Where Science and Religion Fuse

From Humanness in Their Hearts by Del Ratzsch:

Michael Ruse and E.O.Wilson have argued that a (false) belief in the objectivity of morality fosters fitness and has been favored by evolution.[115] David Sloan Wilson has argued that a (false) belief in religion fosters group fitness and has been favored by evolution.[116] According to Scott Atran, evolution has apparently favored a (false) belief very nearly in its own denial.[117] Non-theistic evolution apparently does not merely lack an interest in truth - truth taking the hindmost, as Patricia Churchland puts it [118] - but in important instances seems to have a vested interest in falsehood. There is a deep irony in the neighborhood. Nietzsche (often credited with turning evolutionism into a form attractive to Hitler) is read by some Nietzsche scholars as attributing the rise of science to Christianity's unqualified commitment to truth.[119] We have here an odd near-reversal of the secularly assigned roles for science and religion.

In any case, attempts such as the foregoing to justify the essential presuppositions and related resources of science via science itself will, of course, be problematic. Versions of such materials being pre-requisite for generating any scientific results to begin with, those materials can hardly themselves be straightforward scientific results. Thus, science cannot straightforwardly provide the rational justification for its own foundations.[120] And if science cannot be justified unless the foundations upon which it rests are, then science itself is not rationally justified unless there is some other - non-science – source of rational justification. Thus, rational justification even of science must ultimately spring from some deeper level.[121]

B. Atheism doesn't have much promise here either

The prospects for any sort of philosophical naturalism - and specifically a materialism - providing the requisite resources here are questionable as well.[122] Although I will not pursue the issue here, Alvin Plantinga has recently argued that there may be inescapable self-generated defeaters for any such naturalism in this context, and there are other significant questions which arise straightforwardly.[123] If Plantinga is right, the prospects here are none to minus slim. Dennett lauds Darwinian evolution as a "universal acid",[124] but the acid may be more universal than Dennett suggests - dissolving even its own case for itself.

What would a non-theistic science look like - a science that was truly non-theistic and not one which merely appropriated theistic-shaped science while gluing on a thin veneer of non-belief? An exercise in (hypothetical) comparative science may be revealing here. Stalinist principled denials of "idealist" Mendelian genetics, Nazi principled denials of "Jewish" physics, Maoist principled denials of religion-friendly "bourgeois idealist" Big Bang cosmology (and of the "bourgeois" Copenhagen interpretation), Marxist principled preference for Newtonian absolute space and time over "anti-materialist" relativity theory[125] (and rejection of "anti-Marxist" conceptions of the universe as finite but unbounded, or, in some cases principled objections to 'capitalistic' Newtonian physics), and postmodern principled denials of various "essentialist" theories might give one pause. But although I will not go into all of them here, I think that problems might run much deeper than rejection of specific theories and might involve inadequate metaphysical foundations, inadequate epistemological foundations, rational adequacy concerns, conceptual adequacy concerns, and others. The upshot for science could be grim indeed. The Stalinist theorist Nickolai Bukharin once claimed that pure science was a morbid symptom of class society. [126] And we all - including the later-executed Bukharin - know the standard Stalinist response to things and people perceived as 'morbid symptoms of class society.'

VI. Enter religion

I wish to suggest a fourth principle concerning cognitive terrains:

4. the 'fine-tuned' cognitive terrain required by science is religion-shaped

There are several considerations that offer at least some support for that. The first involves the early rise and history of science. Following is a brief examination of that history.

A. Science's theological history

As a historical matter of fact, modern science arose only once, and that took place within the Western European context of Judeo-Christian theology and praxis - not in Egypt, India, the Middle East, or China, all of which had earlier and longer cultural and technological traditions than had Western Europe.[127] Although there are disputes over degrees, virtually every serious historian of science recognizes that that was not mere coincidence - that some specific Christian theological doctrines (most notably creation and divine voluntarism) played key roles in the origin and rise of modern science. [128] (Indeed, the condemnation of 1277 which emphasized divine voluntarism explicitly against a necessitarian Aristotelianism has been cited by a few historians as the initiating spark for what became modern science.[129])

I will not pursue the details of the historical dynamics, and I do not claim that a Christian intellectual/practical context caused the rise of science, or that nothing like modern science could have arisen without such a context. But key figures in the emergence and growth of what we think of as modern science deliberately and explicitly claimed to find the grounding and intellectual justification for not only the formative presuppositions of science, but even for the legitimacy of the scientific project itself, in the content and implications of the doctrine of creation and other components of basic Christian theology. Perhaps they were confused, self-deluded, or their claims on this point are otherwise untrustworthy. But given the identities involved - some of the most noted minds of the last several centuries - such easy dismissals are not prima facie compelling.

