Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

The Postmodern Confrontation to Modern Science

Introduction

The theme of the first essay in this series is Modernity’s1 quest for authentic humanity, Postmodernism’s skepticism about this quest and new perspectives this opens for Christian life and witness. In this essay I address new perspectives for Christian faith and life opened up by Postmodern challenges to Modern natural science. Modernity’s optimism about recovering authentic humanity in history, I pointed out, was deeply connected to the Modern ideas of progress, emancipation, revolution and secular hope. I said also in the first essay, that Modernity had a second notion of progress, not revolutionary but cumulative, universal and inevitable. The natural sciences were thought to accumulate true information about the world in an every spreading application of scientific method across disciplines and across nations. This accumulating factual knowledge, Moderns believed and hoped, would be applied to technology and industrialization to improve the human condition. Thus, the two Modern notions of progress, revolutionary progress and the cumulative, strait line progress of scientific discovery, were deeply linked. In this essay, we focus on the natural science factor of Modernity and how Postmodern thought challenges three basic assumptions about Modern natural science. Our over-riding interest, of course, is the relevance of Postmodernity’s critical questions to Modern natural science for the Christian churches in the emerging Postmodern era.

Modern natural science posed an enormous challenge to Christianity throughout the Modern era, although the challenge changed as Modernity developed. Both the method (s) and the results of the natural sciences shocked the Christian Churches in the Modern era . Modern Christianity, i.e., the faith and life of the Christian churches especially in the west from the eighteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, in theology, institutional form, worship and piety, could be fruitfully studied as the drama of the Church’s struggle to cope with Modern science’s frontal attack on the Pre-modern Christian understanding of truth and knowledge.2 In many respects, Christianity is still trying to cope with the impact of Modern Science, even as the Postmodern era is dawning.

The major point of this essay is twofold: first, Postmodernity involves a critical questioning of, or even outright rejection of, Modern convictions about natural science. Characteristic of Postmodernity is critical questioning of Modernity’s “dogma” that natural science is the only way to truth. Even more important, Postmodernity deeply questions Modernity’s belief that natural science, linked with technology and industrialization, will inevitably bring cumulative truth and continuous benefit to humanity on earth.

Second, these Postmodern critical questions and rejection of Modern attitudes toward natural science open a new chapter in Christianity’s relation to Modern natural science. How Christianity engage natural science in the framework of Postmodernity’s critical questions about Modern natural science cannot yet be known.3 However, the Christian churches is already becoming aware that Postmodernity opens new possibilities for the Churches to witness to its understanding of God’s truth entrusted to it for witness, mission and service.

Given the often called “century-long warfare between Science and Religion” I probably should state clearly that this essay is not an attack on Modern natural science. Nor is this series of essays an attack on Modernity. My goal in this essay is to train Christian vision to see new possibilities for faith and mission opened up by Postmodern challenges to Modern understandings of Modern natural science. My goal is not to strengthen anti-Modern sentiment within the Church, as was characteristic of official Roman Catholic thinking in the second half of then nineteenth century and characteristic of late Modern Fundamentalism,. I do not want to encourage a defensive fear of modern, technological life. Christian faith and life depend ultimately not on cultural environments but on God grace, on the power of God’s Word written and preached, on the work of the Holy Spirit. Natural Scientists can be Christians; Christians can live and witness in the midst of a positivistic, secular cultural frameworks. But the Christian community interacts with the larger cultures in which they exist; they are influenced by the possibilities and limitations of their culture and they help shape those cultures. This interaction legitimates studying the relevance of Modernity and Postmodernity on Christian living.

The Pre-modern Christian Understanding of “Science”

1. The Cathedral of Medieval Knowing and Knowledge

The new possibilities that Postmodernity may open to Christianity’s relation to natural science become clearer only when we keep in mind Modern natural science’s challenge to Premodern Christianity. To secure a picture of the challenge of Modern natural science to Pre-modern Christianity, we need at least a brief sketch of Christianity’s Pre-modern understandings of knowledge and truth. We are dealing here with three epochs or eras of western culture: Pre-modern, Modern and emerging Postmodern. We need to try to keep the total picture in mind. Therefore, we will start with a sketch of Pre-modern Christianity’s views of knowledge and truth.

St. Bonaventura’s short tractate, The Reduction of the Arts to Theology (De Reductione Artes ad Theologiam) provides a short, elegant and convenient window into the understanding of knowledge that Pre-modern Christianity held. As Bonaventura’s title suggests, all true knowledge of the world can and should be traced back (reducere-led back) to the knowledge of God. God is Truth; God is the source of all human knowledge. Human knowledge of the world (scientia) is not complete until its basis in God is understood. Then scientia becomes sapientia; knowledge becomes wisdom. Theology, therefore, was for that reason, the queen of the sciences.

