{"id":12642,"date":"2009-05-11T18:45:42","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T18:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/05\/11\/does-emergence-help-in-defending-religious-belief\/"},"modified":"2009-05-11T18:45:42","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T18:45:42","slug":"does-emergence-help-in-defending-religious-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/05\/11\/does-emergence-help-in-defending-religious-belief\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I coined the phrase 'ego surfari' some years ago. To go on ego surfari is to type one's name into a search engine in order to see what turns up. The results are often surprising. Today I found <\/font>Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief?<\/font><\/a> by Sami Pihlstr\u00f6m, Helsinki. Excerpt:<\/font><\/p>\n

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One of the few recent contributions in which the combination of (emergentist or supervenientist) physicalism and theism is seriously challenged is William Vallicella\u2019s (1998). [Vallicella, W.F. 1998 \u201cCould a Classical Theist Be a Physicalist?\u201d, Faith and Philosophy<\/em> 15, 160-180.] He rejects eliminativism, type-type identity theory, supervenientism, emergentism, and \u201dthe constitution view\u201d (i.e., the view that persons are materially constituted beings) as five \u201dtheologically useless physicalisms\u201d (163ff.). The argument is largely based on Kim\u2019s criticism of nonreductive physicalism. Regarding emergentism (167- 170), Vallicella points out that even if the human soul were seen as an emergent substance or as having emergent properties, problems would remain, as neither divine nor angelic consciousness can be understood as emerging from matter, upon any Christian construal: \u201dIt is analytic that emergence is emergence from a physical base, and in the case of God and angels classically conceived there is no physical base. Moreover, it is analytic that to emerge is to come into being, and God\u2019s consciousness does not come into being\u201d (169). Vallicella (170) also argues against Stump\u2019s (1995) Aquinian suggestion of combining materialism and dualism (and the possibility of survival), insisting that an emergent property cannot continue to exist after the physical system whose property it is falls apart.<\/font><\/p>\n

If a reconciliation of science and theism were possible through emergentism, this would constitute an intellectual breakthrough of enormous magnitude. No doubts about the cultural or generally human significance of the notion of emergence would remain. Unfortunately, the research program run by theistically inclined naturalists seems to me hopeless; as Vallicella (1998, 176) puts it, physicalism and theism are \u201dcompeting Weltanschauungen<\/em>\u201d. One problem with views seeking to reconcile them, and with the on-going discussion of emergence and theism in Zygon<\/em> (and elsewhere), is \u2013 as in the systematically philosophical emergence literature we find elsewhere \u2013 an unargued commitment to strong metaphysical realism. It is presupposed that both scientific and religious language purport to refer to a fundamentally concept- and language-independent world and that, therefore, religion and science must be coherently fitted into one grand theory of the world, if we if we want to retain both. Against this assumption, a more Wittgensteinian-oriented thinker may argue that religion and science are different human practices (or groups of practices) with their characteristic normative structures. Quite different \u201dmoves\u201d are allowed in these different (families of) language-games; for example, the \u201dsoul\u201d allegedly rendered \u201dscientifically acceptable\u201d in emergentism would hardly have a place in religious language-use.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I coined the phrase 'ego surfari' some years ago. To go on ego surfari is to type one's name into a search engine in order to see what turns up. The results are often surprising. Today I found Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief? by Sami Pihlstr\u00f6m, Helsinki. Excerpt: One of the few recent … Continue reading “Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,95,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-emergence-and-supervenience","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}