Potiphar say, “There is no theological neutrality. There are, however, some who are theologically neutered.”
He can be a bit obscure sometimes.
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I had to smile at the combination of words, “central locus for geocentrism.” I am going to have to figure out a way to bring that into one of my nerdy conversations with someone. I thought by now geocentrism was a minority view in the RC. I will be disappointed if it is a big thing like YEC is a big thing in the Evangelical realm.
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It is not as big as YEC, but with growing influence. They use the same rhetoric as Ken Ham, so AIG spends a lot of time fending them off.
That is interesting, and kind of depressing. And I never thought I would particularly agree with AIG but they seem to only be against geocentrism because some Catholics believe in it.
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I find it fascinating. They have to use the same sort of arguments as theistic evolutionists and Ross to push back on geocentrism. It leads to the trial conflicts they haven’t figured out yet.
One day I want to do a three way conversation between a young earther, a geocentrist, and myself. What fun we would have!
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I think the world would be a better place if people cared a little LESS about theology… and killed fewer people because of it.
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I think that what you say is partly true, but you are mis-stating it.
BioLogos writers tend to avoid committing themselves on their particular, individual, theological views, e.g., about how God is involved in the evolutionary process, about whether God was directly involved in the creation of the first life, about whether God gave man something “extra” beyond what evolution from primate origins conferred. They also avoid the discussion of any theological doctrines which might indicate disagreement with other TE/ECs, e.g., if one of them, say a Mennonite or Nazarene, attacks natural theology, the Calvinists among them (who if they are true to Calvin accept a limited natural theology), will never speak up and express their disagreement. (There is, it seems, a tacit rule at BL that no EC shall ever disagree with another EC over Christian theology in the presence of ID or creationist readers or listeners, lest cracks in solidarity should appear to weaken the theological coherence of EC overall.)
In this sense, BioLogos is maddeningly evasive about theology. But you overstate things when you suggest that they don’t care about theology or don’t want theology. Close analysis of their sketchy statements suggests an implicit theology, one in which the classical Protestant understanding has been seriously modified by the Enlightenment, by the rise of Biblical criticism, and by modern moral and political convictions which are quite different from those entertained by ancient/Medieval/Reformation Christians or by the writers of the Bible.
I have often said that the differences between ID and EC proponents over theology are probably at least as much the cause of friction between the two groups as their differences over science. I know a number of people in both camps fairly well, at least as regards their theological views, and it’s plain to me that, on average, ID Methodists are more conservative than EC Methodists, ID Calvinists more conservative than EC Calvinists, ID Catholics more conservative than EC Catholics, ID Anglicans more conservative than EC Anglicans, etc. And I don’t believe the difference is entirely due to the issue of evolution; I believe that, even aside from the question of evolution, the kind of person that is attracted to ID is different from the kind of person who is attracted to EC (at least. to EC as typically found on BioLogos). The kind of person who is attracted to ID, it seems, is more instinctively attracted to theological, philosophical, political and social positions which stress order, rationality, predictability, respect for theological tradition, etc., whereas the sort of person attracted to BioLogos seems to be more attracted to positions which stress freedom, “creativity”, unpredictability, novelty, individualistic Bible interpretation owing no deference to the classical theological tradition, etc. In a sense, BioLogos Christians have more “modern” Christian minds – but I mean that purely descriptively, and not necessarily as a compliment.
Of course there are exceptions to most generalizations, and I don’t say that everyone at BioLogos is exactly the same, or that all ID proponents are exactly the same. I’m merely remarking on general tendencies.
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You are right, Daniel. There is a wing of “Genesis literalist Catholics” – but they are numerically small, and for the most part lacking influence within the Roman Church.
I doubt that Michael Chaberek (who, by the way, has written the most thorough account so far of the history of Catholic views on evolution) would speak in terms of “science versus faith”; I think he insists that the best science and true faith are always in harmony. On that point he would not differ from other Catholics, though he disagrees with many Catholic intellectuals on the scientific soundness and theological implications of Darwinian theory.
