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Lecture and Discussant Text Harrold
H. Oliver Discussant: Jim Proctor, Department of Geography All text below is in unrevised form exactly as presented. Do not cite without permission of author. Do you have thoughts on the Oliver lecture or
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I count it a special privilege to be invited to speak at this university on the theme of the relationship of science and religion. It is a subject to which I have devoted most of my career and one I continue to reflect upon. You may hear some familiar and unfamiliar things in my presentation as I retrace the steps of others as well as set forth theories of my own. In some cases I will invite you to see things a new way. Now let us begin. The late Alfred North Whitehead, pioneer in the philosophy of science, will be long remembered for his two-fold claim that “science and religion are the two strongest general forces which influence [humanity]” and that” it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.”[1] While he did not offer a scheme of their relationship through time, as others have done, he insisted that we must distinguish genuine science from pseudoscience and informed religion from superstition, and it was these that he implied in the claim above. Several published schemata of their relationship have appeared since his time, one of which I first suggested in an article in 1978.[2] So far as I can tell, this was this first time anyone made the notion of domain essential to the schema. According to the “domain” theory, science and religion are about either the same or different domains. These claims further subdivide as follows: they say the same things about the same domain, or different, possibly, conflicting or complementary things about the same domain. The claim that they are about different domains may lead to the conclusion that either or both may be valid or non-valid, but not contradictory. I. COMPLEMENTARITY: THE THESIS In that article I defended the thesis of the complementarity of science and religion, arguing in favor of the position of Donald MacKay against that of Hugo Bedau, the latter of whom insisted that the term complementarity should be limited to its original use, namely, that which characterized Bohr’s solution to the quantum dilemma.[3] Later, in 1992, Sir John Templeton introduced a new kind of publication, entitled Who’s Who in Theology and Science, with the words:[4]
In words that are resonant with the definition of complementarity presented earlier, Templeton stated what he believes to be the contemporary consensus[5]
In October of 1999, a conference was held at the Harvard -Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics by the new Templeton Commission on the Future of Planetary Cosmology. What was new in such a gathering of scientists was “the emphasis on extrasolar astronomy, with an eye to its ultimate significance as a spiritual quest.”[6] It is of special interest that one of the persons attending the session pointed out[7]
There is even an Oxford Institute of Science and Spirit which awards a certificate in conjunction with the Union Institute (USA). Upon close inspection it would appear that there are two versions of the complementarity principle as it relates to the relationship of science and religion: a weak version, according to which non-conflictual cooperation between scientists and religionists prevails, but the level of cooperation is not specified, and a strong version according to which, for all complementary statements, the alteration or absence of one of the statements would necessitate a change in the other, as MacKay held.[8] Here the relationship between science and religion must be closely monitored by each to insure integrity. This latter definition is implied in Templeton’s description: “they are talking about the same things, with complementary accounts, presenting different aspects of the same event which in its full nature cannot be described by either alone.”[9] Whatever version one chooses, the result is that science and religion are allies that cooperate at a fundamental level. MacKay used a model proposed by C. A. Coulson to explain this version of complementarity.[10] He said that science and religion are like the front and side projections of a the plan of a building. One would need both to reconstruct the building, though the projections are orthogonal, and hence “blind,” to each other. Another form of the one domain thesis is the conflict theory, according to which science and religion say different, contradictory things about the same domain. This is the view of certain conservative Christians for whom the biblical view of creation differs from scientific theories of cosmology and for whom evolution is considered both bad religion and bad science, while religion is thought to be good science. On this basis many of these groups have sponsored efforts to have evolution taught concurrently with what they dubiously call creation science. Even though it is called “science,” it conducts no independent research. When it is held that science and religion do not conflict, this is often based on the supposition that they are about two domains, the natural and supernatural. I have labeled this the Compartment Theory and the strategic advantage of this theory is that science and religion cannot be in conflict, since they are about different things. The ground is open in this claim for scientists to deny the reality of the supernatural, but when this happens, scientific naturalism simply prevails. I will try to make a reasonable case for the belief that there is but one domain and that it is human experience. A recent advocate of the Compartment Theory is Stephen Gould who calls it the “separationist” claim.[11] He seems to have been swayed into a pronouncement about this claim by his reaction to two developments. The first is the theories of the discoverer and curator of the Burgess Shale fauna, C.D. Walcott, who was influenced in his practice of science (a) by assuming, under the spell of the prevailing scheme of the social theory of progress, the cogency of “a view of life as a single progressive chain”[12] and (b) his belief that science should serve “the altruistic, or, as some would call it, the spiritual nature of man,” a claim which Gould connects with Walcott’s attempt to deal positively with the Scopes trial of 1925. [13] The second provocation for Gould’s pronouncement concerns the anti-evolutionists trials in 1925 and 1987. His statement warrants quoting[14]