The medieval movement of the mind was in and through the world up toward knowledge of God.4 Scientia, (L. scire-to know) knowledge of the world by human reason, included “natural philosophy.” Natural philosophy, until the eighteenth century included what we today call the natural sciences. 5 Natural philosophy, in turn, was part of the “Artes” which the western Middle Ages adopted from the learning of the Roman Empire. Because Christian theology assumes that all truth, whatever its source, is God’s truth, the Pre-modern Christian theory of knowledge incorporated classical Greek and Roman understanding of science and knowledge and integrated these into a theological framework. The result was a veritable cathedral of human knowing, where the knowing process and knowledge itself could lead the mind to God.

The classical Roman “Artes” were physica, logica and moralis, what we today probably call physics, logic and morality. St. Bonaventura, standing like St. Thomas Aquinas within the orthodox tradition of a Trinitarian view of God, related these classical Artes back (reducere) to the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Classical Christianity held a Trinitarian view of God; correspondingly, theological reflection on knowing related human knowing to God the Holy Trinity. 6

God created the physical world, which was the subject of natural philosophy. Hence, natural philosophy could lead the mind to God, when God was understood as efficient cause, producing, as Creator, each creature and the world as a hierarchically arranged “chain of being.” The study of these effects, i.e., the natural world, is “physica.” When perceived theologically, the creation points back to its cause, back to God, the Father, the Creator; thus “physica” could lead the mind back to God as Creator, as efficient cause. Physica as the science of the causa essendi could be further divided into physicum, mathematicum and metaphysicam, which are closer to our concepts of physics, mathematics and metaphysics.

Logica, the second major division of the classical Latin Artes, concerned, in the classical philosophical and rhetorical traditions, how ideas were related. Ideas, however, for classical Christian theology pertained to the Logos, the Divine Word, the Mind of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. The connection between “ideas” or “the forms” which gave things their identity on the one hand, to the Divine Word was made very early in Christian theology. In the high Middle Ages, the study of ideas and their logical relations related to God the Word in the realm of human knowing and meaningful speech. Reflection on the exemplary forms of created things could lead the mind back to God, the Word.

Morales , morality, especially in classical Greek and Latin times, concerned the ends or purposes of human life.7 For Christian theology, the Holy Spirit is God moving humans toward their final and proper end, a reconciled and loving relation to God. Thus, for medieval theology, and especially the scholastic theology of St. Bonaventura, morality concerned the “telos” or purpose of human life; morality was about the ordo vivendi, the order of living. Thus, human moral concerns could also lead the mind back to God, specifically to the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Thus, Bonaventura’s tractate wants to show how the classical Roman Artes could and should be understood theologically. When thus understood, they lead back to God, who as Efficient Cause, Exemplary Cause, Final Cause (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Holy Trinity, the source of all truth.

2. The nature of “scientific” knowledge

Thus far, our overview of the medieval view of knowledge concerns the believer’s knowledge of the world. Behind this view was a Pre-modern Christian understanding of what “science” was. The medieval Christian view of “science” was also inherited from classical Greek and Latin philosophy.

For Plato and Aristotle (and also for the Pre-Socratics, like Parmenides, Pthagores and Democrtotis) understanding nature “scientifically” meant to discover and identify its causes or principles. Classical Greek “science” searched for first principles, the first causes that underlay the objects and events we perceive. To know something scientifically was to discover its cause or “principle.”

Important for medieval understanding of science was Aristotle’s analysis of four kinds of causes. Aristotle identified these as efficient causation {the origin of an effect); material cause (what forms shape to constitute physical things) ; formal or exemplary cause (principles of a thing’s identity) and final cause (the end luring or pulling anything toward its fullness of being).8

Medieval theologians, as we indicated above, accepted Aristotle’s four-fold analysis of cause and integrated it with classical Christian Trinitarian theology. God, therefore, should be understand as producing cause, formal/exemplary cause, and final cause. God is not a material being, so God cannot be seen literally as material cause. But God created material things and God uses secondary causes to achieve God’s purposes. These secondary causes could be seen as “material” which God puts to use. We saw how St. Bonaventura, one of the greatest scholastic theologians, identified efficient, formal and final cause with one of the Persons of the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas structured the three parts of his Summa Theologica along the lines of Aristotle’s analysis of causation. Thus, the Summa Theologica has tres partes: Part I, God as efficient cause (Creator); Part II, God as final Cause (Highest Good); Part III, God as “Material” {or Instrumental” cause (Christ, the sacraments and grace) . Thus, not only did Premodern Christian theologies accept the classical Latin divisions of knowledge. They also accepted and integrated into theology the classical Greek and Latins notion of what scientific understanding was—the study of causes, and God as the “Cause of causes.”.

