Theism and Explanation

Gregory W. Dawes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415997386
• eBook ISBN: 9781135841348
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this timely study, Dawes defends the methodological naturalism of the sciences. Though religions offer what appear to be explanations of various facts about the world, the scientist, as scientist, will not take such proposed explanations seriously. Even if no natural explanation were available, she will assume that one exists. Is this merely a sign of atheistic prejudice, as some critics suggest? Or are there good reasons to exclude from science explanations that invoke a supernatural agent? On the one hand, Dawes concedes the bare possibility that talk of divine action could constitute a potential explanation of some state of affairs, while noting that the conditions under which this would be true are unlikely ever to be fulfilled. On the other hand, he argues that a proposed explanation of this kind would rate poorly, when measured against our usual standards of explanatory virtue.

1 Against Religious Explanations

’Tis a pious account, cried my father, but not philosophical — there is more religion in it than sound science.

Tristram Shandy

Sometime in the nineteenth century, God disappeared. He did not, of course, disappear from the wider culture, where belief in God remains influential, in some contexts more than ever. But he did disappear from the professional writings of those who were coming to be known as scientists.¹ It is not that all scientists ceased to be believers. They did not. And for those who remained believers, even a world without miracles, a world of “fixed and invariable laws,”² could be seen as bearing witness to a Creator.³ But no matter how religious scientists may have been as individuals, God was banished from their scientific discourse, as the sciences came to be exclusively concerned with natural rather than supernatural causes.

This development is particularly noteworthy in the life sciences, which had provided rich pickings for the natural theologians of an earlier age. As late as 1830, the geologist Charles Lyell did not try to explain how species emerged; he merely described the circumstances of their emergence.⁴ And the “creative energy” to which Lyell attributed their emergence has a strongly providentialist flavour. It ensured that species appeared in places where they could flourish and gain a foothold on the earth.⁵ But with the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's work On the Origin of Species, even such quasi-religious explanations come to an end.⁶ After Darwin, no religious explanation of a feature of the natural world would be taken seriously, at least by scientists. Even if scientists could discover no natural cause of the phenomenon in question, they would assume that one exists.⁷ This exclusion of divine agency has become a taken-for-granted feature of scientific endeavour. The attitude it expresses is often described as the “naturalism” of the modern sciences.

1.1 THE NATURALISM OF THE SCIENCES

In the pages that follow I explore an alternative to this naturalistic stance. I explore the possibility of offering a non-natural explanation of some observable state of affairs, one which invokes a divine agent. My question is: Could an explanation that invokes a divine agent be a good explanation? Could it meet our general criteria of explanatory adequacy, whether or not we choose to call it “scientific”? But before I address this question, it may be useful to reflect on the naturalistic stance of the modern sciences. What is this position, which in recent years has given rise to so much debate? And how might it be defended?

1.1.1 Two Kinds of Naturalism

The problem here is that the term naturalism is ambiguous. One could define naturalism in such a way that it would not, in principle, exclude appeal to supernatural agents. We see this in the definition adopted by W. V. Quine. For Quine, naturalism entails “the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”⁸ More precisely, it is the view that “the most we can reasonably seek in support of an inventory and description of reality is testability of its observable consequences.”⁹ Naturalism in this sense is a view of how we gain epistemic access to reality, and there is nothing about this view that is inconsistent with theism. Nor is it inconsistent with the offering of a theistic explanation. Indeed Quine himself notes that if positing the existence of God were to offer some “indirect explanatory benefit,” he would embrace this posited deity without in any way abandoning his naturalism.¹⁰

Naturalism in this broad, Quinean sense is a widely-held position among contemporary philosophers. Many would agree that (in the words of Susan Haack) “the only means we have of figuring out what the world is like, is our experience of the world and our explanatory theorizing about it.”¹¹ Like all philosophical positions, a Quinean naturalism of this kind may be controversial, but it is a different controversy from that with which I began. The controversy with which I began my discussion has to do with a stronger sense of “naturalism,” which represents an ontological rather than an epistemological claim.¹² It may be described as the view “that there is nothing besides nature, nothing in addition to nature, nothing outside or beyond nature.”¹³ The natural world, according to this view, is all that there is. It follows that we should not even consider proposed explanations that posit non-natural entities.

This is a common-sense but crude description of the naturalism I am discussing. Can we produce something more precise? It is not easy to do so. As it stands, my crude definition is less than informative, since it merely raises a new question: What do we mean when we speak of nature? If we take “nature” to be equivalent to “the physical universe,” then naturalism can be thought of as equivalent to physicalism. But again this merely shifts the question, which now becomes: What do we mean by the physical universe? On the assumption that the physical is what is studied by the physicist, a naturalist could argue that only those entities exist that are posited by contemporary physics. But any attempt to spell out what this means would merely give hostages to fortune, for it is all but certain that the theories of contemporary physics will be revised.¹⁴ So a more tenable version of naturalism might insist that all that exists are the kinds of entities posited by contemporary physics.¹⁵ What kinds of entities are these? They are, in van Inwagen's words, entities having “non-mental, non-teleological, numerical quantifiable properties” and “composite objects that have these properties as their ultimate parts.”¹⁶

