Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (34 page)

Finally, consider someone who had little or no opinion either way with respect to the question whether Behe’s protein machines, for example, or the eye, or the universe have been designed (and whose noetic structure is otherwise like ours). For such a person, encountering a design discourse like Paley’s or Behe’s, or the fine-tuning considerations presented by Richard Swinburne and Robin Collins, will in all likelihood result in a design belief. But also, for such a person, encountering the relevant Darwinian considerations I think, will present her with a partially undercutting defeater for those design beliefs.

So let’s suppose the Behe design discourses are at least marginally successful. What follows for the question of this chapter, the question whether theistic and or Christian belief gets support from science? Behe’s design discourses certainly start from scientific conclusions; how much support, if any, do they confer upon Christian and theistic belief? Well, they offer little support for specifically Christian belief insofar as it goes beyond theistic belief; they don’t support incarnation, atonement, resurrection. Do they support theistic belief? That’s
not entirely easy to say. For first, theism, of course, involves a great deal more than the bare claim that the living world has been designed. That claim could be true even if there were a number of designers forming a committee, with some of the drawbacks committees display, or even if (here we could follow Hume) the designer(s) are infant deities or superannuated deities, and reveal their limitations by awkward or infelicitous design. According to theism, there is but one ultimate designer, and the designer is the Designer: all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good, loving, the Creator as well as the Designer. The design conclusion thus supports theism in that it entails one very important part of theistic belief; but it isn’t clear how much it supports theism as such.

On the other hand, for many people the live options are either theism or naturalism: either there is such a person as God, or, if not, there is nothing at all like God. For people who think like this, there would be a great deal more support for theism here. Further, suppose theism is indeed true, and add that there is something like Calvin’s
sensus divinitatis
; then there are many situations in which the rational response is theistic belief.
⁵⁵
Here there are at least two relevant possibilities. First, perhaps some of the design situations—the situations such that the rational response to them is design belief—are also situations in which the
sensus divinitatis
works. If this were so, the rational response to those situations wouldn’t be just design belief; it would be full-blown theistic belief. Design discourses—at any rate
those
design discourses—would then indeed support theism, but only by way of being special cases of the support offered by the
sensus divinitatis
. Secondly, if there is such a thing as the
sensus divinitatis
, then perhaps those Humean possibilities—a committee of designers (infant, superannuated, or in some other way incompetent)—are quite properly (that is, quite rationally)
discounted. Discounting those Humean fantasies is in effect to endorse the proposition that if there is a designer, there is the Designer. And hence any support for design would indeed be support for theism. Of course these possibilities presuppose the truth of theism; presumably there isn’t any
sensus divinitatis
, Sensus Divinitatis, if theism is false.
⁵⁶
It is of some interest to see that we really can’t tell what sort of support, if any, design discourses offer theism without knowing whether theism is true.

On balance, then: Behe’s design discourses do not constitute irrefragable arguments for theism, or even for the proposition that the structures he considers have in fact been designed. Taken not as arguments but as design discourses they fare better. They present us with epistemic situations in which the rational response is design belief—design belief for which there aren’t strong defeaters. The proper conclusion to be drawn, I think, is that Behe’s design discourses do support theism, although it isn’t easy to say how much support they offer. I realize that this is a wet noodle conclusion: can’t I say something more definite and exciting? Well, I’d love to; but my job here is to tell the sober truth, whether or not it is exciting. That obligation can sometimes interfere with telling a good story; but what can I say? That’s just life in philosophy. As the saying goes, it is what it is. In the next chapter, however, we’ll look into much deeper and more definitive concord between Christian belief and science.

Recall my overall thesis: there is superficial conflict but deep concord between theistic religion and science, but superficial concord and deep conflict between naturalism and science. In the first few chapters, we saw many allegations of conflict between science and religion. Much of this alleged conflict is merely illusory—between evolution and theistic belief, between science and special divine action (for example, miracles), and between religious faith and the scientific way of forming belief. We also saw that some conflicts—that between theistic religion and various claims and theories of evolutionary psychology—are genuine; though genuine, however, they are merely superficial, in that these conflicts, rightly understood, do not tend to offer defeaters to those who accept theistic religion. We then turned from the question whether science conflicts with theistic belief to the question whether it
supports
theistic belief, gives us some reason to
accept
theistic belief. Here we addressed considerations from contemporary science, in particular fine-tuning arguments and biological arguments of the sort offered by Michael Behe. These, we saw, can be taken either as arguments or as design discourse; either way they perhaps offer a certain limited but still non-negligible support for theism. While these arguments and discourses are interesting and relevant, there is a much deeper concord between theistic religion and science. It is time to turn to this concord.

Modern Western empirical science originated and flourished in the bosom of Christian theism and originated nowhere else. Some have found this anomalous. Bertrand Russell, for example, thought of the Christian church as repressing and inhibiting the growth of science. He was therefore disappointed to note that science did not emerge in China, even though, as he said, the spread of scientific knowledge there encountered no such obstacles as he thought the Church put in its way in Europe.
¹
But the fact is, it was Christian Europe that fostered, promoted, and nourished modern science. It arose nowhere else. All of the great names of early Western science, furthermore—Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Roger Cotes, and many others—all were serious believers in God. Indeed, the important twentieth-century physicist C. F. von Weizsäcker goes so far as to say, “In this sense, I call modern science a legacy of Christianity.”
²

This is no accident: there is deep concord between science and theistic belief.
³
So I say: but why should we think so? We may begin by asking the following question: what sorts of conditions would be required for the success of science? What would contribute to its growth? What would things have to be like for science to flourish? What are the necessary (and sufficient) conditions for such flourishing?

But first, how shall we think of science? There are many opinions here. Realists think science is an effort to learn something of the sober truth about our world; instrumentalists think its value lies in its ability
to help us get on in the world; constructive empiricists claim that its point is to produce empirically adequate theories, the question of the truth of these theories being secondary. Initially (and perhaps naïvely) the realists are right: science is a search for truth about ourselves and our world. From science we learn a little about the great regularities displayed by the planets and their motions, and about how these same regularities are to be found at a more terrestrial level. We learn about the nature of electricity, about the structure of matter and the variety of the elements. We learn about the early history of our planet and about the history of our species. We learn about the incredible and enormously detailed structure of the human body, and have learned how to cope with many diseases and pathologies. By virtue of science, we have learned how to build airplanes that obliterate distance; in the nineteenth century the trip from Chicago to Beijing was an arduous months-long affair; now it takes twelve hours.

The basic idea, therefore, is simple enough: science is at bottom an attempt to learn important truths about ourselves and our world. According to Albert Einstein, a proper scientist is a “real seeker after truth.”
⁴
Of course we don’t expect science to give us the answer to just any question. Science can’t tell us whether slavery is wrong, for example, though it might be able to tell us about some of the social or economic consequences of slavery. We don’t expect science to tell us whether, say, Christian Trintarianism is true: that’s not its business. (Nor does it make much sense to suggest that since we now have science, we no longer need any other sources of knowledge—religion, for example. That is like claiming that now that we have refrigerators and chain saws and roller skates, we no longer have need for Mozart.) Furthermore, while science is an attempt to find important truths about our world and ourselves, it isn’t just any such attempt—there are other ways in which people have tried to discover truths about
ourselves and our world. Still, the fundamental class to which science belongs is that of efforts to discover truths—at any rate it is science so thought of that I mean to deal with here. More specifically, science is a disciplined and systematic effort to discover such truths, an effort with a substantial empirical involvement. While it is difficult to give a precise account of this empirical component, it is absolutely crucial to science, and is what distinguishes science from philosophy.

Now how is Christian belief relevant here? What is this deep concord I claim? The first thing to see here is simplicity itself. It is an important part of Christian, Jewish and some Islamic thought to see human beings
as created in God’s image
. This doctrine of the
imago dei
, the thought that we human beings have been created in the image of God has several sides and facets; but there is one aspect of it that is crucially relevant in the present context. This is the thought that God is a knower, and indeed the supreme knower. God is omniscient, that is, such that he knows everything, knows for any proposition p, whether p is true. We human beings, therefore, in being created in his image, can also know much about our world, ourselves, and God himself. No doubt what we know pales into insignificance beside what God knows; still we know much that is worthwhile and important. Crucial to the thought that we have been created in his image, then, is the idea that he has created both us and our world in such a way that (like him) we are able to know important things about our world and ourselves.

Thomas Aquinas put it as follows:

Since human beings are said to be in the image of God in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect, such a nature is most in the image of God in virtue of being most able to imitate God;

and

Only in rational creatures is there found a likeness of God which counts as an image…. As far as a likeness of the divine nature is concerned, rational creatures seem somehow to attain a representation of [that] type in virtue of imitating God not only in this, that he is and lives, but especially in this, that he understands.
⁵

Here Aquinas says that a nature including an intellect is
most
in the image of God, in virtue of being most able to imitate God. Perhaps he exaggerates a bit in thinking that understanding, the ability to know, is the
chief
part of the image of God. What about being able to act, what about having a grasp of right and wrong, what about being able to love one another, what about being able, in some way, to experience God? In any event, however, this ability to know something about our world, ourselves and God is a crucially important part of the divine image.

But how, more exactly, is this supposed to go? God created both us and our world in such a way that there is a certain fit or match between the world and our cognitive faculties. The medievals had a phrase for it:
adequatio intellectus ad rem
(the adequation of the intellect to reality). The basic idea, here, is simply that there is a match between our cognitive or intellectual faculties and reality, thought of as including whatever exists, a match that enables us to know something, indeed a great deal, about the world—and also about ourselves and God himself. According to Noam Chomsky, “This partial congruence between the truth about the world and what the human science-forming capacity produces at a given moment yields science. Notice that it is just blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the
world.”
⁶
From the point of view of theistic religion, this is not blind luck. It is only to be expected.

Science, clearly, is an extension of our ordinary ways of learning about the world. As such, it obviously involves the faculties and processes by which we ordinarily do achieve knowledge. Thus perception (whereby we know something of our environment), memory (whereby we know something of our past), a priori insight (by which we grasp logic and mathematics), broadly inductive procedures (whereby we can learn from experience), perhaps Thomas Reid’s “sympathy” (by which we know about the thoughts and feelings of other people), and perhaps still others—all of these take their place in the prosecution of science. What is involved in science is these basic ways of knowing; of course it is also true that by use of these basic ways we can construct devices and instruments (telescopes, electron microscopes, and accelerators, not to mention opera glasses) that vastly extend the reach of our ordinary cognitive faculties.