Steve Fuller's "Science of God"

Steve Fuller, at the University of Warwick in the UK, has been proposing for some time that science ought to take God seriously into account.  Here is a brief set of links to his work and related topics. He comes from a Catholic/Jesuit education, but his theology does not seem to agree with the standard Thomistic views as discussed by Edward Feser.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has posted his article The science of God: The philosophical antecedents of Intelligent Design, which is a useful summary of his position. I want to discuss the relation of his work to the theistic science that I am advocating.

Fuller writes:

"Theomimesis" is my neologism for attempts to acquire God's point-of-view - in short, to take literally that we might "get into the mind of God" or even "play God."

The deity in question is Abrahamic, indeed, the "monotheistic" deity that eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers such as John Toland and Gotthold Lessing abstracted as the rational common core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In practice, this monotheism was usually - but not always - heavily biased toward some version of the Christian deity. This deity is distinctive in that it transcends the world it has created, yet its nature is sufficiently close to our own that we might reasonably aspire to approximate the deity's virtues.

This agrees well with the principles of theistic science, following from the core principles of theism whereby God is Love Itself,  and whereby our life is a kind of reduced image of God. Our mental activities of desiring and thinking exist because they derive from the love and wisdom of God.

The theomimetic moment has been captured in several ways. Kant, ever the diplomat, spoke of God as a "regulative ideal of reason." More plain-speaking theologians and philosophers have followed the great fourteenth century Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus' theory of "univocal predication" whereby divine attributes differ from human ones only by degree not kind. Thus, God may be "all knowing" but the sense in which God "knows" is the same as our own, except we "know" to a much lesser degree. This in turn allowed for direct comparisons between human and divine conditions of being, resulting in a trajectory of progress - typically presented as a project of species self-improvement from Adam's Fall to (possibly) the construction of Heaven on Earth.

This is also more or less true, once we acknowledge that the work of 'species self-improvement' is something done largely by God's regeneration of our spiritual life insofar as we permit that to happen. I have discussed before the significance of "univocal prediction" of divine attributes.

Two versions of this project have enjoyed considerable secular influence in the modern era:

• Leibniz's theodicy, which would understand Creation in terms of a divine utility function that tolerates many local harms in service of ours being "the best possible world";
• Hegel's philosophy of history, which makes temporality constitutive of God's own self-realization, which means that Creation itself is incomplete as long as the distinction between God and humanity remains.

Historically these two secular theomimetic projects are known as capitalism and socialism, respectively. The theomimetic agents are correspondingly known as the entrepreneur and the vanguard.

But once religious believers started to take seriously that the actual world might reflect the design of a divine intelligence that is literally "superhuman" - that is, the ultimate extension of human intelligence - disaffection quickly set in, as God seemed to operate on the principle that the end justifies the means. For humans this normally means "unscrupulous."

To be sure, the Jesuits (God bless them!) had already seen this problem in the Counter-Reformation, proposing the "doctrine of double effect," which aims to dissociate what one intends and what one anticipates. Thus, God always intends good, and through his all-powerful nature can bring about good, but the good of primary interest to the deity is ultimate good, not immediate or transient good. These lesser goods are related directly to matter, which for God is always a negotiable instrument. So while it is unfortunate that many must suffer and die, this would happen in service of an end to which they themselves would have agreed (had they been asked). Both military invasion and land dispossession have been justified on these terms.

It seems that we are failing here to have a proper account of God's management of the world, and how Divine Providence is managed.  We see, furthermore, how misunderstandings of theology lead to strange political platforms.

In light of this reasoning, it is perhaps unsurprising that Charles Darwin renounced his lingering attachment to Christianity once he studied closely William Paley's Natural Theology, which openly endorsed Reverend Thomas Malthus' views of divine population control through resource constraint. Of course, Darwin retained the substance of Malthus' theory - now re-branded as "natural selection" - but he refused to believe in the existence of a deity who would allow so many members of so many species to endure such miserable existences. Darwin's morally fuelled atheism thus led him to a kind of Neo-Epicureanism that dissipated divine responsibility in a sophisticated version of metaphysical indeterminacy.

