Science and Intelligent Design, Part II
Responding to some of the ideas in Part I, a friend wrote,“I wish I were wrong, but I think that we will never know if the universe has real spiritual meaning, if there is a God, and if there really are absolute values. So . . . if there is only the material (and I admit we cannot know this, but it is either true or not true), what would that imply about the things we know and how we know them?”
There are various kinds of knowing. We can never know scientifically or mathematically that the universe has spiritual meaning. This is because nothing spiritual can be corralled into the kind of knowledge that science is, the kind that depends on our sensory experience interpreted through pre-existing categories of measurement. As Wendell Berry says, “we cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”
However, there are other kinds of knowledge, based on non-sensory experience, on reason, imagination, aesthetic and moral insights, on the existence of questions like that posed above. If we give these any validity in human life, we do know that there is spiritual meaning, even though that kind of knowledge will never submit to being tested in the arenas of the other kind.
To demand scientific kinds of proof for spiritual meaning would be like trying to prove to my dog that the USA exists (see “Seeker, Snooper, Teacher, Tale” posted here on Sunday, May 22, 2005). She can’t know with her physical senses that the USA does exist. But she certainly is subject to its reality. Similarly, we live within a spiritual reality that we cannot perceive using only those senses useful for perceiving the physical world. But those are not our only senses.
Here is how I think reason, even in the absence of personal revelation, justifies belief in spiritual meaning.
If, as a philosophical experiment, you posit (with the radical philosophical materialists, like the sweet-tempered Lucretius or the bitter-tempered Richard Dawkins) that there is no reality except the physical--matter and forces with no spiritual dimension--then the only possible conclusion is that there is no meaning to anything. Meaning itself being what we call a spiritual phenomenon, under this hypothesis it can be nothing but an illusion thrown onto our illusory minds by the illusion-producing physical world. If that is the case, then all conversation about what things mean is itself meaningless. We may continue such conversation because we want to, but we must not pretend that it really means anything.
Even the phrase “I wish I were wrong,” which I take to be deeply meaningful, we would have to call meaningless, since under the hypothesis wishes too are an illusion of the merely physical world. Similarly, any conversation about why scientific education ought not to be compromised by religious fundamentalism would be pointless. In a solely material universe, science too, compromised or not, would be meaningless.
Since we do not experience such conversations or wishes to be meaningless, since we do want our science to be true because we value truth, since we do crave and experience meaning—in fact simply cannot and will not live without it—it makes no rational sense to assume that material reality is all there is. All the empirical evidence of our mental activity testifies otherwise.
Furthermore, if the material is all and there is no spiritual meaning, then believing in spiritual meaning can’t be wrong, since right and wrong can have no meaning. In a materialist universe the very concept of truth would be a meaningless spiritual illusion thrown up by a meaningless material reality. Thus, a thorough belief in materialism negates its own meaning.
If, on the other hand, there is spiritual meaning (and only if there is), then right and wrong do matter and the error of disbelieving in them may have dire consequences. Only if the physical isn't everything is it meaningful to think about whether it is everything or not. Only if we assume the reality of spirit is it meaningful not to want to believe a falsehood, not to want to believe in a fictional Creator, for example. In fact, to believe that truth is better than lies is to believe in spiritual meaning.
This consideration carries us, as it did Pascal, to the limits of thought, where either our thinking must become absurd or reason demands that we adopt a version of Pascal’s wager: There is nothing to lose and may be everything to gain in betting on the reality of spirit, and there is nothing to gain and may be much to lose in betting on the non-reality of spirit.
In short, if there is only matter, nothing matters. If anything matters, there is more than matter.
To believe that material phenomena are all there is is not only to turn against religion. It is also to remove all reason for studying science. It is to deny significance to all those things that we empirically experience to matter most--truth, goodness, love. Such a denial would make belief in ether, spontaneous generation, or the geocentric universe seem eminently sensible by comparison.
All things, including the rational understanding of materialism, testify to the glory of God!
