The twisted grammar of the naturalistic fallacy

In assuming nature to be uniquely real, a naturalist proposes that “reality” (or “existence”) means “natural being” and nothing more. Instead of saying, “nature is real,” (or “nature exists,”) a naturalist prefers to says, “reality (or existence) is nature.” Such an utterance has an odd syntax, with the subject and predicate being strangely exchanged, thus twisting the grammar and invalidating it. It is not vague, but rather nonsensical. Such nonsense originates from the awful mistake of reducing a group (here, “beings”) into a member (“natural beings”), or, to use logical terms, equating a universal (here, “reality” or “existence”) to a particular (“natural reality” or “natural existence”). What a naturalist attempts here is to narrow the meaning of reality; this can be called “naturalistic fallacy,” borrowing G. E. Moore’s phrase. It is with this attempt that naturalism becomes unreasonable. Namely, as it is reasonable to conceive of “unnatural” beings, that is, any entities outside the world observed, it is thus unreasonable to assume nature as being unique in reality. In other words, the “world observed” is not equal to (nor does it consume the meaning of) the world of reality. The phrase “natural existence” is a necessary reference to-at least the possibility of-“unnatural existence.” Indeed, against this immediate inquiry of justification, naturalistic discourse does nothing but recede from a logical base. As the famous naturalist Kai Nielsen states, naturalism is nothing but an idea without any idea of foundation. That is to say, naturalism remains as arbitrary as any fantastic speculations about an alien world, as both share the same status of justification.

Hetoric divorced from logic

(a) “Naturalism is the view that only natural objects, kinds, and properties are real.”

As “natural” here is used to mean “of the world observed,” then the use of “only” means that “real” cannot be the proper predicate for the sentence. This statement is odd. To perceive the oddity, imagine (if possible) a man who understands the concept of “color” but is unable to perceive anything except red objects. Had such man said, “Only red is a color,” this is then equal to “All color is red.” Similarly, a naturalist suggests imagining reality as “comprising” (not “including”) nature. Can you imagine yourself answering this question: “Do you know why birds are eagles?”

(b) “Naturalism is the belief that the world is a single system of things or events, every one of which is bound to every other in a network of relations and laws, and outside this natural order there is nothing.”

If one were to ask a naturalist what convinced them to view the world as a single system that excludes unnatural things, they would answer, “The fact that I haven’t seen such things.” Responding thus, they admit the possibility of unnatural realities, which fulfills the meaning of the phrase “outside this natural order” in the statement. If a child asks this naturalist what might happen outside the natural order, how meaningful it is if they reply: “I have no idea” and how meaningless if they reply: “Nothing.” Such a conversation would demonstrate that it is impossible to place nature into “space” as a concept of physics, and that it is certainly not a childish attempt to try to squeeze reality into nature.

Groundless denial of supernatural

(c) “Naturalists reject all such notions of spirits, disembodied souls, non-material personal gods, and more-than-natural agencies. The grounds for the rejection of these notions are a lack of evidence adequate to support these notions.”

Ideas of spirits or souls are referred to as “supernatural” in that they are “ordinarily” not subject to the world observed. This means that they might be subject to the world of phenomena or of experience. There may be (reportedly, are) many experiences regarding supernatural phenomena, like spirits, angels, inspirations, revelations, etc. If this is the case then it would be unreasonable to reject all the relevant human traditions. Just as a momentary sighting of a peculiar insect is sufficient reason for the conviction that there is such a species on earth, the same is true for more peculiar entities. This indicates, as William R. Dennes clearly puts, that naturalists may have no reason to exclude intelligible reference to supernatural. Had a child reported to a naturalist that he had certainly seen a ghost, or that his dead grandfather had related a secret to him in dream, but the naturalist denies the child’s claims, accusing him of lying or dreaming, then the child’s rejection, in turn, of all the stories told and all the advice given by the naturalist that are based on experience would be meaningful.

(d) “Naturalism denies that there are any supernatural or spiritual realities. There are no purely mental substances and there are no supernatural realities beyond nature or transcendent to the world or anything of the sort, or at least we have no sound reasons for believing that there are such realities or perhaps even that there can be such realities. Physical realities, or perhaps as well realities dependent on physical realities, are the only kind of realities there are.”

