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.

Storytelling Animals

The traditional philosophical definition of 'human' is "rational animal," and while I think this definition works, it seems to me a case could made for defining us as storytelling animals. That's what is suggested in a recent article by Maria Popova, and also in the book Popova discusses in that article, namely The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall.

There may actually be a close connection between rationality and storytelling. Perhaps defining us as storytelling animals, as opposed to merely rational ones, focuses in on a certain kind of rational thinking that is especially distinctive of who and what we are.

Reason makes connections. Some of those connections are logical ones--and certainly part of what human characteristically do is recognizing logical implications. But the most important connections people make have to do with the question "Why?" And as soon as we start saying why this or that is the case--as soon as we start making causal connections, teleological ones (roughly, connections based on purposes and aims), or what I'll call energent ones (accounts of how some higher level property arises out of the interaction of simpler elements)--we've started to tell a story.

Scientists, in their way, are in the business of telling stories. They aim not just to be collectors of facts and observers of patterns. They want to make sense of those facts and those patterns, weave them together into a coherent picture. This is the essence of narrative, what distinguishes a timeline from a story: Fitting the pieces together in a way that makes sense. The theoretic level of science might be construed as a distinctive refinement of the storyteller's art.

Arguably, the most influential scientists are those who have a knack for how to tell their story well, in a way that resonates with and makes sense to others. Darwin, in The Origin of Species, famously told the story of evolution in a way that connected with the common experience of people of the day--by, among other things, invoking the metaphor of animal husbandry to explain the process of natural selection.

Philosophy, too, can be seen as involving a specialized kind of storytelling. Philosophy has both a negative/critical side and a constructive/speculative one. The constructive side attempts to fit disparate elements of our experience together into a coherent way of seeing the whole--and the critical side is really in the service of the constructive one, assessing attempts at speculative construction to evaluate their internal coherence and their fit with our lived experience and the facts available. Philosophy in this sense becomes a kind of storytelling and vetting of stories in an attempt to piece together our human experience into a compelling account of what it all means.

Even those who resist speculation beyond "what science tells us" have a hard time resisting their own version of such holistic storytelling, which is why "scientism" so often emerges among those who are doggedly committed not to believe in anything beyond what science tells us. Scientism is what happens, we might say, when those who consciously refuse to tell a holistic story end up telling one subconsciously: They weave together a narrative picture of the whole premised on the idea that there is nothing beyond what science gives to us, and hence postulating that the picture of "the whole" cannot include any postulates beyond the very delimited ones that arise in the scientist's specialized form of storytelling.

Naturalism, in contrast with scientism, might be seen as the conscious attempt to build a narrative worldview around such a postulate--and hence as the effort to tell this story in a self-reflective and thoughtful way, as opposed to merely falling into a muddled story by accident.

Note: The above distinction might convey the impression that agnosticism is paired with scientism rather than naturalism, but that is a mistake. Agnostics might be very deliberate, thoughtful storytellers who are simply hesitant to give too much credence to their own stories. Telling a story isn't the same as believing it.

But this point raises some interesting questions which I think I'll take up in my next post. For now, however, let me ask it of my readers: What, exactly, are the different ways in which storytelling can be (or generally is) related to belief?

What is Naturalism, Part IV: Science as a Pathway to the Noumenal

For this post I want to focus on the idea, embraced by many (implicitly if not explicitly) that contrary to what Kant thought, the noumenal realm can be reached through the scientific method—that is, through the method of (a) making careful empirical observations, often with the aid of technological enhancements that refine our capacity to observe and measure, (b) discovering recurring patterns in what is observed, and (c) constructing models (either mechanistic or mathematical) for making sense of these patterns—models which typically (but not always) are empirically testable because they make a difference with respect to what we might observe.
The idea here--which I take to be a particularly helpful way of understanding the core thesis of metaphysical naturalism--is that were this method rigorously pursued to its completion (which will never in fact be achieved), what would be uncovered is reality as it is in itself: the noumenal realm.

Now there are two things I can think of that speak in favor of this view. The first can be highlighted with an example I used in my book for a very different purpose. Years ago I was at a conference on categories in which the audience was presented with a series of computer-generated sounds. What we heard sounded like five P’s followed by five B’s. It was then explained to us that the difference between a P and a B is the interval of time between the “pop” of the lips and the onset of vocalization, and that the computer had generated ten distinct sounds by narrowing this interval by the same increment ten successive times. But because we were all English speakers, and because the English language only has two phonemes into which to categorize this range of sounds, we heard only two sounds, each repeated five times.

What does this have to do with science and bridging the gap between phenomena and noumena? Well, it seems as if, with the help of instruments that don’t have our distinct perceptual limitations, we’ve been able to isolate something in our perceptual apparatus that informs what we experience while at the same time “seeing past” that feature of our perceptual apparatus to get a truer understanding of what is going on. Sounds are more diverse and varied than what we hear, but with the right sort of technological help we can track these variations that our unaided senses can’t track. And so, it seems, we are moving towards a more accurate picture of how things are--that is, bridging or at least narrowing the phenomenal/noumenal gap.

The second point I want to make is broader. Specifically, the world as described by scientists is very different from what we immediately apprehend in our waking lives. The world of ordinary experience would have it that the desk in front of me is solid—but science has taught us that it is “really” mostly empty space, within which atoms comprised of protons and neutrons and clouds of electrons exert forces on one another. Science has taught us that the appearance of solidity is a function of how our sensory apparatuses interact with this reality—and these sensory apparatuses can themselves be studied scientifically, so as to explain why these perceptions are produced despite their disconnect with reality.

In short, science has given us a picture of the world that is very different from ordinary experience, and has at the same time given us a picture of how our senses operate—and these pictures in turn offer at least a partial account of why things appear to us as they do. It’s almost as if science has offered us a way to isolate what we bring to phenomenal experience and separate it out from what is independent of phenomenal experience. Science tells us, “The table looks solid, but we now know that it’s really mostly empty space.” This sounds like an appearance/reality distinction right in line with Kant—but more significantly, it sounds as if what science has done is taken us past appearances to the underlying reality. And so it is concluded that science has given us a glimpse of a noumenal reality that ordinary perception cannot offer.

But none of this is what one would call a deductively valid argument for the conclusion that science puts us in touch with noumenal reality. It is, rather, an interpretation of what science has done—an interpretation based on the fact that science has offered a picture of things quite different from the way things ordinarily appear to us, along with some explanations of how our minds might be structured so as to produce these appearances on the basis of an underlying reality that is as scientists have described it to be.

To see why none of this amounts to a demonstration of the fact that the scientific method is putting us in touch with noumenal reality, let me draw on something else that I use in my book for a different purpose—namely, the Matrix-like analogy of the world of brains-in-vats being fed stimuli by a supercomputer, one which also adjusts the stimuli it sends based on messages coming from the brains-in-vats. The result is a perfectly realized virtual world in which the brains-in-vats experience and respond to their environment.

For Kant, phenomenal reality is analogous to the virtual world experienced by the brains-in-vats. Noumenal reality is analogous to the brains, vats, supercomputer and its programming, etc. If we assume that the virtual world is experientially just like our own, then we can assume that the phenomena experienced by the brains-in-vats can be scientifically modeled in exactly the same ways that we model our phenomenal experience--and that the scientists of the virtual world will therefore conclude, just like we do, that tabletops that appear to be solid "are  really mostly empty space, etc."

