The Case for Methodological Naturalism

In philosophy, there is a system of thought called philosophical naturalism—the belief that nothing exists beyond the natural (physical realm). There is another philosophical conjecture which sounds similar but is not entailed by philosophical naturalism, and that is methodological naturalism. Science, as it is done today and has been since at least the Enlightenment, assumes methodological naturalism, which is simply the practice of explaining the natural world only through natural causes. In other words, methodological naturalism does not invoke anything supernatural to explain the natural. On the one hand, Christians are typically partly accepting of methodological naturalism, as it is a reaction against the polytheistic and pagan beliefs that natural phenomena are the result of actions of the gods. It is ludicrous, in today’s world, to believe that a storm wreaking havoc on a ship at sea is the result of Poseidon’s anger. But, on the other hand, many Christians are wary of methodological naturalism because they think it implies that one cannot explain things in the natural world as the handiwork of God.

I take issue with that claim—that methodological naturalism precludes explanation of any natural phenomena as the handiwork of God.

First, there are multiple types of causation: material causation and final causation, to name two. Material causation is the material explanation of an event, that is, that which explicates everything there is to be said about the matter and its interactions. Final causation is the purpose or goal which explains the event. So if the event was me baking cookies, you might ask, “What’s that you’ve got there?” I might say, “I’ve got two dozen inch-in-diameter portions of dough being heated at 400 degress Fahrenheit.” Now, that wouldn’t be the whole material cause, but it touches on it, and says nothing about the Final cause. Alternatively, to answer the question, I could just say, “I’m baking some cookies to eat. Want one?” This explanation says nothing (or at least, not much) about the materials or their interactions; it’s referring to my purpose in the action.

Likewise, in any other area of scientific inquiry, we might say there is a teleological explanation which involves God and yet also a material explanation which doesn’t. We might go for a hike and happen upon a cascading waterfall, pausing to marvel at its beauty and enchantment. We may even see God’s handiwork in this waterfall, as it reminds us that God has created the universe with such a grand capacity for beauty and the human mind or spirit with a faculty to recognize and appreciate this beauty. But that does not preclude a purely materialistic explanation of the waterfall. Neither, actually, does it preclude a purely natural explanation of what it means for humans to be attracted to beauty.

One can look at the eyeball and marvel at its complexity, also marveling at the processes which produced that eye and ultimately whatever or whoever put those processes in motion. That does not mean there isn’t a purely natural explanation of the eye and where it came from.

Another, more specific, way of applying this idea is to assert that a final cause might sometimes be the efficient cause of a material cause. An efficient cause is that which causes a change in motion to start or stop. If I grabbed the sheet of cookies out of the oven, the quickest and most obvious way of describing this is precisely that: I grabbed the sheet of cookies out of the oven. It takes much more work to describe that event in terms of material causality (“the neurons in my brain sent a signal to my hand…”) or final causality (“the cookies smelled great and I couldn’t resist anymore”). Take a religious worshipper’s spiritual experience while in worship. Some think that simply because we can explain the neurology of a worshipper’s brain, and what typically happens in the brain before or during a perceived spiritual experience, we can discount the act of worship as a purely physical reaction to stimuli—that there is nothing supernatural going on at all. That is a philosophically naturalistic claim, but it’s not necessary to hold this view to accept the neurological evidence. It may be the case that the neurological data is simply showing what is happening in the brain during a genuinely spiritual experience. Perhaps, in the case, the final cause is that God wishes to communicate or encourage or present himself to the worshipper, and this leads to the efficient cause that God moves or acts in the person’s mental state to bring about the material cause—certain neurons firing and chemicals being produced in the brain.

So perhaps we could explain events in the natural world as being ultimately caused by God (in a final causality way), or even immediately caused by God (in a final or efficient causality way), but since God is not material, and since God created the universe with certain set physical laws which we can observe, there is a way in which we can explain all material events without invoking God. That is, since matter and material systems behave according to set laws, we can assume that any given material event is understandable according to these laws.

