Читать книгу III Diálogo entre las ciencias, la filosofía y la teología. Volumen I - María Lacalle - Страница 9

NATURALISM AND THE DISCIPLINES

Brad S. Gregory

University of Notre Dame (USA)

I want to begin by reflecting on the phrase that identifies the Expanded Reason Awards. «Expanded» compared to what? To what reason has been in the past, or should be in the present, or might be in the future? Or perhaps all three? If we can identify shortcomings in the governing assumptions pertaining to the implicitly «contracted reason» as it is employed in research universities, then perhaps we might see some paths forward for its expansion – and not simply for those of us who happen to prefer our reason expanded rather than constricted, but for anyone who wants to be guided by reason as such in the pursuit of truth. In that case, «expanded» reason would mean restoring to its exercise what ought not to have been restricted in the first place. It would mean a move toward repairing what has without reason been broken.

The Expanded Reason Awards website includes remarks by Monsignor Federico Lombardi on the «concept of expanded reason» prompted by Joseph Ratzinger, who long before becoming Pope Benedict XVI expressed concerns about the predominant intellectual culture of our time.¹ We lack a vision of knowledge as a whole, one that can integrate the ever more specialized findings of sub-fields within fields within disciplines, an overarching vision that seems elusive in proportion to the increase of our knowledge; despite our ever-increasing technological achievements, there is neither a shared recognition of the inherent dignity of the human person nor of the ethical imperatives closely connected to that dignity; and the most fundamental human questions, about values, purpose, and ultimate meaning, have been relegated to individual preferences that lie outside of reason understood in any normative or universal sense. Monsignor Lombardi notes the «[r]elativism, scientism, and pragmatism» of this intellectual culture, which characterizes universities today not only in Europe and North America but all around the world. I want to suggest that what underlies this intellectual culture and many of its problems is naturalism, regarded not simply as a methodological assumption in the natural sciences, but as a comprehensive worldview and a metaphysics.

This distinction between methodological assumption and metaphysical assertion is critical, yet frequently the two are conflated. One can scarcely fail to have enormous respect for the natural sciences per se and for their astonishing, ever-expanding capacities for exploring and explaining reality at every scale, from the subatomic to the cosmological, according to their respective methods and assumptions.² Naturalism is a methodological assumption shared by all of the natural sciences, and quite properly so: it means, for the purposes of scientific explanation, regarding the universe as a whole and everything in it as if it were a closed system of nothing but and nothing more than matter-energy explicable through the mechanistic, efficient causality of natural forces. By definition and as a stipulation for doing science, no reference to anything supernatural or transcendent is permissible, nor is reference allowed to any intention, meaning, value, or purpose. The results have been remarkable since methodological naturalism was pioneered in seventeenth-century mechanics, was extended to nineteenth-century biology through Darwinism, and in the last century has been further applied in so many disciplines, including post-Newtonian physics, cosmology, genetics, and neuroscience. Provided the sciences remain within their stipulated self-limitations, including naturalism as a methodological assumption, they are constantly adding to our knowledge of reality. No problem; quite the contrary.

The problem is rather that the exponential increase in scientific knowledge has been taken by some as a warrant to inflate its methodological postulate of naturalism into a metaphysical assertion. Naturalism has been made into a comprehensive claim about reality as such, a worldview that now constitutes part of the de facto framework of our prevailing intellectual culture and of all academic disciplines in universities. When a methodologically provisional «as if» becomes a metaphysically assertive «is» naturalism almost always functions essentially as a synonym for materialism and atheism. Its self-consciously abstractive, reductionist explanatory method shifts from the proper recognition that questions about transcendence, meaning, purpose, and values are simply not part of its intellectual enterprise, to the unwarranted insistence that, its methods having failed to find anything transcendent or any inherent meaning in reality, none exists. (This is bizarre, to say the least – of course none of the natural sciences have discovered what they are prohibited from even considering, as a corollary of their own self-constitutive methodological mandate.) Relatedly, the expanding explanatory power of the natural sciences is wedded to a constantly repeated historical narrative about a seismic, modernizing shift from pre-scientific ignorance, superstition, and religious credulity to enlightened knowledge, observation, and secular rationality. The narrative seems to gain further traction from wider processes of secularization, themselves influenced by consumerist practices that erode the familial relationships and other social solidarities traditionally anchored in communities of faith, practices that depend on the application of technologies in industrial manufacturing that are in turn based on burgeoning scientific knowledge. As Pope Francis tersely put it in Laudato si’, «everything is connected.»³ More apparent confirmation for metaphysical naturalism, at least culturally and institutionally, comes from the dominance of the STEM disciplines in universities all around the world: they attract the big government and corporate money bestowed as investments in the hope that new knowledge can be turned into patentable, lucrative technologies.

Note that none of this has any intellectual bearing on whether naturalism as a methodological postulate might legitimately support or develop into naturalism as a metaphysics and worldview. But this is lost on many people in society at large, not to mention on the ideologues and polemicists who proselytize for naturalism as a worldview, such as the so-called New Atheists. And it would be naïve to remain blind to the ways in which metaphysical naturalism seems to become ever more plausible to the unwary because of the power of the natural sciences, including medicine and all the branches of engineering, through the transformative impact of its technological applications in all domains of human life. Since the late nineteenth century, these disciplines have called the shots in research universities because of their spectacular success in producing «useful knowledge.»⁴

As a corollary, when naturalism’s methodological postulate becomes metaphysical assertion, science is nearly always conjoined with scientism: the ideological position that only the empirical, observational, experimental, mathematizing methods of the natural sciences are justifiable means of pursuing and discovering any truth about reality. In effect: «look how much the sciences have explained – perhaps they will eventually explain everything! But whether they can or not, nothing else can tell us anything true about reality.» This epistemological imperialism is not only false, but mistaken in its aspiration in principle, just as metaphysical naturalism is mistaken because it is based on a fundamental irrationalism; more on this below. Yet warranted and necessary criticisms of scientism do not and should not challenge any genuine findings of the natural sciences; and even though naturalism is an irrational worldview, it remains a legitimate, demonstrably productive methodological postulate for the natural sciences’ self-limited, restricted mode of inquiry.

Another distinction about which it is important to be clear, lest the argument at hand be misunderstood: notwithstanding my criticism of scientism as an epistemological ideology, it is important to retain a commitment to the unicity and integral character of all knowledge in principle, ultimately as a matter of logic (and thus of the exercise of reason). In the traditional scholastic formulation, truth cannot contradict truth; everything that is true must ultimately hang together, even though there obviously is a great deal we don’t know, and even if we can’t see how what we do know coheres. But we certainly have some capacity to relate to each other the distinctive types of knowledge gained from the inquiries characteristic of different disciplines. We can grasp, for example, that in eighteenth-century Brandenburg, Johann Sebastian Bach could not have written any of his sublime keyboard music apart from neurons firing in his central nervous system; or without the capacity for symbolic thought that seems to have arisen in our species around 50,000 years ago; or if hominid evolution had not been part of the evolution of life on earth, extending back more than four billion years; or unless the physical elements in the chemical compounds in the molecules of Bach’s body had been forged in processes of stellar and supernova nucleosynthesis, and in the case of helium and hydrogen at the time of the Big Bang, billions of years ago. Every human creative act, every aesthetic experience, every heartfelt embrace, and every compassionate smile presupposes what is studied by neuroscientists and neurologists, archaeologists and evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary and cell biologists, biochemists and organic chemists, particle physicists and cosmologists. But this neither means nor implies that, for example, knowledge of Bach’s genetic makeup or ancestry tells us anything about the structure and harmonies of his Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor. It doesn’t, nor can it.

Why should a Reformation historian concern himself with these issues? Because of the conditions of our shared academic environment. Regardless of one’s discipline or field, whether we like it or not, the predominant framing assumptions of universities today increasingly include scientism and materialist naturalism. This means we inhabit an intellectual milieu characterized by contracted, restricted reason. There is enormous professional and social pressure to conduct our academic lives as if all reality consists of nothing but and can be nothing more than the natural order of matter-energy in motion, as if the universe is a closed causal system. We are expected in our scholarly lives to talk and act as if, in the event that anything transcends the natural order, there could be no way for us to know, nor could it have any relevance for or influence on us. Not only if one is a physical chemist or cell biologist, but also if one is an economist or sociologist, a historian or an art historian, one is obliged, if one «wants to be taken seriously,» as the saying goes, to conduct one’s research in a manner consistent with metaphysical naturalism. In most universities and in our wider intellectual culture, questions that interrogate naturalist assumptions are not even supposed to be asked, and if they are, those with the temerity to pose them are likely to be met with some combination of incomprehension, dismissiveness, mockery, or disdain. For those who are open to questioning and committed to the exercise of rationality, the irony of this dismissive disdain – in institutions, no less, ostensibly committed to the exercise of critical, self-reflective reason – will become clear.

Whether we are aware of them or not, all of us – humanistic scholars, social scientists, and natural scientists – make philosophical assumptions. We would do well to reflect on what they are and why we hold the ones we do. It is perfectly appropriate for a scholar of modern Spanish literature, or a social psychologist, or a molecular biologist, or any other scholar or scientist, to reflect on the framing assumptions of the university institutions and intellectual culture within which academic scientists and scholars do their work. These assumptions affect every one of us whether we are aware of them or not. Of course, my particular training as a historian shapes the specific ways in which I see the relationship of my own expertise, early modern European history, to the history of the human past as a whole, and the relationship of human history to the evolutionary history of hominins and more broadly mammals and more broadly still to the evolution of life on Earth, and beyond this to the formation of our planet and solar system and galaxy within the history of the universe, and finally to the most fundamental questions about existence and being as such. But whatever our particular research-specific and disciplinary starting points, all reflection along these lines cannot but converge analytically on the same terminus, if we think seriously about integrating knowledge from different disciplines within a whole. We are all, in our specific ways, situated within human history at a point long after the beginnings of the evolution of life on Earth, which is itself embedded within the much longer cosmological history of the universe stretching back to the Big Bang, all of which belongs in turn to the domain of ontologically contingent beings.

My main argument is that there is a problem – a serious problem – with the pervasive assumption of naturalism as it usually functions today, with its anti-transcendent, atheistic, and materialistic metaphysics, in universities and the prevailing intellectual culture we inhabit. The presumption of naturalism depends upon forgetting, neglecting, or overlooking a foundational truth of reason about the entirety of the natural order as such, a critical philosophical error that in turn pervades our intellectual culture and exerts a distorting pressure across the disciplines. One contribution, then, to the expansion of reason beyond its unjustifiably constricted constraints consists in pointing out this problem on the basis of the exercise of reason itself.

That is the aim here. This exercise will in turn have numerous implications for the concerns raised by Monsignor Lombardi, Pope Benedict, and many others, about human dignity, meaning, values, and purpose in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. A major reason for this is because naturalism, which derives its ideological power as a metaphysics from the explanatory and practical success of the natural sciences, tends to go together with constructivism in the humanities: the idea that all meanings, values, priorities, and norms, including morality, are constructed (that is, invented) by human beings. This is precisely because, in the words of the sociologist Christian Smith, in the naturalist universe «[t]here is no inherent, ultimate meaning or purpose» and so «[a]ny meaning or purpose that exists for humans in a naturalistic universe is constructed by and for humans themselves.»⁵ If there is no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value in the natural world per se, of which we are a part as simply another mammalian species that happened randomly to evolve through processes of random genetic mutation and natural selection, then all human meanings and values can only be constructed; none can be «discovered,» because there are none to be found. Human cultural variety across space and time, as studied by anthropologists and historians, at first sight seems to offer ample corroboration of this claim. Combine this constructivist view with a political commitment to equality and individual self-determination and the link to moral and value relativism is readily apparent. As a corollary of metaphysical naturalism, constructivism therefore readily goes hand-in-hand with the liberal individualism championed by many political theorists from John Locke to John Rawls, and the conviction that the purpose of politics ought to be the maximal extension of individual rights about what to believe, how to live, and what to care about – everyone ought to be able to construct their own meanings and live as they please, within humanly constructed laws that permit everyone else to do likewise.⁶ These brief remarks only hint at the ways in which naturalist assumptions in the university have widely ramifying implications that also affect the ways in which humanistic scholars and social scientists do their work. Everything is connected.

