Tom Gilson replies to Barbara Forrest on Naturalism

This is Tom Gilson's critique of a Barbara Forrest essay in defense of naturalism. I had linked to the essay and suggested that it was a huge exercise in begging the question.

Atheistic presuppositionalists

The issue wouldn't be inerrancy, but rather something I would call general historical reliability. Using a Bayesian model of evidence, X is evidence for just in case X is more probable given Y than given not-Y.

I would expect accurate reports of miraculous activity to come from sources which make serious attempts to describe the facts, and which have good enough access to the relevant facts to have a great deal of general historical reliability. So, it seems to me that evidence that Scripture has historically accurate content is evidence that the miracle claims contained within are true; that evidence could be outweighed by the overall plausibility of naturalism in the minds of many reasonable persons.

It seems to me you have to distinguish between saying

1) The evidence for X isn't good enough for me

and saying

2) There is no evidence at all.

What I suspect is that, deep down, a lot of skeptics are atheistic presuppositionalists. They think that in order to have evidence for something it has to have a naturalistic explanation, and to use inductive reasoning to support any claims with respect to the supernatural is to abuse the inductive reasoning process.

If that's the case, they shouldn't be saying we don't have the evidence, what they should be saying is that the kinds of claims Christians make are not the sorts of things that it is even logically possible to have evidence for.

Barbara Forrest on Naturalism

A redated post. 

Is it just me, or is this a paper a gigantic exercise in begging the question? She wants both methodological naturalism and an argument that science refutes religion. But if the methodology of science couldn't have supported religion, how could it undermine religion?

God, Science, and Metal Detectors

A redated post.

This is from my response to the Carrier-Wanchick debate.

Carrier relied on an argument from displacement, but it is the nature of science not to look for supernatural causes, or if so, to accept them as a last resort. It is like saying that the $100 bill you lost at the beach must have been stolen because after scouring the area with a metal detector, you didn't find it. Science is extremely good at telling us some things we need to know; there are other things it is not so good at, and it is far from proven that we ought to make science the measure of all things.



Jan 1, 2011 addendum: Methodological naturalism in the sciences actually weakens the argument for atheism based on science. The only way scientific evidence could possibly undermine religious belief would be if scientific evidence could have gone the other way and confirmed religious belief.

Science without methodological naturalism

Robert Delfino thinks that methodological naturalism is a dogma that science can do without. That doesn't mean that ID works, only that it can't be thrown out at the outset. Looks pretty good on first read-through.

Comparing the Bible and the Qu'ran

According to John Loftus, critiques of other religions either simply quote the Bible as an authority, thus begging the question, or else, in their analysis of the other religions, they operate from the perspective of methodological naturalism with respect to the other religions while failing to employ that same methodological naturalism in dealing with the Christian Bible. That is why Christianity fails the outsider test for faith.

No doubt critics of Christian apologetics will take issue with some of the claims put forth in this comparison. But I don't think the case can be made that the author is employing a different standard for the Bible and for the Qu'ran. Nor does this comparison support Loftus' claim that any analysis of the Qu'ran either presupposes the inerrancy of Scripture or is methodologically naturalistic.

I would like to see some evidence to support Loftus's claims that Christians employ methodological naturalism when they critique other religions. It seems howlingly false to me.

Getting clear on naturalism

I have been working through Barbara Forrest's essay "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connections." In this she argues on the one hand that there is a difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical (or metaphysical naturalism). However, the supernatural, if it is real, is not knowable by humans in any systematic, intelligent fashion. Therefore, we must proceed naturalistically if we are to get to know the world around us at all, and this gives us a powerful reason to accept naturalism metaphysically, while leaving open the bare logical possibility that naturalism is false.

The tricky part, however, is getting an account of naturalism that doesn't simply presuppose a conception of the natural. Natural, you know, just whatever ain't supernatural. And you know what supernatural is, right? It's anything having to do with God, that they talk about in church and stuff.

She starts of with a quote from Kurtz:

First, naturalism is committed to a methodological principle within the context of scientific inquiry; i.e., all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events. To introduce a supernatural or transcendental cause within science is to depart from naturalistic explanations. On this ground, to invoke an intelligent designer or creator is inadmissible....

There is a second meaning of naturalism, which is as a generalized description of the universe. According to the naturalists, nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles, i.e., by mass and energy and physical-chemical properties as encountered in diverse contexts of inquiry. This is a non-reductive naturalism, for although nature is physical-chemical at root, we need to deal with natural processes on various levels of observation and complexity: electrons and molecules, cells and organisms, flowers and trees, psychological cognition and perception, social institutions, and culture....

