Science, Materialism, and Myth

Tom Gilson –

Believers in materialism typically insist… Humans in particular have no free will, no true self, indeed no consciousness (all are illusions), and no enduring reality that could possibly continue beyond death.

Kudos for qualifying that with ‘typically’! (No sarcasm, btw.)

I, for example, only agree with the last, disagree with two and three, and am undecided about the first – depends on the definition used. In my experience, at least, there’s a lot more diversity among atheists than there is among theists – as you’d expect, really.

Tom’s list (that humans have no free will, no true self, no consciousness, and no enduring reality that could possibly continue beyond death) is really a list of the logical manifestations of atheistic belief. An atheist that denies any of these really has the burden of proof to explain why “his” atheism doesn’t include one or more of these

@Earl Morton:

As I understand it, at the quantum level you cannot distinguish the scientist from the experiment. You must take into account that the scientist will affect the experiment’s results by merely watching it.

First, your understanding is not correct. Second, in a sense, it is a trivial observation that “scientist will affect the experiment’s results by merely watching it”, because there is no such thing as “merely watching”. To “watch” an electron, you have to *interact* with it somehow and “affect it” somehow. But this is all quite irrelevant to Tom’s points. In particular the “me” that Tom is talking about, is the first-person point-of-view me, that is not accessible from a third-person point-of-view, and thus inaccessible (like large cardinals!) to the empirical sciences.

BillT –

An atheist that denies any of these really has the burden of proof to explain why “his” atheism doesn’t include one or more of these

What if I were to say that the logical consequence of Christianity is that grace is irresistible? There’s, y’know, a bit of dispute over that in Christian circles. Some contend the other way.

Similarly, for example, atheists can believe that consciousness exists, though we don’t understand how it works. (Yet – it’s not like there haven’t been phenomena that people despaired of material explanations for before that we eventually figured out.)

Good point. And of course evolution, even if true (as I lean toward believing) is a myth of creation in the sense that it explains our origins and gives us a place in the world, if we have no other means of such.

@Ray Ingles:

Yet – it’s not like there haven’t been phenomena that people despaired of material explanations for before that we eventually figured out.

The arguments against naturalism are not gap arguments. But I suspect you already know this, and you are just engaging in your usual potshot MO. Barf.

@Ray Ingles:

Speaking of ‘potshots’, I didn’t say that “arguments against naturalism are… gap arguments”.

No, you did not say that. But that is what your response implies. I just did the thinking for you.

Absent that, I can’t really see how it’s anything but a label rather than an explanation.

That you “cannot see”, I can readily believe. But since an argument from ignorance (literally) is worthless, I shrug my shoulders.

“…I agree that ‘athiests can’t account for consciousness’.The thing is, I don’t see supernaturalists accounting for it either in any substantive way.”

We seem to go round and round on this (and I don’t mean especially with you Ray). Theism does account for consciousness in a logically consistent manner given what we believe is true about reality. I’m sure the details of that explanation are not lost on you Ray. Now, you don’t have to accept that and we wouldn’t expect you to. After all, you don’t accept our view of reality.

But this is what we are saying. We have a view of reality that accounts for consciousness, self, free will, etc. That much is true. Atheism has a view of reality, as you said, that can’t account for these things. Given that we believe that consciousness, self, free will, etc. are real we believe a view of reality that accounts for them must be closer to the truth than one that doesn’t.

Now, we don’t ask you to change or ignore your view of reality to account for these things. We shouldn’t have to change or ignore our view of reality in our accounting. After all, it’s at least as likely that there is a God that provides these things to us as the view that there isn’t.

G. Rodrigues –

Sorry, I am not falling for your feigned interest in actually wanting to know the answers

When, exactly, have I insulted you?

It really seems that the fact that I disagree with many of the positions put forth here, or don’t understand the explanations presented, is considered prima facie evidence that I’m not arguing in good faith.

I really do want a discussion. I’ve checked out, and re-checked-out, Fesers “The Last Superstition” from the library many times. I still don’t get it. Explain to me, as you would to a child if necessary. Treat me, as Tom Gilson says we should, as a human being.

I didn’t ask for an explanation in “reductive, physicalist” terms. Just terms that I can comprehend.

“I haven’t been able to confirm that. I haven’t seen anything that I can recognize as an ‘explanation’ of how consciousness works.”

Given your response to G. Rodriguez, let’s try this though it’s a bit simplistic. And please forgive me if I’m being too simplistic, it’s hard to know exactly what you are looking for. Your children (I’m assuming here) have traits and characteristics they inherited from you and your wife. Though I don’t know you I’d assume they get their good looks from your wife like mine does. Their intelligence, athletic abilities, inquisitiveness, demeanor from some combination of you two. This is true because you and your wife created your children so they share these attributes with you.

Now, the kind of traits like consciousness, self, free will, etc. are not inherited through our DNA as they are for the most part metaphysical traits. But, our worldview allows for this because our God exists in a metaphysical state and thus the idea that we can get these metaphysical traits from Him, our creator, isn’t much of a stretch, if one at all. We share these attributes of God because He is our true creator. We inherit from Him just like your children do from you.

This, of course, doesn’t explain how consciousness “works” but you said you weren’t looking for an explanation in “reductive, physicalist” terms. And to be fair this is certainly a mystery. But it is part of belief in the metaphysical that we accept some level mystery as part of that. After all, we certainly don’t believe that we understand God except in the most elementary of ways. If we could He wouldn’t be God.

Ray, if it’s true that science does not accept unsolvable problems, then what does it do with them?

All problems are treated as unsolved problems. They keep worrying at it – thinking up new hypotheses, and new tests for those hypotheses. For example, right now we know that Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are incompatible. They make different predictions in some circumstances – like space around large, dense, fast-moving objects.

We don’t have any rotating black holes near Earth to test with. (And that’s a good thing.) But scientists don’t give up – they try to come up with alternate ways to get the needed information.

The most you can say in science is “we don’t understand that – yet.” Not “we will never understand that”.

Which is fundamentally different from “there are things we cannot understand”. As I said, if you accept that, then you are guaranteeing you will never understand them. (Also, it’s the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero, but that’s another discussion.)

I ask, what signs do you see indicating Christian are about to run out of interest in learning?

The history I linked to. Speaking of which…

he’s stunningly wrong on Galileo being “alone” in exploring the unknown heavens

The word “alone” doesn’t appear in that essay. Galileo is called a “rare exception” among scientists of the time – but even that isn’t a claim that he was the only one studying the heavens. Please quote the passage from that essay that makes the point you’re claiming.

He’s wrong on the definition of ID,

Possibly. He doesn’t seem to be wrong about how it’s actually been practiced. He admits it’s “an interesting hypothesis” (those words do appear in the essay), but it’s not one that’s been confirmed yet. I’m not aware of a single putative example that’s help up under scrutiny, at least in the biological realm.

the usual cut-and-paste that I get when I mention the Christianity of early theists [I assume you meant ‘scientists’]. You were ready for that one, weren’t you!

But it’s a valid point. As I said, “I didn’t claim that Christians couldn’t be scientists, even great ones.” What I dispute is that Christianity is necessary for, or helpful in, the practice of science.

And I didn’t claim that Christianity
“kills curiosity about the natural world” in general. It demonstrably kills curiosity about those areas of our experience that have been declared to be supernatural. You see the distinction, I hope?

@Ray Ingles:

When, exactly, have I insulted you?

My apologies; I expressed myself badly and misleadingly. My intention was not to make a psychological evaluation, and much less a judgment, of your motivations, whether conscious or unconscious — see below.

It really seems that the fact that I disagree with many of the positions put forth here, or don’t understand the explanations presented, is considered prima facie evidence that I’m not arguing in good faith.

It is not the the fact that you disagree, it is the mode of disagreement and the type of objections you pose. For just one recent example: what the heck does the falsity of the claims of Mormons or Muslims have to do with the claims of historical Christianity? Nothing. The truth of either one implies the falsity of historical Christianity, but you are neither a Mormon nor a Muslim. The falsity of one or both does not advance you one iota towards settling the truth of the claims of historical Christianity. It is like saying that the demonstrable falsity of Newtonian mechanics implies the falsity of Evolution theory. Such general arguments of a skeptical nature are the ground zero of intellectual probity and ultimately self-defeating. They do provide a great excuse for *not* dealing with the evidence on its own terms.

I’ve checked out, and re-checked-out, Fesers “The Last Superstition” from the library many times. I still don’t get it. Explain to me, as you would to a child if necessary. Treat me, as Tom Gilson says we should, as a human being.

Do you intend this as a serious request? What can I possibly do better in the space of a combox than a book written by a specialist? Suppose you said “Explain to me, as you would to a child if necessary”, but replace the particular question you raised for say, quantum mechanics or whatever technical question tickles your fancy. Is that a serious request?

And allow me to put some context back in the discussion; you said and I quote:

In that respect, I don’t see anything but gaps. For example, can you describe to me how a ‘mental substance’ or ‘rational soul’ works? Absent that, I can’t really see how it’s anything but a label rather than an explanation.

Implied in your objection is a gigantic promissory note that with the further advancement of science it will eventually be cashed out. This only makes sense, if indeed the arguments against naturalism are gap arguments, but of course they are not, they are in-principle arguments. If they work, no amount of wishful thinking on your part can save naturalism.

Second, you ask “can you describe to me how a ‘mental substance’ or ‘rational soul’ works?” *What* are you asking here? There is a sense in which cars and computers “work”. Is that the sense in which you are using “works”? Is that the type of explanation that would satisfy you? But that is precisely what you will not get, because the relation between soul and body is not one of efficient causation.

Finally, you say that “absent” such an explanation, it is a mere “label rather than an explanation”. If the explanation does not explain, well, it does not explain and that is that. But from the fact that you do not understand it, the only thing that follows is that, well, you do not understand it. The flaw can be in you, in the one making the explanation (or a combination of both) or in the explanation itself, as in the case if the explanation turns out to not explain anything at all.

@Tom Gilson:

For some reason been having trouble posting comments; my suspicion is that the problem is on my end. Anyway, if there are any previous versions of this comment waiting moderation or in some spam filter, please, just delete them and keep this one.

Victoria – the Neil DeGrasse Tyson essay we’ve been discussing points out several cases where people mistakenly assumed that phenomena were supernatural, and stopped trying to understand those phenomena. I have my own personal favorite example.

The point is, once people decide something is supernatural, they demonstrably stop trying to understand it. C.f. BillT and consciousness, above.

@Ray
Sheepish Grin 🙂 Ah,, that’s what I get for jumping in at the bottom of a conversation.

Anyway, my point still stands. The miracles that Jesus performed were recognized as such precisely because those who saw them and/or experienced them already knew that nature left to itself could never had done that.
You are conflating superstition and a lack of understanding of nature’s regularities and patterns (its properties and dynamics, if you will) with genuinely knowable supernatural events.

You are picking on the weakest examples of Christian ‘thought’, not the strongest ones. If you went to an American Scientific Affiliation conference and said these things, well, after the laughter at you had finally subsided, you’d have your intellectual head lopped off, metaphorically speaking.

Certainly as both a trained, professional physicist and a Christian, I am very much interested in understanding, say, the Creation of physical reality. By faith I understand that the worlds were set in order at God’s command, so that the visible has its origin in the invisible. Hebrews 11:3; as a physicist, I am very much interested in what we can learn of the process, and just how far we can get with using the properties and dynamics of space-time, matter and energy to describe that process, for it seems that He left that information there for us to discover. Must be the legacy I had by studying physics with Christian physicists for teachers and colleagues.

Tom Gilson – Are you sure you’re not confusing J.S. Haldane, the person I quoted, with his son, J.B.S. Haldane?

‘Cause J.S. Haldane was a Christian. Read the book I linked to from that page. It’s avialable free online.

Tom Gilson –

How does your approach to knowledge help you if the truth is that there is a God?

Again, so far as I can see, the ‘supernatural’ equals the ‘unknowable’. It’s no coincidence that pretty much everything people didn’t understand in days past was once considered supernatural – lightning, disease, stars, rain, etc. etc.

Let me ask you a question: You encounter something you don’t understand. How do you determine if it’s beyond human understanding or not?

Will you keep on insisting on natural explanations even if they’re not all true?

See the last sentence of comment #17.

@Ray (#36)
Oh, I regard the creation of the universe as a supernaturally-initiated event and as a subsequent time-dependent process that can be described (at least in part) using the properties and dynamics of space-time and matter-energy bestowed upon the universe by its Creator. In Christian Theism, the universe exists by the will and command of the eternal, self-existent Triune God of the Bible.

God revealed some of the why of Creation (purpose) to us in His Word, the how and when (process) He left for us to discover for ourselves and marvel at.

However Jesus’ miracles (let’s restrict our discussion to just those for now) are direct supernatural events for which the processes, as interesting as it would be to know the details of them, are secondary to their purposes.

In the case of the water-into-wine transformation, we know the initial and final states ( water, then wine ), but the actual transformation process is unavailable for observation. People at the wedding knew full well how wine is made, and what the difference between plain ole water and a good wine is – there was no mistaking this transformation for an as-yet-unknown/not-understood natural process. Having a biochemical description of the fermentation process does not help us understand the miracle any better either.

The miracles do tell us something about Jesus Christ. They tell us that The King is here (re-read C. S. Lewis on this), and that is their purpose, is is not?

@JAD
Ah, thanks, you just saved me a lot of typing to qualify what I meant by … a subsequent time-dependent process that can be described (at least in part) using the properties and dynamics of space-time and matter-energy bestowed upon the universe by its Creator. 🙂

When I said ‘at least in part’ (poorly worded, I admit) I did not mean to imply any sort of gaps fallback, due to missing pieces or unexplored sections of our map of reality.
Christian Theists are not a priori committed to a complete and comprehensive description of reality that excludes God and His sovereign rule over all that exists, in Creation and Eternity.

Even a Multi-verse won’t help us out of that situation, since it (or they?) come from a set of equations (eg, a String Theory multi-dimensional parameter landscape) – that set of equations itself must have an explanation of some sort, and would we be in a realm that is beyond our ability to observe or test?

For example, does anyone know if quantization of matter and energy (and even space-time) is derivable from a more fundamental set of physical principles? I seem to recall coming across a paper a while back where the author proposed a such a derivation of Quantum Mechanics (if I can find it, I’ll post the link 🙂 ). It is of no use appealing to String Theory since quantization and Lorentz invariance are built into the theory from the start ( as far as I understand the theory – still a WIP for me 🙂 ).

Don’t mind me, I’m just thinking aloud here 🙂

@Ray: in #37, you quote Tom thus:

How does your approach to knowledge help you if the truth is that there is a God?

…and reply thus:

Again, so far as I can see, the ‘supernatural’ equals the ‘unknowable’. It’s no coincidence that pretty much everything people didn’t understand in days past was once considered supernatural – lightning, disease, stars, rain, etc. etc.

By my analysis, your answer works as follows:

1. “The supernatural” equals “the unknowable” (explicit claim).
2. The past trend for things that were considered supernatural/unknowable is that they turned out to be knowable in the long run (paraphrase of explicit claim).
3. By extrapolation, in the very long run, the category of supernatural/unknowable things will turn out to be empty (implied, I think).
4. Therefore, God, belonging to the category of the supernatural, does not exist.

In other words, the reply denies the antecedent in the hypothetical question instead of answering it. That’s a shame, because I would like to see an answer to that question.

For my own reference, let me see if I understand your position so far. It seems that your general claim is that a belief in the supernatural is antithetical to science, because appeals to the supernatural replace scientific analysis (ref. final paragraph of #25). It seems that you are therefore insisting on methodological naturalism in science — that is, that all research should proceed as though there is a knowable, natural explanation for all observed phenomena.

If I haven’t mischaracterised your position in any significant way, then let me try to ask something like Tom’s question, again, in a different way. Do you acknowledge that premise #3 from my analysis of your reply, above, might not be true, and that there may be some things which can not be properly explained in terms of natural phenomena?

TFBW writes that Ray is “insisting on methodological naturalism in science — that is, that all research should proceed as though there is a knowable, natural explanation for all observed phenomena.”

I have no problem with methodological naturalism as long as it’s just that–
methodological naturalism. For example, a Hindu, Christian and an atheist chemist run the same experiment under the same conditions. If they do the experiment right they should come up with the same results. If it’s something nobody knew before, we have a new scientific discovery.

The problem is when you conflate methodological naturalism (MN) with philosophical naturalism (PN). PN is the unproven, and scientifically unprovable assumption (or belief) that unintelligent natural causes are sufficient to explain everything: the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life and the genetic code, as well as mind and consciousness. In other words, PN is not something Ray or anyone else can prove to be true; it’s something that Ray believes by faith.

(I remember a year ago or so ago we had a lengthy and interesting discussion/debate here about MN. Maybe if Tom has the time he could find that for us and provide the link.)

Tom Gilson –

It is no prediction of Christianity that supernatural claims rise and fall together; rather that as one set of claims is established, the others must fall, and vice versa. If Christianity’s supernatural claims are true, the others must be false.

Actually, Victoria’s on record as stating that, say, the miracles of Joseph Smith might well have happened as described – just caused by Satan. So the miracle claims of other faiths don’t have to necessarily be false if Christianity is true.

Suppose the detective discovers a dead man with a gunshot wound in his chest.

The claim isn’t, “Islam and Mormonism are excluded as suspects by DNA evidence, therefore Christinity is excluded too.” The claim is, “If we use DNA evidence, Islam, Mormonism, and Christianity are all excluded.”

