Faith, Psychology, and Human Nature

Periodically, undergraduate psychology students enrolled in a course dealing with the relation of the Christian faith to their science interview me. As a Christian naturalist, I am, it seems, an exotic specimen.  Here’s a compilation of some of the sessions:

Question 1: How can a belief in human personhood (a human being as a rational, conscious agent capable of making choices, having limited but real freedom, being morally accountable, reflective, creative, of a unified identity across situations and across situations) be reconciled with the conception of man as the product of causal laws (whether they be physiological, genetic, cultural, historical etc.)? If these views cannot be reconciled, why not?

Our conceptions of freedom and responsibility are complex and not necessarily coherent. They are not theoretical concepts, devised with a view to consistency; they arise out of ordinary human experience, where they serve different purposes in different contexts.

I think the “compatibilist” account of freedom is generally adequate: a free choice is one that has the “right sort” of causes: With respect to freedom, what more could I ask for than that my choices be caused by my deliberative process, involving my very own, reflectively considered, beliefs and desires?

However, the idea of responsibility is more problematic: Part of our idea of responsibility appears to be that our choices be caused by our desires and beliefs, i.e. that they be free as compatibilism understands freedom. And part of our idea of responsibility coheres with this, viz.,. that a person is responsible for what she does just if her behavior is “sensitive to reasons;” i.e. she would have chosen differently if she had relevantly different desires and beliefs. But another part of our idea of responsibility seems to require that human beings be “agent causes,” i.e. that there are no antecedent events that cause our choices. But no material thing, and thus no human being, can be an agent cause.

My view moves along the lines of saying that while we are not—and, as material beings, could not possibly be—agent causes, over time we can become increasingly good material “simulations” of them, to the extent that much of what matters about us is explainable as due to our free choices.

Question 2: Regardless of whether one has a deterministic or a humanistic (or theological) view of a human being, it is safe to say that people are being held responsible for their actions in all societies. Yet if one’s behavior is completely determined, as some scientists claim, how can we be held responsible for it?

I don’t believe determinism is true, but I don’t think it makes any difference in this context. We are completely enmeshed in the cause and effect structures of nature, so our choices are no less caused than other macroscopic events in the world.

So, how can we be held responsible for our choices if they are caused? I think we need to distinguish ordinary, human responsibility—a responsibility appropriate for creatures—from an absolute responsibility appropriate only for an agent cause, i.e., for God. Any attribution of responsibility to a human being needs to take account of the fact that we do not ultimately create ourselves; our rational choices are caused by our beliefs and desires, some of which are prior to any choices we make. We cannot be completely responsible for what we are; and what we do depends in part on what we are, so we have only a relative kind of responsibility. (This places constraints on what it would be right to do to a person by way of punishment: If no ‘ultimate’ responsibility, then no ‘ultimate’ punishment)

Question 3: We can say that determinism hasn’t thoroughly permeated the society, and that people in general do recognize that human beings make choices freely, and are therefore responsible for making the wrong ones (think of breaking laws and suffering legal consequences). However, if a deterministic view of the person prevails in the end, do you think this will bring an end to holding people responsible for their actions? Can any society truly exist if everyone is left alone to do whatever one is “determined” to do?

Among the causes of a person’s choices and behavior are his beliefs and desires, and what he believes and desires at any point is in part an effect of what other people have said and done. The fact that a person’s behavior is caused does not imply that it cannot be affected by social constraints. (The fact that someone is caused—or even causally determined—to do something doesn’t mean he was fated to do it, that he would have done it no matter what anyone else said or did, that he would have done it even if he had no reason to do it, or strong reasons to not do it.)

From my point of view, the worry is that the incompatibilist view will persuade people they are less responsible that they actually are, or that they will not consider it worthwhile to make the effort to become more free, more morally responsible.

If we have scientific findings that say our choices are caused, and a philosophical theory that says caused choices cannot be free, why would anyone reject the science and hold to the philosophical theory? Why would anyone have more confidence in a philosophical theory than in scientific findings?

Question 4: What is the evolutionary perspective on this issue?

Evolutionary theory stresses the fact that humans are to a high degree adapted for social life. We are “hard wired” to care a great deal about what others think, say, and do; to want to cooperate with others; to be somewhat altruistic; and to have intense, action-motivating emotions connected to perceptions of human suffering, and to unfairness, inequity, injustice, etc.

Question 5: Some Christians claim that scientific determinism is compatible with the Christian doctrine of predestination. God has predetermined every detail in His divine plan. The causal laws are simply the means by which God works out His plan. Human freedom is an illusion.

That’s an extreme version of predestination, isn’t it? One might say instead that predestination is a matter of God acting efficaciously to bring human beings to saving faith in Christ, i.e., that God’s choices about whom to do this for are necessary and sufficient for the person to have that faith. One need not move from “God decides who to save” to “All events are intended by God.” In general, I don’t think there’s a tight connection between the general (philosophical) issue of freedom and responsibility, and the (theological) issue of God’s role in salvation. We could be completely free, but still lack the ability to do what is required for salvation.

I believe that God’s acting upon a person is necessary to bring her to faith in Christ, but we should assume the way this usually occurs is by persons of faith—the body of Christ—bringing the gospel to her. God principally works in this world not “magically” but through us.

Question 6: The question is: if we can’t help but do what we do, does this not imply not that we need to be helped rather than punished for our behavior (as some humanists claim), but that no help would help, since our actions had already been predetermined? In this case, how can God hold us responsible for our sins? Is there an alternative way of looking at this? Please elaborate.

I think that most people who have this view about salvation are also compatibilists; i.e., they believe that a choice can be both free and caused. At least I was when I believed it.

Note, though, that a compatibilist cannot accept these questions at face value; they tend to have incompatibilism built in as an implicit assumption.  The compatibilist will resist your move from “I was caused to do x” to “I can’t help doing x;” he’ll say you were caused to do x, but if things had been different, e.g., if you had better information, or had deliberated further, or had different desires, etc. then you would not have done it. (versus: you would have done it no matter what: you were fated to do it.) The compatibilist will also reject the implicit idea that causes always compel. Your beliefs and desires cause your choices; they don’t force you to do things. Various things cause you to believe what you believe and to want what you want; but it is odd to describe these causes as forcing you to believe and desire as you do. If you choose to buy pizza because you want to get something to eat, and you believe that the best way to satisfy this desire is by buying pizza, then, at face value, you were not forced to buy pizza, irrespective of whether your reasons (beliefs and desires) cause your choices. We might ascertain that you have a pizza-eating compulsion; this discovery would lead us to reverse the judgment and conclude that your choice was not free: you would have chosen to buy pizza even if you had very good reasons not to. A compulsive desire is a cause of the wrong sort, so far as freedom is concerned. It’s there being a cause of the wrong sort, one that renders you insensitive to reasons, not there being a cause per se, that robs you of freedom.

But, having said all this on behalf of “compatibilist Calvinism,” I don’t think it works. If an event happens because it’s what God intends to happen, then God, and no one else, is responsible for it. If determinism were true, then all responsibility would be God’s and effectively none of it would be ours. If you do something because your beliefs and desires cause you to do it, but you have these beliefs and desires because someone else caused you to have them, with the intention of your doing it, where her intention guarantees you will do it, then it is more her action than yours. Were that person God, none of the responsibility would be yours. But determinism is not true; not everything that happens is intended by God (or even foreknown). There is a kind of responsibility appropriate to rational creatures. Still, God created the world with its initial conditions and causal laws, and thus is responsible for what happens, though to a lesser degree than if determinism were true. It seems to me that God has so devised the world that God and creatures share responsibility for what creatures do.

However, the bottom line is that God does not hold us responsible for our sins: if he did we’d be sunk. But Christ died for the sins of the world. There can’t be blame or punishment left over. I don’t think there’s a way out of these dilemmas that does not accept that. One aspect of what the crucified God means is that God assumes responsibility for his creatures’ wrongdoing.

Question 7: Other Christians claim that we are truly free only if and when we act out of our God-given identity, our character. We are not free when we succumb to external pressures. In my mind, the question remains: if our character and our identity had already been predetermined, and we are only free when we act out of that identity, isn’t freedom in the ordinary sense (having genuine alternatives to chose from) lost? When we sin, acting out of our God-given identity, does this not make God the author of sin? Again, how can He then hold us responsible? Is better then not to be free (not act out of our identity), and simply follow God’s laws (external pressure)?  What is your opinion on these two positions and how would you tackle the questions raised? Is there another way to look at this dilemma? Can we be free and not free at the same time? If so, how? How do you reconcile, if at all, causal laws by which our body operates with the notion of real freedom? How does the evolutionary perspective on persons fit into theological notions of free will?

