The Coherence of Christian Theism
24
Scientific Objections
The conclusion of the previous chapter was that, on general moral and theological reflection, Christianity has greater a priori coherence than any other world religion—a conclusion that was strengthened by specific objections to each of its rivals. It only remains now to discuss the specific objections pressed against Christianity and determine what force they have against the conclusion of the three previous chapters.
As noted in the Introduction, the usual objections to Christianity fall into three categories. The first category of objections are general to all religions and arise from religious pluralism. The second category of objections suggest that Christianity is antiscientific. And the third category of objections suggest that Christianity is morally unconscionable. In this chapter I will discuss the scientific objections and in the two following chapters the moral objections.
The claim that Christianity is in conflict with science has two main features. Its proponent claims that the Church is and always has been a dead hand on scientific progress and he claims that a Christian is required to believe in all sorts of mythological nonsense that has been scientifically falsified. We shall now see that the first of these claims is historically inaccurate and that the second is misconceived. Both are completely without warrant.
The Conflict Thesis
The belief that Christianity has been the historic enemy of science is sometimes called, “the conflict thesis.” Its tropes are familiar enough. Hundreds of years ago scientists began to make discoveries that conflicted with Christian doctrine. A sclerotic Church demanded they recant. Those who refused to do so were burnt at the stake.
The conflict thesis is so widespread and entrenched that it may surprise many to learn that it has no basis whatsoever in historical fact. As Alvin Plantinga explains,
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All of the great names of early Western science, moreover, were serious believers in God: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, and many others. C. F. Von Weizacker goes so far as to say, “In this sense, I call modern science a legacy of Christianity.” And throughout its development, too, Christian theists figure prominently—from the discovery of genetics by an Augustinian friar to the discovery of the Big Bang by a Roman Catholic priest.
The conflict thesis is false. Neither Christianity nor the Church retarded the development of science. Did they, on the contrary, contribute to the origin and development of a scientific worldview? “As I try to discern its origin,” writes Melvin Calvin, thinking of the same, “I seem to find it in a basic notion discovered 2,000 or 3000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe is governed by a single God and is not the product of the whims of many gods.” Polytheism, Melvin suggests, retarded the development of a scientific worldview because it primed us to view the universe as unpredictable. After all, if the governance of nature is divided up among many independent and capricious deities then nature itself is capricious and there is no motivation to look for unifying principles. Monotheism, on the other hand, inspires just the opposite expectation: That all creation conforms to a cohesive design conceived by a single rational creator.
Scientifically Falsifiable Claims
The historical relationship between the Church and science is, however, something of an aside. The main point the skeptic wants to make when he says that Christianity is antiscientific is that it makes claims which have been scientifically falsified. Genesis, for instance, tells us that the world and its biota were created in six days when we know that our planet and the life on it developed into its present form over billions of years. Nor was the world created in 4,000 BC—the conclusion you reach if you take literally the combined ages of people in the biblical genealogy back to Adam. Nor was there a worldwide flood in 3,000 BC. And so on. If the claim The Bible is true is understood to mean Every sentence in the Bible, taken literally, is factual then very obviously Christianity makes claims that have been scientifically falsified.
Modern Christian "fundamentalists" nevertheless insist that the Bible is literally true; that is, they think that believing that the Bible is true entails believing that each sentence of the Bible is a literal statement of fact: There were literally two individuals called Adam and Eve whom God placed in a literal Garden of Eden in 4,000 BC—and so forth. Unfortunately, this view has come to characterise Christianity in the minds of many skeptics and explains the objection under discussion: Christians believe absurdities on faith that have no basis in our current best understanding of science and history. What these skeptics may not know is that the fundamentalist view is not the traditional view of the Church but in fact a heresy which the Church rejects. Indeed, some of the earliest and most influential Christian theologians mocked the idea of taking Genesis literally. At the beginning of the third century, Origen wrote of the Garden of Eden,
The conflict thesis is false. Neither Christianity nor the Church retarded the development of science. Did they, on the contrary, contribute to the origin and development of a scientific worldview? “As I try to discern its origin,” writes Melvin Calvin, thinking of the same, “I seem to find it in a basic notion discovered 2,000 or 3000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe is governed by a single God and is not the product of the whims of many gods.” Polytheism, Melvin suggests, retarded the development of a scientific worldview because it primed us to view the universe as unpredictable. After all, if the governance of nature is divided up among many independent and capricious deities then nature itself is capricious and there is no motivation to look for unifying principles. Monotheism, on the other hand, inspires just the opposite expectation: That all creation conforms to a cohesive design conceived by a single rational creator.
Scientifically Falsifiable Claims
The historical relationship between the Church and science is, however, something of an aside. The main point the skeptic wants to make when he says that Christianity is antiscientific is that it makes claims which have been scientifically falsified. Genesis, for instance, tells us that the world and its biota were created in six days when we know that our planet and the life on it developed into its present form over billions of years. Nor was the world created in 4,000 BC—the conclusion you reach if you take literally the combined ages of people in the biblical genealogy back to Adam. Nor was there a worldwide flood in 3,000 BC. And so on. If the claim The Bible is true is understood to mean Every sentence in the Bible, taken literally, is factual then very obviously Christianity makes claims that have been scientifically falsified.
Modern Christian "fundamentalists" nevertheless insist that the Bible is literally true; that is, they think that believing that the Bible is true entails believing that each sentence of the Bible is a literal statement of fact: There were literally two individuals called Adam and Eve whom God placed in a literal Garden of Eden in 4,000 BC—and so forth. Unfortunately, this view has come to characterise Christianity in the minds of many skeptics and explains the objection under discussion: Christians believe absurdities on faith that have no basis in our current best understanding of science and history. What these skeptics may not know is that the fundamentalist view is not the traditional view of the Church but in fact a heresy which the Church rejects. Indeed, some of the earliest and most influential Christian theologians mocked the idea of taking Genesis literally. At the beginning of the third century, Origen wrote of the Garden of Eden,
Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer “planted a paradise eastward in Eden” and set in it a visible and palpable “tree of life” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life? And when God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think that anyone will doubt that these are metaphorical expressions which indicate certain mysteries by means of a story which does not correspond to actual events.