The plausibility of naturalism as a comprehensive worldview relies ultimately on the nested dependence of all the other disciplines upon physics, within a temporal scheme that stretches from the present back to the beginning of the universe. This was implicit in the example about Bach’s musical compositions. In a naturalist scheme, the vast majority of humanistic scholars, in all disciplines, study the myriad meaning-laden constructions of one subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, from the last 3,000 or so years. Materialist neuroscientists seek to explain every human experience behind all those constructions not simply as requiring but as reducible to neurophysical processes in human brains, processes shared with other species in their respective brains and extending millions of years back into the evolutionary past. A similar perspective is shared by evolutionary psychologists, who apply a similarly reductionist approach to the human behaviors studied by humanistic scholars as intentional actions, which not only (obviously) presuppose the reality of human genes and survival-oriented behaviors by human beings who survived (a tautology), but are ultimately determined by them. Evolutionary theory is so important among the disciplines as a whole, and neo-Darwinian ideology is so seemingly plausible to the unwary, because of the way in which it connects and purports to explain the entirety of the human world not only as continuous with the rest of human life, but much more fundamentally and ambitiously, as continuous with the non-living, strictly mechanical processes of chemistry and physics. In the words of one of the most zealous neo-Darwinian evangelists, Daniel Dennett, «the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realms of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.»⁷ And by «unifies,» he means reduces to; hence his delight in the alleged «universal acid» of what he calls «Darwin’s dangerous idea.»⁸ Darwinian evolutionary theory extends into the domain of all living things a mechanistic materialism that followed from the seventeenth-century rejection of Aristotelianism characteristic of thinkers such as Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, with which it shares the repudiation of any teleology or intrinsic meaning in the natural world.⁹

There is no question that because of the staggering advances in twentieth-century physics – particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology – we know more about the history, character, and makeup of our universe at the most elemental levels now than ever before, stretching back to the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Those who familiarize themselves with what we now know about our universe can hardly fail to be astounded not only by the time scales, the distances, and the mathematically articulated intricacies of what astronomers and physicists have discovered, but also by how bizarre and mysterious it all is. To give only one example: only a small portion – about 5 percent – of what falls within the purview of physics consists of the protons, neutrons, and electrons that comprise the elements and compounds studied in chemistry, and which, diversely combined in all their dizzying variety, make up the full range of life forms that have ever existed on Earth, as studied in the life sciences (the remaining 95 percent of the universe consists of either dark matter or dark energy, about which physicists understand very little).¹⁰ Nevertheless, there is a strong sense in which, for a naturalist, materialist worldview, among the disciplines physics is and has to be «first philosophy.» If naturalism is true, or plausible, ultimately it is physics that will have to explain how this is so – indeed, how it is possible.

It turns out that it cannot, and this not merely because the answer has not yet been discovered, or because physics has not yet made sufficient progress, but rather because it is a category mistake to think that it could. This is the most fundamental objection to materialist naturalism as a comprehensive account of reality, a further discussion of which follows below. It should first be noted, however, that the conceptual and logical irrationalism of metaphysical naturalism is not its only problem; numerous scholars have pointed out other manifold difficulties. Nor should this be surprising insofar as the insufficiencies of dubious ideas usually disclose themselves in more than one way.

The first problem to be noted might not be insuperable for a scientistic reductionist fervently devoted to naturalism, but it would doubtless unsettle most human beings from all cultures, and rightly so. It is simply that if naturalism is true, there is no reason to think that there might be a basis for any objective ethical norms at all. There are only human constructions of morality, which shift according to cultural differences, historical processes, and individual preferences, subjectively overlaid by Homo sapiens sapiens on the purposeless substratum of matter-energy. There can be no question of anything actually being good or evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, because there are in reality no values, purposes, or meaning. To quote Christian Smith once again: «Matter and energy are not a moral source. They just exist and do what they do. The natural processes that govern the operations of the cosmos are not moral sources. They are simply the givens of physics and mathematics, elemental facts of natural reality lacking meaning or purpose or normativity... The evolutionary development of substances and life forms is not a moral source. They also just happen as they happen.»¹¹ Nor is it apparent how any theories of emergence, which have been important in the natural and social sciences in recent decades and seek to explain how more complex realities and qualitatively different phenomena can arise from simpler constituent realities, could bridge the gulf between the complete absence and the objective presence of ethical norms.¹² If naturalism is the truth about reality, then correlatively and obviously there could be no actual basis whatsoever for human rights, for example, nor any imperative to care about anyone or anything, or to act in certain ways rather than others; nor could there be any basis besides constructed preferences to condemn any behaviors, no matter how seemingly horrific from a conventional ethical perspective, including genocide, sex trafficking, or torture.

This is not strictly speaking a refutation of naturalism; some true believers might be willing to grasp this nettle despite its implications. Nietzsche, for example, seems to have understood that metaphysical naturalism entails ethical nihilism. But it seems apparent that we cannot really imagine any form of shared and sustainable, let alone desirable or appealing, human existence that would be compatible with many persons acting on such a view. Indeed, the longstanding project of trying to upgrade morality, as it were, by seeking to ground ethics in scientific findings, reflects both a recognition of the centrality of morality in human life and the hope that perhaps the empirical, rigorous methods of the natural sciences could overcome once and for all, with the same authority enjoyed by chemistry and physics, the ethical disagreements characteristic of human life and the divergences among moral philosophers apparent across cultures and throughout human history. This is what in recent years a number of different scientists and philosophers such as Patricia Churchland, Owen Flanagan, Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Alex Rosenberg, and others have been trying to do, combining in various ways a Humean sentimentalism, a Darwinian account of the evolution of the mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain, and the utilitarian ethical tradition that goes back to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, rooting their efforts in an insistent, empirical naturalism. After an extensive review of these efforts, especially since the rapid rise of neuroimaging technology in the 1980s and 90s, and after considering relevant research in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, primatology, neuroscience, and social psychology, the sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky have concluded that even considered collectively, all of these efforts have provided «no clear empirical support for any moral theory, let alone for any claim about what is right and wrong, good or evil, or how we should live.»¹³

A second problem with metaphysical naturalism is different in kind – less disturbing in its practical implications for human coexistence, but more serious in strictly intellectual terms. It is not simply the inability of materialist naturalism to explain the phenomenon of consciousness in general, including more specifically human intentionality, cognition, and perhaps above all rationality, but also what multiple philosophers and even some scientists now regard as the impossibility of this explanatory aspiration in principle. Any and every attempt at a psychophysical reduction of first-person experiential awareness to nothing but neurophysiological and ultimately strictly physical processes has not only failed, but looks as though it is bound to fail. In 2011, the distinguished research physician and clinical neuroscientist, Raymond Tallis, a self-described atheist, argued at length in his book Aping Mankind that all attempts to reduce consciousness to nothing but brain functions have failed and cannot but fail.¹⁴ In 2012, one of the most distinguished analytical philosophers in the world, Thomas Nagel of NYU, unsettled the complacency of metaphysically naturalist colleagues committed to reductionist materialism with his short book, Mind and Cosmos, the subtitle of which is Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Reviewers expressed shock and horror, appalled that Nagel acknowledged the influence on his thinking of Intelligent-Design critics of Darwinism, and risked giving comfort to religious believers even as he was apparently giving up on serious philosophy. Significantly, however, Nagel, like Tallis, is an atheist, and explicitly notes his disdain for theism.¹⁵ He simply does not see how materially reductionist accounts of physical processes alone, whether those currently available or any that might ever become available, could explain objective values (which he thinks are real), the experience of first-person subjective awareness (which is self-evidently and undeniably real), or the human capacity to rise above mere conscious sensation and perception to the comparative weighing of evidence and alternatives and the grasping of truth through rationality: «What has to be explained is not just the lacing of organic life with a tincture of qualia but the coming into existence of subjective individual points of view – a type of existence logically distinct from anything describable by the physical sciences alone» (44). Or again, «[j]ust as consciousness cannot be explained as a mere extension or complication of physical evolution, so reason cannot be explained as a mere extension or complication of consciousness» (81). In Nagel’s estimation, this implies that the entire evolutionary process must be rethought in such a way as to include non-material reality, because we know that the evolutionary process taken as a whole has produced the organisms we are: «materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants» (45). This leads him to question the possibility of abiogenesis as a strictly physical process, presumably involving extremely complex protein folding and the formation of amino acids as steps on the way. How this or anything else might actually have led to self-replicating life is still a complete mystery but remains an important promissory article of faith among reductionists committed to what Nagel somewhat mischievously calls a «materialism and Darwinism of the gaps»: «no viable account, even a purely speculative one, seems to be available of how a system as staggeringly functionally complex and information-rich as a self-reproducing cell, controlled by DNA, RNA, or some predecessor, could have arisen by chemical evolution alone from a dead environment» (127, 123). Nagel’s aversion to theism leads him to favor some sort of still unknown «integrated naturalistic explanation of a new kind,» a «nonmaterialistic natural order» that would incorporate «natural teleology, or teleological bias,» in which «[t]he tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the nonteleological laws of physics and chemistry,» even though he is well aware that this is «a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science» (68-69, 32, 91, 124, 66). But insofar as modern science has depended on the bracketing of mental phenomena from reality – carrying on with mechanistic materialism as if they did not exist, even though without human mental phenomena there obviously could have been no modern science – it might not be surprising if their existence and categorical irreducibility to matter-energy turn out to be among the stubborn obstacles that ultimately undermine naturalism.

As noted, Nagel wants to preserve some version of naturalism because he is averse to theism (or at least theism in certain versions, to judge from Mind and Cosmos). His doubts about the comprehensive explanatory adequacy of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, insistence on the irreducibility of consciousness and rationality to material explanations, and rejection of metaphysical materialism shocked his colleagues – all of them, like everyone in research universities, members of an academic culture in which materialist, reductionist naturalism is a largely unquestioned and uncritically accepted default assumption.

But naturalism has a bigger, even more fundamental problem than the mystery of consciousness, first-person experience, intentionality, and rationality, and that is, quite simply, the fact of existence, period – that there is anything whatsoever, none of which accounts for or can account for its own existence. Significantly, Nagel nowhere raises this issue in Mind and Cosmos, although he draws close when he states that «[t]he world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.» Clearly, he is not talking about scientific explanation when he says of the world «[t]hat it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it» (7). Especially astonishing to him is the fact that conscious, rational beings have evolved, which leads him to advocate for a teleological, non-materialist naturalism. Yet properly grasped, the radical contingency of everything that exists and that the natural sciences investigate or could investigate is a logical and metaphysical death knell for naturalism at a more fundamental level. It is part of expanded reason’s revenge on the unjustified restriction of reason to the epistemological imperialism of scientism. And this recognition is itself the product of the exercise of reason – a faculty capable of distinguishing between empirical and conceptual questions, and of understanding that nothing whatsoever in nature, nor nature as a whole, can explain its own existence.