But in our analogous case, this scientific picture of things is no more noumenal than the naïve picture. The brains studied by the scientists are phenomenal ones--not the "real ones" wired into the supercomputer, but the virtual brains produced by the supercomputer's stimuli. The sense organs studied by these scientists are likewise utterly unlike the ultimate reality (in which there are no analogous sense organs at all).  The structure and operation of these virtual brains and sense organs exist exclusively in the virtual (phenomenal) world,  and what a careful study of them tells us (about, for example, how these organs affect our perception) is also something that is true only of the phenomenal realm.

In short, the scientific models proposed to make sense of regularities in the phenomenal world are simply a way to describe (from a different angle and in minute detail) the workings of the phenomenal world. None of this gets us out of the virtual matrix and to the underlying reality. Scientists can work for centuries and never uncover the brains-in-vats or the supercomputer.

Now I don’t introduce this analogy because I think we live in a virtual reality matrix created by a supercomputer, but rather to offer an analogy that can help explain why Kant would say that the scientific picture of things is just as much phenomenal as our naïve picture of things. It’s a more helpful picture of the phenomenal world, offering us more detail and precision and incorporating an understanding of how the phenomenal self (the self as an object of experience that can be studied) interacts with other phenomenal objects to produce “second-order phenomena.” But noumenal reality is just as out of reach after science has done this work than ever before. The scientific picture is still just a picture, a way that things appear to us--and the question of how closely appearances track reality remains an open question.

Let me come at this idea from a very different angle—specifically, from an introspective one. Consciousness has a shape to it. Among other things, there is a subjective pole and an objective one—there is that which experiences and then there is that which is experienced. There’s also the matter of how we experiences, and this connects to another feature of our introspective sense of ourselves. In addition to being subjects of experience, we also seem to be agents. That is, we will things to happen which we can then observe happening.

And the center of our agency seems to be located in the same “place,” so to speak, as the subject of consciousness. It’s as if there is this “self” that is capable of both receptivity and activity—capable both of receiving something from the outside world in the form of conscious awareness, and of deciding to engage the world in various ways (by deciding what to look at, what to ignore, what to delight in and what to despise, as well as deciding how to move one’s body and the like).

Now there is a kind of activity we can pursue—an activity called objective observation—that is really about turning our attention to what we find at the objective pole of experience—the “phenomena”—and then study them in an unbiased way so as to accurately and with great precision and detail describe what we actually find there at the objective pole of experience (as opposed, say, to describing what we wish were there).

The aim is to get an “objective” understanding of what we observe, that is, an undistorted picture of what lies at the objective pole of consciousness—by which we mean a picture that hasn’t been distorted by other things that are at work in our consciousness, especially such things as desires and hopes and aversions and fears. Of course, insofar as we receive the object through our senses and in terms of our concepts and categories of understanding, what we find at the objective pole of consciousness is not the “thing in itself” but the thing as mediated by these faculties. In that sense, then, there is no such thing as an undistorted object of consciousness. Every object of experience comes to us in a form shaped by our means of apprehension and suited to our modes of cognition.

But still, there are influences on how we characterize what is on the objective pole of consciousness that aren’t part of the fixed laws by which our minds present and conceptualize experience. And these variable influences are likely to be numerous. We are rarely merely passive in relation to phenomena. We engage and interact with them. We make value judgments about them. We have feelings about them. We hope they will be like this. We are afraid the will be like that. We hate what they seem to be like. We love what we find there and don’t want it to change.

But at some point in human history it was discovered that there is something to be gained by suppressing all of this interactive engagement with phenomena and trying, instead, just to observe them--that is, to be wholly receptive in relation to them, so that we can come to discern what is there at the objective pole of consciousness with a degree of detail and accuracy that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Put another way, there is something to be gained from really paying attention to what sits at the point of interface between the conscious self and to "other."

Of course, what we gain from this receptive attention has to do with our active side: if we interact with things based on beliefs about them derived from such pure observation, the results are more predictable (things behave and respond the way we expect them to) and hence generally more rewarding. Put another way, our active engagement with the phenomenal world is more successful, at least in terms of prediction and control, to the extent that we base our decisions about what to do on views about that world derived from careful observation—observation that aims to set aside any psychological factors which might interfere with the phenomenal object presenting itself to us “as it is.”

Again, what is presenting itself to us when we strive for such objective receptivity is, from a Kantian standpoint, still the phenomenal object as opposed to the thing in itself. But there’s this sense that the phenomenal object that we encounter through such objective observation is more to be trusted. And so it’s quite natural to suppose that a phenomenal object received in this way—through purely receptive attention, or what is generally called unbiased observation—offers clues to noumenal reality that can be found nowhere else.

And this, I think, is the premise around which science grows. If we focus our attention on the objective pole of consciousness, and endeavor to adopt an attitude of pure receptivity to what the objects at that pole give to us, we can then begin to describe the phenomenal world at a level of detail that will uncover an array of clues about the reality that lies behind it.

We collect a set of observations—for example, the observations spelled out in the ideal gas laws. We note that at a constant temperature, volume and pressure have an inverse proportional relationship (Boyle’s Law). At a constant pressure, volume and temperature are directly proportional (Charles’ Law). At a constant volume, pressure and temperature are directly proportional (Gay-Lussac’s Law).

But instead of being content with merely describing these recurring patterns, we treat them as clues. We speculate about what the gases have to be like—and what pressure and temperature are really measuring—in order for these observations to hold true. We construct a mechanistic model: Gases are really tiny particles in constant, random motion. Pressure measures the frequency with which these particles strike the container in which the gas is housed. Temperature measures the velocity at which these particles are moving.

And so we now arrive at the kinetic theory of gases. But we ask ourselves why we should believe that this model captures the reality behind appearances. Since detached observation of phenomena brought us this far, we appeal to it again. We ask what else we might observe if this kinetic theory of gases is true. And then we try to observe it.

This process continues. The same “particles” that were postulated in the kinetic theory of gases come up in other models used to makes sense of other observations. While we cannot observe them directly, we use our growing grasp of the rules by which the phenomenal world works to create devices that “see” them for us. We make observations about them—and then proceed to model them to make sense of these observations. We conceive of them as made up of smaller particles—some forming a nucleus around which others orbit. We refine this model. We begin to examine everything, including our own bodies and brains, in terms of these powerful models. The models are progressively refined in the light of what we observe--and are themselves explained in terms of more basic models which postulate more basic particles and more basic rules (which we reify in terms of concepts such as “forces” and “physical constants”).

And at some point we become convinced that this picture has taken us beyond phenomena to reality itself. We think that what we are doing, as we engage in this process, is using the careful examination of the phenomenal world to piece together a picture of the underlying noumenal reality. The process that starts with ignoring everything in consciousness but what is at the objective pole, that proceeds by setting aside the influence of any elements of our consciousness that might interfere with pure receptivity to what the objective pole presents us with, and then lets the active element of ourselves back in at the point of constructing models to explain what is observed—this process is taken to put us in touch with noumenal reality, at least in part.  The pragmatic usefulness that this method affords in terms of prediction and control of the phenomenal world is take as evidence that we are steadily aligning our beliefs with the reality that lies behind appearances. And it is a short step from this judgment to the belief that this same process has the power, at least in principle, to give us all of noumenal reality, the whole world as it is in itself (if only we could somehow carry the scientific project to completion and generate a flawless unifying model of every empirical observation). And so, if anything is posited to exist which in principle could not be discovered through this process, then it is dismissed as "supernatural."

