Scientology is sometimes called the "science fiction religion," and the U. S. Supreme Court is not persuaded that it is a religion at all. The Church of the Latter Day Saints, more commonly referred to as "Mormonism," is a recognized and populous form of Christianity. It would be an interesting exercise, which I leave to the reader, to try to find some general principle that would classify Scientology as pseudoreligion and Mormonism as a religion. I'd like to approach the question of cognitive standards in religion in a different way.

If you are a student of Southwestern culture, you may be aware of the vegetable antidefamation laws of Arizona. ("It is unlawful for any person within this state: . . . [t]o disseminate any false or misleading advertisement concerning agricultural, vegetable or ornamental plant seed in any manner or by any means.") For farming states, vegetables are no laughing matter. And if you are a reader of comic strips, you have no doubt read the fable of the Great Pumpkin in the Peanuts cartoon strip – a touching tale of one small boy's willingness to sacrifice for his faith, despite annual disappointment. But very few know the true origin of the fable. In fact, the fable is but a small slice of a rapidly growing religious movement: Vegetabilism. There is as little resemblance between its theology and Great Pumpkinism as there is between the large, elderly, bearded man on the golden throne in Sunday School texts and the God whose nature is expostulated in the most advanced works of Christian theology.

First, let me offer you an orienting framework. Most religions are based on a "person standard": they maintain that a person, or something personlike, is responsible, causally and morally, for the universe's being as it is (most familiarly, the best of all possible persons, or Supreme Being); or, as in some Eastern religions, they may react negatively to this standard, insisting that personal individuality is to be transcended ("salvation through loss of selfhood"). Negative or positive, the defining concepts are the same. Vegetabilist theology rejects the person-standard and finds instead evidence of a botanical, vegetal origin to the universe and all that is important in it: the universe grows like a tree, not like a tumor. The germinus of all Vegetabilist theology is its version of the famous Argument from Design, hinted at in Cleanthes's remark:

The Argument from Design (Vegetable Version)

All Arguments from Design, Vegetabilist or not, share a reliance on the sort of general principle articulated in the second premise. In non-Vegetabilist design arguments, similarity between human artifacts and natural objects (e.g., cameras and eyes) is used to support inferences about the similarity between creators of the artifacts and the Creator of the natural objects. (We'll examine these arguments further when we discuss the role of purpose-directed explanation in religion and science.) And all Arguments from Design, Vegetabilist or not, begin with readily observed similarities such as those recorded in the first premise. To facilitate understanding, I've given an oversimplified version; the Real Thing is, of course, far more complex, and gives due attention to specifying precisely the relevant kinds of similarities, and to explaining how the presence of these similarities confers on the conclusion a particular numerical likelihood.

Before we proceed, I must hasten to warn against a common and abhorrent confusion: do not confuse Vegetabilism with that most disgusting and barbaric of practices: Vegetarianism! It is better by far to eat meat alone than to destroy that which is most holy by scalding it alive, by amputation, or by drowning in dips – so sayeth the Vegetabilists. (My source here is the authoritative Boulder Vegetable Rights Association, bvra@bvra.org on the Internet.) Of course, this means that severe vitamin deficiencies and even death are the more rule than the exception among Vegetabilists – but, like all deeply religious individuals, they are willing to sacrifice for their faith, and indeed welcome the approach of the vegetative state.

Vegetabilists strive for the Photosynthetic Virtues: the highest compliment one can pay them is to say, "S/he's nothing but a vegetable now." Indeed, there are some violent sects – like the Christian Flagellants of Spain – who inflict severe head injury upon themselves with dried gourds, seeking a more thoroughly vegetative state. (This, by the way, is the origin of the expression, "he's out of his gourd.")

No crude materialism, Vegetabilist theology tells us that the fundamental principle of all growth is the nonmaterial Vegetative Essence, not directly observable but manifest in the natural cycle of germination, growth, renewal, ripening, decay and rotting, and generally, going to seed.

The Vegetabilist Hymnal is small, but growing. Its opus is by St. Frank, "Call Any Vegetable," with its poignant refrain

Rutabaga, Rutabaga,

Rutabaga, Rutabaga,

Rutabay-y-y-y...

To welcome the newborn into the world, they sing "This Bud's for You;" at funerals, the mournful "Yes, We Have No Bananas" is, of course, more appropriate. Meals are begun with loud shouts of "Praise the lard!"

Perhaps the best evidence of its vitality is the proliferation of sects and sayings, most evident in the sunnier climes, especially Southern California, wherein the Vegetabilist Mecca, Orange County, is to be found. (As the note on Arizona law indicates, the political influence of the Vegetabilists has already reached beyond California and is rumored to be headed for Texas.) The basic division among Vegetabilists is between the High Fibers and the Low Fibers. The High Fibers favor natural regularity (see The Songs of St. Frank) and observe the Sacred Rite of the Evacuation. The Low Fibers are led by a self-proclaimed Big Banana, who has been criticized for a "fruitier-than-thou" attitude. Modesty prevents me from discussing in any detail the Cult of the Hot Red Pepper, with its obscenities and chants of "I'm a pepper, you're a pepper." A low tolerance for boredom inhibits discussion of the Reformed Vegetabilists of Southern California and their Salad Bar Sect.

Despite the growth of sects, all Vegetabilists agree on certain fundamental principles, for example, "No additives, no preservatives!" and "Herbicide is genocide!"

You don't have to be a Vegetabilist to see that Vegetabilism is a religion with a peel. Ready to convert?

I hope not. I trust that no one has been tempted by my discussion of Vegetabilism. Even if I had the substantial oratorical skills, charisma, and stamina of contemporary televangelists, I would still not convert anyone (I hope). I suppose that some unfortunate soul who had been temporarily rendered mentally unbalanced by life's stresses might choose to place his faith in Vegetabilism, but we can agree, I think, that his faith would be misplaced, and we would wish him a speedy recovery. So, this story does have a moral: although religion surely involves emotion, there is more to it than that. The choice of where to place one's faith is not an intellectually arbitrary one: as the story of Vegetabilism reminds us, there are cognitive standards that we employ to help ourselves decide what is worthy of religious sentiment and what is not. At least some of our objections to Vegetabilism ought to be of just this sort, even if not all of them are. Several millennia of (Western) theology would serve as an additional reminder of the strong cognitive content of religion, if only more people would study it. As Richard Lewontin remarks in a recent review of Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, "If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn."

To reinforce the point that the choice is not arbitrary, consider a not uncommon sort of occurrence. On reaching adulthood, some people decide to reflect on the beliefs, religious and otherwise, with which they were raised. Although the psychological forces at work in giving someone those beliefs may be evident, the evidence and reasons for continuing to hold those beliefs may not be. One mark of maturity is taking responsibility for your own beliefs and attempting to sort out those worth maintaining from the rest. Such a decision may mark a kind of crisis in the process of maturation, and it can be quite painful; some emerge from it with a renewed and strengthened faith. However it turns out, it ought to be clear to us all that it would be the height of irrationality to decide, say, by the flip of a coin: "Heads it's Christianity, tails it's Islam." The choice is not purely arbitrary.

Nor is the choice a 'purely emotional' one: although emotions play an important role in religion (as in the rest of life), many people care deeply about whether their religious beliefs are true. It may sometimes be that having religious beliefs is comforting (or otherwise beneficial), but that's just one reason among many for having a particular set of them; and, of course, being comfortable is not the sole purpose for having such beliefs: many have been willing to die painfully - e.g., by being crucified or incinerated - for their religious beliefs. Even if the emotional component were decisive, that would not show that religious beliefs were essentially irrational and beyond cognitive assessment; in matters of (strong) emotion, we recognize that some emotional responses are appropriate and rational, and that others are inappropriate and irrational.

So, there is as much reason to think that there are intellectual standards in religion as to think that there are in science. We should not, therefore endorse

Religion is a "matter of the heart" and a "matter of the head."

When we were looking at Scientific Creationists' use of the notion of a Great Design, we considered the following criterion:

It may be tempting to reformulate this as an answer to our current question:

As I've already said, I think that the criticism of Scientific Creationism was misguided, and I think that this separation principle has little if anything going for it. It's worth seeing why it fails.

This proposal tries to distinguish religion from science by subject matter. It says that a certain subject is religion's domain, but is off-limits for science. We are entitled to ask, What is it about this particular subject that renders it off-limits for science? We also need to know exactly what subject is alleged to be off-limits.

I've heard only three answers to the first question. I'll present them and explain why they don't work.

First answer: "Science is based on observation. God is unobserved - you won't find Him staring back down at you through even the largest telescope, since He's a purely spiritual being - so God is not an appropriate subject for science." I have two problems with this defense of the proposal. First, it takes an unduly dismissive attitudes towards the many reports of direct experience of God. Many believers claim to have 'observed' God and often speak eloquently and movingly about their experience. Of course, not every such report should be expected to be veridical, and there's got to be some way of sorting out truth from delusion in this arena of human experience as in all others. So before we accept this testimony we must inquire closely into its credentials. But we really shouldn't pretend it doesn't exist. Second, although there's some truth in the truism, it can also be misleading. I'll bet you are good at finding electrons and getting them to do things for you. Plug your TV into the wall socket, drop the batteries into the Walkperson, and you got all the electrons you need. But no one has ever seen an electron, and no one is ever going to see one: they're just too small. What we can do is to observe the effects that electrons have on things that we can observe, and there is a massively well-confirmed theory of electrons that tells us how to get them to do our bidding. Like many good theories, the theory of electrons postulates the existence of things we don't observe to explain the behavior of things we do observe. And it might be the same with God. Isn't that just what an Argument from Design is intended to show?

Second answer: "Science requires that we do properly controlled experiments. Without proper experimental controls, the results will be meaningless. God is by nature uncontrollable. So God is not fit for scientific investigation." What a confused defense this is! It conflates controlled experiments with controllable phenomena. Astrophysics regularly studies explosions of stars, a phenomenon far too powerful and distant to be under our control. But that doesn't mean that it is impossible to study the stars, though it does make it a lot more difficult. Here at home, a field biologist who's just discovered a new species of beetle in the Costa Rican jungles may work very hard at not exerting any control over it, for fear of contaminating the data about its natural behavior in its native habitat. More generally, most complex systems are well beyond human control, and though this makes science tougher, and calls for great ingenuity in experimental design, lack of control does not make investigation impossible.

Third answer: (a new, improved version of the First) "The trouble with electrons is that they're so small and we're so big. If we could just get small, we could literally get our hands on one and observe it. So electrons are in principle observable. But God is not only unobserved, He's unobservable, given his incorporeal nature and His distance from us in space and time." I doubt that this answer is good electron physics, but never mind that. (It's again unduly dismissive of reports of religious experience.) There is one theory (for which several Nobel Prizes have already been awarded) that says there are particles which it is physically impossible to observe - not only are they unobserved, they are unobservable. This theory, our best current account of the fundamental building blocks of all matter, is so widely accepted that it's often called "The Standard Theory." According to it, particles like protons and neutrons are complex entities made up of three genuinely simple particles, quarks. In polite company, physicists say that quarks are 'confined', that is, unobservable.

Here's an analogy that may help. Suppose I give you a bag of marbles and forbid you to open it. Please tell me what's inside the bag. You can find out a great deal about what's in the bag, including its internal structure and dynamics, by bombarding it with marbles (or even other bags of marbles) and doing a careful analysis of the resulting patterns of scatter. One thing you might find out is that the marbles are joined by very strong rubber bands, and that the harder you try to separate them, the greater the counter-force the rubber band exerts to keep them close. Quarks inside, say, protons, are akin to the tied marbles in the bag. By bombarding protons with other subatomic particles in high energy accelerators and analyzing the resulting scatter, experimental particle physicists can tell a lot about what's inside without being able to pry a quark free. In this case, the theory suffers predictive failure if it does not assume that the quarks are confined.

By the same token, one might postulate an unseen, maybe unseeable, Creator or Designer, if that is important to a good explanation of how things are.

Putting aside all of these observations about unobservables, there is still something wrong with this principle. We can see what it is by pressing the second question about Separation by Reference: Exactly what subject is alleged to be off-limits by the proposal?

If we confine our attention to the most populous religions in the US, then we can give an agreed upon answer. According to the main Western religious traditions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, God has at least seven defining characteristics. The first four derive from his supremacy in four respects. God is said to be supreme in knowledge, power, goodness and existence. So God is omniscient (knows all truths at all times), omnipotent (can do anything consistent with his nature), omnibenevolent (supremely good - there couldn't be a better being, morally), and necessarily existent (depending on nothing and no one for His existence). In addition, these religious traditions say that God is creator of the universe (is causally, as well as morally, responsible for its existence), incorporeal (is not like a large astronomical body in outer space, but a purely spiritual being) and, finally, a characteristic that I suspect you've been taking for granted but which is quite distinctive of these religious traditions: there's exactly one God. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all forms of monotheism.

But, of course, it would be the height of bigotry, narrow-mindedness and provincialism to confine our attention to the most populous religions in the US. There is enormous diversity of religions and religious beliefs. If one counts religious sects, some of which differ sharply, even violently, on matters of religious doctrine, then there are thousands of religions now in existence. A crude grouping might reduce the number to a few score, but no lower. Among the matters these religions disagree about is the proper object of worship. The word "god" (or "God" or some translation thereof) may be used, but what is expressed by it can differ radically from religion to religion. There are religions according to which there are many gods, and not just one - polytheistic rather than monotheistic religions. Polytheistic religions have one advantage over monotheism: they can readily account for evil and disorder in the world as the result of disagreement among less-than-supreme deities; monotheism has a tougher time with the Problem of Evil. Supremacy of other sorts is denied to their object(s) of worship by other religions. There is one Christian sect which maintains that God is a physical object - a certain body. As Rita Gross remarks, "[A] standard dictionary definition of 'religion' as recognition by human beings of a controlling superhuman power entitled to obedience, reverence and worship applies to the main Western traditions, but not Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism or many others." So a crippling defect of this principle is that is ignores the diversity of religions. Now that we have noted this fact, I am not going to harp on it, but you should keep it in mind nevertheless. Obviously, we cannot accept a Separation Principle that consigns to oblivion the religions of hundreds of millions of people. Just because certain religious groups are in the majority in this country, they are not entitled to ignore large religious groups elsewhere. Inevitably, the fact of religious diversity will make finding a satisfactory separation principle far more difficult, since we'll need to say, for example, what it is that Judaism and Buddhism and Jainism have in common in virtue of which they are distinct from science. But there's no point in pretending that our task is any simpler than the relevant facts demand.

If you stay up late enough watching TV on weekends, and you've got cable, you can usually find one of those old, SciFi, B-movies from the 50's or 60's playing on some channel. They are a marvelous repository of stereotypes. Stereotypes are often caricatures, but some caricatures carry a bit of truth - or so some people think. Science and scientists are caricatured in those old movies, and we may be able to find something useful for our present task if we see what they have to say about science.

One of the stock characters is The Mad Scientist. A white, middle-aged, balding male whose costume is a long white lab coat, The Mad Scientist has no interest in the things that give us humanity, is indifferent to natural beauty and cares (if he's even capable of such emotion) only about the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of power. He is conducting a very dangerous experiment that threatens to End the World - and with it, his stereotypically beautiful, young female lab assistant (whose own lab coat is noticeably shorter than his). She tries to stop his nefarious schemes, and is rewarded for her efforts by being tied to a large piece of lab equipment by The Mad Scientist (his only sign of sexual interest in her). Not to worry, though. In comes the tall, dark, stereotypically handsome (and so square-jawed) young male reporter, sees to it that the The Mad Scientist is trapped by his own evil devices, and rescues the young female (damsel in distress) at the Last Possible Moment. (Who says no one writes fairy tales anymore?)

The image of the cold, calculating scientist is an influential and prevalent one. It is, of course, a gross distortion of reality. But it's often thought to contain a grain of truth. Science is interested in Nature, but its attitude towards Nature is a 'purely factual' one. In this sense, science is cold - indifferent to the values that color the world (or so many have said).

The picture we find in religion, stereotypical and actual, is quite different. The literature of religion is full of eloquent expressions of awe, wonder and appreciation of Nature, considered as a product of divine creation. A religious believer coldly indifferent to underlying harmony, beauty and order in Nature would be a very peculiar person, and we might well be skeptical about whether or not such a person was capable of truly religious sentiment.

"What a difference a difference in attitude makes." So let's try:

According to this proposal, religion and science do not differ so much in their subject - in what they talk about - than in how they talk about a common subject, Nature. Before we see whether or not this proposal is true, we need to get clear on what it means. We need to find out which attitude is supposed to be distinctive of religion but missing from science. But even before we do that, we have to guard against a misunderstanding of Separation by Attitude.

To find out whether or not Separation by Attitude is true, we do need to look at what some scientists have said about their own attitudes towards Nature. But we have to be careful not to confuse their attitudes towards science with the attitudes, if any, expressed by science itself. Our question is not whether or not, as a matter of fact, individual scientists may differ in their attitudes from individual believers of one religion or another; clearly, they may differ. What we are concerned about is whether there are particular attitudes built into the very natures of religion or science, attitudes that are essential to what they are, and to how they differ. What individual scientists have to say gives us some evidence relevant to answering this question, but it is science and not them on which we have to remain focussed.

Separation by Attitude is also meant to be indifferent to the reasons for which an attitude is held. The reasons may turn out to be important, but, for the sake of clarity, I am going to split our job into simpler parts. So, if there is a religious attitude naturally associated with the Argument from Design and purpose-directed explanation, we will, for now, pretty much ignore the argument and attend to the attitude.

So is the proposal true? One problem with it is that it is not clear that there is a single attitude, or kind of attitude, that is essential to all religions. Religious writers have been among the most eloquent and passionate in their expressions of admiration for what they take to be the creator(s)' handiwork, but given the enormous diversity of religions on Earth (I know, I promised not to harp on this, but it's important), there may be no one emotional thread running through them all. If some sort of admiration is what is essential, then there is a second problem with the proposed separation principle.

On the Importance of Beauty in Assessing Scientific Theories

It is clear from the writings of scientists that aesthetic virtues are very important in science in judging the relative merits of scientific theories. This often comes as a great surprise to non-scientists, but it is a fact nonetheless. Generally, the greater the scientist, the more highly developed her aesthetic sensibility. Often, when scientists write about preferring the simpler theory, about simplicity as a virtue of theories, what they have in mind may better be expressed by saying that the most beautiful (or, elegant) theory is preferable. It is not possible to give you a deep sense of these virtues -beauty, elegance, harmony, symmetry, etc. - and for their importance in doing science, without going through some scientific theories in much greater detail than I have space for. Usually, it takes a lot of advanced training in a branch of science before you're in a position even to recognize the relevant characteristics, and they're often expressed in complex mathematical forms. I wouldn't even try to accomplish all that here. So I will do what is second best, and quote from the writings of several great physicists.

Weyl did not intend to be taken literally, but he did mean to emphasize the importance of beauty in science. He expressed a view common among scientists: that beauty may help guide theory choice because Nature is profoundly beautiful, and a theory that matches Nature in this way is better than a mismatch. We could find many more such remarks by scientists in every branch of science. There is no reason to doubt either the sincerity or the accuracy of their statements. Although one could write a long book on the 'equation' of beauty and simplicity, it is, I think, clear enough that awe and wonder may be as much a part of science as they are of religion. Certainly, religion has no corner on that market, just as science has no corner on the market of cognitive standards.

Now that we know that religion isn't cognitively empty, that deities are not necessarily off-limits in science, and that science isn't blind to beauty, we can turn to more plausible separation principles.

What may underlie the attraction that many feel for Separation by Standards and Separation by Attitude is a perception that religion is personal in a way that Science is not. Science, some say, has as its goal the systematic acquisition of knowledge about nature, based on careful observation and experiment. The discussion of other separation principles reminds us that religion, too, seeks knowledge about nature, based on careful observation and experiment. [As I reported in discussion of Leibniz and Scientific Creationism, some deeply religious scientists see their systematic search for such knowledge as an investigation of a divine plan; as we'll find when we get to Separation by Explanation and Arguments from Design, the knowledge gained from the search can be put to good theological use.] But when religion seeks knowledge it is also concerned, for example, with securing the individual believer's proper personal relationship to God, and these seem to be very different sorts of goals. Since, presumably, a religion will seek to make this relationship better than it would otherwise be, let's consider:

Although this proposal seems quite promising, I think that it defaults.