There are plenty of physicists who understand this, and realize that their discipline can study only physical processes and natural laws, not how or why there are any physical processes or natural laws whatsoever. But metaphysical naturalists who believe in physics as first philosophy are oblivious of this distinction. Some think, for example, that if we can explain everything back to the instant of the Big Bang itself, to the most basic, primordial conditions that were followed by the expansion of the universe with such incomprehensible power and accelerating velocity, we would have explained the mystery of existence. An entirely physical, naturalist cosmology would be tantamount to a comprehensive ontology. But this is fundamentally confused, and ultimately irrational: it fails to recognize that whatever were the most elementary conditions and character of natural reality at the moment of the Big Bang, they are ontologically no less contingent – no more capable of explaining the fact of their existence – than is our universe in its ever-expanding, highly differentiated form 13.7 billion years later. To see this is to realize the rational inference that follows: something ontologically beyond or outside the entire natural order that is not contingent must exist, something which can and does both in principle and in fact account for the existence of the natural order – even though how this is so remains not merely obscure, but vertiginously incomprehensible. On the other hand, to insist that there must be something ontologically contingent that is «just there,» that «the natural order» or «natural laws» or «nature as such» or «the basic physical constituent realities of the universe» are somehow simply a given and whose existence need not be explained, is nothing less than the abdication of reason at the analytical endpoint of precisely the rational process that seeks to understand the totality of human experience, human history, the natural history of our world, and the history of the universe, by showing the interconnected, integral character of different sorts of knowledge gained through all the academic disciplines. It is irrationally to draw back from the precipice of reason to which reason itself leads. Positing any brute facticity of existence to the universe, nature, natural laws, matter-energy, or the like amounts to physics refusing to yield to philosophy not simply when it «should,» but must, and this according to its own principles – provided those principles are well understood. A failure to do so indicates a failure to understand what science itself can and cannot do, what the natural sciences are in contrast to what they cannot be; it is symptomatic of the unwarranted metastasis of naturalism into a metaphysical assertion. The crucial distinction in question can be helpfully brought out by comparing the relevant arguments from two books published in the last decade: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (2012), by the American cosmologist Lawrence Krauss; and The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013), by the American philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart.

Like other scientists who write well for a general audience, Krauss can be engaging when he is discussing the extraordinary discoveries in cosmology and the remarkable features of our universe as disclosed since the early twentieth century. But when he endeavors to make good on the claim in his book’s title and subtitle, he quickly shows that he either cannot or does not want to consider escape from the self-imposed prison of restricted reason that he inhabits. The results are unfortunate. An alert reader is bound to be puzzled already in the Table of Contents with chapter titles that include «Nothing is Something» and «Nothing is Unstable,» and in the preface, one can see that treatment of the central issue at hand is unlikely to go well.¹⁶ Oblivious of the basic conceptual difference between contingent and necessary being, or between a first efficient cause and a ground that makes any efficient causal order possible, Krauss asks blithely, «what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?» (xii) He asserts that the question, «Why is there something rather than nothing?» «is usually framed as a philosophical or religious question» – which is descriptively correct – but then mistakenly adds that «it is first and foremost a question about the natural world, and so the appropriate place to try and resolve it, first and foremost, is with science» (xiii). With unwitting incomprehension, Krauss states that his book’s purpose is to «show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing,» and that both experiments and theories in modern physics «all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem. Indeed, something from nothing may have been required for the universe to come into being» (xiii). Conceding that «we may never have enough empirical information to resolve this question unambiguously» – unaware that no amount could ever be enough – he demonstrates from within the confines of his constricted, naturalist worldview that he does not even grasp what is at issue: «For surely ‘nothing’ is every bit as physical as ‘something,’ especially if it is to be defined as the ‘absence of something’» (xiii, xiv). The philosophers and theologians, he opines, have been «focusing on questions of nothingness without providing any definition of the term based on empirical evidence» (xvi). These are all exact, direct quotations.

With prefatory statements such as these, it is not surprising that nowhere in Krauss’s book – which again, is interesting and informative when treating twentieth-century cosmology – does he even engage the question he ostensibly seeks to answer. He seems unaware that the empirical and theoretical questions of physics on which he focuses are different from «the possible question... of what, if anything, fixed the rules that governed such creation» (a notion which throughout he conflates with the temporal origins of the universe); and ironically, he is correct – although he means to be disparaging – when he states that «The metaphysical ‘rule,’... that ‘out of nothing nothing comes,’ has no foundation in science» (174). Quite so. But instead of recognizing here the limits of scientific inquiry and the starting point for a different kind of rational reflection, in his scientism Krauss tries to force an empirical, scientific answer on a question that cannot in principle have one. Shortly after drawing as near as he comes to grasping the difference between a physical and a metaphysical question, he absurdly suggests that a conceptualization of multiverses in which «the laws of nature are themselves stochastic and random» could circumvent the ontological contingency of those stochastic, random laws (176). Unsurprisingly, given this fundamental incomprehension, everywhere in his book «nothing» or «nothingness» turns out to refer to some primordially basic, already existing, natural condition or quality of the very early universe (or occasionally, its post-entropic, presumptive end-state billions of years hence). Nowhere in his exposition does nothing or nothingness mean ontological non-existence. Hence, depending on what Krauss is discussing, nothing or nothingness refers variously to «empty space» (58, 149, 152), «almost nothing» (148), «gravity» (148), «non-zero energy» (150), «quantum fluctuations» (151), «underlying laws of nature» (151), «gravity and quantum mechanics» (151), «the final post-entropic state of the universe» (157), «[q]uantum processes associated with elementary particles in the primordial heat bath» (158), «quantum mechanics and general relativity» (161), or «quantum gravity» (169). Krauss concedes that «it would be disingenuous to suggest that empty space endowed with energy, which drives inflation [of the universe after the Big Bang], is really nothing. In this picture one must assume that space exists and can store energy, and one uses the laws of physics like general relativity to calculate the consequences» (153). Exactly. This is extremely interesting and, if true, takes its place alongside the other astonishing findings that cosmologists and particle physicists have contributed to our knowledge. It also has absolutely nothing to do with ontological nothingness.

