Razib Khan, is a geneticist who is an atheist but not a naively anthropocentric atheist nor one blind to the reasons why others hold or seek a faith he doesn’t hold and doesn’t desire. He has published an essay, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist?, in which he says:
In the culture of science you occasionally run into the sort of person who believes as an apodictic fact that if one is religious one can not by their fact of belief be a good scientist. You encounter this sort of person at all levels of science, and they exhibit a range of variation in terms of the volume of their belief about beliefs of others. I don’t want to exaggerate how much it permeates the culture of science, or at least what I know of it. But, it is a tacit and real thread that runs through the world-views of some individuals. It’s a definite cultural subtext, and one which I don’t encounter often because I’m a rather vanilla atheist. A friend who is now a tenure track faculty in evolutionary biology who happens to be a Christian once told me that his religion came up nearly every day during graduate school! (some of it was hostile, but mostly it was curiosity and incomprehension)[.]
Khan briefly discusses some believers among well-known evolutionary biologists and mentions a historical study of a “a movement in early 20th century Britain to accommodate and assimilate the findings of evolutionary biology to that of mainstream [Anglican] Christianity,” and then mentions the computer language designer Larry Wall (he might prefer “computer linguist”) and the polymath (math and computer science and typography) Donald Knuth as scientists well known for strong Christian faith. Then he tells us:
To be fair, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a correlation in the aggregate between secularism and science. But this issue is complex, emerging at the intersection of cognitive science, sociology, and history. These subtleties can’t be waved away airily with a reference to facts that everyone knows which happens to reflect one’s own personal prejudices. That reminds me of things besides science.
The reason so many Christians seem befuddled in the face of evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and modern mathematics adds to the understanding Khan already expresses from the viewpoint of a non-believer. More than that, it can be taken as a warning by scientists, believers and non-believers, and points to something which Khan misses as do most modern Christians and other believers. What they miss is a greater understanding of human being which places the human mind (and heart and hands) into the greater context of this concrete (empirical) world as well as the still greater context of Creation.
There are different realms of being, multiple realms of created being and one realm of divine being in the worldview I’ve built up, but the divine realm mostly plays a role in my worldview as being the source of what I call the “raw stuff of created being”; from there, all of Creation can be seen for most purposes—practical and scientific and philosophical—as being freestanding. There are also multiple ways of human knowing and they don’t correspond in a neat way to realms of being.
I wrote a freely downloadable book about the different kinds of human knowledge: Four Kinds of Knowledge: Revealed Knowledge, Speculative Knowledge, Scientific Empirical Knowledge, Practical Empirical Knowledge, the full title indicating what is going on. Scientific empirical knowledge and practical empirical knowledge are but two of four kinds of knowledge. Speculative knowledge, using all kinds of knowledge, provides what I call a worldview and also lesser types of what might be called structures for such purposes as categorizing and otherwise organizing empirical knowledge of things and relationships, of concrete and abstract realms of being. Speculative knowledge also provides a specialized sort of structure: narrative. It’s in these forms of speculative knowledge that we find what I think to be needed in Khan’s position, not that I’ll argue that he should believe in God but only that he should recognize there are non-empirical forms of knowledge involved in understanding empirical knowledge, even the bluntest facts, and non-empirical ways of conceiving a Creation—unified, coherent, and complete. In these three characteristics, Creation and the lesser part of it we know as our concrete world are like persons, even like divine Persons—a similarity seen as an “image” in Christian tradition. By a successful building of a speculative understanding of empirical reality in these Christian terms, we can see this universe as a world ordered to the purposes of its Creator, Creation still more so. A human being, individual or communal, can be seen as a person, an image of a divine Person.
Scientific worldviews differ in type from the one I’ve presented briefly only in being stripped down, skeletons and not enfleshed living creatures. Because of this, scientists can delude themselves into thinking that they bring an existing mind of great power and insight to the task of understanding this world they explore so well, this world they even understand so well in some of its parts and aspects. This is better, even grander than, but not so much different from, the worldviews of those Christians who see this world as if it were a bleeding and tortured heart; they also can delude themselves into thinking they understand. (I have to admit I would prefer the scientific viewpoint to this bleeding-heart viewpoint if there were not a better choice.)
