Kenny on Noble

Anthony Kenny on Denis Noble:

When I was a bachelor don at Balliol I shared a staircase with Denis Noble, who was a physiology tutor: my rooms were on one side of the staircase and his on the other. We were both courting at the time, and so would also meet each other's fiancées on the stairs. We shared students as well as premises. There was an honour school called PPP: Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. Denis taught the students physiology and I taught them philosophy. At meals in college we often discussed topics of common interest: Denis was not only a physiologist but as competent a philosopher as any of my colleagues.

In those days, there was a broad consensus that the sciences formed a hierarchy in which each level was to be explained in terms of the one below it: psychology was to be explained by physiology, physiology by chemistry, and chemistry by physics. This scientific strategy was called 'reductionism', since all sciences were ultimately to be reduced to physics. The idea was pithily expressed by Jim Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA: 'There are only molecules – everything else is sociology.'

Reductionist science chalked up victory after victory, as more and more lower-level mechanisms were discovered to explain higher-level processes. One such discovery was made in 1984 by the young Denis. He explained the pacemaker rhythm of the heart in terms of the flow of ions of potassium and calcium through protein channels. This achievement established his credentials as a reductionist biologist. However, he did not long continue to be a card-carrying member of the fraternity. He soon realized that in the heartbeat there was not only upward causation from the molecular level to the cellular level, but also downward causation from the cell influencing the molecules. Denis chaired the meeting at which I challenged Dawkins on the explanatory power of genes, and he took my side in the argument.

After I became Master of the college I ceased to share students with Denis, and so we had less opportunity for scientific discussion. However, our paths remained entwined at an administrative level. For two years, Denis served as my vice Master. This period included the year in which Mrs Thatcher was proposed, and then rejected, for an honorary Oxford degree. Denis was a founder of the Save British Science campaign which protested against the Thatcher government's cuts to the science budget, and he took a leading part in the campaign against the proposal. After the proposal was rejected, 200 alumni wrote separate letters to Balliol, either to applaud or to condemn the decision of Congregation. Denis and I divided between us the burden of replying. I, who had voted in Council in favour of the degree, wrote to the pro-Thatcher correspondents, while Denis wrote to the rest.

In retirement, I have been delighted to resume philosophical and scientific discussions with Denis. He has now come a long way from his reductionist beginnings. In his latest book, Dance to the Tune of Life, he enunciates a principle that he calls 'biological relativity'. This states that in biology there is no privileged level of causation: living organisms are multilevel open systems in which the behaviour at any level depends on higher and lower levels, and cannot be fully understood in isolation. Levels are distinguished from each other by their degree of complexity. If we start with atoms, we move upward through the levels of molecules, networks, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, whole-body systems and whole organisms.

One of the goals of reductionism was to eliminate from science all teleology or goal-directedness. In fact, Noble argues, teleology is ubiquitous in nature. However, it operates in different ways at different levels. At the purely molecular level, the protein-membrane network that sustains cardiac rhythm has no goal: its function only becomes clear at the level of cells. In its turn, the cellular activity serves a purpose that only emerges at the still higher level of the cardiovascular system.

While he remains a thoroughgoing Darwinist, Denis challenges the neo-Darwinism of Dawkins. He rejects the assumption that natural selection working on chance variations in genetic material is entirely sufficient to explain all evolutionary change, and has followed up the critique of The Selfish Gene that we began in his Holywell Manor drawing room years ago. In Dance to the Tune of Life, he argues that genes are not agents – selfish or unselfish: they are only templates – mere organs of the living cell:

There is nothing alive in the DNA molecule alone. If I could completely isolate a whole genome, put it in a Petri dish with as many nutrients as we may wish, I could keep it for 10,000 years and it would do absolutely nothing other than to slowly degrade.

Moreover, DNA is not sealed off from the outside world: it is subject to modification from within the organism and from the environment. Human beings and other animals are not lumbering robots but autonomous agents who can affect not only their environment but also the make-up of their own genome.

In 2017, Denis organized a joint conference between the Royal Society and the British Academy on the new trends in evolutionary biology. Despite attempts made to block it by outraged neo-Darwinists, the conference was well attended and excited all the participants. I am proud to have had a hand in the early stages of its organization. Its proceedings have recently been published by the Royal Society in its journal Interface Focus.

