The Pascal Centre For Advanced Studies in Faith and Science
presents an international conference
_"SCIENCE in THEISTIC CONTEXTS: Cognitive Dimensions"_
An analysis and evaluation of the internal role of theistic religious beliefs
in the natural sciences and mathematics. Intended for those with an interest
in the relationship between science and religious belief.
JULY 21-25, 1998,
Redeemer College, Ancaster, ON, Canada
CALL FOR PAPERS: Objectives: (1) To produce contextualized case studies of the internal role of
theistic religious beliefs in science and mathematics. (2) To contribute to an understanding of how
theistic religious beliefs can have this internal effect.
(For further information consult our website: http://www.redeemer.on.ca/pascal )
INVITED SPEAKERS AND CHAIRS
Historiography of Science and Religion, Dr. J. H. Brooke (Lancaster U., UK)
Religion and Neuroscience, Dr. G. Glas (State U. of Utrecht & Leiden, NL)
Religion and Mathematics, Dr. I. Grattan-Guinness (Middlesex U., Enfield, UK)
Religion and Physics, Dr. M. J. Osler (U. of Calgary, CA)
Religion and Geology, Dr. N. A. Rupke (U. of Gottingen, GE)
Religion and Chemistry, Dr. C. A. Russell (Emeritus, Open U., UK)
Evaluation, Rev. Dr. T. Settle (Emeritus, U. of Guelph, CA)
Religion and Biology, Dr. P. Sloan (U. of Notre Dame, USA)
Religion and Physics, Dr. S. Turner (U. of New Brunswick, CA)
Religion and Metaphysics, Dr. S. Wykstra (Calvin College, USA)
FURTHER INFORMATION
For information, contribution guidelines, and schedule, consult our website:
http://www.redeemer.on.ca/pascal or contact: Dr. Jitse van der Meer,
Redeemer College, 777 Garner Rd., Ancaster, ON, Canada, L9K 1J4,
Phone: (905) 648-2131, FAX: (905)-648-2134, email: pascalcentre@redeemer.on.ca
ABSTRACTS of Keynote Speakers and Workshop Chairs:
BROOKE, John H.,
Title: "The historiography of religion and science interaction."
Abstract: In a burgeoning literature on "science and religion" there has been extensive discussion of
the impact of scientific innovation on religious sensibilities. Concerning the relevance of religious
belief to the shaping of science, much less has been written. There is a critical literature on the
Merton thesis and its derivatives, in which correlations between scientific activity and religious dissent
have been analysed. The extent to which the cognitive content of scientific theories has
been shaped by religious belief is, however, only rarely discussed.
In my Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (CUP, 1991) I provided a taxonomy
to capture the different ways in which religious belief had shaped the theory and practice of science
in the past. In addition to providing presuppositions, sanctions and motivation for science, religious
beliefs had affected the content of scientific theory both directly (in constituting primitive forms of
science) and by favouring certain theories at the expense of less congenial competitors. In this
keynote address, designed to introduce the main theme of the conference, I shall discuss the
problems faced by the historian both in identying genuine cases of such interaction between religion
and science and in determining their significance. Among the issues to be addressed are whether
religious beliefs function automatically (as has been claimed for Joseph Priestly); whether it is
helpful to isolate them from a more holistic biographical analysis; whether explicit appeal to relgious
considerations on the part of natural philosophers might belong more to the context of justification
than of discovery or theory formulation; whether the teleological language to be found in 18th and
19th-century theories of the earth always bore the print of a natural theology; whether explicit biblical
references in appraisals of the natural world might sometimes be a form of literary affectation;
whether incursion of religious belief into cognitive "scientific" claims might not render the word
"scientific" inappropriate in such cases; and whether a constitutive role for religious belief within the
sciences can be granted only for their pre-modern formations.
GLAS, Gerrit
Title: "Neuroscience and Theism: A Clarification of Perspectives on their Relationship."
Abstract: First I explore which theistic and metaphysical beliefs and concepts might influence
neuroscientific research and its interpretation. Then I examine the different perspectives from
which these influences can be interpreted. These include the positions of Descartes and MacKay,
and the struggle between somaticists (Physiker) and theologically inspired psychicists (Psychiker)
in early 19th century Germany. These positions will be contrasted with current naturalism (the
Churchlands) and/or non-eliminative physicalism (Dennett). Finally, I argue that a restoration of the
relationship between neuroscience and theism, must move beyond the problem of reduction. An
alternative to reductionism is developed using the thought of Dooyeweerd.
GRATTAN-GUINNESS, Ivor
Title: "Manifestations of Christianity in Mathematical Theories - and Vice Versa."
Abstract: A deeply neglected factor in the history of mathematics is the influence that religious
positions or theological factors have played in the formation and interpretation of theories.
