Thinking Christian

Geoff Arnold had some very significant trouble with my recent statement about the Noachian flood. He said,

Do you actually, literally, believe this? The complete lack of any physical evidence for this amazing claim doesn’t trouble you? Do you reject all of science, and if not, how do you disentangle the bits you accept from the bits that are contradicted by your religious beliefs?

Good grief. If this is a thinking Christian position, I shudder to think what an unthinking one might be like….

What shall we make of a criticism like this? I could give a directly worded statement of my position regarding the Flood, which I have done. But that’s not all that Geoff was getting at in this comment. We need to tear apart his premises, some of which are unspoken; for it is often the unspoken premises that most severely undermine good thinking, since we tend to let them enter unprocessed and unfiltered. Here are some of them:

• The Noachian flood is “an amazing claim.”
• There is absolutely no physical evidence for it.
• To believe in the Noachian flood is to reject at least some science.
• That rejection is based on “religious beliefs.”
• There must be some mysterious principle by which I “disentangle” the parts of science I accept and the parts I do not accept.

Let’s examine that last one before proceeding. Science itself, like all of knowledge, involves considerable disentangling, does it not? Consider for example the Tree of Life as constructed under Darwinian principles. On what principle should the branchings be determined? Morphology or genetic similarity? If the latter, then which genes? Different methods yield different results. Don’t these different results require some disentangling? Disentangling is a fact of life, even within science or a single branch of science. Therefore the hoot of derision we hear in Geoff’s, “how do you disentangle…?” is either misdirected or misinformed, or else it’s based on some principle that says that in this case it’s a different kind of problem altogether.

Of course it is the last of those: Geoff obviously thinks disentangle “religious beliefs” from scientific knowledge involves something of a different sort than what happens within science. Let me now suggest that Geoff probably takes these as additional though unspoken premises:

• Science produces knowledge on the basis of physical evidence.
• If there is no physical evidence for the Noachian flood, then there is no evidence for the Noachian flood.
• “Religious belief” is not really knowledge.

The first statement in this set is true but incomplete. Science certainly produces knowledge on the basis of physical evidence, but not only on that basis. Its knowledge is also the product of interpretation, which is filtered through worldview. Uniformitarianism, for example, is an interpretive lens through which historical geology is viewed. It’s not the only one that’s possible. Now, I happen to think uniformitarianism is generally a trustworthy lens, except as it exists as a scaled-down version of methodological and/or philosophical naturalism, which exclude a priori any possibility that the flow of natural history could have experienced some non-linearizing intervention. There are multiple lines of converging evidence to support (not prove, but support) uniformitarianism. There is no physical evidence whatever for naturalism. It is purely a worldview lens.

The last statement in this latter set is just wrong. There are, to be sure, religious beliefs that are false and therefore do not qualify as knowledge. But I don’t think that’s all Geoff probably means, reading between the lines of what he said. There is a rather common view of religion and knowledge that I suspect Geoff would buy into: that religious “belief” and actual knowledge really have little to do with each other, except that where their subject matters overlap, religious “belief” must always yield to actual knowledge. I can “believe” anything I want, but if there’s some actual knowledge out there that my “belief” conflicts with, my “belief” yield to “knowledge.”

But that’s not what religious belief is, at least not in the case of Christianity, the only religious belief system I have in mind here now. I believe that Jesus Christ lived, and died, and rose again. Why do I believe this? Because I know it to be true. How do I know it? On the basis of evidences, reasoning, logic, and so on. I believe that there was a vast flood that destroyed almost all of humanity. How do I know this? On the basis, again, of evidences, reasoning, logic and so on.

The evidence set I’m relying on for both of these is, of course, not primarily scientific, but that doesn’t mean it is not knowledge. I have written at great length on my reasons for believing in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection: reasons based in evidence leading to knowledge. Some say it’s false and therefore not knowledge; I say (and have supported with evidence) that they are wrong: it is true and it is therefore knowledge. Knowledge that I believe; belief that is knowledge.

The Flood is a belief I hold based on evidences as well. The evidence set for it is more complex and involved than that regarding Jesus Christ. It has to do with reasons (reasons!) to believe that God has produced a trustworthy record for us in Genesis. I could go into more detail on this, but I think it would detract from my main point here.

