The Realist Beginner’s Handbook – Part 1

The first step on the path of realism is to recognise that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognise that, however, much one tries to think differently, one will never succeed; the third is to note that those who claim that they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part. If they ask themselves why, their conversion is almost complete.

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Most people who say and think that they are idealists would prefer to be able not to be such, but they cannot find out how. People tell them that they will never get outside their thought and that anything beyond thought is unthinkable. If they consent to seek a reply to this objection they are lost from the start, for all the idealist’s objections against the realist are formulated in idealist terms…

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We must begin by distrusting the term ‘thought’; for the greatest difference between the realist and the idealist is that the idealist thinks, whereas the realist knows…

[For the idealist] the spirit is what thinks, while for us the intellect is what knows… An idealist term is generally a realist term which designates one of the spiritual conditions of knowledge, but is not considered as generating its own content.

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The knowledge of which the realist speaks is the lived and experienced unity of an intellect with an apprehended reality. This is why a realist philosopher always presses towards the very thing that is apprehended, without which there would be no knowledge. The idealist philosophers, on the other hand, since they start from thought, very soon choose as their object science or philosophy. When he genuinely thinks as an idealist, the idealist embodies perfectly the essence of a ‘professor of philosophy’; while the realist, when he genuinely thinks as a realist, fulfils the authentic essence of a philosopher; for a philosopher talks about things, but a professor of philosophy talks about philosophy.

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Just as we do not have to go from thought to things (knowing the enterprise to be impossible), so we do not have to ask ourselves whether something beyond is thinkable. It may well be that something beyond thought is not thinkable, but it is certain that all knowledge implies something beyond thought. The fact that this something-beyond-thought is given to us by knowledge only in thought does not prevent it from being something-beyond; but the idealist always confuses ‘being given in thought’ and ‘being given by thought’. For one who starts from knowledge something-beyond-thought is so far thinkable that it is only this kind of thought for which there can be a ‘beyond’.

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The realist will be committing an error of the same kind [as the idealist] if he asks himself how, starting from the ego, he can prove the existence of a non-ego. For the idealist, who starts from the ego, this is the normal, and indeed only possible, formulation of the question. The realist must be doubly wary; first because he does not start from the ego, and secondly because for him the world is not a non-ego (that would be nothing at all), but an in-se. An in-se can be given in knowledge; a non-ego is what the realist is reduced to for an idealist, and it can neither be grasped by knowledge no proved by thought.

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Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism, quoted in E.L. Mascall's The Openness of Being [p.93-94]

E.L. Mascall adds the following comment:

For Gilson, the idealist problem, how we can compare the content of our mind, with the reality outside in order to know what degree the former accurately depicts the latter, simply does not arise. It is an insoluble problem which idealism has created for itself; for the realist, there is no such thing as a noumenon in the idealist's sense of the term.

~ Jakian Thomist

SLJ: Advent and Science

Yes, Father wrote a little book (about 90 pages) called Advent and Science, which contains four chapters of translations of his talks (in Hungarian) given in Budapest in 1999. If you don't yet have a copy, you ought to get one. Here's the very beginning, just to inspire you...

--Dr. Thursday

It may seem strange to seek a connection between Advent and science, and even stranger if Advent is mainly a matter of sentiments. Yet, undoubtedly, more than any other phase of the liturgical year Advent is the season of that gripping sentiment which is longing. Advent is also replete with the joy of anticipation which in some way surpasses even the joy of possession. Many have observed, and rightly so, that there is something special in the joy of expecting as compared with the joy one feels on coming into possession of what one has eagerly looked for.

What is true of religion, as experienced especially during Advent, is also true of science. The magic of science comes to a large extent from musing about its future marvels and about its promise that man's horizons would forever expand. The feats which science has already achieved along these lines greatly strengthen the confidence that the future has even greater feats in store.

Advent is the most attractive part of the liturgical year also because it is a summary of the entire liturgical year, an annually recurring anticipation of a final Advent. This attitude expresses best the essence of religion, so concisely put in the words of the Scripture: "Faith is solid confidence in what we hope, a conviction about what we do not see" (Heb 11:1). The entire Christian condition is a longing for the kind of present moment which is eternity itself. That moment will not be touched with the anxiety that once it is ours it may slip through our fingers as does the momentary present.

