Retorts

Metaphysical Muddles

I would like to take issue with Barend Vlaardingerbroek's contention Viewpoint, [Feb 92] that a new natural theology is emerging through a defusing of tensions between science and Christianity.

For a start, what he takes to be a conjoining of conceptual schemes is, rather, the subsumption of Christian concepts, suitably reinterpreted, into a scientific framework. Thus, the fact that one can interpret Genesis in terms of the Big Bang theory, or equate God with that infinitesimal point that was the universe before the Big Bang, merely indicates that biblical myths and metaphors can be made to mean whatever you like.

A similar process is at work in the moral sphere when someone says "I'm a Christian, but I think that people have the right to make up their own minds on ethical questions." Such statements are, of course, nonsense: whatever Christianity is, it is not a relativist morality, and cannot be made so just by saying it.

Secondly, science in the 20th century has altered so many of our basic concepts about space, time and substance that there is no general explanatory picture into which the physicists' equations can be placed. The result is that eminent scientists such as Hawkings and Davies, in an attempt to fill in the details, stray into areas of metaphysics which they know little or nothing about, and begin to make the kind of statements about design and purpose that one would expect from first-year philosophy students. Unfortunately, because of their wide audience, this is seen as the "state of the play" of modern metaphysics.

Finally, the future of cosmology may lie in a "nexus of physical and metaphysical concepts," but these will have nothing to do with the revealed "truths" which lie at the heart of Christianity. So-called reactionary fundamentalists at least have the virtue of recognising when religion is being transubstantiated into science.

Ray G. Prebble, Wellington