Abstract
In science-and-theology scholarship much attention has been paid to possible routes from nature to God. Some argue for a robust natural theology; others are skeptical of any inferences from the one to the other. By contrast, I ask: what is the least that humanity might know about transcendence, and in particular about God as transcendent being, and still be able to use the term in meaningful ways? Methodologically, I will argue, claims that connect nature and transcendence must be tested by all the relevant communities of inquiry (RCEs), including naturalists, and not only by whether (say) theists find the inferences compelling. Judged by this standard, no rationally justified inferences can by drawn from the world as described by the contemporary physical sciences to a robust theology of a transcendent God. The less one’s notion of the transcendent is intertwined with the natural world, the more difficult it is to show its compatibility with science. And conversely, the more one’s account of transcendence or one’s doctrine of God inherently includes immanence, the less difficult it is to show its compatibility with science. The chapter concludes with a proposal for conceiving the relationship between transcendence and immanence in ways that maximize the connection between natural emergence and that which is beyond science.
Is emergence leading nature beyond itself?
Is it a variant of traditional theism or an extended version of modern naturalism?
Or is this difference obsolete?
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Notes
- 1.
One would need to consider whether this is true in physics, since it is not clear that emergent phenomena not explainable in terms of physical laws should count as a success.
- 2.
Ideally, one would also follow the phenomena of religion and spirituality as they emerge across the history of human culture, from indigenous religions through the so-called Axial Age and on to the ‘religions of the book’ and the more recent popularity of ‘spiritual but not religious.’
- 3.
The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Manning 2013) covers both of these topics in the first two Parts, but I am not sure that vast differences are given enough weight. At least it’s true that the same words, ‘natural theology’, are used in all these diverse cases.
- 4.
- 5.
It is an interesting question to ask whether the RCE would condone agnosticism about inferences from the natural world as studied by the natural sciences to a transcendent, quasi-theological reality. My own sense is that the RCE would be more likely to be skeptical than agnostic.
- 6.
Richard Dawkins ([2006] 2016), by the way, lacks this humility; he wants to use science to falsify metaphysical arguments. As an example, he argues that the early, non-complex cosmos could not come from a God who is more complex than the cosmos.
- 7.
Broader issues are also raised, which we could not explore here: what, if anything, do emergent phenomena tell us about the Beyond – about metaphysics and theology, about continuities and discontinuities, about the knowable and the limits of the known? We also explored the question whether the natural world points to, or is evidence for, transcendent reality beyond the human. That raises the question: can spirituality be explained in terms of its biological or social or psychological functions, or does its explanation need to be given in terms of some reality beyond the empirical?
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Clayton, P. (2020). Nature: And Beyond? Immanence and Transcendence in Science and Religion. In: Fuller, M., Evers, D., Runehov, A., Sæther, KW., Michollet, B. (eds) Issues in Science and Theology: Nature – and Beyond. Issues in Science and Religion: Publications of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31182-7_1
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