Tag: philosophy

An irrationality of atheists

I find it encouraging that more of the concepts I introduced in TIA six years ago, like the argument that religion does not cause war and the hypothesis that atheism is a mild form of neurological abnormality, have gradually percolated into the mainstream discourse. In this New York Times article, the philosopher Gary Gutting interviews Alvin Platinga:

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

I’ll have to think more about that argument before I accept that it holds any water. But I was disappointed that Platinga readily ceded so much ground on “the so-called problem of evil”. He wrote: “The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and
maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some
strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given
the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is
fairly low.”

However, the observable existence of evil is not even the smallest problem for the varient of theism that is Christianity. Indeed, as I have pointed out repeatedly, the existence of real and material evil is an absolute prerequisite for Christianity.

Answers for MJ 3

It appears MJ is in dire need of some Stoic philosophy:

How exactly do you handle humanity? What I mean is this: when I get up in the morning I either find myself incredibly depressed because humanity is remarkably stupid and beyond hope, or I find myself incredibly hateful because humans are parasitic creatures, stupid, hopeless, hedonistic, narcissistic, and ungrateful among many other things. Or, on even worse days, I wonder if only I am the one being parasitic, stupid, narcissistic, etc. and I am simply projecting these internal characteristics on the world (as much as I don’t care for Freud and psychology in general, I think along these lines). I suppose these emotions stem from a weak faith. I would not be frightened, depressed, or hateful toward humanity if I had hope, faith, and trust in God. I am working on that. I just wondered if you had any other suggestions.

TL;DR: I roll my eyes and move on. This is not exactly an unusual feeling. About 1,900 years ago, a Roman emperor wrote the following:

“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody,
the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things
happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But
I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the
bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is
akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it
participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the
divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on
me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we
are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the
rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is
contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and
to turn away….


“Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art now a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return. Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou dost every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee.”

Most people, being idiots, fail to understand the purpose of my regular resort to the acronym MPAI. It is not a reminder to hold others in contempt; it is a flaw in my character that I seldom need any such reminders. Rather, it is a reminder that most people do not think before speaking or acting and that one should therefore not take pointless offense at their thoughtless words and actions. It is a reminder that people are making decisions with differing amounts of information and differing cognitive capacities, and that it is foolish to expect people to respond to the same input factors in the same way that I would.

God is an ever-present reminder that we are not the center of the universe. We are natural and instinctive Ptolemaics; from birth we are inclined to believe that our awareness is the center of all Creation and that without us the universe does not exist. This is why pride is a root of so much evil and why humility is a virtue. Humility is the child’s acceptance of his true place in the grand scheme of things, and it is little wonder that so many minds cling to their foolish pride and flee from that awful reality.

The observable fact is that without God, humanity is without hope. That is why even the finest minds have never been able to do better than the ancient philosophers did in advising calm acceptance of the daily horror show combined with the firm resolution to make the most of what little time one has.

Answers for MJ 2

In which MJ asks about Platonism and Socrates:

I wanted to ask you about your view of Platonism. I have two acquaintances who are fellow classical language majors; they are both atheists (I view them as rather militant at times) and as far as I understand they became Platonists after having taken a Greek philosophy course. I was wondering how compatible atheism and Platonism are.

While I am convinced that the human mind is able to fuse even contradicting philosophies together to its liking, avoiding the inconsistency in the process, I am not so sure that they form a coherent pair. In particular, Platonism opens up the necessity of a non-material world of the Forms. While a non-material level of existence does not immediately imply the existence of god, I conjecture that the necessity of a non-material world does at least open up the possibility of the existence of god more greatly than atheists would like. After all, I ask, if a non-material realm of the Forms exists, what is preventing there from being a non-material realm of flying monkeys, or other nonsensical abstractions? I don’t believe Plato’s philosophy expressly and logically forbids the possibility of other non-material worlds.

While Occam’s razor could be invoked, the razor alone wouldn’t necessarily bring truth to the discussion. Plus, the razor could work against Plato’s world of the Forms if there were a simpler non-material realm available. I don’t particularly care for Plato or Socrates. They’re fun to read at times, but…well, I think you have similar sentiments. While definitions may be the beginning of wisdom, they can also be the seeds of deceit; Socrates takes advantage of that time and time again.

