Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober∗
Philosophy Department
University of Wisconsin–Madison
November 20, 1997
Abstract.In Chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga
constructs two arguments against evolutionary naturalism, which he construes
as a conjunction E&N.The hypothesis E says that “human cognitive faculties
arose by way of the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought
directs our attention (p.220) .”1 With respect to proposition N, Plantinga (p.
270) says “it isn’t easy to say precisely what naturalism is,” but then adds
that “crucial to metaphysical naturalism, of course, is the view that there is no
such person as the God of traditional theism.” Plantinga tries to cast doubt on
the conjunction E&N in two ways.H is “preliminary argument” aims to show
that the conjunction is probably false, given the fact (R) that our psychological
mechanisms for forming beliefs about the world are generally reliable.H is
“main argument” aims to show that the conjunction E&N is self-defeating — if
you believe E&N, then you should stop believing that conjunction.P lantinga
further develops the main argument in his unpublished paper “Naturalism Defeated”
(Plantinga 1994).W e will try to show that both arguments contain
serious errors.
1 The Preliminary Argument
Plantinga constructs his preliminary argument within a Bayesian framework.
His goal is to establish that Pr(E&N |R) — the probability of E and N, given
R — is low.T o do this, Plantinga uses Bayes’ Theorem, which says that this
conditional probability is a function of three other quantities:
Pr(E&N |R) =
Pr(R|E&N) · Pr(E&N)
Pr(R)
.
Plantinga says you should assign to Pr(R) a value very close to 1 on the grounds
that you believe R (p.228) . He argues that Pr(R|E&N) is low.A lthough
Plantinga doesn’t provide an estimate of the prior probability Pr(E&N), he
says that it is “comparable” to the prior probability of traditional theism (TT)
(p.229) , meaning, we take it, that their values aren’t far apart.
This last claim should raise eyebrows, not just among evolutionary naturalists
who reject the idea that their theory and traditional theism are on an
equal footing before proposition R is taken into account, but also among critics
of Bayesianism, who doubt that there is an objective basis for such probability
assignments.P lantinga says (p. 220, footnote 7) that his probabilities can be
interpreted either “epistemically” or “objectively,” but that he prefers the objective
interpretation.H owever, Bayesians have never been able to make sense
of the idea that prior probabilities have an objective basis.T he siren song of
the Principle of Indifference has tempted many to think that hypotheses can
be assigned probabilities without the need of empirical evidence, but no consistent
version of this principle has ever been articulated.T he alternative to
which Bayesians typically retreat is to construe probabilities as indicating an
agent’s subjective degree of belief.T he problem with this approach is that
it deprives prior probabilities (and the posterior probabilities that depend on
them) of probative force.I f one agent assigns similar prior probabilities to evolutionary
naturalism and to traditional theism, this is entirely consistent with
another agent’s assigning very unequal probabilities to them, if probabilities
merely reflect intensities of belief.
Although Plantinga’s Bayesian framework commits him to making sense of
the idea that the conjunction E&N has a prior probability, his argument does
not depend on assigning any particular value to this quantity.As Plantinga
notes (p.228) , if Pr(R) ≈ 1 and Pr(R|E&N) is low, then Pr(E&N |R) also is
low, no matter what value Pr(E&N) happens to have.
1.1 Proposition R
For the sake of clarity, it is worth spelling out proposition R more precisely.
What does it mean for our psychological mechanisms for forming beliefs to
be “generally” reliable? In his unpublished manuscript, Plantinga says that R
means that “the great bulk” of our beliefs are true (Plantinga 1994, p.2) . Aside
from questions about how beliefs are to be counted, we don’t want to challenge
the truth of this summary statement.Ho wever, it drastically underspecifies
the data that need to be explained.F or the fact of the matter is that our
cognitive mechanisms are reliable on some subjects, unreliable on others, and of
unknown reliability on still others.W e should divide our beliefs into categories
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Polonium Halos (2000)
Lorence Collins
Several patrons have made claims or asked questions regarding the use of "Polonium halos" in granites as evidence of instantaneous creation (see, for example, Halos.com). In response, the Secular Web contacted geologist and petrologist Lorence Collins who had already tackled this complicated issue, and following is his reply for the benefit of our readers.
For your information Robert Gentry does not have a Ph.D. degree in physics, only a master's degree. But he is a competent physicist, and his laboratory experiments dealing with the amounts of radiation necessary to produce halos in mica and fluorite are accurate and acceptable to the referees for major journals. Hence, he has been able to publish in Major Journals and outside the creationists' sponsored journals. His science (at least the experimental part relating to radiation) is not at fault. It is his interpretations and applications of his results that err. As just one example of the problems with his interpretation, in some places polonium halos occur in granite that underlies some fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks and is older than the sedimentary rocks, but in other places polonium halos are found in granites that penetrate sedimentary rocks and are younger than the fossil-bearing sediments, impossible on Gentry's view.
I suspect that Robert Gentry likely claims that he has refuted me. Generally, it has been my experience that no logic exists that will change the minds of the die-hard creationists that instantaneous creation during the Genesis Week is the real truth. There are five articles on my website on Creationism that provide direct or indirect evidence that the Gentry model is wrong. Two of particular note:
- First and foremost: "Polonium halos and myrmekite in pegmatite and granite"
- Besides Po halos in biotite and fluorite, these halos also occur in coalified wood, as is discussed by Gentry. See "Are Po halos in coalified wood evidence for the Noachian Flood?" This article shows why such Po halos can form by natural causes.
As an effort to refute my articles about the natural occurrence and origin of Po halos, a creationist, Mark Armitage, and chemist and co-author Ed Back, attempted to do experimental work on Po-halos to show that they could not have been formed in granite by natural means. Their experimental results and articles are published in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal [a creation science periodical] (v. 8, n. 2, 1994, pp. 212-222; "The thermal erasure of radiohalos in biotite") and in American Laboratory (November, 1997, no. 22, p. 25-33; "The effect of thermal stress on radiohalos in biotites").
However, these authors disregarded the anaerobic environment and the high pressures and temperatures that really exist in the granite in which the Po halos are found. They did their high temperature experiments at one atmosphere pressure in air. Their experiments merely demonstrated that biotite will oxidize and blacken under these conditions, becoming opaque, and that released water from the biotite structure will cause the biotite to decrepitate as steam escapes, tearing the mica sheets apart. In either case the Po halos can no longer be seen through the microscope, but they would not have been destroyed by their experiments, although Armitage claimed they were. In no way are their experiments a valid refutation of the model I propose because they have not duplicated the conditions in which the granite once was formed nor the conditions under which the Po-halos would have formed. See my review of their work and another critique by a competent petrologist, Kurt Hollocher, for the expanded answer to their articles. A final article that bears on the issue of Po halos in an indirect way is my article "Equal time for the origin of granite - A miracle!" This article provides evidence that granite cannot have been formed instantaneously during Day 1 or Day 3 of the Genesis Week without breaking all natural laws. All evidence shows that most granites form by crystallization of melts, and some are formed later than Day 1 or Day 3, if the literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is assumed.
"Evolutionists" in various email talk-groups have engaged creationists in discussions of some of the above articles with no resolution. More heat than light is generally produced in these talk groups, and I avoid them and do not get involved. The creationists always claim they are right. They have to be right, or else their theology is based on sand or a stack of playing cards that will fall down. Their belief in literalism is too much to give up, and they will always claim that my articles have been refuted. Mark Armitage was outraged that his science was challenged and said that his article went through the referees for the journal American Laboratory with no problems. That may be true, but I surely question the quality of the review on the basis of my own analysis and that of Kurt Hollocher. Another article by Richard Wakefield, "The Geology of Gentry's 'TINY MYSTERY'," provides additional evidence, but Robert Gentry does not accept Richard's arguments.
Since jousting with Robert Gentry, my own research has resulted in 36 articles demonstrating the validity of the replacement origin of some granites. More will be added. These articles show (among other matters) that granite that contains Po halos does not form from magma. The generally accepted model that all granites of large size must form from a magma is the basis for Gentry's own model for instantaneous origin of granite. Gentry is correct that Po-halos cannot form from granites that have crystallized biotite from magma at the same time that the Po-halos form. The short half-lives of the Po isotopes make this impossible. But if Gentry's initial premise is wrong about the necessity for granites to form from magma where Po-halos are found, then his whole thesis is wrong. There is no better refutation of Gentry's model that I can offer than my own research reported in the above website: (1) Not all granites must be formed by crystallization from melts and (2) granites that contain Po halos do not require instantaneous formation. They can be formed by replacement conditions that allow millions of years for their production and in purely natural environments. Moreover, experimental work is included in articles 36 and 37 on my website that supports the hypothesis that some granites form at temperatures below melting conditions by chemical replacement processes. Thus, my model is not just theoretical but has field, microscopic, and experimental support.
I hope that this information is helpful.
The Secular Web would like to thank Dr. Collins for contributing this information for the benefit of our patrons
A Representative Example of Intellectual Dishonesty in the pathlights.com Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia (1997)
Mark I. Vuletic
The pathlights.com Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia may very well have the dubious honor of being the worst piece of creationist literature ever written. In this paper, I will examine a passage representative of the lack of integrity and low intellectual caliber demonstrated throughout the Encyclopedia as a whole.
In The Origin of Matter - 1, we find the following statement:
Science fiction. Several men dreamed up the Big Bang idea in the 1920s and 1940s. A science-fiction writer, George Gamow, led out in promoting it to the scientific community. He used cartoons to illustrate it. - pp.13-14.
The Encyclopedia dismisses Gamow as a science fiction writer because of his popularizations of science such as the by all accounts excellent Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (1957. New York: Cambridge), without mentioning the following interesting facts (drawn from a paper by science writer John Gribbin):
Gamow studied physics at the University of Leningrad.
Gamow was a quite accomplished theoretical physicist before he even started theorizing about the Big Bang, having come up with quantum tunnelling as an explanation of the emission of alpha particles by atomic nuclei and the fusion of hydrogen atoms in the sun.
Gamow was "appointed Master of Research at the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, and Professor of Physics at Leningrad University, at the tender age of 27."
Gamow was Professor of Physics at the George Washington University in Washington, DC from 1934 to 1956, and Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, until his death in 1968.
Gamow's original work on the Big Bang theory with his graduate student Ralph Alpher was printed in the peer reviewed journal Physical Review. Rest assured, Physical Review does not publish collections of cartoons.
Gamow's team successfully predicted the existence of the background microwave radiation well before its experimental discovery in 1963 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.
Gamow published a paper on molecular biology in 1954 (shortly after the structure of DNA was discovered, but before the genetic code was cracked) that "presented the key idea that hereditary properties could be characterised by a long number in digital form" which is very close to the way the DNA code works.
That's some science-fiction writer.
So why did the Encyclopedia editors fail to mention the facts listed above? Why did they suggest that Gamow was a mere science fiction writer rather than a top-notch physicist, and that he conveyed his ideas entirely through cartoons rather than through peer-reviewed technical papers? I can think of only two possible explanations: either the editors did not bother to perform the rudimentary research necessary to establish the listed facts (it took me five minutes with AltaVista to find Gribbin's paper), or else they chose to deliberately suppress the above facts, perhaps incorrectly reasoning that lies of omission are not lies. Either way, their actions (or lack thereof) reflect severe intellectual dishonesty on their part, especially since their omissions tarnish the reputation of a physicist who has made noted contributions to the advancement of science.
I would like to thank Bill Schultz for helpful feedback on this article, and John Gribbin for his article on Gamow. Also special thanks to Roger Scott and Mike Hopkins for bringing to my attention two embarrassing errors I made in an earlier version of this paper.
Creationism Is Not Dead (1994)
Frederick Edwords
In the second half of 1987 and the first half of 1988, "scientific" creationists suffered three major court defeats in a row, their most significant legal losses in a battle that has raged continuously since 1964. First, they lost their battle in defence of the Louisiana "equal time for creationism" law when the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 against them in June of 1987. Second, Pat Robertson's National Legal Foundation decided to cut its losses by intentionally missing its December 1987 deadline for filing its appeal of the Eleventh Circuit Court's ruling against Judge W. Brevard Hand's ban of forty-four "secular humanist" textbooks in Alabama. And, third, the U.S. Supreme Court refused in February of 1988 to hear the Tennessee Mozert case, thereby upholding a lower court ruling against a group of fundamentalist parents who wanted alternative textbooks for their children.You'd think then, that with all this, creationism would by now be a dead issue in America's public schools. But it hasn't left us yet, and here's why.
Right after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Louisiana case, creationist attorney Wendell Bird issued a press release that stated:
- . . . the Court Ruling was narrow and did not say that teaching creation-science is necessarily unconstitutional if adopted for a secular purpose. In fact, the Court said the exact opposite:
- "Teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."