The idea of a present moment that lasts forever was best summed up in Boethius' dictum, now almost a millennium and a half old: "Eternity is the perfect and total possession of a life with no limits." Longing for that moment that lasts forever is the essence of Advent and also its perennial timeliness. For we can grasp the notion of eternity only inasmuch as we penetrate the present moment's intellectual significance and conceptual riches.
[SLJ Advent and Science, 1-2]

A Project for the Duhem Society

From A Non-Thomist Thomism:

"The Building blocks from which one might construct a Thomistic epistemology are scattered throughout [Thomas'] vast works, and no Thomist so far has gathered them together in a system, let alone in one that would appear at least consistent to the modern mind. The task may be daunting, because to satisfy a Thomist mind and a modern mind is to satisfy two very different things, though both should put a premium on consistency. I cannot help saying this, nor can I help the fact that ineffective have been my suggestions to younger people interested in Thomistic philosophy that they gather the epistemological statements in the works of Etienne Gilson, whom I consider the greatest Thomist since Thomas Aquinas. I make this suggestion again in the hope that my words, this time, will not fall upon deaf ears."
[A Late Awakening and Other Essays, p.226]

This is a challenge for members of the Duhem Society bequeathed us by father himself. Gilson's primary works on epistemology were Le Réalisme Méthodique and Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge. However, both books are very difficult to find. Father himself prompted the translation of Methodical Realism which highlights its importance. Here is an excerpt from A Mind's Matter on the Father Jaki's discovery of this book:

"My sensitivity to philosophy certainly received a spark when I found quoted a statement of Gilson's in E.Mascall's Gifford Lectures, The Openness of Being, a work I read a year or two after its publication in 1971. There Mascall opened his vindication of philosophical realism by quoting over three pages from a section of Gilson's Le Réalisme Méthodique that had for its title the quaint phrase, "Le Vade Mecum du débuntant réalist." This first three phases quoted by Mascall became indelibly engraved in my mind: "The first step on the path of realism is to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that however much one tries to think differently, one will never succeed; the third is to note that those who claim that they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part. If they ask themselves why, their conversion is almost complete."

Ever since I read those precepts I was on my way to becoming an articularly confirmed realist. I saw to it that this book of Gilson was also translated into English. This time Philip Trower, a gentleman philosopher and theologian in England, did the job and did it most creditably. For him the book was a revelation inasmuch as it informed him about subjectivist intrusions into Neothomism already in the 1930s. Not all problems of present-day Catholics began with Vatican II....

Still I do not understand why Gilson's Réalisme Méthodique failed to be translated into English while he still ruled from the Medieval Institute in Toronto. Had that translation been made, it might have forestalled a Gleichschaltung of Catholic departments of philosophy."
[A Mind's Matter, p.176-177]

It is a terrible pity that a book with such potential is yet again unavailable - even second hand - despite the efforts of Fr. Jaki to bring it to wider consciousness. It will indeed have an important part in our task despite the fact that I am unable to source it! However, I have obtained Mascall's Openness of Being and what better place to start our task than by considering its generous excerpts from Gilson's The Realist Beginner's Handbook, which I will discuss next week.

Contradictions and Refutations

Here is a gem from Cosmos and Creator which neatly contrasts Jaki's realism with the recent philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn et al.) who I hope to cover in the new year.
~ Jakian Thomist

Part of the truth of Thomas' metaphysical realism, the only proper label of a genuinely Thomistic 'epistemology', lies in its consistency. This will not appear a small matter if one recalls Chesterton's poignant observation that 'No sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically;... no materialist, who thinks his mind was made up for him by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind.' Had Cherterton been a professional philosopher and he had lived today when philosophy is in many quarters a respectable enterprise only when it deals with scientific knowledge, he would have easily found some highly acclaimed targets to make his point. Clearly, the falsification theory of knowledge was not proposed to declare that theory to be intrinsically falsifiable. The process theory of knowledge and existence clearly aims a permanence while it subjects everything else to endless transformations. The theory of Gestalt switches obviously wants to retain a permanent image of itself, while it turns all other viewpoints into the prey of unpredictable sudden changes. The theory of knowledge based on the succession of basically disconnected scientific paradigms, brought about by scientific revolutions, carries its own refutation by claiming that there is a connection or structure underlying all revolutions.