I am a nominal platonist in the sense that I believe in the supernatural realm but I am not a Platonist who subscribes to Plato’s various theories concerning that realm. Just to be clear, “platonism refers to “the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism”, which is either the assertion that everything that exists is a particular thing, or that everything that exists is concrete.

So, while it is technically possible for an atheist to be a platonist, at least in the case of a Christian atheist such as Scheisskopf from Catch-22 who does not believe in a very particular god with very specific attributes, it is extraordinarily unlikely. A platonist, by definition, believes in the supernatural, and it is absolutely impossible for a platonist to be a rational materialist, which is the spectacularly ill-named nominalist philosophy to which most atheists subscribe.

MJ’s two fellow students are no more platonists than they are giraffes, indeed, they demonstrate very beautifully the intellectual shallowness of the militant atheist as well as the truth of Chesterton’s quote concerning how those who do not believe in God will readily believe in anything, no matter how absurd.

As for definitions being the seeds of deceit, well, we have certainly seen that in the series on the Fifth Horseman. While I am a fan of utilizing the Socratic method, I believe it should be used honestly, to better open men’s eyes to the truth, not deviously in order to trap people into confessing falsehoods in which they do not believe. As I demonstrated in The Irrational Atheist, Socrates is not above cheating and moving the goalposts, taking his opponent’s agreement and applying it to something to which Socrates himself admits the other man did not agree.

I vastly prefer Aristotle to either Socrates or Plato. And Aristotle correctly identified “ambiguity” in definition as being one of the chief rhetorical tactics of the sophists. And indeed, we see that very ambiguity utilized on an almost daily basis by intellectually dishonest interlocutors here on this blog and elsewhere. The sophistical manual of the Street Epistemologist is nothing but one long exercise in rhetorical ambiguity.

Mailvox: shut up, he explained

The Great Martini doesn’t permit his complete unfamiliarity with Sextus Empiricus get in the way of his expressing a demonstrably incorrect opinion about Boghossian’s clear-cut violation of Sextus’s Sceptical teaching of “suspension of judgment”:

He hasn’t seemed to run afoul of this yet — I just started reading the
Kindle version. Sextus advised suspended judgement but didn’t preclude
the assertion of claims, that seems to be how his skeptical philosophy
would be conducted. As far as I’ve gotten, Bog affirms Dawkins’ 1-7
level of belief, that Dawkins only claimed a 6, and that the definition
of “atheist” he wants to use is a person who doesn’t believe there is
enough evidence to confirm the existence of God. I’m sure he’s not
going to spend the entire book holding to strict suspension of judgement
(I mean the entire purpose of the book is to weaken the societal
influence of religion, which implies a judgement), but at least he seems
to be aligning himself with the skeptical stance from the beginning.

This is completely and utterly wrong. Boghossian has done nothing of the sort. Do you want to know why I am so openly contemptuous of so many people who are fairly intelligent and sound more or less reasonable? Do you want to know why I am inspired to describe myself as a superintelligence? The reason is that it often feels as if I am the only intelligent individual who writes these days who ever bothers to take five minutes to actually read the bloody material upon which I am intending to opine. I don’t know if it was TGM’s intent to defend Boghossian or if he simply happened to miss the obvious, but either way, it is readily apparent that he doesn’t know anything about the Scepticism of Sextus Empiricus.

Scepticism does not mean “I am dubious about X.” It does not mean “I am going to convince you that X is better than Y”. It does not mean “I will only believe X if there is sufficient evidence to justify it”. It means: “I have no opinion about either X or Y, and if you assert that X is better, I will argue that Y is better in order to produce a contradiction of equal weight and thereby allow me to suspend my judgment.” What virtually no one who talks about skepticism seems to understand is that for the Sceptic, suspension of judgment is not the method or the initial approach, it is the objective. If Boghossian was a genuine Sceptic, he would have presented an argument for the primacy of faith over reason to his atheist audience.

TGM is disputing this: “ Boghossian’s very stated purpose is in direct and explicit
opposition to everything Sextus Empiricus advises, beginning with
“suspension of judgment”.”

In the fourth sentence of Chapter One, Boghossian explains his purpose:  “The goal of this book is to… help [the faithful] abandon their faith and embrace reason.”

So, already we know that the Fifth Horseman clearly has an opinion on at least two things. Faith is bad by nature. Reason is good by nature. That this is a correct summary of his opinions on the two matters is confirmed repeatedly throughout the book. Now let us turn to Sextus Empiricus and the Outlines of Pyrrhonism.

Sextus: “He who is of the opinion that anything is either good or bad by nature is always troubled…. But he who is undecided, on the contrary, regarding things that are good and bad by nature, neither seeks nor avoids anything eagerly, is therefore in a state of tranquility of soul…. The Sceptic… rejects the opinion that anything is in itself bad by nature. Therefore we say that the aim of the Sceptic is imperturbability in matters of opinion.”

Boghossian reveals his clear-cut opinions concerning faith being bad by nature and reason being good by nature. He is not even remotely imperturbable with regards to either matter of opinion. Therefore he is not only troubled, but his very stated purpose is in direct and explicit opposition to the heart of what Sextus Empiricus teaches. Which is exactly what I stated in the first place. Boghossian can’t possibly be said to be “aligning himself with the skeptical stance from the beginning”, not when he is expressly violating the very aim of the Sceptic.

And, in doing so, the Fifth Horseman shows himself to be a fraud, given his risible attempt to claim the intellectual mantle of Sextus Empiricus. As it happens, I very much doubt that Boghossian has ever read anything Sextus wrote that isn’t on Wikipedia.

DH had a much more informed take on Boghossian’s little book:

This has all the hallmarks of petty atheism which has as its main feature a
stunning lack of scholarship and education. One of the main
attractions of the RC church is that despite all the many faults, and
theological questions I may have, the long and ancient history of
scholarship remains unbroken. Whatever you think of any given Pope,
it’s unlikely that anything he ever wrote would be so filled with rote
unverifiable garbage.

Oh, we haven’t even gotten to the juvenile, self-serving definitions of terms such as “faith”, “hope” and “atheist” yet. It is a stunningly dishonest little book and is unlikely to impress anyone with an IQ over +1SD who reads it with an open or critical mind.

Throwing out Aristotle

To say nothing of more than two millennia of theology, philosophy, and modern science. And you wonder why I’m dubious about the survival prospects of equalitarian society, or indeed, any society where feminism has grown roots:

What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months
thinking about and researching. There are not a lot of women in
philosophy, and there are definitely not a lot of feminist philosophers,
so I don’t have a good answer for this question. There is great
scholarship talking about weather a feminist logic can build off of
formal logic or if it has to reject the laws of identity and create
something entirely new. There are solid arguments for both camps,
personally I’m swayed by the constructive theories that would build onto
formal logic through a feminist lens. There exist logics that handle
contradiction as part of the system, namely paraconsistent logic. I
think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can
be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the
following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

It should be readily apparent that once you’ve decided that X = !X, you have essentially doomed yourself by denying reality. It is only a matter of time before you make the fatal determination that the hungry bear wants you to play with it, the November ice is thick enough to drive on, or you can leap off the cliff and fly.

This holds as true for societies as it does for individuals. Consider the paraconsistencies that Examerican society has adopted as truths.

  • Third world immigrants are effective substitutes for native children.
  • Expanding the vote to women will improve society.
  • Paying money to the unemployed will not discourage them from working.
  • Debt can expand infinitely without risk of default or currency devaluation.
  • Female labor is as productive as male labor.
  • Free trade in good, services, and labor benefits the economy.
  • Increasing the supply of labor doesn’t reduce its price.
  • Men will marry women and support children regardless of financial disincentives.
  • Members of non-European population groups will behave more like European population groups in European geographies than like non-Europeans in their original geographies.

Pop culture is utter filth

Vile, abusive, and occasionally lethal filth, especially where animals and children are concerned:

American Humane Association monitor Gina Johnson confided in an email to a colleague on April 7, 2011, about the star tiger in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. While many scenes featuring “Richard Parker,” the Bengal tiger who shares a lifeboat with a boy lost at sea, were created using CGI technology, King, very much a real animal, was employed when the digital version wouldn’t suffice. “This one take with him just went really bad and he got lost trying to swim to the side,” Johnson wrote. “Damn near drowned.”

King’s trainer eventually snagged him with a catch rope and dragged him to one side of the tank, where he scrambled out to safety.

“I think this goes without saying but DON’T MENTION IT TO ANYONE, ESPECIALLY THE OFFICE!” Johnson continued in the email, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “I have downplayed the f— out of it.”

