Part 5: Religious Challenges To Christian Faith . . .
AN ISSUE OF T/ME MAGAZINE FEATURED AN ARTICLE DEFENDING STEM-CELL research on human embryos: "These [embryos] are microscopic groupings of a few differentiated cells. There is nothing human about them, except potential-and, if you choose to believe it, a soul."' This statement expresses a widely held opinion that when it comes to belief in the soul, you're on your own. There is no evidence one way or another. You must simply choose arbitrarily what you believe about the soul.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, a very strong case can be offered for the view that consciousness and the soul are immaterial-not physical-realities. Thinking through this issue is not only a fascinating adventure, but for at least four reasons, it is a matter of considerable importance.
First, the Bible teaches that consciousness and the soul are immaterial. This is the most obvious reading of the biblical text. For example, in Matthew 10:28, Jesus recognizes body and soul as distinct entities (cf. Lk 12:4-5): "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the One who is able to destroy soul as well as body in hell."
Second, as the Time article implies, the reality of the soul is important to various ethical issues that crucially involve an understanding of human persons. For example, is personhood-and therefore worth or dignity-defined by one's properly functioning body or brain? Or does it relate to something deeper-an enduring spiritual self-that remains even if mental functioning is lost?
Third, some argue that the Christian view of the afterlife requires a soul that survives in a disembodied intermediate state between death and the final resurrection, yet science has discredited belief in the soul.
Finally, some argue that finite minds provide evidence of a divine Mind as their creator. If we limit our 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. Prior to the appearance of consciousness, the universe contained nothing but aggregates of particles/waves standing in fields of forces. The emergence of consciousness seems to be a case of getting something from nothing. This radical discontinuity seems like a rupture in the natural world best explained by a spiritual Creator.
After clarifying some important concepts, this chapter will present arguments for the claim that both consciousness and the self that contains it are immaterial, spiritual realities and not physical. Property dualism is the view that consciousness is spiritual and not physical, and while substance dualism comes in different varieties, it will be used in this chapter to mean that the self is a spirit and not a physical object.
IMPORTANT PRELIMINARY CONCEPTS
Let's first clarify what is the nature of substances, properties and events. First, a substance is an entity like an acorn, a dog or an angel with at least three important features.
• A substance is aparticular, individual thing.
• A substance is a continuant-it can change by gaining new properties and losing old ones, yet it remains the same thing throughout the change. An acorn can change colors, or an angel can change its thinking, and both are still the same thing.
• Substances are basic, fundamental existents. Substances are not in other things, nor are they had by other things. Properties are in things and are had by them. The dog Fido is not in or had by something more basic than he. Rather, properties such as brownness (and parts) are in substances like Fido that have them.
Second, some examples of properties are brownness, triangularity and painfulness. There are two relevant features of properties.
• Properties don't change. When a leaf goes from green to red, the leaf changes but redness does not.
• Properties can be in or had by other things. Properties are in the things that have them. For example, redness is in the apple. When we are talking about a property, it makes sense to ask the question "What is it that has that property?" Substances have properties;
properties are had by substances.
Finally, there are entities in the world called events. Examples of events are a flash of lightning or the having of a thought. Events are ongoing states or changes of states of substances. An event is the coming or going of a property in a substance at a particular time, or the continued possession of a property by a substance throughout a time.
An overview of physicalism and dualism. According to physicalism, a human being is merely a physical entity. The only things that exist are physical substances, properties and events. The human, therefore, is a physical substance-namely, a material brain or body. This physical substance has physical properties-a certain weight, volume, size, electrical activity, chemical composition, and so forth. There are also physical events that occur in the brain. When someone has an occasion of pain or an occurrence of a thought, physicalists hold that these are merely physical events that can be exhaustively described in physical language. One's conscious mental life of thoughts, emotions and pain is nothing but physical events in one's brain and nervous system.
What is matter? It is hard to define, but examples are easy to supply. Material objects are things like computers, carbon atoms and billiard balls.
Material properties are
• publicly accessible in the sense that no one person is better suited to have private access to a material property than anyone else;
• such that an object must be either spatially located or extended to be considered having material properties;
• such that when a strictly material object has physical properties, that object does not behave in a goal-oriented or purposeful (teleological) manner (i.e., it does not undergo change for the sake of some end or purpose-what Aristotle referred to as a "final cause").
Physical properties are the properties that one finds listed in chemistry or physics books. They are properties such as hardness; occupying and moving through space; having a certain shape; possessing certain chemical, electrical, magnetic and gravitational properties; having density and weight; and being breakable, pliable and elastic. A physical event would be the possession, coming or going of one or more of these properties by a physical substance (or among physical substances).
Another very crucial observation to make about material substances, properties and events is this: No material entity presupposes or requires reference to consciousness for it to exist or be characterized. You will search in vain through a physics or chemistry textbook to find consciousness included in any description of matter. A completely physical description of the world would not include any terms that make reference to or characterize the existence and nature of consciousness.
Dualists disagree with physicalists. According to dualists, genuinely mental entities are real. As with matter, it is hard to give a definition of mental entities. But examples of mental entities are easy to supply. There are at least five different kinds of mental properties/events. A sensation is a state of awareness or sentience, a mode of consciousness (e.g., a conscious awareness of sound, color or pain). Some sensations are experiences of things outside ourself like a tree or table. Others are awarenesses of other states within ourself like pains or itches. Emotions are a subclass of sensations and, as such, they are forms of awareness of things.
A thought is a mental content that can be expressed in an entire sentence and that exists only while it is being thought. Some thoughts logically imply other thoughts. For example, "All dogs are mammals" entails "This dog is a mammal." If the former is true, the latter must be true. A beliefis a person's view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are. If a person has a belief (e.g., that it is raining), then that belief serves as the basis for the person's tendency or readiness to act as if the thing believed were really so (e.g., the person gets an umbrella). At any given time, one can have many beliefs that are not currently being contemplated. A desire is a certain felt inclination to do, have or experience certain things. Desires are either conscious or such that they can be made conscious through certain activities, for example, through therapy. A five choice is an exercise of power, an endeavoring to do a certain thing, usually for the sake of some purpose or end.
Dualists argue that these five properties/states are examples of genuine mental-not physical-entities.
In addition to these differences between physicalists and dualists, there is also an intramural debate between mere property dualists and substance dualists.
Mere property dualists believe there are some physical substances that have only physical properties: for example, a billiard ball is hard and round. They also maintain that there are no mental substances. On the other hand, they contend there is one material substance that has both physical and mental properties-the brain. When I experience a pain, there is a certain physical property possessed by the brain (a C-fiber stimulation with chemical and electrical properties), and there is a certain mental property possessed by the brain (the pain itself with its felt quality). The brain is the possessor of all mental properties. I am not a mental self that has my thoughts and experiences. Rather, I am a brain and a series or bundle of successive experiences themselves. Moreover, mere property dualists claim that just as wetness is a real property that comes about with (or supervenes upon) a certain structure of water molecules, so mental properties arise from (or supervene upon) brain states.
In contrast with mere property dualism, substance dualism holds that the brain and the mind/soul are two distinct things: the brain is a physical thing that has physical properties, and the mind or soul is a mental substance that has mental properties. When I am in pain, the brain has certain physical properties (electrical, chemical), and the soul or self has certain mental properties (the conscious awareness of pain). The soul is the possessor of its experiences. It stands behind, over and above them and remains the same throughout my life. The soul and the brain can interact with each other, but they are different particulars with different properties. Substance dualists accept the existence of both mental properties and substances.
Identity, causation and correlation. It is time to turn to a topic that will explain our strategy for defending dualism: the nature of identity. The eighteenth-century philosopher and theologian Joseph Butler once remarked that everything is itself and not something else. This simple truth has profound implications. Suppose you want to know whether J. P. Moreland is Eileen Spiek's youngest son. If J. P. Moreland is identical to Eileen Spiek's youngest son (everything true of one is true of the other), then in reality, we are talking about one single thing: J. P. Moreland, who is Eileen Spiek's youngest son. However, if even one small thing is true of J. P. Moreland and not true of Eileen Spiek's youngest son, then these are two entirely different people. Furthermore, J. P. Moreland is identical to himself and not different from himself. So if J. P. Moreland is not identical to Eileen Spiek's youngest son, then in reality we must he talking about two things, not one.
This illustration suggests a truth about the nature of identity known as Leihniz's law of the indiscernibility of identicals: If you've got two truly identical things, then there is only one thingyouu are talking about-not two-and any truth that applies to `one" applies to the "other. "This suggests a test for identity: If you could find one thing true of x that is not true of y, or vice versa, then x cannot be identical to y. Further, if you could find one thing that could possibly be true of x and not y (or vice versa), even if it isn't actually true, then x cannot be identical to y. If J. P. Moreland is 5' 8" tall, but Eileen Spiek's youngest son is 6' tall, then they are not the same thing. Further, if J. P. Moreland is 5' 8" and Eileen Spiek's youngest son is 5' 8", but it would be possible for J. P. to be 5' 9" while Eileen's youngest son were 5' 8" then they are not the same thing either.
What does this have to do with the mind-body problem? Simply this: Strict physicalists make the bold claim that alleged mental entities are really identical to physical entities-brain states, properties of the brain, overt bodily behavior and dispositions to behave. For example, pain is just the tendency to shout "Ouch!" when stuck by a pin, instead of pain being a certain mental feel. If physicalism is true, then everything true of the brain (and/or its properties/states) is true of the mind (and/or its properties/states) and vice versa. But if we can find just one thing true, or even possibly true of consciousness and the self that is not of the brain/body and its physical states, or vice versa, then dualism is established.
Keep in mind that the relation of identity is different from any other relation, for example, the relation of causation or constant connection. With regard to the relation of causation, it may be that brain events cause or are correlated with mental events or vice versa. But just because A causes B (or vice versa), or just because A and B are constantly correlated with each other, that does not mean that A is identical to B. Correlation is not the same thing as identity. Physicalism needs identity to make its case.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND PROPERTY DUALISM
Are properties such as being a thought or being a pain-and the events/ states composed of them (a pain or thinking event)-genuinely mental or physical? In this section, we will look at a case for property dualismthe view that conscious properties/events are mental and not physical.
