Renewing American Leadership

Plato's dialogues persistently probe the essence of the good society, and his final treatise, The Laws, insists cosmology and theology serve as the necessary "prelude" to it.  Should a people embrace the "heresy" that the cosmos has "been framed, not by any action of mind, but by nature and chance only," Plato said, social chaos inevitably ensues.  Thus the history of philosophy reveals an unending struggle for goodness, truth, and beauty — truly a "cosmic struggle" pitting theists (e.g. Plato) against atheists (e.g. Epicurus), shaping and setting forth divergent worldviews.  There are big questions to address:  Where did I come from?  Why am I here?  Where am I going?  Does life have any meaning and purpose?  Is there any Design to Reality or is all there is a random collection of subatomic bits of matter?
 

The most vile characters in C.S. Lewis's space fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength) consistently espoused what he labeled "scientism," the philosophical commitment to empiricism (holding that all knowledge comes from the physical senses) as the only valid epistemological strategy, reducing all kinds of inquiry — literature, history, philosophy, et al. — to rigorously material means.

The most vile characters in C.S. Lewis's space fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength) consistently espoused what he labeled "scientism," the philosophical commitment to empiricism (holding that all knowledge comes from the physical senses) as the only valid epistemological strategy, reducing all kinds of inquiry — literature, history, philosophy, et al. — to rigorously material means.  Regarding his first story, Lewis noted that it was clearly "an attack, if not on scientists, yet on something which might be called 'scientism'-a certain outlook on the world which is usually connected with the popularization of the sciences" (Of Other Worlds).  Consequently, reviewing That Hideous Strength in the New York Times, Orville Prescott judged it "a parable (concerning) the degeneration of man which inevitably follows a gross and slavish scientific materialism which excludes all idealistic, ethical and religious values."
 
Still more, insisting that our minds can be reduced to material brains typified the stance of scientists like Lewis's fictional physicist Weston, who shared the view of an atheistic Marxist Professor, J.B.S. Haldane, necessarily assuming that:  "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms" (Possible Worlds).  Such scientism, furthermore, assumed a metaphysical materialism that Lewis often labeled "Naturalism."  Addressing this phenomenon, Lewis made a simple generalization that was neither simplistic nor hasty, differentiating Naturalism from Supernaturalism.  He insisted (in Miracles) that thinkers like Carl Sagan, who declared that "the cosmos is all there is or ever will be" and take the philosophical position that only Nature exists (ontological materialism) and irrationally restrict the realm of Reality to atoms in space.    Consequently, it makes sense to believe in a Supernatural Reality, namely God.  Apart from and above matter there must be Mind.
 

Lewis's concerns permeate The Nature of Nature:  Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science, a 1000 page collection of 41 essays by noted scholars (both atheists such as Francis Crick and theists such as William Lane Craig, philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and scientists such as Steven Weinberg) who attended a conference at Baylor University in 2000.

Lewis's concerns permeate The Nature of Nature:  Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science, ed. Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski (Wilmington, DE, c. 2011), a 1,000 page collection of 41 essays by noted scholars (both atheists such as Francis Crick and theists such as William Lane Craig, philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and scientists such as Steven Weinberg) who attended a conference at Baylor University in 2000. 

What Lewis sensed, as Steve Fuller writes in his Foreword to this volume, is "the inadequacy of an unreflexive naturalism to explain the aspirations" of science itself.  In particular, the hard-line, reductionistic materialism so espoused by many in the past has increasingly proved "problematic" (p. xiii), for "it is clear that we have moved a long way from the idea that nature can be understood as if it were the product of no intelligence at all" (p. xiv).
   
Leading off the book's essays, Bruce Gordon provides, in "The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture," 60 pages of extensively documented historical details needed to understand the subject.  "Philosophical naturalism," he argues, "undermines knowledge and rationality altogether, ultimately leading to the instrumentalization of belief and the fragmentation of culture" (p. 1).  He emphasizes — as have Richard Weaver and other noted historians — the influence of Medieval nominalism (which rejected logical realism) in shaping modern science, giving impetus "to empiricism and an explanational preoccupation with material mechanism" (p. 7). 

William of Ockham, subordinating God's intellect to His will, denied He "has an essential nature, and opened the door to divine arbitrariness and universal possibilism, the view that there are no necessary truths, not even logical ones, constraining divine action" (p. 7).  Nominalism also supported empiricism's attention to particulars rather than universals, leading to an anti-essentialism which incubated philosophical naturalism and the many varieties of relativism that now dominate the intellectual scene.
 

What Lewis sensed, as Steve Fuller writes in his Foreword to this volume, is "the inadequacy of an unreflexive naturalism to explain the aspirations" of science itself.  In particular, the hard-line, reductionistic materialism so espoused by many in the past has increasingly proved "problematic," for "it is clear that we have moved a long way from the idea that nature can be understood as if it were the product of no intelligence at all."

This need not have happened, Gordon says, if scientists had retained the transcendent basis for their inquiries that characterized many of the great Christian scientists who reverently read the book of nature.  Contrary to many popular presentations which dismiss (in accord with Edward Gibbon and Carl Sagan) the "Dark Ages" and conjure up a millennium of conflict between religion and science, diligent historians such as Rodney Stark insist we understand and celebrate the remarkable achievements of Medieval Christians, who "provided fertile metaphysics, epistemic, sociocultural, and economic ground for scientific theorizing and experimentation" (p. 20).  The highly vaunted "scientific revolution" of the 17th century was less a revolution than a "continuous logical outworking — derived from developments in scholastic philosophical theology and medieval technological invention — that reached its consummation in this historical period" (p. 22).
 
The "problematic" aspects of these developments clearly appear, Gordon argues, in Darwin's "theory of universal common descent, which purports to explain speciation in the history of life solely by means of natural selection acting on random variation in populations.  'Random,' of course, means exactly that:  objectively undirected and therefore without discernible purpose" (p. 24).  Thus Richard Dawkins rejoices "that 'although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist'" and "Daniel Dennett describes Darwinism as a 'universal acid' that 'eats through just about ever traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view'" (p. 25).  Rightly evaluated, Gordon insists:  "Darwinism — as an expression of metaphysical purposelessness — has been an indispensable contributor to the spread of secularism in Western society, an undeniable force in our sense of cultural and existential arbitrariness, a logical antecedent to our inevitable embrace of moral relativism, hedonism, and utilitarianism, and a prodigious catalyst for the broader cultural experience of meaninglessness, especially among the younger generations" (p. 26).  If true, quite an indictment!

Gordon's essay clearly draws important distinctions separating the contributors to this volume.  Some (e.g. Christian de Duve and Francis Crick) are devoted to the scientism and reductionistic naturalism C.S. Lewis attacked.  Others, notably David Berlinski, espouse an agnosticism open to the possibility of a Cosmic Mind.  Still others, including the book's editors (Gordon and Dembski), Stephen Meyer, J.P. Moreland, Dallas Willard, and William Lane Craig, make the case for Intelligent Design as a viable way to understand the totality of Reality as eminently understandable (Mind-Designed) to rational minds.

Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books — The Liberating Law;C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue — as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.