Nature and Super-Nature

I recall well that in the spring of 2003 certain doubting Thomases in the vicinity of Emerson Hall raised questions as to whether writing an honors thesis on the philosophical issues in the neighborhood of controversies about the teaching of evolution in public schools was a useful way for an aspiring political journalist to be doing. Flash forward to May 2005 and what do we see but political journalists arguing abotu philosophical issues posed by controversies about the teaching of evolution in public schools! Chris Mooney's mad that anti-evolutionists want to replace the statement that science seeks "natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us" with the claim that it seeks "more adequate explanations of natural phenomena" on the grounds that we shouldn't open the door to the supernatural. Julian Sanchez strikes back arguing that "I very much doubt there's any sort of meaningful distinction to be made between 'natural' and 'supernatural' accounts in this context . . . If ghosts or gods did exist, after all, wouldn't they ultimately be as much a part of the natural world as human beings or dolphins or leptons?" Mooney attempts a reply and gets near the right answer by mentioning "natural laws." All this and more was covered in a deleted scene from chapter five of the thesis. Sadly, that draft died during a computer crash some time ago, but one can find an arcane discussion of the topic below the fold.

The natural law thing is key. The best gloss you can put on the natural/supernatural discussion is that science supposes the world to be governed by certain unchanging natural laws such that the world unfolds through a series of causal interactions that are, in principle, predictable. The content of science consists, in part, of exploring what these laws might be, an effort to discern what sorts of laws might explain the available data and, therefore, allow us to make conjectures about what happened in spatio-temporal regions where we have no data, including, of course, the future.

Most religion posits crucial departures from this sort of scheme. When Jesus transformed water into wine, that was miraculous -- supernatural -- a break with the standard rules of the universe. What's not being posited in that story is that Jesus was some kind of alchemist who devised a method of water-to-wine transmogrification that he could teach to somebody else. Instead, due to his divine nature, he was able to interrupt the normal causal processes. This sort of thing is the supernatural. If it happens, it's distinguished from the natural in that it's not law-governed. Note that supernatural occurrences of this sort produce effects in nature. The created wine becomes wine and intoxicates its drinkers in all the usual law-governed ways. But the transformation is, itself, super-natural. Insofar as posited miraculous phenomena are relatively trivial and micro-scale like this, a supernatural worldview can be pretty compatible with science.

The vast array of small miracles that are attributed to the saints by the Catholic Church are like this. They're supernatural occurrences, but they're rare and occur on a small scale. They're not explainable by science, but their occassional occurence doesn't undermine science. They're exceptions to the rules, not refutations of them. Indeed, it's specifically because miracles are understood as supernatural that belief in their occurence becomes compatible with science -- if you believed these things happened but understood them as natural phenomena, then they would become anomalous data that would need to explain scientifically by altering our understanding of how the laws of nature work.

Evolution, however, is a big deal. If creationism is true, that's not a small miracle that basically leaves scientific understanding intact. Instead, it's a huge miracle that would displace an entrenched and seemingly successful scientific theory.

What's more -- and this is crucial -- if you replace the demand that science investigate laws of nature with the idea that it merely seeks "adequate explanations of natural phenomena" you open the creationist doors wide open. The problem is that with naturalism left out of the picture, Young Earth Creationism becomes a very adequate explanation of all the relevant phenomena. The basic idea here is that God created the world 10,000 years ago and that's that. How come radiocarbon dating seems to indicate that lots of these bones in the ground are way older than that? Well, because they were created with such-and-such a carbon content back 10,000 years ago. Why are there bones of species that never existed as living things during the past 10,000 years? Well, the bones were all created that way 10,000 years ago. One could go on. The point is that "God just made it all that way" adequately explains anything you care to have explained about the fossile record in the sense of providing an answer as to how come our data looks the way it does. And, in fact, it's more adequate than the evolutionary explanation because the God Hypothesis doesn't involve any recalcitrant data at all. It explains everything.

Explains everything, that is, insofar as it explains anything. Scientifically speaking, that's not an explanation at all, because it's intolerably ad hoc. It doesn't tell us anything about the laws of nature or the causal structure of the universe. It's not, in other words, a natural explanation.

So Chris is right that the distinction is important. Awkwardly, though, the same argument holds even if creationism is true. Scientifically speaking, creationism can't be true, less because there's no evidence for it than because there couldn't be evidence for it. Science presupposes, rather than demonstrates, that the supernatural does not play an important role in the unfolding of the universe.