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_Reason in the Balance_ tells the story of a nation running a "moral
deficit", in part because of its investment in philosophical naturalism,
especially as inculcated by the Darwinian teachings about evolution. Whenever
Darwinian explanations are allowed to reign in our classrooms, Johnson argues,
the proposition is implicitly advanced that "purposeless material processes
created us and that purpose and consciousness did not exist in the cosmos
until they evolved naturalistically" (25). And whenever that proposition is
advanced, he fears, the very foundations for morality are undermined.
These conclusions are, of course, independent of the truth or falsity of
Darwinism: that is, Darwinism might be both morally pernicious and
biologically true. (Or it might be neither, or it might even be the other way
around.) But since Johnson devoted the bulk of his previous book _Darwin on
Trial_ to an attempted refutation of Darwinism as science, he chooses not to
present that case again here, at least not in detail. Rather, the subtitle of
the present work promises us that we will be given "The Case Against
NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education": quite a broader argument, it would
seem. To fulfill this promise of delivering a case against "naturalism" in
general, _Reason in the Balance_ would have to go beyond examining the state
of biology: for the "naturalistic assumption" -- the assumption that the
phenomena in question should be explained only through natural causes, without
invoking the supernatural -- is prevalent in virtually *all* scientific and
educational disciplines. If "naturalism" somehow makes good science (or good
morality) impossible, then, we may need to change a lot more than a few
portions of our biology textbooks. In the event, however, Johnson keeps coming
back to Darwin, with an occasional detour to Stephen Hawking. This naturally
raises the question: Why are Darwin's (or Hawking's) theories apparently the
only examples of "naturalism" which involve something methodologically
improper and socially dangerous?
Consider, for example, economics. For every course in evolutionary
biology now being taught on our campuses, there must be at least two or three
being taught with titles like "An Economic History of the Post-War World." In
these classes, whenever teachers and textbooks try to explain (e.g.) the
relative rise of Japan and the relative decline of Great Britain, they do so
in purely naturalistic terms: they look at savings rates, at tax and
regulatory policies, at export strategies, and at natural and human resources.
Never do they even consider the possibility that nations rise and fall as a
result of God's will. But we haven't yet seen a movement against the
dangerous doctrine of "developmentalism" (naturalistic economics), or an
argument that children are being indoctrinated into philosophical naturalism
by the one-sided presentation of developmentalist dogma, and therefore
"providentialism" should be taught side by side with "developmentalism"
Now I doubt that Johnson, or most of those who are on the front lines
against Darwinism, have ever considered going into opposition over the way
economics is taught, and I suspect that most would consider the very prospect
outlandish, a mere strawman set up to make them appear bigoted and fanatical.
And yet I do not think it would be at all easy to point to the key differences
between "developmentalist economics" and "Darwinian evolution" (or between
"providentialism" and "creationism") which would make the analogy fail. It
can't be that standard economics, as taught today, is more genuinely
"scientific" than evolutionary biology, and so is entitled to its "monopoly"
position where Darwinism is not: economists themselves confess that they have
no more predictive power over the long run than do meteorologists. Nor can it
be that a naturalistic view of political economy is perfectly compatible with
the basic views of theism, whereas a naturalistic view of the history of life
is plainly incompatible with those views: after all, the view that God rules
the nations is at least as central to the Judeo-Christian tradition as is the
view that God rules the genotypes.
Johnson does claim that "every culture must have a creation story as a
basis for things like philosophy, education and law." If this is true, it
might explain why cosmology and evolutionary biology, as distinct from
political economy, get (and deserve) special scrutiny. But it is not at all
obvious as a matter of anthropology or sociology that "creation stories" are
more central to most cultures than are stories of national origin. What is
the dominant "creation story" for Japan, for example, and how has it
influenced Japanese laws and mores? I doubt that Johnson could tell us, though
I expect he is aware, as most of us are, that a myth of national uniqueness
and destiny has often been cited as a motive for the Japanese worker's
willingness to sacrifice, in war and peace. We Americans, too, are
notoriously ready to see ourselves as God's country, founded and nurtured by
special providence. So a naturalistic version of history and economics might
be more subversive of a culture's self-image, and thus ultimately of its
"philosophy, education and law", than a naturalistic version of biology.