If we insist on solid evidence of miracles, then we don’t really find much. (Recall the case of the sober witnesses mistaking Venus for a UFO” case I linked to before.)

How high? Can you quantify it?

How about as high as you’d need to establish new physics in science? For example, at the moment it appears we’ve found the Higgs Boson. If we hadn’t, it would have implied the Standard Model had major problems and would need substantial rework.

Perhaps that’s too high. How about the same level of data we’d need to establish contact of some kind with extraterrestrials? Unambiguous decoded messages, exotic materials, something of that nature? At least we’d know something weird had happened/was going on.

Perhaps that’s too high. How about the evidence needed to establish the efficacy of a new medication? We’re actually pretty good at picking out statistical patterns if we know what we’re looking for.

JAD – I’d say 3 and 5 aren’t strictly necessary. We accept that things behave very differently near black holes, for example. But in any case –

Notice that the idea of “natural law” is central to these assumptions. Where did western civilization get it’s idea of “natural law?”

There’s two issues here. First off, the idea of natural laws did fall naturally out of the idea of a Lawgiver. But again – the main inspiriation for the development of astronomy was astrology. And yet, you don’t need astrology to practice astronomy. Similarly for chemistry and alchemy. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths did develop science (though later developments of Islam damped that down eventually in that culture), but that doesn’t imply any of them are correct.

The reason why was ably pointed out by Bertrand Russell a while back: “…the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave…”

Once you have the idea of such regularities – from whatever origin – then, if they are in fact present, you’ll find them when you start to look.

@Ray
I meant, what would you do with the knowledge, as in, how would it affect your worldview, or your stance on the Person of Jesus Christ?

In Christian Theism, God’s miracles always have a spiritual or theological purpose, to demonstrate Who He is, and with redemptive / salvation purposes in view.

This might help you out: http://bible.org/seriespage/meaning-miracles-mark-435-41

If all you came away with from one of Jesus’ miracles was a description of the physics or chemistry or biology that was affected, then you have missed the point completely 🙂

Sigh…

It appears that Ray’s purpose here is to tell us what to think and believe.

@Ray
It is not a question of scientific curiosity winking out – it is a matter of asking the right questions, the significant questions. You are trying to answer questions, interesting as the answers might be (assuming that we could even understand the answers if God were to tell us), that are incidental to the purpose and intent of the miracles.

Let’s be clear here, we are talking about God’s genuine miracles here (events or states that the regular stream of cause and effect in the physical realm would have never produced on its own) and NOT the regular properties and dynamics of the physical realm that God has ordained for it. Don’t mistake our separation of concerns and interests in God’s special providence with a different set of interests and concerns regarding God’s general providence.

Having accepted that Jesus’ resurrection was a supernatural act of God, we are interested in its significance and implications for God’s plan of redemption and how it affects us and our relationship with our Creator.

To complain that we are not interested in the same questions you are is not saying anything of significance, since we understand far better than you do what Christianity is about. Go away and re-read C.S.Lewis ‘Miracles’.

SteveK –

What people DO stop being curious about (or should stop being curious about), is how the supernatural can be explained in terms of the natural.

I didn’t – very specifically didn’t – ask for the supernatural to be explained in terms of the natural.

But consider the figure/ground distinction. Why wouldn’t identifying the boundary of the ground (the natural processes, in this case) help clarify and distinguish at least the shape of the figure (the supernatural actor)?

In #54, Ray Ingles said:

The results I read about in neurology don’t square with the theory Feser advances. I don’t have to specifically identify the error(s) with the argument _ I don’t even have to know what the correct answer is – to know that the argument must be wrong somewhere.

Yes, but that’s hardly paradigm rationality, is it? “That seems wrong to me,” is far from compelling, as reasoning goes. In fact, if I were to surmise your argument from the neurology evidence that you have presented, which ostensibly supports the position, I would phrase it as follows.

1. Evidence suggests that consciousness can be impaired in various specific ways by physical brain damage.
2. Therefore, a physical brain with a certain minimum level of functionality is necessary to support consciousness.
3. Therefore, a physical brain with a certain minimum level of functionality, and nothing more, is sufficient to support consciousness.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify where the logic in that argument runs afoul of a fallacy, and/or figure out what steps could be taken to get from #1 to #3 in a valid manner.

If I were to phrase your arguments from Edgar Allen Poe or Haldane more formally, I would phrase them as follows.

1. In the past, people have mistakenly asserted that certain activities are not possible without supernatural (or at least non-physical) agency.
2. Therefore, it is likely that all such claims are mistaken.

I’ll just say, “that seems wrong to me,” for now.

Meanwhile, would you mind responding to my comment #49? You’ve posted a flurry of responses to other comments, but mine is still going begging.

Victoria –

Ray is conflating a study of God’s Creation with a study of His redemptive acts in human history.

No, I’m not. I’m suggesting it might be possible to supplement “a study of His redemptive acts in human history” by engaging in “a study of God’s Creation”. Shed a light on the issue from another angle, as it were.

I am not suggesting replacing one with another, or suggesting that one is a subset of another. I’m suggesting that it’s at least conceviable that they have a common boundary.

TFBW – Sorry I forgot your comment. I’ve been replying to Tom Gilson, Victoria, SteveK, BillT, G. Rodrigues, and JAD as well, and yours slipped through the cracks. You’re up next.

No, I’m not. I’m suggesting it might be possible to supplement “a study of His redemptive acts in human history” by engaging in “a study of God’s Creation”. Shed a light on the issue from another angle, as it were.

OK, I’m listening, then. How? Give me an answer that I as a physicist and a Christian will be satisfied with.

My question remains – what are you trying to learn from a ‘scientific’ study of the miraculous? God’s supernatural acts introduce discontinuities into the interconnected stream of events that is otherwise described by the properties and dynamics of the physical realm. They are discontinuous in the sense that, as C. S. Lewis said, “…that Nature, left to herself, could not have accomplished”.

Will you humbly bow down before God as the Sovereign Creator and Lord and King, and give Him the rightful worship that is His due? Or is this just idle curiosity that for you has no real spiritual significance or impact on your life?

In the case of the resurrected Jesus, the actual resurrection event itself was unobserved by any human beings (presumably the angels at the tomb might have witnessed it). We have the historical record of what happened before (the initial state) and what happened after (the final state).

Initial State: Jesus was dead (confirmed by all the Gospel accounts, especially John’s). He was wrapped in spices and the burial clothes, and laid in a tomb, which was then closed off by the large cover stone. It was subsequently sealed and placed under guard.

Final State: On the morning of the first day of the week, the tomb was found to be empty, with only the burial clothes still laid out (and this is an interesting discussion on its own – maybe later). Mary was the first to encounter the risen Jesus, and we are told that she was able to touch Him and carry on a conversation with Him. As the narratives progress, we learn that Jesus’ resurrection body possessed physicality (He could be touched, He ate with people, He walked and talked with them), yet was not constrained by the physical limitations of an ordinary human body.

That’s all we have by way of descriptions of His resurrection body. It was enough to convince His friends that He was really alive , but in a completely new way, and they understood that this was a supernatural act of the Living God. They went on to explain the true significance of this event, namely that it is the culmination of God’s plan of redemption for humanity.

In the case of Jesus’ miracles, the distinction between the natural and supernatural was already recognized by those people who were present to witness or participate in the event – they already knew that the sorts of things that Jesus did don’t happen in the natural course of events. We (and the people who were there) don’t need advanced biochemistry and a scientific description of the fermentation process to understand that Jesus’ turning water into wine was an extraordinary event, and that water does not normally become wine in such a fashion.

Your so-called scientific study is just a way of avoiding the real implications of what miracles are – the whole topic is a disingenuous red herring, and quite frankly is damned nonsense. As somebody said on another thread, God is not the subject of idle curiosity.

TFBW – Okay, got a minute. Let’s see. First off, I didn’t answer Tom’s question directly. (Of course, a couple of my questions have gone unanswered, too. This is a long discussion.) But I can expand on things here.

“The supernatural” equals “the unknowable” (explicit claim).

Yes, that’s what it always seems to boil down to. The main point of my reply is in the return question. If you encounter something you don’t understand, how do you determine if it’s ‘unknowable’ or just ‘unknown’?

You could look at the first link I gave in #20; it’s a short enough essay. The key passage:

From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can’t conclude that it’s unknowable. It might be… but it also might be the case that you just didn’t happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt.

For example, your followup question is already addressed there:

Do you acknowledge that premise #3 from my analysis of your reply, above, might not be true, and that there may be some things which can not be properly explained in terms of natural phenomena?

Another bit from the essay:

It’s quite true that unknowable entities can’t be ruled out a priori. Maybe there really are some out there. But… how would you prove it? If we encountered a real, honest-to-goodness ‘miracle’, what evidence could you possibly present that it was caused by a god and not a powerful alien? The most you could ever say would be, “A god hasn’t been ruled out, yet.” From a practical perspective, I can’t see what the notion of ‘supernatural’ buys you.

If you disagree, can you explain a principled, practical way to tell the difference between ‘unknown’ and ‘unknowable’? My examples weren’t meant to prove that the ‘unknowable’ couldn’t exist. They just demonstrate that people have been demonstrably wrong about what was unknowable and what wasn’t before.

TFBW –

Therefore, a physical brain with a certain minimum level of functionality, and nothing more, is sufficient to support consciousness.

Not quite; but I will say that, given what happens to consciousness as the brain is destroyed, if there’s a ‘remainder’ when the brain’s elminated, it must be pretty small.

Again, Feser argues that qualia cannot be instantiated in arrangements of neurons, yet destruction of arrangements of neurons destroys qualia. Very specifically, without impacting anything else.

Doesn’t Occam’s Razor have any traction here?

Feser contends that ‘our purely intellectual capacities cannot have a corporeal organ’. But such a dualism necessarily implies that the immaterial intellect must affect the material in some way. If you follow the course of the matter in the human brain, you will come to a point where that matter does something that matter alone wouldn’t or couldn’t do. We’re getting to the point with MRIs and so forth where we may soon be able to actually test this. (Tom, I’ll answer your recent post as soon as I can – but that’s a start.)

(Hey, Victoria – at one point in TLS Feser says that one arrangement of neurons is very like another, so how could they have radically different effects like the quales of ‘warmth’ or ‘red’? Does that bother you at all? I mean, you know software and physics. ‘One arrangement of bits is very like another, so how could one be a word processor and another a game?’ ‘One arrangement of particles is very like another, so how could hydrogen be very different from anti-Uranium?’ This doesn’t mean that Feser’s wrong about other things, but this in particular strikes me as a surprisingly weak, even nonsensical, argument.)

Larry,

Could you please stop mangling Feser. His argument is that qualia and intentionality cannot be explained purely in terms of the physical as it is conceived in a mechanistic framework. He rejects that framework and cartesian dualism so your “evidence” against his position has no force.

and Victoria,

Larry has misquoted Feser above in that he says “one group of neurons firing seems qualitatively very like another” which makes a difference in context. Not to mention that Feser would also argue that hydrogen and uranium are not “just” different arrangements of particles.

Re #79 my apologies to both Larry and Ray. This comment should have been addressed to Ray.

@Ray Ingles:

A belated and necessarily short (for my standards) response.

The claim is that, given the argument, it’s just impossible for qualia to be explained in a material fashion.

Actually this is only partly correct. There is no need to invoke a subsistent immaterial soul to explain qualia, since qualia is just sensory experience and the latter relies in the sensory organs, and thus matter. What the *type* of explanation cannot be is reductively (or eliminatively) materialistic.

Followed by:

Yet now we have Deep Blue.

Yet now we know about DNA.

Don’t be silly. Neither Deep Blue nor the discovery of DNA hinges one iota on the arguments. Really, this strategy is almost as silly as saying that “yeah, Godel’s theorems prove that every formal system satisfying certain technical conditions cannot prove its own consistency, but we have Deep Blue and DNA, so there, I do not have to understand Godel’s arguments at all!”.

I don’t have to specifically identify the error(s) with the argument _ I don’t even have to know what the correct answer is – to know that the argument must be wrong somewhere.

No this is not correct. But your examples notwithstanding, you have given *NO EVIDENCE* that hinges on these arguments, so I will not belabor the point. And the logic of your argument can be turned around and with even *more* force. The argument is deductive and logically air-tight (you do not even engage with it, so it is left standing as it has always was), therefore I do not even have to respond to your “alleged” evidence.

Feser contends that ‘our purely intellectual capacities cannot have a corporeal organ’. But such a dualism necessarily implies that the immaterial intellect must affect the material in some way.

To see how wrong you are, take for example the hudrogen atom substance. The substantial form is, speaking somewhat loosely, a structural, objective, constitutive principle of the hydrogen atom. It is what marks it off from every other thing in the universe, and in particular, it is the difference between an hydrogen atom on the one hand and a proton and an electron on the other. Similarly for the substantial form of human beings known as the soul. The relation of the soul with the matter it informs, the body, is not one of efficient causation but formal causation, just like the relation of the substantial form of the atom with the (secondary) matter it informs, a proton and an electron say. So saying that,

But such a dualism necessarily implies that the immaterial intellect must affect the material in some way.

just betrays the extent of your confusion.

[to Victoria:]

at one point in TLS Feser says that one arrangement of neurons is very like another, so how could they have radically different effects like the quales of ‘warmth’ or ‘red’? Does that bother you at all?

More egregious misunderstanding.

Ray,
I agree with what Tom said in #85. As far as I can tell, the things you speak of are already being done. So what is your specific complaint?

TFBW –

If I accept your assertion that, given a miracle, we can not know whether it was performed by a supernatural god or a powerful but natural alien, then there exists a true statement about the cause of the miracle, but we can not know what it is.

No. It’s “…then there exists a true statement about the cause of the miracle, but we” do “not know what it is.”

A powerful alien could be investigated, and we could in princople discover that it performed the miracle and perhaps even how. Edward Feser, who gets some credence here, asserts that could not be the case for a supernatural entity: ” What is supernatural is what is beyond the natural order altogether, and thus cannot be known via purely philosophical argument but only via divine revelation.”.

The point is, we don’t know a priori that the event is caused by a god or a powerful natural being. So we have exactly two choices – investigate it, or don’t.

If we don’t, we guarantee we won’t understand it. If we investigate, we might understand it. From a practical perspective, the only way to proceed is to investigate, to assume that it’s understandable.

If I accept your assertion that “unknowable” and “supernatural” are identical,

I didn’t say that they were identical. The supernatural is, at least potentially, a subset of the unknowable.

“Supernatural”, on the other hand, describes a category of things (or beings) which are not composed of matter or energy.

Is the Mandelbrot Set supernatural?

Even if that is true (which would, in any case, stand in conflict with your repeated examples about “X is unknowable” being proved false)

How so? Flesh out the case. Note that I didn’t say those things were in fact unknowable – rather the opposite. Those examples all turned out to have natural accounts.

Ray,

The colour blind painter example does not show that our experience of colour can be explained in reductive materialistic terms, all I’d shows us that our experience of quails is dependent in brain activity.

They contended that they had “deductive and logically air-tight” arguments,

Their arguments are not deductive arguments.

The soul of a rational animal is different, it does immaterial things – and those immaterial processes must affect material things

Material in the AT framework includes form and matter.

I didn’t say that they were identical. The supernatural is, at least potentially, a subset of the unknowable.

So the supernatural is potentially unknowable but so what? That does not bring you to your conclusion that God as an explanation stops investigation.

More egregious misunderstanding.

I’ll dig up the page numbers and quote tonight.

Quote mining will not help. Providing an accurate summary of Feser’s actual arguments wil. It is obvious from what you have written so far about Feser’s that you either don’t understand his position at all or you are deliberately misrepresenting him.

Ray,

If qualia can be explained in terms of material things, then it follows that small differences can have large effects. The same way a couple different nucleotides can spell the difference between normal hemoglobin and sickle-cell anemia.

No one is arguing that small differences in one part of a complex system can’t have large effects in other parts of the system and I’ll quote the next sentence of Feser’s that you left out and is extremely pertinent to the issue: “For this reason (and many others) it is hard to see how any sensation could be reduced to or explained in terms of nothing but the firing of neurons”.

What do you think of his contention that it is the conception of matter, as devoid of qualitative properties and directedness, that has led to the intractability of the mind-body problem?

@Ray Ingles:

Qualia depend not just on the sense organs, but on how the data from the sense organs is processed.

I know what qualia is, thank you. What I said is that qualia is, roughly speaking, the modern name for what the Scholastics termed sensory experience. To have qualia does not require any immaterial soul as sensory organs and the accompanying apparatus of memory and imagination (imagination in the classical, technical sense) is sufficient to explain them; that is why the “problem” of qualia is a typically modern one, one that arose with the advent of the mechanistic, Cartesian revolution. Classical arguments for the immateriality of the soul rely on *thought* not on qualia.

They contended that they had “deductive and logically air-tight” arguments, and it certainly was hard for people at the time to dispute them.

Ah yes, your much loved tactic of *not* responding to the arguments in question and instead focus attention on other arguments, that sorta, kinda, somehow, sound close, and then claim victory by proxy.

Whatever.

The form of a hydrogen atom, in Feser’s terms, doesn’t – cannot – exist when the hydrogen atom ceases to be. The soul of a rational animal is different, it does immaterial things – and those immaterial processes must affect material things. “Free will” can’t be material, for example, according to Feser – the soul must supply that. So the will must impact the body somehow, no?

