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The author of this thesis is The director of this thesis is

Joel B. Hunter Dr. Timothy M. Renick

2987 Sutton Glen Department of Philosophy

Marietta, Georgia 30062 College of Arts & Sciences

Uncovering the Prejudice in Modern Science and Theology

A Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University

1998

by

Joel B. Hunter

Committee:

___________________________________________

Dr. Timothy M. Renick, Chair

___________________________________________

Dr. Linda A. Bell, Member

___________________________________________

Dr. Mark B. Woodhouse, Member

___________________________________________

Date

___________________________________________

Dr. Robert Arrington

Department Chair

Copyright by

Joel B. Hunter

1998

iii

ABSTRACT

We must uncover and confront a hidden condition of our thinking before we can

begin a project of synthesis between philosophy, science, and religion. This condition is

the Prejudice. In science, the Prejudice has been challenged by the discoveries of modern

physics; however, other fields of science remain devoted to the paradigm of the

Prejudice. In theology, the Prejudice dominates our understanding of the text and

interpretation succumbs to its authority. I propose that Galileo may be the first

fundamentalist insofar as he applied flexible interpretations of biblical texts that seemed

in conflict with his empirical findings. The criticisms of the Prejudice by Hans-Georg

Gadamer, Owen Barfield, and Ken Wilber, support my effort to lay a groundwork for

post-Prejudice hermeneutics. We must experience a “felt change of consciousness” from

the Prejudice and once again understand ourselves as participating with phenomena in all

of their empirical, rational, and spiritual aspects.

iv

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter

1. THE PREJUDICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. SCIENCE AND THE PREJUDICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

The Prejudice and Its Evolution . . . . . . . . . . 11

The Independence of Phenomena . . . . . . . . . . 13

Superimposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Science Beyond The Prejudice . . . . . . . . . . . 30

3. THELOGY AND THE PREJUDICE . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Fundamentalism and Textual Naiveté . . . . . . . . 40

Biblical Criticism and Scientific Naiveté . . . . . . . 49

Hermeneutics Mindful of The Prejudice . . . . . . . . 56

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

1

INTRODUCTION

This paper attempts to make a contribution to the discussions in the various fields

of philosophy, science, and religion which arise from the startling discoveries of modern

science—theories such as quantum fields, chaos, and relativity—and which attempt to

unify the fields in a new paradigm. This unification is not a new idea. Philosophers,

scientists, and theologians have published a multitude of popular and academic works in

recent years exploring the connections between these new discoveries and their wider

implications. My intent is to uncover a hidden condition of our thinking that must be

confronted before we can begin a project of synthesis. This condition of our thinking

which underlies the fields to be discussed in this paper is the Prejudice. I say “the”

Prejudice because it is a prejudice against prejudices. Philosophers such as Hans-Georg

Gadamer have argued that prejudice is part of the human condition. We inherit prejudice

from our particular world with its provincial mores and customs. Our prejudice is our

mode of understanding: it affirms both our shared life as a community and our finitude as

human beings.

But what effect has four hundred years of scientific advancement had on our

prejudice in the West? I shall argue that it is significant and ubiquitous. In addition to the

introduction of the Prejudice in Chapter l, we shall meet Galileo, our guide through the

thesis. He is a unique figure in the history of science and religion not simply because of

his well-known trial, but because he provides examples of the Prejudice in both his

scientific statements and his theological statements: he will be our link through seemingly

2

disconnected fields. The first fork in the road, Chapter 2, discusses the two aspects of the

Prejudice as manifested in science. The second fork in the road, Chapter 3, discusses the

Prejudice as revealed in theology. I hope not only to show that we must confront the

Prejudice in our thinking no matter what the field of study, but also that this confrontation

is essential for our recovering meaning in our interpretations of art, literature, and science

before the Prejudice. We shall consider one such text, the Bible, as a case study.

3

CHAPTER 1

THE PREJUDICE

Since the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century, Western Christian

philosophers and theologians have deferred the notion of ultimate truth and certainty in

knowledge to the findings of science. Some thinkers, such as the opponents of Galileo,

resisted this consciously at the outset, but gradually our deference to science as the

primary arbiter of truth has settled, like sediment, into our unconscious. That is to say, we

have accepted it uncritically; it permeates our conscious thought unchallenged as a habit

of thinking. This particular habit of thinking has grave consequences for hermeneutical

efforts such as biblical interpretation because of the longstanding claims that such texts

bear truth, even ultimate truth.1

What is this habit of thinking, this Prejudice we still share with the

Enlightenment, which has become ingrained in our thinking? It consists of two parts. The

primary part is the belief that phenomena, in the material sense of objects and entities,

1 The term “hermeneutics” carries a heavy burden. It is sometimes used as a catchall for that which is

critical of objective science. I wish to employ the meaning found in Gadamer and Ricoeur: hermeneutics is

the inquiry into the “the ‘thing’ or issue of the text.” In written texts, the discourse is between one who

addresses another who is not present in the world of the writer (as opposed to oral discourse that is between

two speakers who inhabit a common world to some degree). The text is about something (referential) in a

world that is not in the text structurally, nor behind the text with the writer, but is rather anterior to the text.

The reader submits to the questions raised by the text and the understanding that evolves is the world of the

text. Thus, hermeneutics is the interpretation of a text that leads to understanding in a holistic sense. It

seeks to disclose what the text says about something as well as the world of the text. (Paul Ricoeur,

Figuring the Sacred (1995), 220-l).

4

exist in absolute independence from human consciousness. One familiar formulation is

Descartes’s cogito. According to his dictum, I can radically doubt all but my own

subjectivity; hence, there exists myself in an alienation from all that is not myself (or

external, extrinsic). This paradigm of a strong distinction between the subject and object

permitted an unprecedented study of phenomenal nature (in terms of matter and

extension) according to the rule of empirical verification and the safeguard of reason. The

Cogito both divorced the self from nature and raised self-consciousness. The self

condensed from its environment by becoming foremost the measurer, the observer of that

environment’ For over four-hundred years, the notion of nature as a sophisticated

mechanism steadily conquered participatory notions of phenomena, that is, of phenomena

in some measure being representations and interpenetrating human consciousness.2

The secondary part of the Prejudice I shall call “superimposition.” If it is given

that phenomena are independent of our consciousness of them. it is also true that this has

always been so, that the processes, systems, and forces which we observe today have

operated unchanged in nature, independent of the presence or absence of a thinking

observer or mind. Superimposition imposes the primary part of the Prejudice upon time:

empiricism is extended to a non-empirical sense-gathering subject from the past (or the

future) by equipping the fictional subject with our paradigm. We assume the constancy of

our perceptions of phenomena in the scientific age for all ages; our mental-

phenomenological constructions under the guidance of the scientific method are assumed

2 Cf. Owen Barfield’s study of language and anthropologists such as Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl on the

collective representations in primitive cultures.

5

reliable at all points in space and at all moments of time. Furthermore, we superimpose

the discourse of the Prejudice on earlier discourses; the language of science does not

merely substitute, but rather reconstitutes the language of its paradigm predecessors, such

as theology. We habitually presume, or expect, pre-Scientific Revolution thinkers to

perceive with the same conscious faculties which we employ when observing the same

phenomena. We find that many critics of the primary part of the Prejudice in its various

manifestations, such as Cartesianism, materialism, positivism, and reductionism,

nevertheless succumb to superimposition in their historical analyses.3 When used as a

criticism of the old because it is old, when claiming that the outdated is wrong for that

reason, it may be recognized as what C. S. Lewis termed “chronological snobbery.”

Superimposition adds the quality of arrogance to our current body of knowledge.

Together, these two notions I shall simply call “the Prejudice,” calling to mind two uses

of the word by philosophers, one by Gadamer, the other by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

I prefer the term “Prejudice” because it generates uneasiness in its common

pejorative meaning. And it is precisely the common meanings embedded in our thinking

of nature, phenomena, science, and biblical interpretation that I wish to challenge:

therefore, I adopt Gadamer’s rehabilitated sense of the term:

The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the

Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens

the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates

not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.4

3 e.g., Arthur Koestler. The Sleepwalkers (1959), subtitled “A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the

Universe.” 4 Gadamer. Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (1989), 276. He presents

prejudice as a precondition to our understanding, received from a tradition and bolstered by authority. He

6

A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity

of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical

circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously

dominate him as a vis a tergo.5

Gadamer refers to the Prejudice as a “force from behind” that dominates the one who

would claim to overcome tradition and apply procedures and methods in pure objectivity.

I would add that this same vis a tergo propels us to claim certainty when we have

perceived verisimilitude and presume an autocracy for empirical science from our

provincial technology. Merleau-Ponty’s review of Gabriel Marcel’s Being and Having

opened with this criticism:

Philosophy as well as common sense has taken our contemplation of

inanimate objects and indifferent things as representing the model and

ideal of human knowledge. . . . we are used to setting out from a certain

type of knowledge considered normal: the contemplation of a set of

qualities or characteristics that are scattered, meaningless. Against these

givens, this spectacle, a subject is posited, who interprets and understands

them and who is consequently no more than a “power of judging.” a

Cogito. And since that analysis is easily applied to scientific knowledge.

philosophers are convinced that knowledge is a dialogue between a

“subject” and an “object” in the sense that we have just specified.6

Later, he disparages what he terms the “prejudice of the world” which is the parent of the

“classical prejudices”: empiricism and intellectualism. The “prejudice of the world”

incorporates both my primary and secondary parts of the Prejudice:

the assumption of a pre-given objective world consisting of meaningless

sense data, which either associate passively to form the phenomena of

perception or are put together by such acts as attention or judgment. This

‘prejudice’ is based on what psychology has called the ‘principle of

points out that the Enlightenment discredited the notion of a legitimate prejudice as antithetical to reason

(pp 277-284). 5 Ibid., 360.

6 Merleau-Ponty, “Etre et avoir.” La Vie intellectuelle, 45 (1936), trans. Michael B. Smith in Texts and

Dialogues, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (1992).

7

constancy,’ according to which each objective stimulus is connected with

a sensation in a one-to-one correspondence.7

Marcel himself criticized the world created by science as “a sort of huge, inflexible

bookkeeping.”8

Ken Wilber categorizes three modes of perception: the eye of flesh perceives the

sensory; the eye of reason perceives the symbolic; and, the eye of contemplation

perceives the transcendent, or the spiritual. According to Wilber, the Scientific

Revolution ushered in the dominance of the eye of flesh for acquiring knowledge. The

over-rationalized system of Thomas Aquinas had not developed observational powers for

the methodical use of the senses (see pp. 10-11), and the perception of the spiritual, while

stronger in the Eastern church, had declined in the West through the Middle Ages. Wilber

suggests that the disputes between science, philosophy and religion arise because of

“category error”: “facts try to replace principles and principles try to replace God.”9

Because the eyes of reason and contemplation were weakened by Galileo’s project of

measurement, “empirical science, spurred on by the likes of Auguste Comte, became

scientism”:10

It went from saying, ‘That which cannot be seen by the eye of flesh cannot

be empirically verified’ to ‘That which cannot be seen by the eye of flesh

does not exist.’

