Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers or Partners?
(
In the Beginning: why did the big bang occur?
Quantum Physics: a challenge to our assumptions about reality?
Darwin and Genesis: is evolution God's way of creating?
Human Nature: are we determined by our genes?
God and Nature: Can God act in a law-bound world?
Over the centuries and into the new millennium, scientists, theologians, and the general public have shared many questions about the implications of scientific discoveries for religious faith. Nuclear physicist and theologian Ian Barbour, winner of the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for his pioneering role in advancing the study of religion and science, presents a clear, contemporary introduction to the essential issues, ideas, and solutions in the relationship between religion and science. In simple, straightforward language, Barbour explores the fascinating topics that illuminate the critical encounter of the spiritual and quantitative dimensions of life.
Ian G. Barbour is professor emeritus of physics and religion at
Barbour's bibliography is a little complicated, with new editions and some
intertwining of them having gone on. So, on the recommendation of someone on
Eyring-L (I can't remember who, but wish to thank them anyway), I started with
this book, which is like a primer on the philosophy of science and religion and
how they stand vis-à-vis each other. It's largely a survey, and Barbour plays
his own personal cards close to the chest, so to speak. Its table of contents
describes the book well, and shows how tightly organized the book is, so I'll
present that, plus an excerpt, as my review.The
second book, which promises to go into more detail, and present more of his own
views (although it's 3 years older in publication), is "Religion and
Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues," which is a revised and
expanded edition of an earlier book, "Religion in an Age of Science."
I'll review that, too, in due course.
1. FOUR VIEWS OF SCIENCE AND
RELIGION
CONFLICT
1. Scientific Materialism
2. Biblical Literalism
1. Separate Domains
2. Differing Languages and Functions
DIALOGUE
1. Presuppositions and Limit-Questions
2. Methodological and Conceptual Parallels
INTEGRATION
1. Natural Theology
2. Theology of Nature
3. Systematic Synthesis
2. ASTRONOMY AND CREATION
CONFLICT
1. A Universe by Chance
2. Harmonizing Genesis
and the Big Bang
1. The Religious Meaning
of Creation
2. The Function of Creation Stories
DIALOGUE
1. The Intelligibility
of the Cosmos
2. The Contingency of the Cosmos
INTEGRATION
1. Design: The Anthropic Principle
2. Models of God as Creator
3. The Significance of Humanity
3. THE IMPLICATIONS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS
CONFLICT
1. God in a Deterministic World
2. God and Chance
1. Instrumentalist Views of Quantum Theory
2. The Lesson of Complementarity
DIALOGUE
1. The Role of the
Observer
2. Holism in the Quantum World
INTEGRATION
1. Eastern Mysticism and
Quantum Holism
2. God and Quantum Indeterminancy
4. EVOLUTION AND CONTINUING CREATION
CONFLICT
1. Evolutionary Materialism
2. Theistic Critics of Neo-Darwinism
1. Contrasting Domains
and Methods
2. Primary and Secondary Causality
DIALOGUE
1. Complexity and
Self-Organization
2. The Concept of
Information
3. A Hierarchy of Levels
INTEGRATION
1. Evolutionary Design
2. God and Continuing
Creation
3. Process Philosophy
5. GENETICS, NEUROSCIENCE,
AND HUMAN NATURE
CONFLICT
1. Reductive Materialism
2. Sociobiology and Human Morality
3. Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom
1. Body/Soul Dualism
2. Body and Soul: Complementary
Perspectives
3. Sin and Redemption
DIALOGUE
1. Neuroscience and the
Embodied Self
2. Anthropology and the
Social Self
3. The Computer and the Brain
INTEGRATION
1. Biological Organism
and Responsible Self
2. Mind and Brain: Two Aspects of One
Process
3. Process Philosophy
6. GOD AND NATURE
CONFLICT
1. Naturalistic Critiques of Theism
2. Religious Naturalism
1. Primary and Secondary
Causality
2. Complementary Languages
DIALOGUE
1. God as Designer of a
Self-Organizing Process
2. God as Communicator
of Information
3. God's self-Limitation
INTEGRATION
1. God as Determiner
of Indeterminancies
2. God as Top-Down Cause
3. Process Theology
There can be no conflict between scientific and religious assertions about
human nature if they are independent and unrelated to each other. In the
classical body/soul dualism, the soul is said to be immaterial and inherently
inaccessible to scientific investigation. Another version of the
I. Body/Soul Dualism
The body/soul dualism found in later Christianity is not found in the Bible itself. In the Hebrew scriptures, the self is a unified activity of thinking, feeling, willing, and acting. H. Wheeler Robinson writes, "The idea of human nature implies a unity, not a dualism. There is no contrast between the body and the soul such as the terms instinctively suggest to us." [20] Oscar Cullmann agrees, noting that "the Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism of body and soul." [21] In particular, the body is not the source of evil or something to be disowned, escaped, or denied -- though it may be misused. We find instead an affirmation of the body and a positive acceptance of the material order. Lynn de Silva writes:
"Biblical scholarship has established quite conclusively that there is no dichotomous concept of man in the Bible, such as is found in Greek and Hindu thought. The biblical view of man is holistic, not dualistic. The notion of the soul is an immoral entity which enters the body at birth and leaves it at death is quite foreign to the biblical view of man. The biblical view is that man is a unity, he is a unity of soul, body, flesh, mind, etc., all together constituting the whole man."[22]
According to the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, the Hebrew word nephesh (usually translated as soul or self) "never means the immortal soul, but is essentially the life principle, or the self as the subject of appetites and emotion and occasionally of volition." The corresponding word in the New Testament is psyche, "which continues the old Greek usage by which it means life." [23] When belief in a future life did develop in the New Testament period, it was expressed in terms of the resurrection of the total person by God's act, not the inherent immortality of the soul. Cullmann shows that the future life was seen as a gift from God "in the last days," not an innate human attribute. Paul speaks of the dead as sleeping until the day of judgment, when they will be restored--not as physical bodies or as disembodied souls, but in what he calls "the spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15:44). Such views of the future life may be problematic, but they do testify to the belief that the whole being of persons is the subject of God's saving purpose.