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The fact that parts of the Bible contain "metaphorical expressions" does not, of course, mean that those parts are false—any more than the fictionality of Pierre Bezukhov entails that what War and Peace tells us about the Nepoleonic invasion or the human condition is false. And nor does it mean that it does not include parts which should be taken literally. What is required, then, is a coherent method of interpretation.
Genres
To coherently interpret the Bible one must begin by recognising that it is a big book gradually compiled from smaller books belonging to different genres. Of these genres Swinburne offers the following taxonomy.
History In a newspaper report of a political coup or a larger work of history each sentence is understood to be literally true or false: It will be true if it describes accurately what really happened and it will be false if it does not. It should be noted, however, that ancient historians did not have the same standards of accuracy as modern historians and so ancient works of history need to be judged by the standards the writer was seeking to satisfy: Accurate in their main historical claims with minor discrepancies of detail. The Bible contains some works of history, so understood, which we can assess for overall truth: Kings, St Mark’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles all belong to this genre.
Historical Fable In addition to works of history the Bible contains what Swinburne calls, “historical fables.” He explains this genre by comparison to modern television “docudramas.” A docudrama tells us the main events in the life of a historical figure but is filled out with fictional details. The fictional details, importantly, are not claimed by the author to have occurred but are included to help illustrate general historical truths. Thus while Queen Elizabeth may not have said many of the words attributed to her in a docudrama about her it may nevertheless be a reliable portrait of her life. The Bible, says Swinburne, contains many books belonging to this genre, such as Judges and the first and second book of Samuel.
Moral Fables Thirdly are what Swinburne calls “moral fables”: Fictional stories with a moral message. Swinburne suggests that the book of Jonah is such moral fable. In it, Jonah is called by God to preach in Nineveh but disobeys and attempts to escape by sea. During a storm he is thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale—only to be saved and finally succeed in his mission. On this view Jonah is a fictional story whose purpose is to enjoin the Jews to take their religious message to the Gentiles. “If we are to assess such a book as true,” Swinburne writes, “all we can mean by saying that the book is true is that its moral message is a true one.” In a like case Hamlet is "true" if it is true that, say, crippling indecision can be the undoing of a sensitive intellectual thrust into circumstances that require fierce resolve.
Metaphysical Fable The Bible may also contain some “metaphysical fables.” These, according to Swinburne, are “fictional stories telling us something very important about the human condition.” Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a paradigmatic example of a metaphysical fable. And the opening chapters of the book of Genesis may also be like this; that is, Genesis may be a sort of prose poem which tells us that all things were created by and depend on God by means of a story in which he creates this on the first day, that on the second day, and so forth. A metaphysical fable will be true if the story, read metaphorically, tells us something true about the human condition. If Genesis is a metaphysical fable it will be a true metaphysical fable if it is true that all things were created by and depend on God.
Other Genres The Bible, finally, also contains hymns, personal letters, moral homilies, theological dialogues and books of still more genres. It follows from all this that the claim The Bible is true is to be understood as the claim that each book of the Bible is true by the criteria of its own genre; that is, each sentence of a work of history is factual within the limits of accuracy observed by its ancient author; that each moral fable communicates a true moral message; that each metaphysical fable tells us something true about the condition of man—and so on.
Nevertheless, major difficulties remain. One is that we do not know the genre of some books and so do not know by which criteria they are to be judged true. Another is that there remain passages in the Bible that are inconsistent with each other. A third and final difficulty is that there remain at least some passages inconsistent with the results of modern science, history and Christian doctrine. The early Christian theologians, the Church Fathers, as they are called, were well aware of all these difficulties—the only difference being that the science with which parts of the Bible seemed in conflict was Greek cosmology. In what follows I will briefly describe the principle of interpretation they used to settle such difficulties and then argue for its coherence both in their time and in ours.
Principle of Interpretation
The principle the Church Fathers used to interpret difficult passages in the Old Testament was the same principle they used to determine which books were to form part of the New Testament; namely, a prior understanding of Christian doctrine derived from the revelation of God through Jesus which had become Church orthodoxy before most of the New Testament was compiled and given its canonical status. [1] That a modern inquirer can establish the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus without appealing in any way to the infallibility or the authority of the Bible is a point to which we shall return. For the time being it is important just to note that the Church did not analyse violent Old Testament passages in a vacuum but had independent criteria by means of which to interpret them.
Those criteria included the belief that God had inspired the Old Testament and that God is eternal, morally perfect, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and so on. The last of these attributes is of particular relevance to the problem under discussion: It is a logical consequence of the omniscience of God that God knows all the truths of science and history. And the Fathers believed that the Church, the intended audience of the Bible, knew most of the truths of Christian doctrine and many truths of science. From all this the Fathers concluded: If some biblical passage understood in its most natural and literal sense is inconsistent with Christian doctrine, science or history, it should be interpreted it in a way consistent with Christian doctrine, science and history—even if, on some occasions, that interpretation is not the most obvious or natural one. [2] Thus, “Augustine’s basic rule,” notes Swinburne, “was the same as that of Origen and Gregory. 'We must show,' he said, 'the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is certainly as follows: Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as metaphorical.'”
It needs to be stressed that Augustine, Origen and Gregory were not minor theologians: The influence of each on early Christian doctrine was formative and profound. Gregory, for instance, was one of the leading bishops at the Council of Constantinople which produced the Nicene Creed—the formal statement of Christian belief in wide use today. This states that, "God spoke by the prophets," meaning, inspired the Old Testament. And Gregory, and so the Church, understood this to amount to a belief that God had given the Church both a Bible and a method of interpreting it: The so-called, "Patristic Method" which has just been set out. There is finally no justification for accepting the authority of the Bible without accepting the authority of the Church to so interpret it.
Justification of the Principle
It is important here to understand that while the Church believe God is the ultimate author of the Bible this “doctrine of inspiration” needs to be spelled out with care. In contrast with the Islamic view that Muhammad took direct verbatim dictation from Allah, the Church believes God inspired certain human authors to write certain texts in their own style and from their own limited worldview, or else inspired them to compile those texts from various sources, but in such a way that God's message to humanity was successfully mediated through them. The Bible, as the Second Vatican Council put it, is "the words of God in the words of men." Understood in this way, the Christian doctrine of inspiration has an important entailment: Precisely because the Bible is a human production and also a divine revelation (“The Bible,” affirmed Pope Gregory the Great, “is God’s letter to his creature”) it needs to be interpreted in the light of God’s beliefs and not those of the human authors—and also in light of the beliefs of the audience for which it was intended, that is, the whole human race, and not merely those who first read it. And “the whole human race” must further be understood as the human race of future as well as past centuries.
On the operating assumption that God is the ultimate author of the Bible and all of humanity its intended audience, the principle of interpretation adopted by the Church is the only rational one. “It is a basic precept of interpreting texts,” notes Swinburne, “that you interpret them in a way consistent with the author’s known beliefs and the beliefs which he believes that his audience hold.” If I write that “John is sharp,” and I know as well as my reader than John does not have a pointed edge I must be understood to be saying something else—that John is quick witted. And if I write that "Colonel Winston is a dinosaur" and know as well as my reader that Colonel Winston is not a prehistoric reptile I must be understood to be saying something else—that Colonel Winston is old or out of touch with the modern world. And so, generally, if someone produces a sentence which neither he nor his hearers believe if understood in a literal sense that sentence must be understood metaphorically.
Relevance of the Principle to Modern Science
So: Whether by setting up natural processes or by a more direct intervention into the conscious life of certain authors, compilers and copyists, it is plausible to suppose that God inspired the writing and assembly of a book that communicates deep and important truths even if some parts of that book, taken literally, are scientifically and historically false. And while some of the Fathers disagreed about whether the Bible or the Greeks provided the best guide to science and so to what God believed, it was generally regarded as permissible to view Greek science as the best guide to God’s beliefs. But, as Swinburne notes, “they were not committed to the view that there was no more science to be discovered. And so if we are to interpret the Bible by their method we must interpret it in a way compatible with modern science and history.”
Plausibly, then, the Genesis account of creation teaches us truthfully that the universe was created by and depends upon God even while giving a false picture of the method and timescale—the correct method and timescale being something a future and more intellectually and scientifically sophisticated generation can discover while retaining the deeper metaphysical truth. And so Adam and Eve may symbolise the first human individuals or communities with free will and moral awareness. Original Sin and the Fall of Man, on this view, would be the subsequent moment at which conscious wrongdoing began to emerge and humanity to incur a moral debt to God. And as in the case of the creation narrative, future generations can discover the exact processes by which life developed (evolutionary descent from protocells in the chemical soup of the early Earth, say, rather than the creation of adult humans from clay) while again retaining the deeper metaphysical truth—and so again if this scientific paradigm is, like the Greek cosmology of the Church Fathers, superseded by future scientific discoveries. And similarly: Many stories contain important moral messages even if they have no basis in history. Thus while Israel may not really have worshipped a Golden Calf and been punished by Moses, everyone who hears the story can understand that no material object should be worshipped—and so generally. “I suggest,” concludes Swinburne, “that it is plausible to suppose that God inspired the writing of the Bible to convey both the very limited message comprehensible at the time a passage was written and the deeper message comprehensible later.”
Criteria of Justification outside the Church
Clearly, the principle of interpretation just outlined depends on the prior truth of at least two features of Christian doctrine; namely, that there is a God who created and sustains the universe and that God became incarnate in Jesus whose teachings are therefore from God. There is, of course, no sense in using the Bible as the evidential basis for these Christian doctrines because the prior truth of these doctrines was the principle used in compiling and interpreting the Bible. However, as already noted, basic Christian doctrine was derived not from the Bible but from the revelation of God through Jesus preserved by the Apostolic Church he established.
It is worth noting that a modern inquirer, as I have already suggested, can establish both claims without presupposing the authority of the Bible; indeed, the existence of God can be established without appealing to the Bible at all: The nine lines of evidence presented in Part II concluded to the existence of God on purely philosophical and scientific grounds. And the resurrection of Jesus, already probable on a priori grounds, can, as we shall see in Part IV, be established using accepted criteria of historical authenticity without presupposing the infallibility or authority of the New Testament. Once these two conclusions are independently established (i.e., the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus) the principle of interpretation just defended follows by tautology and so the Bible can be accepted as true within the limits set out above.
There are two critical points to note. The first is that a Christian is not, as the skeptic claims, committed to accepting scientific falsehoods. The second is that he is not committed to accepting the Bible on faith where “faith” is understood to mean a willingness to believe despite a lack of evidence and argument. This is something worth making explicit. Consider, then, the following chain of a priori and evidential arguments on the basis of which a Christian may finally affirm the truth of the Bible,
Genres
To coherently interpret the Bible one must begin by recognising that it is a big book gradually compiled from smaller books belonging to different genres. Of these genres Swinburne offers the following taxonomy.
History In a newspaper report of a political coup or a larger work of history each sentence is understood to be literally true or false: It will be true if it describes accurately what really happened and it will be false if it does not. It should be noted, however, that ancient historians did not have the same standards of accuracy as modern historians and so ancient works of history need to be judged by the standards the writer was seeking to satisfy: Accurate in their main historical claims with minor discrepancies of detail. The Bible contains some works of history, so understood, which we can assess for overall truth: Kings, St Mark’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles all belong to this genre.
Historical Fable In addition to works of history the Bible contains what Swinburne calls, “historical fables.” He explains this genre by comparison to modern television “docudramas.” A docudrama tells us the main events in the life of a historical figure but is filled out with fictional details. The fictional details, importantly, are not claimed by the author to have occurred but are included to help illustrate general historical truths. Thus while Queen Elizabeth may not have said many of the words attributed to her in a docudrama about her it may nevertheless be a reliable portrait of her life. The Bible, says Swinburne, contains many books belonging to this genre, such as Judges and the first and second book of Samuel.