One kind of improvement is the acquisition of knowledge, because having knowledge has, in addition to secondary effects, intrinsic value. It is a kind of improvement that is, one might say, the heart and soul of most religions since growing spiritually is learning. Of course, religions aim for lots of kinds of improvement, but a lot of what they aim for fits neatly under the heading of "knowledge," though they differ in the methods they recommend for achieving epistemic improvement, and in their advice about exactly what knowledge to acquire. If, as this suggests, learning is a kind of improvement, then to seek knowledge for its own sake is to seek a kind of improvement, and religion and science don't differ in this way.

What about the proposal's emphasis on the personal? This emphasis is a defect because goals in religion and science are often community goals. To see what this means, we need to talk about what kinds of things religion and science are.

I've already emphasized the difference between a theory and people who advocate or apply it (or, in parapsychology's case, the difference between this branch of inquiry as characterized by certain questions and individual parapsychologists with their attributes). The difference is obvious and important, but I don't want to overemphasize it. There is a great deal more to science than the theories it deals in. There are also the collective practices that constitute those dealings. These include devising and evaluating theories, extending the frontiers of ignorance by finding new phenomena to explain, and communicating the results of all this activity, none of which is typically done by lone individuals.

"Theology" means the systematic study of religious belief, but the term is also used to indicate a particular body of religious beliefs, e.g., Catholic theology or Japanese Buddhist theology, that may be the object of study. In the latter sense of the term, a theology is a theory about whatever the religion in question is concerned with, often, the origin and nature of the universe, including the nature of morality. But just as there is more to science than its theories, there is more to religion than its theologies. There is a complex relationship between theology and the normal practice of the religion, as evidenced, for example, in prescribed religious rituals.

A 1996 appeals court decision (US v. Meyers) gives a helpful list of ten "external signs" that are supposedly symptomatic of, if not essential to, religion (see the Appendix to "School Board Problems" for more information). Paraphrasing the decision, the signs are: being wholly founded or significantly influenced by a deity, teacher, seer, or prophet who is considered to be divine, enlightened, gifted, or blessed; embracing seminal, elemental, fundamental, or sacred writings; designating particular structures or places as sacred, holy, or significant (where these sites often serve as gathering places for believers, including physical structures and natural places); having clergy, ministers, priests, reverends, monks, shamans, teachers, or sages (by virtue of their enlightenment, experience, education, or training, these people are keepers and purveyors of religious knowledge); including some form of ceremony, ritual, liturgy, sacrament, or protocol (where these acts, statements, and movements are prescribed by the religion and are imbued with transcendent significance); having a congregation or group of believers who are led, supervised, or counseled by a hierarchy of teachers, clergy, sages, priests, etc.; celebrating, observing, or marking "holy," sacred, or important days, weeks, or months; prescribing or prohibiting the eating of certain foods and the drinking of certain liquids on particular days or during particular times; prescribing the manner in which believers should maintain their physical appearance or clothing; thinking that they have something worthwhile or essential to offer non-believers, and so attempting to propagate their views and persuade others of their correctness - sometimes called "mission work," "witnessing," "converting," or proselytizing.

With the possible exceptions of regulation of diet and dress (which are not necessary features of religion, either), there are striking similarities with science: embracing seminal or fundamental, writings.; designating particular structures (labs) or natural places (the field) as significant; having (tenured) teachers who, by virtue of their experience, education, or training, keep and purvey knowledge; including some form of ceremony, ritual or protocol (PhD orals, grant-seeking, peer evaluation); having a group which is led, supervised, or counseled by a hierarchy of teachers (as in universities); observing or marking important days, weeks, or months (the Annual Professional Convention, the Decade of the Brain, the International Geophysical Year, etc.); thinking that they have something worthwhile or essential to offer non-scientists, and so attempting to propagate their views and persuade others of their correctness (in teaching and through popularization and lobbying). Even diet and dress can be remarkably uniform within a scientific specialty, especially in large gatherings (e.g., professional meetings) - so much so that even if there are no explicit regulations, discipline-specific social forces do seem to be at work. (Joke alert!) How all these activities should be carried out is closely related to, but not determined by, the particular theories current in science or a branch of science.

There appear to be deep, complex similarities between scientific theory and (normal) scientific practice, on the one hand, and theology and (prescribed) religious behavior, on the other. When a particular theology incorporates a specific scientific theory, it will be the "deepest similarity," namely, identity.

Because of these shared complexities, it can be very difficult to figure out exactly what a theory (or theology) and its associated norms of evaluation and application are. Is Professor Smythe really applying special relativity? misapplying it? applying another theory? Is Reverend Browne really a Baptist? a member of distinctive subgroup? a heretic? You need to find representatives whose activities, thoughts and behavior accord with the relevant norms since the norms are rarely spelled out. Even when an attempt at authoritative codification is made, you've got to be able to find the authority and to learn how to read their code, and since you're trying to discover what the norms and theories are, this can be pretty tricky. Your task is to find a good theory about what the theory is, so you face all the usual difficulties in finding explanations for complex phenomena, where part of the task is to distinguish more from less representative examples. As usual, if you're not careful, you'll end up generalizing from the acts of unrepresentative individuals, and biased stereotypes can result. (In the US, public debate about religion has been skewed by taking a few vocal individuals as representative of a larger group - taking conservative, Orthodox Christians as paradigmatic Christians or, more broadly, religious believers, for example.)

Acknowledging these complexities makes the study of religion and the study of science ("Religious Studies" and "Science Studies") difficult, but not impossible. Such studies would miss their subjects if they focused on one of theory or practice to the virtual exclusion of the other.

Talk of "community" in religion and in science can thus describe these important complexities characteristic of the kinds of things they are.

Is it even possible for there to be a religion that's thoroughly "anti-community," perhaps even a religion of one (person) forbidden to seek interpersonal relations of any sort? (-Ultimate Hermitism) Even if there could be a "religion of one," it's clear that for some religions, the basic unit is a group (e.g., the congregation, the adherents to the faith) and the religious group's well-being and improvement is paramount. The ideal may also be for members to benefit from their relationship to the group, but some religious ideals require self-sacrifice in practice. And if one person suffers or dies so that the others may live or live better, she might, according to her religion's tenets, achieve excellence or salvation or eternal reward. But everyone's benefiting is consistent with the purpose of the martyr's actions being the improvement of the group's status. A necessary consequence of the community's improvement might be the improvement of the individual, without the latter's being the purpose of the improvement.

Science seems about as personal as religion is in this way. Learning (including learning what's unknown) is the improvement that the scientific communities seek. Individual scientists may benefit or may make great sacrifices in the process, but the purpose is to increase the community's knowledge. A manic-depressive psychiatrist who tests a potentially toxic, new-found cure on himself risks sacrifice for the sake of knowledge and personal improvement. Acting in accord with a scientist's professional obligations, he seeks to improve the state of knowledge.

We now come to our first example of a potentially insightful Separation Principle. (It seems to be endorsed by no less an intellect than Einstein, in his "Science and Religion.")

Notice that this proposal does not claim that religion alone tells us about values; it allows for the existence of other sources. It does say that science is different from religion in this respect.

Second, we have to understand the word "ought" (or "value") correctly here: there are several different uses of it, only one of which is relevant. One kind of "ought" is an "ought" of practical advice, a prudential ought: "if you want to rob a bank, then you ought to use Uzi's," "if you want the house to be well-insulated, then use 2 x 6's, and not 2 x 4's." We mean simply to give a bit of practical advice about the best means for achieving a certain goal, and intend no evaluation of the goal itself. Another kind of ought is an etiquette ought, or the ought of Emily Post: "You ought to place the fork on the left of the dinner plate," "You ought not belch loudly after meals." This kind of "ought" tells you how to conform to local customs. (I'm told that in some locales, belching loudly after meals is taken as a compliment to the host. I know some people who should consider moving there.) Maybe it is a kind of prudential "ought". There is also a thought "ought" - an "ought" of 'right thinking': "you ought to rid your (arithmetic) beliefs of inconsistencies", "if you have no independent evidence for a belief, then you ought not hold it". These three contrast with the moral "ought": "You ought not torture innocent infants", "You ought to do unto others as you would have others do unto you (unless you're a sadomasochist)", "One ought to treat people with respect and dignity", "You ought to keep your promises, but if you break a promise, you ought to apologize".

I assume that there are objective truths of morality, that it is not all 'merely a matter of opinion'. One very bad reason sometimes given for thinking that 'it's all relative', is that there is a lot of (sometimes very persistent) disagreement about moral issues. But that doesn't show that there are no truths of morality. Disagreement can come about for two other sorts of reasons, consistent with there being objective moral truths: it may not be clear what the truth is, though there is one there to be discovered; and there may be agreement on fundamental principles, but disagreement about how to apply them. One good reason for thinking that there are truths about what we ought to do and about what we ought not to do, is that we know some of them, a fact that we forget when we focus, quite understandably, on the unresolved cases. But we can all think of clear examples, where it's not 'just a matter of opinion': kindness to a sick child that aids his recovery and harms no one, is a tolerably clear example of a right act; the Nazi extermination by torture of over six million human beings, including many thousands of infants and children, was clearly wrong. I trust that you are not inclined to assert, "Although I don't go in for infant skull smashing myself, Hitler and his henchmen thought it was right - it fit in with their 'value system' - so it was what they ought to have done. OK for them, not-OK for me. But we're all OK."

So I assume both that there are truths about morality, and that we sometimes know them. This is not, of course, to say that we get it right most of the time, that it is easy to get it right, or that we tend to answer the important moral questions correctly.

These two assumptions, which ought to be uncontroversial, create a problem for the separation principle. A statement is true if it accurately describes a fact. So, if there are (knowable) truths about morality, then there are facts about morality; and if there are facts about morality, then they are parts of how things actually are. A list of facts about the world might contain statements like these:

But the separation principle says that science attempts to discover facts, and now we are reminded that among the facts are moral facts.

There's an obvious response to this obvious problem: what's intended is a distinction between two kinds of facts, moral and non-moral, and science is concerned with the latter alone. This is a good first response, but it has to be treated carefully here. We don't want to render the proposal empty by simply stipulating

so we need some independent way to characterize the overall difference between moral and non-moral. Let's look at two contrasting approaches to the analysis of the meaning of moral terms. Then we'll be able to see the main weakness for Separation by Fact and Value.

