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The Dialogue of Metaphysics and Religion with Natural Science: Some Continental Examples
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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In a private conversation with an occupant of Rutherford’s chair of Physics at Cambridge University, I was struck by his distance from that overall association of metaphysics and religion which we take as normative, even though, at this moment, it is understandably diversified. “I am prepared to consider the possibility of mind—though most of my colleagues are not.” That British scepticism here is not aggressive conceals from many the intellectual distance that has grown up between science and religion; it also ensures that, despite the heroism of individuals who rise above the ethos, debate is in fact rudimentary; the anti-religionists consider the battle won. English culture and paideia have lost an overarching conception of their unity. That is not the case elsewhere.
But when had this conception broken down? The background, but little known, work of Anneliese Meyer, from the Vatican Library, showed the anticipations of “modern” science in late medieval science. A.N.Whitehead saw the contribution which medieval scholasticism had made to a rational culture, including subsequent natural science. Both Descartes as the mechanist of man and animals and mathematician, and Newton as mathematician-mechanist of the Cosmos, kept their faith, as did Leibniz as mathematician-theodicean. “The Enlightenment”, about whose extent there is incomplete agreement, expressed itself in France in the unbelieving ideal of the Encyclopedic, in Germany in the religious rationalism of Christian Wolff. The position of Kant was not one of pure enlightenment. The last speculative endeavours to include natural science within an overall, complete philosophy including religion
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1 One remembers the sensation caused by the publication of Sir Edmund Whittaker's Space and Spirit (London etc. 1946), with its inference from the non‐etemity of the world to its creation, and therefore to a Creator (pp.116–7), and its citation by Pius XII in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (to which Sir Edmund belonged) (original Italian version, dated 22 November 1951, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis (An. et vol XXXIV (Ser.II v. XIX) 25th January, 1952), v. pp.41–2. Père Maldamé(Christ et le cosmos (v., infra. after n. 50) p.81) comments interpretatively, “in the face of the facts, no‐one would any longer” consider the possibility of an eternal world. cf. also Sir Edmund's (Durham) 1942 Riddell Lecture, The Beginning and End of the World (Oxford 1942), pp.63–4 (creation is continuous), pp.39–40 (cosmic entropy argues for creation and a separate God). One also gladly acknowledges the life‐long concern of Dr. Peter Hodgson.
2 More than half of her writings (including new editions) are to be found in the Italian series Storia e Letteratura (Rome): v. vots. 22, 37, 41, 52, 69, 97, 105, 112, 138. Some English translations of extracts from these are in On the Threshold of Exact Science, Selected Writings of Anneliese Meier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
3 “Fortunately the scholastic age of Alexandrian scholarship dominated Europe for centuries, and bestowed upon civilisation priceless treasures of thought”, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge 1933), p. 150, cf. p. 134.
4 Kant always interpreted “Aufklärung” in a sense which followed from his own philosophy; and the discipline of reason, its supposed motive force, by his critical philosophy was not completely negative in intention. His warning against excessive expectations from reason was principally aimed at Aufklärung—and pre‐Aufklärung theology and psychology, but the defenders of a secular conception of rational enlightenment remain apprehensive even until now that the critique would render the secular exploitation of reason impossible.
5 Besides the Naturphilosophie, as Enzyklopädie II, v. his Habilitation dissertation: De Orbitis Planetarum.
6 For this v. the various (different) figures for a philosophy of nature, along with the natural philosophy section of the complete philosophies of the early Schelling. They all are forms of a philosophy of absolute identity: i.e. of the identity of real and ideal in the absolute.
7 Père Maldamé comes to the conclusion that, with an astronomy become astrophysics, “In the place of movement described by the mechanics of Descartes and Newton, and continued by Lagrange and Laplace, [cosmology] proposes a genesis: a description of transformations” (op.cit., p.35). But such was the philosophical search of Schelling after his philosophy of absolute identity had been lampooned out of existence by Hegel. Schelling had, in this earlier philosophy, maintained that each thing has its own time and space, which is not far removed from Einstein's conception of “reference frames” for any point in space, and he had integrated time with spatial dimensions, which anticipated Minkowski's claim for time as a new dimension: both a hundred years later.
