbook on the history of Christian writings. It's not cheap, but it will take you from a dead start to quite a deep level.
Ehrman wrote a popular book called "misquoting Jesus" which explores the history and origins of Christian scriptures in a way accessible to the layman. It was a NY times best seller.
It probably doesn't go as deep as the textbook you cite but it is cheap, it might be a watered down version of his expensive text book. It is probably good enough for those of us who just want to get the gist of the story but don't plan on becoming biblical scholars. If you are lucky you may be able to find it online somewhere.
I understand the peril of going by only one expert in a field that is not without controversies. I have asked CHeard for his opinions about the book. Unfortunately he said he hadn't read it.
Other Comments by Bonzai
118. Comment #85072 by CHeard on November 4, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Dear Quine,here's a quick run-down of some of the evidence regarding the "canonicity" of the gospels. Please remember that the Christian church never had a single authority figure or group empowered to make such decisions for all Christians everywhere, not even the Council of Nicea (325). Instead, the "canonical process" was a distributed, ad hoc process of sorting through available writings and reaching a Christendom-wide consensus. No consensus was ever reached for the Old Testament, but a consensus was eventually reached for the New Testament. Also, please remember that Constantine's Edict of Milan is dated to 313.
It sounds like you know that the best early evidence is Codex Sinaiticus, which appears to be mid-4th-century and thus post-Constantine. Likewise, Athansius's 39th Festal Letter (for anyone who doesn't know: it was Athanasius's job to write a letter every year telling all the churches when to celebrate Easter) of 367 is the oldest document, apparently, to list exactly the 27 books that are now universally recognized as the Christian New Testament, but this too is post-Constantine and thus doesn't answer Quine's question.
Eusebius, famous as "the first church historian," was contemporaneous with Constantine, but his famous fourfold division of the works then contending for Christian attention almost certainly reflects conditions already obtaining before Constantine's involvement in church affairs. Eusebieus's Ecclesiastical History was apparently completed after the Edict of Milan but before the Council of Nicea. Eusebius is also useful because his categories are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Eusebius devised the following categories: (1) writings that are "recognized" by all Christians as scripture; (2) writings that are "disputed," being acclaimed scripture by some Christians but not others; (3) writings that are of "spurious" authenticity; and (4) "heretical" writings. The important thing for our purposes here is that Eusebius mentions "the holy quaternion of the Gospels" in the category "recognized"; that is, Eusebius claims that (before the Council of Nicea, and probably even before the Edict of Milan) all Christians everywhere (known to him, at any rate) accepted those four gospels as "scripture." He placed the gospels of Peter, Thomas, and Matthias in the "heretical" category, by the way, showing that in "orthodox" (read: majority) Christianity, that distinction had already taken place in pre-Constantinian Christian debate.
Eusebius is close enough to Constantine to be debatable, perhaps, but not Origen (185-253/254). Origen wrote that the church has four gospels, while heretics have many.
Tertullian (c. 160-220) wrote about the gospels in opposition to Marcion, who sought to limit Christian scripture to one gospel (a heavily edited version of Luke) plus some of Paul's letters. In Against Marcion 4.2, Tertullian wrote, "Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instill faith into us; whilst of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards." Recall that Tertullian is writing against Marcion, who wants to shrink the number of gospels to just one; against him, Tertullian writes of four.
There's also the Muratorian Canon—a fragment of text that lists books good to read aloud in church—which numbers the gospels as four, and lists them in the now-standard order. However, the date of the Muratorian fragment is disputed; many scholars date it to c. 200, while others put it closer to 400, post-Athanasius.
Irenaeus (c. 120-200) insisted that there were exactly four gospels, in his book Against Heresies. His reasoning was stupid: he said that there must be four gospels because there are four compass points and four winds, and cherubim have four faces. Nevertheless, he attests to the enumeration of the gospels as four, and specifically notes them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The earliest reference we have to the four gospels is in fragments from a guy named Papias. He is the one who gives us the traditional names of the gospel writers as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He claimed that the Greek version of Matthew was a translation of a Hebrew (i.e,. Aramaic) original. Fragments of Papias's writings survive only in quotations in other writers, but we can date Papias to the first half of the 2nd century CE, c. 110-140 for his writing career. Ironically, Papias also said it was better to get the scoop from a preacher than from a book.
