My road to the ID problem

I thought I should spell out some of my own intellectual history as it bears on the Creationism, evolution, and ID issue. I remember being in grade school when some minister in Phoenix tried to get an initiative on the ballot banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. The minister of my church, Central Methodist in downtown Phoenix, gave a sermon opposing the effort, saying that Christians do not need to oppose evolution. I had always grown up with the idea that opposition to evolution was in order to defend what I thought was a hyper-literal understanding of the book of Genesis. I could never see why you had to accept that kind of literalism in order to be a Christian, and so the evolution problem didn't seem to be something you had to get so worked up about. C. S. Lewis never supported the kind of creationism that I encountered during my undergraduate days. Besides, if you really want to say the world was created in six literal days, then a conflict with Darwin is the least of your worries. Garden-variety astronomy is sufficient to cause a problem. If there are stars out there more than 6000 light years away, and the universe was created 6000 years ago, then we have a problem. Further, these creationsts believed in a worldwide Noachian flood. Let's see, all the animals in the WHOLE WORLD had to get on the ark, the ark is only yea big, (the Bible tells you how big it is), and then after the flood is over, the kangaroos have to get back to Australia, the three-toed sloths, who ordinarily live up to their name, have to go lickety-split to go back to the tip of South America, and so forth. If you say, "It's a mystery but God managed it," then please don't complain about the mysteries left by the theory of evolution.

At the same time, I thought, and still think, the historical case for a miraculous career and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is, on the whole, reasonably good. Just as an example, what sense does a skeptic make of Acts 4: 7-13:

They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: "By what power or what name did you do this?" Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: "Rulers and elders of the people! If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He is " 'the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone.' Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

I mean this takes guts. Peter is basically telling the people who got Jesus crucified (and therefore have the power to get people crucified), that Jesus, whom they condemned to death, was right and they were wrong, and that God had proved that by raising Jesus from the dead. If you say something like that, you had better be right, because there's an awfully good chance you are going to end up on another one of those crosses.

Things like this are the cornerstone of the standard historical apologetic which I first encountered in Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict. That book has many deep flaws, but I think the resurrection apologetic is a strong one.

But I became a philosophy major, and encountered Hume's essay on Miracles. Here was a problem. Hume's argument implied that no matter how stong the evidence for a resurrection is, we should reject a miraculous historical account "from the very nature of the fact." Hume presents this test case for the question of the miraculous;

But suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January, 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprised at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it: I should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was, nor possibly could be real. You would in vain object to me the difficulty, and almost impossibility of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice: all this might astonish me; but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.

Now this strikes me as going a little too far. It would have the implication of making it impossible for Almighty God to convince Hume (except perhaps by performing a miracle that Hume directly perceived) to reasonably believe that He existed. I ended up writing three papers in college in seminary on the Hume's argument, and eventually I wrote two published papers on the subject, one that appears at www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/miracles.html, but the first appeared in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion in 1989, entitled "Miracles and the Case for Theism."

Now the odd thing was that although I never especially wanted to defend creationism, very often the arguments against it sounded a little too much like Hume on miracles to be correct. One book I read attacking creationism actually used Hume's essay to do it.

When I studied New Testament criticism, I reacted to the radical Bultmannian stuff (precursors of the Jesus-seminar stuff that is coming out today) much the way Lewis did: the most sensible explanations involve accepting the reports as mostly accurate. Attempts to avoid this have always seemed contrived; the really ridiculous phenomenon was those attempts to preserve Jesus as a hero while accounting for his actions naturalistically. The arguments used by Bultmann weren't even as serious as Hume's; all he said that in the modern era we can't continue to use the wireless and the electric light and believe at the same time in the NT world of spirits and miracles. (Why? Isn't this just a bald version of the fallacy of chronological snobbery?)

So while I didn't care about defending creationists, at the same time I had found that dogmatic methodological naturalism, in the case of people like Bultmann, didn't lead to more "scientific creativity"(as BDK would say), it led either to groundless guesswork or the frank confession that we have no idea what happened. (That's really what you have to conclude if you think supernaturalism is false, since all the available sources are tainted. But people keep re-inventing the Historical Jesus while impugning the reliability of any of the sources that would tell us anything about Jesus).

So some people come along and say "Forget all that Genesis literalism. Can't we figure out a way to determing if things in nature have intelligent designers? After all, we do make "no-design or design decisions" on a regular basis .

In my first published paper, the above-mentioned "Miracles and the Case for Theism," I wrote:

"We can illustreate the problem of reasonably believing that nature has been interfered with by using the example of a poker game. Now it is certainly possible for events to occur in a poker game that are impossible given its rules, e. g. if five aces were to be dealtina poker hand, that could only occur if someone had tampered with the deck. On the other hand, consider a game in which the dealer's best friend gets royal flush after royal flush. Were the dealer to be accused of cheating, he might suggest that the charge of cheating had not been proved, since it is afterall possible that the hands dealt came up at random. Nevertheless, players in the game would be well advised, for thes ake of their own pocketbooks, to regard such hands as the result of intelligent "interference" on the part of the dealer with the ordinary pattern of dealing. There are always players, of ocurse, who are inclined to suspect cheating every time they get a run of bad luck, just as there are people who are inclined to jump to the conclusion that a miracle has occurred every time someone testifies to something the least bit unusual. On the other hand contintued refusal to suspect interference on the grounds that, after all, it is possible for a string of unusual hands to work by chance to the advantage of the dealer's best friend, would be clearly irrational and hazardous to one's wealth.

Of course, if soemone does not believe that there is an intellgent dealer, then he can reasonably be expected to be more reluctant than otherwise to suspect foul play. If, for example, there wree a supposedly tampre-proof dealing maching, more evidence than ordinary would be required to convice us that the cards were being interfered with. Yet if the evidence were strong, or if ewe had some dounts to begin with about the machine's being tamper-proof, we might be convinced that some bright young hacker had rigged the machine. If a coherent story can be told about how the mahcine came to be rigged, and that story generates expectations about what we should expect to occur, then that account can be confirmed or disconfirmed by future events. Similarly, in the case of miracle claims, we can ask ourselves wheter the evidence,

all things being equal, is mroe like what we sould expect given a miracle, or more l ike what we should expect if there had been no miracle. If the evidence more resembles what we should expect given the miracle, then this evidence is mroe like what we should expect if thesim is true than if naturalism is true. Therefore, evidence for miracles can be evidence for theism.

Later, Plantinga would illustrate my point in a more colorful manner, in his review of Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea entitled Darwin, Mind and Meaning, in the context of the "fine-tuning" argument for theism:

Dennett's rejoinder to the argument is that possibly, "there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity." And given infinitely many universes, Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out; as it happens, we find ourselves in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow for the development of intelligent life (where else?).

Well, perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? "Waal, shore, Tex, I know it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet yore yap, ya dumb galoot." Dennett's reply shows at most ('at most', because that story about infinitely many universes is doubtfully coherent) what was never in question: that the premises of this argument from apparent design do not entail its conclusion. But of course that was conceded from the beginning: it is presented as a probabilistic argument, not one that is deductive valid. Furthermore, since an argument can be good even if it is not deductively valid, you can't refute it just by pointing out that it isn't deductively valid. You might as well reject the argument for evolution by pointing out that the evidence for evolution doesn't entail that it ever took place, but only makes that fact likely. You might as well reject the evidence for the earth's being round by pointing out that there are possible worlds in which we have all the evidence we do have for the earth's being round, but in fact the earth is flat. Whatever the worth of this argument from design, Dennett really fails to address it.

So, in spite of growing up pretty much a theistic evolutionist, I have trouble with attacks on ID which maintain that it's a nonstarted because it appeals to the supernatural. In fact it may well be that terms like "natural" and "supernatural" should not be used without some detailed definitional work. But that is a subject for another entry.

Answering an Inquiry on LIbertarian Free Will

Dr. Reppert,

My name is Ross Parker. I'm 24 years old and I am about to start seminary at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I'm a frequent visitor to your blog, and I have learned greatly from your comments in the field of Philosophy of Religion, especially your critiques of the Calvinistic worldview. I have a philosophical question that has really caused a lot of confusion and frustration for me over the past several weeks, so I was hoping that you could help me out.
I have always firmly believed that I have Free Will-- that my decisions are up to me. I have never been able to make sense of the Calvinistic worldview. How can God cause all events (including people's sins, and souls being eternally seperated from Him in Hell ) and at the same time be a loving God.

Recently I decided I would read up on the issue of Free Will from a philosophical perspective. Here I encountered my first critiques of the concept of Libertarian Free Will. The major critique that caught me right between the eyes (so to speak) was the argument that our decisions are dictated by our strongest motive. The argument (as I'm sure you know) says that not only is the concept of LFW wrong; it is impossible. Decisions are either 1) caused by psychological factors or 2) random and therefore not "up to me".

So I'm in kind of a mental bind. I firmly believe that we have to be free in a Libertarian sense in order to make sense of our common experience of life as well as making sense of the existence of evil and a loving God. But I am clueless as to how LFW "works" (for lack of a better term). The more I think about the issue the more I can't make sense of how I would make a decision if there is no reason that causes the decision. But that would take away my responsibility for the action, and make God responsible for the evil actions that I do.

If you get a chance, I hope that you can respond to my inquiry regarding a rational account of free agency. Perhaps you could recommend the best article or book that you can think of to help me out. I know that you're very busy, so there is no rush. But I hope that you will be able to give me a little insight. I certainly look forward to hearing back from you!

Sincerely,

Ross Parker

This argument is a false dilemma that begs the question against agent causation. By way of response, I would look at chapter 4 of William Hasker's The Emergent Self.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801487609/ref=olp_product_details/103-9250044-6235862?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance
Also, Jerry Walls' book Why I am Not a Calvinist should cover this, though I haven't actually read it.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830832491/qid=1124171011/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9250044-6235862
Let us say you being tempted to commit adultery. You have your desire for what pleasure it would bring you on the one side, and the reasons not to do it on the other. You have reasons for both actions, and agency libertarianism says you can perform either action, you can choose to follow one set of reasons or the other. Your action isn't reasonless either way; but it's your choice which reason you follow. To say that there has to be a determining cause here is to assume determinism, a question-begging position for a determinist to take.

Jason Pratt on ID

I got this note from Jason Pratt:

The question was recently asked, whether failures of Darwinism can be pointed to, similar to the crop failures resulting from trying to apply Lamarckism.In one sense, the obvious answer is that no such similar failure could_ever_ occur; because Lamarckism has a bit of leeway in its basis proposal which could allow the introduction of intentional development (e.g. a person _chooses_ to do this or that, and so passes on any physiological advantages thus gained genetically); whereas neo-Darwinian theory explicitly and exclusively proposes non-directed accidental effective mechanism. Consequently, any directed experiment (whether success orfailure) necessarily includes an element in its process and result which is supposed to be utterly foreign to the whole point of NDT process and result. Parts of the biological mechanism can be tested, and inferences can be drawn about how well the results fit into the basis theory; but the basis theory itself cannot (in this case) be validly tested.The results of testing parts of the mechanism can of course be combined with inferences grounded in systematic observations about actual real-world behavior; with these being compared to inferences grounded in what thebasis theory itself should be implying.So, for instance, if gradualistic NDT is correct, there should be asignificantly large number of 'link species' still in biological play.Mutant B from species A, isn't going to increase its numbers unless it canstill breed with species A. Ditto for Mutant C, D, etc. At some point (callit species X--the changes all being gradual, per gradualism), X shouldn'tbe able to breed with A anymore, and so an actually new species would be inexistence.(Taxonomically I suppose it wouldn't be called a species--a genus maybe? In popular pro-NDT arguments it's still called a new species, generalizing for the sake of simplicity--and I'm okay with that; the principles would be ineffect either way.) But even once X is in existence, there also ought to be a significant number of transitional species still around, able to interbreed with oneanother fairly successfully. (Even if, say, species F has gone extinct in the meanwhile, species K still ought to be able to breed fairlysuccessively with species D et al.) Humans, for instance, ought to be a rare exception--we can't breed with anything else, all our previous transitional species having gone extinct in the meanwhile (maybe because weintentionally killed them off?)In point of fact, however, we humans _aren't_ the rare exception. Cats, for instance, cannot breed with skunks, even though these are genetically very close to feline; just as we cannot breed with gorillas or chimpanzees. Thisis the very common norm. Whereas, even if X can no longer breed with A,there still should be x-number of genetically distinctive intermediary interbreeders between them, _all_ of which are capable of breeding with each other (except for X and A). It's also rather hard to see how multiple kinds of DNA configuration (different numbers of chromosomes, different amounts of DNA per chromosome,etc.) could effectively be transmitted once accidentally generated.A mutation to a gamete-producing cell, or a copy error from such a cell while producing a gamete, could theoretically generate a change of that sort (and it should be obvious that only cell mutations of this very limited sort would be in any position at all to generate mutants--heartcell mutations don't generate mutant offspring for instance). The question is whether the resulting mutant--assuming the mutation even succeeds in running the gamut of sheer luck against any particular gamete, up to thepoint of becoming a breedible entity that is actually performing nominal breeding operations (so to speak)--is carrying anything in his/her/its own gametes that could successfully pair up with non-mutated gametes (keeping in mind that only one pair of the mutant's chromosomes would be carrying the mutation in the first place at all--half the gametes being fired by the mutant will be altogether non-mutated, therefore not possibly sending along the mutation.) And this is only at the macrobiological level. The feasibility of the theory doesn't (currently) hold up very well at the microbiological level either.
Preliminary microbiological restrictions----------------------------------------
The key restriction that must be remembered, is this: **If a protein ismade from a random order of amino acids, chances are nearly certain the protein will do nothing at all.** Furthermore, in many (though not all) cases, something must already be in existence to be the _receiver_ of the protein behavior. Some proteins behave in ways that build such receiver-units, of course. The point is that even if a protein's order might do something, it usually needs a receptor already capable of receiving it to work. Otherwise it might as well be totally useless.Thus, (at least) five levels of protein functionality-composition: a.) the new protein is totally function less in any possible situation (within that organism); b.) the new protein would function if there was a receptor, but there isn't one; c.) a receptor exists which can receive the effect of the protein, but theuse is harmful or effectively neutral; d.) a receptor exists, which can _usefully_ use the protein;ande.) the protein builds a receptor. (It may be possible that this always results in a receptor which canusefully use a protein that does already exist; but I haven't yet heardthis for sure.) The complexity (and restrictions) intensify when we consider that sometimesa road (so to speak) must already exist to get the protein _to_ an alreadyexistant receptor.Aside from questions of original mutations _accidentally_ creating DNA sequences which generate proteins that build receptors and/or roads; anysubsequent random mutation in a DNA sequence becomes exponentially more improbable to generate useful (not even merely useable) proteins the more accidentally complex (so to speak) the organism _already_ is. Besides receptors, and roads (the chemical paths between receptors andDNA), the relevant reactions also require 'catalyst' chemicals. In many cases: no catalysts, no reactions at all. These protein catalysts are the'enzymes'. Enzymes are terribly important in another way, too. They not only helpcertain chemical reactions to work at all, they also help speed reactionsup to rates that are useful. All known enzymes speed up protein-receptor chemical reactions by a factor of at least a million. Factors of ten billion to a hundred trillion are not uncommon (i.e. a reaction that would normally take 3000 years happens in 1/1000th of a second.) One way or another (or sometimes both), enzymes are absolutely necessaryfor the other existant processes to work; thus adding yet another development-complexity factor--and adding yet another way in which an accidental copy error of the DNA in the chromosomes could (much morelikely) mess something up (rather than adding functionality). As I have been stressing, any addition to (existant) complexity not only adds development time constraints (especially when we consider that someextinct species _already_ had biological and genetic systems virtually as complex, at the microbiological level, as modern animals--subtractx-hundred million years for _their_ development time). It also adds increased liklihood that a random mutation will result in something that runs _against_ the existing system.Granted, a system could be complex enough, _in the correct ways_, to bemore tolerant to random copy errors. (Though mere toleration isn't the sameas positive increase of effective complexity.) But this level and (far moreimportantly) type of complexity cannot be legitimately posited to _already_exist to offset the problems which must be overcome _before_ such a system(on naturalistic evolutionary theories) _does_ exist.Also granted, any redundancy in DNA molecules might help overcome thedemerits of a bad copy error (mutation); but accounting for the developmentof those redundancies themselves introduces more complexity (and tightensthe time constrains for species development), even if it doesn't actually harm the organism. Which itself is somewhat questionable--a newly mutated creator-strand of protein 'x' will at least be taking up resources making that many more protein 'x's which could have been spent (with more overtprofit to the organism) elsewhere. Any excess of those proteins (i.e. produced by conveniently redundant protein generator sequences) might causeproblems elsewhere, too.In order to prevent runaway reactions of exactly this sort within a cell (or elsewhere outside the cell), a cell must be able to turn an enzyme group on or off. This adds _another_ level of complexity to the system. (A typical 'off' signal is generated by side-products of reactions, whichunder NDT must accidentally happen to inhibit further enzyme behavior.) More complex information can be carried by RNA strands than by simplerproteins (and their amino acids). RNA resembles DNA in structure: A,G and C nucleotides, plus a U which is a more unstable molecule than thymine butotherwise serves the same purpose, matching to any As. RNA functions a lot like portable DNA, but (because of the U) it isn't as stable. Also it doesn't have a double-helix structure like DNA. Evolutionists tend to think that RNA evolved first out of simpler proteins; and then DNA out of RNA--which again tightens the time constraints. A lot of the sequences in DNA strands don't seem to be contributing at allto the cellular reaction. Recently, biologists have proposed that this'junk DNA' may actually be equivalent to RNA, and perform much the samepurpose.The problem with this, is that the genetic sequences in question are _not_in fact RNA. It's attractive, but ultimately not very feasible (under thebasis NDT anyway), to propose that all such 'not-junk' sequences are the original RNA codes evolved into DNA upon which the rest of the DNA sequence then developed, perhaps melding various strands together. To whatever extent such sections of DNA do behave like RNA, though, more development-complexity with its inherent functionality-and-development-time restrictions must be allowed. This is why I suspect we'll be seeing a push back to 'junk DNA' eventually: it may require more complexity than 'mere'DNA, but requires _less_ complexity in development than RNA-equivalence strands. Though there's nothing saying that a DNA strand couldn't have someRNA-eq _and_ junk, of course. Ultimately, however, RNA-eq ability tends to lend weight against gradualistic neo-Darwin evolutionary theory, per se.These are some, by no means all, of the problems with the _basis_ theory(NDT). The problems are rising, because what we are learning doesn't square with the foundational theory being proposed. I think sooner or later, the basis theory itself will have to be significantly revised--which happened before, too: what we were discovering didn't mesh with the originalDarwinian theory (or its various alternatives, up to that point), so in1941 (notably at a meeting of the _Geological_ Society of America), a suggestion was made that geneticists should join hands with morphologists, taxonomists, zoologists and paleontologists to try to come up with a modernized version of Darwinian theory, rebuilding it from the most recent finds in their fields. (This mixture, happening where it did, gives evidence of all this being done in service to a strong and overarching ideological committment. Three guesses as to what _that_ might have been...) Together, over the next few years, these specialists created the modern synthetic theory of evolution, or as it came to be known' neo-Darwinian Theory' (or NDT). These new NDTheorists emphatically rejected the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics (e.g. a giraffe reaches for taller branches to eat, stretching his neck, and his descendents receive the advantages ofthis); and also rejected Darwin's suggestion of environmental induction ofheritable variations (which would work according to the same principles as Lamarckian theory but in reverse.) It seemed clear to them that neither environmental influences nor acquired characteristics could affect the germ cells (the gametes created by males and females, distinct from the somatic cells everywhere else); and heritable variation could only stem from changes in the germ cells.(Note: I don't know whether they recognized the existence of mutagenic environmental effects or not, but if they did they must have thought these were too few and too inherently harmful to contribute effectively to the number of positive mutations necessary for the theory to work.) Since they were unwilling to accept environmental influence as a cause of variation (probably because the natural evidence for it was lacking, but also possibly because it tasted too strongly of _directed_ evolution), they settled on sheer random copy-error as the source of the variations (a source Darwin had rejected).They agreed that the majority of these copy-errors (as experimentally demonstrated) would be detrimental to the organism's chances of surviving and/or breeding (which are two rather different processes--an improvement in one might be a detriment in the other); and much of the remaining possibilities would be effectively neutral. But, they figured that at leasta _few_ mutations might be beneficial in survival and/or breeding (without a sufficiently detrimental offsetting result in one compared to the other);and that the theory would work sufficiently well on these few positivemutations (plus perhaps the more common neutral mutations combined with eventual changes in environment, though only a fraction of a fraction ofthese would make those previously neutral changes positively beneficial), given the vast time frame available for the process to work.About a decade later, Watson and Crick discovered the DNA structure, and identified the heritable variation with random copy-errors in DNAreplication.This was, however, also the first in a series of dramatic scale-ups ofrecognized complexity in biological organisms. Notably, Crick decided that the vast complexity of DNA could not possibly have been created in the geological time-frame, given the process of random copy-errors plus naturalselection (which would almost always select _against_ the resulting mutant,if it did anything at all.) His solution was to propose that Terran DNA had been seeded on the planet millions of years ago by aliens. This was mocked by the establishment, partly because he was only putting the natural development of even _more-complex_ entities _further_ back in the cosmic time-scale (actually increasing the problem); and partly because it smacked too much of theism (i.e. the only reason Crick proposed naturally developed aliens was because he refused, as a dedicated atheist, to propose God.) Now, I have several problems with what the ID fellows are often doing. Butwhat they _are_ doing, isn't much different from what the NDT synthesisteam was doing back in the early 1940s. They're noting the basis theory isn't just failing to account cogently for operation in the real world, but actually runs _against_ the grain of significant parts of what we'refinding; so they're proposing revisions of the basis theory to try toaccount better for what we _are_ in fact discovering. It's a fact of history that the original NDT team members (along with many of their successors) weren't much (if any) less motivated than modern ID proponents, to be thereby attempting to defend and propogate an ideology (naturalistic atheism in their case, by and large); and it should be obvious that even if one of them (or someone supporting and agreeing with them) came up with crackpot theories (e.g. panspermia) to account for the data, this didn't obviate the other work he (or the others) had done.

Peter Geach and the Lewis-Anscombe Debate Re-Enactment

I was told that Peter Geach got wind of the re-enactment of his wife's controversy with Lewis, and was not happy about it. Apaprently he was concerned about how his wife would be protrayed. I was disappointed to hear that, and I wish I could have talked to Peter Geach about it. The point I would have tried to impress upon him is that a good deal of sheer nonsense has been written about the debate, and the only way to get a proper focus on the whole thing is to bring the focus back to where the participants placed it; on the arguments themselves. His wife's memory is not helped by people who think she bullied Lewis out of apologetics; getting someone like Lewis to revise and thereby strengthen his argument is what philosophy is supposed to be all about.

Strangely enough, I think Geach;s own position was pretty close to Lewis's, since he wrote this:
"When we hear of some new attempt to explain reasoning or language or choice naturalistically, we ought to react as if we were told that someone had squared the circle or proved the square root of 2 to be rational: only the mildest curiosity is in order-how well has the fallacy been concealed?" (The Virtues, Cambridge University Press, 1977) It was Lewis who would argue that explaining reasoning naturalistically is like squaring the circle; Anscombe was on the other side.

If part of the story is that she showed a certain amount of youthful arrogance and gamesmanship in getting the better of Lewis on that particular day, I suppose that's part of the history. I have the feeling that knowing what people's reactions would be to the debate, Anscombe would have affected a different style and manner, at the same time making the same points.

When I titled my paper "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues, I meant to imply that a good deal of discussion concerning that controversy has been over non-issues. It would be wonderful to have it written on my gravestone "Here lies Reppert. Thanks to him, people finally stopped talking nonsense about Lewis and Anscombe." Is that asking too much?

The Conference at Cambridge

I had a good time at Cambridge with my paper presentation, which I came out fairly nicely; I didn't get into a whole lot of complicated issues except when I was asked six questions by one questioner. (He's going to e-mail me). I got to see the English countryside and people punting on the Cam, though I didn't see anyone reciting lines from Monty Python's Life of Brian while punting, something my advisor Hugh Chandler got to see when he was in England. ("We're all individuals. I'm not. I'm not either.")

I met Jerry Walls, co-author of both a book on Lewis and Schaeffer and Why I Am Not a Calvinist. He seems happiest when ripping into Calvinists for their inconsistencies. I am in sympathy with him for this as veteran readers of this blog must be aware.

I also heard a presentation by Gary Habermas on the psychology of doubt and faith, making connections between Lewis's A Grief Observed and Rational Emotive Therapy, cataloguing different types of Christian doubt. Very interesting.

David Baggett gave a paper criticizing John Beversluis's C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion for claiming that after Joy's death Lewis was dealing with a rational rather than an emotional objection to his faith. Beversluis claims that Lewis was dealing with a logical objection to his faith and that his response moved him from a prior belief in Platonism, the view that the goodness of God is commensurable to what humans call goodness, to a view he calls Ockhamism, according to which goodness applied to God and goodness applied to humans is incommensurable. Baggett argued that we have every reason to believe what Lewis says when he says that the crisis precipitated by Joy's death was caused by his emotions and not by any new rational grounds for unbelief.

This was familiar ground to me, since both Thomas Talbott in C. S. Lewis and the Problem of Evil (Christian Scholar's Revew, 1987) and James Petrik (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1994) had argued against a Beversluis claim that Lewis had compromised his Platonism in The Problem of Pain. Talbott wrote the enbtry on A Grief Observed in Schultz and West ed. The C. S. Lewis Readers Encyclopedia (Zondervan, 1998) in which he doesn't mention Beversluis but does mention the consistency between Lewis's thoughts in A Grief Observed and in The Problem of Pain. Richard Purtill wrote a response to Beversluis on A Grief Observed that appeared in a volume entitled A Christian for All Christians in 1990, and Beversluis did respond to that in the Lamp-Post some time shortly thereafter.

I saw a presentation by the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts pointing out a loss of Catholic presence in the arts, in particular amongst novelists in particular, though he applied this to Christian presence in the arts as well. In the 1950s you had Catholic novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'connor, and now this presence has pretty much dried up. I also saw two presentations on the relevance of philosophy for biblical hermeneutics by Anthony Thistleton of the University of Nottingham.

What I was not able to attend was a re-enactment of the Lewis-Anscombe debate which took place the previous Friday night at Oxford and included parts of the revised additions and subsequent comments by Anscombe.

Menuge on ID- a little surprise from the Discovery Institute

Your post on ID is excellent and well-balanced. One small point. While Discovery does not speak for everyone sympathetic to ID, their official position is precisely that ID is not ready to teach as a theory in schools, a view echoed by Rick Sanatorum on NPR (yes, I nearly had a heartattack) this morning. Rather, they consistently urge that students are taught both what the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution says and then are fairly presented with the evidence that supports it and the evidence that doesn't seem to fit. Sanatorum's interviewer sounded ridiculous when he pointed out that many scientists don't believe there is *any* evidence that doesn't fit, granted thelist of 400+ credentialed scientists who doubt the adequacy of Darwin's model prominently displayed at www.discovery.org All reasonable people fear a kind of American Lysenkoism, in which science has to conform to a a preconceived ideology, as Soviet biology had to conform todialectical materialism, which favored a neo-Lamarckian view that was flatly wrong, and caused mass starvation when applied to crop hybridization. Science should not be required to conform to either a materialistic or more teleological view a priori. Which of these paradigms is fruitful in a particularcase should be the result of empirical investigation. Angus

picture

Orange Sunday has a picture of me and Jerry Walls in Cambridge. I'm on the left.

Victor

ID and persecution

Ahab wrote: I'm not sure I understand why you want to keep dwelling on these ad hominem sort of attacks, Victor.
VR: Because I want science to address the issues that ID raises in an open and honest way, so that at the end of the day, if they are wrong, we will all see that their ideas were fairly considered. Some people, like Michael Ruse, whose Darwinist credentials are impeccable, seem to realize this; he is the co-editor with Dembski of Debating Design and wrote an introduction to Menuge's Agents Under Fire, which supports the ID position.

Other people, such as Paul Gross and Barbara Forrest, seem not to realize this; their book is centered around a conspiracy theory that tries to connect the ID movement with the lunatic-fringe of the religious right, the Christian Reconstructionists; people who want to enact blasphemy laws and make the government fully and explicitly religious. (Not even people like Dobson and D. James Kennedy, people with whom I have enormous bones to pick, take it this far).

Forrest and Gross mention the fact that someone on the board of the Christian Reconstructionists has contributed financially to the Discovery Institute. So? The Bush campaign bought Nader ads during the 2000 election. Does that mean that Bush's people really support the ideals of the Nader Campaign? I don't think so!

Now if someone really thought that ID was the scientific arm of the Christian Reconstructionists, then I can imagine them doing whatever it took to keep ID "barefoot and unpublished." Are people keeping scientific views in the closet for fear of the science police? If so, this trivializes the argument from the lack of peer-reviewed support.

It seems like Sternberg's supervisors are responding to the charges put by Sternberg with flat denials. But I really do think that there is a wing of the pro-Darwinist movement that is going over-the-top in the way they deal with anyone who drifts too close to ID, and I think this is doing a lot of harm. These things do not inspire me to put a lot of confidence in Darwinian theory. My reaction is that if they have to go this far to suppress ID, there must be some merit in ID. I support reasonable quality control, but we don't need the science police, and I would believe this even if I was in no way tempted to think ID had some merit. Do you really think that the IDers are just making this up????

Look, the atmosphere in the discussion of ID-related issues has gotten just plain venomous. I don't know why it has, but it has. When I went on talk-origins to discuss what I thought were misinterpretations of my views I got the "Whose side are you on" reaction which turned me off. I don't like it when show up at Christian groups and am given shibboleths to determine whether are not I am really a Christian or not. (Did you really accept Christ as your Lord and Savior? Do you really believe that the Bible is the Word of God? If you were to die tonight.....)

There was a double review in Christian Scholar's Review (Spring 2005) of Dembski ed. Uncommon Dissent, and Forrest and Gross's Creationism's Trojan horse. CSR is not a hotbed of pro-ID stuff; the contributors are Christians but take different positions on evolution. The author of the review, Michael Buratovich, in biology at Spring Arbor College, gave both books a mixed review. He saw some good criticisms of Darwinism in the first volume, but thought that other criticisms didn't really understand the theory. As for F and G, he thought they had correctly identified instances in which they "provided examples where the public activities of the most active promoters of ID theory were less than stellar," but he criticizes them for implying that the ID people support the goals of the Christian Reconstructionists. He describes the book as follows:

"Furthermore, ID has ties to a larger right-wing movement called Christian Reconstructionism that seeks to replace democracy in America with a theocracy where blasphemy is punishable by death and women are restricted to having babies and cooking dinner for their families." This strikes me as the ultimate in scare tactics. These are push-button words for non-Christians in America--shoot I would be scared if the CRs took over.

The reviewer also maintains that ID defenders have to do more serious science before they start petitioning the public schools about including their materials. At this point, I'm inclined to agree. While the public schools should show some sensitivity to religious beliefs in presenting evolution, but while it is the primary paradigm, it should be treated in the public school as the primary paradigm.

I think the ID advocates are hurting their own cause in the long run by insisting on so much airplay in the public schools while their movement is scientifically in its infancy, but I also think there's a search-and-destroy mission on the part of Darwin's rottweilers that is hurting its own cause in the long run. I don't think this can reasonably be denied.

It's Bible study time

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." Bertrand Russell
Matt 10:16: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. (ASV)

A Russell quote anti-ID people should think about

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living.-- Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays (1928) ††

Interesting. So going around and getting people fired who so much as publish a pro-ID essay in a peer-reviewed journal means that thought about that subject is not free. Right??

Also, this kind of operation has the effect of trivializing the charge that ID is not supported in peer-reviewed journals. If people are afraid they will lose their jobs if they publish pro-ID stuff, then the absence of ID from peer-reviewed journals doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot. Right??

Some dialogue with Maverick on Russell

BV: "Thus it is an argument for being a member of a Christian church, and not an argument against it, that there are hypocrites in the church." Good point, Victor, except that it is not specific to Christian churches. One could substitute Jewish synagogue, Muslim mosque, Buddhist temple, etc.

VR: No dispute here. All that is required are standards to go above and beyond what people normally live up to.

BV: Russell is a strange case. Even at the age of 80 he refused to be faithful to his wife. That bespeaks a high degree of physical vitality if nothing else. The high degree of pride and lust in both Russell and Sartre makes one wonder how seriously to take their God denials. One is tempted to psychologize . . . but only after the arguments pro and con have been examined.

VR: Key point about Russell: his conduct clearly shows that he would have had very powerful psycholgical motives to reject the Christian faith or any religion according to which God has the right, power, and authority to give commandments. This would be an ad hominem argument except that Russell was fond of portraying himself as a "free thinker," free from the tyranny of his passions and from the force of tradition.

"The expression 'free thought' is often used as if it meant merely opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. But this is only a symptom of free thought, frequent, but invariable. 'Free thought' means thinking freely -- as freely, at least, as is possible for a human being. The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things: the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker." Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" Bertrand Russell on God and Religion

In THIS matter, Russell was a blazing hypocrite.

Gone to OxBridge

I'm headed to OxBridge tomorrow and will be giving my paper, "Defending the Dangerous Idea: An Update on the Argument from Reason," on Monday. I don't expect to be able to do any blogging when I am gone, but I should be able to give you a full report upon my return.