. . . this encouraged the decline of confidence in the powers of the

subjective mind. . . .the eye of mind was closed out, as the eye of

contemplation before it. Scientism was not only relieving humanity of

God, it was relieving it from responsibility of thinking. . . . the sole

7 Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (1984), 561.

8 Being and Having (1951), trans. Katharine Farrer, quoted by Pietro Prini in The Philosophy of Gabriel

Marcel, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp and Lewis Edwin Hahn (1984), 210. 9 Eye to Eye (1996), 9.

10 Ibid., 20.

8

criterion of truth came to be the empiric criterion mean. . . nonfleshy came

to mean unreal….11

Owen Barfield, a philologist, calls the Prejudice interchangeably “idolatry” and

“literalness”:

[Western thinking] had clothed [the appearances of the familiar world]

with the independence and extrinsicality of the unrepresented itself. But a

representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not

to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves

are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human

perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented.12

Our [modern] collective representations were born when men began to

take the models, whether geometric or mechanical, literally. . . . It was

soon to be stamped indelibly on men’s imaginations by the circumstance

of their being ever more surrounded by actual artificial machinery on

earth. The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on

moving, it ‘goes on by itself’ without man’s participation.13

So, some philosophers have identified the Prejudice that underlies those who aim or

claim to be unprejudiced; such an aim or claim being the very badge of the Prejudice.

The Enlightenment mindscape conceals a metaphysical claim implied by the Prejudice,

one which permits no boundary or horizon to limit understanding or its “power of

judging,” based on the immutable objectivity of the phenomena. It must be pointed out

that these philosophers I have called upon criticize the Prejudice while at the same time

allowing a legitimate sphere for it. For example, Gadamer says, “removing [the

Prejudice] opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates

not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.” Our reflection has no

ultimate vantage point for Objectivity (with a capital O); therefore, we must perceive the

11

Ibid., 21-3. 12

Saving the Appearances (1988), 62. 13

Ibid., 51.

9

boundaries of reflection by abandoning the demand for no prejudice (disregarding

historical circumstances and authority, which is the Prejudice itself) and taking an

account of and coming to terms with the historical circumstances which condition us.

One of these historical circumstances is the Prejudice itself but we must begin to

experience it as a prejudice. This taking account or coming to terms is the practice of an

objectivity (with a little o) which denies neither self-conscious reflection with our critical

faculties nor our participation in the phenomena and the constraint of tradition.

Inquirers unconsciously dominated by the Prejudice since the Enlightenment and

its culmination in scientism, positivism and the end of metaphysics, have become drunk

on the phenomena. These criticisms of the Prejudice are a call for sobriety and

moderation, not for abstinence. If the interpreter of the Bible is to work through the

philosophically transparent Prejudice, she must not succumb to mere reactions against a

non-biblical paradigm: she must first come to terms with her history within that non-

biblical paradigm. Such a vigilant project will demand more critical effort, not less.

While I have attempted thus far to garner some philosophical support for my

challenge to the Prejudice. it would be helpful to turn to the scientists themselves to see if

they have apprehended the Prejudice. In Chapter 2, we shall briefly review its ancestry,

but will examine in detail the watershed figure, Galileo. Examples of superimposition

will be given along the way and discussed in greater depth before studying the new

challenges to the Prejudice from within the scientific community. We shall see a parallel

between the thinkers of the Scientific Revolution who juggled the old medieval paradigm

with the new prejudice and the modern scientists who juggle the Prejudice with the new

10

immaterial paradigm. While one corner of science has its doubts about the Prejudice, the

mechanomorphic worldview still has co-dependent partners in other less-affected fields

of science.

11

CHAPTER 2

SCIENCE AND THE PREJUDICE

The Prejudice and lts Evolution

Before the full flowering of the Prejudice, we can trace its ancestry to those who

paved the way for the Scientific Revolution. Thomas Aquinas aligned Christianity with

Aristotelianism and raised the ‘light of reason’ to the status of obedient partner to faith.

Thus rationality was raised to near equal status with contemplation. Aristotle’s thought

blended rationalism and empiricism to confront Plato’s knowledge by intuition:

It is easy to distinguish those who argue from fact and those who argue

from notions . . . . The principles of every science are derived from

experience: thus it is from astronomical observations that we derive the

principles of astronomical science.14

While the technological successes of the Schoolmen’s empirical program were quite

limited, Arthur Koestler points out the critical change in consciousness:

all that mattered was that ‘the philosopher’…had upheld the rationality

and intelligibility of Nature; that he made it a duty of man to take an

interest in the world around him by observation and reasoning; and that

this fresh, naturalistic outlook freed the human mind from its sickly

infatuation with the Neoplatonic Weltschmerz.15

The Thomists succeeded as midwives to the Renaissance insofar as they awakened those

who would think out of their ‘world weariness”; freeing humanity from Augustine’s

14

De Caelo: De Generatione et Corruptione, quoted by Koestler, 110. 15

Ibid.

12

Neoplatonism transformed human consciousness and our perception of the world. The

empirical seed had sprouted.

The Schoolmen developed an elaborate rational structure upon Aristotle’s

naturalism; however, they did little to develop a method of observation upon which to

build his or their science. While a high value was placed on observing nature, they

themselves weren’t very observant. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rogues like

Roger Bacon, Peter Peregrine, Nicolas of Cusa, William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, and

Nicholas of Oresme set about actually measuring the natural world and inventing things,

refuting Aristotelian science most of the time, and paving the way for Kepler and Galileo.

The Scientific Revolution may be seen more properly as a revolt against reason than one

against religion. Sense experience conquered a hollow rationality. In the words of Wilber,

the eye of flesh overthrew the eye of reason, and the violence implied by this statement

accords with the frustration expressed by Erasmus in the fifteenth century:

They [the Aristotelian Schoolmen] will smother me beneath six hundred

dogmas; they will call me heretic and they are nevertheless Folly’s

servants. They are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions,

conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit and propositions implicit.

Those more fully initiated explain further whether God can become the

substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, and whether, if so, a

pumpkin could work miracles, or be crucified.16

The Schoolmen’s eye of reason frustrated Erasmus because it didn’t live up to the

promise of empiricism expressed by Aristotle and adopted by Aquinas. We shall discuss

in further detail the watershed for the Prejudice, the Scientific Revolution inaugurated by

Copernicus, Tycho de Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, each of whom trod astride the

16

Morias Enkognion, Basilieae, 1780, 218.

13

boundary between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, between Aquinas and

Newton.

The Independence of Phenomena

This essay’s opening remarks place the origin of the Prejudice at a specific point

in history: the Scientific Revolution. We have briefly reviewed the time when the

Prejudice was not predominant and had not taken hold of Western consciousness. We

have mentioned Galileo’s trial as one of the conscious attempts to resist the Prejudice:

therefore, if we examine the essays and correspondence of Galileo and his detractors, we

should hope to find evidence of the full turning from the older paradigm to the new one.

Galileo (1564-1642) believed that the heliocentric cosmology developed by

Copernicus (1473-1543) better saved the appearances than the established geocentric

cosmology perfected by Ptolemy (c. 150). The Ptolemaic system was cumbersome with

its epicycles and eccentricities of motion resulting from the Aristotelian doctrine of

circular motion; however, Galileo deliberately sidestepped the fact that Copernicus’s

theory also required epicycles, eccentricities of orbit, oscillations, and librations.17

Recall Barfield’s association of the Prejudice with literalness: “our [modern]

collective representations were born when men began to take the models, whether

geometric or mechanical, literally.” So what did we do with the models before we took

them literally? The title of Barfield’s book gives his answer: we used them to “save the

17

Koestler, 483. Galileo didn’t investigate the technical aspects of Copernicus’s cosmology, so he may

not have been aware that Copernicus relied so heavily on these devices.

14

appearances.” And it is not surprising to find that this particular phrase concerns both

Galileo and his detractors since it dominated astronomy from the Greeks to Copernicus.

“Appearances” is a helpful translation for us because “phenomena” (which is what the

Greek and pre-Copernican astronomers were saving) has become objectified in our

thinking whereas “appearances” still encompasses both the subjective and objective

senses for us that “phenomena” once did.18

According to one editor and translator of the

Galilean documents, Maurice Finocchiaro, saving the appearances means: “to explain

observed phenomena by means of assumptions which are not taken to describe real

physical processes, but rather to be merely convenient means for making calculations and

predictions.”19

In short, they are hypotheses. I accept Finocchiaro’s definition with the

following qualification: the phrase “which are not taken to describe real physical

processes” is an example of superimposition in that it projects a modern dualism that did

not exist in the pre-scientific Revolution mind. The phenomena were both what were

perceived by an observer as well as what foisted itself upon the observer’s senses. They

had no correlative theory about “real physical processes” alongside of the hypotheses.

And this was precisely the issue with Galileo: he did have such a theory. He suggested

that the hypothesis that saves all of the appearances20

constitutes the greatest truth:

It is true that it is not the same to show that one can save the appearances

with the earth’s motion and the sun’s stability, and to demonstrate that

these hypotheses are really true in nature. But it is equally true, or even

more so, that one cannot account for such appearances with the other

18

Barfield, 48. 19

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair (1989), 332 n.27. 20

A brief list of the appearances would include: the rotation of the earth on an axis; the orbital revolution of

the earth around the sun; the rotation of the sun on an axis; the moon’s surface consisting of mountains and

valleys; the four moons of Jupiter; the phases of Venus; and. the changing distance from the Earth to Mars.

15

commonly accepted system [Ptolemaic]. The latter is undoubtedly false,

while it is clear that the former, which can account for them, may be true.

Nor can one or should one seek any greater truth in a position than that it

corresponds with all particular appearances.21

Galileo argues for the Prejudice: “Nor can one or should one seek any greater truth in a

position than that it corresponds with all particular appearances;” this is perhaps the first

expression of Merleau-Ponty’s “prejudice of the world.” Notwithstanding the political,

religious, and personal issues that may have contributed to Galileo’s persecution, this

fusion of “greater truth” and correspondence in nature, as innocuous as it is to our

Prejudice-laden sensibilities, had enormous consequences as a philosophical challenge to

the church’s authority. Galileo introduced the ‘principle of constancy,’ the one-to-one

correspondence of sense data and ‘the power of judging’ in the subject. He unknowingly

proposed a new discourse between subject and object as superior in acquiring knowledge

of reality to the old discourse of tradition and revelation, the Word (and the Word’s

agent, the Church) rendering the world and reality. But he did not limit the Prejudice to

the empirical; he reinterpreted the Bible where it touched on physical phenomena. When

the Church challenged his observations with Biblical passages which, on their reading,

seemed to conflict with Galileo’s conclusions, Galileo was only too happy to provide

counter interpretations. For one of the first times in history, descriptions of physical

phenomena in the Bible were elevated to prominence as they were seriously disputed in

the new jurisdiction of the empirical method.

