THE NATURE OF NATURE
Examining the Role of
Naturalism in Science
Wilmington, Delaware
CONTENTS
Foreword: Beyond Naturalism to Science
Steve Fuller
Introduction: The Nature of Nature Confronted
Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski
PART I:
NATURALIZING SCIENCE:
SOME HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Introduction
1. The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture
Bruce L. Gordon
2. Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs
Ronald L. Numbers
3. Varieties of Methodological Naturalism
Ernan McMullin
4. Sauce for the Goose: Intelligent Design, Scientific Methodology, and the Demarcation Problem
Stephen C. Meyer
PART II:
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL
FOUNDATIONS OF NATURALISM
Introduction
5. Evolution versus Naturalism
Alvin C. Plantinga
6. More on the Illusion of Defeat
William J. Talbott
7. Evolutionary Naturalism: Epistemically Unseated or Illusorily Defeated?
A. It’s No Illusion! Alvin C. Plantinga
B. The End of an Illusion? William J. Talbott
8. A Quantum-Theoretic Argument against Naturalism
Bruce L. Gordon
9. The Incompatibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism
Robert C. Koons
10. Truth and Realism
Alvin I. Goldman
11. Must Naturalists Be Realists?
Michael Williams
12. The Role of Concepts in Our Access to Reality
Nicholas Wolterstorff
PART III:
THE ORIGIN OF BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION AND THE
EMERGENCE OF BIOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
Introduction
13. On the Origins of Life
David Berlinski
14. DNA: The Signature in the Cell
Stephen C. Meyer
15. Mysteries of Life: Is There “Something Else”?
Christian de Duve
16. Life’s Conservation Law: Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information
William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II
17. Regulated Recruitment and Cooperativity in the Design of Biological Regulatory Systems
Mark Ptashne
18. The Nature of Protein Folds: Quantifying the Difficulty of an Unguided Search through Protein Sequence Space
Douglas D. Axe
19. The Limits of Non-Intelligent Explanations in Molecular Biology
Michael J. Behe
20. The Chain of Accidents and the Rule of Law: The Role of Contingency and Necessity in Evolution
Michael Shermer
21. Molecular Convergence: Repeated Evolution or Repeated Designs?
Fazale R. Rana
PART IV:
COSMOLOGICAL ORIGINS AND FINE-TUNING
Introduction
22. Eternal Inflation and Its Implications
Alan Guth
23. Naturalism and the Origin of the Universe
William Lane Craig
24. Cosmic Evolution, Naturalism and Divine Creativity, or Who Owns the Robust Formational Economy Principle?
Howard J. Van Till
25. Living in the Multiverse
Steven Weinberg
26. Balloons on a String: A Critique of Multiverse Cosmology
Bruce L. Gordon
27. Habitable Zones and Fine-Tuning
Guillermo Gonzalez
PART V:
MATHEMATICS
Introduction
28. Mathematical Naturalism
Philip Kitcher
29. Mathematics—Application and Applicability
Mark Steiner
PART VI:
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE,
AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Introduction
30. Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of Mind and Brain
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides
31. On the Origins of the Mind
David Berlinski
32. Consciousness
John R. Searle
33. Consciousness and Neuroscience
Francis Crick and Christof Koch
34. Supervenience and the Downward Efficacy of the Mental: Nonreductive Physicalism and the Christian Tradition
Nancey Murphy
35. Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections (with a new addendum)
Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose
36. Quantum Interactive Dualism: The Libet and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies
Henry P. Stapp
37. The Physical Sciences, Neuroscience, and Dualism
James P. Moreland
PART VII: SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND RELIGION
Introduction
38. Evolution and Ethics
Michael Ruse
39. Naturalism’s Incapacity to Capture the Good Will
Dallas Willard
40. Naturalism, Science, and Religion
Michael Tooley
41. Theism Defended
William Lane Craig
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Sources and Permissions
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
FOREWORD
BEYOND NATURALISM TO SCIENCE
STEVE FULLER
I can appreciate a book called The Nature of Nature because I have called myself a “reflexive naturalist.”1 If naturalism is the default metaphysical position of the natural sciences, then that fact must itself be explained by the theories and methods of the natural sciences. But how does one do that without begging crucial questions? For example, it is tempting to argue that the natural sciences are simply a somewhat more disciplined version of commonsense, which itself is an extension of the problem-solving skills that all animals deploy in adapting to their environments. Such a view was explicitly promoted in the twentieth century by the American pragmatists John Dewey and Willard Quine, both of whom invoked “naturalism” to name their own positions. It had the virtue of bringing science down to earth by making it seem to be part of our evolutionary heritage. But in the process, this view presumed that the natural sciences’ ideological self-understanding was largely correct. In other words, science was explained as an instance of something of which it was already trying to provide a theoretical account. Yet the epistemic distinctiveness of science, whereby it breaks with animal modes of intelligence and even everyday forms of human reasoning, remained unaddressed, if not obscured, in the process.