So let me state that main point in full now. (I have been heading toward it but I have not articulated it yet.) Geoff mocks my position here, apparently on the basis of some apparent stupidity revealed by my having to disentangle religious beliefs from scientific knowledge. That’s not what’s going on at all, though. Yes, there is some disentangling to be done, and it’s not all simple or obvious, which is also often the case within science itself, as I have shown. What I am disentangling, though, is not “belief” and “knowledge.” It is knowledge and knowledge.

Do I reject all of science? Heavens, no! But I will doubt—and possibly reject—any part of “science” that is clearly contradicted by other solid knowledge I have. And where there is disentangling to be done, whether it is all within science or whether it involves multiple disciplines of knowledge, I will recognize the questions and confusions for what they are and refrain from jumping to dogmatic conclusions. I am not the least bit embarrassed to claim that as a thinking Christian position.

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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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Sean Carroll, physicist at CalTech, says science and religion are incompatible—not that they couldn’t be compatible, somewhere, though:

It’s not hard to imagine an alternative universe in which science and religion were compatible — one in which religious claims about the functioning of the world were regularly verified by scientific practice. We can easily conceive of a world in which the best scientific techniques of evidence-gathering and hypothesis-testing left us with an understanding of the workings of Nature which included the existence of God and/or other supernatural phenomena. (St. Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, would undoubtedly agree, as would many religious people who actually are alive.) It’s just not the world we live in. (That’s where they would disagree.)

[Link: Science and Religion are Not Compatible | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine]

Bravo! And Well Done!
Carroll makes some important and useful points in this article. He raises a warning against the Stephen Jay Gould mistake of “Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA),” which suggests that science and religion can get along because they never discuss the same matters. A magisterium is an area of authority to teach: religion has authority in one realm, science in another, says Gould, and the realms are so distinct from each other, there is so little overlap between them, the two could never really contradict one another. Carroll explains it this way.

One strategy to assert the compatibility between science and religion has been to take a carving knife to the conventional understanding of “religion,” attempting to remove from its purview all of its claims about the natural world.

That would be the strategy adopted, for example, by Stephen Jay Gould with his principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

The problem with that is plain to see, and Carroll gets it right:

It’s utterly at variance with the meaning of the word “religion” as used throughout history, or as understood by the vast majority of religious believers today. Those people believe in a supernatural being called “God” who created the universe, is intensely interested in the behavior of human beings, and occasionally intervenes miraculously in the natural world.

There are other misuses of the term “religion” that Carroll corrects:

Of course, nothing is to stop you, when you say the word “religion,” from having in mind something like “moral philosophy,” or perhaps “all of nature,” or “a sense of wonder at the universe.” You can use words to mean whatever you want; it’s just that you will consistently be misunderstood by the ordinary-language speakers with whom you are conversing. And what is the point? If you really mean “ethics” when you say “religion,” why not just say “ethics”? … If you hold some unambiguously non-supernatural position that you are tempted to refer to as “religion” — awe at the majesty of the universe, a conviction that people should be excellent to each other, whatever — resist the temptation!

To this I say bravo, and well done, sir! What’s the point of watering down a word so it doesn’t mean anything anymore?

Science Disproves Religion?
If only he got the rest of it as right as that! The quote I opened with could have been interpreted rather mildly and uncontroversially as “science and religion are incompatible simply in that because science doesn’t provide proofs for religion.” I could get along with a conclusion like that (though it’s stretching the meaning of “incompatible”), but that’s not what Carroll meant. He thinks science has disproved religion:

The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” [sic] or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.

But science does not say those beliefs are false (except for the six-day creation, of course, which continues to be a bone of contention). Consider his final example, “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” I disagree with this belief as strongly as I possibly could disagree with it. But I can’t think of any scientific reason to disagree with it. My disagreement is based in God’s word, the Bible, which says it is appointed to all to die once, and then comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27). Could Carroll offer one scientific reason to find reincarnation false? Does he have a test for transmigration of souls? Is there a journal article on it? Does he know of an experiment showing that souls don’t exist, and has it been published in the peer-reviewed literature?

What about “Jesus died and was resurrected,” or “Moses parted the Red Sea”? Does science say that didn’t happen? No. Some scientists say it couldn’t happen, but all they’re saying is that the regularities of nature they’ve seen have never ever been broken, and therefore their limited sample of reality rules all of it. They have a decent statistical case, perhaps, but every statistician knows that the tails of the bell curve never touch the x-axis. Statistics can’t prove an outlier (a statistically improbable event) is impossible. Even Carroll insisted in his article that science never proves anything.

No, the reason Carroll thinks these things are impossible is because he has invested natural law with metaphysical absoluteness. It is a metaphysical position, not a scientific one. The Biblical view is that miracles are statistically improbable (otherwise they wouldn’t be miracles) but nevertheless possible under God’s intentional direction. Natural law is not the ultimate or the absolute that Carroll thinks it is, and science cannot prove that it is; or if can, where then is the article in Science or Nature that actually does prove it?

Not the Only Way of Knowing
You might think that the above, Carroll’s view that science has disproved religion, would be my point of greatest disagreement with an article like his. Close, but not quite. Look again at this:

We can easily conceive of a world in which the best scientific techniques of evidence-gathering and hypothesis-testing left us with an understanding of the workings of Nature which included the existence of God and/or other supernatural phenomena.

And

Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It’s not well-defined, it’s completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding.

What’s the problem there? It would appear that Carroll thinks the methods of science rule knowledge. God doesn’t work as a scientific hypothesis, therefore the kind of world that has a God is “just not the world we live in,” and we know for sure that resurrections can’t happen and the Red Sea will never part. Because only science can speak, and science says no to those things. It’s not only that it’s obviously wrong. It’s that this muscle-bound, “you all shut up, I’ll do the talking around here!” attitude about science is a very dangerous approach to knowledge in general.

If it really were the case that only science can produce knowledge, we would certainly lose knowledge of God, because God’s clearest self-revelation has not been through nature. It has been through his personal interaction with real individuals, recorded in the Bible. He continues to relate to persons and communities, and we continue to acquire genuine knowledge of God, through his Word and through his Spirit. Science won’t find that.

In fact it’s astonishing that Carroll would think the things he does about science being able to speak to the religious topics he mentioned. He says the incompatibility of science and religion is “perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look,” but he backs up that “perfectly evident” conclusion with examples that completely fail to address (much less prove) his point. In fact, they illustrate precisely the opposite: that science is the wrong approach to these questions.

Even those who doubt that there is any way to get good answers to those questions must admit that science can’t do it. Why would anyone think otherwise? In part it is because science has been so successful where it has been successful. Where science is competent it is very competent. This has led to a stunningly unaware kind of hubris regarding what science can accomplish—that science is the only route to genuine knowledge.

That’s what bothers me more than anything else in Carroll’s piece. For under that principle we would lose even more than knowledge of God. We would lose all knowledge about value. Science doesn’t speak to value. Science says what the world is like, but as science it does not know what the world ought to be like.

Undermining Science With Scientific Hubris
We would even lose science itself under that principle of knowledge; for the belief, “the methods of science rule all knowledge” is not a scientific belief. You won’t find this one demonstrated by experiment and reported in a scientific journal, either. If all knowledge must come through scientific methods, then there is no way we could know that all knowledge must come through science, for that is the kind of information science can’t produce.

So under this principle we would lose science. That would be a terrible, tragic loss. I don’t think we would ever actually see that happen, though, because the scientific enterprise would continue to run, in spite of false beliefs held by its practitioners, including Sean Carroll. After all, as he said himself,

There is no problem at all with individual scientists holding all sorts of incorrect beliefs, including about science.

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In this third look at Tom Clark’s paper, Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First, I have just one topic to address:

Most thoughtful religionists, paranormalists, New Agers, or adherents of other non-science based worldviews feel, at least to some extent, the force of the empirical imperative: that beliefs need validation independent of one’s subjective convictions. There are two main ways that they attempt to satisfy this requirement. One is to claim to be doing science, the other is to claim that there are reliable non-scientific ways of knowing which reveal truths that science can’t capture.