While Gould’s legally-driven “separationist” position protects both science and religion from improper encroachments on the other, his reduction of the realm of the religious to the “ethical” and “moral” will appall theologians, who view religion as a rich symbolic world.[15] II. THE GROUNDS FOR THE COMPLEMENTARITY THESIS No one can speak for the whole of science and religion, but I shall argue that science, especially modern physics, and religion are converging on a relational paradigm. My reason for highlighting “modern physics” is that relativity theory and quantum theory, both of which emerged in the first years of the twentieth century, displaced Newtonian physics and set physics on a course which is decidedly “relational.” Relativity theory replaced the “substantives” of Newtonian physics--space, time and matter–with space-time events and merged space and time into space-time. The Classical Newtonian theory of matter as composed of substantial particles was displaced by the theory of matter as matter-energy. Though the issues are more controversial, quantum physics raised questions about what seems to be the paradox of particles and waves, apparent in the fact that if one sets up an experiment to test for waves, one finds waves, and conversely, if one sets up an experiment to test for particles, one finds particles. This prompted Bohr to introduce the term “complementarity” to resolve the paradox. The classical theory of particles collapsed. They can only with reservations be called “substantives.” Bohm wrote the following to elucidate the Copenhagen position:[16]
He had already written:[17]
In this same spirit, the physicist Richard Schlegel argued that[18]
Modern physicists are still working within this paradigm of “relationality,” according to which the physical realities are not things with their properties, but the properties themselves. In a recent review in The New York Times by Michael Riordan of a new book by Lee Smolin, entitled Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, the reviewer notes the following viewpoint of Smolin:[19]
Smolin‘s bold stand on relationality is made throughout his book. The essence of his claim appears early on:[20]
Smolin, who teaches at Penn State and conducted his research on occasion with Ted Jacobson here at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, even identifies himself as one of the founders of “relational quantum theory.”[21] On the same page he asserts: “The universe of events is a relational universe. That is, all its properties are described in terms of relationships between the events.” His work on loop quantum gravity has led him to maintain, over against string theory, that on the Planck scale the theory must be background independent. This means to him that space is not continuous, but discrete; this further reinforces the idea that the fundamental entities are not located in space; rather, space–and time–are aspects of relations. It follows, further, that the fundamental entities, to use his term, are processes “by which information is conveyed from one part of the world to another.”[22] Smolin then surmises that finally, perhaps, “the history of the universe is nothing but the flow of information.”[23] I have presented these ideas, not to suggest that his theories are to be preferred to others, but that relational models are still being championed on the frontiers of physics. To return to our thesis of complementarity: for some it is a sufficient basis for the thesis of complementarity to promote a spirit of cooperation among scientists and theologians, as desirable as that may be. For others, there must be some basis for this thesis in the nature of the two disciplines. Since they are historically different modes, some other discipline must mediate between these two modes. Traditionally, metaphysics has played this role, because it is the most generalized form of thinking. One of the lessons we learn from modern metaphysics is that, in contrast to the East, Western thought has become substantialistic and egoistic. Beings are considered substances and their relations are accidents, and reality belongs to substances. This Western bias can be traced to the influence of Aristotle who based his philosophy on the subject-object structure of the Greek language. Aristotelian substantialism did much to shape science and religion in the West. In the modern world Descartes institutionalized substantialism and through his Methodic Doubt developed the notion of the Modern Subject, ensuring the egoistic tendency of Western philosophy, theology and physics. We have seen how Modern Physics moved toward a relational paradigm; now we must turn to the philosophical situation in the twentieth century, and especially to the metaphysical thesis of Universal Internality, to determine the nature of the emerging relational paradigm in physics and metaphysics. To do this we turn to the modern debate among philosophers about the nature of relations. It was in the closing years of the nineteenth century that a British philosopher, T.H Bradley, first proposed that all relations are internal. This case was made in the Appendix to the Second Edition of his magnum opus, Appearance and Reality, published .in 1893, where he argued, among other things, that “Nothing in the whole or in the end can be external, and everything in the Universe is an abstraction from the whole.”[24] Bradley’s compatriot, A.C Ewing, stated that position as follows:[25]
While many responsible philosophers opposed this doctrine of Universal Relatedness, as did Charles Hartshorne, who properly labeled it, it claimed the allegiance of Brand Blanshard of Yale who argued in connection with the doctrine, that scientific method is reductionist because it intentionally dissociates things that belong together. He continues:[26]
It was Blanshard who gives us this definition of internal relatedness:[27]
Bradley had his opponents, mainly Bertrand Russell in his early years, who argued that all relations are external, while William James and G. E. Moore made the more cautious case that some relations are internal, some external. Both men were opponents of Bradley’s neo-Hegelian monism and sought to dethrone it by defending the thesis that at least some relations are external. The American philosopher, Charles Hartshorne, devoted his whole career to articulating and defending the doctrine that some relations are internal to the terms, and some are external. Yet it is the case that Hartshorne could not break completely free of monism, as we see in the following quotation:[28]
