Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (8 page)

First of all, the fact is contemporary philosophers
have
come up with perfectly sensible defenses of the idea that there can be sources of knowledge in addition to reason; and of course the history of the subject is replete with acute discussions of this topic under the rubric of faith and reason.
²⁵
Naturally these defenses might be mistaken; but to show that they are requires more than a silly story and an airy wave of the hand. Second, Dennett apparently thinks that if there
were
any sources of information or knowledge in addition to reason, the deliverances of those sources would necessarily go
contrary to
reason (“think about whether you really want to abandon reason”). But that’s just a confusion. Christians and other theists typically think they know by faith various truths—for example, the main lines of Christian belief, including incarnation and atonement—that are not among the deliverances of reason. They might also think they know by faith that God created the world. Therefore, if indeed the living world has come to be by way of a process of evolution, then God in some way has superintended or orchestrated or guided this process; thus they would be claiming to know something in addition to what reason delivers—but not, of course, something that goes
contrary
to reason. (As we have seen, there is nothing in current evolutionary science to show or even suggest that God did
not
thus superintend evolution.) They wouldn’t be abandoning reason any more than you would be abandoning perception if you relied on memory, rather
than perception, for your views about what you were doing yesterday afternoon. It is no part of reason to insist that there can’t be any other source of true or warranted belief; it is perfectly in accord with reason to suppose that there are sources of truth in addition to reason.
²⁶
It looks as if here it is
Dennett
who is conveniently lowering the net a foot or two when he makes his return. (Perhaps a more apt tennis metaphor would have him take a whack at the ball and completely miss it.)

Dennett suggests still a third claim:

Now if you want to
reason
about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I’m eager to play…. what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a
way of getting to the truth
, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other…. But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify.
²⁷

Here he seems to assume that if you can’t show by
reason
that a given proposed source of truth is in fact reliable, then it is improper to accept the deliverances of that source. This assumption goes back to the Lockean, Enlightenment claim that while there could indeed be such a thing as divine revelation, it would be irrational to accept any particular proposition as divinely revealed, unless you had a good argument from reason for the conclusion that it
was
divinely revealed. This assumption has also been under extensive discussion in contemporary philosophy of religion; perhaps the most impressive work
here (work Dennett ignores) has been done by William Alston, who has cogently argued that this assumption embodies a kind of double standard.
²⁸

Alston’s argument, in rough outline, goes as follows. According to the Lockean assumption, first, there may be warranted (or rational or justified) religious beliefs that go beyond reason in the sense that there are no good rational arguments (no good arguments from perception, memory, rational intuition, et cetera) for them. But second, one can’t rationally accept any such belief unless one has a good
rational
argument (an argument from reason) for the conclusion that the belief in question
does
enjoy warrant (or justification or rationality). Alston points out that we don’t impose that kind of requirement on other sources of belief or knowledge. 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. 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.

Does it follow that there is something irrational in trusting these alleged sources, in accepting their deliverances? Of course not. So why insist that it is irrational to accept religious belief in the absence of an argument for the reliability of the faculty or belief-producing processes that give rise to it? Perhaps it
is
irrational to do that, but surely some argument is needed; one can’t simply assume that it is. Why treat the sources of religious belief differently? Is there anything
but arbitrariness in insisting that any alleged source of truth must justify itself at the bar of rational intuition, perception, and memory? Perhaps we have several
different
sources of knowledge about the world, and none can be shown to be reliable using only the others. Once more, arbitrarily lowering the net (or missing the ball).

By way of summary: Quentin Smith, himself a naturalist, deplores the “desecularization” of philosophy over the past quarter century or so. He complains that most naturalist philosophers ordinarily know nothing about contemporary philosophy of religion and pay little heed to it, “but the great majority of naturalist philosophers react by publicly ignoring the increasing desecularizing of philosophy (while privately disparaging theism, without really knowing anything about contemporary analytic philosophy of religion) and proceeding to work in their own area of specialization as if theism, the view of approximately one-quarter or one-third of their field, did not exist.”
²⁹
Dennett only partially fits this pattern. True, he doesn’t know anything about contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, but that doesn’t stop him from making public declarations on the subject.
³⁰

I’ve argued so far that evolution and theism, contra Dawkins and Dennett, are compatible: this means, as I am using the term, that there are no obvious truths such that their conjunction with evolution and theism is inconsistent in the broadly logical sense. One might argue, however, that even if this is so, the truth of evolution gives us some reason to reject theism: perhaps evolution constitutes
evidence
against theism. Paul Draper makes just this claim: “I will show that
certain known facts support the hypothesis of naturalism over the hypothesis of theism because we have considerably more reason to expect them to obtain on the assumption that naturalism is true than on the assumption that theism is true.”
³¹
What are these “known facts”? One of them, he says, is evolution: “My position is that evolution is evidence favoring naturalism over theism. There is, in other words, a good
evidential
argument favoring naturalism over theism.”
³²
The basic idea is that evolution is more likely—at least twice as likely, Draper argues—on naturalism than on theism.

His argument goes as follows. Where “E” is evolution (that is, the proposition that all current forms of terrestrial life have come to be by way of evolution), “T” is theism, and “N” is naturalism, Draper proposes to argue that

(1) P(E/N) is much greater than P(E/T).

From this he infers that if all else is (evidentially) equal, naturalism is more likely than theism. Given that naturalism is incompatible with theism, it follows that theism is unlikely.

