Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (24 page)

(N) The earth is the stationary center of the universe.

Now this scientific evidence (those photographs) against this proposition shows up; I begin to think about it. My acceptance of
(N) is based on the Bible, which I think is a revelation from God. And of course I am prepared to believe whatever the Lord teaches; what he teaches is nonnegotiable. But it isn’t always easy to determine just what he
does
teach in a given passage; might it not be, with respect to this passage, that the message endorsed by God is not (N) but something else?
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What is my reason for thinking that (N) is indeed what the Lord is teaching in this passage?

On thinking the matter over, I see that my reasons for thinking (or assuming) this are pretty flimsy. I consult the Hebrew text: it’s not at all clear that what’s being taught has anything to do with whether the earth is the unmoved center of the universe. Other translations go like this: “You set the earth on its foundations so that it shall never be shaken” (New Revised Standard) and “He established the earth upon its foundation, so that it will not totter forever and ever” (New American Standard Bible). These don’t even suggest anti-Copernicanism; the earth won’t totter and it won’t shake, but not much follows about the difference between Copernicus and Ptolemy. What is clearly being taught is that the Lord has established the natural order, and that he is faithful and reliable; this includes the fact that the physical universe goes on in a certain regular way, a way that can be relied upon, so that planning and intentional action are possible for God’s creatures. But it is certainly far from clear that what is being taught has to do with the issue between Ptolemy and Copernicus. On the other hand, the evidence for Copernicanism looks solid (well, maybe it didn’t look so solid in the seventeenth century, but by now it surely does). So which has the greater warrant for me: the thought that in the verse God is teaching anti-Copernicanism, or the thought, based on the evidence, that the earth is not the center of things? Pretty clearly it’s the latter. In this way I can indeed acquire a defeater for a belief I held on the basis of scriptural teaching; part of what
I come to see is that the belief in question isn’t really scriptural teaching. Hence in this way I learn something important about the Bible—something about the intended teaching of a given passage—by way of scientific investigation.

My present point is that in some cases one can indeed acquire a defeater for a belief held on the basis of the Bible; I can come to see that what the Bible teaches isn’t what I thought it was. I argued that Simonian science doesn’t give a Christian a defeater for the beliefs with which it is incompatible, because the evidential basis of science is just part of the Christian evidential basis; my point here is that this doesn’t imply that a Christian can never get a defeater for one of his religious beliefs.

Can we go further? Can we come up with a nontrivial test for determining when we get a defeater? Consider some Christian belief incompatible with some bit of Simonian science, for example,

(B) Mother Teresa was perfectly rational in behaving in that altruistic manner.

Now I learn

(A) Simonian science is successful science and implies the denial of (B).

Do I thereby acquire a defeater for (B)? Say that my evidence base is EB
_me
; add A to EB
_me
. The right question, perhaps, is this: is (B) epistemically improbable or unlikely with respect to that new evidence base? If it is, perhaps, we have a defeater; if not, not. Of course (B) might initially be a member of EB
_me
, in which case it will certainly not be improbable with respect to it. But if that were sufficient for (A)’s not being a defeater of (B), no member of the evidence base could ever be defeated by a new discovery; and that can’t
be right. So let’s delete (B) from EB
_me
. Call the result of deleting (B) from my evidence base “EB
_me
reduced with respect to (B)”: “EB
_me
-(B)” for short. The idea—call it “the reduction test for defeat”—is that (A) is a defeater for (B) just if (B) is relatively improbable—epistemically improbable—with respect to EB
_me
-(B).

Of course it won’t work to delete only (B) from EB
_me
—we must also delete conjunctions that include (B)—for example, the conjunction of (B) with
2+1 = 3
. We must also delete all the beliefs in EB
_me
that entail (B)—for example, beliefs of the sort
(If R then (B)) and R
. Still further, we shall also have to deal with pairs of beliefs that entail (B), since it might be that I hold a pair of beliefs that together entail B but do not happen to believe their conjunction. (Maybe I’ve never thought of them together.) Should we delete one member of each such pair? But here we run into a problem: in general there will be no unique way of following this procedure, and different ways of following it can yield significantly different results. So let’s resort to the vague way out (vagueness is all the rage these days): let’s say that EB
_me
-(B) is any subset of EB
_me
that doesn’t entail (B) and is otherwise maximally similar to EB
_me
. Now: could we say the following: could we say that I have a defeater for (B) if and only if (B) is epistemically unlikely with respect to EB
_me
-(B), i.e., if and only if (A) and (B) satisfy the reduction test for defeat?

Well, this test gives the right result in the present cases. First, consider our question about Simonian science and Christian belief. (B) is the proposition that Mother Teresa was perfectly rational in behaving in that altruistic fashion and (B), we are assuming, is incompatible with Simonian science. To apply the proposed criterion, we must ask whether (B) is epistemically improbable (henceforth I’ll suppress the “epistemically”) with respect to EB
_me
-(B)—where of course EB
_me
-(B) includes (A), the proposition that Simonian science is successful science. The answer, I should think, is that (B) is not improbable with respect to EB
_me
-(B). For that body of beliefs includes the empirical evidence, whatever exactly it is, appealed to by the Simonian, but also the proposition that we human beings have been created by God and created in his image, along with the rest of the main lines of the Christian story. With respect to
that
body of propositions, it is not likely that if Mother Teresa had been more rational, smarter, she would have acted so as to increase her reproductive fitness rather than live altruistically. But then (B), the proposed defeatee, is not improbable on that evidence basis. Hence, on the proposed reduction test, the fact that
Simonian science is more likely than not with respect to the scientific evidence base does not give the Christian theist a defeater for what she thinks about Mother Teresa.