For over thirty years I have defended the thesis of Universal Internality as a metaphysical position of greatest cogency. Metaphysics is the study of reality and proceeds by locating the irreducible component, or components, of experience. Relational metaphysics claims that the most economical thing that can be said about experience is that is consists of relatedness. It further argues that experience consists of what is fundamental and what is derivative, and that what is fundamental is relatedness. All the other so-called fundamentals, such as subjects and objects, mind and brain, are derivatives. These derivatives are harmless enough in everyday discourse unless they are treated as fundamental. One might say that the quest in metaphysics is for the answer to Heidegger’s question, “What is a thing?” It is feasible to argue now that the usual things that were thought of as fundamental are best considered derivatives. Continuing to treat them as fundamentals unduly complicates metaphysics. What Whitehead had to say about what we have usually thought of as “enduring things” I should like to apply to all pseudo-fundamentals:[29]
Having established reasons for believing that physics and metaphysics both present relational features, it now remains to be shown how all this pertains to religion. My thesis is that relational metaphysics provides a hermeneutical paradigm which comes closest to respecting the original intentionality of the religious traditions. Religion has been plagued by reification, whereby derivatives have been treated as fundamental. III. “SAYING DIFFERENT THINGS”: THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION AND THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE The thesis of complementarity holds that religion and science “are saying different things about the same domain.” What is the nature of this “difference”? First we shall consider the language of religion. Religion comes to us as mythical discourse and the language derived from it. The aboriginal sources of religion are dramatic mythical narratives. They image reality as relatedness. They are symbolic discourse about the symbolic world. They achieve this as dramatic narratives which “character-ize” experience, i.e., set it forth in characters. The stories are staged, that is to say, they intend an audience. What they portray is what Urs von Balthasar called the drama of existence. He had this to say about drama:[30]
The myths do not intend to make declarations outside of the parameters of the stories about the “reality” of the characters. This means that all the characters of mythical drama have dramatic reality. To say more about their reality transcends the limits of the story We may be tempted to do this nevertheless, but we thereby approach myths with an alien intentionality. This happens when we reify the characters into realities transcendent of their dramatic home, whether human or divine. The reification of religious characters is the result of taking these stories literally rather than symbolically. This claim applies equally to the divine and the human characters in the stories. When we lose sight of the dramatic context of these characters, whether of gods or humans, we are tempted to portray them as realities outside of the stories. We then say things like, God is transcendent or immanent, or both, or neither, and engage in debates about the divine nature a se. “God created the world” is mythical discourse, not wholly unlike that of Israel’s neighbors in the ancient Near East. If we take these words literally we approach them with an alien intentionality. We are then tempted to say theological things like ”God gives us faith,” when it more germane to say, with the Japanese philosopher, Daisetz Suzuki, that it is “faith that gives us God.”[31] I would argue that it is more appropriate to speak of God as the Eminent Other of the myth, but here, from a relational perspective, other means mutuality, not non-mutuality. God is the divine presence in the stories. To take the stories literally leads us into problematical assertions, such as “God is super agent,” or “God is the Absolute Subject” (Barth). This problematic underlies many of the statements of philosophers, such as “God has a primordial and a consequent nature” (Whitehead) or “God is finite” (Brightman). We can never speak univocally about such matters; we must honor the symbolic nature of all religious discourse. It follows from these claims that all the biblical narratives, including the Gospels, are dramatic narrative. If we try to treat them as historical biographies we immediately run into difficulties that are insurmountable. All the so-called quests for the historical Jesus have failed. David Friedrich Strauss was the first post-enlightenment scholar to respect the mythical limits of the Gospels and he soon lost sight of this fact. Kierkegaard said that if we had only the story, that would be enough. And that is what we have. To use the Gospels to try to discover what lies hidden behind them, misses the intention of myth. It instrumentalizes the myth by putting it to an impossible task. Suddenly, what the texts meant to say or failed to say becomes more important than what they do say. As dramatic narratives, the texts are iconic. They image experience as relatedness. They are not referential; they do not refer to entities, but present characters. It is relatedness that is presented in the stories. They depict that divinity and humanity are both relevant dimensions of life, that we are the sum of our relationships, nothing less or more. It is true that prior to the Enlightenment, according to the Yale professor, Hans Frei, the narratives were regarded as “realistic or story-like,” though he adds: “not necessarily historical.”[32] It was with the coming of the Enlightenment and one of its by-products, the supernaturalists, that the earlier viewpoint was displaced. Frei describes this change in perspective as follows:[33]