I am not sure whether Chaberek would call himself a YEC, as opposed to an OEC; if he is the latter, he would not be in complete agreement with some of the Catholic Genesis literalists I spoke of. From a philosophical and theological point of view (leaving aside scientific arguments about evolution) what is most interesting about him is his claim that Darwinian evolution is incompatible with Thomistic thought – a point where he sharply disagrees with a number of modern Thomists who have been bending over backwards to show that there is no conflict between Darwinian theory and Thomistic metaphysics. I have not done enough study yet to state my own position regarding this debate, but I have read enough to know that Chaberek’s arguments, right or wrong, are historically informed in Catholic tradition – in at least some cases more informed than those of his adversaries, who do not appear to have read key passage of Aquinas – and I think they deserve a hearing. But probably this debate will be of more interest to Catholics than to Protestants.
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@Eddie, have you read Fr. Austriaco’s response to Chaberek? He is someone who is both a trained and practicing biologist, as well as having a second doctorate in moral theology and being a Dominican, having a good awareness of Thomism. I have not read Chaberek himself (in fact, I only heard about him from Austriaco’s presentation). But in last July’s conference on Thomism and Modern Science at the Thomistic Institute, the question of compatibility between Thomism and evolutionary biology was discussed extensively, although we were lacking in voices of evolutionary skeptics like Chaberek. Austriaco basically argued that even if we follow Aquinas in arguing that changes in substantial form (which happen in (macro)evolution) have to come from somewhere external than the organisms themselves, we could assign God as the cause of that metaphysical change. Austriaco was interesting because he also uses this as an argument for God - which sounded a lot like ID-type arguments, but pitched on a philosophical instead of scientific level.
Besides Austriaco, I also heard a very good presentation by philosopher Brian T. Carl on Aquinas’ views on spontaneous generation (I was going to refer to this in replying to you in the other thread, but needed more time to properly look up my notes first). Basically, he argues that Aquinas’ view that more perfect beings could come only through univocal (as opposed to instrumental) causality (which could be a major objection to evolution) was based on Aristotelian empirical science known at the time, not metaphysics. According to Carl, Aquinas would be fine with the idea of the perfect developing from the less perfect as a result of instrumental causality (where a carpenter, i.e. God, can use a lesser tool, i.e. evolution, to create something greater than the tool, i.e. humans and the higher animals), if empirical science demanded it.
I don’t know if Carl is one of those “modern Thomists who have bent over backwards” as I am only starting to learn about Thomism, but all of his arguments were based on actual texts of Aristotle and the Summa, and he is a professional philosopher who specializes in Aristotle and Aquinas, so I was pretty convinced by him. But perhaps you might have a very different opinion.
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Daniel:
I read one of Fr. Austriaco’s columns on BioLogos two or three years back. I believe I asked him a question, but I don’t think he replied. (Not all BioLogos columnists, especially guest columnists, reply to commenters.)
I think I found Austriaco’s argument partly reasonable but had some doubts on a particular point. If I could remember the name of the column on BioLogos, I would tell you, but I can’t. Possibly you can find Austriaco on the BioLogos website under the search function, as an Author.
I have not read his response to Chaberek.
I have not read the article by Brian T. Carl, either. (So many things to read, so little time!) I would rather not comment on your summary of his argument until I can read the original – which may not be soon, as I am trying to get a course ready which has already overloaded me with reading. But be aware that Chaberek is also “a professional philosopher who specializes in Aquinas” – in fact, in addition to the aforementioned book on the history of Catholic teaching on evolution, Chaberek has written another book specifically on Aquinas and Evolution. (I haven’t read that one yet.)
For a very detailed discussion of Darwin, Thomas Aquinas, and modern Thomism, I can recommend you to the (very long) article by the philosopher Vincent Torley, which you can find on Torley’s own site, and on Uncommon Descent. The UD link is:
I wouldn’t recommend trying to read it in one sitting. However, it is useful in that he discusses passages of Aquinas which his opponents (Feser, Beckwith and Tkacz) appear to ignore or deal with only superficially. (Like his opponents, he is a Catholic and admirer of Aquinas, but he reads Aquinas differently.)
I think there are parts of the article that deal with Genesis interpretation, and as I recall, those parts were less persuasive, but the parts on Aquinas were substantive.
Further responses to Feser and Tkacz and others can be found in Jay Richards, ed., God and Evolution. There are several essays by Catholics in the book, including one by Logan Gage and three by Jay Richards, all discussing Thomism, Aquinas, and related matters. Richards has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, and his discussion is sophisticated, showing a wide command of philosophy, theology, intellectual history, metaphysics underlying natural science, etc.
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Thanks for alerting me to the various Thomistic voices on evolution - I was under the impression that most Thomists were like Feser and Austriaco, and Chaberek was an exception. (Especially given that almost everyone invited to the Thomistic Institute conference was sympathetic to TE, and this was a conference organized by and held at the official Dominican House of Studies!) Certainly these resources will be interesting reading.
Just like to note that AFAIK Brian Carl hasn’t published an actual article on his views (I can’t seem to find it), so the 1-hour lecture link is the only thing that expresses his argument.
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A student of recent human history might not agree with you. Muslim theology may still have lot’s of blood on its hands but the previous century proves that humans are very capable of mass bloodshed without theology. Ideology above theology has a worse track record than the other way around.
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I’m a frank man with only so many years left in this realm. If they want to stay maddeningly evasive with sketchy statements then they don’t care about it enough to make expressing it clearly a priority. So why should I spend my remaining days trying to read their tea leaves when they don’t care enough to come right out with it? its not the priority there. So let me amend my statement to “they don’t care about it relative to the other things you have mentioned”.
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That being said, I do have a more meta-level question for you, who is more experienced in the field: how would you summarize the overall intellectual position of various Thomists with regards to TE? Is it roughly an equal debate with authoritative voices on both sides, or do you believe that Feser, Austriaco, Tkacz, Carl and others are not as serious, knowledgeable scholars of Aquinas as Torley and Chaberek?
Based on your description of “modern Thomists”, you seem to imply that they are prone to reinterpreting tradition for the sake of a pre-determined modern scientific conclusion. (Perhaps I am misreading you.) But to me this is surprising, because again, my understanding is that if Feser and Austriaco were advocating fringe modernist positions they wouldn’t be doing their conferences in the official DHS. I don’t think you can easily dismiss them as being philosophically unsophisticated, the way you have done (somewhat more justifiably) with some TEs in Biologos, for example.
Thanks, Daniel. The problem of course is that, Thomas Aquinas being a big name, and an “official” theologian and philosopher of the Catholic Church, every Catholic philosopher, theologian, moral reformer, etc. wishes to show that Aquinas is on his or her “side” – it give their view more “clout”. Since there are Catholic EC/TEs, looking for theological vindication for their stance on evolution, it makes sense that they would try to find in Aquinas’s writings, if not an outright endorsement of evolution, at least a compatibility with evolution. Similarly, anti-evolutionists will try to stress things in Aquinas which they think rule out evolution. But all of them will call themselves “Thomists” in the sense of “defenders of the true meaning of Thomas Aquinas.”
The job of the Aquinas scholar, however, is not to prove that Aquinas supported or condemned this or that modern theory or view of anything. The scholar’s job isn’t to vindicate evolution, or condemn evolution. The scholar’s job is to determine what Aquinas taught about origins, about Creation, about primary and secondary causation, etc., and then, regarding evolution, let the chips fall where they may. Trying to enlist a prestigious theologian in the service of a doctrine (e.g., evolution, or the legitimacy of birth control, or pacifism, or the abolition of capital punishment, or whatever else) that one is already committed to for professional or personal reasons is already potentially corruptive of good scholarship.
I’ve read a fair bit of Aquinas, but have nothing like mastery of his thought, even though I can read a bit of Latin and follow a parallel text to some extent. So I won’t declare dogmatically that Aquinas’s metaphysical principles do or don’t support evolution. Chaberek says they are incompatible, but I don’t automatically accept his conclusion. But neither am I convinced by the pro-evolution readings of Aquinas, which insofar as I have looked at them tend to be selective in their use of Aquinas passages, as if they are driven by an external agenda to harmonize Darwin with Catholic theology. So I need more time to get my thoughts together. But probably it will be a year or so down the road before I can give you a fully reasoned position. Sorry if this sounds indecisive, but I think it’s really just plain scholarly caution, when dealing with a writer as subtle and difficult as Aquinas.
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Mark:
I agree that articulating a coherent Christian theology of any kind – Calvinist, Anglican, Lutheran, whatever – has never been a priority at BioLogos. The majority of the founders of BioLogos and most of its occasional and regular columnists have been scientists, most of them with very little training in theology and most of whom seem to spend very little time reading the classical writings of Christian theologians – Luther, Calvin, Aquinas, Augustine, the Greek Fathers – which anyone seriously interested in formulating a coherent Christian theology would do. They are happy to throw together ad hoc theologies pasted together from bits of reading of secondary and tertiary sources – often sources by other EC scientists like themselves! Theology is for them a sideline, not at the center of their intellectual existence. At the center of their intellectual existence is the defense of “consensus science” and the promotion of belief in evolution in the evangelical, Bible-based Christian community. On this point, I agree with you.
But I wanted also to express agreement with Joshua that there is a theology (albeit vaguely formulated, and based on imperfect reading and understanding) underlying many of the statements of BioLogos people. And actually, tacit, unarticulated theologies are more dangerous than explicit ones, because their influence on the arguments is harder to trace. I actually would prefer openly stated heresies, like those of Pelagius or Arius, to subtle flirtations with unorthodoxy which are never clearly owned or understood by the writer, and thus are more likely to confuse or mislead readers, and more likely to confuse the writer himself.
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Eddie,
Just a minor quibble here. Is it possible that you can stop using Darwinian Theory and instead use evolutionary science or just evolution. We go to great length here to speak about the present understanding of evolutionary science and terms like Darwinian Theory went the way of the vacuum tube in the 1960’s . Thanks
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I’d hesitate to make a judgment like that without further reading. I can tell you that Feser was originally an atheist who argued vigorously for atheism, and then became a Thomist who argued as vigorously for Thomism. His field of academic training is philosophy, not theology, and he approaches Thomism from the philosophy side. I think he is a very good reasoner and I think he has done the world a service in attacking modern philosophy and showing the virtues of Thomistic thought. I agree with almost everything he says, except where he ventures into theology and theological attacks on ID.
I find that some of the statements he has made about the Bible and about Christian theology to be one-sided, due to his heavily philosophical approach – my training in Religious Studies included not only philosophy but Biblical study, and I think his understanding of Christian theology is so focused on abstract metaphysics that it sometimes lacks the “guts” that come with emphasizing the Bible and the Hebraic side. (Even Aquinas has been accused of not giving enough weight to the Hebraic side, but Feser doesn’t emphasize even such Hebraic elements as Aquinas acknowledges. His account of “classical theism” is very much more philosophy-sounding than Bible-sounding. From what I have read of Chaberek, the Bible side is more strongly emphasized.)
I don’t know enough about Tkacz.
I don’t know Beckwith’s current academic work – which I gather for the past several years has been more on social, political and ethical theology than metaphysics and creation doctrine. His work in that area may be quite good. But from what he has written about Aquinas on blogs, etc., I’d say he appears to have forgotten a lot of what he learned about Aquinas’s metaphysics in graduate school, and that he’s intellectually sloppy, compared to Torley, who provides passages, whereas Beckwith relies more on “general reasoning from Thomist principles”. If the question is what Aquinas thought, texts trump “Thomist principles” any day.
