Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Preface
'In scientific investigations . . . it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts, it rises to the rank of a well grounded theory.' Charles Darwin (1869): The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication Introduction
A brief personal history
This book comes from a lifetime investment in theology, a journey from disaster and despair to reconstruction and hope.
As a young person I suffered severely from the effects of theological delusion. I pledged my life to the Catholic Church by entering a monastery, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and beginning to train for the priesthood. After about three years I discovered that the Church worships a false God with feet of clay. I spoke my mind and was asked to leave. Evangelical counsels - Wikipedia, Priesthood in the Catholic Church - Wikipedia
I realized that the only way to save myself, and everyone else who has been deluded by the Church, was to bring theology into the scientific fold. In hindsight, the transition is simple. We merely accept that the Universe is divine and that all our experience is experience of God. We then apply scientific method to this divine revelation. Scientists have already been doing this for centuries. From this point of view, science is evidence based theology, divided into various specialities like physics, biology, psychology, ecology, economics, politics, philosophy, literature and so on.
I was born into a Catholic milieu. Like every baby, I unconsciously absorbed the language and culture around me. I went to Catholic schools. I was taught by nuns, brothers and priests, the professed propagandists of magisterial doctrine. I believed it all. My teachers were honoured as good people and I had no reason then to doubt them. They treated me well while filling my head with Catholic doctrine. Fortunately, in my years at high school, I learnt some science and mathematics. This knowledge (passed on by Catholic teachers) ultimately saved me from the Church.
The central tenet of my indoctrination was emphasis on sin. We are all sinners, they said. Our sinful career began with the first people, 'Adam' and 'Eve'. Their original sin is recounted in Genesis. I learnt that pleasure is, on the whole, sinful. I learnt that sinners go to hell. Since I was an energetic and sensual child I couldn't help committing 'sins of the flesh'. I was doomed to eternal agony. The Book of Genesis, Catholic Catechism: '§1035-36: Hell
Since I badly wanted to go to heaven, the only solution seemed to be to go over the top in my search for salvation — supererogation — so I joined a religious order, the Dominicans. Supererogation - Wikipedia
The Dominican Order was founded in 1216, 800 years ago to work on the destruction of heresy. Later it moved into the inquisition business. A religious Order is a total experience. Life is regimented from before dawn until well after dark and one is closely watched for signs of independent thought. Reading was closely controlled. Dominican Order - Wikipedia
I found the early rising, the silence, the meditation and the overall level of control a burden, but believed that the promise of the beatific vision made it worth the effort. Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8: Is human happiness the vision of the divine essence?
The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas is the only theologian endorsed in the Code of Canon Law, the constitution of the Catholic Church. My Latin was good enough to read Thomas and I became completely hooked. His exposition put the Catholic doctrine I had learnt from the little Catechism in a completely different light.
Thomas Aquinas - Wikipedia, Holy See: Code of Canon Law: Canon 252 § 3
Thomas believed that the world leads us to God. This is clearest in his proofs for the existence of God, which fascinated me. I vaguely knew much of this to be false, but what Thomas had to say about God in the first part of his Summa Theologiae captured my imagination and I did my best to understand it.
My dream began to fade when I read Bernard Lonergan's book Insight. Lonergan sets out to translate Thomas's theology into the twentieth century. Thomas himself built his theology on the work of Aristotle, written some 1600 years earlier. Like many philosophers, Lonergan uses a theory of knowledge to try to understand the known world, including knowledge itself. Aquinas and Aristotle define God as pure actuality, the realization of all possible activities. Lonergan translated this the psychological realm, defining God as pure intelligibility. He built his theory of intelligibility on the experience of insight, the act of understanding. Lonergan: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
Lonergan then tried to use his definition of God to prove the existence of God, just as Aristotle argued for the existence of the first unmoved mover because there had to be pure activity driving the moving world. If we believe that God created the world, its existence is obvious. What Aquinas proved is that God is not the world, because the world is not pure act. Lonergan attempted to prove that God is not the world by showing that the world is incompletely intelligible.
