Consilience The Unity of Knowledge

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ConsilienceThe Unity of Knowledge

• Edward O. Wilson
• Knopf, 1998

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Consilience

• argues for the fundamental unity of all
  knowledge and the need to search for consilience
  - the proof that everything in our world is
  organized in terms of a small number of
  fundamental natural laws that comprise the
  principles underlying every branch of learning.
• Trust in consilience is the foundation of the
  natural sciences.

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What does the Bible say?

• What happened was this People knew God
  perfectly well, but when they did not treat him
  like God, refusing to worship him they
  trivialized themselves into silliness and
  confusion so that there was neither sense nor
  direction to their lives. They pretended to know
  it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They
  traded the glory of God who holds the whole world
  in his hands for the cheap figurines you can buy
  at any roadside stand. Romans 121-23 The
  Message
• He is before all things and in him all things
  hold together. Colossians 118

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Enlightenment Assumptions?

• Lawful material world.
• Intrinsic unity of knowledge
• Potential for indefinite human progress
• The greatest enterprise of the mind always has
  been and always will be to attempt to link the
  sciences and the humanities.

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Fragmentation of knowledge

• Not reflections of the real world but
• Artifacts of scholarship.
• What about human nature has caused this?

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Four domains of inquiry
O
O
O
Each has its own practitioners, language, modes
of analysis, and standards of validation. The
result is confusion
The ring closest to the intersection, where most
real-world problems exist, is the one in which
fundamental analysis is most needed.
the psychological benefits of natural
ecosystems are almost wholly unexplored.
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What went wrong with the enlightenment?

• Rousseau
• the general will.
• Robespierre and the Jacobins
• the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality,
  the rule of the eternal justice whose laws have
  been engraved upon the hearts of men.

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This winter of our discontent

• Worth asking whether the original spirit of
  the Enlightenment - confidence, optimism, eyes to
  the horizon, can be regained.?
• Should it be regained?
• They shared a passion to demystify the world and
  free the mind from the impersonal forces that
  imprison it.

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Avoiding metaphysics

• They tried to avoid metaphysics even as the
  flaws and incompleteness of their explanations
  forced them to practice it.
• A few, like Condorcet, thought that human beings
  were perfectible and capable of shaping and
  administering a political utopia.

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Francis Bacon

• The best method for accurate thought is
  induction. Father of induction.
• In order to obtain maximum objectivity, we must
  entertain a minimum of preconceptions.
• Science, as he broadly defined it, should be
  poetry, and poetry science.

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Descartes

• How to do science with the aid of precise
  deduction, cutting to the quick of each
  phenomenon and skeletonizing it.
• insisted that systematic doubt was the first
  principle of learning.
• Cogito ergo sum
• Separation of mind and matter.
• Reductionism
• 1642 Meditationes de Prima Philosophia

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Scientific Theology?

• The cost of scientific advance is the humbling
  recognition that reality was not constructed to
  be easily grasped by the human mind.
• The reassessment of God himself.
• The anthropic principle
• In order for us to ask how things work they had
  to work this way.
• Does revelation have to be reconciled with
  reason?
• Is faith unreasonable?

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Deism to Totalitarianism

• Deism and science failed to systematize ethics.
• The godless creations of science and technology
  are in fact powerful and arresting images of
  modern culture.

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Romanticism to the Unreal

• Turn from science to the natural order
• Scientists moved away from metaphysics.
• Knowledge in the physical and biological sciences
  grew rapidly in the 19th century.
• Science moved away from the humanities.
• The vast majority of scientists have never been
  more than journeyman prospectors.

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Postmodernism

• Enlightenment believed we can know everything,
  and radical postmodernists believe we can know
  nothing.
• Scientists, held responsible for what they say,
  have not found postmodernism useful.
• What is the value of postmodernism?
• What is the relation between science and the
  humanities and how is it important for human
  welfare?

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Christ-Centered Approaches?

• Are there currently Christ-centered approaches to
  understanding the relationships between science,
  humanities and faith that are not essentially
  negative in nature but positive in their
  approach?
• Are there approaches that humbly consider the
  role Christ plays in creating and holding things
  together and that encourage appreciation of the
  wonders of a creation that cannot be fully
  understood by the processes of science?

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Complexity / Emergence

• Kauffman, S., At Home in the Universe The Search
  for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity,
  1995
• Johnson, S. Emergence The Connected Lives of
  Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, 2001.
• Morowitz, H., The Emergence of Everything How
  the World Became Complex, 2002.

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Biological Emergence

• Throughout the twentieth century there was an
  increasing awareness that biology dealt not only
  with matter and energy, but also with
  information. When information became formalized
  in the work of Claude Shannon, biologists
  immediately responded, and in 1953 Henry Questler
  edited Essays in the Use of Information Theory in
  Biology. Genetics and evolution have adapted the
  language of information theory, which also finds
  expression in linguistics. Biology at the
  molecular or global ecological level is
  information-dense, and this had provided a
  background of a branch of mathematical biology.
  The biological emergences that will be discussed
  have a component of information emergences.
  Morowitz, H., The Emergence of Everything How
  the World Became Complex, 2002.

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

• When we consider the development of the Body of
  Christ through time, we have something stronger
  than analogy between creation and new creation.
  To speak of thoroughly mediated creation of life
  is to speak of divine activity by means of
  evolution, Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the
  Body of Christ is the next stage of evolution.
• Just as multicellular organisms developed from
  single cells, Teilhard argued that the Body of
  Christ is a hyper-personal organism. People
  become most fully themselves as members of this
  body, without any crushing out of individual
  personalities Union differentiates and
  personalizes.
• George Murphy, Christology, Evolution and the
  Cross in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation,
  Keith Miller, ed.

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Nancy MurphyTheology in the Age of Scientific
Reasoning

• Presently three dominant schools of thought on
  the relations between theology and science.
• Liberal protestant view - entirely different in
  nature thus no interaction or conflict between
  theology and science is possible.
• Conflict model - still alive in the
  creationist-evolutionist controversy.
• More recent attempt to show, contra the
  two-worlds theorists, that theology and science
  are similar enterprises and capable of
  interaction and that, contra the creationists,
  the interaction is positive rather than
  negative.
• 1. Critical realist - both science and
  theology are said to give us tentative,
  approximate pictures of reality.
• 2. Proposed - theology is methodologically
  indistinguishable from from the sciences.
  Furthermore it opens the door to a very
  straightforward account of interaction.
• Theology and science hybrids
• Competition between theological and scientific
  research programs as in area of the differences
  between theological accounts of religious
  experiences and those of secular sociologists and
  anthropologists.

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1. Biblical Basis of Integration

• (1) Stewardship of Creation
• (2) Incarnation in the world but not of the
  world
• (3) Live a Life Worthy of Our Calling as a
  Christian
• (4) All Truth is Gods Truth

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• Science historian, Thomas Kuhn, argued that
  science moved in leaps. That paradigm's form, led
  to many new discoveries, then become the standard
  in which new ideas are tested. Eventually, some
  new experiment or observation will not fit into
  the current paradigm and will led to a new
  theory, usually by some brilliant, young
  scientist. This new theory undergoes a series of
  phases from disbelief to grudging acceptance
  until it forms the next paradigm. Each paradigm
  shift, or science revolution, leads to a major
  step forward in our understanding of the
  underlying reality.

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• Analogy in Biology
• Evolution vs Intelligent Design?