Post-modernism: A Challenge to Science?

I just finished reading Walter Brueggemann’s  TEXTS UNDER NEGOTIATION:  THE BIBLE AND POSTMODERN IMAGINATION in which he postulates that we are (thankfully) in a time of change whereby the assumptions humans make to guide them are morphing into new ideas that present new challenges to Christianity. 

“Thus many commentators say that we are witnessing the ‘end of modernity,’ that is, the end of scientific positivism, and with it the end of Enlightenment modes of certitude and certain patterns of political domination.”

He does not cite support for his claims but assumes the signs are obvious enough to all in the scholarly community.  Ironically, I find the “certitude” of his claim to conform exactly to the modernity he sees as passing away; it is a very ethnocentric view representing exactly the thinking of the male Western Europe Enlightenment he criticizes in his book.   I think the reality of his claim is that the philosophical shift may be occurring in Western theologians and scholars more than in all of Christianity let alone the entire world.   His assumptions seem based in a certain ethnocentric thinking which post-modernity and Brueggemann himself reject as the old way of seeing things.  I don’t think post-modernity has gripped the Islamic world, nor the world of Eastern Orthodox which still relies on Patristic commentaries on the Scriptures rather than on the changes and developments in 20^th Century biblical scholarship.  I would even venture to say that some of his claims that the Church needs to newly read the Bible as a series of stories/drama rather than as dogmatic theological fodder may be new for Lutherans, but it is part and parcel to the Orthodox use of scripture in our various Prokeimenon, festal Old Testament Vespers readings, hymnology and Gospel lectionary.  The Orthodox frequently read scripture stories “out of context” and treat them as stories having unique insight in God and humanity without treating them in a fundamentalist or historical-critical way.  The end of modernity assumes that Christians throughout the world embraced modernity, an assumption not totally applicable to the Orthodox. 

My main point here however is not to contextualize his claims to embracing post-modernity.  I want to specifically look at his claims as they might relate not to theology and biblical criticism, but as they relate to science.  For if Brueggemann and others are correct and we have entered into a post-modern way of thinking, this should affect science as well as politics or history or literary writing.  Three claims he makes in the book:

“The political promise of the Enlightenment has failed to bring peace and has led to powerful tyranny sustained by ideology.” 

Referring to the thinking of Thomas Kuhn Brueggemann writes:   “That is, scientific knowledge is to some extent a political achievement whereby power is utilized to shape perception and interpretation in one direction rather than in another.  To the extent that scientific knowledge is a political, rhetorical achievement, it is not objective in any positivistic sense.  That is, the interest of the knower intrudes powerfully into what is known.”

“The core of our new awareness is that the world we have taken for granted in economics, politics, and everywhere else is an imaginative construal.  And if it is a construal, then from any other perspective, the world can yet be construed differently.” 

Brueggemann notes that post-modern thinking construes science as not THE objective means to understand the world but rather just another way humans can see the world.  It is not an “unbiased” view, but a very political construal which has its own agenda and goals which are only recently being exposed.  A challenge to the scientific view which has held such sway over modern thinking would be as big a challenge and change as was ushered in with the 18^th Century Enlightenment and the rejection of a traditionalist and authoritarian way of seeing the world. 

Next blog:  The Limits of Scientific Positivism

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This post is part of an interfaith synchroblog on “Religion and science”.

Here are links to other synchronised blog posts on this general topic:

 K.W. Leslie (Christian/Pentecostal/Assemblies of God) of The Evening of Kent on How I taught science instead of “Christian” science. 

 

 

Matt Stone (evangelical Christian) of Glocal Christianity on Is Evolution Atheistic?

Fr Ted (Orthodox Christian) of Fr Ted’s blog on Post-modernism: A Challenge to Science?

Steve Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Notes from underground on Reality isn’t what it used to be

Liz Dryer (Christian) of Grace Rules on Dreaming Quantum Dreams

Jarred Harris (Pagan/Vanic witch) Faith, Reason And Unreason at The Musings of a Confused Man