Metaphors for God’s Time in Science and Religion

226 Pages·2002·1.012 MB·English

by  Stephen Happel

Metaphors for God’s Time in Science and Religion
Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture
General Editors:
Elisabeth Jay, Senior Research Fellow, Westminster College, Oxford
David Jasper, Professor in Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow
The study of theology and religion nowadays calls upon a wide range of
interdisciplinary skills and cultural perspectives to illuminate the concerns at
the heart of religious faith. Books in this new series will variously explore the
contributions made by literature, philosophy and science in forming our
historical and contemporary understanding of religious issues and theological
perspectives.
Published titles:
Harold Fisch
NEWSTORIESFOROLD
Biblical Patterns in the Novel
Susan VanZanten Gallagher and M. D. Walhout (editors)
LITERATURE AND THE RENEWAL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Michael Giffin
JANEAUSTENANDRELIGION
Salvation and Society in Georgian England
Philip Leonard (editor)
TRAJECTORIES OF MYSTICISM IN THEORY AND LITERATURE
Lynda Palazzo
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S FEMINIST THEOLOGY
Eric Ziolkowski
EVIL CHILDREN IN RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND ART
Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (editors)
THE ARTS, COMMUNITY AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY
Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture
Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–79469–9
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing
order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address
below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Metaphors for God’s Time
in Science and Religion
Stephen Happel
Dean, School of Religious Studies
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC
© Stephen Happel 2002
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-71410-2
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under
the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the
Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2002 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan
Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United
Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the
European Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-40324-0 ISBN 978-1-4039-3758-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403937582
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Happel, Stephen, 1944-
Metaphors for God’s time in science and religion / Stephen Happel.
p. cm. — (Cross currents in religion and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Religion and science. 2. Time—Religious aspects—Christianity.
3. Metaphor—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title. II. Cross currents
in religion and culture (Palgrave (Firm))
BL240.3 .H36 2002
261.5’5—dc21 2002025143
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Can Transcendence be Found in Things? 1
1 Metaphors and Multiple Meanings 8
2 The Story of the Universe: Metaphors for Time in
Astrophysical Cosmology 29
3 Does Chaos Tell a Story? 53
4 The Politics of Evolution:Metaphors for Competition 77
5 Neural Networks, Human Time, and the Soul 107
6 Time as Gift: God’s Journey 133
Notes 155
Index 197
v
Acknowledgements
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes – of ships – and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings,’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Called to accounts, I must acknowledge many debts. I owe most to the
participants in a research project on ‘perspectives on divine action’
sponsored by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at
Berkeley, CA and its director Dr. Robert J. Russell; and the Vatican
Observatory, Castel Gandolfo and Mt. Graham, AZ and its director
Rev. Dr. George Coyne, S.J. During the past ten years, they have
invited me to be part of a conversation concerning the issues of science
and theology that have constantly stimulated my mental agility and
provided the kind of hearty intellectual exchange at conferences rarely
available in academic life. In addition to Drs. Russell and Coyne,
ongoing discussions with Michael Arbib, George Ellis, Michael Heller,
Nancey Murphy, Arthur Peacocke, Ted Peters, John Polkinghorne,
William Stoeger, and Wesley Wildman have taught me far more than
I have offered to them.
Earlier versions of Chapters 2, 4, and 5 were published as papers for
the conferences and are reprinted here with the permission of the
Vatican Observatory Press.1 Portions of chapter 3 are reprinted with
the permission of The European Legacy, the Journal of the International
Society for the Study of European Ideas.2
I am also grateful to my editors, Drs. Elizabeth Jay and David Jasper,
for their considerable patience about the completion of this manu-
script. Becoming an administrator in a large urban university at the
conclusion of a sabbatical leaves little time for thinking, let alone
writing, and earns professional demerits with one’s colleagues, espe-
cially when projects are due. I am also indebted to the administration,
faculty, and staff of the School of Religious Studies and The Catholic
University of America for a sabbatical leave which permitted me to
investigate this project. My debts to friends who fed me at dinners and
ignored my unavailability to reciprocate are incalculable.
