What Is “Naturalism”?
Let’s start in by talking about “naturalism,” for this is a word with many meanings. When I was a child, it meant nudism, going around without your clothes on. With some regret, this is not the topic of this essay, for it is rather with notions of naturalism that have to do with nature, that is to say with the physical world. How broadly conceived is part of the discussion. It is usual and convenient to distinguish two senses of naturalism in the way I am using it here.
On the one hand, there is “metaphysical naturalism,” meaning that nature is all there is and that there is no God or gods. In this sense, metaphysical naturalism is opposed to metaphysical supernaturalism. Related terms are “philosophical naturalism,” which I take to be more or less the same thing, and “ontological naturalism” which is similar but not quite the same. The opposite to ontological naturalism is ontological nonnaturalism, which I take to include not just the divine but also nonnatural facts like G. E. Moore’s nonnatural ethical facts and, if you are a Platonist, the facts of mathematics. I take it that in the old days, we might have spoken of “materialism” rather than naturalism but that in an age of electrons and so forth, materialism seems a bit old-fashioned. Also, the naturalist might be a mathematical Platonist – I edge a bit that way – but I doubt a materialist could be.
On the other hand, there is “methodological naturalism.” This is a fairly new term, but the historians have shown that it is an old idea with roots back before the Scientific Revolution. This is the idea that within science, one can and must explain the physical world as if there were no God. In other words, given that scientific explanation means understanding in terms of unbroken regularities (including statistical regularities over groups) – natural laws – this is the only approach permitted. Today, I think we would often connect this with mechanism – understanding must be in terms of the world as if it were a machine. But I don’t see any a priori reason why an Aristotelian approach, invoking final causes, should not be naturalistic. I think Aristotle would think of himself as a naturalist. Again, I don’t think naturalism is quite the same as materialism. As before, electrons seem to be natural but not material, and the same is true of mathematics if you are a Platonist. I am very glad to say that I don’t have to get into the question of consciousness here, but I take it that it is something open to methodologically natural approaches – even if you deny that it is material. I think most naturalists would say that consciousness doesn’t threaten metaphysical naturalism either, although whether it should is perhaps another matter.
Now what is the connection between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism? Some, the Intelligent Design Theorist Phillip Johnson for instance, say that if you are a methodological naturalist then you are a metaphysical naturalist and presumably conversely. This would be a considerable surprise to many scientists. Two of the most important evolutionists of the twentieth century, the Englishman Ronald Fisher and the Russian-American Theodosius Dobzhansky, were both deeply committed Christians. We can certainly say that if someone is not a methodological naturalist then he or she is not going to be a metaphysical naturalist. If, like the Intelligent Designers, you allow massive great interventions by the Almighty into your science, then obviously you are not a metaphysical naturalist. Assuming that Johnson’s fiat is at least open to discussion, the interesting question on which we shall have things to say is whether being a methodological naturalist tips you toward or forces you into being a metaphysical naturalist. Without prejudice, we can certainly say that this often seems to be the case. People do science and it succeeds, so much that in the words of one of the great historians of the Scientific Revolution, the non–God-invoking machine metaphor at the heart of modern science led people to think of God as a “retired engineer.” It is but one more step to think of God as a nonexistent engineer. But things are rarely quite that simple. Charles Darwin was one who insisted on methodological naturalism in his science. He quarreled with his American friend, the Presbyterian, Harvard-based botanist Asa Gray, on this. But as he moved to agnosticism in later life, the main motivating reasons were theological. Darwin hated the idea of eternal damnation for nonbelievers, like his father and his brother. He felt, rightly or wrongly, that such a revengeful god as this supposes simply had to be the fabrication of a group of people (priests) determined to invoke fear in the rest of us and thus to control our lives. He wanted no part of such a system.
