Paper for "Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific
Enterprise" Conference - March 20-23, 1997. The University of Texas at
Austin. Not for redistribution.
Phillip Johnson argues that evolutionary
theory rides on the metaphysical coat-tails of a scientific naturalism that
denies by fiat any supernatural intervention, and that if it were not for this
"dogmatic speculative philosophy" Creationism would be recognized as
the better theory. He recommends that scientific naturalism be replaced by a
theistic science that embraces the absolute truth of divine interventions in
the world and incorporates supernatural explanations. In my published exchange
with Johnson that appeared in Biology and Philosophy last year, I showed that
in Evolution as Dogma (JED) and Darwin on Trial (JDT) Johnson failed to
recognize that science is not based upon a dogmatic ontological or metaphysical
naturalism, but rather makes use of naturalism only in a heuristic,
methodological manner. I also argued that methodological naturalism itself is
not assumed dogmatically but follows from reasonable evidential requirements in
science, most importantly, that hypotheses be intersubjectively testable by
reference to law-governed processes. (In his more recent Reason in the Balance
(RIB) Johnson does at last recognize methodological naturalism in the book's
appendix, but in the body of the text he continues to conflate it with
substantive, metaphysical naturalism.) As do Creation Scientists, Johnson tries
to set up a "dual model" argument so that his version of Creationism
will win be default if evolution can be eliminated by negative argument, and in
the article I showed why Johnson's revised version of this negative strategy
fares no better than the original. In his reply Johnson ignored most of my
criticisms and simply claimed that one could, like Isaac Newton, pursue a
theistic science. Although Newton did bring in God to underpin his physics, a
careful investigation of his actual practice shows that Newton usually followed
and in some cases explicitly endorsed many of the methodological rules that
naturalism recommends. Johnson and the new Creationists go much further than
Newton in their recommendations for a theistic science that incorporates divine
interventions and allows appeal to supernatural explanations. In this paper I
examine the prospects for such a theistic science.
Of course a theistic science would not be
confined to biology and we will have to see how it would apply generally, but
given that Johnson begins with Creationism as the theistic alternative to
Darwinian evolution it is to his definition of that view that we must first
look to discover the essential features of this proposed new science. Unlike
the majority of Creationists, Johnson is silent about the specific time and
pace of Creation and advances only a generic definition of Creationism:
'Creationism'
means belief in creation in a... general sense. Persons... are 'creationists'
if they believe that a supernatural Creator not only initiated this process [of
creation] but in some meaningful sense controls it in furtherance of a purpose.
(JDT p. 4)
The key elements of this definition of
Creationism--elements that Johnson often reiterates--involve a Creator who is
supernatural, and who not only initiates but miraculously intervenes to control
the process with some purpose in mind. In addition, the central conflict is
whether science should continue to pursue naturalistic explanations or whether
it should entertain supernatural "explanations." So, in the case at
hand, we are interested in whether the standard naturalistic Darwinian
explanations of the development of life forms must fall, as Johnson claims, to
the "Creation hypothesis" so conceived. Finally, given that
scientific naturalism is essentially a methodology that follows from an
empiricist notion of nature of evidence, we will want to look carefully at what
alternative notions of evidence a theistic science are supposed to offer.
Though Johnson regularly protests that the
"priesthood" of scientists prevents Creationism from putting forward
its positive evidence, in all his work one finds only two small hints of what
new type of evidence the Creationists have to offer--revelation and the Design
Argument. The first occurs only as a passing remark following an (inadvertently
self-undermining) acknowledgment that empiricism is a "sound methodological
premise." (JED p. 14) Johnson writes:
Science
is committed by definition to... find[ing] truth by observation, experiment,
and calculation rather than by studying sacred books or achieving mystical
states of mind. It may well be, however, that there are certain questions...
that cannot be answered by the methods available to our science. These may
include not only broad philosophical issues such as whether the universe has a
purpose, but also questions we have become accustomed to think of as empirical,
such as how life first began or how complex biological systems were put
together. (JED p. 14)
The sly implication here is that the
"sacred books" and "mystical states of mind" may indeed be
appropriate ways to answer empirical as well as ultimate teleological
questions. So are such forms of revelation to be a legitimate form of evidence
in the new theistic science? Is this Johnson's new source of positive evidence
for Creationism? I asked Johnson just this question following one of his public
lectures and he replied that he was not defending this position. However,
neither did he deny that such appeal to scriptural authority or mystical
experience would count as positive empirical evidence. As at other critical
junctures, Johnson pleads the Fifth and refuses to tell us his positive view.
Johnson is in a tough position here. As I noted in my earlier article, he
cannot reject these revelatory methods without alienating his constituency, for
the Biblical account, perhaps supplemented by religious experiences, is the
prime motivation for Christian Creationists. On the other hand, he cannot
endorse the "evidential method" of supernatural revelation without
abdicating his claim of expertise as a lawyer, for an attorney would be laughed
out of court who argued that one could help establish an empirical fact (say,
that the defendant set off the explosion) by reference to the authority of
revealed psychic or spiritual testimony. I would argue that Johnson's
assumptions about the truth of divine interventions require him to accept
revelation in his "theistic science" and that this by itself is
reason to reject the project as unscientific. Here, however, I will just again
ask Johnson to come clean on whether he endorses revelation in his science. For
the balance of the paper I will take him at his word that he is not defending
that view and will assume that we may reject this sort of "evidence."
This leaves us with the Design Argument as the only other new option on the
table, so it is to the possibility of a theistic science of this form that I
now turn.
Could science investigate God and the
Creation hypothesis in the same manner that it investigates the natural world
and the human intelligent creators that populate it? Could we have a
"theistic science" as Johnson suggests that admits the possibility of
supernatural interventions? There is a story about a conversation between a
theist and an atheist that is relevant here. The theist tries to engage the
atheist in a discussion about religion but the latter resists, saying there
would be no point since she did not believe in God and so they would have no
common ground. The theist says not to be so hasty: "First tell me what you
mean by "God" because it might be that I don't believe in that God
either." The point for us is that most of the time the concept of God gets
used in the Creationist debate without definition, with most everyone tacitly
assuming that we all have in mind the same idea. It always comes as a shock to
someone who has been taught by Creationists to believe that Christianity is
incompatible with evolution and that it is not only false but of the devil, to
learn that most Christians see no conflict between evolution and their faith,
and that the Catholic church and many Protestant denominations have made
explicit policy statements to that effect. What conception of God must
Creationists have to think that God and evolution are incompatible and that a
theistic creation science is possible and necessary?
Historically Creationists who have promoted
some sort of "Creation Science" have taken their conception of God
from a literal reading of the Bible, even though they have often profoundly
disagreed among themselves about what that meant. Following Johnson's lead in
regularly pleading the Fifth, however, the new Creationists are trying to keep
their theological beliefs and disagreements hidden under a bushel; in a
strategy conference held last year at Biola College they agreed to promote
their causes under the generic banner of "Mere Creation." Some
Intelligent Design Theorists now claim that they are indifferent to whether the
designer is the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God (in whichever of multiple
interpretations) or that of any other religious tradition. I believe this is
easily shown to be disingenuous, but if we take the Mere Creation view at face
value it means that the notion of the Creator is radically ambiguous and thus
extremely difficult to assess. Scientific theories are supposed to be precise
so as to constrain possible outcomes, but it is going to be next to impossible
to say what follows from the Creation Hypothesis if we don't know whether we
are talking about Yahweh or Elohim or Kali or Pele. Though this is yet another
reason to think that Creationism is not scientific, let us proceed as best we
can in these obscure circumstances to assess the prospects for a theistic
science. As a simplification I'll consider just two sorts of concept of the
Creator that are most relevant--a supernatural notion and a naturalized notion.
My argument is that in the first case "theistic science" is not
science, and that in the second case it is not theistic in the Creationists'
own sense of the term. I begin with the first possibility, that divine
intervention is meant to count as a supernatural explanation.
Perhaps it is a Neitzschian will to power
that underlies our paradoxical desires both for understanding and for the
mysterious, and that leads us to belief in the possibility of supernatural
explanations. We desire understanding in part because of the control that it
may give us. Knowledge is power, as Bacon said, and with it we feel more in
charge of our own fates and sometimes the fates of others as well. But what of
the mysterious, that by nature seems to be the antithesis of power? In fact,
the mysterious always bears the promise of special, hidden powers. In part this
comes from an idea that mysterious powers are greater than ordinary ones.
Perhaps more important is the seductive notion that if we were but to uncover
its source we would thereby possess a unique control that others lacked. Uncork
the genie's bottle or capture the leprechaun and one's wishes are for the
asking. Read the stars and foresee the future. Contact the spirit world and be
guided to a higher wisdom. Pray with piety and fervor and God will grant
eternal life after death and perhaps special favors before death as well. Even
demonic forces, the dark side of the mysterious, may be harnessed to one's
special benefit, some believe, by the casting of spells or an unholy pact with
the devil. We find this seductive hope for special, mysterious power exhibited
in a variety of ways whenever there are appeals to the supernatural for
explanation.
One of the earliest forms of supernatural
explanation was animistic religion, which populates the world with gods.
According to Japanese Shinto the kami reside in each tree, spring and mountain,
so to ensure a good fish catch a village holds a festival in honor of the kami
of the fishing grounds. On the island of Hawaii, Pele is the goddess of the
volcanoes; bits of Pahoihoi lava that are ejected from a volcano may sometimes
form delicate fibers or tiny smooth droplets and the native Hawaiians said
these were Pele's hair and tears. When Kiluea erupted the explanation was that
Pele was angry, and must be appeased with sacrifices before she would make the
lava stop its destructive flow. In later religious forms the gods have a more
independent existence and may have more fully developed personalities. The
Homeric epics reveal that for the ancient Greeks the world was populated by a
panoply of competing gods and goddesses who regularly, sometimes kindly and
sometimes cruelly, would intervene in the world and in human affairs. Homer
explains how the fates of battling armies on the ground were often decided by
the favors or jealousies of the Olympian gods watching and exercising control
from above for their own purposes.
