Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Today I’m going to talk a little bit about naturalism, and perhaps many people haven't heard of the term or, aren't real clear on the terms. So methodological naturalism essentially is the exclusion of the supernatural from the natural sciences. So you've got your physics, chemistry, geology and so forth, all your sciences, and biology, of course, and includes teaching the theory of evolution.
So the teaching of these sciences, according to naturalism, there is in particular the exclusion of the supernatural. In other words, God doesn't exist or doesn't or intervene in any way in nature and therefore shouldn't be considered. And this is the approach that has essentially been adopted within western education systems.
In fact, I was reading very recently about Lawrence Lemer’s article that he published. He was a professor, science professor, published an article or a paper back around in the year 2000. Anyway, I think it was in September 2000 on good science and bad science teaching in American schools.
And essentially he rated the schools purely on the extent to which they taught the theory of evolution. And so he essentially totally valued the science teaching in the school, not on how they taught physics and chemistry as well, but just on how in general biology, but rather on how they taught evolution, which was quite interesting, of course.
And we've seen similar studies were done more recently here in Australia and published by one of the professors at the University of New South Wales, Professor Archer, looking at how there has been a decline in students believing in creation coming to university.
And he hails this as a great breakthrough in terms of science education. And of course, he's promoting this essentially, particularly atheists, but not necessarily. Some people can think, well, there is a God, but he doesn't intervene or he hasn't intervened.
And so you can have a deist approach to things, but unfortunately, naturalism is a belief. It's a faith. It is underpinned, as I said, that it excludes the supernatural.
And so it's interesting that an atheist by the name of Bradley Monton, one of his articles he wrote in 2013 points out that if science is really committed to methodological naturalism, then it automatically follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that those theories are naturalistic. And so it's quite fascinating there when you look at that, that this is a faith system, a faith system that has been set up.
And of course there's just growing evidence, huge amount of evidence that methodological naturalism or just naturalism is not correct. It's not a valid worldview, really, because there's so much evidence against it. So there's been a lot of attempts to defending and attempting to defend methodological naturalism.
Matter of fact, there was a paper published in 2017 in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, volume 81, pages 335 to 355. And it was by Erkki Kojonen Kojonen. And the title was, “Methodological Naturalism and the Truth Seeking Objection”.
So there's a major philosophical objection to naturalism called the truth seeking objection. And one of the proponents of that, of course, is the christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Plantinga. And he's quite a strong proponent of the truth seeking objection.
And it's quite interesting that there's a lot of other atheist philosophers support that objection, too. My understanding is that Thomas Nagel supports Alvin Plantinga's position.
Of course, Thomas Nagel is professor of philosophy at, I think it's New York University, again, a world leading philosopher as well. And Alvin Plantinga is matter of fact.
A book was published a couple of years ago called, “Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God” by J. Walls and T. Dougherty. They were editors published by Oxford University, as I said, in 2018. And essentially the subheading is “The Plantinga Project”. And essentially, 30 years ago or so, Alvin Plantinga gave a lecture called two dozen or so theistic arguments, and these were arguments for God.
Now, Alvin Plantinga is a christian philosopher, and he proposed in his presentation a number of novel and creative arguments for the existence of God. And so the two dozen or so arguments for God in that book, each of the Plantinga's original suggestions are developed in more detail by a variety of accomplished scholars. So the authors look at metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, ethics, ascetics, and beyond, finding evidence for God in almost every dimension of reality.
And so this is what's happening as philosophers now looking, as I said, they're finding evidence for God in almost every dimension of reality and science. And it's interesting that recent great scientists like John Polkinghorne, who was professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge, resigned and went and studied theology and became an Anglican theologian. And of course, Newton himself.
Isaac Newton spent more time writing, really, in the areas of the Bible and theology. I have copies of his studies on Revelation, his commentaries on Revelation and the book of Daniel. For.
So here we find just recently, in these last couple of years, a whole, many, many strong efforts are coming out. Many, many strong arguments are coming out defending creation, defending the existence of God, and really challenging naturalism. And yet naturalism remains essentially underpinning science education in western countries.
If you want to even talk about probably religion and God in education this day and ages, certainly in some universities, you would be quite severely censored. And it's interesting that Bradley Monton, in an earlier work published in 2009 called, “Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design”. That was published by Broadview Press in Toronto.
And he writes, the doctrine of intelligent design is often subject of acrimonious debate. Now remember, this guy is an atheist.
Again, another atheist professor of philosophy. I think he's actually at the moment at the University of Wuhan. He was in American universities earlier on. And he writes, “seeking God in science cuts through the rhetoric that distorts the debates between religious and secular camps”. —Oh, sorry — This is a review of his work, Bradley Monton, a philosopher of science and an atheist, carefully considers the arguments for intelligent design and argues that intelligent design deserves serious consideration as a scientific theory.
It's interesting that Thomas Nagel said the same thing in his book, “Mind and Cosmos” that was published about 2016. I think somewhere around that. And again, so this atheist is arguing that students in science education could benefit from a careful consideration of the arguments for and against intelligent design.
And I can remember when I published an article in Chemistry Australia, the official Journal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. It was a peer reviewed article. It was published originally as a special feature article and it was entitled, “A Creationist View of the Intelligent Design Debate”. Well, it's interesting when that came out, there were three and possibly more professors at different universities wrote earnestly to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute urging that it was a major mistake that my article was published, that it would discredit the institute and so forth, essentially accused me of making up, made up arguments.
Although I cited my sources there for everybody to see, they made all sorts of assertions without making, citing any sources to defend their position. When I rang them later, I got through to one of them, and because I was interested, if I'm wrong, I'm interested in them showing me where I'm wrong.
And when I spoke to him, I said, well, you've asserted that I'm incorrect, I've said incorrect statements. Where's the evidence that I'm incorrect? And I was amazed that his reply was, well, we don't have the evidence yet, but we will.
And it's interesting that there's so much evidence now that evolution is absolutely impossible and could not occur naturalistically, that the only solution that naturalists have really is that, well, we haven't yet discovered the mechanism that how it happens. But when we look at the science that we currently know, it's absolutely impossible for random mutations to create the amazing complexity that we find in nature.
A couple of talks ago, I talked about the electric motors in E. coli bacteria that are driven by protons. They're not driven by electrons, they're driven by the positive hydrogen ion charges, protons. And the amazing construction of the motor, which has the central gearing system and other gearing drives around the perimeter, and amazing methods of generating forward and rear rotation of the shaft that drives the little flagella, which is sort of like the propellers that propel the bacteria through solutions.
And then, of course, there was the amazing navigation system, because the motors essentially would be largely useless unless there was a way to steer the cell. And the cell actually navigates its environment using a system that tracks chemical gradients with precision. And this navigation system is enabled to turn the cell by switching the rotation direction of the motor of any of its five to ten flagella.
So it's like you see these big ships that can move sideways into the wharf or turn on a very short time by controlling the rotation of different propellers and the way they're rotating. And it's interesting that again, the cell is able to navigate towards food by sensing chemical gradients, or the gradients of nutrients in the media that it's in. And this system has really sophisticated signalling, that is in a hexagonal architecture, organised system that actually computes and analyses thousands of binary input signals from a vast array of sensors that are in front of this detector device that can detect different chemicals.
And it's interesting, they've studied the circuitry of the device and it includes short term memory feedback loops. They're allowing the system to compare chemical concentrations over time. And the authors of the articles, which have been written up in pnas.org and also sciencedirect.com just in 2019. Although earlier work was done back in 2007 and 2008, the different sensor types communicate with another and amplify signals. They've got up to 50 fold amplification, and the result is a navigation system with its high sensitivity. And yeah, it's actually quite amazing.
And one of the comments that was published in cell.com on the 1 June 2008, that issue in Cell 1 June 2008, the comment was, E. coli's navigation system is one of the simplest in bacteria, and yet most are much more complex.
So when we look at this system that is highly engineered and reeks of super intelligent design, yet it's one of the simplest systems amongst bacteria there. When we look at that, the overwhelming evidence for intelligent design in nature, in the DNA codes and so forth, is enormous. And this is being recognised by scientists and philosophers.
And this is one of the interesting things that if you have a total naturalistic theory, it can't explain evolution, because random mutations and the philosophers and the scientists growing number of science recognise this. You can't produce these complex systems that we observe in nature and we get down to the simplest organism, like an E. coli bacteria, that doesn't even have a nucleus, single cell organism, and yet we've got these highly complex systems and machines, and these machines have bearings and rotors and all sorts of parts and they have repair mechanisms as well. It is amazing, but sort of out of sight, and yet the complexity is so great it even takes years for scientists to work on the understanding and identify these systems using the best technology that we have available at the moment.