The latter theory has at least the merit of having been carried by its author to its logical end where it is no longer necessary to assume that the world science deals with is an ordered entity, a consistent construct. That such a world cannot logically prompt that well-ordered knowledge which is science shows the intimate connection between cosmology (science) and epistemology (metaphysics), and also something of the soundness of Thomas' starting principle that it is the existing beings which elicit knowledge. The principle is not only proven sound by that laboratory which is the history of philosophy, but also helps explain why the brute facts of nature can shock the scientific mind to such an extent as to spark profound insights about the workings and structure of the physical world to be tested in laboratories where one looks for real things and not merely one's thought about them.

[Cosmos and Creator p. 101-102]

Giving Thanks

Today in America we are preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and so I wanted to give a very brief insight from Fr. Jaki into this most mystical and most powerful of actions - the action of giving thanks. It must come as a surprise to some readers of this blogg, or of Fr. Jaki's books, to see how deeply human - that is, how truly universal - is Father's awareness of the Human Thing: he does not write simply as a scientist or as a philosopher (or the scholar of any other specific discipline) but as a Man - and so imbues his writing with touches of the Human Scholarship. It is a very Chestertonian style of writing. Take, for example, this excerpt in which Father refers to GKC as well as St. Augustine:

No philosophical sophistication, only robust common sense is needed if one is to be electrified by the plain realization that, as put by Chesterton with his customary incisiveness, "nothing can be more universal than the universe."

With such mental conditioning on hand, man will naturally feel, as he consciously takes his stand on that board, that he is set in an upward motion toward God, the only being beyond the universe of specific, that is, contingent beings. Man will then experience something very different from that leap in the dark which those try to perform agonizingly who never have really felt the universe, and at times not even plain ordinary things, under their feet. The move toward God, if it is to be a safe one, must not be a separation from the universe. The move rather consists in sensing the pulse of cosmic contingency, the relentless pointing of the universe beyond itself. A mental experience of this type animates St. Augustine’s celebrated passage:

I spoke to all the things that are about me, all that can be admitted by the door of the senses, and I said, ‘Since you are not my God, tell me about him. Tell me something of my God.’ Clear and loud they answered, ‘God is he who made us.’ I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things... I asked the whole mass of the universe about my God, and it replied, ‘I am not God. God is he who made me.

That this passage is from Book X of the Confessions is not accidental. Book X begins with Augustine’s asking his readers to thank God for his conversion described in Book IX. His conversion meant among other things the opening of his eyes to the mind’s fascination with glittering half-truths and specious fallacies. The cosmological argument will appear a delusion unless those fallacies and half-truths, which the modern world mass-produces about the universe, are seen for what they truly are. It is precisely because the modern intellectual atmosphere is polluted to suffocation with disastrous ideas about the universe that any vote cast on behalf of the cosmological argument may appear a sheer defiance of all accepted standards of intellectual respectability.
[SLJ God and the Cosmologists 213-4]

Also consider this, which provides me with the link to one of my favourite GKC poems, which I think must be the essence of every true follower of these Great Ones:

The Psalm begins with the declaration of God's full knowledge of all of man's actions including his very purpose, however hidden. It is wholly vain for man to think that he can ever escape the searching eyes of divine knowledge. It is present in the highest heavens no less than at the seas' furthest end and readily penetrates the darkness as if it were broad daylight.

Furthermore a very specific reason is given for all this in three stanzas in which God is not merely credited with full foreknowledge of man's free actions but also portrayed as being the very author of them. To deepen that already very deep perspective, the nature of that divine knowledge is tied to the very depths of that foremost divine act which is creation. Creation out of nothing is not explicitly mentioned, but in view of the obvious immateriality of free human acts, it lurks between the lines as reference is made to the womb as the place of each man's creation:

For it was you who created my being,
knit me together in my mother's womb.
I thank you for the wonder of my being,
for the wonders of all your creation.

Already you knew my soul,
my body held no secret from you
when I was being fashioned in secret
and moulded in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw all my actions,
they were all of them written in your book;
every one of my days was decreed
before one of them came into being.

