The Nature of Nature

Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Bruce Gordon, William Dembski

• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781497644373
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

The intellectual and cultural battles now raging over theism and atheism, conservatism and secular progressivism, dualism and monism, realism and antirealism, and transcendent reality versus material reality extend even into the scientific disciplines. This stunning new volume captures this titanic clash of worldviews among those who have thought most deeply about the nature of science and of the universe itself. Unmatched in its breadth and scope, The Nature of Nature brings together some of the most influential scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals—including three Nobel laureates—across a wide spectrum of disciplines and schools of thought. Here they grapple with a perennial question that has been made all the more pressing by recent advances in the natural sciences: Is the fundamental explanatory principle of the universe, life, and self-conscious awareness to be found in inanimate matter or immaterial mind? The answers found in this book have profound implications for what it means to do science, what it means to be human, and what the future holds for all of us.

PART I

NATURALIZING SCIENCE:
SOME HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

INTRODUCTION

This section provides the historical context for the debate about naturalism that runs through the pages of this volume—a debate that begins with an examination of naturalism’s philosophical credentials, and ranges across the spectrum of the sciences from physics and cosmology to the origin and development of life, the nature of mathematical knowledge, the nature of the human mind and consciousness, and, finally, questions of ethics and religion. The theme of the historical essays, which serve as an introduction to this debate, is the origin and rise of philosophical and methodological naturalism in Western thought, and the role these ideas have come to play—for good or ill—in contemporary science and culture.

In the lead essay, “The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture,” philosopher of science Bruce Gordon begins by examining the implications of philosophical naturalism for the very possibility of rational explanation. Philosophical naturalism, he argues, undermines knowledge and rationality altogether, ultimately leading to the instrumentalization of belief and the fragmentation of culture. With the stage thus set, Gordon chronicles the rise of naturalism in conjunction with the creeping secularization of Western civilization, and discusses the confluence of factors that have led to the embrace of an exclusive humanism by the cultural elite—all the while noting that the foundations for modern science were laid in a Judeo-Christian context where order was sought in nature because it was expected, and it was expected because nature itself was regarded as the product of the mind of God. Gordon then corrects various misconceptions about the “warfare” between science and religion that allegedly began with the Enlightenment, and elucidates the role played by Darwinism in the process of secularization and the establishment of philosophical naturalism’s hegemony in the academy, providing an analysis of the deleterious effects Darwinian ideas have had in the broader culture. The essay concludes with an argument for the reconstitution of science on a transcendent foundation, examining the effectiveness of two ways in which this might be done.

The remaining essays focus more explicitly on the rise of methodological naturalism in science and whether it has, on the whole, been a positive development. In “Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs,” historian of science Ronald Numbers chronicles the history of methodological naturalism, and the role that theists played in promoting it, as a constraint on scientific theorizing and investigation. He discusses the motives that various devout Christians in the scientific community had for supporting it as a path to understanding nature. For them at least, Numbers argues, methodological naturalism did not lead to secularization, and it has not invariably led to secularization in society at large. In “Varieties of Methodological Naturalism,” philosopher of science Ernan McMullin discusses the historical relationship between ontological and methodological naturalism, arguing that there are deep problems with the former when taken as a substantive philosophical position. He then carefully analyzes the content of methodological naturalism, revealing at least three forms of it that need to be disentangled in contemporary discussions, and contending that two of them are worthy of support, even by theists.

In the final essay, “Sauce for the Goose: Intelligent Design, Scientific Methodology, and the Demarcation Problem,” philosopher of science Stephen Meyer examines the question of whether science has a definitional essence, and defends the reasonability of intelligent design as a scientific research program by multiple standards of significance. He then dissects methodological naturalism as a meta-criterion for scientificity, arguing that its justification is circular at best, and that the constraint it represents could have a deleterious effect on scientific progress. The historical sciences in particular, he concludes, are better off employing metaphysically neutral criteria, and following the evidence where it leads.

1

THE RISE OF NATURALISM AND ITS PROBLEMATIC ROLE IN SCIENCE AND CULTURE

BRUCE L. GORDON

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

—T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (East Coker)

It is worthwhile reflecting on how philosophical naturalism rose to its contemporary place of hegemony not just in the sciences, but in the academy in general. It was not always so. The institution of the university was an invention of medieval Christianity and modern science itself was birthed out of a Judeo-Christian worldview, a truth that has been lost in the current landscape of whiggish tales about the backwardness of the Middle Ages and the “warfare” between science and religion that supposedly began with the Enlightenment.¹ A corrective is in order. I propose, therefore, to begin with a concise reflection on the very possibility of rational explanation in the context of naturalism, arguing that it is a woefully deficient context for the scientific enterprise both metaphysically and epistemologically. I will then develop a historico-philosophical etiology of the rise of naturalism and correct a variety of egregious historical misconceptions, all by way of a general argument that the current ontological and methodological foundations for the pursuit of scientific truth are misconceived, counterproductive, and in dire need of reconstitution on transcendent grounds.

1. RATIONAL EXPLANATIONS WITHIN AND WITHOUT NATURALISM

Among those holding to the universality of rational explanations, some would maintain that while it may be a logical possibility that rational but nonnatural explanations exist, as a matter of fact, there are no examples of such. Natural explanation holds sway not only over the sciences, but over everything else as well. This is the viewpoint affirmed by philosophical naturalism. In its reductive form—which insists that everything must ultimately be explained at the level of physics—it devolves into scientism, the belief that the heuristic methodology of the physical sciences is applicable in all fields of inquiry and all real knowledge is the result of such investigations. Aside from its self-referential incoherence, scientism establishes a hermetic boundary between facts and values that strips all values of their factuality and all facts of any objective noninstrumental valuation. The end result is moral nihilism and the instrumentalization of rationality to subjective ends incapable of objective evaluation in terms of their intrinsic merit.

