Abstracts
Keynotes
Round Earth, Flat Universe, Squaring the Evidence
Katherine Blundell, Oxford University
I will examine the provisional and evolving nature of our scientific understanding and consider what functions as evidence in our bid to comprehend the Universe in which we live. We now consider that we live not on a flat Earth but a round one and within a flat Universe. However, this has not always been the accepted, consensus view. How do we learn, change our minds, and deepen our understanding of the world around us, and our place in it, in the light of evolving evidence? How does such renewing and refreshing of our understanding in the light of new evidence apply to matters of faith as well as science?
The Book of Proverbs, the Precautionary Principle, and Prudence in Water Management
Susan Bratton, Baylor University
Recent catastrophes in environmental management have led scholars and regulators to invoke the precautionary principle (PP). In its strong form, PP requires limitation of human-initiated change in an ecosystem until it is certain change will do no harm. In its weak form, PP holds that if an action might be environmentally harmful, regulators may, on best evidence, limit human activities to avoid damaging ecosystemic and human health. The Biblical Wisdom literature addresses agricultural expansion in a semi-arid region with unpredictable rains. Wisdom proposes slow implementation of new economic strategies, and attention to impacts of a venture on all community members. The Biblical Law, in contrast, regulates immediate risks from contamination and unsafe agricultural practices. This paper applies both PP and Wisdom to regulating fresh water quality including implementing recycling of potable water in urbanized regions, conserving lake fisheries, and restricting introduction of pharmaceuticals into waste water. The precautionary principle is superior for managing toxins, pollutants, and exotic species, because it requires proof of safety in terms of human or ecological exposures, while Wisdom and prudence have advantages for exploring new means of resource conservation, because they encourage careful development at a moderate pace. The introduction of religious models for environmental virtue into public dialog, may aid communication with religious organizations, and with rural and ethnic populations, by providing familiar language for discussions of environmental policies, and a sense of ethical ownership of decision making processes.
Matter, Antimatter and Beyond
Gerald Gabrielse, Harvard University
An experimental physicist who specializes in very precise measurements of the fundamental properties of particles and antiparticle, of atoms and antiatoms, reflects upon the basic assumptions of his science. A discussion of the science that is now possible will lead to a discussion of what room, if any, that no-nonsense science leaves for faith and religion?
Ordinary Faith, Ordinary Science
William Phillips, National Institute of Standards, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics
Many scientists are also people with quite conventional religious faith. I, a physicist, am one example. This talk explores the nature of my beliefs, and the relationship between my science and my faith. I compare my religious and scientific understanding. While, for me, science and religion differ in many respects (e.g. verifiability and falsifiability of claims), they also have common features (e.g. conclusions based on received knowledge, experience, and reason). I believe in God both as the source of all the wonderful features of the universe and as a personal, interacting friend. I speculate about how scientific understanding relates to these beliefs, and about how God interacts with a world in which the immutability of physics law appears to be a hallmark of God’s faithfulness. I consider some issues that are particularly troublesome to a Christian: why is there suffering if God is good? what about all the good people who are on a different path of faith than Christianity?
Science and Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies
Alvin Plantinga, University of Notre Dame
I’ll argue (1) that contemporary evolutionary theory is not incompatible with theistic belief, (2) that the main antitheistic arguments involving evolution together with other premises also fail, (3) that even if current science, evolutionary or otherwise, were incompatible with theistic belief, it wouldn’t follow that theistic belief is irrational or unwarranted or in any other kind of trouble, and (4) naturalism, the thought that there is no such thing as the God of theistic religion or anything like him, is an essential element in the naturalistic world view, which is a sort of quasi-religion in the sense that it plays some of the most important roles of religion; and the naturalistic world-view is in fact incompatible with evolution. Hence there is a science/religion (or science/quasi-religion) conflict, all right, but it is a conflict between naturalism and science, not theistic religion and science.
Modes of Knowing: Autism and the Knowledge of Persons
Eleonore Stump, St. Louis University
The rapid, perplexing increase in the incidence of autism has led to a correlative increase in research on it. The most salient feature of autism is now thought to be its severe impairment in what psychologists call “social cognition”, or what some philosophers call “mindreading”, namely, the knowledge of persons and their mental states. Autism’s deficits as regards social cognition or mind-reading have made researchers increasingly aware of what normally developing children can do effortlessly, and the recent studies of autism have been matched by new studies of the abilities of normally functioning children. This research in developmental psychology and neurobiology has done a great deal to illuminate the nature of social cognition or mind-reading. These new insights about the knowledge of persons are suggestive for our understanding of what science can and cannot teach us about the world we live in. If the ultimate foundation of all reality is a personal God, as the major monotheisms claim, then it cannot be understood by means of science alone.
Refutation of an Objection to the Principle of Sufficient Reason
C. Anthony Anderson, University of California at Santa Barbara
Christopher Hill and others have posed an objection to the Principle of Sufficient Reason based on the idea that there is such a thing as the conjunction of all true contingent propositions. This version assumes the existence of the conjunction of all the contingently true propositions that there are. There seems to be no good reason for this assumption, but a more sophisticated variant of the argument due to Peter van Inwagen is more resistant to criticism. Nevertheless, van Inwagen’s formulation of the objection is also refutable since it is based on principles about explanation that are subject to counterexamples.
Evolution & Morality
Kelly James Clark, Calvin College
The time has come, E. O. Wilson, bravely trumpeted, “for ethics to be temporarily removed from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” Wilson seeks to divorce ethics from God (or any transcendental source or warrant), hoping “that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus.” Ethics biologicized is ethics based on the evolution of various traits. “True character,” he claims “arises from a deeper well than religion.” Can ethics survive biologicization—can it be grounded in evolution alone? Can ethics be divorced from a transcendental or religious foundation? Are evolutionary and religious accounts of morality in conflict?
The Idea of Law in Science and Religion
Lydia Jaegar, Institut Biblique de Nogent-sur-Marne
For many, a central task of science is the discovery and formulation of the laws of nature. This characterisation of the scientific enterprise, although almost a commonplace today, is nevertheless of recent origin, more or less contemporary with the birth of modern science. It originated in the seventeenth century, when the leaders of the scientific revolution liked to describe their procedures as a break away from Greek science, as transmitted by the medieval scholastics. Laws of nature were introduced as a rival explanation of natural phenomena, which was meant to replace the Aristotelian categories. This article explores the characteristics of the modern concept of natural law, explains its possible biblical and theological roots and asks the extent to which this background can help us gain a renewed understanding of the scientific concept.
Tapestry arguments in physics and biology may help explain public skepticism about evolution
Ard Louis, Oxford University
150 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, public skepticism of evolutionary theory remains surprisingly robust in North America and Europe, even as the scientific consensus among biologists is firmer than ever. A major source of public resistance may lie in the use of evolutionary theory to bolster quasi-metaphysical claims by proponents of reductionism, nihilism and atheism. But another reason many members of the public remain unconvinced may be that they implicitly privilege the culture and rhetoric of the physical sciences and therefore find scientific arguments in favour of evolution, as articulated by biologists, unpersuasive. These patterns are clearly visible in the rhetoric of anti-evolutionary proponents of intelligent design and young earth creation science. This lecture will apply David Mermin’s category of “tapestry arguments” to illuminate the differences in cultures of explanation between the physical and biological sciences, and explore how metaphors and perspectives that originate in physical sciences can enrich the public debate about the meaning and scope of evolutionary theory.
Science, Religion, and Shaping Principles
Jeffrey Koperski, Saginaw Valley State University
Scientific knowledge is often categorized as either experimental or theoretical. There is, however, a third layer where philosophy of science and science proper overlap, the realm of metatheoretic shaping principles. For example, we assume that the causal regularities observed today will also hold tomorrow. Researchers are thereby relying on the metaphysical doctrine known as the uniformity of nature. There are also the “explanatory virtues” of simplicity, testability, internal and external coherence, fruitfulness, and wide scope. My first goal is to categorize these principles and show how they’ve operated in the history of science. Particular attention will be paid to their suspension and rejection, even of widely held principles. My second goal is to consider how certain shaping principles impinge on theology. Of particular interest will be naturalism (both metaphysical and methodological), reductionism, and realism.
The Evolution of Religion: The Adaptive Value of Belief in Supernatural Punishment
Michael Murray, Franklin & Marshall College
Recent accounts that attempt to provide an evolutionary explanation for the pervasive phenomenon of human religiosity fall into two broad camps: adaptationist and non-adaptationist. While non-adaptationist accounts have received a great deal of attention, adaptationist accounts are relatively unknown. One such account argues that selective pressures in the ancestral environment would have favored minds that canalize cognition toward belief in supernatural agents which punish violations of cooperation inducing moral norms. Such belief would have a profound tendency to deter potential free-riders who might otherwise erode the prospects of group cooperation. However, such accounts face serious conceptual and empirical hurdles. In this paper I argue that these hurdles are ultimately fatal to these accounts.
A Genealogy of Early Confucian Moral Psychology
Ryan Nichols, University of Kansas
In this paper I present a genealogical interpretation of Early Confucian moral psychology. After clarifying my methods and goals, I discuss the origins of moral emotions through social instincts. I present reasons for the hypothesis that teachings of Analects and Mencius about the force and scope of emotions for kin mirror inductive generalizations from evolutionary psychology about the importance of high-genetic relatedness as a source of moral emotion and helping behavior. Here I discuss filial piety (xiao 孝), reverence (jing 敬), Mencius’ “sprouts” and Mencius’ responses to Gaozi and Mozi. I then present reasons for the hypothesis that teachings of Analects and Mencius about the force and scope of emotions directed at non-kin also mirror inductive generalizations from evolutionary psychology about the need to provide external incentives to sustain those emotions and the helping behavior to which they give rise. These external incentives include expectations of reciprocity, tit-for-tat style bargaining and social enforcement mechanisms like shame. Here I discuss the concept of reciprocity (shu 恕) in the Analects, the negative Golden Rule and Mencius’ child-at-the-well parable.