Of course, none of this guarantees the accuracy of anything in the gospels; that's a totally separate claim and a totally separate discussion. What these considerations show is that we can really have a fairly high degree of confidence that by 200 CE there was a pretty solid consensus in the "orthodox" (read: majority) church on the four canonical gospels. The "fourfold gospel" is a second-century phenomenon, not a fourth-century one.
Other Comments by CHeard
119. Comment #85078 by Bonzai on November 4, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Here is a summary and review of John Polkinghorne's theology.http://www.powells.com/review/2002_08_01.html
In it there is this particularly bizzare revelation of what sir John is up to:
At Princeton, Polkinghorne earnestly assures us, he and an "interdisciplinary group of scholars" recently spent three fruitful years making scientific estimates of God's plans for the destiny of the world. According to Polkinghorne and the Princetonians, the last things, when the Day of Judgment comes and the tombs are opened, are a bit like what we have now, but also a bit different: they are an "interplay between continuity and discontinuity." They do not include real Hell. They include only people who have not asked for admission to heaven, and these get some kind of after-life Bible classes. Beyond that, Heaven itself is a bit vague, but it includes pilgrimage and progress and increasing fullness. Heaven does not provide endless harps and psalms; nor, I think, does it afford Aquinas's favored pleasure of watching the tortures of the damned, nor Islam's seventy-two virgins per male martyr. In fact, I could not discover whether it included sex at all, but in their three years of deliberations Polkinghorne's group determined — scientifically, remember — that it may include some animals, especially domestic pets, although perhaps not too many of them, since it is permissible for God to "cull individuals in order to preserve the herd."
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120. Comment #85113 by epeeist on November 5, 2007 at 2:43 am
Comment #84920 by Bonzai
Confucianism has always been an ideology for the rulers as envisioned by its founder.
From my readings it wasn't completely rigid to start with, though it became so later.
However, I don't think this matters. What has been demonstrated is that there were a number of people who existed centuries before Jesus who were attempting to create ethical systems on which to base societies.
Where I believe Jesus is unique in this scheme of things is that his ethical system is essentially theocratic. While the other systems mention one or more gods there does not seem to be the same dependence on them.
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121. Comment #85119 by irate_atheist on November 5, 2007 at 3:07 am
Dear Reverand Polkinghorne,After careful reading and consideration of your article, weighing all things up and taking a balanced view, I would like to say that; I don't wish to be rude, but we've heard it all before, and you can fuck off.
Yours sincerely,
A. N. Atheist
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122. Comment #85302 by Quine on November 5, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Re: Comment #85072 by CHeardThank you, Chris, that was much more than a quick run-down, and I will be awhile digging into the areas you chalk marked. Special thanks for the pointer to Papias, whom I did not know. That I could have read up on Polycarp and missed Papias was disappointing.
I did understand that there were four Gospels recognized in the proto-orthodox group after about 120 C.E. They were probably close to what we have from post 300, but I do not have a good idea of how close. I would expect there to have been some number of copies, of each, at different times, made for circulation among the groups, and there to have been differences among the copies. For example, someone's copy of Mark got copied into Codex Sinaiticus, and everyone else's didn't. I am less concerned with the canonization of the number of the Gospels, than with what was in them.
I very much liked that comment from Papias about getting it from the preacher. It tends to explain the question of why Saul of Tarsus (Paul) did not sit down and write a Gospel back before any of the four. He was busy using his rhetorical powers for preaching, and the idea that written documents had any standing did not exist (also, what do you need texts for if the world is about to end next generation, anyway?). It is only after the original preachers had died, and those who had known them directly started to fade away (and the world had, somehow, not come to an end) that the written word started to take on the power it has been given by successive generations (especially orthodox then reformers then literalist nutjobs of today). This also matches the movement of those preaching in Aramaic through the changing demographic of the faithful to Greek, and into texts.
Later it gets into the whole heretical battles of Origen. It would be wonderful if we ever dug up texts on the other side, instead of just having to take the winner's word for what the losers had. It is a bit like trying to understand what Dawkins is saying using only the writings of Alister McGrath. However, we are stuck now with what we have now, and I don't worry too much about which of the mythologies won out compared to the more interesting history of how the preaching turned to writing.
Thanks again for the time you put into your answer.
P.S. How are your students doing?
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123. Comment #85355 by Quine on November 5, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Bonzai,Thanks for that link to the review by Simon Blackburn; it was great. I also liked the paragraph just before the one you posted:
In other words, and thank heavens, we can mix 'n' match. If we do not like bits of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, we may thankfully junk them. If Jesus's view of fig trees and pigs and witchcraft and possession by devils, or his view of Canaanites (or perhaps it was just Canaanite women) as "dogs," no longer appeals to us, then we may tiptoe past. And if Paul's evident belief that the world was about to come to an end impugns his status as recipient of the divine word, we may airbrush it out. In this way we may arrive at "a consonant combination" and a good night's sleep. Meanwhile our cousinly fellow-readers in Rome or Riyadh can enthusiastically help the God of love to persecute those who use contraceptives or like their sex upside down or back to front, before marriage or in a mirror. According to Polkinghorne, this is just the price of complexity and plurality. Whereas the truth is that when you mix 'n' match you only bring back what you already wanted to bring back. Appeals to biblical authority are pure reader responses, hermeneutics run riot, postmodernism in action.
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124. Comment #85376 by CHeard on November 5, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Friends, it looks like one of my posts was lost during posting. Here it is ... I haven't bothered to edit it, so it's just as incoherent as when I first wrote it late at night.-----
Veronique (81) wrote:
Chris – you are back. I never got an answer from you to my very basic question about religion. Is it possible that you can answer it now? I know you are busy and it has been several weeks since I asked.Yes, I have been intending to get back to this for some time, but as you say, the "Leprechology" thread sort of dwindled out. In any event, I'll give it a shot now. I do ask your indulgence on a couple of matters. First, I will have to approach this autobiographically. I will have to tell you what makes sense to me, to approach this as explication rather than persuasion. Secondly, I feel I should make it clear that it's only quite recently that I've started to rigorously interrogate some of my core religious beliefs, rather than taking them as presuppositions. Some of my colleagues just seem to shake their heads and let the challenges of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, et al. roll off their backs like the proverbial water off a duck's back; to me, these challenges are more like a firehose in the face. In some ways, listening to Dennett's AAI '07 speech was like looking to a very unnerving mirror. I have not yet been persuaded that my theistic beliefs are wrong, but I'm somewhat less confident in their rightness than I was, say, five years ago.
You can see from my earlier post that I am still caught at that very basic point. I don't want theologically erudite expositions. I need an answer to my basic question. I will re-state it for you:
I am far less interested in the minutiae of theological argumentation on specifics, as I am in the basic argument for belief in an unseen, un-evidenced and hidden god. That premise is what halts me right at the beginning. I cannot get past it.
It's a basic question and I would like to see it addressed without prevarication and slippy, slidey, sideways obfuscation. Can you oblige, please?
Okay, with that long preamble, here goes.
