Here's a quote by materialist Andrew Melnyk.
The great chess grandmaster from Brazil, Henrique Meckiing, was at death's door from a rare disease. He is alive and well at 71 todya, and attributes this to a divine healing when his disease was at its worst. A devout Roman Catholic in the charismatic movement, he had a rating of 2606 at the age of 60.
Does Jesus still heal? Here.
Aristotle thought that it was good to think highly of yourself, so long as you don't take it too far. The Christian traditiion says that humility is a virtue and that pride is a sin. How does virtue theory deal with an issue like this?
After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object: it is as if we took out our eyes to look at them. Thus studied, his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenona which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth. As long as this dethronement refers only to the theoretical reason, it cannot be wholehearted. The scientist has to assume the validity of his own logic (in the stout old fashion of Plato or Spinoza) even in order to prove that it is merely subjective, and therefore he can only flirt with subjectivism. It is true that this flirtation sometimes goes pretty far. There are modern scientists, I am told, who have dropped the words truth and reality out of their vocabulary and who hold that the end of their work is not to know what is there but simply to get practical results. This is, no doubt, a bad symptom. But, in the main, subjectivism is such an uncomfortable yokefellow for research that the danger, in this quarter, is continually counteracted.
This includes different forms of the argument from reason than found in Miracles. Anscombe's rebuttals don't apply to some of what we find here.
Perhaps the idea of a mentalistic explanation requires some explanation. A moment ago I went out to get the mail. I believed that getting the mail would be a good thing, I know where the mailbox is, and so I fulfilled my intention to go out to the mailbox and get the mail. My actions had a purpose which I fulfilled. My feet moved, due to signals sent from my brain, but the ultimate reason why the atoms in my brain did what they did is that because they were directed by something possessing a purpose. Or, perhaps the atoms themselves had an inherent purpose. Something desired by some entity brought it about that the atoms moved the way they did.
But these types of explanations are
typically excluded from basic physics. In fact, not only purpose, but
intentionality or about-ness, normativity, and first-person perspective are
also excluded. The four fundamental forces
postulated by physics, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak
nuclear forces, are blind forces, which do not act for reasons. If gravity
operates on boulders falling in an avalanche, they will neither avoid my head
to spare my life nor strike me to punish my wickedness. No, the gravitational force has no mental life,
and genuinely physical particles have no mental life either. But what happens
at the mindless level of basic physics, according to materialism, determines what
goes on at all levels. It is true that physical events sometimes produce
results that an intentional agent would choose, indeed that is how natural selection
works. But in the final analysis, if materialism is true, it looks as if the
idea of intentions or purposes or desires or motives producing actions is bound
to be an illusion.
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
Max Planck
From Patricia Churchland.
The brains in our skulls function as they do largely because they are the product of a long evolutionary history. That fact is, of course, not a fact the brain's biological evolution gave it automatic knowledge of; rather, it is something brains have learned as a result of a long period of scientific evolution. Introspection reveals almost nothing about how nervous systems work, and from an evolutionary perspective, there is no reason why it should. If anything, human brains have a positive tendency to be misled about their nature. They tend to suppose they are not part of the biological order, that they are the result of special creation, that nervous tissue itself is not relevant to the understanding of the mind, and that introspection yields incontrovertible truths about a nonphysical mind, about the nature of free will, experience, knowledge, meaning, and language. What the evolutionary and neurobiological perspective makes evident, however, is that to understand how the brain works, introspection is unreliable. Rather, we must do experiments addressing a variety of levels of organization, and we must engage in real theorizing about how the brain functions
I have argued in defense of God by arguing against materialism. But what if God is just an unusual kind of material entity. After all, matter is just what science describes. If you include God as a theoretical entity in a scientific explanation, then God becomes a an unusal mateiral entity. No skin off the nose of Christians, right? If we can predict the activitiies of God to some extent (and we can) we can form testable theories about God.
No??????
Arthur Lovejoy, in 1922, describes the Behaviorism of his time.
Here. A paper by Daniel Bonevac. This is similar to Ross.