Again questions of divine providence seem to be driving scientific ideas, and in 'strange' directions. Darwin's principle of natural selection, I showed, is impossible within theism.

However, the decline of theomimesis among professional theologians is trickier to explain. Most embraced Darwin's empirical findings and hypotheses without losing their faith. Indeed, the strong pro-science orientation of theologians in the half-century following the publication of Origin of Species is exemplified in Adolf von Harnack, who served as political midwife to the birth of the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institutes, the pioneer vehicle for state-industry-academia research collaborations.

But the close bond between science and theology was undone by the German scientific community's strong presence in the First World War, whose unprecedented devastation led many theologians to doubt that science could be treated as the pursuit of God by technologically enhanced means. From this conclusion arose the sort of "fideism" championed by Karl Barth, which in the name of humanity's fallen state rendered theology a self-referential discourse without any aspirations or accountability vis-a-visthe world as understood by science. As the "Great War" had shown - at least to Barth's satisfaction - the very attempt to redeem theological claims in scientific terms was itself to court evil.

A very interesting observations, of how bad science and bad politics are repulsive.

Barth's regrettably influential inward turn helps to explain the ease with which science's staunchest twentieth-century philosophical supporters, the logical positivists, could get away with asserting the "non-cognitive" status of religious discourse - without hearing much theological complaint in return. Today's "New Atheists" merely raise the positivist ante by querying the whole point of religion, once its cognitive aspirations have been abandoned. In response, religious believers do themselves no favours by acting as if theology were literary criticism applied to an especially vividly experienced form of imaginative writing, otherwise known as "fiction."

Exactly. Theistic science aims to reclaim the cognitive status of scientific discourse, and show how theology may be used to make factual claims and predictions about the world.

Still worse offenders are those "religious pluralists" who declare intelligent design theory - the natural heir to the theomimetic tradition sketched above - as "bad science and bad theology" (here I think pre-eminently of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God). This must count as the "Big Lie" promulgated in the contemporary science-religion debate, for it merely serves to throw honest inquirers off a trail that would lead back to a literal construal of theology as the "science of God."

In that case, one might expect theories about God's nature to have scientifically tractable consequences, just as the protagonists of Europe's seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution had thought, the main fruit of which was Newton's world-system. In this context, the physicist Frank Tipler, the most dogged proponent of a metaphysically full-blown version of the "anthropic principle," must count as someone who lives up to this ideal, despite his outlier status in both science and theology.

Frank Tipler's theology is very far from theism, we should note. Only rather strange ideas seem to be promulgated these days!

For those looking to work their way back to a clear theological foundation for theomimesis, the best place to start is with Augustine of Hippo's interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis. In particular, he stressed three points of lasting significance:

1. A strong reading of our having been created "in the image and likeness of God." The Jews had originally read this passage as a naturalistic explanation for why God found it so much easier talking to humans than other creatures, while Muslims took it to mean that humans were essentially God's robots, ideal vehicles for the conveyance of the divine message, as in the composition of the Qur'an by the functionally illiterate Muhammad. However, Augustine, following Paul (in Romans 5), read this passage to anticipate Jesus, understood not as another Jewish prophet but the "Son of God," which encouraged the idea that humans could be godlike. In the short term, this idea begat many of the heresies that Augustine sought to stamp out as Bishop of Hippo, but it opened the door to query what it might mean to live in imago dei: Are we to live our lives according to the dictates of Jesus' anointed successors, or are we to rediscover Jesus for ourselves in each new generation? In short: Peter's or Paul's way of spreading the Gospel. Nowadays the choice looks like Catholicism versus Protestantism, but it was already present at the medieval founding of the universities, with the Dominican stress on natural history and the Franciscan stress on optics. But equally it captures two scholarly ways of reading the Bible "literally": as a historical document or as a theatrical script. In the one case, we recover the Word (that is, we find out what they meant back then); in the other, we re-enact the Word (we find out what they would mean now). By the late-nineteenth century, this had crystallised as the distinction between "idiographic" and "nomothetic" sciences, the one focussed on the archive, the other the laboratory.

Remembering the "imago dei" is an extremely important part of theistic science. Further developments in theistic science furthermore indicate that the literal readings of scripture are only one of the many meanings that those texts may have. The Bible has many deeper meanings.

2. A stress on the qualified nature of God's forgiveness of Adam's sin. Augustine interpreted Adam's divine death sentence, which extended to all his descendants, as implying that his sin was forgiven yet not forgotten: Each generation is born with a version of Adam's sin that they must then somehow redeem for themselves, presumably with divine approval and preferably with the aid of Jesus. (Contrast this with the account provided in Qur'an 7: Adam's debt is cancelled in return for perpetual submission, the literal meaning of "Islam.") A key feature of what Augustine coined as "Original Sin" is the specification of Adam's failure as being one of judgement, not action. Adam and Eve had erroneously trusted the serpent's plausible reasoning. Henceforth there would be grounds for questioning one's understanding of words, even though God had called things into existence. Many of the distinctive preoccupations of modern science flow from this sensibility, including these three: (a) the search for a pure language of thought that overcomes the noise of natural languages; (b) the concern with distinguishing genuine causal relations from their virtual ("evil") twin, empirical correlations; (c) the desire to mitigate our inherent imperfections by reverse engineering the bases of our material nature, tellingly called "genetics." Common to these preoccupations is the idea that Evil, though radically different in nature from Good, is quite similar in its appearance. Thus, considerable ambiguity has dogged the moral standing of science "pursued for its own sake," as this most ennobling of human endeavours can easily tip over into inhumane acts, as in the Faust legend.

Fuller is here briefly touching on the fact that our understanding changes significantly during the stages of our spiritual regeneration. And similarly, if we spiritually decline, that our understanding of spiritual things will decline. He also notes the fact that everyone thinks of what they desire as good, even if they have poor spiritual insight and hence mistake evil for good.

3. The placement of equal emphasis on the perfection of divine creation as a whole and the radical imperfection of its parts. The story of Creation is presented as a piecemeal process, in which God appears to weigh options, given the (undisclosed) limitations of the material medium within which creation must occur. With the rise of Islam, the divine modus operandi comes to be compared to a chess game in which the grandmaster always win but by means dictated by the position of the pieces on the board. In any case, the existence of such options suggests that God is an "optimiser" - or, as economists say, a "constrained maximiser" - whose ideal solution to the problem of Creation requires many calculated trade-offs that, when taken in isolation, may appear unbecoming of a supreme deity, if not downright evil. The "will" was the name coined for a divine faculty, also present in humans, which realizes the outcomes of such calculations. But it is arguably just such knowledge that God was trying to hide from Adam when he forbade him from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because he wished humanity to be innocent of the "dirty work" of creation - namely, the possibilities that had to be forgone to enable things to be as they are. However, once Adam had been persuaded to eat of the forbidden tree, the only possible (if at all) way back into God's good graces was by discovering - however fitfully and imperfectly it was likely to be - the divine plan to which the forbidden tree had promised access. This meant capturing in temporal terms (over many generations) an achievement that God had accomplished from a standpoint equidistant from all places and times ("the view from nowhere"). The signature legacy of humans trying to reverse engineer the intelligence behind divine creation is the idea that scientific inquiry should aim for the most economical set of universal laws, where such laws are understood as covering not only generalisations of experience but also counterfactual possibilities (for example, those that God considered but rejected).

This story of the nature of Adam's error is a little odd. According to theism, it is rather the desire to deny that his life is forever dependent on God and the desire instead to be 'as God' with life in himself. Fuller also fails to understand the deeper importance of "will". The true will of a person is the state of the loves which constitute the being and life of him or her.