To this day, Denis and I continue our discussions on the relationship between philosophy and science. We both agree that the notion that science is necessarily and uniquely reductionist is not an empirical discovery, but a philosophical postulate. We both agree that teleology is undeniable and ubiquitous, but that we do not know, and perhaps cannot know, whether this is simply a fundamental feature of nature, or whether there is some supreme level at which it has an explanation. Certainly science cannot tell us whence the universe originated, and whether it has an ultimate goal. In his latest book, Denis suggests that even in asking these questions we have reached a boundary across which we cannot go.

(Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, pp 185-188.)

Kenny on Dawkins

Anthony Kenny on Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins and I have been Oxford colleagues for most of our lives, and have been sparring with each other for many years. We agree with each other that most of what religious people believe is false, but unlike Richard I accept that religious beliefs may be quite reasonable, even if untrue. While I am not competent to challenge any of Richard's scientific statements, and while I regard his The Extended Phenotype as one of the last century's finest books of popular science, I believe that he greatly exaggerates the power of genetics to explain human life and thought. We first clashed in a seminar at Holywell Manor, chaired by Denis Noble, shortly after The Selfish Gene appeared. Richard thought that now the DNA code had been cracked, we would be able to understand the book of life. 'Do you think that a knowledge of the English alphabet is all you need to understand Shakespeare?', I asked him.

When I read The God Delusion I found I agreed with about 90 per cent of what it said, but that the area of disagreement meant that the two of us came to quite different positions about the rationality of religious belief. I will mention just one example. I am an agnostic about the existence of God, whereas Richard is an atheist and believes that he can prove that God certainly does not exist. A designer God, he maintains, cannot be used to explain the organized complexity we observe in living beings, because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. He calls this argument 'The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit', in tribute to Fred Hoyle, who once said that the probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. God, according to Dawkins, is the ultimate 747.

A traditional theist would say that Dawkins' argument misrepresented the notion of God in two ways. First of all, God is as much outside the series complexity/simplicity as he is outside the series mover/moved. He is not complex as a protein is; nor, for that matter, is he simple as an elementary particle is. He has neither the simplicity nor the complexity of material objects. Second, he is not one of a series of temporal contingents, each requiring explanation in terms of a previous state of the universe: unchanging and everlasting, he is outside the temporal series. What calls for explanation is the origin of organized complexity: but God had no origin, and is neither complex nor organized.

I made this point in a lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 2007. A few years later I was asked to take part in a debate, in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre, between Richard and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The topic of the debate was 'the nature of human beings and their ultimate origin'. As an agnostic, I was supposed to be a neutral chair holding the balance between the Christian and an atheist. But as the debate proceeded I began to think that the kindly archbishop was letting Richard get away with some pretty feeble arguments, and so I began to intervene on the other side. When Richard again produced his Boeing 747 argument, I protested that he was confusing two kinds of complexity – complexity of structure and complexity of function. A cut-throat razor was a much simpler structure than an electric shaver, but unlike the shaver it could also function as a cut-throat as well as a razor. The archbishop, fingering his beard, said that he did not feel competent to adjudicate between us.

Richard and I have always got on amicably face to face, but have not been afraid to be rude to each other in absence or in print. At dinner, after the Sheldonian debate, I remarked to Richard that moving from The Extended Phenotype to The God Delusion was like moving from the Financial Times to The Sun. This did not go down well, and led to a frosty exchange of emails. Later, Richard took part in a debate in Sydney with Cardinal Pell. At some point in the debate, I am told, the cardinal referred to my critique of the argument for atheism: 'Ah, Kenny', Richard said. 'He is a qualified obscurantist.' Well, I do have a doctorate in theology, which I suppose from Richard's point of view is a professional qualification in obscurantism.

(Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, pp 183-185.)

Ecclesiastical coverup

The task [Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster] Heenan gave me, however, was an embarrassing one. He had heard that the Nazis in Germany had ransacked the archives of dioceses to find papers that could be published to discredit the Church. He was anxious to prevent anything of the kind happening in England, so he asked me to go through the records and get rid of any stories of clerical misdeed that were capable of being used for propaganda purposes. I could not refuse point blank an order from my archbishop, but it seemed to me wrong for an archivist to destroy, on such a partisan basis, material of historical interest. I compromised by separating embarrassing material into a special section which could, in the unlikely event of a hostile raid on the archives by some anti-clerical group, easily be destroyed.