And it's interesting that there was a notice published, I guess, Imperial College in London. The website's Imperial.AC.UK. I'm pretty sure that's the website for Imperial College in London, one of the top unis in the UK. It's by H Dunning and a team investigating the evolution of bacteria trails. Tales, rather wins prestigious grant.
And this is one of the real challenges that they have, trying to still explain in evolutionary terms how these amazingly complex systems can arise without an intelligent designer. And of course, a number of arguments are now being presented that God has to be part of science, God is part of this system. Pure naturalism can't explain the origin of life, can't explain the origin of the universe.
It's absolutely impossible. And yet this is still being taught to our students. It was interesting that one of the articles that was presented for the existence of God was looking at a new thermodynamic argument, because one of the points that was made was that naturalistic physics provides evidence for the failure of induction, because it provides evidence that the past is not all what you think it is, and your existence is just a momentary fluctuation.
But the fact that we are not a momentary fluctuation thus provides evidence for the existence of God. And that God would ensure that the past is roughly what we think it is, and that we have been in existence for roughly the amount of time that we think we have. And at the present time, this particular argument, according to this particular research paper, that atheists don't have a definitive way to refute this argument.
And so Kojonen is attempting to defend and try and find an argument to refute this thermodynamic argument, or the fact that we exist over a period of time again, is a major problem for science if we just have naturalism. It's interesting that an Alvin Plantinga, he's probably worth looking up, he said in an interview on the relationship between science and religion, that religion and science share more common ground than you might think.
Though science can't prove, it presupposes that there has been a past. For example, science does not cover the whole of knowledge enterprise. So it's very difficult for science, for example, to reexamine things that happened in the past.
And we know that there was a past, but it's very difficult for science to examine those things because it wasn't there. It can't make observations in the past. It can interpret, for example, rocks, that it believes old in a particular way, according to particular worldview, but it can never know.
And this is one of the major problems that we have. He goes on to say, this is Plantinga, and by the way, his name is spelled plantinga. And he writes, like any christian and indeed any theist, I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence intelligently designed.
And I think if in fact, science students were taught this, we would have a much more rapid advancement of science, because we would be expecting things to be intelligently designed. There are a number of arguments that can be raised, and Plantinga raises a number of them, that if we are just the product of random mutations, we can't even guarantee that our thoughts would be rational and can be relied upon. There's all these philosophical arguments once we move away from intelligent design, we get into and the existence of God, we get into a major problem.
Plantinga goes on and writes in another place, the attitude that he proposes and elaborates upon writes in his book, where the conflict really lies, science, religion and naturalism. And he points out that there is no tension between religion and science, that the two go hand in hand, and that the actual conflict is between naturalism and science, because really, naturalism can't explain science. It can't really genuinely underpin science.
We really have to believe that there was a God in order to interpret science correctly, and so that it really works. And in accordance with the evidence, we really have to believe in the existence of God. So we see that science overwhelmingly proves the existence of God.
Philosophers also have overwhelming arguments for the existence of God. So the issue then becomes about God, about knowing God. And this is where the Bible comes in.
And I think this is where the challenge comes in. The big issue is, is the Bible reliable? Well, we know that the Bible records a whole lot of history and every bit of history that can be checked has been found to be correct. The secular historical records at the time match and corroborate the names, places and so forth and dates of the biblical account.
We have eyewitnesses of the supernatural miracles performed by Jesus and the resurrection in the writings of John, Paul, Peter and others. And so we have actual witnesses. And it's not as if these witnesses went off and made a lot of money out of this.
They all died for their testimony because it was true and they realised it was so important. People need to know this. Jesus really was God.
And of course, then we have the prophecies, like the amazing prophecy in Daniel, chapter two of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, that essentially prophesied the history of the world. And there's hundreds of other prophecies that have been fulfilled precisely as they were told. And we know they were written well beforehand.
And only there's a few remaining, of course, that are yet to be fulfilled when Jesus returns. So we have powerful arguments for the biblical account of creation being a real argument, a real explanation for how we got here. And it's very important that people, and particularly students, understand this, that naturalism and science hasn't thrown out the Bible, it hasn't thrown out intelligent design.
There's overwhelming evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer and the description fits the creator described in the Bible. And we have the testimony of prophecy, history and eyewitnesses to confirm that Jesus was truly the son of God and the biblical count is correct. You've been listening to Faith and Science.
And remember, if you want to re listen to this programme or send a link to someone else to share it, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
