Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Prospects for a Theistic Science:
A rebuttal of Robert Pennock. Part I.

Robert Pennock has written a paper Supernaturalist Explanations and the Prospects for a Theistic Science or "How do you know it was the lettuce?" that attempts to show "why supernatural explanations should never enter into scientific theorizing".

Some other preliminary comments on his paper point out that all practical action in the physical world must assume some metaphysical principles, for example about constancy of laws. Those principles can only be based in supernatural principles, since they are about the natural as a whole. But let us look more specifically at Pennock's arguments against the possibility of a theistic science that contains principles about what is not natural.

To focus our thoughts, let us consider three kinds of putative non-natural things: (1) Minds as mental not merely physical, (2) Souls as spiritual not merely mental or physical, and (3) the Divine as not merely spiritual or mental or physical. We will see to what extent his arguments block a theistic science that studies the existence, structure and dynamics of these three things. Is he successful in one, some or all of these? We may agree that all three are denied by current scientific naturalism, at least as that appears in science journals.

In his section Supernatural explanations, Pennock puts forward some arguments why 'supernatural explanations' should have no place in science.

The first is that supernatural agents and powers, of course, is that they are above and beyond the natural world and its agents and powers. Indeed, this is the very definition of the term. They are not constrained by natural laws. ... If supernatural agents are constrained at all it may only be by logic.

Pennnock is arguing here that non-natural things {our (1, 2, 3) above}, are not constrained by natural laws. Yes, that is true, because they are not physical. But Pennock then suggests there are no other laws short of logic! Does he not know of any sciences of mind? If minds are not physical, is he saying that there can be no laws of mind? Are all the works and investigations of psychologists about mentality, cognitive processing, social psychology, etc seeking laws which cannot exist??

And for him to not recognise any laws about spirituality is to betray a complete ignorance of what religions have been trying to tell us for thousands of years. We must admit that there are certainly laws of mind, and very probably laws of spirituality. If we do not know what these are, we (as scientists) should investigate! And not give up at the beginning by saying it is impossible.

Pennock's second argument is that a characteristic of the supernatural, that we have mentioned before and that follows rather directly from the first, is that it is inherently mysterious to us. As natural beings our knowledge all comes via natural laws and processes. If we could apply natural knowledge to understand supernatural powers, then, by definition, they would not be supernatural. The lawful regularities of our experience do not apply to the supernatural world. If there are other sorts of "laws" that govern that world, then they can be nothing like those that we understand. Occult entities and powers are profoundly mysterious to us.

In reply, we admit that our knowledge comes 'via natural processes'. We learn about the minds of others by watching them and listening to what they say. Bodily movements and sounds are indeed natural processes. But that does not mean that those natural processes cannot be effects of mental and/or spiritual causes. The whole business of science is to seek a causes, and not be merely satisfied with descriptions of effects. Most of us know (or at least acknowledge) that our spiritual and mental life affects our behaviour. Science, therefore, should investigate these things as causes of our behaviour! And when we include the Divine as a cause of spiritual and mental things, we are talking about theistic science. That brings us to Pennock's next argument:

The same point holds about divine beings--we cannot know what it is that they would or would not do in any given case. God works, they say, in mysterious ways. We cannot have any privy knowledge of God's will and those who have tried to claim it are quickly brought back to earth

This claim again shows much ignorance about religious and spiritual matters. If we review the history of the past few thousand years, we find indeed that God's interactions with the universe are not 'mysterious', but are in fact rather predictable. Indeed, we find that God has (many times!) tried to give us the means to make these predictions: we see in many places some introductions to the principles which guide God's actions. Every warning about consequences of some specific behaviour is in fact just the explication of one of these principles. And it is very relevant the more we try to live according to spiritual and religious guidelines, the less arbitrary and mysterious they appear. Rather they appear more law-like, rational and wise, and similarly for the principles which lead to these guidelines.

Theistic science, therefore, should be concerned with the collection and elucidation of these principles, and how they have consequences of spiritual, mental and physical processes. Yes: physical processes too! If we want to know the causes of physical things, we have to include Divine influences as well. Pennock may reply that many different principles have been proposed over the centuries, and they cannot all be correct. Just so, but let us collect some of the core principles of theism, and see what their structure is and what their consequences are. I have begun this process with my manifesto of theistic principles. We can indeed find laws about things which are not natural (in the sense of 'not physical').