I’m surprised he would say there are these two, and apparently just these two, ways in which believers validate their faith independently of subjective convictions. The two he addresses are quite at the bottom of the list among apologetical arguments.

When he speaks of our “claim to be doing science,” he is pointing specifically at biological Intelligent Design arguments.

The first strategy is exemplified by creationists and proponents of intelligent design, who argue that science, were it honestly and properly conducted, would consider and confirm supernatural explanations of phenomena, for instance the appearance of life on earth and the diversity of species. Science, they say, has been hijacked by philosophical and metaphysical naturalists, who conspire to discount evidence that the earth was created 10,000 years ago, or that the human form is the result of supernatural agency, not the historically contingent process of natural selection.

I think almost every apologist would be quick to admit that, no matter how convinced he or she may be regarding biological ID arguments, using such arguments to persuade unbelievers is an uphill battle. There are too many weeds to clear out of the way, especially philosophical discussions about scientific methodologies and what may be admitted as possible explanations. There is also all the weight of established biology to push against.

Over the course of time, ID can indeed be persuasive: witness Antony Flew, for example. But if I were invited to debate an atheist/agnostic on the existence of God, I certainly wouldn’t begin there. The natural world offers much easier starting places, like the evidence of design in the fine-tuning of the cosmos, which I consider extremely strong. It’s so strong, in fact, that the only real competing explanation is as non-empirical, non-falsifiable as you can get, and quite likely the hugest violation of Occam’s Razor in the history of thought.

When Clark expands on the other way he says we believers validate our beliefs, he points only to inner impressions of God that believers sense (specifically John Haught, in Clark’s example). This is a matter for careful thought. Alvin Plantinga, one of today’s leading philosophers of religion, devotes something like one-third of a book to it (Warranted Christian Belief). The end of it all is this: there’s nothing necessarily irrational or incoherent at all about perceiving God through an inner sensus divinitatus. It can most assuredly count as validation for those who do perceive God in that way. It does not count as evidence for others, though. As William Lane Craig puts it, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit is one way I know about God, but not a way I can show God’s reality, for no one else has access to my internal experiences.

So Haught is not wrong about this at all, at least as Clark represents him, but one person’s internal assurance is not expected to be another’s convincing evidence.

Where Clark really misses the boat is in representing believers as having only these two forms of validation. If all I had to go on was the witness of the Holy Spirit within me, I might be fully persuaded on that basis alone—God could do that in me without any external evidence at all if he wished. The fact is, though, I don’t have only the Holy Spirit to show me the reality of God. Christians do not rely on just that; nor do we place our faith in biological Intelligent Design. (There were Christians around for at least a few centuries before Scientific Creationism, after all!) There are multiple other evidences, evidences that satisfy Clark’s “requirement” of “validation independent of one’s subjective convictions. Alvin Plantinga’s quick overview of Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments lists multiple starting points. History provides much evidence in support of the Old and New Testament records.

Clark probably views all these arguments as less than convincing. That’s his privilege, though I would disagree. What seems strange is that he would pick out two of the least convincing (for non-believers) arguments of them all, and present them as if that’s all we count on in Christianity.

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Several weeks ago Tom Clark commented here on a blog entry about dualism. Clark is the director of the Center for Naturalism and is (I believe) also responsible for a related website, Naturalism.org. He speaks nationally on naturalism and has authored many articles on the topic. I’ve read several of these articles and exchanged a couple of emails with him, and I’ve found him to be both gracious and thoughtful. If I were a naturalist or atheist, I would rather have Tom Clark for a spokesperson than some of the more prominent writers like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris.

Here at Thinking Christian he referred us specifically to his article Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First. In it he argues (as stated in the abstract),

Being epistemically responsible—not taking appearances at face value and seeking external confirmation for belief—inevitably pushes us toward intersubjectivity and science. This in turn increases the plausibility of the claim that there’s nothing over and above the natural world, what science shows to exist.

As reflected in its title, the article’s primary focus is epistemology: how we know what we know, how we know that we know it, and what practices one ought to follow in order to gain knowledge most reliably. He touches also on matters of ethics and meaning. I plan to respond to the latter two topics in future posts here. For this one and another soon to come I will concentrate on what he has to say about knowledge.

