Review of Coyne

In the February 2016 issue of First Things, I review Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.

Reading Rosenberg, Part VIII

And now, dear reader, our critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality brings us to the pseudoscience du jour.  Wittgenstein famously said that “in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion” (Philosophical Investigations, II, xiv, p. 232).  He might as well have been talking about contemporary neuroscience -- or, more precisely, about how neuroscience becomes distorted in the hands of those rich in empirical data but poor in philosophical understanding.  Every week seems to bring some new sensationalistic claim to the effect that neuroscience has “shown” this or that -- that free will is an illusion, or that mindreading is possible, or that consciousness plays no role in human action -- supported by arguments notable only for the crudeness of the fallacies they commit.  

Tyler Burge has given the label “neurobabble” to this modern intellectual pathology, and Raymond Tallis calls it “neurotrash,” born of “neuromania.”  I’ve had reason to comment on it in earlier posts (here and here) and an extreme manifestation of the disease is criticized in the last chapter of The Last Superstition.  M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker subject neurobabble to detailed and devastating criticism in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, and Tallis does a bit of housecleaning of his own in Aping Mankind.  Neurobabble is a key ingredient in Rosenberg’s scientism.  Like so many other contemporary secularists, he has got the brain absolutely on the brain, and maintains that modern neuroscience vindicates some of his more outrageous metaphysical claims.  In particular, he thinks that so-called “blindsight” phenomena establish that consciousness is irrelevant to our actions, and that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s experiments cast doubt on free will.  (Jerry Coyne, in a recent article, has made similar claims about free will.  What I’ll say about Rosenberg applies to Coyne as well.)

Caught in the web

The Dictionary of Christianity and Science has just been published by Zondervan.  I contributed an essay to the volume.

Philosopher and AI critic Hubert Dreyfus has died.  John Schwenkler on Dreyfus at First Things.

A new article from David Oderberg: “Co-operation in the Age of Hobby Lobby: When Sincerity is Not Enough,” in the current issue of Expositions.  (Follow the link and click on the PDF.)

Philosopher Daniel Bonevac on being a conservative in academia, at Times Higher Education.

Addison’s disease (Updated)

Addison Hodges Hart is a Christian author, former Catholic priest, and the brother of theologian David Bentley Hart.  (From here on out I’ll refer to David and Addison by their first names, simply for ease of reference rather than by way of presuming any familiarity.)  A reader calls my attention to the Fans of David Bentley Hart page at Facebook, wherein Addison takes issue with my recent article criticizing his brother’s universalism.  His loyalty to his brother is admirable.   The substance of his response, not so much.  Non-existent, in fact.  For Addison has nothing whatsoever to say in reply to the content of my criticisms.  Evidently, it is their very existence that irks him.

Auld links syne

Get your geek on.  Blade Runner 2049 will be out in 2017.  So will Iron Fist, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Alien: Covenant, Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Defenders, and Thor: Ragnarok.  Season 2 of The Man in the High Castle is already here.

Bioteaching lists the top books in philosophy of science of 2016.

The 2017 Dominican Colloquium in Berkeley will take place July 12-15.  The theme is Person, Soul and Consciousness.  Speakers include Lawrence Feingold, Thomas Hünefeldt, Steven Long, Nancey Murphy, David Oderberg, Ted Peters, Anselm Ramelow, Markus Rothhaar, Richard Schenk, D. C. Schindler, Michael Sherwin, Eleonore Stump, and Thomas Weinandy.

I am overworked, therefore I link

Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Unger think that physics has gotten something really important really wrong.  NPR reports.

The relationship between Aristotelian hylemorphism and quantum mechanics is the subject of two among a number of recent papers by philosopher Robert Koons.

Hey, he said he would return.  At Real Clear Defense, Francis Sempa detects a revival of interest in General Douglas MacArthur.  The New Criterion reviews Arthur Herman’s new book on MacArthur, while the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard discuss Walter Borneman’s new book.

At The Catholic Thing, Matthew Hanley discusses Dario Fernandez-Morera’s book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain.

Lofter is the best medicine

New Atheist pamphleteer John Loftus is like a train wreck orchestrated by Zeno of Elea: As Loftus rams headlong into the devastating objections of his critics, the chassis, wheels, gears, and passenger body parts that are the contents of his mind proceed through ever more thorough stages of pulverization.  And yet somehow, the grisly disaster just never stops.  Loftus continues on at full speed, tiny bits of metal and flesh reduced to even smaller bits, and those to yet smaller ones, ad infinitum.  You feel you ought to turn away in horror, but nevertheless find yourself settling back, metaphysically transfixed and reaching for the Jiffy Pop.

Yuletide links

End-of-semester grading, Christmas shopping, and the like leave little time for substantive blogging.  So for the moment I’ll leave the writing to others:

Times Higher Education on the lunatic asylum that is Jerry Coyne’s combox.

Crisis on campus?  The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University speaks truth to pampered privilege: “This is not a day care. This is a university.”

At Public Discourse: Samuel Gregg on David Bentley Hart and capitalism; and Jeremy Neill argues that the sexual revolution will not last forever.

Traditional logic versus modern logic: What’s the difference?  Martin Cothran explains.  (Also, an older post by Cothran on the same subject.)

Caught in the net

Some of the regular readers and commenters at this blog have started up a Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion discussion forum.  Check it out.

Philosopher Stephen Mumford brings his Arts Matters blog to an end with a post on why he is pro-science and anti-scientism.  Then he inaugurates his new blog at Philosophers Magazine with a post on a new and improved Cogito argument for the reality of causation.

Speaking of which: At Aeon, Mathias Frisch discusses the debate over causation and physics.

The Guardian asks: Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?  And at Scientific American, John Horgan says that biologist Jerry Coyne’s new book “goes too far” in denouncing religion.

Causality and radioactive decay

At the Catholic blog Vox Nova, mathematics professor David Cruz-Uribe writes:

I… am currently working through the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas as part of his proofs of the existence of God… [S]ome possibly naive counter-examples from quantum mechanics come to mind.  For instance, discussing the principle that nothing can change without being affected externally, I immediately thought of the spontaneous decay of atoms and even of particles (e.g., so-called proton decay).

This might be a very naive question: my knowledge of quantum mechanics is rusty and probably out of date, and I know much, much less about scholastic metaphysics.  So can any of our readers point me to some useful references on this specific topic? 

Maudlin on the philosophy of cosmology

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.

Grow up or shut up

I’ve pointed out that the argument so many atheists like to attack when they purport to refute the cosmological argument -- namely “Everything has a cause; so the universe has a cause; so God exists” or variants thereof -- is a straw man, something no prominent advocate of the cosmological argument has ever put forward.  You won’t find it in Aristotle, you won’t find it in Aquinas, you won’t find it in Leibniz, and you won’t find it in the other main proponents of the argument.  Therefore, it is unfair to pretend that refuting this silly argument (e.g. by asking “So what caused God?”) is relevant to determining whether the cosmological argument has any force.    

I’ve also noted other respects in which the cosmological argument is widely misrepresented.  Now, in response to these points, it seems to me that what a grownup would say is something like this: “Fair enough.  I agree that atheists should stop attacking straw men.  They should avoid glib and ill-informed dismissals.  They should acquaint themselves with what writers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. actually said and focus their criticisms on that.”  But it would appear that Jason Rosenhouse and Jerry Coyne are not grownups.  Their preferred response is to channel Pee-wee Herman:  “I know you are, but what am I?” is, for them, all the reply that is needed to the charge that New Atheists routinely misrepresent the cosmological argument.  

Heisenberg on act and potency

What’s that? You say you’re itching for more quotes from popular science books written by major early twentieth-century quantum physicists, which tend to support a classical metaphysical picture of the world? Well OK then, friend, you’ve got it. Today let’s take a look at Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy.

Like many scientists of his generation (and unlike contemporary scientists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne), Heisenberg knew something about philosophy and its history, and took its problems seriously. In particular, he recognized that empirical science requires for its intelligibility a sound philosophy of nature (or metaphysics, as we might say today, though the other term is preferable – the philosophy of nature concerns the preconditions of there being an intelligible natural world, while the concerns of metaphysics are more general than that). Moreover, he saw that a return to certain classical philosophical notions was essential to making sense of modern physics.

Of course, it can hardly be maintained that Heisenberg subscribed in any wholesale way to a classical metaphysical picture of the world; he proposes, for example, that quantum theory calls for a revision of the law of the excluded middle. But he did at least tentatively endorse something like the fundamental notion of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics – the famous distinction between act and potency.

Regarding the “statistical expectation” quantum theory associates with the behavior of an atom, Heisenberg says:

One might perhaps call it an objective tendency or possibility, a “potentia” in the sense of Aristotelian philosophy. In fact, I believe that the language actually used by physicists when they speak about atomic events produces in their minds similar notions as the concept “potentia.” So the physicists have gradually become accustomed to considering the electronic orbits, etc., not as reality but rather as a kind of “potentia.” (pp. 154-5 in the 2007 Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition)

And again:

The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater… was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality. (p. 15)

And yet again:

The probability function combines objective and subjective elements. It contains statements about possibilities or better tendencies (“potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy), and these statements are completely objective, they do not depend on any observer; and it contains statements about our knowledge of the system, which of course are subjective in so far as they may be different for different observers. (p. 27)

Discussing, more generally, the relationship between matter and energy in modern physics, Heisenberg says:

If we compare this situation with the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, we can say that the matter of Aristotle, which is mere “potentia,” should be compared to our concept of energy, which gets into “actuality” by means of the form, when the elementary particle is created. (p. 134)

Now an A-T philosopher would want to clarify and qualify these claims. In the first two quotes, Heisenberg contrasts “potentia” with “reality.” What A-T says, though – and what Heisenberg himself clearly means, given the context – is not that potentials are not in any sense real, but rather that qua merely potential they have not been actualized. (Act and potency are in fact both real, but they are different kinds of reality. Part of the point of the distinction is to note that Parmenides’ notorious absolute distinction between being and non-being is too crude: There is, within the realm of being, a difference between the actuality of a thing and its potentials, and the latter are not to be assimilated to sheer non-existence.)

Furthermore, energy in the modern sense wouldn’t count as matter in the Aristotelian sense if what Heisenberg means by that is “prime matter,” viz. matter without any form whatsoever; for energy in the modern sense, given that it has a specific physical description, has form. (It might instead be, though, that what Heisenberg means to suggest is only that energy is the most fundamental kind of in-formed matter.)

In any event, it is clear that what Heisenberg is defending is a core thesis of A-T philosophy of nature, namely that we cannot make sense of the physical world behaving as it does without attributing to its basic components inherent powers which point beyond themselves to certain (often as yet unrealized) ends – a thesis that, as I have noted before, contemporary writers like Ellis, Cartwright, Molnar, and other “new essentialist” philosophers of science are starting to rediscover.

The smell of the sheep (Updated)

Being insulted by the pop atheist writer John Loftus is, to borrow Denis Healey’s famous line, like being savaged by a dead sheep.  It is hard to imagine that a human being could be more devoid of argumentative or polemical skill.  Commenting on my recent First Things exchange with atheist philosopher Keith Parsons, Loftus expresses bafflement at Parsons’ preference for the Old Atheism over the New Atheism.  Unable to see any good reason for it, Loftus slyly concludes: “Keith Parsons is just old.  That explains why he favors the Old Atheism.”  He also suggests that Parsons simply likes the attention Christians give him.

Well, as longtime readers of this blog will recall from his sometimes bizarre combox antics, Loftus certainly knows well the reek of attention-seeking desperation.  Sadly, being John Loftus, he tends to misidentify its source.

Reading Rosenberg, Part V

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.

