The renewed criticism leads up to the famous statement that there exists an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Book X starts us off with a reaffirmation of a main deficiency of poets: Socrates posits that there are Forms or Ideas of beds and tables, the maker of which is a god; there are imitations thereof, namely beds and tables, produced by craftsmen such as carpenters who behold the Forms as though they were looking at blueprints ; thirdly, there are imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create a kind of image of these objects in the world of becoming.
The tripartite schema presents the interpreter with many problems. Let us focus on one of the implications of this schema, about which Socrates is quite specific. The poets don't know the originals of i. The fundamental point is by now familiar to us: Even putting aside all of the matters relating to arts and crafts technai such as medicine , and focusing on the greatest and most important things—above all, the governance of societies and the education of a human being—Homer simply does not stand up to examination ce.
And what, apart from their own ignorance of the truth, governs their very partial perspective on the world of becoming? Socrates implies that they pander to their audience, to the hoi polloi b3—4. This links them to the rhetoricians as Socrates describes them in the Gorgias.
At the same time, they take advantage of that part in us the hoi polloi are governed by; here Socrates attempts to bring his discussion of psychology, presented since book III, to bear. The ensuing discussion is remarkable in the way in which it elaborates on these theses. How would a decent person respond to such a calamity? Socrates sketches the character of the decent and good person this way: This may be a sketch of Socrates himself, whose imitation Plato has produced.
By contrast, the tragic imitators excel at portraying the psychic conflicts of people who are suffering and who do not even attempt to respond philosophically. Since their audience consists of people whose own selves are in that sort of condition too, imitators and audience are locked into a sort of mutually reinforcing picture of the human condition.
Both are captured by that part of themselves given to the non-rational or irrational; both are most interested in the condition of internal conflict. Onlookers become emotively involved in the poet's drama. Another remarkable passage follows: So the danger posed by poetry is great, for it appeals to something to which even the best—the most philosophical—are liable, and induces a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in the emotions in question above all, in sorrow, grief, anger, resentment.
That is why poetry, with its throbbing rhythms and beating of breasts, appeals equally to the nondescript mob in the theater and to the best among us. But if poetry goes straight to the lower part of the psyche, that is where it must come from. He does not separate knowledge of beauty and knowledge of good.
It is as though the pleasure we take in the representation of sorrow on the stage will—because it is pleasure in that which the representation represents and not just a representation on the stage or in a poem —transmute into pleasure in the expression of sorrow in life. And that is not only an ethical effect, but a bad one, for Plato. These are ingredients of his disagreements on the subject with Aristotle, as well as with myriad thinkers since then.
The poets help enslave even the best of us to the lower parts of our soul; and just insofar as they do so, they must be kept out of any community that wishes to be free and virtuous. Famously, or notoriously, Plato refuses to countenance a firm separation between the private and the public, between the virtue of the one and the regulation of the other. What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected. Poetry unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community. The conclusion is the same: The poets have been characterized as making claims to truth, to telling it like it is, that are in fact—contrary to appearances—little more than the poet's unargued imaginative projections whose tenability is established by their ability to command the applause of the audience.
That is, the poets are rhetoricians who are, as it were, selling their products to as large a market as possible, in the hope of gaining repute and influence. The tripartite schema of Idea, artifact, and imitator is as much about making as it is about imitation. Making is a continual thread through all three levels of the schema. The Ideas too are said to be made , even though that is entirely inconsistent with the doctrine of Ideas as eternal expressed earlier in the Republic itself and in all the other Platonic dialogues. Their effort has to do with discovery rather than making.
Nowhere in the Republic does Socrates mention the poet's claim to inspiration. Indeed, that claim is pointedly omitted in the passage in which Socrates talks about the beginnings of the Iliad e2—a5; see Bloom's note ad loc. Socrates implicitly denies the soundness of that claim here.
Given his conception of the divine as Idea, such a claim could not be true, since the Ideas do not speak, let alone speak the things which Homer, Hesiod, and their followers recount. The result is that the poets are fabricators even of the appearance of knowing what they are talking about; this is not inconsistent with the Ion 's characterization of poetry as inspired ignorance.
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Does the critique of poetry in the Republic extend beyond the project of founding the just city in speech? I have already suggested an affirmative answer when discussing book II. The concerns about poetry expressed in books III and X would also extend beyond the immediate project of the dialogue, if they carry any water at all, even though the targets Plato names are of course taken from his own times.
It has been argued that the authority to speak truth that poets claim is shared by many widely esteemed poets since then. Controversies about, say, the effects of graphic depictions of violence, of the degradation of women, and of sex, echo the Platonic worries about the ethical and social effects of art. The Gorgias is one of Plato's most bitter dialogues in that the exchanges are at times full of anger, of uncompromising disagreement, plenty of misunderstanding, and cutting rhetoric.
In these respects it goes beyond even the Protagoras , a dialogue that depicts a hostile confrontation between Socrates and the renowned sophist by the same name. What is the fight about? Socrates asks Gorgias to define what it is that he does, that is, to define rhetoric.
And he asks him to do it in a way that helps to distinguish rhetorical from philosophical discourse: Gorgias is forced by successive challenges to move from the view that rhetoric is concerned with words speeches to the view that its activity and effectiveness happen only in and through words unlike the manual arts to the view that its object is the greatest of human concerns, namely freedom.
But persuasion about what exactly? But surely there are two kinds of persuasion, one that instills beliefs merely, and another that produces knowledge; it is the former only with which rhetoric is concerned. The analogy of this argument to the critique of poetry is already clear; in both cases, Socrates wants to argue that the speaker is not a truth speaker, and does not convey knowledge to his audience.
As already noted, Socrates classifies poetry dithyrambic and tragic poetry are named as a species of rhetoric. Its goal is to gratify and please the spectator, or differently put, it is just a kind of flattery. Strip away the rhythm and meter, and you have plain prose directed at the mob. It's a kind of public speaking, that's all a6-c The rhetorician is a maker of beliefs in the souls of his auditors a3—4.
And without that skill—here Gorgias begins to wax at length and eloquently—other arts such as medicine cannot do their work effectively b ff.
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Rhetoric is a comprehensive art. But Gorgias offers a crucial qualification that turns out to contribute to his downfall: Although the rhetorician teaches others to use the skill justly, it is always possible for the student to misuse it. This is followed by another damaging admission: It would follow that, in Socrates' language, the true rhetorician is a philosopher; and in fact that is a position Socrates takes in the Phaedrus.
But Gorgias is not a philosopher and does not in fact know—cannot give an account of—the moral qualities in question. So his art is all about appearing, in the eyes of the ignorant, to know about these topics, and then persuading them as is expedient cf. But this is not something Gorgias wishes to admit; indeed, he allows himself to agree that since the rhetorician knows what justice is, he must be a just man and therefore acts justly b-c. He is caught in a contradiction: All this is just too much for Gorgias' student Polus, whose angry intervention marks the second and much more bitter stage of the dialogue b3.
A new point emerges that is consistent with the claim that rhetoricians do not know or convey knowledge, viz. Socrates adds that its object is to produce gratification. To develop the point, Socrates produces a striking schema distinguishing between care of the body and care of the soul. Medicine and gymnastics truly care for the body, cookery and cosmetics pretend to but do not. Politics is the art that cares for the soul; justice and legislation are its branches, and the imitations of each are rhetoric and sophistry.
As medicine stands to cookery, so justice to rhetoric; as gymnastics to cosmetics, so legislation to sophistry. The true forms of caring are arts technai aiming at the good; the false, knacks aiming at pleasure bd. Let us note that sophistry and rhetoric are very closely allied here; Socrates notes that they are distinct but closely related and therefore often confused by people c. What exactly their distinction consists in is not clear, either in Plato's discussions of the matter, or historically.
Socrates's polemic here is intended to apply to them both, as both are alleged to amount to a knack for persuasion of the ignorant by the ignorant with a view to producing pleasure in the audience and the pleasures of power for the speaker. Socrates' ensuing argument with Polus is complicated and long. The nub of the matter concerns the relation between power and justice.
For Polus, the person who has power and wields it successfully is happy. For Socrates, a person is happy only if he or she is morally good, and an unjust or evil person is wretched—all the more so, indeed, if they escape punishment for their misdeeds. Plato's suggestion is that rhetoric and sophistry are tied to substantive theses about the irrelevance of moral truth to the happy life; about the conventionality or relativity of morals; and about the irrelevance of the sort of inquiry into the truth of the matter as distinguished from opinions or the results of polls upon which Socrates keeps insisting.
And if these hold, what use is there in rhetoric? For someone who wishes to avoid doing himself and others harm, Socrates concludes, rhetoric is altogether useless. Tied into logical knots, Polus succumbs. All this is just too much for yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, Callicles. The rhetoric of the Gorgias reaches its most bitter stage. Callicles presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik , as we would now call it. Telling it like it is, he draws a famous distinction between nature and convention, and advances a thesis familiar to readers of Republic books I and II: Nature shows that this is so in many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: Conventional talk of justice, fairness, not taking more than is your share, not pursuing your individual best interest—these are simply ways by which the weak seek to enslave the strong.
The art of rhetoric is all about empowering those who are strong by nature to master the weak by nature. Callicles' famous diatribe includes an indictment of philosophy as a childish occupation that, if pursued past youth, interferes with the manly pursuit of power, fosters contemptible ignorance of how the real political world works, and renders its possessor effeminate and defenseless.
His example is none other than Socrates; philosophy will he says prophetically render Socrates helpless should he be indicted. Helplessness in the face of the stupidity of the hoi polloi is disgraceful and pathetic a-c. By contrast, what would it mean to have power? Callicles is quite explicit: Power is freedom, freedom is license a-c.
The capacity to do what one wants is fulfillment in the sense of the realization of pleasure. Rhetoric is a means to that end. The quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, thus understood, ultimately addresses a range of fundamental issues. Its quarrel with philosophy is comprehensive, and bears on the nature of nature; the existence of objective moral norms; the connection if any between happiness and virtue; the nature and limits of reason; the value of reason understood as the rational pursuit of objective purpose in a human life; the nature of the soul or self; and the question as to whether there is a difference between true and false pleasure, i.
Socrates too starts to speak at length, sounds rhetorical at times, and ends the discussion with a myth. Callicles advances a substantive position grounded in a version of the distinction between nature and convention and defends it. These transgressions of rhetorical genres to one side, from Socrates' standpoint the ultimate philosophical question at stake concerns how one should live one's life c.
Readers of the dialogue will differ as to whether or not the arguments there offered decide the matter. The nub of the debate is as current today, both in academic and non-academic contexts, as it was in Plato's day. Is all of rhetoric bad? Are we to avoid—indeed, can we avoid—rhetoric altogether? Even in the Gorgias , as we have seen, there is a distinction between rhetoric that instills belief, and rhetoric that instills knowledge, and later in the dialogue a form of noble rhetoric is mentioned, though no examples of its practitioners can be found a-b.
The Phaedrus offers a more detailed explanation of this distinction. Readers of the Phaedrus have often wondered how the dialogue hangs together. A slightly closer look reveals that any such simple characterization is misleading, because the first half is also about rhetoric, in several different ways. The other two are rhetorical as well, and presented as efforts to persuade a young beloved. All three are justly viewed as rhetorical masterstrokes by Plato, but for different reasons. The first is a brilliantly executed parody of the style of Lysias an orator and speech writer of significant repute.
