Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (51 page)

15.
Atran,
In Gods We Trust
, p. 4.

16.
Atran,
In Gods We Trust
, p. 4.

17.
For example, according to Jesse Bering, director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queens University, Belfast, who apparently believes that with his research, “we’ve got God by the throat and I’m not going to stop until one of us is dead” (“The God Fossil,”
Broward Palm Beach New Times
, March 9, 2006). (Do you suppose God is trembling in the face of this threat?)

18.
Many writers seem not to grasp this obvious fact. The same goes for suggestions as to what components and dynamics of the brain underlie religious experience, as in Michael Persinger, “The sensed presence within experimental settings: Implications for the male and female concept of self,”
Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied
137:1 (2003). Suppose centers for perception were identified in the brain, and suppose artificial stimulation of these centers could cause experiences as of seeing a tree; would this cast doubt upon our perception of trees?

19.
See Kelly Clark and Justin Barrett, “Reformed Epistemology and the Cognitive Science of Religion.”
Faith and Philosophy
28 (2010), pp. 174–89.

20.
Guthrie,
Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

21.
See Justin Barrett, “Is the Spell Really Broken?”
Theology and Science
, vol. 5, no. 1, March 2007, p. 69.

22.
But wouldn’t this at least show that religious beliefs lack
warrant
, that property enough of which is what separates knowledge from mere true belief? (See my
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 5.) Not just as such; after all, even if belief in other minds originates in HADD, we do presumably know that there are other people. What counts here is not the global reliability of the faculty or cognitive mechanism in question, but its reliability in the relevant circumstances.

23.
Of course there are conflicts between science and particular religious beliefs that are not part of Christian belief as such: belief in a universal flood, a very young earth, etc.

24.
Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral
, pp. 48ff. See also Robert A. Hinde,
Why Gods Persist
(London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 553ff.

25.
Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral
, p. 51.

26.
Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral
, pp. 91, 118.

27.
See chapter 11 of my
Warrant and Proper Function
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

28.
And in such a way that it (or its deliverances) rather resembles Calvin’s
sensus divinitatis
; see
Moses and Monotheism
, pp. 167ff.

29.
Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral
, p. 228.

30.
Tom Crisp points out (private communication) that (again, as with Freud) there is no incompatibility between religious belief and the thought that it arises in the way Wilson says it does. Clearly God, if he chose, could use the process of group selection to bring it that people are aware of him and in a position to worship him.

31.
Here I can be brief; for a much fuller account of HBC, see chapter 12 of my
Warranted Christian Belief
.

32.
See Nicholas Wolterstorff,
Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

33.
Theologico-Political Tractate
, 14.

34.
Levenson, “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism” in
The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies
, ed. Jon Levenson (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 109. An earlier version of this essay was published under the same title in
Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity
, ed. John Collins and Roger Brooks (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).

35.
Brown,
The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus
(New York: Paulist Press, 1973), pp. 9, 11, 18–19.

36.
But what if the main lines of the Christian gospel can in fact be arrived at by reason alone, by virtue of arguments—probabilistic argument—that employ only premises that are deliverances of reason? This is the position of Richard Swinburne, who is the most distinguished contemporary proponent of this view. Among his many works, see, for example,
The Existence of God
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edition 2004),
Was Jesus God?
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and
Revelation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). If you think this is how things stand, then you could proceed just as traditional Biblical commentators do, while also claiming that what you do depends only on premises that are among the deliverances of reason, so that your enterprise, though indistinguishable in terms of results from traditional Biblical commentary, is nonetheless science. It’s fair to say, I think, that HBC presupposes that this idea—that the main lines of Christian belief can be established by reason alone—is mistaken (and indeed this idea is not widely accepted).

37.
Straus,
Das Leben Jesu
(1835), tr. Marian Evans as
The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
(New York: Calvin Blanchardd, 1860).

38.
Johnson,
The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels
(San Francisco: HarperCollins 1996), p. 144.

39.
Wells, “The Historicity of Jesus,” in
Jesus in History and Myth
, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman and Gerald A. Larue (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp. 27ff.

40.
Allegro,
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1970).

41.
Sheehan,
The First Coming
(New York: Harper and Row), p. 197; see my review “Sheehan’s Shenanigans” in
The Analytic Theist: an Alvin Plantinga Reader
, ed. James Sennett (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

42.
Van Harvey, “New Testament Scholarship and Christian Belief,” in
Jesus in History and Myth
ed. R. Joseph Hoffman and Gerald A. Larue (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), p. 193.

43.
See especially his “Über historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie” in
Gesammelte Schriften
(Tubingen: Mohr, 1913), vol. 2, pp. 729–53, and his article “Historiography” in James Hastings,
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics
.