In Chapter 3, we will explore this proclivity towards ad hoc interpretations when

scientific observations seem to contradict the descriptions of physical phenomena in the

21

Ibid., 85.

16

Bible. Galileo’s forays into theological territory were the first signs that the Prejudice

would invade other human enquiry, including religion and theology as well as our

common sense. In foreshadowing Chapter 3, I will digress briefly to discuss two

Christian scientists, Stanley L. Jaki and John Polkinghorne, and analyze their

understanding of ‘saving the appearances.’ Jaki writes about Aristarchus of Samos (the

heliocentric astronomer preceding Ptolemy by three-hundred years):

Their [Aristarchus and Archimedes] learned, intricate combination of

circles, arcs, and radiuses were to be offered as so many devices “to save

the phenomena.” They were means of prediction but in no sense a

reflection of reality. The program was a sophisticated resignation, a

glittering abdication of search for truth about the physical universe. Had

Aristarchus not given at least some touch of realism to his heliocentrism, it

would not have been denounced by such a genuine spokesman of

Hellenistic culture as Plutarch as a sort of sacrilege.22

Again we see superimposition, like Finochiarro’s, the projection of a modern dualism

where none existed. Jaki suggests that Aristarchus “abdicated” the “search for truth” (the

Prejudicial truth of the physical universe) as if Aristarchus had a choice between saving

the phenomena and a non-existent contemporaneous “realism.” While Jaki succumbs to

the temptation of interpreting these as heliocentric “near misses,” the Galilean conception

of the correspondence between truth on the one hand and physical reality on the other and

required an epochal shift in the thinking about phenomena that phenomenally-

participating Greek consciousness was not yet prepared to make. Presumably, Jaki wishes

to deflect criticism of the church for its stand against Galileo.

22

The Savior of Science (1988), 84-5.

17

John Polkinghorne, former professor of mathematical physics and now vicar of

Blean, Kent, wrote concerning Galileo:

An instrumentalist would maintain that the only question to ask about a

theory is, ‘Does it work?’ If it does, then we are not to bother whether it is

true or not. The suggestion urged on Galileo by Cardinal Bellarmine, that

the Copernican system was just a means of ‘saving the appearances’ (of

getting the answers right) but did not describe how things actually were,

would be endorsed enthusiastically by someone of this persuasion.

However it will not do.23

Both Polkinghorne and Jaki confuse technological models and truth. In the dialogue

between observer and observation, the question cannot be, ‘How are things actually?’

This is a metaphysical question which mere physics cannot answer in whole. The caveat

‘actually’ demands a holistic response, not simply a reduction to the pieces of a puzzle.

Suggesting that Galileo’s opponents were instrumentalists confuses the issue: the

Copernican system was a representation of the observable universe which the Church

resisted taking literally. Our conclusion over the ancient notion of ‘saving the

appearances’ as it applies to modern science results from our long history under the

dominance of the Prejudice. The fact that two Christian scientists have the same

confusion indicates how pervasive the Prejudice has become.

The common view of Galileo’s opponents is that of a group of dogmatic,

authoritarian, narrow-minded, and superstitious churchmen. Some clergymen

undoubtedly disliked Galileo and maligned him publicly from their pulpits; however, he

had high-ranking, sympathetic friends in the Church who supported his studies and

lamented his adversity. One friend was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a general of the

23

One World (1986), 20.

18

Jesuit Order, and the most respected theologian of his day, whose opinion carried more

spiritual authority than that of Pope Paul V. In his controversies with the Lutherans, the

Anglicans, and the provincial inclinations of certain Catholic countries, he opposed both

popes and kings. He became Galileo’s main opponent, but it is a mischaracterization to

consider him ignorant of the science of the day. One of his official functions was that of

“Master of Controversial Questions” and in that capacity he was involved with the

leading astronomers of Rome, Frs. Clavius and Grienberger, who heartily welcomed

Galileo to Rome and eagerly confirmed his telescopic discoveries. Bellarmine himself

remained in disfavor with the church as late as 1890 when his Disputationes was

censored. He and others sympathetic to Galileo tried to rein in some of the more radical

claims Galileo made on behalf of the phenomena he was observing. Monsignor Piero

Dini addressed Galileo’s concerns about rumors that Copernicus’s heliocentric work was

going to be banned:

And [Bellarmine] said that as to Copernicus, there is no question of his

book [On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, a heliocentric thesis]

being prohibited: the worst that might happen, according to him, would be

the addition of some material in the margins of the book to the effect that

Copernicus had introduced his theory in order to save the appearances, or

some such thing - just as others had introduced epicycles without

thereafter believing in their existence. And with a similar precaution you

may at any time deal with these matters.24

Galileo thought Copernicus did believe in the heliocentric hypothesis in the sense that he

thought it absurd that Copernicus would not really believe a hypothesis to be physically

true that better saved the appearances. Regardless of his reading of Copernicus, Galileo’s

24

Opere, XII, l5l, quoted by Koestler, 452.

19

disagreement with his friends in the church is apparent,25

and their arguments are at

cross-purposes. Galileo seems blissfully unaware of the huge shift he is suggesting the

church to make with regard to the perception of phenomena while the churchmen seem

unprepared to methodically investigate physical phenomena and unwilling to re-visit the

received biblical interpretations from the church fathers, councils, and creeds.

Cardinal Bellarmine challenged Galileo’s new theory of truth:

First, I say it seems to me that your Reverence [Fr. Foscarini] and Signor

Galileo act prudently when you content yourselves with speaking

hypothetically and not absolutely, as I have always understood that

Copernicus spoke. For to say that the assumption that the Earth moves and

the Sun stands still saves all the celestial appearances better than do

eccentrics and epicycles is to speak with excellent good sense and to run

no risk whatever. Such a manner suffices for a mathematician. But to want

to affirm that the Sun, in very truth, is at the center of the universe and

only rotates on its axis without travelling from east to west, and that the

Earth is situated in the third sphere [orbit] and revolves very swiftly

around the Sun, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to

arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our

holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures.26

Bellarmine clearly wished to maintain a distinction between hypotheses that saved the

appearances and assertions that linked observations and “in very truth.” In his view, these

new assertions about reality undermined the authority of the Bible because of accepted

25

His reply to Dini went like this: “putting on philosophical garments. [Copernicus] considered whether

[the Ptolemaic] arrangement of the parts of the universe could truly exist in physical reality, and he

concluded No. Believing that the problem of its true structure deserved to be researched, he undertook the

investigation of such a structure, with the knowledge that if a fictitious and untrue arrangement of parts

could satisfy the appearances, this could be done much better with the true and real one; at the same time

philosophy would have gained sublime knowledge, for such is to know the true arrangement of the parts of

the world” (Finocchiaro, 60). He is eager to jump from verisimilitude to certainty when he says “the true

and real [structure].” 26

Opere, XII, l71f, quoted in Koestler, 454.

20

interpretations by the scholastic philosophers, theologians, councils, and church fathers.

But even this most respected theologian foreshadowed the impending conquest of the

Prejudice:

Third, I say that, if there were a real proof that the Sun is in the centre of

the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not

go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to

proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture

which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that

we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is

proved to be true.27

So the issue between Galileo and the Church shifts from a scientific one to a

hermeneutical one; namely, that a new assertion about reality challenged the received

biblical and church tradition of Galileo’s time, one that suggested new interpretations

would be needed to reconcile physical phenomena with biblical texts. This shift in the

Galilean controversy from a theory of science to a hermeneutical question vindicates the

rational and spiritual resistance of the churchmen to Galileo, who willingly offered

makeshift interpretations of the difficult passages.28

They sensed that his physical claims

encroached on their metaphysical territory. As subsequent observations and discoveries

superceded Galileo’s “true structure” of the universe, was it not (and is it not still)

presumptuous to claim more than saving the appearances? He defended the Copernican

system but Kepler’s and Newton’s was more economical and Einstein’s general theory of

27

Ibid., 454-5. 28

“and since Bellarmine had quoted Psalm 19 to Dini, the passage that the sun ‘rejoiceth as a strong man to

run his course’, Galileo ‘in all humility’ undertook to refute Bellarmine’s interpretation of the Psalm. ‘The

running of the course’ refers to the light and heat from the sun, not to the sun itself, etc., etc. Dini probably

had the wisdom not to show this to the greatest theologian alive.” (Ibid., 453).

21

relativity incorporates Kepler’s and Newton’s in an even simpler yet grander structure.29

The church failed to respond to Galileo’s notion of the peculiar status of the physical

aspect of phenomena because it was itself engulfed in the change from a medieval

universe to a literal one: “Nor can one or should one seek any greater truth in a position

than that it corresponds with all particular appearances.” In other words, the appearances

themselves took on a being that overarched any other aspects of reality. Such was the

birth of Barfield’s literalness, the ascendancy of Wilber’s eye of flesh over the eyes of

reason and contemplation, and the imminent flowering of the Prejudice.

This revolution provides a case study of Gadamer’s central insight that to be

human is to be prejudiced, to emerge from a tradition, and to lean on authority. So began

the shift from theological authority to scientific authority. The human requirements of

tradition and authority impelled superimposition on the part of the new priests to create

new rituals, creeds, and heresies. As we shall see next, the new discourse of the scientific

Revolution, as with all discourses, produced a mythology. The Enlightenment and

Romantic eras elevated Aquinas’s light of reason in human beings to the god of Reason.

The twin tablets of Newton’s Principia and Kepler’s A New Astronomy established the

new laws, and Paley’s Natural Theology, demoted God to watchmaker.

29

“Scientific theories are supposed to be descriptions of reality; they do not constitute that reality. It now

seems obvious, though, that however successfully one fixed up the epicycle model to predict the positions

of heavenly bodies, it would still be in some sense wrong. The problem is: how do we know that today’s

description of the Solar System is right? However certain we are that our present picture describes how the

Universe actually is, we cannot rule out the possibility that some new and better way of looking at things,

utterly unimaginable to us now, will be discovered in the future.” Paul Davies, The Matter Myth (1992), 20.