The problem in the above statement is that the non-existence of supernatural entities cannot be reasonably claimed, let alone proven. Common sense commands that we not deny any possibility unless logically necessary. In logic, the denial of possibility is one of the two greatest mistakes; the other is the refusal of necessity. It seems that a naturalist cannot maintain such mistakes forever as they would necessarily encounter some form of supernatural experience, just as other fellow humans are. In other words, conjectures die away whenever phenomena manifest themselves. A naturalist then cannot be serious in his materialistic position, in denying the most manifest supernatural phenomenon, the soul, the factual manifestation of which is consciousness and the conscience. Therefore, rejecting any “purely mental substance” is a sophistic proposition. The immutable duality of “subject” and “object” always warrants the fact that “soul” is the constant interference of the supernatural into natural. Namely, if “nature” is the object that is observed, “I” am the subject that observes. Here we infer that a naturalist can only pretend to become a materialist at the expense of their own self. As Schopenhauer once wrote, materialism is the philosophy of the “subject” that forgets to give account of himself.

A pointless appeal to natural science

(e) “Naturalism is the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”

If science is claimed, in this approach, to identify reality, that is, to assign by observation what is real and what is not, then science itself is at stake as the objective study of natural reality, merely because it is the concept of reality that justifies observation. Plainly speaking, it is the sense of “real” that qualifies observation, not the opposite. This is why it is meaningful to say, “What we observe is real.” It is impossible to identify anything without having a “prior” conception of reality. In Kant’s dictionary, it is a priori concepts, the most prior of which is “reality,” that ensure all a posteriori notions, which all scientific terms are subject to. Now, upon this logical structure it is meaningful for a child to ask: “Aren’t ghosts real?” as well as for a naturalist to reply: “Certainly, not!” Similarly, natural science asks: “How is natural reality?” and answers: “It is in accordance with observation.” Thus, science admits that the reality of nature needs to be identified by a prior philosophy, a metaphysical notion. This means that natural science normally denounces (scientists must denounce) the awful illusion of scientism, the claim that science is uniquely eligible to identify the reality of the world; it is in regard with this that Wittgenstein warns that “the whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” What the philosopher means is that a scientist is no wiser about nature than anyone else when he steps out of his laboratory.

A final word

One may gather from this brief analysis that naturalism, in its absolute form, is destined to struggle forever, if not pass away, with the irremovable fallacy of reductionism. A naturalist may understand that to avoid from this destiny they must abandon the vacuous attempt to “invent” a logic for the world, rather maintaining the language on the grammar of possibility when assuming metaphysics, by stating, for instance, “Nature may be autonomous; who knows?” Such normalization turns naturalism, as Kai Nielsen states, into a game that might be called “fallibilism” and must be played without any confidence or hope. As a result, for anybody who wants to take metaphysics seriously for their ultimate concerns, as Michael C. Rea emphasizes, there is no such an option as naturalism.

Erkan Mazhar Kurt has a PhD in theology. He is an executive member of The Institute of Interfaith Dialog, Houston, Texas.

Notes

1. See, William Ray Dennes, Some Dilemmas of Naturalism, Columbia University Press, New York 1960, p. 80.

2. Kai Nielsen, Naturalism without Foundations, Prometheus Books, New York 1996, p. 35.

3. See, Michael C. Rea, World without Design: The Ontological Consequences

of Naturalism, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2002, p. 56. (These and the following emphases are mine for attention at conceptual relations.)

4. See, ibid, p. 55.

5. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (tr. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1961, p. 149.

6. Sterling P. Lamprecht, The Metaphysics of Naturalism, Meredith Publishing

Company, New York 1967, p. 209.

7. Dennes, ibid, p. 21.

8. Nielsen, ibid, p. 25.

9. Cf. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, New York 2000, p. 14.

10. Cf. A. D. Smith, “Non-Reductive Physicalism?” in Objections to Physicalism

(ed. Howard Robinson), Oxford 1993, p. 225.

11. Cf. Ralph Walker, “Transcendental Arguments against Physicalism” in Objections to Physicalism (ed. Howard Robinson), Oxford 1993, p. 78.

12. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (tr. E. F. J. Payne), Massachusetts 1958, II, 313.

13. See, Rea, ibid, p. 42.

14. Cf. Dallas Willard, “Knowledge and Naturalism” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (ed. William Lane Craig & J. P. Moreland), Routledge, New York 2000, p. 30.

15. See, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (tr. J. M. D. Meiklejohn), Prometheus Books, Buffalo 1990, p. 7.

16. Wittgenstein, ibid, p. 143.

17. Cf. Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, HarperSanFrancisco, New York 1997, p. 87.

18. Nielsen, ibid, p. 26.

19. Rea, ibid, p. 59.

Fallacy one: Literalism

A critical fallacy in the arguments of “scientific crusaders” is that their understanding of religions relies on the most primitive way of approaching a text: literalism. Any serious and “scientific” inquiry into a text requires asking certain questions such as “Who wrote this text?” “To whom was it written?” “In which context was it written?” and “Why was it written?” Yet we rarely see the aforementioned scientists using this method when they approach religious texts. Samuel Harris, for example, simply takes certain verses in the Qur’an about killing certain non-Muslims at face value and pays no attention either to the context in which these verses were revealed or to the gigantic Islamic literature on the exegesis of these verses. As such, he simply turns a blind eye to all developments in hermeneutics and uses the most primitive method of text-reading.

