Kant on Ignava Ratio, Lazy Reason

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, p. 25:

     Theology cannot serve to explain the appearances of nature to us.
     In general it is not a correct use of reason to posit God as the
     ground of everything whose explanation is not evident to us. On the
     contrary, we must first gain insight into the laws of nature if we
     are to know and explain its operations. In general it is no use of
     reason and no explanation to say that something is due to God's
     omnipotence. This is lazy reason. . . .

As Kant remarks in a footnote to A 689 = B 717 of the Critique of Pure Reason, ignava ratio was the name given to a "sophistical argument" of the "ancient dialecticians," the so-called Lazy Argument. 

Diligent reason attempts to account for all natural phenomena in natural terms. The role of God is accordingly attenuated. He becomes at most a sustaining cause of the existence of nature, but not a cause of anything that occurs within nature. See my earlier discussion of divine concurrence. The squeeze is on, and it is no surprise that Schopenhauer squeezes God right out of the picture by rejecting the very notion of causation of existence, as I explain in Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.

This is relevant to my series on Plantinga's new book.  The crucial question is whether there is any room for divine guidance of the evolutionary process.

Plantinga Versus Dawkins: Organized Complexity

This is the third in a series on Plantinga's new book.  Here is the first, and here is the second.  These posts are collected under the rubric Science and Religion besides being classified under other heads.  This third post will examine just one argument of Dawkins' and Plantinga's response to it, pp. 26-28. Here is Plantinga in Chapter One of Where the Conflict Really Lies quoting from Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, p. 141.  (The ellipses are Plantinga's; the emphasis is Dawkins'; I have added a sentence from Dawkins that Plantinga did not quote; and I should note that Plantinga gives the wrong page reference.  The passage is on 141, not 140.)

Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. . . .  But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. …. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there", and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it. (1986, p. 141)

Dawkins seems to me to be arguing as follows.

1. What is needed is an explanation of organized complexity as such.
2. God is an instance of organized complexity.
3. If God is invoked as that whose existence and operation explains organized complexity as such, then the explanation is manifestly circular: the explanandum has been imported into the explanans.
4. Circular explanations are worthless: they explain nothing.
Therefore
5. To posit God as cosmic designer fails as an explanation of organized complexity as such.

The argument on my reconstruction is unexceptionable, but how is it relevant? if the task is to explain organized complexity as such, this cannot be done via an instance of it.  No doubt.  But the argument misses the point.  The point is not to explain organized complexity as such, or even the organized complexity of all actual or possible life, but to explain the organized complexity of terrestrial life.  More precisely, the point is to show that this cannot be done by invoking God in one's explanation.  Obviously the argument as reconstructed does not succeed in showing that.

Note that there is no mention of any facts of biology in the above argument.  Now Plantinga doesn't say the following, but I will: the argument is purely a priori.  It is a proof, from concepts alone and without recourse to empirical facts, that an explanation of organized complexity as such cannot be had if the explanans mentions an instance of organized complexity.  How then, Plantinga asks, does the (empirical) evidence of evolution reveal a world without design? (p. 27)

Now suppose we substitute the following proposition for (1):

1* What is needed is an explanation of the organized complexity of terrestrial life.

But if we plug (1*) into the original argument, and modify (3) accordingly, then (3) is false and the argument is unsound.  If we are not trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only the organized complexity of terrestrial life, then there is nothing fallacious about invoking an explainer that is an instance of organized complexity.

The Dawkins passage suggests another sort of argument, oft-heard:  If there is a supernatural designer, what explains his existence?  If you say that God always existed, then you may as well say that life always existed.

This puerile argument is based on a failure to understand that explanations, of necessity, must come to an end.

Why did that tree in my backyard die?  Because subterranean beetles attacked its roots.  If the explanation is correct, it is correct whether or not I can explain how the subterranean beetles got into the soil, or which other beetles were their parents, and grandparents, etc.  Explanations come to an end, and an explanation of a given phenomenon in terms of its proximate cause can be perfectly adequate even in the absence of explanations of other events in the explanandum's causal ancestry.

