Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The Insufficiency of Naturalism

A Worldview Critique

Robert B. Stewart

I intend in this essay to critique the worldview of naturalism.1 In order to do this, I will evaluate naturalism according to some of the criteria that I would use to assess any other worldview. These criteria are (1) coherence, (2) correlation, (3) comprehensiveness, (4) consistency, and (5) commitment.2

Overview of the Criteria

Coherence is a vital ingredient of worldview analysis. By coherence I mean freedom from contradiction. Contradictory statements cannot both be true. If one is true, then the other is false, and vice versa. But bare logical consistency in and of itself is not enough for a worldview to be considered true. The world we find in The Lord of the Rings novels seems to me to be a coherent one, but I do not for a minute think that either hobbits or orcs actually exist. In other words, although coherence is necessary for a worldview to be considered adequate, coherence is not sufficient in and of itself. Other criteria are needed.3

Correlation is also a crucial component for a worldview. By correlation I mean that it matters a great deal that life actually seems to be the way that the worldview in question tells us it is.4 The fundamental issue related to correlation is how well the worldview being considered describes life. To a certain degree we can live with a lack of correlation in our worldview, but at some point the cognitive dissonance from doing so becomes too great. All other things being equal, reason would dictate that no one should prefer a worldview that does less well in terms of correlation to one that does better.

Comprehensiveness deals with the question of how well the worldview does in explaining all of life. Coherence is much more easily attained if one leaves out certain bits of problematic data. But those problematic details cry out for attention and often are indications that something is amiss. Worldviews that don't address all areas of life are partial and incomplete. Therefore worldviews that effectively address more areas of life are preferable to those that address fewer.

Consistency addresses the question of how livable a worldview is. In many ways consistency is the truth serum of a worldview. If one has to live as though his worldview were false to get on with daily life, that does not bode well for his worldview. In fact, doing so constitutes a performative contradiction. A performative contradiction is when the proposition one affirms is contradicted by the action one performs, i.e., how one lives. The crucial issue is this: Does the worldview prescribe a way of life that can actually be lived out consistently or must one live otherwise?

Commitment is the final criterion to be considered. Is the way of life dictated by the worldview existentially fulfilling? Can you commit yourself to it wholeheartedly? Camus put it thus: "Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."5 Again, all things being equal, a worldview that offers more existential value is preferable to one that offers less.

These five criteria are not the only criteria by which a worldview may be judged, but they are central. They will necessarily be judged according to the standards of abductive reasoning (i.e., inference to the best explanation) rather than formal logic, on pragmatic bases rather than deductive or mathematical bases.6

An Examination of Each Criterion

Having given a general sketch of the criteria, here I give a more detailed explanation of why metaphysical naturalism fails to live up to these fundamental criteria for assessing any worldview.

Coherence

Naturalism holds within it a great contradiction. If all causes are material in nature—and the vast majority of naturalists believe that all causes are material—then what is the source of human rationality? Concerning this dilemma J. B. S. Haldane wrote, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. . . . And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."7 Naturalists want to believe that they are being rational. We see this in the titles they assign to themselves and their publications: "freethinkers," "free inquiry," etc. But in fact their beliefs serve to undermine our confidence in our own rationality. Atheist Patricia Churchland puts it thus:

Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.8

The late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty echoes Churchland's analysis of the implications of Darwinian theory: "The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own uncreated prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass—a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck."9

It seems then that, on naturalism, what really matters is not whether or not our beliefs are true but that they serve the right function. So long as our beliefs work for survival, it doesn't matter whether they are true or not. But are you reading this essay because you want to decide whether Christianity is useful or because you want to know whether Christianity is true?

Another contradiction we see is that naturalists generally work from the presupposition that scientific knowledge is superior to any other sort of knowledge. But this belief cannot be supported by science. How would one construct an experiment to prove that scientific knowledge was superior to philosophical or religious knowledge? It can't be done. And it hasn't been done. What is one to make of a worldview wherein some of its most fundamental assertions lead to contradictions of the worldview itself? Certainly such a worldview does not score well in terms of coherence.

Correlation

We generally think that we can trust our mental faculties to provide us with reliable beliefs. We know that sometimes we are mistaken, but for the most part we trust our minds to guide us reliably upon reflection. Yet if naturalism is true, why should we do this? The simplest explanation is that we perceive that our beliefs are generally true. Consider the following questions:

I suspect that you are highly confident if not absolutely certain that at least most of the time you are free, rational, morally responsible, and conscious. One can easily see that human freedom, rationality, morality, and consciousness are not tangential or inconsequential issues; they are fundamental to what it means to be human.

