Barbara Forrest and Naturalism: Part 2
Barbara Forrest, who witnessed for the plaintiffs
in the Dover ID case, has written a defense of philosophical naturalism, which I
have very
briefly outlined. Her argument can be
summarized:
1. Science employs methodological naturalism in its search for knowledge.
2. Science has been extremely successful in its search for knowledge.
3. Supernaturalist metaphysics have no comparably successful methodology for reliably discovering knowledge.
4. Science is progressively explaining more and more of the world, so that the need for extra-natural explanations is being gradually eliminated.
5. Therefore, although a supernaturalist metaphysic cannot be absolutely ruled out, there is no basis whatever for believing in it.
Even the first assertion can perhaps be challenged, but that would have only academic interest. Points 2, 3, and 4 present more interesting problems, and in fact they are where Forrest's argument fails.
1. Science employs methodological naturalism in its search for knowledge.
2. Science has been extremely successful in its search for knowledge.
3. Supernaturalist metaphysics have no comparably successful methodology for reliably discovering knowledge.
4. Science is progressively explaining more and more of the world, so that the need for extra-natural explanations is being gradually eliminated.
5. Therefore, although a supernaturalist metaphysic cannot be absolutely ruled out, there is no basis whatever for believing in it.
Even the first assertion can perhaps be challenged, but that would have only academic interest. Points 2, 3, and 4 present more interesting problems, and in fact they are where Forrest's argument fails.
In today's post we will look at the validity and
generality of point 2, "Science has been extremely successful in its search for
knowledge." Dr. Forrest
wrote:
"Naturalist philosophers ground their philosophical naturalism in both the failure of the supernaturalist to meet Schafersman's challenge and in the success of methodological naturalism in science. This is because the reliability of knowledge depends on the method by which it is obtained, and as Schafersman says, 'science, solely because of its method, is the most successful human endeavor in history. The others don't even come close.'"
...
"[T]he demonstrated success of methodological naturalism suffices to show why it is the only justifiable explanatory principle. "
...
[Quoting Kornblith] "What does have priority over both metaphysics and epistemology, from the naturalistic perspective, is successful scientific theory, and not because there is some a priori reason to trust science over philosophy, but rather because there is a body of scientific theory which has proven its value in prediction, explanation, and technological application. This gives scientific work a kind of grounding which no philosophical theory has thus far enjoyed.
...
Since philosophical naturalism is an outgrowth of methodological naturalism, and methodological naturalism has been validated by its epistemological and technological success, then every expansion in scientific understanding lends it further confirmation.
And in summary, including also some points we'll save for a later post:
"Taken together, the (1) proven success of methodological naturalism combined with (2) the massive body of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a comparable method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of any conclusive evidence for the existence of the supernatural, yield philosophical naturalism as the most methodologically and epistemologically defensible world view."
There's certainly no denying the success of science in its proper function. We live in a world unimaginable even a couple of generations ago, shaped largely by technology born out of science. We can take knowledge for granted that would have astounded and perplexed our predecessors, who argued over whether heat was the flow of phlogiston, whether there were such things as atoms, and what was the center of the universe. We can't imagine a planet or a solar system without gravity, yet the word itself was only invented as recently as Isaac Newton.
Science is successful epistemologically because of the consistent accessibility of the material it works with. it deals with regularities and the publicly observable.* It is uniquely fitted, especially in the "hard" sciences, to reliable observation and measurement. As one whose training is in a field of social psychology (Industrial and Organizational Psychology) I know that this reliability wanes quickly as personality gets involved; we just can't predict and measure human behavior the way we can an electron or a mitochondrion. In physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, though, the stuff with which scientists work has a nice consistency of behavior. This allows scientists to repeat tests, to check each other, to make predictions and measure their accuracy, and all the things that work to make science the stable body of knowledge that it is.
So we won't get anywhere attacking Dr. Forrest's assertions that science is spectacularly successful, and I'm not inclined even to suggest she's wrong, except for this: while science is very good at what it's good at, it has nothing to offer in other extremely crucial areas of knowledge.
I'll use three of of these other areas as examples:
A. What is the basic substance of reality? Does science describe real entities or something else?
B. How do we determine truth?
C. How do we determine value?
Question A addresses whether science actually provides true knowledge about the world, a matter that remains controversial. Most scientists are realists, meaning that they accept that they accept the full reality of the physical universe and believe that science yields ever more accurate approximations of a true picture of that physical reality. There remain scientists and philosophers who question it, though, taking the antirealist position. Without full assurance on this, science can hardly claim epistemic superiority over anything. Space does not allow a full exposition of the question. A few introductory comments, from Christianity and the Nature of Science by J. P. Moreland (pages 139 and following), will have to suffice for now:
The major issues in the realist/antirealist debate involve questions like these: Do the theories of science give a literally true model of the way the world is, or do they merely provide useful fictions, calculating devices, or convenient summaries of sensory experience that 'work' (e.g., help us control nature, predict phenomena, and so on)?
