Habit of Mind: A model for the rise in atheism among scholars

A meeting of the Royal Society in London

This discussion was originally included as part of Physicalism and Transcendence, but it made more sense to pull it out as a separate post. Physicalism, similar to materialism, is the belief that the physical world is all there is. As in, there can be no transcendent religious experience, no eternal soul, no God, no afterlife. Turning a blind eye to the fact that half of all Americans have had a religious or mystical experience, academia has adopted physicalism as the dominant paradigm for at least 100 years or so. That attitude has trickled down through the university and education systems into the rest of society, where faith has been in steep decline in recent generations.

The rise of physicalism among scholars

English historian Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) had an interesting hypothesis for how physicalism rose to prominence among scientists and scholars. He suggests in Christianity and History (1949)¹, that it was sort of by accident:

It is recorded somewhere that the group of men who founded the Royal Society in seventeenth-century England resented the waste of time that was liable to occur in their discussions when-as in the case of some societies in our present-day universities--every topic would be carried back to the region of first principles and fundamental beliefs, so that the debate was for ever returning to the same issues and they could not discuss the ordinary operations of nature without perpetually coming back to their basic theological or philosophical differences. Only when these men learned to keep their conversation fixed on the mere mechanical operations of nature- the observable effects of heat on a certain substance for example (where what was true for one was true for all of them) could they short-circuit that tantalisingly unprogressive form of general debate. ...

[W]e fall into certain habits of mind and easily become the slaves of them, when in reality we only adopted them for the purpose of a particular technique. It is as though people could be so long occupied in tearing flowers to pieces and studying their mechanism that they forget ever to stand back again and see the buttercup whole. It is possible that in the transition to the modern outlook the world was guided much less by any deliberated philosophy than is often assumed, and I think that few people could be said to have come to that modern outlook by an authentic process of thinking things out. Men are often the semi-conscious victims of habits of mind and processes of abstraction like those involved in technical historical study or in physical science. They decide that for purposes of analysis they will only take notice of things that can be weighed and measured, and then they forget the number they first started from and come to think that these are the only things that exist.

In this view, physicalism's dominance in academia happened simply by focusing on the measurable, repeatable phenomena at the expense of everything else, sort of by accident, via a habit of mind. Spiritual experience and religious faith just atrophied due to neglect over after a period of time. Jonathan Rauch discusses this very same process in Chapter 3 of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth². Rauch's version is slightly more deliberate, and perhaps less purely neglectful. His key example is the fierce late 18th and early 19th century geological debates between the "Vulcanists" and "Neptunians" - those who believed granite was formed from volcanic activity, versus those who thought granite was formed quickly by crystallization from the water of Noah's flood. Both sides acted like creeds, highlighting theory over evidence. For the Neptunians, the theory was based on assumptions from a certain reading of the Bible. In the words of Rauch:

A younger generation, disgusted with the creed war, announced that they would reject theorizing altogether. Instead, they swore that they would talk only about facts. ... Extreme though the recourse to empiricism may have been intellectually, it proved successful as a social strategy: that is, as a way to divert energy and attention to arguments which appealing to evidence could adjudicate. Over the first decades of the nineteenth century, the new, empirically minded breed of researchers roamed Britain and the continent, building troves of geological samples, archives of stratigraphic drawings, repositories of fossils. No less important, the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807 provided a clearinghouse and social hub for a growing and increasingly self-conscious community of scholars ... in which all agree to convince each other by following the same set of rules.

Rauch makes a good point about science and rationality. Assuming he has the history right, the geologists probably became better geologists by focusing on the technical and setting aside religious differences in their quest for geological understanding. That increased focus on empiricism led to scientists as a community making greater headway in their fields and accelerated technical progress - a great achievement. The tragedy is not the religious pluralism or the focus on the technical in science. The tragedy is in forgetting that there could be something greater beyond the purely technical.

Rauch celebrates that religious ideas were expelled from “the reality-based community,” as he puts it. He claims that religious people have their own communities, which is just fine with him, where we can feel a sense of belonging without the need for reality ever to crash the party. Obviously he isn’t a Christian and doesn’t understand Christianity. If he did, he would know that Christians are very much interested in the reality of Christ, not just the community of Christians. Christ’s atonement is just as objectively real for us as the granite those geologists were studying. Empirical observation has revealed the Vulcanists to be more right than the Neptunians. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is wrong or irrational. The discovery of relativity didn’t mean that all of physics should be scrapped - just advanced with new learning, better models, and different assumptions. Similarly, advances in geology don’t mean we need to reject the Bible, but it may improve our interpretation of it and change some of our assumptions about it.

The problem with the purely analytical / technical / scientific approach to knowledge is, of course, that its scope is limited to a narrow range of empirical and repeatable phenomena. It can't provide an origin story, purpose, morality, or values, without being woven into a more interpretive metaphysical narrative, and humans crave interpretation, origins, and meaning. I’ll quote again from Herbert Butterfield’s Christianity and History:

But for the fulness of our commentary on the drama of human life in time, we have to break through this technique -have to stand back and see the landscape as a whole and for the sum of our ideas and beliefs about the march of ages we need the poet and the prophet, the philosopher and the theologian. Indeed we decide our total attitude to the whole of human history when we make our decision about our religion -and it is the combination of the history with a religion, or with something equivalent to a religion, which generates power and fills the story with significances. We may find this in a Christian interpretation of history, or in the Marxian system or even perhaps in H. G. Wells's History of the World. 