Property dualists argue that mental states are in no sense physical since they possess five features that physical states don't have:
1. there is a raw qualitative feel or a "what it is like" to have a mental state such as a pain;
2. at least many mental states have intentionality-ofness or aboutness -directed toward an object (a thought may he about the moon);
3. mental states are inner, private and immediate to the subject having them;
4. mental states require a subjective ontology-namely, mental states are necessarily owned by the first-person sentient subjects who have them (I own them; they are mine; they are directly accessible to me);
5. mental states fail to have crucial features (e.g., spatial extension, location) that characterize physical states and, in general, cannot be described using physical language.
The dualist argues that once one gets an accurate description of consciousness, it becomes clear that mental properties/events are not identical to physical properties/events. Mental states are characterized by their intrinsic, subjective, inner, private, qualitative feel, made present to a subject by first-person introspection. In general, mental states have some or all of the following features, none of which is a physical feature of anything: Mental states like pains have an intrinsic, raw conscious feel. There is a "what it is like" to a pain. Most-if not all-mental states have intentionality, that is, they are of or about things. Mental states are inner, private and known by first-person, direct introspection. Any way one has of knowing about a physical entity is available to everyone else, including ways of knowing about one's brain. The examination of physical states and events is in principle publicly accessible. But a subject has a way of knowing about his own mental states not available to othersthrough introspection. He alone knows his own private mental states by first-person introspection. Mental states are made up of directly available-or self-presenting-properties. One can be aware of the external, physical world only by means of one's mental states, but one need not be aware of one's mental states by means of anything else. One is directly aware of them. For example, it is by way of a sensation of red that one is aware of an apple, but one is not aware of the sensation of red by way of another sensation. Mental states are necessarily owned by a subject, indeed, by the particular subject that has them. One's mental states could not have belonged to someone else. However, no physical state is necessarily owned, much less necessarily owned by a specific subject.
We can add other differences between mental and physical states to the list. Some sensations are vague (e.g., a sensation of an object may be fuzzy or vague), but no physical state is vague. Some sensations are pleasurable orunpleasurable, but nothing physical has these properties. A cut in the knee is, strictly speaking, not unpleasurable. It is the pain event caused by the cut that is unpleasurable. Mental states can have the property of familiarity (e.g., when a desk looks familiar to someone), but familiarity is not a feature of a physical state.
Since mental states have these features and physical states do not, mental states therefore are not identical to physical states.
THE IMMATERIAL SOUL
At least three arguments have been offered in the recent literature for some form of substance dualism.
Our basic awareness of the self. The first one focuses on one's basic awareness of the self. When we enter most deeply into ourselves, we become aware of a very basic fact presented to us: We are aware of our own self (ego, I, center of consciousness) as being distinct from our bodies and from any particular mental experience we have, and as being an uncomposed, spatially unextended center of consciousness. I simply have a basic, direct awareness of the fact that I am not identical to my body or my mental events; rather, I am the immaterial self that has a body and a conscious mental life.
An experiment may help convince you of this. Right now I am looking at a chair in my office. As I walk toward the chair, I experience a series of what are called phenomenological objects or chair representations. That is, I have several different chair experiences that replace one another in rapid succession. As I approach the chair, my chair sensations vary. If I pay attention, I am also aware of two more things. First, I do not simply experience a series of sense images of a chair. Rather, through self-awareness, I also experience the fact that it is I myself who has each chair experience. Each chair sensation produced at each angle of perspective has a perceiver who is I. An "I" accompanies each sense experience to produce a series of awarenesses-"I am experiencing a chair sense image now."
I am also aware of the basic fact that the same self that is currently having a fairly large chair experience (as my eyes come to within twelve inches of the chair) is the very same self as the one who had all of the other chair experiences preceding this current one. Through self-awareness, I am aware of the fact that I am an enduring I who was and is (and will be) present as the owner of all the experiences in the series.
These two facts-I am the owner of my experiences, and I am an en during self-show that I am not identical to my experiences. I am the conscious thing that has them. I am also aware of myself as a simple, uncomposed and spatially unextended center of consciousness (I am "fully present" throughout my body; if my arm is cut off, I do not become four-fifths of a self). In short, I am a mental substance.
Unity and the first person perspective. A complete physicalist description of the world would be one in which everything would be exhaustively described from a third-person point of view in terms of objects, properties, processes and their spatio-temporal locations. For example, a description of an apple in a room would go something like this: "There exists an object three feet from the south wall and two feet from the east wall, and that object has the property of being red, round, sweet, and so on."
The first-person point of view is the vantage point that I use to describe the world from my own perspective. Expressions of a first-person point of view utilize what are called indexicals-words like I, here, now, there, then. Here and now are where and when I am; there and then are where and when I am not. Indexicals explicitly or implicitly refer to one's self. "I" is the most basic indexical, and it refers to one's own self that one knows by acquaintance with one's own self in acts of self-awareness. I am immediately aware of my own self, and I know to whom "I" refers when I use it: It refers to me as the self-conscious, self-reflexive owner of my body and mental states.
According to physicalism, there are no fundamentally basic or intrinsic (irreducible), privileged first-person perspectives. Everything can be exhaustively described in an object language from a third-person perspective. A physicalist description of me would say, "There exists a body at a certain location that is five feet eight inches tall, weighs 160 pounds," and so forth. The property dualist would add a description of the properties possessed by that body, such as the body is feeling pain or thinking about lunch.
But no amount of third-person descriptions ("he," "she," "it") captures my own subjective, first-person ("I") acquaintance of my own self in acts of self-awareness. In fact, for any third-person description of me, it would always be an open question as to whether the person described in third-person terms was the same person as I am. I do not know my self because I know some third-person description of a set of mental and physical properties and also know that a certain person satisfies that description. I know myself as a self immediately through being acquainted with my own self in an act of self-awareness. I can express that selfawareness by using the term I.
Irefers to my own substantial soul. It does not refer to any mental property or bundle of mental properties I am having, nor does it refer to any body described from a third-person perspective. Iis a term that refers to something that exists, and I does not refer to any object or set of properties described from a third-person point of view. Rather, Irefers to one's own self with which one is directly acquainted and which, through acts of self-awareness, one knows to be the substantial uncomposed possessor of one's mental states and one's body.
The modal argument. Thought experiments have rightly been central to debates about personal identity. For example, we are often invited to consider a situation in which two persons switch bodies, brains or personality traits or in which a person exists disembodied. In these thought experiments, someone argues in the following way: Because a certain state of affairs S (e.g., the disembodied existence of Smith) is conceivable, this provides justification for thinking that S is metaphysically (or really, actually) possible. Now if S is possible, then certain implications follow about what is or is not essential to personal identity (e.g., Smith is not essentially a body).
We all use conceiving as a test for possibility/impossibility throughout our lives. I know that life on other planets is possible (even if I think it is highly unlikely or downright false) because I can conceive it to be so. I am aware of what it is to be living and to be on earth, and I conceive no necessary connections between these two properties. I know square circles are impossible because it is inconceivable, given my knowledge of being square and being circular. To be sure, judgments that a state of affairs is possible/impossible grounded in conceivability are not infallible. They can be wrong. Still, they provide strong evidence for genuine possibility/impossibility. In light of this, I offer the following criterion:
For any entities x and y, if I have good grounds for believing I can conceive of x existing without y or vice versa, then I have good grounds for believing x is not essential or identical to y or vice versa.
1. The law of identity: If x is identical to y, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa.
2. I can strongly conceive of myself as existing disembodied.
3. If I can strongly conceive of some state of affairs S that S possibly obtains, then I have good grounds for believing of S that S is possible.
4. Therefore, I have good grounds for believing of myself that it is possible for me to exist and be disembodied.
5. If some entity x is such that it is possible for x to exist without y, then (i) x is not identical to y and (ii) y is not essential to x.
6. My body is not such that it is possible to exist disembodied, i.e., my body is essentially a body.
7. Therefore, I have good grounds for believing of myself that I am not identical to my body and that my physical body is not essential to me.
A parallel argument can be advanced in which the notions of a body and disembodiment are replaced with the notions of physical objects. So understood, the argument would imply the conclusion that I have good grounds for thinking that I am not identical to a physical particular nor is any physical particular essential to me. A parallel argument can also be developed to show that possessing the ultimate capacities of sensation, thought, belief, desire and volition are essential to me; that is, I am a substantial soul or mind.
I cannot undertake a full defense of the argument here, but it would be useful to a say a bit more regarding (2). There are a number of things about ourselves and our bodies of which we are aware that ground the conceivability expressed in (2). I am aware that I am unextended (I am "fully present" at each location in my body as Augustine claimed); I recognize that I am not a complex cluster of separable parts, nor am I the sort of thing that can be composed of physical parts. Rather, I am a basic unity of inseparable faculties (of mind, volitions, emotion, etc.) that sustains absolute sameness through change and that I am not capable of gradation (I cannot become two-thirds of a person).3
In near-death experiences, people report themselves to have been disembodied. They are not aware of having bodies in any sense. Rather, they are aware of themselves as unified egos that have sensations, thoughts, and so forth. Moreover, Christians who understand the biblical teaching that God and angels are bodiless spirits also understand by direct introspection that they are like God and angels by virtue of the following: (a) They are spirits with the same sorts of powers God and angels have but that they also have bodies. (b) The New Testament teaching on the intermediate state (between the body's death and its final resurrection) is intelligible in light of what they know about themselves and it implies that we will and, therefore, can exist temporarily without our bodies. In 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, Paul asserts that he, in the midst of a visionary experience, may actually have been disembodied. Surely part of the grounds for Paul's willingness to consider this a real possibility were (i) his own awareness of his nature through introspection, (ii) his recognition of his similarity to God and angels in this respect and (iii) his knowledge of biblical teaching.
All of the factors mentioned in the above paragraph imply that people can conceive of themselves as existing in a disembodied state, which provides grounds for thinking that this is a real possibility (even if it is false, though, of course, I do not think it is false). Thus, one cannot be one's body, nor is one's body essential to him.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have seen that the immaterial nature of consciousness and the soul are important topics for Christians to defend, and we have looked at a case for dualism. Jesus once warned that we should fear those who can "destroy both soul and body in hell" (Mt 10:28). On another occasion he cautioned about being cavalier regarding forfeiting one's soul (Mt 16:24). Perhaps the first step in losing something is to stop believing it is real in the first place.
FOR FURTHER READING
Habermas, Gary R., and J. P. Moreland. Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality. Rev. ed. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2004.
Hasker, William. The Emergent Self. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Lee, Patrick. Abortion and Unborn Human Life. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996.
Machuga, Ric. In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2002.
Moreland J. P., and Scott B. Rae. Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000.
Swinburne, Richard. The Evolution of the Soul. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
A MAN RECENTLY WROTE DENVER SEMINARY CONCERNED THAT OUR WEBPAGE mentions the seminary's mission to defend "absolute truth." This put off the prospective student. He thought that those who believe in absolute truth think they have all the answers and are not receptive to dialogue with others with whom they disagree. He had been influenced in his thinking by Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian.' This is not surprising, because McLaren's book is an apologetic for importing postmodernism into evangelical Christianity. A hearty emphasis on objective truth and traditional apologetic engagement are two of the book's main targets. This book received an Award of Merit in the category of Christian Living for the 2002 Christianity Today book awards.
McLaren provides a window into the corrosive effects of postmodernism in the church. He tells a story in which one character, Neo, speaks for a postmodern approach to Christianity. The narrative format makes the material more lively for those not inclined to read weightier treatises on postmodernism. It also allows the writer to insinuate and suggest controversial ideas through his spokesman without forthrightly stating these ideas. This book complements the postmodern approaches to theology and culture articulated by Christian writers such as Stanley Grenz, Leonard Sweet and Nancey Murphy (all mentioned in the footnotes), but without the academic air. There is little recognition of the profoundly tinbiblical and irrational nature of postmodernism and the threat it poses to the articulation and defense of Christian truth. Nevertheless, many writers are claiming that since our society is postmodern (more pluralistic, less idealistic and less tolerant of absolute truth-claims), the church and apologetics must bend in this direction as well.
Postmodernism poses a great challenge to the enterprise of Christian apologetics, largely on account of its views of truth, rationality and language. Historically, defenders of the Christian worldview have argued that the biblical worldview is both objectively true and rational (Is 1:18; 1 Pet 3:15; Jude 3). It is derived from the Bible, which contains a true and rational revelation in linguistic form (2 Tim 3:16-17). That is, apologetics endeavors to show that biblical truth can be known to be true and that it can survive and thrive even when under intellectual attack (2 Cor 10:3-5). Apologetics is a command given to the church and cannot be ignored by faithful followers of Christ. While many attempts to undermine Christianity argue that it is false or irrational, the postmodernists criticize Christianity for even claiming to be true, rational and knowable in a linguistic form. This is because postmodernism rejects notions of absolute truth and binding rationality as well as the notion that language can unambiguously communicate matters of ultimate meaning. These claims need to be assessed and evaluated for the sake of Christian apologetics today.
This chapter cannot do justice to the multifaceted and often convoluted variety of postmodernist theories. I will focus on avowedly secular postmodernists and respond to general trends in their philosophies. In a nutshell, postmodernism holds that truth is determined by various social constructions that are devised for different purposes. Various cultures have their own "language games," which describe reality very differently. However, we cannot adjudicate which language game or which linguistic "map" correlates more correctly with reality, since we cannot get beyond our own cultural conditioning. There is no objective reality apart from our languages and concepts. To say we know the objective truth is to set up a "metanarrative" that is intrinsically oppressive and exploitative (Jean-Francois Lyotard). Various "interpretive communities" (Stanley Fish) determine their own truth. Texts, whether religious or otherwise, do not have any objective meaning; therefore they are neither true nor false in themselves but inherently unstable and ambiguous (Jacques Derrida). Truth is not a matter of statements corresponding to reality but of how various power structures define "truth" (Michel Foucault). Various communities use various "vocabularies," none of which is closer or farther away from objective truth, since objective truth does not exist (Richard Rorty).3 There is no "God's eye view" of anything; therefore, there is no objective truth binding on everyone everywhere.
Against the postmodernists, the vast majority of philosophers have held to the correspondence theory of truth, which asserts that statements or beliefs are true only if they agree or match up with reality. As Nor man L. Geisler writes, "There may be many different ways to defend different truth claims, but there is really only one proper way to define truth, namely as correspondence."6 Various groups may take different things to be true, but truth itself is unified and cannot he contradictory. Therefore, what is true does not depend on individual or collective opinion, tradition or perspective. Furthermore, philosophers-both East and West-have worked within a basic logical framework, which they did not take to be culturally contingent. We will discover some of the logical problems in denying truth as correspondence (or as objective) below. But even logic itself is being attacked by some postmodernist thinkers who claim that logic is merely the result of cultural factors.
THE LOGIC OF TRUTH
Postmodernist claims to the contrary, logic is not the product of white, male and totalitarian thinking. Logic is, rather, indispensable for all rational analysis, for the testing of truth-claims. Without logic, we are left mute and muzzled concerning reality.
The logic of truth is the logic of the law of noncontradiction. First codified but not invented by Aristotle, this law states, "Nothing can both be and not be at the same time in the same respect." Nothing can possess incompatible properties; that is, nothing can be what it is not. For example, Jesus cannot he both sinless and sinful. If there is exactly one God, there cannot be many gods. This logical principle is not the unique possession of Christianity. It is a truth of all creation and how God ordained us to think. Despite what some benighted theologians have claimed, Christian faith does not require that we somehow transcend this law of logic. God is consistent and cannot lie (Heb 6:18). God cannot deny himself or assert what is false; nor can he make something both true and false in the same way at the same time.
Those who claim that this basic principle of thought is false must assert this principle in order to deny it. In so doing, they make a mockery out of all thought, language and the very notion of truth. Consider the statement: "The law of noncontradiction is false." For this statement itself to be true, it must contradict its opposite (that the law of noncontradiction is true). But in so doing, it must affirm the duality of truth and falsity-which is the very thing that the law of noncontradiction itself requires. This is how God made us to think-to think in accord with reality. Postmodernists who assert that logical principles are merely social and historical constructs nevertheless often accuse their critics of culpable falsehood and thus assert the law of noncontradiction.'
The law of noncontradiction combined with the specificity of Christian truth and the high stakes involved in choosing whether to believe in Christ means that truth for the Christian is confrontational. When Paul beheld the idolatry of Athens, he was "greatly distressed" and "so he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks" (Acts 17:17). This apologetic spirit eventually led to his famous Mars Hill apologetics address. While the postmodern world beholds the great welter of lifestyles, trends and facades and can only utter "whatever" with a smirk and a slouch, the followers of "the Way" (Acts 11:26) must defend "the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints" (Jude 3).
Anthropologist Ernest Gellner, a secular critic of postmodernism, pays tribute to biblical monotheism when he says that the Enlightenment emphasis on "the uniqueness of truth" and the hope of discovering nature's objective secrets is rooted in monotheism's avoidance of "the facile selfdeception of universal relativism." s He further sharpens his analysis by claiming this connection between the singularity and supremacy of God with a fundamental logical principle closely related to the law of noncontradiction.
The law of excluded middle trades on the same essential insight as the law of noncontradiction by stating that any factual statement and its denial cannot both be true. Either Jehovah is Lord or he is not Lord. There is no middle option. Jesus assumes this principle when he warns that "no one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money" (Mt 6:24).
These essential logical principles-and many more-are the necessary tools for fruitful work in apologetics, philosophy and all rational thought. To relativize or ignore them is to welcome irrationality and court intellectual suicide.10 These principles should be part of the foundation of our knowledge."
THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF TRUTH
God is true or faithful to his word and in his activities and attitudes; God is the God of truth. So David prays, "Into your hands I commit my spirit; redeem me, 0 LORD, the God of truth" (Ps 31:5; see 2 Chron 15:3). Through Isaiah, God declares, "I, the LoRD, speak the truth; I declare what is right" (Is 45:19).
The Hebrew emet can also represent "that which is conformed to reality in contrast to anything that would be erroneous or deceitful."13 In several passages, "If it is true" means, "If the charge is substantiated" (Is 43:9; Deut 13:14; 17:4). Many biblical texts include statements such as "speaking the truth" (Prov 8:7; Jer 9:5) or "giving a true message" (Dan 10:1) or a "true vision" (Dan 8:26). Emet can also connote "what is authentic, reliable, or simply `right,' " such as "true justice" (Zech 7:9) or as in swearing in a "truthful, just and righteous way" (Jer 4:2). Roger Nicole explains that faithfulness and conformity to fact are
Both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament draw a clear contrast between truth and error. John warns of distinguishing the "Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood" (1 Jn 4:6). Paul says that those who deny the reality of the God behind creation "suppress the truth by their wickedness" (Rom 1:18). Before Pilate, Jesus divided the field into truth and error: "For this reason, I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me" On 18:37).
This biblical conception of truth as fidelity to objective fact also involves the claims that God's revealed truth is absolute as well. It is invariant and without exception or exemption. Neither is it relative, shifting or revisable. A classic text on the absoluteness of truth is Jesus' uncompromising statement, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" On 14:6). There is no exception or exemption from this claim: there is but one way to the Father, Jesus himself.
The truth of the gospel is not subject to any human veto or democratic procedures. This claim does not mean that Christians claim to have absolute knowledge about God. It simply means that God has revealed his one way of salvation through Christ and made this known in history and as recorded in Scripture and as illuminated by the Holy Spirit. Those who know Jesus as Lord confess his absoluteness, not their own. We can know this truth and testify to it only in light of God's grace because it is only by grace that grace can be known. Postmodernists to the contrary, the biblical metanarrative does not lead to oppression and arrogance because it centers on the revelation of a good, loving and holy God who has commissioned his people to communicate the absolute claims of the gospel in humility and love.
Moreover, God's revealed truth is universal. To be universal means to apply everywhere, to engage everything and to exclude nothing. The gospel message and the moral law of God is not circumscribed or restricted by cultural conditions. When Peter preached before the Jewish religious authorities, he declared in clear terms concerning Jesus of Nazareth: "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must we saved" (Acts 4:12; see also 1 Tim 2:5-6). This, of course, is a direct spiritual and intellectual challenge to every other religion and philosophy on the planet (see also Acts 17:30).
A survey of the biblical view of truth can not do justice to the richness of the words employed in a wide diversity of contexts. Nevertheless, it should he clear that the biblical view of truth collides with postmodelnist notions of the social construction of reality and the relativity of truth. Nicole concludes that "the biblical view of truth (emet-aletheia) is like a rope with several intertwined strands"; it "involvesfdctuality,,faithfulness, ness.and The Bible does not present truth as a cultural creation complete"" of the ancient Jews or the early Christians. They received truth from the God who speaks truth to his creatures, and they were expected by this God to conform themselves to this truth. With his basis in revealed truth, the defender of the faith can work to challenge false philosophies pitted against the Christian worldview (2 Cor 10:3-5; Col 2:8-10).
PROBLEMS WITH POSTMODERNISM: TRUTH, LANGUAGE AND ETHICS
Secular postmodernist philosophies come in various forms, but they all attempt to undermine the rich biblical concept of truth. However, they are subject to several criticisms. First, postmodern pronouncements on truth often contradict themselves. These pronouncements claim to be applicable to reality itself, not merely to their own language game or constructed map; yet this is just what postmodemists themselves claim cannot be done. They have painted themselves into a linguistic comer in which they are silenced from affirming anything objectively real. Consider this statement:
All "truth" is a social construction of language, and nothing more. It cannot orient us to any objective reality outside a system of discourse.
This statement makes a claim about objective reality. It refers to all truth and says that it is nothing but a contingent construction that cannot connect us to objective reality at all. This claim includes the statement itself in its description or range of reference. Therefore, the postmodelnist statement about truth is merely a social construction-and nothing more. But if it is, then the statement itself cannot be true to reality. Therefore, it is false. Put another way, the statement sets up conditions that it cannot fulfill.
NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVISM: MANY ANGLES, No TRUTH
This point of philosophical failure can be illustrated also by Nietzsche's philosophy of perspectivism, which has significantly shaped many postmodernist approaches to truth. He claimed that there are no facts but only interpretations (or constructions) created according to one's particular needs to enhance one's life, what he called "the will to power." There is "no true world," only "a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us.' .J8 Everything is a matter of relative and pragmatic perspective, with no method by which to adjudicate between perspectives rationally in order to discern an objective truth true for everyone. Nietzsche claims: "There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes-and consequently there are many kinds of `truths,' and consequently there is no truth."19
But Nietzsche put this forward as an account of the human situation, as an explanation for human knowing, being and acting. Still, if Nietzsche's own view is nothing but a relative perspective whose origin lay in himself only, and not a fact of the matter, his own view cannot successfully describe the lay of the land. It summarily executes itself, however poetically or passionately enunciated. Moreover, Nietzsche condemns many other views as flatly false, including all nonperspectivist views. Consider this condemnation: "In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contract with reality."20 Nietzsche implicitly claims that this statement against Christianity corresponds to reality and directly claims that Christian truth-claims fail to correspond to reality. Hence Nietzsche reverts to a view of truth he elsewhere earnestly denies. But no zeal can make contradictions come true.
We all have different perspectives to some degree (which can be biased, prejudiced, ignorant, arrogant, and so on), but perspectives do not determine truth. They can, however, affect our sense of what is true. A perspective may be partially true, largely true or mostly false, but its worth is gauged by its truth. A perspective in itself does not establish truth; it is a perspective on or about something else-something outside of itself. One has a perspective, but it refers to reality, either successfully (by being true) or unsuccessfully (by being false). Perspectivism reduces to a kind of collective autism: everyone has a perspective, no one has the truth-and that's the truth.
Postmodernist constructivism or perspectivism also renders the concept of lying impossible. One lies when one affirms the opposite of what one takes to be true: either affirming what should be denied or denying what should he affirmed, given the facts of the matter. However, if everything is a matter of interpretation or perspective all the way down, there are no bedrock facts at all-no facts to relay and no facts to obscure. One creates all the reality we can ever "know." Lies become nonexistent because they are impossible. This is so radically counter-intuitive as to be absurd. Lies, lying and liars have existed, do exist and will exist-and in abundance. Perjury is still a crime, as is defamation of character, libel, slander and the obstruction of justice. The commandment not to bear false witness against one's neighbor (Ex 20:16) is still broken, even in postmodern times.
POSTMODERN CONFUSIONS ON TRUTH IN LANGUAGE
The sheer fact that finite, previously earth-bound human beings could construct manned space vehicles that travel to the moon and back reveals that the sophisticated mathematical formulations required for the successful navigation of space corresponded to the territory where no one had gone before. The map was a proper guide to the territory because it objectively fit the territory. In other words, the mathematical equations and the language related to their implementation (the signifiers) connected to the objective realities of outer space (the signified).
In addition to the above notions about language, postmodernists often argue that the semantics (word meanings) and syntax (grammatical structure) of human languages are contingent and ultimately arbitrary. They are merely social constructions. Humans have many differing languages, and translations between languages are often difficult. Moreover, the way people understand reality is dependent on the nature of their languages. These observations have led postmodernists to take languages to be self-enclosed and self-referential systems.
From another angle, the postmodernist idea that language defines thought is highly suspect. There are empirical counterexamples to this claim, as noted epistemologist Alvin Goldman observes. Babies have been shown to possess logical categories before they speak or understand any language. Adults can solve certain kinds of tasks by employing concepts without words. Moreover, people frequently have the sense that the words they have used to express something were not quite right. Therefore, what they intended to say is different from what was said. Yet this would he impossible if thought was exhausted by language. Therefore, thought is not exhausted by language.25 "In short, postmodernists need to moderate their claim that language is the great determiner of thought, for that unqualified view is simply false."'`'
ETHICAL QUANDARIES
Right-thinking people judge certain acts-such as racism, rape, child abuse and terrorism-as objectively evil, and not as merely relative social constructions. If such assessments are correct, then the postmodern view cannot be sustained. Postmodernism emphasizes the diversity of truth-claims, particularly in pluralistic settings, but it provides no key to test these claims against reality. Instead, it succumbs to a kind of intellectual indifference. Truth is what you make it, nothing more. Yet the despicable terrorist crimes of September 11, 2001, jostled even the secular New York Times into questioning some assumptions. On September 22, 2001, it ran an editorial by Edward Rothstein, who wrote that "cataclysms not only cast shadows over human victims but can also shake the foundations of intellectual life." He opines that the events of September 11 challenged the perspective of postmodernism, which denies that "truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity."
"A transcendent ethical perspective" hints at the will of God, but the article doesn't go that far. Nevertheless, it exposes an Achilles heel of postmodernism.
Postmodernists have difficulty in living out their denial that moral statements can be objectively true. While Foucault attacked objective standards of ethics as constructions used to support oppressive systems, he nevertheless had to rely on some standard independent of society itself to make these judgments.'" Foucault, like so many postmodernists, is operating on borrowed capital, which he can never repay, given the impoverishment of his worldview. Ironically, Foucault himself worked for prison reform, taking the penal system of his day to be unjust.29
As an anarchist, Foucault made the individual's freedom to maximize pleasure the highest good and was fearful that "society constitutes a conspiracy to stifle one's own longings for self-expression." He even "agonized profoundly over the question of whether rape should be regulated by penal justice" because he thought that law equaled oppression, and lawlessness meant freedom.30 His final writings made clear his ethical concern to liberate "human beings from contingent conceptual constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori limits" in order to lay out "alternative forms of existence."31
The logic of Foucault's presuppositions forced him to wrestle with a proposition that is self-evident: rape is immoral violence and exploitation of the highest magnitude. Without an objective moral order, such judgments are void. Yet Foucault contradicts himself by granting some kind of individual rights to pleasurable self-expression, some goodness in the liberation of the marginalized. This claim has no foundation, however, since "man" is, according to Foucault, only a "recent invention" during "European culture since the sixteenth century." 32 To all those "who still ask themselves question about what man is in his essence," Foucault responds, "we can answer only with a philosophical laugh."33 Foucault would have, therefore, no ethical standard beyond the contemporary social constructions of what humans are on which to base any ethical criticism. When God is eliminated, humanity is annulled, and ethics is eroded. Only madness and anarchy remain (Prov 8:36).
CONCLUSION: LEAVING POSTMODERNISM BEHIND
Postmodernism has many facets that I have not explored.34 However, the central postmodernist accounts of truth, rationality, language and ethics need to be understood and critiqued by Christian apologists, since these ideas generally stand in stark contrast to the fundamentals of a Christian worldview (Col 2:8). Some argue that the postmodern emphasis on the finitude and culture-bound nature of all knowledge claims is a fitting rebuke to the pretensions of rationalism and fits well with the biblical account of humans as limited and sinful knowers. While Paul says we "see but a poor reflection," we can see something. While we "know in part," we can know something (1 Cor 13:11-12).
Postmodernism's rejection of the classical and biblical views of truth, rationality and language is not a fitting tonic to intellectual arrogance. Instead it shackles the intellect in a prison with no windows open to objective reality. While Christian witness must be savvy concerning the realities of the postmodern condition in order to make the historic Christian message understandable and pertinent to denizens of the contemporary world, this does not mean that we should become postmodernists in the process.
FOR FURTHER READING
Anderson, Walter Truett, ed. The Truth About Truth: Deconfitsing and Reconstructing the Postmodern World. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995.
Beckwith, Francis J., and Gregory P. Koukl. Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998.
Erickson, Millard. Truth or Consequences: The Promise and Perils of*Postmod- ernism. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
Groothuis, Douglas. Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000.
MacCallu in, Dennis, ed. The Death of Truth. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996.
Veith, Gene Edward. Postmodern Times. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1994.
MANY CHRISTIANS WANT TO SHAPE THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS of their communities by helping to pass or keep in place laws and ordinances that are intended to protect notions that are central to preserving civil society. These notions include the intrinsic dignity of each human person (before and after birth), the sanctity of marriage (between one man and one woman) and the primacy of the family. Those who do not believe that these notions should be reflected in our laws typically reply that Christians and their allies in other faith traditions have no right to legislate morality.
The constant or determined repetition of an error does not make it true. Errors are errors regardless of either their prevalence or the persistence of those who advance them. Indeed, given the egregious foolishness of some of our most widespread beliefs in the recent past, the great popularity or predominance of a notion sometimes is enough to raise suspicions about its truthfulness. We moderns too eagerly and too often live our lives on the basis of insupportable, indefensible, half-true truisms that cannot stand up to close analysis. The assertion that you cannot legislate morality is just such a notion. No matter how often one hears that you cannot legislate morality, the truth is that you can legislate nothing else.