The early Church Fathers argued that the only answer is that there is a transcendent causal power making that relation possible. The power cannot be the forms themselves, or the form of the Good, as Plato thought, for our relation to them is precisely the point at issue. Nor can it be generated from finite minds themselves. The best explanation of our relation to the transcendent identifies the transcendent power with God. (17)
a. If realism is true, then, given a content bearer b, among our possibilities are skeptical scenarios for b.
b. Content bearers have specific contents.
c. A content bearer b can have a specific content only by virtue of some fact.
d. If there were a fact by virtue of which b had a specific content, there would be grounds for discounting skeptical scenarios for b.
e. There could be grounds for discounting skeptical scenarios for b only if b’s content is grounded in something transcendent.
f. Something independent of individual, finite minds can ground content only if there is something with causal power, independent of individual finite minds, that makes such grounding possible.
g. Only a transcendent causal power could make possible grounding in something transcendent.
h. Nothing natural is transcendent.
i. Anti-realism grounds content in some feature of a collection of finite minds.
j. A finite collection of finite minds does not suffice to explain the grounding of content.
k. An infinite collection of finite minds does not suffice to explain the grounding of content.
l. The best explanation for the existence of a supernatural, transcendent causal power grounding content in the transcendent includes an infinite mind and, in particular, the existence of God.
m. So, there is a God.
Plantinga's is an argument that is designed to be consistent with externalism. I have thought of it as the argument from the reliabillity of our rational faculties, though I think he ends up appealing to mental causation. However, I think there are some aspects of science that seem to require internalist accounts of knowledge. Sure, there's other knowledge, but for science to work a scientist has to be able to present his or her experimentaal process so that someone else can follow the same process and check to see if the result is the same. There are some kinds of knowledge where wee can say "It doesn't matter about the process so long as it's a reliable one." But if we are relying on that kind of knowledge in order for science to be possible, it won't work.
But our thoughts can only be accepted as a genuine insight under certain conditions. All beliefs have causes but a distinction must be drawn between (1) ordinary causes and (2) a special kind of cause called “a reason.” Causes are mindless events which can produce other results than belief. Reasons arise from axioms and inferences and affect only beliefs. Bulverism tries to show that the other man has causes and not reasons and that we have reasons and not causes. A belief which can be accounted for entirely in terms of causes is worthless. This principle must not be abandoned when we consider the beliefs which are the basis of others. Our knowledge depends on our certainty about axioms and inferences. If these are the results of causes, then there is no possibility of knowledge. Either we can know nothing or thought has reasons only, and no causes.
Materialism, ordinarily understood, means that all causation is mechanistic. Consider materialistic determinism. The basic elements are in some position at the beginning if there was one, and everything that happens to every basic element of the universe that is necessitated by the laws of physics. All other states that exist are states that follow necessarily from those basic physical states. On chance-and-necessity physicalism, there is a brute chance factor involved, but nothing at the base level is teleological, normative, perspectival, or intentional. You may get, as Churchland indicates, effects that one might think require intelligence, but they are in fact produced by stupid elements properly hooked up. This is teleonomy, not teleology, the quality of apparent purposefulness of structure in living organisms due to evolutionary adaptation.
When a Darwinian materialist says “The purpose of your eye is to see” it is not literally true. There are no true purposes in a materialist universe. However, the power to see did result in the eye being selected for. In the same way, if a materialist says that he accepts materialism because the evidence supports it, this is also not literally true.
IV. Argument from the Psychological Relevance of Logical Laws
My fourth argument concerned the role of logical laws in mental causation. In order for mental causation to be what we ordinarily suppose it to be, it is not only necessary that mental states be causally efficacious in virtue of their content, it is also necessary that the laws of logic be relevant to the production of the conclusion. That is, if we conclude “Socrates is mortal” from “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man, then no only must we understand the meanings of those expressions, and these meanings must play a central role in the performance of these inferences, but what Lewis call the ground-and-consequent relationship between the propositions must also play a central role in these rational inferences. We must know that the argument is structured in such a way that in arguments of that form the conclusion always follows from the premises. We do not simply know something that is the case at one moment in time, but we know something that must be true in all moments of time, in every possible world. But how could a physical brain, which stands in physical relations to other objects and whose activities are determined, insofar as they are determined at all, by the laws of physics and not the laws of logic, come to know, not merely that something was true, but could not fail to be true regardless of whatever else is true in the world.