But if naturalism is true, then you are very likely wrong on all these counts. This is not simply my opinion; notable naturalists themselves have made these same assertions. Consider this statement from the atheist philosopher of mind, John Searle:

Physical events can have only physical explanations, and consciousness is not physical, so consciousness plays no explanatory role whatsoever. If, for example, you think you ate because you were consciously hungry, or got married because you were consciously in love with your prospective spouse, or withdrew your hand from the flame because you consciously felt a pain, or spoke up at a meeting because you consciously disagreed with the main speaker, you are mistaken in every case. In each case the effect was a physical event and therefore must have an entirely physical explanation.10

Significant issues are at stake if you believe that you are free. Consider the following from the website naturalism.org, which has many noted atheists, such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, on its advisory board.

From a naturalistic perspective . . . [h]uman beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental. We do not have the capacity to act outside the causal connections that link us in every respect to the rest of the world. This means we do not have what many people think of as free will, being able to cause our behavior without our being fully caused in turn.11

Not being free has devastating implications for other important areas of life, such as ethics. Below is another naturalistic "tenet" found at naturalism.org.

From a naturalistic perspective, behavior arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self. . . . Therefore individuals don't bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn't have done other than what they did. Nevertheless, we must still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is, partially, how people learn to act ethically.12

The question is: How can we hold individuals responsible if they aren't responsible for their actions and "couldn't have done other than what they did"? If it is true that "they couldn't have done other than what they did," then why do we call Francis of Assisi a saint and Jeffrey Dahmer a monster? Why do we lock one up and celebrate the sacrifice of the other? In fact, if we cannot do other than what we do, then theists and atheists are on equal footing—we're all determined to believe what we do. We can't do otherwise. So why write books like The God Delusion, which are specifically intended to change people's worldviews?13

Lacking freedom also has huge implications for our human relationships. Just how do we make sense of this thing we call love? If our actions are the result of physical forces, then why does your husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, love you? Why do you love your significant other? Does he or she do so freely? Do you? It is hard to see how in a naturalist world. Love, it would seem, is simply a byproduct of our biology and upbringing. In a very real sense, then, in a naturalist world we can say that love is the fruit of our genes and our experiences—but so is mental illness. How then are we to distinguish between love and psychosis?

What it boils down to is that naturalism leads to the denial of the independent existence of the self. Here is another tenet of naturalism:

As strictly physical beings, we don't exist as immaterial selves, either mental or spiritual, that control behavior. Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and they are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body. The self is constituted by more or less consistent sets of personal characteristics, beliefs, and actions; it doesn't exist apart from those complex physical processes that make up the individual. It may strongly seem as if there is a self sitting behind experience, witnessing it, and behind behavior, controlling it, but this impression is strongly disconfirmed by a scientific understanding of human behavior.14

What should be clear at this point is that naturalism leads to the denial of some truths that seem obvious to most people, truths such as that I can choose my actions, that I can reason through issues, that I am morally accountability for my actions, and that I have consciously reached these conclusions. It is thus apparent that naturalism is lacking significantly in terms of correlation.

A few months ago I was discussing some of this with some atheists, and one said that I was appealing to emotion. I think he said so because most of us would prefer being free to being determined, being rational to being nonrational, being conscious to being nonconscious automatons. But I was not then nor am I now appealing to emotion or to desire. I don't think that simply wanting something to be true will make it true.15 So what am I appealing to here? I am appealing to perception, a time-honored source of knowledge. I am not saying that everything that "seems" to be so is so. Perception is not a perfect guide to truth. But when we perceive every day of our lives that we are freely choosing certain actions over other actions, that we are reasoning our way to many of our beliefs, that we and others are accountable for our actions, we ought not abandon these beliefs without extremely strong evidence to the contrary. How strong does the evidence need to be to cause us to abandon belief in the reality of the self, of human freedom, and of human rationality? I cannot quantify my answer—nobody can—but at the very least I would say that the evidence needs to be enormous. And given the implications of naturalism related to these issues, naturalism cannot score well in terms of correlation.

