Barbara Forrest and Naturalism: Part 3

Philosopher Barbara Forrest, in trying to make a case for philosophical naturalism, makes a big deal of what she sees as science muscling religion out of any claim on truth. Her argument in Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism replays familiar "God-of-the-Gaps" themes, portraying science and religion in a zero-sum game where any advance in science forces religion to retreat. (This addresses Point 4 of an earlier entry in this series.)

This zero-sum approach is stated concisely here:

"Under the theistic model, according to Strahler, any recognition of natural causation is logically nullified by the simultaneous assertion of supernatural intervention, either actual or merely possible."

It's either one or the other, there is no shared territory.

The point is expanded later in her essay:

"The gaps in scientific knowledge which have historically functioned as entry points for divine creativity are considerably narrower than they were just a generation ago. Every expansion in scientific knowledge has left in its wake a more shrunken space of possibilities from which to infer the plausibility of supernaturalism. . . . The more expansive the continuity, the firmer the foundation for the inference from methodological naturalism to philosophical naturalism, and the less plausible the non-naturalistic explanations.
. . .

"The known world expands, and the world of impenetrable mystery shrinks. With every expanse, something is explained which at an earlier point in history had been permanently consigned to supernatural mystery or metaphysical speculation. And the expansion of scientific knowledge has been and remains an epistemological threat to any claims which have been fashioned independently (or in defiance) of such knowledge. We are confronted with an asymptotic decrease in the existential possibility of the supernatural to the point at which it is wholly negligible."

How defensible, though, is this zero-sum assumption? Do increases in scientific knowledge necessarily take ground away from religious knowledge? Historically the answer has been "no." As Rodney Stark has shown in several recent writings, science itself is an experiment testing a prediction of religion. Christian theism, unlike all other world religions and philosophies*, saw rationality in God the creator, and began to test the possibility that God's creation could be understood rationally.

The earliest real scientists, going back at least to William of Occam (whose famous "Razor" is among the most crucial principles of scientific knowledge) viewed scientific knowledge as a window on the mind of God. Today, around 40% of scientists believe in a God who is active in the world--who can be prayed to, for example--a figure that has not changed over 80 years. That percentage is much lower among biologists, where conflicts between science and religion are obviously most heated. In other sciences, the question of compatibility with religion seems not to be at issue.

The tussle between science and religion began slowly during the Enlightenment but gained steam with 19th-century studies in geology (Lyell's uniformitarianism) and especially with Darwin and his followers. It was a period of astonishing progress in all the sciences, something we've become accustomed to in our day but which left almost everyone at the time rather breathless. It's easy to see how, under those circumstances, the power of science would seem limitless. (Now we understand better that there are boundaries around science's capacities.)

Some religious explanations of the time did have to give way before the advance of science. The germ theory of disease made it hard to view sickness as a personal affliction by God or demons. Lightning and thunder could no longer be viewed as fire from God's hand and shouting from his mouth.

What may be too easily forgotten, though, is that Western Christians did not choose belief in God because of mysteries of disease and weather. They saw his hand in such things--with some naivete, to be sure--but they did not build their theology on natural mysteries. Belief in God was based on the historical record of his workings with Israel, the life of Christ and the early church, and the tradition of church history, not to mention believers' personal experience of God. An impressive body of thought built up over the centuries as theologians and philosophers (most notably Thomas Aquinas) explored rational arguments for God.

Dr. Forrest and others apparently view religion as nothing but a foolish and simple set of explanations of natural mysteries. If this were true, then the advance of science might be a real defeater for religion, but it's a very skewed vision of what theistic belief is about. Religious belief comes primarily from other sources of knowledge. Still, "all truth is God's truth," as the saying goes, and all knowledge is a glimpse of the knowledge of God.

Part 3 of a series

Part 1
Part 2

*It's interesting to speculate, but we can never know, whether Judaism might have reached the same conclusion under different sociological circumstances.

Posted: Fri - January 6, 2006 at 11:40 AM |

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Barbara Forrest and Naturalism: Part 3

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson