The Conspiracy of Naturalism
Note: This post is a continuation of the conversation started here.
Suppose someone told you their alternate theory of history, where they believe everything you do, minus Abraham Lincoln. You might be curious to learn how their theory explains certain events, particularly those formerly explained by what you thought was a man born in a log cabin in Kentucky, who later became a lawyer, etc. You might ask about everyone who witnessed the Gettysburg Address, or the assassination at Ford’s theater, etc. Clearly, just having the absence of Abraham Lincoln doesn’t explain this data by itself. Explanatory holes must be filled if this alternate version of history is to be seriously considered.
This is where our friend tells us how Abraham Lincoln was an imposter, someone the government concocted to push through a particular agenda, with all the appearances of a humble and honest man. He wasn’t who you thought he was. However, because he didn’t ultimately go along with their conspiratorial agenda (perhaps his conscience finally got the better of him), they had him assassinated. Or something along those lines. As we know, the problem isn’t that conspiracy theories don’t explain the data. In fact, conspiracies are often difficult to refute precisely because they are designed with the data in mind.
Nevertheless, most of us would not accept this conspiratorial version of history. Why? The problem is twofold. First, the conspiratorial hypothesis itself seems less likely to be true, given all the moving parts this theory has related to deception, coordination, and cover up. Second, there is other data this alternative hypothesis doesn’t initially account for – like, what about Lincoln’s mother who died of milk sickness, and his sister, and everyone else who knew Honest Abe before he was a potential political candidate? Surely, the theorist could turn a story to explain these data points as well. But in doing so, the theory will pick up “adjunct hypotheses” which are themselves improbable and not independently evidenced, further complicating the theory overall. At some point, the conspiracy theorist might not just have to continue increasing the amount of government coordination and cover up, but suggest influence from extra-terrestrial aliens was at play, as well. Who knows. If you’re ever talked to any committed conspiracy theorist, you know things can get interesting, fast.[1]
The point? We often prefer less complicated theories because those theories are thought to have fewer “moving parts,” as it were, or basic components; thus, fewer ways things could go wrong, and the theory turn out to be false. Conspiracy theories are examples of narratives we find unbelievable – not because of lack of explanatory power – but because of their inherent complexity and consequent improbability.
Atheism is like this.
Atheism – or naturalism, if we’re getting into the theory side – is, as we’ve explained previously, run by a principle of indifference; indifference, at bottom, is the naturalistic root of everything (whereas theism is the principle of perfection or pure actuality). The problem is indifference isn’t very predictive; it doesn’t seem to anticipate the data of our world well or literally at all. What, honestly, would we expect from some entity or collection of entities that is neither benevolent nor malevolent nor intentional nor personal nor anything of the sort? The answer, if we’re being honest, is not much.
Thus, where things which were simply explained by the existence of God (minimally, why any concrete thing exists instead of not, though with further conceptual analysis one sees God predicts beings like us, and by extension a universe like ours[2]), we are now left with some seriously gapping holes. My suggestion is to the extent naturalism can wrap around the relevant data it must necessarily complicate itself, quite like a grand metaphysical conspiracy theory.
Look at moral facts and moral awareness.
Of course, many atheists are happy to eliminate this data, seeing (clearly, I think) that it is not something that can be reasonably located in the naturalistic grand narrative, but rather something the inner logic of naturalistic — or the naturalistic grand narrative, if you prefer — causes us to think is a programmed false (but useful for survival) belief. However, to eliminate data can be risky – in this instance, it is very risky – since it might be an admission that one’s theory has less explanatory oomph than we originally supposed; an admission which can be a far more significant penalty concerning theory comparison than adopting further complication. In other words, the naturalist, if he wants to compete with the theist, should strive to avoid eliminating data which seem either undeniable or extremely well evidence, and of course I claim moral facts and moral knowledge fall into that category.
How can the naturalist explain these features? Well, if anyone has read the work of naturalists who want to explain not just moral facts but moral knowledge rather than explain them away, undoubtedly, they will have come away with the impression that it is quite a complicated story which seems highly unlikely, all things considered. Take, for example, Eric Wielenberg’s account of Godless Normative Realism. Apart from being an interesting work of philosophy, Wielenberg’s project could be mistaken for a Norwegian death metal album. Either way, there are problems with Wielenberg’s account, particularly those pointed out by William Lane Craig in their debate book.[3]
For one, Wielenberg is a Platonic (or extreme) realist, thus ushering something into his naturalism that itself has a serious “location problem”; which is to say, is itself something difficult if not impossible to make sense of given the inner logic of naturalism. Where, in other words, in the naturalist world picture, are we supposed to locate entities of this sort: i.e., immaterial abstract entities? Naturalism, after all, is committed to a broad scientism, where what one knows about what things exist and their powers is what comes out of the best science can or has offered; the naturalist should only believe in entities that science picks ups or at least theoretically could pick up. Plato’s heaven – that is, a realm of causally inert, eternally existing abstract objects or forms – is definitely not one of those things. Hence why naturalism has always been at odds not just with extreme realism but realism more generally. As Wilfred Sellars once said, “a naturalist ontology must be a nominalist ontology.”[4] Like hate in Martha’s Vineyard, universals have no home in naturalism.
