I’ve already got a stock of quotes and thoughts from the intro alone that I’ll try to pace out so as not to just dump all my initial reactions here. It seems to me that one of our challenges with discussing the introduction, is that it is difficult to do that without discussing the whole book since Penner uses the intro to give us teasers about each chapter. (Perhaps many of you have read the book in its entirety already - but I haven’t.) If we remain faithful to the set schedule (and I very much like the thought of doing that - thanks for setting it all up, @Kendel), then our fullest discussion of some of these subjects would need to wait for the relevant chapter discussion.
In any case, some opening salvos have already been fired. Mitchell has already given one reaction (part of which is quoted below).
You do go on to elaborate on this in your original post, Mitchell, and so perhaps you have no more to say on it here. But I want to note that it appears (on Penner’s thesis) that you - and probably nearly all of us here - seem to be textbook examples of exactly what Penner anticipates and is speaking about. Yes - you attempt to “soften” the modernist apologetic enterprise a bit by saying it ought to limit itself to “showing the rationality of Christian faith” and jettison the more aggressive tactic of trying to show all other traditions irrational. But again - and echoing Penner I think - this may seem more “neighbor friendly”, but it still makes our faith something more about geniuses rather than apostles - and therefore more elitest in the intelligence sense. (Those two categories may already be jumping ahead to future chapters - highlighting our difficulty I mentioned at the top.) You’ve already made your aversion to authoritarianism quite clear, Mitchell - and your extreme preference for science and rationality, which is understandable and probably the norm around here. And yet how does this not make you (many of us here) yet more poster children for exactly what Penner is talking about? Do you have any more response for his charge other than your loathing of it?
Also - could you (@Mitchell) say more about why you find McIntyre’s opening thought exercise to be poppycock? Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m guessing you were referring to his “imagine science had been almost totally eradicated - but then a few try to recover the fragments again.” And then he went on to say we’re more like Alice down the rabbit hole rather than being on the deck of Starship Enterprise (where our popular imagination likes to dwell.) Was that whole comparison the one you found so preposterous? And if so, can you say more about why?
Regarding McIntyre’s example it initially seemed discordant as an analogy for a couple reasons which now seem minor to me. Any analogy between things which are not the same must have things which set them apart. Otherwise no analogy would be required.
What I like about it is it gets you to imagine what it would look like. It wouldn’t just be some bits of knowledge have gone missing. The very frame for understanding the processes that gave rise to the knowledge and any real basis for understanding would also erased. None of this is to say you can’t any longer make sense of your theology or Christian practice. But when you go formulate that sense you make remember that the modem expectation to explain along empirical and analytical lines cannot deliver what as understood by the Bible’s intended audience. Knowing that the ground beneath our understanding has shifted we should be more careful in the way we address those who do not even share the Bible as a common ground at all.
Probably not l, nor do I think we should attempt to cease all modern/enlightenment attempts to understand, but we can dial down our insistence that our own constructed understanding should do the trick for everyone else as well. Our circumstances are all distinct and the embodied wisdom we have accumulated will have the final say as to how much and which final truths are reasonable for us at this time. Live long enough and you’ll notice that can change.
Your comment is interesting in that I also had difficulty picturing what a world where science is parroted, and why it would be so difficult to recapture an accurate understanding of the scientific method even if in small subgroups where it can be validated objectively.
Now I as think about it again, maybe a better comparison would be to look at, and for the sake of illustration, assuming the OT narrative is true, what it would be like for a secular people today to imagine what it would be like for God to be uniquely present to a community of people. Not just to an individual as we are so able to understand now, but as to a priestly nation.
As I think more about the novel which I first read at least fifty years ago what strikes me as the most implausible is that the loss of scientific knowledge would cause the whole population to slide down to a pre modern world view. I hardly think science is the only thing keeping the modern view afloat. Actually I suppose the idea is the devastation from a nuclear Armageddon would have scared people into avoiding any practices which could have led to the development of those kinds of weapons.
I didn’t find it to be total poppycock. I said the post science apocalyptic vision was believable. What I didn’t buy into was his notion of pre-enlightenment morality discourse being on some imagined solid ground before the enlightenment tore it down. And my contempt for authoritarian morality was a big part of this. I will never accept the preposterous traditional claim that morality is made absolute by divine dictation. That just makes it relative to the religion doing the dictating. On the other hand, I will say that we might have overlooked the possibility that some aspects of morality can be a product of long experience – things we do because that is what makes for a functional society (a product of social evolution). But that would itself would be a reason – and that reason affording an absolute nature to that morality.
To say apologetics should be limited in that manner is NOT to say that this improved apologetics must be our faithful witness to Jesus Christ. Quite the contrary I said our faithful witness to Jesus Christ consists of telling our own story whatever that may be. And yes for the “stuck in his head” intellectual that might look like apologetics and speaking to others who are like them. I will not support MacIntyre’s own brand of elitism that we must all be his approved sort of saintly witness. People are different and the sooner we accept that the better – not all the ivory tower intellectuals and not all the common grass either.
More to the point is that there is no need to abandon our intellectual pursuits such as science in order to be a good Christian.
This reminds me of a question I have: How inextricably wedded are science and modernity? Can either one be conceptualized in the absence of the other? Or another way to put it … is it totally redundant to add the qualifier: modern science? As in … there is no other kind?
I believe Kendel was making a connection between post-modernism and the social science. And perhaps this speaks of a challenge to doing social science in quite the same way we do the hard sciences. But I would have to leave that question to the social scientists.
Yes there is the pre-modern notion that theology is the “queen of the sciences” and thus the term “modern science” is a rejection of this. One does encounter attempts to backtrack the definition of science to a time where such thinking would be valid… where science is just a branch of natural philosophy. So “modern science” refers to the methodological ideas in science as we practice it today and not this medieval understanding of the word.
But… this is not about any connection between science and modernity in philosophy. The whole point of those methodological ideals is that such philosophy should have no impact on the work of science.
It may be a rejection of that notion from within the modernist (or scientific!) paradigm, and yet from within a Christian perspective, I can see how theology would still be considered the legitimate wider (widest) context within which things like science continue to operate. And that seems entirely coherent and consistent to me (and in fact perhaps a large part of Penner’s thesis). In that analogy, science could be an arm belonging to my body and mind. And my arm (by itself) does not have the wherewithall to discern whether it is part of a larger body or not (or whether it is indeed the entire body). In order to adjudicate on the topic we inevitably have to appeal to the mind - which simply cannot be found anywhere in the arm. Don’t mistake this metaphor for some simplistic dimunition of science or a claim that science does not involve thought (obviously not true). It is merely to suggest that science cannot get us to any legitimate theology (or ‘atheology’). That in itself is a loaded statement, hotly rejected by many - even here. But it is not a new statement, and if Penner’s thesis were largely just this, then I could claim I was already there before having seen this material - though he does help add some nuance to my conclusion. (e.g. …that there really is no such thing as generic theology - all theology is contextual to a specific setting - either Christian or Islamic or so forth.)
Are you trying to redefine theology so that it too can fit within the modernist (or scientific) paradigm? It is a… fanciful idea (I could not bring myself to call “intriguing”). Let’s remember that I am still pretty married to the Kierkegaard notion of this divide between the objective and the subjective. And I don’t see how theology could ever survive a move from the subjective to the objective. Indeed I would argue that addressing our needs with regards to the subjective aspects of our existence is kind of the whole point of religion and theology.
Stray thought… is the very idea of this divide between subjective and objective (or any existence of an objective aspect of reality) being identified with modernity? My idea was that post-modernity has its place in recognizing the value of the subjective and trying to understand it, but if it is taken so far as to reject science and the objective aspect of our existence then it is nothing but trash as far as I am concerned.
Well minus science I don’t think there would be so much scientism, the belief that rational processes operating with scientific principles will eventually answer all questions. I think of science as the gold standard for finding out how things are in the world.
But ultimate truths are the bedrock by which we test the reasonableness of what may strike us as rationally entailed by previously accepted truths. Rationality tends to forget it is a branch of the imagination, specifically the one dedicated to imagining what else is possible given our best maps of the cosmos. Of course all maps are less complete than what they map so inferences drawn from them are never entirely conclusive. It is good to remember that imagining is not the same as deliberate fabrication; it is a basic and essential mental function.