3. God, the foundation of human reason and knowledge

We are identifying key aspects of Pre-modern Christian theory of knowledge to better understand the radical newness of modern natural science and the trauma it caused Christianity. Thus far we have indicated how Christian medieval theology integrated classical Greek and Roman ideas of “science” and the Artes into a theological framework. Thus, medieval theology had a theologically informed view of what true knowledge is. But medieval theology, and especially the Franciscan theological tradition, also had a theological view about how humans could attain true knowledge. Humans can have true knowledge of the world because God illuminates humans with His divine Light and Truth. Humans are able to share in this divine illumination because God created humans in his divine image and likeness. Medieval theologians certainly taught that humans were endowed with reason, with “a rational soul,” which lower animals did not have. But they understood human reason not as Modern, secular thinkers did, as an independent, autonomous power, but as a continuous sharing in , a participation in God’s own light and mind.

For Bonaventura, this divine illumination has four dimensions. Most external was lumen exterius (natural light, e.g., sunlight); lumen inferius (the light of the five physical senses), the lumen interius, (the light of human reason) and finally lumen superius, (the light of grace and the Sacrae Scripturae.)9 Humans, created in the image of God, i.e., the image of the Divine Word, were illuminated inwardly by divine light. Sin and finitude could certainl produce error. But, in principle, God’s illumination “enlightened” humans; in God’s light humans could see light, i.e., could see truthfully. Therefore, medieval Christians believed not only that truth exists but also that humans had access to truth, both through reason and through divine revelation.

Thus medieval theologians agreed that all human knowledge whatever, including “natural philosophy,” is openness to reality enabled by God, indeed was a sharing in God’s own eternal openness as Generated Word. Bonaventura learned this from the Bible. In his tractate on tracing the Artes to Theology, he begins with the Scriptural teaching that God is “the Father of lights” (James 1:7). Further, not only is God’s illuminatio the basis for the possibility for human knowledge; in principle every aspect of human skill, technology, “know how, ” even agriculture and warfare, or the experiences of the senses, or the understandings of reason, are possible because of divine illumination. Little wonder, therefore, that Bonaventura thought that all human knowledge could in one way or another be “traced back” to theology, the knowledge of God.

Bonaventura, like Thomas Aquinas, taught that in this life all our worldly knowledge is only preliminary, a “vesper/twilight knowledge,” for God’s illumination is indirect.10 Nevertheless, even while living as a pilgrim in this world, God’s Being as light, in which humans by nature and grace participate, allows a true, indeed finally the only true access to real knowledge. Whereas late Modern philosophy, beginning with Kant, increasingly questions whether the human mind can really know “things in themselves” at all, Medieval theology taught that humans were bathed in divine illumination in all its aspects, opening humans to a rich knowledge of the world and the world’s relation to God. Humans, through God, could not only have scientia, but also sapientia, not only profane knowledge of the world but also wisdom.

This brief sketch of the Medieval cathedral of knowing and knowledge is necessary to more easily understand how its foundations were rocked by the new science that arose in the Renaissance and took full form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Consider: Modern natural science rejected God as the immediate source of knowledge, replacing that with the unaided human mind (Rationalism) . Modern natural science redirected the mind’s attention from God as the goal of human knowing to the world as an end-object itself, now called “nature.” Further, Modern science ignored final/exemplary causation to focus only on efficient causation, which was sought always within the world, and analyzed by Newton’s Laws of Motion. And, above all, Modern natural science shifted the purpose of knowing and knowledge from directing the mind and heart to God to linking natural scientific knowledge to technology and industry for the improvement of human life on earth. The development of Modern natural science was so traumatic for Premodern theology not because it altered matters within the Premodern paradigm. The trauma came because Modern natural science worked within a totally different paradigm of knowing and knowledge altogether.

Modern Science.

The impact of Modern science on this traditional, Pre-modern, “cathedral of knowing and knowledge” was massive. In this section we want to try to identify more specifically the aspects of Modern natural science that contrasted radically to the Pre-modern understanding of “science.” The first point to attend to is that Modern natural science, beginning in the sixteenth century, developed a new language and a new method which led to very different results in the pursuit of true, reliable knowledge.

