Theism

Theism can be defined as the position of those who believe in God. This does not help too much, unless one defines what kind of being a theist understands by ‘God.’ There are, of course, many approaches, but one prominent philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne, may be taken as a fairly typical voice. The second sentence of the revised edition of his book The Coherence of Theism (, 1) comes to the point immediately:

By a “God” he [a theist] understands something like a “person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.”

Any of these characteristics can be disputed, but for the present contribution I want to emphasize a few elements as characteristic of most forms of theism.

• (a)

  God is worthy of worship. If one were to say of a king or a president that the person is worthy of respect, a value judgement is given. A value judgment is implied even more when we speak of “worthy of worship,” because “worship” far surpasses “respect.” Creatures are not to be worshipped. Upon a traditional Christian view, well supported by our experiences, we and other creatures are imperfect, and perhaps even sinful, “fallen,” and thus in need of redemption.

• (b)

  With the emphasis on perfection and all‐encompassing knowledge, power, and goodness, God is taken to be the Supreme Being, the one who cannot be surpassed. I prefer the more cautious “negative” formula that we owe to Anselm (eleventh century), who in his Proslogion reflected upon God as “a being greater than which nothing can be thought.”

• (c)

  As creator and sustainer of the universe, there is a categorical distinction between God and everything else—the distinction between Creator and creatures. The Creator is the one to whom we all owe existence, and who is the ultimate judge of value.

Pantheism/Religious Naturalism

Pan‐theism, etymologically a combination of the Greek term for “all.” pan, and “theism,” does without such a strong categorical distinction between Creator and creatures. Rather, “nature” is all there is. There is nothing else, nothing greater. However, as a religious position, it is not just a belief about existence, but also one about value. “Nature” has value. “Awe” and “wonder” might be terms that come easily to a pantheist, a deep appreciation and gratitude for nature and all that it has given us. A classic expression goes back to the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict Spinoza, ‘deus sive natura,’ speaking of reality as ‘God or nature.’

A more recent title that resonates with such a position is the one used by cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (). She advocates a contemporary articulation of such a position, ‘religious naturalism’ (for her work and related voices see the website of the Religious Naturalist Association, , and studies such as those of Jerome Stone [] and Donald Crosby []; see Drees ).

As religious naturalism and pantheism come in many varieties (as does theism), let me highlight a few motives.

• (a)

  Some “religious naturalists” seem to be driven by a dislike of the dualism implied in a categorical distinction between Creator and creatures; they prefer some form of philosophical monism.

• (b)

  By doing away with a transcendent or supernatural reality, the pantheist seems to avoid epistemological claims that go beyond the domain of experience. Thus, pantheism seems to align well with the empirical sciences.

• (c)

  Affective preferences may also be involved. “Immanence” is preferred over “transcendence”; nearness over distance. Rather than a supreme being “out there” who judges us—whether imagined as a Father or as Lord—it is Nature that “judges us,” because some ways of life are more effective and fertile than others; a line of thinking expressed by the founding editor of this journal, Ralph Burhoe, in an essay on “the Lord of History” ().

Panentheism

Now for pan‐en‐theism, here taken as distinct from theism and from pantheism or religious naturalism, though this label is used for variants of those positions as well. My teacher in philosophy of religion at Groningen University, H. G. Hubbeling, had written on Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, two major Protestant theologians in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, on Spinoza, and on Charles Hartshorne and his logical reconstruction of the modal version of the ontological argument. He introduced me to the concept of panentheism.