This is what I take metaphysical naturalism to be: the view that the picture of the world that emerges through the exercise of the scientific method (roughly as described here) is an exhaustive picture of the fundamental reality behind the world of appearances. In other words, it is the view that noumenal reality is to be identified with the scientific picture of the world—or, more precisely, with the picture of the world that the scientific method would ultimately produce if it were able to achieve and adequately test an ultimate model of everything. In any event, the idea is that science is bringing us ever closer to an exhaustive grasp of noumenal reality. As such, metaphysical naturalism is a much stronger view than the more modest thesis that science gives us insight into some important feature or dimension of noumenal reality, leaving open the possibility that there are things in the noumenal realm that science cannot even in principle get at.

And so, if the picture that emerges from this scientific process leaves no space for an understanding of ourselves corresponding with our immediate inner experience of ourselves as unified subject and agent, this is taken to show that the noumenal reality about ourselves is at odds with our phenomenal experience of ourselves. If the resultant picture cannot account for entities in the world possessing objective value, then our experience of such a thing must be a subjective projection, produced by an underlying physical reality (the brain)—another case in which noumenal reality is at odds with phenomenal appearances.

Now this identification of noumenal reality with the outcomes of an idealized science cannot be falsified through the scientific method, because that would require that the scientific method offer up a picture of reality at odds with its picture of reality. Science cannot directly access noumenal reality in some way independent of its methodology in order to show it to be at odds with the picture produced by science. Furthermore, if the noumenal reality is at odds with the scientific picture of things, it will likely be because the noumenal reality is related to phenomenal experience in something analogous to the way that the supercomputer-reality is related to the virtual experience of the brains-in-vats. In other words, if the identification of the scientific world picture with ultimate reality is wrong, it will be wrong for reasons that make it impossible to directly show that it is wrong.

One might think, however, that we should believe in the close correspondence between the scientific picture and noumenal reality unless one has been given good reason to doubt it. Unless we have good reasons to think there's a disconnect between appearances and reality as significant as what one has in the brain-in-vat analogy, one should trust that there isn't such a disconnect. Science gives us reason to think there is such a disconnect between everyday appearances and reality, but there is nothing comparable that provides us with reason to suspect a comparable disconnect between scientific appearances and reality. And so, we should trust that scientific appearances connect us with reality, and the default position should be metaphysical naturalism.

There are several problems here. First, there is the question of what is to count as a reason to suspect the identification of scientific models with noumenal reality. Many of the disputes in this blog turn on just this question--a theist offers reasons to be suspicious of the identification, and these reasons are dismissed because (a) they aren't the sorts of reasons that fit with the assumption that what can be scientifically modeled exhausts reality, and (b) scientific modeling provides a means of explaining away as predictable illusion the considerations that have been put forward to challenge the identification.

But let's set aside worries of this sort and accept as legitimate only the kinds of reasons for doubt that scientists typically treat as legitimate. If we do this, then the absence of reasons for doubting the identification of ultimate scientific models with noumenal reality doesn't say much. The absence of reasons for doubt counts in favor of a belief only if we would expect there to be reasons for doubt if the belief is wrong---but this is not the case with the identification between what science depicts and what is ultimately real. The absence of any such reasons for doubting the identification is just what we would expect were noumenal reality as inaccessible to real-world scientists as it is to virtual-world scientists in our analogous case.

Finally, let us return to thinking about the scientific method from our starting place in consciousness.  Science proceeds by intially bracketing (or setting aside for a pragmatic purpose) everything but the objective pole of consciousness. Metaphysical naturalism then identifies the whole of reality with what has been arrived at by paying exclusive attention to this objective pole. The subjective pole of experience, our sense of agency, the deepest longings of the soul, our values—these are reintroduced only once a holistic picture of reality has been constructed without them. Is it any wonder that, according to a holistic picture of reality embraced without paying any attention to anything but what we find at the objective pole of experience, everything other than what we find at the objective pole of experience is judged to be a phenomenal illusion?

Kant, by contrast, was more than prepared to consider the possibility that the scientific picture of reality left things out because, after all, it was just a picture. And so, for example, he looked at the self-understanding that comes from empirical investigation, according to which all things are mechanistically determined by pre-existing conditions and constant natural laws. He saw that this implies that our actions are determined rather than free. But for Kant, all that this showed is that the phenomenal self--the self as an object of experience--is determined. But that doesn't mean the noumenal self is. Moral agency, he argued, makes no sense apart from real freedom--but the determinism of the phenomenal self isn't therefore a bar to affirming moral agency, since we can postulate that the noumenal self is free. He called this a necessary postulate of practical reason (reason that is action-guiding), because in order for reason to be action-guiding the self must be capable of choosing to follow the dictates of reason rather than merely act mechanistically in accord with physical laws. While no scientific picture will show a self that can do this, such pictures are purely phenomenal. And so attributing such determinism to the noumenal self would be both unwarranted and inappropriate, since it would mean the denial of moral responsibility.

One might treat this as a kind of practical wager: Either we are morally responsible for our actions or not. Which is true depends on what the noumenal self is like, something we cannot know. We can postulate that the noumenal self is determined, that we have no moral responsibility for our actions, or we can postulate that the noumenal self is free and that we do have such responsibility. If we postulate the former and are mistaken, then we have abdicated a responsibility that we actually possess. If we postulate the latter and are mistaken, we are just as determined as we ever were. Kant thought that practical reason demands we make the former postulate--that, in other words, practical reason demands we reject metaphysical naturalism.

What I would add to all of this is that our intuitive sense of ourselves is one that affirms free agency. And the fact that the scientific method begins by bracketing all such intuitive affirmations so as to focus exclusively on the objective pole of consciousness is not a good reason to conclude that these intuitive affirmations are false. After all, we should expect that a model of reality that begins by setting these intuitive affirmations aside won't afford them a veridical place in the model.

Of course, it doesn't follow that these intuitive affirmations are true, either. And that practical reason demands that we postulate things about the noumenal realm that transcend what scientific modeling can endorse doesn't entail that the metaphysical naturalist's position is false.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with metaphysical naturalism as a theory about ultimate reality that (as far as we can say at this point in our thinking) might be true but is hardly uncontestable. In my next post I want to consider a range of alternatives to metaphysical naturalism—not merely metaphysical supernaturalism, but also pragmatic naturalism (which Burk gestured towards in a comment on an earlier post in this series) and perhaps some other alternatives as well.

