The Joshua Letter

Chapter 8

THE ROOTS AND EFFECTS OF NATURALISM

I. Introduction.

Having surveyed the findings in many areas of science, the dearth of evidence for naturalism is striking, and the wealth of evidence of design is even more so. How can it be, then, that naturalism remains the world view of most of the scientific establishment - not to mention the governmental, academic and media elites?

Until a very short time ago - as recently as the very late 19th Century - westerners had no difficulty recognizing the design in a flower, or a starfish, or in the human eye. Now, we look at the same flower, the same starfish, or we look at the night sky, with the same amount of wonder; but our wonder is not at the creative power of God, but at the creative power of an impersonal, mechanistic Nature.

Even evolutionists recognize design when they see it - yes, even in living things - but seldom, if ever, make the logical connection to personal causation. Phillip Johnson tells of A. G. Cairns-Smith, a prominent evolutionist who, in Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, explains the Darwinist conception of life which underlies the field of prebiological evolution. "Life is a product of evolution," he writes, and the indispensable element in evolution is natural selection. This means that the purpose of a living thing "is to survive, to compete, to reproduce its kind against the odds." Says Johnson:

The Darwinistic definition of life is Cairns-Smith's philosophical preference. When he describes what he actually sees, however, he tells of something very different:

After all what impresses us about a living thing is its in-built ingenuity, its appearance of having been designed, thought out - of having been put together with a purpose. . . .1
Similarly, Richard Dawkins, one of today's most active anti-creationist polemicists, writes, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."2

In The Dreams of Reason (a book about scientific reasoning), Heinz Pagels discusses what he calls "the cosmic code," which includes quantum and relativity theory, the laws of chemical combination and molecular structure, the rules that govern protein synthesis, among other things, and to which he refers as "the Demiurge":

Scientists in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge's hidden message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be the work of an Alien Intelligence!

. . . Whether God is the message, wrote the message, or whether it wrote itself is unimportant in our lives. We can safely drop the traditional idea of the Demiurge, for there is no scientific evidence for a Creator of the natural world, no evidence for a will or purpose that goes beyond the known laws of nature. Even the evidence of life on earth, which promoted the compelling "argument from design" for a Creator, can be accounted for by evolution [Pagels refers his readers to books by Dawkins and Gould for the evidence.] So we have a message without a sender.3
Johnson offers this commentary:

The first paragraph of that passage tells us that the presence of intelligent design in the cosmos is so obvious that even an atheist like Pagels cannot help noticing it, and rhapsodizing about it, dubbing the Creator "the Demiurge." Naturalistic philosophy controls his mind so completely that Pagels can stare straight at evidence of intelligent design, describe it as such, and still not see it.4
And so it is with many of us: our assumptions about what is real, if mistaken, can prevent us from recognizing what is in front of us; and that is exactly what happens to most of our generation in its thinking about the nature and origin of the physical world. The question which this Chapter raises and attempts to answer is whether there a comprehensible explanation for this. If design really is so pervasively apparent, then how could we have missed it for so long?

A wise man once said that anyone who does not draw on 3,000 years is living hand-to-mouth. I don't remember who it was, but he was speaking of 3,000 years of intellectual history, and his aphorism was meant to express the notion that if one is unfamiliar with the development of man's thinking about himself and his place in the world since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, and how and why our way of thinking has changed over the centuries, then one simply has no context within which to make an intelligent evaluation of ideas. One is consequently powerless to resist anything that seems plausible on its surface. One is as Paul describes him, "tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine."5

The more familiar I become with the history of ideas, the more it seems to me that contemporary Americans' minds are furnished with notions which they consider to be obvious, but the dubious origins of which, if they knew them, would astonish them. Particularly, if they should investigate the transition from theism to a widespread belief in an impersonal, self-organizing cosmos, they would be dismayed to learn that it did not occur because it was warranted by scientific findings, but because of the temporary success of certain ideas which have subsequently been shown to be false, misleading, or incomplete. Then, understanding this, they might begin to realize that the dominance of naturalism was never inevitable and that its cultural imperium is nearing an end. They might even learn to recognize, and to question, the naturalistic suppositions in their own thinking.

