The Noble Lie of Poetic Naturalism

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome to Reasonable Faith with  Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. People ask good questions, and we need to give them good answers. So if you’ve been thinking about supporting the work of Reasonable Faith, now would be a really good time because our annual matching grant is going on. Whatever you give will be doubled by a group of generous donors. So whatever amount you give, they will double it, up to $250,000. That’s happening now until the end of the year, so consider making us part of your year-end giving. You can give online at ReasonableFaith.org. And while you are on our website, check out Equip. It’s a free course that will teach you how to make an intelligent presentation and defense of the truth of the Christian faith. So take advantage of this excellent free material, and spread the word. Thanks so much.

Bill, we are looking at an article, The Noble Lie of Poetic Naturalism, by Melissa Cain Travis.^[1] It is in the Worldview Bulletin. Melissa starts her article with the terrible future depicted in H. G. Wells’ classic science fiction novella The Time Machine. Humans have become helpless child-like persons who are hunted and eaten by the Morlocks, and the farther he goes the worse it gets. He travels to a time when humans and most life forms are extinct. Then the narrator at the end of the story says, “only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end,” then “it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”^[2] That's a pretty good description of the Noble Lie that the article will further define below.

DR. CRAIG: It sure is! I can say personally that Wells’ novel The Time Machine was one of the key factors in my life as a non-Christian teenager. I read the book and when I came to the end of it I was absolutely devastated because it ends in lifelessness and destruction. There is no meaning or purpose for the human race. I think this brought home to me in a way that nothing else had the futility of life on a naturalistic worldview. We're all doomed to extinction, and nothing we do ultimately matters. In the end our fate cannot be avoided, and yet it's impossible to live happily and consistently with this sort of worldview. That is what prompted someone like L. D. Rue to say that we must deceive ourselves by means of some Noble Lie that will enable us to get along with each other and continue to live as though life were not ultimately meaningless and insignificant.

KEVIN HARRIS: Travis continues,

. . . most scientific materialists of today believe that we must cheerfully carry on and pretend that our intellectual and humanitarian pursuits matter in the face of impending oblivion. In other words, we should live according to what has been called a Noble Lie^[3]—a man-made narrative that serves to impart the comforting illusion of objective meaning, purpose, and value in human existence and motivate individuals beyond self-interest for the sake of social harmony and political order.

Travis says that many materialist scientists have tried to soften the blow of the ramifications of the heat death of the universe. She quotes Sean Carroll's philosophy of poetic naturalism which he explains as follows, quoting Sean here,

Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world—the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world—no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings. I like to talk about a particular approach to naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world. . . . The vocabulary we use is not handed to us from outside; it’s ultimately a matter of our choice. A poetic naturalist will deny that notions like "right and wrong," "purpose and duty," or "beauty and ugliness" are part of the fundamental architecture of the world. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. . . . There won’t be a single rational way to delineate good from bad, sublime from repulsive. But we can still speak in such terms, and put in the hard work to make our actions live up to our own internal aspirations. We just have to admit that judgments come from within ourselves.^[4]

What do you think of Sean Carroll's poetic naturalism?

DR. CRAIG: Well, such self-deception is patent in this account. Poetic naturalism sounds to me like just good old plain naturalism – the physical world is all there is. We are electrochemical machines. There are no transcendent meanings, purposes, values in life. Everything is relative. There is no significance to anything that we say and do. But we can't live that way, and so we adopt a kind of poetic language to describe our lives that fills it with meaning and value and purpose. This exemplifies, I think, what Francis Schaeffer called the leap from the lower story to the upper story. Schaeffer says modern man lives in a two-story universe and the lower story is the natural world, which is just like Sean Carroll described – devoid of meaning, purpose, value. In the upper story are these transcendent values. And modern man, unable to live consistently and happily in the lower story, continually makes leaps of faith to the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose for his life, even though he has no right to on his naturalistic worldview. So this is really what the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called an exercise in inauthentic existence. This is not authentic existence. This is the very definition of living inauthentically – of living a pretense or, as Melissa would put it, a Noble Lie.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. Melissa comments on Sean Carroll next. She continues,