It is mostly an allegory cast in the form of a myth, and tells the story of true love and of the soul's journeys in the cosmos human and divine. The themes of poetry and rhetoric, then, are intertwined in the Phaedrus. It looks initially as though both rhetoric and poetry have gained significant stature, at least relative to their status in the Ion , Republic , and Gorgias. I will begin by focusing primarily on rhetoric, and then turn to the question of poetry, even though the two themes are closely connected in this dialogue.
The answer to this crucial question constitutes one of the most famous contributions to the topic. In essence, Socrates argues that someone who is going to speak well and nobly must know the truth about the subject he is going to discuss. The sort of theory Polus and Callicles maintained in the Gorgias is false see Phaedrus e4—a4. How to show that it is an art after all?
Quite a number of claimants to rhetoric are named and reviewed, and readers who have an interest in the history of Greek rhetoric rightly find these passages invaluable. Many rhetoricians have artfully and effectively misled their audiences, and Socrates argues—somewhat implausibly perhaps—that in order to mislead one cannot oneself be misled.
It will not only be coherent, but structured in a way that mirrors the way the subject itself is naturally organized. This will not be truly accomplished if it only looks that way; to be that way, a discourse's unity should reflect the unity of its subject. At this point we might want to ask about the audience ; after all, the rhetorician is trying to persuade someone of something. Might not the speaker know the truth of the matter, and know how to embody it artfully in a composition, but fail to persuade anyone of it? Would not a failure to persuade indicate that the speaker lacks the complete art of rhetoric?
Just as an expert physician must understand both the human body and the body of medical knowledge—these being inseparable—so too the expert speaker must understand both the human soul and what is known about the soul. The reader will immediately recall that the great speech the palinode in the first half of the Phaedrus was about the soul in its cosmic context—the soul's nature, its journeys divine and human, its longings, the objects of its longings, its failures and their consequences, were all part of the same story. The consequence of this approach to rhetoric has now become clear: True rhetoric is philosophical discourse.
But what happened to the question about the audience? This last demand is a matter of practice and of the ability to size up the audience on the spot, as it were. The reader will find them summarized at b5-c6. If the audience is philosophical, or includes philosophers, how would the true, artful, philosophical dialectician address it? This question is not faced head-on in the Phaedrus , but we are given a number of clues. According to reflections inaugurated by the Theuth and Thamus myth, the written word is not the most suitable vehicle for communicating truth, because it cannot answer questions put to it; it simply repeats itself when queried; it tends to substitute the authority of the author for the reader's open minded inquiry into the truth; and it circulates everywhere indiscriminately, falling into the hands of people who cannot understand it.
Dialectical speech is accompanied by knowledge, can defend itself when questioned, and is productive of knowledge in its audience e4—a4. Of course, all this raises the question as to the status of Plato's dialogues, since they are themselves writings; we will return to it briefly below.
Popular rhetoric is not an art, but a knack for persuasion. Artful rhetoric requires philosophy; but does philosophy require rhetoric? The Phaedrus points to the interesting thought that all discourse is rhetorical, even when the speaker is simply trying to communicate the truth—indeed, true rhetoric is the art of communicating the truth notice the broad sweep of the discussion of discourse at e5—b4. Rhetoric is present wherever and whenever people speak de4 and context. Even when one is not sure what the truth is, and even when one is thinking through something by oneself—carrying on an inner dialogue, as it were—discourse and persuasion are present.
The bottom line is that there is no escaping from persuasion, and so none from rhetoric—including of course from the very problem of distinguishing between warranted and unwarranted persuasion. Self-deception is an ever-present possibility as Socrates implies here, and notes at Cratylus d. That is a problem about which the philosopher above all worries about. The Gorgias' notion that the struggle between popular rhetoric and philosophy—or as we might say, unphilosophical and philosophical rhetoric—is one between comprehensive outlooks is clear from the Phaedrus as well.
The speech is quite explicitly a retraction of an outlook that does not espouse these views; ordinary rhetoric moves in a very different moral, metaphysical, psychological, and epistemic world. It is an interesting fact that Plato deploys certain elements of poetry such as myth, allegory, simile, image in drawing the contrast between these outlooks. That poetry is itself a kind of persuasive discourse or rhetoric has already been mentioned. This echoes the Ion 's charge that the rhapsodes do not know what they are talking about.
But what about the rationale that the poets and rhapsodes are inspired? Inspiration comes up numerous times in the Phaedrus. It and the related notions of Bacchic frenzy, madness, and possession are invoked repeatedly almost from the start of the dialogue b , in connection with Phaedrus' allegedly inspiring recitation of Lysias' text d1—6 , and as inspiring Socrates's two speeches a7—b1, d2—6, d1—3. These references are uniformly playful, even at times joking.
More serious is the distinction between ordinary madness and divine madness, and the defense of the superiority of divine madness, which Socrates' second speech sets out to defend. The case is first made by noting that three species of madness are already accepted: As noted, it begins to look as though a certain kind of poetry the inspired is being rehabilitated. And yet when Socrates comes to classify kinds of lives a bit further on, the poets along with those who have anything to do with mimesis rank a low sixth out of nine, after the likes of household managers, financiers, doctors, and prophets e1—2!
The poet is just ahead of the manual laborer, sophist, and tyrant. The philosopher comes in first, as the criterion for the ranking concerns the level of knowledge of truth about the Ideas or Forms of which the soul in question is capable. This hierarchy of lives could scarcely be said to rehabilitate the poet.
