Part II
God & Science:
Does God Exist? Follow Me and I’ll Show You.
“Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable
by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge
of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his
providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator…”[1]
“Human intelligence is surely
already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence
of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of
human reason …”[2]
“The biblical and
Judeo-Christian faith has always been convinced, not
only that we can and should believe in a Creator, but also that we are able to
understand a great deal about the Creator with our human reason.”[3]
“In defending the
ability of human reason to know God, the Church is expressing her confidence in
the possibility of speaking about him to all men and with all men, and
therefore of dialogue with other religions, with philosophy and science, as
well as with unbelievers and atheists.”[4]
Classical Arguments for God’s Existence
Classic Philosophy Reformulated as Scientific Theory
Many devout Christian/Catholics will be tempted to say
at this point, “OK, fine. Intelligent design theory has finally come into its
own in science. The logic is clear
enough; the scientific data even quite startling in its implications. Common
sense is certainly on its side. But can’t we really go that further step beyond
affirming intelligent design in general terms to affirm God as the most likely
designer, as did many of the great philosophers? Can’t the classical
philosophical arguments for God’s existence, the argument from direct religious
experience, St. Anselm’s argument from necessary existence, William Paley’s
design inference, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ first cause argument, be properly
restated as convincing scientific theories, or components of them?
Perhaps surprisingly, the short answer is, in some cases, yes, they can be
reformulated as scientific theories.
To accomplish such a reformulation of philosophical
argument forms into scientific ones, and to know that the result really
qualifies as science, we must first know what science is and what it is not,
how the charter of science has been defined, and what its rules and methods
are. This is not an impossible task, as scientific method is not a complex
matter as such, but there is much variation between the disciplines in how
scientific method is employed. And there is the complication that the charter
of science has never been formally and explicitly nailed down.
There is more than one kind of science: strict
laboratory science, historical science, and social science. The methods,
procedures, and standards of each type of science differ radically from those of
the others, and the approaches within each of the various disciplines
unavoidably vary to facilitate their unique objectives and subject matter.
Obviously, the methods of chemistry (hopefully) don’t match those of psychiatry
exactly; sociology doesn’t match physics; history doesn’t match mathematics;
and so on. Much like Bilbo Baggins’ burglary contract, the definition and
charter of “science” remains vague on several points.[5]
Rest assured, however, that my approach to converting
the classic philosophical arguments for God into science will not be a complex
and esoteric procedure, even given so much variation among the disciplines. It
is a simple matter of comparing the form and structure of the argument from
religious experience to the explanatory models of theoretical psychology, and
of validating the design inference via mathematics (the probability and
resource exhaustion arguments) and a basic cognitive epistemology (we know
intelligent design when we see it).
Before looking at the specific arguments and
addressing the general nature of scientific evidence, scientific arguments, and
scientific theory evaluation, let’s take just a moment to ask some obvious and
intuitive questions in order to get a better feel for why our title question is
even legitimate. Perhaps the most obvious question is “Why doesn’t the
testimony of the fully 4 billion people who now belong to a major religion
(roughly two thirds of all the people on Earth) count as scientific evidence
for God’s existence?” To dismiss them all as neurotic is no longer
scientifically tenable, if it ever was.[6] True, consensus alone never makes truth, but, in
almost all cases, that large of a
consensus is a default indication of sanity.
Witness testimony from the sane adds corroborative value anywhere else in
science, politics, and law unless it can be explained away as resulting from a
known error. Yes, the world may be
crazy in general (this thesis
becomes harder to oppose every day), but to have 4 billion people
going crazy in the same way at the same
time entails such a low statistical probability that science cannot defend
such a thing without producing evidence that these people are in fact neurotic
independent of the sole fact that they believe in God. Of course, there is no
such evidence to be found on that kind of scale because on average believers
act no more irrationally than nonbelievers.
Witness testimony is a valid form of evidence for many
of the scientific disciplines, so why is it automatically suspect when the
testimony is about religious experience? It counts in astronomy and history. It
certainly counts in law. It counts anywhere observations need be made by lone
investigators, or a few acting in concert. Witness testimony is not a perfect form of evidence, of course, but
neither are photographs or microscope images perfect evidence. There can be
flaws in the lenses, small foreign particle debris, dirty slides, altered
photos etc. Nothing humans do in this world is, in fact, perfectly reliable.
There are no perfect forms of evidence. All forms of evidence have this general
vulnerability to corruption in common and must be scrutinized to make sure
flaws of various kinds haven’t crept in. Thus, the requirement to vet specific
increments of evidence for reliability does not invalidate personal testimony
as a legitimate form of evidence. The same concern applies to all other forms
of evidence, which are vulnerable to corruption in different ways.
Not everyone’s testimony will be of equal value, of
course. Just as neurotics approach gambling, drugs, or drink as a psychological
escape mechanism, humans can approach religion for the wrong reason. Even
sports and hobbies can take on a neurotically exaggerated role in life. This
simple fact is by now all too well known to all of us: sick people can make a
neurosis out of anything—witness
the headlines. When they do, it doesn’t disprove the valid version of the life
experience they have distorted into a neurosis. Eating disorders do not
disprove the validity of eating! Not all drinks and drugs are psychological
crutches. Similarly, Freud’s findings in the psychologically ill did not demonstrate that all of
religion is false; it only showed that some persons were flawed in the event of practicing their religion.
So there is a very common sense case for accepting the
validity of religious testimony, particularly where 4 billion people are
involved. Having established that much, let us move on and take a closer look
at how one might use that testimony as the foundation for a formal heuristic
model of human religious behavior, an explanatory model that posits God’s
existence as the best explanation available for the known data.
Spiritual Perception & The
Heuristic Model of Religious Experience
In many ways, the problem of proving God’s existence is
a false dilemma. Historically we have tried much too hard at it.[7] Instead of striving for deductive proofs as the
classic philosophers did, we should have gone about it exactly as we would for
proving Uncle Bob’s existence, Aunt Helen’s, or anyone else’s: we should have
personally gone looking for God to see if he was there. Via logic alone, or
conceptual argument, prior to going and looking, man cannot prove the existence
of anything, or anyone, let alone God. Why have we made God an exception to our
procedure for proving the existence of persons or things?
Seriously, though, the question of the existence of
anything, or anyone, is simply a matter for perceptual confirmation—you have to
go look: perception, observation, or encounter; that is how we prove the
existence of a person. The proof of God’s existence must be treated the same
way. It is not logically necessary that there be a God any more than that there
be a President Kennedy, a Michelangelo, or a grocer on the corner. We simply
have to go look for him.
Enter the heuristic psychological model of evidence. In support of the theory that God is the designer of our world we have millions of reliable reports that God has manifested himself in a variety of directly and indirectly observable ways, and presented himself to the subjective awareness of millions upon millions of rational people. In this sense, the theory of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God (JCIG) is more closely tied to direct experience and better evidenced than either the current versions of extra-dimensional theories in physics or generic intelligent design theory minus the God component. JCIG theory explains the well-established traditions and professional knowledge base of the Church and the testimony and behavior of billions of reliable witnesses who affirm that they have encountered God. Which model offers the best explanation in view of religious behavior, atheistic materialism or JCIG? Obviously JCIG offers the best heuristic explanatory model because the large majority of people act as if it were true.
The consistent behavior patterns and expressed claims of spiritual encounters of billions of otherwise known to be reliable people can be construed as proper evidence for God in an explanatory heuristic model. This is no different from the same approach used in theoretical psychology/psychiatry. Four billion people on planet Earth act as if there were a God. The theoretical constructs of the science of psychology are said to be corroborated when people act as if they are true. Observed behavior is a type of evidence for the theoretical models of psychology. So why doesn’t it count the same here? Is it because science only admits the physical? No; psychology and psychiatry admit the nonphysical where it serves as the best explanation. Jung’s archetypes are not physical; Freud’s Id and Ego are not physical, etc.
Including God as the explanation for religious behavior and religious witness contradicts nothing in scientific method if we allow that the entire range of all the scientific disciplines including the social sciences and psychology/psychiatry are valid. Excluding such evidence for God is not consistent with what science is doing elsewhere with heuristic models. This exclusion is only another manifestation of the prejudice of the current materialist-dominated mainstream scientific culture against God as discussed in Part 1.
Why include such “ridiculous things” as God in science? One might as well ask why include such ridiculous things as id’s, ego’s and archetypes? They cannot be empirically confirmed or falsified. The answer is explanatory power and logical consistency. Logical consistency? Yes; the personal testimony of the very same people who bear religious witness is elsewhere deemed legally sufficient to warrant taking a man’s life in a murder trial. The legitimacy of their testimony is not deemed ridiculous there. Why does testimony from the very same people all of a sudden bear no evidential weight when their testimony is for God?
Consider the following situation. A dozen material witnesses walk out of court after testifying against a murderer who was assigned the death penalty largely upon the weight given the testimony of these witnesses. They are interviewed by a news anchor and described, to affirming nods all around, as credible witnesses. The TV audience agrees that it was a just and fair sentence. But now the very same dozen citizens go down the street a scant three blocks to attend a church service. An hour later they come out and testify that they all had a personal encounter with God. The TV network is, of course, prepared for this. All of a sudden a Richard Dawkins-type talking head pops up on a split screen calling them all nuts. He is a PhD, after all; has written popular books; so what he says must be true…right? Immediately 95% of the brain-dead TV viewing audience brand the testimony of those twelve witnesses unreliable and incoherent! “The poor souls are obviously deluded…neurotic. We all know religion is a dangerous, obsolete superstition, the scourge of civilization—witness the Crusades, Jihad, etc.” But the defendant in the murder trial remains just as dead based upon their earlier credible testimony. Is this logically consistent or even rational: now you are credible now you are not? No and no!
This whole thing about condemning religion without a hearing is laughably politicized, hypocritical, and self-contradictory. In the absence of a clinical diagnoses of a genuine neurosis/psychosis that has been shown to engender hallucinations, a person’s testimony is as reliable in the religious context as it is in any other. The same people who challenge religious testimony without looking to independently verify the credibility of the source never challenge a person who says they have not had a religious experience. They never challenge someone who says that they have searched for God for decades without finding him. He or she is not crazy for spending fifty fruitless years searching without any hint of impending success, but someone who spends a few months in the Catholic instruction program and has a religious encounter while receiving the Holy Sacrament of Baptism is automatically nuts. The idiots who wasted fifty years scouring the Earth randomly are automatically considered heroic searchers, but believers who go directly to the authoritative source, the Church, and do find God are considered charlatans or self-deceived neurotics. It is all a bunch of politically engineered nonsense!
“OK,” you may admit. “There are some inconsistencies in our approach to religious testimony. But what about the great analytical philosopher, A. J. Ayer? Didn’t he prove that religious language has no meaning? Doesn’t that in and of itself justify dismissing all religious witness as having no evidential value? Even if the people are sane, isn’t it true that all religious language is incoherent, semantically empty, and therefore useless as evidence?” No. First, even should we grant Ayer’s claim that a statement about an encounter with God can have no meaning just because it has no empiric referent or empiric entailments (and we shouldn’t), that does not justify dismissing testimony of a reliable witness as having no evidential weight. Although much of religious language may not have empiric referents, religious behaviors are empirically describable. They are consistent and the enormous numbers of them can serve as the foundation of a heuristic model that supports the belief in God’s existence.
Ayer & Co. may say that individual witness concerning direct personal encounters with God cannot be formed into meaningful statements with empiric content, but the statements of social scientists about the religious behaviors of the witnesses en masse can be formulated into meaningful heuristic models that generate predictive and analytical statements with empiric content no less coherent and explanatory than the heuristic models psychologists/psychiatrists employ to explain human behavior. There remains this heuristic scientific argument from sociology and psychology for the reality of the religious experience even should we grant that religious language is empirically vacuous.
But why should we grant such an artificially contrived thing in the first place? At the end of the day Ayer is just wrong. Empiric reference is not required for meaning. Modern physics’ theories of extra dimensions, for example, have no direct empiric reference beyond a heuristic explanatory model. They are not deemed scientifically vacuous, incoherent, or meaningless. The physical world behaves as if certain extra dimensions were there, and that is enough to give coherence and meaning to the language. The concept of a very large and powerful personal being is not vacuous or incoherent in and of itself. Merely transferring that being’s residence to the spiritual dimension (which dimension can have effects on the physical dimensions) does not make the concept of God incoherent. Heuristic models in science elsewhere satisfactorily lend coherence and meaning to extra-dimensional theories that do not allow direct empiric confirmation.
And, even on the common sense level, religious language is not meaningless. It is grounded in real experiences held in common by two or more speakers. We humans make meaningful statements all the time that have no empiric referent or entailments. Talk about our romantic feelings and friendships and various other poetic sentiments of human emotion: these statements are all meaningful. Some might say they are the most meaningful things we do say. They have referents, subjective feelings that can be identified and understood by those with whom we speak who have had similar subjective experience. At the end of the day after hours of heady talk about empiricism inspiring us to false hopes of making life more neatly manageable, a subjective referent for a statement remains a meaningful referent. When we say “I have strong feelings of patriotism,” we are coherently referencing the feeling, and anyone who has ever felt patriotic fervor knows what we mean.
Thus, religious language is not incoherent in principle or in itself. It is only temporarily incoherent to those persons who have not had religious experience, like talk of patriotism might be temporarily incoherent to a person born and raised on an island with no national or tribal identity. There were no enemies there, no strangers, no “us” against “them.” “What is patriotism?” After another twenty years post-immigration to the U.S., spanning three wars and several major terrorists events, the same individual gets it: “Yes, I am a patriot!” And consider St. Paul’s words in Romans 5:5 and 2 Corinthians 1:21-22 (NABR). If God himself places his love in our hearts, it would obviously be a noteworthy and singular experience. When one person who has had this grace refers to it in speaking to another who has also been blessed in the same manner it would clearly be a meaningful and coherent communication.
“This hope is not
deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy
Spirit which has been given us…. Remember it is God himself who assures us all,
and you, of our standing in Christ, and has anointed us, marking us with his
seal and giving us the pledge, the Spirit, that we carry in our hearts.”
The only way around this objection is to say that the event of receiving divine love as a gift of grace simply didn’t happen; it was only imagined. But how does one establish that without begging the question? Ayer begs the question of materialism not only in denying the coherence of religious language but in ruling out the entire realm of human subjective experience as not offering any coherent referents for language, while having proved himself wrong through most of his younger life in his having often spoken meaningfully of love, friendship, patriotism, etc. If he admits the validity of the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry Ayer also demonstrates a double standard: admitting heuristic models when they don’t invoke God, but denying them when they do (and only because they do).
But it can be shown that religious language is often coherent, even under the assumption of materialism. If or when events of grace were a self-imposed deception or hallucination, because the Church has defined and described the event of receiving God’s grace in clear and consistent terms in its rich traditions, the experience of most of those having such psuedo-religious experiences would still be consistent enough to constitute a coherent communication, given only that they (and their subconscious) had been exposed to Church teachings. They are referring to the same thing in using the language; they are merely leaving out the fact that a delusion is involved. This is not incoherence; it is dishonesty.
One may think that Ayer’s position is supported by another famous philosopher, Charles Peirce, who claimed that all metaphysical talk was “gibberish.” But Peirce did not equate “religious” with “metaphysical.” Religious language was meaningful for Peirce because it was grounded in real, direct experience, while abstract metaphysical theories were not so grounded. And Peirce did not think metaphysical language was in principle incoherent so much as in practice. Metaphysical theories in Peirce’s experience were either untestable or the terminology was never linked to anything real, but merely went in circles. Thus, there was nothing to be gained from doing metaphysics. Peirce apparently believed that, were these errors to be corrected in metaphysical theory, that is, if the terms were tied to real experience and the theories made testable, what we would end up with would be claims admissible into either the natural or social sciences. So, Ayer is not supported by Peirce, who is saying something entirely different.[9] What I am proposing in this section is, one might say, a heuristic version of Peirce’s concept of a valid metaphysic: as a consequence of being empirically (in this case heuristically) validated, the metaphysical JCIG theory can be legitimately moved into the realm of science.
Another error Ayer makes is to (conveniently) equivocate “empirically supportable” with “empirically provable.” True, we cannot empirically prove God’s existence, but we can give empiric support for it in the sense of explanatory heuristic models. The larger part of science, if not all of it, is never fully proven but only convincingly supported. All things considered, the aggregate of hard data supporting the ID theory, theoretical consistency, and overall explanatory power results in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic theory of God (JCIG) being our best supported theory for the origin and development of life and the natural world as we know it.
To grant Ayer’s position is simply to become a materialist or a physical reductionist, to say that statements of all of our internal experiences such as love, loyalty, and patriotism have no meaning at all. There can be no justification for arbitrarily truncating human experience to fit a preferred theory. Rather the only way for a creature to build a trustworthy epistemology is to validate the theory by reference to direct experience, not the other way around. Nothing could be more ill-advised, and as a matter of fact reductionism is just wrong. It is also a spiritual illness, as I think Charles Peirce would affirm. Reductionism denies our direct experience; it denies much of what is both real and real important in our lives. It denies the larger core of that which makes us who we are, a higher moral and spiritual species.
Reductionism is epistemological genocide, denying that the heart, mind, spirit, and intuition all provide direct ways of knowing and experiencing life in addition to the five senses. I am not talking ESP here, but the very core of human experience. Reductionism and materialism deny what a healthy human being knows by valid direct means of cognition. We know we love our family; we know we are committed to freedom and the U. S. Constitution; we know that our tender grief, empathy, and sorrow for a small child run over by a car in front of us is more than a label for a set of behaviors; we know these things. Love is real as Peirce affirmed, and so is our direct experience of God when we are granted the grace to have it.
Love has no direct empiric referent, yet to say “I love” or “I am in love” is to say something meaningful. To report a direct encounter with a God who is the transcendent source of love, that is, to report the experience of divine love is even more meaningful; it just can’t be empirically proven. Can we empirically prove that we love a family member or a fiancée? No. It can’t be proven (unless we share half our lottery winnings with them). It can be supported by behavioral corroboration, but not given a direct empiric proof. Does that mean that our love is unreal and the language that references it nonsense? Of course not! It is as real as anything we know. An experience of God is very similar, but potentially more intense. Therefore, religious language is no more meaningless than is any of our language of the emotions, values and virtues.
But, one may object, Ayer may have been technically incorrect, but he was on to something important because God will always be largely mysterious to us. Science cannot manipulate a mystery. While it is true that much mystery will always attend to God, to say something is largely mysterious is not to say that it is meaningless. Something that is completely mysterious cannot be spoken of in a meaningful way, yes, but something only partly mysterious can be referred to with meaningful language, just not with completeness. To say that “I bumped into something in the dark” is mysterious, but it is not meaningless. Recent theories of physics, even at the first moment of their inception were not adjudged meaningless because they posited 10, 26, or more dimensions of which we can have no direct empiric evidence (since humans only experience four physical dimensions). Those extra dimensions were almost 100% mysterious at the inception of the multi-dimensional theory (and still are to most of us); they merely filled a mathematical niche in a formula. But we understand, if only vaguely, what the physicists are saying. What they are saying is meaningful; it just leaves much room for mystery by not answering all possible questions on the subject. God, for those who make an effort to look into religion at all, is much less mysterious than that. He is Father; he is Creator; he is counselor; he is priestly intercessor, and many other things well within the bounds of our conceptual understanding, and not only in abstract conceptual theory, but in our living experience of the faith.
Thus, our conclusion is that the argument from religious experience cannot be dismissed so easily as Ayer suggests. There is both a sociological argument for the validity of religious behavior, the heuristic explanatory model, and a sociological and legalistic argument for giving weight to religious testimony, in other words, a reliable witness is just that, and there is the common sense argument that we know what we are talking about when we share our subjective feelings and religious experience in language. Thus, the argument from religious experience as a heuristic explanatory model of science survives Ayer’s incoherency challenge to join the design argument as a properly scientific argument for God’s existence.
“Explanatory models are fine,” one might say, “but
what about the claims of a valid faculty of direct spiritual perception? Isn’t
that all a bunch of new age hooey?” And, the skeptic continues, “How can God’s
existence be established with perception? He’s nonphysical and invisible!” The
invisibility objection is bogus for four perfectly good reasons: (1) God is not
invisible to the heart; (2) God is not always invisible to the eye; he can be seen
when he chooses to be seen; (3) invisible things can be confirmed to
exist with other forms of perception; and (4) it’s perfectly understandable
that he who is all good, all powerful, and perfect would at times restrict our
access to him until we purify ourselves, and otherwise not be disposed to come
running at our beck and call.
We all believe in the existence of many things
invisible to the eye: gravity, electricity, wind, atoms, etc.—we don’t see
them, we only see their effects. We have reliable indirect or theoretical
evidence that they exist, or we perceive them through means other than the
unaided eye. We can feel wind, gravity, and electricity (if we are not
careful). We use an electron microscope to view atoms. It is important to note
that, with these invisible things, we can still find them if we earnestly go
looking for them. We simply have to use the right instrument. It’s the
same with God: we will find him if we look with the right instrument. According
to God’s Word, the Holy Bible, the correct instrument is the heart. Powerful
contact with God can also occur when he comes looking for you, as Saint Paul discovered on the road to
Damascus.
In addition, quite a few people have actually seen
God, perhaps not the fullness of God, but they have made visual contact. In
other words, he’s not invisible at all; he’s just not present in a given place
at a given time in visible form on human demand. According to the Bible, the
Lord God and his angels from Heaven have the ability to either incarnate, to
assume a perceivable pseudo-physical form that is indistinguishable from the
physical (cf. the archangel Raphael in the Old Testament book of Tobit), or to
reveal their radiant gloriously luminous form directly (unfortunately Satan can
do this too). They can give indirect but perceivable physical signs, e.g.,
wiping out the larger part of the entire Assyrian army in one night. God’s
appearance in the person of his Son Jesus was in fully visible form, and he was
genuinely physical. Jesus was also
transfigured on Mt. Tabor into a glorious radiant being. In addition, Moses and
Aaron saw God along with Nadab, Abihu and seventy of the elders of Israel on
Mount Sinai. God led many thousands of the Israelites out of Egypt, going
before them in a pillar of the cloud in the day and a column of fire at night.
He appeared to Moses in a miraculously burning bush[10] and passed by while Elijah was hiding in a crag of
the mountain.
Thus, God is only invisible, or more correctly put,
unseen, when he chooses to be. Logically, since God is the source of all things
and all energy, one could justifiably speculate that, when God, the creator of
this world, chooses to manifest himself in this world, he would turn out to be
he who is the most visible of all: pure radiant power and light itself.
The extant scriptural descriptions are, in fact, very much like that.
The skeptic’s error is to start out looking with the
wrong instrument, the eyes or the mind; in this case we must look with our
hearts. God does not require us to contradict the evidence of the eyes and the
mind, but they are not fully sufficient to this task. We may properly conclude
God’s existence through the faculty of reason, true, but a logical inference is
not the same thing as a direct spiritual perception. The heart is where the
faculty of direct spiritual perception resides. We discover that there is a God
through the use of reason, but we only encounter that God by using our
heart. “ ‘You will seek me and find me when you seek
me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah
29:13) “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8).
God exists in the spiritual dimension, and our heart
is the portal to it. Pope Benedict XVI has recently reminded us of this: “The
organ for seeing God is the heart.”[11]
Just the same, as “visible”
(directly perceivable) as God can be, he does not appear on demand from his own
subordinate creation. Skeptics
should not find this so odd. The fact that he who is supreme authority elects
to restrict and control public access fits perfectly with the behavior patterns
of our own earthly leaders, who are far less authorities. Science cannot,
therefore, control and reproduce spiritual events at will for the simple reason
that God is our superior; he makes the rules. He decides who has access to him,
and when. This is a very natural circumstance.
Professors have to ask to meet their president, and we
have to ask to meet God...politely, and often patiently. Skeptics reject this
answer out of hand despite the fact that, in every other situation in life,
this is precisely the norm: we have to ask permission to meet our superiors,
and sometimes wait patiently. Once again, we have made God the only exception
in our thinking about how we encounter persons.
It’s quite natural that God doesn’t show up on demand
when we decide to doubt his existence--especially not then.
True, there are, in a sense, negative witness reports
from atheists who claim they have searched high and low and can’t find God, but
there is a difference in epistemological weight in favor of witness affirmations
over witness denials in the context of corroborating a person’s existence. For
Mrs. Brown to say that “I have not met Mr. Smith who you say lives two doors
down” is not to give positive evidence against Mr. Smith’s existence, but if
Mrs. Brown’s says “I have met Mr.
Smith,” it is positive evidence for his existence. In the first case, Smith’s
existence is compatible with the witness testimony for they may have gone
shopping and walked the dog at different times, and the possibility remains
that Mr. Smith is intentionally avoiding Mrs. Brown (and there could be many
other reasons they haven’t met). But an actual meeting firmly establishes the
existence of Mr. Smith. Could God be
avoiding the atheists? Count on it! He says as much in the scripture.
Because
he is found by those who do not test him,
and manifests himself to those who do not
disbelieve him.
For
perverse counsels separate people from God,
and his power, put to the proof, rebukes
the foolhardy;
Because
into a soul that plots evil wisdom does not enter,
nor does she dwell in a body under debt of
sin. [Wisdom 1:2-4 RNAB]
God’s restricting our access to him naturally results
in a relatively limited number of encounters (limited only by people’s faith,
however). Any resultant scarcity of encounters with God cannot serve as
evidence for his nonexistence, however, because it’s a natural result of his
authority, power, and perfection—and the absence of perfection in us. The
scarcity of encounters with God may be more reliably taken as evidence for our
personal foul-ups, our sins, and our failure to make an honest effort to find
God in our hearts. Nonetheless, given the affection, compassion and mercy God
has shown his children over the centuries, it would be more correct to say that
only the public encounters with God are scarce—the number of private
encounters with God is actually enormous.
The invisibility objection, of course, ‘begs the question’, as philosophers love to say. It assumes, without proof, the answer to the exact question that has been put up for debate in the first place: can things invisible to the eye, like God, be perceived in some evidentiary way, nonetheless. Any blind person can tell you that everything physical, except color and light itself (and the heat energy of intense light can be felt), can be perceived in an evidentiary way exclusive of sight. So, not only does this invisibility thing beg the question, it’s just a tomfool thing to say. Invisibility is not evidence for the nonexistence of anything. Try going to the bathroom without a flashlight in the middle of the night in a household with young children. Unseen things will turn up everywhere—beware the stairs!
The case of God is no different. So the answer to the
core question is that yes God can be
perceived, so long as he consents to facilitate the perception. It is like a
father or mother telling ghost stories to the children in a darkened room
during a storm and occasionally acceding to the children’s request to turn the
light on. The parent is always visible in the sense of being an object capable
of being seen under the right conditions, but they have to grant the request to
turn on the light before they actually are seen. There are other similarities.
When the child politely asks for the light with respect, they get it, and when
they rudely or arrogantly demand, they don’t get it. In addition to the
well-known instances where God has been seen, God can and does often “touch us”
with blessings that have unmistakable physical manifestations.
The success of this endeavor, then, looking for God,
hinges upon a person’s capacity for spiritual perception, not deductive
argument, and upon God’s grace and intention to facilitate an encounter. It’s
that simple. Do you have the ability to “see” him when you do find him, and are
you permitted contact?
How does all of this impact the overall concern of
God’s interaction with science? Let’s stick with the stories and analogies for
a moment to see the answer to that question. If the children hearing the ghost
stories in the darkened room during the storm decide to do a scientific study
of the flashing light in the room (before Dad reveals that it is his
flashlight), will the study stand any real chance of success if Dad elects not
to cooperate? No. Dad is in control of the light and therefore any mission of
discovery is fully at his mercy. One might say that, “Real adult scientists
could discover the truth, if given authority over the household premises and
the privilege to search the occupants, etc.” This is true but it breaks the
analogy to God who is the highest power and authority and his premises are a
bit larger.
If God doesn’t consent to show someone that it is his
“flashlight,” then our best scientists are just stuck. “So science can never confirm
God then?” some may rush to conclude. No; that’s the wrong conclusion because
science and philosophy have been asking the wrong question all these years. The
right question is, “What happens in regards to the question of God and science
when God does consent to show you the
flashlight?”
If Dad shows the kids the flashlight do they know the
truth and in a manner that science can corroborate that knowledge? Of course
they do; they saw it for crying out loud! Multiple witnesses, standard viewing
conditions, the entire observation is entirely trustworthy. God can, and has,
made “himself” perceivable in a variety of ways. Easy
for him; he is, after all, the creator of everything including our perceptual
mechanisms themselves. So, science could be justified in saying there was an
encounter with someone or something when God facilitates human encounters
because the perceptions would be real and verified; the only remaining question
is “How would you know it was God as such, as opposed to some other entity?” That
question is not insoluble either, and will be addressed a few paragraphs
further on.
Suffice it to say here that the analogy can still help
us. If the school science teacher queries the children about their
investigation of the light, the exchange might end with, “OK, you proved it was
a flashlight in the hand of a man, but how did you establish the identity of
the man holding the light?” “Come on now,” the kids might well respond, “can’t
you trust us to know our own father!?” And so it is with the faculty of
spiritual perception and encounters with God. Sometimes you just know it is
your Father (in Heaven) that you have encountered. It is a bonafide direct
experience and, as America’s great philosopher, Charles Peirce said, we should
never deny our direct experience.
At this point, some readers are probably saying, well
you have made the theory clear enough, but, do people really have this ability? Is there such a thing
as a faculty of spiritual perception, something that functions like a sixth
sense in regards to perceiving things spiritual in real human experience?
Richard Bücke thinks mystics at least have such
abilities.[14] He has written an entire book full of nothing else
but accounts of people describing glorious encounters with God. The Catholic
Church thinks so as well. The writings of the Church are replete with the
saints’ encounters with God, angels, and the martyrs in Heaven. My thesis here
is, therefore, the same: people do. They do have the faculty of
spiritual perception, but in varying degrees among different people and with
variations occurring over time due to age, experience, and the condition of
falling in and out of communion with God due to sin.
I therefore argue, as most persons of faith already know, there is a faculty of spiritual perception and we who have it have every right to trust its results, not perhaps in the details but in the larger themes. The gift doesn’t make us infallible. It broadens our range of perception, but does not perfect our accuracy of perception. (And here is the solution to the problem of who is holding the flashlight.) I maintain that this spiritual faculty produces bonafide evidence for God because God’s holiness and divinity are both perceivable and unique attributes. They are attributes found nowhere else but with God, except in the host of Heaven in a lesser derivative fashion. Other unique features of God that may present themselves to persons with varying gifts of spiritual perception are divine grace, divine love, divine goodness, divine justice, divine mercy, divine transcendence, divine faithfulness, and divine wisdom.[15] Just as children recognize a greater wisdom and legitimate authority in their parents, we have the innate ability to recognize God when he interacts with us through these attributes of divinity that are unique to him. Those who claim to have no such ability are either in denial of their own innate functions, those functions have been neutered by God as punishment for their refusal to acknowledge and use them, or God, for his own reasons, is waiting to instill that gift at some later point in life.
A casual survey of literature and our own experience
indicates that the presence of the faculty of spiritual perception in the
population at large is mixed, the same as it is for sight or hearing: some
people have good spiritual perception, some don’t. Some people have it at some
point in their lives, and not at others.
The blind man could have spoken to Bob, and the deaf
woman could have seen him if she had stepped around the corner of the garden
wall from where she was calling. Moral of the story: first, you have to have
spiritual perception, and then you have to make an effort to use it—the same
goes for common sense. Perhaps St. Anselm’s words will help clarify the primacy
of the presence of a faculty of spiritual perception to the capacity to
properly evaluate spiritual claims. “I do not seek to understand that I may
believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe—that
unless I believed, I should not understand.”[16]
By interviewing the devout of all religions and
examining the records of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the
other great faiths, that is, by looking at the history of those who have made a
special effort to practice their faith, it would easily be established that
events of spiritual perception are genuine and frequently occur.
Let’s also be clear about what we are claiming.
Spiritual perception is a direct mechanism of sensing or knowing things of the
spirit, just as the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) are for
things of the physical world. Much like a blind man who cannot perceive colors
does not doubt their existence, and who doesn’t challenge all who profess the
existence of colors as being liars or idiots, those without spiritual
perception at any given moment in time have no greater grounds for doubting
God’s existence. In order to see the similarity, however, it may be necessary
to cast aside the ingrained prejudice against religious knowledge that the
modern world teaches us.
The validity of this faculty of spiritual perception
is confirmed daily by thousands upon thousands of reliable people—potentially
billions if they are living right.
I grant that spiritual perception is unlike the five
senses in some ways; it does different kinds of things. On the other hand, the five
senses are also different from each other. One cannot see colors with hearing,
or hear sounds with sight. We don’t doubt hearing or vision for that reason. In
the case of seeing our in-laws, for example, when no sound is present we just
consider it a good day. ☺ We understand sight is
designed to do one thing, and hearing something else. It is the same with the
faculty of spiritual perception. We should not throw out otherwise reliable
reports involving the use of spiritual perception because they have not been
confirmed by one of our other faculties.
We can advance our understanding of spiritual
perception by further comparing it to the five senses on four points.
1. Why do we believe our eyes and ears to begin with
(they are not infallible)?
2. How does the evidence for spiritual perception
differ from the evidence for the five senses?
3. What sorts of things are perceived with spiritual
perception?
4. How do you verify questionable spiritual
perceptions?
In other words, let’s respond to the objection, “You
claim that spiritual perception works, then exactly how does it work?”
Spiritual perception is no different. One might object
that, “No, there are differences, two of them: we are not born with
spiritual perception, and, at present, we cannot explain the mechanics of a
body part that is associated with its use.” On closer inspection, however,
these apparent differences go away. We know there are some people born without
the use of their eyes or ears, so that circumstance applies to the five senses
as well as spiritual perception, and, since babies are the most blessed among
us, it is not clear that they don’t employ spiritual perception at a
rudimentary level.
Within the Christian paradigm at least we can defend
against the concern that we are not all born with spiritual perception on other
grounds as well, i.e., there is a reason for it. Because of the original sins
of our ancestors, we are born in sin, separated from God at birth. Being
unreconciled to him, and therefore having nothing of the spirit in our lives at
that point, we have no notable spiritual faculties for the purposes of this
discussion beyond the bare existence of the soul itself. Nor will we have them
until that separation is resolved.
God gives us additional gifts all along our journey of
faith after Baptism. One can ask outright for the spiritual gifts that would be
proper for them, and should. Matthew 7:7 NAB “Ask and you
will receive.” Unbeknownst to many, the daily bread we ask for in the
Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer, is also bread from
Heaven, spiritual gifts; it is not just food and material necessities.
The specific gifts of the Holy Spirit are not the same
for everyone. Christ is the Head and we are the various parts of his mystical
body. However, the person, now born of the spirit, will frequently possess some
general faculty of spiritual perception. For those who rush to reject this
assertion simply because it smacks of religion, and for no other reason,
logical or evidential, i.e., reject it automatically, I remind you that it is
not good philosophy or good science to reject anything automatically. Such
behavior reveals a prejudice, not a logical thought process. We should give the
JCIG thesis serious consideration, as we would any other claim, study it and
see how well it can be supported.
Now, what about the second enumerated point that we
cannot demonstrate the physical mechanics associated with spiritual perception?
By science’s own assumptions they can find the bodily processes that are
associated with the events of spiritual perception if they want to, they simply
haven’t looked until recently. Materialistic science assumes that all
of our mental states correlate to a brain state. As of 2006 the first
exploratory work in this area has now been done. A new study from the University of Montreal appearing in the scientific journal Neuroscience Letters Volume
405, Issue 3,
25 September 2006, indicates that as many
as twelve different regions of the brain are activated during a mystical
experience.[18]
The BBC, referring to the University of Montreal study,
reports that:
Father Stephen Wang, a Catholic priest teaching at Allen Hall Seminary in
London, said: "These brain studies can give us fascinating insights into
how the human body and mind and spirit inter-connect, but they should not make us
think that prayer and religious experience are just an activity in the brain.
“True
Christian mysticism is an encounter with the living God. We meet him in the
depths of our souls.
“It is an
experience that goes far beyond the normal boundaries of human psychology and
consciousness.”[19]
Dr. Mario Beauregard, the lead
researcher at Montreal said “This does
not diminish the meaning and value of such an experience and neither does it
confirm or disconfirm the existence of God.”
There is apparently nothing so
simple as a one to one correspondence between spiritual perception and a single
minute area of the brain, but rather a much more complex response. It also
appears that the mind can function
without the brain under certain conditions. This latter possibility would
seem to rule out the neo-Darwinists’ often hidden assumption of materialism and
physical reductionism. To pin down the physical processes that correlate to
spiritual perception more precisely science will have to develop sophisticated
monitoring and observation techniques than are currently available. Even when
they do, such experiments might not garner great multitudes of volunteers,
however: “How about you, or you? We’d sure like to know the answers to these
questions, and your family will be well taken care of…just in case…well, you
know…cough!—anyway, just sign here to waiver all liability of the hospital and
we can get started. We’ll do our best, you can be sure of that. Good. Now,
let’s get go ahead and get that skull cap off…like so…attach a few wires… and
just look at all those pretty lights!”
Humor aside, science has every reason to expect that
such a demonstration of the brain areas and functions associated with spiritual
perception can, in theory, be done. The ability to do it is implied by
our current scientific assumptions. But we must keep in mind that having a
mental, emotional, or spiritual experience correlate to a physical state of the
body or brain does not thereby reduce the experience to nothing more than the
physical aspects; it simply reflects the way the spiritual is tied to and
translated by the physical. Every valid perception of real entities in the
world, chairs, cars, dogs, homes etc. has correlated brain states, brain states
that could, in theory, be artificially reproduced to induce hallucinations of
those objects. But the fact that our perceptual processes involve the intermediate
facilitation of the brain does not mean that perceptions are all illusions.
What we are perceiving, or think we are, is typically
real.
Correlating a particular brain state with the
perception of God or other things spiritual, even a state known to be
artificially inducible, no more brings the reality of God into question than
does correlating a brain state with perception of a car or a dog bring the
reality of cars and dogs into question. The validity of spiritual perception,
therefore, is not impugned by the ability to correlate it to brain
activity or to artificially induce a
“religious,” mystical or meditative state of mind, by means of hallucinogenic
drugs for example. This is acknowledged in a recent Scientific American
article by David Biello concerning scientific research into the brain states
associated with religious experience, Searching
for God in the Brain.[21] All mental activity will of necessity have brain
activity associated with it whether one assumes the existence of the soul or denies
it. Correlation entails neither reduction nor identity, especially if the
process correlated is already known to be a naturally occurring intermediate
step in a larger event process.
True, at the present time we can’t identify a single
physical organ that correlates with the faculty of spiritual perception like
the eye does with sight. We can’t lay the organ on a lab table, dissect it, and
explain its mechanics; in other words, we can’t say “this is why it works,
because this is how it works.” But there has been a time in our history when we
could not do that for the eye or the ear either. During those times, people
still used their eyes and ears and trusted the result.
Of course, for those of us with spiritual perception,
the mind-body problem has long since gone away. Encounters with spiritual
persons prove the reality of the spiritual dimension. Interactions between such
spiritual beings and we who are in part physical, interactions that at times
have direct effects on our bodies, demonstrate the possibility of the spiritual
and physical interacting. Healings, blessings, and demonic attacks all can have
noticeable effects on the body.
It’s interesting to note that, if we were to attempt
to justify our belief in the reliability of the five senses, we would soon
encounter a startling realization: there is no other justification, except the
fact that many people, though not all, use these faculties and report that they
work—they get results; they make it easier to navigate our environment.
To further justify reliance on the senses, one might
say that their use is consistent with a structured body of accumulated
knowledge, in this case scientific knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, the
rigorous quality control measures built into the scientific method removes much
of the risk of error deriving from the inherent fallibility of the five senses.
Spiritual
Perception Part 2: Squirrelly Veterinarians
One of the technical problems philosophers have had
trouble with for centuries in trying to prove God’s existence has to do with
giving a full definition or a complete set of criteria that might be used to
describe or identify God. If we happened to encounter God on the street, how
would we know it was God whom we had met? Perhaps it would be obvious if he
chose to put on a dramatic display of supernatural signs. But, even then, does
that prove him God, or just a magician able to do powerful signs. How, in fact,
could it be established that it was actually God? Having a full
definition of God would do it, if we could reach to verify the values of the
parameters set for God’s characteristics in that definition. We could then
simply refer to the definition and compare it to the person we had met.
So how can we fully grasp, fully understand, fully
explain, or fully define something/someone that is so much greater than ourselves—how can anyone or anything fully understand that
which is greater than they who are attempting to understand it? Could we, in
theory, ever achieve a full definition of God? I submit to you that the
answer is “No.” This is a logical impossibility, true simply by definition of
the terms ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ as applied to beings whose minds are limited
in their capacity to grasp ideas commensurate to their own level of existence.
This is especially so regarding the finite trying to grasp the infinite.
No matter how egotistical we choose to be as the
species at the top of the food chain here on Earth, when it comes to God we are
stuck; we can only go so far. The larger concepts pertaining to the greater
being can find no room on the thin mental storage shelves of the lesser minds
we wield. Those concepts are too big and too different; no proper home can be
found for them.
As a concrete example, a squirrel encountering a human
veterinarian knows it has encountered something, a being perhaps. But what kind of being? Does it know it has encountered a
veterinarian, per se: literally a degreed, scientifically trained,
veterinarian? Can it know that? Can a squirrel fully comprehend the concept of
‘veterinarian’ so that when it goes ‘home’ it can somehow communicate to its
squirrel friends the equivalent of “Hey, guess what? I encountered a
veterinarian today. How about that boys!”
The squirrel can make some progress though. Over time,
and following repeated encounters, he or she may come to distinguish those
kinds of things a veterinarian does that others do not do. The squirrel then
creates a place in his or her mind for such persons. But even then does the squirrel
fully know that he has encountered a veterinarian at the highest level of what
there actually is to know on the subject? No, of course not;
she still doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand science; she doesn’t
understand human beings as self-conscious, rational thinkers. She can’t grasp
the details of sophisticated medical technology, and so on—but she does now
know that it is an entity with a unique experiential tag, a user ID or
conceptual mug shot, if you will. “Oh yeah, that’s the guy! He’s the one that
always does whatever that none of the other creatures do.”
Similarly, despite our inability to establish a full definition of God, there remains a real hope for establishing some less comprehensive criteria that would be, nonetheless, sufficient to adequately identify him. Having the capability to merely identify, as opposed to fully define, God would be enough to provide a basis for presenting conclusive evidence for his existence. One doesn’t have to fully define something to be able to identify it. What is required is to find something truly unique about God, something that pertains to no one else but him. Then we would be able to know it was God when we had met him. We need, not only some unique characteristic or attribute, but one that is within man’s ability both to perceive and to understand. To ‘prove’ God’s existence one then need merely give sufficient evidence to establish that one or more of his unique attributes had been perceived—not all of him, which would be too much for us, but only something unique which would point to him and nothing else. I argue that, given spiritual perception, this much can be done.
Now let’s take the squirrel story a little further.
How much of her experiential criterion for the vet’s
existence is the squirrel able to communicate to others? What happens when the
squirrel, recently treated by the vet, is healed of her injuries and released
back into her own community? Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that
squirrels can talk, other things remaining the same. What sort of interactions
might occur on the subject of her encounter with the veterinarian?
Squirrel #1: “Well what exactly was it?”
Squirrel #2: “Something different, higher.”
“Higher? In what way?”
“I was injured, and he healed me. I think he cares
about us.”
“That’s not possible. You’re nuts.”
“No, no it’s real, it happened. My leg is
healed, see for yourself. In fact, your leg is hurt too,
maybe you should go meet him.”
“Leg’s heal all the time. I’m not going to see him
until you prove it to me.”
Another squirrel, says, “I just got ran over on the
road. I’m hurt. I wish you could prove it, I need help, and quick.”
After exhausting all the alternatives in her mind, the former patient just throws up her paws (and tail) and says, “Follow me and I’ll show you.”
In the case of God, as with the squirrels, it turns out to be impossible to explain even that much which we do have under our conceptual belts, a partial experience-based definition, unless the person we are speaking to has had the same experience. Otherwise they will see no referent to the words we are using, themselves either not having the faculty of spiritual perception, or not having used it. They see no referent to the word ‘God’. Our language is literally meaningless to them, though it is not meaningless to us.
Mrs. Squirrel finds
herself frustrated by the same communications gap. Time passes, and at this
point, several injured squirrels have gone out, met the veterinarian, and
returned healed. Some detailed reports are given of the shots, the
splints, veterinarian hospital food, the knife, the medicine, etc.—all from the
limited perspective and mindset of a squirrel, mind you, but detailed and
reliable reports nonetheless. They now have a reasonably clear set of criteria
with which to identify a veterinarian from their own frame of reference and
range of experience.
The
squirrels can’t fully explain, define, or understand the vet, but they can
identify him. He is the being which does these kinds of things:
temporarily restricts you’re freedom, causes you some painful experiences,
gives you the best food every day, has a nice caring touch, handles certain
special kinds of objects, heals you completely, makes you feel wonderful, then
sets you free to live a happy life. Sound familiar? It should; this is
precisely what we know about God and what we see him doing via the priest
acting in persona Christi at each and every Holy Mass or Church service.
Of course the squirrels would be fools at this point
to deny the existence of the veterinarian simply because they don’t know
everything there is to know about him. They have sufficient grounds to believe
in his existence and can pick him out of a crowd. That is something, in itself.
But, can they prove to another who hasn’t had the same experience that the vet
exists: no. They can only ‘say’, “Follow me and I’ll show you.”
The situation with humans and God is the same as with the squirrels and the vet, even to the point of our being reticent to visit the “doctor.” Also, as we begin to learn the faith we first find our freedom somewhat restricted (by the Ten Commandments). We have some painful experiences (acute moral awareness and the pangs of guilt at confession). As we begin to actively seek the Kingdom of God we discover that God is very actively caring for us and providing our daily bread as he promised in the scripture. Over time, we are fully healed through divine forgiveness, conversion, and rebirth and then set free to be happy. Afterwards, we will always be able to pick God out of the crowd as he who does these uniquely wonderful things; and what he does has become mightily important to our lives.
The squirrels “in the know” have found out
something both unique and significant about the veterinarian. They can pick him
out of a crowd by the things he does. This is important to understand in
discussing the history of arguments about God because it is often said that
since we can’t fully understand God, we shouldn’t talk about him at all, i.e.,
our attempts are all doomed to be useless and incoherent, having no uniquely
specific or even coherently understandable referent, thus providing no
concretely useable information.
Group-limited linguistic coherence is not unique to
religious experience; it applies to sports, technical professions, complex
hobbies, etc. Group-limited linguistic coherence applies anywhere a specific
set of experiences and private knowledgebase is required to provide the
meaningful referents for a subset of language.
We, now have a proper means to establish God’s existence: direct contact with his holiness and divine love, an immediate awareness achieved through the mechanism of spiritual perception. We have established a set of unique and perceivable attributes he has that no one else has—not a complete set, but a unique set. This is as fully legitimate as the means we use to establish the existence of anything or anyone else. We first perceive that there is something or someone there. We then employ a means to uniquely identify who or what it is, to distinguish it/them from the other things we encounter. We are not required to know and understand everything about the person or thing we have identified; citing the unique attributes are sufficient. Nothing is different in the case of God except that he, God, is so much greater than man. Squirrels shouldn’t pretend veterinarians don’t exist, and we shouldn’t pretend God doesn’t exist either. If someone claims to have met the late actor Paul Newman, having identified him more or less by use of the same process as we have discussed for identifying veterinarians or God or anyone else, do the atheists and materialists immediately say they are neurotic absent a complimentary set of other behavioral symptoms of illness? No, they don’t. So aren’t they being irrational, inconsistent, politically prejudiced and/or hypocritical in accusing 4 billion people of neurosis merely because they claim to have met God and for no other reason? Yes, they are at least being inconsistent.
Of course, in the case of the squirrels, no new faculty of perception is required to be installed, as is the case with spiritual perception in humans. We should also note this important difference between God and a veterinarian: all things are possible to God, though not to the veterinarian—all things. God (our creator) can, if he chooses to, reveal himself to us and at the same time increase our capacity to grasp the meaning of what he has revealed, if only temporarily. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 52) teaches that God intends to do exactly that. Paradoxically to human science, this is still true be the revelation outside the normal range of human comprehension or not—God can do it. He can miraculously expand our cognition, either temporarily in a mystical experience or as a permanent spiritual gift of spiritual discernment, through a gradual process of growth or as an instant change.
Components of such a spiritually-imbued increased understanding that falls outside man’s normal cognitive range will then only be communicable to others similarly gifted. In “Squirrelsville,” this situation would be comparable to, say, a genetic engineering experiment where some of the squirrels are altered to increase their brain capacity and function. Three of four of them now play the stock market each quarter and have happily progressed to become major shareholders in Mixed Nuts & Sunflower Seed Corp. Still, the expanded capacity for perception and ‘understanding’ that has comes about as a result of the experiment is only communicable between those squirrels having similar alterations. The others “don’t get it,” so to speak. Nor do they understand why security guards drive off all the other squirrels when the corporate truck arrives at the park for weekly deliveries, leaving only those same five odd geeky squirrels with reading glasses and calculators to eat their fill.
In review, I have argued that the use of direct spiritual perception is the most proper method to establish God’s existence. On that basis, we are as entitled to believe in God as we are in any other person we know—the same methods of proof are available to us. The soundness of this argument rests firmly on the secondary argument that many people have a capability we have called ‘spiritual perception’. I argue that we have every bit as good a set of reasons for accepting the existence and reliability of spiritual perception as we do the existence and reliability of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell.
We can be as certain of God’s existence as we can of Uncle Bob’s. On the other hand, when facing a skeptic or someone who hasn’t met God or Uncle Bob, we can only respond as the squirrel did, and much the same as Jesus’ life and teachings also implied: “Follow me, and I’ll show you.” Historically, Uncle Bob, like God, has gotten very little respect from philosophers and religious skeptics.
Skeptic: “Prove to me your Uncle Bob is real.”
Christian: “Well I just spoke with him this morning.”
Skeptic: “No, you can’t use that, it doesn’t count.”
Christian: “Well, I could introduce you to him.”
Skeptic: “No, I’m afraid that won’t do. All the experts agree with me, you’ll have to ‘prove’ it deductively or scientifically. Experiential proof is out because there is a chance you might infect me with your mass neurosis.”
Christian: “Oh, well, if the experts agree—but just how, then, do I convince you?”
Skeptic: “It has to be a deductive logical proof or straightforward science, you know, an indisputable demonstration.”
Christian: “OK, I’ll try to be logical and scientific. But first give me an example of how to provide a logical or scientific proof of a person’s existence—like what? Give me a deductive or scientific proof that you exist beyond the fact that others have met you and can pick you out of a crowd.”
Skeptic: “Oh, I don’t know how to do that, but the proof is your problem, not mine; after all he’s you’re uncle. Look, I’ve been to his house twice and never seen him. As far as I’m concerned he’s just not there. If you want me to believe he exists, you will just have to give me some ‘logical and scientific proof.’ Otherwise, I simply won’t believe it; and, since I’m an expert,” (the axe falls) “you won’t be justified in believing it either.”
Christian: “But I’ve known Uncle Bob on a personal basis for years!”
Skeptic: “Sorry, your belief in Uncle Bob remains fully unjustified, even irrational, until you can produce a satisfactory ‘logical and scientific’ argument that he actually exists.”
Christian: “Can I still take him to brunch on Sunday?”
So, now we see the weight of the argument from direct religious experience in its true light. It is no different than arguments we all deem conclusive every day concerning our direct experience of the existence of persons or objects. Are there neurotic people who think they see things that aren’t there? Of course, but that doesn’t impugn the valid sightings of the rest of us. The perception of God in our lives is arguably the most frequently shared single perception we humans have after, say, the experience of food, water and air—certainly the most frequent experience of any one person. Yet atheists and materialists dismiss the argument from direct religious experience out of hand while accepting the exact same argument form in every one of billions of its other conceptually identical everyday applications, excepting perhaps only claims of having seen Elvis at the gas station or Mel Gibson driving a taxi. Why? Materialist-Marxist politics again? Of course; you can take it to the bank! What other reason would there be? They start with materialism as an assumption and then rule out all spiritual experience before they even begin their analysis. It is nothing more than the logical fallacy of begging the question.
A fallacy cannot serve as the sole foundation for criticizing an argument; therefore the argument for God’s existence from direct religious experience stands as a valid form of argument whose factual soundness is directly corroborated by an enormous mass of testimony from billions of reliable witnesses. To be consistent with its own use of heuristic models in psychology and the accrediting of reliable witness testimony elsewhere, science must give the thesis of God’s existence the status of its default explanation of religious experience, belief and behavior. The burden of proof now moves to materialists to counter the undeniably massive evidence in favor of the theistic hypothesis. At a bare minimum, the individual believer is validated as being fully rational in his or her belief, regardless of what course science elects to take on the issue. After all, should we deny the existence of Uncle Bob or Aunt Helen because some head-in-the-clouds ideologue never seems to find them at home? No. As Charles Peirce taught us, we should never deny our direct experience, and certainly not deny it merely to appease someone else’s personal philosophy and politics.
Miscellaneous Objections
While we are considering possible objections to our
thesis of there being such a thing as a faculty for spiritual perception, we
should point out that to be born without a major faculty or ability and to then
acquire it later in life is not so novel a concept. We are all born stupid, emotionally
immature, and physically uncoordinated—though very, very cute. In fact, most of
our important capabilities are developed sometime later in life. Vision itself,
is not very well developed at birth—and we can’t even feed ourselves.
Therefore, you can throw out the objection that because we are not all born
with the faculty of spiritual perception, it can’t be real.
We don’t doubt sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell
because we happen to be temporarily lacking in one or more of those gift ourselves,
or because reports from others in the community are mixed. We understand that
different people have different abilities, but these abilities when present
function in a reliable way. It’s no different with spiritual perception. If
many people consistently report the results of their spiritual perception, and
it is as functional within the community of those who have it as the five
senses are in the communities of those who have them, we have no grounds for
rejecting the one, while accepting the other.
Imperfections, flaws, mistakes, hallucinations and
intentional obstructions, are all common to the five senses and spiritual
perception. We don’t reject the former for such flaws, and should not reject
the latter. What then is the critical evidentiary difference between the
five senses and spiritual perception? Simply stated: none.
The difference is only political: it’s a prejudice. Politics do not constitute
a critical evidentiary difference (generally no difference at all) and
prejudices do not equate to sound thinking.
If we are to accept such flagrant prejudices, we may
as well define science as including only reports from four senses, not five,
excluding the evidence of sight because, let us say hypothetically, members of
the blind community happen to control Congress this session. As a result of
recent elections, they now hold the purse strings for the nation and they
cannot be convinced to spend money on art, traffic control devices, or
scientific research involving visual evidence of any kind. They have moved all
related funds to guide experiments based upon four senses. Who would not
acknowledge that the Congress’s thinking in such an instance would embody a
clear prejudice, with no reason or logic involved?
I submit to you that the case is the same with
spiritual perception. Those with a prejudice towards it have held sway politically in the mainstream of science, but
there aren’t the slightest logical or evidentiary grounds to reject spiritual
perception as a valid means of perceiving things for those who have that
capacity. Why do the members of our blind and deaf communities have a vastly
better track record of trusting those with sighted or hearing than atheists and
agnostics have of trusting the community of the faithful? Because
the reality of the five physical senses is not a politically loaded subject.
And spiritual perception, you might be surprised to
learn, can at times admit of public (though not empiric) verifiability. This
has at times occurred, at Fatima, Portugal in 1917 for example where St. Mary
appeared to the three shepherd children and later a much larger group.
The epistemological validity of spiritual perception
is thus not impugned by infrequent shared “public” perceptions with multiple
confirmations. The fact that they are theoretically possible is enough to
validate the faculty as of some epistemological value. The frequent lack of
public confirmation of spiritual perceptions has more to do with the nature of
the event than the nature of the faculty.
Consider also that sense perceptions themselves are
not always public. Some people are colorblind for example and see green in
place of red and vice versa, some don’t have sight at a given moment, some may
have an injury that distorts their vision, and others may simply not be looking
in the direction of the object seen by the majority. Spiritual perception by
its very nature invokes the occurrence of a lot more situations of this kind,
for spiritual gifts are given to those who are looking in the right direction
and the faculty is easily atrophied or distorted through lack of use or by any
of a plethora of spiritual illnesses.
Consider as an analogy the community of newborn
infants up to a year old. Like these infants are physically immature, mankind
is immature spiritually. The infants’ vision is not matured in many cases, but
even once it is they are not all given the same toy to play with at the same
time within sight of all the others. Those that receive the toy, however, have
no doubt of its reality, and when the recipient shares the gift with another
infant, they too are justified in admitting its reality. Infants of course have
the good sense not just to admit, “Yes, that colorful frozen, flavored teething
ring is real,” but to joyfully cram it into their mouth and celebrate it! Would
that we adults possessed such wisdom in regard to the spiritual gifts that
others would gladly share with us.
Sense perception itself is imperfect. The five senses
are neither universally possessed nor consistently accurate throughout the
population. Empiric observation, usually described as an objective method of
verification, is to some extent really subjective, for not only are some
individuals going to “see” radically different things in the same event, but no
two individuals are going to see exactly the same thing owing to minor
differences in their perceptual mechanisms. Brain injuries, drugs, exhaustion,
or even wishful thinking can substantially alter what is “seen” or “heard” in a
given situation. This range of variation is well known but does not impugn the
reliability of sense perception generally. Although spiritual perception by its
nature involves a much higher frequency of circumstances that generate
inconsistency, we can learn, as we do with sense perceptions, in which
circumstances to trust it and in which situations countervailing factors can be
assumed to be operating that preclude consistency.
Of course, the ability of the empiric method of
science to proceed successfully based upon use of the five senses fully depends
upon the assumption that the majority of people have the intention to tell the
truth about what they have perceived. Fortunately, the success of science so
far demonstrates that scientific observers have usually been willing to tell
the truth concerning their observations. My point is that there is nothing compelling them to tell the truth. We have to make the assumption that typical
human observers are both honest and rational in order to justify even the
empiric method of science as reliable. But once we make the assumption that
human witness is generally honest we have every reason to grant the reality of
spiritual perception based upon the testimony of masses of people otherwise
known to be credible.
There are millions of historical incidents of
spiritual perceptions. There are close to a billion Catholics at present all of
whom receive significant spiritual gifts at confirmation. They are routinely
blessed at Mass; they are periodically blessed by God, their guardian angels,
and by their patron saints. These blessings are often palpable events,
undeniable moments of spiritual awareness. Historically there have also been
frequent events of visitations and miracles. If one discounts them all as
psychological manifestations without basis, as lies or hallucinations,
science’s assumption that typical observers are honest, rational and physiologically
sound goes away, pulling the rug out from under the integrity of the empiric
observations that ground the practice of science itself.
Both the empiric method of science and spiritual
perception then fully depend upon the veracity of personal testimony. To assume
that the same people are reliable when doing science, but suddenly become
unreliable when reporting spiritual perception reveals a stark prejudice
against God and cannot be defended. One could say that theists, perhaps
especially Christians, are so biased in favor of their worldview that their
reports cannot be trusted, but as we saw in the discussion of the fallacies in
Part 1, the majority of the very fathers
of science were Christian. We cannot throw out the veracity of Christian
observation and reporting generally without invalidating the historical
foundations of science itself.
If everyone were a clone of each other and on the same
point of the track in terms of direction and rate of personal spiritual growth
one might expect God, who wishes to do what is best for our spiritual progress,
to grant the same or closely similar experiences to many at the same time.
Events of spiritual perception would then coincide more often. But our
struggles to defeat sin and grow in friendship with God have turned out to be
highly unique and variable, and therefore the assistance we get from God varies
accordingly.
Denying the reliability of the children’s eyesight there at McDonald’s playground would be a fallacious inference because the variable conditions of their observations are known and well documented. The deposit of faith reliably and consistently documents similar variability in the environment of spiritual observers, who will nearly always be at different points from others on their own personal path to God at a given moment. Exceptions to this variability do tend to occur, however, especially when the faithful sit down to eat together or go in to worship in Church. At both of these latter events, reports of spiritual perceptions are surprisingly consistent. We all tend to feel the blessing at the beginning and end of our meals and the holy presence of the love of God during the Church service. All things considered, the spiritual perception faculty should not be considered impugned by the appearance of inconsistent results any more than sense perception is impugned by inconsistent results so long as the results are explainable by comparable differences in individual perspective, distorting factors, environmental conditions or state of health and mind.
The Catholic Church has a well-developed professional
knowledge base on the subject of spiritual perception and many well-documented
and publicly verifiable cases of interaction with spiritual persons. It is well
established that greater compassion, holiness, and purity tends to yield more
access to such gifts. Given the known variability in the parameters that affect
religious experiences, spiritual perception is no more inconsistent than the
five senses; it is, rather, operating in a more variable environment.
As Kant noted, we always interpret what we see with
our eyes through the filters of our culture, our language, and our personal
experience. Add to this the imperfections in each person’s sense organs and we
see that no two persons ever truly know what the other is seeing with
certainty, at least as regards details. Police detectives will tell you that
witnesses to the same crime don’t always report precisely the same
observations. There is also the matter of mentally processing what you have
seen, and then recalling it with accuracy. The bottom line is that the combined
system of sense perception mental processing that underlies empiric science is neither perfectly accurate or perfectly reliable. It is in
fact, not the physical system as such that gives near certainty to scientific
observations, but the combination of cross verification between different
observers at different times and the repeatability of an observation.
With regards to at least the infallible core of the
faith, both of these features are available to spiritual perception as
well. People from all cultures, of all
ages, with varying languages and personal experience can, through the grace of
God, come to understand the reality of God as Father and creator and Christ’s
gift on the cross as a once and for all atonement for our sins in exactly the same way as all other persons
of the faith understand them.
Yes, the details of spiritual perceptions are hard to
synchronize among different persons, and, yes, spiritual perception will never
be a practical tool for day-to-day real time epistemology, but we have every
good reason to accept the general evidence from the faculty of spiritual
perception as a proof of God’s existence and as a proof of the reality of the
spiritual dimension of life.
The addition of the rigorous validation techniques of
the scientific method to raw sense perception adds much reliability to the
perceptions of the five senses. However, that level of reliability does not
attach to the basic sense perception itself, which is somewhat fallible, but
only occurs after the rigorous application of scientific method. The Church has
a correspondingly rigorous professionally maintained set of validation
procedures that guarantee the core truths of the faith, and to authenticate
proposed miracles. These professional validation measures take all or most of
the opportunity for error out of the process of spiritual perception regarding
core theological tenets just as the scientific method does for empiric
observations validated by science. In the case of the infallibly proclaimed
truths of the faith, all of the possibility for error is removed.
Thus, I stand on my assertion that the epistemological
differences between sense perception and spiritual perception are minor in
comparison to the fundamental similarities that overwhelmingly validate them
both.
But is this difference a reason to reject the entire realm of religious truth? If a photographer cannot see far off with the macro lens on the camera she is using, she has the good sense to change to the telephoto. Similarly we should not throw out the validity of the telephoto lens of religious faith in epistemology just because we can’t do science with it. We should accept the truths offered by both science and religion and be glad to have them.
Let that suffice to cover the first two questions: we
believe in our five senses simply because they work, and there is
no significant difference between the evidence for the validity of the five
senses and the evidence for spiritual perception at the most fundamental level
of epistemological theory, only at the practical level. And now let’s tie
things up on spiritual perception by considering the third and fourth
questions: what sorts of things are perceived with spiritual perception and how
can such perceptions be verified?
There are at least five classes of things that can be
perceived with spiritual perception:
spiritual persons (angels, saints, God)
spiritual “objects”
spiritual and moral events
spiritual qualities of persons: holiness, goodness, virtues, evil
spiritual truths, to include the core tenets of the
faith, teaching principles, and moral guidelines
The class of spiritual persons is composed of God the
Father Almighty, Jesus Christ our Savior, the Holy Spirit, angels, demons
(fallen angels), saints and martyrs who have died and gone to Heaven, and the
souls of the faithful departed in Purgatory (this last group is not routinely
contacted, however). The throne of God in Heaven and the tongues of fire of the
Holy Spirit at Pentecost are examples of spiritual objects.
Spiritual and moral perception allows us to notice the
corresponding aspects of world events. Moral perception is taken here as a
subcategory of spiritual perception. Not everyone has the same gifts for these
kinds of perceptions, but most of us can at least see a startlingly good or
evil situation for what it is. We can see that some people act morally
better than others at any given moment in time, and some people see
morally better than others at any given moment in time. They can see the good
or evil in a situation (moral events) more sharply while some of the rest of us
may overlook it and stumble into an impropriety even while prepared to act for
the good and the right when we can see it. Kindergarten and Sunday-school
teachers for example, are a likely group to have enhanced spiritual perception
regarding the moral value of events because they must remain constantly on the
lookout for a chance to instruct the child—and to correct us should we make a faux
pas in a child’s presence.
Spiritual qualities are easy enough to understand. We
all take for granted that in some cases at least we can tell the difference
between a good and an evil person. We will grant, even if we are not very good
at it, that others have the faculty of discerning the goodness or evilness of a
person, and specific virtues. Kindness, generosity, charity, honesty, etc., are
all spiritual qualities (the virtues) as are their opposites, the vices.
Spiritual truths include the primary tenets of the
faith: God as creator, Christ as savior, and the Ten Commandments, which
through Christ have now been written on our hearts. All the moral and religious
truths of the Bible are truths that can, at least with a modicum of
instructional formation, be perceived in with spiritual perception. Biblical
precepts as well as those of more general spiritual wisdom can be perceived in
the same manner: “charity covers a multitude of sins;” “ask and you will
receive;” “do unto others as you would have them do unto you;”
Now we come to the last of the four questions we asked
at the beginning as a guide to clarifying the nature of spiritual perception:
how do you verify questionable spiritual perceptions? How do you resolve
differences of spiritual perception? Given satanic deception, how do you judge
between candidates for the truth even in matters of church doctrine?
First, we must dismiss the fallacy that just because
spiritual perception can’t compete with science in practical applications that
it has no use at all. Spiritual perception, of course, is not concerned with
such things, but with matters of the spirit. Within the realm of spiritual
matters there are some methods of verification available on specific types of
questions or perceptions. There is a specific means given in scripture at 1
John 4, for example, to verify the nature of the spirit that is influencing a
person’s speech or actions at any given moment in time. The test of spirits
involves a determination of whether that spirit will acknowledge or deny that
Jesus as Christ has come to earth in the body. If the person whose speech or
actions are under evaluation acknowledges Christ, the spirit influencing them
is of God and their influence can be trusted, if not the spirit is of Satan or
the antichrist and must be considered compromised.
Spirits (angels or demons, for there are no other
kinds other than God himself) who intervene in our lives overtly cannot be
safely tested directly using the same test. Rather, in this case, the test must
be offered as a request to God in prayer because of the danger of confronting
demons directly. Minus the Church’s permission to do an exorcism (only Bishops
and their delegates currently have this permission), confronting a demon
directly will result in harm to the individuals involved and perhaps those
around them. Only Bishops and priests appointed as exorcists should do this
directly. Laymen and laywomen can pray to God for a rendering of the test of
spirits on their behalf, however, so long as they keep their attention off of
the demon while they do it. In some cases, bishops and priests can also hear
the demons speak through the possessed individual in an exorcism. Thus, we have
several ways to resolve questions concerning difference of opinion about spiritual
persons: the test of spirits of 1 John chapter 4, and the Bishop or his
delegate exerting power over an evil spirit in the holy Rite of Exorcism, as
well as praying for an answer.
A skeptic may still ask, “But how do you know there is
a spiritual being there at all?” The answer is that not all contacts with
spiritual beings are subtle. If God or his servants want your attention they will
get it—trust me—and the demons are hugely powerful and will at times do
flagrant physical and spiritual attacks and obstructions. Angels and saints may
otherwise convey a direct awareness of their personae, which one can easily
differentiate from his or her own self. The only question with the appearance
of spiritual beings is not whether there is one present, but whose side is he
on, given the frequency of demonic impersonations. Granted, outside of
miracles, this modes of verification are not public, but
miracles do occur and if we climb to the top of a mountain solo, the wonderful
vistas we see are not unreal just because no one shares the perception with us.
Others can repeat the mountain climb, true, but the
same holds for spiritual encounters. Many people have had encounters with the
same saint or the same angel, including, unfortunately, the fallen angels. Many
persons have been touched by the same God.
Another method available to resolve differences of
opinion regarding spiritual truths is to consult the Holy Bible in conjunction
with the Church’s accumulated “Deposit of Faith,” or to consult the bishops who
have apostolic teaching authority, including the Pope. The authoritative
teachings of the Church are consolidated into what is called the magisterium.
The magisterium is a sure and trustworthy guide, though only a small part of it
is literally infallible. The standard method of resolving spiritual disputes is
to request a priest or bishop to render an interpretation of the magisterium on
an issue after making a reasonable effort to find the answer in scripture, the
Catechism, decrees of the ecumenical Church councils, writings of the Church
Fathers, or the lives of the saints.
Having a professionally managed knowledgebase and standardized
procedures of verification renders the otherwise often subtle and elusive
spiritual faculties coherent and fully useable, at least in mainstream
Church-driven applications. Spiritual perceptions can therefore yield truth in
predefined, systematic and verifiable ways, though they are concerned with much
more general questions than are the five senses in the typical science
investigation.
Yes, much of the spiritual realm remains mysterious and mystical, but not all. Enough is coherent that we can at least establish that we have a spirit, that we have a God, and that at times and within limits we may be privileged to interact with a spiritual community of saintly and angelic persons.
I should note here what has become obvious to many
experienced members of the Church: the presence of God and his angels and
saints are truly unmistakable. The holiness, the righteousness, the
sense of reverence, the authority, the peace, love and joy clearly mark an
event or encounter as being of God. Such encounters are a blessing, and they
feel like one. Satan and his demons do offer close sense-organ or mental
counterfeits. They will attempt to impersonate even holy encounters with God
and his angels and saints. They have deceived most of us in the Church in our early
days of the faith, and more than once, but further experience reveals that the
counterfeit falls far short of the real thing. Once one has
experienced a genuinely holy moment, that’s it. But even the
counterfeits give unmistakable evidence of the reality of the supernatural as
such.
How do you detect the counterfeit? The demons can make
impressive events of light and sound, crystal clear visions, and powerful
biochemical or mental hallucinations, but there is no love in them. By contrast what one perceives
in an encounter with God or the host of Heaven is love first and foremost to
the point of being the overwhelmingly dominant element of the encounter if not
the entirety of it. Having once experienced the presence of divine love and
genuine holiness, you know when it is missing. Prior to having had such a
blessing, of course, deception remains much more possible due to the absence of
a known standard of reference.
Spiritual truths may be expressed symbolically and
thus need interpretation, translation, or exposition. There is an established
academic discipline to do these tasks using rigorous methods, although
universal agreement isn’t always achieved even among scholars. The lack of
universal agreement, however, makes theology no different than the other
disciplines. Differences of opinion on prophetic questions occur more
frequently than on topics of basic theology. Many of these questions are still
unresolved, but, to the extent that anyone in fact knows or can determine the
answer, they can be reliably answered by study of the scriptures and reference
to the deposit of faith and the magisterium.
The fact that some questions of the faith are complex or vague enough to require resolution over long periods of time is not so odd, certainly not invalidating. Physics has been struggling with grand unification theory for some time now, but that doesn’t mean the whole enterprise is incoherent. The Church herself admits to lacking full guidance on some of the questions of prophecy, admits that she is awaiting further guidance from the Holy Spirit prior to forming an authoritative opinion. The Church’s admitted ignorance and humility on certain questions does not so radically distance its methods from those of science. Einstein and his colleagues in theoretical physics did not always immediately come to agreement on complex and obtuse issues minus periods of further study, analysis and deep contemplation, and in some cases never did come to agreement, notably about quantum physics.
Why is it then that intellectuals, scientists and
philosophical experts holding the materialistic perspective casually challenge
the validity of spiritual perception as if it should be clear to everyone
(without study and analysis) that the whole enterprise is nothing more than
ungrounded folklore, primitive superstition, and incoherent jibber-jabber from
a bunch of Freudian neurotics: the equivalent of a collection of children’s
ghost stories! The answer is in the question. It is a debating tactic, a trick.
This tactic suggests to the uninformed person (and only to the
uninformed) that they needn’t bother closely studying the issue as we have done
in this book, but to merely take the materialist’s word for it. The truth of
the matter, of course, is quite different. Close study reveals that we have
exactly the same sort of fundamental epistemological justification for the
reliability of spiritual perception as we have for the use of the five senses:
1. It
works: utility
2. Consensus among reliable witnesses that it works
3. Consistency with an accumulated body of
technical knowledge managed by professionals
4. Intuitive understanding of its purpose
5. A well-delineated and understood scope of
application
6. A method of confirmation and a means to resolve disputes concerning
questionable perceptions and differences of opinion
------------
William Paley’s Design
Argument Updated
One down, three to go. Next up is Paley’s “Watchmaker Argument.” William Paley became famous for saying a watch implies a watchmaker.[23] Though the argument is powerfully elegant as it is, expanding Paley’s argument (which does not improve it) to get at its logical structure and facilitate applications to things whose origin is unknown (like biological systems) yields something like this: the living world exhibits not only complex designs, intricate patterns, and fine art, but sophisticated functional machines. Therefore, there must, at a minimum, be a designer of those mechanisms and possibly a designer of the larger world that contains them. This is true because, as Paley argued, a machine implies its maker.
Ironically, in comparison to what we now know of the nearly incomprehensible intricacies of microbiology and genetics, what Paley and the design theorists of his generation were calling complexity turns out to be simplicity itself. The present evidence for design is vastly more impressive than even Paley could have imagined. In fact, no one on either side of the early evolution debate, Paley, Darwin, Wallace, Mivart, or any of the other experts of their day, knew or even suspected of the immense biological complexity science has since discovered. “A cell wall, a nucleus, some protoplasm and chromatin: all done for cells! Read the next thirty pages in your textbook for tomorrow’s lesson on paleontology.” If the design argument was convincing then, how much more so should it be today?
Despite a decades-long parade of neo-Darwinian propaganda, Paley’s design argument remains unrefuted; a watch still implies a watchmaker. And the evidence for design continues to pile up at an astounding rate. The problem in finalizing the evolution debate in favor of God, or an intelligent designer of some other kind, consists not so much in establishing that a watch implies a watchmaker, or that the biological systems of life look like very impressive machines (it does, and they do), but in demonstrating the applicability of Paley’s argument to biological evolution specifically.
The neo-Darwinists would have us deny the applicability of Paley to biology. They make nature/biology the special case, the sole exception to the rule that a watch implies a watchmaker. Why is nature the exception? You guessed it: “Well, nature is just that way.” And, in the larger philosophical view of things they could be right; but taking that position is not good science or philosophy because there is nothing in our experience that supports it. All of our experience supports Paley now that we can see the intricate mechanisms involved in life. Life is clearly a machine. Huge inductive probabilities say it has a maker because the trillions of other machines in our experience over the centuries all have had makers too. Adding the probability and resource exhaustion arguments to the case virtually seals the verdict: there is an intelligent designer of life. Thus, the neo-Darwinist view is properly considered an arbitrary philosophical preference (or possibly a political one), not a well-grounded scientific position.
It all hinges on this one question: Is nature, or one or more of its component systems (such as the living systems of biology), a true “watch,” a true machine, or something that just happens to look like one. Is nature, as the neo-Darwinists suggest, so special a case that it can look exactly like a machine without being one? Their corroborative argument is that the winding apparently undirected path (that is, what we know of it so far) that nature has taken through evolutionary history and its lack of concern for the individual creature’s immediate adaptation to its present environment rules out a designer, who would necessarily have been more direct and more concerned for the species hosting the adaptation. As previously discussed, they also use bogus theological arguments, such as the problem of evil and naïve finalism to argue their case.
My response is, largely William Dembski. Yes, the path wandered, but the math says an accidental process could not have made these living ultra-complex machines in trillions of times the time and physical resources available in evolutionary history. Plus, they are functional; they maintain consistency and specificity in what they do; they have many closely matched interactive parts; and they error check and repair themselves. They are guided by an information blueprint coded into DNA, indistinguishable from a computer language. Translating this code to create and maintain mammalian systems invokes complexities so vast as to dwarf our own mechanistic creations. Why then aren’t they machines? If it quacks like a duck…. Accident is ruled out, so what is left? Plus, the presence of computer-code-like DNA and Boolean logical circuits in natural systems also convincingly adds the element of artificiality, which is what SETI employs to determine if a signal from outer space is from an intelligent source. If artificiality signals intelligence there, it should signal intelligence here. Quack! Quack!
Finally, the weight of the Darwinist objection that the wandering path can’t be guaranteed to arrive at its destination is very much minimalized by the fact that the designer is most likely God who could foresee precisely where the path will arrive, and that the few mismatched adaptations that have actually been documented in evolutionary history (if there are any documented mismatched adaptations) fall far short of demonstrating that random mutations are the driving force behind the creation of the larger tree of life. Fully random mutations in the accidental sense, the sense that would be of no use to a designer, may be responsible for some minor variations, but there is no real evidence that fully random mutations built the tree of life. Finally, it’s pretty hard to argue the impotency of a wandering path in this case when the wandering just so happened to accomplish precisely what nature needed for a sophisticated and finely tuned interdependent living ecosystem.
And, something new has recently been added to this discussion. Some may have intuitively felt that the gooey substances of life simply were not tractable to an intelligent construction process. In other words, it may have intuitively appeared that only an accident could have done anything with such squishy, gooey, slimy building materials. (Need a lunch break?) How does one hold a slimy squishy nail in place long enough to set it with the hammer? How in fact can it be set? Genetic science and microbiology have recently answered these questions. It can be done. In addition, scientists have now begun to create biotic machines out of the same stuff of which life is made. Since the biotic machines of real life do everything other machines do, and since they have now been demonstrated to be made of materials that are a viable medium for intelligent craftsmanship and engineering (and since they are the most complex machines known), why aren’t they considered to be machines of intelligent design like all the others having the same characteristics?
Some things are visibly machines whether we know their history, place, date, and manner of manufacture or not. If a new type of car shows up in the middle of the Sahara Desert or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon we don’t assume it was constructed by accident just because we cannot identify the manufacturer (at least not until after we drive it); that car is just visibly a machine.
After all we have seen so far, where should the burden of proof lie on this question? With those who say that living organisms and their subsystems are machines or with those who say they are not? The intellectual trick that neo-Darwinists have so far gotten away with in grand style is to convince the public that the default answer to any question about design must always be that accident is responsible until fully proven otherwise. Not so. Why should accident be the default explanation for things visibly qualifying as complex machinery (or for anything else except a chaotic mess)?
Accident has never been demonstrated to be capable of making any “machine” more complex than a roughly hewn teeter-totter, a shaky one-plank bridge, or a loosely tied rope swing. And those simple creations do not endure; they do not carefully check themselves for errors and scrupulously maintain and repair their system architecture; they don’t use thousands of lines of computer code for reference in building and maintaining their design. In fact, everywhere else in science and life calling something an accident equates to admitting that we have no explanation. Thus, the default explanation for complex mechanisms in science must remain with intelligent design, not with accident, because accident provides no explanation at all and providing an explanation is precisely what science is tasked to do.
Has accident really been a rational or intuitive default explanation for life since, let’s say around 1975-80 when modern genetics and microbiology really started pouring on the complexity data? Well let’s see. We have the DNA code that comprises the basic blueprint of life; the brain; the genetic translation system; DNA error-checking and repair systems; and the microscopic buzz of activity equivalent to a small city that takes place inside each of the trillions of microscopic cells in our bodies every hour of every day doing some 2 million actions per minute. The detailed descriptions of the minutest portion of any cellular subsystem in the body are typically more intricate than most industrial machines, and there are systems of systems within systems…. Sounds like an accident to me, doesn’t it…you? Please….Science has to be able to do better than this.
Having fully shirked the natural burden of proof and explanation and forced it back upon their opponents through sheer politics of majority consensus, neo-Darwinists continue to ask us to believe without proof that the enormously complex living designs of nature just so happen to be the one exception to the two rules that govern our world in all the rest of our experience: 1) accidents don’t make machines; and 2) we always know machines when we see them. They ask us to accept that the one exception to these rules, life, just so happens to be more complex than any machine we have ever built. According to the neo-Darwinists, accident does not make the easy stuff, only the supremely difficult. None of this makes one bit of sense, yet it is the prevailing view in evolutionary science. You ever get the feeling someone is “pulling your leg?”
And, if your other leg is free…many neo-Darwinists say something like this…
Now wait just a
minute; you have it all wrong. We are not claiming our world started in chaos
as pure accident or disorder. The universe is known to have been highly
ordered, near perfectly homogenous, in fact. What happened was that something
occurred to break the symmetry of certain elements in the homogenous soup of
matter and energy that followed the Big Bang. Then things just sort of fell
together in precisely the right way. A vast, but random, chain reaction of
events followed. For some (unknown) reason a near perfectly and very simply
ordered universe fell into a not fully chaotic, but just “on the edge of chaos”
kind of “random” configuration. It remained there just long enough to allow
accidental recombinations of the elements that, in the oddest stroke of luck,
created not only the planetary systems but also the astronomically complex
forms of life on Earth. The creation of life required another huge burst of
good luck during the Cambrian explosion to have accidentally achieved most of
the major body forms of the tree of life (and their enormously complex internal
cellular and genetic systems) in a short 5-10 million years, but…well, shit
happens! Anything’s possible with an accidental process and a large amount of
time, right? Nature has paid for that good run of the cards ever since. Hardly
any major life form evolution at all has occurred since the Cambrian. Some
minor evolutionary alterations have been noted, however, and this is all the
justification we feel our theory of accidental evolution requires because, if
the world were accidental, and if it happened just this way,
that’s all the justification there would be to find.
That is the neo-Darwinist view of things. While that general event scenario, or something very much like it, is what appears to have happened, this is true only if one first takes the accidental claim out of it. There are two things very wrong with this description of events when used as a defense of neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution:
1. It is not neo-Darwinian evolution that is described here because the event process is not an accidental process at its foundation. The universe starts with a high degree of homogenous order (it is not chaos), loses symmetry and moves only partially toward chaos, and then inexplicably moves back to very complex order, achieving highly complex life forms. Mathematical probability theory, however, assures us that to achieve the complex machinery of life in the available time the initially highly-informed combinations of matter and energy must have unfolded, not accidentally, but in close accordance with natural law, and without losing all the life-favoring information that was packed into matter and energy at the start. In other words, the symmetry breaking unlocked information already present in just the right way to form the enormous life-favoring specificity of our universe’s physical parameters using the help of natural law along the way. This is not the description of an accident. The math assures us that the symmetry-breaking event was more of a hugely precise diamond-cutting type of event than a drop-and-shatter-a-glass-in-the-kitchen accidental paradigm. To say otherwise is to violate science’s own probability standards for scientific credibility.
Some of the intermediate steps in the unfolding of our universe may be mildly random, but they are both closely constrained by natural law and directionally pushed by the very highly ordered matter and energy that flowed into them. The output options from such a process are not unlimited, and in fact appear to be such that life on Earth becomes inevitable. Thus, there is nothing truly accidental at the foundation of the unfolding of our universe and the life forms within it.
2. Merely providing a general description of the way our universe unfolded does not equate to providing an explanation of why it unfolded the way it did. It certainly doesn’t show it to be an accident given that the math fully forbids such a conclusion. What current cosmology describes, when viewed as an accident, has a statistical probability close to nil (zero), far beyond the scientific threshold of credibility, even while admitting the existence of some random subroutines in nature. Therefore science cannot affirm that the event processes that created the order of our cosmos and life were accidental because science must always affirm the probable over the improbable.
Yes, there are accidents in the world, but accident is not the cause of the world. Where random elements occur at intermediate points in any process they may be productively “harnessed” or integrated into the overall function and purpose of the larger system. There is no reason to claim lack of purpose in such a system. But if the neo-Darwinists want to say something stronger, namely, that random elements genuinely comprise the foundation of our world, and that our world is fully chaotic in its inception, they are just wrong. That kind of system simply does not match what we know about the origin of our universe or its present physical and biological mechanics.
The neo-Darwinists reach for our trousers yet again when they ask us to ignore the fact that neo-Darwinian theory is not testable (as all scientific theories must be). They say that all the tests one might pose for their theory of accidental evolution that could practicably be carried out are inadmissible as nonrepresentative of the theory. This dilemma results, they say, not from the fact that their theory is wrong, but merely because evolution doesn’t happen in brief spans of time. True, it has taken millions of years for life to evolve, and, therefore, any valid test of macroevolution would have to be carried out over millions of years. And, yes, it is impractical for science to carry out such a test. For this reason neo-Darwinists feel that the absence of successful tests of (basic) evolution should not detract from the credibility of their theory of (accidental) evolution.
While apparently quite reasonable on the surface, this evasion of testability only succeeds so far. It does work for basic evolution, but it doesn’t work for accidental evolution. We must always keep in mind that the neo-Darwinian theory includes an accidental worldview. While the overall event of evolution cannot be directly observed, the underlying concept of an accident creating complex biotic machines on a scale requisite to achieving the known evolutionary timeline can be tested. Why don’t neo-Darwinists bring this to our attention when it would show at least one major tenet of their theory (the accidental tenet) to be directly testable after all? The reason they don’t bring this kind of test to our attention is because this test has already been inadvertently performed by science and neo-Darwinian theory has flagrantly failed it.
We see this inadvertent test of accidental evolution being performed by neo-Darwinists themselves every day in the laboratory. Millions of accidental nucleotide mutations generated in thousands of scientific studies have never produced any support for the belief that an accident can generate the macroevolutions required to build the tree of life in real evolutionary time. If the theory of accidental evolution were true, the random mutation of DNA produced in these studies should have produced viable improvements to the design of the experimental subject (usually a germ or a fly) being mutated. But no viable alterations have ever been noted from mutagenesis studies that are developmentally non-trivial, that is, that constitute a genuine advancement towards a more complex creature. Nor have we seen the numbers of smaller component steps that might build toward such advancements that would be preserved by natural selection as fitness advantages required to make the math work for the real evolutionary timeline (if we have seen any at all)—in short, none of these thousands of studies have produced any evidence that macroevolution can be produced by accident.
The aggregate of these many thousands of past mutagenesis studies amounts to a failed test for the theory of accidental evolution. The cumulative weight of the evidence from mutagenesis studies continues to grow each year. We must conclude then, that, while the larger basic theory of evolution is not testable due to both the time scales involved and the inability to recreate the partially unknown and possibly very complex conditions that once prevailed on primeval Earth, the more narrow theory of accidental evolution is testable in its accidental tenet. All the tests performed to date have failed. The failure of these empiric tests of the accidental tenet, combined with the probability argument and resource exhaustion argument, gives strong empiric support for the intelligent design argument.
Another failed test of the accidental tenet occurs through direct observation of the processes of nature across the entire spectrum of minute physical-chemical interactions and larger natural processes. If nature at its foundation were a genuine fractal-producing mixing bowl, constantly turning and churning out accidental variations as neo-Darwinists say it is, we should frequently find simple and small non-living biotic machines being randomly produced in nature—everywhere—and some of them should be periodically combining into larger more complex machines. There would have to be many thousands of accidentally created biotic machines and components “lying about” at any given moment despite the fact that bacteria would readily consume them. Bacteria consume cow droppings too, but we cannot fail to miss their existence.
Applying probability theory to the known evolutionary timeline entails enormous numbers of biotic machine discoveries. If accidental evolution were true we should frequently encounter freshly made biotic machine components during their short duration prior to biodegradation or consumption by microbes. In addition, it should be relative child’s play to produce the same biotic machine components in the lab from purely random processes. Neither of these events are occurring with any statistical significance. Thus, accidental evolution has failed a second test, and the design argument is further corroborated.
One can say that although nature is not presently a random mixing bowl, it used to be. But there is no evidence that the laws and conditions of nature have ever been different than they are today in terms of the amount of control and randomness present.
Even if we found that biotic machines had been or were being produced from random processes, the resource exhaustion argument of William Dembski tells us that there was not enough time to make the achievement of life by such an accidental process scientifically credible. (see Appendix 2, Crunching the Numbers) In other words, we would simply be observing a fizzle, a false start that didn’t have the horsepower to get the job done.
What we are finding is that the only significant and substantial biotic machine production takes place within an already living organism, or to a very limited extent, is accomplished by intelligent design in the lab by patching together biotic components that nature has already made. So, basically, there are two simple empiric reasons (that is, in addition to the probability and resource exhaustion arguments) that show the neo-Darwinist model to be wrong.
1. We know from direct observation that nature, governed closely by natural law, is not a random fractal machine; it does very little truly random mixing of anything. A world that was a truly random mixing bowl would be chaos. Neither life nor much of what we know as natural law would be found in it.
2. As far as science can presently demonstrate, it takes life to create life: either a living organism must generate a new biotic machine internally, or an intelligent being with a bio lab and an expert knowledgebase of biology must make it externally. This latter situation is what is called “synthetic life” and as of this writing, though loudly and often alluded to, synthetic life is yet to be accomplished. But when it is accomplished (if it ever truly is), it will be a case of intelligent (human) design, not a demonstration of what an accident can do. All we can presently do is borrow and rearrange what nature has already built, and even then rarely and on a small scale.
Modern research has clearly moved the design argument fully into the realm of science by revealing that the biology of life, which had always looked like a watch, is actually trillions of times more complex than we had ever suspected (and trillions of times more complex than a watch). Beyond the raw numbers (which in themselves are fully convincing), it is the precise nature of the complexity that clinches the question.
Molecular biologist Professor Michael Behe has shown that basic cells and many of the organelles, systems and subsystems of animal physiology represent a “true watch” as opposed to a superficial approximation of one.[24] Mathematician and philosopher of science William Dembski has shown us that, no matter what one considers life to be, a true watch or a false one, nature did not have sufficient resources available through the entire history of the universe to build life by accident (see Appendix 2). Dembski’s argument is comprised entirely of basic physics and simple math. To throw out Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument requires us not only to throw out basic math and physics, but to deny the probabilistic foundations of science itself. It requires us to affirm the vastly improbable over the highly probable. To do such a thing (as neo-Darwinists do) is not to do science.
Then there is the work of geneticist Dr. Michael Denton. Denton convincingly argues that the achievement of life as we know it, at least in general terms, appears to be intended by nature to the exclusion of any radically different alternative.[25] In his 2003 offering, Life’s Solution, noted evolutionist Simon Conway Morris also asserts that human life was inevitable given the nature of our universe. In other words, (and this is my conclusion, not that of Morris) it appears that the designer wanted this category of watch, one based upon amino acids, proteins, and RNA/DNA, not just any clunky old animated contraption whatsoever.
Darwin’s view of animal physiology, compared to the modern one, equates to just that: an old clunker, something so simple that an accident might indeed have thrown it together. Darwin admitted that, could it be shown that even one component of life was so complex that an accident could not assemble it by a sequence of random variations locked in by natural selection, his theory would be disproved. This has now been done hundreds of times over, but mainstream science remains in denial.
There is also a somewhat radical philosophical implication of Denton’s research (and Morris’s thesis) that is relevant to our inquiry into the scientific evidence for God. To my knowledge, neither Denton nor Morris goes into this implication, but their work has, in my mind at least, unexpectedly resurrected the old, thought to be forever vanquished, view of human centricity in the universe. Granted, it is a very limited type of centricity, limited to nature’s having a goal of human life appearing on Earth within a supportive ecosystem. But at least this much human centricity now appears to be a defensible thesis in philosophy based upon science. The achievement of human biology within a friendly environment really does appear to be the center and driving purpose of nature. This doesn’t prove the thesis of God outright, but it certainly adds corroboration beyond what an accidental worldview provides.
Yes, the process of evolution wandered around a lot in regards to the details, but not in regards to the whole. RFP again: the result satisfied the “proposal” of a Genesis-like living system, while leaving the details of component parts unspecified. Neo-Darwinists, being micromanagers obsessed with the “trees” (and perhaps good Marxists), were unable to see the “forest” (the overall intention, purpose, or RFP) in nature. Dembski, Morris, Denton, Ross, Gish and many other noted scientists have had the presence of mind to stand back a bit and look at larger themes such as convergence, resource exhaustion, probability, complexity, and fossil record patterns. Viewing evolution from these additional perspectives afforded those thinkers an “aha experience” of seeing purpose in nature, purpose that others who were doctrinally locked into the Darwinian party line of accident and materialism missed.
Thought to be forever vanquished by the (at the time in 1860) “ultra-enlightened” protoplasm-era theory of accidental evolution, the theory of a direction or purpose in nature is no longer the intellectually outré, out of touch, and out of vogue, hypothesis it once was. The neo-Darwinists remain in abject denial of this change in the scientific paradigmatic weather. But, of course, they would be, for it bodes no good for their group’s politicized point of view. For the past few decades they have been stubbornly dragging their rhetorical heels in an attempt to delay the inevitable discrediting of the accidental worldview, and the materialistic politic that goes with it. They have sponsored a tactic that one might call the “silent transition.” In brief, the “silent transition” strategy amounts to this: “Whatever happens, for God’s sake don’t tell the public!” You may laugh, but in very large part it has worked. The accidental worldview has already been jettisoned from much of science. But who knows it!? The public will be the last to know this because the political implications are so adverse to the materialist worldview.
Evolution textbook writers have, for many decades now, admitted that the “random mutations” of neo-Darwinian theory are not truly accidental, only unbiased towards the fitness of particular organisms in their environmental niches. Cutting edge evolutionists such as Simon Conway Morris have pointed out that the phenomena of convergence (achieving the same form or function through different evolutionary routes) is ubiquitous in nature, and that known constraints on natural processes make human life inevitable, at least on Earth.[26] Morris, not being an ID theorist, might well shy away from human centricity as smacking too much of religion, but the logic goes where it goes: human life is either inevitable or it isn’t. In any case, accident has no home in such a view. Centricity may seem a bit of a digression for us, as our primary concern here is with the merits of the design argument as a scientific theory, it shows a bias for human life that is too large for the accidental thesis to accommodate.
Science can neither replicate the biological machines of life in the lab under random conditions nor observe a random process generating the machines of life in nature. The accidental theory of evolution has in fact failed on eleven separate tests:
1. Probability (Dembski, Meyer)
2. Resource exhaustion (Dembski)
3. Physical bias beyond an accidental or random parameter (Penrose, Morris, Ross, Denton)
4. Direct observation that nature is not a random fractal producing mixing bowl (Everybody)
5. Chicken & egg problem for abiogenesis: it takes life to produce life (Everybody)
6. Thousands of mutagenesis studies have produced no support for the accidental thesis (Everybody)
7. Randomly produced biotic machines and machine components are not seen to be produced by nature en masse as required by an accidental evolutionary process (Everybody).
8. Irreducible complexity satisfies Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory (Behe, Darwin).
9. The fossil record mismatches an accidental process. (Gish, Meyer, Denton—even Mayr)
10. Artificiality: we are entitled to a design inference when we see computer programming-controlled systems of high complexity that are visibly machines. (Dembski)
11. Failure to explain. Neo-Darwinian theory has no real explanation for macroevolution, and many of its presumed icons have been discredited. (Wells)
Paley’s design argument thus becomes not just a naïve religious belief as the neo-Darwinists claim, but a strongly supported coherent scientific theory. It is in fact a good scientific theory that has survived substantial testing. Life is now scientifically demonstrable to be something an accident cannot produce.
Nonetheless, modern critics of design, citing Darwin, Hume, and other antiquarians who never had the chance to see inside the cell or learn of the complexity of the genomes, assert (erroneously) that Paley’s argument has long been demonstrated false. This is absolutely not so. In light of modern microbiology, genetics, physics, and cosmology, the watchmaker argument not only remains alive and well, but readily converts to a coherent scientific theory. If Paley’s work contains no more force and merit than the musings of an elementary school child, as neo-Darwinists describe it, why are there 3,000 books in the current books list at Amazon and Borders bookstores referencing his life and work?
What we have seen in exploring the strong scientific evidence for intelligent design and the eleven failed tests of accidental evolution is that the materialist-atheist-Darwinist camp has been far too casual in dismissing Paley over the years. Immanuel Kant, as great a thinker as the world has produced, said the design argument was the one argument for God that we must always treat with respect, and yet the neo-Darwinists ridicule it as having less merit than the blunder of a child. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science evinces a similar prejudice in refusing to examine intelligent design theory at all. They assume ID must still be merely a theological or a philosophical argument, since it began that way 150 years ago. Unfortunately, even the National Academy of Science also appears to hold a similarly outdated and prejudiced view of intelligent design theory.[27]
To be fair to Paley as a thinker, although he was a man of faith, his design argument did not require faith for support; it could stand on its own intellectual feet. The structure of his original design argument in its standard deductive form, though of course much simpler than modern ID theory, was a valid and sound argument. It went something along these lines:
Premise 1: All things that exhibit a specific function, sophisticated structured patterns, complexity of design, and closely matched parts constitute a mechanism.
Premise 2: All mechanisms have a designer.
Premise 3: Nature (the Earth, or the Universe), and life forms especially, exhibit high complexity, sophisticated structured patterns, and specific functionality, closely matched parts, etc. .
============================ (Therefore)
Conclusion: Nature and life have a designer.
It is apparent at first glance that the argument is valid, i.e., the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. That doesn’t mean the premises are true, however, just that they are logically related to the conclusion. The combination of premises 1 & 2 comprise what some modern scientists and philosophers call the “design inference.” No one to my knowledge ever disagrees with premise #2, except Charles Darwin himself. Darwin was purported to be, and in fact was, the paradigm of a close observer of nature. However, he did not see what most of the rest of us do see: design inherent in the processes of nature—couldn’t see the forest for the trees, perhaps. Whatever the reason, Darwin did not see the indications of purpose or design in nature that are apparent to nearly everyone else. Even Richard Dawkins admits that nature looks as if it were designed.
Darwin saw some mechanisms in nature, of course, planetary movements, the water cycle, growth processes, natural selection, specific anatomical functions, etc. He was so awed by the vastness of the cosmos and the ability of man to contemplate it that he did posit God as the ultimate source of the universe. He saw no intelligent plan guiding the day-to-day interactive course of natural processes, however. What Darwin saw, or thought he saw, was the interaction of purely chance biological form variations and natural selection: a process so unconstrained that, once the larger cosmos had been created and set fully free by God, anything or nothing might have come out of it in the way of life forms and natural processes.
In addition to the naïve finalism and problem of evil arguments, both of which depend upon flawed first-grade-level theology,[28] the big gun of the neo-Darwinian argument has always been this claim: things could have turned out differently; there cannot be a designer of life because he did not guarantee the results. In other words, the wandering processes that evolutionary science had observed in nature from 1850-1950 need not have produced life at all. Simon Conway Morris has now shown us plenty of reason to disagree with that portrayal of the natural processes of evolution, and the resource exhaustion, probability, and irreducible complexity arguments of Dembski, Meyer, and Behe tell us that science can no longer rationally ascribe life’s creation to an accident.
But what else could Darwin have seen? The science of his day had neither atomic physics, molecular biology, the electron microscope, or genetic science. All he could see is some nondescript goo inside the cell. Darwin’s case is a clear paradigm of a theory being limited by the vision and technology available to its time. The prevailing religious view—and the prevailing cultural view was religious—stipulated a kind of naïve biblical finalism, creatures created in their final form right out of the chute, as it were. The cultural milieu, at least subconsciously, posed a kind of either-or limitation to the theoretical alternatives that could be taken seriously by the scientist, theologian, or philosophers of the time: either God did it in this simplistic way or he didn’t do it at all.
Thus it is no surprise that Darwin, himself once bound for the ministry, failed to see design. It had already failed the simplistic pass/fail test of his cultural milieu, and he could find no direct observations to save the theory. Darwin saw no benign governance in nature; he saw only cruelty, chaos, blindness, and apparent accident. He saw a natural process set free to run its own blind course. Not having discovered, as we have since, the intricacies of genetics and microbiology, Darwin did not feel compelled to label the universe a vast machine-building machine; he labeled it a vast, wandering, tragic, and unfortunate mess, though not a mess without laws to keep things more or less in bounds.
The laws of nature to Darwin, however, were visibly insufficient to require the production of life or to guide the evolution of the tree of life in the direction it took. He had no knowledge of the directional factors we can now see thanks to Ross and Penrose and the myriad of researchers whose work they summarize. Darwin saw no failed tests of the accidental process that have now become glaringly obvious to us. He could not see the irreducible complexity of cellular machines because he could not see inside the cell. Thus, Darwin’s work, while not illogical, was grossly uninformed. As such it cannot refute Paley even in the original form of his argument, and much less so in the modern form of intelligent design theory.
We should also note here that the one remaining obstacle to the success of Paley’s original thesis, that of having a scientific argument posit the existence of a supernatural religious being, has been removed. Modern forms of intelligent design theory make no such claims; they don’t assert who the designer is, only that there must be one. Although Paley couched his watchmaker argument in terms of God’s existence, over the past few decades, mathematician William Dembski, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, and molecular biologist Michael Behe, et al., have formally proposed intelligent design theory in this more generalized way. ID theorists explicitly disavow making any claim that God must be the designer (or any other religious claim). Modern ID theorists simply say that life qualifies as a highly sophisticated machine and that all such machines have designers. Both claims are properly scientific, and, on the surface at least, apparently true. [Yes, I will put that supernatural claim back in this part of the book to form what I call a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God theory, but modern ID theory does not do that.]
Consider. To say that the information content in natural law (as currently understood) is inadequate to explain the information content in DNA and other features of complex biological machines, as Dr. Stephen Meyer does, is not to say that God exists; it is simply to say that there is a mismatch between the information capacities of the two systems. Meyer thinks that mismatch calls for an explanation beyond merely dismissing it as an accident. I think he is right. In science any substantial mystery calls for an explanation. Intelligent design provides that explanation, while nothing else does in this case.
Likewise, to say with Meyer that science currently has no explanation of the origin of biological information beyond intelligent design is only a statement about the current merits/demerits of our scientific theoretical base vis-à-vis the available data; it is not religion. And William Dembski has spent three good long books (The Design Inference, The Design Revolution, and No Free Lunch) teaching us why the design inference is good science. There is nothing of religion in his argument. He doesn’t deny his own personal faith, but would we respect him more or less if he did? What he has done is gone to great lengths to help both the layman and professional scientist to see that there is an objective threshold of complex specified design-driving information that justifiably triggers the intelligent design inference.
Michael Behe has spent another two excellent books teaching us that the facts of biology, many only recently discovered, show the accidental gradualistic model of neo-Darwinian evolution to be inadequate as an explanation of the origin and development of complex biological systems. Stephen Meyer has now joined this ID book parade with a superbly written tome called Signature in the Cell. Every bit of this is valid science, yet neo-Darwinists dismiss it all as religion.
Behe has taken the first steps towards a physiological definition of what it is that we intuitively know we are seeing in biological designs when we ascribe intelligent design to such systems. He terms this, “irreducible complexity,” something an accident cannot achieve. Dembski, on the other hand, gives a primarily mathematical treatment of the design inference. While Behe focuses on the perceivable failure of the neo-Darwinian model to account for irreducibly complex biological structures, Dembski makes a more abstract argument for intelligent design from complexity, probability, physical resource limitations, and information theory. Stephen Meyer’s argument centers around the lack of explanation for the biological information in DNA specifically, and the large unexplained jumps between radically different types of creatures that evolution somehow accomplished in an amazingly short period of time during the Cambrian explosion. Once again, all of these are proper scientific logics—nothing of religion in any of it.
One effect of these new works in intelligent design is to make explicit in scientific terms the often subconsciously perceived criterion that ordinary people employ every day when they make a design inference. In doing this, they genuinely succeed in pulling the classic design argument into the realm of science. They demonstrate that the term “intelligent design” can be consistently and rigorously applied to biological machines via a scientific analysis. The criterion may be somewhat flexible in varying from situation to situation, but it remains a scientific criterion.[29]
The design inference as described by these scientists is not merely some whimsical “Gee whiz, that’s an impressive gizmo!” type of subjective feeling that everyone does differently—it is not just popular nonsense, in other words. People agree in amazing fashion as to what qualifies as intelligently designed and what does not. According to Dembski, this amazing consistency occurs because we are actually seeing something there, something objective and perceivable that qualifies on a known, if only subconscious, criterion. Among the endless patterns of complexly arranged parts that millions of different designed artifacts and machines display there is something they all have in common: a perceivable threshold of complexity, information, and specificity of function, and this reliably indicates intelligent design. It does not have to be a simple, unitary criterion to work; it can be an either-or criterion with multiple ways to qualify as intelligent design. But whatever form the design inference takes, there is something objectively perceivable that triggers it.
One might object that these treatments are not rigorous because we cannot yet specify with precision where the ID threshold is in each of its practical applications. We should not think that the validity of the design inference must be denied simply because we cannot immediately quantify it. This is not a requirement for other valid inferences that we make. We can see that a wall is too high to climb over, or a puddle to wide to jump without being able to give the height of the wall or width of the puddle to centimeter accuracy. We are confident that a threshold has nonetheless been crossed. We can confidently affirm the truth of gravity without being able to specify precisely how much force is being applied to a falling apple or a climbing space rocket. We can see that a force is compelling the apple down and that it takes an awful lot of fuel to overcome gravity to get the rocket up without knowing precisely how much force. So it is with the design inference. We know it when we see it without being able to give our reasons in precise mathematical terms. And we must remember that intelligent design theory is still in the seminal stage, in its scientific infancy, as it were. It is unfair to demand perfection and completeness at the beginning of a theory’s development. Further scientific investigation will undoubtedly yield precision for design inferences as it has done for estimates of gravity, height, and distance. Pending the achievement of that precision, we should remain confident in our everyday inferences to intelligent design just as we do for height, distance, and gravity.
The fact that there are alternative methods to compute the presence of intelligent design complicates the decision process but does not invalidate the decision. Sheer complexity might be enough in one instance, while a combination of precisely fashioned parts with somewhat less complexity would justify the design inference somewhere else. Unmistakable artificiality present in an otherwise very simple design structure would also be a sufficient indication of intelligent origin, etc. This latter method is the one presently employed by astronomers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).[30]
Thus, the inference to intelligent origin can be valid despite the fact that science has yet to complete a thorough exposition of all of its many and varied applications. People can make mistakes, of course, but, in general, methods commonly used to infer intelligent design are reliable. We all make math errors at times, yet we know the mathematical operations of addition and multiplication are valid though we have not exhaustively applied them to all types of problems. The same is true of the inference to intelligent design.
All of this adds up to a solid case for intelligent design theory. Throw in some common sense, and ID is a shoe-in. All of the signs the ID authors have pointed to in the complex systems of biology are nonrandom and sufficiently complex that if the equivalent were translated into graphic symbols, blueprints, natural language, computer language, or mathematics they would be acknowledged as originating in an intelligent source.
Finally, to add additional confidence in the design inference, we can formally pose it as a scientific theory. To do that, let’s briefly look first at how science makes its arguments. We can then build an argument of the same type for the design inference. What, then, is the logic of science?[31]
The scientific method is based upon what is referred to as inductive logic. Inductive logic essentially reduces to the general rule that when something has been shown to repeatedly happen in a certain way, it is reasonable to assume it will happen the same way the next time. This is because a natural law is assumed to be operating, and natural laws are assumed to be constant, or so nearly so that the rare deviation is of no consequence. If an apple is observed to have fallen from a tree in a downward direction a few million times, while never observed to have floated up, then we feel justified in assuming that the next time the apple ripens and disconnects from its branch, it will fall down to the ground. In this case, the natural law in operation is the law of gravity. So far, observation has very substantially confirmed the law of gravity and never refuted it. The empiric evidence for the law of gravity can be posed as a simple scientific argument based upon inductive logic. It is also reinforced by multitudes of mathematical confirmations in aerospace and other science and engineering applications. In addition to multitudes of confirming observations the law of gravity has good theoretical support.
Science assumes the existence of natural laws that do not change, and our observations are consistent with that assumption because nature is seen to be orderly and consistent. Our understanding of natural law grows over time as observations of regular patterns in nature are codified into new laws and existing laws are polished and made more and more precise over centuries of further observation and test. Following so much effort at precise confirmation, science then feels confident in making predictions based upon these laws—and, perhaps more importantly, has been dramatically successful in doing so. Successful predictions and tests, support from other theoretical models and mathematical arguments, as well as explanatory power all lend additional evidential support for the truth of a scientific theory. This, in a nutshell, is how science works.
We can now apply this type of scientific logic (in a simplistic way) to the argument from design. When we observe something with intricate functionality or sophisticated structured pattern, a car or a wren’s nest for example, we also discover that there is a designer or a creator of that thing. We should note that, many millions of these observations have occurred even within the very process of scientists doing science: ornithologists observing birds building nests, anthropologists studying ancient tools, entomologists observing the construction of bee hives, etc.
The inductive evidence base, the number of confirmed observations of the design inference posed as a scientific theory, is huge. Our daily life, alone, is replete with such test cases. All of our tools, machinery, and instruments qualify, all of our construction, as well as the constructions of wildlife. What refutations, negative test cases, and counterexamples have been given? None. Where is one sophisticated design that we know was made by an accidental process? There aren’t any.
True, the type of intelligence involved in producing a structured dwelling for a bird or an insect is obviously different than that employed by “higher” beings, simpler, and perhaps unconscious and “hard-wired” as opposed to conscious and temporary, but it is intelligence. Thus, there are billions of confirming empiric observations for the design inference. There is also substantial theoretical and mathematical support for intelligent design theory from the resource exhaustion and probability arguments as well as observations of convergence in evolution and irreducible complexity in cellular and other biological systems. Thus, ID theory matches up perfectly with the standard methods and paradigms of science.
Questions remain to be answered about what is actually going on in the internal, psychological/mental side of things when a particular human being arrives at a design inference. In addition to a logically defensible conscious inference and plausible scientific theory, the design inference may also have unconscious origins, and be a hard-wired instinctive function resident at an unconscious level similar to unconscious but intelligent routines found in lower creatures. The existence of such an unconscious faculty would, perhaps, explain why investigators have such a hard time clarifying what exactly is being done when humans make the design inference, with everyone seemingly doing it in a slightly different way. If this is so, studies of the design inference that proceed by observing human behavior in real time will be confounded by people flip-flopping between the conscious and unconscious inference methods. This could potentially cause investigators to confuse two entirely different kinds of processes, one conscious, rational and scientific, the other unconscious and instinctive.
All I wish to note here regarding the possibility of an instinctive design inference is that 1) it is fully compatible with the theory of evolution as modern humans might well have inherited such a faculty from primitive man, and 2) its presence or absence says nothing of importance concerning the conscious and scientifically formulated design inference, which is our concern here, and, as we have seen, can be scientifically formulated and is very well supported.
A critic might say (as the neo-Darwinists do) that nature itself (all of it taken whole) is the counterexample. In other words, the negative test case, is, well, everything. Yes! We have a counterexample, and it’s a big one! It’s really that simple, or so the neo-Darwinists would have us believe. Nature is just that way, one big accident. Nature just happens to produce complex machinery, and it consistently maintains them in a very careful way—by accident. Walla booby! Accidental evolution proved, right? Not quite.
According to scientific method and procedure, to be a successful negative test case one must have observed an instance of a result contrary to the theory or hypothesis being evaluated: observed, not merely proposed. For all of nature to count as a counterexample, one would have to have observed that there is no designer of nature. Who has made such a vast observation? How could such an enormous observation have been made; and where is the documented report for us to consider?
Clearly, no man has accomplished this observation because it is such an enormous task in concept that no man or group of men could do it. (It also would have made the news.J) We would first have to have not only scoured the entire known physical universe, but done it in a single instant to preclude God or another intelligent designer of our world moving to where we were not looking at the time. We would have to have proven that the hypothesized designer could be neither nonphysical nor existing in another dimension where we were unable to go or unable to look. Clearly, these things have not been done to the satisfaction of science and logic, and they present what are probably insurmountable physical and logical obstacles to ever being done.
Therefore, not only is nature not the negative test case, the negative counterexample, it is clear that it cannot be. Without an observation to validate the proposed negative result, the critic’s objection that nature has no designer reduces to an unsupported claim. It begs the question.
It is ironic that Darwinists tend to deny the design inference because the mental operation involved is practically identical to their own bread and butter tools of phylogenetic inference and fossil pattern analysis. Isn’t it truly odd that the neo-Darwinists’ instincts would be so consistently different from those of the rest of us. We all make frequent pattern-based inferences in the course of a normal day; it is, in fact, the most fundamental operation in the thinking process. Implicitly trusting in our ability to discern patterns, we typically don’t take the trouble to make the mechanics of unconscious design computations explicit. However, lack of awareness of logic does not entail the absence of logic. In the case of the design inference, Dembski has revealed the presence of an epistemologically valid computational logic underlying the design inference. His analysis reveals that the design inference is as valid as any pattern matching inference we make. It is also a matter of simple common sense.
Suppose, for example, Sgt. Joe Smith, a retired Air Force noncommissioned officer, gets a job at the CIA or the NRO identifying objects in photographs taken by aerial reconnaissance or satellite imagery. He does this five days a week for twenty years until one day, as a now expert interpreter, he sees a system of presumed to be natural canals on Mars shown in some new NASA photographs that have come his way. The canals are formed so that they spell out a near perfect English language statement: “George Washington slept here.”
Now, enter the neo-Darwinists’ supposedly fatal objection to Paley’s watchmaker argument: the design inference isn’t thought to properly apply to natural objects. Joe was out a bit late with some old friends last night, and the aspirins and coffee haven’t fully resolved the fog…but yet…that image still says “man-made” to him. He simply has to face the truth. What he is seeing is an intelligently designed object—he just knows it.
In addition to the innate ability to recognize intelligent design that we all have, over the years Joe’s mind has abstracted certain general features from specific equipment and structures, so that as few as three blurry rectangles in a given juxtaposition discovered in certain remote desert areas would indicate a terrorist training camp with confidence. This is a valid mental operation—four really: pattern extraction, pattern matching, recognition of the meaning of context, and elimination of competing alternatives. Nothing mysterious going on here at all—just common sense, logic, and specialized knowledge bases. Darwinists do precisely the same thing all the time when they say that the DNA sequences of two “relatives” on the tree of life are not an exact match, but, that, within the context of Darwinian theory, they are close enough to safely conclude inheritance. And when the jawbones of some intermediate fossils in a sequence of twenty conflict somewhat with the overall pattern, the remaining similarities are enough for Darwinists to confidently place these creatures on the same branch of the tree of life—despite their differences. Patterns don’t have to be identical to be properly considered instances of the same concept.
But this pattern, “George Washington slept here,” is so flagrantly unambiguous that a child could see it. No training needed, no experience, no long years of research, no nothing: these canals are intelligently designed.
“I’d
better show this to the boss,” Joe mumbles to his partner, and then carries the
pictures to the big corner office down the hall.
“But
the design inference doesn’t apply to natural objects, Joe. Don’t you read Dawkins?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
Never argue with the boss; rule #1. Nonetheless Joe is already reconsidering as he walks away. OK…let’s assume a minimum of ten points of complexity are required to form each letter properly, times twenty-five letters. To get all those points and lines in rudimentary sequence by accident is improbable to the magnitude of 1025. They are also perfectly aligned and spaced. That adds improbability. They form a meaningful sentence, which is vastly more improbable than twenty-five random letters. That’s too much to be accidental. Joe turns back to his boss.
“What
would the odds be against achieving this by accident?”
“The
design inference doesn’t apply to natural objects, Joe.”
“Right.”
On the way out Joe notices a wad of paper only slightly resembling an airplane on the floor.
“Here
boss, it was on the floor.”
“Oh,
yeah, my kid just left with his Mom; he must have made this.” Joe’s boss
awkwardly tosses the crumpled sheet forward and it tumbles just as awkwardly to
the floor. “Look at that baby fly, Joe. That kid is really somethin’ ”
“Right boss; a future engineer without a doubt. I’ll be getting back to work now.”
With any luck we are all asking ourselves the same questions Joe is asking himself on the way back to his office: “Why doesn’t the design inference apply to natural objects?” and “Why do those who say it doesn’t only insist when the politics of materialism versus God are involved?”
Did Joe make a valid inference? Of course. We humans can make canal systems into patterns, sculpt flower beds into Bible verses, plant a stand of trees to conform to geometric shapes, design golf courses and lakes that do the same, do rudimentary genetic engineering on simple creatures, make simple computational devices from biotic components, etc., etc., etc. We are looking for intelligent signs from other civilizations in outer space and targeting thousands of viable candidate stellar systems some of which might contain advanced civilizations that could do much greater things with organic or biotic engineering—perhaps even construct androids. Accident is so rarely capable of doing such a thing that the explanation is all but dismissible. The probabilities were heavily on Joe’s side.
Why doesn’t the design inference apply to natural objects? Or, put another way, how do we know an object made of natural materials is not an intelligently designed object prior to close analysis when we now know that it could be?
In the example, Sgt. Joe has seen twenty-five letters in a stationary pattern, twenty-five well-constructed letters, with meaning. In the human body we have several trillion cells, each with thousands of optional parts used at various times for different purposes. Each cell is in rapid motion, accomplishing over two million actions per minute. The human genome is 3,000,000,000 nucleotides.[32] Much of what was once considered useless repetitions and junk in this genome has now been discovered to have a function. There are nine levels of machines built into machines built into machines that compose the vertical hierarchy of the human body, and many of those components communicate laterally in complex ways in multiple instances. If Joe were to see the equivalent of this level of complexity on Mars it would equate not to the simple statement “George Washington slept here” but a full multi-media showing of War and Peace replete with a cast of thousands.
And, consider this. The evolutionary argument itself strongly supports the reliability of the design inference that mainstream evolutionists are all rushing to deny. Our ancestors had many thousands of years to hone a conditioned response for accurate recognition of intelligently designed objects. This conditioned response would have been polished over millenniums while gathering discarded tools or weapons from other clans, tribes, civilizations, or individuals, when plundering enemy campsites, etc. The ability to recognize a useful tool or weapon, perhaps one that had yet to be used by the finder’s tribe, one particularly strong or well made, could impart a significant advantage to survival. This would be especially true under the strong environmental pressures of low food supply or frequent attack by large predators: tools and weapons can be fully decisive when it comes to survival. Neo-Darwinian theory says that such advantages are preserved by natural selection, so why do neo-Darwinists distrust our design inferences when their own theory favors those inferences being accurate?
This ain’t natural, a primitive tribesman might think, turning his head from side to side pondering what the opposing tribe might be doing with it. If he could only discover its purpose.... One can imagine a humorous Tim Conway/Harvey Korman/Carol Burnett skit where the tribesman first tries every possibility except the correct one, finally giving up from sheer exhaustion, before his thought to be useless wife stumbles in and immediately begins using the instrument correctly, perhaps lofting an arrow that inadvertently kills the opposing chieftain, thus saving their lives from an impending attack.
People can recognize intelligent design, and our confidence level for premises #1 & #2 is high based upon the amount of inductive evidence for the reliability of the design inference generally and our belief that the very forces of evolution itself would have endowed us with the innate ability to recognize intelligent design when we see it.
What about premise #3, then? Nature (the Earth, or the Universe), and life forms especially, exhibit high complexity, sophisticated structured patterns, and specific functionality, closely matched parts, etc. At a glance, even the inanimate parts of nature, especially the nonliving components of the ecosystem seem to qualify here, and certainly living organisms exhibit functional design characteristics. The ecosystem is a sophisticated, interrelated, highly tuned, structured system of living and non-living subsystems—clearly functional, i.e., configured to promote the survival of animal life. We are still learning to appreciate the precision with which these systems are tuned to life given the recent advance of global warming and the infelicitous perturbations in those systems now predicted that will threaten, first our comfort, then our survival…all from a mere two or three degree difference in average temperature.