Metaphysical Naturalism and Evil
This mention of Darwin starts to move us toward the central topic of this chapter, naturalism and the problem of evil. What Darwin shows is that whatever the relationship between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism, there are often nonscientific reasons pushing people toward metaphysical naturalism – reasons that are philosophical or theological. I am one with Darwin on this. I cannot accept the existence of a god – for convenience, let us stick with the Christian God, although the argument can be generalized – for several reasons that have little or nothing directly to do with science. For a start, I think the Christian God is an irreconcilable confusion of two traditions, Greek and Jewish. The Greek God – the God of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas – is not a person. He is a necessary being outside time and space. Of course, the Christianized Greek God reveals intentions as do people, but to use the vernacular, He is simply not “one of the chaps.” Jesus certainly was, but then was he so very Greek? The Jewish God – the God of the Protestants, today of people like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga – is a person. He is beside me, comforting me, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. We have here two different notions, and I just don’t think you can bring them together harmoniously. For the second, with David Hume, I have a lot of trouble with the notion of a necessary being. 2 + 2 = 4 is necessary, but that is not a being. I won’t go into full details here – I and others have done so at great length elsewhere – but you can see the point I am making.
And so to the problem of evil. I take this in the pretty standard form: If God is all powerful, He could prevent evil. If God is all loving, He would prevent evil. Evil exists. Therefore God – the Christian God – does not exist. I realize that there are counterarguments to avoid this conclusion, and we shall be looking at some of them soon. Let me say that overall I do not find them convincing and that some of the counterarguments I find downright appalling. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, thinks that our sins made necessary the death on the cross of Jesus of Nazareth and that this is such a good thing that the sins are a cost worth paying: “no matter how much evil, no matter how much sin and suffering such a world contains, the aggregated badness would be outweighed by the goodness of incarnation and atonement, outweighed in such a way that the world in question is very good.” This is a Calvinist position known as “supralapsarianism,” and frankly it strikes me as being a very good reason for not being a Calvinist.
My position is absolutely clear. I am a metaphysical naturalist primarily because of the problem of evil, and not only do I not think there is an effective counterresponse, I don’t want to be argued out of my position. I know I speak for many in making these responses. Let me highlight the deaths of two young women in the Second World War. Anne Frank, the brilliant, full-of-life, so-lovable diarist, ended her days dying of typhoid in Bergen-Belsen. Sophie Scholl was one of the White Rose group in Munich who handed out pamphlets criticizing the Third Reich. Her life ended under the guillotine. In the light of these two deaths, nothing can ever convince me (or the many who think like me) that the Christian God exists. Even to try to think otherwise would be immoral. On the subject of metaphysical naturalism, the problem of evil is definitive. And if you say that God’s ways are mysterious and hidden from us, then you are asking me to go against what I presume you think is my God-given nature and to condone acts that by any reasonable standard are pure evil. That I think is unfair of both you and God.
From Methodological Naturalism to Metaphysical Naturalism?
This said, there is considerable philosophical interest in seeing if methodological naturalism really does contribute to metaphysical naturalism. In America particularly, there is also much social and political interest in seeing if methodological naturalism really does contribute to metaphysical naturalism. Many right-wing, evangelical Christians are deeply suspicious of science, particularly any science to do with origins, and are forever tampering with school curricula and trying to enforce their views on teachers and children, often by promoting and passing laws favorable to their agenda. Recognizing that for people like these the problem of evil is clearly not a definitive refutation of their God, here (apart from philosophy) we have another reason for digging into the relationship between methodological and metaphysical naturalism.
In the context of this collection, we are focusing on issues connected to the problem of evil; but, as it so happens, this is no strain, because one of the chief – if not the chief – arguments that is trotted out about the significance of methodological naturalism for metaphysical naturalism is based precisely on the problem of evil. Charles Darwin gave the classic exposition in a letter to Asa Gray just after the Origin of Species was published in 1859. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” Well, yes, you might say, but this is going to happen whether or not Darwin and Gray ever existed or wrote on the subject. What’s it got to do with naturalism? The point is that Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection – a methodologically naturalistic theory if ever there was one – focuses on these issues, stresses their widespread nature, and confirms their importance. All of which implies that if God did create through the evolutionary process, He did so in a particularly painful (for others) fashion, almost to the point of sadism.