This, of course, does not include miracles, which might be defined as acts of God which, in some cases, have no purely materialistic explanation. But miracles, by their definition, are exceptions, not the rule. Methodological naturalism would assert that, if one were to come across an anomaly in the natural world, it would be more rational to assume there is a material explanation for it than that it is a miracle.

Why accept methodological naturalism? Why not say that sometimes the best scientific explanation for a natural event is that it’s a miracle—that God did it? (This would assume that it is within the realm of science to make such assertions as “God did it,” thus denying methodological naturalism.) The primary problem with this approach is that it halts scientific inquiry and indeed supposes that there cannot be a natural cause for the event. It is a form of argument from ignorance in that it asserts its truth on the basis that no other contradictory explanation has been proven in its place. Notice, it does not assert that no other contradictory explanation can be given in its place, for that would be a much stronger—and more difficult to prove—statement. (Note that any natural explanation would constitute a contradictory explanation in this case, as the miracle assertion is that, since God did it, there is no natural explanation.) If it did propose that it would be impossible for a contradictory (natural) explanation to be proven, it would have to show why. But it’s difficult to show how a natural event could not possibly have a natural explanation. And, moreover, if no other explanation could possibly be true, then the claim is not falsifiable, because there has to be some explanation for every event. If no claim is being made, however, to the impossibility of other explanations, then it is indeed a sort of appeal to ignorance: since no other hypothesis has been proven, the “God hypothesis” must be true.

A more solid foundation for miracle claims would be through theology or philosophy. If, at its core, your miracle claim is through theology or philosophy, it may have scientific (material) implications, and it might not. Say you looked into the sky and saw a cloud forming the shape of a cross, and you concluded that God was using this to remind you of Himself. The claim that God is using the cross-shaped cloud to remind you of Himself is theological. To go on to say that God intervened in nature to create this cloud, thus precluding any natural explanation for the formation of the cloud, is not necessary to the theological message received from it.

Exchanging the TULIP for GRACE

I recently listened to a podcast on my long commute to work from Pastor Bruxie Cavey critiquing the Calvinist tenets which make up the acronym TULIP. I did a little dabbling at trying to come up with an open theist acronym once, which you could find on this blog, but I must say Bruxie and Tim (another teacher pastor at The Meeting House Church in Canada) have come up with a way better one.

The five core tenets of Calvinism as summed up in TULIP go like this:

-Total Depravity (or Total Inability—inability of man to do anything but sin)

-Unconditional Election (or Sovereign Choice—the prerogative and need for God to choose some for salvation, not based on works or effort but rather purely upon His gracious disposition)

-Limited Atonement (or “Sufficient for All, Efficient for the Church”—Christ’s sacrifice is able to cover the sins of all, but in reality, since God chooses whom to save, Christ’s sacrifice was meant only for the Church)

-Irresistible Grace (the inability of man to resist God’s salvific will)

-Perseverance of the Saints (or Preservation of the Saints—salvation cannot be lost because God chose which individuals to save before creation and will preserve them forever)

For reasons which should be obvious after a short survey of this blog, I think TULIP is a biblically, morally, and philosophically flawed view of God. So it should be replaced with another acronym, GRACE.

-God’s Image (present, but tainted, in us all, giving humans the capacity to move toward or further away from God)

-Renewed Through Faith (rather than faith being granted to us after we are renewed or reborn, we are renewed/reborn/remade after we have faith)

-All-Inclusive Atonement (or Atonement for All—since God desires humans to come to Him freely, He has made the way to salvation genuinely possible for all)

-Capability to Resist (though powerful and alluring and convicting, God’s grace is resistible and respects humans’ self-determination)

-Empowerment to Endure (the Holy Spirit empowers believers to endure and mature in Christ)

Thank God for GRACE

Edward Fudge’s Case for Annihilationism

Watch the Youtube video here. It’s about an hour long.

Response to Matt Perman’s “Did Jesus Teach Pacifism?”

Perman’s article can be found here.

