Whether we are aware of them or not, all of us – humanistic scholars, social scientists, and natural scientists – make philosophical assumptions. We would do well to reflect on what they are and why we hold the ones we do. It is perfectly appropriate for a scholar of modern Spanish literature, or a social psychologist, or a molecular biologist, or any other scholar or scientist, to reflect on the framing assumptions of the university institutions and intellectual culture within which academic scientists and scholars do their work. These assumptions affect every one of us whether we are aware of them or not. Of course, my particular training as a historian shapes the specific ways in which I see the relationship of my own expertise, early modern European history, to the history of the human past as a whole, and the relationship of human history to the evolutionary history of hominins and more broadly mammals and more broadly still to the evolution of life on Earth, and beyond this to the formation of our planet and solar system and galaxy within the history of the universe, and finally to the most fundamental questions about existence and being as such. But whatever our particular research-specific and disciplinary starting points, all reflection along these lines cannot but converge analytically on the same terminus, if we think seriously about integrating knowledge from different disciplines within a whole. We are all, in our specific ways, situated within human history at a point long after the beginnings of the evolution of life on Earth, which is itself embedded within the much longer cosmological history of the universe stretching back to the Big Bang, all of which belongs in turn to the domain of ontologically contingent beings.
My main argument is that there is a problem – a serious problem – with the pervasive assumption of naturalism as it usually functions today, with its anti-transcendent, atheistic, and materialistic metaphysics, in universities and the prevailing intellectual culture we inhabit. The presumption of naturalism depends upon forgetting, neglecting, or overlooking a foundational truth of reason about the entirety of the natural order as such, a critical philosophical error that in turn pervades our intellectual culture and exerts a distorting pressure across the disciplines. One contribution, then, to the expansion of reason beyond its unjustifiably constricted constraints consists in pointing out this problem on the basis of the exercise of reason itself.
That is the aim here. This exercise will in turn have numerous implications for the concerns raised by Monsignor Lombardi, Pope Benedict, and many others, about human dignity, meaning, values, and purpose in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. A major reason for this is because naturalism, which derives its ideological power as a metaphysics from the explanatory and practical success of the natural sciences, tends to go together with constructivism in the humanities: the idea that all meanings, values, priorities, and norms, including morality, are constructed (that is, invented) by human beings. This is precisely because, in the words of the sociologist Christian Smith, in the naturalist universe «[t]here is no inherent, ultimate meaning or purpose» and so «[a]ny meaning or purpose that exists for humans in a naturalistic universe is constructed by and for humans themselves.»5 If there is no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value in the natural world per se, of which we are a part as simply another mammalian species that happened randomly to evolve through processes of random genetic mutation and natural selection, then all human meanings and values can only be constructed; none can be «discovered,» because there are none to be found. Human cultural variety across space and time, as studied by anthropologists and historians, at first sight seems to offer ample corroboration of this claim. Combine this constructivist view with a political commitment to equality and individual self-determination and the link to moral and value relativism is readily apparent. As a corollary of metaphysical naturalism, constructivism therefore readily goes hand-in-hand with the liberal individualism championed by many political theorists from John Locke to John Rawls, and the conviction that the purpose of politics ought to be the maximal extension of individual rights about what to believe, how to live, and what to care about – everyone ought to be able to construct their own meanings and live as they please, within humanly constructed laws that permit everyone else to do likewise.6 These brief remarks only hint at the ways in which naturalist assumptions in the university have widely ramifying implications that also affect the ways in which humanistic scholars and social scientists do their work. Everything is connected.
The plausibility of naturalism as a comprehensive worldview relies ultimately on the nested dependence of all the other disciplines upon physics, within a temporal scheme that stretches from the present back to the beginning of the universe. This was implicit in the example about Bach’s musical compositions. In a naturalist scheme, the vast majority of humanistic scholars, in all disciplines, study the myriad meaning-laden constructions of one subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, from the last 3,000 or so years. Materialist neuroscientists seek to explain every human experience behind all those constructions not simply as requiring but as reducible to neurophysical processes in human brains, processes shared with other species in their respective brains and extending millions of years back into the evolutionary past. A similar perspective is shared by evolutionary psychologists, who apply a similarly reductionist approach to the human behaviors studied by humanistic scholars as intentional actions, which not only (obviously) presuppose the reality of human genes and survival-oriented behaviors by human beings who survived (a tautology), but are ultimately determined by them. Evolutionary theory is so important among the disciplines as a whole, and neo-Darwinian ideology is so seemingly plausible to the unwary, because of the way in which it connects and purports to explain the entirety of the human world not only as continuous with the rest of human life, but much more fundamentally and ambitiously, as continuous with the non-living, strictly mechanical processes of chemistry and physics. In the words of one of the most zealous neo-Darwinian evangelists, Daniel Dennett, «the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realms of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.»7 And by «unifies,» he means reduces to; hence his delight in the alleged «universal acid» of what he calls «Darwin’s dangerous idea.»8 Darwinian evolutionary theory extends into the domain of all living things a mechanistic materialism that followed from the seventeenth-century rejection of Aristotelianism characteristic of thinkers such as Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, with which it shares the repudiation of any teleology or intrinsic meaning in the natural world.9
There is no question that because of the staggering advances in twentieth-century physics – particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology – we know more about the history, character, and makeup of our universe at the most elemental levels now than ever before, stretching back to the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Those who familiarize themselves with what we now know about our universe can hardly fail to be astounded not only by the time scales, the distances, and the mathematically articulated intricacies of what astronomers and physicists have discovered, but also by how bizarre and mysterious it all is. To give only one example: only a small portion – about 5 percent – of what falls within the purview of physics consists of the protons, neutrons, and electrons that comprise the elements and compounds studied in chemistry,