I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my second installment in what may become a daily soap. (Part 1 is here.)

2) On the way home from the panel, I had a long conversation with Drs. Poythress about the significance of the other panelists response. When the moderator asked how they combined their science with their faith,  one replied that "I just do science", and the other opined that "my faith isn't shaken by science", amplifying with a disturbing scientific discovery that they just accepted. In other words, there appears to be no connection between science and faith.

"Two Kantians versus one VanTillian!" I said.

But despite the claim that science has not shaken their faith, both of the other panelists made the statement that the Bible contains myth. It was the only time I saw Dr Poythress agitated; it was all he could do to keep from interrupting, waiting for the moderator to acknowledge him before blurting out "I don't believe there is any myth in the Bible!"  One of the panelists was not so reserved, shaking her head and restating her opinion.

Now what is peculiar, is that 50 years ago in their member churches, "them's fightin' words". What was unreconcilable, unadulterated "liberalism" for their grandparents, has become mainstream conservatism today. How did "myth" creep into this Kantian wall of separation between church and state?

To answer that question, we'll have to do some history.

Before Christ, at the dawn of Greek civilization, pre-Socratic philosophers were trying to understand how the world could be both beautiful and true, both varied and understandable, both changing and always the same. On the one hand, every person you meet is a unique, different, distinct, person, yet on the other hand they are all people, intelligent, recognizable human beings. Different but also the same. 

Parmenides thought that at the foundation we all exist, and all existences are one, so it is change and variety that is the deception. He had a great influence on Plato, and echoes of his philosophy can be seen right down to the present. Heraclitus took the opposite view, that change was the characteristic of life, that we "cannot step in the same river twice." Leucippus (and later Democritus) tried to find a compromise, that the atoms are unchangeable, but they are ever moving and combining in new ways that lead to change. And there, at the beginning of the classical world, you have the problem of "the one and the many".

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle gave an answer to the one-and-many problem that dominated the entire classical world, and indeed, the medieval world so much so that a classical education, whether of Platonic or Aristotelian flavor, saw Truth as a unitary goal of educational Trivium: Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric. Whenever any of these disciplines sought a different goal, they were roundly criticized. Both Plato and Aristotle seemed to reserve their greatest invective for the Sophists, who valued Rhetoric for its social and political benefits rather than its spiritual and unifying benefits.

With the Christianization of the Roman world, all of these techniques came over into Christendom, merely by exchanging the goals of Greece with the goals of Christ. Although there was much development throughout the Medieval period, the first major crisis came with the Enlightenment, and the breakdown of the Medieval synthesis.

Inductive truth competed with deductive truth, and rhetoric lost its pre-eminent position in the Trivium since argumentation could easily be trumped by experimentation. (eg, Aristotle's arguments that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects could be disproved in 15 seconds with an experiment in Pisa.)

In other words, the pre-Socratic dilemma of the one-and-the-many had resurfaced, and philosophers were at a loss to reconcile the new sciences with the old synthesis. Just as in classical Greece, skeptics proliferated in this now uncertain environment with the most famous being the apostate David Hume. Later on his analysis would be called an epistemological critique, but the Medieval synthesis did not so compartmentalize its philosophy; it was equally a critique of ethics, theology, and metaphysics, which is what made it attractive to atheists.

In this environment, Immanuel Kant's 1781 Critique of Pure Reason marks a watershed, solving the confusion of skepticism (as well as rescuing theology from the atheists, he believed) with an essential duality between Science and Thought. That is, the world of science and experiments was irrevocably separated from the world of mind and logic by the untrustworthy senses that mediated between the two. Notice the parallels between the pre-Socratic materialist solution of Democrites and that of Kant.

But Kant's solution was not universally admired, and this led to GWF Hegel's development of idealism (~1816) and his lectures on history (1822-23), that inverted the role between the mind and the sciences, arguing that there was a dialectic of Mind working through time that ever produced dualities and braided their syntheses back together again. You might also note the parallels to both Heraclitus, the change being part of the essential unity of Mind.

