The Dawkins Model: A response to Keith Parsons as part of a dialogue on ridicule

This is the original thread.

But you have to realize that in the atheist community today, following what I call the Dawkins model, any kind of religious belief is open to ridicule. Remember Dawkins' famous speech at the Reason Rally. There the example he used was the doctrine of transubstantiation. Now, I don't believe in transubstantiation myself, having decide against becoming a Catholic way back in 1975. But I know plenty of intelligent, serious people who do believe exactly that, going all the way to two of my best friends as an undergraduate. If you attempt to show that the doctrine is evidently self-contradictory, then you have to face some very serious work aimed at showing that this is not the case, from Aquinas in the 13th Century to philosopher of science Frederick Suppe in our time. Refuting such positions is hard work, but resorting to ridicule has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Part of the Dawkins model involves presuming that committed religious believers are impervious to reason, but by showing how much contempt you have for their beliefs, you might peer pressure "fence-sitters" to think twice about believing as they do. That's what I mean by talking over people, and I find it reprehensible.

This is the statement I have in mind:

Dawkins: Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

You probably aren't going to persuade real hard-core Gishites that there is something wrong with YEC by ridiculing them. So, what is the point? What do you hope to accomplish? Winning over low-information "fence-sitters" through what amounts to little more than peer pressure isn't going to cause anyone to become a genuine critical thinker. So, ridicule of this sort has little value over and above entertainment.

So long as all you have to do is quote them to generate the ridicule, that's one thing. But there is an occupational hazard that everyone who uses ridicule faces, and that is misrepresentation and straw-manning. Dawkins, for example, is frequently accused not only of failing to understand the arguments he criticizes, but of not  even trying to understand themAnd his response was provided by P. Z. Myers in the Courtier's Reply.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyn...

The trouble with this is that theists do have arguments for their position, not just theology which presumes the truth of their position. And if you put ridicule in place of a serious attempt to understand your opponent, then once again, you are taking a path that has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Maybe we should thank God for Gnus

They may be driving some people back to God. 

Of course, not doubt this is because they were never real atheists in the first place. 

Is dialogue between theists and atheists possible?

Well, I would have thought so, but I am starting to wonder. Are we moving toward a society bifurcated on religious grounds, where believers and unbelievers can't even talk to one another in a reasonable fashion?

I have had several conversations with nonbelievers which I have found enjoyable and worthwhile. I remember getting my first discussion with Keith Parsons when I was in seminary, who lived in the same house I did on North Decatur Road in Atlanta. He was using the Bultmann line that modern persons cannot accept miracles, and I responded with Lewis's critique of chronological snobbery. I thought I got the better of that discussion, but I thought he got the better of most of the discussions that followed, because he was already a grad student in philosophy and knew more philosophy than I did at that point. I remember another discussion I had with a fellow graduate student when I got to the University of Illinois. He told me that had an easy time debating with theists, but arguing with me was a good deal more difficult.

Later, I presented a paper at the APA meetings in 1988 which eventually became my first philosophy publication, "Miracles and the Case for Theism."  Apparently my paper inspired an undergraduate student at Claremont-McKenna college to write a paper in response to me (and several other defenders of miracles) called "Miracles and Testability," which he published in an undergraduate philosophy journal. I wrote a response to him, pointing out what I thought was the naive philosophy of science which underlay his paper. I didn't think much more about it until he wrote me, thanking me for my courteous critique and telling me that he had become a Christian in the meantime. What effect my response might had in producing such a conversion I do not know, but I was of course happy to hear about this.

Nevertheless, in thinking about what my goal might be in engaging in philosophical dialogue, I would have to say that what I am doing is not attempting in any way to convert anyone, since conversion involves far more than intellectual assent. If I were to describe what I am trying to do it is to engender intellectual sympathy for what I believe. You may not end up agreeing with me, and we may be very far apart on our positions, but I always hope when we get finished that you will get more of a feel for what it is like to think as I do, and will have more intellectual sympathy and less contempt (if you have any) for what I believe than you came in with.

This doesn't always work, especially when dealing with people who operate from what I call a zero-concession mindset.

Lewis founded the Oxford Socratic Club to follow the argument where it leads on the topic of Christianity. But maybe the Internet is not the place for this sort of thing.

Lewis the reluctant convert

This contains a discussion of the T. D. Weldon incident.

Almost Persuaded. Why?

As a musical accompaniment to this discussion, I am linking to the Louvin Brothers' rendition of the traditional hymn "Almost Persuaded."  A most remarkable singing sensation from the 50s and the early 60s, though nearly forgotten now. Although I like their music, I'm sure I would differ with them theologically. This is from Lewis's Surprised by Joy: 

Then I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive "apart from his Christianity." Now, I veritably believe, I thought — I didn't of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense — that Christianity itself was very sensible "apart from its Christianity." But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. "Rum thing," he went on. "All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once." To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not-as I would still have put it — "safe," where could I turn? Was there then no escape?

Now, why would an "outsider" like this "hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew" think that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was anywhere near being surprisingly good? Because, in the ancient world, when there is a strong mythological element, you don't find the people who present myth providing lots of times, places and dates. Supernatural claims are not typically embedded in carefully constructed writing aimed at conveying reality. Myths do not occur in recorded history, and stories like Apollonius of Tyana, for example, include things like Apollonius showing up in Nineveh seven centuries after it had been demolished.

Tim McGrew Presents Doubts Relative to Richard Carrier

Here.

A redated post.

Some discussion of burdens of proof (based on a dialogue on Debunking Christianity)

The thread is here. 

That gets down to some very basic issues in epistemology. I did my doctoral work at a highly secular university philosophy program, but the epistemologists and probability theorist that I worked with, who certainly were not religious people, thought that classical foundationalism was a very problematic doctrine, and that the idea that a limited range of beliefs belonged in the "core" while other beliefs had to be proved by evidence, is in fact an unsupportable position. 
http://www.unc.edu/~theis/phil...

As a result, they were in general skeptical of the claim that one particular position as opposed to another had "THE burden of proof." To say that the burden of proof lies on one side or another that we know always, what beliefs can be accepted without proof and which ones need to be demonstrated, and that project doesn't look to be achievable. Descartes, for example, said that he would doubt everything and believe only what could be proved, and most people think his project didn't work. He started by doubting sense experience and then had to appeal the theological arguments to defend his belief in an external world. Hume's empiricism left him in a position where he had to "justify" the idea that the future will resemble the past simply by appealing to custom and habit. In other words, we really don't have justification for it. In other words, Hume avoids having to justify the belief that the future will resemble the past by claiming that belief this belief doesn't have the burden of proof.

From this one could conclude that you can show that just about any belief is unjustified simply by putting a heavy enough burden of proof on it. If you could only justifiably believe in the external world if you could prove that you aren't a brain in a vat, that might prove difficult.

So, for example, as I learned Bayesian theory, a popular theory was that prior probabilities were subjective, and that people who had different one could in theory eventually come to a consensus by adjusting their probabilities as evidence came in, but the idea of a "proper starting point" or "correct priors" was considered misguided. One of my teachers (again a religious nonbeliever) said that "you are justified in believing what you already believe, unless you have good reason to change your beliefs." I remember asking him about Descartes method of doubt, and in response he mentioned an ancient Greek skeptic who sat on the marketplace wagging his index finger because he couldn't believe anything. In other words, what I learned from the study of epistemology led me to the conclusion that fixing the burden of proof is pretty difficult, and that it is hard to discover a "proper" position for the burden of proof. There are relative burdens of proof that different individuals have for certain claims, but a "correct" location for the burden of proof seems to me difficult to justify.

So, for example, when I first encountered the Outsider Test for Faith, it looked to me as if it was another case of implying classical foundationalism, or perhaps, applying classical foundationalism to religious belief in a way that it is not applied to other types of beliefs, and some of my early responses to the OTF came from this perspective.

If you think the key to refuting religious belief is to inculcate a proper epistemology, which results in a proper location of the burden of proof, then I am likely to be pretty skeptical of that enterprise, and my skepticism comes not from my religion, but rather from widely held views in epistemology that I got from secular philosophy teachers. I'm not saying that these epistemologists couldn't be wrong, but it might take a little work to convince me that they are wrong. 

Defining success from the standpoint of evolution

If we succeed in passing on our genes to the next generation, have we succeeded in life? If we fail to do so, have we failed in life? From an evolutionary standpoint,  this  is the definition of success. But is it really? 

C. S. Lewis and the Desire Not To Have Been

Some people question whether one could find personal extinction desirable. But C. S. Lewis seems to have. 

How far was this pessimism, this desire not to have been, sincere? Well, I must confess that this desire quite slipped out of my mind during the seconds when I was covered by the wild Earl's revolver. By the Chestertonian test, then, the test of Manalive, it was not sincere at all. But I am still not convinced by Chesterton's argument. It is true that when a pessimist's life is threatened he behaves like other men; his impulse to preserve life is stronger than his judgment that life is not worth preserving. But how does this prove that the judgment was insincere or even erroneous? A man's judgment that whisky is bad for him is not invalidated by the fact that when the bottle is at hand he finds desire stronger than reason and succumbs. Having once tasted life, we are subjected to the impulse of self-preservation. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine. What then? If I still held creation to be "a great injustice" I should hold that this impulse to retain life aggravates the injustice. If it is bad to be forced to drink the potion, how does it mend matters that the potion turns out to be an addiction drug? Pessimism cannot be answered so. Thinking as I then thought about the universe, I was reasonable in condemning it. At the same time I now see that my view was closely connected with a certain lopsidedness of temperament. I had always been more violent in my negative than in my positive demands. Thus, in personal relations, I could forgive much neglect more easily than the least degree of what I regarded as interference. At table I could forgive much insipidity in my food more easily than the least suspicion of what seemed to me excessive or inappropriate seasoning. In the course of life I could put up with any amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallest disturbance, bother, bustle, or what the Scotch call kurfuffle. Never at any age did I clamor to be amused; always and at all ages (where I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted. The pessimism, or cowardice, which would prefer nonexistence itself to even the mildest unhappiness was thus merely the generalization of all these pusillanimous preferences. And it remains true that I have, almost all my life, been quite unable to feel that horror of nonentity, of annihilation, which, say, Dr. Johnson felt so strongly. I felt it for the first time only in 1947. But that was after I had long been reconverted and thus begun to know what life really is and what would have been lost by missing it.

C. S. Lewis Surprised By Joy,  p. 116. 

Camus on Suicide

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. 

-Albert Camus

Tom Gilson replies to Barbara Forrest on Naturalism

This is Tom Gilson's critique of a Barbara Forrest essay in defense of naturalism. I had linked to the essay and suggested that it was a huge exercise in begging the question.