Moral Fables Thirdly are what Swinburne calls “moral fables”: Fictional stories with a moral message. Swinburne suggests that the book of Jonah is such moral fable. In it, Jonah is called by God to preach in Nineveh but disobeys and attempts to escape by sea. During a storm he is thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale—only to be saved and finally succeed in his mission. On this view Jonah is a fictional story whose purpose is to enjoin the Jews to take their religious message to the Gentiles. “If we are to assess such a book as true,” Swinburne writes, “all we can mean by saying that the book is true is that its moral message is a true one.” In a like case Hamlet is "true" if it is true that, say, crippling indecision can be the undoing of a sensitive intellectual thrust into circumstances that require fierce resolve.
Metaphysical Fable The Bible may also contain some “metaphysical fables.” These, according to Swinburne, are “fictional stories telling us something very important about the human condition.” Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a paradigmatic example of a metaphysical fable. And the opening chapters of the book of Genesis may also be like this; that is, Genesis may be a sort of prose poem which tells us that all things were created by and depend on God by means of a story in which he creates this on the first day, that on the second day, and so forth. A metaphysical fable will be true if the story, read metaphorically, tells us something true about the human condition. If Genesis is a metaphysical fable it will be a true metaphysical fable if it is true that all things were created by and depend on God.
Other Genres The Bible, finally, also contains hymns, personal letters, moral homilies, theological dialogues and books of still more genres. It follows from all this that the claim The Bible is true is to be understood as the claim that each book of the Bible is true by the criteria of its own genre; that is, each sentence of a work of history is factual within the limits of accuracy observed by its ancient author; that each moral fable communicates a true moral message; that each metaphysical fable tells us something true about the condition of man—and so on.
Nevertheless, major difficulties remain. One is that we do not know the genre of some books and so do not know by which criteria they are to be judged true. Another is that there remain passages in the Bible that are inconsistent with each other. A third and final difficulty is that there remain at least some passages inconsistent with the results of modern science, history and Christian doctrine. The early Christian theologians, the Church Fathers, as they are called, were well aware of all these difficulties—the only difference being that the science with which parts of the Bible seemed in conflict was Greek cosmology. In what follows I will briefly describe the principle of interpretation they used to settle such difficulties and then argue for its coherence both in their time and in ours.
Principle of Interpretation
The principle the Church Fathers used to interpret difficult passages in the Old Testament was the same principle they used to determine which books were to form part of the New Testament; namely, a prior understanding of Christian doctrine derived from the revelation of God through Jesus which had become Church orthodoxy before most of the New Testament was compiled and given its canonical status. [1] That a modern inquirer can establish the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus without appealing in any way to the infallibility or the authority of the Bible is a point to which we shall return. For the time being it is important just to note that the Church did not analyse violent Old Testament passages in a vacuum but had independent criteria by means of which to interpret them.
Those criteria included the belief that God had inspired the Old Testament and that God is eternal, morally perfect, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and so on. The last of these attributes is of particular relevance to the problem under discussion: It is a logical consequence of the omniscience of God that God knows all the truths of science and history. And the Fathers believed that the Church, the intended audience of the Bible, knew most of the truths of Christian doctrine and many truths of science. From all this the Fathers concluded: If some biblical passage understood in its most natural and literal sense is inconsistent with Christian doctrine, science or history, it should be interpreted it in a way consistent with Christian doctrine, science and history—even if, on some occasions, that interpretation is not the most obvious or natural one. [2] Thus, “Augustine’s basic rule,” notes Swinburne, “was the same as that of Origen and Gregory. 'We must show,' he said, 'the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is certainly as follows: Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as metaphorical.'”
It needs to be stressed that Augustine, Origen and Gregory were not minor theologians: The influence of each on early Christian doctrine was formative and profound. Gregory, for instance, was one of the leading bishops at the Council of Constantinople which produced the Nicene Creed—the formal statement of Christian belief in wide use today. This states that, "God spoke by the prophets," meaning, inspired the Old Testament. And Gregory, and so the Church, understood this to amount to a belief that God had given the Church both a Bible and a method of interpreting it: The so-called, "Patristic Method" which has just been set out. There is finally no justification for accepting the authority of the Bible without accepting the authority of the Church to so interpret it.
Justification of the Principle
It is important here to understand that while the Church believe God is the ultimate author of the Bible this “doctrine of inspiration” needs to be spelled out with care. In contrast with the Islamic view that Muhammad took direct verbatim dictation from Allah, the Church believes God inspired certain human authors to write certain texts in their own style and from their own limited worldview, or else inspired them to compile those texts from various sources, but in such a way that God's message to humanity was successfully mediated through them. The Bible, as the Second Vatican Council put it, is "the words of God in the words of men." Understood in this way, the Christian doctrine of inspiration has an important entailment: Precisely because the Bible is a human production and also a divine revelation (“The Bible,” affirmed Pope Gregory the Great, “is God’s letter to his creature”) it needs to be interpreted in the light of God’s beliefs and not those of the human authors—and also in light of the beliefs of the audience for which it was intended, that is, the whole human race, and not merely those who first read it. And “the whole human race” must further be understood as the human race of future as well as past centuries.
On the operating assumption that God is the ultimate author of the Bible and all of humanity its intended audience, the principle of interpretation adopted by the Church is the only rational one. “It is a basic precept of interpreting texts,” notes Swinburne, “that you interpret them in a way consistent with the author’s known beliefs and the beliefs which he believes that his audience hold.” If I write that “John is sharp,” and I know as well as my reader than John does not have a pointed edge I must be understood to be saying something else—that John is quick witted. And if I write that "Colonel Winston is a dinosaur" and know as well as my reader that Colonel Winston is not a prehistoric reptile I must be understood to be saying something else—that Colonel Winston is old or out of touch with the modern world. And so, generally, if someone produces a sentence which neither he nor his hearers believe if understood in a literal sense that sentence must be understood metaphorically.
Relevance of the Principle to Modern Science
So: Whether by setting up natural processes or by a more direct intervention into the conscious life of certain authors, compilers and copyists, it is plausible to suppose that God inspired the writing and assembly of a book that communicates deep and important truths even if some parts of that book, taken literally, are scientifically and historically false. And while some of the Fathers disagreed about whether the Bible or the Greeks provided the best guide to science and so to what God believed, it was generally regarded as permissible to view Greek science as the best guide to God’s beliefs. But, as Swinburne notes, “they were not committed to the view that there was no more science to be discovered. And so if we are to interpret the Bible by their method we must interpret it in a way compatible with modern science and history.”
