Why Naturalism Needs a Reformation
Naturalism is the metaphysical doctrine that the world is a closed causal system. If naturalism is true, then science should eventually be able to explain everything about the world without invoking a transcendent causal principle. But is naturalism true? Certainly not in its present form. But does that mean that a supernatural cause is proven? Or might it be possible to save naturalism by reforming it in some way?
I believe it is worth making the attempt to reform naturalism because, if it were true, it would be the most satisfying picture of the world. As Paul Moser and David Yandell have pointed out in a recent article critiquing naturalism, "Explanation in philosophy and science is inherently unifying, subsuming a multiplicity of phenomena under classificatory unity" [Moser & Yandell, 2000; p. 3]. Thus, monism--which for present purposes I will take as synonymous with naturalism--is in a sense the natural aim of all science and philosophy. However, the fact that it would be nice if naturalism were true does not make it true. As Moser and Yandell go on to say, "Proponents of monism . . . must attend to the risk of neglecting genuine data and truths resistant to a monistic explanatory scheme. What monism gains by unification of multiplicity in data may be lost by neglect of genuine recalcitrant data. Explanatory unity may be a virtue, but it will be virtuous only if pertinent truths and data are not excluded for the sake of theoretical simplicity" [idem].
Now, naturalism in its present form is indeed guilty of just this sort of exclusion of inconvenient facts. The recalcitrant datum it is neglecting--the thing that Alvin Plantinga has aptly called the "Achilles' heel" of naturalism [Plantinga, 1998; p. 356]--is normativity. Plantinga writes that "There is no room, within naturalism, for right or wrong, or good or bad. . . . Naturalism also lacks room for the notion of proper function for non-artifacts, and hence lacks room for the notion of proper function for our cognitive faculties. It therefore has no room for the notion of knowledge . . ." [idem; original emphasis].
This hole at the heart of science where normativity should be is a specter haunting much of our contemporary intellectual life. It is, after all, one of the more obvious facts about the world that biological processes occur for a reason: namely, to achieve some goal or purpose. This teleological organization of living things establishes a norm according to which individual actions may be assigned a value, judged as good or bad, properly functioning or malfunctioning. These are perfectly objective facts about the world, in no way dependent on human observers. If human beings had never existed, countless billions of other living creatures would still have pursued their various goals in exactly the same way. Yet, metaphysical naturalism would have us believe that teleology is some sort of illusion. In other words, all of the life sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities, are making constant use of a principle that officially does not exist! This is a deeply pathological situation that cannot go on forever.
If there is any methodological principle that we should be able to agree on, it is surely that we ought to consider all of the evidence. By this criterion, metaphysical Darwinism is an abject failure. It is a failure because it does not give a coherent account of value and purpose, either in the pragmatic form we find in all living things, or in the distinctively human modes of intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic experience--what I like to call the archangelic aspect of human nature. For example, the heaven-storming aspiration expressed in the art of a Michelangelo Buonarotti or the paradisiacal bliss evoked by the music of an Arcangelo Corelli, which make their Christian names so fitting. My point is that the aspiration that produced the Sistine ceiling and the feelings evoked by listening to the Opus 6 Concerti Grossi are real. They exist. These emotions and the values they embody constitute an undeniable part of the furniture of the world. And yet they have no place at all in the grand metaphysical scheme of naturalism.
Now, the Darwinian will of course deny this. He will claim that his worldview is quite capable of accounting for these phenomena, and he will point to a slew of recent publications giving Darwinian accounts of everything from moral feeling to the sense of beauty to religion itself. However, all of these supposed explanations are essentially worthless, because Darwinism simply presupposes the normative aspect of all of these things. Natural selection is nothing more than a calculus that tells us what we may expect to happen given certain assumptions about organisms [Shimony, 1993]. The most fundamental of these assumptions is that living things intelligently strive to achieve their goals. All that natural selection says is that the organisms that do this best will flourish--not exactly the earth-shattering insight it is cracked up to be. But most important, it tells us nothing at all about how intelligence or striving or goals are possible in the first place. By taking all of this for granted, natural selection simply begs the question of the origin of normativity [Barham, 2000, 2002; see, also, Davies, 2001].
I said that Darwinian explanations of the archangelic in human nature are worthless, but in fact they are even worse than that, because they encourage a way of thinking about human nature that is both morally repugnant and politically pernicious. I could elaborate on this theme at length, as I have done elsewhere [Barham 1995], but I do not wish to spend my limited time today discussing the failings of Darwinism--for one thing, I think I would be preaching to the choir! Instead, the question I want to discuss today is whether intelligent design (ID) theory or self-organization theory can do any better.
The Design Inference
I will begin by looking at how ID theory approaches the problem of normativity. No doubt everyone present is already familiar with William Dembski's notion of the design inference [Dembski, 1998], so I will be brief.