All laws, whether prescriptive or prohibitive, legislate morality. All laws, regardless of their content or their intent, arise from a system of values, from a belief that some things are right and others wrong, that some things are good and others bad, that some things are better and others worse. In the formulation and enforcement of law, the question is never whether or not morality will be legislated but which one. That question is fundamentally important because not all systems of morality are created equal. Some are wise, others foolish. Few are still in their first incarnation, nearly all having been enshrined as law at some time or place, often with predictable results. For better or worse, every piece of legislation touches directly or indirectly on moral issues or is based on moral judgments and evaluations concerning what it is we want or ought to he, what it is we want or ought to produce and preserve.
When, for example, the founding fathers drafted the original U.S. Constitution, they did so on the basis of competing belief systems, on the basis of competing assertions of right and wrong, which they endeavored to build into the Constitution. One or more of those belief systems permitted slavery; others did not. No side in the slavery debate at the Constitutional Convention argued that you could not legislate morality. That notion they all recognized as balderdash. They knew that indeed you could legislate morality, and they intended for that legislated morality to be theirs.
Nor did any side in the struggle to legislate morality at our nation's founding say to its opponents that trying to legislate morality was a breach of the wall of separation between church and state. Morality, after all, is not a church. They would have laughed at the confusion of mind revealed in one who thought that separating church from state meant separating morality from law. They wanted the nation to be moral. They wanted its laws to be just. But they did not want to give any one church a national legal advantage over the others. They did not want the nation to be Presbyterian, Baptist or Roman Catholic, which is a far different issue from whether or not to have ethics-driven law. Under the Constitution the founders drafted, all persons are free to follow and to worship God. The founders enshrined freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. In seeking to avoid a state-established church, they were not thereby establishing secularism or separating law from morality.
More fundamentally, the very fact that the founders were creating a new Constitution for their fledgling nation arose from the fact that they understood the actions of King George to be morally evil, to be politically unjust. They all knew quite well that morality belonged in politics, in fact that politics was simply morality applied to the public square, to the public's business.
The founders sought to establish what they called an ordered liberty. The order they sought was provided in part by the morality they intended to enshrine in law. By seeking ordered liberty, the founders were not seeking anything new or unprecedented in political thought or in political history. They well knew from reading the ancient works of Aristotle, for example, that morality encoded in civil law helped to provide order because law inescapably has a teaching function, or pedagogical effect: law teaches the citizens what is right and good, and it punishes those who cannot or will not learn that lesson, or at least act as if they had.
To make the point from a different angle, when we pass laws that require drivers to drive their vehicles at 20 miles per hour or less in school zones, we do so because we have a value system that rightly puts greater worth in human life than in vehicular speed. That valuation is a moral judgment. That moral valuation we properly and wisely seek to translate into binding and enforceable law. We propose and pass such laws because we think it wrong for drivers recklessly to endanger the lives of defenseless children, who lack the experience, foresight and physical dexterity to keep themselves out of harm's way on the streets. Drivers who do not do as the law requires, we punish. No one, in the face of such proposed legislation, says to the local authorities that those authorities have no right to impose their morality on others, even though that is precisely what such laws do. Much less does anyone seriously argue that to propose such values-laden laws is an effort to tear down the wall of separation between church and state.
Those objections are not raised because the laws in question are laws with which all serious-minded citizens are in agreement. That these laws are morals-based, or values-driven, creates no problem for those who find the laws agreeable. Rather, people tend to complain that laws are morals-based only when the law in question is based upon a moral valuation with which they disagree. But to be consistent, those who object to morals-based laws would have to raise the same objection to all laws whatever, including the laws they support. But they do not. They never do. When their own morals are encoded in law, they raise not even the faintest whimper of protest. Yet when laws are passed that they dislike, they say almost nothing else. They seem to want a sword that will cut only others, never themselves. But any sword of objection sharp enough to cut Jack is sharp enough to cut John as well, even though John might not like it.
Legislating morality, in other words, is not an option; it is a necessity, an inevitability. Justice, equity, fairness-those characteristics that all thoughtful citizens want from their government and upon which they think government and its laws ought to be predicated-these are all moral categories. We outlaw slavery, theft, murder, fraud, deceit, rape, and so on, precisely because they are immoral and we want them stopped or at least radically curtailed. We propose, pass and enforce these morals-based laws specifically toward that end, and in so doing we are right.
Let me make the point more explicitly: When it comes to prohibiting sexual harassment or sexual discrimination in the marketplace, feminists do not complain that the proposed legislation attempts to enshrine morality in the civil or penal code, even though it most definitely does. No serious feminist has ever sought to undo or to oppose such legislation because it was based on a system of morals. Feminists complain about legislating morality only when it comes to outlawing abortion. They oh- ject to legislating morality only when the morality in question is one from which they dissent. When the law in question encodes a morality they support, their objection to morals-driven law disappears.
By the same token, when a civil rights leader supports affirmative action laws and opposes the Jim Crow legislation of the old South, both that leader's support and opposition are based upon the moral judgment that all persons are created equal and ought therefore to be treated equally under the law. That civil rights leader cannot then turn around and say to someone else, pro-life advocates for instance, that they are imposing their morality on others because the pro-life advocates are doing exactly what the civil rights advocate is doing, and on precisely the same basis, namely, upholding the dignity and worth of every human being. Like the civil rights advocate, the pro-life advocates are affirming the obligation of a just nation to insure that all persons enjoy equal protection under the law.
Sometimes those who resist legislating morality do so not because they object to the morality being legislated but because they value freedom and wish to defend it. They seem not to understand, however, that their allegedly morals-free proposals will be the death of the freedom they value, not its protection. Without the guidance and constraint of morally informed law, liberty degenerates into mere license, which is not the same as political freedom. One simply cannot reject moral authority and yet live in an orderly world. When you banish morality from the public square, you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom. To live outside the moral law, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death. Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law political freedom is shortlived and finally impossible. Indeed, without great volumes of enforceable law, chaos-not freedom-always results. Authentic political freedom, if it is to remain true to itself and avoid the excesses of license, must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round. Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, of morality. The most important consideration regarding any action is not "Is it free?" but "Is it good?"
Make no mistake, legislating morality is not only inescapable, it works. The proof that laws change behavior is widely known and not far to find: Almost no one in the South today argues that slavery is moral, even though many of their grandparents and great-grandparents thought it was and, as a result, owned other human beings as property. What stands between today's southern Americans and their slave-owning ancestors is morals-based law, specifically the Thirteenth Amendment and the civil rights laws of the 1960s and later, all of which helped radically to reshape the behavior and beliefs of those who grew up in their wake. Similarly, before Prohibition the average annual consumption of alcohol in America was nearly three gallons per person. After Prohibition that number fell to slightly less than one gallon. In fact, alcohol consumption did not return to pre-Prohibition levels in America for nearly forty years. By the same token, before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, about 100,000 abortions were performed in the United States annually. After Roe v. Wade, however, the number rose to between 1.2 and 1.5 million a year. In short, whether the laws in question are good or bad, law has an effect. The morality in the law, whatever it might be, tends to become the morality of the people. Law is always a tutor to morals and a shaper of national character, both for good and ill.
To digress: While legislating morality is an inevitability, I am not saying anything so silly as that all sins ought to be made crimes. No government could effectively enforce laws against lustful thoughts, gluttony or so-called white lies, even though such activities are sinful. And if somehow the impossibility of enforcing such laws were overcome, the immediate result would not be less lust, for instance, but rather the overcrowding of penal facilities on an unimaginable scale.
Back to the point: When people object to legislating morality, they fail to recognize or to remember that their own understanding of morality is the impulse behind the laws they themselves propose and defend. It is also the impulse behind their opposition to other laws. Yet, despite their inescapable dependence upon their own moral code when designing, proposing or opposing laws, they seek to deny that same moral impulse to others who wish to be heard, who wish to have their own ideas taken seriously, who wish to have their own beliefs and values prevail. But you must not withhold from others in the public square what you wish to make use of yourself. If you would banish the moral basis of the laws proposed by your political opponents, you must banish it from your own. But no one does, and no one can.
Furthermore, if you object to legislating morality, you could not, for that very reason, raise any effective moral objection to execution as a punishment for jaywalking or decapitation for tax evasion or speeding. Your objection to such penal atrocities and to the laws that permit or require them is a moral objection, which you say ought to be banished from law.
Because law is not a substitute for parental authority but is a complement to it, one must not argue (as some do) that moral education is the function of parents only and not therefore of the state. Because parents teach morality does not mean that law does not or must not. Parents and law share at least this: They function inescapably as moral educators, whether for good or evil. In cases where parents fail to perform this task wisely or well-a not uncommon occurrence-law must function in this capacity all the more. Similarly, the fact that morality is meant to be implemented by individuals does not mean that there must be no public morality, no civil, social or legal standards of conduct, as if because morality has a personal dimension, it can have no social or political dimension, or as if the existence of personal morality meant that there ought to be no public morality.
But the case for morals-based law rests on a wider and more profound basis than the internal contradictions of those who oppose legislating morality and the impossibility of doing as they insist. Those who wish to banish ethical considerations from legal affairs forget that civilizations are not founded on considerations of mere personal comfort and pleasure, or on science and technology, or even on self-gratification and self-preservation, but on virtue-both public and private. The good society, in other words, depends for its preservation and well-being on the character of its people, on the virtues that accompany, perhaps even define, good citizenship. Only on the foundation of courage, of self-control and self-denial can a good society be founded and continued. But these civic virtues are not natural to us. We are not born into the world as good and competent citizens. The civic virtues and public responsibilities that define good citizenship must be acquired; they must be learned. In that sense, we all enter this world unequipped by natural endowment for effective citizenship and for self-government, which is why one of the oldest political insights available to us is that which insists that we are always only one generation from barbarism, that every newly-born generation needs to be civilized, or culturally housebroken, as it were. Those necessary but unnatural social skills and civic virtues require nurture and guidance for their growth, even for their existence. Consequently, moral education is a prerequisite for a sound and flourishing civil society. This moral nurture, this aid to character formation, the laws of a nation help to provide by setting before the citizenry examples of acceptable behavior and incentives toward adopting that behavior as one's own. But law divorced from morality, law that poses as morally agnostic, cannot accomplish that task. Instead, morally evacuated law teaches the citizens that moral conduct is not necessary, either for their own happiness or for the establishment and continuation of a good society and civil order.
