A rich diversity of apologetic approaches

In his excellent book, Mere Apologetics, Alister McGrath considers a diversity of approaches for engaging with those who are skeptical or curious about the Christian faith.

Chapter 7, Gateways for apologetics: Opening the door to faith, considers four different approaches.

1. Explanation
2. Argument
3. Stories
4. Images

Most traditional apologetics focusses on the first two approaches.

Stories is not just concerned with the Biblical narrative but engaging with influential secular literature such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci code. 

Images is not just art but using and engaging with powerful mental images and concepts such as Plato's cave or the theological notion of adoption.

C.S. Lewis was all the more impressive as an apologist because he was a master at all four approaches, from Mere Christianity to Narnia.

Which approach to use should be determined by the background and interests of the audience.

Artistic idolatry in the U.S. Capitol

I finished reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. Given so much of his material is of dubious scientific and historical accuracy I was curious to verify his claims about The Apotheosis of Washington, the giant mural on the dome of the U.S. Capitol building. In this case he is correct, it does depict George Washington becoming a god!

Maureen Dowd's scathing review of the book in The New York Times is also worth reading. Here is some of the beginning

 the terrifying thing about “The Lost Symbol” is that Brown — who did not flinch when the Vatican both condemned the “The Da Vinci Code” and curtailed the filming of “Angels & Demons” in Rome — clearly got spooked by that other powerful, secretive ancient sect, the Masons.
His book is a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons, rather than to interpret the bizarre Masonic rites and symbols that illuminate — as in Illuminati! — how the ultimate elite private boys’ club has conspired to shape the nation’s capital and Western civilization ever since George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol building in a Masonic ritual wearing full Masonic regalia, including a darling little fringed satin apron. If the Masons are more intimidating than the Vatican, if Brown has now become part of their semiotic smoke screen, then all I can say is, God help us all.

The Lost Saviour

As I have confessed before, I love Dan Brown novels. They are a great read. But, the science (usually presented as "fact") is ridiculous and the history is dubious.
I have just started reading Brown's latest, The Lost Symbol. Again there is comical science. In this case it is "Noetic Science" which is a mish-mash (a synthesis!) of modern physics with ancient mysticism. The frontpiece of the book has a page entitled "Fact" which states that the Institute of Noetic Sciences exists. This is indeed correct. I found the Institute web page fascinating and disturbing reading. This is probably best summarised by The Double Slit Experiment: Experimental Tests of the Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. None of anything I could see had any signs of real science: i.e., experiments that were or could be reproduced by other scientists and published in traditional scientific journals.

Like The DaVinci Code the novel is rich on symbols, puzzles, secrets, and "The Ancient Mystery." The Freemasons are central and portrayed in a sympathetic manner. What is most striking to me is how the world of some of the characters seems to resonate with aspects of the world of both the Old and the New Testament. The preoccupation with images and symbols aligns with idolatry or ritualistic religion. The preoccupation with mysteries and secret knowledge sounds very gnostic. [Paul's Letter to the Colossians addresses these issues]. The responsibility of man [and particularly select men (n.b. not women)] is to use his cleverness to find and discover the secret knowledge. Through ritual he is to find the strength to act in a moral manner.

In contrast, the person of Jesus Christ is not a symbol, an artefact, or a puzzle that man decodes, but rather a real person who reveals the mystery of God to all humanity.

The common literary genre of Dan Brown and Richard Dawkins?

Timothy Jenkins from Cambridge has a fascinating article entitled

Closer to Dan Brown than to Gregor Mendel: on Dawkins' The God Delusion

which just appear in the Scottish Journal of Theology.

The abstract reads:

The aim of this paper is to place Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion (2006) within a particular literary genre and, by so doing, to account for certain features of its written style, to identify its structuring claims and to offer an explanation for the popularity it has enjoyed with a broad readership. By offering a description of this kind, I hope to avoid engaging in the polemics which the book both offers and has elicited; the argument is situated at another level. My proposal may seem a surprising one: Dawkins' work comes within a spectrum that includes in its modern forms both science fiction and fantasy literature, a spectrum that uses the products of science to think with, in order to explore human dilemmas. In a word, this is a modern theodicy. I shall begin by sketching out the notion of thinking with science, before turning to characteristic stylistic features of Dawkins' work, and then examining the core claims of the book in the perspective outlined. I shall offer some concluding remarks, but there is little to be said about the author's argument with respect to religion or faith; his topic is a pretext for another kind of exercise.

Does theology have implications for specific laws of physics?

