Thinking Christian

I have a telephone interview scheduled with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature In the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, this afternoon (update: find that interview here). Part of my preparation has been reading through reviews of the book on Amazon, where I noticed some patterns that I decided to quantify. The results do not represent the whole world of the Intelligent Design controversy—there’s nothing random about the sampling—but they are intriguing nonetheless.*

Strong Reactions

Of the 200-plus reviews of the book posted on Amazon, 75 percent were highly positive (5 stars) and 17 percent were very negative (1 star). Six percent were 4-star ratings, and the remaining 1 percent (percentages are rounded) were either 2 or 3 stars. This is about as non-normal a distribution as you’ll ever see; an upside-down bell curve, with a skew toward the positive. The obvious interpretation of a response set like this is that the book produces strong reactions. One way or another it’s a great book, according to its reviewers: either great in its contribution to science, or else greatly upsetting and disturbing to science.

As I went through the reviews in detail I coded each one on five factors:

• Had the reviewer actually read the book?
• Did the reviewer introduce theological considerations into their assessment of the book?
• Did the reviewer come out with a dogmatic statement for or against Intelligent Design?
• Did the reviewer use negative and/or abusive language in describing representatives of the position they oppose?
  

Did They Read the Book?

On the first of these I gave the benefit of the doubt to each reviewer: I assumed they had read it unless they stated otherwise, or unless they said something that clearly demonstrated they had not read it. One reviewer I placed in that latter category said that the book presented no research and no scientific predictions. That’s an old anti-ID trope that I’m guessing he or she pulled out of the usual set of anti-ID talking points. In the case of this book, it’s just obviously false, as anyone should be able to see even by taking a quick look at the book’s Amazon preview. Obviously this reviewer did not even invest even that minimal effort into the book before giving it a negative review.

Some reviewers said they “skimmed” the book or read only portions of it. I placed them into a middle grouping. There were a small number who seriously misrepresented the content of the book, which would strongly indicate they hadn’t read it, yet they said they had read it. Rather than concluding that they were lying, I placed them into the same middle group. Thus there were three categories:

• LIkely read the book (granting the benefit of the doubt).
• Communicated that they read only part of the book, or communicated they read the book but made errors of representation that makes that statement doubtful
• Communicated that they did not read the book

So then, who read the book? Of those who rated the book favorably (5 stars), 94 percent likely read the book, and 2 percent communicated they had not read it, and 4 percent were in the middle grouping. Of those who gave the book a 1-star rating, only 26 percent likely read the book. About 43 percent of very negative ratings came from people who read the book only in part (or whose reading of the book was in doubt), and 31 percent came from people who felt free to pronounce their opinion without even reading it.

Here’s another way to look at the same information. Three-quarters (75 percent) of reviews on Amazon were very favorable. Counting only those who (with the benefit of the doubt) actually read the book, however, that proportion jumps to 87 percent.

Theological Considerations?

What about theology? I used a simple yes/no distinction for this one. If theological considerations were present in the review, either in the arguments (pro or con) or in the conclusions the reviewer drew, I coded the review as a positive on the theology scale.

I’ll start again with those who gave the book a 5-star rating. In this group, only 8 percent introduced theological considerations into their reviews. But among those who gave the book a 1-star rating, 51 percent made theological considerations a part of their case. The positive reviewers got it right: the book is about science and philosophy of science, not about theology. One wonders how those 51 percent missed that.

Dogmatic In Their Views?

The above two analyses showed significance of .000 on a chi-square test. The third analysis did not have enough cases to allow for significance testing, and I must make it clear that it’s not as reliable a measure as the first two. The question was, Did the reviewer make a dogmatic statement for or against ID, to the point of saying that the question is settled once and for all? That was hard for me to operationalize in a bias-free way, so please take all due care in interpreting what I present next, because its reliability is not at all certain.

As I coded the reviews (keeping that disclaimer in mind), this is how it came out:

Of those who rated the book with 1 star, only 9 percent avoided dogmatism of the sort just described. More than nine-tenths said something to the effect that the question is settled, there’s no need to pursue it any more. Many of them were more colorful than that: The question is settled, and attempts to keep pursuing it are just lies from the “Dishonesty Institute.”

But those who rated the book highly had more open minds to the issue: only 20 percent of that group made statements to the effect that “the question is now settled.”

I wondered whether those who had not read the book might be more (or less) dogmatic in their view of ID than those who had read it. The result: if the analysis included just those who reviewed the book negatively, no significant difference was found (those who read the book were neither more nor less dogmatic than those who had not read it). If I included all the reviews, there was a definite difference between those who had read the book and those who had not read it. But that doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know from earlier analysis showing that among the 75 percent of reviewers who rated the book with 5 stars, the overwhelming majority had read the book and had also avoided dogmatism in their conclusions.

Personally Negative or Abusive Language

Another analysis that was significant to the .000 level was that related to personally negative language. Negative reviewers of the book were very negative: 86 percent of 1-star raters used personal pejorative language (accusations of stupidity, unthinkingness, or worse) with respect to Meyer or ID proponents generally. Positive reviewers were not perfectly kind to their opponents: 13 percent made personally critical comments with respect to their opponents.

But ID opponents’ language was considerably stronger. My coding for negative language was such that I included any negative personal reference whatsoever made to holders of the reviewer’s viewpoint, even at mild levels like, “Those who disagree with x must not be thinking clearly.” Some of the language was actually abusive (accusations of dishonesty, lying, or even “mendacious intellectual pornography”). Abusive language to that degree was present in fully 57 percent of 1-star reviews of the book, but only 3 percent of 5-star reviews.

Conclusions

I can’t say what larger population these reviewers represent, so these conclusions can only fairly be taken as a description of the actual reviewers on Amazon. Negative reviewers were much less likely than positive reviewers to have read the book and to have their opinions of the book affected by theological considerations. To the (unknown) extent that my third analysis was reliable, they were probably also much more likely to deliver closed, dogmatic conclusions about the overall issues involved. The Personal Negativity analysis showed that ID opponents among this set of reviewers are putting a lot of negative emotion into the controversy. Other reviewers have wondered why, and have made suggestions. Is it anger? Fear (feeling significantly threatened)? They don’t know, and neither can I conclude what’s going on, but one way or the other it’s clear that ID opponents among this set of reviewers are not behaving very well in public.

And for my final comment I’ll draw upon my own impressions of the larger world of controversy on this issue. ID antagonists, in my experience, typically complain that proponents are closed-minded and theologically driven. This group of reviewers turns that completely upside down. ID opponents often charge proponents with anti-intellectualism, too. But who in this group of reviewers was more likely to spout an opinion without bothering to read what they were talking about?

*Note 1/16/10: I have re-visited the reviews and taken a slower, more thorough look at each of them. I generated more reliable operational definitions for the factors, and I have slightly revised some of the numbers in here based on that review, and I have added another factor. My coded datasheet is available for your inspection and review.

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Book Review

When I picked up Cornelius Hunter’s Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism, I expected the “unseen religion” of the title to refer in some way to atheistic naturalism itself. Whether naturalism is a form of religion depends on definitions. If religion is defined as a system of beliefs involving the supernatural, then naturalism certainly doesn’t fit the description. Some, however, define it as any system of belief regarding where we came from, what is ultimately real, and what is finally important  or (per Paul Tillich) of ultimate concern. That definition’s wide scope could certainly include naturalism.

I was expecting Hunter to argue that naturalism was religious by the latter, looser definition. I was wrong. His claim was bolder than that, more potentially controversial—yet at the same time more founded in fact, and less in loosely controllable preferences regarding meanings of words. Scientific naturalism, says Hunter, was explicitly born from within the family of Christian theology, and dwells even now in buildings erected on the same ancestral property. We think of naturalism as rejecting religion, but it was actually historically rooted in it, and it seems to have difficulty running away from it.

