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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

POSITIVISM,LOGICAL

— 685—

POSITIVISM,LOGICAL

The term logical positivism is particularly associ-

ated with the so-called Vienna Circle, a group of

leading philosophers, mathematicians, and scien-

tists that met in Vienna, Austria, in the late 1920s

and early 1930s, with German philosopher Moritz

Schlick (1882–1936) as chairman. They put forward

what they regarded as a “scientific world-concep-

tion,” which was both anticlerical and opposed to

metaphysics. It was, they believed, characterized

by two main features. The first was a general em-

piricism, and the second a devotion to a certain

rigorous way of thinking that they called logical

analysis. This relied particularly on the techniques

of modern formal logic.

Empiricism, in the tradition of such philoso-

phers as David Hume (1711–1776), holds that

knowledge can only be obtained from direct expe-

rience. Although explicitly a science-based philoso-

phy, it always causes problems for science because

science always wishes to generalize from present

experience through induction. A strict empiricism

will, however, wish to deduce all claims to knowl-

edge from the direct experience of which we are

infallibly aware. Knowledge is the product of our

pooled, intersubjective experience. What is beyond

the reach of human perception and observation

cannot be judged to be real. In its effects, the view

becomes centered on human judgment and de-

pendent on human capabilities. It is anthropocen-

tric in that it will only deal with what exists in so far

as it is accessible to human experience. The latter is

defined in terms of what is “immediately given.” In

other words, what is in principle beyond the reach

of the human senses cannot be meaningfully dis-

cussed. Science defines what it is possible to know,

and a strict empiricism sets the limits, as the mani-

festo for the Vienna Circle puts it, “for the content

of legitimate knowledge” (p. 309).

The Circle held that “the meaning of every

statement of science must be statable by reduction

to a statement about the given” (p. 309). This puts

the whole of science (and hence, they believed, of

knowledge) on a firm empirical footing. It is, how-

ever, worth noting that, even at the time, it was

questionable whether this gave an adequate ac-

count of physics. Modern quantum mechanics has

been plagued by disputes about the status of sub-

atomic particles. These disputes often themselves

stem from positivist views about the dependence of

knowledge on sense experience. The difficulty is

how far we can posit entities that by definition we

cannot observe. Can they be thought really to exist

even though they cannot be directly observed? That

these kinds of questions were major stumbling

blocks can be illustrated by considering that for log-

ical positivists even the issue of the other side of

the moon was a problem before humans had actu-

ally observed it. They could only say that it could

be observed “in principle,” and indeed it was even-

tually observed by humans. There are, however,

many items to which modern physics wishes to

refer that cannot be observed even in principle, un-

less those words are stretched beyond any recog-

nizable use. What of the other side of the universe,

or the interior of a black hole, not to mention

quarks and other subatomic particles?

The influence of the Vienna Circle

The fame and influence of the Vienna Circle began

to be felt in the 1930’s. Such eminent figures as

philosophers Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Herbert

Feigl (1902–1988), and Friedrich Waismann (1896–

1959), mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), and

sociologist and economist Otto Neurath (1882–

1945) were members, and their own individual in-

fluence was spread as they were all scattered

across the globe as a result of the political up-

heavals of the 1930’s in Central Europe, leading up

to the Second World War. Other well-known fig-

ures were associated in some ways with the Circle.

They tended to see Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–

1951) as one of their own, although, particularly in

his later philosophy, he reacted very much against

the idea that only science could set the standard

for knowledge. Philosopher Karl Popper (1902–

1993) also betrays some of the influence of the Cir-

cle, not least by arguing that the test for science

was its ability to test empirically its theories by see-

ing if they could be falsified. This was a variation

on the Circle’s insistence of being able to test sci-

entific theories through empirical verification. His

argument was that conclusive verification was im-

possible to achieve. One can never know that all

members of a class have been seen. For example,

it is better policy to try to refute the theory that all

swans are white than to seek to confirm it. A sin-

gle black swan will be enough to falsify the theory.

Popper’s philosophy of science is therefore geared

to making conjectures and attempting to refute

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 685

POSITIVISM,LOGICAL

— 686—

them, rather than trying to confirm them. The re-

sult inevitably implies a certain agnosticism about

scientific truth. Theories always have to be tested

for possible falsehood. Yet we cannot know that

they are true but only that they have so far sur-

vived scrutiny.

W. V. O. Quine. Two other philosophers at-

tended the meetings of the Circle and were influ-

enced by its outlook. W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000)

was one of the leading American philosophers of

the twentieth century and put forward a science-

based philosophy. He was, however, also influ-

enced by American pragmatism and criticised

some of the Vienna Circle’s basic tenets. In partic-

ular, it was held that all statements were either syn-

thetic (subject to empirical checking and verifica-

tion) or analytic (true by definition or by virtue of

the meanings of the words used). An example of a

synthetic statement would be, “All swans are

white.” One can discover there are black swans.

Analytic statements would include, “All bachelors

are unmarried” and “Two and two are four.” One

could not discover either statement to be false by

looking at the world. Quine, however, challenged

the whole analytic-synthetic distinction, and in so

doing, undermined much of its empiricism. He

also made space for theoretical entities, such as

electrons, which might not be cashed out wholly in

empirical terms. He did, however, continue in the

belief, strongly held by the Circle, that philosophy

was to be subordinated to science, and that there

was no room for metaphysics, which could justify

the practice of science in the first place.

A. J. Ayer. The other major philosopher who at-

tended meetings of the Circle was A. J. Ayer

(1910–1989). He became the voice of logical posi-

tivism in the English-speaking world through the

publication of his influential Language, Truth and

Logic. First published in 1936 as the first book of a

young man, it argued that meaningful statements

were to be divided into the two categories of the

analytic and synthetic. Any other category of state-

ment had to be dismissed as meaningless. He thus

dismissed all metaphysics, and that explicitly in-

cluded religious statements about God. Genuine

statements of fact had to be empirically verifiable.

Nothing could be factually significant to people

unless they knew how to verify the proposition it

purports to express. This was the criterion of veri-

fiablity or the verification principle.

Since the existence of God is not a mere tau-

tology (true by definition), according to Ayer, it

could only be a factual statement with empirical

consequences. His argument can be illustrated by

the way he deals with the suggestion that the oc-

currence of regularities in nature could be evi-

dence for the existence of God. Yet, according to

Ayer, if the claim that there is a god amounts em-

pirically to no more than the claim that certain

types of phenomena occur in certain sequences,

then talking of God is equivalent to talking of those

regularities. Ayer could not allow reference to any-

thing beyond our experience. Speaking of the tran-

scendent, like the metaphysical, was just so much

hot air, not a genuine assertion of anything. A par-

allel might be the claim that there is a heffalump in

the garden. If a person said there was a heffalump,

but did not know what a heffalump looked like, or

indeed how to ever recognise a heffalump, it be-

comes difficult to know what one is saying. Talk-

ing of something that is in principle unverifiable

becomes perilously like not saying anything at all.

What went for religion also applied to other

wide categories of apparent statements, such as

those of ethics and aesthetics. They are not scien-

tifically verifiable and therefore cannot be regarded

as saying anything that could be true or false. It has

already been remarked that even contemporary

physics may want to refer to what lies beyond pos-

sible human observation, so the verification princi-

ple is a blunt instrument even in science. It was

commonly seen, though, to get into most trouble

when people questioned the status of the verifica-

tion principle itself. If one states that the only

meaningful statements are those that can be em-

pirically verified, or that all metaphysical claims are

literally nonsense, how can one empirically verify

those assertions? Is not the basic claim itself mean-

ingless because it is beyond the scope of empirical

observation? Ayer’s later claim was that the verifia-

bility criterion was “an axiom,” but particular ax-

ioms do not have to be chosen. If someone sees

that the adoption of such a rule, or starting point,

involved the jettisoning of much that is deemed

important in human life, that might seem a good

reason for not having the axiom in the first place.

Positivism and the status of science

Despite its shortcomings, Ayer’s verification princi-

ple, and the veneration for science expressed by

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 686

POSITIVISM,LOGICAL

— 687—

the repudiation of metaphysics, had a profound af-

fect on theology and the philosophy of religion for

many years in the middle of the twentieth century.

In many ways, logical positivism still casts its

shadow. The idea that religion is not entitled to talk

of realities beyond human experience is a seductive

one. Yet it strikes at the root of any belief that the

physical world is not all that there is, but that there

is another nonmaterial realm. Even within theol-

ogy, there is a constant temptation to reduce talk of

a nonmaterial, transcendent realm, such as the

Kingdom of Heaven, to matters of everyday expe-

rience. It is still often thought that what cannot ul-

timately be cashed out in empirical terms cannot

refer to anything real. This involves changing our

concentration from, say, the reality of God, to is-

sues concerning human reactions, attitudes, and

practices. Yet in the end, this is an old-fashioned

materialism in a sophisticated guise. It is no differ-

ent from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the seven-

teenth-century philosopher, saying that there is no

difference between God speaking to someone in a

dream and dreaming that God spoke.

In the debate about the relations between sci-

ence and religion, the legacy of logical positivism is

to accord science a philosophical status that is de-

nied metaphysics in general and theology in partic-

ular. The tendency will be to assume that the as-

sertions of science have an epistemological priority

that theology must always respect. In any dispute

science must always be given priority. Yet, logical

positivism was an anthropocentric view. It related

everything to actual and possible sense experience,

which had to be human sense experience. We

could not understand claims of radically different

kinds of experience. By definition, therefore, it was

related to human understanding, and the possibili-

ties of human knowledge. This, though, is different

from issues concerning the nature of reality. Sci-

ence is always human science, but it purports to be

about a reality that goes beyond, or transcends, our

limited and provisional understanding. Philosophy,

and metaphysics in particular, has to recognise

these limitations. We have to accept that what exists

and how we can know it, are radically different

kinds of question. This is the difference between

ontology and epistemology. The mistake of the Vi-

enna Circle and those it has influenced is to reduce

references to what exists to talk of how we can find

it out, when who “we” are is not always clearly de-

fined. Any exaggerated respect for science never

makes it clear whether it is upholding present sci-

ence, or science as it one day could be. Yet the lat-

ter idea itself begins to seem highly metaphysical in

the sense that it outstrips any possible method of

verification at present available to us.

Logical positivism represents the extreme ver-

sion of the respect for science that permeates con-

temporary thinking. Yet the status of science is it-

self an issue of major philosophical concern that

cannot be taken for granted. Not least is the fact

that science has to assume the existence of an or-

dered and regular world. This is a resupposition of

science. We may as a matter of fact experience na-

ture as uniform, but why is this? Why do humans

have the ability, through reason, to understand the

innermost workings of the physical world? Why is

mathematics somehow applicable to the workings

of nature? For logical positivism, questions like

these were insoluble, and therefore meaningless in

the first place. Yet the worst way of dealing with

awkward questions is to pretend that they do not

exist on the grounds that they are meaningless.

See also CRITICAL REALISM; EMPIRICISM; PHILOSOPHY

SCIENCE

Bibliography

Ayer, A J. Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edition. Lon-

don: Gollancz, 1946.

Feigl, Herbert. Inquiries and Provocations: Selected Writ-

ings, 1929-1975. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel,

1981.

Gödel, Kurt. Collected Works, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Solomon

Feferman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University

Press, 1986 and 1990.

Karnap, Rudolph. The Unity of Science. London: Kegan

Paul, 1934.

Popper, Karl. Logic of Scientific Discovery. London:

Hutchinson, 1959.

Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of

Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1963.

Quine W. V. O. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 1960.

Quine, W. V. O. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Trigg, Roger. Rationality and Science: Can Science Ex-

plain Everything? Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Mass.:

Blackwell Publishers, 1993.

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 687

POSTFOUNDATIONALISM

— 688—

Vienna Circle. “The Scientific Conception of the World:

The Vienna Circle” (1929). Reprinted in Otto Neurath.

Empiricism and Sociology, eds. Marie Neurath and

Robert S. Cohen; trans. Marie Neurath and Paul

Foulkes. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1973.

Waismann, Friedrich. Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna

Circle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophi-

cus(1922), trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness.

New York: Routledge, 2001.

ROGER TRIGG

POSTFOUNDATIONALISM

One of the central methodological issues in the di-

alogue between theology and science is the nature

of rationality. The way one imagines the operation

of reason within and between these disciplines will

shape the way one works to bring them into dia-

logue. The postfoundationalist model of rationality

has emerged out of this ongoing discussion as an

explicit attempt to move beyond the impasse be-

tween foundationalist and nonfoundationalist

models. Unlike the foundationalist, the postfoun-

dationalist acknowledges that rational reflection

(and more broadly, experience itself) is always and

already conditioned by communal and historical

contexts. Unlike the nonfoundationalist, the post-

foundationalist does not believe that this contextu-

ality makes it impossible to reach beyond the con-

fines of particular communities or to strive for

interdisciplinary and transcommunal conversation.

The post is not merely after, nor simply against

foundationalism (as in nonfoundationalism), al-

though it is both of these. Postfoundationalism is

the search for a middle way between the objec-

tivism of foundationalism and the relativism of

many forms of nonfoundationalism.

The philosophical theologian most closely as-

sociated with this view is J. Wentzel van Huyssteen.

His book Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology

(1997) outlines the contours of this model of ra-

tionality, and he fills out the details in The Shaping

of Rationality: Toward Interdisciplinarity in Theol-

ogy and Science (1999). Philip Clayton also illus-

trates this model of rationality in several of his

works, including The Problem of God in Modern

Thought (2000). In his earlier methodological con-

tribution to the dialogue, Explanation from Physics

to Theology (1989), Clayton argued that rejecting

foundationalism does not mean that one automati-

cally falls into the waiting arms of the nonfounda-

tionalists. Several other scholars share the family re-

semblance of postfoundationalism (for examples,

see F. LeRon Shults The Postfoundationalist Task of

Theology, 1999). Both van Huyssteen and Clayton

suggest that the entire debate between foundation-

alism and nonfoundationalism is based on an

outdated epistemological dilemma. Several di-

chotomies are at play here, but they are all embed-

ded in a deeper assumption that separates episte-

mology from hermeneutics.

Epistemology and hermeneutics

In the search for apodictic knowledge (episteme),

classical foundationalists privileged epistemology as

the primary enterprise of philosophy, and es-

chewed the subjective factors that lead to mere

opinion (doxa). Nonfoundationalists valorize the

play of hermeneutics as philosophy’s task; since all

we have is opinionated interpretation, the ancient

(and “modern”) goal of objective knowledge must

be given up. Postfoundationalism aims to accom-

modate the postmodern critique of neutral episteme

without collapsing into relativist hermeneutics.

Conversely, it affirms the modernist interest in gen-

eral patterns of rationality, but rejects foundational-

ist absolutism. Postfoundationalism insists on a con-

stitutive reciprocal relation between epistemology

and hermeneutics, avoiding a collapse into the for-

mer (with its “meta-narrative”) or the latter (with its

isolated narratives). The goal is to maintain the

search for truth as an ideal that drives inquiry,

without asserting that any particular claim to

knowledge provides a totalizing and final metanar-

rative. For van Huyssteen the search for “intelligi-

bility” is upheld as a common link between theol-

ogy, philosophy, and the sciences. Accepting the

ideal of intersubjective intelligibility, however, does

not entail objectivism. An awareness of the “fallibil-

ity” of all human knowledge, argues van Huys-

steen, protects against the absolutism and hege-

mony that worry the nonfoundationalist. Further, to

avoid fideism, which sometimes haunts nonfoun-

dationalist appeals to the faith of a particular com-

munity, the postfoundationalist holds onto the

ideals of truth, objectivity, and rationality, while at

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 688

POSTFOUNDATIONALISM

— 689—

the same time acknowledging the provisional, con-

textual, and fallible nature of human reason.

Experience and belief

As a theory of belief-justification, foundationalism

distinguishes between “basic” beliefs, which are jus-

tified without reference to other beliefs, and “non-

basic” beliefs, which are justified by their inferential

relation to basic beliefs. In this view, basic beliefs

emerge out of and are immediately justified by ex-

perience (whether rational or empirical); inferential

justification then flows in one direction—from basic

to nonbasic beliefs. One can imagine a “pyramid” of

knowledge secured by its firm foundation. Non-

foundationalists typically hold to a form of coher-

entism, which is the main competitor of founda-

tionalism vis-à-vis the debate over the justification

of belief. The favorite images here are a “web” of in-

terconnected beliefs or a “raft” that must be repaired

while afloat. Foundationalism has difficulty defend-

ing its criteria for the basicality of a belief and ac-

counting for the interdependence of all human be-

liefs; nonfoundationalism, insofar as it maintains

strict adherence to coherent relations among beliefs

as the only criterion of justification, has difficulty in-

dicating the truth of its beliefs outside the system. If

these are the only options, then philosophers of sci-

ence and theologians must choose between the al-

leged security of the foundationalist pyramid and

the turbulence of the coherentist raft.

In The Shaping of Rationality, van Huyssteen

suggests a balance that affirms the broader net-

works of belief in which rationally compelling ex-

periences are already embedded and recognizes

the way in which beliefs are anchored in inter-

preted experience. Against the foundationalist idea

that some beliefs enter the web neutrally (without

being interpreted), van Huyssteen insists that all ex-

perience is interpreted. Rather than leading to non-

foundationalist relativism, however, he argues that

one can critically explore the experiential roots of

beliefs without feeling compelled to throw out

one’s commitment to the explanatory power of

those beliefs. In her Evidence and Inquiry (1993)

Susan Haack asserts that foundationalism and co-

herentism do not exhaust the options. Against

coherentism, foundationalism requires that justifica-

tion occurs in one direction; against foundational-

ism, coherentism insists that justification is exclu-

sively accomplished in terms of the relations among

beliefs. Haack argues for a middle way that she

calls foundherentism—the justification of beliefs is

not unidirectional and a coherent relation among

beliefs is not sufficient for their justification.

Individual and community

The debate over belief-justification is closely linked

to the question about the way in which individual

and communal factors shape the formation of be-

liefs. The Enlightenment ideal was the “man of rea-

son” who stands alone and objectively measures

the world. All rational individuals can and ought to

come to the same conclusion, irrespective of their

subjective interests or communal background.

Nonfoundationalists build upon the historicist cri-

tique of this model of rationality, and emphasize

the contextual factors that influence an individual’s

acceptance of criteria for what is reasonable. Point-

ing out the linguistic and communal mediation of

an individual’s web of beliefs, nonfoundationalists

argue not only that the modernist ideal is impossi-

ble but also that it is undesirable because it so eas-

ily leads to the domination of one narrative ration-

ality over another. In its extreme relativist forms,

this leads to the conclusion that local theologies

and local sciences have their own incommensu-

rable rationalities and are not accountable to other

communities of inquiry.

The postfoundationalist agrees that we must

move beyond foundationalist theories of rationality

that aim for universality and certainty, but finds the

nonfoundationalist price for the immunization of

theological rationality from critique from other sci-

ences too much to pay. Postfoundationalism ac-

cepts the nonfoundationalist sensitivity to the

hermeneutical conditioning effected by being situ-

ated in a community of inquirers, but refuses to

give up the intuition that it is the individual who

actually makes rational judgments. This model of

rationality recognizes that an individual is always a

participant within a particular community of in-

quiry and so works out of the standards of its tra-

dition, but also acknowledges that the personal

voice of a rational agent may also critique those

standards through distanciation from the tradition.

Explanation and understanding

The dialogue between science and theology has

been shaped by the separation in western culture

between the natural and the human sciences. This

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 689

POSTMODERNISM

— 690—

modern dichotomy was made explicit by Wilhelm

Dilthey in the nineteenth century, but was

grounded in the metaphysical dualisms of early

modern thought (extended vs. thinking substance,

nature vs. mind). On this model, the natural scien-

tist objectively observes and measures the material

world, offering an explanation of the facts in terms

of universal laws. The human (or social) scientist

examines the behavior of human beings over time,

presenting an understanding of the value of a par-

ticular event in the pattern of a broader context.

With these as the available options, some theolo-

gians tried to model the study of the Christian reli-

gion after the natural sciences; this typically took a

foundationalist form in which basic data is posited

(e.g., in Scripture or religious experience) and

propositions are objectively inferred. Nonfounda-

tionalists, on the other hand, are often satisfied

with categorizing theology as a “human” science,

involving the depth description of particular lin-

guistic communities.

For the postfoundationalist, all human know-

ing and so all of the sciences are characterized by

both hermeneutical understanding and the drive

toward experientially adequate and intersubjective

explanation. In Explanation from Physics to Theol-

ogy Philip Clayton proposes a mediating position

that recognizes the shaping influence of contexts

of meaning, but simultaneously allows for general

standards or criteria for explanation in the sci-

ences. He defines understanding broadly as an in-

tuitive grasping of patterns of meaning, and expla-

nation as a rational reconstruction of these

interrelated structures in a primarily theoretical

context. Although the values, interests and goals

that guide their operation will differ, explanation

and understanding are interdependent and opera-

tive in both theology and science. By exploring

the dynamics of rationality that lay across these

fields, postfoundationalism aims to contribute to a

safe interdisciplinary space for the dialogue be-

tween science and theology.

See also COHERENTISM; FALLIBILISM; FOUNDATIONALISM;

ONFOUNDATIONALISM; POSTMODERNISM

Bibliography

Clayton, Philip. Explanation from Physics to Theology: An

Essay in Rationality and Religion. New Haven, Conn.:

Yale University Press, 1989.

Clayton, Philip. The Problem of God in Modern Thought.

Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000.

Gregersen, Niels Henrik, and van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel,

eds. Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for

the Current Dialogue. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-

mans, 1998.

Haack, Susan. Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruc-

tion in Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Murphy, Nancey. Beyond Liberalism and Fundamental-

ism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the

Theological Agenda. Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press

International, 1996.

Schrag, Calvin O. The Resources of Rationality: A Response

to the Postmodern Challenge. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1992.

Shults, F. LeRon. The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology:

Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Ratio-

nality. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.

Stenmark, Mikael. Rationality in Science, Religion, and

Everyday Life: A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of

Rationality. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1995.

van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel. Essays in Postfoundationalist

Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997.

van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel. The Shaping of Rationality: To-

ward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science.

Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.

F. LERON SHULTS

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism is an abstract, theoretical term and

should be distinguished from postmodernity,

which describes a sociological or cultural climate.

The term postmodernism was coined in the late

1940s by British historian Arnold Toynbee, but

used in the mid-1970s by the American art critic

and theorist Charles Jencks to describe contempo-

rary antimodernist movements like Pop art, Con-

cept Art, and Postminimalism. Jean-François Ly-

otard, in his book The Postmodern Condition: A

Report on Knowledge (1979), was one of the first

thinkers to write extensively about postmodernism

as a wider cultural phenomenon. He viewed it as

coming both before and after modernism, the re-

verse side of it. As such, postmodern moments

have subsequently been discerned in thinkers as

various as the eighteenth-century Scottish philoso-

pher David Hume, the nineteenth-century Danish

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 690

POSTMODERNISM

— 691—

philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, and the German

philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Characteristics of the postmodern

For Lyotard, the postmodern is characterized by an

incredulity towards metanarratives. By metanarra-

tives he means the appeal to explanatory principles

that presume to tell the story of the ways things

are. Metanarrratives are accounts of the origin,

foundations, and formations of the various forms

of human knowledge: for example, motion (Isaac

Newton), the mind (René Descartes and Immanuel

Kant), history (George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel),

the economy (Karl Marx), psychology (Sigmund

Freud), and society (Emile Durkheim). Metanarra-

tives assume the world and human activity within

it can be known as a whole because it is rational

and organized according to certain universal and

verifiable laws or principles. Postmodernism an-

nounces a radical scepticism towards such univer-

salism and the objectivity or view from no where

that is presupposed in investigations into and ac-

counts of these foundational laws or principles.

Postmodernity, then, would describe a cultural sit-

uation in which such scepticism was culturally

dominant. In such a time, the postmodern would

not just be a theoretical critique of modernity’s ra-

tional understanding of the world and the univer-

salism of that reasoning. The postmodern would

be an attempt to rethink and experience the world

according to that antifoundationalism and the turn

towards local knowledges or views from a specific

standpoints: gendered knowledges, ethnic knowl-

edges, religious knowledges, for example.

The postmodern world is composed of little

other than grand narratives, accounts of knowl-

edge that are aware they are partial in nature, re-

fracted through a certain cultural perspective and

constructed. Their constructedness is important,

specifically when attempting to assess the impact

of postmodernism on religion, science, and the de-

bates between them. The constructedness of

knowledge challenges the foundational realism of

the empirical sciences in which language is simply

viewed as transparently communicating the world

as it is, mediating between mind and matter. When

knowledge of “what is” is understood as con-

structed, then reality is soft, pliable, and ultimately

open to endless interpretation and reinterpretation.

Language no longer simply mediates or acts like a

clear window on the world. Language creates,

fashions what people see and what they under-

stand by what they see. The universal concepts

governing thinking in both the human and natural

sciences in modernity—truth, nature, reality, his-

tory—are viewed as unstable. The instrumental

thinking that accumulated “neutral” data, measured

it, calculated the options, and arrived at general

statements through an inductive reasoning is seen,

at best, as just one form of rationality. Explanation

becomes a mode of interpretation. Time (as a se-

quence of present moments), space (as that which

either contains or is the extension of things), mat-

ter (as composed of atomized particles) all are re-

figured by the nonrealism and antifoundationalism

of the postmodern. Attention to the constructed

nature of representing the world leads to an em-

phasis upon the metaphoric, the symbolic, the al-

legorical, the theatrical, and the rhetorical. Rather

than a world of inert entities, passive before objec-

tive enquiry, in the postmodern all things signify,

entities are expressive. The real is an aesthetic ef-

fect so that belief in the literal is exactly that, a be-

lief. The literal, the transparency of modernity’s un-

derstanding of the meaning behind language,

becomes an ideology.

Postmodern science and religion

While Silicon Valley scientists were establishing

both themselves and cyberspace, the postmodern

condition was producing its own understanding of

virtual reality. And while astrophysicists were ex-

ploring the collapse of stars and the creation of

black holes, the postmodern condition was pro-

ducing its own understanding of the implosion of

secular modernity and the sacredness of the void.

The parallelisms between what the empirical sci-

ences term “discoveries” and the cultural sciences

in postmodernity would call “inventions” are not

felicitous but inevitable. If knowledge is produced

rather than found within a particular cultural mi-

lieu, then such parallelism will necessarily occur.

Mary Hesse had already demonstrated this in her

book Revolution and Reconstructions in the Phi-

losophy of Science (1980). Paul Feyerabend had

taken cultural pluralism right into the heart of the

empirical sciences with his Against Method (1975).

At the same time, the French philosopher and

historian Michel Foucault was developing his ge-

nealogies and “archaeologies” of clinics, econom-

ics, madness, punishment, and sexuality, and ex-

tending the thesis that the way the world is

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 691

POSTMODERNISM

— 692—

understood and organized is governed by discur-

sive acts of power and practical disciplines in

which the body becomes the prisoner of the soul

(or the way mind conceives the world to be). A so-

ciology of knowledge led to a sociology of scien-

tific knowledge. New histories were written that

countered modernity’s “progress” model of scien-

tific discovery. New epistemologies and method-

ologies were sought, like the feminist standpoint

work of Sandra Harding and Helen Longino, which

examined abduction—or the choices made in sci-

entific research prior to and governing inductive

reasoning.

At the same time, a new marriage was emerg-

ing between the mythological and the technologi-

cal. In modernity, as the sociologist Max Weber’s

“disenchantment thesis” taught, the job of science

was to demystify the world, and the various tech-

nological revolutions were the practical outwork-

ing of this rigorous demythologizing. The success

of science was measured by progress in terms of

human control over the world. Everything could

be explained; science would provide the answers,

and technology would harness the answers in

order to liberate human beings from the drudgery

of labor for the pursuit of civilized living. The su-

pernatural was for the superstitious and the igno-

rant; religion was for those needing private conso-

lation. Stripped of its liturgies, stories, and

priestcraft, religion expressed human ideals of the

good life. The priest at the altar was replaced by

the scientist in the laboratory as religion, among

the enlightened, was viewed as mythological cloth-

ing for human aspirations, fears, and projections.

As such, modernity’s dreams were often secular-

ized religious ones: a new Jerusalem of technolog-

ical efficiency as intellectually hygienic as it was bi-

ologically controlled. The “disenchantment” of the

world, cultivated by technological progress, was a

fundamental tool in the secularization of the sa-

cred. All values were to be found in this world, not

beyond it, and human beings were capable of re-

alizing the very highest of these values themselves,

through rationalization and forward planning.

The emergence of the postmodern condition,

in critiquing the grand narratives of explanation

and pointing up the ideologies of control, ap-

pealed to what lay outside of the secular world-

view. From the mid-1970s there has been revival of

romantic thinking. The gothic imagination flour-

ishes again in popular culture, not only in terms of

vampires, warlocks, angels, dungeons, dragons,

and fascination with the psychotic, but in terms

also of a renewed interest in all things medieval.

The mythopoetic was revived, and the character of

that revival can be estimated by comparing the

Narnia Chronicles of C. S. Lewis to Philip Pullman’s

Dark Materials trilogy or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Pot-

ter series. For Lewis, Narnia was a separate realm

reached only through the wardrobe in a professor’s

rambling Oxfordshire home. But in Dark Materials,

the supernatural world is not distinct from the nat-

ural world, there is neither one nor the other.

Popular science (promoted in part by various

governments wanting to interest the young in the

technological and nurture a new generation of sci-

entists and technicians) and science fiction assist

now in the re-enchantment of the world. With the

spread of home computers, the developments in

telecommunications, digital graphics, and cine-

matic special effects, science promotes the bending

of modernity’s understanding of the real. Virtual re-

ality is now not standing alongside some naturalis-

tic prototype, virtual realities (plural) confuse any

boundary between the natural and the supernatu-

ral. Science now promotes the transcendence of

the human.

Two important thinkers have helped us to un-

derstand this postmodern science: Bruno Latour

and Michel Serres. Latour’s best known book, We

Have Never Been Modern (1993), points out how

modernity aspired to a transparency that separated

one thing clearly from another. Modernity was

committed to distillation. What it feared and po-

liced was hybridities. As such, modernity produced

and fostered a series of dualisms: the objective and

the subjective; the body and the mind; the public

and the private; the organic and the mechanical;

the natural and the cultural. But the production

and fostering of such dualisms required mediating

agencies. The postmodern world is witnessing the

return of the hybrid, as the mediating agencies can

no longer cope with the infiltration of one category

into another. The vampire, the cyborg, and the

angel all figure this transcendence of the human,

the instrumental, the calculated, and the rational in

contemporary culture. The priest and the scientist

are, as they often were in the mediaeval world, the

same person.

Michel Serres book Angels: A Modern Myth

(1993) expounds this new world-view in which

postmodern science and religion fuse. Sketching a

LetterP.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 692

POSTMODERNISM

— 693—

profound interrelatedness of all things, Serres de-

nies material things are inert. All things communi-

cate—the waves of the sea, weather systems, rock

formations, human beings. The world is caught up

in endless relays and interchanges of messages. As

angels have traditionally been conceived as the

purest of messengers, so the world can be viewed

as participating in an angelic intercommunication

that transcends this particular person or that par-

ticular object. Global telecommunications become

an expression and development of this participa-

tion in a complex, discursive interconnectedness

which, ultimately, for Serres, sings a doxology to

the Most High. Serres practices the hybridity Latour

informs us is the state of things, relating it specifi-

cally to a theological (in fact specifically Christian

and sacramental) worldview.

Conclusion

The postmodern condition announces the collapse

of secularism, but it also announces a new dia-

logue between religion and science. In premoder-

nity, scientific enquiry submitted itself to religious

judgement. In modernity, religion was deemed

outdated, if not pathological, by the rise of the new

sciences. In postmodernity, neither the oppositions

nor the hierarchies pertain. And so the character of

the debates between religion and science will

change also. The earlier debates concerned them-

selves with attempting to show that there was no

incompatibility between scientific discoveries and

the religious perspective. They were conducted

frequently by scientists with religious commit-

ments, in an attempt to integrate two divergent

views of the world. They constituted a form of lib-

eral apologetics in which science offered the vision

of what was, and religionists showed how that did

not conflict with a theological worldview. The

metaphysics of empiricism and positivism re-

mained firmly in place, dictating the terms of the

struggle and the attempts at détente. Postmod-

ernism, having challenged those empiricisms and

positivisms, having announced a contemporary in-

credulity in such foundationalism, will usher in a

round of new debates between religion and sci-

ence that will demonstrate a shift in cultural power,

a reciprocal learning, a new respect. Serres’s work

shows the way, but religionists have recently ap-

pealed also to the work of the Oxford mathemati-

cian Roger Penrose who, in a different way, en-

dorses an indeterminacy between the brain and

the world such that both the material and the im-

material are caught up in complex informational

processes. The various alliances between new age

religions and concerns with ecology are also sig-

nificant indicators of cultural change. The basis for

the new discussions is an emphasis upon intercon-

nectedness and attention to participating within

open-ended informational systems in which the

psychic and the material are not distinct but insep-

arable, mutually informing dimensions.