Why naturalism excludes the supernatural

The problem with naturalism excluding the supernatural is that, at least in one sense, it's trivially true. Of course if everything is natural, then the supernatural is excluded. But that doesn't tell me, by itself, what is natural and what is supernatural. If God could be a theoretical entity in a scientific explanation, then we could say that whatever appears in a scientific explanation is natural, and therefore God is a natural entity. If you say God can't be a theoretical entity in a scientific explanation, then you have to come up with characteristics of God that require God's exclusion.

What would physical proof of God look like?

Would would it be like to physically prove that there is a God? It seems to me that whatever appeared to us physically, we could draw the conclusion that whatever it is, it isn't God? It would, for example, have to occupy space, but God is not supposed to be a being with a location. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on Naturalism

Written by well-known naturalist defender David Papineau. 

A rebuttal to the wishful thinking objection

The Wishful Thinking Argument seems to be becoming more prevalent these days. My inclination is to say "circumstantial ad hominem" and be done with it. But it may not be quite that simple.

Here is a discussion of it.

Walls on what's wrong with Calvinism

Here. 

Vallicella on believing beyond the evidence

He considers it rational in many instances. Here. 

Law Contra Dawkins on the Value of Philosophy

Here. 

The Trouble with Materialism

A redated post.

This is a follow-up to my previous post, The Concept of Matter

I see a fundamental problem that is going to plague any materialist account of the mind. Materialists often piggy-back the case for materialism on the success of reductive analyses in science. But let's take one of the most successful scientific reductions, the reduction of heat in a gas to the mean kinetic energy of that gas. From one perspective, this reduction appears to explain heat away, in particular the element of heat that feels warm. By knowing that the air molecules are moving faster we can infer nothing about the fact that people are more likely to take their jackets off when that happens. They also feel warmer. But that, says science, is not an intrinsic feature of heat that is what happens to human minds in the face of heat. By siphoning off secondary qualities to the mind, the mechanistic reduction of heat is enabled. But when we get to the mind, we have no place to siphon of the "mental" properties.

Edward Feser writes:

One result of this is that materialists have, in the view of their critics, a tendency to give accounts of mental phenomena that leave out everything essential to them: qualia, consciousness, thought and intentionality get redefined in physicalistic terms, with the consequence that materialist analyses convey the impression that the materialist has changed the subject, and failed genuinely to explain the phenomenon the analysis was supposed to account for. This is arguably the deep source of the difficulties that have plagued materialist philosophies of mind. If the materialist conception of explanation entails always stripping away from the phenomenal to be accounted for anything that smacks of subjectivity, meaning, or mind-dependence, then a materialist “explanation” of the mind itself will naturally seem to strip away the very essence of the phenomena to be explained. Being, at bottom, attempts to explain the mental in terms that are intrinsically non-mental, such would-be explanations appear implicitly to deny the mental; that is to say, they end up being disguised forms of eliminative materialism. Some professedly non-eliminativist philosophers of mind come close to admitting this: Fodor, for instance, has famously written that “If aboutness (that is, intentionality) is real, it must really be something else.”

A Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford; Oneworld, 2005) pp. 172-173,

This results in an interesting phenomenon; materialist philosophers attempt to give an account of some mental phenomenon. But either they implicitly bring in the very concepts they are trying to explain materialistically, or they give an account of the mental phenomenon in which the phenomenon to be explained isn’t recognizable. A good example would be Richard Carrier’s critique of my book where time after time he claims that intentionality can be explained in physicalistic terms while using one intentional concept after another to explain intentionality!

More on atheism and reproduction

Here. 

Therefore, the empirical irony remains: The more Atheism is flourishing numerically, the more Religion(s) are winning out evolutionarily.

If there's a God, he seems to sport a certain sense of humour...

HT: Bob Prokop

Lynne Baker's self-refutation argument against eliminative materialism

Here. Materialist philosophers are loth to accept this kind of argument against eliminativism, in my view, because if it proves to be correct, then if it turns out that reconciliations between our mental life and materialism fail, there is no fall-back position, and "retentive" materialists would actually reject materialism in order to believe in science.

Does Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" support the atheist idea that faith is belief without evidence?

One would have thought that the atheists at least have Kierkegaard on their side on this issue. But maybe not. 

The article winds up with a discussion of Kierkegaard's notion of the leap of faith. This mind tend to make one think that faith means the irrational acceptance of of a proposition with no evidence.SK says faith is irrational and that it's achieved by an irrational leap. Yet one must note that the leap itself is an epistemological ploy, it's an attempt to get over the final chasm which can't be bridged by evidence or logic. The road up to the final gap can be paved with argument and reason. One can make a find philosophical diving board to prepare for the leap. The point at which one makes the leap can be narrowed. The leap is always there. Even in the world view there are epistemic blind alleys from which there are no returns. So in the final analysis there is no basis to the atheist straw man definition of faith as "believing things without evidence."

There. Somebody said it!

Exactly what people swear up and down that Dawkins never said. 

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.- Jerry Coyne

The argument from divine hiddenness: A noseeum argument at best?

1. Suppose that God exists—that is, suppose that
there is a perfectly powerful, perfectly wise
being who loves us like a perfect parent.
2. God is mostly hidden from people: Our evidence is inconclusive; religious experience of the interesting and unambiguous sort is rare.
3. There is no good reason for God to remain hidden.
4. If God is mostly hidden and there is no good reason for God to remain hidden, then one of
the following is true:
a. God exists but, like a negligent father, does not love us enough to make himself known.
b. God exists but, like an inept lover, lacks the wisdom to appreciate the importance or proper way of revealing himself to us.
c. God exists but is too weak to reveal himself in the ways that he should in order to secure his relational goals.
5. Premises (1)–(4) are inconsistent.
6. Therefore: God does not exist.