He opens with this:

About the most crucial distinction we can make as cognitive creatures is between appearance and reality, between how things seem and how they really are, between subjectivity and objectivity.

He proceeds to describe how science has succeeded in developing human knowledge over the past several centuries, and contrasts science’s reliability and success with what comes of “disdaining empiricism,” especially “religiously inspired anti-empiricism,” which he equates with “contempt for intellectual prowess.” Anti-empiricism, he says, is “driven by ideology and profit as well as by its role as a cultural identifier.”

Christian evangelicals, who believe the planet and its life forms are God’s creations, and that Darwin’ [sic] theory of natural selection inevitably leads to moral decay, have a religious stake in science being wrong about evolution and cosmology. They work tirelessly to inject young earth creationism and its offspring, intelligent design, into public school curricula.

There are several errors of fact in these short bits quoted so far, which I trust others will be able and ready to comment on. I am mostly interested in what Clark calls “the central argument of this paper:”

that when it comes to representing reality, there is no coherent ethically responsible substitute for science and other empirical disciplines. The alternatives—faith-based religions, empirically unfounded secular ideologies, and commercial agendas hostile to evidence—often claim to be objective representations of how the world is in various respects, but have no entitlement to such claims. The only reliable basis for knowledge, the only route from subjectivity, is to relentlessly subject a belief, then to allay the doubt (or confirm it) by gathering evidence that’s independent of one’s commitment to the belief…. We must put epistemology first and get it right, and make no bones about it.

So how does he propose to get it right? He places primary emphasis on two cornerstone principles. First is what he calls the insulation requirement:

To back up our claim that experience captures reality we must rule out such influences [intensity of experience, strong expectations, lifelong immersion in a religious culture, etc.], insulating our beliefs as best we can from subjective bias and possibly mistaken conventional wisdom…. We must do our best to insulate beliefs in [G]od, the soul, and the supernatural from sources of potential bias.

I note in passing that Clark generally knows how to capitalize proper nouns. Other than the occasional (and understandable) typo, he does it for every proper noun in every article I’ve read of his; except there is one such word he never capitalizes, for some strange reason. I don’t quite understand the rule of grammar that calls for “God,” when used as a proper noun, to be written all in the lower case. Suppose I were to capitalize every proper noun in this blog post except for “Clark.” I think he might take it as a very intentional yet rather puerile personal swipe against him. If he has some reason other than disrespectful dismissiveness for not capitalizing “God,” I would be interested to know what it is. For my part, when I quote him in sentences that include the word I will correct his grammar, as I have just done.

Back to the argument. His second cornerstone principle is what he calls the public object requirement:

Unless there’s intersubjective data, a public object of some sort we can all in principle see or sense in some fashion and thus agree exists, it doesn’t matter how many millions of individuals report subjective experiences of [G]od and the soul: they could all be mistaken, just as all those reporting experiences of alien abduction could be (and likely are) mistaken.

By these two criteria, he is quite sure that religious claims are “perilously unsupported,” extremely likely to be false, and irresponsible to hold as knowledge claims. Science, on the other hand, can be insulated from bias and rests entirely on intersubjective, public-object methodologies, and is therefore reliable as a means of gaining knowledge.

What can be said about this? Is there value in his two central principles? Quite obviously there is, especially for dealing with the natural world; there’s no disputing that science has built its enormous success on these and other methodological principles. But should we take them as normative for all knowledge? We run into serious problems if we try. I’ll start with the insulation requirement. Clark supposes that (a) all religious knowledge claims are tainted by bias, and (b) science can be (and often enough is) free of bias. He insists that

science as it’s commonly practiced manifestly does not make any commitment to naturalism…. science can’t be accused of dogmatism…. Science isn’t in the business of defending or rejecting a worldview, whether naturalism or supernaturalism, scientology or Briantology….

There’s nothing of worldview naturalism in any of this, only a quintessentially natural desire for trustworthy grounds for belief. Non-empirical ways of knowing fail to meet worldview neutral standards of epistemic accuracy….. Were they to champion empiricism as the most reliable route to objectivity, science-friendly organizations wouldn’t thereby be promoting naturalism.