If science were indeed little more than incrementally enhanced ordinary perception—say, the indefinite aggregation of beings with indefinitely powerful eyes—then the history of science would not have been as it is. Long before Thomas Kuhn, it was recognized that science periodically reconstitutes society’s taken-for-granted ideas, regardless of whether that serves to stabilize or destabilize our place in nature. For example, the relativity and quantum revolutions in twentieth-century physics shifted science’s epistemic center of gravity very far from commonsense and in ways that have placed humanity’s survival increasingly at risk. Notwithstanding a persistent undercurrent of protest, sometimes in the name of humanity but increasingly in the name of nature, we have acted as if the benefits of science outweigh the costs. But what is the source of this overriding faith? After all, the practical benefits continue to be controversial—as in, say, nuclear energy, stem-cell research, and nanotechnology.
Nevertheless, science’s theoretical benefits remain clear. In particular, the revolutions in physics appear unequivocally good because they significantly advance the distinctly human quest for “universal” knowledge in at least three senses of that term, all of which cut against the spirit of naturalism:
(1) Science aspires to knowledge of all things, under conditions potential and actual, regardless of their relevance to our everyday lives, let alone personal or species survival. Indeed, most of what science purports to be about will never be experienced directly by anyone, and only a very small fraction of the reality charted by science will be encountered even by expert scientists. Another, more empowering way to make the same point is to say that what we may come to know is not restricted to what we have known. In that sense, science transcends history. A scientific inquiry into “the nature of life” or “the nature of mind” may begin by examining living organisms and conscious humans, but it then poses the question in broader, more abstract terms, countenancing the range of material properties that living and conscious beings might possess, wherever they might be.
(2) Science aspires to articulate all things in a common language, no matter how different these things may appear to our senses. Newton first achieved this feat by mathematically unifying our understanding of the motions of the planets and objects on Earth. John Locke, one of the original Newtonians, canonized the difference between how things are and how they seem to be in terms of “primary” and “secondary” qualities. In the wake of Newton, mathematics’ quest to articulate the primary qualities of things has led the discipline to develop in directions far removed from ordinary tasks of measurement and calculation, from non-Euclidean geometries to the paradoxes of set theory. Corresponding to that has been the introduction of specialized uses for ordinary terms as well as some entirely new terms and conceptualizations that have periodically challenged our basic understanding of space, time, and cause. In this context, for better or worse, symbolic logic has been promoted as the language of universal thought.
(3) Science aspires to be knowledge for everyone, a universal human legacy. This is the sense in which science most controversially defies naturalism. The palpable diversity of human beings—be it by origins or appearance—is not sufficient to discount their experience and ideas from the constitution of scientific knowledge. On the contrary, a mark of the “unscientific” standing of a form of knowledge is that it cannot command universal human assent by virtue of its intimate connection to personal experience. Of course, this is not to deny that different people understand things differently. Rather, it is to say that for such an understanding to count as science, it must be made relevant to those who have not and probably will not experience it for themselves. The principle applies equally to someone possessing arcane technical expertise and rare indigenous knowledge. Here the positivist philosophical distinction between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification” is apt: The more widely justifiable a form of knowledge is, the greater its entitlement to scientific status.
All three senses of science’s “universality” defy any easy naturalistic explanation because they force us to conceptualize knowledge from a standpoint rather removed from our ordinary embodied experience. Thomas Nagel famously identified this standpoint as “the view from nowhere,” which certainly captures the spirit of points (1) and (2) above.2 But it captures point (3) as well, since the range of experience—both real and imagined—of any given individual human is in fact quite limited vis-à-vis that potentially available to all of humanity. This fact helps to explain the hazardous utility of our reliance on what psychologists have variously called “heuristics,” “stereotypes,” “biases” and “prejudices.” These corner-cutting features of cognition make the most out of what immediately strikes us as salient in our experience. And were science simply a species of what Larry Laudan provocatively dubbed “plebeian induction,” then science could be understood as an elaborate exercise in corner-cutting, which would mean routinely discounting the testimony of those whose experience we cannot readily assimilate.3 But in fact science requires what Laudan called “aristocratic induction,” that is, the ability to see beyond our default expectations to something deeper and even counterintuitive. This point applies to how we regard not only the natural world but also those who regard the natural world.
The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—provide the only clear historic basis for conceptualizing science as “universal” in this robust sense of aspiring to knowledge of all things by and for all people. That basis is the biblical doctrine that humans are unique as beings created in the image and likeness of God. To be sure, the doctrine has been variously interpreted, but it has been generally read as a call to epistemic empowerment—at the very least, that humans can know much more than what is necessary to maintain their animal existence. Islam started to take this call seriously as a vehicle of proselytism, which resulted in the compilation and harmonization of sacred (i.e. Abrahamic) and secular (i.e. Greco-Roman) writings into a complete body of knowledge closed under Qur’anic principles.
To be sure, this practice created enormous tensions within Islam, which reached critical proportions in the work of the twelfth-century Cordoban jurist Ibn-Rushd, known to Christians as Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle in contrast to whom Thomas Aquinas defined many of his major positions. Averroes questioned the ultimate unity of knowledge, defending instead a “double truth” doctrine inspired by Plato, whereby science and religion would be distinguished as, respectively, truth for the elites and truth for the masses. While this view has kept Averroes a heretic within Islam to this day, it did not prevent his works from exercising enormous influence within Christendom, first as the means by which the Aristotelian corpus was rediscovered in Europe, and second—and more potently—as the source of the idea that science could be used to reform religion in aid of a purer sense of epistemic unity. To be sure, Christendom also treated this as a heresy—indeed, one called “Averroism.” As it turns out, its most famous exponent was Galileo, who studied in a city, Padua, that for over two centuries had been the hotbed of Averroism.
I have encapsulated this strand in Western intellectual history because, regardless of the various obstacles that organized religion has placed in the way of science over the centuries, the best explanation for the shape and persistence of science’s fundamental questions has been theological. The point is repeatedly driven home by the authors in this volume in their investigations into the various questions of “origins,” “ends” and “design” that have framed scientific inquiry into the nature of life, mind, and the universe as a whole. From the empiricist standpoint privileged by naturalism, it is difficult to motivate, let alone resolve, these questions, as they all invite us to consider reality from a perspective not normally our own. Unsurprisingly, naturalism’s most trenchant adherents—from the ancient Epicureans to moderns like Hume and Darwin—studiously avoided reaching any firm conclusions on these matters and denied that science could ever contribute substantially to them. Indeed, every argument they raised against natural theology could always be turned against “natural science,” understood as the name of systematic inquiry into fundamental explanations. (Hume’s own reservations about Newton certainly had this character.) After all, such inquiry invariably forces us to countenance entities, processes, and events that transcend the normal run of experience. Naturalists routinely underestimate the decisive role that experiments play in science: Experiments are less about enhancing our natural modes of understanding than providing access to new modes of understanding that we might otherwise lack, were it not for the intelligent design of the laboratory.
Once we recognize the inadequacy of an unreflexive naturalism to explain the aspirations—and success—of science, the meanings of many of the key metaphysical, if not ideological, positions associated with the scientific worldview start to look less secure. In particular, materialism starts to look problematic. Marx’s co-conspirator, Friedrich Engels, got it exactly right when he characterised the nineteenth-century revolution in thermodynamics as heralding a “dematerialized materialism” in both science and society.4 Engels was expressing approval that the English word “work” had come to mean human labor (Arbeit in German) and mechanical power (Kraft), both of which could be understood in the same mathematical terms as the release of energy over a certain distance for a certain duration. For Engels, a true believer in conservation principles, thermodynamics proved that any increase in production would require an increase in productivity—that is, an efficiency saving in energy expenditure. The only way that could happen would be through a more intelligently organized workforce. Though hardly a spiritualist, Engels nevertheless recognized that humanity’s species-distinctive sense of intellectual progress lay in its increasing ability to do more with less over time. This intuition continues to be respected in the pivotal role played by new technology in models of economic growth.
But exactly how does the requisite intelligence come about—through some sort of self-generated reorganization of the current system or through the introduction of a wholly new factor from outside the system? The economists’ way of posing the question has acquired more general currency: Is technological innovation “endogenous” or “exogenous” in origin? Throughout its history as a political practice, Marxism has struggled with a version of this problem—namely, how to manage the transition from capitalism to socialism: Should one wait patiently until the material factors and social relations of production rearrange themselves in some appropriate manner (e.g., during a war or a depression), or should one strike decisively with a top-down strategy that activates elements of a system that might otherwise remain dormant indefinitely? In sum, we have the difference between social democracy and revolutionary communism: Kautsky the politician in office versus Lenin the leader in exile as rival heirs to the legacy of Marx and Engels.
For those who like their conceptual distinctions to bear less political freight, analogous cases are readily found. Consider cybernetics, a field that aimed to understand system maintenance in terms of information theory, an application of thermodynamics to communication under suboptimal conditions, as in the noise generated by walkie-talkies in wartime. Cybernetics captured the imaginations of a broad range of interdisciplinary polymaths in the third quarter of the twentieth century, including the mathematician Norbert Wiener and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who debated whether the difference between, say, good and evil, right and wrong, ordered and disordered could be exhaustively explained by the self-regulated rearrangement of the components (“servomechanisms”) within a given system.5 Wiener was more inclined to this position than Bateson, who leveraged some ideas derived from the paradoxes of set theory to argue that a higher-order system may be needed that operates in ways that are at odds with the system on which it acts.
In the contemporary intellectual landscape, we might contrast Stuart Kauffman’s “order for free” defense of a self-organizational approach to evolution that downplays the role of natural selection (or, for that matter, any deus ex machina, including a deity) with William Dembski’s “no free lunch” argument against the self-sufficiency of evolutionary algorithms, which implicitly allows for a theologically inspired idea of intelligent design as the source of genuinely new information in nature. This debate is well represented by the Dembski and Marks piece in this volume. However one ultimately stands on the various issues at stake, it is clear that we have moved a long way from the idea that nature can be understood as if it were the product of no intelligence at all. The long march from the blind chance and mindless necessity of classical materialism to the intelligently organized work that Engels adumbrated for a dematerialized materialism began with the explicit introduction of the engineering mentality into physics through thermodynamics, which quickly spread to political economy and physiology, the dominant biomedical science well into the twentieth century. Later in the century, this trajectory acquired forward momentum from the mathematical formulation of information theory and the invention of the solid-state transistor, culminating in the discovery of DNA as the biological precedent for this feat of miniaturized storage and transmission of information, a point that has been long stressed by Stephen Meyer, who is represented by two pieces in this volume.
From the standpoint of intelligent design theory, the true scientific revolution in biology that allowed the discipline finally to break away from natural history (as both physics and economics had already done) and catch up with developments in the physical sciences would be recounted as follows. First, respect would be paid to the mid-nineteenth-century Bohemian monk Gregor Mendel, who first discerned interesting mathematical patterns in inheritance that, after some neglect, became the basis for population genetics in the early twentieth century. He is reasonably counted as the Copernicus figure in this revolution. However, the story starts to acquire serious momentum with the molecularization of genetics in the 1930s, when Warren Weaver, a pioneer in information theory and director of the natural sciences division of the Rockefeller Foundation, funded the retooling of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratories to enable the discovery of the structure of DNA, the downstream effects of which continue to this day in the mechanical sequencing of genomes from various species.
In terms of this alternative historiography, the Darwinian “tree of life” image of phylogeny may no longer be treated as a self-sufficient account of the actual descent of the species, as suggested by the au courant hypothesis of the “molecular clock,” whereby differences in the genomes of different species are taken as indicators of when they divided from a common ancestor in evolutionary history. Rather, phylogeny may come to be understood as a prototype for, so to speak, a periodic table of biological elements, whereby the macromolecules of the genes are correlated with the expression of traits that may recur at several moments and in different creatures in natural history. In retrospect, Darwin’s evolutionary approach to taxonomy may come to be seen as a temporary diversion from the original strategy put forward by Carolus Linnaeus in the eighteenth century to classify life forms according to a design-based logic, the legacy of which continues in the Linnaean coinage, Homo sapiens (“man the wise”), a shorthand attempt at a functional definition of our species.
But does all this mean that evolution itself is a chimera? Not necessarily. But it does leave wide open the means and ends (if any) of evolution. Simon Conway Morris’s magnum opus Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (2003) makes this point in a particularly compelling way.6 But before considering how Morris’s suggestive account of evolution effectively upends the Darwinian account, almost in spite of itself, it is worth taking a brief look at one current account of evolution that takes the thermodynamic turn in the physical sciences very seriously yet stays firmly within the confines of naturalism. This theory, put forward a quarter of a century ago by two systematic taxonomists, equates the trajectory of evolution with an overall increase in biological entropy.7 Whatever direction evolution seems to be taking is simply a reflection of the options for life becoming more limited, as nature gradually expends itself. Thus, any semblance of progress is an illusion created by the path-dependency of a process that leaves in its wake a lengthening trail of extinct precursors. This rather gloomy view of things envisages humans as possibly the last surviving species in an always already dying world. Although neither Darwin nor the biologist of recent times whose work was closest in spirit to Darwin’s, Stephen Jay Gould, adhered to entropy theory, they had their own rather pessimistic sense of evolution’s naturalistic endgame.
In striking and rather more hopeful contrast, we have Conway Morris, an Anglican Christian who nevertheless joins the atheist Richard Dawkins in rejecting the exaggerated sense of contingency that Gould associated with evolutionary history. But where Dawkins seems satisfied that natural selection is sufficient to explain the adaptation of species to their environments, Conway Morris argues that larger forces are also in play that, in effect, overdetermine evolutionary outcomes. Contrary to the spirit of Gould’s famous thought experiment, replaying the tape of natural history would very likely produce more or less the same run of species. In support of this claim, Conway Morris reads the palaeobiological record as implying the long-term convergence of life forms. And while the array of evidence he mobilizes is impressively diverse and up to date, the claim itself is far from novel. That life forms tend to converge over time, rather than diverge, is the oldest and most persistent scientific objection to Darwin’s construal of evolution. Indeed, over the past century, it has been associated with a variety of heretical Catholic biologists from St. George Mivart to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.8
Conway Morris’s self-positioning in this debate is rather curious. While taking great pains to distance himself from both creationism and intelligent design theory (which he tends to conflate), he nevertheless subscribes to the view that over the eons “life” has “navigated” the space of biological possibilities to reach similar solutions to similar problems of environmental adaptation. The image of navigation is not new to this general discussion. Not only is it embedded in the very word “cybernetics” (from the Greek for “helmsman”), but, more to the point, it recurs in Neo-Lamarckian accounts of evolution that stress both the uniqueness and the ultimacy of humanity. Taken to its extreme, the image suggests that everything worth preserving about evolutionary history eventually finds its way into our own biological makeup—perhaps in the future with the help of biotechnology? Conway Morris, of course, does not draw such a provocative conclusion, but it can be found in the work of Teilhard and that of his biggest mainstream biological defender, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who was perhaps most responsible for converting the Neo-Darwinian synthesis into the dominant paradigm in biology. As an Orthodox Christian, Dobzhansky was attuned to the idea of theosis, namely, the eventual re-identification of humanity with the deity at the end of evolution. Perhaps this volume will help remind us of this fact the next time we hear Dobzhanksy’s most famous sound bite, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”9
Notes
1. S. Fuller, “Epistemology Radically Naturalized: Recovering the Normative, the Experimental, and the Social.” In R. Giere, ed. Cognitive Models of Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 429–59.
2. T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
3. L. Laudan, Science and Hypothesis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981.
4. A. Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
5. S. Heims, Constructing a Social Science for America: The Cybernetics Group 1946–1953. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991.
6. Simon Conway Morris. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (see especially Chapter 10, “Evolution Bound: The Ubiquity of Convergence”).
7. D. R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley, Evolution as Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
8. S. Fuller. Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design’s Challenge to Darwinism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2008.
9. T. Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern. New York: New American Library, 1967.
INTRODUCTION
THE NATURE OF NATURE CONFRONTED
BRUCE L. GORDON AND WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI
We all take for granted that scientific theorizing and investigation epitomize rational activity. But what gives science its foundation as a rational, truth-conducive enterprise? Why should we even suppose that nature is intelligible to the human mind? In short, what are the metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions that justify scientific activity? And what bearing does the answer to such questions have on the tenability of philosophical or methodological naturalism, and vice versa?
Once such questions about the ultimate justification of science are raised, it becomes clear that any conclusions regarding the nature of nature derived from scientific practice and rational reflection will depend on the answers we give to these questions. A central issue in this interplay between presuppositions and conclusions, one made all the more pressing by recent scientific advances, is whether the universe is self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-organizing, or whether instead it is grounded in a reality that transcends space, time, matter, and energy. More pointedly, does our universe find its ultimate explanatory principle in matter or mind? Any perspective on the implications of scientific research for resolving this issue must address whether there are limits to what science can tell us, and whether there are essential constraints that circumscribe scientific methodology and the entities to which it may appeal in its explanations.
So shall we say that science is only concerned with giving natural explanations of the natural world and that any other sorts of explanations, whatever their merits, are not scientific? Or shall we say that any rigorous reasoning based on empirical evidence and theory construction is scientific? Setting aside the suggestion that some natural phenomena may not have a rational explanation,1 it is clear that saying either of these things leaves open the logical possibility that certain features of the world have rational explanations that are not natural. It then becomes a matter of semantics whether any such rational but non-natural explanations should be regarded as “scientific.” Were it not for the cultural cachet and authority our era grants to all things scientific, and the regrettable tendency to assimilate rationality to science simpliciter, this matter of semantics would be insignificant. As things stand, however, this game of words has at times become a war of words in a pitched battle symptomatic of a deeper intellectual and cultural divide.
