Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour Part 1: Religion and the Methods of Science
Chapter 2: Models and Paradigms
IV. Tentativeness and Commitment
3. Revelation, Faith, and Reason
Even if peripheral beliefs are tentative and revisable, are not the core beliefs of a religious
community held with absolute and unconditional commitment? Job may have given up the idea that suffering is always deserved, but his basic faith in God was unshaken. No evidence could count against it: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" Job 13:15 KJV). St. Paul was confident that
"neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:39). In chapter 1 we noted the existentialist thesis that faith is a matter of passionate personal commitment and decision, far removed from the dispassionate weighing of hypotheses. We also referred to the neo-orthodox theme that faith’s
confidence rests on revelation, which was the result of divine initiative rather than of human discovery. Can our account do justice to the importance of faith and revelation in the Christian tradition?
Basil Mitchell contrasts the tentative hypotheses of science with unconditional commitment in religion. But he goes on to qualify the contrast from both sides. He describes the tenacity of a scientist’s commitment to a Kuhnian paradigm. He also insists that ultimate religious commitment is to God and not to Christianity or any other system of belief. And here the cumulative weight of evidence is decisive. All religious ideas are open to revision, according to Mitchell. There must be grounds for accepting a claim of divine revelation in history, even if revelation shows us
possibilities that we could not have anticipated. Mitchell says that knowledge of God in religious experience is also not self-authenticating, for there is no uninterpreted experience, and any
particular interpretation involves claims that must be judged more plausible than the alternatives.
There is thus a continuing dialectic between commitment and reflection, or between faith and reason.42
In the biblical view, faith is personal trust, confidence, and loyalty. Like faith in a friend or faith in a doctor, it is not "blind faith," for it is closely tied to experience. But it does entail risk and
vulnerability in the absence of logical proof. If faith were the acceptance of revealed propositions it would be incompatible with doubt. But if faith means trust and loyalty, it is compatible with
considerable doubt about particular beliefs. Doubt frees us from illusions of having captured God in a creed. It calls into question every religious symbol. Self-criticism is called for if we acknowledge that no church, book, or creed is infallible and no formulation is irrevocable. The claim to finality by any historical institution or theological system must be questioned if we are to avoid
absolutizing the relative.
James Fowler has identified a series of stages of faith on the basis of extensive interviews with hundreds of people of all ages. Paralleling the work of Jean Piaget on cognitive development, Erik Erikson on stages of life, and Lawrence Kohlberg on moral development, Fowler describes six stages of faith: (1) An Intuitive-Projective stage takes place in early childhood, characterized by imagination and dependence on parents. (2) A Mythic-Literal stage follows in later childhood, during which myths are interpreted literally and other adults are significant. (3) In the Synthetic- Conventional stage of adolescence, beliefs are formulated in conformity to peers. Some individuals remain at this stage, dependent on external authority. (4) In the Individuative-Reflective stage, persons question, doubt, and assume responsibility for their own commitments. The locus of authority is internal, and they have a stronger sense of individual identity. (5) In the Conjunctive stage of mature faith, persons integrate tradition and doubt, recognizing the symbolic character of religious language. They show respect for other traditions along with commitment to their own tradition. (6) In the Universalizing stage, reached only by rare individuals, persons exhibit a greater inclusiveness and a more radical living out of convictions. Here there is a greater depth of religious experience, a vision of a transformed world, and a love that reaches out to others.43
Fowler’s ordering of stages of faith is in part empirical. He finds, for example, that in these life histories there is a direction of development, and that the stages rarely occur in the reverse order.
But the ordering also reflects value judgments as to which are "higher" or more "mature." I agree with Fowler’s theological assumptions concerning the nature of revelation and religious authority, but I do not think these assumptions can be derived from his data. The fourth stage (Individuative- Reflective), and the fifth (Conjunctive) are clearly more consistent with the goals I have been presenting than is the conventional third stage. The Universalizing sixth stage represents an ideal for us to seek, even if few people attain it.
Religious faith does demand a more total personal involvement than occurs in science, as the existentialists maintain. Religious questions are of ultimate concern, since the meaning of one’s existence is at stake. Religion asks about the final objects of a person’s devotion and loyalty. Too detached an attitude may cut a person off from the very kinds of experience that are religiously most significant. But such religious commitment can be combined with critical reflection.
Commitment without inquiry tends toward fanaticism or narrow dogmatism. Reflection alone without commitment tends to become trivial speculation unrelated to real life. Perhaps personal involvement must alternate with reflection, since worship and critical inquiry do not occur simultaneously.
Divine revelation and human response are always inextricably interwoven. Revelation is
incomplete until it has been received by individuals, and individuals always live within interpretive communities. The God-given encounter was experienced, interpreted, and reported by fallible human beings. In the history of Israel, crucial events were revelatory only when interpreted in the light of the prophet’s experience of God. God acts in the lives of individuals and communities, especially in the life of Christ, we have said, but the records of these events reflect particular personal and cultural perspectives. There is no uninterpreted revelation.
Moreover, revelation is recognized by its ability to illuminate present experience. Revelation helps us to understand our lives as individuals and as a community today.44 Special events in the past enable us to see what is present at other times but may have been ignored. The cross reveals God’s universal love, everywhere expressed but not everywhere acknowledged. The power of
reconciliation in Christ’s life is the power of reconciliation in all life.45 Revelation leads to a new relation to God in the present; thus it is inseparable from reorientation and reconciliation. It is not a system of divine propositions completed in the past but an invitation to new experience of God today. So revelation and experience, like faith and reason, are not mutually exclusive.
