A new article of mine--"Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?"--has been published in Religion Dispatches.
One commenter ("ortcutt") makes explicit the distinction that is implicitly at work in the article, between moral psychology and meta-ethics. I eschewed this terminology in writing the piece, since I thought my points could be made without introducing those technical terms from my discipline. However, the distinction is helpful and important. Put briefly, meta-ethics pertains to the nature of moral claims and their truth-conditions (if indeed they have a truth value), while moral psychology pertains to our moral motivations and their origins.
In these terms, my article can be summarized as follows: Paul Bloom takes it that when Francis Collins appeals to morality in making his case for God's existence, Collins is invoking an argument premised on beliefs about moral psychology. It is this way of reading Collins that allows Bloom to treat Collins' argument as an intelligent design argument, one that can be refuted by his own research into moral psychology.
But it is more plausible to see Collins' argument as premised on meta-ethical views.
Showing posts with label Intelligent Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intelligent Design. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The Intelligent Design/Justin Bieber Connection
Okay, so this blog title is a bit misleading. My aim here, really, is to critically assess a proposal offered by Randal Rauser on his blog. Randal’s blog is one I like to check in on occasionally, since Randal is a philosophically-trained theologian who is consistently thoughtful, clear, and witty. While he self-identifies as an apologist in a way that I do not, his brand of apologetics is far more appealing to me than, say, William Lane Craig’s.
That’s not to say I always agree with him. About a month ago he put up a post, "In Search of an Arsonist," that I would likely have commented on—in critical terms—if I hadn’t been grieving my father’s death. The post had to do with the method by which we determine whether something is the product of intelligent design. Randal’s thesis is that we decide that something is the product of intelligent design by ruling out other causes until intelligent agency is all we’re left with.
Sometimes, of course, this is exactly how we proceed. Randal offers the example of forensic investigators who conclude that a fire was arson (and hence the result of intelligent agency) by ruling out other causes. But can we generalize from such cases? Is it always or even usually true that we infer intelligent agency by a kind of process of elimination? More significantly, can we or should we rely on such a process in the effort to infer an intelligent designer behind natural phenomena?
Before tackling these questions, I want to take a slight digression. Specifically, Randal’s arson investigation case is precisely the kind of case commonly invoked by members of the so-called “ID movement” to support their claim that what they are doing is science—that it is methodologically in line with established scientific procedures and so should qualify as science. Is this right?
I’m not sure Randal wants to draw this conclusion. After all, if intelligent agency is best inferred by ruling out other kinds of explanations, then the quest to decide whether phenomena in the natural world are the product of intelligent design might best be pursued by dedicating a discipline to the task of uncovering and testing these other kinds of explanations. In short, we might use Randal’s point as a basis for arguing that science should be “methodologically naturalistic” in something like the way that opponents of ID movement insist it should be.
But let’s set this concern aside for now. To determine whether the ID movement is pursuing an approach that qualifies as scientific, we need to know how ID theorists actually defend their views. As I understand it, the modern ID movement (as opposed to believers in design or defenders of philosophical arguments from design) grew out of "creation science," and it shares with its predecessor the political aim of getting the God hypothesis into the public school science classroom. But ID's approach is much more sophisticated than what one finds in creation science, setting aside pseudo-scientific arguments for the literal inerrancy of Genesis in favor of modern updates of William Paley’s version of the argument from design. Where the modern updates differ from Paley is not in the basic logical structure of the argument, but rather in their choice of examples of things-that-are-best-explained-by-positing-a-God.
Contemporary ID theorists typically rely on examples taken from two sources: molecular biology and physics. The first version of the modern argument, which might be called the Argument from Irreducible Complexity, relies primarily on the views of biologist Michael Behe. Put simply, the argument runs as follows: Certain complex biological systems on which organisms rely are said to possess the property of “irreducible complexity”—that is, they are such that, were they to be rendered any simpler by having any of their components removed, they would cease to function altogether and so would confer no adaptive advantage on organisms possessing them. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, it is argued, cannot account for the emergence of such irreducibly complex systems, since evolution explains complex systems in terms of incremental increases in complexity, where each such increase is preserved by the adaptive advantage it supposedly confers. Intelligent design, by contrast, can account for such systems. There is, supposedly, no credible third alternative. Therefore, these systems are best explained by positing an intelligent designer.
Second, we have what’s sometimes called the Fine-Tuning Argument. A set of physical constants are said to possess the property of being “fine-tuned” for the emergence of organized complexity (and hence life). No purely physical theory, it is argued, can adequately account for such fortuitous fine-tuning. Intelligent design can. There is no credible third alternative. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is best explained by positing an intelligent designer.
In each of these cases, what the ID movement offers is an argument, some of whose premises are susceptible to assessment in the light of established scientific methods. But notice what it doesn’t offer: a strategy for positively testing the “intelligent design hypothesis” itself. Instead, what we have is a disjunctive argument in which ID theory is endorsed based on a process of elimination—which is, of course, precisely the mechanism that Randal endorses as the proper one for inferring intelligent agency.
One question we can ask is whether reliance on such a disjunctive argument alone can ever justify one in saying that the conclusion reached was arrived at scientifically. Clearly, scientists can and do make use of this sort of disjunctive reasoning—ruling out known causes for a phenomenon as a way of concluding that some unknown cause is at work. But this is typically a kind of prelude to further scientific work, involving speculation about what the unknown causes might be, and then conducting experimental tests (in some sense repeatable) to determine whether one’s guesses have any merit.
But maybe invocations of intelligent design just can’t work like that, because intelligent design brings things about through agency, and agency is subject to will rather than uniform laws. The argument might go as follows: When a hypothesized cause is mechanistic (to use Hermann Lotze’s language), we can test it—by, paradigmatically, making predictions and seeking to falsify them. But freedom isn’t law-like and so doesn’t allow for that kind of testing. And intelligent design inevitably involves an exercise of freedom. Thus, intelligent design can’t be tested for scientifically, and so can only be rationally embraced in some other way. Perhaps this “other way” is the process-of-elimination approach Randal endorses: If nothing else can explain it, we are left with intelligent agency by default.
If so, we might well ask whether this process-of-elimination approach qualifies as science (i) always, (ii) sometimes (and if so, when and why?), or (iii) never. If it isn’t science, then this just goes to show that intellectual inquiry can and does proceed beyond the boundaries of scientific inquiry, invoking a palette of resources that are still available when science has hit the limits of what it can do with its methods. At stake here is not just the credibility of other methods of inquiry, but the political agenda of the ID movement. If this sort of thing isn’t science, then it shouldn’t be in a science classroom—although it arguably should be part of high school education even so, as part of the philosophy curriculum that high schools shamefully lack.
But the question of whether the process-of-elimination approach to inferring intelligent agency is science needs to be assessed in the light of a deeper question: Is it generally true that we can and do infer intelligent design by elimination of other causes?
I think that, in fact, the situation is much more complex. Consider again the case of the forensic scientists investigating a fire. In this case, we have a certain kind of event (a fire) about which we have considerable experience. On the basis of this experience we have derived a list of “known culprits”—that is, kinds of causes (lightning strike, untended campfire, discarded cigarette, deliberate arson, etc.) which are typically responsible for an event of this kind.
In a situation of this sort, we can systematically rule out the various kinds of causes until we are left with only one—and thus, by process of elimination, arrive at the conclusion that, most probably, the cause was of the remaining kind. I say “most probably” because, even though a rich body of experience tells us that events of this kind are ordinarily produced by causes within this list, there might be unusual kinds of causes that don’t appear on the list. The list is fairly exhaustive, but not completely so.
Some contexts aren’t like this, however. Suppose I’m a space explorer who has recently landed on Planet X. The terrain is uniformly flat in most places, but on my third day I come across a big mound of dirt. After investigating the mound, the ground beneath, and other bits of evidence, I’m able to ascertain that what I’m witnessing is the result of a kind of “dirt-geyser” phenomenon produced when trapped gas pushed up through a silt-filled fissure.
Now I come across another mound of dirt. Upon investigating, I conclude that it is not the effect of a dirt-geyser. But, being new to the planet, I have very little experience with such mounds, and hence very little experience with what might cause them. My list of “known culprits” has one member, and I’ve eliminated it. Presumably, in this case, we can’t reasonably infer intelligent agency on the basis of eliminating all the other known culprits.
What we might say is that the explorer is in the process of creating a known-culprits list for dirt mounds. At that stage of the game, the negative method of determining causes through a process of elimination is unavailable, or in any event untenable. There is just too little that is known about how things work on the planet, and hence no reason to suppose that the list of “known culprits” for dirt mounds even approaches being exhaustive.
Furthermore, there is no reason as of yet for the explorer to suppose that intelligent agency should be included in the list of causes for dirt-mounds on Planet X. The explorer has seen no intelligent denizens on the planet, let alone any who were busy making dirt mounds. This distinguishes our explorer from forensic scientists on Earth who are exploring an unexplained fire, insofar as these scientists know there to be intelligent agents running around and also know that these agents have the means to start fires and sometimes do so.
Of course, this may not be quite right. Suppose our explorer is exploring the planet with a colleague, who is a known practical joker. In that case, the explorer would be well advised to investigate the theory that his colleague created the dirt mound as a joke.
But there’s a difference between appealing to a known sort of intelligent agent—an intelligent agent of a kind known to exist and known to be capable of producing the effect observed—and using observed phenomena as the basis for concluding that a new kind of intelligent agent, one not otherwise observed to exist, in fact does exist. If, after years of study, the Planet X explorer has produced a fairly exhaustive list of causes for dirt mounds—but has never observed any intelligent denizens of the planet—can this explorer really deduce that there must be such denizens if he encounters a dirt mound that cannot be explained by any of the known culprits on his list?
It doesn’t seem so. In fact, it seems that were the explorer to reason in this way, he’d be guilty of a kind of question-begging. What running out of known culprits warrants is the conclusion that there is a heretofore unknown culprit. To assume that the new culprit is an intelligent agent is, in effect, to operate as if the “gap” in one’s list is in fact not a gap at all but is filled by precisely the new kind of intelligent agent one is seeking to establish. The explorer has, in effect, treated the hypothesized new sort of intelligent agent as a member of the known culprits list in order to reach the conclusion that a new sort of intelligent agent should be included in the know culprits list.
But now suppose I’m exploring Planet X and come across an enormous rock in the shape of Justin Bieber’s head. I mean the resemblance is perfect. Of course, I scream in utter terror. Not only are there intelligent beings here, but they clearly wish me ill.
In this case, unlike the dirt-mound case, I immediately infer intelligent agency. I don’t infer this because I have eliminated all non-agent causes from my list of things-that-can produce-perfect-stone-replicas-of-Justin-Bieber’s-head. Rather, I infer it immediately from the nature of the phenomenon that stands in need of explanation. And I infer it (rightly, I would say) without having ever observed any intelligent agents at work on this planet, without having any idea of what those intelligent agents are like, how they produced the stone head, etc.
The reason I justifiably make this inference is because a sculpture of someone’s head is the kind of thing that, in my experience (and not just mine), is only produced by intelligent agents. Once I rule out my practical-joker colleague as the cause, I might now reasonably add a new kind of intelligent agent to my list of known culprits for things observed on Planet X.
In effect, then, from the above we can identify two distinct ways of arriving at the view that intelligent agency is responsible for some phenomenon of type P: (1) A body of experience teaches us that P’s are typically caused by a range of causes, one of which is intelligent agency; the phenomenon at issue is a P; and all causes other than intelligent agency have been eliminated; (2) A body of experience teaches us that P’s are caused only by intelligent agency, and the phenomenon at issue is a P.
(1) and (2) may not be exhaustive. They wouldn’t be if, for example, we could ever immediately intuit, without a body of experience, that certain phenomena require intelligent agency. I'm inclined to suspect that, in fact, we can do exactly this. But I won't pursue that case here. Instead, I simply want to summarize what I take to be the lessons of the above analysis:
Anyway, that a first run at articulating my thinking about this. Thoughts?
That’s not to say I always agree with him. About a month ago he put up a post, "In Search of an Arsonist," that I would likely have commented on—in critical terms—if I hadn’t been grieving my father’s death. The post had to do with the method by which we determine whether something is the product of intelligent design. Randal’s thesis is that we decide that something is the product of intelligent design by ruling out other causes until intelligent agency is all we’re left with.
Sometimes, of course, this is exactly how we proceed. Randal offers the example of forensic investigators who conclude that a fire was arson (and hence the result of intelligent agency) by ruling out other causes. But can we generalize from such cases? Is it always or even usually true that we infer intelligent agency by a kind of process of elimination? More significantly, can we or should we rely on such a process in the effort to infer an intelligent designer behind natural phenomena?
Before tackling these questions, I want to take a slight digression. Specifically, Randal’s arson investigation case is precisely the kind of case commonly invoked by members of the so-called “ID movement” to support their claim that what they are doing is science—that it is methodologically in line with established scientific procedures and so should qualify as science. Is this right?
I’m not sure Randal wants to draw this conclusion. After all, if intelligent agency is best inferred by ruling out other kinds of explanations, then the quest to decide whether phenomena in the natural world are the product of intelligent design might best be pursued by dedicating a discipline to the task of uncovering and testing these other kinds of explanations. In short, we might use Randal’s point as a basis for arguing that science should be “methodologically naturalistic” in something like the way that opponents of ID movement insist it should be.
But let’s set this concern aside for now. To determine whether the ID movement is pursuing an approach that qualifies as scientific, we need to know how ID theorists actually defend their views. As I understand it, the modern ID movement (as opposed to believers in design or defenders of philosophical arguments from design) grew out of "creation science," and it shares with its predecessor the political aim of getting the God hypothesis into the public school science classroom. But ID's approach is much more sophisticated than what one finds in creation science, setting aside pseudo-scientific arguments for the literal inerrancy of Genesis in favor of modern updates of William Paley’s version of the argument from design. Where the modern updates differ from Paley is not in the basic logical structure of the argument, but rather in their choice of examples of things-that-are-best-explained-by-positing-a-God.
Contemporary ID theorists typically rely on examples taken from two sources: molecular biology and physics. The first version of the modern argument, which might be called the Argument from Irreducible Complexity, relies primarily on the views of biologist Michael Behe. Put simply, the argument runs as follows: Certain complex biological systems on which organisms rely are said to possess the property of “irreducible complexity”—that is, they are such that, were they to be rendered any simpler by having any of their components removed, they would cease to function altogether and so would confer no adaptive advantage on organisms possessing them. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, it is argued, cannot account for the emergence of such irreducibly complex systems, since evolution explains complex systems in terms of incremental increases in complexity, where each such increase is preserved by the adaptive advantage it supposedly confers. Intelligent design, by contrast, can account for such systems. There is, supposedly, no credible third alternative. Therefore, these systems are best explained by positing an intelligent designer.
Second, we have what’s sometimes called the Fine-Tuning Argument. A set of physical constants are said to possess the property of being “fine-tuned” for the emergence of organized complexity (and hence life). No purely physical theory, it is argued, can adequately account for such fortuitous fine-tuning. Intelligent design can. There is no credible third alternative. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is best explained by positing an intelligent designer.
In each of these cases, what the ID movement offers is an argument, some of whose premises are susceptible to assessment in the light of established scientific methods. But notice what it doesn’t offer: a strategy for positively testing the “intelligent design hypothesis” itself. Instead, what we have is a disjunctive argument in which ID theory is endorsed based on a process of elimination—which is, of course, precisely the mechanism that Randal endorses as the proper one for inferring intelligent agency.
One question we can ask is whether reliance on such a disjunctive argument alone can ever justify one in saying that the conclusion reached was arrived at scientifically. Clearly, scientists can and do make use of this sort of disjunctive reasoning—ruling out known causes for a phenomenon as a way of concluding that some unknown cause is at work. But this is typically a kind of prelude to further scientific work, involving speculation about what the unknown causes might be, and then conducting experimental tests (in some sense repeatable) to determine whether one’s guesses have any merit.
But maybe invocations of intelligent design just can’t work like that, because intelligent design brings things about through agency, and agency is subject to will rather than uniform laws. The argument might go as follows: When a hypothesized cause is mechanistic (to use Hermann Lotze’s language), we can test it—by, paradigmatically, making predictions and seeking to falsify them. But freedom isn’t law-like and so doesn’t allow for that kind of testing. And intelligent design inevitably involves an exercise of freedom. Thus, intelligent design can’t be tested for scientifically, and so can only be rationally embraced in some other way. Perhaps this “other way” is the process-of-elimination approach Randal endorses: If nothing else can explain it, we are left with intelligent agency by default.
If so, we might well ask whether this process-of-elimination approach qualifies as science (i) always, (ii) sometimes (and if so, when and why?), or (iii) never. If it isn’t science, then this just goes to show that intellectual inquiry can and does proceed beyond the boundaries of scientific inquiry, invoking a palette of resources that are still available when science has hit the limits of what it can do with its methods. At stake here is not just the credibility of other methods of inquiry, but the political agenda of the ID movement. If this sort of thing isn’t science, then it shouldn’t be in a science classroom—although it arguably should be part of high school education even so, as part of the philosophy curriculum that high schools shamefully lack.
But the question of whether the process-of-elimination approach to inferring intelligent agency is science needs to be assessed in the light of a deeper question: Is it generally true that we can and do infer intelligent design by elimination of other causes?
I think that, in fact, the situation is much more complex. Consider again the case of the forensic scientists investigating a fire. In this case, we have a certain kind of event (a fire) about which we have considerable experience. On the basis of this experience we have derived a list of “known culprits”—that is, kinds of causes (lightning strike, untended campfire, discarded cigarette, deliberate arson, etc.) which are typically responsible for an event of this kind.
In a situation of this sort, we can systematically rule out the various kinds of causes until we are left with only one—and thus, by process of elimination, arrive at the conclusion that, most probably, the cause was of the remaining kind. I say “most probably” because, even though a rich body of experience tells us that events of this kind are ordinarily produced by causes within this list, there might be unusual kinds of causes that don’t appear on the list. The list is fairly exhaustive, but not completely so.
Some contexts aren’t like this, however. Suppose I’m a space explorer who has recently landed on Planet X. The terrain is uniformly flat in most places, but on my third day I come across a big mound of dirt. After investigating the mound, the ground beneath, and other bits of evidence, I’m able to ascertain that what I’m witnessing is the result of a kind of “dirt-geyser” phenomenon produced when trapped gas pushed up through a silt-filled fissure.
Now I come across another mound of dirt. Upon investigating, I conclude that it is not the effect of a dirt-geyser. But, being new to the planet, I have very little experience with such mounds, and hence very little experience with what might cause them. My list of “known culprits” has one member, and I’ve eliminated it. Presumably, in this case, we can’t reasonably infer intelligent agency on the basis of eliminating all the other known culprits.
What we might say is that the explorer is in the process of creating a known-culprits list for dirt mounds. At that stage of the game, the negative method of determining causes through a process of elimination is unavailable, or in any event untenable. There is just too little that is known about how things work on the planet, and hence no reason to suppose that the list of “known culprits” for dirt mounds even approaches being exhaustive.
Furthermore, there is no reason as of yet for the explorer to suppose that intelligent agency should be included in the list of causes for dirt-mounds on Planet X. The explorer has seen no intelligent denizens on the planet, let alone any who were busy making dirt mounds. This distinguishes our explorer from forensic scientists on Earth who are exploring an unexplained fire, insofar as these scientists know there to be intelligent agents running around and also know that these agents have the means to start fires and sometimes do so.
Of course, this may not be quite right. Suppose our explorer is exploring the planet with a colleague, who is a known practical joker. In that case, the explorer would be well advised to investigate the theory that his colleague created the dirt mound as a joke.
But there’s a difference between appealing to a known sort of intelligent agent—an intelligent agent of a kind known to exist and known to be capable of producing the effect observed—and using observed phenomena as the basis for concluding that a new kind of intelligent agent, one not otherwise observed to exist, in fact does exist. If, after years of study, the Planet X explorer has produced a fairly exhaustive list of causes for dirt mounds—but has never observed any intelligent denizens of the planet—can this explorer really deduce that there must be such denizens if he encounters a dirt mound that cannot be explained by any of the known culprits on his list?
It doesn’t seem so. In fact, it seems that were the explorer to reason in this way, he’d be guilty of a kind of question-begging. What running out of known culprits warrants is the conclusion that there is a heretofore unknown culprit. To assume that the new culprit is an intelligent agent is, in effect, to operate as if the “gap” in one’s list is in fact not a gap at all but is filled by precisely the new kind of intelligent agent one is seeking to establish. The explorer has, in effect, treated the hypothesized new sort of intelligent agent as a member of the known culprits list in order to reach the conclusion that a new sort of intelligent agent should be included in the know culprits list.
But now suppose I’m exploring Planet X and come across an enormous rock in the shape of Justin Bieber’s head. I mean the resemblance is perfect. Of course, I scream in utter terror. Not only are there intelligent beings here, but they clearly wish me ill.
In this case, unlike the dirt-mound case, I immediately infer intelligent agency. I don’t infer this because I have eliminated all non-agent causes from my list of things-that-can produce-perfect-stone-replicas-of-Justin-Bieber’s-head. Rather, I infer it immediately from the nature of the phenomenon that stands in need of explanation. And I infer it (rightly, I would say) without having ever observed any intelligent agents at work on this planet, without having any idea of what those intelligent agents are like, how they produced the stone head, etc.
The reason I justifiably make this inference is because a sculpture of someone’s head is the kind of thing that, in my experience (and not just mine), is only produced by intelligent agents. Once I rule out my practical-joker colleague as the cause, I might now reasonably add a new kind of intelligent agent to my list of known culprits for things observed on Planet X.
In effect, then, from the above we can identify two distinct ways of arriving at the view that intelligent agency is responsible for some phenomenon of type P: (1) A body of experience teaches us that P’s are typically caused by a range of causes, one of which is intelligent agency; the phenomenon at issue is a P; and all causes other than intelligent agency have been eliminated; (2) A body of experience teaches us that P’s are caused only by intelligent agency, and the phenomenon at issue is a P.
(1) and (2) may not be exhaustive. They wouldn’t be if, for example, we could ever immediately intuit, without a body of experience, that certain phenomena require intelligent agency. I'm inclined to suspect that, in fact, we can do exactly this. But I won't pursue that case here. Instead, I simply want to summarize what I take to be the lessons of the above analysis:
(a) Inferring intelligent agency by a process-of-elimination is an acceptable approach (arguably a scientific one) in cases where there is a known set of culprits for a given phenomenon, intelligent agency is among the known culprits, and there is reason to suppose that the set of culprits is fairly exhaustive (that is, most phenomena of the given sort are explained by one of the known culprits).In place of Randal Rauser’s process-of-elimination strategy for inferring intelligent design, I would therefore offer up (a)-(c). And given (a)-(c), it would take more work than Randal has done to say that the fine-tuning case should be approached in the same way that forensic scientists investigate a possible arson.
(b) In cases where we have no firm reason to suppose that our set of “known culprits” is fairly exhaustive, the process-of-elimination approach is not acceptable for inferring intelligent agency or any other cause.
(c) If we are asking whether there exists a new kind of intelligent agency that we haven’t seen before, the process-of-elimination approach is question-begging—unless the phenomenon we are seeking to explain is the sort that we justifiably believe on other grounds could only be produced by an intelligent agent. In that case the process-of-elimination approach would operate on known intelligent agents who might have caused the phenomenon, with the inference to an unknown intelligent agent reached when all known intelligent agents have been eliminated.
Anyway, that a first run at articulating my thinking about this. Thoughts?
Sunday, June 13, 2010
From Electrons to God: A Closer Look at a Design Argument Proposed by a Commenter on this Blog
In this post I want to feature a discussion that emerged in an earlier post between two regular discussants on this blog (Dianelos Georgoudis and Burk Braun).
In an exchange in the commentary on my “Contemplating New Atheism’s Effects” post, Dianelos sketched out an argument against naturalism and in support of theism, one which relied in part on the premise that naturalism forces us to accept certain extraordinary claims about electrons. Burk responded with the following dismissive comment: “I would be quite interested in how you deduce a personal god from the electron.”
Now in a sense, Dianelos had already offered just such a deduction in his prior comment. Whether that deduction is sound is another matter—and we can take Burk’s comment as, perhaps, a flippant way to ask Dianelos to elaborate on and defend certain key premises of the argument. Dianelos has since responded with a brief elaboration, one that presents his argument as a variant on the design argument—but an interesting variant that hasn’t been addressed to my knowledge in the philosophical literature (it’s neither the fine tuning argument nor an argument from the supposed irreducible complexity of specific organic systems).
Burk responds in turn with some of the standard complaints against design arguments—basically, “Just because science hasn’t explained a phenomenon yet doesn’t mean science can’t or won’t, and positing God explains nothing.” While there’s something to the first part of this retort (although there are complexities I won’t get into now), the second part misses Dianelos’s central thesis, which is that theism and atheism are holistic ontologies (that is, understandings of the nature of existence) rather than explanatory hypotheses in the scientific sense, and that locating scientific claims within the theistic ontology renders them less extraordinary than they are when located within the atheistic ontology. As I take it, Dianelos is thus not offering God as an alternative to scientific explanations but, rather, as a holistic framework within which all scientifically derived explanations are understood. As such, I don't think it's quite the same kind of design argument that we see in the ID community in relation to biological examples of so-called “irreducible complexity.”
But let me leave these general issues aside so we can lay out the argument at issue more formally (as a deductively valid argument for theism) and then zero in on the details (specifically identifying vulnerable premises and the controversies and conversations they might stimulate). I think doing so is worthwhile because I think it will raise some interesting points of discussion; and because it is a distinctive design argument worthy of fuller development (it not only involves some non-traditional indicators of design but has a form that’s a bit different from that of a conventional design argument).
So, while preserving Dianelos’s original language as much as is consonant with formalizing it as a deductively valid argument, here is my reproduction of The Argument from the Electron to God.
1. Theism is the doctrine that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being.
2. Atheism is the contrary doctrine that it is not the case that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being.
3. Hence, if atheism is false, theism is true (and vice versa) (from 1, 2)
4. If it is not the case that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being, then all existence is ultimately autonomous, purposeless, and of a mechanical nature.
5. Naturalism holds that all existence is ultimately autonomous, purposeless, and of a mechanical nature.
6. Hence, if atheism is true, naturalism is true. (from 2, 4, 5)
7. Scientific research supports the claim (E) that electrons, which are physical primitives with no access to some computing machinery, nevertheless behave in ways that are highly computationally complex.
8. On the presumption of naturalism, claim (E) is an extraordinary (highly implausible) claim.
9. Hence, if naturalism is true, we must accept extraordinary claims. (from 7,8)
[Note: Premise 7 is taken to be one example among many for which the same kind of sub-argument 7-9 can be generated}
10. Any ontology which requires one to accept extraordinary claims should be rejected unless those who would endorse it provide compelling reasons to accept its truth despite the extraordinary implications.
11. No naturalist has provided compelling reasons to accept the truth of naturalism.
12. Hence, naturalism should be rejected as false. (from 9-11)
13. Hence, atheism should be rejected as false (from 6, 12)
14. Hence, theism should be accepted as true. (from 3, 13)
Now as laid out, this argument is valid. The question, then, is whether we should accept the premises. Premises 1, 2, and 5 are definitions—and even if Dianelos’s definitions do not track onto all contemporary usage, that doesn’t change the outcome of the argument if all other premises are correct. In other words, we can treat these definitions as stipulative (that is, nothing substantive hinges on how well these definitions fit with ordinary usage). That leaves premises 4, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Should all of these premises be accepted?
Well, I don’t know quite what I think of 4, but I’ll let it pass. With respect to 7, there are really two claims: first, that electrons behave in computationally complex ways; second, that electrons do not have access to any computing mechanism. I really don’t know enough to assess the first of these claims, but I’m very curious about it and would like to hear more about what sorts of behaviors Dianelos takes to exemplify computational complexity. Educate me!
With respect to the second claim, I wonder if naturalists might not try to invoke recent quantum research (which I don’t really understand) suggesting the possibility of some mode of immediate communication across great distances. Could the possibility of such communication make it possible for isolated electrons to have some kind of access to a sophisticated computational machinery comprised of scattered basic particles forming an organized system through these non-spatial channels of communication? Possibly (I don’t know)—but even if this suggestion is plausible it probably wouldn’t deflect Dianelos’s argument—first, because communication of spatio-temporal objects in the absence of any spatial proximity or mechanistic mode of communication might be taken as another claim that is problematically extraordinary when located within a naturalistic ontology; second, because the suggestion begins to gravitate towards a kind of pantheism in which a “universal mind” emerging out of the non-spatial, non-mechanistically produced interconnection of the basic building blocks of the universe guides the behavior of the basic particles that make up the universe—which is so close to theism (albeit in a pantheistic variation) that I doubt atheists would find it a satisfactory escape hatch from Dianelos’s argument. But further discussion about this would intrigue me.
Premise 8 is the key “design premise.” That is, it is the premise which holds that what we observe is very implausible given an ontology in which the properties of existing things are ultimately explained by blind mechanism and chance (but not similarly implausible given an ontology in which the properties of existing things are ultimately explained by agency). The observational claim (E), again, is that electrons behave “in computationally complex ways” (some elaboration of this would be welcome) but that they do not have access to a computing machine (such as a brain).
I’d say that what is posited in (E) does seem pretty strange if there is no other possible guidance system for computationally complex behavior than a mechanistic computational system. If such a system is the only thing that can reliably guide computationally complex behavior (that is, if there are no immaterial minds or intelligences not rooted in the organized complexity of a mechanical system like an organic brain or synthetic computer), then (E) imples that there are these basic entities that behave in computationally complex ways for no reason at all. It’s just what they do—act as if they are guided by intelligence in the absence of any guiding intelligence. Put another way, (E) is highly implausible given naturalism. On theism, by contrast, (E) would not imply that basic entities behave as if they are guided by intelligence in the absence of intelligence, because theism posits that all existent things have the properties they have by virtue of an underlying intelligence. Hence, if (E) is true (which I’m in no position to assess), it follows that there is a fact about the universe that is extraordinary on the assumption of naturalism but not extraordinary on the assumption of theism.
There is, of course, more to be said here—about the basis on which we judge a proposition to be extraordinary or implausible. But let’s move on for the moment, since this issue will come back.
Premise 10 won’t do as stated, but has to be modified—an once modified appropriately, it calls for a modification in 11 in order to preserve its validity.
Why do I say this? Well, 10 says in effect that we should reject P if P has implausible implications and there is no case for P more compelling than P’s implications are implausible. But suppose it is the case that not only does P have such implications (without an outweighing justifying argument), but so does not-P. In that case, given 10, we’d have to reject both P and not-P. And so, under conceivable circumstances, 10 would require that we reject the law of excluded middle (which holds that, for any proposition P, either P or its negation, not-P, is true). And so I think 10 needs to be reformulated to say something along the following lines:
10*: Any ontology which requires one to accept extraordinary claims should be rejected unless either (a) there are reasons to accept the ontology that are at least as compelling as the indicated implications are implausible, OR (b) the rejection of the ontology requires one to accept claims that are just as implausible.
[Note that if (b) is the case, it doesn’t follow that one should accept the ontology in question, only that one is no longer called to reject it based on its extraordinary implications. If one is saddled with extraordinary implications whether one accepts or rejects an ontology, the fact that it has extraordinary implications ceases to be, by itself, a good reason to reject it.]
But if we replace 10 with 10* we can validly make the inference to 12 only if we replace 11 with the following:
11*: No naturalist has provided compelling reasons to accept to truth of naturalism and no one has shown that rejecting naturalism (in other words, accepting theism) requires one to accept claims that are just as implausible.
Now, once we modify the final premise of the argument in this way, what we open up are, I think, two very difficult philosophical research projects. The first calls for a careful critical examination of all arguments in favor of naturalism. And, as I’ve said countless times, we cannot establish naturalism through a simple exercise of the scientific method; so these arguments for naturalism will be essentially philosophical, appealing to something other than empirical evidence alone (although presumably making use of empirical evidence as part of a broader philosophical case). The second research project calls for an assessment of the implications of a theistic ontology (relative to the known features of the world) to determine whether any of its implications are as extraordinary as those of naturalism.
But here we again confront the challenge of the criteria we use to decide whether we take a claim to be extraordinary. Of course, many atheistic naturalists take theism as in some way intrinsically implausible in itself. They contemplate the idea of agency behind the universe and it just seems to them, in an immediate way, to be incredible. What are we to do with such anti-theistic intuitions?
One might dismiss them as irrelevant. In the case of (E), its implausibility is presumably a function of naturalism’s own standards of what is plausible or implausible. Since naturalism’s only explanation for computationally complex behavior is the guidance of an evolved computing machine of some sort, seeing the former without the latter is extraordinary by naturalism’s own standards. That is, Dianelos seeks to point to an implication of naturalism that a naturalist would find implausible looking at it from a naturalist perspective. Parity would require that, for theism to be viewed as comparably problematic, it have implications that are extraordinary by theism’s own standards.
But there is more to be said. Are the only standards by which we can assess the reasonableness of a claim internal to a given comprehensive worldview? Or are there standards that transcend worldviews? And if so, what are they?
Once we descend into these sorts of issues, we find ourselves quickly enmeshed in a range of ongoing philosophical debates. And since I’ve already gone on long enough, what I’ll say here is that there are highly intelligent, thoughtful, sincere, intellectually virtuous people who fall on different sides of the various implicated controversies. And this leads me back to my own default position—namely that, given the finite human intellectual position, reasonable people can disagree about whether there is a God.
In an exchange in the commentary on my “Contemplating New Atheism’s Effects” post, Dianelos sketched out an argument against naturalism and in support of theism, one which relied in part on the premise that naturalism forces us to accept certain extraordinary claims about electrons. Burk responded with the following dismissive comment: “I would be quite interested in how you deduce a personal god from the electron.”
Now in a sense, Dianelos had already offered just such a deduction in his prior comment. Whether that deduction is sound is another matter—and we can take Burk’s comment as, perhaps, a flippant way to ask Dianelos to elaborate on and defend certain key premises of the argument. Dianelos has since responded with a brief elaboration, one that presents his argument as a variant on the design argument—but an interesting variant that hasn’t been addressed to my knowledge in the philosophical literature (it’s neither the fine tuning argument nor an argument from the supposed irreducible complexity of specific organic systems).
Burk responds in turn with some of the standard complaints against design arguments—basically, “Just because science hasn’t explained a phenomenon yet doesn’t mean science can’t or won’t, and positing God explains nothing.” While there’s something to the first part of this retort (although there are complexities I won’t get into now), the second part misses Dianelos’s central thesis, which is that theism and atheism are holistic ontologies (that is, understandings of the nature of existence) rather than explanatory hypotheses in the scientific sense, and that locating scientific claims within the theistic ontology renders them less extraordinary than they are when located within the atheistic ontology. As I take it, Dianelos is thus not offering God as an alternative to scientific explanations but, rather, as a holistic framework within which all scientifically derived explanations are understood. As such, I don't think it's quite the same kind of design argument that we see in the ID community in relation to biological examples of so-called “irreducible complexity.”
But let me leave these general issues aside so we can lay out the argument at issue more formally (as a deductively valid argument for theism) and then zero in on the details (specifically identifying vulnerable premises and the controversies and conversations they might stimulate). I think doing so is worthwhile because I think it will raise some interesting points of discussion; and because it is a distinctive design argument worthy of fuller development (it not only involves some non-traditional indicators of design but has a form that’s a bit different from that of a conventional design argument).
So, while preserving Dianelos’s original language as much as is consonant with formalizing it as a deductively valid argument, here is my reproduction of The Argument from the Electron to God.
1. Theism is the doctrine that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being.
2. Atheism is the contrary doctrine that it is not the case that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being.
3. Hence, if atheism is false, theism is true (and vice versa) (from 1, 2)
4. If it is not the case that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being, then all existence is ultimately autonomous, purposeless, and of a mechanical nature.
5. Naturalism holds that all existence is ultimately autonomous, purposeless, and of a mechanical nature.
6. Hence, if atheism is true, naturalism is true. (from 2, 4, 5)
7. Scientific research supports the claim (E) that electrons, which are physical primitives with no access to some computing machinery, nevertheless behave in ways that are highly computationally complex.
8. On the presumption of naturalism, claim (E) is an extraordinary (highly implausible) claim.
9. Hence, if naturalism is true, we must accept extraordinary claims. (from 7,8)
[Note: Premise 7 is taken to be one example among many for which the same kind of sub-argument 7-9 can be generated}
10. Any ontology which requires one to accept extraordinary claims should be rejected unless those who would endorse it provide compelling reasons to accept its truth despite the extraordinary implications.
11. No naturalist has provided compelling reasons to accept the truth of naturalism.
12. Hence, naturalism should be rejected as false. (from 9-11)
13. Hence, atheism should be rejected as false (from 6, 12)
14. Hence, theism should be accepted as true. (from 3, 13)
Now as laid out, this argument is valid. The question, then, is whether we should accept the premises. Premises 1, 2, and 5 are definitions—and even if Dianelos’s definitions do not track onto all contemporary usage, that doesn’t change the outcome of the argument if all other premises are correct. In other words, we can treat these definitions as stipulative (that is, nothing substantive hinges on how well these definitions fit with ordinary usage). That leaves premises 4, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Should all of these premises be accepted?
Well, I don’t know quite what I think of 4, but I’ll let it pass. With respect to 7, there are really two claims: first, that electrons behave in computationally complex ways; second, that electrons do not have access to any computing mechanism. I really don’t know enough to assess the first of these claims, but I’m very curious about it and would like to hear more about what sorts of behaviors Dianelos takes to exemplify computational complexity. Educate me!
With respect to the second claim, I wonder if naturalists might not try to invoke recent quantum research (which I don’t really understand) suggesting the possibility of some mode of immediate communication across great distances. Could the possibility of such communication make it possible for isolated electrons to have some kind of access to a sophisticated computational machinery comprised of scattered basic particles forming an organized system through these non-spatial channels of communication? Possibly (I don’t know)—but even if this suggestion is plausible it probably wouldn’t deflect Dianelos’s argument—first, because communication of spatio-temporal objects in the absence of any spatial proximity or mechanistic mode of communication might be taken as another claim that is problematically extraordinary when located within a naturalistic ontology; second, because the suggestion begins to gravitate towards a kind of pantheism in which a “universal mind” emerging out of the non-spatial, non-mechanistically produced interconnection of the basic building blocks of the universe guides the behavior of the basic particles that make up the universe—which is so close to theism (albeit in a pantheistic variation) that I doubt atheists would find it a satisfactory escape hatch from Dianelos’s argument. But further discussion about this would intrigue me.
Premise 8 is the key “design premise.” That is, it is the premise which holds that what we observe is very implausible given an ontology in which the properties of existing things are ultimately explained by blind mechanism and chance (but not similarly implausible given an ontology in which the properties of existing things are ultimately explained by agency). The observational claim (E), again, is that electrons behave “in computationally complex ways” (some elaboration of this would be welcome) but that they do not have access to a computing machine (such as a brain).
I’d say that what is posited in (E) does seem pretty strange if there is no other possible guidance system for computationally complex behavior than a mechanistic computational system. If such a system is the only thing that can reliably guide computationally complex behavior (that is, if there are no immaterial minds or intelligences not rooted in the organized complexity of a mechanical system like an organic brain or synthetic computer), then (E) imples that there are these basic entities that behave in computationally complex ways for no reason at all. It’s just what they do—act as if they are guided by intelligence in the absence of any guiding intelligence. Put another way, (E) is highly implausible given naturalism. On theism, by contrast, (E) would not imply that basic entities behave as if they are guided by intelligence in the absence of intelligence, because theism posits that all existent things have the properties they have by virtue of an underlying intelligence. Hence, if (E) is true (which I’m in no position to assess), it follows that there is a fact about the universe that is extraordinary on the assumption of naturalism but not extraordinary on the assumption of theism.
There is, of course, more to be said here—about the basis on which we judge a proposition to be extraordinary or implausible. But let’s move on for the moment, since this issue will come back.
Premise 10 won’t do as stated, but has to be modified—an once modified appropriately, it calls for a modification in 11 in order to preserve its validity.
Why do I say this? Well, 10 says in effect that we should reject P if P has implausible implications and there is no case for P more compelling than P’s implications are implausible. But suppose it is the case that not only does P have such implications (without an outweighing justifying argument), but so does not-P. In that case, given 10, we’d have to reject both P and not-P. And so, under conceivable circumstances, 10 would require that we reject the law of excluded middle (which holds that, for any proposition P, either P or its negation, not-P, is true). And so I think 10 needs to be reformulated to say something along the following lines:
10*: Any ontology which requires one to accept extraordinary claims should be rejected unless either (a) there are reasons to accept the ontology that are at least as compelling as the indicated implications are implausible, OR (b) the rejection of the ontology requires one to accept claims that are just as implausible.
[Note that if (b) is the case, it doesn’t follow that one should accept the ontology in question, only that one is no longer called to reject it based on its extraordinary implications. If one is saddled with extraordinary implications whether one accepts or rejects an ontology, the fact that it has extraordinary implications ceases to be, by itself, a good reason to reject it.]
But if we replace 10 with 10* we can validly make the inference to 12 only if we replace 11 with the following:
11*: No naturalist has provided compelling reasons to accept to truth of naturalism and no one has shown that rejecting naturalism (in other words, accepting theism) requires one to accept claims that are just as implausible.
Now, once we modify the final premise of the argument in this way, what we open up are, I think, two very difficult philosophical research projects. The first calls for a careful critical examination of all arguments in favor of naturalism. And, as I’ve said countless times, we cannot establish naturalism through a simple exercise of the scientific method; so these arguments for naturalism will be essentially philosophical, appealing to something other than empirical evidence alone (although presumably making use of empirical evidence as part of a broader philosophical case). The second research project calls for an assessment of the implications of a theistic ontology (relative to the known features of the world) to determine whether any of its implications are as extraordinary as those of naturalism.
But here we again confront the challenge of the criteria we use to decide whether we take a claim to be extraordinary. Of course, many atheistic naturalists take theism as in some way intrinsically implausible in itself. They contemplate the idea of agency behind the universe and it just seems to them, in an immediate way, to be incredible. What are we to do with such anti-theistic intuitions?
One might dismiss them as irrelevant. In the case of (E), its implausibility is presumably a function of naturalism’s own standards of what is plausible or implausible. Since naturalism’s only explanation for computationally complex behavior is the guidance of an evolved computing machine of some sort, seeing the former without the latter is extraordinary by naturalism’s own standards. That is, Dianelos seeks to point to an implication of naturalism that a naturalist would find implausible looking at it from a naturalist perspective. Parity would require that, for theism to be viewed as comparably problematic, it have implications that are extraordinary by theism’s own standards.
But there is more to be said. Are the only standards by which we can assess the reasonableness of a claim internal to a given comprehensive worldview? Or are there standards that transcend worldviews? And if so, what are they?
Once we descend into these sorts of issues, we find ourselves quickly enmeshed in a range of ongoing philosophical debates. And since I’ve already gone on long enough, what I’ll say here is that there are highly intelligent, thoughtful, sincere, intellectually virtuous people who fall on different sides of the various implicated controversies. And this leads me back to my own default position—namely that, given the finite human intellectual position, reasonable people can disagree about whether there is a God.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Reflections on the Argument from Design
A number of readers of my book have asked me why I’m as dismissive of the argument from design as I seem to be. My best friend is among them. He finds considerable power in several formulations of the argument, including Indian versions which, based on his descriptions of them, I think I probably need to study.
I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.
Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”
But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.
To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.
Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.
For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”
The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.
This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.
But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).
My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.
This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.
I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?
I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.
I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.
In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.
Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.
And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.
I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.
Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”
But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.
To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.
Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.
For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”
The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.
This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.
But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).
My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.
This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.
I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?
I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.
I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.
In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.
Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.
And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Gratitude and Grace
A few weeks ago I wrote in this blog about my daughter’s “Ariel sighting” in a splat of bird poop, and I used the incident as a chance to reflect on the significance (or lack thereof) of Virgin Mary sightings. The job of preparing a sermon on gratitude, which I’ll be delivering this Sunday in my role as chair of the Stewardship Committee, has given me the opportunity to think again about such “miraculous” sightings—but this time in a way that connects to the question of what it means to live one’s life in a spirit of gratitude. While the full sermon is too long to reproduce here (and probably too long to read on Sunday morning—but, well, they’ll live), I wanted to share here a core section of that sermon. The excerpt appears below:
Now, I don’t want to debate the plausibility of interpreting such images as signs from God. That’s not my objective here this morning. What I want to think about instead is what happens to our relationship with God when we become obsessed with finding the stamp of the divine in such things as toasted cheese sandwiches, or in chocolate drippings (as happened in California a few years ago), or in a swirl of marble on a chapel wall (as happened not long ago in Ghana).
And I don’t want to limit my attention to this fixation on Virgin Mary sightings and the like—because something very similar is going on with what’s come to be called “Intelligent Design” or “ID” theory. ID theorists are determined to find evidence of the divine in biological structures that are supposedly “irreducibly complex” and hence can’t be explained in Darwinian terms. And when they find something that they think fits the bill, they hold it up and declare, “Must be God!” These ID theorists are really doing the same kind of thing as those obsessed with Virgin Mary sightings: They’re scouring the world, sifting through the ocean of human experience, looking for miracles.
As if life itself weren’t a miracle. As if every breath I take isn’t a miracle. As if the astonishing fact of existence weren’t a miracle.
The poet and scholar, Frederick Turner, puts the point this way: “It is easy to deceive ourselves that something strange, something supernatural, is happening, as we know well from accounts of flying saucer enthusiasts, superstitious cultists, and ghost hunters. But perhaps our greater danger, our greater credulity, lies in deceiving ourselves that something strange and marvelous is not happening.”
In fact, I think that the first sort of deception contributes to the second. When we begin to fool ourselves into thinking that this unusual chocolate dripping or that complex molecule is a special revelation of God, we magnify the risk of losing sight of the miraculous character of what’s always there, all around us.
As Kahlil Gibran puts it in The Prophet,
In this passage, Gibran isn’t trying to prove God’s existence by arguing that clouds and lightning, flowers and trees, can’t be explained in scientific terms. Rather, he’s saying that if we open ourselves up to the fullness of life and reality all around us, we’ll experience the divine moving in it all.
The quest to find God in distinctive images burned onto toasted cheese, or in biochemical systems that can’t be explained in evolutionary terms—such a quest is a distraction from the religious life as Gibran describes it. When we get caught up in such a quest, we become “solvers of riddles,” rather than children of God living in the light of God’s grace. We become so focused on finding fireworks in the night sky that we lose sight of the sky itself and the beauty of the scattered stars.
And so we forget to be grateful for the miracle of existence that surrounds us and fills us up at every moment. The constancy of the sky leads us to ignore it, and we attach our hopes and joys to the ephemeral bursts of colored sparks that splash for just a moment across our vision and are gone. The sky’s very constancy, which should magnify our gratitude, leads us instead to take it for granted.
Part of what it means to live in a spirit of gratitude is to resist this tendency. It means seeing and taking joy in the deep and abiding miracles: life; our capacity to love and to be present in the world; the spray of stars across a blue-black sky.
But there’s something else as well. As the mystic philosopher Simone Weil points out in today’s meditation, the universe is filled to the brim with everything we have ever thought to wish for. But because I don’t possess this thing at this moment, I curse the universe. I define the good as my good, and all the wonders of the universe therefore count as nothing unless I hold them in my clutches.
But I don’t need to make the universe as small as I am. I can, instead, expand myself so that my sense of self sweeps outward across the heavens, and every good that exists can be for me a source of joy. When I do that I’ve left the confines of my narrow ego and chosen instead to abide in the dwelling place of the living God (Psalm 84).
In this place, gratitude and generosity are part of the same whole. To be grateful is to feel the grace of God flowing through you. To be generous is to let it flow, unimpeded. In this place, authentic gratitude has no contact with its dark pretender, that burden of indebtedness Kahlil Gibran warns against when he tells us to “assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.” In the dwelling place of God, generosity is a gift that makes no demands on the receiver. Gratitude is a joyous response, not the burden of reciprocal obligation. The grateful are generous, not out of duty, but because possessiveness would amount to leaving the dwelling place of God behind. It would mean a return to that lonely little universe, as tiny as a single ego.
My sermon goes on to exemplify what it means to live a human life in this spiritual space of gratitude and generosity by (no surprise here) looking at the life of Friedrich Schleiermacher. More specifically, I look at the words he spoke at the graveside of his youngest son, his beloved Nathaniel. But a discussion of that heart-wrenching sermon will have to be the subject of a later post.
Now, I don’t want to debate the plausibility of interpreting such images as signs from God. That’s not my objective here this morning. What I want to think about instead is what happens to our relationship with God when we become obsessed with finding the stamp of the divine in such things as toasted cheese sandwiches, or in chocolate drippings (as happened in California a few years ago), or in a swirl of marble on a chapel wall (as happened not long ago in Ghana).
And I don’t want to limit my attention to this fixation on Virgin Mary sightings and the like—because something very similar is going on with what’s come to be called “Intelligent Design” or “ID” theory. ID theorists are determined to find evidence of the divine in biological structures that are supposedly “irreducibly complex” and hence can’t be explained in Darwinian terms. And when they find something that they think fits the bill, they hold it up and declare, “Must be God!” These ID theorists are really doing the same kind of thing as those obsessed with Virgin Mary sightings: They’re scouring the world, sifting through the ocean of human experience, looking for miracles.
As if life itself weren’t a miracle. As if every breath I take isn’t a miracle. As if the astonishing fact of existence weren’t a miracle.
The poet and scholar, Frederick Turner, puts the point this way: “It is easy to deceive ourselves that something strange, something supernatural, is happening, as we know well from accounts of flying saucer enthusiasts, superstitious cultists, and ghost hunters. But perhaps our greater danger, our greater credulity, lies in deceiving ourselves that something strange and marvelous is not happening.”
In fact, I think that the first sort of deception contributes to the second. When we begin to fool ourselves into thinking that this unusual chocolate dripping or that complex molecule is a special revelation of God, we magnify the risk of losing sight of the miraculous character of what’s always there, all around us.
As Kahlil Gibran puts it in The Prophet,
…if you would know God be not therefore a solver of
riddles.
Rather, look about you and you shall see Him playing with
your children.
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in
the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending
rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving
His hands in trees.
In this passage, Gibran isn’t trying to prove God’s existence by arguing that clouds and lightning, flowers and trees, can’t be explained in scientific terms. Rather, he’s saying that if we open ourselves up to the fullness of life and reality all around us, we’ll experience the divine moving in it all.
The quest to find God in distinctive images burned onto toasted cheese, or in biochemical systems that can’t be explained in evolutionary terms—such a quest is a distraction from the religious life as Gibran describes it. When we get caught up in such a quest, we become “solvers of riddles,” rather than children of God living in the light of God’s grace. We become so focused on finding fireworks in the night sky that we lose sight of the sky itself and the beauty of the scattered stars.
And so we forget to be grateful for the miracle of existence that surrounds us and fills us up at every moment. The constancy of the sky leads us to ignore it, and we attach our hopes and joys to the ephemeral bursts of colored sparks that splash for just a moment across our vision and are gone. The sky’s very constancy, which should magnify our gratitude, leads us instead to take it for granted.
Part of what it means to live in a spirit of gratitude is to resist this tendency. It means seeing and taking joy in the deep and abiding miracles: life; our capacity to love and to be present in the world; the spray of stars across a blue-black sky.
But there’s something else as well. As the mystic philosopher Simone Weil points out in today’s meditation, the universe is filled to the brim with everything we have ever thought to wish for. But because I don’t possess this thing at this moment, I curse the universe. I define the good as my good, and all the wonders of the universe therefore count as nothing unless I hold them in my clutches.
But I don’t need to make the universe as small as I am. I can, instead, expand myself so that my sense of self sweeps outward across the heavens, and every good that exists can be for me a source of joy. When I do that I’ve left the confines of my narrow ego and chosen instead to abide in the dwelling place of the living God (Psalm 84).
In this place, gratitude and generosity are part of the same whole. To be grateful is to feel the grace of God flowing through you. To be generous is to let it flow, unimpeded. In this place, authentic gratitude has no contact with its dark pretender, that burden of indebtedness Kahlil Gibran warns against when he tells us to “assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.” In the dwelling place of God, generosity is a gift that makes no demands on the receiver. Gratitude is a joyous response, not the burden of reciprocal obligation. The grateful are generous, not out of duty, but because possessiveness would amount to leaving the dwelling place of God behind. It would mean a return to that lonely little universe, as tiny as a single ego.
My sermon goes on to exemplify what it means to live a human life in this spiritual space of gratitude and generosity by (no surprise here) looking at the life of Friedrich Schleiermacher. More specifically, I look at the words he spoke at the graveside of his youngest son, his beloved Nathaniel. But a discussion of that heart-wrenching sermon will have to be the subject of a later post.
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