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Where the Substance Really Isn’t

by Tim Callahan

Alvin Plantinga, O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, seems adept at talking philosophy around issues of science without ever grappling with anything concrete. Despite the length of this book I waded through its often impenetrably dense verbiage, searching in vain for much real substance. The author’s basic assertion is that, while there is superficial conflict between. science and religion (particularly Christianity), there is, in fact, a deep concord between the two. At the same time, he argues, there is a superficial concord between science and naturalism, but in reality, a deep conflict between them. Naturally, the supposed conflict between science and theism centers on evolution, and Plantinga takes atheist spokesmen—particularly the “four horsemen of the new atheism,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens—to task for asserting that evolution is directionless and unguided:

In this chapter and the one previous, we have been looking into the claim that current scientific evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian belief. This claim, as we saw, is false. The scientific theory of evolution is not incompatible with Christian belief; what is incompatible with it is the idea that evolution, natural selection, is unguided. But that idea isn’t part of evolutionary theory as such; it’s instead a metaphysical or theological addition. (p. 65)

While it’s true that the theory of evolution per se doesn’t preclude a creator deity, the fossil record, to which Plantinga never refers or alludes, would seem devoid of any teleological pattern.

Consider the basic thesis of a God with whom evolution is compatible. This is the God of teleological arguments, the God who creates life and spurs it on with mutations and natural selection, who goads it forward with the eventual goal of creating beings who, like Him (or Her), are sentient and self-aware. Across the vast panorama of deep time, the creator’s work stretches from the simplest life forms to the sentient apex of his grand design: namely, us. This is certainly the God I believed in when I was a theist, and, given the upward course of evolution, it did seem to me then to have a discernible pattern and a grand design.

The great curse on this picture, glaringly revealed in the fossil record, is the haphazard nature of mass extinctions. If humans were God’s goal, then the rise of mammals to dominance would have to be integral to that goal. By the end of the Permian Period, about 248 million years ago, the mammal-like reptiles were the dominant mega-fauna, and were poised to evolve into dominant mammals. Then the Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species. Among those groups hard hit by this greatest of all mass extinctions were the synapsids, the mammal-like reptiles, which were almost entirely wiped out. As a result, while the few surviving synapsids did evolve into mammals, these were not the dominant mega-fauna. Rather, they were small furtive creatures that eked out a living under the feet of the dinosaurs for about 185 million years, only gaining dominance when another mass extinction annihilated those great beasts 65 million years ago. This begs the question: Why the 185 million-year detour? Were we to compare a creator who dealt thus with his creation to a gardener trimming a hedge, this gardener would have to be incompetent indeed. His hacking away with capricious mass killings would make the tree of life resemble an asymmetrical topiary shaped by a mad-man.

Another seeming pattern I used to accept when I was young was that of “orthogenesis,” a seeming straight line of evolution, which, again, showed a striking pattern and demonstrated a goal. Orthogenesis, or “straight line” evolution, often less elegantly referred to as the “hat-rack” model, depicted the evolution of the horse as proceeding from Eohippus (now called Hyracotherium, a loss, to my way of thinking) to Equus, with only a few, quickly pruned, side branches. It was a grand triumph, a great success story, a valiant journey from little Eohippus to magnificent Equus, a great demonstration of the Creator at work. The problem with this picture is that, aside from beginning with Eohippus / Hyracotherium, and ending with Equus, nothing in this epic tale is true. Far from being a great success story, it is one of wretched bare survival. A lone genus of an entire family, out of a many-branched line, escaped extinction. Far from looking like a hat-rack, the phylogenetic tee of the Equidae, like that of life in general, resembles an ill-trimmed bush.

The late Stephen Jay Gould noted another example of evolution’s randomness in his popular book about the Burgess Shale fauna, Wonderful Life. Most of the bizarre phyla dominating this Cambrian deposit went extinct, and the survival of one insignificant genus, Pikeia, probable ancestor to all vertebrates, would seem to be a matter of chance and contingency. This is not to say, of course, that natural selection doesn’t impose an iron law of survival on chance mutations, or that there isn’t a general upward flow of increasing complexity to be found in the fossil record, only that the creator’s stamp is missing.

Plantinga fails to consider this body of evidence—that of mass extinctions, bare survival and random contingency—upon which Richard Dawkins and others base their assertion that evolution is unguided. He fails to consider it, because, in a book that deals with the issue of whether science in general, and evolution in particular, supports a theistic view or naturalism, he fails to even mention the fossil record—and with it, its implications.

In the process of arguing that naturalism is irrational, Plantinga attacks evolutionary psychology. As an example of its failure and the failure of sociobiology to provide a sound basis for ethics and morality, he quotes Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson as saying in a paper entitled “The Evolution of Ethics” (reprinted in the 1993 volume Religion and the Natural Sciences, edited by James Hutchinson, published by Harcourt, Brace), “ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our own genes to get us to cooperate; thus morality ultimately seems to be about self-interest.” Did Ruse and Wilson actually say that ethics is an illusion and morality is just about self-interest? Sort of. The quote is only small part of the original section from which the quote was taken. Let us restore it to its original context with Plantinga’s quote in boldface.

The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day. In particular, we must recognize our biological past in trying to understand our interactions with others. We must think again especially about our so-called ‘ethical principles’. The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance. … Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race. Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.