On the surface, nature quite obviously appears to be designed (and nearly everyone admits it, even Richard Dawkins). If the neo-Darwinists had not so authoritatively insisted over many decades that nature is an exception (without saying why), most people would acknowledge that they are convinced that nature is intelligently designed. But the neo-Darwinists, the “experts,” have gone well out of their way to shame us uneducated laypersons into denying both our instinctive and our conscious cognitive recognition of design in nature (which we now see to have been valid all along). The neo-Darwinists cannot support their position in the face of recent data, however, and since the present argument for intelligent design in nature is so overwhelming, we can now confidently cast off such politicized intimidation and follow where the evidence leads.
It is a safe bet that premise #3 is true because the intricate design and function of natural systems are obvious even to a child. A great deal of humanity affirms this truth, and the overt characteristics of functional mechanisms are all visibly present in living systems. We can at least say that premise #3 has an enormous amount of popular and scientific support, perhaps as much as any of our currently held scientific theories. All of our scientific observations to date confirm this, that nature has intricate functionality and sophisticated structured patterns. No negative observation has been made, no counterexample presented. Any biology, biochemistry, or genetics text will confirm the intricacy of the mechanisms of nature.
We have now examined the support for all three of the premises of a fleshed-out version of Paley’s design argument. Our conclusion is that Paley’s argument is both valid and sound, and can be converted to scientific theory without problems. The theory itself wildly succeeds since it has billions upon billions of positive test cases, and no negative ones. Consequently, we who value intellectual integrity, good science, and logical consistency, should admit that the theory that a designer of nature exists is as good a theory as our other major scientific theories.
Many of these theories, by the way, also include concepts of powerful but invisible forces: gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, etc. And, like the theory of intelligent design, some of our other accepted theories also give rise to potential confirming or refuting observations that cannot be accomplished at present due to practical, if not logical, limitations. Astronomy’s black holes offer one example. Care to take a test drive and observe what’s in the center? And, as previously mentioned, the theory of evolution is itself out of reach of direct confirmation.
One might object that the theory of a designer is unscientific because it invokes something mysterious, a designer whom we know little or nothing about—some have even said a designer whom we cannot know in a coherent way. But the Big Bang theory also starts in a complete mystery,[33] as does Darwinian evolution. Science cannot explain either the origin of our universe of the origin of life, yet both Big Bang theory and the Darwinian theory of evolution are fully accepted icons of science.
You may say, “Darwinian theory, starts in a complete mystery? Oh, come now?” Sounds strange, but it is true. The Darwinian theory of evolution only applies after life is present, after the basic elements of the living genomes have already been mysteriously constructed. Darwinian theory begins in the middle of the larger explanation of life; it does not even address the origin of life. The Darwinian theory of evolution therefore, does not rescue us from mystery. Darwin, himself, ascribed to God the function of bringing life out of nonlife. Thus, the argument from design as currently posed by intelligent design theory is not only science, but stands to potentially advance the explanation of life well beyond what Darwinian evolution can hope to offer.
Granted, adding God to the theory as I do in this part of the book does add a further element of mystery, but it also adds a further element of explanation. Putting God’s name on the Big Bang does not violate the charter of science any more than saying there could be an unexplained violation of the laws of physics from which all physical matter and energy has sprung. That is the definition of miracle, after all: violation of the laws of nature. And with JCIG theory we gain an explanation of why powerful natural laws would have instantaneously sprung into existence as opposed to the (dumb) elements remaining in chaos. The key point to remember here is that the charter of science only rules out using God or spiritual forces as intermediate causes in scientific explanation, not as first causes.
Modern theories in physics have posited as many as ten dimensions, while not saying much more about them than that they solve certain mathematical problems in the description of physical event processes that arise in their absence.[34] There are no direct observations of these dimensions, no direct empirical evidence for them, only a mathematical explanation of events that goes beyond what we can provide without them.
While the ability to predict is of great value to science, because more than one model can explain the same raw observable data of our world and generate the same predictions (especially where the only variations in the models concerns ultimate origins) predictability alone does not guarantee truth. So, if we elect to affirm one model over the other it will be on the grounds either of simplicity or the ability of the theory to explain higher level phenomena beyond physical data points. JCIG theory offers an additional level of explanation that goes beyond what any of the physical models can offer in that it explains the consistently religious behavior of some two thirds of the world’s billions of people.
Physics has defined the hypothesized extra dimensions as physical because science will (properly) not allow itself to do otherwise, but we do not experience those extra physical dimensions directly in a manner that can prove that they are in fact physical. For all we know in science alone there are extra dimensions that are nonphysical but can influence the physical. In such a case science would still, by its own (properly) self-imposed limits restrict itself to using explanatory models that assumed all relevant causative agents were physical. Should this situation arise where there are nonphysical dimensions that influence the physical, science would have absolutely no way to distinguish between a false but coincidentally explanatory physical model and the true model that included nonphysical dimensions. That is to say, science could not experimentally distinguish between those models. However, there is nothing to say that science might not heuristically distinguish between them. This is where we can combine the earlier argument from religious experience and spiritual perception with the design argument to make a stronger integrated argument for God. Heuristically, the theory of God explains a whole lot more of human experience than the materialistic model that science traditionally defaults to.
To recap the ground we have covered so far, we have affirmed the explanatory power of religious experience and spiritual perception, and demonstrated that Paley’s design argument can be reposed as a properly scientific theory that is more powerfully explanatory of modern scientific data than is the theory of accidental evolution.
The
First Cause: A Cosmological Argument
Let us turn now to a great saint and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas has an interesting argument for God’s existence that we must look at, not only because practically everyone who can read has heard of it, but because it appears to literally succeed. I am going to refer to it here as the “first cause” argument, while actually combining three of his arguments into one: necessary existence, prime mover, and first cause. I combine them because they all invoke the same (valid) logic that any chain of events must have a beginning in order to come into being at all. Otherwise we are left with an infinite regression having no starting point. Infinite progressions present no problem, that is, in the direction of the future. But infinite regressions in the direction of the past do present a problem because they do not allow for a beginning, without which nothing can exist. While physicists can say that our world could just be that way, infinite in all directions, including time, in my opinion at least, logicians must side with Aquinas: without a beginning to a causal chain, none of that chain can come to exist. Whereas physicists can hypothesize unlimited time, space, and matter without getting into logical difficulty, this is not quite the same thing as hypothesizing unlimited chains of causation.
My contention, then, is that the first cause argument remains the simplest and most clearly valid truth in the world: a series of events in a chain of causation with no starting point never starts. If A is the sole causative source for B, and A has not occurred, B does not occur either. Expanded into the full scope of the first cause argument, if A is the first cause, the causative source of all creation, and B represents the entirety of the world’s history, without A, B never follows. For me the force of this argument lies in its utter simplicity and in the meaning of the word “causation.” Thus, it is truly an a priori argument for a first cause. What that cause must be, however, is not so simple as Aquinas makes it with his dismissive “and this all men call God.”
Aquinas poses a similar argument for something having “necessary existence.” Here is the argument in his own words? “It is necessary to assume something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside itself but is rather the cause of necessity in other things. And this all men call God.”[35]
Let’s take a closer look at the structure this argument. To begin, we’ll need to pin down the different uses of the word ‘necessity’ in this passage; otherwise, confusion will result. By “necessary to assume,” St. Thomas apparently means, required by logic or rational thought. Substituting this definition into his statement we get, “Logic, or rational thought, requires us to assume something which is necessary of itself…”
On the other hand, the concept of necessity Aquinas employs when he says “necessary of itself” and “necessity in other things” apparently means something different. He is referring here to the physical reason for, or the physical cause of, the existence of something. Adding this clarification produces the following reformulation: “Logic, or rational thought, requires us to assume something which is in some sense necessary in itself, has no cause for its existence outside itself, but is itself the cause of the existence of all other things. And this all men call God.”
A simple diagram helps to make the argument clear. For the sake of discussion, let’s assign everything in the world a letter to stand for it and, for practicality’s sake, we’ll pretend it’s a small world, abbreviating the list to only A through I:
A→B→C→D→E→F→G→H→I = (everything in the world)
Combining Aquinas’ arguments and terminology we will say ‘→’ stands for “is the reason for, the cause of, the mover of, or that which gives necessity to” that which follows. It is then clear, as St. Thomas says, that we must assume something that of its own nature requires no other thing as the source of its necessity, its reason or cause, if we are to follow reason or rational thought. This is true because, if ‘H’ has no reason for, or cause of, its existence, no necessity in any sense, it cannot properly ground the existence of ‘I’. If ‘H’ has no cause for its existence, it literally won’t exist and therefore can’t cause ‘I’. If ‘H’ has no reason for its existence, it cannot provide a reason for the existence of ‘I’. If ‘H’ does not have the property of necessity (in any sense), it cannot transfer that which it does not have to ‘I’. Therefore, ‘H’ must either have derived its necessity from ‘G’, or simply have it within its own nature, otherwise it has nothing to impart to ‘I’.
Following the same logic back the chain one step at a time to ‘A’ we arrive at the point where we must concede St. Thomas' point. Reason requires us to assume something eternal and necessary in itself, something that simply is by virtue of its own nature.[36] Otherwise, there is no cause, no reason, no necessity, no mover, for any of the things of our world, and they simply won’t exist. Without a first cause the entire chain is ungrounded and never “gets off the ground.”
I think most people will find this argument intuitively very convincing. I have always considered four of St. Thomas “Five Ways of Proving God’s Existence”[37] good arguments: first cause, prime mover, necessary existence and the design argument. Nonetheless, we have to ask ourselves why they are convincing. Are they convincing on purely logical grounds, or on scientific grounds?
Surprisingly, after such a convincing demonstration, it can be shown that, on grounds of pure logic alone, the first cause argument fails as a proof of God because we can produce a counter-example. There might be multiple instances of something necessary in itself, multiple eternal movers, or multiple “first” causes. In theory, current scientific knowledge aside for the moment, each of the physical elements might themselves be eternal, and if natural law were also eternal, the problem of the source of all things in the physical world would be solved and the claim of some materialists that the universe just is eternal would not violate the logic St. Thomas uses. We would just be assuming multiple instances of something that had necessary existence instead of only one.
Why, on the grounds of logic alone, must we assume there is only one such thing that has necessary existence; no logical contradiction results from assuming many? On purely logical grounds, then, although St. Thomas’ argument succeeds in requiring a grounding for all chains of causation, it fails as a proof of God because it can be shown that it is not logically necessary for there to be only one chain of causation—there could be many, each grounded separately.
Now, let’s bring current scientific knowledge back into the discussion. Modern science and our everyday observations tell us that nothing we have so far perceived (God excepted) is a “first cause.” This is because science, or our own eyes, can produce a cause for all the things we see, causes that are not eternal. These things come into existence and then disappear all the time. We have good scientific reasons to profess the origination of all things in the Big Bang and, much later, the ultimate physical disintegration of all physical things over time, the collapse of the entire universe in the Big Tear or the Big Rip. As a matter of fact, we know a good deal about what causes many of the things we observe in the world each day.
What we actually observe to be happening through science then are causal chains of events, and very many of them. Clearly all things are not then first causes and necessary in themselves because we actually see them being caused by other things, and later going out of existence. So, St. Thomas’ argument is seen to still be strong and alive on the basis of first- hand and scientific observations, though it can’t be defended on purely logical grounds alone. On the basis of empiric observation and scientific theory it appears that, as a matter of fact, all things may indeed trace back to a single cause at the Big Bang.
We are currently unable to literally trace all causal chains back to their beginning without any perceptual break through the use of scientific instruments, but this is only due to the enormous size and content of the universe; it is not a theoretical obstacle. There remain many distinct causal chains of events that have yet to be fully shown to originate in the same source by direct observation. However, theoretical science, specifically the Big Bang theory of cosmology, asserts that we can in theory trace everything back to one mysterious event at the first fraction of a second of cosmic history.
Therefore, if we view the first cause argument as a scientific argument, a scientific theory in fact, combining the more general a priori truth that all chains of causation must be grounded in an initial event for the succeeding effects to ever come into existence, it appears fully substantiated. We observe things being caused each day all day long, and all according to science. We can explain, though not fully predict, the weather, our health, earthquakes, the behavior of atoms, planetary motions, etc., all based upon causality. These things have causes, usually visible ones. We can rule out an infinite regress of causes on a scientific basis because we are dealing with real physical events that require some minimum amount of time to occur. Modern science says the age of the universe is not infinite; it is only around 20 billion years old.
Our current science tells us that, in theory, using all of our science together, though primarily physics and cosmology, we can trace a chain of causality all the way back to the big bang origin of the universe—where we can explain no further. There could be no closer description of a first cause scenario than what science has currently provided us. We can conclude that St. Thomas’ cosmological argument for God’s existence succeeds when presented in scientific form, i.e., when proposed as a scientific theory. The only alternative is multiverse theory, which is not testable, and therefore not scientific.
St. Thomas, of course, is one of the foremost thinkers in the history of the Catholic Church as well as the history of philosophy. His version of the first cause is the Judeo-Christian-Islamic version: God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is his first cause. Aquinas’ version of the first cause argument tells us why the big bang is not traceable further: God did it and he is beyond our ability to grasp fully by any means, and science has the additional problem that God is not of physical or material substance.
According to the big bang theory, prior to 10-43 fraction of the first second of this world’s existence (Planck time) natural law did not exist. Therefore, whatever was at the source of this world’s beginning prior to that first fraction of a second was apparently not physical because all physical things comport to natural law. Nor did time itself as we know it exist beyond that threshold.[38] In a very real sense, then, science’s view of the Big Bang shows the antecedent phenomenon that precedes the Planck time to be a “timeless” one, if not exactly eternal in Aquinas’ conception.
As an aside, although intelligent design theory is accused of being unscientific, we can now see that it poses less of a mystery than the Big Bang theory minus ID in allowing that the designer could be a superior physical being as opposed to simply an anomalous nonphysical question mark. Big Bang theory minus ID is arguably more mysterious and incoherent in providing no explanation for the order and design in our world while retaining the same basic mystery at the Big Bang.
A startling logical implication of Big Bang theory is
that it refutes the primary theoretical assumption of most modern
scientists: materialism! This is not so difficult to see. All material
things exist in space and time by definition, but normal space/time did not
exist on the other side of the Planck time in Big Bang theory. Therefore, the
first cause, residing, as it must, in that anomalous beginning point posited by
Big Bang theory is, by definition, nonphysical.
The materialist’s habit of adding the materialistic assumption that all things are physical to science as if it were part of the definition and charter of science itself is an invalid procedure; it literally produces a contradiction so long as the big bang theory says all things came from a nonphysical singularity. The existence of a contradiction refutes a theory until that contradiction is removed, so, as of the present time, materialism stands refuted by science. Not only are our science classrooms currently unfairly banning intelligent design theory as if it were religion and not science, but materialistic instructors are in many cases still teaching (at least by subtle implication) the refuted theory of materialism as if science had confirmed it, as their religion.
The problem with overlooking implied or overt endorsements of materialism in science books as if they were completely innocent is that those who promote materialism as their “religion” employ the statement that all things are physical in its literal philosophical meaning, which makes no exception for the nonphysical source of our world on the other side of Planck time at the Big Bang. This invokes a contradiction, and thus is bad science. It also misleads our students, and anyone else gullible enough to believe it, that the world can be fully explained by reference to physical entities and a fully accidental process alone.
So far our discussion supports four important conclusions: the intelligent design argument shows that accidents cannot explain life; the Big Bang theory shows that purely physical entities cannot explain the universe; St. Thomas Aquinas’ first cause argument succeeds as a scientific theory; and the argument from spiritual perception and religious experience establishes JCIG (Judeo Christian Islamic God) theory as the most explanatory version of intelligent design and first cause theories. God is good science! It’s that simple.
St. Anselm’s Necessary Existence: A Valid Argument or a
Logical Fallacy?
Now we come to the final and perhaps the weakest of the four classic arguments for God that we will consider here: St. Anselm’s argument from necessary existence. After having covered so much, and since Anselm doesn’t add much to an already exhausting analysis (not exhaustive, however), I suppose I could close the book now, or perhaps allow the reader a much deserved break. You can rebel and take one anyway if you like, run off to browse the library for the true gems of philosophy. For example, there is Professor William Irwin’s profound analysis of how the Simpson’s cartoon has irrevocably altered our understanding of metaphysics, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer.[39] Be sure not to miss that one! ………………..
Break over? Now that you are rested and have cappuccino and truffles in hand, let’s not leave loose ends. We should press on to examine the ontological argument of St. Anselm. St. Anselm offers the classic ontological argument[40] for the existence of God. I consider it as having succeeded—but only given spiritual perception as a faculty available to one who is evaluating the argument. This faculty is needed to establish the truth of the premises on independent grounds.
The following version of St.
Anselm’s argument from Proslogium[41] is forceful because substituting the definition of God given in
premise 1 into the term’s use in premise 2 appears to establish that any denial
of God’s existence will create a very literal contradiction: undeniable proof
of God by reductio ad absurdum.
(1) God is that than which no greater can be conceived.
(2) If God does not exist then there is something greater than God that can be
conceived (namely the same conceptual entity that does exist)
Therefore:
(3) God exists.
Elegant and simple—and therefore seemingly hard to prove or disprove. It is either simply right, or simply wrong. But how do you demonstrate that it is right or wrong? That is the problem. It is supremely difficult to do either, and, so naturally, I propose to do both. It is wrong on linguistic and logical grounds, but it is right on grounds of direct perception. This is not empiric observation, but spiritual perception I am referring to. As Charles Peirce chided us, we should never deny our direct experience of anything.
Let’s try to disprove it first. Making the substitution of the definition of ‘God’ in premise 1 into the use of ‘God’ in premise 2 yields: “If that than which no greater can be conceived does not exist, then there is something greater than that than which no greater can be conceived that can be conceived (namely, the same thing which does exist).” St Anselm seems to have us at this point. If we deny God’s existence we cause a contradiction. It can’t be that simple, can it? Some readers with instincts sharply honed over the years may suspect some kind of verbal trickery is going on here, and they are right—though I have no doubt that St. Anselm offered the argument sincerely. We are not being tricked by St. Anselm, but by the words themselves.
Implicitly assuming that existence is an aspect of ‘greatness’ is both the strength and the weakness in St. Anselm’s argument. Closer examination reveals this assumption as a hidden premise, built into premise 2. Making this sneaky premise explicit reveals premise 2’s real form:
(2) Existence is an aspect of
‘greatness’ (or at least of divine greatness). Therefore, if God does not exist
there is something greater than God that can be imagined (namely, the same
thing which does exist).
Let’s break this down into two sub-premises for clarity.
(2a) Existence is an aspect of
‘greatness’ (or at least of divine greatness).
(2b) If God does not exist then
there is something greater than God that can be imagined (namely, the same
thing which does exist).
Rewritten the full argument,
correctly stated, becomes
(1)
God is that than which no greater can be
conceived.
(2a) Existence is an aspect of ‘greatness’ (or at least of divine greatness).
(2b) If God does not exist then
there is something greater than (God), that than which no greater can be
conceived, that can be conceived (namely, the same thing which does
exist); but this is a contradiction.
================
Therefore:
Since assuming God does not exist leads to a contradiction, God must exist.
It is easy to see that the argument is valid. The conclusion must be true if the premises are true. But are the premises true? Bot premises 1 and 2a are potentially problems. Here St. Anselm has simply defined the word ‘greatest’ to include existence. By virtue of doing this we have not discovered God in the real world; we have merely discovered the words ‘God’ and ‘greatness’ in St. Anselm’s private dictionary. Such a tactic involves the invalid procedure of arbitrarily moving existence, which is a contingent property established by direct experience (a posteriori), into the realm of things that can be true by virtue of the meaning of words alone (a priori). Using St. Anselm’s own form of argument, substituting the full true definition of ‘existence’, which includes its contingent aspect, yields a contradiction. This occurs anytime one assigns an empirically contingent property, such as existence, as a component element of a definition of a word because definitions of words allow conclusions to be drawn a priori from their meanings. Of course, drawing a priori conclusions about contingent matters invokes a contradiction. Thus, Anselm falls prey to his own argument form, reductio ad absurdum. Using St. Anselm’s linguistic form of argument, defining a word, any word that refers to an object whose existence is contingent, to include existence, leads to obvious absurdities.[42]
A common sense corollary to our attack by reductio ad absurdum is readily available. If one invents a new word, adds it to the dictionary, and defines the word to include existence, does it mean the thing referenced by the word must exist? No, it clearly doesn’t. Language alone cannot create objects, linguistic existence ≠ ontological existence. Professor Larry Colter provides us with a creative example that the dictionary argument alone fails to prove existence. We could invent the word ‘radiocorn’ for a unicorn with yellow and purple spots, having a transistor radio in its rump, and define it as having existence. But, does that mean such a unicorn exists? Could we then go find one? No. Language itself is insufficient to do the job of guaranteeing the existence of something in the real world of physical objects. We would only find radiocorns in our newly revised dictionary, not in the real world. Thus, although we may have defined ‘God’ in our dictionaries to include existence; it is still possible that he won’t be out there in reality.[43]
We may safely conclude with Professor Colter that a merely linguistic definition of the word ‘God’, defined by way of including existence as part of the meaning of the word ‘greatness’ and ‘greatness” as part of the meaning of the word ‘God’, is insufficient to prove God’s existence outside the dictionary. Or in even simpler terms, just because we can imagine something in our minds by recombining words and concepts in novel ways doesn’t mean that thing exists in the world. The world may have no such conceptual or linguistic hybrids in it. Using Anselm’s logic, all possible things would become actual things merely from someone’s having decided to add the property of existence to their definition—another contradiction, and a big one.
As a matter of fact neither “greatness” nor “God” nor “divinity” is defined to include existence in our standard dictionary. But even if it were, it would not mean that any ‘great’ or divine being we might be able to conceive of in our imagination existed. The “great” creatures of mythology and other literary inventions need not be found in the real world: unicorns, dragons, wizards, and so on. We can find them in trilogies, on pinball machines and in movies and computer games, but that’s it. Not all words have referents in the real world—and they need not have one just because someone had the imagination to invent the word.
On the surface then, St. Anselm’s classic ontological argument commits the obvious fallacy of trying to define something into existence—it fails as a purely a priori proof from language. But let us now attempt a defense of his argument at a deeper level. We should stop to consider for a moment: St. Anselm was an archbishop, a very profound and learned man. It is therefore likely that more was going on in St. Anselm’s mind (and heart) than just these few lines of text hastily extracted by us from his larger writings. As one of the consummate philosophers of the ages, one suspects that he would probably have passed one of Professor Colter’s philosophy exams (not everyone did).
What kind of approach might work? I suggest that we “flesh out” the summary form of St. Anselm’s argument a bit by placing it into the fuller context of all his writings, as well as into the context of the entirety of his learned and devout life. Then, perhaps, we can obtain a more accurate picture of what the argument truly represents. In other words, given Anselm’s saintly life, it seems to me that it would be more correct to say that St. Anselm was claiming “God exists because I perceive that he must,” rather than “God exists solely because we have defined the word ‘God’ that way.” It’s spiritual perception again. Anselm might respond to Professor Colter something like this: “Now wait just one minute Professor, we don’t arbitrarily define dogs to have four legs; we look at them first, see that they have four legs, and then we construct our definition based upon what we have seen. The devout are privileged to have seen this about God; they have ‘seen’ that he possesses necessary existence.” Thus, what appears to be an arbitrary definition, is actually first grounded in a veridical perception, though the perception is not an empiric one, but rather spiritual.
And if we look closely at Anselm’s own words in the form in which I first rendered his argument, they did not reveal Anselm to be defining the word ‘God’ and the word ‘greatness’ as in Professor Colter’s analysis. Rather his linguistic modality appears to be one of asserting a perceived fact and then reporting the definition that has sprung up around it, not of arbitrarily constructing a definition “from scratch,” as it were.
Professor Colter’s response would be that, although the modality of asserting God’s necessary existence as a perceived fact saves Anselm from the Radiocorn fallacy, by presenting no evidence for the first two premises Anselm is guilty of a more basic fallacy. In this view of the argument, St. Anselm has placed the conclusion of the argument into the premises and given no evidence to support its truth. He therefore seems to be begging the question.
