Scriptorium Daily
It is good to know the origin of ideas so we can critically examine our own assumptions.
The pre-Socratics philosophers who lived in the ancient Greek world helped invent philosophy. Any civilized person owes them a debt of gratitude.
They also were fumbling to discover new ways to think about the world. They did not, however, simply sit under a tree and speculate about the nature of the cosmos. They tried to develop theories to “cover” the observations collected by Greek citizens. Why do seasons change? Why does the coast line crumble here and advance over there? The ideas of men like Anaximander fit at least some of the data available at the time. Given the initial Greek worldview, the theories of Anaximander seemed to fit the facts. After all, as the coastline near a city advances, the water retreats. Further down the beach, the water might be washing away the walls of yet another city. The Law of Opposites “covers” this observed phenomenon. New data would produce new ideas. The Greeks were quite open to changing their views in light of further evidence.
A less productive development in the thinking of these pre-Socratics was the rise of naturalism and a preference for naturalistic explanations. Naturalism, the belief that there is no “supernatural,” must have seemed an improvement on the chaotic religion of the Homeric sagas. Why did a thing happen? More and more the pre-Socratics shifted from personal or theological explanations, to naturalistic ones. A god or hero did not do a thing; some basic force of nature did it. This had a major advantage. If everything that happens in the natural world is given a natural explanation, then the gods and the danger of their unpredictable personalities have been removed.
The difficulty is that this methodology might be very fruitful in one area, but less helpful in another. Humans have personality. It is not obvious that their actions can be reduced to “naturalistic” explanations. Anyone with children knows how impossible it is to predict exactly what ice cream a child will order when confronted with fifty some flavors! Personality plays a role in many normal events in the world. That is not true of every kind of change. The change of seasons seems regular without being personal. Some types of phenomena, behavior in free will beings for example, seem to resist naturalistic “covering” stories. Other types of behavior, leaves falling from trees, seem suited to these solutions.
Greek religion was so irrational that it made early Greek philosophers resist any but naturalistic gods. Gods that were no better than humans could not explain or provide a basis for the cosmic order one could see in looking at the stars. Anaximander, like Thales before him, reduced god to a source of motion.
The lack of personal god or intelligent mind designing the cosmos made it impossible for pre-Socratics like Anaximander to explain regular phenomena in nature that resisted naturalistic explanations. Living things, even with the crude observations then available, seemed too elegantly constructed for crude mechanisms like Anaximander. Anaximander had humans spring out of cruder, fish-like ancestors in a primordial slime. How could such a complex set of changes occur? Did simple opposition explain this magical development? The later Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, would recognize this difficulty and rectify it with better theology and explanations of personal agency.
The problem of the origin of complex, living things was coupled with the problem of “teleology” in nature. Many things look made for a purpose. This purpose is the “telos” of the thing. Eyes are for seeing. They seem made for seeing. They seem perfectly suited for the task of seeing when fully functional. Most living things, and many non-living things, seem to be part of pattern or plan. For good or bad, it is nearly impossible for humans not to say, “The sun is as it is to produce energy so that life can exist.” Fully naturalistic systems cannot speak meaningfully in this way. Things can not have a reason for what they are, beyond the mere accident. “Telos” is gone.
To the Greek, this seemed dangerously close to a return to the chaos and meaninglessness of traditional religion. Each of the pre-Socratics, like Anaximander, brings the “divine” back into the cosmic scene. The god-principle is reduced to some part of nature, but it never disappears. To remove it entirely, would be to lose the possibility of meaning or an explanation of apparent purposefulness in natural things.
This created a fundamental tension in Greek pre-Socratic thought. Gods had to be thrown out of the cosmos at the fundamental level. A physical arche, water for Thales and the indefinite for Anaximander, was substituted. Some “divine” principle was reintroduced, however, to allow for purpose and meaning. Eventually, the Greeks would split into two camps. The atomists would carry reductionism to its logical extreme and banish the divine entirely. The last great pre-Socratic Anaxagoras would postulate a divine Mind apart from the cosmos.
Modern Forgetfulness: Naturalism and Personality Today
The ancient Greeks had a problem that was never fully solved in their time. How could purpose be preserved without introducing the chaos of personality? The need was for a god who was at once eternal, good, rational, and all-powerful. Such a god did not exist in Greek religious thought. Plato postulated a “divine craftsman” and anticipated Intelligent Design arguments in his Laws.
Aristotle further advanced science and metaphysics by allowing his “unmoved mover” a role, however limited, in his cosmology. Greeks still had difficulty motivating “gentlemen” to view matter as worthy of study and keeping personal and impersonal explanations in proper tension.
The coming of Christ was, therefore, good news for science and philosophy.
The Christian church would eventually fill the gap between the two extremes of Greek thought. Christian theology, with a God outside of nature, would allow for both natural and personal cosmic cause. Some things could be recognized as divine action, the creation of life for example. Other things, such as the cycle of seasons, could be given natural explanations in the context of an overarching divine purpose. Only Plato and Aristotle would come close to grasping this elegant solution. As we shall see, neither fully grasped it and only with the coming of Christianity were the necessary philosophical distinctions to be made. Christianity allowed for the final birth of a truly modern science.
Why is the current generation of scientists so hostile to religious thinking? Why do even some Christian scientists allow for only naturalistic explanations and methods in science?
The answer is quite simple. For a long time, the philosophical foundations for science were taken for granted. Eventually they were forgotten or deemed unimportant. Christianity was often recognized as being necessary to birth modern science, but now could be discarded. Purpose and the action of any rational beings other than humans could safely be ignored. Scientists and philosophers now knew enough about the world to assume that such a decision was a safe one.