8 An expression of Leibniz: “L'infini véritable … c'est l'absolu”: quoted by Cantor, Ges. Abh. (v. next note), p. 179.
9 For this, v. H. Meschkowski: i) Probleme des Unendlichen, Werk und Leben Georg Cantors, (Braunschweig 1961), ch.8; ii) art. “Cantor, Georg” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography vol.3 (New York, 1971). Also “Das Leben Georg Cantors” by A. Fraenkel in Georg Cantor Gesammelte Abhandlungen (ed. E.Zermelo, Berlin 1932, and later reprints), pp.452–83. Section IV and espec. V of its “Mitteilungen zur Lehre von Transfiniten” (v. pp.401 n.3 (=pp.4014), p.405 n.1 and sub‐note*) shows how widely read he was in the Church Fathers and Scholastics. While his “Grundlegen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre” (Ges. Abh. III, 4, Nr.5 (pp. 165–209) says that the “absolutely realistic, but simultaneously not less idealist basis of his reflections”, with the “infinite relationships also possessing a transient reality” (p. 181), “is in altogether essential agreement with the principles of the. platonic system, as also with its essential he adheres to the “principles of the Platonic system, as also with the essential characteristics [Züge] of the spinozistic system”, as also that of Leibniz (pp.206–7). He also took Thomas Aquinas into account, though he rejected his opinion that a continuum consisted of no parts, saying he had handled it as “a religious dogma” (pp.190–1, 207). But best of all, for mathematician and non‐mathematician, is J.W.Dauben, Georg Cantor His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinity (Cambridge Mass. etc., 1979), chs.5 and 6.
10 For the place of Cantor in the place of mathematical history, v. U.Bottazzini, The Higher Calculus: a History of Real and Complex Analysis from Euler to Weierstrass (translated from the Italian by Warren van Egmond, New York 1986), pp.274–80.
11 B.Russell saw the connection between Cantor and Zeno's paradoxes: v. The Principles of Mathematics (only vol.1 produced: Cambridge 1903), ch.XLII, pp.346–354,358–60.
12 Dauben, p.123 (v. Ges.Abh. pp.175–83).
13 Following Dauben's account, pp.96–9. This draws on Ges.Abh. pp. 195–9, which concludes, “By respecting these three principles it is possible to arrive, with the greatest sureness and self‐evidence, at ever new classes of numbers, and with them to arrive at all occurring, different, successive powers in corporeal and intellectual nature, with the newly acquired numbers always having the same concrete determinateness and objective reality as the earlier ones”
14 But Cantor's absolute ordering was not as ordered as say Schelling's: “A manifold [Vielheit] can be so constituted that the assumption of a being together [Zusammensein] of all its elements into a whole leads to a contradiction, so that it is impossible to conceive of the manifold as a unity, a completed thing. Such manifolds I call absolutely infinite or inconsistent manifolds” (Ges.Abh, p.443); cf. Dauben p.245.
15 Dated 1 February 1896. v. Meschkowski i) pp. 122–4, including n.157: for source v.p.132 of Meschkowski's “Aus den Briefbüchern Georg Cantors”, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 2, pp.510–13. In January 1894 he wrote (to Hermite) that Divine providence has denied him a post at Göttingen or Berlin which “constrained me, through a deeper penetration into theology, to serve Him and His Holy Roman Catholic Church better than I have been able with my exclusive preoccupation with mathematics”, v.Meschkowski i), p. 124 (taken from M. “Aus den Briefbüchern”, pp.514–5; cf Dauben p. 147). Meschkowski i) p. 123, n. 157, refers to a marginal addition in the draft, without indication of its place: “(With the reservation [that one would be] submissive to an infallible decision of the church)” [“Unter vorbehalt der Unterwehng vor der unfehlbaren Entscheidung der Kirche”].
16 v. Dauben, pp. 146–8.
17 v. Dauben, pp.145–6, citing Ges.Abh. pp.385–7. cf. Meschkowski I, pp.126–7.
18 Continuation (dated 15 February) of letter to Pater Esser of 1 February (cf., supra, n. 15), id., p.513 (cited by Dauben p.147): “From me, Christian Philosophy will be offered for the first time the true theory of the infinite”.
19 Cited in Meschkowski i) (pp.257–9) from a private source. cf. his account of it, ib., p. 124. Cantor quotes from the commentary on Aristotle's Physics (1591), by the “Conimbricenses”: Jesuits of the Portuguese university of Coimbra.
20 Meschkowski i) p. 141.
21 ib., pp. 126–9, 225.
22 cf. H.Hartmann, Max Planck ah Men sch und Denker (Berlin 1938), p.117.
23 v. art. “Planck” by R.H.Stuewer, in The New Encyclopedia Britannica (15th edn. 1997). vol.25, cols.856b–866a.
24 On Kant and Planck, v. espec. C. Liesenfeld, Philosophische Weltbilder des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine interdisciplinäre Studie zu Max Planck und Werner Heisenberg (Epistemata (Reihe Philosophie) 113, Würzburg 1992), the whole section IB, especially pp.31–43.
25 v. his 1947 paper “Religion und Naturwissenschaft”. translated (by F. Gaynor) in his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (London 1950), p. 181: “natural science exhibits a rational order to which nature and mankind are subject, but a world order the inner essence of which is and remains unknowable to us, since only our sense data (which can never be completely excluded) supply evidence for it”. The nuance of the relationship he found in Kant himself: “Kant did not teach that man actually prescribes laws for nature. He taught simply that whenever man formulates the laws of nature, he always adds something of his own too” (ib., p. 176)
26 ib., p. 170 (cf.pp. 169–173).
27 ib., p.172.
