CHALLENGING DAVID K. JOHNSON’S TRUNCATED NATURALISM
In a series of exchanges David K. Johnson has challenged the Argument from Reason as defended by Victor Reppert.[1] As part of that challenge, Johnson has alleged that Reppert has “loaded the die” in terms of defining naturalism to necessarily exclude the mental from the “basic level of reality.” The purpose of this paper is not to defend the Argument from Reason, but, rather, to critically examine Johnson’s conception of naturalism. Johnson’s articulation of naturalism is underdeveloped and lacks appropriate specificity thus allowing him to help himself to ontological realities that do not fit well within more developed and robust conceptions of naturalism.
It will be helpful to consider the description of naturalism provided by Reppert to see that from which Johnson is dissenting. According to Reppert, naturalism can be accurately defined by the following three theses:
(1) At the basic level, reality is mechanistic. What I mean by that is that it lacks intentionality, subjectivity, purposiveness, and normativity. None of these items can enter into a description of reality at the basic level of analysis.[2]
(2) The basic level of analysis (which we typically call the physical level), is causally closed. If a physical event has a cause at time t, it has a physical cause at time t.
(3) Whatever else exists must supervene on the basic level. It is the sort of thing that must be the way it is because the physical is the way it is.[3]
Johnson accepts (2) and (3) as proper elements of naturalism but he is unwilling to grant that (1) is a necessary component of naturalism. Johnson alleges that Reppert has “rigged the debate” by choosing a definition of naturalism “that demanded it exclude the mental from the basic level and then condemned naturalism for doing exactly that.”[4] In response, Johnson provides his own definition of naturalism:
As the name suggests, naturalism is simply the denial of the supernatural. The naturalist thinks that only the natural world exists. But since, as we’ve seen, the mental is not necessarily supernatural, and thus could be a part of the natural world, the naturalist can believe (without contradiction) that minds exist—even on the basic level.[5]
Johnson adds, “In reality, nature is simply the universe.” This loose definition of naturalism allows Johnson to posit that the mental (with its intentionality, subjectivity, purposiveness, and normativity) is simply a part of the natural world.[6]
Such a loose definition of naturalism is open to the charge of being underdeveloped. Simply saying that naturalism is the denial of the supernatural is not enough. Further specifications about the conditions of naturalism need to be acknowledged. J. P. Moreland has sought to uncover the inner logic that a robust naturalism ought to affirm. He writes:
Intellectually responsible naturalists cannot merely deny God’s existence. Additionally, they must provide an account of what naturalists ought to hold regarding epistemological commitments, a broad creation story (the Grand Story) about how all entities have come-to-be, and a resulting ontology such that all entities can be located in the Grand Story as certified by naturalist epistemological commitments.[7]
Moreland’s three components—epistemology, Grand Story, and ontology—more fully map out the contours and boundaries to which naturalism is constrained. In that light, it will be helpful to further unpack Moreland’s three components with an eye to seeing in what ways Johnson’s articulation of naturalism falls short.
Moreland’s first component concerns the epistemology upon which the naturalist is relying. The key element here is reliance upon empirical science with a methodology that is third-person in perspective and in which “the entities justified by it are capable of exhaustive description from a third-person perspective.”[8] This dependence upon science is recognized by many naturalists as a defining element of naturalism. For instance, Graham Oppy, in an essay seeking to define naturalism, offers the following definition:
Naturalism is the claim that: (a) there none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal powers (“natural reality exhausts causal reality”); and (b) well-established science is our touchstone for identifying causal entities and causal powers.[9]
This inclusion of science in the conception of naturalism is pervasive.[10] Indeed, as Charles Taliaferro notes, “The jewel in the crown for the case of naturalism’s superiority over theism lies in the success of the natural (physical) science.”[11] It is precisely contemporary science with its basis in physics that is alleged to give naturalism its explanatory power of theism in that mechanistic explanations can consistently and comprehensively displace teleological explanations.[12]
It is not only science as a methodology which is crucial for naturalism but it also necessary to note that the “scientific theories that are paradigm cases of epistemic/explanatory success (e.g., the atomic theory of matter, evolutionary biology) employ combinatorial modes of explanation.”[13] Moreland further notes, that “any entity in the naturalist ontology should exhibit an ontological structure analyzable in terms that are isomorphic with such modes of explanation.”[14] This means that naturalists ought not simply posit brute entities which are not, in principle, capable of explanation in terms of combinatorial modes of explanation.
