The Relationship of Philosophy, Theology and Science This chapter is structured by a historical survey of grand philosophical programs. Each philosophical program will be expounded enough to identify relationships to theology and science, and to provide a sample of each. More could be said about each philosophy, theology, and science contribution, which if the reader’s interest is peaked, I encourage following where the notes lead. One of the purposes of this paper is to show how philosophy changes theology and science with which it syncretizes. This will provide an opportunity to affirm aspects and to critique other aspects of the philosophies expounded. In the previous chapter I identified briefly my epistemic and theological method. This chapter provides a philosophical rationale for this previous sketched summary. If I provide a critique in this chapter as we travel through each philosophy (such as under Kant) then any following philosophies, theology and science that depend upon such a perspective are also critiqued without further raising the point repetitively. 13 This survey includes: 1) Stoicism-Tertullian, 2) Plato-Augustine, 3) Aristotle- Aquinas, 4) Renaissance Humanism-Calvin and the Biblical theology movement, 5) Descartes-Rationalists, 6) Locke and Newton-Edwards and Common Sense Realism, with Intelligent Design 7) Kant-Strauss, Ritschl and Crockett, 8) Romanticism-Evolution, Pietism of Schleiermacher and Evangelicalism, 9) Existentialism of Kierkegaard-Barth, Bultmann and Tillich, 10) Marx-Liberation theology, 11) Pragmatisms-Liberation, Evangelicalism, Relativity, and Quantum, 12) Process philosophy of Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin, 13) Postmodern language games with traditional Christian communities and their theological hermeneutic, and 14) Critical Realism of Shedd, McGrath, Murphy, and Lakatos. I embrace a hybrid view of critical realism in a Lakatos’ scientific method. Throughout this survey, I will summarize some of the ways in which philosophy has affected theology and science, and highlight some of how it is affecting evangelical theology now. In the midst of this survey I will assess each view for warrant in a few of its core beliefs. This will provide us with the opportunity to evaluate whether these affects are appropriate and desirable. I argue for philosophy’s role in theology to be streamlined to: 1) helping us be precise and coherent in our thought (as a critical realist), within a Renaissance humanism program of “back to the Christian textual roots” which Biblical theology largely provides, 2) helping us think through ramifications of our commitments and the relationships this identifies us with, and 3) providing any additional basic beliefs that are strongly warranted, but do not counter those of Biblical theology. 1 This chapter is not addressing 1 What I have in mind is “A Personal Statement,” and chapter on “Faith and Knowledge,” in Doug Kennard, The Relationship Between Epistemology, Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology and Contextualization (Lewiston: The Mellon Press, 1999), pp. 31–33 and 35–69. 14 the value or limitations of philosophy as a discipline itself; I leave that issue for others at another occasion. Stoicism By the time Christianity arrived, Stoicism had entered its ethical phase and was one of the few highly moral options available in the Roman Empire, along with Judaism and Christianity. When Paul presented the gospel to some stoic philosophers, he resisted the Stoic cyclical metaphysic with its internal idealistic creation and cataclysm, 2 and presented a sovereign personal God, Who creates and draws all history out in a linear arrangement, ultimately heading to judgment and bodily resurrection (Acts 17:18–31). 3 Such a linear view of history is dependant upon the Jewish construct of creation unto Kingdom or more microscopically: exodus to Promised Land as a stage on the way to Kingdom (Ex. 1–19; Deut. 1–4). 4 However, in a positive direction Christianity utilized Stoic concepts to provide some basic connections in making sense of the concept of the Trinity, as when Tertullian appropriated the concept of procession from the Stoic belief system to help Christianity make sense of the Trinity. The stoic concept of procession meant “an extension” as in 2 Seneca, Nat. quaest . 3.29 in Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. LCL. trans. R. M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947) 24.4–7; 98.12–14; Silius Italicus, Punica LLC, Trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge: Harvard, University Press, 1949) 6.531–38; Tacitus, Annals LLC. Trans. J. Jackson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951); Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers (Philosophoi Biol ) 8.134; Plutarch , Moral. 1077d. 3 Friedrich Lang, s.v. “ pu`r ,” TDNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968) 6:928–945, claims that such stoic ideas are fused with apocalyptic Jewish cataclysm to fund 2 Peter 3: 7–10, however I think that there is ample source material in the Jewish heritage of the prophets and apocalypses without folding in a philosophical source no where mentioned in the text. Cf. Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Waco: Word, 1983), pp. 300–1; 1QH 3.193b; Sib. Or. 2.187–213; 3.71–92; 4.171–182; 6.153–161; 1 Enoch 10.3; Hermas, Vis. 4.3.3. Jewish-Christian apocalyptic continued to be rich in descriptions of cataclysm without dependence upon stoicism, e.g., Apocalypse of Peter. 4 Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews (New York: Doubleday, 1998), pp. 18–19, 125–131, nicely summarizes the invention of linear history in a context in which all other peoples of the ancient Near East held to cyclical views. 15 the economic Divine Being extends Himself from the dominant expression of Father to a second and third persona of the Son and Holy Spirit. 5 This connection did not impose the Stoic concept of logos or spirit as a divine impersonal grand metaphysical principle, for Christianity’s God concept involved three persons within it. However, the fact that such concepts as logos and spirit were already seen in Stoicism as “divine” encouraged using other stoic concepts for describing the Christian’s Trinitarian God. Furthermore, the clarity of the revelational “Word” as Christ, resisted being interpreted in a non- personal Stoic manner within the church. So on the whole, the early church comes out strongly against embracing a Stoic world view, 6 even though a few Stoic concepts contributed to Christian theology. Stoicism with its idealistic world view resisted the value and development of science. Stoic metaphysics focused on the unseen ultimate, like the fire within everything as a non-personal divine principle that constituted all reality, which would eventually consume all reality in a cataclysm. This distracted the stoics from the available advances in science such as Pythagoras’ mathematical analysis of a spherical earth and Egyptian astronomy, because they did not value the constituents of the universe. Instead, they urged a morality to remain steady within divine determinism. Platonism Plato is a major influence on Western Christian ideas, especially due to a neo- Platonic version of his metaphysic, the theory of forms, and the simplicity of the Good. 5 Tertullian, Adv. Prax. 4, 5, 7, 8, 11; Against Praxeas. In The Writings of Quintus Sept. Flor. Tertullianus. Edited by Richard Ellmann. (Kila: Kessinger, 1869–70). 6 E.g., Origen, Contra Celsus 4.11-13 in Origen Against Celsus. Edited by James Bellamy (London: B. Mills, 1660); Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.7.1 in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1995). 16 For example, one does not find in the real world a perfect circle, so Platonism conjectures that there is a realm of the forms which would house these perfect objects. Thus, pure geometrical and mathematical concepts occupy this realm of the forms, which Augustine located for Christianity as in the mind of God. 7 This grounding of geometry and mathematical concepts is the only way in which I can be said to be Platonic. More extensively, Plato thus provides meaning to the shadows which we see and feel about us in the real world. This level of Platonism is nicely pictured by Plato’s myth of the cave. 8 The forms are that which is really true for Plato, in that they are: eternal, unchanging, unmoving and indivisible. These forms introduce into all fields a dualism in which the higher realm associated with the forms is the true reality experienced through the lower realm of visible things and the discursive reasoning by which one conjures up the unchanging and indivisible truth of the forms. For Plato, the realm of the forms is only accessible to humans because they have trafficked among the realm of the forms as souls before we were incarnated into our bodies. 9 This pre-embodiement experience funds the Socratic method, so that everybody (even children and slaves) could recollect the truth of the forms with well placed questions to help them recollect this pre- embodiement experience of their souls. 7 In this I follow Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (London: Vintage, 1995). As a theologian, Alister McGrath (in A Scientific Theology: Reality , Volume 2 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], pp. 79–83, 170–176) concurs with this assessment and locates this mathematical realism in the mind of God following Augustine. cf. Per Lindstrom “Quasi-realism in Mathematics,” The Monist 83 (2000): 122–47, but especially p. 130–132, and p. 138 where he discusses the objective reality of numbers and proposes options including Platonism and Dummett’s alternative of a Wittgenstein defined language game that has an intuitional essence beyond the definition, that perhaps accesses real mathematical objects like Putnam proposed. 8 Plato, The Republic , book 6, sections 509–11 in Great Books of the Western World, #7 Plato (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), pp.