Argument from the Psychological Relevance of Logical (and mathematical) Laws

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.
We can certainly imagine, for example, a possible world in which the laws of physics are different from the way they are in the actual world. We can imagine, for example, that instead of living in a universe in which dead people tend to stay dead, we find them rising out of their graves on a regular basis on the third day after they are buried. But we cannot imagine a world in which, once we know which cat and which mat, it can possibly be the case that the cat is both on the mat and not on the mat. Now can we imagine there being a world in which 2 + 2 is really 5 and not 4? I think not.
It is one thing to suggest that brains might be able to “track” states of affairs in the physical world. It is another thing to suggest that a physical system can be aware, not only that something is the case, but that it must be the case; that not only it is the case but that it could not fail to be the case. Brain states stand in physical relations to the rest of the world, and are related to that world through cause and effect, responding to changes in the world around us. How can these brain states be knowings of what must be true in all possible worlds?
Consider the difficulty of going from what is to what ought to be in ethics. Many philosophers have agreed that you can pile up the physical truths, and all other descriptive truths from chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology, as high as you like about, say, the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and you could never, by any examination of these, come to the conclusion that these acts we really morally wrong (as opposed to being merely widely disapproved of and criminalized by the legal system). Even the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie argued that if there were truths of moral necessity, these truths, and our ability to know those truths, are do not fit well into the naturalistic world-view, and if they existed, they would support a theistic world-view. Mackie could and did, of course, deny moral objectivity, but my claim is that objective logical truths present an even more serious problem for naturalism, because the naturalist cannot simply say they don’t exist on pain of undermining the very natural science on which his world-view rests.
Arguing that such knowledge is trivial because it merely constitutes the “relations of ideas” and does not tell anything about the world outside our minds seems to me to be an inadequate response. If, for example, the laws of logic are about the relations of ideas, then not only are they about ideas that I have thought already, but also they are true of thoughts I haven’t even had yet. If contradictions can’t be true because this is how my ideas relate to one another, and it is a contingent fact that my ideas relate to one another in this way, then it is impossible to say that they won’t relate differently tomorrow.
Carrier responds somewhat differently. He says:
For logical laws are just like physical laws, because physical laws describe the way the universe works, and logical laws describe the way reason works—or, to avoid begging the question, logical laws describe the way a truth-finding machine works, in the very same way that the laws of aerodynamics describe the way a flying-machine works, or the laws of ballistics describe the way guns shoot their targets. The only difference between logical laws and physical laws is that the fact that physical laws describe physics and logical laws describe logic. But that is a difference both trivial and obvious.
What this amounts to, it seems to me, is a denial of the absolute necessity of logic. If the laws of logic just tell us how truth-finding machines work, then if the world were different a truth-finding machine would work differently. I would insist on a critical distinction between the truths of mathematics, which are true regardless of whether anybody thinks them or not, and laws governing how either a person or a computer ought to perform computations. I would ask “What is it about reality that makes one set of computations correct and another set of computations incorrect?”
William Vallicella provides an argument against the claim that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations:
1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reductio).
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might have not been the case.)
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible the p be false. (True by definition)
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which p & ~p is true.
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Therefore 1 is false, and its contradictory, the clam that the laws of logic are not empirical generalizations, is true.
Logic, I maintain, picks out features of reality that must exist in any possible world. We know, and have insight into these realities, and this is what permits us to think. A naturalistic view of the universe, according to which there is nothing in existence that is not in a particular time and a particular place, is hard-pressed to reconcile their theory of the world with the idea that we as humans can access not only what is, but also what must be.

Lippard on Original vs. Derived Intentionality

Victor: Suppose human beings build a robot that is capable of responding to verbal commands and building internal representations of its environment through cameras and by moving around and manipulating its environment.You would say that its internal representations of objects in its environment have only derived intentionality which comes from human intentionality. Now suppose all human beings cease to exist, while the robot continues to function. The robot is then discovered by some other intelligent alien species with original intentionality. That species learns how the robot works, and infers that it has internal representations which correspond to objects in its environment. What would you say about those internal representations during the time when there are no humans and before the aliens discover it? If the derived intentionality is only from the human intentionality, would you say that there is no representation going on anymore? Or does the derived intentionality survive the extinction of humans?Likewise, what would you say about the representations after the aliens discover it?Do they cause representation to begin anew?On my view, it doesn't matter how the causal structures which cause covariance of the internal structures of the robot in correspondence with objects in its environment originate, that is all there is to representation, and the robot has representations which refer regardless of who else exists. How would you describe these situations?-- Jim Lippard

Jim: My concept of original intentionality requires that it be the intentionality of some conscious thinking subject to whom the objects are represented. We can attribute an as-if intentionality to systems where there is this kind of covariation between inner states and objects in the world, but unless is it recognized by the thinking subject, it is merely as-if intentionality and nor original intentionality.

The Argument from Mental Causation

I. The Argument from Mental Causation
The third of my arguments is the Argument from Mental Causation. If naturalism is true, even if there are propositional states like beliefs, then these states have to be epiphenomenal, without a causal role. Now careful reflection on rational inference, if we think about it, commits us to the idea that one mental event causes another mental event in virtue of its propositional content.
Now if events are caused in accordance with physical law, they cause one another in virtue of being a particular type of event. A ball breaks a window in virtue of being the weight, density, and shape that it is in relation to the physical structure of the window. Even if it is the baseball that Luis Gonzalez hit against Mariano Rivera that won the 2001 World Series, its being that ball has nothing to do with whether or not it can break the window now.
So let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, causes the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts. If anything not in space and time makes these thoughts the thoughts that they are, and if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions. Only that property of the brain can be relevant to what the brain does, according to a naturalistic account of causation.
What this means is that those forms of substance materialism that accept property dualism invariably render the “mental” properties epiphenomenal. If the physical properties are sufficient to produce the physical effect, then the mental properties are irrelevant unless they are really physical properties “writ large,” so to speak. And mental states that are epiphenomenal cannot really participate in rational inference.
Carrier’s account of mental causation clearly presupposes a reductive, rather than a nonreductive materialism. He writes:
Every meaningful proposition is the content or output of a virtual model (or rather: actual propositions, of actual models; potential propositions, of potential models). Propositions are formulated in a language as an aid to computation, but when they are not formulated, they merely define the content of a nonlinguistic computation of a virtual model. In either case, a brain computes degrees of confidence in any given proposition, by running its corresponding virtual model and comparing it and its output with observational data, or the output of other computations. Thus, when I say I "accept" Proposition A this means that my brain computes a high level of confidence that Virtual Model A corresponds to a system in the real world (or another system in our own or another's brain, as the case may be); while if I "reject" A, then I have a high level of confidence that A does not so correspond; but if I "suspend judgment," then I have a low level of confidence either way. By simply defining "proposition" as I have here, Proposition 3 follows necessarily from Propositions 1 and 2. Therefore naturalism can account for this as well.
But I see a serious problem with this whole concept. In order for the content of the mental state to be relevant to the production of a rational inference, it seems to me that everyone who believes that Socrates is mortal would have to be in the same type of brain state as everyone else who believes that Socrates is mortal. Is this plausible?
But more than that, here again we find Carrier explaining one kind of mental activity in terms of another mental activity and then explaining it “naturalistically” by saying “the brain” does it. My argument is, first and foremost, that something exists whose activities are to be fundamentally explained in intentional and teleological terms. Whether we call it a brain, a part of the brain, a soul, a banana, or a bowling ball is not essential to my argument; if the fundamental explanations are intentional, then I have established all that I am trying to establish.

The argument from Truth

Carrier’s account of truth is indeed a correspondence theory of truth. He writes:
From an analysis of data a brain computes varying degrees of confidence that a virtual model does or does not correspond to a real system. If there is such a correspondence, then having confidence in this is a true belief, while having confidence that there isn't such a correspondence would then be a false belief. If there is no such correspondence between the virtual model and reality, then having confidence that there is such a correspondence is a false belief, but having confidence that there isn't such a correspondence would be a true belief. Thus, Proposition 2 only requires the existence of correspondence and confidence, both of which can and do exist on naturalism.

But there is a problem with this whole idea. If truth is a relationship between someone’s belief that something is so and the reality that it is so, then what that means “there is at least one reptile” would not have been a truth during the Jurassic period, unless there was someone in existence during the Jurassic period who had confidence that his or her thought corresponded to the truth “there is at least one reptile.” (I owe this point to Bill Vallicella). And unless there is something like a God, we do not know of anything alive during that time that had confidence in the representation, “There is at least one reptile alive now.”

Because of this, a naturalist may be inclined to accept the idea what can be true or false are not states of the person but propositions. These propositions could exist timelessly, but not exist in anyone’s mind. If that were the case then the proposition “There is at least one reptile alive during the Jurassic period” would be a truth that would exist at that time, because it would be true at all times.

This account of propositions is hard to square with some versions of naturalism, according to which everything that exists exists at some place and time in particular. But if we waive this requirement, there are still difficulties. In particular the argument from reason based on mental causation maintains that naturalism cannot explain how one thought can cause another thought in virtue of its content. On this view, how would it be possible for our thought to be related to the truth that our thoughts are about, if our thoughts are completely products of the spatio-temporal-physical world, but the truth of our thought does not exist in any particular place or time. The physical, is supposed to be causally closed according to naturalism, and as such nothing outside the physical, whether eternal propositions, or nonphysical souls, can affect what goes on in the physical world. Because of this, I regard this move to non-spatial propositions as the acceptance of a poisoned pawn, the taking of which will make the next argument, the argument from mental causation, impossible to answer.

