The Naturalism elephant in the middle of the room

"It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty." --Charles Darwin, 2 April, 1873. From: Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, (New York: Appleton and Co.), 1905, 276-277.

Better commentators than me have wrestled with the above quote for more than a hundred years. Many now interpret this quote as uncovering the internal ambiguity and struggle felt by Darwin toward the end of his life as he watched the logical consequences of the natural selection theory (which he merely introduced)--a struggle that Darwin was reticent to share with even his closest friends. T.H. Huxley (Darwin's "bulldog") and his grandson Julian (brother of author/philosopher/stoner Aldous and co-formulator of "neo-Darwinism") certainly interpreted this letter that way. They each were initially downright embarrassed that the great Evolutionist did not know how to neatly tie-up his theory, to dive completely and unreservedly into the implications of materialist Darwinism. But as he, too, passed into old age, T.H. Huxley--after defending Darwin for much of his career by hook or by crook--took the end of his life to attempt to temper the worst social effects of Darwinism. In one of his most famous essays from the end of his life, Huxley wrote:

"Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." ("Evolution and Ethics," 9:83).

But why should Huxley turn his back on a raw social interpretation of Darwinism and toward some sense of existentialism? Was he actually disavowing the persuasiveness of evolutionary theory? Not at all. Instead, Huxley had moved from seeing man as animal only to seeing man as a walking material/ethical dialectic. This notion of human as both physical and non-physical (ideal, extra-physical, epi-phenomenal, spiritual, whatever) is the same notion Darwin was afraid of losing--as indicated by his little phrase "...but man can do his duty." What duty was Darwin talking about? What ethical progress was Huxley referring to?

What they feared was not the theory of evolution itself. After all, neither Darwin nor Huxley spoke of retracting the science. In other letters, Darwin explicitly states that he found evolution as a science to be in accord with a vaguely Judaeo-Christian concept of anthropology (i.e., what it means to be human in society). What they feared was metaphysical naturalism. They feared that evolution was being used to support metaphysical naturalism. And though both Darwin and Huxley ended their lives as more-or-less agnostics (Huxley coined the term), they were agnostics in the sense that they couldn't say for certain. Neither man believed that one couldn't know anything about the non-material world at all (a species of metaphysical naturalism).

Metaphysical naturalism implies a few concepts, not the least of which is that the material world is the only thing we can know exists for certain. It also indicates, when it becomes positivism, that only science can discover "truth" and, since science can only discover truth empirically (through observation and testing) that the only thing that is real is, you guessed it, the empirically-verifiable world. This type of metaphysical naturalism is known as anti-realism, in part because the only things that are real are the things science can tell us about. A non-positivist might say, Well, we can't say for certain that other things aren't real, but we certainly can't say that they are, so let's forget about that question and focus on what we can prove empirically. You see that the point is the same--the uninvestigatable, the unknowable (what Kant called the noumena) isn't worth our time. Why does metaphysical naturalism make a difference for Darwin and Huxley? I'm not sure about Darwin--other than the fact that earlier in his life he wanted to be clergy and didn't like the fact that, according to him and many of his current prophets including Dawkins and Dennett, metaphysical naturalism means that the only point to existence for "this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves" is a material one: one that can be measured and sorted out. Enlightened self-interest, I believe they call it. And enlightened self-interest rarely leads in a positive direction without concomitant "enlightened others-interest." At least, this was Huxley's major fear. Unlike Darwin, Huxley grew up working class and knew the shit that poor folk have to go through when the rich are acting out of "enlightened self-interest." Whereas upper-crust Darwin perhaps feared Marxism or anarchy, Huxley feared the Victorian coal mines, textile mills, and blast furnaces would proliferate over the entire globe--and what that would do to the working classes worldwide.

Materialism, or naturalism if you like, did not provide any physical or metaphysical foundation point from which to build an ethic. If you stuck to your metaphysical naturalist guns, there was no compelling reason to stop "natural" selection from taking every ounce out of an individual, out of a society, or even out of planet Earth. (Herbert Spencer saw this clearly and knew there was money to be made for those with a leg up in the world--which is why he invented and supported social "Darwinism" throughout his career.)

Why then, you ask, do people like Dawkins and Dennett say that they still support things like welfare and tsunami relief if they're committed naturalists? Well, I dunno exactly. It seems inconsistent with their metaphysic. Or maybe I should say that sometimes they fall into the "naturalistic fallacy" and sometimes they don't. The naturalistic fallacy (not to be confused with natural-ism) is a philosophical term describing the mistake made those that derive an "ought"--things that we should do/behavioral norms--from an "is"--things the way we currently find them. For instance, if we note that many societies espouse the practice of slavery (the "is"), it doesn't mean that ethically slavery should be practiced or is somehow ethically okay (or even neutral; the "ought"). Richard Dawkins would not believe that, just because natural selection weeds out the weak (the "is"), we should weed out the physically handicapped or allow nature to do so (the "ought"). What he would espouse (perhaps tacitly) is that, because the world is only observable through empirical means--the "is" (though this is itself a philosophical claim)--than we ought to believe that the empirical is all that exists. The fact that not everyone does believe this is due, in Dawkins' mind, to their naivety, brainwashing of religion, the fact that the brain "codes for" religion, etc.--something quite naturalistic. So thought Dawkins is not following into the naturalistic fallacy at all points, he is falling into it at least some of the time.

By definition, metaphysical naturalism precludes knowledge or belief in the existence of God or anything like God. Therefore it is completely incommensurate with Christianity and doesn't really sit that well with the claims of science in general (even evolutionary science) according to prominent scientists and philosophers of science--a major point we'll need to come back to, so suspend judgement on that particular claim for now if you please.

As to the point that I've attempted to make that metaphysical naturalism is a belief/faith-claim (holding aside whether it is a good claim or not), all I can say is that there is no way to assess whether or not naturalism is true empirically since metaphysics are by definition above the physical order and epiphenomenal. Therefore anyone who claims something is or is not true using the preconception of metaphysical naturalism is making a claim based on an evaluation of belief or faith. (**The claim I am making here is a definitional one and is open to refutation by a counter-definition assuming that the counter-definition itself utilizes fairly commonly understood foundational definitions. In other words, one who asserts metaphysical naturalism is not a belief/faith-claim must do so by following conventional definitions of faith, belief, metaphysics, and claim, as I have attempted to do. In order to help with that let me say--and then let the readers decide--that I am defining belief/faith-claim as an evaluative statement bridging the gap between evidence and hypothesis in order to maintain a higher-level structure. We can go into "for instances" if we need to.**) The end goal of making the claim that metaphysical naturalism is a belief/faith-claim is to demonstrate that those that hold to this metaphysical belief do so in part (though not wholly) to position themselves counter to not only the greater metaphysical stipulants that come along with a non-naturalism/materialism but to avoid the categorical imperatives implicitly and explicitly foisted upon the individual once they acknowledge the knowable non-natural/material metaphysic.

In other words, naturalism--as it has been said of Christianity many gazillions of times over the last few decades--is a crutch that has little to do directly with validity of evolutionary theory but says that it does. As one of my professors often says, when Dawkins wakes up in the morning, he argues with the God he doesn't want to be there.