Edward Feser

Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics

2012-01-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

The long-awaited anthology Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, edited by Tuomas Tahko for Cambridge University Press, is now available. The good news is that you can save over $7 by ordering it from Amazon. The bad news is that it will still set you back $91.49. (Hopefully a paperback version will appear at some point!) Anyway, you can find the CUP page for the book here, and you can check out a preview via Google Books here. (Gotta love the symbolism of the cover: A new days dawns as the sunlight of sound metaphysics illuminates the barren wasteland of modern philosophy. Well, that’s my take anyway -- I don’t know if that’s what Tuomas intended!)

Reading Rosenberg, Part VI

2012-01-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

Let’s continue our detailed critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. In the previous installment, we took a detour to consider how some of Rosenberg’s problematic views in the philosophy of biology are developed more systematically in his book Darwinian Reductionism. Here we return to the text of Atheist’s Guide and to the subject of religion, though we are not quite done considering what Rosenberg has to say about biological matters. For he argues that Darwinism not only makes theism unnecessary (as he falsely assumes), but is positively incompatible with it: “You can’t have your Darwinian cake and eat theism too,” insists Rosenberg. In particular, he thinks Darwinism is incompatible with the idea that God is omniscient. How so?

Obviously, everything depends on how one understands “Darwinism” and “theism.” Rosenberg says dubious things about both. He assures us that Darwinism put the final nail in the coffin of teleology, and that any theism worth bothering with must attribute to God the intention to create us, specifically. He then reasons as follows: Since they are non-teleological, Darwinian processes do not aim at the generation of any particular kind of species, including the human species. In fact the generation of any particular species, including us, is highly improbable. No one could have known before the fact that evolution would go the way it did. But then an omniscient God could not have used such processes as a means of creating us, since only a very foolish deity would think it likely that natural selection would result in intelligent life.

One problem with this is that it is false to say that Darwinism is incompatible with teleology. For one thing, it is by no means clear that Darwinism really drove teleology even out of biology, let alone the rest of the natural world. To hear writers as diverse as Etienne Gilson, David Stove, James Lennox, J. Scott Turner, and Marjorie Grene tell it, Darwinism does nothing of the kind. For another thing, even if we do suppose either that biological phenomena are entirely non-teleological, or that the teleological aspects of biological phenomena are real but can be reduced to non-teleological features, it doesn’t follow that there is no irreducible teleology in the natural world at all. As I have noted many times, the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition argues that irreducible teleology of a very basic sort -- namely, bare directedness toward an end -- must exist wherever even the most elementary kinds of efficient causation exists. (Rosenberg’s problem, as I have noted before, is that like so many atheists he thinks of teleology entirely on the model of Paley’s watch -- where the teleology involves the functioning of parts relative to a complex whole, and where the function is imposed from outside on parts that would not otherwise have it -- instead of thinking of it in Aristotelian terms, in which teleology is intrinsic to natural phenomena rather than externally imposed, and where the functioning of parts in relation to a complex whole is only one, relatively rare instance of teleology among others.)

Now, I have myself argued that getting from the world to the God of classical theism requires the distinction between act and potency and thus (since the notion of potency goes hand in hand with the notion of finality) the existence at least at the bottom level of physical reality of immanent final causality or teleology. So, to that extent it is correct to say that theism is incompatible with a non-teleological universe (or to be more precise, that the possibility of arguing from the world to the God of classical theism is incompatible with a non-teleological universe). But Darwinism, on any construal, implies at most only the non-existence of certain kinds of teleology, not the non-existence of all teleology; indeed, on an Aristotelian view, Darwinian processes themselves, like all efficient causal processes, necessarily presuppose the reality of some deeper level of final causality. But the existence of any actualization of potency at all, and of any immanent teleology at all, entail the existence of the God of classical theism, including all of the key divine attributes (such as omniscience). That, at any rate, is what arguments like those summarized in the Five Ways purport to show when rightly understood and completely spelled out. (I explain in Aquinas and in my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways” how they have been spelled out and defended in the Thomistic tradition. I suppose I need to point out to the uninitiated reader that the Five Ways are not, and are not intended to be, complete “stand alone” arguments, but only summaries of and starting points for lines of argument that are more fully developed elsewhere.) Various objections might of course be raised against these arguments -- objections I have responded to at length -- but Darwinism per se isn’t relevant one way or the other.

To be sure, the arguments do not all by themselves show that the God whose existence they purport to prove intended us, specifically; by themselves they leave open the question of whether or not human beings are an accidental byproduct of natural evolutionary processes. But this does not help Rosenberg, for five reasons. First and most fundamentally, it is very odd for Rosenberg to claim that any theism worth bothering with must hold that God intentionally created the human race, specifically. It’s true that some forms of theism (such as Christianity) hold that man was made in God’s image, but that claim is logically independent of the proposition that the God of classical theism exists. (After all, those who claim that man was made in God’s image also hold that God existed before He created man, would have existed even if He had never created the human race, and would continue to exist even if He decided to destroy the human race.) It is either intellectually sloppy or intellectually dishonest of Rosenberg to suggest that showing that the human race was not made in God’s image would suffice to refute theism per se. If the God argued for in arguments like the Five Ways exists, then atheism is false and that is that. The serious debate will be between forms of theism, not between theism and atheism. Whether man is made in God’s image will be relevant to the question of which form of theism is correct, but not to the question of whether some form of theism or other is correct.

Second, those who say that human beings are made in God’s image do not mean that our bodily nature is made in God’s image. What they mean is that our rational nature as thinking and willing creatures is a finite reflection of God’s nature; our bodily characteristics could have been radically different, consistent with our being made in God’s image in this sense. Moreover, those who hold that we are made in God’s image also often claim, on the basis of independent philosophical arguments, that our rational and volitional powers cannot even in principle be accounted for in materialist terms, including Darwinian terms. Many of them also hold that given its immaterial powers, the human soul must be specially created by God each time a new human being comes into existence. (Contrary to the impression one might get from Rosenberg, this doctrine was not cooked up as a way to reconcile evolution with theism by concocting some aspect of human nature which Darwinian processes did not generate. The doctrine of the special creation of the human soul is centuries old, and is a development of arguments for the soul’s immateriality that are in turn as old as Plato and Aristotle.) So, those who regard man as made in God’s image do not have to maintain that a species genetically and/or phenotypically identical to homo sapiens sapiens was intended by God. The most they need to maintain is that God intended some biological species or other to come into existence at some point or other to which rational souls might in principle be conjoined. And it is at the very least much harder to maintain that Darwinism is incompatible with this claim, even on the most anti-teleological construal of Darwinism.

Third, even if we supposed that God did have to intend a species with the particular genetic and phenotypic characteristics of homo sapiens sapiens, it does not in fact follow even from the most anti-teleological interpretation of Darwinism that this result was improbable -- or at least not improbable from the relevant, “God’s eye” point of view -- for reasons Rosenberg himself should have seen given his commitment to the multiverse hypothesis. For suppose that, as multiverse proponents often suggest, the existence of our universe is not in fact as remarkable or improbable as it seems given that it is only one of an infinite number of parallel universes. On this view, our universe’s existence seems remarkable and improbable to us only because of our vantage point within it; but in fact it was inevitable that it should arise out of a process in which every possible universe is generated. In this case we can imagine that God, intending the existence of homo sapiens sapiens specifically, simply caused the multiverse to exist, knowing that, even though the evolution of our species in any particular universe would be improbable, it would be inevitable that it will arise in some universe or other. (Not that I endorse this suggestion, mind you, since I don’t buy the multiverse hypothesis. The point is that Rosenberg, who does buy it, is again being either sloppy or dishonest.)

Fourth, the probabilistic nature of Darwinian processes does not in any event exclude divine intervention within a particular universe, for reasons Elliot Sober calls attention to in his recent book Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? That the probability of a tossed coin’s landing heads is 0.5 is, Sober notes, perfectly consistent with saying that its probability of landing heads is either 0 or 1. For each probability is relative to background conditions. Given only that the coin has been tossed, its probability of landing heads is 0.5; given that it has been tossed and that its upward velocity, air resistance, the surface on which it lands, etc. are of such-and-such a character, then (assuming determinism for the sake of argument), its probability of landing heads is either 0 or 1. When we make the judgment that the probability of the coin landing heads is 0.5, we are ignoring hidden variables of the sort which, when factored in, would make the probability either 0 or 1.

Now, when we say that mutations are random in the sense of occurring with equal probability whether or not they benefit an organism, this, Sober says, is like saying that a coin is equally likely to come up heads whether or not its doing so will benefit the gambler who is tossing the coin. The latter claim is perfectly consistent with the fact that when all the hidden variables are taken account of, the probability of the coin coming up heads is either 0 or 1. And the former claim is perfectly compatible with the fact that when all the hidden variables that determine a particular mutation are taken account of, its probability of occurring will be either 0 or 1. But there is, Sober argues, nothing in Darwinian biology per se that entails that divine intervention cannot be among those hidden variables in certain cases. (We might add that assuming otherwise is like assuming that the fact that human beings sometimes interfere with the course of random mutation and natural selection -- as we have in experiments on Drosophila -- shows that Darwinian processes never really occur in nature.)

But all of this concedes too much to Rosenberg in the first place, and that brings us to the fifth and final point, which is that Rosenberg’s entire argument rests on a crude misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. In particular, he evidently knows nothing about the traditional distinction between primary causality and secondary causality, and operates with a crudely anthropomorphic conception of deity. For he assumes that making evolution compatible with theism would require supposing that God intervenes in biological history at various points in order to alter the course of events so as to ensure that homo sapiens sapiens comes about, but does so in so subtle a way that it looks like the product of random variation and natural selection (but really isn’t, which is why such an account of evolution would not be truly Darwinian).

But this is like saying that the author of a novel has to “intervene” in the story at key points, keeping events from going the way they otherwise would in order to make sure that they turn out the way he needs them to for the story to work. Indeed, it is like saying that the author of a science fiction novel in which such-and-such a species comes about via natural selection has to “intervene” at key points so as to make sure that the evolutionary process comes out the way he needs it to in order for the story to work -- but at the same time has to do so subtly so that none of the characters would guess that he had intervened in this way. The very suggestion is silly, for the author isn’t one causal factor in the story among others. His causality relative to the story is not at all like the causality of either the characters or the impersonal processes operating within the story.

Similarly, on the classical theist conception of God, God is not one causal factor in the universe among others, not even an especially grand and powerful causal factor. He is not a “first” cause in the sense of being followed in a temporal series by a second cause, a third cause, a fourth cause, etc. Rather, He is “first” or primary in the sense of being the fundamental cause, the necessary precondition of there being any causality within the universe at all, just as the author of a story is the “first cause” of what happens in the story, not in the sense of generating effects in the way the characters and processes described in the story do, but rather in the sense of being the necessary precondition of there being any characters or processes in the story at all. Things in the world are “secondary” causes, then, in the sense of deriving their being and causal power from God, just as the characters in the story have any reality and causality at all only because the author of the story has imparted it to them by virtue of writing the story. (For more on primary and secondary causality, see this post and this post.)

Now, it would be absurd to suggest that Macbeth did not really murder Duncan, but that it was Shakespeare who committed the murder and merely made it look like Macbeth had done it. This would be to treat the author as if he were a character in the story. For the same reason, it would be absurd to suggest that in a science fiction novel in which such-and-such a species evolves, it is not really Darwinian processes that generate the species, but rather the author of the story who does so and merely made it seem as if Darwinian processes had done it. But by the same token, it is absurd to suggest that if God creates a world in which human beings come about by natural selection, He would have to intervene in order to make the Darwinian processes come out the way He wants them to, in which case they would not be truly Darwinian. This is to confuse primary with secondary causality, to think of God as if He were merely one causal factor in the world among others, like treating an author as if he were merely one character in his story among the others. (Physicist Stephen Barr made this point well in his lecture at Franciscan University’s recent Science and Faith Conference. As I have pointed out before, though, one shouldn’t push the author/story analogy too far.)

In short, Rosenberg thinks of God as a Paley-style watchmaker, an anthropomorphic tinkerer who cleverly intervenes in a natural order that could in principle have carried on without him -- in this case by manipulating evolutionary processes, like the Marvel Comics character the High Evolutionary. But as I have so often emphasized when criticizing “Intelligent Design” theory, that is not the God of classical theism -- of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, of Maimonides and Avicenna, or in general of Christian, Jewish and Islamic orthodoxy and of philosophical theism. (I should emphasize for ID enthusiasts that none of this presupposes that the standard Darwinian story is in fact correct in all of its particulars, or even that it is correct at all for that matter. For the point has nothing essentially to do with Darwinism or biology in the first place. What Aristotelian-Thomistic critics of ID fundamentally object to is ID’s overly anthropomorphic conception of God and its implicit confusion of primary and secondary causality -- and that, by virtue of these features, ID muddies the waters in the debate between atheism and theism, fostering misunderstandings of the sort that Rosenberg and so many other atheists have fallen prey to.)

Maudlin on the philosophy of cosmology

2012-01-23T18:42:00.000-08:00

What’s the difference between a philosopher of science and a scientist who comments on philosophy? The difference is that the philosopher usually makes sure he’s done his homework before opening his mouth. I’ve had reason to comment on recent examples of philosophical incompetence provided by Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Stephen Hawking, and others. (I’ll be commenting on further examples provided by Peter Atkins and Lawrence Krauss in some forthcoming book reviews.) In an interview over at The Atlantic, philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin comments on Hawking’s ill-informed remarks about the state of contemporary philosophy. Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow claim in The Grand Design that “philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.” The gigantic literature that has developed over the last few decades in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of chemistry, and philosophy of science more generally, not to mention all the work in contemporary philosophy of mind informed by neuroscience and computer science, easily falsifies their glib assertion. Says Maudlin:

Hawking is a brilliant man, but he's not an expert in what's going on in philosophy, evidently. Over the past thirty years the philosophy of physics has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists, so the situation is actually the exact opposite of what he describes. I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I mean there's no reason why he should. Why should he spend a lot of time reading the philosophy of physics? I'm sure it's very difficult for him to do. But I think he's just… uninformed.

Maudlin is being too kind, for there is a very good reason why Hawking should make the effort to learn what philosophers are saying. Hawking and Mlodinow not only pontificate about philosophy in their recent book; the book is itself essentially an attempt to do philosophy of science and metaphysics -- and a very bad one, precisely because they have not bothered to acquaint themselves with the basics of these fields. Had they done so, they would have saved themselves from committing the egregious fallacies and other errors I and other philosophers have identified in our reviews of the book. (If a philosopher tried to do physics without first learning what contemporary physics actually says, no physicist would be as generous with him as Maudlin is with Hawking!)

Maudlin has a lot of other interesting things to say, so do read the whole thing. Commenting on the reasons why contemporary physicists fail seriously to grapple with the foundational philosophical questions raised by their discipline, he says:

[P]hysicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.

and

Look, physics has definitely avoided what were traditionally considered to be foundational physical questions, but the reason for that goes back to the foundation of quantum mechanics. The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that, fortunately.

Notice that even someone who disagreed with Maudlin that Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong to dismiss the need to address the metaphysical issues -- for that is what they were, on his account, essentially doing -- would in the nature of the case be taking a position that physics itself could not justify, a philosophical position. And if they want to give a rational justification for this position rather than hold it as a mere prejudice, they will of necessity be engaging in philosophical rather than scientific arguments, and thereby implicitly conceding that there is such a thing as rational discourse that isn’t scientific discourse. The only remaining question is whether to do philosophy well or badly, and those who pretend they are not doing it and scorn those who do are certain to do it badly themselves. Scientism is self-refuting; or as Gilson famously said, philosophy always buries its undertakers.

On the “fine tuning” of the universe and attempts to account for it in terms of various “multiverse” hypotheses (on which I’ve had occasion to comment recently), Maudlin remarks:

If we give up on that, and it turns out there aren't these many worlds, that physics is unable to generate them, then it's not that the only option is that there was some intelligent designer. It would be a terrible mistake to think that those are the only two ways things could go.

I think he’s right about that. Both atheists and some theists attribute an importance to this issue that it simply doesn’t have. It is as foolish for theists as it is for atheists to make too big a deal of what current physics has to say about this or that, whether it’s “fine tuning,” multiverse theories, or whatever. That’s “god of the gaps” (or “No god of the gaps”) territory, and it has nothing to do with natural theology as its greatest practitioners understood it, or as a serious atheist should understand it. Natural theology, as I have argued, rests on deeper considerations than natural science -- considerations that any natural science must itself take for granted -- and thus on considerations that are unaffected by the current state of play in natural science.

Maudlin also makes some astute remarks about the relevance of contemporary physics to the philosophy of time:

Some physicists are very adamant about wanting to say things about [time]; Sean Carroll for example is very adamant about saying that time is real. You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.

“Mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself” -- now there’s the fallacy of scientism in a nutshell. Not that this entails that the mathematics does not describe the reality at all; the point is that it does not give us an exhaustive description of reality, but is rather an abstraction from a reality that in itself is richer than can be captured by mathematics alone, even in principle. (Nor do proponents of scientism ever give non-fallacious arguments for thinking otherwise -- here’s one example.)

The claim that physics has shown that change is illusory is in any event seriously problematic. As Karl Popper noted, Einstein, as interpreted by Minkowski, recapitulates Parmenides. (See the essay “Beyond the Search for Invariants” in Popper’s book The World of Parmenides.) And that means that relativity, if interpreted as entailing the illusoriness of all change, would inherit all the problems with Parmenides’ position.

Now I don’t myself believe for a moment that modern physics really has shown that there is no genuine change in the external physical world. But even supposing for the sake of argument that it has, that would not show that all change is an illusion, for two reasons. First, what we would have in this case is one more instance of the common strategy whereby science (as the moderns have defined “science”) attempts to unify phenomena by relativizing the apparent differences between them to the observer. Hence “heat,” “sound,” “red,” “green,” etc. are redefined so that what common sense means by these terms (features which are irreducibly qualitative rather than quantitative, and which can vary from perceiver to perceiver) is relativized to the “mental” or “subjective” point of view of the observer, and what is allowed to count as “objective” or “physical” heat, sound, or color is only what can be captured in a quantitative model -- the motions of particles, compression waves, surface reflectance properties, and the like. So too, time and change, when treated as if they do not really exist in the external world, are relativized to the mind of the observer as mere projections onto external reality.

But the observer himself remains. And as Popper pointed out, there is no getting around the fact that change really occurs at least within the observer’s consciousness itself. To deny this is implicitly to deny the very empirical evidential base on which physical theory is supposed to rest. (Democritus’ paradox all over again.) Hence if Einstein really were Parmenides redevivus, his position would face incoherence just as the Eleatic philosopher’s did, at least if the Minkowskian interpretation is correct and if we want to say that the conscious subject is a part of a natural world that is purportedly free of change. Alternatively, we could adopt a dualist view according to which the conscious subject is not a part of that world. That will save the Minkowskian view from incoherence, but at the cost of merely relocating change rather than eliminating it. (And also, of course, at the cost of leaving us with the problem of explaining how the conscious subject is related to the natural world if it is not part of it.)

A second point is that unlike Parmenides’ own block universe, the block universe of Minkowski is supposed to be governed by laws that are contingent. And if they are contingent, then, the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher will argue, they are merely potential until actualized. That means that even if there were no real change or actualization of potency within an Einsteinian four-dimensional block universe, the sheer existence of that universe as a whole would involve the actualization of potency, and thus something like change in the Aristotelian sense (and thus in turn an actualizer or “changer” distinct from the world itself, though that’s a subject of its own).

Anyway, the occasion of the Atlantic interview with Maudlin is the advent of philosophy of cosmology as a distinct subfield within philosophy of physics. This is a welcome development, which will hopefully bring some sobriety to a discussion to which the likes of Hawking, Krauss, and others have been contributing so many silly and ill-informed remarks. Here’s an appropriate video to watch in celebration. (Just for laughs, you might think of the giant squid head as representing the dark forces of vulgar scientism, and the Beasties and their robot as striking back in the name of true, philosophically-informed science. Have fun!)

Jokes, lies, and jocose lies

2012-01-20T01:26:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, arriving at a party at a friend’s house, I noticed a Jaguar parked out front. The guy who answered the door didn’t know me, but I happened to know through my friend who he was, and that he was the owner of the car. So I decided to have a little fun. “Who owns the Jag?” I said with mock distress; “It just got totaled!” The only thing more priceless than the look of horror on his face was the “Who the hell is this guy?” expression that replaced it when I told him I was kidding.

Was I lying? No, I was merely joking. So what’s the difference?

You’ll recall that I have argued on traditional natural law grounds that it is always wrong to tell a lie, even if the sin is often only venial. Circumstances are irrelevant to determining whether lying is wrong, because the act of lying is intrinsically bad, given that it involves intentionally acting contrary to the natural end of our communicative faculties. However, circumstances are relevant to determining whether or not a given lie is gravely wrong. They are also relevant to determining whether something counts as a lie, because language is conventional, and the conventions governing certain expressions determine that under certain circumstances they do not function to convey one’s true thoughts in the first place. Hence to say “Fine, thank you” in response to the everyday greeting “Hi, how are you?” does not count as a lie even if one is in fact feeling terrible, because as a matter of linguistic convention these words function as a mere pleasantry under such circumstances, rather than a literal description of one’s mental or physical state. Under other circumstances -- say when you are being given a medical examination for insurance purposes, and the questioner seriously wants to know how you are really feeling -- they would count as a lie. (Earlier posts spelling all this out in detail can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here. Please don’t bother commenting on the claims I’ve just made until you’ve read the posts in question, which deal with the stock objections at length. I’m not going to rehash it all here.)

Recall also that lying is not the same thing as deception, even though there is an obvious relationship between them. One can be guilty of lying even when one knows one’s word is not likely to be believed. And one can legitimately deceive someone without lying to him, as when one speaks evasively, but not falsely, to someone demanding information he has no right to. As John Henry Newman wrote:

An instance is supplied in the history of St. Athanasius: he was in a boat on the Nile, flying persecution; and he found himself pursued. On this he ordered his men to turn his boat round, and ran right to meet the satellites of Julian. They asked him, "Have you seen Athanasius?" and he told his followers to answer, "Yes, he is close to you." They went on their course as if they were sure to come up to him, while he ran back into Alexandria, and there lay hid till the end of the persecution.

Then there is what natural law theorists call a “broad mental reservation,” which is distinct from a lie insofar as, given the conventions governing language, one’s listener could reasonably determine from one’s words under the circumstances what one really thinks, even if he is likely not to. An example would be a secretary answering “He’s not in, can I take a message?” to someone looking for the boss. Given the conventions governing such expressions, it is well known that what is meant is “Whether or not he’s in, he isn’t seeing visitors right now.” Though if the questioner went on to say “No, seriously, is he really in or not? I need to know,” to respond “No, he really isn’t in!” when the boss is in would, it seems to me, clearly be a lie, even if only a minor one.

Now jokes of the sort I played on arriving at the party seem to me not to count as lies precisely for the sorts of reason that Athanasius’s words, pleasantries like “Fine, thanks,” and conventional expressions like “He’s not in” used under typical circumstances don’t count as lies, even if the listener is deceived. Jokes are such a common part of everyday life that whenever something startling is said, people automatically wonder whether it is meant seriously. The immediate response is, commonly, not belief, but rather to exclaim “You’re joking!” Hence it seems clear that the linguistic conventions governing startling statements are relevantly like those governing pleasantries and certain kinds of evasive or ambiguous speech. The listener could in principle determine from the context that what is said is not intended as if it conveyed the literal truth, just as he could in the case of “Fine, thanks” or “He’s not in.” And the fact that the speaker foresees and even hopes that the listener is nevertheless deceived (at least momentarily) no more makes such an utterance a lie than the hope that Julian’s agents would be deceived made Athanasius’s followers’ words “Yes, he is close to you” a lie. Moreover, the circumstances of an utterance that determine whether certain words count as a lie plausibly include more than linguistic conventions and what is going on physically in the vicinity of a conversation. They surely include also what immediately follows a joking utterance of the sort I made about the Jag -- a smile, wink, or laugh, or the words “Just kidding!” or the like. Just as the theatrical context makes “My kingdom for a horse!” a non-lie even when uttered by someone who has no kingdom to trade for a horse, so too does the overall conversational context typically surrounding jokes like the one I made about the Jaguar make them non-lies.

But suppose I had carried the pretense on for some time. Suppose the guy at the door said “Wait a minute, are you serious?” and I answered “Yeah, it’s totaled. Was that your car? Sorry, man, some drunk driver just plowed into it!” To make this plausible, suppose the guy’s car was parked a couple of blocks away so that he couldn’t know I was joking just by peering over my shoulder, and had to go check. Here I think we would clearly have a lie, just as we would in the case of the person who falsely says “Really, I mean it, he’s not here” to someone who asks “Seriously, is the boss in or not? I really need to know.” In particular, we’d have what is sometimes called a “jocose lie” -- a lie intended to amuse. Another example of a jocose lie would be making up some story and relating it as true so as to make one’s conversation more entertaining. Of themselves such jocose lies are considered by traditional natural law theorists to be merely venially sinful, though circumstances could make them mortally sinful -- for example, if the one telling a jocose lie intended gravely to inconvenience or humiliate his listener.

The view I’m putting forward here may be more lenient than that of Aquinas. We are told the following story about him:

One day a Friar in a jovial mood cries out: "Friar Thomas, come see the flying ox!" Friar Thomas goes over to the window. The other laughs. "It is better," the Saint says to him, "to believe that an ox can fly than to think that a religious can lie."

I don’t know the circumstances under which this is supposed to have happened, but if the first friar’s remark about the flying ox was relevantly like my Jaguar gag, I’m inclined to say that it was not really a lie at all. In any event, the distinctions that underlie the traditional natural law view that broad mental reservations, conventional pleasantries, and the like do not count as lies were hammered out in the centuries since Aquinas wrote. They are grounded in Aquinas’s overall approach to the subject even if they go beyond what he actually said himself.

“New natural law” theorist Germain Grisez also seems to take a more stringent view. In Living a Christian Life, volume 2 of his The Way of the Lord Jesus, Grisez writes:

Humorous lies manipulate others and often offend their dignity… [They] aim to deceive someone, although usually only temporarily, and generally in the context of playful mocking or teasing (“kidding”). For instance, someone first tells a credulous person something astonishing, embarrassing, or frightening but untrue, and by this deception provokes an emotional reaction; then the joker manifests the truth and at least implicitly ridicules the reaction. (p. 411)

I have already explained why I think such “playful mocking,” “teasing,” or “kidding” does not count as lying in the first place -- given the linguistic conventions governing surprising statements, the listener typically can figure out that the speaker is not serious, in just the way that he can figure out the truth when a speaker uses evasive language or a broad mental reservation.

But then, Grisez, like “new natural lawyers” in general, eschews the “perverted faculty” approach to the subject that (as I explained in a recent post) motivates the traditional natural law theorist’s view that lying is inherently bad. Grisez appeals instead to the value of “self-integration and authenticity” and a lie’s tendency to “attack[s] the real community that truthful communication would foster” (p. 405). Yet the suggestion that playful mocking, teasing, and kidding “attack real community” and “offend the dignity” of persons seems to me to be absurdly overwrought, certainly if intended as a general statement about such practices. (Grisez says that “humorous liars typically victimize people whom they regard as inferiors,” but this way of putting it only reinforces the impression -- which nothing in his discussion clearly contradicts -- that he regards even kidding between equals as a kind of “lying.”) Of course, mocking, teasing, and the like is sometimes intended maliciously, and can sometimes cause real harm even to people who are not oversensitive -- hazing, schoolyard bullying, and the like are obvious examples. But everyday pranks and the joshing that friends engage in are not at all like this. The “victims” of such jokes typically enjoy them -- “Ha ha, you got me! Good one!” -- and would rightly dismiss as ridiculously humorless any suggestion that in doing so they are somehow complicit in an assault on their “dignity.” Indeed, the sort of bonhomie that typically surrounds such joking surely fosters community rather than “attacks” it. (Here as elsewhere the “new natural law theory” tends towards an excessive rigorism born of an obsession with a quasi-Kantian understanding of “respect for the dignity of persons.” Of course, neither moral rigorists nor Kantians are famous for having a sense of humor.)

So, I would say that playful kidding of the sort I engaged in in the Jaguar case does not count as a lie, not even a jocose lie (and is thus not inherently wrong), whereas falsely insisting that what I had said was true even when asked whether I was joking would have been a jocose lie (and thus would have been inherently wrong, even if only mildly so). There are interesting middle ground cases, though, that are not as clear-cut. In Volume II of The Science of Ethics (a work for which I have great esteem), traditional natural law theorist Michael Cronin rightly says that:

It should be remembered… that it is possible for the jocular element in our statement to become itself a part of the statement instead of remaining outside the statement, as merely the end to which it is directed. And thus what is often incorrectly called a jocose lie is really not a lie, but a true statement, made up partly of words, partly of jocose acts, and partly, perhaps, of the circumstances, for even the circumstances sometimes “speak.” … Smiling, nodding, a jocular tone of voice may all be used to convey our meaning or part of our meaning, just as well as words; and, provided their significance is understood by people generally, they have a claim to be regarded as a substantive part of our speech, as adding to, or modifying the literal sense of the words used. (p. 72)

I would argue that these sorts of considerations support the claim that jokes of the “totaled Jaguar” sort do not count as lies under the circumstances described. But Cronin says the following about another example:

To say to a boy on All Fools’ day that his teacher wishes to see him, when it is known that this is not the case, is a lie -- a very minor lie, no doubt, but still a lie. The innocence of the end aimed at diminishes, indeed, the sin of lying, but it still leaves the lying statement what it is in itself, just as any other end would. (p. 71)

This, as I say, seems to me to be a middle ground case. On the one hand, unlike my “Jaguar” example, the content of the statement in question is of itself not necessarily surprising enough naturally to lead the listener to suspect that the speaker might be joking, and if the speaker does not soon go on to say “Just kidding!” or the like but lets the boy go to see his teacher, there is nothing else in the immediate context to indicate the speaker’s true thoughts. That much supports Cronin’s judgment that this case counts as a jocose lie. On the other hand, the overall context is April Fools’ Day, and most people are aware that jokes and pranks are unusually common on that day. Someone who remembers what day it is will likely be especially wary, suspecting anything remotely surprising or unpleasant that anyone says on that day of being a joke. Hence it seems to me that there are grounds for holding that the overall context makes it plausible that the average person could figure out the speaker’s true thoughts, so that the overall communicative act is no more a lie than the utterance of a mere pleasantry like “I’m fine, thanks” (even when one is feeling depressed) would be.

Someone might wonder: Couldn’t considerations of the sort raised here be used to justify practices like telling children untruths about Santa Claus, or deliberately telling a falsehood to the murderer at the door (practices which in earlier posts I have argued count as lies)? The answer is No. Take the Santa Claus case first. In most cases, there is nothing analogous to broad mental reservation, evasive speech, non-literal language and the like here; nor, even if there were, does a small child have the sophistication to know the difference. When you tell an adult that you’re fine even when you’re not, he knows well that you might not really be fine at all and that you didn’t really intend in the first place seriously to be claiming that you are. When you tell him that the sun rose at 6 am today, he knows well that you do not literally mean that the sun moved relative to the Earth but that this is just a loose way of speaking. But when you tell a four-year -old that a man in a red suit comes down the chimney on Christmas eve, leaves gifts around the tree, and eats the cookies the child has left for him, he understands you to mean that this is literally what happens -- that you are describing an event no less real and in principle observable than a visit by Grandma and Grandpa would be. He doesn’t think that it is a joke, or merely a delightful myth that you don’t mean seriously -- especially if you insist that it is true even when he says “But Bobby at school said there really is no Santa Claus!” It is sheer sophistry to pretend that this is anything but a lie, even if the motivation for it is innocent.

Regarding the murderer who comes to your door looking for his victim, I suppose that if the murderer presented himself as just an ordinary visitor paying a visit and you said “Sorry, he’s not here,” this (like the secretary’s words in the example given above) would count as a broad mental reservation rather than a lie, given the linguistic convention governing such forms of speech. But suppose the murderer says: “Look, I intend to kill this guy but I’m on a tight schedule here and I don’t have time to fool around. So, just give me a straight answer-- none of this broad mental reservation or evasive speech stuff. Is he here or not?” In that case, if you falsely say “No, he’s not,” then you’ve told a lie. Not mortally sinful, to be sure -- and consult this article by Fr. Lawrence Dewan for an account of just how minor a fault such an act would be -- but still a slight defect.

But rest assured that you can still joke with the murderer about his Jag being totaled…

Point of contact

2012-01-15T22:57:00.000-08:00

Bruce Charlton identifies six problems for modern Christian apologists, and proposes a solution. His remarks are all interesting, but I want to focus on the first and most fundamental of the problems he identifies, which is that the metaphysical and moral knowledge that even pagans had in the ancient world can no longer be taken for granted:

Christianity is a much bigger jump from secular modernity than from paganism. Christianity seemed like a completion of paganism - a step or two further in the same direction and building on what was already there: souls and their survival beyond death, the intrinsic nature of sin, the activities of invisible powers and so on. With moderns there is nothing to build on (except perhaps childhood memories or alternative realities glimpsed through art and literature).

From this problem follow several others. Bruce continues:

Modern Christianity as experienced by converts tends to be incomplete - precisely because modern Christianity has nothing to build on. This means that modern incomplete Christianity lacks explanatory power, seems to have little or nothing to say about what seem to be the main problems of living. For example, modern Christianity seems to have nothing to do with politics, law, art, philosophy or science; to inhabit a tiny, shrinking realm cut-off from daily concerns.

and

Modern Christianity often feels shallow - it seems to rely on diktat of scripture and the Church - this is because moderns lack a basis in the spontaneous perceptions of Natural Law, animism, the sense of active supernatural power in everyday life. Modern Christianity (after the first flush of the conversion experience) thus feels dry, abstract, legalistic, prohibitive, uninvolving, lacking in purpose.

As they say, read the whole thing. There is, I think, much truth in what Bruce has to say. To be sure, I don’t for a moment think (and I take it that Bruce doesn’t think) that Christianity really is in fact “shallow,” “incomplete,” “dry,” “lacking in purpose,” devoid of “explanatory power,” with “nothing to build on” by way of common ground with secular modernity, etc. Quite the opposite. But I agree that it can seem that way to many modern people. (It more or less seemed that way to me in my atheist days, before I discovered what Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, actually said -- that is to say, what its greatest representatives have actually held historically, as contrasted with the distortions of Christianity, whether liberal or fundamentalist, that have replaced it in much of the public mind.)

The problem, in part, is one of historical and cultural circumstances. Take a simple example, the Christian description of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. To modern people this sort of talk can sound unbearably mawkish; indeed, I sometimes find it unbearably mawkish, unless the context is such as to counteract the awful cultural associations that have come to surround it. Hence, if I’m hearing a reference to Jesus as Lord or Savior in the context of the Mass (whether the extraordinary form or the ordinary form celebrated in a dignified way), it does not bother me at all; but if I hear it uttered by a televangelist, I feel (perhaps like a Dawkins or a Hitchens would) an irresistible urge to change the channel.

Think, though, of the associations a word like “Lord” would have to someone in the ancient or medieval world -- it would bring to mind an emperor, or an aristocrat. Think of what “Savior” would mean in a cultural context where ancient local communities were being swallowed up by ruthless and seemingly invincible empires, and where rigorist moral systems like Stoicism and Neo-Platonism competed for the allegiance of the intelligentsia -- that is to say, where people had an ongoing sense both of being in real physical jeopardy and of continual personal moral failure. A description of Jesus of Nazareth as “Lord” and “Savior” would have the reverse of the sentimental and effeminate connotations secularists hear in it now -- it might bring to mind a stern Constantine riding to the rescue on horseback, say, rather than a Mister Rogers with long hair and sandals, ready with a smile and a Band Aid for your spiritual boo-boos.

Combine the egalitarian politics, easy morals, and relative affluence and social stability of recent decades, and few people in the modern secular world are looking for a Lord or Savior in a sense the ancients and medievals would have understood. Add to that the fact that “Jesus is Lord!” has become the expression of a therapeutic, emotionalistic religiosity conveyed through mass-produced T-shirts, bumper stickers, and bad music, and the whole idea is bound to the modern secularist to seem unintelligible and repulsively tacky. (Scratch a New Atheist and you’ll often find that this is the kind of stuff he’s reacting against, and all he’s ever known of Christianity.)

So that’s part of the problem. But that can be remedied if proponents of a muscular and intellectually rigorous form of Christianity -- that is to say, of Christianity simpliciter, as it existed historically -- rediscover their ancient heritage. For they will thereby rediscover too the heritage of the pagan world, and find in it the resources to communicate with modern man, indeed with any man. Aristotelians and Neo-Platonists knew that God exists, they knew that man is not a purely material creature, and they knew that good and bad are objective features of the world and that reason directs us to pursue the good. They knew these things through philosophical arguments which have lost none of their force, arguments which were picked up and refined by Christian thinkers and which informed the great Scholastic tradition.

As Pope Leo XIII beautifully put it in Aeterni Patris, the intellectual treasures of the pagans are like the gold and silver vessels the Israelites took out of Egypt, ready for deployment in the service of the true religion. Thus did the Scholasticism whose revival this encyclical fostered happily adopt whatever was of value in the thought of Greeks and Romans, Jews and Arabs. With philosophy as with art, literature, and architecture, if you want to learn what the greatest non-Christians had to offer, come to the Church, which absorbs and protects it -- honoring our divinely given nature and its products even as she raises them higher through grace. She reminds man of what he already knows, or can know, through his own powers, before revealing to him truths he could not arrive at under his own steam. She speaks to him in his own language -- the language of natural theology and natural law, which are in principle accessible to all, and have no “sell by” date. Even modern secularists know this language, for they are no less human than their pagan ancestors. The problem is that they speak it at only a grade school or even kindergarten level, whereas the greatest of the ancients at least had high school level proficiency. But through “remedial education” they, like the ancient pagans, can be prepared for the graduate level work afforded by divine revelation.

This is, of course, the idea of what Aquinas called the praeambula fidei -- the preambles of faith, by which philosophy opens the door for revelation (where faith and revelation, keep in mind, are when rightly understood in no way contrary to reason but build on it -- I have explained how in the first half of a previous post). But this brings us to another problem. Like the Pharisee who scorns the sincere piety and virtue of the Samaritan, some Christians scorn natural theology and natural law as impious or at least questionable. They either despise human nature, and with it any non-Christian understanding of God and morality, as altogether corrupt and without value; or they are willing at least verbally to affirm that nature, but only if it is effectively absorbed into the order of grace, like the Monophysite who is willing to acknowledge Christ’s human nature only if it is first completely divinized. On the former tendency, faith alone and scripture alone must suffice to bring one to Christianity, preambles be damned. On the latter, human nature is conceived of in a way which (to borrow a phrase from Pope Pius XII) threatens to “destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order” by taking the natural up into the supernatural, in effect treating natural theology and natural law as if only the Christian can understand them aright. In both cases Christianity can come to seem a matter of mere diktat (as Bruce Charlton puts it) -- fideistic, inaccessible from and irrelevant to the world of the non-believer.

The first tendency, obviously, is associated with Luther and Calvin, though it is only fair to acknowledge that there are Protestants who have resisted it. All the same, their resistance is itself often resisted by their coreligionists, as is illustrated by a famous dispute between the 20^th century Protestant theologians Emil Brunner and Karl Barth. Brunner argued that natural theology represents a “point of contact” between human nature and divine revelation, by which the former might be able to receive the latter (though even Brunner qualified his notion of “natural theology,” lest it imply the certainty of God’s existence through natural reason alone that is affirmed by Catholicism). Barth responded angrily (in a work with the pithy title “No!”), rejecting any suggestion that human nature contributes something to the “encounter” between God and man and arguing that any needed “point of contact” was itself provided by revelation rather than human nature. This is a little like saying that billiard ball A knocks into billiard ball B by hitting, not B’s surface, but a surface provided by A. If intelligible at all, it only pushes the problem back a stage: How does the surface provided by A itself have any efficacy vis-à-vis B? And how does the “point of contact” provided by revelation itself make any contact with human nature?

It is also only fair to point out that some modern Catholic thinkers have taken views which at least flirt with the second tendency I described above -- though in part under the influence of Barth. Hans Urs von Balthasar sought to meet Barth halfway by rejecting the conception of man’s natural state developed within the Thomistic tradition and central to the Neo-Scholasticism fostered by Leo’s Aeterni Patris (a conception which I described in a recent post on original sin). On this traditional view, the natural end of human beings is to know God, but only in a limited way. The intimate, “face to face” knowledge of the divine nature that constitutes the beatific vision is something we are not destined for by nature, but is an entirely supernatural gift made available to us only through Christ. In place of this doctrine, Balthasar put the teaching of his fellow Nouvelle Théologie proponent Henri de Lubac, who held that this supernatural end is something toward which we are ordered by nature. Whether it is even coherent to maintain that a supernatural gift can be our natural end, and whether de Lubac’s teaching can ultimately be reconciled with the traditional Catholic doctrine of the “gratuity of the supernatural order” reasserted by Pius XII, have for several decades now been matters of fierce controversy. But the apparent (even if unintended) implication of the position staked out by de Lubac and Balthasar is that there is no such thing as a human nature intelligible apart from grace and apart from Christian revelation. And it is in that case hard to see how there could be a natural theology and natural law intelligible to someone not already convinced of the truth of that revelation.

Related to this is Etienne Gilson’s tendency to deemphasize the Aristotelian core of Aquinas’s system and to present it instead as a distinctively “Christian philosophy.” As Ralph McInerny argued in Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers, Gilson’s position, like de Lubac’s, threatens to undermine the traditional Thomistic view that philosophy must be clearly distinguished from theology and can arrive at knowledge of God apart from revelation. Such views thereby “unwittingly [erode] the notion of praeambula fidei” and “lead us along paths that end in something akin to fideism” (p. ix).

McInerny’s book, along with other recent works like Lawrence Feingold’s The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters and Steven A. Long’s Natura Pura, mark a long-overdue recovery within mainstream Catholic thought of an understanding of nature and grace that was once common coin, and apart from which the possibility of natural theology and natural law cannot properly be understood. Nor, I would say, can other crucial matters properly be understood apart from it (such as original sin, as I argue in the post linked to above). The blurring of the natural and the supernatural may also lie behind a tendency in some contemporary Catholic writing to overemphasize the distinctively theological aspects of some moral issues. For example, an exposition of traditional sexual morality that appeals primarily to the Book of Genesis, the analogy of Christ’s love for the Church, or the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity may seem more profound than an appeal to (say) the natural end of our sexual faculties. But the result of such a lopsided theological emphasis is that to the non-believer, Catholic morality can (again to use Bruce Charlton’s words) falsely “seem to rely on diktat of scripture and the Church” and thus appeal only to the relatively “tiny, shrinking realm” of those willing to accept such diktat. It will fail adequately to explain to those who do not already accept the biblical presuppositions of Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” or of a “covenant theology of human sexuality,” their merits notwithstanding, exactly how Catholic teaching is rationally grounded in human nature rather than in arbitrary divine or ecclesiastical command. Grace doesn’t replace nature but builds on it; and an account which heavily emphasizes the former over the latter is bound to seem ungrounded.

The late pope himself realized this, whether or not all of his expositors do. In Memory and Identity he says:

If we wish to speak rationally about good and evil, we have to return to Saint Thomas Aquinas, that is, to the philosophy of being [i.e. traditional metaphysics]. With the phenomenological method, for example, we can study experiences of morality, religion, or simply what it is to be human, and draw from them a significant enrichment of our knowledge. Yet we must not forget that all these analyses implicitly presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being and also the reality of being human, that is, being a creature. If we do not set out from such “realist” presuppositions, we end up in a vacuum. (p. 12)

And in Chapter V of Fides et Ratio he warned:

There are also signs [today] of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God. One currently widespread symptom of this fideistic tendency is a “biblicism” which tends to make the reading and exegesis of Sacred Scripture the sole criterion of truth…

Other modes of latent fideism appear in the scant consideration accorded to speculative theology, and in disdain for the classical philosophy from which the terms of both the understanding of faith and the actual formulation of dogma have been drawn. My revered Predecessor Pope Pius XII warned against such neglect of the philosophical tradition and against abandonment of the traditional terminology.

And the Catechism promulgated by Pope John Paul II, citing Pius XII, affirmed that:

human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator… (par 37)

There is a reason why the first Vatican Council, while insisting that divine revelation teaches us things that cannot be known by natural reason alone, also taught that:

The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason…

and

Not only can faith and reason never be at odds with one another but they mutually support each other, for on the one hand right reason established the foundations of the faith and, illuminated by its light, develops the science of divine things…

and

If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.

and

If anyone says that divine revelation cannot be made credible by external signs, and that therefore men and women ought to be moved to faith only by each one's internal experience or private inspiration: let him be anathema.

and

If anyone says… that miracles can never be known with certainty, nor can the divine origin of the Christian religion be proved from them: let him be anathema.

The point of such anathemas is not to settle by fiat the question of whether God exists or whether miracles have actually occurred; obviously, a skeptic will be moved, if at all, only by being given actual arguments for these claims, not by the mere insistence that there are such arguments. The anathemas are directed at the fideistic, subjectivist Christian who would dismiss the atheist’s demand that faith be given an objective, rational defense, and who thereby makes of Christianity a laughingstock. Preaching Christianity to skeptics without first setting out the praeambula fidei, and then complaining when they don’t accept it, is like yelling in English at someone who only speaks Chinese, and then dismissing him as a fool when he doesn’t understand you. In both cases, while there is certainly a fool in the picture, it isn’t the listener.

Video of Science and Faith Conference now online

2012-01-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Last month I gave a talk at the Science and Faith Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, on the theme “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science.” The other main speakers were Stephen Barr, Michael Behe, William E. Carroll, Jay Richards, Alvin Plantinga, and Benjamin Wiker. My understanding is that a conference volume containing the papers is planned, but video of most of the talks is now available online here.

You’ll find my own talk below. (Keep in mind that the camera adds ten pounds. Lots of gin and pizza can add a few pounds too.) There’s a lot of new stuff in this paper. I argue that it is impossible in principle to get from the world to the God of classical theism unless we affirm the act/potency distinction and (therefore) the reality of immanent final causality. Along the way I deal with Greek atomism, Berkeley’s critique of matter, the nature of divine causality, the existential inertia thesis, the problem with Leibnizian cosmological arguments, the limitations of the Kalām argument, and some other stuff as well. Jonathan Sanford also makes some important points in his reply, which follows my talk.

TLS in the Telegraph

2012-01-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

Christopher Howse of The Daily Telegraph on The Last Superstition: “God’s more than a watchmaker: How a misapprehension of the New Atheists has been exploded.”