To begin with, at this point in time, I still find something convincing about "regress" arguments, and actually the more so as I come to better understand current scientific thinking on the early universe. It seems to me—and please remember that I am an educated amateur, but very definitely a nonspecialist, when it comes to science, so if I get something grossly wrong, please correct me gently—that there are only three basic possible answers to the question of why our space-time universe exists at all: (1) it's just that way, it's just a brute fact; (2) it was generated by unintelligent, "natural" forces within a multiverse in which the creation of universes is happening all the time; or (3) it was generated by a creative intelligent agency, e.g., a minimally deist-style "God." It's my understanding—again, correct me if I'm wrong—that speculations about multiple universes are not held in very high esteem by leading astrophysicists and cosmologists, and I haven't done very much reading about those notions anyway, so I'll focus on (1) and (3). To me, (3) seems to work better than (1). I freely admit that my a priori Christian bias may be unduly influencing this judgment, although you will have to take my word for it that I've tried to adjust for that bias. Accepting (1) is unsatisfying to me because it entails that our space-time universe simply came into existence spontaneously, in effect, of its own accord. This affirmation does not actually explain the coming-into-existence of our universe at t=0; it merely accepts the fact. However, (3) offers an actual explanation of the coming-into-existence of our universe at t=0. I am well aware of Dawkins's objections to "regress-terminus" arguments in The God Delusion, but I don't think he quite gives such arguments their due. Objecting to a claim like (3) with a question like "Who designed the designer?" seems to me to push known principles of causality from within space-time to the outside of space-time. If there is, so to speak, any entity outside of space-time, there is no reason to think that said entity is subject to laws of cause and effect that would even be comprehensible to us, bounded as we are by our understanding of things from within space-time. In short, it seems more convincing to me to think that space-time has a "creator" who is outside of space-time itself than to take space-time merely as a brute fact. Put another way: postulating something outside the system as an explanation for the existence of the system makes more sense to me than postulating a self-generating system. I realize that all this talk of "satisfying" and "convincing" explanations makes the argument sound almost aesthetic, but I'm not sure we can get on any better footing unless we can find a way to observe space-time from outside of space-time (I don't think our technology will ever enable this) or we get vastly more information about the universe from t=0 to t=10-43, I'm afraid we may be stuck with making judgments about what is "satisfying" and "convincing." Hopefully, agree or disagree, you find the foregoing relatively clear and free of obfuscation (intentional obfuscation, at any rate).
Should anyone happen to agree with that paragraph, it only gets us to a minimal sort of deism. I'm afraid I'll have to stop here for the night —there are some other things I need to do before crashing into bed, and it's already 10:45 PM here—but I'll try to come back and explain (again in autobiographical/descriptive rather than prescriptive mode) why I continue to affiliate myself with a specifically Christian tradition.
Other Comments by CHeard
125. Comment #85379 by steve99 on November 5, 2007 at 4:03 pm
It's my understanding—again, correct me if I'm wrong—that speculations about multiple universes are not held in very high esteem by leading astrophysicists and cosmologists, and I haven't done very much reading about those notions anyway,
You are wrong here. Some of the most respected astronomers (such as Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society) support the idea of a multiverse.
Objecting to a claim like (3) with a question like "Who designed the designer?" seems to me to push known principles of causality from within space-time to the outside of space-time. If there is, so to speak, any entity outside of space-time, there is no reason to think that said entity is subject to laws of cause and effect that would even be comprehensible to us, bounded as we are by our understanding of things from within space-time. In short, it seems more convincing to me to think that space-time has a "creator" who is outside of space-time itself than to take space-time merely as a brute fact. Put another way: postulating something outside the system as an explanation for the existence of the system makes more sense to me than postulating a self-generating system.
Ah, but you are missing another option. That laws of cause and effect have to hold when talking about the Universe and its origin even when considering purely natural phenomena. Below the Planck time, they just don't work any more, and according to some models of the origin of the Universe, causality as we understand it does not apply.
We can talk about natural processes that are outside of our space-time that don't follow the normal laws of cause and effect that could have created our Universe. No need for any intelligence.
but I'm not sure we can get on any better footing unless we can find a way to observe space-time from outside of space-time (I don't think our technology will ever enable this)
We are close to being able to do this now. In the near future we will have instruments that will look at patterns in the cosmic microwave background, and observe gravity waves. These observations could give us considerable information about the nature of our universe and what is beyond it, such as whether there are other dimensions, other universes, other space-times.
