Transcript
The dedicatory address will be given by a scholar who in his own life and work and faith and witness epitomizes what this center stands for and hopes to achieve. The very Reverend Professor Thomas F. Torrance is past moderator of the Church of Scotland. He is winner of the Templeton Prize for progress in religion for his work in theology and science. The royal astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell says that Dr. Torrance knows more theoretical science than that he
knows, although his discipline is theology. Yet he has been and is and will continue to be a pioneer in the relationship between theology and science, in the conviction that truth indeed is one and that the revolution that has taken place in modern thought, a revolution of which many of us remain oblivious, is something that holds very great promise for the future of human knowledge, human understanding, human faith, and human living. I'm grateful that Professor Torrance crossed
the Atlantic with his wife Mrs. Torrance and their daughter Dr. Allison Torrance for this occasion and it's a very great joy to present Professor Torrance now. [applause] Nothing has a higher place in my pride than the friendship of Jim McCall and I should like to say that we all share with him today the fact that the vision he brought from Austin to Princeton 25 years ago today comes to its great and beautiful fruition. In those that shared
his vision he omitted to mention the one who shared it longest and most profoundly his dear wife Hazel who is unable to be with us today. But I should like to say in our gratitude to her and that we and in our prayers and thanks for her that the beauty of this place internally and externally owes an immense amount to Hazel's wonderful taste and we want to say thank you to her along with Jim and to
those others who have made this possible. The Center of Theological Inquiry has been established to provide conditions in which fundamental thinking of the most advanced kind can take place and human understanding of God in response to his truth is renewed and re-expressed in the context of advances in knowledge of the created universe and of the knowledge of knowledge itself. Primary attention must be given to research that probes into the conception of reality implicit in the
scientific mind. The ultimate beliefs, the hidden premises axiomatically shaping the framework of understanding that has guided and controlled scientific inquiry for nearly 300 years. Through clarifying our ultimate beliefs and releasing their regulative and unifying force in all human inquiry we are intent upon closing the gap torn in the age of enlightenment between faith and reason, the humanities and the sciences and healing the rift between knowledge of God and knowledge of the created universe. Our aim is
thus to promote the reintegration of understanding and knowledge across the whole range of human enterprise and thought. Scientific inquiry as we have come to think of it in modern world is bound up with the rise of experimental science in the 16th and 17th centuries when a radical change in the human approach to natural knowledge took place. It became the task of science to devise experiments in which appropriate questions may be put to nature in order to
encourage the disclosure of its coherent patterns of behaviour and then in the light of what is discovered to formulate explanatory theories. This change was made possible by a powerful re-emergence during the Reformation of the Christian doctrine of the creation of the universe out of nothing which carried with it a very different view of nature from that which had prevailed since classical times. Nature was no longer regarded as the embodiment of eternal rational forms and final
causes through which it could be interpreted and explained in logico-deductive ways. The fact that the world had been created out of nothing endowed with a creaturely reality and rational order of its own in utter differentiation from God meant that it must be investigated out of itself alone on its own contingent ground and understood in the light of its own autonomous structures or natural laws. It also meant, correspondingly, that the sciences of nature had to develop
their own autonomous methods of inquiry and explanation. This was a conception of natural science detached from the control of all external authorities, disconnected from any systems of thought, philosophical or theological, gained on other grounds, that might prejudice the results of independent investigation, but functioning under the control of the objective reality of the created universe so that the nature of the universe was regarded as the ultimate judge of the truth or falsity of scientific concepts and explanations.