1. The New Scientific Language-Mathematics

The language of Modern science is mathematical. A key feature of modern scientific method is that it expresses, or aims to express, its findings in mathematical form. The nova scientia (the name given in the sixteenth century to the beginnings of the new scientific way of knowing) began in the field of astronomy. This early focus of the new science helped elevate mathematics to the status of a fundamental tool in the methodology of modern science and to the mode of expressing its results. In Pre-modern Christian scientia , mathematics had almost no role. The closest medieval theology came to math was talking about a creature’s “number weight and measure” as an external reflection of the Holy Trinity. In Aristotle’s writings, mathematics played no role at all.11

Nicolous Copernicus (1473-1543) was the pioneer of the “nova scientia, ” and because his science was astronomy, it used mathematics. Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the then- known universe offered a simpler, more comprehensive “explanation” of astronomical mathematical measurements than the earth-centered Ptolemaic model, inherited by Premodern Christian natural philosophy from second century A.D. astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. To avoid trouble with the institutional Church, Copernicus did not allow his results to be published until he lay dying.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) took up some questions from Copernicus, which Copernicus had not been able to answer, even using his nova scientia. One of Copernicus’s questions was why, if the earth is winging its way around the sun, we feel no sense of movement. Galilei applied mathematics to motion. Applying mathematics, by actually measuring the rate of fall of bodies (down an inclined plane, not from the top of the Tower of Pisa), Galilei refuted Aristotle’s doctrine that heavier objects fall faster. Everything falls at the same rate; and Galilei discovered what that rate was. This required him to distinguish velocity from acceleration (change in velocity), and this distinction enabled Galilei to explain why we don’t sense flying through space around the sun. Human’s don’t feel movement, if velocity remains the same ( as when we sit in a train moving at a steady speed). We only experience movement when the velocity changes, i.e., when we experience acceleration (as when the train speeds up or slows down). Galilei’s study of falling objects connected directly to knowledge of the natural world generally because gravity was a universally present force causing things, aerodynamics aside, to fall at an accelerating velocity. One of Isaac Newton’s great achievements was to measure the force of gravity.

The discovery, around 1609, of the telescope dramatically furthered the nuova scientia, challenging assumptions about the planets taught by Aristotle and taught as doctrine by the Christian church. Galileo published his findings in A dialogue on the Two Principal systems of the World (1632), in which the Ptolemaic dialogue partner appears rather foolish. The Pope, Urban VIII (1623-1644), thought Galilei was caricaturing him and brought Galilei before the Inquisition. Galilei was shown the instruments of torture; then invited to “recant” his theories about the planets. This he did, and was nevertheless held under house arrest until he died. Yet, no one could deny what they saw with their own two eyes through a telescope and Galilei’s teachings helped cement mathematics as a key means in the method of the nova scientia.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)12 was both a philosopher and a brilliant mathematician. His philosophy profoundly furthered the role of mathematics in modern science. One of his key teachings was that reality consisted of two kinds of being: rational (or thinking) essences and material or extended beings, e.g., the human body and all physical objects. Mathematics was the proper form of knowledge of the physical world, extended being. Descartes is extremely important for Modern natural science, because he framed natural science in a subject-object relationship. Humans, essentially res cogitans (thinking things) stand apart from and over against an extended world, knowing it by measuring it and knowing it to control it. The contrast with the intention of Medieval ‘scientific” knowledge could hardly be greater.

2. The New Scientific Method: No Final Purposes

Medieval theology understood human beings as part of creation and saw humans as privileged creatures. Of all God’s creatures, God created humans in His own image, i.e., endowed with reason and will. Human reason was, as we saw when discussing Bonaventura and Thomas, an inward share in God’s illumination allowing humans to investigate the world as the effects of God. The ultimate purpose of examining the world was not to satisfy our curiosity about the world, much less to control the world. The goal was the know God; to let the world lead the mind back to its Maker.13

Understanding creatures as created by a knowing, purposeful God, and knowing themselves as knowing and purposeful creatures, Pre-modern thinkers credited a kind of purpose to every creature. The contrast to Descartes could not be greater. Descartes, as we mentioned, defined human being as having a completely different “nature” from everything else in creation, res cogitans vs. res extensa. As Modern scientific method took over this view of non-human nature, it made no sense to think of natural objects having purposes, any final telos/end. Final cause was excluded from scientific understanding of the physical world. Efficient causation, mechanical causation of physical objects acting on other objects, became the focus of scientific attention. 14 Only humans had purposes, and in the framework of Modern science, the physical world was to be known in order to serve human purposes. In one sense, therefore, Modern science was “objective” focusing on things as “objects.” In another sense modern science was driven by human purposes of curiosity, mastery, control, and domestication of “nature.”