While the editors of this volume stand on one side of this divide, the essays in this volume advance a rational and balanced discussion of these questions. To further this goal, we have refrained from extensive commentary on and analysis of each essay, instead providing a short introduction to each of the seven parts of the book and then letting the authors speak for themselves, so that the readers may judge for themselves. In short, we thought it best to let the readers enter the interplay of ideas and the titanic clash of worldviews in what follows, using their own best judgment as a guide. Before taking leave, however, a brief account of the academic conference that served as the genesis of this compendium is in order.
“THE NATURE OF NATURE” REVISITED
“The Nature of Nature” conference was the first and last fruit of the former Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information and Design (MPC) at Baylor University. The Polanyi Center was also the first, and to this day only, intelligent design think tank at a major research university.2 It was so named with the permission and blessing of Michael Polanyi’s son, John Polanyi, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist at the University of Toronto. The MPC hosted the “Nature of Nature” conference during April 12–15, 2000, on the Baylor campus. The origin of the conference was as follows: Late in the fall of 1999, the director of the MPC, William Dembski, received a substantial grant from the Templeton Foundation. He and the MPC’s associate director, Bruce Gordon, had close ties to Seattle’s Discovery Institute (in particular, to its Center for Science and Culture) as well as to Touchstone Magazine (which had just recently published a special issue on intelligent design coedited by Dembski).3 Together, they approached these organizations about funding a conference devoted to a key theme in the MPC planning document: the nature of nature.4 All three organizations enthusiastically supported the proposed conference. Along with support from Baylor’s Institute for Faith and Learning, the conference was ready to proceed. Its official description read as follows:
Is the universe self-contained or does it require something beyond itself to explain its existence and internal function? Philosophical naturalism takes the universe to be self-contained, and it is widely presupposed throughout science. Even so, the idea that nature points beyond itself has recently been reformulated with respect to a number of issues. Consciousness, the origin of life, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics at modeling the physical world, and the fine-tuning of universal constants are just a few of the problems that critics have claimed are incapable of purely naturalistic explanation. Do such assertions constitute arguments from incredulity—an unwarranted appeal to ignorance? If not, is the explanation of such phenomena beyond the pale of science? Is it, perhaps, possible to offer cogent philosophical and even scientific arguments that nature does point beyond itself? The aim of this conference is to examine such questions.
When John Wilson, the editor of Books & Culture, saw the conference description and the lineup of speakers, he remarked that it promised to be the most important academic conference of the past twenty years. Many of the participants ended up feeling the same way. By any standard, the conference was an unqualified success. Paid attendance was huge. The roster of conference speakers was exceptional, not only for bringing together the very top thinkers about naturalism along with various luminaries in the scientific community, but also for providing just the right balance on all sides of this controversial topic.5
“The Nature of Nature” conference was the Polanyi Center’s glorious beginning. As already intimated, it was also the center’s swan song. The conference ended Saturday, April 15. That following Tuesday, April 18, the Baylor Faculty Senate voted 27 to 2 to shut the center down. The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting the following day, quoted Baylor neuroscientist Charles Weaver: “I have never seen faculty as upset over any issue, and I’ve been here 12 years now. It’s just sheer outrage.” All activities of the center were immediately suspended. Robert Baird, chair of the faculty senate, told the Baylor Lariat (the school newspaper), that the creation of the MPC was “one of the most divisive issues to have arisen on the Baylor campus during my 32 years on faculty.”
Rather than close the center right then, the Baylor administration instituted a “peer-review committee” to examine the center and make recommendations for its future. In October 2000, while recognizing the legitimacy of the academic work associated with the center and the appropriateness of Baylor as a context for it, the review committee recommended (with, in our view, an inadequate grasp of Polanyi’s work and legacy) dropping the Polanyi name and absorbing the center into the Institute for Faith and Learning: “the Committee believes that the linking of the name of Michael Polanyi to programs relating to intelligent design is, on the whole, inappropriate. Further, the Polanyi name has come by now in the Baylor context to take on associations that lead to unnecessary confusion.”6 The Baylor administration complied with all the committee’s recommendations. The Michael Polanyi Center thus ceased to exist.
With all the turmoil surrounding the Polanyi Center (its demise was widely reported across the United States), any hope of procuring a conference proceedings for “The Nature of Nature” event seemed dashed. Both Dembski and Gordon remained on at Baylor as contract faculty for several years following the Polanyi Center’s dismantlement. And for a time, the Baylor administration hoped to salvage something from the wreckage, even holding out the hope that Dembski and Gordon might be rehabilitated in the eyes of the recalcitrant Baylor faculty who had forced the center’s closure. But as the years passed, such hopes vanished. The Baylor administration became further embattled in its strategy to reverse the university’s drift toward secularization and by financial concerns related to the capital projects (facilities expansion) it had undertaken. At this juncture, continued support of Dembski and Gordon was, in the words of the administration, “politically unviable.” Ironically, around the time that Dembski and Gordon left Baylor (May and August 2005, respectively), Robert Sloan, who had hired them, was also forced to step down from the Baylor presidency. It was a clean sweep for the opposition and a clear setback for academic freedom.7 Notwithstanding, a decade after “The Nature of Nature” conference, harbingers of a brighter future for Baylor are evident. Many faculty are committed to sound scholarship and open dialogue with novel research programs like intelligent design—ideas that have an obvious place at an institution like Baylor—and the new president, Kenneth Starr, no stranger to controversy, seems willing to give such faculty his support.