Therefore by the middle of the 19th century, we had three basic solutions to the problem of the one-and-many,  (which can also be analyzed as metaphysics and/or epistemology): an Enlightenment faith in Science (subsuming Mind); a Kantian Dualism (separate but equal); and Hegelian faith in Mind/Process (subsuming Science). We might also stereotype these views with respect to religion as: atheist monists, theist dualists, and pantheist monists.

This intellectual history neglects what was going on politically. As any historian will tell you, they are not unrelated events. For the Enlightenment view dominated France in 1789 and directly led to the Reign of Terror. This caused a lot of theologians (and politicians like Edmund Burke) to reconsider how best to handle this overzealous faith in Science that abolished God. Kant's dualism suggested that we should let them both live in peace, doing what each does best.

If France was an aberration, it was only that it was a century ahead of its time. Napolean's wars and the rise of the Prussian state set the stage for a reenactment in the 20th century wars of Modernism. Thus throughout the 1800's as Enlightenment though became more and more pervasive, theologians were turning to Kant for a way to reconcile the Church and State. 

The basic conclusion was that morality was a matter of the heart, which the Church could teach best, whereas civility was a matter of the brain, which the state could teach best. Overlapping areas like Miracles were addressed with a compromise: the brain knows they aren't true, and for matters of state we don't allow them to exist, but the heart needs them to be true, so for matters of morality we allow pious belief in their importance. This schizophrenic approach was hard to sustain, and therefore many bright scholars attempted to resolve again this hoary "one-and-many" problem.

In 1921, Rudolf Bultmann published a careful account of how Kant could "de-mythologize"  the Bible without losing its importance, and for the next 50 years, this was the reigning paradigm in theology circles. The idea was that "myth" was something not scientifically true, but morally true, and thus to make the Bible acceptable to an Enlightenment world, which would be of great help restraining their immoral behaviour, one should go through the Bible with a pink highlighter, separating the myth from the facts. 

Now that we have a properly highlighted Bible, we can immediately see which parts are meant for our moral development, and which for our mental development. Bultmann, like Kant before him, saw this as a vast improvement over immoral atheism that would slaughter men as if they were animals. Miracles, as Bultmann carefully explained, were myths that could not possibly be scientific, but were meant for our edification.

This was the view of the two other panellists that night. There is just one problem with it. The Resurrection is highlighted in pink.

Can one disbelieve in Miracles and still believe in a resurrected Christ? And if Christ was not resurrected, was one still a Christian? St Paul, an otherwise unmythological favorite of Bultmann's, thought differently. But then, St Paul didn't have Kant. Could we achieve today what Paul could not achieve in the classical world? What does history tell us?

History has not been kind to Bultmann; first the evangelicals attacked him, and later the liberals. But in a peculiar way, physics attacked him first. In 1924 De Broglie began the deconstruction of Democritean materialism with his thesis on electrons as waves. In time this became the weird world of Quantum Mechanics that destroyed Kant's separation between mind and matter.

It has been, however, a long, slow death. As we noted earlier, politics seems to precede philosophy in these areas. Just as evangelicals became more politically involved in the 1980's, so also they found their rigid separation of church and state was too confining. The realignment of the Republican party under Ronald Reagan, which recombined church and state was preceded by a realignment of the Democratic party in 1968 with the atheist monists, which bore fruit in the election of 2008. The Kantian respect between the natural sciences and the liberal arts had vanished, so that by 2006 the Nobel laureate and president of Harvard could be ejected for "disrespecting" the liberal arts faculty.

But as usual, reactionary evangelicals are the last to hear the news, hence the reliance on poor dead Kant at the panel last night. No, that's unfair to them. They rely on Kant because they are scientists trying to maintain the mutual respect that keeps them their jobs.

Unfortunately, it is a losing battle.  One way of understanding the movie "Expelled", the documentary of academic persecution, is to view it as the result of the Kantian wall crumbling along with the Berlin wall.

How can we then live? If there is no respect between science and faith, we are at the mercy of the one with power? Are the wars of religion next? How do we resolve the problem of the one-and-many, of miracles for the 21st century?

The answer takes us to Hegel, and the next installment.

To be continued...