Estranged notions

Strange Notions is a website devoted to discussion between Catholics and atheists and operated by Brandon Vogt.  It’s a worthwhile enterprise.  When he was getting the website started, Brandon kindly invited me to contribute to it, and also asked if he could reprint old posts from my blog.  I told him I had no time to contribute new articles but that it was fine with me if he wanted to reprint older pieces as long as they were not edited without my permission.  I have not kept a close eye on the site, but it seems that quite a few old blog posts of mine have been reprinted.  I hope some of Brandon’s readers find them useful, but I have to say that a glance at the site’s comboxes makes me wonder whether allowing such reprints was after all a good idea.  Certainly it has a downside.

Corrupting the Calvinist youth [UPDATED]

Some guy named “Steve” who contributes to the group apologetics blog Triablogue informs us that “Feser seems to have a following among some young, philosophically-minded Calvinists.”  (Who knew?)  “Steve” is awfully perturbed by this, as he has “considerable reservations” about me, warning that I am not “a very promising role model for aspiring Reformed philosophers.” And why is that?  Not, evidently, because of the quality of my philosophical arguments, as he does not address a single argument I have ever put forward.  Indeed, he admits that he has made only an “admittedly cursory sampling” of my work -- and, it seems, has read only some blog posts of mine, at that -- and acknowledges that “this may mean I'm not qualified to offer an informed opinion of Feser.”  So he offers an uninformed opinion instead, making some amazingly sweeping remarks on the basis of his “admittedly cursory” reading.  (Why that is the sort of example “aspiring Reformed philosophers” should emulate, I have no idea.)

Normally I ignore this sort of drive-by blogging, but since Triablogue seems to have a significant readership among people interested in apologetics, I suppose I should say something lest “Steve” corrupt the Calvinist youth by his rash example.

Repressed knowledge of God?

Christian apologist Greg Koukl, appealing to Romans 1:18-20, says that the atheist is “denying the obvious, aggressively pushing down the evidence, to turn his head the other way, in order to deny the existence of God.”  For the “evidence of God is so obvious” from the existence and nature of the world that “you’ve got to work at keeping it down,” in a way comparable to “trying to hold a beach ball underwater.”  Koukl’s fellow Christian apologist Randal Rauser begs to differ.  He suggests that if a child whose family had just been massacred doubted God, then to be consistent, Koukl would -- absurdly -- have to regard this as a rebellious denial of the obvious.  Meanwhile, atheist Jeffery Jay Lowder agrees with Rauser and holds that Koukl’s position amounts to a mere “prejudice” against atheists.  What should we think of all this?

Pre-Christian apologetics

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum.  The very first Christians debated with their opponents in a cultural context within which everyone knew that there is a God and that he had revealed himself through Moses and the prophets.  The question, given that background, was what to think of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hence the earliest apologists were, in effect, apologists for Christianity as opposed to Judaism, specifically.  That didn’t last long.  As Christianity spread beyond Judea into the larger Mediterranean world, the question became whether to accept Christianity as opposed to paganism.  Much less could be taken for granted. 

Still, significant common ground for debate was provided by Greek philosophy.  In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.

Dude, where’s my Being?

It must be Kick-a-Neo-Scholastic week.  Thomas Cothran calls us Nietzscheans and now my old grad school buddy Dale Tuggy implicitly labels us atheists.  More precisely, commenting on the view that “God is not a being, one among others… [but rather] Being Itself,” Dale opines that “this is not a Christian view of God, and isn’t even any sort of monotheism.  In fact, this type of view has always competed with the monotheisms.”  Indeed, he indicates that “this type of view – and I say this not to abuse, but only to describe – is a kind of atheism.”  (Emphasis in the original.) 

Atheism?  Really?  What is this, The Twilight Zone?  No, it’s a bad Ashton Kutcher movie (if you’ll pardon the redundancy), with metaphysical amnesia replacing the drug-induced kind -- Heidegger’s “forgetfulness of Being” meets Dude, Where’s My Car?