. . .
Rational nonrealism, also called instrumentalism, comes in several varieties, but all agree that science is an objectively rational discipline . . . . Nonrational nonrealism also comes in different forms, but all adherents of this school accept at least two theses: science does not seek truth or approximate truth; there is no objective notion of rationality available that either sets science off from other disciplines as objectively rational or sets some particular scientific theory off as more rational than another.
I personally favor realism and I do not bring this up to argue that science yields no actual information about the world. Rather, I wish to make two points in this regard: one, the question remains open whether science leads to real knowledge about reality, so Dr. Forrest would do well to adopt an appropriate stance of humility about science's epistemological success; and two, the answer to the question is not within the purview of science, it is a philosophical matter. If science is not even competent to say whether what it studies is real, that is all the more reason to view its epistemological prowess humbly.
Question B, "how do we determine truth?" is also unanswerable from within science. To say that knowledge of truth comes from the careful application of the scientific method is fine at one level of analysis (assuming a realist view of science and ever-closer approximations over time), but there's another level that even Dr. Forrest alludes to:
"Should cognitive science and neurobiology succeed conclusively in explaining the phenomenon of human consciousness, mind-body dualism would be completely undermined, and philosophical naturalism would again be immeasurably strengthened."
I'd like to alter that slightly: if human reasoning could be explained in terms of cognitive science and neurobiology, naturalism would be greatly strengthened, for it is perhaps the most salient point of difficulty for naturalism. Dr. Forrest is naively optimistic, however, in suggesting it could someday be possible to bring consciousness under purely physical explanation, for it is a self-defeating enterprise. If human thinking could be reduced to merely naturalistic operations, it would be invalid for apprehending truth. Peter Williams wrote:
"Beliefs and thoughts have and require intentionality: 'intentionality is the mind’s ofness or aboutness. Mental states point beyond themselves to other things. Every mental state I have is of or about something - a hope that Smith will come, a sensation of the apple, a thought that the painting is beautiful.' [quoting Habermas and Moreland]
"We do not include physical entities such as books or computers in the category of ‘beings capable of having beliefs’ and thus of knowing things (holding true beliefs about facts). But how could this line be drawn on a physical view of the mind? As Habermas and Moreland argue:
"'Now intentionality is not a property or relation of anything physical. Physical objects can stand in various physical relations with other physical objects. One physical thing can be to the left of, larger than, harder than, the same shape as, or the thing causing the motion of another physical object. But one physical object is not of or about another one.'
"C.S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he wrote that, 'to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense.' What could possibly distinguish one state of matter from another such that one had the property of being true while the other had the property of being false?'"
Science may lead to a deeper understanding of what is happening neurologically as we think, but there is no possible naturalist bridge from the firing of neurons to propositional truth. Philosophical naturalism is self-defeating: if it were ever to establish itself as true, it could only do so by destroying the meaning of the word "true."
The same holds for human values: what is good, what is important, and why? Could these potentially, someday, be explained in physical terms? This too is impossible, regardless of any advances in our understanding of physical processes of thought or belief. C. S. Lewis showed in Miracles that the more thoughts and values are explainable in physical terms, the less we credit them. I'll use an experience of my own to illustrate.
I was still single, in my late twenties, when I invited Vera out for a snack after church one Sunday evening. We went to the Good Earth restaurant, known for its multi-grain and vegetarian offerings and its delicious herbal tea. We stayed there a couple of hours drinking cup after cup of tea, and I had a great time. In fact, I got more and more excited as the night went on. I started to think, "This woman is really amazing--I've never felt so excited, just being out with someone at a restaurant on a first date!"
I was still really quite excited when I got home about 10 or 11 pm. In fact, three hours later I was still just as alert and awake. It was about 3 am that I had the sinking recognition: "I know this feeling--and it's not from being excited about Vera." I called the restaurant the next day and asked if there was caffeine in their tea. Sure enough, they said there was quite a load of it. I had been mistaken in assuming it was as herbal and drug free as their multi-grain pancakes. And I'd been mistaken about my feelings: it was just a caffeine rush.
Vera and I dated for some time after that first evening, but there never really was a "spark" between us. My initial excitement was almost entirely a drug reaction, and as soon as I realized that was so, I discounted any thought of "love at first sight." Compare this to the common theme in fantasy stories (even in the recent Harry Potter): the magician who has a love potion refuses to use it because he or she wants the other's love to be real, not chemically determined. If science were to succeed in reducing all value, including love, to physico/chemical states, it would destroy it. Value depends on choice, which disappears in a purely physical universe (despite Daniel Dennett's protestations to the contrary).