There seem to be two lines of
criticism of arguments from reason. One is to argue, a la Moore and Anscombe,
that causal antecedents of belief are irrelevant to rationality, because
reasons are not causes. The other is to argue that, along the lines of Haldane
and Churchland, that mechanistic causation and rational inference are
compatible, explaining the confluence in terms of Darwinian survival advantage.
The former line of critique denies that reasons are causes, the other claims
that reasons are causes, but are a species of ordinary physical causation.
Some thinking (iudgment) is determinate in a way no physical process can be. Consequently, such thinking cannot be (wholly5) a physical process. If all thinking, all judgment, is determinate in that way, no physical process can be (the whole of) any judgment at all. Furthermore, "functions" among physical states cannot be determinate enough to be such judgments, either. Hence some judgments can be neither wholly physical processes nor wholly functions among physical processes.
The argument from reason, I am being told, has a problem because it focuses exclusively on the parts (atoms) and doesn't take wholes seriously.
If this argument in Hume's Dialogues is right, wholes are products of "an arbitary act of the mind." Wholes, including brains, depend on being thought together by minds.
In such a chain too, or succession of objects,
each part is caused by that which preceded it,
and causes that which succeeds it. Where then
is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you
say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting
of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of
several distinct counties into one kingdom, or
several distinct members into one body, is per|formed
merely by an arbitrary act of the mind,
and has no influence on the nature of things.
Did I show you the particular causes of each in|dividual
in a collection of twenty particles of
matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should
you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of
the whole twenty. That is sufficiently explained
in explaining the cause of the parts.
Patricia Smith Churchland, however,
in response to a version of the Argument from Reason presented by Geoffrey
Madell, attempts to defend materialism by suggesting that although humans,
unlike computers, are not products of intelligent design, the evolutionary
process simulates intelligent design in such a way as to provide reason:
There is a fatal tendency to
assume that intentionality cannot just be a function of the neurons and their
connectivity, but that there must be someone in the head who interprets
neuronal signals, who sees the activation patterns of the visual cortex, who
takes the data and makes a free decision, and so on. As Dan Dennett has tirelessly
pointed out, postulating homunculi does not explain anything - it just defers
the question. And on this, even someone as wedded to intrinsic intentionality
as Searle, agrees. If AI has taught us anything, it is that effects which seem
to require an intelligent homunculus can really be done by stupid elements
properly hooked up. Who hooked us up? Evolution.
So, not only do we have a Blind
Watchmaker, we have a Blind Programmer.
But stupid elements cannot
select in the interests of truth, and can they add up to determinate meanings?
Without determinate meanings it is never clear what anyone means by anything,
and logic is impossible.
Determinism is the view that given what happened in the distant past (which you and I had nothing to do with) the future is inevitable. Such past events can simply be the positions of the material particles in the universe as of, say, July 13, 1950 at 12:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. Or the set of past event could include choices God might have made to predetermine that such and such will happen. Whether it's physical or divine, given that past state, the future is inevitable. If you play a CD with Ariana Grande's music, you will hear her songs the same way every time you play it, and you won't hear Demi Lovato instead. It's predetermined.
The argument from
reason says that reason cannot emerge from a closed, mechanistic system. The
computer is, narrowly speaking, a mechanistic system, and it does “follow”
rational rules. But not only was the computer made by humans, the framework of
meaning that makes the computer’s actions intelligible is supplied by humans.
As a set of physical events, the actions of a computer are just as subject as
anything else to the indeterminacy of the physical. If a computer plays the
move Rf6, and we see it on the screen, it is our perception and understanding
that gives that move a definite meaning. In fact, the move has no meaning to
the computer itself, it only means something to persons playing and watching
the game. Suppose we lived in a world without chess, and two computers were to
magically materialize in the middle of the Gobi desert and go through all the
physical states that the computers went through the last time Fritz played
Shredder. If that were true they would not be playing a chess game at all,
since there would be no humans around to impose the context that made those
physical processes a chess game and not something else. Hence, I think that we
can safely regard the computer objection as a red herring.
