What is interesting and what is not
Another thought from Tom Clark on supernaturalism.
If one takes the “ontological features” of consciousness, free agency, rationality, and moral knowledge to be fundamental to reality – as resident in an all powerful God – then of course it’s no surprise that God’s favored creations should also possess such features. But absent independent evidence-based reasons to believe in God, and given competing naturalistic explanations that meet high standards of coherence, verifiability, transparency and simplicity, Moreland’s supernatural hypothesis has little appeal for those wanting to know how things really work. It’s their evidential and methodological constraints that make naturalistic explanations worth pursuing, and it’s the lack of such constraints that makes the supernatural hypothesis facile, uninteresting and ultimately empty.
That’s just it. A hypothesis that is not tethered to anything – a hypothesis that does not, to use Tom’s metaphor, have to pay any attention to a net – is fundamentally uninteresting because it doesn’t come to grips with anything. It is the coming to grips with something that is interesting, and it is the refusal to do so that makes supernaturalism uninteresting. You get this from reading about Ardipithecus, or scientific discussions of the evidence for human dispersal, or any other in-progress scientific or otherwise empirical investigation. If there is no net, if anything goes – then what’s there to think about?
Spot on. It’s why I find a lot of metaphysics to be intellectual wankery. I know, I’ll probably come across as a logical positivist now, but if you can’t test it and discard it or perhaps in the case of logic and maths prove it, then how can it be knowledge? How can you know it if you don’t use intersubjective rational methods?
In the case of souls/minds, it’s worse, there are parts of science, fundamental parts, that must be horrendously wrong if there are immaterial substances communicating with material substances. We have this well tested and pretty well explained facts of nature all wrong? There aint no ghost in the machine.
Brian, I am a philosopher by training and profession – and *I* find a lot of metaphysics to be intellectual wankery. The trick is distinguishing which bits of metaphysics are utter bollocks and which are absolutely crucial – but since there are a lot more of the former bits than the latter, a healthy skepticism about metaphysical claims and questions is always a good starting point.
:-)
That said, I don’t think there’s much reason to dignify Moreland’s collection of baseless supernatural claims by calling it metaphysics in the first place: Tom Clark only refers to the “ontological features” of consciousness because Moreland himself does so, and he goes on to point out that in fact the entire laundry list of consciousness, free agency, rationality, and moral knowledge are really just human phenomena with naturalistic explanations. The claims that consciousness, free agency, et cetera are fundamental features of reality are really just a series of rationalizations offered by Moreland to support claims about God he is already committed to in advance by his faith: While the content of the claims may be metaphysical, the process by which Moreland arrives at these claims is hardly that of metaphysics as a branch of philosophical inquiry – that is, the claims are not conclusions generated by reasoned, evidence-constrained arguments about the nature of reality.
If one still wants to say that what Moreland engages in is metaphysicsal argumentation of a sort, then it is spectacularly bad argumentation, poorly reasoned and not very attentive to evidence. As Clark says in his understated way, “[T]heologians and theistic philosophers such as Moreland aren’t operating under the same epistemic and explanatory constraints as secular scientists and naturalistic philosophers.” Quite. To say the very least.
I guess that Armstrong might say that, at minimum, the otherwise seemingly empty god theories may have therapeutic value. If we forced her to honest conclusions, then it would seem as though the only thing the theories must tether to would be ourselves (our “souls”, “spirits”, etc. — insert sexed up synonym for “mind” here).
But minds are needy, hungry babies. We need things to encounter and grapple with. A mind that has grown up in a sensory deprivation tank would arguably not be much of a mind at all. Even our therapies have to connect with something (other people, the world) in at least a loose and ephemeral sense. Though the immediate point of such indulgences is not to learn about the world (it’s to achieve ataraxia, enlightenment, a buzz, etc.), they also can’t get along without providing consolations about how to deal with it.
If it were true that god theories provided people with the best consolations for getting on in the world, then it would admittedly not be useless, so long as we think of usefulness as being minimally satisfied by the baseline contentment of the single pious sir or madam. That’s not hard. But I don’t think we have much reason to think it outcompetes other ways of living.
Whatever the competition may be, I don’t seem to live by it. I must admit that though I trust science and scientists well enough, and believe in naturalism as a worldview, I don’t get much consolation from it. I really do want to feel like Carl Sagan, with wide doey eyes staring out at the brilliant universe, but I usually don’t feel that way. What I do get consolation from is a sense of justice served.
Thanks G. I was probably and unwittingly being too kind to term that mind babble as Metaphysics.
Benjamin, I sort of am with you. I take the universe to be all there is. I don’t expect it to provide me with meaning. I mean it’s genuinely cool to look at a Hubble deep space image. But life seems to be about relationships and entertaining oneself and not thinking about how fucked up we’ve made the planet. :)
OK, this is not strictly appropriate but it is very funny
http://reportr.net/2008/03/25/mitchell-and-webb-ask-what-do-you-reckon/
(30s to 60s seemed appropriate to the discussion at hand)
What strikes me as interesting re the contest between naturalism and supernaturalism, and between empiricism and theology, is that the triumph of naturalism and empiricism in the West was due to the relative weakness of its theological opposition re the theological counterparts elsewhere.
China has a wonderful scientific tradition, but largely stifled and muzzled by the competing Confucian bureaucracy up to the 20th C.
The great Islamic arc that stretches from Nigeria to Indonesia has seen the triumph of theology over reason everwhere within it. There was thankfully a hiatus during the European dark ages, but it has been in a dark age of its own most of the time since. Despite the Sunni/Shia split, Islam seems to have managed to stifle independence of individual thought; essential to rationaism and science.
I put it down to the fragmentation of theology in the West: to the split between Judaism and Christianity, and then between Catholicism and Protestantism. The competition between those three allowed naturalism to sprout, like daisies, between the cracks in the pavement of supernaturalism.