Two Approaches to Analysing Moral Terms (after Feldman)

It will be convenient if we focus on some one moral term. It's grammatically simpler to talk about "good" than to talk about "ought", so that's what I'll do. The two approaches are Ethical Naturalism and Ethical Anti-Naturalism. Oddly, it's easiest to present the "anti" view first.

Let's begin by distinguishing between two different sorts of characteristics. Suppose I ask you to list some properties that this book has. You're likely to mention its shape, weight, color, perhaps something about the materials in it (paper, ink, etc.). If you want to be very thorough, you might do some chemical tests on the ink, or even check for radioactive isotopes. In doing all this, you are using your five senses, sometimes by extending their reach with scientific equipment, to discern what you can about the object. Call something a natural property if it's a characteristic that you can detect by using your five senses, possibly augmented by extra equipment.

According to Ethical Anti-Naturalism, goodness is a real, objective property of objects and actions, but there is no scientific or observational method that can even so much as help us to determine whether a particular thing or action has it. Goodness is not a natural property. Nor is it analysable as some cluster of natural properties. According to this view, if two individuals disagree about whether or not a certain thing or action is good, they may be unable to come to any agreement, but exactly one of them is right, though there is simply no way to determine who it is. According to Ethical Anti-Naturalism, goodness is indefinable, unanalysable, and undetectable.

Ethical Naturalists find this view unacceptable because it makes moral knowledge impossible in two ways. We want our children to acquire the concept of goodness. The psychology of learning and concept acquisition is a big, complicated subject, but in many cases, we begin with examples. If you want your daughter to know what "red" means, you'll show her lots of red things (and tell her they're red) and you'll show her lots of nonred things (and tell her they're not red), and, with amazing speed, she'll pick up on the relevant difference (if you choose your examples judiciously; obviously, if every red thing you show her is also round, you're going to confuse her). Nothing like this can work if goodness is a nonnatural property, since nothing your daughter can do with her senses (even if she drags in equipment from the lab) will allow her to detect the goodness in the fifty thousand examples you show her. So, if Ethical Anti-Naturalism were correct, no one could learn what goodness is.

I've sometimes been offered the Revelation Defense of Ethical Anti-Naturalism: No one can know any moral truths if they are not revealed, directly or indirectly, by God. I have two questions for anyone who makes this claim. Isn't it possible that an isolated community, deprived of contact with the Bible or other scriptures, could develop some appreciation of moral truths; e.g., mightn't they come to see that the wanton torturing of infants is wrong? Second, supposing that some fundamental moral principles are revealed or instilled (in all human beings?) by God, we will need to be able to apply them to individual cases. Won't that require an ability to perceive goodness in particular things? Unless a special mental power of moral intuition is built into us by God, it seems that we must be able to perceive goodness in things and acts. If there is such a power of moral intuition, how does it work, why does it sometimes fail so miserably, and why is there so much disagreement about moral matters?

So, a second way in which Ethical Anti-Naturalism makes moral knowledge impossible is this: if, by some miracle, you could get the concept of goodness into your mind, there'd be no way for you to apply it to particular cases to tell whether it was present or absent.

Naturalists claim instead that goodness can, after all, be tied down to what we can perceive or feel. The Ethical Naturalists claim that goodness can be explained by the use of terms that each express an ordinary, observable property. Different Naturalists have different proposals about how exactly to define or analyse goodness, but they all agree that it can be analyzed, and analyzed purely in terms of natural properties.

There are many good books on ethics, and I leave it to them to delve into the many Naturalist analyses. For our limited purposes, it will be enough to examine just one suggestion about how science might be a source for knowledge of moral truths.

Science, Normal Function and the Well-Being of Human Beings

Given two highly plausible premises, we can argue for the moral relevance of science.

(i) What is good for an individual, what constitutes her well-being, what she ought to do, and what she ought to be, all depend directly upon her nature. It is almost a commonplace that what is good for human beings depends on human nature, that their well-being is determined by what kind of being they are. For example, what kind of government and society human beings ought to have depends upon what their natures are. Or, to take a more obvious case, torturing people is not good because it harms them; and it harms them because of the nature they have. We can put this same homey truth in other words: there are certain conditions and states it is normal for a human being to be in, states and conditions conducive to their well-being; some departures from normal function are not good, and ought to be avoided if well-being is to be maintained. (Let's put aside questions about supernormal function.)

(ii) It is possible to discover, by means and methods familiar in science, what is and what is not normal for a human being. How an organism functions normally is something that biologists are often quite successful in discovering. There seems to be no reason to believe that medical doctors and psychologists have not or can not discover a great deal about normal human function, or human well-being. I must stress here that I am not talking simply about average function. There is a difference bewteen normal and average: even if a whole population of organisms suffered from some sort of harmful disease, (e.g., an unusually bad flu epidemic) we would say that, on the average, their function was then below normal. It is normalcy in this optimum, well-being sense, as well as statistical averages, that science can discover. Based on these two plausible assumptions, we can give an argument for the moral relevance of science:

In the second premise, some form of Ethical Naturalism is assumed to be correct. It is a substantive assumption. But it certainly seems to be true. It may even be difficult to imagine how human well-being could otherwise be discovered. Nevertheless, I would mislead you if I didn't tell you that this argument, and the Ethical Naturalism it is based on, are highly controversial. So I won't pretend to have refuted Separation by Fact and Value. But I think that I have raised some serious questions about its adequacy.

What of Einstein's proposal? (Do I think I'm smarter than he was?!) He took the rather strong position that conflict between religion and science is impossible; here's his reason:

He does, however, see the need for "strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies":

What is Einstein proposing here?: he is proposing a redefinition of religion and science, how they should be seen, and not primarily how they are or have been seen (-as he implies in his historical remarks, 109). He wants to redraw the map. His proposal is not without its odd consequences. On his view, Marxism, with its emphasis on higher goals, would be at least part religion. He also proposes a redistribution of labor and resources: to remove from religion much of its traditional explanatory role, and to give that job to science alone. So, at best, Einstein is offering a personal vision of science and religion, and proposals for changes in, and reconciliation between, the two. (His vision is not unique to him, as he notes. A much more sophisticated version of it is defended at length by Robert John Ackermann, who accepts Marxism as a religion.) There is nevertheless reason to treat his proposal with some caution: there may be more fact in function (goal and purpose) than he allows. And even if the job of explaining is divided between the two, religions will still want to say a great deal about "facts and relationships between facts", on any reasonable interpretation of "fact".

So I think that we need to keep looking for a separation principle. Next, everyone's favorite: religion is based on faith, but science is not.

We come now to the most popular separation principle of all.

Many religious writers have said that religion requires a 'leap of faith', that religious belief is religious precisely because it is held in the absence of proof or supporting observations; in fact, it may be held so strongly as to persist despite a great deal of contrary evidence. We might even say, echoing some of these writers, that a faith untested by reason is a faith not worth having.

In our examination of this most popular proposal, we must check on three things: first, we have to be clear on what it is to have a belief on faith; then, second, we need to ask why faith is thought to be essential to religion; and third, we need to make sure that the principle really marks a difference between religion and science. We have already found reason to think that the proposal is overstated. In our discussion of Scientific Creationism, we were reminded that inconclusive justification is the best that is even hoped for in science - so it does not seem to require proof. Also, given how indirect the connection between theory and observation is, given how remote observational evidence may be from many theoretical claims it helps to justify, there may be more room for observation in religion, and more similarity between it and science, than a distorted picture of science would allow. Let's drop the second part of Separation by Foundation and focus on faith.

The Evidentialist Objection to Religious Belief

It's useful to consider an old, familiar objection to belief in the existence of God. For the sake of simplicity, I will now narrow the focus to the God of Western theology. Let's begin with an analogy.

Consider the peculiar case of Mr.Maxwell Jones, multi-millionaire. Mr.Jones has become fantastically wealthy by playing the stock market. Beginning with an investment of $25, he has amassed a multi-million dollar fortune. How did he do it? What is the secret of his success? He offers to share his secret with you. "It's all in this book" he says, the Book of Fluctuations. The Book, he tells you, was a gift from beings from another planet, a race of supereconomists who amuse themselves by observing the economies of other worlds and finding the fundamental principles that govern them. They themselves are too rich to care about making more, and it pleases them to give whatever they find out to a Select Few on each planet they study. They came to Max one day in a vision on Cablevision, and soon after the Book arrived in the mail, post paid. Ever since, he's been on easy street. You are pretty skeptical - after all, all you've got is Max's word on this - but he is very rich, so you decide to take a look at the Book. What you find is deeply disappointing: a bunch of vague financial platitudes, open to a variety of interpretations. Instead of something really useful, like "Buy IBM at 104 on October 15, 1999; sell at 108 on October 23, 2001.", you find instead such statements as "Buy low, sell high", "Avoid excessively large risks" and "High tech stocks are risky during the end of the Second Millenium." All good advice, but not the detailed stuff of real get-rich-quick schemes. Max, you say, money's not the only thing you're full of.

As you first listened to Max, you had clearly in mind what appears to be an eminently sensible principle for the conduct of your cognitive affairs:

But you soon brought in another principle which seems equally worthy of assent:

Both of these principles seem eminently sensible. And they direct you not to believe Max's story. It's more reasonable to suppose that he's a rich nut.

Mustn't the same principles apply to the claims of religious believers? Surely, one might say, it is the height of irrationality to accept claims for which one has no evidence. And if the claims are both vague and extraordinary, as some of the Bible's claims are, isn't it your epistemic duty to demand a great deal of evidence before you believe what it offers? There is, I think, a case to be made for the extraordinariness of the belief that God exists. We are used to this belief, the overwhelming majority of us accept it, and even the atheists and agnostics among us are quite familiar with the belief. Suppose, however, that someone grew up in isolation from religious belief, and then enters our society. This would be very unusual but not, I think, impossible. Mr. Theistically Ignorant (luckily, his name is aptly descriptive for our purposes) is walking down the street one day, minding his own business, when you, acting on a deeply felt obligation to prosleytize for your religion, introduce yourself to him and say, "I believe that there's one and only one omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, necessarily existent, incorporeal creator of the universe, and I want you to believe this, too." Mr. T would be within his cognitive rights to ask for some evidence. We'd not fault him if he responded, "Very interesting, but what justification can you offer me for that remarkable assertion." Indeed, we should fault him if he did not express some skepticism. This helps to motivate

This is an agnostic's favorite argument; atheists find it too weak. Coupled with the principle that one ought not believe what is irrational to believe, this argument would lead to the conclusion that one ought not believe that God exists.