Plausibly, then, the Genesis account of creation teaches us truthfully that the universe was created by and depends upon God even while giving a false picture of the method and timescale—the correct method and timescale being something a future and more intellectually and scientifically sophisticated generation can discover while retaining the deeper metaphysical truth. And so Adam and Eve may symbolise the first human individuals or communities with free will and moral awareness. Original Sin and the Fall of Man, on this view, would be the subsequent moment at which conscious wrongdoing began to emerge and humanity to incur a moral debt to God. And as in the case of the creation narrative, future generations can discover the exact processes by which life developed (evolutionary descent from protocells in the chemical soup of the early Earth, say, rather than the creation of adult humans from clay) while again retaining the deeper metaphysical truth—and so again if this scientific paradigm is, like the Greek cosmology of the Church Fathers, superseded by future scientific discoveries. And similarly: Many stories contain important moral messages even if they have no basis in history. Thus while Israel may not really have worshipped a Golden Calf and been punished by Moses, everyone who hears the story can understand that no material object should be worshipped—and so generally. “I suggest,” concludes Swinburne, “that it is plausible to suppose that God inspired the writing of the Bible to convey both the very limited message comprehensible at the time a passage was written and the deeper message comprehensible later.”
Criteria of Justification outside the Church
Clearly, the principle of interpretation just outlined depends on the prior truth of at least two features of Christian doctrine; namely, that there is a God who created and sustains the universe and that God became incarnate in Jesus whose teachings are therefore from God. There is, of course, no sense in using the Bible as the evidential basis for these Christian doctrines because the prior truth of these doctrines was the principle used in compiling and interpreting the Bible. However, as already noted, basic Christian doctrine was derived not from the Bible but from the revelation of God through Jesus preserved by the Apostolic Church he established.
It is worth noting that a modern inquirer, as I have already suggested, can establish both claims without presupposing the authority of the Bible; indeed, the existence of God can be established without appealing to the Bible at all: The nine lines of evidence presented in Part II concluded to the existence of God on purely philosophical and scientific grounds. And the resurrection of Jesus, already probable on a priori grounds, can, as we shall see in Part IV, be established using accepted criteria of historical authenticity without presupposing the infallibility or authority of the New Testament. Once these two conclusions are independently established (i.e., the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus) the principle of interpretation just defended follows by tautology and so the Bible can be accepted as true within the limits set out above.
There are two critical points to note. The first is that a Christian is not, as the skeptic claims, committed to accepting scientific falsehoods. The second is that he is not committed to accepting the Bible on faith where “faith” is understood to mean a willingness to believe despite a lack of evidence and argument. This is something worth making explicit. Consider, then, the following chain of a priori and evidential arguments on the basis of which a Christian may finally affirm the truth of the Bible,
P1 On the evidence of natural theology it is probable that there is a God. (The nine lines of evidence presented in Part II).
P2 Given human sin and suffering, it is probable that, if there is a God, God, being morally perfect, will become incarnate. (The a priori argument for the Incarnation presented in Chapter 21.) P3 There is good historical evidence for the resurrection and self-proclaimed deity of Jesus. (Evidence that in no way presupposes the authority or infallibility of the New Testament—as we shall see in Part IV.) P4 It is not plausible that a morally perfect God would allow evidence of the strength of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus if Jesus were not God Incarnate. (Because a morally perfect being would not deceive.) P5 Jesus was very probably God Incarnate. (From P2 to P4.) P6 Therefore, basic Christian doctrine can be established on independent criteria. (From P1 to P5.) P7 Therefore, the principle of interpretation used by the Church to resolve inconsistencies in the Bible is justified. (Since it is based on the prior truth of basic Christian doctrine.) C Therefore, the Bible is probably true. (That is, each book of the Bible is probably true by the criteria of its own genre.) |
This conclusion is strengthened by a final consideration that figured prominently in Chapter 21. There it was noted that, since the human life of God Incarnate would be of limited duration, he would need to found a worldwide institution to record, interpret and promulgate his life and teachings: the Church. This provides further grounds for trusting the authority of the Church Jesus established in interpreting the Bible. For if there is a God and Jesus were God Incarnate, as the evidence suggests, it is very plausible to suppose that God would providentially guide the history of the Church Jesus founded to ensure that his teachings are correctly interpreted and made widely available. And, indeed, the Gospels contain various sayings implying that Jesus or the Holy Spirit would continue to guide the Church after his departure. The final words of Jesus in Matthew are, “I am with you always to the end of the age.”
Miracles
The view that a Christian is required to accept on faith claims that are in conflict with science is, as we have seen, false. Like Allan Sandage, who was both a Christian and one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century, one can coherently accept both the evidence of physical cosmology about the age and timescale of the universe and the deeper metaphysical truths imparted by the creation account in Genesis. Like the geneticist Francis Collins, who is both a Christian and the former leader of the Human Genome Project, one can coherently accept both biological evolution and the deeper metaphysical truths imparted by the Biblical story of Adam and Eve—and so forth. [3]
Nevertheless, after we have successfully reconciled the contents of the Old Testament with science and history the skeptic has a further objection: The Bible contains accounts of miracles and a Christian is committed to taking many of these literally; indeed, Christianity stands or falls on the truth of the claim that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead—a point acknowledged by the very first Christians. Paul writes, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” The question arises: Is it demonstrably absurd and irrational, on a modern scientific worldview, to believe in miracles?
