FOR AN OPEN MINDED NATURALISM

Sidney Hook New York University

I welcome Kai Nielsen’s adhesion to the philosophy of naturalistic humanism although I have a premonition that his philosophical Odyssey is still not complete. I am indebted to him for the attention he has given my views but confess that I am puzzled by the upshot of his analysis and somewhat repelled by the tone of his argument against those who believe in God. He is not content with refuting their beliefs in the existence of God but seems intent upon silencing them by his insistence that even to talk about the existence of God is plain or fancy nonsence.

I am puzzled because sometimes he seems to be agreeing with me, as when he endorses my criticisms of conceptions of God as a force, power or principle that transcends experience. At other times, he expresses dissatisfaction with my position on the ground that I have not established my philosophical right to hold it, that, despite my denials, I am committed to my views in an a priori fashion, and that what is lacking is a more sophisticated defense, which he has supplied, that would establish in advance that all references to a transcendent God are ultimately incoherent, and that literally people who talk this way do not know what they are talking about, and that therefore “true” or “false” cannot intelligibly be predicated of what they say. Although I have been especially concerned with avoiding the charge of question-begging or legislating what exists in the universe, he taxes me with being guilty of the charge because of certain semantical assumptions I make. Yet if I have understood him properly-I am not sure that I have!-he himself is committed to these assumptions (1 to 6) . The great difference between us, so it seems to me, is that he seeks to foreclose future discourse about transcendent conceptions of God while I am prepared on principle to listen and to modify my position if reason and evidence convince me. I have tried to show, and according to Nielsen himself I have sometimes succeeded, that many writers who talk or write about God do not do so intelligibly, but I would not on the basis of any semantic theory of meaning conclude that therefore everyone who talks about God must talk unintelligibly. And this for at least two reasons. Many who do talk about God, like most religious people I know, do talk intelligibly, and what they say seems to me to be clearly false or extremely improbable. Whatever my theory of meaning currently is, it is not a principle of logic but a proposal, justified by its fruitfulness, in furthering communication and in acquiring

Sidney Hook is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at New York University and currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford Universify. Among his recent publications are Education and the Taming of Power and Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life.

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new knowledge, and therefore modifiable in the light of further inquiry. That is to say, although I cannot establish the logical validity of my theory of meaning, I present it as a proposal and offer reasonable grounds for accepting it-among them, that it accounts better than any other theory of meaning for the truths that all human beings, religious or irreligious, theist or atheist, accept about the world, and especially that it helps us to advance the growth of knowledge about the world. I am pretty sure that this will always be the case, but I cannot be certain. What bothers Nielson is that I am prepared to admit the logical possibility of the existence of God and other supernatural creatures and my refusal to assert that all theists are literally talking non-sense or gibberish. That is why although he regards himself as a naturalist, too, I feel that Nichts trennt uns, nur der Abgrund (Nothing separates us-only an abyss).

1.

Almost every sentence in Nielsen’s critique of my position invites extended commentary. However, I shall restrict myself to just a few comments in hopes of clarifying my views.

To begin with, some relatively minor points of nomenclature. Nielsen refers to my position as “agnostic atheism.” I am puzzled by his adjective “agnostic.” An agnostic is someone who claims that either we do not or we cannof know whether God exists or not. An atheist is one who denies that He exists and who asserts that in the light of all the available evidence, there is no more reason to believe that He exists than do the creatures of mythology. The fact that the atheist may possibly be mistaken does not make him an agnostic anymore than the fallibility of all our beliefs about matters of fact makes us agnostics about whatever we believe true or false.

Further, I distinguish between religion and belief in God. Although all theists are religious not all who are religious are theists. There are some religions (early Buddhism) that do not believe in God, and there are some religious philosophers like McTaggart who are atheists, who do not believe in God or Gods. The term “God,” however is sometimes used in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with Theism, eg., in the writings of Spinoza, Hegel, H. Spencer, S . Alexander, and Whitehead to name a few. I find the concept of God as defined in these and other metaphysical systems (the “One” of F’lotinus) unintelligible. But I would regard it as extremely odd to say that because I am an atheist, I reject their belief in God. Nor would I say in their case that because their concepts are unintelligible to me that therefore I am an atheist. Yet at one point, Nielsen contends that he is perfectly justified in designating himself an atheist “because the concept of God is either meaningless, unintelligible, contradictory or incoherent.” In so doing it seems to me that he is arbitrarily extending the connotation of the term “atheism” and is guilty of violating what Peirce called “the ethics of words.” He is using the word “atheist” as loosely as philosophers who are not theists use the term