To do this he invented empirical residue meaningless data, and claimed that there is such data in the world. To me, this seemed wrong. I knew enough physics to know that every event is a consequence of previous events, and that this chain of events links back to the initial singularity, which is formally identical to Thomas's God. Every event is given meaning by its history. So maybe there is no empirical residue. The past is fully intelligible, or would be if we knew it, so the world fits Londergan's definition of God. Initial singularity - Wikipedia
This is, of course, heresy, but I became sufficiently convinced to begin talking about my exegesis of Lonergan, asking in an essay How universal is the Universe?. I took the naive view that since theology is a science, it is open to paradigm changes like all the other sciences. I had misunderstood the difference in meaning between the medieval Latin term scientia and the modern term science. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, How universal is the Universe?
Scientia is a scholastic term meaning knowledge deduced from principles. The principles of theology, according to Aquinas, are the knowledge of God expressed in the scriptures. Science, to one educated in the twentieth century, means knowledge based on observation and experience of the world.
It seemed to me that theology would be so much more meaningful if we could actually observe God. After years of intense discussion with the Master of Studies, I was found to be in error and asked to leave. My solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were annulled by the Pope.
This was a shock. I was a bit like a farm bred animal being released into the wild. It became clearer and clearer to me that the Catholic Church is a scientific fraud. The principal problem is that the Church believes its own false conception of god. This conception is essential to the Catholic business plan, laid out by its alleged founder, Jesus of Nazareth. As long as their god is invisible, they can say what they like about them without fear of refutation. Robert Crotty: The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors
The divine Jesus established the Church, founded on "Peter, the rock" and gave it a monopoly on developing and spreading the story of salvation (often called the word of god).
And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Mark 16:15-18
The word of God, the Church's intellectual property, is the foundation of its global prosperity. The Church says that it is only by believing this story, as transmitted through and interpreted by the Church itself, can we be saved.
The ancient misunderstanding of god has a long history and is very widespread. It arises from the problem the ancients had reconciling motion and stillness. We find early documentation of this problem in fragments of a poem by Parmenides. Parmenides - Wikipedia
How can we have true and permanent knowledge of our moving world? One answer is that we cannot. If we are to have such knowledge, we must postulate a perfect eternal being that is not only the true subject of knowledge, but explains the existence of the world. Plato developed Parmenides' idea into the invisible world of perfect forms which is very poorly imitated by our material world. The notion that there are purely immaterial beings (God, the Angels and the Devils) has remained central to Catholic theology ever since.
We now have a new solution to Parmenides' ancient problem in the mathematical theory of fixed points. We begin with Aristotle's argument that there must be a first unmoved mover which is pure actuality. Aristotle: Metaphysics, Book XII, vii
He arrived at this conclusion using his theory of potential (dynamis) and act (entelecheia or energeia). This theory is built on the axiom that no potential can actualize itself: it can only be actualized by something already actual. Since motion is the transition from potential to actual, there can be no motion in the world unless there is a first unmoved mover which is pure act. Aquinas took this argument straight over into his first proof for the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3: Does God exist?
We might identify the ancient term actus purus with the modern terms action and dynamics. Mathematically we model dynamic processes using functions or mappings. Fixed point theory tells us that under some very broad conditions, mappings f have fixed points x such that f(x) = x. This enables us to reconcile the enormously complex array of fixed points that we observe in our world with the world in which we live.
The fixed points in the divine dynamics are known in quantum mechanics as observables. They are in effect messages from god, that is revelation. By taking note of all our experiences, we are led to an understanding of god. Because our experiences are real data, they can form the foundation of science. If the Universe is divine, all science is science of god. In this picture theology is the theory of everything which sees the findings of all the other sciences as partial images of the whole.
We live in god, we are divine, and we see god face to face all the time. This is my story.