Samuel Harris might not be interested in finding out what Muslim scholars have thought about killing innocent people; however, he has to be aware of the fact that it is not the individuals’ own interpretations but mostly scholars’ interpretations that have shaped Muslims’ opinions on any issue. An interesting point is that there is no precedent whatsoever for suicidal terrorism in traditional Islam before the late twentieth century. There has been a solid consensus among Muslim scholars for fourteen centuries on the sanctity of human life, because the Qur’an declares unequivocally that killing an innocent person unjustly is like killing all of mankind (Maidah 5:32). Thus, the critical question becomes: if something (such as terrorism) is “inherent” in a religion (such as Islam), why did that religion not encourage that thing for fourteen centuries but suddenly started to encourage it later? Unfortunately, scientific crusaders do not seem to be very interested in this kind of question.

Fallacy two: Crime against empirics

A second fallacy of scientist crusaders is that their understanding of religion’s influence on society is highly impressionistic and lacks any credible scientific inquiry or understanding. Samuel Harris’ argument about the violent nature of European Muslim youth and Richard Dawkins’ argument regarding oppression of women in Islamic societies are purely impressionistic inferences because they totally ignore other potential factors that can also influence juvenile violence and gender discrimination. The fact that Muslim youth in Europe are also disproportionately poorer and less educated than many other groups does not seem to undermine Harris’ sense of cognitive comfort. Yet any scientist with a basic knowledge of quantitative methods knows that we cannot analyze the influence of one factor on a dependent variable independent of other related factors. Statistics tells us that we will have nothing but biased results in such control-free analysis. Indeed, Scott Atran reports a study that reveals that “religious education is a negative predictor of Muslims entering European prisons.” ⁴ If a Muslim’s becoming more religious decreases the likelihood of his or her involvement in violence, then religion is a peaceful element. If this is the case, then the root causes of violence may be a combination of the very things which Harris avoids studying.

Dawkins’ argument about oppression of women in Muslim societies suffers from the same problem. He commits the same methodological error as Harris by excluding other potential explanatory factors from his analysis. Thus, his study cannot tell us whether it is Islam or something else (such as tradition, poverty, education, etc.) that distinguishes Muslim societies from the Western Christian societies regarding the oppression of women. Fortunately, we have some other (and more scientific) studies to examine the issue. A report by UNICEF in 2000 revealed that average domestic violence is essentially no different in Christian and Muslim societies. Below is the table from this report that gives the details about domestic violence rates in different Christian and Muslim countries. According to these survey results, average domestic violence against women was 25.5% in Western Christian societies (Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States); 30% in Muslim societies (Egypt, Israeli Arabs, and Tajikistan); and 38.3% in African Christian societies (Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe). The survey results indicate that domestic violence rates in Muslim societies were higher than they were in certain Christian societies but lower than they were in other Christian societies. As such, these figures solidly refute Dawkins’ impressionistic argument and rather suggest that something other than Islam is the root cause of domestic violence in Muslim societies.

Here, Dawkins can respond, “These data do not refute my arguments entirely, only the argument that Islam encourages more domestic violence than Christianity. But the argument that both of these religions encourage domestic violence remains valid and sound.” Yet, is this really the case? If one accepts Dawkins’ argument, one must also argue that increasing religiosity of a married Muslim or Christian man should increase domestic violence in his home. It is easy to check this. We can simply ask a random sample of large numbers of married Muslim and Christian women first to grade the religiosity of their husbands on a scale of 0–10, and then ask them how often their husbands behave violently at home. Although we do not have such a study on Muslims yet, to our surprise (and to Dawkins’ shame), we already have one study on Christians, which used exactly this method. In a study of nearly 1,000 New Zealand families, Fergusson et al. (1986) found that the self-reported religious attendance of parents (both fathers and mothers) is inversely related to their self-reported perpetration of domestic assaults. They reported a graded pattern: men and women who attend services once a month or more are least likely to report being involved in domestic violence, followed by those who attend less than monthly. On the other hand, men and women who never attend religious services are much more likely than their more religious counterparts to be involved in domestic violence.⁵The findings of this earlier study were later supported by another one, which employed a more objective measure of religiosity, on American couples as well. ⁶ (Although we have yet to prove it, this relationship between religiosity and domestic violence is very likely to hold for Muslim men as well. After all, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, “The best of you is the one who treats his wife in the best manner.” ⁷) Once again, contrary to Dawkins and Harris, we find that religion is an element of peace, not violence.

