For example, when one has to detour to avoid falling in a hole, the Christian and the Atheist both interpret this event in a naturalistic way - they each accommodate themselves to the purely physical fact that a hole would not be a good thing to fall into. Primitive humans invented various mystical forces, demons, and gods to rationalize some of life's events - in this case, maybe some sort of malicious imp who placed the hole in their path. In this same spirit, Christians deploy their own supernatural layer on top of the default worldview, introducing their own collection of metaphysical and teleological concepts. The philosophical naturalist does not add any of these extra layers, but continues to interpret both simple and complex phenomena as impersonal, natural processes. Naturalism is a metaphysical worldview that provides an explanation of reality using the assumption that nature and natural entities are all that exist, and that everything in our reality is ultimately reducable to natural entities, forces, properties, phenomena, and interactions. It does not attempt to catelog all of these things, but just asserts that when we encounter them, they can be understood as natural, rather than supernatural. Theistic worldviews add a supernatural layer involving invisible intentional forces and/or beings on top of this base layer.
So, what constitutes nature? Some naturalists respond that nature is basically the same as physical materialism - that nature consists of anything that can be described in terms of matter, the known forces, energy, space, the other exotic combinations non-matter particles, etc. However, there is a more economical and minimal definition of naturalism that doesn't restrict the natural world to the known forms of material existence with which we are familiar, and avoids the messy issue of the existence of abstract entities such as mathematical concepts, properties of objects, love, beauty, ideas, etc. This simpler form of naturalism is just this - there is no metaphysical agency-driven, teleology. There is no conscious entity or force that shapes our destinies, that cares about us, that reveals knowledge to us, or which has a stake in our existence. In other words, there is no "intelligent design" or overall purpose or goal for the universe other than to continue to do what it does - to exist. Naturalism entails a blind and undirected cosmos, recognizing that higher level properties and behaviors can emerge from interactions of these lower level entities. There are certainly processes that exhibit their own internal design, and systems that appear to work together in a beautiful and harmonious manner, but this does not require or imply an external creative intelligence which is directing everything. Everything in naturalism is reducible to non teleological, impersonal causes. This is what is meant when we say that "everything has a natural explanation". This does not preclude an Aristotelian form of goal-directed behavior in nature. He identified impersonal forms of teleology in nature that do not involve a god-like characters.
- Formal. Biological developmental processes that occur for the sake of self-preservation or preservation of the species (form).
- Functional. Parts of organisms that are present for the sake of the organism possessing them.
What this means is that all phenomena that occur do so in the absence of any external supernatural intentionality, and any evidence that purports to come from a supernatural origin (like the revealed word of a god) is not taken seriously. So, when a tidal wave destroys a city without any intention to do so, we would say this was a natural disaster, while when one person intentionally shoots another person, we would say that this was caused by an agency-driven, teleological force (the killer had a goal or purpose). This simpler form of naturalism rejects intention and teleology in the universe and in its metaphysics. Because it makes a more modest claim than philosophical materialism, this form of naturalism is not vulnerable to the apologist attack as being a crude materialist philosophy - it is not that. It merely eschews an outside, interested, intelligence that gets in the way of, and redirects, natural processes.
For the purpose of this blog entry, I will set aside my convictions about the default, naturalistic worldview I believe we all share and grant that Christians and Atheists do differ in major regards in their cosmological and metaphysical worldviews. Everyone has a worldview in one way or another. You can avoid defining or exploring your worldview, but when you believe in anything, ultimately the conclusions that you draw will be based on your guiding philosophy in life. They will be tied to your epistemology, your metaphysics, and so forth. It will shape how you interpret evidence. For example, a naturalist would interpret the evidence of geologic processes in the Grand Canyon differently than would a Young Earth Creationist. I argue in this posting that one world view gives a far more complete and satisfying (i.e., "better") explanation of the Grand Canyon than the other.
The decriptor, "better" implies that we have any way of evaluating whether a worldview is right or wrong. Do we? Or do we all just have our own experiences and beliefs, making one worldview just as good as another - a kind of "worldview relativism"? It's difficult to determine whether a worldview is right or wrong in part because the epistemic criteria that we use to judge the truth of it will be contained in that worldview. It is hard, maybe impossible, to step outside one's worldview to evaluate it (or evaluate a different worldview) objectively. An argument or explanation made following the "rules" of one worldview may have very little influence on someone who subscribes to a different worldview. A scientific/logical defense of naturalism might have very little impact on a fundamentalist Christian, for whom faith and revelation comprise the most convincing proofs. Incidentally, if one feels that objectivity and open-mindedness are not important in their worldview, then I will politely leave them here in peace because we have nothing more to discuss. If someone has a different worldview with a different epistemology (such as belief in revelation or direct communication with god, or belief in the factual truth of ancient religious texts, instead of science) then how could you convince them that their worldview is wrong and yours is right? And likewise, how could someone with a religiously based worldview convince someone with a science-based worldview that theirs is wrong? History has shown that those two camps tend to talk past each other.
Matthew Ferguson, a classics historian and prolific blogger (Κέλσος) on the subjects of philosophical naturalism and counter-apologetics, offers a viable solution to the impasse. He recommends that one way that we might evaluate a worldview is not so much by whether it is right or wrong, but instead by the pragmatic criteria of how well it "fits the data" and how well it actually achieves its purpose of being a robust and complete view of the world. After all, with the imposing name, "Worldview", one might reasonably expect that a good one would encompass a wide collection of things that it can explain. A worldview is not a trivial thing - it is an explanation of "life, the universe, and everything". If one's worldview, for example, proposes entities that don't appear to really exist in the world, or if it makes predictions that repeatedly are proven to be wrong, or at least don't align with what we actually see in the world, or fails to make any interesting predictions at all, then it's probably not a very good fit with the data provided by the world. So, the way you could evaluate a worldview is to ask, "How well does it explain the phenomena around us?" It is an open question as to whether these pragmatic criteria actually have any strong connection to "truth". But they certainly have a strong connection to how consistent and useful our theories are as they apply to the world. These pragmatic criteria, as will be shown, are rather loose and relativistic. But they have the advantage of at least acknowledging that our understanding of the world is not complete and certain, but is only partial and provisional.
First and second of the criteria - does the worldview have both explanatory scope (i.e., breadth) and explanatory power (i.e., depth)? Explanatory scope is something that can explain multiple independent categories of evidence, a measure of the amount of diverse phenomena explained by the hypothesis. Explanatory power is the degree to which it can explain the details of one particular category. For example, Evolutionary Theory has explanatory scope because it can explain biological features across all of Earth's life forms. Evolution's explanatory power can be seen in its ability to explain particular evolved features in great detail and depth. The Theory of Evolution has strong explanatory power, in that it presents strong evidence that explains how specific features developed.
The reason you want a worldview to have explanatory scope is that it would explain multiple things as opposed to only a single thing or few things, but not explaining others. If a worldview has explanatory scope, you would expect to see a lot of things it predicts if it were true, and nothing or very few things that it predicts if it were false. If your worldview has scope, you can explain many different things about the world using it. If it has explanatory power, you can explain those things to a very high degree and give a lot of evidence for them, as well. One worldview would also have more explanatory power than another about the same subject if it offered greater predictive power. That is, if it offered more details about what we should expect to see, and what we should not. Can the worldview predict events that will happen in the future, and also predict future discoveries of things that actually did happen in the past (i.e, "retrodict")? A worldview with both scope and power is more coherent, internally consistent, and effective in explaining the breadth and depth of our experience. Simply put, it is more effective and has a higher correspondence to reality. So, the Christian may argue that their worldview is as "good" as the Atheists (though I am at a loss to explain how they might define "good" in this context). But they would be completely unjustified in arguing that it has the scope or power of the naturalistic worldview. The Christian worldview is comparatively impotent, narrow, and weak, and it does not fit the data of our experience in the world, it fails to predict anything, and is essentially a cobbled-together collection of ad-hoc explanations, admonitions, appeals to authority, and aphorisms.
In addition to explanatory scope and explanatory power, described above, there are other "criteria of adequacy" which help us determine the extent to which a worldview systematizes and unifies our knowledge. Theodore Schick describes these in his article, Can God explain anything?. In addition to Scope and Power he adds fruitfulness (the ability of a hypothesis to successfully predict novel phenomena), consistency (freedom from contradiction), simplicity (not the brevity of the hypothesis, but the number of assumptions it has to make), and conservatism (how well the hypothesis fits with what we already know). And it almost goes without saying that Testability is a key component of the criteria. The hypothesis or theory should be testable against the real world. Without this, the explanation can never be truly grounded. In each of these areas, the scientific/secular/naturalistic hypothesis is superior to the superstitious/religious hypothesis.