In the ancient world and more or less through the Middle Ages, mythic consciousness was still in place. To the question, what are the stories about, the answer would be: about the gods. With the Enlightenment the question was extended to: what are the stories of the gods about? With this question mythic consciousness was broken, and gave way to the primacy of reason alone. Those who continued to live within the faith community did so on a different basis. The rationalists had argued that “the statement, God exists, is false”; the believers countered, not that God exists, but that “the statement that God exists is false, is false.” Supernaturalism continued the earlier traditions, as it does in some many places today, not as something positive, but doubly negative. This is the seed-bed of the some of the conflicts between religion and science.It is not in the true spirit of religion to seek to undermine any genuine human endeavor, especially one so significant as science, for religion too seeks to elevate the human spirit. Turning to science, the difference of language becomes obvious. Rather than myth, we find that science is characterized as the most economical way of speaking of the natural world. Economy of hypothesis is to be preferred. Science is an idiom of the indicative mode. Things are often stated as fact without regard to what a fact may be. It is an idiom of “if...then.” Unfortunately, in media presentations the “if” is omitted. An article might begin by saying that “if the red shift is cosmological, the Universe is expanding, only then continue, “The Universe is expanding.” Science depends upon methods which are time-tested but not necessarily without flaws. Since the time of Bacon it has been assumed that the law of induction is trustworthy. But as late as the twentieth century logicians have challenged the adequacy of inductive reasoning. One of the advantages of science is that it is public and universal. The community of scientists is not bound to a specific culture and seeks to escape the idiosyncracies of local cultures. Science does not depend upon individual sleight-of-hand, nor does it make room for revelation in the religious sense. Nor is it dogmatic in a negative sense; it is ever revising its more trusted conclusions. I am always a bit suspicious when I see the word “really” in scientific papers. In 1971 I was in Cambridge where tensions ran high between Steady State and Big Bang cosmologies. At that time I ran across an article by Geoffrey Burbidge, who is now at the University of California at San Diego, entitled, “Was there really a Big Bang?” My first thought was that the article would reach a new level of profundity, but discovered, upon inspection, that it was simply a routine defense of Steady State theory.[34] When scientists use the word “real,” it is often for apologetic reaons. IV.“THE SAME DOMAIN”: HUMAN EXPERIENCE It has often been said that religion is about the supernatural and science is about the natural. Scientists do not like this division because it plays into the hands of the religionist. The scientist who denies the existence of the supernatural is accused of espousing naturalism. It is more economical to say that religion and science are about the same domain, namely, human experience. This is because, as I like to say, experience is all there is. Experience is very tolerant; it answers the questions we put to it. If we ask spiritual questions, we get spiritual answers; and conversely, if we ask physical questions, we get physical answers. If I ask, why the planets move, I don’t expect to get the answer, “because they are put in motion by angels,” even though Newton thought so. If I ask, if there is a heaven, I do not expect a scientific confirmation. It was simple ignorance when the early Russian astronaut said God was not to be found in space. It was a remark clearly out of touch with the true nature of science and religion. The domain of experience is difficult to agree upon. If we draw on a relational metaphysics of experience, we come to the conclusion that experience is relating. It is not the experience of an experiencer. The experiencer qua experience does not precede the experiencing. Nor does what-is-experienced precede the experiencing. The reality is the action, the acting, relating. Relata are derivatives, useful abstractions, but we must not make them fundamental. It is this metaphysical perspective that makes some aspects of quantum theory so interesting. When Heisenberg maintained that the reality of the particle comes into existence when we observe it, some realists thought that he had introduced the” ghost of the observer” into quantum mechanics. I should argue that it is a metaphysically responsible position, in that in the words of David Bohm the observer and the world represent an indivisible system (see above). One thing I have insisted upon in my relational position is that we need only one metaphysics for the whole of experience. In the previous state of affairs people had several: one metaphysics for science at the macroscopic level, another for the quantum level, another for the social level and still another for religious matters. The relational schema I am proposing has in its favor extreme economy. We may say that the observer–the observing–and the observed reduce to the observing. The observer and the observed are co-derivative abstractions. In the social world the self--the relating–and other reduce fundamentally to the relating. The self and the other are co-derivatives .In religious discourse, the worshiper-–the worshiping–and the Worshiped reduce to the worshiping The Worshiped is not demeaned by this formulation, for it is worship that gives us God, as I shall argue later. In this connection Whitehead’s words are worth remembering: “The power of God is the worship He inspires.”[36] In the West where there is almost an idolizing of the “subject”–-as witness the long entrenchment of the philosophy of Idealism–some may feel that this relational system demeans the subject, namely the individual. This objection I should counter with the insight of the Kyoto philosopher, Nishida--somewhat influenced by William James–who argued that: “It is not that there is experience because there is an individual, but that there is an individual because there is experience.”[37] It is only along this line of reasoning that we can say that experiencing is all there is. One of his colleagues, Keiji Nishitani, elaborated upon this notion which Nishida associated with what he called “pure experience” in memorable words:[38]
V. SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND TRUTH The question naturally arises when speaking of complementarity, whether science or religion, or both, or neither, gives us truth. In the quotation above Sir John Templeton cautiously speaks of science and religion as “complementary avenues of truth.” This is a fairly optimistic assessment of science and religion; a more pessimistic view holds that either science or religion speaks truth, but not both. Perhaps we should approach this weighty question by first considering science and religion seriatim, then together. Science and Truth We have been taught to think that scientists are laboring in the service of truth. In the steady growth of science, many supposed truths have given way to what are thought to be more certain truths. Some of these supposed truths were earlier scientific theories, while others were prevailing notions associated with religion. Cosmologies came and went, all in the interest of a better understanding of the physical world. Scientists have been vigorous in their pursuit of better understanding. But not all have agreed upon the nature of their conclusions. Some use the word truth more confidently of their theories than others. There are endless anecdotes about this, but I shall call attention to an interview between Richard Feynman and Fred Hoyle which was aired on the BBC in 1972. Feynman was questioning the propriety of saying that the laws of physics evolved over time, but realized that this was a point on which he and Hoyle differed. He said to Hoyle: “I think of the possibilities; you are the one who speculates.” Whereupon Hoyle replied: “I do not set as a requirement that the answers be right.” This reminds us of the famous words of Whitehead: “[It] is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”[39] Here the remark of J.D. North is relevant: “The individual theory of cosmology is neither true nor false; like any other scientific theory, it is merely an instrument of what passes for our understanding.”[40] We should be reluctant today to say of any scientific theory that it is true. In the eighteenth century this is precisely what was said of Newton’s theory. D’Alembert wrote in 1757: “The true system of the world has been recognized, developed and perfected.”[41] In the nineteenth century confidence in Newton’s theories began to wane, and in 1900 quantum theory and in 1905-16 Special and General Relativity brought a new era in physics. When Einstein predicted that starlight is bent when it moves past a massive body in space, Arthur Eddington led an expedition designed to test the prediction. After much checking of the data, he went on record as saying that his findings “prove” General Relativity. When this was announced to Einstein, his response was: “The truth of a theory is in your mind, not in your eyes.” But when it was brought to the attention of the Royal Society, its president, J. J. Thomson, remarked: “It [General Relativity] is the greatest discovery since Newton enunciated his principles.”[42] Eddington’s expedition had set out to “confirm” or “verify” Einstein’s theory. Now that it was “confirmed,” what was to said of the new physical theories, that they are right and the older theories wrong? The philosophy of science arose in this century to respond to this question. Michael Ovenden, an astronomer, expressed a belief about the older physics which shows how far some physicists have come on the truth question in light of the new situation in physics:[43]
Karl Popper, the eminent philosopher of science, was more of a realist, though expressing caution in what we say about prevailing theories. He proposed that we say that a prevailing scientific theory is one that is “corroborated” rather than “verified,” but then threw caution to the wind by claiming that there is a growth of scientific knowledge in that the successive development of theories brings us ”closer and closer to the truth.” This optimism is not shared by all, for how can one say that we are moving closer to the truth without knowing what the truth is? I prefer to say that scientific theories add new features to our experience. Einstein’s General Theory made us look at the Universe in a different way, and there is no going back. This is not to say that General Relativity is true. The theory is rather, with all of its shortcomings, what passes for our understanding. It has come to be what Thomas Kuhn calls “normal science,” and will continue to function in that way until some more comprehensive theory of gravity prevails. Religion and Truth So far some of our discussion of scientific truth has assumed that truth is the right term for the actual state of affairs. We were cautioned by Heisenberg that the observer and the observed are not to be conceived as “subject and object,” that there is a more unified way of conceiving of physical reality. It is in Quantum Theory that physicists have become quite philosophical in speaking of relationality. Some philosophers of science have yet to conceive of the question of truth in the physical sciences taking this fully into account. Whitehead is a notable exception to this indictment. When we turn to a consideration of religion and truth, we must make every effort to avoid the “subject-object”model. When this has not been done, religious conceptions are conceived as “external” to the believer. The time has come to think of religious truth in a relational way, because this way is most compatible with religion itself. The believing self is not a subject-self over against an object-God. A quotation from Whitehead’s Process and Reality is worth noting in this regard:[44]
All of the world’s great religions equate believing and knowing, but the knowing is not of the subject-object kind. Religion is an iconic way of manifesting the relationality that lies at the root of all experience, as I have argued throughout this lecture. Relational metaphysics is the notional form of the same insight. As an iconic manifestation of relatedness, religion emphasizes community over individualism, altruism over self-interest. It is, as Whitehead said, “the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised.”[45] Religion is a primal knowing which is easier to illustrate than to define. The finest contemporary example of which I am aware appeared in an interview of the octogenarian Carl Gustav Jung by John Freeman of the BBC. The dialogue between them is instructive:[46] Freeman: When you were young did you go to church? Jung: Oh yes! We all went to church. Freeman: And did you believe in God? Jung: Oh yes! We all believed. And then as if to ensnare Jung, Freeman asked: “Now, do you believe?” Jung replied: “Now? Difficult to answer….Now...I know.” Jung, who claimed to be scientific in his work, did not think of his knowledge of God as objective. In his unusual life the world of science and the symbolic world were conjoined. As regards religion and truth we must make a difference between relationality and relativism if we want to avoid the appearance of the superiority of one religion over another. In this regard the following words of Raimundo Pannikar are instructive:[47]
