A testable case for ID?

New Proofs of the Existence of God

This is a new book. HT: GREV

C. S. Lewis on the Dangers of Extrapolating from Past Scientific Success

This is in response to a Secular Outpost post by Keith Parsons.

The Secular Outpost: C.S. Lewis Pontificates about Something or Other

I am afraid you don't have Lewis right here at all. In fact, when you read him, and when I read him, it is as if we are reading the same words, but getting an entirely different message. Now I could be being exasperatingly generous, or maybe you aren't giving him a fair shake, but somehow we just aren't seeing the same things. Lewis isn't romanticizing dryads, etc. What he is doing is pointing out the problems with taking successful scientific developments and extrapolating from those to other areas of discourse where treating something else in the same way as science treated another area results in bad conclusions.

In the case of psychology, I take it that since you and I are close to the same age, you remember what psychology departments were like in the early 1970s. They were filled with people, following B. F. Skinner, who thought to really treat human beings in a scientific manner we had to stop talking about consciousness. It's the extrapolation from previous successes in science, the idea that we can look at the trajectory of science and make confident predictions about how science is going to have to treat certain types of subject matter, that we get into trouble.

Now the reason this is not an attack on science is because this history of science should really teach us that we can't plot the course of future scientific success. Science progresses sometimes by coming up with successful reductions, and sometimes progresses by recognizing that reductionism isn't going to work. Cognitive science, while not going anti-naturalistic, has come to reject the idea that consciousness has to be denied (although it is still very much a scientific mystery). The behaviorist hegemony which seemed to pervasive in psychology in my undergraduate days (the entire ASU philosophy department was one huge rat lab) is now considered a Dark Age.

This passage, from the Abolition of Man, helps to see that Lewis is complaining about extrapolations from science, not about science itself.

From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because `Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

I originally brought this up in connection with a passage from Richard Swinburne about how some of these past scientific successes were achieved.

There is a crucial difference between these two cases. All other integrations into a super-science, or sciences dealing with entities and properties apparently qualitatively distinct, was achieved by saying that really some of the entities and properties were not as they appeared to be; by making a distinction between the underlying (not immediately observable) entities and properties and the phenomenal properties to which they give rise. Thermodynamics was conceived with the laws of temperature exchange; and temperature was supposed to be a property inherent in an object. The felt hotness of a hot body is indeed qualitatively distinct from particle velocities and collisions. The reduction was achieved by distinguishing between the underlying cause of the hotness (the motion of the molecules) and the sensations which the motion of molecules cause in observers. The former falls naturally within the scope of statistical mechanic—for molecules are particles’ the entities and properties are not of distinct kinds. But this reduction has been achieved at the price of separating off the phenomenal from its causes, and only explaining the latter. All reduction from one science to another dealing with apparently very disparate properties has been achieved by this device of denying that the apparent properties (i. e. the ‘secondary qualities” of colour, heat, sound, taste, etc.) with which one science dealt belonged to the physical world at all. It siphoned them off to the world of the mental. But then, but when you come to face the problem of the sensations themselves, you cannot do this. If you are to explain the sensations themselves, you cannot distinguish between them and their underlying causes and only explain the latter. In fact the enormous success of science in producing an integrated physico-chemistry has been achieved at the expense of separating off from the physical world colours, smells, and tastes, and regarding them as purely private sensory phenomena. The very success of science in achieving its vast integrations in physics and chemistry is the very thing which has made apparently impossible any final success in integrating the world of the mind with the world of physics.

It was Lewis who said, "It is the glory of science to progress." But progress may not go in the same direction as past progress.

The Steve argument and the AFR

I need to go back over what the Steve argument is. It is a response to the "anti-causal" reply to the argument from reason, or, more particularly, the problem of mental causation. Actually, it's one of a few arguments I use against this position, which goes back to Anscombe's critique of Lewis. I have to give kudos to Clayton for keeping focused on what this post is about.