The design inference is a semi-formal deductive method that is founded on two fundamental premises. First is the explanatory filter. This is the assumption that there are three and only three distinct kinds of causal processes in nature: chance, mechanistic law, and intelligent design. If we can eliminate chance and law as explanations for a given phenomenon, then we can be certain that the cause must have been intelligent design. The second premise is that the formal mathematical apparatus of information theory may be brought to bear on any phenomenon in nature in such a way as to assign it unambiguously to one of the three categories. Now, I agree with Dembski that neither chance nor mechanistic law is a sufficient explanation of the teleological organization that we observe in living things. Nevertheless, I do not accept intelligent design as an explanation, either. The reason is that I question both premises underlying the design inference.
Let's take the second premise first: that information theory is appropriate for analyzing biological phenomena in connection with the explanatory filter. To begin with, for this purpose information theory is unnecessary. To show the vanishingly small probability that even a single protein molecule can have arisen by chance, all we need are ordinary physics and chemistry. The basic problem is that there is no energetically favorable path leading to the immensely long polymers that constitute biomolecules. Therefore, constructing a protein is something highly unnatural from the point of view of physics. Not only do you need nucleic acid templates; you also need enzymes to make the necessary reactions go, the enzymes themselves have to be coupled with exergonic reactions, and you need a ribosome to coordinate everything. In short, to create a protein you need a cell! In my view, the specificity of proteins simply lies in the fact that this whole elaborate song and dance is necessary. All you really need in order to show that a protein could not arise by chance is statistical mechanics. There is no need for information theory.
But not only is information theory unnecessary, I believe it is actually misleading. It misleads us by undermining a realistic attitude towards information. Information in the semantic sense is a perfectly objective phenomenon--all living things use information to interact with their environments. But information theory, despite its name, has nothing to say about objective, semantic information. It tells us nothing at all about how a mere physical process can come to be endowed with a meaning. Rather, information theory simply presupposes a cognitive agent standing somewhere offstage for whom a target pattern is meaningful. Thus, its conception of information is inherently observer-dependent and therefore subjective. What we want to know is how it is possible for a cell to act in ways that are purposive and meaningful, not with respect to an outside observer, but with respect to the cell itself. It is simply not possible to address this problem using information theory.
Furthermore, there are now strong empirical grounds for being suspicious of information theory in this context, as well. ID theory seems to accept the view of mainstream mechanistic science that DNA is the most important locus of causality in the cell, and that it can properly be described as a code. If this received wisdom were true, then it might make sense to reduce biomolecules to their linear monomer sequences and to regard them as bit strings. But we now know that it is not true, and that cells are capable of regulating their own genomes in a functional, goal-directed manner, in violation of Crick's "central dogma" [Caporale, 1999; Fedoroff, 1999; Shapiro, 1997, 1999; von Sternberg, 1996a, 1996b, 2000] [1] This means that the whole idea that the organism is a machine controlled by the genome in the same way that a program controls a computer is out the window {Gordon, 1999; Gray, 2001; Griffiths & Gray, 2001; Keller, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Lewontin, 2000; Morange, 2001; Moss, 2001; Nijhout, 2001; Oyama, 2000; Sarkar, 1998; van der Weele, 1999]. Furthermore, philosophers are now questioning the idea that DNA constitutes a code at all in the proper sense of the term [Godfrey-Smith, 1999, 2000; Kay, 2000; Sarkar, 1996]. In short, the set of assumptions behind ID theory's analysis of biomolecules as bit strings is rapidly being discredited.
Now, what about the first premise underpinning the design inference? You will recall that this was the assumption that chance, mechanistic law, and intelligent design are exhaustive causal categories. How can we know for certain that these three categories exhaust the productive possibilities of nature? It is to this crucial question that I turn next.
Notes
[1] In prokaryotes, transposable elements are rearranged within a single organism, as well as shared among different organisms, in response to functional needs [Caporale, 1999; Fedoroff, 1999; Lombardo et al., 1999; Shapiro, 1997, 1999]. Similar phenomena exist in eukaryotes, as well: in addition to transposons, cassettes, and other mobile elements that cause DNA itself to be reorganized both within and across generations [D'Onofrio et al., 1999; Hall et al., 1999; Sinden et al., 1999], there is of course the well-known phenomenon of "editing"--i.e., cutting and pasting of RNA transcripts. It was long thought that introns--the DNA sequences corresponding to the discarded RNA transcripts--were accumulated evolutionary "junk"; now it appears likely that they have a functional role in the regulation of mutation rates of exons [Olivera et al., 1999]. What all of this means is that instead of falling back on the intellectually lazy neo-Darwinian concept of "junk DNA," we must now proceed on the assumption that all DNA is functional, and that the chromatin is a reciprocally integrated element in the self-regulation of the cell. Finally, we must not forget the fact that inheritance of many functional capacities is not mediated by the chromosomes at all, but is rather carried out epigenetically--that is, through the soma of the ovum [Jablonka, 2001; Jablonka & Lamb, 1995; von Sternberg, 2000]--and, of course, behaviorally [Avital & Jablonka, 2000; de Waal, 2001].
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