Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (54 page)

24.
Letter to Johannes George Herwart von Hohenburg, April 9–10, 1599,
Gesammelte Werke
, 13: 309, letter no. 117, lines 174–79; English tr. in
Johannes Kepler Baumgardt: Life and Letters
, p. 50.

25.
Again, typically but not universally. David Lewis, for example, thought of laws as axioms of a deductive system describing the world containing a best balance of strength and simplicity; so thought of they need not display any kind of necessity.

26.
A few philosophers demur: Sydney Shoemaker, for example, holds that natural laws are indeed necessary in the broadly logical sense. See his “Causal and Metaphysical Necessity,”
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
, vol. 79, issue 1 (March, 1998), p. 59.

27.
Armstrong,
What is a Law of Nature
? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

28.
“New Work for a Theory of Universals,”
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
61 (1983).

29.
Strictly speaking, what is precluded is not relative velocities greater than
c
(for perhaps tachyons aren’t precluded) but acceleration of one body relative to another from a velocity less than
c
to one greater than
c
.

30.
See Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(New York: Bantam, 2006); Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(New York: Penguin, 2006); and Hitchens,
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007).

31.
Harris,
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(New York: Norton, 2004) and
Letter to a Christian Nation
(New York: Knopf, 2006).

32.
Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in
Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics
, vol. 13, no. I (February 1960).

33.
Dirac, “The Evolution of the Physicists’s Picture of Nature,”
Scientific American
2008, no. 5 (May 1963), p. 53.

34.
Well, you never really know. Eleonore Stump, the
mater familias
of Christian philosophy, reminds me that female pheasants seem to be deeply impressed by apparently gratuitous decorative plumage; and some claim that perverse preference on the part of female Irish elk for males with gigantic horns led to the extinction of the species. Who knows what idiosyncratic romantic preferences prehistoric women might have had? Still, set theory…?

35.
See chapter 5.

36.
Consider Thomas Aquinas,
De Veritate
: “Even if there were no human intellects, there could be truths because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if,
per impossibile
, there were no intellects at all, but things continued to exist, then there would be no such reality as truth.” And see my “How to be an Anti-Realist,”
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
, 1982.

37.
See Charles Parsons, “What is the Iterative Conception of Set?” in
Mathematic in Philosophy
(Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 1983), pp. 268ff.

38.
J. R. Shoenfield,
Mathematical Logic
(Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1965) writes: A closer examination of the (Russell) paradox shows that it does not really contradict the intuitive notion of a set. According to this notion, a set A is formed by gathering together certain objects to form a single object, which is the set A. Thus before the set A is formed, we must have available all of the objects which are to be members of A (p. 238).

39.
Cantor,
Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und philosophischen Inhalts
, ed. Ernest Zermelo (Berlin: Springer, 1932), p. 282.

40.
Wang,
Mathematics to Philosophy
(New York: Humanities Press, 1974), p. 238.

41.
Wang,
Mathematics to Philosophy
, p. 182.

42.
Field,
Realism, Mathematics and Modality
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

43.
See Paul Benacerraf, “What Numbers Could Not Be,”
The Philosophical Review
, 74: 47–73 (1965).

44.
Reid,
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
, Essay VI, V, 12. A similar principle is stated by David Hume:

If reason determined us, it wou’d proceed upon that principle, that past instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.
A Treatise of Human Nature
, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, first edition 1888), Book I, Part III, 6, p. 89 (Hume’s emphasis).

45.
Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(LaSalle: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1956), Sect. IV, 2, p. 34.

46.
See Ian Hacking’s
The Emergence of Probability
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 164.

47.
Weinberg,
Dreams of a Final Theory
(New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 98.

48.
Here see Richard Swinburne,
Simplicity as Evidence of Truth
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997).

49.
Einstein,
Ideas and Opinions
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1954), p. 224–27.

50.
See Del Ratzsch, “Humanness in their Hearts: Where Science and Religion Fuse” in
The Believing Primate
, ed. Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

51.
There are exceptions. You use a computer to calculate the product of a couple of 6 digit numbers; the computer comes up with a certain number n. Your knowledge that this product is indeed n—which is, of course, necessary—is
a posteriori
; it depends on your
a posteriori
knowledge that computers ordinarily calculate the right answers to arithmetical questions. I name the actual world “alpha”; then it is a necessary truth that (say) there was a U.S. Civil War in alpha, but your only way of knowing this necessary truth is
a posteriori
.

52.
Some have claimed that there are contingent truths of which we have a priori knowledge. Others claim this is a mistake; see my
The Nature of Necessity
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) p. 8, footnote 1.