Moreland’s second component of naturalism concerns what he calls the “Grand Story.” The Grand Story refers to the account of how things came to be. Usually, this starts with the Big Bang and moves through time with the development of planets (with specific focus on Earth), living organisms, animal life, and a culmination with human life with its attendant consciousness. This developmental story is one in which the increasing complexity of life forms is produced through mereological combination. Again, the atomic theory of matter and biological evolution are seen as paradigmatic cases of such mereological combination. Furthermore, “the Grand Story is constituted by bottom-up, event causality, eschewing irreducible teleology and agent causation in which the first relatum of the causal relation is substance and not an event.”[15] If there is to be any property of the mental with its attendant intentionality, subjectivity, purposiveness, and normativity, then such will have to be an emergent property which is “dependent upon [and] necessitated by their subvenient physical states constituting the Grand Story.”[16]
Moreland’s third component of naturalism concerns the ontology that is most consistent with the first two components—naturalism’s epistemology and its Grand Story. Moreland distinguishes between “strong” and “weak” naturalism. The former accepts a strong version of physicalism whereas the latter is willing to embrace various forms of emergent properties. But acknowledging the reality of emergent properties raises the “location problem”—where to locate such entities in the naturalistic ontology considering the Grand Story. Moreland appeals to the work of naturalist philosopher Frank Jackson. Jackson argues that a naturalist must either find a way to locate a problematic entity (such as mental properties) in the naturalistic ontology or else eliminate it.[17] Moreland, thus, specifies the constraints provided by the naturalistic ontology:
a) Entities should conform to the naturalist epistemology.
b) Entities should conform to the naturalist Grand Story.
c) Entities (1) should bear a relevant similarity to those found in chemistry and physics or (2) be capable of one-to-one or one-to-many correlation with entities in chemistry/physics or (3) depend necessarily on entities in chemistry/physics.[18]
Moreland notes that the first disjunct of (c) follows nicely from (a) and (b). Genuinely emergent properties will not fit this first disjunct. However, when consider such emergent properties, the second and third disjuncts of (c) will fail to satisfy (a) and (b).
With this tripartite construal of naturalism, we can begin to examine Johnson’s version of naturalism and his defense of its consistency with adopting mental properties as an element of such naturalism. To define naturalism as merely the denial of the supernatural, as Johnson does, is too clumsy a definition to properly outline the boundaries of demarcation. By failing to consider the interrelationships between the epistemological method of science, the explanatory backstory of the Grand Story, and the resultant ontological constraints, Johnson’s appeal to naturalism’s consistency with the mental at a basic level seems ad hoc.[19] It is not sufficient for Johnson to simply stipulate that mental properties are not supernatural, therefore they are natural. As Thomas Nagel notes, any explanation of consciousness “will have two elements: an ahistorical constitutive account of how certain complex physical systems are also mental, and a historical account of how such systems arose the universe from the beginning.”[20] Johnson fails to adequately consider both the ahistorical and historical elements Nagel mentions.
Consider, first, the historical element. This correlates with Moreland’s component of the Grand Story. Johnson offers no explanation of how his view of the mental at a basic level coheres with the Grand Story with its combinatorial modes of explanation based on the atomic theory of matter and evolution. He fails to recognize these as naturalistic constraints to which his theory should take heed. Regarding the ahistorical element Nagel mentioned, Johnson, again, fails to adequately address the key concerns of the location problem given the ontological constraints posed by naturalism. To see this, consider Moreland helpful distinction two different meaning for the word “natural.” The first is to recognize something as natural if is regular or normal. “In this sense, to say that mental states are natural is to say simply that they are regularly correlated with physical states or that they occur normally.”[21] The other meaning of natural “means ‘not surprising or puzzling, at home and not odd.’ In this sense, to say that mental states are natural is to say their appearance is not surprising or odd, but rather quite at home, given the rest of a naturalist creation story (the Grand Story) and ontology.”[22] Johnson operates with the first sense of natural regarding the mental. The mental is correlated with a physical base by a relation of supervenience. But this is not enough. There is the ontological element to be considered. As Moreland argues:
In this sense, the naturalness of a postulated entity is a function of its relationship to the ontology of the overall theory of which it is a part. The types of entities postulated, along with the sorts of properties they possess and the relations into which they enter, should be at home with other entities in the theory, and, in this sense, be natural for the theory.[23]
Johnson fails to consider this sense of naturalness and arbitrarily posits the mental as a basic reality.
Johnson does raise the issue of supervenience of the mental on the physical but his discussion here is flawed. Johnson writes:
According to naturalistic theories which hold to mind/brain supervenience, human minds are dependent upon their physical substrate: the brain. On such naturalistic theories, human brains cannot exist without producing the minds they do, and human minds (like mine and yours) cannot exist without their corresponding human brains.[24]
Simply stating that human minds supervene on the physical substrate of the brain does not explain much of anything. As Jaegwon Kim notes, “the bare statement that a family of properties supervenes on another does not tell us much. For it to be philosophically informative and enlightening we must know the deeper relation that grounds and explains why supervenience holds between these two sets of properties.”[25] Furthermore, the property of the mental that Johnson is arguing for includes, as has been repeatedly stated, the following features: intentionality, subjectivity, purposiveness, and normativity.
It is important to keep in mind that there are two kinds of supervenience. The first is structural property supervenience “which is constituted by a configurational pattern of subvenient parts, properties, relations, and events. It is not a new kind of property; it is merely a new pattern of subvenient entities.”[26] The description of the mental as acknowledged by Johnson shows that this kind of structural supervenience is not under consideration. Rather, it must be a case of emergent property supervenience in which the properties are “completely unique, new kinds of properties different from those that characterize their subvenient bases. Accordingly, emergent supervenience (ES) depicts the supervenient property as a simple, novel property different from and not composed of subvenient entities.”[27] Given this status (of the mental properties as emergent properties dependent upon a physical base) how are such emergent properties possible given the inner logic of naturalism as outlined above? Simply positing the mental as a brute fact seems problematic and undermines the epistemic methodology of the search for scientific explanations. As Taliaferro argues, “some strategies for helping oneself to ostensibly nonscientific objects without abandoning naturalism seem strained.”[28] Simply appealing to persons who have such emergent supervenient properties in their system and who are also considered “naturalists” does not answer the charge of incoherent fittedness.[29]
David Johnson’s conception of naturalism as being consistent with mental properties is underdeveloped and only gains traction because it does not pay attention to the parameters and constraints of a fully developed conception of naturalism. Considering naturalism’s epistemology of science, its Grand Story, and its ontology, renders problematic Johnson’s easy and facile acceptance of mental properties as consistent with naturalism.
References
Ganssle, Gregory. “Fine Tuning and the Varieties of Naturalism,” Religious Studies 47.1
2011: 59-71.
Goff, Philip. “Panpsychism” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta,
accessed December 4, 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/.
Hasker, William. “What Is Naturalism? And Should We Be Naturalists?” Philosophia Christi
15.1 (2013): 21-34.
Johnson, David Kyle. “Retiring the Argument from Reason: Another Reply to Reppert,”
Philosophia Christi 20.2 (2018): 541-563.
Kim, Jaegwon. “Emergence: Core Ideas and Issues,” Synthese 151.3 (2006): 547-559.
Moreland, J. P. “Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness,” Faith and Philosophy 29.1
(2012): 70-83.
Moreland, J. P. “Wielenberg and Emergence: Borrowed Capital on the Cheap,” in God and
Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, ed. Adam Lloyd Johnson, 93-114. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature
Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Oppy, Graham. “Naturalism and Naturalness: A Naturalist’s Perspective,” in The Naturalness
of Belief: New Essays on Theism’s Rationality, eds. Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro, 3-16. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.
“Quick Facts on IIT (The Leading Theory of Consciousness,” Mind Matter News [no author]
(May 20, 2021), accessed December 4, 2021, https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/quick-facts-on-iit-the-leading-theory-of-consciousness/.
Reppert, Victor. “Extending the Debate on the Argument from Reason: A Further Response
to David K. Johnson,” Philosophia Christi 20.2 (2018): 517-539.
Taliaferro, Charles. “Is Naturalism Natural?” in The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on
Theism’s Rationality, eds. Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro, 19-31. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.
[1] The focus of this essay will be the recent exchange in Philosophia Christi 20.2 (2018)—Victor Reppert, “Extending the Debate on the Argument from Reason: A Further Response to David K. Johnson,” 517-539; David Kyle Johnson, “Retiring the Argument from Reason: Another Reply to Reppert,” 541-563. This is the continuation of a debate started in C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con, ed. Gregory Bassham (Boston: Brill, 2015): Victor Reppert, “Pro: The Argument from Reason Defended,” 75-89; David Kyle Johnson, “Con: Naturalism Undefeated,” 91-104; Reppert, “Reply to David Kyle Johnson,” 105-112; Johnson, “Reply to Reppert,” 113-120.
[2] Reppert’s full description of this point includes the following: “This definition of mechanistic is neutral between determinism and indeterminism at the basic level. It can be chaotic or rigidly determined by physical law. As long as the above four elements of the mental are missing from it, it is mechanistic in the sense required.”