According to Schick, a strong worldview should exhibit consistency. Not only should it be internally consistent, but it must also be externally consistent, consistent with external data. If an explanation about reality is internally inconsistent (i.e., self-contradictory) it can’t possibly be true. Thus one of the most effective ways to refute a theory is to show that it harbors a contradiction. The inconsistencies found in the bible (should we stone witches, or should only those without sin cast stones?), much less the disputes and conflicting doctrines between different denominations of Christianity, and between different religions, show how inconsistent religious worldviews are. A recent blatant display of inconsistency was seen in the 2014 debate between creationist Ken Ham and science advocate Bill Nye. Ken Ham argued (1) scientists rely on the Laws of Nature and the Uniformity of Nature, which were created by god, and (2) relying on the uniformity of nature to conduct "historical science" (his term) is invalid because "we weren't there" to confirm that nature was behaving uniformly in history. Also, according to his worldview, the Laws of Nature are not really laws, because god can break them any time he wants by injecting a miracle. Ken Ham (more than most), but really all Christians, put preservation of their religious convictions far above respect for and adherence to consistent use of logic.
Simplicity refers to the preference for less complex theories and worldviews over more complex ones - complexity referring to Occam's razor, "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." Like the principle of Conservatism, this was advocated by Quine as being required of a theory for it to be integrated with the "web of belief". All things being equal, the simpler a hypothesis is (the fewer assumptions it makes) the better it is. If phenomena can be explained without making certain assumptions, there’s no reason to make them. Christians perversely see their god-based worldview as simpler than the secular one. They assume just one thing: an omnipotent god, whereas science assumes many, many things (rejection of magic and miracles, naturalistic causes, rules of logic, the value of evidence, external reality, laws of nature, our ability to create meaningful models of reality, reliability of the senses, etc). This is completely disingenuous. Their one assumption, god, is the most complex, all encompassing, overwhelming entity that could ever be imagined. It is far, far more complicated and unlikely than the more modest assumptions of the naturalistic worldview. This criteria must be wielded carefully - not all the best theories are the most simple, but a more complex theory must have other redeeming traits. Examples of complex theories that are better than their more simple counterparts are Mendeleev's periodic table consisting of over 100 elements contrasted with Aristotle's five simple elements, and Quantum theory comprising dozens of elementary particles vs. Atomic theory which has only the proton, neutron, and electron. So, like all these criteria, the criteria of simplicity is a guideline rather than a rule or a law.
Conservatism, which is sometimes called coherence, describes the worldview's fit with other worldviews and theories. This is a desirable trait because if buying into a worldview requires rejecting a good deal of what we’ve already established about the world, instead of enhancing and augmenting existing beliefs about the world, then it may diminish our overall understanding. Like the principle of Simplicity, this was advocated by Quine as being required of a theory for it to be integrated with the "web of belief". Conservatism means that we want to preserve as much of our existing web of belief as we can (don't make big changes if we don't need to). The Christian worldview, specifically the part that allows and even requires miracles, directly conflicts with every experience we have (and have ever had) in the miracle-free world. The moral and social aspects of Christianity can mesh with other aspects of our belief systems, but the Christian push into causality, the injection of religious miracles into our present day world, directly contradicts our actual experience, every other non-magical worldview, and other magical (but non-Christian) worldviews.
Precision is a characteristic of a worldview which means that it makes precise and targeted statements about the world, it is not vague and fuzzy. The naturalistic world view does just that - the more precise and detailed it can be about our experience in the world, the better. The religious worldview is variable, overly flexible, and imprecise. It assigns all outcomes of all events to god's will. If there is a natural disaster, that was god's will. If there was no natural disaster, that was also god's will. It is impossible to nail down on any issue because it is so intrinsically imprecise.
Philosopher of Science, Alan Musgrave, elaborates on the criteria of fruitfulness, the ability of a worldview to generate novel predictions. It is relevant as much to worldviews as it is to scientific theories. Can the worldview make predictions concerning phenomena which were unknown during the development of the theory/worldview - predictions of unexpected and surprising events which play no part in the formation of the worldview? This ability weighs heavily in favor of many of the best scientific theories and the naturalistic world view, as a whole. If a logical model of the world fits reality so well that it not only can explain and predict what we understand, but can anticipate things we have not yet discovered, that is a very powerful strength - a strength possessed by the naturalistic worldview and not by the religious worldview. Examples of such novel predictions in science that served to strongly confirm those theories are:
- Fresnel's transverse wave theory's prediction of a bright spot in the center of a shadow.
- Einstein's General Theory of Relativity's prediction bending of light waves around the body of the sun, as well as the irregularities in the perihelion of Mercury.
- Mendeleev's periodic table and the prediction of several previously unknown elements based on obvious gaps in the table.
- Copernicus' heliocentric theory and the prediction of the phases of Venus and the brightening and dimming of the planets as their distance from the Earth changes.
