tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post5341559794485820494..comments2024-03-15T17:06:31.642-05:00Comments on The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: A Reply to "Evaluating the Unfalsifiable"Eric Reitanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-72547232040787712642008-11-17T10:46:00.000-06:002008-11-17T10:46:00.000-06:00Here are the basic points I want to say defending ...Here are the basic points I want to say defending Reitan from Shook’s attack.<BR/><BR/>A) He never even addresses Reitan’s contention that neither materialism nor supernaturalism is falsifiable. Instead he focuses on the consistency of supernaturalism with “empirical facts”. They are not the same, but I wonder if he thinks they are.<BR/><BR/>B) Shook seems to put all religions and religious experiences in the same category (as species of supernaturalism), and thus fails to distinguish between different sorts of religious experience as well as between different sorts of religion. I am inclined to think that much pagan religion can be well accounted for in the way Lucretius and Hume thought it could—by noting that primitive men did not have scientific explanations for any number of phenomenon and so posited the existence of anthropomorphic deities to explain such phenomenon. Such religions were typically grounded in fear (as both Lucretius and Hume noted) not in a sense of intrinsic value and, ultimately, they are not so different from naturalism since the gods of such religions evolve from matter. But the great world religions were rooted in a sense that the ultimate explanation of contingent, changing existence must be sought in a transcendent, uncreated, perfect “being”, a being which they all understand to be spiritual even if some forms of Hinduism do not understand this spirit to be a spirit. These religions are grounded in a deep appreciation of the worth of persons and of moral action. So, both naturalism and the old pagan religions are on one side, reducing spirit to matter, and what is truly valuable to what has no (or little) value, while the supernaturalism characteristic of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Christianity, etc. does the reverse. Finally, the great world religions have commanded, and still command, the allegiance of truly great minds, minds which have fashioned powerful arguments in favor of their central doctrines (e.g. Mardan Faruck for the Zoroastrians, Sankara, Ramanuja and Udayana for different branches of Hinduism, Aquinas, Suarez, and Lotze for Christianity, etc.) Can anyone claim the same for the worshipers of Zeus? (I realize Plato referred to Zeus, but this was just his way of referring to God—he did not believe in the Zeus of the myths). Shook’s attack on all religion as irrational seems to me to be a haughty dismissal of some of the greatest philosophers who have ever lived. <BR/><BR/>C) In arguing that Reitan’s Christian supernaturalism would require him to explain away the religious experiences of Muslims, Hindus, and other non-Christians, Shook fails to distinguish between a type of experience and various possible interpretations of it. Some persons who have near death experiences interpret them religiously, others don’t. (Ayer feared that his near death experience proved there is life after death, but comforted himself with the thought that it could be explained naturalistically after all!!) Moreover, Shook seems to fail to notice that none of us experience all there is to experience of any person we know. This can lead to disagreements about whether or not a certain person X that two other persons, Y and Z, know does or does not have certain attributes, about what X’s motives were for doing certain actions are, etc., but it does not follow from this that Y and Z did not have veridical experiences of X. I have rather darker interpretations of Cheney’s motives than my republican friends, but that does no mean that neither of us have had any experience of him, nor does it mean we can’t really refer to the same man, the vice president of the United States, even if we disagree about certain of his attributes. Similarly, Zoroaster and Udayana and Suarez may all be referring to the same being, the all knowing all good creator of the universe, even if Zoroaster believes he has an eternal enemy, while the other two do not, and Suarez believes that his is “one in three persons” while the other two do not. (This is not the same as believing that God does not have the attribute of being one in three persons). Kripke showed all this long ago.<BR/><BR/>D) I do not see how Shook’s evolutionary account of moral values touches Reitan’s contentions concerning naturalism and moral values. It seems to me he wants to say (as the evolutionary ethicists do) that we all (or most all of us) intensely disapprove of killing small children, for instance, because such disapproval helped our race survive. (I suppose that he thinks that the survival of our race is good, but the reason he thinks that, according to his own views, is just that he likes the race to survive and he likes that for evolutionary reasons But this is simply not the same thing as saying that it is wrong to kill small children because they have a certain intrinsic value and that killing them would, in some way, contradict that value, be in disaccord with it. For any X, if X has intrinsic value then it would be objectively appropriate to value X for its own sake, to prefer its existence to its non-existence, all things considered, and to seek to benefit it, if it can be benefitted. Now, humans, if they have intrinsic value have it whether or not God exists. But the naturalist has a hard time defending the existence of humans (at least if he has taken the time to consider exactly how a number of mindless, meaningless micro particles united, no matter how tightly, could constitute one thing—see Liebniz and Lotze), and if humans don’t exist then they can’t have any intrinsic value. Moreover, although one could account for the unity of human beings by supposing that they are souls ordered to being united to certain kinds of arrangements of atoms, most naturalists find souls as “queer” as God. Finally the naturalist tends to deny the existence of such queer properties as the property “having intrinsic value” since the existence of such a “queer” property cannot be known via sense perception nor can its existence (or non-existence) play any role in the sorts of explanations scientists are after. Now, I don’t want to argue for the existence of such a property as the property “having intrinsic value” here; I just want to note that Shook’s insistence that naturalism can ground an objectivists ethics seems to me silly. Why doesn’t he have the guts to say (as Makie) did, that Ethics is a useful fiction (though I can’t quite see what it is really useful for if Makie is right in supposing that it comes from a projection on to things of what we happen to like or dislike, not because of any really likable or dislikable properties of things but simply because of the way we happened to evolve.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com