The switch to monotheism saw no change in
this sort of use of supernatural explanation. Yahweh was regularly moved to
anger, even towards his chosen people, and in His wrath would bring forth
destruction and pestilence. In the mid-14th century, Christians in much of
Europe tried to make wholesale atonement for their sins, that they though must
have led Yahweh to set upon them the Plague of Black Death. A similar
explanation was offered for the more recent plague in the 1980's by some
prominent Evangelicals when it appeared that the A.I.D.S. epidemic was
primarily attacking gay men: homosexuals were "reaping the whirlwind"
of God's anger for disobeying His supposed commands against homosexual
behavior.1 God's displeasure with gays was the supposed explanation for the
occurrence of this baffling new disease and the horrible death it caused, and
the implicit message was that good Christians would be able to avoid that fate.
Of course it is not only to deities that
people have appealed to try to make the baffling phenomena of the world
comprehensible, and to possibly bring it under their control. There is a
wondrous company of preternatural beings that have figured in supernatural
explanations--ghosts and poltergeists, angels and demons, spirit guides and
familiars are just some of the more common in the Western tradition. One also
finds a similar array of associated occult powers that supposedly may be tapped
using prayers and spells, blessings and curses, talismans and potions.
Also, though religions have probably included
supernatural explanation most systematically, they are not alone in this
predilection. Until just the 19th century even the natural philosophers and
scientists who studied the world would often include supernatural elements in
their theories.
Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, spent as much
of his energies delving into alchemy and studying ancient wisdoms as he did on
the mathematical and physical investigations for which he is now famous. He
worked to show, contrary to the view of the Cambridge Platonists, that atomism
was not atheistic, arguing that the atomistic doctrine could be traced back to
Mochas, who was identified with Moses, and thus was a Christian view. He held
that atoms and the laws they obeyed were fixed at Creation by God. "All
these things being consider'd, it seems probable to me, that God in the
Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable
Particles, of such sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in
such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd
them..." (Quoted in Toulmin and Goodfield 1962, p. 192) Newton also
included forces in his ontology, holding that they too were created by God and
superimposed upon matter to serve as causes. (As I pointed out in my reply to
Johnson, however, in his rules of reasoning Newton endorses some of the
standard elements of methodological naturalism--not to admit unnecessary causes
when explaining phenomena, and to regard the conclusions of inductive methods
as "accurately or very nearly true" (Newton 1962, p. 399) and to
eschew contrary hypotheses until new evidence requires them.)
Among 19th century British geologists, many
of whom were also clergymen, it was mostly taken for granted that the Genesis
account of the Noachian Deluge was true. Members of the Geological Society
spent much of their time searching for evidence of the global flood and using the
deluge hypothesis to try to explain diluvial gravel deposits, river valleys and
other large-scale geological features. It was only in mid-century that,
following a protracted debate between the "gradualist" Charles Lyell
and the "catastrophist" Rev. Adam Sedgwick that the latter finally
admitted that the evidence did not support and indeed went against the biblical
supernatural account. In his final address as President of the Geological
Society Sedgwick publicly renounced the supernatural view:
Having
been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I
now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for
opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before
I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation. (SAP313)
This debate helped spell the end of appeals
to supernatural agents in scientific theorizing and paved the way for quick
acceptance of Darwin and Wallace's natural theory of the origin of species.
Before Darwin's proposal of a clear mechanism
for biological evolution, British naturalists were almost exclusively
Creationists. They had profound disagreements among themselves about, for
example, whether God's organic plan was based upon perfect adaptation of every
organism to its environment or upon creating organisms according to ideal
archetypes that in many cases were not properly adapted, but they agreed that
the biological world was specially created through God's supernatural agency.
Nevertheless, Darwin's natural theory was quickly accepted for the origin of
most animal species, except for homo sapiens. Even Wallace had difficulty
accepting a natural theory of the origin of human beings and he fell back on a
supernatural account. He allowed that human beings had evolved, but under the
direction of spirit beings, and he spent considerable effort investigating
mediums and other spiritualists who claimed to have access to beings in the
supernatural realm. (Kottler 1974)
Since then science has completely abandoned appeal
to the supernatural. In large part this is simply the result of the consistent
failure of a wide array of specific "supernatural theories" in
competition with specific natural alternatives. But there is also a deeper and
more generally compelling reason for the abandonment of supernaturalism by
science. Though in his early work Johnson failed to distinguish methodological
from ontological naturalism, in his more recent pronouncements he argues that
naturalism is dogmatic even as a method and, unfairly, speaks of it as
"methodological atheism." However, Science adopts naturalism as a
principle of inquiry not because of any hidden atheistic agenda or even any
special antagonism to theism. Rather, science eschews theistic explanations for
the same reasons that it eschews other supernatural explanations, and it is to
a discussion of these that that we now turn.
It is misleading for Creationists to
characterize science in general and to define evolution in particular and as
being "godless." Science is godless in the same way that plumbing is
godless. Evolutionary biology is no more or less based on a "dogmatic
philosophy" of naturalism than are medical science and farming. Why should
Johnson find methodological naturalism so pernicious and threatening in the one
context and not the others? Must we really be seriously "open-minded"
about supernatural explanations generally? As Bertrand Russell said, it is good
to keep an open mind, but not so open that our minds fall out! Surely it is
unreasonable to complain of a "priesthood" of plumbers because they
only consider naturalistic explanations of stopped drains and do not consider
the "alternative hypothesis" that the origin of the backed-up toilet
was the design of an intervening malicious spirit. Would it not be bizarre to
reintroduce theistic explanations in the agricultural sciences and have
agronomists tell farmers that their crop failure is simply part of God's curse
upon the land because of Adam's disobedience, or sugget that they consider the
possibility that the Lord is punishing them for some moral offense and that it
may not be fertilizer they need but contrition and repentance?
Johnson tells us that it is possible that
such interventions are indeed true. Even though he may be right, we should
acknowledge that such spiritual possibilities fall under the purview of the
priest and not the scientist. Given the nature and limitations of scientific
modes of investigation, the proper role of the scientist is to search for
natural causes of such occurrences and not to beg off the investigation by
attributing them to supernatural interventions, divine or otherwise. Clearly
scientists are not being dogmatic or atheistic in proceeding under the
methodological heuristic that such events have natural explanations.
To take one important case, think of how
these considerations apply to the medical sciences. It was once commonplace to
attribute the origin of certain illnesses to curses or demonic possession.
Indeed, Jesus is said to have performed some miraculous cures by expelling
devils from the body of the diseased. If we accept Johnson's diagnosis, medical
schools and research physicians are doing a terrible disservice by not teaching
students how to perform exorcisms and by not investigating the possible
supernatural origins of diseases.
Some of the more sophisticated new
creationists recognize that evolutionary theory is not "Godless" in
any dogmatic, ontological sense, but they remain critical of science's
naturalistic methodological stance and try to portray the methodology as being
essentially equivalent to atheism. For example, they disparagingly characterize
science's naturalistic methodology as "methodological atheism." This
sort of rhetoric has the effect of making it seem that science has a particular
antipathy to theism. Of course it is true that methodological naturalism does
reject appeals to theistic interventions, but not because of some special
distaste for God. The creationist's rhetoric is misleading in the same way that
the following case would be. Suppose someone criticizes a lawyer, saying that
she refuses to represent any Jewish person in civil rights cases. This makes
the lawyer sound like a bigot. In fact, it turns out that the lawyer
specializes in corporate tax law. So, although it is true that she refuses to
defend the civil rights of Jewish individuals, that is just because she does
not represent any individuals in any civil rights cases. It is simply not the
sort of law that she handles, so it is unfair to make her appear a bigot by
narrowly characterizing her rule of practice. Similarly, science does not have
a special rule just to keep out divine interventions, but rather a general rule
that it does not handle any supernatural agents or powers. That is what it
means to hold methodological naturalism, so it is quite unfair to equate this
with methodological atheism.
Creationists want science to reintroduce
divine entities and powers into its theories and theorizing. The Creationist's
supernatural "alternative explanation" should be given equal time to
the natural theory of evolution. Literalist Creationists hold that Biblical
revelation should be admitted to explain and justify the supernatural origin of
the world, of animal species, of human beings and more. Johnson and ID
Creationists want science to incorporate the reality of God and to cite His
preternatural divine intelligence as the best explanation of biological
complexity. But are these sorts of appeals to supernatural explanation
reasonable? In particular, are they reasonable in science?
Many scientists would immediately answer in
the negative on the grounds that explanation, supernatural or otherwise, should
play no role at all in science. Science, they would claim, does not explain the
world, but merely describes it and leaves the explanations to philosophers and
theologians. Indeed, Arno Penzius made just such a statement in an interview
with Creationist Fred Heeren about his work with Robert Wilson that led to the
observation of cosmic background radiation and evidence for the Big Bang. Asked
why Wilson had been disposed to accept the steady state theory before those
1965 observations, Penzius offered: "[Wilson], like most physicists, would
rather attempt to describe the universe in ways which require no explanation;
there's the economy of physics. And since science can't explain anything--it
can only describe things--that's perfectly sensible."
Although this is a rather common view among
contemporary scientists, it is quite mistaken, and it is important that we see
why it is mistaken. First, however, we should note that as a response to the
Creationist this would be a weak argument. It provides no good reason to rule
out supernaturalism. The supernaturalist could easily agree not to call
Creationism an "explanation," but just a straight-forward hypothesis
about the world, what things exist in it and what relations hold among them.
They are simply offering an alternative description of the world. This gives us
a clue about the nature of the scientist's mistake.
The mistake arises in part from ambiguity in
the notion of explanation. To see this let us take a moment to examine the
concept. At the generic level an explanation of X is something that "makes
X plain." That is, explanation brings understanding where before there was
confusion or obscurity. But there are many species of explanations that may be
distinguished by the nature of the phenomenon to be explained as well as the
question that is being asked about it. For example, one may ask someone to explain
what is the temperature and light output of the sun. Here we see without
difficulty that the explanation one would offer would be just a
description--the surface temperature of the sun averages X degrees centigrade
and its light output is such and such. The scientist would probably quickly
accept this sort of case and then claim that the problematic case is when we
ask the person to explain why the sun so shines. But here is the source of the
ambiguity that leads to the mistake. There are two different questions that we
might have in mind when we ask "why X?"