The Phaedrus quietly sustains the critique of poetry, as well as much less quietly of rhetoric. Plato's critique of writing on the grounds that it is a poor form of rhetoric is itself written. Does the critique apply to the dialogues themselves? Scholars dispute the answers to these well-known questions. There is general agreement that Plato perfected—perhaps even invented—a new form of discourse. The Platonic dialogue is a innovative type of rhetoric, and it is hard to believe that it does not at all reflect—whether successfully or not is another matter—Plato's response to the criticisms of writing which he puts into the mouth of his Socrates.
Plato's remarkable philosophical rhetoric incorporates elements of poetry. Most obviously, his dialogues are dramas with several formal features in common with much tragedy and comedy for example, the use of authorial irony, the importance of plot, setting, the role of individual character and the interplay between dramatis personae. His works also narrate a number of myths, and sparkle with imagery, simile, allegory, and snatches of meter and rhyme.
Indeed, as he sets out the city in speech in the Republic , Socrates calls himself a myth teller d9—10, e4—5. In a number of ways, the dialogues may be said to be works of fiction; none of them took place exactly as presented by Plato, several could not have taken place, some contain characters who never existed. These are imaginary conversations, imitations of certain kinds of philosophical conversations. The reader is undoubtedly invited to see him or herself reflected in various characters, and to that extent identify with them, even while also focusing on the arguments, exchanges, and speeches.
Exactly what to make of his appropriation of elements of poetry is once again a matter of long discussion and controversy. Suffice it to say that Plato's last word on the critique of poetry and rhetoric is not spoken in his dialogues, but is embodied in the dialogue form of writing he brought to perfection. I would also like to thank David Roochnik for his help with various revisions along the way.
Introduction A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him —Dylan Thomas [ 1 ] When we think of a philosophical analysis of poetry, something like a treatise on aesthetics comes to mind.
So Ion, and by extension Homer, are faced with a series of unpalatable alternatives: They could continue to defend the claim that they really do know the subjects about which they discourse—in the sense of possess the techne kai episteme of them, i. Yet if they do defend that claim they will be liable to examination by relevant experts. They could admit that they do not know what they are talking about. This admission could be understood in several ways: Gorgias The Gorgias is one of Plato's most bitter dialogues in that the exchanges are at times full of anger, of uncompromising disagreement, plenty of misunderstanding, and cutting rhetoric.
Phaedrus Readers of the Phaedrus have often wondered how the dialogue hangs together. Plato's Dialogues as Rhetoric and Poetry Plato's critique of writing on the grounds that it is a poor form of rhetoric is itself written. Cambridge University Press, pp. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , trans. Plato's Gorgias and Phaedrus , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Princeton University Press, pp. University of Alabama Press. Dialogues with the Silent Philosopher , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
John Hopkins University Press. University Press of America, pp. Complete Works , Indianapolis: Lastly, they may begin as an attempt not to succumb to the scandal of evil, by resorting to a Superior logic or Good that is capable of giving meaning to suffering, pain, or death. Since this is not the place to develop and evaluate these proofs critically they are presented, for example, in Alfaro, ; Fabro, ; Gonzalez, , I simply want to hint at some of the relationships they have with the world of science.
This has often been a cause of misunderstanding between philosophy and science. In confining certainty of knowledge only to the sphere of pure reason, Kant himself believed it was not possible for experience to lead to something that transcends it. For example, it would be a mistake, to interpret the first and the second of the five ways proposed by Thomas Aquinas cf.
The origin of material movement would then involve a source of energy, and in turn the geometry of space-time it comes from, making the causal chain behind it hard to describe and understand. The supremacy of the act underlined by Aquinas something that must be in act in order to give existence to a chain of beings and causes is on the scientific level understandable in terms of the supremacy of some given form. Formal causality lies at the foundation of the empirical world, but at the same time, it is not demonstrable within it.
The third way suggested by Aquinas starts from contingency, and it requires a passage to transcendence as well. This passage presents no difficulty when compared with scientific thought, since it identifies a sphere of reflection that does not interfere with the scope of empirical analysis. Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 6. Without by any means making use of a metaphysical approach, Stephen Hawking poses the question: The fifth way is an example of a broader vision of the physical and teleological arguments that even Kant, who was critical towards all other proofs, regarded with respect.
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However, though the action of physical or biological laws, constructive or selective as they may be, may give an explanation for this order, they nonetheless do so only from a phenomenological and descriptive point of view. They cannot confirm or deny the kind of finality found at a higher level of abstraction, that is, intentional finality, as the ultimate meaning of order and finality in nature. Finalism is a tricky concept, having different levels of understanding.
At the level of physical analysis, we can only see rationality, numerical coherence, the effect of a gradient, or the fruit of a symmetry. At the level of biological investigation, finality may appear as the result of functional coordination or adaptability. Only at the philosophical level can finality be recognized as the effect of a final causality , that is, as due to personal intentionality. The theological level allows for a further step, since final causality is connected with the quest for answers regarding the ultimate meaning and sense of all things, which can only be the meaning conceived by a Creator God.
In general, a criticism of the philosophical-cosmological proofs for the existence of an Absolute is not possible using scientific experimental methods. Nevertheless, these proofs do not seem contradicted by, or senseless when seen from the perspective of, experimental methods, since the existence of an order of knowledge going beyond empirical data, by analogy, abstraction, or transcendence, is certainly compatible with the analysis of science see below, III.
With regard to the anthropological proofs, they do not stir up specific problems within the field of the natural sciences. Criticizing the soundness of the anthropological problem, and its correspondent access to God, is only possible within a framework of philosophical reductionism. This last reduction, however, is not engaged in by science, which, on the contrary, does perceive how the experience of the mind cannot be reduced to the physiology of the body or, at least, it considers the question of the Mind-Body Relationship an open problem.