It is the puerile atheist who demands to know what caused God.  As Plantinga remarks, "Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God." (p. 28)  I would add that this is obvious if God is an necessary being: such a being is in no need of explanation.  But it holds also if God is a contingent being.  For again, not everything can be explained.

But if God was "always there" as Dawkins puts it, why not say that life was "always there"?  Because life wasn't always there! 

Ultimately, the theist explains everything in terms of the divine mind.  Since explanations must come to an end, the theist has no explanation of the existence or complexity of the divine mind.  But, as Plantinga remarks, p. 28, the materalist or physicalist is in the same position. He cannot explain everything. He "doesn't have an explanation of the existence of elementary particles or, more generally, contingent physical or material beings . . . ." (28)  I would also ask whether the materialist can explain why there are natural laws at all, why the universe is intelligible in terms of them, and why there are these laws and constants rather than some other possible set. 

There is one point that ought to be conceded to Dawkins, however.  It certainly would be a "lazy way out" to invoke divine intervention in cases where  a naturalistic explanation is at hand. 

So far, then, Plantinga 1, Dawkins 0.

Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Notes on Chapter One

This is the second in a series on Alvin Plantinga's latest book.  The first post, on the preface, provides bibliographical details and an overview of Plantinga's project.  In this post I will merely set forth what Plantinga understands by Christian belief and what he understands by evolution and where he sees real conflict between the two.  Things will heat up a bit in my third post wherein I will come to grips with Plantinga's critique of Richard Dawkins.  There is a lot of good material that I won't mention, in particular, the discussion on pp. 4-5 on the narrow and broad construals of imago Dei.

A. Plantinga proposes that we take Christian belief "to be defined or circumscribed by the rough intersection of the great Christian creeds: the Apostle's Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed . . ." but not in a manner to exclude particular creeds.  (p. 8) The "rough intersection" of all of this is ably presented in C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

B. As for evolution, Plantinga distinguishes six theses (pp. 8-10):

1. Ancient Earth Thesis:  The earth is "perhaps some 4.5 billion years old."
2. Progress Thesis: "life has progressed from relatively simple to relatively complex forms . . . ."
3. Descent with Modification Thesis:  "The enormous diversity of the contemporary living world has come about by way of off-spring differing, ordinarily in small and subtle ways, from their parents."
4. Common Ancestry Thesis:  "life originated at only one place on earth, all subsequent life being related by descent to those original living creatures . . . ."
5. Darwinism: "there is a naturalistic mechanism driving this process of descent with modification: the most popular candidate is natural selection operating on random genetic mutation . . . ."
6. Naturalistic Origins Thesis:  "life itself developed from non-living matter without any special creative activity of God but just by virtue of processes described by the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry. . . ."

Plantinga uses 'evolution' to refer to the first four theses, and 'Darwinism' to refer to "the mechanism allegedly underlying evolution." He adds that "the sixth thesis thesis "isn't really part of the theory of evolution."

Now where is there real conflict wth Christian belief?  That God created  man in his image is an absolutely  nonnegotiable element of Christian belief. But on Plantinga's account it does not conflict with any of (1)-(4) or with all of them taken together.  Nor does it conflict with Darwinism, the fifth thesis, "the view that the diversity of life has come to be by way of natural selection winnowing random genetic mutation.  God could have caused the the right mutations to arise at the right time . . . and in this way he could have seen to it that there come to be creatures of the kinds he intends." (p. 11)

This will of course sound crazy to a naturalist.  Every naturalist is an atheist (though not conversely), and most atheists consider the notion that there is a purely spiritual, providential being superintending and directing the goings-on of the physical universe to be risible, a childish fantasy on the order ot the Tooth Fairy, and as such  simply beneath serious discussion. But in point of strict logic, there is nothing inconsistent in one's maintaining all of (1)-(5) and the proposition that evolution is divinely guided.