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“God” in a cultural tradition in which that term normally has definite theistic implications. Atheism is the denial of the existence of God customarily regarded as a “self-existent, eternal Being, infinite in power and wisdom and perfect in holiness and goodness, the Master of Heaven and earth,” etc. (the predicates of God vary with different theistic believers). Now I do not see by what right Nielsen can call himself an atheist; and go from the claim that those who talk about God do not do so intelligibly or coherently to the assertion that God does not exist. After all many of those who talk about God admit that what they say about Him is stutteringly inadequate. They are not at all fazed by the discovery that ordinary usage doesn’t apply to Him. There are other analogies of experience in which men and women talk incoherently and unintelligibly about some person or occurrence. And it is risky-and sometimes downright dogmatic-on that ground alone to assert that what they are talking about does not exist. Sometimes despite the language of oxymoron, we can dimly discern the objectively existent reference of the discourse. Sometimes we have reason to deny the existence of what the incoherent language seems to be referring to. A man or a woman in a state of shock or hysteria can talk about an experience in such a way as to convince us, despite the disjointedness of their speech, that Something dreadful really occurred. On the other hand, we may conclude that they are deluded or that they imagined or dreamed up the incident. It all depends upon the evidence available. To infer merely on the basis of discourse, that something is or is not present in the nature of things is extremely hazardous. The ontological disproof of the existence of God is no more valid than the ontological proof.

I am not an agnostic or skeptic about the existence of God any more than I am an agnostic or skeptic about the nourishing qualities of stones, the existence of elves and gremlins, or the Virgin Birth. I deny that stones nourish, that elves and gremlins live outside books of fairy tales, or that the Virgin Birth ever occurred. Nielsen wants me to say that no possible evidence would ever lead me to admit I was wrong. This I cannot and will not do. Professor Walter Stace once sardonically inquired, after I read a paper at the New York Philosophy Club, what account I would give of myself if I died and woke up in the presence of God. “My answer would be,” I replied, “Oh! Lord, you didn’t give me enough evidence!” At the time I thought the retort was original with me but since then several persons have claimed priority for it. One of them was Bertrand Russell.

Speaking of Russell, I vividly recall his remark about the matter at issue as we walked through New York’s Washington Square Park in the lovely dusk of a rare autumnal day. I was organizing a meeting on Naturalism for the Conference on Methods in which he was to be pitted against Reinhold Niebuhr. I was briefing him about Niebuhr’s oddviews on God with which he was completely unfamiliar. In the course of our conversation, I asked him in a semi-humorous vein, under what circumstances, if ever, he would be prepared to believe in God. His reply, as I recall it, was “If I heard a

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voice come out of the sky, referring to something I, and I alone, knew, predicting some altogether unlikely event that no one else anticipated, and if that happened again and again, I would acknowledge the existence of God.”

Russell was probably just as aware as Nielsen that 1ogicaZZy the state of affairs he described that would bend his belief toward accepting God’s existence is just as compatable with the non-existence of God-i.e., an extraordinary world in which the belief in God was a belief in an illusion. There is nothing logically compelling one way or the other about these beliefs, in the sense that one conclusion is strictly necessary and the other contradictory or impossible.

The crucial point, however, and one it seems to me completely missed by Nielsen, is that we are not dealing with a question of pure logic but of existential probability of the same mder as the question whether, in the face of certain special circumstances observable on earth, it would be more reasonable to believe that there were other intelligent creatures in outer space with powers of perception and control roughly as superior to our own as ours is to that of ants, than to believe that the pattern of continued observable effects was a matter of chance.

Given the situation Russell describes, after careful inquiry, in which I would bring in not only the most knowledgeable and critical scientists of all kinds but the Houdinis and other specialists on fraud, sound effects, etc., if I had to bet my life on my belief, I would bet with Russell. It would be a reasonable bet even if it turned out to be wrong. I have bet my life on evidence and considerations in the past that were not so strong. On Nielsen’s position he could not bet at all. He could not even suspend judgment. He would simply insist that one of the options was unintelligible. In practice, however, I hazard the guess that he, too, would also, under the circumstances, bet the same way-not out of fear or weakness but as the vestigial expression of common sense. Peirce’s warning against philosophical insincerity in his critique of Descarte’s profession of universal doubt is a propos here. Let us not profess to doubt what in our hearts and minds we firmly believe-although we may very well be mistaken about that belief. That is to say that there is a reasonable habit of inference with respect to belief or disbelief about natural fact which we follow with respect to supernatural fact. And it is still a reasonable habit of belief despite the claim that the supernatural fact is of a different order. For however unique it is, it is still, in Santayana’s phrase, a concretion in discourse and it is reasonable to extend the logic and ethics of discourse and inquiry to it. Some theists have concluded that they can only discourse about God in negative terms. The presupposition of an intelligible statement *about what a thing is not, is that it is which is precisely what an atheist denies upon reflection and inquiry after the theist affirms existence. If the theist, as some have, chooses silence, there is no issue b.ut he must never be browbeaten into silence by any antece- dently formulated theory of meaning. He must always be free and

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feel free to speak.

Nielsen seems to me to misconceive the strength of the naturalist’s position with respect to what exists in the world, the furniture of heaven and earth. I need not repeat the detailed arguments in my The Quest for Being. Their gist has been stated by Nielsen and I have no quarrel with his summaries except with his view that I have begged all the questions at issue. He admits that everyone including believers in their secular behavior operate with the empirical methods of common sense and science. He admits that “all parties agree on this,” that it has been “the most successful way of resolving everyday questions of fact about what goes on in the world.” But he then asserts that this is not sufficient, that what I must do “is to establish that scientific knowledge alone is genuine knowledge.” (his italics). I do not see the necessity of it. I do not know how to establish that scientific knowledge alone is genuine knowledge, for every attempt to establish it rests on assumptions about what constitutes knowledge. And one can always ask us to establish that these assumptions themselves are alone essential for the acquisition of genuine knowledge. Anyone can claim that he has a different or higher kind of knowledge that is incompatible with these assumptions, ,and accuse those who deny its possibility of vicious and stultifying circularity in their position.

I submit, however, that this is the wrong approach to the question whether or not God exists in the sense that something is present or, more pertinently, whether or not someone is present, and indeed, someone who is a Person or who possesses some essential traits of personality. The naturalist who is not a dogmatist simply asks: show me what difference there is between saying He exists and saying He doesn’t exist? What different consequences ensue? Surely there must be different consequences, for if all the consequences of the affirmation and denial of the existence of God are the same, the two expressions would have the same meaning, and there would be no difference between the beliefs of the theists and those of atheists. But since the beliefs are asserted to be different, presumably the consequences will be different. The naturalist does not claim that the existence of God is logically impossible, and he rejects the view of some believers that his existence is logically necessary. But many things may exist which are not logically necessary; and God is among them, especially the God of the Judaic-Christian-Moslem faith.

However, and this is the simple but weighty point that Nielsen overlooks, whoever says that God exists must give reasons and evidence. The burden of proof rests on him in the same way that it rests on those who assert the factual existence of anything natural or supernatural. The naturalist, after carefully pondering the reasons and evidence offered by the believer, asserts that it is false to say God exists or that the statement is unwarranted. Nielsen regards the intellectual responsibility of the

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naturalist and supernaturalist as on the same plane, as if they were arguing a case on the basis of equally funded experience. But his admission that everyone including the supernaturalists recognizes the validity of the empirical, scientific approach shows that they are not on the same plane. They have different responsibilities in the quest to establish what is. We are not dealing with two conflicting hypotheses about what kind of God exists but with the question whether he exists. It rests with the supernaturalist to present the evidence that there is more in the world than is disclosed by our common empirical experience.

This appears too simplistic or unsophisticated to Nielsen. Since the supernaturalist’s belief cannot be falsified, it is not common sense or scientific knowledge. If it has any meaning, it is not the meaning of an empirical fact. Let the naturalist therefore prove, Nielsen declares, that there can be no other kind of knowledge, that there can be none but empirical fact! And unless he can prove it, he is a question-begging a priorist, and we are back to square one with Murphy, Sheldon and other critics of the naturalism of Dewey, Nagel and Hook.

But here, too, the naturalist need undertake to do no such thing. Is there a different kind of knowledge that makes God an accessible object of knowledge in a manner inaccessible by the only reliable method we have so far successfully employed to establish truths about other facts? Are there other than empirical facts, say spiritual facts or transcendent facts? Show them to us. Is this knowledge by revelation? What about false revelations? How are they distinguished from true ones? After all, not all revelations can be true since so many of them conflict. If you can’t tell the difference between the true and false until after the event, whatever it may be, what good is this knowledge by revelation? And if you can tell the difference between true and false revelation before the event, how do you do it without falling back upon empirical methods? What holds for claims of knowledge by revelation or authority holds for claims of knowledge by intuition.

Is there a method discontinous with that of rational empirical method which will give us conclusions about what exists on earth or heaven, if there be such a place, concerning which all qualified inquirers agree? Tell us about it.

We must first agree, Nielsen seems to me to be saying, on what we mean by knowledge before we deny the theists’ assertion on pain, once more, of obvious question-begging. I fail to understand why we must do so. Indeed such a strategy is intellectually disastrous. Before we attempt to discover what the proper analysis of “knowledge” is we must be able to identify pieces of knowledge or be in possession of some knowledge-just as before we can determine what the best or most adequate definition or analysis of “truth” is, we must know some truths. For the naturalist the paradigmatic instances of knowledge are those drawn from common sense experience and science. There is nothing arbitrary about this, for we are not dealing with a skeptic who denies that we know anything, but with the

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supernaturalist who in his secular life agrees with the naturalist yet who maintains that beyond the natural order there is another, and that at the center of this order is God.

It is well known that in the history of thought the argument for theism has not always presupposed that the supernatural order is unrelated to the natural order, and that the methods of common sense and science are necessarily incompetent to establish the existence of God. Many have contended that the book of nature properly studied points to the existence of a Creator of nature. Many tracts have been written that are variations on themes of “the common sense of theism” (or of Christianity). The arguments of natural or rational theology do not presuppose a different conception of “knowledge” or the acceptance of a special method of discovering truths that go beyond the methods used by those unconverted and who have not yet seen the light. A whole library of literature exists written by scientists, especially some eminent English scientists, who have attempted to show by arguments that claim to be continuous with those employed in scientific inquiry that the nature of things is spiritual and that “an active mind” and “energizing Will” is operative throughout the universe. The considerations are of the same character as are those of physicists who have linked the jump of electrons from one orbit to another with freedom of the will-and with no greater validity. I do not think that it is unfair to say that only when the appeal to common sense experience and the scientific knowledge of the time demonstrably fails to give a rational warrant for believing in the existence of God, or when it is realized that the invocation of such arguments and evidence makes God’s existence problematic or unlikely, is there a resort to conceptions of God that allegedly would make the methods by which we ordinady acquire knowledge incompetent or irrelevant.

Naturalistic humanism has developed in opposition to supernaturalism, and especially to theism. The term “God” sometimes appears in metaphysical systems designating categorial features of existence that have nothing to do with theism-for example, with the principle of creativity or concretion or totality. Even when it is innocent of theistic implications, its use causes confusion because readers import religious and theistic significance into its connotation. Although all naturalists reject metaphysical systems that involve transcendent terms, including systems that are atheistic (like Heidegger’s), they differ among themselves about the nature and intellectual validity of metaphysics. Those who speak of a naturalistic metaphysics regard it as vaguely anticipatory of, or continuous with, science, which makes those who have denied that it has a distinctive subject matter, metaphysicians, too. Some regard it as devoid of any cognitive significance. These raise interesting problems but for present purposes they do not bear directly on the theological questions of the existence of God as theists understand it. The three great theistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, no matter how refined or sophisticated, assert the existence of a self-existent, eternal power,

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infinitely wise and good, who directs the destinies of the world and its creatures. Not every account of God is coherent or intelligible for by definition the attributes are possessed in a pre-eminent degree. But in all the variations offered of His nature, He appears as a Person-and if He did not, it would make pointless the rituals and practices of myriads of believers.

The naturalist denies that there is any convincing evidence or reason for believing in the existence of any Person of this kind irk the universe. It should be obvious-and it surprises me that Nielsen does not see this-that to the naturalist all belief in God-all theism-is either open or disguised anthropomorphism. He has read Feuerbach to little purpose if he does not see this. The great merit of Feuerbach’s still unappreciated contribution is to show in detail that all the predicates of God are “anthropomorphi~m~,” and therefore, that the belief in the existence of God is an anthropomorphism, too.

