For Further Reading
2
The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism
J. P. Moreland
And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
GENESIS 1:27
One of the roles of a worldview is to provide an explanation of facts, of reality the way it actually is. Indeed, it is incumbent on a worldview that it explain what does and does not exist in ways that follow naturally from the core explanatory commitments of that worldview. In this sense, we can call a worldview an explanatory hypothesis.
From worldview explanations of facts to scientific theorizing to explaining little things in everyday life, we all quite appropriately engage in if-then reasoning, or what philosophers call the hypothetico-deductive method: If the moon were in such and such a place, then the tide would be thus and so. But the tide isn’t thus and so, so the moon must not be in that place. If my daughter did not come straight home from school, she would not have had time to clean her room. The room is messy, so it is likely she did not come straight home from school. And so on. And if the facts are as we deduce they should be, given our hypothesis, then this provides confirming evidence that our hypothesis is true—the best explanation for the facts.
A theory may explain some facts quite nicely, but there are recalcitrant facts that doggedly resist explanation by a theory. No matter what a theory’s advocate does, the recalcitrant fact just sits there and is not easily incorporated into the theory. In this case, the recalcitrant fact provides falsifying evidence for the theory and some degree of confirmation for its rivals.
The Bible teaches that human beings are made in the image of God (Gen 1:27). This implies that there are things about our makeup that are like how God is. At the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin observed:
No man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves.[1]
As image-bearers, human beings have all those endowments necessary to represent and be representative of God, and to accomplish the tasks and exhibit the relationality placed before them: endowments of reason, self-determination, moral action, personality and relational formation, and so on. In this sense, the image of God is straightforwardly rooted in God’s nature, or ontological.
The ontological nature of the image of God, among other things, implies that the makeup of human beings should provide a set of recalcitrant facts for other worldviews. The reasoning behind this claim goes like this:
(1) If Christianity is true, then certain features should characterize human beings.
(2) Those features do, in fact, characterize human beings.
(3) Thus, these features provide a degree of confirmation for Christianity. These features characterize God and, moreover, come from him. He made us to have them.
The Christian, then, offers a challenge to other worldviews—particularly scientific naturalism: show that you have a better explanation for these features than Christianity does (with its doctrine of the image of God), or show that these features are not actually real, even though they seem to be.
The recalcitrant nature of human persons for scientific naturalism has been widely noticed. Thus, Berkeley philosopher John Searle recently noted,
There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy. . . . How do we fit in? . . . How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?”[2]
For the scientific naturalist, the answer is “Not very well.” Notable atheists have failed to notice the difficulty for scientific naturalism in accounting for these commonsense features of human beings. In fact, the nature of human persons has led some to embrace theism. In the seismic book recounting the shift to theism by famous atheist Antony Flew—There Is a God—Roy Abraham Varghese notes that
the rationality [consciousness, freedom of the will and unified self] that we unmistakably experience—ranging from the laws of nature to our capacity for rational thought—cannot be explained if it does not have an ultimate ground, which can be nothing less than an infinite mind.[3]
In what follows I shall first offer a brief sketch of contemporary scientific naturalism and then mention five features of human persons that provide evidence against naturalism and for biblical theism. I shall employ more direct quotations than is typical for a chapter like this, and it may make reading what follows a bit cumbersome. I do this to demonstrate that my depiction of these five features is acknowledged by top atheists themselves as serious problems for atheism and as grounds for believing in God. By quoting top atheists directly, it will be hard to accuse me of creating a strawman depiction of contemporary naturalism.
The Nature of Scientific Naturalism
To gain further insight into why consciousness is such a problem for naturalists, it may be wise to look briefly at the nature of naturalism as a worldview. Naturalism usually includes
Scientism constitutes the core of the naturalistic understanding of what constitutes knowledge, its epistemology. Wilfrid Sellars says that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”[5] Contemporary naturalists embrace either weak or strong scientism. According to the former, nonscientific fields are not worthless nor do they offer no intellectual results, but they are vastly inferior to science in their epistemic standing and do not merit full credence. According to the latter, unqualified cognitive value resides in science and in nothing else. Either way, naturalists are extremely skeptical of claims about reality that are not justified by scientific methods in the hard sciences.
As I’ve been using the phrase, “the Grand Story” is the naturalist creation account: All of reality—space, time and matter—came from the big bang. Various heavenly bodies developed as the universe expanded. On at least the earth, some sort of prebiotic soup scenario explains how living things came into being from nonliving chemicals. And the processes of evolution, understood in either neo-Darwinian or punctuated-equilibrium terms, gave rise to all the life forms we see, including human beings. Thus, all organisms and their parts exist and are what they are because they contributed to (or at least did not hinder) the struggle for reproductive advantage, more specifically, because they contributed to the tasks of feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing.
The Grand Story has three key features. First, at its core are two fundamental theories: the atomic theory of matter and evolutionary theory. If we take John Searle to be representative of naturalists here, this means that causal explanations are central to the (alleged) explanatory superiority of the Grand Story.[6]
Second, the Grand Story expresses a scientistic philosophical monism according to which everything that exists or happens in the world is susceptible to explanations by natural scientific methods. At first glance, the most consistent way to understand naturalism in this regard is to see it as entailing some version of strong physicalism: everything that exists is fundamentally matter, most likely, elementary “particles” (whether taken as points of potentiality, centers of mass/energy, units of spatially extended stuff/waves, or reduced to [or eliminated in favor of] fields), organized in various ways according to the laws of nature. No nonphysical entities exist, including emergent ones.[7]
Third, the history of the universe is a story of unfolding chains of events in which small particles constantly rearrange to form larger and more complicated wholes (for example, atoms, molecules, organisms, planets). The only sorts of causes in the universe are mechanical/efficient (that by means of which an effect is produced) and material (the stuff out of which something is made). There are no purposes, goals, final causes, irreducible teleology. And there are no free agents with the active power to be the real originating causes of their own actions without being determined to act by the laws of nature and external environmental factors.
Indeed, the Grand Story is deterministic in two senses. First, through time the state of the universe (and everything in it) at any particular moment, plus the laws of nature, are sufficient to determine or fix the chances of the state of the universe at the next moment. Second, at a point in time, the characteristics and behaviors of ordinary-sized objects like rocks and living organisms (including human persons) are determined by the characteristics and behaviors of their tiny parts at the level of microphysics.
In sum, there are three constraints for developing a naturalist ontology and locating entities within it:
Five Recalcitrant Features of the Image of God
Given that the metaphysical features of theism are fundamental in existence—God, the basic Being, is a unified, conscious self with rationality, free will and intrinsic value—it is hardly surprising that they appear elsewhere in the created order, especially in association with beings that are alleged to have been created to be like God. Thus, biblical theism predicts that these five features are irreducible, ineliminable aspects of human persons, and the fact that they seem to be such provides confirmation of biblical theism.
But things don’t go so well for the scientific naturalist. He or she begins not with the Logos but with particles (strings, waves) that are brute, mechanical, unconscious, nonrational, nonteleological, slavishly subject to law and bereft of value. And then a story is told about how these continue to rearrange into larger and larger aggregates of the same stuff. On this view, living organisms—including human persons—are relational structures of parts held together by various forces, not unified, uncomposed substantial selves. For sixty years or so, naturalists have tried to reduce or eliminate these five features of human persons in order to depict them in ways natural to a scientific atheistic worldview and within the bounds of its constraints. Labeling these features “emergent phenomena” is just a placeholder for the problem to be solved, not a solution (e.g., consciousness simply emerges when matter reaches a suitable form of complexity). How, for example, could it be that they emerged in the first place? But human persons have resisted such efforts—they are recalcitrant facts for naturalists—and this is exactly what would be predicted if biblical theism were true. It is not what would be predicted from the Grand Story. Let’s probe these issues more fully.
1. Consciousness and the mental. Many believe that finite minds provide evidence of a divine mind as their creator. If we limit our live options to theism and naturalism, it is hard to see how finite consciousness could result from the rearrangement of brute matter; it is easier to see how a conscious Being could produce finite consciousness.
This argument assumes a commonsense understanding of conscious states such as sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires and volitions. So understood, mental states are in no sense physical since they possess four features not owned by physical states:
Given that conscious states are immaterial and not physical, at least two reasons have been offered for why there can be no natural scientific explanation for the existence of conscious states.
First, something from nothing. Before consciousness appeared, the universe contained nothing but aggregates of particles/waves standing in fields of forces. The naturalistic story of the cosmos’s evolution involves the rearrangement of atomic parts into increasingly more complex structures according to natural law. Matter is brute mechanical, physical stuff. The emergence of consciousness seems to be a case of getting something from nothing.
In general, physico-chemical reactions do not generate consciousness. Some say they do in the brain, yet brains seem similar to other parts of organisms’ bodies (e.g., both are collections of cells totally describable in physical terms). How can like causes produce radically different effects? The appearance of mind is utterly unpredictable and inexplicable. This radical discontinuity seems like a rupture in the natural world.
Second, the inadequacy of evolutionary explanations. Naturalists claim that evolutionary explanations can be proffered for the appearance of all organisms and their parts. In principle, an evolutionary account could be given for increasingly complex physical structures that constitute different organisms. However, organisms are black boxes as far as evolution is concerned.
As long as an organism, when receiving certain inputs, generates the correct behavioral outputs under the demands of reproductive advantage, the organism will survive. What goes on inside the organism is irrelevant, becoming significant for the processes of evolution only when an output is produced. Strictly speaking, it is the output, not what caused it, that bears on the struggle for reproductive advantage. Moreover, the functions organisms carry out consciously could just as well have been done unconsciously. Thus, both the sheer existence of conscious states and the precise mental content that constitutes them are outside the pale of evolutionary explanation.
It will not do to claim that consciousness simply emerged from matter when it reached a certain level of complexity. “Emergence” is not an explanation of the phenomena to be explained. It’s merely a label.
2. Free will. It is widely acknowledged that the commonsense, spontaneously formed understanding of human free will is what philosophers call libertarian freedom: one acts freely only if one’s action was not determined—directly or indirectly—by forces outside his control, and one must be free to act or refrain from acting; one’s choice is “spontaneous,” it originates with and only with the actor.
It is not my purpose to argue for libertarianism. I simply offer two fairly obvious remarks.
For one thing, as John Searle has recently noted, the experience of libertarian free will is compelling—so compelling, in fact, that people cannot act as though that experience is an illusion, even if it is one.[8] He reminds us that when we are presented by the waiter with a choice between pork or veal, we cannot bring ourselves to reply, “Look, I’m a determinist. I’ll just have to wait and see what order happens!”
According to a major understanding of Christianity, God has libertarian freedom and created his image-bearers to possess this freedom. By contrast, most philosophers are agreed that libertarian freedom and a theory of agency it entails are incompatible with the generally accepted depiction of naturalism presented earlier. John Searle says that “our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical [libertarian] freedom.”[9] And if moral (and intellectual) responsibility has such freedom as a necessary condition, then reconciling the natural and ethical perspectives is impossible.
In what may be the best naturalist attempt to accomplish such a reconciliation, John Bishop frankly admits that
the idea of a responsible agent, with the “originative” ability to initiate events in the natural world, does not sit easily with the idea of [an agent as] a natural organism. . . . Our scientific understanding of human behavior seems to be in tension with a presupposition of the ethical stance we adopt toward it.[10]
There are many reasons why atheists admit that free will is incompatible with scientific naturalism. But here’s a major one. All the particular things and their behavior in the naturalist order are lawlike and, so, subsumable under laws of nature.[11] Further, a free act involves an exercise of active power by a first mover, an uncaused causer, an undetermined actor. By contrast, since all events in a naturalist ontology are passive happenings, they all are examples of moved movers. Something has to happen to an object first—an event that triggers and actualizes its passive causal powers—before it can cause something else to happen. In this sense, all naturalistic causation involves changed changers. But a first mover can actively produce change without having to change first to do so.
It should be obvious why such an agent is not an object that can be located in a natural ontology. Unmoved movers with active power are quintessentially unnatural! Indeed, in this regard they are exactly like the God of the Bible.
3. Rationality. According to Christianity, God—the fundamental being—is rational and created his image-bearers with the mental equipment to exhibit rationality and be apt for truth gathering in their various environments. But rationality is an odd entity in a scientific naturalist world. Christian philosopher Victor Reppert agrees: “The necessary conditions for rationality cannot exist in a naturalistic universe.”[12] According to naturalist Thomas Nagel:
The problem then will be not how, if we engage in it, reason can be valid, but how, if it is universally valid, we can engage in it. There are not many candidates to this question. Probably the most popular nonsubjectivist answer nowadays is an evolutionary naturalism: We can reason in these ways because it is a consequence of a more primitive capacity of belief formation that had survival value during the period when the human brain was evolving. This explanation has always seemed to me to be laughably inadequate. . . . The other well-known answer is the religious one. The universe is intelligible to us because it and our minds were made for each other.[13]
There are at least two reasons why human persons can’t be rational agents in a scientific naturalist worldview but are predicted to be precisely such in a biblical worldview: (1) the necessity of the enduring, rational self and (2) the need for room for teleological (goal-directed) factors to play a role in thought processes.
There must be not only a unified self at each time in a deliberative sequence but also an identical self that endures through the rational act. Consider A. C. Ewing’s argument:
To realize the truth of any proposition or even entertain it as something meaningful the same being must be aware of its different constituents. To be aware of the validity of an argument the same being must entertain premises and conclusion; to compare two things the same being must, at least in memory, be aware of them simultaneously; and since all these processes take some time the continuous existence of literally the same entity is required. In these cases an event which consisted in the contemplating of A followed by another event which consisted in the contemplating of B is not sufficient. They must be events of contemplating that occur in the same being. If one being thought of wolves, another of eating, and another of lambs, it certainly would not mean that anybody contemplated the proposition “wolves eat lambs.” . . . There must surely be a single being persisting through the process to grasp a proposition or inference as a whole.[14]
Rational deliberation and intellectual responsibility seem to presuppose an enduring I. But on the naturalist view, I am a collection of parts such that if I gain and lose parts, I am literally a different aggregate from one moment to the next. Thus, there is no such enduring I that could serve as the unifier of rational thought on a naturalist view.
But there’s more. Consider the following argument:
(1) If naturalism is true, there is no irreducible teleology.
(2) Rational deliberation exhibits irreducible teleology.
(3) Therefore, naturalism is false.
Scientific naturalism completely eschews irreducible teleology. However, teleology is essential to reasons-explanations. To see this, look at these two sentences:
It seems clear that the first offers a reason-explanation and the second does not. “The glass broke because the rock hit it” cites an efficient (mechanical) cause after “because” (the rock hitting the glass). But “I raised my hand because I wanted to vote” is very different. It cites a teleological goal or end (to satisfy the desire to vote, to make a difference in the culture, etc.) for the sake of which the person raised his or her hand.
4. Unified selves. Naturalism cannot countenance a substantial, enduring mental self (what we could perhaps call a mind or immaterial soul). If one starts with separable physical parts, and simply rearranges them according to natural laws into new relational structures constituted by external relations, then in the category of “individual,” one’s ontology will have what are called atomic simples.
There are two basic reasons why a substantial, simple soul is not an option for a naturalist. First, the naturalist is committed to the closure of the physical. All physical events that have causes have entirely physical causes; when tracing the causal antecedents of a physical event, one need not—and, indeed, cannot—leave the physical realm. If by some sort of magic, a simple soul could be an emergent entity, then the soul would be an entity with no causal powers. However, most naturalists banish entities with no causal powers from their ontology, so a soul with no causal powers is tantamount to a nonexistent entity. Jaegwon Kim speaks for most naturalists when he says:
If the immaterial mind is going to cause a neuron to emit a signal, . . . then it must somehow intervene in these electrochemical processes. But how could this happen? At the very interface between the mental and the physical where direct and unmediated mind-body interaction takes place, the nonphysical mind must somehow influence the state of some molecules, perhaps by electrically charging them or nudging them this way or that way. Is this really conceivable? . . . Even if the idea of a soul’s influencing the motion of a molecule . . . were coherent, the postulation of such a causal agent would seem neither necessary nor helpful in understanding why and how our limbs move.[15]
Second, given the Grand Story, apart from atomic simples (if such there be), all larger wholes (such as brains and bodies) are aggregates composed of separable, substantial parts that stand in various external relations to each other. In such an ontology, macrosubstances are replaced with structures constituted by myriads of separable parts. There is no unified, substantial self or mind connected to a body. Daniel Dennett says, “We now understand that the mind is not . . . in communication with the brain some miraculous way; it is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain.”[16] And Carl Sagan flatly asserts: “I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label.”[17] The terms configuration, system, organization and collection capture nicely the nonsubstantial, relational nature of such aggregates. In contrast with scientific naturalism, Christianity’s fundamental being is a substantial, unified spirit, and those made in his image are as well.
5. Intrinsic, equal value and rights. On a Christian view, God the fundamental being possesses intrinsic value, and his loving, just character is the source of objective moral obligation for human persons. Moreover, since all human beings share the image of God equally, they all have high, equal value and rights simply as such. Thus, a Christian worldview has a natural place for and provides an explanation of (1) the existence of intrinsic value, (2) the reality of objective moral obligation, and (3) high, equal value and rights for all humans. But these three cannot be accounted for adequately by scientific naturalism.
Let’s look first at the existence of intrinsic value and an objective moral law. Evolutionary naturalist Michael Ruse notes that
morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.[18]
Given scientific naturalism, it is hard to see how there could be intrinsic value and an objective moral order or why that order would have anything to do with human persons. Moreover, the combinatorial processes of the Grand Story cannot account for the appearance of simple, intrinsic value; thus its existence counts against naturalism and for Christian theism. As atheist J. L. Mackie acknowledged: “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”[19]
In addition to intrinsic value and an objective moral order, scientific naturalism cannot account for the high, equal value and rights of human persons simply as such. Naturalists Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse acknowledge that the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God.[20] This claim by Singer and Kuhse has been acknowledged by a wide number of thinkers for some time. For example, in the early 1960s, Joel Feinberg, arguably the leading legal, political philosopher of that time, advanced the following argument.[21]
According to Feinberg, a natural right is a human right held unalterably, unconditionally, and possessing certain epistemological properties (e.g., perceivable by direct, rational intuition) and metaphysical groundings. If human rights are natural rights that apply to all human persons equally, then they presuppose equal human worth but not equal merit. Human merit (e.g., talents, skills, character, personality, various abilities) is graded, but human worth is not. Equal rights accrue to individuals quite apart from their graded merit.
The following skeptical question, Feinberg believes, has never been adequately answered: why should we treat all people equally in any respect in the face of manifest inequalities of merit among them? The simple response “Because we just have such worth” does not answer the skeptic’s query. If “human worth” is real and generic, says Feinberg, then it must supervene on some subvenient base that (1) we all have equally in common and (2) is nontrivial and of supreme moral worth. Operating within a naturalist framework, Feinberg considers several attempts to delineate that base, and he judges them all to be a failure because they
At the end of the day, Feinberg acknowledges that the notion of equal worth and equal rights for all human persons is groundless and may simply express a noncognitivist, unjustifiable pro-attitude of respect toward the humanity in each man’s person.
My point in mentioning Feinberg is not to evaluate his claims, but to illustrate just how difficult it is to justify equal value and rights for all human persons if one has taken the naturalistic turn.
Evolutionary theory has also made equal human value and rights hard to justify. Thus, David Hull—perhaps the leading philosopher of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century—makes the following observation:
The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of “natures” to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about “human nature.” Perhaps all people are “persons,” share the same “personhood,” etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate “Homo sapiens” from “human being,” but the result is a much less plausible position.[22]
Similarly, atheist James Rachels claims that a Darwinian approach to the origin of human beings, while not entailing the falsity of these notions, nevertheless provides an undercutting defeater for the idea that humans are made in the image of God and that humans have intrinsic dignity and worth as such. Indeed, according to Rachels, Darwinism is the universal solvent that dissolves any attempt to defend the notion of intrinsic human dignity:
The traditional supports for the idea of human dignity are gone. They have not survived the colossal shift of perspective brought about by Darwin’s theory. It might be thought that this result need not be devastating for the idea of human dignity, because even if the traditional supports are gone, the idea might still be defended on some other grounds. Once again, though, an evolutionary perspective is bound to make one skeptical. The doctrine of human dignity says that humans merit a level of moral concern wholly different from that accorded to mere animals; for this to be true, there would have to be some big, morally significant difference between them. Therefore, any adequate defense of human dignity would require some conception of human beings as radically different from other animals. But that is precisely what evolutionary theory calls into question. It makes us suspicious of any doctrine that sees large gaps of any sort between humans and all other creatures. This being so, a Darwinian may conclude that a successful defense of human dignity is most unlikely.[23]
Conclusion
I have argued that on a Christian worldview, God the fundamental being possesses and shares with his image-bearers (1) consciousness, (2) libertarian free will, (3) rationality, (4) a unified self (and as a Trinity, three unified I’s) and (5) intrinsic value. By contrast, given the epistemological and Grand Story constraints placed on the scientific naturalist ontology, not a single one of these five fits naturally in a non-ad-hoc way.
Naturalists can’t appeal to emergence to solve their problems because (1) this is just a label for the problem to be solved and not a real solution and (2) it begs the question against Christian theism in a most egregious way. It would seem, then, that important features that characterize us human persons provide evidence that there is a Creator God who made us. And this is exactly what one would predict if biblical teaching about the image of God is true.
For Further Reading
Moreland, J. P. Consciousness and the Existence of God. London: Routledge, 2008.
———. The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism. London: SCM Press, 2009.
Reppert, Victor. C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
Swinburne, Richard. The Evolution of the Soul, rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.