It is apparent that not only has Plantinga failed to install an ellipsis between “ethics” and “is an illusion” and that “ethics as we understand it is an illusion,” is a considerably less provocative statement than Plantinga’s quote, but that placed in its original context it is a much different statement than it is in Plantinga’s portrayal of it. The statement that morality is about self-interest would seem to be from another paragraph altogether. This is, of course, a tactic with which we skeptics are all too familiar, having seen so often dishonestly employed by creationists. It is extremely disappointing to see it thus used by someone of Dr. Plantinga’s stature. What is implied by the cherry-picked quote, taken out of context, is that Ruse and Wilson, seeing ethics and morality as illusory, would also see it as something to be dispensed with. Of course, that’s not at all what they are saying. Rather, they argue that ethics and morality are not God-given, but rooted biologically in our nature.

In yet another attack on the rationality of naturalism and as an example of the innate agreement between science and theism, the author raises the argument of the fine-tuning of the universe. Here we see the sad spectacle of a philosopher seizing on a scientific concept he truly doesn’t understand and using it to make a philosophical point. He writes:

For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case would life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been slightly different, life, at any rate life even remotely similar to the sort we have, could probably not have developed. (p. 199)

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A number of physicists, among them Victor Stenger, have pointed out many of the fallacies of this argument. For example, in his book Just Six Numbers (often cited by fine-tuning advocates) Martin Rees says that the gravitational constant would have to increase by a factor of 3000 to preclude the formation of stars. This doesn’t sound that fine-tuned. As to the fine-tuning of the strong force, consider the mass of the proton. Is it that fine tuned? In his article “Rough-Tuned Universe” (Skeptic vol. 16, no. 4 2011, p. 51) Christopher Sirola notes:

Change something as simple as the mass of a proton, it is said, and nuclear fusion no longer works. The physicist Victor Stegner created a simple computer program to refute such charges, and on his web site one can alter a star’s parameters. I tried doubling the mass of the proton—fairly important since stars generate energy by turning protons into larger nuclei—and while the star’s lifetime was cut roughly in half, it still had hundreds of millions of years to live. The “fundamental” constants of the universe, it seems, aren’t so fundamental after all.

Take the force of gravity. The fine-tuning argument says it had to be precisely what it is in order for the universe to expand as it did after the Big Bang. Too strong and the universe would collapse back to a singularity. Too weak and the universe would expand too rapidly. This doesn’t seem to depend on other parameters. So doesn’t the exactness of gravity alone imply design?

No. If you’re going to circumvent Stenger’s argument by focusing on a single value, gravity is the wrong one to pick because it didn’t have to be all that exact. In Rees’ book he finds that the gravitational constant would have to increase by a factor of 3000 to preclude the formation of stars. (I’ve never seen anyone use the same approach on another constant, so I suspect none of the others have similarly obvious independent significance.)

Plantinga quotes Stephen Hawking from “The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times” (in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data M.S. Longair ed. 1973): “reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 10¹² at the time when the temperature of the Universe was 10¹⁰K would have resulted in the Universe starting to recollapse when it radius was only 1/3000 of and the temperature was still 10,000 degrees.” But on p. 128 of A Brief History of Time, Hawking says: “The rate of expansion of the universe [in the inflationary model] would automatically become very close to the critical rate determined by the energy density of the universe. This could then explain why the rate of expansion is still so close to the critical rate, without having to assume that the initial rate of expansion of the universe was very carefully chosen.”

The final chapter of Plantinga’s book is an exercise in symbolic logic. It would seem that what is first needed to decipher this chapter is a translation into English. Here’s an example:

That’s how things stand for nonreductive naturalism: P(R/N&E&nonreductive materialism) is low. We can deal more briefly with P(R/N&E&reductive materialism), the probability of R given naturalism and evolution and reductive materialism. On reductive materialism, mental properties are complex combinations of physical properties; more briefly, taking complex combinations of physical properties to be themselves physical properties, mental properties just are physical properties. What is the probability of R on N&E and reductive materialism? (p. 343)

Here is a key to the letters in the quasi-mathematical formulae above:

P is probability. R is the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable. N is naturalism, and E is the proposition that our cognitive faculties came about through evolution.

So, I guess what Plantinga is saying that P(R/N&E&nonreductive materialism) is low, is this: The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable based on evolution, naturalism and non-reductive materialism is low. I must confess that, having read what led up to this conclusion, I really can’t figure out how he came to it. However, it all seems to go back to this statement on p. 326: “Nietzche, Nagel, Stroud, Churchland, and Darwin, nontheists all, seem to concur: (naturalistic) evolution gives one a reason to doubt that human cognitive faculties produce for the most part true beliefs.”

So, out of this doubt, which Plantinga boils down to the phrase “Darwin’s doubt,” he manufactures the bold statement that our cognitive faculties—which can be anything from a belief that movement in the tall grasses may be a lion stalking us, to the belief that lightning is being hurled at the earth by an angry god—cannot be considered reliable based on naturalism. Since our cognitive faculties are, at least to some degree reliable, naturalism contradicts science. Or, am I missing something here?

It also occurs to me that many fallacious ideas, such as that lighting is being hurled at the earth by an angry god, are in no way detrimental to survival in a primitive state—that of hunter-gatherer, a subsistence farmer or a herdsman. These occupations being the state of most of the human race for most of its existence means that only recently has our innate non-rational nature become a problem. It’s much like our cravings for sugar, salt and fats, all of which were aids to survival in the general scarcity of salt, immediate sources of energy (sugar) and long range, high energy storage foods (fats). Only recently did these cravings become detrimental.

The idea that our cognitive faculties are, in the raw, reliable in the concrete and near term, yet initially (i.e. without training) unreliable in the abstract, seems to be an alternative Plantinga hasn’t explored. Yet, the scientific method is an elaborate means by which to overcome the naturally subjective and essentially irrational nature of the human mind. Thus, the existence of the discipline we call science would seem to undercut Plantinga’s argument that naturalism and science are in conflict.