One way that naturalists will try to show that we are physically determined is to show that we can track certain types of reactions in the brain scientifically. None of what I've stated means that our thoughts are not processed by the brain, or that a scientist working in the field of neurobiology or neuropsychology could not (at least theoretically) with the right equipment map the brain in such a way that he can know what portions of the brain are involved in mental activities such as anger, fear, memory, abstract thought, mystical states, worship, sexual arousal, and so forth. But what cannot be observed without some reference to the world beyond one's brain is the specific content of that mental activity. He might be able to identify the part of the brain that is involved in meditation or prayer, but he cannot discern what the individual is praying for—or to whom. This is because the content of thought is not to be found in the brain but in the mind. You can look in my laptop and find the data that translate to the words of this essay, but you will not find the thoughts behind the words in my computer because those thoughts are in my mind, not the instrument that I use to communicate those thoughts. I repeat, naturalism seems to be woefully deficient in terms of correlation.

Comprehensiveness

There are fundamental areas of life that naturalism cannot adequately explain.16 One of them is consciousness. Another is purpose. Let's see what some leading naturalists have to say about consciousness. Richard Dawkins says this:

There are aspects of human subjective consciousness that are deeply mysterious. Neither Steve Pinker nor I can explain human subjective consciousness—what philosophers call qualia. In How the Mind Works Steve elegantly sets out the problem of subjective consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what's the explanation? Then he's honest enough to say, "Beats the heck out of me." That is an honest thing to say, and I echo it. We don't know. We don't understand it.17

Consider what naturalist Ned Block has to say concerning consciousness: "We have no conception of our physical or functional nature that allows us to understand how it could explain our subjective experience. . . . But in the case of consciousness we have nothing—zilch—worthy of being called a research programme, nor are there any substantive proposals about how to go about starting one. . . . Researchers are stumped."18

Some have argued that purpose is simply an illusion, and that we simply impose purpose upon actions because we need purpose—or because it is useful to believe that our actions have purposes. But this is just confused. If it were true that purpose is just a figment of our imaginations, then there would be no possibility of demonstrating that purpose is required. But consider a simple question: Why did my fingers move as they did when I typed out these pages? One naturalist answer to this sort of question would be that my fingers moved because of the contraction of muscles, stimulated by my nerves, and other physical processes, such as chemical changes in my brain. Most people find this sort of instrumental answer incomplete and unsatisfying in the extreme. It might answer the "how" question—but it would never be able to answer the "why" question. More importantly, the question includes those three little words: "as they did." Why did my physical motions render those letters in that order? Why do those letters make words—and not just words but English words, and not just a series of English words but sentences, and not disconnected sentences but sentences that fit together and make pretty good sense? Surely we can't believe the result is simply because of a random series of biological events. And certainly it makes no sense to say we just impose meaning upon the product of my fingers moving where there is no real purpose or end. But this is what it seems we must affirm in a naturalist world. Naturalism therefore comes up short in terms of comprehensiveness.

Consistency

Naturalism is unlivable. In saying that naturalism is unlivable, I mean that the naturalist has to live in a way that contradicts his stated beliefs in any number of areas. Consider the following from naturalists Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson:

Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey. We help others because it is "right" to help them and because we know that they are inwardly compelled to reciprocate in equal measure. What Darwinian evolutionary theory shows is that this sense of "right" and the corresponding sense of "wrong," feelings we take to be above individual desire and in some fashion outside biology, are in fact brought about by ultimate biological processes.19

So Ruse and Wilson recommend that we fake it and live as though there were objective moral standards even though we know there aren't any objective moral standards. Along the same lines, Richard Dawkins has this to say:

As an academic scientist, I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.20

Perhaps the most controversial feature of contemporary atheism is the concept of a meme. Richard Dawkins introduced the concept in his book The Selfish Gene. Simply put, a meme is a cultural replicator. Suggested examples of memes include such disparate things as thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances, and languages. Accordingly, memes propagate themselves and can move through a culture in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus and influence behavior similarly to a gene. In coining the term, Dawkins wrote:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like "gene." I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to "memory" or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with "cream."21

Several challenges arise in connection to memetic theory. One is to show how memetics is truly an empirical discipline. Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary palaeobiology at Cambridge University, holds that memes seem to have no place in serious scientific reflection. "Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic."22