Perman asks if it would be a good idea to “turn the other cheek” after 9/11 by offering the terrorists the Sears Tower in addition to the WTC towers. I think two things need to be remembered: first, that the NT makes a definite distinction between God’s people (the Church) and the State, contrasting with the OT picture which was of God’s people as a nation; second, while the people inside the buildings and airplanes on 9/11 were innocent victims, the American government could hardly be considered innocent of any crimes to warrant a terrorist retaliation—i.e. the express purpose bin Laden gave for the attacks was for the removal of US troops from sacred territory in Saudi Arabia. (The terrorists’ motivations are often portrayed by politicians and media pundits as being anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-liberty—and they certainly are these things—but their motivations for attacking were to respond to American aggression and occupation of Mid East territory.)

To comment further on the first point, I would urge that we must, as a part of the “renewing of our minds”, make clear the separation of Church and State. No one state is God’s people, not because the population contains some non-Christians, but because God has revealed that something essential to the State defies God’s ultimate (Kingdom) will for the Earth, and has been that way all along (see, for example, 1 Sam. 8). That essential “something” about the state that defies God’s ultimate will is the use of violence—for self-defense, for taxation, for restraint and punishment of evil. In short, the State does evil so that good may result.

Not all effects of the State’s doings are evil; sometimes its effects are good, and even when it commits violence, God uses this violence to suit His purposes. But God has revealed in the NT that He wants His people to be a holy family, set apart from the ways of the world. The New Chosen People are not to do evil so that good may result (Rom. 3:8), and they are to imitate Christ’s love for all people on Earth (Eph. 5:1-2). In this way, God’s people (the Church) are to manifest the coming Kingdom in this present age.

With that framework, it’s tough to see how Perman can so unreservedly assume that it is permissible for Christians to use the offices of government to disregard their calling to manifest the Kingdom, in which “no nation shall lift up sword against nation” (Mic. 4:3-7). Why can’t we take that further to any roles one plays? For instance, if I was a father, would I not see it as my duty to protect my family, through fatal violence, if necessary? If I was trapped in an alley by brutal gang members, would I not see it as my role as the innocent party to do whatever I must, including any sort of violence, to escape alive?

Even in the exact situation Jesus offers—an insulting slap on the face—it doesn’t seem to be serving any sort of justice to let the victim get away with his violent act. In the mindset of the world, acts of aggression need to be punished, or else justice is not served. But since the adoption of such a mindset would seem to completely discount the teachings of Jesus, it’s obvious that we Christians have to rethink our idea of justice. The old idea of retaliation—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, acts of violence are to be met with retaliatory acts of violence—simply doesn’t fit with Jesus’ teachings.

The teachings of Jesus call us to rethink even such fundamental things as our idea of justice.

Perman starts from natural law, not Scripture. There is no way, in my estimation, to derive the idea of a “just cause” for war from the NT or any of Jesus’s teachings. After assuming the natural law position that some causes justify violence and killing, Perman then moves to Scripture, first citing John the Baptist’s lack of prohibition against military service in the Roman army. He says that’s significant. But it is also significant that (as we know from the early church fathers themselves) the early church for nearly three hundred years either forbade military service or allowed it with the proviso that no oaths could be taken and the sword could not be used.

John may not have specifically forbade military service, but neither did he condone it.

His comment that pacifism would require the elimination of the police as well as the military is both a red herring and a misunderstanding (as I see it) of the intended audience of Jesus’s teachings. As Perman says later, Jesus is speaking to individuals, not governments. That is correct. But furthermore, Jesus is speaking to individuals making up the Church—the disciples of Jesus. The Church is not to be involved in the use of violence, but since Jesus’s teachings are not directed toward any government, it is reasonable to conclude this teaching does are not intended for governments.

Perman derives exactly the opposite message from John 18:36 as I believe he ought. It is not saying that we should abstain from fighting for the Kingdom of God but feel free to fight for any worldly kingdom. Nowhere does the NT say we Christians ought to live as “citizens of two kingdoms” as Perman says. We are first and foremost citizens of heaven, and that is where our loyalties ought to lie (Phil. 3:20). If Christians are not to fight for the cause of the Kingdom of God, then there is no cause great enough to fight for.

