does not say, but he is certain that people who look beyond nature for fulfillment “are still in the grip of illusions.” “Trust me,” he says, “you can’t get more. But what you can get, if you live well, is enough. Don’t be greedy. Enough is enough.”68
My own work brings me into contact with many good scientists and philosophers from all over the world. Some are religious, but many others are naturalists like Owen Flanagan. Naturalism is now so entrenched in science and philosophical faculties around the globe that it constitutes one of the most influential “creeds” operative in the world today. Scientific naturalists are still a small minority in the world’s overall population, but their influence is out of proportion to their numbers. Generally speaking, their beliefs quietly determine what is intellectually acceptable in many of our universities. Naturalism has now spread from science and philosophy departments into social studies and the humanities. Even departments of religion are no longer immune.
The academic world now harbors numerous scientific naturalists who prefer to keep a low profile in order to avoid controversy wherever religion is considered important. Flanagan wants them to come clean. Likewise, the Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Natalie Angier believes that most scientists are closet naturalists, but are reluctant to state openly what they really think about religion and theology. In a recent issue of The American Scholar, she cites studies showing that as many as 90 percent of the members of the elite National Academy of Sciences are nontheists, and less than half of other scientists believe in a personal God. She upbraids scientists for not being more vocal in criticizing the “irrationalities” of religion in all of its forms. Most scientists are no longer afraid to state publicly that Darwinism has made creationism obsolete, but Angier is annoyed that they pass over in silence the larger body of religious illusions. In her own opinion, the entire history of human religiousness is a preposterous mistake—since there is no scientific evidence for its empty musings. And so she is agitated that most scientists refuse to wear their de facto naturalism on their sleeves.69
It is annoying to scientific naturalists such as Flanagan and Angier that religious people can’t come up with “evidence” for what they take to be more than nature. But to religious experience, this “more” will always be something that grasps us rather than something we can grasp. We can know it only by surrender, not possession. It will never have the clarity of scientific evidence, nor should it be presented as an alternative to science. The most immediate “evidence” for it is the fact of our own anticipation of more truth, deeper goodness, and wider beauty, an insatiable reaching out toward a fullness of being that is by no means illusory, but instead the very core of our rationality. Biblical religions refer to this transcendent dimension as God. They think of God as possessing the most noble of attributes: infinite goodness and love, unsurpassable beauty and splendor, the fullness of being and truth. God is also the epitome of fidelity, creativity, freedom, healing, wisdom, and power. As one who allegedly makes and keeps promises, this God is understood to be “personal” as well, since only persons can love and make promises.
Naturalists, on the other hand, consider such a belief untenable, especially after Darwin. To them, the universe is, at heart, utterly impersonal. Their persistent question is: where is the evidence for God in this imperfect world? Religious people, however, do not usually claim to be able to see the mystery of God directly—“nobody can see God and live.” God is the light that lights up everything else, but one cannot look directly into that primordial illumination without being blinded. Yet, even though the human person cannot grasp God, many people testify to being grasped by God. For them, the powerful sense of being carried away by something of ultimate importance is evidence enough. To take them at their word, they have surrendered their lives and hearts to an irresistible presence and power that receives them into its compassionate embrace. It is not that they have comprehended the overwhelming divine mystery of beauty, goodness, and truth. Rather, they have been comprehended by it. They express their response to this experience in acts of worship, prayer, praise, and gratitude, as well as in distinctive ways of living and relating to the world. That this is not wishful thinking can be demonstrated if it turns out that our longing for the infinite is supportive of what I shall call “the desire to know,” the very heart of human rationality.
As Flanagan and Angier illustrate, however, the naturalist ideal is to bring the totality of being out into the clear light of daytime consciousness, so that there is nothing left for religions to talk about. If theology wants to be respected intellectually, so says the naturalist, it must also adduce the right kind of evidence, namely scientific. This does not necessarily mean that all naturalists demand that God show up among the objects available to empirical inquiry. But there must be visible and unambiguous tracks of divine reality in the natural world if scientifically educated people are to pay any attention to theology. If science comes across anything in nature that cannot be fully explained naturalistically, then there might be good reason to invoke the causal powers of a deity. Today, however, naturalists are eager to demonstrate that everything that formerly gave the appearance of being a trace of the divine can now be explained in natural terms. Not only the “apparent” design in living organisms but also the ethical and mystical inclinations of human beings can be “naturalized.” And if science can account sufficiently for even the holiest of phenomena, there is no need any more for theology.
The Outlines of a Response
The goal of scientific naturalism is to explain everything, insofar as it can be explained at all, in terms of natural processes. This would include the mind itself, which is part of nature. Human intelligence arose by way of a natural process that can be accurately laid out in Darwinian terms. But, as we shall see, the actual performance of human intellection (and later I shall include moral aspiration) is such that it will forever overflow the limits of naturalistic understanding, no matter how detailed scientific understanding becomes in the future. I shall propose that the concrete functioning of intelligence cannot, in principle, let alone in fact, be fully captured by the objectifying categories of any science. In other words, the natural sciences cannot account completely for what I shall be calling critical intelligence. If this claim turns out to be true, it will be necessary to go beyond naturalism in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of the universe.
In order to present my argument as clearly as I can, I shall be inviting you, the reader, to place yourself in the mindset of the naturalist, even if ordinarily you are not quite at home there. Then I shall ask you, if only as a thought experiment, to try to provide adequate justification on naturalist premises for your own mental functioning. I don’t believe you can do so in all honesty. As a naturalist, you already claim that your mind is fully part of nature. But your naturalistic worldview, as I hope I can lead you to acknowledge, is too restrictive to account fully for your own cognitional activity. And if your mind and your view of nature do not fit each other, then something has to give. My suggestion is not to abandon scientific explanations of mind but rather to accept them as intermediate rather than ultimate. By itself, science cannot justify the spontaneous trust you have placed in your own mind, even as you seek to arrive at scientific truth. To justify your implicit trust in the possibility of arriving at truth, you will need to look for a wider and deeper understanding of the universe, a more expansive worldview than naturalism has to offer. My proposal is that your own mind’s spontaneous and persistent trust in the possibility of reaching truth is itself a hint that the physical universe, at least as naturalism conceives it, is only a small fragment of all that is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.
65. Previously published in Haught, Is Nature Enough?, 21–31. Reprinted with permission.
66. Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, 14.
67. See Bowker, Is Anybody Out There?, 9-18 and 112-43.