In my title, I use the term “naive anthropocentricism” to refer to any attempt to set up part or all of human being as an impartial and external judge of empirical reality. Many scientists are more like Galileo’s inquisitors and not so much like the master scientist himself. Stanley Jaki—the Benedictine scientist (PhD in physics), theologian, philosopher, and historian—considered Galileo to be a better Catholic theologian than his inquisitors and better than St Robert Bellarmine (not quite an inquisitor). Galileo himself didn’t separate his faith in Creator and his trust in the truthfulness of Creation; in fact, Galileo’s defense of his position (in his letter to the Grand-duchess of Florence) drew upon a line of thought going from St Augustine and St Jerome through St Anselm through St Albert and his student St Thomas Aquinas. Even with respect to evolutionary biology: Augustine believed that more complex species came from simpler species and, oddly enough, went against his own better instincts in choosing to see the human species as a special creation. St Albert was a great enthusiast for the idea that new species form all around us and, in a similar way to other enthusiasts including some modern scientists, went overboard and saw the grafting of a domestic rose stalk onto a wild rose root system to be the creation of a new species—he had a list of species transformations and got some right but certainly got the whole idea almost as right as he could have in the first half of the 13th century.
It was, and is, bad Christian thought and not Christian thought which targeted parts of science as an enemy. Some Christian thinkers and many ecclesiastical leaders made bad choices and led the Christian Church into a wasteland of superstition in which human schemes were seen as more important than the facts of God’s own Creation. Scientists are not themselves immune from the construction of human schemes which are then treated as superior to reality.
Somewhere—I believe in The Perfectibility of Man, the philosopher, John Passmore, points out the real problem with belief in an all-powerful God: Such a God is consistent with any conceivable world. Only sloppy and ill-disciplined thinkers could seriously believe that the existence of a coherent, unified, and complete empirical reality argues against the existence of an all-powerful and all-knowing God.
Yet, my main argument isn’t along theological grounds but rather toward an understanding of human being. Recognizing the objectivity of empirical knowledge, we can yet see the true nature of science in the true nature of human being in which the scientist shares. The trick, if that is the right term, is to realize that human being truly is part of the world in which it came to be and in which it lives its mortal life. There is an inside to human being but it’s an inside which is shaped in its fundamental, species level by our evolutionary history and shaped in other ways by cultural and individual development. In Christian terms, we Christians are images of God by way of being images of our environments and the environments of our ancestors going right back to self-sustaining and self-reproducing blobs of chemicals.
This is almost a gimme for one who holds a more complete belief involving hands and heart as well as mind as well as a sense of gratitude or at least a sense of justice (see Justice: The First Step Towards God); it can be a problem for one who approaches the ultimate questions from the perspective of traditional philosophical thought in which the thinking organ and its thoughts are as if from a different realm of being than empirical reality or from the perspective of traditional Christian piety of a peasant sort in which the heart is from a different realm. There are also problems for those who think of the world as but a playing field for social work or wealth acquisition or political gamesmanship.
The human being is a dynamic entity formed by various processes involving all three `parts’, heart and hands and mind, and each of these parts responds to objective, empirical reality in a different way and is shaped by those responses in a different way. In action, those processes produce a rather chaotic stream—at least that is true of those with a greater sort of life in them. I’ll try not to push this metaphor too far but it can be useful for early thoughts on the wholeness of human being and of the way that a specific human being, individual or communal, is shaped from raw human stuff. Each of us is constrained by the particularities of place and time but we move with some freedom in that streambed set in a particular forest or meadow. In a simple way, we can think of those three degrees of freedom, heart and hands and mind, and realize—at least intuitively—that it is hard to keep a balance of constraints upon those three and it is easy to distort the movement of the stream or to bring it into a state of disorder. I’ll move away from that metaphor by claiming, more or less in line with the traditions of all human civilizations, that the goal of that movement of that stream is a properly rich human being which is true to this world. Take that goal for little more than an ideal in a non-idealistic world but it does capture an essential aspect of the movement of those human streams, as understood in the West by pagans and Christians and modern atheists alike.
The modern world is something of a battlefield among the three groups who define human being, and the human understanding of reality, in limited terms:
- those who judge the world from the viewpoint of a giant and badly bleeding heart,
- those who judge the world from the viewpoint of hands always in motion to make the world an allegedly better place, and
- those who judge the world from the viewpoint of a mind which is seen as capable of direct understanding, unmediated by the shaping forces of evolutionary and developmental events.
