A Few Thoughts Concerning Naturalism: Five Sketches

A Partial Response to Burk Braun

While I am almost done with the next post in my series on biblical inerrancy, I spent the last hour writing up my thoughts on another issue, which I share here. Recently, I have pursued an exchange with Burk Braun concerning naturalism. In response to my partial defense of Goetz and Taliaferro’s NATURALISM , Burk offered a lengthy post of his own.

One of the points he makes—accusing G&T of making use of rather impenetrable technical philosophical language and ideas—I will not contest. What I will say is that their book reads as if it were aimed at an audience of fellow philosophers for the purpose of trying to dislodge the naturalistic presuppositions that prevail in so much of the philosophical community today, or at least to spark a discussion with naturalistic philosophers. Prior to the recent atheist literary wave, I suspect G&T would have been right to assume that virtually no one but philosophers would read their book.

The other dimensions of Burk’s post amount to a defense of naturalism, largely by appealing to the dangerous free-for-all that he thinks results if one has beliefs that aren’t subject to the testing ground of empirical evidence.

There is no way I can address the substance of his post adequately in a brief post of my own, and I don’t have time to address it fully at present in any event. But what I want to do here is enumerate and briefly sketch out some of the thoughts I would like to take up fully at some later point, perhaps on my own blog when I’m finished with my series critiquing biblical inerrancy (although I may, depending on the “personality” of the post, submit it to Religion Dispatches instead).

1. The terms “naturalism” and “supernaturalism” are probably not the most helpful, because they have become so loaded and are used in so many different ways. Stipulative definitions become necessary to avoid talking past one another. So let us contrast two theses. First, there is the thesis that once we have offered an exhaustive account of the content of empirical experience (an account that proceeds on the assumption that such experience is veridical), we have fully characterized reality. Second, there is the thesis which is the negation of this, and as such affirms the reality of the transcendent (“that which transcends what we encounter in empirical experience”). I call the former thesis “naturalism” and the latter “supernaturalism.” Empirical experience as such can speak to neither thesis.

2. It is simply not the case that belief formation relative to the transcendent is cut loose from anything to which it might be accountable (other than the laws of logical consistency—a qualification of Burk’s claim that I’m sure he’ll accede to). This would follow were empirical experience the only kind of human experience. But it is not. There is also moral experience, aesthetic experience, mystical religious/spiritual experience, and the immediate consciousness of oneself as a subject of experience and as an agent.

3. The most popular form of naturalism today extends a preferential bias to empirical experience. It begins with the assumption that only experience of this sort is veridical (that is, it assumes that only experience of this sort connects the subject to a reality “out there,” tracking it in such a way that one can learn about that reality through the kind of careful examination of the content of the experience that scientists engage in). It then constructs an account of reality on the basis of this kind of experience alone. And when other kinds of experience, were they to be treated as veridical, would require one to posit orders of reality transcending this “naturalistic” account, naturalism explains away these other experiences as epiphenomenal by-products of entities whose reality is endorsed by the naturalist metaphysics (e.g., the brain).

Hence, for example, my immediate sense of my daughter’s intrinsic value is not treated as an experience of something real “out there.” Since there is nothing in the naturalistic account of reality that corresponds to “intrinsic value,” the experience I am having is explained away as nothing but an inner psychological phenomenon, a product of brain activity whose neural subroutines probably evolved because of their role in promoting reproductive fitness.

All of this can be done, of course. But the adequacy of the resultant worldview is likely to be exaggerated if the focus of one’s attention is the world of empirical experience (for which it works very well, for obvious reasons). The inadequacies of the resultant worldview come into focus if and only if one ceases to prioritize empirical experience in an ad hoc way and focuses on other kinds of experience (moral experience, religious/spiritual experience, subjective experience of self as subject and agent), taking seriously the possibility that they might be veridical, too. Taking these other modes of experience seriously in this way does not require one not to take empirical experience seriously. But if one takes all modes of experience seriously without, ab initio, extending preferential favoritism to one of them, it will no longer be obvious that materialistic worldviews offer the best fit with our experience. The quick and unexamined line that Burk draws between “outer reality” and “psychological reality,” between what is going on out there in the world and what is only going on in our heads, is not nearly so easy to draw in an uncontestable and presuppositionless way.