Naturalism & the Evolutionary Psychology of Religion
Del Ratzsch, Calvin College
It is widely held that our cognitive faculties are the results of evolutionary processes. It is further generally assumed that accurate (truth-like) cognitive representations and products are fitness enhancing, and will consequently have been selected for, reliability of representation and function having consequently increased over our evolutionary history. But it is also widely held – especially among naturalists – that while our scientific beliefs, structured on various of our evolutionarily produced cognitive faculties, are rational, reliable, and truth-tracking, our religious beliefs, structured also on various of our evolutionarily produced cognitive faculties, are not rational, reliable, or truth-tracking. In what follows, I argue that maintaining that differentiation on any evolutionary basis is not the straightforward matter naturalists casually (and generally implicitly) assume, and that there may be resources for defending religious belief among this general set of issues.
Evolutionary Biology and the Question of Altruism
Jeff Schloss, Westmont College
Since the time of Darwin, a central theoretical question in evolutionary theory has been how (or if) natural selection could give rise to behaviors that genuinely benefit others at net expense to the actor, that is, altruistic sacrifice. Interestingly, this important scientific question involves an issue that is also crucial to many world religions, and especially the Christian tradition, which views sacrificial love as the fundamental moral goal and chief fulfillment of human existence. In the last several decades evolutionary theory has made important progress on this question, in two ways. First, it has come to recognize a series of major evolutionary transitions that involve a progressive increases in cooperation of the history of life. But cooperation is not altruism. Second, new theoretical approaches to human altruism have been. This talk will describe and evaluate several leading contemporary approaches to the biological origin and impact of human altruism. Each major theory sheds light on particular aspects of altruism, none yet provides a fully adequate account, and all acknowledge that there are aspects of human behavioral sacrifice that are unique and not reducible to kinship or reciprocity. Moreover, the theories that appear to be most compatible with the full range of altruism observed in humans, are the most intensely debated within the scientific community. Interestingly, these scientific controversies reflect a long-debated issue in western theology as well, which is whether self-giving love and the moral norms that encourage it, represent an imposition upon an otherwise recalcitrant biological nature or somehow constitute the fulfillment of a self-giving organismal telos.
Moral Psychology and the Moral Faculty in Neo-Confucian Philosophy
David Tien, National University of Singapore
An emerging trend in moral psychology displays a renewed appreciation for the powerful role played by intuitions in producing ethical judgments. This new perspective marks a sharp break from traditional, “rationalist” approaches, in which moral evaluations derive from conscious reasoning, and moral cultivation reflects an improved ability to articulate sound reasons for such conclusions. The moral psychology of Wang Yangming presents a compelling view of how our moral judgments result not from a series of conscious calculations, but from an innate moral faculty that produces emotional responses to morally significant situations.
More Heat than Light: The New Atheists on Religious Belief
Kevin Timpe, University of San Diego
Philosophical opposition to religious belief is nothing new. But in recent years, the critical evaluation of religious belief has grown. One reason for the resurgence of attention to religion in the public sphere is the highly visible work of a number of leading philosophers who actively, and often quite aggressively, argue for atheism in works aimed at the general public, many of which have become best-sellers in western countries. Included in this set is Daniel Dennett’s best-seller Breaking the Spell, and the more confrontationally titled The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. In an article in the November 2006 issue of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf titled these authors “the New Atheists”: “The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil.” In this paper, I examine the central claims of Dennett’s and Dawkins’ recent criticisms of religious belief.
Illustrating the New Historiography: Newton, God, and Gravity
Stephen J. Wykstra, Calvin College
Over the past few decades, historians of science have shed much new light on the rise of modern science. The older positivist historiography—that science arose when we set aside prejudices and speculation, and asked questions that could be answered by strict observation—has been replaced by rich vision of how early modern scientists was shaped by religious and metaphysical background commitments. In my talk, I will illustrate this ongoing historiographical revolution by considering some recent Newtonian scholarship. I will focus on Isaac Newton’s unpublished manuscript “Gravitation and the Equilibrium of Fluids,” which reveals the fascinating interplay of commitments—metaphysical, epistemological, and theological—that shaped Newton’s thinking about matter, force, space, and time. A modernized paraphrase of Newton’s essay will be made available on the website.
Bodies and Souls
Dean Zimmerman, Rutgers University
Dualism, as a philosophical theory about the relation between minds and bodies, is often said to come in two quite different varieties: substance dualism and property dualism. According to the substance dualist, for every person who thinks or has experiences, there is a thing that does the thinking and experiencing but that lacks the physical properties characteristic of human bodies and other material objects. Persons have (or, according to most dualists, are) minds, and minds are nonphysical, thinking things. Property dualism is a weaker thesis: That at least some kinds of mental properties (e.g., propositional attitudes or phenomenal states) are in some way distinct from or independent of physical properties. I argue that, if property dualism is true, then—given the difficulties in locating subjects of consciousness in a purely physical world—substance dualism should remain on the table as a plausible account of what kind of thing we are.