Very briefly, the strongest version of the doctrine of creation says that the cosmos and everything that exists in it was created by a transcendent, rational God. That implies that the cosmos had a beginning - it has not existed always and is not eternal. The only thing eternal, according to this doctrine, is God. All else is created. This doctrine also says that the things which God created were created out of nothing - that God brought the cosmos itself into existence by His decree and command, and did not merely fashion the cosmos out of some pre-existing (possibly recalcitrant) materials or matter. Further, according to this doctrine, since only God is eternal, there were no substantive pre-existing rules or principles or boundaries that He had to work within. He was not subject to any substantive constraints in choosing what to create, so all else - being made by Him - was utterly subject to His will and free decisions.[130]

Again very briefly, that theological position was explicitly taken to imply that the cosmos (being structured around God's wisdom) was rational and intelligible, that we (being created in God's image) could in principle comprehend that creation, that our senses and cognitive faculties (being designed for knowing) were basically reliable, that we (being finite) could not just deduce a priori what and how God would have created, and consequently that since God had created not only rationally but freely in a way not evident to us a priori that we had to actually look if we wanted to know what God had done - i.e., that our investigation of nature had to be fundamentally empirical. (For additional specifics on this general theme, see Appendix II.)

B. The alleged separability possibility - backwash[131]

Of course, it might well be that even if religion was instrumental in getting science up and running, that science has long since left any such connection behind. But despite widespread assertions that science and its theistic heritage are separable, it is not at all clear that this separability thesis is true. It may be that the overtones of the theological conceptual context of science are not only essential, but have filtered deep into the very bones of science, and that science cannot be theologically filleted. Let me suggest some considerations which make that position at least plausible.

The phrase 'scientific inference' is often taken to suggest that there is some single style of reasoning which is definitively and uniquely scientific. Such is not, of course, the case. A number of types of reasoning are essential to various facets of science. Prediction, for instance, may involve straightforward implication, but currents often run in the opposite direction in confirmation - from confirming data back up to confirmed theory. There is here a backwash - an inferential ebb tide - with the empirical success of a theory anchoring its epistemic warrant. In some cases, even in the absence of strict inference in any direction a substantive intermeshing - the smooth embeddability of a theory into an accepted wider conceptual matrix - is taken as constituting support for the embedded theory.[132] Other currents are both more complicated and even less directional. For instance, the familiar claims that data are theory-laden, or that observation is partly constituted by paradigms, have led some to see epistemic feedback loops within science.[133] And depending upon where the boundaries for scientifically acceptable explanations are set, 'inference to best explanation' presents an extremely wide scope for scientific validation.

Epistemic legitimation can thus move in a variety of directions within science. Given that cognitive procedures within science are basically honed versions of common sense procedures, it is possible that processes generating epistemic legitimation within science may do so beyond science as well. For instance, just as empirical success provides backwash confirmation to relevant theory, the broader success of science itself might provide some level of genuine confirmation to the larger philosophical matrix within which that science is embedded.[134] It is well worth noting that anyone claiming that science undermines religion – i.e., that science confirms some sort of metaphysical naturalism – is thereby committed to this general possibility of science confirming metaphysical principles.

As noted above, that matrix owes a considerable conceptual and practical debt to the Christian intellectual context. Science works only in a very particular sort of reality and only with a very particular sort of conception of reality. The requisite picture - of a comprehendable, intelligible, uniform, predictable, even beautiful, cosmos which can in principle make sense to finite minds like ours when observed via perceptual faculties like ours - is a picture of a cosmos structured in fundamental ways like a mind would do it. It is a picture of a cosmos structured like a creation.

As also noted above, smooth interlockings of that sort within science are typically taken to have confirmatory force. By parity of reasoning, an epistemic backwash to the philosophical presuppositions of science and on back to the theological principles which historically provided their foundations and within which they smoothly embed, would seem both in principle unproblematic and productive of epistemic significance.

Even deeper potential arises in other ways. First, the possibility of theory-ladeness of data suggests that currents may sometimes even carry substance as well.[135] If so, then content may migrate among fundamental presupposition, theory, and observational data. Historically, varying conceptions of reality, of the proper aims of science, of the proper conceptual resources available (or not) to science, of the relative importance of competing epistemic values within science, and so forth have both affected and been affected by developments within science, within philosophy, and within theology (not to mention the broader social context in general). Just as observational data may be theory-laden, theories in this circumstance may be metaphysics- or even theology-laden.

Second, it is sometimes argued that conceptual structure and content are not cleanly separable - that at least in (subtle) part structure is content.[136] That, if true, has significant implications. If science has co-opted some of its conceptual structure from theology, filtering out every even distant echo of theological content seems unlikely.

Third, it is widely recognized that metaphor plays an indispensable role in theoretical understandings. That would carry the potential - indeed the inevitability - of structure and content flowing into even the most arcane and abstruse scientific levels. Dirac once remarked:

Nature's fundamental laws . . . control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies[137]

That seems right - those alleged irrelevancies including the metaphoric overtones of the human concepts formed elsewhere and imported into the theoretical context.[138] And metaphors with ultimately theological tints - for instance, biological 'design', cosmic fine-tuning, or even law - would suffuse that tint wherever applied. (And recall that some science-essential presuppositions - e.g., intelligibility - may be agent-freighted as well.) This observed pervasiveness of teleological talk may have deep roots. Mary Midgley argues that it is unlikely that even our (scientifically crucial) imagination can work without notions of teleology. She goes on to say that

These words are indeed metaphors. But they are not optional, disposable metaphors. They cannot be replaced at will by literal and 'objective' language. Like many metaphors, these form part of the thought. [my emphasis][139]

So science cannot escape teleological metaphors, those metaphors are essentially agent-flavored, and that agent undertone becomes an indispensable and inescapable part of scientific thought itself.[140] Any science denying on principle the existence of the relevant agency will, of course, encounter some awkwardness here.

In any case, if out of conceptual embedding and interactions any theistic substance flows, at least some whiff of that will nearly inevitably make its way into science 'proper.' And as noted earlier, one does indeed find hints of such in the writings of some scientists.[141]

But if anything like a tint-suffusing backwash really functions within science, why is separability so widely and confidently held? That may stem from the tints and overtones having become so familiar that we no longer recognize them for what they are. Einstein once asked: what does a fish know of the water in which it swims all its life? Perhaps in similar fashion, science is so thoroughly infused with core theological conceptual structures - in which it has swum all its life - that we no longer recognize them for what they are. Paul Davies has remarked that:

Science began as an outgrowth of theology, and all scientists, whether atheists or theists ... accept an essentially theological worldview.[142]

Much both of the cognitive and of the non-cognitive underpinnings of science is starkly appropriate to the domain of artifacts, personhood and agency - e.g., intelligibility, values, the relevance and basic reliability of tacit feels and emotions, the inescapability of teleology in some guise or other, the significance of beauty.[143] That appropriateness is so stark that even Dennett notes that

Nowhere are Mother Nature's hidden constraints written down in a way that can be read without the help of the interpretive rules of artifact hermeneutics. [his emphasis][144]

And the fact that a science which functions via such deeply person-appropriate cognitive resources works, whereas systems explicitly and intentionally contradictory to such resources routinely fail, is surely not just arbitrarily dismissible.[145] At the very least, the naturalist claim to ownership of science is not merely intellectual imperialism[146] - it is the intellectual equivalent of Moby Dick trying to collect royalties as the inventor and first practitioner of the bicycle. In any case, if Davies is correct (and I think that he is) then science seems to (still) exhibit a deep theological shape - a theological Cheshire cat's skeleton.[147]

If nature is not only a creation but an integrated cosmos genuine understanding of which must lock into relevant religious truths (or at least their structure), and if part of learning to do good science is via praxis osmosis, and if science is striving for intelligibility (i.e., for a projection/terrain fit), and if science involves an immersion into nature and nature's projections onto our cognitive terrain which can in some way alter that terrain, then the very practice of science may ineluctably shape one's terrain in religion-friendly directions. After all, intelligibility is an agent-laden concept, and if nature is supposed to shape our scientific cognition (and that is the core of science's 'self-correctiveness'), and if nature as a creation is agent-reflective, then our science - including our terrain - must be sculpted (or polished) to accommodate that agency.