A final relevant element of the notion of the supernatural, closely linked to the previous ideas, (according to Pennock) is that supernatural beings and powers are not controllable by humans. Though our secret desire may be to gain esoteric power through contact with the supernatural, we seem to understand at a deep level that such control would be impossible. ... We need to recognize that this wishful belief in the possibility of human control of divine and occult powers actually contradicts the idea of the supernatural in a profound manner, for by definition the supernatural is beyond the reach of we mere creatures of the natural world. If the supernatural could be controlled by the natural then it would cease to be super.

This claim betrays an ignorance even of contemporary science. That science does not insist on being able to control everything that it studies! Just think of cosmology, and the study of neighbouring galaxies, neutron stars, or black holes. Scientists are unable to control these things, but can still study them! Pennock may reply that the limits here are 'practical' rather then 'theoretical'. But science can never control the Big Bang, because of even stronger principles, namely the fixity of history, and its unrepeatability. By comparison, controlling such non-natural things as our minds and souls is a piece of cake: we do it (with varying success!) every hour of every day of our lives. To decide that one of these actual acts of controlling is impossible, but controlling neutron stars as 'in principle possible', is to betray an extreme prejudice against mental and spiritual realities, in favour of exclusively physical realities.

So Pennock claims that These characteristics of the supernatural show why supernatural explanations should never enter into scientific theorizing. Science operates by empirical principles of observational testing; hypotheses must be confirmed or disconfirmed by reference to inter-subjectively accessible empirical data.

Science does indeed use 'inter-subjectively accessible empirical data'. Science, however, also uses rational thinking about causes that cannot be directly observed. We cannot directly observe individual quarks (in principle), but that does not stop us rationally inferring their existence from their (many) effects in (many) experiments. In exactly the same way, theistic science can rationally infer the existence of (many) mental and spiritual processes from their (many) effects in the world. At it can rationally postulate the Divine according to the principles that God has been trying to tell us for centuries, and examine the logical consequences of those principles for everything we see in the world.

To be continued ...

4 comments:

  1. ===
    "If minds are not physical, is he saying that there can be no laws of mind? Are all the works and investigations of psychologists about mentality, cognitive processing, social psychology, etc seeking laws which cannot exist??"
    ===

    It is the case today as the dominant perspective in the "science of psychology" that laws are attributed to behaviors only. Mental laws and mental science are not accepted in contemporary psychology as "mental" but only as "behavioral" (physical measurement must be involved). For instance, the "measurement of meaning" in my PhD dissertation and other published articles on it, always had to translate into a behavioral measurement (e.g., a rating on a scale of options, which is then translated into a relative number).

    Hence to prove that there are meaning differences, or semantic differences, we must prove that there are differences in behavior in the direction predicted about meaning changes. Another example is the "law of similarity" in semantic relation between words or objects which says that words that are related in meaning (by prior behavioral measures) will be recalled together even though they did not follow each other in the original sequence of exposure.

    I agree with your solution as theistic science, but the statement needs a clarification:

    ===
    "theistic science can rationally infer the existence of (many) mental and spiritual processes from their (many) effects in the world. At it can rationally postulate the Divine according to the principles that God has been trying to tell us for centuries, and examine the logical consequences of those principles for everything we see in the world."
    ===

    There are two ideas here. The first is:

    ===
    "theistic science can rationally infer the existence of (many) mental and spiritual processes from their (many) effects in the world"
    ===

    There are problems with this method that need to be considered. The inductive method, going from physical observations to mental laws of operation is fraught with errors and false hypotheses, leading to controversies and contradictions, just as the situation has been in the "science" of psychology for the past one hundred years. Perhaps theistic science should avoid this devolution by going to the next method exclusively.

    The second idea is:

    ===
    "At it can rationally postulate the Divine according to the principles that God has been trying to tell us for centuries"
    ===

    Yes, I think this would work, especially since the Writings of Swedenborg give us an empirical and objective dictionary of correspondences, which as you point out in your book, are rational laws of cause-effect description between spiritual phenomena as cause, and physical phenomena as effects. Or, if you prefer, from Divine Law as end (or source), to spiritual-celestial law as cause, to natural mental and natural physical as effects.

    --
    Dr. Leon James, Professor
    University of Hawaii

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  2. the universe made sense because it was overseen by a supreme intelligence who made mathemmatical description and perdiction possible

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  3. on the question of human origins,religion and science have shared little common ground since the time of darwin.but now some theologians are trying to make room for biological data.

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  4. enlightment thinkers argued that human reason and scientific empiricism, rather then then religious belief, were capble of explaining human existence."

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