Another issue is that memes can frequently appear to be nothing more than an ad hoc solution, i.e., they are not so much an explanation discovered as a solution created to solve an intractable problem. When asked to give evidence for memes at the 2007 Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture, Daniel Dennett responded that it was an accepted scientific belief and offered his article in the Encyclopedia of Evolution as supporting his position.23 But what kind of evidence is this? It certainly is not the sort of evidence brought forward in support of general Darwinian theory, such as the fossil record, vestigial organs, embryology, geographic distribution of species, and so on. In fact, if this is a legitimate response, I see no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to hold that there is good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus because I wrote the article on the resurrection of Jesus in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity.24 If an article with the imprint of a prestigious university press is all that's required to prove the reality of a hypothesis, then the matter seems settled. Frankly, I am advocating no such thing; it seems to be a category mistake. Simply put, while encyclopedia articles are generally sufficient to explain a theory on some basic level, they are not sufficient to establish a scientific theory—and with good reason.

Alister McGrath, an Oxford University-trained scientist and theologian and a former atheist, holds that there is no way to prove the existence of memes scientifically. This leads him to comment concerning Dennett's presentation of memes in Breaking the Spell, "This book, in my view, makes a critique of religion dependent on a hypothetical, unobserved entity, which can be dispensed with in order to make sense of what we observe. Isn't that actually a core atheist critique of God—an unobserved hypothesis that can be dispensed with easily? The evidence for belief in God is far better, in my view, than the evidence for belief in memes."25

One must remember that the concept of memes is based on an analogy between genes and ideas. An analogy is a type of supposal, a way of likening one thing to another; analogies are not evidence that something is so but rather illustrations of how something could be so. Analogies are tremendously useful things in philosophy, science, and history. Positing them often allows us to make progress. Unfortunately, analogies can also distort our view of reality and lead us down many dead-end paths. Remember that scientists in the late nineteenth century routinely posited the luminiferous ether—the hypothetical substance that was rigid in relationship to electromagnetic waves but completely permeable to matter—based on the supposed analogy between light and sound. The idea was analogically plausible but mistaken. Worse, the idea of ether actually held back scientific progress. Fortunately, Einstein built on the work of Michelson and Morley and disproved it in his special theory of relativity. Dawkins believes that memes are merely waiting for scientific confirmation.26 I concur with McGrath who thinks they are merely waiting for their Michelson and Morley to deliver the death blow to an unsatisfactory and unnecessary theory, of questionable relevance to our debate about God.27

What sort of score can naturalism receive in terms of consistency if even its most ardent supporters refuse to live according to their stated beliefs and must resort to creating explanations dependent on hypothetical, unobserved, immaterial entities?

Commitment

How does naturalism fare existentially? Naturalism with its commitment to biological and social determinism seems to offer no reason to stand for human freedom and against tyranny, or to praise Mother Teresa for her sacrifice and condemn Hitler for his genocidal agenda. In fairness to naturalists, many naturalists do stand for freedom, praise altruism, and even live altruistic lives. My critique is not that a naturalist cannot do these things. It is rather that someone who accepts naturalism's tenets has no intrinsic reason to do so. So when the naturalist makes such an existential commitment, he is living on borrowed capital, i.e., living according to values that flow from another worldview. C. S. Lewis, reflecting on his own past atheism, put it this way:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? . . . Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.28

On the other hand, naturalists often say that a world without religion would be a better world because religious belief leads people to do evil. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg puts it thus: "Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, but for good people to do bad things—that takes religion."29 But surely this criticism is misguided. Thomas Crean argues that even if the charge were true, it would not prove the naturalist position.

Insofar as this is true, it has no tendency to show that religion is itself a bad thing, or that its message is false. Love causes people to do evil things; so does patriotism. The love of a man and a woman can lead to unfaithfulness, to the destruction of families and even to murder. Patriotism can lead to hatred and to the indiscriminate bombing of cities. None of this means that either love or patriotism is a bad thing. It simply means that the weakness of human nature is such that any great object or cause may stir our emotions as to lead us to act against our better judgment. If religion occasions evil as well as good, this is no sign of its falsity, but simply of its power of attraction over human nature. That in the name of religion good men may do bad things is no argument against religion, unless crimes of passion are arguments against human love.30

How well can naturalism fare in terms of existential commitment if even the attempts of naturalists to build a world of peace and nonviolence depend on oversimplification and cannot be drawn out logically from the worldview itself? The existential cost of naturalism is indeed high, too high.

