Jerry-built atheism

David Bentley Hart’s recent book The Experience of God has been getting some attention.  The highly esteemed William Carroll has an article on it over at Public Discourse.  As I noted in a recent post, the highly self-esteemed Jerry Coyne has been commenting on Hart’s book too, and in the classic Coyne style: First trash the book, then promise someday actually to read it.  But it turns out that was the second post Coyne had written ridiculing Hart’s book; the first is here.  So, by my count that’s at least 5100 words so far criticizing a book Coyne admits he has not read.  Since it’s Jerry Coyne, you know another shoe is sure to drop.  And so it does, three paragraphs into the more recent post:

[I]t’s also fun (and marginally profitable) to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided is true beforehand. [Emphasis added]

Well, no, Jerry, not only there.

 
Now, criticizing what a book says when you haven’t actually read it is no mean feat.  After all, you’re lacking some of the basic resources commonly thought to be useful in doing the job, such as knowledge of what the book says.  How does Coyne pull it off?  MacGyver style.  He jerry-builds a critique out of the metaphysical equivalent of rubber bands and paper clips.   Unfortunately, Coyne is more of a MacGruber than a MacGyver, so the result is (as it were) an explosion which brings the house down upon Coyne and his combox sidekicks while leaving Hart unscathed.

Where most reviewers would prepare to attack an author’s arguments by consulting his book to find out what they are, Coyne’s procedure is to consult his own hunches about what might be in the book.  (All part of not “prov[ing] what one has decided is true beforehand,” you see.)  Coyne writes:

[A reviewer says that] Hart has presented the Best Case for God, and we’ve all ignored it… 

But what, exactly do we mean by “the opposition’s strongest case”?  I can think of three ways to construe that:

1. The case that provides the strongest evidence for God’s existence.  This is the way scientists would settle an argument about existence claims: by adducing data. This category’s best argument for God used to be the Argument from Design, since there was no plausible scientific alternative to God’s creation of the marvelous “designoid” features of plants and animals. But Darwin put paid to that one…

2. The philosophical argument that is most tricky, or hardest to refute: in other words, the argument for God that has the greatest degree of sophistry.  This used to include the Ontological Arguments, which briefly stymied even Bertrand Russell. But we soon realized that “existence is not a quality”, and that, in fact, existence claims can be settled only by observation or testing, not by logic.

3. The argument that is irrefutable because it’s untestable.  Given that arguments in the first two categories are now untenable, people like Hart have proposed conceptions of God that are so nebulous that we can’t figure out what they mean.  And because they are not only obscure but don’t say anything about the nature of God that can be compared to the way the universe is, they can’t be refuted…

And this, in fact, is what Hart has apparently done in his new book…

End quote.  Now, it’s interesting that Coyne’s first two possibilities roughly correspond to the contemporary philosophical naturalist’s standard assumption that if you’re not doing natural science, then the only thing left for you to be doing is mere “conceptual analysis,” which (so the standard objection goes) can only ever capture how we think about reality, but not reality itself.  Traditional metaphysics, which purports to be neither of these things, would thus be ruled out as groundless at best and (as the logical positivists claimed) strictly meaningless at worst -- not too different from Coyne’s third option.

The thing is, this commonly parroted contemporary naturalist assumption is just a modern riff on Hume’s Fork, viz. the thesis that “all the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact” (Hume, Enquiry IV.1).  And Hume’s Fork is notoriously self-refuting, since it is not itself either a conceptual truth (a matter of the “relations of ideas”) or empirically testable (a “matter of fact”).  Now, the contemporary naturalist’s variation is in exactly the same boat.  The claim that the only respectable options are natural science and conceptual analysis is itself neither a claim that is supported by natural science, nor something revealed by conceptual analysis.  (The naturalist might try to bluff his way past this difficulty by asserting that neuroscience or cognitive science supports his case, but if so you should call his bluff.  For neuroscience and cognitive science, when they touch on matters of metaphysical import, are rife with tendentious and unexamined metaphysical assumptions.  And insofar as such assumptions are naturalist assumptions, the naturalist merely begs the question in appealing to them.)

So, the naturalist unavoidably takes a third cognitive stance distinct from natural science or conceptual analysis, in the very act of denying that it can be taken.  That is to say, he takes a distinctively metaphysical stance.  And so does Coyne.  Like his more philosophically sophisticated fellow contemporary naturalists, Coyne supposes that if a claim isn’t (1) a proposition of natural science or (2) what Coyne calls a proposition of “logic,” which his example (the ontological argument) indicates he takes to involve a mere analysis of concepts with no purchase on objective reality, then it must be (3) “untestable,” “nebulous,” “obscure,” etc.  But this supposition is itself neither a proposition of type (1) nor of type (2), in which case, by Coyne’s criterion, his own position must be regarded as (3) “untestable,” “nebulous,” “obscure,” etc.

