Thinking Christian

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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In response to one part of a comment from Geoff Arnold:

Geoff, the following is apparently your expansion of an assertion you had made earlier of “profound metaphysical problems” with the existence of the soul. [The "Dan" Geoff is speaking of here is the prominent philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett.]

I remember attending a class with Dan in which he was discussing Descartes. There has always been this big problem with the causal relationship between a putative “soul” and the human mind. We all agree that physical phenomena (drugs, injury, hormones, etc.) affect the mind, but how does a non-physical supernatural entity like the soul do so? If it induces physical changes in the state of the brain, what’s the causal connection, and doesn’t this violate the conservation of energy? Descartes postulated that the pineal gland was the brain-soul interface. Does that solve the problem? If the pineal gland is a physical system, the answer is clearly no.

There were several (younger) students in the class who were clearly uncomfortable about this: was Dan saying that souls, and the afterlife, didn’t exist? Dan made it clear: he wasn’t making an argument about this one way or the other. What he was saying is that if someone believes in souls, and believes that souls have a causal effect on the physical world (the brain), they have to explain this relationship in such a way that anyone examining the workings of a brain could observe the effects. Otherwise there was nothing that science could (or should) say about souls.

I agree with the final sentence, the conclusion you landed on: that souls are not something science knows how to study. What concerns me is what led up to it. Maybe I’m projecting something on Dennett that he didn’t say. Steven Schafersman said this:

except for humans, philosophical naturalists understand nature to be fundamentally mindless and purposeless, and here I would agree. Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of supernatural mind and purpose in nature; the only requirement would be the demonstration of its existence and mechanism, which is up to the supernaturalist to provide. We are still waiting.

This is a strange request. I wonder if Dennett’s request for an explanation is strange in the same way. Schafersman expects an explanation of the supernatural to include its “mechanism.” But nobody proposes that the supernatural is mechanical, so if we have to demonstrate its mechanism in order to be able to assert its existence, then the rules are rigged: “All we’re asking you to do is to prove the existence of the supernatural, and show us thereby that its operation is natural. We’ll believe something other than the natural exists as soon as you admit that it’s really natural after all.” I trust you can see the illegitimacy of that kind of demand.

Does Dennett say that? I don’t know, I admit I may be projecting on him. I was aware (from Consciousness Explained) of his argument based on conservation of energy. I think it’s an interesting one that needs more work. I wonder what he thinks of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum indeterminacy, which I believe faces precisely the same problem. But what in fact is the causal interface between soul and body, the non-material and the material? How do we explain it? If we can’t explain it, does that mean it can’t exist?

I think Schafersman’s problem really is your problem, and Dennett’s as well. Let me explain. Your problem is to ask the question in such a way that non-mechanical supernaturalism has permission to be part of the answer. Otherwise your question is rigged. If you will only accept an answer that includes something like a mechanistic causal process on both sides of the point of interface, you’re asking the wrong question. Meanwhile the supernaturalist like myself “happily acknowledges that there are good … reasons why the question is unanswerable.” (I trust you will recognize the source of that allusion. Other readers may find it in Geoff’s comment.)

It’s unanswerable because we are so locked into thinking of causal relations as somehow mechanistic (physical effects, exchanges of particles, etc.) that we don’t have categories in our minds to handle the problem. I don’t see any reason to think that proves there are no supernatural causes.

(The discussion also continues here.)

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I’m certainly more than overdue to respond to Tom Clark here, and now finally there is opportunity to do so. It has been so long since the last post on this topic, and this answer will run so long, that I’m publishing it as a new blog post.

First, I want to state my agreement with what he wrote about non-Christians’ ability to “be moral in all the ways that Christians endorse,” though only partially. I think he and I would both agree that this applies strictly to moral norms such as found in the latter portions of the Ten Commandments and not to the earlier, where the topic has to do with relating to God. The first and greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” (Matthew 22:37). This is not something a non-Christian can do or would choose to do, unless she were at the same time deciding to follow God’s way. Somehow, strangely, I think even Christian believers have forgotten that this is a central ethical issue, though as the first and greatest commandment it certainly must be.

