Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

HUME,DAVID

— 441—

Philosophy of religion

From an early age Hume was preoccupied with re-

ligion and science. Before he was twenty, he set

down in a notebook “the gradual progress” of his

thoughts on theism: “It begun with an anxious

search after arguments to confirm the common

opinion: Doubts stole in, dissipated, return’d, were

again dissipated, return’d again; and it was a per-

petual struggle of a restless imagination against in-

clination, perhaps against reason.” It therefore is

unsurprising that the Treatise as originally written

contained several antireligious sections and re-

marks that Hume prudently removed before publi-

cation. In 1737 he told a friend that he was “cas-

trating” his manuscript, or “cutting off its nobler

parts” so that it would “give as little offence as pos-

sible.” He deleted an essay on miracles and proba-

bly also one on the immortality of the soul. But

notwithstanding these precautions, the very first

notice of the work warned readers of its “evil in-

tentions,” evident from the book’s motto alone:

“Seldom are men blessed with times in which they

may think what they like, and say what they think”.

Hume must have realized that a discerning

reader of the Treatise would have detected echoes

of principles and doctrines prominent in the works

of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Anthony Collins

(1676–1729), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Baruch

Spinoza (1632–1677), and other “free thinkers.” He

therefore should not have been surprised when, in

1745, he applied for a chair in philosophy at the

University of Edinburgh, and the local clergy de-

feated his candidacy by charging him with advo-

cating “universal scepticism” and “downright athe-

ism.” They also accused him of “denying the

immortality of the soul” and of “sapping the foun-

dations of morality, by denying the natural and es-

sential difference between right and wrong, good

and evil, justice and injustice; making the differ-

ence only artificial, and to arise from human con-

ventions and compacts.” Hume defended himself

against these misunderstandings and misrepresen-

tations, but thereafter his writings became increas-

ingly antireligious.

In 1748 Hume published his essay on miracles,

in which he argued that there is no reason to be-

lieve that any miracle has ever occurred. His argu-

ment was attacked by many contemporaries, in-

cluding William Adams, John Douglas, Richard

Price, and George Campbell, whose criticisms are

still worth reading. In the same collection Hume

devoted an essay to arguing that there is no reason

to believe in a particular providence or a future

state. This attack on the argument from design was

elaborated in Hume’s posthumously published Di-

alogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which

is modelled upon Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.

The historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) re-

garded the Dialogues as “the most profound, the

most ingenious, and the best written of Hume’s

philosophic works.” It remains the classic discus-

sion of the argument from design (or argument a

posteriori), and some regard it as the most impor-

tant work in the philosophy of religion in English.

Had William Paley (1743–1805) carefully studied it,

he might never have written Evidences of Chris-

tianity (1794) or Natural Theology (1802). Along

the way Samuel Clarke’s (1675–1729) a priori ar-

gument for the existence of God is refuted, and the

objections to theism from the existence of evil are

forcefully presented.

The Dialogues involves three disputants: the or-

thodox rationalist theologian Demea, the “careless

sceptic” Philo, and the scientific theologian Clean-

thes, who frequently echoes Bishop Butler’s Anal-

ogy of Religion (1736). Though the argument from

design is subjected to sustained criticism, and the

attentive reader may be convinced that the canons

of scientific reasoning do not issue in theism, at the

end Cleanthes seems to emerge as the winner, lead-

ing some mistakenly to conclude that Cleanthes

speaks for Hume himself. But the Dialogues were

so “artfully written” that Philo the sceptic only ap-

pears to be “silenced.” In a private letter Hume said

that he objected “to everything we commonly call

religion, except the Practice of Morality, and the

Assent of the Understanding to the Proposition that

God exists.” But in the Dialogues the concept of

God is virtually evacuated of all meaning, so such

“assent” amounts to little or nothing. Hume’s friend

Dr. Hugh Blair, who advised against publishing the

Dialogues during Hume’s lifetime, remarked that

they are “exceedingly elegant” and “bring together

some of his most exceptional reasonings, but the

principles themselves were in all his former works.”

Most scholars now hold that Philo represents Hume

himself. Hume denied that he was an atheist or a

deist, so he is perhaps best viewed as a not-so-

careless sceptic.

In the Treatise Hume argued that morality is

not founded on reason, but on passion. Reason

LetterH.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 441

HUME,DAVID

— 442—

alone cannot motivate people to act, and one can-

not logically derive statements about what one

“ought” to do from statements about what “is” the

case. One’s sense of justice rests upon self-interest,

limited generosity, utility, human conventions, and

sympathy or fellow-feeling with the sentiments of

others. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) said that the

scales fell from his eyes when he read this part of

Hume’s work. Though utility enters into his expla-

nation of the evolution of morality, Hume himself

was not a utilitarian. But he was one of the first to

insist upon the autonomy of morality, and espe-

cially its independence from religious belief. In the

Natural History of Religion (1757) he inquired into

the causes of religion and speculated as to how

monotheism had evolved from primitive polythe-

ism, while emphasizing the absurd doctrines and

immoral consequences of most world religions.

His critics argued that, though his temperament

enabled him to be just without being religious,

most people require the sanctions of religion in

order to be just.

Anonymous writings

Hume counted several of the more liberal Church

of Scotland ministers as friends but resented those

evangelical ministers who had lobbied against his

appointment to a professorship at Edinburgh and

Glasgow and who, in the mid-1750s, had unsuc-

cessfully tried to have the Church of Scotland ex-

communicate him. He carefully cultivated the char-

acter of a “virtuous infidel” by encouraging the

literary projects of his clerical friends (and potential

literary rivals) such as Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson,

and Robert Wallace; and by anonymously publish-

ing favourable reviews of William Robertson’s His-

tory of Scotland, William Wilkie’s epic poem the

Epigoniad, and Robert Henry’s History of Great

Britain, as well as of Adam Smith’s Theory of

Moral Sentiments. The extent of Hume’s clandes-

tine literary activity has yet to be determined.

In “My Own Life” (1777), Hume asserted that

he was “a man of mild dispositions, of command

of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful hu-

mour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible

of enmity.” Adam Smith (1723–1790) testified that

his “constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion

of good nature and good humour … without even

the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the

disagreeable source of what is called wit in other

men.” Nevertheless, under cover of anonymity,

Hume composed several satires against the clergy

and corrupt politicians. “The Bellman’s Petition”

(1751) is directed against an increase in the

stipends of ministers of the Church of Scotland.

The far more ambitious, lengthy, and scathing Sis-

ter Peg (1760) is directed against politicians who

had defeated his friends’ struggle to reestablish a

militia in Scotland. An anonymous satire from 1758

is directed against the commonly felt “antipathy to

the corn merchant” during times of famine and “af-

fection for the Parson” who at such times in-

veighed against the supposedly greedy corn mer-

chants. In it Hume argued that these popular

sentiments were based upon ignorance, supersti-

tion, and bad reasoning; good reasoning should di-

rect one’s passions in the opposite direction, so

that one should instead feel affection for the useful

corn merchants and antipathy for the useless par-

sons who “cram us with Nonsense, instead of feed-

ing us with Truth.” In these works Hume appears

to have revenged himself against those who had

previously opposed him.

Political history

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hume

was best known as an historian. His multivolume

History of England is not only a narrative history

but is a philosophical study of the English consti-

tution in which he never misses an opportunity to

satirize the folly and hypocrisy of self-interested

politicians and clergymen. His historical research

was informed by his political and economic theo-

ries, which were less conservative than many have

assumed. Believing that the first duty of a historian

is to be accurate and impartial, while the next is

the be instructive and entertaining, he succeeded

so well in fulfilling these obligations that his history

is still read, while those of most of his contempo-

raries have sunk into oblivion. Though born a

Scotsman, Hume always strove to write an elegant

and correct English and to surpass the best English

stylists. Occasionally some vanity is evident in his

writings, which gives them a conversational tone

and an engaging character. Hume believed that

good writing “consists of sentiments, which are

natural, without being obvious.” He repeatedly re-

vised his works in order to perfect them. His views

in philosophy, politics, economics, theology, his-

tory, and criticism were generally original and un-

obvious and so artfully expressed as to disguise his

artfulness.

LetterH.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 442

HYPOTHETICAL REALISM

— 443—

Hume died on August 25, 1776, and was

buried in Calton Hill cemetery, overlooking Edin-

burgh. At his internment someone was overheard

to say: “Ah, he was an atheist.” To which another

answered: “No matter, he was an honest man.”

See also DESIGN ARGUMENT; EMPIRICISM; GOD; HUMAN

NATURE, RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS;

MAGINATION; KANT, IMMANUEL; MIRACLE;

ONOTHEISM; MORALITY; NATURAL THEOLOGY

Bibliography

Gaskin, J. C. A. Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edi-

tion. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Hume, David. An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature,

1740: A Pamphlet Hitherto Unknown, eds. John May-

nard Keynes and Piero Sraffa. Cambridge, UK: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1938.

Hume, David. Sister Peg: A Pamphlet hitherto unknown,

ed. David R. Raynor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1982.

Jeffner, Anders. Butler and Hume on Religion: A Compar-

ative Analysis. Stockholm, Sweden: Diakonistyrelsens

Bokforlag, 1966.

Mackie, John L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For

and Against the Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1982.

Millican, Peter., ed. Reading Hume on Human Under-

standing: Essays on the First Enquiry. Oxford: Claren-

don Press, 2002.

Mossner, Ernest C. The Life of David Hume, 2nd edition.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to

Hume. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,

1993.

Penelhum, Terence. Themes in Hume: The Self, The Will,

Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Raynor, David R. “Hume’s Abstract of Adam Smith’s The-

ory of Moral Sentiments.” Journal of the History of

Philosophy 22 (1984): 51–79.

Raynor, David R. “Who Invented the Invisible Hand?

Hume’s Praise of Laissez-faire in a Newly Discovered

Manuscript.” Times Literary Supplement (August 14,

1998): 22.

Stewart, John B. Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political

Philosophy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 1992.

Stewart, M. A. The Kirk and the Infidel. Lancaster, UK:

Lancaster University Press, 1995.

DAVID RAYNOR

HYPOTHETICAL REALISM

Realism, generally, is the view according to which

knowledge refers to objects that actually exist. Hy-

pothetical realism is a weak form of realism based

on the theory of the growth of knowledge put for-

ward by evolutionary epistemology. The basic as-

sumption is that human cognitive capacity has

evolved through an interaction with the external

world. Therefore even if our knowledge has only a

hypothetical character and must be open to im-

provements, the ontological reality of the known

(i.e., external reality) is certain.

See also CRITICAL REALISM; EVOLUTIONARY

EPISTEMOLOGY; REALISM

TOMAS HANCIL

LetterH.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 443

— 445—

IBN RUSHD

See AVERROËS

IBN SINA

See AVICENNA

IDEALISM

Idealism as an ontological or epistemological doc-

trine holds that reality, or what can count as reality

for human beings, is determined by mind. The var-

ious ways of specifying the basic role of mind on-

tologically or epistemologically yield various forms

of idealism. As an ontological doctrine idealism

can hold that reality is basically mental in nature;

the physical world is an expression of this mental

reality. An argument for the position that what one

takes to be material is actually spiritual is that what

is actual is process or activity, and mind or spirit is

the model of activity. In this sense, metaphysical

idealism is contrasted with materialism. An exam-

ple is the doctrine of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

(1646–1716) that reality consists of active sub-

stances, or monads.

As an epistemological doctrine, idealism can

hold that humans do not have access to a mind-

independent reality. However, an epistemological

idealism along this line can easily be transformed

into an ontological one to the effect that there is no

mind-independent reality. Idealism in this sense is

constrasted with realism. The position of George

Berkeley (1685–1753) that esse est percipi (to be is

to be perceived) could be read as an example of

an epistemological idealism with radical antirealist

claims, which amounts to an ontological immate-

rialism. But Berkeley also argues that sensible

things exist independently of human beings in that

they exist in the mind of God (theistic idealism).

An ontological idealism can hold precisely that

there is a reality beyond the physical world of

sense experience, and this transcendent reality is

the basic or true one in that it accords actuality to

the relentlessly changing world of sense experi-

ence. Humans have access to the ultimate reality

beyond the world of sense experience through

higher forms of mind, but the true or divine reality

transcends the human mind. This form of meta-

physical idealism is thus an ontological realism

(claiming that reality is independent of the human

mind). The classic example of a metaphysical ide-

alism as a transcendent idealism is the doctrine of

the world of ideas in Plato (428–347

B.C.E.).

Epistemological idealism can be reformulated

as transcendental idealism. The critical philosophy

of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) not only attacks

dogmatic metaphysical positions that imply that

humans have access to things in themselves be-

yond the world of sense experience, but also

Berkeley’s subjective idealism (as Kant takes it to

be), which dissolves reality into what humans ex-

perience. Instead, according to Kant, space and

time, and the categories (e.g., the category of

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 445

IMAGINARY TIME

— 446—

causality) are, as structures of the human mind,

also conditions of possibility for the experience of

the world. However, this opens the problem that

reality is on the one hand “reality-for-us,” while on

the other hand an ultimate reality beyond this re-

ality is postulated. This problem is dealt with by

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wil-

helm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), and

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831),

whose various positions are collectively labelled

German Idealism.

Absolute idealism in Hegel seeks to overcome

the Kantian split between the world of sense ex-

perience and ultimate reality (thing-in-itself) with-

out returning to a dogmatic position. Hegel points

out that in having an experience, human

understanding of the world and human self-

understanding can be changed. This possibility of

self-transcendence implied in experience cannot

be accounted for if ultimate reality is placed

beyond the limits of experience. Hegel’s absolute

idealism solves the basic task of German Idealism

left over by Kant, namely, to account for both free-

dom inherent in rationality (autonomy) and the

embodiment of that freedom. While Fichte empha-

sizes the activity of the human mind as a produc-

tive activity, Schelling sets out to overcome this (as

he called it) subjective idealism in Fichte by com-

bining a transcendental philosophy and a philoso-

phy of nature. In Hegel’s absolute idealism, mind

(Geist) transcends the divide between freedom and

nature by coming to itself through nature and his-

tory. Accordingly, Hegel’s idealism is not to be

captured by the opposition between idealism and

materialism, or between realism and antirealism.

As the complex position of Hegel indicates,

idealism needs to be reformulated in opposition to

its traditional forms. Basically, idealism concerns

the problem that human access to reality must tell

something about that very reality. From the brief

outline above one can extract the insight that in re-

lating to reality human beings are doing some-

thing. Thinking is an activity. Humans only relate

to reality in interpreting it. This does not imply,

however, that reality is what people interpret it to

be or that reality is a mental construction. If mind

were basic in this sense, people would not be able

to discuss the reality of the mind. Instead the cru-

cial argument could be the following: A compre-

hensive theory of reality must be able to account

for the reality of mind and self-consciousness that

it itself presupposes. Following this line of argu-

ment, idealism could be reformulated as a re-

sponse to reductive forms of naturalism in that it

points to the presupposition that human beings as

subjects relate to the world, and only as self-inter-

preting animals are they able to form theories

about the world in which they live. The task is to

account for both the embodiment of mind and this

presupposition of mind.

The question of idealism is thus not only the

basic question of science concerning the reality of

interpretations and models of reality. Idealism also

concerns religious questions about the place of

human beings in the world. Religion need not be

interpreted along the lines of an idealism that

posits a second world beyond the world of sense-

experience. A reformulation of idealism as outlined

above can instead draw upon the understanding to

be found in religion that human consciousness re-

flects the problem of the embodiment of con-

sciousness itself.

See also MATERIALISM; NATURALISM; REALISM

Bibliography

Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of

Human Knowledge (1710). In The Principles of

Human Knowledge with Other Writings, ed. G. J.

Warnock. London: Fontana Library, 1962.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of

Mind (1807), trans. J. B. Baillie. London: Allen and

Urwin; New York: Humanities Press, 1977. Revised

reprint of 1931 edition.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans.

Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1978.

ARNE GRØN

IMAGINARY TIME

See COSMOLOGY, PHYSICAL ASPECTS

IMAGINATION

Since Plato, thinkers have recognized human

mental capacities for producing images and com-

bining them in ways that do not copy experience.

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 446

IMAGINATION

— 447—

Philosophers have held many theories about the

origin of images. One of the most original is ex-

pressed by the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist

philosopher Hsuan-tsang in his interpretation of

the Yogacara writings of the Indian thinker Va-

subandhu (c. fifth century

C.E.). Hsuan-tsang sug-

gested that the mind has a great storehouse

consciousness of images or “seeds” that are “per-

fumed” into consciousness (as smells incite other-

wise hidden memories) by other conscious seeds

that have an emotional vector. David Hume, the

eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment philoso-

pher, had a theory of imaginative association mod-

eled on mechanical principles.

Synthesis and construction

Immanuel Kant, Hume’s younger contemporary,

revolutionized thought about imagination in the

first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

He claimed that imagination is a foundational ca-

pacity for synthesis in the mind whereby stimuli or

impingements from the external world are organ-

ized into the basic structures of experience such as

a spatiotemporal field and the applicability of con-

cepts to sense data, as explained in Robert Cum-

mings Neville’s Reconstruction of Thinking (1981).

