Top 30 Apologetics Books (#11): Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion
Plus: Are We Alone in the Universe by Edgar Andrews
Quotable
Doesn’t the growing evidence that humans are hard-wired to detect agency render religion less plausible and push it into the shadows?
When it is said that humans are hard-wired to detect agency, what is meant is that we have well-tuned mental and physiological abilities to perceive agents, such as animals and other humans. Does this ability render religion less plausible? The antitheistic argument is approximately that the ability is "overactive," that we have a built-in tendency to detect agency even when it is not there. And that, it is said, explains religion, ghosts, demons, and other superstitions: we are detecting agents that aren't there because our agency-detecting circuits are overactive. An evolutionary advantage is conveyed by agency-detecting ability, since it helps us (and many other animals) find prey and avoid predators. However these arguments are not science and affect the plausibility of theism hardly at all.
First, it is completely obvious, regardless of any modern research, that we possess strong and sensitive agency-detecting abilities. The most elementary observation of an infant can persuade anyone of that. Casual observation also reveals humans' tendency toward anthropomorphism: attributing quasi-human attributes (especially agency) to nonhuman entities. Skeptics have for centuries taken the anthropomorphic language of most religious expression to indicate that religion is nothing but anthropomorphism. Science adds little to that presumption.
Second, there is to my knowledge no demonstration, experimental or otherwise, or persuasive argument that the agency-detecting ability is systematically overactive. In fact, if evolution is responsible for it, one would expect it to be active to just about the optimal degree: not too much, not too little, so as to make our survival chances about the best they can be. And that seems to be roughly true by inspection. Certainly our agency detection is imperfect and subject to errors. Sometimes we detect an agent when one is not there; we see what we take to be a sheep when it is really a rock. Sometimes we fail to detect an agent that really is present, and it surprises us, maybe bites us! But that is insufficient for a demonstration that it is overactive. It is (so far as I can see) just as often underactive. I'd say we might be detecting God when he is not there, or we might be not detecting God when he is there.
What is at work, then, when evolutionary psychology "explains" an aspect of religion is a scientistic attempt to explain away a higher-level perception by offering a scientific-sounding alternative explanation. The presumption is that reductionist scientific explanations are always preferable and supersede other types of explanation. However, once you concede that our agency-detecting ability is actually very good at detecting agents, it is just as plausible to say that a God who wants us to "detect" him as agent (because he wants us to have a personal relationship with him) arranges to make agent-detection capability a part of our standard mental equipment. If evolution is some (or even most) of how he did that, it changes nothing. It simply reaffirms what we knew already: that the ability is natural. We do not say that our having a hard-wired ability to detect agents renders our friends less plausible; why would it do so to God?
— Ian Hutchinson, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles: An MIT Professor Answers Questions on God and Science (IVP Books, 2018), 90-91.
Note: Below, Dr. Rob Bowman continues his series on the 30 most important apologetics books in church history. See his earlier posts in previous weeks of Useful Things.
#11: Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Course and Constitution of Nature (1736)
In eighteenth-century England, deism posed the main intellectual challenge to Christianity. The deists agreed that a deity had created the world, but they were skeptical of miracles and critical of the Bible. Deism flourished in the soil of seventeenth-century advances in science, especially following the achievements of Isaac Newton, though Newton was not himself a deist. Of the many responses to deism published in that era, the most popular and enduring was by the Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692-1752). In 1736 Butler published The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. It was the most important work contributing to a radical shift in British apologetics away from metaphysical, rationalistic argumentation to a more scientific, empirical form of reasoning. The long title of Butler’s book provides a helpful summary of his argument. Butler sought to refute the deistic claim that, while natural religion was valid, revealed religion—specifically Christianity—was beset by various intellectual problems and could not be rationally believed. He argued that the problems raised for the Christian religion are analogous to problems in nature.
Butler explained that his argument dealt with probability. He admitted that the imperfect character of probabilistic knowledge is irrelevant “to an infinite Intelligence…. But to us, probability is the very guide of life” (2). He then proposed to argue, by probabilistic reasoning, “that he who denies the Scripture to have been from God” because of its apparent difficulties might as well, “for the very same reason, deny the world to have been formed by him” (4).
Butler’s book is divided into two major parts, dealing with natural religion and revealed religion respectively. The first division corresponds roughly to arguing for a position common to some forms of deism and Christianity, while the second division presents an argument for what is distinctive to Christianity itself. More specifically, Part I defends belief in divine justice and life after death, while Part II defends belief in divine revelation.
Only in chapter 7 of Part II did Butler offer positive evidences and arguments for Christianity. He argued that biblical history should be presumed accurate in the absence of evidence to the contrary. He pointed out that Paul’s epistles offer substantial evidence for the gospel, independent of the other apostles. And he noted that Christianity appears fairly unique in having been founded on the belief in miracles (in contrast especially to Islam, which does not view Muhammad as a miraculous figure). Butler averred that these arguments, taken cumulatively, form a strong argument for the Christian faith. In Butler’s conclusion, he emphasized that he had been answering objections, not providing absolute proof.
Butler’s Analogy of Religion was a landmark work that set the course for the development of what is known today as evidentialist apologetics.
—Rob Bowman Jr. is an evangelical Christian apologist, biblical scholar, author, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of over sixty articles and author or co-author of thirteen books, including Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ, co-authored with J. Ed Komoszewski. He leads the Apologetics Book Club on Facebook.
Are We Alone in the Universe?
by Edgar Andrews
It's easy to confuse SETI with YETI because both relate to creatures that probably don't exist. The Yeti is a proverbial beast that inhabits the Himalayas and walks upright like a human, but leaves huge footprints in the snow and strikes fear into the local populace. Related to America's Bigfoot, it is sometimes called the Abominable Snowman (apparently due to a mistranslation of its Nepalese name). SETI, on the other hand, stands for “the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence” — the hunt for an intelligent alien who is so unlikely to show up that he might, with some justification, be called “the abominable no-man”. Yet nations around the world are currently spending eye-watering sums of money looking for him in distant galaxies, and building bigger and better radio telescopes to further their quest. Why, I wonder, would they do that?
The answer is that SETI scientists and the governments and institutions that finance them believe that the discovery of alien intelligences would help answer the question, “What is Man?”
Small Flat Bugs
“Found, a planet like Earth but 5 billion years away—best chance yet of extra-terrestrial life”. So ran a headline in the Times newspaper on 11 November 2009. Later, a BBC TV news correspondent solemnly declared that the new planet was probably inhabited by “small flat bugs”. The 5 billion years was a miscalculation by The Times—it should have been half a million light years. But what difference do a few zeros make to a gullible public? Furthermore, you must understand that the bugs in question have not actually been seen. Nor, come to that, has the planet, though its presence can be inferred with a fair measure of certainty. But small flat bugs? No chance. As Mark Twain once pointed out, “It’s amazing how, for a small investment of fact, one can get such a large return in speculation”. The slightest hint of life elsewhere in the universe, no matter how unlikely, sends the mass media into a frenzy (with NASA, which should know better, not far behind).
Atheists like the idea that Earth is just one of a countless number of similar inhabited planets in the universe because if true (they argue) it would diminish the significance of life on Earth. This in turn would remove the need to think that Man is anything other than an accident of nature. So let’s pursue our headline and consider the current excitement over what are called “exoplanets”—planets that exist outside the solar system. First, what are the facts? The search for planets orbiting stars in distant galaxies is a large and growing area of astronomical research. At the time of writing, the on-line Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia lists some 1000 cosmic planetary systems containing over two thousand planets which are known to be orbiting stars other than the Sun.
The exoplanet (named Gliese 581c) featured in our headline is one of three believed to be orbiting a “red dwarf” star called Gliese 581 in the constellation Libra. Its discoverers claim that it is a rocky planet with a radius 50% greater than Earth and about five times Earth’s mass. They estimate that its surface temperature places it within the “habitable zone” of its parent star because liquid water could exist there. And if a planet has liquid water (they argue) then life could have evolved there “as it did on Earth”. But why might it be inhabited by small flat bugs? Because with a mass five times that of Earth, the planet’s gravity would also be five times greater—enough to flatten even a bug. Why small bugs? Perhaps because an uncritical public are more likely to swallow small bugs than little green men.
I should make it clear that the planet’s discoverers said nothing about bugs—that was an invention by the BBC. But their claim that Gliese 581c is a rocky planet like Earth and has liquid water on its surface is itself based on a string of assumptions. An informed website respondent commented:
“You must remember that neither the mass nor the radius of this planet are actually known. The mass is the minimum mass and … could actually be much larger. I would not be surprised if it turned out that these planets are all Jupiter-size. The quoted radius of 1.5 Earth radii is the size the planet would be if it were terrestrial [rocky] which is not known. We actually have no idea what the density of Gliese 581c is.”
SETI and Mars
But let’s leave aside the ill-informed enthusiasm of the mass media and turn to serious science. The search for extra-terrestrial life goes back over a century. In August 1924 when Mars was at its closest approach to Earth, a 36 hour radio silence was observed in the USA (for five minutes every hour) to listen for possible radio signals from Mars. The US Army’s chief cryptographer was even assigned to translate any Martian messages that might be detected. I imagine he was quite relieved when his services were not required.
This may all seem rather quaint to us but let’s not forget that while we no longer expect to find intelligent life on Mars, the search for more humble life-forms there (extant or extinct) continues unabated. As part of the aptly named “ExoMars” program, the European and Russian space agencies launched a mission to the Red Planet in March 2016 to analyze the methane gas present in the Martian atmosphere. However, interpretation of the evidence will be crucial. One commentator says;
“Measurements of methane on Earth suggest that methane originating from geological processes as opposed to biological processes has a distinctive signature in hydrogen and oxygen isotopes ... [but] I've always wondered if we would be able to interpret what this would mean on Mars (for one thing, Mars is greatly depleted in light hydrogen versus deuterium)”.