Despite all the conversation and support, however, any failures of
vii
viii Metaphors for God’s Time in Science and Religion
understanding, whether in science or theology are my own. I am only
grateful that there should be fewer of them for the time these thinkers
spent with me. I thank Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter for the careful
index, more a collaboration than a task performed. For whatever
remains, I am thankful and dedicate the book to my mother, Jane
Connor Happel, the chemist who relinquished a great love of her labo-
ratory to raise me. I suspect that genes and culture cooperated to give
me my passion for understanding science and religion. To have
learned about both from a woman who read me Shakespeare and
Carroll was sheer grace.
Stephen Happel, Dean
School of Religious Studies
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC
Introduction: Can Transcendence
be Found in Things?
Geometry came to a halt,
struck with amazement at the glittering sky.
Her hair was beautifully groomed, but
her feet were covered with dust.
Martianus Capellus,
The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, ca. 410–439
This book is about many questions: God, time, and the search by
human beings for God in time and space. As Coleridge said of George
Berkeley, the philosopher and bishop, because the topic reaches from
‘tar-water, ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the inter-
space,’1carrying a map or fixing upon a geophysical satellite might be
useful as readers travel through the terrain. In the foreground I will
examine the ways in which metaphors for time function in the natural
sciences and theology or religious studies.2But I will aim for a view of
God and divine action in our world that includes, rather than
excludes, all of creation – from the formation of metals and planets to
human beings. To complete these tasks will require some clarity about
notions of metaphor, changing notions of temporality in the sciences,
and Christian theology. If it has been chronically painful for theology
since the nineteenth century to become privatized, relegated to
personal experience or intimate interpersonal interactions, this book
hopes to be some remedy.
To scientists, it will be obvious that I am not a mathematician or a
specialist in any of the fields whose data and interpretations I oversee.
My academic training is in philosophy, literary and cultural studies,
and Christian theology. I will examine the images and texts of science
as literature, a peculiar, and not always ‘artful,’ type of prose to be sure,
1
S. Happel, Metaphors for God's Time in Science and Religion
© Stephen Happel 2002
2 Metaphors for God’s Time in Science and Religion
but a literature with metaphors nonetheless. Recognizing that scien-
tists use language and symbols to communicate their findings has
guided my investigations.3 Implicitly, sometimes explicitly, rhetoric
has a role within scientific discourse itself. Increasingly, the politics of
grant-application and reception is understood as an exercise in public
rhetoric. Scientists sometimes tell me that when they are engaging in
science, they are not being rhetorical. However, part of my argument
about the role of metaphors, images, and stories within the natural
sciences is that science both is a rhetoric in its methodological opera-
tion and it includes rhetoric inside its borders.4 This does not demean
science; it helps locate its effectiveness.
Theology and religious studies also involve rhetoric.5 In theology
this is easier to observe since homiletic communication was not only
the original, oral form of Christian religious discourse, but theories
about such liturgical, narrative, and missionary communication have
never ceased. Religious studies with its embedment within social scien-
tific discourse has only recently begun to discuss its rhetorical
dimensions, along with its dialogue partners in sociology, psychology,
anthropology, and economics. To differentiate the importance of
rhetoric within theology, even to give it priority, does not demote
systematic theology or doctrines, it challenges religions to think about
how they were effective in the past and how they might be persuasive
in the cultures of post-Enlightenment, post-industrial societies.
Recognizing that both science and religion have rhetorical dimensions
may allow them to communicate more readily across the borders of
mutual suspicion.
My understanding of both science and religion charts their relation-
ships to artful language and images, the rhetoric they share as well as
the styles that divorce them. Some may think this claim bizarre, since
it interprets what is clear, precise, and accurate truth about the objec-
tively real with what is muddled, fuzzy, emotional, and subjective.
Religious people may estimate that I have turned the expressions of
faith into novels and poetry. Indeed, both art and religion have been
relegated to the same relativizing dustbin of post-Enlightenment
refuse. How can we hope to shed light on the truthful pragmatic
methodologies and results of the natural sciences with the subjectivity
of aesthetics and religion?
The argument of the book must therefore proceed from two sides.
The results of the philosophy of science teach us that the supposed
precision of the sciences is just that – a carefully constructed clarity.
With more attentive historical study, we also have begun to recover