In fact traditional metaphysics is not “untestable,” “nebulous,” “obscure,” etc., and neither are the traditional arguments of natural theology that are built upon it.  Take, for example, the Aristotelian-Scholastic theory of actuality and potentiality.  It is motivated completely independently of any theological application, and has been worked out over the centuries in systematic detail.  It argues that neither a static Parmenidean conception of the material universe nor a radically dynamic Heraclitean conception can in principle be correct; that natural science would not in principle be possible if either extreme position were correct; and that the only way in principle that both extremes can be avoided is by acknowledging that actuality and potentiality (or “act and potency,” to use the traditional jargon) are both irreducible aspects of mind-independent reality. 

Now precisely because the theory concerns what must be presupposed by any possible natural science, it is not the sort of thing that can be overthrown by any scientific discovery.  It goes deeper than any possible scientific discovery.  But that does not make it “untestable.”  To be sure, it is not going to be refuted by observation and experiment -- precisely since it concerns what any possible observation and experiment must presuppose -- but it can be challenged in other ways.  Are the arguments given for it valid?  Are the distinctions it makes carefully drawn?  Are there alternative ways of dealing with the facts it claims that it alone can account for?  And so forth.  Defenders of the theory take such challenges seriously and offer responses to them.  And they offer arguments, not appeals to intuition, or faith, or ecclesiastical authority.  (I’ve defended the theory of actuality and potentiality in several places, such as in Chapter 2 of Aquinas.  An even more detailed exposition and defense will be available in my forthcoming book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.  The book won’t be out until May, but Coyne will no doubt have a 2500 word refutation up by tomorrow.) 

Now the core Scholastic arguments for the existence of God rest on the theory of actuality and potentiality.  (I defend these arguments too in several places, such as Chapter 3 of Aquinas.  For a popular presentation of one of them, see this public lecture.)  Because that theory is concerned with what any possible natural science must presuppose, the theistic arguments built upon it, like the theory itself, cannot in principle be overthrown by natural science.  But, like that theory, that does not make the arguments “untestable.”  As with the theory of actuality and potentiality, we can ask various critical questions of the arguments -- Are the arguments valid?  Are their premises true?  Are there alternative ways of dealing with the facts they claim that they alone can account for?  Etc. -- and we can see how well the arguments can be defended against them.  At no point do the arguments appeal to intuition, faith, authority, etc.

New Atheist types will insist that there can be no rationally acceptable and testable arguments that are not empirical scientific arguments, but this just begs the question.  The Scholastic claims to have given such arguments, and to show that he is wrong, it does not suffice merely to stomp one’s feet and insist dogmatically that it can’t be done.  The critic has to show precisely where such arguments are in error -- exactly which premise or premises are false, or exactly where there is a fallacy committed in the reasoning.  (In Aquinas and in the public lecture just linked to, I show why the usual objections have no force.)  Moreover, as we have seen, the New Atheist refutes himself in claiming that only the methods of natural science are legitimate, for this assertion itself has no non-question-begging scientific justification.  It is merely one piece of metaphysics among others.  The difference between the New Atheist metaphysician and the Scholastic metaphysician is that the Scholastic knows that he is doing metaphysics and presents arguments for his metaphysical positions which are open to rational evaluation.  The New Atheist, by contrast, has no non-question-begging arguments for his naturalist metaphysics, but only shrill and dogmatic assertion.   He thinks that to show that he is rational and that his opponent is not, all he needs to do is loudly to yell “I am rational and you are not!” 

Coyne is, of course, evidently unfamiliar with any of the ideas referred to, even though they are at the heart of the Western theological tradition he ridicules.  He will dismiss them preemptively as “bafflegab,” “nebulous,” etc., though he has absolutely no non-question-begging reason for doing so.  He is, as I have pointed out before, exactly like the populist anti-science bigot who dismisses quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and the like merely because the terminology of such theories sounds odd to him and the conclusions seem counterintuitive.  Coyne would deny that the analogy is any good, but of course this just begs the question yet again.  What he needs to do is actually carefully to study the arguments of those he disagrees with, and then to show specifically where the arguments go wrong -- rather than engage in the usual New Atheist hand-waving about how they’re not worth the time, or that someone somewhere has already refuted them anyway, or that they’re motivated by wishful thinking, etc.  But that is exactly what he refuses to do.

Then again, Coyne assures us that he has in fact “spent several years reading theology.”  Really?  Apparently it was all in badly transliterated Etruscan, viewed through gauze bandages on a Kindle with a cracked and flickering screen.  While drunk.  And asleep.  How else to explain the following?  Of the claim that:

God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

Coyne, wearing his vast theological learning lightly, casually asserts:

Aquinas, Luther, Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way.

I can’t top Kenny Bania’s reaction when reading this passage from Coyne.  Unlike Kenny, though, Jer, we’re not laughing with you.