I didn’t say Feser was philosophically unsophisticated. I do think he has tunnel vision on some issues – as do we all. Nor would I say that any Thomist who supports evolution is automatically doing it only to rescue a pre-determined scientific conclusion. But I’ve been in academics a long time, about 45 years, and I know academics very well, and I know that in every academic discipline (yes, sometimes even in the natural sciences) there are a large number who are very concerned not to look “out of it” or “old-fashioned” or to be seen as “swimming against the tide” in their fields. It is sometimes (not always) the case that people read texts governed by wishful thinking, hoping to defend certain conclusions. (I’m sure you have heard of people who try to force the Biblical texts to say that all the “wine” referred to in the Bible was unfermented grape juice, for example, and I’ve just finished reading a biography of Darwin containing copious examples of academics of his day trying to force his ideas about natural selection etc. into their preconceived social and political doctrines.) In fact a large number of scientists now advising the Vatican are unrepentant and convinced evolutionists, and that can lead to twisted readings of Aquinas and other authorities, if scrupulous scholarship does not intervene.
Re “Modern Thomists”, if the term is used generally, it means merely modern thinkers of the Thomist school, and that includes a healthy range of views on what Thomas Aquinas taught and what its systematic development should be. I have nothing against “Modern Thomism” in that sense. But in the context of internet and book debates about ID, evolution, etc., certain people claiming to be the authoritative voice of Thomism, or Thomism-Aristotelianism, have tended to bash ID mercilessly and support some form of EC/TE. It is that narrow group of “Modern Thomists” that I am critical of, not all modern scholars who study and articulate the thought of Aquinas. So when someone like Chaberek comes along, I say, “Wait a minute, guys – you aren’t the only “modern Thomists”, and some “modern Thomists” disagree with you. And even if all modern Thomists agreed with you, past Thomists might not. So you don’t speak in an authoritative voice for all of historic “Thomism.” You can’t claim to be the authoritative voice of Thomas Aquinas, or that the world has to bow to your reading of Aquinas’s texts.”
My approach to scholarship is to determine as best I can what a text says, and as best I can what an author teaches, and to engage in that activity, as far as I can, blind to the possible consequence for other beliefs I might hold dear. (As a physician, trying to determine if his wife has cancer, would do his professional best to blot out his personal feelings to come to a correct analysis even though it might not be what he wants to find.) So I try to get straight as best I can what Aquinas teaches, and as best I can what Darwin or neo-Darwinism etc. teaches, and at the outset I try to assume nothing about whether the two will be compatible. The problem that Catholic scientists have, of course, is Aquinas’s semi-official position as a doctrinal authority within the Catholic Church, which makes it almost a duty to beat his teaching into a form compatible with current evolutionary theory – even if Aquinas’s views don’t lend themselves to that. If you know in advance that Rome is never going to let you say that on some points, Aquinas was just dead wrong, and you find that there are some points where Aquinas just doesn’t accommodate Darwin, and therefore (in your view as a biologist) must be wrong, then you have to write diplomatically, rather than honestly, in order to square the circle.
Protestants of course are free from such constraints regarding Aquinas, since there is no reason in Protestant thought why Aquinas couldn’t sometimes be seriously wrong. About Aquinas and evolution, they could in principle write with more impartiality. And most Protestants reject the fundamental metaphysical premises of Aquinas, so there is generally no problem. But Catholic scientists have to be more careful, since they dwell in two mental worlds, a theological world with a Thomistic metaphysics, and a scientific world with an underlying Cartesian-Baconian metaphysics. This creates all kinds of opportunities for conscious or unconscious intellectual dishonesty, as the demands of both Catholic orthodoxy and scientific integrity have to be met at once, even where that might in fact be impossible. I don’t say it is impossible, but it might be – and that is why it is necessary, in order to avoid “confirmation bias”, for EC folks, after reading Austriaco and Feser etc. (which I don’t object to), to read people like Torley and Chaberek. A wish that Darwin should be compatible with Aquinas is not adequate to make the thing so.
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@Eddie Ahh, gotcha, and agree. And really liked your piece on the Hump of the Camel.
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Patrick:
We are discussing Chaberek, and he explicitly couches evolution in Darwinian language. I’m trying to accurately represent what he writes. If you don’t like that, you will have to take it up with Chaberek! 