Wisdom from Jordan Peterson. I'd say this man is a national treasure, except that he is Canadian.
His advice comports well with a self-admonition I lately coined:
Forgive, forget, let go, move on, live now!
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Life After 70
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Naturalism, Ultimate Explanation, and Brute Facts and Laws
Malcolm Pollack solicited my comments on an article by Tomas Bogardus that appeared in Religious Studies under the title, If naturalism is true, then scientific explanation
is impossible.Malcolm summarizes:
I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if we are to have confidence in the explanatory power of science (and he believes we should), then the naturalistic worldview must be false.
Here is the abstract:
I begin by retracing an argument from Aristotle for final causes in science. Then, I advance this ancient thought, and defend an argument for a stronger conclusion: that no scientific explanation can succeed, if Naturalism is true. The argument goes like this: (1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity. Next, I argue that (2) any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one. From (1) and (2) it follows that (3) a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking
one. I then argue that (4) if Naturalism is true, then every natural regularity calls out for explanation but lacks one. From (3) and (4) it follows that (5) if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful. If you believe that scientific explanation can be (indeed, often has been) successful, as I do, then this is a reason to reject Naturalism.Keywords: philosophy of religion; philosophy of science; scientific explanation; naturalism; supernaturalism; theism; atheism
The gist of the argument is that science, which is in the business of explaining observable phenomena, must offer for every explanandum (i.e., that which is to be explained) some explanans (that which explains). But if the explanans itself requires explaining, the explanation is incomplete, and must rest upon some deeper explanans.
Bogardus’s paper explores the varieties of possible explanatory regression. Either a) we bottom out on a “brute fact”, or b) we encounter an infinite stack of explanations (“turtles all the way down”), or c) our explanations loop back on themselves (so that at some point every explanandum also becomes an explanans), or d) we come at last to some explanans that breaks the chain, by requiring no further explanation.
Bogardus argues that of all brute facts, infinite regressions, and circular explanations explain nothing; the only kind of thing that will serve is (d). But the “laws of nature” do not meet this requirement, because they do not (and cannot) explain themselves.
The heart of Bogardus’s argument, then, is that only some sort of necessary truth, some teleological principle that stands outside of the chain of scientific explanation, can serve as the anchor to which that chain must be fastened. And because Naturalism admits of no such entity, then if scientific explanations are to be considered valid, Naturalism must be false.
My Evaluation
It is given that nature is regular. She exhibits all sorts of regularities. Some of them are codified in scientific law statements. Coulomb's Law, for example, states that particles of like charge repel and particles of unlike charge attract. Another regularity we are all familiar with is that if a gas is heated it expands. This is why I do not store my can of WD-40 in the garage in the Arizona summer. The regularity is codified is Gay Lussac's law: the pressure of a given amount of gas held at constant volume is directly proportional to the Kelvin temperature. Now why should that be the case? What explains the law? The kinetic theory of gases. If you heat a gas you give the molecules more energy so they move faster. This means more impacts on the walls of the container and an increase in the pressure. Conversely if you cool the molecules down they will slow down and the pressure will be decreased. The temperature of the gas varies with the kinetic energy of the gas molecules.
But invoking the kinetic theory of gases is not an ultimate explanation. What about those molecules and the laws that govern them?
So here is a question for Malcolm: Is Bogardus assuming that a genuine explanation must be or involve an ultimate explanation? And if he is making that assumption, is the assumption true?
Here is another example. Farmer John's crops have failed. Why? Because of the drought. The drought in turn is explained in terms of atmospheric conditions, which have their explanations, and so on. Question is: have I not explained the crop failure by just saying that that drought caused it?
Must I explain everything to explain anything? Is no proximate explanation a genuine explanation?
But we are philosophers in quest of the ultimate. That's just the kind of people we are. So we want ultimate explanations. And let us suppose, with Bogardus, that such explanations cannot be non-terminating, that is, they cannot be infinitely regressive or 'loopy,' i.e. coherentist. Ultimate explanations must end somewhere. Bogardus:
. . . I believe many Naturalists subscribe to scientific explanation in the pattern of Brute Foundationalism, either of the Simple or Extended variety, depending on the regularity. Here’s Carroll’s (2012, 193) impression of the state of the field: ‘Granted, it is always nice to be able to provide reasons why something is the case. Most scientists, however, suspect that the search for ultimate explanations eventually terminates in some final theory of the world, along with the phrase “and that’s just how it is”.’31
My question to Malcolm (and anyone): Why can't scientific explanations end with brute laws and brute facts? Has Bogardus given us an argument against brute laws? I don't see that he has. Or did I miss the argument for (2) below in Bogardus's main argument:
1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural
regularity.
2) Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls
out for explanation but lacks one.
3) So, a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural
regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking one.4) If Naturalism is true, then every natural regularity calls out for explanation but
lacks one.
5) So, if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful.Bogardus tries to argue for (2), but I don't see that he succeeds in giving us a non-question-begging reason to accept (2).
I myself reject naturalism and brute facts. My point is that Bogardus has failed to refute it and them. He has merely opposed it and them. As I use 'refute,' it is a verb of success. To oppose me is not to refute me. I will oppose you right back.
There is another question that I will address in a separate post: Can it be demonstrated that there is a Necessary Explainer? Pace the presuppositionalists, the demonstration cannot be circular. A circular demonstration is no demonstration at all. You cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. You are of course free to presuppose anything you like. You can even presuppose naturalism and then 'argue': it is true because it is true, and then try to account for everything is naturalistic terms.
32 responses to “Naturalism, Ultimate Explanation, and Brute Facts and Laws”
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How They Love to Hate!
Malcolm Pollack speaks Tesla truth to Dementocratic madness.
5 responses to “How They Love to Hate!”
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Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist? Part II
Part I is here. Sproul thinks he can prove that the God of the Christian Bible exists from reason alone. By 'prove' he means establish with objective certainty.
He begins by listing four possible explanations of reality as we encounter it. I take him to mean by 'reality' the world as given to the senses.
1) Reality is an illusion.
2) Reality creates itself.
3) Reality is self-existent.
4) Reality is created by something distinct from it that is self-existent, God.Sproul considers these the only four possibilities. His strategy is to refute the first three, thereby establishing (4). Pressed for time, I will be brief. I will simply dismiss (1) as beneath refutation.
As for (2), nothing can create itself, if 'x creates x' means x causes x to exist. Why not? Well, for anything to do any causing it must already exist. 'Already' can be taken either logically or temporally or both. But nothing is or can be either temporally or logically prior to itself. It is therefore impossible that anything create itself. It is a necessarily true law of metaphysica generalis that nothing can create itself.
But isn't God classically characterized as causa sui? He is indeed. But what that means is not that he causes himself to exist, but that he is not caused by another to exist. As I like to put it, the sense of causa sui is privative, not positive. It is built into the very concept God that God would not be God if he were caused by another to exist; that is not to say, however, that he causes himself to exist. To say that God is causa sui is equivalent to saying that he exists of metaphysical necessity.
By the way, don't confuse the concept God with God. That would be like confusing the concept chair with what you are presumably now sitting on. Are you sitting on a concept?
As for (3), this pantheistic possibility is worth consideration, but I must move on. The idea is that Reality does not cause itself to exist, nor does it just happen to exist; it necessarily exists.
Sproul affirms (4) and he thinks he can prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. By 'reality,' he means "reality as we encounter it." (p. 9) That includes mainly, if not wholly, the people and things disclosed by inner and outer sense experience.
But are those four the only (epistemic) possibilities? Why couldn't the reality we encounter just exist as a factum brutum, a brute fact? By 'brute fact' I mean an obtaining or existing state of affairs that exists without cause or reason.
Sproul needs to explain why the cosmos, physical world, nature cannot just exist. Why must it have an efficient cause or a reason/purpose (final cause)? Why can't its existence be a brute fact? That is a (fifth) epistemic possibility he does not, as far as I can see, consider.
7 responses to “Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist? Part II”
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Homo Faber
Man is homo faber. Among the things he makes: fake certainties.
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Peak Academic Absurdity Unlocked
I hadn't known until now that Steven F. Hayward of Power Line was a Stack man. (HT: J.I.O)
Don't conclude, however, that every academic is academented. I oppose the anti-intellectualism too often found among populists and conservatives just as strenuously as I oppose the pseudo-intellectualism of lunatic leftists.