CONCLUSION I have held up the ideal of the complementarity of science and religion. Now I want to suggest that the highest ideal is reached when scientific understanding and religious truth are found in the same person. While the example we think of most readily is Einstein, there is a story about Robert Oppenheimer that well illustrates what I have in mind. It tells how at the test site of the first atomic bomb he saw the spiritual significance of this triumph of physics. At the experimental area called “Death Tract” (Jornado del Muerto) the observers of the first blast did not know what to expect. Robert Jungk tells us that “Oppenheimer oscillated between fears that the experiment might fail and fears that it would succeed.” [48] Jungk then proceeds to describe the actual moment:[49] People were transformed with fright at the power of the explosion. Oppenheimer was clinging to one of the uprights in the control room. A passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred epic of the Hindus, flashed into his mind:
Yet, when the sinister and gigantic cloud rose up in the far distance over Point Zero, he was reminded of another line from the same source:
Finally, I cannot stress strongly enough the unity which is the basis of the complementarity thesis. It was perhaps best expressed in 1911 by Nishida in An Inquiry into the Good:[50]
What I have said in this lecture is offered in the spirit of this insight. NOTES [1]. Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: The Free Press, 1967; first published in 1925), p. 181. [2].Harold H. Oliver, “The Complementarity of Theology and Cosmology,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 13 (1978): 19-33. Reprinted in Harold H. Oliver, Relatedness: Essays in Metaphysics and Theology (Macon,, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp.1-20. [3].Hugo Adam Bedau, “Complementarity and the Relation between Science and Religion,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 9 (1974): 202-224. [4].Who’s Who in Theology and Science. Compiled and Edited by the John Templeton Foundation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 7. [5].Ibid. [6]. Progress in Theology: The Newsletter of the John Templeton Foundation, Vol 8 (March/April, 2000), p. 1. [7].Ibid. [8].Oliver, Relatedness, p. 12. [9]. Progress in Theology, p. 9. [10].D. M. MacKay, “‘Complementarity’ in Scientific and Religious Thinking,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 9 (1974): 229. [11].Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1989), p. 261. [12].Ibid., p. 260. [13].Gould, ibid., p. 261, here quotes Walcott’s letter, dated January 7, 1926, to R.B. Fosdick. [14].Ibid. [15].Advocates of the right and/or duty of scientists to critique religion will not respond positively to Gould’s theory. Cf. Thomas W. Clark, “Faith, science and the soul: on the pragmatic virtues of naturalism,” Humanist 53 (May-June 1993): 7-12. [16].David Bohm, Quantum Theory (London: Constable and Company, Limited, 1954 Reprint), p. 161. [17].Ibid, p. 147. [18].Richard Schlegel, ‘Quantum Physics and Human Purpose,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 8 (1973):200-220. [19].Michael Riordan, “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity: Space-Time is of the Essence,” The New York Times Sunday, August 19, 2001. I wish to thank my former student, John Thatamanil, now professor at Millsaps College, for bringing this review to my attention. [20].Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p.20. [21].Ibid, p. 53. [22].Ibid., p.176. [23].Ibid., p. 178. [24].F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality A Metaphysical Essay. 2nd ed., 9th cor. Impression (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), p. 521. [25].A.C. Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey (New York: The Humanities Press, 1934), p. 187. [26].Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought. The Muirhead Library of Philosophy. Vol 2 (New York: The Macmillan Co, 1940), p. 454. [27].Ibid., p. 431. [28].Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Hamden Co., Archon Books, 1941; reprinted by Harper & Row, Inc., 1984), p. 238. [29].Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 70. [30].Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. 1, Translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), pp. 17ff. [31].Daisetz Suzuki, “The Awakening of a New Consciousness in Zen,“ Eranos-Jahrbuch `1954 23 (Zurich: Rheim-Verlag, 1955), p.285. [32].Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 10. [33].Ibid., p. 87. [34].Burbidge is still using the idea of “reality” in his recent book, co-authored with Fred Hoyle and J.V. Narlikar, entitled, A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). [36].Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: The Free Press, 1925), p. 192. [37].Kitaro Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives, Introduction by Masao Abe (New Haven: London, 1990), p. 19. [38].Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitaro. Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and James Heisig, with an Introduction by D.S. Clarke, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 54f. [39].Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 259. [40].J. D. North, The Measure of the Universe: A History of Modern Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 407. [41].From D’Alembert’s Elements of Philosophy, cited from Gerd Buchdahl, The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), p. 7. [42].Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: World Publishing, 1971), p. 232. [44].Whitehead, Process and Reality , p. 185. [45].Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. 191f. [46]. John Freeman interview with Carl Gustav Jung. BBC “Face to Face”. October 1959. 40. Raimundo Panikkar, “Religious Pluralism: The Metaphysical Challenge,” in Religious Pluralism, ed. by Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 113. [48].Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns. A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. Translated by James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), p. 200. [49].Ibid., p. 201. [50].Nishida, p. 78.
