Discussion Grounds

Greetings, Luke,

I could also rattle off a long list of things I think are wrong with atheism, if that were our purpose here. I could “give a hint at” why I think atheism is “a terrible explanation for the world,” for indeed I think it is. I haven’t done that (“not even close!”) because that’s not what we’re about here. So I’ll take it as duly noted that you believe Christianity is a “tangled mess,” etc., and move on to the discussion we’ve agreed to have.

I’m also not going to get into your misrepresentations of Christian theology, because that would just throw us off track. That discussion is proceeding just fine without me in the comments.

Now for the meat of it. You said,

I think the natural explanations for these phenomena are plausible, while the Christian explanation is absurd. You think natural explanations for these phenomena are weak, while the Christian explanation for them is strong. Therefore I suspect we have very different ideas about what makes an explanation strong or weak, good or bad…. Personally, I tend to think of a good explanation as one that possesses many explanatory virtues: testability, consistency with background knowledge, simplicity, informativeness, and so on.

I would center my conception of explanation around this:

x is a good explanation for y if

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x; and if

(B) there is adequate reason to believe that x is true, reliable, trustworthy, etc.; and if

(C) there is no competing z, such that z is contrary or contradictory to x and fulfills the conditions of (A) and (B) more successfully than does x.

That’s a fairly simplified and generalized picture of what I think explanation is about. It leaves open the door for variations like tentative explanation (the best explanation we have so far, where (B) could possibly be true, but is not well established), multiple coinciding explanations (where z is complementary rather than contrary or contradictory to x), and so on.¹ It also provides for some comfortable flexibility in how we determine whether (A), (B), and (C) are each true. Certainly your list of explanatory virtues is relevant.

Now I think that Christianity certainly meets condition (A) for the phenomena I focused on in my last two posts. The Judeo-Christian doctrines of the imago Dei and the fall certainly help us to understand the confusing, paradoxical human condition. We were created in dignity, love, and moral innocence for an intimate relationship with a holy God and with others of his creation. We rebelled against God and fell away from that state of complete dignity, love, and relationship; and we feel the sting of it in the form of alienation, moral failure, and multiple indignities including physical illness and death. Our longing for something better or something more is a sense that is built into us by virtue of being in God’s image. Our moral awareness, which is largely (not perfectly) in tune with truth, is a reflection of God’s moral character still stamped in us. Our successes in love, giving, sacrifice, etc. are real successes in living in tune with that character as it is known to us through conscience and natural law (and also, for those who know and accept it, by revelation from God). Our awareness of failure, on the other hand, is a result of really not matching up to a really existent standard. It’s an awareness that is not born of our own imaginings, it’s not a mere social construction, it’s not the result of evolution, but it is based on a standard that has stood forever.

Knowing our origin and state—created in the image of God but fallen—certainly gives us a better understanding of our paradoxical condition than not knowing it does. Thus it meets part (A) of my definition for an explanation. Does it meet the test of (B)? I think so. I know you disagree. I cannot present the whole case for that here; it would require having our whole discussion about all of Christianity at once! I am content to show that it meets (A), but not just that; that it meets (A) better than the competing naturalistic explanation. If it succeeds in that, then that by itself contributes to the case (B) for its being true.

The naturalistic explanation for the human condition seems problematical to me. Yes, I know there’s more than one naturalistic explanation, but they all share the view that every cause that produces every effect, including every human feeling, thought, or behavior, is purely natural: matter and energy interacting according to necessity (natural law) and chance (quantum effects).² The naturalistic worldview entails the causal closure of the physical; that is, that all causes are physical. Matter and energy interacting by law and chance constitute the entire ultimate causal picture for everything.

More proximately, the cause of all human feeling, thought, behavior, etc. is to be found in evolutionary processes that are built in randomness and seek and reward³ only reproductive fitness. If there is any other naturalistic explanation available for any organism’s characteristics, well, it hasn’t been suggested yet.⁴ Random variation and reproductive success constitute the entire causal schema for all organisms’ attributes. This, too, is causal closure. On this level of analysis, there are no other causes for human behavior.

