A heartfelt reckoning with Australia's history of colonialism, racism, and Whiteness

Life experiences shape us, for better or for worse. They can be rich, meaningful, and beautiful. They can be awful and scar us for life. Much of our experience is shaped/determined by the family, culture, and moment we were born into. 

Both Stan Grant and I were born in Australia in the early 1960s and went to high school in the Canberra suburb of Belconnen. Besides, living many years outside Australia, perhaps that is the sum total of our common life experience. He has been successful as a journalist, both internationally and in Australia.

Stan Grant is a Wiradjuri man. His grandparents' home was bulldozed by the Police with the authority of the British crown. His family was dirt poor, always lived on the fringes of towns, and moved continually as his father sought itinerant work. He never stayed in one school for more than a year. No one in his family finished high school, let alone attended university. He says his family was characterised by love. His grandfather fought for Australia in World War II, but when he returned, he was not allowed to go to the local pub to share a drink with his mates. Other returned soldiers were entitled to housing. His grandfather was not. Family members were often harassed by the police. One was put in prison for speaking his native language. Until his family moved to Canberra when he was a teenager, most of his peers were indigenous.

In contrast, I spent the first 22 years of my middle-class life in the same house, my father had the same job that whole time,  both my parents had a Ph.D., and the schools I attended were "lily white".

Literature can be powerful because it can create empathy. It can help us see and feel the world through the eyes and experiences of another person. Incidentally, this is one argument for the importance of the humanities and a liberal arts education. 

Grant is a gifted writer, and his book, The Queen is Dead gave me a glimpse into a world so different to my own, even though it is spatially close and overlapping. The emotions I experienced included sadness, confusion, shock, anger, embarrassment, powerlessness, despair, frustration, and guilt. I guess that my emotional responses are tame and transient compared to the raw emotions that Grant lives with, day in and day out.

Most chapters begin with the refrain. "The White Queen is dead."  The book is prompted by the death of the British monarch in 2023. It is not about her as a person. "The White Queen is a metaphor". (page 9). The book is a personal reckoning with the legacy of colonialism and racism in Australia.

"How do we live with the weight of history? How do we not fall prey to soul-destroying vengeance and resentment, yet never relent in our righteous demand for justice?" (page 5).

Reflecting on his and others' response to the death of the White Queen, he states:

"And in my anger I am confronted again by the two consuming questions of my life: what is Whiteness? And what is it to live with catastrophe?" (page 54)

While in primary school, a white student asked Stan, "Why are you so Black?" (page 84). This incident has tormented him his whole life, and he keeps coming back to it in the book.

Grant reflects painfully on public events over the past quarter of a century that have attracted media attention and have a racist dimension. This includes the significance of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for Australian identity, Cathy Freeman's gold medal in the 400 metres at that Olympics, the abuse of footballer Adam Goodes, the sponsorship of the Australian women's netball team by Hancock Prospecting, Hawthorn Football Club's treatment of indigenous players, and  Grant's experience working for and eventual departure from the public broadcaster ABC News. He helped me see these events in a raw and painful way.

Grant provides a helpful critique of modernity and the Enlightenment. White men "invented modernity as a place of endless possibility." (page 19). The freedom promised often degenerated into tyranny. Modernity provided an intellectual framework and justification for racism and colonialism. 

"Identities can nourish us. They can give us community. Identities can give us voice. That notion of identity is a conceit of the West - identity as freedom. But identity can also - and far more often than not, in fact - be a pathway to tyranny." (page 23).

"Modernity has supplanted god with its own faith in progress and reason. The liberalism that emerged out of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment imagines that we can wash ourselves clean of the past. But there can be no redemption without atonement." (page 214)

We discussed the book this month in the theology reading group. At first glance, the book might not appear to have much theology, particularly if you read the publisher's blurb

Grant dedicates the book :

To Baiame, my creator

To Jesus Christ, my saviour

To Yindyamarra, the Spirit

"Vindicate me, O God. And plead my cause against an ungodly nation" (Psalm 43:1)"

Theological allusions are scattered through the book. Two short sections (pages 207-211 and 272-278) focus on theology. He engages with Simone Weil, the mystic who had a strong solidarity with the oppressed, and Miroslav Volf.