Hunter traces two streams in intellectual history, rationalist and empiricist. Aristotle was the rationalist above all other philosophers. In early modern philosophy, Descartes supremely represents that stream. Francis Bacon, considered by many to be the founder of scientific methodology, represents empiricism—not that anyone is a pure example of either rationalism or empiricism, for no person has ever occupied the extreme endpoints of the continuum between the two.

How are the two distinguished from each other? I’ll come back to rationalism in a moment. Empiricism (in this context) is an approach which lets empirical evidences rule over scientific conclusions, with as little regard for metaphysical preconceptions as possible. Hunter’s attitude toward empiricism is perhaps best explained through his depiction near the end of the book (p. 137), in a section titled “An Alternative to Rationalism:”

The empirical approach is much less certain about the form of the result. And at the end of the investigation, it is less certain about the truthfulness of the result. Problems are complicated, and humanity is not always up to solving them completely. The empirical approach is not as tidy as the rational approach. But it also does not constrain itself to predetermined notions. It is more amenable to new and unexpected results.

All of this sounds like standard scientific reasoning. It echoes Intelligent Design opponents’ voices calling us all not to rush to conclusions, not to be in a great rush to fill in the gaps with God. Intelligent Design, they say, is built around a predetermined belief in God, and marshals all its evidence only toward that end.

But just as the empirical approach is not as tidy as the rational approach, so the history of ideas is not as tidy as many mistakenly think it is. Hunter introduces rationalism with this (pp. 11-12):

The assumption of naturalism in science is … a consequence of metaphysical reasoning, and the implications for science are profound…. naturalism provides science with well-defined universal criteria to which it conforms. Instead of merely following the data wherever it may lead, science already has a framework in place. The answer, to a certain extent, is already in place. This is a move toward rationalism and away from empiricism. The result is that science has a powerful philosophy of science, but as we shall see… it does not come without cost…. naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

The rest of the book is about what I left out in the ellipses in that quote. Bear with me a moment before I fill in the blanks. I want us to think about the part of this that I have already quoted. Is it true that science is guided, even controlled, by an assumption of naturalism? Let’s acknowledge that there is no such thing as “science” to be monolithically governed by one stream of thought. Nevertheless it is still true that many of the most prominent spokespersons insist that science treat the natural world as if it is all that exists. God and the supernatural, they insist, either do not exist, or if they do, they are useless or irrelevant as far as science is concerned.

If this is the case, as Hunter says and I think we all must agree, is it a “move … away from empiricism”? Of course it is. God’s non-existence has not been and cannot be proven in the lab or the field. Or is naturalism a necessary assumption for science—that the scientist must at least be a practical atheist? Some would say so, but this is just not at all the case. It’s based on completely mistaken or ad hoc assumptions about God. Any person who says that all knowledge should come by way of science, and that he or she is quite sure there is no God at work in the world, speaks a contradiction.

This is all fairly familiar. What Hunter surprisingly adds to it is the historical roots for the naturalism that is common within science. Let me fill in some of those ellipses now, with emphasis added:

The assumption of naturalism in science is neither a result of atheistic influence nor an empirically based scientific finding.

Theological naturalism provides science with well-defined universal criteria to which it conforms.

Theological naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

Do you see now why I chose to introduce the topic at a gradual pace? Things could get confusing here. What on earth is “theological naturalism”? Isn’t that a self-contradictory concept?

No, it’s not, for though the naturalism that reigns in science today may be atheistic, it is unabashedly theological in nature. And in its historical beginnings its theology was even Christian, in a way. It wasn’t good Christian theology, but it was certainly theology in a Christian tradition.

In 1671 the Anglican chaplain Thomas Burnet wrote that the world was filled with majesty and grandeur yet also with “incredible confusion” and (as Hunter adds in his words, page 52) “lack of symmetry and proportion:”

From a distance the mountains were awe inspiring, but up close there were irregular rocks, moraines, and valleys. Maps and atlases portrayed well-ordered and symmetrical mountains, but Burnet found them to be “shapeless and ill-figured.”

To Burnet this did not seem like the kind of thing God would design. In fact, in 1681 he wrote (Hunter, p. 20),

We think him a better Artist… that makes a Clock that strikes regularly at every hour from the Springs and Wheels which he puts in the work, than he that hath so made his Clock that he must put his finger to it every hour to make it strike.

Hunter goes on to explain,

In other words, special divine action should be minimized. It is better for God to make a self-sufficient machine than to make one needing divine intervention.

This Anglican writing more than 300 years ago sounds astonishingly similar to Francisco Ayala today, who insists that God must be absent from nature, or else evil has no explanation. Or to Ken Miller, who cannot believe God would want to take credit for the mosquito. Or to Ian Barbour, who said (p. 120),

There seem to be too many blind alleys and extinct species and too much suffering and waste to attribute every event to God’s specific actions.

Or even to Darwin, who could not understand why (p. 121),

the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? … Facts, such as these … admit of no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation.

It sounds like Douglas Futuyma today, who (in Hunter’s paraphrase, p. 135) cannot believe God would have created nature so “full of useless features, inadequate design, shoddy workmanship, and harshness or cruelty”? Or evolutionary biologist George C. Williams who thinks a real God would have made better use of the sun (p. 133):

Why, then, would it be so far away, and why would it be enormously larger than the earth? This makes for a wasteful design…. Williams suggests a precisely shaped and brightly polished reflector mounted behind the sun to reflect wasted light upon the earth. As it is, the real earth-sun system “shows no such evidence of purposive engineering.”

One could easily ridicule a sentiment like that, but it would be grossly unfair to do so without having the context in which WIlliams said it. Instead we need to focus on this: Are these not theological arguments? Do they not presuppose a certain view of God? From whence within science does such a view of God come? The answer, of course, is nowhere; it does not come from within science. Historically it came from theologians in the Christian tradition: Thomas Burnet along with Ralph Cudworth, John Ray, Thomas Wolleston, Peter Annet, Charles Kingsley, and others, all of whom taught a view of God that they thought was Christian, and which required God to keep his hands off of his creation. This was not a Biblical view, but it was a view about God, propounded by men who actually believed in such a God. Naturalism was born in theology. Its parentage remains evident.

The “blind spot” spoken of in the title is scientific naturalism’s unawareness of its theological heritage. And it is also its diseased inability to see the possibility—not the certainty or proof, which Hunter does not consider to be in the purview of science, but the possibility—of a designer involved in nature. His arguments for design are well stated, yet they are also familiar, so I will not spend time on them here. More important is the gentle way he opens the philosophical door to the possibility of thinking of design. The alternative to rationalism Hunter espouses is aptly named moderate empiricism. We have met it already, in the first quote I provided near the beginning of this review. It’s a humble approach to knowledge. Unlike naturalism, it does not assume it sees all there is to see. It does not blind its eyes to the possibility of unexpected ultimate explanations.

There are flaws in this book. Several sentences and paragraphs in the early chapters could have used a copy editor’s review (which is surely often the case with my blogging, too, but a blog post just can’t go through as many cycles of review and revision as should be done with a book). Somehow that all seemed to diminish in the middle and end of the book, and I found myself less often needing to re-read, or wishing I could re-write something Hunter had said. The overall structure and flow could be more logical. There is a reason I started this review by quoting from near the end of the book.

Still I’m glad I pushed on through the awkward constructions and the somewhat strange sequence of topics. By the end of the book, Hunter had made his argument superbly clear, and along the way he provided persuasive evidence. If he is right, then naturalism is not just a blind spot: it is an inescapably theological blind spot.

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Where can the small things take you?

Responding to my last point on the distinction between magic and supernaturalism, doctor(logic) offered this:

When you make a voodoo doll, don’t you have to follow a recipe and include one of the victim’s hairs or possessions?

That would mean that there’s a very specific relationship between the actions of the voodoo practitioner and the pain or death of the victim. There are laws that control the magic. Voodoo is predictable. Scientifically falsifiable, even.