What is Naturalism? Part III: The Quest for a Pathway to the Noumenal

In the last post, we looked at Kant’s distinction between phenomena (objects as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves), and we saw that Kant took the noumenal realm to be entirely inaccessible to human understanding. Whatever is knowable by human beings is knowable by virtue of being presented to us in experience—and anything that is presented to us in experience is a phenomenon. Furthermore, phenomena are not only presented in a form that says more about our mode of apprehension than it does about the things being apprehended (their spatio-temporal properties are an example of this), but any effort to understand them necessarily involves putting them into conceptual categories that, at the most basic level, say more about the nature of human cognition than than they do about the objects being conceptualized.
So, the object of experience is an appearance, not a thing-in-itself (which is beyond the reach of cognition). All our knowledge is thus knowledge of appearances. But the world of appearances has a givenness to it: it is a world we have to come to grips with, a world that operates according to rules that hold regardless of what we might wish. Put in simple terms, this world of appearances is the world in which we live our lives—and even though it is in part constructed by our distinctively human cognitive faculties, its features are beyond our conscious control or will. Space and time won’t go away just because we wish them to—they are an inextricable part of the world of experience.

For these reasons, Kant calls the world of appearances “empirical reality”—it is real in the sense that it’s a given, something we have to come to grips with. But even though space and time are therefore “empirically real,” they are not for Kant a feature of things as they are in themselves apart from our experience. They are, rather, the necessary form in which our faculties of perception present objects to us in experience. Kant captures this idea by saying that space and time, while empirically real, are transcendentally ideal. That is, they are a real part of the empirical world (the world of phenomena) but not of the noumena that lie behind or beyond the empirical world.

If all of this is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And, as I pointed out in the last post, this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.

I’m speaking, of course, of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Both thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience.

So: the self that has experiences is a noumenal reality. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel believed that this fact could be made use of, so that somehow the self could serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway through the wall of mystery, into an understanding of reality as it is in itself.

But this understanding couldn’t be achieved by simply turning our attention on ourselves. As soon as we do that we’ve made ourselves into an object of experience, and this object is just as likely to be the product of our own cognitive reconstructions as any other object. In other words, what we are presented with when we investigate ourselves introspectively is the phenomenal self, not the noumenal self. The self as it appears to itself may be radically unlike the self as it is in itself.

In briefest terms, Hegel’s solution to this conundrum was his dialectical method. If my understanding of myself is at odds with what I am in myself, Hegel thought this would become apparent as I attempt to be (in practice) what I take myself to be (in theory). There arises a clash between my self-concept and what the self really is, a clash that manifests itself as a “contradiction,” one that then forces a revision in my self-understanding. When I try on this new self-understanding and attempt to live it out, another contradiction emerges. And so on. The resulting “dialectic” (Hegel’s name for this evolutionary process) continues until (at the end of history, so to speak) I finally reach a self-understanding that generates no contradictions when lived out. At that point, the phenomenal self has collapsed into the noumenal self—and I come to see what I am in myself.

According to Hegel’s own developed philosophy, the vision I have of my noumenal self turns out to be not just a vision of one small piece of the noumenal realm, but rather a vision of the Absolute (Hegel’s term for the ultimate noumenal reality). And this makes sense, insofar as an understanding of the self cannot be divorced from an understanding of broader reality. A materialist understanding of the self is wedded to a materialist understanding of the universe, etc.

Let’s leave Hegel aside for a moment to consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the same conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.

And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment. One may not be able to adequately put this experience into propositional terms that can be affirmed as true, but that doesn’t mean one hasn’t in some sense encountered noumenal reality. One hasn’t encountered it as an object of experience (since that would turn it into a phenomenon). Rather, one encounters it in the way one experiences.

The challenge, then, is to attempt to articulate this encounter in a way that is meaningful to us--in other words, in a way that our cognitive minds can grasp and affirm. The encounter itself is what Schleiermacher calls “religion.” The effort to articulate this encounter is theology. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that theology risks turning this profound mystical experience into just another phenomenon unless something like Hegel’s methodology guides the theological discipline. And so, rather than treating the approaches of Schleiermacher and Hegel as alternatives, I treat them as complementary pieces of a broader strategy. In effect, as we spiral up through the Hegelian dialectic, one of the most important things to do is pay attention to what implications our self-understanding has for the interpretation of mystical experience. Contradictions that arise on this front are uniquely significant in driving the evolution of our self-understanding

But defending the merits of this approach will have to wait for another time, because my aim here is simply to describe one broad strategy for trying to get beyond the Kantian wall of mystery that hides noumenal reality from us. And my main reason for describing this broad strategy is to offer a point of contrast with the view that I take metaphysical naturalists to be espousing.

Make no mistake: like Hegel and Schleiermacher, metaphysical naturalists think there is a way to get beyond appearances to things-as-they-are-in-themselves. But for the metaphysical naturalist, the method isn’t Hegel’s philosophical one of pushing successive self-concepts to the point of rational untenability, nor is it Schleiermacher’s method of critically reflecting on alternative interpretations of mystical experience. Rather, the method is a scientific one of describing the phenomenal world, modeling it in essentially mechanistic or mathematical terms (that is, conceiving a general mechanism that might produce the range of phenomena we observe, or a coming up with a mathematical formula that these varied observations all fit into), and then testing and refining the models in the light of further phenomenal observations.

What the metaphysical naturalist claims is that this method gets us past appearances to things as they are in themselves—or at least it moves us ever closer to an understanding of reality as it is apart from our experience of it. The question is why one might think that, and why one might be skeptical. And while I had originally thought to take up that question in this post, my lead-up to it took more space than I had expected—so it will be the topic of the next.

What is Naturalism? Part II: Kant’s Phenomenal/Noumenal Distinction

In my previous post I started a series in which I hope to shed some light on the distinction between "metaphysical naturalism" and contrary ontological positions. I began there with an overview of the position I want to develop. Today, I want to look more closely at a key distinction that I will make use of throughout this series—specifically, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena.

For Kant, the “phenomenon” refers to the object of experience—or, perhaps better, the object as experienced. The “noumenon” refers to the thing as it is in itself. Thus, there is for Kant the phenomenal or empirical world, which will inevitably be constituted in part by the faculties we rely on to interact with the underlying reality; and then there is the noumenal world— reality “as it truly is in itself,” we might say, apart from our experience of and cognitive engagement with it. In oversimplified terms, what we have here is the distinction between appearance and reality.


Kant makes several important points with respect to this distinction in The Critique of Pure Reason. First, the phenomenon is the object as given to us in sense perception, or through what Kant also refers to as an “empirical/sensible intuition” (for Kant, to “intuit” something is to be, in a sense, presented with it through some faculty of apprehension; and empirical intuition is contrasted with the kind of apprehension we have of mathematical objects, which Kant calls a “pure intuition”).

Second, sense perception or “empirical intuition” presents objects to us in a certain form—specifically, phenomena always come to us as situated in space and time. But this, Kant argues, is a feature of our sensory faculties, not a feature of things in themselves. In Kant’s words, “space and time are only forms of sensible intuition, therefore conditions of the existence of things as appearances only.” Put another way, our perceptual faculties are designed so as to spontaneously organize sensory inputs in spatio-temporal terms, so that the phenomenal objects given to us through perception are always located in space and time. But it doesn’t follow from this that spatio-temporal location is a feature of noumena, that is, of objects as they are in themselves.

As Kant puts it, “…space is nothing if we leave out of consideration the condition of all possible experience, and assume it as something on which things in themselves are in any way dependent.” That is, space is meaningful only as attributed to the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world), not when it is attributed to the world as it is in itself.