There are two premises here, and both have been attacked. I am going to wait until Separation by Explanation to attack the second premise, though attack it I will. Here, the flaws in the first premise are relevant.

Is it irrational to believe where one lacks evidence? It is often irrational to do so. The story of Maxwell Jones reminds us of this. But there are homier examples, too. If I get it into my head to believe that wearing white socks leads to success, without having any evidence at all, then, surely, I am being irrational. But is this always the way it is? Let's consider a third example. I meet with one of the students about his test grade, and I come to believe that he is angry. "Why do you think he's angry?" you ask, in a skeptical and challenging mood What's your evidence? I respond by reporting the usual sorts of evidence: he shouted obscenities at me and made unkind remarks about my parentage, he waved a baseball bat in my direction, he hopped up and down, etc. This, of course, is usually enough to settle the matter; usually, no further evidence is demanded. But, pressing me further, you ask about my claim that he shouted at me. I respond that I heard him shouting, and he mentioned my name, and there was no one else around, and I remember all this clearly and vividly. "What makes you think that you heard him shouting?" you ask. I respond that it seemed then to me that I heard a voice emanating from the neighborhood of his mouth, and have a clear, present memory impression of that audio-visual perception. "What makes you think that that is how it now seems to you?" ask you. At this point, I get angry, hop up and down etc.. You have outrun my patience. "I don't have any further evidence," I say. "What's more, I don't need any: this is how things now seem to me to be; and for how things now seem to me to be, I need no justification. Beliefs like these are self-evident, are not the sort of thing about which I could be mistaken, so I don't need evidence for them. So your last request is not reasonable. Get lost before I hit you with my baseball bat." (I don't really have a baseball bat. I do have a crow bar.)

This story brings out two important points:

First, justification must come to an end somewhere. This is not just because we get tired, or our patience runs out. It is because there must be beliefs that need no independent justification, if any justification is to be possible. Such beliefs we can call foundational, because they lie at the foundation of all our knowledge and rational belief. It is on such a basis that all of our other beliefs rest: all the beliefs, that is, that are justified or known for us at any one time, all beliefs that we are rational in holding on to. It is because the 'higher' beliefs are linked in the appropriate ways to the lower ones that we can be justified in believing anything at all. This view is, naturally enough, called "Foundationalism," and has a long history, dating back about 2500 years. It is difficult to resist.

The second point of our story is this: whatever else the foundation includes, it will surely include beliefs about how things then seem to the believer. In order to get clearer on what this means, I want to say a bit about the most famous argument in philosophy. It was given a few hundred years ago by our friend Descartes. He himself did not buy the argument's conclusion, but he thought that it was useful for getting at some truths about Foundationalism.

First, however, I need to run a sanity check on you. I'd like you to bring to mind someone you really care about, whose well-being really matters to you. Now,what do you think of the following scenario: you arrive home one day to find your loved one (I'll write "she") deep in anguished thought. She says that she's now convinced that it's all just a dream. "Sure, it looks like I'm here on the couch, talking with you, but I'm really back in my room, fast asleep, in bed, dreaming it all up. And it's been that way for quite a while. You're just a figment of my imagination." Wouldn't you take that as an emergency, and try to get help for your loved one? After all, such a belief is obviously crazy. Anyone who takes it seriously does not deserve points for philosophical insight; they need, perhaps, a long rest in a quiet place. Consider a slightly different scenario. This time, your loved says she thinks it all might well be a dream - "maybe, maybe not - I'm no longer sure." Even this much of a loss of one's grip on the difference between dreams and reality is a sign that your loved one needs help. This, too, is a sign of serious mental malfunction. I hope all that seems right to you.

Of all the sources of information about the world - testimony of others, memory, present use of the senses - the last is clearly the most trustworthy. Among our least trustworthy sources of experience are dreams. If we think that an experience is just dreamed up, we know not to trust it as a guide to how the world is then. But, Descartes asks, how can you now be sure that your present experience isn't just dreamed up? And if you can't be sure, then there is no reason to trust it as a guide to how the world is now. Since present sensory experience is rendered suspect in this way, and it is the most trustworthy source of information, it seems to follow that we can never know anything. Obviously, it would be cheating to rely on less reliable sources - memory and testimony - to shore up the most reliable source, so relying on those sources is 'against the rules'.

As Descartes observed, the first premise is overstated and so false. There are things about which you can be certain even if you are crazy enough to be convinced that your whole life's a dream. Even if you think that your just dreaming up this whole book - what a nightmare!- and so don't know that there really is a book that you are now seeing, you can still be absolutely certain that it now seems to you that you are seeing a book. In general, certain statements about how things seem to you to be now will be self-evident to you. Let's say

Statements that are in this way self-evident you can make true simply by thinking that they are true, and so you could not be wrong about them. About the current, conscious contents at the surface of your own mind, at least, you are infallible - as long as you confine myself to mere appearance, and don't stick your neck out on matters of mental causation.

This definition is so strict that even your own body is beyond self-evidence. Consider, for example, your belief (indeed, your knowledge) that you have a nose.

The medical literature is full of case histories of people with nervous system malfunction so severe that they make mistakes about the presence or absence of parts of their own bodies. In phantom limb pain, an amputee may continue to feel pain as if it is in her missing limb, even though she can see quite clearly that the limb is gone. Some stroke victims lose all sense of ownership and all voluntary control over a limb, sometimes asking for its removal from the hospital bed because, after all, it must belong to someone else. It's as if the brain maintained a map of the body that can get out of synch with the actual state of the body.

So imagine that you've been in an accident, and you're just awakening from anaesthesia after surgery. You take inventory: "Two legs, two arms, and, thank goodness, I still have my nose." But, despite heroic efforts, your nose was too badly damaged to save, and the surgeons were forced to do an emergency nosectomy. You are now noseless, though you don't yet know it. The bare conceivability of such mistakeness about your own nose is enough to deprive your belief "I now have a nose" of self-evident status. From the perspective of self-evidence, even your own body is in the external world, outside your mind.

Among the foundational beliefs are surely the classically self-evident ones. But do any other beliefs deserve to be foundational as well? Classical Foundationalism takes the highly restrictive view that the classically self-evident statements are the only ones that belong in the foundation.

Classical Foundationalism thus sets the highest possible standards for the foundational and other beliefs: they must be immune to doubt or error.

Classical Foundationalism has been the object of many attacks. Alvin Plantinga presents one of them in "Is Belief in God Properly Basic?" He says that Classical Foundationalism is self-referentially incoherent. His objection is an ingenious one. Consider the statement (CF), which is Classical Foundationalism itself. Presumably, its proponents hold that it is possible to know that their view is correct. But then, according to Classical Foundationalism, (CF) must be either self-evident or derivable with certainty from self-evident statements. It is clearly not self-evident, nor does there appear to be any hope of deriving it from a bunch of statements about how things now appear to me to be. So, according to Classical Foundationalism, it itself is unknowable or unjustifiable.

Of course if Classical Foundationalism is false, and we consider that fact, it would be irrational to hold it. Either way, Classical Foundationalism seems to be a view that it would be irrational to hold. It presents us with the very odd spectacle of a theory of rationality that says to you, "Don't believe me. Why, you'd have to be nuts to believe me!"

This argument, as well as common sense, suggest that Classical Foundationalism is too restrictive in setting irrationally high standards for rational belief: it shuts the door on any number of perfectly reasonable foundational beliefs that, although not classically self-evident, are fit for inclusion in the foundation. So, we might also object to Classical Foundationalism in this second way: There are many possibilities that might interfere with our justification. The dream hypothesis is one we've seen already. You might like to entertain yourself by imagining others. For example consider the possibility that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrients, and that the Mad Scientist has stuck electrodes in your brain to make you think that you're embodied and reading a book. But unless you have some compelling and specific reason to take that possibility seriously in a given situation, it should not be allowed to interfere with your justification: some possible alternatives are normally irrelevant and (thought-) ought to be ignored. It is possible to get into abnormal situations - you suddenly are told by a reliable source that the water supply has been contaminated by hallucinogens, and you begin to wonder how much of the day really happened - but in such situations we typically know what to do to check on the abnormalities and to discover when they're no longer an issue.

We began with the question: do we always need evidence for rational belief? We saw that in some cases - the classically self-evident ones - independent evidence is not needed. We have also seen that knowledge and justified belief have a structure described by Foundationalism: some beliefs are justified because they rest on yet other beliefs, but there must be an end to requests for justification; they terminate in beliefs that need no independent justification. And we have discovered that the foundation must contain more than the classically self-evident beliefs. Let's call this, by way of summary, Common Sense Foundationalism. What has all this to do with faith?

To have faith in something is to make it foundational. It is not because we can provide further evidence for them that we have faith in them. It is because they need no independent justification. In this way, faith can gain intellectual respectability by associating with all those other common sensical beliefs, like "I have two hands" and "there's a book I'm reading now". For, as we have already discovered, the foundation must be made thicker if it is to sustain the weight it needs to bear, and we're going to have to accept some such common sensical statements without justification anyway. Plantinga suggests that among the beliefs in the thickened foundation of a theist may be some religious beliefs; e.g., "God forgives me", "God is to be worshipped", "God has created the universe and all around me", etc. As he puts it, belief in God is "properly basic". Let's call his view "Theistically Thick Foundationalism".

Of course, on this view, one may not be able to give an airtight proof that God exists - but the same can be said, for example, of your belief that there are people in the room with you, or that you are now reading a book. There is little to be done, and normally nothing that needs to be done, against the Dream Hypothesis except to assume that the properly basic beliefs somehow get beyond it, and this supposition seems eminently rational. So the Evidentialist Objection to Belief in God turns out to have a false first premise. In some cases, believing without proof or evidence is quite rational, and belief in God may be one of them. Plantinga offers the theist a rather clear way to characterize faith and to make it intellectually respectable. He can thus explain why the numerous attempts to prove the existence of God are not necessary: they are attempts to prove what needs no proof. He even gives believers a way of making good use of religious experience: statements of such experience can be properly basic as well, fitting as they do with similar beliefs in a theistically thick foundation.

