[Updated on July 16, 2010]
What are the rules by which specialists in natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology properly distinguish truth from error? What procedural guidelines appropriately govern the work of specialists in social sciences such as psychology, sociology and anthropology? Do specialists in philosophy and theology have trustworthy rules for their work too? If not, why not? If so, in what ways are these norms similar to, and in what ways are they different from, the canons that we rightly expect natural and social scientists to follow?
Because it responds to these questions with comprehensiveness, precision and clarity, and because it is one of the first publications by a younger theologian whose influence is growing, this book is worth studying today even though it was first published more than a dozen years ago.
Philip Clayton, who was born in 1956, earned degrees from Westmont College and Fuller Theological Seminary before studying the history of philosophy and theology for two years with Wolfhart Pannenberg and Lorenz B. Puntel in Germany. After returning to the United States, he completed the requirements for doctorates in both philosophy of science and theology at Yale University, graduating in 1986. He then spent an additional two years studying in Germany and taught at Haverford College, Williams College and California State University at Sonoma, where he chaired the philosophy department.
Clayton became a professor at Claremont School of Theology in 2003 following a year as a guest professor at Harvard Divinity School and a second year doing research at Stanford University on a Templeton Grant. So far he has authored or edited eighteen scholarly books in German and English, translated one book written by Wolfhart Pannenberg from German to English, and published many articles in peer reviewed journals in both languages. A leading Christian panentheist who draws on writings in addition to those of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, three more of his books are now being prepared for publication. Additional information about Clayton’s life and work is available on the Internet at the Web sites for the Claremont School of Theology (www.cst.edu/acad/clayton) and its Center for Process Studies (www.ctr4process.org).
"For believers, religious beliefs help to explain the world and their place within it," declares Clayton in the first sentence of this book’s first chapter. With this opening salvo, he distances himself at the outset from the claims of the late, great Stephen Jay Gould and others that the methods and conclusions of religion and science cannot contradict each other because these disciplines operate in totally separate realms of inquiry.
Clayton is aware that religious beliefs are not merely explanatory. He recognizes that facts and interpretations differ logically from values and the larger meanings in which they are nested. He also knows that it is logically impossible to deduce either facts or values exclusively from the other and that science specializes in facts and interpretations whereas religion focuses upon values and meanings. So far so good, for Gould!
Nevertheless, Clayton also realizes that science proceeds on the basis of certain moral values and meanings, such as the ethical obligation to seek the truth without fear or favor, which it does not and can not generate exclusively from its own conceptual resources. Meanwhile, religion often makes factual claims, such as the assertion that human beings either are or are not physically similar to other forms of life, that science can confirm or disconfirm. Contrary to the well-intentioned but overly simplified attempts by Gould and others to achieve peace by separating these quarreling disciplines, the realms of science and religion do overlap, not wholly but partially, he believes.
Clayton prefers to speak of "explanation" instead of "explanations" in science and religion and other academic disciplines in order to highlight the continuities as well as the discontinuities in their various procedural norms. An explanation is an answer to questions about why things are they way they are, or why they happen the way they do. In harmony with standard terminology, he uses the term explanans for the answers and explanandum for the thing or event about which the answers are given. He describes that which is procedurally common to all academic disciplines from physics to theology as "intersubjective criticizability."
As though it is operative in three concentric circles, Clayton holds that religious explanation can be private, communal and intersubjective or public. In the innermost circle, although it can be about anything at all, it appeals only to the individual believer. Communal explanation in the middle circle is directed only to the individual and to other members of his or her community of faith. Intersubjective or public explanation is aimed at the individual, other members of his or her community of faith plus all others who are able and willing to consider the matter.
Explanation varies among these three circles in its type, ranging from accounts that are frankly subjective to those that strive for objectivity, as well as in its scope. It also varies in its persuasive strength. When inductive, explanation can be intelligible, possible, plausible and probable. When deductive, it can be provable. Clayton claims that "the deductivist model as a standard for religious explanation rightly finds few advocates in contemporary philosophy of religion," however. He elsewhere describes his own philosophical and theological proposals as hypothetical, dialogical and pluralistic.
Unlike some other members of the "Yale-Duke School," who sometimes leave the impression that Christian theology should be judged only by criteria generated by life within the Christian community, Clayton holds that it should be intersubjective or public as well. He insists that theology should be active in all three concentric circles-- private, communal and intersubjective or public--not just the first one or two.
It is necessary but not sufficient for Christian explanation to be judged by Christian specialists according to Christian norms that apply to Christian experiences and evidences, he holds. "In its strongest form," Clayton writes, "my thesis is that theology cannot avoid an appeal to broader canons of rational argumentation and explanatory adequacy."
In his discussion of explanation in the natural sciences, Clayton analyzes and evaluates two schools of thought and sides with a third that mediates them. Formalism, the first of these, is particularly evident in the work of Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Hans Albert, Richard Braithwaite, Ernest Nagel, Alfred Tarski, Carl G. Hempel, Paul Oppenheim and Wesley Salmon. In various ways, it holds that scientific explanation is deductive and nomological, or law abiding, in that antecedent conditions in the empirical world serve as major premises, universal laws as minor premises and the resulting descriptions of empirical phenomena as logically necessary conclusions. Formalism holds that scientific explanation is largely untouched by the conceptual and cultural setting, or paradigm, in which it occurs.
This is exactly the assumption that a second school of thought about the natural sciences challenges. This alternative, contextualism, was evident in the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in the eighteenth century, Heinrich Hertz in the nineteenth and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stephen Toulmin, John Passmore, Bas C. Van Fraassen and N. R. Hanson, among others, in the twentieth. Thomas Kuhn made it famous in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1970).
Contextualism holds that conceptual and cultural settings matter even in the natural sciences. Everyday scientific work is governed by paradigms, widely shared views and values, that are taken for granted until, because of their increasing difficulties, they are suddenly and comprehensively replaced by new ones that are not necessarily better in every respect, contextualists hold. Because paradigms help determine what counts as data, all data are theory-laden. Theories are neither verified, as the early logical positivists taught, nor falsified, as Karl Popper and his followers held; they are judged instead by how much data they fruitfully explain and, most importantly, by how well they fit together. Pushing this point of view to the limits, Paul Feyerabend heralded an era of "epistemological anarchism" in which scientific standards yield to a conviction that in science now "anything goes."
Such lack of methodological discipline in the natural sciences was too much for Imre Lakatos who proposed an alternative to both formalism and contextualism. According to this mediating position, scientists do not properly begin by observing raw data merely to see what they might happen to see; they rightly start instead by formulating questions to be answered or problems to be solved. They then propose hypothetical answers or solutions to these questions or problems and test them in ongoing research programs that either progress over time or degenerate.
Each research program assumes a negative heuristic, an unquestioned cluster of initial convictions. When the negative heuristic is reasonably sound, the positive heuristic, the research program itself, gradually adds a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that harmoniously integrates more and more data and theories. When the negative heuristic, or cluster of initial beliefs, is not what it should be, the positive heuristic, or research program, slows and then stalls because it finds it more and more difficult to incorporate new data and theories and to meet new challenges. The changes in what the contextualists call "paradigms" are either evolutionary or devolutionary rather than revolutionary, Lakatos held.
Clayton finds in Lakatos’ proposals an alternative to formalism and contextualism that is superior to both. He also holds that this option is more continuous with academic disciplines beyond the natural sciences. Its three steps of formulating questions or identifying problems, proposing hypothetical answers or solutions and publicly testing them in continuing research programs can be followed in other areas of scholarship. In addition, it puts much emphasis upon the norm of coherence, even in the natural sciences.
"If a theory’s correspondence to empirical reality can in fact be determined only in terms of the mutual fit of sets of statements," Clayton writes, "one is no longer justified in positing a fundamental difference in kind between empirical and nonempirical disciplines." Nevertheless, he also stipulates that, because "empirical testability diminishes as one moves through the social sciences toward philosophy and theology, these disciplines are forced to rely ever more heavily on the coherence or incoherence of a program of study."