Let us begin by defining a miracle. A miracle is A claimed event which, if it occurred, would constitute a violation of the laws nature. By this definition it is not certain that all of the extraordinary claims in the New Testament are miracles. In Where the Conflict Really Lies, for example, Plantigna includes a Quantum Mechanical account of the transformation of water into wine—provided by the atheistic but rather sporting physicist Bradley Monton. GRW, for what it is worth, refers to the Ghirard-Rimini-Weber approach—one of a set of collapse theories in quantum mechanics. Morton says,
Miracles
The view that a Christian is required to accept on faith claims that are in conflict with science is, as we have seen, false. Like Allan Sandage, who was both a Christian and one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century, one can coherently accept both the evidence of physical cosmology about the age and timescale of the universe and the deeper metaphysical truths imparted by the creation account in Genesis. Like the geneticist Francis Collins, who is both a Christian and the former leader of the Human Genome Project, one can coherently accept both biological evolution and the deeper metaphysical truths imparted by the Biblical story of Adam and Eve—and so forth. [3]
Nevertheless, after we have successfully reconciled the contents of the Old Testament with science and history the skeptic has a further objection: The Bible contains accounts of miracles and a Christian is committed to taking many of these literally; indeed, Christianity stands or falls on the truth of the claim that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead—a point acknowledged by the very first Christians. Paul writes, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” The question arises: Is it demonstrably absurd and irrational, on a modern scientific worldview, to believe in miracles?
Let us begin by defining a miracle. A miracle is A claimed event which, if it occurred, would constitute a violation of the laws nature. By this definition it is not certain that all of the extraordinary claims in the New Testament are miracles. In Where the Conflict Really Lies, for example, Plantigna includes a Quantum Mechanical account of the transformation of water into wine—provided by the atheistic but rather sporting physicist Bradley Monton. GRW, for what it is worth, refers to the Ghirard-Rimini-Weber approach—one of a set of collapse theories in quantum mechanics. Morton says,
The wave function for each particle is spread throughout an unbounded region of the universe at every time except perhaps momentary instants of time. This means that for each particle there is at most a finite region where it couldn’t be localised by a GRW hit. Some, probably even most, particles could be localised anywhere. So for changing water into wine, it’s not a big deal—you’ve got a bunch of individual particles that are composing the water, and they can all have GRW hits such that their positions are redistributed to the locations that would be appropriate for them to compose wine.
|
Monton's final assessment is that, "all of the other miracles are unproblematically compatible with quantum mechanics."
Morton helps to show that even the most extraordinary claims in the New Testament are not in principle beyond the purview of science but such speculations are, in the end, beside the point. And this is because the Christian claim is not that the miracles recorded in the New Testament are Quantum anomalies—even ones deliberately caused by Jesus. Christians claim that the miracles of Jesus, and in particular the resurrection of Jesus, did violate the laws of nature. And since violating the laws of nature is something which only God could do, the resurrection constitutes a divine signature on the life and teachings of Jesus.
I will now briefly discuss three standard objections to the belief in miracles and show that each one is ultimately without warrant.
The Objection from Scientism The first objection holds that the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge about the world. Its proponent claims: If something cannot be empirically measured and quantified, or proven by means of a repeatable experiment, then it cannot be rationally affirmed. And since miracle claims, by definition, lie beyond the scope of the scientific method they cannot be affirmed either.
The problem with this view, dubbed “scientism” by its critics, is that it is self-referentially incoherent. Consider: The claim Science is the only valid source of true beliefs about the world is a metascientific claim—a belief about the world that cannot itself be proved by experiment. To demonstrate its validity one would therefore need to produce a philosophical proof—but since this proof would not be the result of an empirical inquiry, it would, if valid, disqualify itself. Scientism fails its own test for truth.
Recently, scientism has enjoyed an unselfconscious resurgence in the writing of the New Atheists but it originates in an obsolete mid-twentieth century movement in Western philosophy called Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism held that the only meaningful statements were those capable of being verified through sense experience or (as in pure logic and mathematics) those that are true by tautology. All other claims were subject to the “verification principle” championed by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book, Language, Truth and Logic. God, interestingly, was excluded from the conversation: Ayer said that it was just as absurd to be an atheist as to be a theist. The statements, “God exists” and “God does not exist” simply had no meaning.
By 1945 Logical Positivism has been abandoned by its own founders. The first problem with the verifiability criterion was that it forbade universal statements necessary to formulate a theoretical framework for scientific inquiry. The second problem was the fatal one already noted: The verifiability criterion itself is not verifiable. As the mathematician David Berlinski puts it, "All such arguments, when self-applied, self-destruct."
The Objection from Hume A second influential objection against the belief in miracles goes back to Hume. Hume claimed that the inductive confirmation of natural law in everyday experience is so overwhelming that no eyewitness report of a violation of natural law could ever outweigh it. For instance: The fact that heavy objects are always and everywhere observed to fall to the Earth is overwhelming background evidence against a report that, say, a marble bust of Mozart had levitated into the air. Whether or not this miracle really occurred, an ordinary subject is rationally compelled to reject it on the basis of his everyday experience of gravity.
Contemporary philosophers of religion identify two flaws in Hume's argument, both of which are discussed by Swinburne in The Existence of God.
Swinburne first notes that, even granting Hume’s claim that the only relevant background evidence is our experience of the laws of nature, there is no reason to suppose that this evidence always counts decisively against the report. “Maybe,” Swinburne writes, “so many careful witnesses report very clearly what happened that their evidence can outweigh the evidence from the normal operation of laws of nature.” In support of this point one may appeal to the two principles of rationality discussed in Chapter 18: The Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony—without allowing which we quickly find ourselves in a "skeptical bog." [4]
“But Hume’s main mistake,” continues Swinburne, “was his assumption that in such cases our knowledge of what are the laws of nature is our only relevant background evidence.” Equally relevant to our assessment of a purported miracle is any background evidence for the existence of God—such as the nine lines of evidence presented in Part II. And if on the total background evidence it is probable that there is a God then it is probable that there exists a being with the power to violate the laws of nature. Evidence that there is a God is therefore evidence that laws of nature can be violated—which will have particular relevance in cases where the event is of a kind that God would have reason to bring about.
What reasons might God have to occasionally bring about an event that violates laws whose regular operation he usually ensures? Swinburne suggests that there are reasons of two kinds. The first is to answer human prayer. “A world in which everything occurred in accordance with natural laws,” he notes, “would not be a world in which God had any living interaction with human beings.” The second kind of reason why God might violate natural law is, "just occasionally to put his signature on the work or teaching of some prophet in order to show that that work or teaching was God’s work or teaching."