To move from Krauss’s book to David Bentley Hart’s Experience of God is to move from someone confused about the limitations of his own discipline, and who does not understand the difference between empirical and conceptual questions, to someone lucidly aware of this difference, deeply learned about the histories of Western and Eastern philosophy and religious traditions, as well as the history of science, and knowledgeable about modern physics and its relationship to metaphysical questions. Hart’s wide-ranging book addresses commonalities in the understanding of God, and especially divine transcendence, across multiple, philosophically sophisticated religious traditions, including issues pertaining to metaphysical naturalism and ontological contingency. Hart sees with articulate clarity that the sheer facticity of the existence of all realities that do not explain their own existence – which is to say, everything in the universe that we know of or can encounter, in any academic discipline, by means of whatever methods, and including the universe considered as a whole – implies that these realities must, as a matter of both metaphysical and logical necessity, owe not simply their particular coming-to-be but also the continuing fact of their existence to something that is not itself another contingent reality in need of precisely the same type of explanation for its coming-to-be and continuing existence. This logically and metaphysically necessary, non-contingent, supra-natural reality is what all of the world’s religious traditions have understood by God; more on this below. Note that this argument is neither a form of the traditional ontological argument for God’s necessary existence associated with St. Anselm, in which a perfect being must exist because perfection entails existence; nor is it in any sense a form of the traditional argument from design, of the sort frequently associated today with the proponents of so-called Intelligent-Design arguments for God’s existence. It is more closely related to some versions of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, including the third of Aquinas’s viae.

Yet quite apart from any considerations of faith or religious belief, the ontological contingency of all things that exist, have ever existed, or will ever exist, and the conclusion that there must therefore be some non-contingent reality that explains their existence and is metaphysically distinct from all of them, is a strictly rational inference. In other words, recognition of the inadequacy of metaphysical, materialist naturalism is not a «matter of faith» or based on a «religious objection,» which is important insofar as this is sometimes implied, even by theologians.¹⁷ Rather, this unavoidable, rational inference about a necessary, transcendent source and sustaining ground of being does not ineluctably entail faith in God as understood, much more expansively and elaborately, in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, for example. The inference is philosophically very strong, but prima facie, at least, religiously rather weak. That said, it is not unimportant that these traditions have for millennia understood that the God of faith possesses logically singular attributes that are shared with attributes of the rationally inferred ground of all contingent beings. Indeed, we meet here precisely the metaphysical, logical, and religious distinction between God and creation that both rational reflection and multiple faith traditions share.

What Hart sees that Krauss does not is that even a complete empirical explanation of the universe extending back to and including the Big Bang would not and could never be an account of either why or how there is something, anything at all, rather than nothing. Physics could never, even in principle, function as first philosophy; nor could all of the sciences, taken together and including even all possible discoveries at every scale from the subatomic to the cosmological (including all possible multiverses, if such exist), in principle explain the existence of what it is that they study. In Hart’s words,

Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature – the physical – is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the stream of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, «hyperphysical,» or shifting into Latin, super naturam. This means not only that at some point nature requires or admits of a supernatural explanation (which it does), but also that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural in the first place.¹⁸

In other words, «there simply cannot be a natural explanation of existence as such; it is an absolute logical impossibility» (44). Efforts such as Krauss’s imply that the closer we get temporally to the Big Bang in our physical explanation about the universe, or the simpler are the physical states and natural laws out of which the universe developed, the closer the natural sciences get to «explaining everything.» But such attempts overlook the total irrelevance of their findings for the question of ontological contingency: «no purely physical cosmology has any bearing whatsoever upon the question of existence... and so it is immaterial here how small, simple, vacuous, or impalpably indeterminate a physical state or event is: it is still infinitely removed from non-being and infinitely incapable of having created itself out of nothing» (97). Again, it is extremely interesting and indeed dumbfounding that the cosmically elaborated universe in which we live today seems to have developed as it has from such extremely few initial natural conditions and states, and anyone who cares about knowledge ought to be grateful for the remarkable experimental and theoretical work physicists have done to disclose the mind-blowing character of our universe, intellectual labor that remains ongoing. But reducing everything to its most basic, original conditions and constituents at the moment of the Big Bang, and thinking that thereby one has arrived at a sort of ontological «ground zero» of nothingness, simply broadcasts, with an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, one’s incomprehension of what the contingency of existence means. «In fact,» Hart writes, «one will be starting no nearer to nonbeing than if one were to begin with an infinitely realized multiverse: the difference from non-being remains infinite in either case» (98). To see this is to understand the point at issue.

A corollary of Hart’s argument is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is a truth of reason. It is not simply something that religious believers happen to affirm based on faith, as is sometimes implied, but also, and more basically, a rational inference about the impossibility of an infinite regress of contingently dependent beings, given the obvious reality that any exist at all. The manner in which dependent beings exist qua existence, as distinct from the natural causes and forces that account for them coming into existence as they have and being the sorts of natural things that they are – which is what physics and the other natural sciences study – cannot itself be the result of simply other antecedent causes and forces of the same sort. Hence the term «creation.» In fact, contingent beings’ existence per se must be radically different in kind – of a sort that literally, albeit admittedly inconceivably, has its source in what can and does create everything out of nothing. And logically, although again incomprehensibly, it must be creation out of nothingness – because anything antecedent that was not self-subsisting of its very character would be another contingent, dependent being in need of the same sort of explanation. Whatever all of the natural sciences taken together explain about how everything that exists fits together is a conceptually different story, the objects of which study are entirely and necessarily included within the metaphysically and logically more fundamental account of their existence – because one cannot study something in any discipline, whether in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, that does not exist at all. For anything to exist, there must be a non-contingent source and sustaining ground of all contingent beings. Regardless of where and in what discipline it begins, any logically progressive, restlessly and consistently rational reflection on reality will inevitably end up here – moving from the humanities or social sciences to the natural sciences, and within them eventually to physics, until physics reaches its limits. As a corollary, Hart therefore rightly says that «naturalism – the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural – is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking» (17). Confronted with an unavoidable inference at the most fundamental level of rational reflection, protagonists of naturalism stubbornly champion a sheer «it’s-just-there» irrationalism. It almost seems as if they are dogmatically committed to whatever it takes, no matter how radically incoherent, to avoid the acknowledgment of a necessary, non-contingent, supra-rational ground of all contingent realities – and where such an acknowledgment might lead.