The naturalistic explanation requires one to suppose that the painful, paradoxical experiences that go with being human led to reproductive success sometime in our species’ natural history. Now, I have trouble seeing how a purely natural process could have thrown up any reliable sense of right or wrong whatever: it’s just not in the nature of physical things to be right or wrong. I can imagine natural processes producing a sense of right or wrong, but not a reliable sense; for there is nothing about natural processes that could be expected to produce such a thing, in a way it could be relied upon as true. So on naturalism, I have to take it that our sense of being somewhat right, somewhat wrong; somewhat good, somewhat bad; somewhat dignified, somewhat dirt; somewhat eternal in value, somewhat eternally flawed—all of this is just a sense, and there is no reason to consider it the least bit reliable. It is only a sense, one that was developed and preserved in humans just because it served our ability to make more babies that made more babies.

I have spoken of two levels of explanation for human behavior. On the most ultimate level, all causation is accounted for in terms of physics, interactions of particles by lawlike or chance processes. On a more proximate level, all causation relevant to human behavior is accounted for by random variation and natural selection (reproductive success). This does not obviate or contradict the most ultimate level of causation. Evolution expresses physics, at a more complex level of organization, it does not deny it or override it.

Of course there are still other levels of explanation, including our mental processes of belief-forming and decision-making; but on naturalism, given the causal closure of the physical and the causal closure (on another level) of random variation and reproductive success, it is impossible for this level of explanation to escape the causal necessities of the more ultimate levels of explanation. Therefore whatever mental processes we think are influencing our behavior, those mental processes are ineluctably and inescapably caused by physical interactions of particles (on one level) and by randomness and reproductive success on another level. There is no other causal stream contributing to human attributes, and thus no other causal stream contributing to human mental processes.

To state it baldly: all of my and your most human mental attributes—our aspirations, hopes, dreams, confusions, moral victories, moral shames—do not exist because we really do have dignity, worth, moral value, etc. They exist in us because attributes like this helped our ancestors reproduce more successfully and for no other reason.⁵ This is the conclusion Dawkins draws in The Selfish Gene, and if naturalism is a true picture of reality, then I don’t see how he could be wrong on this.

Further evidence for my position is found in the immense difference between humans and animals in this respect. Animals do not agonize over unfulfilled aspirations, and they don’t mourn their moral failures. They don’t reach for something higher. What could evolution have done to some population of primates to produce this in homo sapiens? It would have had to introduce in us a sense that some things were right, and other things were wrong. But is it plausible to think of this happening in that population of primates, when what evolution cares about⁶ is getting the male and the female together in some environment where they’ll make babies that will live to make babies? It works awfully well in animal populations without all this mental anguish of hope and failure; why would evolution have bothered to do more than that for humans? Where is the reproductive advantage in it?

So naturalism could plausibly explain the sense of human aspiration and failure, but it cannot explain it as a reality. It can tell how we feel worth and dignity, but it certainly cannot say how we really have worth and dignity beyond those feelings. If that sense or feeling is actually tapping into something real, then naturalism’s explanation for it is inadequate. Or as I put it last time, what we know to be true about the human condition fits within the Christian worldview. It takes some serious Procrustean hammering to make it fit with naturalism.

1. I’m also saying we can call x a good explanation without requiring that it be the whole explanation. The pot is boiling on the stove because I want to make spaghetti is a good explanation, even if it doesn’t make reference to how the electricity was supplied, how the resistive stovetop coil produces heat, how heat makes water boil, etc. The greater the explanatory scope of x, the better an explanation it is, of course. [↩]
2. I have seen attempts by naturalists to avoid the such reductionism, but I’ve never seen any that succeeded in avoiding self-contradiction. [↩]
3. Please pardon the anthropomorphism [↩]
4. Genetic drift is just randomness writ large. [↩]
5. There actually is another possible reason: that these things came up as a co-adaptation along with some other human feature that served purpose of reproductive success. If so, and if there is any actual truth to be found in this co-adaptive state, that’s just marvelously lucky indeed. The odds are not in favor of such a thing happening. [↩]
6. I know, I’m anthropomorphizing again [↩]