- The majority opinion leaves open at least two alternatives . . . (1) the right of teachers to teach "a variety of scientific theories" and to bring Scopes-type lawsuits if punished or prohibited, and (2) the right of schools, school districts, and perhaps legislatures to encourage or require teaching of "all scientific theories . . . about origins."
In 1986 Dr. Michael Zimmerman, professor of biology at Oberlin College in Ohio, conducted a survey of high school biology teachers in his state. Not only did he find that 37.6% of the teachers responding favored teaching creationism in public schools (25% favored doing it in the science classroom), but he discovered that creationism was actually being taught in 19% of the public high school biology courses. When he added data that indicated creationism was being taught in 40% of such courses in non-sectarian, private schools and in 67% of such courses in sectarian schools, he found that 22% of all Ohio high school students were studying creationism in the science classroom!
Zimmerman also found that when teachers offer creationism, they devote less time to material on evolution. As a result, an average of only 7.5 class periods are were devoted in 1986 to evolution, as compared to 10 class periods in 1949. In the light of this, it is small wonder that U.S. high school students continue to come out on the bottom of the list in biology in comparisons of industrialized nations. Students in the major European and Asian countries tend to score much higher.
And this carries over to college. According to a November 1986 poll of liberal arts majors, conducted by Francis Harrold, professor of archaeology at the University of Texas, 30% of college students believe that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time! (We are witnessing the rise of what might be called "the Flintstone generation.") To provide a little perspective, one article reporting the story opened with the sentence, "The good news is that only 15 percent of 1,000 college students polled in three states said they had faith in astrology."
So, despite a long line of court victories against creationism, creationist ideas are gaining in acceptance among the general population. Furthermore, creationists don't recognize defeat. They just regroup and launch another offensive.
A fairly recent development in this controversy is the reentry of Paul Ellwanger into the fray. In case the name doesn't ring any bells with you, he is the respiratory therapist from the South who drafted the "model creationism bill" that became the basis of the "equal time" laws passed in Arkansas and Louisiana before the courts overturned them. Well, now he has a new "model bill," called the "Uniform Origins Policy," that he believes will get around the constitutional problems of the old one. And he's encouraging creationists everywhere to seek its passage both as state legislation and as a local school board resolution.
Ellwanger also offers a "powerful" 19-page paper "containing 36 easily understood scientific weaknesses of evolution" which he feels should accompany the Uniform Origins Policy. This combination, he believes, "would make crystal clear to [legislators] exactly why this Policy is urgently needed in our schools."
The Policy itself calls for "disclosure of relevant scientific information that makes classroom presentations more objective by including both the strengths and weaknesses of concepts on origins presented by the public school teacher or textbook." On the face of it, this doesn't sound too threatening. It even sounds laudable, which could make the Policy popular. However, keep in mind that there is no such subject matter as "origins" except in the lore of creationism. Since creationists consider evolution to be an "origins" theory, this Policy would require that pseudoscientific anti-evolutionism be presented every time evolution is discussed. And fundamentalist teachers who use class time to actively "debunk" evolution would be protected under the Policy's provision that no teacher "acting in good faith to carry out the intent and provisions of this Policy" could be fired or disciplined.
The only plus would be that staunchly pro-evolution teachers could devote considerable class time to debunking creationism. But this is scant consolation when one realizes that few teachers will want to brave criticism from fundamentalist parent groups in a conservative political climate. When it comes to taking a stand, it will more often be fundamentalist teachers who enter the lists. Most of the rest will quietly avoid the subject of evolution altogether, which is how creationists today continually succeed in suppressing evolution even when the courts are against them. They make evolution "controversial" and thus win by default.
"Evolution," in fact, has become a dirty word. A headline over an article covering Alabama's science curriculum declared, "New science curriculum dodges the 'E' word." That says it all.
And this Alabama science curriculum, which will be in effect into 1994, is worth noting. The word "evolution" appears nowhere in it. Sometimes the term "species modification" is used as a substitute, which gets the state down to some serious waffling. Such a term can easily be interpreted to mean mere changes within an existing species (which creationists accept) rather than the replacement of old species by new ones.
Furthermore, when this science curriculum was approved in the late 1980s, local school superintendents were notified in an official letter that teachers may supplement the curriculum with various theories of the origin of life. That opened the door to the introduction of creationism. As a result, we continue to hear from Alabama's creationists.
And so it goes. Even with an astonishing array of victories chalked up by the evolution side, creationism still flourishes and grows. Whether the newspapers daily report it or not, the creation-evolution controversy rages on. Creationism is not dead. It is not even dying. What is dying is American science education. We are graduating a generation of scientific illiterates who will be the voters of tomorrow. It is they who will determine how we fare in international technological competition. And, given that the high stakes issue of the future could be biotechnology, we may be moving toward a particularly ominous tomorrow.
This is the updated text of a paper that, since 1988, has been presented in slightly varied forms both orally in public forums and in print in local and national periodicals. Its author, Frederick Edwords, is the executive director of the American Humanist Association and founder and former editor of Creation/Evolution journal.
© Copyright 1994 and 1988 by Frederick Edwords
For further information on how you can become active in the effort to counter the effects of "scientific" creationism, please contact
NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION
PO BOX 9477
BERKELEY CA 94710-0477
Phone: (510) 526-1674
Since 1977, the American Humanist Association has been active in the defense of church-state separation specifically applied to the creation-evolution controversy.
Ten Things Wrong with Cosmological Creationism (2000)
A short series of exchanges on cosmological creationism which largely transpired in our August and October feedback pages touched upon every issue that I have often visited and continue to visit in my discussions with creationists. In this essay, I now present several objections which I believe are fatal to the brand of cosmological creationism which is most often defended by people who approach me in private e-mail or in a public forum. Versions of similar arguments given by various scholars have already been addressed by others in the Secular Web's selection of essays on the Cosmological Argument. It is important to note that although I often refer to creationists as a group, it is not the case that all creationists make all the same mistakes I report here. Rather, I usually find at least one of these errors in each creationist argument I encounter, and for creationists to have a chance of changing my mind on this issue, they must first avoid all ten of these errors in any argument they present.
Mr. Walker's Reasons for Being a Creationist
My defense of creationism as the explanation for the universe and all it's contents was based upon the science of statistical probability. Even a cursory glance at most dictionaries will define probability as "likely to happen or probable." This does not mean 100% but simply that something is most likely to have happened. My point was that when we look at the numbers involved re: the 40 or so parameters that science has identified as being required for any kind of life, then the odds are that life didn't just happen but was an intentional act.
There is nothing unreasonable about this approach, and if we were talking about any other subject but God I suspect that those types of odds would be accepted without question. Just for the heck of it, let's look at some numbers. Some years ago, molecular biophysicist Harold Morowitz calculated the odds of a cell assembling under ideal natural conditions. If we took the simplest living cell and broke every chemical bond within, then the chances of reassembling would be 1 in 10 to the power of 100,000,000,000. We cannot begin to imagine a number like this. The age of the universe no longer matters. Put another way, which of us would not buy a lottery ticket if these were our chances of not winning? We would all be at the corner 7-11 store buying it right now so great would our faith be!!
[Ted Drange] fail[s] to address how the universe that we know came to be. Whether or not our universe is "special" is irrelevant. We are simply concerned with how it came to be. Supposing there were 100 other universes that we knew of, we would still be in the same position of trying to explain their existence. In conclusion, let me say that I found Mr. Drange "grasping at the proverbial straw." Instead of giving me statistics refuting my position, he left me pondering a series of vague speculations such as: "if physicists were able to come up with a plausible theory of origins" or they are "attempting to construct such a theory." Again, "if there were a very large number of universes apart from our own" and "...various other kinds of universes that might have existed..." In other words, there must be some other explanation for existence. It can't be (gasp) God!
Warrick Walker
Calgary, Alberta, Canada - Wednesday, August 18, 1999
My Initial Response
The Harold Morowitz calculation is invalid. See the heading for Morowitz in my essay on the Odds of Life. And your criticism is self-refuting. If we posit a god, we would still be in the same position of trying to explain his existence. Anything sufficient to explain a god's existence will also apply to the universe, or at least the physical principles of the universe which give it form and motion, and thus there is no reason for the added element of a god.[1] It seems to me that it is theists who are "grasping at the proverbial straw" when they appeal to God and then end all inquiry. At least physicists are doing something to test their theories. That is not grasping at straws.[2] That is called putting your money where your mouth is. When will we see theists do this?
As for the "40 or so parameters" that science has identified as being required for any kind of life [emphasis added], you are crediting the wrong people. Science has not identified these things. Creationists have. And they often get their science hopelessly wrong. See my discussion of the teleological argument in my review of In Defense of Miracles. The fact is that most of the "parameters" are not the parameters required for any kind of intelligent life to evolve, but only the parameters within which human life can survive, and that is not the same thing. The remaining "parameters" are such that we cannot even know what the odds of them are. Creationists assume any value is equally likely, but anyone who studied statistics would know that this does not follow--even if we "assume" (and we would have to assume, because we do not know) that other values for these parameters were possible (and are not dependent on each other in any way), we do not know what range of values were possible, whether that range is a span in which every value is equally likely, or whether it fits a bell-curve distribution of relative probability, or a chi-square distribution, and we have no clue, consequently, where on any of these probability curves the actual parameters fall. So any argument built on this huge stream of blind assumptions is a house of cards.
Mr. Walker's Rebuttal
As to your reply to my previous article, I am a little perplexed. You seem to be saying that only Richard Carrier is capable of doing correct and accurate calculations. With one sweeping statement you have discredited the life-long work of such respected scientists as Fred Hoyle, Harold Morowitz, Hubert Yockey, Tippler, et al. Of course this is preposterous. I suggest you reexamine their work (all of it) and see what conclusion you come up with. Julian Huxley, that bastion of the theory of evolution, once calculated the odds of the evolution of the horse were 1 in 1000 to the power of 1,000,000. He then went on to admit that no one would ever bet on anything so improbable. See his book Evolution in Action for more on this. For some reason, we are expected to disregard the figures of all these great minds (as well as many more not mentioned) in favor of Richard Carrier, who apparently knows something they don't?
As appealing to statistics seems to be ineffective with you, I just ask that you consider Einstein and Hawking, arguably the two most competent men in their field. Both came to the same conclusion, namely that the universe had a primary cause. Einstein grudgingly acknowledged "the necessity for a beginning" and "the presence of a superior reasoning power." Or as Hawking put it,"These laws of physics may have been originally decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not intervene in it." In short, both acknowledge a creator, but one that is impersonal and unknowable. More on this below.
As to "proving" God's existence, I believe you have things in reverse. As reasoning creatures, it is enough for us to see that the world around us is not the product of random chance, but a deliberate act of creation, whereby we can be confident there exists a creator responsible for this. Having to explain God's existence, as you put it, is setting up a straw man. This is simple cause and effect. The effect (i.e. the universe) is the result of a cause (GOD). Indeed, when I look at the wondrous universe that surrounds me, I have no problem in accepting a being that I can't fully explain. In short, we can easily apprehend God without completely comprehending Him.
I believe that the universe provides an interesting (though by no means perfect) analogy here in the shape of black holes. We are only "aware" of their existence by means of observing other phenomena. We have never, and may never, actually observed a black hole directly due to it's peculiar characteristics. Most people today accept their existence, yet have never seen one let alone interacted with one in any way. Yet, can we say with absolute, 100% certainty that black holes exist? No! Do we have good reason to believe in their existence? Yes! I believe that a similar case is easily made for the God of the Bible. Naturally, as a Christian I believe 100% in God's existing. This is for the sake of analogy only.
As to the second part of your reply, you are making three basic mistakes. First, that simply because someone is a theist he is incapable of being objective. It is a well documented fact that some of the best evidence for the holocaust comes from Jewish sources, the victims of this horrible time in our history. According to your logic, no victim of a crime should be able to testify because of their "bias." Of course this is an unreasonable point of view and as such a non-starter. Secondly, you ignore the Fact that many non-theist scientists have identified numerous "parameters" based solely on the evidence, their theological construct not withstanding. Evidence for this position can be found in places such as Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union symposium #63, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 22, etc. Thirdly, your statement re: most of the parameters are relevant as to human life only is demonstrably false. Fred Hoyle in the late 70'S and early 80"s "discovered that an incredible fine-tuning of the nuclear ground state energies for helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen was necessary for any kind of life to exist." Other examples can be cited if you require them. In short, the "objections" at the end of your article fall far short when we take the views of the experts in the field into account. The weight of both secular and nonsecular scholarship clearly supports the idea of a deliberate cause by an intelligent designer to explain the existence of the universe around us.