Denying access to God through the anthropological problem can only be done by invoking a philosophy that denies the transcendent nature of humankind, a course of thought that easily ends by endorsing nihilism. Such an approach would therefore need to be compared critically against other philosophical perspectives, rather than against science.
The best philosophy faces the Absolute with humility and an openness to listening, which characterizes any perception of mystery. To know what or who God is , remains a necessary, but unsolvable, problem for philosophy. Seeking to understand the Absolute often leads to the idea of God becoming limited by human customs, misconceptions, or prejudices. Attempts made by the pre-Socratic philosophers identified the divine principle of every existing thing in water, in air, in the four elements together earth, water, air, and fire , or in numbers.
Anaxagoras, but especially Plato and Aristotle, tried to conceptualize God as intelligence, the supreme good, or the ultimate spiritual life. Those who wish to deny God all face the problem in a similar manner: The task of true philosophy is to distinguish between true mystery and that which is not. We speak not as supplying His name; but for want, we use good names, in order that the mind may have these as points of support, so as not to err in other aspects.
With regard to its relationship with faith, natural knowledge of God does help reason to understand Who or what the Christian Revelation is talking about when it speaks of God. Yet, by itself, any natural knowledge of God remains insufficient to generate the act of faith, which comes from a freely given love for the personal being of God. The insufficiency of a natural knowledge of God based on some kind of philosophical proof is a constitutive insufficiency; it is also incomplete for a believer. It is a knowledge of God that is necessary, but insufficient.
Contexts in which Contemporary Science Refers to God. The question of God has never been completely foreign to science. Beginning with the foundation of the scientific method, and throughout modern times, the natural sciences have examined many of the questions regarding God, offering issues for philosophical debate. Even in contemporary times, which like any age has its own language and terms proper to its vision of the world, there are ways in which the sciences continue to appeal, at least indirectly, to the notion of God: There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation.
In the transition from the second to the third millennium the question of God, or at least some reference to a notion of God, has continued to intersect with several branches of science. Debates concerning bioethics hosted in biology and medicine involve specific visions of human life, one of which poses in a Creator God the very reason for the respect due to the nature of human creatures.
Originally associated with the origin of life and of the human being in biology and paleoanthropology, the debate about evolution has now reached cosmology , which presents the evolution of the whole cosmos within a new, even more totalizing, vision cf. In the first half of the 20th century, quantum mechanics initiated a debate with the metaphysical and religious vision of the world by discussing to what extent the principles of causality and indetermination should be applied.
In the area of physics, especially in physical cosmology, comments on the possible role of a Creator God arise with the greatest insistence. A simple look at the amount of popular science books published in the last decades easily shows how reflections on nature and the question of God are tied together. Numerous scientists have published popular works or undertaken studies on philosophy and science with titles explicitly addressing that connection: God and the New Physics P. Quantum Cosmologies and God W. Is God a Geometer? If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? It is very likely that the use of such titles is part of the reason they have sold so well; however, it also testifies to the existence of a new sensitivity, which is the implicit reason for such a specific market.
Cosmology and physics seem to imply questions regarding God in three main, intertwining themes. Furthermore, the role of God is debated in order to assign the correct values to the constants of nature and provide proper boundary conditions to the equations that describe the overall development of the cosmos. The second theme refers to what is called the Anthropic Principle and the interdisciplinary discussion deriving from it.
A few interpretations of this Principle try to support a return to the famous Argument from Design, well known in philosophy, claiming experimental results at a cosmic level. Presented in a coherent and fashionable form in the influential book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler which summarized and organized all the previous thought and evidence on this subject , the debate regarding the Anthropic Principle and its possible employment to back a Teleological Argument in favor of the existence of God has accompanied interdisciplinary literature up until now cf.
Manson, ; Barrow et al. Though the Anthropic Principle contains interesting seeds for the revision of the presently reigning ideas regarding the evolution of the cosmos, it engages in leaps between different levels of abstraction when it is in dialogue with philosophy and theology.
The paradigm of an evolution that used to consider the progressive, blind game of chance, plus a sufficiently long period of time, as mainly responsible for the appearance of life, has revealed its limits. While in its strong formulation it is a philosophical and somewhat a priori principle that can be used as a deductive key for understanding and foreseeing properties of our human-inhabited universe, the weak Anthropic Principle simply indicates events and numerical results as read in terms of coordination and coherence.
The observations and results on which the Anthropic Principle are based do not constitute a scientific experimental proof for the existence of a cosmic plan aimed at giving rise to life, or of the existence of a Creator: This is, firstly, because the delicate physical and biological conditions of life are actually necessary, but far from sufficient conditions for the appearance of life as such.
Secondly, because empirical analysis, equipped with the sole methods of science, cannot reveal the existence of a purposeful final causality, and even less of a Creator God. The third theme of scientific research where authors appeal to some notion of God regards the intelligibility of the universe. In the debate regarding the ontological status of natural laws , one line of thought more inclined to realism has progressively underlined the objectiveness of such laws as something external to the knowing subject.
According to some authors, intelligibility could be considered the banal result of a necessary tuning of cosmic laws and the laws regulating the human mind, since they were both forged by means of the same evolutionary process including the effectiveness of its selection mechanisms. However, we know that human cultural development started when its biological evolution terminated. We could also ask why we interpret nature in terms of differential equations and nature is capable of being interpreted in this way, accordingly if differential equations are not so crucial for our survival.
Reductive interpretations of the enigma of the intelligibility of nature seem to be less frequent today, and the issue is acknowledged to be meaningful cf. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order [Oxford: Barrow, Pi in the Sky [Oxford: Davies, The Mind of God [London: Explanations resorting to the postulation of meta-mathematical and meta-physical levels usually involve an occasional indirect reference to the notion of Logos , or universal rationality; empirical analysis, of course, does not possess the instruments necessary to discern if such a rationality is imminent within the cosmos or transcendent to it.