The heart of Darwin’s theory comes in two parts. First, he argues to a struggle for existence.
“A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.”
Darwin then showed that given any natural population of organisms, there are going to be huge amounts of variation between the individual members – no two organisms are ever exactly alike. This led him to speculate that in the struggle, those that succeed – the fitter – will on average tend to do so because of the features they possess and that the losers – the less fit – will lose because they do not have such features. There will therefore be a process akin to the selective breeding in the domestic world that leads to fatter cows and shaggier sheep and bigger turnips. Given enough time, these successful types will spread through the group, and eventually there will be full-blooded change.
“Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.”
Pain and suffering are not just incidental. They are part of the very fabric of life. As it happens, Darwin was still hanging on, barely, to belief in a deity. But it was certainly one far from the God of Abraham and Isaac. “I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”
Richard Dawkins feels no such qualifications or hesitations. He introduces the notion of “reverse engineering,” meaning the process of picking backward to try to work out something’s purpose, and the related notion of a “utility function,” meaning the end purpose being intended. He then draws our attention to the cheetah/antelope interaction, asking, “What was God’s utility function?” Cheetahs seem wonderfully designed to kill antelopes. “The teeth, claws, eyes, nose, leg muscles, backbone and brain of a cheetah are all precisely what we should expect if God’s purpose in designing cheetahs was to maximize deaths among antelopes.” Conversely, “we find equally impressive evidence of design for precisely the opposite end: the survival of antelopes and starvation among cheetahs.” One could almost imagine that we have two gods making the different animals and then competing. If there is indeed but one god who made both animals, then what is going on? What sort of god makes this sort of encounter? “Is He a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? Is He trying to avoid overpopulation in the mammals of Africa? Is He maneuvering to maximize David Attenborough’s television ratings?” The answer is inevitable.
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Houseman put it:
‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither know nor care.
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.’”
There are others who feel likewise. Philosopher Philip Kitcher also dwells on the suffering brought on by the struggle for existence, writing,
“[George John] Romanes and [William] James, like the evangelical Christians who rally behind intelligent design today, appreciate that Darwinism is subversive. They recognize that the Darwinian picture of life is at odds with a particular kind of religion, Providentialist religion, as I shall call it. A large number of Christians, not merely those who maintain that virtually all of the Bible must be read literally, are providentialists. For they believe that the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity. Yet the story of a wise and loving Creator, who has planned life on earth, letting it unfold over four billion years by the processes envisaged in evolutionary theory, is hard to sustain when you think about the details.”
In our terms, Kitcher allows that he once thought methodological naturalism reconcilable with metaphysical supernaturalism but now steps back, insisting he alone should be held responsible for “the earlier errors that I recant here.”
Is Naturalism Incoherent?
The issue is whether methodological naturalism, as exemplified by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, pushes us toward metaphysical naturalism because it underlines – stresses the inevitability of –pain and suffering in this world, something incompatible with the existence of the Christian God. Before we turn to this question, however, there is one preliminary matter we must clear out of the way. Does the very acceptance of Darwinian Theory negate the possibility of metaphysical naturalism? This is the position of Alvin Plantinga. He argues (in an argument that was started by the sometime British Prime Minister A. J. Balfour) that if you are a metaphysical naturalist, then you will be a methodological naturalist. If you are a methodological naturalist, then you will accept Darwin’s theory as the essentially correct explanation of all organisms, including humans, and you will agree that the way we think is a product of natural selection. But then you will agree that our beliefs are not necessarily a function of truth but rather of what will help us in the struggle for existence. Somewhat cheekily, Plantinga quotes Darwin: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” As it happens, Darwin immediately excused himself as a reliable authority on such philosophical questions, but this somewhat awkward point goes unmentioned. Also unmentioned is the fact that Darwin was explaining why he saw purpose in life, something one might have thought Plantinga would have welcomed.
