LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 212

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

from the good in the world to the existence of a good God, why can we not
argue from the evil in the world to the existence of an evil God?167 Following
the earlier lead of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Julien Offray de La Mettrie
(1709–1751), a physician, asked why the same mechanistic approach applied
to the natural world around us could not be applied to human beings. His
studies led him to the view that man himself is a machine—a machine in a
world of machines.168 And Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) concluded that if
we are subject to the same kind of causation we see in the physical world, we
must not have free will.169
This corrosive skepticism did not immediately lead most thinkers to
embrace a naturalistic worldview. This is largely because, despite the ideological crusade of the Encyclopedists—who are in many ways the intellectual
forebears of today’s New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam
Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens)170—there were many defenders of natural theology and, in particular, biological design, well into the
nineteenth century. After the classic work Natural Theology (1802) of William
Paley (1743–1805), there were many other great works of natural theology,
such as the contributions of William Whewell (1794–1866) and Charles Babbage (1791–1871) to the Bridgewater Treatises. These are the works of men
of scientific and philosophical genius who were not intimidated by David
Hume or the French Encyclopedists. In fact, in his treatment of the argument
from design in The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume himself had
admitted that alternatives to divine design, such as the self-organization of
matter due to unknown powers, were far less plausible. Hume even anticipates the modern design argument by apparently conceding that a library of
self-reproducing books (uncannily similar to a contemporary understanding
of DNA) would surely point to a designing intelligence.
Naturalism, therefore, could not hope to gain a strong foothold until the
argument from design was unseated. Two major factors came to the aid of a
naturalistic worldview. The first was the scientific theory of natural selection
proposed in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). After studying
the selective breeding of livestock, the range of species found in the Galapagos, and a variety of fossils and geology, Darwin concluded that the apparent
design of living creatures was really the result of natural causes. In any given
population of creatures, there would always be variation (whose source Darwin did not know) and some creatures would happen to be equipped with
167
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
168
Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
169
See Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, The System of Nature (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press,
1999), chapter XI.
170
Vox Day makes this connection very clear in his The Irrational Atheist (Dallas: Benbella
Books, 2008).

features that gave them an adaptive advantage, increasing their chances of
survival and reproduction. If the source of these features was heritable, then
over time and assuming no great change in the environment, creatures with
those features would tend to predominate in the population. So chance variation and natural selection could produce creatures that looked as if they had
been especially designed to be well-adapted to their environments.
Darwin did not merely propose a “new” scientific theory (in fact, the
idea was not that new, being anticipated by the work of Denis Diderot and
Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus). More important, Darwin proposed a whole
new method for science which removed the need to talk of design, something
which Boyle and Newton had made room for, at least in the background.
While Kepler, Boyle and Newton had recognized three modes of causation—chance, necessity and design—the Darwinian methodology recognized
only two. Many later scientists and philosophers took this as a mandate for
methodological naturalism. According to methodological naturalism, while
scientists can believe in intelligent causes, a truly scientific explanation can
only appeal to the undirected, unintelligent causes of chance, necessity, and
their combination. If this is so, then a complete scientific account of reality can
be given without ever appealing to the intelligent causation of a designing
God.
As Michael Ruse points out, however, Darwin’s theory was not at first
widely accepted and he failed to found “a professionally based area of biological science.”171 This was mainly because Darwin had no mechanism to
explain the variation of creatures, and because many scientists maintained
that there were fixed boundaries between species. While natural selection
might explain variation within a species, it could not account for transitions
between two species. The proposed mechanism came only later in the “Darwinian synthesis” with Mendelian genetics in the 1930’s. With the subsequent
discovery of DNA, and the suggestion that the main source of variation was
mutation and other undirected changes to the instructions in DNA, the modern neo-Darwinian paradigm emerged.
But this entrenchment of a naturalistic theory of the variation of life was
not the only factor that led to the ascendance of naturalism. The other was a
parallel, philosophical development that encouraged an increasing number
of thinkers to believe in scientism, the view that the naturalistic style of science as currently practiced was the only reliable source of knowledge about
the world. The beginnings of this scientism can be seen in the work of the
encyclopedists, who dismissed tradition and revelation in favor of what
unaided, scientific reason could discern. The view was given a further push
by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his magnum opus, The
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that our concepts are only valid of the
world of experience (phenomena) and cannot tell us how the world really is in
171

Darwinism and its Discontents (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24.

