Separation by Reference

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.

All the answers I've heard to the first question seem to boil down to the following three. 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 quite a few Nobel Prizes have 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 even 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 something far more serious that is 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, after all, monotheistic.

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 it 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, those in the local majority 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.

Additional Sources

2000 David F. Austin

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