The first section reflects on his experience of church while growing up. A similar reflection is in a beautiful and powerful article, “This is the way healing begins”: Recovering the language of lament in a disenchanted age 

"For me, Easter is not a time of resurrection. I don’t rush to Easter Sunday but dwell in the darkness of Holy Saturday — the day after the crucifixion, when those closest to the crucified Christ shivered in fear. On that day there is no promise of tomorrow. There is no hope. It is the day when faith itself feels destitute.

It was the darkness of Holy Saturday that I felt — deep in my bones — when I was a little boy. I felt it in the church on the mission on the outskirts of Griffith in New South Wales that was a home, spiritually and physically, to my family. It could have been any of the missions scattered across our country. The places to which we were banished, and yet managed to find refuge.

There was a tiny wooden church on the mission. I remember cramming into the pews, with my best Sunday clothes on and my hair spit down.

My uncle was the pastor. He was an old-time fire-and-brimstone preacher. Not long into his sermon, his white shirt would be stained with sweat. He would constantly mop his brow with a handkerchief. He clutched a tattered black leather-bound copy of the King James Bible under one arm, yet never needed to read from it. He could recite the scripture from memory. With his other arm he would point. Each word landing — and I felt always landing on me.

My head would ache in that church. I would twitch and look out the window. I felt a heavy weight in that church. I have felt it in other black churches, places where our people come to worship. We pray differently. We sing differently. Our hymns are songs of sorrow...

Ours, you see, was the church of the forsaken.

Why, you may be wondering, am I talking about God, about the church, about Christianity? Is that not the religion of empire? Isn’t Christianity the legacy of colonisation? Certainly since the time of the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine, Christianity has been wielded as the divine right of kings. It has interwoven itself with power and tyranny.

Yes, those proclaiming the word of God came to this land with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. The doctrine of discovery, of terra nullius, was itself a sort of decree — that any land not belonging to a Christian monarch was free for the taking.

Yes, God sat astride empire. But that was not our God. That is Christendom, not Christianity. God did not arrive here with the first fleet. We knew God. We walked in God’s creation, in the land that God had given us. We told stories to God. We painted God on our rocks and on our bodies. We had our word for God: Baiame.

When we heard the stories of Jesus, we heard the story of a dark-skinned man in a land of empire. Oppressed and colonised. A tribal man. We heard the story of someone speaking back to power. We heard the words of an ancestor. And in the crucifixion. We felt the wounds. We felt the shame. We felt the abandonment."

This is how theology should be done: personal and contextual, rather than impersonal and abstract. 

Stan Grant writes some wonderful columns every fortnight for The Saturday Paper. There is also a beautiful episode, "Disenchanted Age" of the Undeceptions podcast, where he is interviewed by John Dickson.

Did Jesus believe in miracles?

A legacy of the Enlightenment was the notion of a divide between the natural and supernatural. Miracles can only happen if God intervenes in the natural world.

There was a nice discussion of these issues in a podcast episode, The Intelligible Universe, where John Dickson has a discussion with Peter Harrison and two astrophysicists, Sarah Sweet and Luke Barnes. 

[Aside: It was a treat for my wife and I to be in the audience where this episode was recorded live in Brisbane earlier this year.]

Peter Harrison recently published Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age

Here is a summary of one of the relevant chapters

This chapter gives an account of the origins of our present understanding of the natural/supernatural divide, showing how the terminology of the ‘supernatural’ first emerged in the Middle Ages and gradually assumed its modern form between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The attendant ‘isms’—naturalism and supernaturalism—arrive at the end of this period, during the 1800s. The original context for the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction was neither science nor philosophy, but the sphere of biblical criticism. From there it was imported into a scientific context. The nineteenth century also witnessed attempts to reconstruct the history of science with a view to arguing for a long-standing alliance between naturalism and science. A more accurate portrayal of the relevant history shows, to the contrary, that ‘science’ had been consistently aligned with theistic assumptions about the regularities of nature. These regularities were formalised as laws of nature in the seventeenth century, at which time they were understood as divinely authored imperatives to which nature necessarily conformed. In the nineteenth century, what had originally been understood as expressions of the divine will were simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms by advocates of naturalism. Ironically, they were now claimed to represent evidence against theistic readings of nature.

