fruitful faith » science

patience…

Dale — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:59:35 +0000

With any discipline or line of enquiry, patience is a virtue.

We must have patience regarding the amount we will ever be able to know about a given topic. Whether your ‘-ology’ is of ‘bios’, ‘theos’, or ‘cosmos’, it’s essential to remember that there will always be more questions. For some, this is an enquiry-stopper. ”Heck, if we can’t know it all, why bother?” For myself, however, this is invigorating! More to learn! More to think about! More to consider! Let’s get to it!

a trinity of ‘knowledge-lights’…

Dale — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:42:35 +0000

Epistemology is the most foundational of topics in philosophy. How trustworthy is human knowledge? Or worded another way: How much ‘faith’ (Greek ‘pistis’ for ‘trust’) can we put in what we think we know? At one end of the spectrum, you have narrow, ‘verificationist’ epistemologies (such as: logical positivism & naive realism) that only trust knowledge that can be ‘verified’ by empirical methods. At the other, you have skeptical ‘post modern’ epistemologies (such as the phenomenalism of Maurice Merleau-Ponty – The Phenomenology of Perception) which hold that all we can truly ‘know’ is the ‘sense data’ of our perceptions.In his book, The New Testament and the People of God, N.T. Wright follows the thought of renowned Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan (particularly his Generalised Empirical Method) discussing a kind of middle-way between positivism and phenomenalism: ‘critical realism’. Elsewhere, he has described an ‘epistemology of love’, where love is that which a) respects the ‘otherness’ of the other, while at the same time b) remaining in rich subjective relationship to it. Critical realism is first critical in that it is aware of its potential for self-deception and the distortion of perception, but it is not so critical that it does not take the second post-critical step of then daring to describe the reality it believes it actually ‘knows’.

I’ve been recently intrigued, however, by a talk on Epistemology by Mark Strom (audio here) where he claims that all human knowledge involves not only acts of love, but also faith and hope. I find this really compelling. Our knowledge of any activity, person, principle or thing involves faith, hope and love – in some form, and at some level.

Scientific knowledge, for an interesting example, involves all three. The natural scientist must first have faith (Greek pistis, meaning ‘trust’) that his object of study, the natural world, will, under the exact same conditions, always behave exactly the same way in the present and future as we’ve observed it to in the past. She also hopes that the hunch followed will be fruitful, that the experiment designed will be sufficient, and that the knowledge gained will be helpful and worthwhile. And finally, there is also love – the relational dynamism between a subject and object; in the case of science, between the observer and the observed, the cosmologist and the cosmos, the neurologist and the neurons.

Faith, hope and love (I thought for a few minutes today), then can be thought of as the ‘vehicles’ by which knowledge comes to us. However, this, I decided, is too anthropocentric a metaphor. Better to see them as ‘lights’ by which we are enabled to ‘see’ Truth. But of course, this vision remains imperfect, blurry and ‘dim’…

Love never ends. Prophecies? They will be set aside. Tongues? They will cease. Knowledge? It will be set aside. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 13:8-13

the mighty chorus

Dale — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:02:53 +0000

Just making preparations for song-leading at Carey graduation, and spotted this gem of a line, which opens the fourth verse of Henry van Dyke’s hymn (to the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy), Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee:

Mortals join the mighty chorus, which the morning stars began…

I love the thought of all of the vast ages upon ages of ‘chorusing’ that the stars have sounded. And that we humble and small and relatively quiet humans get to ‘join’ (not lead!!) it.

methinks no telos in evolution

Dale — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:45:06 +0000

My ‘techno-skepto’ mate, Damian, has posted an updated version of his funky cool little evolving tool. Head over and have a play with the numbers (offspring & mutation rate) and the target phrase.

for all

Dale — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:35:31 +0000

James Chastek points out that the authors of Scripture were not constructing a body of ‘evidence’ for God, but rather relating their testimony of things they were witnesses to. He remarks, “Christ, for one, was chiefly interested in making sure that he would have continual witnesses on earth, not that there would be any careful documentation of what he did or incontrovertible evidence that he did it. [...] It is not obvious that founding everything on a monument, a DNA finding, a more meticulous Hebrew census-taking, etc. would be a better way to go.”

