Jeffrey Koperski

Mark Harris has developed a new research program at the intersection of theology and quantum physics, centered on two coordinated commitments: quantum fundamentalism, the claim that quantum mechanics has a unique standing within the sciences, and Christological fundamentalism, the claim that the divine Logos is the source and ground of the created order. I make the case that Harris’s program, while rejecting naïve versions of reductionism, is still structurally reductive. I then develop an alternative framework based on emergence which is intrinsically non-reductive. A theology of science based on emergence would proceed in a distinctive manner compared to fundamentalism.

According to standard cosmology, the universe underwent a brief period of inflation within the first second of its existence. The cosmological multiverse is grounded in an extrapolation of this idea known as “eternal inflation.” This paper argues that the physics of eternal inflation is far less secure than inflation itself, and that a multiverse generated from eternal inflation should not inherit support from inflation alone. After explaining inflation, the anomalies it was intended to explain, and the mechanism by which eternal inflation is supposed to produce pocket universes, the paper surveys a range of difficulties from both philosophy and physics. No single objection is decisive. Rather, the accumulation of problems reveals a research program sustained more by theoretical extrapolation than empirical evidence. These problems include the measure problem, the relocation rather than resolution of fine-tuning, trans-Planckian worries, the presupposed quantum-to-classical transition, and swampland constraints tied to quantum gravity. At present, the existence of the multiverse based on eternal inflation warrants skepticism rather than belief.

Intelligent design (ID) raises several challenges for the relation between science and religion. One's views on these matters ramify across the other sciences, including physics. Can design, especially supernatural design, play any legitimate role in science? Is the ID question just a matter of evidence? What is the proper role for naturalism in all this? These are important questions in the philosophy of science. Before taking them up, this chapter briefly looks at the core concepts used in ID today. There is a less visible but equally menacing problem for the viability of ID. Methodological naturalism (MN) gets a lot of attention, but there is another methodological shaping principle to be contended with, namely, conservatism. Conservatism is also the reason ID attracts so many theists and few nontheists. If one already believes in an intelligence that can play the role of designer, then ID‐based science is not a radical move.

This open access book addresses the question of how God can providentially govern apparently ungovernable randomness. Medieval theologians confidently held that God is provident, that is, God is the ultimate cause of or is responsible for everything that happens. However, scientific advances since the 19th century pose serious challenges to traditional views of providence. From Darwinian evolution to quantum mechanics, randomness has become an essential part of the scientific worldview. An interdisciplinary team of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars—biologists, physicists, philosophers and theologians—addresses questions of randomness and providence.

Działanie Boga a prawa przyrody: odpowiedź Łukasiewiczowi W odpowiedzi Łukasiewiczowi na Opatrzność Boża a przypadek w świecie bronię trzech wniosków. Po pierwsze, stanowisko nazwane przez niego „deizmem epistemicznym” staje przed wyzwaniami ze strony fizyki, których często się nie zauważa. Po drugie, jeśli teiści opowiadający się za argumentem celowościowym opartym na tzw. delikatnym dostrojeniu nie mają racji, to nie ma jej również większość fizyków, która uważa, że delikatne dostrojenie wymaga wyjaśnienia. Po trzecie, nie wszystkie prawa przyrody są warunkowe w takim sensie, jaki przyjmuje Łukasiewicz. Na szczęście rozróżnienie między prawami a nienomologiczną informacją pozwala na rozszerzenie jego modelu działania Boga.

A longstanding question at the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology is how God might act, or not, when governing the universe. Many believe that determinism would prevent God from acting at all, since to do so would require violating the laws of nature. However, when a robust view of these laws is coupled with the kind of determinism now used in dynamics, a new model of divine action emerges. This book presents a new approach to divine action beyond the current focus on quantum mechanics and esoteric gaps in the causal order. It bases this approach on two general points. First, that there are laws of nature is not merely a metaphor. Second, laws and physical determinism are now understood in mathematically precise ways that have important implications for metaphysics. The explication of these two claims shows not only that nonviolationist divine action is possible, but there is considerably more freedom available for God to act than current models allow. By bringing a philosophical perspective to an issue often dominated by theologians and scientists, this text redresses an imbalance in the discussion around divine action. It will, therefore, be of keen interest to scholars of Philosophy and Religion, the Philosophy of Science, and Theology.