First, why believe that there is such a thing as a God-given identity? It seems to me that there are some pretty general things that God wants for human beings: he wants us to trust him, to love one another as we love ourselves, to have meaningful, interesting lives, to be happy, to be responsible persons, and so on. But I assume that God wants us to decide for ourselves what to become and responsibly to pursue the ends we’ve chosen. The alternative seems to be that God has some sort of semi-secret, detailed blueprint that we are supposed to figure out.

On my view, we can be free only if our choices are caused by our own, reflectively considered beliefs and desires, i.e., we’re free to the extent that we are rational agents. If that is our generic identity as persons, then it’s true that we are free only insofar as we act in accord with our identity. But that amounts to the uninteresting fact that to be free you have to be free.

By the way, though, I find it strange that anyone would think we are not free when we “succumb to external pressures.” Suppose Prof. W. is broke, and you offer him $100 for an A in the course. He knows he should not accept the bribe, but he succumbs to temptation. Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing we think he should be blamed for? And if we think he is to blame, don’t we think he is morally responsible for doing it, and that it was a free choice on his part? (On the other hand if to “succumb to external pressures” is simply to be caused to do something in a way that renders your beliefs and desires irrelevant, then what you do is not free, and perhaps not an action at all. But what the compatibilist won’t buy is characterizing your own reasoned desires and beliefs as “external pressures.”)

Question 8: Where does, in your opinion, human responsibility originate? Can you reconcile, and in what ways, theological views and the views of evolutionary psychology with regards to human responsibility?

We are responsible because we act for reasons (beliefs and desires) and our choices can be influenced by rational deliberation. A responsible person is someone you can reason with; she’s responsive to reasons. Dogs, cats, and small children are not responsible because giving them good reasons to do something does not suffice to get them to do it. They have to be dealt with by other means, involving non-rational constraints, training, physical force, and so forth.

But, as I say above, we are not ultimately responsible because we never escape a causal history that traces back to desires and beliefs that are simply “given,” not the products of rationally chosen processes of inquiry and reflection. (Perhaps here the distinction to make is between being responsible—which we are—and having unlimited culpability—which we don’t have.) We never directly choose what to desire or what to believe; we choose what to do in light of those reasons; and we choose, or ought to choose, to put ourselves in the position of acquiring only true beliefs and good desires. So we are partially, not totally, responsible for the reasons for which we act. Only God can be responsible in this ultimate sense: everything about God is what God freely chooses to be, except of course when he makes himself vulnerable to us, as the Christian faith claims he does.

Question 9: From an evolutionary perspective, how would you describe the origins of morality? How is this view, if at all, compatible with the Christian view that morality originates with God and is innate in human beings who are created in the image of God? Basically, if values are derived from this world, how can any society (or any man) hold the others accountable for their actions? Who is to say that certain values are better than others if there is no ultimate authority, if there are no ultimate, transcendental values, against which to judge human behavior? If we reject the God-established normative standards of behavior, and insist that it is through the evolution of culture that we inherited our values, are we not left with cultural relativism? And isn’t it obvious that some cultural practices are superior?

Contrast three issues:

(1) What is the truth about morality? E.g., is it right to smother my roommate to make her snoring stop?

(2) What makes the truth about morality what it is; e.g. why is it morally wrong to smother your roommate to make her stop snoring?

(3) Why do human beings have the capacity to know the truth about morality, and why are we motivated to act on it; e.g. why do we find the idea of your suffocating your roommate so horrible?

Evolutionary theory has nothing to say directly relevant to the first question or the second. It addresses the third question only. (Analogy: “What’s the mathematical truth, e.g., what’s the solution to the equation 1 + 1 = ?” vs. “Why is the mathematical truth what it is, e.g., why is it true that 1+1=2?” vs. “Why can human beings know that 1+1=2?”)

The typical evolutionary view is that human beings have the capacity to acquire moral concepts, make moral judgments, engage in moral reasoning, and (especially) to have and act on moral emotions, because natural selection favors creatures that have these capacities; they are important adaptations for social life. (Note that for evolutionary psychology, the crucial changes our pre-human ancestors underwent after they departed the main chimpanzee line five or six million years ago were adaptations to the social, not the natural, environment.)

However, an evolutionary answer to question (3) might have indirect relevance for question (2): Certain kinds of explanations might have implications about the nature of moral knowledge and its object, e.g., that, given its nature and origins, it is not a grasp of some sort of transcendent reality.

Does morality originate in God? Some Christians think moral principles are like commands God gives, and thus that morality originates in God in a direct way; but this is not the main line of Christian thought about the nature of morality. Most Christians who have thought much about it say morality depends on human nature, and thus originates with God, the creator of humanity, but only indirectly. This traditional view says that if we find out what human nature is, we can draw conclusions about what we ought to do.

Evolutionary psychology is in some respects on board with this: the human moral capacity is a feature of a universal human nature. This contrasts with views that describe morality as being culturally relative. But evolutionary theory does not suppose that we can infer what we ought to do from a description of human nature. (No more than an evolutionary or psychological explanation of how we can do math can tell us what’s true in math.)

I see morality as originating with human beings; it’s a result of how we evolved, not something handed down from God. I think of God as being interested in morality only because God cares about persons, and morality involves constraints on how we treat persons. God cares about morality not for its own sake but only insofar as it coincides with what’s good for the human beings he loves, and serves his purpose of having a personal relationship with us. (Sin should not be understood as infraction of a moral law, but as failure to trust God.) And I think our innate morality can and should be criticized and modified from the perspective of the Christian gospel. I imagine Jesus was doing something like this when he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” (It should also be criticized and modified from a general perspective of rationality.)

Question 10: What do you think of survival (that is, reproductive success that leads to survival of the species) as the ultimate value? Do you see any problems with Skinner, or evolutionary psychology, claiming that reproductive success is the ultimate value by which all other values should be judged? Does the end, in this sense, justify the means (think Hitler and the preservation of Aryan culture)?

I don’t see either of these research programs—Skinner’s zany personal pontifications aside—as having implications about what is valuable. At most they might tell us why we value what we do. (As a theory of the mind, behaviorism is defunct, anyway.)

Evolutionary theory says that many (but surely not all) human characteristics can be understood as adaptations, and that the primary explanation of how we acquired these adaptations involves natural selection. Human beings have a characteristic because, in the past, creatures who had it were more likely to reproduce than creatures lacking it, and it was a heritable characteristic.  At most this predicts that, under certain circumstances, a human being is likely to value such and such. It tells us nothing about what we ought to value, i.e., about what we have good reasons to value. Some of the characteristics we have (e.g., wanting to care for infants, dislike for cheaters) are ones we judge as morally good, and worth encouraging; others (e.g., dislike of strangers, hatred of homosexuals) we judge morally bad, and as worthy of being suppressed, or at least denied the categorical force we reserve for moral matters. The fact that some feature of human beings is the product of natural selection tells us nothing about whether we ought to approve of it. Nor does it tell us whether we can do something to mitigate it.

It is important to distinguish a causal explanation of why people have the motivations they have from claims about what motivates them to act.  E.g., why do oranges taste good to most human beings? Maybe, a liking for the taste of things rich in vitamin C was selected for in an ancestral environment in which such sources were rare but getting enough of it was a factor in health, and thus reproductive fitness. But that does not mean that people who want to eat oranges have getting vitamin C as a goal; lots of people want to eat oranges even though they’ve never heard of vitamin C; they eat them because they like the taste.

The same goes for the motivation to have sex: people have sexual desire because in the past there was natural selection for it—we can be quite confident that all our ancestors had sex, and that we are descended from no one who consistently avoided it! And there was natural selection for sexual desire because those who had it tended to have more sex, and more descendents. But this does not mean that people are, or ever have been, motivated to have sex because they have the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness. People would want to have sex even if (somehow) they did not notice its connection to reproduction. Of course, people who do have the goal of making a baby will want to have sex for that reason (just as someone who wants to get more vitamin C might want to eat more oranges.) But plenty of people want to have sex even when they do not want to produce offspring. And even people who have sex as a way to get a baby are not trying to maximize reproductive fitness: suppose someone has the choice of having one baby and keeping it, or having ten, all of whom would be given away immediately to a reliable adoption agency; she’d choose the former, even though it’s the latter that would maximize fitness.

Question 11: What experiences have influenced your view of the relationship between religion and psychology, or the separation of the two? What are some illustrations of how you experience this relationship in your work?

I was raised in a community of quite conservative Christians, many of whom were also natural scientists who saw no conflict between faith and science. E.g., I learned the theory of evolution in Sunday school, from a distinguished biochemist whose approach was “Isn’t it wonderful how God made us?” So the anti-scientific mentality that pervades evangelical Christianity is barely comprehensible to me.

My interest in psychology is roundabout, by way of my philosophical interest in the nature of the human mind, and my view that philosophical inquiry should be constrained by science.  Psychology became interesting to me only after it became clear that evolutionary explanation can be applied to the workings of the mind, that there is a good deal of quite intricate, modularized innate causal structure in the mind, and that it is not a “blank slate.” When I went to college in the 1970’s, much of psychology, particularly where it aspired to rigor, focused on learning theory, which was very boring. Without some such grounding in the underlying causal mechanisms, much psychology seems to me to be, if not sheer speculation, at least not sustaining the claim upon rational belief that science enjoys.

Question 12: How have ideas or issues from psychology influenced the way in which you interpret religious faith (e.g., your interpretation of Scripture, or God, or morality)? Are there any other issues for which you presently believe that you must take into account of psychology in understanding a specific issue of the faith?

I think there are at bottom two main ways human beings have tried to understand themselves: one has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy, one in modern science. For historical reasons, mainly having to do with the fact that when Christian theology was first articulated, Greek philosophy provided a set of default suppositions about the world, the Christian faith absorbed various assumptions that are neither true nor ultimately consistent with Christianity. Modern science, which has its origins not in pagan Greece but in late medieval Christianity, offers an alternative account of human nature, one that is both true and more consistent with Christianity. Unfortunately, today many of the ideas that come from the Greeks are still assumed to fit with Christianity, and ideas from science are regarded as opposed to it.

Question 13: Have issues of religious faith influenced the way in which you interpret psychology?

I believe it is important that we not ignore the fact that we are creatures: We need to avoid the temptation to inflate our status, so as to see ourselves as more god-like than we are. From a biblical perspective, it seems that human pride, the desire “to be as gods,” is a much more significant concern than any tendency to see human beings as less special than they really are. I regard the fact that we are physical beings as of central importance in seeing us for what we are. There is a long philosophical tradition that describes human beings as having  value or importance because they are not being part of the material world; its roots are fundamentally opposed to the Christian view, which is that the material world is good and in fact that God becomes incarnate as part of it. (In fact I believe that God created the world for the purpose of becoming incarnate in it.) I regard the idea that we have souls that exist after the body dies as especially at odds with the Christian faith. We are material beings whose only hope of life beyond death is the resurrection we see prefigured and promised in Jesus’ resurrection. Also, conceptions of responsibility that require that we be agent causes seem to me to portray us as only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from God, i.e., they make a human being a “prime mover.” In general, the fact that a scientific theory tends to debunk inflated notions of human beings as transcendent should count in its favor for Christians, not against it.

The imago Dei is best understood not in terms of some sort of resemblance of human beings to God, but in terms of God’s election of human beings for fellowship with himself, to be invited to share in the personal life of the Holy Trinity, and to be God’s representatives, and share his work, in the creation. Still, we do resemble God in various ways: like God, we are persons; we have rationality, consciousness, freedom, creativity, meaningful thoughts, etc. but not necessarily in the same way. We have these characteristics, but in the way a material thing can have them, which might be quite different than the way in which God has them. (What I said about the nature of human, as opposed to divine, responsibility is an example.)

Question 14: In what respect do you think psychology (science) and religion should be separate? In what respect do you think they should influence one another?

Christians should always weigh the evidence for a scientific hypothesis in light of Christian faith. If you believe that something is true, and that it might affect the plausibility of a hypothesis, it is rationally obligatory to pay attention to it. We should reject the idea of a scientist leaving her faith at the door of the lab for the sake of “objectivity.” (In discussions of these matters objectivity often seems to get confused with neutrality.) For one thing, why should she accept the notion that her theological beliefs are less objective—rather than simply harder to justify—than her scientific beliefs? If her religious beliefs cannot be justified on an objective basis, then why should she have them at all? If they can be, why should she pretend she does not have them? If a hypothesis conflicts with her Christian faith (or with anything else she is sure is true), that is a good reason to be skeptical of that hypothesis. She should accept it, and conclude that her theology needs to be revised, only if the evidence for it is extremely good. But the evidence might be good enough, and if it is she should modify her theological beliefs accordingly.

The interpretation of Scripture is a reliable, but not infallible, method of getting truth. This is true even if we assume that the Bible is God’s word; it is infallible, but we are not infallible as its interpreters. Science is also a reliable, but not infallible, method for getting truth. If there is a conflict between what science thinks the creation ‘says,’ and what the interpreter thinks the Creator says in the Bible, where are we most likely to have gone wrong? Science is the more reliable method, so we should suspect that, in the event of conflict, it is more likely our interpretation of Scripture, not our science, has gone wrong.

However, it seems to me that most of the alleged conflicts between Christianity and scientific hypotheses are not really between the scientific hypothesis and Christianity, but between a hypothesis and some philosophical theory that is associated with Christian faith; e.g., incompatibilist ideas of freedom, dualist ideas of the human mind, ideas about transcendent moral values.

Question 15: On what foundation should psychological theory or methods be based? Should religious, theological concepts of “personhood” play any role in influencing these methods or theories? Please explain.

If we regard science as being principally in the business of explanation (as opposed to other ways of trying to describe, understand, and otherwise make sense of things) then the paradigm is natural science: finding the relevant causal laws and locating things in the world’s causal mechanisms. To explain something is to show either that the laws in the circumstances necessitated its happening, or to show how they fixed the probabilities of its happening. I think psychology ought to be “naturalized,” i.e., integrated with the natural sciences. From this perspective, the major challenge is to figure out the nature of the freedom, moral responsibility, rationality, consciousness, personhood, and so on that human beings, conceived as part of the causal order of nature, possess. In all likelihood, scientific inquiry will lead to some, though perhaps not always radical, revision of our concepts of these characteristics. We should keep in mind that what undermines the traditional human self-image does not necessarily undermine an authentic Christian view of the human condition; at the end of the day it might strengthen the Christian view. Christian faith need not be held hostage to pre-scientific ideas about human nature.

If we have beliefs about human beings, then no matter what their source, it makes sense to ask what empirical implications they have and to see if they can be tested scientifically. A belief might not have any testable scientific implications; that is no reason to abandon it. We don’t need scientific evidence for all our beliefs. But if a belief can be tested scientifically, and it is disconfirmed, then we should stop believing it.

Science is our best way of knowing, in the sense that the strongest degree of justification we could have for a belief about the world or ourselves is that it is a well-confirmed scientific theory. (We should not assume that there is a correlation between the importance of a belief and how well it can be justified. In particular, we should not pretend that our religious beliefs have as secure a basis in the evidence as scientific beliefs. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon us to possess good enough evidence for them.) None of this means that science is our only way of knowing (“scientism”), or that scientific methods are best in every context. There is much of importance to know about human beings that cannot be acquired by scientific methods. Perhaps there is a basis here for a non-scientific, “humanistic,” psychology. We should not decide a priori what the structure of knowledge can be; we should let the world reveal itself to us.

Conspiracy Theory?

 

Memorial Colloquium for John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis

21 November 2003

I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?” When after all it was you and me.

Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” 1968

At 12:30 in the afternoon on the 22^nd of November, a Friday in 1963, the President of the United States was shot and killed on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas. Some of the facts as to what occurred are undisputed: At least three shots were fired. President Kennedy sustained a non-fatal wound from the rear and a fatal wound to the head. John Connelly, the Governor of Texas riding in the limousine with Kennedy, was seriously, but non-fatally wounded and a bystander, James Tague, was grazed by a bullet fragment. Of the two hundred or more witnesses there in Dealey Plaza, many reported shots coming from above and behind the president, many reported shots coming from in front of him, and many from both directions. Estimates ranged from two to as many as a half dozen shots. Some of those who thought shots came from the rear identified the Texas School Book Depository as the source. Those who reported shots from in front of the president described them as coming from behind a wooden fence on what has become known as the “grassy knoll.” Later that afternoon, Lee Oswald, an employee of the Book Depository, was arrested in another part of Dallas in connection with the murder of a police officer and charged, late Friday night, with the killing of the President. In the course of hours of interrogation Oswald insisted on his innocence and proclaimed “I’m just a patsy!” On Sunday morning, while he was being transferred to another prison, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub operator. Oswald, an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the U.S. in 1962, disillusioned with the Soviet state but still, apparently, a communist, was quickly and all but universally regarded as guilty and as having acted alone.