Can Steven Wykstra's critique of  noseeum arguments, which he develops in response to the problem of evil, be applied here? 

In the Midwest we have "noseeums" — tiny flies which, while having a painful bite, are so small you "no see 'um." We also have Rowe's inductive argument for atheism. Rowe holds that the theistic God would allow suffering only if doing so serves some outweighing good. But is there some such good for every instance of suffering? Rowe thinks not. There is much suffering, he says, for which we see no such goods; and this, he argues, inductively justifies believing that for some sufferings there are no such goods. Since it gives such bite to what we cannot see, I call this a "noseeum argument" from evil. ("Rowe's Noseeum Arguments from Evil", in The Evidential Argument from Evil, p. 126.)

In other words, if we can't see why God would not make himself more obvious, is that sufficient grounds for rejecting his existence? Should we expect to know the answer to this, if theism is true?

Lovejoy on Behaviorism

This is a 1920s precursor to the argument from reason.

HT: Steve Hays.

Motive arguments and Mutual Assured Destruction

My claim is that everyone's belief choices are partly the result of reflection, and partly the result of motives, of which none of us are fully aware. No one side in the discussion has a monopoly on rational or nonrational motives. So motive arguments are a wash, and if they are introduced in place of actual arguments, the result is mutual assured destruction, since each side can "bomb" the other with an equal measure of motive arguments, and blow up the discussion permanently.

Motives and arguments

I've been acutely aware, since I was 18, of the wishful thinking charge against Christianity, when I read Bertrand Russell, and that is one of the main reasons I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. If there were reasons to reject Christianity, I wanted to know what those were, and I wanted to know that sooner rather than later. These considerations have made Christianity more difficult to believe, not easier to believe.

All discussion of the motives of other people is sheer speculation. If you become convinced, say, that atheism is true, it may help you explain why there are so many believers, but you have things backwards if you think you can start with speculation about peoples motives and conclude anything about what you have good reason to believe. Everyone can speculate about the motives of their opponents. It's as easy as pie, but it ends in a stalemate.

If you say, "I'd love to believe in a heaven, but I just can't because the evidence just isn't there." I'm not going to call you a liar. But if I tell you I thought about these issues, and I would believe if I didn't think there were good reasons for believing (and I've just given a couple of reasons off the top of my head), then no matter how poorly you think of them as reasons, you don't have a good reason to disbelieve my introspective report.

Does the material add up to the mental?

Further, when people define matter, they do it by defining the mental out of it. If we start attributing mental properties to matter at the basic level of analysis, we don't call that materialism, we call it panpsychism. Yet, we couldn't do science without minds, so somehow these material states some how add up, put together, to a mental state. OK, but now, it looks to me as if, if you add up material states until doomsday, you never close the question of whether the mental state is there. The computer beats me in chess, but does it have the inner states of mind that go along with winning a chess game. Most of us would say no. So something can function as mental, it seems to me, without actually being mental.

Why is one chunk of matter me, and all the others not me?

 I want to know, if materialism is true, why one chunk of matter is "me" and all the rest of the chunks of matter are not me. Even if you buy the whole story about something evolving that functions as if it were a me, I can still imagine a possible world physically identical to this one in which I am somebody else. So the explanation for why one chunk of matter is me, and another chunk of matter is, say, Barack Obama, can't be something about the physical world, since in a physically identical world, I'm Obama, and someone else is Reppert.

C. S. Lewis on wishes and beliefs

From a letter to Sheldon Vanauken. 

Dear Mr. Vanauken,

My own position at the threshold of Xianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true; I strongly hoped it was not. At least, that was my conscious wish: you may suspect that I had unconscious wishes of quite a different sort and that it was these which finally shoved me in. True: but then I may equally suspect that under your conscious wish that it were true, there lurks a strong unconscious wish that it were not. What this works out to is that all the modern thinking, however useful it may be for explaining the origin of an error which you already know to be an error, is perfectly useless in deciding which of two beliefs is the error and which is the truth. For (a.) One never knows all one's wishes, and (b.) In very big questions, such as this, even one's conscious wishes are nearly always engaged on both sides. What I think one can say with certainty is this: the notion that everyone would like Xianity to be true, and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) wd. be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing even in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they cd. say to Him `Keep out! Private. This is my business'? Do you? Rats! Their first reaction wd. be (as mine was) rage and terror. And I v. much doubt whether even you wd. find it simplypleasant. Isn't the truth this: that it wd. gratify some of our desires (ones we feel in fact pretty seldom) and outrage a good many others? So let's wash out all the wish business. It never helped anyone to solve any problem yet.

The hiddenness of God

This discussion, by Loftus, explains a typical atheist response on what good evidence for theism would look like to them. What it does is raise the whole issue of the hiddenness of God. Even if we think there are good reasons to believe there is a God, there are things God could have done to make it more evidence, so that we could more confidently assert that nonbelievers are all irrational. Michael Rea has a nice paper in response to this problem.

Here's a quote from it:

That’s one way of pitching the idea that divine hiddenness might help to preserve our freedom. But here’s another: Suppose Bill Gates were to go back on the dating scene. Wouldn’t it be natural for him to want to be with someone who would love him for himself rather than for his resources? Yet wouldn’t it also be natural for him to worry that even the most virtuous of prospective dating partners would find it difficult to avoid having her judgment clouded by the prospect of living in unimaginable wealth? The worry wouldn’t be that there would be anything coercive about his impressive circumstances; rather, it’s that a certain kind of
genuineness in a person’s response to him is made vastly more difficult by those circumstances. But, of
course, Bill Gates’s impressiveness pales in comparison with God’s; and, unlike Gates, God’s resources
and intrinsic nature are so incredibly impressive as to be not only overwhelmingly and unimaginably
beautiful but also overwhelmingly and unimaginably terrifying. Viewed in this light, it is easy to suppose that God must hide from us if he wants to allow us to develop the right sort of nonself-interested love for him.


This isn't about Loftus and his personality, but the issue at hand, please.

The Naturalism thread redone

I am trying to get rid of an unsightly mess this post caused, so I am redoing it, with the comments included

“But if naturalism is true, then this type of causation, according to Lewis, is impossible. Events in nature are determined by theprevious position of material particles, the laws of nature, and (perhaps) a chance factor. In that situation, according to Lewis, the object that is known determines the positive character of the act of knowing. But in rational inference what we know is a logical connection, and a logical connection is not in any particular spatio-temporal location.”

C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, p. 64. 

Zach said: 

But in rational inference what we know is a logical connection, and a logical connection is not in any particular spatio-temporal location.

Unless a logical connection is partly constituted by the operations of the mind of a rational agent, not of something outside of space and time (after all, you cannot assume rational thought is outside of spacetime without begging the question, and you cannot assume that logical connections are nonnaturalistic without begging the question--if this is meant to be an argument against naturalism anyway).

If drawing a logical connection is a pattern of thought, and the latter is some material process, then to say a logical connection is not in any particular spatio-temporal location is like saying a particular utterance has no particular spatio-temporal location.

Now, I am no naturalist wrt mind, mind you, but this argument begs too many questions against the naturalist to be of use against him. It might be a nice binky for those who are already antinaturalists about all these different things.

April 24, 2013 7:49 PM 

Hal said...

Zach,
Not to mention that the form of Naturalism that Lewis was apparently attacking is only one kind. It is sort of analogous to an atheist attacking an old-fashioned fundamentalist and thinking he had demolished Christianity.

Dan said:

The AfR is funny to me because it assumes that the universe is superlatively deterministic if naturalism is true: "the object that is known determines ... the act of knowing." I can only guess that the sort of determination spoken of here is that of non-rational causation, because the Naturalist is bound to assume, so his opponent thinks, that that's the only sort of causation that exists. As Hal implies, other species of Naturalism exist. Not every naturalist is a materioeliminatipositiviatheist.

Hal:

Dan,
Good point.

Anscombe mentioned Lewis was working with that deterministic conception of causation in his argument.
I don't have the exact quote at hand but it is located in the into to her collection of essays on metaphisics.
She was sympathetic to Lewis' efforts to improve his argument, by the way.

I think this argument can be helpful for those naturalists who think reductionism is flawed.

Anscombe is considered to be one of the top British philosophers of the last century and was also a very devout Catholics. I think anyone interested in these issues would do well to read her writings on action and intention.

BeingItself said...

And supernaturalism solves this alleged mystery how?

Victor Reppert said...

Actually brute chance is not going to help defend against the AFR. The problem is that if we know an object, we know the object. At the basic level of analysis, all causation is physical, that is blind, causation according to a naturalist, unless that naturalism can include something like panpsychism.

42

In my opinion, next year's Oscars are wrapped up already. This movie about Jackie Robinson's entry into baseball is the best movie I've seen in years.

Anyone tempted to believe that religious belief does nothing but harm should ask if they still believe this after seeing the movie. The moral conviction behind Branch Rickey's ending the segregation of baseball comes from his Methodism.

Carrier and the Robot Apocalypse

See here .

Sir Isaac Newton was only masquerading as a scientist

Richard Dawkins wrote:

I am starting to think that the onus is on those who espouse 'serious theologians' to nominate at least ONE who is serious enough to be worth bothering to engage. It cannot be John Haught (see here). Nor can it be William Craig, whose idea of a moral theological argument is that infanticide is just fine because you are doing the children a favour by sending them straight to heaven. Nor can it be John Lennox, who masquerades as a scientist while believing Jesus turned water into wine. And now we see that it cannot even be the Archbishop of York. Where are we to turn for a theologian worth arguing with? Who, indeed, are these 'serious theologians' about which we hear so much. And what is this 'serious theology', ignorance of which is held to be so reprehensible?

If believing that Jesus turned water into wine is sufficient to be not taken seriously by Dawkins, then he is requiring that people water Christianity down in order to be taken seriously. 

But C. S. Lewis wrote: 

Do not attempt to water Christianity down. There must be no pretence that you can have it with the Supernatural left out. So far as I can see Christianity is precisely the one religion from which the miraculous cannot be separated. You must frankly argue for supernaturalism from the very outset. . . .

The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left.

C.S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics" (1945) included in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970) 99..

The obvious question, though, is why someone can't be a scientist who believes that Jesus turned water into wine. Science attempts, or so we are told to map the activities of nature, (though I wouldn't dismiss at least the possibility that science might not discover laws of supernature as well, if it pushed on far enough), while a miracle involves the activity of someone who is outside of nature. So, we all know water doesn't turn into wine naturally. An omnipotent being surely would have the power to turn water into wine, and that is the agency through which Jesus presumably did this. I take it that Sir Isaac Newton believed that Jesus turned water into wine. Is Dawkins going to claim that Newton was only masquerading as a scientist since he holds that this is sufficient grounds to say that Lennox is only masquerading as a scientist? 

On being judgmental

Are Christians judgmental? To answer that question we have to ask what it is to be judgmental. If someone were to say "homosexual activity is a sin, because the Bible condemns it," is that person therefore being judgmental? Now, I am not here raising the question of whether a Christian must say this sort of thing, and certainly there is a considerable theological debate on the matter. But is it wrong to say something like this because it's judgmental? Does our disapproval of conduct on moral grounds constitute being judgmental? Is it judgmental to say that people who raise their child to believe a religion are abusing them also judgmental?

This blog post discusses that question.

Relativism, God, and Bill Clinton

If there is a God, and God has informed us that something is wrong, then we can be relativists only if we think that God's opinion is no better than anyone else's. Can you imagine Bill Clinton saying to God "You say adultery is wrong, but that's just your opinion. I think it's OK. Who's to say which of us is right, and which of us is wrong?"

Bulverism and the AFR

A redated post. (It's time to redate it one more time).

Pat Parks, who is working on a master's thesis on the AFR at Cal State Long Beach, sent a question about the relation between the AFR and Lewis's critique of Bulverism. If Bulverizing is a bad thing, then doesn't that imply that what causes our beliefs is irrelevant to the justification of those beliefs, and if that is so then doesn't Anscombe's critique of Lewis go through. Steve Lovell, who has written a dissertation on Lewis and philosophy, responded to this query by mentioning that he had covered the same issue in the conclusion of his dissertation. Steve's comments are in bold, followed by mine.

Bulverism and the Reasons/Causes Distinction
There was a method of ‘refutation’ that Lewis encountered so frequently that he felt he ought to give it a name. Bulverism, named after its fictional inventor Ezekiel Bulver, consists in dismissing a person’s claims as psychologically tainted at source, as in “Oh, you say that because you’re a man” (1941a: 181). The Bulverist’s thought is that if a person’s convictions can be fully explained as a result of non-rational factors then we need not bother about those convictions. Lewis deplored this sort of attack on our beliefs, seeing it as an illegitimate tactic which shortcuts the reasoning process. I argued in Chapter 5 that such ‘genetic arguments’ are often, but not always, fallacious. In general, we should find out whether or not a person is wrong before we start explaining how they came to be wrong. And of course the Bulverist’s game is very easy to play. If illicit motives may operate on one side of a debate, they may equally operate on the other. We do not (at least not always) clarify an issue by delving into psychology or personal history but rather by reasoning about the subject in hand.
If you try to find out which [thoughts] are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, [you may] go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
 In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. … [Y]ou can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning – never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology. (1941a: 180-1)



In attacking Bulverism, Lewis distinguished between reasons and causes:
Causes are mindless events which can produce other results than beliefs. Reasons arise from axioms and inferences and affect only beliefs. Bulversism tries to show that the other man has causes and not reasons and that we have reasons and not causes. A belief which can be accounted for entirely in terms of causes is worthless. (1941a: 182)
It is unclear how this last quote fits with the general critique of Bulverism. On the one hand we have Lewis saying that we can only find out the rights and wrong by reasoning and not by explaining (away) our opponents beliefs as the product of non-rational causes, and on the other Lewis appears to claim that the presence of such causes is incompatible with the presence of reasons. Is the problem with Bulverism that it fails to distinguish between reasons and causes and so presumes that one must exclude the other? Or is it that Bulverism is too quick to attribute beliefs to non-rational causes in the first place?
 The question is interesting in its own right, but it is also interesting for the light it may (or may not) cast upon Lewis’ argument against naturalism. For if the presence of a non-rational cause for a belief does not exclude the presence of reasons, it is hard to see how the naturalist’s commitment to the presence of such causes can discredit the naturalist’s beliefs. On the other hand, if these two kinds of explanation are really incompatible, we cannot claim that the Freudian critique of religious belief commits the genetic fallacy but merely that it assumes too easily that religious belief is brought about by non-rational factors. If religious belief may have non-rational determinants (may be ‘desire based’) and yet still be warranted, then surely the naturalist’s general commitment to the presence of such determinants cannot undermine his claims to knowledge. In terms of the reasoning presented in Chapter 5, we may wonder whether Lewis’ argument against naturalism cannot be rejected on the same grounds as we rejected the Freudian critique of religious belief, that it commits the genetic fallacy. If the one argument commits this fallacy, then so too does the other. Or so it would appear.
 But to commit the genetic fallacy is to take the origin of a belief to be relevant to its evaluation and then illegitimately fault the belief because of its origin. A clear entailment is that if any arguments commit this fallacy, there must be a meaningful distinction between the causal origins of a belief and the grounds of that belief. But it is at just this point that Lewis attacks naturalism. To argue that a worldview cannot accommodate the reasons/causes distinction is not to commit the genetic fallacy but to contend that within that worldview the accusation of making that fallacy would cease to have meaning. Lewis is not only not committing the fallacy, he is arguing against a view which (if his argument is correct) entails that there is no such fallacy to commit. Alan Gerwith puts the point in strikingly Lewisian terms.
[The naturalist] thesis is unable to account for the difference between the relation of physical or psychological cause and effect and the relation of logical or evidential ground and consequent. (1978: 36)
Bulverism also connects with several other aspects of Lewis’ work. In The Personal Heresy (Lewis and Tillyard 1939), Lewis argues against E.M.W. Tillyard’s view that poetry, and literature more generally, is first and foremost the “expression of the poet’s personality”, that “All Poetry is about the poet’s state of mind” and that, therefore, “the end we are supposed to pursue in reading … is a certain contact with the poet’s soul” (quoted in Schultz and West Jr. 1998: 318). According to Lewis, to read a poem as it should be read “I must look where he [the author] looks and not turn around to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles” (quoted in Duriez 2000: 162).
I look with his eyes, not at him. He, for the moment, will be precisely what I do not see; for you can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your own nose. The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him. (Quoted in Hooper 1997: 599)
If we are to treat a person’s opinions fairly we cannot treat them as facts to be explained merely as episodes in their biography, we must consider the belief in question on its own merits. This in turn means thinking about the content of the belief and not about the belief itself. In a similar manner, to read a poem ‘fairly’ we cannot treat it merely as an expression of the poet’s personality, we must attempt to see what the poet sees and not merely to see the poet.
 Lewis’ assault on Bulverism is noted by Como (1998: 170), by Hooper (1997: 552) and by Burson and Walls (1998: 160-1) as among Lewis’ most important ideas, and its relevance to Lewis’ rejection of the Freudian critique of religious belief is obvious. As demonstrated in Chapter 5, that attempt to discredit religious belief is no more (and is perhaps less) convincing than the attempt to discredit atheistic belief in the same manner.

Steve and Pat: This is a little bit related to the internalism/externalism issue that was explored between my blog and John DePoe's. Something I have to keep emphasizing is that science depends crucially on some beliefs being *rationally inferred*. This entails a claim about how the belief was produced. If I say some people form beliefs because they perceive a logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion. That requires a nonaccidental confluence between cause and effect relations and ground-consequent relations which is prima facie very tough to square with the mechanism and causal closure of the physical. The AFR says that if physicalism is true, then this never occurs.

Contrast this with a case of Bulverizing. I offer a rational reason for believing in God, say, the AFR. You reply that I can't possibly believe in God because of the argument, I must believe because of wish-fulfillment. Then there are two problems. One arises if I claim that I came to believe in God as a result of reasoning. If I'm making that claim, then we have to ask what kind of evidence could show that this wasn't true. A brain scan maybe? Prolonged observation of my behavior? Even if I have a wish to believe, this doesn't show that the wish, and not the reasoning, caused the belief.

But what if I don't say that I myself came to believe in God because of the AFR. I don't make that kind of autobiographical claim myself, even though I have been inviting people for years to be able to make that autobiographical claim. For me, of course, it's one of a number of reasons I believe in God. Even if I am a theist because of wish-fulfilment and the AFR is an attempt on my part to rationalize my beliefs, nevertheless the argument is "out there" and has to be considered on its argumentative merits. Of course, this all presupposes that we live in a world in which at least some people at some times make rational inferences, and change their beliefs on that basis.

One can criticize Bulverism without committing oneself to Anscombe's implausible thesis that how a belief is formed is irrelevant to how the belief is justified.

I provide a link to Lovell's dissertation here:

Why Bulverism is a fallacy

Saying that Bulverism is a fallacy is simply to say that you can't refute someone's position by pointing out an ulterior motive they might have for believing in it.

Here's the way the whole thing works. Once an argument is given, the focus goes away from the person to the argument they use. 

If someone gives an argument for the claim that smoking really doesn't cause cancer, then it isn't a refutation of their argument to point out that the person is paid by the cigarette companies. They might, for all that, have a good argument. Now if they are saying "I'm an expert, trust me, smoking really doesn't cause cancer," then the fact that they are paid by the cigarette companies is a problem. But if you can evaluate the argument, you should do that, as opposed to just considering the source.

If you don't like Lewis's term Bulverism, (since it comes from a Christian) just substitute ad hominem circumstantial. 

Bulverism: A Truly Democratic Game

I find the fruits of his discovery almost everywhere. Thus I see my religion dismissed on the grounds that “the comfortable parson had every reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in another world.” Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is an error, I can see clearly enough that some people would still have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the other way round, by saying that “the modern man has every reason for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is rejecting.” For Bulverism is a truly democratic game in the sense that all can play it all day long, and that it give no unfair advantage to the small and offensive minority who reason. But of course it gets us not one inch nearer to deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or false. That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds – a matter of philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided, the improper motives of some people, both for believing it and for disbelieving it, would remain just as they are.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury writes book on Narnia

Here. 

How chess saves lives

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov talks about chess and education in developing countries.

Ehrman's nonrepeatability argument against the resurrection

Doug Benscoter argues that this argument wouldn't just rule out the Resurrection, it would rule out the Big Bang.

Are believers a bunch of sheeple?

It is an interesting stereotype amongst religious skeptics that they think people who believe believe like sheep, without thinking or questioning. In general, I have not found this to be the case in my experience. 

On a common rebuttal to the First Way

From Martin, here.

Some basics on the Cosmological Argument

Here. 

Can people learn to avoid simple mistakes in assessing cosmological arguments?

Atheism's cyanide pill

We have seen the argument that atheism must be true, because it's the wave of the future? But is it? Apparently atheists don't reproduce at the rate of religious believers, so the future belongs to...well, not the atheists.

Why do people avoid philosophical discussions?

Someone asked that question on a philosophy forum, here.

Imagine there's no Darwin

What would the world have been like without Darwin? Peter Bowler wrote a book on this, but Michael Flannery of Evolution News and Views begs to differ.

Why the next C. S. Lewis must be a geek

Here. 

HT: Bob Prokop

Christian crimes, and the crimes of atheists

Papalinton brings up the actions of Christians in Africa who harm children accused of being witches.

Why is this any different from bringing up the crimes of communists, and the persecution of religious believers in Communist countries.