Sexual orientation is a matter of who you are naturally attracted to sexually. Some people seem to be sexually attracted to the same sex, others to both sexes, and some only to the opposite sex. Now, traditional sexual morality says that these desires can only be acted on where there is a marriage, and marriage, in the sacred sense is only possible for opposite-sex partners. I seriously doubt that this is simply genetic, as some have argued, but for some people at least it doesn't seem to be alterable. Trying to "pray the gay away" doesn't seem to work for some people, and the failure of Exodus International seems to support this contention. But if traditional Christian sexual morality holds, then people who are in this condition through no fault of their own are morally obligated to be celibate. It doesn't seem to me that those who are in that condition can alter their condition, nor does it seem to me that they had to have committed some sin in order to get into that condition.
Unlike Balfour, J. B. S. Haldane is quoted by C. S. Lewis. Also
unlike Balfour, Haldane was a dedicated atheist. He wrote in 1934 “My practice
as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I
assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and
this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my
professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were
not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.” Haldane was also a virulent
Lewis critic who considered Lewis a “danger to clear thinking.” He once gave a
presentation on behalf of atheism at the Oxford Socratic Club with Lewis
present but departed without answering questions, preventing any in-person
exchange between the two of them.
Nevertheless,
in 1927 Haldane offers a reason for rejecting materialism. He writes.
"It seems to me immensely
unlikely that mind is a mere byproduct of matter. For if my mental processes
are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to
suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does
not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my
brain to be composed of atoms."
What he seems to have been committed to at this stage is some
version of Absolute Idealism, as evidenced by this passage:
But I notice that when I
think logically and scientifically or act morally my thoughts and actions cease
to be characteristic of myself, and are those of any intelligent or moral being
in the same position; in fact, I am already identifying my mind with an
absolute or unconditioned mind.
However, by 1940 he wrote “Why I am a materialist,” giving an account of his rejection of his previous idealistic philosophy but not rebutting the specific argument he had provided.
But in
1954, after Lewis in 1947 had quoted him so prominently in the third chapter of
Miracles, he wrote “I Repent an Error,” for Literary Guide, in which he
responded to the passage Lewis had quoted. Haldane’s counter-response bears
little resemblance to Anscombe’s reply to Lewis, but is resembles how many
naturalists’ respond when they first encounter the argument. Benjamin Fain
summarizes it as follows.
….computers act in
accordance with the laws of physics, and despite that they act in full
accordance with the laws of logic. The human mind can be represented by the
brain, which we can compare to the computer. It is simultaneously a physical
and logical being.
The context here is that I have been working on a paper on the history of arguments from reason. Balfour seems like the first post-Darwin version of the argument, and Haldane is interesting because he uses the argument against materialism, then develops a rebuttal to his own argument based on computers which I think more closely resembles a lot of people's responses than did Anscombe's rebuttal. Popper is interesting because he defends the earlier Haldane against his later self.
Here's a BIG problem for people who think that the physical facts determine all the facts. There is a possible world in which I am you and you are me, despite the fact that the two worlds are physically identical.
You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning.
And in a period when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind. A man who has experienced love from within will deliverately go about to inspect it analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience.
The extreme limit of this self-binding is seen in those who, like the rest of us, have consciousness, yet go about to study the human organism as if they did not know it was conscious. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.”
–C. S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 1949/2001), 114-5.
What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.
Some people believe that government's primary role is to protect people from violent threat, but not so much to protect people from misfortune that does not stem from violent threat. Liberals wonder whyconservatives are so strong on national defense and law enforcement but less motivated toward government action to protect us against disease. I think this is a dividing point between liberals and conservatives historically.
Balfour’s presentation in Foundations of Belief faced a well-known critic, G.E. Moore. Moore wrote;
In science, how beliefs are
produced seems to matter, and matter profoundly. Some belief-forming mechanisms
work effectively without our knowing how they work. Star basketball players
would be hard-pressed to provide algorithms as to how they decide when to
shoot, pass, or drive the lane. But science depends crucially on or ability not
only to make inferences, but to communicate those inferences in such a way that
others in the scientific community can repeat the process and determine whether
they concur or not. The paradox of science is that while science seems happiest
analyzing realities that are mindless machines, the description they have to give
of their own activity in order for that activity to be legitimate is invariably
and inescapably mentalistic. Propositions are chosen, and others rejected, on
the grounds that they conform to the evidence. In fact, atheists like Richard
Dawkins never tire of telling us that their process of selecting beliefs
concerning religious claims is evidence-based, while the religionists they
criticize ignore evidence. In other words, Dawkins is saying that, unlike
religionists, his activities in choosing to accept or reject religious claims can
be explained in mentalistic terms, the terms of evidence evaluation. But wouldn’t
that be nonsense if nothing in the universe, in the final analysis, has a
mentalistic explanation?