However, a dualistic view developed in the early church, largely because of the influence of Greek thought. Plato had held that a pre-existent immortal soul enters a human body and survives after the death of the body. The Gnostic and Manichaean movements in the late Hellenistic world maintained that matter is evil and that death liberates the soul from its imprisonment in the body. The church fathers rejected Gnosticism but accepted the dualism of soul and body in Neoplatonism and to a lesser extent the moral dualism of good and evil associated with it. Other forces in the declining Greco-Roman culture aided the growth of asceticism, monasticism, rejection of the world, and the search for individual salvation. Some of these negative attitudes toward the body are seen in Augustine's writing, but they represent a departure from the biblical affirmation of the goodness of the material world as God's creation.[24]
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas accepted the Aristotelian view that the soul is the form of the body, which implied a more positive appraisal of the body. He said that the soul was created by God a few weeks after conception, rather than existing before the body. Animals were held to have "sensitive souls," but only humans were said to have "rational souls." Aquinas gave a complex analysis of human nature and moral action that included an important role for emotions ("passions") in carrying out the good, which is known by reason as well as revelation.[25] Medieval theologians expressed a sense of the organic unity of a world designed according to God's purposes. Nevertheless, the concept of an immortal soul established an absolute line between humans and other creatures and encouraged an anthropocentric (human-centered) view of our status in the world, even though the overall cosmic scheme was theocentric (God-centered). With few exceptions, the non human world was portrayed as playing only a supporting role in the medieval and Reformation drama of human redemption.
Descartes' dualism of mind and matter departed even further from the biblical view. The concept of soul had at least allowed a role for the emotions, as the biblical view had done. But mind in the Cartesian understanding was nonspatial, nonmaterial "thinking substance," characterized by reason rather than emotion. Matter, on the other hand, was said to be spatial and controlled by physical forces alone. It was difficult to imagine how two such dissimilar substances could possibly interact. Descartes claimed that animals lack rationality and are machines without intelligence, feelings, or awareness.
Many theologians have continued to defend a dualism of body and soul. The official Catholic position is that the human body evolved from the body of primates and proto-human hominids, but the human soul was introduced into a body ready to receive it at a particular point in evolutionary history…
A dualism of brain and mind has been defended by several prominent scientists. Wilder Penfield points out that the patient whose brain is electrically stimulated is aware that it is not he or she who is raising the arm. Penfield postulates a center of decision radically distinct from the neural network, "a switchboard operator as well as a switchboard."[27] In The Self and Its Brain, physiologists John Eccles and philosopher Karl Popper hold that the mind selects among brain modules, reads them out, integrates them,, and then modifies other brain circuits. "The self-conscious mind is an independent entity that is actively engaged in reading out from the multitude of active centers in the modules of the liaison areas of the dominant cerebral hemisphere."[28] They point out that impulses appear in the supplementary motor area before those in the motor area only when there is a deliberate, voluntary initiation of action. They defend the interaction of consciousness and brain and the causal efficacy of mental phenomena. But most scientists today do not accept either a body/soul or a brain/mind dualism, though these ideas can still be defended on theological or philosophical rather than scientific grounds
____________________
References
21. Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the
Dead? (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 30.
22. Lynn de Silva, The Problem of
Self in Buddhism and Christianity (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 75.
23. Interpreter's Dictionary of
the Bible, vol. 4 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), p. 428.
24. David Kelsey, "Human
Being," in Christian Theology, 2nd ed., ed. Peter
Hodgson and Robert King (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
25. James Keenan, Goodness
and Rightness in