Metanexus: Views 2002.05.17 Subject: Review of By the Waters of Naturalism by Andrew Porter
From: Michael Lotti
Suppose you are looking for a book that introduces you to some of the
problems in the so-called "science and religion debate." Andrew Porter's By
the Waters of Naturalism would fit the bill nicely, and it's rather readable
and funny to boot. Suppose, however, that you had a fairly good grasp of
the so-called "science and religion debate" and wanted something that delved
into some issues with convincing depth. In that case, By the Waters of
Naturalism would be a disappointment. It would not add much to your
storehouse of knowledge, and you would probably find many of its more
extensive arguments lacking in detail or reasoning or both. Undoubtedly,
though, you would still find the book readable and funny.
Porter's book has a fairly clear structure. He first describes and
criticizes the all-too-common attempt to account for God within a
naturalistic framework. The problem with such an attempt, according to
Porter, is that it assumes a naturalistic framework as the only (or best)
way of talking about reality. This ignores the possibility of looking at
the world through historical eyes and results in all sorts of confusion
about the way that God can exist and act in the world. Porter goes on to
criticize the literal interpretation of the Biblical miracle stories as one
such confusion. He ends the book by expounding upon the essential
differences between religions based on nature and religions based on
history, focusing mainly upon the demands that history-religions like
Judaism and Christianity make upon their adherents.
Porter's book is helpful in basically three ways. At the beginning of
the book, he exposes the inherent problems with the attempt to argue for the
existence of God on naturalistic grounds. For one, it is inherently based
on "gaps" in scientific knowledge, like the "indeterminacies" of quantum
physics. These gaps are not permanent, so the best one can get with such an
approach is that God (or perhaps a god) could possibly be acting in a
framework that could be superceded some day. Not exactly grounds for a
rock-solid faith, in other words. Porter points out that the deeper
problems with this approach are philosophical. It is assumed, without
warrant, that a description in a naturalistic framework is superior to any
other description. Moreover, seeing the world - in particular, the human
world - through a historical lens is just as basic as seeing it in a
naturalistic framework, and Porter's development of this distinction is the
second way in which his book is helpful. When we talk about human actions,
he says, we assume that they are open to several different descriptions. A
young man is driving in a car: he could be going to work, escaping from
juvenile prison, running to the store for his mother, thinking about his
girlfriend, "cruising," or any number of other things. Unlike an event in
nature, how we understand a human event, according to Porter, is dependent
on the story that it fits into. And in most cases, the same event can
legitimately be interpreted as a part of different stories. For Porter, it
is only ever proper to think about God acting in a historic rather than a
naturalistic framework. The descriptions of nature-based religions and
history-based religions are the third helpful aspect of Porter's book.
Briefly, he states that the goal in a naturalistic religion is conformity
with nature, while the goal in a historical religion is to bring one into
the realm of responsibility. Specifically, this means acknowledgment of
"exposure, limitation, and need:" "exposure meaning an honesty about what
one really is, warts and all; "limitation" meaning a sense of one's
powerlessness before so many natural and human forces; and "need" meaning
simply a need for other people. Porter rightly notes that accepting these
conditions preempts any human pretension to divine status and actually forms
the basis for the responsibility to one's neighbor that is the cornerstone
of a free civil society.
Before moving on to some of the shortcomings of Porter's ideas,
something must be said about his style, which is, indeed, another helpful
aspect of his book. Porter obviously revels in using commonplace language
and images as a way of explaining his most important points. When
discussing miracles, for instance, he does not begin by focusing on the
Bible, but instead talks about a time when water "miraculously" got out of
his shower stall and onto his bathroom floor. The example of the young man
driving, used above, is Porter's way of introducing the distinction between
naturalistic and historical description. His first example of people with a
history-based religion is not the Hebrews, but a tribe of youngsters from
the notably non-academic film "Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome." The
subheadings of the book are evidence of Porter's persistent jocularity:
"Turkey Day," "Right Here in Liver City," "God's Driver's License," "Want to
Play Tennis?" "How to Clean an Oven," and so on. For one who has plodded
through any number of academic books driven by obtuse vocabulary and dense
prose, Porter's style is refreshing and, indeed, enlivening. It is a large
part of what would make this book good reading for students who are just
beginning to think about science and religion.