But how could random genetic mutations be caused by God?  Doesn't 'random' imply 'uncaused'?  No. Plantinga quotes biologist Ernst Mayr, and philosopher of biology Elliot Sober.  The following is from a credible source  I found:

Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs." Factors in the environment may influence the rate of mutation but are not generally thought to influence the direction of mutation. For example, exposure to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be. [Be sure to click on internal link.]

If mutations are random in this precise sense, that does not rule out their being caused.

Real conflict between Christian belief and evolution first arises with respect to the sixth thesis, the Naturalistic Origins Thesis.  Here is the source of the incompatibility according to Plantinga. If the sixth thesis is true, then Christian belief is false.

 A question.  Suppose all six theses are true.  Could not one still be a theist who holds that man is made in the divine image?  If the sixth thesis is true, then God does not intervene in the workings of nature.   He does not cause or prevent genetic mutations; he does not preserve certain populations from perils, etc.  He creates the universe ex nihilo and sustains it in existence moment by moment 'vertically' so to speak, but he  does not interfere 'horizontally.'  He does not insert himself, so to speak, into any unfolding causal chains.  As primary cause alone, he has nothing to do with natural, 'secondary,' causation.  Accordingly, man as an animal has a purely naturalistic origin. But of course imago Dei has nothing to do with man as an animal . . . .  Just a question, to be put on the back burner for now while we continue to examine how Plantinga's overall argument unfolds.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Memorable Instrumentals from the ’60s

Jorma Kaukonen's Embryonic Journey from The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow LP, 1967.

Bent Fabric, Alley Cat, 1962.

The Village Stompers, Washington Square, 1963.

Kenny Ball, Midnight in Moscow, 1962.

David Rose, The Stripper, 1962.

Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore, 1962.

Dick Dale and the Deltones, Misirlou, 1963. If surf music had a father, Dick Dale was the man.

The Chantays, Pipeline, 1963. A nice college boy effort, but the definitive version is the Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughan cover.

Floyd Cramer, Last Date, 1960.

Michael Bloomfield, Albert's Shuffle, 1968.

It’s Nonsense, but it’s True Nonsense!

Lawrence  Krauss writes:

Classical human reason, defined in terms of common sense notions following from our own myopic experience of reality is not sufficient to discern the workings of the Universe. If time begins at the big bang, then we will have to re-explore what we mean by causality, just as the fact that electrons can be in two places at the same time doing two different things at the same time as long as we are not measuring them is completely nonsensical, but true, and has required rethinking what we mean by particles. Similar arguments by the way imply that we often need to rethink what we actually mean by 'nothing', from empty space, to the absence of space itself.

Perhaps this passage that I just dug up answers or helps to answer the question I posed yesterday:  How can someone so intelligent spout such nonsense as I quoted Krauss as spouting?  Answer: he's a mysterian!  We have discussed mysterianism before in these pages in connection with the theologian James Anderson and in connection with the materialist philosopher of mind Colin McGinn.  With Krauss (and others of course) we find the mysterian move being made in the precincts of physics.  Marvellously manifold are the moves of mysterians!

Yesterday I quoted Krauss as saying, "Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."  I commented:

This is just nonsense. Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing. So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics. [. . .]

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it.

This implies an explicit logical contradiction: the laws of physics both do and do not exist.  They do  exist because they govern the transition from nothing to something.  They do not exist because they are included in the nothing from which something arises.

Completely nonsensical (in the sense of being logically contradictory) but true nonetheless! 

Now this is either a mysterian position or a dialetheist position.  The dialetheist holds that, in reality, there are some true contradictions.  The mysterian does not hold this; he holds that there are, in reality, no true contradictions, but some propositions no matter how carefully we consider them appear to us as contradictory, or perhaps must appear to us as contradictory given our irremediable cognitive limitations.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions.  Here is one:  One task of science is to render the world intelligible to us (understandable by us).  But if natural science in one of its branches issues in propositions that are unintelligible (either because they are intrinsically contradictory or such that they appear or even must appear as contradictory to us), then how can one call this science?

Forgive me for being naive, but I would have thought that science, genuine science, cannot contain propositions that are nonsensical!  And would it not be more reasonable to take the apparent nonsensicality that crops up in the more far-out branches as a sign that something has gone wrong somewhere? 

Why Do Some Physicists Talk Nonsense about Nothing?

Sam Harris poses the following question to physicist Lawrence M. Krauss:

One of the most common justifications for religious faith is the idea that the universe must have had a creator. You’ve just written a book alleging that a universe can arise from “nothing.” What do you mean by “nothing” and how fully does your thesis contradict a belief in a Creator God?

The answer Krauss gives is such an awful mess of verbiage that I will not  quote a big load of it, but I will quote some of it.  The reader can read the whole thing if he cares to.

1. The "long-held theological claim" that out of nothing nothing comes is "spurious."  This is because "modern science . . . has changed completely our conception of the very words 'something' and 'nothing.' " We now know that " ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy." 

Wow!  Modern science has completely changed our conceptions of something and nothing! That is something!   Something and nothing are physical concepts?  You mean, like mass and momentum?  Please tell me more!

2. "The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly. I then go on to explain how other versions of 'nothing'—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.” Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."

There is no point in quoting any more of this stuff since it is obviously gibberish.  What is not obvious, and indeed what is most puzzling, is why anyone who is supposedly intelligent would spout such patent nonsense.  Or is he joking?  Pulling our leg?  Trying to sound 'far out' to sell books?  It surely sounds like a weird joke to hear that nothing boils and bubbles and 'morphs'  and is unstable with particles popping in and out of existence.  If a virtual particle popped out of existence would it be even more nothing than the nothing that it was a part of?

If I tell you that I met nobody on my hike this morning, it would be a bad joke were you to inquire, "And how is Nobody doing these days?"  'Nobody' is not the name of a person or the name of anything else. If you are confused by 'I met nobody on my hike,' then I will translate it for you: 'It is not the case that I met somebody on my hike.'  The same goes for 'nothing.'  It is not a name for something.

The point, of course, is that nothing is precisely nothing and not a weird something or even a non-weird something. Krauss is not stupid, and he is presumably not joking.  So he is using 'nothing' in some special way.  He and his colleagues are free to do that.  He and they are  free to stipulate a new meaning for an old word.  But then he is not using it in the sense in which it figures in the old principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, 'out of nothing nothing comes.'  Whether true or false, the meaning of the principle is clear:  if there were nothing at all, nothing could have come into being.  This obviously cannot be refuted by shifting the sense of 'nothing' so that it refers to a bubbling, boiling soup of virtual particles. 

The strong scent of intellectual dishonesty is wafting up to my nostrils from this bubbling, boiling cauldron of Unsinn.

If I make a tasty hamburger out of a lump of raw meat, have I made something out of nothing?  Sure, in a sense: I have made something tasty out of nothing tasty.  In a sense, I have made something out of nothing!  But one would have to have hamburger for brains if one that ought that that refuted ex nihilo nihil fit. 

"Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."  This is just nonsense.  Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing.  So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics. 

Not only is the quoted sentence nonsense, it contradicts the rest of what Krauss says in quotation #2 above.  For he says that there is a sense of 'nothing' which implies the absence of physical laws.  So we are supposed to accept that physical laws require the emergence of something out of nothing even if there are no physical laws?

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it.  Bullshit!  Sophistry for the purpose of exploiting rubes to make a quick pop science buck.

Krauss spouted nonsense on a previous occasion when he said  in the New York Times that human beings  are just a bit of cosmic pollution. See "We're Just a Bit of Pollution," Cosmologist Says.

See also Do Physicists Bullshit?

Ed Feser has also done good work exposing this cosmological nonsense. 

John Haldane on Christopher Hitchens

The piece ends as follows (emphasis added):

Hitchens is a case worth studying. He is more interesting than Dawkins because evidently more psychologically complex and humanly engaging. If we Catholics are right about God and humanity, why was he so wrong? Or, put another way, what can we learn from his attitude about how to understand our own religious claims and about how our lives reflect them? Hitchens pointed to the record of evil associated with Christianity and with Catholicism in particular. It is glib to reply that humanism has its own tale of terrors, and problematic if we also claim that religious adherence brings transforming grace. If I were to take up Hitchens’s campaign against religion it would be to ask again and again: “Where is your grace and your holiness?”

This challenge has particular force against those who downplay human sinfulness and the extent of depravity. Not until we have taken seriously the idea that the effects of sin and ongoing sinfulness corrupt the soul will we be in a position to fashion an effective counter to the charges Hitchens brought against Catholicism and Christianity more generally. It will not be to say that we are better than he claimed. Rather, we need to explain effectively our failings and those of all humanity in terms of a shared supernatural identity. To which we might add, adapting a saying of Wilde’s, whose style of wit Hitchens sometimes echoed: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking to heaven in hope of salvation.”

Two comments. 

First, I don't find it at all glib to point out the horrors of atheistic humanism which in the 20th century alone are greater than those inflicted over 20 centuries of Christianity.  The purpose of pointing that out  is to underscore the fact that it is not religion as religion that is the source of the horrors, but dogmatic adherence to a worldview, whether religious or anti-religious,  that permits the suppression and murder of opponents.  Bigotry and hate have their source in the human heart, not in religion or in humanism.  Certain forms of religion and humanism may give carte blanche to the exercise of murderous impulsees, but the animating cesspool and prime mover ansd applier of doctrines is and remains the human heart.  It is a fundamental mistake of leftists to seek the source of evil in something external such as religion or capitalism when its source is in a mind made dark by a foul human heart.

But I wholly agree with Haldane that religious people need to explain why their beliefs and practices are so ineffective in transforming their character.  We all know people whose fervent religiosity has made scarcely  a dent in their fundamental nastiness.  Why does religion contribute so little to the amelioration of people?  Twenty centuries of Christianity and even more centuries of Buddhism and we are still tearing each other apart, body and soul.  As for glib remarks, Chesterton's takes the cake: "Christianity hasn't failed; it's never been tried." (Or something like that; I quote from memory.  If you have the exact quotation in its context with references, e-mail me.)  If it hasn't been tried by now, it will never be tried.

Of course, one can argue that the religious would have been worse without religion and I don't doubt that that is true.  And not only are the religious better than they would have been without it, the irreligious are also better than they would have been without it.  For religion supplies the morality that civilizes and humanizes, a morality that permeates the social atmosphere and affects even those who reject the metaphysical underpinnings.  Unfortunately, Western civilization now appears to be running on empty, on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian-Athenian  tradition, and one fears what happens when they too evaporate.  A good question for the New Atheists:  once your suppression of religion is complete, what will you put in its place?  How will you inculcate morality, and what morality will you inculcate?

Although Haldane does not mention the Fall by name, he alludes to it.  The explanation for religious inefficacy anent moral transformation has to involve the notion that man is a fallen being.  Although the religious are not much better than the irreligious, they at least appreciate their fallen condition.  They at least know they are in the gutter, and knowing this, are inclined to do something about it.

Addendum:  My thanks to several readers who have quickly responded with the correct G. K. Chesterton quotation. It is at the end of the following paragraph:

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

It is from What 's Wrong with the World, Part I, Chapter 5.  I am now inclined to say, having seen the context, that my calling the quotation glib  was itself somewhat glib.

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism: Notes on the Preface

I now have Alvin Plantinga's new book in my hands.  Here are some notes on the preface.  Since I agree with almost everything in the preface, the following batch of notes will be interpretive but not critical.  Words and phrases  enclosed in double quotation marks are Plantinga's ipsissima verba. 