To summarize: science is fantastically successful, as Barbara Forrest says, but in limited arenas. It has little or nothing to offer in basic matters of reality, truth, and value. That's okay; it's not a flaw of science, it's just an inherent limitation; but it means that science has nothing whatever to tell us about some of the most important questions. It tells us that Dr. Forrest should not be putting such stock in science as the ultimate model of epistemological success.
Part 2 of a series
Part 1
Part 3
*Note, I'm speaking in generalities. I'm aware of the traps in defining science (the demarcation problem), and that there may be exceptions to what I'm saying, but in general it applies.
"Naturalist philosophers ground their philosophical naturalism in both the failure of the supernaturalist to meet Schafersman's challenge and in the success of methodological naturalism in science. This is because the reliability of knowledge depends on the method by which it is obtained, and as Schafersman says, 'science, solely because of its method, is the most successful human endeavor in history. The others don't even come close.'"
...
"[T]he demonstrated success of methodological naturalism suffices to show why it is the only justifiable explanatory principle. "
...
[Quoting Kornblith] "What does have priority over both metaphysics and epistemology, from the naturalistic perspective, is successful scientific theory, and not because there is some a priori reason to trust science over philosophy, but rather because there is a body of scientific theory which has proven its value in prediction, explanation, and technological application. This gives scientific work a kind of grounding which no philosophical theory has thus far enjoyed.
...
Since philosophical naturalism is an outgrowth of methodological naturalism, and methodological naturalism has been validated by its epistemological and technological success, then every expansion in scientific understanding lends it further confirmation.
And in summary, including also some points we'll save for a later post:
"Taken together, the (1) proven success of methodological naturalism combined with (2) the massive body of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a comparable method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of any conclusive evidence for the existence of the supernatural, yield philosophical naturalism as the most methodologically and epistemologically defensible world view."
There's certainly no denying the success of science in its proper function. We live in a world unimaginable even a couple of generations ago, shaped largely by technology born out of science. We can take knowledge for granted that would have astounded and perplexed our predecessors, who argued over whether heat was the flow of phlogiston, whether there were such things as atoms, and what was the center of the universe. We can't imagine a planet or a solar system without gravity, yet the word itself was only invented as recently as Isaac Newton.
Science is successful epistemologically because of the consistent accessibility of the material it works with. it deals with regularities and the publicly observable.* It is uniquely fitted, especially in the "hard" sciences, to reliable observation and measurement. As one whose training is in a field of social psychology (Industrial and Organizational Psychology) I know that this reliability wanes quickly as personality gets involved; we just can't predict and measure human behavior the way we can an electron or a mitochondrion. In physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, though, the stuff with which scientists work has a nice consistency of behavior. This allows scientists to repeat tests, to check each other, to make predictions and measure their accuracy, and all the things that work to make science the stable body of knowledge that it is.
So we won't get anywhere attacking Dr. Forrest's assertions that science is spectacularly successful, and I'm not inclined even to suggest she's wrong, except for this: while science is very good at what it's good at, it has nothing to offer in other extremely crucial areas of knowledge.
I'll use three of of these other areas as examples:
A. What is the basic substance of reality? Does science describe real entities or something else?
B. How do we determine truth?
C. How do we determine value?
Question A addresses whether science actually provides true knowledge about the world, a matter that remains controversial. Most scientists are realists, meaning that they accept that they accept the full reality of the physical universe and believe that science yields ever more accurate approximations of a true picture of that physical reality. There remain scientists and philosophers who question it, though, taking the antirealist position. Without full assurance on this, science can hardly claim epistemic superiority over anything. Space does not allow a full exposition of the question. A few introductory comments, from Christianity and the Nature of Science by J. P. Moreland (pages 139 and following), will have to suffice for now:
The major issues in the realist/antirealist debate involve questions like these: Do the theories of science give a literally true model of the way the world is, or do they merely provide useful fictions, calculating devices, or convenient summaries of sensory experience that 'work' (e.g., help us control nature, predict phenomena, and so on)?
. . .
Rational nonrealism, also called instrumentalism, comes in several varieties, but all agree that science is an objectively rational discipline . . . . Nonrational nonrealism also comes in different forms, but all adherents of this school accept at least two theses: science does not seek truth or approximate truth; there is no objective notion of rationality available that either sets science off from other disciplines as objectively rational or sets some particular scientific theory off as more rational than another.
I personally favor realism and I do not bring this up to argue that science yields no actual information about the world. Rather, I wish to make two points in this regard: one, the question remains open whether science leads to real knowledge about reality, so Dr. Forrest would do well to adopt an appropriate stance of humility about science's epistemological success; and two, the answer to the question is not within the purview of science, it is a philosophical matter. If science is not even competent to say whether what it studies is real, that is all the more reason to view its epistemological prowess humbly.
Question B, "how do we determine truth?" is also unanswerable from within science. To say that knowledge of truth comes from the careful application of the scientific method is fine at one level of analysis (assuming a realist view of science and ever-closer approximations over time), but there's another level that even Dr. Forrest alludes to:
"Should cognitive science and neurobiology succeed conclusively in explaining the phenomenon of human consciousness, mind-body dualism would be completely undermined, and philosophical naturalism would again be immeasurably strengthened."
I'd like to alter that slightly: if human reasoning could be explained in terms of cognitive science and neurobiology, naturalism would be greatly strengthened, for it is perhaps the most salient point of difficulty for naturalism. Dr. Forrest is naively optimistic, however, in suggesting it could someday be possible to bring consciousness under purely physical explanation, for it is a self-defeating enterprise. If human thinking could be reduced to merely naturalistic operations, it would be invalid for apprehending truth. Peter Williams wrote:
"Beliefs and thoughts have and require intentionality: 'intentionality is the mind’s ofness or aboutness. Mental states point beyond themselves to other things. Every mental state I have is of or about something - a hope that Smith will come, a sensation of the apple, a thought that the painting is beautiful.' [quoting Habermas and Moreland]
"We do not include physical entities such as books or computers in the category of ‘beings capable of having beliefs’ and thus of knowing things (holding true beliefs about facts). But how could this line be drawn on a physical view of the mind? As Habermas and Moreland argue:
"'Now intentionality is not a property or relation of anything physical. Physical objects can stand in various physical relations with other physical objects. One physical thing can be to the left of, larger than, harder than, the same shape as, or the thing causing the motion of another physical object. But one physical object is not of or about another one.'
"C.S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he wrote that, 'to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense.' What could possibly distinguish one state of matter from another such that one had the property of being true while the other had the property of being false?'"
Science may lead to a deeper understanding of what is happening neurologically as we think, but there is no possible naturalist bridge from the firing of neurons to propositional truth. Philosophical naturalism is self-defeating: if it were ever to establish itself as true, it could only do so by destroying the meaning of the word "true."
The same holds for human values: what is good, what is important, and why? Could these potentially, someday, be explained in physical terms? This too is impossible, regardless of any advances in our understanding of physical processes of thought or belief. C. S. Lewis showed in Miracles that the more thoughts and values are explainable in physical terms, the less we credit them. I'll use an experience of my own to illustrate.
I was still single, in my late twenties, when I invited Vera out for a snack after church one Sunday evening. We went to the Good Earth restaurant, known for its multi-grain and vegetarian offerings and its delicious herbal tea. We stayed there a couple of hours drinking cup after cup of tea, and I had a great time. In fact, I got more and more excited as the night went on. I started to think, "This woman is really amazing--I've never felt so excited, just being out with someone at a restaurant on a first date!"
I was still really quite excited when I got home about 10 or 11 pm. In fact, three hours later I was still just as alert and awake. It was about 3 am that I had the sinking recognition: "I know this feeling--and it's not from being excited about Vera." I called the restaurant the next day and asked if there was caffeine in their tea. Sure enough, they said there was quite a load of it. I had been mistaken in assuming it was as herbal and drug free as their multi-grain pancakes. And I'd been mistaken about my feelings: it was just a caffeine rush.
Vera and I dated for some time after that first evening, but there never really was a "spark" between us. My initial excitement was almost entirely a drug reaction, and as soon as I realized that was so, I discounted any thought of "love at first sight." Compare this to the common theme in fantasy stories (even in the recent Harry Potter): the magician who has a love potion refuses to use it because he or she wants the other's love to be real, not chemically determined. If science were to succeed in reducing all value, including love, to physico/chemical states, it would destroy it. Value depends on choice, which disappears in a purely physical universe (despite Daniel Dennett's protestations to the contrary).
To summarize: science is fantastically successful, as Barbara Forrest says, but in limited arenas. It has little or nothing to offer in basic matters of reality, truth, and value. That's okay; it's not a flaw of science, it's just an inherent limitation; but it means that science has nothing whatever to tell us about some of the most important questions. It tells us that Dr. Forrest should not be putting such stock in science as the ultimate model of epistemological success.
Part 2 of a series
Part 1
Part 3
*Note, I'm speaking in generalities. I'm aware of the traps in defining science (the demarcation problem), and that there may be exceptions to what I'm saying, but in general it applies.
Posted: Mon - January 2, 2006 at 02:29 PM |
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