Finally, as noted above, both Einstein and Hawking accept that a "creator" was responsible for the universe. They maintain, however, that this creator is impersonal and unknowable. I believe this is where the "atheist movement" misses the mark. If someone wants to argue that God is not personally involved in our daily lives, then fine. Let's open a serious dialog on this issue. However, to deny a deliberate act of creation by a Creator in the face of all the evidence seems to be stretching credulity to the limit.
Warrick Walker
Calgary, Alberta, Canada - Sunday, October 10, 1999
My Ten Point Response
Mr. Walker makes a lucid, convincing case. I believe it is precisely because such reasonings seem so sound that many are misled into creationist beliefs. As I examine the fallacies and problems in these arguments, I will preface my responses with some generalizations that go beyond Mr. Walker's position.
1. The Fallacy of Appeal to Authority
Creationists tend to want it both ways: they can say that 99% of the scientific experts are wrong, but won't let us say what is even more reasonable--namely, that it is the other 1% who are wrong. Worse, when creationists do appeal to the few authorities they have chosen to trust, they very often--all too often--misquote them.
With regard to my Odds of Life essay, I do not claim that only I can be right. To the contrary, I acknowledge that nearly half the statistics discussed there are correct in their contexts, and instead note how they are misused by other authors. The abused authors are Salisbury, Quastler, Sagan, Charles-Eugene Guye, Morowitz, Prigogine, Eden, and Küppers--none of whom made any calculations about the improbability of just "any" life arising by chance, yet are routinely quoted as doing so. More on this in Point Two below.
But what about the other authors? The first and most important thing everyone should be taught in high school mathematics is that statistics are routinely abused in every field, or misemployed by those who have an agenda, or lack ability, so we should not be surprised to find a lot of this sort of error, everywhere--not just in the creationism debate. Indeed, whenever statistics come up in any venue, we should always be at our most skeptical. And even more so in the present case. For we should expect something is up when the information needed for a correct statistical calculation doesn't even exist. We do not know what the protobiont was made of or how complex it was, nor do we know how many possible protobionts that can be manufactured chemically, yet both must be known before any calculation of the probability of the origin of life can be made. The fact that several authors go ahead and do such a calculation anyway should set off alarm bells--honest or competent people don't do that. They must have some motive other than the presentation of an objective discovery--for they have not discovered the nature of the protobiont or any other useful fact, but merely decided it by unjustified fiat. This is subjective, not objective, and thus most prone to error and bias, deliberate or not.
Observe that of the ten other authors who actually generate what I argue are bogus statistics, in order to make an argument against some form of natural creation (Yockey, Hoyle, Barrow, Tipler, Coppedge, Bradley, Thaxton, Schroeder, Morris, and Overman), only one (Yockey) presented his material in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. He actually believes in natural causes for life's origin, as does Hoyle; the rest are creationists. Yet even his paper had the self-proclaimed agenda to prove that "belief in little green men in outer space is purely religious" (those are his very words--not the words of an objective scholar) in order to advocate a shift in funding from astronomy to his own field, biology--he thus has a parochial and financial objective, as well as an ideological axe to grind. Moreover, Yockey's work is still misquoted and abused by other authors, as I note (he does not even generate a statistic or make any absolute declarations about odds), and he professionally qualifies himself in his book to the extent of admitting that a natural origin is possible (e.g. by allowing that a 56-amino-acid replicator is possible, and that uniform chirality could be deterministic). As for the rest of my criticisms, of Yockey and the others, readers can judge them for themselves.
In the end I do not see how creationists like Mr. Walker think it is "with one sweeping statement" that I discredit these authors--my critical essay is over 13,000 words long. Walker typifies the creationist in that he has not made any direct challenge to any argument I make there, nor advanced any defense of any statistical calculation made by these authors. "They must know what they are doing" is not an argument--experts are not infallible. We are all allowed, even obligated, to investigate their evidence and arguments to see if they are sound--as all creationists certainly must agree if they are willing to accept that the vast majority of scientific experts are wrong about evolution, as they do. So creationists should not try appeals to authority in this subject--if truth were determined by polling the experts, the creationists would lose. It is fortunate for them that such an appeal is inherently fallacious anyway.
2. The Fallacy of the Misquoted Source
Misquoting or abusing sources is a woefully common practice among creationists, indeed this is arguably among the most common mistakes of fact that they make. Mr. Walker is a model example, claiming Morowitz said something he didn't, by subtly altering the context of the Morowitz calculation. I suspect Mr. Walker has not read Morowitz, but has fallen victim to a misrepresentation made by a creationist author in whom Walker is placing too much trust. Whether his source is guilty of dishonesty or incompetence is of less concern than the simpler fact that his source has it wrong.
I point out in my essay on the Odds of Life that Morowitz's calculation was invalid not because it was wrong, but because it was not about the origin of life--in other words, his calculation is misquoted and misused [I have rewritten the paragraph slightly to make this more clear, presuming that Mr. Walker read it but didn't catch this]. The calculation was about what would happen to life in a system at thermal equilibrium, which was not the condition of things on Earth when life began--or ever. Morowitz himself would be shocked at how his calculation is snatched out of context and portrayed as being set, in Walker's words, "under ideal natural conditions." The exact opposite is the case: equilibrium is the least ideal condition any living system can be found in. Yet Walker, like many other well-meaning creationists, fails to investigate the context. He trusts his sources too much. A healthier dose of doubt, and some modest research, would have saved him the grief.
Ignoring the warning, Mr. Walker persists in this error and does it again when he cites Julian Huxley. I have appended a paragraph on that quote to the essay above. If Mr. Walker had bothered to examine the quote itself, in its actual context (pp. 45-9 of the Harper & Brothers 1953 edition of Evolution in Action), he would have seen how irrelevant it is to what he is arguing. No one claims that any horse spontaneously formed out of the dust, and the factual evidence of a continuity of evolution disproves such a notion. So such a number tells us nothing about the odds of the first life forming naturally, and Huxley specifically says that the odds he calculates are not the odds against a horse evolving through natural selection, but the odds of a horse arising without evolution through natural selection. He then proves that the horse is far from improbable given the action of natural selection (pp. 55-62). The fact that Mr. Walker didn't bother to check this, and then gullibly believed this statistic was an argument against natural design of the horse, only demonstrates the kind of inadequate research which typifies almost all the creationists I have so far encountered. If they only took the trouble to put more rigor and skepticism in their researching of sources they would see the light at the end of the tunnel.
3. The Fallacy of Appeal to Reverence
Creationists are often fond of pointing eagerly to "respected" scientists who are believers in god, whether it be Newton or Paul Davies, saying "see, these smart, educated guys believe, so you should, too!" The rationale is that such men have examined the evidence much more closely and with greater knowledge and skill than anyone else, so "naturally" their conclusions should be respected. The fallacy lies in supposing that the study of any science, even physics, grants someone authority in the matter of theology, and that they have actually thought seriously, correctly and at length on the subject--neither assumption is justified. It also sets up a double-standard. There are actually many more respected scientists who are atheists.[3] If we are supposed to respect their opinion as better informed than ours, then we should be atheists, not theists. But as it happens, the whole "appeal to reverence" is a fallacy--these men's opinions are not guarantees of truth. Even their peer-reviewed, carefully-controlled research can end up wrong, and their belief in God is a far cry from the conclusion of peer-reviewed, carefully controlled research.
But it is most ridiculous to cite Einstein and Hawking as supporting belief in a "creator" not only because, as I've noted, it is vain to appeal to the opinions of admired men (why should Einstein know more about God than Carl Sagan?), but even more importantly because neither has declared the idea of a creator to be a necessary conclusion from anything, and both have stated point blank that it as likely as not that there is no intelligent creator. Einstein said that there is in "the scheme that is manifested in the material universe...neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being" (Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 69-70) and declared that "I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of 'humility'" (ibid. p. 39). Finally, he declared that "to inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view," thus denying that anyone, least of all him, can conclude that a creator exists (The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 1-2). Elsewhere in that same book he writes, "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves." This soundly refutes the creationist misrepresentation of Einstein as supporting belief in a creator, as weak as such an argument from authority already is.
Hawking's views are fundamentally similar. Far from concluding or acknowledging a creator, as even Mr. Walker's quote shows Hawking says only that the laws of physics may have been decreed by a now-absent deity (A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Books, New York, 1988, p. 122), and he admits that there are coherent and possible physical theories, to which he is personally attracted, in which the universe "would not be created, not be destroyed; it would simply be. What place, then, for a Creator?" (ibid. p. 136, cf. 141, 174). Hawking also doubts the existence of a creator on the grounds that this leaves unexplained where the creator came from, and above all he does not believe "this whole vast construction exists simply for our sake" (ibid. p. 126). Thus, Hawking does not "acknowledge" the existence of a creator--he is adamantly agnostic about the issue. For more on his take, see "Stephen Hawking's Cosmology and Theism" and "Stephen Hawking and the Mind of God."
4. The Composition Fallacy
When it comes to errors of reasoning, creationists are most typically guilty of the composition fallacy, which as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is "the error of arguing from a property of parts of a whole to a property of the whole, e.g., 'the important parts of this machine are light; therefore this machine is light" (s.v. "informal fallacy"). What is troublesome is that creationists are so blind to this fallacy in their thinking that they actually think it is their best argument, as we see in Mr. Walker's own enthusiasm for it.
The fact is that there is nothing "simple" about a proposed theory of cause and effect in which the cause has never even been seen and is merely supposed, and the "effect" is not even proven to be an effect of anything in the first place. All real cause-effect theories come from thousands of controlled observations of an isolated cause followed by its characteristic effect--it is a description of the inner workings of isolated physical systems. I don't know about you, but I have never seen a universe begin. I do not even know if it had an absolute beginning. No one knows this. In fact, scientists actually believe that it is possible that mass-energy as a whole can never begin or end (the First Law of Thermodynamics states this), but even if it can, even though we have ample proof that units of mass-energy function under a cause-effect relationship with each other, we have no proof that this property of the parts extends to the whole--every atom is low in mass, but the universe is not low in mass; likewise, every atom obeys the laws of cause and effect, but for all we know the whole of all the atoms and the space and time in which they move might not. The universe consists of a set quantity of mass-energy, space and time, and certain forms of regular behavior. But all these are categorically different from anything that we describe in terms of cause and effect, and thus we have no grounds for extending our generalization about causes to the universe itself. Is the law of gravity "caused" to be what it is? How can anyone know? No one has ever seen a law of physics caused. Was time "caused" to exist? This seems an odd question, and it is certainly unanswerable.
Creationists think they know the answers to these things--they think it is "simple" or "obvious" that the whole must have the same properties as its parts--but they cannot justify this, because there is no definite link between the two. For a detailed example of this fallacy tripping up another creationist, see the July feedback, and a follow-up in August. Even Mr. Walker must agree that it is a bit silly to extend the properties of cause-effect to the very space and time in which causation occurs--after all, atoms on the one hand and time on the other are very different animals, with many other fundamental differences. We have a perfect analogy with a map: every mark on the map is made of ink. Does it follow that the map is made of ink? Certainly not. Like marks on a map, causes are only, as far as we know, things that happen in space-time, and not necessarily things that happen to space-time. Likewise, we only know that causes are things that happen to already-existing matter-energy. We do not know if causes are the things that create matter-energy. So the question of whether "it" began at all, or what "began" it is thus beyond our ken, and is even still little more than the object of pure speculation by physicists. But at least they are honest--they do not proclaim certainty, but propose testable ideas and then test them. So far, the ability to decisively test any theory, even the Big Bang theory in general, has been exceptionally limited. Is Inflation Theory correct? Maybe. Who knows? And if scientists cannot even be sure about that, a theory which makes testable predictions and is partly deducible from proven physical principles, how on earth can anyone be any more sure about theism, which makes far fewer predictions and is even more weakly deductible from the known facts?
5. The Fallacy of Self-Refutation
Another typical feature of creationist arguments is their readiness to adopt a position that is self-refuting. Since they expect there to be no reason to ask for the cause of God, it follows that there is no reason to expect a cause for all that exists--for to suppose that everything must have a cause is to suppose that something caused God. If nothing caused God, then it is possible for something to exist without a cause, refuting the premise that "everything has a cause." If "everything has a cause" is false, then the argument from causation fails. If the line of causation is ever to stop (and there is no logically necessary reason why it must), it may as well stop with all that exists: the cosmos. Whatever property allows God to exist without cause can just as well be a property of the universe instead, and creationists simply cannot refute that possibility. Mr. Walker completely misunderstands this central flaw in his reasoning, to the extent that he accuses me of building a straw man against him. But this is yet further evidence of how much creationists don't understand the consequences and premises of their own arguments. A proper use of syllogistic logic as a test for all their deductions and inferences would help them avoid relying on self-refuting arguments like this one.
