Abstract
The debate about the relationship between science and religion shows no sign of abatement. Are science and religion in conflict? Are they just different? Or are they even complementary ways of approaching the world? This chapter examines the major arguments for and against the conflict thesis, focusing on the role of naturalism in science. It argues that both science and religion are epistemic fields, trying to come up with true knowledge of the world. In this sense they do have partly overlapping interests, in particular concerning the place of humans in the world. It argues further that in science, naturalism is to be understood as a metaphysical presupposition, not a methodological one, and it examines the methodological consequences of this view with respect to empirical testability and scientific explanation. The naturalist metaphysics and methodology of science is contrasted with the supernaturalist ontology and methodology of religion, concluding that science and religion are both metaphysically and methodologically incompatible. If science and religion are incompatible, it follows that religious education is not in accord with science education either.
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Notes
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Of course, there are approaches to teach religion in a very general sense of “spirituality,” whatever that exactly means (see, e.g., Stolberg and Teece 2011). Even so the presupposition is that this spirituality comprises more than what can be obtained in a comprehensive scientific worldview.
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It may be argued that attempts to split the world into two or more “worlds” are incoherent because, by definition, the world is everything that exists (Worrall 2004). However, if our metaphysics requires that not any old collection of causally unconnected things is itself a material thing and hence a real entity, worlds are real things (or, more precisely, systems) only inasmuch as their parts are causally connected, however weakly. Two causally unconnected universes would then be two different things, and there would be no supersystem of which they would be physical parts.
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For the metaphysical and epistemological problems of the idea of divine intervention, see Fales (2010).
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In science education, Sinatra and Nadelson (2011) follow this approach by postulating different epistemologies for science and religion, that is, “epistemologies that have different roles and explain different aspects of the human condition” (p. 175). Obviously, and sadly, this is an instance of epistemological relativism.
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To the consistent naturalist, the attempt to naturalize religion reduces to a game of words:
The bogus procedure is this: When there is something that clearly does not exist, but one wishes that it did exist and wants to be able to say that it does exist, then choose something real that is similar in some respects and give it the name of the nonexistent entity. Voilà! You have now proved the existence of something that doesn’t exist. Suppose one wants to prove that God exists. Find something awe-inspiring, or powerful, or infinite, or fundamental …. and call it “God”. Now God exists, and the various practices with respect to that God are “religious”. Unfortunately, in reality, all you’ve done is play with words and, thereby, pull off a shabby, unconvincing trick. (Pasquarello 2002, p. 51)
This applies not only to religious naturalism but also to the various hermeneutic approaches in modern theology, such as Paul Tillich’s definition of God as “ultimate concern” (for a criticism of hermeneutic theology, see Chap. 5 in Albert 1985).
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Peacocke’s (1993) panentheism does not seem to be a consistent naturalism, as it makes God only partly natural, so I shall not discuss his view here.
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Further criticism of religious functionalism in Guthrie (1995).
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This is echoed by Plantinga who has the gall to call naturalism a quasi-religion because it fulfills this world view aspect: “It offers a way of interpreting ourselves to ourselves, a way of understanding our origin and significance at the deep level of religion. It tells us where we come from, what our prospects are, what our place in the universe is, whether there is life after death, and the like. We could therefore say that it is a ‘quasi-religion’” (Dennett and Plantinga 2011, p. 16f., see also Plantinga 2011). Needless to say, it is disingenuous to call a world view that has overcome religion a quasi-religion. A similar theological ploy is to compare the philosophical underpinnings of science to religious faith.
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“Ontology” is used synonymously with “metaphysics” in this paper.
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A very general ontological realism is probably the least controversial metaphysical presupposition of science (Bunge 1983, 2006; Alters 1997; Gauch 2009; Ladyman 2012), although there is an ongoing realism/antirealism debate in philosophy. However, this debate concerns mostly epistemological problems regarding the justification of more detailed realistic claims such as the status of unobservable entities and the truth of scientific theories. Thus, someone who rejects more specific forms of realism, such as scientific realism, usually is still an ontological realist. I shall not defend ontological realism in more detail here (for such a defense, see, e.g., Vollmer 1990), because both ontological naturalists and supernaturalists share a basic realist outlook anyway.
