Thinking Christian

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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Alvin Plantinga, the prominent Notre Dame University philosopher, says that if you’re a believer in evolution, you have no warrant for believing in naturalism (atheism, roughly speaking). Here’s part of his argument, to whet your interest:

Now what evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behavior, (perhaps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that issues in survival and reproduction.

Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn’t, as such, care a fig about true belief.

[Link: Evolution vs. Naturalism - Books & Culture]

Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.

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A few days ago Tony Hoffman suggested,

Expelled’s charge and the constant revival of this aspersion on this website — that Darwin leads to Hitler — seems fundamentally wrongheaded….

Tom, you keep saying that although you concede that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler there is in fact a historical one. While I agree with you, I have no idea what your point is in raising it….

It’s a good question. Besides having had about half a dozen deadlines land on me since then, I’ve had to take time to give it some serious thought. Now that I have some time again, what, indeed, is the point of all this?

I hope Tony recognizes I didn’t start this discussion. It was brought up by a movie that’s proving to be fairly popular, as documentaries go. There were some who objected that the Darwin-Hitler link was an ID proponents’ fabrication. I’ve weighed in to respond to that, but I didn’t start it.

Also, if one reviews what I’ve actually posted on this topic, I think “constant revival of this aspersion” is overstated. I wrote one post calling for understanding on why this is such a sensitive issue. I hope an approach of that sort isn’t considered off limits. Other than that, I’ve posted just one link to an article on another website, and two other sentences. Of course there has also been discussion, fueled by participants on all sides of the issue.

But whether or not I’m not to blame as Tony apparently thinks I am, that doesn’t address his real question: why would anybody expend any effort on this at all? Isn’t it all a complete red herring, a distraction from genuine issues? I don’t think so.

First, we ought to learn from history. That ought to be relatively uncontroversial. If the German scientists made a mistake interpreting Darwin, then for heaven’s sake, let’s not forget what they did, and make the same kinds of mistakes all over again! I see potential for it even in our enlightened 21st century. Haeckel’s biggest error was dehumanizing some races of humanity. Peter Singer and PETA are doing the same for the whole human race. For Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” For Singer, we are guilty of “speciesism” if we hold humans to be of more value than animals. This is Haeckel’s error writ large.

Second, it’s not quite true that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler. There are two at least two valid connections between them.

A. There is an ethical consequence to Darwinism. It is not, as was supposed at the time, that it leads to a moral requirement that we “advance the species.” The connection is this: naturalistic Darwinism, if taken to be the sole explanation for all of life,* erases all ethical requirements. It is specifically the naturalism–closely related to atheism–that is the serious problem in all non-theistic versions of evolution (which I think answers Point 1 in Tony’s comment).

I’ve never seen a good refutation or even rebuttal for this. Paul stated the issue quite well two and a half years ago, long before the current debate began:

Just to be clear, I think the Holocaust was wrong. From my culture’s morality, from many cultures’ morality, but not from Hitler’s. I would fight against it no less.

That’s a hole big enough to drive a Panzer division through. Paul would “fight against it,” and for that I commend him; yet for him, that’s all he has. The only ultimate moral decider is power:

A relativistic moral law is made when a group of people (family, tribe, culture, country, etc.) decide to do so. There is no absolute or objective foundation for doing so: as I’ve said before, it is merely a question of power what laws are made…. When differing moral cultures clash, it’s up to power to decide the difference. Doesn’t look pretty, but that’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God.

Fighting is all anyone can do. There’s no recourse to any higher ethic. If Hitler had won, his power would have decided the difference between the differing moral cultures. Now, lest anyone think I’m picking on Paul, I think he’s right, based on his assumptions. I think he gets it. “That’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God,” says Paul, quite rightly; and that’s an assumption that squares up quite nicely with naturalistic, unguided evolution.

B. There is an ontological implication in Darwinism: humans are the same kind of thing as animals. Hitler applied this selectively, to be sure, but he applied it with great effect. He packed up hordes of people on trains like cattle, took them to the slaughtering plant, and used their parts as raw materials for industry. Yes–they wove gunny sacks out of Jewish hair. You can see unused remains of it still warehoused at Dachau. This, I believe, is why we abhor Hitler so much more than other great murderers like Stalin or Mao: they all killed; but only Hitler so thoroughly dehumanized. Darwinism dehumanizes in a different way. Hitler treated humans like animals; Darwinism says that’s what we are.

Third, ideas matter. I suppose we could trace all kinds of historical linkages to the Holocaust. In fact, I’ve actually heard people say this, even taking it to ridiculous extremes: “if you’re going to say Darwin was responsible, then so were the people who invented shower heads. It couldn’t have happened without them, either!” The difference is in ideas and their consequences. Darwinism–the naturalistic version–is not ethically neutral. It is not lacking in ethical implications. True, it doesn’t prescribe an ethic–it just applies a kind of metaphorical poison gas to any overarching, culture-transcending ethic a nation might turn to, in deciding whether to stand with or against a would-be tyrant like Hitler.

Fourth, contrary to Tony’s point 2, influencers certainly can be blamed for the actions of others that follow. They can be blamed to the extent that others did harm while following them:

• Doing actions the influencers recommended, taught, or prescribed, or
• Doing actions for which the influencers opened an ideological or ethical door, which would not otherwise have been opened.

Darwin was responsible in the second sense. This is the sense in which Berlinski (in Expelled), and Weikart (in his book on this topic) said, “Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for Hitler’s atrocities, but it was a necessary condition.” Without Darwinism, I believe, Germany would have resisted Hitler. It was not the only necessary link leading up to Nazism, but it was one of them.

*This is the sense in which I am speaking of “Darwinism” throughout this article: naturalistic evolution by means of random variation and natural selection, unguided by any intelligence. I recognize there are other versions of evolutionary theory.

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“Pantalaimon,” a commenter on Thinking Christian, supplied a number of quotes yesterday to show that (in his words)

ID is not a scientific research program in any sense, and never has been. Scientific understanding is of no intrinsic interest to ID. Any “research” they may undertake is strictly subservient to the philosophical goal of crushing naturalistic science for religious and philosophical purposes.

Strong generalities like that are risky; nobody is one-dimensional, and in fact Pantalaimon’s quotes were a great example of quote-mining out of context. When I pointed that out to him, he graciously offered me the opportunity to track down the source of the quotes myself and put them in correct context. I have declined his generous suggestion. Instead I’m going to try to put the issue in its proper full perspective, based on my entire experience with Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design is entirely a ploy, manipulating science in order to win religious/political battles. That’s the charge. This statement touches, albeit lightly, on something like the truth of the matter. Many leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are Christian believers, and one (Jonathan Wells) represents the Unification Church. (Unification Church theology as I understand it has little in common with Christianity, other than a belief in some spiritual reality.) These ID leaders recognize strong opposition between a certain dominant form of evolutionary theory–naturalistic neo-Darwinism–and their religious beliefs. Not surprisingly, they consider their religious beliefs not only true but also important. Thus there is a conflict.

I don’t know anybody who has ever handled a major conflict perfectly. I do not need to be convinced that everything ID leaders have done was done just right. The infamous “Wedge Document” was a strategic mistake, in that opened a wide and inviting door for interpretations of evil scheming. The Discovery Institute has worked hard to correct misinterpretations related to the Wedge, not entirely successfully. I think it’s fair to acknowledge errors, to learn from them, and move on wiser than before.

Phillip Johnson is regarded to be the father of the ID movement. At the core of his message is a direct, unflinching, head-on assault against philosophical naturalism, a form of atheism. From his first foray into this field, Darwin on Trial, Johnson has highlighted the close association between Darwinism and philosophical naturalism. His disagreement with Darwinism has been based in part on its assumptions that nothing could have happened, and nothing ought to be explained, by any means other than strict natural cause and effect.