The Steve argument is an illustration of the fact that when we say that someone is rational, we are saying that evidential relationships are relevant to the actual occurrence of beliefs as psychological events. In particular, when we try to explain why we are rational in believing something, we make counterfactual claims about the relationship between evidence and our beliefs, such as "If the evidence for evolution weren't so strong, I wouldn't believe in it." A typical way in which people impugn the rationality of others is to say that smart people believe things for not-so-smart reasons, and then use their reasoning powers to justify what they have already committed themselves emotionally to believe. In fact, people like Loftus very often charge that Christians are something like Steve; that is, they for a belief in Christianity through processes that could just as easily produce a  false belief as a true belief, and then find whatever arguments they can to undergird those beliefs which were really reached in a non-truth-conducive way.

But what we are saying when we say we believe something for a good reason is that the presence of reasons is relevant to the production of our beliefs, that, unlike those benighted folks over there, we have actually paid attention to the evidence and are following it wherever it leads, whether it makes us feel good or not.

But what that means is that evidential relationships are relevant to what beliefs we hold, and therefore, what states our brains get themselves into. But evidential and logical relationships are abstract states. They are not physical things, and they do not have particular locations in space and time. Yet they are, apparently, causally relevant to the beliefs we form. Or, at least they can be.

But these same people will say that the mind is the brain, and that what goes on in the brain is simply physical causation playing itself out. Abstract objects don't, they say, cause anything to happen in the brain, since the brain is a physical system and events in the brain are caused just like any other events. It's just the laws of physics playing themselves out.

Lewis wrote: But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence
of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it? (1960b: 20)

(1960b) Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1974)

It seems to me that this points to something paradoxical in the naturalist's view of reasoning.

A critique of the AFr

Apparently this was written by Charles Echelbarger of SUNY Oswego, though it never quite says anywhere. 


But I wonder how he handles my "Steve" case? 


If you were to meet a person, call him Steve, who could argue with great cogency for every position he held, you might be inclined to consider him a very rational person. However, suppose that on all disputed questions Steve rolled dice to fix his positions permanently and then used his reasoning abilities only to generate the best-available arguments for those beliefs selected in the above-mentioned random method. I think that such a discovery would prompt you to withdraw from him the honorific title “rational.” Clearly, we cannot answer the question of whether or not a person is rational in a manner that leaves entirely out of account the question of how his or her beliefs are produced and sustained.

It seems to me that how beliefs are produced and sustained is crucial to assessing whether someone is rational. If it is a consequence of the fact that everything in the universe occurs as a result of the motions of a fundamentally non-teleological substrate that reasons never really affect the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event, then there has to be something wrong with a world-view according to which everything in the universe occurs as a result of the motions of a fundamentally non-teleological substrate.

Soulforce on the Bible and Homosexuality

A pro-gay Christian perspective on the Bible.

Steve Lovell's Doctoral Dissertation on Lewis and Philosophy

This is really excellent work on Lewis. It was completed the same year my book was published.

Ed Feser on the Materialist Shell Game

A redated post.

Along the same lines, here's a Lewis quote, from The Empty Universe:

The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance gradually empties this rich and genial universe, first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account:classified as out sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls” or ‘selves” or “minds’ to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods, that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the Dryad is a “ghost,” an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing. And just as we have been broken of our bad habit of personifying trees, so we must now be broken of our habit of personifying men; a reform already effected in the political field. There never was a Subjective account into which we could transfer the items which the Subject had lost. There is no “consciousness” to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colours, and concepts. Consciousness is “not the sort of noun that can be used that way.”

The Wikipedia entry on Delusion

Maybe this will help us get an idea of what the delusion-rhetoric is all about.

School Prayer? Sure, so long as it's Islamic prayer

Where is the ACLU when we need them? (Well, they're actually suing.)

Can an Intelligent Person be a Christian? Some Plantingian Reflections

A redated post from a couple years back.

In going on the Secular Web and looking at some atheist blogs, the answer seems to be no. In Alvin Plantinga's essay "A Christian Life Partly Lived," he writes:

At Wayne, the late Hector Neri-Casteneda, George Nakhnikian, and Edmund Gettier confronted me with antitheistic argumetns of a depth and philosophical sophistication and persistence I had never encountered before....Nakhnikian was our chairman; he thought well of my powers as a budding young philosopher, but also thought no intelligent person could possibly be a Christian. He would announce this sentiment in his usual stentorian tones, whereupon Robert Sleigh would say "But what about Al, George? Don't you think he's an intelligent person?" George would have to admit, reluctantly, that he thought I probably was, but he still thought there had to be a screw loose in there somewhere."

James Hannam attacks the Jesus Myth theory

Chris Hallquist debunks the resurrection in one page

Naturalism without materialism

Many people have made the argument that difficulties for materialism need not be difficulties for ontological naturalism. But that leaves an important question: what is a non-materialist naturalism supposed to look like?

I can imagine a form of naturalism in which God, angels, and what we used to call human souls are part of nature. But then we could even imagine the physical in such a way that all these things are physical. When I took a course on physicalism with Hugh Chandler, who eventually became my doctoral dissertation advisor, he suggested that the physical is whatever is quantified over in an ideally completed physics. Since some theories in physics quantify over God, on that view, God would be physical.

Such definitional liberality, however, would make it difficult to define even methodological naturalism, since it would then no longer exclude what most of typically think it is supposed to exclude.

Homophily and the Good Samaritan

This piece, from Internet Monk, suggests that the besetting sin that people today are failing to notice is homophily, the restriction of our love to people who are like us.

An ethical genius from two millennia ago told us when we ask ourselves who we should love, in other words, who is my neighbor, we have to ask that question from a position of dire need, the kind of need one would be in if one had just been mugged and left for dead on the road  from Jerusalem to Jericho. From that vantage point, try thinking that the person who takes care of you is too Samaritan, too feminist, too Republican, too Democrat, too rich, too poor, or too gay, or too immoral, or too illegal, to be my neighbor.

What would disprove Christianity

A redated post. 

I have often reflected on world-views and disconfirmation. Many non-believers will tell me that they would believe if God were to do something miraculous. God could provide a dramatic, Spielbergian confirmation of his existence which would disconfirm atheism, perhaps decisively. The galaxies in the Virgo cluster spelling out "Turn or Burn: This Means You, Parsons" is my personal favorite. Though Perezoso has been pointing out Christine Overall's argument that miracles wouldn't confirm the goodness of God, and might be one more piece of evidence that the Infinite One is not good, even if he exists.

Can the theist point to something similar that would decisively refute his own theism? After all a God who doesn't exist can't dramatically demonstrate his non-existence. In most atheist post-mortem scenarios, both the theist and the atheist have gone out of existence, so no one will be around to collect their bets. But there is no Spielbergian scenario that the theist can point to. Most people who come to believe, or disbelieve, do so for a variety of reasons put together, and so I can offer a vague suggestion that a lot of things going south with respect to my faith might undermine it decisively, without being able to specify exactly what that would amount to.

It is somewhat easier to think of a circumstance according to which my Christian beliefs might fall apart, though this is a post-mortem scenario.

I die, and stand before an august figure who is carrying a curved sword, and a gong mallet. The august figure asks me who my God is. I tell him "The triune God, the Father, on and Holy Spirit." The august figure scowls and bangs the gong. This isn't going so well. "The true God is Allah, he says." Oops. Then he asks "Who is your prophet?" I answer, "There were many prophets. There were the nonliterate prophets, like Elijah and Elisha, there were the Major Prophets, and the Minor Prophets. The gong bangs again. "And Muhammad is his prophet." I then find myself falling into a desert. There are lots of mirages but no water. And lots of demonic laughter whenever I realize there is no water. I'm really thirsty.

Then I reach a canyon, which I can't cross. I see all of the 9/11 hijackers enjoying...uh... the fruits promised them in the Muslim paradise, and praising Allah. I mean, this is serious damnation.

After awhile it will get through to me that this is not a bad dream, and the logical conclusion would have to be that Islam was true and Christianity was not.

Vallicella on the naturalist version of fides quaerens intellectum

Do naturalists use the principle of faith seeking understanding. In this old post, Bill Vallicella argues that they do, rebutting some objections that I have heard from time to time from naturalists.

A Scientific American article on the impasse in origin of life research

Scientists, according to this article, have no clue as to how life began. But the author thinks this doesn't support a theistic account, because theists can't answer the question "Who made God?"

Colin McGinn reviews Ramachandran

Interesting because McGinn is a "mysterian" about the mind.

The IEP on Skeptical Theism