A Power Unto Salvation: Science, Semantics, and the Supernatural

Part 1: Defining the Views

“In all religion there is a recollection of the Divine Truth which has been lost; in all religion, there is a longing after the divine light and the divine love; but in all religion also there yawns an abyss of demonic distortion of the Truth, and of man’s effort to escape from God.”

Emil Brunner

In this series, I’m examining three broad approaches to the perennial question of the human condition. I will label each approach to our existential crisis as follows, using alliteration as a mnemonic device: Scientism, Semanticism, and Supernaturlism. The first and last terms are commonly used and, most often, seen as antithetical to one another. As to the middle term, Semanticism, I will explain as I go along what I mean by it. After I describe each view, I will put the following question to each: “Which of these views, if any, has the power to save real people from their real, existential situation?” That existential situation can be described as such: the recognition that all human life is finite (susceptible to decay and death), that ultimate meaning and purpose is elusive, that knowledge of truth is obscure, and that goodness is hard to both define and to demonstrate. These are the problems of human ontology, teleology, epistemology and morality.

Each view presented here offers some answers to the problem of human existence. But I will argue one is more adequate as a real means of liberation, i.e., as an intellectual and emotional relief from our current state of alienation, oppression and anxiety given the apparent inability to solve the aforementioned existential questions of life. First, however, we must discuss the main common feature of the first two approaches, namely, the feature of metaphysical naturalism.

Two Kinds of Naturalism

Starting with the breakdown of the Medieval Synthesis (the union of Biblical Revelation with Greek Philosophy) in the late 15th century, there have been, at least in the West, essentially two overarching, naturalistic views of the nature of the human condition. The first is the scientistic materialist view. The second, a related view, is what I will call the semantic existentialist view. The former of these places epistemic authority and power in the domain of the natural sciences with the scientific method as the primary, if not only, means to knowledge. The latter, the semantic existentialist view, places the same authority in the domain of language and human culture: the natural sciences being not a free-standing, value-neutral domain of knowledge inquiry, but, like art, another domain of human cultural production.

For Christians living in English-speaking contexts today, the major battle of ideologies has played out between a logic-centered, scientistic empiricism and a reason-oriented, metaphysical, and historical Christianity. The concept of “Reason” itself being restricted or reduced to mere logical abstraction in or around the time of William of Ockham. In the 19th and 20th centuries this battle between the new science and the old theology was waged between rationalists on both sides: metaphysical naturalists and metaphysical supernaturalists who used arguments and evidence to justify and compel belief, either toward atheism or toward Christian theism.

These engagements developed into robust philosophical debates between great minds of previous generations, e.g. Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley in the 19th-century, Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell in the mid-20th, and more recent philosophers today like William Lane Craig and Graham Oppy. Since the emergence of Christian analytic philosophy in the 1970s with the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, this domain of intellectual dispute has informed much of our theological dialogue in the United States, especially in Protestant Christianity, but also in Roman Catholic and Easter Orthodox theological spheres.

Less familiar perhaps to many Evangelical Christians in the United States, however, were the contemporaneous developments occurring in the German and French speaking worlds of existential philosophy. As such, for many Protestants the works of men like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (on the French side), or Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (on the German side) went unexamined or, at least, were seen as marginal as they related to defending Christian orthodoxy. In addition, the Christian, or theistic, interlocutors to these existentialist philosophers have also gone under the radar. Or, perhaps , remain completely undiscovered. This is with the exception, perhaps, of particularly theological or apologetic giants like: Karl Barth, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedikt XVI), or the much beloved Francis A. Schaeffer.

In the existentialist camp of philosophy, what became known as “continental” philosophy (as opposed to analytic), the most impactful group of thinkers were the founders of Critical Theory. They were the philosophical grandfathers of today’s manifold critical theories: critical race theory, critical gender theory, queer theory, etc. This group, commonly called “The Frankfurt School” attempted to develop a third way of looking at the world. It was a way that neither denied the metaphysical naturalism of the scientistic worldview, yet without rejected the symbolic value and meaning of the religious worldview. This was their indebtedness to and development of the last great system-building philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel. The main figures in this very German-Jewish secular movement of philosophy were Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and, to some extent, Eric Fromm.