The full scope of animal injuries and deaths in entertainment productions cannot be known. But in multiple cases examined by THR,
the AHA has not lived up to its professed role as stalwart defenders of
animals — who, unlike their human counterparts, didn’t themselves sign
up for such work.

Corey Feldman and others have spokenly openly about the homosexual pedophiles who infest Hollywood. But they’re also active in the music industry, as the guilty plea of Ian Watkins, the former lead singer of Lostprophets, demonstrates:

The police faced serious questions last night over why they failed to act sooner to stop Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins after it emerged fans had warned for nearly four years that he was obsessed with child porn.

From early 2010 horrified fans who had become friends with Watkins went online to beg for help after discovering vile images on his computer. Friends claim they called police to tell them the 36-year-old was a paedophile but officers did nothing, allowing him to go on to subject babies to the most horrific abuse.

A disturbing child porn profile created in that time by Watkins was viewed by more than 40,000 people on the internet and yet appears never to have been monitored by authorities.

In one post, written before his arrest, a fan wrote: ‘His on-off girlfriend reported him to police twice for being a paedophile.

‘He sent pornographic pictures of a little girl to a few girls telling them it was a five-year-old girl he’d raped. He also watches child porn constantly. Sick sick man.’

Watkins allegedly boasted to obsessed female fans that he had HIV and was on a mission to pass it on to children.

Child abuse and animal abuse are two of the inevitable consequences of secular culture. It’s not an accident that these predilections are beginning to come out of their closets at this time. It is both logically and empirically obvious that the tolerant, non-judgmental moral parasitism of secularism cannot survive the absence of its host. This is not to say that all men and women will inevitably descend into total depravity, only that their inability to prevent those who are more susceptible to such sins becomes complete in a moral vacuum.

You who pride yourselves on your tolerance, know that you are tolerating the rape and slaughter of the innocent. If you cannot say: “these things are wrong and they are evil because they are against the Law of God and Nature”, you are part of the problem. You’re not responsible, but you have rendered yourself useless with regards to assisting in the solution.

I liked Lostprophets. But, not unlike the band members themselves, I really don’t care to have anything to do with it anymore. Ian Watkins did, indeed, turn out to be a Prophet of the Lost.

Mailvox: of God and games

Civilservant asks two questions:

Are man-made morals more arbitrary than god-made morals?  The original question involved “authority” as if that were
synonymous with “legitimate”. People typically view God’s laws (however
conceived) as being “authoritative” and therefore “legitimate”. But
are not God’s laws arbitrary in exactly the same way as Man’s laws may
be arbitrary? As I said earlier anyone may say “My Game, My Rules” with
equal legitimacy but the difficulty is in getting others to go along
with the Rules. Witness the war in heaven and Satan’s disobedience.

Man-made morals are no more arbitrary than God-made morals – and note that the capital G is necessary here – but they are considerably less-informed and they lack all legitimacy and authority.

And as for God’s laws being arbitrary in EXACTLY the same way as Man’s laws, that depends upon the specific sense of “arbitrary” being used.  Let’s consider the four definitions: 

1.subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one’s discretion: an arbitrary decision. 

God’s laws are clearly MORE arbitrary in this sense, because His will is less restricted than Man’s.

 
2. decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute.

God’s laws are MORE arbitrary than Man’s in this sense; even though the USA, for example, has increasingly become a nation of case law rather than statutory law. God has laid down the laws of the Creation, but in relation to Man, He is more judge than legislator.

3.having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government. 

Again, God’s laws are MORE arbitrary than Man’s laws, since God’s power is less limited than Man’s. 

4.capricious; unreasonable; unsupported

In this sense, God’s laws are much LESS arbitrary than Man’s. Since we are told the wages of sin are death and that all men sin, the fact that all men die is empirical evidence that God’s laws are neither capricious or unsupported. Furthermore, God’s laws are scientifically falsifiable; all a man interested in testing the validity of God’s laws must do is not sin, then die, and they will be falsified.

So, the answer is obviously no, God’s laws are not arbitrary in exactly the same way as Man’s laws. Furthermore, it is totally incorrect to say “anyone may say “My Game, My Rules” with
equal legitimacy.”  God is the creator and owner of the game. The universe is His game, and no man has any more right to say that his rules take precedence over God’s than Adrian Peterson has the right to declare that the next touchdown he scores will be worth 100 points. Whereas, if the entity called NFL decides that a touchdown is henceforth to be worth 100 points, the next touchdown Mr. Peterson scores will, in fact, be worth 100 points.