Replacing the Aristotelian, Scholastic three or four fold analyses of causation (efficient, material, formal/exemplary; final) was a reduction to one notion of cause: efficient causation. This meant that scientific understanding came to mean grasping the cause or causes within the world for the movement of something else in the world and expressing this causal relation mathematically. Isaac Newton’s Four Laws of Motion and the understanding of planetary motion as caused by the force of gravity embodied this view of scientific knowledge. 15

Thus, we can speak accurately of Modern scientific method as being atheistic in principle. Modern science, by explicit or implicit intention, rules out, methodologically and by original intent, any world-transcendent cause to explain anything in the world. Only this-worldly causes count in Modern scientific explanation. Indeed, only this- worldly causes that can be measured can count as scientifically real. Because God, in Christian understanding, transcends the world, is not measurable and has no physical extension, Modern science refuses, methodologically, to include God or any other “spiritual” being as a real entity in its framework of thinking. Not surprisingly, as natural scientific method gained legitimacy and authority as the only avenue to reliable, true knowledge, references to God increasing became burdened with a haze of unreality and falsehood.16 This brings us to the modern scientific experiment, standing at the core of modern scientific method. The experiment is so designed as to rule out the very possibility of experiencing God or anything that cannot be measured and expressed mathematically from being experienced.17

3. Modern Natural Science: experimental

Central to the Method of modern natural science is the experiment. Experiments, in the framework of modern natural science, are planned, i.e., highly structured and determined processes aiming to determine (by physical measurement of some kind) how two events in “nature” are causally related. The modern scientific experiment maximizes the control and domestication of experience. The experimental situation aims at determining and fixing in advance the conditions of all the variables of the part of nature under investigation.

Human life, especially human social life, contains innumerable variables. Therefore, the human sciences have struggled to legitimate themselves in the arena of “Modern science.” Indeed, one stream of late Modern thinking, associated with German thinker , Wilhelm Dilthey, and established in European intellectual life, distinguished the physical sciences , (Naturwissenschaften) from the human sciences (Geisteswissenscaften), and contrasted the goal of natural science– explanation (Erklaeren)— to the goal of the human sciences—understanding (Verstehen). The Modern intellectual examination of hermeneutics, the study of interpreting texts, assumes this distinction. This does not prevent so -called researchers in the “human sciences” –e.g., psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology—from trying to adapt their view of humans as much as possible to the requirements of natural scientific experimentation. Branding all Modern natural science with Nazi medical experiments would be very wrong. But objectifying humans, needed methodologically and psychologically for such experiments, is implicit in the experimental paradigm of Modern natural science, when that paradigm is appropriated by the “human sciences.” 18

The modern scientific experiment is far from a preposition less, open inquiry about the world, such that the scientist might experience the world in a totally unexpected way.19 Experiments might yield results not predicted by the hypothesis that the experiment was designed to test. In that sense, natural scientists might report that their results of their investigation surprised them. And, as with then discovery of radiation, scientific discovery can happen outside the framework of the original experiment. But natural scientific experiments are constructed to fix all the other factors of the test situation, so that only one relation between two variables can be examined. Far from opening the scientist to new experiences of the world, the experiment fixes the range of experience in advance and determines all the framework conditions explicitly so that others can repeat the experiment. Modern scientific method intentionally excludes the possibility of discovering anything outside of its predetermined range of “reality”, i.e., extended objects within this world, which can be measured and described mathematically. Imagine a physicist saying in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plasma Physicists, “I concluded that an angel caused the change in temperature.” The laughter, bewilderment or consternation of that scientist’s colleagues signal that he or she is not playing by the rules of Modern science.

4. Modern scientific method and the Modern ideal of Progress.

We conclude this brief overview of modern scientific method by making explicit that it operates in a larger social context, a context determined by the Modern belief in inevitable, steady progress through science and technology. Two early thinkers established for the Modern era the notion of progress and the link between natural science and technology that are such fundamental characteristics of Modernity. One is Francis Bacon (1561-126). Politician and lawyer, Lord Chancellor under King James I, philosopher and writer, Francis Bacon laid the foundation for the legitimacy of natural science as the engine of human progress by urging the link between the new science and technology. In his Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon reorganized knowledge into categories different from those of scholastic theology. In the two volumes completed of his planned six volumes of natural history, in his New Atlantis (1620), a description of an ideal state, and in his Instauratio Magna (The Great Renewal), a plan for the renewal of knowledge, Francis Bacon taught that the importance of natural science was its application in technology in service to the improvement of the human race. Thus, Francis Bacon was a key figure in what may be the platform principle of Modernity, the idea of cumulative, inevitable progress through science- based technology.

