My Grand Apologetics Project Part 6 parts a & b

See these previous posts: 

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3-a.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3b.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-3c-f.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-4.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-5.html

Part 6- Sense Experience And Some Possible Objections

We are now ready to do a little world-view building. At this point, I've laid out why I think it makes sense to trust certain human experiences. I've further argued that once the decision to trust these experiences has been made, we have reasons to believe in some kind of personal God. Finally, I laid out a theory of what religion is, and how one can go about adjudicating which religion is better than another. I ended with an affirmation of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, and spoke a little bit about some possible objections to what I have said so far. Here I will deal with other objections that might come up, and try to deal with the issue of the relationship between science and religion. I will also tighten my argument from Part 5 even further, and make a case for my particular and idiosyncratic form of Christianity.

a. Sense Experience & Science

I spoke earlier about the process that science undergoes when it wants to learn about objects of sense experience. One issue that is a hot button topic today is the relationship between science and religion. Many people see a fundamental conflict between the scientific and religious approaches to the world. Scientists often use some particular piece of data and try to use it as counter-evidence to the proposals of religious traditions. Meanwhile, religious people often go to great lengths to try ignore the evidence science puts forth that contradicts the particular stories that are central to their traditions.

Let me say straight off that I find myself in a position of calling for a pox on both of these houses. I love science. I think science is the cadillac of knowledge. It is the best way to gain knowledge about the world. Science is awesome, and it's outputs are rigorously supported with argument and evidence. But I do not think that science is the end-all be-all. Yes, it is the end-all be-all analysis of the physical objects we encounter, but the central argument in this project has been that physical objects of experience are not the only objects of experience there are. Science cannot step into my moment of humor and tell me what it is like to be a particular person, at a particular time, laughing at a particular joke. That is because science tries to take a third-person perspective on every matter it studies. Religious experience requires a first-person perspective that the very methods of science eschew.

This doesn't mean that science has no bearing on religion. The trappings of science limit what we can meaningfully say is factual in our religious traditions. Earlier I talked about a ritualized relationship between the stories and beliefs of a particular tradition and the history that those stories and beliefs deal with. Science limits how much we can believe is genuine history from those stories. But this doesn't bother someone like me, as I have already admitted that those stories are about the first-person encounter of particular people with historical events, and are not attempts to give straightforward factual accounts of what happened, from a third-person only point of view.

Similarly, religion has something to say about what we can believe about science. For instance, many of the experiences I choose to take seriously, the religious experiences that I take to be foundational to my personal religious quest, require that I have some kind of actual freedom in the world. Many of science's models are deterministic, some are probabilistic. Most scientists have a conviction that those models that are probabilistic hide a determinism that is inaccessible to us due to a limitation on our mind's abilities. Others take these probabilistic models to be equal to, or perhaps even more foundational than, those models that are deterministic.

A person like me, holding the religious beliefs I do, requires me to agree with those scientists who see a fundamental 'looseness' in the world. Now this belief is not 'science' and neither is the belief in absolute determinism. Both beliefs are examples of philosophy of science, that is, they are beliefs ABOUT science. There are other philosophy of science debates that probably are unsolvable on strictly scientific grounds, but are shaped by beliefs one holds outside of the the methods of science. Some see the laws of nature as binding forces that cause things to behave the way they do. They are called 'necessitarians'. Others see the laws of nature as simply our understanding of the regularities of nature. These are called 'regularists'. Nature behaves in certain ways, and the laws of physics are descriptions of those behaviors. My religious beliefs incline me towards regularism.

So science shapes my beliefs ABOUT religion, and religion shapes my beliefs ABOUT science. The trappings of both I take seriously. That leads me to philosophy. I think we have to do a little world-view building if we are going to navigate this world effectively, and we are going to take both science and religion seriously. Alfred N Whitehead once said that we need to do science, religion, and metaphysics in tandem with one another, neither cut off from the other two. "There is no shortcut to truth." I think that is about right.

b. Some Objections

Some people will object to my entire project on the grounds that the experiences I described before could all be seen as mental projections or purely psychological states. They may even appeal to Ockham's Razor and claim that the suggestion that they are purely psychological states is the only rational position one can take, since for me to believe in something more than that is multiplying entities unnecessarily. This is a terrible misuse of the Razor.

Ockham's Razor is about competing scientific theories. When you have a particular physical event or object, you should seek the explanation that has the least number of entities. But that is not what it going on here. The key to the whole thing has to do with 'necessity'. What is necessary for explanation? If one chooses to take one's experiences seriously, then one has already stepped beyond the physical, and so the Razor does not apply. These are not competing scientific explanations, but different realms of explanation entirely. And it must be noted that simplicity is just one epistemic value among many. Science uses other values that are a part of it's methodologies. Predictive efficacy, instrumental efficacy, aesthetic values and others are all involved in adjudicating good theory. Some reject string theory because it is so complex and multiplies entities so greatly. Others accept it because it has vast explanatory power. The razor can be rejected even in science, if other values come into play.

One such scientific value is what is known as intellectual fertility. It is the idea that any theory that increases the adventure of ideas is preferable to an explanation that stops the adventure cold. Any theory that causes us to ask new questions, think in new ways, and open up new fields of science, is chosen over a theory that arrests it. That is one of the best arguments for evolution and against creationism, for instance. For anyone can simply say 'God did it' and end the conversation there. But biology is a field that ever-expands our horizons, leading to new questions and new experiments and new puzzles to solve.

Some have tried to simply shut off belief in God by claiming a universe created without a God is 'simpler' than one created by a God. But against this suggestion, which as I've said I think is a misuse of the Razor in the first place, I suggest that belief in BOTH science and religion is far more intellectually fertile than either is alone. For there are all kinds of interesting theological questions that arise once one has chosen to take one's affective experiences with the utmost seriousness. These need not shut off scientific debate, but can exist alongside it. A person who is both religious and scientific can explore ideas in all directions at once, and so the world in which he lives looks far more intellectually fertile. I think that even granting the Ockham's Razor objection, this is a good counter-argument.

Let's take one simple example of this kind of use of a science to discount what I've said. Evolutionary psychologists will claim that all psychological states, including laughter, hope, play, and the need for risk and venture, have some evolutionary account. We act this way because we evolved to. And that evolutionary account will explain them without any recourse to anything outside of it. Let me say I have no problem with evolutionary accounts of religion. In fact, I gave one earlier. But the evolutionist here is missing the point. It is not the fact that I laugh that makes me believe in God. It is not like it is a piece of data that I then reason to God's existence, no. Rather it is what it is like to laugh, the internal experience that leads me to God. It is not the fact that I hope that I believe in God. It is my encounter with hope as ultimately self-justifying that leads me to believe in God. When I talk about what it is like to laugh, and a scientist starts talking about the evolutionary causes of laughing, they only show they don't understand the conversation they are involved in.

There is no psychological state that we have, nothing we do, that doesn't have an evolutionary story behind it. I can believe in nothing that evolution hasn't 'given' me the ability to believe. Love and hate are both given to me by my evolutionary history. Despair and joy, are also both given to me. Predation and compassion, both given to me. All of these dichotomies and more all have the ability to help me survive. They are options I am given from my evolutionary history, they are not forced choices. The question is why, in this moment, I choose the one over the other? Why do I give one evolutionary 'gift' power over me, and negate the other?

It is that experience as a deciding, thinking human being that is the place where the religious quest is found. Once one chooses to take the phenomenal content of those experiences seriously, new data comes up that needs to be accounted for. Whether I am able to laugh because of the history of the human species or not, the fact of laughter, the act of laughing, presents me options I didn't have before. The choice to respond is a choice limited by, but ultimately transcending, my biology. Of course you may deny the reality of free will, of choice, but that is a philosophical, not a scientific, belief.

To give an even more specific example. Some have claimed that all belief in God is the result of pattern-recognition. Ancient ancestors in the forest benefited from over-recognizing agency in the motions of the world. Every wind swept wave of wheat is looked at as a living being, so that predators, which hide among the fields, are easier to avoid. It is the same reasons rabbits are so jumpy. Fear and run away from everything, and you are less likely to get hurt. So our minds benefit from projecting agency, mind, onto much of the world, and this accounts for our belief in gods and spirits. But the truth is that pattern-recognition is just something humans do. It is the same tendency to see patterns in things that makes science possible. How does one step outside of one's pattern recognition tendency to see if the pattern one sees is really there. There can be no doubt that the mechanism can misfire, and often does. But it must be generally reliable, for if it isn't then one wonders how we can trust science as we do.

More than that, though, the pattern recognition theory proves too much. Think about the whole range of experiences I spoke about earlier. On this theory the reason why laughter creates a universe of joy, is because of predator pattern recognition. The reason why play slows time and turns the world upside down, is predator pattern recognition. The reason why risk and venture seem like the highest form of life, is because of predator pattern recognition. Do you see how ridiculous this is? These experiences have an internal logic to them, which I described earlier. That logic is real, it is present every time we encounter life 'that way'. At some point this kind of explanation just looks too ad hoc, and completely lacking in intellectual fertility.

The final issue sense experience brings up is the fact that much of the world doesn't look like a place of joy, of eternity, etc. Doesn't the world we encounter with our senses contradict the world of the experiences we talked about earlier? How can one trust those experiences when our senses show us such a world that is counter to them? Moreover, why do we need counter-worlds in the first place? Why isn't the world of common sense experience as we want it to be, if life is so wonderful? These questions bring up the classic problem of evil and innocent suffering. It is the most important and devastating argument against all I have said here. Equally devastating is that we have negative experiences of hopelessness, evil, and suffering that create worlds in direct opposition to the ones I spoke of earlier. It is to this issue that I turn next.