Romantic philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle

and Ralph Waldo Emerson developed the view that

the structures of imagination are more basic than

the surface affirmations of conscious thought and

reveal assumptions about reality that are presup-

posed by other forms of thought. Myths reveal

truths more basic than science, for instance. The

pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce

(1839–1914) gave an evolutionary interpretation of

imagination such that its deep structures are more

likely to be true about basic issues, because cor-

rected over a long evolutionary development, than

the reasonings of philosophers. Ray L. Hart in the

twentieth century argued that imagination is cen-

tral to the constitution of human beings before

God and is the very form of revelation, inspiring a

movement of “theologies of imagination,” as ana-

lyzed by Fritz Buri in his 1985 article “American

Philosophy of Religion.”

Imagination has been particularly important in

science. For Plato the ideal scientific imagination

was mathematical, as Robert Brumbaugh has

shown in his Plato’s Mathematical Imagination

(1954) and for Aristotle imagination was the wit to

hit upon the third term connecting two otherwise

unrelated topics. Whereas some people in Western

philosophy might have thought that science is

merely a reading off of the lessons of nature, Kant,

in the Critique of Pure Reason, argued that post-

Copernican science forces nature to answer ques-

tions of our own imaginative devising. Peirce, at

the beginning of the twentieth century, argued at

length that all hypothesis construction in science

begins with an imaginative guess at the answer and

then proceeds by imagination to articulate the

guess in theoretical terms that might be tested. Al-

though certain positivistic trends in mid-twentieth

century philosophy of science minimized imagina-

tion in the testing of hypotheses by focusing

closely on the performance of controlled experi-

ments, a counter-movement associated with

Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1995) has been extremely

influential. Kuhn argued that the controlled testing

of hypotheses, or “normal science,” takes place

within larger assumed paradigms of what is at

stake in the tests, their assumptions and their inter-

pretations as defined by the instruments involved.

“Revolutionary science” is when the paradigms

themselves are criticized and changed, and this in-

volves much imagination in stepping outside of lin-

ear inference. Imagination plays a large role in

contemporary thinking about scientific creativity.

In the last two centuries scholars have used

the notion of imagination to describe the set of as-

sumptions, thought patterns, and ways of seeing or

sensing peculiar to an age or culture. For instance,

the imagination of the Hellenistic world of antiq-

uity, when rabbinic Judaism and Christianity arose,

included the view that the cosmos is a stack of

many spatial levels of which the Earth occupies

one, with perhaps many heavens above and hells

below. Each level has its characteristic agents, bod-

ies, movements, and patterns of causation. Aristo-

tle’s theory that motion above the orbit of the

moon is circular whereas that below is straight-line

illustrates one version of the multilevel theory;

when his theory or others became unquestioned

assumptions they formed part of the age’s imagi-

nation. Biblical references to angels are to be un-

derstood as to beings from certain higher levels

crossing the boundaries into the earthly level. God

often was imagined to occupy the highest level as

a being within a spatiotemporal system that in-

cludes earthly life at a different place. God’s nature

might be very different from that of things on the

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 447

IMAGINATION

— 448—

earthly level, for instance that of a pure, immate-

rial, infinite spirit, but it is connected with the

earthly plane by the geography of the cosmic lev-

els. In Christianity (Phil. 2) God’s “Son,” who has

the form of God when with God in the divine

heaven, descends to Earth, taking on a nature

proper to the earthly level (indeed that of a slave

in earthly terms). When human beings make the

reverse journey to God, they must take on natures

appropriate to the divine heavenly level, for in-

stance “celestial bodies” (1 Cor. 15).

The challenge of science

The challenge of modern science to the imagina-

tive structures of the religions formed in the an-

cient world is that science itself shapes contempo-

rary imagination to make it incompatible with

them. Because of modern science, people know,

and assume deep in their imaginations, that be-

neath the Earth’s surface is a molten core, not hell,

and that traveling upward leads to outer space, not

one or more heavens with different causal struc-

tures. Indeed the imagination shaped by modern

science assumes a uniformity of measure through-

out the entire cosmos: An inch is always and

everywhere an inch, a chemical reaction on Earth

is the same as it would be in any part of the cos-

mos with the same conditions, and mathematics

applies equally everywhere.

So, in the modern imagination there is no

“proper heavenly place” for God if God is ex-

tremely different from earthly beings. Theologians

have responded to this in various ways. Process

theologians (e.g. Charles Hartshorne [1897–2000])

say that God is not so different and is part of the

cosmos. They explain this by saying that the dif-

ferences between God and humans can be ex-

pressed within a set of metaphysical measures that

apply to the finite God and ordinary things alike.

Other theologians (e.g. Paul Tillich [1886–1965])

deny that God is a being at all because to be a

being requires having a place; God rather is the

ground or creator of all beings and places. Yet

other thinkers (pantheists) say that God is identical

with the cosmos and differs from any particular fi-

nite thing by being all of the things together. Many

thinkers reflecting on the differences between the

ancient and the modern scientific imaginations say

that belief in God is simply incompatible with sci-

ence, and hence are atheists. Some religious peo-

ple are able to divide their imagination into one

structure for religious matters and another for en-

gaging the world in other respects, although this

makes the integrating intent of religion difficult.

The study of “science and religion” sometimes

attempts to reconcile contemporary scientific imag-

ination with the ancient imagination that forms the

symbols and rhetoric of traditional religions. One

approach, called demythologizing and associated

with Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), is to treat the

ancient imagination as metaphorical, searching for

“religious meaning” distinct from “scientific mean-

ing.” Another is to treat the modern imagination

and scientific conceptions as themselves open to

the literal kinds of beings and causation depicted

as heavenly in the ancient imagination. So it is

argued that science still allows for miracles and

divine agency without denying scientific causation,

as discussed in Mark Richardson and Wesley

Wildman’s 1996 book Religion and Science (espe-

cially case study one). The problem for religious

imagination is related to but not the same as the

problem of reconciling ancient and modern theo-

ries: It is a problem of apparently conflicting imag-

inative presuppositions that affect how people per-

ceive and act.

Contemporary scientific imagination poses a

potentially more explosive problem for modern

life. Until the mid-twentieth century the modern

European scientific imagination could picture

atoms interacting within the void, or fields of

forces affecting material objects within them. Even

quantum mechanics could picture the world as

having particles that travel along a path but skip-

ping some sections relative to observation. More

recent physical science has moved into a mathe-

matical imagination that is not picturable in terms

of customary space-time models. Quarks are not

like tiny spinning suns, as people had earlier imag-

ined electrons, photons, and neutrons. Only highly

sophisticated mathematicians are able to compre-

hend the relations that added together in bulk

might give rise to picturable images. Popularized

expressions of many fundamental ideas in micro-

physics and astrophysics we know to be just plain

false to the sophisticated science. This is exactly

like the situation regarding certain kinds of theol-

ogy whose conceptions of God are not picturable

in any way and that need to be understood in

purely conceptual terms, like mathematics though

perhaps with a different dialectical logic. Popular

religious expressions, like popular expressions of

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 448

IMAGO DEI

— 449—

certain scientific ideas, must be said to be “just

plain false,” or at least highly misleading, relative

to some sophisticated theology that cannot be un-

derstood except by the sophisticated. The elitism

common to the mathematical imagination in sci-

ence and the dialectical imagination in theology is

more problematic in the religious realm. Whereas

technologists can deliver the results of science to a

popular world that cannot picture its theory, reli-

gions no long have technological priesthoods to

mediate unpicturable truths easily to people whose

credulity requires traditional religious language.

See also KANT, IMMANUEL

Bibliography

Brumbaugh, Robert S. Plato’s Mathematical Imagination.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954.

Brumbaugh, Robert S. Platonic Studies of Greek Philoso-

phy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York:

Scribners, 1958.

Buri, Fritz. “American Philosophy of Religion from a Euro-

pean Perspective: The Problem of Meaning and

Being in the Theologies of Imagination and Process,”

trans. Harold H. Oliver. Journal of the American

Academy of Religion 53, no. 4 (1985): 651–673.

Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. and ed. A Source Book in Chinese

Philosophy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 1963.

Hart, Ray L. Unfinished Man and the Imagination: To-

ward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation. New

York: Herder and Herder, 1968.

Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity: A Social Con-

ception of God. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

Press, 1948.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Neville, Robert Cummings. Reconstruction of Thinking. Al-

bany: State University of New York Press, 1981.

Neville, Robert Cummings. The Truth of Broken Symbols.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Richardson, W. Mark, and Wildman, Wesley J., eds. Reli-

gion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue. New

York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1951.

Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding: The Collective

Use and Evolution of Concepts. Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

ton University Press, 1972.

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE

IMAGO DEI

Imago Dei is Latin for “image of God,” a theologi-

cal doctrine common to Jews, Christians, and Mus-

lims that denotes humankind’s relation to God on

the one hand and all other living creatures on the

other. Traditionally, only human beings are in the

image of God, and it is by virtue of this image that

human beings are moral and spiritual creatures.