Furthermore, if the cosmos is constructed with a purpose or meaning, one would expect that whatever that meaning was would have ramifications for the structure and governance of the cosmos. If a human architect claimed that she was going to construct a building for a particular purpose, but insisted that that purpose would have absolutely no bearing upon the structure of that building, we would find that puzzling, if not downright unintelligible. Attempts to understand the cosmos while insisting on ignoring even the possibility of such meaning would be similarly intellectually risky in the extreme. It might be asserted that one does not need to take account of any such meaning (if any), but it cannot be easily claimed that science confirms that fact. Science requires the presence of intelligible pattern in the cosmos, and the presence of such pattern is hardly promising grounds for assertions of an absence of purpose or meaning.

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[115] "Ethics ... is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate ... Our biology enforces its ends by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject" "The Evolution of Ethics", in J. E. Huchingson, ed. Religion and the Natural Sciences, HBJ, 1993)

[116] This is the thrust of Darwin's Cathedral (Chicago: Chicago, 2002). For instance:

Religion returns to center stage, not as a theological explanation of purpose and order, but as itself a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units - at least to a degree. (p. 6).

[117] Atran cites empirical evidence that

One characteristic of an evolved cognitive disposition is evident difficulty in inhibiting its operation.

Atran also cites evidence suggesting that a strong, universal tendency to believe in specifically biological essences emerges spontaneously early in childhood. The indirect result of this evolutionarily generated tendency?

The essentialist bias to understand variation in terms of deviance is undoubtedly a hindrance to evolutionary thinking. even for "students and philosophers of biology."

Scott Atran, "Modular and cultural factors in biological understanding: an experimental approach to the cognitive basis of science" p. 41-72 in Carruthers et. al., op. cit.

[118] Patricia Churchland, "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience" p. 544-553, Journal of Philosophy, 84/10 (Oct. 1987), p. 553. Jerry Fodor notes that while it is important to appreciate truth, it is more important not to be eaten. On a related front, in Beyond Good and Evil §4, Nietzsche says:

The falseness of a judgment is not necessarily an objection to [it]. The question is to what extent it is life promoting ... life preserving.

Anthropologist Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust subjectivises logic itself:

Logic itself is merely a tool for shifting one's intuitive feelings of confidence about premises to the conclusions that the rules of logic generate. [p. 156]

More generally, evolutionary views such as astrophysicist Jim Peebles's conception of humans as "flotsam and jetsam" don't inspire great confidence. (Quoted in Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 255-6.)

[119] That attribution generally rests on Book 5 § 344, The Gay Science:

But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests - that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.

At least some Nietzsche scholars explicitly associate this with Christ's statement concerning truth:

The really corrosive effects of doubt, Nietzsche notes, began with Christianity's faith that "the truth shall make you free." It was Christianity's uncompromising critique of pagan superstition and its quest for truth that began to shatter older, taken-for-granted ways of thinking. This method of doubt was later intensified by the emergence of science and scientific procedure in the modern age ....." p. 93.

Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom Existentialism: Basic Writings

[120] I have discussed this elsewhere - e.g. Science and Its Limits (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), p. 92-3. The same general point applies to mathematics – that being, I take it, one implication of Gödel.

[121] I have argued this elsewhere, e.g., Science and its Limits (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), p. 93.

[122] Methodological naturalism is, of course, simply the stipulation that naturalism must be employed as an extra-empirical factor within science regardless of whether or not it is true, believed, employed beyond science, etc.

[123] See his "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism" in Naturalism Defeated? ed. James Beilby (Ithaca: 2002, Cornell) p. 1-12. The argument appeared earlier in Warrant and Proper Function. Being committed to a view which generates its own undefeatable defeaters puts one in a position for which Plantinga proposed the technical term of being epistemically screwed.

[124] Darwin's Dangerous Idea, passim.

[125] The Chinese Communist government did not drop opposition to relativity until 1985. Earlier China is interesting in this connection as well. During some dynasties, learning mathematics without permission was a capital offense, and in the 17th century, five astronomers were executed in connection with attempts to reform the calendar.

[126] Polanyi reports this from a personal conversation with Bukharin (Tacit Dimension p. 3).

[127] Since modern science only began once, all subsequent science has descended from that origin in 'meme'-transmission fashion, science thus being a Dawkinsian mind-virus.

[128] Interestingly enough, a corresponding point was recently made by the world class Chinese cosmologist Fang Lizhi (who is also China's most prominent political dissident of the past two decades, and who is currently at the University of Arizona). In an essay in Bringing Down the Great Wall (NY: Knopf, 1990), Fang attributes China's failure to independently generate modern science to the absence of three key principles characteristic of Western religion - the cosmos being intelligible and nature's laws exhibiting uniformity and universality (p. 33-36).