In contrast, prayer to God has nothing of the sort. Pray for a cardiac patient, and they’re as likely to die or recover as anyone else.

The defining characteristic of superstition is improper statistical sampling, and the amplification of bias. Superstition is all about creative interpretation of individual events, and assigning significance to events based on bias and emotion. It has nothing to do with relationship or mechanism.

There’s a whole worldview contained in there, and it’s one of the most characteristically defining worldviews of our age. It’s a view that takes it that except for mathematical knowledge, all knowledge of the world begins with particulars.

What do I mean by that, and what difference does it make? doctor(logic) has given us the illustration we need to explain it: voodoo. Those of us who have followed his comments know that he does not accept the existence of magic or the supernatural, so we can be quite sure that he does not believe in voodoo (except if there is some psychological impact associated with it, which is a different thing entirely). But here he suggests the following:

• If statistical sampling were applied to voodoo in actual practice, and
• If bias were removed from interpretation of the results, and
• If a genuine, unbiased association were found between the practice of voodoo and its intended outcomes,
• Then voodoo would be predictable, and
• Then voodoo could be regarded as a real phenomenon, and presumably
• Then work would have to be done to investigate the means by which it operates.

Statistical sampling is a matter of gathering particulars: actual individual instances, each measured one by one, in which voodoo practice* is attempted, and actual individual instances of its “success” or “failure.” These individual instances are collated and analyzed mathematically. If that analysis says something is going on, then the researcher lifts up his head and looks around, so to speak, to theorize possible larger explanations and connections. If there were some statistical correlation between voodoo practice and its outcomes, and if other confounding variables were weeded out, then we would have to think hard about some theory to explain it.

This is how doctor(logic) would handle voodoo as a matter of knowledge, if I read him correctly (and he’s been saying this sort of thing a long time). Those two processes—the gathering of many individual instances, and mathematical analysis—are at the basis of all knowledge of the world, according to this viewpoint. If it’s not statistical, it’s not about reality. But we have to recognize that for what it is: particulars upon particulars upon particulars, aggregated and collated and analyzed statistically. The world is known only through its small things.

This is not only about one commenter’s position. It seems to me this is characteristic of the natural sciences in general, and even of human sciences like psychology. The description of knowledge-generation I just gave could have come from my grad studies in industrial and organizational psychology, the science of human effectiveness on the job and in organizations. I/O psychology research and knowledge is all about statistical analysis of individual people and events, measured one by one by one. Small things, aggregated.

On this view, knowledge of small things leads to knowledge of larger things: general theories or laws regarding how nature operates. It never works the other way around: we never start with knowledge of larger things. And that leads me to several questions. These are not fully thought-out conclusions, but conversation starters instead.

• Other than mathematical knowledge (based on axioms and logic) do the sciences ever start with anything other than particulars (small things)?
• Is it possible that there is a method-to-result correlation here? That is, the sciences are infamously reductionistic in their conclusions with respect to matters like thought, design, and so on. Could their reductionist results be as much a product of method as it is of the reality being so studied?

I need to illustrate my next question before I ask it. A friend of mine once told me about a certain science-fiction story in which an earthling was trying to communicate with an alien. He pointed to a rock and said, “Rock.” The alien pointed and repeated, “Rock.” The earthling, excited by that success, pointed at it again and said, “Rock.” Unfortunately, this didn’t work for the alien. It thought, “How strange! There was ‘rock’ there a moment ago, so how could there be ‘rock’ there now? What was there has changed so much since then, in all of its deep molecular and energy structure; it no longer exists in the same state. If it was ‘rock’ before, it must be something other than ‘rock’ now. How can this other being so unaware of that?”

And then the earthling pointed at another object on the ground, and again said “Rock.” At this point the alien knew it was hopeless.

