User:Mkmcconn/Scratchpad

This cul de sac exists temporarily, for the purpose of thinking some things through. I am interested in intellectual history and philosophy (although I am not an expert in these fields), within a dogmatic, Reformed, Christian-theistic perspective. I have only a minor interest in science, per se. But lately I've been paying more attention than usual to the Creation versus Evolution articles; and this scratchpad records some of my thoughts on the subject.

I have already admitted that I am not an expert; but only an expert has the right to ask and presume to answer such questions as I try to do below. Anyone may ask and answer, but only the expert has a right to do so without being laughed at. That's why, although this page is publicly posted, it is not public material. It's only here because I am bothered by the issues it addresses, and I can't disguise this when I try to write public material on the issues dealt with below.

Prolegomena

The Calvinist is commanded to believe. Part of what he is required to believe, is that he ought to doubt the soundness of his own beliefs.

1 Corinthians 8
2 If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.

On one level the Calvinist says presumptively, "I do not believe as I ought to", because he believes in total depravity.

That is, the Calvinist believes that people, despite their best intentions, not only make mistakes but also deceive themselves. This is because even their intentions are not what they should be, and this distortion that enters into thought is on the one hand wilfully chosen, and on the other hand is a surrender of their freedom to know the truth. Just below the surface, people know what the truth is, because they are constantly confronted with it; but they hide the truth from themselves, by subtleties which they are all-too-willing to believe. The Calvinist believes himself to be like other people, and like others, a guilty victim of self-deception.

But, let's assume for the sake of making the point, that only Calvinists are afflicted with this problem of total depravity. I'm sure that this will be permitted to me, by everyone: by Calvinists because they believe it to be true of themselves, and by others because they like to think it true of Calvinists (that Calvinists are perverse). Certainly, history is full of examples that will prove the point that Calvinists are depraved, and so, we are on very solid ground to speak this way.

As I started to say, an important implication of the doctrine of total depravity for the Calvinist, is the doubtfulness of his own knowledge, wisdom, and righteousness. Here, I'm speaking in particular about the doubtfulness of his powers of intellection. Calvinists call this "the noetic effects of sin". This means that the Calvinist's mind is not trustworthy. The deliverances of his reason are not declared immune to doubt; and most disturbingly, this applies even to the interpretation of Scripture.

A practical effect of this doctrine, is that the Calvinist is more than usually inclined to develop rules by which to test his interpretation of the facts. The thoughts that pop into the fevered brain are not given automatic credibility: instead, they are tested. These rules are especially rigorously applied to those propositions of new ideas about God, because it is precisely on the subject of who God is and the duty owed to God by his creatures, that the imagination is least to be trusted.

One example of these rules, by which the Calvinist tests his own thinking for self-betrayal, is called "the analogy of faith". The Analogy of Faith supposes the integral nature of all truth. In seeking to believe the truth, belief is predicted to be capable of reflecting this integrity of truth. If a particular point of uncertainty can be decided by comparison to accepted belief on another point, then the probability of the truth of both beliefs is commended by analogy. In other words, there are normative beliefs (things considered more clear) which serve as the norm for helping to decide doubtful beliefs (things not as certainly believed). This is the reason that Reformed churches adopt creeds. These are collections of normative beliefs, which help to decide doubtful beliefs.

[Note: It is because Calvinism is chiefly concerned with godliness, that the Noetic Effects of Sin become important. The resulting investments in epistemology and the philosophy of science, no matter how intensely these have been investigated at times, are merely a byproduct. Calvinism is not a philosophy of science, any more than it is a theory of politics; but it has produced these byproducts. Also, these byproducts have never been regarded as an unmixed blessing.]

Creation: God is a given

There are few articles of his faith in which the Calvinist invests more significance, than the doctrine of Creation. This is one of those normative beliefs just mentioned; creation of all things by the Holy Trinity is considered to be one thing that is very clear.

The Calvinist, cannot imagine that divine acts only operate in the internal economy of the world as a way of making up for lack of sufficient explanation in naturalistic terms. God is not the explanation for what physics cannot explain. This is a persistent myth of philosophical naturalism, that the arena in which God appears to operate is always shrinking. The Calvinist has to think for a moment, just to understand what in the world the naturalist must be thinking, because it makes no sense. The arena of God's activity always seems to expand, for the Calvinist. It never shrinks, because we are always learning much more about everything, and everything that we know about how created things work expands our knowledge of God's activity. There is no room in a Calvinist's thinking, for a God whose activity is only evident where naturalistic causes seem insufficiently accounted for.

Literally, what I have just said is false. I said "there is no room in his thinking" for this grave theological mistake. But, in fact, there is practically no resistance against this error, because the Calvinist is prone to think perversely about God; and this is one of those fatal self-delusions, against which he is constantly warning himself. But, when he is in his right mind, the Calvinist presupposes that the Creator is unceasingly active, and stands in relation to everything else as origin, sustainer, governor and provider.

Putting this another way, God is a "given". His existence and activity are presupposed as "the case", "always and necessarily". Faith is a starting point for Christian thinking, rather than an end-point to be proven. This is not to say that Calvinists do not believe that facts can be shown and arguments presented, which offer compelling reasons for believing; but it is saying that these evidences will only be perceived as compelling after unbelief is made untenable by a change of heart. Put crassly, the Calvinist believes because he wants to; and he attributes his wanting to believe, to God who had first granted him this change of heart. He accounts for his belief this way, because he is commanded to believe it.

Created things: a functionally complete economy

Some intellectual-historians have tied the history of the Reformed movement very closely to the development of "science" in the modern sense. They point out the historical reasons for this. Calvinism is an Augustinian movement, with influences from the Occamist wing of the humanist renaissance in the Medieval universities, strongly embued in its later development with Thomistic scholasticism, Jansenist rationalism, Ramist methods of proof and argumentation, Baconian empiricism, and Scottish common-sense realism. These influences and more were added willy-nilly to Reformed culture, mixed into the strong broth of its commitment to the sovereignty and transcendence of God, thinned by a nascent antipathy toward imaginative interpretation of the Scriptures, to form a distinctively hard-minded approach to religion and life. It is false to say that the Reformed churches produced modern culture and the secular, desacralized mind; however, there was no closer analogy to that mind, in the religious world of the 17th century, than in the Reformed churches. It was for this reason (and their lack of a hierarchy by which scientific heresy was expunged in other churches) that the Reformed more quickly accomodated Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, than other Protestant or Catholic traditions.

What this adds up to in the end, is a tendency to see created things as an internally complete economy. God is not an additional cause operating within the internal economy of creaturely things. Instead, God is the origin of things, the guarantor of meaning and purpose, the ruler of all creaturely causality, who implicitly causes all things to work toward the fulfillment of his purposes. Nature is God's to guide continually. All things operate according to their nature, and yet things do not have this nature from themselves, it is given them by the arbitrary decision of God.

Therefore, it is very common for Calvinists interested in science (ancient and modern) to speak in terms of "role" and "purpose", even when speaking of inanimate things. They do not mean by this that there is some ghostly personality present in bears, birds, bugs or boulders; what they mean is that God's will is the ultimate reference point of all existence. The highest cause of things is volitional rather than mechanical. The chief purpose of rare miracles and the even rarer disclosure of angels and demons, is to train the believer to think this way, to view every event in which they participate as an intensely personal environment, full of meaning with which we are constantly confronted, but of which we are only slightly aware. This "personalism" in Calvinism vascillates between supporting voluntarist explanations of purpose, and rationalist explanations of mathematical structure. But even when Calvinists have attempted to revive scholastic conceptualism and metaphysics, as the Italian Turretin did, it is spoken with accents of Calvinist experimentalism and empiricism. Or, when Jonathan Edwards constructed a realistic view of the mind of God displayed in the order of nature, this is tempered by a revulsion against the fatalism of impersonal forces.

So, Calvinists have made a contribution to the legitimation of science. At historically important moments, they have given positive and enduring answers to the questions, "is knowledge of nature possible?", "is science beneficial?", "how should science be done?", "how should science be regulated?". Not the whole, but an important part of the Calvinist answers to these questions, influenced the general progress of science as a careful accumulation of enough facts that the arrangement of details provides an explanation of the creaturely economy of causes and effects.

[Note: It is a common apologetical myth among Calvinists, that modern science was invented by the Puritans. By "puritan" they mean a party of theologically rigorous Calvinists in the late 16th century into the late 17th century, especially in England, Scotland, and Holland. By means of this myth, they intend to legitimate their own theological perspective and to canonize as the true and orthodox "Science", their own theological perspective in the venerable name of their forebears. It is not difficult to see the falsity of this interpretation of history. Nevertheless, it is obviously true that Calvinist theology has had its role to play in the development of Western thought, including science (but certainly not Calvinism alone, and not even Calvinism moreso than other strands). The myth that the Bible and Protestant theology produced western science is as bigoted, shallow, wrongheaded and self-serving as the contrary, free-thought myth, that the normative relation between Christianity and science has been one of constant conflict]

How things go wrong and get right again

This whole scheme of things goes horribly wrong, when the Creature/Creator distinction is ignored (the Calvinist revision of the Roman Catholic idea of Nature/Grace). When the mechanics of creation are identified with the movements of God, instead of distinguished from one another, this transgression is answered with a devastating penalty. Theology and science become legislative over one another: a conflict between the two fields of knowledge wrestling for jurisdiction. The transgression can occur from either side, either from theology or from science, and the resulting conflict will be exactly the same in either case. It is the penalty of idolatry.

The casualties of these periods of warfare are very real, and painfully remembered. But, this state of warfare is not normal. On the other hand, it may not be possible that the conflicts could have been avoided. At least, they cannot be avoided by the Calvinist, who believes that the tendency to make idols is never completely overcome. The way to survive the wars of idolatry, is to learn how to repent, and this is not easy for the Calvinist to do. It is hard to tell the difference between God and an idol, once the heart has been tricked into making the two seem to be the same thing. But it's in anticipation of hard cases such as this, that confidence in the mercy of God is so important to him. Otherwise, knowledge of his own capacity for self-deception would leave him without a reasonable hope.