The reason why cosmology and physics give rise to references to the notion of God derives from the fact that today these disciplines are capable of placing us in front of the universe in its entirety. The discovery of the Hubble flow and cosmic background radiation, success in applying the nucleosynthesis of chemical elements to explain the evolution of the stars, the high degree of coherence between microphysical and astrophysical scenarios, and current theories of a great unification and its experimental successes of those energies now accessible to our particle accelerators, all provide sufficient ground to treat the universe as a strongly unified picture, as a unique, intelligible object, ordered by the same logic on a large scale.
We know it has one history, capable of connecting the past with the future, of associating what happens at a local level with that which happens, or has already happened, at a cosmic level. The fact that the natural sciences are not methodologically equipped to conceptualize passages from efficient to formal and final causal ascents to transcendence, that is, to transcend the empirical level, does not prevent scientists from facing these higher level questions from within their research domains, and then speaking about them.
Benvenuti, in Corriere della Sera , 10 April , p. In a manner different from those mentioned previously, there is a way in which some sectors of contemporary science demonstrate their openness to interpretations of reality in which a kind of spiritual or divine dimension seems to find a place: Ruyer, La gnose de Princeton.
The new mystic vision of science arose from the desire to understand a number of paradoxes in particle physics and quantum mechanics by resorting to Eastern religious philosophies, chiefly Hinduism and Buddhism, whose visions of the world provide useful logical forms, which seem not to be found in Western thought. The core of these religious visions of the cosmos is then assumed as the ultimate key to understanding the relationship between humankind and nature. This path from science to the realm of the spirit , however, shows signs of ambiguity.
True contemplation—which the study of nature certainly gives rise to—is reduced to a mere sensation. Without endorsing any specific religion, the movement acts as a spokesperson for the attempt to overcome scientism and reductionism , and it aims to open up science and scientists to the dimensions of the Spirit, however generically this may be interpreted. Among the new interpretative paradigms proposed by the mysticism of physics, there are some that have enjoyed growing success due to their explicative capability regarding certain problems left open by science.
Some of these newly proposed paradigms, such as the complementarity, or the coincidence, of opposed poles, were already present in Christian thought think, for instance, of the mystery of the Incarnate Word , but they have not been recognized, probably because they require theological insight, whereas the philosophical views imported from the far East seemed to be easier to adopt. The passage from the geocentric to the heliocentric system gave rise to an inevitable conflict between the image of the cosmology offered by the theological and cultural establishment and the new image of the cosmos.
Due to the success of new scientific discoveries, the Enlightenment sought out the empirical sciences as a privileged interlocutor and gradually put forth an idea of nature where reference to God might be still present as occurred in deism but which was different from the idea of nature found in the revealed religions. The natural sciences soon became the field where the forms of non-belief typical of modernity arose, such as rationalism, positivism , and later materialism ; however, at the same time, the natural sciences were also the field in which attempts to affirm the existence of God starting from the order of the cosmos found new strength.
The physiology of human beings, the biology of living beings, and the order of the universe as a whole, were all used as a starting point to establish the existence of a divine Intelligence, an Architect of the world. This philosophical and scientific trend influenced the work of great scientists, including Newton. The books published at the time bear titles that elucidate the intentions of their authors. From an historical point of view, in depth study is in order to discern what relationship the notion of God supplied by these authors may have had with that later notion referred to as the God of the gaps.
The use of this latter expression refers in particular to some remarks present in the works of Newton. Criticized by Leibniz, Newton does indeed mention God as a cause intervening in the mechanics of the planets in certain places where there was no way to interpret some aspects of their motion by means of natural causes only. Nevertheless, the approach followed by the exponents of the Physico-Theology movement was not necessarily the same as that of Newton.
They believed that if the world was the work of an Intelligent Cause, this Cause must have visible effects on creatures. The natural sciences, therefore, ought to be a source of knowledge of God. In this regard, despite their ingenuousness, they represented an interesting attempt to use the results of science in philosophy and theology. Today it is not the case, but at the time, their way of arguing was quite common and easily accepted: Some of their arguments, such as the marvelous complexity of the human eye, were destined to survive for a long time within 19th-century apologetics.
As the empirical and metaphysical levels of their arguments were not properly distinguished or satisfactorily explained, the physico-theological approach certainly did support the eventual idea of a God of the gaps.
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Philosophical insight about the transcendence of a final causality that remains non-accessible at the empirical level athough some of its effects certainly intersect the world of nature was not provided. As a result, once a natural justification, and a complete experimental description, of many of those physical or biological well-organized structures was made available, the progress of science was considered to have superseded and removed the Architect or Clock-maker God.
Again from an historical point of view, among the consequences of Physico-Theology, two repercussions are of great importance in relation to the question of God within a scientific context. First, the debate between theism and atheism gradually became restricted within the kind of rationality associated only with empirical analysis, dramatically denying the capacity of other important areas of human reason to access God cf. Second, a Darwinian evolutionary interpretation of the forms of living beings ended by assuming a precise anti-religious character; it soon clashed with the religious, intellectual, and even linguistic, context that was guided by the argument from design , by wiping out any design and the Designer with the rules of natural selection and adaptability to the environment.
In a different philosophical and theological context, had the question of God been associated with other arguments, or had the distinct degree of philosophical abstraction involved in different levels of finalism been better explained, the theory of evolution would not have caused such a huge fracture. In such a scenario, theology would have found a better philosophical climate in which to comprehend the theory of evolution in the light of those seeds already contained in its biblical, patristic, and medieval sources.
One example of how the natural sciences played a major role in the historical debate affirming or negating God is represented by 19th-century mechanism. In a philosophical climate in which deterministic and rational laws of nature were considered the effect of an intelligence, and the source of all determination for the entire cosmos, theology was unwittingly led to think of, and present, mechanism as an image of harmony and order existing in the will of God.
The permanence of laws and permanence of the Creator were to stand or fall together. Once it was clear that the world could work quite well thanks to its own autonomy , the hypothesis of God became superfluous, a statement that has been inscribed in history by the well-known answer given by Laplace to Napoleon.
In an atmosphere that lacked an adequate theology of creation and a correct image of God, the discovery of the intrinsic dynamisms of nature , which explained the origin of properties and forms both in chemistry and in biology, did favor the vision of a world with no God. The attempt to eradicate the question of God through the Marxist endeavor described in Dialectics of Nature F. Psychoanalysis, as well, attempted to interpret religion from a scientific, namely pathological, point of view though it partially belongs to the field of human sciences, psychoanalysis chose to categorize itself as empirically grounded knowledge.
In mathematics and logic, by restricting the value of knowledge to what is empirically verifiable and expressible within the formal language of science, Neo-Positivism tried to deny the notion of God had any meaning. These philosophical visions, whose implications for metaphysics and theology were clear at the outset, were later overcome by criticisms that originated within the world of science, rather than from philosophy. The issue that, without a doubt, dominated the debate in the second half of the 20th century was the relationship between chance and finality, a paradigm capable of incorporating aspects of many different areas and disciplines.
The issue reached the public primarily in the biological theses expounded by Jacques Monod Chance and Necessity , and Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker , , although there have also been a few well-known thinkers in the areas of physics and cosmology e. Atkins, The Creation , Behe, ; Dembski, ; Shanks, ; Brockman, ; Ayala, In fact, many exponents of this Movement maintain that their rejection of Darwinism makes no allusion to God their adversaries affirm exactly the opposite ; moreover, the debate contains probably on both sides some ideological aspects, which make it difficult to evaluate correctly its philosophical import.
Another example of a reductive interpretation of the question of God within a chance-finality paradigm is the alternative between two different kinds of universes. One is a universe born by chance from nothing, where dependence from time can be eliminated S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time , ; the other is a universe born from a space-time singularity, whose definite boundary conditions would reveal a plan, and eventually a Creator. In the context of the Anthropic Principle, this general paradigm operates again, discriminating between a single universe oriented towards the appearance of life, versus an infinite ensemble of universes, each with parameters set by chance, among which only one had, again by chance, the right parameters to allow the birth of intelligent beings, and in this way evidencing an apparently finalistic orientation.
Just like the previous examples regarding the affirmation and negation of God, the debate about chance and finality also transposed philosophical categories to an empirical level. Words like chance, purpose, necessity, or freedom belong, de facto , to a philosophical dictionary, just as other notions such as probability, consistency, or coincidence, belong only to that of the physical and mathematical sciences.
A debate often presented as coming from a scientific framework to decide whether a Creator exists or not is actually a debate between two different philosophies. One philosophy is open to a notion of knowledge capable of transcending the empirical order, while the other is a philosophy which confines human knowledge to the world of phenomena and appearance; one is open to a transcendent foundation of reality responsible for the meaning of all reality, while the other embraces a self-referential, immanent foundation.
Behind the alternative between chance and finality, we can discern the everlasting philosophical struggle between realism and idealism. The idea that the world of science should be the chief field for proving or denying the existence of God, or that it is the best terrain for belief and unbelief to undergo reflection, is nothing but a very narrow and limited vision.
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At the same time, theology cannot neglect the quest for understanding that comes from relating the discourse on the world and the discourse on God, even when this quest originates within the context of scientific knowledge. Theology is called to put such a search for unity on its correct epistemological track and acknowledge the philosophical soundness of many reflections arising from science.
Theology is also definitely better situated to recognize the true cosmological contexts of its formulations and teachings. Some of them are certainly a heritage from the past, but the history of the relationship between the discourse on nature and the discourse on God could assist theology in reexamining these contexts, and even altering them in the light of a new physical image of the world.
Doing so acknowledges the role the natural sciences have in the work of theologians ; theology favors the contemporary intelligibility of its formulations, and better serves the dignity of their object. The Epistemological Meaning of a Discourse on God. In any encounter between theology and science, it is not enough to emphasize that the question of God is of everlasting relevance.
We should also analyze what kind of discourse on God a culture mainly shaped by science and technology can deem significant cf. Gaudium et spes , 5. Indeed, any discourse on God today is critically evaluated through categories belonging to science and rationality. The success of technology has a crucial role in this respect. In fact, the notion of a Creator God, Almighty and Provident, implies His dominion over the world and its visible, material effects, that is, over those same effects which technology demands be held under its increasingly sophisticated control.
At a philosophical level the notion of God, in order to be relevant to the world of science, should include a meaningful semantic area of intelligibility that has been tested in the context of the scientific interpretation of the world and its language. Only pure reason , with its theoretical rationality nourished by the experience of the empirical sciences, brings about true knowledge.
Within the realm of pure reason, to affirm or deny something transcendent to the empirical level is impossible: The idea of God is an antinomy, since it is not a possible object of experience. According to Kantian epistemology, the notion of God would make sense only in terms of practical reason , since it would become the object of a practical postulate Ger. God is something thinkable, presumable, or can even be an object of invocation, but God is not knowable. Nevertheless, the profound separation he posits between pure reason and practical reason prevents Kant from seeing science as a source of philosophical human questioning, connecting the world of experience to the problem of existence.
Since these discourses on God refer to non-communicable assertions, which lack any objective validity and are impossible to falsify, they are deemed neither true nor false. According to the more rigorous heritage of logical Neo-Positivism, such assertions would not make sense in any context at all , since there is no knowledge at all, except that which can be empirically verified.