The first is a question that inquires after
the intended purpose, or the ultimate end, of sunshine. We sometimes express
this more explicitly asking it in the form of an explain what for question. That
is, when we ask "Why does the sun so shine?" we might mean "What
is sunshine for?" This is the teleological sense of why-explanation. The
term "teleology" comes from the Greek term telos, which means
"goal" or "end." In his classification of explanatory
types, Aristotle called these "final" explanations. If one considers
how to explain, for instance, a sculpture in this sense it would not be
appropriate to simply start listing the sculpture's many physical effects (it
tips the scales at 2000 kg., it casts an irregular shadow, it makes many
observers shrug and say that their 6 year old child could have done better, and
so on). Rather the relevant teleological explanation is, say, that the
sculpture is meant to express the artist's alienation from contemporary
material culture and feelings of irony in having accepted the commission for
the sculpture from a major Wall Street trading firm. Teleological explanations
are "final" because they refer to ultimate intended goals. It is to
this notion of explanation that the positivistic scientist is probably
objecting. When science investigates the sun it can tell you that sunshine
warms the earth and helps make plants grow, but it cannot say that doing these
things is what sunshine is for. If that is what you mean by asking for an
explanation of sunshine then let the romantic nature poet give that sort of
answer. Science could also discover that sunshine can burn one's retina or
cause skin cancer, but it could never discover and offer the explanation that
one or another of these effects was sunshine's ultimate purpose.
However, there is a second notion that
someone may have in mind in asking why the sun shines in the manner it
does--the interrogator may be inquiring about the physical processes that
produce the observed light and temperature. This is the genetic sense of
why-explanation, and there is no good reason for the scientist to object to
this sort of explanation. Indeed, giving accounts of processes that give rise
to phenomena is the main thing that scientists do. Furthermore, an explanatory
account of this sort is just a special sort of description, so we see again
that the distinction between explanation and description that the Positivistic
scientist appealed to was mistaken.
There is a simple reason that many
contemporary scientists make this mistake; probably without realizing it they
are following a philosophical position that was the received view during the
first half of the 20th century. The position was advocated under a variety of
different names and its specific tenets evolved over time, but we may speak of
it under the general name of "Positivism." Positivism's influence
continues to be felt in science even though philosophers of science themselves
have long since abandoned many of its tenets after continued argument and
analysis revealed their conceptual flaws. Positivists held that science should
not go beyond what is physically observable, and they explicitly rejected
explanation in science because they thought that it was necessarily
metaphysical. Their maxim, heard echoed above, was that science describes but
does not explain. But Positivists readmitted explanation into science after
Carl Hempel, in a series of important articles beginning in 1948, showed how it
could be explicated in a way that was not dangerously metaphysical. The
contemporary "positivistic" scientist probably absorbed the
anti-explanatory view that dominated until the time of Hempel's work and is
simply not aware of the more recent developments in philosophy of science.
Hempel developed several explanatory forms to
deal with different sorts of scientific cases, but all fall under what was
called the "Covering Law Conception" of scientific explanation. The
idea is that we may explain X--the explanandum--by showing that it follows from
the empirical law (or laws) governing that sort of phenomena together with
background information such as the initial conditions of the variables in the
law. Let us take his central Deductive-Nomological (D-N) Model to give an
example. Suppose one were to ask for an explanation of why a cannonball takes a
given number of seconds (say six and a half) to hit the ground after being
dropped from a tower? Here the explanandum, E, is the specific duration of the
cannonball's to fall. This is explained by giving a logical deduction from the
gravitation law (nomological has the Greek stem nomos, which means
"law") and the values of its variables for the case at hand. That is,
one may derive E from Galileo's gravitation law that governs bodies falling
near the earth (or some more general gravitational law) and plug into its
equation the figure for the height of the tower from which the cannonball was
dropped (the initial condition). We explain the duration of the fall by showing
that it follows in this way from the law of gravity. The abstract form of the
D-N model looks like this, where the line indicates that what is below is a
logical derivation from the premises above.
L1,
L2...Lk Laws
C1,
C2 ...Ck Initial conditions
-----------------
---------------
E
Explanandum (Fact, or feature of an event)
Thus, on Hempel's conception a scientific
explanation is a special sort of deductively valid argument, namely one that
contains at least one general law in the premises from which one derives the
explanandum. Furthermore, Hempel specified that the laws must have empirical content,
by which he meant that they had to be testable by observational data. This
condition prevented explanation from falling back into metaphysics. Science
could indeed explain empirical phenomena by reference to covering laws so long
as it was careful to stay within the bounds of empirical testability.
Explanation was now acceptable to the Positivists and the anti-explanation
tenet was dropped. Actually, Positivism was itself abandoned as a unified
philosophical view shortly thereafter when sufficiently many of its other
central tenets were also rejected for other reasons. Today almost no
philosophers of science still consider themselves Positivists, though there are
still scientists who are vaguely "positivistic" in the old, outmoded
sense without realizing it.
So, science may indeed offer explanations.
However, it is unfortunate that we cannot rest with Hempel's precise D-N model
of explanation and proceed immediately with our assessment of supernatural
explanation by comparing it to the detailed logical structure of his model.
Hempel's work was successful in reintroducing explanation to science, and many
of his broad conclusions remain in force, but extensive discussion of the
technical details of his particular logical models revealed weaknesses that he
was unable to overcome. Other philosophers of science took up the task and have
made significant conceptual progress since then.
It turns out that in some ways Hempel's
conditions were too weak and in other ways they were too strong. For example,
the specific logical form of the D-N model was too lenient and thereby allowed
in cases where were not truly explanatory. A variety of proposals have been
offered for how to strengthen the requirements. One important version,
developed by Philip Kitcher, emphasizes the idea that explanatory understanding
may be achieved by unifying our knowledge and thereby reducing the number of
"brute facts" we must accept. On this view for a derivation to count
as an explanation it must belong to a restricted set of derivations that
optimizes unification by minimizing the number of explanatory patterns needed
while maximizing the number of conclusions that may be generated. (KEUC431) On
the other hand, Hempel's requirement that an explanation be an argument that
cites a law may be too strict. Many philosophers now argue that an explanation
need not take the form of an argument at all, and that a description may be
sufficient. It also may not be necessary that the description include a
statement of a law. On the influential account developed by Wesley Salmon, to
explain X it may be sufficient to describe the causal process that produced X.
Salmon has a detailed theory of causal processes and their interactions that
forms the framework for this sort of explanation, but we need not get into its
details here. Salmon's main point is that at the most basic level the
explanation of something in the world involves something else in the world--the
causal processes that led to it. An explanatory account need not include an
explicit statement of the causal law, though of course it is understood that
the cited causal processes are lawful. Finally, philosophers now agree that
Hempel's hope for a theory of explanation that made use of only syntactic and
semantic constraints was not possible, and that pragmatic considerations must
also enter the picture. Bas van Fraassen has developed this point, showing how
explanations of X are fixed in relation to a contrast class--some alternative Y
that depends upon the question in which we are interested. Thus,
explanation-seeking why-questions are too vague if that take the form of
"Why X?" and need to be further specified by contrast, such as by
asking "Why X, rather than Y?" Philosophers of science have developed
other elements of Hempel's view as well but the three we have mentioned give us
enough to proceed with our discussion of supernatural explanations.
Given the above brief history, let me now
sketch a simple theory of genetic explanations that we may use that combines
the elements we have discussed.
(I) X is explained by what makes it so (in
situ).
(II) A person explains X by showing what
might make it so (in situ).
The idea of what makes X so is the core of
our concept of explaining why X. (Pennock 1995, p. 42) I will call this a
"Constructive" theory of explanation, since it holds that
why-explanations necessarily involve the processes that make or structure that
which is to be explained. Though the locution is not always felicitous, we may
say that one explains something by showing what "constructs" it, and
sometimes how these processes construct it. I also choose this term as a
friendly gesture towards Constructionists, especially moderate ones like the
later Latour, but to still maintain a constructive distinction with those forms
that endorse extreme social relativism.2 It is an ontological realist view of
explanation that recognizes that explanatory accounts have important pragmatic
features.
The Constructive theory of explanation is a
generic analysis that aims to capture the ways explanations may legitimately
vary depending upon the type of explanatory relata--what it means to "make
X so" depends upon the type of thing to be explained--and upon the
specifics of the why-question we are asking. Given that scientific explanation
is a special case of why-explanations, we should expect that its analysis will
fall under a generic conception. Scientific explanations are more precise than
everyday ones, but they are not radically different in kind, so it will thus be
useful to review several mundane examples to illustrate the generic pattern and
then see how it applies to the scientific case. Some of the examples that
follow could be developed into scientific explanations, but here we just note
them as ordinary explanations.
-
Why is so-and-so President of the U.S.? Because he was made so by election.
(Political practice)
-
Why is Johnny angry? Because Billy made him so by calling him a dork.
(Psychological explanation)
-
Why is the U.S.S. Enterprise sailing into the neutral zone? Because Captain
Picard gave the order, and he has the power of command to make it so.
(Authoritarian explanations)
-
Why are all bachelors unmarried adult males? Because we make this true by the
way we use our language. (Linguistic convention)
-
Why are triangles three-sided? Because they are made so by the definition of
triangle and by the rules of Euclidean geometry. (Formal definitions and
relations)
Again we see that although these are all
why-explanations, only some of them make even an indirect reference to
unification. What is common to them all is that the explanatory accounts cite
something that makes, or purportedly makes, the explanandum so.
In science there are several varieties of
explanation, and all fit this pattern, and in specific domains the somewhat
vague notion of "making it so" may be spelled out in a much more
precise manner. The most common variety of Constructive explanation in science
is that in which one explains by citing the causal processes that produced the
fact. The causal view has its roots in Aristotle's theory of explanation in
terms of the "four causes" and has since been endorsed in various
forms. Important recent advocates include Michael Scriven (1958) and others,
but the view has been developed most thoroughly by Wesley Salmon (1984; 1994).
According to his Causal-Mechanical (C-M) model: "To provide an explanation
of a particular event is to identify the cause and, in many cases at least, to
exhibit the causal relation between this cause and the event-to-be-explained."
(Salmon 1984) We need not endorse the full details of these views to recognize
the importance of causal explanations in science and the straight-forward sense
in which the cause of X is something that constructs or makes X so. (I will
take causal explanations as my main example to show how the Constructive
account becomes more precise in specific contexts.)
A second sort of scientific explanation is
that in which one may explain a fact by reference to its classification, say,
explaining a given property of a species by reference to its genus (or other
higher order taxon). This fits the Constructive pattern in that we explain why
a thing has the characteristics it has by virtue of the kind of thing that it
is. For instance, one might explain why whales are viviparous by noting the
fact that they are mammals. I know of no detailed treatment of this sort of
case that is as well-developed as theories of causal explanation, but aspects
of it have been discussed under various other headings. Dray presented the idea
of "explanation-by-concept" in historical contexts (Dray 1959, p.