I like to think that there have been four significant turning points in the development of scientific inquiry since it began in the 16th century. I shall speak about three of them and concentrate mostly on the fourth, which is the main theme I've taken for today. First, while scientific inquiry was held to start from experience and end with it, under the aegis of Newton it was believed that the basic concepts and theories of science could be logically
derived from experience without having recourse to invented hypotheses. It was the business of scientific inquiry to gather experimental data and then to offer a theoretical construction of them. Since it was the assumption of the new science that only what is measurable or can be made measurable qualifies for scientific investigation, it was understandable that mathematics should become the rational instrument employed in the analysis of natural phenomena, in deducing concepts and in organising them into explanatory theories. The
effect of this was in fact to give the human reason a legislative role in reducing understanding of the world of nature into a consistent mechanical system, as we see in Newton's great system of the world, in which the rational explanation of natural phenomena was achieved by clamping down upon them a frame of absolute mathematical time and space, that is, a set of rigid concepts that were in fact not derived from or even affected by experience. It
is not surprising then that at the same time they should have developed the notion of the autonomous reason parallel to the notion of structures in nature. Thus a thoroughly empiricist conception of natural science and scientific method was put forward during the so-called age of reason with the claim that rational man is now able to shed light upon the real nature of things in the universe by subjecting them everywhere to reductive analysis and mechanistic explanation. The
effect of this marriage between modern science and rationalism in the 18th century and of the strictly deterministic conception of the world which it promoted was not only to import a grave split into human culture but to build a deep tension into the development of science itself, which it has taken nearly two centuries to overcome. The emphasis and scientific inquiry was shifted away from the objectivity of empirical reality to the autonomous self-legislating reason. Thus there arose
the view that the laws of nature are not read out of nature but are read into nature along with the claim that we human beings understand and accept as real only what we have fashioned by our reason for ourselves. Now when we consider this constructivist rationalism together with the position adopted by natural science at its very outlook with Galileo in a dogmatic exclusion of all that transcends the limits of the mathematical reason we are in a
position to appreciate the serious damage which such a narrow-minded view of scientific inquiry was to do not only to human culture but eventually to the nature of science and scientific inquiry as such. Sooner or later the demand had to be made that we transcend the self-set limits of modern classical science in its closed mechanistic conception of nature. This is what happened in the latter half of the 19th century when it was found that Newtonian
mechanics could not offer any adequate explanation of the behaviour of electromagnetism and light. And so we come to the second turning point with the 20th century under the aegis of Einstein a considerable shift in the foundations of science set in along the line pioneered by James Clark Maxwell his conception of the dynamical field as an independent reality within which matter force and field were indivisibly integrated for the understanding of which an embodied mathematics was needed. It
was only with general relativity theory however that the nature and extent of the change involved really became apparent in closing the gap between experience and mathematics in the logical structure of classical physics. With the realisation that time and space are inherent features of the empirical universe the old Newtonian idea of infinite time and space independent of the empirical universe with all the rigid absolutes it had imported into the foundations of science fell away and a more
open and dynamic yet a more objective understanding of the universe began to take over. The ontological and epistemological implications of this new relativistic physics were immense in the fundamental conception of the world and not least in the and limitation of scientific inquiry. The universe was now held to be finite yet unbounded. This had the effect of making room again in our for our understanding of the contingent nature of the universe and its rational order so that
science began to accept limits to its explanations and to withdraw the claim that natural scientific explanations could be extended effectively to the whole range of human experience. The recognition that the inheritance of theoretical and empirical factors in each other limits scientific explanation has been greatly reinforced by the stubborn problems of measurement encountered in quantum mechanics. It is thus to a humbler and more objective view of scientific method that science is now returning. The fusion of physics
and geometry that lies at the heart of general relativity theory has an importance far beyond physics itself. It destroyed the radical dualism built into Newtonian system of the world and replaced it with a profound integration of ontology and epistemology in the framework of time and space within which all human knowledge arises and takes shape. That was an event of the greater significance for rational inquiry in every field for it clarified the foundations of knowledge and altered
their rational structure. They developed a form of scientific inquiry which is more rigorous in that it is more governed it is governed throughout by the demands of its object and yet for that reason more flexible in that it is equally applicable in every field of human experience. A scientific imposition upon one field of experience of forms and connections of thought abstracted from another is ruled out for every field of experience is to be understood strictly out