Some of the modern atheists, and allied skeptics and agnostics, have used evolutionary theory to pound away at religious faith without accepting themselves what a truly empirical theory of evolution would say about those minds they use in such acts of vandalism. Truth is attainable only if found in this world they reduce to a collection of facts, this world which too many Christians dismiss as a realm of Satan—the father of lies. There are those who have honestly confronted that question: what is the mind which arises from the physical brain? For example, the brain-scientist and philosopher, Walter J Freeman, presents a clear and accessible theory of the human mind in How Brains Make Up Their Minds; that theory is a modern version of the understanding of mind found in the work of St Thomas Aquinas, one of the most insightful of empirical observers and thinkers—no matter the angelic decorations which sometimes obscure his empirical thought. The human mind arises from the brain shaped by evolutionary history; the human mind is itself shaped by active responses to its environments. (Remember that those environments include not just physical places but also the abstract environments of, for example, mathematics which are conceived in the human mind as it seeks to understand the abstract realms of being underlying this world of things.)
From a book written by Gerd Gigerenzer, Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World, I learned a basic principle: in understanding the human mind, we should take care to first understand how it does it job of helping the human being to deal with the world around. For example, Gigerenzer disproved the idea which underpins a truly wrongheaded idea spread by certain sorts of skeptical empiricists from the fields of psychology and economics and business: human beings don’t know how to think properly under conditions of uncertainty. It turns out that psychologists and economists and business theorists don’t know how to design experiments in the real world in which human beings evolved. In short, human beings—even those with little education in mathematics or statistics—can deal with uncertainty so long as it’s presented in the way found in the real-world, that is, in terms of frequencies and not abstract percentages or probabilities.
It’s reality that judges us, no matter how some think to judge reality by way of heart or hands or mind. It’s far more accurate to claim a human being is shaped properly when shaped in active response to that reality outside of him, including the abstract realms of being which have become increasingly important in human life and have become increasingly real since we discovered that matter itself is some sort of condensation of some strange and abstract being we can describe only in terms of mathematical equations. In fact, I’ve proposed that these mathematical relationships are a fundamental form of being, a realm of abstract being from which this concrete realm is shaped. I see no intelligible alternative to speaking directly of `quantum relationships’ as a form of being just as much as things are a form of being.
The mind isn’t something given to us at conception or any other point in our lives. The mind isn’t something which rises above empirical reality so that it can just gather in data and produce lists of true conclusions or even a grand theory. To set up the mind as something which can judge reality from a neutral stance is the original sin of modern thinkers, including scientists, just as pietistic Christians sin in glorifying the heart and others sin in glorifying the hands (acts) of human beings. These errors, as I have noted, are a form of anthropocentricism but are far more erroneous than the anthropocentricism which Medieval and Renaissance Christians inherited by readings and misreadings of the writings of the ancient pagans.
The mind, as Aquinas told us centuries ago and as Freeman and other neuroscientists have been telling us more recently, is formed by way of active responses to the environments of that human being. In addition, we have to realize that the brain as a purely physical organ is predisposed to certain responses to some wide but not infinitely variable range of physical environments. In other words, much of our mind-shaping has taken place on a species level during the processes of biological evolution. To complete this picture, we would also have to consider cultural evolution, but I’ll leave that to the reader for now. See the sketchy essay, Human Moral Nature: An Overview or download the book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, for a little more development of these ideas.
The major point for residents of an empirical world is that there is no `I’ in here to bring order to or to judge the world or the greater realms of created being from which it is shaped. We learn order by finding it in the seeming disorder of physical reality. So it is that there is an `I’ which achieves its appropriate richness, its completion and perfection, by way of encapsulating what lies out there, encapsulating by way of active responses and not in the way of computer-like knowing.
There is an `I’ which achieves its appropriate richness, its completion and perfection, by way of encapsulating what lies out there, encapsulating by way of active responses and not in the way of computer-like knowing. Truth is truly out there, in the realm of created being which can be objectively explored, studied, and subjected to speculation by this `I’ which is less a super-scientist—part scientist and part god-like judge, and more a willing participant in created being and perhaps in divine being if we Christians or some other believers are right. To understand isn’t to apply to data some transcendental rules of thought which we can magically access; to understand is to work with the ways of thought selected for purposes of survival and reproduction, to refine those ways of thought, and to develop further ways of thought as we explore the various realms of created being which we can reach by heart or hands or mind.