The sorts of mistakes that lead to an over-reliance on such arguments are manifold, but consider the false dichotomy Mr. Walker builds: the universe, which is clearly intricately ordered "is not the product of random chance, but a deliberate act of creation, whereby we can be confident there exists a creator responsible for this." But there is a third option that Mr. Walker omits, for intelligent creation is not the only possible cause for order. The universe may be a necessary thing--that is, it was not produced by chance or design, but could not have not existed, and could not have been any different than it is. Mr. Walker already believes this is possible--for he believes it of his God--and if it is possible for his God, it is just as possible for the universe alone. Self-refutation yet again. But even this trilemma is false, for it could be any combination of any of these three factors--maybe some god designed some of it, maybe several gods collaborated on it, and perhaps he or they were constrained by laws which are necessarily always the case (like geometry), and at the same time he or they were unable to prevent some randomness from featuring in the result. Or maybe there is no God, but some necessary things and some random things which combined to make our universe. Indeed, logically, god could have created a billion universes, each time waiting for a random result that suited him--or there could be a billion gods, each with his own "science project" universe. Logically, the possibilities are endless. And some are very persuasive, since they actually make predictions that come true, such as Taoism, which predicts a universe that has no concern for human values, and lo and behold, that's just the universe we find ourselves in. Thus, there is no way we can be "confident" that an intelligent creator exists. To the contrary, given the state of things, there are reasons to prefer naturalistic explanations for the existence and nature of the universe: at the very least, simplicity and historical precedent.
In fact, it gets worse when we consider the possibility that the creator no longer exists--imagine a lonely god who has a choice, to live alone, or to die, and in dying create a universe from his exploding "corpse" which will have populations of people who can then live the god's lost dream of knowing love and never being alone. Perhaps the god stays alive, so he can share in this love, but is powerless, having given up his body for the creation of a universe. This is plausible, coherent, logical, and actually better explains things--it perfectly explains how god can be good and yet silent and inactive, how the universe can function so cold and mechanically and deterministically, how humans can be so confused, divided, and uncertain about god's nature or thoughts, etc. Indeed, this theory explains everything, far better than any actual creationist theory proposed today. By all sense and reason, this theory should be adopted by creationists--yet they adhere to a weaker theory, oblivious to the self-refuting character of declarations like that of Mr. Walker when he writes "when I look at the wondrous universe that surrounds me, I have no problem in accepting a being that I can't fully explain" and yet fails to see how the atheist, with just as much right if not more, can and does say exactly the same thing--but the "being" the atheist sees and can't fully explain is the universe itself. How much simpler this is--it requires adding nothing to what we see or know. Instead, creationists refuse to accept "a being that they can't fully explain" (the universe) and because of their refusal are compelled to invent a god to provide the explanation that they insist is necessary. They don't notice that they then do a complete about-face, and act in an exact opposite manner when it comes time to explain their god. Inconsistency is the creationist's hobgoblin.
6. The Fallacy of the Vacuous Theory
The most crushing problem with creationism is that it is an empty theory. As for why the universe has the particular features it does, this is not even explained by positing a deity--for we are still left to wonder why this organization instead of something else. Why a quantum universe instead of a continuity of energy? Why a universe that is mostly lethal vacuum and radiation? Why carbon-based life, instead of silicon? Why do we breathe oxygen instead of carbon dioxide or sulfur, or flubber or chi for that matter? Why not a steady-state universe? Why gravity or electricity or atoms? To say that any of these things is necessary is to admit that it would be so even if a God did not make it so, and thus we cease to need God to explain it. But if any of these things is unnecessary, which theory has the best chance of explaining why these particular features instead of others? Does theism offer any hope? No. It offers no clues. It doesn't even try. It says, in effect, "Look, I'm just here to explain order, any order, and nothing more." But that is useless. Does natural physics offer more? Yes. It has already made huge strides in explaining all these things. But if natural physics can one day explain everything about why the universe is the way it is, there is again no need for a God as explanation. Maybe one day we will end up with God at the end of our investigations, but right now there is little encouraging news.
While the creationist thinks God explains the "fine tuning" of the universe, he fails to see that every possible universe which can contain intelligent life will appear "fine tuned" no matter what its cause, and what must instead be explained is why this balanced set of conditions rather than some other--or why a universe has to have such an intricate and complex balanced structure of arcane principles and particles in the first place. One wonders if the gravitational constant is different in Heaven--and if it is not present there, why is it present here? If people can live in a Heaven without atoms, why have atoms at all? Finally, the gravitational constant is neither explained nor predicted by the theory that God exists. Nor is the vacuum of space, the quantized nature of energy, the existence and properties of atoms and molecules, the poor design of our backbones, why we have two arms instead of four, the reason for plagues or the reason we are unable to see in the infrared or ultraviolet--nothing we find in the universe is explained or predicted by this theory. The only "thing" creationists refer to as a prediction is "order" in a general and undefined sense--but order can be caused by any number of things, as even they must admit, for God's own being is ordered, yet to them it is uncaused by a god. Thus, even the creationists agree that order can be caused or can exist without a creator. So why do they think order entails one?
Instead of seeking to make predictions and then testing them, instead of simplifying the theory to just what is needed to predict only what we observe, theistic creationism aims at justifying itself, usually in spite of observation. More than any other theory about the universe, it is almost entirely comprised of excuses as to why it does not appear to fit experience (see my discussion of this in regard to theism in general at the end of my essay on Proving a Negative). What, then, does God explain? Order. First cause. A few other things, like objective moral values and miracles. But God is not logically needed to explain order, or a first cause, and we have no direct empirical evidence of such a connection either. Morals I have addressed in part in an essay on the basis for moral values, and miracles in my Review of In Defense of Miracles, and other matters concerning first cause and the supposed fine-tuning of life-conditions in section four of that same review. It is sufficient to say that these are not yet in need of divine explanation, and that they fail to constitute predictions which demonstrate the truth of the theory--from the assumption that there is a God, it is impossible to predict what sorts of values this God would or must have or why, or how or where or when he communicates them, or to predict what he can and cannot do, what he wants and doesn't want to do, or what he is likely or unlikely to do and why. And when it comes time to investigate and discover these things, all we meet is confusion, heated disagreement, and a complete absence of clear, objective evidence either way. As a rational, objective theory--rather than a traditional dogma or subjective opinion--theism is void of all useful content. This content is only filled by appealing to unsubstantiated tradition (the Bible), subjective opinion (what we "feel" is the case, what we judge from our limited, private, internal experiences--about which I have something to say in my essay on critical thought and religious life), and the arbitrary reasons made up from whole cloth to explain problematic observations like divine silence and the misery of the good. This may be fine as a personal faith. But it cannot parade as a scientific finding or any sort of certainty that others should be expected to agree with.
7. The Fallacy of False Analogy
A less significant but still typical common fault among creationists is the employment of false analogies. The most famous is the watch found on the beach--even though there are significant differences between a watch and a living cell which make the analogy hard to connect. For instance, watches, as with every manmade thing we ever encounter, are often made by many workers who are in turn rarely the designers. If we are entitled to expect of all complex organisms what we expect of manmade objects like watches, then we are entitled to conclude that many gods, following plans drawn up by several other gods, made living cells.
Instead, consider Mr. Walker's analogy of black holes. First, to tell the story more correctly, we are actually aware of the existence of black holes only because of deduction from the basic laws of physics: we know what the laws of gravity are, and we know there is a lot of mass in the cosmos, and when we plug a lot of mass into the laws of gravity, the outcome is a black hole. In other words, unless the laws of physics are different than we have so far proven them to be, or unless there are other laws as yet undiscovered, black holes are a necessary consequence of gravity and mass. In contrast, God is not the necessary consequence of anything we observe. Moreover, even though black holes were deductively "proven" to exist in theory, there was still very justified doubt until observational evidence confirmed their existence, and we have the same sort of proof (though in lesser quantity) of black holes now as we do of the existence of gravitational and magnetic fields, which are just as invisible.
The point is that the laws of gravity predicted a specific set of observations (particular forms of radiation emitted from certain densities of mass, a specific kind of gravitational lensing of background light, etc.), and then those observations were made, confirming the theory. The God theory fails to meet this analogy. When we posit a god, we are left with almost no predicted observations--theism does not predict any physical feature of the universe that we can check. And the few observations that it does predict--such as a loving, mighty hand in our lives and in the design of our environment--fail to be seen. Instead, we have brittle, soft, smelly, weak, back-ache-and-disease-prone bodies; the laws of physics proceed without any regard for right or wrong, good person or bad, and they proceed relentlessly and monotonously, never demonstrably deviating with anything like a value-laden purpose; resources are arbitrarily limited and randomly distributed without regard for merit; and no clear supernatural events or messages are present in any of our lives--guns are not suddenly turned into flowers, churches are not protected by mysterious energy fields, preachers cannot regenerate a lost limb, and when we ask God a question, with all sincerity and earnest urging, we never receive a clear, reasoned answer that all can hear and agree upon. Theism fits no analogy with any scientific belief.
8. Misreading Arguments
Creationists often have trouble understanding what their critics write. Mr . Walker again gives us a good example: I never said that "because someone is a theist he is incapable of being objective." I suggest Mr. Walker read what I wrote again with greater care. I never used the word "bias" or anything equivalent, and made no argument of such a kind. I also did not ignore the "fact" that many scientists have identified numerous "parameters" based solely on the evidence. What I said was that these very "'parameters' are not the parameters required for any kind of intelligent life to evolve, but only the parameters within which human life can survive, and that is not the same thing." In other words, the parameters identified by science tell us nothing about the design of the universe for us, but the design of us for the universe, a design explained by recombinant molecular biology and natural selection over a very long period of time in a relatively dangerous environment. Thus, I appreciate Mr. Walker's references, but they have nothing to do with what I was saying.
9. Credulity Instead of Investigation
A common feature of all these errors is a seeming disinterest in researching and questioning even favorable sources and evidence. Atheists frequently doubt each other and things they run across that seem to support their position, and when they don't, their colleagues will, and atheists will take all this seriously, and make progress by checking their sources, and coming to understand the principles and fields of knowledge that underlie them. For example, as for whether "an incredible fine-tuning of the nuclear ground state energies for helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen was necessary for any kind of life to exist" it is apparent that Mr. Walker did not follow my original advice and read my discussion of this kind of argument in my review of In Defense of Miracles, nor did he consider the point I made in my previous reply about precisely these "remaining parameters" (I am also skeptical that Hoyle actually said such fine-tuning was necessary for any life, since all I have read by him only makes claims about life on Earth as we know it--i.e. carbon-based, RNA-DNA constructs). First of all, these energies are not independent variables, since they are derived from more basic properties like the nucleon binding energy, thus they cannot be independently tuned at all--whenever one is altered, the others change along with it. And physicist Vic Stenger has proven that you can toy with these values and still end up with universes than can contain life. Indeed, you can experiment with universes yourself, and read Stenger's surveys of the physics behind the question.
Instead of looking into these things, taking them seriously, studying them, trying to understand them, and admitting how little we really know, creationists tend to fall back on their own creationist sources, or what they think to be plain reasoning (but which risks falling into various logical traps), or they give up altogether, determined to hold an unorthodox, heavily challenged point of view without any extensive or persistent examination and research. Though I do not attribute this to Walker by any means, I have personally encountered several creationists who claim to be widely read in the field of evolution yet show no understanding of even basic, introductory textbook principles, terms, and findings--in physics or biology (the most frustrating example of this is David Foster, whose book was so bad, so astonishing that it generated from me a rather excessively impassioned review). It is perhaps resistance to this intellectual laziness which makes some creationists, like I suspect in the case of Mr. Walker, at least sensible in their presentation of arguments, but I am still often disappointed with their command of relevant theories, terms, and literature.
10. The Fallacy of Hyperbole
Finally, a common creationist tactic (no less common among dogmatic atheists) is to resort to hyperbole--to claim total victory, to claim something is incredibly obvious, that a conclusion is undeniably certain, that something can be easily apprehended, when in fact such confidence is not at all justified. Mr. Walker, for example, makes it appear as if all we do is throw out god at the top and refuse to discuss any other issue. But that is hyperbolic. We all here at the Secular Web "argue that God is not personally involved in our daily lives" and we have all, on numerous occasions, managed or tried to "open a serious dialog on this issue." The fact that the "God" theory fails to explain why this universe is the way it is, and the fact that a creator is not necessary to explain the existence of order (or else God must have been created, too, etc.), and the fact that there are numerous different organizations of things that produce universes hospitable to some form of intelligent life, all destroy the creationist insistence that it is "extreme incredulity" to disregard a theory which explains little, predicts nothing, and is logically unnecessary.
