A plausible plausibility structure (5)

3. Location and resolution of internal problems

Newbigin locates a central dichotomy within a secular scientific plausibility structure. This is the perception that the universe comes into existence entirely as the result of random changes and therefore has no ultimate purpose. But this is a perception that has been formed through a huge amount of purposeful activity on the part of the scientists that have investigated the various laws and processes through which the universe has come to be. As Newbigin states:
“We all engage in purposeful activity, and we judge ourselves and others in terms of success in achieving the purposes that we set before ourselves. Yet we accept as the final product of this purposeful activity a picture of the world from which purpose has been eliminated.”

The alternative - that we engage in purposeful activity because the universe has been created for a purpose by a purposeful God – is, therefore, more consistent with our actual experience than the view that life is inherently purposeless. Nor does this view contradict scientific data. First, scientists express amazement at the extent to which the laws and processes that make up the universe are finely tuned in favour of life. Second, scientists find considerable openness within the structures and processes of the universe which leave “room for the operation of purposeful activity as a factor in evolution”. As a result, Newbigin has written of the way in which “life moves towards its proper completion not automatically by any purely mechanical or organic process but in response to a loving purpose, which draws out and makes actual powers that were otherwise only latent and potential”.

4. Light shed elsewhere

Finally, I wish to suggest that a Christian plausibility structure incorporating the argument from design can shed light in the area of theodicy. John Hick has developed a theodicy based on the belief “that the actual universe, with all its good and evil, exists on the basis of God’s will and receives its meaning from His purpose”. Hick says that “God has ordained a world which contains evil – real evil – as a means to the creation of the infinite good of a Kingdom of Heaven within which His creatures will come as perfected persons to love and serve Him, through a process in which their own free insight and response have been an essential element”. The argument from design – that God, by creating through the laws and processes which bring the universe into being, is at an epistemic distance from humanity enabling a free response to Him - is foundational to such a theodicy.

Conclusion

Newbigin believes that the conflict between two different plausibility structures will not be settled on the basis of logical argument but on the basis of which is seen to offer the widest rationality. His approach meshes with that of Gavin D’Costa which demonstrates the way in which pluralism and inclusivism mask exclusivism, making us all exclusivists. As a result, in speaking of the argument from design in terms of plausibility structures, we are within the context of mission calling for a radical conversion, a paradigm shift, from the dominant Western plausibility structure to a Christian plausibility structure.

The necessity for this shift can be illustrated through two poems of John Berryman. In the first, Berryman’s character, Henry, cannot accept religious and philosophical plausibility structures and finds himself facing madness in a purposeless existence:

Hung by a thread more moments instant Henry’s mind
super-subtle, which he knew blunt & empty & incurious
but when he compared it with his fellows’
finding it keen & full, he didn’t know what to think
apart from typewriters & print & ink.
On the philosophical side

plus religious, he lay at a loss.
Mostly he knew the ones he would not follow
into their burning systems
or polar systems, Wittgenstein being boss,
Augustine general manager. A universal hollow
most of the other seems;

so Henry in twilight is on his own:
marrying, childing, slogging, shelling taxes,
pondering, making.
It’s rained all day. His wife has been away
with genuine difficulty he fought madness
whose breast came close to breaking.

The second finds Berryman again facing the prospect of a purposeless universe but accepting the plausibility of God’s existence and thereby coping with loss:

Ninety percent of the mass of the Universe
(90%!) may be gone in collapsars,
pulseless, lightless, forever – if they exist.
My friends the probability man & I

& his wife the lawyer are taking a country walk
in the flowerless April snow in exactly two hours
and maybe won’t come back. Finite & unbounded
the massive spirals absolutely fly

distinctly apart, by math and observation,
current math, this morning’s telescopes
& inference. My wife is six months gone
so won’t be coming. That mass must be somewhere!

or not? Just barely possible may not
B E anywhere? My Lord, I’m glad we don’t
on x or y depend for Your being there.
I know You are there. The sweat is, I am here.

It is this wider rationality that the Christian plausibility structure provides, offering not just the plausibility of the argument from design but meaning for life itself.

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U2 & Daniel Lanois -Falling At Your Feet.