Tuesday, September 21, 2010

From the Archives: Reflections on the Argument from Design

This week, in my philosophy of religion class, we are looking at the argument from design--that is, the argument which attempts to support the existence of an intelligent supernatural creator by appeal to the apparent evidence of design in the universe. Since I've been busy getting ready for a conference (where I'm presenting a paper critiquing Don Marquis's "future like ours" argument against the morality of abortion), I haven't had the chance to write up a blog post on the design argument.

And so I dust off the following, which appeared on this blog in early 2009. Enjoy!

A number of readers of my book have asked me why I’m as dismissive of the argument from design as I seem to be. My best friend is among them. He finds considerable power in several formulations of the argument, including Indian versions which, based on his descriptions of them, I think I probably need to study.


I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.

Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”

But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.

To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.

Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.

For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”

The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.

This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.

But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).

My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.

This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.

I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?

I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.

I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.

In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.

Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.

And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.

49 comments:

  1. That was a passionate and interesting testimony Eric. However, how much more inspiring is it for humans to invest in altruism and goodnes in spite of the universe being pitiless and uncaring rather than because of a 'feeling' that there must be more to it than meets the eye.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eric,

    I'd like to know more about your take on Don Marquis. Meanwhile, here is something from your post:

    [Intelligent design defenders] proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world [...] that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.

    You disagree with the last part on the ground that scientists can always argue that an explanation is just around the corner. I don't think this is a fair assessment. While it is true that the existence of unexplained phenomena at the frontier of knowledge cannot imply a supernatural explanation, this frontier is not static: science advances all the time and, eventually, what was such an unexplained “frontier” fact will either be explained or remain behind, so to speak, as a sore anomaly on an otherwise well understood background. This is the kind of fact that can be expected if ID is true (a miracle of sort, if you wish). Of course, establishing that something is an anomaly would not be easy – but, I expect, not significantly more difficult than most of science. That we don't have such a fact (or even a credible candidate) is certainly significant.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, Eric-

    Thanks for that chestnut...

    "Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project."

    ... or any other rational project, to be honest. In reality, science is not confined to what you label as "naturalistic" explanations. Anything rational will do as a scientific explanation.. it just has to have some evidence behind it. If by your lights any evidence we gather has to come from the natural world, then you have in advance defined the scope of reality as naturalistic. But science per se doesn't say so.

    Which is to say that god could make itself plenty apparent if it chose to do so, and the evidence might or might not be called naturalistic, and we would make a science of it, and theologians and scientists would all sing Kumbaya. The issue is purely one of reason based on evidence.

    But the lack of evidence, and the necessity of theology to cite transcendence and super-naturalism, puts these thoughts not just outside science, but into a psychological realm where, faced with the bare mystery of everything that is, we project whatever merciful or vengeful deity comes into our collective heads to account for it.

    At which point we come to your real point...

    "I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?"

    The reason, of course, is because if there is no evidence for a transcendent order and no reason or evidence for its connection with our minds if it did exist, then we had better stick to our knitting and our neuroscience and go with explanations that are true rather than with ones we make up out of whole cloth.

    Hundreds and thousands of years ago, we could be forgiven for framing our ignorance of ourselves and the world in these mythological terms. But not any more. And to frame one's meaning in such highly questionable terms leaves one open to all the misuse to which cults and other false belief systems have been put. It is difficult to rein in untruth once you have started down that road.

    You are playing sort of a confidence game with yourself, where you rely on your basic humanistic instincts to channel and tame your imaginary constructions so that their numinosity can be preserved (as if it came from outside) while at the same time their content reflects your moral values and world view, which all come from inside. Why not just face the truth?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jeff,

    I agree that there is something fiercely beautiful about, say, the stance expressed by Walter Stace in his essay, "Man Against Darkness"--in which Stace calls us to live with a strong moral sense in the face of the conviction that reality at its most basic level cares not a whit for the good or the right. But that I can admire this does not mean that emulating this stance would satisfy the moral imperative I experience, nor does it fit with my understanding of what implications an uncaring reality has for the coherence of the stance Stace describes. But these are points I need to take up at another time, since I am swamped with other pressing matters right now.

    ReplyDelete
  5. JP--The distinction you make, between mysteries at the frontiers of science and anomalies at its heart, is a good one worth keeping in mind. What implications it has for theism depends, I'd think, on the species of theism we're talking about. Schleiermacher's understanding of what would characterize a perfect God is such that the PRESENCE of anomalies as you describe them would count against such a God (no miracles in the sense of breaches in natural law are allowed in Schleiermacher's theology). In this respect he's a bit like Newton, who was motivated to look for consistent patterns in nature on the conviction that a universe created by a perfect God would exhibit such patterns.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Burk,

    In the first part of your comment, you reject the limitations I impose on science by, it seems, saying that any explanation is scientific so long as it is supported by evidence--whether that evidence be evidence from the natural world (the world of shared sensory experience) or not. So you appear to be open to the possibility that there might be evidence other than the empirical sort scientists typically rely on.

    In the second part of your comment, you take it as given that an experience that--to the subject having it--seems veridical in the manner of empirical experience but isn't itself empirical (and seems to the subject to be an encounter with something "else") MUST be dismissed as nothing but internal projection or delusion.

    But if this is right--unless I'm seriously misunderstanding you--then it seems to me you are replacing my assertion (roughly, "Science only considers a certain kind of evidence--evidence of an empirical sort") with something roughly as follows: "Science considers every kind of evidence--but only evidence of the empirical sort IS evidence."

    In other words, there is no substantive difference between your view of how science proceeds and mine. The difference lies in your conviction that there cannot be any evidence or any rationally supported explanations other than the kind exemplified by science. This is an epistemological position--and a philosophically controversial one--for which you offer no evidence. (One might wonder how you COULD offer evidence for it given your epistemology.)

    It is here that Hegel's approach is useful. He doesn't deny you the right to your starting points concerning what counts as evidence and what doesn't--we all have to start somewhere--but he insists that these starting points be taken on provisionally for the sake of seeing where they lead.

    Does the fact that they lead to a radical subjectivising of ethics constitute a problem? (Not every species of naturalism does this, but your epistemology does seem to lead there). Does the fact that they lead to the dissolution of free agency count as a problem? Do the puzzles concerning consciousness that fall under the heading of the "hard problem" count as a problem?

    Many think so, but your tendency has rather consistently been to dismiss their concerns based on their failure to conform to your epistemological starting points. And this renders your epistemology hermetically sealed from serious critical scrutiny. Is THAT a problem for an epistemology that demands evidence and reason?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi, Eric-

    You understand me correctly, I think. It is hard to credit claims for truths without basing them on reason & evidence. (Assuming as always that one means a correspondence truth.) But I think you may be unnecessarily cramping your definition of empirical evidence, of which I take a broad view. I agree, for instance, that our feelings and subjective impressions are evidence.. but their interpretation has been extremely controversial over the last few centuries. Gone are the times when "God spoke to me" is taken as prima facie truth. One is more likely to end up in a mental ward. Is that, in your view, and unfortunate development?

    Then you ask whether we should judge truths by their effects rather than on the bases of reason and evidence as above. To take an example, if one believes in Santa Claus, and behaves as one should for an entire month, would that provide evidence for the truth of that belief, because we implicitly assume that behaving well is not only good but veridical?

    The fact that my starting points (and ending points) lead to a radical subjectivizing of ethics is not my problem. What I (and I think many others as well) observe is that ethics are radically subjectivized, whether we understand why that is or not. Erecting theistic totems to support so-called objective ethics hardly changes that situation, except in a propagandistic sense. Whether society can function in full view of the (in my view) facts of the matter might be a question (though contemporary Europe is promising in that regard). But that's just the thing about philosophy- it seeks truth, not comfortable or even efficacious illusion.

    cont ...

    ReplyDelete
  8. On free will, you probably know that on the naturalist account, that is not a problem at all... Not an issue, rather only one to theists who imagine themselves embodying some divine spark that separates them from the common run of cause and effect.