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I submit that the mainstream view of laws in the philosophy of science is inadequate. Science calls for a (neo-)essentialist view of laws, according to which “the laws of nature are immanent in the things that exist in nature, rather than imposed on them from without. Thus, […] things behave as they do, not because they are forced or constrained by God, or even by the laws of nature, but, rather, because of the intrinsic causal powers, capacities and propensities of their basic constituents and how they are arranged” (Ellis 2002, p. 1). Thus
not even an omnipotent God could change the laws of nature without changing the things on which they are supposed to act. Therefore, the idea that the laws of physics are contingent, and superimposed on intrinsically passive things that have identities that are independent of the laws of their behavior, is one that lies very uneasily with modern science. (Ellis 2002, p. 5)
The lawful behavior of things neither entails that we can always represent them as law statements nor that every scientific explanation is a subsumption under some law. For example, due to the enormous variation of organisms, many biologists believe that there are no laws (= law statements) in biology. But this does not entail that organisms do not behave lawfully: it is just that it often makes not much sense to try to find general, let alone universal, law statements because their reference class is rather small, holding only for some subspecies, variety, or even smaller units, for example, that is, only for those organisms sharing the same lawful properties (more on laws in biology in Mahner & Bunge 1997, Ellis 2002). Finally, even some cases of randomness are lawful because they are based on stochastic propensities such as in quantum physics. That is, there are probabilistic laws. For the neo-essentialist approach to laws adopted here, see Bunge (1977), Mahner and Bunge (1997), Bunge and Mahner (2004), and Ellis (2002).
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Note that “nothing” really means “nothing,” not some form of radiation or some other massless form of matter. For example, what is called particle annihilation is just a transformation of a particle with mass into one or more massless particles, that is, into some form of radiation. However, it seems that the ex-nihilo-nihil-fit principle is being challenged by cosmologists, who keep entertaining the idea that the universe originated from nothing (see, e.g., Stenger 2011). In particular, according to multiverse cosmology, some primordial “nothing” keeps randomly popping out universes. But since this “nothing” has at least one property, namely, the propensity to pop out universes, it doesn’t seem to be a genuine nothing which should have no properties at all and hence be unable to change.
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The no-psi principle was one of Broad’s (1949) so-called basic limiting principles of science. Being a strong believer in the paranormal, Broad maintained that this basic limiting principle had been refuted by parapsychology. However, Broad was fooled by the sloppy and partly even fraudulent parapsychological research of his time.
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This was already acknowledged by J. S. B. Haldane (1934), who stated that his “practice as a scientist is atheistic,” that is, when he sets up an experiment, he assumes “that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course” (p. vi).
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As Fales (2010) argues, even God may not know whether his thinking is manipulated by some evil demon. Does this require a second-order God of higher power who guarantees the truth of God’s knowledge? If so, we would end up with an infinite regress of truth guarantors.
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In his debate with Plantinga, Dennett has recently called naturalism a null hypothesis (Dennett and Plantinga 2011, p. 49). Plantinga had argued that science is compatible with theism, because science doesn’t explicitly state that there is no God. This shows that Plantinga is not familiar with the concept of a null hypothesis. The same seems to apply to Flanagan (2008, p. 437), who argues against “imperialist naturalism” that we would simply not know everything that there is or is not. Yet this is exactly the reason why we have to start with naturalism as a metaphysical null hypothesis.
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Despite many theological defenses, the notions of omnipotence and omniscience are incoherent (Martin 1990), so that we have reason to reject characterizations of the supernatural that employ them.
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More on the problems of supernaturalist explanations in Pennock (2000), who also explores the consequences of supernaturalism for the legal system, which would have to reconsider the-devil-made-me-do-it arguments including historically superseded forms of evidence based on “higher insights” and revelations.
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Note that the famous “theory of everything“ in theoretical physics is a misnomer, because it would not explain everything. It would just offer a unified theory of the fundamental forces of physics. But this would not even begin to explain all the emergent properties of higher-level systems.
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Those supernaturalists who dislike the god-of-the-gaps approach for theological reasons have retreated to a transnatural conception of the supernatural, which is immune to any empirical refutation.
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Philipse(2012) has recently shown that the inference-to-the-best-explanation approach of natural theology faces insurmountable problems, including the failure of Bayesianism, which is also championed by radical empiricists (e.g., Fishman 2009), who believe that scientific methodology has no metaphysical presuppositions.