11 responses to “Peak Academic Absurdity Unlocked”
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Hypocrisy: Two Observations
Substack latest
3 responses to “Hypocrisy: Two Observations”
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It’s Later than You Think
A Substack protreptic. Pithy and pointed. No TLDR excuses accepted.
In rhetoric, protrepsis (Ancient Greek: πρότρεψις) and paraenesis (παραίνεσις) are two closely related styles of exhortation that are employed by moral philosophers. While there is a widely accepted distinction between the two that is employed by modern writers, classical philosophers did not make a clear distinction between the two, and even used them interchangeably. (Wikipedia)
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Trump’s Executive Orders
87 and counting. See how many you agree with.
2 responses to “Trump’s Executive Orders”
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Who Nominated Amy ‘Conehead’ Barrett?
Trump demands an investigation. 'Conehead' is my coinage. It has two meanings. They are for me to know and you to guess.
9 responses to “Who Nominated Amy ‘Conehead’ Barrett?”
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Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added:
. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle, the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things. The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.
Key ideas in and suggested by the above passage:
1) Unity admits of degrees. Some unities are 'tighter' than others.
2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.
3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness. Think of the membership or extension of a mereological sum of utterly disparate items. That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.
4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect. A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.
5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological/normative. To be is to be good. A being is good in the measure that it is, and in the measure that it is, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good, valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)
'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers. Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on; at the other extreme, non-being, me on, or an approach thereto as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff), material prima.
6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others. Why not? Well, the One is other than or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.
7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse) itself — is the maximally powerful being.
And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.
My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism.
7 responses to “Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!”
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Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer
I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer. I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013, p. 202, "God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19)."
This compound sentence conveys two thoughts:
a) God does not contradict himself.
and
b) Some Biblical texts appear to show that God does contradict himself, but in every case this is a mere appearance.
Ad (a). This is true, and presumably true by definition. Nevertheless, there is a question one could raise, but pursuing it here would lead us off track. The question concerns God's relation to the law of noncontradiction (LNC). Is he subject to it as to a norm external to himself? Must he abide by it? If yes, that would appear to limit God's sovereignty and his power. If he is all-powerful, does he have the power to make LNC false? See here. I raise this issue only to set it aside (for now); so please no comments on this issue. For present purposes, (a) stands fast.
Ad (b). What I write here is not verbatim the same as what Vanhoozer wrote in his second clause. What justifies my "in every case"? It is justified by Vanhoozer's definition of inerrancy on p. 202:
. . . inerrancy means that God's authoritative word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. (emphasis in original)
Vanhoozer appears to be reasoning along the following lines. Since God does not contradict himself, and since God is wholly truthful and trustworthy in everything he communicates to us in the Scripture, the Scripture cannot contain any contradictory passages or any false claims. From this follows that any appearance of contradiction is a mere or false appearance, and any appearance of falsehood is a mere or false appearance. And so what some of us see as errors, are not really errors, but mere "difficulties." (202)
Thus the Bible is wholly inerrant, inerrant in everything it claims, and not merely in its soteriological claims, that is, its claims regarding what is needed for salvation!
Now why don't I accept this?
Well, Vanhoozer appears to be confusing the Word of God = the Logos = the Second Person of the Trinity with the Word of God in a second sense of the term, namely, the Scripture. I argued in an earlier post that they cannot be one and the same, and this for a very simple reason: the Word in the first sense is co-eternal with the Father and thus eternal. The Word in the second sense is not eternal inasmuch as it had an origin in time. So at best it is sempiternal.
What's more, the Word in the first sense is metaphysically necessary; it is as metaphysically necessary as the First Person of the Trinity. But the Scripture is metaphysically contingent, which is to say: there is no necessity that it exists. It would not have existed had God not created anything. The divine aseity ensures that God has no need to create. Had he not created us humans, we would not have fallen, and would be in no need of 'salvific info.' God revealed himself to us in Scripture. No 'us,' no revelation to us. It takes two to tango, as Trump recently reminded us, echoing Ronnie Raygun (as lefties call him).