44.
For an account and endorsement of Troeltsch’s principles, see John Collins, “Is Critical Biblical Theology Possible?” in
The Hebrew Bible and its Interpreters
, ed. William Henry Propp, Baruch Halpern, and David Freedman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), p. 2. For much more detail on Troeltschian HBC, see my
Warranted Christian Belief
, pp. 390–95.

45.
Bultmann,
Existence and Faith
, ed. Schubert Ogden (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 291–92. For more recent expressions of the same opinion, see John Macquarrie,
Principles of Christian Theology
, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), p. 248; Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language” in
God’s Activity in the World: the Contemporary Problem
, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, Calif: Scholars Press, 1983), p. 31; and John Collins, “Is Critical Biblical Theology Possible?”

46.
Named for Pierre Duhem, who argued (in response to Abel Rey) that metaphysics shouldn’t enter the texture of physics; if it did, the sorts of disagreements that characterize metaphysics would also break out in physics. See the appendix to Duhem’s
The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory
, tr. Philip P. Wiener, foreword by Prince Louis de Broglie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1906] 1954). The appendix is entitled “Physics of a Believer” and is a reprint of Duhem’s reply to Rey; it was originally published in the
Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne
Vol I (October and November) 1905, pp. 44ff. and 133ff.

47.
Sanders,
Jesus and Judaism
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 5.

48.
Meier,
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus vol. 1
(New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 1.

49.
Of course it may be difficult to specify the relevant community. Suppose I am a scripture scholar at a denominational seminary: what is my relevant community? Scripture scholars of any sort, all over the world? Scripture scholars in my own denomination? In western academia? The people, academics or not, in my denomination? Christians generally? The first thing to see here is that our scripture scholar clearly belongs to many different communities, and may accordingly be involved in several different scholarly projects.

50.
Harvey,
Jesus and the Constraints of History
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), p. 6.

1.
For an examination of this question with respect to some of the early claims of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, see Philip Kitcher’s
Vaulting Ambition
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987).

2.
For a masterful account of defeaters and their ways, see chapter six of Michael Bergmann’s
Justification Without Awareness
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

3.
Of course that there are several versions of the Christian faith, and I don’t mean to suggest that every Christian’s evidence base will include the same religious beliefs.

4.
Scott, “Darwin Prosecuted: Review of Johnson’s
Darwin on Trial
”
Creation Evolution Journal
vol. 13, no. 12 (1993).

5.
McMullin, “Plantinga’s Defense of Special Creation,”
Christian Scholar’s Review xxxi: 1
(September 1991), p. 56.

6.
Jones,
Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al.; Jones, Kitzmiller v. Dover Memorandum Opinion
2005, p. 64.

7.
Van Fraassen,
The Empirical Stance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

8.
Of course there
could be
defeaters embedded in a piece of Simonian science discourse; my claim is only that Simonian science doesn’t automatically, just as such, provide a defeater for the Christian beliefs with which it is incompatible.

9.
Of course there
could
be such a preponderance of evidence as to convince me that my memory has been playing me tricks—for example, if several independent witnesses claimed they
saw
me slash your tires, the security camera in the parking lot clearly shows me slashing away, etc. The point is only that it is possible that the right conclusion for the jury to come to, given their evidence, might be a conclusion I know to be false. (Think of people—some on death row—convicted of crimes they know they didn’t commit.)

10.
Calvin, ed. John T. McNeill and tr. by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: the Westminster Press, [1559] 1960).
Institutes
III, ii, 7, p. 551. My emphasis.

11.
See some of the many attempts to give arguments from reason (taken as including history) for the Jesus’ resurrection—e.g., N. T. Wright, Willliam Lane Craig, Stephen Davis, Gary Habermas, Timothy and Lydia McGrew, Richard Swinburne, and many others.

12.
For a much fuller account of faith and its relation to reason, see my
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 8.

13.
Atran,
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.

14.
Of course there is still the relativity of defeat to noetic structure; there are some noetic structures with respect to which those beliefs would not be a defeater for the belief that R. For example, I might believe, for some reason, that space is pervaded by an ether-like substance that causes photographs of cubical objects to appear spherical, or I might believe that the camera in question had the unusual property (sort of like a fisheye lens) of photographing cubes in such a way that they look like spheres.

15.
See
chapter 5
, section IIIA.

16.
I have addressed them in a preliminary way in
“
Science: Augustinian or Duhemian?”
Faith and Philosophy
(July, 1996), “Christian Philosophy at the End of the 20th Century,” in
Christian Philosophy at the Close of the Twentieth Century
, ed. Bert Balk and Sander Griffioen (1995), and “On Christian Scholarship,” in
The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University
, ed Theodore Hesburgh (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); I hope to address them at greater length elsewhere.