Plantinga’s own example invites us to dinner at Oxford, where there are many courses and much conversation, including Richard Dawkins telling the philosopher A. J. Ayer the conditions under which one could be an atheist. (Coals to Newcastle, one would have thought.) It could be that our senses and reason deceive us so much that we could project being at this dinner to other, very different circumstances. We could be in the jungle fighting crocodiles, but the features that lead to croc fighting also lead to illusions about what we are doing – illusions that we are putting Freddie Ayer right on matters of religious commitment. “Under this possibility … beliefs wouldn’t have (or needn’t have) any purpose or function; they would be more like unintended by-products, and the likelihood that they are mostly true would be low.”
Obviously this silly example does not do what Plantinga intends. No Darwinian would ever think that drunken discussions about God help fight crocodiles – one needs rather speed and cunning and strength. It is true, to bring about its ends of continued existence and reproductive success, evolution can and probably does deceive us sometimes. There is for instance a school of thought – “evolutionary debunking” – claiming that our belief in the objectivity of morality is an illusion, brought on to make us successful social beings. But the point about illusions, if such there be, is that we can tell they are illusory because we have other nonillusory beliefs that tell us what is so. It is like explaining a magician’s tricks. That there are two girls in the box is truth. That one is sawn in half is not and is explained by the two-girl fact.
Plantinga persists. Perhaps we are deceived all of the time. To take an analogy, suppose we are in a factory producing widgets, and all on the assembly line look red. We then discover that the redness is a function of our protective glasses, and once they are removed, we see the widgets in another, true color. Could we not be in a situation in which natural selection forces on us such glasses for our own good, and we can never take them off and know the truth? Even our basic statements – there are two girls in the box – could be mistaken. Perhaps selection-based evolution deceives us all of the time, and so all of our thoughts, including our thoughts about evolution and its causes, collapse into meaningless jumbles. The methodologically naturalistic pursuit about human nature has led to irresolvable paradox – a paradox that goes up the chain to metaphysical naturalism, which must now be rejected in favor of metaphysical supernaturalism. Then, with the good God guaranteeing the truth of our beliefs, we can happily adopt some form of evolutionary theory.
There is an important philosophical point here, but it is not the one to which Plantinga points. It is that, in the spirit of Hume and Kant, we are always going to be looking at the world through our evolutionarily acquired natural abilities. Perhaps – almost certainly – these do give us an evolution-infected way of understanding reality. Absolute truth in the God’s-eye sense that Plantinga desires is unobtainable. But we pretty much knew that even without evolution. We can be realists, in the sense of believing in a real world and in making judgments about good understanding of this world and bad understanding, but the realism that we have is the kind of neo-Kantianism or even Pragmatism. Ultimately all understanding has to be processed through human nature. At the best – but it is a pretty good best – we can have a kind of coherence of our beliefs. It all hangs together, and at a pragmatic level, which is what really counts, it works. Within the system, we can have correspondence between our beliefs and the world about us. There is correspondence between our thinking that the plates of stegosaurus are for heat control and the nature of the plates themselves and the kind of functioning they seem capable of. There is no correspondence between the thinking you are at the dinner but really being in the jungle.
Let us bring this discussion to a quick end. Even if Plantinga were right, he too is open to skeptical worries. He has an absolute conviction that God is guaranteeing his beliefs about the physical world and the applicability of some kind of evolutionary theory. He is right open to that Demon that Descartes introduced in the first Meditation – the Demon that undermines even our most basic convictions about reality, about mathematics, about metaphysics, and indeed about anything we might believe to be true.
“I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these….”
We could be mistaken about everything – except perhaps that we exist. The metaphysical supernaturalist is in the same supposed jam as the metaphysical naturalist. Let us move on, taking Darwinian evolutionary theory with us.
Natural Evil
Does Darwinian Theory really make the problem of evil that much worse, meaning whatever the philosophical and theological issues, does Darwinian Theory in some sense intensify the problem of evil so that here we have a case in which methodological naturalism points towards metaphysical naturalism? To answer this sensibly, let us think a little more about the nature of evil. Without trying for anything new, what is the standard line on the topic? Traditionally one divides evil into two: natural evil and moral evil. Let us take these in turn.
Natural evil I take to be earthquakes and that sort of thing. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, when about fifty thousand people lost their lives, is the paradigmatic example and certainly cured the French Enlightenment figure Voltaire of any illusions about the friendly nature of this world. The philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz is the author of the classic response. God could not do the impossible, and even the best world of law is going to have natural pain and suffering. God could not make 2 + 2 = 5. God could not make a cat the size of an elephant – the weight would be far too great for the legs of a cat. Thus, putting matters in modern terms, the planet had to have some kind of law-bound (methodologically naturalistic) geological system, and the one it has is continental drift brought on by plate tectonics. God could not stop this system having some dreadful effects in Lisbon – as it will surely have before too long in California. Of course, this all presumes that God had to create through law. I can think of some fairly obvious reasons why He would, starting with the fact that a world not subject to such law hardly seems coherent, with everything happening randomly. In fact, it would be hard to know what a world without any law would be like. I suppose God could keep intervening every time something bad is about to happen, but where would be the end to it? So if only to keep the argument going, let’s cut God some slack here.
Of course, the assumption is that the physical laws are the best there are in the sense of getting the job done with the minimum amount of pain and suffering. I am not sure how one would prove this. Is there an alternative to plate tectonics that would cause more human suffering? It is well known that it was this kind of question that inspired Voltaire to write his brilliant satire Candide, arguing against Leibniz, and his claim that this world of ours is the best possible – thus natural evil is the unavoidable cost of getting anything to work at all. To make his point, Voltaire introduced one of the all-time classic figures of fiction, the Leibnizian philosopher Dr. Pangloss. It matters not how awful things may be or turn out to be, Pangloss had happy optimism that things had turned out for the best in this best of all possible worlds. A man of the people, with the desires of men of the people, Pangloss catches venereal disease, becoming “a beggar all covered with scabs, his eyes diseased, the end of his nose eaten away, his mouth distorted, his teeth black, choking in his throat, tormented with a violent cough, and spitting out a tooth at each effort.” Is this not terrible? Oh no, responds the optimist, “it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.”
Whether or not this is quite fair to Leibniz and his solution, we may be able to make a bit more progress on the matter when we turn to instances of natural evil in the living world, those predator–prey interactions for instance. One thinks of the untold suffering every day highlighted by Darwin, as one group of animals goes out to find food literally on the backs of another group of animals. Yet one can plausibly suggest that, even though it does mean ongoing suffering, here is a case in which we can talk of what is possible. God could not create organisms by law without the struggle for existence and natural selection. Richard Dawkins of all people makes this point. He argues that in order to get organic adaption, the design-like nature of features like hands and eyes and mouths, no mechanism other than natural selection will do the job. Random large mutations do not lead to functioning organisms. The bigger the change, the more likely it is to be totally disastrous. The one other mechanism that does speak to functioning – Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics – is false. It would be nice if the giraffe’s neck got longer through stretching. It just isn’t true. It is selection or nothing. If God wanted to produce functioning organisms through such natural laws, then the cost was going to be a lot of suffering.
Moral Evil: Original Sin
The other side to the coin is moral evil. It is this that led to the deaths of Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl. One set of human beings, of their own free choice, deliberately caused great harm and suffering to another set of human beings. There are two ways in which methodological naturalism via Darwinian Theory impinges on the problem of evil – one perhaps brings more comfort to the metaphysical naturalist and one perhaps brings comfort to the metaphysical supernaturalist. Start first with the question of why we are sinful, why we commit moral evil. According to the Christian, we are made in the image of God. Since God is wholly good, why are we not wholly good? The traditional answer, at least for Western Christians, goes back to St. Augustine. Adam sinned, and humans from henceforth are tainted by this sin. Whether we are born sinners or with the predisposition to sin, either way we are sinful. “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (Romans 7: 15). This tells us why Jesus had to die on the cross. We are incapable of lifting ourselves out of sin and can do so only by the saving grace of the blood of the lamb. He washes away our sins, and we are forgiven.