- Evolutionary Theory predicted that a transitional fossil linking fishes and tetrapods would be found in rocks from the Devonian period (and it was found - the "Tiktaalik"). The existence of the Morgan's sphinx moth in Madagascar was predicted based on the odd structure of a certain orchid. Many other examples exist (so much for not being able to conduct experiments to test Evolutionary Theory!)
- Quantum Theory predicted many previously unknown particles, including the Higgs Boson, that were eventually discovered
Pierre Duhem (of Duhem-Quine fame) also proposed a few strategies to decide among theories that are underdetermined by the data. Like others who have considered this problem, he concluded that not all theories of this type are equally justified, or equally hopeless. Quine provided us with a set of standards to apply to competing theories. He called these the "explanatory virtues". Modesty is a virtue, because (all things being equal) logically less demanding hypotheses and hypotheses that claim less are preferable to hypotheses that entail more assumptions, as are hypotheses that assume events of a familiar sort. Simplicity (mentioned previously) is also a virtue because simpler hypotheses are preferable to complex ones (another restatement of Ockham's razor).
The term, worldview, is used by a lot of Christians today. For example, worldview.org is a Christian apologetics website. It describes a "battle of worldviews" and pits the Christian against the Naturalistic worldview. Some Christians place an inordinate importance on the worldview concept, which is why I am blogging about it in this chapter. This Christian focus on worldview is a tactic that Christian presuppositionalists use to undermine atheism and naturalism. They claim that atheists don't believe in miracles, resurrections, god, angels, etc because they have a built-in presupposition of naturalism. They claim that these naturalistic presuppositions causes atheists to believe, apriori, that nature is all that exists. This atheist filtering would cause them to reject all counter-evidence that comes from outside of nature (i.e., supernatural evidence) that would refute these presuppositions. They argue that atheists are therefore inhibited by their implicit rejection of the supernatural, and that they poison the well against any supernatural phenomena. This is completely wrong - it interprets the naturalistic worldview incorrectly. The naturalistic worldview is not an apriori belief that atheists just decide to subscribe to, as some sort of preference or bias. Instead, it can be and usually is arrived at aposteriori, after one has looked at the world, investigated its mysteries, studied and researched it, and after all of this analysis, comes to the conclusion that nature appears to be all that exists. Therefore for all future phenomena that we look at, we would assume they would have a higher chance of being natural events rather than supernatural ones. That is not an apriori process (i.e., based purely on logic), but one based explicitly on evidence - the historical evidence for miracles and supernatural events is simply not strong. Additionally, many phenomena that were formerly considered supernatural (lightning, plagues, disease, insanity, natural disasters, eclipses, comets, creation of species, and so on) have been demystified by science and transformed from supernatural to natural. That process continues.
Atheism, at its most basic level, is not a philosophy or positive assertion of a worldview. It is not a counterbalance to the religious worldview, but involves a far smaller claim. It is just an statement concerning a particular issue - the existence or the non existence of the supernatural. It doesn't necessarily imply the adoption of a set of other beliefs to substitute for superstition (though naturalism is a frequent candidate for that). It really is just an epistemic statement about how one comes to acquire knowledge. It rejects revelation, miracles, and millennia old religious legends as legitimate sources of knowledge. Some atheists go on to assert strong confidence that there is no god, while less assertive atheists would maintain that after centuries of failed attempts, all the evidence presented for a god fails miserably, and they therefore conclude that there is almost certainly no god - in the same sense that there are almost certainly no fairies living in my mailbox, and no boogeyman hiding under my bed.
One justification I commonly hear from Christian apologists, evangelical intellectuals, or students of the philosophy of religion is that their belief in the Christian story is based on an “inference to the best explanation”. In using this justification, they are not only borrowing from the methods of empirical and epistemic philosophy, but attempting to co-opt it. This type of inference, also called "abduction" or eliminative inference, is performed when one chooses among several hypotheses that attempt to explain a phenomenon, throw out those that fail to fit the data, and choose the best of the remainder. In hijacking this reliable reasoning technique, they appeal to god as the best explanation of the origin of life, morality, consciousness, and the entire universe. There are problems with using the convenient and supportive part of abduction, but choosing to leave out the unpleasant parts. They overlook some obstacles that get in the way of their desired conclusion when they employ this technique. For example, they are guilty of "underconsideration", which is not really considering all the other available explanations, and also of extreme subjectivity - when the goal is so attractive, it is not difficult to fit explanations to it. But worst of all, they stop just before the most important step, in that they don't then follow their hypothesis up with evidence to support it. The inference leads to a theory (really, a hypothesis), but the theory needs real-world testing. This is the way you have to test your claims - Einstein's theory of relativity didn't gain full acceptance until it was empirically confirmed in 1919 by the astronomer, Arthur Eddington, when observing an eclipse. But, you can't test god. He is immune to puny human testing. Any evidence in the world can be fitted to god simply by saying that this is how god chose to do something. Because of god's infinite power, the god hypothesis is impossible to test. Coming up with the explanation is only the first half of the battle. Supporting it with evidence to prove that the theory holds up is the second, and much more challenging and really - important - part. It is not sufficient to propose an untestable theory, dust your hands together, and then congratulate yourself with a "job well done". The job is only half done without the backing evidence. The proposed explanation is only a hypothesis until it can be transformed into a true theory of reality, which requires the support of hard evidence.
Some Christian apologists use this approach to try to drag the discussion back to this unhelpful and misleading presuppositional level. For example, an atheist would say that he doesn't believe Jesus was resurrected because he doesn't see any evidence that someone can be resurrected from the dead. The theist would blame the naturalistic presupposition that blinds atheists to the possibility of resurrection. In fact, this is not really a presupposition at all. We have observed billions of people live and die throughout history, and none of them ever come back from the dead. From the tremendous body of knowledge we have accumulated about biology, we understand that there would be many insuperable difficulties associated with reviving a thoroughly dead and decaying corpse. So, the fact that people don't resurrect is consistent with a naturalistic worldview, but strongly conflicts with the religious worldview that says that they can.
In a conflict of world views, once a debate leaves the empirical and moves to the supernatural, then naturalism cannot speak to it, since it takes as one of its premises the reliability of empirical evidence and testing of claims against reality. A trust in empiricism is one of the axioms that cannot be proved, but must either be rejected, or be accepted as self evident and the most likely explanation for our experiences of reality (for other axioms of naturalism, see "Assumptions of Science").
There are multiple worldviews that are capable of explaining our world and our experiences. The Christians have an explanation that involves Special Creation (some arguing that it all happened just 6000 years ago), but all believing that god got it all started and is actively managing things, now. There are other worldviews that also claim to be coherent and complete explanations - among them are Solipsism, Last-Thursdayism, "Brain in a vat", and the many other religion/superstition-based explanations for how things work. When the same evidence is explainable by several theories, we say that the evidence "underdetermines the theories". This is called the underdetermination problem. There will always be more than one theory that fits the data, no matter how much evidence comes in. For example, we have a theory that when several hours of night has past, the sun will rise. Another theory that accounts for our experience so far is that for all of history the sun has risen, but starting tomorrow it will not do so. Both theories explain the evidence so far. Which is better? James Ladyman summarized Carl Popper's approach to resolving multiple hypotheses that account for the same evidence in his book, Understanding the Philosophy of Science. In it he says:
"For any theory H there is always another theory G such that:Theory "H" is Naturalism, and theory "G" is any of Solipsism, Last-Thursdayism, "Brain in a Vat", Young-Earth Creationism, or any other religion/superstition-based explanation for reality. Each of these theory "G"s offer no new predictions (and never have predicted any past events either), seem ad-hoc, and are clearly attempts to harrass and nip at the heels of Naturalism, which is the only theory that has anything like a successful history of explanation, description, and prediction. Given Popper's (and Ladyman's) explanation, we have every reason to believe "H" (Naturalism) and none of the competing explanations.This is potentially a real problem for the scientific realist because, if it is correct, there are always rival theories we have not thought of, which fit all the data that support each of the best current scientific theories. If this is the case, why should we believe our best theories and not the skeptic’s alternatives? However, this argument may be challenged by denying the first premise, in other words, by arguing that the mere existence of a rival hypothesis consistent with all the data so far does not mean there is no reason to prefer one of H and G. Hence, for example, Popper argued that if G is ad-hoc, and entails no other empirically falsifiable predictions, then it should be ignored.
- If H & G are weakly empirically equivalent (i.e., they both account for the observable evidence) then there is no reason to believe H and not G.
- We see that H & G are weakly empirically equivalent.
- Therefore, there is no reason to believe H and not G.
Of course Popper didn’t think we should believe H either, but it is easy to adapt his response to defend an inductivist approach to the underdetermination problem. Hence, it might be argued that if H has previously been predictively successful, and G is ad-hoc in the sense of being introduced merely to accommodate the data without entailing any new predictions, then, given the past success of the overall method of believing empirically successful theories over ad-hoc ones, we have inductive grounds for thinking H and not G is likely to be true".
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