403), and his notion was discussed by Hempel (1965, p. 453-57), who tried to
reduce it to his nomic view. More recently Ruben (1990, p. 218-22) endorsed the
possibility of "identity explanations" whereby one may explain a fact
by citing "another" fact that is identical to the first, but at a
different level of description, such as explaining a change in the temperature
of a gas in terms of a change of its mean kinetic energy.
A third sort of explanation involves
mathematical relations. Being able to account for mathematical explanations had
been one of the notable advantages of the Unification over the Causal theory of
explanation. These fit naturally within the Constructive notion of making
something so by virtue of formal relations. We find this idea entering at the
most basic level of mathematical understanding as when we are taught
mathematics by first learning that one and one "makes" two. In
science we find mathematical explanations appearing in both theoretical and
applied contexts. Here I mention a single example. In genetics one explains a
one-to-one ratio of males to females in a population in terms of Fisher's sex
ratio argument that shows it arises as a mathematical consequence under
assumptions of random mating, differential ratios of sons and daughters
produced by different parents, and heritability of these offspring production
ratios. (Sober 1993, p. 15-7)
I would argue that other forms of
why-explanation in science may be couched in one or another of these or in one
of the other varieties previously mentioned.
Returning now to the generic Constructive
notion, the qualification that an explanation be "in situ" limits the
requirements for an explanation. To explain a given item one need not show what
would make it so in all situations, but just what made it so in the
situation(s) under consideration. This is a pragmatic constraint. An ideal
complete explanation of X would include everything that made X so, but this is
seldom, if ever, required. We typically take certain background facts for
granted in a given context, and need only cite what made the difference, say,
in getting X rather than Z, in that situation. To make this point clearer, let
me how to think of causal explanation from a Constructive point of view.
As we noted, according to Salmon's C-M model
one explains an effect by identifying "the cause." However, the world
is a complex causal network and for any given effect there are multiple causal
factors that were involved in its production. The Constructive view agrees that
causes count as explanations because they "make things so," but does
not hold that the ontic relations alone fix "the cause" unless by
that we mean the ideal complete explanation, an account of which would include
all the factors, such as might be written out in an Ideal Explanatory Text
(Railton 1981). Instead, it holds that explanations may be and for the most
part are relativized to a situational context and suggests that this is picked
out on a pragmatic basis. To be precise about the elements in the basic sort of
case I propose that we not think of the causal relation in the standard
two-place (C causes E) fashion but rather as a four-place relation that I call
the "CaSE" model. This is simply a more fine-grained way of parsing
causal relations in a way that recognizes both the ontic elements and the
pragmatic ones and thereby licenses certain inferences. I cannot here defend
the details of the model or its logic, but the idea is that one factor C in the
network is separated out from the others, in the situation ('S'), for pragmatic
reasons. Typically this is done by means of contrasting alternatives ('a'),
such as noting by the emphasis in the question that one is interested in one
aspect of the event rather than some contrasting other (which may be its
negation or some specified alternative), or that one is interested in C rather
than some possible C' that did not occur (again, its negation or specified
alternative), but may be done in other ways.3
So, in a causal explanation of some effect E,
we cite its cause C, relative to a "background" situation S, which is
fixed (explicitly or tacitly) by our interests. In a loose way we may often
think of S as referring to assumed "standard conditions" or perhaps
to some discipline-determined background domain. In the most precise manner we
may think of it as a ceteris paribus clause. The CaSE model is best exemplified
in practice by controlled experimental testing, which I take to be the gold
standard of good scientific method; the parameters (S) are fixed in both the
experimental and control groups and only the independent variable is allowed to
change (C relative to some interesting alternative, a, which is either not-C or
some set base line), and the effect upon the dependent variable (E) is
observed.4 Because on the Constructive view there is no single ontically
privileged way to make the separation, the "same thing" may have
different explanations depending upon the way a question is posed, allowing for
legitimate explanatory pluralism without falling into unconstrained
relativism.5 The story would have to be told differently for non-causal
explanations, but similar considerations are involved.
Continuing now to spell out the Constructive
view, its notion of being "made so" may involve but does not require
necessity. We see this most clearly in explanations of human behavior. Although
Johnny was angered by Billy's remark, we don't think that his response had to
have been necessitated by the events to be explained by them. Perhaps in an
ideal psychological theory scientists would get necessary mental connections,
but we may still have good explanations without them. We also see this in
statistical explanations. (Salmon takes it as a strength of his view that it
can incorporate statistical explanation, recognizing indeterministic causal
processes as possible explanations. Ruben appears to want to stick with
necessary--"determinative"--relations, but in the end he opens the
door a crack to allow the possibility of stochastic explanations, not for a
positive reason, but so as not to beg the question of indeterministic
causation.) Of course, we sometimes do desire more of an explanation,
especially in science. If so, then we may explicitly indicate the higher
standard by asking not why X was (or is) so, but why X had to be (or must be)
so. In such cases we would expect an adequate explanation to involve necessity,
by indicating processes that necessarily made X so.
Given the Constructivist analysis of
explanation, we may now turn to an exploration of some of the explanatory
virtues. According to the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) confirmation
theorist, we appeal to explanatory virtues to sort out the better or best of
competing potential explanations. Here I will discuss just three explanatory
virtues and show how Creationism fails in comparison to evolutionary theory for
each of them.
(a) Explanatory scope
We begin with one of the most commonly cited
explanatory virtue, that related to the scope of the explanation. By this is
meant the variety of phenomena explained by the explanatory hypothesis. Whewell
discussed this virtue in terms of conscilience--if two or more different sorts
of evidence point in the same direction this is a sign that our investigation
is on the right track and that we have a good hypothesized explanation.
Typically we emphasize the importance of greater variety and express notion
this by saying that a given explanation has breadth or wide applicability. For
example, the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism has broad scope in that it can
explain adaptation of organisms to their environment, the origin of species and
features of their bio-geographical distribution, and the tree-structure of
biological taxonomy, among other general phenomena. That is, these various
patterns of facts are made so by the causal processes of variation, inheritance
and natural selection. This is strong evidential support for evolutionary
theory; no alternative can account for as wide a variety of phenomena. Other
things being equal, we tend to hold that explanations with broad scope are
better than those with narrow scope, though there are caveats to this generalization.
Some methodologists use the term
"explanatory power" as a synonym for explanatory scope--when they say
that something is a powerful explanation they mean that it has broad scope, or
broader scope than some alternative, weaker explanation--but others use the
term in a more general sense to mean that a given explanation has broad scope
and other virtues as well, such as being especially precise, or deep, or
simple. This terminological ambiguity may be part of the reason that
unification has been confused with other explanatory virtues. I'll use
"explanatory power" in the more inclusive sense and will try to sort
out unification from scope and other specific virtues.
Explanatory scope is sometimes identified
with unification, but these are not the same. Even if we thought that
unification is the correct analysis of what it means to be an explanation, a
given explanatory hypothesis could explain more or fewer phenomena than some
other hypothesis. So, explanatory scope would be a measure of a certain degree
of unification. Scope refers to how much gets explained, however the notion of
explanation is explicated and it is useful to keep this as a separate virtue
even when we reject unification as the correct explication of explanation.
Often we assume that the greater the scope
the better the explanation, but it is important to recognize that a particular
explanation may have a narrow scope and still be good. For instance, a three
hour timer delay for my dishwasher set at noon explains why the machine activates
at three o'clock. In general that setting of the timer mechanism explains no
(or relatively few) other sorts of events, but in the context it is a perfectly
good explanation of the event. Explanations will have broader or narrower scope
depending upon the sort of phenomena being considered, so an absolute measure
of scope is not by itself an indication of a good explanation. Rather I suggest
that scope comes into play for IBE confirmation when we are comparing
alternative hypothesized explanations of the same data set; other things being
equal we should prefer H1 over H2 if H1 explains more of the data set than H2
does. For example, a chemist may get a series of measurements from a laser
absorption analysis of an unknown compound. The hypothesis that it has
structure H2 may account for just certain features of the curve, but this
should be rejected in favor of structure H1 if the latter accounts for more of
the data curve. Creationists claim that their hypothesis of a benevolent deity
who specially designed and created organisms explains the organisms'
adaptations to their environments, but this hypothesis cannot explain the
concurrent existence of maladaptations. It is thus not as good an explanation
as Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis which has the resources to explain both.
Finally, we should note that even if H1 has
broader scope than H2, the latter may be better supported if their other
explanatory virtues are not equal. A possible explanation of the same data set
may still be rejected in favor of another with narrower scope if, for example,
the way the mechanisms of the latter produce the observed phenomenon can be
shown in greater detail.
(b) Explanatory resolution
We tacitly accept that the best explanations
are those that account for the phenomena in a manner that is detailed and
precise. For example, it is sometimes sufficient to say that the sailor is sick
because of a "vitamin deficiency," but we find the explanation better
(and thus better confirmed) if we can delineate the biochemical pathways that
lead to the observed symptoms, say, from absence of vitamin C to the signs of
scurvy. This is so not only in explanations of specific cases but also in
general explanations--the current medical explanation of A.I.D.S. is the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus, but researchers are not fully satisfied with the
explanation since they can so far say only a little about how the virus works.
Surprisingly, methodologists have rarely
discussed this property of explanations explicitly and it is not included in standard
lists of explanatory virtues. Following the optical instrument metaphor, I will
call this the virtue of explanatory resolution. The resolution of a telescope
or microscope refers to its ability to resolve or distinguish points nearby one
another. The clearness of the image depends upon this property of the
instrument, and clarity is also a basic feature of good explanations. We
disparage explanations that do not have this property by calling them fuzzy or
vague. Let us say that an explanation that provides a great level of detail
about the productive processes is one with high resolution, and one with
minimal detail has low resolution. I suggest that a hypothesis that accounts
for the phenomena with higher resolution is better than one with lower resolution.
Indeed, I propose that explanatory resolution is the most basic and the most
important of the explanatory virtues, and in general will trump other
explanatory virtues. We find that this is typically so in the judgments of
scientists on specific issues.
The centrality of explanatory resolution
makes sense given that, as we saw, explaining why X involves showing how X
became as it is; that is, showing what made it so. In giving a causal
explanation, for example, we expect to see the details of how the causal
mechanism can produce the observed pattern of data as precisely as possible.
This is more important than having an explanation that unifies but in an
imprecise way.
