Naturalism vs. supernaturalism: how to survive the culture wars.

THE CULTURE WARS HAVE, at their root, a conflict between two drastically different ways of understanding reality: one essentially empiricist, the other decidedly not. The liberal-democratic political solution to such conflict is to provide a neutral public space within which differing worldviews make their case. But the very existence of such space and our pluralist society are threatened by totalitarian ambitions for ideological conformity. This threat is best countered by promoting empiricism, not faith, as the basis for knowledge.

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

Central to the culture wars is the conflict between science and faith and, derivatively, between naturalism and supernaturalism. As much as some think that science and faith constitute what paleontologist Steven J. Gould called "non-overlapping magesteria" or separate, non-conflicting domains of authority, the fact remains that both make claims about the actual world, and these claims often conflict. Was the Virgin Mary's conception literally immaculate, and did Jesus literally rise from the dead? Does an immortal soul animate the newly formed embryo? Did God give us contra-causally free wills so that we--not God--bear ultimate responsibility for good and evil? Is there a "higher power" or intelligence that transcends the physical world? Are life forms designed by this intelligence, or are they the product of random mutation and natural selection? Science and faith-based religions might well have different answers to such questions.

Science and faith often disagree because they constitute dramatically different epistemologies--that is, different ways of justifying belief, ways which lead to naturalism and supernaturalism, respectively. If you're scientifically, or more broadly, empirically inclined, then you'll likely place your cognitive bet with varieties of intersubjectively available evidence. Knowledge is more or less what we can observe, or what others we trust have observed or inferred from reliable observations over the centuries. Science is the ideal of such knowledge. By means of observational evidence, inferences, and theories, science describes a single, natural world in which all phenomena are interrelated. If we take science as criterial for deciding what exists, the natural world is what is real. Absent convincing empirical evidence, you might well not believe in a god, Jesus, souls, the virgin birth, or contra-causal free will. On the other hand, if you're inclined to faith, then evidential requirements are relaxed. Based on intuition, revelation, tradition, what the Bible says, or what you're told by the local imam, you might well believe in categorically supernatural, immaterial entities. The upshot is that we have two very different takes on reality--one more or less naturalistic, the other at least partly supernaturalistic--driven by two very different epistemologies--one empiricist, the other not. (Religions that take an empirical approach to knowledge, e.g., religious naturalism, "Einsteinian religion," and the ontologically austere versions of Buddhism and Zen, won't, of course, conflict with science about the nature of reality.)

So how do we as a culture handle the conflict between empiricism and non-empiricism, and the worldviews they generate? Some rather strident voices on both sides see little room for compromise. The religious right (also called the "theocratic right") routinely demonizes scientific naturalism and materialism as the devil's work, undermining the basis for meaning, morality, human freedom, and dignity. And on the secular side are militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (Pen Award-winning author of The End of Faith), inveighing against faith and traditional religion as (metaphorically) the devil's work, spurring narrow-minded chauvinism, ideological intolerance, and dangerous fanaticism. The hope on both sides is that the opposition will eventually dry up and blow away.

But, given that both science and faith appeal to deeply rooted human predilections, neither side is going away anytime soon. Science appeals because we are necessarily curious creatures, with insatiable appetites to understand, predict, and control our surroundings and ourselves. The discovery of how things work is intrinsically rewarding, and developing the practical applications of discoveries is no less so. On the other hand, faith appeals because, afraid of death and wanting our suffering on earth to be redeemed, we gravitate toward the possibility of having souls and gods that transcend mere matter. The desire for something beyond the natural world described by science, something that might confer ultimate purpose and significance to our lives, strongly motivates an acceptance of beliefs that have little empirical support. Someday, perhaps, we as a species will abjure this "transcendental temptation," as Humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz calls it; indeed, the decline of religious observance in Europe suggests that this is possible. But until then, the consolations of traditional faith-based religion will be integral to our culture.

The question, then, is how to engineer a peaceful coexistence between these worldviews, one essentially naturalist, the other supernaturalist. Such coexistence wouldn't be problematic were it not for the evangelical desire, so common to the human heart, to universalize one's beliefs--what we might call the totalitarian temptation. We aren't content to have our certainties; others must share them as well, since a plurality of worldviews raises doubts about our truth. The desire for ideological conformity is sometimes expressed in attempts to coerce belief and crush opposing views, as, for instance, in the international jihad of extremist Islam, for which kafirs (infidels) are deserving of death. Secular jihads that champion decidedly unscientific, non-empirical understandings of human nature and history--racism, Nazism, the triumph of the proletariat--have been mounted as well, with horrific consequences. Were it not for fanatics who insist that we must all share their worldview or die, the problem of ideological coexistence wouldn't arise. But since they are among us, the problem is paramount.

PUBLIC NEUTRALITY AND PRAGMATIC EMPIRICISM

The liberal democratic political solution to the problem of coexistence is to keep the state ideologically neutral, creating a public space of secular services and protections based in no particular cosmology or view of human nature. Within this space, differences in worldviews are debated, for the most part peacefully--and, in theory if not always in practice, the government doesn't take sides. As citizens, we're free to believe what we wish about ultimate reality, and indeed this pluralist freedom of belief is a cardinal good to be protected in liberal democracy; it's central to the individual autonomy we cherish so highly. If we are public servants, then while at work our convictions come second to the obligation to keep the public space ideologically neutral, since such neutrality is a necessary condition for everyone's freedom of conscience.

This freedom is of course explicitly codified in the First Amendment, which protects a person's right to hold the worldview (not just the religion) of her or his voluntary choice. The founders' intent, in response to harsh English colonial rule, and then the populist whims of state legislatures, was to secure an individual's freedom of conscience against the tyranny of both monarchs and majorities. Thus the separation of church and state, requiring an ideologically neutral public space, became an essential democratic precept.

This neutrality requires that when designing and justifying public policies (on issues such as abortion, civil rights, and death with dignity), the deciding arguments must refer to this world: the physical, temporal world that we all inhabit, agree exists, and know via the senses. To justify policy based on a particular view of the world to come (should it exist), without appealing to facts about the present world held in common, would necessarily marginalize other such views. It would privilege a single understanding of ultimate reality, grounded in sectarian faith or contested philosophical assumptions. This means that, whatever our worldview, we have to act as this-world empiricists when arguing for policy, citing facts potentially available to all parties to the dispute, and using shared canons of logic and evidence.

Such pragmatic empiricism is reinforced by the realities of politics in a pluralist society. To gain support from diverse constituents, legislators have to appeal to what the electorate has in common--namely, its shared concerns about material reality, not the transcendent realm of faith, about which there is often little agreement. Trying to lock up the Christian vote by citing the New Testament might well lose you the Muslim, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, or New Age vote, so the safe bet is to steer clear of explicit religion when appealing to a heterogeneous population, and cite empirical facts instead. A diversity of worldviews, then, forces politicians to ground their arguments in the here and now, not the hereafter, which has the effect of protecting minority faiths and philosophies. Writing in the New Republic, Peter Beinart says,

      It's fine if religion influences your moral values.
   But, when you make public arguments, you
   have to ground them--as much as possible--in
   reason and evidence, things that are accessible to
   people of different religions, or no religion at all.
   Otherwise, you can't persuade other people, and
   they can't persuade you. In a diverse democracy,
   there must be a common political language, and
   that language can't be theological ...

The burden of supplying non-sectarian, empirical justifications for policy also serves us well in a very practical sense, in that policies responsive to facts about this world are likely to be more effective than those that give faith-based claims precedence. We wouldn't, for instance, be well served in deciding environmental policy on the basis of biblically based beliefs that the End Times are near. Rather, we're better off sticking with the scientific evidence that, short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the Earth has several millions of years ahead of it. Such public pragmatic empiricism sidesteps talk about ultimate concerns, giving us reality-based policies while avoiding conflicts between worldviews. In a recent paper, neurophilosopher Joshua Greene and psychologist Jonathan Cohen make this point in the context of the law:

      [T]he law in most Western states is a public
   institution designed to function in a society that
   respects a wide range of religious and otherwise
   metaphysical beliefs. The law cannot function in
   this way if it presupposes controversial and unverifiable
   metaphysical facts about the nature of human
   action, or anything else. Thus, the law must
   restrict itself to the class of intersubjectively verifiable
   facts, i.e., the facts recognized by science,
   broadly construed. This practice need not derive
   from a conviction that the scientifically verifiable
   facts are necessarily the only facts, but merely from
   a recognition that verifiable/scientific facts are the
   only facts upon which public institutions in a pluralistic
   society can effectively rely. [emphasis added]

Of course, it sometimes happens that purported secular justifications are merely a cover for religiously-derived commitments. For example, Christian judges may claim that posting the Ten Commandments at the courthouse is simply to remind us of our judicial heritage. And the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance are claimed to be merely ceremonial. The sincerity and constitutionality of such claims is a matter of recent dispute. An example of more moment, perhaps, is that some abortion opponents disguise their religious concern for the embryo's supernatural soul as claims about the sanctity of life--a secular, this-world value. (The difficult task for pro-choice advocates is to prove that what seems to be a secular claim has no basis but in religious convictions.)

Despite such stratagems, the requirement of public pragmatic empiricism serves us well in maintaining an open society--one in which minority worldviews are protected from ideological totalitarians. However, it's important to remember that citizens and legislators are completely free to cite their beliefs about ultimate reality, supernatural or not, in policy debates, since that's guaranteed by the First Amendment. Indeed, the public square can be populated by all sorts of worldviews clamoring for allegiance as Congress and the courts consider laws and legislation. But for the reasons given above, democratic resolutions of policy debates that result in laws and legislation must, in a pluralist culture, have explicitly secular, this-world justifications.

BLOCKING THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION: THE VIRTUES OF EMPIRICISM

The perennial, obvious difficulty facing the open society is that it presumes exactly that which the totalitarian contests: the paramount value of the peaceful coexistence of different worldviews, ensured by a pragmatic commitment to this-world empiricism. The raison d'etre of the totalitarian ideologue, religious or not, is quite the opposite: to create global uniformity of belief about ultimate reality that directly drives policy; for such a person there is no higher value or calling. The means toward such uniformity may vary, from the nonviolent persuasion of political campaigns (presently the tactic of the Christian right), to bombings, assassinations, and other acts of terror meant to cow dissenters into silence and reduce their numbers by the easiest expedient--death. But whatever the means, the ultimate objective is the same: to establish the one true view of reality in the minds and hearts of all, and have it rule their lives.

The primary threat to pluralist coexistence, then, is the totalitarian drive for ideological conformity, which is itself a function of the psychology of belief. The inability to tolerate dissent from one's view of ultimate reality has, no doubt, multiple sources: the needs for cognitive certainty, simplicity, and security; the tribalistic desire to demarcate in-group from out-group; the egoistic urge to prevail in an argument and dominate others. Whatever its exact roots in the human psyche, anything we can do to lessen the totalitarian impulse increases the chances that the culture wars will remain nonviolent, and that our pluralistic culture will survive.

Since our innate predilections for cognitive security, tribalism, and egoism are not about to change any time soon, the task becomes one of making the best of our psychology when it comes to holding a worldview. This is to ask, what sorts of worldviews are least conducive to totalitarian excess, and therefore most likely to countenance an ideologically neutral public space? Is it possible that some understandings of reality are more likely to promote a live-and-let-live stance towards their competitors? Since a worldview involves a commitment to an epistemology, are there some epistemologies that militate against the totalitarian temptation?

