Contingent Rationality and Science

[I'm not sure that I fully understand Torrance fully, so please point out any errors in my interpretation.]

"Natural science tacitly assumes the contingence, as well as the orderliness, of the universe. If there were no order immanent in the universe, if there were chaos and not a cosmos, the universe would not be accessible to scientific knowledge; if the universe were not characterized by contingence, the laws of nature would be derived from it immediately and necessarily through logico-deductive processes without experimental questioning of nature to induce it to yield its secrets - which would make empirical science quite pointless. It is through relying on the indissoluble bond between contingence and order in the universe that natural science has come to operate with the distinctive interconnection between experiment and theory which has characterized our greatest advances in knowledge of the physical world. Yet we cannot prove that there is order in the universe, for we have to assume it in order even to attempt proof of it; while genuine contingence is something that natural science on its own cannot come up with, but is rather something that natural science, through its ways of determining regularities in nature and formulating universal laws, is always on the point of resolving away. Quite evidently science must assume conceptions and principles that are themselves not logically derivable, explainable, or provable, but without which it could not function. Contingence and order are assumptions of that kind"

(pp. 26-27, Divine and Contingent Order)

How can you know that there is an order to the universe? How can you assume that it is understandable?

We assume order all the time. Inductive reasoning is based on it, and science is just the most refined example of this. But it is not provable, as David Hume and others have shown. In faith scientists commit to trying to understand the order of the world, without being able to prove that order exists to understand. However, Christianity provides the support for believing in an ordered universe because it believes the universe was created by God who is reliable, rational and loving.

Why do we use experiments to understand the order in the universe?

Scientists in faith believe that the way to understand the world is empirical research. Their whole enterprise is founded on this commitment. Why not assume that the world must be a certain way? Why not assume that the order of the universe is necessarily X? That was what the Greeks tended to do and that was why they also tended to think that "its regularities and laws can be discovered by pure a priori thought alone" (p. 31, ibid). However, if the universe is contingent then we cannot use reason alone to understand it. If it is contingent we expect it to constantly challenge our attempts to understand it, and so we perform endless experiments to understand from nature what its laws are. However, again it is Christianity that provides the support for believing in a contingent universe. In opposition to prevailing Greek thought and on the authority of the Bible it rejected the idea that the universe (and God) had to be a certain way. It insisted on the freedom of the personal Creator, and so gave the foundations for assuming that the way to understand nature is endless experiments.

To quote Torrance again:

"It is through being correlated to the endless possibilities of the Creator, that the universe is endowed with innate power constantly to surprise us in its manifestation of unexpected features and structures which nevertheless always turn out to be consistent with its other features and structures. What else is that but a manifestation of its contingent intelligibility and indeed its objective reality over which we have no control? This intelligibility of the created universe, its intrinsic orderliness, consistency, and reliability, is the ground of our confidence in scientific inquiry, but it is the contingent nature of that intelligibility which makes the universe attract and challenge the most arduous and unremitting scientific effort, and gives discovery its immense excitement" (p. 40, ibid).

Modern science flourished in Western Europe, to a degree not seen in other cultures where it existed but did not flourish, because of the Biblical teaching about our Creator. The biblical worldview has now been largely cut away but that was the origin of the foundations it is now built on.