Homo Deus and Ontological Naturalism

A fundamental concept in understanding the relationship between religion and science is the distinction between methodological naturalism and ontological naturalism. Methodological naturalism means that one operates as if there is no supernatural. Ontological naturalism is the actual belief that there really is nothing outside of nature. Methodological rationalist fields such as science and history must operate according to methodological naturalism for the simple reason that beings like God, while they may exist, cannot be analyzed using such methods. Now it is important to realize that this is not atheism or some kind of trick to smuggle in atheism. On the contrary, methodological naturalism stands as a major stumbling block to atheism as it requires us to acknowledge that science is totally inadequate for directly telling us if there is a God or not.

This is not mere theist apologetics. There is often incredible value to analytical statements that are not actually true but help us understand a field. A great example of this is the Smithian Man (Homo Economicus). Contrary to stock criticisms of economics, no economist, not even Adam Smith, actually believes that there are such super-rational and all knowing humans such as Smithian Men. That being said, imagining that such a being exists and asking how he might respond to particular situations has proven to be a productive starting point for economics.

To be clear, science may play an indirect role in promoting atheism. A universe in which the methodological naturalism of science did not offer adequate explanations for observable phenomenon (imagine if there really was something in biology that was irreducibly complex) would have a lot more theists. By contrast, if methodological naturalism really allowed us to understand everything about nature, leaving no more questions, then atheists would have good ground to argue that methodological naturalism offers powerful reasons for taking the philosophical position of ontological naturalism. God would then follow fairies as a being that we have no reason to hypothesize about and come to ignore.

Keep this in mind and you can dismiss most polemics from either the theist or atheist sides as nonsense. This brings me to Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In most respects, this is an insightful book if it were not marred by the author's willingness to engage in crude atheist polemics that casually jump between methodological and ontological naturalism.

According to Harari, evolution refutes the existence of the soul. Evolution is a gradual step-by-step process while the soul, for some reason, must be indivisible.

Unfortunately, the theory of evolution rejects the ideas that my true self is some indivisible, immutable and potentially eternal essence. ... Elephants and cells have evolved gradually, as a result of new combinations and splits. Something that cannot be divided or changed cannot have come into existence through natural selection.

... the theory of evolution cannot accept the idea of souls, at least if by 'soul' we mean something indivisible, immutable and potentially eternal. Such an entity cannot possibly result from a step-by-step evolution. natural selection could produce a human eye, because the eye has parts. But the soul has no parts. If the Sapiens soul evolved step by step from the Erectus soul, what exactly were these steps? Is there some part of the soul that is more developed in Sapiens than in Erectus? But the soul has no parts.

You might argue that human souls did not evolve, but appeared one bright day in the fullness of their glory. But when exactly was that bright day? ... biology cannot explain the birth of a baby possessing an eternal soul from parents who did not have even a shred of a soul. (pg. 104-06.)

It should be noted that if we are to take Harari seriously, we should reject the foundation of classical liberalism that individuals exist. We all might just be soulless byproducts of evolution but I would hope our collections of DNA and cells can count as distinct persons with rights. It is certainly not the place of science to say otherwise. As for the soul, any person of faith, who is already comfortable with the notion of evolution should also be open to the idea that souls might exist on some kind of continuum between animals and the divine. Alternatively, why not imagine that some kind of Adam with a soul arose at some point in history born to philosophical zombie parents. Like most religious people, I treat the soul as a black box and do not have strong opinions one way or another about its precise nature (beyond rejecting on monotheist grounds the notion that the soul can, in any way, be a part of God). The idea that science should have some kind of opinion on the matter strikes me as a bad joke on par with creation science.

The bad theology and even worse science continue with Harari attempting to prove that God does not disapprove of homosexuality. Following Sam Harris, Harari wants to turn statements of ethics or religion into factual claims, which science can then weigh-in upon. We are offered the example of the Donation of Constantine, which was used to make the religious claim that the Church was the sovereign authority over Western Europe. In the fifteenth-century, Lorenzo Valla, using historical scholarship and linguistic analysis, demonstrated that this document was a medieval forgery. So, according to Harari, Valla used science to refute a religious claim. Of course, neither history nor linguistics are sciences and their claims are far more tentative. Even if one accepts, as I do, that the Donation was a forgery. This is a relatively minor blow against a belief system that was likely based upon the normative position that the Church should have sovereign power. So some anonymous scribe had Constantine say words that are spiritual facts that he clearly believed in. Why should this affect anyone's simple faith in the Church's supremacy?

Harari applies this same logic to homosexuality. The ethical position that humans should obey God hides the "factual" claim that, 3,000 years ago, God wrote a book denouncing homosexuality, leading to the practical guideline that humans should not practice homosexuality. Harari then brings out the "science" of Bible criticism to demonstrate that this opposition to homosexuality is the product of priests and rabbis rather than the almighty. Harari ends with the retort that: "If Ugandan politicians think that the power that created the cosmos, the galaxies, and the black holes becomes terribly upset whenever two Homo sapiens males have a bit of fun together, then science can help disabuse them of this rather bizarre notion." (pg. 196.)