Conversely, mathematics has played a role in aspects of the content of various religious positions.
This lecture will view examples of influence in both directions, but confine itself largely to Christianity
and to developments since the early modern period. Examples to be taken include: (1) numerology
and geomatria, and some related geometry in orthodox and apocryphal Christianity, (2) the religious
stance over the stability of the planetary system, and the principle of least action in mechanics,
(3) the ecumenism in A.L. Cauchy, Catholic and mathematician as one, and in the algebra of logic,
and (4) Theism in set theory. I will also address the role of educational status and discuss why all
Irish mathematicians were Protestants. From these and other noted cases some general
conclusions will be drawn.
MANIER, Edward
Title: "Neurobiology and Narrative in Psychiatry: an Issue between Theists and Naturalists?"
Abstract: Various books by Oliver Sacks, a glorious teller of neurological stories; a number of
intriguing and equally successful personal "memoirs of madness" (as William Styron calls them),
and important scholarly work on the role of narrative in psychotherapy by Donald P. Spence and Roy
Schafer, set a significant challenge for the philosophy of psychiatry: Can scientific theory and
narrative case histories be integrated within the "state of the art" in molecular neuropsychiatry and
the various cognitive and narrative approaches to psychotherapy?
This paper seeks a constructive response to that challenge. It argues that new advances in
understanding the coevolution of language and the brain provide a more powerful, non-reductive
account of the relation of nature and culture. This may provide a more fruitful context within which
to address the tensions between medical (neuropsychological) and religious approaches to mental
disorder which have prevailed since the Enlightenment.
OSLER, Margaret
Title: "Whose Ends? Teleology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy."
Abstract: Traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution claimed that one of the characteristics
of the Scientific Revolution was that it eliminated teleology and Aristotelian final causes from
science. Consideration of the writings of many key figures of the period --including William Harvey,
Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton -- reveals that these thinkers believed that
teleology and final causes played a significant role in a natural philosophy which viewed the
world as created by God and ruled by his providence. In this paper, I will consider two questions:
(1) what did these early modern figures mean by 'final cause' and how did they deploy the concept
in their writings? (2) What presuppositions have caused twentieth-century historians to mis-read the
texts so badly? The paper will be based on close readings of texts in context.
RUPKE, Nicolaas A.
Title: "Earth Sciences in Theistic Context."
Abstract: The historiography of the earth sciences has tended to focus on the real and presumed
discordances between 'Genesis' and 'geology', such as the age of the earth and the geological
impact of Noah's deluge. Insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that theistic religious beliefs
and geology, in a number of substantive instances, interacted fruitfully, with reciprocal stimulation,
mediated through the concepts and institutions of natural theology. During early-modern times
and right up into the nineteenth century, the 'Deluge' kindled the study of fossils and other
phenomena pertaining to the earth's crust. When by the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries historical geology began to take shape, the conviction that geological time has a distinct
and definable beginning in time owed much to Christian eschatology; and so did the persuasion that
the history of the earth can be described as a directional and progressive process of development.
Moreover, during the first half of the nineteenth century, functionalist palaeontology flourished under
the umbrella of the theistic design argument. One could argue that theistic beliefs were part of the
matrix from which several of the basic concepts of the earth sciences crystallized.
RUSSELL, Colin
Title: "Theology and the Cognitive Content of Chemistry."
Abstract: Of the links between chemistry and cultural and social change there can be no possible
doubt. At a cognitive level the situation is much less clear. There are several reasons for this. First,
it is often possible to identify themes or doctrines that have the same apparent shape as those
outside science, but very difficult to show any causal connection between the two. Second, it is
much harder to speak of a "philosophy of chemistry" than it is of (say) a philosophy of physics.
Moreover, "philosophies" of parts of chemistry varied widely within a similar period. In this light it
may seem a hopeless task to identify positive cognitive links between chemistry and theology.
However, numerous areas exist where there might be evidence of cognitive links. I present a brief
account of at least seven areas of chemistry in which theology has arguably had a specific input
into the way that chemists thought about their subject.
SETTLE, Tom
Title: "Is Science Immune to Religion?"
Abstract: Let us suppose the default hypothesis to be that science is neutral regarding religion.
Call this "the naturalistic assumption." It is consistent with religious beliefs or theological concepts
having functioned heuristically in the course of scientific investigation; and consistent also, therefore,
with religious or theological vocabulary having entered scientific discourse, at least for a while. But
the default hypothesis denies that science uses religious or theological CONCEPTS. Thus, for
science's cognitive content to be expressed lastingly in religious or theological terms, this
hypothesis expects such vocabulary to have become anaesthetized or sterilized or naturalized
at the hands of scientists. This paper assesses whether recent historical studies on the influence
of religion on science serve to disturb this expectation.