Is this sustaining ground of all contingent beings God? It seems to me not only intellectually correct but also prudent both to note the features that this source of creation ex nihilo shares with God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the possibility of rationally affirming the reality of this source of creation without implying that such an affirmation automatically entails a further faith commitment. This distinction provides an analytical basis for arguing against the constrictive scourge of metaphysical naturalism without immediately raising the additional, fraught, complicated issue of faith and religion – an important consideration given the character of our current, prevailing intellectual culture. Strategically, this distinction opens a space for rational dialogue – at least with those who are not irrational fundamentalists in their materialism – to question and, if they are rational, eventually to reject metaphysical naturalism without any adjunct pressure also to make some sort of faith commitment.¹⁹ Of course, perhaps some who do so will come to faith as well, and in ways consistent with their rational reflection on the contingency of creation. But creating a non-threatening space for dialogue seems desirable from a purely pragmatic point of view, considering how many problematic expressions of religion are evident in the world today, which tend to render many direct efforts of proselytization ineffectual. So too, resistance to religion is bound to come from deeply ingrained habits of self-determination and individualist autonomy so widespread especially in the modern West, and the pervasive assumption that any and all religion compromises this autonomy in oppressive ways. Prudentially, then, it seems wise to maintain a distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of faith.

At the same time, of course, it would be contrived to ignore the overlap between the rationally entailed features of this God of the philosophers and many of the traditional attributes of God as understood in the monotheistic traditions: the creator ex nihilo who is one, necessarily exists, is eternal (in the sense of atemporal rather than temporally perduring), is transcendent, sustains all contingent beings, is infinitely powerful, and is incomprehensible. Hart discusses these and other rationally entailed attributes of God.²⁰ Whether this God also called the ancient Israelites to be his chosen people, or became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Palestine, or revealed himself to his last and greatest prophet Mohammed in the early seventh century are additional, analytically distinct questions – yet they are not questions about some other God, but rather about the only one whose reality and sustaining power explains how and why anything exists at all. And far from trivially, this is the same God whose existence, if more than just a matter of metaphysical and logical necessity, is also the ground and source of the uninvented values, meaning, moral norms, and sense of purpose affirmed by these religious traditions and which a materialist naturalism does not and cannot provide.

The positive implications of this understanding of God for Roman Catholic and much other Christian theology can only be noted briefly here. Keeping the rationally inferred metaphysical transcendence of God clearly in mind insulates Christians against the intuitive tendency, reinforced by the grammar of ordinary language, to speak and think of God as a highest being among other beings, a comparatively greatest demiurge within existence, rather than the logically necessary prior ground for any and all possible and actual existent, contingent beings. The similarly incomprehensible eternity of God – not an entity that has always existed in temporal everlastingness, but one for whom there is no passage of time – eliminates the tendency to think of God as a cosmic supercomputer somehow able to process simultaneously all the data of all events in the universe in real time over 13.7 billion years. God’s transcendence means God needs no «room» to be what he is, and so, being in no sense spatial, points to how God could be present to every bit of matter-energy (including dark matter and dark energy), no less than his eternity points to how he could be present to every moment in the history of all possible universes. This has important implications for a theology of divine providence, because it is precisely God’s metaphysical transcendence that far from precluding entails his presence in and through all physical reality. And God’s radical, incomprehensible otherness helps to provide a formal, theoretical way for thinking about the nature of Christ as truly human and truly divine (rather than as a party-human, partly-divine theological centaur), as well as for a sacramentality (underpinning a robust Catholic sacramental theology) in which grace can be and is present in and through the material world, because the material world, as creation, is not and can never be devoid of God’s sustaining presence as the necessary ground of all that exists. To be blunt, God could become incarnate in Christ, and the sacraments can convey grace, because metaphysical naturalism – with its abstracted, mistaken view of matter as «mere» and separate from its supernatural, sustaining source – is a false, irrational view of reality.

We have all heard and continue repeatedly to hear variations of a narrative in which the rise of modernity beginning in the seventeenth century meant intellectually, and fundamentally, that a purely natural, scientific, empirical, materialist, anti-supernatural worldview progressively and gradually displaced premodern, prescientific, religious worldviews in which variously unenlightened persons superstitiously believed in supernatural reality, because science has shown that everything that exists can be explained, or will eventually be explained, via its empirical, reductionist methods. This narrative is not only mistaken, but based on a foundational, philosophical amnesia. It presupposes an obliviousness of the conditions necessary for its own existence by neglecting the conditions necessary for the existence of anything at all. Obviously, humanistic scholars and social scientists would be foolish and irrational to imagine that the biological species whose complex cultures and histories they study could somehow «just be there» without the evolution of life on our planet. Similarly, cell biologists would be foolish and irrational to imagine that the molecular and genetic processes they study could somehow «just be there» without the chemical compounds made of the physical elements involved in all of those processes. So too, but for a different kind of reason, physicists and cosmologists – and all others, for that matter, who subscribe to such a view – are foolish and irrational to think that the universe itself, or its most basic laws and constituent realities antecedent to the formation of the first elements in the Big Bang, could «just be there.» «Expanded reason» includes seeing how all the disciplines contribute in diverse, different ways to our understanding of reality, not only at dissimilar spatial and temporal scales and with respect to their divergent objects of investigation, but also through their respectively appropriate methods that subvert the epistemological ideology of scientism. Starting from any expertise in any field within any of the disciplines, expanded reason means exercising our capacity to think beyond the crippling misconceptions, the distorting denials, and the dangerous dogmas born of metaphysical naturalism.