II. Newtonianism, Enlightenment Rationalism, Higher Criticism, Relativity and Freudianism.

The history of ideas is replete with ironies. Fundamental shifts in thinking occur for the most spurious reasons; but once established, they often prove tenacious. It is doubtful whether there is a more extreme instance of this than the process whereby naturalism became the dominant world view of our civilization, as it resulted, in my most humble opinion, from at least six separate ideological wrong turns. Four of these intellectual blunders have subsequently been acknowledged as mistakes. The other two - Darwinism and Higher Criticism - are closely related. Darwinism deserves to be discarded for the reasons stated in this essay, and Higher Criticism deserves to be discarded for many of the same reasons. Despite the erosion of support for these ideas, however, their temporary success created enormous cultural momentum toward naturalistic thinking. That momentum carries us still, and continues to darken many brilliant minds. Let us take a lightning tour of the last three and a half centuries, and consider these ideas in roughly chronological order.

A. Newtonianism.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) showed that the physical universe was governed by understandable regularities which he called "laws." Newton is best known for his discovery of the universal law of gravitation, which predicted the motions of the planets with much greater accuracy than any previous system. Many people are unaware that Newton also invented the calculus, which showed that the behavior of physical systems takes place in elegant and precise mathematical relations. It was from Newton's work that the notion of a "clockwork" universe, which God was thought to have "wound up" and then left to run by itself, was derived. Newton - who, of course, was a traditional theist in his religious beliefs - did his work well ahead of the nineteenth century, of course; his ideas did not by themselves seriously undermine widespread acceptance of the activity of God in nature. Nevertheless, Newtonian mechanics fostered the assumption that matter was governed by rational, predictable and universal regularities. This fostered a great deal of enthusiasm for the explanatory power of science and created fertile soil in which naturalism would later take hold.

It was not until the twentieth century - after naturalism had already taken firm root in western culture - that Einstein showed Newtonian mechanics to be incomplete; and the greater success of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity (Chapter 7) in predicting the behavior of physical bodies demonstrated that physical causation is not as neat, simple or understandable as had been thought.

Also in the early twentieth century, Max Planck (1858-1947) and Niels Bohr (1885-1962) introduced quantum mechanics (also discussed in Chapter 7), which showed that at the subatomic level, physical causation is radically unpredictable. Today, quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in the history of science and is universally accepted; yet physicists do not understand quantum behavior, and they do not expect ever to understand it.

Thus the confidence in physical causation which Newtonian physics seemed to justify has been significantly eroded. In particular, the universe no longer appears to be governed by strict mechanical laws, as formerly seemed to be the case.

B. Enlightenment Rationalism.
After the Protestant Reformation of the early Sixteenth Century, in which many people split from the Roman Catholic church to establish new, independent churches, Europe was torn by religious warfare, culminating in the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. (It should be noted that the causes of these wars were often as much political and economic as religious.) Substantially impelled by revulsion toward crimes committed during this period by religious protagonists who felt called by God to impose their own interpretations of biblical faith on others through force, Enlightenment philosophers attempted to identify means for the discovery of truth other than the revelation of Scripture. They believed they had found it in Reason. The human rational faculty, they believed, was a sufficient guide; and since each man was equipped with the faculty of reason, no authority (religious or otherwise) could claim the right to compel belief.