And it occurs to me that founding the faith on personal testimony instead of ‘evidence’ (i.e. “a monument, a DNA finding, a more meticulous Hebrew census-taking, etc.”) is more fitting of a God who wishes to be known to any and all persons and not only to archaeologists, geneticists, and historians.

the nature of nature

Dale — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:26:10 +0000

Most popular level ‘arguments for God’ are based on the ‘art/artisan’ analogy, which is probably dismissed a little to easily at times. But nature can still quite rightly and easily seen to be God’s creation even if it was not ‘artificially‘ designed. Artifacts are designed by an artisan, and ‘natural’ things have a mystifying yet lawful and consistent character of having ability to do what they do. The question is: why is nature like it is? Even a complete understanding of abiogenesis would still leave the question: how did those things get the power to come together and become living? Which reminds me of a striking question to put to the so-called ‘design theorists’: Wouldn’t God be smart enough to make a nature that could actually do stuff?

brute moral facts?

Dale — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:28:37 +0000

It’s not every day you see an article in a theological journal by an atheist.

But lo and behold, the latest issue (downloadable here freely) of American Theological Inquiry includes a ‘guest’ article by Erik J. Wielenberg called “Objective Morality and the Nature of Reality”, which is a rejoinder to a theistic critique in a former issue. He calls his approach “non-natural, non-theistic, moral realism”. See for yourself, but when he goes on about “brute moral facts” and doesn’t seem worried that they are without any foundation, I just don’t follow him at all (not that I think the fellow he is critiquing has it sussed either).

polkinghorne on fine tuning

Dale — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 01:17:49 +0000

Interesting article (with video) here.

good maximal happiness?

Dale — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:37:27 +0000

Not only are Sam Harris’ recent thoughts about morality in tension with basic philosophical distinctions such as is/ought and fact/value, it also re-raises basic questions raised by utilitarian ethics – namely which version of ‘happiness’ is right?

I listened to an interesting discussion of Sam’s ideas today (thanks to Damian for highlighting it), and at one point they were talking about the hypothetical possibility of finding a “wellness” part of the brain. You might as well name it the “wellness according to this brain’s owner” part of the brain. But anyway, apart from the problems with this thought experiment, it did start me on a thought path that led me to the following:

Consider that we define¹ the goal of morality to be not only the maximal happiness of one individual, but the maximal happiness of all humans (leaving non-human ‘happiness’ aside for the moment). Suppose we could tell from brain function when humans were feeling (and to what degree they were feeling) ‘happy’ as defined by them.

The most ethical action to achieve or work toward this goal, then, would be any action which would cause the most (or all) humans to have that specific brain function (or the highest intensity of that brain function) which signaled human happiness.

Putting aside the fact that implementing this ‘action’ (whatever it might be) with universal scope – all of humanity – would almost certainly involve forcing it upon a good many people, we can also speculate that it would be very, very expensive. Imagine voting on that use of our tax dollars.

It could well be that (again, putting aside the issue of forcing it on unwilling humans) the most financially expedient way to accomplish this would be to find a way to make people believe that things were happening to them that were too expensive to actually make happen in reality.

Every single human could – conceivably – simultaneously enjoy a state of maximal happiness. The utility goal getting the big tick…

What? Haven’t you seen ‘The Truman Show‘ or ‘The Matrix‘?

somewhat arbitrarily and non-scientifically, I hasten to add

as nature intended – 2

Dale — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 10:27:57 +0000

Another culturally embedded phrase in addition to “just as nature intended” refers to “letting nature take its course.” Excuse me? …its course?? Again, nature has no intentions… as if it had some magical ability to transcend itself and perceive the course of its own history… in other words, as if nature were supernatural.