Smith, Tollefsen, and Pruss on lying

2012-01-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Last summer, theologian Janet E. Smith published an article in First Things defending the moral legitimacy, under certain circumstances, of telling falsehoods. In September, Chris Tollefsen and Alex Pruss replied to Smith, and last month Smith responded to Tollefsen and Pruss. I hate to disagree with Smith, whom I’ve long admired; and as longtime readers know, I’ve had my differences with Tollefsen. But on this subject, I have to side with Tollefsen and Pruss -- though I also think that some of their arguments are weak, and that they are not entirely fair to Smith.

I have addressed the subject of lying at length in a number of earlier posts (which you can find here, here, here, here, and here), and it will be useful to summarize the main points before addressing the debate between Smith and her critics. Following the classical natural law approach to ethics associated with Aquinas and other moralists in the Scholastic tradition, I have argued, on both philosophical and theological grounds, that:

1. Lying is always wrong, even if not always gravely so.

2. Broad mental reservations are not lies, and neither are obvious jokes nor polite expressions such as “You look nice today,” “I’m fine, thanks,” and the like, because the linguistic conventions governing these expressions entail that they are not generally intended to convey one’s actual thoughts and feelings in the first place, but function as mere pleasantries. Certain kinds of stratagems in war, certain deceptive moves in games, etc. do not necessarily count as lies either.

3. What is essential to lying is deliberately speaking contrary to one’s true thoughts; whether the listener has a right to the truth is irrelevant.

4. Hence it is wrong to lie even to the murderer who comes to your door demanding to know where to find his intended victim. It is not wrong to refrain from telling him, or to speak evasively, or to use a broad mental reservation. But if these ploys do not work, it would be wrong to lie to him. Not gravely wrong, but still mildly wrong.

5. It is also wrong to lie in wartime. That certain deceptive practices are justifiable in war does not show otherwise, because lying is not the same thing as deception. Broad mental reservations, evasive speech, feints, etc. during wartime are fine, but deliberately speaking contrary to one’s true thoughts is always lying and thus always wrong.

6. It is also wrong to lie to children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc. Not necessarily gravely wrong, but still wrong, and unwise too insofar as children who find that they’ve been lied to about these matters might reasonably wonder whether their parents have been lying to them about other matters too (religion, morality, etc.).

7. To the extent that Live Action’s methods in their sting operation against Planned Parenthood involved broad mental reservation, evasion, and the like, those methods may be defensible; to the extent that these methods involve actual lying, they were wrong (even if not gravely so) and should not be used.

Please don’t bother commenting on these claims until you’ve read the posts in question, which deal with the stock objections at length. I’m not going to rehash it all here. The point is just to summarize my own approach to the issue in question before commenting on Smith, Tollefsen, and Pruss. They cover a lot of ground in their exchange, but I will confine my remarks here to two issues: the teaching of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis lying, and the traditional natural law grounds for condemning lying as inherently immoral.

Catholic teaching

Tollefsen and Pruss give the impression that Smith is dissenting from official Catholic teaching on lying. It is not clear whether they intend to give that impression, but such a charge would in any event be unjust. Smith is no dissenter. What the Church teaches is that lying is always wrong, and Smith, it seems to me, does not deny this. What she defends is the claim that not all false assertion counts as lying, just as not all killing counts as murder and not all taking of another’s property counts as stealing. (Certainly this is all her position commits her to, though I think she could have stated things a little more carefully at a couple of places in her reply to Tollefsen and Pruss.) Smith appeals to the idea that for one’s false assertion to count as a lie, the person one is speaking to must have a right to the truth. While I strongly disagree with her position, and while it has never gained a wide following among orthodox Catholic moral theologians, Smith is perfectly correct to hold that this minority view has historically been defended by some orthodox theologians and has not been condemned by the Church.

Consider this statement from Fr. Francis J. Connell’s Outlines of Moral Theology -- a typical pre-Vatican II manual of moral theology published in 1958 and carrying the Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat:

A lie is a statement contrary to what a person believes to be true. It may be in word, in writing, or in deed. It is forbidden explicitly in Sacred Scripture, and also by the natural law. Some theologians base their argument on the fact that the purpose of speech is to manifest what one believes to be true; and hence it is against the primary purpose of this faculty to tell a lie. Other theologians argue that the primary purpose of the faculty of speech is to promote the welfare of mankind by mutual communication of ideas, so that a lie is wrong because it tends to disrupt the spirit of trust and confidence among human beings. However, they say, when a person is unjustly trying to force me to reveal a truth which I have a right to conceal, I do not sin if I say something to the contrary. In that event, I am telling a falsehood, but not a lie. This opinion is truly probable, but those who accept it must be very careful not to abuse it. (p. 158)

Or consider Fr. Thomas Slater’s 1925 Manual of Moral Theology. After arguing that lying is always and intrinsically wrong, even if done to save a life, Slater writes:

Some of the Greek Fathers held a different view from the above, and thought that lying was not wrong under all circumstances, but that it was occasionally allowable, like medicine, on account of inevitable necessity. English moralists have very commonly held a similar opinion, that a lie is only told when what is false is said to one who has a right to the truth. Some modern Catholic theologians have also adopted this opinion, which places the malice of lying in the denial of the truth to one who has a right to it. (Vol. I, p. 292)

Slater goes on vigorously to criticize this view for failing to make the nature of this right clear, for construing lying in an implausibly narrow way, and for failing adequately to answer the arguments for the more traditional and stricter view. I agree with his criticisms, and most of the manuals of the day also firmly reject the more lax view in favor of the stricter traditional view, according to which a listener’s right to the truth is irrelevant to whether something counts as a lie. But the more lax position was a view that had a small number of defenders within the tradition, and Slater does not question the orthodoxy of those who hold it. (Smith provides some other citations in support of her position in her reply to Tollefsen and Pruss.)

It is this minority theological opinion that seems to have influenced the original edition of the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, which stated:

To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth. (par. 2483)

Now the revised Catechism altered this passage, deleting the reference to a person’s right to know the truth. And as I noted in an earlier post, apparently the change was made by then-Cardinal Ratzinger at the request of theologians concerned to maintain continuity with the more traditional view defended by the majority of orthodox theologians. Since I think the minority view is not only wrong but seriously problematic from a theological point of view, I am glad the change was made. But it is only fair to acknowledge that the fact that the less strict minority view made it into the first edition of the Catechism at all only lends support to Smith’s claim that the Church has not officially condemned that view, and regards it as at least defensible and within the bounds of orthodoxy.

(It is also a bit rich for Tollefsen to be citing Scripture and tradition against Smith. After all, Tollefsen takes the view, not merely that capital punishment should not be used -- something a Catholic can certainly hold -- but that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral, a claim that not only has no support from Scripture and tradition but is manifestly in conflict with Scripture, tradition, and even the teaching of the current Catechism and of Pope John Paul II, which disfavors capital punishment but acknowledges that it can be legitimate at least in principle. I’ve discussed Catholic teaching on capital punishment here, and Tollefsen’s views on the subject here, here, here, and here.)

The “perverted faculty” argument

As I’ve indicated, Smith’s defense of telling falsehoods under certain circumstances rests on an analogy with lawful killing and the lawful taking of another’s goods. Aquinas and other traditional natural law theorists agree that not all killing counts as murder, because it is only the taking of the life of an innocent human being that is intrinsically wrong, and killing in self-defense, in a just war, and in executing those guilty of serious enough offenses involves taking the lives of people who are not innocent. (See the articles and posts on capital punishment just linked to for more on this issue.) They also agree that not all taking of another’s property without his consent counts as stealing, because the natural law does not in the first place give us so strong a right to our property that we can justly withhold it in all circumstances, including cases like those where a person lost in the woods will starve to death unless he takes some food from someone else’s cabin. (See my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation” for more on this subject.) Similarly, Smith argues, Aquinas and those influenced by his natural law approach to ethics should allow that not every case of deliberately telling a falsehood counts as a lie, since some people do not have a right to the truth from us.

The problem with Smith’s argument is that the cases of murder, stealing, and lying are simply not parallel in the way she supposes, certainly not from the point of view of the classical approach to natural law theory represented by Aquinas. For Aquinas and the classical natural law tradition that informed the thinking of the Scholastic manualists, deliberately telling a falsehood is intrinsically immoral, whether or not the listener has a right to know the truth, because it involves acting contrary to the natural end of our communicative faculties. It is in this respect like contraception, or deliberately vomiting up a meal so that one can gorge oneself indefinitely. Their argument is thus a species of what is known as a “perverted faculty” argument. Murder and stealing do not involve the perversion of a faculty; they are immoral for other, more complex reasons. Hence the analogy Smith needs in order to make her case does not hold. (Smith also appeals to the difference between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian conditions of the human race, but I don’t think this is relevant. Like contraception, deliberately telling a falsehood involves the perversion of a faculty as much after the Fall as before.)

“Perverted faculty” arguments are very widely misunderstood, and routinely dismissed on the basis of these misunderstandings. This is no place for a full defense, but the basic idea can be spelled out fairly briefly. Classical natural law theory presupposes certain elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics, namely its essentialism and affirmation of the reality of immanent teleology. The idea is that natural substances have essences, and that these essences entail certain ends toward which a substance is naturally directed. In the case of living things, the realization of these ends will constitute the thing’s flourishing as the kind of thing it is. So, for example, a tree will, by virtue of its essence, have a natural tendency to sink roots into the ground, to grow branches and leaves, and so forth; and to the extent it successfully does so, it will flourish as a tree, while if it fails to do so (e.g. if because of external factors or internal defects it is unable to sink roots very deeply into the soil) it will atrophy. A squirrel, by virtue of its essence, will naturally tend to gather acorns, scamper up trees, and so forth; and to the extent it pursues these ends it will flourish qua squirrel, while to the extent it fails to do so (again, whether because of external circumstances or internal defects) it will not flourish.

For classical natural law theory, such natural teleology grounded in the essences of things entails an objective standard of goodness and badness. A tree with strong roots and branches is to that extent a good tree, while a diseased tree with weak roots and withered branches is a bad one; a healthy squirrel which likes to scamper about and gather food is to that extent a good squirrel, while a squirrel which has through injury lost the ability to climb trees and because of genetic defect does not enjoy the taste of acorns is a bad one; and so forth. So far this is not a moral sense of “good” versus “bad”; it is rather the sense operative when we describe something as a “good specimen” or “bad example” of a kind of thing. But it is an entirely objective sense. When we say that the healthy tree is a good tree and the diseased squirrel a bad squirrel, we are not expressing our own preferences but simply stating what follows, as a matter of objective fact, from the nature or essence of a tree or squirrel. (There is no “fact/value distinction” from an A-T point of view; so-called “values” are built into the facts from the get go.) Moreover, distinctively moral goodness or badness falls out as a special case of this more general sense. Moral goodness or badness is just the kind of goodness or badness manifested by rational agents, who (unlike plants and animals) can freely choose whether or not to pursue what is good for them given their nature. A rational agent who chooses to pursue the ends that his essence determines are good for him is to that extent morally good, while a rational agent who chooses to pursue that which is contrary to these ends is to that extent morally bad. (For a more detailed treatment of the metaphysical foundations of classical natural law theory, see the first half of my article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” linked to above, or chapter 5 of Aquinas.)

Now, the way this gets worked out so as to provide us with moral guidance on specific issues is complicated, and much depends on various concrete details of human nature and the physical, cultural, and historical circumstances in which human beings find themselves. (I discuss the implications for private property and related issues in the article linked to, and the implications for sexual morality in chapter 4 of The Last Superstition.) But “perverted faculty” arguments for certain moral conclusions fall out as a natural consequence of the general principles already described. The basic idea is that when some faculty F is natural to a rational agent A and by nature exists for the sake of some end E (and exists in A precisely so that A might pursue E), then it is metaphysically impossible for it to be good for A to use F in a manner contrary to E. For the good of a thing is determined by the end which it has by nature. F exists for the sake of E, and agents like A naturally possess F precisely so that they might pursue E. Hence (given the underlying metaphysics) it cannot possibly be good to use F for the sake of preventing the realization of E, or for the sake of an end which has an inherent tendency to frustrate the realization of E. Hence (to cite the best-known applications of this reasoning) it cannot possibly be good to use our sexual faculties in a way that positively frustrates their procreative end. And it cannot possibly be good to use our communicative faculties in a way that positively frustrates their truth-conveying end.

None of this entails that F cannot have more than one natural end, and neither does it entail that it cannot be good for us to use F for an end other than E. For “different from E” and “other than E” do not entail “contrary to E.” Hence there is nothing inherently wrong with married people having sex for the sake of expressing affection or merely because they feel like doing it, or with their sexually stimulating each other in various ways during foreplay, as long as they do not act in a way that positively frustrates the procreative end of the sexual act. And there is nothing wrong with using our communicative faculties for all sorts of purposes other than conveying truth -- for entertainment, expressing one’s feelings, or what have you -- as long as this is not done in a way which is contrary to the truth-conveying end, as deliberate falsehood is.

Nor does any of this entail that we have to use F at all. Hence it is legitimate for someone to refrain from sex for the sake of the priesthood or the religious life, or even just to avoid pregnancy; and it is legitimate to refrain from using one’s communicative faculties at all so as to avoid conveying a truth one does not want others to know. Indeed, it can even be legitimate to destroy F if this is the only way to preserve the agent A, as when one has cancerous reproductive organs or vocal cords surgically removed. But if one is going actually to use F, it cannot be good to use it in a manner contrary to the realization of E.

Nor does any of this entail that we cannot use F when we know its end won’t in fact be achieved; for in that case we are not using F for the sake of frustrating the realization of E, and we are not ourselves attempting to frustrate the realization of E in the course of using F. To foresee that F’s end E won’t in fact be realized is not the same thing as using F in a way that will prevent E from being realized, any more than foreseeing that something will happen is the same as causing it to happen. Hence there is nothing inherently wrong with sex during pregnancy, or during infertile periods, or with a sterile spouse, or after menopause. And there is nothing inherently wrong with using broad mental reservations -- which do not actually convey falsehoods but merely express truth in an oblique way -- even though one knows that one’s listener will in fact probably draw the wrong conclusion.

Nor does anything said here entail that man-made devices are per se contrary to nature in the relevant sense. The reason contraception is objectionable from a natural law point of view is not because it involves the use of drugs in the case of the birth control pill, or artifacts in the case of condoms. The use of drugs to treat impotence, or of eyeglasses to improve vision, are not “unnatural” in the relevant sense, despite the means being artificial, because they do not involve using a faculty contrary to its natural end. Indeed, these means restore or enhance the faculties’ power to realize their natural ends. By contrast, the “withdrawal method,” though it does not involve the use of any artificial devices or drugs, is unnatural in the relevant sense, because it does involve using a faculty contrary to its end.

Nor is it any objection to “perverted faculty” arguments to point out that some people have very strong desires to use their faculties in a way contrary to what natural law theorists claim to be their natural ends, even if these desires have a biological basis. That something has a biological basis doesn’t by itself make it “natural” in the relevant sense, since some biologically grounded traits are defects. For instance, color blindness and Down syndrome have a genetic basis, but that hardly makes them “natural” in the relevant, A-T metaphysical sense. By the same token, even if it turned out that homosexual attraction or a compulsion to lie had a genetic basis, that wouldn’t show that these desires are “natural” in the relevant sense.

Most objections to “perverted faculty” arguments rest on a failure to make distinctions like the ones just spelled out. Another objection sometimes raised is that such arguments are objectionably “physicalistic” in that they purportedly reduce morality to brute physiology -- making sex (for instance) a matter merely of plumbing, the placement of fluids, and the like. But the charge is unjust. First of all, no one claims that “perverted faculty” arguments address the whole of morality, or even the most important part of every moral question. For example, traditional natural law theorists typically regard the perversion of our communicative faculties involved in lying as in itself only venially sinful. Gravely sinful lies involve elements beyond merely the perversion of a faculty. (Here the listener’s right to the truth would be relevant.)

Second, even “perverted faculty” arguments themselves do not merely concern brute physiology in the first place. In the case of sexual morality, the point is not just that female and male sexual organs fit together like lock and key, etc. For we have psychological faculties as well as physiological ones. Hence the male sexual passions are by nature woman-oriented, the female sexual passions are by nature man-oriented, the longing men and women naturally have for one another includes more than just a desire for sexual release but also a yearning for completion and companionship, and so on and so forth. The “complementarity” of men and women is as relevant to the “perverted faculty” approach to sexual morality as it is to purportedly “deeper” approaches like personalism. (Again, that some people’s sexual desires are not like this is irrelevant, just as the existence of three-legged dogs is irrelevant to the question of how many legs dogs have in their natural state.) In the case of lying, it isn’t just the physiology of speech that is relevant; our spiritual nature as rational animals is even more important. In general, for the traditional natural law theorist, it isn’t merely our physiological faculties that are perverted in lying and in sexual immorality, but our higher faculties as well.

Obviously there are various ways in which this position might be challenged. But it seems to me that Smith’s objections to Aquinas’s condemnation of all deliberate falsehood do not address the crucial, “perverted faculty” approach to the issue that underlies his view and that of natural law thinkers influenced by him. For one thing, Smith’s appeal to the “postlapsarian” condition of man is, as I have said, irrelevant. Given the nature of the considerations the “perverted faculty” argument appeals to, the circumstances of human life after the Fall can no more make deliberate falsehood good than they can make contraception good. And as I have also noted, the parallels she attempts to draw with murder and stealing do not hold up, because the wrongness of murder and stealing do not stem, as the inherent wrongness of lying does, from using a natural faculty in a manner contrary to its natural end.

For another thing, many of Smith’s objections are aimed at a straw man. She points out that it is legitimate to use our communicative faculties for purposes “other than” conveying truth, as if this conflicted with Aquinas’s position. But as I have indicated, defenders of the “perverted faculty” argument agree with her that this is legitimate. It simply doesn’t follow that using our communicative faculties in a manner “contrary to” their truth-telling function is also legitimate. Smith also insinuates that defensible practices like “dissimulation designed to smooth over awkward social situations,” “pretending to enjoy a meal that doesn’t please,” certain deceptions during wartime, and the like, are incompatible with Aquinas’s position, when in fact (and as I have also indicated) they are commonly regarded by traditional natural law theorists as legitimate exercises in broad mental reservation rather than lies. In general, Smith fails to address the arguments of those moral theologians who refined Aquinas’s position over the centuries, and fails to draw careful distinctions of the sort that are common in their writings.

Unfortunately, though I agree with their main conclusion, the arguments of Tollefsen and Pruss are not much better. As Smith rightly notes, their approach is “more Kantian than Thomistic,” grounded not in the classical natural law theory of Aquinas but in the so-called “new natural law theory” of Germain Grisez and John Finnis. (Or at least Tollefsen’s is; I don’t know how far Pruss would go in the “new natural law” direction.) Eschewing the A-T metaphysical foundation of traditional natural law theory, the “new natural lawyers” affirm the “fact/value distinction” and reject “perverted faculty” arguments. But the arguments they would put in place of the traditional ones are, in my estimation, notable only for their pretentious obscurity and deviation from traditional natural law conclusions. (Like Tollefsen, other “new natural lawyers” typically condemn capital punishment as always and intrinsically immoral; and their position on lying also tends to be more rigorist than that of traditional natural law theorists, ruling out certain kinds of broad mental reservation that some traditional natural law theorists would allow.) But I have already criticized Tollefsen’s “new natural law” approach to the ethics of lying in an earlier post. What I said then applies to his latest piece as well.

Hitchens, Dawkins, and Craig

2011-12-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

As I have said, I never thought it was realistic to expect a deathbed conversion from Christopher Hitchens. But for all his ill-informed ranting and raving on the subject of religion, Hitchens was capable of showing a manful, basic decency toward the other side in a way some other New Atheists are not. Consider these remarks by Hitchens about William Lane Craig, prior to their debate:

And compare them to the cringe-makingly dishonest tactics employed by Richard Dawkins in avoiding the public debate with Craig that he so obviously fears, and to these remarks:

(Hat tip to Peter Byrom for calling my attention to Hitchens’ comments. Peter is the guy in the second clip asking Dawkins the question about Craig.)

Dawkins is a petty man. Hitchens was not that.

Reading Rosenberg, Part V

2011-12-28T00:52:00.000-08:00

In the previous installment of our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we began to examine what Rosenberg has to say about biological phenomena. This time I want to take a brief detour and consider some of what Rosenberg says about the subject in his book Darwinian Reductionism. I noted that while Atheist’s Guide pushes a generally uncompromising eliminative materialist line, Rosenberg resists the “eliminativist” label where issues in the philosophy of biology are concerned, and presents his views in that field as reductionist. Darwinian Reductionism (a more serious book than Atheist’s Guide, and of independent interest) explains why.

I have emphasized that though Rosenberg offers no serious criticisms of theism, though his own positive philosophical claims are preposterous, and though his core argument for the scientism on which his entire position rests is worthless, he is nevertheless a more serious thinker than the likes of Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or other New Atheists. The reason is that Rosenberg is more consistent than these other writers, and he is more consistent because he understands (as they do not) the grave philosophical challenges facing naturalism. In particular, he understands that a consistent naturalist must take a radically eliminativist line vis-à-vis intentionality -- that the naturalist must deny that meaning of any sort exists, even at the level of human thought and language. And he understands that the reason why the naturalist must take this line is that it follows from the claim that there is no teleology or final causality inherent in the natural order. Or at least, once you make that anti-Aristotelian move -- a move which (as I have argued at length) was definitive of modern philosophy -- and you affirm also that the natural order is all that exists, there is no way consistently to affirm that intentionality is a real feature of the world. For intentionality essentially involves “directedness” toward an object, as a thought is “directed” toward what the thought is about or a word is “directed” toward what the word means. And to deny that there is any teleology or final causality immanent to the natural order just is to deny that there is any “directedness” of any sort in it -- that there is anything that points beyond itself to some end, goal, or object. (For more on intentionality, see the relevant posts among my many posts on the mind-body problem.)

The intentionality of words is commonly said to be derived, insofar as, apart from human interpreters and their linguistic conventions, the sounds and ink squiggles we think of as words would be entirely devoid of meaning. “The cat is on the mat” would, apart from us, have no more semantic content than “blah blah blah.” The intentionality of a thought, by contrast, is commonly said to be original insofar as it is inherent to our thoughts in a way it is not inherent to words. We use otherwise meaningless ink squiggles and noises to convey meaning, but no one is using our thoughts as instruments to convey meaning. They just have it, and are the source of the meaning of words and the like. The eliminativist is committed to the claim that not only what we think of as words, but even our thoughts are really as meaningless as “blah blah blah” is. For if original intentionality exists, then there exists something irreducibly “directed” toward an object, which there can’t be if there is no teleology in nature. And without original intentionality, no derived intentionality can exist either.

This position informs Darwinian Naturalism, where Rosenberg writes:

The problem of naturalistically explaining the original intentionality of the human (and infrahuman) brain is perhaps the most serious fundamental challenge facing neuroscience and its philosophy. No one has yet solved it… Indeed, if human intentionality turns out to be derived from some evolutionary process as yet unimagined (and it will have to be unimagined so far, if it is to prove “unmysterious”), it will turn out that both artifacts and genomes will be on a par, neither of them deriving their intentionality directly from something with nonderived intentionality, and both tracing their intentionality back to evolution by natural selection. Of course, as I indicated above, I am dubious that natural selection can actually produce original intentionality in the brain or anywhere else, and so it cannot produce derived intentionality either. Both will, on my view, turn out to be illusions, like the purposes we overlay on nature and that natural selection has dispelled. (p. 108)

As I have said, I think this eliminativist position is the one a consistent naturalist has to take. For to say that “directedness” is real but external to the natural order is essentially to adopt a Cartesian position; while to say that it is real and intrinsic to the natural order is essentially to return to an Aristotelian position. And either way, naturalism will have been abandoned. A serious naturalist, then, either has to find some way out of this dilemma -- the dilemma of having to choose either eliminativism or some form of anti-naturalism -- or follow Rosenberg in adopting eliminativism and then try to find a way to make eliminativism something other than the incoherent mess that I (and many others) have argued that it is. Whatever his faults, Rosenberg faces up to the problem in a way that ignorant hacks like Coyne do not.

Or at least he does where the mind is concerned. While his position also entails (as I suggested in my previous post) a kind of eliminativism about organic phenomena, Rosenberg in general tries, as I have said, to hew to a less radical, reductionist line in the philosophy of biology. Not that even that line isn’t radical. Rosenberg’s complaint in Darwinian Reductionism is that most of his fellow naturalists are not sufficiently reductionist. Like him, they tend to be physicalists, holding that the physical facts fix all the facts; but unlike him, most of them resist reductionism in biology. Rosenberg (rightly, in my view) regards this position as incoherent. But rather than taking that as a reason to abandon physicalism (which is what it is), he takes it as a reason to endorse reductionism (committed as he is to physicalism -- though there is even less in the way of argument for physicalism in Darwinian Reductionism than there is in Atheist’s Guide). His aim in Darwinian Reductionism is to argue that biological reductionism does not have the unhappy implications that have led other naturalists to resist it.

One of those implications is that reductionism would seem to conflict with the evident fact that where biological phenomena are concerned, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Rosenberg maintains that the sense in which this slogan is true is a sense perfectly consistent with reductionism. He offers the wetness of water as an example of a feature that the parts of a whole do not have -- individual H₂O molecules are not wet -- but which is nevertheless reducible to relations between the parts. And purportedly irreducible biological phenomena (Rosenberg implies) are no different.

Now since it is the distinctively organic properties of biological phenomena that are supposed to pose a challenge to reductionism, appealing to the wetness of water hardly addresses the biological antireductionist’s concerns. Moreover, the claim that even water and its properties are “reducible” to H₂O molecules and their relations is more controversial than Rosenberg (and many other naturalists) suppose. (See e.g. Oderberg’s Real Essentialism and van Brakel’s Philosophy of Chemistry for discussion of the relevant issues.) But let’s leave all that aside and consider Rosenberg’s response to the specific objection that the feeling of wetness isn’t reducible to relations between H₂O molecules:

But the feeling of wetness is a complex relation between the molecules and our neurological system -- more molecules, of course. It’s not an isolated property of the water. Reducing the feeling of wetness of water is another matter altogether different from reducing its wetness. Reducing feelings, sensations, is one that science has yet to accomplish, owing to the incompleteness of our understanding of neurology. But it would be blatantly question-begging to assert that no macromolecular -- that is, reductionistic -- explanation of our sensations can ever be provided. Making such an unargued assumption is very far from taking on the burden of proof. It is, in fact, a matter of shifting the burden of proof onto the reductionist, and demanding an impossibly high standard of proof: that science should complete the reduction of human neurology in order to show that the wetness of water is equal to the relations among molecules. Although reductionists cannot accept so high a standard, they can and do argue that the whole history of science since the seventeenth century has been a continuing empirical vindication of reductionism. (p. 13)

Now, I do not necessarily have a problem with the suggestion that the feeling of wetness is a complex relation between water itself and our nervous systems, nor with the idea that the feeling is a material feature of the human organism (though my own, Aristotelian conception of “matter” is not the same as Rosenberg’s materialist conception, and “molecules” are certainly not the whole story). But the rest of this passage reflects a delusion common in those beholden to naturalism, scientism, and (by extension) modern atheism -- the “picture that holds them captive,” as Wittgenstein might have put it.

This delusion -- the delusion that “science has now explained everything else, and so it’s only a matter of time before it explains X (where X = qualia, or intentionality, or some other feature which poses a difficulty for naturalism)” -- is one I have elsewhere called “the materialist shell game,” and it works like this. First, “science” is (implicitly if not explicitly) defined in such a way that no explanation that makes reference to irreducibly teleological or qualitative features of the world is allowed to count as “scientific.” Second, seemingly irreducibly teleological and qualitative features of the world -- apparently goal-directed natural processes, say, or colors, sounds, heat, cold, and the like as these manifest themselves to ordinary experience -- are re-described as mere projections of the mind onto external reality and not allowed to count as truly “material.” Teleology, color, sound, heat, and cold as we experience them do not (so the story goes) really exist in the material world itself, but only in our subjective mental representations of it; objectively there are only colorless, soundless, purposeless particles in motion, which by virtue of their motions cause us to experience them as if they had the characteristics common sense attributes to them. (Color, sound, etc. as physical properties are accordingly also re-defined, in terms of surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and the like.) Third, it then asserted that “science has explained” such-and-such external material phenomena in a way that makes no reference to irreducible teleological or qualitative features. What is not acknowledged is that this claim is a tautology, since (again) nothing that made reference to such features would be allowed to count as “scientific,” and (again) no features that couldn’t be described in non-teleological and non-qualitative terms would be allowed to count as “material.” Fourth, it is fallaciously inferred that since this methodological sleight of hand has “shown” that irreducibly teleological and qualitative features do not exist in the external material world, we have every reason to believe that it will also “show” that they do not exist in the mind either -- that they will either be reduced to non-teleological and non-qualitative features of the brain, or eliminated altogether.

This is like saying that since we have gotten rid of all the dirt in the room by sweeping it under the rug, we have good reason to think that the dirt under the rug can also be gotten rid of in the same way, and even for thinking that it never really existed in the room in the first place. Such an argument would be doubly farcical. For first of all, none of the original dirt has really been gotten rid of at all, but merely relocated. And second, the “sweep it under the rug” method is for obvious reasons the one method that cannot in principle work when applied to the dirt under the rug itself. Those naturalists -- and they are like the sands of the sea for multitude -- who confidently appeal to the historical “success” of scientific reductionism in providing “reductive explanations” of “everything else,” as evidence that the mind too is bound to yield to the same mode of explanation, are committing a fallacy no less egregious. (And we have already seen why an appeal to the predictive and technological virtues of the methodological stipulations in question is no less fallacious if intended to establish the metaphysical completeness of the reductionist’s picture of the world.)

In Darwinian Reductionism no less than in Atheist’s Guide, then, the scientism that undergirds Rosenberg’s entire position rests on little more than an appeal to ill-founded contemporary academic prejudice. But there are other problems too. As I have indicated in earlier posts in this series, one problem with reductionist and eliminativist accounts of this or that natural phenomenon is that they fail to do justice to the irreducible causal powers (arguably) manifested by the phenomenon. In the case at hand, a reductionist account of biological phenomena would seem implicitly to deny that there are any genuine causal powers at anything higher than the molecular level, and thus seems to entail eliminativism about the biological (as, in my previous post, I suggested Rosenberg’s position does).

In response to this sort of objection (which, as he notes, parallels what is called the “causal drainage argument” in the philosophy of mind, since reductionism seems to make causal power at all higher levels of reality “drain away” to the lowest physical level), Rosenberg tells us that “reductionism does not deny that biological kinds have causal powers -- the physical ones; it reveals them” since “’higher-order’ [functional] terms… name the same properties which ‘lower-order’ -- macromolecular -- terms name” (p. 196). In other words, it’s not that biological phenomena lack causal powers; it’s that they have no causal powers over and above those of their molecular parts, no powers that are not “physical powers,” which are “the only causal powers there are” (Ibid.) For biological or functional terms, Rosenberg claims, “do not identify distinct ‘higher-level’ kinds with distinct ‘higher-level’ causal properties.”

This is like saying that Feuerbach’s conception of God as a mere projection, or Freud’s theory of religion as wish-fulfillment, are not really forms of atheism, but are rather merely “reductionist” versions of theism which do not “eliminate” God but merely “reveal” the true nature of His causal relationship to the world. Obviously, to say that a “higher-level” term like “God” does not “identify a distinct ‘higher-level’ kind with distinct ‘higher-level’ causal properties” but instead names “the same properties which ‘lower-level’ terms name” -- viz. human psychological properties like projection and wishful thinking -- would just be a roundabout way of saying that there is no God and that only the psychological processes themselves are real. Similarly, to say that biological terms do not really name any kinds or causal powers over and above the molecular ones is just a roundabout way of saying that the biological kinds and causal powers do not exist and only the molecular ones do. Rosenberg’s biological reductionism -- like the bogus Feuerbachian or Freudian “reductionist” “theism” just described, like reductionism in the philosophy of mind, and indeed like reductionism generally -- really is just a thinly disguised eliminativism.

Except, that is, when it is a thinly disguised Aristotelianism. In one of the more interesting sections of Darwinian Reductionism, Rosenberg addresses the question of whether genes really can be said to carry “information” and to embody “programs,” as they are commonly said to do. As I emphasize in The Last Superstition, this sort of talk doesn’t sit well with the naturalist’s official rejection of immanent teleology. Now, some philosophers of biology regard talk of “programs” and “information” (in anything but the thin Shannonian sense of “information”) as merely metaphorical. But as Rosenberg indicates, the problem cannot be so easily evaded:

Molecular biology is, of course, riddled with intentional expressions: we attribute properties such as being a messenger (“second messenger”) or a recognition site; we ascribe proofreading and editing capabilities; and we say that enzymes can discriminate among substrates… Even more tellingly, as we have seen, molecular developmental biology describes cells as having “positional information,” meaning that they know where they are relative to other cells and gradients. The naturalness of the intentional idiom in molecular biology presents a problem. All these expressions and ascriptions involve the representation, in one thing, of the way things are in another thing… The naturalness of this idiom in molecular biology is so compelling that merely writing it off as a metaphor seems implausible. Be that as it may, when it comes to information in the genome, the claim manifestly cannot be merely metaphorical, not, at any rate, if the special role of the gene is to turn on its information content. But to have a real informational role, the genome must have intentional states. (pp. 99-100)

But how can a naturalist accept such descriptions of biological phenomena as more than metaphorical -- especially a naturalist like Rosenberg, who takes an eliminativist line on intentionality?

Rosenberg’s solution is to split the difference. “The crucial question,” he says, “is not intentionality but programming” (p. 108). What does this mean? Rosenberg rehearses John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment, and allows at least for the sake of argument that it shows that running a program is not sufficient to generate original intentionality. But even if the intentionality of a program is at most derived, the program can still be efficacious. After all, Searle in the Chinese Room still gives out the right answers in response to questions put to him, even though he has no idea what the symbols he’s manipulating mean; and he does so by virtue of running a program. Therefore (Rosenberg seems to infer), we can say that genes embody programs, and do their distinctive work by virtue of embodying them, even if we deny that they really possess original intentionality.

The trouble with this is that it takes account of only half, and the less important half, of Searle’s critique of computationalism. The Chinese Room argument shows only that computationalism cannot be the whole story about the mind. But Searle’s later argument against what he calls “cognitivism” -- the thesis that the brain is a digital computer (as distinct from the thesis that the mind is the software run on the computer) -- is intended to show that it isn’t even part of the story. If the Chinese Room argument succeeds, it shows that even if the brain is running programs, it could not possess original intentionality merely by virtue of running them. The later argument purports to show that the brain is not in any interesting sense running programs in the first place. For being a “program” is not (Searle argues) an observer-independent feature of the world; it does not capture anything intrinsic to the physics of a system. A physical system “runs a program” only relative to an interpreter, who uses the system to run the program, just as ink squiggles and sounds count as words only relative to an interpreter who uses the squiggles or sounds to convey meaning. And since no one is literally “using” the brain to run programs -- no one is literally saying of each of our brains “Let’s let this brain process count as such-and-such a symbol, let’s let that brain process count as such-and-such a transition between symbols, and so forth” -- the brain is not running them.

Now as I argue in The Last Superstition, one could resist Searle’s conclusion here, but not in a way that helps the naturalist. If we say that computationalist descriptions of the brain capture real, objective features of the brain, then we are implicitly committed to an Aristotelian conception of matter. For the notion of a program is teleological; and teleology that is intrinsic to a material system is just Aristotelian, immanent final causality. As Searle emphasizes, we could in principle attribute all sorts of programs to all sorts of physical systems -- to use one of his examples, there is a possible interpretation of the microstructure of the wall in his room on which it is running Wordstar. To say that some particular attribution is privileged, that a physical system is, apart from our interests, running such-and-such a program and not the others, is to say that its states inherently “point” to the realization of that program rather than to the others. (The Aristotelian implications of computationalist descriptions of nature have also been noted by James Ross and Valentino Braitenberg.)

This puts Rosenberg in a dilemma. If he wants to insist that matter is utterly devoid of any inherent teleology -- his official general metaphysical position -- then (given Searle’s critique of cognitivism) he is not entitled to attribute programs of any sort to genes. If instead he wants to insist that genes really do embody programs even apart from human interests -- his official position on this specific issue -- then he has to acknowledge that something like Aristotelian final causality is a real feature of the world after all.

Rosenberg misses the Aristotelian implications of his position because he evidently thinks that the only alternative to reductionism and eliminativism in philosophy of biology is vitalism. But vitalism is like Cartesian dualism in the philosophy of mind, or the extrinsic, “watchmaker” model of teleology represented by Paley’s “design argument” -- it is a corruption of the Aristotelian-Scholastic views the moderns sought to replace, even if a corruption that is sometimes mistakenly read back into those older views. For the Aristotelian, the right way to think about the soul is in hylemorphic terms, as the form of the living body, not as a complete substance in its own right a la Descartes’ res cogitans. The right way to think about teleology is as immanent to the natural order, on the model of organic phenomena rather than on the model of machines. And the right way to think about life is also in hylemorphic terms, as the possession of a certain kind of formal cause, not as a spooky kind of “force” or elan vital.

(Rosenberg also seems to think that intentionality-with-a-t entails intensionality-with-an-s, so that since -- he argues -- genes do not exhibit the latter, neither do they have the former. As Tim Crane and others have emphasized, though -- and as I noted in an earlier post -- intensionality-with-an-s is not essential to intentionality-with-a-t. What is essential is just directedness toward an object, which a thing can exhibit even if we can give a non-intensional description its directedness.)

So, Rosenberg’s attempt to find a reductionist middle ground in the philosophy of biology fails. His position is unstable, equivocating between eliminativism on the one hand and Aristotelian anti-reductionism on the other. But there is a lot more to Darwinian Reductionism than I have been able to convey here, and in particular much to make it a more serious and interesting book than Atheist’s Guide. As a philosopher of religion, and as an apologist for naturalism, Rosenberg is hopeless. But as a philosopher of science and an interpreter of naturalism, he is consistently interesting. Both naturalists and their critics need to take him seriously.

Links of interest

2011-12-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

Kathrin Koslicki and Tuomas Tahko are two important contributors to the current revival of interest in neo-Aristotelian metaphysics. Tahko’s commentary on Koslicki’s book The Structure of Objects is available via his blog.

Mike Flynn, hard SF writer extraordinaire and friend of this blog, is interviewed here.

David Goldman argues that, like Europe, the Islamic world is facing a catastrophic decline in population.

An interview at Thomistica.net with the executive director of the winery that produces the Aquinas line of wines.

Robert Pasnau discusses Averroës, the decline of Islamic philosophy, and the revival of philosophy in the medieval West.

Metaphysician Stephen Mumford describes the influence superhero comic books had upon him.

New and recent books to watch for:

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers

James Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness

Something new from the late David Stove: What’s Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment [Links to reviews here. Scroll down.]

Steven A. Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith

Gregory T. Doolan, ed., The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations (HT: Thomistica.net)

Bruce Charlton, another friend of this blog, has recently published Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness.

Hayek and Popper

2011-12-22T14:10:00.000-08:00

My paper “Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind” appears in the latest volume of Advances in Austrian Economics, a special issue edited by Leslie Marsh and devoted to the theme Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology. The publisher’s web page for the volume is here. You can find Marsh’s website devoted to the book here, the table of contents here, and Marsh’s introduction to the volume here. Here’s the abstract of my article (which follows the publisher’s required abstract format):

Purpose – The chapter provides an exposition both of Hayek's causal theory of the mind (especially as applied to intentionality) and of Popper's critique of causal theories, argues that Hayek fails successfully to rebut Popper's critique, and shows how the dispute between Hayek and Popper is relevant to controversies in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Methodology/approach –The chapter elucidates Hayek's ideas and Popper's by situating them within the history of the mind/body problem and comparing them to the views of contemporary philosophers like Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, and Hilary Putnam.

Findings – Popper's critique has yet to be answered, either by Hayek or by contemporary causal theorists.

Originality/value of the chapter –The chapter calls attention to some important but neglected ideas of Hayek and Popper and examines some of their as-yet-unpublished writings.

What that last line is referring to, specifically, are Popper’s private letters to Hayek vis-à-vis Hayek’s book The Sensory Order and Hayek’s unpublished (and unfinished) draft “Within Systems and about Systems: A Statement of Some Problems of a Theory of Communication,” all of which receive substantive discussion in my article. The article is an extended treatment of themes to which I was only able to devote the last few pages of my essay “Hayek the cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind” in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek. It also contains material that should be of interest even to readers with no special interest in Hayek or Popper, since what it has to say about them is relevant to the more general question of whether causal theories of intentionality (which are at the core of attempts to “naturalize” intentionality) can succeed. (I’ve addressed this issue in previous blog posts, such as this one, this one, and this one. Obviously, my many other posts on the mind-body problem are also relevant.)

My Christmas gift to you…

2011-12-21T16:42:00.000-08:00

We’ve had some things to say about nothing (here, here, and here), or at least about how some people who themselves claim to have something to say about nothing in fact have nothing, or at least nothing of importance, to say about nothing. Or something like that. One thing’s for sure, and that’s that this is a subject about which one had better have a sense of humor.

So, for the blog reader who has everything, here’s a little more about nothing, and on the lighter side. (Nothing can be pretty heavy, after all.) For something on nothing written along philosophical but humorous lines, there’s nothing better than P. L. Heath’s article “Nothing” from the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards. Something also worth reading about nothing is Jim Holt’s “Nothing Ventured,” from the November 1994 issue of Harper’s. Holt’s book on the subject, Why Does the World Exist?, is due to appear (not out of nothing, presumably) next year. I’ll no doubt have something to say about it when it does. (Holt’s little book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, about which I’ve long been meaning to write up a blog post, is terrific.)

No need to thank me. It was nothing.

The phenomenology of spirits

2011-12-19T16:23:00.000-08:00

Human life is tragic. And while there are, without question, a great many evils we would all wish away in a heartbeat if only we could, to wish away all of them would be to wish away much of what gives our existence depth and meaning. Every grownup knows that life would lose its savor if it entirely lost its bite. (Of course, a certain kind of atheist thinks that a really loving God would have made the world a 24/7 Disneyland. But I was talking about grownups.)

Nor are the pains always extrinsic to the pleasures. Some of them are built in; indeed, the greatest earthly delights are never without a sharp sting. Examples are all around us: Tobacco. Women. And whiskey.

Spirits are an adult pleasure. They grow on you with experience -- experience with the drink itself (no one ever likes his first sip), but, more than that, experience in living. High school and college kids like their keggers. The school of hard knocks breeds a preference for something more refined and bittersweet, or indeed just bitter. Show me a guy who doesn’t like whiskey or gin and I’ll show you a guy who’s never lost his job, or had his heart broken or his ass kicked. Beer is for party people dancing to “Love Shack.” The Scotch drinker’s favorite song, as everyone knows, is “Deacon Blues.”

Hilaire Belloc, it seems, recommended confining one’s drinking to beer and wine, or in any event to alcoholic beverages developed before the Reformation. One can easily see Chesterton heartily agreeing. What this shows is that for all their insights, the Chesterbelloc were capable of saying eye-rollingly stupid things -- something you already know if you’re familiar with Belloc’s views on the French Revolution (now there’s modernism for you) or Chesterton’s on jazz (now there’s Puritanism for you). Where culture is concerned, the “more Catholic than thou” card ought seldom if ever to be played -- Catholicism is universal and embraces what is of value in all cultures, not just the medieval.

But if we are going to play that silly game, the friend of spirits has the better of the argument. The Incarnation, after all, is not a story of beery pub songs and forced bonhomie, after the fashion of the local Chesterbelloc Men’s Supper Club:

Come on now, fellows, let’s show the world we Catholics aren’t Jansenists! Um, but do stick to the script. Please put down the Martini and cigarettes! Pick up the burgundy. Light that pipe. Adjust that monocle. Now sing along, everyone: “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine etc.”

No, the Incarnation is the story of God Himself taking on the pain of being a human being, to the point of public humiliation and gruesome death. It’s a swig of frozen gin, or a bracing shot of peaty Laphroaig.

And the peatier the better, I say. Youth prepares you for adulthood, with its greater joys and deeper sorrows. And beer and wine exist in order to prepare you for the Speysides, which in turn exist in order to prepare you for the Islays.

Now listen to the gorgeous Carolyn Leonhart singing gorgeously on the theme. (She looks like my wife, by the way. Just sayin’.) More reflections on our subject here and here.

Greene on Nozick on nothing

2011-12-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality surveys the various speculations about parallel universes on offer in contemporary physics. Toward the end of the book, Greene discusses a proposal put forward by Robert Nozick in chapter 2 of his book Philosophical Explanations. (Turns out that Greene took a course with Nozick at the time Nozick was writing the book.) Greene notes that even if any of the multiverse theories currently discussed by physicists -- those inspired by quantum mechanics, string theory, inflationary cosmology, or what have you -- turned out to be correct, one could always ask why the world is as the theory describes it, rather than some other way. (This is one reason why it is no good to appeal to such theories as a way of blocking arguments for God as an Uncaused Cause of the world. We had occasion recently to note some other problems with this atheist strategy.) But Nozick put forward a version that Greene regards as not subject to this question -- what Greene calls the Ultimate Multiverse theory.

On the Ultimate Multiverse theory, all possible universes exist, including a universe consisting of nothing. To the questions “Why does this universe exist rather than some other?” and “Why does any universe at all exist rather than nothing?”, the Ultimate Multiverse theory responds: “There is no ‘rather than’ about it. This universe and every other possible universe all exist; indeed, this universe and a universe consisting of nothing both exist. So there is no special explanation of our universe required, because it isn’t in the first place only one of many possibilities to have been actualized.” (It should be added that neither Nozick nor Greene actually endorses this theory; they merely float it as a possibility. David Lewis famously did defend a similar view, though.)

Now, the proposal that every possible universe exists does not, by itself, actually explain anything. In fact -- again, at least by itself -- it makes things more mysterious rather than less. Suppose I ask “Why is there a cup on the table?” It is no good to answer “Actually, there are in fact two cups on the table; hence there is no special reason to ask where the one cup came from!” This hardly defuses the original question; indeed, there is now more to explain than there was originally. And the problem would rather obviously only be made worse if it turned out that ten or twenty cups were on the table, and certainly if every possible cup were on the table. Similarly, that every possible universe exists hardly explains why anything exists at all; it just adds to the explanandum rather than providing an explanans.

But Nozick’s Ultimate Multiverse theory involves more than merely the suggestion that every possible world exists. Nozick tells us that this “fecundity assumption,” as he calls it (and which he compares to the traditional “principle of plenitude,” which I had reason to discuss in an aesthetic context), follows from a metaphysical “egalitarianism.” But what does he mean by “egalitarianism,” and why does he think it defensible? The answers to these questions constitute the heart of Nozicks’ treatment of the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And they reveal, I think, that Nozick misses the point both of the question and of the traditional theistic answer to the question, at least as these are understood within classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic) philosophy.