Note how Carroll dresses up the idea of self-delusion by claiming that the useful stories we tell to make sense of our experience of the world should be regarded as real, even though they are, he admits, fully relativistic. The empirical sciences cannot produce the very things that make life worth living—things like moral truths, intrinsic value, and objective beauty—but we should still incorporate those concepts into our personal narratives. As human beings, these are required for a psychologically healthy, happy existence, so we should ignore the fact that they have no objective grounding.

Travis says that Carroll anticipates the answer that this is all just denial and dishonesty by saying,

[Carroll’s dismissive response is that] “This is just grumpiness talking.”^[5] What his view amounts to is the idea that we should go right on cultivating rich personal life-narratives using the vocabulary of transcendentals to avoid the grim reality of humanity’s eventual fate. This seems intellectually dishonest, at best.

I guess we're just being grumpy.

DR. CRAIG: No. We are not just being grumpy. We are being intellectually honest. I think even more than that, we are being authentic. I agree with the existentialist philosophers that it is really important to live an authentic existence rather than this sort of pretense. I just can't imagine how someone like Carroll would advocate living in self-deception rather than in honesty and authenticity, but this is the desperate straits in which the naturalist finds himself.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article concludes,

Poetic Naturalism is merely a new, romantic version of the old Noble Lie. For the rational and reflective person, this philosophy does precious little, if anything, to satisfy existential longings. It is one more demonstration of the fact that naturalists cannot actually live out their own worldview with philosophical consistency. To be fair, some have tried (but still failed). For example, renowned atheist intellectual Bertrand Russell believed in facing the truth with bravery and thereby achieving psychological liberation . . . he extolled as humane virtues things like compassion and creativity, and he believed that we ought to live in pursuit of the perfectly good and beautiful, even though such ideals are (according to naturalism) illusory and thus unattainable: “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.”^[6]

There's that word – ennoble. We must ennoble our lives even though it's ultimately futile.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, that's a Freudian slip – isn't it? – on Russell's part. For on his view there is no difference between nobility and cheating on a naturalistic view. And yet he thinks that these thoughts do ennoble us. This is from his essay “A Free Man's Worship.” I would encourage everyone to read this. It's short. I'm sure it's available widely on the Internet. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man's Worship.” But don't read it just before going to sleep or at night because it is incredibly depressing as this naturalist philosopher works out the implications of a naturalistic worldview.

KEVIN HARRIS: Melissa Travis makes an important point, I think, at the end of the article. She says,

It must be recognized that the bleakness of life according to consistently held naturalism is not positive evidence for Christian theism. However, the ability to clearly articulate the philosophical conundrum the naturalist faces can be quite effective in terms of inspiring deeper consideration of all one must relinquish when embracing that worldview with intellectual integrity. We might call this a pre-apologetic—explaining why Christianity is an existentially attractive alternative prior to offering arguments for its truth. As Blaise Pascal famously put it, “make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.”^[7]

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's marvelous. And this is the way I use this material in my book, Reasonable Faith. It is a kind of pre-apologetic to awaken in the non-Christian a sense of desperation when he realizes the implications of atheism and naturalism. This is my attempt to deal with the sort of “whatever” attitude of so many young people today who think that these questions ultimately don't matter. That is the result of superficial thinking, or perhaps no thinking at all. But for someone who reflects deeply on these questions, they are indeed agonizing. I think that while they provide no positive proof for the existence of God, what they can do is awaken you to the situation and make you ask yourself, “How do I know that God does not exist? Maybe there is a Creator and Designer of the universe who loved me and has a purpose for my life? A Creator and Designer that I can know.” And then begin to go on a spiritual search to see if, in fact, this might not be a better account of the world than the naturalistic account.^[8]