Menuge on Carrier

Angus Menuge offers this in response to Carrier on intentionality.

My reply is: Cognitive science has not discovered but rather has assumed that the brain is a computer, because it is the most advanced, bastract mechanism available for comparison. It is entirely possible that the analogy breaks down in important areas, just as the Newtonian picture of the universe as a clockwork mechanism failed to account for important phenomena, e.g. quantum phenomena. The problem with defining intentiionality as an assignment could not be more severe: assignment is an intentional activity! Furthermore if this assignment is a decision, then while it does seem to be something that an intterpreter of a computer can do, I see no reason to suppose that the computer does it. Computer's match patterns "syntactically" to use Searle's jargon, with no grasp of their meaning. What Carrier describes is perhaps a computer model of intentionality, but it no more has intentionality than a computer simulation of a tornado is a tornadao, or has updrafts, etc. Over and over again, identifying a correlate of X is claimed to be explaining X. I might just as well argue that the urn's being smashed, or my having a head-ache while smashing it explains my smashing it.

Angus

Methodological Naturalism

Here's the Wikipedia definition: "Methodological naturalism (MN) is the operational ground rule that, within natural science enquiry, one can only use natural explanations - i.e. one's explanations must not make reference to the existence of supernatural forces and entities. Note that methodological naturalism does not hold that such entities or forces do not exist, but merely that one cannot use them within a scientific explanation. Methodological naturalism is often considered to be an implied working rule of all scientific research and logically entails neither philisophical naturalism nor atheism, though some would argue that it implies such a connection."

I suppose we are going to need some clarifications of the terms "natural"and "supernatural."
The point about Lewontin's quote has to do with my question as to whether this is supposed to be an absolute principle or not, and whether the prinicple defines science or not. Some initial commitment to methodological naturalism seems to me to make perfect sense as part of science commitment to something like Ockham's Razor. But some people MN is an absolute and that it is definitive of science. Lewontin is an example, and plenty of people have argued that ID is a pseudoscience merely from its apparent supernaturalist commitments. I have a problem with that. Apart from that, I would just note that Dembski's The Design Revolution was written to answer a lot of the standard objections to ID. I'm not an ID expert and am a poor person to defend them on a lot of issues. Maybe others can do better.

On the other hand we do have, in ordinary life, situations where we have to decide whether there was design or not, and shouldn't we be using those principles in the investigation of nature. If I am playing cards, and one person gets 3 royal flushes in a row, I probably should have gone home a long time ago, because now I'm going to have to go home in my underwear. Even if the acceptance of design requires something on the order of the supernatural, I believe that there is some point at which enough is enough.

I remember one time I read a paper by old housemate and atheist philosopher Keith Parsons. It involved a strong commitment to methodological naturalism in the case of miracles. I told him, "This seems to imply that if I were God I couldn't persuade you no matter how many miracles I performed." And he said "No. If the stars the Virgo cluster were to spell out the words "Turn or Burn: This Means You Parsons," I'd turn. But I've read others who say they would not turn!

If by the "fact" of evolution you mean the gradual emergence of species, that's hard to doubt, I'll grant. Lots of scientists have thought that there is design in the universe, though they have often been shy about making it part of science. Can this conviction be made scientific?

An exchange with Ahab on ID

Ahab wrote: Just respond to the question I asked in my original post:Given a choice between saying that a supernatural being causes lung cancer in people that smoke or finding and explaining the physical processes that link smoking to lung cancer, where do you want this scientific funding to go? Which methodology do you honestly think is going to be most effective in understanding how lung cancer is caused and helping to prevent and cure it?

VR: Well, I happen to think it was a physical process, so I would certainly look for a physical process, but does that mean I have to maintain my physicalism even if the evidence points the other way? You have to look really hard for physical causes before concluding that there are none. In one sense I am all in favor of methodological naturalism, as a defeasible heuristic. I don't think we should write it an infinite blank check, and say that nothing could disconfirm my belief that this or that event has a natural cause.But if it turns out to be true that God did bring about the correlation between smoking and cancer, then I would want a science that could, in principle tell me that this is so.

At least ID can come up with a reason why God might want bacteria to have flagella; it plays an important role in the development of future species. There is a teleological account that makes at least some sense; given that God wants complex creatures to develop, the BF is a good idea.

Ahab: Given what has already been learned from evolutionary theory, there is very good evidence to suppose that the bacterial flegellum is a result of those some processes. And, given what we already know about the laws of physics, you'd need some very strong evidence to abandon the assumption that any physical effect does not have a prior physical history.

VR: If this were correct, then neither Big Bang cosmology nor quantum-mechanical indeterminism would have ever gotten off the ground, because in both cases we are taking events in nature and saying that they do not have determining physical causes. If we were really locked into physicalistic determinism, then both Big Bang theory and QM would be thrown out as pseudoscience.

Ahab: When archeologists study artefacts that were intelligently designed they are able to approximate how these artifacts were made because the designers were very much like us. Often they will recreate one possible way to make a particular artefact. They can also figure out for what purpose the designers made these artifacts. Again, because they already have a very good idea of who these designers are. All of this information about the artifact is filtered through MN. ID'er's often insist there is no way to know who this intelligent designer of the bacterial flagellum is. If not, how can we know the purpose behind the design? Was this intelligent designer(s) simply playing a practical joke by making something that could be taken to resemble an outboard motor?

VR: Again, I really do think that the design theorist needs to come up with an account of why this development fits somebody's purposes. I'm not too sure that that wouldn't be too hard to do here, however.

Ahab: A theistic explanation is fine within the realm of theology and people's faith systems. I've never claimed or argued here that theists shouldn't be allowed and even encouraged to use their faith to help them understand this world. But those kind of explanations are not scientific. Science doesn't deal with trying to prove or disprove the existence of God or of any of the particular theological claims any particular faith may have. That is why any scientist (whether the is an atheists, theists or agnostics) can adhere in good conscience to the scientific theory of evolution.

VR: Of course they can be evolutionists. I accept an ancient earth, the gradual appearance of species, and common descent myself. (As does Behe). But I do see design behind the process, and I have always wondered, is there a scientific way to detect that design, or does that always have to be an extrascientific belief that may or may not be reasonable to hold?

Ahab: The last part of your sentence can be understood in a couple of different ways... (The sentence was that many first-rate scientists have been Christians) However, if you mean that they should take one of their cherished theological doctrines and try to get other scientists to accept it, I couldn't disagree more. You keep hand-wringing over how science is going to be ruined by not accepting your AfR. If you inject supernturalistic based explanations that rely on your particular belief of what God wants into science, you will see science ruined so quickly it will make you dizzy.

VR: Which cherished doctrine? If you mean six-day creation or something like that, then ID theorists have said over and over and over again that they are not out to defend that kind of position. Whatever motivations design theorists have in mind, at the end of the day the evidence has to support their position. You don't have to screen them out at the entrance to science; they will leave quietly as the weight of the evidence stacks up against them, if it does stack up against them.

Ahab: And after all, if God is willing to create a world in which there is so much evil, why couldn't He create one in which natural selection directs the random variations that result from things like mutations of DNA? If you are able to swallow evil why do you spit out natural selection? Do you really think natural selection is a worse problem for theodicy than evil?

VR: I would be the last person to deny natural selection. I don't think all ID theorists want to deny evolution in toto. I sure as heck don't. The question for me is whether there is any way to detect design along the way. I spent most of my life calling myself a theistic evolutionist. But I don't think you have to make methodological naturalism an absolute, the way Lewontin does in his review of Sagan. And I don't think it's necessary to conflate ID with creationism, when ID theorists say over and over that they are not creationists. And I don't think it's necessary to attack the intellectual credentials and motives of everyone who has doubts about Darwin. ID theorists are asking serious, important questions, that the culture as a whole is asking. They do not deserve the kind of arrogant dismissal with which they are all too often greeted.
As for public school education, all I would ask is that educators not be dogmatic either way. Last I heard, science education was about letting people make up their own minds based on the evidence. Why teach evolution in a brainwashing way? I don't think we are anywhere near getting to the bottom of the issues posed by intelligent design.

A defense of the correspondence theory of truth

I. The Argument from Truth
A second argument I provided was the argument from truth. In presenting this argument I
I was admittedly rather sketchy, pointing out that the Churchlands, operating from a very strong form of naturalism, had drawn the conclusion that the idea of truth should be eliminated and superseded by some more scientifically adequate concepts. Of course I did not provide much of any argument for why naturalism has these implications, and so I can hardly be said to have provide the adequacy of the argument from truth in my book.
Let us reflect for a moment on truth as an epistemic summum bonum or supreme good. It seems to me that the scientific enterprise, at least as classically understood, is based on a desire first and foremost to know the truth, and only secondly to manipulate and control the world. We are told, for example, that no matter how comforting it is to have religious beliefs, if those beliefs are not based on good evidence that they are true, then they ought to be abandoned.
But this raises some questions about what this property of truth is, that we should abandon beliefs that we may find comforting for the sake of truth. Here it seems that many “deflationary” accounts of truth are going to fail to capture why we care about truth so much. In William Hasker’s generally friendly response to me in Philosophia Christi he asks
And now consider truth: why should the naturalist find it problematic? That snow is white is true just in case snow is white; what would motivate (let alone force) a naturalist to reject this?
Here Hasker is adverting to a Tarskian disquotational theory of truth; truth is a matter of taking quotation marks of sentences. But truth has to have more to it than this if it is to carry the weight of being the supreme epistemic value. Timothy Erdel takes Quine to task for, at one point, saying that he rejected religion and politics in favor of the pursuit of truth, but then he defines truth in this disquotational way. As he says:
If truth is no more than Quine generally claims when he is describing or explaining truth (as opposed to when he is appealing to it as the grounding motive more his life’s work), namely, the removing of quotation marks from the names of sentences, then one senses some fairly significant equivocation in his use of the term, “truth.” Presumably one does not cast aside all claims from religion and politics to pursue philosophy as a vocation solely to facilitate the removing of quotes from names of sentences…
So to make the sort of thing we ought epistemically to pursue, even at personal cost, truth
must be something more than mere disquotation. But what can it be? I think that only the correspondence theory is the only one that adequately underwrites the intuition that many of us share that truth is the supreme epistemic good.

J P Moreland on Jaegwon Kim

J. P Moreland, author of Scaling the Secular City (Baker, 1988) and other apologetic works, raises some questions about Jaegwon Kim's most recent work:

Have you readKim's recent book Physicalism Close Enough (or something like that). Hetries to save mental causation for doxastic states by functionallyreducing them to brain states. I have never understood this move. Relations seem to be such that depending on the sort of relation inquestion, only certain relata can instantiate it (larger than for sizedobjects, brighter than for colored ones, etc.). Now physical states donot stand in logical relations to other physical states (they stand incausal ones). But mental states do, so the latter cannot be reduced tothe former. It will do no good to say that, strictly speaking, it ispropositions, not mental states, that stand in logical relations becauseif propositions do not enter into thoughts, then logical relations arejust irrelevant to actual processes of human thinking. In my view,propositions are certain kinds of properties, namely structuralintentional properties that the mind exemplifies. So a particular thoughtlike a particular instance of red in an apple, is the instantion of aproposition (redness) by the mind (apple). Propositions are in minds byway of an "in" of exemplification, and the essence of a property-instanceis constituted by the universal that composes it. In this way, mentalstates literally stand in logical relations like color-instances can standin the brighter-than relation in virtue of the universal (the proposition) instantiated by the mind and constituting the essential property of theindividual thought which turns out to be a property-instance. I don't know how brain states can stand in logical relations to each other. JP

Any reactions to this would be most welcome.

A response to Ahab

Ahab wrote: What you are advocating here is that people should practice science in accordance with their preconceived religious views. To apply this to your smoking example above: Theistic scientists can attribute the effects of smoking on lung cancer to the act of some omnipotent being. They don't need to understand the physical mechanism to explain the cancer casuing process. God with His omnipotent powers simply chooses to smite a large numbre of smokers with cancer. And He probably does this because he wants to discourage people from doing something evil like smoking. While atheistic scientists will have to struggle with trying to find the mechanism by which smoking causes cancer. Which method do you think is going to be of value to our knowledge of the causes and cures of lung cancer?I really don't get why you have so much trouble understanding that ID theory as a pseudo-science??? It is just a way to reintroduce pre-scientific explanations into science. You don't have to worry aboout being able to explain how something works, simply attribute it to a divine, omnipotent being - at least if you are a theistic scientist.

1) I have never seen way to demarcate the difference between science and pseudoscience, and am strongly inclined to suggest that there is none. Old joke: What is the difference between science and pseudoscience? Science is funded.

2) There is nothing preventing a theistic scientist from attributing something to a physical process if there is good evidence to suppose that there was one. But a theistic explanation makes sense to me, at least, if given my prior probabilities about God, it is more likely than not that God should want it to happen. When we are forming expectations, we operate in the context of discovery. People can discover ideas about the natural world in their dreams. But then they have to make predictions about what they expect to find true if their theories are correct, and this is the context of justification. If nature confirms their expectations, then their thesis is confirmed, theistic or atheistic. If nature fails to confirm their expectations, then their theory is disconfimed. Many first-class scientists were orthodox Christians, and they didn't always separate their religion from science.

3) Bayesian theory expectations are formed based on prior probabilities, which are confirmed or disconfirmed by experience. But there is no method I know of for assessing prior probabilities. Thus if there is a report that, say, the Virgin Mary has been speaking to young people in, say, Africa, Roman Catholic will want it checked out, but will certainly be prepared to think it's for real if good evidence emerges and it's tough to explain away. A Protestant, who thinks that there's a God and the Mary is Christ's mother, but doesn't expect Mary to be talking to people, will require a higher standard of evidence. An atheist should be the toughest of all to persuade. And the evidence may turn out to be such that Catholics are reasonable in thinking that this is for real, while Protestants and atheists are reasonable in being skeptical. For more discussion on this see www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/miracles.html

4) If methodological naturalism is the rule, and it turned out that the bacterial flagellum did come into being as the result of divine creation, then science could never discover that, and would have to say, even though it was false, that there had to be some evolutionary process somehow that produced it, even though there really was none, and God actually did it. This is, to me, a troubling result, that some events should be scientifically invisible if they occurred.

Menuge replies to Carr II

Carr writes: Menuge wrote 'What's puzzling about the passage below is how we can specifiy what the information that is being transmitted is without talking about its meaning.'But a CSI detecting machine can, according to Menuge,pattern match the specification of the information without knowing about the meaning of the specification.Is *specified* information something that cannot be detected by naturalistic methods, or can only human beings detect specified information (as only agents can understand the meaning of the specification)?

Menuge replies:

Well, here's an example: a mindless computer program might be programmed withcertain information that in fact contains CSI, such as, to use Dembski's example, a long sequence of prime numbers. Now suppose that in the Search forExtra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, a radio signal is detected from deep space that consists of a large sequence of these prime numbers. Theprogram could match the received sequence with a subsection of the sequence ofprimes in its database, and also determine if the sequence was long enough to be"complex" (in the sense that it is too unlikely to have been generated by chance). It seems to me, so long as "detect" is used in a minimalistic way (athermometer detects the temperature in this sense), there is no reason to denythat the program detects CSI.  The machine can detect (reliably register /signal) this CSI even though there is no reason to suppose it knows what a primenumber is, or why the sequence it received consitutes CSI. The way I see it, detection does not require understanding, and the detection of CSI that has a meaning does not require that the detecting device can access the meaning. This is rather like the way a voice-activated computer can be programmed to obey thespoken words "Open Word" without knowing what it means to open the program. So it seems that, at least in some cases (I'm not sure in all, because some information is not so easy to represent computationally: there might be problems raised by Turing's halting problem or Godel's incompleteness theorem, where a human can detect CSI that is not computationally tractable---but this is endlessly debated), CSI can be detected by naturalistic methods. However, just as there is distinction between non-conceptual seeing (seeing red) and conceptual seeing (seeing red as danger), it seems to me that the program thatdetects CSI is not, like the scientist, seeing it as CSI, because it lacks the relevant concepts.. Angus

Doug Groothuis's blog

Doug Groothuis, a Christian philosopher from Denver Seminary, has started a blog, The Constructive Curmudgeon. Welcome to the "sphere," Doug! His first entry is a review of Frankfurt's "On Bullshit." It reminds me of a teacher I TA'd for once, who, while grading a pile of student tests, said that he should get a "Bullshit" rubber stamp to put on student papers.

Menuge responds to Carr

Steven Carr asks:

Is Dembski's formulation of Complex Specified Information intended to be a nauralistic method of detecting CSI without any need to consider of the 'meaning' of any such information?