[1] After I wrote this, in his 1999 debate with Phil Fernandes, Jeff Lowder made an equally crucial point: if the actual parameters of the universe do require an explanation, God is not necessarily the most probable option, since to give such an option greater weight than others which do not include a god we must have additional evidence that something like a creator-god actually exists. But we already have evidence that universes exist (we live in one), and so we already have some grounds for positing multiple universes to explain the parameters of ours, e.g. there may be a million universes with different parameters and only one has life (and thus we are in it, since that is the only place we could be). This is no more ad hoc than positing God, and is arguably less so, since there is less reason to invoke an unknown type of entity (a god) than a known one (a universe).
[2] Far from grasping at straws, scientists have history on their side: thanks to science, we have been very successful in providing explanations for things previously thought explainable only by appeal to the supernatural, so we can hardly be blamed for rejecting a supernatural explanation and waiting for a naturalistic one. For more on this argument, see my discussion the "naturalist fallacy" under Prima Facie Presumptions vs. The Lessons of History.
[3] In 1997, a random poll of American scientists listed in American Men and Women of Science determined that 60% did not believe in a personal god--45% were atheists, 15% agnostics, the other 40% believers. But when the same study was made of more distinguished scientists, those who had achieved the prestigious membership of the National Academy of Sciences, the number of unbelievers was 93%, and of atheists specifically it was 85%, and the numbers were greater among physicists than others. For sources and analysis, see Michael Shermer's How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, 2000, pp. 72-4. The question of whether an "impersonal" god still counts as a creator will be addressed later. What is evident is that scientists are more likely than non-scientists to disavow a personal god (among all Americans generally, 96% believe in god--65% even believe the devil is real, cf. ibid. p. 21). And physicists are the most likely of all to be unbelievers--so if we are to appeal to what scientists conclude about god, then we must disavow the existence of a personal creator. But the absurdity of such a method of deciding what to believe should be apparent.
The Watch in the Desert
OK, so if you found a watch lying in the desert, would you assume that it "spontaneously assembled" itself from the desert sand and rocks? Of course not! You would assume that it was made, or created, by a skilled watchmaker, and dropped there by him or someone else. The watch was clearly designed for a very specific purpose, by someone with great expertise, who knew exactly what he wanted ahead of time. Therefore, when we find something as perfectly designed as a living animal, it is utterly foolish to assume that it "spontaneously assembled itself" either. It had to be designed, in all its perfection, by some Great Designer. The mere existence of well-designed watches and animals is all the proof we should need that both were created by someone with infinitely more wisdom than the creations. Both, by their existence alone, imply the existence of a great designer or creator. Watches don't "just evolve," and neither do animals (or people); ergo, evolution is logically absurd (and, by extension, anyone who believes in it is an illogical idiot).
Anyway, that's sort of how the analogy usually goes. And it looks pretty good at first glance. I imagine a few evolution-minded folks have been taken aback by this one, the first time they heard it, not knowing quite how to answer it at the time. I'll also bet that some creationists see this as an irrefutable gem of logic that utterly destroys evolution and all its works.
Hold on a minute, though. Since this argument is presented in the form of an analogy, let's hold the creationist to his own logic, and see if the analogy holds up. For an analogy to make any logical sense at all, the two things being compared have to have a LOT in common, not just one salient feature. For instance, when we're considering the functioning of a living thing (like a person), an analogy is often drawn with a complex machine of some sort (like a watch, but a car works even better). Both need fuel, both produce heat and waste products, both wear out eventually, both turn chemical energy into mechanical energy, both have many small but critical parts, etc. But the watch-in-the-desert analogy is not about how the things work. It's about where they came from--or really, how they came to be. And when you think about that, you come to some interesting conclusions. Remember, it's supposed to work this way: because a watch doesn't spontaneously assemble and has to have a maker who made it just the way it is, therefore an animal can't spontaneously assemble either, and it, too, must have a maker who made it just the way it presently is.
Let's start with this: watches DIDN'T just appear in the world as they presently are! As a matter of very obvious fact, they evolved . The first timepieces were very primitive, clumsy, and inaccurate. They improved over the years. If we can refer to really old time-keeping devices as "fossils," then we can show a fossil sequence of the evolution of watches from some dim time in the past up to our present electronic wonders. Nowadays they evolve visibly from one year to the next. The watchmakers went through a whole, evolving series of clocks and watches before someone carelessly dropped one in that desert. So is this supposed to prove that the animal we find in the desert was made in its present form, with no significant changes over many generations? Am I missing something here?
Remember, the debate is really about whether evolution occurs , not about whether there's a creator behind it. A watchmaker (mankind) slowly developed (evolved) the sequence of timepieces. Maybe a Watchmaker slowly developed (evolved) the sequence of living things--you'll get no argument about that here. But the evolution happened in both cases. The message of that lost watch is NOT "I sprang up in my present perfection, with no primitive ancestors before me." It's more like "I'm at the end of a long chain of slowly evolving ancestors, and my descendants will continue to change."
Is finding a man-made watch in the desert supposed to somehow show that animals were created in their present forms by magic (or miracle) some few thousand years ago? What on Earth would lead us to that conclusion? The watch wasn't created by magic. In fact it was created by purely natural processes (as opposed to supernatural). If the creation of the watch really is analogous to the creation of living things, then what the analogy shows us is that the origin of both can be explained by natural processes.
Supernatural intervention could have been responsible for either or both, but that explanation certainly isn't necessary for the watch. If we hold the creationist to the logic of his own analogy, then what the analogy "proves," if it proves anything, is that well-designed "creations" can be produced naturally, in small, incremental steps: no magic required, thank you very much.
"But, but, but..." the creationist insists, "the point of the analogy is that things like watches and animals don't spontaneously assemble!" Well, that's half right, and here's where the analogy breaks down. Any analogy can only be stretched so far. The car stops being analogous to the human body when you start talking about thought or emotions. And watches stop being analogous to animals when you start talking about how the individual item is assembled. Watches, after all, never have little baby watches! An individual watch is, of course, always assembled by something outside itself (a human watchmaker, although nowadays it's more likely to be industrial robots). All the animals I've ever seen have assembled themselves , quite literally! They take in (usually) nonliving material from their environments, chemically process it, and turn it into parts of the living animal. In the case of mammals like us, the only parts of us that are directly made by someone else are the sperm and egg cells that unite and subdivide into our first few cells. After that, for the rest of our lives, we take in material from the outside, and assemble it ourselves into parts of us. Early on, that material is supplied by our mother, but she doesn't make us: she just supplies the raw material. We absorb it, manipulate it, build ourselves , and get rid of what we don't need.
OK, I know, the point is the first animal. How could it get started? All presently living animals are started off with bits of already-living matter created by their parents. Nonliving chemicals don't spontaneously assemble, don't create orderly, complex molecules out of simple elements... Don't they? If the creationist gets to this point, he has revealed his basic ignorance of the simplest chemistry. Elements and simple molecules combine spontaneously all the time to form more complex molecules. When was the last time you found any loose hydrogen on the Earth, or fluorine? All of it has spontaneously combined with other elements to form more complex molecules. If you turn some loose, it won't stay uncombined for long. Carbon atoms, especially, have a tendency to form spontaneously into all kinds of complex molecules, which in turn often combine to form very complicated polymers and mega-molecules. Some of those combinations are even self-replicating , if the raw materials are available. We don't commonly see molecules assembling themselves into living systems, but then it only had to happen once--from then on the natural tendency of life has been to keep itself going, spread out, and evolve. When you get down to the level of molecules, or small collections of them, the dividing line between living and nonliving gets pretty fuzzy. As a matter of fact, one of the basic criteria used in modern biology to distinguish living from nonliving complex systems, is that truly living systems are capable of evolving as they reproduce.
And, if we are committed to the idea of a Creator, He certainly could have been the one to arrange that first unlikely combination. He could have even directed all the evolution since then. Again, the point of the tired, old watch-in-the-desert analogy was supposed to be that evolution does not and could not occur. But watches have evolved; they aren't created miraculously, ex nihilo ; and their inability to self-assemble has nothing to do with the obvious ability of chemical compounds and living things to assemble themselves out of available materials.
Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection (2000)
This article was originally published in Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000), pp. 7-29.
Abstract: In response to the charge that methodological naturalism in science logically requires the a priori adoption of a naturalistic metaphysics, I examine the question whether methodological naturalism entails philosophical (ontological or metaphysical) naturalism. I conclude that the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.
An attack is currently being waged in the U.S. against both methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. The charge is that methodological naturalism, by excluding a priori the use of supernatural agency as an explanatory principle in science, therefore requires the a priori adoption of a naturalistic metaphysics. The disquiet over naturalism is rooted most immediately in the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution; hence, the specific focus of the attack against naturalism is evolutionary biology.[1] The aim of this paper is to examine the question of whether methodological naturalism entails philosophical naturalism.[2] This is a fundamentally important question; depending on the answer, religion in the traditional sense
DEFINITION OF NATURALISM
I am addressing the subject of naturalism in contrast to traditional supernaturalism, which means belief in a transcendent, non-natural dimension of reality inhabited by a transcendent, non-natural deity. Although I have relied to some extent upon contemporary naturalists, I have drawn heavily from the work of American philosophical naturalists of the first half of the twentieth century. These thinkers, the groundbreakers of modern American naturalism, were knowledgeable enough about science to understand its important implications. Moreover, their work is still recent enough for the science on which they relied not to have been radically superseded; there have been no major "paradigm shifts" which would force them now to alter the scientific foundations of their views.[3]
I shall use "methodological naturalism" and "philosophical naturalism" to mean what Paul Kurtz defines them to mean in the first and second senses, respectively:
First, naturalism is committed to a methodological principle within the context of scientific inquiry; i.e., all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events. To introduce a supernatural or transcendental cause within science is to depart from naturalistic explanations. On this ground, to invoke an intelligent designer or creator is inadmissible....
There is a second meaning of naturalism, which is as a generalized description of the universe. According to the naturalists, nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles, i.e., by mass and energy and physical-chemical properties as encountered in diverse contexts of inquiry. This is a non-reductive naturalism, for although nature is physical-chemical at root, we need to deal with natural processes on various levels of observation and complexity: electrons and molecules, cells and organisms, flowers and trees, psychological cognition and perception, social institutions, and culture....[4]
Methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism are distinguished by the fact that methodological naturalism is an epistemology as well as a procedural protocol, while philosophical naturalism is a metaphysical position. Although there is variation in the views of modern naturalists, Kurtz's definition captures these two most important aspects of modern naturalism: (1) the reliance on scientific method, grounded in empiricism, as the only reliable method of acquiring knowledge about the natural world, and (2) the inadmissibility of the supernatural or transcendent into its metaphysical scheme.[5] Kurtz's current definition is consistent with Sidney Hook's earlier one:
[T]here is only one reliable method of reaching the truth about the nature of things ... this reliable method comes to full fruition in the methods of science, ... and a man's normal behavior in adapting means to ends belies his words whenever he denies it. Naturalism as a philosophy not only accepts this method but also the broad generalizations which are established by the use of it; viz, that the occurrence of all qualities or events depends upon the organization of a material system in space-time, and that their emergence, development and disappearance are determined by changes in such organization.... naturalism as a philosophy takes [the word "material"] to refer to the subject matter of the physical sciences. Neither the one [philosophical naturalism] nor the other [science] asserts that only what can be observed exists, for many things may be legitimately inferred to exist (electrons, the expanding universe, the past, the other side of the moon) from what is observed; but both hold that there is no evidence for the assertion of anything which does not rest upon some observed effects.[6]
SCIENTIFIC VIEWS OF NATURALISM
Since methodological and philosophical naturalism are founded upon the methods and findings, respectively, of modern science, philosophical naturalism is bound to take into account the views of scientists. As Hilary Kornblith asserts, "Philosophers must be ... modest ... and attempt to construct philosophical theories which are scientifically well informed."[7]
Arthur Strahler, a geologist who has taken particular interest in the claims of supernaturalists to be able to supersede naturalistic explanations of the world, points out the essentiality of naturalism to science:
The naturalistic view is that the particular universe we observe came into existence and has operated through all time and in all its parts without the impetus or guidance of any supernatural agency. The naturalistic view is espoused by science as its fundamental assumption."[8]
Clearly, the first statement refers to philosophical naturalism. Strahler's point in the second statement, however, is that science must operate as though this is true. So philosophical naturalism serves minimally as a regulative, or methodological, principle in science, for the following reasons given by Strahler:
[S]upernatural forces, if they can be said to exist, cannot be observed, measured, or recorded by the procedures of science
This is clearly a methodological objection to supernaturalism on Strahler's part. Introducing supernatural explanations into science would destroy its explanatory force since it would be required to incorporate as an operational principle the premise that literally anything which is logically possible can become an actuality, despite any and all scientific laws; the stability of science would consequently be destroyed. While methodological naturalism is a procedural necessity for science in its study of the natural world, it is also the rule for philosophical naturalism since the naturalist world view is constrained
Strahler ventures onto the turf of philosophical naturalism when he points out how supernaturalism's lack of methodology renders it metaphysically sterile, in effect pointing out the inseparable connection between epistemology and metaphysics:
In contrasting the Western religions with science, the most important criterion of distinction is that the supernatural or spiritual realm is unknowable in response to human attempts to gain knowledge of it in the same manner that humans gain knowledge of the natural realm (by experience).... Given this fiat by the theistic believers, science simply ignores the supernatural as being outside the scope of scientific inquiry. Scientists in effect are saying: "You religious believers set up your postulates as truths, and we take you at your word. By definition, you render your beliefs unassailable and unavailable." This attitude is not one of surrender, but simply an expression of the logical impossibility of proving the existence of something about which nothing can possibly be known through scientific investigation.[10]
Although I am generally in agreement with Strahler, I differ with him on one point. Although it is logically impossible to prove the existence of something about which nothing can be known at all, it is not logically, but procedurally, impossible to prove the existence of something about which nothing can be known through scientific investigation. Scientific investigation is a procedure based on an empiricist epistemology. The fact that there is no successful procedure for knowing the supernatural does not logically preclude its being known at all, i.e., through intuition or revelation. The problem is that there is no procedure for determining the legitimacy of intuition and revelation as ways of knowing, and no procedure for either confirming or disconfirming the supernatural content of intuitions or revelations.
