Guarding the Mystery: On Science and Religion again

Since the Dennett posting generated so much controversy, I thought I would continue with some of my own homegrown thoughts regarding naturalism and religion. -- JHW
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"The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena." Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.371

"Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose." Chesterton, Orthodoxy

What did Wittgenstein mean in saying that it is an illusion that laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena? I believe he meant that some are led by scientific laws to the mistaken thought of a deep structure undergirding natural phenomena in accordance with which they are produced. Wittgenstein wanted to persuade us that there is no deep, governing structure, either in thought or in what we perceive. Or at least, it is an enormous and generally incoherent presumption we make if we think there area such structures. Laws of nature allow us to predict future phenomena, but they do not articulate a deep structure that explains why there are such phenomena, which is, according to Wittgenstein a perfectly contingent matter. Why is this important to note? We are especially prone to pose the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" And we are especially prone to the illusion that we have answered this question when we have not. Science and religion both offer temptations to this illusion.

The ancient and medieval conception of the world, in the West, at least, embraced the idea that God explained the existence of something rather than nothing. It was part of the neo-Platonic view that any adequate explanation had to terminate in something that itself did not need explanation. The idea of a 'necessary being' (God) comes in here to plug the gap. Here's the structure of the illusion: everything must have an explanation, so the beings in nature must have an explanation, the only way to have a complete explanation is for there to be a necessary being that is the cause of them all, therefore God must be the cause of all things. Platonic metaphysics wedded with Hebrew mythology to create a very nice picture to dispel our craving for an answer. The first part of that argument, the claim that 'everything must have an explanation' is called 'the principle of sufficient reason.' The claim, more technically, is that every positive fact must have an explanation.

Thomas Aquinas rightly observed that to give an explanation of the present state of affairs by appeal to a prior state of affairs explains very little. But he still insisted on the principle of sufficient reason -- and thought that it proved the existence of God. The so-called cosmological argument for the existence of God turns very centrally on the principle of sufficient reason -- more to the point, it turns on our need for explanation. But why assume that there is an explanation?

It seems to me that in these matters a crucial component of religion is being sacrificed to a undisciplined rationalism, by which I mean the demand to give an intellectual accounting for all matters. Kant and Wittgenstein both wanted to discipline our rationalism. That is not to say they were encouraging us to be less intellectual -- rather, they were encouraging us give up illusory pseudo-explanations, and to remain content before that which we cannot explain (either at present or in principle).

There are two basic types of intellectual error: not taking into account our best available evidence. A Creationist who offers an account of the universe in conflict with our best scientific observations is guilty of this error. The second is using available evidence in ways that go beyond what it shows. There are rather mundane ways of doing this, and deeper ways of doing this.

There is a sense in which some who embrace a literal creationist account of the origins of the universe is in the same boat as someone who thinks that physics will 'explain it all.' The physical explanation is a certain sort of explanation, but it does not, if we are honest, explain away the mystery. I should also note that there is a way of embracing the a theistic creation account without losing the mystery -- it would be to acknowledge: this really explains nothing! That there is a God, that He created this world, that there is ecstasy and suffering in it -- all of that is mysterious! Likewise, physicists can explain the big bang down to a micro-scale of time and acknowledge: this really explains nothing! (or, one can hold: it explains something, but leaves something unexplained, as well, and the latter is even more important).

What do we gain by guarding this sense of what I have called mystery: an empty open-mouthed astonishment? I don't think so. Preserving a sense of mystery also preserves a basic problem: the formation of a fundamental attitude to what there is. Take pleasure and pain: regard these as a fundamental mystery. Granted, science can tell us a great deal about the neurological processes undergirding these phenomena. But the fact we know that pain is a C-fiber firing doesn't really explain pain. We can control pain rather well now, but that doesn't dispel the fundamental problem. Should we want to increase our pleasure and decrease our pain? Or should we want to do so, provided it doesn't produce further bad effects, future pain or disablement (a heroin addiction)? If this is our view, we've already slipped into a certain attitude toward pleasure and pain. I'm not saying we should not attempt to control our pain, but I think I understand why people who renounce controlling pain do so; they want their fundamental attitude not to be a superficial hedonism, but a receptivity to the world (most would regard this position as irrational, but that is because they are taking a different, and not obviously superior fundamental attitude). Our present challenge is to guard our ability to take the fact of our pleasure and pain as a fundamental problem, more fundamental than controlling it. It is even more than a moral problem -- how we relate to such matters in some sense sets the framework within which we will pose moral questions. It is a challenge particularly for us because the framework of medicine is based on control and, perhaps even more than pain palliation, survival. The configuration of our cultural concepts puts pressure on us not to adopt other attitudes.

I've been too obscure here. But my point was mainly to gesture at a problem that is common to many naturalists and theists who see themselves as opposed.