A second philosopher who embodies the Modern belief that science and technology will bring humans closer and closer to a utopian life on earth was August Compte. Compte (1798-1857)20 is known in the history of knowledge as “the father of sociology.” He coined the word and conceived of the study of human society as a kind of scientific discipline. Comte advocated studying social life as a science. More interesting for this essay are ideas Compte expressed in his six-volume work Course of Positive Philosophy, published between 1830-1840. There he presented his “law of the three stages.” According to this law, human “science” passes through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. Humans begin by interpreting the world as the work of supernatural powers; then comes an era which explains the world by abstract concepts as “causes” or “forces.” In the third stage, humans become real scientists, gathering facts, determining relationships among observed facts and perceiving laws that rule natural events, both human and subhuman. Using this truly scientific knowledge, humans are prepared to shape the social world just as they were increasingly successful shaping the physical world. In case anyone in the third and “positive stage” wanted some religion, Compte provided them with a “religion of humanity” in which humans who had improved the human condition were the objects of reverence.

Christians should keep in mind the demoralizing impact Compte’s popularized three-stage theory of the history of culture could have on them. As Compte’s philosophy of history slowly pervades the Modern climate of opinion, religious faith in general, and Christian faith in particular, becomes branded as primitive, superstitious, typical of ignorant people. This same branding occurs today in relation to political Islam and “Right-wing” Christianity. Therefore, Christians should become aware of emerging Postmodern attitudes to the Modern linking of natural science, technology and industrialization.
The Postmodern Questioning of Modern Natural Science

Critical disbelief in the Modern consensus about natural science is a key feature of Postmodernity. This questioning is happening on at least three fronts. One is challenging the Modern belief that the methods of the natural sciences steadily accumulate true knowledge of the world. A second front is challenging the Modern assumption that natural scientific method, based on exact measurement, experiment and explicit mathematical expression, is the only valid way to true knowledge.21 Most decisively, the third front is the Postmodern rejection of the Modern assumption that natural and human sciences, linked to technology, are bringing us closer and closer to a this-worldly utopia. Each of these Postmodern challenges carries with it new opportunities for Christians to rethink their truth claims and their witness.

1. The Structure of Scientific Knowledge

A typical Postmodern insight about Modern natural science is that scientific knowledge does not progress through a linear accumulation of new knowledge gained by one, single method but, rather undergoes periodic revolutions. This radical revision of scientific knowledge is now an established postmodern perspective on Modern natural science.22

This revision is due largely to writings of Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996), an historian and philosopher of science. 23 Kuhn called these revolutions “paradigm shifts.” In his now classic study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn persuasively showed that what counts in any era as “scientific knowledge” is determined by a cultural paradigm of knowledge which itself is less a function of science itself than a function of widely shared assumptions about what is real and how one accesses reality. What counts as “scientific” knowledge changes from epoch to epoch and is, to a degree, a function of a particular culture’ world view. What a culture or society views as “scientific truth” is as much as function of larger cultural assumptions and values as it is of “the scientific method” or the lack of it.

More specifically, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn distinguished three distinct phases of science.24 Prescience is a phase in which scientists collect data but lack a framework or paradigm for organizing the data. Then come the phrase of “normal science” in which scientists work within an accepted paradigm for explaining data in a particular field of science and for “puzzle-solving”, i.e., trying to fit new data within an established paradigm. When many data accumulate which cannot be fitted into the accepted paradigm for that scientific field, a “crisis” occurs, until a genius arises who proposes a new paradigm that gives a place for the old results, the new, anomalous results, and suggest new, creative avenues for research in that field. Kuhn called that revolutionary science.25

Especially challenging to the Modern scientific self-understanding was Kuhn’s claim that scientific paradigms are incommensurable. That means, understanding one paradigm in the terms and within the assumptions of another paradigm is impossible. The idea of incommensurable paradigms flatly contradicted the Modern idea that science gains knowledge in a cumulative, coherent, progressive way.

Thus, Postmodernism questioned Modernity’s self-understanding about the development of scientific knowledge. Modernity pictured natural sciences as gathering, in progressive, cumulative fashion, in different fields, true information about the world using the scientific methods appropriate for physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, etc. The Modern view of science was that it produced an uninterrupted, widening flow of true facts and laws, facts and laws that gradually but steadily accumulated and from which could be abstracted ever fewer and ever more general laws.

Relevance for Christian Faith and Life

Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm shifts” and, especially of paradigm incommensurability has important, positive implications for Christian theology, teaching and mission. Postmodernity is teaching contemporary people that not only is natural science not the only way to truth about the world but that even within natural science shifts in understanding knowledge occur which cannot be directly compared.

In this new intellectual climate Christians can more plausibly claim that God opens humans in Jesus Christ to truth in a unique way, a way which cannot be compared or dismissed because it differs from natural science knowledge in method and results. Postmodern people are becoming aware of different paradigms, different models, different frameworks for knowledge. Truth is not obtained by only one method. Postmodernity is becoming aware that the natural sciences do not have a hammer lock on truth. And, through Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigm shifts and the non-comparability of scientific paradigms, contemporary people could be more open to a unique Christian framework for truth.

2. The All-Sufficiency of Science for Truth

Typifying a Modern view of science is the phrase: “science has shown,” as the only necessary warrant for a truth claim. In the framework of Modernity, “the proven results of modern science” were impregnable and had persuasive force. The purest form of this Modern belief in scientific method was the claim or the assumption that only the natural sciences, and their methods of experiment, measuring and mathematical expression should or could count as real, i.e.,, truthful, knowledge. This reduction of truth to the findings of natural science, as we have said, is usually called “reductionism” or “scientism.”26

Typically Postmodern is doubting this claim or to reject this belief outright. Postmodern is the conviction that more than one path to real knowledge exists. Certainly rejected by Postmodernism is the Modern assumption that the ideal form of real knowledge is mathematical.27

A remarkable representative of this Postmodern view is the Polish philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi.28 With his notions of implicit and tacit knowledge, Polanyi helped break the Modern fixation on natural scientific method as the only way to real knowledge. Typical of Polanyi’s major point is his statement, “we know more than we can tell.” Examples he gives knowing how to ride a bike, how to swim or the ability to recognize a friend’s face in a crowd of strangers. Even the dogmatic defender of “scientism” must admit that these are real forms of knowledge which everyone, including the believer in scientism, depend on and use every day.

Another of Polayani’s points is especially valuable for Christian witness to truth claims. He said that not only does tacit knowledge exist and consitute important knowledge. Tacit knowledge is also a key to innovation, to new knowledge. The human mind’s and imagination’s ability to “jump” from the literal to the figurative and the metaphorical is key to the discovery of analogies in reality, to the recognition of real connections and comparisons previously unobserved. This insight is especially devastating to scientism, because scientific knowledge, which Modern scientism idolizes, views mathematical expression as the highest form of truth claims. But mathematical expression is denotative expression in pure form.

Polyani’s insights reinforce and are reinforced by that of other thinkers in very different fields. An example is the analysis of language meaning established as authoritative today by the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.29 Although his work lies early in the twentieth century, it has been the basis of the movement of structural linguistics and of philosophical structuralism generally, both of which were and are central to Postmodern philosophy.

One of Saussure’s key insights, consonant with Polyani’s claims about tacit knowledge and cognitive innovation, is that linguistic signs (i.e., the sounds or marks expressing concepts) have two kinds of relation to meaning. He called these the ‘rapports syntagmatiques” and “rapports associatifs.”30 The syntagmatic meaning is the meaning of signs joined correctly by the grammar of a natural or artificial language. Mathematical denotative meaning would be a kind of syntagmatic meaning, because the operatives in a mathematical or a logical formula define explicitly the meaning of the formula. By contrast, the “associative” meanings of signs are meanings suggested by individual signs through the sign’s interaction with the mind and imagination of the reader or hearer of the sign. Saussure uses the word “enseignement” (teaching/education/instruction) to exemplify les rapports associatifs. Thus, one line of associations is enseigner; ensignons, etc. Another line of associations could be “apprentissage; education; etc. etc. A third line could be “changement; armement, etc., etc. A fourth could be “clement; justement, etc. etc.31 The human mind, in fact, has the remarkable ability to think analogically, metaphorically and by association. Granted the important place of denotative meaning for communication of factual information and for the natural sciences. But association, analogy, simile and metaphor are fundamental forms of meaning; and they are foundational for Christian communication of meaning in Scripture, teaching, worship, prayer and preaching. Saussure’s analysis of how linguistic signs work was a retrieval of this non-denotative meaning that became a fundamental insight of Postmodernity.

The creativity of metaphor; the ability of metaphor’s to generate new meaning has led postmodern philosophers to study metaphor and symbolic language generally. A giant in this field was the French Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Every Christian who can do so should seek to become familiar with his writings.32 Especially his writings on metaphor and on symbols, as well as his writings on the difference between a spoken text and a written text to generate new meanings is very important for Christian reflection on Scriptural interpretation, preaching and language in general.

Significance for Christianity

Postmodern thinkers have successfully challenged Modernity’s tendency to think that natural science is the only valid way to knowledge and the only proper form of knowledge. This Postmodern rejection of scientism should be a tremendous encouragement to Christian believers. Christians can now expect that contemporary people will agree that more than one avenue to truth exists. Ideas of revelation as a source of knowledge, faith as a way of knowing; love as both a kind of knowing and as a prerequisite for certain kinds of knowing chould find more ready ears today than in the Modern era, when natural science, in the popular mind, held exclusive rights to truth.