Among many possible metaphysical lenses through which one might interpret science and history, Butterfield mentions three that are relevant to West: Christianity, Marxism, and HG Wells’ History of the World (1920)³. The latter represents a physicalist, proto-evolutionary psychology worldview gaining speed in popular science 100 years ago, and now highly prevalent in a more developed form of evolutionary psychology. Just as much as thinkers 300 years ago would inject Christian assumptions into all their writings, thinkers today inject evolutionary psychology pseudoscience explanations into almost any kind of discussion, including in Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge. It's everywhere.

Butterfield’s broader point is that the interpretation of historical events or technical data will depend entirely on the worldview of the scholar. In the absence of objective proof for or against Christianity or evolutionary psychology, a Christian's decision to interpret history in ways consistent with his or her faith is no more irrational than the atheist's decision to interpret technical facts through an evolutionary psychology narrative.

Case study: Robin Hanson's path to atheism

I sometimes read the blog of Robin Hanson, a polymath, rationalist, and economist at George Mason University. He is full of interesting ideas - sometimes delightfully useful, sometimes delightfully wacky. He recently wrote about how he became an atheist after a Christian upbringing. I don’t know Robin, and I can’t see into his brain, but his path seems to be a good fit to Herbert Butterfield’s “habit of mind” model of the rise of physicalism. My point here is not to judge Robin, but just to show an interesting contemporary case study supporting Butterfield's explanation for the decline of religion in our scientific age. Quoting Robin Hanson:

In college I drifted slowly away, eventually to full atheism. ... But my change had little to do with disagreeing with church doctrines or with difficulties explaining evil. ... No, the main issue for me was that in college I became greatly persuaded by and deeply immersed in a physics view of the universe. It was not just one set of lenses through which one might look to gain insight. No it purported to offer a complete (if not fully fleshed-out) description of the reality accessible to me. It offered me many detailed ways to test that claim, and it passed those tests as far as I could tell. So far as I could see then, and now, the world immediately around me *IS* in fact the world of photons, electrons, protons, and neutrons described by the physics I learned.

But that world just offers few openings for hidden powers to be listening to or influencing my thoughts and feelings, or changing how my life goes according to my sins and prayers.

Robin expands a little in response to a couple of the comments to his post. Like many modern atheists, he relies on an evolutionary psychology pseudoscience narrative to provide greater understanding and a sort of meaning in the universe. He believes that evolution and evolutionary psychology are sufficient explanations for the rise of rational beings from primitive life: “We expect evolution to eventually create minds who can reason, because that's just d[arn] useful.” He also says “I just do not see that I access connections inexplicable via physics.”

Robin also describes some negative experiences with joining a Christian “cult” when he was younger. I’m not quite sure what exactly he is referring to, but there is very little that kills faith as quickly as a bad experience with abusive or hypocritical church leaders. I have a lot of sympathy with this aspect of his story. I have spoken with many who have had traumatic experiences with abusive church leaders both in my faith (not my current ward) and in other faiths. This is tragic.

I count myself among those who, unlike Robin Hanson, can point to very clear spiritual experiences that make it impossible for me to accept a physicalist worldview. I am also grateful for a very positive church and family environment growing up that fostered faith. If it weren’t for these factors, who knows, I could see myself potentially being susceptible to the physicalist habit of mind after going through the anti-Christian education system and after years of scientific training through college and graduate school. But instead, I am grateful for the gift of faith I have received.

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1 Christianity and History should be much better known. There is nothing available online, so I actually had to order a physical copy of the book. I got a used first edition from the UK, and found a personal inscription inside the cover written in Welsh along with a newspaper clipping of a column about Herbert Butterfield on the occasion of his death in 1979. I think this Welsh theologian who passed away in 2020 was the previous owner of my book. It seems like he received this book at the beginning of his career as a gift from a minister W. J. Griffeths. Given the newspaper clipping, I wonder if there was a personal connection with Herbert Butterfield.  ^↩ 

2 The Constitution of Knowledge is an important book and a strong defense of reason and rationality in the face of modern challenges. My only criticism is that Rauch brings his personal biases to the work. For example, Rauch cites John Locke as the central figure in establishing the framework for social epistemology that Rauch labels the "Constitution of Knowledge." Then Rauch explicitly places religious ideas out of bounds for discussion within the "reality-based community." The only problem is that, as we all know, Locke himself certainly didn't feel that religion was out of bounds for reality-based scholarship. He himself authored multiple works combining reason with revelation - including, of course, The Reasonableness of Christianity.   ^↩ 

3 History of the World is a shortened version of H.G. Wells' Outline of History, which inspired GK Chesterton's eloquent response, The Everlasting Man.   ^↩