It is also worth mentioning that much less crime has been reported in religious schools (imam-hatip) than in secular schools in Turkey. Naci Akay, former Istanbul Head of National Education, said there have never been any activities reported in these schools that pose a threat to public safety. Likewise, Ibrahim Solmaz and Ahmet Gundogdu, chairmen of ONDER and Egitim-Bir-Sen respectively (two civil educational organizations) said parents prefer these schools mainly because they do not have high crime rates and students are much less likely to develop bad habits like drug abuse, alcoholism, or gambling. ⁸

The holy month of Ramadan in which Muslims observe day-long fast and additional devotion, is also a time of security for the entire Muslim world: crime rates plummet in this month, and sometimes fall to zero.

Fallacy three: Avoiding the literature

Another major problem for the crusaders of science is that they completely ignore the literature on the root causes of conflict and violence. None of the major theories on domestic or international conflict emphasize religion as a central factor, let alone singling it out as the root cause of violence. The major theories explain violence as resulting from peoples’ ambition for power, from liberalism with its inevitable conflict of interests and peoples’ inability to solve them in cooperative ways, and from class conflicts. To the subscribers to any of these theories, the argument that we could minimize or eliminate violence in this world if we could substitute scientific inquiry for religious faith is simply laughable. For them, religion is at most a secondary factor and therefore its elimination does not help to address the root causes of violence. As such, scientific crusaders’ emphasis on religion as a cause of violence is misleading and unhelpful because it moves our attention away from other more influential factors which could be more successfully addressed. In this respect, the anti-religion arguments of Harris, Dawkins, and the like resemble the wishful thinking of the nineteenth-century positivists. Ironically, ignoring the real forces at work neither makes the world more peaceful nor serves these scientists’ very goal of converting people to “scientism”. The new rise of religious faith since the second half of the twentieth century indicates that science and reason alone have failed to provide sufficient answers to peoples’ metaphysical questions or solutions to their moral problems. Hence, the return to religion!

Fallacy four: Imbalanced sheet

Last but not least, we have been taught since elementary school that we should never come to a judgment on any issue without first evaluating its pros and cons. What we see in the books of Dawkins and Harris, however, are only questionably negative aspects of religions and religious people. We see no appreciation whatsoever of the virtues of religions and their positive influences on their adherents. To start with one of the most obvious, is it not intriguing enough a question for Darwinian Dawkins to ask what prevented the Muslim Moors of Spain from following the “survival of the fittest” rule and simply annihilating the Jews and Christians of the Iberian Peninsula? How rational or scientific is it to simply avoid studies that have found that “teens from intact families with frequent religious attendance were the least likely to have ever shoplifted,” ⁹ “adolescents’ religiosity was related to a decreased likelihood of delinquent behavior,” ¹⁰ “increasing individual religiosity decreased tax fraud acceptability,” ¹¹ and “regular religious attendance was inversely associated with the perpetration of domestic violence,” ¹² to name but a few? Interestingly, the books of scientific crusaders have no place for such virtuous consequences of believing in God. It seems not only religious people have dogmas!

To conclude, certain scientists’ arguments against religions in general and Islam in particular lack scientific basis and thus do not merit much scholarly attention. There might be some valid grounds to criticize religions and their adherents as they are, but, believers or not, we all deserve more holistic, more scientific, and less hostile evaluations of religions. If atheist scientists want to wage a crusade against dogma, their own would be a good place to start.

Kaan Kerem has a PhD in political science. He is a freelance writer on philosophy and scientific thought.

Notes

1. Author of The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

2. Author of The End of Faith, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

3. http://www.edge.org/discourse/bb.html#harris.

4. http://www.edge.org/discourse/bb.html#atran.

5. Ferguson, David M., L. John Horwood, Kathryn L. Kershaw and Frederick T. Shannon (1986). “Factors Associated with Reports of Wife Assault in New Zealand.” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 46: 663–70.

6. Ellison, Christopher G. and Kristin L. Anderson (2001). “Religious Involvement and Domestic Violence among U.S. Couples.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40(2):269–86.

7. Ibn Maja, Section: Marriage, Hadith # 50.

8. http://www.yenisafak.com.tr/arsiv/2004/mayis/31/g01.html

9. Fagan, Patrick (2006). A Portrait of Family and Religion in America: Key Outcomes for the Common Good. Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation.

10. Regnerus, Mark D. (2003). “Linked Lives, Faith and Behavior: Intergenerational Religious Influence on Adolescent Delinquency.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 42(2): 189–203.

11. Steven Stack and Augustine Kposowa (2006). “The Effect of Religiosity on Tax Fraud Acceptability: A Cross-National Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 45(3):325–51.

12. See note 7.