Quantum Non-Linearity: Denis Alexander: "I would suggest dropping the term 'methodological naturalism'"

Friday, August 12, 2016

Denis Alexander: "I would suggest dropping the term 'methodological naturalism'"

Theological Dualism: The "God bits" vs. the "Natural forces bits": You only need drop the "God bits" and you're an atheist.

I'm continuing to work my way through (v. slowly) Denis Alexander's book "Creation or Evolution: Do we have to choose". Chapter 8, which is entitled "Evolutionary Creation", critiques the concept of "naturalism" (and also "methodological naturalism"), a concept which I have also criticized in this blog many times. Naturalism is the subliminally theological idea that so called "natural forces" are set over and against Divine creative "interventions". Underlying "naturalism" is, in fact, the deistic notion that the cosmos works "naturally" by itself and where God (if you believe in him) steps in on occasion to do his stuff. Perhaps I caricature just a little, but to a dualist "Evolution did it" is identical to saying "God didn't do it" and "God did it" is the same as saying "Evolution didn't do it"! This mindset readily connects with subliminal gnosto-dualism, an implicit view where God is set over an against the inferior, if not downright evil, "natural forces".

"Naturalism" as a concept is also subliminally entrenched in the de-facto Intelligent Design community's explanatory filter. This filter is actually a sound epistemic procedure if we are dealing with human or alien artifacts: Intelligent entities, although they themselves may arguably conform to the laws of physics, are nevertheless too complex a realization of physics to their make treatment from physical first principles possible and therefore their works are best treated as a separate "intelligent" category.

But the explanatory filter is grossly flawed if used in Christian theology where a totalising all-embracing immanent God is inextricably bound up with all that passes under the created order. In short all activity in creation, theologically speaking, traces back to Divine intelligence whether by permission or proactive decree. There is really no such thing as autonomous "natural forces" unless by it one simply means those phenomena whose patterns of behavior which are tractable to the law and disorder descriptions of conventional science. In contrast, the de facto IDists find it difficult to conceive God as much more than a tinkering alien. Let me submit here a radical proposal: If manifest divine "interventions" are the main basis for belief in God you may as well drop the whole concept of God and become an atheist.

I'm not going to do justice to Alexander's account here - he really needs to be read - but he also is highly critical of "naturalism" and by implication its subliminal philosophy of dualism,. However, I will give some sample quotes from Alexander. I don't myself necessarily accept the plain neo-Darwinist ideas of the academic establishment, but I believe Alexander is right in saying that Darwin's explication of creation as a process had the ironic consequence of actually giving traction to the idea that God was immanent and active in creation. For example, Alexander quotes Aubrey Moore, a fellow of St John's College Oxford and curator of the Oxford botanical gardens in Victorian times:

There are not, and cannot be, any Divine interpositions in nature, for God cannot interfere with Himself. His creative activity is present everywhere. There is no division of labour between God and nature, or God and law...For the Christian theologian the facts of nature are the acts of God. (p. 202)

What's gone wrong since then? Christian theology, at least among the de-facto IDists and fundamentalists seems to have gone backwards since the nineteenth century! The above exposes the theological naivety of trying to put the intelligence of God in a similar category to that of aliens or humans who work very much within the created order. The only thing I would want to add to the above is that like an author of a book God has different attitudes toward what he brings forth from platonic space for reification by his permissive or proactive will.

At the very least the quote from Moore does bring out Alexander's point that evolution favored explications that moved away from deism and dualism towards a full-time rather than part-time dualist-deist God. (At this juncture we must bear in mind that there are arguments against the notion that the creation didn't initially contain death as is maintain by most fundamentalists - see Alexander's comments here)

If I'm not careful I could end up quoting the whole of chapter 8 but here are some further samples:

This rapid baptism of evolution into the Christian doctrine of creation, so characteristic on both sides of the Atlantic, was facilitated by a strongly providential theology that emphasized the total sovereignty of God over the whole created order. (p. 203)

Given that context it's no surprise that Alexander has turned against so-called "naturalism" and also it seems "methodological naturalism":

We don't call Christian accountants 'naturalistic' because of the absence of theological terminology as they check the company accounts, any more than we expect our doctor to use theological language when she tells us that we've got the flu, or the mechanic to refer to Biblical texts when servicing our car. The absence of specific references to God does not render our lives suddenly 'naturalistic'. Quite the opposite: Christians walking with God in the power of the Spirit will be only too aware of God's presence and leading permeating every aspect of their daily lives. Naturalism is the philosophy that there is no God in the first place, so only an atheists can provide truly naturalistic explanations for anything.
For the same reason I would not myself use the term 'methodological naturalism' to refer to what scientists do in their research, irrespective of their own personal beliefs. .....I would therefore suggest simply dropping the term 'methodological naturalism'

But today in the West we are in reactionary gnosto-dualistic times, so I don't suppose Christians unschooled in the nuances of the sciences will be able to unthink the well entrenched dualism of God vs "Natural Forces". In its place a defensive blend of anti-science Biblical liberalism and "touch of God" gnosticsm are likely to persist in Christian fundamentalist circles as they fight a retreating rearguard action. These people are unlikely to listen to Denis Alexander or any other Christian member of the academic establishment for that matter. For the extremists that establishment is all part of the end-time satanic conspiracy!

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Friday, August 12, 2016

Denis Alexander: "I would suggest dropping the term 'methodological naturalism'"

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION