So, in a mammoth tu quoque, I said "naturalism cannot be rationally belived"[1]. I suppose I'd better try to back up that assertion ;). If I fail, please turn your attention to Alvin Plantinga on the same subject. He's an awful lot cleverer than I am.
Naturalism is slightly stronger than atheism; it is possible to be an atheist without being a naturalist. It is, however, by far the most popular form of atheism around at the moment. So how do we define it? The front page of the Secular Web tells us that naturalism is "the hypothesis that the physical universe is a 'closed system' in the sense that nothing that is neither a part nor a product of it can affect it". I'll take a second premise to be that the list of these "parts and products" is exhausted by those entities postulated by the natural sciences.
So defined, naturalism cannot account for the following:
- The existence of contingent beings, or, "why does anything exist at all?" When Richard Dawkins dismisses this as a "vacuous existential question"[2] he is displaying an unfortunate tendency to trivialise those massive issues with which he is incapable of dealing. I have a friend who, when asked this, replied "You can't ask that question!" Unfortunately, I just had.
- The origin of the universe. Linked to the above. If you accept Einsteinian cosmology, it seems you must accept that the universe at some point began to exist; therefore, it is a contingent being. This is what Hume could not have known. We today have less excuse. I am not likely to take "imaginary time" as a threat to these conclusions any time soon.
- Basically, anything to do with the mind, that is, consciousness, intentionality, rationality, the self, free will, etc., etc. I realise I am in way over my head (hehe) here; it's just that I never cease to be amazed by the volume of scorn some thinkers pour on Christians for believing in a soul, while failing to notice the flagrant absurdity of their own views. There are several naturalists who notice this, for instance Thomas Nagel,
The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life. [...] One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everthing about life, including everything about the human mind.[3]
John SearleWhy are so many philosophers driven to deny certain common-sense claims, such as, that we really do have conscious thoughts and feelings; that we do have real intentional states such as beliefs, hopes, fears, and desires[...]? [...] This is a rather easy view to refute, because it denies the existence of the things we all know to exist. It asserts that there are no ontologically subjective phenomena, and we know this is false because we experience them all the time.[4]
and Michael RuseI don’t buy into this meme bullsh**[5]
As I've said elsewhere, dogged commitment to materialism in the philosophy of mind has led some very intelligent people to say some very silly things. Put conservatively, consciousness is not the sort of thing we should expect given naturalism. Put more boldly, if naturalism were true, consciousness would be impossible. A purely physical being can no more think than an abstract object can have mass. They're just different kinds of things. - Normative ethics: not "why are we moral?" but "why should we be moral?" (or even, what does to "be moral" even mean?). Please at least read this post if you think the reason theists keep going on about morality is because they're too dumb to understand game theory, or kin selection, or utilitarianism, or...
[1] Quoting myself somewhat out of context...
[2] River out of Eden (Phoenix, 2001), 97. HT: Prof. D.C. Spanner
[3] The Last Word (OUP, 1997), 130-131
[4] Mind: A Brief Introduction (OUP, 2004), 72, 91. Searle makes it clear he does think all the phenomena I have listed can be accounted for naturalistically. Others disagree. I leave it to the reader to study the relevant arguments and come to his/her own conclusions.
[5] In an e-mail to Daniel Dennett, which Ruse himself released and which can be read here.
8 comments:
I'm not sure whether I'm a naturalist or not. Does your postulated "spiritual" realm have rules like the "material" universe apparently does (I'm assuming that the patterns we find through science represent something about the world and not entirely about our minds)? If so, why is it different from the material universe, rather than being an extension of it into territory we don't yet understand? If a spiritual realm exists, presumably it oculd be investigated in the same way the material realm can. (If it doesn't have rules, how does any order arise there?)
I think I'd just say that science has worked out pretty well at explaining things so far. If it ceases to be effective, we'll have to try something else. As I've said elsewhere, to be wedded to the position that science will explain everything seems to go against the pragmatism which makes science so powerful.
Have you shown some areas where science is ineffective? On to your list of things which naturalism cannot account for:
Theism merely removes the question of why anything exists to another level. You may think "who made God" is a schoolboy question, but the standard response (that God exists by definition) is unsatisfactory. Assuming the question is meaningful at all, why can't the laws of physics exist by definition, for example, and then cause the universe to exist? Simple axioms seem more likely to be necessary than a complex being.
If you're not inclined to take imaginary time as a threat, you're admitting that discoveries about how the universe actually is can have no effect on your theistic cosmological arguments, so, as I've complained on Yellow's blog, these theistic cosmological arguments have no physical content. If you accept the conclusions of physicists, what you're accepting is that all of the universe we can now see was once very hot and very small, and then expanded very rapidly before continuing to expand a lot more slowly. You're not commiting yourself to creation ex nihilo or even, necessarily, to the idea that there was a first moment in time. Sean Carroll's posting should be read by everyone who thinks their Kalam argument is supported by Einstein or any other physicist.
Consciousness: nobody understands it, everyone likes talking about it. I note that poking at brains alters conscious experience, so brains are involved in human consciousness somewere. If consciousness is not purely a function of brains (or similar arrangements of stuff), what else is there and how does it interact with our brains? Your assertion that matter is not the kind of thing that thinks appears to be a faith statement which I've no good reason to accept unless it buys you some explanatory power, but I've not seen that from the idealists I've talked to.
Morality: I find myself unable to stop thinking that some things are right and other things are wrong, but it seems the height of arrogance to imagine that my feelings reflect some properties of the non-human world (it's also pretty unlikely, unless those properties happen to change over time). Why do we feel we should we be moral? Because it seems we cannot feel otherwise. There are those who don't feel as we do (sociopaths, say), but from our perspective, we're right to consider them immoral. In the end, though, if all the typical humans died out and left the sociopaths behind, our morals would die with us. Personally, I think morality is what you can get away with. (That's just my view, of course, there are other non-theistic moralities: ask a Buddhist).
Matt,
Great post.
Paul,
I'm sure Matt can answer the bulk of your questions himself, but I'd just like to comment on something you said:
Theism merely removes the question of why anything exists to another level. You may think "who made God" is a schoolboy question, but the standard response (that God exists by definition) is unsatisfactory.
Why is it unsatisfactory? What do you mean by "unsatisfactory" - that it's rationally not an adequate explanation, or that you don't like it? If you mean the former, I assure you, from a philosophical perspective, it surely is. If you mean the latter, I'm sorry about that - me, I don't find it particularly satisfactory that I am incapable of unaided flight.
Assuming the question is meaningful at all, why can't the laws of physics exist by definition, for example, and then cause the universe to exist?
Because you need more than just the laws of physics to get you to "universe exists".
Simple axioms seem more likely to be necessary than a complex being.
Necessary, perhaps (and that's a big perhaps), but certainly not sufficient. Moreover, I think you'd have to beg the question and presuppose naturalism to assert that.
Hello Paul, and welcome. You make many very interesting points, to which I’d like to respond in a separate post, because this is going to be looong…
Hello Aaron, and thank you. I plan to use your points when I reply at length.
Gb, m@
Thanks, Matt. I look forward to your post. Incidentally, I realized (rather belatedly) that I could have given a fuller response to Paul's "Simple axioms seem more likely to be necessary than a complex being" by discussing Aquinas' notion of divine simplicity - not necessary for a response, but an interesting consideration. As you said earlier, though, Plantinga does a great job answering this objection - have you read his response to Dawkins? Here's the URL:
http://www.ctlibrary.com/43018
Hi Aaron. By unsatisfactory, I mean that it cheats in the same way that Plantinga says Dawkins cheats by presuming naturalism, namely, that the premises of the argument are rigged so you win it. To paraphrase some noted philosophers, "you atheists would love to ask why God didn't need a cause, but you can't! That question is not for you."
What if the laws of physics turn out to require the universe to exist?
I don't think it is presupposing naturalism to prefer a simple explanation to a complex one, unless you consider a preference for parsimony and economy of explanation to be an exclusively naturalist trait.
I find it hard to believe that someone of Plantinga's intelligence isn't being disingenuous when he writes that Dawkins is wrong to call God complex because God does not have material parts. If we accept that there can be immaterial minds, those mids are complex not because of how many neurons they contain, but because their mental structures are complex. By mental structures, I'm not thinking of the analogues of structures made of neurons, but rather things at the entirely mental level of explanation, which I'm imagining exist in an immaterial mind without the need for neurons to produce them. The sort of God who is merely a good force permeating the universe like a warm path might be simple; a mind which can comprehend the whole affair from beginning to end is anything but.
Hi Paul,
I never said you couldn't ask the question, "What caused God?" People do it all the time, so we're certainly capable of such a querry. I simply meant that you make no sense when you ask it. It's no more "rigging the argument" than if I were to tell you that you made no sense in asking, "Where are the corners on a circle?" Read Aquinas on necessary and contingent beings (or, if you're not able or inclined, let me know and I'll do my best to sum it up for you). In short, Aquinas does not beg the question, because he only proves that, if God exists, He exists necessarily, which is all that is needed once the naturalist concedes the existence of God even for the sake of argument.
I don't think it is presupposing naturalism to prefer a simple explanation to a complex one, unless you consider a preference for parsimony and economy of explanation to be an exclusively naturalist trait.
Maybe you're right. I might have been too hasty there, but I'm not sure. I'll have to think about it some more.
I find it hard to believe that someone of Plantinga's intelligence isn't being disingenuous when he writes that Dawkins is wrong to call God complex because God does not have material parts.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I think you find it hard to believe because you don't really understand Plantinga's argument. He's basically drawing directly on Aquinas' notion of divine simplicity, which is a little hard to condense into a soundbite, but it is basically the idea that you cannot break God down into the logical parts or categories of a substance with an essence and an existence - these categories don't apply to Him, because there is no distinction between His substance, essence and existence. God is the only thing whose essence (the qualities of a substance taken together) is His existence. In other words, God is not a "thing" that exists among a universe littered with other "things", like the greatest object among other objects - He is existence itself. Simplicity here refers to logical simplicity, which philospohically works very well to answer the "Dawkinsian challenge".
Hope that helps. Let me know if you need further clarification.
Regards,
Aaron
Aaron,
Having done some reading around the subject, I'm not entirely convinced that asking "who created God?" is equivalent to "where are the corners of a circle?" I'm not an expert on this stuff and it may be that I've mistaken Aquinas's argument, but Aquinas's distinction between necessary and contingent appears to be based on whether it is possible to conceive of a thing not existing. But that is precisely the point at issue between theists and atheists, so I'm not convinced that this argument avoids question-begging, or possibly tautology ("if God exists, then God exists"). I'm also worried that this sort of argument may be treating existence as an attribute, and boil down to an ontological argument, although I'd need to think about that for longer than I want to now.
So instead, as I've said, even if we concede that something necessarily exists, why not the simple seed of some rules and a starting place, rather than something as involved as the Christian God, or indeed, any sort of person?
On simplicity, I'm not sure I understand your conception of God. It seems you've reduced him to a homogeneous blob rather than a person. Are Christians wrong to speak of God's will or God's love, in your view?
It sounds like "simple" is a theological term of art which many leading theologians (Swinburne is another, ISTR) are annoyed with Dawkins for misusing. Nevertheless, in the sense in which Dawkins is using the word (which I think is a more common usage), a human is less simple than an ant and an entity which can completely comprehend the whole universe is pretty complex (arguably more complex than the universe, I'd say).
Post a Comment