Recall that in the Platonic/Neo-Platonic tradition, whatever is in any way composite must be explained by reference to what is absolutely simple or non-composite; that in the Thomistic tradition, whatever has an essence distinct from its act of existence must be explained by reference to something whose essence just is subsistent existence; and that these points ultimately reflect the Aristotelian principle that whatever contains potentiality of any sort must ultimately be explained by reference to that which is pure actuality, devoid of potentiality (since that which is a composite of an essence and an act of existence, or indeed composite in any way, is merely potential until the composition of its parts into a whole is actualized by something else). These points are, of course, very abstract, and as always I presuppose that the reader has some familiarity with the basic concepts given that I’ve spelled them out in detail elsewhere. (The Aristotelian and Thomistic ideas in question are developed at length in The Last Superstition, Aquinas, and my article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways” and, more briefly, here and there in various blog posts such as this one or this one; and I had reason to discuss the Neo-Platonic conception of divine simplicity in another earlier post.) The point for now is to emphasize that it is because the things in the world of our experience are composite, because there is in them a distinction between essence and existence, and because they are mixtures of actuality and potentiality, that they necessarily require a cause. And it is because God is none of these things -- where what we mean by “God” is that which is none of these things -- that He does not and cannot in principle require a cause. Precisely because he can actualize without having to be actualized, precisely because He is being or existence itself rather than something which merely participates in existence, and precisely because He is absolutely simple and not in need of composition of any sort, He and He alone can serve as the ultimate terminus of explanation.

Now at the beginning of his discussion, Nozick tells us, plausibly enough, that the alternative to an infinite regress of explanations is that there is some truth to which no further truth stands as an explanation. But he regards the latter possibility as entailing that there is some truth or truths “without any explanation.” And this claim, in turn, is one he says can be interpreted in either of two ways:

About such truths p lacking further explanation, there also appear to be two possibilities. First, that such truths are necessarily true, and could not have been otherwise. (Aristotle, as standardly interpreted, maintained this.) But it is difficult to see how this would be true. It is not enough merely for it to be of the essence of the things which exist (and so necessarily true of them) that p. There would remain the question of why those and only those sorts of things (subject to p) exist; only if p must be true of everything possible would this question be avoided.

The second possibility is that p is a brute fact. It just happens that things are that way. There is no explanation (or reason) why they are that way rather than another way, no (hint of) necessity to remove the arbitrariness. (p. 117)

Here, it seems to me, Nozick’s account already goes awry in several respects. For one thing, the notion of what is “necessary” needs to be more carefully unpacked than he (and many other contemporary philosophers) unpack it. For instance, there is in Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics a sense in which a necessary being might derive its necessity from some other necessary being. That a derivatively necessary being exists (if it does exist) is thus a truth which will have a “further explanation,” in terms of a further necessary being from which the one in question derives its own necessity. (See my discussion of the Third Way in Aquinas for more details.) Moreover, even with respect to an absolutely necessary being -- one which does not in any way derive its necessity from another, but has it in itself -- it will not be correct to say that its existence is “without any explanation.” Rather, its existence is self-explanatory. For that which is absolutely necessary is (for A-T) absolutely necessary precisely because it is pure actuality or subsistent being itself. Hence it doesn’t “have” or merely “participate in” being or existence in the way contingent and derivatively necessary things do, and it doesn’t have a potential for contingent or derivatively necessary existence which needs in some way to be made actual. Again, it “already” is being or existence itself; it “already” is pure actuality. That does not make its existence less intelligible than that of other things, but more intelligible. Contingent and derivatively necessary things are contingent or derivatively necessary precisely because their existence is merely participated existence, and is in one way or another merely potential until actualized. Their explanation must accordingly lie in something outside them. The being or actuality of an absolutely necessary being, by contrast, is like the goodness of Plato’s Form of the Good -- it is intrinsic, intelligible in itself and the source and standard of the intelligibility of all other things.

(Note that the notion of being self-explanatory is not to be confused with the notion of being self-caused, which is incoherent. Causation is a metaphysical notion, having to do with the source from which a thing derives some aspect of its being. But explanation is a logical notion, having to do with the way in which we understand or make sense of some aspect of a thing’s being. We cannot coherently say that a thing derives its existence from itself or its nature, for that would entail, absurdly, that the thing or its nature exists prior to itself, in an ontological sense even if not a temporal sense. But we can coherently say that a thing’s existence can be made sense of in terms of its nature, for that has to do, not with where a thing “gets” its existence from -- an absolutely necessary being doesn’t get it from anywhere -- but rather with how we can make intelligible or understand its existence.)

This brings us to the second part of the passage from Nozick just quoted, wherein (to repeat) he says:

It is not enough merely for it to be of the essence of the things [lacking further explanation] which exist (and so necessarily true of them) that p. There would remain the question of why those and only those sorts of things (subject to p) exist…

Nozick seems to mean by this that we would have to ask, with respect to any purportedly necessary terminus of explanation, whence it derived its necessity and why only the thing or things that constitute the terminus have derived it, and that we would have to ask this even if this necessity were “of the essence” of these things -- as if the necessity of the terminus of all explanation were merely a “participated” or “instantiated” necessity, in the way that the four-leggedness of a dog, though “of the essence” of being a dog, is still a “participated” or “instantiated” four-leggedness. But this misses the whole point of the idea of God as an absolutely necessary being, at least as that is understood in classical metaphysics (i.e. in terms of pure actuality, subsistent being itself, and so forth).

Nozick may have been misled here by the way modern philosophers of religion often speak of God, under the influence of what Brian Davies has called a “theistic personalist” conception of God that is very different from the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other ancient and medieval thinkers. (I have addressed the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism in a number of posts, such as this one, this one, and this one.) Proponents of Leibnizian cosmological arguments and Cartesian ontological arguments often say that God’s essence “includes” existence -- as if existence (or perhaps “necessary existence”) was merely one among a number of “great-making properties” that God “instantiates.” But that is not at all what Aquinas (and, I would say, Anselm) are saying. God doesn’t “instantiate” properties. That would make of God merely “a being” among other beings, and the God of classical theism is not that. Aquinas, Anselm, and other classical theists are saying something far more radical. For them (and to repeat) God does not “have” existence but is existence itself; and He doesn’t “instantiate” or “participate in” anything, but is rather that in which everything else participates.

Of course, one might object on various grounds to classical theism and its classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic) metaphysical underpinnings. The point is just that Nozick’s discussion of the question of why there is something rather than nothing simply fails even to take account of this entire classical tradition -- no small lacuna given that it is, historically, the mainstream approach to the question. And it is his failure to take account of it that leads him quickly to jump to the conclusion that any answer to the question is to some extent going to have to appeal to an inexplicable “brute fact” -- a position the classical tradition vehemently rejects. One can intelligibly deny that the God of classical theism exists. But one cannot intelligibly say that even if He did exist, His existence would be a “brute fact,” or that “there would remain the question of why that and only that sort of thing” does not require further explanation. As I have noted before, suggestions of this kind completely miss the point of classical theism.

This brings us to Nozick’s metaphysical “egalitarianism,” which undergirds his Ultimate Multiverse scenario and which is best understood in contrast with what he calls “inegalitarian” views:

An inegalitarian theory partitions states into two classes: those requiring explanation, and those neither needing nor admitting of explanation. Inegalitarian theories are especially well geared to answer questions of the form “why is there X rather than Y?” There is a non-N state rather than an N state because of the forces F that acted to bring the system away from N. When there is an N state, this is because there were no unbalanced forces acting to bring the system away from N.

Inegalitarian theories unavoidably leave two questions unanswered. First, why is it N that is the natural state which occurs in the absence of unbalanced external forces, rather than some other (type of) state N’? Second, given that N is a natural or privileged state, why is it forces of type F, not of some other type F’, that produce deviations from N? If our fundamental theory has an inegalitarian structure, it will leave as brute and unexplained the fact that N rather than something else is a natural state, and that F rather than something else is the deviation force. (p. 121)

Perhaps it is obvious from the foregoing what is wrong with all this, at least if intended as an analysis of classical metaphysical approaches to the question of why anything exists rather than nothing. As the classical tradition understands it, the N from which there are “deviations” would be (say) a potency or potential, such as the potential redness of skin (before it has become sunburned), the potential squishiness of an ice cream cone (before it has been left out to melt), or indeed the potential existence of a universe. And there is nothing “brute,” “unexplained,” or “unanswered” about why these or any other potentials need some “external factor” or “force” to bring about a “deviation from N” -- being merely potential rather than actual, the Ns in question quite obviously cannot do anything at all. In particular, potential redness, potential squishiness, potential universes, etc. cannot actualize themselves. The relevant F which does actualize them is something which is itself already actual (such as the sun in the case of the sunburn and the melted ice cream cone), and there is nothing remotely “brute” or “unexplained” about why F has to be something already actual -- nothing non-actual could be F, because being non-actual, it (obviously) couldn’t do anything at all.

Nozick makes the whole issue sound more mysterious than it really is precisely because of his use of formalisms of the sort fetishized by analytic philosophers, and he thereby provides a good illustration of how this method can generate obfuscation rather than rigor. For the formalisms simply ignore the actual content of the principles classical writers appeal to when addressing questions of ultimate explanation, and thereby miss the entire point. When, for example, a Scholastic writer says that no potential can actualize itself, but has to be actualized by something already actual, he is not postulating some mysterious “force of type F” whose power to “produce deviations from N” is left “brute” and “unexplained.” For he is not talking about “a” force among other forces in the first place, not even a special kind of force; he is rather making the extremely obvious point -- indeed, one almost wants to say the trivial point, except that some decidedly non-trivial consequences follow from it -- that only what is actual can serve as any kind of force at all. And neither is the Scholastic postulating some mysterious “natural state N which occurs in the absence of unbalanced external forces.” He is rather making another obvious point, viz. that what is merely potential -- whether it is “natural” or not is not relevant -- cannot do anything, precisely because it is merely potential and not actual.

Thus, when Nozick asks “Why is it forces of type F, not of some other type F’, that produce deviations from N?” he is not asking a profound question, but a very silly question, at least if he intends to raise problems for an account like that of Aquinas or some other Scholastic. You might as well ask: “Why is it only actual forces that act as forces?” To ask the question is to answer it. Nor is it profound to ask “Why is it N that is the natural state which occurs in the absence of unbalanced external forces?”, again, at least not if this is intended to raise problems for views of the sort defended by ancient and medieval philosophers. You might as well ask: “Why do potentials remain potential until actualized?” When we put things the way traditional writers actually put them, instead of in terms of Nozick’s pseudo-rigorous formalisms, the answers are obvious, and obviously hard to deny.

It is also obvious why there is nothing the least bit “brute” or “unexplained” about the classical metaphysician’s “inegalitarian” “privileging” of actuality over non-actuality. Nozick’s own discussion presupposes that actuality is “privileged” in this way, insofar as he is keen to explore various possible answers to the question of what “states” and “forces” might account for this or that aspect of reality. For to raise the question of whether this or that “state” or “force” is the correct explanation of anything is precisely to ask whether this or that “state” or “force” actually obtains or is operative, and is thus available to serve as an explanans. (This is true even of Nozick’s rather farcical discussion of the idea of a “nothingness force” which “nothings” other things, and even “nothings itself” -- see pp. 122-24, complete with the obligatory variables, and even a graph for extra “rigor.” To ask whether there is such a force is precisely to ask whether it is actual and thus an available explanans. It is, by the way, standard Nozick shtick to devote many pages to exploring ideas that are obviously non-starters and which he does not even believe himself. Some of Nozick’s fans seem to find this kind of mental onanism entertaining. I find that it gets tiresome pretty fast, especially in a book of over 700 pages.)

Now, Nozick’s Ultimate Multiverse proposal crucially depends on the suggestion that there is something fishy about “inegalitarian” theories. The idea is that if no state of affairs is special or “privileged” in the way “inegalitarian” theories suppose, then there is no reason not to regard all possible worlds as equally actual. In this way, Nozick’s “egalitarianism” -- which is just a rejection of “inegalitarian” theories -- underwrites the “fecundity assumption.” But what Nozick does not realize is that what the classical, “inegalitarian” metaphysician regards as “privileged” is not this or that state of affairs or possible world, and not even the actual world per se, but rather actuality itself -- something that, as I have said, Nozick too implicitly “privileges” no less than the classical metaphysician does. The classical metaphysician simply pushes this “privileging” out to its logical conclusion: Since actuality is more fundamental than potentiality, the ultimate explanation of things must be purely actual, without potentiality; for anything less than that would itself require actualization in some respect, and thus not be the ultimate explanation.

To be sure, Nozick suggests that his “principle of fecundity… den[ies] special status to actuality” insofar as it makes every possible world as real as the actual world (p. 131). But what it really denies special status to is the actual world, not actuality itself. That is to say, it denies that there is anything special about a universe which (say) includes human beings, began with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity, and so forth. It does not deny that being actual is privileged over being non-actual; on the contrary, rather than denying this privilege to any possible universe, it extends it to all of them. Indeed, its attribution of actuality to all of them is precisely what is supposed to be doing the theory’s explanatory work vis-à-vis answering the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

That Nozick does not understand the way ancient and medieval philosophers would approach that question is especially evident from the following passage:

To ask ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ assumes that nothing(ness) is the natural state that does not need to be explained, while deviations or divergences from nothingness have to be explained by the introduction of special causal factors. There is, so to speak, a presumption in favor of nothingness. The problem is so intractable because any special causal factor that could explain a deviation from nothingness is itself a divergence from nothingness, and so the question seeks its explanation also. (p. 122)

This is, in fact, the reverse of what the classical metaphysician thinks. For the classical metaphysician, God -- understood as pure actuality, subsistent being itself, and absolute simplicity -- could not have failed to exist, precisely because He is pure actuality, etc. Hence His existence -- the existence of that which is the opposite of “nothingness” -- is the “natural state” of things, in the relevant sense. When the classical metaphysician claims to explain why there is something rather than nothing, then, he doesn’t mean that sheer nothingness is the natural state of things and that we need to find out why it doesn’t obtain. He means that the world of our experience, since it is a mixture of actuality and potentiality, composite rather than simple, etc., could have failed to exist, so that its explanation must lie in something distinct from it, something which actualizes its potentials, which composes its parts, and so forth. And when we arrive at that explanation, we find that it lay in something whose existence is self-explanatory, precisely because it is pure actuality without any admixture of potentiality, absolutely simple, and subsistent being itself. Rightly understood, then, the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” leads us to conclude that nothingness is not the natural state of things and that there is nothing without an explanation -- precisely the opposite of where Nozick seems to think the question leads. And we are led to these conclusions however many possible universes -- one, two, or all of them -- exist. For that they could have failed to exist -- that they are mixtures of actuality and potentiality -- is what leads to those conclusions.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-15T23:37:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens, who had been suffering from esophageal cancer for over a year, has died. I think I first came across his work around 1990, at the time his book Blood, Class, and Nostalgia appeared. (My copy is still around here somewhere.) I recall seeing him on television -- grilling some George H. W. Bush administration official, perhaps -- and being very impressed by his forceful and formidable intelligence. I have always been conservative and have usually disagreed with him, but I followed his work with interest from that point on, long before he started to please right-wingers with his well-argued criticisms of the Clintons and support for the Iraq war. He was almost always smart, funny, and interesting even when he was wrong.

Except on religion, where he was a complete bore and an insufferable hack. There is no use sugar-coating that fact now that he is gone, and Hitchens was not in any event a fan of the polite obituary. Religion is the last subject about which to have a tin ear or a closed mind, and Hitchens had both. Some Catholics seem to have gotten it into their heads over the last year that he might convert -- as if someone who is overtly so very hostile to Catholicism simply must be compensating for a secret longing for it, and is sure to be moved by the prospect of imminent death to let his inhibitions fall away. This struck me as romantic fantasy, born of too steady a diet of happy “crossing the Tiber” stories. Sometimes a man has mixed feelings about you, but will accentuate the negative, loath as he is to acknowledge the merits of an adversary. And sometimes he just hates your guts, and that’s that. As far as I know, Hitchens was no closer on his deathbed to becoming the next Malcolm Muggeridge than he had been when penning his decidedly un-Muggeridgean book about Mother Teresa. I very much hope I am wrong.

The Hitchens jokes in The Last Superstition are the only ones with any affection behind them -- well, some of them have it, anyway. (No one who knows me or my work could think I regard a crack about one’s affection for the sauce as a serious insult. Which makes it ironic that the one joke my publisher demanded I remove was a certain jibe about Hitchens’ boozing.) Of the four horsemen of the New Atheism, Hitchens was the only one I found likable, and the only one possessed of a modicum of wisdom about the human condition, or at least as much wisdom about the human condition as one can have while remaining essentially a man of the Left. While there was rather too obviously something of the champagne socialist about him, I do not doubt that he had real concern for real human beings -- rather than merely for grotesque abstractions like “the working class” or “humanity” -- and that he showed real moral and even physical courage in defense of what he sincerely took to be the best interests of real human beings. But love for one’s fellow man, however genuine, is only the second greatest commandment.

May God comfort his family, and may God have mercy on his soul.

Reading Rosenberg, Part IV

2011-12-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

Alex Rosenberg’s dubious use of physics was the focus of the previous installment of our look at his new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. In this post we’ll look at his dubious biological claims. “When physics disposed of purposes,” Rosenberg tells us, “it did so for biology as well.” Now as I’ve noted before, in fact modern physics has not “disposed” of purposes at all, if what Rosenberg means by this is that physics has somehow established the metaphysical claim that the material world is devoid of objective teleological features. All it has done is to make the purely methodological move of confining itself to non-teleological descriptions of the phenomena it studies. This no more shows that teleology doesn’t exist than the fact that I am confining my comments in this post to Rosenberg’s work shows that no other philosophers exist. Moreover, the non-teleological methodology of modern physics rules out irreducibly teleological explanations in biology only if you buy into Rosenberg’s “physics or bust” brand of scientism, which he has given us no good reason to do.

But Rosenberg does at least understand the implications of his position for the question of biological adaptation:

Scientism needs more than an explanation of this or that particular adaptation -- white fur in polar bears or the fact that bottom-dwelling fish have both eyes on the side of their bodies facing away from the bottom. We need an explanation of how, starting from zero adaptations, any adaptation at all ever comes about. The explanation we need can’t start with even a tiny amount of adaptation already present. Furthermore, the explanation can’t help itself to anything but physics. We can’t even leave room for “stupid design,” let alone “intelligent design,” to creep in. If scientism needs a first slight adaptation, it surrenders to design. It gives up the claim that the physical facts (none of which is an adaptation) fix all the other facts. (p. 50)

We might compare the alternative Rosenberg wisely rules out -- that the naturalist might allow in a tiny bit of adaptation at the start and build up more complex adaptations on that basis -- to the strategy of “homuncular decomposition” in the philosophy of mind. This is the idea that we can explain human thought in terms of sub-personal homunculus-like processes which exhibit a lower degree of intelligence than the thought processes we are trying to explain; that these sub-personal processes can, in turn, be explained in terms of even “stupider” homunculi; those in terms of yet stupider homunculi still; and so on until we reach a lowest level of homunculi which are so stupid that their operations can be carried out by processes that are clearly purely material and non-intentional. As critics like John Searle and John Haldane have pointed out, this whole procedure is fallacious. The lowest-level homunculi will be carrying out operations that can intelligibly be said to “add up” to the higher-level mental ones only if they possess some minimum degree of intentionality, in which case the naturalist’s problem of explaining intentionality in non-intentional terms will merely be relocated rather than solved. Proponents of the strategy fail to see this because, as Haldane notes, they confuse the intentional/non-intentional distinction with the more intentional content/less intentional content distinction. And, I would add, if they were to bite the bullet and accept that there is genuine intentional content at least at some very low level of physical reality, they will have implicitly given up a physicalist conception of matter and revived an Aristotelian commitment to finality or “directedness” as a fundamental aspect of the natural order.

Rosenberg -- who correctly sees that to be a consistent naturalist in the philosophy of mind requires being an eliminative rather than reductive materialist vis-à-vis intentionality -- also realizes that to pursue a similarly reductive strategy in biology vis-à-vis teleology would be equally fallacious, and equally fatal to naturalism. He sees that teleology and allied notions must be completely avoided, that smuggling in even a “slight” or “tiny” amount of adaptation would give the game away. (As I discuss in The Last Superstition, Daniel Dennett is one naturalist who does not see this, or at least who constantly helps himself to teleological concepts which he cannot successfully “cash out” in naturalistic or non-teleological terms. Dennett is also, as it happens, a well-known proponent of the homuncular decomposition strategy in the philosophy of mind -- in for a penny, in for a pound, and all that.)

Now, I would say that in fact you aren’t going to get any biological adaptation at all from a starting point utterly devoid of adaptation, any more than you are going to get the intentional from the non-intentional. Biological adaptation is an inherently teleological concept, and the processes from which Rosenberg would derive it are (as he conceives of them, anyway) inherently non-teleological. Reductive versions of materialism in the philosophy of mind are always disguised forms of eliminative materialism; they make use of mentalistic vocabulary while subtly but completely evacuating it of its ordinary mentalistic content. And Rosenberg’s reduction of the adaptive to the non-adaptive does something similar. But while Rosenberg’s eliminativism in the philosophy of mind is explicit, he does not make it clear that he is committed to an eliminativist position with respect to biological adaptation. (Indeed, in his -- very interesting -- book Darwinian Reductionism, Rosenberg presents his position in philosophy of biology as reductionist rather than eliminativist. I’ll have something to say about that book in a follow-up post.)

Here’s how the “reduction” goes in Atheist’s Guide. Rosenberg sets the stage as follows:

Natural selection requires three processes: reproduction, variation, and inheritance. It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations. Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or even asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction. Any kind of replication is enough. (p. 59)

He later puts things instead by saying that in addition to “replication and variation… fitness differences [are] the last of the three requirements for evolution by natural selection.” (pp. 64-65).

With these criteria in hand, Rosenberg devotes several pages to sketching out scenarios in which inorganic molecules can be said to replicate, vary, differ in their fitness, and thereby give rise to “adaptation.” And he has no trouble doing so given how broadly he construes the key concepts: The formation of crystals counts as an example of “replication”; the chemical difference between sugar and Splenda counts as an example of “variation”; an inorganic molecule’s being able to “persist or replicate or both” counts as “adaptation”; and so forth.

Thus does Rosenberg “show” how “adaptation” can arise from non-adaptation in a way that doesn’t “cheat” by smuggling in adaptation in at the beginning. But this is a little like proudly proclaiming that you didn’t cheat on your exam, because the professor handed out the answers in advance. It’s true, but only in a completely trivial and uninteresting sense. For given how broadly Rosenberg is willing to allow us to construe the key notions, you might as well say that pebbles are “well-adapted” to their environment. After all, they “replicate” (when one pebble is broken into two); they “vary” (the new pebbles are smaller than the original, and differ from it and from each other in shape); they “inherit” features from their parents (the new pebble is solid and rough, just like Dad -- a chip off the old block!); and they differ in their “fitness” (the new pebbles are smaller and thus less easily broken than their ancestors). Descent with modification, in rock gardens no less than in botanical gardens!

