LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 215

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

are best explained by postulating a soul.190 Most of the time, however, scientists are not attempting such a grand explanation, but are merely focusing
on the local and proximal causes of observed events which, unsurprisingly,
are typically physical.191 So again, the findings of such limited inquiries are
typically irrelevant to the existence of the soul. When scientists (more usually,
materialist philosophers) claim that science has somehow disproved the existence of the soul, we should ask whether their methods of investigation were
capable of detecting the soul’s presence or absence in the first place.
In the case of objective moral values, a great deal of confusion has been
caused by a systematic ambiguity in the contemporary usage of “value.”192
The ancients spoke of virtues as something knowable and objective that
would promote human flourishing. Using “value” in this sense, we can
talk of justice, goodness or rightness as being just as real as mountains and
gravitation. But today, we tend to focus more on the psychological process of
evaluation, a process which results in our valuing something. Thus for us a
“value” is a subjective, personal possession: it characterizes not how valuable
something is, but how much we value it.
As a result, when neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists provide accounts of the origin of “morality,” it is easy for them to confuse two
quite different questions.193 These theories typically try to explain the neuroanatomical194 features correlated with moral cognition (such as the prefrontal
cortex, vital to our self-control) or to suggest an evolutionary origin for the
moral sense.195 But this only looks at values in the subjective, psychological
sense: it concerns how and why we tend to think and feel some things are good

190
For example, see Baker and Goetz, eds., The Soul Hypothesis; Moreland, The Recalcitrant
Imago Dei; David Barnett, “You Are Simple,” in Robert C. Koons and George Bealer, eds., The
Waning of Materialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 161–174; E. J. Lowe, Personal
Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and
Richard Swinburne, Mind, Brain, and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
191

For an excellent discussion of this point, see Goetz and Taliaferro, Naturalism, chapter 2.

192
A good study of the decline of virtue language is Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Demoralization
of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Knopf, 1995).
193

A good example of this confusion is Christopher Boehm’s recent book, The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012). Boehm’s evolutionary account of how
humans allegedly came to value things is presented as an account of the evolution of morality,
as if actions became good or evil when we came to think of them in a certain way. By contrast, in
Scripture, the validity of God’s moral law is never made dependent on anyone’s recognition of
that validity. Indeed whole nations can be wrong, following false gods and mistaken moral and
religious beliefs, and God judges them because of their failure to acknowledge His moral law.
194
Neuroanatomy is that specialized branch of anatomy that studies the various functional
components of the human brain and nervous system.

or bad, right or wrong, but it has nothing to do with what actually is good or
bad, right or wrong.
If by morality we mean a moral law—a system of objectively binding
obligations and duties—these accounts have nothing to do with morality.
These theories at most may tell us something of the secondary causes that
have shaped our moral faculties and that play a role in our moral cognition.
This by itself tells us nothing about whether or not there is, beyond these
secondary causes, an objective moral law according to which some of these
thoughts and feelings are correct and some are not. As C. S. Lewis argues,
such “an account may (or may not) explain why men do in fact make moral
judgments. It does not explain how they could be right in making them.”196
It is only if the accounts claim to give a sufficient, materialistic account
of the moral law itself that they could hope to show that the moral law is not
transcendent. But this appears to be a serious case of overreach: materialistic
science is equipped to tell us about what is and about what in fact happens,
but it cannot tell us what should be or what ought to happen. To claim otherwise is to commit the naturalistic or “is/ought fallacy,” where one moves
illicitly from what in fact occurs in nature to a conclusion about what ought
to occur. In particular, scientific facts about why and how we value certain
things cannot tell us whether we should value them. The mere fact that we
value something in the psychological sense does not show that it is valuable.
For example, a person may psychologically value a poisoned apple as food,
but it does not follow that the apple is valuable as nourishment.
So in all of these cases, thoughtful Christians in the sciences should guard
against the ideological appropriation of science—the attempt to make science
say more than it really can. To the extent that much of science restricts itself
to secondary causes within nature, it is incapable of making pronouncements
on transcendent matters like God, the soul, and objective moral values.
The illusion that it can make such pronouncements often derives from an
unconscious commitment to scientism, an ideology often associated with
materialism.

b. Scientism
Scientism is a philosophical handmaiden of materialism. While
materialism is a metaphysical claim (about what exists), scientism is an epistemological claim (about what we can know). In its strong form, scientism
asserts that materialistic science is the only means of knowing what is real.197
Materialists typically claim that science can only disclose material causes of
material effects. Notice that this is much stronger than saying that most of the

196

C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 36.

195
For example, see James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993); Larry
Arnhart’s Darwinian Natural Right (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); and
Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

197
A weaker version of scientism admits that there may be other sources of evidence, but asserts that materialistic science is the most authoritative and hence best source for anything we
can confidently call knowledge.