No less extraordinary depths are intimated by the same Psalm's conclusion about a need for infinity if the Infinite himself is to be fathomed:

To me how mysterious your thoughts,
the sum of them not to be numbered!
If I count them, they are more than the sand;
to finish, I must be eternal, like you.

[SLJ The Purpose of It All 195-7]

Indeed - and now, Chesterton's poem:

"Eternities"

I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well bath He spoken: 'Swear not by thy head,
Thou knowest not the hairs,' though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in His own strange book.

I cannot count the sands or search the seas,
Death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.
Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon the trees.

In heaven I shall stand on gold and glass,
Still brooding earth's arithmetic to spell;
Or see the fading of the fires of hell
Ere I have thanked my God for all the grass.
[GKC CW10:209]

You do not need to be American to be thankful today - or any day. Indeed, we should do as St. Paul told us, "Dedicate yourselves to thankfulness" [See Col 3:15]

Polkinghorne on Jaki

Dr. Polkinghorne has been aware of Fr. Jaki’s writings for many years and indeed has quoted from them across several of his books, including his Gifford Lectures. One can find a reference to the theistic origins of science thesis in Faith, Science and Understanding p. 18, Science and the Trinity p. 9 and Quantum Physics and Theology p. 107. Polkinghorne presents the argument is a non-committal manner and always with an incomplete explanation by ignoring Jaki’s emphasis on the stillbirths of science and the Christological thrust of the Buridan’s thinking. Polkinghorne’s silence on the writings of Pierre Duhem should therefore not come as a surprise.

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Fr. Jaki is mentioned by the interviewer in Polkinghorne’s best-selling Questions on Truth with colleague Nicholas Beale, and indeed is associated with linking the Godel theorems to TOE:

Q: Do you agree with Stanley Jaki’s invocation of Godel’s incompleteness theorem as an argument against the possibility of developing a theory of everything as an argument against the impossibility of developing a theory of everything that is “necessarily” and not just “contingently” true? Hawking, as I understand it even admits that Godel’s work will complicate the consistency of a unified theory, does he not? If Godel’s work does throw a wretch into the works, why hasn’t the physics community caught on to this? Why, after his many walks with Godel in Princeton, was Einstein not dissuaded from pursuing a grand unified theory?

JP: Godel’s theorem shows us that truth can never be totally caught in any purely logical system – a useful lesson I think. It seems that truth always exceeds what can be proved by logic. This fact certainly provides a significant check to grandiose claims about theories of everything. Stanley Jaki is very learned and interesting to read. I think that Christian belief in creation was an influence on the birth of modern science in twelfth-century Europe, but I would not go so far as Jaki’s claim that this belief, then and now, is indispensable to a fruitful science.

[Questions on Truth p.51-52]

Of course, Jaki never argued that Christian belief is still indispensable for fruitful science, as science is now successfully birthed and self-sustaining. Actually in The Road of Science and the Ways to God, “ Fr. Jaki argued that the same philosophical realism underlay both the classical proofs of God’s existence and science’s greatest steps. One had to begin not with the mind, but “with objects, with facts.” [A. Gardiner, NOR] [1]

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It was father’s respect for objects that lead him to reject the Copenhagen Philosophy, not Quantum Mechanics itself, as Polkinghorne claimed in his review of God and the Cosmologists. [2] This difference over the Copenhagen Philosophy had major consequences for their respective stances on natural theology and the cosmological argument.

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“Stanley Jaki may say with some impatience ‘if pointers do not point unambiguously, that is, with certainty, what is the point of using them?’ but God is not to be read out of experience with quite that degree of clarity. I have more sympathy with the words of David Burrell, who speaks of the aim ‘to secure the distinction of God from the world, and to do so in such a way as to display how such a One, who must be unknowable, may also be known’.”

[Faith of a Physicist p. 40, my emphasis]

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Setting aside the logical dilemma of the last sentence, quoting the surrounding paragraph to Jaki’s quotation may prove instructive.

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One indeed reveals a grave myopia for very broad consequences when one declares that instead of the cosmological argument or proof, one should talk about pointers the universe affords about the existence of God. For if pointers do not point unambiguously, that is, with certainty, what is the point of using them? But if the difference between proofs and pointers is merely verbal, why the reluctance to speak of proofs? Or is it perhaps one’s particular cult, in which rational certainties are not welcome, that recommends the abolition of proofs along a broad front so that a particularly sorry predicament might not appear for what it truly is?

A chief reason for doubts concerning the demonstrative value of the cosmological argument may lie in a pathetic surrender to a cultural cliché which Niels Bohr wanted to see elevated, as if he had been a magus and not a scientist, into a secular cult.

[God and the Cosmologists p. 231]

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Yet again the problem of knowledge raises its ugly head and once objects are not taken for a starting point, scepticism lurks in the wings. Even with this in mind I was quite surprised to read that Polkinghorne thinks that;

If we cannot even prove the consistency of arithmetic, it seems a bit much to hope that God's existence is easier to deal with [Faith of a Physicist p.57]

While Polkinghorne was referring to Anselm’s argument in writing this, these sentiments appear elsewhere, as he endorses Nagel’s statement that ‘we must also admit that world probably reaches beyond our capacity to understand it, no matter how far we travel.’ Polkinghorne adds ‘How much more so must that be true of God’. [Faith of a Physicist p.40]

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Lack of confidence in man’s ability to know the Truth is a symptom of what Jaki views as a sickly atmosphere where an “infatuation with the ‘proofs’ of the scientific method may blind one to a wider meaning of proofs…Its proofs are for the most part identity relations, plain tautologies, to recall a remark of Bertrand Russell. Those proofs work as long as one remains within the limits of mathematical formalisms, but are of no help when a physicist wants to demonstrate the reality of the telescope he uses. Statements about the reality of this or that object, however trivial, cannot be cast into the molds of mathematics.” [God and the Cosmologists p.230-231]

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A. Garnider notes “sadly, the excessive respect for quantitative considerations in the West has bred an “insensitivity” to philosophical questions, so that the pseudoontological interpretation grafted onto quantum mechanics by Bohr now carries the day, even in theology.” [1] From this perspective, Polkinghorne’s attempts at an “unexpected kinship” between Copenhagen Philosophy and Theology are only one step nearer to Bohr’s goal to make ‘complementarity’ the ultimate religion.

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Jaki’s commitment to the Cosmological argument, in contrast to Polkinghorne, necessarily dispels doubt about man’s ability to know the world. “…Truth is given its greatest service when its certainty is held high unconditionally. Only then does truth perform its very role, which is to liberate man.” [God and The Cosmologists p.232]

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~Jakian Thomist

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[1] Excerpts from Anne Barbeau Gardiner’s excellent review of Father Jaki’s work and life in the New Oxford Review. Available from www.sljaki.com along with an extensive bibliography of Father’s writings.

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[2] Quoted from P. Haffner Creation and Scientific Creativity p.168. I could not access Polkinghorne’s review in Theology 63 (1990) p.407. I would be grateful if anyone could pass on details of its availability.

Jaki on Polkinghorne

John Polkinghorne is the famed physicist turned Anglican minister who has written several books on science and religion such as “Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship”, “Exploring Reality: The intertwining of Science and Religion” and “Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue”.

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However, Polkinghorne’s fondness for “quantum” theology only earned him a serious talking to in Fr. Jaki’s works. With direct reference to Polkinghorne, Jaki writes:

Almost a crude lack of perceptiveness is at work in a Christian who sees in that “quantum mechanical” world an ally of Christian faith, a deliverance from ironclad mechanical determinism. For one, such a Christian fails to see that physical determinism, discovered freely and investigated freely, can never be any threat to human freedom. For another, such a Christian fails to see anything significant in the fervent espousal of that random world by a post-Christian world. The fervour is largely fuelled by the “liberating vistas” of moral randomness, the worst counterfeit of true freedom.
[The Only Chaos and Other Essays p.257]

Jaki criticises Polkinghorne’s attempts at theo-scientific monism through the Copenhagen interpretation and its end results, such as taking “quantum mechanical chance for a proof that God handed over to the universe the work of creation.” [God and the Cosmologists p.152] According to Jaki, only a play of words “lies at the basis of any explanation of physical reality as a particle play” [ibid p.139], such as the one outlined in Polkinghorne’s The Particle Play, his popularisation of Quantum Mechanics.

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Jaki had little sympathy for Polkinghorne’s stance as a “critical realist” and for his “dual aspect monism”. In God and the Cosmologists (p.152), Jaki notes Polkinghorne’s rejection of Aquinas’ argument “that only an immaterial organ can carry on with the act of understanding”, and comments:

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“When a Christian clergman does not see why this has to be so, he obviously can but be disturbed by the age-old Christian belief that the soul survives bodily death.”

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I conclude this piece with some long excerpts of Jaki’s review of Polkinghorne’s Christian apologetic, “The Way the World Is” in the National Review (22 March 1985). Next week I will consider Polkinghorne on Father Jaki’s writings.

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~ Jakian Thomist

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WORLDS FRAGMENTED

Stanley L Jaki

The Way the World Is, by John Polkinghorne

(Eerdmans, 144 pp., $4.95)

The book is mostly on theology, an area in which the author considers himself a novice, not necessarily out of false modesty. Only three years elapsed between his resigning his Cambridge professorship in physics and his writing this booklet. In that interval he studied theology as a preparation for "ordained ministry," as he puts it, in the Church of England. Judging by this book, the theology he assimilated was heavy on New Testament criticism, a field more complex than theoretical physics. Still more importantly, the sciences and theology are very different fields—a claim that may turn one nowadays into a loner.

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Polkinghorne doesn't mention Kuhn, though twice he approvingly recalls Popper, the architect of falsificationism. He fails to suspect that on that basis also fragmentation is in store for his theological venture aimed at securing reasonableness for the main tenets of the Christian religion. He is not only galloping across the crucial issues of Christian theology (the status of the New Testament, of Jesus, His divinity and Resurrection) but also riding the wrong horse. It would be a bad horse even if it were a good scientific methodology, which can hardly be said about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the author's chief intellectual arsenal. For all its computational wizardry, quantum mechanics is not (as the Copenhagen interpretation claims it is) a proof of the proposition that one can know only aspects but not things in which aspects presumably inhere. Countless books to the contrary—including The Particle Play, Polkinghorne's popularization of fundamental particle physics—if one is to probe the play of particles one must have particles or things. It still remains a colossal fallacy in logic to argue, with an eye on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that if an interaction cannot be measured exactly, it cannot take place exactly. The fallacy is the confusion of the operational and ontological levels.

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Ontology, of which the author could not learn through his studies of New Testament criticism, is indispensable even in Biblical theology. There one has to come face to face with such statements as "I AM WHO IS" and "Before Abraham existed I AM," and "I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life," to mention only three. The second and third are not cited by Mr. Polkinghorne, whose notion of truth is probabilistic, harking back to his quantum- mechanical upbringing. Truth he confuses time and again with "knockdown demonstration." No wonder that he has no use for dogmatics, not even for the hallowed dogmatics of Nicea and Athanasius's defense of it, although it failed to "knock down" either the Arians and semi-Arians or their present-day liberal progeny.

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Polkinghorne is unconvincing in his efforts to make his reader accept something divine in Jesus, Whose strict divinity he leaves to the mercy of the phenomenological approach, where it is largely ignored. According to Polkinghorne, that approach may liberate one "from the hectoring and self-confident tone of the Quicunque vult." Such is the worst kind of liberation theology conceivable. For it imprisons one in that probabilistic subjectivism for which the deepest ontological questions of theology—such as the homoousion and its chief corollary, the constant beatific vision enjoyed by Christ, the man—do not carry any significance.

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It is doubtful that on the basis of this book one might hope for a calming of the latest Anglican storm stirred up by the new Bishop of Durham's [David Edward Jenkins] "scientific" onslaught on Christ's miracles and His Resurrection. Tellingly, the bishop rejects the bodily Resurrection of Christ. Once more, things— bodies—are the ultimate touchstone of truth. This book is hardly about the way the world is, physical and spiritual, and it certainly does not provide those worlds. In fact, both are potentially fragmented in this book. It may titillate Christians eager to make a misconstrued theology appear respectable to a scientific forum chronically misunderstanding itself.