Intranaturalism, Possibly Continued

I think I had a previous post about intranaturalism, the philosophy (and word!) that I invented. It is basically the doctrine that one should look within nature to find meaning, purpose, good, beauty, etc., rather than looking outside, around, or above nature. Well, after attending the Janus Conversation "Can God Exist?," a supposed debate about whether belief in god is reconcilable with science and/or a scientific worldview, I find myself thinking in large part about intranaturalism.

UPDATE: This is really, really, long, so I'm going to put most of it after the fold.



The debate was very interesting, though not much of a debate. Jason Brennan, the philosopher of the due, spoke first and argued that, yes, theism is compatible with science, but this is a boring question. The real question, he said, was whether it was reasonable to believe in god under a scientific worldview. Frustratingly, to me at least, he then refused to answer that question, being content merely to point out that we had asked the question wrong. (Incidentally, I thought that we meant to ask him whether belief in god was compatible with philosophy, which might've gotten him to answer the question!) He then gave a bunch of fairly standard examples of ways in which religious claims often make themselves untestable or ways in which a religious claim might fail to be reasonable.

The scientist, Ken Miller (who is somewhat famous for his position in this debate in the broader context), spoke second. He also didn't really answer the question, since he considered his position of the central debate to have been conceded. Instead, he talked about whether a theist can be a good scientist, saying, not shockingly, that they can be. I actually liked the first half of his talk very much, which was mainly devoted to talking about how good science is and why religious people are wrong to oppose science. He started losing me when he shifted to specifically challenging some claims made by various of the New Atheists, including my personal favorite Richard Dawkins. Miller argued that Dawkins' statement that this universe has exactly the properties we would expect if there were no design, no creator, no inherent purpose, etc. was a fundamentally non-scientific statement, and therefore had zero standing in a scientific worldview. He then said that he thought a contrary statement, that this universe has exactly the properties we would expect if there were an intelligent creator who wanted to create conditions that promoted freedom and the opportunity for love, was equally scientifically valid and, in his opinion, equally philosophically valid.

Then the question-and-answer portion started up. The question I initially wanted to ask was, okay, it's clearly not possible to disprove god via science, but is it possible to make an informed guess or shift the perceived odds legitimately? In other words, is it not possible to make certain logical deductions about what traits in the physical world we might expect given an intelligent creator, or given no intelligent creator, and see which of the predictions are more true, and then draw tentative conclusions based on that *scientific* evidence? However, someone else asked a similar question before I got my chance, something I think about the "Problem of Evil," which Miller deflected by arguing, essentially, that this world is in fact the best of all possible worlds for facilitating the things which god wants. In any event, I decided that my question was a little too similar to that question, and tried to come up with another one. (Side note: that questioner responded, when asked by Miller how god could've made a better world with less suffering, that god could've made us all vegetarians. I was happy. Miller responded not by saying that the process of evolution is uncertain and therefore a god using evolution wouldn't have control over whether or not we are vegetarians, but by trotting out the old "vegetarians kill plants!" chestnut. He's a plant biologist, so apparently he's indignant at our consumption of plants. First of all, he does it too; second of all, we have, of course, a defense to that charge, and it is sentience. I would've loved to point that out, but it wasn't germane.)

The question I did ask was the following: "If as it happens there does exist one or more gods, what is to stop science from claiming jurisdiction over he/she/it/them?" The answer I got was wholly unsatisfactory. Brennan basically said that when he says science he means the empirical sciences, like physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, etc., and that there are some things beyond the reach of the empirical sciences, like the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4. Miller essentially agreed with him. Neither of them really answered my question, though to be fair I think it's a question that is meant not to be answered up front and requires a little bit of explanation to show what I'm driving at. I didn't have a forum to give that explanation during the event, so here it is.

Yeah, 2 + 2 = 4 is not an empirical question subject to the empirical sciences. It is, rather, a tautology. The word "two" is defined as being the number which is obtained by adding the unit onto itself; the word "four" is defined as being the number which is obtained by adding another unit onto two, and then another one. From these definitions, plus the definition of addition, we get 2 + 2 = 4. Incidentally, we really get 2 + 2 = 4 from the distributive property, because if you want your number system to have the distributive property then you arrive at the same order of integers regardless of whether you start from addition, as I did in that example, or start from multiplication. (Starting from multiplication would mean that you start with the first prime, and then the next prime, and then the prime after that, etc., and see how they fit together along with a unit that had no powers of any prime in it.)

The question of the existence of god is a fundamentally different question. I answered the question "Does two plus two equal four?" using only the definitions of the worlds two, four, plus, and equals. Try answering the question "Does god exist?" using only the definition of the words god and exist. If you can, then your definition of god is probably something like a pantheistic definition, i.e. god = the world, which is, as Richard Dawkins put it, just sexed-up atheism. Using a definition of god that includes the "intelligent creator" part, I don't think that the statement "god exists" is either tautologically true or false, unlike the statement "2 + 2 = 4".