An Incarnation authenticated by a divine miracle has, as we saw in Chapter 21, a certain a priori probability given the moral perfection of God and the obvious general fact of human sin and suffering. And when this a priori probability is combined with the evidence for the existence of God from natural theology, a multiply and independently attested miracle of the right kind under the right circumstances may outweigh the inductive evidence that, when natural laws operate in the usual way, such things do not occur. Thus on the total relevant background evidence Hume’s objection fails to establish that a miracle is always unworthy of credit.
The Objection from the Laws of Conservation The third and final objection to miracles claims that special divine action in the world would violate the laws of physics. Take Plantinga’s example of a miracle: God creating ex nihilo an adult horse in the middle of Times Square. During such an event the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and so forth, would all be violated. Physics, meanwhile, tells us that this is impossible. The objector therefore concludes miracles are impossible.
However, the laws of conservation in fact apply to systems that are causally closed—closed to causal influence from without. But it is no part of standard physics that the universe is causally closed and whether or not it is depends on whether or not God exists. For consider: If God does exist then there exists an omnipotent being who can act upon the universe from without. Evidence for the existence of God is therefore, equally, evidence against the causal closure of the universe. And likewise: any system in which a miracle occurs is, ipso facto, not constrained by the various conservation laws. One cannot reject a miracle on the presupposition that God does not exist and therefore the universe is causally closed; indeed, the reported miracle itself is evidence against the presupposition on the basis of which the skeptic rejects it.
Conclusion
We have seen that both features of the claim that Christianity is in conflict with science are without warrant. The conflict thesis was shown to be false: Western empirical science emerged in Christian Europe and nowhere else and has been assisted throughout its development by prominent Christian theists. A Christian, moreover, is not required to accept on faith claims that are in conflict with science; per contra, much of the alleged conflict only arises from taking every sentence of the Bible literally—an approach promoted by modern fundamentalists but rejected by the early Church Fathers. A Christian can, and should, accept the rational and nuanced interpretation of scripture traditionally provided by the Church Jesus founded. And while a Christian is committed to the belief that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead, this is something than can be rationally assessed on the available evidence of natural theology and history: Claimed grounds for rejecting reports of miracles out of hand were shown to be unfounded.
Morton helps to show that even the most extraordinary claims in the New Testament are not in principle beyond the purview of science but such speculations are, in the end, beside the point. And this is because the Christian claim is not that the miracles recorded in the New Testament are Quantum anomalies—even ones deliberately caused by Jesus. Christians claim that the miracles of Jesus, and in particular the resurrection of Jesus, did violate the laws of nature. And since violating the laws of nature is something which only God could do, the resurrection constitutes a divine signature on the life and teachings of Jesus.
I will now briefly discuss three standard objections to the belief in miracles and show that each one is ultimately without warrant.
The Objection from Scientism The first objection holds that the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge about the world. Its proponent claims: If something cannot be empirically measured and quantified, or proven by means of a repeatable experiment, then it cannot be rationally affirmed. And since miracle claims, by definition, lie beyond the scope of the scientific method they cannot be affirmed either.
The problem with this view, dubbed “scientism” by its critics, is that it is self-referentially incoherent. Consider: The claim Science is the only valid source of true beliefs about the world is a metascientific claim—a belief about the world that cannot itself be proved by experiment. To demonstrate its validity one would therefore need to produce a philosophical proof—but since this proof would not be the result of an empirical inquiry, it would, if valid, disqualify itself. Scientism fails its own test for truth.
Recently, scientism has enjoyed an unselfconscious resurgence in the writing of the New Atheists but it originates in an obsolete mid-twentieth century movement in Western philosophy called Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism held that the only meaningful statements were those capable of being verified through sense experience or (as in pure logic and mathematics) those that are true by tautology. All other claims were subject to the “verification principle” championed by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book, Language, Truth and Logic. God, interestingly, was excluded from the conversation: Ayer said that it was just as absurd to be an atheist as to be a theist. The statements, “God exists” and “God does not exist” simply had no meaning.
By 1945 Logical Positivism has been abandoned by its own founders. The first problem with the verifiability criterion was that it forbade universal statements necessary to formulate a theoretical framework for scientific inquiry. The second problem was the fatal one already noted: The verifiability criterion itself is not verifiable. As the mathematician David Berlinski puts it, "All such arguments, when self-applied, self-destruct."
The Objection from Hume A second influential objection against the belief in miracles goes back to Hume. Hume claimed that the inductive confirmation of natural law in everyday experience is so overwhelming that no eyewitness report of a violation of natural law could ever outweigh it. For instance: The fact that heavy objects are always and everywhere observed to fall to the Earth is overwhelming background evidence against a report that, say, a marble bust of Mozart had levitated into the air. Whether or not this miracle really occurred, an ordinary subject is rationally compelled to reject it on the basis of his everyday experience of gravity.
Contemporary philosophers of religion identify two flaws in Hume's argument, both of which are discussed by Swinburne in The Existence of God.
Swinburne first notes that, even granting Hume’s claim that the only relevant background evidence is our experience of the laws of nature, there is no reason to suppose that this evidence always counts decisively against the report. “Maybe,” Swinburne writes, “so many careful witnesses report very clearly what happened that their evidence can outweigh the evidence from the normal operation of laws of nature.” In support of this point one may appeal to the two principles of rationality discussed in Chapter 18: The Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony—without allowing which we quickly find ourselves in a "skeptical bog." [4]
“But Hume’s main mistake,” continues Swinburne, “was his assumption that in such cases our knowledge of what are the laws of nature is our only relevant background evidence.” Equally relevant to our assessment of a purported miracle is any background evidence for the existence of God—such as the nine lines of evidence presented in Part II. And if on the total background evidence it is probable that there is a God then it is probable that there exists a being with the power to violate the laws of nature. Evidence that there is a God is therefore evidence that laws of nature can be violated—which will have particular relevance in cases where the event is of a kind that God would have reason to bring about.