1. If
naturalism is a rational position, then science is a legitimate way of knowing
the world, if not the only legitimate way of knowing the world.
2. If
science is a legitimate way of knowing the world, then some people infer their
beliefs from other beliefs. This is essential to the scientific method.
3. If
some people infer beliefs from other beliefs, then some things in reality act
for reasons.
4. But
if naturalism is true, nothing in reality acts for reasons. Everything acts due
to non-rational causes.
5. Therefore,
if naturalism is true, science is not a legitimate way of knowing the world.
6. Therefore,
if naturalism is true, naturalism is not a rational position.
7. If
a thesis can be a rational position only if the position is false, then that thesis
if not a rational position.
8. Therefore,
naturalism is not a rational position.
If materialism is true, it's impossible for evidence to determine what ssmeone believes. What someone believes is determined by the basic forces of physics. Evidence is not a basic force of physics, so it cannot really cause belief if materialism is true. People who believe in materialism based on evidence exist only if maeriaalism is false.
Lewis mentions Balfour’s Theism
and Humanism in one place, but the closest parallel to the argument Lewis used
in Miracles comes in Lewis’s book The Foundations of Belief, originally
published in 1895.
Balfour’s argument derives four
propositions from what he calls the “naturalistic creed.”
1) My
beliefs, in so far as they are the result of reasoning at all, are founded on
premises produced in the last resort by the “collision of atoms.”
2) Atoms,
having no prejudices in favour of truth, are as likely to turn out wrong
premises as right ones; nay, more likely, inasmuch as truth is one and error
manifold.
3) My
premises, therefore, in the first place, and my conclusions in the second, are
certainly untrustworthy, and probably false. Their falsity, moreover, is of a
kind which cannot be remedied; for any attempt to correct it must start from
premises not suffering from the same defect. But no such premises exist.
4) Therefore,
again, my opinion about the original causes which produced my premises, as it
is an inference from them, partakes of the same weakness; so that I cannot
either accurately doubt my own certainties or be certain of my own doubts.
In
other words, if naturalism, then skepticism. But if skepticism is true, then we
have to be as skeptical about naturalism as we are about anything else
Importantly,
Balfour considers the Evolutionary Rebuttal to this argument. Evolutionary
biology “establishes the existence of a machinery which, irrational thought it
may be, does really bend gradually, and in the long run, to produce true
opinions rather than false.” That machinery, of course, is natural selection.
This brings the organism into more and more perfect harmony with the
environment.
But
he finds the Evolutionary Rebuttal to be less than adequate. He writes:
But what an utterly inadequate basis
for speculation is here. We are to suppose that the powers that evolved in primitive
man and his animal progenitors in order that they might kill with success and
marry in security, are on that account, sufficient to explore the secrets of
the universe. We are to suppose that the fundamental beliefs on which these powers
of reasoning are to be exercised reflect with sufficient precision remote
aspects of reality, though they were produced in the main by physiological processes
which date from a stage of development when the only curiosities that had to be
satisfied were those of fear and those of hunger.
He
concludes:
I
do not think believe that any escape from these perplexities is possible unless
we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was
the work of a rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in
however feeble a fashion, able to understand it.
This is the Foundatons of Bellief, available in its entirety on Google Books.
The passages I quoted from start on p. 306.