Later that year the new president Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to report on the crime. The Warren Commission Report, completed in the fall of 1964, confirmed the widely accepted view that Oswald was the lone assassin. However, public confidence in this conclusion waned steadily through the 1960’s and into the 1970’s. Mounting skepticism, engendered in part by revelations about the role of U. S. intelligence services in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and a new investigation. The House committee in 1978 concluded that President Kennedy probably had been assassinated by a conspiracy and recommended that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation. No such investigation has been forthcoming.

The evidence that the Warren Commission assembled against Oswald as “lone gunman,” as well as that for conspiracy, is almost entirely circumstantial. But sometimes the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. I’m going to proceed on the assumption that there are certain crucial facts that are knowable, despite their being vehemently denied in certain official and other elite circles. I realize that not everyone here will agree and as much as I’d like to drag you all on a lengthy tour of the evidential warrant for these facts, I won’t do so, but instead solicit your indulgence so as to consider, for the sake of argument at least, how things look from a certain point of view forty years after the first Kennedy assassination. I believe that a fair appraisal of the evidence available in the public record puts it beyond reasonable doubt that John Kennedy was shot from the front, as well as from the back, and that more shots were fired at him than Oswald conceivably could have fired in the time available. Oswald probably did not fire his rifle at Kennedy but might have been involved in some way with the conspirators, wittingly or unwittingly. Lee Oswald was in some capacity on the payroll of intelligence agencies of the United States. Jack Ruby killed him at the behest of those who wanted him silenced. Powerful officials in the government of the United States intentionally covered up the conspiracy after the fact, sought to pin the blame on Lee Oswald as a “lone nut,” and actively interfered in attempts to get at the truth.

These things are not hidden; they’re not esoterica that come into view only by way of some subtle analysis of the data. Plain common sense focused on the public evidence compels the conspiracy conclusion. The Warren Commission’s case for there having been no conspiracy simply disintegrates on examination. This is not a matter of a generally adequate account that has a few outlying anomalies exploited by a competing explanation. That’s the way of most conspiracy theories. They are properly rejected. They trade on the mistaken assumption that a true account should leave no loose ends, no unexplained data, no anomalies. True explanations never account for all the data for the obvious reason that some of the data are always false. No, this is a case where the official account fails at virtually every point. Its “Oswald, Oswald alone, and nothing but Oswald” conclusion is systemically dependent on false information, spurious data, coerced, confused, and contradictory witnesses, crudely fallacious inferences, physical absurdities, speculative fancy, and outright lies.

We read the world through the stories we find ourselves capable of accepting. If a theory is implausible, then it is entirely reasonable to reject it, even when there is evidence for it. If a theory is implausible, one should accept it only on the basis of high quality evidence, and lots of it. Indeed, if a theory is sufficiently implausible it is reasonable simply to ignore the alleged evidence in its favor. Crackpot theories like black helicopters and alien abduction, or that the United States government engineered the 9-11 attacks, could be true, but finite creatures like us shouldn’t waste our time investigating the evidence for them. In certain circles, particularly in the mainstream media, the story that John Kennedy was murdered by conspirators is treated as having this sort of antecedent implausibility, and thus dismissed without serious recourse to the evidence. However, this implausibility is an illusion. Once that illusion is dispelled the evidence can speak for itself.

Consider a hypothetical: suppose, that in the fall of 1963, not John Kennedy but Fidel Castro had been gunned down. Suppose that the theory was floated that this was the act of a conspiracy, one involving anti-communist Cuban exiles living in the United States, as well as elements of United States intelligence agencies and organized crime (assuming those were fully distinct categories at that time). Given what we know of the murderous hatred individuals in these groups had toward Castro the theory is not implausible. Add the fact that by 1963 these groups had already attempted to murder Castro. Our conspiracy theory might, of course, be false, but surely it would be unreasonable to dismiss it out of hand. Were a great deal of evidence to accumulate in favor of it, and if evidence for competing explanations proved to be bogus, it would be unreasonable not to believe it.

I submit that the actual history is analogous to this hypothetical history and warrants a similar conclusion. We know that in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco the Cuban exiles who had plotted against Castro came to see Kennedy as a traitor to their cause and personally to blame for the deaths of their comrades. Their bitter hatred for the Cuban dictator turned toward the American President. These sentiments were shared by some of their allies in United States intelligence agencies and by organized crime figures, though in the latter case for different reasons. What does it take to motivate murder? Sheer hatred, a desire for revenge, suffices. There is no doubt that this motive was present among those already in the business of political assassination. Those possessed of the means for this kind of murder also had this motive, at least. Another motive for murder is fear, and the events of the early 60’s inspired this too. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1961 brought the United States to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. This was widely portrayed as a victory for Kennedy who had faced down the Soviets and forced them to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. But dedicated cold warriors in the American military and intelligence services saw Kennedy as having backed down, as having capitulated to the Soviets when he agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey, to terminate support for the Cuban exiles’ terrorist campaign against Castro’s regime, and not to invade Cuba. Kennedy’s performance during the crisis, following on the heels of the Bay of Pigs, where in their view he also chickened out, generated genuine, even if paranoid, fear.

Consider for a moment the fact that Allen Dulles (Director of Central Intelligence), Richard Bissell (the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans) and General Charles Cabell (Deputy Director of the CIA) were fired by Kennedy because of their role in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. There can be no doubt that these men saw themselves as publicly humiliated and having their careers ruined by the man whose irresolution and betrayal was the real cause of the disaster. If we were looking for those with the means, motive and opportunity to have Kennedy killed, as well as the capacity to cover it up by shaping the investigation, it would be hard to imagine a more likely crew. (Note, in connection to this, two interesting facts: President Johnson appointed Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission, where he coordinated all inquiries related to the intelligence community. And in November 1963 the mayor of Dallas was Earle Cabell, General Cabell’s brother.) This does not of course imply these individuals had something to do with the crime, either antecedently or in covering it up, but it does imply that any hint of evidence that they did cannot reasonably be dismissed without examination.

Given all this, I think it’s clear that, prior to any specific evidence being brought forward, this conspiracy theory, unlike most, has enough plausibility to be taken seriously. The question is why, with the facts I’ve just cited beyond question, the judgment that conspiracy is too implausible to take seriously was formed almost immediately and persists to this day. Significant resources were devoted to establishing and defending the view that the case for conspiracy is beyond the pale. The aim was not to dispute the evidence, but to render it invisible. We know, from classified documents pried loose by later official investigation and the Freedom of Information Act, that Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson insisted, prior to any actual investigation, that the government conclude there was no conspiracy. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any significant piece of evidence, even that used by the Warren Commission to frame Oswald, that was actually in the authorities’ possession before Oswald was declared guilty. The Warren Commission brazenly ignored, distorted and denied evidence that tended to exculpate Oswald or that indicated conspiracy. We also know that the CIA set itself the task of defending the Warren Report and marginalizing its critics. An April 1967 CIA directive instructs Agency personnel to utilize “elite contacts especially politicians and editors” to defend the Warren Report and “to employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics.”

Whatever the motivation, and whatever the efficacy, of these efforts, I think the more important part of the explanation lies in the mainstream media itself, not in any nefarious influence brought to bear upon it by the CIA or other Federal agencies. The story that the killer was Oswald, the maladjusted communist defector, was propagated by Dallas and federal agencies almost instantaneously. Behind the scenes, the view that a serious investigation might uncover a foreign communist conspiracy, precipitate a confrontation with the Soviets, and perhaps lead to nuclear war, was offered–sincerely or otherwise–as a reason to go along with the official account that Oswald acted alone. There is, for example, good reason to believe that Johnson used this story to persuade Earl Warren to chair the commission that later bore his name. Perhaps Johnson was told this by others and believed it; perhaps he cynically manipulated Warren with it.

Journalists might have been fed this account, the “inside story,” early on, and gone along with it, committing themselves to playing along for the sake of peace. The terrifying events of the previous October were still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Journalistic reputations were made or broken in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. There is the case of Dan Rather, a young correspondent at a CBS affiliate in Texas. Shortly after the assassination the existence of Abraham Zapruder’s amateur movie became public knowledge, and the authorities refused to release it to the media, but they invited Rather to a private screening, which he then recounted on national television. In his account the president’s head, at the fatal shot, was thrust violently forward. This cohered with the already developed official story, later to be enshrined in the Warren Report, of a fatal shot from the rear. However, anyone who has seen the Zapruder film, which all too clearly shows Kennedy’s head being thrust violently backwards, must wonder if Rather’s ability accurately to report on what he saw could have been quite so poor, or if he had acquired reasons to support the government’s story of a fatal shot from behind Kennedy. Also, I wonder whether journalists, then as now generally aligned with the left, realized the devastating impact news that leftist conspirators, still at large, murdered the popular president would have on the American left, and on the whole liberal side of the political spectrum. It’s easy to imagine an anti-communist witch hunt surpassing in viciousness what was only then winding down from its height in the 1950′s. It’s a reasonable conjecture that when the evidence for conspiracy came unambiguously to point toward the radical right, not the radical left, it was too late for journalists to backpedal without looking like dupes.

In the ensuing four decades, this issue has been unique insofar as this country’s elite media have manifest an unshakeable implicit trust in the deliverances of the state, an almost heroic lack of curiosity, a readiness to ignore, trash or minimize any finding that further undermines the creaking “lone gunman” theory, to belittle researchers critical of the official story as “assassination buffs,” and to lionize any ill-informed rehash of the old falsehoods as the brilliant “last word” on the assassination; Posner’s egregious Case Closed is a salient case in point. On major anniversaries the long-since refuted story is dusted off, packaged in snazzy computer graphics, dressed up with psychobabble, and ceremoniously paraded. Why? Surely, the CIA is long since done with suborning journalists and paying off publishers. Do the senior statesmen of journalism still enforce an implicit embargo on the truth? Do we see something as mundane as the effects of intellectual laziness? Of institutional inertia? Or a simple aversion to being associated with the whackos who populate the shadowy realm where conspiracy theories enjoy rampant plausibility? I don’t know. In any event it is ironic that John Kennedy, whose advent to the presidency signaled a new vigor and hope for American political life, and whose brief time upon history’s stage was taken up with the great issues of freedom and tyranny, war and peace, discrimination and justice, has left a legacy that is at best a sobering lesson in practical epistemology, and at worst a sordid tale of credulity and perfidy.

Intelligent Design & “Expelled”

Handout for a talk on ID:

Despite a widespread impression to the contrary, many persons of faith find the case for evolutionary theory compelling, and have no difficulty integrating it with belief that God is our creator. However, advocates of ‘Intelligent Design’ contend that it is only a naturalistic bias that leads anyone to think the evidence supports evolutionary theory. They tell us that an objective evaluation of the data supports “the design inference,” not Darwinian evolution. What is scientific objectivity and what role, if any, should our philosophical and theological presuppositions play in our evaluation of scientific theories? I propose to take seriously the ID claim that these presuppositions can play a crucial role in the reasoning that leads us to accept or reject scientific theories. And I propose to ask what presuppositions underlie the ID dismissal of the scientific evidence that so impresses the rest of us.

Evaluating the Evidence for Hypotheses

Case 1

Hypothesis1: Mary grew up in Neptune, NJ

Evidence1: Mary says that she grew up in Neptune, NJ

In light of this evidence, the hypothesis is probably true:

Prob(H1|E1) = HIGH

Case 2

Hypothesis2: Marvin grew up on the planet Neptune

Evidence2: Marvin says that he grew up on the planet Neptune

In light of this evidence, the hypothesis is probably false:

Prob(H2|E2) = LOW

The moral: When we ask whether we have good enough evidence to accept a hypothesis, more matters than the evidence itself. Evidence good enough for one hypothesis is not good enough for another.

Background Beliefs

Whether it is reasonable to accept a hypothesis depends in part on the specific evidence for it, but also on a large, rather indefinite and largely implicit body of background beliefs:

Prob(H|E & B) = n

Against this background, some hypotheses are antecedently probable (plausible)

Prob(H1|B) = HIGH

while others are antecedently improbable (implausible)

Prob(H2|B) = LOW

If a hypothesis has high antecedent probability, then it is reasonable to accept it on the basis of relatively less, and less good, evidence.

If a hypothesis has low antecedent probability, then it is reasonable to accept it only on the basis of relatively more and better evidence.

Even when a hypothesis is antecedently implausible in light of one’s background beliefs, the evidence might be—or become—so good that it is reasonable to accept it

Prob(H|B) = LOW but Prob(H|E & B) = HIGH

Disagreement as to whether it is reasonable to accept a hypothesis comes in two possible forms:

Differing views as to what the evidence actually is

Prob(H|E1 & B) = HIGH

Prob(H|E2 & B) = LOW

and/or

Differing judgments as to the antecedent probability of the hypothesis due to different background beliefs, i.e.,

Prob(H|E & B1) = HIGH

Prob(H|E & B2) = LOW

In this kind of case there is agreement on what the evidence is but disagreement as to whether it is good enough to accept the hypothesis.

Permissible Background Beliefs

Not everything can reasonably be included in the background in light of which hypotheses are evaluated:

(a) Irrelevance: Some beliefs should be excluded simply because they have no bearing on the probability of the hypothesis:

If this hypothesis doesn’t turn out to be false, I’ll look like a fool and lose my funding

If this hypothesis is true, there will be morally bad consequences

(b) Other beliefs should be excluded on epistemic grounds, i.e., because they are rationally unjustified

Prob(H|E & B612) = n

In the absence of good reason to believe B612 the judgment about the probability of H is defective.

Theological Beliefs

Are theological beliefs among those we are rationally required to exclude from the evaluation of scientific theories? Is it always a mistake to reason

Prob(H|E & T) = n?

(a) Some say yes: Theological beliefs should be excluded on grounds of irrelevance. They have no factual implications about empirically observable reality. They are about values, about what ought to be, not about what is, and thus have no bearing on the evaluation of scientific theories. (Stephen J. Gould, Rocks of Ages)

(b) Some say yes: Theological beliefs should be excluded on epistemic grounds. They are not beliefs that can be rationally justified and thus should not influence the weighing of evidence for beliefs that can be rationally justified. (A popular conception of what scientific objectivity requires: exclusion of “private,” “subjective,” i.e., non-rational, religious belief. The scientist’s faith properly influences her choice of research projects, and it properly influences what she does with her scientific knowledge once she acquires it, but it should have no bearing on her scientific reasoning itself, on the evaluation of evidence for hypotheses. Faith must be left at the door of the lab.)

(c) Some say yes, but only as a practical matter: Beliefs not shared by one’s peers in the scientific community should play no role in the evaluation of the evidence for scientific hypotheses.

Response to (a): Theistic beliefs have empirical content. The claim that God created the world and acts in human affairs is vulnerable to possible, and indeed actual—e.g., the problem of evil—countervailing empirical evidence.

Response to (b): We should believe only what we are warranted in believing. If theological beliefs are not rational we should not only not employ them in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses, but not have them in the first place!

Response to (c): The fact that many in one’s scientific community do not share one’s theological beliefs places important constraints on the reasons one can offer one’s colleagues in favor of or against any hypothesis where

Prob(H|E & T) ≠ Prob(H|E & not-T).

Nonetheless, it is a basic constraint of rationality that when someone believes something and believes that it makes a difference to the plausibility of a hypothesis, she must take account of it in forming her own beliefs, irrespective of what others believe and what considerations she can cogently offer them.

Thus, at face value it is reasonable that one’s theological beliefs play a role in the evaluation of the evidence for a scientific hypothesis. There is nothing necessarily amiss when someone accepts a hypothesis on the basis of relatively less, and less good, evidence, because it is antecedently plausible in light of her theological beliefs, nor if she rejects a hypothesis at least until the arrival of more and better evidence because it is antecedently improbable in light of her theological beliefs. This assumes, of course, that those theological beliefs are ones it is rational for her to have.

And objectivity is clearly not some kind of neutrality, a “view from nowhere” free of presuppositions, but a commitment to ongoing methods of critical evaluation subject to public appraisal.

Intelligent Design and the Antecedent Probabilities

The debate between proponents of ID and persons of faith who accept standard scientific accounts of human origins is typically conceived as a debate about the quality of the evidence. To some extent this is accurate. However, judgments about the antecedent probability of these accounts, and thus views as to what sort of evidence one needs reasonably to accept them, are at least as important.

Suppose we reconstruct the thought processes of a hypothetical honest and reasonable advocate of ID, and suppose that H is the hypothesis that the human species came about as a result of Darwinian natural selection. He reasons

Prob(H|T) = VERY LOW

and he might, despite accurately assessing the evidence, also reason

Prob(H|E & T) = STILL TOO LOW TO ACCEPT

Actually I doubt he could reasonably make this latter judgment if he really knew the evidence, but assume for the sake of argument that he could, better to focus on the role of his background assumptions.

Aware that others reason

Prob(H|E & not-T) = MORE THAN HIGH ENOUGH TO ACCEPT

he claims that it is only their anti-theological presupposition, their bias in favor of naturalism, that leads them to accept evolutionary theory; the evidence alone does not suffice. This is accurate, yet misleading, given that his contrary judgment is made not from some position of neutrality, but with the help of his own theological presupposition, his anti-naturalistic bias.

The crucial question is why does the defender of ID believe that

Prob(H|T) = VERY LOW

indeed so very low that the vast quantity of high quality evidence for this theory amassed over the last century and a half is not enough to make it believable?

Why is he so sure that the human species being the product of Darwinian natural selection is so unlikely from the perspective of Christian theology?

To answer this T needs to be decomposed into various specific claims, some overtly theological, others philosophical.

Note first, though, that if for T we insert “God is the creator of the human species” we get nowhere:

Prob(H|God is the creator of the human species) = IMPONDERABLE

In light of the bare confession that we are God’s creatures no theory about the means by which God created us seems more or less plausible than any other. We need to add further assumptions to arrive at any useable judgment about prior probability.
(However, I note in passing that some who call themselves “creationists,” apparently oblivious to the longstanding theistic idea that God also acts by secondary causes, seem tacitly to assume that either God created us directly, by way of miraculous intervention, or he did not create us at all.)

There are candidates:

(a) If one’s theological background includes the belief that a literalistic reading of primeval Genesis is correct, then she must regard the Darwinian hypothesis as utterly implausible. The belief that the “special creation” of humans should be understood in etiological terms, rather than pertaining to the place and purpose of humans in God’s creation, leads to the same judgment. Likewise the belief in the “young Earth” based on the OT genealogies. However, ID’s advocates assert that their claim about evolution’s improbability involves no appeal to Scripture.

(b) Moving away from biblical literalism toward more serious theological concerns, it is important to see that there are assumptions about God and God’s relation to the creation that demand the judgment that the Darwinian theory is antecedently improbable. If God employed secondary causes of the sort Darwin described to bring the human species into existence, then we were not designed. Natural selection is not a way to bring about results specified in detail in advance, at least not in a universe whose basic laws are indeterministic. God might have generally intended the existence of some sort of personal creatures, but who actually came into being would have been left to somewhat chancy natural processes, the outcome neither specifically intended nor even foreknown by the creator. This is what I take William Dembski’s arguments about “specified complexity” to come to. As such, they are an admonition to we “theistic evolutionists” lest we suppose we can accept evolutionary theory without having to modify some traditional theological beliefs. Whether those modifications are rationally required, and indeed whether they might have independent theological motivation, is a further issue. It is at least worth asking what a theology looks like in light of which Darwinian evolution is antecedently probable. We need not give the ID folk the crucial presupposition that it is improbable.

(c) Finally, there are philosophical beliefs about human nature which, though not themselves components of any theological confession, are and have for a very long time been closely associated with certain theologies. These are part of a traditional human self-image, one that is in the process of being profoundly unsettled, and partially dismantled, by the advance of science, in particular the application of evolutionary biology to the human mind. These include the idea that our uniqueness vis-à-vis other creatures is a deep, ontological matter, that we are endowed with some non-physical element and are not merely these fragile bodies, and that we possess a kind of free agency and ultimate responsibility that transcends the causal matrix of nature. If one’s background beliefs include these and various other philosophical assumptions, one reasonably finds what Daniel Dennett accurately calls the “universal acid” of the Darwinian hypothesis highly implausible. Here too, the ID charge of “naturalistic bias” is not groundless; those of us willing to bid farewell to some cherished parts of the traditional human self-image have among our suppositions something that might reasonably be called naturalism. But again, we need not cede to the proponent of ID the assumption that this “naturalism” is implausible from the perspective of faith.

EXPELLED

The other night I saw the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

I left the theater reminded of Mary McCarthy’s famously hyperbolic condemnation of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

Expelled was, as one would expect, an attempt to put forward the familiar, but patently false, idea that there is a serious debate within the scientific world between advocates of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and “intelligent design.” As its title indicates, the film’s particular twist is the claim that scientists are being fired, or denied tenure, or losing research funding, merely for taking seriously, let alone believing in, intelligent design.

So far as I’m able to ascertain—not being personally involved in any of the events in question, but relying on sources I take to be prima facie reliable—the accounts of alleged persecution are for the most part presented with cynical contempt for the truth. However, the sources I regard as reliable generally are the voice of the very scientific establishment that the film charges with conspiring to suppress the evidence for intelligent design and silence its proponents.

So the important question to ask is: What if scientists were penalized for being involved in intelligent design? Would this be warranted, reasonable, and in keeping with professional ethics? Or, as the movie strenuously insists, would this be irrational and unethical persecution of these beleaguered individuals by the desperate defenders of a theory in trouble?

Among the cases the movie presents, the one that comes closest to plausibility is that of astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who in 2007 was denied tenure at Iowa State University. Although the official reasons given for the denial of tenure make no mention of Gonzalez’ involvement in the intelligent design movement, the allegation that this was taken into account by those who turned him down is at least not obviously false. He did submit his intelligent design promoting book, Privileged Planet, as one of the publications for his tenure evaluation. So assume, for the sake of argument, that this professor was denied tenure in virtue of his adherence to intelligent design. Would this be objectionable?

A principal theme of Expelled is that it would be objectionable, indeed, it would be un-American, since we have a right to free speech that such penalties violate. (In fact, an aim of the film is to inspire support for “academic freedom” legislation designed to give proponents of intelligent design the platform their peers in the scientific world deny them.) One need only state the assumption that imposing sanctions on a scientist for what he says or writes is a violation of his right to free speech to see its absurdity. What scientists teach and write is subject to critical evaluation by their academic peers and, if it falls short of the standards of the relevant discipline, they are rightly subject to various sanctions: the individual might not be hired, not tenured, not promoted, not published, or not granted funds for research. As an American citizen, Gonzalez has a legal right to say pretty much whatever he pleases, irrespective of the quality of the evidence—if any—for his claims and irrespective of the quality of the scientific reasoning—if any—that he adduces on their behalf. However, if, e.g., he were to publish a book contending that the planets and stars are embedded in crystal spheres that move around a fixed earth, his colleagues would not violate his right to free speech were they to judge him unqualified as an astronomer and decide that he should ply his trade elsewhere. The right to free speech does not entail a right to be tenured when your colleagues believe you propagate bogus science.

So, let’s again move to the interesting question, which is whether the academy’s “punishment”—whether real or imaginary—of advocates of intelligent design, could be justified. What’s on reflection salient to anyone who sits through Expelled is that this crucial question is simply ignored. We are repeatedly told that there is a great controversy sundering the scientific world, and that those on one side of it are unjustly persecuting those on the opposing side, but we are offered not a single example of the scientific evidence that has created this crisis. Surprisingly absent are the usual claims about “irreducible complexity;” even the famous bacterium flagellum has motored out of sight. Although William Dembski figures prominently, “specified complexity” and natural selection’s inability to achieve it is merely alluded to. There is no attempt to make the case. What the movie offers instead is supposed experts confidently telling us that evolution obviously is a theory in crisis, and that many in the scientific community have grave doubts about Darwinism, but for fear of persecution reveal these doubts only when suitably inebriated. (I’m not making this up.) The informed viewer knows that this is close to being the exact opposite of the truth, that the case for the neo-Darwinian synthesis is today stronger than it has ever been, and that confidence in it among the scientifically informed (at least when they are sober) is at an all time high. This does not entail that evolutionary theory is true, but it does entail that the main claim of Expelled is false. The uninformed viewer will not notice, and I assume is intended not to notice, that most of those telling us that evolutionary biology is a theory in crisis are philosophers or mathematicians, not scientists, let alone biologists, let alone evolutionary theorists. However, the wells are well poisoned: the complete absence of substantive evidence for the alleged crisis and controversy is implicitly enlisted as evidence of the conspiracy of silence and the effective supression of dissent.

I have so far referred only to the first half of the movie. The second half passes beyond garden variety intellectual dishonesty into sheer propaganda. It features Ben Stein wandering through Nazi death camps, promoting the idea that this is where Darwinism leads. Between the film’s beginning and end Darwinism mutates from a possibly faulty theory some scientists are in trouble for questioning to an unmitigated evil that threatens civilization. Along the way we are told that Darwinism implies there is no God, no morality, and no freedom. All this is put forward as simply obvious, with no regard for reason or history. Particularly egregious is an attempt to show that Darwin himself supported what later became eugenics by means of a patchwork quotation from a passage in which he says the opposite.

Unlike Ben Stein, the film’s star and narrator, most of those who advocate for “intelligent design” are evangelical Christians. As a colleague pointed out to me, the typical viewer, hearing highly educated and articulate fellow Christians confidently describing the great conflict in science and the evil conspiracy to hide it, will find it impossible to believe they are not telling the truth. And that, I think, leads to the serious question: Why have evangelical Christians, who are not always merely moralistic but often actually moral, concluded that dishonesty is permissible? Why has it become O.K. to lie for Jesus?

I believe that the “intelligent design” movement has been a disaster for Christianity. Prior to the 1990’s most secular academics were dimly aware of old-style creationism, something associated with the Scopes trial and the benighted fundamentalism of rural America. The intelligent design movement changed this. Its proponents had the credentials and wherewithal to seek a “place at the table” and get their ideas under discussion in respectable academic circles. (My view is that by and large, the secular academic establishment bent over backwards in an effort to give them a fair hearing.) These ideas received the respectful, but highly critical, treatment that was their due. However, the debate did not evolve in the normal matter, with each side paying heed to the arguments of the other side and trying its best to respond honestly to them. Instead, so far as most academics were concerned, the issue rather quickly became not the issues themselves, but the evasiveness, obscurantism, and downright dishonesty of the anti-evolution side. In the eyes of the intelligentsia, Christian critics of evolutionary theory are shockingly willing to prevaricate for their cause. This was, no doubt, exacerbated by the blatantly dishonest attempt to introduce intelligent design into the public schools as a supposedly non-religious alternative to Darwinism. One reads the court documents of Fitzmiller v. Dover Area School District appalled at the willingness of evangelical Christians to commit perjury in the effort of get a mere nod to intelligent design into the science classrooms.

The film Expelled is simply the latest, and a particularly sordid, instance of the forces opposed to evolution presenting a mendacious face to the world. Yet many of those opposed to what contemporary science tells us about human origins are good, honest people. Why do good people tell lies? Many, of course, are not lying but merely repeating what people they trust have told them, people who are, in turn, sincerely repeating falsehoods they have heard from sources they trust. But at some point the trail leads to those who surely know better. Why do these presumably otherwise honest persons judge that deceit is acceptable when it comes to the theory of evolution?

The closest I’ve been able to come to grasping this is the analogy of the district attorney who is utterly convinced of the guilt of a suspect, but frustrated with a judicial system that makes it impossible to convict him with the admissible evidence. As we know, otherwise ethical individuals in these situations sometimes go wrong, suppressing exonerating evidence and even fabricating evidence against the culprit. Such wrongdoing, they feel sure, is justified if that’s what it takes to keep a dangerous criminal off the street. Maybe individuals like the makers of Expelled are so convinced of the “guilt” of Darwin, Dawkins, and their ilk that they feel justified in dealing with them and their ideas deceitfully.

Beyond this, the paradigmatic situation in which ethical people believe dishonesty is permissible, or even obligatory, is war. In a just war, it can be permissible to lie to, and tell lies about, your enemy. Perhaps what we’re now seeing is an ugly effect of the “culture wars” mentality. This could explain the surreal disregard for the truth that has come to characterize religious opponents of science. They see themselves at war with the horrendous evil of Darwinism, a war in which everything is at stake and “all’s fair.” It’s perfectly O.K. to deceive Dawkins and other interviewees about the nature of the film, just as it’s perfectly O.K. to ascribe to Darwin views plainly opposed to his actual words, it’s perfectly O.K. to distort the facts about proponents of intelligent design being fired or denied grants, and it’s perfectly O.K. to proffer a totally fictional account of the current status of evolutionary theory in the scientific community. However, what this deplorable business has to do with faithful Christian witness is, obviously enough, precisely nothing.

Materialist Resurrection?

1. Can a human being survive an existential gap, as materialist accounts of the resurrection require?

2. If there is an existential gap, then person Y can be the same person as X (numerically identical) although:

Person X exists at t

Person Y exists at t + n

There is a time after t and before t + n when there exists no person identical to X or to Y (non-continuity)

X and Y have no basic parts in common

3. We know that having common parts is not necessary for personal identity through time. A 50 year old human body need have no parts it had when it was 1 week old.

4. We know that continuous existence is not necessary for personal identity through time. A person might exist after an existential gap by means of having her parts retrieved and painstakingly reassembled as they were before.

5. But can there be personal identity through time when there is neither commonality of parts nor continuous existence? Although neither continuity nor sameness of parts is necessary, maybe identity requires that at least one of these conditions is satisfied. The worry is that if there is neither continuity nor sameness of parts, then Y is at best a perfect copy of X, not numerically identical to X. Consider the case of my watch: I bring it to repair shop where it is broken, and its parts dispersed. New parts are assembled into a watch qualitatively indistinguishable from the watch that was destroyed.  It might fool me, but it is not the same watch as the one that was destroyed, but just a copy, since it is neither continuous with the original watch nor does it have parts in common with it.

6. Hypothesis 1: For things of some kinds, e.g., watches, being a copy entails being a mere copy, and thus not being numerically identical. But this is not the case with biological organisms, which exist from one time to another in virtue of their internal, microscopic parts making copies of themselves. According to materialism, a human person is a biological organism, and person X at t is the same person (the same biological organism) as person Y at t + n just if Y is the result of a reliable copying process that causally links it to X. What happens continuously in the natural course of events from birth to death is a reliable copying process, but what God does miraculously at the general resurrection is an infallible copying process and as such suffices for personal identity.

7. However, there is no reason to think that the copying process necessarily has a unique result. So this account of personal identity through time despite an existential gap is vulnerable to transitivity paradoxes: If God can make Y at t + n in such a way that X = Y, then he can also make Z at t + n which stands in the same “copy of” relation to X and thus is also numerically identical to X. Assuming the transitivity of identity, this implies that Y = Z, which is absurd.

8. Hypothesis 2: Transitivity paradoxes are a problem only if we make the assumption that identity is  never indeterminate, and thus that there is always a matter of objective fact whether a = b. We should reject this assumption. It holds only for the basic constituents of reality. It does not hold for complex things that are assembled out of other things by way of highly contingent processes. It does not hold for things that are “ontologically shallow.” The materialist should acknowledge that human beings are ontologically shallow and admit that there are possible situations, e.g., those envisaged in the transitivity paradox, in which there is no objective matter of fact about whether this person is the same person as that person.

(We should in any event note that the results of the natural copying processes on which personal identity depends are also only contingently unique. Thus the resurrection makes explicit an issue that applies to materialism as such, irrespective of Christian claims about the possibility of our being resurrected. Future technologies may well pose the same kind of problems: genetic engineering, biological engineering, teleportation…)

9. Implications: There is no precise time at which a human person begins to exist, nor need there be a precise time at which a human being stops existing. So there is not always an objective matter of fact as to whether a human person exists at a given time; indeed whether a person exists at t might depend on how things go in the future, e.g., on whether she will get reassembled. This is how it is with complex physical things in general, e.g., the Hospers Garden Club, my 38 year old car.

10. However, the fact that there is not always an objective matter of fact as to whether X = Y does not imply that there never is. There are plausible criteria for personal identity through time, and the materialist resurrection scenario implies that in fact these criteria will be satisfied. It is possible that God will act in a way that renders it indeterminate whether I am identical to a person that exists after I die, but we have no reason to believe that he will.