Now, I certainly think that science can operate as nondogmatically, with reference to naturalism, as he describes here. Naturalism is hardly essential as a foundational belief either for scientists or for the practice of science. Science has to hold that there is a natural world and that it operates generally in ways that can be studied, predicted, and understood, but it does not have to hold that the natural world is the only reality. That science has this worldview freedom is not to say that it always exercises it, or that Clark himself is consistent on the point. His own naturalistic bias is quite evident.

Should science find public, reproducible evidence for intelligent design, including a specification of the designer and a clear account of its mode of operation, all this would perforce be incorporated into our best intersubjective picture of the world. The more reliable and convincing this account, and the more integrated with the rest of what we reliably know, the less tempted we would be to call such design supernatural. By illuminating the connections between phenomena of vastly different scales and types, science is inherently monistic in showing the unity of reality. So it’s hard, perhaps impossible for purportedly supernatural phenomena to survive clear explanation and empirically-based understanding; instead, they get naturalized.

A passage like that is hardly free of worldview bias. It predicts that if any truth about God or spirituality is ever reliably discovered, it must push us toward naturalistic interpretations of God and the spiritual world. Elsewhere, similarly and with no less bias, Clark argues for “causal closure, the idea that a scientific examination of bodily action leaves no explanatory room for anything non-physical.’”

But there is a deeper problem with the insulation requirement, if I have understood correctly. Its purpose is to insulate knowledge from bias. Its effect, however, is to rule out non-natural knowledge by definition. It cannot permit a person to come to a non-natural conclusion. It is thoroughly biased toward naturalism. The bias of which Clark accuses religious knowledge is peanuts by comparison. He says that it has great difficulty overcoming preconceptions, desires, and prior expectations. His epistemology, on the other hand, does not just have great difficulty overcoming its expectation of non-supernaturalism, it cannot ever, by definition, overcome its prior commitment to non-supernaturalism.

More specifically, it is biased against any knowledge toward which the knower holds a personal relationship of concern or commitment. Clark says that those who claim to know God ought to be able to do so dispassionately, unconcernedly, if they are to trust their own claim. He supposes, I guess, that God would want us to relate to him as we do to a laboratory experiment; that our doctrine of God might be of no more personal concern than our doctrine of quarks. If God is personal, a being of love and holiness who relates to us as such, then Clark says such a God cannot be known, because inevitably we would care about that which we think we know, and as soon as we care about it we must conclude we don’t know it after all. The insulation requirement does not insulate us from bias, for it is itself inherently biased. It rules out even the bare possibility that there is a knowable personal God.

I have two principles of my own to suggest to Tom Clark. (I’m sure he already knows them, but if my analysis is correct he has not applied them here.) One: any rule of knowledge that by definition rules out even the possibility of knowing something in matters as important as God, is biased and cannot be used to judge whether there is a God. Two: if you propose a universal rule of knowledge that violates its own strictures, it would be wise to discard it.

Now to Clark’s “public object requirement.”

Not only must we do our best to insulate beliefs in [G]od, the soul and the supernatural from sources of potential bias, we must find evidence for them outside private subjective experience, evidence that’s publicly observable by those who haven’t experienced [G]od’s embrace.

His discussion on this is pointed primarily toward disagreements he has with a theologian, John Haught, whose religious epistemology is (according to Clark) based on internal experience alone. I have not read Haught, but I have seen enough quoted from him in secondary sources to doubt that he represents historic Biblical Christianity—he seems to hold to something like process theology. Clark also speaks of similar discussions he has had with Stuart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, who I believe are more orthodox in their Christianity. Nevertheless I share the view that one contributing factor to Christian knowledge is one’s personal encounter with the personal God. I don’t see anything the least bit incoherent about that. My experience with God is not evidence for you to believe in, but it certainly can be evidence for me, supporting my belief. Not the only evidence, but part of it.

Clark makes his own case absurdly simple, though, by pointing to Haught in the way that he does. He represents Christianity as if it had nothing more to offer on its behalf than Christians’ internal experience (or Intelligent Design, mentioned elsewhere in his paper). This is hardly the case! There is the historical record of Israel, Christ, and the church; there are strong philosophical arguments in favor of God, and also in favor of the soul and free will (see below); and there are strong existential arguments in favor of Christianity. There is evidence for Christian belief outside private subjective experience. If Clark addresses this anywhere, I have yet to find it. I haven’t read all of his papers, so maybe he can point us toward one that’s relevant. In this article he certainly treated it as if there were only the two ways of knowing about God.

Clark also says,

Just as belief in[G]od needs support by public observation to be warranted, so too does belief in the soul and free will.

What could be more publicly observed than people (one’s self and others) leading lives by our own decisions, exercising free will? And what basis could there be then for denying free will, other than a strong naturalistic bias?

Finally, the public object requirement seems rather too stringent. In a paper devoted entirely to Haught’s religious epistemology, he puts the requirement this way:

Given the fallibility of human experience, its potential to misrepresent the world, it seems reasonable to ask for further justification for the claim that religious experience reveals the truth about things. This normally involves producing evidence for the claim that’s independent of the experience itself, something other than the mental state of the experiencer, such as a publicly observable object or measurement.

It seems to me that a consistent application of this requirement would lead to a rejection of any knowledge that was not, in principle, available for public observation and measurement. Thus I cannot know what I am thinking at this moment, for my thoughts are quite inaccessible to any other person’s verification, or for observation by any instrument. Now, perhaps there is some valid principle whereby the public object requirement is set aside for knowledge of one’s own thoughts and internal state. If so it ought to be articulated; for Clark certainly seems to make it a universal test for reliable knowledge:

I’ve called this the public object requirement, and along with the insulation requirement it constitutes basic epistemic good practice, without which no factual claim about the world has credibility (emphasis added).

So although Tom Clark’s paper is well written, and his tests of knowledge are interesting, the standard they set is one they fail to meet, if my analysis is correct. They are fatally self-contradictory. And there is yet one additional major sense in which I think they fall short, which I will save for my next post on this topic.

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Book Review

In this, my fourth and final post on Francisco Ayala’s book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I wish to examine very briefly his views on knowledge as related to science and religion. I am addressing the same primary audience that he does in his book: believers in God. For the sake of brevity, and because Ayala seems also to have accepted them himself, I am going to work on the basis of two starting assumptions: there is a God, and he has revealed himself through the Scriptures. I ask readers who contest those assumptions to recognize that this is not the place for me to defend them. This is a blog, not a book, and to do the job properly would run very long. Even as it is, my treatment here can only be an introduction to issues of religious versus scientific knowledge, but I trust it will at least open up some good discussion.

Fences Around Religious Knowledge
Ayala devotes an entire chapter to showing there need be no contradiction between revealed religion–Christianity, to be specific–and evolutionary theory. Clearly he respects Scripture. He would like Christians to understand that Darwin has been a gift to religion as well as science. If it is a gift in the Ayala takes it to be, however, it comes to us as a horse once did to Troy with dozens of armed men hidden inside. The problem is most clearly expressed on page 172 (emphasis added):

The scope of science is the world of nature, the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations concerning the natural world, explanations that are subject to the possibility of corroboration or rejection by observation or experiment. Outside that world, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic, or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose; nothing to say about religious beliefs (except in the case of beliefs that transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge; such statements cannot be true).

When there is a conflict of knowledge or opinion between science and religion, science always wins; religion’s statements “cannot be true.”

Now, is this necessarily so? Why would it be? One could muster several plausible reasons, I suppose: science is evidence-based, its conclusions are open to public challenge and revision, it follows a near-universally trusted method for determining what is true, and its results have been wildly successful in helping us understand and control nature.

Why Would This Necessarily Be?
Let us, however, recall the assumption we have made for present purposes, and that Ayala seems to hold: that there is a God who has revealed himself through the Scriptures (an assumption that I hold to be quite true, but again, it is not my purpose this time to defend it). This God is revealed as the omniscient and omnipotent Creator, faithful and reliable, certainly able and eager to reveal himself to humans. He speaks with complete authority: he knows what is true. He cannot lie. Therefore what he speaks through the Scriptures is true, and if I may paraphrase, when science makes assertions about the natural world that contradict Scriptural knowledge, such statements cannot be true.

Given our assumptions, why would that conclusion not follow? Why would Ayala (who appears to have respect for God and Scripture) say just the opposite? We can never trust any Christian beliefs except as science allows, he says. It’s tantamount to saying we can only trust God as far as science allows; but who forced God aside and enthroned science in his place?

Religious knowledge has its obvious difficulties. Agreement is hard to find, and from a human perspective there is no universal method for testing religious truth. Let us not overstate the problem, however. Ayala is not speaking of comparative religion, or the conflicts of belief between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and secularists. He speaks as one who believes in a Christian conception of God, to others who believe in the same God.

Interpretation: It’s for Both Science and Scripture
Ayala takes the position that the Bible just isn’t intended to speak to the same questions as science. It’s not a book on natural history or cosmology. Therefore if science contradicts the apparent teaching of theology on these subjects, then theology can gracefully bow aside and say, “A thousand pardons; I didn’t mean to be intruding on your territory.” This opens up the matter of interpretation: how literally (for example) are we to take the Genesis creation account? That’s a valid question. But interpretation is a valid question for science as well. How do we interpret nature and its evidences? Theologians have been wrong; scientists have been wrong too. Scientific knowledge is fluid, sometimes adjusting in minor ways, sometimes completely being overturned. A few years ago it was scientific knowledge that stomach ulcers were caused by stress; now it’s scientific knowledge that about 90% of them are caused by H. Pylori bacteria, and most of the rest by certain medications. Why then should “assertions [by religion] about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge” necessarily be false?

Historic Christian theology teaches that God has spoken through nature, through an internal witness in human hearts (conscience, for example), and most clearly and unambiguously through Scripture. Psalm 19 expresses all three of these sources of revelation. Some theologians point out that God has written two books: the Bible and the book of nature. Both “books” may be understood correctly or incorrectly; both need to be interpreted. For a Christian, then, there is more than ample room for discussion about interpretation: Are the early chapters of Genesis intended to be taken literally or figuratively? Great question! Let’s work on it. The book of nature is open to similar discussion. Properly understood and interpreted, the two sources of knowledge must agree.

Necessary Agreement
If God is indeed God, the Creator of all, who speaks only truth, there is no need to ask which source of knowledge trumps the other, for in the end there can be no contradiction between them. Apparent contradictions are signals that our understanding or interpretation from one or both of these perspectives is wrong, and that we have more work to do. They do not automatically signal that science is right and that Scripturally-based knowledge is wrong. That view of knowledge is no gift at all.

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007. 256 pages. Amazon price $24.95.

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There have been a bewildering 170 comments so far in response to a post published here a week ago. The bewilderment, for me, has been that much of the discussion has been a debate on the Law of Noncontradiction. It’s hard for me to see how that could be controversial–or how controversy is even possible if the LNC is not an agreed principle–but it has been.

It started with the question whether there is such a thing as nonempirical knowledge. One commenter proposed this test:

“If you can’t check it (ie. test it), then even if it is true, you can never know that.”

This alone doesn’t assert that the test must be empirical (based on observation), but that’s the direction the discussion went. One example:

“I showed you a specific example of how logic is verified by observation. I’ll repeat: if the observations I laid out didn’t verify the logic, we wouldn’t believe in the logic, so the logic is directly dependent on those observations.”

All this time I’ve had a relevant resource in my list of waiting web pages–pages I saw when I did not have time study them, and bookmarked to return to later. A few weeks ago J.P. Moreland published a short article on Christianity and Non-Empirical Knowledge. Here’s a taste of it (he is using “see” as shorthand for “testing something with the five senses”):

First, truth (the relation of matching or correspondence between a thought/proposition and reality) is not something we can see, so if we are limited to our five senses, we can have no grasp of it. If I believe that a book I ordered is at the bookstore, and then go to the bookstore and see the book, I know that my belief about the book is true. I can see the book there, but I cannot see my belief that the book was there, nor can I see the correspondence relationship between the book’s being there and my belief that it was there.

(Emphasis added)

What does this have specifically to do with Christianity? I don’t know where Moreland is planning to go with it in his next article in this series. There is, though, a common belief that the only reliable form of knowledge is scientific knowledge, which is further believed to be all empirical. If this is true, then faith is excluded. Moreland shows that this is a false assumption.

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