Johnson has been accused of falsely assuming all evolutionists are Richard Dawkins; that is, that evolution is equivalent to atheism. I don’t know that he has actually always made that error. Nevertheless there is a strong association between evolution and atheism in this sense: evolution may not entail atheism, but atheism certainly entails evolution. Without evolutionary theory, atheism has no explanation for nature whatsoever.

Confronting philosophical naturalism has been one aspect of Johnson’s approach to the issue from the beginning. Further, he took a very long and careful look at the scientific literature, and came to the conclusion that evolutionary theory is not well supported by the evidence. Though he is a lawyer, let that not blind you to the fact that he was approaching the question from the basis of science and the available evidence. He concluded that evolution’s explanatory strength depends critically on the assumption that all explanations must be in terms of natural causes and effects and nothing else. This, he rightly noted, is a philosophical assumption that is open to question, which puts evolution itself open to question.

So in Johnson, back at the start of it all, there were three intersecting streams: religious, scientific, and philosophical. He was not an expert in all three (with apologies to all of you out there who are). He proceeded to gather conferences and symposia of scientists and philosophers to explore the question further. Out of this the Intelligent Design movement was born.

The three intersecting streams still pervade the question, but not monolithically so. When David Berlinski’s new book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions comes out, don’t expect a shrill screed for some kind of fundamentalist American Christianity. He is a secular Jew living in Paris. Whether or not Michael Denton wants to be associated with ID now, the fact is his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis critiqued evolution strictly on scientific grounds, and set a course that is still being traveled.

Anti-theists also follow the same three threads. Daniel Dennett employs philosophy and evolution in service of dissolving what he calls religion’s “spell” of misunderstanding. Richard Dawkins uses science, and something reminiscent of philosophy (I can’t call it better than that), to call God a delusion. They both have a strong interest in defeating religion, but that hardly means they are uninterested in science–though it would be easy to quote-mine them and make it appear that way.

By the same token, if ID leaders have an interest in philosophy and/or religion, as represented in the quotes Pantalaimon pulled, that hardly means they are uninterested in science. The relation between science and design is controversial; commenter Holopupenko is convinced design cannot be detected through the sciences and that ID scientists are philosophically naive; meanwhile ID-supportive philosophers like Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, J. P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and my friend Rob Koons are confident it potentially can be. On that basis, the scientists in the ID movement proceed with their research.

Let’s grant the obvious, looming in the background, which is that ID’s record of published science is hardly stellar. That in itself does not show there is no interest in science, which was the charge Pantalaimon made. The activities of Minnich, Behe, Marks, Dembski, Seelke, Gonzalez, and many others put the lie to that. Their low published output could be attributed to the difficulty of defining relevant research problems, the fiery-hot hostility toward ID among other scientists and journal editors, the relative youth of the field, or many other explanations. Many observers think they know another reason, which is that ID cannot actually produce science. My somewhat educated word of caution is not to rush to judgment on this. Whatever science ID could produce, conditions are so set against it being published that it’s worth giving it considerably more time.

There is a fourth stream that has been sometimes bundled in with ID, the political, especially in regard to public education in America. Where schools have been pressured to teach a positive theory of Intelligent Design, that has been nothing but a mistake. On the other hand, schools’ resistance to bringing up evolution’s evidential difficulties seems puzzling to me, except as just another facet of academics’ ID-phobia. In hindsight, though, I believe it would have been preferable to leave even that question off the political table, innocuous though it should have been. ID miscalculated the opposition and ended up stirring up even more antipathy without much advancing its primary agenda, which is research. Now it has become difficult to pull out of the PR battles and get focused. Nobody gets everything right.

So to Pantalaimon, in summary, I see your own deep animosity toward ID seriously distorting your view of the matter. ID is not uni-dimensional. (Not even Richard Dawkins is uni-dimensional!) Intelligent Design cannot be defined by mined quotes. It has to bear responsibility for its missteps, but so do we all. It wasn’t very long ago that evolutionists confidently spoke of the useless, vestigial appendix and junk DNA as evidence for their theory, after all.

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