So, that’s a problem. Wielenberg has just greatly complicated naturalism and still has much further to go, since the mere posit of Plato’s heaven (by itself) does little to make sense of the relevant data. Even if there exists, in some abstract realm, the form of justice or goodness or love, we still want to know what relation these forms bear to various physical configurations in the concrete realm and how that relationship is attained. The suggestion, as it happens, is just that when the right physical situations occur, there is strong supervenience of these abstract objects. As you can tell, things are starting to become more than just a little bit complicated – that is, in a negative (contrived) sense. Moreover, the naturalist is now committed to two realms of existence: the concrete realm and the abstract realm. Perhaps the theist is as well? We can revisit that in a later post (personally, I maintain scholastic realism is correct, which avoids having to posit an independently existing realm of abstract objects).
Getting back to Wielenberg’s account of supervenience, consider the criticism of Craig,
“First, its account of the supervenience of abstract moral properties on physical situation seems unintelligible. How is it that these abstract objects like goodness or badness come to be attached to physical situations?... He (Dr. Wielenberg) claims that the physical objects cause the abstract objects to supervene on physical situations. This is not supervenience; it’s been rightly called superdupervenience! Unfortunately, this superdupervenience is utterly mysterious. Ask yourself: How can a physical object somehow reach out and causally connect to a transcend, causally isolated, abstract object?”[5]
The naturalist might just say the connection is brute, but they shouldn’t want to do that, since it effectively admits that their theory is an explanatory flop.[6] Rather, Wielenberg proposes an analogy with theism, where God wills some state of affairs and necessarily that state of affairs attains, but as Craig points out, the analogy fails for the obvious reason that God is a concrete rather than abstract entity; one with enormous causal power, if God exists. God and the world are instances of concrete entities interacting, so Wielenberg’s attempted parallel is not parallel at all and does nothing to help his account.
Moreover, Craig challenges Wielenberg’s account on its ability to even explain the relevant data in the first place. For example, concerning moral obligation,
“In any case, having decisive moral reasons to do an act implies at most that if you want to act morally, then that is the act you ought to do. In other words, the obligation to do the act is only conditional, not unconditional… a robust moral theory ought to provide a basis for unconditional moral obligations, which Wielenberg’s view does not.”[7]
However, I mention this only in passing, since for now I am mostly interested, not in the ways Wielenberg’s account fails explanatorily, but in the ways it must complicate itself to even approximate a story which might succeed.
At this point, it worth reiterating that it is rather more natural for naturalists to move in the direction of explaining away (eliminating) such moral features. Sharon Street, for example, argues that the naturalistic grand narrative should cause naturalists to prefer an “adaptive link account” between fitness and moral beliefs, which means embracing some variety of moral anti-realism (like constructivism).[8] She simply disregards a “tracking account” where fitness follows mind-independent moral truths as scientifically implausible. Far more consistent with evolutionary theory and naturalism generally to go the route of moral anti-realism. Mark Linville reinforces Street’s proposal in arguing against moral-supervenience theories among naturalists, since what Darwin’s theory conjoined to naturalism should cause is to do is “glance back over our shoulder” to see if our widely held judgments might be unreliable, including supervenience of moral facts upon natural facts.[9] In other words, if the atheist is assuming some sort of dependence thesis between moral and natural facts to undergird a system of moral objectivity, then what thinkers like Street and Linville are proposing is strong reason for doubting that any judgments about the dependence thesis itself are true.
Moreover, as philosopher J.P. Moreland points out, “Wielenberg plugs the holes in his view by regularly borrowing capital from theism and does so on the cheap.” At length in his response to Wielenberg’s account, Moreland demonstrates that Wielenberg’s reliance upon exemplification of strong emergence of moral properties is itself ruinous to the naturalistic explanatory project, straining it to the point of unbelievability, or just making it useless.[10]
What’s worse, things only become more complicated when a story must be told of how unguided evolutionary forces somehow bring us into reliable cognitive contact with such moral properties, which is a necessary story if moral knowledge is to be explained. Because notice: moral facts and moral knowledge are logically independent, for even if we granted a naturalistic account of supervenience or dependence of moral facts upon natural facts, that, of course, does nothing to entail our ever coming to know such facts. Thus, what we want is a theory which makes sense – hopefully, in a relatively simple way – of both. Theism does this; atheism cannot.