There are various kinds of knowing. We can never know scientifically or mathematically that the universe has spiritual meaning. This is because nothing spiritual can be corralled into the kind of knowledge that science is, the kind that depends on our sensory experience interpreted through pre-existing categories of measurement. As Wendell Berry says, “we cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”
However, there are other kinds of knowledge, based on non-sensory experience, on reason, imagination, aesthetic and moral insights, on the existence of questions like that posed above. If we give these any validity in human life, we do know that there is spiritual meaning, even though that kind of knowledge will never submit to being tested in the arenas of the other kind.
To demand scientific kinds of proof for spiritual meaning would be like trying to prove to my dog that the USA exists (see “Seeker, Snooper, Teacher, Tale” posted here on Sunday, May 22, 2005). She can’t know with her physical senses that the USA does exist. But she certainly is subject to its reality. Similarly, we live within a spiritual reality that we cannot perceive using only those senses useful for perceiving the physical world. But those are not our only senses.
Here is how I think reason, even in the absence of personal revelation, justifies belief in spiritual meaning.
If, as a philosophical experiment, you posit (with the radical philosophical materialists, like the sweet-tempered Lucretius or the bitter-tempered Richard Dawkins) that there is no reality except the physical--matter and forces with no spiritual dimension--then the only possible conclusion is that there is no meaning to anything. Meaning itself being what we call a spiritual phenomenon, under this hypothesis it can be nothing but an illusion thrown onto our illusory minds by the illusion-producing physical world. If that is the case, then all conversation about what things mean is itself meaningless. We may continue such conversation because we want to, but we must not pretend that it really means anything.
Even the phrase “I wish I were wrong,” which I take to be deeply meaningful, we would have to call meaningless, since under the hypothesis wishes too are an illusion of the merely physical world. Similarly, any conversation about why scientific education ought not to be compromised by religious fundamentalism would be pointless. In a solely material universe, science too, compromised or not, would be meaningless.
Since we do not experience such conversations or wishes to be meaningless, since we do want our science to be true because we value truth, since we do crave and experience meaning—in fact simply cannot and will not live without it—it makes no rational sense to assume that material reality is all there is. All the empirical evidence of our mental activity testifies otherwise.
Furthermore, if the material is all and there is no spiritual meaning, then believing in spiritual meaning can’t be wrong, since right and wrong can have no meaning. In a materialist universe the very concept of truth would be a meaningless spiritual illusion thrown up by a meaningless material reality. Thus, a thorough belief in materialism negates its own meaning.
If, on the other hand, there is spiritual meaning (and only if there is), then right and wrong do matter and the error of disbelieving in them may have dire consequences. Only if the physical isn't everything is it meaningful to think about whether it is everything or not. Only if we assume the reality of spirit is it meaningful not to want to believe a falsehood, not to want to believe in a fictional Creator, for example. In fact, to believe that truth is better than lies is to believe in spiritual meaning.
This consideration carries us, as it did Pascal, to the limits of thought, where either our thinking must become absurd or reason demands that we adopt a version of Pascal’s wager: There is nothing to lose and may be everything to gain in betting on the reality of spirit, and there is nothing to gain and may be much to lose in betting on the non-reality of spirit.
In short, if there is only matter, nothing matters. If anything matters, there is more than matter.
To believe that material phenomena are all there is is not only to turn against religion. It is also to remove all reason for studying science. It is to deny significance to all those things that we empirically experience to matter most--truth, goodness, love. Such a denial would make belief in ether, spontaneous generation, or the geocentric universe seem eminently sensible by comparison.
All things, including the rational understanding of materialism, testify to the glory of God!
posted by G.Rap | 2:28 PM
11 Comments:
From your blog:
If, as a philosophical experiment, you posit . . . that there is no reality except the physical--matter and forces with no spiritual dimension--then the only possible conclusion is that there is no meaning to anything.
This is far from obvious to me. No non-physical entities exist; therefore my love for my family and friends is meaningless?
You assert further that if no non-physical entities exist, then wishes, right and wrong, and truth are likewise illusory. The correctness of these assertions is similarly non-obvious.
Materialists do not believe that wishes don't exist; they believe that wishes are the products of physical phenomena. Maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong, but their position isn't self-contradictory as you seem to imply.