The disestablishment of religion - the renunciation of the right to impose religious belief through law - must be seen as one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization; but it was accomplished by the embrace of a false notion: that unaided reason can lead to the discovery of moral truth, and of a basis for law and politics. The Enlightenment philosophers believed that many basic principles were self-evident to the rational mind; but they only believed this because they were so close to the Medieval period, in which the Christian consensus was practically universal in the West, that it was inconceivable to them that man's inherent value could ever be rationally denied.6

One of the best illustrations of this is found in the American Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson stated that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. . . ." To Jefferson and his generation, these things were self-evident; but our generation has seen another 225 years of the erosion of the Medieval consensus, and we are no longer willing to say that these truths are self-evident. That is not to say we are ready to criticize the Jeffersonian basis for American political institutions; instead, we avoid the subject altogether, lest we admit publicly that we no longer believe the principles on which our nation was founded.

Reason can evaluate the validity of an argument; what Jefferson could not see is that reason cannot provide First Principles. It is, in fact, the failure of Enlightenment rationalism to justify its claim to provide a basis for human decency that led to the latest philosophical movement, Post-Modernism, which posits that there is no morality to be discovered, only power.

Post-Modernism is primarily the darling of the academic intelligentsia, of course; its influence on popular culture, while pervasive, is subtle and, to most minds, unseen. Most of those who know that the Enlightenment ever occurred, are completely unaware that it is over. Furthermore, in a time when half of high-school graduates cannot identify the century in which the American Civil War occurred, there are, no doubt, many who are unaware that the Enlightenment ever occurred. Nevertheless, we are all rationalists, precisely because we don't know where rationalism came from, and precisely because we don't know that its exaggerated claims have been discredited.

We cannot leave the subject of the Enlightenment without a word about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant's ideas may be thought of both as a culmination of much of Enlightenment philosophy and also as setting the stage for the breakdown of the modern synthesis, leading in a straight line to Post-Modernism.

More than any other philosopher, Kant is responsible for the wide acceptance of the divided field of knowledge. According to this doctrine, factual knowledge is objective and is apprehended by the mind, while meaning and purpose are based on realities which are not amenable to empirical investigation, and must be embraced, if they are to be embraced at all, by faith, or intuition, or through the emotions. Kant set the stage for Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian philosopher who taught that religion is to be found through a "leap of faith" and not as a result of rational inquiry.

The Enlightenment began in hope that reason could discover the basis for the moral life, for meaning and purpose in human existence; by Kant's time, many Enlightenment philosophers had given up that hope. As successful as science had become in explaining material phenomena, fewer and fewer moral truths continued to seem obvious: reason and science had not yielded a basis for religion after all. Kant rescued religion by proposing that although science was incompetent in matters of the soul, a rational theology can be founded upon the common human experiences of beauty, conscience and the religious impulse. John Herman Randall explains Kant's solution:

[S]ince we can neither prove nor disprove by the methods of science that we must choose the right rather than the wrong, that we are free so to choose, and that the universe is governed somehow by a moral law, and since we are absolutely compelled, being the creatures that we are, to live as though these things were true, we are justified in assuming that they are.7
According to Randall, "Such a rational defense of faith . . . seemed cogent to multitudes of men; it was enthusiastically accepted by the romanticists who felt already that rational science was inadequate." Nevertheless, Kant's solution, by drawing a false distinction between faith and knowledge, contained the seeds of its own destruction. Kant decisively severed religion's moorings to objective reality:

From the critical point of view the doctrine or morality and the doctrine of science may each be true in its own sphere. . . . I have, therefore, found it necessary to deny knowledge of God, freedom, and immortality, in order to find a place for faith.8
This was a great watershed in Western intellectual and religious history. Today, the divided field of knowledge and the irrationality of religious belief are dogmas which millions of Westerners - especially within the secular elites who dominate academia and the media - eagerly and unquestioningly embrace, unaware that prior to the Enlightenment and Kant, no intelligent person would have entertained these ideas for a moment. Thus to Stephen Jay Gould, science and religion are separate arenas: "science treats factual reality, while religion struggles with human morality." But Phillip Johnson rightly notes that this is "naturalistic metaphysics in a nutshell. . . . The power to define 'factual reality' is the power to govern the mind. . . . For example, a supposed command of God can hardly provide a basis for morality unless God really exists."9

When Kant thus divorced religion from scientific knowledge, "men were free to believe anything," says Randall. "Almost any kind of faith had been made intellectually respectable."10 Claims about the activity of God came to be seen as matters of faith, not fact; hence, they were beyond both scientific investigation and rational critique. This notion now typifies modern discourse: no one has the right to criticize others' ideas, religion, or morality. We criticize behavior because we find we must, but not without great unease.