For instance, Lamarckism could be said to
unify in a vague manner about the same evolutionary phenomena as Darwinism. It
also has only somewhat less explanatory scope. Nevertheless it loses to the
latter because it provides no clear account of how the change works. Indeed,
even before Darwin's alternative was in place Lamarckism was judged harshly
because it could not show in detail a plausible mechanism by which use led to
heritable characteristics. On the other hand, Darwin provided a clear process
that could produce transmutation through natural selection of heritable
variations. Moreover, one of the most persuasive new sorts of evidence in favor
of Darwinism was the discovery of DNA, RNA and the molecular mechanisms that
underpinned evolutionary theory. Now we have the details of how genetic
information is stored, replicated and transmitted. We can show with remarkable
precision how the genetic mechanisms produce the heritable properties of an
organism, and how variation arises that can then be selected for in an
environment, producing organisms that are adapted to their conditions. The
primacy of explanatory resolution shows why biologists judged the Darwinian
explanation to be far superior to the Lamarckian even though the two are
approximately comparable regarding other virtues. Creationism does not even get
out of the gate on this explanatory track for their "theory" says and
can say nothing at all about how the process of divine special creation is
accomplished.
(c) Explanatory focus
Closely related to explanatory resolution is
a virtue we may call explanatory focus. We expect that better explanations will
be able to account for the distinctive features of the explanandum, that is,
why it has this particular feature rather than some other one. As in the virtue
of resolution, we are interested in seeing detail, but here the emphasis is on
a specific feature in contrast to some specific alternative. We spoke of this
in passing earlier in the discussion of the limitation that explanations be in
situ, noting that, in situation S, we want to be able to explain why X rather
than Z. Lack of this virtue makes for a different sort of vague explanation,
one that cannot account for the what is distinctive about what is to be
explained. Many explanations in folk psychology lack focus in this way. For
example, "stress" has been cited as the explanation of all manner of
personal malaise from angry outbursts and nervous breakdowns to chronic fatigue
and hives. It may be true that stress is involved in the explanation of these
maladies and many others, but medical physiologists still judge it to be a poor
explanation because nothing in the "stress hypothesis" can
distinguish why the sufferer got one rather than another. Such explanations
quickly give way when scientists discover more focused alternatives. Stomach
ulcers were commonly explained in this unfocused manner and sufferers were
advised, in a similarly unfocused manner, to "reduce stress," but
this explanation and therapy are quickly being abandoned now that a bacterium
has been discovered that appears to be the specific cause of ulcers. (Tompkins
and Falkow 1995) The "unifying" appeal of the stress theory does not
carry much relative weight.
This is really what Popper must have had in
mind in developing his falsification criterion of demarcation between science
and pseudo-science. He explained that his original motivation was to understand
why Marxist history and Freudian and Alderian psychology were not scientific
theories in the same way that Einstein's theory was. He claimed that it was not
"explanatory power" that differentiated them, because these theories
explained "practically everything that happened within the fields to which
they referred." (Popper 1962, p. 35). What was needed to make something a
good scientific theory, Popper thought, was that it could make risky
predictions that could potentially falsify the theory. If the foregoing
analysis of explanation is correct, then what Popper was really after was not
so much a certain type of prediction, but rather the virtue of explanatory
focus so that the theory could clearly give an account of why X rather than Z,
and so could be rejected if observation proved otherwise. This misunderstanding
may account for why Popper originally dismissed evolutionary theory as not
being scientific; evolutionary theory is notoriously poor at making predictions
because of the complexity and historical contingency of the causal factors in a
changing environment. On the other hand the sorts of causal processes it
appeals to are certainly able to provide explanatory focus once the selective
forces in a given environment are understood. For example, Peter and Rosemary
Grant's already classic research on the evolution of Darwin's Finches on Daphne
Major documented how changing weather conditions leading to changes in
available food sources caused the population to evolve by selectively favored
finches with larger beaks were over those with smaller ones. Again, the
Creation Hypothesis has no resources to explain why one trait occurs rather
than some other except by a generic appeal to God's will, and this equally
"explains" both X and Z.
We could continue in this manner down the
lists of explanatory virtues with similar results, but rather than multiply
examples let us step back and see if we can find the reason for this pattern.
The previous sections have outlined the
basics of the theory of scientific explanation and a little of how assessment
of explanatory virtues allows us to evaluate the worth of competing explanatory
accounts. There are actually a range of other explanatory virtues that have
been discussed in the literature, but, like scope, they are subsidiary to
resolution and focus. As we have seen, the supernatural Creationist theory
seems to fare poorly on these points. But this is not because of any special
bias against Creationism, for the conclusion holds for any supernatural theory,
simply because of the characteristics of the notion of the supernatural. Let us
review three of the main characteristics of the supernatural to see why this is
so.
The first and most basic characteristic of
supernatural agents and powers, of course, is that they are above and beyond
the natural world and its agents and powers. Indeed, this is the very
definition of the term. They are not constrained by natural laws. Indeed, on
some views it is a supernatural creator that makes the laws in the first place,
and those that make the laws have the power to break them. Of course, this is
why humans hanker after access to occult powers, since they would supposedly
free us from the laws that bind us.
If supernatural agents are constrained at all
it may only be by logic. Even God cannot make it so that something is at once P
and not-P. When story-tellers need a way to save their protagonist from a
misguided pact with the devil, they invariably do it by placing a bet that the
devil is unable to win by virtue of the rules of logic. But other than logical
impossibilities, there is nothing that we can know that a supernatural agent
could not do.
The second characteristic of the
supernatural, that we have mentioned before and that follows rather directly
from the first, is that it is inherently mysterious to us. As natural beings
our knowledge all comes via natural laws and processes. If we could apply
natural knowledge to understand supernatural powers, then, by definition, they
would not be supernatural. The lawful regularities of our experience do not
apply to the supernatural world. If there are other sorts of "laws"
that govern that world, then they can be nothing like those that we understand.
Occult entities and powers are profoundly mysterious to us.
The same point holds about divine beings--we
cannot know what it is that they would or would not do in any given case. God
works, they say, in mysterious ways. We cannot have any privy knowledge of
God's will and those who have tried to claim it are quickly brought back to
earth. When the complex Ptolemaic epicycle theory of the planetary system was
explained to Alphonso X, king of Castile, with its equant points, eccentrics,
deferents and epicycles--wheels upon wheels within offset wheels--he commented
that "if God had consulted him at the creation, the universe should have
been on a better and simpler plan." (WHI151) Defending the complexity of
his theoretical models, Ptolemy is reported to have said, "You may complain
that these models are not simple, but from the point of view of God, who knows
what is simple." And of course Ptolemy was right; we cannot say that our
notion of simplicity is at all relevant to what God's might be, or if it is
even an important property for Him. Scientific models must be judged on natural
grounds of evidence, for we have no supernatural ground upon which we can stand
for it is necessarily a mystery to us.
A final relevant element of the notion of the
supernatural, closely linked to the previous ideas, is that supernatural beings
and powers are not controllable by humans. Though our secret desire may be to
gain esoteric power through contact with the supernatural, we seem to
understand at a deep level that such control would be impossible.
Folk tales and literature consistently tell
us that those who would steal the fire of the gods are bound to be burned.
Information about the future acquired by supernatural foresight did not allow
Oedipus to escape his fate, and only made the inevitable outcome all the more
pitiful because his parents' foolhardy attempts to use that information to
outwit fate became the very means that sealed it. The power of wishes, however
it may be granted and however carefully used, turns upon the wishers who soon learn
that they cannot predict or control the negative effects that follow. The
sorcerer's apprentice appears to touch supernatural power for one giddy moment
before losing control, with usually dire consequences. The very notion of the
"Faustian bargain" carries this warning against the temptation of
thinking one can control supernatural powers for one's own benefit; pacts with
the devil inevitably turn out for the worse, for Satan never does have one's
interests at heart. The best protagonists can do in such tales is to return in
the end to their prior state, having learned, one hopes, to be content with
their natural estate and powers.
Perhaps one may find a few isolated
exceptions to this pattern in which humans are unable to control the
supernatural, but the pattern certainly holds true of our relation to the
divine Creator as Christian Creationists want us to believe in Him. God
controls the world and, though we may control ourselves, we cannot control God.
Indeed, part of what it means to accept Christ, on the Evangelical view, is to
relinquish even the control we have of our selves and to turn our lives over to
God's will. Despite this, however, there remains the same temptation to think
that we may influence God's supernatural power for our benefit through our
actions. What is the difference between the belief that wearing a religious
medallion or making the sign of the cross will protect one from evil and the
belief that a charm or a knock upon wood will ward off bad luck? Of course one
important difference is that many people uphold the efficacy of the former
because of their belief in the divinity of Jesus, while most dismiss the latter
as silly superstition because they no longer take seriously the idea of the
goddess Fortuna. Nevertheless, the two beliefs are the same in the sense that
both seem to maintain the hopeful possibility of supernatural control. Does not
the belief in petitionary prayer yield to the same subtle temptation? Prayers
for healing or discernment, for career advancement, for success in war, or even
for peace, that are made "in Christ's name" seem to contain the
implicit idea that we may bring God to use His powers towards such ends by our
sincere petitions. And do we not find this again in the most basic idea that we
may gain forgiveness and eternal life by choosing to accept Jesus as our
savior? Evangelicals emphasize that we need only ask for salvation to be given,
saying that it is "up to you." All this appears to fit the original
impulse that leads us to the supernatural with the hope of benefiting from its
powers.
However, we need to recognize that this
wishful belief in the possibility of human control of divine and occult powers
actually contradicts the idea of the supernatural in a profound manner, for by
definition the supernatural is beyond the reach of we mere creatures of the
natural world. If the supernatural could be controlled by the natural then it
would cease to be super. If we may control the natural world it is only because
the world is governed by physical laws that must be "obeyed" even
when we are pulling the strings. But in the very idea of the supernatural is
the notion that it stands above natural laws and thus outside the possibility
of our control. If God were really under our control in any sense then He could
certainly not be said to be omnipotent, and probably would not be thought very
godly. The whole point of the supernatural is that it may control nature but
nature cannot control it; God commands and we must obey, not vice versa.