If "naturalism" causes offense in one case but not in another, then,
perhaps it is for psychological or historical reasons rather than because some
vital principle is being violated. Popularizers of evolutionary biology like
Dawkins have acknowledged how utterly counterintuitive Darwin's claims seem.
Another difference which may be relevant to this case is that there was no
watershed moment for economics, as there was for biology, when "naturalist"
explanations took command away from "supernaturalist" explanations; that is to
say, there was no Darwin of economics. Even Adam Smith, for example, was not
rebelling against a "providentialist" view which declared that God was the
direct source of the wealth of nations, rewarding those nations which followed
His commandments and punishing those who did not; he was only attempting to
replace one naturalistic view with another. And so it came to be taken for
granted that of course economics textbooks should stick to naturalistic
explanations: that it would be wildly inappropriate for them to speculate
about what Great Britain had done which was wicked in the eyes of the Lord,
and what Japan had done which was gratifying to Him; or even to preface the
textbook by conceding that 'modern economies are such complex entities that no
naturalistic theory yet devised can fully account for why one will succeed
where another falls behind, and so we must at least allow for the possibility
that God's providential interventions are behind them all.'
But suppose a providentialist did appear on the scene, demanding equal
time for a theistic explanation of the wealth of nations, and saying of
standard economics-- as Johnson says of standard biology -- that by excluding
God from consideration, it was in effect promulgating atheism. He would
almost certainly be told -- by conservative Christians as well as by atheist
Darwinians -- that he was seeing offense where no offense was offered; that
the lack of mention of God's providence in the economics textbook did not
amount to a positive denial of God, any more than the similar lack of mention
of God in standard military histories of World War II amounted to a denial of
God; that, in short, absence of acknowledgment is not acknowledgment of
absence. And this would also be the obvious response to Johnson's accusations
against the "methodological naturalism" of modern biology and cosmology: the
absence of acknowledgment of a designer is not tantamount to acknowledgment of
the designer's nonexistence, or (as Johnson puts it) "actively promoting a
naturalistic understanding" (28) or "[making] naturalism the established
constitutional philosophy" (34): it is just a case of a discipline sticking
within its proper limits.
To Johnson, however, it is somehow obvious that failing to acknowledge
the creator in cosmology and biology is not mere methodology but active denial
against the obvious facts in order to bolster atheistic ideology. Unlike
other sciences and disciplines, it seems, which work on problems which are
intrinsically soluble in naturalistic terms, evolutionary biology (and
big-bang cosmology) are trying to provide naturalistic solutions where there
is no prospect for success. "Why devote prodigious effort to speculating
about how a primitive form of RNA might be produced in a chemical soup,"
Johnson asks, "if you have no idea how such a molecule could evolve into a
cell?" (70)
But even if it were not a great exaggeration to say we have "no idea"
how to get from RNA to the cell, the history of science is full of problems
which seemed insoluble until they were solved. RNA itself is one of the prize
cases of this. Before the unraveling of the double helix, Johnson's
"anti-naturalist" predecessors, like Jacques Barzun, were insisting that
reductionist, mechanistic biology was an exercise in futility, for nobody
could begin to explain the molecular basis for heredity itself. (_Darwin,
Marx, Wagner_, pp. 120-121) Watson and Crick's work appeared pretty much as
the print was drying on the second edition of Barzun's _Darwin, Marx, Wagner_.
That second edition, published in 1958, also carries, unaltered, the claim
made in the 1940 original that science was completely stymied at
understanding the process by which the sun created energy: "we are told," said
Barzun, "that a certain point in the chain of events, 'a miracle happens.'"
(5) By the time this was reprinted, the pressing question was not whether we
could ever hope to gain a glimmering of understanding of this miracle, but
whether we could hope to avoid blowing up the planet through our mass
production of it.
The fact that the anti-reductionist side has been spectacularly wrong
before does not, of course, guarantee that they are wrong this time. But
clearly scientists can be forgiven (to put it mildly) if they go on with their
research even in the face of outsiders' predictions that *this* time they will
*surely* fail to find a naturalistic solution. The scientist, in other words,
is a "methodological naturalist": she assumes, as an operating principle, that
naturalistic solutions *are* available for the problem she is working on. The
rationale behind this assumption seems self-evident: If she assumed there were
no solutions, she would never find them even if they did in fact exist.
Furthermore, if supernatural forces were at work, it is virtually impossible
to see how they could be quantified, or repeated, or investigated further: and
those are the currencies science deals in. That, in a nutshell, is why both
textbooks and research proposals in both biology and economics are written in
naturalistic language.
Johnson will have none of that; MN to him is simply another devious
stratagem by which naturalists preserve their cultural hegemony. His specific
arguments against MN, however, seem to display a truly stunning
incomprehension of the issues involved. Johnson's first indictment of
methodological naturalism is the extraordinary accusation (as he seems to take
it), that "A naturalistic science that assumes it can explain everything is
likely to offer explanations that are not true" (209). As if the goal of
science were, or should be, the utterly futile and sterile one of preventing
false solutions from ever being proposed! Scientific understanding has not
advanced, nor can it advance, by making sure that no solution is ever proposed
which might possibly turn out to be false; it has advanced when competing
proposals have proliferated, the great majority of which were doomed to
rejection. To argue against MN on the grounds that it makes the production of
false theories inevitable is thus like arguing against the First Amendment on
the grounds that it makes the publishing of bad ideas inevitable.
The argument that Method N must be rejected because it sometimes produces
untrue theorems would only have force if there existed a competing Method T
which only produced true theorems, or which at least produced them at a higher
rate than Method N. But when it comes time for Johnson to produce his
competing method, it turns out not to be a method at all, but merely a
_credo_: and Johnson seems oblivious to the distinction. He promises us "a
definition of MN, followed by a contrasting definition of my own position,
which I label 'theistic realism' (TR)." The definition of MN is basically
straightforward, but then Johnson offers his own alternative as follows: "A
theistic realist assumes that the universe and all its creatures were brought
into existence for a purpose by God." (208)
Now it makes no more sense to call this description of TR an
"alternative" to methodological naturalism, or even a "contrasting position",
than it would be to call a desired verdict an "alternative" to the jury
system, to call a favored candidate a "contrast" to our electoral process, or
to call chocolate ice cream an "alternative" or "contrast" to a cooking
course. It may be that the course does not teach you how to make chocolate
ice cream (e.g., because it's a health-food course), or that the electoral
process makes it impossible to elect your candidate (e.g., because he's not a
U.S. citizen), or that the jury system makes it difficult to convict O.J.
You may find this lamentable because (in the latter example) you are convinced
that O.J. is guilty, but you probably would still recognize the fatuity of
trying to "refute" the jury system simply by pointing to the fact that guilty
people sometimes go free. Nor is anybody likely in the near future to
present, as an alternative to our current system of justice with its
"methodological assumption" of innocence, its constitutional protections, its
trial by jury, what might be called "OJ-Realism", defined merely as "the
assumption that OJ really did it." If you were really serious about replacing
the current justice system with something better, you would feel compelled to
give us the operational details and assumptions of the better system in
detail: would it presume innocence? would it rely on expert testimony? would
it put verdicts solely in the hands of judges? And so on. And the superiority
of your process could only be established by showing that it would do a better
job of convicting the guilty, *while still protecting the innocent.* After
all, anybody could devise a "method" which guaranteed the conviction of the
OJs, simply by instituting the rule that all defendants were presumed guilty
until proved innocent.
Similarly, Johnson seems to want a method adopted which will reach the
"proper" verdict in the trial of Darwinism, but gives us no hint of how this
can be accomplished without leading to miscarriages of justice in other cases.
The rules of methodological naturalism tell the researcher *never* to stop
looking for a naturalistic explanation for the phenomena in question. If this
rule is to be overturned, then the substitute rule must tell us *when,
precisely* the search for naturalistic explanations must cease, or else it is
no method at all. If it tells us "stop searching when research has gone one
for five years with no solution," then obviously it will lead to a vast loss
of information, information which might have been obtained in the tenth year
(or the hundredth). And a rule which simply says "stop when the phenomena are
in the realm of the origin of life and the origin of the cosmos" or "stop when
the Pope tells you to stop" (advice which Johnson wishes Hawking would take
[103]) is mere ad hoc obscurantism.