One of the main arguments against interventionist views of special divine action is that God would not violate his own laws. But if intervention entails the breaking of natural law, what precisely is being broken? While the nature of the laws of nature has been widely explored by philosophers of science, important distinctions are often ignored in the science and religion literature. In this paper, I consider the three main approaches to laws: Humean anti-realism, supervenience on more fundamental aspects of metaphysics, and nomological realism. The first denies that there is any metaphysical reality behind laws or causation. The second holds that laws supervene on capacities, dispositions, or counterfactuals. The third takes laws to be irreducible aspects of reality. The mechanics of special divine action and worries about intervention vary depending on which view of law one holds. In the end, I argue that early modern natural philosophers, who first introduced law-language for nature, largely had it right. Laws are not created entities or powers that act as intermediaries between God and nature; they are best understood as expressions of God’s will for nature. The outstanding question is whether such a view inevitably lands in occasionalism.

The indispensable role of models in science has long been recognized by philosophers. In contemporary dynamics, the models are often simply sets of equations. Bridging the gap between pure mathematics and real-world phenomenon is especially difficult when the model is chaotic. I address the charge that this bridge has not, in fact, been built and that chaos remains "just math." Although the problems discussed have become acute with the rise of modern chaos theory, their roots were recognized nearly a century ago by Pierre Duhem. The skeptical attacks are both foundational and epistemic. ;Targeting the foundations of chaos theory, the skeptic claims that the geometry instantiated by some chaotic models cannot be representative of real-world processes. Specifically, mathematical fractals are said to have more complexity than can be captured in a material world of discrete atoms. Furthermore, there is what physicists call "the problem of quantum chaos:" quantum mechanics appears to forbid full-blown chaotic evolutions. I argue that the counterfactual nature of chaotic models can be used to resolve these tensions. Moreover, I show that the skeptic cannot attack the foundations of chaos theory without calling into question unproblematic areas of mathematical science. ;The epistemological problems are driven by an essential property of chaotic dynamics, viz., sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This sensitivity confounds the confirmation schemes familiar to philosophers by precluding future predictions of the state of a system. The skeptic argues that without such predictions, the models cannot be tested. I show how researchers in chaos theory can overcome these skeptical objections via a recently developed method of model construction. This new method not only yields a decisive answer to the skeptic, but reveals a lacuna in the philosophical literature on models in science. I present a new taxonomy of models that incorporates these recent discoveries and conforms more closely to contemporary scientific practice than do previous classifications

Scientific knowledge is not merely a matter of reconciling theories and laws with data and observations. Science presupposes a number of metatheoretic shaping principles in order to judge good methods and theories from bad. Some of these principles are metaphysical (e.g., the uniformity of nature) and some are methodological (e.g., the need for repeatable experiments). While many shaping principles have endured since the scientific revolution, others have changed in response to conceptual pressures both from within science and without. Many of them have theistic roots. For example, the notion that nature conforms to mathematical laws flows directly from the early modern presupposition that there is a divine Lawgiver. This interplay between theism and shaping principles is often unappreciated in discussions about the relation between science and religion. Today, of course, naturalists reject the influence of theism and prefer to do science on their terms. But as Robert Koons and Alvin Plantinga have argued, this is more difficult than is typically assumed. In particular, they argue, metaphysical naturalism is in conflict with several metatheoretic shaping principles, especially explanatory virtues such as simplicity and with scientific realism more broadly. These arguments will be discussed as well as possible responses. In the end, theism is able to provide justification for the philosophical foundations of science that naturalism cannot.

The word “model” is highly ambiguous, and there is no uniform terminology used by either scientists or philosophers. Here, a model is considered to be a representation of some object, behavior, or system that one wants to understand. This article presents the most common type of models found in science as well as the different relations—traditionally called “analogies”—between models and between a given model and its subject. Although once considered merely heuristic devices, they are now seen as indispensable to modern science. There are many different types of models used across the scientific disciplines, although there is no uniform terminology to classify them. The most familiar are physical models such as scale replicas of bridges or airplanes. These, like all models, are used because of their “analogies” to the subjects of the models. A scale model airplane has a structural similarity or “material analogy” to the full scale version. This correspondence allows engineers to infer dynamic properties of the airplane based on wind tunnel experiments on the replica. Physical models also include abstract representations which often include idealizations such as frictionless planes and point masses. Another, but completely different type of model, is constituted by sets of equations. These mathematical models were not always deemed legitimate models by philosophers. Model-to-subject and model-to-model relations are described using several different types of analogies: positive, negative, neutral, material, and formal.

Some phenomena within nature exhibit such exquisiteness of structure, function or interconnectedness that many people have found it natural—if not inescapable—to see a deliberative and directive mind behind those phenomena. The mind in question, being prior to nature itself, is typically taken to be supernatural. Philosophically inclined thinkers have both historically and at present labored to shape the relevant intuition into a more formal, logically rigorous inference. The resultant theistic arguments, in their various logical forms, share a focus on plan, purpose, intention and design, and are thus classified as teleological arguments (or, frequently, as arguments from or to design). Although enjoying some prominent defenders over the centuries, such arguments have also attracted serious criticisms from a number of major historical and contemporary thinkers. Both critics and advocates are found not only among philosophers, but come from scientific and other disciplines as well. In the following discussion, major variant forms of teleological arguments will be distinguished and explored, traditional philosophical and other criticisms will be discussed, and the most prominent contemporary turns (cosmic fine tuning arguments, many-worlds theories, and the present Intelligent Design debate) will be tracked. Discussion will conclude with a brief look at one historically important non-inferential approach to the issue.

A recent noninterventionist account of divine agency has been proposed that marries the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics to the instability of chaos theory. On this account, God is able to bring about observable effects in the macroscopic world by determining the outcome quantum events. When this determination occurs in the presence of chaos, the ability to influence large systems is multiplied. This paper argues that although the proposal is highly intuitive, current research in dynamics shows that it is far less plausible than previously thought. Chaos coupled to quantum mechanics proves to be a shaky foundation for models of divine agency.

For quantum mechanics to form the crux of a robust model of divine action, random quantum fluctuations must be amplified into the macroscopic realm. What has not been recognized in the divine action literature to date is the degree to which differential dynamics, continuum mechanics, and condensed matter physics prevent such fluctuations from infecting meso- and macroscopic systems. Once all of the relevant physics is considered, models of divine action based on quantum randomness are shown to be far more limited than is generally assumed. Unless some sort of new physical mechanism is discovered, the amplification problem cannot be solved.

The use of idealized models in science is by now well-documented. Such models are typically constructed in a “top-down” fashion: starting with an intractable theory or law and working down toward the phenomenon. This view of model-building has motivated a family of confirmation schemes based on the convergence of prediction and observation. This paper considers how chaotic dynamics blocks the convergence view of confirmation and has forced experimentalists to take a different approach to model-building. A method known as “phase space reconstruction” not only reveals a lacuna in the philosophical literature on models, it also fails to conform to conventional views about how models are used to confirm a theory

Theologians and philosophers of religion are increasingly interested in physics. From the fine-tuning of universal constants to quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology, physics is a surprisingly common subject where religion is involved. Bridging the gap between issues in religion and those in physics can be quite difficult, however. Fortunately, the philosophy of science provides a middle ground between the two disciplines. In this book, a philosopher of science provides a critical analysis of the ways in which physics is brought into play in matters of religion.

This paper continues a dialogue that began with an article by Jeffrey Koperski entitled “Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones,” published in the June 2008 issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. In a response article, Christopher Pynes argues that ad hominem arguments are sometimes legitimate, especially when critiquing Intelligent Design (2012). We show that Pynes’s examples only apply to matters of testimony, not the kinds of arguments found in the best defenses of ID.

There is an ongoing debate over cosmological fine-tuning between those holding that design is the best explanation and those who favor a multiverse. A small group of critics has recently challenged both sides, charging that their probabilistic intuitions are unfounded. If the critics are correct, then a growing literature in both philosophy and physics lacks a mathematical foundation. In this paper, I show that just such a foundation exists. Cosmologists are now providing the kinds of measure-theoretic arguments needed to make the case for fine-tuning. Introduction Probability and infinite sets 2.1 No probability function 2.2 Arbitrary and wrong probability functions The measure of the universe The coarse-tuning objection Arbitrariness and error Conclusion.

In his recent anthology, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, Robert Pennock continues his attack on what he considers to be the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design Theory. In this critical review, I discuss the main issues in the debate. Although the rhetoric is often heavy and the articles are intentionally stacked against Intelligent Design, there are many interesting topics in the philosophy of science to be found. I conclude that, contra Pennock, there is nothing intrinsically unscientific about Intelligent Design. At this stage, however, it remains more of a provocative idea than a research program. Whether design theorists can bridge this gap is still very much in question. In any case, the debate serves as a modern case study for such classic problems as the nature of scientific explanations, theory change, the demarcation problem, and the role of metaphysical assumptions in the development of science.

Scientific knowledge is often categorized as experimental or theoretical. There is, however, a third layer where philosophy of science and science proper overlap, the realm of metatheoretic shaping principles. For example, we assume that the causal regularities observed today will also hold tomorrow. Researchers are thereby relying on two metaphysical doctrines: the uniformity of nature and mechanistic causation. There are also the “explanatory virtues” of simplicity, testability, internal and external coherence, fruitfulness, and wide scope. My first goal is to categorize these principles and show how they’ve operated in the history of science. Particular attention will be paid to their suspension and rejection, even of widely held principles. My second goal is to consider how certain shaping principles impinge on open theology. Of particular interest will be naturalism (both metaphysical and methodological), reductionism, and realism. Surprisingly, differences within the open theology camp are more relevant to these issues than open theism itself.

Four arguments are examined in order to assess the state of the Intelligent Design debate. First, critics continually cite the fact that ID proponents have religious motivations. When used as criticism of ID arguments, this is an obvious ad hominem. Nonetheless, philosophers and scientists alike continue to wield such arguments for their rhetorical value. Second, in his expert testimony in the Dover trial, philosopher Robert Pennock used repudiated claims in order to brand ID as a kind of pseudoscience. His arguments hinge on the nature of methodological naturalism as a metatheoretic shaping principle. We examine the use of such principles in science and the history of science. Special attention is given to the demarcation problem. Third, the scientific merits of ID are examined. Critics rightly demand more than promissory notes for ID to move beyond the fringe. Fourth, although methodological naturalism gets a lot of attention, there is another shaping principle to contend with, namely, conservatism. Science, like most disciplines, tends to change in an incremental rather than revolutionary manner. When ID is compared to other non- or quasi-Darwinian proposals, it appears to be a more radical solution than is needed in the face of the anomalies.

Creationism is usually paired these days with evolution, as in “The Creation vs. Evolution Debate.” Although there is something right about that, it is not the whole story. The controversy is older than Darwin and touches on far more than biological evolution. In this chapter, we consider broader questions about the origin of the universe and the relation between science and Scripture: How old is the universe? If God created it, how did he do so? How should we interpret the account of creation in the early chapters of Genesis? There are four main approaches to these questions. The first is naturalism: nothing exists beyond the realm of nature, material objects, and energy. Most naturalists consider religious beliefs to be purely matters of faith, making no contribution to history or science. Although naturalism and atheism are not synonymous, when it comes to matters of religion, they are essentially the same. The second view is young earth creationism (YEC), which takes a literal interpretation of Genesis and the six days of creation. The last two views, progressive creationism (PC) and theistic evolution (TE), reject this interpretation and agree with contemporary science about the age of the universe. The difference between PC and TE has to do with God’s activities after the initial creation of the cosmos. Although there are nonchristian theists in each camp, the debate is a much larger, defining issue among contemporary, Protestant Christians than it is in other religions.