For critical theorists, the result of accepting metaphysical naturalism (i.e. of rejecting philosophical metaphysics), while not explicitly rejecting the existential aid of theology, invested this version of Marxist philosophy with a quasi-religious flavor or tone. It is a flavor or tone, however, that makes it difficult to discern for many Christians whether or not its tenets, or the tenets associated with any of its successor theories, are compatible with an actual biblical worldview. The “biblical worldview” being a worldview that is committed to the existence of God, gods (Elohim), angels and demons, and human souls that have actual causal powers, moral natures, and that endure after physical death. This is a quite different kind of naturalism in this sense, and one harder to identify than its overtly anti-religious counterpart.

Before we look at each of these naturalisms individually, and how they attempt to address the human condition, let’s define them a bit more carefully and also introduce their metaphysical opponent: Supernaturalism.

The Three Views Articulated: Scientism, Semanticism, and Supernaturalism

1. Scientism

is best embodied by philosophers like A.J. Ayers who avowed logical positivism (at least early on),¹ W.V.O. Quine, who tried to naturalize the philosophical domain of epistemology,² or scientists like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss today. Since the days of Ayer’s positivists, who considered any claims that could not be verified through scientific means to be meaningless, modified versions of Scientism have been defended in the English speaking world. Scientism, in brief, holds that while there are true statements about the world (i.e. the way things really are), the only statements that we can know to be true are ones that can be known viathe natural sciences. According to one Christian philosopher,

In scientism…science is the very paradigm of truth and rationality….There are no truths that can be known apart from the appropriately certified scientific claims, especially those in the hard or natural sciences [e.g. physics, chemistry, biology].

J.P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, 29.

Thus, when it comes to metaphysical statements about non-physical entities or agents, Scientism says these are at best speculative (weak Scientism), or, more likely, they are false or meaningless (strong Scientism).³ When it comes to moral issues, those who hold to Scientism may try to ground moral values or obligations in scientific facts about material reality, even though this has been traditionally seen as an inherently quixotic task, as it is almost universally agreed upon that the fact-value distinction cannot be bridged apart from something other than, or outside of, the scientific statements. In short, you cannot get “an ought from an is.”

In addition, and as we will see in the next post, the question of meaning and purpose for those who avow Scientism also cannot really be answered, let alone addressed. For proponents of Scientism, like Richard Dawkins, have repeatedly, and rightly, proclaimed, that while “how” questions are certainly addressable and answerable on the scientistic worldview, “why” questions are silly.⁴

2. Semanticism

Or what I am calling “Semanticism,” might be described as an ideology that rejects the hegemony of natural science to fully explain the world, let alone give answers to our existential questions. However, it also rejects the hegemony of any religion or religious worldview, especially that of the Judeo-Christian religion, to do the same. Semanticism, nevertheless, retains core components of both the scientistic and supernaturalistic approaches. On the one hand, Semanticism holds fast to the empirical analysis of the scientific method, even if it does not look to reduce all of life to the results of those analyses. On the other hand, therefore, it affirms the symbolic and “semantic” world of theology and religion, which it sees as giving meaning to the world of scientific facts.

Semanticism sees power in how language is used and how concepts are employed in human societies. Language constructs social realities, and these realities come to have objective meaning for us language users. As such the main theories that assume Semanticism are social theories, most predominantly Critical Theory, and its various successor theories (e.g. Critical Race Theory, Feminist Studies, Queer Theory, etc.). These try to rationally analyze not the composition of physical objects, the patterns of natural processes, or the nature of causal relations, as in chemistry or physics, but instead the meaning and value of human artifacts, i.e. of human culture itself. In empirically analyzing cultural forms, Semanticism tries to understand how individuals interact in their own socially-constructed environments of communication and meaning. As such, Semanticism puts far more emphasis on human experience and the subjective life of the human person than does Scientism, which tries to reduce the human subject and her experiences down to impersonal facts (i.e. facts about particles, gravity, and neuro-biological functions).