In short, the rule of law is necessary to a civil society, and a just rule of law requires adherence to a strict moral code. Perhaps an analogy will serve to clarify the point: Computer programmers often employ the acronym giro, derived from the first letter of the words "garbage in, garbage out," a phrase warning those programmers that no had program yields good results. You get back from the computer results that reflect the worth of the program it employs. And farmers likewise understand that you could not reasonably expect to gather a harvest of corn from a field planted with beans. You reap what you sow; you harvest what you plant-a principle that applies to law and to culture as well as to farmers and programmers. Only a legal code counseled by virtue and rooted in goodness can yield civil justice. Justice is not the harvest of a legal system into which it was never planted. Moral outcomes are not to be expected from a legal system into which it was never programmed, never cultivated. Except by the happiest of chances, moral results-in other words, just results-do not grow from the legal field in which those seeds were never planted. If you neglect to plant morality in the legal code, you must not expect to harvest it in court, or in the character of those citizens whose moral nurture is shaped partly by the laws of the society in which they are raised.
One of the most distressing facts about the United States today, therefore, is that it is now undergoing a deliberate deflation of traditional ideals and values, both in the culture in general and in the law in particular. It is enduring what Gertrude Himmelfarb called the de-moralization of society, or what George Will described as the slow-motion barbarization of America, in the wake of which politics and life have become impoverished, coarsened and tawdry. This disaster we deliberately and foolishly inflict upon ourselves by insisting, in the face of history and of clear thinking, that we ought not to legislate morality, and that governing and government have no effect upon the character of the nation and the persons who constitute it.
Given the penchant we all have for self-seeking and for personal satisfaction, things for which we are sometimes sorely tempted to sacrifice almost anything, in our moments of honest self-reflection we know that we would alter both the government and the law to suit our whims and desires, however perverted they might be, had we the opportunity to do so. Only enforceable laws based on unchanging morality can obviate this threat. Civil society requires morality from its legal code for its very existence and continuance because our natural character does not suffice to constrain us. We must never forget what thinkers as divergent as Burke and Rousseau knew: the act of establishing a civil society is identical with that of establishing a binding morality, something a morally agnostic legal code is impotent to help produce.
Government does not exist simply to make possible whatever delights and advantages its citizens might happen to prefer at any given moment, whether privately or collectively. If some types of pleasure are better and more socially and morally suitable than others, then one of the purposes of government is to help educate the citizenry to pursue the higher pleasures rather than their lower or more base alternatives. Moral education, one of the functions of law, helps make those right thinking and right choosing citizens-and the culture they desire and seek to preservemore likely. Good societies, in other words, depend for their existence upon good and decent people. Good and decent people do not simply happen. They are nurtured, and one of the institutions that helps to nurture them best is well-formed, morally responsible law. Public institutions, like law and law enforcement, need to be concerned with the bridling of egoistic motives and actions. If they are not, something worse than chaos ensues, namely, cultural perversity and moral decay.
Put differently, political questions are moral questions. For example, every government asks and answers, whether knowingly or not, "What things in life are worth having and preserving, and at what price to the nation, to the community, to the people?" Public policy issues are simply the political and economic application in the present of the enduring moral questions. In the public square and in the marketplace, our public policies are our appropriation of and approximation of the permanent things. To form wise public policy, and the system of laws under which it is best pursued and applied, requires not a flight from morality but a resort to it, a resort to prudence, which is by no means the same thing as a legally encoded moral agnosticism.
Law and morality share this burden: both serve the function of governor-morality for those with self-control and self-restraint, law for those without it. That is, morality and law are like the two banks of a river, the river in this case being human action and the passions and desires that drive it. The banks of a river run roughly parallel: where one turns left or right the other tends to do the same. If they did not, the river would become a swamp-putrid, fetid and stagnant. Law and morality, like the banks of a river, ought to move in roughly the same direction in order to help curb the defects in human nature. If they do not, human action and human society quickly become a swamp, a morass of polymorphic perversity, something that always occurs in the absence of public virtue and the enforceable law that upholds and nurtures it. To protect us from the moral and cultural swamp that threatens to engulf us, law must take its cue from morality.
Well-framed law helps us make the best use of our freedom by teaching us to avoid both excess and deficiency. Without the pedagogy of law, we are deprived of one of our best and potentially wisest instructors and are thereby vastly impoverished, both individually and corporately. Those who are frightened by the moral pedagogy of law seem not to understand that human beings can be oppressed by an excess of freedom, which is another name for licentiousness. Good law leaves room for liberty, not for license. Good law helps curb human excess, while morality helps curb the law. What a bridle is to the horse, law is to human nature. And what law is to human nature, morality is to law. Law helps regulate the people; morality helps regulate the law. In that light, some of those who object to morals-based law seem not to appreciate the great cultural and moral value of shame, of guilt, and of the proper fear of just punishment.
Morally sound law helps us to distinguish right from wrong, innocence from guilt, and justice from injustice. But if the law from which we learn is not rooted in true morality, what we learn is misshapen, misguided and misleading, because law always teaches. In such cases it teaches error. Put differently, ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad ones. The bad ideas encoded in supposedly morals-free law are corrosive of virtue, of duty, of civility and of human fulfillment. One of the disastrous effects of allegedly morals-free legislation is that it tends to produce deep and widespread doubt in persons across the culture about what is right and what is wrong, which leaves only a resort to power as a way out of our moral dilemmas. In a moral vacuum power and doubt rule all. Doubt makes us unsure of ourselves and of our beliefs; power makes those who have it despotic over those who do not. Without morality in law, we know less well and less surely what is right, and if we are ignorant about what is right and wrong, we can raise no compelling argument against evil, or even know it when we see it. Our ignorance makes it so.
Government and governing involve questions of value, questions about what is good and what is good for us, as well as what is evil and what will do us harm. To instruct us regarding the good, to lead us toward it and to protect us from evil-whether our own or someone else's-are all part of the function of law. But those who wish to exile virtue from the legal code, who wish to banish virtue from law and to render legislation a morality-free zone set these important and valuable functions of law at naught. Were those persons to succeed, both they and we would suffer incalculable harm, having had one of our most useful moral educators shut down, censored as it were. They would stop the moral voice of law and in so doing would silence one of our most valuable instructors of civic virtue and thereby destroy one of our most effective guides to prudent social behavior and to the blessings that attend it.
All cultures are rooted in, and are expressions of, deeply held values. Cultures are the historical outworking of those values, the historical human consequences of those values, values that sometimes lead to compassion, beauty, war, deprivation, heroism or degeneration. Law is a function of culture-all cultures have law-which means that law is a function of values, of morality. Law without values is cultural suicide, which is what those who wish to separate the one from the other are going to produce, whether they wish to do so or not.
In our age of increasingly complex moral problems, where technological advances outstrip our moral growth and understanding, we must do our level best to cultivate the wisest persons, the noblest motives and the highest actions of which we are capable. To do so, we must make far better use of the law as tutor, as moral ennobler. We must remind ourselves repeatedly that the best habitat in which to raise ennobled citizens is a well-ordered society, one in which law is rooted in morality. We must not forget that law is an expression of, and a shaper of, the conscience of a nation. Consequently, the nearsighted and misguided movement to separate law from morality is as dangerous as it is impossible. Both for nations and for us as individuals, our character is our future. Morality is destiny.
FOR FURTHER READING
Arkes, Hadley. First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
. Natural Rights and the Right to Choose. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Beckwith, Francis J., and Gregory P. Koukl. Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid Air. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998.
Geisler, Norman L., and Frank S. Turek. Legislating Morality: Is It Wise? Is It Le- gal.?IsItPossible.?Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1999.
George, Robert P. The Clash of Orthodoxies. Law, Morality and Religion in Crisis. Willmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2001.
Making Men Moral. Civil Liberties and Public Morality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
ONE OF THE GREAT CULTURAL CONFLICTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY HAS BEEN over the teaching of evolution in public school science classes. Many Christians have objected to the teaching of evolution on the grounds that evolutionary theory is really a form of atheism and that public schools should not teach atheism as "the truth" because, according to several well-known Supreme Court opinions, the teaching of irreligion as a state orthodoxy violates the Constitution as much as teaching any religion as a state orthodoxy.' In order to create a fair public school curriculm, many Christians (often joined by like-minded citizens from other faiths such as Islam and Judaism) have supported legislation in their individual states that would require that their schools offer lesson plans that are balanced. Several federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have struck down these statutes as unconstitutional because they violate the clause of the First Amendment that forbids the government from establishing a religion (aka "the establishment clause").
In what was perhaps the most colorful of these cases, McLean v. Arkansas (1982),2 Norman L. Geisler testified as an expert witness for the state of Arkansas, which passed a law requiring that the students in its public schools be offered a balanced approach on the question of evolution. This balance would include the teaching of creationism. In a book that was released five years after McLean, Geisler (with coauthor J. Kerby Anderson) would suggest a way to understand this debate that was a forerunner of what would later be called the intelligent Design (ID) movement.3
Although the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt specifically with state laws that either forbade evolution (Epperson v. Arkansas [19681) or required balanced treatment between evolution and creationism (Edwards v. Aguillard [19871), it has never addressed directly the question of whether a public school or teacher could offer scientific criticisms of, and alternatives to, evolution that are not derived from religious literature hut still lend support to a theological worldview. In this chapter, I argue that the presentation of arguments for one of these points of view, ID theory, in a public school science classroom does not violate the U.S. Constitution.
There are several reasons why this issue should he important to Christian citizens. First, evolution, as it is widely understood in the professional literature (see below), presupposes that only naturalistic accounts of natural phenomena count as science. But naturalism is a philosophical point of view that holds that the natural universe is all that exists and all the entities in it can be accounted for by strictly material processes without resorting to any designer, Creator or nonmaterial entity as an explanation or cause for either any aspect of the natural universe or the universe as a whole. Thus, if science is the paradigm of knowledge, as is widely held in our culture, and it presupposes naturalism, then naturalism is the only worldview for which one can have knowledge. But if a public school science curriclum offers exclusively a naturalistic point of view, it is in fact instructing the school's students that claims of knowledge outside of naturalistic science are not really knowledge. This sends the message to the nation's citizens that non-naturalistic claims-whether in ethics, theology or traditional metaphysics-are simply matters of opinion and/or subjec tive preference. This makes it more difficult for Christian (or even broadly religious) truth-claims to be taken seriously in the wider culture, because a naturalistic bias grants people the intellectual permission to reject nonnaturalist truth-claims a priori without examining the arguments and evidence for their truth.
Second, although Christians should not be employing the resources of the state to coerce people to become Christians, naturalists should not do the same in order to advance the cause of naturalism. Thus, if a state were to permit or require its public school science teachers to explore in the classroom scientific alternatives to, and criticisms of, evolution, its schools would better reflect the wide disagreement over the nature of science, knowledge and metaphysics that pervades the worlds of philosophy and the philosophy of science. Right now students are given the false impression that naturalism is the only intellectually respectable view, and because alternatives to naturalistic science are dismissed as religious regardless of the quality of the arguments for them, naturalism also wins by default.
The purpose of this chapter is not to offer an argument for an aspect of Christian doctrine (e.g., the existence of God, Christ's resurrection) but rather to explore a cultural impediment to belief that has become part of the wider intellectual culture as a result of what has been taught in its publicly funded institutions. I will first define the terms creationism, evolution and intelligent design and then make the argument that ID may be taught in public school science classes without violating the establishment clause. Of course, whether ID should be taught is another matter altogether, one that falls outside the scope of this chapter. However, it seems to me that at minimum there should be some aspect of public school curriculumwhether inside or outside the science classroom-by which teachers may instruct their students that naturalism (or materialism) is as much a worldview as theism and that a scientist's preference for one or the other is driven by philosophical considerations, which may be rigorously defended and held by trained philosophers but are nevertheless not the result of the deliverances of science per se.
IMPORTANT TERMS
The statutes struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Edwards and by a federal district court in McLean had this type of creationism in mind. Thus "creationism" refers exclusively to this point of view.
Evolution. "Evolution" can mean different things. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for Darwinism, both the theory defended by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in his On the Origin of Species as well as the subsequent refinements of Darwin's theory. Arguing from what he observed occurs when domestic breeders engage in selection, Darwin offered natural selection as the engine by which living organisms adapt, survive and acquire new characteristics and pass them on to their offspring:
Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by the offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power inces santly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.6
No one, not even hard-line creationists, deny this sort of evolution, if all that it means is that biological species adapt over time to changing environments and pass on those adaptations genetically to their offspring. This is typically called microevolution. This should be distinguished from macroevolution, the view that the complex diversity of living things in our world, through small, incremental and beneficial mutations over long eons of time, are all the result of one bacterial cell. That is, all living beings share a common ancestor, giving the appearance of being designed, though in reality engineered, by the unintelligent forces of natural selection.
Evolution is more than a theory applicable to biology and biochemistry. It also asserts that the bacterial cell from which all life arose sprung from inorganic matter. According to Douglas J. Futuyama, "we will almost certainly never have direct fossil evidence that living molecular structures evolved from nonliving precursors. Such molecules surely could not have been preserved without degradation." Nevertheless, "a combination of geochemical evidence and laboratory experiment shows that such evolution is not only plausible but almost undeniable.-8 More over, inorganic matter, indeed the matter of the entire universe, is said to have resulted from an initial explosion called the big bang, an event that occurred over fifteen billion years ago.' Thus evolution is a grand materialist explanation for the diversity and apparent design of entities that make up what we call nature, including both organic and inorganic entities.1° George Gaylord Simpson explains the "meaning of evolution":
Thus evolution, as understood in the professional literature, is naturalistic evolution, the view that the entire universe and all the entities in it can be accounted for by strictly material processes without resorting to any designer, Creator or nonmaterial entity or agent as an explanation for either any aspect of the natural universe or the universe as a whole. Therefore, to say that evolution is true is to say that naturalism (or materialism) as a worldview is true, for the former entails the latter, for the latter is a necessary condition of the former. Consequently, to challenge that necessary condition-by appealing to something even as modest as Intelligent Design-poses a threat to the materialist edifice. That is, naturalistic evolution provides an answer to the very same question ID provides an answer: What is the origin of apparent design in biological organisms and/or other aspects of the natural universe and/or the universe as a whole? Evolution answers the question by appealing to the forces of unguided matter (and/or energy), the latter to intelligent agency.
Intelligent Design (ID). Intelligent Design is a research program embraced by a small though growing platoon of academics who maintain that intelligent agency, as an aspect of scientific theory-making, has more explanatory power in accounting for the specified, and sometimes irreducible, complexity of some physical systems, including biological entities and/or the existence of the universe as a whole, than the blind forces of unguided matter.
We will look at two aspects of ID that are relevant to this chapter's purpose: the case against methodological naturalism and the case for intelligent Design. Because the literature supporting ID is sophisticated, vast and growing, my presentation of its case will be cursory. For a more detailed presentation, see chapter five, authored by design advocate William A. Dembski.
THE CASE AGAINST METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM
ID proponents maintain that there is a fundamental reason why evolution seems to most scholars to be the only real legitimate explanation for the origin of the universe and life: a prior commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), "the view that science must be restricted solely to undirected natural processes." " According to Johnson, "A methodological naturalist defines science as the search for the best naturalistic theories. A theory would not be naturalistic if it left something out (such as the existence of genetic information or consciousness) to he explained by a supernatural cause."'3 Thus, according to design theorists, once one defines science as a discipline that allows only naturalistic explanations, and if one maintains that science is the only field that provides truth on the question of origins, then evolution (not necessarily Darwinism) must be true even if there are many unanswered questions that seem incapable of being adequately addressed under the evolutionary paradigm.
Thus, the real question, according to design theorists, is whether their arguments for ID work, not whether ID conflicts with MN. After all, if the ID arguments work and they conflict with MN, then one may conclude that MN is not a necessary precondition of natural science and cannot he employed to exclude positions contrary to it.
THE CASE FOR INTELLIGENT DESIGN
At the core of the ID research program is its criteria by which its proponents claim they can detect or falsify design. One such criterion is proposed by Dembski, which he defends in chapter five. He proposes an explanatory filter in order to detect specified complexity (SC), something that we recognize in many fields as evidence of intelligent agency, for example, "forensic science, intellectual property law, insurance claims investigation, cryptography, and random number generation."" Thus, what Dembski is suggesting is not something unknown to the world of science. Rather what he is proposing is that we extend these insights, which have proved so fruitful in other fields, to the world of the natural sciences.
Why specified complexity? According to Dembski, "Whenever we infer design, we must establish three things-contingency, complexity and specification. Contingency, by which we mean that an event was one of several possibilities, ensures that the object is not the result of an automatic and hence unintelligent process." In other words, an event that is not contingent is one that can be completely accounted for by natural law (or an algorithm). To cite an example, a salt crystal "results from forces of chemical necessity that can be described by the laws of chemistry. A setting of silverware is not." 1' The place setting is contingent, for there are no laws of chemistry or physics that direct the knife and spoon to the right side of the plate and the fork to the left. In other words, a contingent event cannot be reduced to natural law.
"Complexity," writes Dembski, "ensures that the object in question is not so simple that it can readily be explained by chance." For Dembski, `complexity ... is a form of probability." For example, the improbability of opening a combination lock by chance depends on the complexity of the mechanism. As the lock mechanism increases in complexity, the greater the improbability that one will be able to open the lock by chance. Therefore, "the greater the complexity, the smaller the prohahil- ity. Thus to determine whether something is sufficiently complex to warrant a design inference is to determine whether it has sufficiently small probability." 16 Nevertheless, complexity by itself may not be design. For example, a random selection of one thousand symbols (rtvwix%*<3g498d ...) and the result of a thousand coin flips are complex and improbable but can be explained by randomness or chance. This is why specification is essential.
"Specification ensures that this object exhibits the type of pattern that is the trademark of intelligence. -'Specificity by itself may not he design. For example, redundant order, such as the beating of a pulsar or the earth's orbiting of the sun every 365 days, can be explained by law and necessity. However, if specification is combined with complexity, a design inference may be warranted. Dembski offers an example from one area of science, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI researchers, in their attempt to detect intelligence outside earth, have die- veloped a filter that has certain preset patterns so that it may discard radio waves that do not exhibit specified complexity. In the novel (authored by Carl Sagan) and movie versions of Contact, SETI researchers detect extraterrestrial intelligence when they discover a sequence of beats and pauses that correspond to the prime numbers from 2 to 101.'"
Dembski makes a distinction between specification and fabrication. The latter occurs when one infers a pattern ad hoc after the fact even though chance and necessity may account for the pattern. For example,' suppose a hurricane moves through my neighborhood, destroying four out of the seven homes on my street, and the three homes not destroyed are owned by me and my two brothers. Moreover, my brothers and I own the second, fourth and sixth homes on the block, which means that the hurricane destroyed only the odd-numbered homes. Suppose I were to infer from this pattern either that the hurricane intentionally spared the property of the Beckwith boys and/or that the hurricane did not like odd-numbered homes on my block. This design inference would not he warranted, since the pattern may be adequately accounted for by chance and necessity and thus is ad hoc. But the pattern detected by the SETI researchers in Contact is not a fabrication. It is an instance of specified complexity because it is not only highly complex and improbable but also has specification, a pattern that is independent of, or detachable from, the event it explains. That is to say, the pattern is one that is not derived exclusively from the event-as is the ad hoc pattern read back into the hurricane example-but one we could construct even if we did not know which one of the possible events would occur. Thus, my winning the lottery with eight randomly selected numbers, though the outcome of a highly complex process with a result that is antecedently improbable, is not detachable, for it does not exhibit a specified pattern. But the pattern of the message from space in Contact is detachable, for our background knowledge (or side information, as Dembski calls it)20 about binary arithmetic provides us the resources by which we can construct this pattern independent of the message itself. As a researcher in 21 In the movie Contact exclaimed, "This isn't noise, this has structure." other words, the message is not merely complex with an improbable random pattern but has "structure," a pattern that one could have constructed independent of the message itself, as the SETI researchers evidently assumed when they constructed their pre-set patterns in a way that would not discard patterns that exhibited SC. According to Dembski, "this distinction between specifications and fabrications can be made with full statistical rigor. -22
There are several ways in which design theorists employ Demhski's filter in order to detect design in nature. We will look at two: the irreducible complexity of certain biological systems and the fine-tuning of the universe for the existence of life.
Irreducible complexity of certain biological systems. Michael Behe takes seriously Darwin's claim that "if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." 23 Thus a system that is irreducibly complex (IC) is a serious challenge to the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Behe defines an IC system as "a single system of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. A mechanical mousetrap is an example of such a system. Writes Behe:
Behe cites a number of examples of irreducibly complex biological systems including those contained within the cell. One of the cell's molecular machines is the cilium.27 Behe explains that in order for the cilium to work a number of components are needed. Writes Behe:
Behe does not share this optimism. Rather, he argues that the data are more consistent with an ID explanation. He suggests this explanation not from ignorance but because he maintains that we do have legitimate criteria by which to detect design (e.g., SC) and that an IC system exhibits the characteristics these criteria are meant to detect. It is contingent (i.e., it is one of many possibilities; Darwinian algorithms cannot account for it), complex (i.e., it involves numerous systems, subsystems and parts) and specified (i.e., patterns of biological systems and subsystems a capable intelligence would have constructed if it intended to bring about certain functions in an organism).
The fine tuning of the universe for the existence of human life.
In the 1960s some physicists began making the observation that our universe appears to have been fine-tuned for the existence of human life.30 During the 1980s and 1990s a number of works assessed this "anthropic coincidence" in differing ways.31 According to Stephen C. Meyer, these scientists "discovered that the existence of life in the universe depends upon a highly improbable but precise balance of physical factors. The constants of physics, the initial conditions of the universe, and many other of its features appear delicately balanced to allow for the possibility of life."32 Any negligible modification in these constants would have made human life impossible. For example, there would have been no life in the universe if the rate of the universe's expansion had been faster or slower, the strength of gravitational attraction had been stronger or weaker or Planck's constant had had a different value.33 These, of course, are not the only characteristics of the universe that had to be in place to make life possible. In 1998 astrophysicist and design advocate Hugh Ross estimated that there are "twenty-nine characteristics of the universe that must be fine-tuned for any kind of physical life to be possible" and that our solar system has forty-five characteristics that are necessary for human life to arise in it.34 Given the individual and collective probabilities for these characteristics to all arise by chance with precisely the correct values to make human life possible, Ross estimates that there is "[m]uch less than 1 chance in one hundred billion trillion trillion trillion [that there] exists... even one" planet on which life "would occur anywhere in the universe."35 This is why a Nobel laureate in physics, Arno Penzias, writes that "astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan."36
ID advocates have applied Dembski's explanatory filter to this phe- nomenon.37 According to some design theorists, the fine-tuning of the universe for the possibility of human life exhibits the characteristics of specified complexity and thus can be attributed to an intelligent agent. For it is contingent (i.e., it is one of many possibilities), complex (i.e., it is a highly improbable arrangement of independent variables) and specified (i.e., it is a cosmological pattern a capable intelligence could have constructed if it intended to make the universe conducive to the arising of human life).
ID AND THE E D WARD S STANDARD
If the Supreme Court were to assess a law that permitted or required the teaching of ID in the public schools, it would likely employ the test it set down in Edwards, the case that set the standard by which public school curricula on origins should be evaluated.
The Louisiana statute assessed in Edwards was struck down for four reasons: (1) its historical continuity with the Scopes trial and the creationevolution debate, (2) its textual connection to the Genesis-inspired statutes struck down in previous federal court cases, (3) the religious motivation of its supporters and (4) its illegitimate means (e.g., advancing religion, limiting what teachers may teach) to achieve appropriate state ends (e.g., academic freedom), though the court concluded that the statute's purported purpose or end was "a sham,"38 and thus the statute had no real secular purpose. Thus the court concluded that the Louisiana statute's only purpose was to advance religion and thus violated the establishment clause of the Constitution.
Reasons 1 and 2. Concerning reasons 1 and 2, ID is neither historically connected to the Scopes trial, nor is its literature replete, as is creationist literature, with science and recommended curricula that are transparently derived directly from the book of Genesis.
However, Jay Wexler argues that because ID has some historical connection to the creation/evolution controversy, it would not pass the Edwards standard.39 But that would make the genetic fallacy ° a principle of constitutional jurisprudence. After all, if an historical connection of any sort, no matter how distant or loose, is sufficient to prohibit the teaching of a subject, then perhaps astronomy and chemistry ought to be prohibited from public school classrooms since they have their historical origin in the religiously oriented practices of astrology and alchemy.
The court's historical problem with the creationism curriculum required in the statute struck down in Edwardswas its transparent connection to the book of Genesis and the contents of previously repudiated statutes in Epperson and Mclean. The courts in these cases were asking the question, How closely does the curricular content required by the statute parallel the creation story in Genesis, and/or is the curricular content prohibited by the statute proscribed because it is inconsistent with the creation story in Genesis? Therefore, if there are no essential differences between ID and creationism, the teaching of ID in public schools would not pass constitutional muster. ID can be summarized in the following way:
(A) If an apparently designed entity exhibits specified complexity (SC), one is warranted in inferring that the entity is the result of an intelligent agent.
(B) SC can he reliably detected by an explanatory filter.
(C) The irreducible complexity of some biological systems and the fine-tuning of the universe for the existence of life are instances of specified complexity.
(D) Presupposing methodological naturalism (MN) and relying exclusively on its resources (i.e., chance and necessity) cannot account for SC in the instances listed in (C).
(E) Thus one cannot exclude ID from serious consideration because it is inconsistent with an a priori commitment to MN.
(F) Therefore, given (A) through (E), ID best accounts for the irreducible complexity of some biological systems and the fine-tuning of the universe for life.
Reasons 3 and 4. In order to address the concerns of reasons 3 and 4 of the Edwards standard, any government body that sought to require or permit ID to be taught in its public schools would have to justify it by appealing to secular reasons. The following are four possible secular reasons such a body could employ.
1. The endorsement test. In Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor proposed an endorsement test by which the court may assess alleged trangressions of the establishment clause. According to this test, if a government action creates a perception that it is either endorsing or disfavoring a religion, the action is unconstitutional. The concern of this test is whether the disputed activity suggests "a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community. 1,42
That is, if a particular curriculum gives the impression that a certain disputed, irreligious point of view is favored-in this case, evolution and materialism-the state can argue that in order to erase that perception, a statute requiring or permitting the teaching of ID is necessary.
2. The neutrality test. The Supreme Court in Epperson writes that the "government ... must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of nonreligion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion." 43 Thus an ID statute could be justified on the basis of neutrality by arguing that to teach only one theory of origins (evolution)-that presupposes a controversial epistemology (methodological naturalism), entails a controversial metaphysics (materialism) and is antithetical to traditional religious belief-the state is in fact advocating, aiding, fostering and promoting irreligion, which it is constitutionally forbidden from doing. The state is not merely teaching what some religious people find antagonistic or offensive to their faith, which would not be unconstitutional. Rather, it is promoting a point of view-a metaphysical perspective-"that occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by- traditional belief in God."
Perhaps this is why justice Hugo Black, in his Epperson concurrence, raised the question: "If the theory [of evolution] is considered anti-religious, as the Court indicates, how can the State be bound by the Federal Constitution to permit its teachers to advocate such an `anti-religious' doctrine to schoolchildren?" According to justice Black, "this issue presents problems under the Establishment Clause far more troublesome than are discussed in the Court's opinion," for "the very cases cited by the Court as supporting its conclusion that the State must be neutral" assert that the state should not favor "one religious or anti-religious view over another. ,45
Thus, when government schools, whose attendance is generally compulsory, delve into matters epistemological and metaphysical-matters that touch on the scope of human knowledge, the ultimate nature of things and who and what we are-and imply or affirm an orthodox position on such matters,`' they violate what the court maintains is a f in- damental liberty.
3. Exposing students to new and important scholarship. A state could appeal to the importance of exposing students to reputable scholarship that critiques evolution. The Edwards court maintains that its holding does "not imply that the legislature could never require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught." The court asserts that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."47 In addition, the court points out, with apparent approval, that the Balanced-Treatment Act it struck down in Edwards was unnecessary because Louisiana already did not prohibit teachers from introducing students to alternative points of view. 48
ID proponents have had their works published by prestigious presses" and in academic journals,'0 have aired their views among critics in the corridors of major universities and other institutions," and have been recognized by leading periodicals, both academic and nonaca- demic.52
4. Furthering and protecting academic freedom. A state could also make the argument that an ID statute enhances and protects the academic freedom of teachers and students who may suffer marginalization, hostility and public ridicule because of their support of ID and/or doubts about the veracity of the evolutionary paradigm. This is not as farfetched as one may think. Consider just one example.
The Supreme Court has affirmed that a teacher engages in protected speech under the rubric of academic freedom (and thus the First Amendment) when she brings into the classroom relevant material that is supplementary to the curriculum (and not a violation of any other legal duties) and she has adequately fulfilled all of her curricular obligations.'' Given that, it seems to me that any government body that passed legislation to protect the academic freedom of teachers and students to discuss in the classroom scientific alternatives to evolution, including design theory, would simply be affirming what is already a fixed point in constitutional law.
CONCLUSION
In a society of contrary and contradictory religious and philosophical points of view, the law must address, with fairness and consistency, how public schools ought to deal with the question of teaching origins without violating both the deliverances of science and the rights of the nation's citizens. The infusion of intelligent Design into this debate has changed the legal landscape significantly. Unlike the creationism repudiated by the federal courts, ID cannot be dismissed as merely a transparent attempt on the part of religious people to force the teachings of Genesis in the public schools.
FOR FURTHER READING
Beckwith, Francis J. Law, Darwinism and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
DeWolf, David K. "Academic Freedom After Edwards." Regent University Law Review 13, no. 2 (2000-2001): 480-81.
DeWolf, David K., Stephen C. Meyer and Mark Edward DeForrest. "Teaching the Controversy: Science, or Religion or Speech?" Utah Law Review (2000).
Geisler, Norman L., A. F. Brooke II and Mark J. Keough. Creator in the Courtroom: Scopes IT Milford, Mich.: Mott Media, 1982.
Greenawalt, Kent. "Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism and Intelligent Design." Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy 17, no. 2 (2003).
House, H. Wayne. "Darwinism and the Law: Can Non-Naturalistic Scientific Theories Survive Constitutional Challenge?" Regent University Law Review 13, no. 2 (2000-2001).