The trouble is that if Darwinian evolution through natural selection is right, there was no original Adam and Eve. There is debate about this, but no one thinks that the human population – including the prehuman populations leading to us – ever fell below at a minimum several thousand, and much of the time it was significantly bigger. It is possible that going back in time, we humans today all share some individual as an ancestor. Much more likely is that we share a large number of individuals as ancestors. One or many, they would all have had parents and grandparents and more back through the ages. They would not have needed original sin to make truth of what St. Paul said. Evolution suggests that we are all going to be an ongoing combination of selfishness and altruism. That is how social beings work. In other words, whomever you pick out as Adam and Eve, they would have had parents, and those parents would basically have been just as good and bad as their children. Even if someone did sin and eat a forbidden apple, there would have been sin before that. There would have been apples, too, providing the opportunity!
Darwinian evolution totally undermines the Augustinian line on original sin. It cannot be saved. There is another line, more favored by Christians in the orthodox tradition. Before Augustine, Irenaeus of Lyons argued that putting it all on the shoulders of one sinner seems an awfully stern thing to do. A rather naïve couple are seduced by the wiles of a duplicitous serpent, and death and pain ensue for evermore. Apart from anything, that seems a rather harsh reaction, overcompensating for the misdemeanor. More than this, it makes the whole Christian story of the Incarnation (Jesus’s coming) and the Atonement (Jesus’s death) very much a matter of catch-up, Plan B as one might say. Adam sinned, and so God had to do something about it. Would it not be better to have the story of Jesus and his sacrifice intended from the beginning? Humans were created imperfect, and the Christian story is one of God helping us on our way until we are ready for eternal life. Adam and Eve are purely symbolic.
Although this tradition has much to commend it, there are still issues that need to be dealt with at a theological level. One still wants to know why God demanded the blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, especially now that we can hardly be blamed for our sinful nature. Let’s leave the discussion here. The point is that the methodological level is reaching up to the metaphysical level. The answer by traditional Christian supernaturalism to one of the most puzzling questions about our nature, why we have this propensity to moral evil, is threatened if not destroyed by Darwinian Theory. Without a significant repair job, the balance tilts toward metaphysical naturalism.
Moral Evil: Free Will
The second matter of interest here asks why it is that we fell into evil in the first place. The traditional response is couched in terms of free will. Being made in the image of God, it is better that we have free will than that we be automata, even though great evils ensue. “God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but he wills to permit evil to be done, and this is good.” Philosophically, as you know, I do not think this an adequate answer. The free will of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler does not outweigh the harm they did. But this is not the point at issue here. Ask rather about Darwinian Theory and what it has to say about free will. Does it strengthen the free-will defense in some sense?
What do we say about free will? There are two basic positions. One, known as “libertarianism” (not to be confused with the political philosophy of that name), argues that free will is a matter of reasons that lie outside the usual causal nexus. Kant is the point person here.
“Since the conception of causality involves that of laws, according to which, by something that we call cause, something else, namely the effect, must be produced; hence, although freedom is not a property of the will depending on physical laws, yet it is not for that reason lawless; on the contrary it must be a causality acting according to immutable laws, but of a peculiar kind; otherwise a free will would be an absurdity.”
I will not stay to argue this position, simply to note that if it works, the whole matter is outside the domain of science and so says nothing about the sorts of issues at stake here.
The other position, much in the English empiricist tradition, is known as “compatibilism.” Here the distinction is drawn between determinism and compulsion. Everything, including humans, may be part of the causal picture, so in this sense we are determined in all of our actions; but we can still draw a distinction between people being free, as I am now as I sit at my computer, and people being unfree or compelled, as the prisoner in chains or the subject of the hypnotist or the unfortunate individual in the grip of a dire mental illness. Now conversely, without judging whether this position works, do note that now science is very relevant. In particular, science is going to throw light on whether an actor is free or unfree. I take it that on the basis of science, we would judge that a snake striking a bird is dangerous but not immoral because it is not a free actor – it has no sense of right and wrong and does what it does by instinct without much choice. I take it on the basis of science, we would say that (whatever his childhood) Adolf Hitler was a free agent, and when he went to war in 1939, he bore responsibility.