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126. Comment #85388 by CHeard on November 5, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Steve99, is the following paragraph (from #125) complete? It seems to end in mid-sentence.Ah, but you are missing another option. That laws of cause and effect have to hold when talking about the Universe and its origin even when considering purely natural phenomena. Below the Planck time, they just don't work any more, and according to some models of the origin of the Universe, causality as we understand itAlso, what bibliography would you (or anyone else reading this) suggest as a primer for a nonspecialist on early-universe cosmology, multiverse models, and the like? My recent (well, going on 10+ years now) science reeducation has been mainly in biology, not physics.
Other Comments by CHeard
127. Comment #85427 by Quine on November 5, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Hi Chris,Yes, it is a fairly short road for informed logical people to get at least as far as Deism. If you know science, you know Genesis and Exodus are just mythology. That means no chosen people so, Judaism is mythology. If there was no original sin, then a person needs a redeemer like a fish needs a bicycle so, Christianity is mythology. Islam needs the same creation story so, Islam is mythology. Need I go on to the Mormons, JWs, Xsci, etc.?
When you get to Deism, there are still many things to think about. Do watch out for the
Sherlock Holmes Fallacy and know there are more possibilities than we know now, or will perhaps ever know. I will get back to this part of the discussion.
Early humans saw an intelligent mover in all things in nature. After a while, we pushed that back past thunder, lightning, sun, moon, stars, species, and almost life itself (abiogenesis). After the ID fight, I thought they would slide the main battle lines back to abiogenesis, however, the smart money (Templeton Foundation) seems to be gathering around the position pushed all the way back to fine-tuning. John Polkinghorne, a Templeton Foundation prize winner, is giving that indication and I just saw this book announcement:
Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning edited by Charles L. Harper, Jr., who is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist and serves as Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation.
Steve99 and I have discussed some of the things re fine-tuning on another thread, and there are more threads about it over in the Forum, and I am sure we will keep thinking about it. I look at it as another form of trying to find a "gap" so the "God of the Gaps" has a place to live. Physics will make progress on this, but we have no guarantee that the "gap" won't then be movable to higher energy levels than we can test, or higher dimensionality than we can access.
Please keep in mind that the map is not the territory. The constants we put in our model of the physical behavior we observe from our instruments are in the map, not the physics. There is no evidence that they are settings, or changeable parameters. Some may turn out to be sums over histories as in some quantum cases. My new slogan for this is, "Show me the knobs." (Note: if you sum over the history of all reciprocals of the squares of the integers, you would get 1/6 of the square of pi, which if you wrote out in digits would go on forever, now that, is fine-tuned!)
So, what if the Universe turns out to be stranger than we are capable of imagining? A couple of days ago, I asked a friend who is an astrophysicist for a rough estimate of the ratio of the mass of the earth to the mass of the known Universe. He thought about it for a few seconds and came up with 0.000000000000000000000001 (if I typed the right number of zeros that is 10^-23). That is the whole earth, which in the old days was most of creation, and we are just a tiny part of that. Now, even if it may psychologically look like physics is fine-tuned for this Universe, it certainly does not look like this Universe is fine-tuned for us.
Back to Deism, suppose you spend the rest of your life believing there is something out there somewhere that caused this Universe to exist. I will just skip the infinite regress issue and go on to what difference does it make? First off, just because something caused our Universe to exist, we don't know if that thing knows it caused our Universe to exist, or that it knows our Universe does exist at all. This would be the case for something that went out of existence in the process of giving rise to our Universe. Also, just because something caused our Universe, there is no necessity that it can interact with our Universe. Or if it can, what if it just did it to watch the exploding stars and black holes and doesn't know life is here. What if it did it for the benefit of some other kind of life somewhere far away, and we are just the consequence of the laws of chemistry being the same over here? These metaphysical questions just keep going on and on. The only hope to have something rational is to stick to falsifiable propositions no matter how much emotional appeal you feel from the metaphysical.