While not denying Colter’s analysis as far as it goes, my suggestion is that the worst error St. Anselm has likely made is not to have explicitly stated all of his premises. And his argument, contrary to what some readers may hold from a cursory examination, is not the naïve celebration of a philosophical simpleton entangled in his or her own words, the kind of verbally entangled simpleton we all use to be back in elementary school when we were trying to puzzle out the origins of our world for ourselves. What I think Anselm has done in reality is to have very courageously blazed an entirely new trail in epistemology, a trail that allows for a third category of truth.
There are the a priori truths of logic, math, and language; there are the a posteriori truths of science contingent upon empiric observation; and there are higher truths that God can convey to us that are not otherwise available to human cognition. Some of these truths, such as the divine axiom that God exists are genuinely necessary truths, though in a new sense of the word “necessary.” These truths are available to human cognition via divine grace. So, yes, Anselm was celebrating a magnificent discovery, but it was not a case of a child discovering the circular capacity of language; he was celebrating the event of divine grace having revealed to him nothing less than the very name of God: the great “I Am Who Am.” This name, even to non-theologians, clearly implies necessary existence. And, if God reveals himself to you and reveals that it has to be this way—He has to be—then you know in that moment that God’s existence is necessary and well worthy of a celebratory proclamation! What you don’t know is how to make thick-headed philosophers grasp what has just been shown to you.
Yes, these divine truths are inscrutable and intractable to science, and, yes, they cannot be proven a priori by language and logic alone (it requires experience of God to ground them), but they are truths available to (divinely assisted) human cognition nonetheless. Allowing for a third category of truth that cannot be validated empirically or by logic alone is not so strange. A priori truths cannot be validated empirically, and empiric truths cannot be validated a priori by logic. The specific truths from each category must be validated by the means natural to their category. Likewise, divine truths are not validated by empiric or logical means, they are perceived directly via another faculty, the divinely imbued faculty of spiritual perception.
Materialists will no doubt scream that this all begs the question of dualism, the question of whether we even have a spirit. Aside from the fact that one would think that we should intuitively know whether we had a spirit or not, no question begging is going on here. For a sighted person to make an argument to a blind person that includes as a premise, “That stoplight at 3rd & Grant St. has three colors, yellow, red, and green,” does not constitute begging the question merely because the blind person cannot confirm that those colors are there. The same holds true for our last version of St. Anselm’s argument. For those with spiritual perception, it can be observed that God has necessary existence. If we grant that much regarding the form of Anselm’s argument, Anselm at least escapes both the Radiocorn fallacy, and question begging. His argument form becomes valid. It remains to be shown to those without spiritual perception, however, that his premises are actually true, and thus that his total argument is sound.
Should we read St. Anselm in the manner I have suggested? Yes, I think it is a pretty obvious move. If we can see the absurdity of trying to arbitrarily define something into existence, wouldn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury be likely to see it as well? While I grant the possibility that Anselm may have been consciously trying to offer a strictly logical/linguistic proof, one not explicitly grounded in spiritual perception, I think we have to grant that he was at least unconsciously doing what I have suggested. He was affirming his own gift of spiritual perception, the gift of the faithful community he was leading, and a gift available to everyone else who seeks the truth about God.
Anyone can make a mistake. Anselm may, in his conscious thoughts, have formed his argument without making his assumptions about spiritual perception explicit. Nonetheless, this does not absolve critics and commentators from the burden to closely consider the entirety of his total belief system and his personally devout life when translating the meaning of his works. We do no less for the other literary and philosophical authors. The standard charter of literary criticism is to place the author’s thesis into the full context of the entirety of his or her works and beliefs, including the larger context of the socio-historical milieu of the time.
As an archbishop and a saint, Anselm’s life certainly yielded many fundamental spiritual perceptions, including a direct awareness of the greatness and necessary existence of God. Therefore, whether or not Anselm intended to explicitly offer only a Socratic like derivation of God’s existence in Proslogium based upon “tricks” of language and logic alone, his devout life fully entitles us to ascribe to him the more defensible alternative form that is grounded in spiritual perception. It would only being doing Anselm justice.
Critics and learned commentators have routinely been at least this generous on many occasions throughout the history of literary exposition. This is particularly true of poets and novelists where critics have gone to great lengths to place specific lines of an author’s work into the larger context and conceptual framework of the total writings, cultural background, historical timeframe, and social position of the author. This procedure is, in fact, nothing less than an axiom of literary criticism. Are we therefore wrong to do as much for St. Anselm? The voluminous writings of the saints gloriously proclaim the reality of spiritual perception. Why make Anselm the sole exception to both his own socio-historical group and to the procedure of literary criticism in general?
Books abound on such presumed profundities as Nietzsche, Sartre, Husserl, Heidegger, Marx, Whitman, and Machiavelli. These go to exorbitant lengths to make sense out of sentences that would, minus Herculean salvage efforts, clearly be incoherent, shallow, or outright mistaken on the surface. Christian philosophers, however, less often meet with equal charity in the exposition of their works.
Those of us with spiritual perception, of course, easily grant the Archbishop’s contention that premises 1 and 2a are true and that the total argument succeeds as a result. Of course, we must also grant that, from our point of view, the entire argument, and any argument for God’s existence, is unnecessary for us because we can directly perceive that God exits; we have met him. No less than we, St. Anselm had certainly perceived God, perceived his existence, perceived his perfection, and perceived that there is no alternative, no possibility for his nonexistence—he had truly perceived that divine greatness entails existence. But he didn’t perceive this in the dictionary. Rather he perceived it from within the higher realm of cognition afforded by divine grace.
To say that some people can confirm the truth of the premises while others cannot is not such an odd form of argument as one might suspect. We make such arguments ourselves all the time. A blind person is missing the prerequisite visual perception to acknowledge the truth of the driver’s contention that he must stop because there is a red light. The driver’s argument for stopping remains both valid and sound, but it cannot be demonstrated to be so until they have come back from the optometry clinic following surgery for removal of the passenger’s cataracts. Of course most physically blind persons take the word of the sighted for what they have seen. Why is it that only where God is involved does personal testimony from trusted friends immediately become suspect?
Which brings us to one last point in favor of theistic arguments such as St. Anselm’s: they also qualify as examples of the expert witness form of argument. Expert witnesses are much heralded in our system of criminal law. Expert witnesses are trusted in science, engineering technology, ballistics, DNA tests, fingerprint analysis, etc.—and rightfully so. This is because they have developed knowledge, skills and abilities the average person does not have and have come to be recognized as the best in their field. Giving St. Anselm the same consideration as an archbishop and accomplished theologian with well-honed and disciplined spiritual perception should in fairness put his ontological argument on a stronger footing.
The genetics lab technician is saying the equivalent of “I have performed an operation that you, the judge and jury, are incapable of performing, and seen something you would not know the meaning of when you saw it.” Nonetheless, the judge and jury take the technician’s word because he is an expert with presumed good intentions, even when a defendant’s life hangs in the balance. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury says the same thing he is lightly dismissed as a well-intended anachronism suffering from cultural or personal self-delusion. Yes, there is a difference in the two cases in that genetic science is an objective discipline and the results of a given test can be repeated by other technicians and cross-validated. But, our society still manifests a bias for materialism in that we are not predisposed to challenge the (humanly fallible) DNA technician. Yes, his science is valid, but he can make mistakes. At the same time, we seem always to be predisposed to challenge anyone claiming spiritual experience, including, in this case, a premier theologian and archbishop.
Critics of Anselm have only one option: they must simply say that there is no such thing as spiritual perception and/or that people cannot become expert in the use of it. But this flies in the face of testimony from millions of reliable and highly educated people who claim to use spiritual faculties each day. Martyrs and those threatened by persecution have historically had such extreme confidence in spiritual perception as to literally stake their lives upon it. Is spiritual perception more likely to be a mistaken fantasy or a valid faculty if thousands of martyrs refused to deny it under horrible torture even unto death? Would you hold onto a fantasy under torture if denying it could save you such an ordeal? I wouldn’t. No way! Those martyrs knew that God was real, and so did St. Anselm.
God as First Cause is Good Science
Having established a plausible case for the existence of a first cause and for the existence of a designer of life and the ordered structures of the Universe, the question arises as to whether God should be considered to be that first cause/designer (and, perhaps, which God?). We can say at least this much: adding God as the first cause does add explanatory power to our theoretical base. Explanatory power is, naturally, one of the primary criteria for evaluating the strength of a scientific theory. Without the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God we cannot explain the behavior of nearly a billion respectable Catholics and fully twice as many millions of others in the great God-fearing faiths of the world.[44]
What is the difference in epistemological value between an explanation of the origin of our structured world and the complex living designs in it that refers to a complete “physical” mystery that by definition of materialistic science should not be there, a singularity, such as the Big Bang, and an explanation that refers to a “nonphysical being,” intelligent, coherent, articulate and communicative—one who essentially says, “I did that”—a being having the ability to interact with the physical world and give visible manifestations in it? The difference is that the former cannot explain the complex designs of life, and the latter can explain them. Once we grant the fact that they are both on a comparable epistemological footing because one mystery is no better than another, we can proceed to ask the next logical question: which explanation is otherwise better? One requires the universe to run out of time and physical resources before approaching the smallest fraction of 1% of probability of hitting upon the designs of life by accident; the other does not. One provides no information about the first cause (the Big Bang theory); the other provides some information (Judeo-Christian-Islamic God theory). In short, one offers no explanation of the designs of life; the other does.
If the same situation occurred at an intermediate level in the physical event processes of this world where God and associated anti-religious politics would not be invoked, which of the alternative kinds of explanation would we prefer? The one that gives us something, or the one that gives us nothing? At a minimum we would prefer the alternative that was not shown to be scientifically implausible within the available time and resources. We would prefer a partial explanation to a complete mystery.
Remember when Allen Funt of the television series Candid Camera used to hide and secretly manipulate the physical environment of unsuspecting citizens (victims) in bizarre ways? The victims of his practical jokes were baffled, but only for a brief moment; they ultimately came around to a rational point of view, suspecting a setup. They soon rejected total mystery, remembering that Allen and his TV cameras were out there stalking the planet. They soon went looking around the corner and in the attic for an affectionate old guy commonly known to be the cause of such things—in this case, a guy with a hidden camera, Allen Funt. Candid Camera reveals that people intuitively acknowledge that fully mysterious physical phenomena are less acceptable as explanations than hidden beings, especially hidden beings with an established track record. With billions of well-educated and morally upright citizens testifying to the reality of God through history, God similarly qualifies as a properly evidenced hidden being whose existence explains our religious experience a whole lot better than complete mystery (or mass neurosis).
Evidence of design
in biology and the high improbability of accidental evolution are not the only
reasons to add God to our scientific theories. Adding God explains something
else that we cannot otherwise explain: the development of ordered structures in
the universe. The NASA website on Big Bang Cosmology indicates that science has
no definite answer as to how the structure of the galaxies came into existence
after the Big Bang. However, we do have an idea of how much order it contains.
According to famous mathematical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose,[45]
the Big Bang event was precise to the magnitude of 10 to the power of 10123.
10123 is only the exponent![46]
(Also see Structure
in the universe, Fluctuations
in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and The inflationary universe.[47]
Penrose computed the odds of our present orderly universe appearing by accident, given the 2nd Law, as one chance in 10300. Adding this to the minimum improbability of neo-Darwinian evolution as reflected in Table 1 (10-6,545,000) raises the magnitude of improbability for the accidental origination of life to well less than one chance in 10-6,545,300. The only alternative to adding these probabilities for the sequential achievement of the physical structure of the universe and then life, is to assume that the order impressed into the structures of the universe that is included in Penrose’s first figure, 10300, is sufficient, in combination with natural law, to generate life more or less directly. If we make that assumption, however, we have admitted that evolution is a largely directed process, and that the physical universe comprises a machine-building machine for life before the first genome is ever achieved (which enormously reduces the difficulty of protein construction and offers the only known means of producing some of the proteins essential to life). Either way we are talking about immense improbabilities, and neo-Darwinian accidental evolution must be considered refuted. There are only 10150 (single particle) events available in the entire history of our universe. This puts the odds of accidental evolution well outside the range of scientific credibility.
Such a huge improbability in explanation is significant anywhere else in science. We should, therefore, consider it significant here. The theory of an intelligent designer closes this improbability gap essentially by 100%. The addition of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God as the designer to our theory further increases the explanatory power, while bringing no new problems with it.
Restricting evidence to the objectively verifiable empirical realm is a good rule because it provides the opportunity for the precision, rigorous control, and public verifiability that science requires to proceed securely and rapidly. However, in the Design Revolution, William Dembski reminds us that we cannot properly limit the conclusions of our investigations to the physical in the same way that we limit evidence. To do so is to prejudice our investigations. Where properly admitted evidence points we must follow. This is true even when the evidence suggests things invisible or “immaterial.” Scientists shouldn’t be afraid of the dark. They are not afraid of the mystery prior to the Big Bang; why are they only afraid of the dark when it points to God? The scripture says to fear God, but the current practice of phobicly avoiding any reference to God in science is not what is meant.
Science should simply go where the data leads them. In his new book Science Discovers God, zoologist Ariel Roth agrees:
Some scientists
will immediately insist that science cannot consider God, because it and God
represent separate realms of thought. Unfortunately, such a view imposes a
narrow outlook on science that limits its ability to find all truth. Science
cannot discover God and His role as long as it excludes Him from its
explanatory menu. If science hopes to provide meaningful and truthful answers
to our deepest questions, it needs to get out of the prison of secularism in
which it has now trapped itself….This book approaches the question of God’s
existence from the perspective that science is—or at least should be—an open
search for truth, and that we will allow the data of nature to direct us
wherever it may lead…. It is
interesting that the pioneers of modern science, such as Kepler, Galileo, Bole,
Pascal, Linne, and Newton, all included the concept of God in their scientific
outlook.[48]
The materialists’ side of the entire historical discussion about God and science is largely founded upon one major conceptual error: a mistaken assumption that God cannot interact with the physical world in reliably discernable ways, as if this were true by definition. No such stipulation has been made in the major religions of the world. Nothing that we know or have set down in our religious precepts precludes God from interacting with the physical dimensions in which we live in. Certainly science has not shown this to be true. God’s interactions with his creation could even occasionally occur in ways discernable to humans. There is nothing in science, philosophy, or theology to rule this out.
Again, science’s current cosmological theory, the Big Bang, has the entire universe springing out of a nonphysical “dimension” or a “singularity,” if you will. The Big Bang coincides strikingly with the creation stories of the world’s religions. Pope Pius XII enthusiastically proclaimed that Big Bang theory constitutes nothing less than scientific proof of the creation story, and so it does appear.
Epicurus felt that, as a matter of fact God never chose to soil his hands by interacting with this world, and Darwin couldn’t see any evidence of divine guidance within nature, but what did they know? After all, God is the creator of all things. Doesn’t creating it count as interacting? God, in theory, would be so capable that he could set the “bowling ball” of nature on its path, and much more than making a powerful left turn into the strike zone, God’s skill could have the “bowling ball” of physical systems and lifeform evolution dancing the Nutcracker Suite for millenniums and then switching to Hip Hop Rap or Country Western in alternating cycles.
Contrary to the loud objections of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, no one else but the AAAS and atheistic materialists have defined God as being composed of a type of substance that cannot produce empiric results. Such an arbitrary definition begs the philosophical debate about dualism outright and cannot be defended by recourse to science; it is a metaphysical theory, not a scientific one. The neo-Darwinists’ arguments against God typically are grounded on two hidden and very false premises: 1) the lie that intelligent design theory must be disguised religion, and 2) the lie that by definition God cannot interact with the physical world in discernible ways or be evidenced by empiric data.
We see evidence for God every day in the design and glory of his creation, in well-documented and rigorously-analyzed religious experience, in billions of reliable reports of spiritual perception, in verified miracles, exorcisms, encounters with the supernatural, in the overwhelming evidence against an accidental process achieving the amazing designs of living organisms and the structure of the physical universe, and in the Big Bang theory itself. To not only ignore evidence of this magnitude, but to dismiss it flippantly, reveals a clear prejudice. It is not good science because it is not good thinking. Some thinkers, including the authors of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (see the quotes that introduce this part of the book) and American philosopher Charles Peirce, hold that through some capacity of our rational intellect humans can see evidence for God in his creation more or less directly, even before formal science and philosophy have their say.
People will differ in their opinion as to how much and what kind of evidence is sufficient to conclusively resolve the question of God’s existence, but at this point in our analysis it should at least be clear that we have some bonafide scientific evidence for God in the ID arguments, plus the solid epistemological support of our direct experience of God, and reliable witness testimony. Thousands of reliable people have reported contact with God, saints or angels, including voice communication. This (unfortunately) includes thousands of fully documented contacts with fallen angels (demons) in the exorcisms of the Catholic Church. While contact with demons is not good, not to be sought, it is evidence for the supernatural and for God. Oh yes, many thousands of exorcisms have been performed, and the records of the Church are replete with miracles. The miraculous event at Fatima, Portugal in 1917 involved a communication that was publicly confirmed in the sense that a crowd returned with the children who witnessed the first two apparitions and they too were witness to a supernatural event. They didn’t all have precisely the same experience, but most did have supernatural experiences.
I am not proposing that we accept the veracity of individual reports of spiritual experience as if they were the empiric observations of science, but only that the hypothesis of God be admitted generally based upon the aggregate of much reliable evidence. I concede that spiritual perception will never be a practical scientific tool the way vision and hearing are. Even our premier theologians such as Pope Benedict XVI admit that spiritual messages are “translated” by each recipient somewhat differently as the pure content is necessarily filtered through the person’s cultural background influences, overall conceptual framework, education, personal beliefs, and knowledgebase.[49] However, admitting God as a good scientific theory does not require the existing rules of scientific evidence to change; it only requires the removal of a prejudice that restricts the kinds of conclusions we are permitted to validly draw from the evidence. There should be no restrictions on conclusions; conclusions must go where the evidence leads. If that is in the direction of God or intelligent design then so be it.
The operational integrity of science is not negatively affected by admitting God as a valid scientific hypothesis, or even as the favored scientific theory. Theoretical integrity is only increased by removing the bias in science for philosophical materialism. And scientific method remains untouched. Admitting God as first cause and designer doesn’t require us to give up microscopes, atomic physics, controlled experiments, surgery and antibiotics and return to medieval alchemy, leeches, and turpentine.[50] Although the neo-Darwinists and other materialists in science mercilessly play off of these kinds of fears, nothing could be further from the truth. Admitting God as a scientific hypothesis does not affect scientific method in any way; it merely protects the integrity of science by allowing science to affirm the theory that best explains the facts. JCIG theory is purely theoretical. Nothing in scientific method is altered one iota.
Our conclusion then is that, while Allen Funt may be responsible for some of the mysteries of life, God is responsible for a great deal more, viz. hundreds of thoroughly investigated miracles and well-documented encounters with the supernatural (Church records of exorcisms, for example[51]), and the personal encounters with God affirmed by billions of reliable persons.
JCIG theory is then good science because it is a more explanatory version of first cause than Big Bang theory, and more consistent. JCIG theory also avoids the contradiction inherent in the modern materialists’ view that all things are physical with the exception of the source of all things (the nonphysical anomaly at the Big Bang), which is not physical.[52] Therefore, adding God to our scientific theoretical base constitutes good science on the grounds of both explanatory power and logical consistency.
JCIG theory also restores philosophical credibility to scientific cosmological theory by allowing science to acknowledge the ontological validity of the first cause argument as an a priori truth. Aquinas was right: there can be an infinite progress forward, but there cannot be an infinite regress backward in any system, including the total universe. This is an ontological axiom, true on purely logical grounds. Why should science be required to disavow any truth that can be demonstrated as fully necessary?
Problems, Objections & Limitations
The Limitations of Science
The discipline of science does not entail the
metaphysical worldview of materialism. Science itself does not commit the
fallacy of begging the question of the dualism/materialism debate—only
materialists beg that question. But to do so, as noted geneticist Robert
Pollack has said, is to ask for big epistemological trouble by making science
into a religion, a religion that stipulates that science has no limitations and
no boundaries.[53] While materialists make the unwarranted assumption
that science can ultimately bring within its own very limited charter all there
is to know, legitimate science does not do this. Legitimate science does not
argue for or against the spiritual; it simply restricts itself to investigation
of the physical realm where controlled experiments are possible.
Science restricts itself to the study of the physical
because methodical study and investigation are only possible where control is
possible. Thus, science makes no investigations into the spiritual realm where
God or other supernatural entities are in control and human science is not.
While the lack of experimental control makes probing the spiritual realm
directly via experimental science an impossible task, indirect approaches like
the Dr. Mario
Beauregard study mentioned above can give us useful information concerning the
interaction of the spiritual and physical realms. Such studies are legitimate
science because they only correlate brain states with public testimony
concerning the concurrent spiritual experiences of the subject; they do not
introduce ghosts and demons into the middle of a chain of physical causation.
We should say a further word about the physical
mechanics of spiritual perception to appease the skeptics. Those who have done
some reading in the philosophy of mind, the mind-body problem, phenomenology,
and all that fascinating, but largely unsubstantiated theorizing, will
understand the difficulty of explaining the final stage of sense perception:
subjective awareness. How does one explain awareness exclusively in terms of
the physical organ itself? This difficulty has been around a long time, and has
never been satisfactorily resolved.
The aspect of this debate of concern to us here is
that demonstrating the mechanics of the eye, the ear, etc., is not enough to
establish that sense perception is a purely physical event. By analogy, the
same is true of spiritual perception. In other words, Beauregard’s study should not be
taken to mean that spiritual perception reduces
to nothing more than brain states just because there are brain states that
correlate with it. Take sight for example. The physical stimuli
of light are received by the eyeball and nerve ganglia are then affected. They
send neurons speeding along their way to the brain. The brain receives those
neurons…and then what? What happens next? Networks of patterned neural
connections are involved fluid channels convey additional information by still
poorly understood means, and when we go to consider the meaning, importance,
and moral import of what we have seen, very subtly patterned networks of
microtubules are involved that influence brain states in both computational and
noncomputational ways. These microtubule systems can be very complexly formed
and informed even at the quantum level.
Yes, it is all highly complex. But the question is how
do we get from gray gooey protein cells, fluid channels, neural networks, and
what have you, to the associated internal
events of conscious awareness and understanding, to the intellectual, moral,
and emotional things that make up our internal experience?
Let’s take the simple case of stopping at a traffic
light. In the case of seeing a red traffic light the event of conscious
awareness that (we trust) results includes not only understanding of red and
green, stop and go, but also the concepts of danger and safety, legal and
illegal, concern for fellow drivers and passengers in our own and oncoming
cars, the value of rule of law and an ordered society, courtesy to fellow
travelers, etc. These are all part of the total event of perceiving the traffic
light. Is there nothing more to the meaning of all of these concepts and our
concern for our infants in the back seat than gray gooey protein and
electrochemical signals? Of course there is! And a whole heck of a lot more
too! We all know that, we just won’t admit it in public discussion for fear
Richard Dawkins’ talking head (or a near facsimile) will pop up nearby and
ridicule us for believing in outdated “superstitions.” Why we might even be
(falsely) labeled “unscientific”—a terrible fate indeed.
True, we can’t dissect our feelings and lay them out
on a glass slide for microscopic examination, but aren’t all of the internal
experiences that are so central to the meaning of our lives real? How can love
of family equate to nothing more than a gooey bunch of grey brain matter? Appreciation of fine art? Friendship?
Romance? Poetry and music?
Love of children? Love of God? The
intense feelings of personal loss in a tragedy? Patriotism?
Do all those things reduce to gooey brain cells? How could they?
In cognition, that is, the event of knowing something,
the terminal or final stage of sense perception is mysteriously translated to
awareness, consciousness, whatever you choose to call it: the “mental” part of
evaluating the raw data received through nerve impulses originating from
physical stimuli. This is the stage of perception and learning that assigns
meaning or knowledge to the raw data. Does the eyeball do that? Do the nerve
ganglia do it? Does the gray matter of the brain do it? How? And
where? Where is awareness? What is it? Where is consciousness? What is
consciousness? What is meaning? What is knowledge? Do we know the answers to
these questions? No, we do not.
“There is no consensus on the correct concept of consciousness or even
whether it is unitary.”[54] The nature and essence of human consciousness is still
very much a mystery to science.