Does it not imply that we value more highly the kingdom for which we are willing to fight and die than any other kingdom? Think about the number of American Christians who have died in service to their country. Now think about the number of American Christians who have died in service to the gospel or the Kingdom of God. The ratio of American Christians who are willing to die for the USA versus those who are willing to die for the Kingdom of God is staggeringly lopsided in the direction of the former. What does this imply about the place our values lie?

Perman does a good job of interpreting Romans 13, but he does not realize that Paul never implies Christians are permitted to take part in these actions of the government. He never implies that Christians may use the sword so long as they do it under the limitations of their governmental office. Rather, the role of the Church is to reject vengeance leaving it for the Lord to handle (Rom. 12). In Romans 13, we see how God chooses to carry out His vengeance on Earth—through governments.

The Christian’s submission to the government does not include taking the office of the government. The NT never specifically rejects the Christian’s service in governmental offices, but we are to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). If the office of government has as one of its duties to use non-redemptive, non-loving violence, for whatever reason, Christians are to obey God rather than men.

Governments still operate by the OT law of retaliation, but the Church does not.

Finally, Perman trivializes Jesus’s profound teaching to refrain from resisting evil with violence by calling it hyperbole. He does not give any evidence for his conjecture that it is hyperbole, and it is not obvious from a straightforward reading of the text. Two New Testament scholars that I have read, Walter Wink and Richard Hays, have given in depth exegetical consideration to this passage, and both advocate a pacifist view. They (correctly, in my estimation) see no reason to read the passage as hyperbolic.

Perman, without giving an exegetical proof, flatly asserts that it is hyperbole. He does so because this makes sense with his wider view of Christians and violence, which is ultimately based on natural law. (Though Perman does not admit as much, I have heard several Just War theorists admit that their view rests, finally, on natural law. They argue that anything provable by natural law is compatible with Scripture, but, to my mind, this is exactly backwards from a distinctly Christian way of thinking.)

The only practical advice we get from Jesus here, according to Perman, is to refrain from overreacting when someone cuts us off on the freeway or says something nasty to us or slights us in some personal way. Where Jesus is giving a teaching that should cause people to rethink their notions of justice, Perman sees only a pep talk that a father might give his son before school. (Of course, the pep talk most fathers give their children, including many Christian fathers, is to slug the bully back when he hits you—to not put up with being abused but return abuse with abuse.)

And when the Christian is killing his nation’s enemy, Perman asserts that the believer can still be loving the enemy as a person even though he opposes (is “hate” too strong?) him as an agent of the opposing government. Besides being incompatible with truly loving one’s enemy as well as the believer’s calling to manifest the Kingdom in this age, the previous sentence highlights a glaring weakness of Just War Theory.

Theoretically, both sides of a conflict could have just cause for fighting against another nation, both sides could have exhausted all other means of resolving the conflict, both sides could be using just means to fight the war, and both sides could have soldiers who love the opposing side’s soldiers as people while killing them as agents of their respective governments. A Just War could be justified by both sides, and in such a case the ultimate goal of peace is not served.

Often so called Just Wars have been justified by both sides, and certainly most of the wars of the past century could be justified by either side. For instance, were bin Laden a Just War theorist, he could assert that al Qaeda had a just cause for going to war—the Americans were occupying Muslim holy ground. Bin Laden could say that all other options have been exhausted, as multiple videos had been released, threatening a violent conflict if the Americans did not leave. According to Islamic tradition, civilians are not necessarily to be counted as noncombatants, therefore no unjust means were utilized by his standards. Do you see the problem?

Matt. 5:38-48 Commentary

Each issue Jesus addresses in the Sermon on the Mount (SotM) takes a command or theme from the OT and intensifies it in order to get at the heart of the Law, summed up in the Two Great Commandments in Matt. 22:34-40.

The bits about retaliation in Matt 5:38-42 and loving your enemies in Matt 5:43-48 are not so obvious, though. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is definitely in the OT, and in my judgement it sums up the law of retaliation. In an age when it was common to kill an entire family over a relatively minor insult, the law of retaliation restrained the Israelites from this norm and forced fairness to be practiced over the cultural instinct. This was fitting for when God’s people were a nation struggling to exist in the ancient world.

But like the other issues (anger, lust, divorce, and oaths), Jesus intensifies the law of retaliation. The proper way to retaliate to your enemies is the sort of “disarming” peacemaking measures like turning the other cheek. Where your enemy expects you either to flee, thus making him the “winner,” or fight, thus dragging you down to his level, the new law of retaliation has us stand our ground in firm, self-sacrificing love for our enemy. In this way, we have to deny neither our own dignity nor our enemy’s. The new law of retaliation looks more like love than fairness, more like blessing than retribution.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it the “new” law of retaliation… maybe “Law of Retaliation 2.0.”

Something similar goes for “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” It’s not one verse that’s being cited but rather a theme. Israel’s enemies are justifiably hated, and David often cries out to God to destroy his enemies, declaring how passionately he hates the enemies of the Lord. But “loving your neighbor” refers back to Leviticus 19, wherein the command is given to care for the aliens and sojourners by leaving some of your fields unharvested—basically to make sure you care for even the “outsiders,” those who are not within your family or friends.

Again, Jesus intensifies the Law. Care not only for the outsiders—the poor, the needy, the aliens, the sojourners—but also for the ultimate outsiders, your enemies. This is how I get to pacifism: there is no exception clause to loving your enemies, much less any exception clause to loving anybody. Rather, we are told in the same paragraph to “be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect” (v. 48). This is the reason that peacemakers shall be called “sons of God,” because this is the greatest leap a believer could make toward becoming more like God. It is the final step toward embodying the perfection of our Heavenly Father.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Perfect, all-inclusive love is the act of the Father, it is also the act of the sons of God as it was the act of the only-begotten Son.”

And to be perfect through loving one’s enemies (thus making peace with them, at least in your own heart) is to be blessed (Matt. 5:9).

Responding to the Non-Pacifist Christian

The non-pacifist Christian will not likely accept the principle Jesus gives Peter (“all who take the sword shall die by it”) after Peter defends Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. They will probably say the principle refers to those who use the sword for evil or unjust purposes. But to this I must ask, was Peter’s intention unjust or evil?

Peter was using the sword to protect an innocent person from oppressive and evil-intentioned men. And I think the fact that Jesus gives this principle (“he that lives by the sword shall die by it”) includes Peter’s action. That is, I take it as both a proverb-type principle (which is generally true but not always) in that there is always the possibility that someone who uses the sword will get away with it and die of natural (non-sword) means. But I take it also as a condemnation of any use of the sword for Jesus’ disciples, even to protect the innocent, and even with good-intentions.

The non-pacifist will say that Jesus had to die in order to become the savior of the world, thus Jesus stopped Peter because he had to preserve the necessity of His death.

Certainly, Christ’s death was necessary. But that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus rebuked Peter for his actions of defending him. Peter’s intention, it seems, was to defend the innocent against an evil-intentioned oppressor. Jesus’s rebuke and the principle he gave (“he that lives by the sword shall die by it”) implies that even the attitude of using violence to defend the innocent is impermissible for member of God’s kingdom. Remember, Christ’s rebuke and the principle he gave was directed toward Peter, not the Roman guards. It was not the actions of the oppressive and evil persons that Jesus was critiquing, but the action of Peter, who was violently defending the innocent.

So, I contend, Jesus was not only rebuking the action but also the moral principle behind the action—that violence is justifiable in protecting the innocent, or even that violence is justifiable in advancing God’s kingdom.

What if our enemies are shooting the innocent? Do we let the innocent die? No, of course not. The believer has the obligation to act in defense of human dignity, but in a way that is still loving to the believer’s enemies. Saint Augustine (who formulated Just War theory) taught that one can love his enemies even in the act of killing them. I disagree. I think loving one’s enemies means we do not exclude them from the blessings of the Kingdom. To love one’s enemy is to bless them; to bless them is to seek their well-being; and to seek their well-being is incompatible with killing them.

God’s love, even for His enemies, is like the rain: impartial—sent upon both the righteous and the evil (Matt. 5:45). When we love as God loves, we will be called “children of your Father in heaven.” Similarly, if we are peacemakers, we will be called “children of God.”

We must reject the notion that we must choose which party to love: either the enemy or the innocent. We love the innocent by (first) seeking peace between him and the enemy, and if that doesn’t work then (second) we put ourselves in a position to suffer before the innocent can be harmed. After all, Jesus said that true love is this: “to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

The non-pacifist will ask if we are to let only non-believers take militant stances against injustices in the world. Wouldn’t passivity be almost as unjust as acting unjustly? And if only non-believers were left to fight the wars, wouldn’t that mean more non-believers would die and be forever excluded from God’s kingdom?

In my view, there is a discrepancy between the kingdom of God, the members of which are called to peace both in the ends and in the means, and the various kingdoms of this world. Kingdoms of this world seek to protect the innocent and act in self-defense through violence, while God’s kingdom does not. So, in essence, yes, I do think that a militant response to these issues is a mark of the non-believing world. None of this, however, means that pacifism (peace-making) entails passivity.

And if the concern is the souls of our enemies, it seems we should be willing to sacrifice our own lives over taking theirs’. We are prepared to face God, but they might not be. If our concern is to include non-believers into the Kingdom, then how can we justify killing them, which ensures their final exclusion from the Kingdom?

Lastly, consider that God had the right and power to purge the world of sin in a different way, such as through military-type force. God had the power to deliver Israel through military force as He had done before, but instead He chose to reveal Himself (as fully as He had ever been revealed to the world) in the person of Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:3). And this Jesus, who prescribed us to love, bless, and do good to our enemies, is the one whom we as the church ought to imitate (Eph. 5:1-2).

Instead of destroy His enemies, God revealed in the person of Jesus that His heart was to rescue them and include them in the Kingdom family. So we, the body of Christ, ought also to seek our enemies’ inclusion in the kingdom rather than their defeat or exclusion, even to protect the innocent.

Response to Utilitarian Argument Against Christian Pacifism

The non-pacifist argument is nearly always a utilitarian one—that we ought to take a few lives if it means saving many more. This consequentialist framework asserts that the act of intervening with violence is sometimes morally required if one perceives that such an act could minimize overall pain and maximize overall pleasure. In contexts of war, this would amount to an act of violence which would take a few lives in order to save more than the number taken.

But notice that the origin of this sense—that violent intervention is morally required if one perceives that such an act would minimize the number of lives lost—does not originate from New Testament ethical principles but simply from a utilitarian mindset.

Contrary to the (primarily American) utilitarian mindset, the Hebraic mindset asserts that our moral obligations are determined by God’s laws. Divine revelation, to a Hebrew, determines our moral obligations, even when we believe there is a better way to live. That is, even when we perceive that there is a more “morally efficient” way to go about things, our true moral obligation remains obedience to God’s covenant.

The utilitarian mindset would have us assess what the outcome of each choice will be before we make it. If the moral value of our actions is determined by the outcome, then it may sometimes be right to act in contrariety to the New Testament. In fact, if we are utilitarians, then it we will often be morally required to contradict the New Testament, since the New Testament tells us to prepare for suffering. In essence, utilitarianism forces us to rely on our own wisdom to determine which choices to make.

In contrast, the Hebraic mindset, which Jesus seems to adopt to a large degree, demands that our choices be made out of wholehearted obedience to God’s revelation. While the moral principles in God’s revelation are very concerned with striving toward a peaceful and stable society, nowhere does God’s revelation imply we ought to make the perceived benefits of an act the sole basis of its moral value. As Lee Camp puts it, “it is not our task to make things turn out right, but instead to be faithful witnesses. We have to trust that God will be God, and do what God has promised.”