It seems that the cautionary tales we have
noted tacitly recognize the impossibility of natural control of the
supernatural and the hubris of believing otherwise. Indeed, even the religious
examples of supposed supernatural control by symbol, prayer or action that we
mentioned have another interpretation than the one we first considered that
respects this view. According to this alternative interpretation our actions
cannot control God in any way. Our prayers are not worthy of answer and no good
deed or profession of faith can make us worthy of salvation. Redemption is not
owed and it cannot be earned. If redemption comes, it comes as a gift. It is
out of our control. Admittedly, this is a harsh doctrine and few Christian
sects, except perhaps the Calvinists, have faced all its consequences squarely,
but this does seem to be the only consistent view. Many try to have it both
ways and intimate that, although God cannot be compelled by petitions, actions
or even faith, somehow we can be confident that these will indeed make a
difference, and that He cannot fail to heed the call of the believers. But even
come judgment day, no matter what our actions it still remains God's free
choice whether or not to heed our petitions. This certainly seem to be the view
that would be held by the Evangelical Creationists. We cannot control God.
These characteristics of the supernatural
show why supernatural explanations should never enter into scientific
theorizing. Science operates by empirical principles of observational testing;
hypotheses must be confirmed or disconfirmed by reference to inter-subjectively
accessible empirical data. One supports a hypothesis by showing consequences
obtain that would follow if what is hypothesized were to be so in fact. Darwin
spent most of the Origin of Species applying this procedure, demonstrating how
a wide variety of biological phenomena could have been produced by (and thus
explained by) the simple causal processes of the theory. But, as we have seen,
supernatural theories can give no guidance about what follows or does not
follow from their supernatural components.
The appeal to supernatural forces, whether
divine or occult, is always available because we can cite no necessary
constraints upon the powers of supernatural agents. This is just the picture of
God that Johnson presents. He says that God could create out of nothing or use
evolution if He wanted (JDT p. 14, 113); God is "omnipotent" (JDT p.
113). He says God creates in the "furtherance of a purpose" (JDT p. 4),
but that God's purposes are "inscrutable" (JDT p. 71) and
"mysterious" (JDT p. 67). A god that is all-powerful and whose will
is inscrutable may be called upon to explain any event in any situation, and
this is one reason for the methodological prohibition against such appeals in
science. Because of this feature, supernatural hypotheses remain immune from
disconfirmation. Young Earth Creation-Science does include supernatural views
at its core that are not testable and it was rightly dismissed as not being
scientific because of these in the Arkansas court case, but it at least was
candid about a few specific non-supernatural claims that are open to
disconfirmation (and indeed that have been disconfirmed), such as that the
earth is less than 10,000 years old and that many geological and
paleontological features were caused by a universal flood (the Noachian
Deluge). So far at least, Johnson has declined to offer any specific positive
claims of this sort by which his notion of Creationism could be tested.
Experimentation requires observation and
control of the variables. We confirm causal laws by performing controlled
experiments in which the purported independent variable is made to vary while
all other factors are held constant and we observe the effect on the dependent
variable. But by definition we have no control over supernatural entities or
forces.
Finally, if we were to allow science to
appeal to supernatural powers even though they could not be tested, then the
scientist's task would become just too easy. One would always be able to call
upon the gods for quick theoretical assistance in any circumstance. Once such
supernatural explanations are permitted they could be used in chemistry and
physics as easily as Creationists have used them in biology and geology.
Indeed, all empirical investigation could cease, for scientists would have a
ready-made answer for everything. For example, consider Wayne Frair's
alternative creationist explanation of the many general similarities among
animals (such as common reactions of humans and rats and monkeys to drugs).
These, he says, "can be explained as originating in basic design given by
the Creator. Evolution is not needed to account for the similarities."
(Frair and Davis 1983, p. 14) In
short the "explanation" does not go beyond claiming that this pattern
is so because God designed it so. Clearly science must reject this kind of
one-size-fits-all explanation. By disqualifying such short-cuts, the Naturalist
method also has the virtue of spurring deeper investigation. If one were to find
some phenomenon that appeared inexplicable according to some current theory one
might be tempted to attribute it to the direct intervention of God, but a
methodological principle that rules out appeal to supernatural powers prods one
to look further for a natural explanation. Clearly, it is not just because such
persistence has proved successful in the past that science should want to
encourage this attitude.
The scientists' appeal to supernatural agency
in the face of a recalcitrant research problem would be as profoundly
unsatisfying as the ancient Greek playwright's reliance upon the deus ex
machina to extract his hero from a difficult predicament. Sydney Harris, the
preeminent scientific humorist, cleverly made the point in a cartoon that
appeared in American Scientist. He pictures two scientists standing before a
chalk-board that the first had covered with an intricate series of symbols and
equations, but with one gap in the sequence at which is noted "Then a
miracle occurs." The second scientist, gesturing towards this notation,
states his considered assessment: "I think you should be more explicit
here in step two."
Without the binding assumption of
uninterruptible natural law there would be absolute chaos in the scientific
worldview. Supernatural explanations undermine the discipline that allows
science to make progress. It is not that supernatural agents and powers could
not explain in principle, it is rather that they can explain all too easily. As
such we may think of them as the explanation of last resort, since, like the
Greek god in the machine, they can always be hauled down to "save the
day" if every other explanation fails. They are the poor person's
explanations, that is, the explanations of the intellectually poverty-stricken,
since they are available for free. Surely it is not in this sense that the poor
in spirit are blessed with seeing God.
I believe that such abstract considerations
provide sufficient reason to reject appeals to supernatural explanations in
science. Nevertheless, it will be worthwhile to make the ideas more concrete by
considering a few specific effects of reintroducing the possibility of
supernatural interventions in a practical setting.
Rather than addressing the possibility of a
theistic science immediately I think it will help us to first consider the
effects of introducing theism in another area that Johnson recommends--namely
his special area of expertise, the law. In Reason in the Balance Johnson claims
that naturalism has eaten away at the law in the same way he says it has
infected science, and he fondly recalls the era in which "lawmakers
assumed that authoritative moral guidance was available to them in the
Bible" (RIB39). Thus, one result of introducing theism into the law would
be that the content of the law would change, with secular rules and notions of
justice replaced by ones with a religious foundation in the law of the Bible.
He gives the example of adultery, noting that in a naturalist legal setting one
could oppose it as a breach of contract but one could not condemn it merely
because God forbade it. Johnson tells us that every culture must base its laws
in some "creation story" (RIB12) and that naturalistic evolutionary
tale has replaced the traditional story of our creation. We see what Johnson
takes to be the proper basis for laws about adultery when he writes: "If
God really did create us 'male and female' and intended male and female to play
different roles in the family, and intended sexual intercourse to be confined
to the marital relationship, then the system of traditional family morality
makes sense." (RIB31) Johnson recommends this approach in part because he
believes that moral duties make no sense except as commandments from a divine authority.
I have elsewhere (Pennock 1996) discussed Johnson's claim that scientific
naturalism undermines morality and leads inevitably to relativism, and I will
not repeat my criticisms here. We will return to the connection of the Creation
story to morality shortly, but first I want to focus on two other significant
ways in which the introduction of the Creationist variety of theism would be
likely to transform our legal system.
The first follows in parallel from Johnson's
insistence that science admit the reality of supernatural influences in the
daily workings of the world. For the law to take this seriously as well, it
would have to be open to both suits and defenses based on a range of possible
divine and occult interventions. Imagine the problems that would result if the
courts had to accept legal theories of this sort. How would the court rule on
whether to commit a purportedly insane person to a mental hospital for
self-mutilation who claimed that the Lord told her to pluck out her eye because
it offended her? How would a judge deal with a defendant, Abe, accused of
attempted murder of his son, Ike, who claims that he was only following God's
command that he kill Ike to prove his faith? As Johnson says, such
interventions may indeed be true. But though in our private religious faith we
may respect their possible authenticity, surely the law, a public institution,
is not being dogmatically biased in discounting them. How, for instance, could
the legal system handle torts if it had to consider accusations that a
defendant caused plaintiff's miscarriage by casting an evil eye, or hexed
plaintiff's cow? We need only look to legal history to see the sorry effects of
such a system.
The law once did take such accusations of
occult interventions seriously. We could pick any number of supernatural
possibilities that the law considered, all based in the authority of Scripture,
but the case of witchcraft is a good example. The law took the Bible seriously
in its descriptions of witches, sorcerers, demons, transvection, and familiars.
It also incorporated the Scriptural command that one not suffer a witch to
live. In the Renaissance the Catholic church wrestled with the legal
implications of this worldview; in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII appointed Heinrich
Kramer and Jakob Sprenger as inquisitors and they authored the Malleus
Maleficarum, laying out accepted procedures for investigating and prosecuting
people accused of witchcraft. There were some safeguards against too quickly
accepting accusations of witchcraft at face-value, so in some cases it might
require half a dozen persons to testify (perhaps anonymously) that the
defendant had bewitched a child or a cow. On the other hand, since witchcraft
was practiced in secret, making it difficult to witness, and since witches were
especially malicious, judges were allowed to be deceitful to trip them into
inadvertent confessions. In the following centuries the procedures were
elaborated upon. Jean Bodin's influential Daemonomania of 1580 advised that
when a woman was reported to be a witch there was a strong prima facie
presumption that she was one and so could be tortured if there was any other
corroborating evidence. As Wayne Shumaker, from whose fascinating history The
Occult Sciences in the Renaissance I recount these facts, sadly observed that
in Europe from 1484 to 1700 some 200,000 to 300,000 persons were executed as
witches, usually by burning at the stake, and that "the situation of any
person accused by malicious neighbors was regularly desperate." (Shumaker
1972, p. 67) Is there any doubt
that we may thank naturalistic science for bringing an end to the need to fear
such "possibilities?"
The second significant effect of introducing
Johnson's philosophy of Theistic Realism into the law would be a radical
dismissal of ordinary standards of evidence. The most common evidence upon
which someone was found guilty of witchcraft was simply the accusations of
others, against which the only real defense was try to have the testimony
thrown out on the grounds that the accuser was one's mortal enemy.