In response to Maurile’s seeing the obvious as “non-obvious,” about meaning, I am claiming two things:
First, that even materialists experience love and wishes and truth, which by definition are themselves spiritual, not merely physical, things, seems to demonstrate that the claim of materialism is false. The idea of materialism itself is a non-physical thing. How can materialism account for everything when the very concept of “accounting for” is non-material?
Second, I take the human experience of meaning to be a result of our experience of participation in something greater than we can master or control or comprehend. Anything that we can reduce to a perfectly comprehensible mechanism ceases to hold meaning for us. Love and wishes and truth and baseball are meaningful because in them we come into touch with realities that are less limited than we are ourselves. The moment we believed that our loving and our wishes and our truth and our baseball were nothing but physical phenomena, were merely composed of the facts of the atoms and molecules making up brains and baseballs, those experiences would cease to be meaningful. The very love of learning how the physical world works is itself meaningful because it is not merely a physical thing. If this is non-obvious, then someone is fooling himself, which is yet another proof of spirit, since physical things just are and can't even rise to the level of fooling themselves!
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Gideon wrote:
First, that even materialists experience love and wishes and truth, which by definition are themselves spiritual, not merely physical . . .
By definition of what? Materialists don't see love or wishes or truth as being non-physical. This is what I said they may be wrong about, but not in a self-contradictory way.
I'm not an expert in brain science so I won't try to describe the physical process of wish-making. I will only say that some people who are experts in brain science believe that wishing and loving are strictly physical phenomena.
Perhaps it is a matter of semantics and the materialists are simply using word definitions that differ from the one(s) Gideon referred to above.
To make a pseudo-Thomistic argument, we might say that the physical nature of wishing is demonstrated by the fact that physical events have physical causes (and vice versa), and our wishes are influenced by (and influence) physical events.
In any case, whether the idea of materialism (like all ideas) is itself a physical or a spiritual phenomenon is a question of fact about which people disagree. For someone who believes that it is a physical phenomenon, the idea of materialism is not self-defeating.
The moment we believed that our loving and our wishes and our truth and our baseball were nothing but physical phenomena, were merely composed of the facts of the atoms and molecules making up brains and baseballs, those experiences would cease to be meaningful.
This may be true for some people. It is not true for everybody.
On the issue of whether comprehending the mechanism of a thing reduces its meaning to us, I agree with the late physicist Richard Feynman:
"I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree, I think. And he says - 'you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.' And I think that he's kind of nutty.
"First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
"At the same time, I can see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.
"Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? All kinds of interesting questions, which shows that a scientific knowledge only adds to the mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds; I don't understand how it subtracts."
Maurile writes "some people who are experts in brain science believe that wishing and loving are strictly physical phenomena." My point is that believing is what they're doing; they are not knowing. The word "strictly" as used here is faith, not science. No one can know that whatever physical causes they discover for phenomena are the only causes.
As for Feynman, I certainly don't disagree. I am not asserting that knowing the physical aspects of something makes it meaningless. I am saying that asserting that the physical is all there is makes it (and the assertion itself) meaningless. This is not an argument against the reality of the physical aspect of phenomena. It is an argument against the unquestioned faith that the physical aspect is ALL there is to it.
I think the bigger question here is the sisue of faith itself. Faith is a concept based on the unprovable. As the doctor indicated we can never truly know of the spiritual realm just as his dog cannot comprehend the concept of the united states.By that same token I can say that pink elephants in tutus are working behind the scenes of our reality and governing love, ambition, and friendship. We do not have the means to detect their reality but they still exist. How can I be proven wrong? How can you then prove that a bunch of old men throughout history have somehow tapped into spirtual truth? You can't it's all based on faith which is based on what? The doctor has detailed a vision of the world in which meaning resides in an unknowable realm. I would argue that our sense of meaning comes from a holistic sense of self and others,like an emergent property. For example my retinal cells can detect individual photons but they do not have the concept of apple when an photon from an apple excites them. That idea of apple is based on my whole being perceiving light and assigning meaning based on societal rules. Could it be that meaning arises as a result of the synergistic relationship between individual experince and societal gestalt?
I believe in the spiritual realm, that God created the world and that He loves us. I believe these things somewhat on faith and also by certain experiences which seemed to answer my doubts.
And I also believe in the material world, a world that we can touch and study. I sometimes fear that all of our spiritual nature has a physical origin and is put in place as one more survival mechanism of evolution. (i.e. the more we care about lofty goals or the more intensely we fall in love, the more likely we are to stay alive long enough to successfully reproduce and defend our offspring).
For all feelings, wishes, and love to be just an evolutionary strategy (or worse--a byproduct of an evolutionary strategy) is sad to me. BUT, take heart, my fellow seekers! Even if our spiritual feelings have a physical origin, and even if we could study this and know it to be true, it could also be true that God created the worldly scenario that led to the evolution of such spirituality (see Rap's comments from Intelligent Design part I about the randomness of environmental factors leading to natural selection). That asssertion can not be studied, but it can be the hope of deeply spiritual scientists like myself, and it explains all of the experiences I have had which compel me to believe in a spirit-Creator-God.
I just wanted to share a link to a lecture given by one of my college professors, Langdon Gilkey. He taught my senior seminar in theology, and was really a fantastic teacher: he had a rare talent for covering difficult issues in great depth without sacrificing clarity. I just found out last night that he passed away last November.
He was called as an expert theological witness in the 1981 trial in Little Rock, Arkansas, over teaching creationism in public schools. Here's a lecture he gave on some of the issues raised in that trial: LINK (Real Audio).
I'll summarize a few of his points here.
1. The Scopes Trial in 1925 was largely seen as involving a debate between science and religion.
2. In contrast, in the 1981 trial, the plaintiffs challenging the pro-Creationism law were various mainstream churches and synagogues. (Despite the judge's admonitions to the contrary, however, the mainstream media still cast it as a debate between science and religion.)
3. While it is true that Creationism is not science, and teaching it as science gives a distorted view of biology, that was not the main point of the lawsuit as seen by Gilkey or the plaintiffs. The biologists can fend for themselves (although they had largely been asleep at the wheel up to this point).
4. The main point of this case was that while Creationism is not science, it is religion. And not just any religion, but a particular religion -- i.e., a literalist one. Teaching a particular view of religion encroaches on the religious freedom of everyone who doesn't share that particular religious view -- in this case, most mainstream churches and synagogues.
5. There are several reasons for Church-State separation: (1) intertwining them can cause religious influences to corrupt the government; (2) intertwining them can cause governmental influences to corrupt religion; and (3) no right-thinking Lutheran or Calvinist or Episcopalian or Baptist or Catholic wants to have his laws driven by the doctrines of those uptight Puritans.
6. The Plaintiffs were fighting for freedom of religion. Specifically, they didn't want a religion that differed from their own shoved down their throats in public schools. Why should the fundies get to decide what the doctrine of Creation meant? The mainstream churches that joined as plaintiffs were not literalists, and teaching literalism as the alternative view to evolution encroached on the religious freedom of mainstream denominations to have their own view of the creation event.
7. Since creationism is not science, but is religion (and a particular religion at that), teaching it in public school violates the First Amendment.
In response to Maurile's points, I want to make it clear that I have NOT been arguing for the teaching of Creationism (i.e. biblical literalism) as science. I have been arguing for the rational discussion of intelligent design, which is not the same thing.
I should have pointed that out myself. My last comment wasn't in response to anything in Gideon's blog -- I just wanted to share the link to Professor Gilkey's lecture because I thought people would enjoy it.
The debate rages on. Never satisfactorily. After reading the string of discussions on this topic, I can't help but think how curious it is that neither science nor faith can seem to help human beings know when, and how, to bravely and staunchly defend a position in this regard, and when and how to bend with compassion. Of course, both science and faith speak to the issue in different ways, but neither in ways that have made it a particularly successful enterprise for humans. To me this argues for the position that materialism and intelligent design are both at work in the universe. We can, apparently, understand ever more fully but never quite fully understand
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