28 ib., pp. 182–5.
29 ib., p.186.
30 ib., p.187.
31 In a 1947 lecture, “Sinn und Grenzen der Exakten Wissenschaften”, also in Scientific Auto biography, pp. 107–8.
32 ib., p.102.
33 v. J.L.Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man, Mar Planck as Spokesman for German Science (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 183–4.
34 v. C.Liesenfeld, op.cit., pp. 15,17. This is also the overall conclusion in the last part of the article, “Planck, Max”, “Philosophy, Religion”, by H.Kangro in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol.XL, pp.13b–15b.
35 In consequence of his independence, it is difficult to find precise information about him. He has a brief entry in Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten Kalendar of 1974; but disappears from later editions. The dust‐jacket of his Der Dreieine (Stein am Rhein 19764) lists an impressive list of international contributions; he himself has said publicly that he had been “advisor to different governments as well as the Vatican” (but he is not an academician of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences). His Christliche Prophetie und Nuclearenergie (Nuremberg 19611, last edn., Stein am Rhein 1991), which makes Saint John's Apocalypse“a protocol and almost exact description of a nuclear war with all its consequences” (so a review) is much appreciated by German Catholic and Protestant academics, but we exclude it here as being important, but not a direct entry into dialogue.
36 Offenbarung, abridged translation, Revelation (Plumpton, Australia, 1994), p.39. There is a shorter, different abridgement, The Sovereign (Plumpton, 1997).
37 By J.F.McCarthy, in “The New Theology of Bernhard Philberth” (Living Tradition, Nov. 1994). They include his logical criticism of the formula “Mary as Mother of God”. One appreciates the reviewer's concern, and Philberth's presumption of a false logical argumentation should not be answered by further logic: rather by an understanding of the mysteric base of definitions, where the overlapping of categories of different origins alludes to the mystery which is beyond words: cf. my “Kategorialität in der Patristik”, in Kategorie und Kategorialität (edd. D.Koch and K.Bort, Würzburg 1990), pp.49–74
38 i.e. “The Three‐that‐are‐One, Beginning and Being, The Structure of Creation”. The 4th (not the last) edn. (Stein am Rhein, 1976) has been used.
39 v. ib., pp.64–5. To make the irony of this passage clear, it is necessary to paraphrase it in English: most men attempt to explain the world by a one‐in‐oneness, but far more is seen when it is interpreted according to a three‐in‐oneness.
40 ib., p.21.
41 “This reflection back on to itself [Rückbesinnung] of theology at the hands [unter der Faust] of physics is not the end of theology, but a greater beginning It permits the original and ancient truths of theology to arise in a new way”, ib., p.45 (cf., pp.41–5); cf pp.439–40.
42 ib., pp.46–65.
43 ib., pp.324–331.
44 ib., pp.332–3.
45 ib., pp.334–437.
46 ib., pp.380–1.
47 ib., pp.438–531.
48 ib., pp.440–1. “Wesenheiten” are essences [Wesen] abstractly considered.
49 As arising from geometrical figures: ib., pp.569–79; followed by a section on man and woman (pp.579–82).
50 A fuller account of his work is in the “Présentation” by Mgr Doré to his Le Christ pour l'univers, p.7.
51 op. cit., p.8.
52 ib., p.110.
53 ib., p.131.
54 ib., p.272.
55 ib., p.265; cf. p.273.
56 ib., p.90.
57 ib., p.76.
58 ib., p.103.
59 ib., p.102.
60 Admirably summarised in ch.7.
61 ib., p.103.
62 ib., p.97.
63 ib., p. 100. As the anthropic principle had originally proposed. cf., infra, n.74.
64 ib., p. 133: as S. Irenaeus linked together deification and recapitulation.
65 ib., p.134.
66 ib., p.163.
67 ib., p.273.
68 v. chs.11–18. The power of its insights frustrates brief summarising. Saint Paul's expression of God as “all in all” is better explained, he says, thanks to science (p.272).
69 ib., p.255.
70 ib., p.265.
71 ib., pp.15–19. One may doubt whether the importance given to Pascal's ironies can bear the weight of significance often attributed to him.
72 op.cit., pp.43–62.
73 ib., p.87: “to found, to fashion, to mould, to breathe out, to call express the foundational relationship and its actualization”.
74 One is grateful for the succinct expression of why it supposes the ultimate existence of an observer: “The human observer could not live in a universe other than his own. Since the observer exists, the universe must fulfil the conditions which makes this existence possible” (ib., p.97).
75 ib., p. 112. Even less so for the sciences of man than for biology (p. 115).
76 ib., pp. 117–60.
77 ib., pp. 189–90.
78 ib., pp.249, 260.
79 ib., p.258.
80 ib., p.268.
81 ib., pp.260–1: as a fulfilment of the original Sabbath.
82 ib., p.268 (cf.pp.261–8).
83 ib., pp.270–1.
84 ib., p.277.
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