53.
Here I must correct or perhaps supplement what I said earlier about Ockam and Aquinas. The Thomists, following Aristotle, leaned towards necessity in nature; Ockham emphasized its contingency. Perhaps it was the creative tension between these that was the fertile soil for modern science. Perhaps what was required is something like a synthesis of Ockham and Aquinas: as Ockham says, God freely chooses to create this world; as Aquinas says, however, he creates a world that manifests regularity and reliability.

54.
Cotes,
Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his writings
, pp. 132-33; emphasis added.

1.
For example: “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.” Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
(London and New York: Norton, 1986), p. 5.

2.
Simpson,
The Meaning of Evolution
(New Haven: Yale University Press, rev. ed., 1967), pp. 344–45.

3.
For example, he might do so in the way suggested in chapter 4: he might be active at the quantum level in such a way that (in accord with the GRW version of quantum mechanics) he selects the eigenvalues to which the wave functions associated with quantum mechanical systems collapse.

4.
Among the ancestors of my argument are C. S. Lewis’s argument in
Miracles
(1947) and Richard Taylor in
Metaphysics
(1963). I first proposed the argument in “An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,”
Logos
12 (1991); it has also appeared in many other places, including
Warrant and Proper Function
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 12;
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 227ff.;
Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
, ed. James Beilby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), Introduction, pp. 1ff. and “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts,” p. 204ff.;
God or Blind Nature
, internet book with Paul Draper, 2007 (available at
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/debates/great-debate.html
); Plantinga and Tooley,
Knowledge of God
(New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 30ff.; with Daniel Dennett,
Science and Religion; Are They Compatible?
, pp. 16ff., 66ff.; and “Content and Natural Selection,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
, forthcoming. In the years since I first proposed it, I have learned much about the argument (from critics and supporters alike), and have repeatedly revised it. The version presented here is the official and final version (I hope).

5.
Contra Daniel Dennett; see Daniel Dennett and Alvin Plantinga,
Science and Religion; Are They Compatible?
, pp. 73ff. “No Miracles Needed,” where Dennett thus misconstrues the argument.

6.
See my
Warranted Christian Belief
, chapter 6.

7.
Summa Theologiae
Ia q. 93, a. 4.

8.
Nietzsche,
Nietzsche: Writings from the Late Notebooks
(Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), ed. Rüdiger Bittner, tr. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Notebook 36, June–July 1885, p. 26.

9.
Nagel,
The View From Nowhere
(Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 79.

10.
Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism” in
Naturalism in Question
, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 28.

11.
Churchland,
Journal of Philosophy
LXXXIV (October 1987), p. 548; emphasis in original.

12.
Letter to William Graham, Down, July 3rd, 1881. In
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter
, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 315–16. It may be that by “convictions,” Darwin means something narrower than belief.

13.
Dennett,
Consciousness Explained
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991). Some who don’t admire the book have complained that a better title would be “Consciousness Explained Away.” Dennett’s book illustrates, I think, the problem for one who accepts materialism but also (like the rest of us) can’t help thinking that there is such a thing as consciousness.

14.
See, e.g., William Lycan (who is himself a materialist), “Giving Dualism its Due,”
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
, vol. 87, Issue 4 December 2009, and Charles Taliaferro, “Incorporeality,” in
A Companion to Philosophy of Religion
, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 271ff., who does a nice job of exposing some of these weaknesses. See also my “Against Materialism,” in
Faith and Philosophy
, 23:1 (January 2006), and “Materialism and Christian Belief,” in
Persons: Human and Divine
, eds. Dean Zimmerman and Peter van Inwagen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

15.
Dawkins, “The Improbability of God,”
Free Inquiry Magazine
, vol. 18, no. 2 (1998).

16.
Again, this reason is far from conclusive. As we’ll see below, materialists usually think that mental properties supervene on physical properties. If so, it is conceivable that the property of having an immaterial soul supervenes on physical properties of an organism; perhaps there are physical properties such that necessarily, any organism with those physical properties will also be linked with an immaterial soul. See William Hasker,
The Emergent Self
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

17.
It is of course extremely difficult to see how a material structure or event could have content in the way a belief does; on the face of it, this appear to be impossible. That is one of the main problems for materialism. For development of this thought, see my “Against Materialism” footnote 14.

18.
Crick,
The Astonishing Hypothesis: the Scientific Search for the Soul
(New York: Scribner, 1995), p.3.

19.
For simplicity, I ignore so-called “wide content”; nothing in my argument hinges on this omission.

20.
We could put this by saying that any content property is a Boolean combination of NP properties.