I hold that Deism is a difference that doesn't make a difference. The continuous development of both the species and the individual indicate that we are our bodies, and when we are dead, we are dead. If a deity does not interact with the world, and we are our bodies, then there is no afterlife, and believing in that unknown deity makes no difference.
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. --Ecclesiastes 9:5
------
EDIT: I looked around for a better mass of Universe number and found 3e52 kg, so with a mass of Earth at 6e24 kg that gives a ratio of 2e-28, which is 5 more zeros than I wrote above.
Other Comments by Quine
128. Comment #85541 by SpeakerToAnimals2 on November 6, 2007 at 5:59 am
I met John Polkinghorne many years ago at a summer school for particle theorists. He got right up my left nostril then by referring to particle physics as a young mans game -- and I was one of the admittedly few young women graduate students at that meeting.He doesn't seem to have improved in the intervening years, given this supposed review.
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129. Comment #85542 by SpeakerToAnimals2 on November 6, 2007 at 6:08 am
That laws of cause and effect have to hold when talking about the Universe and its origin even when considering purely natural phenomena. Below the Planck time, they just don't work any more, and according to some models of the origin of the Universe, causality as we understand it..
Causality goes out of the window, according to simple interpretations of quantum theory, in that events happen on the quantum scale which are uncaused in the sense that there is not anything that causes an radioactive atom to decay NOW, as opposed to a year later. Usually referred to as non-deterministic.
As regards the universe itself, we are getting into the realms of quantum cosmology, which sees the entire universe as the result of a quantum fluctuation:
Universe creation is not something that takes place inside some bigger spacetime arena - the instanton describes the spontaneous appearance of a universe from literally nothing. Once the universe exists, quantum cosmology can be approximated by general relativity so time appears.
Try the DAMTP website at Cambridge, and Stephen Hawkings website for some useful stuff.
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130. Comment #85550 by epeeist on November 6, 2007 at 6:22 am
Comment #85541 by SpeakerToAnimals2
I met John Polkinghorne many years ago at a summer school for particle theorists. He got right up my left nostril then by referring to particle physics as a young mans game -- and I was one of the admittedly few young women graduate students at that meeting.
Ah, but if you were a female version of Speaker to Animals you wouldn't be sentient anyway, would you ;-)
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131. Comment #85552 by steve99 on November 6, 2007 at 6:29 am
Also, what bibliography would you (or anyone else reading this) suggest as a primer for a nonspecialist on early-universe cosmology, multiverse models, and the like? My recent (well, going on 10+ years now) science reeducation has been mainly in biology, not physics.
Oops yes! That sentence was not complete.
Personally, I can't really suggest a primer. Others may do better than I. I can mention some ideas you might want to look up. The Hawking-Hartle model, and Gott and Li's time loop idea. These are very speculative, but show that what seems common sense to us may not apply.
Other Comments by steve99
132. Comment #86087 by SpeakerToAnimals2 on November 8, 2007 at 5:20 am
Ah, but if you were a female version of Speaker to Animals you wouldn't be sentient anyway, would you ;-)
Tee Hee! Except archaic kzinreti were sapient.........
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133. Comment #86091 by epeeist on November 8, 2007 at 5:35 am
Comment #86087 by SpeakerToAnimals2
Tee Hee! Except archaic kzinreti were sapient.........
I was assuming you were an up to date sort of lady (from hlæfdige, someone who makes bread) ;-)
Other Comments by epeeist
134. Comment #95921 by monkeytrumpet on December 9, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I don't know if I'm angry or depressed about this. I think I'm angry. I never totally bought the 'moderates provide cover for the nutters' argument but now I do. Reverend Polkinghorne is a cynical, dishonest twat who hopes people won't think very hard about what he says. We need to keep battering these people with reason. I'm totally fucked off.Other Comments by monkeytrumpet
135. Comment #120463 by AmericanGodless on February 1, 2008 at 5:42 pm
This is a very cold thread, and after several months, maybe nobody will read this; but I gotta comment, because... Wow! This is really an excellent article; it is just too bad that Polkinghorne doesn't understand what he's talking about.A lot of the discussion in the first few days got awfully far away from Polkinghorne's article. (BTW, I can't help suggest, for the question about a "primer" or bibliography on early-universe cosmology, CHeard, you might want to look at Victor Stenger's "God: The Failed Hypothesis." I am personally in no position to say how accurate or likely his story might be. As a whole, it's a book of very mixed quality, as Prometheus did a rotten job of editing. But his explanation of how the universe adds up to essentially nothing has the virtue of at least being neat. Hitchens borrows some of the better stuff from Stenger's book for an article in his "The Portable Atheist.")
But the Polkinghorne article deserves some more attention. I think that he has the beginnings for an understanding of the main difference between science and religion, but in spite of his scientific background, I don't think he understands at all what science is.
As a minor opening salvo, he demonstrates his lack of self-understanding when he compares Dawkins to a gibbering relativity denier (the kind that you can see on the sidewalk outside physical science conventions), and then complains when Dawkins suggests believers may be "malevolent, barking mad, mendacious, deluded." Polkinghorne whines that "He cannot have the courtesy to take seriously those of us who are both scientists and believers;" but he refuses himself to take seriously the vast majority of scientists who are material naturalists. He thus makes of himself Dawkins' own Exhibit A.
He then cites the "problems of theodicy" as "surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief." Some may find this an interesting, subject, but I don't see why. After all, "evil" is a problem only if you insist on a god with complete omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. To the modern atheist or agnostic observer, or even to an open-minded believer, the God of the Old Testement, far from being omnibenevolent, is as Dawkins has said, "arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction." For the true believer, the answer to all Biblical contradictions is just not to think about the things they don't think about (as Colonel Brady suggested in "Inherit the Wind"). But Polkinghorne has his own solution: "They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal." So he just quietly dispenses with omnipotence and figures nobody will notice. That'll do it. Good work, Colonel Polkinghorne!
The last two paragraphs are marvelous, as he sees so much, but is also blind to so much. First, he gives us a definition of what he means by faith, and it's a pretty good one: "Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it."
Some of the early comments in this thread found this definition confusing, but it is very close to what Jacob Bronowski said about science â€" the difference is in the motivation; that is, the difference in moral motivation. The scientist is committed to act in a way so that what actually is true might eventually come to be known to be true (or at least known to be probably true). On the other hand, (though Bronowski was too polite to say so explicitly) the person of faith is committed to act in such a way so that what must, by faith, be true, will eventually come to be widely accepted as true.
Polkinghorne is dead wrong, however when he says that science is impersonal. Bronowski again: "Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal."
Polkinghorne: "The concept of reality offered by scientism [sic] is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it." But that is exactly what a person is! It is a shame that Polkinghorne (being committed to the propagation what must be true, rather than to the the harder work of discovering what likely is true) does not understand that. What we have here is yet another case of a scientist with experience in one field (Polkinghorne is or used to be a mathematical physicist) deluding himself into seeing his god in another field (in this case, biology and neuroscience).
Polkinghorne is quite right that the human epistemic condition is necessarily one of uncertainty. "Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science." But the moral difference is that religion will claim absolute knowledge without a requirement for any justification beyond faith and authority. Science, honestly reported, NEVER claims certainty, though it may express its uncertainty with amazing precision.
Bronowski called science "a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible." Again, motivation is the moral key: when it comes time to make a judgement about the proper action to take when the nation may be in jeopardy because of a ruler gone mad, an afternoon performance of King Lear may provide a thoughtful interlude. But the wise member of Parliament will spend more time with the senile dementia case-notes.
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101. Comment #84908 by keith on November 4, 2007 at 6:50 am
What's bellicose (or even pseudo-bellicose) about thinking that 'Zen and the Art of Archery' is thought-provoking? Are there some people on this site who don't like (or pseudo-don't like) Zen?
Does this mean that both characters in the novel is Christianity or that both books, "Narziss" and "Goldmund" is?
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