The Second Vatican Council was a turning point in Heenan's life. Forever loyal to successive popes, he found uncongenial the direction in which many of the Council fathers wished to take the Church. His distaste for academic theology found expression in speeches attacking the experts, or periti, who came from monasteries, seminaries or universities: he saw them as ignorant of "the real world". For him, theology consisted in an unquestioning acceptance of Vatican dictates, even if that meant–as in the case of the morality of contraception–a reversal of his own considered opinion on the topic. And for him, the worst sin was "giving scandal"–that meant doing anything that showed the Church in a bad light, even if it was a true light. A. Kenny, Brief Encounters (SPCI 2018), 30, 32.

The development of ecclesiastical doctrine

The Development of Ecclesiastical Doctrine
Anthony Kenny

The development of doctrine is not itself a doctrine of the Catholic Church. From the beginning, the Church has taught, not that its dogmas develop, but that its faith is immutable. St Paul told the Galatians: 'Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed' (Galatians, 1, 8). Quoting those words 400 years later, Pope Simplicius wrote 'One and the same norm of apostolic doctrine continues in the apostles' successors'. The Council of Trent, in its preamble, asserted that the Gospel truth is to be found in the written books, and unwritten traditions, which were received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ, or dictated to them by the Holy Spirit; which have been handed down to us and preserved by continuous succession in the Catholic Church. Pius IX, writing against Günther in 1857, spoke of the 'perennial immutability of the faith' which he contrasted with 'philosophy and human sciences which are neither self-consistent nor free from errors of many kinds'. The Syllabus of 1864 condemned the view that divine revelation was imperfect and might progress in step with the progress of human reason. The Vatican Council repeated this. 'The doctrine of faith which God has revealed is not, like a philosophical theory, something for human ingenuity to perfect; but rather divine deposit from Christ to his bride, to be faithfully preserved and infallibly explained.' The immutability of dogma is not a matter of words only but of meaning also: 'That sense is always to be given to sacred dogmas which holy mother Church has once explained; it is never to be given up under the pretext of a more profound understanding.'¹

Kenny on transubstantiation

Steve sent this essay on transubstantiation by Anthony Kenny. The source is the first chapter of Reason and Religion: Essays in Philosophical Theology.

A Path from Rome

In this post I'll be quoting some passages from Anthony Kenny's intellectual autobiography, A Path from Rome (Oxford 1986). He's a former priest who left the priesthood due to intellectual doubts. He later became an important philosopher. As a gifted young man he received a topnotch Catholic education, by the standards of the day. And I daresay the standards were probably more rigorous back then than they are today, for prospective priests:

Any violation of the Catholic sexual code was, of its nature, a mortal sin; a sexual sin could be venial only if there was some lack of knowledge or consent involved. This meant that a voluntary dwelling on a sexual fantasy put one in danger of Hell if not promptly repented and confessed. It became an agonizing question whether one had, on a given occasion, "consented" to the fantasy; and consent seemed such an ethereal, elusive event, difficult for even the most intrepid introspection to pin down with certainty. 

As a child I had been puzzled by the catechism's denunciation of "the irregular motions of the flesh"; with the onset of puberty, I became a little clearer about what it was that the sixth commandment existed to stop me doing. However, though there were frequent exhortations to purity, clear information about what sex was and what it was for played no part in the syllabus. (That is not quite correct: sex instruction was imparted, along with the relevant part of moral theology, to 23-year-old divines the year before their ordination)…I remained ignorant of the nature of human reproduction until I was about fifteen. Then, one day during the vacation, I confessed to my parish priest that I had sinned by reading a pious book on the Virgin Birth for an unworthy motive, namely  to discover about birth and conception. The priest, a mild, unconventional and very erudite Benedictine, was not as shocked as I expected. He gave me a very thorough explanation of the mechanics of sex and reproduction in a concrete but unprurient manner. I was much luckier than several of my companions at Upholland who remained ignorant of sex until eighteen or later…

Most people who have never heard confessions imagine that it must be an enthralling experience to listen to people confiding their most shameful secrets. In fact the hearing of confessions consists of hours of tedium occasionally relieved by embarrassment. Interestingly wicked people never go to confession at all; most of those who go do not realize what their real sins are. So most confessions are repetitions of short catalogues of unimportant and humdrum sins. The moments of embarrassment most frequently occur in connection with the confession of sexual sins. The priest is obliged to satisfy himself that every mortal sin has been confessed specifically; it will not do , for instance, for the sinner to accuse himself of being unchaste, he must specify whether he is guilty of adultery, fornication, &c. Consequently, if a penitent says "I did something dirty", the confessor must embark on a series of questions to elicit the nature of the sin. 