In the second place he convinced me that the positions we had hitherto held left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in the technical sense of the term, "realists"; that is, we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses. But at the same time we continued to make for certain phenomena of consciousness all the claims that really went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was "valid", and our aesthetic experience not merely pleasing but "valuable". The view was, I think, common at the time; it runs through Bridges' Testament of Beauty, the work of Gilbert Murray, and Lord Russell's "Worship of a Free Man". Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent. If thought were a purely subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned. If one kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the senses, aided by instruments and co-ordinated so as to form "science", then one would have to go much further--as many have since gone--and adopt a Behaviouristic theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. But such a theory was, and is, unbelievable to me. I am using the word "unbelievable", which many use to mean "improbable" or even "undesirable", in a quite literal sense. I mean that the act of believing what the behaviourist believes is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into the cavity at the base of that same bottle. It is as final as a physical impossibility. I was therefore compelled to give up realism. I had been trying to defend it ever since I began reading philosophy. Partly, no doubt, this was mere "cussedness". Idealism was then the dominant philosophy at Oxford and I was by nature "against Government". But partly, too, realism satisfied an emotional need. I wanted Nature to be quite independent of our observation; something other, indifferent, self-existing. (This went with the Jenkinian zest for rubbing one's nose in the mere quiddity.) But now, it seemed to me, I had to give that up. Unless I were to accept an unbelievable alternative, I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.
Left wing argument for outlawing abortion:
1. Fetuses are an oppressed class, like blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, and lesbians. They must be protected in the name of social justice (and Critical Birth Theory).
Right-wing argument for abortion choice:
If abortion is outlawed, then a lot of babies that would otherwise be aborted will be born under difficult economic circumstances. These will have to be cared for through an expanison of the social welfare system. It will motivate such socialist proposal as paid family leave. In order to protect capitalism, we mut affirm a woman's right to choose abortion.
So why are all the pro-lifers on the right, and all the pro-choicers on the left?
But at the base level of analysis we can form expectations of where every atom in the universe will be indepenent of any meaning or purpose. It can look as if meaning and purposes have results as to where atoms in the universe will be at some time (such as why I am choosing just these words to put iinto this post) but if materialism is true the location of every atom in this computer can be best predicted without reference to anything I mean to say here. This includes not only the physically determined but intelligently designed computer, but also my brain which chooses my words at this very moment. which ex hypothesi was not inteligently designed. If determinism is true, then a Laplacian Physicist could, given the state of the atoms (and yes, you could write the laws of physics into the state of the the atoms rather than making the laws independent of it, but that would not change my argument) perfectly wihtout reference to anything mental. There would then still be truths of supervenience which indicate what pattens of physical states exist, if physical states are arranged a certain way, but these fact exist without intelligent content. If physicalism is true, the appearnce of believing something for a reason is just that--appearance. An opera singer can appear to cause a window to break by singing the words "Shatter now." but we know that itis physical causes, not intelligible content, that causes the window to shatter. In the same way, given physicalism, a philosopher may have the illusion that he has inferred the nonexistence of God from the evil in the world, but what the physicalist believes, once the logical implicationa of physicalism are drawn, entails he the philosopher has done no such thing. The blind physical processes of physics have caused his "conclusion," and the claim to have inferred anything is an illusion.
Transference between parts and wholes is tricky. But if there is no teleology in the parts, there is no teleology in the whole. A brick wall is six feet tall because the bricks add up to six feet. But nonteleological activity on the part of basic particles means no real telelogy at the higher levels. The explanation at the basic level provides a sufficient cause, so the mental explanation is otiose.
Suppose Hannibal invites someone over for dinner, shoves them into the oven, and cooks them AS dinner. You discover what Hannibal has done, and maintain that he has done something very unethical. He replies that ethics is subjective, and the from his subjective point of view, he did nothing wrong.
Is ethics really subjective?
Here's a Christian who says they do. The implication is that they really know in their hearts that there is a God, but are suppressing it.
In spite of the snobby attitude that a lot of people have towards Lewis, I would point out that Lewis tutored philosophy at Oxford University before taking a permanent job as professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford. How many of you could get a job as a tutor in philosophy at Oxford?
Do you think there are no exceptional cases where there is a medical reason to do a gender reassignment.? Granted. I think the trans craze of the early 21st Century will I think be viewed as crazy by future generations, in much the way the eugenics craze of the previous century is now viewed (How could they have thought that?). But does it follow that birth assigments are infallible?
Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, defends the Washington School District for ending its student teacher contract with Arizona Christian University. It isn't because ACU is Christian, it's because it affirmation of traditional marriage is "bigoted," diversity and inclusion is, he thinks, consistent with excluding such "bigots."