SLOAN, Phillip R.
Title: "Nature, History and Darwinism: Secularized Theology and Natural Selection Theory."
Abstract: I address the importance of the concept of "nature" in the period between 1750-1870 as it
bears on the issues of evolution, teleological purposiveness, and theism. I begin by examining the
transformations in the concept of "nature" in the middle decades of the Enlightenment, concentrating
on the French and German traditions, and develop the relations of reflections on these issues to the
preceeding tradition in Newtonian and Cartesian physical science. From this background, I then
develop the significance of the "vitalist" revolution of the 1770s and its role in the replacement of
Deistic views of the relation of God to the world, which had previously maintained the distinction
between created and creative orders. This replacement is with the conception of an immanently
"dynamic" nature with self-creating and constructive powers.
Secondly, I show how this new conception of nature becomes important for the rise of the first
evolutionary theories, starting with Jean Baptiste Lamarck and then following this via the
manuscripts and notebooks of Darwin into Darwinism. I show how Darwin replaced his original
notion of a semi-Deistic creator in the 1842 and 1844 drafts of the Origin with this more immanently
vitalistic nature by the publication of the mature Origin. The importance of this for his notion of
"natural selection"will be worked out in detail.
This history will supply the foundation for the two divergent readings of the theological significance
of Darwinian evolution. One reading could see in his notion of "nature" the workings of divine
providence and intermediate creation not unlike the solutions worked out by theistic contemporaries
such as Richard Owen. The other reading emphasized the notions of chance, purposelessness, and
anti-teleology as the "implications" of Darwinism that became canonized in orthodox
Neo-selectionist evolutionary theory.
TURNER, S.
Title: "Physics, Theism, and 'Metaphysical Interests'"
Abstract: The constructivist turn in the sociology of scientific knowledge has suggested that in
theory-building, theory-choice, and scientific programmatics, scientists are led by a variety
of "social interests," that include their disciplinary commitments, resource investments, and larger
social-political identities. Philosophers counter that scientists are equally concerned with various
"cognitive interests" that include commitments to coherence, testability, and confirmation; and
historians of science have further challenged the elasticity of "interests explanations" by pointing to
the role "affective interests." By extension, we could attribute the putative role of theistic
commitments and beliefs on scientific change to "metaphysical interests" pursued by some
scientists.
Discussing science and theism in terms of scientists' "metaphysical interests" offers unexpected
advantages, not least that it appropriates a formidable body of "interests" talk from other branches
of Science Studies. It leads us to expect many varieties of metaphysical interests, ranging from an
"existentialial holism" (the need to integrate science into all-embracing worldviews that refocus
attention on the interface between the natural and the supernatural) to a more modest "metaphysical
pragmatics" (the strategy of drawing on beliefs about metaphysical structures as a guide to what
might be true in the realm of natural science). This line of analysis clearly indicates that
"metaphysical interests" ought to be understood as embracing anti-theistic as well as theistic
commitments. The work of reductionists who have explicitly been led by any programme to
discomfort theism or any non-materialistic metaphysics demonstrate the influence of theism on the
content of science as much as the work of their theistic counterparts. Finally, interest-analysis
indicates that "metaphysical interests" compete with other sorts in determining scientists' cognitive
behavior, and that the balance may have changed over time. The institutionalization of scientific
practice and the emergence of a "disciplinary order of sciences" in the early nineteenth century
certainly imposed a powerful new set of guiding commitments on scientists that may well have
competed with metaphysical interests. It is occasionally claimed that theistic and metaphysical
beliefs played a smaller historical role in influencing scientific change after the early nineteenth
century than before. If this is true (and the claim needs to be examined closely), then the fact
should not be seen as reflecting the indirect influence of a more secular and materialistic society,
or the triumph of positivistic methods, but rather the competition of disciplinary and institutional
interests with metaphysicalones in the minds and imaginations of scientists.
This article examines these issues further through a review of some of recent literature in the history
of physics that deals with individuals or episodes in which theistic beliefs (or metaphysical beliefs
linked to theism) are claimed to have influenced the actual cognitive content of "high physics." In
particular it examines recent writing on William Thomson, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Robert
Mayer, the German tradition of Naturphilosophie, and certain aspects of scientific materialism in
Germany. The literature review concentrates mainly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
and explores the relationship between theistic beliefs, their institutional and cultural setting, and the
forms of scientific knowledge they allegedly influenced.
WYKSTRA, Stephen
Title: "The Distinction Between Religious & Metaphysical Beliefs."
Abstract: A philosophical analysis of the distinction between religious and metaphysical beliefs as
it relates to the interaction of faith and science with sensitivity to the history of science and to
theology.