The foolishness of trusting experts

I am not infrequently criticized for being intrinsically skeptical of anything an expert says, despite the fact that I am, literally, a professional card-carrying “expert” myself. But such skepticism is absolutely justified:

As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions — prime ministers, presidents and chief executives — and so I’m all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere. But up until then I hadn’t thought much about the process of decision making. So in between M.R.I.’s, CT scans and spinal taps, I dove into the academic literature on decision making. Not just in my field but also in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, information science, political science and history.

What did I learn?

Physicians do get things wrong, remarkably often. Studies have shown that up to one in five patients are misdiagnosed. In the United States and Canada it is estimated that 50,000 hospital deaths each year could have been prevented if the real cause of illness had been correctly identified.

Yet people are loath to challenge experts. In a 2009 experiment carried out at Emory University, a group of adults was asked to make a decision while contemplating an expert’s claims, in this case, a financial expert. A functional M.R.I. scanner gauged their brain activity as they did so. The results were extraordinary: when confronted with the expert, it was as if the independent decision-making parts of many subjects’ brains pretty much switched off. They simply ceded their power to decide to the expert.

And there is the problem. Experts are simply people with more information and experience. But they are not necessarily as intelligent as you are, they often lack some of the most relevant information, and they usually have no skin in the game so they often don’t even bother paying serious attention to the matter at hand.

Some of my biggest mistakes have been because, against my better judgment, I trusted the expert to know what he was doing. The main problem, I think, is that the expert is usually making a probabilistic decision based on the averages without bothering to apply the specific details that happen to alter the odds. And this doesn’t even include the more serious, but less common problem of when the expert has a financial incentive to make a particular determination.

As we know, someone with a financial incentive to see things a certain way tends to have a very difficult time seeing it any other way, regardless of their level of expertise. The expert investment adviser wants you to invest in something, anything, and the more churn the better. The expert real estate salesman wants to sell your house quickly, with as little marketing expense as possible, and he doesn’t care if you get the best price or not. The expert banker wants you to take out the largest loan he can get you to sign for, even if you can’t really afford it. The expert IT guy just wants you to shut up, stop asking questions, and do what he tells you.

None of this means that expert advice is useless. Often they have a considerable amount of useful information. But that doesn’t mean you should ever let them make your decisions for you. Listen and learn, but do not trust.

The return of Aristotelian anti-reductionism

And the intellectual surrender of scientific naturalism. Edward Feser considers the implications of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos as well as Philip Kitcher’s response to it at the New York Times:

Like other Nagel critics, Kitcher agrees that reductionism has failed.  The “Newtonian vision” promised a “cosmos in which everything would be explained on the basis of a small number of physical principles.”  But this, Kitcher says, is not what science has actually delivered.  It has given us “no grand theories, but lots of bits and pieces, generating local insights about phenomena of special interest.”  And the future of science promises to continue in this vein, taking us beyond “the illusion of unity” and replacing it with “an enormous and heterogeneous family of models.”

What about the specific aspects of nature emphasized by Nagel?  Kitcher doesn’t seem to dispute that they have not been explained the way reductionistic science and naturalistic philosophy promised.  He acknowledges that “we lack a physico-chemical account of life” and indeed that the problem of giving such an account “hasn’t been directly addressed by the extraordinary biological accomplishments of past decades.”  And he allows that scientists have an “incautious tendency… to write as if the most complex functions of mental life — consciousness, for example — will be explained tomorrow.”

So, what then is Kitcher’s alternative answer to the questions reductionist science and naturalistic philosophy have failed to answer, and to which Nagel offers a (partially) neo-Aristotelian answer?  He doesn’t have one.  Instead he suggests that we stop asking the questions.  More precisely, with respect to the nature of life, he proposes: “[D]on’t ask what life is (in your deepest Newtonian voice); consider the various activities in which living organisms engage and try to give a piecemeal understanding of those.”  He recommends taking a similarly piecemeal approach to answering questions about mind, and forgetting about whatever won’t succumb to this method.  “With luck, in a century or so, the issue of how mind fits into the physical world will seem as quaint as the corresponding concern about life.”  For “philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them.”