I think ultimate truths are passed along culturally but how they are articulated can misrepresent them with too much specificity or too little. Too much specificity renders them as dead facts unable to speak for themselves; too little and we lack a focal point for the imagining function to latch on to. I think Penner believes modern apologetics misses the target on the too specific side, leaving no room or apparent need for what might be called the Holy Spirit to work.
It is a clever for sure. I think of it as the difference between asking for the point of it and calling for its termination. I suppose depending on what we think is the point we might call for a change in practice rather it’s final curtain.
Quite the opposite! I am looking at the scientific paradigm to see how it fits within our theology. And I agree with your sentence at the end that any postmodernism that leaves science behind (or tries to) … leaves [physical] reality behind.
I’ll have to think about that some more. I was gathering from Penner at one point that he thought apologetics (to the extent it attempts to be merely theist) was not nearly specific enough.
I’m still looking for childlike hearts and minds that marvel at the wonderful and wondrous (a subtle distinction) objective evidence we have of God’s interventions and his M.O. It seems so far that neither Kierkegaard’s nor Penner’s thought can allow it (nor anyone else’s?). But we are told in scripture to remember God’s activity in our own lives and others’. That is an apologia, and there are external facts which are not subjective.
That’s all of us (though I’m finally through chapter 2).
I took Penner’s critique of generic theism (or “natural theology”) to be something along the lines of (to borrow on Lewis a bit here) … That “to be in a house” in reality means “to be in some particular room of that house.” One doesn’t spend their time in a hallway or such - you spend your time in a living room or dining room or kitchen or bedroom. To try to tie that in to how I took Penner’s thought: claiming to have “found” or “verified” some general kind of ‘theism’ might be like speaking of a roomless mansion. In reality mansions have rooms. Though I can also hear critics answering Penner here … that one can still speak of “the mansion” in general terms and without reference to any particular room. So why not the same for natural theology? It may be that Penner’s assessment of natural theology is that it actually claims to be a mansion without rooms - in other words - something that pretty much doesn’t really exist.
According to MacIntyre, the great disaster that erased our knowledge of past moral discourse and put us in this state of grave disorder may be described more or less as the Enlightenment—or perhaps we could say the modern emphasis on universal, neutral (impersonal, ahistorical), and autonomous reason—which cuts off the modern self and its rational grounds for belief from a dependence on tradition or any other source outside the self.°
I push back on Penner here, in ways that maybe were answered by @Kendel earlier.
As a modern, I respond that “self” is not cut off from the physical reality it is still embedded in. In fact this is the very central glory of science: that one is eventually forced to bring all their inner musings out into the crucible of reality to see if it really works, and for others then too to test and see if your hypothesis works. So it seems to me that modernism (science) succeeds in spades at just the very point where Penner wants to identify its failure.
What Kendel reminded me of earlier is that Penner isn’t trying to contest science as our best tool for understanding physical reality. Penner is focusing on theological (not scientific) questions, and so to keep trying to pull him back into a seat around “our modernist table” is to exercise the very kind of scientism that he is walking away from (and that many of us have also - as believers - walked away from ourselves.)
I still think there are other layers to this onion though - the “rationality layer” (which Penner is also holding at arm’s length) but which we freely use here to still reason ourselves away from scientism with.
I’m not following the mansion vs rooms talk too well. But then I don’t know what natural theology refers to either. Google here I come.
Well these seem pretty different:
Natural theology is generally characterized as the attempt to establish religious truths by rational argument and without reliance upon alleged revelations . It has focused traditionally on the topics of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.
Religion
The term “natural religion” is sometimes taken to refer to a pantheistic doctrine according to which nature itself is divine. “Natural theology”, by contrast, originally referred to (and still sometimes refers to) the project of arguing for the existence of God on the basis of observed natural facts .Jul 6, 2015
Well okay, both are about arguing for Gods existence rationally based on observations of nature. Most of us not already in the tent aren’t buying a ticket to that.