    On consciousness, there is a problem indeed, since the inner and outer experience has not yet been knitted up in a convincing and complete way, despite the many signs of their connection. But where has philosophy gotten us on that question? Nowhere, and I would argue even worse than nowhere, it has sent us into a miasma of confusion. At least that is the way it looks, and the reason is not hard to find.. theism. On that score, it is time to take a philophical breather, and follow the evidence, of which there is plenty, and plenty more to come.

    OK- those are my answers. Are they hermetically sealed from criticism? I think they cohere among themselves and accord with known evidence, so therefore they would naturally be difficult to undermine. I do take them as provisional, as I do all our facts as well. I would welcome attacks on their weakest points, not only on their strongest points. The typical attack seems to be, however, that theism wishes to posit some aspect of reality beyond the naturalistic account which we have no evidence for, but have ... hope, or tradition, or scripture, or moral rationales to prefer it were true. These seem unavailing. Yet I look forward to your treatment of Hegel!

    cont...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Oh- you ask whether there would be any evidence that could contravene my epistemology of reason + evidence. That is an interesting question. As above, taking a broad view of evidence, it goes far beyond what positivists would typically confine to science. All of philosophy is fair game, as long as premises and reasons are sound. That is why I am interested in your blog.

    So, for instance, were we to live in a non-regular world, where induction was useless and everything changed for no reason from minute to minute, then we couldn't use evidence, other than to say that whatever we thought about reality one moment, it wouldn't be true the next. We would be thoroughly mystified about reality, (if alive at all), and probably thrown back on theism as a default position, for lack of any better ideas.

    To take it one step further, if the supposed deity frequently made itself manifest in some way, accounting for the irregularity of reality, then evidence would once again be efficacious, but this time for theism rather than against. So naturalism does depend heavily on the observed regularity of nature, and the efficacy of, despite the unprovability of, induction.

    That is why evidence is so central. If all the properties of reality are consistent with naturalism rather than with theism, then we hardly have much else to go on, do we? One could say that at the origin of everything lies a deity, but what is the use of that? What difference would it make, without being able to extend that concept to places where the evidence fails to support it?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Eric

    I'm not sure your position, if I understand it correctly, isn't still vulnerable to accusations of being a God of the gaps treatment.

    I find it easy enough to accept that there might be a realm beyond the physical for which no evidence presents itself that we, being physical beings, could comprehend. An absence of evidence for this style of supernaturalism is not evidence for absence, indeed should we find concrete evidence then I'm not sure in what sense it would remain supernatural.

    What puzzles me about theism then is the claim not that the supernatural exists but that we, through revelation or contemplation or whatever, can come to know something of this realm. As soon as we claim this, we are making a claim about the functioning of our brains, as we all seem to accept that at the very least thinking/consciousness is correlated with brain activity. So we are making a statement that is absolutely open to scientific investigation.

    Now, as we all also seem to agree, there are aspects of the mind we don't yet understand, and it appears to be into exactly this gap that the theist is forced to insert their experience of God. If we have some experience of God then it somehow gets into our brains, and because we don't yet understand the brain fully, then this remains to the theist a possibility that they presumably believe in. So, as a concrete example, somehow knowledge of moral values leaks into our brain, leading to this style of thought/reaction/patterning being physically present in the brain. Do theists have a working hypothesis for how this occurs? (I think Dianelos might have suggested using quantum uncertainty to insert direction into evolution but I don't remember).

    Because none of these hypotheses are as yet backed by evidence, then waiting for science to tell us more does seem smart to me. Choosing in advance to tell us how the science will eventually fall lacks for me the intellectual humility of careful investigation.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  11. Eric,

    Thank you for the reply. I will await with interest any future material you may find time to post on the incoherence of Stace's stance. Thanks too for this blog as it has introduced me to a whole new world of philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hi Eric,

    I find Schleiermacher's idea that no anomalies (breaches in natural laws) are allowed very interesting, and more so the fact that they would count as evidence against God. But this raises two questions: (1) What would these anomalies be evidence for? And (2) How do we explain religious experiences?

    The latter needs some explaining. If they are to mean anything in the religious sense, these experiences must imply some form of connection between the physical and the noumenal. Saying that it's the non-material mind that connects to the noumenal does not help – it shifts the question to the connection between the mind and the brain.

    So, we have a series of links connecting our brain to the noumenal realm and, on the occasion of religious experiences, interactions between the two realms occur somewhere along the chain.

    Now, either these interactions obey natural laws or they require exceptions to them. If the former then the noumenal becomes part of the natural world and can be studied by scientific methods (Bernard mentions something similar in a comment above). If the latter we are led, using Schleiermacher's principle, to the intriguing conclusion that religious experiences should count as evidence against God.

    ReplyDelete
  13. JP and Eric,

    I wouldn’t that there are “mysteries” in the frontiers of natural science; rather I’d say there are challenges: For example currently our best models for different kinds of fundamental phenomena (namely GR and QM) are incompatible, and virtually all physicists intuit that there must be a way to integrate these two models into one, the so-called TOE or “Theory of Everything”. As has been often the case in the past when a broader model was discovered, everybody expects that the TOE will not only produce a deeper description (or “explanation”) of physical phenomena, but would also point to previously unthought of phenomena (such as when GR predicted the existence of gravitational lenses, or when QM predicted the existence of non-local phenomena).

    But I agree that there are anomalies at the heart, not of science, but of the naturalistic interpretation of science. Science and its interpretation are two different concepts, not withstanding the fact that many people, including many scientists, conflate them. By naturalistic interpretation of science I mean the metaphysical hypothesis that the objective (or noumenal) reality which produces the physical phenomena that the natural sciences study conforms with naturalism’s basic assumptions, namely that reality is ultimately of a material nature and that causality is ultimately of a mechanical nature.

    Modern science has produced several anomalies at the heart of the naturalistic interpretation of science. Eric in his response to Burk mentions a few. In what follows I’d like to make a list:

    1. QM has made it very difficult to describe a naturalistic reality which would produce the kind of quantum mechanical phenomena we now know about. In other words thanks to science we now that, surprisingly enough, physical phenomena display order of the kind that cannot be produced by a mechanistic reality unless one assumes highly complicated and implausible hypotheses such as the many worlds interpretation, or Bohm’s interpretation.

    2. Modern science has made it very difficult to believe that matter rather than concsciousness is primary in reality. QM has played a role here too, but perhaps the strongest issue is that despite the great advances of science there is nothing in the scientific knowledge about matter that so much as suggests the idea that matter when structured in some particular way would become conscious.

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  14. [continued from above]

    3. One deep property of modern science’s models which has made it hard to defend a naturalistic interpretation of science is the so-called fine-tuning of the fundamental constants. In response naturalists have proposed the hypothesis of the multiverse, but only at a grave cost to naturalism’s traditional epistemology according to which one should not posit invisible entities for which no scientific rationale exists just in order to prop up one’s metaphysical assumptions. What’s more, arguably, any naturalistic process capable of producing the multiverse would have to be even more fine-tuned, so it’s not clear whether that expensive response even works.

    4. Another deep property of modern science which makes trouble for the naturalistic interpretation of science is what has become known as the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. This is an even harder problem than the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, because it seems that the evolution of intelligent beings can obtain in universes which are not as deeply mathematical as ours, which makes it on naturalism very difficult to understand why our universe should be so mathematical.

    5. The models of modern science are such that relatively simple high level physical phenomena (which are the only phenomena we can possibly know about) are the result of the addition of the highly complex behavior of elementary particles. This is the opposite of what naturalists in the age of classical science thought to be the case. That elementary particles with no internal parts and no access to computing machinery would nevertheless be capable of such complex behavior is an appeal to magic and directly contradicts naturalism’s sense of matter being a dumb and blind substance.

    6. One scientific model which is easy to naturalize is Darwinism. Of course this fact does not say anything about whether the naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism is actually true, for there is also the theistic interpretation of Darwinism which is also possible. Indeed we now know that it is possible for God to have guided evolution in a way that does not violate the physical closure of phenomena. And even though Darwinism does not make ontological trouble for naturalism it does make epistemic trouble for it, as Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism demonstrates.

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  15. [continued from above]

    7. Any naturalistic interpretation of science, whether deterministic or probabilistic, implies that there is no freedom of will (i.e. that we could not have chosen to act differently than how we in fact did), because our choices were either determined by the previous state of the universe or else random. Some naturalists find it easy to claim that our sense of freedom of will must therefore be an illusion, notwithstanding the fact that freedom of will lies at the heart of our experience of life. Moreover the denial of the reality of freedom of will makes a joke of some of the most important concepts of society, such as that of personal responsibility, as well as of some our deepest and most useful emotions, such as the emotion of remorse. Now, clearly, determinism is incompatible with freedom of will, but modern science has discovered what appear to be intrinsically non-deterministic phenomena and has thus made it possible (and indeed highly plausible) that objective reality is non-deterministic. Thus the effect of modern science in this context has been to keep a problem for naturalism, while removing a problem from theism.

    8. The naturalistic interpretation of science also implies that there are no objective moral values, i.e. no moral values in reality at all. The idea that, say, to torture a child for fun is not intrinsically wrong, but wrong only because of what people believe about this matter, or because of social conventions, or because the way our brain has evolved - that idea strikes many people as a paradigmatic case of an irrational belief. Sociobiology explains the patterns we observe in behavior (or at least makes it plausible that such mechanistic explanations exist), but this makes it even harder for naturalists to explain what it is that gives behavior its moral dimension. It seems that modern science keeps strengthening J. L. Mackie’s point that any naturalistic reality in which moral values exist is “queer”.

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  16. [continued from above]

    Some concluding remarks: There is clearly some confusion about the relationship between science and reality. On the one extreme some people as per Kant think that reality is entirely beyond scientific knowledge, because many different realities would produce exactly the same phenomenal data that science uses. On the other extreme some people, including most scientists, find scientific realism to be obviously true. Also some people believe, erroneously, that methological naturalism implies that a naturalistic interpretation of science must exist. So I would like to suggest the following relationship between science and reality: Clearly, reality produces all of our experience of life, including that part which science studies, namely the physical phenomena we observe. Thus science may not be sufficient to say how reality *is*, but has something to say about how reality *is not*, namely science can falsify descriptions of realities such that would *not* produce the physical phenomena that science knows about. And it is on this ground that I argue science is making naturalism improbable: it has proven very hard to describe a naturalistic reality that would produce the quantitative/public/objective part of our experience of life that science studies (never mind to produce the qualitative/private/subjective part of which we have direct knowledge). Given the huge amount of trouble that modern science has created for naturalism one realizes that the idea that science supports naturalism is a modern day myth. Contrary to the God of the gaps idea, what is in fact the case is that modern science is creating ever larger gaps for naturalism.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Hi JP,

    You write: “[Religious experience] needs some explaining. If they are to mean anything in the religious sense, these experiences must imply some form of connection between the physical and the noumenal.

    On theism all experiences, including much simpler experience as for example that we always observe an apple fall when left free in the air, show a connection between the physical and the noumenal. The idea, believed even by many theists, that God has created a mechanistic universe with us in it and only here and there (perhaps in religious experiences) interacts with creation, that idea is simply false. This idea does not comport with classical theology (see “general providence”) and it does not comport with the strongest theistic philosophy of today.

    Given that on theism there is a connection between all our experiences and God, the question would be what the meaning or purpose of religious experiences are. And that question seems very easy to answer.

    Finally, it is of course the case that religion is a natural phenomenon, as are all other phenomena we observe. Surely nobody should think that God would have created the universe in such a way that all phenomena were natural except for religion which would be an unnatural phenomenon.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Dianelos

    Sometimes I think your naturalists are straw men. None of the scientists I know, nor have read, when pushed on the matter, claim that science is producing a complete description of reality. Most think of science much more in terms of a muddling through, a pragmatic enterprise to produce the most powerful (in a predictive sense) model of our world that we can manage. They do this for good and proper reasons, medicine being an obvious example.

    So, of course there are puzzles in science, mysteries at the frontier, and probably there always will be. Some of the issues you raise may cause problems for a particularly strict form of naturalism, but for the naturalist agnostic who claims only that it's the only way we have of forming reliable knowledge, your list causes no trouble at all. Certainly there is nothing in that list that would tempt one to opt instead for a story for which there is neither evidence nor the possibility of falsification.

    The problem of Free Will is a problem not because of naturalism, but because the theist explanation disintegrates into randomness, and indeterminism doesn't solve this.

    Moral relativism is not implied by naturalism, evolution allows for the creation of a set of moral parameters, but history and anthropology remind us that morality is highly relativistic (by the end of today another 10 000 children under the age of five will have perished, and judging by our actions we don't seem to mind much, which is puzzling for the theist surely).

    There is nothing unreasonable about mathematics' effectiveness, any more than there is vision's effectiveness. We have a tool and apply it the best we can. Sometime it does the job, often it can't.

    This idea that simple particles exhibit complex behaviour is highly anthropomorphic. What is complex is our method of anticipating their behaviour, as is true for the behaviour of a speck of dust in a wind.

    As always, there is nothing unreasonable about plumping for a story you enjoy. All power to you. But to claim reason requires works only when the reasoning employed is highly selective.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  19. Hi Dianelos,

    Interesting list. I will try to go through all your items and explain, if I can, why I don't find them as problematic for naturalism as you do. But before I get to this, let me point out some reasons why theism is not appealing to me.

    First, I don't feel the needs Eric and others have often mentioned: need for absolute morality, need to know that the universe is on the side of good, need to know the “meaning” of life and so on. If I had, I would probably also engage on this quest for a God or something that would satisfy these needs. I can't tell where this difference comes from and this, in itself, is one of the reasons I am so interested in this blog.

    Second, as far as explaining power goes, theism falls completely flat. You (and others) often claim that theism has no problem explaining this or that but I am still looking for any real substance in these explanations. Without details on how it works, it's just an empty shell. One answer is that this is not what theism is about – it's all about the why and not the how. Seems like a cop-out to me.

    Now to your points.

    1. I'm not sure what you mean. If you are referring to the role of randomness in QM I don't see what the problem is – unless what you mean by “mechanistic” implies determinism. If reality turns out to have a random element, so be it. It cannot count against (or for) naturalism.

    2. As far as I know, consciousness plays no role at all in modern physics. I know some make that claim and I would be very much interested in seeing a real reference to this in a serious physics paper. Any physicist out there?

    As for your other point about organized matter becoming conscious... You say that there is nothing in [science] that so much as suggests the idea that matter [...] would become conscious. On the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence linking consciousness to the material brain: consciousness can be turned off by drugs, split in two by brain surgery; conscious states can be measured by instruments; and so on. It seems most reasonable to follow the trail where it leads – to the physical brain.

    Moreover, I don't think it is strictly correct to say that matter “becomes” conscious. No more than saying that the matter in our bodies is alive. What is conscious or alive is an organism – not parts of it.

    [...]

    ReplyDelete
  20. [...]

    3. The alleged fine-tuning is interesting. Being no physicist, I cannot comment on the specifics but it's clearly a case of a “mystery” at the frontier of science. Let's wait and see.

    In any case, why would we say that such a fine tuning proves the universe is made for us? I can only see this as a case of supreme human arrogance. It would be much more reasonable to say that the universe is “tuned” for the existence of stars of black holes. Human life may be just a freak accident.

    4. Mathematics constitute the most precise and powerful language we have to describe physical reality. Whatever we know about reality must be expressed using some language. Mathematics is successful almost by necessity. Not because reality is mathematical but because this is the tool we have to talk about it.

    5. I don't understand this one. Elementary particles don't show complex behaviour... Are you talking of higher level of complexity arising from simple parts?

    6. I think convincing reasons to doubt Plantinga's argument have been raised on this blog. I don't believe these have been satisfactorily answered.

    7. Freedom of will is a very interesting topic. It is often opposed to determinism but I am not sure why we cannot have both at the same time – why can't a free choice be predictable? In any case, you seem to be saying that what you see as undesirable consequence of a position should count against it. But our desires or preferences have nothing to do with what reality is or is not.

    8. Morality makes perfect sense in an evolutionary framework. You use the phrase paradigmatic case of an irrational belief and I must accept that this is a real problem for you. But I don't get it at all. Why would the universe care about how we behave? Why would ultimate reality mirror in any way human values? Another case of human hubris, I fear.

    A last thought. Many of the points you raise are very interesting and it is regrettable in a sense that the discussion almost always ends up as an opposition between theism and naturalism. I wonder sometime what real differences this imply and I like to think – not much. As you mention in another comment most of all here share a lot in terms of values. We are horrified by the idea of torturing a child, we have the same sense of beauty, we are moved by great music, and so on. All this despite what appears to be an irreconcilable difference in world-view. But if this difference is so important, why is it that it has no more impact on all these other aspects of our life?

    jp

    ReplyDelete
  21. Just returned from my conference. One of the more interesting, if difficult to follow, talks that I attended critically explored the work of two physicists who apparently have argued that basic premises of quantum physics are incompatible BOTH with determinism AND indeterminism.

    This, they think, establishes the need to posit some third, poorly understood alternative--something which qualifies neither as determined by prior states nor as random.

    Of course, if they're right about this, it has implications for the free will debate--because one of the big challenges for that debate is that both determinism as ordinarily conceived and indeterminism (conceived along the model of randomness) seem to be at odds with our immediate-but-not-conceptually-worked-out sense of what it means to be free.

    I can't say, of course, whether the contention here is correct--but if so, it would offer an example of a situation in which a scientific conclusion has bearing on philosophical debates (although it hardly settles them).

    ReplyDelete
  22. Eric

    How interesting. Are people looking at this in terms of the possibility of a new perspective on determinism unlocking different ways of thinking about free will in general, or is it more there's speculation on the way quantum effects might impact directly on brain processes (there are some reasonably controversial hypotheses in this area already I think).

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  23. Hi JP,

    You write: “ First, I don't feel the needs Eric and others have often mentioned: need for absolute morality, need to know that the universe is on the side of good, need to know the “meaning” of life and so on.

    Religion is not primarily about knowledge. Religion is not primary an intellectual response, but is primarily an existential response. The religious person makes an existential choice, namely she commits herself to a particular way of life, the religious way. What is the religious way of life? The way of life that would make sense if reality were on the side of the good. At the same time of course the religious person believes, at least on faith, that reality is indeed on the side of the good.

    That life stance strikes me as quite admirable, especially when the religious person believes that reality is on the side of the good without having sufficient evidence for holding that belief.

    You (and others) often claim that theism has no problem explaining this or that but I am still looking for any real substance in these explanations.

    Perhaps you expect a mechanistic kind of explanation, such as science provides. But theism’s explanations go beyond scientific explanations, and are based on agent causality which is not of a mechanistic nature. Naturally enough, theistic explanations are of a personal nature. But they fulfill what I’d say are the characteristics of a valid explanation, namely they give one intellectual satisfaction, they simplify one’s worldview (i.e. diminish what one must assume as brute facts), and they have predictive power. Conversely I am not aware of any explanations produced by naturalism beyond what science explains.

    [continued in the next post]

    ReplyDelete
  24. Intriguing. But still, I don't see how randomness or indeterminacy is any use in saving free will as a concept.

    Free will posits that we not do things because we are puppets of quantum indeterminacy any more than because we are puppets of cause and effect.

    As far as I understand, free will posits that there is some "me" that exists outside cause-and-effect as well as randomness, which makes decisions based on .. take your pick of divine inspiration, a separate soul, or god-encodded morality, etc. The idea is that there is a fundamental separateness that affords this magisterial "self" the capacity to deny whatever causes might be vying for control of the decision process, including the omnipotent deity, incidentally.

    ReplyDelete
  25. JP,

    You write: “ 2. As far as I know, consciousness plays no role at all in modern physics.

    Yet it undeniably exists. That’ precisely a major anomaly from which the naturalistic interpretation of science suffers.

    On the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence linking consciousness to the material brain: consciousness can be turned off by drugs, split in two by brain surgery; conscious states can be measured by instruments; and so on. It seems most reasonable to follow the trail where it leads – to the physical brain.

    That’s a confusing issue. I wonder how you’d respond to the following thought experiment: Place a normal human being in a windowless room which is lighted by a single light bulb. Let’s call that person Peter. Now it’s true that if you mess with some particular part of his brain Peter will lose his capacity of sight. If you fix that particular part of his brain Peter will regain his capacity of sight. So Peter’s conscious states are certainly linked to his brain. Now it’s also true that if you mess with some particular part of the light bulb Peter will lose his capacity of sight. If you fix that particular part of the light bulb Peter will regain his capacity of sight. So Peter’s conscious states are certainly linked with the light bulb also. What is then the fundamental difference between Peter’s brain and the room’s light bulb vis-à-vis Peter’s conscious states? If no fundamental difference exists then to study Peter’s brain as the seat of his consciousness makes as much sense as to study the room’s light bulb as the seat of his consciousness.

    ReplyDelete
  26. JP,

    You write: “ 3. The alleged fine-tuning is interesting. Being no physicist, I cannot comment on the specifics but it's clearly a case of a “mystery” at the frontier of science. Let's wait and see.

    The apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants is no “mystery” for science, for these constants simply represent a property of science’s extremely successful modeling of phenomena. Science may well advance producing models with constants of even greater fine-tuning, without being for that any less successful.

    But such fine-tuning certainly represents an anomaly for naturalism’s interpretation of science, for in response naturalists must either claim that the universe being balanced on the point of a pin is just a brute fact of reality, or else hypothesize without any evidence whatsoever that a huge number a invisible parallel universes exist.

    4. Mathematics constitute the most precise and powerful language we have to describe physical reality. Whatever we know about reality must be expressed using some language.

    Surely, the mathematical modeling of phenomena must be given using mathematics. But the phenomenal reality that science studies is not just of a mathematical nature, but of a highly sophisticated mathematical nature; that’s the anomaly. And this anomaly is especially hard because intelligent beings can naturalistically evolve in a universe of a much simpler mathematical nature, so the hypothesis that a vast number of parallel universes exist does not work. Out of all the possible universes where intelligent life can evolve naturalistically there is only a vanishingly small proportion of universes that display the deep mathematical structure that ours displays. And it turns out that our universe belongs to this vanishingly small proportion.

    ReplyDelete
  27. JP,

    You write: “5. I don't understand this one. Elementary particles don't show complex behaviour...

    Actually they do. Even the simplest exercises where one must calculate the future states of a single particle require a lot of computations. To claim that the elementary electron manages to produce the complex behavior it produces just by itself is an appeal to magic. In reality the situation is much worse: Strictly speaking the behavior of a single particle depends on the state of every other particle in the universe.

    6. I think convincing reasons to doubt Plantinga's argument have been raised on this blog. I don't believe these have been satisfactorily answered.

    Plantinga’s EAAN argument is so remarkably assertive that many people, including theists, feel there must be something wrong with it. There is book where several professional philosophers try to respond to Plantinga’s argument, and Plantinga in that book deals with all of them quite convincingly in my judgment (see “Naturalism Defeated?” edited by James K. Beilby.)

    7. Freedom of will is a very interesting topic. It is often opposed to determinism but I am not sure why we cannot have both at the same time – why can't a free choice be predictable?

    Predictability is a difference concept than determinism. Indeterministic systems can be highly predictable, and deterministic systems (e.g. chaotic systems) can be unpredictable.

    The fact remains that all mechanistic ontologies imply that free will does not exist, hence all the naturalistic talk about free will being an illusion etc. For which, again, absolutely no evidence exists.

    ReplyDelete
  28. JP,

    You write: “ 8. Morality makes perfect sense in an evolutionary framework.

    The anomaly for naturalism is not about behavior. All behavior by all systems, including that behavior of humans we call moral, makes perfect sense in a naturalistic reality. The question rather is this: What is the property of behavior we call “moral” (whether good or wrong)? In a naturalistic reality it seems there is no place for such a property.

    In other words, the problem for naturalism is not to explain how very few people approve of torturing a child for fun. The problem for naturalism is to explain in what the wrongness of torturing a child for fun consists of. In a naturalistic reality “behavior” refers to the state evolution of a mechanical system. Human beings are highly complex mechanisms, but so is a galaxy. What is it that makes only the former state evolution fitting for the “moral” qualifier? And what is it that makes some state evolution (such as helping a child for love) fitting for the “good” qualifier, and some other state evolution (such as torturing a child for fun) fitting for the “evil” qualifier? Some naturalistic thinkers (e.g. J. L. Mackie) realizing that there is nothing in a naturalistic reality that would answer such questions argue that all moral talk is invented, and that objectively speaking there is nothing evil about torturing a child for fun. All moral talk only refers to properties of the human brain or human culture.

    Why would the universe care about how we behave?

    A naturalistic reality certainly doesn’t. Indeed in a naturalistic reality one has trouble making sense of the concept of “good” and “evil” in the first place. But to actually believe that there is nothing intrinsically evil in torturing a child for fun is irrational, in my judgment.

    Why would ultimate reality mirror in any way human values?

    That’s an interesting question. Many people, both ignorant and philosophical, find that the best understanding of reality is such that ultimate reality does mirror human values, and therefore arrange their lives around that picture.

    ReplyDelete
  29. JP,

    You write: “it is regrettable in a sense that the discussion almost always ends up as an opposition between theism and naturalism.

    Why regrettable? If there are reasons why theism or naturalism is more probably true then I think it is quite useful to discover them.

    As you mention in another comment most of all here share a lot in terms of values.

    Right, which makes one think that perhaps the fundamental facts of reality we all recognize are related to values. Which makes perfect sense on theism, and no sense on naturalism.

    But if this difference is so important, why is it that it has no more impact on all these other aspects of our life?

    If two people share the same values then the theist who believes that such values reflect a deep property of reality (namely God’s nature and the purpose of one’s life) is more apt to act on them than the naturalist who believes that such values only reflect personal opinion, social convention, or the way our brain has evolved.

    Ontological beliefs have a measurable impact on how people behave. There are several statistical studies which show that all other factors being the same religious people are more giving than non-religious people. Which, if you think about it, is really not surprising at all. And it goes without saying that religious belief can greatly benefit one’s outlook on life.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Dianelos

    I think you explain your favourite arguments well. What I can't quite work out is why, at the point where you make an intuitive leap, and simply assert that one view works better than another, you don't own that leap a little more explicitly. Often you present arguments like these in language that makes it seem you believe any rational person would see it the same way. Yet you are well aware that a good many highly educated, informed and rational folk see it differently.

    There are good reasons to think for example that moral language is indeed a human convention. I understand that you don't see it that way but there is nothing at all unreasonable about my contrary point of view on this.

    Your light bulb example is a good case in point too, if we are studying that aspect of consciousness that registers and makes available for contemplation the seeing of light in the room, then yes, the light bulb is part of the physical system that describes the conscious experience, and we do need to consider the physical mechanism by which the light information is created and gets inside the brain as part of our full description of the consciousness generating process.

    The mathematics example contains some pretty big assertions too, the 'intelligent beings can naturalistically evolve in a universe of a much simpler mathematical nature' is a brave claim. And as you will well know, for many the anthropic argument works well enough: for any sufficiently complex single trial, all outcomes are vastly improbable, so the fact we live in a vastly improbable universe is a necessary fact first because any universe would have been vastly improbable and secondly, we're in it so of course it has the necessary conditions for life. To then ask, yes but why these particular conditions is close to asking, yes but why this particular combination of lottery numbers? That there is a psychological need to ask this question is clear, that it is meaningful is less so.

    Finally, it may well be certain styles of religious belief predispose us to types of behaviour that you and I approve of. But a belief in Santa Claus predisposes children to certain behaviours (excitement, anticipation, celebration) that I approve of and I don't feel the need to then conclude Santa Claus is real.

    Again, I can see these styles of arguments work nicely for you, and that's great. But exactly the same arguments have little heft with me, and I don't think it's because you understand them better than I do. Rather, I think it's because at the point where, inevitably, a leap of faith must be made, I choose to remain sceptically agnostic, whereas your personal story draws you towards metaphors of God. Like JP, I think this difference is much much less important than people make it out to be.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  31. Bernard,

    Thanks for pointing out that all arguments ultimately rest on some epistemic principles. It’s certainly the case that if one does not agree with these epistemic principles then the respective arguments will not be seen to be convincing. In any case let me identify on which epistemic principles my arguments from science rest on. So here is a list of the epistemic principles I value:

    1. Epistemic parsimony (or Occam’s razor). A worldview which rests on an ever increasing number of appeals to facts being so because they are brute facts strikes me as increasingly improbable. So, for example, naturalism responds to the fact of the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants either by claiming that the universe being balanced on the point of a pin is a brute fact, or else that the existence of a huge number of invisible parallel universes is a brute fact. Similarly I don’t see any other naturalistic answer to the fact that elementary particles are capable of highly computationally complex behavior than that this too is a brute fact. Similarly I don’t see any other naturalistic answer to the fact that the universe is so deeply mathematical than that this too is a brute fact. Similarly I don’t see any other naturalistic answer to the fact that the universe resists naturalistic modeling than that too is a brute fact. Science has revealed that the universe we live in possesses some mind-boggingly rare properties, and to keep believing that it’s all a brute fact requires an increasing level of credulity.

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  32. [continued from above]

    2. Epistemic plausibility. For example I judge the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be so implausible as to be absurd, not withstanding the fact that according to physicist and atheist Steven Weinberg this is the interpretation that most (naturalistic) physicists today subscribe to. For example the many worlds interpretation entails that each one of us lives in an increasing number of universes, in some of which each one of us will never die no matter how much we try kill ourselves. In other universes, each one of us, including Steven Weinberg himself, will become the next Pope. I mean, how implausible must a worldview be to be deemed probably false?

    3. Epistemic consistency (aka what goes for the goose goes for the gander). After centuries of claiming that one should not believe in anything for which no scientific evidence exists naturalists today are claiming that without any scientific evidence whatsoever we should believe in the existence of a huge number of invisible parallel universes, or that matter in some complex configurations becomes conscious, or that elementary particles are capable just by themselves to behave in complex ways, or that unguided evolution in our universe will probably produce organisms as complex as we are, and so on. In some cases, who knows, such scientific evidence may be forthcoming in the future, but none is available now. The more general problem is that there is actually no scientific evidence that naturalism itself is true.

    4. Explanatory power. I find that theistic explanations (which, naturally enough are of a personal nature) explain much more than what science explains, and indeed explain some meta-scientific facts such as the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, the deep mathematical nature of the universe, etc. Conversely it seems to me that naturalism does not explain anything at all beyond what science explains.

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  33. [continued from above]

    5. Epistemic quality. Some of the arguments many naturalists use strike me as simply bad. So, for example, the arguments they propose for the claim that our brain produces our consciousness also apply to the light bulb. I mean a naturalist can reasonably claim that what we are ultimately conscious of is what happens in our brain, or that what we are ultimately capable of thinking is limited by our brain, but the claim that there is overwhelming scientific evidence that our brain produces our consciousness rests on very bad thinking indeed that in my judgment borders on the delusional. Similarly, I find that the anthropic principle expresses a truism that in no way responds to the problem of the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants. It’s certainly true that reality must be so as to produce all facts we know about including the fact that we exist, but this does not explain why the fundamental constants are so value sensitive. Intelligent beings can evolve in a universe where a slight shift in these values would not destroy their possibility of existing. Similarly the idea that “somebody must win the lottery” is simply a very bad one. Surprising facts cry out for an explanation beyond pointing out that winning the lottery is surprising too. If we discovered that, say, there is a message from God encoded in the exact ratio of the masses of the proton and electron, or in how the stars are arranged when looked from the center of the galaxy, then the answer “well, somebody had to win that lottery too” does not work. Nor does it work to suggest that when confronted with surprising facts we ask for explanations only because of some psychological need. Further, it is very often the case that naturalists implicitly or explicitly conflate naturalism and science, which strikes as an obvious and colossal epistemic mistake. At the very least, almost all naturalists believe that science supports their ontology, whereas I see that the opposite is in fact the case.

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  34. [continued from above]

    Now, at this juncture a naturalist may suggest that it’s not the case that the naturalistic reasoning I point out above is fallacious, but rather that my reasoning about it is fallacious. Which is fine as an hypothesis, but unless somebody points out to me where my fallacies lie I must of course follow my own reasoning. Or the naturalist may argue that I am right, but that the fallacies I point above are only committed by more or less ignorant naturalists. This may be a valid point; I have been reading some academic naturalistic philosophers who actively point out the many problems that naturalism suffers from and speculate about the direction naturalism must transform itself in order to remain viable.

    6. Compatibility with my experience of life. In my experience of life I could have chosen differently than how I in fact chose, so I have free will. In my experience of life some actions are just intrinsically good and others are just intrinsically evil. I hold then to the epistemic principle that an ontology which clashes with my most basic experience of life is not to be embraced, especially when there are other ontologies which make perfect sense of my experience of life, and especially when the incompatible ontology can offer absolutely no evidence for its extraordinary claims. I mean I really see absolutely no evidence or argument that shows that objective moral values do not exist, or that free will does not exist, as naturalists claim. I understand that naturalism implies such things, but for a naturalist to use naturalism as a premise is to commit the fallacy of begging the question. Naturalists often insist on the epistemic principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but in the case of free will and of morality they seem to forget it (once more violating the principle #3 about epistemic consistency). It would require a mountain of evidence for me to believe that I lack free will, or that to torture a child for fun is not intrinsically evil, and I see zero evidence for such naturalistic claims. (Actually I cannot even imagine how such evidence may look like.)

    [continued bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  35. [continued from above]

    Finally, I’d like to discuss some further issues you raise:

    You correctly point out that “a good many highly educated, informed and rational folk see it differently” and believe in naturalism. Similarly I am sure you’d agree that a good many highly educated, informed and rational folk believe in theism. What are we to make of these facts? One possibility is that our epistemic condition is such that believing in diametrically different ontological worldviews is equally rational, but even if that is true I am not sure that this implies that agnosticism is in response a rational position to take. Another possibility is that ontology is just a hard (not to mention fashionable) field and that good, educated, informed and rational people can fall for some bad reasoning where ontology is concerned.

    I agree that belief in Santa Claus predisposes children to some types of behavior we value, on the other hand we are not like children, so I don’t understand the analogy. Or perhaps you think that we are like children after all; if so then perhaps we should believe in fairy tales.

    You say that ontological differences are much much less important than people make them out to be. As it happens yesterday I was walking with friends on the countryside and at some point we discussed how the ideal of consumption has swept all the world, rich and poor, East and West, capitalistic and communistic, democratic and autocratic, educated and non-educated, hardworking or lazy, honest or dishonest. It should be clear that this path towards ever greater materialistic consumption is both unwise for the individual and suicidal for humankind. I personally do not see any hope in stopping and reversing that worldwide trend, except in the ethical strength that religion potentially offers. So I beg to disagree. I think that religion can make a huge difference, not just for each one of us but also for the whole of the human race.

    ReplyDelete
  36. Bernard and Burk: The physicists' argument (and let me say that this is based on LISTENING to a conference paper ABOUT their argument, so there is considerable room for misunderstanding here) is that NEITHER randomness NOR determinism fits with observations in quantum physics (especially as relates to quantum entanglement and experimenters making independent observations with respect to intangled particles). So the point is not that something about quantum indeterminacy can make sense of free will. Rather, the point is that, in order to make sense of scientific observation, we need to carve out a conceptual space that is NEITHER reducible to cause-effect determinism NOR randomness. That is, if we combine these observations with the assumption of determinism we get a contradiction, and if we combine these observations with the assumption of randomness we get a contradiction. So there must be a THIRD category--events which are neither caused nor random--in order to avoid a contradiction with what is observed.

    The relation to the free will debate is that philosophers have argued (with considerable force) that neither determined behavior nor random behavior qualifies as "free"--but the difficulty is that it is hard to make sense of a third alternative. If the above argument works (and I must say I have no idea whether it is sound or not), what follows is NOT that human beings have free will. Rather, what follows is that, in order to make sense of scientific observations, we need to hold that there IS a third alternative to causal determinism and randomness (even though we can't conceptualize this alternative). In other words, the physics will have shown that the following argument is unsound:

    1. Every event is either determined or random.

    2. A choice that is determined is not free.

    3. A choice that is random is not free.

    4. Therefore, no choice is free.

    If the argument based on quantum physics is sound, it shows that premise 1 above is false, and that one common argument for denying free will doesn't work. But there are no positive conclusions concerning freedom of the will that can be drawn.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Tracked down the names of the physicists: John Conway and Simon Kochen. Their theories are laid out in a series of articles published in Foundations of Physics and Notices of the American Mathematical Society, between 2006 & 2009. Obviously, their conclusions are controversial and contested--and, on a quick overview, it seems they throw around the terms "free will" and "freedom" without much precision--thus enabling them to too-quickly equate the need for a third alternative with the need for free will.

    One of the more interesting claims they make is that IF experimenters have free will, then quantum particles have some measure of it, too. I'd be more inclined to say that IF we use the term "free will" to describe the decisions of experimenters in the cases at hand, then we should use the same term to describe the behavior of the particles. But doing so opens the door to misunderstanding, since what has been established is at best "something that is neither causal determination nor randomness." Still, it is pretty provocative.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Thanks, Eric-

    I see the wiki site on this. Isn't there an elementary error here, in that it assumes what it wishes to prove?

    "The theorem states that, given the axioms, if the two experimenters in question are free to make choices about what measurements to take, then the results of the measurements cannot be determined by anything previous to the experiments."

    Since the whole issue of what comes out of such experiments depends on what the experimenters choose to look at, they have only displaced the "free" science-y results of an experiment back to the assumed free will of the experimenters. But it is that original choice/freedom that is at issue.

    And in the second place, if we grant the premises, how is this different from indeterminacy?

    ReplyDelete
  39. Eric,

    What I can understand about the “Free-Will Theorem” is this:

    We have on one hand we have two experimenters about to decide which measurement to make and, on the other hand, the measurements themselves. The theorem eliminates the following possibility: the experimenters decide freely what measurements to make (they have Free Will) AND the results of the measurements are predictable.

    I suppose the opposite was conceivable: the experimenters decide (freely) on their measurements and, before making them, an all-knowing being can predict what the results will be. The theorem rules that out (if the choice is free).

    Does that make sense to you? The text on Wikipedia is very short and not altogether clear. In addition, I don’t see where the need for a third way arises. If I have time, I will try to look at their paper later on.

    By the way, the Conway of the theorem is the well-known mathematician who invented the game of Life.

    ReplyDelete
  40. Here is an extended discussion of the theory, for those interested.

    ReplyDelete
  41. Burk--Yes, your point about begging the question is well-taken. This was also brought up and discussed during the conference session--with some claiming that Conway and Kochen beg the question and others pointing out that they explicitly formulate their argument as a conditional: IF the experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles.

    But for me, this conditional argument just seems a bit of a muddle, since it makes no effort to unpack the concept of freedom. The part of their argument that interested me was when they argued that their three axioms (called SPIN, TWIN, and MIN) taken together with determinism implied a contradiction, and the same three axioms taken together with indeterminism implied a contradiction. THIS is what I think has the greatest philosophical interest--since it seems to entail the need for a third alternative (however hard it may be to conceptualize). Identifying that third alternative with freedom seems premature. Rather, if right it establishes the existence of a genus of which free will might be a species.

    ReplyDelete
  42. Dianelos

    I may have been unclear. Certainly the case I am making does not require your assumptions to be fallacious, as I am not arguing you are wrong to hold your beliefs. Rather I am arguing it is a step too far for you to assume your beliefs are better than mine. As such, I am claiming that my own assumptions are no more fallacious than yours.

    Specifically, I think there are two ares where I would disagree with you. The first is setting up a falsely exclusive opposition between naturalism and theism as if these two are the only games in town. An agnostic supernaturalism is clearly one of the other options, and as it's the one I'm promoting as good for me, attacks on a rigid form of naturalism are likely to get us going around in circles.

    The second areas is not so much the principles of reasoning you promote (I think Occam's razor is often tremendously useful, we agree on this and many things) but on how you apply it. It is no the principles, but the great leaps of faith within your idiosyncratic application of them that is the more interesting arena for discussion.

    You make many points, so for clarity I'll choose just three as these illustrate my point well enough I think. You say that a belief must fit with your life experience. This is I think a good principle. But then you say, in your life, you could have made different choices, hence you know you have free will. Well, this issue of whether you could really have made different choices is the whole point of contention, and it's a very difficult one to come to grips with. To conclude on this point intuitively and make this key assumption a crucial plank in your reasoned theology is the sort of thing I think you can be fairly called on.

    You dismiss the lottery example as bad reasoning. You do this on the grounds that it would give one licence to dismiss all pattern as brute facts, not needing an explanation. this is to misunderstand the analogy I think. It simply reminds us that some patterns (roll a die twenty times, you find some apparently almost impossible patterns) should be dug into, and others not. The question then is the so called fine tuning one of these patterns? I'm not sure. You seem confident it is and I'm not sure either hunch is more reasonable here.

    You are also keen to assume potential interpretations of Quantum Physics represent genuine attempts to describe reality. For most physicists they're no such thing. They're seen simply as scaffolding that can assist one towards the next line of experimental enquiry. Meanwhile, the 'shut up and calculate' school dominates.

    And, on another tack, your speculation that theism can save the world from consumerism is charming but, form my perspective, somewhat naive. Take an issue like global warming. What's the right balance between prevention and mitigation? How about between investing in new technologies and curing consumption. Is it better to rely upon emissions trading or carbon taxes? What's the right balance between government leadership and consumer awareness? How to spread the costs between continents, income classes and generations? These are tremendously pressing and complex issues and to suggest a belief in God is going to be the circuit breaker is to my mind an unusual take on this. One could legitimately ask which countries have done the most to address this one, and how this correlates with their religious beliefs, and your argument does poorly by this measure.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  43. Hi Dianelos,

    Thanks for your extensive answers. For now, I would like to concentrate on the issue of “explanatory power”, as this has come repeatedly in these discussions.

    You say that theistic explanations explain much more than what science explains – but what does that mean? Take the alleged fine tuning of physical constants – it's probably fair to say that physics cannot explain at this moment how they came about with any degree of certainty (I say this tentatively, being no physicist, but let's suppose it's the case). Physicists advance many hypothesis concerning this and we have now no way to know if any of them is correct. So, what are we to do? I suppose we could say that there is some explanation, E, waiting to be established but still unknown - but this is saying nothing of substance, isn't it?

    Now, what is theism saying? That God determined the values of these constants – somehow. How is that different from invoking explanation “E”? It seems to me it's just replacing an unknown by another, without any gain. Furthermore, where does that leave the physicists' hypothesis? Does this help in any way to decide between them? I don't think so – all these hypothesis are still alive. If any one could be established by experiment, God's hypothetical intervention would simply be moved to the next unknown checkpoint. How can that be considered an explanation?

    Take consciousness. You say that on theism, there is no problem. But what does theism say? Just that consciousness does not reside in the brain and that a perfect correlation is maintained between it and brain states. That's not an explanation – it's the statement of a problem: how does that work? Where does it come from? How is the correlation maintained? What are the interactions between consciousness and the brain? How are they controlled? How can we explain split consciousness caused by certain brain surgery? Can we interact with consciousness with instruments? If not, why? There are gazillions questions waiting to be answered.

    Can you see my difficulty here? It's all very well to say that theism does not concern itself with scientific questions. I have no issue at all with that. But when theism claims to explain, and to explain better than other approaches, then it must provide more than extremely general statements without any real substance. It seems theism wants to have it both ways: claim to explain better while not having to provide any detail.

    I am also very puzzled by the fact that theists don't seem interested at all in these questions. Don't they follow naturally from theistic claims?

    jp

    ReplyDelete
  44. Burk

    Thank you for the link to the discussion article on the free will/quantum paper. I'll have to read it a few more times to get a proper sense of it, but it is interesting to see the authors being pulled up on the old trick of hiding one's conclusion in the starting assumptions. Such an easy trap to fall in to.

    I was reminded to of a slightly exasperated statement on quantum physics Daniel Dennett once made, something along the lines of 'well, we don't quite understand consciousness, and we don't quite understand quantum physics, so hey, consciousness must be caused by quantum physics, right?' Is there a similar wish fulfillment thing going on here with free will I wonder.

    A final point, it would be interesting from an anthropological point of view to consider whether a statement like this about free will made within the context of the scientific world will be treated, and resolved, differently than a similar statement made within the confines of the world of philosophy. Will the instinct to isolate and test the embedded claims bear fruit I wonder?

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  45. Hi, Eric-

    I see. It all seems quite vague, especially when the theory itself is seriously contested. Here is what my linked article (Menon) had to say about it, with, I believe, good expertise:

    "What the FWT makes apparent more than other no-go theorems is that any relativistic theory that aspires to explain non-local correlations must abandon this notion of causality. [a metaphysically robust, frame-independent notion of causality]"

    I think we had already given this up by Bell's theorem, EPR, and spooky action at a distance. But this non-local (and probabilistic) causality is also quite circumscribed to some quantum phenomena, in special entangled situations and not many other classical phenomena. So I am not sure what has been gained, or what it could say about human free will.

    He also claims.. "We have seen that the FWT does not present us with a new verdict on the possibility (or otherwise) of deterministic theories." ... Once we have abandoned a robust notion of causal influence between the fundamental elements of reality, the locality assumption in MIN is no longer plausible. Norton (2007) has more on why this notion of causation has no place in fundamental physics.

    Incidentally, here is the essay on the variability of causality by Norton, who seems very focused on relativity. Indeed it sort of pours cold water on metaphysics more generally.

    I think the most productive thing that could be done would be to define the notion of "freedom" in a truly explicit way, since when I try to figure it out, there is nothing there. Free from what? From our bodies and minds, which are afflicted by causal entrapment? Free to do what? What would constitute internal motivation without the causal paraphernalia you want to get away from? It is all rather mystifying, and I suspect it owes more to theological rhetoric / illusions of sovereign consciousness than it does to deep & empirical analysis.

    Of course this is all from a materialist perspective, where mind and body are all physical. Obviously, you could free yourself from such discipline with claims that a non-physical mind exists with a passel of non-caused properties like motivation & knowledge, while at the same time having causal agency ... whatever is needed to answer the question. I'd regard this obviously untethered from reality, both in terms of the soul concept, but more critically in terms of the imputed motivation, which we here on earth find so thoroughly enmeshed in historical cause and effect when we look at such matters closely (e.g. Tolstoy, in famous fashion).

    And if that cause and effect is, in quantum terms, probabilistic, and slighly non-local, and perhaps slightly weird in other ways, does that afford "us" greater freedom? If you posit your "self" outside material reality anyhow, it hardly makes any difference. And if you stick to materialism, we come back to the impossibility of indeterminism setting us any "free-er" than determinism does. If you want to make hay out of a third way- some kind of semi-determinism- something more specific would have to be said about it. If that third way were to lead to theism, rather than to more of the same, you would need to show additional biasses or explicit connections to a deity (super-causality, one might say!). Not something I have yet heard about from the physics community.

    ReplyDelete
  46. I see. It all seems quite vague, especially when the theory itself is seriously contested. Here is what my linked article (Menon) had to say about it, with, I believe, good expertise:

    "What the FWT makes apparent more than other no-go theorems is that any relativistic theory that aspires to explain non-local correlations must abandon this notion of causality. [a metaphysically robust, frame-independent notion of causality]"

    I think we had already given this up by Bell's theorem, EPR, and spooky action at a distance. But this non-local (and probabilistic) causality is also quite circumscribed to some quantum phenomena, in special entangled situations and not many other classical phenomena. So I am not sure what has been gained, or what it could say about human free will.

    He also claims.. "We have seen that the FWT does not present us with a new verdict on the possibility (or otherwise) of deterministic theories." ... Once we have abandoned a robust notion of causal influence between the fundamental elements of reality, the locality assumption in MIN is no longer plausible. Norton (2007) has more on why this notion of causation has no place in fundamental physics.

    Incidentally, here is the essay on the variability of causality by Norton, who seems very focused on relativity. Indeed it sort of pours cold water on metaphysics more generally.

    cont...

    ReplyDelete
  47. I think the most productive thing that could be done would be to define the notion of "freedom" in a truly explicit way, since when I try to figure it out, there is nothing there. Free from what? From our bodies and minds, which are afflicted by causal entrapment? Free to do what? What would constitute internal motivation without the causal paraphernalia you want to get away from? It is all rather mystifying, and I suspect it owes more to theological rhetoric / illusions of sovereign consciousness than it does to deep & empirical analysis.

    Of course this is all from a materialist perspective, where mind and body are all physical. Obviously, you could free yourself from such discipline with claims that a non-physical mind exists with a passel of non-caused properties like motivation & knowledge, while at the same time having causal agency ... whatever is needed to answer the question. I'd regard this obviously untethered from reality, both in terms of the soul concept, but more critically in terms of the imputed motivation, which we here on earth find so thoroughly enmeshed in historical cause and effect when we look at such matters closely (e.g. Tolstoy, in famous fashion).

    And if that cause and effect is, in quantum terms, probabilistic, and slighly non-local, and perhaps slightly weird in other ways, does that afford "us" greater freedom? If you posit your "self" outside material reality anyhow, it hardly makes any difference. And if you stick to materialism, we come back to the impossibility of indeterminism setting us any "free-er" than determinism does. If you want to make hay out of a third way- some kind of semi-determinism- something more specific would have to be said about it. If that third way were to lead to theism, rather than to more of the same, you would need to show additional biasses or explicit connections to a deity (super-causality, one might say!). Not something I have yet heard about from the physics community.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Bernard,

    You write: “The first is setting up a falsely exclusive opposition between naturalism and theism as if these two are the only games in town.

    Interesting you should mention this. I am now reading “Knowledge of God”, a debate between theistic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and atheistic philosopher Michael Tooley. In this book Plantinga explains that whereas atheism is the view that God does not exist, naturalism is a stronger view, namely that nothing even *similar* to God exists. He writes (p. 19): “If you are a naturalist, you don’t believe in God, but you also don’t believe in the the Stoics’ Mind or Fichte’s Absolute I, or Plato’s Idea of the Good, or Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, or Hegel’s Absolute, [or, I might add, Zeus]. Plantinga, instead of defending theism as expected, proceeds then to attack naturalism instead. Tooley is not amused. In his conclusion he writes: “In his opening statement, Plantinga attempted to show that theistic belief is justified by arguing that naturalism is false – a strategy that a number of other theists are now adopting. In my response, I attempted to show that the arguments that Plantinga offered, interesting though they were, are not in the end successful. But beyond the question of the success or failure of particular arguments, there is the question of whether this whole approach is a promising one to pursue. It seems to me that it is not. The reason is that a refutation of naturalism would get one only to supernaturalism of some sort or other, and there is an enormous gulf between that conclusion, and the conclusion that God exists.”

    I’d like here to say something in defense of the strategy of attacking naturalism that many theists (including myself) are now adopting.

    1. The whole point about there being other atheistic worldviews between naturalism and theism is kind of irrelevant. There are also other supernaturalistic worldviews between naturalism and theism (“Zeus”, Hegel’s Absolute I, etc). The fact is that most non theists are naturalists, and most non naturalists are theists. More precisely, in the West out of 100 people who hold some kind of belief system about reality, probably 99 will be either theists or naturalists. So it is certainly useful to compare these to dominant ontologies and analyze which one is more reasonable. Indeed this is a very good consciousness raising exercise, for naturalists have gotten into the practice of exacting very high epistemic duties from theists without so much as giving a thought to applying the same principles to their own worldview. So the average naturalist will forcefully express her judgment that there are no good arguments for theism and that without such arguments one should not believe in it, without for a moment wondering whether there are any good arguments for naturalism. (Plantinga in the above mentioned book says that he knows of no decent, let alone good, argument for naturalism. I must say I don’t know of any either.)

    [continued in the next post]

    ReplyDelete
  49. [continued from the last post]

    2. It’s more practical to argue for the falsity of the opposite of the belief one wants to justify than to argue for the truth of it. The reason is that most beliefs B imply evidence E, and one uses such evidence to argue about them. Unfortunately the argument [If B is true then E is the case. E is the case. Therefore B is true] is invalid and commits the so-called fallacy of affirming the consequent. The valid argument has the form [If not-B is true then E is the case. E is not the case. Therefore not-B is false. Therefore B is true].

    At this juncture one can argue that naturalism is not the opposite of theism, for, as you say, these are not the only games in town. Well, by looking at what is essential in theism and naturalism, we may find that they are the only two games in town after all, and therefore mutually exclusive. I find that what is essential in naturalism (let’s call it essential-naturalism) is that reality is fundamentally mechanistic, i.e. that the future evolves blindly following some kind of laws. Atheistic philosopher Andrew Melnyk in his recent paper “Naturalism as a Philosophical Paradigm” defines naturalism in a way I think comports well with my idea. He says that naturalism is the thesis that there are in reality no instances of acting (or choosing) for a reason. Naturalism then is the hypothesis that reality is such that ultimately nothing happens for a reason, i.e. that ultimately everything happens for no reason. But if ultimately everything happens for no reason then we get a mechanistic reality. Conversely, essential-theism would be the hypothesis that reality is such that ultimately some things at least happen for a reason and not just as the result of a mechanistic/blind evolution. Essential-naturalism and essential-theism would then be mutually exclusive, opening the way for arguments against one alternative to be arguments for the other.

    Within these broad definitions, individual naturalists and theists may of course build their more specific worldviews, with classical theism claiming that not just a few things but rather everything ultimately happens for a reason, namely the purpose of a being who is perfect in all respects, “God”. Conversely the scientific naturalist claims that everything ultimately happens because it blindly follows the physical laws that science discovers, and which define with what probability a particular state of reality will evolve into another.

    If a person who leans towards essential-naturalism and its mechanistic understanding of reality is moved by the many theistic arguments against it to discard it she will then embrace essential-theism and its understanding that ultimately some things happen for a reason. That’s already an important step. From here the epistemic path towards classical theism is a relatively simple matter. (Roughly: If some things ultimately happen for a reason then there is some ultimate purpose; if there is some ultimate purpose then there is some ultimate intelligence; purposeful intelligence implies consciousness; the best explanation of the whole of one’s experience of life is that that consciousness is one and is good.)

    ReplyDelete