(revised 28 December 2020)
Table of contents
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Further readingBooks
Crotty (2017), Robert, The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors, Springer 2017 ' The book puts the current interest in historical Jesus research into a proper historical context, highlighting Gnosticism’s lasting influence on early Christianity and making the provocative claim that nearly all Christian Churches are in some way descended from Roman Christianity. Breaking with the accepted wisdom of Christianity’s origins, the revised history it puts forward challenges the assumptions of Church and secular historians, biblical critics and general readers alike, with profound repercussions for scholarship, belief and practice.
About the Author
Robert Brian Crotty is the Emeritus Professor of Religion and Education at the University of South Australia. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge University. Professor Crotty was educated in Australia, Rome and Jerusalem. He has research degrees in Ancient History, Education, Christian Theology and Biblical Studies. He is an Élève Titulaire of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. In Rome and Jerusalem, he studied under some of the great scholars of early Christianity, including Ignace de la Potterie, Marie-Émile Boismard and Pierre Benoit and studied Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Syriac in order to further his intimate understanding of biblical texts. He has authored or edited some 33 books, multiple book chapters and journal articles in the areas of Theology, Biblical Studies and World Religions.'
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Darwin (1875), Charles, and Harriet Ritvo (Introduction), The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (Foundations of Natural History), Johns Hopkins University Press 1875, 1998 ' "The Variation, with its thousands of hard-won observations of the facts of variation in domesticated species, is a frustrating, but worthwhile read, for it reveals the Darwin we rarely see -- the embattled Darwin, struggling to keep his project on the road. Sometimes he seems on the verge of being overwhelmed by the problems he is dealing with, but then a curious fact of natural history will engage him (the webbing between water gun-dogs' toes, the absurdly short beak of the pouter pigeon) and his determination to make sense of it rekindles. As he disarmingly declares, 'the whole subject of inheritance is wonderful.'.
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Kuhn, Thomas S, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press 1962, 1970, 1996 Introduction: 'a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man, and never overnight.' [p 7]
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'
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Links
Aquinas, Summa, II I, 3, 8, Does man's happiness consists in the vision of the divine essence?, 'Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: secondly, that the perfection of any power is determined by the nature of its object.' back |
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, vii, 'But since there is something which moves while itself unmoved, existing actually, this can in no way be otherwise than as it is. For motion in space is the first of the kinds of change, and motion in a circle the first kind of spatial motion; and this the first mover produces. The first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle.' 1072b3 sqq back |
Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c3, a12 IV, IV Hell, '§1035 'The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, "eternal fire."The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
§1036 The affirmations of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church on the subject of hell are a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny. They are at the same time an urgent call to conversion: "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few." ' back |
Charles Darwin (1869), The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, ' 'In scientific investigations . . . it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts, it rises to the rank of a well grounded theory.' back |
Dominican Order - Wikipedia, Dominican Order - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Order of Preachers (Latin: Ordo Praedicatorum, postnominal abbreviation OP), also known as the Dominican Order, is a mendicant Catholic religious order founded by the Spanish priest Dominic of Caleruega in France, approved by Pope Honorius III via the Papal bull Religiosam vitam on 22 December 1216. . . .Founded to preach the Gospel and to oppose heresy, the teaching activity of the order and its scholastic organisation placed the Preachers in the forefront of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The order is famed for its intellectual tradition, having produced many leading theologians and philosophers.' back |
Evangelical counsels - Wikipedia, Evangelical counsels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The three evangelical counsels or counsels of perfection in Christianity are chastity, poverty (or perfect charity), and obedience. As Jesus of Nazareth stated in the Canonical gospels, they are counsels for those who desire to become "perfect" . . . . The Catholic Church interprets this to mean that they are not binding upon all and hence not necessary conditions to attain eternal life (heaven). Rather they are "acts of supererogation" that exceed the minimum stipulated in the Commandments in the Bible. Christians that have made a public profession to order their life by the evangelical counsels, and confirmed this by a public religious vow before their competent church authority (the act of religious commitment called "profession"), are recognised as members of the consecrated life.' back |