Interestingly, there were a few physical signs that were supposed to count as
evidence, such as the so-called "Devil's mark." This was an area of
skin that seemed to be insensitive to pain, supposed to have been caused by
contact with the devil's claw when the pact was sealed. Confessions under
torture were also accepted, though again defendants were at a disadvantage for
it was thought that refusing to confess under torture was also a sign of guilt
because only a witch insensitive to pain, perhaps with supernatural aid, would
be able to withstand the torture. Judges were warned that they had to be
especially wary because the interventions of demons could cause illusions. As
proof of this power one author cited the story from St. Gregory's first
Dialogue telling of a woman "who thought she was eating lettuce but
instead ate a devil in the form of a lettuce or, possibly, invisible within
it." (Shumaker 1972, p. 78) The authority of St. Gregory was supposed to
be proof enough of this possible supernatural power. It was apparently
inappropriate to ask, as Shumaker suggests a doubter today might, "How do
you know it was the lettuce?" (Shumaker 1972, p. 79)
We here consider posing such a question in
the legal setting, but it is the same problem of evidence that is at issue for
a theistic science that Johnson says is supposed to sanction the possibility of
supernatural interventions. We have seen this exact problem arise in the
Creationism debate before, when Gosse and current "mature earth" creationists
suggest that the earth is in fact only six thousand years old but that God gave
it the appearance of great age. However, the issue is not just whether or not
God would deceive us in this way, but how we could ever tell that something
produced by a supernatural agent. Some commentators assumed that witchcraft
made direct use of supernatural power, while others thought that the mischief
was really all done by demons who used secondary causes, that is, by natural
though perhaps yet unknown causal laws. In either case we have the same trouble
finding out whether or not there is a devil in the lettuce. It will do no good
to peel back the leaves. How could Gregory have reached his conclusion? We may
call the problem of how to determine whether or not a supernatural agent
intervened in particular cases "the problem of the lettuce."
Perhaps as a saint Gregory was privy to some
special lettuce revelation, but I am still taking Johnson at his word that he
is not defending revelation. Given that the core Creationist hypothesis
involves special supernatural interventions we should expect some answer to the
lettuce problem. The Darwinian view holds that the evolutionary processes are
working all the time, and can point to observations thereof. We may observe mutation,
recombination, inheritance, natural selection and the resultant changes in gene
frequencies in populations. Can the Creationist do as well with the Creation
hypothesis? On this point I now issue another challenge to Johnson to come
clean: Are divine interventions occurring today in particular cases? If so,
which ones, and how do we tell? If not, why not, and again, how do we check?
Johnson wants us to believe, as he writes in
Reason in the Balance, that "The possibility that divine intervention may
occur... emphatically does not imply that all events are the product of an
unpredictable divine whimsy." (RIB92) Perhaps not, but we want to see the
test for distinguishing the specific cases. It is amusing to remember that in
his earlier book, Darwin on Trial, Johnson's single example of how the
Creationist theistic explanation is better than evolution was the case of the
elaborately tailed peacocks, that he says an uncaring evolutionary process
would never allow to develop, but that they are "just the kind of
creatures that a whimsical Creator might favor." (JDT p. 31)
Returning to Johnson's definitions of
Creationism, we see that the problem of the lettuce affects his view in deeper
ways than even that of simply identifying the presence or absence of supernatural
interventions. Johnson's Creationism dismisses the worth of Deistic views of
Creation and demands ongoing direct control. It thus seems fair to ask how the
theistic scientist supposes that control to work. The Darwinian can specify a
fair number of the sorts of causal processes that control evolution, fulfilling
the basic requirement for a scientific explanation. The third challenge to the
Creationist is to tell us their alternative divine control process. Creation
Scientists, like the Morrises, who keep to Genesis literalism at least are
forthright in specifying special creation from nothing or from the dust.
Johnson and other Intelligent Design Creationists are silent about the control
process. May theistic science appeal to ex nihilo miracles or other control
processes? In the case of the development of life forms, does God create by
selecting the variations that will survive? (Young Earth Creationists reject
this possibility because it makes death God's instrument of Creation, and I
suspect that ID Creationists would not allow it because it could undermine
their basic argument from information.) So does God create by causing the
variations upon which selection occurs? This control mechanism was proposed by
some of Darwin's contemporaries to keep God in direct control of the process.
But, then, does God also create fatal and deleterious mutations or only the
"good" ones? The specter of the lettuce problem reappears in all
these possibilities.
Finally, what about the third, and most
important, core element of Johnson's definition of Creationism--that God
creates for a purpose. How is a theistic science to discover God's purposes?
Consider the example mentioned in passing of Creationist Jerry Falwell's claim
about the purpose of A.I.D.S.. How would Johnson's theistic science test the
hypothesis that A.I.D.S. was created by God for the purpose of punishing
homosexuals, drug-users and others for their sinful lifestyle? Naturalistic
science simply proceeds by seeking a natural explanation and treats A.I.D.S.
like other diseases and discovers that it is caused by the Human
Imuno-Deficiency Virus, and nothing in its methodology allows it to test such
moral or teleological hypotheses about God's possible purposes. The problem of
the lettuce is particularly keen here and its implications particularly
chilling.
I do not bring up this case of the theistic
purpose hypothesis about A.I.D.S. as just a provocative hypothetical scenario,
but because the questions of the morality of homosexuality and explanation of
A.I.D.S. figure in significantly in Johnson's work and because he thinks both
are intimately connected to core issues in the Creationist debate. In
"Naturalism, Creationism and the Meaning of Life" (Pennock 1996) I
discuss in detail the way that Johnson and other Creationists see the debate as
being as much about the proper moral order as about the proper explanation of
biological order, and point out how Johnson brings up homosexuality as one of
his standard examples in Reason in the Balance to illustrate this point.
Johnson is more subtle than those Creationists who note that God "created
Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," but his point is the same that we are
supposed to learn from the creation story that homosexual behavior breaks the
created order and thus the moral order. Johnson's views about the explanation
of A.I.D.S. is less well known to those who have only followed his
anti-evolutionary writings. The A.I.D.S. issue has been his other avocational
pursuit. He has written against the current scientific view that A.I.D.S. is
caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and in support of Peter Duesberg's
radical contrary view that it A.I.D.S. is the result of lifestyle behaviors of
homosexuals and drug-users that cause general ill-health. Many biomedical journals
gave Duesberg's view a thorough hearing since he first challenged the HIV view
in 1987. A.I.D.S. researchers have concluded that the available evidence does
not support Duesberg's alternative view, but Duesberg and a small coterie of
public supporters like Johnson continue to press the point. Duesberg's view
meshes rather well with Falwell's hypothesis about God's purpose for A.I.D.S.,
though of course the latter could also apply even if one accepted the standard
HIV view. For us here it does not so much matter what the efficient cause of
A.I.D.S. but how, whatever the efficient cause, a theistic science could test
Falwell's teleological hypothesis about God's ultimate purpose. This is my
fourth challenge to Johnson's proposal for a theistic creationist science. As
scientists, I claim, the best we can do is to try to find some natural
explanation for A.I.D.S., and though it is likely that science will find there
is more to the story than the virus itself, science's naturalist methodology
can never go further to test and discover God's purposes.
Having previously shown why science has good
reason to rule out appeal to supernatural powers and entities as a
methodological principle, and in this section some of the unacceptable
consequences of abandoning it, let us now turn to the second horn of dilemma I
posed earlier.
To say that science doesn't deal with
"the supernatural" does not mean that everything that we currently
think of as supernatural--ghosts and extra-sensory perception, for
example--really is. Perhaps these are actually natural law-governed phenomena
that are yet to be discovered. Philosophers are fond of appealing to scenarios
from the Star Trek television shows to illustrate hypothetical conceptual
possibilities, so let me take a case from one episode to develop my point here.
The episode involved the people of a world
who transported themselves to an asteroid in the belief that there their souls
would there be set free of their bodies to live on in a blissful afterlife.
There are the usual conflicts and misunderstandings to be worked out as the
crew tries to deal with this seemingly absurd practice. In the end, however,
they are made to reevaluate their skepticism when their sensors detect unusual
energy patterns around the asteroid that exhibit individual coherence and
excitations that appear to match the electrical activity patterns of people's
brain. Trekkers know this is all "technobabble" of course, but we
willingly suspending our disbelief, and, within the science-fictional world of
the series, we recognize that the peoples' belief in a ghostly afterlife is
true in a sense after all, and has a scientific explanation.
In this science-fiction example it looks as
though science has tested and confirmed the existence of ghosts and a
"spirit afterlife." In one sense this surely seems right; if such
evidence were found then there seems to be no reason that there could not arise
a new scientific speciality that investigates and tests hypotheses about this
afterlife. In our own real world we have not found such evidence but isn't it
possible that we could? If we agree with this then, similarly, why couldn't
there be a science that incorporates theistic interventions? This is the
creationist's complaint that science is close-minded in ruling out such
possibilities. But here is the question: even in the Star Trek example are we
really still talking about "ghosts" and a "spirit
afterlife" in the way we ordinarily conceive of them? The danger of such
hypothetical examples is that they mislead us about what sense of
"possibility" we are talking about, since one can hide a lot of
question-begging assumptions in some well-spun technobabble. In the episode the
departed "souls" turn out to be "coherent energy patterns."
They interact causally with other matter and energy, of course, or the sensors
would not have picked up their "energy signature." Indeed, if they
are energy in the ordinary scientific sense, then it would now be possible to
exert causal influence upon them in the usual ways. Presumably we could
manipulate or disrupt them as we can other forms of energy. Presumably we could
"kill" them. At this point we should be beginning to feel a little
uncomfortable about our earlier conclusion about what was confirmed here. Let
us step back now and analyze what has been going on in this science-fiction
example.
By discussing the confirmation of
"ghosts" in this way we have tacitly taken them out of the
supernatural realm and placed them squarely in the natural world. To conceive
of ghosts as supernatural entities is to consider them to be outside of the
natural realm, outside the law-governed world of cause and effect physics. But
to say that science could test and confirm their existence, as in our
hypothetical case, is to reconceive them as natural entities. Perhaps there
really are "coherent energy patterns" as postulated in the story, but
such "ghosts" are no longer supernatural--they have been naturalized.
Surely the Christian will quite properly object that, whatever these things are,
they are surely not departed souls in the religious sense of the term.
So what should this tell us about Johnson's
and other Creationists' idea for a theistic science? How does God figure in
this picture? Will theists really be happy from a religious viewpoint to think
of God as a scientific hypothesis as we just considered the hypothesis of a
spirit afterlife?
As we saw, for a hypothesis to be scientific
it must be inter-subjectively testable, and fit within the framework of
law-governed cause-effect relations. This is the core of what it means to be a
natural object and to be amenable to scientific investigation. Agreeing to be
constrained by this sort of epistemological approach as the means of gathering
public knowledge about the empirical world is just what it is to be a
methodological naturalist. This is no different than what we tacitly assume for
everyday knowledge, and all science does is make careful extensions of our
ordinary experience in what is simply a more precise and explicit version of
the ordinary way we get such knowledge. In proposing a theistic science Johnson
claims to be expanding science to supernatural possibilities undreamed of in
this philosophy, but what he and other so-called Creation scientists are really
doing is reducing God to a scientific object, placing God in the scientific
box.
Creationists are especially fond of quoting
the 19th Psalm but they have a rather odd way of interpreting it.
The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and [the
sky] is declaring the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge." (Psalm 19:1-2)
Instead of appreciating the lovely poetic
sensibility of these images--imagining the dome of heaven to be like a clay
bowl that praises the potter--Creationists talk about this as though it had
something to do with the search for extra-terrestrial life-forms. They speak of
talking pulsars and information-bearing signals from a divine intelligence as
though God were a broadcaster beaming out messages for us on a literal carrier
wave and waiting for some enthusiastic ham-radio operator to pick up the word
of His existence.
Returning to the Design Argument, we see that
it works in just this way, drawing an inference from to the nature of God from
what is already known and familiar to us in human, natural, terms. The ID
Theorists have given us a scientifically gussied up version of Paley's
venerable argument. God becomes a big watchmaker in the sky, a divine genetic
engineer, or a supped-up "intelligence." But philosophers long ago
revealed the flaws in the Design Argument, and Scripture itself warns against
analogizing God to human experience. As (Isa. 40:18) rhetorically asks,
"To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?"
Johnson tells us that scientific naturalism
is the root of all evil, but it turns out that he is doing nothing less than
naturalizing God. Ironically, Johnson may not be a supernaturalist after all,
but a super naturalist.
To recognize this ironic fact is to suddenly
understand what previously seemed to be a rather puzzling feature of the
Creationist debate, namely, the surprising similarity of outlook between
Creationists and atheists. Scientific organizations and religious institutions
have issued explicit statements, correctly, that evolutionary biology neither
affirms nor denies the existence of God and that Christianity is not threatened
by evolution, but both Creationists and atheists seem to think that God hangs
in the balance over the truth or falsity of evolution. In the present instance
we see this in the affinity between Johnson and a few atheist scientists, Will
Provine and Stephen Weinberg in particular, who have been happy to engage him
in debate. Provine and Weinberg concur with the essentials of Johnson's
framework and the implication that theism is incompatible with evolution.
Johnson is an unwitting friend of such atheists, for they agree in naturalizing
God and making God an empirical hypothesis, amenable to scientific
investigative testing. Adolf Grnbaum, for example, a distinguished philosopher
of science who has argued an atheistic position against theists like William
Craig and Philip Quinn (who want to appeal to divine interventions to explain
cosmological facts), quite agrees with Johnson and other Creationists that
science can test the God hypothesis. The difference is that the atheists have
looked at the world and concluded that from this perspective the balance of
evidence weighs heavily against the ordinary conception of an omni-benevolent
personal Creator. Naturalize God and put the Creation Hypothesis to empirical
test and the atheists claim a knockout.
Because Creationists see the dispute in the
same terms they fear that atheism is the inevitable conclusion if one accepts
evolution. This is why they fight so fervently to deny evolution and to try to
uphold the scientific status of the biblical account, often to the point of
absurdity. To defend the scientific plausibility of Noah's ark, ICR
Creation-scientist John Woodmorappe provides a book-length ark feasibility
study (Woodmorappe 1996) and finds himself arguing that Noah solved the problem
of animal waste management by training the animals to urinate and defecate upon
command as someone held a bucket behind them. Is it surprising that mainstream
Christians are embarrassed by Creationism?
As an ID "Mere Creationist,"
Johnson refuses to state any position about Noah's ark and focuses on more
generic Biblical claims, but because he too thinks of God as amenable to
scientific test he holds the same incompatibilist view of the relation of
Christianity and evolution. He writes:
One might have thought that Provine and I would be
bitterly opposed, since I am a Christian who emphatically affirms that the
world is the product of a purposeful Creator, not a blind material mechanism.
But in fact I think Provine has done a lot to clarify the point at issue, and I
agree with him about how to define the question. (RIB189)
Provine says that compatibilists have to
check their brains at the church-house door because he thinks both the Creation
hypothesis and the evolutionary hypothesis are on a scientific par and can be
evaluated by standard naturalistic methods and on this basis the former is a
clear loser. Johnson holds out hope that evolution may still be proved false,
but he frames the conflict in the same way: "Christianity makes sense only
if its factual premises are true... The essential factual premise is that God created
us for a purpose, and our destiny is a glorious one in eternity." (RIB204)
On Johnson's view naturalistic evolution is incompatible with this premise. He
seems to think that the only way that God could give human beings purpose is by
creating their bodies by directly intervening in the causal processes to
produce them. The only option remaining for him, then, is to stand and slug it
out on science's home turf.
To enter the field of intellectual argument is to
accept the risk that we may lose by being proved wrong. But accepting the risk
of being wrong is the inescapable price for making any meaningful statements
about the world. The best scientists have never feared to accept that risk...
(RIB110)
Having recognized Johnson's inadvertent
crypto-naturalism we are now sensitized to the significance of such remarks.
Whether or not he realizes it, in this statement Johnson is advocating a return
to the Verifiability Criterion of Meaning--the view that only statements that
can be tested are meaningful. This view of meaning was one of the central
tenets of Logical Positivism in its most scientistic vein, and its
unworkability was one of the reasons that Positivism was overturned. Its
reappearance in Johnson's conceptual framework shows the extent to which he is
unwittingly caught up in an even more pervasively naturalistic outlook than the
one he decries. That statements be empirically testable is indeed a requirement
for scientific knowledge, but to think that such statements alone are
meaningful is to buy into the scientistic view that only scientific knowledge
is meaningful. Christian critics of Creationism have pointed out that Young
Earth Creationists, in their insistence upon the need for Creation-Science, are
actually venerating science above God. The critics are right. After all, what
is a literal, "scientific" reading of Genesis but exegesis from a
naturalistic perspective? Johnson may or may not be a Biblical literalist but
he exhibits the same inverted perspective, protesting just a bit too much against
the supposed naturalist mote in the scientist's eye while remaining unaware of
the super naturalist log in his own. This is the reason that he and the atheist
see eye-to-eye. Continuing just beyond the above quote, Johnson writes:
If Christian theists can summon the courage to argue
that preexisting intelligence really was an essential element in biological
creation and to insist that the evidence be evaluated by standards that do not
assume the point in dispute, then they will make a great contribution to the
search for truth, whatever the outcome. (RIB110)
He concludes by acknowledging that this
courageous approach allows the possibility that biologists may respond with
convincing evidence that shows that direct creation by such intelligence is not
necessary. If we are to take him at his word this means that he would then have
to admit that the Creation hypothesis is false. This is just the line of
reasoning that the atheists have already followed to its "natural"
conclusion.
But let us be honest here. Do we really
expect that the ID Creationist would accept this conclusion even in such a
case? More importantly, is the Christian really forced to accept this
scientific conception of God that Creationists and atheists put forward? The
answer is certainly "No" in both cases. As a scientific Creationist,
Johnson would have us put God on a slide and peer at Him under the microscope
of science. But there is a tension in Johnson's conception of God, as we saw,
for at other places he expresses the traditional notion of a supernatural,
omnipotent God who is mysterious and inscrutable. We would expect Johnson to
retreat to this notion in the same way that other Creationsts have done.
Christians would be wise to not even start down the dead-end road of
Creation-Science or Theistic Science, however it is called, for it is unlikely
that they would find a naturalized God to be worthy of worship.
Johnson quotes John 1:1-3 as the Scriptural
basis of his theistic science.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came
into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John
1:1-3)
Somehow, Johnson seems to think that this
tells us that God's creative purposes are open to scientific scrutiny. Perhaps
Christians might better judge this passage and the prospects for a theistic
science in the light of another New Testament passage from Romans 11:
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of
God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Rom.
11:33)
1 Jerry Falwell
on AIDS - July 17, 1983 ABC local affiliate program "AIDS: The Anatomy
of a Crisis". Falwell opened the program by citing Galatians. "When
you violate moral, health, and hygiene laws, you reap the whirlwind. You cannot
shake your fist in God's face and get by with it." (Quoted in Shilts
1987, p. 347)
2 At one level
one might characterize the difference between a Constructivist like myself and
a Constructionist as only a matter a matter of degree. The Constuctionist
thinks that hypotheses about the world are so vastly underdetermined that
anything goes. For instance, H. M. Collins holds that one may "connect the
dots" of the world in any fashion at all to produce any picture one likes.
(Collins 1985, 1992, p. 16) On
most versions of this sort of view, only social factors (particularly power
relations among knowledge-constructors) make a significant difference. By
contrast, the Constructivist holds that the constraints that come from the
world are more important. At another level, however, the Constructionist and
Constructivist have a more fundamental disagreement. The former has taken the
linguistic turn with a vengeance and holds that science should be thought of as
simply another form of narrative manipulation of texts, while the latter
recommends a return to a naturalistic, ontological view. This difference
emerges, for instance, in the way they think of laws. The former thinks that
laws are just propositions, while the latter holds that natural laws are in the
world and that scientific laws expressed in language are approximate
representations thereof. More on laws later.
3 The ontic
factors (C and S are the causal inputs and E the effect) are indicated by
uppercase letters while the 'a' is in lowercase because it symbolizes the
pragmatic elements that indicate how are interests are parsing the network for
the question at hand. In real cases we typically share a tacit set of
assumptions about the "background" situation and our interests, so we
omit S and a and may simply deal with the standard two-place "C causes
E," but the pragmatic assumptions are necessary for the inferences we draw
and may have to be made explicit, especially if interlocutors discover that
they do not share the same theoretical framework.
4 I discuss this
CaSE Model of the causal relation and its application in more detail in (Pennock
1991 and forthcoming).
5 Consider the
classic example of identifying "the cause" of a traffic accident. The
driver cites the slippery road, the mechanic cites the worn brakes, the city
planner cites the partially obstructed view. Each of these may be a legitimate
explanation of the same accident because each explainer has pragmatically put
different features of the network of causes into the assumed background situation
and has in mind different contrasting alternatives (e.g. a wet rather than a
dry road, worn rather than safe brakes, obstructed rather than open views at
intersections). This is a sense in which I believe we should bow to the
Constructionist, since there is no privileged one of these which is better just
by virtue of the way the world is without considering our interests.
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