Where the earthling saw similarity, the alien saw constant change and difference. Where the earthling saw and analyzed on the macroscopic level of visible and touchable hardness, color, texture, and so on, the alien saw and analyzed on the level of molecules. Where the earthling saw constancy across time, the alien saw massive change.** Which one of them was right? On what basis? How do we know what to aggregate? If the answer to that is based in some human mental process with no larger justification, then it is very contingent, and its reliability is suspect. Another kind of being might see reality very differently, and there’s no telling whether we or it have a better handle on what’s real or true. But if aggregating small things is the basis for all knowledge, and we don’t have a reliable way of knowing what or how can be aggregated, then the basis for all knowledge is highly suspect.

It’s not necessarily as hopeless as that, though, for science does offer an answer to that question: if you can correlate ‘em, you are justified in aggregating ‘em. If two events, objects, processes, or other phenomena have mathematical similarity, then you can call them similar in reality. With that as background I return to my bullet-formatted questions:

• Isn’t there some function in the human mind that just knows that a rock is a rock, and knows it with high reliability, without mathematical analysis?
• Could we even study anything on the level of particulars without prior knowledge of at least some generalities (and I’m not talking about logical/mathematical axioms)?
  If so, then not all knowledge is statistical, for statistical knowledge depends on a different, prior kind of knowledge.
• If we approach all knowledge from the small end, looking for generalities through statistical analysis of particulars, what might we be missing in the form knowledge that can’t be gained by that method?
• If there is a God, what is the likelihood we would find him by starting our search from the small end of everything? Could it be that if one insists on starting at that end, one is guaranteed to miss the potentially biggest reality of all?

Just some questions. I haven’t thought them through well enough to be sure of the answers, but I think there’s something there. If there’s a God, and the goal is to know him, can the small things take you there? I doubt it. And I doubt that starting from the small things is the only way for us to know what is real.

*There are probably errors in the popular conception of voodoo that this characterization calls to mind. I’ll grant that, and ask the reader to recognize that this is an illustration of a point about knowledge, not a treatise on voodoo; and the illustration is based on how voodoo is popularly conceived, not on how it is actually practiced or what its proponents actually believe.

**There are other interesting questions and inconsistencies to be considered in that exchange, like, did the alien actually hear the same word “rock” both times, and did it think the earthling was the same being from one moment to the next? But I didn’t read the story, and that’s not what matters here anyway.

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More than two years ago I wrote “Servants of a Twisted God,” including the following:

Recently in the influential journal Science, Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney bemoaned scientists’ difficulties with influencing public policy. They recommended that scientists back off from their technical language, and recast their communications in “frames”—alternative ways of viewing information—such as “public accountability,” “public morality,” and “economic development.” They proposed that “scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.”

…

But there’s a deeper problem. Nisbet’s and Mooney’s advice can only lead to science undermining its own platform to speak. Something very similar has happened before.

Consider the position of science and scientists in Western culture. Put bluntly, science is our god of knowledge, and scientists are its only priests.

…

Nisbet and Mooney would have scientists do more of this: to present persuasive arguments rather than pure science. They want scientists to spend less energy on telling the public the full truth, and more on being politically effective. They are encouraging scientists to follow the fatal path that too many clergy took in the past: to become priests of power, servants of a twisted god.

The public will lose its religion over this.

Cara L. Santa Maria wrote recently in the Huffington Post, Is Science Just a New Religion? Her assessment is no, it is not religion, and for my part I emphatically agree it ought not to be. Science ought to be what science is, and what it is so good at: using empirical means to give us reliable information about the natural world.

But Bradford at Telic Thoughts points out the Checkered Beliefs of some science practitioners. Santa Maria’s article was written before the ClimateGate revelations were made, but now Bradford draws an interesting connection:

Is Science Just a New Religion? is authored by Cara L. Santa Maria and appears at the Huffington Post website. A read of this is timely in the wake of Climate Gate which shows that scientists are not immune to unethical impulses which sometimes plague mere mortals as well. Cara seeks to explain “two enormous differences between science and religion: doubt and faith.” Cara gets off course almost immediately by asserting that religious certainty quickly dwindles when doubt is present. Her point is tautological for one could remove the adjective religious and insert almost anything and come out with the same result. Certainty about the correctness of U.S. policy toward Iran quickly dwindles when doubt is inserted. Certainty about global warming quickly dwindles when doubt is inserted. Certainty about RNA world proposals quickly dwindles when doubt is inserted…

And then yesterday in the wake of ClimateGate, we have this from Michael Bolt in Australia:

The tide is turning. and fast. There will soon be an accounting – and the mood and the money for it. The reputation of science – and of many scientists – will be damaged severely.