You can't have it both ways. If these horrible actions by Christians counts against Christianity, then the crimes of atheistic communists counts against atheism.

These things were done by Christian theists, but not by Christianity. In the case of Christianity, we have Matthew 18:6, which says

"If anyone causes one of these little ones--those who believe in me--to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

That's what Christ says about harming children, so Christians who harm children have to violate the teachings of its founder to do such things. I'm not even saying that the people who did these things are not real Christians. What I am saying is that they are violating the teachings of Jesus. You cannot even say that the actions of Stalin, Mao, et al, violate the fundamental teachins of atheism. Atheism does not require such actions, but it does not proscribe them either.

Is the mental on the ground floor?

BI asked: How does supernaturalism solve the problem of consciousness?

To respond to this, I am transferring in some material I posted on Dangerous Idea 2, which eventually became part of my essay in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Here's the general idea: when we call something material, or even natural, we are presuming that, at the basic level of analysis, mental characteristics are not present. If, on the other hand, the basic building blocks of the universe are not restricted to the non-mental, then the mental is already present at the basic level of analysis. With naturalistic views, as I am understanding them, we start with a supervenience base that is mental-free, and then we have to account for the existence of mind. With "supernaturalistic" views (and I don't really like the term here, but OK, though Lewis had no problem with it), you start with the mental on the ground floor, so it is far less difficult to see how the mental could arise. It is not to be completely explained in terms of the non-mental. 

There are four features of the mental which someone who denies the ultimacy of mind maintain must not be found on the rock bottom level of the universe. The first mark of the mental is purpose. If there is purpose in the world, it betokens the existence of a mind that has that purpose. So for anyone who denies the ultimacy of the mind, an explanation in terms of purposes requires a further non-purposive explanation to account for the purpose explanation. The second mark of the mental is intentionality or about-ness. Genuinely non-mental states are not about anything at all. The third mark of the mental is normativity. If there is normativity, there has to be a mind for which something is normative. A normative explanation must be explained further in terms of the non-normative. Finally, the fourth mark of the mental is subjectivity. If there is a perspective from which something is viewed, that means, once again, that a mind is present. A genuinely non-mental account of a state of affairs will leave out of account anything that indicates what it is like to be in that state.

If the mind is not ultimate, then any explanation that is given in terms of any of these four marks must be given a further explanation in which these marks are washed out of the equation.

IV. Minimal Materialism

There seem to be three minimal characteristics of a world-view which affirms that the mind is not ultimate. First, the “basic level” must be mechanistic, and by that I mean that it is free of purpose, free of intentionality, free of normativity, and free of subjectivity. It is not implied here that a naturalistic world must be deterministic. However, whatever is not deterministic in such a world is brute chance and nothing more.

Second, “basic level” must be causally closed. Nothing that exists independently from the physical world can cause anything to occur in the physical world. Second, the level of basic physics must be causally closed. That is, if a physical event has a cause at time t, then it has a physical cause at time t. Even that cause is not a determining cause; there cannot be something non-physical that plays a role in producing a physical event. If you knew everything about the physical level (the laws and the facts) before an event occurred, you could add nothing to your ability to predict where the particles will be in the future by knowing anything about anything outside of basic physics.

Third, whatever is not physical, at least if it is in space and time, must supervene on the physical. Given the physical, everything else is a necessary consequence. In short, what the world is at bottom is a mindless system of events at the level of fundamental particles, and everything else that exists must exist in virtue of what is going on at that basic level. This understanding of a broadly materialist world-view is not a tendentiously defined form of reductionism; it is what most people who would regard themselves as being in the broadly materialist camp would agree with, a sort of “minimal materialism.” Not only that, but I maintain that any world-view that could reasonably be called “naturalistic” is going to have these features, and the difficulties that I will be advancing against a “broadly materialist” world-view thus defined will be a difficulty that will exist for any kind of naturalism that I can think of.

Did the Apostles Die as Martyrs?

This video, from Stand to Reason, suggests that we have good reason to believe that, though it is an argument from silence. 

My view is that regardless of how they actually died, when you say something like this, from Acts 4: 9-10, 

If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being 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.

you are telling the people who had the power to get someone executed, namely Jesus, that you are sufficiently convinced of what you are saying that you are willing to die for it. This does, it seems to be, support the claim that the Apostles strongly believed in the Resurrection, and would undercut conspiracy theories. A skeptic needs a theory that explains, and does not deny, this sincere belief. 

Ayn Rand's Jack-Hammering

Ayn Rand was no fan of C. S. Lewis. See here. 

HT:  Bob Prokop

The Problem of Pain-for naturalists.

Steven Carr wrote: I really don't think Victor understands the argument from evil.

Evil and suffering occur pretty much randomly.

There is no god organising the world, just as there is no god organising quantum events.

VR: No, I think I do understand it. The claim is that if theism is true, then we should expect the world to be one in which pleasure and pain are distributed strongly in favor of pleasure, while pain or suffering will occur, if it occurs at all, only when it is necessary to some greater good. 

On the other hand, if naturalistic atheism is true, then we should expect to find pleasure and pain distributed evenly and randomly. Since that is what we do in fact find, the pain and suffering in the world gives us a reason to believe that naturalistic atheism is preferable to theism. 

But, here's my problem. I wouldn't expect there to be any pain and suffering given naturalism. Pain behavior maybe, but not real pain and suffering. Unless someone has a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, pain may be a problem for theists, but it's a devastating problem for naturalism. Why is the theist's problem of pain worse than the naturalists?