science and religion/Christianity

Stephen Barr in First Things on the passing of Stanley Jaki and Peter Hodgson-- two key players in the intersection between science and religion...

The conversation between science and religion has suffered two sad losses recently, with the deaths of Peter E. Hodgson, the English physicist, on December 8, and Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, the historian and philosopher of science, on April 7....

In the writings of Jaki and Hodgson, however, readers saw a different attitude. They held fast to the truths both of science and revelation, without feeling the need “to cut and pare at the facts” (to borrow a phrase from Maxwell). They believed in the strict lawfulness of nature, without denying either God’s ­freedom or human freedom. They had faith in the competence of physics to explain the physical, while recognizing that there is reality beyond the physical. They accepted evolutionary biology as the great and fruitful branch of science it is, while rejecting the dreary materialist philosophies that have grown on it like fungi. Jaki and Hodgson were among the first of a new wave—a wave that has now grown to include many scientists of international reputation who also defend their robust Christian faith: John C. Polkinghorne, for example, and Owen Gingerich, Micha Heller, Kenneth Miller, and Francis S. Collins....

Some excerpts from Barr on Jaki:

Jaki argued, the doctrine of Christ as the “only begotten” forestalled any conception of the universe as itself a necessary and eternal emanation of the divine. In creation ex nihilo, with a creator who is good, the universe itself must be good and therefore worth investigating. As the creator is the logos, the universe is intelligible and therefore capable of being investigated—and human beings, made in the image of the creator, are intelligent and capable of investigating it. As the creator created freely, the universe is contingent and therefore can be investigated only empirically, rather than by speculative or a priori methods. It was not Christianity that held back modern science, Jaki noted, but the organismic and cyclic universe of ­Aristotle, which the Christian imagination ultimately burst like an old wineskin.

As Christianity helped to provide a sound metaphysical foundation for science, so, argued Jaki, bad metaphysics has led repeatedly to bad science. He traced in rich historical detail how apriorism, whether in its Aristotelian, Cartesian, or German Idealist forms, always gives rise to wildly erroneous scientific speculations. At the other extreme, crude empiricisms, such as those of Hume, Mill, Comte, and Mach, prove equally incompetent...

These repeated embarrassing failures of philosophers to come to grips with science engendered a powerful anti-philosophical prejudice among scientists that continues to this day. Ironically, the naive attempt to do without philosophy produces simpleminded philosophical assumptions all the more dangerous for being unexamined. In particular, it leads to the idea that science consists of nothing but observations (conceived of as sensory input) and logical or mathematical deductions from them. This dovetails with an ontology that has room only for physical entities and mathematical laws...Along with this comes a contempt for all knowledge claims that cannot be subjected to scientific tests....

Finally, Barr's conclusion on Jaki & Hodgson's failure to embrace quantum mechanics:

The fear of subjectivism led both Jaki and Hodgson to a vehement rejection of the traditional understanding of quantum mechanics, against which they inveighed constantly. They hoped that physics would eventually return to a more Newtonian framework, despite the fact that this would entail a return also to the mechanistic and deterministic cosmos from which quantum mechanics had once delivered physics—a deliverance that Jaki celebrated in many passages. In any event, such a return is highly unlikely. In my view, they despaired far too quickly of the possibility of reconciling the traditional understanding of quantum mechanics with a sound metaphysics, challenging though that task may be....