In the same way we do not say that the substantial form ( the constitutive, structural organizing principle that marks off hydrogen atoms from everything else in the universe and in particular from a proton and an electron as twoi independent substances) of the hydrogen atom “impacts” the proton nucleus and the electron somehow, the soul does not “impact” the body somehow, because the soul *just is* the form of the body to which it has a relation of *formal causation*. The soul, as the substantial form of the body, is not a substance (complete substance is the appropriate technical term) that exists apart and outside of the body to which it has interactions with that we have to explain, because there are no such interactions (unless interaction is understood in an analogous, non-mechanistic way) in the first place. Neither is Free Will a “thing” so as to be material or immaterial, but rather a power of the soul.

note: yes, I know that being a Christian, I now have to explain the status of the soul post-mortem. But since you are not a Christian, I do not have enter into such theologically charged territory.

[to TBFW:]

A powerful alien could be investigated, and we could in princople discover that it performed the miracle and perhaps even how. Edward Feser, who gets some credence here, asserts that could not be the case for a supernatural entity: ” What is supernatural is what is beyond the natural order altogether, and thus cannot be known via purely philosophical argument but only via divine revelation.”.

More egregious misunderstanding; “supernatural” is a technical term of art. The actions of powerful aliens are, under the definition of supernatural Feser is working with, *not* supernatural. Strictly speaking, only God is supernatural, that is, above the natural or created order. And from this, it follows what Feser is saying.

Is the Mandelbrot Set supernatural?

You tell me.

[to Melissa:]

You can almost hear Haldane arguing that one collection of chemicals is much like another, so how could one ‘germ plasm’ correspond to a frog while another corresponds to a person?

Your caricature of the argument is duly noted. In the meantime, and until you do have such a naturalistic explanation for qualia, why not just stay silent instead of making reverse gap arguments?

If qualia can be explained in terms of material things, then it follows that small differences can have large effects.

If cows had wings I would never leave home without an umbrella.

When you have something relevant to say I will respond — of course, if my responses are unnerving, then by all means carry on.

TFBW –

In #37, you said, “again, so far as I can see, the ‘supernatural’ equals the ‘unknowable’.”

If you were confused by my phrasing, I apologize. I did not intend to claim that all unknowable things were ipso facto supernatural. But I do claim that, in practice, all supernatural things are unknowable.

So, yes, reread what I’ve written with the interpretation that ‘calling something supernatural is sufficient, though perhaps not necessary, for it to be unknowable’. See if it’s more consistent then.

G. Rodrigues –

Classical arguments for the immateriality of the soul rely on *thought* not on qualia.

But Feser includes several pages on qualia anyway.

“supernatural” is a technical term of art. The actions of powerful aliens are, under the definition of supernatural Feser is working with, *not* supernatural.

Since I was using the example of a ‘powerful alien’ as something that isn’t supernatural, I’m not clear what your point is supposed to be. I didn’t say aliens were supernatural, nor did I say Feser says aliens are supernatural. I think the misunderstanding may be on your end.

Is the Mandelbrot Set supernatural? You tell me.

I’m sort of a quasi-Platonist, so no, I don’t think so. Do you think it’s supernatural?

Let’s put two sections together, now:

Ah yes, your much loved tactic of *not* responding to the arguments in question and instead focus attention on other arguments, that sorta, kinda, somehow, sound close, and then claim victory by proxy.

until you do have such a naturalistic explanation for qualia, why not just stay silent instead of making reverse gap arguments?

You accuse me of misunderstanding Feser’s arguments. Unfortunately, I have to accuse you of misunderstanding mine. It was thought, by logical argument, that all the things in the sky went around the Earth. Then Galileo saw moons going around Jupiter. An argument can be trumped by empirical observation. Poe and Haldane are other examples of arguments that are trumped by empirical observation.

So, my contention is not, ‘those arguments were wrong, therefore Feser is wrong’.

My contention is, ” 1. Arguments can be disproved by empirical observation (here are some examples), 2. the colorblind painter (and other cases) provide empirical observations at variance with Feser’s argument, 3. therefore that argument is wrong.”

Do you object to 1., 2., or both?

Ray,

My contention is, ” 1. Arguments can be disproved by empirical observation (here are some examples), 2. the colorblind painter (and other cases) provide empirical observations at variance with Feser’s argument, 3. therefore that argument is wrong.”

Do you object to 1., 2., or both?

Since it has been pointed out multiple times by multiple people that the case of the colour blind painter does not provide empirical evidence against Feser’s position. I don’t know why you are still going on about it as if no one has told you this is the problem.

Feser includes discussion of quaila in his book as part of a discussion of the current status of the mind- body problem and how he thinks it is the modern conception of the physical has manufactured the problem not as evidence for an immaterial soul.

But I do claim that, in practice, all supernatural things are unknowable.

I’d like to see evidence for this claim. Do you mean completely unknowable or unknowable in part?

Let me see if I can focus in on the exact difference that separates Ray’s view of the evidence from everyone else’s, since I’ve been carefully trying to pin down that exact thing myself.

Ray has been giving multiple examples (primarily sourced from Oliver Sacks) of cases where physical brain damage resulted in the loss of qualia — the subjective “what-it’s-like-ness” of experience. His ultimate contention is that this demonstrates that the physical brain is wholly responsible for that experience.

To me (and evidently to most others here), this seems like an unjustified conclusion. Portions of the brain can be essential for experience without being the entirety of experience, just as a machine can cease to function when any single vital part is removed. The vital part is not wholly responsible for the operation of the machine — it is merely an essential component. in #67, I characterised Ray’s argument as follows.

1. Evidence suggests that consciousness can be impaired in various specific ways by physical brain damage.
2. Therefore, a physical brain with a certain minimum level of functionality is necessary to support consciousness.
3. Therefore, a physical brain with a certain minimum level of functionality, and nothing more, is sufficient to support consciousness.

This was not intended to be a sound argument: it was an invitation for Ray to fix up an unsound approximation of his argument. In #77, Ray responded as follows.

Not quite; but I will say that, given what happens to consciousness as the brain is destroyed, if there’s a ‘remainder’ when the brain’s elminated, it must be pretty small.

The working assumption then seems to be “only that which is not eliminated by the destruction of the physical part needs to be accounted for”. I don’t buy this at all: the “vital part” analogy still applies. A vital part, the removal of which disables a particular function, is not necessarily the only thing which is responsible for that function. Ray’s answer to this is to brandish Occam’s Razor in an assertive manner.

I think that part of the fundamental misunderstanding is that Ray thinks that consciousness is a process. This is from the article (his own) which he linked to in the above quotation.

I think consciousness isn’t a static ‘object’; it’s an active process. Consider wind – what is wind, exactly? It’s something air does. Is a tornado an object, or is it a process that happens within a particular volume of air? I think the mind isn’t something the brain has or creates – the mind is what the brain does.

The controversial aspect of this is not the idea that “the mind is something that the brain does”, but the implication that the brain, and only the brain, is responsible for the phenomena we associate with “mind”, including “qualia”, or “experience”.

To understand the difficulty of this situation, I must ask Ray to clarify what he means by the brain being an “active process”. I recognise two different kinds of process, off the top of my head: physical processes, and computational processes. Physical processes represent interactions of matter and energy: chemical reactions, large scale mechanics, quantum behaviour, and so on. Computational processes are abstract things which can be instantiated through specific physical processes: it’s what modern computers do with electronics, and what the brain does with neurons.

If consciousness is a physical process, then what sort of physical process is it? There must be physical properties of consciousness which either derive from other fundamental properties of matter, or which are basic properties unto themselves (like gravity and electrical forces). On the other hand, if consciousness is a computational process, then what sort of computational process is it? I’m a PhD in computer science, and I know of no computational process which bears any relevance to consciousness. But if consciousness is a purely computational process, then we should be able to make a machine conscious by making it perform the relevant computations.

It is because nothing in the whole of physics or mathematics seems to be even related to consciousness that modern intellectuals (excluding those with a prior commitment to philosophical materialism) still consider consciousness to be a hard problem. None of those thinkers are even slightly swayed by the fact that certain physical or computational processes might be necessary for consciousness. If you could come up with an in-principle argument as to how consciousness might be a physical or computational process, then that would give the evidence an entirely different significance. As it stands, no such connection exists.

This is a case of arguments being different depending on what one accepts as a premise or a conclusion in the argument. For a materialist, the argument goes like this.

1. Consciousness exists.
2a. Everything that exists is either physical, or a second-order product of something physical.
3a. Therefore, consciousness is either physical, or a second-order product of something physical.

For someone who does not hold #2a as a premise, the argument goes like this.

1. Consciousness exists.
2b. Consciousness is a phenomenon that can not be explained in terms of physical or computational processes.
3b. Therefore, there exists a phenomenon which is not a physical or computational process.

When non-materialists try to persuade materialists that their premise #2a is untrue, and cite consciousness as a counter-example, materialists refute it by asserting their conclusion, #3a. That’s poor logical form, because the conclusion can only be as true as the premise on which it is based, and if the premise happens to be false as charged, then the conclusion is equally faulty.

When materialists try to persuade non-materialists that their premise #2b is untrue, they blather. They call it “giving up too easily”, or try to cite loads and loads of examples where consciousness is seen to be closely related to something physical (without showing that it reduces to something physical). If materialists really want to refute #2b, then they need only come up with a plausible suggestion of how consciousness could, in principle, be a physical or computational process.

The problem, as Jerry Fodor famously quipped, is this: “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.”

Materialists are willing to overlook this difficulty on the basis of their faith in materialism. For those of us who lack such a strong faith in materialism, consciousness represents a glaring problem for the materialist doctrine.

Understand that, and I think you can understand the communications failure-in-progress between Ray and the rest of us.

Yeah, I’ve heard of that one. As far as I can see, an illusion is a species of experience — specifically a non-veridical one. I’m not sure how you could have a non-veridical experience of experience.

For those of you who can’t get enough of this philosophical mumbo jumbo, I wrote an essay on the subjects of consciousness and intuition here.

Tom Gilson –

But you haven’t received any [divine revelations], therefore they aren’t an option.

…aren’t an option for me. If you’ve received divine revelations, that’s awesome for you, and congratulations. But I have to use my non-divine senses and reason to evaluate what you say when you relate those experiences to me. ‘Cause that’s all I have.

Melissa –

Since it has been pointed out multiple times by multiple people that the case of the colour blind painter does not provide empirical evidence against Feser’s position…

Asserted, yes. Elaborated upon, no. Tom Gilson characterizes it as, “If you say X, and someone answers not-X because of Y,” but I haven’t seen the “because of Y” part yet. Well, TFBW finally essayed such a Y, after your post. He’s next.

Melissa –

I’d like to see evidence for this claim.

People seem to treat it that way. As soon as it’s regarded as supernatural, any investigation into how it works or the details of how it happens stops. Even in idle curiosity.

Do you mean completely unknowable or unknowable in part?

There’s no difference. Asserting there’s things you can’t know – even in part – is the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero. Once you go there, all bets are off. You can ‘prove’ anything you like. If you say something’s (even ‘partially’) incomprehensible, you’re unavoidably saying that no amount of evidence can prove anything about it. You don’t get to pick and choose.

@Ray Ingles, #108:

Well, let’s turn it around for a second. Let’s assume some other component – an immaterial component – is also necessary for experiencing color. OK, then. What does it do? How does it work? In what manner does it interface with the known material component?

If I knew that, we’d be having a completely different discussion. How can I possibly explain the operation of a non-material thing? I might arbitrarily attach the word “mind” or “soul” or “spirit” to it, and say that it is the nature of such a thing to experience, and perhaps to choose, but what else can I do? Still, I can offer you a completely speculative answer to the last of those questions — an answer that is at least compatible with what we do know.

First, however, I note that the question poses a two-part problem. One part is the transference of information from the physical to non-physical (experience), and the other is the influence of the physical by the non-physical (metaphysical free will). Your comments sometimes blend these two distinct concepts together. You don’t seem to have any in-principle objection to epiphenomenalism, and I don’t need to argue for anything more than that in order to place the faculty of consciousness in a non-physical component, so I’ll take it that you have no in-principle objection to the non-physical receiving information from the physical. I haven’t actually argued a case for metaphysical free will, so the second part of the problem is introduced by expanding the scope of the discussion.

I will accept this expansion in the scope, under certain terms. Consciousness is the hard problem for materialists, and metaphysical free will is the hard problem for non-materialists, so, to be fair, I will offer to provide an in-principle, speculative, compatible-with-what-we-know-about-physics account of metaphysical free will, if you, in turn, provide a similar explanation of consciousness from the materialist perspective. We’ll see which explanation appears to be the more plausible.

If you accept the terms of that offer, then please provide a brief explanation as to why you think that a non-material thing could not (or observably does not) influence a material thing. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I consider the mind to be formed by the interaction of the physical brain, and a non-physical “soul”. Please give me a rough outline as to why this model is incredible, particularly in the “free will” case of the soul exerting influence over the physical body. I will respond to your objections as best I can, within the bounds of currently orthodox physics.

Once I’ve done that, I’d like you to explain why you “suspect that consciousness is a computational process of some sort,” and defend that position with something a little more concrete than oblique references to past failures and implied hope for future successes — an optimistic meta-induction, if you will — since I find that more or less indistinguishable from wishful thinking. As far as I can tell, you hold the suspicion because you have a prior commitment to materialism, not because a reasonable case can be made that consciousness could be a material phenomenon.

If you’re going to go on to claim that such a faith is, ipso facto, an unreasoning or unreasonable faith, though, then we’re going to have another disagreement.

Dear me, no: I’m not Richard Dawkins. Faith is not ipso facto unreasonable. The question as to whether faith in materialism (or its alternatives) is reasonable is an open one. I’m prepared to give my reasoning on the subject of free will in exchange for yours on the subject of consciousness. If you think that the reasonableness of your faith rests on other grounds, however, you might want to bow out and simply concede that the phenomenon of consciousness is reasonable evidence against the doctrine of materialism. It’s your call.

Ray,

The thing is, if the materialistic account is wrong, or even just incomplete, then the materialistic account must, eventually, with a fine-enough measurement, make predictions that aren’t borne out in practice.

When do we reach “eventually”? If you’re an ardent materialist, you will never get there because giving up on materialistic explanations for everything, including the supernatural, is – how did you put it, Ray – the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero. You also said, once you go there, all bets are off.

I should add that I still have a standing offer to explain how metaphysical free will might be compatible with what we know about physics. If I thought that the supernatural were necessarily and completely unknowable, I would never have made that offer.

Do a quick audit of yourself, Ray. You are reading stuff into what other people say that contradicts what they are actually saying.

Tom Gilson – To quote from the essay that it appears only TFBW has read:

Accepting that there are things that we don’t know is not the same as accepting that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know.

As I’ve just discussed with TFBW, I can’t explain the operation of my wife. That doesn’t mean I presume to claim that it is impossible, even in principle, for me to ever do so.

Do you claim you cannot, even in principle, “explain “the operation” of all that”?

(BTW, do you think that if it ever were possible to explain the operation of someone, that would automatically reduce their value in some sense? I don’t.)

@Ray Ingles, #124:

Ah, but when you say you can’t explain the operation of an immaterial thing, do you mean you can’t explain it yet, or that you can’t ever explain it? One of those does map to ‘unknowable’ pretty darn well, and seems to fairly characterize the words of yours I quoted.

That conclusion is based on a particular view of knowledge that I do not share with you. Tom has already addressed this somewhat, but I’ll put it another way.

There is an approach to modelling (in the sense of “describing a system”) called “black box” modelling. In this approach, one considers a system to be an impenetrable black box: one can observe the things on the outside surface, but not on the interior. One can only interact with the features on the outside surface of the box, and observe how they react. For any given exterior, there is always more than one interior which would be capable of producing the observed behaviour, so even perfect knowledge of the exterior is not always enough to determine what’s actually inside.

Whether or not it remains so indefinitely, consciousness is somewhat like a black box to us at the moment. We can know its exterior surface but not its inner workings. What you seem to insist upon, in order to attain “knowledge”, is a complete description of both the inside and outside of the box (or at least the in-principle possibility that such a complete description can be obtained). That’s what I understand by your “explain the operation of” requirement. And if that’s a more or less proper interpretation, then I think that your criterion for knowledge is silly, and you’re trying to draw me into a silly argument about a silly subject. I decline: I’ll settle for the observation that our ideas of what constitutes “knowledge” are incommensurable, and leave it at that. It’s too fundamental a disagreement for there to be any other productive discussion of the subject.

I will offer a quick speculation of my own – does it by any chance incorporate uncertainty at the quantum level, possibly admixed with some chaotic sensitivity in neural networks like the human brain?

Are you explaining consciousness at the physical level, or trying to guess my explanation for free will? It seems like the latter. No dice, buddy. No comment until you agree to the terms of the deal. If you can’t offer a remotely plausible explanation for consciousness, then any old half-baked explanation of free will is better than what you’ve got — even if you think you’ve got legitimate objections to it. Heck, if you can think of an argument that I might offer in support of free will, but can’t come up with anything at all in support of consciousness, then I think we’ve established that “metaphysical free will exists” is a more plausible position than “consciousness is reducible to the material”. The former is at least theoretically comprehensible.

The way that consciousness is affected by the brain’s workings seems to suggest that it’s an effect of the material processes in the brain…

No. Just no. I’ve been over this repeatedly to the point of tedium. Regardless of how many times and how accurately anyone can demonstrate that specific portions of the brain are associated with particular aspects of consciousness, we still have no in-principle explanation for how anything physical or mathematical could be conscious. By all means, let the fascinating research carry on, but it’s only through the lens of a priori materialism that this “seems to suggest that it’s an effect of the material processes in the brain”. You can’t even give me the slightest whiff of a hint as to how that might actually be the case — and this coming from the guy who considers “knowledge” to be a close relative of “can explain the operation of”.