But not only did religion become sealed off from science: scientific inquiry became sealed off from religion as well. It is the divided field of knowledge which has fostered the modern penchant for thinking of science as an exclusively secular pursuit of mechanistic, naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena, and not an integral part of man's unitary quest for knowledge.

The presupposition that investigation can never reveal philosophical or religious truth was never scientific. To deny that science can ever discover evidence of the activity of a deity is logically fallacious, it discourages investigation, and it prejudices the mind against certain interpretations of evidence. Furthermore, any understanding of the meaning of human existence must be based on what is true about ourselves and the cosmos in which we live. These are subjects which are open to investigation. Indeed, they have been, and are being, investigated; and now, in the age of the Big Bang, molecular biochemistry and the Fine Tuning of the Universe, the naturalistic project of science, which was expecting the impersonal, the mechanical and the accidental, has blundered into a world permeated with proof of design.

C. Higher Criticism.
Following Kant and straddling Darwin's Origin of Species was the theological movement known as Higher Criticism. Unwilling to abandon biblical Christianity altogether, but anxious to conform to the unvariable system of Newtonian physics, theologians sought to distance themselves from the supernatural. The inspiration of scripture and accounts of miraculous events both required reinterpretation. The former was reduced to the kind of inspiration which animated secular authors such as Shakespeare; the latter was attributed to any number of things, from the human need for transcendence, to mendacity on the part of the Bible authors, to mass hysteria - any explanation, no matter how bizarre, was preferred to the miraculous, no matter how well-documented. The new hermeneutics was eagerly embraced by a public, and especially by an intelligencia, by now entranced with naturalism.

Higher Criticism is the direct theological parallel to scientific naturalism. In each case, the impersonal conclusion is reached prior to investigation, because the alternative is seen as impossible. Just as God could not have created the animals, neither could Moses have parted the Red Sea. There must be some other explanation.

Higher Criticism contributed to the momentum toward naturalism which began with the Enlightenment. It further tilled the ground for Darwinism, which, in turn, prepared the soil for the next philosophical developments, namely, the popular misinterpretation of Einstein's theory of relativity, and Freudianism.

D. Relativity.
According to Paul Johnson, the modern world began on May 29, 1919, when careful observation of a solar eclipse confirmed the prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity that starlight would follow a curved path as it passes a massive body such as the sun.11 Einstein thus proved that time and space are relative, and that massive objects cause a curvature in space. Most people, says Johnson, found the discovery profoundly unsettling.

It was as though the spinning globe had been taken off its axis and cast adrift in a universe which no longer conformed to accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.12
E. Sigmund Freud.
The impact of relativity was amplified by the fact that it coincided almost exactly with the first widespread awareness of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud regarded religion as purely a human construct, and morality merely the result of guilty feelings induced by parental repressiveness. The reasons for Freud's success are complex, but it is not necessary to document his widespread influence until well into the 1980s. Since then, his methods have been shown to be generally counter-productive. As Paul Johnson says:

After eighty years' experience, [Freud's] methods of therapy have proved, on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than cure the sick. We now know that many of the central ideas of psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formulated by Freud before the discovery of Mendel's Laws, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, the existence of hormones and the mechanism of the nervous impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory is false.13
F. Non-Ideological Catalysts.
Others have described the nonideological events and sociological trends which helped to propel naturalism to its dominant position in western society: the Scopes trial, where a southern teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution in public school in the 1920s, which defense attorney Clarence Darrow turned into a public relations fiasco for the creationist camp; the withdrawal from the universities of many Christian intellectuals to form a separate system of higher education; and many other things which need not be repeated here.