In fact, I think that the crucial part of the question is the word "exist." Because the word "exist" clarifies that we are talking about a factual question here. Yes, it is (in the present day at least) a question which is very difficult and/or impossible to answer based on empirical evidence, at least based on current technologies. But it is a factual question. Either an intelligent force created the universe, or that did not happen. There is a factual answer that exists, regardless of whether or not we are currently capable of easily and directly investigating it. It is, I think, a rather narrow, hollow view of science which says that science encompasses only those things which we can investigate, rather than those things which are in principle investigatable.

This brings me back to intranaturalism. I think that my biggest disagreement with Brennan and possibly my biggest disagreement with Miller (maybe edged out by his belief in the Christian god) is their definition of the words "nature" and "science." To me, both of these are concepts which automatically expand to include everything which is. Actually, that's not quite true: the concepts simply include everything which is. Our understanding of nature and science gradually expands to include everything which we either think, know, or have reason to suspect might exist. The most forceful instance in which I took issue with something one of the presenters said on these grounds were when Miller, I think, discussed the "first cause principle," Aristotle's game of "turtles all the way down." Basically, the logic goes "everything has a cause, and those causes have causes, etc.; therefore, either there is an infinite chain of causes or there is a first cause, which has no cause." Aristotle, and I think also Miller, thinks that god is that first cause. But Miller seemed to assume that the first cause must be "supernatural." First of all, the proper scientific response to the first cause argument is, 1) there's no inherent reason to doubt an infinite chain of causality, and 2) if there is a first cause, we don't know what it is currently, but we're working on it. And I would also argue that the first cause is inherently within at least the jurisdiction of science, which I think attempts to explain the world as it is, and also nature as I understand it.

There are, of course, other ways to interpret the word "nature." I can think of two main ones. The first is trivial for this discussion: in that context, "nature" means the world minus humans and their influence. A tree is natural, a concrete sidewalk or the computer I'm typing on is not. This is clearly different from the use of nature in the word "supernatural." I also think it's an example of human exceptionalism and arrogance, but that's another matter altogether. The other alternate use of "nature" would define nature as encompassing only the things of this universe. Obviously, adopt this definition and my argument collapses. But I think it's not a reasonable definition, and as an example I would use the cosmology of the His Dark Materials trilogy. In these works, there are many parallel universes, the parallel universes predicted by certain kinds of quantum theory, and it is possible to move between them. A universe very much like ours is one of these worlds. Suppose we in fact live in one universe attached to that kind of quantum-parallel-universe structure, but just don't know it because no one's cut an opening into our world yet. Now suppose that one of them does tomorrow. Would the other worlds we encountered through that cut be outside of nature? Would we consider them "supernatural" simply because we didn't know they existed yesterday? Or paranatural or extranatural or whatever. I don't think so: I think that would be an absurdly narrow understanding of nature. Obviously, it just was the case that the nature in which we resided was fundamentally different than we had thought a week ago, and we now know that we were wrong. That happens all the time in science. Why should god and the realm he/she/it inhabits be any different? Oh, sure, that realm might be quite different. It might be, in some sense, "spiritual," in a way that our world is "material." But so what? Isn't that just the truer nature of the existence we all inhabit? Sure, it might be useful to have a word differentiating our part of that existence from god's part, but "material" vs. "spiritual" works well enough, I think.

I understand science's mandate as being the seeking of reliable knowledge about the extant world. If god exists, then it is implicitly part of science's mandate to seek knowledge about that god. I don't see how we get around that. Maybe human scientists are incompetent to make those investigations, but that is a practical, incidental limit, not a limit in principle about the status of god as beyond the reach of science. If god exists, then theology is a scientific discipline, at least if it is pursued in a manner consistent with the standards that inform the word "reliable" in my definition of science above. The conflict between god and science comes from the following fact: there is no good evidence available to we poor humans that reliably indicates the existence of god. We might be wrong. I might be wrong, scientifically speaking. If I am wrong, it is scientifically speaking. This is an empirical question, it is within the bounds of science, it is within the bounds of nature. Notions of salvation, even, are scientific questions: what does it mean to be saved? Does hell exist? What is it like, if it does? How does one avoid it? Does heaven exist? What is it like? How does one get there? These are all questions about the properties of things that exist; i.e., scientific questions. Separation of church and state is a valuable principle of governance; separation of church and lab is an absurd principle.

Questions of pure morality are another story, and are also somewhat removed from religion even in a religious world. Is X good? There's no question of existence there. Science might be able to inform the discussion, especially within parameters; e.g., if we stipulate that unnecessary suffering is bad, then the question "Is X bad?" is answered if the question "Does X cause unnecessary suffering?" a fundamentally scientific question, is answered in the affirmative. But science doesn't establish that unnecessary suffering is bad. Neither, for that matter, does "God says X is bad." You need first to establish "Things god says about morality are true." I think that all questions of pure morality ultimately boil down to an opinion, such as "Unnecessary suffering is bad."

But the matter of god's existence is not a question of morality, and it is not a tautology, it is a question of fact. And science's purview is to investigate and answer questions of fact. And I feel that nature is given too narrow, too worthless a construction if it only includes the universe we observe, regardless of whatever else exists. Therefore, any god or gods, be they Adonai, Allah, Yahweh, Poseidon, Thor, Osiris, or any other, is within the scope of both science and nature.