We come to the end of our series within a series, on Michael Allen Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity. We’ve spent a lot of time on this text because it’s such good, rich material, and because it’s a fairly recent book with a genuinely novel perspective. For my part, I’m persuaded that nominalism goes a long way toward explaining the modern world. Before we leave this Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XIV: Nominalism, Petrarch, and the Renaissance Origins of Humanism
In the last two articles, we explored the origins of nominalism in an obscure medieval controversy, and the sharp break it represented with past traditions in philosophy. The prior model of knowledge had been based on mathematics, where definitions, deduction, and a priori reason yielded certain knowledge. The certainty of knowledge arrived at through these means created secure Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XIII: William of Ockham and the Origins of Nominalism
In the last article, we saw how William of Ockham developed his nominalist philosophy in the context of disputes within the medieval Franciscan order. Ockham’s nominalism—the thesis that there are no real, abstract universal concepts, but that these terms refer only to ideas that we have—undercut Aristotelian arguments about the naturalness of property ownership, based as they Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XII: Michael Allen Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity
In the previous two articles, we saw how two competing, perhaps contradictory, inheritances from Plato were absorbed into Christian theology. There was, on the one hand, the conception of God as self-sufficient, immovable perfection, which rendered the existence of the world of experience superfluous, and, indeed, problematic. On the other hand, there was the conception of God Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XI: Arthur O. Lovejoy, the Great Chain of Being and Pre-Darwinian Biology
In the previous two articles, we took a detour in order to explore two interactions between theology and the science of astronomy. In the first, I argued that the oft-repeated narrative, which holds that Copernicus’s heliocentric model demolished a prideful, theologically inspired anthropocentrism, was not historically accurate. In the one that followed, I argued that a Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part X: Thomas Paine and the Controversy over Extraterrestrial Life
In the previous article, we explored the claim that Copernican astronomy humbled human—and specifically, theological—pride. I tried to show that this particular story about science and theology was not really true, as medieval people did not think that the earth was special because it was in the center of things. On the contrary, they thought of the center as the worst place Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part IX: Did Heliocentrism Knock Humanity off Its Perch?
We are often told that Europeans, in the medieval times, believed that Earth was at the center of the universe, and therefore especially good and important. An anthropocentric point of view flattered human vanity, according to this story. Sigmund Freud was perhaps its most famous representative. He wrote: Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part VIII: Arthur O. Lovejoy, the Great Chain of Being
In the previous article, we saw how geometry set the standard for knowledge in the world of ancient Greek philosophy, and how Christian theology emerged out of an effort to harmonize the very different traditions of Greek and Hebraic thought. Plato’s theory of the forms is perhaps his most famous contribution to philosophy, and requires no extensive discussion. But, as Arthur Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part VII: Plato and the Geometric Model of Knowledge
In order to better appreciate the relationship between the collections of knowledge claims, today labeled “science” and “religion,” it may be helpful to take a step back and look at the category of knowledge itself. What do we know, and under what circumstances can we be said to know it? A historical approach to this question will eschew normative claims about true, justified Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part VI: Jonathan Hedley Brooke, Complexity Thesis
In previous articles, we’ve explored conflict, independence, synthesis, and dialogue models in science and religion studies. Since I’m a historian, or at any rate studying to become one, it would be remiss for me to not mention a fifth model, not discussed by Barbour, but squarely in the mainstream of historical scholarship. This is the complexity thesis: that the richness and Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part V: Ian Barbour—The Synthesis Model
In previous articles, we explored the conflict, independence, and dialogue models in science and religion studies. We now turn to Ian Barbour’s favored model, synthesis. In the synthesis model, the goal is to arrive at a unified world picture that incorporates the most important insights from both science and theology. Barbour identifies three principle representatives of the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part IV: Ian Barbour—The Dialogue Model
In previous articles, we explored the conflict and independence models. Both take the view that science and theology need to be sharply distinguished, either such that they make incompatible claims about the same dimensions of life, or compatible claims about different ones. A third view, articulated by Ian Barbour, the founder of Science and Religion studies, is the dialogue Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part III: Ian Barbour—The Independence Model
In our last article, we examined the conflict model for the interaction between science and theology. The conflict model holds that science and theology discuss essentially the same set of facts, and do so in mutually exclusive ways. They cannot both be valid, either as sets of facts or general approaches. As philosopher Helen De Cruz has observed, however, “The vast majority Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part II: Ian Barbour—The Conflict Model
If one had to attach a name to the contemporary revival of interest in science and religion, the name would almost certainly be that of physicist Ian Barbour (1923–2013, pictured right). His 1966 book, Issues in Science and Religion, outlined four models for interaction between science and religion: conflict, dialogue, synthesis, and independence. These four models have Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part I: Introduction
Where did humanity, the world of life, and our universe come from? What sort of patterns do they evince, how can they be explained, and how can we affect their outcome? Science tries to answer questions like this through observation, measurement, and experiment. One of the defining characteristics of our time is the centrality of science to our society and our understanding of Continue Reading …
Creationism and Structural Relations between Sciences
One of the points that creationist Ken Ham made in his debate with Bill Nye, and presumably is still making on his site "Answers in Genesis," is that we have to distinguish between experimental and historical sciences. According to his argument, physics is an experimental science, evolution and geology are historical. Since the first type produces testable knowledge, and the Continue Reading …
Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha”
But one thing this doctrine, so clear, so venerable, does not contain: it does not contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. –Hermann Hesse Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was a German-Swiss novelist and poet whose introspective, philosophical romances have inspired generations of young people. His parents were devoted Continue Reading …
The Ship of Theseus and “The Outer Limits of Reason”
In his book The Outer Limits of Reason, MIT computer scientist Noson S. Yanofsky explores a number of paradoxes that, he argues, are intrinsic to the process of cognition. According to his argument, the universe does not contain contradictions, but our thinking about it does and must. If this is true, any representation of the universe must be inaccurate, not simply in details, Continue Reading …
Leo Strauss: Three Waves of Modernity
The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact … that modern western man no longer knows what he wants—that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, right and wrong. –Leo Strauss Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a German-Jewish political philosopher who, like earlier conservatives and later postmodernists, challenged the central contention of the Continue Reading …
Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. –Friedrich Hayek Military strategists divide large-scale conflicts into “theaters of war.” During the Second World War, for instance, Europe was divided into Western, Eastern, North African, and Atlantic theaters. From the Continue Reading …