Vern Poythress is a Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminister Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He also has a Ph.D in Mathematics. He is author of the book, Redeeming Science: A God Centred Approach. The Seminary has sponsored a new web site The Truth about Angels and Demons, featuring material written by Poythress. It is very flash and worth a look.

But, one thing I had reservations about was a statement concerning antimatter:
The Word of God, the second Person of the Trinity, expresses the rationality and wisdom of God. The world that God made has deep harmonies because it was made by him and expresses him. In the Word, the wisdom of God, physical order (the positron) and mathematics hold together in harmony. Antimatter exists because it reflects within nature the harmony of God's mind, and the harmony between the persons of the Trinity.

This reminded me of some of the material in Alister McGrath's The Foundations of the Dialogue between Science and Religion (1998), of which I wrote a critical but appreciative review.
Chapter 2 contains a section (pp. 69-73) which discusses the fact that symmetry plays a major role in quantum theory. This might be of some theological interest because Aquinas argued that observed symmetries reflect the perfection of God. McGrath suggests that this interest has been offered a ``new lease of life'' because of the recent current interest in supersymmetry in theoretical physics. Later in the book (p. 181), in the context of the use of analogies in theology McGrath states:

It is important to pause here, and note the importance of the way in which the growth of ``supersymmetry'' theories have posited a fundamental relationship between various aspects of modern physics. The doctrine of creation, puts such relationships on a secure intellectual footing, suggesting that a correlation exists within the created order prior to its being discerned through human investigation.

Some of my concerns about this discussion of supersymmetry and this last point, in particular are, in order of increasing importance.

i. It is not at all clear that superstring theories will ever be tested experimentally because they would require particle accelerators bigger than the size of the earth. Hence, we may never know whether superstring theories really describe the created order rather than being just beautiful mathematical constructions.

ii. If supersymmetry really is an underlying symmetry of the physical laws of nature, the universe itself would still have only exhibited perfect supersymmetry (equal numbers of photons and photinos) during some incredibly short time, like the first 10 to the power -41 seconds, after the beginning of the universe. However, in the world in which we now live the supersymmetry is ``broken'', i.e., that is far from perfect. There are an ``astronomical'' number of photons in the universe but so far we have not found a single photino. Won't such imperfection present problems to Aquinas' argument?

iii. A statement by a theologian that theories based on symmetry are on a ``sound intellectual footing'' because of the doctrine of creation can be easily mis-interpreted as an endorsement of a specific scientific theory and is problematic. Wasn't that the source of Galileo's problems?

Angels and Demons: "fact" or science fiction? II

My previous post on Angel and Demons generated some traffic. I see that it is currently the most popular movie in Australia at the box office. I am curious whether the movie contains the following interaction in the novel, between the hero Robert Langdon, a Harvard Professor and expert in symbology, and Maximillian Kohler, a physicist and CERN director:

`Since the beginning of history,' Langdon explained, 'a deep rift has existed between science and religion. Outspoken scientists like Copernicus-'

`Were murdered,' Kohler interjected. `Murdered by the church for revealing scientific truths. Religion has always persecuted science.'

It appears that since the original edition, Copernicus has been replaced with Giordano Bruno, at least in my 2001 Corgi paperback edition. Why the change?

How did Copernicus die? He died following a stroke.
How were his theories received by the Roman Catholic church? What did Copernicus believe about the Bible? Wikipedia has detailed and well-referenced entries on Copernicus and Bruno. Here are extracts from the Copernicus entry:

On 1 November 1536, Archbishop of Capua Nicholas Schönberg wrote a letter to Copernicus from Rome:

Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you... For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ...^[17]

By then Copernicus' work was nearing its definitive form, and rumors about his theory had reached educated people all over Europe. Despite urgings from many quarters, Copernicus delayed with the publication of his book, perhaps from fear of criticism — a fear delicately expressed in the subsequent Dedication of his masterpiece to Pope Paul III. Scholars disagree on whether Copernicus' concern was limited to physical and philosophical objections from other natural philosophers, or whether he was also concerned about religious objections from theologians.^[18]

At original publication, Copernicus' epoch-making book caused only mild controversy, and provoked no fierce sermons about contradicting Holy Scripture. It was only three years later, in 1546, that a Dominican, Giovanni Maria Tolosani, denounced the theory in an appendix to a work defending the absolute truth of Scripture.^[32] He also noted that the Master of the Sacred Palace (i.e., the Catholic Church's chief censor), Bartolomeo Spina, a friend and fellow Dominican, had planned to condemn De revolutionibus but had been prevented from doing so by his illness and death.^[33]

Arthur Koestler, in his popular book The Sleepwalkers, asserted that Copernicus' book had not been widely read on its first publication.^[34] This claim was trenchantly criticised by Edward Rosen,^[35] and has been decisively disproved by Owen Gingerich, who examined every surviving copy of the first two editions and found copious marginal notes by their owners throughout many of them. Gingerich published his conclusions in 2004 in The Book Nobody Read.^[36]

It has been much debated why it was not until six decades after Spina and Tolosani's attacks on Copernicus's work that the Catholic Church took any official action against it. Proposed reasons have included the personality of Galileo Galilei and the availability of evidence such as telescope observations.