My objection notwithstanding, Strahler is making an essential point which the philosophical naturalist also makes: the methodology of science is the only viable method of acquiring reliable knowledge about the cosmos. Given this fact, if there is no workable method for acquiring knowledge of the supernatural, then it is procedurally impossible to have knowledge of either a supernatural dimension or entity. In the absence of any alternative methodology, the metaphysical claims one is entitled to make are very strictly limited. The philosophical naturalist, without making any metaphysical claims over and above those warranted by science, can demand from supernaturalists the method that legitimizes their metaphysical claims. In the absence of such a method, philosophical naturalists can not only justifiably refuse assent to such claims, but can deny
Strahler makes another point that is important to the understanding of philosophical naturalism: the metaphysical adequacy of supernaturalism is inversely proportionate to the explanatory power of science. The more science successfully explains, the less need or justification there is for the supernatural as an explanatory principle. Strahler, quoting E. O. Wilson, asserts that the explanatory power of science diminishes the metaphysical adequacy of supernaturalism by explaining even religion:
Most importantly, we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences ... sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the human brain.
If this interpretation is correct, the final, decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon....[11]
However, many people reject the application of scientific method to the phenomenon of religion and, though they adopt the methodology of naturalism to inquire about a natural entity or object or to solve a practical problem, they simultaneously assent to existential claims about the supernatural. Sterling Lamprecht, in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, says that some philosophers "accept a kind of empiricism for purposes of scientific procedure and practical affairs, but all the time hold that the existences and occurrences thus empirically found require some further 'explanation' to make them 'satisfactory' or 'intelligible.'"[12] These philosophers hold that what is learned scientifically must still be explained from within a more comprehensive, non-naturalistic metaphysics, in effect adopting the supernatural as a causal explanation. Strahler, however, in his remarks about using the supernatural as a causally explanatory principle while simultaneously acknowledging the sufficiency of scientific method to provide causal explanations of the natural world, maintains that using the supernatural as an additional causal explanation is logically contradictory as well:
A specific event of history in a specific time segment must fall into either (a) divine causation or (b) natural causation. Our logic is as follows: 'If a [divine, supernatural causation], then not b [natural causation]. If b, then not a.' To follow with the proposal 'Both a and b' is therefore not logically possible. Moreover, one cannot get out of this bind by proposing that God is the sole causative agent of all natural causes, which in turn are the causative agents of the observed event. This 'First Cause/Secondary Cause' model, long a standby of the eighteenth-century school of natural theology ... adds up to 100 percent supernatural creation.
Consider the analogy of cosmic history as an unbroken chain [of causal explanations] made from all possible combinations of two kinds of links, a [supernatural cause, as in religion] and b [natural cause, as in science].... When a theist declares any link in the chain to be an a-link (whereas all the others are b-links), an element of the science set has been replaced by an element of the religion set. When this substitution has been accomplished, the entire ensuing sequence is flawed by that single antecedent event of divine creation and must be viewed as false science, or pseudoscience. The reason that replacement of a single link changed the character of all ensuing links is that each successor link is dependent upon its predecessor in a cause-effect relationship ... that divine act can never be detected by the scientist because, by definition, it is a supernatural act. There exists only the claim that such an act occurred, and science cannot deal in such claims. By the same token, science must reject revelation, as a means of obtaining empirical knowledge.[13]
Under the theistic model, according to Strahler, any recognition of natural causation is logically nullified by the simultaneous assertion of supernatural intervention, either actual or merely possible. Even while differing with Strahler on the logical impossibility of invoking both natural and supernatural explanations
Let us consider now the comments of Wesley Elsberry, in "Enterprising Science Needs Naturalism":
While the subjective appreciation of a role for supernatural causation may be important to personal fulfillment, it does not afford a basis for objective knowledge, nor can it be counted as a means of comprehending the universe in a scientific manner....
I will connote "naturalism" as "proposing only natural mechanisms for physical phenomena" rather than "asserting that only natural mechanisms have existence."... Science is incompetent to examine those conjectures which cannot be tested in the light of inter-subjective experience or criticism. The assertion that "only natural mechanisms have existence" is equivalent to the claim that "no supernatural causes exist." That is an example of proving a negative, and can only be regarded as a statement of faith, since it requires omniscience on the part of the claimant.... humans cannot establish a supernatural cause by experimental reproduction of that cause. No human is capable of producing a supernatural cause.... natural and supernatural causation are confounding: suspected supernatural causation may simply be due to currently indiscernible natural causes. Because of the confounding nature of the interaction, the only way to establish supernatural causation is through the elimination of all natural alternatives. This is simply another case of proving a negative, which is an intractable problem....[14]
Elsberry's point is a methodological one: in explaining the natural world, one can not invoke the supernatural because of its methodological inaccessibility, and no successful method other than the naturalistic one is available in scientific explanation. However, Elsberry's methodological point has metaphysical implications. If supernatural causation as a methodological principle "does not afford a basis for objective knowledge," the implication is that methodological naturalism does afford one. If supernatural causation cannot be "counted as a means of comprehending the universe in a scientific manner," the implication is that methodological naturalism can be so counted upon. And comprehending the universe in a scientific manner is the goal of philosophical naturalism.
Steven Schafersman, also a scientist, makes the same point as Elsberry:
[N]aturalism is a methodological necessity in the practice of science by scientists, and an ontological necessity for understanding and justifying science by scientists.... The alternative to naturalism is supernaturalism.... [T]he foundations of science ... will not be epistemologically reliable unless naturalism is either true or assumed to be true, since by not doing so, part of reality will remain unexplained and unexplainable.[15]
Schafersman's point here is that, given the (procedurally but not logically) necessary exclusivity of methodological naturalism in science, any view of the cosmos other than a naturalistic one becomes unjustifiable. The philosophical naturalist would expand upon this by adding that given the procedurally necessary exclusivity of methodological naturalism in science and the unavailability of any other workable method for grounding any claims with existential import, any metaphysical view of the cosmos other than the naturalistic one is epistemologically unjustifiable.
The point is not that supernaturalism is logically impossible; rather, the point is that, from both an epistemological and a methodological standpoint, supernaturalism has not proved its mettle, whereas methodological naturalism has done so consistently and convincingly. Supernaturalism has not provided the epistemology or the methodology needed to support its metaphysics, whereas naturalism has, although the invitation to supernaturalism to do likewise is a standing one, as Schafersman indicates: "except for humans, philosophical naturalists understand nature to be fundamentally mindless and purposeless.... Of course, this doesn't eliminate the possibility of supernatural mind and purpose in nature; the only requirement would be the demonstration of its existence and mechanism, which is up to the supernaturalist to provide. We are still waiting."[16]
METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM IN PHILOSOPHY
Naturalist philosophers ground their philosophical naturalism in both the failure of the supernaturalist to meet Schafersman's challenge and in the success of methodological naturalism in science. This is because the reliability of knowledge depends on the method by which it is obtained, and as Schafersman says, "science, solely because of its method, is the most successful human endeavor in history. The others don't even come close."[17]
Lamprecht defines philosophical naturalism as "a philosophical position, empirical in method, that regards everything that exists or occurs to be conditioned in its existence or occurrence by causal factors within one all-encompassing system of nature, however 'spiritual' or purposeful or rational some of these things and events may in their functions and values prove to be."[18] The emphasis in this definition is on the exclusivity of methodological naturalism. This exclusivity is not mandated a priori; the philosophical naturalist justifies it on the basis of the explanatory success of science and the lack of explanatory success of supernaturalism.
The upshot is that methodological naturalism
John Herman Randall defines naturalism as "not so much a system or body of doctrine as an attitude and temper ... essentially a philosophic method and a program" which "undertakes to bring scientific analysis and criticism to bear on all the human enterprises and values so zealously maintained by the traditional supernaturalists...."[20] He clearly understands naturalism to be dominated by method, marked by a skeptical attitude toward claims which cannot be substantiated with public, sharable, empirical evidence. The basis of this skepticism is the recognition that the only method of obtaining such evidence is the method of inquiry which, though not confined exclusively to science, has been most refined and perfected in science, and the recognition of the lack of any successful method for acquiring knowledge in any non-natural field.
Methodological naturalism does exclude the supernatural as an explanatory principle because it is unknowable by means of scientific inquiry, whereas philosophical naturalism, both by definition and because of the methodological and epistemological inaccessibility of the supernatural, excludes the latter from its ontological scheme. Even though there are some variations among naturalists, the following statements by Sidney Hook are not likely to be contested:
[S]cientific method is the refinement of the canons of rationality and intelligibility exhibited by the techniques of behavior and habits of inference involved in the arts and crafts of men; ... the systematization of what is involved in the scientific method of inquiry is what we mean by [methodological] naturalism, and the characteristic doctrines of [philosophical] naturalism like the denial of disembodied spirits generalize the cumulative evidence won by the use of this method....[21]
These may well sound like fighting words to the supernaturalist, and since those who wish to allow the supernatural as an explanation cannot produce conclusive evidence that it exists, their insistence upon appealing to it sometimes amounts to a challenge to the naturalist to produce evidence that it does not exist, or that it is not a causal factor in natural phenomena. However, the challenge is empty
Let the naturalist prove [says the challenger] ... that there can be no other kind of knowledge, that there can be none but empirical fact! And unless he can prove it, he is a question-begging a priorist....
But here, too, the naturalist need undertake to do no such thing. Is there a different kind of knowledge that makes ... [the supernatural] an accessible object of knowledge in a manner inaccessible by the only reliable method we have so far successfully employed to establish truths about other facts? Are there other than empirical facts, say spiritual or transcendent facts? Show them to us....
Is there a method discontinuous with that of rational empirical method which will give us conclusions about what exists on earth or heaven, if there be such a place, concerning which all qualified inquirers agree? Tell us about it.[22]
Hook asserts that "The crucial point ... is that we are not dealing with a question of pure logic but of existential probability ... there is a reasonable habit of inference with respect to belief or disbelief about natural fact which we follow with respect to supernatural fact. And it is still a reasonable habit of belief despite the claim that the supernatural fact is of a different order. For however unique it is, ... it is reasonable to extend the logic and ethics of discourse to it."[23] He further emphasizes "a weighty point" by saying that
whoever says that ... [the supernatural] exists must give reasons and evidence. The burden of proof rests on him in the same way that it rests on those who assert the existence of anything natural or supernatural.... It rests with the supernaturalist to present the evidence that there is more in the world than is disclosed by our common empirical experience.[24]
And he is seconded by Lamprecht:
[E]xistence is always a matter of fact ... whether it be God's existence or any other existence that is being investigated.... The existence of God is an open [logical] possibility.... From the standpoint of any naturalism ... all matters of existential status can be determined by no other than uncompromisingly empirical means.[25]
Methodological naturalism does not disallow the logical possibility that the supernatural exists. To assert categorically that there is no dimension that transcends the natural order is to assert that human cognitive capabilities are sufficient to survey the whole of what there is; such a claim would amount to epistemological arrogance. But neither does methodological naturalism allow that logical possibility is sufficient warrant for the attribution of existence. At least the naturalist position is well established with respect to the kind of cognitive capabilities we do have. The supernaturalist, on the other hand, makes an assertion for which there is no epistemological justification when claiming that humans can know in any sense other than the natural one.