Third, humans are not merely awash in a sea of sensory experience. We aren’t just presented with phenomenal objects. We also think about them. We make judgments about them and can come to know things about them. And this requires concepts. One of Kant’s most important ideas is that there are certain basic laws by which human cognition operates. More specifically, our minds have these basic concepts or “categories of the understanding” by which we make sense of “intuitions”—and it is only through the work of these categories (which include the categories of cause and effect, by the way) that we can formulate propositions about the phenomenal objects we intuit.

Let’s put it this way: when we passively experience the “external” world, what comes to us immediately is already merely an “appearance” rather than the thing in itself. But as human beings, we rarely just experience the world passively—and whenever we try to do something more (whenever we form beliefs about the world) we do so in terms of conceptual categories that are a part of our cognitive make-up rather than part of reality “in itself.” This means that the object of the understanding—the object as something we can have beliefs about, learn things about, etc.—is in a sense even further removed from the noumenon, the “thing as it is in itself,” than is the uncomprehended phenomenal object (what we might suppose is experienced by the newborn baby).

For these reasons Kant draws a very sharp line between the world of phenomenal objects that we can study and learn things about and the world of things-in-themselves (the noumenal world). In fact, Kant was convinced that our knowledge could never reach beyond the realm of phenomena. He thought we could confidently say there is a noumenal reality, a thing in itself, that isn’t identical with the phenomenal object we directly encounter in experience. While he’s convinced that “all theoretical knowledge of reason is limited to objects of experience,” that is, to phenomenal objects as presented by intuition and conceptualized by our cognition, he also thinks “that this leaves perfectly open to us to think the same objects as things in themselves, though we cannot know them. For otherwise we should arrive at the absurd conclusion that there is appearance without something that appears.”

So, in summary: we can know that there are things-in-themselves or noumena, we cannot know anything about them. The objects of perception are already shaped by the process of being perceived, and are further shaped by the conceptual categories we must make use of in order to even begin to formulate knowledge claims. The objects of our knowledge are therefore necessarily, inescapably, objects that we have helped to construct through our sensory and cognitive apparatuses. Things as they are in themselves are thus utterly unknowable.

This doesn’t mean we can’t postulate things about noumena. In fact, Kant thought we had to do so. He was convinced that making sense of ourselves as moral agents requires us to make postulates about the noumenal realm (especially about the noumenal self—me as I am in myself as opposed to me as the object of my experience). But these postulates are just that. They are not knowledge. Knowledge of the noumenal is impossible.

If you take Kant seriously about all of this, then his perspective has some very important implications. One is this: whatever scientists discover, through whatever methodologies they employ, will never be an understanding of reality itself. At best, science will be the project of describing in painstaking detail the world of appearances (what Kant called the empirical world) and constructing helpful conceptual models for engaging with it in ways that, we might say, decrease the frequency with which we are surprised.

Predictably, many scientists have historically been loath to accept this implication—as have philosophers and theologians. Scholars in various disciplines have sought to pierce the wall of mystery that Kant erected—some by defending a “direct realism” which denies the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, others by acknowledging the distinction but looking for some method of inquiry that can take us through the wall into the noumenal world. Ultimately, I think metaphysical naturalism is a claim to the effect that scientists have found a way to pierce that wall—that, in other words, what they are modeling for us on the basis of their methodologies isn’t just a useful way to engage with the phenomenal world but is, actually, a picture of reality as it is in itself.

As such, metaphysical naturalists are in the same camp as others—such as Hegel and Schleiermacher—who have been unwilling to accept that the veil between us and noumenal reality is utterly impenetrable. But they are looking in a very different place for the way to peek beyond the veil.

But these last points are ones I will develop in my next post in the series.

What is Naturalism? Part I: An Overview

What is naturalism? Or more precisely, what is metaphysical naturalism—naturalism viewed as a theory about reality? This is the question I intend to explore in a series of posts that will, hopefully, do a couple of things once we’re finished: first, clarify some issues that come up repeatedly on this blog; second, set the stage for more precisely characterizing (in future posts) the roughly Hegelian method for trying to understand reality which I tend to favor.

So, what is metaphysical naturalism? To say that it’s a theory which rejects the existence of the supernatural isn’t especially helpful, since what’s really at issue when we ask this question is precisely how to draw the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural.” For this reason, some choose to define metaphysical naturalism by reference to science. On this understanding, to be a metaphysical naturalist is to believe that what can be studied scientifically exhausts what is “real.”

This approach strikes me as in the ballpark, assuming we can specify the “scientific method” of inquiry in a sufficiently narrow way, and assuming that we can do so without appeal to the natural/supernatural distinction. A key move in contemporary efforts to characterize the scientific method (and one I’m sure I’ve resorted to myself) is to say that scientists are methodologically naturalistic. In other words, to do science is to look for naturalistic explanations rather than supernatural ones. Obviously, if we define or characterize the scientific method in these terms, we won’t be able to define naturalism by reference to science without finding ourselves right in the middle of a vicious circle.

What I propose to do here is pursue a definition of metaphysical naturalism (and by implication metaphysical supernaturalism) in relation to a method of inquiry that at least characterizes much of what scientists take themselves to be doing. Whether this method is coextensive with the scientific method is an issue I won’t take a stand on here (I suspect it's not, especially not at the level at which theoretical physicists operate).

With respect to both the method of inquiry I wish to describe and the definition of naturalism in relation to this method, my intention is to appeal to Kant’s distinction between phenomena (in brief, appearances) and noumena (the realities that underlie appearances).

In this post, however, I want to offer a kind of overview of the position I will be developing. By necessity, this overview will gloss over lots of details which will be fleshed out more carefully in subsequent posts—so concepts and distinctions that aren’t as clear as one may wish for here will hopefully be fleshed out in future posts. My objective in this post is to provide enough of an overview of the forest so that, once we’re in the midst of the trees, we’ll be less likely to get lost.

In briefest terms, then, what I will argue is this: there is a method of inquiry widely used by scientists which makes use of “phenomenal/empirical observations" to generate models of how the world works, models which are not themselves directly observed (phenomena) but which would have phenomenal effects that are. Such models are accepted on two conditions: first, we must be able to predict further phenomenal observations based on them; and second, those predictions must consistently come true.

This methodology ultimately generates a picture of the world which I’ll call (for lack of a better term) a “scientific picture.” And the scientific picture that has emerged today is very different from the way the world immediately appears to us (the phenomenal world). What I will propose is that metaphysical naturalism is the theory that the noumenal world in roughly Kant’s sense (what really is the case apart from our experience of it) is to be identified with this scientific picture.

More precisely, noumenal reality is to be identified with the scientific picture that would ultimately emerge once this methodology has been pursued to completion—that is, to the point at which no more refinement in the picture is possible because all actual and potential phenomenal observations have been perfectly modeled. Stated in these terms, it should be clear that, on this naturalist hypothesis, we will never actually arrive at a full understanding of the noumenal realm, but will steadily come closer and closer to it the more we rely exclusively on this “scientific” method of inquiry for developing our understanding of reality.

In any event, that’s a summary of what I take “metaphysical naturalism” to be. But a fully adequate articulation of this naturalist thesis—one which exposes both its strengths and weaknesses and helps us to better conceptualize the alternatives to it—will require a more in-depth look at several things, including Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal distinction.

My next post will therefore be about that.