1. Plantinga is concerned with the relations among monotheistic religion, natural science, and naturalism.  His main thesis is that there is "superficial conflict but deep concord" between natural science and monotheistic religion but  "superficial concord but deep conflict" between science and naturalism. 

2. The great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) affirm the existence of "such a person as God."  Naturalism is a worldview that entails the nonexistence of such a person.  "Naturalism is stronger than atheism." (p. ix) Naturalism entails atheism, but atheism does not entail naturalism.  One can be an atheist without being a naturalist.  John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart is an example. (My example, not Plantinga's.)  But one cannot be a naturalist without being an atheist.  This is perhaps obvious, which is why Plantinga doesn't explain it.  Roughly, a naturalist holds that the whole of reality (or perhaps only the whole of concrete reality) is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  No one who holds this can hold that there is such a person as God, God being a purely spiritual agent.

To put it my own way, theistic religion and naturalism could not both be true, but they could both be false.  This makes them logical contraries, not contradictories.  Their being the former suffices to put them in real conflict.  For many of us this is what the ultimate worldview choice comes down to.

3. Plantinga rightly points out that while naturalism is not a religion, it is a worldview that is like a religion.  So it can be properly called a quasi-religion.  (p. x) This is because it plays many of the same roles that a religion plays.  It provides answers to the Big Questions: Does God exist? Can we survive our bodily deaths? How should we live?

I would add that there are religious worldviews and anti-religious worldviews, but that natural science is not a worldview.  Science is not in the business of supplying worldview needs: needs for meaning, purpose, guidance, norms and values. Science cannot put religion out of business, as I argue here, though  perhaps in some ways that Plantinga would not endorse.

4. Given that naturalism is a quasi-religion, there is a sense in which there is a genuine science vs. religion conflict, namely, a conflict between science and the quasi-religion, naturalism.  Very clever!

5. Plantinga's claim that "there is no serious conflict between science and religion" puts him at odds with what I call  the Dawkins Gang and what Plantinga calls the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.  Plantinga, who never fails us when it comes to wit and style, suggests that the atheism of these four "is adolescent rebellion carried on by other means" (p. xi)  that doesn't rise to the level of the the old atheism of Bertrand Russell and John Mackie.  "We may perhaps hope that the new atheism is but a temporary blemish on the face of serious conversation in this crucial area."  That is indeed the hope of all right-thinking and serious people, whether theists or atheists.

6. Plantinga fully appreciates that modern natural science is a magnficent thing, "the most striking and impressive intellectual phenomenon of the last half millenium." (p. xi)  This has led some to the mistake of thinking that science is the ultimate court of appeal when it comes to the fixation of belief.  But this can't be right for two reasons.  First, science gives us no help in the areas where we most need enlightenment: religion, politics, and morals, for example. (p. xii)  There are worldview needs, after all, and science cannot supply them.  "Second, science contradicts itself, both over time and at the same time." (p. xii)  Indeed it does.  But no one, least of all Plantinga,  takes that as an argument against science as open-ended inquiry.  A question to ruminate on:  Should not religion also be thought of as open-ended and subject to correction?

7.  I would say that if there is demonstrable conflict between a religious belief and a well-established finding of current natural science, then the religious belief must give way.  Plantinga commits himself to something rather less ringing: if there were such a conflict, then "initially, at least, it would cast doubt on those religious beliefs inconsistent with current science."(p. xii).  But he doesn't think there is any conflict between "Christian belief and science, while there is conflict between naturalism and science." 

8. One apparent conflict is between evolution and religion, another between miracles and science.  Plantinga will argue that these conflicts are merely apparent.  Theistic religion does not conflict with evolution but with a "philosophical gloss or add-on to the scientific theory of evolution: the claim that it is undirected . . . ." (p. xii) As for miracles, Plantinga says he will show that they do not violate the causal closure of the physical domain and the various conservation laws that govern it. "Any system in which a divine miracle occurs . . . would not be causally closed; hence such a system is not addressed by those laws." (p. xiii)  That sounds a bit fishy, but we shall have to see how Plantinga develops the argument.

9. As for the "deep concord" between theistic thinking and science, it is rooted in the imago Dei.  If God has created us in his image, then he has created us with the power to understand ourselves and our world.  This implies that he he has created us and our world "in such a way that there is a match between our cognitive powers and the world." (p. xiv)  I would put it like this: both the intelligibility of the world and our intelligence have a common ground in God.  This common ground or source secures both the objectivity of truth and the possibility of our knowing some of it, and thereby the possibility of successful science.

10.  But when it comes to naturalism and science, there is "deep and serious conflict."    Naturalism entails materialism about the human mind.  It entails that we are just complex physical systems.  If so, then Plantinga will argue that "it is improbable, given naturalism and evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable."  If this can be shown, then the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is not rationally acceptable. "Hence naturalism and evolution are in serious conflict: one can't rationally accept them both." (p. xiv)  

Material Composition and Modal Discernibility

(For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.)

Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of Tinker Toy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort. A unique classical mereological sum — call it 'TTS' — comes into existence 'automatically' at the instant of the creation ex nihilo of the TT pieces. (God doesn't have to do anything in addition to creating the TT pieces to bring TTS into existence.) Suppose further that God at t assembles the TT pieces (adding nothing and subtracting nothing) into a house. Call this object 'TTH.' So far we have: the pieces, their sum, and the house. Now suppose that at t* (later than t) God annihilates all of the TT pieces. This of course annihilates TTS and TTH. During the interval from t to t* God maintains TTH in existence.

I set up the problem this way so as to exclude 'historical' and nonmodal considerations and thus to make the challenge tougher for my side. Note that TTH and TTS are spatially coincident, temporally coincident, and such that every nonmodal property of the one is also a nonmodal property of the other.  Thus they have the same size, the same shape, the same weight, etc. Surely the pressure is on to say that TTH = TTS? Surely my opponents will come at me with their battle-cry, 'No difference without a difference-maker!' There is no constituent of TTH that is not also a constituent of TTS. So what could distinguish them?

Here is an argument that TTH and TTS are not identical:

1. NecId: If x = y, then necessarily, x = y.

2. If it is possible that ~(x = y), then ~(x = y). (From 1 by Contraposition)

3. If it is possible that TTS is not TTH, then TTS is not TTH. (From 2, by Universal Instantiation)

4. It is possible that TTS is not TTH. (God might have assembled the parts into a fort instead of a house or might have left them unassembled.)

5. TTS is not TTH. (From 3, 4 by Modus Ponens)

If you are inclined to reject the argument, you must tell me which premise you reject. Will it be (1)? Or will it be (4)?

Your move, David.

Dale Tuggy Pays Me a Visit; Belief Versus Acceptance

Dale Tuggy was kind enough yesterday to drive all the way from Tucson to my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.  He came on short notice and late in the day but we managed to pack in more than six hours of nonstop conversation on a wide range of philosophical and theological topics.  He was still going strong when, two hours after my bedtime, I had to send him on his way.

Talk got  on to mysterianism, of course, and his ongoing debate with James Anderson.  Dale made a distinction that I hadn't considered, namely, one between belief and acceptance.  My tendency up to now has been to identify believing that p with accepting that p.  Up to now I thought I should make a four-fold distinction: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withhold. 

For the distinction between belief and acceptance, see Raimo Tuomela, Belief Versus Acceptance.

I repaid Dale for his gift of the belief vs. acceptance distinction by pointing out the distinction (or  putative distinction) between supension and withholding which I borrow from Benson Mates:

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied." Aporia is not doubt. Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding. The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent and suspension of judgment. One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies. See Mates, p. 32. A good distinction! Add it to the list.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment. Close but not the same.