Therefore, the belief of the supernaturalist is on neither a logical nor an evidential par with the disbelief of the naturalist. What Hook says about the existence of God can just as well be used here with reference to any supernatural belief:
[T]he admission that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated is often coupled with the retort that neither can his non-existence be demonstrated
Supernatural claims are existential claims, i.e., they have existential import, and so are subject to the same evidentiary requirements as claims about the natural order.[27] Yet despite this, even though no method which does not depend upon empirical verification has ever been demonstrated for ascertaining conclusively the truth of existential claims, supernatural claims are beyond the reach of these requirements. Paradoxically, supernatural claims are the kind of propositions for which empirical evidence is required, but impossible to obtain. The cognitive apparatus has not been identified through which one can know the supernatural.
Supernatural claims are, admittedly, semantically meaningful as explanatory principles, i.e., we understand what is meant by a proposition such as, "God designed and created the universe." However, the only feature of supernatural claims which can make them workable as explanatory principles is their existential import, and this is the Achilles heel of supernatural explanation. Supernatural claims are grounded on the presumed existence (or the presumably demonstrated existence) of a supernatural dimension of reality and the existence of any entities which inhabit it. The question is whether a supernatural claim, despite being an existential claim, is also a viable existential possibility or merely a logical possibility.
"Existential possibility" is understood here as meaning both (1) logical possibility
Existential possibility is easy to specify with respect to empirically verifiable propositions. For example, in order for a winged horse to be existentially possible, the concept of a winged horse must be logically consistent, i.e., thinkable without contradiction, which it is, and the gene necessary for wings must be present in the equine genome, which it is not. Therefore, a winged horse is existentially impossible, although not logically so. The ontological conditions are physical, but they do not in fact obtain. On the other hand, a chicken with teeth is a genuine existential possibility since the concept is logically consistent and chickens do in fact have a gene for teeth which merely remains unexpressed.
What analogous conditions may be specified for the existential possibility of supernatural entities? Again, there must be no logical contradictions in the concept of a supernatural entity. So, for example, the concept of a being which can exist without physical substance of some kind must be thinkable. Yet even the concept is not clearly possible in this first respect. If one is thinking of something with no measurable physical dimensions or detectable physical presence, one can plausibly argue that one is thinking about nothing. Even if the stipulation is made that a non-physical, supernatural entity is detectable only by its physical effects, one is still faced not only with the traditional, irresolvable dualism, but with the problem that one can, even in principle, detect only the phenomena which are being question-beggingly designated as "effects," and not the supernatural phenomenon which is posited as the cause. Therefore, not only are the questions of both existence and causal efficacy begged, but one is still essentially thinking about something which can simultaneously be conceived as both "something" and "nothing," a logical impossibility.
The logical difficulties aside, what ontological conditions can be specified for the existential possibility of a supernatural entity? In order for a non-physical, supernatural entity to exist, what must obtain? Such describable, specifiable, and necessary conditions do not seem to be available. The mind draws a blank.[28]
Saying that the supernatural is a logical possibility, then, is not saying very much. It is logically possible that I can go to the window, jump out, and fly to the next building. But there are no conclusive reasons to believe that I can do this and many good reasons to believe that I cannot. An existential claim to which one wishes to commit epistemically must be more than a mere logical possibility. If one is concerned with the justification of belief in terms of truth and falsity rather than with pragmatic justification, such commitment must be accompanied by some positive evidence which points to the truth of supernatural belief. There must be empirical evidence for any claim with existential import, and any area of human thought, including religion, in which existential claims are made is subject to the criteria by which existential claims are tested. Consequently, claims about the supernatural are logically possible, but their status as existential possibilities remains problematic.
Clearly, the problem of whether the supernatural is an existential possibility is not merely a methodological problem, but also the epistemological one of how the truth of supernatural propositions is to be ascertained. Sidney Hook asks, "Are the laws of logic and the canons of evidence and relevance any different in philosophy from what they are in science and common sense?"[29] His answer is that the rules of logical reasoning and evidence do not change simply because that which is subject to scrutiny is asserted to be beyond their reach. The minute an adherent of such a claim asserts its truth, the same rules apply. Every area of human inquiry is subject to the same logical and evidential analyses, and the person who maintains that the supernatural is not subject to the traditional rules of logic and evidence bears the burden of producing those that are relevant. Methodological naturalism, on the other hand, asserts the continuity of analysis, meaning that, in turn, philosophical naturalism asserts ontological continuity
These difficulties suffice to explain why supernaturalism cannot be appealed to in explanation of natural phenomena, whereas the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism suffices to show why it is the only justifiable explanatory principle. According to Hook, "This sounds very dogmatic, but is really an expression of intellectual humility that seeks to avoid unlimited credulity. It does not doubt that we possess scientific knowledge but leaves open the question of what we can have knowledge about.... Such humility does not assert that the experience of knowledge exhausts all modes of experience or that scientific knowledge is all-knowing."[31]
The methodological naturalist is concerned with what is to count as unambiguous confirmation for an existential claim. Methodological naturalism does not provide an exhaustive inventory of what exists and what does not. Rather, its specific aim is to discern and specify any aspects of reality for which there is sufficient warrant.[32] It permits the cumulative gathering and grounding of information about the bounded field we call the natural world, the epistemological boundary of which is constituted by its empirical accessibility. So in adopting the methodology of science, we are able to make defensible pronouncements about what exists in the natural order, but about nothing that may transcend it. For the latter type of claim we would need another method.
PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM
Understanding methodological naturalism as the adoption of a skeptical temperament which emphasizes the scientific analysis of all areas of human inquiry, we now may examine the precise nature of the connection between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.
For the philosophical naturalist, method is everything, so philosophical naturalism stands or falls with its reliance on methodological naturalism
Adopted in the sciences because of its explanatory and predictive success, methodological naturalism is the intellectual parent of modern philosophical naturalism as it now exists, meaning that philosophical naturalism as a world view is a generalization of the cumulative results of scientific inquiry. With its roots in late 19th-century science in the aftermath of Darwin's The Origin of Species, it is neither the a priori premise nor the logically necessary conclusion of methodological naturalism, but the well grounded a posteriori result. Yet because the philosophical naturalist begins with method, not metaphysics, methodological naturalism does impose constraints on what can be included in philosophical naturalism's metaphysical scheme, constraints necessitated by its empiricist epistemology. Methodological naturalism need not (and does not) assume a priori that empiricism is the only conceivable avenue of truth or that intuition and revelation are non-existent, and therefore non-functional as forms of cognition. Neither need it assume a priori (nor does it) that the supernatural is non-existent. It does function in the absence of convincing evidence that intuitive or revelatory claims are genuinely cognitive, and in the absence of any clear epistemological or metaphysical progress made on the basis of such claims. Likewise, it functions not only in the absence of any clear consensus regarding the ontological status of the supernatural or supernatural entities, but in the unlikelihood that there is any way to reach a consensus. The only way to make any existential claims beyond those warranted by methodological naturalism is to produce the methodology by which these claims can be legitimately credited with belief. If that method cannot be produced, then any claims which cannot be justified by means of methodological naturalism cannot be warranted at all.
So then, how does naturalism move from method to metaphysics? Sidney Hook asserts that "Scientific method does not entail any metaphysical theory of existence...."[35] This means only that methodological naturalism's reliance upon scientific method for acquiring knowledge about the natural world does not thereby logically necessitate the metaphysical conclusion that nothing exists beyond nature. To claim such entailment would require that one be omniscient, able to eliminate all other metaphysical possibilities as untenable. But Hook also says that "'method' is dogged by a pack of metaphysical consequences ... a 'pure' method which does not involve reference to a theory of existence is as devoid of meaning as a proposition which does not imply other propositions."[36]
Exclusive methodological naturalism does have metaphysical implications, and the metaphysical implications of the exclusive use of scientific method are the same, i.e., philosophical naturalism, whether the latter is presupposed in an a priori fashion or whether it is a generalization founded on the result of the method's consistent application. Insofar as methodological naturalism can accept as evidence for belief only what scientific method judges reliable, it does define what is an acceptable world view by limiting what one can justifiably assert.
Although philosophical naturalism is not logically entailed by methodological naturalism, there are a number of other possible relationships between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. The first possibility is that methodological naturalism merely permits, or is logically consistent with, philosophical naturalism. Though true, this claim is completely trivial and, as such, provides no substantive reason to link the two at all.
The second, but very far-fetched, possibility is that methodological naturalism logically precludes philosophical naturalism because, as previously noted, a claim of entailment would require omniscience. This possibility is untenable since philosophical naturalism makes no claim of omniscience. It rests on methodological naturalism as the necessary condition of reliable knowledge of the natural world, but not as exhaustive of what can be known.
The third possibility is that methodological naturalism is not connected in any essential way either to philosophical naturalism or any other metaphysical view, but that it is compatible with all and prescriptive of none.[37] Certainly, it is possible to compartmentalize one's thinking, acknowledging methodological naturalism as the only viable methodology with respect to the natural world, while simultaneously believing in, for example, the existence of a supernatural world. (This is not to say that the latter is reasonable, but that it is an actually held view as well as a logically possible one.) But this alternative presupposes the simultaneous possibility of a unitary, empirical methodology and a dualistic metaphysics consisting of a natural world within the framework of or ontologically contiguous with the supernatural. Either it requires the denial of the need for another methodology and epistemology, or it implies that there is an additional methodology and a different epistemology for the supernatural. Moreover, the two methodologies and epistemologies must be procedurally and logically compatible.
Since the claim that methodological naturalism is compatible with anything other than philosophical naturalism requires the so far indefensible claim that there are an additional but logically compatible methodology and epistemology, the fourth possibility constitutes the only viable relationship between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, which is this: Taken together, the (1) proven success of methodological naturalism combined with (2) the massive body of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a comparable method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of any conclusive evidence for the existence of the supernatural, yield philosophical naturalism as the most methodologically and epistemologically defensible world view.[38]
This is where philosophical naturalism wins
PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM'S ONTOLOGICAL CATEGORIES
In the face of what I consider a compelling case for philosophical naturalism, I must also point out that philosophical naturalism is not an epistemologically airtight metaphysics for two reasons: (1) Since it tracks the developments of science and depends upon its methodology, it is marked by not only the groundedness but also the tentativity of scientific understanding. (2) Neither can it be a guaranteed certainty until the nonexistence of the supernatural can be conclusively established. But this lack of epistemological certainty is emphatically not a weakness, but rather the strength, of philosophical naturalism. One never has "proof" of a comprehensive world view if proof is defined strictly as logical demonstration, and exactly the same is true of any comprehensive metaphysical view, meaning that none enjoys the security of absolute certainty. Naturalists, grounding their metaphysics in science, learned from Descartes' failed attempt to ground science upon metaphysics that science cannot proceed under the constraint of a priori certainty. David Papineau explains this:
[The argument] that philosophy needs firmer foundations than those available within empirical science ... depends on the assumption that knowledge needs to be certain, in the sense that it should derive from methods that necessarily deliver truths. Once you accept this requirement on knowledge, then you will indeed demand that philosophical knowledge in particular should come from such arguably incontrovertible methods as introspection, conceptual analysis, and deduction; and the epistemological status of science will remain in question until such time as philosophy succeeds in showing how it too satisfies the demand of certainty....
If you hold that knowledge requires certainty, then you will hold that philosophy needs to come before science. If you reject this demand ... then you will have reason to regard philosophy as continuous with science ... the onus surely lies with those who want to exclude relevant and wellconfirmed empirical claims from philosophical debate to provide some a priori rationale for doing so....[39]
The problem with the demand that a world view be privileged with a priori certainty is that if one starts with non-empirical basic beliefs
Philosophical naturalism, rather than constructing a world view from a priori ontological categories, constructs a world view ordered by categories constructed from the ground up, so to speak, on the basis of empirically ascertained knowledge of nature; its categories are just as stable, or just as fluid, as scientific explanations themselves. Actually, except for its one most stable category, "nature," philosophical naturalism commits itself a priori to no particular ontological categories, and to no ultimate categories at all. For the philosophical naturalist, ontological categories are not a priori primitives, but a posteriori derivatives of scientific theories and common human experience. As such, the ontological categories of philosophical naturalism are not scientifically restrictive, meaning, very importantly, that they are subject to any adjustments to which scientific theories are subject and can be altered as scientific understanding changes. William R. Dennes, in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, points out that philosophical naturalism has a history of such revisions: "The last half-century has seen a striking shift in what may be called the basic, as contrasted with the derivative, categories employed in naturalistic philosophy. Older interpretations in terms of matter, motion, and energy ... have given way to interpretations in terms of events, qualities, and relations...."[40]
Naturalism's ontological categories may actually be regarded as superfluous since they do not in any way add to the substantive understanding of the cosmos afforded by science. Even when invoked, naturalistic categories never stipulate any specific existential characteristics; the term "quality," for example, can not specify any particular existential quality.[41] They are merely organizational categories which "tidy up" or schematize what we know scientifically.