Images of God

We now have to establish principles that make connections between what God is and what we are. We saw previously that we do share ‘being’ . Now we look for more detailed relations that govern our interior constitution. The first thing to establish is whether there is any such detailed relation. Is there a principle in core theism which affords connections between Divinity and the mundane world?  Certainly, if God continually sustains our existence, then we would expect that there must be something about ourselves, and continue to be that something, that allows these acts of sustaining to have their effects. In Judaism and Christianity, humans are made ‘in the image of God, in His likeness.’ (Genesis 1:26) This imageo dei appears to tell us something about humans, and, perhaps, something about God. Some evolutionists take being in the image of God as not making ontological claims at all. It is generally interpreted,  however, to mean that humans are rational or have a rational soul because God is in some sense the Logos, the first principle of rationality. In this view, animals are not images of God and neither are plants or inorganic material. 

Apart from our rationality, we can see that we have many similarities with animals. The internal functions of our bodies are almost all mirrored in simpler forms in some animal or another. Even plants have nutritional functions within their physiology that are simpler forms of the biological functions that go on within our human bodies. Moreover, within the Bible story of creation, the processes leading up to the creation of man suggest that plants and animals were partial contributions to this making, not to mention that they can both be food for humans. There are a great many internal similarities of plants and animals with humans. Such similarities remain even though animals have sensation and locomotion that plants do not and even though humans have a rationality that animals do not.

All these similarities cannot be about size or shape since there is an enormous range of sizes from the smallest plant cells to the largest mammals. Instead, we must be talking of similarities of internal forms and functions. If the similarities concern the systemic organization of living organisms, then there are indeed similarities between cells and mammals, starting from metabolic, genetic and sensory structures. Even nonliving things have their own patterns of nuclear, atomic, molecular and chemical structures, which everything in the world is conceivably able to share in some way.

Humans themselves are, of course, more than just their rationality. It is common to say that a human is a whole and unified person which consists of one body-mind combination and to try in this way to obviate the problems of conceiving minds and bodies together without a ‘dreaded’ dualism. Our own theistic view of the unity of humans will be discussed later; for now we only insist that humans contain not just rationality in the soul, but also sensations, loves, affections, actions—and that all these have effects in the body as well as in the mind and/or soul.

Let us take a broader view of the constitution of humanity and of the structure and materials of which our bodies are formed. We should give a generalized formulation of the way in which we, with all the world, are images of God. This is to add to our set of postulates the assertion:

Postulate 5  All the world, and each of its parts, is a kind of image of God.

This formulation still allows that the rationality of humans is a special kind of image of God, namely a more complete image. To be a ‘likeness’ seems to imply a closer and more complete relationship than an ‘image’. This generalized principle implies that plants and animals are also in the image of God but to a lesser extent. The challenge to theistic science is to elucidate in each case what kind of image of God is involved and what ‘lesser extent’ is implied in connection with plants, or even conceivably, with minerals, etc.

We observe that present-day humans are not angelic in everyday life and that some fail to show even normal humanity, let alone glimpses or pictures of divinity. In such cases, the generalized principle, which allows for lesser images, seems entirely appropriate. We should also note that the ‘image and likeness’ comes at the end of a creation story, and hence that such similarities are more like the culmination than the starting point of our religious and spiritual life. It may therefore be that the creation story describes, by images and likenesses, the stages of spiritual regeneration in religious life, rather than of stars, planets, plants and animals.

The possibility, even widespread likelihood, of lesser images of God is in agreement with the eternity of God. That eternity implies that God is constant while the world varies. That is, variations in the ways that creatures are sustained must reflect the variations in those individual beings, not in God himself. Similar conclusions are indicated by Matt. 5:45: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”.

Since organic and inorganic non-living materials have extensive similarities in their atomic structures to living materials, we may conclude that physical materials are, in a weak sense, also made in the image of God.