That's one definition of naturalism. It is, perhaps, a little narrow. There are many things the existence of which a naturalist might wish to concede that do not fall into this category. He may, for instance, recognise the existence of “dreams, joys, plans, aspirations”¹⁷ and other mental states, such as beliefs and desires. And even if he is sceptical about mental properties, he may grant some kind of reality to predators, genomes, or inflation rates, none of which fall under van Inwagen's description.¹⁸ So it might be better to speak of “the existential and causal primacy” of physical properties.¹⁹ What would this primacy entail? There are a number of options here. It could be argued that there are, in fact, no non-physical properties, or that such properties exist but are in some sense identical with, supervene on, or are realised by physical properties.²⁰ And while van Inwagen's definition equates naturalism with physicalism, the latter term may be misleading. Physicalism was originally used of a distinct thesis, namely that “all meaningful sentences can be translated into sentences of a universal physical language”²¹ or – more modestly – that all scientific theories could, in principle, be reduced to those of physics, in the same way as thermodynamics was reduced to mechanics. I would argue that one can be a naturalist without accepting either of those theses.²² Finally, like many such definitions, van Inwagen's assumes that there is some “fundamental” level of reality? But what if there is not? What if the world turns out to be “infinitely decomposable”? Could one still make sense of the naturalist thesis?²³

These are interesting and important issues, but I shall make no attempt to address them. The point I wish to make is a more straightforward, less controversial one. However you define a naturalism of this kind, there is no doubt that it excludes any reference to a supernatural agent,²⁴ that is to say, an agent who is not part of the natural world but who can interact causally with it.²⁵ A methodological naturalist will insist that we must proceed as if there were no supernatural agents, while an ontological naturalist will insist that there are no such agents. The two are united in their view that, in the words of Richard Lewontin, “our explanations of material phenomena exclude any role for supernatural demons, witches, and spirits of every kind, including any of the various gods from Adonai to Zeus.”²⁶ It is this feature of naturalism, and this feature alone, which is the starting point of my investigation. What interests me is the point made in my opening remarks, namely that this view is shared by “nearly every present-day scientist,”²⁷ the only exceptions being those who are professed creationists.²⁸ The origins of this attitude are a question for the historian. What the philosopher can ask is: Is it warranted?

While I hope that my study will shed light on this issue, it will do so indirectly, for the question I wish to address is a broader one. I am interested not merely in those explanations that we customarily describe as scientific; I am interested in explanations in general (1.2.2).²⁹ The question I am addressing can be variously described. Could any account of divine action have explanatory force? Could the existence and action of a divine agent be the primary causal factor in a satisfactory explanation? Or, to put it crudely, even if all this talk about God were true, could it explain anything? If the answer to these questions is “no,” then it is not only scientists who have good reason to be methodological naturalists. We all do.

1.1.2 Methodological and Ontological Naturalism

I have suggested that the naturalism in which I am interested is an ontological rather than an epistemological position. It is this fact that enables us to distinguish it from Quinean naturalism, which would not (in principle) exclude the supernatural. (Quinean naturalism could, perhaps, exclude the supernatural in practice, on the grounds that science has shown physicalism to be at least probably true, but that's another issue.³⁰) But defenders of the naturalism of the modern sciences often insist that theirs is not, in fact, an ontological commitment. What they are defending, they argue, is nothing more than a methodological naturalism. An ontological naturalism, writes Robert Pennock, “makes substantive claims about what exists in nature and then adds a closure clause stating ‘and that is all there is.’”³¹ By way of contrast, methodological naturalism is an epistemological position. It specifies how we should seek to attain knowledge: typically, by using the methods of the natural sciences.³² It does not, at least in the first place, specify the content of our knowledge.

Is this a workable distinction? Could you be a methodological naturalist without committing yourself to any particular ontology? More precisely, could you be a methodological naturalist while continuing to believe in God? There are many who think you can: philosopher Michael Ruse is perhaps the best-known defender of this position.³³ Phillip Johnson, on the other hand, argues that such people are deceiving themselves, that a methodological naturalism leads naturally and inevitably to a stronger, metaphysical commitment.

The problem, very briefly stated, is this: if employing MN [methodological naturalism] is the only way to reach true conclusions about the history of the universe, and if the attempt to provide a naturalistic view of the universe has continually gone from success to success, and if even theists concede that trying to do science on theistic premises always leads nowhere or into error (the embarrassing “God of the gaps”), then the likely explanation of this state of affairs is that naturalism is true and theism is false.³⁴

I shall be critical of Johnson's work shortly, but in this case he is surely right. It is true that he would not grant the premise of his own argument. He would deny that the naturalistic programme of the sciences has been as successful as its advocates urge. (Johnson is a leading opponent of evolutionary theory and advocate of “intelligent design.”) But if he is wrong, if the naturalistic research programme of the sciences has been overwhelmingly successful, then one could argue that the best explanation of its success is the truth of ontological naturalism.³⁵

Indeed I would go further. I would argue that for the purpose of offering explanations, methodological naturalism is practically indistinguishable from its ontological sibling. It is true that in itself methodological naturalism entails no particular metaphysics. But this is only because it entails nothing at all, since it is a procedural matter, a rule rather than a proposition. What does that rule specify? If it specified nothing more than a particular method of enquiry, as Pennock suggests, it would be less controversial. As Quine notes, we could not assume that adherence to such a method would exclude the supernatural. But those who defend the methodological naturalism of the sciences apparently mean something more than this. They wish to exclude any possible appeal to a divine agent.

So it seems more plausible to interpret the phrase “methodological naturalism” in a second way. It tells us that in our quest for knowledge we should proceed as if ontological naturalism were true. If you accept this definition, then at least in p...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Against Religious Explanations
• 2 On Explanations in General
• 3 What are Theistic Explanations?
• 4 What Would They Explain?
• 5 Potential Theistic Explanations
• 6 Inference to the Best Explanation
• 7 Successful Theistic Explanations
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: Intentional Explanations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index