Michael Egnor responds,

Bolt is right about this: there will be an accounting for this fraud. People are very very angry, and while the skeptics whose darkest doubts have been vindicated don’t pull the levers of organized science (the frauds do that), there are some financial and political resources available to the skeptics who have been demanding integrity in science, and they understand now that this is war.

Meanwhile Chris Mooney himself tells us his opinion on Why ClimateGate Ain’t Nothing:

None of this is at all relevant to the climate issue today. It’s a nasty, ugly sideshow. The science of climate change doesn’t stand or fall based upon what a few scientists said in emails they always thought would remain private….

The fact is that no matter what a few scientists may have said in emails, we have to go to Copenhagen and deal with our warming, melting planet. That’s what matters. The rest of this is hot air.

But that’s not all that matters. What also matters is trust.

Science, practiced the way it ought to be practiced—the way scientists say it is practiced—is a good thing that needs continuing strong support. But it stands in danger right now: danger from within, or rather, danger that flows naturally from following a path like that recommended by Nisbet and Mooney.

It’s not just that the public might cease bowing to the idol. It’s also that it might start thinking twice about dropping all those billions of dollars in the bucket.

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This from Scientific American raises interesting questions regarding knowledge: The Will to Power–Is “Free Will” All in Your Head?

The author, Christof Koch, apparently wants to balance philosophical questions with scientific ones. I appreciate his trying—but he doesn’t succeed. Not even if we ignore the oddly inappropriate allusion to Nietzsche in the title (for which Koch may not be responsible, as titles are often written by editors instead).

His topic is the perceptual effects experience by patients during brain surgery. Neurosurgeons have long used electrical stimulation to test what is going on in regions of the brain near where they are working. Patients, who are under local anesthetic, report various perceptual experiences during these surgeries, or their limbs may move without any intention on their part. The current article touches on both perception and motion. It describes a sensation scientists have termed “intention,” described by patients as “an urge to move a limb,” or the feeling of “a need to move the leg, elbow, or arm.” Or, as stated in one French study,

Patients made comments (in French) such as “It felt like I wanted to move my foot. Not sure how to explain,” “I had a desire to move my right hand,” or “I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth.” In none of these cases did they actually carry out the movement to which they referred. But the external stimulation caused an unambiguous conscious feeling of wanting to move. And this feeling arose from within, without any prompting by the examiner and not during sham stimulation.

The question this raises, as indicated in the article’s title, is whether this means intentionality is just a neural process; and if it is, whether that means that deciding to do what we do is just a neural (physical/chemical) process, too, and if our sensation of intentional decision-making is misleading. If so, that implies that human free will is an illusion.

One one level Koch seems quite appropriately cautious. His closing sentence reads,

In the debate concerning the meaning of personal freedom, these discoveries represent true progress, beyond the eternal metaphysical question of free will that will never be answered.

Scientists have made progress, he says, but there never will be an answer. Now, I’m thankful he did not jump to the materialist conclusion that the mind is necessarily a purely physical entity, subject to the same physical necessities as any other physical system. That would be a typical naturalistic/materialistic response. I applaud him for his restraint on that. He was not quite so even-handed, however, near the beginning of his article:

Surely there must have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional answer is that this is not the job of the brain at all but rather of the soul. Hovering above the brain like Casper the Friendly Ghost, the soul freely perturbs the networks of the brain, thereby triggering the neural activity that will ultimately lead to behavior.