Please rule out the possibility that the research is identifying portions of the brain that interact with an immaterial “soul” in some way, and then we’ll revisit your claim about this being evidence for a materialistic model of consciousness. If you don’t do that, then the evidence is utterly equivocal, and I’m thoroughly tired of hearing you cite it ad nauseam as univocal support of your position. Repetitions are very good for muscle building, but they do not strengthen a weak argument.

Ray,

No. Very much no.

… followed by long and irrelevant, to the point I was making, couple of paragraphs.

Since you already agreed that in practice the unknown and the unknowable is indistinguishable, I’m going to conclude that you have no problem now with the statement that something that is actually unknowable is not completely unknowable.

Not necessarily, though that’s certainly to be preferred when possible.

Explanations in the form if a scientific how are not certainly to be preferred. It depends what the question is. An explanation in terms of an agents intentions are in fact often much more informative than an answer of how.

And the more we learn, the more it’s possible to learn.

We all know that our scientific knowledge continues to expand but it expands within certain parameters just because of what it is.

TFBW –

Whether or not it remains so indefinitely, consciousness is somewhat like a black box to us at the moment. We can know its exterior surface but not its inner workings.

I’ll grant that. I’ll even grant that you and I have different guesses about what might be in that black box.

But I’ll further note that your insistence that I either produce a complete working hypothesis, or your hypothesis wins by default, is invalid. In the 1600’s, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to “What causes lighting?” was “Darn if I, or anyone else, knows.”

What you seem to insist upon, in order to attain “knowledge”, is a complete description of both the inside and outside of the box (or at least the in-principle possibility that such a complete description can be obtained).

No. Reality is underdetermined, and there’s an unlimited number of hypotheses that can account for any finite set of data. Given the outputs of a black box, you can construct an endless number of models of the internals.

But saying a particular black box is ‘unknowable’ seems to devolve to the position that “no further observations, experience, or cogitation will get us any further in studying it, or limit the range of possibilities, so we might as well give up.” It means, for example, that you can’t apply Ockham’s Razor to theories about it, so literally anything can come out of it.

I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t think humans get metaphysical certainty – but I think we do get varying levels of certainty, and enough observations (and, ideally tests) do build up those certainties.

Feser in TLS heaps scorn upon Hume for his notions of causality – but regarding a particular black box as fundamentally unknowable seems to be the equivalent.

Are you explaining consciousness at the physical level, or trying to guess my explanation for free will? It seems like the latter.

The latter, indeed. Not that quantum indeterminacy is free will, but that the spirit tweaks quantum events in such a way that the matter ends up doing what the non-material free will chose.

If you can’t offer a remotely plausible explanation for consciousness, then any old half-baked explanation of free will is better than what you’ve got

If I can’t offer an explanation for lightning, then God or Zeus or Thor or Seth or the Thunderbirds is better than what I’ve got? Why can’t I say, “It doesn’t look like anyone knows yet”? Why can’t I even say, “I’ve a hunch the answer might lie in this direction”?

Please rule out the possibility that the research is identifying portions of the brain that interact with an immaterial “soul” in some way

So… ‘you can’t prove it isn’t’ is the standard you have to meet?

@Ray Ingles:

Let me expand a little bit on note2. You wrote:

As you note, “2, 4 and addition are not mechanisms with causally interacting parts”. “2+2=4″ is eternal, unchanging, outside of time, and could not be otherwise than it is – no “2+2=fish”.

This is the standard Platonic account of mathematical objects: they are extra-mental existents, necessary, and abstract that is, not localized in space-time.

I do not know if you realize, but you have just destroyed naturalism. First, you grant the existence of necessary, non-material, causally inert objects. Second, you are committed to the proposition that we can *know* these necessary, non-material, causally inert objects. By the nature of the case, if the mind is reducible to its physical substrate, the brain, you have an an obvious problem. Actually, what you have is an insoluble problem.

Complaining about souls? Really? Maybe I should write down some examples of the scorn naturalists pour on “magical souls”, an “explanation that explains nothing”?

Tom Gilson –

If someone said that was all the information that might be available now or in the future, and that we ought to close off all investigation, that would be wrong. But they weren’t saying that in 1613, were they?

No, they waited until Franklin and others started actually making progress in the 1700’s.

Many pious types decried the placing of lightning rods on churches. The whole idea that man could influence such things was hubristic, it was said, and God would protect His churches anyway. (Google the phrase “fulgura frango”, or look up Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man”.) Gunpowder would be stored in churches, since surely God wouldn’t send lightning there, right? Then, in 1769, a hundred tons of gunpowder exploded when the Church of San Nazaro was hit in Brescia, Venice. Up to 3,000 people died and up to one-fifth of the city was leveled. Objections to lightning-rods started quieting down.

Here’s the problem with physicalist explanations for consciousness: there don’t seem to be any available, even in principle.

Speaking of misdirection, let’s jump to your other comment.

If there is some non-physical process going on there, how would you expect us to describe it? As non-physical neurons interacting by non-physical laws? Or what?

How does ‘indescribable’ differ from ‘unknowable’? How is ‘non-physical process of some type we can’t describe or comprehend’ an explanation? Does anybody really have an “explanation” for consciousness yet?

Are you sure the word process even applies? I’m not.

What other word do you apply to something that changes over time, as consciousness indisputably does?

Melissa –

Are you deliberately changing the subject?

Not at all. The fact that no one seems to want to even attempt to answer that question may give you a hint as to why I think it’s central.

@Ray Ingles:

The Mandelbrot Set exists but is causally inert.

What problem? Even a computer can explore the Mandelbrot Set, in a fuzzy, physical, floating-point-IEEE-math kind of way.

How exactly is anything like “2+2=4″ supposed to interact with causal stuff like a brain?

You really have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about. It really is amazing the lack of self-awareness.

‘Forms’ are nice and pristine; nothing causal maps directly to any form. Pretty much everything causal maps to many, many different forms – they map to regions of phase space, not points. The ‘reality’ of a form is not such that it could cause anything – anything like consciousness, for example.

Kindly go traffick your pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to someone else.

Anyway, discussion in this thread about souls is over for me. You have already conceded all I could ever want from you, even if unwittingly and unknowingly — but that is your problem, not mine.

@Tom Gilson:

A computer can explore the Mandelbrot set?

Wow.

Wow indeed.

Understand very carefully what Ray Ingles is saying: the Mandelbrot set *exists* and is *causally inert*. Ponder a minute on what this means. Yet it is obvious that we do *know* things about the Mandelbrot sense, from which it follows the mind that knows such things *cannot* be reduced to the physical substrate of the brain, precisely because the Mandelbrot set is causally inert.

This is an *air-tight* argument. Ray was given us *all* we could ever wish for. All. Game over. Dismiss the foolish ignorance of “Even a computer can explore the Mandelbrot Set” because it is obvious that we know, our minds know, a lot about the Mandelbrot set *independently* of having computers aiding us in acquiring such knowledge.

@SteveK:

The fact that a causally inert reality (Mandelbrot set or any other of your choosing) makes an impression on our mind such that we become consciously aware of it seems to disprove your theory that it’s causally inert.

Am I wrong?

You are wrong insofar as the problem is not in the Madelbrot set, which in the Platonist account is a necessary, not localized in space-time and causally inert (like all mathematical objects for that matter) where causality is understood in the usual sense of efficient causality.

I confess when I first heard Ray saying that he was a “quasi-Platonist” I dismissed it because he is also a self-avowed naturalist, and granting the existence of Platonic entities is to bury naturalism six feet under ground, so I took the “quasi-Platonist” as an equivocal misuse of the term. But here we have it in all its glory. The account Ray gives of mathematical objects just is the standard Platonic account. No more, no less. But if the Platonic story is true (I do not think it is by the way, so my argument is a reductio), the mind *cannot* be reducible to the physical substrate of the brain because there is no efficient causal mechanism that can account for how we can possibly know say, the Mandelbrot set. And we *do know* the Mandelbrot, not in a fuzzy way but in a *determinate* way: it is compact, self-similar, its boundary has Hausdorff measure 2, etc. and etc. How is it possible to know a causally inert entity? Whatever qualms Ray has about souls apply in the same measure to knowledge of these entities. And he has already opened the door to the existence of necessary, abstract, that is, not localized in space-time and thus immaterial, entities like mathematical objects. After granting this, what objections can one raise about the existence of souls, angels or even God?

I have to say that I am not so much gloating, but genuinely confused. For how could this obvious problem escaped unnoticed? Has Ray never heard of Benacerraf’s epistemological challenge?

Ray,

Not at all. The fact that no one seems to want to even attempt to answer that question may give you a hint as to why I think it’s central.

I have tried multiple times to pull you back on track to defend your claim that partially unknowable things are completely unknowable. You have avoided the question. Don’t worry though, it’s a ridiculous claim so no wonder you keep changing the subject.

But I will address your question which was …

In other words, on what basis do you conclude that a particular thing is unknowable in principle?

The answer is we don’t (except possibly with the exception that God could ever be completely comprehended by us and I think even then that’s not the type of statement that your question is referring to). That’s probably why no one has addressed it straight on – because that’s not the claim we are making. Some things are unknowable to science and some questions are unanswerable because they are poorly formulated.

Fair warning to all: this is another of my essay-length summaries of the argument so far, and an attempt to re-focus the key issues.

@Ray Ingles, #139:

But I’ll further note that your insistence that I either produce a complete working hypothesis, or your hypothesis wins by default, is invalid.

Woah there, skippy. Can you please single out which of my sentences you misunderstood as me insisting anything like that? I said that you can think of rough theories in support of metaphysical free will, but you can’t even come up with a vague idea as to how matter might be conscious, and that’s enough to demonstrate that the former idea is more plausible than the latter.

But saying a particular black box is ‘unknowable’ seems to devolve to the position that “no further observations, experience, or cogitation will get us any further in studying it, or limit the range of possibilities, so we might as well give up.”

You keep ascribing that position of naive intellectual defeatism to everyone who doesn’t share your optimism about science. More precisely, you equate claims of “unknowable” (epistemic pessimism) with “supernaturalism” and inevitable consequent intellectual stagnation. Conversely, you equate epistemic optimism with naturalism and consequent intellectual vigour. (See #20, #22, #25, #37, #62, #75, and #109 — possibly others as well.)

The thing is, you seem to be the only one insisting that the supernatural is necessarily unknowable (#99). Melissa explicitly disagreed with that assertion in #112, and you misinterpreted one of my remarks (from #113) in an attempt to refute her (in #116). You assert that there’s no difference between unknowable in part and completely unknowable — that asserting something is unknowable even in part is the “intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero,” and reason is no loner possible (#109).

You raised the following question in #37, and reiterated it by reference in #66, #136, and #145.

You encounter something you don’t understand. How do you determine if it’s beyond human understanding or not?

The motivation for asking this seems to be driven by one key point: your doctrine that “supernatural” is a useless concept which serves only to deaden intellectual curiosity. Attempts to investigate either succeed, in which case the thing we sought to know was knowable, or do not, in which case the question of whether it is knowable remains unanswered, and we should continue to investigate (#75, #132). As far as I can tell, you want us to answer this question in order that our reply might serve to prove your point that supernatural explanations deaden intellectual curiosity.

Melissa offers an answer in #155, but also makes the following observation: “no one has addressed it straight on – because that’s not the claim we are making.” This is spot on. All the focus on “unknowable” has been brought to the conversation by you, Ray, and you have been harping about it as though we are the ones asserting that things are unknowable. Presumably this is because of your belief that “supernatural” means necessarily unknowable (#99), and we have been allowing supernatural elements into the discussion.

In short, the reluctance to answer the question stems from the fact that you seem to want us to defend a position that none of us hold — that the supernatural is unknowable. The consensus position among the rest of us seems to be that the supernatural can be known in part, but you hold to the bizarre doctrine that no “parts” are possible — it’s all or nothing (#109) — so you insist that we defend a particular extreme to which none of us actually hold.

I, for one, have not wanted to answer this question, because it would encourage this fundamental misunderstanding of yours. Here, for what it’s worth (which isn’t much) is my answer, just so we can put to rest your conspiratorial accusations of evasiveness (#145). I pray that my answer does not result in an attempt on your part to drag us even further down the path of defending a position that none of us hold.

Humans are finite, both intellectually and experientially. To find answers to certain questions may require understanding or experience beyond our innate capacity. There are several reasons we might think that a question belongs in the “unanswerable” category. The weakest of these is that we know what it would take to answer the question, and we know that the requirements are beyond our current reach. This is relatively weak, because our reach tends to advance over time. More problematic is where we have good reason to think that the question is unanswerable in principle, because of other justly-held beliefs such as uncertainty principles, incompleteness theorems, computability arguments, philosophical antinomies, etc.

Lastly, there are those problems which are so fundamentally baffling that we don’t even know what sort of intellectual tool we need to address the problem (e.g. consciousness). We may consider this to be unanswerable on the basis of an inductive argument of demonstrated long-term ineptitude. It is this argument which seems to impress you the least, since you gravitate towards the optimistic induction that other once-insoluble problems have been solved, so any particular problem might be solved in the long term. Mostly this serves to highlight the limits of inductive reasoning, since opposing inductive arguments exist, and only time will tell which one of them was right.

There’s a converse question which Tom asked in #35, and which I think that you should answer.

How does your approach to knowledge help you if the truth is that there is a God? Will you keep on insisting on natural explanations even if they’re not all true?

The question is an important one, because it asks whether you hold your pragmatic refusal to consider the supernatural above the question of fact as to whether the supernatural actually exists. I did an analysis of this problem, as it relates to your mode of argument, in another post. You gave a non-answer to this question in #37, which I pointed out as being a non-answer in #49. You admitted to being a non-answer in #75, but only went on to give another non-answer.

Perhaps I can answer the question on your behalf, and you can correct my answer to suit your actual position. I think that your answer to the second part of Tom’s question is “yes”: you will go on insisting that we look for natural explanations even if they’re not all true. You believe that the nature of inquiry is such that any non-natural explanation is the equivalent of giving up and not seeking an explanation at all. Your entire approach to explanation presumes the truth of naturalism, such that any connection that your explanations might have with the truth are dependent on that premise being true.

If that description of your position is remotely accurate, then it explains the fundamental disconnect between your position and the rest of us: we strongly suspect that naturalism is a false premise; you take it for granted that it isn’t. If it’s a false premise, then your approach to knowledge is a pragmatic one, but there isn’t the slightest guarantee that your conclusions will be true. You are welcome to your pragmatic approach, but given its lack of essential connection with the truth, the rest of us are entitled to reject it on the basis of nothing more than personal taste.

I said that you can think of rough theories in support of metaphysical free will

Correction. I can come up with a hypothesis for how a non-material something could interact with the known material of the brain in a way that cannot currently be falsified. That’s not quite the same thing as ‘support’.

but you can’t even come up with a vague idea as to how matter might be conscious

But you can’t come up with even a vague idea how something non-material can be conscious! That’s the point. All anyone has so far said is, ‘I can’t see how matter could be conscious, therefore something else must be conscious.’

This is problematic in two ways. First off, just because it can’t be imagined now is no real evidence a solution can’t be found. (As I’ve laboriously demonstrated with the examples I’ve pointed out.)

The other problem is that it doesn’t get us any further toward explaining what consciousness is or how it works or anything. ‘Consciousness is non-material’. OK… but as G. Rodrigues is willing to concede, just because something is non-material doesn’t make it conscious. Why isn’t the Mandelbrot Set conscious? There must be something more to consciousness than there is to the Mandelbrot Set. What is that ‘something more’?

and that’s enough to demonstrate that the former idea is more plausible than the latter.

No, the proper conclusion is that nobody has a complete account of consciousness yet. There’s rational room for lots of pet theories and personal bets on where the answer might be found.

All the focus on “unknowable” has been brought to the conversation by you

What’s the knowable answer to the consciousness problem above?

The consensus position among the rest of us seems to be that the supernatural can be known in part

God’s ways are above man’s ways. Could God again command the killing of infants and children for a greater good?

Humans are finite, both intellectually and experientially. To find answers to certain questions may require understanding or experience beyond our innate capacity.

Sure. And we may also be living in the Matrix, or some other perfect simulation or dream we cannot wake from. But both ideas are of only philosophical interest. They are of no practical utility whatsoever.

Lastly, there are those problems which are so fundamentally baffling that we don’t even know what sort of intellectual tool we need to address the problem (e.g. consciousness).

Oh, so we don’t have a supernatural ‘explanation’ for consciousness after all? Feser, in TLS, derides ‘materialists’ for “pushing consciousness under the rug”. How is “pushing consciousness under the rug (of supernaturalism)” materially (no pun intended) different?

We may consider this to be unanswerable on the basis of an inductive argument of demonstrated long-term ineptitude.

But you can never conclude something’s unknowable like that. All you can ever conclude is that ‘nobody’s answered that yet’. There’s no way, in practice, to tell the difference between something that’s forever unknowable and something that hasn’t been solved yet. Prior to the solution, they look exactly the same.

So, since we’ve demonstrated that such problems have been solved before, the only practical thing to do is keep trying to solve them. Sure, we might be wrong, but if we give up, it seems pretty certain that solvable problems will go unsolved. Whereas, if we try, unsolved (but solvable) problems will get solved.

If something’s unknowable… then it’s by that very fact unknowable that it’s unknowable.

Gotta go, I’ll answer your ‘important’ question asap.

