A Fly on the Wall at the Benjamin Cain and David Bentley Hart Debate on Atheism vs Theism

Usplash: Chris Curry image

I have occasionally read Medium writer Benjamin Cain’s screeds against religion, theism, and Christianity in particular. Even though he’s obviously intelligent and educated in philosophy, one does get a bit tired of watching him accuse theists of being absurd, medieval, infantile, outdated, and all forms of stupid for disagreeing with him about God. One would think the strength of one’s arguments should be sufficient without resorting to language that displays such disrespect for the opinions of others.

When I picked up David Bentley Hart’s books attacking materialism as a belief system and supporting classical theism, I thought perhaps Mr. Cain had met his match. Hart often similarly refers to positions he disagrees with as absurd, illogical, oblivious, etc. Cain might characterize Hart’s writing as a screed, but I think most would not. He may stoop a bit low occasionally, but he presents a lengthy argument with multiple aspects as to why he considers the atheist/physicalist position to be untenable. The books I am referring to are The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, and the in-depth conversation between Greek gods about materialism, consciousness, etc., called All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life.

So when I saw that Cain had taken on Hart in a couple of articles on Medium, I was eager for a lively and substantive debate. I got lively, but unfortunately not too much of substance. Hart makes some strong arguments against naturalism. (Cain prefers that name for the philosophical/metaphysical belief that nothing exists except the physical reality describable by science, so I will use that instead of the close synonyms physicalism or materialism.) I was eager to read Cain’s rebuttal of them, but, true to form, he fails to take them as seriously as many other even atheistic philosophers have. He again appears to think he can easily dismiss substantial arguments by applying terms like absurd, medieval, classical, outdated, ancient, etc.

Cain has a good following and the comments on his takedown of Hart convey a sense of the singing of a smug but joyful choir. One questioned the motivation of apologists like Hart, concluding that they must be grifters, doing it for the money, and then, of course, Donald Trump inevitably comes up. Cain has intimated that much of his emotional animosity to Christianity has to do with the political beliefs of some Christians. In response to the comment about Trump and grifting he makes a distinction between conservative and liberal believers who are not as “obnoxious or dangerous as ‘conservative’ ones.”

Cain may not be aware that liberal or mainline Christians are considerably more likely to be politically engaged, and mostly in left-oriented politics, than the far-right Christians he so passionately despises. He might also be surprised that according to the Wikipedia entry on Hart, he is a Christian Socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Cain may have found in Hart someone with whom he can agree politically, but starkly disagree with regarding theism and naturalism. He seems to think Hart is obnoxious and dangerous so Hart may upset Cain’s liberal-conservative equation.

Introducing the arguments

Somewhat strangely, Cain begins his refutation of Hart by calling on a favored image of a Christian believer. This target Christian is a woman who believes because she has had some kind of religious experience, who is ignorant of science and philosophy, and who believes in God because she was raised in the tradition and blindly follows the teachings of her elders.

This is a bit ironic in that in the subtitle he refers to Hart’s position as a “caricature of naturalism.” Is this not a caricature of the theistic believer? Why introduce her when Hart is his target? Presumably, it is a warm-up move to set the stage by saying here is how ignorant these Christians are, and now let’s talk about another believer, Hart. But, Cain does grant that Hart is a more sophisticated apologist than this caricature of a theistic believer.

Why Hart is dismissive of naturalism

Hart minces no words in expressing his view that atheism is an untenable philosophical position. While he considers it “the only fully consistent alternative to belief in God” he says it suffers from a fundamental problem:

“When I say that atheism is a kind of obliviousness to the obvious, I mean that if one understands what the actual philosophical definition of ‘God’ is in most of the great religious traditions, and if consequently one understands what is logically entailed in denying that there is any God so defined, then one cannot reject the reality of God tout court without embracing an ultimate absurdity.”

Responding to this, Cain reverts to form: name calling and caricaturing. He says Hart is “reconstructing a basis for medieval Christian sanctimony and condescension,” needed, he says,

“so that Christian leaders needn’t have troubled themselves about burning heretics and witches. They demonized nonbelievers so they could assure themselves that totalitarian medieval Christendom wasn’t a travesty.”

Does Cain think that anyone buying Hart’s argument is well down the slippery slope to witch burning? In this response and in others defending atheism, Cain repeatedly dismisses arguments for God as “medieval,” somehow believing that brilliant thinkers in previous eras had nothing worthwhile to say. This is a chronocentric fallacy.

If Cain is dismissive of Hart’s “medievalism” and classical argument, Hart in turn is dismissive of the tendency among “late-moderns” to believe the technological success of science gives them some great advantage in addressing these philosophical questions:

“We late moderns can be especially prone to mistake our technological mastery over nature for a sign of some larger mastery over reality, some profounder and wider grasp of the principles of things, which allows us to regard the very different intellectual concerns and traditions of earlier ages or of less ‘advanced’ peoples as quaintly charming or attractively exotic or deplorably primitive or unintelligibly alien, but certainly not as expressions of a wisdom or knowledge superior to our own.”

But to Cain Hart is not only medieval, he is also engaging in pop psychology. Hart, Cain says:

“…contents himself with his pop psychological personal attack, to match the lack of Christian power in the late-industrial age.”

Personal attack? Cain is taking Hart’s argument against atheism and naturalism personal? And do I hear a pot name-calling a kettle?

Hart has two primary bases for making this strong claim of atheism’s obliviousness: the need for an explanation for being and existence, and the self-defeating belief that random particles in an evolutionary scheme can create the rational function of mind. Cain does get around to responding to these two claims, but first he takes great issue with Hart’s “caricature of naturalism.”

Is Hart’s view of nature a caricature?

Hart attacks naturalism as a metaphysical position by saying that nothing in science can confirm by argument or empirical proof that nature is a closed system as naturalism insists. He says the idea that natural explanations are totally sufficient in explaining everything is an arbitrary judgment. Naturalism, therefore, he says “can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice.”

Cain’s response is to say, strangely, that naturalism is not a metaphysical position. He insists that what is called “methodological materialism,” the basis on which science must operate, is what is being addressed.

“According to the option Hart misses, naturalism is best conceived of as pragmatic, not metaphysical. The pragmatic view of naturalness is called “methodological naturalism,” which means that naturalism is a program, rather like a hypothesis that’s prudent for us to try out until it fails.”

Methodological naturalism is a necessary position to pursue scientific discovery because one must assume causes operating in a closed universe to find how such causes can produce the observed results. But there are a great many theists in the past and even today who are great scientists using methodological materialism without adopting it as a metaphysical position. Naturalism as a metaphysical position says that there are not and can not be anything other than causes operating in a closed universe. Cain says that naturalism is not metaphysical, instead:

“Naturalism would be inductively or abductively established, as a generalization that technically outstrips the finite observations of naturalness that have been made.”

He is not bothered by this “technical outstripping.” This denial of naturalism as a metaphysical position is a strong outlier (I’m trying to avoid saying absurd). Grok3 explains that philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, and Daniel Dennett all agreed that naturalism is a metaphysical position. Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality, such as what it means to exist. Grok summarized:

“In short, materialism is widely regarded as a metaphysical position because it makes a foundational claim about the nature of reality. Philosophers across history — whether materialists like Hobbes and Dennett or critics like Descartes and Hegel — would generally agree on this classification, even if they differ on its truth.”

Then, Cain says that the metaphysical position of theism depends on “mere intuitions” while naturalism is based on the success of science. We’ve heard this trope before: since science has been so effective at discovering facts about the universe, any argument against naturalism is “infantile:”

“So indeed, Hart has it backwards: it’s manifestly the classical theist who’s being infantile in trusting the sufficiency of our mere intuitions, the kind that have been overturned by an armada of counterintuitive scientific discoveries, such as that all terrestrial species are genetically related due to their common origin.”

This is interesting since philosopher Hart is hardly basing his arguments for theism on “mere intuition” but on the logic proceeding from existence itself and the rationality of the human mind. However, the intuition of perhaps 99% of all humans who have ever lived that led them to believe in “something more” than what we observe in nature should not be so easily dismissed as infantile. In summary, it’s hard to find in Hart’s argument the “caricature of naturalism” in Cain’s accusation. In responding to Hart’s strong claims, Cain makes the very questionable move of claiming that naturalism is not a metaphysical position but merely an understandable generalization drawn from the great success of science.

The argument from being

Hart’s first major basis for claiming that atheism is untenable and oblivious is the argument from being. Cain includes Hart’s summary statement of his position, which simply argues that the existence of nature itself needs explanation:

“A still more important consideration, however, is that naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.”

Science studies what is. But that leaves out the question of what (or Who) was before what is arrived. Hart’s argument is that something cannot come from nothing. (Amanda Gefter attempted to answer this question from a physics standpoint in her very intriguing book titled *Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn*, succeeding in answering the question by “proving” that physics shows all of reality is an illusion.)

I must admit I find Cain’s response to this argument muddy, inconsistent, and incoherent. He says that Hart’s problem is that he takes metaphysical reasoning too seriously. Huh? What is that supposed to mean? Then, he suggests that Hart makes a “mystical error of rationalism,” the same “error” that Plato supposedly made when he

“…made mountains out of the molehills of all our concepts.”

Leaving aside the temerity involved in pointing to “errors” in Plato’s philosophy, Cain says that just because we count apples and oranges, it doesn’t mean that numbers are abstract objects. Presumably, his answer to the question of whether math was created or discovered would lean toward it being a development of an evolved brain. If this is true, he again runs against the grain of most philosophers who lean to the discovery model.

Regarding inconsistency, he then makes the interesting move of separating atheism from naturalism. He claims that he accepts the supernatural while retaining his naturalism metaphysics (even while denying it is a metaphysical position), and expands the definition of supernaturalism as anything outside the purview of classical, Newtonian physics:

“But suppose there is a metaphysical mystery of nature’s very existence. Can naturalists address that mystery without refuting themselves by resorting to supernatural notions? Of course they can since Hart only strawmans naturalism. A naturalist can be a pragmatist, an existentialist, and even a pantheist. (I’m all four.) Nature includes quantum fluctuations, black holes, and personal minds, which are all virtually supernatural in that they’re not typical subjects of the outdated Newtonian, mechanistic picture of nature.”

“Virtually supernatural?” It’s an interesting take, but is it coherent? The standard definition of naturalism, according to Grok, eliminates any form of supernaturalism. Grok3:

“Naturalism is the philosophical view that everything arises from natural causes and laws, and that there is no supernatural or non-natural realm that influences the world. It emphasizes that the universe is governed by consistent, discoverable principles, and it often rejects the existence of entities like gods, spirits, or anything beyond the natural world. In essence, it’s the belief that reality is fully explicable through nature and science.”

By suggesting that supernaturalism exists within pantheism and the mysteries of today’s quantum physics, he changes the definition of naturalism. Perhaps Cain’s pantheism is consistent with the definition of naturalism that he dismisses, in that there is no separation between God and Nature which means God/Nature has no intention and is not purposefully active in any way. Nature/God is strictly random particles and forces without purpose or direction. A strict pantheist then would be indistinguishable from a naturalist in holding to an entirely closed system. The question of something from nothing then goes away. Everything comes from God because everything is God.

Cain refers to Hart’s view of nature as an archaic “folk conception,” while modern science has transcended the old view of what nature is. His idea that some exotic objects are “supernatural” confuses the definition of naturalism. But, then he says something that seems to contradict his denial of naturalism as metaphysical. The “exotic subjects” he referred to as supernatural [quantum fluctuations, black holes, personal minds]:

“…they’re natural on roughly postmodern grounds, in that we can tell a philosophical story that connects these things in a cohesive metaphysical picture. For instance, we can appeal to the concept of emergence to explain how nature complexifies and evolves novelties.”

Leaving aside that emergence is called a kind of “natural magic,” considering these natural, if exotic, objects fitting into a metaphysical “story,” is inconsistent with his previous position that naturalism is not a metaphysical position.

Other than name-calling and offering a confusing response to the idea that existence or being itself suggests a Source of Being that Hart and other “medievalists” consider the definition of God, in this post Cain only hints at his view of the “nothing” that pre-existed creation. In later post responding to a similar challenge to atheistic belief, Cain wrote:

“Cosmology indicates that the spatiotemporal domain of matter and energy emerged from a subatomic fluctuation of something like a gravitational singularity, so the question is about the origin of the simplest subatomic bits of matter and spacetime that inflated and evolved into the present universe over some billions of years. Whatever mysteries remain to be solved, the point again is that scientists tracked the universe’s origin not directly to nothing, but to much simpler stages and things.”

This is a rather extreme example of Popper’s “promissory materialism.” Cain views this “gravitational singularity” and quantum fluctuations as a way out for naturalists to avoid the question of something from nothing. Amanda Gefter and her father set about the quest to answer that question from a fixed naturalist perspective, and as I explored in a previous post, they decided that nothing was actually something they called the H-state but that ultimately all of reality is an illusion. It seems the way out of the difficult question is to redefine nothing.

That is most certainly what Laurence Krauss did in his 2012 book Something from Nothing. It is widely seen as a failed attempt to answer the big question by redefining nothing as a quantum vacuum with fluctuations that remarkably and mysteriously brought the world into existence. Scientists also pointed out there is no established process for what he claims is the act of creation, and as such it is metaphysical speculation.

Dedicated naturalists and atheists will point out, correctly I believe, that believing that there was an eternal something with embedded and finely-tuned laws is no different from believing in a Creator Being who spoke the universe into existence. But accepting this position puts atheism and theism on similar grounds requiring faith and believing is something quite mysterious, something Cain would likely soundly reject. For theists, the idea of a quantum something from which a universe with intelligent, conscious beings emerged based on the exquisitely fine-tuned laws needed for that to happen fails the Occam test.

What about Darwin’s Horrid Doubt?

The second primary basis for Hart’s criticism of naturalism is the now well-known argument against the existence of the rational function of human minds in a naturalistic world in which evolution is the complete answer to great mysteries. Darwin, the scientific genius that he was, also was intellectually honest in raising a central question arising from the idea of naturalism — that natural processes including evolution can explain everything, including our rational faculties. In a letter he raised his grave doubt:

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

Evolution enables life to respond to environmental conditions. The survival of homo sapiens on the African plain has nothing to do with these creatures’ remarkable ability to envision abstract ideas and arrive at convictions, even truth, through rational thought. In Darwin’s words, how can monkey minds perform this feat?

Cain helpfully provides Hart’s summary of this argument.

“If, moreover, naturalism is correct (however implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could possibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as a whole. Our brains may necessarily have equipped us to recognize certain sorts of physical objects around us and enabled us to react to them; but, beyond that, we can assume only that nature will have selected just those behaviors in us most conducive to our survival, along with whatever structures of thought and belief might be essentially or accidentally associated with them, and there is no reason to suppose that such structures — even those that provide us with our notions of what constitutes a sound rational argument — have access to any abstract “truth” about the totality of things. This yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical precept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could correspond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better, a miracle).”

The distinguished philosopher Alvin Plantinga developed this concern at considerable length in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism. Grok3 helpfully summarized Plantinga’s argument:

“He argues that if human cognitive faculties evolved solely through unguided natural selection (without a purposeful design), there’s no guarantee they would be reliable for producing true beliefs — only beliefs conducive to survival. If our faculties are unreliable, then naturalistic beliefs, including belief in evolution itself, are undermined, creating a self-defeating problem for naturalism. In contrast, if our faculties are designed by God to seek truth, we have a basis for trusting them, including when they lead us to belief in God.”