Panentheism stands between pantheism and theism. Here the world is seen “in” God, but God still transcends the world. This concept is, however, not clear in every respect, because in theism also God is both transcendent and immanent, which would imply that the world is in God. Here one may think of Paul's saying: ‘… for in him we live and move, in him we exist’ (Acts 17: 28). But insofar as panentheists say that the world has not been created by God but has emanated from him, and still maintain that God transcends the world, they certainly take a middle position between theism and pantheism. (Hubbeling , 143)

Hubbeling points out the similarity of theism and panentheism. As he formulates it, the difference is in the distinction between creation and emanation, and with that in the question whether God and world are categorically distinct as Creator and creatures, or whether they are more alike, as the concept of emanation suggests. By shifting from “creation” to “emanation,” there is also a shift towards pantheism—the world as produced is similar in kind to the one who produced the world.

Hubbeling mentions one possible motive in favor of panentheism: “It is difficult to choose between theism and pantheism, and perhaps a middle system like panentheism should be preferred.” However, immediately thereafter, Hubbeling wrote: “On the whole, I prefer theism” (, 147). Thus, he himself does not opt for the middle, but points out that one of the attractions might be its position, as mediator between two major options. I do not accept such a rhetorical argument—for then, by arranging options in such a way that the preferred outcome is in the middle, we could make the middle position more plausible. Thus, a question to be addressed in the next section is: Why opt for panentheism?

Multiple Levels of Description

The natural sciences articulate knowledge about reality, for instance about matter, substances, stuff. A classic example, present in almost all chemistry labs in secondary schools, is the periodic table of the elements, which begins with hydrogen and helium, and orders the various chemical elements in rows and columns. This scheme embodies knowledge, mostly acquired in the nineteenth century, on substances and their constituents. At this level of description, we—or at least the chemists among us—seem to understand reality quite well. It is knowledge to which people of various countries and cultures have contributed, which allows chemists to study and create new substances. It is, heuristically and pragmatically, extraordinarily effective.

We also know why the table has the structure it has; for instance, why there are various similarities (e.g., between elements on different rows in the same column) and why there are that many elements on each row. This has to with the structure of individual atoms, with a nucleus (protons, neutrons) surrounded by electrons, and the consequences of a description of such a system in terms of quantum physics. With such a description, we move into the territory of physics. Within physics, theories have been developed that probe more deeply, and describe protons and neutrons as consisting of sets of three “quarks,” held together by particles called “gluons.” This theory passes sophisticated empirical tests well, but it is farther removed from human experience than the knowledge presented in the periodic table. It is a level of knowledge that is not needed within chemistry when considering the efficacy of drugs in pharmaceutical contexts, but nonetheless genuine knowledge. What then are quarks? Some branches of physics dig further. Among the ideas proposed are theories that describe reality in terms of minute vibrating strings (string theory), but here we clearly have moved into rather provisional, speculative areas of science.

Similar “layers of understanding” arise at many places. Gravity was effectively described in 1687 by Isaac Newton in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, as a force acting at a distance. This was an excellent theory that served very well to explain and predict movements on earth and in the heavens. However, it did not align well with a major success of the nineteenth century, James Clerk Maxwell's equations that described electromagnetic radiation. Newton's equations of motions were harmonized with electromagnetism (and the constant speed of light) in the early twentieth century with Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905). A further development, the general theory of relativity (1915), incorporated gravity by replacing the idea of gravity as a force working at a distance by the effect of curvature of space‐time. For low velocities (relative to the velocity of light) and modest masses, Einstein's general relativity theory would give the same results as Newton's, which thus continues to be a very effective way of understanding movements in the world around us. But deeper down, it presents to us a different ontology, a different understanding of the way things are. And Einstein's theory might not be the final answer yet either, as it is not in line with another extremely successful theory, quantum physics. Proposals for further developments in “quantum gravity” have been made (superstrings; most recently, a proposal on “emergent gravity” that draws on quantum information and the holographic properties of surfaces of black holes, by Erik Verlinde ), but here we are clearly in an area were all current science is hypothetical and explorative rather than consolidated.

In this contribution, I intend to point out some of the characteristics of this multilayered understanding of science that this selective history might be taken to indicate.

• (1)

  There is consolidated science, such as embedded in the periodic table. Though all science is a human construction, this layer of understanding is so well established, confirmed by numerous experiments, and used effectively in a wide variety of practices, that at that level of description one should not dismiss such knowledge.

• (2)

  However, if one pushes further, there is the current frontier of science. Scientists disagree, theories and models may be proposed but not yet tested (and perhaps even not yet testable with current technologies). Some of these might become successful, and become consolidated science. Some might fail and be discarded, with honor. And some proposals might remain undecided.

• (3)

  Among those that are undecided, and beyond the boundary of well‐defined scientific theories and models, one finds proposals that are rather hypothetical and speculative, at a distance from empirical testing and pragmatic use. Issues about emergent gravity and other proposals in quantum gravity should be considered as such, and ideas about multiple domains of the universe, so called “multiverses,” beyond our horizon.

• (4)

  And interpretations of well‐established science, such as quantum physics, may remain speculative. There may be multiple interpretations of a single mathematical formalism, and those interpretations seem to be empirically equivalent.

It is in the realm of proposals (3) and of interpretations (4) that most of the metaphysically interesting issues are, such as questions about the nature of time, about ultimate origins, about determinism or indeterminism, and the like. But those domains are also most marked by a plurality of research programs, driven by different philosophical preferences.

Why Should We Respect Science?

Science is done by humans. It is the outcome of social processes. It is fallible, because people may cheat. Why then should we take the sciences seriously? Such a challenge became more prominent with Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (), which considered major changes—so‐called revolutions—changes in the ruling “paradigm.” The most prominent example was the shift from a geocentric understanding of the universe to a heliocentric one, with Nicholas Copernicus and Galilei Galileo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we have been wrong in the past, should we not assume that we can be mistaken today as well?

The history sketched above might allow for some differentiation. At a practical level, the transition from the geocentric to the heliocentric view did not undermine predictions, for example on solstices. And even if our understanding of substance “deep down” is likely to change, the knowledge embodied in the periodic table, that is, the knowledge used in chemistry, is likely to remain unaffected. Within a domain such as chemistry, we have made enormous progress since the early nineteenth century, not only with the periodic table but also in discovering the rich variety of materials that can be made with these elements. Just as the “flat earth” is no longer worthy of serious discussion, given all our knowledge of the earth, our experiences with weather satellites and intercontinental flights, and much more, so too a division of matter in just four or five categories, say fire, air, water and earth, is something of the past, at least at that level of description.

The Kuhnian challenge has triggered quite some work in the philosophy of science. One example of relevant work, in my opinion, is Philip Kitcher's The Advancement of Science (), which takes the social character of scientific research seriously, but argues that despite radical changes there is sufficient continuity in the whole complex of science—not just theories, but also questions, techniques and much else—that one can speak of progress. Thus, though current knowledge is not the final answer, it may be taken to be serious enough, especially when scientific insights make major advances at the theoretical level by unifying, expanding and correcting theories, and/or at the practical level, either because of applicability in a wide variety of domains (as chemistry) or as insights that once were new become so well established that they serve as tools in further research (e.g. using electrons in electron microscopy).

What Does Respecting Science Entail?

There are intellectual and moral reasons to respect science. By using the best available knowledge we can help people. Playing down established knowledge makes it easy to exploit vulnerable people. Experimental evidence that smoking causes cancer, not just among smokers but also among bystanders, made it possible to promote wiser policies. Of course, such steps are not always welcome. Thus, we find that science is played down in the interest of the tobacco industry, and more recently for the sake of those with an interest in fossil fuels. And, more driven by ideology than driven by economic interest, the opposition to evolution and to vaccination is also a context in which advocates of various positions play down science, including science that I would classify as “consolidated.” Each of those appeals to doubt and provisionality, some lavishly funded and legally smart, as documented in Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (), plays down established science for the sake of nonscientific interests. In consequence, vulnerable people suffer. Though we should allow freedom to advocate nonsense, we also have the responsibility to live and work with the best available knowledge, and hence to counter nonsense. Serious thinkers in “religion and science” should align themselves with fair‐minded sceptics, who challenge the exploitation of human gullibility.

The natural sciences deliver knowledge such as that embodied in the periodic table, through a collaborative effort of scientists from many different national and cultural backgrounds. Such knowledge is well tested and confirmed, and turns out to be eminently applicable. In those cases, it is a matter of practical wisdom that we should use such knowledge as much as possible, in the domains were it has been shown to be valid. The judge of such knowledge is the scientific community; decisions are not up to outsiders who, for economic, political, cultural, social, religious, or philosophical interest would have preferred a different “science.” However, such knowledge is not the answer to metaphysical or moral questions; that would reach too far.

Multiple Interpretations of Scientific Theories and Concepts

Even if scientific theories are understood as well‐established, they need not have an unambiguous philosophical interpretation. Possible interpretations of scientific theories are not determined by the theories, even though any theory constrains the range of its possible interpretations. There may be multiple interpretations of well‐established theories, that is, multiple ways of describing the philosophical, human, moral, religious, or metaphysical consequences of a particular scientific theory.

It is fairly widely known that there are multiple interpretations of quantum physics; they describe ways the world could possibly be (Van Fraassen , 171). Quantum physics is not exceptional; other theories allow for multiple interpretations too. Relativity theory can be formulated as a theory about the development of the universe through time, or as a theory about the whole four‐dimensional space‐time as a “block universe” at once, just as a film can be shown as a temporal narrative or treated as a whole as a single object. Similarly, dynamic systems can be described in terms of phase space rather than as evolving in ordinary space. There are multiple ways of understanding “time,” each one consistent with current science as far as corroborated.

The concept of “emergence,” beloved by some of the panentheists as different from “reduction,” is no exception to the openness to a plurality of interpretations involved, but the clarity of meaning also suffers from the variety of cases subsumed under the category of emergence. It is itself not a single theory or theoretical scheme, such as quantum physics, but a label covering a variety of situations. In any particular instance of a relationship between scientific theories that seem to describe different levels—from thermodynamics (a gas with pressure and temperature and a cloud of particles that move around with a certain velocity and hence kinetic energy and momentum) to organic chemistry and biology, or neuroscience and consciousness—the way the levels are demarcated and the conceptual relations are envisaged may be different. When the emphasis is on new entities with properties not found previously, one might envisage such emergence as ontological. When the emphasis is on the new conceptual vocabularies, the new theories and epistemic strategies at the “higher” level relative to the lower one, one might consider it epistemic emergence. Of course, there is much more detail in discussions on emergence in philosophy of science, but here I would like to consider the meaning of emergence and its alternative, reduction, in general terms, and thus their potential significance when deciding on religious‐metaphysical schemes.

As I see it, any successful attempt to correlate descriptions at two different levels of complexity could be considered an example of understanding emergence, as it clarifies how new entities arise. It could also be considered an example of reduction, as the new is correlated with the underlying or preceding processes. In that general sense, emergence and reduction can be considered two words for the same insight: the reality we live in has many remarkable opportunities, and these tend to be connected. Reduction and emergence are words that signal the dense web of relatedness within natural reality, as studied by the natural sciences. A reductionist description seeks to explain how Y might arise out of underlying processes X (and in that sense would be holistic by embedding Y in the larger understanding of which X is a part). Someone who values emergence might say that Y has emerged out of X, in a particular context. A major difference seems to be that the one values the “upper level” Y more, as more complex, whereas the reductionist might consider the “lower level” X more fundamental. Such a difference in appreciation is a matter of interpretation; as far as the science is concerned, reduction and emergence might be understood as two sides of the same coin (Drees ; McMullin ).

Interpretation is, of course, even more the case when emergence is interpreted religiously, in terms of “divine immanence,” as a panentheist might opt to do. A theist could understand emergence as a possibility of the laws of nature, given by God. And a pantheist could treat the web of relations of emergence and reduction as a significant possibility of nature, which thereby shows its rich potentiality, and realizes some its potential. The divine may be seen nowhere or everywhere, but when such religious language is used it is a religious or metaphysical interpretation given to scientific theories; the theories themselves do not involve such a vocabulary or meaning.

Ultimate Questions

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the world as it is? These questions are unanswerable within the sciences, because a scientific explanation does not begin with “nothing” it assumes laws and existence. These laws can be questioned, too, but that pushes the horizon further. We build our knowledge upon pillars driven deeper and deeper, but not on pillars that rest on a self‐evident and self‐supporting layer of rocks.

Theism seems to have the advantage on this issue, as it offers an answer: the answer to ultimate questions is “God,” the Creator of it all. However, despite a long history of “cosmological” arguments for the existence of God, none seem to have been decisive. Furthermore, giving “God” as the answer raises a further question: Why is there such a God? The traditional philosophical response, that God is His own cause (causa sui) does not really convince as an answer; God, and God's nature as the sole being that has necessary existence, are assumptions.

A different orientation might be preferred by a pantheist or panentheist: there is not a “being” who created this world, but a “Ground of Being” (Drees ). An analogy might be with the role of axioms for a mathematical system: they are part of the system, not prior in time but fundamental to the system as a whole. Such a “ground,” like the axioms, may be an intrinsic part of the system, and that suits the pantheist. But from a point of view outside the system, they are contingent; other axioms could have been picked, and with other axioms a different reality.

If there is no necessary connection between the scientific understanding and a particular religious or metaphysical scheme that would provide an “ultimate explanation” of why the world exists and is as it is, science does not make a difference when we seek a basis to choose between theism, pantheism, and panentheism, as long as these respect the regularities discovered by science. For the theist, this requires a “naturalistic theism” without miracles that intervene in natural processes (but such positions do exist; see, for a more extensive discussion on religious naturalism alongside naturalistic theism, Drees , 116f.). Perhaps we do best to acknowledge that we do not have access to the ultimate explanation; our models will be inadequate—a motive with ancestry in ‘negative’ theology, because God is always greater than we are our imaginations. “The” answer might remain a mystery. In this vein, the physicist Charles Misner (, 95) wrote: “To say that God created the Universe does not explain either God or the universe, but it keeps our consciousness alive to mysteries of awesome majesty that we might otherwise ignore.”

In its avoidance of a positive answer, this statement might be sympathetic to a panentheist, but in the end the claim is epistemic (agnostic) rather than advocacy of any particular metaphysical position.

Universal Values

Moral conclusions need a moral premise, as well as scientific knowledge about possible causes and consequences. Any reasoning that moves from merely a description to a prescription suffers from the naturalistic fallacy. Calling something “purely natural” may work in advertising, but is not a valid argument. Thus, science by itself does not deliver moral values.

Theism might claim to provide an argument for universal values, though historical, particular forms of theism have fallen short of that ideal. In order to count as a religious position, panentheism has to incorporate a value dimension as well. For many adherents who emphasize emergence, it has one: valuing complexity over simplicity, the temporal over the timeless, dynamics over static situations, and mind over the matter out of which it emerged. None of this is itself a consequence of science, but neither is it inconsistent with science. However, it may be difficult to make a case for universality if values are related to contingent outcomes of natural processes.

What We Care About: Particular Meaning

There is a different type of values, more particular in kind. Morally speaking, I ought to value all humans equally. But in a personal sense, some people are more important to me than others. And some pursuits are closer to my own heart than others. Answering personal questions about one's loves and sources of meaning is not the business of science either. We care about our loves, and we engage in projects that provide existential meaning—and those are particular loves, rather than the universalizability that is assumed in moral discourse (Frankfurt ; Wolf ; Van Stee ) as well as in science.