Science and Religion: Some Parables and Models

Karuvelil, George

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7_3

George Karuvelil²

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Abstract

If the last chapter focused on the impact of scientism on thinking about religious diversity, this chapter deals with the impact of the same in thinking about religion in general. Using the classic symposium “Theology and Falsification” it spells out four epistemological positions regarding science-religion relations. It goes on to rule out two of them (Conflict Model and Holy Science Model) as not viable in the contemporary world. In the course of discussing the logic of religious statements, Antony Flew’s demand to explain the concept of God without using other religious terms is introduced. This is taken as the first task of fundamental theology, and would be further elaborated in Chap. 5.

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Notes

1.
Antony Flew, R.M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, ‘Theology and Falsification’, in Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds.), New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1955), 96–108.
2.
Preface to the 50th anniversary reprint of the article in Philosophy Now (Oct–Nov 2000), 28–29.
3.
Flew, Hare, and Mitchell, ‘Theology and Falsification’, 96.
4.
Ibid., 97.
5.
Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).
6.
Flew, Hare, and Mitchell, ‘Theology and Falsification’, 99.
7.
Ibid., 103; italics original.
8.
Ibid., 100.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Ibid., 101.
11.
Ibid., 103.
12.
Ibid., 104.
13.
Ibid., 124–25.
14.
John Hick, ‘Theology and Verification’, Theology Today 17 (1960), 12–31; ‘Eschatological Verification Reconsidered’, Religious Studies 13 (1977), 189–202.
15.
Hick, ‘Eschatological Verification Reconsidered’, 190; italics original.
16.
Michael Tooley, ‘John Hick and the Concept of Eschatological Verification’, Religious Studies (1976), 188; cited by Hick in ‘Eschatological Verification Reconsidered’, 200, fn. 2.
17.
He says: ‘I have not suggested that the eschatological situation will explain the meaning of theological statements to one who does not already understand them. I begin from the fact that there is already, in this present life, a putative awareness of God, expressed in religious statements which the religious believer understands. ... These statements are part of a unitary body of beliefs which include eschatological beliefs, and it is these latter that give factual-assertion status to the system as a whole’ (ibid.).
18.
Antony Flew, God: A Critical Enquiry (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1984), x–xi.
19.
Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000); he summarizes other major classificatory schemes (4–5). For a later classification by Stenmark, see Mikael Stenmark, ‘Ways of Relating Science and Religion’, in Peter Harrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 278–95.
20.
John Worrall, ‘Science Discredits Religion’, in M.L. Peterson and R.J. Vanarragon (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 60; cited in Stenmark, ‘Ways of Relating Science and Religion’, 278.
21.
See Richard Olson, ‘A Dynamic Model for “Science and Religion”: Interacting Subcultures’, Zygon 46 (2011), 65–83.
22.
James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2011); it is published as God’s Philosophers in UK. (London: Icon Books, 2010).
23.
See Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: the Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England, Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).
24.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 16.
25.
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), 484–5.
26.
Russell’s position seems to be that only one should emerge alive, so that true wisdom (based on science) becomes possible. See Russell, Religion and Science, 18.
27.
Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 10.
28.
Such books include: Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, (London: Atlantic Books, 2008); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London, Toronto: Bantam Press, 2006). Although all four are atheists, there are differences. Harris’ atheism, for example, is suffused with Buddhist spirituality. See Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
29.
A similar conclusion can be found in Christopher C. Knight, The God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science, Theology and the Sciences (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 3.
30.
‘Four horsemen’ is the title of the CD brought out (2008) by these men about their atheistic convictions. It is freely available on YouTube.
31.
Philip Kitcher, ‘The Many-Sided Conflict Between Science and Religion’, in William Mann (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion, Blackwell Philosophy Guides (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 266–82. For a more complete statement of his ‘soft atheism’, see Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, The Terry Lectures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
32.
See, George Karuvelil, ‘Religious Experience: Reframing the Question’, Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 16 (2011), 139–55.
33.
Elsewhere I have called it Religion-in-Science view. See George Karuvelil, ‘The Science-Religion Dialogue: The Cognitive Issues’, Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection 68 (2004), 799–812.
34.
Morris West, Shoes of the Fisherman (New York: Dell, 1963), 188–89.
35.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1959).
36.
Claude Cuenot, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965), 251; cited in Michael J. Latzer, ‘The Marcel-Teilhard Debate’, New Blackfriars 82 (2001), 132.
37.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 193.
38.
Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49. Horgan and Timmons’s attempt to defend metaphysical realism against Putnam’s view neglects this specific definition and takes it merely in terms of mind-independent existence or the metaphysical thesis of realism, which we shall see in Chap. 6. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, ‘Conceptual Relativity and Metaphysical Realism’, Philosophical Issues 12 (2002), 74.
39.
Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, 49.
40.
Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 140.
41.
Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William M. Hohengarten, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 30.
42.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 2.12.
43.
Typical of this realization is Harvey Cox. His immensely popular The Secular City (1965) was premised on the disappearance of religion, but he had changed his view by1999. Harvey Cox, ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rise and Fall of “Secularization”’, in Gregory Baum (ed.), The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview, (Ottawa/New York: Novalis/ Orbis Books, 1999), 135–43.
44.
C.A. Russell, ‘Science and Religion’, in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier, 2001), 13,621–25.
45.
Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science is perhaps the best known of these.
46.
J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen (ed.), Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, 2nd ed. (New York; Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference; Thomson Gale, 2003); Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier, 2001).
47.
See Melville Y. Stewart (ed.), Science and Religion in Dialogue, 2 vols. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
48.
Stenmark, ‘Ways of Relating Science and Religion’, 279.
49.
For the differences between experientialism and other positions, see William Hasker, ‘Evidentialism’, in Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Richard Askew, ‘On Fideism and Alvin Plantinga’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 23 (1988), 3–16.
50.
Alston’s most elaborate work in the field is Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). Plantinga’s mature epistemology of religious experience is found in Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). This comes as the culmination of his ‘Warrant’ trilogy. He published a simplified, less technical, version of Warranted Christian Belief in 2015 as Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2015).
51.
Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).
52.
This is found in the Marcel-Teilhard debate of 1947. A brief account of this debate is to be found in Latzer, ‘The Marcel-Teilhard Debate’, 132–37.
53.
Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, 1st ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 173.
54.
Alister E. McGrath and Joanna McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2007), cover page.
55.
John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), xi, 12.
56.
Dan Barker, ‘Forward’ to Victor J. Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012). EPUB file.
57.
John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1989), 12.
58.
Robert McKim, ‘On Religious Ambiguity’, Religious Studies 44 (2008), 373–92.
59.
Flew, Hare, and Mitchell, ‘Theology and Falsification’, 96.
60.
C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
61.
Daniel Garber, interview with Garry Gutting, New York Times, October 5, 2014.
62.
K. Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems (1931), trans. B. Meltzer (New York: Basic Books), 1962. My statement of the incompleteness theorem is from Michael A. Arbib and Mary Hesse, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 31–32; italics original.
63.
This example comes from Arthur Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, Introduction, cited in J.W. Cornman, “Can Eddington’s Two Tables Be Identical?” in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 52/1 (1974), 1.
64.
Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, 23.
65.
See Craig Callender, https://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/09/stephen-hawking-says-theres-no-theory-of-everything.html; accessed 4 September 2017.
66.
Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
67.
Mysore Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993), 180.

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Faculty of Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India
George Karuvelil

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Karuvelil, G. (2020). Science and Religion: Some Parables and Models. In: Faith, Reason, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7_3
Published: 25 July 2020
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