Indeed, for the philosophical naturalist, the very existence of metaphysics as an independent philosophical discipline is questionable. It is clearly not a discipline which has added in any substantive way to our knowledge of the world, as admitted by Kornblith: "What does have priority over both metaphysics and epistemology, from the naturalistic perspective, is successful scientific theory, and not because there is some a priori reason to trust science over philosophy, but rather because there is a body of scientific theory which has proven its value in prediction, explanation, and technological application. This gives scientific work a kind of grounding which no philosophical theory has thus far enjoyed."[42]
Hook certainly does not see in metaphysics a discipline which adds to the cumulative knowledge of the world:
I do not believe that there is any consistent usage for the term "ontological." I ... propose that we call "ontological" those statements which we believe to be cognitively valid, or which assert something that is true or false, and yet which are not found in any particular science.... For example ... There are many colors in the world; Colors have no smell or sound.... Thinking creatures inhabit the earth.[43]
Such statements are true but uniformly trivial, requiring no specialized methodology in order to be known, but derived simply from reflection upon non-specialized observations.
It is clear that the ontology of philosophical naturalism is itself theoretical in the scientific sense: it is an explanation, albeit much more general than a scientific one, of what is warranted as knowledge, why we do not have certain other kinds of "knowledge," and why we therefore cannot lay cognitive claim to ontological categories such as the supernatural. It is not a categorical rejection of the supernatural, but a constantly tentative rejection of it in light of the heretofore consistent lack of confirmation of it. And rather than accepting methodological naturalism a priori as the only reliable methodology for acquiring knowledge about the cosmos, it accepts it rather as a methodology the reliability of which has been established historically by its success and the absence of any successful alternative method for acquiring knowledge about either the natural world or a supernatural order. The general rule for philosophical naturalism is this: the more of the cosmos which science is able to explain, the less warrant there is for explanations which include a divine or transcendent principle as a causal factor.
For the philosophical naturalist, the rejection of supernaturalism is a case of "death by a thousand cuts." Since its inception, methodological naturalism has consistently chipped away at the plausibility of the existential claims made by supernaturalism by providing increasingly successful explanations of aspects of the world which religion has historically sought to explain, e.g., human origins. The threat faced by supernaturalism is not the threat of logical disproof, but the fact of having its explanations supplanted by scientific ones.
Paul Kurtz correctly perceives the implications of methodological naturalism in evolutionary biology, viz., the implications of the fact that the methods of studying humans are fundamentally the same as those of studying the rest of the natural world: The more knowledge of human biological existence yielded by the reliance upon methodological naturalism, the less need or justification for supernatural explanations. Kurtz says, "The new critics of Darwinism properly perceive that, if the implications of Darwinism are fully accepted, this would indeed mean a basic change in the outlook of who we are ...."[44] This is because modern evolutionary biology is the product of Darwin and his successors' exclusive reliance upon methodological naturalism. Indeed, the problem for non-naturalist philosophies is that science, with its historical track record of explanatory success, has progressively crowded out non-naturalist explanations of the cosmos. This expansion and confirmation of scientific knowledge, combined with the absence of any other reliable methodology, results in the increasing marginalization of non-naturalistic world views.
The gaps in scientific knowledge which have historically functioned as entry points for divine creativity are considerably narrower than they were just a generation ago. Every expansion in scientific knowledge has left in its wake a more shrunken space of possibilities from which to infer the plausibility of supernaturalism. Science is yielding an increasingly expansive and supportable picture of continuity between humans and other life forms, and between living organisms and the rest of the cosmos from whose elements, such as the carbon produced during the evolution of stars, these organisms are constituted. The more expansive the continuity, the firmer the foundation for the inference from methodological naturalism to philosophical naturalism, and the less plausible the non-naturalistic explanations.
Since philosophical naturalism is an outgrowth of methodological naturalism, and methodological naturalism has been validated by its epistemological and technological success, then every expansion in scientific understanding lends it further confirmation. For example, should life be genuinely created in the laboratory from the non-organic elements which presently comprise living organisms, this discovery would add tremendous weight to philosophical naturalism. Should cognitive science and neurobiology succeed conclusively in explaining the phenomenon of human consciousness, mind-body dualism would be completely undermined, and philosophical naturalism would again be immeasurably strengthened.[45]
For philosophical naturalism, this is better than logical entailment, which would make it the only permissible conclusion of methodological naturalism. Relationships of logical necessity need not reflect any state of affairs in the world, whereas expansions of empirically verifiable knowledge always do. The known world expands, and the world of impenetrable mystery shrinks. With every expanse, something is explained which at an earlier point in history had been permanently consigned to supernatural mystery or metaphysical speculation. And the expansion of scientific knowledge has been and remains an epistemological threat to any claims which have been fashioned independently (or in defiance) of such knowledge. We are confronted with an asymptotic decrease in the existential possibility of the supernatural to the point at which it is wholly negligible.
One reason that belief in the supernatural remains widespread, despite its negligibility, is that, as discussed earlier, it cannot be proven wrong, and the epistemological insulation provided by its inaccessibility is accorded the weight of evidence despite the fact that it carries no evidential weight at all. The supernatural remains logically possible, and thus an option for belief, only because it is not susceptible to confirmation or disconfirmation on the basis of evidence. But this status is permanent
To say that we live in a natural world, situated in a universe governed by natural laws, even if these laws are considered nothing more than invariable regularities, is to say a great deal, the major points of which are specified by Kurtz:
Today, it is possible to defend ... naturalism ... on empirical scientific grounds. Naturalism thus provides a cosmic interpretation of nature. The universe is basically physical-chemical or material in structure, it is evolving in time; human life is continuous with other natural processes and can be explained in terms of them. To defend naturalism today is to say something significant, for it is an alternative to supernaturalism ... [which] is unsupported by scientific evidence.[46]
This means that we are saying
Science, because of its reliance upon methodological naturalism, lends no support to belief in the supernatural. Consequently, philosophical naturalism, because of its own grounding in methodological naturalism, has no room for it either. While for the supernaturalist, this absence may be the chief complaint against both science and methodological naturalism, for the philosophical naturalist, it is the source of the greatest confidence in both.
NOTES
[1] See Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism, chapter 4, "Of Naturalism and Necessity," (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 181-214.
[2] In this paper, I shall use the term "philosophical naturalism," instead of "metaphysical" or "ontological" naturalism, although all three are synonymous and may be understood in every use of the former term.
[3] Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).
[4] Paul Kurtz, "Darwin Re-Crucified: Why Are So Many Afraid of Naturalism?" Free Inquiry (Spring 1998), 17. Kurtz also defines a third, ethical sense of naturalism, which falls outside the concern of this paper.
[5] Arthur Danto says the following: "There is ... room within the naturalist movement for any variety of otherwise rival ontologies ... it is a methodological rather than an ontological monism ... leaving [philosophers] free to be dualists, idealists, materialists ... as the case may be." See "Naturalism," in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967), 448. Contrary to Danto, however, dualism
[6] Sidney Hook, "Naturalism and First Principles," in The Quest for Being (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1961), 185-86.
[7] Hilary Kornblith, "Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological," 50.
[8] Arthur N. Strahler, Understanding Science: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 3.
[9] Ibid., 13-15.
[10] Ibid., 286. Kornblith asserts that metaphysics and epistemology must go together, as "these projects present important constraints on one another" and are "mutually reinforcing." In "Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological," 39.
[11] E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 192; quoted in Strahler, Understanding Science, 339. For a similar, more recent statement on the possibility of explaining religion naturalistically, see E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, chapter 11, "Ethics and Religion" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
[12] Sterling Lamprecht, "Naturalism and Religion," in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian, 18. See also Steven D. Schafersman, "Methodological Naturalism and Ontological Naturalism," in "Naturalism Is an Essential Part of Science," http://humanism.net/~schafesd/naturalism.html; accessed May 26, 1999 [Ed.: Now at http://www.freeinquiry.com/naturalism.html]. Cited with permission.
[13] Strahler, Understanding Science, 345-46.
[14] When Elsberry says that natural and supernatural causation are "confounding," he presumably means that one cannot differentiate, describe, or identify a separate, supernatural causal factor. Wesley Elsberry, "Philosophy and the Practice of Science" in "Enterprising Science Needs Naturalism," http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/papers/Elsberry.html; accessed May 26, 1999 [Ed.: Now at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/papers/Elsberry.html]. Cited with permission.
[15] Schafersman, "What Is Science?" in "Naturalism Is an Essential Part of Science."
[16] Schafersman, "Naturalism and Materialism," in "Naturalism Is an Essential Part of Science."
[17] Schafersman, "What Is Science?"
[18] Lamprecht, "Naturalism and Religion," 18.
[19] "The burden of proof rests entirely upon those who assert that there exists another kind of knowledge over and above technological, common sense, empirical knowledge, and the scientific knowledge which is an outgrowth and development ofit." Sidney Hook, The Quest for Being, 217.
[20] John Herman Randall, "The Nature of Naturalism," in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian, 374.
[21] Sidney Hook, The Quest for Being, 173-74.
[22] Sidney Hook, "For an Open Minded Naturalism," Southern Journal of Philosophy vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1975), 132.
[23] Ibid., 130.
[24] Ibid., 131-32.
[25] Lamprecht, "Naturalism and Religion," 31-32.
[26] Sidney Hook, The Quest for Being, 97.
[27] "Existential import" is defined as "The commitment to the existence of certain objects that is entailed by a given proposition." Baruch A. Brody, "Glossary of Logical Terms," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967 ed.
[28] The supernaturalist response that the supernatural's existence is necessarily unconditioned is hollow
[29] Hook, The Quest for Being, 177.
[30] For a discussion of the concept of continuity of analysis, with some discussion of John Dewey's position on ontological continuity, see Thelma Z. Lavine, "Naturalism and the Sociological Analysis of Knowledge," in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian, 183-209.
[31] Sidney Hook, The Quest for Being, 214.
[32] "Naturalists ... seek by discipline to distinguish the varying degrees of probability which ideas seem to have, to accept as beliefs only those ideas that are well accredited, and to entertain any further ideas only as hypotheses or hopes or fancies." See Lamprecht, "Naturalism and Religion," 18.
[33] Ibid., 37.
[34] Kornblith, "Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological," 40.
[35] Sidney Hook, "Naturalism and Democracy," in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian, 42.
[36] Sidney Hook, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1927), 6.
[37] See Arthur Danto's comment and my response in note 5.
[38] Schafersman says the same thing from the scientist's viewpoint: "Is [philosophical] naturalism true? We may think so, but we can't know for certain. Naturalism's truth would presumably depend on [the question of] the existence of the supernatural realm. If there were empirical evidence for the supernatural or a logical reason to believe in the supernatural without such evidence, then naturalism would be false. If we knew for certain that the supernatural did not exist, then naturalism would be true. But if there is no evidence for the supernatural and no reason to believe in it despite the lack of evidence...the supernatural could still possibly exist without our knowledge. Such a lack of evidence and reason forces one to be agnostic about the existence of the supernatural and thus about the ultimate truth of naturalism. However, because of such lack of evidence and logical argument, it is more reasonable to disbelieve the supernatural and believe that naturalism is true." In Schafersman, "Definitions," in "Naturalism Is an Essential Part of Science."
[39] David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 4.
[40] William R. Dennes, "The Categories of Naturalism," in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian, 270-71. Dennes is referring to the changes in philosophical naturalism resulting from the advent of modern biology with Darwin and of modern physics with relativity and quantum theory.
[41] Dennes, "The Categories of Naturalism," 284-86. He writes, "by making serious use of the category of quality, but at the same time insisting that no categorial systems can determine what qualities are manifested ... contemporary naturalism has freed itself from the objection leveled against earlier naturalism that it excluded from existence ... any qualities experienced or imaginable....The explanation of any entities will consist in hypotheses, grounded in evidence and appreciably confirmed by evidence ... any other procedure would be a surrender either to mendacity or to fantasy." Hook affirms this view: "That first principles must be justified before we can achieve assured knowledge is a view seemingly held by some philosophers but rarely by anyone else. Scientists, for example, have satisfactorily solved problem after problem without feeling called upon to solve the problem of justifying their first principles." Hook, The Quest for Being, 174.
[42] Kornblith, "Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological," 49.
[43] Sidney Hook, The Quest for Being, 168.
[44] Kurtz, "Darwin Re-Crucified," 17.
[45] Science is proceeding incrementally toward these goals. According to Daniel Dennett, materialism is already the accepted point of view in the explanation of mind: "The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter
[46] Kurtz, "Darwin Re-Crucified," 17.
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