Suppose, however, as most theists who have thought about it do think, that theism is noncontingent: necessarily true or necessarily false. If so, (1) doesn’t imply that naturalism is more likely than theism; instead (1) obviously entails that theism is true. For if theism is noncontingent and false, then it is necessarily false; the probability of a contingent proposition on a necessary falsehood is 1; hence P(E/T) is 1. But if, as Draper claims, P(E/N) is greater than P(E/T), then P(E/T) is less than 1, hence T is not necessarily false. If T is not necessarily false, however, then (given that it is noncontingent) it is necessarily true. So if theism is noncontingent, and (1) is true, then theism is true, and indeed necessarily true. Draper is of course assuming that theism is contingent; hence his argument
won’t be relevant if theism is noncontingent. But let’s set this limitation aside and look at his interesting argument.

How does the argument go? Let “S” be the proposition that “some relatively complex living things did not descent from relatively—celled organisms but rather were independently created by a supernatural person;” then, as Draper points out,

(2) P(E/N) is much greater than P(E/T) if and only if P(-S/N) × P(E/-S&N) is much greater than P(-S/T) × P(E/-S&T).
³³

Naturally he proposes to show that P(E/N) is much greater than P(E/T) by showing that P(-S/N) × P(E/-S&N) is much greater than P(-S/T) × P(E/-S&T). He proposes to show this by showing (a) that P(-S/N) is much greater than P(-S/T), and by showing (b) that P(E/-S&N) is
at least as great as
P(E/-S&T).

Draper argues with respect to (a) that P(-S/N) is at least
twice
P(-S/T). If, as he also argues, P(E/-S&N) is at least as great as P(E/-S&T), the consequence is that P(E/N) is at least twice as great as P(E/T); this is sufficient, he apparently thinks, for P(E/N) to be much greater than P(E/T). If his argument is correct, therefore, P(E/N) is at least twice as great as P(E/T).

Suppose this is true: how much does it really show? As he says,
if all else is evidentially equal
, theism is improbable. But of course all else is not evidentially equal. Aren’t there are a host of other probabilities in the neighborhood that favor theism at least as heavily? For example, let “L” be “there is life on earth.” Given the incredibly difficulties in seeing how life could have come to be just by virtue of the laws of physics, P(L/N) is low. But P(L/T) is not low: it’s likely that the God of theism would desire that there be life, and life of various kinds. Hence P(L/T) is much higher, I’d guess orders of magnitude higher, than P(L/N). Similarly, let “I” be “there are intelligent beings”; let “M” be “there are beings with a moral sense”; let “W” be “there are creatures who worship God”; each of P(I/T), P(M/T) and P(W/T) are much greater than P(I/N), P(M/N), and P(W/N). The God of theism would very likely desire that there be creatures who resemble him in being rational and intelligent; he would also, no doubt, desire that there be creatures who have a moral sense, and can tell right from
wrong; and he would also very likely desire that there be creatures who can experience his presence and who are moved to worship by God’s greatness and goodness. There will also be many other “known facts” that are more probable on theism than on naturalism. If so, however, the evidence favoring naturalism over theism that Draper cites will be more than counterbalanced by evidence favoring theism over naturalism.

As we’ve seen, Dawkins, Dennett, and the rest of that choir favor us with a
fortissimo
rendition of their claim that current evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian belief—and, indeed, theistic belief of any sort. As we’ve also seen, they are mistaken on this point (as on many others). This mistake, however, isn’t a merely theoretical error: it has serious practical consequences. Polls reveal that most Americans have grave doubts about the truth of evolution. Only about 25 percent of Americans believe that human beings have descended from ape-like ancestors, whatever they think about the main lines of the whole theory. Many Americans are concerned about the teaching of evolution in the schools and want to add something as a corrective (“intelligent design,” perhaps) or they want it taught as a mere “theory” rather than as the sober truth, or they want the objections to it taught, or they want it taught along with “critical thinking.”

What accounts for this? Why don’t Americans simply accede to the authority of the experts here, and shape their opinions and educational policies accordingly? Kenneth Miller thinks it is because of a “healthy disrespect for authority” on the part of Americans, perhaps going back to frontier days:

If rebellion and disrespect are indeed part of the American Talent for science, then what should we make of the anti-evolutionary
movement? One part of the analysis is clear. The willingness of Americans to reject established authority has played a major role in the way that local activists have managed to push ideas such as scientific creationsim and intelligent design into local schools.
³⁴

Miller’s idea seems to be that Americans tend towards a rugged and self-reliant individualism; they aren’t going to let a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals tell them what to believe. While there may be some truth to this, it can hardly be the whole answer. Americans don’t ordinarily reject other basic scientific theses, such as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
³⁵
True; they may not have
heard
much about these theories; but that just raises the question why evolution, as opposed to other central parts of science, is so much in the public consciousness.

The answer, of course, is obvious: it is because of the entanglement of evolution with religion. The vast majority of Americans reject atheism, and hence also naturalism. A solid majority of Americans are Christians, and many more (some 88 or 90 percent, depending on the poll you favor) believe in God. But when that choir of experts repeatedly tell us that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, it’s not surprising that many people come to believe that evolution
is
incompatible with belief in God, and is therefore an enemy of religion.
³⁶
After all, those experts are, well, experts. But then it is also not surprising that many Americans are reluctant to have evolution taught to their children in the public schools, the schools they themselves
pay taxes to support.
³⁷
Protestants don’t want Catholic doctrine taught in the schools and Christians don’t want Islam taught, but the distance between naturalism and Christian belief, either Catholic or Protestant, is vastly greater than the distance between Catholics and Protestants or, for that matter, between Christians and Muslims. Christians, Jews, and Muslims concur on belief in God; naturalism stands in absolute opposition to these theistic religions; and, due in part to those declarations by the “experts,” evolution is widely seen as a central pillar in the temple of naturalism. The association of evolution with naturalism is the obvious root of the widespread antipathy to evolution in the United States, and to the teaching of evolution in the public schools.