Fall of Man - Wikipedia, Fall of Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In Christian doctrine, the fall of man, or simply the fall, was the transition of the first humans from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience to God. Though not named in the Bible, the concept for the Fall comes from Genesis chapter 3. Adam and Eve live at first with God in a paradise, but the serpent tempts them into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God forbade. After doing so they become ashamed of their nakedness and God consequently expelled them from paradise. Many Christian denominations believe that the fall corrupted the entire natural world, including human nature, causing people to be born into original sin, a state from which they cannot attain eternal life without the gracious intervention of God.' back |
Holy See, Code of Canon Law: Canon 252 § 3, 'There are to be classes in dogmatic theology, always grounded in the written word of God together with sacred tradition; through these, students are to learn to penetrate more intimately the mysteries of salvation, especially with St. Thomas as a teacher. There are also to be classes in moral and pastoral theology, canon law, liturgy, ecclesiastical history, and other auxiliary and special disciplines, according to the norm of the prescripts of the program of priestly formation.' back |
Initial singularity - Wikipedia, Initial singularity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The initial singularity was the gravitational singularity of infinite density thought to have contained all of the mass and spacetime of the Universe before quantum fluctuations caused it to rapidly expand in the Big Bang and subsequent inflation, creating the present-day Universe.' back |
Mark 16, The Great Commission, 'And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.' back |
Parmenides - Wikipedia, Parmenides - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Parmenides of Elea (early 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, his only known work is a poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. In it, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In the Way of Truth, he explained how reality is one; change is impossible; and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In the Way of Opinion, he explained the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful. These thoughts strongly influenced Plato, and through him, the whole of western philosophy.' back |
Priesthood in the Catholic Church - Wikipedia, Priesthood in the Catholic Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The priesthood is one of the three holy orders of the Catholic Church, comprising the ordained priests or presbyters. The other two orders are the bishops and the deacons. Church doctrine also sometimes refers to all baptised Catholics as the "common priesthood".' back |
Supererogation - Wikipedia, Supererogation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In the theology of the Roman Catholic Church, "works of supererogation" (also called "acts of supererogation") are those performed beyond what God requires. For example, in 1 Corinthians 7, Saint Paul says that while everyone is free to marry, it is better to refrain from marriage and remain celibate to better serve God. The Roman Catholic Church holds that the counsels of perfection are supererogatory acts, which specific Christians may engage in above their moral duties.' back |
The Book of Genesis, The Fall, '1. Now the snake was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made. He asked the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?”
2.
The woman answered the snake: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;
3
it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die.’”
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But the snake said to the woman: “You certainly will not die!
5
God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know* good and evil.”
6
The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
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Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
8
When they heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden at the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
9
The LORD God then called to the man and asked him: Where are you?
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He answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.”
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Then God asked: Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat?
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The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.”
13
The LORD God then asked the woman: What is this you have done? The woman answered, “The snake tricked me, so I ate it.”
14
Then the LORD God said to the snake:
Because you have done this,
cursed are you
among all the animals, tame or wild;
On your belly you shall crawl,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
They will strike at your head,
while you strike at their heel.
16
To the woman he said:
I will intensify your toil in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Yet your urge shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.
17
To the man he said: Because you listened to your wife
and ate from the tree about which I commanded you,
You shall not eat from it,
Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.
18
Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.
19
By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.' back |
Thomas Aquinas - Wikipedia, Thomas Aquinas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Thomas Aquinas, OP (1225 – 7 March 1274) . . . was an Italian Dominican friar and priest and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, within which he is also known as the "Doctor Angelicus" and "Doctor Communis". . . .
He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived in development or opposition of his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory. Unlike many currents in the Church of the time. Thomas embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle — whom he referred to as "the Philosopher" — and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity.' back |
Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back |
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