Plantinga's view is not without its problems, and, characteristically, he is among the first to point them out. The main problem is, how does one rationally decide in general what to include in the foundations? There must be some constraints, unless 'anything goes' - and that would be irrational indeed. On what principled grounds can one charge an adherent of Vegetabilism, or Mr. Maxwell Jones, of cognitive irresponsibility, while keeping foundationalism safe for Western theology? What reason can be given for preferring the Bible to the Book of Fluctuations, or to Vegetabilist scripture? Plantinga's response is about two books long, wholly appropriate given the depth and difficulty of the question. But since this difficulty does not threaten Plantinga's proposed characterization of faith, I leave it to you to read what Plantinga has to say.

Now that we know what faith is, we can evaluate Separation by Foundation, and we can see quite clearly that it is false. If accepting something on faith is including it in the foundations, then it is clear that everyone accepts a great deal on faith, scientists doing science included. They do, of course, accept the testimony of their fellow scientists on many matters - not every claim made in the journals gets checked before being accepted. Even in those cases where checks are made, where, for example, experiments are repeated, scientists do not allow themselves to be taken in by Classical Foundationalism, not even when they are doing perceptual psychology. We would rightly think a scientist crazy if he began to raise serious questions about the existence of his laboratory or co-workers. Science may move beyond common sense, but it has no alternative to starting with it. Scientists, like the rest of us rational believers, have no choice but to accept a great deal without proof or justification. So accepting things, even important things, without proof, marks no difference between science and religion. It may be that what is accepted in this way, on faith, is different in science and religion, but that's tantamount to admitting that Separation by Foundation is false (-since it says that it is how statements are accepted, not what they say, that matters), and the difference lies elsewhere. Perhaps it does. Many theists have thought that the best response to the Evidentialist Objection is to refute its second premise by producing the evidence. We will consider what they have to say next.

In considering the Evidentialist Objection to the belief that God exists, I presented the evidentialist premise that there isn't adequate evidence for God's existence, either because there is no such evidence, or because there is some evidence, but that it is not sufficiently strong or compelling evidence. I want now to look at a direct response to this premise, one of the most famous and widely honored arguments for the existence of God: the Argument from Design, or Teleological Argument. ("Teleological" comes from Greek roots meaning, roughly, purpose-directed.) According to the various versions of this argument, there is compelling evidence of God's existence because we can see God's purposes and design in many parts of the universe, and in the universe itself, considered as a whole. We've already met this kind of argument in Plutarch's Purpose Argument, concerning extraterrestrial life, but it's so important, it's worth going over in more detail. Probably the best discussion of the argument in a religious context was given during the late 18th century by the British philosopher and historian David Hume, in his beautifully written Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. We can gain a better appreciation of this argument if we begin with bits and pieces of the universe, and work our way up to the universe itself.

Recently, I was on a walk in the woods with my dog, Snickers, and my friend, Sam the Skeptic. (Perhaps you already suspected that I have an odd social life.) At one point in our perambulations, Sam tripped. I retrieved the object over which he tripped and examined it for a few minutes. I noted that it had many parts, among them a viewfinder, a lens, a focusing-ring, various buttons and levers, etc. After a few minutes of non-expert examination - I'm no optical engineer - I was able to see the soundness of:

This seems a perfectly reasonable way to argue. Precisely parallel arguments could be, and are, made about any number of other familiar objects.

Living up to his name, and feeling pretty annoyed about having been tripped, Skeptical Sam objected in three ways to the argument:

"See this lever on the right. It's twisted and no longer works. The camera has a broken part, so it is not likely to have been designed." But this is not a good objection; perhaps the object was broken in the factory, or in shipping, or by being abused by its previous, obviously quite careless, owner.

"There's a little black button here on the side of the lens. Push it, and nothing happens. The camera has a useless part, so it is not likely to have been designed." This is not a good objection, either; perhaps there was an error in the manufacturing process, or it's the designer's idea of a joke.

"It's all just a cosmic accident. Camera molecules drifting through the atmosphere happened to glom together here on the forest floor. The camera came to be as it is where it was purely by chance, so it is not likely to have been designed." Ha! This is the worst objection of all; the possibility it mentions (if it's even a possibility) is so unlikely that we need not take it seriously.

The Camera Argument is safe from these objections, and appears to be a perfectly good way to reason.

The 18th century theologian, William Paley, wrote that "the surest cure for atheism is contemplation of the human eye". (Natural theology, or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity) The eye is certainly a marvelous object, in many ways superior to cameras. To cite a very few respects in which it is superior: color distortion is a major problem in lens design, costing huge sums of money and lots of computer time, but eyes are virtually free of chromatic aberration. The very young daughter of a friend once decided to take some pictures in her wading pool with his very expensive 35mm camera, so she immersed it in the water and began clicking away. When she was finished, she gently towelled it off, and put it bakc on the shelf - where its guts rusted. Unlike cameras, eyes are safely submersible in water. If it's the right kind of water, it's even good for eyes to be under it. Unlike cameras, eyes are to a remarkable extent self-repairing, as I discovered after my daughter poked me in the right eye when I carelessly got too close to her waving hands while changing her diapers one day twelve and half years ago. The emergency room doctor told me that my corneal abrasion would heal within hours, as it did, and that they saw several fathers every week for similar injuries. So not only are eyes similar in purpose to cameras, they do a better job in many ways, and are more complex and more highly, even hierarchically, organized. And the Camera Argument appears to run every bit as smoothly if we replace "camera" in it by "eye".

Notice also that the three bad objections that Skeptical Sam made to the Camera Argument are every bit as bad as objections to the Eye Argument. Some eyes are 'broken' (malfunction), but that does not show that they aren't designed. Even if there were useless parts on some eyes - a bit of tissue dangling by the side, doing nothing for your appearance - that would not be evidence against design. And, of course, it is preposterous to suppose that eye molecules, drifting through space, coincidentally came together in the two holes so conveniently located in your head. We can be confident that the eye did not come to be as it is by chance.

Once we see this kind of argumentation, it is not hard to extend it to larger, more complex objects. Wherever there is the right sort of resemblance or similarity between objects that we know to have been designed, and various 'natural' objects, we can infer the existence of an intelligent designer.

In this case, conjectures about the relevant purpose, or purposes, or harder to come by, but, as I pointed out when we discussed Plutarch's Purpose Argument, knowing which purpose(s) is not essential for the argument to have force.

One common sort of objection to this argument and the Eye Argument is that they ignore cosmology and evolutionary biology. We have alternative accounts of both the evolution of the universe and the evolution of the eye, the objector says, and so we need not suppose that the eye or the universe are designed; in fact, we know that they were not, since we have these correct, alternative scientific explanations. This sort of reply is rather odd. For it might seem that far from discrediting these purpose-directed arguments, they provide more support for them. Although these arguments are stated as arguments about particular objects - eye and universe - precisely analogous arguments could be made about processes. We often do find it convenient to describe complex processes by breaking them down into parts, usually called "stages". We can therefore observe about the evolution of the eye and of the universe that they are production processes that resemble the production processes of human manufacturing. Far from detracting from these arguments, this objection can be reinterpreted to yield additional evidence for the existence of purposefully directed patterns in nature. It is somewhat puzzling that believers do not react in this way to evolutionary theory, and instead sometimes react with fear. What keeps them from saying that science describes the production process in exquisite detail?

[The claim that 'there must be something that started it all' is the basis of a less compelling argument than these purpose-directed ones. Such cosmological arguments throw away information about natural patterns and processes, and try to scrape by with the mere fact of the existence of the universe, ignoring the many subtle complexities that they could instead put to good use.]

But there is a yet stronger version of the argument from design, presented by Plantinga. In order to state it, it will be useful to introduce a standard way of stating such arguments about likelihood. Such arguments are called "inductive arguments", and the arguments from design are among them. Let's consider a simple example. Suppose that I stand outside a gold mine, examining chunks of ore as they come off the conveyor belt. I have examined the first 1000 chunks roll off the belt, and have found them to be gold; I conclude that the next chunk to roll off the assembly line will be a chunk of gold. Let C be the class of all conveyor belt items, and G be the property of being gold. Now every item to come off the belt about which I have the relevant knowledge is in fact a chunk of gold. So

There are three fundamental components in this sort of inductive argument: a reference class, a sample property, and a sample class. Here, the reference class is C, the class of all conveyor belt items; G, the property of being gold, is the sample property; and those members of C which we have examined and know whether or not they have G, constitute the sample class. So what we do is to examine members of the reference class to find out whether or not they have the sample property; the items thus examined form the sample class. If every one of the items about which you have made a determination has the sample property, then you have strong support for your claim that the next member will, as well.

In the case of the Argument from Design, the reference class is the class of all things that exhibit 'curious adaptation of means to ends' in Hume's phrase (A), and the sample property is being the product of intelligent design (D). We do not know of any member of class A that it does not have D: even if we knew that a thing was not designed by human beings, we do not know that God did not design it, unless we already know that God did not design the universe (in which case it would be pointless to consider the argument from design). Hence we have:

or, using some obvious abbreviations,

This argument gives a partial answer to the second premise of the Evidentialist Objection to Belief in God. Its claim that there is no evidence for the existence of God is false. But this is only a partial answer. The second premise also claimed that even if there was some evidence, it wasn't adequate to the job at hand: establishing the existence of a rather special sort of being: the one and only one omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, necessarily existent, incorporeal creator of the universe, God. And here, of course, is where even the stronger version of the Argument from Design falls down. Perhaps that argument boosts the likelihood that the universe has property D - being intelligently designed. But given the nature of the reference class (A) and the sample class (things definitively examined for being D), we do not have differential evidence for

there is just one designer of the universe

over

there is more than one designer of the universe

or for

any universe designer is omnibenevolent

over

any universe designer is sometimes good, sometimes malevolent

-and similarly for most of the defining properties of God. In short, the Argument from Design does not provide adequate evidence for the existence of God, though it may give us some reason to believe in the intervention of some sort of purposive agent or agents in the evolution of the universe and human beings.