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time this is what science does, which is uncontroversial. Still, even if science
could never provide evidence for immaterial entities such as God, the soul,
and objective moral values, we have just seen that this by itself has no bearing
on whether or not these entities exist. Only if this (alleged) fact is combined
with scientism in its strong form are we led to conclude that knowledge of
such immaterial entities is impossible. If science is the only way to know what
is real, and science can only discover the material, then immaterial entities are
unknowable.

do.199 These results hold regardless of how the computer is physically implemented at the hardware level and are not obtained by interacting with actual
physical computers—indeed, some of the results preceded the existence of
any physical, general purpose digital computer. Thus this knowledge of the
limitations of physical systems appears to transcend anything that could be
known by interacting with material causes, including physical computers
themselves. Also it seems that we know some things—that we are selves, that
we can reason, that we have free will and moral responsibility—by introspection, by direct, first-person access to an immaterial mind or soul. We do not
know such things by the impersonal observations of materialistic science,
such as observations and manipulations of brains. It is hard to read the works
of the great ancient and medieval philosophers (such as Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine and Aquinas) and deny that they contain any knowledge about the
nature of moral virtues and their connection to human flourishing, despite
the fact that moral virtues are not materialistic entities.

How should thoughtful Christians respond to such an argument? One
response is an in-principle objection: full-strength scientism is internally
incoherent, for two reasons. First, scientism is not science—materialistic or
otherwise—but a philosophical claim about science. If that is so, and materialistic science exhausts what is knowable, then no one can know that scientism
is true. Second, even within science, scientific theories require for their
formulation the existence of abstract objects like numbers and mathematical
relations. Abstract objects, however, are not material objects and (as many
philosophers argue) they are not “the sorts of properties whose instances
can stand in physical causal relations with the brain.”198 These theories are
themselves collections of propositions held to be at least approximately true,
and propositions (and arguably, truth itself) also seem to be abstract entities
and hence not physical.
If this is right, and if scientism is true, then scientific theories are not
themselves knowable because they involve non-materialistic metaphysical
commitments. On the other hand, if we can know that a scientific theory is
(at least approximately) true, then it must be that we can have knowledge of
the non-material entities that are presupposed by stating that theory and by
attempting to verify or falsify its claims, in which case scientism is false. But if
scientism is rejected and non-physical objects are allowed as potential items
of knowledge, then there is no reason to exclude the possibility of knowing
God, the soul, and objective moral values.
Another response is an in-fact objection: in fact, it is highly implausible
to claim that materialistic science is the only legitimate source of knowledge.
Full-strength scientism appears to be an example of intellectual imperialism,
in which one discipline attempts to claim a monopoly on knowledge by delegitimizing other sources. Yet it is hard for anyone well-versed in great poetry,
plays, novels, etc., to believe that none of this literature provides knowledge
about the human condition. Similarly, mathematicians and logicians seem to
provide knowledge that is not dependent on material causes. For example,
Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and many other mathematical logicians proved
theorems which show that there are some things that no digital computer can

198

Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 149.

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A third response is a practical objection: if something is true, coherent and
important, we would expect it to be possible to live by it. Yet no one can live
as if scientism is true. In our ordinary dealings with others, we must generally assume that they are enduring, rational persons with free will and moral
responsibility, and we think of ourselves in the same way. If we do not think
of people in this way, we can no longer make rational sense of their behavior.
Yet enduring, rational, free, moral beings do not seem to be merely material
objects. Purely materialistic science gives no evidence of the existence of such
beings. So it seems we must assume we can know something about people
that we cannot know if scientism is true. Further, even within science, scientists must act as if they know what numbers, truth, consistency, and logical
implications are, but abstract objects (like numbers) and relations (like truth,
consistency, and logical implication) are not material entities.
Finally, and most important, the thoughtful Christian should reject scientism on scriptural grounds, since it is directly incompatible with the biblical
teaching that man has a natural knowledge of God.200 According to Romans
1:19–20, we can know of God’s existence and attributes from studying nature,
so our knowledge must not be limited to the physical causes of physical phe199
Gödel's first incompleteness theorem shows that for any computer which incorporates the
axioms of basic arithmetic, there will be statements true in that system which the computer
cannot prove. His second theorem on consistency shows that if the computer is consistent it
will not be able to prove that fact. Alan Turing showed that there cannot be a general purpose
computer which can tell whether or not an arbitrary computer will ever halt (e.g., it cannot tell
whether or not it contains an infinite loop). This is known as the “halting problem.” Gödel's
paper is available in Jean van Heijenoort, ed., From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical
Logic, 1879–1931, 3rd ed., (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Alan Turing's
paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936),”
is in The Essential Turing: Ideas that Gave Birth to the Computer Age, B. Jack Copeland, ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
200
For a discussion of the reality and limits of the natural knowledge of God, see the CTCR’s
report on The Natural Knowledge of God in Christian Confession and Christian Witness.

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2016 Convention Workbook