Conclusion

Some may object that all worldviews have their problems. This is true; all worldviews have their challenges. I think Christianity fares better than naturalism in terms of coherence, correlation, comprehensiveness, consistency, and commitment. I have tried to be fair in my assessment of naturalism by focusing on core tenets of naturalism and the implications of those tenets. I have also tried to support my critique by citing naturalists themselves, thus showing that at least some significant naturalist thinkers agree with me as to what naturalism entails. As with all worldviews, readers will have to judge for themselves whether or not naturalism is sufficient. I am of the opinion that it is not.

1 By "naturalism," I mean metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is not to be confused with environmental naturalism, which refers to an individual who actively seeks to commune with and/or preserve nature. Neither is metaphysical naturalism to be confused with methodological naturalism, which is the attempt on the part of a scientist or historian to state one's position without reference to supernatural beings or phenomena. A scientist or a historian may personally have a supernatural worldview but choose as a scholar to operate as a methodological naturalist.

2 These are not the only criteria that can be used to assess a worldview, but in my view they are necessary criteria for critiquing any worldview. For more on worldview analysis, see www.nobtsapologetics.com/worldviews.

3 In actually assessing competing worldviews it may be the case that all the worldviews being assessed appear in some sense to be incoherent. Or it may be the case that we reach a point where we are unable to know whether a worldview is truly coherent or incoherent. In such cases I suggest that the worldview that seems less incoherent, or about which we are less dubious in this regard, is preferable to the one that seems more incoherent or one about which we are more in doubt. My point is that matters are not always simple in worldview analysis, and thus we may have to be satisfied with assessing worldviews relative to one another, i.e., in terms of degree.

4 Though I hold to a correspondence theory of truth, I intentionally steer away from saying "correspondence" in order not to import too much epistemological baggage into this analysis. It is enough to say that it counts strongly against a worldview that it doesn't seem to tell us how the world actually is. Similarly it counts strongly in favor of a worldview that seems to do a better job of telling us how the world actually is.

5 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Knopf, 1955), 3. Ironically, a worldview that doesn't offer one a way of life worth dying for doesn't offer one a way of life as much worth living as one that does.

6 For more on abductive reasoning, see Louis Pojman, Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999), 29; and Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).

7 J. B. S. Haldane, "When I Am Dead," in Possible Worlds, ed. Carl A. Price (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002), 209. In fact, Haldane also states that he thinks it "immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. . . . I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter" (ibid). On this, see C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 22.

8 Patricia Smith Churchland, "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience," Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 548–49. Alvin Plantinga has formulated a much-discussed argument against naturalism in which the probability of our minds producing rational beliefs is either low or inscrutable given the conjunction of naturalism and evolution precisely because natural selection prefers beliefs that are advantageous to those which are true. Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 216–37. For a thorough discussion of this argument, involving both theists and nontheists, see James Beilby, Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Victor Reppert further develops this basic idea in his C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003).

9 Richard Rorty, "Untruth and Consequences," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, 32–36.

10 John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review of Books, 1997), 154.

11 "Tenets of Naturalism," accessed March 10, 2008, http://www.naturalism.org/tenetsof.htm.

12 Ibid.

13 See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

14 Ibid.

15 I do think, however, that a strong argument for God's existence can be made on the basis of human desire. For an example of this sort of argument, see C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 25–46.

16 I need to be very clear here that I am not attempting any sort of a "God of the gaps" move here. I am not saying that anything that cannot be explained now must be attributed to God. I am saying, though, that worldviews that can make sense of more rather than less data are, all things being equal, to be preferred over their competitors.

17 Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, "Is Science Killing the Soul?" accessed March 5, 2008, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins_pinker/debate_p4.html.

18 Ned Block, "Consciousness," in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel Guttenplan, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1998), 211.

19 Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, "Moral Philosophy as Applied Science," Philosophy 61 (1986): 179.

20 Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 10–11.

21 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 11.

22 Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 324.

23 Daniel Dennett, "Evolution," in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Mark Pagel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). The article is reprinted in Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 341–57.

24 Robert B. Stewart, "Resurrection (the) of Jesus," in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, ed. Daniel Patte (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

25 Alister McGrath, "The Future of Atheism: A Dialogue," in The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 31.

26 Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain, 124.

27 McGrath, "The Future of Atheism: A Dialogue," 32.

28 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 38–39.

29 Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 242.

30 Thomas Crean, God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 118–19.

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