In March 1616, in connection with the Galileo affair, the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation of the Index issued a decree suspending De revolutionibus until it could be "corrected," on the grounds that the supposedly Pythagorean doctrine^[37] that the Earth moves and the Sun doesn't was "false and altogether opposed to Holy Scripture."^[38]

So, not only was Copernicus not murdered by the church, but it seems some church leaders were actually very receptive to his ideas. And it was only sixty years after his death that the church opposed his work.

On the other hand, Bruno was definitely condemned to death by the church. But, was it for his scientific views? The wikipedia entry on Bruno expands on the subtleties involved:

Some authors have characterized Bruno as a "martyr of science," suggesting parallels with the Galileo affair. They assert that, even though Bruno's theological beliefs were an important factor in his heresy trial, his Copernicanism and cosmological beliefs also played a significant role for the outcome. Others oppose such views, and claim this alleged connection to be exaggerated, or outright false.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When [...] Bruno [...] was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology."^[16]

Similarly, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) asserts that "Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc."^[17]

However, the webpage of the Vatican Secret Archives discussing the document containing a summary of legal proceedings against him in Rome, suggests a different perspective:

"In the same rooms where Giordano Bruno was questioned, for the same important reasons of the relationship between science and faith, at the dawning of the new astronomy and at the decline of Aristotle’s philosophy, sixteen years later, Cardinal Bellarmino, who then contested Bruno’s heretical theses, summoned Galileo Galilei, who also faced a famous inquisitorial trial, which, luckily for him, ended with a simple abjuration."^[18]

I took a fascinating visit to the relevant Vatican Secret Archives webpage and also found the following statement of Bruno:

Firstly, I say that the theories on the movement of the earth and on the immobility of the firmament or sky are by me produced on a reasoned and sure basis, which doesn’t undermine the authority of the Holy Sciptures […]. With regard to the sun, I say that it doesn’t rise or set, nor do we see it rise or set, because, if the earth rotates on his axis, what do we mean by rising and setting[…])

Congratulations, if you read this far! This post took longer than I originally thought because it turned out so much more complicated [and richer] than I anticipated. But, isn't that the way science, history, theology, and life often are!

Dan Brown and Richard Dawkins do not wish to engage with subtleties and shades of gray. For them, it is simple:

Since the beginning of history ...... a deep rift has existed between science and religion. Outspoken scientists .....Were murdered .... by the church for revealing scientific truths. Religion has always persecuted science.

Angels and Demons: "fact" or science fiction?

I love Dan Brown novels. They are a great read. But when it comes to scientific and historical accuracy, they are laughable. I noticed this particularly in Angels and Demons, because physics and physicists play a major role. This book was the prequel to the DaVinci Code. The movie version, staring Tom Hanks, will be released next week.

CERN, the particle physics laboratory, featured in the novel has a web page which details the many scientific errors in the novel.
To get an idea of just how bad these errors are consider this. The novel has a page at the beginning entitled FACT, which states:

Antimatter is the most powerful energy source known to man. It releases energy with 100 per cent efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5 per cent efficient). Antimatter cereates no pollution or radiation, and a droplet could power New York City for a full day.

In response, the CERN site states:

The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.

But my favourite blooper in the novel is Dan Brown's description of the heroine by the CERN director,

She's a bio Entanglement Physicist. She studies the interconnectivity of life systems. Her work ties closely with her father's work in particle physics. Recently she disproved one of Einstein's fundamental theories by using atomically synchronized cameras to observe a school of tuna fish.

[page 69, 2001 Corgi edition]
This is complete scientific gooblygook, comparable to that found in What the bleep do we know, on which I wrote a previous post.

A very long list of other errors, mostly geographical and historical, can also be found here.

Enjoy the book. Enjoy the movie. They are great suspense.
But learn your science and church history elsewhere....
The movie trailer looks very exciting. It ends with Tom Hanks saying, "This is the truth." No. This is a great story which may lead the uncritical viewer to believe the myth that science and Chrisitianity are incompatible.