Atheistic philosophers such as Thomas Nagel have also struggled with this question. Grok concludes:

“Nagel agrees with Plantinga to the extent that he finds materialism inadequate for explaining the existence of rational minds. He argues that the development of consciousness, reason, and value cannot be fully explained by random physical processes alone, aligning with Plantinga’s skepticism about a purely naturalistic account.”

Cain might complain that Nagel, while an atheist, is not a naturalist in the purest sense of the term because he posits natural teleology as a “third way” between theism and naturalism.

Other naturalists like Columbia University physicist Brian Greene have addressed this question as well, such as in his book Until the End of Time. He explains that we essentially have Boltzmann brains –– random collections of particles interacting to create our thoughts and consciousness. He says it is certain in the lengthy time horizon of the universe that this random collection that makes us uniquely us will happen again, maybe multiple times — sort of a naturalist’s version of eternal life, I suppose. But he also struggles with this idea that brains made in this way can arrive at anything reliable:

“If a brain, yours or mine or anyone’s, can’t trust that its memories and beliefs are an accurate reflection of events that happened, then no brain can trust the supposed measurements and observations and calculations that constitute the basis of scientific understanding…the deep skepticism that emerges from the possibility of spontaneous brain formation forces us to be skeptical of the very reasoning that led us to entertain the possibility in the first place.”

Naturalism is true then because some random and purposeless collections of matter called brains determined in the configuration of matter at the Big Bang say it is. Cain dismisses Hart’s argument as circular and “question begging” but other atheists take it far more seriously.

Greene refers to “emergence” as an explanation for consciousness and the mind’s ability to conceive of abstracts and arrive at rational convictions. Emergence appears to me to be a sort of “science of the gaps” term used to wave away questions for which no physical processes can currently explain. Hart says:

“Talk of emergence in purely physical terms, then, really does not seem conspicuously better than talk of magic.”

How does Cain answer a question that most consider a profound debate? Cain says:

“Naturalism rests not just on what evolution made of us, but on what we made of ourselves. Evolution gave us a long genetic leash, as it were, enabling us to explore not just our natural environment but our mental models of possibilities. We figured out that we could test those models’ reliability by imagining scenarios, without having to endanger ourselves by engaging directly with nature. Thus, our thoughts aren’t bound by what’s useful in a strictly evolutionary context. We can think counterfactually and counterintuitively, working off conjecture or speculation.”

That was a nice thing of evolution to do for us: give us a long genetic leash. Evolution which is a process designed to enhance survival naturalism teaches, has given rise to the ability to contemplate the universe, abstract concepts like beauty, and create or discover mathematical truth. The idea that we have the capability of making ourselves seems to me to be a denial of the deterministic and exclusively natural causes required for naturalism. Cain suggests that this remarkable ability, far beyond what is needed to hunt or forage for food or avoid the panther in the bush, arises from natural processes. The idea of making ourselves implies intention which implies mind and free will, which are forbidden in the naturalist view.

Cain does believe that this explanation is sufficient to allay any concerns from his choir about the power of the consciousness and rationality argument. He dismisses Hart’s objection:

“But Hart’s dichotomy is vitiated by his scholastic conception of reason. Sure, the question-begging metaphysical conceit about absolute reason goes hand in hand with theism, but late-modern folks needn’t adopt that archaic rationalism. Again, we can be more pragmatic or ironic about the limits of our rational faculties. A naturalist can indeed affirm an updated view of reason while dispensing with outdated religious confusions and theocratic preoccupations.”

Again, Hart is just being old-fashioned and out of date. And “late-modern folks” like him need not worry about such medieval thinking. Although near the end, Cain allows that naturalism struggles with answering all the questions in such a hand-waving fashion:

“I happen to agree that naturalism entails some absurdities or alienating existential truths. A godless universe is bound to seem strange and even monstrous to social mammals that are inclined to engage with fellow minds.”

In Cain’s dismissive and name-calling approach, this seems a major admission. Maybe he realizes at some level that a God-filled universe would not seem so strange and monstrous to him.