[129] This view has been attributed to Duhem by Weisheipl (62) and Crombie (Vol I, 64). Crombie seems to concur.

[130] There have been disputes historically within the Christian community over whether or not the basic laws of logic constituted boundaries within which God had to work. We need not settle that question for present purposes.

[131] Much of this section derives from my "Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and 'Turtles all the way down'" Faith and Philosophy Vol 21 # 4, Oct. 2004, p. 436-455.

[132] As Owen Gingrich says,

Science is primarily looking for a self-consistent description of nature that hangs together in a convincing way ... Science works by coherence, not by proof.

"How Galileo Changed the Rules of Science." p. 32-36, Sky and Telescope Vol. 85#3, 1993, p. 36.

[133] Data are the repository of choice for all sorts of things. Not only are they alleged to be theory-laden, and/or partially constituted by paradigms, but they (or their 'fabrication') are sometimes described as "decision-laden" (Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 5-6 (NY: Pergamon, 1981)) or as "inference-laden" (Naomi Oreskes, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, and Kenneth Belitz, "Verification, Validation and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences" p. 642, Science Feb. 4, 1994, vol 263 #5147, p. 641-646).

[134] I have argued for this sort of view elsewhere (Ratzsch, e.g., ibid.). This picture also emerges from work by Stephen Wykstra and also in some really nice work a half century ago by J.W.N. Watkins, e.g., “Confirmable and Influential Metaphysics”, Mind vol 67, no 267, Jul. 1958, p. 344-365.

[135] Of course, coherentism or any other sort of view entailing that forward inferences and backwash are not cleanly separable would have this same consequence. And if the observation/theory line is as blurred as often claimed, similar consequences ensue.

[136] This idea has some currency in literary circles - that e.g., part of what is conveyed by a literary work depends upon (or is carried by) the structure, genre, etc. of the work, and cannot be adequately expressed via significantly varying forms. The idea is also, I suspect, deeply implicit in Wittgenstein's "the meaning is the use" and in David Lewis's treatment of propositions as sets of worlds. (Don't ask me to defend that suspicion.)

[137] Quoted in Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society p. 88.

[138] The same general point applies to models as well.

[139] Science as Salvation p. 10. Others - e.g., Michael Ruse - sometimes talk in this direction.

[140] If arguments by Alvin Plantinga are correct, the biologically crucial concept of properfunction may be unavailable within any purely naturalistic system. See his Warrant and Proper Function (NY: Oxford, 1993), p. 199 ff. Even something as important as the Principle of Sufficient Reason is seen by Steve Fuller as just a disguised contemporary version of the core of the traditional design idea.

[141] E.g., Planck on action principles.

[142] Davies, Are We Alone? (NY: Basic, 1995), p. 138. Kant, of course, argued that science could not operate except under design as a regulative principle - meaning that the structure Davies refers to is not mere historical accident. In this vein recall again Neitzsche, Gay Science § 344:

even ... we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which is also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.

[143] I have argued this point from a slightly different angle in Nature, Design, and Science, and Mary Midgley, in Science as Salvation, p. 12, says:

[T]his category of the intelligible necessarily counts as akin to mind, because the order we detect in it is of the kind our minds acknowledge.

[144] Darwin's Dangerous Idea p. 259. That sort of view is echoed in Dawkins's definition of biology:

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Blind Watchmaker (NY: Norton, 1987), p. 1.

[145] For example, with respect to specifically Maoist views, Fang Lizhi claims that:

The fact is that every single 'philosophical' [Maoist] intrusion in the natural sciences since the founding of the People's Republic has been a huge mistake.

Fang, op. cit. p. 25.

[146] I love William James's reference to

the strange arrogance with which the wildest materialist speculations persist in calling themselves 'science'.

Principles of Psychology, Ch. 11.

[147] As one example, Michael Ruse says that

[A]t its heart, Darwinian evolutionary biology is riddled through and through - in language and in attitude - with a mode of thought which, when it entered biology, was highly value-impregnated. And that in itself is no small thing to note.

Moreover, I'm far from convinced that all the values have gone from the adaptationist way of thinking.

"Biology and Values: a fresh look" p. 455, Logic, Methodology and the Philosophy of Science VII ed. Ruth Marcus et al, Elsevier, 1986. p. 453-466.