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itself (we cannot access the noumena or things in themselves). From this, Kant
concluded that metaphysical speculation about God, souls, and the moral law
could not claim to be knowledge, even though he argued that all of them are
presupposed by practical reason when we think about morality. After Kant,
it seemed to many that science provides knowledge of the empirical world,
but we cannot have knowledge in matters of religion or ethics, the beginnings
of the “fact/value” divide.

it cannot claim to be true by definition and because it is not verifiable by
observation. Therefore, by its own lights, logical positivism is literally meaningless and at best an expression of emotion. And despite its pretensions
to exalt science as the only way of knowing, logical positivism is actually
incompatible with scientific practice, since scientists frequently postulate
unobservable particles and forces to explain what they can observe, and also
rely on unobservable entities like numbers and logical relations to formulate
their theories.

Scientism was given further support by the work of Auguste Comte
(1798–1857), who proposed the philosophy of positivism, according to which
theology and metaphysics were outmoded, and empirical science was the
only rational means of governing human society. Similar views were held
by the Vienna Circle, a group of scientists and philosophers who met at the
University of Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s, including Rudolf Carnap
(1891-1970), Victor Kraft (1880–1975), and Moritz Schlick (1882–1936). These
thinkers advocated an austere empiricist epistemology that came to be known
as logical positivism, according to which traditional metaphysics, religion
and morality were non-cognitive (they could not be known or reasonably
believed), because their statements were not amenable to empirical scientific
investigation.
Logical positivism was popularized by Alfred J. Ayer (1910–1989) in his
highly influential work, Language, Truth and Logic (1936). According to Ayer’s
“verification principle,” a statement is literally meaningful only if is either
true by definition (like ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’) or
verifiable in principle by some empirical observation or test. The consequence
was that the statements of metaphysics, religion and ethics, being neither
true by definition nor empirically testable, were declared to be literally
meaningless. This did not imply that the statements of these disciplines had
no meaning at all. For example, Ayer suggested that since the statements of
ethics are typically expressed with a great deal of passion, perhaps they are
merely disguised, indirect reports of our emotion. According to this view,
known as emotivism, “Murder is wrong” is an expression of a strong feeling
of disapproval for murder, while “Kindness is right” expresses a strong feeling of approval for kindness.
If naturalistic science is content to say that it reveals what can be known
about reality under the limitation of naturalistic assumptions, then, of course,
it is consistent with the existence and operation of supernatural forces which
exceed its ability to explain. But if naturalistic science is combined with scientism, then the conclusion may be drawn that if science cannot detect the
supernatural, then the supernatural does not exist. By similar arguments, not
only miracles but souls, objective moral values, and God Himself are declared
to be unknowable.

But the cultural residue of scientism is still with us in the widespread
assumption that there is no such thing as metaphysical, religious or moral
knowledge. At the practical level of everyday life, this is the legacy of naturalism, which makes people unable to see how what is believed in faith could
be known to be true. It is one reason apologists find it so hard to convince
contemporary people that there is hard evidence for the resurrection as a
historical fact. For many, the resurrection has already been placed in a noncognitive realm, since the assumption is that there could not be evidence for
a supernatural event. Science is by definition naturalistic and if something
cannot be known scientifically, it cannot be known at all. As a result, the
resurrection and other miraculous claims of Christianity are relegated to a
subjective realm accessible only by faith.

6. Science as a profession
Parallel with the rise of the idea that nature is an autonomous machine
governed by purely undirected causes, there was a move away from the idea
that science is a vocation, a way to be a priest in the book of nature, to the
modern idea that science is a profession governed by standards independent
of revelation. It is a revealing fact that this move was in part engineered
by scientific materialists, like Thomas Huxley (1825–1895), who sought to
position modern science as a rival and successor to the Christian church as
a locus of cultural authority. While students of nature were called “natural
philosophers” and “natural theologians” from the time of the scientific revolution until the nineteenth century, the coining of the new term “scientist” by
William Whewell (1794–1866) in 1834,172 signaled the appearance of a new
and independent profession. Clergy who had played a large role in previous
scientific work were supplanted by a newer, more secularized breed of investigators more targeted on serving the needs of the modern, industrialized
state.
[W]hereas previously in many of the scientific disciplines—and
in natural history in particular—clergymen had played a predominant role, this was to change dramatically over the course

In the academic philosophical world, logical positivism has been roundly
rejected because it is self-refuting and is inadequate even to make sense of
science. Logical positivism is self-refuting because, as a philosophical theory,

172
Peter Harrison, “’Priests of the Most High God, with Respect to the Book of Nature’: The
Vocational Identity of the Early Modern Naturalist,” in Menuge, ed., Reading God’s World, 61.

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2016 Convention Workbook