A worldview based on empirical inquiry--not faith, tradition, revelation, or authority--is the clear choice when it comes to combating totalitarianism. Why? Precisely because the content of an empirically derived worldview is held as a matter of evidence, not faith; it is responsive to observation of a world that's understood to exist independently of the needs and desires that faith so often flatters. Empiricism therefore keeps us cognitively humble. The universe may not, in fact, be built quite to our liking, so how precisely is it built? Implicit in the cognitive norms of empirical evidence and observation is the assumption of fallibility, the idea that we may not be getting the world quite right, that we might someday have a more accurate view of reality based on more reliable and comprehensive observations and evidence. And, of course, this fallibilism helps to inoculate empiricists against the self-righteousness of being necessarily right. Those committed to unfettered inquiry are unlikely to resort to threats and coercion to silence opposing views.

In contrast, adherents of faith-based views of reality unresponsive to evidence may be less inclined toward cognitive humility. The driving assumption can be quite the opposite of fallibilism--my revealed, intuited, empirically unresponsive worldview is necessarily true, so any contradictions of it must be discounted as illusory and wrong-headed. Since I am right, others must be wrong, and their beliefs stand as an insult to Truth.

Now, the assumption of infallibility is of course by itself not enough to drive totalitarianism of the sort which demands utter conformity. Many non-empiricists are irenic, live-and-let-live types who, although quite certain in their beliefs, have no burning evangelical desire for ideological dominance. But it's also clear that, absent the brake of fallibilism, the totalitarian impulse finds freer rein. Indeed, it's hard to find an example of an ideology seeking to universalize itself which doesn't ultimately rest on some unquestionable truth about the universe or human nature, whether it be Aryan superiority, the existence of Allah, the divinity of Jesus, or the final and benign rationality of unregulated markets. Should ideologues suddenly question their certainty, the totalitarian impulse, whether peaceful or violent, religious or political, would lose a good deal of its steam. Overall, the world might be a less contentious, more tolerant place if we moved towards empiricism as the basis for what we believe about it. And, as noted previously, the evidential requirement is precisely that which keeps us focused on this world when shaping policies that affect all citizens in a democracy. So a commitment to the empirical stance not only avoids ideological inflexibility, it's the cognitive basis for democratic pluralism, creating an environment in which those of widely differing views of ultimate reality can interact peacefully and effectively in this reality.

AVOIDING TOTALITARIAN EMPIRICISM

Of course empiricists and naturalists (those who hold a naturalistic worldview) are sometimes accused of wanting to ruthlessly universalize the empirical stance: of wanting to stamp out non-empirical modes of justifying belief and the supernaturalism that follows. Indeed, some like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are notoriously intolerant of faith, seeing in it the summum malum of human error that threatens our very existence on the planet. The quicker we can overcome the human propensity to believe in propositions for which no evidence exists, they would say, the better our chances for survival. The enemy is faith itself, and in his book The End of Faith Harris calls for its extinction, swing that even religious moderates, by countenancing non-empiricism, aid and abet religious extremists whose agenda is literally global domination.

By the lights of this article, Harris's point against faith is well taken; if a causal connection exists between non-empiricism and totalitarianism, then the decline of faith should increase tolerance and the prospects for pluralism. However, in his anti-faith fervor, Harris sometimes seems to betray the very freedom of conscience that's at the heart of Western democracy and that his empiricist epistemology requires. He writes, "Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene" (p. 46). And, even more provocatively, "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them" (p. 53). Such statements invoke the ideological absoluteness and (taking him at his word) the sometimes draconian tactics of the fundamentalist faiths he so opposes.

In an open society, we must continue to tolerate the existence of faith-based worldviews, so long as their adherents harbor no malign intent against us, as best as we can determine. To detain, much less kill, someone for their beliefs alone and absent clear evidence of such intent would make us no better than the conspirators who destroyed the World Trade Center. To defend science and reason in this fashion would be to undercut the essential context of their deployment: a culture in which beliefs are arrived at via an individual's educated encounter with the world, not via coercion.

We must be careful to distinguish between faith, which needs not be coupled with totalitarianism, and totalitarianism itself, especially that which has declared literal war on opposing worldviews. We'd certainly be better off if non-empirical beliefs about ultimate reality and human nature didn't hold sway, and we should do all in our power to non-coercively encourage science and critical thinking, in the classroom and the wider culture. And we must, as Harris and Dawkins recommend, call faith-based convictions widely and loudly into question, not be politically correct about respecting them. But inveighing against "the mad hordes of religious imbeciles" and "the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved" (as Harris does in recent articles in Free Inquiry and the Huffington Post, respectively), counterproductively attacks believers rather than their beliefs. Empiricists should be secure enough in their epistemological commitments that they need not ridicule and thus further alienate their opposition. They need only model their preferred approach to propagating reliable knowledge: not with taunts and insults, but through rational, evidence-based arguments that expose flaws in the opposition's assumptions and reasoning.

Using all legal means, we must defend against threats to an open society, whether these include bomb plots or unconstitutional encroachments on church-state separation. Some among us would prefer that society not remain open, but our defenses against them must be proportional to their tactics and the threat they pose. Zealots of any stripe, whether religious, white supremacist, Marxist, or atheist, must all be tolerated so long as they accept the procedural constraints of pluralism in promoting themselves, even if their ultimate goal is the end of pluralism itself. We can (and must) fight them on the field of nonviolent political discourse and action, keeping openness our first priority both as a means and an end. We will try to persuade them out of their various racist, dogmatic, millennialist, and otherwise non-empirical, anti-pluralist convictions--so long as they limit themselves to trying to persuade us. But if they seek to destroy the neutral state via coercive, extra-legal means, we of course have coercive, but legal, remedies. Tolerance reaches its limit when the conditions of tolerance itself are threatened, and thus force is sometimes necessary to keep society open.

REASSURING SUPERNATURALISTS

For supernaturalists, whether of traditional religions or the New Age, the fact that our society's neutral public space entails a pragmatic, this-world empiricism might seem an affront to faith, and thus a victory of sorts for naturalism. But this isn't the case. Naturalism--as a worldview that admits only of natural processes and entities, and therefore denies the existence of gods, souls, and spirits--results only if we take empiricism as our sole epistemology, which, of course, is entirely optional in an open society. Naturalism doesn't inhere in our public pragmatic empiricism; it requires the additional, philosophical assumption that we should place our cognitive bets with science in deciding what ultimately exists. Therefore, supernaturalists should not see the secular state that supports an open society as enshrining naturalism.

We can reassure the forces of faith and non-empiricism that naturalism as a worldview isn't assumed in public policy or discourse; it's simply that in order to have public discourse among diverse participants, we must all partake of this-world empiricism. This means, for example, that to teach good science in public school isn't to teach materialistic atheism, since no one is forcing students to adopt the empirical stance in deciding all their beliefs. But it is to teach an essential skill for negotiating the modern world. If supernaturalists can see this, and understand that their worldviews are not threatened by the secular framework required for pluralism, they'll be more likely to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude toward naturalists, and more broadly, toward secular pluralism. Naturalists will of course advocate for empiricism as a reliable, evidence-based foundation for a satisfying understanding of our place in the cosmos, but that's strictly on a par with Christians, Muslims, and Jews advocating their faith-based epistemologies and worldviews. Making the public case for one's worldview, whether naturalist or supernaturalist, is protected under the First Amendment

Beyond giving us the satisfactions of naturalism--a unified, effective understanding of ourselves as fully included in nature--advocating a thorough-going empiricism confers important public benefits. Since maintaining a democratic, open society requires keeping totalitarianism at bay, and since totalitarianism feeds on non-empiricism (as argued previously), we have good reason to champion the empirical stance as a safeguard to democracy. Naturalists, who take empiricism all the way in thinking about ultimate reality, are therefore among democracy's best friends. But naturalists must not overreach in combating faith and supernaturalism, lest they themselves end up in totalitarian excess. And they should remember they have good allies among liberal religionists, most of whom value pluralism over ideological conformity. To keep the culture war a war of ideas, not weapons, all protagonists must remember and be thankful for that which they have in common: a battlefield of neutral public space, provided courtesy of the pluralist society in which they so fortunately find themselves.

Thomas W. Clark is director of the Center for Naturalism, a non-profit educational organization in Massachusetts, on the Web at www.naturalism.org.