 

Why Materialism?

Because the evidence for it is unambiguous and conclusive. E.g.,

Causal Closure

If there were an immaterial mind/soul that interacts with the brain, there would be brain events that have no physical cause. It would look as though they “just happen.” No such events have been identified. Here, absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it is good evidence for it.

Supervenience

It appears that mental changes occur only when there are changes in the brain, but there are brain changes with no corresponding mental change. Materialism predicts this while dualism predicts the contrary.

Brain Impairment

Damage to the brain affects central cognitive, emotional, and moral functions in ways that are highly unlikely if dualism is true, but which are to be expected if materialism is true.

Parsimony

If two hypotheses explain something equally well, but one is simpler than the other, then the simpler is more probable (Occam’s Razor). Materialism is simpler than dualism, and explains the phenomena of the mind at least as well as dualism.

Explanatory Success

Some important features of the mind remained unexplained, but materialism can explain other important features of the mind. Dualism explains virtually nothing about the mind. The single most important characteristic of the mind for which materialism offers no explanation, viz., subjectivity or phenomenal consciousness, is known to occur as a feature of material objects, viz., non-human animals, so introducing an immaterial substance to explain it is superfluous. And we have no more notion how an immaterial thing can be conscious than how a material thing can be conscious.

Non-human Minds

The more similar a mind is to a human mind, the more closely that creature’s brain resembles the human brain, and the more closely that creature is related to humans in evolutionary terms. This is what we should expect if materialism is true, but there’s no reason to expect it from the dualist point of view.

Further, much of the intuitive appeal of dualism lies in the idea that while all material things are objective, consciousness is a subjective property. If nothing can be both objective and subjective, then the mind must be immaterial. But all non-human animals are material objects, and some of them are conscious. Thus it is an error to believe that something cannot be a piece of objective reality while possessing subjectivity.

The Case for Dualism?

The most important argument for dualism relies on claims about what we allegedly know to be possible, viz., a fully functioning human brain that lacks consciousness. If the mind is in some sense identical to the brain this is not a possibility, since if x = y then necessarily x = y. But, while acknowledging their general value in making sense of the world, we cannot reasonably rely on such “modal intuitions” as more reliable than the empirically confirmed claims of science.

The dualist might appeal to the fact that most human beings find dualism intuitively plausible and materialism highly implausible. However, whatever evidential weight this has evaporates when we take account that this phenomenon is explained by the evolved cognitive architecture of the human brain. The information processing modules which output beliefs about bodies are not those which output beliefs the mental properties of bodies. For this reason humans spontaneously continue to ascribe mental properties even after it is empirically evident that the biological organism no longer functions. Ironically, the material human mind has evolved to find dualism as intuitively obvious.

Materialism and the Bible

Centuries of dualism being taken for granted by virtually everyone has shaped biblical exegesis, so it’s easy to impose dualist assumptions on the text. Nonetheless, Scripture in general presents no clear view on, or interest in, the matter.

The Bible contains various voices, some presuppose materialism, some dualism, and some neither.

It’s a mistake to assume that if the English Bible contains the word “soul” or “spirit” then the Hebrew or Greek term it translates refers to the immaterial substance of philosophical dualism.

It’s a mistake to assume that whenever the biblical text uses a noun there is a unique corresponding entity referred to, rather an aspect or property of an entity.

It’s a mistake assume that theoretical, metaphysical conclusions can readily be extracted from the prevailing everyday, non-theoretical, language of the Bible. We should refrain from drawing theoretical conclusions from biblical texts that do not intend to make theoretical points.

It’s a mistake to assume that while the ‘scientific’ presuppositions of biblical authors, e.g., ANE cosmology, geology, biology, etc., should be filtered out of proper exegesis of the biblical text, we should hear their ANE metaphysical presuppositions about human nature as God’s word. On the contrary, the fact that a biblical writer presupposes a dualist view of human nature is of no more significance for what God tells us by way of Scripture than the fact that he takes it for granted that the sky is a metal dome, that the Earth is flat, or that the dead go to an underground realm called sheol.

It’s a mistake to assume that the vitalism taken for granted in the ANE, particularly in the OT, where it is deeply integrated into Israel’s faith, equates to dualism.

It’s a mistake to assume that the term “spiritual” and its cognates in the NT mean “immaterial” or “non-physical.” In contrast, as a theological term “spiritual” in NT theology pertains to the question of whether the human person as a whole is properly oriented to God.

It is selective exegesis to focus on biblical texts that appear to presuppose dualism while ignoring the many texts that appear to presuppose materialism. E.g., in the OT psychological properties are frequently ascribed to various parts of the body, such as the heart.

What Scripture is (eventually) clear on is the resurrection of embodied persons. There is no consensus on, or serious interest in, what happens between death and the resurrection.

The one NT instance (1 Cor 15) of a sustained attempt to speak in a theoretical, rather than simply a pastoral, way about the resurrection manages to do so with no explicit reference to disembodied human persons. (This is particularly striking in light of the fact that St. Paul probably did believe in mind/body dualism.)

Error Detection

Biblical exegesis is a reliable, but fallible, method for arriving at the truth about God’s word. The sciences are reliable, but fallible, methods for arriving at the truth about God’s world. When the results they produce conflict, it’s reasonable to accept those produced by the more reliable methods. The methods of science generally are more reliable than those of biblical hermeneutics. Therefore, when what I think the Bible says disagrees with what science says, I should suspect not that the Bible is wrong nor that science is wrong, but that I have made a mistake in my interpretation of Scripture.

Materialism and Christian Theology

Christian materialists of course reject materialism as a theory about the nature of reality as a   whole. The claim that only material things exist is tantamount to atheism. At issue here is not the nature of reality overall, but the nature of human beings. Blurring the distinction might help the cause of the Christian dualist, and of the atheist materialist, but it renders an important theoretical option invisible, and ought to be resisted.

Some materialists argue that the idea of an immaterial mind is incoherent. Christian materialists reject this argument since God is an immaterial mind. An immaterial mind is not impossible. Neither is a material mind—some non-human animals have mental properties. The question is whether the mind of the human creature is, like our creator, immaterial, or whether, like that of some other creatures, it is material.

Natural Immortality

Dualism does not entail, but almost always includes, commitment to the natural immortality of the human person. It is difficult to make this cohere with the fact that our hope in everlasting life with God depends on our being joined by grace through faith to the resurrected Christ. The focus of authentic Christian hope is the redeemed future of this world, not in departing this world for a “heavenly” realm.

How is the Resurrection Possible?

Dualism offers a familiar account of how bodily resurrection is possible: The body dies, but the disembodied immaterial soul continues to exist until the resurrection, when God supplies it with a new body.

In contrast, materialism implies that at death the human person stops existing. After an “existential gap,” God miraculously recreates that person by creating a body that stands in a relation to the body that died which suffices for numerical identity. Some regard this as metaphysically impossible: the newly created body/person can be a best a copy of the body/person that died.

The materialist needs an account of the identity of a human person through time that allows for an existential gap.

Some Christians, aware of the powerful case for mental properties being neurocomputational properties of the brain, acknowledge that the mind is the brain, but suggest that there is still an immaterial enity that continues to exist after the body’s demise, and that it is the continuous existence of this item that make for the person’s numerical identity through time. However, it is difficullt to envisage such an account succeeding. If continuous existence is necessary for personal identity, it is the continuous existence of something the existence of which is sufficient for the existence of the person. If it isn’t sufficient for the person’s existence, it is of no more use than the continued existence of, say, the person’s big toe in a jar of formalin. But it is difficult to see how the existence of something that lacks mental properties (which are ex hypothesi properties of the brain, now destroyed) could suffice for the existence of the person.

This consideration may inspire the attempt to parcel out mental properties, assigning enough to the brain to accommodate scientific knowledge, and enough to the hypothesized immaterial entity to allow for the continued existence of the person, but the ad hoc character of this move quickly becomes apparent.

Note: Why “materialism” rather than “physicalism?”

The term “materialism” has some negative popular connotations, and in theoretical discourse it can be misleading if it suggests the early modern view of the world as composed of particles, i.e., very small versions of macroscopic material objects. What we experience as material objects is just one manifestation of the underlying physical reality known to contemporary natural science. For these reasons many now prefer “physicalism.” However, much of our experience is of material objects and the human body is a salient example of one. Thus I prefer the older term to emphasize that a human being is this, the body we see.