Nevertheless in terms of human relationships, atheists can and generally do indeed act morally, as do Christians, so that point is not in contention here. The question is whether naturalism presents a compelling and coherent explanation for morality, and as Tom said at the end of his comment, it was his goal, he said, to show that a naturalistic ethic could be stated and held coherently.

He may have met that goal, though I have serious questions about that. There is another important goal in moral discussion, which is to state an ethic compellingly. On this he ended up where (in my experience) non-theistic ethics always seem to end up, in a place that is not at all fruitful for moral thinking. I’ll explain as I go along.

Coherence
First, my questions about the coherence of his description of morality.

Tom Clark says “values flow from human nature as modulated by human culture… we’re hard-wire to take our moral intuitions very seriously.” We agree that values may be discovered by observing human nature, and by reflecting on our own experiences; and we agree that these are things we take very seriously. To the not inconsiderable extent that this is an empirical fact, it is explained at least as well by theism as by naturalism. Christian and Judaic theism takes it that humans are created in God’s image, which includes having at least some grasp of what goodness is in God’s view.

Tom says then “there’s good empirical evidence for a robust natural motivational basis for the problem morality addresses.” If by that he means that this provides differential support for a natural motivational basis–i.e., that this is evidence for a natural more than for a supernatural basis–I would disagree, for supernaturalism accounts for the empirical evidence at least as well as naturalism does.

We come now to a further point Tom makes here, which raises several puzzling questions for someone like me.

How does a liberal-progressive Western naturalist like myself justify the proposition that all humans have equal claim to the same set of rights against the opposing conservative-regressive claim, advanced by some Eastern Muslim theocracies, that certain classes of humans (gays, women, minorities, non-Muslims) should not be granted equal rights? This is a quintessentially normative, not empirical question, but it is informed by empirical considerations. The basic argument, some of which you kindly quoted, is that all classes of human beings have, in empirical fact, more or less the same desire for self-preservation and actualization – for human flourishing – and there’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Normativity
My first question with respect to this is how it can be, when Tom has set up empiricism as the only basis and test for knowledge, that another category, the normative, can find room to enter in. He seems on the one hand to have set the two in opposition to each other, but on the other hand to have given the normative some epistemic space anyway. I’m not at all sure how this can be done, given his epistemology (discussed earlier in this series).

Equality of Desire
Second, is it empirically true that all human beings (not classes of human beings as written here, but human beings themselves) have the same desire for self-preservation and actualization? How has this been measured? Is there not psychological/sociological evidence to the contrary? What about suicidal persons? The question is important because of a follow-up point found not much later:

The claim that all humans are of equal worth flows from the fact that each of us has more or less the same desire for flourishing, and the fact that there’s no basis to suppose some classes of humans should be thwarted in that desire. The value, the worth of each human being, is rooted in human nature itself, namely in each and every person’s strong innate desire to live and thrive.

If worth is derived from desire to flourish, then if I become depressed and suicidal, does my worth decrease? I assume Tom would answer no, but on what basis? This puzzles me.

My third and fourth questions from this passage requires me to quote part of it again:

There’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Abstractness
I frankly don’t know how to apply morality to a class. This is an abstraction beyond practical application. I can treat a person morally or immorally, and I can treat members of a class morally or immorally, but I can only do so by the way I treat them as individual persons. Maybe my decisions on how to treat them are based on the class to which they belong (in reality or in my perception). But even in that case it is not the class I’m treating well or ill, it is the person. Even if another member of that class feels well-treated or put off because I made my decision on the basis of class membership, that is a person, not a class, that is being affected by my action.

This point matters in this discussion because Tom Clark seems to think equality of worth comes from each class having equal desires for life, self-actualization, and flourishing. Statistical leveling of large groups tends to make this the case, but morality is not about statistically-defined groups, but about persons. I would like to know if he can take this to the level of individuals.

What is a Class?
Further, even if treating the matter according to classes could be defended as legitimate, I wonder if there’s some smuggled-in set of assumptions about what constitutes a class. I think there may be a class of suicidal persons who do not have the same desire for flourishing as others have. Does being a member of that class make one’s worth less than others? Or, there may be a class of suicidal persons and their spouses. Why can we not define a class in that way? This class’s overall desire for self-actualization and self-preservation is, on average, less than the rest of the population. Does that mean that even the non-suicidal spouse, as a member of that class, has a lower worth than someone who is not associated with a suicidal person?

In other words, if there is a coherent basis for regarding each person as equal in Tom Clark’s ethic, I have yet to understand it.

has to do with a to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

Compellingness
I suppose I made up that word “compellingness.” It has to do with answering to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

But as Tom Clark has astutely pointed out, these norms are not all universally shared. The naturalist has two options to revert to at that point: persuasion and power. He states it clearly enough here:

Because there’s no value-neutral criterion (such as God’s authority) by which to decide between competing moral principles, arguments for them necessarily involve appeals to pre-existing values. So, progressive naturalists appeal to the innate moral sense… and they cite the virtues of existing cultural traditions and political arrangements based in progressive values…. However, given sharp differences in cultures and worldviews, there is no guarantee such arguments will cut any ice with the opposition, and sometimes we are forced to use force in defending our principles. This point gets elaborated here.

In the ellipsis I left out part of the way in which he would attempt to persuade those who disagree, but the point is that there is either persuasion or force. What bothers one like me most about this is that quite clearly, morality is a matter of who wins. I don’t see a universal law in naturalism that decrees liberal equality will be the winner. In fact, I suspect there may even be some chronological/cultural chauvinism involved in supposing that our culture, alone among all cultures and all periods of history, has figured it out in a way that will last. The door is wide open for a different winner, one that Tom Clark will argue (unless he changes his mind) fails to meet the standards of empiricism. The new winner may well say, “we see it differently,” and that will be that. The word “compellingness” comes back, with a decidedly less friendly feel to it than in the first way I employed it here; and who knows where “oughtness” goes?

Christian theism’s ethic is based on a much firmer foundation. Standards of morality are part of the furniture of reality, as it were, which is why we have a basic apprehension of them in our consciences. Their oughtness is inherent within them, and not derived from some other non-moral principle. Their compellingness is fitting to them, inherent and appropriate to their own basic nature, and our experience of their compellingness may be internalized or external. Either way, it fits.

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After a two-month hiatus, it’s my pleasure once again to take up conversation with Tom Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism, who also runs the website Naturalism.org and the Memeing Naturalism blog. Our first three rounds on this were interesting and productive, in my opinion, and apparently also Tom’s.

Previously we discussed whether his approach to epistemology was adequate and supportable, which I do not intend to raise for discussion again here; I think we’ve covered that, even though we did not come to agreement. The great remaining question has to do with his position on the ethics of naturalism. I will illustrate his position with a series of quotes from his paper Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First.

This statement of the obvious – that respect for empiricism matters, crucially – simply sets the stage for 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.

But the empirical imperative is not only rational, it becomes a positive ethical obligation when we engage in collective projects that affect the lives of millions.

A little epistemic humility would go a long way toward reducing the ideological tribalism underlying the culture wars.

So we see that Clark values, and seeks to be guided by, responsibility and humility, and he acknowledges that there are ethical obligations upon humans. On these things we are quite in agreement. He shares more detailed ethical views in passages like this one:

Religiously motivated opponents of birth control, abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage have sought to disseminate information at odds with science: about the supposed inefficacy of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, the purportedly dire psychological impact of having an abortion or growing up with two mommies or daddies, and the supposedly superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells.

(I note in passing that the “superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells” is, at least at this stage of research, quite empirically factual. But that is not my main point here.)

Now, all of this is in context of an impassioned call for empiricism, Clark’s position that nothing is known unless it is knowable through science or means very much like science, i.e., intersubjective empiricism. In a spirit of epistemic humility, no belief or opinion should be regarded as knowledge unless the object of that belief is a public object, capable of being examined by anyone (theoretically at least), and on which other persons generally find agreement.

Clearly, though, he takes ethical obligations to be an object of knowledge. How can he do this on his empiricist epistemology? One potential difficulty with his position comes to mind but must be discarded immediately. By public object, we can be sure Clark does not necessarily mean a physical object; I’m sure he also includes abstract objects like, say, the triangle formed by our sun, Betelgeuse, and Sirius; or numbers; or logical relations. So even though ethical obligations are not touchable, countable, or measurable, that in itself does not automatically rule them out under his epistemology, provided they can be tested by some appropriately empirical means.

Clark suggests that this is possible. He says that “empiricism and equality go hand in hand,” producing a basis for ethics that stands, by the way, in sharp contrast to religiously based ethics:

The primary justifications for discrimination against women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, atheists, homosexuals, and other out-groups are found in traditional faith-based religions such as Christianity and Islam, and in non-empirical secular ideologies such as Nazism, social Darwinism and white supremacy. There are no good science-based reasons for such discrimination, so to the extent that we can divest people of their factually unfounded prejudices we’ll move toward a more tolerant, pluralist, egalitarian culture of universal human rights.

In an earlier paper of his he expresses this view in further detail:

By contrast, there is no science-based, empirically derived justification for supposing any class of individuals merits fewer opportunities for self-development, or for limiting their rights to education, political participation, owning property, or any other right commonly held by individuals in liberal secular societies. Such limitations and discriminations can only find justification in non-empirical beliefs about the privileges owed those ranked higher in a social hierarchy, or belonging to certain in-groups, whether based on gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religious identification, or other denomination. The history of progress in human rights (progress as progressives see it) is the dismantling of such justifications, of showing them to have no basis in empirical fact.

Whatever biological and cultural differences exist between genders, races, ethnicities, religious groups and nationalities, there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or low status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met, or not to develop their full potential by according them the same rights as others. As scientific empiricism has won allegiance as our guide to reality, displacing faith and other non-empirical grounds for belief, the discriminatory social practices built on such beliefs have been deprived of their rationales, making the presumption of equal rights more and more the norm.

In summary, then, Clark holds to an ethic including responsibility, humility, and human equality (a generally liberal approach to this, as stated elsewhere in that paper); and he considers that there are obligations attached to all of these. He maintains that there is an empirical basis to his ethic.

Two questions come to mind in response. First, is there any place where he proposes to bridge the is-ought gap? This is the famous issue posed by David Hume and described as the naturalistic fallacy: that one cannot derive an ought from an is. Christian theism has no problem with this, for the ought is as much an aspect of the character of God, and thus the foundation of reality, as any other aspect of his character. The oughts of human ethics do not start from an is, they derive from the original oughts of basic reality in God.

Second, is there really an empirical basis for any of his ethics at all? What is the empirical basis for supposing we have an ethical obligation to empiricism? Is that not somewhat circular? In his paper he poses this ethical obligation as being demonstrated in its results; that it leads to more equal treatment for humans, more respect for public health and the environment, and so on. These imply values attached to the environment and to human equality. Do these values flow from empirically-based knowledge?

To the second of those, human equality, he proposes an answer. He says there is “no empirically derived justification for supposing any class individuals merits fewer opportunities…. there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or law status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met.” But what is the empirical study that supports this? Is it not empirically obvious that persons are not equal? As individuals, some of us are more intelligent, some less; some more emotionally intelligent, some less; some more athletic, some less; some more productive in giving to society, some less, some even taking more than they give. Now, it’s true that science has shown that, taken as groups, we are all very much the same (some highly controversial studies even differ on that). But individuals are not at all the same.

People as individuals differ, groups are similar, at least on a biological level. What ethical imperative flows from that? About a hundred years ago, it was forced sterilization and other eugenics programs. Now, Clark says that the ruling value is that people should be allowed to “develop their full potential.” This sounds suspiciously like Maslow, whose “Hierarchy of Needs” has, unfortunately for Maslow and possibly also for Clark, not been supported by empirical research. Regardless of that, what empirical study showed that individuals developing their full potential is more important than the improvement of the race? Now, I certainly do believe that individual growth is a better ethical idea than eugenic manipulation, but I didn’t get gather that opinion from an empirical study, and I don’t think Tom Clark could have, either.

Further, suppose people were much markedly similar to each other than they are in fact. How would that fact make equal treatment an ethical imperative? It seems that “equal treatment” was picked out of the empirical air.

But in fact it wasn’t. It comes from historical roots, for example, “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator…” And those historical roots have roots themselves. The principle of equality was never one of empirical observation, but of theological reflection. The only relevant sense in which humans are equal is in worth, but worth is not an empirical concept at all. How is it measured? How could it be? No, equality is a matter of our standing before God. As a matter of historical fact, this conception of human equality arose out of Christian roots. Agreed, it took time to flourish, but it’s no accident that is has never flourished anywhere but in lands informed by Biblical beliefs.

Now, this post is running long, and it was not my primary purpose to establish the validity of Christian ethics or to defend their historical expression. (Timothy Keller does a great job of this in this talk: mp3 download.) Rather, my main purpose has been to explore two of Tom Clark’s central beliefs: that the only reliable route to knowledge is the empirical one, and that there are ethical obligations binding upon us, including the obligation to be empiricists. I think he can maintain those two beliefs as long as he does not try to impose the first one on the second one. If he does, he will find that on his terms of knowledge, his knowledge of ethics has no standing.

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Michael Shermer on why science and religion can never unite:

I don’t think a union between science and religion is possible for a logical reason, but by this same logic I conclude that science cannot contradict religion. Here’s why: A is A. Reality is real. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is a violation of A is A. It is an attempt to make reality unreal. A cannot also be non-A. Nature cannot also be non-Nature. Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism.

[Link: Edge.org]

This is part of an ongoing discussion on science and faith at Edge.org, to which I have also contributed on the side here. There are several things in his short piece that puzzle me.

The Un-Argument from Unreality
First, we have the editor of The Skeptic telling us that

1. A is A
2. Reality is Real
3. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is … an attempt to make reality unreal.

This is a fiat statement asserting that either the supernatural or the natural is unreal. It’s obvious which one it is in his mind. I’m rather puzzled why he threw in this language of reality/unreality, with no argument or support whatever for it. Given The Edge’s audience, he might not have felt it necessary to argue that the supernatural is unreal, for most readers would already share that opinion. Perhaps space was limited so he couldn’t develop his train of thought on this. That’s the charitable interpretation; another way to look at would be that he forgot to make his argument on the matter, or that he assumed his conclusion; neither of which is a helpful way to demonstrate one’s point.

The Argument From Naturalism: Philosophical Naturalism?
Aside from that, I’m also puzzled by where he goes from there, in what unquestionably is intended to function as an argument. “Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism,” he says. Of course he’s right, if he means that philosophical (or ontological) naturalism cannot be supernaturalism. They are contrary to one another; it’s completely impossible for both of them to be true descriptions of reality. But how does that have anything to do with the questions at hand?

There actually seem to be two questions. One is, can science contradict religion? To say that philosophical naturalism contradicts supernaturalism does not answer the question, obviously; it’s a merely definitional statement. Shermer moves rather toward the second question, which is epistemological, or one might say methodological in nature: does science deliver knowledge to show that God does not exist? But philosophical naturalism is a metaphysical position, not a methodology. Shermer speaks of the “attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural,” but an ontological position is not something one employs in the pursuit of knowledge. It’s not an epistemological strategy. It is especially not something one would think of as a strategy for proving its own opposite. For if by naturalism he means philosophical naturalism, then the middle sentence from the above excerpt is equivalent to:

To attempt to use my firm conviction that the supernatural does not exist, to prove that the supernatural does exist, is a violation of A is A.

That violates a lot more than just “A is A”!

The Argument From Naturalism: Methodological Naturalism?
So then, I wonder if he meant instead to say that methodological naturalism cannot be supernaturalism? But that would be committing a category error, for the former is an epistemological position, a way of approaching the practice of science for the advancement of knowledge; while the latter is an ontological matter. It would be like saying that doing research in a library is not the same thing as believing that the world really exists. The statement is true enough, but it hardly advances the discussion.

What then did he mean to say? Let’s bring in the rest of his short article and see if it helps at all:

In a natural worldview, there is no non-natural or supernatural. There is only the natural and mysteries left to explain through natural means. Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. The only way to do this for theists is to posit that God is outside of time and space; that is, God is beyond nature—super nature, or supernatural—and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes. This places the God question outside the realm of science. Thus, there can be no conflict between science and religion, unless one attempts to bring God into our time and space, which is a violation of the principle of A is A.

The phrase “In a natural worldview…” and that which follows, suggest that he is speaking of philosophical naturalism. It does nothing whatever to solve the difficulty I’ve already described with taking that view of naturalism. His repeating his non-argument about making reality unreal also accomplishes nothing more here than it did in the prior paragraph. So in the first few sentences, no progress is made.

The Argument From Relying On the Opposite of One’s Conclusion?
And then he presents another puzzler: what does he mean by “the only way for theists to do this is to posit that God is outside of time and space”? What does the pronoun “this” refer to? Grammatically, the best I can make of it is with this substitution for the pronoun: “The only way to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism, is for theists to posit that God is outside of time and space.” Why, though, would theists have any interest in turning naturalism into supernaturalism? We’ve already seen the problems with the way Shermer has presented this. It’s hopelessly muddled. Furthermore (if I’ve read the mysterious pronoun usage right), then he’s saying the only way theists can only prove the supernatural exists is by first making sure it doesn’t. If overthrowing theism were that simple, it would have happened long before Christ walked the earth! But of course that approach is all wrong, as we’ve already covered.

Or, The Argument From Being My Trombone So I Can Play It?
Maybe, though, the antecedent of that mysterious pronoun “this” came from earlier in the preceding sentence. Then it would read, “The only way to have both religion and science is for theists to posit that God is outside of time and space.” Now that, of course, is exactly what theists do posit. Apparently Shermer thinks there’s a problem with that: he says that if “one attempts to bring God into our time and space, [that] is a violation of the principle of A is A.” Here he touches tangentially on a true statement: God is not his creation; God (A) is God (A); he is not his creation (not-A).

Of course theists do not think that God is his creation. Pantheists may think so, but theists disagree with pantheists. We believe that God influences or actually rules over time, space, and events therein, which has nothing to do with his being time or space. I can play my trombone without being my trombone. There is no violation of the law of identity here, nor of the law of non-contradiction.

The Final Puzzle
None of this is very hard to see. So I close with a fourth puzzler, this one in two parts: What am I missing here? Or was this really the best Shermer had to offer?

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This came to me by email this morning, and there are good questions here. The sender agreed that it would be good to answer here on the blog. I’ve changed her name here, as we also agreed.

Hi, I’m a Christian, but I’m having some problems. I was thinking that maybe some naturalists believe what they believe because naturally the universe just has to “be”, I guess, in the way that a circle and a square can’t be the same thing at the same time. And you can’t really create the fact that a circle and square can’t be the same thing because it just has to be so, which is the height of logic, isn’t it?

Also, I think, like Tom Clark said, a supernatural God, upon further investigation, wouldn’t actually be supernatural because that really wouldn’t be possible, again, in the same way that a square and circle can’t be at the same time. There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen. It seems like this would sort of answer the reason why for everything, maybe, in the way that, if there is anything at all than there simply can’t not be anything. So, because it just has to be, that’s why it is, like it’s impossible for it not to be.

Do you understand what I mean? Also, it wouldn’t matter if you had evidence for evolution or not because this fact would have to be so, anyway. I’ve been obsessing almost every waking moment over the past few days about science and psychology and I’m not sure I can really think of a way out of this argument. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Heather.

Does the Universe Exist Necessarily?
There’s more than one question there, obviously. We’ll start by considering whether it’s possible that the universe exists just because it’s one of those things that had to be. Is the universe something that exists necessarily? Actually Heather wrote a significant piece of the answer to this herself, in the second paragraph of her email. She may not have intended it to be used in this connection, but it’s an insight that’s important for this issue:

There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen.

That’s exactly right. I would word it this way: everything that begins to exist must have a cause, or every event must have a cause. God is not an event, and his existence does not have a beginning, so his existence does not require a cause; he is eternal.

There was a time when scientists and other thinkers thought the universe might be eternal and beginningless. That was before Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding outward at great speed. Astronomers modeled what this must have meant going backward in time. It led to the rather surprising conclusion that billions of years ago, the entire universe must have been compressed into an almost infinitely small volume. That in turn implied that the universe began in a huge explosion, which astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called a “Big Bang.” As you know, the name stuck.

This was rather upsetting to some scientists: they knew all too well what it implied, which I’ll come back to in a moment. There was hot debate over the Big Bang vs. Steady State theories until a couple of scientists at Bell Labs noticed a “cosmic microwave background radiation”—you could think of it as a small degree of heat—distributed everywhere throughout the cosmos. It was exactly what had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. That and some further research confirmed the Big Bang theory.

This means the universe began to exist. And remember, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe could not have caused itself. You can’t even coherently describe what it would mean for something to cause its own beginning. It would have to exist before it existed if it were to do that! Since then the question has been what or who caused the Big Bang.

Is it possible, then, for the universe not to be? Certainly. Go back 15 billion or so years, and there was no universe. The universe’s non-existence is surely possible, since it did not exist more than about 15 billion years ago.*

Is God Part of Nature?
It will come as no surprise that I think the cause of the universe was God. I had been convinced on other grounds that God was the Creator, long before I became aware of things like I just discussed. But the Big Bang suggests a very powerful and personal God as the “beginner” (the one who begins) the universe. Whatever caused the Big Bang had to be immensely powerful, since the effect of his or its work was to create all the hundred billion galaxies that exist. The cause also had to be personal, though. If it were something impersonal, with no ability to choose, and yet it had the ability to cause the Big Bang, it would not have been able to choose to exercise that ability, or choose not to exercise it, or choose when to exercise it. This impersonal cause could not have existed without immediately causing the Big Bang, for where there is a cause capable of producing an effect, the effect necessarily happens immediately (taking all factors into account, obviously). The cause of the universe and the universe itself would be the same age, about 15 billion years old. This seems strange and highly unlikely; and it leads to further questions about what caused the cause.

This impersonal cause almost sounds like the picture of God Heather is wrestling with in the second paragraph, actually. It’s a being that’s part of the machine. A personal God who created the universe, not as part of himself but as a separate thing from himself, is not part of the machine.

But then how does God insert himself into the actions of the machine? He does it by his own spiritual power, which he first exercised through creation and continues to employ up until now.

Is That Really An Answer?
Is that a satisfactory answer? Not to some people: they want that “how” answer to be a lot more descriptive than that. Here’s the problem, though. When God works in nature, it involves an interface between his spiritual essence and the natural world we live in, which are two entirely different things. Part of the transaction has to take place on the spiritual side of that interface. People who press for a more descriptive “how” are asking for something that looks like a natural description, but if we gave a natural description, then we wouldn’t be talking about God, we would be changing the subject. The one who asks “how could God do this?” must expect and allow that the answer not be entirely in the form of a physical description. This is as logically necessary as that a square cannot be a circle.

To say otherwise would be analogous to asking how a magnet attracts iron, and adding “but you cannot answer in terms of the properties of a magnet.” If we want to know how God does something, part of the answer has to be given in terms of who and what God is. Thus it is simply wrong to expect the explanation to work entirely as we’re accustomed to scientific explanations working.

The next objection I’ve heard, following this, has often been, “But then you have no explanation!” To which I say, “God is the explanation! Do you insist that explanations involving God be just like physical explanations? Then you’re demanding that the way God the creator works must be just like the way his creation works. It’s saying that you’ll consider God as an explanation, as long as this God isn’t God. That doesn’t quite seem logical, does it?“

God is not one of us. To accept that is to be appropriately humble before him.

The Evolution Question
Your third question, Heather, was whether evolution itself might have been a necessity. I don’t think there’s anyone, even among highly committed evolutionists, who would say that the origin of life was inevitable in a universe that’s only natural. It happened (they say), and we’re, shall we say, the lucky beneficiaries, but it didn’t have to happen that way. If the origin wasn’t inevitable or necessary, then the whole rest of it could not have been either.

For this (and also to some extent for the first question) I would refer you here to read about the incredible odds against our universe being suitable for any complexity at all, much less the complexity of life.

The Other Big Question
You also asked, “Do you understand what I mean?” I hope I do. It’s always possible that I missed it completely, and that none of this is much help for what’s really on your mind. If so, please let me know and I’ll take another shot at it.

*Some think there might have been a different universe before the Big Bang. Rather than taking space to address that here I will refer you to these articles by William Lane Craig, especially The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe.

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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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