It seems, however, that contemporary scientific thought provides new insights in overcoming both Kantian and Neo-Positivistic visions. Contemporary science does not deny that an area of meaning and intelligibility exists, one that is also important to scientific reason, a semantic area that the scientist grasps from within his or her own research activity. This is the semantic area that calls for a Foundation of the world, for the source of its rationality and intelligibility, for the ultimate reasons for why all things are the way they are and not otherwise.
Here a logos of God becomes meaningful, one which entails sufficient guarantees of universality and meaning. I will try to illustrate this point in progressive arguments. Ludwig Wittgenstein took an important step in this direction. We cannot define it in terms of a formal language; the problem of the meaning of it all is something mystical. The philosophical path blazed by Wittgenstein overcomes the conclusions of Kantian pure reason, because the question of meaning and openness to the inexpressible both arise from an analysis coming from within scientific knowledge, rather than from outside it.
In other words, the problem is meaningful within a wider meta-logic, but it cannot be expressed. The resort to a meta-language is then a necessity arising from the very limits of language as they are acknowledged by language itself. Just like them, Wittgenstein drew a line between what we can speak of and what we must remain silent about. The important difference is that the neo-positivists had nothing to keep silent about. Indeed, for the positivists only that which we can speak about is important in life. Wittgenstein, on the contrary, passionately believed that what is important in human life is that which, according to his vision, must be held in silence.
It concludes the parable of logical empiricism and it lays the foundation for a philosophy capable of recovering a sense of the problem of God. It is a God we still cannot speak about, something or someone we can only show. This would lead to a mounting conflict with two intrinsic problems: Secondly, today it is easier to acknowledge that at the base of the world of facts, and beyond the language of science, there are some metaphysical requirements implicit in scientific knowledge, which are necessary for the work of science itself.
They make science possible, but their justification lies outside the methods of science. A notion of God, here understood as the cause of being and the source of the formal specificities of all natural reality that is, as the cause for why the world is as it is, and not otherwise is prior to any scientific description of the world, through making the world intelligible. It is a metaphysical cause that gives reason to the world, without interfering with it. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.
To leave room for a logos of God, mystical and significant even in the context of science, is consistent with the evidence that the universe exists, and that it exists with properties science does not entirely deduce from its own methods, since it receives them and discovers them by means of induction.
Furthermore, the scientist is surprised by his or her capability to dialogue with physical reality. The perception that physical reality is a subject open to dialogue with the scientist is strong in not a few researchers. Nature is recognized as worthy of being studied and having the capacity to motivate intellectual effort because it is capable of binding to a truth and beauty existing independently from the knowing subject. This is how Albert Einstein put it: Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.
One could indeed one should expect the world to be subjected to law only to the extent that we order it through our intelligence. Ordering of this kind would be like the alphabetical ordering of the words of a language. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. Einstein, Letter to M. Philosophical Library, ], pp.
Paul Davies offered similar reflections, forty years later: For example, an explanation of some phenomenon in terms of physics presupposes the validity of the laws of physics, which are taken as given. But one can ask where these laws come from in the first place.
Questions about God : today's philosophers ponder the Divine
One could even question the origin of the logic upon which all scientific reasoning is founded. It is, however, highly significant that such questions arise by the extension of empirical analysis, and point to a semantic area of meaning, to a logos grasped in science but which is open to a logos of God. The possibility of a discourse on God that is also meaningful for scientific rationality is witnessed to by the openings to transcendence recorded in the personal reflections of several contemporary scientists.
Science reveals, but does not preclude, access to the Absolute or to a logos grasped as a realm of intelligibility and meaning. The scientist seems to perceive all physical reality as a coherent and objective otherness, characterized by formal specificity. The connection between this personal perception and the philosophical notion of the Absolute relies on two aspects of great importance in scientific activity: Of course it is also possible for the scientist not to reach this experience. For the perception of God in scientifically known nature is the final flowering of a long search, the result of much patience and consistent engagement in response to the intelligibility of reality.
What is in question here, in fact, is something that goes well beyond the ordinary scientific understanding of nature. That is why there are many scientists who compare scientific experiences to experiencing the sacred, and consider them capable of linking re-ligo and leading to the threshold of mystery cf. Cantore, , pp. Similar to what Wittgenstein noted in the analysis of language, and Popper noted in the epistemology of science, physicists and astronomers may run into the mystical as well: He himself is completely convinced, but he cannot communicate the certainty.
Here we encounter a vision of scientific activity that looks not only like a dialogue between the researcher and nature, but much like a dialogue between the researcher and the Absolute. The image of the Absolute as perceived by scientific rationality, and in the way it is spoken of by scientists, is of course philosophically imprecise; the image of the Absolute is often mixed with ambiguity and, frequently, with a shade of pantheism.
Epistemology here refers to an implicit metaphysics, open to reality and amenable to learning from nature and its laws. In the last analysis, to think that the influence of scientific rationality on philosophy and culture necessarily narrows down or banishes the discourse on God, does justice neither to the meaning, nor to the essence, of a true scientific mentality cf. A true scientific mentality is an activity involving the whole person, capable of stirring philosophical questions, even though it does not possess adequate instruments to find an answer to them within its own methods.
Any search for this explanation calls for a notion, and for a broader area of intelligibility, that cannot be considered nonsense and therefore opens up the possibility of a meaningful discourse on God. From an historical perspective, it should be stressed that when scientists began to recognize the autonomy of the scientific method with respect to philosophy and theology, this did not imply any denial of God, a denial that neither scientists in the beginnings of modernity, nor their medieval predecessors, thought it necessary to make.