What reasons might God have to occasionally bring about an event that violates laws whose regular operation he usually ensures? Swinburne suggests that there are reasons of two kinds. The first is to answer human prayer. “A world in which everything occurred in accordance with natural laws,” he notes, “would not be a world in which God had any living interaction with human beings.” The second kind of reason why God might violate natural law is, "just occasionally to put his signature on the work or teaching of some prophet in order to show that that work or teaching was God’s work or teaching."
An Incarnation authenticated by a divine miracle has, as we saw in Chapter 21, a certain a priori probability given the moral perfection of God and the obvious general fact of human sin and suffering. And when this a priori probability is combined with the evidence for the existence of God from natural theology, a multiply and independently attested miracle of the right kind under the right circumstances may outweigh the inductive evidence that, when natural laws operate in the usual way, such things do not occur. Thus on the total relevant background evidence Hume’s objection fails to establish that a miracle is always unworthy of credit.
The Objection from the Laws of Conservation The third and final objection to miracles claims that special divine action in the world would violate the laws of physics. Take Plantinga’s example of a miracle: God creating ex nihilo an adult horse in the middle of Times Square. During such an event the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and so forth, would all be violated. Physics, meanwhile, tells us that this is impossible. The objector therefore concludes miracles are impossible.
However, the laws of conservation in fact apply to systems that are causally closed—closed to causal influence from without. But it is no part of standard physics that the universe is causally closed and whether or not it is depends on whether or not God exists. For consider: If God does exist then there exists an omnipotent being who can act upon the universe from without. Evidence for the existence of God is therefore, equally, evidence against the causal closure of the universe. And likewise: any system in which a miracle occurs is, ipso facto, not constrained by the various conservation laws. One cannot reject a miracle on the presupposition that God does not exist and therefore the universe is causally closed; indeed, the reported miracle itself is evidence against the presupposition on the basis of which the skeptic rejects it.
Conclusion
We have seen that both features of the claim that Christianity is in conflict with science are without warrant. The conflict thesis was shown to be false: Western empirical science emerged in Christian Europe and nowhere else and has been assisted throughout its development by prominent Christian theists. A Christian, moreover, is not required to accept on faith claims that are in conflict with science; per contra, much of the alleged conflict only arises from taking every sentence of the Bible literally—an approach promoted by modern fundamentalists but rejected by the early Church Fathers. A Christian can, and should, accept the rational and nuanced interpretation of scripture traditionally provided by the Church Jesus founded. And while a Christian is committed to the belief that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead, this is something than can be rationally assessed on the available evidence of natural theology and history: Claimed grounds for rejecting reports of miracles out of hand were shown to be unfounded.
[1] In his book The Canon of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger identifies three criteria by means of which a book was entered into the canon of the New Testament: Conformity with basic Christian tradition, apostolicity (that is, having been written by an Apostle or an author in close contact with an Apostle) and widespread acceptance by the Church at large. And all three criteria apply again to the interpretation of each book and passage in the canon.
[2] This principle of interpretation has an interesting and relevant implication. It implies that the human authors of the Bible may have written passages which they understood in one way but which God intended to be taken in another way; that is, the human authors of the Bible did not always know how their texts were to be understood.
[3] Like British philosopher Antony Flew, Allan Sandage and Francis Collins both came to reject atheism on the basis of the view that the integrated complexity of the physical world is best explained by intelligent agency. Thus not only were they able to read the Bible in a way that is consistent with the findings of modern science, their conversion to theism was based on the findings of modern science.
[4] Recall: The Principle of Credulity states: If to a subject S it seems, in an epistemic sense, that x is present then, in the absence of special considerations, probably x is present. Thus if Mr Green has the experience of it seeming to him that there is a German shepherd on his lawn then that is good evidence for his believing that there is a German shepherd on his lawn. "The principle of Credulity," Swinburne asserts, "is a fundamental principle of rationality and unless we allow it to have considerable force, we quickly find ourselves in a skeptical bog in which we can hardly know anything."
In ordinary experience we also use a wider principle: Other things being equal, we believe that what others tell us is probably true. “Most of our beliefs about the world,” observes Swinburne, “are based on what others claim to have perceived—beliefs about geography and history and science and everything else beyond immediate experience.” Swinburne argues that such beliefs are justified even when (as per usual) we do not personally vet witnesses for their reliability. Thus the Principle of Testimony: The experiences of others, in the absence of special considerations, are probably as they report them.
Given these two principles of rationality, so, contra Hume, receiving detailed reports of a miracle from several reliable sources may outweigh the inductive evidence of natural law from everyday experience—even without including the evidence of natural theology in our total background evidence.
[2] This principle of interpretation has an interesting and relevant implication. It implies that the human authors of the Bible may have written passages which they understood in one way but which God intended to be taken in another way; that is, the human authors of the Bible did not always know how their texts were to be understood.
[3] Like British philosopher Antony Flew, Allan Sandage and Francis Collins both came to reject atheism on the basis of the view that the integrated complexity of the physical world is best explained by intelligent agency. Thus not only were they able to read the Bible in a way that is consistent with the findings of modern science, their conversion to theism was based on the findings of modern science.
[4] Recall: The Principle of Credulity states: If to a subject S it seems, in an epistemic sense, that x is present then, in the absence of special considerations, probably x is present. Thus if Mr Green has the experience of it seeming to him that there is a German shepherd on his lawn then that is good evidence for his believing that there is a German shepherd on his lawn. "The principle of Credulity," Swinburne asserts, "is a fundamental principle of rationality and unless we allow it to have considerable force, we quickly find ourselves in a skeptical bog in which we can hardly know anything."
In ordinary experience we also use a wider principle: Other things being equal, we believe that what others tell us is probably true. “Most of our beliefs about the world,” observes Swinburne, “are based on what others claim to have perceived—beliefs about geography and history and science and everything else beyond immediate experience.” Swinburne argues that such beliefs are justified even when (as per usual) we do not personally vet witnesses for their reliability. Thus the Principle of Testimony: The experiences of others, in the absence of special considerations, are probably as they report them.
Given these two principles of rationality, so, contra Hume, receiving detailed reports of a miracle from several reliable sources may outweigh the inductive evidence of natural law from everyday experience—even without including the evidence of natural theology in our total background evidence.