But what does any of this have to do with organic phenomena, with biological adaptation? Nothing at all; certainly Rosenberg does nothing to justify the claim that it does, other than to make the obligatory hand-waving reference to the Miller-Urey experiments and hydrothermal vents, and a passing concession to the effect that “molecular biologists don’t yet know all the details, or even many of them” about how organic processes might arise from inorganic ones. Ah yes, all we’re missing is a few details. Except that since the question at issue is whether biological adaptation can be explained in terms of the stuff about crystals, Splenda, etc., to leave out these “details” is just to fail to answer the question at all. Rosenberg is like the guy who contracts to build you a house, clears the ground a little, and then takes off without doing anything else -- dismissing your concerns about the absence of a foundation, framework, walls, electrical, plumbing, etc. as mere quibbling over “details.” Well, no, they’re not mere details. They’re the house.

What Rosenberg owes us is an account of how biological adaptation, specifically -- and not just the kind of “adaptation” a resilient inorganic molecule or a pebble exhibits -- can arise from physical processes that initially involve no biological adaptation at all. And that means he owes us an account of what life is -- an account that makes it evident exactly how the sort of “adaptations” he describes add up to the kind a living thing exhibits. But “What is life?” is a question which (oddly for a professional philosopher of biology) Rosenberg does not directly address. He just speaks of “adaptation” sans phrase, and insinuates, without argument, that having given an account of processes that might in some extended sense of the word be called “adaptation,” he has thereby given an account of life.

Now the Aristotelian tradition has, of course, an account of what life is. Living things, it says, are those which exhibit immanent causation as well as transeunt (or “transient”) causation; non-living things exhibit transeunt causation alone. Transeunt causal processes are those that terminate in something outside the cause. Immanent causal processes are those which terminate within the cause and tend to its good or flourishing (even if they also have effects external to the cause). For example, an animal’s digesting of a meal is a causal process that tends to the good or flourishing of the animal itself (though it also has byproducts external to the animal, such as the waste products it excretes). By contrast, one rock’s knocking into another is a transeunt causal process, in that it does not in any sense tend to the good or flourishing of the rock itself. (I had reason to address these matters in an earlier post. I also address them in chapter 4 of Aquinas. The best recent treatment of issues in the philosophy of biology from an Aristotelian point of view is in chapters 8 and 9 of David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism. If you’re up for tracking down older Scholastic works on the subject, you might look for Henry Koren’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animate Nature or George Klubertanz’s Philosophy of Human Nature.)

Whatever the details, the Aristotelian conception of life is irreducibly teleological, for the notion of causal processes that tend toward the good or flourishing of the cause is itself inherently teleological. (Though it is important to stress that the kind of teleology characteristic of living things is only one, relatively rare sort of teleology; and also that -- contrary to what Darwinian naturalists and “Intelligent Design” theorists alike suppose -- whether there is teleology in nature and whether there is a “designer” are separate questions. On these issues, see my article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” and my various posts criticizing ID theory from an Aristotelian point of view. I should also note here that the “immanent causes vs. transeunt causes” distinction in Aristotelian philosophy of biology is different from the “immanent finality vs. extrinsic finality” distinction that arises in discussions of the question of whether final causality is immanent to the natural order -- as Aristotelians claim -- or whether it is entirely extrinsic or imposed from outside -- as moderns like Newton and Paley claim.)

Rosenberg, who claims that teleology of any sort has been banished by physics and that “the physical facts fix all the facts,” will naturally have no truck with this conception of life. But if the Aristotelian is correct to hold that life is an inherently teleological notion, then Rosenberg’s position vis-à-vis life is implicitly eliminativist: If life is inherently teleological but there is no teleology, then there are no living things either; there only seem to be. That doesn’t mean, of course, that Rosenberg is committed to denying that there is a real difference between you and your corpse. But it would mean that whatever important differences there are between you and a corpse, or you and the “adaptive” inorganic molecules Rosenberg describes, the difference does not involve your having some teleological or irreducibly “life-like” features that they lack.

But you needn’t be an Aristotelian to regard Rosenberg’s position on life as implicitly eliminativist. Rosenberg implies that his account of adaptation is not merely an account of life that is consistent with scientism; he evidently regards it as the only account that is consistent with it. Though he finesses the details, he is committed to the proposition that there cannot be any “adaptation” in the world that doesn’t boil down to the sort of thing he describes when he tells us his story about how Splenda is an example of “variation,” resilient inorganic molecules are instances of “fitness,” and so on. Rosenberg’s Infallible Dogma -- “The physical facts fix all the facts!” -- cannot allow anything more than this; certainly it is hard to see how we could add any more to it without bringing in something like the Aristotelian notion of immanent causation and its attendant teleology.

Now, that means that biological adaptations must in Rosenberg’s view be entirely continuous with inorganic “adaptations” of the sort he describes. And that means in turn that we are faced with a choice if we buy into Rosenberg’s premises. We could say, on the one hand, that Rosenberg’s resilient inorganic molecules -- and, for all I know, pebbles too -- are “really” “living” things after all, even if very simple kinds of life. (On this interpretation, when contemplating a crystal or a pebble, Rosenberg might soon find himself channeling Colin Clive, or maybe Gene Wilder.) Alternatively, we could say that since inorganic molecules really are inorganic and so-called “living” things are not essentially different from them, it follows that so-called “living” things are “really” no more alive than inorganic molecules, pebbles, and the like are. Again, this doesn’t mean that Rosenberg would have to deny that you differ significantly from a corpse or an inorganic molecule -- any more than, as an eliminativist about intentionality, he would deny that there is a significant difference between the words you utter and random noises. But just as he would deny that the words you utter really have any meaning or semantic content that random noises lack, so too (on this latter interpretation) would he deny that there is any such thing as “life” which you have and the corpse or inorganic molecule lacks.

Given that Rosenberg clearly holds that the bottom-level physical facts determine what we should say about higher levels rather than the other way around, and given that he is already more than happy to eliminate other higher-level phenomena from our picture of the world, it is pretty clear that this latter, eliminativist view of life is the one Rosenberg is implicitly committed to. And I don’t see why he couldn’t shrug his shoulders in agreement, given the other things he’s willing to say. (Again, Rosenberg does in his book Darwinian Reductionism claim to be a reductionist rather than eliminativist vis-à-vis biology, but what he is directly addressing in that context is the question of whether functional descriptions pick out real features of the biological realm, rather than the question of whether there is a real distinction between living and non-living things. Anyway, as I have said, I’ll discuss that book in a follow-up post.)

The problem with all of this isn’t that it’s absolutely bizarre, though of course it is. The problem is that there is simply no reason whatsoever to take it seriously. In particular, there is no reason at all to think that whatever is true of bacteria and bees, trees and toads, pigs and people is entirely exhausted by what physics tells us about these things, as Rosenberg understands “physics.” It isn’t biological science, but ideological scientism that leads him to suppose otherwise. And as we have seen, his sole argument for scientism is entirely devoid of merit. Biological phenomena, as Rosenberg represents them, are like something you’d find in a taxidermist’s shop -- bits of dead matter stripped from a corpse and sewn onto a framework of cold wiring and stuffing, so as vaguely to look like something living. Here as elsewhere, Rosenberg guides us, not to reality, but to a Frankenstein’s-monster-like simulacrum of reality.

Radio Free Aquinas

2011-12-07T16:20:00.000-08:00

I’ll be on The Frank Pastore Show on KKLA Radio on Thursday, December 8 (tomorrow) from 5 - 6 pm PST to discuss The Last Superstition and Aquinas.

UPDATE: It was a great show. The podcast is now available on Frank's site.

Dawkins vs. Dawkins (Updated)

2011-12-05T16:09:00.000-08:00

During my Catholic Answers Live interview last Monday, I noted that Richard Dawkins refuses to debate philosopher William Lane Craig. Dawkins’ representative Sean Faircloth, who was also on the show, did not contradict this. On the contrary, Faircloth defended Dawkins’ refusal to debate Craig. Still, after the interview, Patrick Coffin, the host of the show, received the following email from Dawkins:

Dear Mr Coffin

Contrary to what was repeatedly said on your show, I HAVE debated William Lane Craig, in a nationally televised debate in Mexico in 2010, and he was DEEPLY unimpressive. I hope you will correct the record in your next show.

Richard Dawkins

Now, I certainly want the record to be correct. But if it isn’t true that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, where could anyone have gotten the idea that he does refuse? Well, for starters, from the fact that Dawkins published an article in the Guardian just this past October with the title “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig” -- an article reprinted on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and widely discussed online. That does rather give the impression that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, no? So, perhaps Dawkins should send himself an email demanding a correction. And if, in future, he doesn’t want people to get the idea that he refuses to debate with William Lane Craig, he might consider not saying -- loudly, publicly, online and in print -- things like “I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.”

The reader of Dawkins’ weeks-old Guardian article will also notice that after recounting Craig’s repeated challenges to debate him, Dawkins does not say “I HAVE debated Craig, in Mexico in 2010, and found him DEEPLY unimpressive!” No, not a peep about that. Instead he explicitly affirms that “I would rather leave an empty chair than share a platform with him.” (This just repeats a policy he had earlier expressed in some now famous remarks you can view on YouTube.)

But then, what is all this “Mexico in 2010” stuff Dawkins made no reference to in his Guardian article but now cites in his email to Coffin as evidence that what I said in the interview needs “correction”? Dawkins is referring here, not to any one-on-one matchup between Craig and himself, but rather to a six-person panel exchange in which both he and Craig participated. And from Craig’s own account of the episode, it seems that the participants didn’t necessarily know, before the fact, who the other participants would be; certainly Craig himself says that he found out only after he arrived, and to his surprise, that Dawkins would be there -- which raises the question of whether Dawkins even knew in advance that Craig would be there. Moreover, Craig reports that when he conveyed to Dawkins that he was surprised by his participation, given Dawkins’ longstanding refusal to debate him, Dawkins replied: “I don’t consider this to be a debate with you. The Mexicans invited me to participate, and I accepted.”

So, two years ago Dawkins insisted that his encounter with Craig in Mexico was not a debate; and only weeks ago he loudly and publicly acknowledged that he refuses to debate Craig. Yet, in response to my statement on the air that he refuses to debate Craig, Dawkins now insists that this is “contrary” to the truth and needs to be “corrected,” citing the 2010 non-debate encounter as evidence. What is going on here?

What’s going on, I suspect, is a farcical attempt at damage control. Dawkins’ recent Guardian article received much criticism, some of it from people Dawkins cannot easily dismiss. In a response to Dawkins published in the Guardian, philosopher Daniel Came writes that though he “tend[s] to agree with Dawkins's conclusion regarding the falsehood of theism,” he also regards Dawkins’ refusal to debate Craig as “cynical and anti-intellectualist.” Oxford historian Tim Stanley judges Dawkins “either a fool or a coward.” Paul Vallely notes that Craig is widely acknowledged to be a formidable debater even by prominent New Atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and is also acknowledged even by atheists to have bested Hitchens in debate -- the implication being that Dawkins is afraid to debate Craig and is desperately seeking an excuse for not doing so. Perhaps the criticisms and accusations of cowardice have gotten to Dawkins. I conjecture that, finding that the “Craig defends genocide!” shtick isn’t working as an excuse for not debating him, Dawkins has now decided to shift gears and try a different excuse, viz. “Oh, it’s not that I refuse to debate Craig. It’s that I’ve already debated him and won, and there’s no need to do so again!” Unfortunately, he’s forgotten -- or at least hopes that others have forgotten -- what he said to Craig two years ago and what he said in the Guardian only weeks ago.

In short, whether or not Dawkins will ever debate Craig, he certainly now seems keen on debating himself. The Dawkins of 2010 and October 2011 versus the Dawkins of December 2011. “Never mind what I said before! We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia!” Come to think of it, it all sounds very familiar…

[Note: Patrick Coffin has replied to Dawkins with an invitation.]

UPDATE 12/6: Patrick Coffin discussed the Dawkins debacle (and his still-unanswered invitation to Dawkins) during the first few minutes of yesterday’s show. You can listen to the podcast here.

TLS in TMR

2011-11-30T15:21:00.000-08:00

The Montréal Review kindly runs a précis of The Last Superstition in their latest edition. While you’re over there, do browse through TMR’s website -- lots of interesting pieces on philosophy, religion, politics, history, science, literature, you name it.

TLS on radio

2011-11-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

I’ll be on the Catholic Answers Live radio show tomorrow at 7 pm ET to discuss The Last Superstition. (You might be able to find podcasts of earlier radio interviews by following the links you’ll find here, though I believe most of them are no longer available.)

UPDATE: The podcast is now available here.

Palmer on libertarianism

2011-11-26T10:43:00.000-08:00

My review of Tom G. Palmer’s recent book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice appears in the latest issue of Reason Papers, now edited by Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja. (For the full contents of the current issue and of archived issues, go here.)

TLS and formal causes

2011-11-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

The website Apologetics 315 kindly reviews my book The Last Superstition. I’ll let you check out the nice things said about the book for yourself and cut to the reviewer’s main criticism:

Feser convincingly shows throughout the book that Final Causation is inevitable. Even if someone might say they don't believe in it, no one can really escape it. But once the Final Cause is firmly established, Feser tries to sneak in the Formal Cause as well, by piggybacking on top of it. This seemed insufficient. Based on what Richard Dawkins in particular has written, evolution itself undermines the Formal Cause. He claimes [sic] that there is no static 'Form', because life is constantly and mindlessly changing. Although Feser tackled the Final Cause aspect of this line of thinking extremely well, this reviewer would have liked to hear more about why Dawkins and others are mistaken about Formal Causality specifically. Especially since so much rests on it.

A lot could be said about formal causes, and it’s true that I don’t say all of it in TLS. (Useful recent treatments of the subject include chapter 1 of Eleonore Stump’s Aquinas, David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism, and James Ross’s Thought and World.) But with all due respect to the reviewer, it is not correct to maintain that what I do say in the book amounts to “sneaking in” formal causes alongside final causes, as if the relationship between them were contingent. It is not contingent. For every irreducible level of immanent final causality in the natural order, there is necessarily a corresponding irreducible level of formal causality.

Recall first that for the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, the fundamental sort of final causality that exists in nature is the “directedness” of an efficient cause toward the generation of its typical effect or range of effects. It is similar to what contemporary writers on dispositions and causal powers like C. B. Martin, John Heil, Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, and George Molnar have in mind when they speak, for example, of the way dispositions are “directed toward” or “point to” their characteristic “manifestations,” or the way causal powers are “directed toward” their characteristic effects. Hence the directedness of brittle objects toward shattering, of soluble objects toward dissolving, of the phosphorus in a match head toward generating flame and heat, are instances of finality as that is understood in the A-T tradition. The A-T view is that unless we regard such “directedness” or “pointing” as immanent or inherent to the natural phenomena that exhibit such dispositions and causal powers, we have no way of making it intelligible why they have the manifestations and effects that they typically do. Causes and effects, dispositions and manifestations would become inherently “loose and separate,” so that any effect or none might follow upon any cause. Such Humean fantasies are for A-T an inevitable result of the abandonment of immanent final causes.

Now with that much the reviewer seems to agree; or at least, he allows that TLS makes a strong case for this position. But what he apparently does not see is that for a cause A to be inherently directed toward the generation of some effect B is just for A to have what the A-T tradition calls a substantial form -- the immanent principle by virtue of which a natural object carries out its characteristic operations. To deny that A has such a principle is implicitly to deny that A is inherently “directed” toward any particular operations at all, and thus implicitly to deny immanent final causes. But the notion of substantial form was the core of the Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine of formal causality. Hence final causality and formal causality, as those are understood in the A-T tradition, go hand in hand; to affirm the first is to affirm the second.

Another way to make the point is in terms of the distinction between act and potency (or actuality and potentiality). A potency or potentiality is always a potency for some actuality; to have a potency is to be directed toward or to point to some outcome. Hence the notion of potency goes hand in hand with that of final cause. Now as I note in TLS, a thing has the potencies it has only because of the ways in which it is actual; for instance, a rubber ball has the potential to be melted at such-and-such a temperature only because it is actually composed of rubber rather than granite or steel. And where the potencies a natural object has are concerned, it will have them by virtue of whatever makes it actually the kind of natural substance that it is. But that is just to say that it has them because of its substantial form; for the substantial form of a thing just is the inherent principle that makes it actually the kind of natural substance it is, with the operations typical of that kind of substance. To deny that a thing has such a form is to deny that its basic potencies (and thus its directedness toward what those potencies are potencies for) are inherent to it. Again, immanent finality -- inherently being “directed toward” or “pointing to” some end -- goes hand in hand with formal causality.

Indeed, act and potency, substantial form, final causality, causal powers, essentialism, and so on -- all of these notions form a tightly integrated network, and an understanding of the precise nature of their interrelationships was something Scholastic writers gradually and carefully refined over the course of centuries. It is no accident that the moderns more or less rejected this network of ideas as a whole when it rejected Scholasticism, and it is no accident that the revival of interest in dispositions, causal powers, and the like in the work of recent analytic philosophers like Martin, Heil, Ellis, Cartwright, and Molnar has gone hand in hand with a revival of essentialism and the appearance in contemporary metaphysics of something like the act/potency distinction (in the distinction between “categorical” and “dispositional” properties) and something like immanent final causality (in e.g. Molnar’s talk of “physical intentionality” and the common suggestion that powers and dispositions are “directed toward” their effects and manifestations). The language is often different and the details are not always worked out the way the A-T tradition would work them out, but this recent work nevertheless constitutes a partial revival of the Scholastic metaphysical apparatus. And that so much of the apparatus has been revived by writers with no Thomistic ax to grind is itself a further indication that bringing formal causality in together with final causes is not a matter of “sneaking” something in. The connection between the notions is, as I say, necessary, not contingent.

Now, that much shows at most only that if you allow immanent final causes at all, you are to that extent committed also to formal causes. But someone could admit this and still deny formal causes at the level of biology. He could say, for example, that there is immanent final causality at the level of fundamental physics -- that basic particles, say, have causal powers and dispositions by virtue of which they are “directed at” or “point to” certain effects and manifestations -- but that there is no such finality at any higher level of physical reality. And in that case, formal causes need be admitted only at the level of physics: Fermions and bosons, say, would have substantial forms, but trees, squirrels, and human beings would not.

But such a position would be plausible only if there were no causal powers at higher levels of physical reality that are irreducible to those described by physics. And that is simply not the case; at the very least, such reductionism is highly controversial. Whether even chemistry is reducible to physics is doubted by most philosophers of chemistry. Reductionism in biology and psychology are notoriously controversial. Chemical systems, organic systems, and psychological systems have causal properties that are simply impossible (or, to put the point less controversially, at least extremely difficult) to reduce to the causal properties of their basic physical parts. And even within the biological realm reductionism is more problematic than is often realized. For example, the traditional Aristotelian view that there is a difference in kind and not degree between sentient life and vegetative life is routinely dismissed as a historical curiosity. Yet even many naturalistic philosophers admit that it is at least extremely difficult to explain qualia in terms of insensate matter -- not realizing that they are thereby implicitly acknowledging that the old Aristotelian distinction has a serious metaphysical basis after all.

[One reason why they don’t see this is that contemporary philosophers universally regard “the qualia problem” as a problem in the philosophy of mind rather than the philosophy of biology, and see it as a question of whether or not qualia, understood as “mental” properties, are “physical.” From an A-T point of view this is entirely wrongheaded, and unreflectively presupposes a post-Cartesian conception both of mind and of matter. If you think that the intrinsic nature of matter is more or less exhausted by the mathematical description given by physics and that anything that cannot be assimilated to this description exists only in the mind and is wrongly projected onto material reality in perceptual experience, then “qualia” are inevitably going to seem inherently both “mental” and “non-physical.” But the Aristotelian regards modern physics’ description of matter as nowhere close to exhaustive, but rather as merely an abstraction of mathematical features from something which in its intrinsic nature is far richer than can be captured by mathematics. Hence the Aristotelian is happy to regard qualia as material, in his sense of “material”; and where the mind is concerned, the material/immaterial divide has in the Aristotelian view to do not with qualia, nor even with intentionality considered as mere “directedness” -- even simple material causes have that -- but rather with intellectual activity in the strict sense: the grasping of concepts, the formation of judgments, and reasoning from one judgment to another. See chapter 4 of Aquinas for more on this subject.]

Now, if there is irreducible efficient causality at a certain level of physical reality, there is also at that level (given what was said above) a correspondingly irreducible level of final causality. For instance, if the capacity of a tree to grow roots is irreducible to efficient-causal activity within the physical microstructure of the tree, or if the capacity of an animal to have sensations is irreducible to efficient-causal activity in its nervous system, then the tree’s “directedness” toward the growing of roots and the animal’s “directedness” toward the having of sensations will constitute levels of finality irreducible to the finality exhibited by the components of the physical microstructure. But then, given what was said above, there will also be levels of formal causality -- substantial forms -- at any such irreducible level of final causality.

Now, the Apologetics 315 reviewer appears to sympathize with my arguments in TLS to the effect that there is indeed irreducible immanent final causality at multiple levels of the natural world -- not only at the level of basic physics, but also with some higher-level inorganic natural processes, at various biological levels, and at the level of human thought and action. But in that case he should acknowledge (given what has been said above) that such arguments indicate that there is formal causality at each of those levels as well. Again, final causality and formal causality go hand in hand.

Nothing Dawkins says shows otherwise, because Dawkins lazily supposes (as, in fairness, so many other people do) that what makes something the kind of thing it is (i.e. its form) has something to do with its origin. That may be true of artifacts -- a watch is a watch only because of the watchmaker’s intentions, since there is nothing inherent in the object itself that gives it its time-telling function -- but it is not true of natural substances. If a natural substance has causal powers that are irreducible to those of its parts, then it has a substantial form. How it came into existence -- special divine creation, natural selection, an infinite series of preceding natural substances -- is irrelevant. To suppose otherwise is to commit one of many errors that follow upon the collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between natural substances and artifacts.

As to the suggestion that “there is no static 'Form', because life is constantly and mindlessly changing,” this sort of talk, though also very common, is just muddleheaded. If species A gives rise to species B, that does not entail that the form of an A somehow morphed into the form of a B -- whatever that could mean -- but rather that organisms that had the form of A gave rise to organisms with a different form. The form itself doesn’t change, any more than erasing a triangle from a blackboard changes the form of triangularity. What happens in that case is that the matter which had the form of a triangle now has the form of a pile of dust particles -- not that the form of triangularity has itself changed, so that the geometry textbooks would have to be rewritten to make reference to dust particles instead!

So, the reviewer’s criticisms miss the point. But he is right to say that TLS gives more explicit attention to final causality than to formal causality, at least in the latter part of the book. The reasons for this are that final causality has been the main object of attack among critics of Aristotelianism and Scholasticism, and that among the various interrelated A-T concepts cited above, final causality is the most crucial. It is not for nothing that Aquinas calls the final cause “the cause of causes.” Deny that final causality is immanent to the natural world and the whole A-T edifice (the act/potency distinction, substantial forms, etc.) pretty much collapses. Grant that final causes are immanent to the natural world, and the whole A-T edifice -- together with its implications for natural theology and natural law -- pretty much follows. Which is no doubt one reason many people are so loath to grant it.

What part of “nothing” don’t you understand?

2011-11-17T22:29:00.000-08:00

While we’re on the subject of bad cosmological speculations: A reader asked me some time back to comment on this little video from New Scientist, which summarizes some of the claims made in an article from the July 23 issue on the theme “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The magazine has been sitting on my gargantuan “to read” stack for a few months, and I've finally turned to it for some light reading. And boy is it ever light. Could anything possibly be as bad as the cringe-making pseudo-scientific amateur philosophizing on this subject we had reason to examine a few months ago? Oh yes. Oh my goodness, yes.

Pop science writers (including scientists when they are writing pop science) are always trying to translate traditional philosophical issues into terms they are familiar with. At best the result is, usually, to change the subject while pretending not to. At worst it is sheer nonsense. And sometimes it is both. Consider the article, which informs us that:

Entropy measures the number of ways you can rearrange a system’s components without changing its overall appearance… [N]othingness is the highest entropy state around -- you can shuffle it around all you want and it still looks like nothing. Given this law, it is hard to see how nothing could ever be turned into something, let alone something as big as the universe.

Well, all of that is nothing if not thought-provoking. What kind of “system” is nothing? If nothingness is a “state,” what exactly is it that is in that state? What are the “components” of nothing? What does “shuffling around” those components involve? How exactly does all of this differ from not shuffling anything around at all, or there being nothing in a state at all, or there being nothing with any components at all? What exactly does it mean to turn nothing into something, even something small? Isn’t the very suggestion pretty mystifying even apart from the law of entropy? What exactly is it that the law of entropy is governing when there is nothing around for it to govern? And the most profound question raised by this little passage: Just how much nonsense can you pack into three sentences, anyway?

Well, not as much as you can pack into an entire article, that’s for sure. It keeps on a-comin’:

But entropy is only part of the story. The other consideration is symmetry... Nothingness is very symmetrical indeed. “There’s no telling one part from another, so it has total symmetry,” says physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So, “nothingness” or “nothing” has “parts.” And how exactly does the claim that nothing has parts differ from the claim that there is nothing with parts? Surely what the article means to say is not “It is not the case that there is an x such that x has parts,” since that is both false and irrelevant to the subject of the article. So is it saying instead “There is an x such that x is nothing and x has parts”? But what the hell does that mean? How can there exist something that is “nothing”? Does “being nothing” involve being a kind of eccentric something? Similar questions could be asked, of course, about what it means for this something that is nothing to be “symmetrical.” Don’t wait for an answer, though, because it turns out there’s less to all of this “nothing” talk than meets the eye. Or rather, there’s more:

Wilczek’s own specialty is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes how quarks behave deep within atomic nuclei. It tells us that nothingness is a precarious state of affairs. “You can form a state that has no quarks and antiquarks in it, and it’s totally unstable,” says Wilczek. “It spontaneously starts producing quark-antiquark pairs.” The perfect symmetry of nothingness is broken.

So we’ve got nothingness, except that it isn’t nothingness, because what we’re really talking about is a “state” that is unstable, and this state starts producing quarks and antiquarks. Indeed:

“According to quantum theory, there is no state of ‘emptiness’,” agrees Frank Close of the University of Oxford… Instead, a vacuum is actually filled with a roiling broth of particles that pop in and out of existence.

Well, a “roiling broth” governed by the laws of quantum theory is not “nothing.” In which case all the preceding stuff about how “nothingness” has “parts” and can be in “states” and is “symmetrical” wasn’t really ever about “nothingness” in the first place. And a good thing too, because none of those things could intelligibly be said about “nothingness,” since nothingness is, of course, not a kind of thing at all.

Nor are the reasons for this as profound as the article insinuates:

[T]here is an even more mind-blowing consequence of the idea that something can come from nothing: perhaps nothingness itself cannot exist. Here’s why. Quantum uncertainly allows a trade-off [etc.]

Well, yes, I suppose it is “mind-blowing” that “nothingness cannot exist,” at least if by “mind-blowing” you mean “completely obvious and trivial, and as well-known to 8-year-olds and fishmongers as it is to experts in quantum uncertainty” -- since, of course, “nothingness” just is the non-existence of anything.

But perhaps the article is here just badly expressing another thought, to the effect that it is necessary that something must always have existed, that it could not in principle have been the case that there is or ever was absolutely nothing at all. And I would say that the article is right about that. But neither “quantum uncertainty” nor any other theory of physics is or could be the reason, for quantum mechanics and all the other laws of physics presuppose the existence of a concrete physical reality that behaves according to those laws, so that such laws cannot coherently be appealed to as an explanation of that reality.

So what’s the point of all this ado about nothing? You know what the point is: To try to show that physics alone can explain the existence of the universe. Hence the key line of the piece: “Perhaps the big bang was just nothingness doing what comes naturally.” But read in a straightforward way, this is just nonsense, for reasons of the sort already given: If this so-called “nothingness” has a “nature” and “does” things, then it isn’t really “nothingness” at all that we’re talking about. And of course, the article and the physicists it quotes don’t really mean “nothingness” in a straightforward way in the first place. They mean a “roiling broth” governed by the laws of quantum theory, entropy, etc. and that not only isn’t nothing, but just is part of the universe and therefore just is part of the explanandum and therefore does nothing whatsoever to explain that explanandum.

You might as well say: “Let me explain how this whole house is held up by nothing. Consider the floor, which is what I really mean by ‘nothing.’ Now, the rest of the house is held up by the floor. Thus, I’ve explained how the whole house is held up by nothing!” Well, no you haven’t. You’ve “explained” at most how part of the house is held up by another part, but you’ve left unexplained how the floor itself is held up, and thus (since the floor is itself part of the house) you haven’t really explained at all how the house as a whole is held up, either by “nothing” or by anything else. Furthermore, you’ve made what is really just sheer muddleheadedness sound profound by using “nothing” in an eccentric way.

The “scientific” “explanations” of the origin of the universe from “nothing” one keeps hearing in recent years are really no less stupid than this “explanation” of the house. They aren’t serious physics, they aren’t serious philosophy, they aren’t serious anything except seriously bad arguments, textbook instances of the fallacy of equivocation. On the other hand, they do give us an excuse to listen to a Sinatra classic. Enjoy:

Broken Law (Updated)

2011-11-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

So, a year after promising a reply to my detailed critique of his “evil god challenge,” Stephen Law’s long-awaited response (see the combox remarks he links to) mostly comes to this: You just don’t get it. Go re-read my paper and this article by Wes Morriston.

“Courtier’s reply,” anyone?

Though he dismisses them as “awful,” Law does not respond in any substantive way to the points I made in my critique. He does offer a few brief remarks intended to clarify his position, but they serve only to reinforce, rather than answer, my objections. I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve said before -- if you haven’t already, go read my original post on Law (since which I’ve written a few other relevant posts, which I’ve linked to here). But you might recall that the problem with Law’s position is as follows.

Law claims that the evidence for the existence of a good God is no better than the evidence for the existence of an evil god, and that any theodicy a theist might put forward as a way of reconciling the fact of evil with the existence of a good God has a parallel in a reverse-theodicy a believer in an evil god could put forward to reconcile the presence of good in the world with the existence of an evil god. Now, no one actually believes in an evil god. Therefore, Law concludes, since (he claims) the evidence for a good God is no better than that for an evil God, no one should believe in a good God either. That’s the “evil god challenge.”

The trouble is that Law regards this as a challenge to theism generally, and it simply isn’t. It applies at most only to one, historically idiosyncratic version of theism. So, suppose you regard the divine attributes as in principle metaphysically separable -- that something that is, for example, omnipotent or omniscient could nevertheless fail to be all-good. Suppose also that you regard good and evil as on a metaphysical par, neither more fundamental than the other. And suppose that you consider the grounds for belief in God to consist in an inductive inference to the effect that God is the best explanation of various bits of evidence -- the orderliness of the world, the good we find in it, etc. Given those specific metaphysical and epistemological assumptions -- the sort that might be made by someone beholden to a “theistic personalist” conception of God and who thinks Paley-style “design arguments” and the like are the best reason to believe in God -- Law’s challenge might be a problem. (Or maybe not. But since I have no time either for theistic personalism or for Paley-style “design arguments,” I really couldn’t care less.)

But given different metaphysical and epistemological assumptions, Law’s “evil god challenge” is no challenge at all. Hence, suppose that, like almost all of the most prominent theologians and philosophers of religion historically (Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, and Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics generally) you are a classical theist. You will hold, accordingly, that God is absolutely simple or non-composite, so that all of the divine attributes are one and thus metaphysically inseparable in principle. You will also regard God, not as one being among others, but as subsistent being itself or pure actuality, beyond any genus. And you will regard Him, not as one cause among others, but as that from which all finite causes -- which have, ultimately, only instrumental causality -- necessarily derive their causal power. Suppose that you also hold that good and evil are not on a metaphysical par, but that evil is a privation of good. And suppose you endorse the doctrine of the transcendentals, according to which being and goodness are convertible, so that whatever is being itself or pure actuality is also goodness itself, necessarily devoid of evil. It follows from all this that nothing that is omnipotent could possibly be less than perfectly good, and indeed that nothing that is divine could possibly be less than perfectly good.

Suppose, finally, that you also think there are demonstrative (as opposed to merely inductive or evidential) arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism -- that you endorse an Aristotelian argument from motion to a purely actual Unmoved Mover, say, or Aquinas’s “existence argument” in On Being and Essence for something that is subsistent being itself, or a Neo-Platonic argument for a source of the world that is an absolute unity. If such arguments work at all, then given the background metaphysics, they prove conclusively (and not merely with some degree of probability) that there is a God who cannot in principle be anything less than perfectly good.

Given these very different metaphysical and epistemological assumptions, it is blindingly obvious that Law’s “evil god challenge” is completely irrelevant. His “evil god hypothesis” doesn’t stalemate the arguments for classical theism, for two reasons. First, unlike the “good god” of theistic personalism, the God of classical theism isn’t in the same genus as Law’s “evil god.” The God of classical theism isn’t the same kind of thing as Law’s “evil god” at all. (Indeed, unlike everything else that exists, the God of classical theism isn’t in a genus or kind in the first place -- that’s part of the whole point of classical theism.) So there is no parallel between alternative “hypotheses” of the sort Law needs in order to get his “challenge” off the ground.

Second, the arguments typically employed by classical theists simply cannot be stalemated by “evidential” considerations because they are typically not “evidential” or inductive or probabilistic arguments in the first place. If an Aristotelian argument from motion, or Aquinas’s “existence argument,” or Neo-Platonic arguments work at all, they get you demonstratively to something that is pure actuality, or subsistent being itself, or an absolute unity; and the other metaphysical theses alluded to get you from there to something that is of necessity perfectly good (indeed, something that is goodness itself). To suggest that what is purely actual or subsistent being itself might, given the “evidence,” be evil, is simply unintelligible. To make such a suggestion would merely be to show that the one making it doesn’t understand the metaphysical concepts in question.

Now that does not mean that classical theism and the arguments for it are not subject to criticism. A critic could try to show that there is something wrong with the doctrine of divine simplicity, or with the doctrine of privation, or with the doctrine of the transcendentals, or that there is some fallacy in one of the attempts to provide a demonstrative argument for the existence of the God of classical theism. But even if an atheist could make such objections stick, it is those objections that will be doing the work, and not the “evil god challenge.” The “evil god challenge” drops out as simply irrelevant.

(Compare: Suppose someone presented a purported proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, to which two critics raised objections. Critic A says that the purported proof contains a fallacy. Critic B says that the inductive evidence the attempted proof provides can be stalemated by equally good evidence for a counter-theorem. Critic A may or may not be correct. Critic B is, as they say, “not even wrong.” He is merely embarrassing himself, and even if critic A turns out to be right, critic B will still have been merely embarrassing himself.)

Now it is pretty clear that what Law should say to all this is: “Fine, the ‘evil god challenge’ is not a completely general challenge to theism, but only, specifically, to evidential arguments for theistic personalism. That’s at least something, even if it is nowhere close to the atheistic knock-out punch I hoped it would be.” But rather than make use of this dignified exit from the hole he finds himself in, Law has chosen to keep digging. Still insisting that my criticisms are “awful,” Law makes several attempts to clarify his position. In particular, he says this:

[CLARIFICATION I:] My point is that even if it could be shown that an evil god is an impossibility (and that does seem to be your strategy, after all), we might still ask, "But supposing it wasn't an impossibility, would an evil god not in any case be pretty conclusively ruled out on empirical grounds - e.g. given the amount of good we observe?" If the answer to that question is "yes", then the challenge remains to explain why a good god is not similarly ruled out.

And he says this:

[CLARIFICATION II:] My argument is that there is, on the face of it, overwhelming empirical evidence AGAINST the good god hypothesis (whether or not this god is thought of as a person, as being morally responsible, etc. personhood is not required). Most people accept this, unless (i) they're religious, and (ii) it dawns on them what the consequences of this are re their belief in a good god, when many suddenly get radically skeptical!

The challenge is, then to explain, why, if the evil god hypothesis is ruled out pretty conclusively on empirical grounds, the same is not true of the good god hypothesis.

To these combox remarks, I replied with a combox remark of my own, to which Law responded with this and this:

[CLARIFICATION III:] Even if an evil God is a conceptual impossibility, the fact that he can ALSO be ruled out on empirical grounds (which you may dispute of course) raises the question, "well, why isn't a good god similarly ruled out on empirical grounds?" The question remains whether or evil god is ruled out on empirical grounds. Surely this is bloody obvious by now?

PS and of course my argument does not depend on the thought that Christians arrive at their views about god inductively based on observation of the world. As Edwars' [sic] criticism assumes that is my view, it fails. That's it.

Now as far as I can tell, CLARIFICATION I amounts to this: Yes, given all that classical theism stuff, the “evil god challenge” would fail. But suppose that classical theism is wrong and that evidential arguments for a theistic personalist god are the best we can do. In that case the “evil god challenge” applies!

This is a little like Critic B of our imagined proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem saying “OK, but suppose the proof in question were an inductive argument. Then my objection would be a pretty powerful challenge, huh?” More to the point, Law’s CLARIFICATION I implicitly concedes that my criticism is correct even as Law continues to maintain that it is “awful.” Law has here made his “evil god challenge” completely trivial: It applies to those versions of theism to which it applies. True, but hardly interesting.

CLARIFICATION II is simply baffling. Law tells us that most non-religious people tend to agree with him that there is overwhelming evidence against the existence of a good God, however that God is conceived. Well, maybe they do (which would not be surprising given that they’re non-religious). But what’s Law’s point? Is he saying that since those people don’t buy classical theism (or any other kind of theism), they should take the “evil god challenge” seriously? Again, that may be true, but so what? How does that show that the “evil god challenge” applies also to classical theism? Once again Law reduces his position to a triviality: The “evil god challenge” needs to be taken seriously by anyone who isn’t convinced by those versions of theism to which the “evil god challenge” does not apply! Again, true, but uninteresting.

CLARIFICATION III is about as good as the following argument from Critic B of our imagined proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem: Even if Critic A is right that the proof contains a fallacy, my point is that the proof can ALSO be ruled out on empirical grounds (which you may dispute of course). Surely this is bloody obvious by now?

Again, Critic B would simply show by such a statement that he doesn’t understand the difference between an attempted mathematical proof and an empirical theory. And Law’s remarks show that he doesn’t understand the difference between a purported metaphysical demonstration of the impossibility of an evil God (in the classical theist’s sense of “God”) and empirical theorizing about whether there is a “god” in some other sense, a sense that would leave it open whether this “god” is good or evil.

Law’s “PS” to CLARIFICATION III is also baffling. He now tells that “of course” his argument doesn’t depend on the assumption that Christians arrive at their views about God inductively based on observation of the world. Well, in that case, he needs to answer the following question: Take a classical theist who is working with the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions described above and who claims to have a demonstrative argument to the effect that there is a God who is pure actuality or subsistent being itself and who therefore (given the background metaphysics) cannot even in principle be anything less than perfectly good. How exactly does the “evil god challenge” pose a challenge to such a theist?

In answering, Law should remember that it will not do to say: “Well, I don’t think the doctrine of privation, the doctrine or the transcendentals, divine simplicity, etc. are correct and/or that the attempted demonstration in question is sound.” For in that case, it will be the various specific criticisms of these various metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that will be doing the philosophical work, and not the evil god challenge itself. He should remember also that it will not do to say: “If we don’t make these various classical theistic background assumptions in metaphysics and epistemology, then the ‘evil god challenge’ applies.” For that is true but completely trivial.

I think we’re done here. On the other hand, Law also tells us that a more substantive reply is forthcoming. I guess I can wait another year.

UPDATE 11/15: For readers who haven’t already noticed, Stephen Law has now replied to this post in two blog posts of his own (here and here) and in a number of combox remarks, both below and in his own comboxes. In response, I’ve posted a number of comments of my own down below.

Reading Rosenberg, Part III

2011-11-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

Continuing our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we come to Rosenberg’s treatment of the question “Where did the big bang come from?” As serious students of the cosmological argument for the existence of God are aware, most of its defenders historically (including key figures like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibniz) are not arguing for a temporal first cause of the world. Their claim is not that God must have caused the world to begin (though some of them believe that He did, for independent reasons) but rather that He must continually be sustaining the world in existence, and would have to be doing so even if the universe had no beginning. But there is a version of the cosmological argument that does argue for a temporal first cause of the world, namely the kalām cosmological argument. Rosenberg does not explicitly address any specific version of either argument, but he is, in effect, trying to rebut them both.

To the kalām cosmological argument, Rosenberg has a ready implicit response:

The best current theory suggests that our universe is just one universe in a “multiverse” -- a vast number of universes, each bubbling up randomly out of the foam on the surface of the multiverse, like so many bubbles in the bathwater, each one the result of some totally random event. (p. 36)

If the multiverse hypothesis is correct, then, while our universe began at the big bang, its cause was entirely physical insofar as it arose from the larger multiverse. Moreover, if the multiverse as a whole did not have a beginning, it would not require a temporal cause. Thus is the kalām argument blocked -- again, if the multiverse theory is correct.

But why suppose it is correct? You might think, with William Lane Craig, that “there’s no evidence that such a world ensemble exists. Nobody knows if there even are other parallel universes at all.” Indeed, you might agree with Craig that even if there is such a multiverse, it wouldn’t really undermine the kalām argument anyway, since (for reasons he summarizes in the clip linked to) “the past of the multiverse must also be finite” and thus in need of a temporal cause.

Yet Rosenberg claims that:

One remarkable thing about this best current cosmological theory is the degree to which physicists have been able to subject it to many empirical tests, including tests of its claims about things that happened even before the big bang, let alone before the formation of Earth, our sun, or even our galaxy, the Milky Way. One of the most striking was the successful prediction of where to look for radiation from stars that went supernova and exploded as far back as 10 billion years ago. These tests came out so favorably to the big-bang theory that physicists decided to risk several billion euros on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), outside Geneva, to test the big-bang theory directly by creating the very conditions that occurred just after the big bang. (pp. 36-7)

Did you hear that? The multiverse theory has been subjected to “many empirical tests,” and apparently has passed them all! That will be news to many, since the common rap against the multiverse theory is precisely that it is untestable. Except that when you read the passage more carefully, what Rosenberg really seems to be saying is that it is the big bang theory, specifically, that has been subjected to many empirical tests; at least, the only example he gives of an empirical test is a test of the big bang theory specifically. And that would certainly be the most Rosenberg could plausibly say. There have been journalistic claims to the effect that the multiverse theory has finally found some empirical support, but others have called bullshit on such reports. In any event, it would be absurd to pretend that it has been “subjected to many empirical tests,” much less passed any.

The unwary reader would certainly get the opposite impression, though. Perhaps Rosenberg thinks that since the multiverse theory incorporates the big bang theory, confirmation of the latter counts as confirmation of the former. This is a little like saying that since Deepak Chopra’s theory of “quantum healing” incorporates quantum mechanics, confirmation of quantum mechanics counts as confirmation of Chopra’s theory. Maybe Rosenberg’s got material here for a sequel. (Craig, by the way, has addressed the CERN business here.)

I doubt Rosenberg is being willfully dishonest here; I suspect wishful thinking or maybe just bad writing. In any case, let the multiverse theory be as well-confirmed as any of its proponents could wish, it still wouldn’t undermine non- kalām cosmological arguments in the least. An Aristotle or Aquinas would simply shrug and point out that what matters is what accounts for the fact that the multiverse keeps going at all, whether or not it has always existed.

Now Rosenberg is aware of this. He acknowledges that “wishful thinkers” (apparently it takes one to know one) might ask:

“If our universe is just one of many in a multiverse, where did the multiverse come from? And where did the multiverse’s cause come from, and where did its cause come from?” And so on, ad infinitum. Once they have convinced themselves and others that this series of questions has no stopping point in physics, they play what they imagine is a trump card, a question whose only answer they think has to be the God hypothesis. (p. 37)

But Rosenberg’s got a better answer grounded in scientism, right? Not exactly. Or at least, out of one side of his mouth he insists that there is in fact “no reason, no reason at all” why the multiverse exists (p. 38) and that natural selection has merely made it “psychologically natural [for us to] refus[e] to take ‘No reason’ for an answer” (p. 39). That makes it sound like we are supposed to regard the existence of the multiverse as a brute fact, without any explanation.

Now as I have argued in earlier posts (here and here), the “brute fact” move as a defense of atheism is seriously problematic; it makes scientific explanation unintelligible and, indeed, makes naturalism tantamount to an appeal to magic. Rosenberg accuses his critics of “mystery-mongering,” but it is precisely those who claim that there is “no reason at all” why the universe exists who are promoting mysteries, and it is precisely those who say that there is and must be an explanation who are dispelling them.

But then, out of the other side of his mouth even Rosenberg himself speaks as if there is an explanation of sorts after all, albeit one that he mixes together with another generous dollop of mystery-mongering:

A hundred years ago, it became clear that most events at the level of the subatomic are random, uncaused, indeterministic quantum events -- merely matters of probability… Since the big bang is just such a quantum event, it, too, is a wholly indeterministic one. It is an event that just springs up out of the multiverse’s foam of universes without any cause at all. Why is there a universe at all? No reason at all. Why is there a multiverse in which universes pop into existence for no reason at all? No reason at all! It’s just another quantum event. (pp. 38-39)

This isn’t a complete muddle, but it is close. Rosenberg evidently thinks that when traditional metaphysicians and philosophers of religion insist that there must be some reason why events happen as they do, what they mean is that there must be some deterministic efficient cause; and since quantum physics tells us that there are events without causes of this sort, Rosenberg concludes that there is “no reason at all” why they happen. But of course, that is not what traditional metaphysicians and philosophers of religion mean. Aristotelians, for example, rather famously hold that the identification of an efficient cause is only one of four basic kinds of explanation, and many philosophers (including non-Aristotelians) would deny that even efficient causes are necessarily deterministic, but hold that they nevertheless remain true causes and truly explanatory.

Rosenberg implicitly acknowledges the latter point when he appeals to quantum mechanics in his account of the origin of the universe. For all his “no reason at all” sensationalism, he isn’t really saying that the universe has no explanation; he is saying that quantum theory provides an explanation, just not one in terms of deterministic efficient causes. (Rosenberg’s “No reason at all! It’s just another quantum event” is a rather comically inept pair of sentences, since to say that “It’s a quantum event” just is to give a reason in the relevant sense.) As we have seen before, it is simply incompetent to appeal to the laws of physics (whether those of quantum mechanics or of any other part of physics) as if they somehow cast doubt on the traditional metaphysician’s insistence that what happens in the world requires a cause, since the laws of physics (including quantum physics) themselves are included among the possible causes of things, in the relevant sense of “cause.”

Moreover, the laws of physics (including, again, the laws of quantum mechanics) cannot in any case be the ultimate explanation of anything. “Laws,” after all, are mere abstractions; indeed, the Aristotelian argues, talk of “laws” is really just shorthand for a description of the way concrete objects and systems will tend to behave given their natures. (As I have noted many times, you hardly have to be a Thomist or to have any theological ax to grind to take such a view. Cf. the work of Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, and other “new essentialist” philosophers of science and metaphysicians.) But this means that the operation of the laws of physics presupposes, and thus does not explain, the existence of the concrete physical objects and systems that behave in accordance with the laws. In particular, “Quantum mechanics says such-and-such” cannot be an adequate explanation of the existence of the universe, of the multiverse, or of anything else, precisely because the operation of the laws of quantum mechanics is (qua description of the behavior of a concrete physical system) part of the explanandum. And “No reason at all!” is, needless to say, even less explanatory.

Now you might still try to argue, contrary to classical theism, that the ultimate explanation of why the world exists at all lies in something other than what is pure actuality (as opposed to a compound of act and potency), something other than what is subsistent being itself (as opposed to a compound of essence and existence), something other than what is absolutely necessary (as opposed to being either contingent or only derivatively necessary). Good luck with that. But Rosenberg has said absolutely nothing to make this plausible. He certainly has said absolutely nothing to show either that the multiverse theory is an adequate explanation or that there is no explanation.

Some bonus fallacies: As I have noted, Rosenberg claims that the reason we refuse to regard “No reason at all” as a serious answer to the question of why the universe exists is that we have been hardwired by evolution to find such answers unsatisfying. He is appealing here to a view he develops later in the book to the effect that natural selection has molded us in such a way that we always try to understand the world in terms of stories or narratives. Hence (so the argument seems to go) we want some account of the world in terms of a “beginning” of some sort. But Rosenberg’s eliminative materialism entails that narratives and stories, even naturalistic or atheistic narratives and stories, are all false. Only formulas, systems of equations, etc. really give us the truth.

Now it is not in fact clear why this is supposed to render the request for an explanation of the universe somehow illegitimate. After all, Rosenberg thinks requests for explanations in other domains are legitimate; indeed, his case for scientism rests in part on the claim that science has provided powerful explanations of various natural phenomena. Now if the purportedly delusory tendency to try to understand things in terms of stories and narratives does not make the request for an explanation of (say) the existence of this or that species or this or that chemical reaction suspect, how does it make the request for an explanation of the existence of the universe suspect? We are not told. (Rosenberg’s objection to narratives as such is no answer, even if it were defensible. Remember, an explanation of why the universe exists at all need not appeal to a beginning, nor indeed to any story or narrative at all. Certainly a Thomistic explanation of the world in terms of purely actual cause which creates by conjoining an essence with an act of existence, or a Neo-Platonic explanation in terms of emanation from the One, are not narrative explanations, since the “causes” in these cases are timeless or eternal in the strict sense.)

There is another problem. Part of the point of Rosenberg’s brief treatment of cosmological questions is evidently to answer a potential objection to his scientism. He wants to rebut the charge that scientism leaves something unexplained that should be explained. But insofar as (at least out of one side of his mouth) he dismisses the request for an explanation as resting on a delusion, his answer presupposes his scientism, for his eliminative materialism (and its dismissal of stories and narratives as such) rests on his scientism.

We seem to have a circularity, then, reminiscent of the sort we might get from a Freudian or a Marxist. You dismiss the very idea of the Oedipal Complex as ludicrous? Well, that’s just what someone with an Oedipal Complex would do! You don’t agree with Marxian critiques of free market economics as an ideological smokescreen for capitalist ruling interests? Of course you don’t, you’re in thrall to the ideology! You think scientism fails to provide an adequate explanation of the world? That’s just what we should expect you to think if scientism is true! If Rosenberg can be rescued from the charge of begging the question, it is only because, as with his remarks about the multiverse hypothesis, the sloppiness of his exposition can make an argument of his something of a moving target.

All this in what amounts to a digression. And the main lines of argument in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality are no better. Rosenberg’s book is the gift that keeps giving, as we’ll see in future posts.

Reading Rosenberg, Part II

2011-11-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

We saw in part I of this series that Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is less about atheism than it is about scientism, the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality. This is so in two respects. First, Rosenberg’s atheism is just one implication among others of his scientism, and the aim of the book is to spell out what else follows from scientism, rather than to say much in defense of atheism. Second, that it follows from his scientism is thus the only argument Rosenberg really gives for atheism. Thus, most of what he has to say ultimately rests on his scientism. If he has no good arguments for scientism, then he has no good arguments either for atheism or for most of the other, more bizarre, conclusions he defends in the book.

So, does Rosenberg have any good arguments for scientism? He does not. In fact, he has only one argument for it, and it is quite awful.

What is scientism?

Before we look at the argument, let’s consider how Rosenberg characterizes scientism:

“Scientism”… is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when “complete,” what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today. (pp. 6-7)

As I’ve noted elsewhere (e.g. here, here, and here), the trouble with the claim that science is the only reliable source of knowledge is that it is either self-defeating or trivial -- self-defeating if we narrowly construe what counts as “science” (since scientism is itself a metaphysical and epistemological theory and not a view that physics, chemistry, or any other particular science has established) and trivial if we construe “science” broadly (since in that case philosophy, and in particular metaphysics and epistemology, count as “sciences” no less than physics, chemistry, and the like do). Rosenberg certainly avoids the second horn of this dilemma. For his construal of what counts as “science” is very narrow indeed:

If we’re going to be scientistic, then we have to attain our view of reality from what physics tells us about it. Actually, we’ll have to do more than that: we’ll have to embrace physics as the whole truth about reality. (p. 20)

To be sure, he does not deny that chemistry, biology, and neuroscience also give us knowledge. But that is only because he thinks they are reducible to physics: “The physical facts fix all the facts. [This] means that the physical facts constitute or determine or bring about all the rest of the facts.” (p. 26)

Now some naturalists will demur at this point, preferring a “non-reductive physicalism,” or “emergentism,” or some other such doctrine to Rosenberg’s radical reductionism. As a number of chemists and philosophers of chemistry have argued in recent years, it is at the very least debatable whether even chemistry is really reducible to physics. (For a useful overview of the literature, see chapter 5 of J. van Brakel’s book Philosophy of Chemistry. Also useful is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the philosophy of chemistry.) Reductionism in biology is even more obviously open to challenge. And of course, whether consciousness and human thought and action can be accounted for in physicalist terms is notoriously controversial even among naturalists themselves -- Fodor, McGinn, Searle, Nagel, Levine, Strawson, and Chalmers are just some of the prominent naturalistic philosophers of mind who have been critical of existing attempts by their fellow naturalists to explain the mind in purely materialistic terms.

Now I sympathize with such arguments, but I don’t think they establish an alternative form of naturalism. For what they show, I would argue, is that higher-level features of material reality are no less real than the lower-level features, that the lower-level features are not somehow ontologically privileged. And in that way they show (even if only inchoately, and even if their proponents often do not realize it) that something like an Aristotelian, holistic conception of material substances is correct after all. Talk of “emergence,” “non-reductive physicalism,” and the like fudges this, because it insinuates that the lower-level features described by physics are still somehow more fundamental than the higher-level ones, even though the higher-level ones are acknowledged to be irreducible. The latter, it is implied, somehow have to “emerge” from the former. Such views are bound to sound obscurantist precisely because they amount to an unstable halfway position between reductionistic naturalism of the Rosenberg variety and traditional Aristotelian anti-reductionism.

I would say, then, that one has either to go the whole hog for Rosenberg-style reductionism or chuck out the whole naturalistic framework altogether (along with “emergence” and other such half-measures) and return to a full-blown Aristotelian metaphysics of material substances. To that extent I think Rosenberg is right to hold that if someone is committed to scientism, then he should hold that “the physical facts fix all the facts.” (Obviously some will dispute this conditional, but since it constitutes a point of agreement between Rosenberg and me, I won’t pursue it further here.)

If Rosenberg avoids the one horn of the dilemma, though, he thrusts himself headlong onto the other. For how exactly has scientism been established by physics, chemistry, biology, or even neuroscience (if we allow for the sake of argument that neuroscience is reducible to physics)? Does scientism make predictions that have been rigorously confirmed? Is there something like a Michelson-Morley experiment that scientism makes sense of in a way no rival theory does? To ask such questions is to answer them. The fact is that neuroscience hasn’t come close even to discovering exactly what it is that goes on in the brain when scientists form hypotheses, construct theories, make predictive inferences, develop experimental tests, write up their results, submit them for peer review, etc. That is to say, neuroscience hasn’t even explained the practice of science itself in purely neuroscientific categories, much less shown that no other practices can yield genuine knowledge. Scientism remains what it has always been -- a purely metaphysical speculation and not an empirical theory at all, much less a confirmed empirical theory.

No doubt we will be treated at this point to some hand-waving to the effect that even if neuroscience has not “yet” fully explained scientific practice, neither has it turned up any evidence that there are sources of knowledge other than science. But whether neuroscience is the only genuine source of knowledge about how we come to have knowledge is itself part of what is at issue in the dispute between scientism and its critics. Hence, to argue “We have no neuroscientific evidence that there is any genuine source of knowledge other than science, therefore there are no grounds at all for believing that there are any such alternative sources” would simply be to beg the question.

Rosenberg’s Gem

All of this might seem moot if Rosenberg had a really powerful argument in favor of scientism. But he does not. David Stove once gave the ironic label “the Gem” to a Berkeleyan argument for idealism he regarded as especially bad. Rosenberg’s argument for scientism gives Berkeley a run for his money, for it is a real Gem. He states it several times in the book:

The technological success of physics is by itself enough to convince anyone with anxiety about scientism that if physics isn’t “finished,” it certainly has the broad outlines of reality well understood. (p. 23)

And it’s not just the correctness of the predictions and the reliability of technology that requires us to place our confidence in physics’ description of reality. Because physics’ predictions are so accurate, the methods that produced the description must be equally reliable. Otherwise, our technological powers would be a miracle. We have the best of reasons to believe that the methods of physics -- combining controlled experiment and careful observation with mainly mathematical requirements on the shape theories can take -- are the right ones for acquiring all knowledge. Carving out some area of “inquiry” or “belief” as exempt from exploration by the methods of physics is special pleading or self-deception. (p. 24)

The phenomenal accuracy of its prediction, the unimaginable power of its technological application, and the breathtaking extent and detail of its explanations are powerful reasons to believe that physics is the whole truth about reality. (p. 25)

Rosenberg’s argument, then, is essentially this:

1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.

2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real.

How bad is this argument? About as bad as this one:

1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.

2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real.

Metal detectors are keyed to those aspects of the natural world susceptible of detection via electromagnetic means (or whatever). But however well they perform this task -- indeed, even if they succeeded on every single occasion they were deployed -- it simply wouldn’t follow for a moment that there are no aspects of the natural world other than the ones they are sensitive to. Similarly, what physics does -- and there is no doubt that it does it brilliantly -- is to capture those aspects of the natural world susceptible of the mathematical modeling that makes precise prediction and technological application possible. But here too, it simply doesn’t follow for a moment that there are no other aspects of the natural world.

Those who reject Rosenberg’s scientism, then, are not guilty of “special pleading or self-deception,” Rosenberg’s condescending bluster notwithstanding. Rather, they are (unlike Rosenberg) simply capable of recognizing a brazen non sequitur when they see it. Unfortunately, condescending bluster is all Rosenberg ever offers in addition to his favorite non sequitur. Here’s some more of it:

“Scientism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their theistic cake and dine at the table of science’s bounties, too. Opponents of scientism would never charge their cardiologists or auto mechanics or software engineers with “scientism” when their health, travel plans, or Web surfing are in danger. But just try subjecting their nonscientific mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to scientific scrutiny. The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “scientism.” (p. 6)

According to Rosenberg, then, unless you agree that science is the only genuine source of knowledge, you cannot consistently believe that it gives us any genuine knowledge. This is about as plausible as saying that unless you think metal detectors alone can detect physical objects, then you cannot consistently believe that they detect any physical objects at all. Perhaps someone who thinks that metal detectors give us exhaustive knowledge of the world could write up a Metallicist’s Guide to Reality and “argue” as follows:

“Metallicism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their stone, water, wood, and plastic cakes and dine at the table of metallic bounties, too. Opponents of metallicism would never charge their metal detector-owning friends with “metallicism” when they need help finding lost car keys or loose change in the sofa. But just try subjecting their nonmetallic mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to metallurgical scrutiny. The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “metallicism.”

Of course, “metallicism” is preposterous. But so is Rosenberg’s scientism.

Those beholden to scientism are bound to protest that the analogy is no good, on the grounds that metal detectors detect only part of reality while physics detects the whole of it. But such a reply would simply beg the question once again, for whether physics really does describe the whole of reality is precisely what is at issue.

I am being hard on Rosenberg, and he deserves it for putting forward such transparently bad arguments, and with such arrogance. But it is only fair to note that he is hardly alone in the delusion that his Gem is some kind of knockdown argument for scientism. One hears this stupid non sequitur over and over and over again when arguing with New Atheist types. It is implicit every time some Internet Infidel asks triumphantly: “Where are the predictive successes and technological applications of philosophy or theology?” This is about as impressive as our fictional “metallicist” smugly demanding: “Where are the metal-detecting successes of gardening, cooking, and painting?” -- and then high-fiving his fellow metallicists when we are unable to offer any examples, thinking that he has established that plants, food, works of art, and indeed anything non-metallic are all non-existent. For why on earth should we believe that only methods capable of detecting metals give us genuine access to reality? And why on earth should we believe that if something is real, then it must be susceptible of the mathematically precise prediction and technological application characteristic of physics? I submit that there is no answer to this question that doesn’t beg the question.

As always, earlier generations of skeptics were wiser than the intellectually backward Dawkins generation. For instance, Bertrand Russell was well aware that, far from giving us an exhaustive picture of reality, physics in fact gives us is very nearly the opposite, and is unintelligible unless there is more to reality than what it reveals to us:

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure. We only know the intrinsic character of events when they happen to us. Nothing whatever in theoretical physics enables us to say anything about the intrinsic character of events elsewhere. They may be just like the events that happen to us, or they may be totally different in strictly unimaginable ways. All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13)

Moreover, physics’ tremendous success at prediction and technological application is precisely the result of its deliberate neglect of any aspect of reality that does not fit its mathematically-oriented methods. Early modern thinkers like Bacon and Descartes sought to reorient science in a practical, this-worldly, technological direction. Mathematics facilitated this; aspects of the world that couldn’t be mathematically modeled were a distraction. Hence they were relegated to the status of mere “secondary qualities,” or treated as features that are the proper study of metaphysics rather than physics. That was less a metaphysical discovery, though, than a methodological stipulation. If you set out to study only those aspects of reality that might be rigorously predictable and controllable, then you are bound to find that those are the only ones you discover. But it is preposterous to pretend that you have thereby shown that there are no other aspects of reality, just as it would be preposterous for the “metallicist” to pretend that his exclusive focus on those objects that might be detected electromagnetically shows that there are no non-metals. (See The Last Superstition for more detailed discussion of this theme.)

What Rosenberg and others beholden to scientism have done, then, is simply to confuse method with metaphysics (an occupational hazard of post-Galilean science and post-Cartesian philosophy, as E. A. Burtt warned in his classic book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science). The fallacious blurring of epistemology and metaphysics is, of course, also a feature of many idealist arguments, which is why Stove thought they merited our scorn. All the more appropriately, then, might we label Rosenberg’s argument a “Gem.”

Scientism versus teleology

Among the features of the world physics deliberately ignores for its purposes are those that involve final causality. As Rosenberg writes:

Ever since physics hit its stride with Newton, it has excluded purposes, goals, ends, or designs in nature. It firmly bans all explanations that are teleological… (p. 40)

As the words “exclusion” and “ban” indicate, though, this is, yet again, merely a methodological stipulation. By itself it tells us nothing at all about whether teleology is real. Again, if the designer of a metal detector says “For purposes of metal detection, let’s ignore every feature of the objects we’re after except their electromagnetic properties,” then he is naturally going to pay no attention to whether this or that object is a coin, or a key, or a thumbtack, or even whether it is made of iron as opposed to nickel. But it obviously does not follow that the only real properties of the objects the metal detector finds are their electromagnetic properties, and that we should be eliminativists about coins, keys, thumbtacks, iron, and nickel. Similarly, since teleological features cannot be modeled mathematically, the early moderns – thinkers who, following Bacon and Descartes, wanted to turn science in a practical, this-worldly direction and thus toward a focus on prediction and control – decided to ignore them. But (as it cannot be repeated too frequently) it simply doesn’t follow that such features do not exist.

Rosenberg no doubt thinks an appeal to Ockham’s razor justifies such an inference. He writes:

Since Newton 350 years ago, [physics] has always succeeded in providing a nonteleological theory to deal with each of the new explanatory and experimental challenges it has faced. That track record is tremendously strong evidence for concluding that its still-unsolved problems will submit to nonteleological theories. (p. 40)

The implication is that since physics hasn’t ever needed to postulate final causes, we can infer with confidence that it will not need to do so in the future; and if it does not need to do so, the principle of parsimony should lead us to conclude that final causes don’t exist.

But there are several problems with such an argument. For one thing, Rosenberg’s main reason for denying the existence of teleology, plans, purposes, designs, intentionality, and the like at the biological level and even at the level of the human mind, is that physics has ruled teleology and cognate notions out of science altogether. But in that case an appeal to Ockham’s razor of the sort just considered would lead Rosenberg into a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. He will be saying, in effect: Physics can explain everything that exists without appealing to teleology. So, by Ockham’s razor, teleology must not be a real feature of the world. Of course, biological functions, human thought and action, and the like cannot be understood except in teleological terms. But that just shows that they must not really exist, because teleology doesn’t exist, because physics can explain everything that exists without it!

Another problem is that something like teleology is necessary to explain the facts that physics describes, at least if we regard any of them as embodying genuine causal relations. That is, in any event, the view of a number of contemporary philosophers of science and metaphysicians – George Molnar, C. B. Martin, John Heil, and other “new essentialist” writers – who have no theological ax to grind, but who regard dispositions as “directed at” their manifestations and thus as exhibiting what Molnar calls a kind of “physical intentionality.” This is (as historian of philosophy Walter Ott has noted) essentially a return to an Aristotelian-Scholastic understanding of final causality as a precondition of the intelligibility of efficient causality. Unless we suppose that an efficient cause A inherently “points” beyond itself to its typical effect (or range of effects) B as toward an end or goal, we have no way of making sense of why it is that A reliably does in fact generate B rather than C, D, or no effect at all.

Rosenberg doesn’t see the possibility of such a view because he has only the crudest conception of teleology -- he evidently thinks that a teleological explanation is one that simply postulates that “God designed it that way.” No one familiar with the Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions would make such a mistake, though someone who supposes that teleology and natural theology stand or fall with Paley-style “design arguments” is likely to. (As I have noted before, Rosenberg’s knowledge of natural theology seems to derive mostly from whatever was in the anthology his undergrad PHIL 101 teacher was using.)

Rosenberg also supposes that the second law of thermodynamics is incompatible with the existence of teleology. For “the second law tells us that the universe is headed to complete disorder” (in particular, heat death) and “no purpose or goal can be secured permanently under such circumstances” (p. 41). But the existence of teleology doesn’t require that an end or goal be realized permanently. And insofar as the second law of thermodynamics describes causal regularities -- and in particular a tendency toward disorder -- it would itself be an instance of teleology, not a counterexample to it.

(The subject of teleology is one I have devoted much attention to elsewhere , e.g. in chapter 6 of The Last Superstition, chapter 2 of Aquinas, and in a great many blog posts on the dispute between Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and “Intelligent Design” theory. I won’t repeat myself here -- interested readers are directed to these sources.)

So, Rosenberg has no good arguments for scientism, and thus no good arguments either for atheism or for the other, more bizarre conclusions he derives from scientism. As we will see in the remaining posts in this series, some of those conclusions are in any event incoherent, and thus constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that lead to them.

Before turning to these conclusions, though, it will be worthwhile examining Rosenberg’s brief attempt to counter kalam-style arguments for God as the cause of the Big Bang, with some alternative cosmological speculations of his own. We’ll do so in the next post in this series.

[Addendum: A reader calls attention to this critique of Rosenberg by Timothy Williamson, which dovetails with some of the points made above. A key line: “Those most confident of being undogmatic and possessing the scientific spirit may thereby become all the less able to detect dogmatism and failures of the scientific spirit in themselves.”]

Crickets still chirping... (Updated)

2011-11-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago, in the combox of a post on another topic, a reader asked for my opinion of Stephen Law’s “evil-god challenge” to theism. In the same combox, I dashed off some brief remarks in response. To my surprise, Law called attention to my off-the-cuff remarks over at his own blog, and offered a testy response in my combox. He suggested that I read his article on the subject and told his own readers: “I have rattled [Feser’s] cage with a comment… Wonder if he'll respond?”

Well, I did read his article and I did respond both to the article and to his combox remarks, non-polemically and in detail. Over a year later, I am still waiting for Law’s reply – a reply he said he would write. Wonder if he’ll ever get to it?

Mind you, I don’t necessarily blame him for not replying. He said he was busy, and I believe him. I am extremely busy myself and don’t have time to reply to more than a fraction of the people who comment on my work. But a reader’s remarks suggest that it may be a good idea for Law to get to it already:

I also listened to [William Lane Craig’s] first debate with Dr Stephen Law last Friday and found the debate both frustrating and confusing. Dr Law used the "Evil God Challenge" as his central (I might even say his only) argument of the night…

I also noticed that Stephen Law (on his website) had said that he would reply to your more considered critique when he was less busy, although he doesn't appear to have done so yet.

Considering that you had replied to him a full year ago, and pretty comprehensively it appeared to me, I was doubly surprised that he had chosen to go with the Evil God Challenge against Dr Craig. He appears to have been telling everyone how well he did in the debate on his own blog, as well as on other blogs to those who disagree with him, which I find disturbing.

If Law is going to keep presenting his “evil-god challenge” as if it were some knockout punch to theism generally, he really ought to reply to the points I made in my post. For as I argued there, Law’s “challenge,” to the extent that it has any force at all, is a threat at most only to the modern, historically idiosyncratic, and anthropomorphic conception of God enshrined in what Brian Davies has labeled “theistic personalism” (and what others have called “neo-theism”). It is irrelevant to the classical theism of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Aquinas, and classical (Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic) theology more generally. And thus it is irrelevant to what has historically been regarded as standard (and in some contexts, such as Catholicism, normative) Christian theology (not to mention historically standard Jewish theology, Muslim theology, or purely philosophical theology).

No doubt Law gets away with presenting his “evil-god challenge” as if it were a threat to theism in general because most of his readers and listeners are as ignorant as he evidently is of the classical theistic tradition. But while that may be good rhetorical strategy, it is bad philosophy.

Since posting my more detailed reply to Law, I have written up a couple of other posts relevant to the topic of the relationship between God, goodness, and morality. Readers interested in understanding what is wrong not only with Law’s argument but also with other common atheist arguments concerning God and morality (e.g. the so-called Euthyphro dilemma) are thus directed to the following:

“Law’s ‘evil-god challenge’”

“God, obligation, and the Euthyphro dilemma”

“Does morality depend on God?”

Readers who want a more detailed account of the classical theistic conception of God and how it differs from theistic personalism might also look at the following:

“William Lane Craig on divine simplicity”

“Davies on divine simplicity and freedom”

“Classical theism”

“God, man, and classical theism”

“The ‘one god further’ objection”

“A further thought on the ‘one god further’ objection”

Obviously, what I have to say on the subject in my books Aquinas and The Last Superstition is relevant too. (For example, anyone who is going to comment on the relationship between God and goodness had better know something about the Scholastic doctrine of the transcendentals, which I discuss in chapter 2 of Aquinas.)

UPDATE: See the combox below for a response by Stephen Law and my reply.