The justification Johnson offers for issuing the "stop now" command for
evolutionary biology is that it has not provided a detailed naturalistic
scenario for many of the steps it proclaims must have taken place:
abiogenesis, the formation of the first cell, the formation of multicellular
organisms, etc. I don't imagine that any biologists would deny this, but they
would certainly deny that *no* progress has taken place in these fields.
Assume, however, that there has been no progress (or, say, as little progress
as scientists had made in 1940 towards accounting for how the sun keeps
burning). Why is that the signal to stop? Johnson's "answer" to this key
question is, again, revealing. "TR considers that recognizing the
irreducibility of genetic intelligence [i.e., of the apparent elements of
design in living organisms-JK]may be facing reality; MN views it as 'giving
up.' Methodological naturalists have no comparable reluctance to 'give up' on
the investigation of mind-reading or the search for the Loch Ness monster.
The difference is that a naturalistic origin of life is indispensable to the
naturalistic worldview, and so no amount of experimental discouragement
destroys the faith that a valid naturalistic theory can someday be found."
Of course Johnson here is ignoring the far more obvious and far more
relevant difference between the search for the origins of life and the search
for the hiding place of the Loch Ness monster: the existence of life is an
undeniable fact, and facts are to be accounted for; the existence or
nonexistence of the Loch Ness monster, on the other hand, is the very point
at issue. Similarly, it is an undeniable fact that atoms and galaxies exist,
and cosmology attempts to account for that fact; it is not an undeniable fact
that mind-reading exists, however. All that undeniably exists, in both cases
-- all that science can reasonably be called on to account for -- is a series
of *reports* of Nessie-sightings and clairvoyant perceptions. Scientists did
not at all give up on providing a naturalistic explanation for these reports;
far from it, they stuck to their naturalistic guns in the face of claims
(rather like Johnson's) that these tales could only be accounted for by
positing preternatural entities or supernatural forces. Scientists instead
concluded that perfectly natural phenomena or forces -- optical illusions,
misidentifications of rare animals, coincidences, and occasional frauds --
could in fact account for all these reports. The examples of Nessie and
mind-reading actually go to show how *consistent* science has been in
following the rule of MN.
(Perhaps because he doesn't see this, Johnson is ready here to assume
that his opponents could only have bad-faith motivations for arguing as they
do: in this case, he projects on them a willingness to abandon reason out of
the desperate need to maintain their "faith". This happens with tedious
regularity throughout the book, and it becomes almost insufferable at times:
"[the] appeal of a unified theory stems entirely from the position it occupies
in the naturalistic philosophy that scientists generally assume"[56]; "The
authority of the scientific priesthood rests on public acquiescence [so] the
rulers of science cannot afford to leave any openings for rival stories" [66];
"The point of the materialist theory of mind... is that biochemists who are
materialist reductionists fiercely want to believe" [67]; "Searle apparently
adheres to Darwinism... because the authority structure of his university
culture [demands it]" [129]; etc., etc., etc. I've avoided focusing on this
unpleasant aspect of RITB, but not to mention it at all would leave a
misleading impression of the work.)
Assume, however, that MN is overturned, and the field is opened to
supernatural explanations for the development of life on earth. What, given
our current state of knowledge, would follow from this? Johnson seems to
assume that there is a healthy and promising body of theistic biology just
waiting to appear on the scene, once the unnatural rule of naturalism is
ended: "Freed of the metaphysical chains that tie it to nineteenth-century
materialism, biology can turn to the fascinating task of discovering how the
intelligence embodied in the genetic information works through matter to make
the organism function." (90) Johnson may not live to see this promised land,
but -- having freed the Israelites from bondage -- he could still presumably
rest happy, since the vision of it is so clear in his mind that the details of
its landscape are essentially minor irrelevancies.