The postulate of theism, that all things in the world (all the human and inhuman, all the good and the barely good) are each a ‘kind of image of God’, allows us to make significant progress in theistic science. The properties of God must be conceived in such a way that our being such images is a sensible claim. The non-trivial question is then to determine what kind of lesser image should be envisaged in each case. The following chapters will describe the structures of the world in such a way that they can be images of the divine. This is the heart of theistic science, which describes general structures for mental and physical objects. Our task will be to identify the specific parts of this structure. This is easier since fortunately many of them have already been discovered by science.

We note that the principle of imageo dei is often criticized as anthropomorphic, as if God were (to much amusement) the ideal creature of each group of humans or animals. However, we are proceeding in the other direction: we are starting from basic features of God and seeing how the world might be constituted and might function in the presence of such a God. In a genuine theism, this is not at all the anthropomorphic ‘God in the image of man’, but rather ‘theomorphic’: man in the image of God.

Adapted from chapter 10 of Starting Science From God.

Can there be Esoteric Knowledge?

Parallel to the standard 'exoteric' view of the state (whether of the established church, or of established science), there have long been other esoteric views about mind, spirituality and religion, that have been somewhat different, even radically different. Most of us feel that we are party to one or more of these esoteric perspectives, and, of those, most will also feel a considerable tension between these rare beliefs and those of our universities, industries and government. Furthermore, there are many apparent discrepancies between different esoteric schemes.

Our challenge is unify the inner and the outer, to find our integrity again. We have to creatively resolve, especially within ourselves, the tension between the disparate elements. Standard views will have to be considerably extended, and the esoteric themes will have to be developed into considerably more detail.

Fortunately, we have at least a few illustrious predecessors who give us indications of the way this could possibly be done, by telling us how they resolved these tensions. Here,  I begin with Emanuel Swedenborg.

From different religious and esoteric traditions, we hear general concepts such as that

• ‘Humans are created in the image of God’, and
• ‘As above, so below’,

but is there sufficient detail here? It is clear that if we are to develop a new science from these views, then we need considerably more detail about one or more of ‘God’, ‘above’ and/or ‘below’.

For example, if our principal view of the Divine as ‘an unknowable unity’, then it is not clear how to carry on to make a science. Conversely, if we view God as having arbitrary omnipotence, then ‘anything is possible’, and again a rational science is difficult to imagine. Alternatively, we can speculate endlessly, with enormous variation, to form rational schemes which describe the essential features of our physical world combined with some new spiritual features. To induce specific, workable and useful knowledge, I believe that we need some guidance from someone who already knows. Otherwise we are guessing in the dark.

Thus, again we are obliged to consider the knowledge and wisdom of some of our predecessors. We may consider this either as inspiration or revelation, but, whatever the source and whatever the means, we have to decide of ourselves which to consider. In this blog I am trying to develop and apply the knowledge presented by Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg is particularly useful because of his position as ‘rational visionary’ within the Western Christian tradition. Not that he leaves this tradition unchanged, but that, more clearly than does Plotinus for example, he explains in much detail the visionary and mystical contents of many of the outer forms of Christianity.

Are the ideas of theistic science common knowledge? Or are they esoteric? Are they part of ‘science of consciousness’? In the past, only those with esoteric interests have found these ideas. They are commonly only found by going beyond ‘literal meanings’ of religious, to various esoteric texts. But what we want should not be esoteric, but common knowledge! They should be part of everyone’s knowledge who is interested. Just as science is today: so they should be part of science, namely the science of consciousness.

Furthermore, they should not be esoteric because we are somehow ashamed of the new theories. We should be able to tell them to our neighbors without belittling them or their everyday efforts to be friendly, faithful, loving and useful.

We may intuitively agree with the above principles. But Swedenborg gives reasons for them all. Let us follow these reasons, and develop a theistic science to see what must be in the ‘science of consciousness’ for these principles to hold.

www.beginningtheisticscience.com