I take it that several areas of science can potentially throw light on questions like these, and not just evolutionary biology. All of the sciences interested in matters of choice and decision – psychology particularly, but also areas like economics – have a role to play here. It is not a question of one science but not others but of all sciences being committed to the methodological naturalism program. Does science give us reason to think that the very distinction between being free and being unfree is significant? Does science give us a reason why Hitler might be judged free but the snake – or any of the other so-called lower organisms like the ants – be judged bound and fully determined in some sense? It does. Evolutionary theory today makes much of what it calls “altruism.” Organisms often do better if they help others, because then they might expect help in return. Think for instance – I write this piece while in South Africa – of the meerkats and how one or two in the group will stand erect, functioning as sentries and warning against predators. In turn, the sentries expect others to do the same for them or their offspring. The risk of sentry duty is balanced by the gains in being able to live normally in relative safety.
The question now is how Mother Nature gets organisms to function altruistically. There are two basic ways. It can all be a matter of instinct, if you like genetic preprogramming. Organisms have engrained on their genotypes (their genetic constitution) the ways in which they must behave whenever certain environmental circumstances obtain. Ants have gone this way. When a leaf falls in the neighborhood, the leaf cutters don’t think about it. They act instinctively, as do their companions, following pheromone trails and the like. It is all very efficient because no education is needed. The drawback is that if something goes wrong, they are not really equipped to handle the change. A sudden rain shower washes away the pheromone trails and the ants are lost, literally as well as metaphorically. It matters little to the nest because there are millions more, and basically it matters little to the loser because the survivors are all close relatives and will carry on the genes.
Organisms like humans simply cannot function this way. As highly social mammals, we live in constantly changing circumstances, and we have only a few offspring that we cannot afford to lose in a rain shower. (I am sure that there was a feedback effect between our evolutionary path and its demands and opportunities and our fewness of offspring.) We must have the power to adjust and change in the face of difficulties or challenges. (This in the trade is known as being “directively organized.”) As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, we humans have to be like the Mars Rover. Note that it is entirely determined. It does nothing outside the world of unbroken law, but it has a dimension of freedom that a simpler machine would not have. When it encounters a rock in its path, it does not have to signal to base for instructions. Of its own accord, it can assess the situation and move around the rock. In short, in order for us to be altruistic – indeed, in order to function at all – humans have to have a dimension of freedom not possessed by the ants. This is something stressed by science, by evolutionary biology. It is, in short, a case in which science bolsters the Christian’s free-will defense. It certainly does so inasmuch as it both affirms the compatibilist position but stresses the real and significant nature of our free choice.
Envoi
The problem of evil is very much a problem for Western religions. Eastern religions recognize pain and suffering; indeed, pain and suffering are very much at the heart of Buddhism and Jainism and other such religions. But they are not a problem in the way they are for the Abrahamic faiths particularly. If you do not posit an all-powerful, all loving God, then you have no questions to answer about why He permits or cannot prevent evil. Science as we know it – an enterprise totally committed to methodological naturalism – is also very much a Western phenomenon, and this is particularly true for parts of science like Darwinian evolutionary theory. Any historian of science today will tell you that whatever the present relationships between science and religion, in major respects, the histories of science and religion are intertwined with moves in one being reflected by or causing reactions in the other. And this is particularly true of Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is no exaggeration to say that with its emphasis on things like adaptation, central to traditional natural theology, it is a bastard offspring of Christianity. It seems so different, but then in the half-light, you catch overwhelming similarity. It is therefore hardly a surprise that science has things of interest to say about the problem of evil. It is not the only thing that has things of interest to say about the problem of evil, and as we have seen, what it has to say is by no means one sided. But what it does have to say is both interesting and important. We should have expected this.
Michael Ruse, “Naturalism, Evil, and God”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 249-266.