If you disagree with what I have just argued, then you would be saying that the Scripture pre-exists its being written down. That may be so in Islam (I am not quite sure), but it is surely not so in Christianity.
But there is more to my argument, namely, that communication from God to man is via ancient human authors, who are finite and fallible and riven with tribal and cultural biases, even if they are our superiors in wisdom and discernment. This is why one cannot validly infer the inerrancy of Scripture from the inerrancy of God. No doubt God is wholly veracious, infallible, omniscient, and inerrant. But how do you get from that proposition to the proposition that the Scripture contains no errors about anything soteriological or non-soteriological? You need an auxiliary premise to the effect that the authors of the scriptural texts, who received the divine messages, were somehow able to put them into the words of ancient languages and in such a way that the divine meaning was perfectly captured and expressed. I see no reason to believe that. In fact, given what we know about human beings, I see every reason not to believe it.
Vito Caiati correctly pointed out that in Christianity God reveals himself in the man Jesus of Nazareth. True. But that is irrelevant to the inerrancy question. Here's why. The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible, the whole Bible, OT and NT, is inerrant, either in all its claims or in all its soteriological claims. So the fact, if it is a fact, that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," — the Second Person of the Trinity, mind you, not the Bible! — and that the Incarnate Word was encountered by the apostles and disciples of Jesus and written about by them, is irrelevant to the question whether the Bible as a whole is inerrant.
11 responses to “Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer”
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Random Political-Polemical Observations
Hanoi Jane. Jane Fonda recently opined that being 'woke' means that you care about people. Now how stupid is that? But I'll give her this much: she looks damned good after all these years (to an old man, leastways.) All style and no substance, just like pretty-boy Gavin Newsom of California, an unctuous opportunist if ever there was one. Dems demonstrate their stupidity by their inability to see through poseurs like him.
The Democrats. Knee-jerk oppositionalism and blind obstructionism are all they have these days, as witness the In-Lieu-of-SOTU spectacle.
John Fetterman. When a guy such as this piece of atavism is the wise man of the Dems, and, horribile dictu, a Senator to boot, you know that the Dems have become a pack of fools, and that any ship of state with them in control is headed for troubled waters. That being said, my estimation of Fetterman has gone up a notch since he 'beat' Dr. Oz. The well-fed Futter/Fetterman actually possesses a soupçon of sense, and a grain of gravitas, with which he surpasses Kamala the Clown and the overgrown adolescent, AOC.
Sartorial slack-off and the demise of decorum. That charismatic and stylish trend-setter, JFK, rid men of their Fedoras. Now we have baseball caps and Senator Fetterman in cargo shorts. Decorum on the decline. "Weird Al" Green, who is black, and sports a pony (horse?) tail, was rightly censured for his recent outburst by the Speaker of the House. He complained about being made to "sit in the back of the bus." It will always be the 'fifties for these people. And they say we want to 'turn back the clock'?
Let's not leave out Adam Schiff, a leaky vessel if ever there was one, issuing his "Screw you and the horse you rode in on" to Trump & Co. Not to mention the 'shit' mantra dutifully repeated by the Dem lemmings. My friendly advice to them: You'd better get your shit together or you'll never lift your sorry asses out of the dreck. As for the 'Ragin Cajun,' he seems to have reversed himself on his 'Play possum" advice. Back to the bayou with you, pal.
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Why We Are Winning
Roland Fryer, WSJ, The Economics of DEI and MEI. (Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence)
Victor Davis Hanson, Five Ukrainian Fables
James Piereson, New Criterion, Too Many Democrats
Kimberly Strassel, WSJ, Trump's School Choice
Paul Craig Roberts, Every Vote for a Democrat is an Attack on America. HT: Tony Flood who writes, "Salient line (for me): 'And still, American citizens vote for Democrats. How can a population this stupid be made great again?' "
We are winning, but it will remain a nasty slugfest for the foreseeable future, as my man Hanson fully appreciates. We need to get tough with our political enemies, as they reveal, day by day, the full depth of their depravity.
Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion, MAGA agonistes. Excerpt:
Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.
Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.
Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.
2 responses to “Why We Are Winning”
7 responses to “Life After 70”