My own imagination, however, is quite incapable of reaching these
heights. I confess that I cannot picture what even a sentence from this
"intelligence research" could possibly look like which would be a genuine
contribution to knowledge. The dilemma for the theorist of intelligent design
would be the same faced by providentialist economics: it could simply accept
the body of current knowledge (high savings rates are positively correlated
with productivity gains) and add in the margins, "such is God's plan", which
would be vacuous; or it could make bold predictions or correlations of its own
("economic history shows that God rewards Godly people") which are probably
indefensible (are the Japanese more Godly than the British?) So would the new
theistic biology describe the workings of a mitochondria in the same way
standard biology does, and add "take that, Darwin"? Or would it finally
appease the spirit of J.B.S. Haldane and reveal the purpose behind God's
apparently inordinate fondness for beetles? So far (at least to my knowledge)
there are no answers, just a very noisy silence as Johnson and other
proponents of "intelligent design" go on and on about how badly their theory
is needed in today's society, how impossible it is for their theory to get a
hearing in an atmosphere poisoned by naturalism, and how their theory could
set biology on its ear given half a chance, but never get around to saying
what exactly their theory *is.* (Veterans of the "Science and Religion"
section will know how frustrating that dance can be.)
"God did it" repeated for every organ of every species still does not add
up to a scientific theory. Any theory must offer explanations, not just
proclamations. Why does the fossil record have the pattern it does? Why does
molecular analysis show such startling genetic similarities between man and
chimpanzee? Why, as Stephen Gould asks, does a bat fly, a horse run, a whale
swim, and a man throw and catch, with a limb of the same basic design? Will
theistic biology genuinely try to take up these questions, or will it simply
dismiss them as tricks and snares of the enemy?
There seems to be an assumption in some quarters (especially in this
forum) that all such questioning is mere defensive sophistry thrown up by the
Darwinist who is desperately trying to prevent the youth of America from
saying "God did it!", and that once the magic words "God did it!" are spoken,
all will be well. With our original "creation story" restored, we will return
to a sense of God's providence, and the moral debt will be liquidated. But it
was never that simple, even before Darwin, and it would not be that simple
even if Darwin and Darwinism were retroactively erased from our collective
memory. The facts of nature, as revealed by any serious, unblinkered look at
the waves of extinction recorded in the fossil record, are never going to
support any glibly comforting conclusions about the creator's plans for
humanity.
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life....
"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go."
When Tennyson wrote these verses -- and the still more famous lines about
"Nature, red in tooth and claw" -- Darwin had not yet shipped out aboard the
H.M.S. Beagle.
"Naturalistic biology", therefore, seems in theory no more open to the
charge of moral subversion and atheist indoctrination than does "naturalistic
economics." It is possible, however, that it is a very different matter when
it comes to practice. It is possible that biology teachers routinely tell
their students not only that Darwinism is the best scientific explanation
available for the development of life, but that it is a demonstrated truth:
and that, therefore, any theistic belief about God having had anything to do
with the process has been conclusively falsified. That would be atheist
indoctrination, as it would be if economics teachers routinely told their
students that economists now understood national development so well that
there was no role left for God.
But Johnson scarcely begins to make the case that such is the actual
state of biology in academia; for all his constant laments about naturalistic
hegemony, naturalistic establishment and naturalistic indoctrination, he
provides virtually nothing in the way of actual examples or details about what
is actually being taught, and how. In the entire book I found precisely one
quotation from one textbook, in which Douglas Futuyma declares that "By
coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of
natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the
life processes superfluous."
This does indeed look like a claim that "Darwin has been proven right,
and therefore God has been properly disposed of." But even the context
Johnson provides indicates that Futuyma was speaking not of Darwinism's
triumph within biology, but of its part -- along with Freudianism and Marxism
-- in "the platform of mechanism and materialism... that has since been the
stage of most Western thought." One does not have to believe that Marx 's
account of history has been vindicated in detail (or even in general!) in
order to acknowledge the influence of Marxism, and the same is true of Darwin
and biology. (Ironically, Futuyma seems to agree with Johnson's claim that
naturalism -- "mechanism and materialism" -- now permeates our culture.
Perhaps they are both wrong, though. Indeed, claims like this about "Western
thought" are so broad and vague that it is hard to call them either right or
wrong.)
Still, this is a passage which would understandably raise eyebrows not
just within the Institute for Creation Research, but among parents who --
though they have no quarrel with evolution as such -- don't think it's a
biology text's business to enlist students in the march of materialism. And
it may be the case that textbooks in general are doing too much of that, or
are making one-sided, unsustainable claims about the proven success of the
Darwinian explanation of evolution. If Johnson, or anybody else, has more to
offer on this score, we should be prepared to listen. It would be
appreciated, of course, if the offering came with a little less bile ladled on
it.