Although such dualistic accounts are emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying, they break down as soon as one digs a bit deeper. How can this ghost, made out of some kind of metaphysical ectoplasm, influence brain matter without being detected? What sort of laws does Casper follow? Science has abandoned strong dualistic explanations in favor of natural accounts that assign causes and responsibility to specific actors and mechanisms that can be further studied. And so it is with the notion of the will.

The “Casper” caricature is not very “Friendly” to serious discourse on the topic. The language of “emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying” is rather patronizing. And “metaphysical ectoplasm“? Really, now.

What’s especially telling, however, is the question, “What sort of laws does Casper follow?” It reminds me of Steven Schafersman’s absurdly stated willingness to accept the spiritual if only we discover the “mechanism” by which it operates. Here’s what Koch is saying: Some people believe Casper provides humans with free will, but science can’t accept that possibility because (among other things) it doesn’t know what laws govern Casper’s action. But what does this mean? Scientists cannot accept the reality of free will unless we can discover the laws that rule it!

It’s an absurd thing to say: free will can only make sense if it’s ruled by law, which in the world of natural science, is fairly well synonymous with necessity. Free will is doing what you must do by necessity.

The confusion appears to be that of the scientistic mindset, that cannot break free of natural-law-rules-all thinking long enough to recognize what an absurdity it is.

What’s also on display here is the assumption that there is no knowledge but that which can be gained by science. Now, it’s perfectly appropriate for science to “abandon” a search for “strong dualistic explanations,” for that’s not the kind of thing that science is competent to search for. Here’s what I mean by that: if there are strong dualistic explanations out there, and if they are true ones, they may or may not be discoverable, but they will certainly not be discoverable by means of science, any more than you could discover a sliver of hay in a needle-stack by searching with a magnet. It’s the wrong way to go about looking for it. You might find all kinds of other things, but not what you’re really after.

Koch might recognize that science isn’t the only way to study matters like free will, but if so, he surely didn’t say so. He apparently assumes the soul can be studied only if its effects can be detected somehow (apparently its interaction with the brain doesn’t count). He assumes the soul can be studied only if the laws governing its action can be sorted out. He knows that neither of these will ever happen. And so he concludes free will is an “eternal metaphysical question … that will never be answered.”

It will never be answered by science; that’s true enough. Does that mean it will never be answered? For my part, I’m quite sure that science isn’t our only way to know true things about the world. And I’m quite sure this “eternal metaphysical question” already has been answered. If you think I’m wrong on that, then please feel free to choose to disagree.

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BreakPoint has just published my article “Intelligent Artistry: Maybe We Should Read More Poetry,” a response to the new film Darwin’s Dilemma. It’s not a review, but rather more of a reaction to some thoughts the film got me to thinking: What stories might there be for us in the record of nature? What kinds of stories are thinkable? If certain kinds of stories cannot be thought of, is it perhaps because we’ve limited ourselves in our imaginations?

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From Simon Conway Morris:

Indeed it is now legitimate to talk of a logic to biology, not a term you will hear on the lips of many neo-Darwinians. Nevertheless, evolution is evidently following more fundamental rules. Scientific certainly, but ones that transcend Darwinism. What! Darwinism not a total explanation? Why should it be? It is after all only a mechanism, but if evolution is predictive, indeed possesses a logic, then evidently it is being governed by deeper principles. Come to think about it so are all sciences; why should Darwinism be any exception?

But there is more. How to explain mind?…

To reiterate: when physicists speak of not only a strange universe, but one even stranger than we can possibly imagine, they articulate a sense of unfinished business that most neo-Darwinians don’t even want to think about. Of course our brains are a product of evolution, but does anybody seriously believe consciousness itself is material? Well, yes, some argue just as much, but their explanations seem to have made no headway.

He’s a paleontologist at Cambridge, an expert on the Cambrian era (and the Cambrian explosion); not an Intelligent Design supporter, but certainly a supporter of intelligence and design behind the universe.

(I owe someone a hat tip for this link but I’ve lost track of the source…)

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