Commentary: Thomas A. Carlson As my own paper tomorrow night will suggest, I am, I think, in fairly deep agreement with Professor Oliver on the importance of developing a philosophy able to articulate and elucidate the relational character of what we might understand--or experience--as "reality" in both religious and scientific contexts. I am not convinced, however, that religion and science themselves actually want or intend to understand reality according to such a relational paradigm; indeed, I think a good part of religion and a good part of science involve a fairly deep desire to deny or to surmount the implications of a thoroughly relational thinking--at least, that is, if such thinking implies, as I believe it does, that we are never done with the business of interpreting reality because we can never attain or even posit a truth or a meaning that would correspond to some stable, self-identical reality in itself. I don't think we need to look far in order to locate forms of religion and science that seek not endless interpretation or the ambiguous play of irreducible perspective but indeed truth itself--truth grounded in a reality that would stands beyond all interpretation, outside all context. Now, on the side of our agreement, I find especially convincing Prof. Oliver's suggestion that a relational paradigm would unsettle in profound ways our modern Western understandings of the human individual as a self-possessed and self-identical ground of thought and action--and here, I think, Prof. Oliver is pointing in very interesting ways toward other thinkers I'll be discussing tomorrow, such as Katherine Hayles and Mark Taylor, who understand subjective intelligence and agency in terms of distributed networks that exceed every individual and unsettle overly clear and stable boundaries between individual and environment, subject and object, self and other, etc. This approach to subjectivity, of course, is related intimately to what Prof. Oliver has to say about that nature of world and the nature of being. I am quite convinced when Oliver suggests, in quoting the physicist Lee Smolin, that the "the world is at root a network of evolving relations" (Smolin, qtd. p. 7). When world is understood in these dynamic, relational terms, so likewise individual beings or entities appear not as stable, self-identical things-in-themselves but rather as shifting nodes or points of intersection that emerge and evolve through relational--often informational--processes. From this perspective, a world is not simply the fixed sum of all entities that are; it is rather the ever-shifting network of relations in and through which alone beings can first emerge. Likewise, from this perspective, beings are not first things-in-themselves which might then assume or possess properties; rather, things are always already relational functions, constituted by their properties and activities rather than possessing or controlling those properties and activities. In continental philosophy, of course, one finds a very similar understanding of being as relation in Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously insists that there are no things in themselves (whether subjective or objective) but only relations and hence interpretations ("if I remove all the relationships, all the 'properties,' all the 'activities' of a thing," Nietzsche argues, "the thing does not remain over" (Will to Power, § 558); in such a relational thinking, there are no facts but only interpretations); likewise one can find a thoroughly relational understanding of world-hood elaborated very powerfully in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, where a world is not simply the collection of all entities that are but rather a totality of referential relations through which alone entities come into being--a totality of relations that we inhabit and negotiate everyday by means of ongoing interpretation, which itself can never come to an end because in our daily life activities we will never reach any stable, self-identical reality that might consummate and thus arrest the play of interpretation. Now, I am evoking thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger here because their analyses of relation often move in directions that can be deeply disturbing to much of religion and science alike--and here I'm thinking especially of those directions where interpretation would seem to be an endless enterprise that excludes the possibility of reaching any truth beyond perspective or any meaning beyond the insurmountable ambiguity of context. In these directions, of course, a more recent thinker like Jacques Derrida will insist on the irreducibly differential character of relational systems. If read from a perspective like Derrida's, the differential--and dynamic--understanding of relation would imply that entities or systems constituted relationally can never remain stable or self-identical but rather prove always to be in flux or becoming, always, therefore, differing from themselves. From such a perspective, one can never get beyond interpretation because one can never get beyond the ambiguity of meaning and the multiplicity of truth. To the degree that religion and science often want to insist on the unity of truth and on the stability of meaning, they would remain, I think, rather closed to the more unsettling implications of relational thinking--at least as such thinking is developed in these contexts I've just alluded to. Now, in light of those contexts, a number of interesting questions might arise concerning Prof. Oliver's complementarity thesis. According to that thesis, religion and science are saying "different things about the same domain" (10). If however, the relational character of reality implies that we are never done with interpretation; if it implies that no being or system is ever stable in its own self-identity, on what ground or from what perspective, I wonder, can we speak of some domain that would always remain "the same"? A related question arises for me in light of Prof. Oliver's wonderfully rich and, I think, quite productive understanding of religious language not in terms of reference to some reality beyond or outside that language but rather in terms of the reality that is created or actualized only through that language itself--as in a kind of performance or drama. If, however, religious language is not referential or constative but rather performative; if it does not point to any reality beyond itself, then what does it mean for us to say that religion and science are simply different ways of speaking "about" the same domain (10). The assertion that religion is "about" anything other than itself seems in some way to contradict the analysis of religious language as non-referential, and the assertion that religious language is about "the same" thing as science seems to be in some kind of tension with the assertion that every reality is relationally and hence differentially constituted (hence prohibiting any final identification of "the same"). I believe that a response to these questions would have to do with Prof. Oliver's understanding of "the human," since when he indicates that science and religion are "about the same domain," he understands that domain to be what he calls "human experience." It seems that some notion of the human here would have to be posited as that which remains stable or unchanged as we move from the relational context of religion to the relational context of science--but I wonder whether such stability or self-identity is consistent with the core thesis concerning the relational character of reality. It seems to me that "the human" as constituted within the relational networks of science might well mean--or be--something quite different from "the human" as constituted within the relational networks of religion (and I think an historical treatment of these domains would bear this out in very interesting ways). It seems to me, then, that we would need to achieve a perspective beyond all relation, we would need to stand outside of all context, in order to assert that in moving from religion to science, from one context to the next, we are dealing with the same thing--or, likewise, that despite their insurmountable plurality and partiality, the perspectives operative in seemingly disparate relational systems would nevertheless refer to "one and the same reality" (Nishida, qtd. p. 21).It is a great honor to have the opportunity to offer thoughts on Professor Oliver’s lecture. As he is well aware, I am one of his great admirers, precisely because he addresses the central theoretical problem of science and religion: are they two? Are they one? Are they in conflict? Are they independent of each other? Or are they complementary, and what precisely does that mean? The vast majority of people I know, and this includes both scholars and laypeople, are quite comfortable with a two-box model of science and religion, much along the lines of what Stephen Jay Gould proposed recently in his book Rocks of Ages (as Oliver mentioned in his talk). Gould’s notion of non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA, basically suggests that both science and religion are valid human enterprises, yet they attend to different domains or magisteria, divided much along the lines of the fact/value distinction many people find to be intuitively obvious. Oliver’s argument of complementarity disrupts this easy and peaceful status-quo settlement between science and religion, and though many others have disputed Gould’s NOMA hypothesis, none has done so, I believe, with the philosophical insight of Oliver. I’d like to briefly discuss his argument concerning relational metaphysics, and then turn to implications for science and religion, which I believe are quite radical. As Oliver sums it up, metaphysical relationality involves the substantive claim that relations are prior to things. How do we make sense of this claim? Take us, for example: what is going on in this room? Now, this may be a decidedly submetaphysical example, but it is the scale on which much of our lives operate. You could say “Well, here are various people gathered in this room to hear Professor Oliver’s talk; they are sitting on chairs; there are some lights up there in the ceiling; thank goodness they remembered the refreshments over there; etc.” That is standard thing-language: this room is filled with things, some living and some inanimate, many of which (I’m excepting the lights and the more enduring features) are here to listen to Professor Oliver’s talk. We are, in other words, things first that enter into relation second. Now let’s consider how relationality involves a different claim. I propose we temporarily substitute the word entanglement, which sounds messier than relationality but offers to us a visual metaphor for how things are tied up in networks of relations. What are all those things in this room, the people and the chairs and the refreshments? They—we—are all entangled beings, the products of networks of relations, both material and meaningful, that ultimately brought us together today as we continue to spin our webs of relations. Relationality emphasizes the entangled process that constitutes and reconstitutes all things. “Now wait,” you may say; “I still see people and chairs and lights and refreshments.” And you’re right: I do too. But we should acknowledge the grammatical structure of the language we are using to describe this room, which roots existence in nouns or things and connects these things with verbs. We should also note the related dominance of the visual sense in our inventory of this room, which as Oliver has argued elsewhere supports a perception of distance and disconnection. Relationality, attentiveness to entanglement, demands a sort of sensitivity and imagination to a world that may be less obvious to most of us than the world of things. Now it is true that entanglement, and certainly the example I discussed, does not necessarily support a doctrine of universal internal relations, as Oliver advances. It does, however, accord some degree of logical precedence to relations over things, though the relationship between relations and things may look a good deal like the riddle of the chicken and the egg. Perhaps that much-used physical term “complementarity” may have its rightful analog in suggesting why there are different outcomes if we decide to view reality as if it consisted of things or as if it consisted of relations. So: what implications follow for science and religion? Here is where I think Oliver’s argument is quite radical. First, I must explain what I understand as science and religion: both are, to me, thoroughly human institutions, not logically-defined categories. This is why I am uncomfortable with standard ways of defining science versus religion: for instance, science attends to facts, religion to values; science attends to the material world, and religion to the spiritual world (as Gould relates, science is about the ages of rocks, whereas religion concerns itself with the rock of ages). What is the basis for this dichotomous thinking? Oliver’s talk offers several clues to its deep historical embeddedness. I think it is important to note that each of these dichotomies reflects the more fundamental dichotomy implied in thing-language, namely that between knowing subjects and the objects of knowledge. For instance, facts are things that cling to objects, hence they are objective; values are things that cling to subjects, and are thus subjective. The last several hundred years of the development of science and religion as major domains of authority in western civilization, I believe, has necessitated a sort of settlement between the two, whereby science became the final authority for the object-world of things out there, and religion became the final authority for the subject-world of our selves. What is the nature of reality? Go ask a scientist. What is the meaning of my life? Go seek a religious answer. Of course, the authority of religion over the subject-world has been displaced in many realms of so-called secular modernity, and hence in the modern university we have the sciences, which attend to the object-world, and the humanities, whose emphasis on meaning serves this broadly religious function for many of us. But if Oliver’s argument is correct, there is no separable world of subjects and objects, in spite of the deep institutional embeddedness of these two seemingly pure domains. This implies that the very basis upon which much science and religion has been defined is a historical construct and not a neat category of reality. This implication is profoundly disturbing, to say the least, and we cannot do justice to it now, but one important set of related philosophical questions involves the nature of truth, as Oliver himself considers toward the end of his talk. As feminists and others have reminded us, relational epistemology demands a reexamination of what we mean by truth, what we mean by knowledge. As a consequence of Oliver’s argument, any intellectually fruitful dialogue between science and religion, which in my mind should involve both “insiders” and “outsiders,” i.e. scientists and science studies scholars, religious practitioners and religious studies scholars, must necessarily consider the philosophical and practical implications of a relational epistemology. From a scholarly perspective, that is what ultimately matters. Complementarity can be a nice way of saying that we should all respect, and perhaps occasionally listen to, each other; but the complementarity that Oliver advocates necessitates the much harder, more challenging, and ultimately more exciting and fruitful work of moving beyond the neat categories of object and subject, fact and value, in relationally reconstructing science and religion so that they may help us understand, and live in, this entangled world of which we all are a part. Thank you.
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