The recent series of popular atheist books, and the limp theist responses to them, I see as fairly expectable stages in the above process. If the Universe were set up the way the theists say it is, then I would expect that theists would be able to marshal evidence and arguments that would utterly demolish their atheist opponents inside three minutes. Everything would be in their favour.
But philosophically, it’s not.
Yes, indeed, Ian, it was, I think you are right, the fact that the breakdown of ‘christendom’ put nets up all over the place and no one had the right to take them down. Western thought and science really took off then. (And, by the way, while China had a sophisticated technology, it never really got the secret of science.) The Vatican tried with its Index, but arguably it just made those books and ideas that much more attractive, because they were opposed, and simply begged to be talked and argued about, and made the centre of “research projects”.
The importannt point here, however, is not only about nets, important as these are (in Dennett’s analogy). The point is that the language of spirituality, religious experience, etc. was shown to be hollow, and not to underwrite an onotology. Don Cupitt, in his book Mysticism and Modernity notices that mysticism just is a literary tradition. It seems as though its about internal experiences and its not. Its a kind of writing.
Notice Armstrong, she tries to convince us that religion is really about apophatic states, that is experiences of the limit of experinece, if you like. This too is a literary tradition, and she traces it in her book. The tradition’s there. What Armstrong hasn’t noticed is that that tradition is a literary one, not an experiential one.
That’s also why people like the bearded Elliott, writing about Armstrong, thinks, while not really what God is all about, she’s okay really. And she is, because she’s filling in the unforgiving minutes with religious language, and that’s what religion is. And if we stop and think about it for a moment, that’s all it can be, in the end. Nothing so grand as an ontology, and certainly not an epistemology, but a way of letting language off the leash. And, for some people, this ‘glossolalia’, shall we call it, provides a quantum of religious ecstacy. But it doesn’t really say anything, as you notice as soon as you hear people talking about God – ‘No, that’s not the God I believe in.’ ‘No, my God is very differrent to yours.’ ‘God, really, when you come down to it, is just love.’ (A recent advertisement from a local church: “What is God up to in the 21st Century. Come to our Conference and find out!”)
But when you stop and ask yourself what you’ve just said – well, it’s a bit like reading about all those crazies in William James’ Gifford Lectures – yes, you know the ones.
I think Ian’s point is well made. Secular or scientific thinking needs an intellectual space to push and poke. If everything is already decided and mandated then there’s little or no room for novelty or creativity. The reformation might have given us crazy Calvinists or whatever (not that the Vatican was ever sane) but it created a space between religions and their patrons, due to sectarian quibbles, where folks like Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, Liebniz, Hume, Kant, et al. could think and propogate thoughts that would have lead straight to a death sentence when Rome was ruler of Europe. I’ve heard many apologists say that Xtianity lead to science, they’re wrong but there is a grain of truth, when xtianity went infighting it allowed science to prosper. It was more inspite of, not in favor of science. But the space had to be opened up by sectarian bitchiness. But science originated with the Greeks and before them Mesopotamians and Egyptians…..
Eric, I love reading what you write. Sadly I’m so ignorant of the theological/scriptural/critiqe of literature tradition that I just take what you say as correct and don’t gain a great insight. That’s no poor reflection on you, just on me. Is there non-woo-woo books that I could read that would get me up to speed? (Apologies for the rhyme.)
Eric: Yes, I second what Brian says. Your comments I find to be always engaging and interesting.
But “… by the way, while China had a sophisticated technology, it never really got the secret of science” has me a bit genuinely puzzled. I find it hard to concieve of any technology that is not underpinned by science, however defined. I would welcome an elaboration on that.
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As OB says: “If there is no net, if anything goes – then what’s there to think about?” (To which I reply, ‘well one can always think about Barry Manilow’; and if that doesn’t convince you, nothing will. ;-)
The supernatural hypothesis has failed at the first test, for it is not itself testable. All the soaring Gothic cathedrals, the masses penned by JS Bach and the other great composers, the poetry of the Psalms and all the rest of it provide no escape from that simple fact.
But in life, one thing leads to another. A habit of mine is to file interesting things away on a flash drive as Word documents. So now I have one arising out of this thread, subtitled as follows:
‘http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1387.Daniel_C_Dennett linked to from http://www.naturalism.org/Morelandreview.htm linked to from http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=2952 ‘
One of the Dennett quotes contains this: “It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.”
I have read Dennett’s ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ but must have missed the significance of that passage at the time. So when I read that again this morning, I said: ‘Hold on there, Daniel. What’s the difference between you (or me) and a robot?’
While at present and to my knowledge there is no robot, computer or program around that can pass the Turing Test, they are getting better all the time. The gaps are being filled on that front too. Who is to say that the day will not come when an online computer somewhere will be able to convince Daniel that it is his long-lost second cousin, or whatever?
I say this because I read somewhere that after about 2,000 trials, a researcher was able to get protozoa to perform appropriately in a chemical maze. That is, to display learned ability. I thought at the time, if protozoa can learn, why not neurones? (I must chase that up.)
Looking then at the human body as a nervous system plus appendages, we ourselves may be more complex than we assume. Each of us may be a crowd of simpler beings, but with each of those neuronic beings endowed with a rudimentary ‘soul’, consciousness or whatever, displayed in an independent ability to learn, ie to display consciousness.
My faithful friend Charlie (God rest his departed soul) was not conscious of the fact that he was a dog, but I have yet to be convinced that he had no consciousness, however one cares to define it.
All of this on a bright chilly morning here on the NW plains of New South Wales, when I should be out chainsawing up trees blown down in a recent storm. There’s climate change for you. Gets in the way of eveything. ;-)