Disenchanted with reductionism, nonreductive naturalists adhere to the universal scope and rationality of natural explanations, while asserting that consciousness and rationality are mental properties that supervene on and emerge from physical circumstances to which they are nonetheless irreducible. This attempt to combine a materialist monism about entities with a pluralism of supervenient or emergent properties—accounting for consciousness, intentionality, rationality, normativity, and a variety of other things that pose prima facie difficulties for naturalism—is indicative of the highly malleable character of naturalist doctrine. This native elusivity, combined with strategies of retrenchment, is designed to insulate the fundamental thesis of naturalism—the causal closure of the material realm—from disconfirming evidence. The literature on supervenience and emergence offering variations of this sleight of hand is voluminous and we cannot survey it here, but such a survey is unnecessary since we can more easily provide two principled arguments for the falsity of both reductive and nonreductive naturalism (anomalous monism).²

First of all, quite apart from the research difficulties engendered by multiple neurophysiological realizability of function, there is no way that conscious apprehension of meaning (semantics) could be generated from neurochemical syntax. Consider that the semantic content of a graphical representation in natural language is transcendently imposed upon it by an intelligent assignment of meaning to the symbols within the structure of attendant grammatical rules. Brain electrochemistry can be no different. It consists in a molecular arrangement of neurons and synaptic traffic that bears no meaning in itself, but rather requires a transcendent meaning correlate that is not intrinsic to the brain as a biological system but rather the property of a consciousness that is distinct from it. John Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument” thus serves not just as an illustration of the falsity of functionalism and an explanation of why computers will never have conscious experiences;³ with all due respect to Searle’s claims on behalf of biological naturalism,⁴ it also serves as an illustration of the falsity of nonreductive materialist monism and an explanation of why personal consciousness, while correlated with proper brain function, is ontologically and operationally distinct from it. So by all means, let us establish the neurophysiological correlates of thought insofar as we can, but not be so naïve as to think such an achievement would establish materialist monism; on the contrary, an immaterial consciousness must exist if our beliefs have semantic content, which they undeniably do. The rejection of an ontological distinction between matter and mind requires the self-refuting belief that there are no such things as beliefs. It leaves us with an eliminative materialism that renders consciousness an illusion and therefore precludes the very possibility of rationality.

A parallel argument can be given that belief in naturalism, whether reductive or nonreductive, is epistemically self-defeating. Various forms of this argument have been offered by C. S. Lewis, Richard Taylor, and Alvin Plantinga. Since the most recent version of Plantinga’s sophisticated evolutionary argument against naturalism is available to the reader in this collection, I distill here the essence of the Lewis-Taylor-Plantinga insight.⁵

The prospect of human knowledge depends upon the veridicality of our perceptions and the validity of our reasoning processes. If the certainty resulting from cognitive perception and valid inference provides a genuine grasp of how reality must be independent of our minds, then knowledge is possible, but if the certainty so obtained is a mere feeling and not a genuinely reliable insight into reality, then we do not have knowledge. Now, if naturalism is true, human beings came about as the result of undirected processes of evolution that had no goal in mind. In such case, our cognitive faculties are the end result of mindless causes and historical accidents that take no account of truth or logic, just the exigencies of survival. Under such conditions, any complex of beliefs and desires that conduces to survival would suffice. What we believe to be true under such conditions is therefore an accidental historical byproduct of purely natural events that bear no intrinsic relation to the actual truth of the beliefs we hold; it is an expression of how our brains just happen to work. That our beliefs should actually be true under such conditions seems quite unlikely; at the very least, whether our beliefs are true or false cannot be ascertained. If naturalism is true, therefore, our reasoning processes are so discredited that they cannot support the truth of any of the beliefs we happen to hold, especially those rather distant from immediate experience, such as the belief in naturalism itself. Belief in naturalism is therefore epistemically self-defeating, and since there is for the naturalist no remedy to this situation, it is irrational to be a philosophical naturalist because it destroys the possibility of rationality altogether.

This leaves us to philosophical naturalists who are most appropriately categorized as “pragmatists.” While eschewing anything beyond the natural realm, they deny the universality of rational explanation. In their view, all explanations are radically contextual, and nothing would license the assumption that all contexts—even scientific ones—are mutually reconcilable. This stance, which represents a kind of irrationalism, is ironically the most consistent realization of the metaphysical and epistemological implications of philosophical naturalism. Adoption of the pragmatic stance ultimately leads to the fragmentation and instrumentalization of all rationality, scientific rationality included. Whatever science is, under the rubric of pragmatic naturalism, it is not the rational search for a unified truth about the natural world. It is merely one instrumentality among many in a relativistic world of personal and societal agendas that have no objective standard in respect of their merit. Without such a universal standard, “truth” has no purchase point that would grant it objective ascendancy, “knowledge” becomes mere power in the service of appetite, and everything gets politicized. While many academic pragmatists give no personal evidence of an oppre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword: Beyond Naturalism to Science
• Introduction: The Nature of Nature Confronted
• PART I: NATURALIZING SCIENCE: SOME HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
• PART II: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF NATURALISM
• PART III: THE ORIGIN OF BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF BIOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
• PART IV: COSMOLOGICAL ORIGINS AND FINE-TUNING
• PART V: MATHEMATICS
• PART VI: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS
• PART VII: SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND RELIGION
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Sources and Permissions
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright Page