Clayton observes that the debate between the formalists and contexutalists continues in the social as well as the natural sciences with many of the same persons taking the same positions with the same results. He notices that a different but related debate also pervades the social sciences, however. This is the ongoing exchange between the formalists and the antipositivists.
The formalists hold that the methods of explanation in the natural sciences should be used with little or no modification in the social sciences too. The antipositivists insist that this is exactly the wrong approach. Their view is that the social sciences must employ methods of explanation that vary as much from those of the natural sciences as the human beings and cultures they study differ from the things biologists, chemists and physicists examine.
A number of antipositivists hold that understanding, in the sense of empathetic identification with what the researcher studies, not explanation, in the sense of giving accounts of why things are they way they are, or why things happen the way they do, is the proper goal of the social sciences. Specialists in the social sciences differ in their views about the extent to which either explanation, understanding or some combination of both is the true goal of their disciplines, a debate that does not occur as vividly in the natural sciences. In differing ways and degrees, antipositivists in the social sciences, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Theodor W. Ardono, Jurgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Alfred Schutz, hold that the methods of explanation used by the natural sciences do not and cannot fully capture what is distinctive about human experience.
Although he concedes that social scientists are free to define their discipline in any way they prefer, Clayton holds that their work is not truly scientific, though it may still be rational in other ways, unless it includes explanation as well as understanding. In harmony with his preference for the mediating positions of Imre Lakatos, he holds that in the social sciences understanding is a necessary precondition to explanation. In order to explain it as accurately as possible, for instance, an anthropologist must first empathetically identify with a culture more thoroughly than a physicist must do so with an electron. In the social sciences, "to the extent that understanding is hampered or incomplete in regard to a given range of phenomena," he writes, "the probability of explaining those phenomena adequately is reduced."
Clayton holds that in this respect the natural and social sciences differ in degree, not in kind. Even physicists to some extent must emphatically identify with what they study. We can imagine that physicists who hate electrons with blinding rage are not likely to explain them very well, for example! Clayton’s point is that the debate between the formalists and the contextualists in the natural sciences establishes that the natural sciences are somewhat contextual or dependent upon paradigms. Likewise, the debate between the formalists and the antipositivits in the social sciences establishes that the natural sciences are also somewhat empathetic, subjective or hermeneutical, and rightly so.
Clayton holds that explanation in philosophy rightly follows the same three steps that, according to Lakatos, other fields of study properly follow: (1) identifying questions to be answered or problems to be solved, (2) formulating testable hypotheses and (3) publicly testing them in ongoing research programs. The questions or problems which philosophy addresses differ from those in other specialties because they are so general; that they pertain to all of the academic disciplines, including philosophy itself. "An explanation is philosophical if it is not limited in scope to any particular discipline or aspect of experience," Clayton writes. "What is truth?" is a philosophical question because all fields of study must respond to it even if they refuse to answer it, for instance. Although philosophers do other things as well, philosophy is a distinctive academic discipline when it functions at a third level of reflection. It is "reflection upon other disciplines’ reflection upon experience," Clayton contends.
In what is probably the conceptual keystone in the long methodological arch he constructs between physics and theology, Clayton collapses the distinction between two of the standard philosophical theories of truth. Correspondence theories, which are probably the default positions in everyday life and in the ordinary practice of the natural sciences, hold that assertions are true to the degree that they accurately convey what actually is the case. Coherence theories, which are more common in the social sciences and humanities, hold that assertions are true to the extent that they dovetail harmoniously with other true assertions.
Like most other specialists today, Clayton holds that even in the natural sciences we have no absolutely precise, direct, immediate, clear, distinct and indubitable access to what actually is the case. What is scientifically observed is conditioned in part by the cultural and conceptual context in which scientific observation takes place. Furthermore, to some extent researchers alter what they study by their research methods. That is the bad news. According to Clayton, the good news is that expanded coherence theories can do all that needs to be done.
"What we mean by asserting that a philosophical explanation is true is simply that it is consistent, comprehensive, pragmatically useful, fits with widely (universally?) accepted beliefs, intuitions and practices—in short that it is coherent in the widest sense of the term. To say that we also want it to correspond to the world is not to say anything additional at all," Clayton claims.
Much later in his discussion, Clayton makes this point more precisely by distinguishing between concepts or definitions of truth, on the one hand, and criteria or standards for determining it, on the other. "Assuming the inadequacy of appeals to direct evidence or intuition," he writes, "there is no direct way to verify the word/world relationship in the case of any given claim to knowledge (i.e., to truth). It follows that, even if the correspondence theory remains an indispensable part of any definition of truth, it can no longer be claimed an adequate criterion of truth." This division of labor between correspondence theories, which may help us define truth, and coherence theories, which enable us to determine whether it is present, is superior to Clayton’s first expression because it preserves the indispensable contributions of each.
One of the most important strengths of Clayton’s exposition is that it recognizes the methodological differences between the academic disciplines of religious studies and theology. As evidenced by the plethora of publications and courses on the history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, phenomenology, economics and politics of religion, religious studies properly functions like any other social science. Its goal is to understand and then to explain religious beliefs and practices without initially passing judgment upon their value or validity.
The efforts of religious studies as a social science require attention both to how religious beliefs and practices help those who endorse them to find meaning in their lives and to the researcher’s own attempts to make sense of his or her existence, Clayton holds. To neglect either the religious believer’s or the researcher’s quest for meaning is to run the risk of failing to understand the religious believer’s experience and therefore to fall short when attempting to explain it.
According to Clayton, specialists in religious studies may attempt to evaluate as well as to understand and explain religious experience; however, their academic discipline does not require this of them. If a specialist in religious studies does engage in evaluation as well as understanding and explanation, he or she moves from the realm of social science to that of philosophy, Clayton contends. Religious believers may also take this additional step, he writes. It is not the case that either scholars of religion or practitioners of it are always more successful in understanding, explaining or evaluating religious experience, however.
Some observers of a particular form of religious life can understand and explain it more skillfully than can some of its participants. Likewise, some of its participants can evaluate it more trenchantly than can some of those who assess it from the outside. Clayton calls religious practitioners who evaluate their beliefs and practices by comparing them with things they encounter beyond their own religious communities "skeptical believers." They are numerous in pluralistic and mobile societies, he holds.
Unlike specialists in religious studies, theologians cannot avoid taking the additional step beyond understanding and explanation to evaluation, Clayton holds. An anthropologist of religion may successfully understand and explain a culture’s religious beliefs and practices without passing judgment upon them; however, this is not an option for the theologian because, by definition, he or she is accountable to a religious community as well as to an academic one. Although neither community should dictate the methods the theologian must use or the conclusions he or she must reach, both rightly insist upon being taken seriously, even when their expectations differ.
This dual professional obligation distinguishes the work of a theologian from that of a philosopher even when they both address questions at same level of generality. It is also one of the things that can make the work of a theologian more interesting and challenging! Another complicating factor is that today some in both the religious and the academic communities leave the impression that they are more interested in doing other things than pursing truth, particularly if what actually is the case does not appear to advance the interests of their favored project or cause. Thankfully, Clayton regrets and resists this trend.
In harmony with his methodological observations about the natural sciences, social sciences and philosophy, Clayton holds that expanded coherence theories are appropriate for distinguishing truth from error in theology, also with a constant openness to revising positions in light of better evidence and improved reasoning. He endorses Ian Barbour’s "five requirements for theological reflection: systematic consistency, criticizability, trueness to one’s religious tradition as well as current thought and practice, coherence of paradigm beliefs, and correlation with paradigm-external disciplines."
Although it is impossible to do equal justice to all of these in every instance, none of them should ever be wholly ignored. In addition, the fifth requirement in Barbour’s list, that of correlation with paradigm-external disciplines, is especially important because it reiterates that theology ought to be public or intersubjective as well as private and communal.
Clayton apparently holds that when it uses the methods and conclusions of other disciplines, as it selectively must, theology must either appropriate the best of what these other fields of study have to offer or argue from within them to justify doing otherwise. For example, if he or she disagrees with a widely accepted conclusion within the discipline of psychology, a theologian must justify that disagreement on psychological rather than theological grounds. It is neither effective nor appropriate to provide theological answers or solutions to psychological questions or problems, or vice versa, he contends. This is apparently why, as a Christian theologian, Clayton has equipped himself to address the issues of explanation in the various academic disciplines from within the philosophy of science.
Clayton's point that when a theologian does natural or social science he or she must work from within those disciplines, and that, by implication, when a natural or social scientist does philosophy or theology, he or she must work from within them, may tempt us to think that at long last he has come up with an approach that is similar to Stephen Jay Gould's idea of religion and science as non-overlapping magesteria after all. This is not the case for at least three reasons.
First, unlike Gould, Clayton holds that, among other things, religion, like science, is an explanatory enterprise, not just an ethical or axiological one. Second, unlike Gould, Clayton holds that the three-step method of identifying questions to be answered or problems to be solved, formulating testable hypotheses and publicly testing them in continuing research programs is appropriate in religious studies, philosophy and theology as well as in the natural and social sciences. Third, unlike Gould, Clayton arranges the various explanatory disciplines in a hierarchy that begins with physics at its base and moves through chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology and religious studies to philosophy and theology at the top.
As Clayton sees it, at least three things occur as we move up this hierarchy. First, the questions to be answered, problems to be solved and hypotheses to be tested become increasingly general. Second, issues about the meaning of life become increasingly important, both for the researcher and for that which or those whom he or she studies. Third, although both are present and important to some degree at every level of the hierarchy, the appropriate criteria for distinguishing truth from error gradually shift from correspondence to coherence theories.
Although Clayton does not make this point, it is safe to assume that his hierarchy includes neither the humanities nor the various mathematical disciplines because, strictly speaking, they are not explanatory enterprises. For example, the history of art can be studied and taught as a social science as can the history of anything else; however, a course in art appreciation that is taught in one of the humanities has aesthetic rather than explanatory purposes. Likewise, the various mathematical specialties have more to do with what David Hume called "the relationship of ideas" than with what he called "matters of fact."
We can hope that in future publications Clayton will provide a more detailed theological discussion that will supplement his philosophical case on behalf of theological work that is public or intersubjective as well as private and communal. We can also hope that he will demonstrate that the methodological norms he endorses in his expanded coherence theory of truth are at least harmonious with, and perhaps even expressive of, similar standards that can be found in Scripture. Given what he has already accomplished, neither of these additional things should be difficult for him to do with substance and style.
David, you've done a beautiful job of summarizing EXPLANATION FROM PHYSICS TO THEOLOGY and of offering your own critical analysis.
There is much to comment on here, but for the moment just one note. A famous Yale philosopher (an atheist, incidentally) asked me, "So you've written about HOW to talk about God; what do you actually believe about God?" That launched my research program as a theologian for a number of years. First, I worked for almost eight years to understand how God became a problem in the modern period. The results were published by Eerdmans in 2000 under the title THE PROBLEM OF GOD IN MODERN THOUGHT.
The interaction with science became a major preoccupation; you can see some of the results at . I tried to pull all the results together in a very new book from Fortress, ADVENTURES IN THE SPIRIT: GOD, WORLD, DIVINE ACTION. I'll be interested to see if it satisfies your worries about the Explanation book.
I've also come to worry that academic theology is not being helpful enough to the church. That led to a short, popular book last year, TRANSFORMING CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY (also Fortress).
I look forward to continuing this conversation.
-- Philip Clayton
Posted by: Philip Clayton | July 17, 2010 at 05:23 PM