I've begun reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenemenon and I find it frustrating. It's not the subject matter I don't like, but the style. Leon Wieseltier, in his NY Times review, expressed it nicely: "The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing." Yes, I object to evolution as the explanation for life's origin and sustainability, but even the NY Times got tired of hearing that evolution is the answer to every human phenomena, whether biological, social, economic, religious, or otherwise.
Dennett's assumption is that rational people are obligated to believe the reality of empirically verifiable phenomena. But what naturalistic principle of evolution obligates me to believe something that is empirically verifiable? Now, it may be true that not believing a scientific "fact" leads to my demise, and eventually to my species' extinction, but that's not Dennett's claim: he places his readers under some kind of moral obligation to believe him when he's proven something "empirically" or "rationally". Why should they? In the deadly competition between species that are struggling to survive, there can be no moral obligation of any kind; all that remains is the surviving species (and for it to get in line for the next struggle). Surely our horror in the face of such natural calamities as the recent cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China testify that our deep longing for meaning in life is more than mere evolutionary residue.
Christianity, however, makes no claim to be a non-natural religion, nor does it claim that natural phenomena are in conflict with God's supernatural (or supranatural) activity. Natural means (i.e. sexual intercourse toward procreation, digesting food toward physical growth, sensual observation and cognitive reflection toward learning) are everywhere affirmed and employed in the Christian faith. The medical advances alone that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment bear adequate testimony to the belief at the time that God had so ordered the world that natural explanations could be found for countless natural phenomena which would thereby provide widespread and acceptable remedies for disease, illness, and injury. Indeed, Christians have historically bound themselves earnestly to use as many natural means, in addition to prayer, for the relief of human suffering.
If we suppose that Dennett is able to explain every religious phenomena in purely naturalistic terms, the most it would prove is that religious phenomena can be correctly observed and explained (in scientific terms) but incorrectly understood by unbelievers. In other words, Christianity does not require a person to believe in Jesus before the secrets of human anatomy or oxygen or calculus open up to them. What it requires faith for is so that the believing person will see, in such secrets discovered by empirical methods, the purpose for which such secrets were entrusted to them: the honor of God and the good of humanity.
In the end, Dennett's faith in the verifiability of science is no more rational than anyone's faith in their own religion: both assume that when a truth claim is presented to the mind - whether it has been demonstrated empirically or logically - it is thus obligated to either embrace it or refute it - to neglect it is a moral foul.
2 comments:
It isn't a moral foul not to believe something empirically demonstrable. It's just, well, most unwise. Of course, in some conceptions of morality that amounts to the same thing.
Your position sounds a lot like Plantinga's 'Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism', which has its problems.
Thanks for your comment.
When I called not believing the reality of demonstrable phenomena a 'moral foul', I meant that theists and atheists alike regard it as an offense of some kind and not merely a person's right to disbelieve. C.S. Lewis says that our attempts to persuade each other of the reasonableness of our position are themselves evidence that we believe ourselves to be right and therefore the other to be culpable for not believing us once we've made our case, so to speak. I find such thinking persuasive.
As your website indicates, you've clearly given these argument more thought than I have, so I'll ask you to forbear any oversimplification you perceive in my arguments.
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