At this point I believe it is necessary to say that Nielsen in characterizing “naturalisms like Hook’s, Nagel’s or Dennis’s,’’ has a very crude notion of scientific method. He seems to think that the use of logical analysis is foreign to it and introduces a special philosophical or semantic method which is more fundamental or intellectually superior to scientific method, since it can sit in judgement, so to speak, on the relative merits of the scientific way of knowing and the religious way of knowing. But in formulating an hypothesis among various alternatives, in drawing their implications, a great deal of logical analysis may be involved. Hypotheses may be rejected because they are discovered to be too fuzzy or vague or question-begging or contradictory or seemingly paradoxical. A considerable amount of logical analysis is required to answer the question: “What does it mean for two events to be simultaneous?” But the logical analysis helps us only to clarify: no amount of it will enable us by itself to deduce what actually exists in the world. If I understand Nielsen this is what he claims to be doing. On the one hand he castigates most naturalists on the ground that they have not properly rejected “the religionists’s claim that religion too has its own techniques and its own way of knowing.” On the other hand, he purposes to improve on these simple-minded naturalists who rely on empirical methods by fixing the limits of intelligible discourse in advance and ruling out the existence of God from the actual scheme of things. But in a world where some religionists say that they believe in God because existence is absurd and others proclaim that God is completely Other than man and human discourse necessarily inadequate in describing him, Nielsen’s improved strategy betokens a naivete’ profounder than any he criticizes.

How do the “simple minded naturalists” deal with the religionist’s claim that “religion too has it’s own techniques and its own way of knowing?” Presumably these techniques and ways of knowing result in assertions that certain events have occurred and that certain states of affairs exist. They not only ask for confirmable instances, for which they

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are still waiting, but they turn to the two thousand years war of religion against science which are replete with disconfirming instances-a history which is apparently irrelevant in Nielsen’s view-as among the grounds for denying the validity of religious techniques and ways of knowing. They are not as dogmatic as Nielsen because some of them at least still have an open mind about the existence of God (or more likely the Devil) whereas nothing conceivable about what could happen in the universe would ever lead Nielsen to recognize Him. Naturalists are well aware that there are difficulties in the concept of a Divine Person or of a disembodied consciousness but instead of ruling out references to them as meaningless or unintelligible, they ask what follows in the way of consequences from the statement that a Divine Person exists different from the statement that He does not exist? Nielsen contends that this does not meet Father Daly’s retort to similar questions as to what would have to occur to constitute a disproof of the love or existence of God-viz “quite literally ‘Nothing.”’ To the naturalist the retort is a compound of logical errors. For the alternatives “God or nothing” may be exclusive, they are obviously not exhaustive. In addition even if it makes sense to speak of the universe as contingent, as this argument implies, it would not establish that the existence of God, no less the existence of a loving God, was necessary. The God of Maimonides and Aquinas may not be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph implies Nielsen-which would certainly be news to Maimonides and Aquinas-but there is no more evidence of the existence of the God of the former than of the God of the latter.

One concluding observation. Nielsen asserts that according to me the distinction between fact and fantasy rests upon assumption 5 and that this assumption is itself “a categorical or conceptual remark” (or in Wittgenstein’s language, a “grammatical remark”). “DO we observe by means of the scientific method,” he asks, “that non-verifiable claims are fanciful or is this part of the specification of the very meaning of the distinction between fact and fantasy? It seems to me to be the latter.” I find this very confusing, and unless I have radically misunderstood Nielsen another illustration of his tendency to determine what exists in the world and what does not exist by semantic or conceptual fiat. The distinction between fact and fantasy or reality and illusion rests upon the differences in their experiencable effects. The difference between the fire I truly perceive and the imaginary or illusory fire is that the first warms or burns me or others, and the second does not: the difference between the real feast and the Barmicidean feast is that, among other specifiable effects, the first nourishes me or gratifies my hunger while the second does not. Whether or not I declare something to be a fact or an illusion, in either case I am relying upon the Same set of epistemological assumptions, whatever they may be, and therefore it is false to say that these assumptions enter into the specification of the very difference between fact and fantasy. And evely theist when he is not talking about God knows and accepts this. He is at one with the naturalist. I am confident that most

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theists would find it as bewildering as I do to read that the truth of the statements “God exists” or “God created the heavens and the earth” is au fond a categorical or conceptual or grammatical remark. If he did, he would have to treat my denial that God exists, that the belief in him is a belief in an illusion, as another conceptual remark rather than as an impious, atheistic utterance. And although we may agree with Wittgenstein that it is sometimes difficult to draw the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions, as the history of the empirical sciences show, it no more bears on the question whether the atheistic conclusion of the naturalistic humanists is warranted by evidence and reason than that the actual length of any object although objectively relevant to other things, depends on whether it is described in yards or meters.

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