The problems with Porter's book begin with his somewhat careless use of
the word "naturalism." He says that pining for a naturalistic explanation
of God is a way of being "objective" at the price of ignoring the subjective
demands of religious claims. Then, however, Porter goes on to construe any
attempt at describing facts, including historical facts, as necessarily
"naturalistic" and therefore beside the point when it comes to faith. What
is finally important for Porter is that people come to embrace the human
condition of "exposure, limitation, and need." Ironically, then, Porter
develops his own version of "naturalism" that is independent of history,
although it is not, like scientific naturalism, independent of human
freedom. This is problematic, for it is not obvious that an "objective"
historical fact could not elicit or even demand a subjective response.
Shouldn't the facts about World War II, for example, mean something to
Americans? And is there any way that Americans could possess such meaning
apart from those historical facts? And if the facts about the 1940's can
have a claim on modern-day Americans, why not facts about the 1500's? or
the first century A.D.? or the 9th century B.C.? Historical facts do not,
of course, determine a particular subjective response: there are, after all,
many different ways of seeing World War II as part of the American story.
But historical facts can, indeed, be the stuff upon which a subjective
response is based, and thus concern for "objective" historical truth is not
necessarily a way of avoiding the subjective demands of religious belief.
In fact, it can be a way of determining the proper content of a subjective
response.
In pursuit of a criticism of "naturalism," Porter advances some spurious
arguments. Expounding upon the historical skepticism of Ernst Troeltsch, he
easily concludes that we are all trapped in our own age and incapable of
seeing anything historical for what it really was. Moreover, he states that
Biblical texts are not reliable as a source of history because they were
written or assembled by people with a theological agenda. This all devolves
into the claim that Christians and Jews should admit that their religions
are invented. It never seems to occur to Porter that if the Gospel writers
could have a theological agenda, then it is certainly possible that Jesus
had one too and that the Gospel writers were, indeed, trying to record his
agenda-driven life. The historicity of the Bible, in other words, is not as
easily dismissed as Porter thinks. The claim that Christians and Jews
should admit that their religions are invented is quite surprising, for
Porter also insists that Christians and Jews need one another for the sake
of distinguishing and defining themselves. But if the only thing that
really matters is acceptance of "exposure, limitation, and need," and if
Christianity and Judaism get this right, what is there that should
distinguish them? Porter seems unaware of his self-contradiction.
Porter's reasoning about miracles is similarly problematic. Focusing on
the Gospel of Mark, he dismisses its miracle stories as meaningless if true
or as parts of a misinterpretation that (again) attempts to objectivize away
"exposure, limitation, and need." These claims devolve into the claim that
the proper way to understand such stories is ironically. That is, the
Gospel of Mark is actually a set-up, meant to make people think that a
glorious Messiah-story is being told, only to end up announcing the
blessings of "exposure, limitation, and need." One problem here is Porter's
assumption that insistence on the historicity of the miracle stories is
driven by a desire for "objective" proof of Jesus' divinity. While some have
done this, it seems clear from the Gospels themselves that the miracles were
not self-explanatory. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus' miracles lead the
Pharisees to openly accuse him of being in league with the Devil. Likewise,
in the Gospel of John, the remarkable raising of Lazarus is immediately
followed by several people who, instead of believing in Jesus' divinity, run
to the Pharisees to report his trouble-making. How one understands Jesus'
miracles, then, depends on how one understands the rest of his life, and
this again underscores the potentially vital theological role of knowing the
"objective" history.
Porter's dismissal of miracles underscores another problem. Why assume,
as he does, that "exposure, limitation, and need" are the defining limits of
the divine story? Why can't God be thought of as wanting, in part, to
overcome exposure with forgiveness, limitation with new power, and need with
fulfillment; i.e. as a blessing God? Within such a framework, the Gospels
and the Book of Acts, miracle stories included, begin to look decisively
un-ironic.
My criticisms here are partly based on the magesterial work of N.T.
Wright, a prominent Biblical scholar who Porter seems not to have read. In
fact, what he cites and appeals to seem to be fairly selective. Few of his
sources date from after 1990, despite the enormous amount of groundbreaking
historical-critical material on the Bible that has been published since
then. It is this, along with his historical skepticism and his limited
theological imagination, that prevents By the Waters of Naturalism from
being a notable contribution to the "science and religion debate." The book
raises some good questions and provides a few good answers along with a lot
of provocative conclusions. And, again, it is fun to read. As such, it is
not a bad book for a beginner in the field, but it is too easily superceded
to be of much interest to others.
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