Atheism 22 - Back to the Beginning

Even though it's been quite a while since the stats have indicated any observations, I am still in hopes that some day someone might actually read some of this and benefit from it.  To that end, I must now return to the beginning and clarify a few points.

The biggest obstacle I still hear from my non-believing friends is the stumbling block of anything to do with the supernatural, and the concept of God obviously is such a thing.  I am often accused of being biased simply because I profess a belief in Christianity.  This, despite my frequent admonitions to others to set aside their own biases (see posts dated Aug. 19, 2021, Aug. 21, 2021, Oct. 2, 2021, Nov. 12, 2021, Feb. 13, 2022, Jan. 1, 2023 and Sept. 26, 2023). This isn't too surprising; those of us from the Star Trek generation have been conditioned to have a strong presupposition for Philosophical Naturalism: the idea that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe.  I am neither a Creationist nor an Intelligent Design enthusiast.  I agree that both of these schools of thought as widely published demonstrate a definite theistic bias.  On the other hand, I do not necessarily agree that I am biased simply because I am willing to entertain the notion of supernaturalism.  On the contrary, I believe that to simply eliminate supernatural explanations as impossibilities when they most readily fit the evidence based solely on the idea that "I don't wike it!" is an equal and opposite bias of its own.

Philosophical Naturalism can be found to be just such a bias, and, as we were pointing out in our last post, it is far from a generally-agreed-upon scientific idea.  Indeed, Philosophical Naturalism once pitted two of the greatest scientific minds of recent history, Richard Lewontin (an evolutionary biologist and geneticist working at Harvard University and others) and Carl Sagan (astronomer and astrophysicist at Harvard and Cornell Universities); two men for whom I have the highest respect both personally and professionally.

In "Billions and Billions of Demons," a review of Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness, Lewontin writes "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.  It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a materialistic explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.  Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot let a Divine Foot in the door."  (New York Review, Jan. 9, 1997, 31).  Basically, Lewontin is saying that, while the Scientific Method does not, of necessity, preclude the possibility of the supernatural, the common materialistic application of that method certainly does.  Just as some Creationists are so certain of their belief in the literal inerrancy of Scripture that they are willing to force humans and dinosaurs into coexistence, some biologists are so equally certain of their philosophical naturalism that they will not even consider the possibility of supernatural influence on evolution, even in instances in which it provides the best explanation (see Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God).

Scientists aren't alone in their commitment to a naturalistic philosophy.  Many historians are more than happy to accept the historicity of the New Testament Gospels inasmuch as they describe the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, but refuse to accept the historicity of the miracles described alongside that life and those teachings.  Bert Ehrman (UNC Chapel Hill) once said "The bottom line is whether there can be such a thing as historical evidence for a miracle, and, I think, the answer is a clear 'no,' and I think virtually all historians agree with me on that." (Unbelievable? radio program, April 16, 2011)  Ehrman rejects the very notion of historical evidence for miracles because, as he stated, "it's invoking something outside our natural experience to explain what happened in the past."  In other words, he rejects the concept of miracles simply because, by definition, they do not have a natural explanation. So strong is the commitment to Philosophical Naturalism that any possible supernatural explanation is dismissed out of hand, even if the supernatural is the more plausible evidential conclusion. 

I'm fairly confident that this is the very definition of the word "bias."  Just one more of those ideas that make me go, "hmmm..."

Pax