III. Contemporary Naturalistic Fallacies Against Design Theory. Over time, these many fallacious modes of thinking have borne fruit in the nearly universal acceptance of naturalism. Our naturalistic thinking is manifested in many ways, but in particular it fosters several common misconceptions about the scientific verifiability of the activity of God in nature. Among those misconceptions are the false dichotomy between science and religion and the refusal to entertain the possibility of miracles. I hope to show that both of these notions are irrational and unsupported by empirical evidence.

A. Science, Not Religion.
Design theory is distinctive in its taking seriously the possibility that God exists and that His activity may be scientifically verifiable. Naturalists seek to deny a hearing to design theorists by ruling evidence for design out-of-bounds in advance, even if it can be shown to exist, by defining science in naturalistic terms. De Vries, for instance, contends that the goal of science is "to explain contingent natural phenomena strictly in terms of other contingent natural phenomena, that is, to 'place events in the explanatory context of physical principles, laws, fields.'"14

Thus, testing for God is seen as objectionable because it is deemed not to be science at all, but religion. This objection rests on the assumption that science must not entertain the possibility that the cosmos and living things originated through the activity of a conscious agent, because the only conscious agent capable of such a thing would have to be God. To consider the activity of God would necessarily involve the scientist in religion, and that is something which the scientist must not do.

We have already taken the first step in understanding why this objection is utterly lacking in merit: earlier in this Chapter we became familiar with the intellectual history which led to the formation of the naturalistic consensus. Once we realize why naturalism's cultural strength is undeserved, we may be in a position to understand that there is no reason why God should not be a legitimate subject of scientific study. The doctrine that science must not test for God is a manifestation of the specious Divided Field of Knowledge.

The next step we must take in appreciating the fallaciousness of the dichotomy between science and religion is to understand that the task of defining "science" is not a scientific undertaking, but a philosophical one. There is no experiment, no factual investigation, no observation one may make, to "discover" the meaning of the term, "science." One must establish the answer to that question prior to investigation, by reasoning. Thus, establishing the scope of the scientific enterprise is the work, not of scientists, but of philosophers of science.

Presumably, in defining "science," one would begin with the principle that it is important to the scientific enterprise to establish reliable bases for knowledge of what is true about reality. By a process of reasoning from that simple principle, then, it would not be obviously fallacious to suppose that if an uncaused, personal creator of the cosmos objectively existed, if He were active in the world, and if He were to leave detectable traces of His activity, the search for and discovery of those traces would deserve to be called "science."

This is all the more clear when we stop to realize that the naturalist does not claim to have established by any investigation or experiment that God does not exist, or that he is not active in the cosmos, or that there are no detectable traces of His activity. (As we now have seen, we are practically swimming in those "traces".) No, the naturalist merely assumes there is no God or that it is vain to test for His activity. Thus, the naturalist's definition of science is a priori, which shows that it is indeed a matter of philosophy, and not of science. But the naturalistic definition of science is bad philosophy because it is a bad definition of science.

How, then, should we define science? No doubt we would want our definition to meet many criteria. The present discussion need consider only one: we would want to define "science" in such a way as not to preclude the discovery of anything which exists. That may seem obvious, but there doubtlessly are many criteria for a good definition of science that would seem very obvious.

Since it is possible that God exists, our definition of science ought not to preclude us from detecting Him if other conditions will permit it. The mere fact that God might be an object of religious worship has nothing to do with the question whether He is a valid subject for scientific study. Golden calves may be the object of religious worship, as may be many things; yet they may be scientifically studied as well. Conversely, one may acknowledge God's existence yet refuse to worship Him. This distinction becomes plainer if we consider the etymology of the terms, "science" and "religion." The former means, essentially, "to know"; the latter, "to bind."