I did indeed become depressed and worried about the prospect of continuing my studies for the priesthood. More and more of what I was taught seemed either muddled or incredible. The proofs we were offered for the existence of God all seems to contain serious flaws; many of the philosophical theories we were taught seemed implausible constructions invented to shore up particular theological doctrines. 

All material bodies, we were told, were made up of substance and accidents; the substance appeared to be an invisible metaphysical core around which the accidents clustered like wrapping…the metaphysics we were taught appeared to save the coherence of transubstantiation only at the cost of calling in question our knowledge of every ordinary material object. For all I could tell, my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli transubstantiated; since all I could see were mere accidents, and I lacked any metaphysical eye to see through to the real substance. 

In ways like this the philosophy we were learning came to seem less and less credible, and its incredibility connected directly with specific Catholic dogmas…The implausibility of the philosophy did strain the student's faith in the dogmas themselves; if they needed support from such a ramshackle philosophy, how could they be sound in themselves?…I was also full of foreboding about the life I was committing myself to; I began to realize what misery could lie in a life devoted to the spread of doctrines in which one only half-believed. 

So when the Council of Trent says that the substance of the bread and wine turns into the substance of Christ's body and blood, it simply means that the bread and wine turns into the body and blood. But why does the notion of turning into crop up at all? There is no mention of it in Scripture. It was introduced by Aquinas as the only possible explanation of the presence of Christ's body under the appearances of bread and wine after the consecration: Christ is there because something which was there has turned into him. But, Aquinas insists, and after him the Council of Constance, the accidents which remain, the whiteness and roundness, do not inhere in Christ; if they'd, then Christ himself would be white and round. But the principle that the accidents inhere in no substance, however, leaves one problem: among the accidental categories of Aristotle is the category of place. "…is on the altar", for instance, is an accidental predicate. But if the accidents which once belong to the bread do not inhere after consecration in the substance of Christ's body, then it appears that it by no means follows from the presence of the host on the altar that Christ is present on the altar. Thus the doctrine of transubstantiation appears in the end to fail to secure that for which alone it was originally introduced, namely the real presence of Christ's body under the sacramental species. 

It was an essential part of having the virtue of faith, without which neither charity nor salvation was possible, that one should believe all the defined doctrines; one could not pick and choose. To fail to believe even one was not only sinful in itself, it called in question one's belief in all the other doctrines: for one could not be believing them with the correct motive, namely that they were revealed by God through Christ and his Church. That is why, for a Catholic, a doubt about any doctrine is, in a manner, a doubt about every doctrine.

The whole account of faith given by the Church troubled me…to accept something as an arcticle of faith one had to accept a number of historical facts: as that the article had been defined by the Church, that the authority claimed by the Church had been conferred on it by Jesus in well-known passages of the Gospels, that the Pope was the successor of St Peter and spoke with the  authority given to him. Now these historical assertions were vulnerable to the progress of history and exegesis, and many of them were hotly controverted by scholars of standing. And if these "preambles of faith" could not be objects of irrevocable assent, how could the faith which rested on them be irrevocable?

I was assigned to treat the topic of development of doctrine. Catholics were taught that revelation had ceased with the death of the last Apostle, and that the Faith was unchanging. How was this to be reconciled with the manifest variation in the theological beliefs recorded during the long history of the Church?…It was easy to say the doctrine of the Church could change only in accidental matters not in essential ones. For it look as if only after the event could we tell which elements at a given time were essential. If so, something now regarded as essential, e.g. the wrongness of contraception, might turn out with hindsight to have been accidental. If a doctrine is defined, then it must be definable. And if definable, it must be contained–whether we should ever have guessed this for ourselves or not–in Scripture and tradition. For revelation ceased with the death of the last Apostle. If we accept these criteria, then no difficulty can be brought against the doctrine of the immutability of faith. The only trouble is, that our criteria render the doctrine impregnable only at the cost of making it vacuous. For we say–in order to avoid Modernism–that the Church teaches only those doctrines that are contained in Scripture and tradition. Then we ask: which doctrines are contained in Scripture and tradition? In order to avoid both the inadequacy of private judgment and the difficulties of Church history, we reply: those doctrines are contained in Scripture and tradition which the Church teaches. We have come round in a circle. 

Anthony Kenny on the pros and cons of Catholicism

Here's a stimulating lecture by agnostic philosopher and ex-priest Anthony Kenny. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's a much more probing thinker than Bishop Barron, and it's instructive to compare Kenny's analysis with all the lightweight Catholic apologists, converts, and reverts:

N.B. The subtitles are hilariously inaccurate.