As interesting or distressing as this result may be, it does not matter all that much for our discussion of separation srinciples. Finding a correct such principle does not require determining the truth of religious and scientific claims. At most, it requires that we find some patterns in their meanings. To this our previous discussion is relevant. It prompts the following:

The kinds of explanation contrasted here are quite familiar to us from a variety of contexts. (We met them when we talked of UFOlogy, and I'll say more about them in The Meaning of "Life.") Purpose-directed explanation is a resource we use every day; indeed, we couldn't survive long without it. Causal explanation is also familiar to us from laboratory science. These two kinds of explanation are very different.

In contrast to previous Separation Principles, Separation by Explanation gives proper emphasis to the fact that many religions try to give explanations of why things are the way they are. A religion that did not at least attempt to give us some such understanding would seem, I think, rather empty and unappealing. The present proposal also suggests that conflict between religion and science is at least a possibility, especially if they both attempt to explain the same phenomenon from opposed standpoints. The essential use of some notion of purpose- or goal- directed action is undoubtedly a striking feature of many of the explanations that almost all, perhaps all, religions offer.

The problem here is one that we've seen before, in our discussion of Gilkey's criticisms of Scientific Creationism. Religion does not seem to have a corner on the market in purpose-directed explanation. Two branches of science - biology and psychology - make heavy use of purpose-directed explanation. Texts in both subjects and at all levels are full of such explanations. And it certainly seems that they could not explain what they do without being allowed to use purpose-directed explanation. Purpose-directed explanation seems essential to both biology and psychology. Or is it?

Let me address this issue in a slightly different way, by describing an unlikely circumstance. Suppose that, two hundred years from now, an article is written for the Physical Review in which the last word on cosmological issues is stated: it had been confirmed, after much investigation and testing, that the Big Bang was caused by several very powerful beings who, working together, designed and caused it. They surveyed the many ways that the universe could be, and decided, in the interest of propagating more of their own kind - sentient beings - to select this one, with its finely tuned physical constants and four finely balanced fundamental forces. That's how it was. The popular press, in its typically irreverent fashion, calls these beings the "Big Bangers." Their old label was: minor deities; and after them, physicists call this theory "Deistic Cosmology."

I am not saying that such a theory is likely to be correct. As monotheists and atheists alike will agree, this particular theory is pretty unlikely. The point I want to make is not about its likelihood, but about its status as science. As unlikely a candidate for truth as it may seem, let us ask if there is any reason not to allow it scientific status. There seems little doubt that equally peculiar theories have been proposed. For example, Francis Crick, one of the world's leading theoretical biologists, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA's structure, has suggested the hypothesis that life on Earth developed from the crumbs left behind from an extraterrestrials' picnic. Being weird or unlikely is, we know by now, not enough to render a hypothesis unscientific.

If there is resistance to Deistic Cosmology, it is most apt to come from the same source as Separation by Explanation. Here is how the resistance might go: there is nothing unscientific simply in talking about living or thinking things, what they do and why they do it. It is alright to talk about such matters in science. But in order for an explanation to be scientific, it must rely on causal explanation alone: any apparent reference to purposes or goals must be shown to be mere shorthand for a deeper, more revealing causal explanation. So if we are to talk about the Big Bangers, then we must explain what they have done in a non-purpose-directed, causal manner if our explanation is to be scientific. And so it is in biology and psychology, as well: all their talk of purposes and goals is just misleading talk: a cover for current ignorance about how to translate the purpose talk into talk of natural laws of cause and effect. Can we reduce biology and psychology to physics, as chemistry has (apparently) been reduced to physics? This leads us to consideration of our final questions: What conceptual resources are essential in biology? Is a science of the mind even possible, and if so, what conceptual resources does it need? Until we have a better handle on their answer, we won't know whether Separation by Explanation keeps its promise.

In "The Mystery of Our Being," the famous 20th century physicist Max Planck asserts that there are limits to what science can explain. His view is of interest to us because he assumes that science is limited to causal explanation. The limitations arise in consideration of what he calls "freedom of the will":

What does Planck have in mind here? Why is he so concerned to exempt the ego, or self, from the laws of causality? We can understand what he's getting at by considering a deep problem, The Problem of Free Will and Determinism.

Here are some principles that all seem so obvious that it might not seem worth stating them explicitly:

PUC seems necessary for making the most basic sort of sense of what happens in the world. When the washing machine throws soapy clothes all over, we're not happy if the repair service says they can't discover the cause of the malfunction; but we'd reject as utterly preposterous a claim that the malfunction was not caused. Similarly, we may not expect to understand fully (or even partially) why one person murders another, but we'd find unintelligible the claim that the murder occurred for absolutely no reason whatsoever and without there being any cause at all.

R is a very weak claim. All that's required for its truth is that there be one instance in all of history of some person's performing some one action for which s/he bears moral responsibility. Of course, most of us believe something far stronger than R; we believe that much of the time people bear moral responsibility for their actions, even if we often have a hard time determining the exact nature and degree of responsibility.

The apparent truth of A is easiest to see in cases where what someone does is unavoidable. If your kidnappers drug you unconscious and then toss you out the third story window before they abscond to Rio with the $100 ransom, you're not to blame if you crush a passerby below the window - even if their death insures your survival. In such circumstances, you're no different from a rock thrown out the window and bear no moral responsibility for damage to what you hit. And just as unavoidablity entails lack of moral responsibility, so, as a matter of simple logic, does moral responsibility entail avoidability.

Although each of these three principles seems to be a matter of common sense, we can prove that at least one of them must be false. The problem is then to find some rational basis for rejecting one of them, with the understanding that we're in a 'no win' situation. We can see that the principles are inconsistent by means of the following argument:

This is not offered as a proof that PUC is wrong: we could just as well have argued that if PUC and A are true, then R is false; or if PUC and R are true, then A is false. This argument is intended to show that PUC, R, and A are mutually inconsistent. So at least one of them must be false and the best outcome we can hope for is to minimize our inevitably large loss. Let's examine four possible solutions to the problem.

One possible solution is Hard Determinism: Every event is causally determined, and moral responsibility entails avoidability, so no one is ever morally responsible for anything. If there were any way to avoid the repugnant consequence of this view, we should surely take it. Nevertheless, some argue in its favor as follows:

The first premise is based on the belief that some day psychology will be a science and so will be able to give correct explanations for all of human behavior. The weak premise is (2). We may distinguish between two types of explanation. Causal explanation entails that human behavior is causally determined. But purpose-directed explanation need not entail that human behavior is causally determined. If purpose-directed explanation is a genuine alternative to causal explanation in not entailing causal determination, then it may have an important role to play in solving the Problem of Freedom and Determinism.

A second logically possible solution to the Problem is Indeterminism: At some time, some person is morally responsible for what s/he does, and moral responsibility entails avoidability, so some events are uncaused; for these uncaused events and their consequences we may be morally responsible. This view seems to be advocated by Existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as by some who misinterpret the significance of probabilistic quantum mechanics.

The first premise simply restates part of Indeterminism, and the second premise is true by definition. The third premise is well illustrated by the case of "Crazy" Bob. Bob is an otherwise ordinary guy who, without cause, suffers occasional episodes of very rapid right arm extension. It is of course implausible that such uncaused events would occur, but Indeterminism embraces this possibility. During his first such episode, he happened to be passing a fellow pedestrian, whom he hit and knocked into the path of an unstoppable steamroller. Despite having been directly involved in the pedestrian's death, Bob is as much a victim of circumstance as the now defunct pedestrian - Bob's right arm went out for no reason whatsoever; he did not choose to extend it then, nor could anyone have taken precautions to prevent its extension since there was no knowing in advance that it might happen. Indeterminism nevertheless assigns blame to Bob. So this argument shows that Indeterminism is false.

Planck's Proposal: There are two ways to interpret what Planck says. On one reading, he's an Indeterminist, since he exempts minds from causal laws. If that's what he means, then, as the argument above shows, his proposal is wrong.

On another reading, he maintains that the material world is governed by causal laws, but the internal world of the self is governed by the "dictate of duty," of Categorical Imperative. The idea seems to be that just as laws of causality govern the material world, laws of morality govern the internal world of the self. But laws of morality say what ought to be, not what actually is, and so are useless in explaining what people actually do, and why their moral characters may change over time; to explain morally significant change, it seems that causal explanation is necessary. So on this second reading, Planck's proposal makes it impossible to explain moral change or to undertake moral education, an unacceptably high price for a solution that is supposed to 'save morality'.

A third possible solution, which is probably the most popular nowadays, is Soft Determinism: Every event has a cause, and at some time, some person is morally responsible for what s/he does, so we may be morally responsible for some unavoidable actions - those that are internally caused, and their consequences.

Soft Determinism is also called "Compatibilism" since is says that causal determination and moral responsibility are compatible (and so A is false). Soft Determinism owes us a clear and precise account of internal causation. Here are three attempts to define internal causation. Each must be tested against the claim at the heart of Soft Determinism: if an action is internally caused, then the person who performs it (the 'agent' of the action) is morally responsible for the action and its consequences.

An appealingly simple definition is

But this can't be right. Suppose that the Vegetabilist Liberation Front kidnaps and tortures you, imposing on you weird beliefs and desires by convincing you that the only way to make the world safe for your family and incidentally for Vegetabilism is to murder the chief lobbyist for the Florida Citrus Commission. If you carry out this heinous act, you'll be involved in something very bad. You have acted on beliefs and desires that did indeed motivate you, but you are not to blame. More generally, people can be 'brainwashed' into having beliefs and desires that are bizarre and out of character, and they may act on those externally imposed mental states, but surely it's the fault of those who tortured them that they act badly, and not the agent's fault, contrary to what the definition implies. So let's try stipulating that the relevant mental states are not imposed on the agent:

There are two objections to this definition, one minor and one major. The minor objection is that beliefs and desires are often not chosen at all: we simply find ourselves with them. This is particularly clear in the case of perceptual beliefs: when you open your eyes upon awakening, you don't choose to see the sunlight - you just do, and you believe thereby that it's sunny. The major objection focuses on the phrase of "freely chosen" - what, exactly does this mean? One possible meaning is that the choice is uncaused, but Soft Determinism holds that every event is caused, so that meaning is unavailable to it. Instead, what must be meant is that the choice is caused in a way that secures moral responsibility for the action, that is, "freely chosen" must mean that the choice was internally caused. But if that's what "freely chosen" means, then the definition is circular and hence useless. Another possible way around the 'brainwashing' problem is:

Unlike the second proposal, there's no implication that the beliefs and desires are uncaused, nor is there any apparent circularity. And the last part rules out brainwashing. Nevertheless, this definition is also open to counterexample. Suppose that Reliable Ralph, a lab assistant, is feeling very thirsty and sees what he reasonably believes is a beaker of distilled water on the lab table. His belief is well-justified since he's known the lab supervisor for years and knows her to be even more reliable than he is and especially careful not to leave anything dangerous around. So, he takes a drink from the beaker instead of going down the hall to the soda machine. Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the supervision and Ralph's just consumed a powerful hormonal extract that causes him to fly into a homicidal rage and to strangle the supervisor, who's just returned to the lab. As terrible as this is, Ralph's clearly not at fault. But the definition says he is. So the definition is wrong. And remember that we can't modify the last part of the definition to read "– and nothing compelled e's agent to have those beliefs and desires," since that would say in effect that the beliefs and desires were uncaused - an impossibility according to Soft Determinism.