SETI and the Cosmos
But let’s return to the wider history of SETI. In March 1955, John D. Kraus published in Scientific American a proposal to scan the cosmos for natural radio signals using a radio telescope. Two years later, and funded by US$71,000 from the National Science Foundation, Ohio State University began constructing a radio observatory called “Big Ear”—which later undertook the world’s first continuous SETI program. On 15 August 1977, Jerry Ehman, a project volunteer at the observatory, observed a strong signal and wrote “Wow!” on the recorded trace. Unsurprisingly known as the “Wow! Signal”, some enthusiasts consider it the best candidate to date for a cosmic radio signal from an artificial source. However, additional searches have failed to reproduce the observation and recent investigations suggest that the signal was caused by a passing comet.
Russian scientists also took a strong interest in SETI during the 1960s, using omni-directional antennas to look for powerful radio signals from outer space. Space scientist Losif Shklovsky wrote a seminal book Universe, Life, Intelligence (1962) which was followed in 1966 by American astronomer Carl Sagan’s best-selling book Intelligent Life in the Universe. In 1971, NASA funded a SETI study that recommended the construction of a radio telescope array with 1,500 dishes at a cost of US$10 billion. Known as “Project Cyclops”, the proposal never saw the light of day, but the report was a major influence in many of today’s on-going SETI projects.
So Where Is Everybody?
The failure of SETI to produce any return on investment naturally raises questions. If there are billions of earth-like planets out there in the universe, as many claim, and if intelligent life arises whenever the conditions are just right, where are all these advanced civilizations hiding? Astronomer Jill Tarter offers two explanations. Firstly, “The universe is vast and we haven’t been able to look everywhere yet. With our current technologies and the time we’ve dedicated to SETI, we’ve only searched an incredibly small portion of the universe for intelligent life”. Secondly, “We may not have found intelligent life yet because we’re stuck with the physics and the technology that we have ... We may not have invented the right way to do this yet”. In brief, then, we’re stuck with a big universe and rusty technology. So why do we bother?
I suggest firstly that we persist in seeking this tiny needle in the cosmic haystack because the human race is incurably curious about the universe in which we live. It is this curiosity that drives exploration of all kinds—whether geographic, oceanographic, scientific, psychological, or any other kind. But I believe there is a more focused reason for the insatiable search for “life out there”, namely, the need to understand ourselves. We need an answer to the Psalmist’s question, “What is man?” and many believe that the discovery of intelligent extra-terrestrial life would give us one. Of course, finding bugs on Mars (small, flat, or otherwise) is quite a different matter from getting an e-mail from an extraterrestrial. But atheists argue that either discovery would tend to favor the claim that humanity is an uncreated accident of nature that could occur anywhere in the universe given the right conditions. But if SETI continues to prove unfruitful in spite of all our efforts, we may well have to conclude instead that as far as we know humanity is unique on a cosmic scale. And given the supposed abundance of Earth-like planets, a unique humanity would imply something more like a miracle than an accident.
* This article is based generally on a chapter in the author’s volume What Is Man? Adam, Alien or Ape?
—Edgar Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Materials Science in the University of London, England. Formerly Head of Department and Dean, he holds PhD and DSc degrees in physics and has published over 100 scientific research papers. In retirement, he serves as co-pastor of the Campus Church, Welwyn Garden City, UK. He is the author of Who Made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything and What Is Man? Adam, Alien or Ape?
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Book Highlight
*Unless otherwise noted, descriptions are those provided by the publisher, sometimes edited for brevity.
Plasma physicist Ian Hutchinson has been asked hundreds of questions about faith and science:
What is faith and what is science? Are they compatible?
Are there realities science cannot explain?
Is God's existence a scientific question?
Is the Bible consistent with the modern scientific understanding of the universe?
Are there scientific reasons to believe in God?
In this comprehensive volume, Hutchinson answers a full range of inquiries with sound scientific insights and measured Christian perspective. Without minimizing challenging questions, he explores how science and Christianity are mutually supportive and intellectually consistent.
Both God and science truthfully address our curiosity and destiny. Find answers to your deepest questions.
Ian Hutchinson is a plasma physicist and professor of nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in England, educated at Cambridge University, and received his doctorate from Australian National University. His research group explores the confinement of plasmas hotter than the sun's center, aimed at producing practical energy from nuclear fusion reactions, the energy source of the stars.
A frequent Veritas Forum presenter, Ian has written and spoken widely on the relationship between science and Christianity. He is the author of over two hundred research articles, and his books include Principles of Plasma Diagnostics and Monopolizing Knowledge.
Reviews
"Ian Hutchinson has been an outspoken advocate for clear and rigorous thinking about issues at the intersection of science and faith. This excellent volume carefully yet approachably explores some of the most perplexing and challenging issues at this interface. Both religious believers and skeptics alike will learn and be challenged by it."
— Michael Murray, John Templeton Foundation
"In this compact, beautifully clear and well-informed volume, Professor Ian Hutchinson, a renowned physicist at MIT, vanquishes many of the enduring myths of the conflict metaphor of science and faith. In doing so, he clears away many of the obstacles that stand in the way of faith today, preparing a clear way for the coming of the Lord."
— Andrew Pinsent, Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford
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