OK let's work with these definitions for a minute. The first of these definitions assumes that we know what a natural cause is. Surely, we say, God must be supernatural. But must he? If you are enunciating a principle of methodological naturalism, then it is incumbent on you to tell me what it is about the theistic God that would make him not a part of nature. If nature is what is, and there is a mentally driven what is and a non-mentally driven what is, have we really excluded anything?

The other requires that naturalism maintain that the world is at root physical. Whatever is real either is physical or supervenes on the physical. But now we have to define what "physical" means, and here we have the same difficulties as we find for defining "natural."

My dissertation advisor once said that a scientific theory could possibly quantify over God, in which case it would make God physical. But surely, in defining the physical, or the natural, God is precisely the very sort of being you are trying to exclude. Can we define methodological naturalism in any kind of systematic way, such that advocates of intelligent design can't just embrace the principle?

Andrew T on Inerrancy and Methdological Naturalism

The fact that abandonment of a belief might result in one’s being expelled from one’s institution of education doesn’t mean that the position is indefeasible. Someone who starts doubting aspects of Darwinian biology might have similar fears about their status at their own institutions of learning. I don’t want to uphold the whole “Expelled” claim, but I think there is considerable pressure within many academic biology departments not to stray from Darwinism. Further, people in places like Talbot got positions at places like Talbot because their thinking led them to think that inerrancy was true to begin with. There have been people who have left their Christian academic institutions because they had doubts about the doctrinal commitments of the institution. And sometimes these institutional statements are given fairly liberal interpretations. If you apply at Calvin College the official statements affirm the Canons of Dordt, but I know that some people who teach there are not five-pointers (Plantinga, who taught classes there while at Notre Dame, openly said that the Canons of Dordt may not have gotten things right.)

Further, exactly what is built into inerrancy is a little complicated, and what it takes to be guilty of “denying the Bible” may have more to it than just rejecting some popular hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis. The medievals said “Authority has a nose of wax” and that is, I think, true of inerrancy, although there are occasions where you get explusions, or attempted explusions, from groups like the ETS. However, the attempt to get Open Theists out of the ETS failed a couple of years back. I take it you have read the Chicago Statement and know what the doctrine is actually thought to mean by its contemporary advocates.

There are stronger and weaker versions of MN, just as there are stronger and weaker versions of the commitment to inerrancy. It is a framework believe that the advocate will call into question only in the face of considerable evidential pressure.

One of the things I tried to explain in my long exchanges with the Calvinists was that someone might in fact believe that inerrancy is true, but at the same time hold, based on their moral understanding, that the Calvinistic conception of a reprobating God was morally unacceptable. They might think that the biblical evidence supported anti-Calvinism rather than Calvinism, and therefore accept both inerrancy and anti-Calvinism. However, if presented with sufficient evidence (based on Calvinist exegetical arguments) that inerrancy and anti-Calvinism could not be held simultaneously, they might choose, in the hypothetical situation, to give up inerrancy. It wouldn’t follow from that never really believed in inerrancy in the first place.

Even if Craig would believe in inerrancy regardless of whether there were strong evidence for it or not, it could be that he could say he was confident that there were lots of good arguments and reasons for being and inerrantist, or he could say that it was an article of faith. One's faith that something is true doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to make all sorts of ......stuff up to support one's beliefs.

Inerrancy and Methodological Naturalism

This is something I put in the combox of the last post, but it need to be treated separately here.

I think there are difficulties with Craig's apologetical operation. I have some fundamental differences in methodology, etc. I'm not comfortable with what he does with his appeal to religious experience and the testimony of the Holy Spirit.

However, I fail to see how pre-commitment to biblical inerrancy is any worse than pre-commitment to methodological naturalism. If a naturalistically inclined biblical scholar finds it difficult to account for the founding events of Christianity, well, by golly, my hallucination/legend/whatever-else theory may not fit all the facts as we know them, but at least it's better than admitting a miracle. We can't let a divine foot in the door, now can we?

The "special pleading" charge, as in the case of Russell's analysis of Aquinas, carries with it an implicit classical foundationalism that has been rejected in numerous areas of inquiry. We don't come to the data as a blank slate to be written on, nor should we. We are humans, not Vulcans. And pretending to be a Vulcan when you aren't one is just one more way of being irrational.

Now, a methodological naturalist could treat MN as a defeasible working hypothesis, but an inerrantist could do the same.