The word, "science," is derived from the Latin scientia, past participle of scire, which means, "to know." According to Webster's New World Dictionary, its original meaning as used in English was "state or fact of knowing; knowledge."15 There is no rational basis for limiting the kinds of knowledge which science may pursue; if knowledge about God is possible, science must pursue it. Any religious belief system which makes factual claims can be evaluated on the basis of evidence, just as any fact claim can be. If it is claimed that God exists, or that He created the cosmos, or the plants, then science can investigate whether those factual claims are true, or whether they are false.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the word "religion" derives from the Latin religio, "bond between man and the gods, perhaps from religare, to bind back: re-, back + ligare, to bind, fasten." Its primary definition is "The expression of man's belief in and reverence for a superhuman power recognized as the creator and governor of the universe."16. Thus, science has to do with knowledge of what is true about reality; religion, with man's response to God. If science pursues the truth about all of reality, including God, it makes no prescription as to what response the individual ought to make if evidence of God is found. But if God is real, and certainly if God created the cosmos, then science, properly conceived, is hardly religion's adversary.

This objection to design theory rests on the willingness to ignore one of the possible causes for the cosmos and of living things, whether it is true or not. If our definition of science precludes us from considering evidence of a possible cause for a given phenomenon, then our definition is too restrictive. When was deliberate ignorance understood to be scientific? God may not exist; or if He does, it may be impossible to detect His activity. But those are questions of fact, and they are the kind of questions of fact which cannot be settled, as the naturalist would like to do, a priori - they must be settled by investigation, and one's definition of science must allow for that investigation.

Far from precluding inquiry concerning the reality, nature and activity of God, the spirit and essence of science compel it. The religious implications of the Big Bang, the Fine Tuning of the Universe, and the design implications of molecular biochemistry - not to mention the unanswered questions raised by general relativity, quantum theory and human psychology - demolish the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive. The naturalistic fallacy that imperiously declares belief in God to be irrational is just that: a fallacy. It is itself irrational, and now transparently so.

B. Miracles Violate the "Laws" of Physics.
But wouldn't personal causation involve miracles, and aren't miracles unscientific by definition, since miracles entail violations of the laws of physics?

There are at least two ways to answer this question. First, this objection is merely another way of dispensing with design by definitional fiat. If we should find credible evidence that a "law" of physics had been violated, why then, wouldn't we want to know about it? Shall we refuse to know something because it does not fit our preconceived notions as to what is possible? Scientific theories frequently must be refined, modified or even discarded when new evidence shows them to be inaccurate or incomplete accounts of reality. Indeed, science could hardly progress if we could never entertain evidence which could not be explained by our current theories.

Just as importantly, so-called miracles do not violate the laws of physics unless one defines them as "events which violate the laws of physics." If we so define them, then, why, yes, miracles violate the laws of physics. But do we know that miracles in fact violate the laws of physics, or do we merely assume that they do?

First of all, what do we mean when we refer to a "law" of physics? Sometimes, all we mean is that physical objects have been observed to behave a certain way under certain conditions in the past. For instance, when we predict that a drinking glass held in the hand four feet above the earth and then released will drop to the earth unless some other object obstructs its fall, we may think of the drinking glass as "obeying" the "law" of gravity. But that is merely a metaphor, a figure of speech which is understood not to be literally true. When we speak of the "law" of gravity, we do not mean that God, or nature, or physics, or any other authority, has issued a command which the glass has a legal duty to obey; for the glass has no capacity to decide whether to fulfill such a duty. What we do mean is that our experience of glasses released from close proximity to the earth in the past is that they have always fallen, and based on that experience we expect such objects to continue to behave in the same way under similar circumstances in the future. But our expectation is just that: an expectation, and nothing more. Indeed, scientists continue to be unable to explain why the glass falls, so we also do not mean, when we speak of the "law" of gravity, that there is an identifiable mechanism in operation which causes the glass to fall. We may assume that there is such a mechanism, but it is only an assumption, for if such a mechanism exists, we have no idea what it is. Therefore, if the glass does not fall, which "law" of physics does it "violate"? In fact, as we shall shortly see, according to science's best understanding, it is possible that the glass will not fall, and without violating any laws.

Let us suppose, then, just for the sake of examining the reasoning involved, that a miracle did in fact occur. For instance, let us suppose, hypothetically, that Jesus of Nazareth actually healed the man born blind, as the Apostle John claims. What, if anything, would knowing that enable us to say as to whether any law of physics was violated? Absolutely nothing, because we know nothing about how Jesus pulled it off. Given our ignorance on that question, we can only speculate as to whether or not his method involved a suspension in the operation of physical laws.

There are physical regularities for which the mechanism is better understood than the mechanism for gravity. For instance, during combustion, one atom of carbon always combines with two of oxygen under certain conditions. Similarly, all physical materials are composed of molecules consisting of atoms in certain ratios. But which of those ratios were altered in the parting of the Red Sea, or in the raising of Lazarus? We do not know; hence we cannot say that any of those regularities were violated.

I fear I am venturing beyond my knowledge. I am not a physician. I imagine that the reversal of death would involve many great difficulties. But even if we knew that the raising of Lazarus did in fact involve a suspension in the operation of physical laws, it should be apparent that if it is God who established the laws of physics (remember, the naturalistic presupposition is no longer allowed), then God would presumably be able to suspend their operation in order to raise him. However, it is not the reversal of death which is implausible to the naturalist, but the intervention of God in the affairs of men. The reason the naturalist will not investigate a resurrection is not that it violates the laws of physics, but that God cannot or will not raise the dead. God cannot intervene, because either God does not exist, or if He does, He is not a personal God, but a force, a principle, or something so transcendent as to be unknowable altogether. Indeed, the reason the naturalist will not investigate is that he is not a scientist at all, but a theologian: he has made a statement about God. He just happens to be a bad theologian, and his theology places roadblocks in the way of his practice of science.

The existence of a supernatural God is not inherently implausible. At least, it is no more implausible than the existence of an autonomous, uncreated universe - particularly in light of the current scientific consensus that the universe began at a point in space-time - out of nothing as far as we can tell - in the "Big Bang." A cosmos having a discrete beginning, giving rise to an intelligent, ethical race on a planet and in a sky of sublime beauty, may to some reasonable minds suggest that it all arose for an intelligible and wonderful purpose, suggesting a highly personal creator. It is not a completely absurd hypothesis.

A final word about "miracles" "violating" the "laws" of physics. In 1900 Max Planck made a scientific discovery which led to the development of an understanding of the behavior of light and subatomic particles that is still reshaping the science of physics: quantum mechanics. This subject was discussed more fully in Chapter 7; but in summary, quantum physics shows the following:

At the subatomic level, the behavior of matter is completely indeterminate. Although the behavior of a large number of particles - say, a roomful of air - can be predicted with confidence, the behavior of individual particles cannot be predicted. Consequently, our expectation that the air will remain a homogenous, uniform mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide throughout the room is only a matter of probability. Because the air consists of such a vast number of individual particles, their motions, though indeterminate, tend to offset each other; but there is nothing in principle to prevent all the oxygen molecules from moving in the same direction at the same time, suffocating those in one part of the room. It would be an event of extremely low probability, but it would not violate any law of physics.

We do not know why the motions of particles are indeterminate.

We can never find out why. We have penetrated to the bottom of the material world, and what we have found is irreducible mystery.
As amazing as these conclusions seem, they have been confirmed by countless observations and now represent standard scientific theory. As the discussion in Chapter 7 showed, I am not making this up.

Thus in our present state of knowledge, it cannot be said that miracles violate any physical laws, and it appears unlikely that it will ever become possible to say such a thing.