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It may be argued that the variation in the meaning of “God” is not problematic, because scientific concepts often start out with fuzzy and variable meanings too. Think of terms like “gene” or “atom.” However, the variations in the precise meanings of these concepts are adjustments guided by empirical research and theory development. These concepts could be made precise enough to even get hold of their referents: today, genes can be sequenced, and atoms can be photographed. The various concepts of God, by contrast, are not constricted and guided by empirical research, so there is no improvement in the sense of an approximation to reality. The conceptual “development” in theology is purely apologetic in that the traditional overnatural concepts of God have been transformed into transnatural ones, so that they can no longer conflict with science, or anything factual for that matter.
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That this is one of the main reasons behind MN has also been shown by Boudry et al. (2012).
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MN in the first sense can be held either dogmatically or provisionally. In the latter case, we may provocatively propose the name “methodological methodological naturalism,” so as to point out the double meaning of “methodological.” Note also that Boudry et al. (2010, 2012) distinguish intrinsic MN (in the sense of a defining feature of science) from provisional MN. The latter would be what I have just called methodological MN. Here I defend provisional ON as an intrinsic feature of science.
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Curiously, Smith (2012, p. 13) appears to realize this difference but he downplays it by saying that “in practice, however, the distinction is less stark.” Yet practice is irrelevant: demarcation is first of all a matter of methodology. The cognitive and sociological similarities of learning on the basis of authority in both science and religion cannot attenuate the methodological conflict.
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Even more curiously, Plantinga (2011) argues that evolutionary theory is incompatible with metaphysical naturalism (see also Dennett and Plantinga 2011). A premise of this counterintuitive claim is that naturalists adopt an instrumentalist view of evolution, according to which natural selection favors at most cognitive faculties adequate for survival, not cognitive faculties furnishing truth, whether absolute or approximate. A purely natural evolution, then, entails that our cognitive faculties are not reliable in the sense of truth tracking. Plantinga is aware of the objection that a frog which manages to catch a fly must have correctly represented some property of its environment. But he claims that, even in the case of humans, the naturalist can talk only of appropriate behavior, not of true beliefs. He supports his case by resorting to antimaterialist arguments from the philosophy of mind, maintaining that any materialist conception of the brain and its functions, whether reductive or emergent, allows at best for appropriate behaviors, never beliefs, let alone true beliefs. True beliefs, so Plantinga’s presupposition, can be had only in a nonmaterialist conception of the mind and a nonnaturalist conception of evolution. And the naturalist, who believes in the truth of naturalism, is inconsistent because naturalist evolution does not allow for the very existence of true beliefs. The real conflict, then, is between evolution and naturalism, not theism and evolution or science in general. Yet as evolutionary epistemology shows (Vollmer 2005), which is ignored by Plantinga, the evolution of cognition does lead to approximately true representations of the world (see also Dennett’s reply in Dennett and Plantinga 2011). Also, naturalism requires a reconceptualization of concepts such as “knowledge” and “belief,” which renders the antimaterialist argument moot (Bunge 1983).
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See, e.g., Humphrey (1999), Goode (2000), Orenstein (2002), Hergovich et al. (2005), Lindeman and Aarnio (2007), and Eder et al. (2010). Note that the relation between religious belief and belief in the paranormal is not straightforward but depends on many variables such as level of education, gender, church attendance, and even the nature of the paranormal claims. For example, whereas astrology is mostly ruled out by Christians, creationism is not; and regular church attendance seems to prevent belief in the paranormal, presumably because the more frequent contact with official dogma protects from belief in competing paranormal or supernatural claims, respectively.
- 47.
For example, if science is strongly associated with technology, as in the questionnaire of Cobern et al. (2012), it may not be surprising that even orthodox believers see not much conflict between science and religion, except for ideologically contentious issues such as creationism or embryonic stem cell research. After all, even fundamentalists are glad to reap the benefits of modern technology. More importantly, personal views about the relation of science and religion, or even career choice, do not answer the de jure conflict problem concerning a consistent world view.
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Mahner, M. (2014). Science, Religion, and Naturalism: Metaphysical and Methodological Incompatibilities. In: Matthews, M. (eds) International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7654-8_56
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