Menuge replies:

A good question. It seems to me that contemporary biology assumes that genes contain assembly instructions for proteins, and so information in at least the sense that a computer program contains information that (conditional on certain input) sepcifies the output. It does seem implausible to say that they only contain this information in the eye of an interpretive beholder--the instructions seem to objectively specify the configuration of the end product. It seems to me, therefore, that there is teleology right there in the instructions--they do, objectively point to an end product, and this is typically denied only because teleology is banished in principle from nature by an unduly restrictive definition of "nature." The fact that the intructions aren't trying to make proteins and do not have intentional states is not a convincing reason to deny a more primnitive sort of teleology. In this way, design need not always be thought of as supernatural: design can be something present within nature, so long as nature is rich enough for teleology.

The difficult question here is the status of the "specification" (independent pattern). A skeptic might say that the specification, e.g. a coherent body plan, or a functional specification of an irreducibly complex system is somehow subjective. I would disagree. Design specifications may be abstract, but science discovers that geometrical and mathematical relations obtain in nature all of the time and they are abstract. So the fact that specifications are "abstracta" not "concreta" (to use Dennett's distinction) does not seem to be a convincing reason to deny that they are objective. For example, scientists who have studied the bacterial flagellum (whether Darwinists or not) find it hard to deny that it objectively meets the design specifications of a miniaturized outboard motor. Likewise, biomimetics works because some natural systems happen to implement engineering principles in striklingly efficient ways, sometimes outperforming unaided human ingenuity. Ruse may say that design is only serving as a useful metaphor, but if a metaphor is that systematically useful, isn't it worth considering whether it is more than a metaphor (the "If it looks like a duck; quacks like a duck, then just what reason is there to deny it is a duck?" principle).

In all this, it does seem that meaning in any rich sense is not presupposed in our description of the system. One could in principle build a machine that could detect CSI by pattern matching, although only a human scientist with intentional states could understand the information detected.

Angus

Menuge's Dennett Denied

This is the link to Menuge's paper, "Dennett Denied."

Defending the Dangerous Idea II

My problem has to do with Carrier's use of terms. He uses terms such as belief, confidence, etc. to account for intentionality, yet when I think of belief I think of a belief that something is true, and when I think of confidence I think of it as confidence that something his true. Now Carrier's account of intentionality seems to be that when you have attention to an objects (this, he says, is well understood by brain science) and we also have motivational confidence, we are confident that the map of that object in our mind is accurate, then we have intentionality.

My objection to this is that in order for confidence to play the role it needs to play in Carrier's account of intentionality that confidence has to be a confidence that I have an accurate map, but confidence that P is true is a propositional attitude, which presupposes intentionality. In other words, Carrier, like Dretske, is trying to bake an intentional cake with physical yeast and flour. But when the ingredients are examined closely, we find that some intentional ingredients have been smuggled in through the back door.

It's my hypothesis that this is going to happen every time you try to bake an intentional cake with physical yeast and flour.

Let science decide?

In response to Ed Babinski:

Ed: There is a sense in which I maintain that it would be a violation of naturalism to say that an atom can be affected by higher level configurations, since the physical level is, according to my defintion of naturalism, the physical is causally closed. On the other hand, certainly certain cells will be more likely to exist in virtue of the fact that they are part of a system that exhibits fitness to survive, and my argument is not about that. What I think doesn't work is a gradualist bridge between the nonintentional and the intentional. Add up the nonintentional all you want, and the information cannot entail anything about what intentional state exists.

Don't jump to the end of the argument. Lewis thought, for instance, that the mind was divinely illuminated, but his argument, by his own admission, is consistent with Absolute Idealism and Pantheism. He himself accepted a theistic account, but the AFRs, strictly speaking, don't prove that theism is the only answer. These essays are by an Absolute Idealist, Daniel Hutto.
http://www.herts.ac.uk/humanities/philosophy/dh.html

When I hear people say "Let science figure it out, I often wonder if the relevant conception of science would ever permit us to find out that dualism is true if it is in fact true. According to many forms of methodogical naturalism; the very forms of methodological naturalism that are used to argue that ID is pseudoscientific, if dualism were true we would never know that scientifically, because science ceases to be science once it appeals to that kind of entity. "Our commitment to materialism," says Lewontin, "is absolute." So saying "Let science decide" ends up being a "heads I win, tails you lose game." If the analysis of the brain gives is an adequate account of intentionality, hurray for naturalism. If it fails to produce an adequate account of intentionality, it can take out a promissory note. What could possibly falsify a materialist account of the mind?

Menuge on Dretske II

Dogtown, on his new blog Dretske forum, quotes Dretske as saying:

"It rests on a confusion, the confusion of information with meaning. Once this distinction is clearly understood, one is free to think about information(though not meaning) as an objective commodity, something whose generation, transmission, and reception do not require or in any way presuppose interpretiveprocesses."

Angus Menuge responds:

Victor,This is an interesting passage. Darwinists and naturalists cannot deny the existence of information, since the information in cellular communication systems and developmental programs is crucial to understanding how they work.But they have to treat informational signals as like a swarm of fish, some of which can be caught by the nets of artificial selection and used to make useful responses to the environment.What's puzzling about the passage below is how we can specifiy what the information that is being transmitted is without talking about its meaning. Some, like Dennis Stampe, argue that a trees rings do objectively containinformation about the age of the tree (i.e. it is not in the eye of the interpretive beholder). One could follow Grice by saying that is what the rings "naturally mean" as natural signs, or meanN, even though the tree has no beliefs and regardless of whether or not anyone else has beliefs about the tree's age. In this sense certain kinds of clouds meanN rain and mouse droppings mean mice.So it is quite true that you can talk of information without bringing in beliefs and interpretive agents, but is still seems like some sort of account of meaning is required, enough that we can say that the tree rings meanN that the tree is 100 years old. This seems inevitable given that we talk of "the information that..." which seems to be a content clause of some kind although not a propositional attitude like "believes that...."

What do you do about skeptics?

This is in response to the Carrier post that precedes it. Back in graduate school, the reigning idea was that the problem of skepticism was overrated and that the enterprise of refuting the skeptic was pretty much misguided. At least that was the prevailing attitude of the "naturalistic epistemology" that was popular at that time. My epistemology teacher, Fred Schmitt, used to like to refer to foundationalism and skepticism as "The Bobbsey Twins," that foundationalism attempts to provide a response to skepticism and so takes skepticism seriously in a way that perhaps it should not. I think there are three strategies in response to the threat of skepticism. The problem of skepticism arises classically by 1) the discovery that knowledge requires justified belief 2) attempting to justify beliefs by arguments, 3)noticing that arguments themselves have premises that have to be justified and 4) realizing that you need justification for the justification, and then justification for the justification for the justification, and then justification for the justification for the justification for the justification... and I'm going to disappoint Fred for wimping out here, but I think you get my drift.

It was Descartes, with what I have been calling the Satan Test, who wanted to put all beliefs up to the severest possible tests to see if any of them were justified. But even if, as I have argued he succeed with the existence of a self that thinks, in order to avoid a pretty severe skepticism he had to dumb down the Satan Test. At least that's how I see it.

Descartes' Evil Demon has been replaced by the modern Brain in the Vat, but the problem remains the same. How do we refute the skeptic about, say, rational inference? So long as I feel required, for the sake of my epistemic life, to refute the claim that we are brains in vats, it looks awfully difficult to answer the person who asks me to prove that I am not a brain in a vat. And no, theism won't do the trick here. That's why I do not recommend attacking naturalism on the grounds that we theists can refute the skeptic but the atheist cannot. That's what I call a skeptical threat argument. Whatever I appeal to as my justification for why I am not a brain in a vat, the skeptic is going to attribute to the masterful neuroscientific understanding of the vatkeepers.

It seems to me that two strategies are effective in responding to the skeptic. One is outright dismissal, and the straightforward denial that we need to refute the skeptic. The burden of proof should not be on me for denying that we are brains in vats, the burden should be on the skeptic to prove that we are brains in vats.

But secondly, it can be pointed out that the skeptic's position is self-refuting. If someone says that there are no rational inferences, it doesn't bother me much as a mere statement, but if the skeptic is trying to argue for it, then the skeptic is contradicting himself. Moreover, as Hilary Rodham Putnam pointed out, on a plausible causal theory of reference, the words in the statement "We are brains in vats" are meaningful in virtue of the causal relations between the words and their objects, in other words, if the words "brains" and "vats" stand in an ordinary causal relationship to brains and vats. If they don't, which would have to be true if we WERE brains in vats, then the words don't mean anything. In other words, the BIV hypothesis is meaningful only if it is false.

Now it seems to me that both of these strategies is available to the advocate of AFR. The attempt to argue empirically against the skeptic, which Carrier thinks is somehow undermined by accepting AFR, seems to have serious problems as a strategy against the skeptic anyway, since whatever empricial evidence is provided can be explained in terms of the omnipotent power of either the evil demon or the vatkeepers, depending of what mythos you are using to get the skeptical argument going.