Alan Torrance’s Didsbury Lectures 2009, 4/4.

‘Exclusivism and Embrace’

Torrance started by suggesting that one way we construct idols, or fit the gospel into a procrustean bed, is through language. He called this ‘semantic immanentism’, a failure to ‘re-schematise’ our language in the reality of the divine, a failure in the ‘direction of pressure of interpretation.’ He offered three examples of Hebrew terms that, through translation are totally transformed, leading to radically different conceptions of the divine and our relation to it.

1)      berith (covenant) > diatheke in NT > foedus (contract) (Latin has no word for covenant). So rather than unilateral and unconditional acceptance and covenant, we end up with a contractual and conditional relation to God.

2)      Tsedaqah (righteousness) > dikaiosune in NT > iustitia (justice). Latin/Western Christian tradition ends up with an impersonal and retributive sense of justice, rather than God’s righteousness as not breaking a bruised reed (Is 42).

3)      Torah > nomosin NT > lex (law) – takes on Stoic connotations as legal demands to be met before we are accepted by God, rather than the demands put on us precisely through being accepted already by God.

Torrance was frequently critical of the Western ordo salutis for failing on each of these regards. Instead of a God of unconditional loving faithfulness to Israel we end up with a legalistic, contractual religion, with a  God who must be cajoled into forgiving us. The legal replaces the filial. He suggests this  is so common because a) the freeness of grace offends human pride and control; b) the continuing appeal of the desire for understanding of the divine to be universally and immanently available (not mediate through particular historical events); c) desire to see sinners as culpable; d) fear of antinomianism.

As to the latter, Torrance evidenced the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Winnie Mandela refused, in the face of massive evidence to admit any wrongdoing. Tutu stood up, approached her with open arms and said, ‘I speak to you as one who loves you deeply. Can you not admit that mistakes have been made?’ She then admitted that things had gone horribly wrong.

He then moved on to talk about the political ramifications of forgiveness, citing Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. He rejected the idea that retributive justice could ever make things right (Arendt’s ‘predicament of irreversability’: the wrong cannot ever be undone). He also rejected the idea of the scales of justice, that wrong done to the offender restores some sort of universal harmony. This was not true to the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

He addressed the problem of who could forgive, is it possible to forgive on behalf of others? He pointed out that this was a problem for atonement theory: can God only forgive sin that is done directly against God? His response was to suggest that the incarnation was on behalf of all and was of the one in whom all participate. So a wrong against a person is a wrong against God who is ‘one being with’ the victim; and it is the same wrong against both.. This means that human forgiveness can participate in God’s forgiveness of others, so that we can forgive on behalf of others.

It was an excellent, very moving lecture, full of personal and political examples to illustrate his argument. The book wherein he works all this out more fully than he had time for in his lectures should be great.

Alan Torrance’s Didsbury Lectures 2009, 3/4.

‘The Triune God and the ‘Re-schematised Mind.’

‘Christians neither should nor can ground their belief in the triune God on abstract arguments for theism in general. The recognition of where and how God speaks is intrinsic to the Self-communication of God…It is precisely in and through God’s Self-disclosure that we recognise that God speaks here and in this way and not there and in that way.’

Torrance thinks this point is not fully appreciated in theological circles. Partly because people fear it is circular. He thinks it is but not viciously so, since any knowledge of a person involves us depending on their free self-disclosure to us. Partly because it seems to undermine human freedom. Again, he thinks it does, since if God reveals Godself to a person it does reduce their freedom not to believe in God. Partly because it compromises objectivity. Yet if there is a God proper objectivity would involve knowing this God.

Torrance thinks the more serious criticism is that he’s advocating esoteric and individualistic knowledge of God. So the main question of the lecture is: what are the criteria for theological claims? Torrance used Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments to produce an answer.

For K, if we say the criteria for recognising Christian truth are immanent within us, then we repudiate God’s Self-disclosure by collapsing it into Socratic self-knowledge (from the Meno problem and its midwife solution).

K proposes a different scheme (neither Plato nor K are proposing general epistemologies, but asking about knowledge of the divine). The teacher and the moment in time are and remain decisive for our relation to the truth (the opposite of Plato’s model). Prior to this decisive help from the teacher we are in ‘untruth’. But to recognise the truth is not an irrational leap, it is not to abandon reason nor have something added to reason; it is rather a paradigm shift, a new perception on the world.