In the episode, John Dickson makes the following provocative argument.

Jesus probably didn't believe in miracles. Jesus probably didn't believe in the supernatural. If what we mean by supernatural and miracle is the invasion of an outside alien force into nature, that definition of course comes from the enlightenment.

It assumes a dualism, a spiritual ethereal world and the physical one. And every now and then the spiritual injects itself into the material. The gospel writers didn't share this outlook from their viewpoint, which was really the Jewish viewpoint. There aren't two worlds. There's just one world. There is just the creation that comes from the creator.

Everything that happens in the universe from the regular rising of the sun to the very surprising sight given to the blind person. It's all the powerful Work of the one creator working in and through nature. What we call miracles are not invasions from a parallel world. They are just powers, God's powers in and through creation.

And this is why the gospels describe Jesus baffling deeds, not as supernatural events, not even as miracles. They see them as special examples of power. And as signs of the future. The Greek terms in the Gospels are Dunamis, which means strength or power, and Semea, which means sign. Powers, that's easy enough to comprehend.

But what about signs? What are they signs of? It'd be tempting to think that what Jesus means when he describes his powers, his healings, his signs, that what he means is these are signs of the spiritual world. If only you could pull the veil, you would see a spiritual world invading the natural. But actually that's not what Jesus says. 

He says they are signs from the future. They are little displays in the present of God's intentions with all of creation...

Don't portray a supernatural world as distinct from a natural one. There is just one world, God's world, where the creator acts powerfully in every moment, and wherein the moments of Jesus healings, the creator gave a preview that one day he will mend all things. 

Beyond dualistic theology in Asian contexts

 For the global church, three questions that have attracted significant debate and division are the following.

1. What is the relative priority and relationship between evangelism, social action, and political involvement?

2. Do miracles of physical healing and exorcism of evil spirits happen today?

3. How unique is the Christian message and the salvation that Jesus offers in light of a pluralism of religions?

Over the past century, the global church has become divided over these issues. These fractures are not always just along liberal and conservative lines but between Pentecostals and others, and the Western and the Majority World.

These issues are explored in depth in Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology, by Hwa Yung. This is the book for this month's theology reading group.

Most advocates of a particular answer to these questions may claim that their position is supported by the Bible or at least by their theological tradition. Hwa's important contribution is to argue that there is more to the story. Two influences drive different answers, and these are interrelated and in tension. The first influence is the culture and context of the theologian. Culture affects the way people think and reason; it gives them a worldview, a set of presuppositions that are usually implicit and rarely questioned. The second influence is related to the first, but more specifically, the overpowering intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. 

Although Hwa focuses on his own Asian context, the book is relevant to a broader audience, including Westerners, such as myself, as it may stimulate a greater self-awareness of the influences shaping one's own theology.

Hwa follows David Bosch to identify seven contours of the Enlightenment worldview. In his classic book, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Bosch has a chapter that is 90 pages long, Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment. The seven contours are the following.

1. The supremacy of reason

2. Subject-object dichotomy

3. Elimination of the idea of purpose

4. Optimism in Progress.

5. Distinction between facts and values

6. All problems are solvable in principle

7. Humans are emancipated and autonomous individuals

Hwa explains how much of this is alien, both intellectually and emotionally, to Asian thought and culture. In a moving and personal chapter (added to the second edition) he says (p. 199-200).

"With these three issues troubling me (their resolution came only later) I almost lost confidence in my theological pilgrimage. Some of my good western friends urged me to go back to work on a PhD in the west. But I told them that I could not bring myself to go back to do a doctorate in systematics, even to the most illustrious of institutions, because I would die emotionally. For then I would have to spend the bulk of my energy and time justifying my presuppositions to Western teachers and examiners, whose Enlightenment mind-set would probably mean that they and I live in different thought-worlds."