In 2004, toward the end of Dembski’s and Gordon’s tenure at Baylor, contact was renewed with Richard Spencer, who at the time was Child Family Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, and who remains on the faculty there as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Spencer had attended “The Nature of Nature” conference as part of a contingent from his local church (Grace Valley Christian Center) led by the Senior Pastor, Rev. P.G. Mathew. At the conference, Spencer was an active and incisive participant in the discussions following the plenary sessions, and as a consequence he had come to Dembski’s and Gordon’s attention. After contact was renewed, subsequent discussions with Spencer and the church administration about the fate of ID research at Baylor led to the birth of a vision for resurrecting the conference proceedings. Doing so, however, proved easier said than done. Gordon’s work as the primary contact and liaison with the original conference speakers had involved a lot of negotiation and some last-minute substitutions. In addition, over four years had passed since the event had taken place, and most of the original talks, many of which were delivered without preparation of a formal paper, were not available. Those talks which were available in written form were not necessarily representative of the current views of the participants or the current state of research. All of these difficulties were further compounded by the continual controversy swirling around intelligent design as a research program.
Nonetheless, this project was not to be deterred. Grace Valley arranged a generous grant for Bruce Gordon to serve as the primary editor, with William Dembski as coeditor, for a suitably updated compendium based on the conference.8 Such a book would incorporate the latest thinking by key conference participants along with some important voices who were not able to attend the original event. The Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute subsequently also gave its considerable support to the effort. The result, a major landmark in the ongoing debate over Nature’s nature, is the volume you hold in your hands.
Notes
1. For a discussion of this possibility, see the first section of Bruce Gordon’s essay “The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture” in Part I, and the discussion of Humean supervenience in his Part II essay titled “A Quantum-Theoretic Argument against Naturalism.”
2. The opening paragraph from the five-year planning document that led to the founding of the Michael Polanyi Center (a document submitted in March 1999 to Robert Sloan, who was then president of Baylor University) read as follows:
Naturalism currently dominates science, both in the secular and in the Christian academy. According to naturalism, science is best practiced without reference to anything “non-natural.” Granted, science’s proper object of study is nature. Naturalism, however, assumes an impoverished view of nature that artificially limits nature to brute material processes subject to no intelligent guidance or control. The problem with naturalism is not that it limits science to the study of nature, but with its hidden assumptions about the nature of nature. Is nature a seamless causal web controlled solely by undirected natural processes—what Jacques Monod called “chance and necessity”? Or do intelligent causes also play a fundamental and ineliminable role within nature?
The MPC began quietly as one among several academic centers at Baylor, building bridges to the Baylor community through such activities as a faculty book discussion group on the nature of science and its relation to the historic religious foundations of Baylor as an institution. William Dembski was the center’s founder and director, Bruce Gordon its associate director.
The MPC was named after Michael Polanyi, a world-class physical chemist who turned to philosophy later in his career. Among the things that prompted Polanyi’s move to philosophy from science was his desire to foster free and open scientific inquiry. Polanyi had visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalinist repression and saw how scientific inquiry could be subverted through authoritarianism and ideology. In response, Polanyi stressed the need for science to be free of artificial strictures and to regularly reexamine its presuppositions. It was in this spirit that Baylor’s Michael Polanyi Center was founded.
When the website for the MPC debuted in January 2000, a controversy immediately ensued that fell within the parameters of an ongoing battle between the Baylor administration and a certain segment of the Baylor faculty regarding the vision for Baylor as a Christian, and specifically Baptist, institution of higher learning. The administration was interested in restoring the historic Christian foundations of Baylor and encouraging scholarship and research that would advance such concerns; the opposed segment of the faculty, represented by the faculty senate, was more interested in compartmentalizing Baylor’s identity as a Baptist institution and sealing it off from any contact with academic work. The ultimate battle, of course, related to whether Baylor would remain a Christian institution of higher learning or drift into secularization as had so many denominationally founded schools before it. For those interested in the history of the Michael Polanyi Center and a chronological account of the controversy surrounding it, the full planning document, as well as other documents and news reports related to events associated with the center, may be found at http://www.designinference.com/documents/2007.12.MPC_Rise_and_Fall.htm (last accessed August 15, 2009).
3. The July/August 1999 Touchstone was a special double-issue focused on intelligent design. The essays in this issue, with an additional contribution by Bruce Gordon, were subsequently published as a book edited by William Dembski and James Kushiner titled Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001).
4. The key line in the planning document as it relates to the conference theme ran: “The problem with naturalism is not that it limits science to the study of nature, but with its hidden assumptions about the nature of nature.” See footnote 2.
5. The complete conference schedule and roster of speakers can be found as part of the general history of the Michael Polanyi Center at http://www.designinference.com/documents/2007.12.MPC_Rise_and_Fall.htm (last accessed August 15, 2009).
6. Again, see http://www.designinference.com/documents/2007.12.MPC_Rise_and_Fall.htm (last accessed August 15, 2009).
7. This affront to academic freedom, unfortunately, is a common experience among academic representatives and defenders of intelligent design as a research program. Though the debacle surrounding the Polanyi Center was not covered in the film, similar cases involving academic persecution of ID researchers at a variety of institutions formed the subject of a Ben Stein documentary titled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which was released in spring 2008. Those interested in this issue and the defense of academic freedom in origins research can find more information at the website: http://www.academicfreedompetition.com/.
8. See also the grateful remarks of the editors in the acknowledgments.
PART I
NATURALIZING SCIENCE:
SOME HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
INTRODUCTION
This section provides the historical context for the debate about naturalism that runs through the pages of this volume—a debate that begins with an examination of naturalism’s philosophical credentials, and ranges across the spectrum of the sciences from physics and cosmology to the origin and development of life, the nature of mathematical knowledge, the nature of the human mind and consciousness, and, finally, questions of ethics and religion. The theme of the historical essays, which serve as an introduction to this debate, is the origin and rise of philosophical and methodological naturalism in Western thought, and the role these ideas have come to play—for good or ill—in contemporary science and culture.
In the lead essay, “The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture,” philosopher of science Bruce Gordon begins by examining the implications of philosophical naturalism for the very possibility of rational explanation. Philosophical naturalism, he argues, undermines knowledge and rationality altogether, ultimately leading to the instrumentalization of belief and the fragmentation of culture. With the stage thus set, Gordon chronicles the rise of naturalism in conjunction with the creeping secularization of Western civilization, and discusses the confluence of factors that have led to the embrace of an exclusive humanism by the cultural elite—all the while noting that the foundations for modern science were laid in a Judeo-Christian context where order was sought in nature because it was expected, and it was expected because nature itself was regarded as the product of the mind of God. Gordon then corrects various misconceptions about the “warfare” between science and religion that allegedly began with the Enlightenment, and elucidates the role played by Darwinism in the process of secularization and the establishment of philosophical naturalism’s hegemony in the academy, providing an analysis of the deleterious effects Darwinian ideas have had in the broader culture. The essay concludes with an argument for the reconstitution of science on a transcendent foundation, examining the effectiveness of two ways in which this might be done.
The remaining essays focus more explicitly on the rise of methodological naturalism in science and whether it has, on the whole, been a positive development. In “Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs,” historian of science Ronald Numbers chronicles the history of methodological naturalism, and the role that theists played in promoting it, as a constraint on scientific theorizing and investigation. He discusses the motives that various devout Christians in the scientific community had for supporting it as a path to understanding nature. For them at least, Numbers argues, methodological naturalism did not lead to secularization, and it has not invariably led to secularization in society at large. In “Varieties of Methodological Naturalism,” philosopher of science Ernan McMullin discusses the historical relationship between ontological and methodological naturalism, arguing that there are deep problems with the former when taken as a substantive philosophical position. He then carefully analyzes the content of methodological naturalism, revealing at least three forms of it that need to be disentangled in contemporary discussions, and contending that two of them are worthy of support, even by theists.
In the final essay, “Sauce for the Goose: Intelligent Design, Scientific Methodology, and the Demarcation Problem,” philosopher of science Stephen Meyer examines the question of whether science has a definitional essence, and defends the reasonability of intelligent design as a scientific research program by multiple standards of significance. He then dissects methodological naturalism as a meta-criterion for scientificity, arguing that its justification is circular at best, and that the constraint it represents could have a deleterious effect on scientific progress. The historical sciences in particular, he concludes, are better off employing metaphysically neutral criteria, and following the evidence where it leads.
1
THE RISE OF NATURALISM AND ITS PROBLEMATIC ROLE IN SCIENCE AND CULTURE
BRUCE L. GORDON
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
—T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (East Coker)
I1