IV. Conclusion

Westerners have learned from many tutors that the universe is impersonal, and religion irrational. Moreover, recognition of the misconceptions inherent in each of the ideological developments which have been summarized in this Chapter, has done little to diminish their combined momentum toward naturalism. Consider:

Newtonianism was not refuted by relativity, but only refined, and anyway the philosophical implications of relativity and quantum mechanics do not often intrude upon ordinary life, where events still appear to be governed by "the laws of physics" - the simple, predictable, and apparently mechanical rules of physical causation.
Rationalism remains the dominant mind-set for most Westerners; it is not widely faulted for its failure to provide a basis for morals or meaning. Meanwhile, the Divided Field of Knowledge and the supposed inviolability of the "laws of physics" discourage serious consideration of the fact-claims of the one religious system which stakes its validity on the verifiability of historical events.
The misinterpretation of relativity as implying moral relativism is an influence which is so vague and unconscious as to escape serious challenge.

Higher Criticism continues unabated in liberal Christianity, and though it never much influenced conservative Christianity, the latter has little influence upon the scientific establishment.
The weaknesses of Freudianism have become apparent only in the last 25 years, and many of its concepts have become irretrievably embedded in our view of the world. It will be a long time before we forget the Oedipus Complex, the inferiority complex, the Freudian slip, or the ego, id, and superego. More to the point, though psychoanlysis may have been discredited, Freud's disdain for religion and morality has taken on a life of its own. If one were in a conversation with someone claiming religion to be a crutch, and were to ask, "Don't you know Freud is passe'?" one would be met with complete incomprehension, because we know religion is a crutch, but we don't know where the idea came from. Freud, like naturalism itself, has become like the air we breathe.
Popular culture does not follow logical lines; it is not shaped by truth (scientific or otherwise), reason, or logic, but by forces which are hardly controllable by anyone. By the time the false implications of a scientific discovery have been recognized, the world has already gone on to the next fad. Why is this important? It is important because most scientists are as profoundly influenced by popular culture as most of us are. Scientists are seldom philosophers, but technicians. They do not study philosophy in graduate school, but the structure of atoms and proteins, the location of fossil beds, archeological excavation techniques and the distribution of microwave radiation in the cosmos. Most scientists do not know why they are naturalists, except that they know that their teachers and colleagues are all naturalists. Non-scientists are no different. Naturalism is understood to be so obviously true that it doesn't even deserve to be questioned, much less studied.

Breaking free from the myths of one's time always requires both effort and imagination. It requires a willingness to question, to study, to imagine the possibility of understanding reality in a way which is at odds with one's generation. Sometimes, the world is wrong. This is such a time. Now, thanks to the undeniable proof of design coming from molecular biochemistry and from physics, it can be hoped that the impasse will break, one mind at a time.

ENDNOTES

1Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 111-112.
2Johnson, 168. 3Quoted in Johnson, p. 119.
4Johnson, p. 119.
5The Bible, Ephesians 4:14.
6It must rank as one of Christendom's greatest failures that it did not find the true basis for religious liberty in the Scriptures, namely, the inability of the human conscience to respond to anything but its own understanding of the truth. And here is the true basis for religious liberty. It is not that the individual must be free to choose what to believe. We do not choose the truth; the truth chooses us. We believe whatever we see as true. The individual cannot choose to disbelieve what the evidence and his conscience tell him is true, or to believe what they tell him is false. Religious liberty lies in the recognition that the human conscience is real and of supreme value, and that it is an offense against the individual, against the human community, and against God to punish an individual for being true to his conscience.
7John Herman Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1940), pp. 412-413. (Emphasis added.)
8Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, XIX.
9Johnson, 161-162. 10Randall, 413.
11Paul Johnson, Modern Times - A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000 (London: Orion Books, 1999), page 1.
12Paul Johnson, 4.
13Paul Johnson, 6.
14J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), p. 46.
15Webster's New World Dictionary (1966), p. 1305.)
16The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), p. 1099.

© 2000 Thomas O. Alderman