In the area of biblical scholarship, many modern Liberals and Fundamentalists see a zero-sum game between the realities of inspiration and historical embeddedness of the biblical texts. On the one hand, Liberals insist that if they can find a human or historically contextual aspect to the text, it must not have come by supernatural revelation. This is because metaphysical univocalism [the belief that words describing God and creatures mean the same thing] implies that there is a zero-sum game between temporal and divine causes. As a result, the assumption is that the human and contextual excludes the divine. On the other hand, Fundamentalists sometimes speak as if they exclude all historical and contextual factors in the composition of the text and read the writings a historically. Again, since the causal agency of the human and divine constitute a zero-sum game within a univocal framework, for divine revelation to take place the divine must replace the agency of the human and temporal.
Indeed, univocal metaphysics are major (though not the sole) source of modernity’s imagined strife between science and religion. In the pre-modern view of God, naturalistic causes and explanations and divine ones did not conflict since there was no zero-sum game between divine and creaturely agency. With univocal metaphysics, naturalistic explanations of phenomenon invariably crowd out divine ones. One can see attempts by early theistic scientists like Isaac Newton making what has often been termed “God of the gaps” arguments in order to find a place for God in a causal order that could increasingly be explained naturalistically. In a number of cases, when there was a causal gap in his theory Newton would attribute the phenomenon to God. Of course, when the naturalistic cause behind the phenomenon was discovered, then God and his causal role were simply pushed back. As things stand in contemporary science, most of the universe can be explained naturalistically. Hence, the chief arguments of the “New Atheist” movement rest on the basis of the onto-theology and univocal metaphysics that they have unconsciously absorbed from modernity. They believe that since science can explain most temporal causes without reference to an eternal cause, like Pierre-Simon Laplace, they have “no need” for the God hypothesis.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Bible and pre-modern theism, this is an absurd argument. To use a theater analogy, the claim that the New Atheists are making is that since there is no character in Hamlet named “William Shakespeare,” then William Shakespeare has no causal agency in the play and therefore does not exist. As should be clear, such a claim would completely misconstrue William Shakespeare’s ontological status and causal agency. Moreover, even if one could give a description of the action in the play without any need to make reference to William Shakespeare, such a paradigm of understanding still could not explain why there was a play in the first place or why it was intelligible.
Continue reading “Univocity and Big Problems”
