Open Theology & Science – Week 2 Recap

Continuing coverage of a 3-week “Open Theology and Science” conference being held in the Boston area. For my week 1 recap, see here.

On Monday (6/25) we drove out to Concord, MA. We started out at the Concord Museum, which covers the life and work of the major figures of the Transcendentalist movement, including Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne, all of whom lived in or near Concord. At the museum we heard a lecture by Dr. Ross Stein, a chemist at the Harvard Medical School. An atheist up until a few years ago, Dr. Stein became convinced by the astounding complexity of even the simplest form of life that the problem of abiogenesis (the origin of life) could not be solved apart from the influence of a supernatural directing intelligence (i.e., God). In light of the problem of evil, however, Dr. Stein opts for process theism. He reasons that if God can unilaterally intervene in the world, then he ought to have intervened more often, hence it must be impossible for God to unilaterally intervene in the world. In process thought, God can ‘lure’ events in a certain direction, but all events retain a degree of self-determination that God cannot override, even if he wants to. Dr. Stein tried to sketch how process theism might be able to account for abiogenesis, though he freely admitted that in sketching his account he was practicing theology and philosophy “without a license”.

Tuesday’s speaker was Jeffrey Schloss, a biologist at Westmont University. Dr. Schloss showed himself to be extremely well-informed both on the current state of evolutionary biology and on its relevance to ongoing theological and philosophical debates. He marshalled an impressive array of evidence in favor of ‘directionality’ in evolution – the idea that natural selection can be expected to select in favor of larger, more intelligent beings. Dr. Schloss was quick to point out, however, that establishing directionality does not by itself settle the debate over whether evolution is more friendly to theism or to atheism, though he himself is a theist.

Tuesday evening we had a debate between two biblical scholars on whether God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge. Defending the NO position was Dr. Karen Winslow, professor of Old Testament theology at Azusa Pacific University. Defending the YES position was Dr. Randall Tan, a professor of New Testament theology at Kentucky Christian University. Given the different specialities of the participants (OT vs. NT), there was not a lot of interaction between the two debaters. Both agreed that humans have libertarian free will, and both pointed to passages in the Bible that they believed supported their position, but there was little in the way of detailed debate over particular passages. During the Q&A session, Dr. Tan seemed to be shifting between Molinism and the simple foreknowledge explanations of how God comes by his foreknowledge. All in all, I think Karen’s presentation was a little more clear, but time constraints limited either of them from really developing their respective positions.

On Wednesday morning we had no speaker. Instead, we broke up into small groups to discuss our respective research projects. After that, we had a free-for-all on the problem of evil. The process theists in the group argued that they have a strong edge over classical theism because on their view it is metaphysically impossible for God to unilaterally intervene in the world. Consequently, all evil is blamable on creatures and we avoid the apparent unfairness of God’s selectively intervening in some cases but not in others. The classical theists in the group argued that the advantages of process theism over classical theism are largely illusory. Either God’s ‘luring’ or ‘persuasive’ power is very great (God’s almost always gets what he wants) or it is not. If it is very great, then the theodicy problem reemerges in nearly the same form as it does for the classical theist (why doesn’t God do more?). If it is very limited, then we can have little or no assurance that God will ever be able to overcome evil. In short, any advantages vis-a-vis the problem of evil that are gained on the front end by denying God’s omnipotence are balanced by disadvantages on the back end (God’s inability to redeem the evil in the world and replace it with good).

On Thursday morning we heard a presentation by Brown University cell biologist Kenneth R. Miller critiquing the Intelligent Design movement. Miller’s presentation was very slick and rhetorically powerful, though most of the philosophers in the audience (myself included) thought that he was being unfair to the ID position. The way Miller frames the debate, ID proponents have to ‘prove’ that naturalistic evolution cannot explain everything in the biological world. In the absence of a strict disproof, argues Miller, ID is a ‘science-stopper’. The problem with Miller’s approach, however, is it by no means clear that ID, charitably construed, faces such a high burden of proof or results in such deleterious consequences for science. As I tried unsuccessfully to point out to Miller, the sophisticated ID advocate is making a ‘inference to the best explanation’, an inference that is inductive and therefore inherently fallible. So construed, the issue is not one of strict proof or disproof, but of how strong the case is for design as the best explanation on a case-by-case basis. As a fallible mode of inference, any conclusion of design is in principle revisable and/or open to supplementation by naturalistic explanations. So construed, ID is not at all a science-stopper but rather, if anything, a science-opener. It simply adds a further idea to the discussion without taking anything off the table or specifying in advance what sorts of conclusions have to be arrived at.

Besides his caricature of ID, other things that annoyed several of us about Miller’s presentation were his complete failure to define ‘evolution’ and his continued pronouncements that ‘science’ can only deal with what is empirically testable. As anyone trained in the philosophy of science knows, there is no standard definition of ‘science’, no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that adequately demarcate between ‘science’ and other disciplines.

Finally, Friday’s speaker was John Haught, a theologian who accepts a completely naturalistic take on evolution and, following Teilhard de Chardin, is trying to develop a theology of cosmic evolution to preserve a semblance of theistic religion in the face of what he regards as the deliverances of science. Frankly, I was not persuaded by Haught. His discussions of emergence are too metaphorical to provide any assurance that his system can work. And his dismissal of ID. and of classical theism seems to me to be completely unwarranted by the reasons he gave. A number of the participants (notably, John Sanders) also noticed that Haught leaves no role in his allegedly Christian theology for the person and work of Jesus. For him, the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection refer to pervasive features of the cosmos. For example, the Incarnation refers to God’s working out of his purposes through the history of the physical cosmos; whereas the Resurrection refers to the goal of the cosmic evolutionary process in which matter gradually gives rise to a ‘noosphere’, or spiritual community.

One final thought before closing. It’s really struck me at this conference that there’s a three-way conversation going on between metaphysical materialists, process theists, and classical theists. Materialists and process theists tend to gang up against classical theists in the name of “science” while making heavy wind of the problem of evil. Process theists and classical theists tend to gang up against materialists by opposing the atheism and barren reductionism of the latter. And both materialists and classical theists tend to gang up against process theists as fuzzy-thinking “have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too” types.