Now compare the case of the person who first believes the earth is a rectangular solid on the basis of the Biblical verse I mentioned above, and then acquires the evidence, including photographs, that the earth is spherical. Consider her new evidence base reduced with respect to the proposed defeatee—that is, the proposition that the earth has corners. With respect to this reduced evidence base, the proposition that the earth has no corners is very likely. For that reduced evidence base contains or includes all of our reasons for supposing that in fact the earth doesn’t have corners. And what does it include on the other side—that is, what does it include by way of support for the belief that the earth has corners? Only what would be, presumably, the rather tentative thought that in the passage in question, God was intending to teach us that the earth has corners. But clearly there are other perfectly plausible ways of construing that passage. On balance, therefore, she will conclude that in fact that is not what the passage in question is intended to teach. Hence in this case, unlike the case of Simonian science, the reduced evidence base provides evidence, indeed powerful evidence, against the proposed defeatee, and the proposed defeatee is improbable with respect to the reduced evidence base.

So the reduction test gives the right result in the present case. But it can’t be right in general. Perhaps it states a necessary condition of rationality defeat: perhaps, wherever I get a defeater for a belief (B) by way of acquiring a new belief (A), B will be relatively improbable with respect to EB
_me
-(B). But this condition is nowhere nearly sufficient for defeat. And the reason is of the first importance. For it might be, clearly enough, that (B) has a lot of warrant on its own,
intrinsic
warrant, warrant it doesn’t get from the other members of EB
_me
or indeed any other propositions; (B) may be
basic
with respect to warrant. But then the fact that it is unlikely with respect to EB
_me
-(B) doesn’t show for a moment that the belief isn’t perfectly rational. This is easily illustrated by the example (above, pp. 176ff) where I am falsely accused of slashing your tires. There is strong evidence against me; however, I clearly recall spending the entire afternoon skiing in Love Creek County Park. My belief that I was skiing there then isn’t based on argument or inference from other propositions (I don’t note, for example, that I feel a little tired, that my ski boots are damp, and that there is a
map of Love Creek in my parka pocket, concluding that the best explanation of these phenomena is that I was skiing there).

So consider EB
_me
-P, my evidence base diminished with respect to P, the proposition that I didn’t slash your tires. With respect to EB
_me
-P, P is epistemically improbable; after all, I have the same evidence as everyone else for the denial of P, and everyone else is quite properly (if mistakenly) convinced that I did slash your tires. Still, I certainly don’t have a defeater, here, for my belief that I didn’t do it. And the reason, of course, is that P has for me a source of warrant independent of the rest of my beliefs: I
remember
it. In a case like this, whether I have a defeater for the belief P in question will depend, on the one hand, upon the strength of the intrinsic warrant enjoyed by P, and, on the other, the strength of the evidence against P from EB
_me
-P. Very often the intrinsic warrant will be the stronger (husband
in flagrante delicto
to wife: “Who are you going to believe—me or your lying eyes?”). But it isn’t automatically the case, of course, that the intrinsic warrant of P overcomes the evidence from EB
_me
-P; if the latter is strong enough I may have to conclude that the source of the apparent warrant of P is deceiving me. If the department chairman, assorted grad students, and the chaired professor most distinguished for probity and judiciousness unite in declaring that they
saw
me slash those tires, I may have to conclude that my memory has let me down; perhaps I have repressed the whole unpleasant episode.

It is clear, therefore, that Simonian science doesn’t (automatically, anyway) constitute a defeater for the Christian beliefs with which it is incompatible. The Christian can think of Simonian science as specifying how things look from a given perspective, how they look given a particular evidence base, an evidence base that includes only a part of the Christian evidence base. The mere existence of Simonian science—science that comes to conclusions incompatible with tenets of the Christian faith—has no tendency to produce a defeater for those tenets. Of course it is theoretically possible, as I said above, that a defeater for Christian belief should arise in the course of work at Simonian science; as far as I know, however, this hasn’t happened. The conclusion to draw is that there is indeed conflict between science and Christian belief in this area, but the conflict is merely superficial, of no deep significance. There is conflict, of a sort, but it shouldn’t occasion any concern for Christians.

Simonian science specifies how things look from a given perspective or evidence base, a perspective characterized by methodological naturalism. It may be
of considerable interest to see how things look from that evidence base. But shouldn’t the Christian also want to know how the phenomena in question look from the standpoint of the Christian evidence base? Shouldn’t she, perhaps in addition to pursuing scientific study of those phenomena from the conventional scientific perspective, also want to study it from the perspective of her own evidence base? Would such study fail to be science? Shouldn’t the Christian community engage in Christian science—not in the sense of following Mary Baker Eddy, but in the sense of engaging in empirical study unconstrained by methodological naturalism? These are excellent questions. Excellent as they are, however, addressing them here would take us on a side track, too far from the main line of argument.
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To return to that main line: so far I’ve argued that there is no conflict between Christian belief and evolution; nor is the claim that God acts specially in the world in conflict with science. I’ve gone on to argue that there is indeed conflict between Christian belief and certain areas of evolutionary psychology and historical Biblical criticism; this conflict, however is superficial. So much for conflict; I turn next to concord between Christian belief and science.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being….. This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.

—Isaac Newton
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