3. Natural Science and Progress

We cited Auguste Compte as a paradigmatic Modern figure for establishing the typically Modern assumption the natural science, linked to technology and industrialization, inevitably benefits the human race in history.33 Basic to Postmodern perspectives is skepticism about this fundamental assumption of Modernity. In the first essay of this series, we examined how Postmodernism has a deep skepticism about the idea of progress itself. Especially suspect Modernity’s assumption that science, technology and industrialization produce an inevitable, steady and universal improvement of the human condition.

Probably the development of atomic weapons, during the Second World War, began the disintegration of the Modern dogma that better living comes inevitably and unambiguously through science and technology.34 The prospect of mutual mass destruction through the latest fruits of nuclear physics broke the aura of science as the benign and inevitable force of human progress, even to the first developers of the atomic bomb. Since the Second World War, awareness of industrialization’s devastation of the natural environment, the new problems raised by a generation whose physical lives have been extended by the “wonders” of modern medicine, and, last, but not least, the moral dilemmas raised by intervention in the human genome have broken the spell the natural sciences with technology held over Modern men and women. Belief in “Progress” died in principle in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Auschwitz and Dachau. Postmoderns can acknowledge and welcome some limited meaning to “progress” in technology. But belief in “Progress”, with a capital “P” is gone forever.

Significance for Christians

A major point of the last essay (the first in this series) was that Postmodernity’s disillusionment with the Modern belief in inevitable progress leading to a this-worldly utopia provides a negative confirmation of Christian teaching that God alone, not sinful, finite and fallible human beings, can bring humanity to its fulfillment. If nothing else the concentration camps, the political fanaticism, the rabid dictatorships, the blindness to environmental destruction, the threat from weapons of mass destruction which fills the last century confirms the Christian teaching about human sinfulness. Modernity was western humanity’s self-chosen project to remake and save itself. This project was a miserable failure and that failure has produced a Postmodern skepticism reserve and a wariness about all totalistic projects for “saving the world.”

While this Postmodern disillusionment with Modernity’s Dogma of Progress reinforces Christian teaching, we must be careful about how we respond to it. As we mentioned in the last essay, Modernity was deeply critical of institutional religion. Postmodernity is no less skeptical. Postmodernity is just as suspicious of institutional religion as it now is of scientism, Enlightenment secularism, and Progress as ideologies. Some forms of contemporary organized religion, in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism but also Christianity, provide Postmodern people with plenty of evidence that institutional religion can be violent and destructive. Christians today should be aware that some thinkers think there is an intrinsic link between all monotheistic religions and violence. Thus Postmodern challenges to Modern assumptions about natural science do not send them flocking to churches, certainly not in Europe. Indeed, Postmodern people do not typically bind themselves to any institutions, whether marital nor religious. Postmodern religiosity is eclectic; super-market selecting from world religions what is individually pleasing. New Age religiosity does not support traditional religious institutions.

Of course, Christian theology also teaches that not the Church saves, but God saves. So Christians should be willing to share Postmodernity’s critical view of the institutional churches. Nevertheless, Christians would be naïve to think that Postmodernity’s disillusionment with the Modern idea of Progress will produce a wave of faith in the teachings of the Christian Churches.35

Important also is that Christians do not uncritically support Postmodernism’s critique of Modern science. Modern science, like Enlightenment Rationalism and the Modern belief in Progress has born many wonderful fruits. Christians will not commend the faith to Postmodern people if they convey the idea that we Christians reject modern medicine, modern technology, Enlightenment teachings about religious toleration, democratic institutions, individual liberties and equality before the law.36 I presume my readers, as I, thank God for much modern medicine, for new possibilities of electronic communication, for equality before the law, for the equal dignity accorded women, for religious tolerance and other achievements of Modernity. As we stated at the end of our Introduction: these essays are not anti-Modern polemic. They take account of an emerging new sense of reality—the Postmodern—and inquire what new perspectives this opens for Christian life and witness.

The Next Essay

Characteristic of this emerging Postmodern era is the renewed place of the image. Postmodern is that this image is not the literary image or the painted image but the electronic image. Advertising and marketing are key engines to the global market that constitutes the economic parameters of Postmodernism. In Christian theology, art and worship images are central. Any series on the interaction between Christianity and Postmodernism must address the new, Postmodern role of the electronic image. We hope to attempt this in the next, the third, essay of this series.

The Rev. David Scott, Ph.D.

January, 2007

Murnau, Germany