Abstract
This article challenges the claim that the rise of naturalism is devastating to religious belief. This claim hinges on an extreme interpretation of naturalism called scientism, the metaphysical view that science offers an exhaustive account of the real. For those committed to scientism, religious discourse is epistemically illegitimate, because it refers to matters that transcend—and so cannot be verified by—scientific inquiry. This article reconstructs arguments from the phenomenological tradition that seem to undercut this critique, viz., arguments that scientism itself cannot be justified without recourse to matters that transcend scientific inquiry. If this is true, then scientism and religion share a cognitive conundrum: a commitment to truths that cannot in principle be known from our current perspective.
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Notes
Worrall (2004, p. 60).
Papineau (2009).
McDowell (1998, p. 173).
This is J.J.C. Smart’s term. In his (1959), ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’, he argues that mental states must be identified with brain states if they are not to become “nomological danglers”, i.e., entities that play no role in the explanation of behavior.
McDowell, op. cit., p. 173.
Husserl (1965). Henceforth cited in the text as ‘PS’.
Husserl never uses the term scientism, but what he has in his sights is pretty close to ‘bald’ or ‘hard naturalism’, so I will continue to use the term scientism.
Greenberg and Arndt (2011).
Heidegger (1998, p. 84).
Husserl (2012, p. 118).
Husserl’s argument against strong naturalism clearly bears a certain resemblance to Alvin Plantinga’s argument in “An evolutionary argument against naturalism” (1999).
Nagel (1974).
Chalmers (1995).
Heidegger (1965, p. 42/68). [Henceforth cited as BT with German pagination followed by the English].
For an in-depth discussion of the concept of mineness and the essential role that it plays in the possibility of consciousness, see Zahavi (1999).
To my knowledge John Haugeland offers the best defense there is of the claim that existential commitment underwrites all scientific research. See his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (1998).
My discussion of the concept of practical identity here is inspired by Christine Korsgaard’s work (especially The Sources of Normativity, 1996) and Heidegger’s account of the self as “being-in-the-world” Division I of Being and Time (1962). For an illuminating analysis of Heidegger and Korsgaard’s respective conceptions of practical identity, see Crowell (2007).
McDowell (1998, p. 173).
Crowell makes a start at formulating a phenomenological approach to soft naturalism in light of Husserl’s critique of scientism in “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” See his Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (2013).
Yoshimi (2015).
Marion (2002).
Levinas (1987, p.59).
I analyze Marion’s breach of phenomenological method in Burch (2010).
Heidegger (1992, p. 80).
Heidegger (1999, p. 22). [Henceforth cited as OHF].
Husserl (1990b, p. 406).
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Phenomenology has been clarifying first-person phenomena that undermine scientism for over a century now, and it has uncovered too many to address here.
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Burch, M. Religion and scientism: a shared cognitive conundrum. Int J Philos Relig 80, 225–241 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9571-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9571-4