Textual criticism is not a science and any conclusions it comes to are going to be highly tentative (like any study of ancient history). Science and textual criticism can tell us nothing about the mind of God whether, assuming he was inclined to write a book, he might write the book at once while making it look like it was assembled over a period of time. Alternatively, divine providence might have manifested itself through a historical process of bringing together and redacting different documents. Taking this logic a step further, the history of religion itself might plausibly be a divine revelation allowing man to evolve into something more godly. Whether such spiritually enlightened beings will allow gay marriage or hunt gays for sport is something beyond the boundaries of science.

The problem of how a creator God can actually care about human beings at all let alone their ritual practices (whether gay sex or pig eating) has haunted monotheism from the beginning. Much like the problem of evil, science has been able to add little to what was already a serious problem. Keep in mind that, contrary to the Whig nonsense about there being a Copernican revolution to teach man that he was not the center of the universe, pre-modern Judeo-Christian Islamic theology already taught that man was not that important in the scheme of things. If several thousand years of theology has not made religious fundamentalists, whether in Uganda or in the Bible Belt, cautious about drawing straight lines between God's will and public policy, they are unlikely to listen to scientists.

 

History 112: Final

Here is the final I gave my students. It consisted of two sections, identifies, where they had to give the proper context for a given person or term, and a pair of short essays for them to write. With the exception of a few disasters pretty much everyone did well on this final. The average for this final was about an 84. My philosophy is that I demand more than most from my students, but I am a fairly generous grader.

Identifies – 70 pts (Pick 7)
1. Friedrich Engels
2. John Calvin
3. Thomas Hobbes
4. Spanish Armada
5. Versailles
6. Immanuel Kant
7. Schlieffen Plan
8. Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty
9. Six Day War
10. Maximilian Robespierre

Bonus: Deborah Lipstadt


Essays – 130 (Pick 2)
1. What is the Whig narrative? Give specific examples from the material we covered in class such as the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. How would a Whig view these events? Is the Whig narrative particularly useful? What might some alternatives?
2. What are primary and secondary sources? How does each of these things contribute to an understanding of history? Give specific examples from the reading and your non-fiction book.
3. What were some of the major implications of the Scientific Revolution? Did the Scientific Revolution mean an end to faith? Discuss the religious beliefs of at least three major figures from the Scientific Revolution (e.g. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, Newton)
4. Describe some of the methods used by the Nazi and Soviet Regimes to promote their views. Can brilliant art be put into the service of totalitarian regimes? What is the moral responsibility of the artist for the uses of their work? Can one separate art from the historical context in which it was created?

The Whig Narrative of History: Secular Creationism (Part II)

(This is the continuation of an earlier post. See here.)

This thousand year period of church darkness came to an end in the fifteenth century with the dawn of the Renaissance. In truth, even to use the word "Renaissance" bespeaks of a Whig bias. The word Renaissance means rebirth. In particular, this is supposed to refer to the rebirth of classical culture, which had lain dormant for a thousand years. The person most responsible for the popular understanding of the Renaissance was the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt. According to Burckhardt:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Part II chapter 1.)

For Burckhardt the Renaissance meant a rediscovery of the individual. Man became conscious of himself, and by extension the state, as works of art; which could be fashioned to suit the will of the individual. At a cultural level this led to the rise of Renaissance art with its increased emphasis on the human form, but it also, at a scholarly level, led to the rise of Humanism. Humanist scholars recovered many classical texts, which were unknown in the western world, hence widening the canon of texts. More importantly, Humanism, in defiance of the medieval Church, placed man at the center of the world.

The Church came under attack as new horizons, both literal and figurative, were opened. The invention of the printing press brought literacy to the masses. This opened up new horizons as people came to be able to read, and think for themselves. No longer were people enslaved to the Church and its interpretation of the Bible; now they could interpret the Bible for themselves. This led to the Reformation, in which Martin Luther broke away from the Catholic Church. Luther believed in the rights of the common man to read the Bible for himself. For that purpose he translated the Bible into German, overthrowing the Latin Vulgate.

Christopher Columbus literally opened up a new horizon with his discovery of the New World in 1492. The voyages of Columbus and those who followed in his wake demonstrated that the world was round and not flat as most Europeans had believed. Thus people’s eyes were opened to the fact that the Church and Aristotle were not infallible and that courageous individuals, unshackled by medieval dogma, could accomplish things that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations.

The Renaissance’s emphasis on man as an individual and its willingness to challenge Church dogma bore its ultimate fruit with the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo overturned the Ptolemaic view of the solar system, which placed the earth at the center of the universe, with the heliocentric view. Overturning Ptolemy meant a lot more than just a change in man’s view of the solar system; it also was the overthrow of Aristotelian thought and of the Church which had supported it. No longer would man live at the center of his tiny solar system, in which angels and even God lived right above the earth just out of reach. No longer could man view himself as the central character of a divine drama. Mankind now awakened to the fact that the Earth was just a tiny, and not particularly important, part of a much larger cosmos. Christianity’s man-centered narrative must now give way to the forces of science.

While the Church tried to hold back this tide of new knowledge by persecuting scientists such as Galileo and putting books they disagreed with on the Index and forbidding people to read them, ultimately they failed. With the coming age of the Enlightenment, the Church found itself more and more under attack as philosophes such as Voltaire not only challenged specific doctrines of Christianity but also came to openly reject it. This overthrow of Christianity also brought with it the overthrow of the medieval aristocracy. With the Church no longer powerful enough to protect it, the whole edifice of the medieval hierarchy came tumbling down in the wake of democratic revolutions, first in America and in France then across Europe. These democratic revolutions overthrew both the Church and the aristocracy and in its place established freedom of religion and the equality of all mankind.

(To be continued …)

The Struggle between Mysticism, Magic, Miracles and Religion

While we tend to think of mysticism, the claim to possess some sort of individual knowledge or relationship with a divine or metaphysical being, as being synonymous with religion, in truth mysticism poses a challenge to established religions that is actually quite similar to the challenge posed by science. While all religions rest upon mystical claims, such as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father or Mohammed receiving the Koran, these are all things that supposedly happened far in the past and are divorced from reality as we know it today.

As I have argued before, established religions are built not just around doctrinal claims, but also around traditions, which grant authority to established power structures. For example, Judaism claims to be not just a true doctrine, but also to be the heir of the Mosaic tradition. This view is encapsulated in the opening of Ethics of the Fathers: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave it to Joshua and Joshua to the Elders and the Elders to the Prophets and the Prophets gave it to the Men of the Great Assembly.” (Ethics of the Fathers 1:1) Similarly, replacement theology Christianity, which believes that Christianity is “Verus Israel,” the true Israel, claims to be the heirs of that same tradition, in addition to the New Testament tradition while Duel Covenant Christianity only claims to be the heirs the New Testament tradition. As with magic and miracles, mysticism is an end run around such traditions. The moment one can claim to receive information from a maggid, Elijah the prophet, the Angel Gabriel or for that matter Jesus or the Virgin Mary, then you no longer need to submit to any religious tradition and can stand in defiance against any priest, rabbi or imam. Because of this both Judaism and Christianity, while in theory being open to mystical claims, have, have in practice treated mystics with great suspicion.

What does this have to do with science; science makes empirical claims, subject to outside verification while the mystic’s claim is completely subjective? When dealing with science, the usual temptation is to focus on how scientific claims often contradict established religious doctrines. The problem with placing such emphasis on such a threat is that it ignores the history of theology and it fails to take into account the scope of different religious traditions.

The notion that a religion might be contradicted by outside forms of thought is hardly a product of the Scientific Revolution. Contrary to the traditional Whig narrative of medieval intellectual history, medieval thinkers were not simply devoted to reading the Bible literally and accepting Aristotle as the something infallible. Ever since Philo, Jews, Christians and, later, Muslims, have struggled to understand their respective faiths in light of the challenge posed by the Greek philosophical tradition. This, attempt to harmonize the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions with Greek philosophy, formed, as Harry A. Wolfson argued, the foundation of the medieval religious tradition.

There are many parts of the Bible that, from an Aristotelian point of view are problematic. So geologists, in the early nineteenth century, came along and showed that the Earth was millions of years old. According to how most medieval thinkers understood Aristotle, Aristotle believed that the universe was never created and always existed. So Copernicus and Galileo raised certain issues about how to understand the miracle in chapter ten of the book of Joshua, in which the sun stands still. In Aristotelian thought all miracles are problematic. If you assume that the universe has always existed, then the laws of nature become logical necessities. This would mean that miracles do not just violate the physical laws of nature; they also violate the laws of logic as well. As such, miracles are not just physically impossible but logically impossible as well.

Why is science threatening in ways that Aristotle never was? One possible explanation is that science forms its own authority structure, with its own traditions and, most importantly, its own “miracles.” The philosophy of Aristotle never claimed to perform miracles nor did it ever radically change people’s lives. This is not the case with science; we live in a world blessed by the creations of science, its “miracles.” In fact, I am typing these words, at this very moment, on one of these “miracles” of science. These “miracles” of science, like the miracles of traditional religions, testify to the truth of science. They also create a system and tradition of authority to which one can appeal to. Even if science never made a heterodox claim, the mere fact that science can operate as a system and tradition of authority makes it a threat to any established religion.