Because the image of God is ultimately a doctrine

of human nature, it has also been inappropriately

used historically to justify racism and sexism.

The term image of God is originally found in

the biblical book of Genesis, where it occurs three

times (1: 26–27, 5: 1–3, 9:1–7). The meaning of the

term in the original Hebrew context has been

much debated, although current scholarship has

moved to understanding it as a designation of

stewardship or representation of God’s sover-

eignty. This understanding of the image of God

seems to be significantly changed in the Christian

New Testament, where it is used primarily by the

apostle Paul, who speaks of Christ as being in

God’s image and of human beings becoming in

the image of Christ.

In the Christian theological tradition, the image

of God has been interpreted in a wide variety of

ways. Most ancient and medieval theologians iden-

tified the image of God primarily with the human

ability to reason, and it was this quality that was

seen to distinguish human beings from all other

organisms. Irenaeus of Lyon (second century)

made a further distinction between the image and

likeness of God, as both terms are used in Genesis

1. As a consequence, later theologians argued

whether or not human beings are still in the image

of God after the Fall, or whether human beings

have lost the image and are now merely in God’s

likeness. On this understanding, the Fall perma-

nently altered human nature for the worse, the

image being restored only through the redeeming

action of Christ.

In the wake of the Reformation, the image of

God came to be reinterpreted along two primary

lines. The first, following Martin Luther (1483–

1546), interpreted the image of God primarily in

terms of human relationality with God, a move fol-

lowed especially by Karl Barth (1886–1968) and

the neo-orthodox movement. The second followed

the dominant philosophical interpretations of

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 449

IMMANENCE

— 450—

human nature in the Enlightenment and after. Par-

ticularly after Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–

1834), the image of God has often been seen in the

human capacity for self-consciousness.

Many modern theologians continue to be in-

fluenced by one of these two strands of thought.

The chief influence of the sciences has been to

emphasize human continuity with nature, either

because of humankind’s evolutionary heritage or

because of humankind’s increased knowledge of

the animal world. For this and other reasons, the-

ologians such as Langdon Gilkey (1919– ) and Gre-

gory Peterson (1966– ) have argued that all of na-

ture should be understood as being in the image of

God. Nevertheless, interpretation of the image of

God continues to be dynamic, and will no doubt

be increasingly influenced by both scientific per-

spectives and inter-religious dialogue.

See also FALL; HUMAN NATURE, RELIGIOUS AND

PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS; SOUL

Bibliography

Borresen, Kari Elisabeth, ed. The Image of God: Gender

Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition. Minneapolis,

Minn.: Fortress Press, 1985.

Gilkey, Langdon. Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: The

Nexus of Science and Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.:

Fortress Press, 1993.

Johnson, Gunnlaugur A. The Image of God: Genesis 1:

26–28 in a Century of Old Testament Research. Stock-

holm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988.

Peterson, Gregory. “The Evolution of Consciousness and

the Theology of Nature.” Zygon 34 (1999): 283–306.

GREGORY R. PETERSON

IMMANENCE

In theological discourse, immanence refers to the

presence of God in the world. Conventionally, im-

manence contrasts with the term transcendence,

which emphasizes God’s separateness and superi-

ority to the world. The two terms, however, are not

exclusive opposites, and many theologians balance

doctrines of God’s transcendence with God’s im-

manence. Historically, theologians have tended to

emphasize God’s transcendence over God’s imma-

nence. In the past two centuries, however, this

emphasis has shifted, and many theologians now

give more weight to God’s immanence. Advocates

of panentheism such as Arthur Peacocke (1924– )

argue that a theology emphasizing God’s imma-

nence is most compatible with modern science.

See also GOD; PANENTHEISM; TRANSCENDENCE

Bibliography

Peacocke, Arthur. Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and

Becoming—Natural, Divine, and Human, enlarged

edition. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993.

GREGORY R. PETERSON

IMMORTALITY

See LIFE AFTER DEATH

IN VITRO FERTILIZATION

See REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY

INCARNATION

From the Latin noun caro, or carnis, meaning

“flesh,” the term incarnation was appropriated by

Christianity to designate its belief that in the his-

torical existence of the man Jesus, known to Chris-

tians as the Christ, the very being of God has en-

tered fully into human history and the created

universe. The incarnation of God implies for be-

lievers not only that the person of Christ is the

dwelling place of God, his human nature held to

be substantially united with the Logos (the eternal

Word) of God, but that by extension the entire ma-

terial cosmos is the domicile of God.

In the history of religions, representations of

incarnate deities have been a powerful way of

communicating a common human intuition that

the realm of the sacred is not separate or remote

from the empirically given world and that the tan-

gible world is embedded in a mysterious dimen-

sion of divine depth. In fact the idea of a divine in-

carnation is itself a specification of the more

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 450

INCARNATION

— 451—

generically sacramental character of religions as

such. Religions have almost always had a sacra-

mental aspect, by which is meant that their devo-

tees grasp the presence of God or the sacred pri-

mordially through the mediation of concrete

things, events, or persons that function as revela-

tory symbols of the divine. The natural world in

particular, with its sunlight, flowing water, fertility,

life, oceans, mountains, and storms has provided a

rich array of symbols by which the sense of a sa-

cred mystery has been communicated to religious

awareness. The idea of a divine incarnation in a

human being may be understood in the context of

the richly sacramental character of religions.

Incarnation in Christian doctrine

A sacrament is any property of the visible world

through which humans have gathered the impres-

sion that the sacred or the divine is expressing itself

in an especially intense way. In Christianity, for ex-

ample, the person of Christ is taken to be the pri-

mary symbol or sacrament of God. Theological re-

flection has even led to the Christian conviction

that the fullness of the Godhead has disclosed itself

incarnately through the compassion and self-

sacrifice of Jesus. Early Christian controversies

about how to understand the incarnation led to the

teachings of the early Ecumenical Councils (espe-

cially First Nicea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451) that

Jesus is the incarnate Logos or “Word” of God.

It was an arduous and politically tumultuous

process that led to the Christian doctrinal formula-

tions surrounding the incarnation. Denials of

Christ’s divine nature in the early centuries took

the form of Arianism and Nestorianism, both even-

tually condemned as heretical. And at the other

extreme, the humanity of Christ was dissolved into

his divinity, in a heresy known as monophysitism

(literally, “having a single nature”). Christianity has

never been completely divested of the tendency to

deny that Jesus was fully human, and in recent

centuries a decidedly monophysitic leaning has

shaped much Christian spirituality. A case can be

made that this monophysitic bias has brought

needless complications into the dialogue between

religion and science.

At the heart of Christian quarrels about the in-

carnation was the question of how the unchang-

ing, eternal, and almighty God could coherently be

said to be fully present in a finite man, one vul-

nerable enough to be killed by crucifixion. The

doctrine of God’s incarnation coincides at this

point with the shocking idea of a divine kenosis,

according to which the infinite God empties out

the divine substance into the finite world in self-

sacrificing love. The God-human paradox of Christ

is one that subsequent centuries and contemporary

theological discussion have not yet reduced to clar-

ity. Moreover, attempts to clarify the so-called

“mystery” of the incarnation have usually led either

to the nonacceptance of Christ’s divinity or to the

suppression of a sense of his humanity. In either

case the rejection of a divine incarnation entails a

denial of the divine kenosis. The notion of a self-

emptying God is one that even Christians have not

yet come to terms with, even though it is an idea

that can possibly contribute much to the reconcili-

ation of religion and science.

Incarnation in the age of evolutionary

science

In this age of evolutionary science, theological re-

flection on the doctrine of the incarnation has led

to speculation that in God’s taking on the corpo-

real reality of Christ the whole universe is, by ex-

tension, taken into the divine life. The physical

body of Christ is, like every other living organism,

the outcome of a cosmic and biological evolution.

Hence one may conjecture theologically that the

story of the entire universe is inseparable from the

existence of the incarnate God. The cosmic story

itself, therefore, becomes sacramentally the revela-

tion of God. In light of the idea of God’s incarna-

tion in matter the notion of “revelation” can no

longer be restricted simply to a brief series of

salvific events in the narrow province of terrestrial

human history as recorded in the Bible. Rather, the

universe as a whole is now seen by many to be the

sacramental disclosure of the incarnate God. To

some Christian thinkers, especially the Jesuit geol-

ogist and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(1881–1955), the epic of evolution is endowed

with the deeper meaning that it is from start to fin-

ish the process in which God becomes increas-

ingly incarnate in matter, clothing the divine being

in the stuff of the universe.

However, as Teilhard de Chardin repeatedly

emphasized, “true union differentiates.” God’s in-

carnate union with the world is one in which the

world becomes even more, not less, distinct from

God. Incarnation implies that God foregoes any

annihilating relationship to the world. The doctrine

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 451