4. Burk seems to have no clear understanding of the conceptual distinction between a belief about that which transcends the empirical world and a superstition, as is evidenced by his example of Peter Pan pushing around tectonic plates. I refer readers to chapter 4 of my book, including a careful reading of footnote #2, for a fuller discussion of this issue. In effect, beliefs of this sort reveal an unwillingness to allow empirical beliefs to be subject to the constraints of empirical observation. I share Burk's disapproval of that tendency. But this tells us little about whether there can be intellectual constraints on belief formation with respect to the transcendent.

5. It is simply not the case that contemporary science has left Aristotelian metaphysics or other older metaphysics in the figurative dust as useless relics of the past. The reductive materialist metaphysics that dominates in so much of the sciences faces, among other problems, a crucial difficulty when it comes to avoiding an infinite regress of reductionistic explanations—a difficulty that arises whenever it is presupposed that the properties of a thing are given by the spatio-temporal arrangement and interaction of its parts. A neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of natures can be helpful in ending the regress. In effect, unless there are entities (“the basic building blocks of the physical world”) that have the properties they have in themselves by virtue of what they are (in some non-reductionistic sense rather than as an emergent consequence of the interactions of their parts), the reductionistic method of explanation is not ever really explaining anything. It is simply shifting the need for explanation down one level, ad infinitum. For this reason, I think, quantum physicists tend to be neo-Aristotelian in their thinking about the most basic particles (even if they remain open to the question of whether the most basic particles have yet been discovered, and so continue to be methodologically reductionistic so as not to exclude this possibility).

This is not to say that such neo-Aristotelianism is without difficulty. There is no metaphysics yet devised that is free from legitimate controversy and serious conceptual difficulties. This includes the metaphysical theories favored by naturalists. What distinguishes naturalists of the reductive-materialist school is that they pretend they don’t have a contestable metaphysics. But they do. It is pragmatically impossible to function without one.

The contestable metaphysical view they adopt has been enormously useful for scientific advances in the last two hundred years—a fact which implies that we should not dismiss it when it encounters difficulties. Instead, we should supplement or modify it. I favor a method of synthesis that focuses on what alternative metaphysical approaches are good at doing and why, and then seeks richer and more encompassing metaphysical systems that can incorporate the useful elements of all.

Such a synthesis is going to be impossible if thinkers focus only on one kind of usefulness—usefulness in making reliable predictions in the domain of empirical experience, and creating tools for more effectively achieving our aims within the empirical world—and treating all other metaphysical systems as “completely vacuous” if they do not exhibit this kind of use. There are, after all, other kinds of usefulness: there is usefulness in terms of promoting joy, and usefulness in terms of promoting social harmony, and usefulness in terms of nurturing our capacity for moral goodness in the face of various contrary temptations and drives.

The project I am proposing here, which plays no favorites with respect to which of the different kinds of human experience are to be treated as presumptively veridical, and which plays no favorites with respect to the different ways in which ideas can be useful, is not a project that can be finished in anyone's lifetime. As such, we should all admit that we do not know the fundamental nature of reality. I am deeply bothered by naturalists who operate as if they do, just as I am by religious fundamentalists who operate as if they do.

But for practical purposes we need to make choices among worldviews. While the intellectual project I describe above is being pursued, how should we make such choices? Here, I don't think we will find an approach that necessitates a single choice. We will, instead, encounter parameters that demand logical consistency, conformity with the empirical experience available to us, and a responsiveness to our conscience, but which allow us to follow the deepest longings of our souls.