Well, “get over it” is, needless to say, not an answer we would accept in other contexts.  When you give the cashier a twenty for the three dollar coffee you just purchased and he hands you back seven dollars, “Get over it” is no answer to the question “Where’s the other ten?”  When you go into the hospital for an appendectomy and awaken to find your legs missing, “Get over it” is no answer to the question “What the hell did you do to me?!”  And, needless to say, “Get over it” is no answer Kitcher or any other naturalist would accept in response to criticism of a theological proposition.  So why should we give naturalists a pass we wouldn’t give to theologians, surgeons, and cashiers?

It’s worse than that, though.  For when someone offers you a unified explanation of the world — as Nagel does, in a very sketchy way, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition does in a rigorously worked out way (and a way that can incorporate what we’ve learned from modern science, as present day representatives of the tradition have shown) — it is no response whatsoever to say: “Well, I’ve got this alternative view of the world on which there is no unified explanation.”  The only thing to say to that is: “Um, thanks for sharing, but I’ve just given you a unified explanation.  So what you need to do, if your rejection of it is going to be rational, is to show me exactly what is wrong with it, and not just question-beggingly assert that there is no explanation, or that acceptable explanations have to fit into your Procrustean philosophical bed.”

Actually, it’s worse even than that.  For the main philosophical selling point of naturalism has, of course, always been the idea that it can explain everything its rivals can but in a more economical way.  The original claim was that we don’t need all that Aristotelian metaphysics (or the Cartesian, idealist, or other non-naturalistic metaphysics that replaced it) in order to account for rationality, sentience, life, etc.  Ockham’s razor and all that.  And Ockham’s razor, of course, says: Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.   It doesn’t say: Don’t multiply entities when doing so would be tantamount to an embarrassing admission that naturalism can’t after all perform as advertised.  And if it turns out you do need the entities for explanatory purposes, then multiply away.

Nagel’s proposal is like that of the honest salesman who gives you a refund when his product doesn’t do what he said it would do.  I’m sorry ma’am, here’s your money back.  You should have stuck with Aristotelianism rather than that new-fangled Elixir of Materialism I was peddling.  In fact I now rep the Stagirite brand myself!

Kitcher’s proposal, by contrast, makes of naturalism (whatever his own intentions) something of a bait and switch.  Naturalism will explain mind, life, etc.?  A unified metaphysical picture of the world?  Did I say that?  Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell, lady.  Must’ve been some other salesman.  Anyway, the check’s cashed and you already signed the contract.  But hey, have a look at these really interesting recent findings of molecular biology.  Might lead to some new pharmaceuticals…

As usual, the scientists and their gaggle of male science fetish groupies are well behind the philosophers. Over the years, I’ve gradually come to understand that scientists have a lot more in common with IT guys than they do with software developers and designers. They’re pretty good with pushing the right buttons and fixing the little things, but they have no idea what is going on under the surface and don’t understand what the developers are talking about when they raise questions related to intent, purpose, and meaning.

Scientists aren’t stupid, and for the most part they aren’t midwits like nearly all their groupies are. (If you meet someone who loves, loves, loves science, and swears by it in a quasi-religious manner, but doesn’t work in a lab or research facility, the odds are that he simply didn’t have the brains to cut it.) But perhaps because their training is so specialized these days, scientists often appear to exhibit a strange inability to maintain logical coherency, let alone logical consistency, with regards to their expressed opinions and philosophies, which is something I don’t observe as often in non-scientists of similar intelligence.

A foretaste of Hell

Tom Simon draws attention to an important Dorothy Sayers quote:

If we refuse assent to reality: if we rebel against
the nature of things and choose to think that what we at the moment want
is the centre of the universe to which everything else ought to
accommodate itself, the first effect on us will be that the whole
universe will seem to be filled with an inexplicable hostility. We shall
begin to feel that everything has a down on us, and that, being so
badly treated, we have a just grievance against things in general. That
is the knowledge of good and evil and the fall into illusion. If we
cherish and fondle that grievance, and would rather wallow in it and
vent our irritation in spite and malice than humbly admit we are in the
wrong and try to amend our behaviour so as to get back to reality, that
is, while it lasts, the deliberate choice, and a foretaste of the
experience of Hell.

—Dorothy L. Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante

I leave it to the reader to decide to what sort of all-too-familiar figure Sayers is describing here.