At this point, I hope the comparison is clear enough – that is, between naturalism and conspiracy (i.e., how if naturalism is to keep up in the explanatory race, it must wire itself with vastly greater complexity) – but let’s push the illustration further.
Coming back to moral knowledge. Plainly our grasping abstract moral properties within the inner logic of a naturalistic framework would undoubtedly require something – as atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie once called it – “queer.” That is, “some special faculty of moral perfection or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.”[11] Of course, this rational intuition is not queer according to the inner logic of classical theism, but as Moreland says about Wielenberg potentially adopting this strategy, “It would be a case of helping himself to an entity that just can’t be located in the most reasonable naturalist epistemology, Grand Story, and result ontology, bereft of queer brute entities.”[12] Moreland then references Thomas Nagel on this score about how adopting the ability of any such rational intuition is one that is “secularly uncomfortable, should make naturalists nervous, and is suspiciously religious or quasi-religious.”[13]
All this links back to the remarks from Street and Linville where the inner logic of naturalism should push one away from moral realism. Naturalism predicts against moral realism; thus, it is not surprising (from the theistic perspective, anyway) that for the naturalism to secure moral facts and moral knowledge, it must steer against what appears to be its obvious, if not outright inevitable, trajectory. In doing so, things become rather complicated, where auxiliary components are introduced and subsequently wired together, with many apparent ways things could go wrong. It just no longer becomes a credible story; it is too implausible. Not only that, but these naturalistic accounts for making sense of the moral features of our world introduce, as we’ve seen above, other aspects into the naturalist world picture which are not only not a natural fit within naturalism but can no longer find an adequate explanation according to naturalism (for example, strong emergence) but appear like magic, ultimately replacing one explanatory difficulty with another. (Here “progress” for the naturalist is like politics: trying to resolve one problem by causing a bigger one, and then realizing the originally problem still remained). What we are left with is an impressive metaphysical mess, with components scatted all over the place, themselves brutely obtaining or brutely connected or both, and – worse still – ultimately failing to make sense of the very datum they were brought in to explain. In this sense, naturalism is worse than most grand-scale conspiracy theories, since most conspiracy theories do have the requisite explanatory power, even if their complications make them ultimately unbelievable.
I’ll stop there. However, think back to my original post where I listed the features of world requiring explanation. Here, we have considered only two: moral facts and moral knowledge. My contention is things become worser still (more complicated) when naturalists must develop their theory to account for all the other features, from consciousness to rationality to physical fine-tuning to free will, and so on. Of course, I maintain that naturalism cannot in principle explain some of these features (for example, why any contingent thing exists), but concerning features where it may seem like a possible naturalistic explanation could be found, it requires the adoption of too much complexity for naturalism to remain a serious worldview competitor to classical theism.
- Pat
[1] Again, I emphasize conspiracies of a “grand-scale” simply because conspiracies of a much lesser sort happen all the time: conspiracies to murder, rob banks, assassinate people in power, etc. Thus, not all conspiracies are false, nor even that complex or improbable. Some, we know, are historically true. Where conspiracies become unbelievable is when they are concocted on a much larger scale and must introduce an impressive number of moving parts with many ways they could fail to coordinate, which is to say, so many ways things could go wrong.
[2] See Swinburne’s Existence of God for this unpacking.
[3] A Debate About Morality: What Is The Best Account of Objective Moral Duties and Values.
[4] Quoted by Moreland in A Debate About Morality.
[5] A Debate on Morality, 93.
[6] But what if the naturalist tries to attach the same cost to theism, claiming they have their own “brute” entities or connections. J.P. Moreland has a cogent response, “… the proper ontological place for a brute entity is a necessary being and its or His essential properties. Thus, Wielenberg’s tu quoque fallacy raised against Craig is simply wrong-headed. Given the contingency of phenomenal-property/moral-property emergence, Craig’s questions about how the physical situations ‘know’ which property to exemplify is spot-on due to the contingency involved. But given Craig’s (and, presumably, Wielenberg’s) concept of God and His essential nature, these are brute, necessary entities. As such, questions like ‘How do the various divine properties ‘know’ to knit themselves together in every possible universe?’ are category fallacies.” Of course, classical theists can go further, since there is ultimately no composition in God that needs to be knitted together the first place; as well, classical theists should resist the label brute with God altogether (God is ultimately fully self-explained and so not a brute fact but rather an autonomous fact), for reasons I’ve explored in other places. Either way, enough has been said on that point for now.
[7] Ibid, 101.
[8] https://philpapers.org/rec/STRADD
[9] See Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.
[10] A Debate on Morality, 93-114.
[11] Inventing Ethics.
[12] A Debate on Morality, 101.
[13] Ibid.