Ray,

I’m not sure what to make of your responses. A lot of them are irrelevant to what’s being argued:

First off, just because it can’t be imagined now is no real evidence a solution can’t be found. (As I’ve laboriously demonstrated with the examples I’ve pointed out.)

The problem is not one of imagination but an in principle objection. If you define the material (as it is defined for the purpose of doing science) as having no sensible qualities and no purpose then you are not going to be able to explain qualia and intentionality in terms of the material. All your many examples of other things that have succumbed to a scientific explanation that we have laboriously had to read through are irrelevant because they fail to address this point.

You constantly put forward what I guess you consider to be evidence for your position that doesn’t show what you think it does. For instance:

God’s ways are above man’s ways. Could God again command the killing of infants and children for a greater good?

Doesn’t show that the supernatural is not knowable in part.

You also fail to understand what is being argued:

Feser, in TLS, derides ‘materialists’ for “pushing consciousness under the rug”. How is “pushing consciousness under the rug (of supernaturalism)” materially (no pun intended) different?

You’ve bought this up a couple of times already and I’ve ignored it but you clearly haven’t understood the analogy. He is not deriding materialists for pushing consciousness under the rug. My suggestion is to stop referring to his book because it just emphasises how little you have understood of it.

Tom Gilson –

I believe that free will is essential to understanding human nature, and freedom of will is something that science won’t ever fully explain.

According to quantum mechanics, while we can count on half of a sample of a radioactive element to decay in x period of time (the ‘half-life’), it’s not possible, even in principle, to predict when a particular atom will decay.

It’s not that there’s even a ‘clock’ of some type, hidden inside the atom and set to a particular time, and we just can’t see it. There’re no ‘hidden variables’ (at least, no ‘local’ ones); it just ‘goes off’, for no particular reason.

Do you think, based on this, that quantum mechanics is not, in fact, a scientific theory?

The ‘important question’ (actually two):

How does your approach to knowledge help you if the truth is that there is a God?

As I note here, everybody’s gotta start somewhere epistemologically. You’ve got to have (or at least, in practice, every human does have) some base precepts. And you can’t pick them based on evidence; part of the problem is deciding what counts as evidence!

But some precepts are automatically futile. For example, if you assume your reason can never reach true answers… then what? If you assume that the data from your senses bears no relation to the outside world (solipsism and its variants)… then what? You kinda have to assume something other than those things to make any progress at all. (As G. K. Chesterton put it, “…a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask”.)

So some precepts can be picked based on ‘anti-futility’. They could be false… but if they were, we’d be no worse off. You talked about Ockham’s Razor in the other thread, but that, too, is not mysterious. As I said back in #139, “Reality is underdetermined, and there’s an unlimited number of hypotheses that can account for any finite set of data.” You might as well pick the simplest one that covers all the current data. (Note: if an explanation doesn’t account for all the data, then it’s not an ‘explanation’!)

So, based on principles like “reason can work”, “my senses report data correlated with an outside world”, and Ockham’s Razor, naturalism seems to fall out pretty… well, naturally. I try – by Ockham’s Razor, y’know – to limit my presumptions to as few as feasible, ideally just the ‘anti-futile’ ones.

But were I to get some divine revelation, I might well change my mind. Hasn’t happened yet. I could be wrong, but I’ve come to these beliefs honestly. So… if there’s a God that I’ve overlooked, I’ve got to assume that’ll be taken into account. (I’m aware of things like Romans 1:20 but that’s not my experience.)

Will you keep on insisting on natural explanations even if they’re not all true?

I’ll try to answer in light of your comment:
“How? can mean either 1. in what manner/by what means? or short for, 2. how can it be true that … ?”

Some natural philosophers objected to Newton’s physics because he postulated forces acting at a distance, like gravity, without being able to explain ‘in what manner/by what means’ those forces acted. And that was, in fact, kind of a big gap. But Newton had the advantage of accurate predictions to many decimal places. And his physics didn’t, by its nature, automatically preclude anyone ever understanding ‘by what means’ gravity acts.

I don’t encounter supernatural explanations making dramatically better predictions than natural ones. (E.g. Romans 1:20 not seeming to be borne out in my own feelings and intuitions.) So I’ve “no need of that hypothesis”, and the naturalistic hypotheses for things like consciousness don’t automatically preclude ever really understanding the phenomena.

Given a better track-record for supernatural predictions, I’d be willing to revise that. Absent that, I’ll stick with what seems to be working.

TFBW –

Since you bring up the subject, however, are you aware that there is a serious charge against naturalism as being a self-defeating doctrine?

In a word, yes. If you want more words, click the link.

or if you’re willing to accept a promise that an acceptable naturalistic explanation will be found at some point in the future (possibly thousands of years hence if the past is any guide to the future)

Is it irrational to believe that a problem might take thousands of years to solve? If so, why?

The best you can do is hope that God will accept that you honestly didn’t realise he existed.

Click on the “hasn’t happened yet” link, and you’ll find this passage: “In the interest of fairness, I did try praying and so forth, in response to prompts from interlocutors on newsgroups. I never received any intelligible answers.” I’ve actually, y’know, tried to talk to a God, and haven’t detected any answers.

In other words, it’s not just “I don’t see how God could be, therefore I don’t believe it.” It’s, “I don’t see how God could be, and the predictions of that hypothesis haven’t been borne out in my experience, so I don’t believe it.”

Has it occurred to you that Romans 1:20 might be referring to the sense of awe and wonder that comes with exploring nature?

I’ve seen that proposed, but while I experience that feeling regularly, I don’t experience it as pointing at God(s), any more than I see rainbows as pointing to pots of gold. (Indeed, billions of tiny raindrops floating in the air, illuminated at the correct angle so the light is reflected at least twice through the drop, refracting and revealing all the colors hidden in ‘white’ light? How is that not cooler than a Leprechaun signpost?)

The premises of naturalism assume that God does not exist or does not intervene;

God could certainly intervene in ways that could be detected. There would be some fairly straightforward ways we could detect that something really weird was going on. But, of course, the hypothesis is that God quite deliberately doesn’t do so. “Can’t detect something” and “can’t detect something that’s hiding” are obviously two different thresholds.

they assume that matter is all, so there can be no soul

I’m open to something outside the material we see interacting with the material we see. But I’ve had no need of that hypothesis so far.

and no objective distinction between “is” and “ought”

But… I think we actually do have a naturalistic basis for that distinction.

To investigate them using techniques based on naturalistic assumptions is to presume the answers before one commences investigation.

Not that supernatural presuppositions are immune from that, either. There’s a scene in the movie “Gandhi” where as a younger man he and a British friend manage to evade some attackers. The Britisher comments that it was a lucky escape, and Gandhi quips, “Luck? I thought you were a Christian!”

If a God’s out there, then there really is no such thing a coincidence, no? Everything that happens means something. Everything. If there were coincidences, wouldn’t a supernatural (or at least Christian) perspective tend to blind one to them?

The fact that your tools still seem to work (from your perspective) outside those limits is not evidence that they are actually working: it’s a demonstration of how badly they break when misapplied.

So do they seem to work or is Romans 1:20 correct?

@Ray Ingles:

It’s, “I don’t see how God could be, and the predictions of that hypothesis haven’t been borne out in my experience, so I don’t believe it.”

God is not a hypothesis; neither is He a man that He should be put to the test.

I’ve seen that proposed, but while I experience that feeling regularly, I don’t experience it as pointing at God(s), any more than I see rainbows as pointing to pots of gold.

It is not a feeling, it is an argument.

God could certainly intervene in ways that could be detected. There would be some fairly straightforward ways we could detect that something really weird was going on.

The only sense I can make of God’s “interventions” is that it is a miraculous act; miraculous events, cannot be “detected” as they happen unless you yourself are the locus of the miracle, but then this “detection” is not any different from other first-person experience and subject to the same criticisms. We *infer* that the event *was* miraculous by sifting through the evidence available and reasoning through the possible and the necessary. A miracle is a claim of and on history; historical claims have different standards of proof.

I’m open to something outside the material we see interacting with the material we see. But I’ve had no need of that hypothesis so far.

This is really funny, coming from someone who proclaims himself a “quasi-Platonist”. Not that the necessity of the immaterial is an hypothesis, but I have already given up on trying to make you understand this simple point.

If a God’s out there, then there really is no such thing a coincidence, no?

No, not necessarily; Aquinas, following Aristotle, wrote extensively about “coincidences” — chance occurrences, or in the traditional Scholastic jargon, the intersection of independent causal lines.

To continue, TFBW –

Assume God isn’t hiding: how do we go about detecting him?

Well, there’s direct divine revelation, which for some reason isn’t available to everyone. But otherwise…

Thus, miracles can not be used to detect God.

Miracles can’t be used to differentiate between God(s) and aliens,true. But they can be used to detect them, to prove that something really unusual and unexpected is going on. If we found someone really could regrow limbs by laying on hands, we’d be pretty confident that something, er, beyond the current state of the art was happening.

But ‘miracles’ don’t seem to happen in any kind of patterned way. We look for patterns when trying to detect agency (like, say, an odd pattern of deaths when a particular doctor is in charge of the ward), and it’s funny that such patterns are not in evidence when it comes to ‘miracles’.

Therefore, the complexity and appearance of design in nature can not be used to detect God.

Oh, no, it really could. If an actual example of ‘irreducible complexity’ were really found, it’d be very strong evidence of intelligent action. For some thoughts on this, see the very last comment on this thread (this comment promises to be long enough as it is). The problem is, the examples of IC that I’ve heard of – the bacterial flagellum, the vertebrate immune system and the vertebrate clotting cascade, etc. – all seem to have evolutionary precursors and are not, in fact, irreducibly complex.

Thus, the inexplicable can not, even in principle, prove anything other than, “nobody’s answered that yet.”

One could fairly straightforwardly demonstrate the existence of a powerful being that actively wanted to interact with humans and was generally well-disposed toward them. Certainly such a being could demonstrate Its own existence! The only thing you couldn’t legitimately conclude is that such a being would be forever unknowable, that’s all.

We agree that we share certain feelings of awe and wonder when we apprehend the hidden inner workings of nature. Can we consider this to be an actual sense of God’s greatness

Well, it’s a sense of the greatness of “the hidden inner workings of nature”. Can you construct an explicit formal argument that that’s the same as ‘an actual sense of God’s greatness’?

I think I’ll break here and tackle the rest in a separate comment.

TFBW –

You have a pragmatic suggestion as to why it is more in one’s interests, given a certain set of values, to act in a manner which is most likely to realise those values.

That’s not quite right. The idea is more that given a widely-applicable range of values, certain strategies prove to be robust ways of realizing those values. (In a huge range of non-zero-sum games – where the values and objectives differ widely – strategies that don’t start fights, will forgive some attacks, but will defend against others, and are clear about the difference do very well.

What you don’t have is an objective basis for the values themselves.

Is there such a thing as a “human nature”? Does it mean something to say that someone is human? Is it completely ridiculous to assume that might have some relevance to human values? Ones we could even research?

The range of human values is wide, sure, but not infinitely wide. (And if someone’s a full Hannibal Lecter sociopath, one who truly doesn’t care at all about other people… well, it’s not clear that Christian morality does any better job restraining them.)

To the extent that you have a research programme, it assumes that morality inheres in human nature: that “real-world” morality is a complex phenomenon which we can reduce to rules by studying people in the way that gravitational attraction is a complex phenomenon which was reduced to rules by studying the movement of planets.

Oh, no, not at all! I explicitly compare morality to engineering, not physics! For example, we discovered rules for gravitation, but that doesn’t mean we have a practical solution for the three-body problem. We keep having to solve new instances as they come, and look for heuristics and new special cases.

As I (explicitly!) said in the link you apparently read, “Engineering moral (and legal) codes is similarly complicated… but that does not imply that it’s impossible. Engineering continually improves and finds new ways of doing things, sometimes better than the old, sometimes merely applicable in certain special cases. There may never be an Ultimate Engineering that can accomplish all possible things… but that doesn’t mean we should abandon engineering.”

Engineering and science are two different things. Science helps engineering a lot, but people built perfectly good brick walls before they had any real idea why cement works.

In other words, you’re trying to get an “ought” from an “is”, and your “ought” is therefore nothing of the sort.

You might want to read this discussion about ‘ought and is’. (I prompted it, but made only one comment on it. Suffice it to say, people disagree with how I take your meaning.)

Are you admitting that you hold to premises which preclude the possibility of you recognising certain truths, but that’s okay because we’re all in the same boat?

No, but I admit that some presuppositions can make some truths harder to see. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill

Do you think that the fact that your methods seem to work is a valid excuse, so therefore you are not without excuse?

If my methods are failing undetectably, then how am I to blame for not detecting that?

TFBW –

Perhaps I didn’t emphasise that enough: your appeal to possible future developments is a weak argument by your own standards.

In some ways yes, in some ways no. First off, I’ll note that we have unsolved problems. Pretty much every philosophy is writing checks about those problems. Some promise that they will be solved, some that they won’t be. Not all of them can be right. And some of those questions and problems are important.

To take things out of order:

Fine, so long as you don’t think it’s a more intellectually respectable position than the opposite bet, which is also not arbitrary or whimsical, and for similar reasons.

But as I’ve noted, there’s a pretty clear and unambiguous progress in science, explaining a wider and wider range of observations, including things that used to be accounted for by religious means. It does seem quite reasonable to me for that progression to continue.

No, that’s not a scientific case. However:

When one makes the categorical assertion that science is the sole or supremely reliable means to discern what is true, that’s scientism.

Well, I don’t claim that science is the “sole… means to discern what is true”. Go ahead, check back.

I do claim it’s the most reliable means we’ve found, though. When possible, I certainly think it should be preferred.

The lack of rigour detracts from the reliability of the conclusion.

Absolutely. Again, if you look back, you’ll see that I never claimed anything else.

At that link you gave, you wrap up with, “Rigour should be held in higher regard than experiment. A rigorous argument that lacks experiment provides greater clarity than an experimental result that lacks rigour.”

I disagree. Rigor and experiment should be held in at least equal regard. Aristotle argued incorrectly, but with rigor, about a lot of things that he could have actually checked with experiments. Rigorous argument is based on premises – assumptions – and they need to be checked. As engineers put it, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different.”

Rigor applies to experimentation, too, as you note – the more rigorously the experimentation is carried out, the more reliable the data will be.

But we do run into situations where we have to make judgment calls based on incomplete information. At that point we have to work with what we have. And if the data we have is incomplete and lacks rigor – well, sometimes that’s just too bad. You have to make a call anyway.

You yourself provide an example: “A child experimenting with and testing the boundaries of his parents’ tolerance for disobedience is not conducting science. He’ll probably learn something from the experience, but that still doesn’t make it science.” Should – could – the child proceed by rigorous argument?

I think you’ve been reading everything I’ve written through your preconception of me as a “scientismist”. You… well… might want to check that assumption.

(To be continued.)

TFBW –

Can you offer naturalistic definitions of “good” or “evil”, which are not matters of opinion — i.e. not dependent on whether specific people assert them to be such?

As I said before, “The range of human values is wide, sure, but not infinitely wide.” Let me give you an example. There exist insects which reproduce by what is, unfortunately accurately, termed ‘traumatic insemination’. The males – with members that are terrifying to behold – pierce and often shred the females to deposit sperm inside them. (Cats, BTW, do this to a marginally lesser extent. There’s evidence the damage done triggers ovulation in the female.)

Then there are insects that exchange gametes only once in life – after that, the female preserves the male seed and parcels it out later during reproduction.

It’s not a huge stretch to imagine a species that combined the traits. Such a species would, in a very real sense, have to engage in traumatic juvenile rape to reproduce! From a ‘natural law’ standpoint, it could be argued that would be moral for such a species, if it possessed intelligence.

Human reproduction, happily, is not structured that way.

In short, I can accept a lot of existing ‘natural law’ argumentation, based on what humans are, often unchanged.

…do you have a definition of “evil” which could be applied to someone like Hannibal Lecter, and carry the normative force of, “he ought not to behave like that”, rather than simply the observational statement, “his pleasure comes at the cost of other people’s misery?”

Consider an example (from the first link in #175): Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

People frequently get caught up in buying thingsm in getting possessions. But in practice, research (and a few thousand years of tradition) indicates that experiences and memories – even (especially?) helping others – make us happier. I only have a few physical keepsakes from before college, but I remember many, many service projects with the Scouts.

I can argue that the Hannibal Lecters are doing it wrong, not doing what will bring them the most long-term happiness, that they are acting against their own self-interest. (Which, note, is also a conclusion of Christian morality.)

In both heliocentrism and geocentrism, there’s still night and day. They have radically different understandings of what a ‘sunrise’ constitutes, but their predictions for what you’ll actually observe, standing on the shore watching a sunrise, are remarkably congruent.

I do think our understanding of what constitutes morality are different, in some ways radically so. And yet I suspect we reach a lot of the same conclusions by our different routes.

@Ray Ingles, #177–179:

But as I’ve noted, there’s a pretty clear and unambiguous progress in science, explaining a wider and wider range of observations, including things that used to be accounted for by religious means. It does seem quite reasonable to me for that progression to continue.

That progression also comes at the cost of previous scientific theories, many of which were held to be true in exactly the same way that current theories are. As I noted in another thread (but I will repeat it here because you did not respond to those points), the geosynclinal origin of the major mountain systems was an established principle in geology in the first half of the twentieth century. This was asserted as being a “fact” of science: dissent from it was considered to be anti-scientific in the same way that dissent from Darwinism is held to be anti-scientific today. Somewhere in the 1960s, however, geosynclinal theory died a quiet death, and was replaced by the completely different theory we know as plate tectonics.

