Thinking Christian

Dallas Willard, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, asks this question in his excellent book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God:

How does a life in which one speaks the creative word of God differ from a life of voodoo, magic, and superstition?

Here is part of his answer (the section begins on page 137):

The word magic in this context refers to … the attempt to influence the actual course of events, as distinct from their appearance, by manipulation of symbolisms or special substances such as effigies and incantations….

Magic and witchcraft … are forms of superstition. They work from belief that some action, substance or circumstance not logically or naturally (or even supernaturally) related to a certain course of events does nonetheless influence the outcome of those events if “correctly” approached. Prayer and speaking with God must be carefully distinguished from superstition.

The word superstition is derived from words that mean “to stand over,” as one might stand in wonder or amazement over something incomprehensible…. Martin Buber rightly says that “magic desires to obtain its effects without entering into relation, and practices its tricks in the void,” the void of ignorance and selfish obsession.

Superstition, then, is belief in magic; and magic relies on alleged causal influences that are not actually mediated through the natures of the things involved. Suppose, for example, someone ways they can throw you into great pain or even kill you by mutilating a doll-like effigy of you…. It is superstition or magic, for there is no real connection between someone’s sticking a pin in a doll and your feeling pain….

In our faith we do not believe that the power concerned resides in the words used or in the rituals taken by themselves. If we did, we would indeed be engaged in superstitious practices. Instead we regard the words and actions simply as ways ordained in the nature of things as established by God for accomplishing the matter in question. They work as part of life in the kingdom of God. They enlist the personal agencies of that kingdom to achieve the ends at their disposal and are not mere tools by which we engineer our desired result. We are under authority, not in control….

It is the very nature of the material universe to be subject generally to the word of an all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing divine mind.

Three times in this excerpt Willard refers to the natures of things:

• Magic is not real because its “alleged causal influences are not actually mediated through the natures of the things involved.”
• Christian prayer (or speaking with spiritual authority, the real subject of this chapter) has its effect by working in concert with “ways ordained in the nature of things as established by God.”
• “It is the very nature of the material universe to be subject generally to the word of an all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing divine mind.

Although one specific recent controversy over the term “magic” has been resolved, this passage from Willard helpfully speaks to a larger question regarding the supernatural. Atheists generally consider belief in the supernatural to be not just wrong; to them it is mindlessness or idiocy. In one of the ellipses (omitted passages) of the above passage, Willard tells how Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court was able to get the superstitious Old Englanders to believe he had magical powers, when he was in fact working by natural methods known to 19th century science. Christians, according to the naturalists (this was not Willard’s point) are gullible in the same way, imagining there is more to the universe than the natural course of events, and misattributing natural effects to unnatural causes.

The consistent, supernaturalist theistic position is that supernatural causes and events actually are natural, though not in the sense of being susceptible to study by science or occurring within some closed system of matter, energy, natural law, and chance. They are natural in the sense that they involve the universe and its parts acting according to their natures; where the nature of everything is to be “subject to the word of an all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing divine mind.”

Whether using the term “magic” or the more acceptable “supernatural,” naturalistically-inclined atheists typically consider it risible that Christians believe in a “fairy-tale” view of reality. But it’s far from clear to me what’s ridiculous or even odd about this, if we view the supernatural and the natural as intertwined, all of it together subject to the word of God. It fits logically; it works; it’s not incoherent. Of course it is a strange, unfamiliar viewpoint for the mind trained to see nature (matter, energy, law, and chance) as a closed system. But what if it’s that training that’s confused? Is that not at least logically possible? If so, then it’s also logically possible that to mock supernaturalism might be to display one’s own confusion regarding the true nature of reality. And it might also be that this very confusion is what causes some to miss what’s really there.

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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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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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