Perhaps there's some other way to make good on Soft Determinism's promise of moral responsibility with causal explanation. But things don't look good.

So far, we've focused on causal explanation of human behavior (except for the brief mention of purpose-directed explanation above). But mightn't the problem be solvable with the proper uses of non-causal, purpose-directed explanation? Let's see.

The fourth possible solution to the Problem of Freedom and Determinism is the metaphysically radical view, Libertarianism or the Theory of Agency: Every event is caused, but some events are caused by the agent and not by any event; for these agent-caused events and their consequences we may be morally responsible.

Agency Theory is a radically different from any of the three preceding views. They all maintain that causation is a relation between pairs of events ("event c causes event e"). According to Agency Theory, some but not all events are caused by other events ("event causation'); some events are caused instead by persons ("agent causation"). According to Agency Theory, agent-causation is involved in choices for which we may bear moral responsibility because, after all, we ourselves are the causes.

But the Agency Theorist should reject the third premise. She may reply that some acts may nevertheless be explained by being given a purpose-directed, rather than a causal, explanation. In this way, they may be rendered 'intelligible'. Here, it seems, is the 'natural home' of purpose-directed explanation taken as a genuine alternative to causal explanation. But there is a problem with taking it in this way, as we can see from an argument first offered by the philosopher C. D. Broad. I'll introduce it with an example.

Al has a problem with alcohol - he drinks too much of it. On ten successive Saturday nights, he attends a party at Ben's house with the usual set of friends and on the first nine nights, drinks himself into a stupor, though not before vomiting on the couch. Suppose that on all ten occasions, the event-causal forces acting on Al balance exactly: the forces inclining him to drink to excess are matched exactly by the forces inclining him not to drink to excess. According to Agency Theory, it is under precisely such circumstances when the agent himself can 'step into' the causal chain and (agent) cause one alternative or the other. So each of the first nine nights, when Al drinks to excess, he is the cause of his bad behavior. On the tenth night, Al 'gets his act together' and causes abstinence instead, with much rejoicing by Ben and others. According to agency theory, he is to blame for his behavior the first nine nights, and deserves praise for his moral reform on the tenth night. Ben and others wonder why Al got his act together on the tenth night, and not, say, on the fourth or the twelfth. What is the explanation for Al's moral improvement? It seems that Agency Theory precludes there being any answer to this natural question, "Why now?" To summarize:

Agency Theory seems to preclude there being any explanation for why a person acts one way at one time and another way at another time, with respect to moral choices.

This suggests that if we take purpose-directed explanation to be incompatible with causal explanation, in line with Agency Theory, we will be forced to give up any hope of psychological explanation in the cases where we want and need it most.

Is it possible that purpose-directed explanation is both not reducible to causal explanation and compatible with it? That's a good question - one that deserves an answer from anyone who wishes to explore Separation by Explanation's prospects more thoroughly.

In 1986, two books were published which take very seriously the possibility that presence of living and thinking things in the universe may have an important role to play in explaining the physical origin and nature of the universe. The first book to come out was John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, a 706 page book published by Oxford University Press, a highly respected academic publisher (which recently celebrated its 500th birthday as a publisher.) Barrow is an astronomer and Tipler is a mathematical physicist. The book contains a foreword by a leading theoretical physicist, John Wheeler. It is a demanding work, full of the concepts and equations of the most advanced physics of our day. The other book was a best-seller, John Updike's Roger's Version. Updike is one of the country's leading novelists, noted for, among other things, his perceptive predictions of cultural change. (To take a small example from a series of novels he wrote beginning in the early 1970s, he saw the importance of competition with the Japanese long before it was a fashionable topic of conversation, and made one of his central characters a Toyota dealer harassed by resentful Amercian workers.) His nose for cultural news has led him to focus on the possible theological significance of recent developments in mathematics and physics, among them the anthropic principles discussed at such length by Barrow and Tipler. It is a lot easier to get a feel for what's at issue from Updike than from Barrow and Tipler. A briefer, but much less enthusiastic, rendition is given by Martin Gardner, in his review of Barrow and Tipler. On this one, I'm with Gardner, so I'll follow his lead.

Barrow and Tipler offer four ways of forging an explanantory connection between life and the universe.

-or, in simpler terms, since life has evolved, the Universe permitted it to have done so. Does this explain why the physical constants are as they are? Pretty clearly not, since all that WAP notes is that it is a necessary condition for life's evolution is that the Universe permit such evolution. Saying that this gives an explanation would be analogous to saying that entering a race explains winning it: entering is a necessary condition for winning, but it hardly explains a win.

SAP is stronger than WAP: it says not merely that the Universe does as a matter of fact permit life to evolve, but that it had to permit life to evolve - that it could not possibly have been other than it is in this way. Some physicists have tried to use SAP to derive precise values for certain physical constants. The idea is that if the constants had slightly different values, there'd be no life as we know it. (To use terminology that I'll explain further in discussing Behaviorism, the Universe has a strong disposition to have life evolve in it.) So SAP is sometimes claimed to have predictive power. Whether or not SAP is predictively successful - and that is a matter of some debate among physicists - with most saying that at best, it is not needed - we should not confuse prediction, even numerically precise prediction, with explanation. Here are two examples from other areas to remind us of the difference between prediction and explanation. The first is from medicine. Lupus erythematosus is a systemic disease, in the same general family as arthritis, in which the patient becomes allergic to some of her own body's tissues. The resulting inflammation results in much pain and destruction of body tissues. There is now a fairly reliable test for lupus - a blood test called the "Anti-Nuclear Antibodies Latex" test. It is an excellent predictor of lupus in the sense that if the result is in a certain numerical range, the patient's got the disease. But being able to predict lupus from a test is different from being able to explain it. No one knows why this test turns out as it does in lupus patients, and no one knows what the real cause of the disease is - so the search for an explanation continues. This example also reminds us of the difference between causation and correlation. To know the cause of lupus would be to explain it, but all we now have is a correlation between a positive ANA latex test and the presence of the disease. No one wants to say that the positive test result causes the disease.

The second example is from solid state physics. In some solids, the material has a highly regular structure of the sort that we associate with crystals. But this kind of regular structure is not present in many materials; for example, many plastics, concrete, soil, alloys, etc. have highly irregular structures. This makes it very difficult to predict the behavior of such materials - e.g., strength, thermal or electrical conductivity - and in engineering courses, experimentally discovered 'rules of thumb' are often used to predict their behavior. Such mathematical 'rules of thumb' come with limited ranges of application, but they are useful and within their ranges quite accurate. So they yield adequate predictions about the behavior of the material. But they are not even intended to explain why the material behaves as it does as a consequence of the fine structure that it has. In fact, it is only during the last few years that developments in mathematics - fractal geometry - have allowed physicists to develop plausible explanatory models. So, once again, prediction is different from explanation - you can know how something would behave even if you do not know why it would behave that way.

This is certainly a remarkable claim. It says that the Universe as it actually is would not even exist if some thinking things were not around to observe it. What could possibly prompt such a claim? Barrow and Tipler say this: according to some physicists' understanding of one current physical theory - quantum mechanics - a physical system is not in any definite state until it is measured to be be in that state. Until such time as measurement takes place, the system could be in any number of physical states, some of which it is more likely to occupy, but no one of which it actually occupies. Measurement requires observation, and observation requires a conscious observer. Hence, for the universe, or any part of it to be more than a mere possibility - for it actually to exist in some definite state - there must be conscious observers observing it. There is even an interpretation of quantum mechanics to go with this, called the "Many Worlds interpretation" (cf. Paul Davies, Other Worlds). There is, I think, no question that the mathematical theory called the "Many Worlds interpretation" is a respectable theory. But there is a reason to question how some people have understood it. The mistake, it seems to me, occurs when it is assumed that measurement requires observation by a conscious observer. This assumption, necessary for PAP, is not a part of any modern physical theory. What the theory says about measurement indicates that all that is really required is some sort of physical interaction between two things, one of which we can call measurer and the other of which we can call measured. There is nothing to imply that the measurer must be conscious or alive. Quantum mechanics may say some interesting things about the nature of physical interaction (e.g., about dispersion relations between physical magnitudes) but it is silent about the need for conscious observers.

FAP builds on PAP. It says that since the Universe needs us, or something conscious like us, we conscious beings will be around as long as the Universe is. How could life be necessary if it were to vanish soon after its arrival? What a pointless thing that would be! And of course, why stop at the beginning? Why not also postulate the continued development of consciousness, and see the Universe itself as evolving towards higher forms of self-realization, a necessary and unending progression towards the development of God. So God is not dead - he is waiting to be born, and we are both embryo and midwife on the long journey towards Ultimate Delivery and Ultimate Deliverance.

FAP is supported by absolutely nothing in any physical theory, and it is based on a chain of invalid inferences from false premises. It serves mainly as a reminder that scientists do not always abide by the highest cognitive standards.

Our discussion of anthropic principles is not in vain, however, because it helps to steer us clear of several serious mistakes in giving explanations. To summarize: explaining something is not the same thing as giving a necessary condition for it, predicting it or saying what it's correlated with. As a bonus, we also found that saying that two things are (strongly, positively) correlated is not the same as saying that one causes the other.

(c)2000 David F. Austin

This page last updated on July 14, 2000