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.

Considering the Effects of Spiritual Practices on the Brain

Since I’m starting up a new semester (but the kids haven’t started school yet), I’ve been dividing my time equally between course preparation and parenting (my son is in my office with me as I write this). Thus, I don’t have much time to work on the blog these days. And so, in lieu of something more time-consuming, such as the next (and likely final) chapter in my biblical inerrancy series, I invite readers to read and share their thoughts about a Reuters article that appeared yesterday: “Faith Rites Boost Brains, Even for Atheists.”

The article discusses a recent book by Andrew Newberg (How God Changes Your Brain) that addresses some current research into the impact that religious practices—meditation and meditative prayer in particular—have on the brain. The research discussed in this article isn’t totally new (I’ve read about similar findings off an on for a few years). But it is interesting and worth reflecting on. What follows are a few of the questions and ideas that reading the article generates for me (to the extent that I can express them clearly while a six-year old builds an elaborate tunnel system in my office using the packing boxes I haven’t yet filled with books for the impending office move).

The obvious lesson in this article is that science is able to discern, through its empirical methods, effects that certain religious practices have on the brain—effects that, at least in terms of their correlation with states of consciousness, most would judge to be positive. Beyond this obvious lesson, there is much that deserves reflection and debate.

One such issue relates to the positive value that is generally attributed to the psychological products of the spiritual practices in question: greater compassion, a deeper sense of connectedness with the world and other beings in that world, greater “peace of mind,” etc. Of course, these things are widely desired and valued. But is that all there is to it? Or are they things that ought to be valued? Is there a reason why they should be valued, even by those who, as a matter of contingent psychology, fail to value them? And if so, what are those reasons? More basic contingent desires? Then we can ask the same questions at a deeper level. If we think that some things ought to be valued apart from contingent desire (as I do), we need to look for an answer to the question, “What makes these psychological states categorically valuable?” The answer will not rest in empirical facts about the brain. As such, and insofar as the positive value of the states produced by spiritual practice is integral to what makes them significant, we cannot fully appreciate the fruits of spiritual practice through brain science alone.

A second issue relates to a point that some readers of this blog are likely to make: namely, this research demonstrates that the positive benefits of religious practices can be divorced from the metaphysical beliefs about reality which so often operate as both motivation and interpretative framework for these practices. I essentially agree with this. I don’t think you have to, say, believe in God or in a universal spirit or in the illusory nature of the world of ordinary experience in order to benefit from meditative practices. The same is true about a lot of things. Food nourishes you regardless of your specific beliefs about eating and what it does to your body. Drinking plenty of water is beneficial regardless of what beliefs you have about what happens to you when you drink water and why drinking it is good for you. The real question is not whether these practices impact the brain in discernible ways, ways that correlate with beneficial changes in consciousness, but what implications this fact has, if any, for the reasonableness of various metaphysical beliefs.

There is also the question of describing what is going on in the agent, at the level of consciousness. That is, what are we, as conscious agents, doing when we meditate? Simone Weil, whose provocative and challenging reflections on her own mystical experiences have been deeply influential on my own thinking, describes meditative prayer as an exercise in absolute attention—an attention that isn’t directed towards anything in the field of empirical experience nor to any construct of the imagination. In her view, it is a matter of opening up a place in consciousness that is free from all the things that usually vie for our attention—sense experiences as well as our inner thoughts and ideas and imaginings. Meditation is about paying absolute attention to that which is not these things, and as such is really a matter of opening up an empty space in consciousness, a space of quiet waiting.

Of course, Weil interprets what happens next in the following way: the “God” that transcends human concepts and categories, that transcends empirical experience, floods into the empty space that we have made. As such, she’d interpret the current brain science as offering a picture of how the brain responds to the inflow of the divine. By contrast, many naturalists will argue that current brain research belies this interpretation, because there is no reason to suppose that any such grand encounter with a mysterious and otherwise inaccessible order of reality is happening when we can just explain religious experience as nothing more than the by-product of a distinctive sort of brain activity.

My own view is that there is a reason to interpret religious experience in something falling within the broad family of interpretations to which Weil’s belongs (even if, all things considered, that reason may not prove decisive). The reason is provided by what the experience “feels like” from the inside, so to speak. It feels like a veridical encounter with something other than what we are connected to in ordinary experience.

The naturalist account of spiritual experience is, I think, inspired by a suspicion of taking such subjective “feelings” as having any evidentiary value worth attending to. On a more basic level, it seems to be rooted in the insistence that the same kinds of evidentiary standards that drive science should be followed in all domains of human inquiry—even when the questions we ask are ones to which such standards simply cannot be applied (and hence become questions that it is either pointless to ask, meaningless to ask, or about which the only answer we should ever give is silence). But this leads to yet another question: What is lost, and what is gained, by such an insistence?

In some ways, different answers to this question may lie at the root of the disagreement between metaphysical naturalists and those progressive supernaturalists who treat science as authoritative but not exhaustive in its account of the reality we inhabit.

A Few Thoughts Concerning Naturalism: Five Sketches

A Partial Response to Burk Braun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extensive Comments on Another Blog

I recently stumbled across a blog entry on "Atheist Spirituality." My comment on it sparked a response, which in turn led me to offer a further series of comments (since what I had to say was too lengthy to fit in a single comment). These comments basically amounted to an overview and qualified defense of the recent book by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, entitled Naturalism (it's a critique of metaphysical naturalism). I should probably have simply posted my comments here and offered a link on that website, but what's done is done. And so I do the opposite, and invite readers of my blog to see what I said there.

In any event, this will give my readers something to look at while they wait for the next post in my "Authority without Inerrancy?" series...due out soon, if only I can stop being distracted by such pesky things as grading and commenting on other people's blogs.

Objectivity and the Longings of the Soul

A commentator on my last post, Tom Clark, nicely expresses in his own words the same “ethical view” about our epistemic duties expressed by Charles Taylor (a view that Taylor, by the way, does not share). The view is roughly this: Since Christians (and, I presume, other religious believers) are forming beliefs about the way reality is, it is imperative that they do so with a dedication to making sure that they aren’t influenced by anything but the evidence—and certainly not by their desires.

In Clark’s words, “If you’re interested in getting a maximally unbiased, objective view on reality, then you should take all possible steps to insulate your knowledge claims from the influence of your hopes, longings, etc. Since Christianity presents itself as an objective worldview, one that makes claims about what really exists (e.g., god), its followers should…seek to ‘avoid at all cost the risk of being duped by an alluring illusion.’”

This is a compelling view, one to which many are drawn. It is one of the two basic schemes of thinking that William James identifies as vying for our allegiance. But there are complicating factors.

One such complicating factor has to do with the distinction between knowledge claims and other sorts of affirmations of belief. It is always dangerous to claim knowledge where what one has is something else. This is what happens, I think, in the case of fanatical religion. But not all religion is fanatical. Religious belief needn’t adopt false pretensions of knowledge where one’s belief is really a kind of pragmatic decision to live one’s life as if a hoped-for possibility is true (which is what I and many others mean by “faith”). And there is a real question about whether the demand for “a maximally unbiased, objective view” that precludes being moved by your longings and hopes should prevail in every sphere of belief, even at the level of one’s meaning-bestowing worldview, even when it comes to belief that is explicitly identified as a matter of “faith,” not knowledge.

Another factor that complicates any simple picture of our epistemic responsibilities is concisely expressed by Taylor himself when he considers the two stances William James identifies as vying for our allegiance. In Taylor’s words: “Each stance creates in a sense a total environment, in the sense that whatever considerations occur in one appear transformed in the other. They can’t be appealed to in order to decide the issue, because as they pass from one stance to the other they bear a changed meaning that robs them of their force in the new environment.”

From the one stance, the deepest longings of the soul are treated as a dangerous temptation away from one’s “Cliffordian” epistemic duty (to believe only in accord with the evidence), whereas from the other stance they are treated as (again in Taylor’s words) “the hint that there is something important here which we need to explore further, that this exploration can lead us to something of vital significance, which would otherwise be closed to us.”

This religious-leaning stance is routinely viewed by those on the other side as displaying an unacceptable indifference to truth. But that is a mischaracterization on several levels. As James points out, there are two broadly epistemic goals that have to be in view when one is forming beliefs about the nature of reality: connecting with the truth, and avoiding error. And these two goals are to an important degree in tension with one another. An epistemic practice that tries to maximize the number of truths to which one gives one’s intellectual assent may also increase the number of falsehoods to which one assents. And an epistemic practice that tries to minimize assent to falsehood may also, in the process, shut off the possibility of assenting to whole classes of truth.

Every philosopher recognizes this trade off, and few are prepared to give the goal of error-avoidance absolute dominion in the epistemic sphere. After all, the consequence of doing so is a radical skepticism which we cannot really sustain when we get on with the business of living our lives. Likewise, few are willing to open the floodgates of complete credulity.

So the real question isn’t whether one or the other of these epistemic goals should rule the day. The question is really about what kind of balance we should pursue, and what belief-forming strategies are acceptable in the attempt to find that balance. James sees passion as playing an inevitable role in this decision, even for those who choose the strict regimen of pursuing “maximally unbiased” thinking by taking “all possible steps to insulate your knowledge claims from the influence of your hopes, longings, etc.” Ironically, what motivates this decision may be nothing more than a deep longing to avoid error, to escape the risk of living under a false picture of the world. All other longings are sacrificed to this singular one.

My own view is that there isn’t one belief-forming strategy that should be required of all of us on the basis of some a priori considerations. My own inclination here is more democratic and experimental. We should afford space for people to live out different alternatives to see how well they work.

Now in the sphere of scientific inquiry, it seems pretty obvious that a certain strategy of inquiry, one that is error-averse and seeks to insulate the process of inquiry from the inquirer’s desires, has proved extremely effective in advancing human understanding of the empirical world. In fact, the success of science is so obvious to any who aren’t blinkered by ideology that within its sphere of inquiry we can rightly say that it has proved itself.

But it doesn’t follow that this same scientific strategy should be transferred to spheres of human belief formation which in principle lie outside the limits of science. When it comes to meaning-bestowing beliefs about the transcendent, or what might be more simply called “religious beliefs,” the scientific approach would dictate a kind of silence, that is, a refusal to form any beliefs at all (which for practical purposes would amount to disbelief).

And it is here that James’ thinking once again becomes salient. As James puts it, “I… cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules of truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for the plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”

The conclusion here is a wholly negative one: the rules of belief formation exemplified by science should not be relied upon when it comes to religious beliefs. What this negative conclusion opens up is a question: What rules, then, should we follow?

Some strategies have been tried and, in my judgment, have proven themselves to be abject failures in the field of human experience. One such failed strategy is the idea that religious questions are best settled by blind allegiance to the literal meaning of some purported revelatory text or central authority. That some still cling to this strategy is, in my view, more troublesome than the fact that some cling in the religious sphere to what James calls “the agnostic rules of truth-seeking.”

So what are we to do? I don’t think we will arrive at the best strategy through some a priori principles. Instead, I think we will do so through a spirit of democratic experimentation. People should be free to live out alternative strategies for forming their religious beliefs. That is, we should establish a secular society in which freedom of religion is guaranteed within certain parameters (parameters that have themselves been arrived at through social experimentation, and have been found to keep the more dangerous experiments from getting out of hand).

In my own life, I’ve found a roughly Hegelian approach to be the most compelling. It is an approach that might be called “critical traditionalism”: live out an inherited worldview to see how well it works, and revise it when it crashes up against lived experience; then live out the revised worldview to see how well it works, etc.

And when deciding which worldview to adopt in this critical way, I don’t think you can do better than to choose the one that sings to you, that resonates most with who you are and with the deepest longings of your soul. Only such a worldview will hold your interest and passion enough to enable you to really live it out, and hence really discover the merits and limitations of doing so.

While this line of thinking is all I want to develop for the moment, I do want to stress that I haven’t developed in the above reflections a stream of argument beautifully advanced by Hermann Lotze, and powerfully summarized in the introduction to his magnum opus, the Microcosmus. Lotze challenges with distinctive eloquence the view that, in the overarching business of living a human life (as opposed to, say, the more narrow business of scientific or academic inquiry) we should set aside our deepest longings in favor of a strict regimen of avoiding being duped. To do so amounts to sacrificing all that is most important in one’s life to the altar of objectivity—and while objectivity is an important value that needs to be afforded its place, it is hardly the only value. The question of how these diverse values should play out in the business of shaping our view of life, and hence how we live, is one that cannot and should not be answered too hastily, or without due attention to the many voices—including religious ones—that have something of significance to say.

Naturalist vs. Supernaturalist: Identifying the Chief Points of Contention

Last week I posted John Shook’s reply to my “Evaluating the Unfalsifiable” post, along with a few general comments about it. But it seems to me that for the sake of a more careful discussion, it might help to lay out the core of Shook’s argument more formally. What I present in this post is, first, my attempt to lay out his main line of argument as fairly and accurately as I can; second, an identification and brief discussion of the premises with which I (and, I suspect, other religiously inclined philosophers) disagree; and third, a reflection on what I ultimately suspect will be the most likely outcome of serious philosophical reflection on the choice between naturalism and supernaturalism. I begin, then, with a kind of formalization of Shook’s argument:

1. Supernaturalism will either be a vague assertion that there is “something more,” or it will involve specific beliefs about the supernatural, that is, endorsement of a particular religious creed.
2. Supernaturalism that is a vague assertion that there is “something more” is what Shook calls “Theology in the Dark,” and such supernaturalism is vacuous and hence unacceptable.
3. So, a substantive supernaturalism will have to involve specific beliefs about the supernatural—that is, endorsement of a particular religious creed.
4. Endorsement of a particular religious creed will require the supernaturalist to “explain away” the religious experiences of all those people (inevitably millions) who ascribe to a different religious creed.
5. If the supernaturalist is forced to explain away the religious experiences of all those who ascribe to a different religious creed, then the supernaturalist’s worldview has no real advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining religious experience.
6. So, supernaturalism has no real advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining religious experience.
7. While some species of naturalism have difficulty explaining the apparent objectivity of value experiences, Dewey’s pragmatic version of naturalism explains (rather than explains away) this apparent objectivity of values as well as any version of supernaturalism does (without smuggling in any assumptions about transcendent values).
8. If (7), then supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining human value experiences.
9. So, supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining human value experiences.
10. If supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining either religious experience or value experiences, then it has no advantage in its capacity to explain human experience (hereafter, its explanatory power).
11. So, supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of its explanatory power.
12. If the supernaturalist’s worldview has no advantage over naturalism in terms of its explanatory power, then the simpler worldview (the worldview that posits fewer theoretic entities) should be preferred.
13. Naturalism is simpler than supernaturalism.
14. Therefore, naturalism is preferable to supernaturalism

As a way of helping to isolate key points of contention between myself (and supernaturalists like me) and Shook (and naturalists like him), let me briefly identify the premises with which I disagree in this argument, along with what amounts to a very cursory sketch of the strategy I would pursue in challenging these premises.