22

Superimposition

We now turn from the primary part of the Prejudice which dominates the so-called hard

sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.) to the secondary part of the Prejudice

which dominates what I will call the secondary sciences (geology, biology, paleontology,

etc.) and the human sciences (anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.). This distinction

between the sciences follows from the dependence the secondary sciences place on the

diffusion of discoveries from physics into their own fields. For instance, a microbiologist

may attempt to unite concepts developed by quantum mechanics into her own theories of

DNA replication. This interchange has occurred alongside the process of fortification of

the Prejudice within the whole realm of scientific inquiry from the Scientific Revolution

through the full-fledged reductionism of positivism and materialism. The present status of

the interchange is in confusion precisely because the primary sciences are undergoing a

revolutionary shift to an immaterial paradigm at just the moment when reductionism has

matured in the secondary and human sciences. Paul Davies, a popular writer of the new

physics and a professor of mathematical physics, states the matter forcefully:

It is hard to overstate the impact that these new physical images have had

in shaping our world view. The doctrine that the physical Universe

consists of inert matter locked into a sort of gigantic deterministic

clockwork has penetrated all branches of human inquiry. Materialism

dominates biology, for example. Living organisms are regarded as nothing

more than complicated collections of particles, each being blindly pulled

and pushed by its neighbors. Richard Dawkins, an eloquent champion of

biological materialism, describes human beings (and other living entities)

as “gene machines.” Thus, organisms are treated as automatons. Such

ideas have even influenced psychology.30

30

Ibid., 12-3.

23

The use of metaphors and symbols for scientific phenomena, theories, and

discoveries is an attempt to convey in everyday language what is publicly obscured by

the mathematical language scientists use in their experiments and in a great deal of

communication with their peers. We’ve mentioned many of these metaphors and symbols

already: law (borrowed from the diverse fields of jurisprudence, politics, and most

notably, religion); orbit (borrowed from astrology); machine (formerly used of plots and

intrigues, or for anything erected or put together by man); and, regular (borrowed from

the monastic ‘orders’ of the church). Barfield provides an excellent history of the

transformation of words as the Prejudice took hold.31

Davies cites Dawkin’s metaphor of

“gene machines” for human beings. The use of symbolic language is natural since the

realities expressed are often abstract or at least beyond the sense experience of the

layman. I referred to the new discourse Galileo introduced between subject (observer)

and object (independent phenomena). Science has created its own particular form of

discourse: we refer to the practice of science as an inquiry, the exchange of question and

answer, probing dialectically. The scientist then acts as mediator between the precise

professional language of data (the mathematical) and the precarious common language of

ordinary communication. He must have command of the first to practice and should have

command of the second for the theory or discovery to become communal. This position

of authority is the new priesthood of science and the analogy is striking when we

encounter its many facets.

31

History in English Words (1953), 183-200.

24

The first facet is that of mediator of languages. Completing the analogy with the

scientist, the religious priest studies the specialized language of scripture (Hebrew,

Greek, Latin, lyric, parable, eschatology, and so on) and mediates the Word to the

congregation by speaking the sermon in the profane language. Both types of priest are

entrusted with a sacred knowledge obscure to the uninitiated. Both types of priest are

authoritative in matters of law. Both types of priest defend the faith again heresies.

Mythologies develop which tell of heroes and villains, of origins and apocalypse. The

forms remain from the paradigms past, but superimposition rewrites the stories in the new

language of the Prejudice.

The secondary sciences developed doctrines of disembodied mind that observed

phenomena from an absolute frame of reference. Sir Charles Lyell postulated one such

doctrine: uniformitarianism.

No causes whatever have, from the earliest time to which we can now look

back to the present, ever acted, but those now acting, and that they never

acted with different degrees of energy from which they now act.32

He presumed the purely mechanical view of history insisted on by the Prejudice. By the

end of the nineteenth century, the human sciences adopted uniformitarianism to apply to

history in general, qua determinism.33

The secondary scientists forbade catastrophic

changes to the well-oiled mechanism of the universe. They built this mechanism upon the

Cartesian edifice of the externality, the alienation of nature from the observer. It was no

32

Principles of Geology (1830). 33

e.g., in psychology, the behaviorism of John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, or in the sociological thought

of the philosopher George Herbert Mead, who postulated the “life process,” a social Darwinism.

25

great extension to say that such a condition has always been so.34

A young friend, Charles

Darwin, adopted Lyell’s doctrine of objective and eternal laws as the guiding principle of

evolutionary theory in biology. Where Lyell required uniformitarianism to give an

account of the earth’s crust caused by natural forces exerted over a very long time,

Darwin used it to give an account of the species caused by chance variation and the

survival of the fittest given a very long time.

But inquirers like Theodore Roszak and scientists like James Jeans, David Bohm,

Richard Feynman, and Fred Hoyle, have questioned uniformitarianism and the

mechanism of chance. Roszak quotes his “agnostic manifesto,” the creed of Positivism as

taught to him in the words of Bertrand Russell:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they

were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves

and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms….

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of

unyielding despair can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.35

The mythological Superman is destined to know all that can be known only to be

annihilated, in the supreme tragedy, at the close of the drama by the dying sun or, failing

that, the collapse of the entire universe in the Big Crunch. Roszak felt secure with an

eternity of randomness and the certainty of matter at his back. But he forever lost his

security with the advent of modern cosmology and modern physics. The universe is

expanding. It has a beginning. The hypothesis of an eternal universe has gone the way of

phlogiston; the universe has a finite age and history. This finite age does not allow

34

Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning (1977), 191. 35

The Voice of the Earth (1992), 100.

26

enough time for chemical, much less biological, evolution to account for existence within

the range of statistical possibility.36

The secondary sciences have reconsidered

catastrophe to save the Prejudice.37

Furthermore, on the microscopic level, modern

physics undermined uniformitarianism.

In quantum theory, matter dematerialized, subatomic units lost their concrete

mass. That is to say, one of the fundamental quantities of the Prejudice, mass. Was

relegated to the status of a quality, like color. All nuclear components are composed of

quarks, either two or three, but the quarks themselves cannot be isolated as we are

accustomed to thinking of individual particles. Protons and neutrons, which have mass,

are composed of three quarks each, which are not entities per se, but a “level of

description.”38

Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle showed that the more

accurately you defined a particle’s position (∆x), the less certain you were about its

momentum (∆p), the product of velocity and mass, or about the time it was at the position

you observed, or about the energy of the particle. Increasing accuracy in any of these

quantities reduced the accuracy of all the others. The very act of observation introduces

uncertainty in the measurement. Roszak and others came to question the Positivist creed

36

Paul Davies, God & The New Physics (1983), 166-74. 37

e.g., S. J. Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain stasis in the fossil record with bursts of

“creativity” and speciation. 38

“none of the subatomic particles, quarks or otherwise, are really particles in the common meaning of the

word. Indeed, they may not even be ‘things’ at all. Once again, the description of matter in terms of such-

and-such a collection of particles must really be regarded as levels of description, stiffened by mathematics.

The physicist’s precise description of the structure of matter is only ever through abstract advanced

mathematics, and only in that context can one be precise about the meaning of the reductionist statement

‘made up of’.” (Ibid., 161-2).

27

and any certainty that science, the practice of observation and measurement, would ever

be the domain of exclusive truth:

Can we continue to regard the world as the result of blind chance? Or is

there some essential element of design in nature that intimates the

presence of intelligence? Are life and mind still to be seen as the

accidental epiphenomena that Russell, like Freud, took them to be?39

He is very much aware that the dogmatism he is criticizing is part of common sense,

engrained by our culture’s fixation by textbook40

and respect for scientific authority.41

The textbook view of science as a linear and cumulative progression, and the

superimposition lurking behind the view, illuminate the duplicity in science today.

Scientists commonly acknowledge that the revolution of quantum theory has questioned

the literalness with which we take our models. But they equivocate this humble view of

scientific theory insofar as they extol their pronouncements and discoveries as reliable

knowledge and of absolute validity rather than as instruments for new applications and

study.42

Wilber also recognized this duplicity:

It is certainly true that the scientistic-positivistic world view has lost some

of its overt persuasiveness; but I believe that it is not only still with us but

also, in many ways, extending its influence…. while few would claim to

39

Roszak, 101. 40

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), 137-8: “Textbooks thus begin by

truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what

they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an

introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such

references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical

tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that,

in fact, never existed…. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are

implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the

same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem

scientific.” 41

Roszak, 108-9. 42

Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 54.

28

be scienticians, many are in effect…. In principle, not much else is

accepted.43

We must doubt about the Prejudice in our consciousness, in the manner of the expression

“saving the appearances,” lest we fall prey to presumption as Galileo did about the “true

structure” of the universe. Roszak suggests that an Anthropic Principle is at work in the

“illusion of randomness,” an order that guides the chaos of complex systems. The

Anthropic Principle is, as might be suspected, an anthropocentric (or “biocentric”)

hypothesis. It states that nature exhibits a premeditated quality of design, it has a fitness

for life that exceeds the boundary conditions of mere chance. The bogeyman of the

Prejudice, the designer, has been resurrected to save the appearances.

The list of numerical ‘accidents’ that appear to be necessary for the

observed world structure is too long to review here. . . . Opinions differ

among physicists as to the significance of these coincidences. As with the

apparently contrived initial conditions of the universe, recourse could be

made to anthropic considerations and hypotheses of multiple-universes in

which, for some reason, the fundamental constants assume different

values. Only in those universes where the numbers come out just right

would life and observers form.

Alternatively, the numerical coincidences could be regarded as

evidence of design. The delicate fine-tuning in the values of the constants,

necessary so that the various different branches of physics can dovetail so

felicitously, might be attributed to God. It is hard to resist the impression

that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor

alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out.44

In biology, Michael Behe has argued that the irreducibly complex systems found in

molecular biology, such as cilia, imply design.45

And design implies intelligence: a mind.

Barfield summarizes the universal Mind that precedes matter and all physical creation

43

Wilber, 30-1. 44

Davies, God & The New Physics, 188-9. 45

Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996).

29

with the expression “interior is anterior.” Scientists have also perceived qualities such as

beauty, harmony, simplicity, and symmetry in the mathematical expressions that

compose our most fundamental understanding of the universe.

It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them

fit experiment…because the discrepancy may be due to minor features that

are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with

further development, of the theory…. It seems that if one is working from

the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really

a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.46

All of these endeavors are based on the belief that existence should have a

completely harmonious structure. Today we have less ground than ever

before for allowing ourselves to be forced away from this wonderful

belief. Equations of such complexity as are the equations of the

gravitational field can be found only through the discovery of a logically

simple mathematical condition.47

The beauty in the laws of physics is the fantastic simplicity that they

have…. What is the ultimate mathematical machinery behind it all? That’s

surely the most beautiful of all.48

Mind preceding matter annuls the dogma of superimposition. Quantum theory requires an

observer to act in order that the state vector may collapse and materialize the ghostly

particles. Systems as simple as two particles (as we shall see in the next section) or as

complex as the cosmos holistically link observer and phenomenon. We do indeed play

games with language when we habitually use the discourse developed under the

supremacy of the eye of flesh to coopt the terms and forms of discourse developed with

the knowledge gleaned from perceptions with the eyes of mind and spirit.

46

Paul Dirac, ‘The evolution of the physicist’s picture of nature’, Scientific American (May 1963). 47

Albert Einstein, Essays in Science (1934). 48

John Wheeler, in A Question of Physics: Conversations in Physics and Biology, ed. P. Buckley and F. D.

Peat (1979), 60.

30

Science Beyond The Prejudice

Science is a discourse—one among many. This implies that science employs

language and, in the words of Gadamer, “being which can be understood is language. We

do not necessarily embrace the irrational when we acknowledge the finitude and

limitations of empirical science, the eye of flesh, for acquiring understanding of the world

and human being. We cannot simply substitute a new discourse and discard the out-of-

date as our proclivity toward superimposition would urge us. Rather, from our experience

of a “felt change of consciousness” from the Prejudice, we can broaden the language we

inherited from the Enlightenment to include the a-rational or trans-rational. What we

have begun to recover from that mysterious age before the Prejudice is an awareness of

the interpenetration between phenomena and consciousness, between mind and matter,

and between metaphorical and literal. The Prejudice represents a costly investment in our

faculty of measurement; we arc beginning to diversify into faculties of reason and

contemplation.

These faculties recall our earlier remarks about Wilber’s three types of eyes and

the notion of category error. I believe the strict boundaries he draws between the

categories is somewhat contrived. I do not dispute that we can distinguish the categories;

rather, I dispute that we can divide them. Let’s review the boundaries: irreducible,

empirical facts are the realm of the eye of flesh; self-evident or axiomatic truths are the

realm of the eye of reason (mind); and. revelatory insights are the realm of the eye of

contemplation (spirit).49

He affirms that each realm has its own form of valid knowledge:

49

Wilber, 9.

31

empirical (flesh); rational (mind); and, mystical (spirit). But he allows no amalgamation

of the three types of knowledge, e.g., we cannot provide rational statements about the

spiritual.50

He says such statements result in paradox. He often implies that paradox is

contradiction and that such statements are therefore absurd or useless. Martin Luther

would agree.51

In other places, Wilber allows a role for rational statements about the

spiritual, or “mandalic reason,” but only as teaching aids which hint at what may lie

beyond the rational; they are not to be confused with actual spiritual experience.52

I agree

with this qualification, and would take it a step further. Paradox may arise because

statements that appear superficially self-contradictory nevertheless express a hidden or

possible truth. The Greek word paradoxos means literally “beyond what is thought.”

implying a mystical insight or even the scientific experience of “Eureka!” which resolves

the tension of the enigmatic. If so, then Wilber’s “category errors” might not be errors at

all but may reveal a genuine truth. Our reaction to paradox, whether aversion,

indifference, or delight, may reveal the well-being of our rational and spiritual faculties.

An example of a scientific paradox is the famous EPR experiment. Einstein and

his collaborators Podolsky and Rosen challenged the holistic property implied by the

quantum “ghost” theory. It states that once two quantum particles have interacted with

each other they retain the power of mutual influence however widely they may

50

“To the extent that science remains science and religion remains religion, no conflict is possible.” (Ibid.,

35). This view is criticized directly by Whitehead (see following) even though Wilber attributes many of

his views to Whitehead. 51

“Therefore when God speaketh, reason judgeth His word to be heresy, and the word of the devil, for it

seemeth unto it foolish and absurd.” (Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, trans. by Erasmus

Middleton, ed. by John Prince Fallowes (1979), p. 126). 52

Ibid., 172-8. Cf. Blaise Pascal: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of

things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go so far to realize that.” (Pensee 188).

32

subsequently separate. For example, if two electrons have been in interaction and I then

investigate one of them here in the laboratory, that investigation will have an

instantaneous effect upon the other, even if it is light years away. Einstein thought this

effect of the quantum theory fraudulent since the first particle here could not

communicate the effects of measurement immediately to the second particle in violation

of the speed of light. Niels Bohr replied that the two fragments, though well separated,

must be regarded as a single system instead of independently real. In the 1960s, John Bell

developed a theory that limited the degree of cooperation between a widely separated

system if the fragments exist in separate states before observation. Alain Aspect

conducted the most accurate test of Bell’s inequality at the University of Paris in 1982.

Aspect’s experiment consisted of performing simultaneous measurements on pairs of

oppositely directed photons that were emitted in a single event from the same atom, and

so possessed correlated properties. The results showed more cooperation than Bell’s limit

would allow; Einstein lost as did common-sense reductionism. The results confirm

uncertainty in the quantum world that cannot be explained by any theory that assumes (l)

the independent reality of the external world, and (2) no secret reversed-time

communication between the widely-separated photons. Once the particles have interacted

they remain linked, effectively parts of an indivisible system. The EPR experiment

indicates an astonishing togetherness in separation. At the very root of reductionist

physics we find holism reasserting itself.53

53

Davies, God & The New Physics, 104-6 and The Matter Myth, 222-4.

33

When we empirically reduce phenomena to their most fundamental level an

enigma endures if we fail to see that the barriers between the eyes of flesh, reason, and

contemplation are themselves ephemeral. We should not hasten to vitiate paradox as

mere category error; rather, we should recognize and participate in the hermeneutical

circle that forms when we try to express the perceptions of one category in the language

of another category. The counter-intuitive EPR experiment was possible because the

phenomena studied under the eye of flesh were not presumed by Bohr and Bell to

necessarily obey the prejudicial cause-and-effect nexus. The scientists trusted the

implications of quantum theory with the eye of reason and the experimental results that

ensued require re-interpretation of just what we mean when we think of the “external”

world. If we presume that phenomena may be restricted to only their physical aspects, the

paradox of the EPR experiment is unpalatable: however, if we infer that “there is more

than meets the eye” and strive to understand the phenomena in some amalgamation of our

knowledge of the empirical, rational, and spiritual, the paradox is mediated. So if we

encounter paradox, we should not necessarily conclude category error, but rather should

search our community for confirmation as to whether the paradox may articulate some

greater truth before we cast it aside as mere contradiction, lazy logic, or bad semantics.54

54

Wilber, 187. Wilber distinguishes paradox from complementarity. He cites the example of “wavicles”,

particles that exhibit the qualities of both waves and particles, as one of complementarity, not paradox. I

agree, but we can only distinguish this from paradox if we move up a level in the hierarchy of eyes. In other

words, it is paradox (apparently self-contradictory) if we remain in the proper empirical category of the eye

of flesh. We have to employ the rational category of the eye of mind to “see” the complementarity and

express it in mathematical terms. My point is that paradox may well lead us to a “felt change of

consciousness” (see next page) in which the empirical and rational come together to form a new meaning

(or the empirical and spiritual, or the rational and spiritual).

34

The new physicist has become adept in working beyond the eye of flesh (but not

excluding it) to unravel paradoxes such as complexity and order, progress and chance, the

clutter of matter amid extraordinary beauty, and convoluted mathematics which yield

simple and elegant solutions. The scientist must step over the Prejudicial boundaries to

continue work. One has proclaimed:

It may seem bizarre. but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God

than religion. Right or wrong, the fact that science has actually advanced

to the point where what were formerly religious questions can be seriously

tackled, itself indicates the far-reaching consequences of the new

physics.55

Wilber has taken notice:

More recently, it is the empirical scientists who are trying to become

theologians or even prophets…. That the in-depth and heartfelt study of

physics leads some physicists (perhaps 10 percent or so) to a mystical

world view tells us something nice about, not physics per se, but about

those sensitive and noble physicists.56

I think Wilber is unnecessarily reductionist; he doesn’t expect phenomena to reveal more

than their physical aspects when the study is intentionally limited to the eye of flesh. But

the example of the EPR experiment shows that empiricism can yield paradox when

properly limited to the eye of flesh. What on first blush appears self-contradictory may

yet point beyond itself. Consider two replies to the question “What do you see when you

observe the sun?”: the scientist’s “an average middle-aged star which provides heat

energy to our planet,” and Blake’s “the multitude of the heavenly host praising God.” The

question appears to pertain to the eye of flesh, yet it bears two responses, one prosaic the

55

Davies, God & The New Physics, ix. 56

Wilber, 36.

35

other poetic. While Blake’s casual mysticism may have been a reaction to the Prejudice,

we cannot assume the poetic reply prohibits a genuinely literal and true perception. I

return to Barfield’s “felt change of consciousness,” the striking and startling experience

which may emanate from poetry, religion, or even science, the disclosure of the

numinous aspect of phenomena that affects the way we look at the world thenceforth.57

Our conversation with Blake may transfigure our own prosaic idolatrous perception of

the sun into a new participatory perception and meaning. Such is the power of a text

when we open ourselves to it. Two previously separate notions unite to unveil an

otherwise inaccessible notion, a new meaning.

The scientific discourse is a dialogue between subject and object: the object

“replies” when it has more to say than what simply meets the eye (of flesh). This very

encroachment of one category into another has led some scientists to embrace holism:

The main thrust of Western scientific thinking over the last three centuries

has been reductionist. Indeed the use of the word ‘analysis’ in the broadest

context nicely illustrates the scientist’s almost unquestioning habit of

taking a problem apart to solve it. But of course some problems (such as

jigsaws) are only solved by putting them together—they are synthetic or

‘holistic’ in nature. The picture on a jigsaw, like the speckled newspaper

image of a face, can only be perceived at a higher level of structure than

the individual pieces - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.58

Alfred North Whitehead also disagreed with strict divisions between our empirical,

rational, and spiritual faculties:

It seems an easy solution to hold that each type of idea is within its own

sphere autonomous. In that case, the controversies arise from the

57

Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning (1992), transcript of an interview with Owen Barfield by G. B.

Tennyson. 58

Davies, God & The New Physics, 61.

36

illegitimate poaching of one type over the proper territory of some other

type. For example, it is fashionable to state that religion and science can

never clash because they deal with different topics. I believe that this

solution is entirely mistaken. In this world at least, you cannot tear apart

minds and bodies. But as soon as you try to adjust ideas you find the

supreme importance of making perfectly clear, what you are talking about.

It is fatal to osciilate uncritically from the things which endure to the

things which occur, and from the things which occur to the things which

recur.59

The evolving discourse of physics has returned quality to the universe. Quarks are

said to have flavors. Gluons (which hold quarks together) are fields of color; their study

is called chromodynamics. The dissolution of matter has spurred new metaphors, such as

ghosts, superstrings, symmetry, and chaos. “Events without causes, ghost images, reality

triggered only by observations--all must apparently be accepted on the experimental

evidence.”60

The ghost symbol recurs frequently in the quantum measurement problem

and the wave-particle duality: “Without a Wigner-type mind to integrate it, the universe

seems destined to languish as a mere collection of ghosts, a multi-hybrid superposition of

overlapping alternative realities, none of them the actual reality.”61

The appropriation of

the term “ghost” in the lexicon of the new physics echoes the admonition of that famous

ghost of Shakespeare’s:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

There are more things in heaven and earth. Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.62

59

Adventures of Ideas (1933), 40. 60

Davies, God & The New Physics, 106-7. 61

Ibid., 116. 62

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5.