Torrance thought this should be conceived christologically not rather than individually. What I think he meant by this is that through coming to faith we participate in a person, Christ, through the Spirit, and thereby in God, in contrast to a platonic conception of participation in the forms. But when he publishes the book you can check out the details.

I had dinner with him last night; he’s a remarkably nice man.

Alan Torrance’s Didsbury Lectures 2009, 2/4.

‘Turning the Tables on Naturalism: Unsaddling the four horsemen of modern atheism!’

The Scylla of his original title is religion, the charibdis is atheism and scientific naturalism. The aim of this lecture is to show that the burden of proof lies with atheism rather than theism, and that Dawkins et al have very poor arguments and are unaware of or ignore the philosophical community’s approach to theism as a coherent position (i.e. that it is one).

Part I: some problems with naturalism

Naturalism = the view that ‘reality is wholly accessible (at least in principle) to the natural sciences. Nothing…can exist beyond their reach,’ (Roger Trigg, Philosophy Matters, 149).

            This is a philosophical view that must be distinguished from science. The sort of evidence that must be adduced for naturalism puts it on the same level as a religious belief rather than a scientific theory. Naturalism cannot result from science.

So there is no guiding force behind the universe; it and we evolved through chance and natural selection. For Dawkins, it follows that ‘ruthless utilitarianism’ is the only ethic that can survive in evolutionary terms (‘What use is religion?’ Free Enquiry magazine, vol 24, no 5 (June 2004)). For Patricia Churchland, humans are governed by their nervous systems, which operate according to the four F’s of ‘feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing’. (Journal of philosophy LXXXIV, Oct 87).

Darwin had a doubt here. Why trust any of the ideas of people who evolved from lower animals and whose sole purpose is the transmission of genes? If naturalism is true and evolution is true then the reliability of our epistemic faculties is low, because evolution would select only those desires that produced beliefs that furthered our search for the four F’s. This is a problem for naturalism.

Altruism is another problem for naturalism. Herbert Simon asked why certain people don’t behave according to evolutionary theory. His answer: they are either docile or of limited rationality, and therefore do not question what they are told by society or religion. This does not seem equal to the evidence, e.g. intelligent altruistic people who know what they’re doing and still do it.

So our ability to grasp the truth (which naturalism presupposes) and the existence of altruism (such as Dawkins travelling around the country persuading us out of our theism instead of reproducing as frequently as possible), are difficult to explain on naturalism’s own terms. It appears to be reductionist.

Part II: three reasons why theism is rational

1) Modal form of the ontological argument (which has existed for about 35 years apparently and still hasn’t been refuted)

 ‘If there is a possible world in which God exists, then since God is a necessary being, God exists in all possible worlds’ (handout). This implies that to be an atheist either that God cannot logically exist or that God does not exist is the actual world as a matter of fact. To do either is of course very difficult. Given three decades of attempts to refute this, let’s say the probability of it being fallacious is 0.5; this implies theism is rational.

2) Fine-tuning: basically, with incredibly small changes in any number of physical constants, the world would be uninhabitable for us; thus the chances of the universe being the way it is so as to be habitable for us are incredibly small. Torrance mentioned just three though he said there are other major ones too.

a) the ‘cosmological constant’: if there was a difference in this of the order of 10⁵³ the universe would be completely different, but the chances of such a precise constant existing for the present conditions are thus incredibly small.

b) similar argument about gravity for 10³⁶ or 10⁶⁰.

c) Roger Penrose estimates our universe is one in 10¹⁰¹²³ possible universes only one of which could be our current universe.

3) So one could account for this through theism, or through the generation of infinite universes which would eventually produce this one. The former is a more simple explanation. Would a universe generator have to be finely tuned?

Conclusion

Christian theism is rational and explains a number of things that naturalism struggles with: ‘Christian theism explains why there is something rather than nothing, the intelligibility of the contingent order, the fine tuning necessary for life to evolve and the moral universe which science presupposes. All this adds to the probability of the existence of a God who must already be judged to have an inherently high probability given the modal form of the ontological argument’ (handout).

The point of the lecture was not to show that theism is true (‘It takes a lot to get a Barthian to do this sort of thing’), but that it is rational, and hence why it is flourishing in analytic philosophy (apparently 1 in 4 analytic philosophers in North America are theists).