by jimwalton » Thu Jun 29, 2017 8:42 am
Yeah, it's lengthy to go through the whole case, but I'll try to summarize it here for you. It comes from Alvin Plantinga in his book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. He spends 350 pages analyzing the logic of theism and atheism with respect to science. Let me try to bring out his major points without writing a veritable wall of text.
His thesis is, "There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism."
Evolution and Christian belief: There is no inherent incompatibility between evolution and Christian belief, no necessary contradictions between Christian theology and the progressive development of the earth and life on earth. God often works by progressive means. It is very possible to believe God caused the right mutations at the right time, preserved various populations, orchestrated specific events, etc. Elements of fine-tuning and design that we see in nature accord well with a purposeful and intelligent source. Scientific naturalism, by contrast, has to claim all is driven by chance occurrences, natural selection, and random mutation. While theism can explain the full sequence of the universe and life, there are many gaps in pure naturalistic evolutionary theory that have yet to be confirmed. Though there is plenty of evidence for progressive development, we have to make many leaps in the transitions because evidence is lacking. Evolutionary theory can only claim that it's abstractly possible.
What Darwin has to show is an unguided evolutionary path that is not prohibitively improbable. Have Darwinians actually accomplished this? Have they shown, for example, that it is not prohibitively improbable that the mammalian eye has developed in this way from a light sensitive spot? They have NOT. They have pointed to various sorts of eyes, lining them up in a series of apparently increasing adaptive complexity, with the mammalian eye at the top of the series. But that of course doesn’t actually show that it is biologically possible—that is, not prohibitively improbable—that later members of the series developed by Darwinian means from earlier members.
Is it possible that unguided natural selection generated all the stunning marvels of the living world? Arguments from science are speculative, inconclusive, and astronomically statistically improbable. And yet there is nothing in current biological science that is necessarily in conflict with Christian belief.
Science can only speculate (without evidence) where our sense of purpose, morality, artistic strivings, reason, religious sensibilities, and personality came from. Such things are endemic to theism. Naturalism must claim that all this has happened by the grace of a mindless natural process. Human beings and all the rest are the outcome of a merely mechanical process, and that mind, intelligence, foresight, planning, and design are all latecomers in the universe, themselves created by the unthinking process of natural selection. Is it really inferring the most reasonable conclusion that language, say, or consciousness, or the ability to compose great music, or prove Godel's incompleteness theorems, or to think up natural selection, should have been produced by mindless processes of this sort? It's an ambitious claim. The neo-Darwinian scientific theory of evolution doesn’t prove that “mind has to arise from mind” (John Locke) is necessarily wrong, or that God necessarily doesn’t exist. It hasn’t even shown that it is possible, in the broadly logical sense, that mind arise from pure incogitative matter. That’s because evolution doesn’t pronounce on such questions.
Even if it's logically possible, is it biologically possible? That again is an ambitious claim. Even if biology could prove it's possible, that still doesn't prove it had to, because it's just as possible that it came to be by guided natural selection as by unguided. The biological process doesn't reveal the mechanism of causality.
With respect to the laws of nature, therefore, there are at least 3 ways in which theism is hospitable to science and its success, three ways in which there is deep concord between theistic religion and science.
1. Science requires regularity, predictability, and constancy; it requires that our world conform to laws of nature. From the point of view of naturalists, the fact that our world displays the sort of regularity and lawlike behavior necessary for science is a bit of enormous cosmic luck, a not-to-be-expected bit of serendipity. But regularity and lawlikeness obviously fit well with the thought that God is a rational person who has created our world and instituted the laws of nature.
2. Not only must our world in fact manifest regularity and law-like behavior: for science to flourish, scientists and others must believe that it does. Whitehead: “There can be no living science unless there is a wide-spread instinctive conviction in the existence of an order of things.” Such a conviction fits well with the theistic doctrine of the image of God.
3. Theism enables us to understand the necessity or inevitableness or inviolability of natural law: this necessity is to be explained and understood in terms of the difference between divine power and the power of finite creatures. Again, from the point of view of the naturalist, the character of these laws is something of an enigma. What is this alleged necessity they display, weaker than logical necessity, but necessity nonetheless? What if anything explains that fact that these laws govern what happens? What reason if any is there for expecting them to continue to govern these phenomena? Theism provides a natural answer to these questions; naturalism stands mute before them.
When it comes right down to it, how can we know our process of reasoning is reliable (a necessary conclusion for intellect to matter and science to make sense)? Consider, for example, rational intuition, memory, and perception. Can we show by the first or first two that the third is in fact reliable—that is, without relying in any way on the deliverances of the third? Clearly not; rational intuition enables us to know the truths of mathematics and logic, but it can’t tell us whether or not perception is reliable. Nor can we show by rational intuition and perception that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is reliable. Nor can we give a decent, noncircular rational argument that reason itself is indeed reliable; in trying to give such an argument, we would of course be presupposing that reason is reliable.
We have many cognitive faculties: memory, perception, reason, intuition, sympathy, introspection, logic and mathematics. These faculties or powers work together in complex and variegated ways to produce a vast battery of beliefs and knowledge, ranging from the simplest everyday beliefs (it’s hot in here, I have a pain in my knee) to more complex beliefs of philosophy, theology, history, and the far reaches of science. In science, clearly enough, many of these faculties work together.