To sum up, there are many parallels between science and religion: the interaction of data and theory (or experience and interpretation); the historical character of the interpretive community; the use of models; and the influence of paradigms or programs. In both fields there are no proofs, but there can be good reasons for the judgments rendered by the paradigm community. There are also important differences between science and religion, but some of them turn out to be differences in emphasis or degree rather than the absolute contrasts sometimes imagined. We have traced a number of polarities in which the first term was more prominent in science and the second in religion, but both were found to be present in both fields: objectivity and subjectivity; rationality and personal judgment; universality and historical conditioning; criticism and tradition; and tentativeness and commitment. But some features of religion seem to be without parallel in
science: the role of story and ritual; the noncognitive functions of religious models in evoking attitudes and encouraging personal transformation; the type of personal involvement characteristic of religious faith; and the idea of revelation in historical events. Some additional comparisons are explored in the next chapter before we draw overall conclusions.
Footnotes:
1. Several sections of this chapter are revisions or summaries of portions of two earlier books: Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966) and Myths, Models, and Paradigms (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). The original passages are identified in footnotes.
2. Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966); Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1956).
3. W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in his From a Logical Point of View, 2d ed.
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963).
4. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958);
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
5. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
6. See, for example, Frederick J. Streng, Understanding Religious Life; Ninian Smart, Worldviews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983).
7. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. W. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1959).
8. Bhagavad Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (New York:
New American Library, 1972); David Kinsley, Hinduism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1982).
9, In Myths, Models, and Paradigms, chap. 3, 1 discussed writings on scientific models by Mary Hesse, Max Black, Richard Braithwaite, Peter Achinstein, and others. See also W. H.
Leatherdale, The Role of Analogy, Model and Metaphor in Science (New York: American Elsevier, 1974).
10. Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1934), p. 96.
11. See Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, pp. 162 -74; also Myths, Models, and Paradigms, pp. 34-38.
12. Larry Laudan, "A Confutation of Convergent Realism," in Scientific Realism, ed. Jarret Leplin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
13. Laudan, "Convergent Realism"; W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); James T. Cushing, C. F. Delaney, and Gary Gutting, eds., Science and Reality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984);
Ron Harré, Varieties of Realism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); and Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1987).
14. Ernan McMullin, "A Case for Scientific Realism," in Scientific Realism, ed. Leplin, p.
39.
15. In Myths, Models, and Paradigms, chap. 4, I discuss the writings of Ian Ramsey and Frederick Ferré on models in religion, and I develop a theory of religious models. There is some discussion of models in Earl MacCormac, Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976).
16. Richard Braithwaite, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1955); see William H. Austin, The Relevance of Natural Science to Theology (London: Macmillan, 1976), chap. 3.
17. Janet Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
18. Frank Brown, "Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and Theological Reflection," Journal of Religion 62 (1982): 39- 56; also his Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Language of Religious Belief (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
19. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms, pp. 56-60.
20. Ninian Smart, The Concept of Worship (London: Macmillan, 1972) and Worldviews, chap. 3.
21. Winston King, Introduction to Religion: A Phenomenological Approach (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968), p. 165.
22. Ninian Smart, Reasons and Faiths (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).
23. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).
24. Sallie McFague, Models of God. Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1987).
25. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 147.
26. See Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms, chap. 6.
27. See also Polanyi, Personal Knowledge.
28. Harold Brown, Perception, Theory and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
29. Ibid., p. 167.
30. Ibid.
31. Frederick Streng, "Lens and Insight: Paradigm Changes and Different Kinds of
Religious Consciousness"(Plenary address to Second Conference on East-West Religions in Encounter, "Paradigm Shifts in Buddhism and Christianity," Hawaii Loa College, Oahu, Hawaii, Jan. 4,1984).
32. Hans Küng, "Paradigm Change in Theology," in Paradigm Change in Theology, eds.
Hans Küng and David Tracy (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989).
33. Stephan Pfürtner, "The Paradigms of Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther: Did Luther’s Message of Justification Mean a Paradigm Shift?" in Paradigm Change in Theology, eds.
Küng and Tracy.
34. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge; W. D. King,
"Reason, Tradition, and the Progressiveness of Science," in Paradigms and Revolutions, ed.
Gary Gutting (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).
35. Mark Blaug, "Kuhn versus Lakatos, or Paradigms versus Research Programs in the History of Economics," in Paradigms and Revolutions, ed. Gutting.
36. Richard Vernon, "Politics as Metaphor: Cardinal Newman and Professor Kuhn," in Paradigms and Revolutions, ed. Gutting.
37. Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,"
in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970). Also Lakatos, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, eds. John Worall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
38. See William Austin, "Religious Commitment and the Logical Status of Doctrines,"
Religious Studies 9 (1973): 39-48.
39. Nancey Murphy, "Revisionist Philosophy of Science and Theological Method" (Paper delivered at the Pacific Coast Theological Society, Spring 1983); Theology in the Age of Probable Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). "Acceptability Criteria for Work in Theology and Science," Zygon 22 (1987): 279-97.
40. Gary Gutting, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), chap. 5.
41. Phillip Clayton, paper delivered to American Academy of Religion, Nov. 1988. See also his Explanation from Physics to Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
42. Basil Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan, 1973), chaps.
5-8.
43. James Fowler, Stages of Faith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).
44. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
45. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 2:165- 68.
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