The key issue for Hwa is the dualism of Western thought, in contrast to the holism of Eastern thought. He argues that this dualism underlies Western answers to the three questions, and even how the questions are framed or the importance that is placed on them. This dualism is nicely summarised by a footnote on page 53.

 "In commenting on the differences between the positions of Melbourne 1980 and Pattaya 1980 [a meeting of the World Council of Churches and Lausanne, respectively], David Bosch (1985:85) writes: ‘My contention has been, and still is, that both positions are indefensible, as both have succumbed to a perhaps, not easily detectable but nevertheless insidious dualism in which, ultimately, grace remains opposed to nature, justification to justice, the soul to the body, the individual to society, redemption to creation, heaven to earth, the word to the deed, and evangelism to social responsibility.’"

Balance is the necessary but impossible task of theology.  We need to be aware of and avoid false dichotomies and be open to dialectic and integrative thinking.

Integrated mission for global historic Christianity

This month at the theology reading group we discussed Integrated Mission: Recovering a Christian Spirituality for Evangelical Integral Transformation by Sarah Nicholl and published by Langham.

Sarah is a member of the reading group. The book is based on her recent Ph.D. thesis. She recently gave a talk on the book at Theology on Tap Brisbane.

Sarah considers the Lausanne Movement through the statements issued at their three global congresses: Lausanne (1974), Manilla (1989), and Cape Town (2011). [The book was completed because the most recent congress, held in Seoul last month]. 

Her focus is on the lack of discussion of the role of Christian spirituality in mission. She creatively addresses this by listening to four voices: John Wesley, Ignatius of Loyola, Orlando Costas, and Segundo Galilea. 

Major themes in the book. These themes are to varying degrees explicit and implicit. 

Integration. Since its origin, Lausanne has stimulated debates about the relationship and relative priority for Christians of evangelism (defined as the verbal proclamation of the Gospel to those who do not identify as followers of Jesus) and social action, such as serving the poor and addressing unjust social structures. These debates led to the concept of integral mission, which does not prioritise one but integrates them. This perspective was pioneered by some attendees, including Costas, who are sometimes identified as "radicals".

The book explicitly focuses on the integration of spirituality and mission (being and doing, acts of piety and of mercy, heart and hands,...). Implicit is a broader perspective on the need for integrative thinking and action in other areas. Dualities such as public/private and secular/sacred are briefly mentioned.

Ecumenical. Both Lausanne and Sarah identify as evangelical and Protestant. Nevertheless, unlike some, Sarah considers there is much to learn about mission, spirituality, and the Christian life from Catholics. Two of her dialogue partners, Ignatius and Galilea are Catholic. Ignatius pioneered The Spiritual Exercises, including the Examen, that are increasingly used by Protestants. Sarah is also sympathetic to a form of sacramentalism.

Sacramentalism. This sees all of life as sacred and considers that engagement with even mundane aspects of life can lead to a rich experience of God, just as for acts that are explicitly identified as sacraments, such as baptism, the Eucharist (holy communion), or marriage. Sarah explicitly discusses a sacramental view of mission in terms of Matthew 25. In that passage, Jesus says that those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and provide shelter, are actually doing it to him. Hence, such acts of mercy are encounters with Jesus.

Ministry at the margins should be central. Jesus was a friend of sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes. He embraced lepers, cripples, the demon-possessed, Samaritans, and Gentiles. He came from Galilee and commenced his ministry there. Jesus was scorned by the religious establishment and warned of the dangers of wealth, social status, and worldly power. In summary, Jesus operated on the margins and embraced those on the margins. 

Yet, the history of Christianity has been characterised by an unrelenting desire and embrace of power, wealth, social status, and formal institutionalisation. People on the margins (social, economic, health, political, ethnic, geographical, educational, theological, gender,...) have been and are marginalised. Nevertheless, again and again, in the long term, at the centre the church dwindles, loses vitality, and diminishes in influence. In contrast, on the margins, the church grows in numbers, dynamism, and influence. Shifts and struggles in Lausanne are a reflection of the Majority World involvement.

All four voices engaged by Sarah testify to the importance of ministry from and to the margins. This was most clearly articulated by Orlando Costas, who emphasised the Galilee roots of Jesus' ministry.

Similarity in difference. The four voices came from vastly different contexts, spanning 400 hundred years, from Europe to Latin America, and from Catholic to Protestant. Yet they were all involved with mission, albeit in different ways. Furthermore, they all believed in and practised integrated mission. Their outreach was sustained and influenced by a personal spirituality and visa verse. Sarah follows David Tracy who considered that such "similarity in difference" can be a pointer to truth. 

A person or community's perspective on any matter is influenced by their own context and life experience. Assessing the level of influence is difficult, especially whether the context is determinative of the perspective. This is important because if context is determinative it means the perspective may not be valid or helpful for other contexts. On the other hand, different contexts producing similar perspectives may be suggestive of truth.  

A major theme in the background

The fraught legacy of modernism for mission. Sarah briefly mentions the views of David Bosch. His classic book, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission,  has a chapter that is 90 pages long, Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment. Bosch identifies seven contours of the Enlightenment worldview:

1. The supremacy of reason

2. Subject-object dichotomy

3. Elimination of the idea of purpose

4. Optimism in Progress.

5. Distinction between facts and values

6. All problems are solvable in principle

7. Humans are emancipated and autonomous individuals

These issues are also explored in depth in next month's book, Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology, by Hwa Yung

Implications for me

There were several things that the book challenged me on personally. These were not necessarily new ideas, but rather the struggles of practical and regular implementation. Hearing from the four voices was helpful and challenging.

Be engaged personally, especially with the poor. Just giving money is not adequate.

Spiritual practices and mission are communal and not just individual.

Contemplative reading and prayer. 

Minister on the margins. Listen to marginal voices. Engage with the suffering of those on the margins. Empower those on the margins. 

Fact Collecting by Robin McKenzie

Fact Collecting

Child of the enlightenment 

Going from one extreme to the next 

Throw the baby out with the bathwater 

Purging that which can’t be replicated in the lab

Makes no sense of love or intuition 

One must know, only the facts

Overthink, analyse, scrutinise 

Analysis paralysis 

But true wisdom is knowing what can’t be known 

Embrace the mystery 

Accept the contradictions, shades of grey

It doesn’t have to make logical sense.

You don’t have to be able to understand 

Forget fighting the slippery thin edge of the wedge

What are we so afraid of?

The prompting of the spirit?

Feelings that can’t be calibrated? 

Our forefathers rejoiced in their new understanding 

Why the sun sat

Where lightning came from 

How to kill a germ

Would they be aghast to see the baby disappear with the water?

Our denial of things immaterial?

Is fact collecting always preeminent?

Surpassing the value of spiritual engagement?

Do facts alone lead to sanctification? 

Ah, The fear of the thin edge of the wedge

      

Engineering principles undergird  bridges

But just as important is the soul 

A corrupt heart leads to use of shoddy material

And bridges falling down.

Who is man that he assumes he is capable of knowing everything?

That knowledge is the answer to all predicaments?

As God said to Job “ Why do you confuse the issue?

Why do you talk without knowing what you’re talking about? 

Pull yourself together.  Up on your feet!  Stand tall. 

I have some questions for you and I want some straight answers… 

Tell me since you know so much!” 

The intellectually illegitimate children of Isaac Newton

The incredible scientific success of Isaac Newton led to intellectual revolutions in science, philosophy, economics, and theology. But many of the ideas developed and promoted have a dubious intellectual parentage. 

The key issues to consider centre around whether Newton's approach, success and interpretations in physics translate to other topics of interest.

Newton studied a specific topic: the mechanical motion of bodies, including cannonballs and planets. He used a method appropriate to that topic. High levels of precision, both in measurement and in making theoretical predictions were possible. This led to high levels of certainty about what was true and what was not.

A few intellectual bastards fertilised, fed, and sustained by the success of Newtonian mechanics include the following.

 The mechanical philosophy

The clockwork universe. 

People are machines.

 Strasbourg Astronomical Clock

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was the first philosopher of modern science and a founder of sociology (social physics). He was the founder of positivism, claiming that societies progress through three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. These correspond to eras of primitive (Christendom), Enlightenment, and modern science. Comte promoted a hierarchy of sciences with physics as the most fundamental. Comte's legacy has been roundly criticised by Pierre de Gennes, a Nobel Laureate in Physics.

Foundationalism seeks to establish truth logically by starting from a few axioms that can be taken as self-evident or "justified". There are parallels to Newtonian physics in that it starts with just Newton's laws and can deduce all the details of mechanical motion from these laws.

Theology was diverted in unfruitful directions and impoverished by these intellectual movements that claimed credence because of the success of Newton. There was a desire to mimic methods and levels of certainty of Newtonian physics. Here I identify several problematic movements in theology.

Deism. This was a natural outgrowth of the clockwork universe.

Foundationalism. Theology is largely concerned with propositional truth rather than with godly living. The object-subject distinction was considered possible and desirable.

Liberal theology. Since one could not match the confident certainty of Newtonian science one was left with doubt about everything: the reliability of the Bible, miracles, the existence of a heavenly realm, and the divinity of Jesus. The solution was the methods of historical-biblical criticism (form, source, redaction, literary, .. criticism), demythologisation, ...

Fundamentalism.  This reaction to liberal theology led in the opposite direction. A desire for certainty produced notions such as the infallibility of scripture, the inerrancy of scripture, and strict true-false dichotomies with little room for paradox, dialectic, imagination, or polyphonic readings of texts.

Modernist forms of apologetics.  In the second half of the twentieth century in the U.S.A. , there was the development and promotion of evidential apologetics and presuppositional apologetics. They attempted to show the intellectual validity of orthodox faith to the point that anyone who did not believe or accept the arguments presented was portrayed as irrational. Presuppositional apologetics aims to show a non-Christian that their worldview is intellectually incoherent and then in their despair preach the gospel to them.

In conclusion, I do not think any of these movements was particularly helpful. They impoverished theology rather than enriching it. Their intellectual foundations were shaky. They created as many problems as solutions. They lacked nuance and in hindsight are now seen by many as problematic. Humans and the Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are not cannonballs or planets orbiting the sun like clockwork. The methods and certainty of Newton cannot be uncritically transposed onto other areas of knowledge.

Why did the success of Newton lead to an intellectual revolution?

A common view today is that science provides the best, or even the only, means to discover the truth about anything, whether in physics, politics, or theology. Furthermore, science supersedes "faith" and provides a basis for certainty. What are the historical origins of such views.

A pivotal time in the intellectual history of the Western world was the 17th and 18th centuries when stunning advances were made in understanding the physics underlying the motion of bodies, from cannonballs to planets. This success was encapsulated in Isaac Newton (1643-1727) formulating calculus, his three Laws of Motion, and his theory of gravity. This made it possible to understand and quantitatively describe the motion of bodies, whether on earth or in the heavens.

These stunning successes led to significant new developments in science, philosophy, economics, and theology. They drove and provided legitimacy to the thinking and claims often associated with the era identified as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.

My main purpose here is to highlight how several intellectual moves (claims and arguments) were made that were debatable, including by theologians. These moves impoverished theology and science, both then and now, particularly in relation to the nature of certainty and choices of methodology.

To understand why these scientific advances were so disruptive it is helpful to review what the stunning achievements of Newton and his scientific children were. Until Galileo stirred the pot, the views of Aristotle dominated science, philosophy, and theology, especially in the Roman Catholic Church. Key elements of Aristotelianism that were demolished include the following.

• Reason not experiment takes priority.
• To understand the natural world, one makes common sense observations, not precise measurements.
• A ball falls faster than a feather.
• The earth is not in motion.
• On earth moving bodies slow down and stop if left to themselves.
• Motion on earth and in the heavens are different.

(Aside: My appreciation of these points is due to Peter Harrison.)

This distinction between heaven and earth may have fuelled some readings of scripture that emphasised sharp distinctions between heaven and the earth, the spiritual and the material.

Elements of Newton's mechanics that had a significant intellectual impact, included the following.

a. Just two mathematical equations can describe a diverse range of mechanical phenomena.

b. Solving these equations produced results that could be compared to detailed and precise observations (experimental data) of the motion of planets and cannonballs. Furthermore, the equations could be used to make predictions, such as the existence of new planets. This is how Neptune was discovered.

c. The same laws described the motion of bodies in the heavens and on earth.

d. The motion of bodies could be understood simply in terms of cause and effect. 

e. An axiomatic approach was possible where mechanics can be understood as following from a few simple assumptions, such as the stationary action principle.

For the purposes of this discussion, the most important implication of all this was that certainty was possible. Theories were testable and we could clearly know what was true. Ptolemy's model of the solar system was wrong. Copernicus and Newton were correct. There was no need to invoke deities to understand the motion of heavenly bodies. The latter was embodied in a famous, albeit apocryphal, dialogue between Napoleon and Laplace.

Aside: An example of the level of precision possible is the precession of the orbit of the planet Mercury. The observed magnitude of this effect disagrees with Newton's predictions by an angle of less than one ten-thousandth of a degree per orbit. This discrepancy was later solved by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity

In life success often leads to hubris, whether in business, politics, science, or Christian ministry. For example, today there is a mythology that athletic success can translate into success in business and politics. The success of Newton's mechanics led to a hubris that became embodied in the Enlightenment. In particular, several intellectual moves were made that are contestable. The most important move was a confidence that similar approaches to that used for mechanical motion were appropriate to obtain knowledge about other objects of study. Furthermore, it was assumed that similar levels of success and certainty were possible and would occur in due time.

A different perspective begins with the observation that each field of science, from physics to biology to sociology, is concerned with a distinct object. The nature of this object then determines the methods to use, what it is possible to know, and what levels of certainty were possible concerning any knowledge gained.

In the next post, I will introduce some of Newton's intellectual bastards, influential ideas and methods that are claimed to be scientific, but are actually debatable. Some marginalise Christian faith, which is considered old-fashioned, unscientific, or intellectually inferior. Some of these ideas impoverish theology. 

Can we be certain about the truth?

We yearn to know the truth, whether about astronomy, God, family history, or politics. But what is the best method to find the truth about a specific subject? How certain can we be about whether what we discover is actually true?

A modern view is that science provides the best method to discover the truth and that it can provide certainty. This view was developed and advocated in 18th century Europe following the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. This perspective obtained significant intellectual credibility due to the success of Newton's theories of gravity and mechanical motion. These theories provided highly accurate descriptions of the motion of bodies, whether that of planets or cannonballs. Science was certain, in contrast to "faith". Science provided a method to discover the truth about everything.

But, people are not planets or cannonballs. Biological cells are not cannonballs or planets. To study people, literature, biological cells, or the Triune God an approach that is appropriate to the object under study is necessary. Chemistry, condensed matter physics, psychology, sociology, and theology all involve different methods, assumptions, and concepts. This also leads to different criteria for deciding what is true, and the levels of certainty that are possible. This is now generally accepted by academics who study the history and philosophy of science. However, this view has not spread to most scientists, particularly those who are perceived as "public intellectuals." 

Newton's success is to be admired and celebrated. But it does not follow that a similar approach is appropriate for other fields of study. Neither should we necessarily expect similar levels of certainty.

In the first few pages of Karl Barth's Evangelical Theology: An Introduction  he states that theology is a "science" [wissenschaft = a discipline of study] because it seeks

"to apprehend a specific object and its environment in the manner directed by the phenomonen itself...to understand it on its own terms and to speak of it along with all the implications of its existence." 

In the next post, I will discuss in more detail why the success of Newton led to such seismic intellectual shifts.