In our current intellectual circumstances and in practical academic terms, the most important implication of the conception of God broached here is its compatibility not only with all of the natural sciences and their respective findings, but with all possible natural-scientific findings, in principle. Because in principle and necessarily, the sheer fact of existence is conceptually inexplicable and therefore will always remain per se resistant to any naturalist, materialist explanation. Yet theologians, and anyone else who cares about truth, must see this, and know enough about the natural sciences to identify and criticize instances in which their legitimate findings have been confused with unjustified philosophical assertions or moral claims. The power of the sciences via technology throughout our society and culture, in government, medicine, consumerist capitalism, and more, means that there is no greater imperative for theologians than to be able to engage with the natural sciences productively – acknowledging all the extraordinary things that they have accomplished and continue to achieve with respect to explaining the natural order of which we are a part. Roman Catholic theologians in particular should continue to champion the traditional insistence on the compatibility of faith and reason – but how, in what ways, in what manner, with respect to the relationship of Catholicism to the natural sciences? Until and unless Catholic theologians can discuss this in sophisticated, persuasive ways, their influence in intellectual culture and society at large will remain negligible. Fearing the natural sciences, or resenting them, or ignoring them, is a dereliction of duty in our present circumstances, and any retreat from them in order to take refuge in a religiously safe harbor constructed of encyclical, conciliar, and biblical quotations is in effect an act of intellectual cowardice. It turns out that the institutional separation of most Catholic seminaries from universities since the nineteenth century, like the insulation of neo-scholastic philosophy and theology from other academic disciplines prior to Vatican II, did not serve the Church well with respect to the intellectual culture of the wider society. The combination of metaphysical naturalism, moral relativism, philosophical liberalism, assertive individualism, and neoliberal capitalism is indeed based on a constricted understanding of reason – but it is doing incredibly expansive and ever-expanding damage to human beings and to our planet at one and the same time. This would seem to be the bottom-line implication of Laudato Si’. For those who care about reason and truth – expanded reason and the fullness of truth – now is not the time to sit on the sidelines in quiet resignation or nostalgic torpor. The fate of souls and our shared life on the only planet we have hang in the balance.

¹ Federico Lombardi, «The Concept of Expanded Reason,» at https://expandedreasonawards.org/the-concept-of-expanded reason/, accessed 28 August 2019. For indications of Ratzinger’s concern, see e.g. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster, preface Michael J. Miller (1969; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), and idem, Values in a Time of Upheaval, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

² Michael Hanby puts it well when he writes that the success of the scientific revolution, «which began in the seventeenth century and has not ceased,» «is nothing short of stunning, and it has given us insights into objects whose existence could not even have been imagined.» Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 107.

³ Pope Francis, Praise Be to You/Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), §§ 91, 117.

⁴ On the centrality of practical, applied «useful knowledge» in the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the economy that has so drastically transformed the entire world over the past two and half centuries, see Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).

⁵ Christian Smith, Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can’t Deliver (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 45.

⁶ In the words of the British historian Keith Thomas, «in the modern liberal West, as well as in many other parts of the world, it is axiomatic that all human beings are entitled to fulfil themselves in the way they choose and that, so far as possible, society should be ordered in such a way as to enable them to do so.» Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9.

⁷ Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 21.

⁸ For a scientifically informed, philosophical and theological critique of «ultra-Darwinist» efforts such as Dennett’s as fundamentally misguided and incoherent, see Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids, Mich. and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010).

⁹ For an impressive analysis of this extension and its implications, see Hanby, No God, No Science?

¹⁰ Apparently, about 25 percent of the total is dark matter and 70 percent dark energy. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 294-303, 432-435.

¹¹ Smith, Atheist Overreach, p. 69.

¹² See, for example, Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

¹³ James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 81-117, quotation on 117.

¹⁴ Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, U.K.: Acumen, 2011).

¹⁵ Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 12: «I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design alternative as a real option. I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables – indeed compels – so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling.» Elsewhere in the book, Nagel calls his disinclination toward theism and the notion of any «divine intervention» in the natural order «my ungrounded intellectual preference.» Ibid., p. 26. Subsequent references to Mind and Cosmos will be indicated parenthetically in the text.

¹⁶ Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. ix. Subsequent references to Krauss’s book are given parenthetically in the text.

¹⁷ For example, in his generally excellent book about the relationship between evolution and creation, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn refers to «the belief that God creates out of nothing» and discusses «what is wonderful and unique about the biblical belief in creation.» Schönborn, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), pp. 22, 46 (my emphases).

¹⁸ David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 96. Hart makes a similar point in many other incisive passages; for example, «existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.» Ibid., p. 18. Subsequent references to Hart’s book will be given parenthetically in the text.

¹⁹ Nagel is an example of a philosopher who rejects a reductionist, materialist naturalism without embracing even philosophical theism, but from Mind and Cosmos it seems that his understanding of God owes much to modern assumptions about the relationship between God and the natural order and the idiosyncracies of analytic philosophy of religion, in addition to the fact that, as noted, he does not raise the question of existence or ontological contingency in relationship to metaphysical naturalism. For Nagel’s views on God in Mind and Cosmos, see pp. 12, 21-23, 25-26, 59, 66, 94-95.

²⁰ Hart, Experience of God, Chapter 3, esp., pp. 134-148.