Hunter, Cornelius G. Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism. Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press, 2007. $14.99.
This book is an excellent "thinker." I often had to re-read portions so that I could more fully understand and I found myself, my assumptions, challenged in a very positive way. I urge anyone interested in science, an aspect of science, to read this book. Below, I will first try to deal with Hunter's arguments and then go one step further in some analysis of my own.
Hunter's thesis is that, by requiring that science can only ever provide natural/material explanations, it has created a blind spot such that, if the data ever pointed to a non-material explanation it would be missed. Nowhere in the book does Hunter try to prove that non-material explanations are necessarily present, but he does argue that science should reject the adoption of a priori assumptions, such as the requirement that all explanations be material, in favor of following the date wherever it leads.
To illustrate his point, Hunter shows the difference between empirical science (fact-based, experimentation, repeatable) and rational science (theory-based, not repeatable or experimental, dogmatic). His clear example is of two biologists, one studying how nerve cells work and the other studying the evolutionary descent of some animal species. The one involves lab experiments all over the world, while the other involves historical fiction and supposition based on thin data collected from paleontology and similarities between organisms. It is clear that these two types of science are vastly different, the rational sort not conforming well at all to common definitions of science.
Interestingly, Hunter does not blame this intellectual requirement that all explanations be material on atheism, as I've often thought. He calls that a bad mistake committed by many Christians in scientific debates. Rather, he argues that naturalism (what he calls theological naturalism) arose during the Enlightenment because of theological concerns. These relate to the problem of evil, human freedom issues, and a disbelief in an intervening God, not from a disbelief in any god at all. Theologians and scientists looked at the world, its suffering and apparent lack of meaning, and felt that God could not be responsible for all of this. This group, many of whom were deists (names include Burnet, Kant, Leibniz, Darwin, etc.), therefore, posited that God does not intervene in the world but has created natural laws sufficient to explain all that exists. Thus, science should only ever look for natural/material explanations because, according to their theology and not any sort of science, that was all there could be. Essentially, they felt the need to get God off the hook for evil.
This has great bearing on the Intelligent Design debate, since ID scientists argue that the date points to a designer while evolutionists argue that it points to purely material causes. According to Hunter, it may be that evolutionists can't see the design implications because they have decided before examining any data that it can't exist.
Hunter definitely holds to the principle of parsimony, which is that when a natural/simple explanation fits the data it is unnecessary and undesirable to look for a more complex, non-material one. However, when material explanations fail to fit the data, non-material ones can and should be considered. He argues that, in the case of evolution, the material explanation fails in key ways to adequately explain the data.
As my own contribution, I would like to point out that theological liberalism, like that which opened the door to deism and theological naturalism, leads people to reject the God of the Bible in favor of some other god derived from philosophy and human reason. When this occurs, it should be no surprise that concepts based off of the nature of this new god do not work well in the real world. This is why the doctrines of the inspiration and authority of the Bible as so important. Interestingly, if people are worried about the problem of evil, the Bible actually addresses that subject already in a way that shows that God bears no taint of evil but is actually at work to redeem those who brought it into creation.
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2 comments:
I am very glad I found this post. I had not heard of this book before, but it seems to cover many of the thoughts I have had about this subject. This book will be added to my "must read" list.
I have had many debates about this very thing with hard-core evolutionists on the Internet. They like to start out by saying that the evidence points to evolution, not creation, but when you pin them down, they will admit that: a) science cannot prove evolution happened because science does not deal in "proof", and b) they think belief in God is ridiculous.
A little more than a year ago, I wrote and published on the Internet (the link is in my blog) an article called "Why Evolution Is a Faith." My point in the article is that evolution cannot be proved because the scientific method, as practiced by science, actually prevents science from trying to prove evolution. That is because the scientific method does not allow consideration of supernatural causes. You cannot prove something by looking at only one side - you have to look at both sides without bias. But science cannot do that. Thus they cannot prove evolution.
Let's put it this way. Science believes that all species came about through descent from a common anscestor with genetic changes through natural causes only. That is the only kind of evolution taught in the public schools. Now, if God supernaturally intervened as selected times to modify the genetics slightly to produce new species over millions of years, that would look exactly like evolution looks as far as the evidence of fossils and genetics is concerned. But that would not be evolution as it is taught in the public schools. Evolution is "natural causes only", as is all science. Yet, evolution cannot prove that God did not intervene that way. Hard core evolutionists do not think that kind of proof is necessary, since they think the idea of God is ridiculous.
Science works well in examining repeatable processes because God has set in motion physical laws that work in a predictable way more than 99.99% of the time. God wants man to be able to work with his environment, and for man to be able to do that, physical processes need to be predictable. This is what the scientific method is good for. But it is not good for examining the origins of things.
Evolution is a faith, not a religious faith, but an anti-religious faith. By faith I mean it is a chosen belief in something, in this case, the belief that there is no God that intervenes in physical processes, and that all life must therefore have come about through natural processes only. This is a belief that hard-core evolutionists have chosen, and they try to impose it on others, but they cannot prove it with logic. And they are as zealous for their belief as any religious believer may be zealous for his religious beliefs.
Good review John. I am a bit skeptical of Hunter's extension of the problem of evil as a motive for evolution (in his previous book, Darwin's Proof), to a motive for natural science as a whole. I'll have to read the book, but it seems to me that there are other philosophical issues at stake.
I myself am coming to think that debates concerning naturalism/materialism/physicalism suffer because these terms are not clearly defined. If by "natural" explanation we mean explanation in terms of energy or conserved quantities, then I think it is right that physics and chemistry be naturalistic, and it would be ridiculous to invoke divine intervention to explain why my glass of water stays still. The problem comes with the philosophical positionthat other sciences reduce to physics, and that therefore any divine causality, or even human mental causality, must be akin to a magical intervention. But this philosophical position is often assumed tacitly because the or natural/supernatural (or physical/mental) distinction is thought of uncritically as something like Cartesian substance dualism.
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