[6] Johnson seeks to supplement his case for his version of naturalism by appealing to other thinkers who have embraced “basic level mental causality”: Thales, David Chalmers, and Giulio Tononi. Johnson, “Retiring the Argument from Reason,” 546-550. These thinkers will be briefly examined in a footnote below.
[7] J. P. Moreland, “Wielenberg and Emergence: Borrowed Capital on the Cheap,” in God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, ed. Adam Lloyd Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2020), 94.
[9] Graham Oppy, “Naturalism and Naturalness: A Naturalist’s Perspective,” in The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on Theism’s Rationality, eds. Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 4.
[10] Greggory Ganssle provides a short catena of definitions of naturalism which bears this out. See his “Fine Tuning and the Varieties of Naturalism,” Religious Studies 47.1 (2011), 59-60.
[11] Charles Taliaferro, “Is Naturalism Natural?” in The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on Theism’s Rationality, eds. Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 23.
[12] The distinction between “contemporary physics” (which is almost certainly inconclusive) and a future “completed physics” (which is currently indeterminate) and the problems for defining an “event” can be overcome to some degree by “noting some extremely general characteristics that apply to the explanation of physics as we know it and also, arguably, to any legitimate successor thereof.” William Hasker notes that a characteristic would be that explanations are nonteleological in nature. He adds, “That our science of physics should come to include teleology on a fundamental level seems impossible; a science that did that would be a different science entirely.” William Hasker, “What Is Naturalism? And Should We Be Naturalists?” Philosophia Christi 15.1 (2013), 26.
[18] Moreland, “Wielenberg and Emergence: Borrowed Capital on the Cheap,” 99—I have added the numbering in (c) to delineate the disjuncts.
[19] Moreland notes, “The notion of ‘being ad hoc” is notoriously difficult to specify precisely. It is usually characterized as an intellectually inappropriate adjustment of a theory whose sole epistemic justification is to save the theory from falsification. Such an adjustment involves a new supposition to a theory not already implied by its other features.” J. P. Moreland, “Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness,” Faith and Philosophy 29.1 (2012), 78.
[20] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54.
[21] Moreland, “Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness,” 76.
[22] Moreland, “Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness,” 76.
[23] Moreland, “Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness,” 77.
[29] Johnson utilizes this approach by seeking to enlist several “naturalists who embrace basic level mental causation.” He mentions the ancient philosopher Thales and two contemporary philosophers: David Chalmers and Giulio Tononi. All these examples ultimately fail in that all are found to be variants of or heavily leaning toward panpsychism. A brief word about these thinkers is all that can be broached here. First, regarding Thales, Johnson acknowledges that there is a debate about how to characterize his view. Some have argued that Thales fits more into a panpsychism position—see Philip Goff, “Panpsychism—section 1” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta, accessed December 4, 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/. Two further considerations about Thales should urge caution in using him as an example in the manner Johnson does: (1) the fragmentary nature of the written sources about Thales views and (2) Thales was operating within a different conception of reality significantly different from the Grand Story of today’s naturalism. Johnson’s use of David Chalmers is likewise problematic. Chalmers is often appealed to as one who holds to robust naturalism with irreducible mental properties—Erik Wielenberg and Graham Oppy are two additional examples. The problem with this has been pointed out by J. P. Moreland: “However, Chalmers’ approach is a version of panpsychism, and it is ‘natural’ in only two senses: it is not theistic and it establishes ‘regular and normal’ connections between the relevant states. But it is not natural in the sense that panpsychist mental entities are odd and not at home in a physicalist, naturalist ontology, nor can their existence be adequately explained by the Grand Story with its combinatorial processes, a point that Chalmers acknowledges.” J. P. Moreland, “Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness,” 79-80. Regarding Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), it has also been seen as panpsychist in nature. A proponent of IIT, Christof Koch, has noted its panpsychist character. He has written, “One line of argument takes the principles of integrated information theory (IIT) to their logical conclusion. Some level of experience can be found in all organisms, it says, including perhaps in Paramecium and other single-cell life forms. Indeed, according to IIT, which aims to precisely define both the quality and the quantity of any one conscious experience, experience may not even be restricted to biological entities but might extend to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless — a pleasing and parsimonious conclusion about the makeup of the universe.” Quoted in “Quick Facts on IIT (The Leading Theory of Consciousness,” Mind Matter News [no author] (May 20, 2021), accessed December 4, 2021, https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/quick-facts-on-iit-the-leading-theory-of-consciousness/.