37

In this chapter, we’ve considered the history of the Prejudice and identified

Galileo as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution, the watershed event which I believe

gave birth to the Prejudice. We’ve observed the two aspects of the Prejudice, the

independence of phenomena and superimposition, exhibited in a historical context.

Galileo assumed the independence of phenomena when he fused the notion of truth with

correspondence in nature and accomplished this correspondence by methodical

observation and measurement using the senses and tools, i.e., empirically. A change in

discourse accompanied this paradigm shift, from the Word rendering the world to the

Prejudice rendering the world. This change occurred by conscious effort to see the world

empirically (like Galileo), but gradually the change consolidated and became a habit of

thinking for future generations. The second aspect of the Prejudice, superimposition,

extends the primary part of the Prejudice into time; the empirical project no longer relies

on the presence of a perceiving mind. We examined the propensity of the Prejudicial

thinker to superimpose a new discourse of metaphors, symbols, terms, and forms,

supplanting the inherited language.

In the next chapter, we’ll investigate how the Prejudice has appeared and

developed in theology. As I suggested in Chapter 1, my intent is to show the effect of the

Prejudice upon biblical interpretation. The discussion of science was meant not only to

show the origin, development, and approaching demise of the Prejudice, but also to show

that the Prejudice persists in seemingly unconnected fields of inquiry and common sense.

Next, I will contend that not only are science and biblical interpretation analogous with

respect to the Prejudice, but that its theologically disparate representatives, biblical

38

criticism and fundamentalism, are cut from the same cloth. Superficially, this contradicts

the claims of both, but I am suggesting that they converge upon the Prejudice, wherever

else they may diverge. This convergence upon the Prejudice is evident in and central to

their biblical interpretation. It is to this argument that I now turn.

39

CHAPTER 3

THEOLOGY AND THE PREJUDICE

I am surprised to see how many critical thinkers, whose suspicious nature

is elsewhere limitless, capitulate before what they take to be the verdict of

modernity and adopt the ideology of science and technology in a most

naïve fashion.

Paul Ricoeur

These words from Figuring the Sacred provide an appropriate theme for this

chapter concerning the influence of the Prejudice in theology and other fields of study

beyond science. Ricoeur, one of the leading voices in hermeneutics, should not be

surprised. The limitless suspicious nature of critical thinkers is the essence of the

prejudice in humanity. Recall from Chapter 1 that the power of the Prejudice dominates

unconsciously the “person who believes he is free of prejudices.” Ricoeur’s critical

thinkers capitulate unconsciously to the authority of science and technology. This

capitulation is analogous to the superimposition in the secondary sciences described

previously.63

The Prejudice has matured in theology at just the moment when the primary

sciences are undergoing a revolutionary shift to an immaterial paradigm. Superimposition

continues in theology just as it does in the secondary sciences, a linguistic colonialism

that subjugates the discourse to the empirical sciences. The language of the theocentric

paradigm, the predecessor to the Prejudice, has undergone a reconstitution: the husks of

its symbols, metaphors, and myths have been filled with new meaning that is limited to

our understanding gained through the eye of flesh.

63

See p. 21.

40

As I mentioned at the end of Chapter 2, I will argue that science and biblical

interpretation are analogous with respect to the Prejudice. My claim is that the

Prejudice’s theologically disparate representatives, biblical criticism and fundamentalism,

are cut from the same cloth. That their interpretative methods are intimately connected

superficially contradicts the claims of both groups, but I suggest that they converge upon

the Prejudice, wherever else they may diverge. Their view and use of science connects

them, creating a tension with the theological project of studying something beyond the

realm of science. The poles of science and theology split the theologian’s mind. While

the fundamentalists and biblical critics diverge on their theological pole, they converge

on their scientific pole.

Fundamentalism and Textual Naïveté

The Prejudice in fundamentalism is hidden within the doctrine of inerrancy. This

doctrine distinguishes a fundamentalist from other theologians. The fundamentalist thinks

between the poles of science and inerrancy within the Prejudice. As the term suggests, the

question of error in the Bible is central, whether theological, historical, geographical,

scientific, or biographical.64

The “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” states the

following in Article XII:

We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all

falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual,

religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of

history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth

64

James Barr, Fundamentalism (1981), 40.

41

history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on

creation and the flood.65

James Barr makes a concerted effort to establish inerrancy as the primary mode of

interpretation for the fundamentalist rather than the more common notion of literalness.

While I agree with Barr’s point that literalness is not a constant interpretative method, I

do not agree that the distinction is as sharp as Barr makes it. Rather, I prefer to expand

the meaning of “literal.” Consider Barr’s own insight:

the correspondence between the biblical account and the actual event or

entity is the supremely important thing about the Bible. A biblical account

of some event is approached and evaluated primarily not in terms of

significance but in terms of correspondence with external actuality.

Veracity as correspondence with empirical actuality has precedence over

veracity as significance…. correspondence with external reality must be

affirmed as an inalienable and essential property of the biblical texts, and

especially so when they narrate events that seem on the surface to be

events in space and time.66

This correspondence to external reality is precisely a “literal” frame of mind. The post-

Scientific Revolution thinker and the fundamentalist presuppose the verifiable, external

truth of the Prejudice. Fundamentalism is a species of reductionism.

Common examples of the literal frame of mind include the creation and flood

narratives in Genesis. Inerrancy applied to these texts first demands the empirical

actuality of the events. From this a priori, however, no principle guides further

interpretation. The interpretations thus blossom into a spectrum of views that attempt to

reinforce the empirical aspect of the text. For instance, in the creation narrative, inerrancy

may lead a fundamentalist to assert a strictly literal reading of the passage: God created

65

International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (1978). 66

Barr, 49-50.

42

the universe in six twenty-four hour days about six thousand years ago (employing the

genealogy in Genesis and the synoptic gospels as a chronology). They assert the strictly

literal view notwithstanding the findings of science. The earth may appear to be four

billion years old, but the written revelation of the Bible trumps natural revelation, so too

bad for science. They exchange one empiricism for another. Most inerrantists are

uncomfortable with this degree of literalism and instead opt for a more flexible

interpretation, introducing concepts such as a gap theory67

to permit some correlation

with accepted scientific findings. Flexible literal interpretations require scientific

supplements for support because they retain some elements of the literal reading. It

should not be surprising that “creation science” arose to provide the respectability of

quasi-science for inerrantists because science itself had assumed an authority in the mind

of modern humanity equal to or greater than the authority of theology. The literal mind of

the fundamentalist freely mixes the strictly literal with other concerns. Since empirical

actuality concerns the fundamentalists, they tend to have a profound interest in the

findings and pronouncements of the academic scientific world that overlap the events that

the Bible describes. This concern often overrides the stated desire for the “plain” or literal

reading of the text.

The accuracy of material and physical aspects in the biblical text are elevated to

cruciality. They limit interpretations to affirmations of the objectiveness of the event or

67

The gap theory loosens the meaning of a “day” of creation, allowing “day” to mean epochs of millions of

years rather than the more obvious 24-hour day.

43

entity in the text with realistic narration. Charles Hodge, the former president of

Princeton Theological Seminary, proclaims confidently:

The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his

store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible

teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to

ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to

ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed

concerning himself and our relation to him. These facts are all in the

Bible.68

He declares more than mere biblicism (relying on the Bible as the ultimate religious

authority); he describes an avowedly empirical project. Notice that Hodge goes so far as

to claim the unity of the method of biblical interpretation and the scientific method!

Inerrancy transforms the biblical text from a beacon for human existence expressed with

multifaceted meaning to a mere source of external religious details. Inerrantists treat this

muted text as an object for inspection with Wilber’s eye of flesh. Both are equipped with

the same Prejudicial mindset; the only difference is that science’s eye of flesh looks at

nature for empirical knowledge while fundamentalism’s eye of flesh looks at the Bible or

empirical knowledge.

The creation narrative provides a good example of why science and

fundamentalists often clash. The scientist looks only at nature while the fundamentalist

looks first at Genesis. Both seek the same goal: to understand how things came to be. The

fundamentalist directs attention toward the text with the lens of the Prejudice and thus

emphasizes the empirical aspect in the meaning of the text to the loss or exclusion of the

spiritual aspect. Barr suggests that the fundamentalist thrives in an era of mechanistic

68

Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (1872-3), 1:10-11.

44

science because the fundamentalist believes the Bible is objectively true in the same

sense as science. I would add that they thrive together, as does biblical criticism because

they all have taken the scientific models literally.

Fundamentalists defend inerrancy as an ultimate concern.69

They require a

foundational epistemology, a reliable bedrock (like the skeptic’s doubt) on which to

construct the key ingredients of belief. The disciple Thomas demanded the physical

sensation of touching the wounds of the risen Christ before he would believe. The

modern fundamentalist requires the presupposition of biblical inerrancy before belief in

the kerygma of the text. I use the term “belief’ rather than “faith”, observing the helpful

distinction provided by Paul Tillich:

Faith is the state of being grasped by something that has ultimate meaning,

and acting and thinking on the basis of this as a centered person. Beliefs

are opinions held to be true…. We need beliefs in practical affairs all the

time. But they are never a matter of life and death.70

Tillich revives the verb tense of faith as action following metanoia.71

By this definition,

the fundamentalist has strong beliefs but little or no faith. If one detail of a biblical text

that is apparently meant to correspond with external reality does not, then the whole

edifice crumbles and all that remains is an existential leap of faith and reason in a

vacuum. The fundamentalist commonly responds to conflicts between scientific

propositions and accepted interpretations by making interpretative moves so that the

69

Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984), 46: “Unless the Bible is without error, not

only when it speaks of salvation matters, but also when it speaks of history and the cosmos, we have no

foundation for answering questions concerning the existence of the universe and its form and the

uniqueness of man. Nor do we have any moral absolutes, or certainty of salvation….” 70

The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message (1996), 15. 71

Cf. common noun tense of faith as a synonym for belief and a requirement before metanoia.

45

conflict is avoided or by employing other quasi-scientific findings that support the

accepted interpretation.72

Inerrancy sidesteps the bothersome requirements to interpret texts within a

historical context because fundamentalists in practice disregard historical processes as

insignificant contributions.73

The fundamentalist’s concern with eschatology reshapes

world events within the context of their literal interpretations of eschatological passages.

For example, the fundamentalist may safely ignore the influence of World War I, the

treaty of Versailles, European nationalism, German culture, multimedia propaganda, and

other political and historical contexts when trying to grasp the significance and reasons

for Hitler’s rise to power. They simply point to Revelation 13 and identify him post facto

as the Antichrist. They also conveniently eliminate the need to consider the human

experience of the biblical writers, their cultural settings, or literary types. The

fundamentalist is risk-averse: inerrancy presupposes that the Word of God speaks directly

through the biblical text but without mediation. They evade the life-or-death state of faith

and adopt an anti-intellectual disposition. Recall from Chapter One our judgment that

sense experience conquered reason, not religion, in the Scientific Revolution. In this

light, fundamentalism is simply an extension of the Scientific Revolution, albeit with

dissimilar objects of study.