In a totally fascinating 1994 vintage tome, Shadows of the Mind, perhaps the world’s
premier scientific conceptual investigator, mathematical physicist Sir Roger
Penrose, first proposed a radical new model for how physical brain systems
might handle the more complex and subtle of our mental processes. This model is
predicated upon a radically new idea, that quantum-coherent (Q-C) networks resident in the
microtubules of the cytoskeletons of neurons might be able to provide a
physical basis for noncomputational mental events as well augmenting our
existing understanding of the more classically understood computational events.
This calls to mind a prior quote from Dr. David Faust (citing J. C. Eccles):
If anything, I
believe the case for complexity has been understated. Anyone who wishes to
glimpse the complexity of processes needed to manage the sensory world might
find current studies of the human brain illuminating. Eccles…a prominent
researcher in this area, makes the following statement when discussing human
perception:[55]
Before the cerebral
cortex is involved in the necessary complex patterned reaction to the sensory
input so that it gives a conscious perception, there will be activity of this
immense, unimaginable complexity…it will
be necessary to develop new forms of mathematics, as yet unimagined, in
order to cope with such immense patterned complexities.[56]
(my emphasis)
What Penrose has recently done with the Q-C network
hypothesis strikingly fulfills Eccles’ prediction. While going on to laud the
promise of his new and impressive mathematical approach to understanding
quantum-coherent networks involved in brain systems, Penrose first acknowledges
that all prior approaches to understanding the mind in terms of physical
systems have fallen far short of the mark.[57]
So, currently, even as scientists further explore
Penrose’s hypothesis,[58] we don’t at present know how the brain can do all the
things that the mind does. Yes, Penrose gives us a possible model, but it is a model we very probably cannot
thoroughly explore and test due to resource limitations. It therefore remains
quite possible that science will never achieve a testable model of physical
brain systems that correlate to the more subtle functions of the mind. My point
here is that, given that science to date has never known how purely physical
systems can account for our more subtle and complex mental experiences, and
given that science has never had grounds for a confident vision of a future
purely physical explanation of mental events that science could thoroughly vet
and verify, from whence has come the overbearing confidence in materialism that
we have been forced to endure from much of mainstream science over the past 150
years?
But, if science can’t ground materialists’ confidence in their theory, what does? Obviously, politics (or nothing). The assertion of materialist philosophy within science constitutes a prostitution of the purity of the scientific disciplines, and this cultural phenomenon originated in and gains much of its continued support from Marxist political propaganda.
Historically, especially since the era of Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels circa 1840-1890 (an era shared by Charles Darwin), science
has, under the influence of Marxist propaganda, arbitrarily ignored the entire
realm of human subjective experience because it does not fit neatly into the
then thought to be enlightened view of scientific materialism. Marxists and
materialists would have us believe that the vast majority of humanity (everyone
except the materialists) has somehow become deluded into believing that their
subjective experiences, especially concerning morality and religion, are “real”
in the sense of being distinct from the mess of gooey brain cells with which
they correlate. “What nonsense!” you may want to say, “Why even bother with
it?” Yes it is nonsense, but it is politically sponsored nonsense with real
paid “agents of influence,” as they are called in the espionage literature. Such
agents have been actively at work within and outside of science for many
decades. Their job is to move public opinion in the direction of scientific
materialism as a first step toward conversion of Western society to a Marxist
system. Marxist agents of influence were the world’s first “spin doctors,” as
we now call the obviously biased among our political commentators. While we
grin and dismiss modern propaganda artists in the media because their bias is
so obvious, Marxist agents have been much more subtle and successful over the
years, perverting even science itself to their political aims.
But ultimately the Marxist
argument for scientific materialism is empty, devoid of both fact and logic.
The modern intelligent design movement is making that increasingly clear.[59] Even if we can discover
suitable brain system corollaries for the most sophisticated things our minds
can do via Penrose’s Q-C networks or some other system, can knowledge, meaning, love and morality ever be reduced to mere
bodily processes? Mere correlation ≠ (does not equal) reduction, nor does
correlation otherwise guarantee reduction. Science does not and cannot argue
either for or against materialism. But, as the father of American Pragmatism,
Charles Peirce, rightly points out, our own direct experience has much to say
on the subject, offering sufficient and reliable grounds for belief in God, as
well as the forceful reality of intangibles such as love. Clearly, from the
point of view of common sense and direct intuition one feels intellectually
obliged to say that love and a particular glob of gooey brain cells are not
identical. Pure logical entailment from the meaning of the words seems to say
the same thing, and unsurprisingly so because the meaning of those words was
arrived at based upon our direct experience.
At this point, we really should turn the coherency
challenge around on the materialists in science who so often lament that all
religious language is incoherent. Is the thesis that protein cells can ascribe
meaning, resolve issues of right and wrong, or account for love of family a
coherent thesis? Does it make sense? Why isn’t it the logical contradiction it
appears to be based upon our direct experience of emotion and moral rectitude,
and the meaning of the words we have established to represent that experience?
Reductionism invokes a contradiction by improperly
equating incompatible conceptual categories. By the extant definitions of
‘protein’ and ‘emotion’ and ‘abstract conceptual meaning’, proteins cannot do
those kinds of things—by definition. To avoid this problem,
materialistic scientists would have us change the definition of all the terms
referring to our subjective experience such that they have purely physical
referents. They would have us reduce meaning and love to physical reactions
alone. But that is just cheating, rigging the game. There is nothing of
open-minded investigation or analysis in that. Much further, it amounts to
moral, emotional, and spiritual castration! It is like saying, “Hey, let’s all
castrate ourselves and then redefine human anatomy to be devoid of sex organs.
Any takers…?” The proper response to that, of course, is “Huh, uh. I don’t
think so.” We should no more emotionally and spiritually castrate ourselves at
the invitation of the physical reductionists than we should physically castrate
ourselves and redefine human anatomy as devoid of sex organs. Who wants to live
a life that is emotionally and spiritually barren?
You may think I overdramatize the problem, pulling the
castration example fully out of left field, but let me tell you something about
the agenda of scientific materialists. They have extreme elements just as any
other ideology, and in those circles the move to eliminate the moral,
emotional, and spiritual dimension of human experience has a very practical
purpose. That purpose is to remove the legal obstacles and social objections to
scientifically engineering the human race, no matter the cost in tragedy,
torture or suffering. Their agenda also involves explicit management of the
world’s population, including forced castration and other involuntary forms of
birth control, eugenics, overall population reduction, etc. Such methods have,
tragically, already been tried by modern nations, including the United States, resulting
in cases of clearly abusive applications and violations of human rights. This
antiquated policy has obviously been rescinded in the United States, but there
are those in the scientific materialist community who would prefer it
otherwise.
Physical reductionism portends nothing less than a
complete disaster for morally grounded human society and culture, a
catastrophic moral, spiritual, and emotional bankruptcy. It opens the door to
unrestricted human experimentation, human slavery, caste systems, human-animal
species hybridization, and atrocities of any and all kinds. When atrocities
such as cruel mass slavery for public works projects or live human vivisection
without anesthetic for medical research can be linked to some anticipated
long-term “improvements” of the physical state of a nation in the sick
imagination of some political despot or other, anything can be justified: “After all, we need to reduce the
population anyway, right? So, who cares if they suffer a little before they go,
so long as there is a chance that we, the privileged genetic aristocracy, might
gain something from doing research on them?”
Foolish government officials can guess wrong for decades, torturing hundreds of thousands or millions of people to death without ever producing real improvements at all. In fact these things have already been done (Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia), and to what effect? They did not advance the human condition; they merely tortured and killed millions of people—and the emotional suffering of families far exceeded the physical. Who gets exemptions for carrying the burdens of these projects and experiments? Why, friends of the political leadership of course. An artificial selection criterion comes into force where the sick and insane get preference over the morally and psychologically healthy, causing the problem to get progressively worse as the good are exterminated and the evil politically protected.
Wouldn’t the legal system prevent such a result? No.
In a reductionist society the only foundation for law is the “good of the
majority” as anyone who happens to be in power defines it. There is also no
basis for legal punishment, which is eschewed in favor of chemical therapy to alter the physical state and behavior of the
offender. In such a system, although the offense may be minor, if mild therapy
doesn’t change the behavior, well they will just have
to try a little harder, won’t they. And who would volunteer to perform such
work? Sadists, of course. As the great theologian C.
S. Lewis aptly describes in the final part of his Ransom Trilogy, entitled That
Hideous Strength, these are the
social implications of adopting the physical reductionist worldview.
The bottom line is that the move to physical
reductionism is politically motivated, not scientifically grounded. The
definitions assigned to terms applicable to emotional, moral, and subjective
experience in our natural language are not neurotic psychological fictions as
the materialists would have us believe. They are based upon our direct experience
of reality. They clearly set these things apart from the physical. If we permit
these terms to be redefined by reductionists, we will have defined away the
spiritual, moral, emotional and subjective realms of our bonafide personal
experience, all the good stuff of the higher realms of human experience. But
these are precisely the things that make us who we are, that make us
distinctively human. The materialists agenda reduces
humanity to the base level of dumb animals, in fact, turning back millions of
years of evolution.
Reality cannot be arbitrarily redefined by
simply changing the assignment of meaning to words in the dictionary. If one
wants to update the dictionary periodically, OK, but why do it in a way that
fully contradicts our direct experience of life? The political motivations of
materialists in science are revealed in such tactics. The philosophies of
physical reductionism (materialism) and accidental evolution are politically motivated worldviews; they
are not scientifically supported theories. There could, in theory, be
scientific evidence for or against accidental evolution, and through heuristic
models at least, for or against materialism, but in fact all the actual
evidence is against them. Accident can be shown fully incapable of building
complex machines in real time, and all the heuristic models favor God’s
existence. We should never allow politics to redefine reality. This is
especially true in science, which prides itself on strict objective standards
for truth.
But never fear. The reductionist case will remain
forever weak so long as we, the public, retain the ability to think for
ourselves. Despite frequent comments by materialists implying otherwise,
science has never produced any substantial evidence for reductionism. What
science has done with its natural emphasis on mechanistic “explanations,” and
all that it has done, is to explain the bodily states associated
with our subjective experiences; it has not explained the full experience. It has not
demonstrated that mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual experiences can be
reduced to nothing more than a sequence of physical events in cellular systems.
Still many scientists these days appear to assume that
there is no such thing as the mind, that it is only a higher order emergent
pattern of neural activity that humans can somehow mistake for genuine
subjective experience. But, if we humans who must perform all the direct
observations that underlie the various works of science can’t be trusted to
know what is and what is not a valid immediate experience during the empiric
observations of scientific operations, what are the epistemological grounds for
trusting scientific experiments? And if direct conscious awareness and
subjective experience are illusions, what guarantees the veracity of science
and the other cognitive operations? If cognition is just a stream of physical
events, including the cognition of what we currently take to be scientific
operations, computations, and evaluations, what guarantees consistency in the
performance of science? One stream of physical events cognitively validates
another? Does that make sense? This is another hugely important part of
advanced human society that we lose with materialism: truth, knowledge, and
cognition. There are no true and false statements (or “propositions” as
philosophers say) in the reductionist world, only streams of physical events.
Take away subjective mental experience and there is no knower, without which
there cannot be knowledge. The result of denying the human ability to validly
interpret direct experience is epistemological nihilism. As many great thinkers
have affirmed, including Heisenberg, Jung, and Peirce, we are both entitled to
acknowledge the existence of our mind (as well as our heart and soul) and
entitled to use it. And let’s not forget Descartes: “I think therefore I am.”
The entire enterprise of physical reductionism is a ridiculous denial of our minds, a denial of the reality of self-consciousness and of consciousness itself. Thus, the materialist argument is not only weak, it is self-refuting. How would purely physical systems ever come up with a distinction between the physical and the nonphysical in the first place such as the one that underlies this entire discussion? Descartes again. What is an idea or a concept in a materialist world? What are conceptual systems in a materialist world, and how can they work to ground our thought processes? What is thought in a materialist world? What is consciousness? What is self-consciousness? What is mind, soul, and spirit? Human beings know what these things are through direct awareness. They are some of the elemental components of our existence that we cannot analyze further because they are prerequisites for analysis, as in the case of mind, or unitary in substance such that they permit no further analysis. They are the major and essential components of humanity itself, and yet materialists would simply have us throw them all away! We, therefore, need not be so constrained by the fear of materialist ridicule that we deny all the beautiful and important events of our subjective experience, the things that give life meaning and ground our systems of law, faith, and family, and our very existence and essential human nature. We need not fear materialist ridicule because nothing is so ridiculous as materialism itself.
In closing this topic, then, let us consider the
wisdom of American philosopher Charles Peirce who hadn’t the slightest
intention of denying his own direct experience:
Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from, if
not from direct experience?…No: as to God, open your
eyes—and your heart, which is also a perceptive organ—and you see him.[60]
Are All Religious Claims Incoherent and Meaningless?
As we briefly
touched upon earlier, some critics of spiritual perception, notably A. J. Ayer,
go so far as to say that one can’t even speak coherently of such things as God
and the spiritual dimension, that spiritual talk makes no sense in concept.[61]
They feel that religious language, lacking (they say) consistent, verifiable,
and objective referents, is therefore meaningless.
Surprisingly, even God’s existence has publicly verifiable possibilities, if not strictly empirically verifiable ones. God can make himself visible according to scripture, as can the host of Heaven. St. Raphael the archangel, for example, in the book of Tobit assumed a form that was indistinguishable to human perception from the physical. I am not arguing scriptural authority in place of science to answer scientific and philosophical questions here; I am merely saying that there is a conception of God in which perceptual if not “empiric” verification is available. I say “if not empiric” because in the minds of many “empiric” is defined to rule out its application to anything nonphysical. If we insist on only empiric verification for everything, while defining “empiric” in this way, we have rigged the game and ruled out the confirmation of anything nonphysical simply by arbitrary convention.
If we avoid rigging the game and begging the question before we start, objective, or at least perceivable referents to religious language are not ruled out in theory, or by definition; they are only absent in the typical living experience of many people. In the Christian view, and once again I am not affirming Christianity as a scientific authority. As the ultimate counterexample to the coherence objection, the lack of public verifiability of God would be remedied at the event of final judgment par excellence. If the posited mass resurrection of the dead at final judgment is a public event (though technically not an empiric one, since this physical world has passed away), even God’s existence would be publicly verified as the watchmaker returns to replace the old watch with a new one. One wonders if Darwinists would recognize the evidentiary value of that event even while standing before God in judgment: “Just subjective phenomenology, you know; nothing to it.”
Others critics of deism claim that one has to beg the
question, that is, arbitrarily assume
the truth of the spiritual realm first in order for religious language to make
sense. But one is not arbitrarily
assuming the reality of the spiritual life if one is directly experiencing it.
To assert such a rule creates the ridiculous situation of religious persons
having to prove to atheists the reality of their own direct experience before
they can consider their own interpersonal communications coherent.
The most radical of the critics of religious language
(what one might call the ontological atheists) claim that as a simple matter of
fact there are no referents to spiritual language, that such things just aren’t
out there in the “real world.” Therefore, they claim, religious language can
never be meaningful. What do they use as proof that there are no spiritual
things out there to perceive? Why, science, of course. But science, as we have
seen, by its very definition and charter (as the materialists conceive that
charter) excludes the consideration of anything nonphysical. Therefore, the
case of these critics of spiritual perception rests upon a fallaciously
circular argument.
As far as the claim that all religious talk is
incoherent, the faculty of spiritual perception provides the bonafide
experience that gives meaningful referents to the language. The fact that a
population is not universally endowed with a faculty is an entirely different
matter to that of incoherence. For those so endowed, the experience provided
through use of the faculty of spiritual perception simultaneously serves as
reasonable evidence for the reality of the phenomena in question and provides
coherence to the language. For spiritual talk to make sense, it is enough that
we be so endowed, that we have the faculty of spiritual perception; nothing
more is needed.
Moreover, spiritual talk, even to nonbelievers,
is not nonsense any more than talk of sound to the deaf is nonsense, or talk of
sight to the blind. The congenitally blind man may not get the full meaning,
having never seen a stoplight, for example, but he understands that there is a
signal that can be perceived with a faculty of perception that he happens not
to have. Such talk is not complete nonsense to him; it is just devoid of most
of the perceptual detail. He won’t be able to fully conceive of or picture the
traffic light’s visual characteristics, but he does know where it is, what it
does, and that it is—that it exists. He understands that much.
Or, take the case of someone born with significant
visual impairment that is surgically correctable. They have never seen or heard
of such surgery, or even the concept of corrective eye
surgery, a tribesman from the Andes for example. One day a visiting optometrist
tells them that they can now have this wonderful new faculty of sight, but they
will have to trust the doctor, and do the specific things required to start the
process in motion. They may well be skeptical, even fully so. Rumor has it the
process can be painful, and the question of the surgery highlights the fact
that there is some defect in the tribesman in comparison to his fellows—never a
comfortable thought. What should the tribesman do in regards to the claim that
he could have this new faculty of sight? And (for those who don’t have it) what
should you do regarding the claim I have made that you can have this new faculty
of spiritual perception? What would the situation be if the whole tribe had the
same impairment and then all of them agreed among themselves that the doctor
was irrational—if they achieved a clear majority consensus that the doctor was
“nuts”? They would never take that critical step, and therefore never gain use
of the new faculty of sight.
The burden-of-proof-shifting tactic of the atheists
has never been justified. Science has never comprehensively looked to prove or
disprove the existence of spiritual things. No large scale, fully funded,
professionally staffed, well-planned and thoughtfully designed scientific
investigations concerning the spiritual realm have ever been undertaken. If
they had been, they would have ultimately encountered the fatal limitations of
the charter of science itself: they could only have accepted the evidence of
the five senses in their investigations, not the evidence of spiritual
perception.
Why have so many of us fallen prey over the years to the materialists’ bogus claims that science has ruled out the validity of religious claims despite the massive cumulative weight of religious testimony—merely because the faculties of vision and hearing don’t confirm it? We would think it ludicrous to design a study about color and accept only the evidence of our ears. Oddly, we have approached the subject of spiritual perception in this irrational way. Two thirds of the human race claim to be using spiritual perception, but we won’t believe the faculty is real until it is confirmed by the physical senses, which by definition can never give direct evidence on the question. Go figure. And are we arranging for the indirect studies that would be required to corroborate spiritual perception? No. We won’t validate the faculty until the indirect studies are done, but we are making no effort to do the studies.
Science may have done a few sparsely funded, weakly
staffed, hastily put together, and not fully rigorous, looks at spoon bending,
hauntings, and card guessing, but that is not where the credible hypotheses of
the supernatural lie. The credible hypothesis of the supernatural lies in the
hundreds of millions of rank and file everyday members of the Church who all
credibly posit a personal relationship with God the Father Almighty. A serious
investigation of the spiritual realm would involve rigorously controlled
extensively cross-referenced interviews with the devout members of the great
religious faiths of the world, and a close analysis of the extensive records,
traditions, history and knowledge bases of each. This has never been done.
The Catholic Church alone has historical records
replete with accounts of spiritual visitations, human interactions with saints
and angels, and direct experience of God himself. This includes many rigorously
verified miracles such as the appearance of St. Mary at Fatima, Portugal, the miraculously suspended portrait of St. Mary and baby Jesus at
Genazzano, Italy, and the incorruptible bodies
of St. Sharbel and St. Eustochia.[63] All of the hundreds of saints have performed miracles
scrupulously verified by the Church. Over 300 saints are described in the concise
edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints alone. “Who does not know about the great shrine of Ste. Anne de
Beaupre in Canada, where miracles abound, where cured cripples leave their
crutches, and where people come from thousands of miles to pray to the
grandmother of Jesus?”[64]
During
World War I Pope Benedict XV made repeated but forlorn pleas for peace, and
finally, in May 1917, made a direct appeal to Mary to intercede for peace in
the world. The response was Mary's first appearance at Fatima just over a week later. At
this time Fatima was just a small village about seventy miles north of Lisbon;
the three children to whom she appeared were Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, and
her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, brother and sister, aged eight and
seven respectively.[65]
These miracles all have an element of the
scientifically confirmable in them. They involve publicly perceivable and
clearly anomalous events in the natural world for which no alternative
scientific explanation can be found. The process of scientific elimination can, by painting a picture around the
perimeter of a phenomenon, prove it to be supernatural. It would not be
difficult to design a bonafide scientific study around such miracles that would
confirm them in general concept.
I suspect that many laymen (and perhaps even more scientists) misunderstand the nature of miracles. Miracles are not beyond science’s ability to detect, miracles are beyond science’s ability to explain. They involve violations of the laws of nature. Granted, science cannot go directly to the spiritual source, as it were, and perceive the miracle as it perceives the raw sense data of sight and sound, but it can by the process of elimination, say that what has occurred cannot be explained by reference to the laws of nature.
To date science has ignored the obvious and the
credible evidence for the spiritual dimension, ignored voluminous evidence most
promising of success, and focused instead only on the categories of evidence
more scarce and incredible—those topics that tend to discredit or debunk the
entire subject of the supernatural. This is not how science normally or
properly operates. Once again, the manner in which modern science has proceeded
reveals a prejudice. Modern science clearly does not want to find the truth
about the spiritual realm for it is looking in all the wrong places based upon
science’s own basic protocols on how to design a credible and successful study.
The Church, however, has given us more than enough consistent history,
conceptual background, and solid investigations of miracles to show that
religious language and experience is neither imaginary nor incoherent. Science
can design studies to prove this any time it wants to commit the resources to
the subject; there is just no political will in science to do it.
Science and Philosophy Don’t Assume Materialism, Only
Materialists Do
The mind-body question, closely entwined with the
monism-dualism debate, is perhaps the all-time classic issue in philosophy. It
was historically posed in terms that assumed at least the possibility of the
existence of two radically different kinds of substance, mind and body, spirit
and matter. The possibility that these two kinds of substance could potentially
interact was taken as a given when the question was initially posed and further
argued over the course of many centuries. Modern materialists, however,
completely ignore this intellectual history,
arbitrarily limiting their preferred definition of the charter of science in
such a way that it rules out science’s being able to make even indirect
inferences to spiritual phenomena. The modern materialist position implies that
the entire prolonged and distinguished academic debate on the topic of mind and
matter was based entirely upon elementary error or religion-induced fantasy.
Until science can bring itself to admit that a
combination of scientific evidence and logic can legitimately point to the
reality of things beyond the physical, the mind-body/dualism question must
remain out of reach of any scientific input whatsoever. But this is a ludicrous
result, that our primary investigative system could
have nothing to say on such a fundamentally important question. Obtaining a
ludicrous result generally signals the presence of a flaw in logic or one or
more false premises. Here, the problem is a false premise: the assumption that
there can be no inferential bridge between physical data and a conclusion
asserting something nonphysical.
However, from no more than a casual examination of the
origin of life question we can see that such an inference from physical data to
a nonphysical conclusion is warranted under certain circumstances. For
example, consider the mathematical analysis of the improbability of
neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution as the explanation of life’s origins. We
first establish by valid scientific evidence that the probability that random
chance could have produced the life forms on earth is so remote as to fail the
current standards of scientific credibility. Logical inference takes us the
next step to conclude that an intelligent designer is the only alternative
(other than to say nature is just that way; it does intelligent things while
not being an intelligence itself). The final inference is that, since that
designer cannot be produced in physical terms, we must conceptually allow for
the possibility that he/she/it is a spiritual entity.
In theory, inference can go the other direction as
well, from the spiritual to the physical. While the Catholic Church rightly
insists that the Bible is not a science book, and that the Church is not a
scientific authority, there remains the possibility of logical inference from
the conceptual truths expressed in the Bible or other religious texts, such as
the Koran, to some general, at least tangential, truths about the physical
world. For example, Christianity, among other religions, proposes that God is
the creator of all matter. This implies that he, a spiritual being, can
interact with a physical world. It is also, in very simplistic form, a theory
of cosmology: the theory that our world had a beginning in time and sprang from
a creative source that was nonphysical. This theory in fact matches what
scientists believe about our world’s origin very closely. The concept of
miracles also implies the ability of spirit and matter to interact.
The conceptual possibility of spirit and matter
interacting has been the predominant presumption throughout man’s entire
intellectual history. No demonstrable contradiction results from that
assumption. In fact, the only way to demonstrate that spirit and matter cannot
interact is to demonstrate what the true nature of spirit is. But one cannot
demonstrate the true nature of spirit without proving the existence of spirit.