Regardless of the revolution in geology, there has been an unbroken stream of scientific experts who could explain in great detail why they professed to know how mountains are formed, whether in terms of the old theory or the new. Clearly, some of them were (or are) severely mistaken about the correctness of their explanations, but they certainly did have explanations — scientific, naturalistic, evidence-based explanations.

This leads to the question of the basis for your assertion as to the reliability of science. You imply that the progression is a reasonable basis for preferring “scientific” (by which you mean naturalistic) explanations, such as Evolution, over others, such as creation. You go so far as to say that you prefer naturalistic explanations even when no such explanation exists yet, as for the case of consciousness. But in what sense is science “better” or “reliable”? Better for what? More reliable at what?

Given that the so-called “clear and unambiguous progress in science” happens at the expense of previous scientific doctrines (as well as pre-scientific folklore and superstition), I have a very solid basis for holding current science in doubt. While I might assent, in many cases, that the current theory is the best one we have, given certain constraints on the range of acceptable options, that is by no means an affirmation that the explanations are correct in any important details. Indeed, the safe bet is that much of the science we take for granted as “fact” is nothing of the sort. Future generations of science students will laugh at our quaint “scientific” ideas, if we get mentioned at all.

If the value of science stems from its utility, then actual correctness is incidental. Newtonian physics is good enough to get you to the moon and back, so you can cut it a lot of slack for its known shortcomings. In the utilitarian model, you may apply Occam’s Razor with impunity — to the extent that the result remains useful. Thus, if correctness were not an issue, I would grant you your point. However, I’m specifically concerned with truth over utility in some cases, such as the existence of God and the supernatural. I’m not concerned over whether it is scientifically useful to hypothesise the existence of a God: I want to know whether he exists and created us or not.

Your argument does not speak to the truth of scientific theories: only to their utility. Yes, we might expect that utility would follow from truth, but truth does not follow from utility, as the history of scientific revolutions makes clear. Your argument from scientific progress does not provide a good basis for thinking that science tends towards truth — not even in the sense of a general trend.

The other problem with your assessment is that it presupposes naturalism. You take it as given that the defining characteristic of science, and the key ingredient that makes it a success, is methodological naturalism. That premise is the basis on which you extrapolate the future course of science, and claim that certain kinds of hypothesis are more “scientific” than others, even in the absence of concrete experimental results. Your view of the history of science is also coloured by this presupposition. The motif of naturalism and scientific progress recurs frequently in your posts, making it a recognisable theme.

Putting it bluntly, I’m not buying it. If you ask me where I think the greatest contributions to science have been, I’ll put Newton at the top of the list, followed by a long list of other clever folks who were able to turn their observations into formulae. I don’t see value in explanations just because they are naturalistic: I am “mathematicist” in my aesthetic judgement. I adhere to Kelvin’s creed, that measurement and mathematics is the soul of science.

The greatest impact of naturalistic thinking in science has been in the areas of geology (Hutton’s “deep time”, Lyell’s uniformitarianism) and biology (Darwinism, specifically). As I’ve already observed, the recent history of geology has demonstrated that one of its major theories can be completely overthrown without much actual fuss, going from “no rational person would doubt this theory” to “no rational person would accept it” in the space of a decade or so — and not on the basis of new discoveries so much as reinterpretations of known facts, and the natural passing of the Old Guard who were trained in the Old School. I’ve no reason to believe that anything else founded on principles of naturalism (and lacking mathematical maturity) is any more solid or significant than that.

So here’s what I think of your argument from scientific progress, in summary. To the extent that it illustrates a trend, it does not illustrate a trend towards truth, but only utility. That is, it argues for something only tangentially relevant at best. And, to the extent that it claims that such a trend can be attributed to naturalism, the argument is not compelling. The kind of science that yields technological benefit is characterised by mathematical maturity, not naturalism.

So, not only is your argument not scientific, it is simply not at all compelling in the more general, informal sense. The fact that you see it as such a compelling argument, and repeatedly present it to others as though they ought to be similarly compelled by it, gives me further cause to believe that you view the world through naturalism-tinted glasses.

When one makes the categorical assertion that science is the sole or supremely reliable means to discern what is true, that’s scientism.

Well, I don’t claim that science is the “sole… means to discern what is true”. … I do claim it’s the most reliable means we’ve found, though. When possible, I certainly think it should be preferred.

You don’t claim that it is the sole means, but you do claim that it is the most reliable means. That qualifies as scientism under the definition I gave (“sole or supremely reliable means”). If you wanted to be extremist about it, you could follow Richard Dawkins and assert that if science has nothing to say, then it’s certain that no other subject can say anything at all (a leap which lands him squarely in the tar-pit of self-contradiction — not that he ever notices), but a general attitude of, “science speaks above all other voices when it speaks at all,” is sufficient to qualify as scientism.

I’ve already addressed why I think that the argument in favour of scientism is weak. I won’t belabour that point any further.

I’m interested in your “when possible” qualifier, however. Do you simply mean that there are practical limits to what science can achieve at any given time? If so, then that’s obvious and uninteresting. On the other hand, if you are admitting that there might be limits to science in principle, outside of which something else might have a better claim to reliable knowledge, then please elaborate. What are those limits? Why do those limits exist? What is the consequence of stepping outside those limits? In what areas does science gracefully step aside and let other voices speak with authority?

I think you’ve been reading everything I’ve written through your preconception of me as a “scientismist”. You… well… might want to check that assumption.

It’s not a preconception: it’s an inference drawn from ample evidence — one which you have now explicitly affirmed, unless your “when possible” qualifier has any in-principle substance to it. I’m not calling you names, I’m identifying your position by the characteristics of your arguments.

That’s fair, but bear in mind the effect it can have on a relationship when one treats the other party as a test subject.

So long as we’re being fair – when did I propose that?

When you suggested that you could test for the existence of God scientifically. To do so would make him the subject of a test, thus “test subject”.

In other words, first let’s establish that something needs to be explained before we start arguing about what explanation best fits.

But why would there be any argument about the best explanation? Wouldn’t a naturalistic explanation win automatically, by merit of existing — or by merit of possibly existing in future, even if you don’t have one now? Isn’t that why the existence of human life is not considered a problem in need of a divine explanation: because we have a naturalistic explanation, and naturalistic explanations are automatically sufficient and superior to their alternatives? Indeed, your approach to science can be characterised as a programme with the goal of demonstrating that there is never any need for a supernatural explanation.

We do have readily-available evidence that a powerful being exists and actively wants to interact with humans and is generally well-disposed toward them. We have the documented case of Jesus Christ. Which part of your criteria does Jesus not fit? But, of course, you do not accept this evidence. You want something else — something you can specify, and examine here and now (in return for which you might concede that, “something with a lot of the traits traditionally ascribed to God existed”). I’m sure that you have plenty of specific objections to the particular case of Jesus. Go ahead and list them, if you like: such objections aren’t rare in atheist circles.

Regardless of what your specific objections are, however, I’m pretty sure I can say this: if it’s true that Jesus is God come in the flesh as a man, to live among us, perform many benevolent miracles as testament to his identity and intentions, and then ultimately die so as to take on the punishment of death that was justly due to all of us, then it’s true that a powerful being exists and actively wants to interact with humans and is generally well-disposed toward them (which is explicitly what you said science could detect). If all that is true, and if science can look at the evidence of Jesus Christ and reject it (for whatever reasons), then it is science, not God, that has failed.

Putting it another way, even if God exists, and there is ample evidence of his existence, there’s no guarantee that science will be competent to recognise the evidence for what it is. Not only do you want evidence of God’s existence, you want your kind of evidence. Indeed, you dismiss other kinds of evidence as “not evidence” or “unreliable”. Eyewitness testimony? Disqualified! Unreliable! Inadequate! And you can prove that it’s unreliable — using specially-selected evidence which happens to meet with your approval.

Given your analysis of the evidence, one of two things is true: either there is no God, or your analysis is faulty. I’m arguing for the latter alternative. I’m arguing that your analysis is faulty mostly because, despite its many references to “science” and “evidence”, it is not science: it is a philosophy of naturalism which claims the credit for the success of science, and therefore confidently predicts that the future trajectory of science will be increasingly naturalistic, and by-the-way science is the most reliable path to knowing the truth, so science will lend increasing support to the idea that naturalism is true, and therefore science shows that God does not exist. QED.

That’s the point I keep trying to make. You’ll look at this, that, and the other, and say that it shows no evidence of God, yet claim that you should be able to see the evidence if it exists. I think you’ve already looked at the evidence and erroneously explained it away through some naturalistic narrative — and you will inevitably do so to all such evidence. You are arguing from within a philosophical framework which is antithetical to the hypothesis in question — one which can no more admit the possibility of an involved God than ordinary mathematics can allow the possibility of division by zero.

And yet somehow you continue to feel confident that there is nothing to explain, and therefore that you are justified in disregarding God. Of course there’s nothing to explain. Your way of looking at the world is contrived in such a way that God is permanently in your blind spot — the explanation ranked below every other possible explanation. You wouldn’t accept that God exists unless there literally were no other option — and it’s not at all clear how that could be the case when an open-ended appeal to future options is an option.

In short, I can accept a lot of existing ‘natural law’ argumentation, based on what humans are, often unchanged.

Close, but still deriving an ought from an is, so to speak: it derives the normative from the normal. If violent rape became the norm in a particular human culture, would your natural-law argument against rape still stand? Would it still stand if that was the only culture left? If it’s possible for there to be gross divergence between what people are and what they ought to be, then what is it that defines the ideal “ought to be”? And if gross divergence isn’t possible, then isn’t “natural law” simply coercively enforced normality?

I can argue that the Hannibal Lecters are doing it wrong, not doing what will bring them the most long-term happiness, that they are acting against their own self-interest. (Which, note, is also a conclusion of Christian morality.)

Yes, but the Christian conclusion is based on the premise that there will be eternal consequences which guarantee the long-term outcome. Assume Hannibal Lecter is the kind of atheist who believes in his heart that there is no God. He’s open to the idea that there might be reprisals from his fellow humans, but the risk is part of the thrill, and in the long run we’re all dead, so maximise your enjoyment of the now. I don’t think he’d accept your analysis that he’s betraying his long-term happiness. If he’s happy with what he’s doing now, and expects to be happy doing more of that, and will eventually be dead one way or the other, then where’s the lack of long-term planning?

I do think our understanding of what constitutes morality are different, in some ways radically so. And yet I suspect we reach a lot of the same conclusions by our different routes.

I don’t doubt that we share many moral intuitions, and I have no desire to present myself as “holier than thou”. The purpose of the exercise is to examine yet another fact of human existence that does not mesh well with naturalism. I think that naturalism can only lead to anti-realism about morality, such as error theory. Your model doesn’t look like error theory, but I’m still having difficulty figuring out if there’s a difference between “normative” and “normal” in your model, so I can’t classify it yet, or determine whether it is consistent with naturalism. Indeed, it’s not clear that it contains a theory of meta-ethics at all.

Indeed, I’m not familiar with any supernatural theory that either is characterized by mathematical maturity, or that yields technological benefit. Let alone both! Can you suggest an example?

Considering that you don’t have a natural theory for consciousness (you said earlier that there is no known natural explanation for it), you must not have a natural theory for mathematics or technology – because both are a product of consciousness. Yet you are claiming that you have one.

If the justification for claiming it is because the natural theory “works”, well guess what? The supernatural theory “works” pretty well too.

Tom Gilson –

There is a supernatural explanation for consciousness.

Both myself and TFBW aren’t aware of it. See TFBW’s comment #157: Lastly, there are those problems which are so fundamentally baffling that we don’t even know what sort of intellectual tool we need to address the problem (e.g. consciousness).

See if you can explain it to him, and then you two can try to explain it to me.

But it seems like you’re looking for a supernatural theory that makes detailed, immanent-level mathematical and technological predictions.

No, no, I was responding to TFBW. He claimed that mathematical maturity was the key to technologically-useful theories, and their naturalism was incidental. I was making the counterpoint that only naturalistic theories are ‘mathematically mature’. For example, your “supernatural theory that God created the world to be rational and amenable to mathematics and technology” is not, itself, a mathematically-mature theory.

I mean, saying that ‘the further away two masses are, the less they attract each other’ can be a scientific theory, but it’s not mathematically mature. A mathematically mature theory is “F = G (m_1 * m_2 )/ r^2”. (An even more mature form is the Einstein field equations.)

It also looks as if the non-existence of such theories counts against the supernatural, in your mind.

Only secondarily. As I just wrote to TFBW, ‘I didn’t appeal to technological utility when talking about the progress of science. I talked about “explaining a wider and wider range of observations”.’ And also, in the morality sub-thread, I specifically distinguished between engineering and science.

JAD – Numbers 1, 2, and 5-8 are all phrased as aesthetic judgments.

#3 is also an aesthetic judgment in that we can’t yet really distinguish between the Everett-Wheeler model and the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.

#4 is true, but no stronger than my own contentions about potential future developments.

For the record, I’m waiting for Ray to pronounce his reply to my #181 complete before I respond.

TFBW – Thanks for your patience. There’s only one of me, and several people who want to talk to me at once. Anyway, another installment:

a general attitude of, “science speaks above all other voices when it speaks at all,” is sufficient to qualify as scientism.

Let’s say that’s correct. I don’t think the ‘most reliable’ formulation has all the same consequences you attribute to the ‘sole’ formulation. As an analogy, Christianity and Islam both fit under the heading ‘monotheism’, but there are rather substantial differences too.

I’ve already addressed why I think that the argument in favour of scientism is weak.

Well, I still don’t follow. I mean, you hold up rigor as your supreme standard, I want rigor and testing predictions. I think we can both agree that science qua science combines both. So why wouldn’t that be the most reliable technique to apply, when possible?

On the other hand, if you are admitting that there might be limits to science in principle, outside of which something else might have a better claim to reliable knowledge, then please elaborate.

Now there’s a dissertation-worthy philosophical question!

Science, as (again, I think) we both agree, requires rigor, and the ability to make and test predictions. (Just in case, note that we can still do science about history by making predictions about what we should find today. E.g. if an ‘antique’ table contains modern glue and the rings in the wood don’t match the forest from the time and place it’s supposed to come from, we can be pretty sure it’s not an ‘antique’.)

Where you can’t apply rigor (because you don’t have any decent hypotheses – we agree that consciousness is such a problem today) or you can’t test predictions (if we had a black hole handy, we’d probably be further along in studying QM and GR) then you can’t do science.

When we can’t, we do the best we can. Take economics, the ‘dismal science’. What we’ve got there is heuristics and educated guessing (and superstition). In a lot of situations we resort to ‘the worst possible solution, except for all the others that have been tried’. We sometimes just have to settle for experience and the school of hard knocks. That can work, sometimes. Humans managed some pretty impressive engineering feats without the benefit of science. People can even develop intuition based on long experience, get a ‘feel’ for how things work even if they can’t articulate why.

I don’t trust intuition all that much outside of experience, though. Pretty much everything we’ve learned about the universe since we left the savanna has been counterintuitive. Round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, atomic theory, germ theory of disease, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics… all deeply counterintuitive and unexpected. Frankly, in areas we can’t test and have no experience in – my money’s always on the answer being something we didn’t expect.

And even long experience is no guarantee. People have been deeply and fundamentally wrong about their own bodies – Aristotle taught that the brain was basically a cooling system for the heart, and educated people believed that for centuries.

There’s the possibility of divine revelation, of course, but – as I said – I haven’t received any (at least, that was recognizable as such) and so I have to resort to my other tools – science, and trial-and-error – to evaluate claims of divine revelation.

So, three tools I can think of – science, trial-and-error, and divine revelation. I think I can account for which of those I prefer and why. Are there others I’ve missed?

(More coming, though perhaps not until tomorrow.)

@#188 I wrote:

8. HM dualism is the best explanation for freewill.

In his book, The Mind and The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, neuro-psychiatrist Jefferey Schwartz observes that new studies have “finally toppled the old dogma that when a stroke damages a neural network, function (whether speech- or movement-related) is lost because no other system in the brain knows how to perform the same job. The spontaneous recovery of such a lost function, sometimes in only a few weeks, had only mystified neurologists. With the dawn of the new century it became clear that neuroplasticity, especially when nudged by effective therapy and mental effort, allows the brain to reassign tasks. The power of plasticity distinguishes the nervous system from every other system in the body. Although plasticity still seems to be greatest from infancy through early adolescence, it is now evident that the brain retains some plasticity throughout life, offering possibilities undreamed of just a few short years ago.”

In other words, through intentional or volitional effort, aided by therapy, patients are able to reverse many of the effects of a stroke.

In his own work with people afflicted with the obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) Schwartz has seen success in using a method he refers to as “mindful attention.”

Schwarz was able to develop successful therapies for treating OCD because he deliberately took a non-reductionistic, non-materialistic view of the mind.

TFBW –

When you suggested that you could test for the existence of God scientifically.

There’s at least three problems there. First off, since God isn’t supposed to be a human, or any kind of material anything, the usual means of detecting someone so as to have a relationship with them don’t work. Can’t see them, be introduced to them, talk to them on the phone, etc.

Second, there’s a difference between the kinds of tests courting lovers undertake and lab examination. I rather explicitly talked about the former.

And finally, as I noted, I did try the alternate means suggested by Christians. Prayer, not to put too fine a point on it. That didn’t work for me. If that had worked, I wouldn’t have to fall back on science.

But why would there be any argument about the best explanation? Wouldn’t a naturalistic explanation win automatically, by merit of existing — or by merit of possibly existing in future, even if you don’t have one now?