How can we assess the reliability of these faculties? My memory, for example, is reliable only if it produces mostly true beliefs—if, that is, most of my memorial beliefs are true. What proportion of my memorial beliefs must be true for my memory to be reliable? Of course there is no precise answer, but presumably it would be greater than, say, two-thirds. We can speak of the reliability of a particular faculty (e.g. memory) but also of the reliability of the whole battery of our cognitive faculties. And indeed we ordinarily think our faculties are reliable, at any rate when they are functioning properly, when there is no cognitive malfunction or disorder or dysfunction. We also think they are more reliable under some circumstances than others. Visual perception of middle-sized object close at hand is more reliable than perception of very small object, or middle-sized objects err some distance. Beliefs about where I was yesterday are ordinarily more likely to be true that the latest high-powered scientific theories.
Now the natural thing to think, from the perspective of theism, is that our faculties are indeed for the most part reliable: God has made us this way. But suppose you are a naturalist: you think there is no such person as God, and that we and our cognitive faculties have been cobbled together by natural selection. Can you then sensibly think that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable? I say you can't.
First, the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low. (To put it a bit inaccurately but suggestively, if naturalism and evolution were both true, our cognitive faculties would very likely not be reliable.) But if I believe in both naturalism and evolution, I have a defeater for my intuitive assumption that my cognitive faculties are reliable. And if I have a defeater for that belief, then I have a defeater for any belief I take to be produced by my cognitive faculties. That means I have a defeater for my belief that naturalism and evolution are true. I cannot rationally accept them. Therefore, if I can’t accept them—the pillars of contemporary science—then there is serious conflict between naturalism and science.
Despite the superficial concord between naturalism and science—despite all the claims to the effect that science implies, or requires, or supports, or confirms, or comports well with naturalism—the fact is that science and naturalism don’t fit together at all well.
Nietzsche: “Only if we assume a God who is morally our like can “truth” and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.”
Thomas Nagel: “If we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory (e.g., true beliefs) were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results.”
Barry Stroud: “There is an embarrassing absurdity in [naturalism] that is revealed as soon as the naturalist reflects and acknowledges that he believes his naturalistic theory of the world. … I mean he cannot it and consistently regard it as true.”
Patricia Churchland: “Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems it to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. … Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”
What Churchland is saying is that from a naturalist perspective, what evolution guarantees is at most that we behave in certain ways—in such ways as to promote survival, or more exactly reproductive success. The principal function or purpose, then, of our cognitive faculties is not that of producing true or near true beliefs, but instead that of contributing to survival by getting the body parts in the right place. What evolution underwrites is only (at most) that our behavior is reasonably adaptive to the circumstances in which our ancestors found themselves; hence it doesn’t guarantee true or mostly true beliefs. Our beliefs might be mostly true, but there is no particular reason to think they would be: natural selection is not interested in truth, but in appropriate behavior. What Churchland therefore suggests is that naturalistic evolution—that is, the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism with the view that we and our cognitive faculties have arisen by way of the mechanisms and processes proposed by contemporary evolutionary theory—gives us reason to doubt two things: (a) that a purpose of our cognitive systems is that of serving us with true beliefs, and (b) that they do, in fact, furnish us with mostly true beliefs.
Darwin himself also expresses serious doubts along these lines: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Naturalists don’t ordinarily explain just why they think science guarantees or supports naturalism; they merely announce it. They don’t claim that God has been dethroned by quantum mechanics or general relativity or the periodic table of elements, but by Darwin. This is the result of confused logic (see chapters 1-2). It is a confusion between guided and unguided evolution, between sober science and philosophical or theological add-on. But the scientific theory of evolution just as such is entirely compatible with the thought that God has guided and orchestrated the course of evolution, planned and directed it, in such a way as to achieve the ends he intends. Perhaps he causes the right mutations to arise at the right time; perhaps he preserves certain populations from extinction; perhaps he is active in many other ways (such as on the quantum level. See ch. 4). On the one hand, therefore, we have the scientific theory, and on the other, there is the claim that the course of evolution is not directed or guided or orchestrated by anyone; it displays no teleology; it is blind and unforeseen; it has no aim or goal in its mind’s eye.
This claim, despite its strident proclamation, is no part of the scientific theory as such; it is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on. On the one hand there is scientific theory; on the other, the metaphysical add-on, according to which the process is unguided. The first part is current science, and deserves the respect properly accorded a pillar of science; but the first is entirely compatible with theism. The second supports naturalism, all right, but is not part of science, and does not deserve the respect properly accorded science. And confusing the scientific theory with the result of annexing that add-on to it, confusing evolution as such with unguided evolution, deserve not respect, but disdain.
Materialists believe that rising in the evolutionary scale eventuates in content properties. The question is this: What is the likelihood, given evolution and naturalism, that the content thus arising is in fact true? What is the likelihood, given naturalism, that our cognitive faculties are reliable, thereby producing mostly true beliefs?
Science fits much better with theism than with naturalism. On balance, theism is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism, a much better home for it. Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called “the scientific worldview.”
There are areas of conflict between theism and science (evolutionary psychology for example), but that conflict is merely superficial. There is deep concord between science and theistic belief; science fits much better with theism than with naturalism. Turning to naturalism, there is superficial concord between science and naturalism, if only because it is claimed—but they are mistaken. One can’t rationally accept both naturalism and current evolutionary theory. Both naturalism and evolution are self-defeating. There is deep conflict between naturalism and on e of the most important claims of current science. There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic belief, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism. Given that naturalism is at least a quasi-religion, there is indeed a science/religion conflict, all right, but it is not between science and theistic religion; it is between science and naturalism. That’s where the conflict really lies.