Inerrancy narrows significance in the interpretation of biblical texts. The real

importance of interpretation is to ascertain “the facts” from a biblical passage and to

72

Barr, 94-5. He quotes Bernard Ramm’s account of the Flood story. 73

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), 133.

46

formulate assertions and propositions for conversion, evangelism, spirituality, and of

course, inerrancy. Fundamentalists denude symbolism, metaphor, myth, and other literary

qualities in the text of any plurality or depth of meaning. Consider Article VII and

commentary from the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics”:

We affirm that the meaning in each biblical text is single, definite, and

fixed.

The affirmation here is directed at those who claim a ‘double’ or ‘deeper’

meaning of Scripture than that expressed by the authors. It stresses the

unity and fixity of meaning as opposed to those who find multiple and

pliable meanings.74

The eye of flesh methodically detaches “facts” from the text in complete disregard for the

larger (or holistic) meaning of the text. The expanded sense of literalness guiding the

fundamentalist’s biblical interpretation suggests that “fundamentalism” includes a broad

camp of adherents.

Fundamentalists occasionally recognize their historical detachment from other

traditions within Christianity. They often cite two major Reformation theologians. Martin

Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564), as their forefathers: however, as I have

tried to define fundamentalism, these theologians have no relation to fundamentalism in

the age of the Prejudice. They were precritical realists75

(the Bible rendered the world)—

the literal and the metaphorical understanding of both the Bible and the world

interpenetrated in their exposition and interpretation. For example, consider Luther’s

74

International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (1983). 75

For an elaboration of this term, see pp. 49-50 below.

47

interpretation of Numbers 21:6-8, the story of the fiery serpents sent by God as

punishment for the complaints and lack of faith of the people of Israel:76

This was notably and lively represented by the brazen [fiery] serpent,

which is a figure of Christ. Moses commanded the Israelites who were

stung by serpents in the desert, to do nothing else but behold it steadfastly,

and not to turn away their eyes. They that did so, were healed by that

steadfast and constant gaze. But they which obeyed not Moses’ command

to behold the brazen serpent, but looked elsewhere upon their wounds,

died. So, if I would find comfort and life, when I am at the point of death I

must do nothing else but apprehend Christ, and look at Him…. Besides

Him I see nothing, I hear nothing.77

Notice the intertwining of the historical, the miraculous, and the contemporary in

Luther’s exposition. Luther understands the passage as about Moses, Jesus, and us the

readers, easily, one might even say casually, associating the serpents figuratively to

Christ; therefore, Luther is most certainly not a fundamentalist, having failed the

hermeneutics test of the inerrantists. To Luther, the precritical realist, the Bible renders

and exposes the world of yesterday and today, without regard to Prejudicial

predispositions toward space-time-dependency. Conversely, the fundamentalists must

consider the passage principally as a proposition about the historicity of the miraculous

serpents, compelling a normative interpretation that Luther never proposes. They lose the

symbolic significance of the passage and its connection to us personally78

in the reflex to

76

And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel

died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord,

and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the

people. And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come

to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. (KJV) 77

Luther 224-5. 78

Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s pro me in Act and Being, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt, ed. Wayne Whitson

Floyd, Jr. (1996), 116-23.

48

emphasize “facts” from the text. In other words, Luther reads a living narrative, while the

fundamentalist reads an archive.

One of the first fundamentalists in this broader sense of the word, one of the first

interpreters who rendered the Bible by the world and within a literal frame of mind, was

none other than Signor Galileo. When faced with a conflict between physical phenomena

described in the Bible and his observations of the heavenly bodies, he insisted on the

physical reality of his observations while maintaining the inerrancy of scripture with

nimble interpretative twists. Galileo and his interlocutors debated how God made the sun

and moon stand still in the sky for a whole day as reported in Joshua 10:12-13.79

Galileo

performed the following interpretative gymnastics:

it is not believable that God would stop only the sun, letting the other

spheres proceed; for He would have unnecessarily altered and upset all the

order, appearances, and arrangements of the other stars in relation to the

sun, and would have greatly disturbed the whole system of nature. On the

other hand, it is believable that He would stop the whole system of

celestial spheres, which could then together return to their operations

without any confusion of change after the period of intervening rest….

However, we have already agreed not to change the meaning of the words

in the text; therefore it is necessary to resort to another arrangement of the

parts of the world, and to see whether the literal meaning of the words

flows directly and without obstacle from its point of view. This is in fact

what we see happening.80

Galileo concludes that what the text really meant is that God stopped the spinning of the

sun on its axis, which Galileo thought gave motion to the rest of the planets. When the

79

Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of

Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of

Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their

enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted

not to go down about a whole day. (KJV) 80

Finocchiaro, 53-4.

49

text says that God stopped the sun from moving, Galileo maintains the principle of

inerrancy by asserting that this does not refer to the sun’s movement from east to west but

rather the sun’s rotation. The more realistic reading of the passage is discarded, the view

that God simply stopped everything, in favor of a reading that tries to reconcile the

literalness of the phenomena with the text understood as a repository of true, if

incomplete, set of facts. Galileo, by no means a theologian himself, nevertheless

inaugurated an unprincipled methodology of interpretation for future fundamentalists—

one that adopted a naiveté towards the text itself but which sought sophisticated

reconciliations between nature and the Bible as seen with the eye of flesh alone.

Biblical Criticism and Scientific Naiveté

If fundamentalism thinks between the poles of science and inerrancy within the

Prejudice, its adversary, biblical criticism, is its dialectical twin. Biblical criticism adopts

a hermeneutic of suspicion towards the text, functioning between the poles of science and

relevance. Prior to modern critical methods, the Bible was expounded by precritical

realistic interpretation, according to Hans Frei. If the narrative seemed realistic, then its

full meaning was partially revealed and partially hidden in the literal meaning. Precritical

realistic interpretation of the Bible involved two needs: first, the uncovering of the figures

and types from earlier stories of the Bible into later ones: second, the encompassing of all

the reader’s experience in the light of the text.81

The interpreter understood the world and

81

As an example, see Luther above, pp. 46-7.

50

himself as rendered by the Bible. This was the theocentric mindscape in the West before

the Prejudice took firm hold during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.82

Historical criticism emerged first from the notion that “an autonomous temporal

framework” of real historical events was isolated from its biblical description. The

Prejudicial view of the independence of phenomena from consciousness spread into the

study of history as an “autonomous temporal framework,” historical events becoming

equivalent to the atoms of matter studied in physics. Texts required criticism because

they introduced subjectivity in relating these discrete events that clouded the “real” event.

The Prejudicial mind shifted the narrative’s meaning from being intertwined with the

reader to being documentation of a historical flow of events. This “logical distinction and

reflective distance” recalls Merleau-Ponty’s prejudice of the world: “our contemplation

of inanimate objects and indifferent things as representing the model and ideal of human

knowledge…we are used to setting out from a certain type of knowledge considered

normal: the contemplation of a set of qualities or characteristics that are scattered,

meaningless.” Wilber also emphasizes the difference between thinking about the text

(with the eye of reason) and experiencing the text (with the eye of contemplation).

Historical critics reversed the direction of interpretation from the Bible rendering the

meaning of the world to the world rendering the meaning of the Bible. The Prejudice

precipitated this reversal of direction.

82

Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

Hermeneutics (1977), 3-5.

51

The modern theologian from the historical, literary, and source-critical schools

accepts the Prejudice without skepticism. Rudolf Bultmann writes:

This conception of the world we call mythological because it is different

from the conception of the world which has been formed and developed

by science since its inception in ancient Greece and which has been

accepted by all modern men. In this modern conception of the world the

cause-and-effect nexus is fundamental. Although modern physical theories

take account of chance in the chain of cause and effect in subatomic

phenomena, our daily living, purposes and actions are not affected. In any

case, modern science does not believe that the course of nature can be

interpreted or, so to speak, perforated, by supernatural powers.83

Returning to our example of the creation narrative, he would reject the fundamentalist

notion that the Genesis text refers to an empirical actuality. He would not attempt to

reconcile the apparent empiricism in the text with the empiricism of science. Instead he

would adopt the scientific view uncritically and recast the creation story in terms other

than a realistic reading of the text. For instance, “And the Lord God planted a garden

eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed,”84

does not refer to a

geographical location on Earth called “Eden” (a realistic reading). Rather, the author of

the text imagines a mythology of paradise established by an anthropocentric God, and the

experience of the newly emergent, sentient human beings, unaware of sin. Generally,

then, Bultmann seeks to demythologize the mythological, superimposing modern

metaphors on realistic language. And here we see biblical criticism and fundamentalism

converge: both exhibit a literal frame of mind in the sense that the empirical eye of flesh

supercedes the rational and spiritual for truth-finding. Both look at the text through an

83

Jesus Christ and Mythology (1958), 15. 84

Genesis 2:8.

52

empirical lens and interpret with acts of judgment; they presume that the “scattered,

meaningless” text requires their powers of organization.

Bultmann provides us with a clear example of the superimposition of the

Prejudice on other fields of study. He admits that the cause and effect nexus is not as

strong as it used to be in modern physics yet maintains that our lives are not affected.

Many physicists would disagree; Chapter 2 briefly catalogs some of them. The observer

who sees the universe as premeditated has realized the barrenness of chance as an

explanation for what exists; we have this universe despite the appearance of cause and

effect. Bultmann’s science and his modern man are quite naive. He declares that the

cause-and-effect nexus is fundamental for the modern conception of the world. But this

conception has been radically criticized to the extent that, in examples like the EPR

experiment, the notion of reducible phenomena has been abandoned in favor of a holistic

view of the material and immaterial. The cause-and-effect nexus conceals real

complexity; it is a more simplistic conception of science than even Newton’s. Bultmann

mentions the exception of modern physics casually but dismisses it with a nevertheless:

“modern science does not believe that the course of nature can be interrupted or, so to

speak, perforated, by supernatural powers.” This view has changed among scientists.

Some see in the phenomena of quantum physics and chaos the possibility of intervention

by a supernatural God in the flux of nature: fully forty percent of American scientists

believed in a personal God in 1997.85

85

“Science Finds God,” Newsweek (July 20, 1998), 46-51.

53

The Prejudice upholds Bultmann’s method of biblical interpretation—a project he

calls demythologization—an attempt to resolve the conflict between the “mythological”

world view of the biblical writers and the scientific world view of modernity. The

concern for relevancy fosters the tendency of the biblical critic to render the Bible

consistent with the world.86

Bultmann asks: “is it possible that Jesus’ preaching of the

Kingdom of God still has any importance for modern men and the preaching of the New

Testament as a whole is still important for modern men?”87

Paul Tillich’s Earl Lectures at

the Pacific School of Religion in February 1963 echoed Bultmann’s question: “Is the

Christian message (especially the Christian preaching) still relevant to the people of our

time? And if not, what is the cause of this? And does that reflect on the message of

Christianity itself?”88

Tillich lists six symptoms of irrelevance, two of which correlate to Bultmann’s

connection between relevance and interpretation: the loss of significance of the Christian

language and the content of preaching. Tillich identifies the barrier to understanding as

the “thoroughly objectifying attitude”:

In order to define anything, you must objectify it—make it finite. Definere

(the Latin root) means circumscribing a finite reality. Therefore all

problems of something unconditional, ultimate, or infinite—not in the

mathematical but the qualitative sense—are strange to the typical modern

person. For these matters cannot be construed in terms of finitude or

definition.89

86

Rudolf Bultmann: Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era, ed. Roger A. Johnson (1991), 288-328. 87

Bultmann, 16. 88

Tillich, 3. 89

Ibid., 35.

54

Tillich is not as eager as Bultmann to accept the Prejudice without skepticism. He argues

that the modem mind lives in a horizontal dimension, looking ahead in time and space

with a controlling or transforming intention towards the natural world. He sees that this

“objectifying attitude” hinders relevance. But he argues for re-introducing the vertical

dimension toward the ultimate and divine in much the same sense as Bultmann’s

demythologizing project. Instead of starting with the text, Tillich starts with the modern

person, asking them existential questions about their ultimate concern. Tillich is a torn

theologian: on the one hand he criticizes the modern mindscape, the objectifying attitude,

fostered by the Prejudice; on the other hand he remains suspicious of the text in the sense

that he trusts an existential analysis of the modern person rather than a newly

participatory hermeneutics. Tillich demotes interpretation from the fusion of the world of

the text with the world of the reader or listener to an inquiry of the reader or listener as to

their concerns and situation. He loses true dialogue with the text.

Biblical critics concede hermeneutics to the concern of relevance. They set aside

the realism of the biblical narrative in deference to the realism of science. They study the

texts for modern meaning apart from their depictions. They impose literalized models of

history over the interpretation of biblical narrative.90

Gadamer argues that the total

abandonment of authority in interpreting realistic narratives perpetuates the reason-

Prejudice dichotomy:

If the prestige of authority displaces one’s own judgement, then authority

is in fact a source of prejudices. But this does not preclude its being a

source of truth, and that is what the Enlightenment failed to see when it

90

Cf. Frei, 12.

55

denigrated all authority…. Based on the Enlightenment concept of reason

and freedom, the concept of authority could be viewed as diametrically

opposed to reason and freedom: to be, in fact, blind obedience.91

Kuhn, Barfield, Wilber, and Roszak each argue that the scientific paradigm is just one

more source of authority and subject to becoming as blindly obeyed as Church

dogmatism. Both fundamentalism and biblical criticism are species of reductionism and

Barfield’s idolatry. While the hard sciences have shown us the presumption of taking the

models literally, biblical criticism, like the historical and human sciences, has not yet

incorporated this criticism of the Prejudice into its mindscape. Is it appropriate to insist

on relevance if the very Prejudice which modern man holds with respect to his

conception of science is itself obsolete?

The theology of relevance resists submission to the text; it is a “knowledge by

domination.”92

Such knowledge is a type of superimposition in that it confiscates the text

as a possession, an object of study. This objectification contrasts sharply with Gadamer’s

knowledge by submission:

rather, [hermeneutics] consists in subordinating ourselves to the text’s

claim to dominate our minds. Of this, however, legal and theological

hermeneutics are the true model. To interpret the law’s will or the

promises of God is clearly not a form of domination but of service.93

How do we avoid the tendency to treat the text as an object? Is it possible to submit to the

text without feigning a primitive naiveté? How might the Prejudice inform us but not

master us? Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale theologians suggest narrative theology of

one form or another, which combines theological reflection and literary analysis of the

91

Truth and Method, 279. 92

Max Scheler, The Forms of Knowledge and Society, ed. Maria Scheler (1954), Vol. 8. 93

Gadamer, 311.

56

text.94

They return to the text in critical recognition of our Prejudicial ideal of

autonomous perspective and division between the self and other, following the claim of

Gadamer that the prejudice against prejudices enslaves us to the “closed” world of our

alienated self.

Hermeneutics Mindful of The Prejudice

I have attempted to show that a longstanding Prejudice derived from the Scientific

Revolution exists in our mindscape. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians have

questioned the Prejudice; however, in principle it persists in science, philosophy,

theology, and common sense. We must confront the Prejudice before we can amalgamate

knowledge from diverse fields of enquiry. In this regard, theology and modern physics

form a peculiar alliance. They are instructive for us in that some of their participants have

renewed awareness of the Prejudice as formative to our modern understanding of the

world, whether we consider the world empirically, rationally, or spiritually.

Let’s briefly consider the insights of some who have become mindful of the

Prejudice. Ricoeur offers narrative theology as a “second naiveté”:

Does that mean that we could go back to a primitive naiveté? Not at all. In

every way, something has been lost, irremediably lost: immediacy of

belief. But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in

accordance with the original belief in them we can, we modern men, aim

at a second naiveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting

that we can hear again.95

94

Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (1995), 13-6, 40-5,

and 87-9. 95

The Symbolism of Evil, trans. G. W. Bromiley (1967), 351.

57

His second naiveté suggests a hermeneutical circle of belief and understanding—

understanding giving rise to belief and belief giving rise to understanding, a hermeneutic

of translation. This circle preserves the strong Cartesian distinction between the subject

and object by limiting understanding to the action, or belief, of the subject vis-à-vis the

text (as object). Is it proper to think of primitive naiveté essentially as “belief’? This

elevation of belief, and the concomitant sense of symbol, reduce the text to an articulated

thought rather than a communally lived world or shared life. In neither primitive naiveté

nor second naiveté do we participate in a “fusion of horizons” between the world of the

reader and world of the text.

Ricoeur fails to fully appropriate Gadamer’s notion of understanding that “occurs

in the to-and-fro dialogue between text and interpreter whenever the interpreter is willing

to be put into question by the text and risk openness to the world of possibilities the text

projects.”96

Ricoeur desires a mediation of the subject and object97

but his partiality to

demythologization98

inevitably leads to a juxtaposing of the subject and object. He

subdues hermeneutics to literal thinking:

What we need is an interpretation that is taught by the symbols but then

promotes the meaning in full responsibility of autonomous thought. . . . the

symbol is constituted by starting from something which has a fust-level

meaning and is borrowed from the experience of nature--of contact, of

man’s orientation in space.99

96

Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 9. 97

Ibid., 61-7. 98

“…demythologization gains truthfulness, intellectual honesty, and objectivity.” 99

See “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection” in Symbolism of Evil, 287-334.

58

We see again the ubiquity of superimposition, here as anthropological projection the view

that myths are metaphors taken literally. Ricoeur helps as a critic of the Prejudice but he

remains in his hermeneutical efforts shackled to it.

We can learn the following lessons: one, the Prejudice forcefully asserts its claims

through our thinking even when we attempt to hold it before us in full consciousness;

two, the Prejudice tends to maintain the strong Cartesian distinction between subject and

object, which reduces the text to a monologue of reflection rather than a dialogue of

being “put into question by the text and risk openness to the world of possibilities the text

projects”; three, hermeneutics is in constant peril of reduction to a methodology which

juxtaposes the world of the text and the reader rather than mediation of a true “fusion of

horizons.” Wilber warns us against a sterile hermeneutics:

just as empiricism wants to reduce symbol to sensation, hermeneutics

wants to reduce spirit to symbol. It wants to claim God is a mere idea, or

only an idea, in the community of intersubjective interpreters. It refuses to

include in its methodology the practice of contemplation . . . and thus it

fails to see that God can be verified as a transcendental reality by a

community of transsubjective mediators.100

We must guard our interpretations of texts against a new reductionism, that of spirit to

mind, an idolatry which asserts that the spiritual is nothing but symbols. In his warning, I

believe Wilber actually criticizes structuralism, the thesis of Saussure that states that

there are no signifieds, only signs. Structuralists reduce spirit to symbol because their

sign has no referential function; or, as Ricoeur says, the “symbol left to itself, tends to

thicken, to become solidified in an idolatry.”101

But in a newly participatory

100

Wilber, 186. 101

Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 351.

59

hermeneutics, the spiritual must reconstruct the symbolic (because the Prejudice has

reduced the symbol to sensation) so that it can once again point to the spiritual. The

project of hermeneutics should encompass the three modes of seeing. The eye of flesh

detects the opaqueness of the solidified symbol as it has passed through the collective

filter and lens of the Prejudice into our everyday world of objects. The eye of mind

conceptualizes the reconstructed symbol; we have a “meeting of the minds” when our

dialogue with the text uncovers the world we share with it. Finally, the eye of

contemplation, essential to this interpretative circle, perceives anew the transparency

between sign and signified, between symbol and object, and between myth and history in

the text. The perception of this transparency is bound up with the “felt change of

consciousness,” an alarming awareness of the numinous aspect of the phenomena/text

heretofore hidden from the observer/reader. In short, hermeneutics is a holistic enterprise,

one which demands the nurture and application of the human spectrum of consciousness

in all of its modes: empirical, rational, and spiritual.

60

CONCLUSION

Modern science has asserted a new holistic paradigm, an understanding of the

cosmos that recovers the notion of interpenetration, a fusion between phenomena and

consciousness, between mind and matter, and between metaphorical and literal. We may

create paradox when we speak or write of the spiritual in terms of the flesh or the

mind;102

however, paradox may be the remnant or the internal symptom of the strong

Cartesian division between subject and object recurring in the modern discourse. Taking

Wilber’s admonition to heart, we can broaden the language we inherited from the

Enlightenment to include the a-rational or trans-rational, following our experience of a

felt change of consciousness from the Prejudice.

Human beings have come of age. We’ve lost our spiritual innocence; primitive

naiveté faded as self-consciousness condensed, and we entered the life of reflection. How

do we find meaning from texts that were written before this coming of age? Perhaps the

lessons from both science and theology are instructive. Both have followed the

reductionism of the Prejudice to its nihilistic end. In science, holism reasserts itself

through diverse phenomena such as chaos, Godel’s theorem, and the EPR experiment. In

theology, holism reasserts itself through the discourse of the text and the reader, their

horizons fusing in a shared life world. Can we, in our mature state of consciousness,

break the idols of the study and again participate with both the phenomena and the text?

102

Simone Weil: “Contradiction experienced to the very depths of the being tears us heart and soul: it is the

cross.”

61

Theology speaks of the metanoia, the turning in repentance from the old life of the flesh

to the new life of the spirit. Perhaps we must be converted from the old paradigm of the

Prejudice to the new paradigm of holism before we can experience the numinous in all of

its physical, mental, and spiritual aspects.

62

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