And here’s where the key misunderstanding lies, I think. Way back in #170, I had said “I’m open to something outside the material we see interacting with the material we see.” and you asked, “So, you don’t subscribe to dark matter theory, then? No Oort cloud? Or did you mean that you’ve had no need of the God hypothesis, specifically?”

I probably should have addressed that directly then. We actually have evidence of dark matter, and the Oort cloud. Those account for a lot of otherwise-puzzling data. I already noted how Newton came under fire for postulating non-material ‘fields’ that affected the visible. But he had some evidence the theory actually worked to explain things.

But the supernatural hasn’t proved to be a good explanation for much, over the long term. Seriously, has anything ever moved from the ‘widely accepted to be just an ordinary, natural phenomenon’ to ‘a supernatural manifestation’? The flow has been entirely in the other direction, so far as I can see. Given a well-developed supernatural theory that actually explained things and made predictions, that could change. We’ve accepted fields and dark matter and neutrinos and such. I could accept non-material beings if there were call for it.

But I have had no need of the ‘God hypothesis’ specifically, or supernatural agents in general, yet. And it’s not that I couldn’t. If I were to be presented with some miracles, some kind of communication, even a solid and mature theory, that’d be different.

I’m sure that you have plenty of specific objections to the particular case of Jesus. Go ahead and list them

Already discussed some with Victoria.

Given your analysis of the evidence, one of two things is true: either there is no God, or your analysis is faulty.

Sure.

I’m arguing for the latter alternative. I’m arguing that your analysis is faulty mostly because, despite its many references to “science” and “evidence”, it is not science

No, it’s an explanatory pattern that makes use of science where possible. Judgment and trial-and-error have their place, too. And – I’ll note again – my own experience trying to verify Christian claims about prayer, using their own methods.

I’m willing to accept I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. But maybe a more concrete argument than ‘you can’t explain consciousness yet’?

Your way of looking at the world is contrived in such a way that God is permanently in your blind spot — the explanation ranked below every other possible explanation.

It’s clear that’s your opinion. My opinion is that you’re wrong.

Morality next.

@Ray Ingles:

But the supernatural hasn’t proved to be a good explanation for much, over the long term. Seriously, has anything ever moved from the ‘widely accepted to be just an ordinary, natural phenomenon’ to ‘a supernatural manifestation’? The flow has been entirely in the other direction, so far as I can see. Given a well-developed supernatural theory that actually explained things and made predictions, that could change. We’ve accepted fields and dark matter and neutrinos and such. I could accept non-material beings if there were call for it.

For the love of God (or whatever you hold dearest) will you stop with this kind of idiocy? “Natural” explanations (and natural is about as vague and meaningless qualifier in the mouths of naturalists, since it is so expansive that it includes anything they need) have only explained a narrow range of phenomena in the universe, *precisely* the type of phenomena that are amenable to those types of explanations, so what you are saying is tautological. And listen to yourself: “Given a well-developed supernatural theory that actually explained things and made predictions, that could change”. Huh? So your problem is that Philosophy (and Theology) are not hard empirical sciences?

But I have had no need of the ‘God hypothesis’ specifically, or supernatural agents in general, yet. And it’s not that I couldn’t. If I were to be presented with some miracles, some kind of communication, even a solid and mature theory, that’d be different.

Since you show little understanding of what for example, Aristotelian-Thomists argue, a “solid and mature theory” request is an empty one, especially in light of the fact that as a bona-fide scientismist what you count as “solid and mature theory” is another name for “scientific theory” — and do not bother to protest about the scientismist qualifier; it is all over the thread.

But the more illuminating fact is that you say that if only you were presented with a state of affairs with no natural explanation then you would accept the “God hypothesis”. In other words, if only you were given a God-of-the-gaps argument you would accept the “God hypothesis”. Oh wait, there are plenty of such arguments, so allow me to rephrase that as if only you were given a “convincing” God-of-the-gaps argument you would accept the “God hypothesis”. Now, God-of-the-gaps arguments are fallacious (at least in their common formulation; if you weaken the conclusion, usually to a purely negative one, they can be made valid). There are now three options. One, you are asking for a gap argument not knowing that it is fallacious, in which case you are clueless. Two, you do know it, in which case it is a mere rhetorical ploy and you are intellectually dishonest. The third and last option is that you know that gap arguments are fallacious, but given your (self-refuting) epistemic strictures you then must say that there can be *no* evidence for God. Is this what passes for being open-minded and committed to evidence and reason?

Bar that, a miracle would do as well you say. But there are plenty of miracle cases, so we must also rephrase that as a personal miracle — but this not only puts the epistemic bar unduly high, it relies critically on first-person experience so even if it convinces you, it does not have the compelling force to convince anyone else. And if you do say that a well-attested case of a miracle would convince you, then once again, what you are asking is, *given your epistemic stance*, besides a personal intervention of God in your life, for a God-of-the-gaps argument. If you are not convinced by all the other God-of-the-gaps arguments — e.g. the coming to be of the universe, of life, of rationality, or of anything at all for that matter, all of which look pretty miraculous to me — why would you be convinced by any such type of argument? The obvious answer is that it is all bluster and empty rhetoric (not to mention atrocious logic).

[Tried twice to post this yesterday. The second time it said I’d ‘already posted that’. But I haven’t seen it show up yet, so one more try…]

TFBW –

If violent rape became the norm in a particular human culture, would your natural-law argument against rape still stand? Would it still stand if that was the only culture left?

Sure. Human males don’t have spiky barbs on their penises, nor do they secrete glue. Human females don’t have visible estrus.

Humans actually manage to avoid most of ‘arms races’ characteristic of other species. (Not all of them – there’s a bit of an ‘arms race’ between mothers and their offspring, which seems to be responsible for menstruation.)

Whether the nature of human mating was designed or evolved, it’s there. And that has implications for how humans relate. Violent rape is a choice, not a requirement.

And it sure seems to me – and a lot of other people through history – that sexual fulfillment is optimized when the people involved are enthusiastic. Indeed, even more – emotionally committed to one another. Rape is, at best, a short-term pleasure that abrogates the potential for long-term fulfillment.

(Conceivably a sub-population of humanity could get into a situation of constant violent rape to the point where it started an arms race that led, eventually, to speciation. But they’d be starting a wasteful biological arms race. Plus, it’d necessarily require subjugation of women, and I discussed the downsides of slavery above. It’s hard to imagine an environment where they’d be better-adapted than ‘stock’ humans, or even where they’d be happier during the transition.)

Yes, but the Christian conclusion is based on the premise that there will be eternal consequences which guarantee the long-term outcome.

As opposed to more probabilistic real-world (or, at least, current-world) consequences. Sure. But then, casinos don’t have guarantees, just the odds. And yet, the house tends to win…

If [Lecter]’s happy with what he’s doing now, and expects to be happy doing more of that, and will eventually be dead one way or the other, then where’s the lack of long-term planning?

Did you ever notice that the fictional character of Hannibal Lecter is almost superhumanly intelligent? He’d have to be, to get away with what he does in the stories. Using Hannibal Lecter as a counterexample is just about as sensible as argumentum ad Batman.

Most humans do have to worry about other humans. Stalin and Saddam spent their days in paranoid fear of assassination. (I wonder if they ever regretted the situations they’d locked themselves into?)

So that’s one problem. But then there’s the other problem, the one I specifically mentioned when I brought up Hannibal Lecter back in #175.

Has there ever been a sociopath without any empathy who nevertheless believed in God and tried to be good because of that? I mean, like, ever? I’m talking about a guy who would think to himself, “What a beautiful day! I think I’ll go down to the mall and shoot a bunch of people. Oh, wait – God says I shouldn’t do that, darn it all. Guess I’ll just go fishing.”

It’s kind of hard to accept, as a fatal problem, you pointing out an instance where the sort of scheme I’m proposing might fail… when the scheme you’re peddling doesn’t handle that case well (if at all) either.

That’s probably enough. I should put together a book at this rate. TFBW, have at it.

To borrow from the good Bishop Berkeley, if you can swallow this abusive extrapolation of QM, I wonder why you are so squeamish about any point of divinity.

Good question. I’ve often wondered the same thing.

I’m going to respond to Tom Gilson from #204 and #207 at more length next, but first, this needs to be pointed out:

G. Rodrigues –

And your persistent mangling and nigh-deliberate distortion of what we are arguing is rather unnerving

This is astonishingly ironic, bordering on comical, considering the next bit:

So you have found yourself one more get-away escape to add to the vast ensemble of irrationalities that Atheists have been gathering since Democritus.

That’s a “mangling and nigh-deliberate distortion of” what I said. I pointed out that ‘thermodynamic miracles’ are a potential “get-away escape” that I reject! I mean, you had to completely ignore where I said “Just because a natural explanation is conceivable doesn’t mean it’s correct, or even plausible”, and “No, in such a case the action of some kind of agent would be far more likely.” The entire point is that I don’t “swallow this abusive extrapolation of QM”!

May I diffidently suggest that – maybe, possibly, just barely conceivably – I’m not the only one who’s having difficulty understanding what others are saying?

@Ray Ingles:

The entire point is that I don’t “swallow this abusive extrapolation of QM”!

And the entire point of my train of thought, in case I was misleading (which upon rereading myself I actually was, so your complaint is fully justified; apologies for that), is that what you are asking *amounts* to asking for a gap argument. And then complain about gap arguments or embrace whatever outlandish “naturalist” scenarios needed to escape unsavory conclusions.

note: that last sentence is not necessarily directed at you, by the way.

@Ray Ingles:

Actually, one last point about #207, where Tom Gilson says,

You persist in [saying that ‘Pretty much everything we’ve learned about the universe since we left the savanna has been counterintuitive’]

I persist because (a) it’s true, and (b) it’s relevant.

I have already said it, but I will repeat it: it is true only if some heavy qualifications are added and, more importantly, the conclusions you draw from it are demonstrably false.

@Ray Ingles:

Now, if you feel like actually listing those qualifications, and/or demonstrating the falseness of the “demonstrably false” conclusions, please do so. I don’t even insist that you be polite or patient about it.

This is common knowledge, so I did not think I had to be pedantically explicit about it.

Let us take this sentence from #206:

Humans are demonstrably terrible at reasoning and extrapolating outside the areas where they can gather experience and test their predictions. Even when they reason with exemplary rigor, like Aristotle.

False. Mathematics being the obvious counter-example. Not only is it about the most counter-intuitive type of knowledge (paradoxical decompositions, space-filling curves, nowhere-differentiable continuous functions, totally disconnected “dust” spaces, the diabolical linear geometry of Banach spaces; the examples are endless), so much so that you need an extended period of training to sharpen your intuition, but the knowledge obtained is also the most certain and with the highest rigors of standard of any field of human knowledge.

Let us take another sentence, now from #218:

I’m not sure anyone has ever written a program of more than 20 lines that didn’t contain at least one error in the first draft.

There are rigorous methods to prove the correctness of programs. This is computer science 101 and a corollary of the Mathematics counter-example. There are some severe limitations to these methods, and if you have a complex program, with many communicating pieces, with millions of LoC, these will not help you much, but even here there have been considerable advances, especially in functional languages, with *practical* consequences.

And finally the punchline, also from #218:

If that’s true… what does it say about human reasoning? I mean, in the ‘simple, relatively-unimportant’ areas where science applies, we can check our answers – and the answers frequently turn out wrong.

So human reasoning proves human reasoning flawed and deficient? Employing reason against reason should not be tolerated, so may I suggest that if you really do believe this, as you seem to, to retire yourself from rational debate?

Okay, my turn again, although I feel that this is expanding beyond manageable limits. I’ll break my reply into multiple responses, corresponding with Ray’s. Brace yourselves, folks.

@Ray Ingles, #184:

Indeed, the safe bet is that much of the science we take for granted as “fact” is nothing of the sort.

Really? It’ll turn out that the sun orbits the Earth? That time dilation doesn’t happen? That electrons don’t transition between orbitals?

No, those things probably won’t happen. On the other hand, the geosynclinal model of mountain formation went from “scientific fact” in the first half of the 20th century to “outmoded theory” in the second half, while plate tectonics made the converse journey from “pseudoscience” to “scientific fact”. That kind of drastic example can’t be lightly ignored, although you’re doing your best to draw attention away from it.

You’ve chosen examples of strong science to challenge my assertion that much of our science is likely wrong. Are you representing science as uniformly strong, having mathematical maturity and precisely testable consequences akin to the phenomena you have cited? If so, then your argument is valid, but remarkably ambitious, because it’s clear to me that not all science is equally strong. If you disagree on that point, and genuinely wish to defend the position that all science is strong science, please say so explicitly. Note that this is distinct from the argument that “all science is stronger than all non-science”, which you have already asserted, so please don’t offer me that red herring.

On the other hand, if you don’t hold to the idea that all science is strong science, then your objection is disingenuous, because it presents itself as a valid objection without actually being one. When I say, “much of the science we take for granted as ‘fact’ is nothing of the sort,” I am not claiming that all science is bunk, or even that most science is bunk. What I am claiming is that there exist some theories, currently presented as unassailable “scientific fact”, which are actually no better than poor old geosynclinal mountain formation. However, I certainly didn’t claim that those particular theories, which you cited, were weak and likely to be overthrown, and I don’t think I’ve given you any basis for surmise that I consider them likely candidates. I can only assume you picked them, not because they are representative of my position, but in order misrepresent my position as something ridiculous.

The likely victims of scientific revolution are not the rigorously tested, mathematically mature theories you have cited. Even if they were superseded by newer theories, they would probably continue to be valuable, like Newtonian physics in the face of Einstein’s relativity. Indeed, your example of whether the Earth orbits the sun (or vice versa) has been invalidated by Einstein, since the question relates to a preferred frame of reference. We still think of the Earth orbiting the sun, however, because it’s a convenient frame of reference. The likely candidates for dethroning are the mathematically sparse theories which speak more of the distant past than the measurable present, and which rely on circumstantial evidence as a consequence. Geosynclinal mountain formation was exactly that kind of theory.

So, which argument were you presenting? The ambitious one, or the disingenuous one?

The more observations you have, the narrower the range of explanations that fit.

The more measurements you have, the narrower the range of mathematical models that fit. Explanations, on the other hand, can be metaphysical, and some categories of explanation can not be eliminated by any amount of observation. I will elaborate on “explanation” later.

That progress in narrowing the range of potential explanations is real, and difficult to get around. QM and Relativity make different predictions around things like black holes. At least one and probably both of them are wrong. But any explanation that succeeds them will have to account for why the GPS system works (without relativistic calculations it would drift hopelessly out of sync in less than a day, and the computers that do those calculations depend on quantum electrodynamics being accurate to many decimal places).

Right, so understand my point. Either one or both of QM and relativity are wrong because they contradict each other in specific details, but they are mathematically mature enough that we know exactly what those details are, and how to measure the systems they describe in order to see whether they are behaving in accordance with the models. They are probably both wrong (in the sense of being not absolutely right), but they are also both indispensable for technological purposes, and we know the boundaries of their utility. A unified theory that aspired to supersede them both would not necessarily have to predict anything new, but it would need to postdict (produce results compatible with known data) everything that the other two theories already do well.

Now take geology and its recent history. Either one or both of Geosynclinal and Plate Tectonic theories are wrong about mountain formation because they contradict each other in practically all details. Neither of them is mathematically mature, and both of them deal with events which are either in the past, such that explanations consist of just-so stories as to how the state of affairs came to be, or so slow that the little data we can actually gather must be extrapolated over many orders of magnitude in order to be made relevant. Neither theory is indispensable for anything technological, which is why the transition from one theory to the other was barely noticed outside the field, despite the radical difference between the two. Because of their weak connection with empirical data, we can not recognise the boundaries of their utility, or say precisely which theory explains the data better. All we can say for sure is that one theory used to be popular, and now the other one is.

I do no violence to any real-world application of the geological theories of mountain formation if I claim that they’re probably both wrong in most of their substantial details. It’s a slap in the face to geologists who think that their explanations bear some relevance to truth, but that’s all, and it’s clear that at least some of them deserve that slap, because at least one theory is substantially wrong. I can’t do that for QM or relativity. Wrong though they almost certainly are, they are indispensable in real-world applications, and to the extent that they are measurably accurate models of reality, within certain limits, they are as “true” as any model can be.

In summary, the “progress in narrowing the range of potential explanations” of which you speak is far from uniformly distributed among the sciences. We have not seen the last of the scientific revolutions, and I stand by my assertion that some of today’s “scientific facts” will be tomorrow’s “outmoded theories”. In the absence of demonstrated strength (mathematical maturity, rigorous testing), I see no special reason to consider scientific theories likely to be true. Indeed, I am inclined to think that, in the absence of those strengths, they are likely targets for revolutionary action, whether they are true or not.

And note that technological utility is a consequence of the predictive accuracy of scientific theories. The theories themselves are not useful – their utility flows from how true the predictions are.

Well, that assumes that the predictions themselves are somehow useful to someone for something, but, in general terms, I agree, and I will explain why.

The ability of a theory to make predictions at all is largely a factor of its mathematical maturity. In order to make a really specific prediction, you need to be able to measure the state of the system as it stands, plug those measurements into the mathematical model, and compute the future appropriately. The result is your prediction.

Not all branches of science are this mature, and not all of them are primarily about making predictions in any case. The theories of mountain formation already discussed are primarily about retrodiction — plotting the past, rather than the future. Darwinian evolution is similarly placed: it can’t really plot the future in the way it claims to be able to plot the past, because random mutations can’t (by definition) be predicted.