This mistake was due to the success of chemistry and physics in explaining so many things in a naturalistic manner. Of course, this success was simply a continuation of the prediction that non-living things would be best explained in this manner. It is interesting to note that psychology, sociology, and some areas of biology have not had comparative success.
Some things may be the products of intelligence or intelligences (the mind) are not reducible to purely material or physical explanations.
Eventually, scientists themselves would come to forget their own heritage in this area. A rejection of certain mistaken forms of “teleological” thinking developed in the Middle Ages, then turned into a wholesale denial of purpose, design, and intelligent agency in the cosmos. Scientists and many philosophers refused on principal to allow for a God who did things that were part of the picture. These thinkers saw the growth of naturalistic explanations as without any end. Science would eventually have a naturalistic explanation, with matter and energy in mindless motion, for everything in the cosmos. God was left with nothing to do. The attempt to squeeze him into the shrinking gaps in human scientific knowledge was futile. Better to get it over with and declare God dead. Most of the academic mainstream has gone slowly in this direction.
Certain religious thinkers, attempting to rescue cherished childhood beliefs from the “march of science,” agreed with this naturalistic methodology. It was hoped that accepting naturalism in science would allow for supernatural activity in other areas. Such people forgot that science was claiming every area of the cosmos as its domain. These theistic naturalists relegated God’s actions to areas like salvation history, ethics, and life after death. God was thereby kept far distant from their day to day work in the lab. Jesus could live in their heart and help them be good, but He had nothing to say about biology.
To avoid the charge that this is the “God” of a practical atheism, these persons suggest God is constantly involved in a mysterious “sustaining” of the cosmos. This sustaining work is, of course, invisible to science. It is something for God to do as long as no one can detect it, but it is never clear what that something is. How could God be what makes a thing exist, without this essential function being subject to scientific investigation? No one ever says. The function of such a belief is to obscure, not illuminate. The Christian believer can trumpet his belief in God’s action, without ever worrying about his secular colleagues studying it. Such a tamed god is even less worrisome to secular science than the god of Thales.
The immediate result of this historical forgetfulness has been the wounding of religion. It is possible, as with Thales and Anaximander, to put a sort of impersonal god-force into a fully naturalistic scheme. One could even, if one wished, decide to worship him. It simply is not clear why anyone should. Such a god, invisible on any practical level, is unworthy of daily worship. Most humans are not tempted to worship electricity or a gasoline engine in their car. In the same way, a pre-Socratic god disappears from practical, daily consideration.
Eventually the greatest blow suffered will be in the sciences. This seems like an odd suggestion, given the continuing advances in science today. How is this possible if naturalistic science and philosophy have ruled God out of their practical deliberations? Such a blind retreat from the history of science has been possible in the short term, because most scientists continued to use teleology anyway. The change in thinking has been slow and uneven. In many parts of the world, it has not gone very far even yet. While proclaiming allegiance to natural methodology in principle, many scientists see and write of design and intelligence all the time.
This puts many scientists and philosophers of science in an odd position. They use the language of purpose and design while exiling the author and Designer. DNA experts cannot help but speak of “libraries” of data. Doctors devise cures to help humans function “the way they are supposed to.” Things in nature that look designed, like the workings of the interior of the living cell, are often studied as if they were in fact machines. No one tries to explain their naturalistic origins. Science has often been better than its stated methodology. Naturalists, some of whom mouth a Sunday-go-to-meeting theism, have had it both ways. This has allowed science to keep growing, but is also allowing intellectual dishonesty.
This is changing, however. Post-modern skeptics have revealed the flaws in a purely naturalistic science. If humans are simply part of the vast cosmic scheme, like Thales god, how can they see objectively what that scheme is? If there is no purpose, no being providing order, then why assume there is any order to find. Western science is under assault by these critics. Western science is “white male” science. It is after all just the way that white males have happened to see the world. There is no “truth” out there to find. So perhaps, there could be a woman’s science or a Latino mathematics. The modern scientist has no response. He or she should have given up on the search for meaning and objective truth in their discipline when science banished the supernatural. They could not and do science. Therefore, the modern tried to have both. The post-modern critics attack this sort of “science” for its philosophical inconsistencies.
Another group of scientists and philosophers has recognized that the only hope for science and philosophy is in a return to the Christian view. What are they up to? They are building again on the old Greek tension between the teleological (or personal) explanation and the naturalistic one. Such thinkers will allow both personal and natural explanations for events. Science and philosophy need both types of approach. It is not always clear which approach is best, though progress has surely been made in that area.
The tension is wholesome and any attempt to get rid of it (by making everything theological or naturalistic) is simplistic and counterproductive.
The two approaches are like two different tools in a kit. One uses the appropriate tool at the appropriate time. An archaeologist examines a stone. Is the stone the product of intelligent design or a natural occurrence? She has learned to recognize the purposeful products of human civilization. Her field has studied this question for years. Guidelines have been set. She can, after examining the stone, classify it as “designed” or “natural.” Either philosophical tool can be taken out of her mental kit and used to classify and scientifically examine the rock. If it is an intelligently designed object, she looks for purpose. If it turns out to be just a stone, then she looks for a naturalistic account of its odd shape and structure. She will not be content until she finds it. No one claims when she declares a shaped rock is a tool that she “has given up science.” No fool stands up to claim that seeing design and purpose in the world must lead to the death of science. If that were the case, archeology could not be science.
The pre-Socratic Greeks knew this almost instinctively. Modern researchers know it from practical experience. The data under their microscopes demand it. One cannot simply reduce all of nature to its component parts and demonstrate how it came to be without reference to intelligence. Intelligence itself is resisting simplistic naturalistic explanations. There is a growing need for a philosophy of science that include words off limits to a pure naturalist.