This semantic approach to the human condition can be summed up in Jürgen Habermas’ comments on Karl Jasper’s theory of the role of modern philosophy:

Jaspers regards the transition to modernity and to postmetaphysical thinking as a profoundly ambivalent process. On the one hand, the Enlightenment frees us from the dogmatism of a faith based on inherited authority [i.e. the Bible and the Church]….On the other hand, this philosophical translation of symbolic [religious] meanings courts the danger that the enciphered truth-contents of the great traditions [i.e. Judeo-Christianity] will be entirely forfeited, while the modern sciences reduce the lifeworld to the domain of the objectively knowable and technically controllable.

Jürgen Habermas, “The Conflicts in Belief” in The Liberating Power of Symbols, 37.

What Scientism and Semanticism have in common is that they both share a common view of metaphysics, namely, that beyond the physical world nothing exists. Jaspers and later critical theorists can confidently claim along with new atheists like Dawkins and Dennett that we all now live in a “postmetaphysical” world. However, as Habermas explains, the costs of accepting a full-blown Scientism is too great for the human creature, and, consequently, the existential content of religion must be salvaged to protect us from science reducing “the lifeworld” down to the merely objective and impersonal. At the same time, we can still be happy about being relieved from religious “dogmatism” of the past.

When it comes to morality, these two kinds of naturalism begin to differ in that those who invest their hope in the semantic power of language and symbols try to ground morality in some universally shared aspects of human culture, as opposed to merely natural facts about the human organism. As we will see, however, this is no less as quixotic or herculean a task than that of its materialistic cousin. Regardless, both Scientism and Semanticism are on one side of a philosophical line. A third view, Supernaturalism, is clearly on the other side of that line.

Three Approaches to the World: Three Worldviews

3. Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism is the view that there is a real world of immaterial Being (either God or something like Abstract Objects or both), and real cause-and-effect agency beyond the mere physical world of natural processes or human biological machines. As such Supernaturalism is usually the overarching view of the traditional theist, the view of someone who really believes that the semantic content of their sacred texts refers to actual mind-independent entities: to a God or gods, angels or demons, souls etc. For the supernaturalist, these are real substances (albeit immaterial ones) that have causal powers, a moral dimension, and some kind or degree of free will. Those who hold to the existence of minds may also be rightly called super-naturalists, or at least metaphysical dualists of some sort.

For Christians of a classical persuasion, Supernaturalism is the correct understanding of and approach to reality. Although it may sound unfashionable or shocking to modern ears, the true Christian really does believe that the cosmos is a lot “spookier” than the scientist or semanticist may be willing to grant. Christians who accept the full inspiration of Scripture are committed in their belief that the scriptures contain a special kind of knowledge, a revelation knowledge. This revelation is part of which confirms our common sense notion of a realm that goes unseen in the normal day to day. As such, the beings the scriptures speak of, this “unseen realm” referred to in its pages, are to be taken quite seriously. The spiritual realm, the non-physical domain of existence is, in some sense, more real than the physical world itself (or, at least, equally as real).

When it comes to morality, the supernaturalist will have a wider range of explanatory options than the adherent of Scientism or Semanticism, and that in virtue of the existence of a real Divine Person, as well as various principles that issue forth from that Person. These principles issue forth either directly in the form of divine commands, e.g. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, or wife, or ox, etc…” or indirectly through natural laws embedded in a designed, created, and, as such, purposeful order. The same goes for meaning and purpose, as the supernaturalist, whether Christian or Jew or Muslim, will also claim some kind of true story, some universal hermeneutic that explains our position in reality, and that comes replete with an origins story and an eschatological future.

In the next post I will look at Scientism, and ask the question of whether or not it can offer us any sense of hope in light of our existential circumstances.

first published October 10, 2020 by Anthony Costello

1. Ayer went on to say this of his former views “I suppose that most of the defects of it were that nearly all of it was false.”

2. see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Naturalism in Epistemology,” chapter 2: “Epistemology Naturalized.”

3. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, 29-30.

4. see Dawkins debate against Craig, Geivett and Wolpe here: