Morality, Science, and Intelligent Design: New Essay on Religion Dispatches

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.

Richard Dawkins, the Neo-Thomist

Of course, the title of this post is kind of a joke. A Thomist is a follower of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose arguments for God Dawkins dismisses as “vacuous” in a couple of pages in The God Delusion (pp. 77-79). This dismissal is—as I’ve pointed out in Is God a Delusion? (pp. 101-105) and elsewhere—based on a mischaracterization of the arguments. He basically attacks straw men. This is not to say that Aquinas’s actual arguments succeed in their aims, but it does say something about the care (or lack thereof) which Dawkins brings to bear on the philosophical arguments for God’s existence.


But in addition to pointing out Dawkins’ exegetical shortcomings with respect to Aquinas in Is God a Delusion?, I also note something else in passing. Speficially, I point out that Dawkins’ mischaracterization of the logical structure of the first two of Aquinas’s Five Ways is particularly egregious because his own argument against theism has the very same logical structure. Here’s how I put it there:

Just as Aquinas did, Dawkins notes that a certain kind of explanation leads to an infinite regress. He insists that an infinite regress explains nothing. And so he concludes that there needs to exist a regress-ending explanation of a different kind (p. 116).

It occurs to me that it might be useful—both for general readers of this blog and for students in my class who are examining Dawkins’ atheological argument—to lay out the parallel between Dawkins’ and Aquinas’s arguments more explicitly. Let’s begin with Dawkins’ argument against the idea that the universe is ultimately explained by an intelligent designer. Here is at least one way to formalize it:

D1. There are instances of “organized complexity” (Dawkins’ term for a complex teleological system, that is, a system comprised of parts whose parts work together to achieve a common end or to make possible a certain kind of coherent activity)

D2. Every instance of organized complexity must be explained either by (a) an intelligent designer or (b) a "self-bootstrapping crane," that is, an uncomplicated mechanism such as Darwiniain natural selection that builds organized complexity gradually. (Dawkins endorses this because he thinks organized complexity is far too improbable to be explained by chance).

D3. Any intelligence capable of designing a given instance of organized complexity must exhibit at least as much organized complexity as what it designs.

D4. Hence, nothing in category (a) can terminate a regress of explanations—and hence be the ULTIMATE explanation—for organized complexity.

D5. An infinite regress of explanations, without an ultimate explanation, explains nothing.

D6. Hence, to explain organized complexity, we must posit something in category (b) to serve as the ultimate explanation.

Now compare this argument with Aquinas’s “First Way”—the way from motion. Keep in mind that for Aquinas, “motion” is a technical term that means roughly the same as what we mean by “change”—except that the focus seems to be on what might be called “positive changes,” that is, changes in which something comes to acquire a property it had previously lacked, as opposed to losing a property it had previously possessed. While the meaningfulness of this distinction can be challenged under some assumptions about the nature of properties, it at least has some intuitive plausibility (changing from being a non-conscious thing to a conscious one seems to involve coming to possess something, whereas changing from being conscious to non-conscious seems to involve losing something). In any event, with this understanding of “motion” in mind, we can formalize Aquinas’s First Way as follows:

A1. There are things that move from being potentially something (say S) to being actually S (from “potency” to “act” with respect to S).

A2. Everything that moves from potency to act with respect to S must have its movement explained either by (a) something else that is itself moved from potency to act with respect to S or (b) something that always actually possessed S (an eternal S-possessor).

A3. Nothing in category (a) can terminate a regress of explanations—and hence be the ULTIMATE explanation—of movement from potency to act.

A4. An infinite regress of explanations, without an ultimate explanation, explains nothing

A5. Hence, to explain motion, we must posit something in category (b) to serve as the ultimate explanation.

Of course, the two arguments are quite different in terms of the substantive premises they adopt. And Dawkins’ argument requires an additional premise (D3) that, structurally, isn’t required for Aquinas’s argument. But other than the need to insert this additional premise D3 (which, by the way, is probably the primary target of critical responses to Dawkins’ argument), the two arguments share the same logical structure.

And this makes it all the more perplexing that Dawkins would fail to accurately represent Aquinas’s arguments. Because at least when he sets himself to the task of constructing his own positive argument for his own conclusion (as opposed to attacking the arguments of others), Dawkins thinks, more than a little bit, like Aquinas.

And that, by the way, is a compliment. (For other, lengthier compliments of Dawkins, see my 2009 post, "The Misguided Desire to Stifle Dawkins," which I wrote when members of the Oklahoma Legislature made a stink about the University of Oklahoma's decision to invite Dawkins to speak on campus as part of its celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species).

From the Archives: Reflections on the Argument from Design

This week, in my philosophy of religion class, we are looking at the argument from design--that is, the argument which attempts to support the existence of an intelligent supernatural creator by appeal to the apparent evidence of design in the universe. Since I've been busy getting ready for a conference (where I'm presenting a paper critiquing Don Marquis's "future like ours" argument against the morality of abortion), I haven't had the chance to write up a blog post on the design argument.

And so I dust off the following, which appeared on this blog in early 2009. Enjoy!

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.