of its own natural organization and explained only through empirical theoretical structures developed in the course of scientific inquiry under the constraint of the reality there being investigated and in accordance with this distinctive nature. Rigorous scientific inquiry of this kind applies to theological and biblical studies no less than it does to the operations of any natural science. Now in scientific inquiry of this kind the fact that empirical and theoretical elements interpenetrate each other means that fundamental ideas
in Clark Maxwell's expression actually play a major role in scientific investigation and verification. And here we come to the third turning point in the development of scientific inquiry in the directing of attention specifically to our ultimate beliefs about the nature of things. This became forcefully evident in Einstein's many intriguing references to God and decisive points in his argumentation when he made it clear that what was at stake was his intuitive grasp of the structure of reality
from which he refused to be moved by any arguments that were not intuitively related to it. It was Michael Polanyi however more than any other who showed that ultimate beliefs play an essential part in all explicit and rational activity. While these beliefs cannot be made fully explicit they belong to the premises without which no scientific inquiry can take place. Proper beliefs of this kind are rational and not irrational although they are not subject to direct testing
for their truth and falsity since they have to be assumed in any attempt at rational proof or disproof nevertheless they should not be held blindly but required to be examined to see whether they really are ultimate beliefs generated in our minds by the unalterable nature of things for which there can be no alternatives. What is now demanded of us however is not just a critical but a positive reconsideration of the place and importance of ultimate beliefs
and the nature and function of in relation to their normative role in scientific inquiry. Let me focus the issue by referring to an ancient Greek distinction between two kinds of demonstration apodeixis reflected in Saint Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians and taken up and developed by the Greek fathers in the second third and fourth centuries they frequently adduced it in elucidation of the words of Isaiah in the Septuagint unless you believe you will not understand which
later on Sue Hilary was greatly to influence in Augustine. Now this is the distinction between the discursive mode of demonstration found in geometry and kindred sciences when we argue from fixed premises or axioms to certain conclusions and the ontological mode of demonstration that arises when something utterly new becomes disclosed and our minds cannot but yield conceptual ascent to its self-evident reality. Such an act of ascent was also spoken of not only by the Christians as
the response of faith made in recognition and acknowledgement of a truth that seizes the mind and will not let it go. Genuine faith in God, for example, was held to involve a conceptual ascent of this kind as the human mind is allowed to respond faithfully to his self-evident revelation. Both forms of demonstration were considered by theology to be necessary in genuine inquiry into the truth for while access to reality independent of ourselves is given only
to the latter is with the aid of the former that conceptual ascent may respond more accurately and consistently to the nature of the reality apprehended. In classical geometry, however, long considered the model for scientific demonstration, form and being were held apart so that the force of demonstration lay in its purely formal connections and logical compulsion. On the other hand, when form and being are found not to be separated but to be indivisibly united, the real force
of the demonstration lies in its ontological compulsion. It is only through such an ontological grasp of things in their intrinsic intelligibility and truth that genuine advances in knowledge are made. Now that was precisely the nub of the position adopted by Einstein when he accorded primacy in all scientific inquiry to his intuitive beliefs in the fundamental nature of things, although of course he recognized the necessity of logical or geometrical reasoning and reaching a consistent formalization of new
knowledge. And that was the reason why Paul Lanier set out to reinstate the function of ultimate belief in the regulative framework of scientific knowledge, thereby restoring the balance of our cognitive powers disrupted through critical rationalism and scientism and healing the breach between faith and reason brought about by the enlightenment. Faith is thus recognized again as the very mode of rationality adopted by the reason in its fidelity to what it seeks to understand and as such it
constitutes the most basic form of knowledge from which all subsequent inquiry proceeds. Ultimate beliefs above all are to be appreciated as the indemonstrable but ontologically derived insights of the human mind in its commitment to the compelling claims of reality which all rational knowledge presupposes and on which scientific inquiry relies in every authentic drive toward the truth and without which it is finally blind and impotent. Now it's not my purpose to discuss further the rational status of
these ultimate beliefs but to draw attention to the nature of their inherent force and to the mode in which they apprehended for it is in these respects I believe that theological inquiry has a significant contribution to make at this fourth turning point in the development of inquiry and one of particular significance to us today in our institute. The inherent force of ultimate beliefs is due not simply to the fact that reality is what it is and
not something else but to the fact that it thrusts a compelling obligation upon us emanating from the ultimate ground of all order transcendent ground of rationality which gives them their consistency and authority. Again and again today the scientist is baffled and tempted to speculate when the intelligible connections in the universe which he seeks to grasp and describe just break off and point mutely beyond themselves he raises fundamental questions which he knows he is not in a
position to answer directly or even properly to ask within the conceptual frame of his science and yet the meaningfulness and the intelligibility of the whole scientific enterprise are here at stake. This seems to be the issue behind Wheeler's demand for meaning physics and his interest in the so-called anthropic principle regarding the unique place of on earth within the expanding universe. Why is it for example that although physical laws are formalized in terms of probability equations
nevertheless all major physical laws are found to be utterly improbable. There must be a reason for it which cannot be excogitated through natural scientific operations. At an impasse like this on the very frontiers of knowledge the scientist can only suspend judgment and listen for a word of meaning from beyond from a higher level. Thus it would seem right for the scientist to consider another approach to the impasse by coming at it from the other end the
other side from the ultimate ground of order in which his controlling beliefs are anchored. Now theologically speaking this would be an approach within the perspective of divine revelation starting from the word of God on which the whole universe is contingent for its existence and order. Thus the scientist learns to believe with Henry Robinson Luce that meaning was built into life in the beginning by the creator. Physicists like W. Heitler and our own W. G. Pollard have
argued convincingly that there are significant points in our scientific comprehension of the universe where the transcendent shines through as Heitler says or where there are rumors of transcendence as Pollard says but without the mediation of any positive truth. They agree however that it is the human mind or spirit which constitutes the significant boundary condition within the natural world of things where it is intelligibly open to the creator and where intramundane experience and understanding may be coordinated
with a higher level of experience and understanding giving them meaning which they could not otherwise have. It is surely at such a point where the rationality of man and the rationality of the world come together under the impact of the word of God making them articulate beyond what they are capable of in themselves that we be given some insight into the inner justification of nature's laws demanded by Einstein or into the regulating principle demanded by Wheeler
at the boundaries of contingent being and the frontiers of scientific knowledge. In this event the mode in which knowledge of the universe is gained in scientific inquiry and not least the mode in which its controlling beliefs arise would need to be coordinated with the mode in which knowledge of God arises in theological inquiry that is through listening to His word. Now from the theological perspective the laws of nature are held to be permanent features of the
world stamped upon it by the voice of the creator through the word of God. As such they are open contingent forms of order which derive their constancy from the word of God and may ultimately be understood only through coordination with their resource and ground in that word. The ordered universe is to be regarded then as unceasingly contingent on God in such a way that he not only upholds and sustains it in its created reality but makes
its coherent arrangement serve his supreme purpose of love in the communion of the creation with the creator. Hence the natural order is to be recognized not simply as the actual order in which things happen to be arranged but rather as the kind of order in which things ought to be arranged under the wisdom and righteousness of God. From the theological perspective this means that the idea of chance or accident yields place to the Christian concept of
contingent providential event and that the natural order and the moral order are ontologically linked together as different forms of the one rational order impressed upon the creation by the commanding voice of God. Now this brings us back to consider the distinctive mode in which our convictions about the essential nature of the universe come to be gained. Like our fundamental religious beliefs to which they are akin ultimate scientific beliefs arise in us as we listen to what
is said from beyond ourselves. In the emergence of these ultimate beliefs there takes place what the anthem spoke of as a subliminal hearing of a speech, a locutio, embedded in reality which precedes, accompanies, and shapes specific acts of scientific understanding. Now Clark Maxwell, Einstein, and Polanyi often refer to their intuitive contact with objective reality or their scientific intuition of the hidden intelligibility of the universe but I would want to add that intuitive apprehension of this kind
is auditive rather than perceptive in nature akin to the mode of learning through hearing rather than the mode of learning through seeing or observing and that what results in this way is an intuitive correlate in the mind of the scientist of the creative address of the word of God. When our ultimate beliefs are considered in this way we find that their epistemological modality and their inherent force are due to the commanding word of God. It's in
such a way such a way that beliefs generated in us are informed with an implicit conceptual content imparted to them by the word of God. Now this is not information that we can derive for ourselves by tracing back our rational connections in the universe to their end in the created order for in themselves they are empty, inarticulate. They may be filled and become articulate only through correlation with the commanding word of God when they are made
to echo with a meaning and are characterized with an authority beyond what they are capable of in themselves. If this is the case then we must be ready at all the frontiers of knowledge where our inquiries have now carried us to stop and listen again to the word of God in the hope of learning why nature is ordered in the way it is and not in some other way and of penetrating into what Einstein called the
inner justification of nature's law. If the logical inquiry and scientific inquiry are allowed to interrelate in this deep level the scientists will be encouraged to give more attention to the obligatory force of his ultimate convictions and he searched for a more satisfying and meaningful order. The mysterious imperative that bears upon him from the fundamental nature of things in the universe will resonate with the creative purpose of God disclosed to his word in such a way that
an ultimate belief in the goodness of the created order will take its place in the controlling framework of his inquiries besides other ultimate beliefs in the reality contingency rationality stability constancy and simplicity of the universe. Now this would mean that the moral imperative the alt that had been banished from the realm of science in the age of reason would have to be restored to the conceptual structure of rigorous science not as some external parameter like a
Newtonian geometrical time but as an internal parameter in the framework of scientific inquiry and formalization just as it is now necessary for us to leave Newton behind and to build time as an ingredient into the fundamental structure of physical law which also raises the question of why so it becomes necessary to include the moral alt within the structure of physical law as an essential ingredient this recovery of the ethical imperative as an internal factor of control
imports a further significant step in the advance of scientific inquiry for it is then understood to function in an obligatory relation to the good as well as the orderly thus making for a profounder more meaningful science within a reunified human culture now so far as the contribution of theological inquiry is concerned such a change calls for a far-reaching theology of nature which would remint the concept of nature by reintegrating it with the basic christian ideas
that gave rise to empirical science in the first place and this is best done today through conjoined inquiry between theological science and natural science as the astonishing patterns of order with which god has endowed the world are steadily brought to light however i believe that such a theology of nature may be sustained only with a recovery of the full christian framework of knowledge for it is through the incarnation of the word of god among us in
jesus christ that the ultimate secret of the whole created order is disclosed in the comprehensive purpose of god's love for the order this implies that all laws of nature all patterns of order in the universe are finally and satisfyingly intelligible only as they are ontologically found to be linked to the love of god the supreme power of order an articulate belief in the goodness and the purpose of the which implicitly control all human inquiry will go
far toward healing the breach and integrating human culture now we cannot forget that scientific and theological inquiries are pursued only within the medium of society within and with the continuous support of its community structures and institutions on the other hand they have to reckon with the fact that all our human structures and institutions today are in a severely critical state they're to reckon with serious problems that are to be traced back to the application society of
mechanistic analyses and explanations arriving from the 18th and 19th century and to the damaging splits in human life and culture resulting from alien and inappropriate patterns of behavior imposed upon them that is to say scientific inquiry today whether in natural or theological science must struggle with a strange anachronistic perpetuation in contemporary society and a general framework of knowledge of the very mistakes which rigorous scientific inquiries had to leave behind in the development but if scientific and
theological inquiries are to consolidate the kind of advance we've been discussing they must be ready to help other sciences overcome the radical dualisms built into their structure and recover normative convictions ontologically anchored in objective reality now i think here particularly i'm begging the pardon of many people of the backward state of moral legal and social sciences today owing to the lack of proper ontological foundations what they require is a fundamental reconstruction of their scientific base through
a fusion of ontology and epistemology within the space time field in which we live similar to that which has been brought about through general relativity in physical knowledge of the universe now it is just here that the advance in scientific inquiry which we'll be discussing has a great deal to contribute to them and not least to the restoration of an ontologically grounded moral imperative as an internal factor of control in the process of rigorous inquiry and
formulation that is surely an issue of supreme importance in which all sciences natural theological or social must cooperate and thereby contribute together into the development of a deeper more coherent and meaningful order of human faith life and now well that is the grand end which the center of the logical inquiry hopes to serve its own special objective is to promote really basic research that will transform the foundations of human thought and science thus continuing in our
modern world the reconstruction which early christian theology brought about in the classical tradition of philosophy science and culture although it has constantly strayed from the christian reorientation that initial christian reorientation the development of human civilization remains infinitely indebted to it our specific task here then is to theological inquiry working as rigorously as possible in harness with natural inquiry not least at the points of their deepest convergence to renew the foundations of human understanding of the living
god within the objective space-time structure of the created universe where he makes himself known to us through his word since theological inquiry has to do with the ontological and intelligible relation between the created universe and god in all sciences are ultimately rooted it is our hope here that through this institution steady engagement in fundamental inquiry will promote the unification of human knowledge and serve the comprehensive purpose of god's love for the creation. [applause]