First, I disagree with premise 2. While my own theology is more substantive that the vague supernaturalism of, say, many Unitarians, I do not think that this vague supernaturalism is wholly vacuous. Here, I would gesture to R.M. Hare’s idea of a “blik,” a kind of way of seeing or experiencing one’s life. I think that a vague supernaturalism constitutes a different blik than does naturalism, one that has an impact on the overall character of one’s lived experience. It grounds a way of life characterized by spiritual practices that seek to open the individual to a relational connection with this vague “something more.” These practices frequently culminate in “mystical” experiences (of varying degrees of intensity) that feel like the attainment of such a relational connection—and these experiences in turn have impact on the life of the individual, especially in terms of mood (they tend to elevate mood), outlook (they tend to promote optimism), and character (they tend to lead to less self-centeredness).

Second, I disagree with premise 4, for reasons along the same general lines as those mentioned by John Kronen in his posted comments to Shook’s argument. Basically, there is a difference between experience and its interpretation. Much of the disagreement among the great world religions occurs at the level of interpretation (and to a great extent, also, at the level of doctrinal teachings that have little connection with experience). Admittedly, the distinction here is muddier than it sounds, and some careful philosophical work needs to be done to fully develop this line of thought. There are many good thinkers who have done some of that work. Schleiermacher is one. William James is another. And there’s Walter Stace and R.C. Zaehner. More recently, we have John Hick. While these great thinkers have important differences and disagreements, they are all provocative, and their ideas and arguments are worth meditating on.

Third, there is premise 7. Now Shook has devoted a large portion of his career to interpreting and defending Dewey’s thought. And so if Shook says there’s something here worth examining carefully, we should take him seriously. And so, the other day, I tracked down my copy of Shook’s book, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, and started looking through it. A few things became quickly clear to me. First, it will take a great deal of effort to figure out exactly what Dewey means, even with Shook’s guidance. Second, Dewey’s thought is both provocative and controversial. I am grateful that Dewey has devotees such as John Shook willing to devote their careers to advancing Dewey’s thought, just as I am grateful that Aquinas and Kant and Hegel have such devotees. I’m a bit saddened that some other truly great philosophers (such as Hermann Lotze) do not. But it also seems to me, in the case of all of these great thinkers, that there is both much to admire and much to criticize. What these philosophers are tackling is just too difficult to expect any one of them to have the final word. While I am grateful for John Shook’s devotion to Dewey, I don’t share it.

Finally, there is premise 12, which says that the simpler worldview should be preferred over the more complex one if the more complex one lacks any advantage in terms of explanatory power. Formulated in this way, the premise leaves out something that I’m sure Shook would not want to leave out—namely, pragmatic value. What should really be said here is that the simpler theory should be preferred all other things being equal, where “all other things” is taken to include both explanatory power and pragmatic value. But I also think that both explanatory power and pragmatic value should take precedence over simplicity. We turn to the question of simplicity only once explanatory power and pragmatic value have both been assessed and found to be comparable.

And this leads me to my final thoughts. My own view is that, in terms of explanatory power, we’re likely to find something of a standoff between the strongest species of supernaturalism and the best formulations of naturalism. In other words, the advantages of one will be offset by the advantages of the other in such a way that we are left with a kind of existential choice. This will be true not only when all is said and done (which will never happen), but also at whatever stage of personal or collective inquiry we find ourselves at.

What I mean is this: we are faced with a choice that ultimately cannot be made on the grounds that one worldview is clearly preferable to the other in terms of its rational fit with experience. All surviving contenders will require us to make sacrifices (in terms of “explaining away” elements of experience) to roughly the same degree. And so we will have to decide which sacrifices we can live with, and which we can’t.

Some will likely view this existential choice in the manner expressed by Hermann Lotze in a passage which follows his efforts to show that there cannot be “any real speculative proof for the correctness of the religious feeling upon which rests our faith in a good and holy God, and in the destination of the world to the attainment of a blessed end.” Lotze, in considering what to do on the basis of this conclusion, says the following:

“He who does not share this religious conviction may…very easily from a speculative point of view reach that Pessimism, which is just now the order of the day, and for which there will be on speculative grounds no refutation. But this Pessimism, which reverts to the thought of an original energy without will, that produces the Good and the Bad alike without design, is not a profound view but is just that cheap and superficial kind of view, by which all enigmas are conveniently disposed of—by simply sacrificing all that is most essential and supreme to the unprejudiced mind.”

Others will likely view the same existential choice in terms of the distinctive ethical perspective nicely summarized by Charles Taylor in his masterful (and masterfully brief) discussion of James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book called Varieties of Religion Today. Taylor describes the ethical perspective as follows:

“…it is wrong, uncourageous, unmanly, a kind of self-indulgent cheating, to have recourse to this kind of interpretation (a supernatural or religious interpretation of one’s experience), which we know appeals to something in us, offers comfort, or meaning, and which we therefore should fend off, unless absolutely driven to them by the evidence, which is manifestly not the case.”

This is the kind of ethical standpoint so powerfully voiced by Walter Stace in “Man Against Darkness,” and by Bertrand Russell when he said, in reply to someone who asked how to face mortality given his philosophy, that we should face it “with confident despair.”

In short, we are faced with an essentially pragmatic choice. Do we choose to be the kind of people who avoid at all cost the risk of being duped by an alluring illusion, and who forge ahead in life like those mountain men of old to test their mettle against an indifferent world? Or do we choose to be the kind of people who live in the hope that there is truth in the religious inkling, the feeling that something greater and more wonderful lies beyond the horizons of experience, making itself felt most clearly in the deepest longings of our souls?

On a fundamental level, I think this is the perspective sketched out by William James in his works on religion. And so I consider myself, at least in this respect, a Jamesian. The process for evaluating worldviews which I’ve sketched out is a necessary first step towards settling on a worldview, but its function is this: to identify the viable contenders.

I think it unlikely that this process will ever winnow down the contenders to just one. And I also think it unlikely that it will winnow down the contenders to just one kind (natural or supernatural). But when faced with this general choice between natural and supernatural worldviews, I don’t think the choice will ever be judged to be a pragmatically neutral one. And so deciding between naturalism and supernaturalism on the basis of simplicity doesn’t strike me as the appropriate move—unless simplicity has first been invested with pragmatic significance, and in a Jamesian way allegiance to the ideal of simplicity has been adopted over against alternative ideals.

In the end, the choice between naturalism and supernaturalism will be a Jamesian one. If Shook and others want to call this step “faith,” I have no objection. But I would resist having it called blind or irrational.