If you have mathematical maturity, and a model which allows precise prediction of the near-term future (on the scale where we can wait and see if the prediction actually matches reality), and the predictions are accurate with a high degree of statistical significance, then you have strong science — the kind which might produce useful technology, or test for the existence of a hypothetical entity like the Higgs boson. The further you are from this state of affairs, then the weaker your science.

If we are to use utility as a proxy for truth — which is about the best that science can offer us, given that it deals in models of reality, not reality itself — then we should pay close attention to the predictive ability of a theory when assenting to its “trueness”. You don’t do that: you want us to believe that so long as we are thinking “naturalistically”, we’re probably on track. That’s the wrong metric, and I object to your reasoning on that basis.

You may not have noticed, but I didn’t appeal to technological utility when talking about the progress of science. I talked about “explaining a wider and wider range of observations”.

Indeed, I noticed, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt, because if you had appealed to technological utility, then you would have received qualified agreement from me, as per the section above. If you are appealing to an ability to explain things as an indicator of “trueness”, then I disagree completely. “Explanation” is cheap. Explanations are only indicators of “trueness” when they incorporate a mathematically mature model capable of making accurate predictions.

Geologists have explained mountain formation in terms of geosynclinal theory and plate tectonic theory. Both of those have been, in their given eras, the paragon of scientific respectability, such that dissent was considered anti-scientific. But they are utterly incompatible explanations. They are not like QM and relativity which only differ in overlapping edge cases: they are entirely different.

I don’t even see any good reason to consider the more recent one “truer” than the older one. Maybe it is, but its preferred status seems to have been mostly the result of applied intuition (more scientists feeling that it offered a better explanation, once the stubborn old school died off), and as such it could possibly be a sideways or backwards step. Granted that there is a consensus among geologists on the matter (as there was with the previous theory), how can we verify their theory independently of their subjective degree of satisfaction with it? Without measurements and precise near-term predictions, what options do we have?

On that basis, I strenuously reject mere explanatory power as a basis for surmising any kind of association with the truth. Both theories of mountain formation are (or were at some recent time), allegedly scientifically respectable explanations, but at least one (and possibly both) are substantially untrue (as a logical consequence of their mutual incompatibility).

Don’t get me wrong: explanatory power is desirable. It offers a paradigm within which to frame questions. Newton’s theory of gravity was useful not just because it gave us a mathematically precise inverse-square law, but also because it gave us the explanatory device of forces, which provided a framework for thinking about physical interaction. Explanations can be completely divorced from reality, however, no matter how plausible they seem. We should bear that in mind.

Science earns trust through predictive power, not explanatory value.

You go so far as to say that you prefer naturalistic explanations even when no such explanation exists yet, as for the case of consciousness.

Not quite. Rather, in situations where no explanation exists – natural or supernatural – like consciousness, I’ll bet on the natural.

As has already been pointed out in the intervening comments (e.g. #194), this is not a case where no supernatural explanation exists. Rather, you have chosen to reject the existing supernatural explanation in preference for a natural explanation that might exist at some future date. You might not be satisfied with the quality of the supernatural explanation, but you can’t say that there exists a naturalistic explanation of better quality.

Now, given sufficiently high demands on what qualifies as an explanation, it is always possible to say that no supernatural explanation exists, and maybe that’s your justification for saying that no explanation exists in this case. In #167 you suggested that you want supernatural explanations to make better predictions than natural ones before you’ll take them seriously. But what sort of prediction can a supernatural explanation of consciousness make, even assuming that it is the correct explanation?

Way back in #20, you said that the supernatural “has the accidents of an explanation, but not the substance.” Please explain, what is the substance of an explanation, so that we might provide it, or determine that it is impossible in principle, or at least determine whether you are applying a double-standard.

The kind of science that yields technological benefit is characterised by mathematical maturity, not naturalism.

Actually, it seems to be characterized by both mathematical maturity and naturalism.

For the benefit of those who don’t click on Ray’s random links, that’s an XKCD comic which argues for a distinction between science and pseudoscience (or the validity of “crazy ideas”) on the basis of economic application. In the list of crazy ideas, only Relativity and Quantum Electrodynamics meet the criteria — or so says the cartoonist. Ray is further extrapolating this to say that the successful ideas are naturalistic ones, apparently, although it’s not clear to me that “Homeopathy” is meant to be at all supernatural.

This is where we need to address the question of what it means for a theory to be naturalistic or not, and whether all theories (or explanations) can be properly classified as one or the other. So far, we’ve been taking it for granted that they can. It’s time to challenge that assumption.

Relativity and Quantum Electrodynamics are not “naturalistic” theories in any sense that excludes the supernatural, any more than Newtonian physics was. They do not displace prior supernatural explanations — at least, not so far as Christians are concerned. Newton was a thoroughly religious man, and was of the view that his scientific discoveries were supportive of belief in God. The other physical models which have followed in his footsteps are just as supportive of belief in God for the same reasons Newton gave.

You see it the other way, Ray, because in your binary model of explanation, natural explanations supersede and replace supernatural non-explanations (a sentiment most recently expressed in #201). The fact that something qualifies as an explanation at all makes it a naturalistic explanation in your model. Reality is far more nuanced than that, as the case of Newton and all the other Christian scientists who did their work to the glory of God should make abundantly clear.

One can produce an excellent mathematical model of how the universe behaves without detracting from the role that the author of the universe (should there be one) played in making it that way. Mathematical models of physics can not and do not explain why things are the way they are, and how they came to be — they simply try to approximate that which is actually observed. Scientists may speculate as to why the laws are the way they are, but that is metaphysics, not science. To the extent that there is any “naturalism” associated with physics, it is in the metaphysical pronouncements of physicists who incline towards that belief (e.g. Hawking), not in the physics itself.

I believe that this is the kind of thing that Stephen Jay Gould was trying to point out when he spoke of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA), the idea that “science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.” It’s a good point, but the NOMA model is not entirely sufficient. The Bible never concerns itself with descriptive physics, so no conflict on that subject is possible, but it most certainly contains history, and science can easily come into direct conflict with it when both presume to give an account of the past.

The actual cases where scientific theory and Christianity stand in direct conflict are relatively rare and specific. The explanation of origins is one such example: a special divine act of creation is incompatible with a natural explanation (although if the mode of creation is guided evolution, then the incompatibility is entirely metaphysical). In the case of geology, the conflict is not between naturalism and supernaturalism so much, but between uniformitarianism and catastrophism: modern geology simply does not abide the idea that the past might be radically different from the present (although this intolerance seems to be focussed on the Noahic flood, specifically — other extinction-level catastrophes may be entertained).

So, no, I do not accept your argument that naturalism is a necessary component of successful science. That characterisation is only made possible by an over-broad and simplistic definition of “naturalism”. Relativity and Quantum Electrodynamics are not “naturalistic” in any sense that conflicts with the existence of the supernatural. Newton would cite the existence of such laws as support for the existence of the supernatural law-maker, as he did for his own theories.

Naturalistic explanations abound, but these are not to be confused with hard science.

@Ray Ingles:

There are (at least) three problems with your counterexample.

If there are, you have not pointed a single one. Let me repeat, what Mathematics is a counter-example of:

Humans are demonstrably terrible at reasoning and extrapolating outside the areas where they can gather experience and test their predictions. Even when they reason with exemplary rigor, like Aristotle.

So let us take your alleged problems one by one:

We pick the axioms that make sense to us, and reason from them. Recall the big controversy over the parallel postulate. Mathematicians were rather upset – for about two millennia – that they couldn’t find a contradiction when they denied it.

The story is not quite as you relate it, but even granting it for the sake of argument, it is irrelevant to what I said.

Second, if you don’t think testing is part of mathematics, I’m rather surprised.

There may be testing in mathematics, as when a mathematician says “testing a conjecture”, but this has nothing to do with the “gather experience and test their predictions” done in the empirical sciences. Every mathematician knows this; I know this; I suspect you know this, but then I am not sure what to make of your equivocation.

Has Fermat’s Last Theorem been proven yet? I mean, Wiles thought he’d proved it in 1993, but then other mathematicians examined (tested?) the proof and found problems. He went back and re-worked things, and now his proof is accepted as ‘likely correct in its major components’. And that’s “the most certain and with the highest rigors of standard of any field of human knowledge.” Then there’s things like the four-color problem. A few holdouts still think using a computer to check the individual cases is ‘cheating’ and don’t consider it ‘proved’ yet.

You do not know what you are talking about. Wiles proved the Tanyama-Shimura conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves, which by results of Frey imply Fermat’s theorem. His first proof contained a major error, but it was patched up by himself and Richard Taylor within a year or two, around 1996 if memory does not fail me. Wiles’ techniques have been used since then to prove the full Tanyama-Shimura conjecture by Taylor, Breuill and others by the beginning of the millenium. The crux of the resistance to the proof of the 4-color problem has nothing to do with “cheating” or even that is not “a proof”, but that it is a brute-force proof communicating no understanding, which is what mathematicians are after: understanding.

Once again, even if what you say were the complete truth, it would not go an inch to disprove what I said.

Third, and the most critical – there’s the problem that comes with applying abstract mathematical models to the concrete real world.

Irrelevant to what I said.

I do not know what exactly what you are responding to, but it surely is not to what I claimed. And I did not merely say that your contention was false (because there is quite an obvious counter-example), but that it was self-refuting. And it is. Demonstrably so:

Human reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect to detect that human reasoning is imperfect.

I never claimed that human reasoning was perfect in the sense of always reaching true conclusions. Equivocating again? I repeat what I said: push your skepticism as far as you want, but please remove yourself from rational debate.

Finally:

And as you admit they are, to date at least, of notoriously limited practical application.

Yes. But there are other aids. You surely have heard of such things as unit testing? As for practicality, I have already conceded that they are of limited practical application, but that was not the only thing I said. This is computer science 101, but I will just throw it out anyway: *EVERY* compiler optimization carries with it a proof of correctness. Are compiler optimizations of limited practical usefulness? Speaking of a statically typed language like C alone, constant folding and propagation, variable loop hoisting, elimination of dead code, register reordering and allocation, etc. and etc.?

Doesn’t the fact that human reasoning needs such ‘training wheels’ to produce correct code indicate anything to you?

Of course it does indicate something. It just is not what you think it is, or not in the measure you think it is.

@Ray Ingles, #197…

a general attitude of, “science speaks above all other voices when it speaks at all,” is sufficient to qualify as scientism.

Let’s say that’s correct.

Very well then, we’ve established that “scientism” is an appropriate designation for your position. Now it’s just a question of degree. It’s taken us a long time, but I think we’ve identified the root cause of may of our differences. Expect this issue to remain a key focal point, since it is often here that our paths first diverge.

…I want rigor and testing predictions. I think we can both agree that science qua science combines both. So why wouldn’t that be the most reliable technique to apply, when possible?

Ideally, science is rigorous and thoroughly tested. It still suffers from limits, but it’s some of the best knowledge we have about the physical world when it meets those criteria. Unfortunately, those criteria are frequently not met, and yet the product is still called “science”, and adherents of scientism still demand that we treat it like the good stuff. That’s where much our conflict arises: in your assertion that science is “most reliable” — that “science says” is the best basis for assent to a proposition, without regard to the quality of the science, because it’s still better than anything else.

There are at least two problems with this variety of scientism: it’s presumptuous, and it’s self-deprecating.

It’s presumptuous because it takes it for granted that even poor science is better than, say, random guessing. I don’t feel that this is something we can take as given. Poor, weak science might contain systematic errors which result in conclusions which are worse than random guessing. Unless the science in question has the kind of mathematical maturity and predictive ability which permits an objective demonstration of its superiority to random guesswork, how are we to know whether it meets even that meagre grade? Experimental science utilises “controls” for pretty much this exact reason.

The geosynclinal theory of mountain formation was systematically wrong about the bulk of its claims — or so say proponents of the new theory. But this judgement is not made on the kind of “experimentally determined mathematical fit” criteria characteristic of physics; rather, it is based on the weaker notion of “explanatory value”, where one theory allegedly provides a “better explanation” of the observed data. The trouble is that any sufficiently weak science is indistinguishable from a just-so story. Thus, there comes a point where scientism is indistinguishable from personal preference in explanatory narratives. Why on earth should I grant that any credence?

Secondly, scientism is self-deprecating because it is founded on principles that it classifies as a poor basis for belief. If you could offer a rigorous, mathematically mature, experimentally testable argument that science has the superior properties you ascribe to it, then by my own standards, I would be obliged to agree with you (or revise my standards). Clearly, however, you can’t do that, and you don’t pretend otherwise. The best that you can do is offer an informal argument in support of your position — one which can hardly be called “scientific” for its lack of testable predictions, rigour, and mathematics.

I think that’s a problem for the case you’re making. You’re arguing for science as the most reliable means of knowing anything, but you’re not presenting the case scientifically: you are supporting your case with a mode of argument that you consider inferior. Now, I suppose that you are presenting your case in the best possible light, so this must be one of those cases where scientific argument simply isn’t possible. But look at what that means: your whole basis for scientism — for declaring science to be the most reliable approach to knowledge — is based on an argument that is weak by its own standards.

That lack of scientific rigour might be less of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the rest of your reasoning is built on this foundation. The doctrine of scientific superiority, which undergirds all your other thinking, is founded on essentially unscientific grounds. Scientism is the worship of science without being the practice of science. At best, scientism does not support itself; at worst, it deprecates itself.

Just in case, note that we can still do science about history by making predictions about what we should find today.

We can — but there is a qualitative difference between forensic science of this sort, and operational science such as physics. Forensic science is prone to type 1 and type 2 errors (false positives and negatives). You can’t assume that the scientific test produces the right result just because it’s scientific: you need to measure the accuracy of your testing method against known data. This poses a problem for cases where there is no “known data”. (Recommended reading: “Biometrics”, chapter 15 of Security Engineering, 2nd ed., by Ross Anderson. Seriously, folks — have a look.)

People can even develop intuition based on long experience, get a ‘feel’ for how things work even if they can’t articulate why.

Absolutely. Sometimes invention is like art: some people are born with the knack. Sometimes science lags behind technology, or the two develop independently for a while, because the engineering discipline isn’t mathematically unified enough to represent a coherent theory, and the science isn’t mature enough to be practical in real-world conditions.

I don’t trust intuition all that much outside of experience, though.

I’m afraid that you’re going to have to make a much clearer distinction between intuition and experience before I can even pass comment on whether that’s a coherent statement or not, given that your preference for experience is largely grounded in intuition. I won’t elaborate on that further, since this is just the problem of scientism being self-deprecating again, in another guise.

So, three tools I can think of – science, trial-and-error, and divine revelation. I think I can account for which of those I prefer and why. Are there others I’ve missed?

Well, pure reason seems conspicuous in its absence from that list, but I’m equally concerned that you’re not using the tools that you do have in an appropriate manner. Your attitude to science is to treat it as a signpost to philosophical naturalism, rather than a tool for testing specific hypotheses with empirically distinct implications, while your attitude to revelation is, “I tried that, and it didn’t work for me.”

The analogy that springs to mind is a person whose favourite tool is a power-saw, but he uses it for everything, including hammering nails — and hammering screws. A power saw is an indispensable tool — so long as it’s the right tool for the job, and you’re using it right.

Next time, #201.

@Ray Ingles, #205:

Whether the nature of human mating was designed or evolved, it’s there. And that has implications for how humans relate. Violent rape is a choice, not a requirement.

So violent rape is immoral on the basis that it is a sexual act that is not required for reproduction? So, by that reasoning, homosexual intercourse is more immoral than violent rape, because it’s a sexual act that can’t even in principle result in reproduction. A desperate man might at least argue that rape was required as a last resort to meeting his reproductive needs after exhausting the consensual approach. Homosexuality has no such excuse.

I don’t expect you to agree with that analysis, but that’s because I don’t really think you’re arguing from a natural law position at all. It’s pretty clear to me that you’re arguing from a John Stuart Mill style of hedonistic utilitarianism, but you’re backing it up with a natural law argument when it happens to coincide.

Utilitarianism says that the moral is that which promotes the most good. Of course, that only shifts the question from “what is moral?” to “what is good?” Hedonistic utilitarianism equates the good with pleasure — the best quality and most enduring pleasure for the greatest number of people.

Here are some other things you say which lend weight to my analysis.

And it sure seems to me – and a lot of other people through history – that sexual fulfillment is optimized when the people involved are enthusiastic.

It’s hard to imagine an environment where they’d be better-adapted than ‘stock’ humans, or even where they’d be happier during the transition.

The focus seems to be on psychological states, not natural function. Going back to #179, you responded to my question, “do you have a definition of ‘evil’ which could … carry the normative force of ‘he ought not to behave like that’,” with an answer that spoke of effective ways to maximise happiness. That only makes sense as an answer if we take it as given that “good” equals “maximisation of happiness”. Even then, the observation that a certain action is not likely to maximise happiness does not carry any normative force. I don’t think that utilitarianism can be normative, only informative.

This is also shown in your statement from #179, “I can argue that the Hannibal Lecters are doing it wrong, not doing what will bring them the most long-term happiness, that they are acting against their own self-interest.” This is not a normative statement that “it is wrong to do X“; it is an observational statement that “doing X will not maximise Y“.

Immediately following that quote, you said that the “acting against their own self-interest” part was also “a conclusion of Christian morality.” In #181, I pointed out that “the Christian conclusion is based on the premise that there will be eternal consequences which guarantee the long-term outcome.” Now, in #205, you respond as follows.

As opposed to more probabilistic real-world (or, at least, current-world) consequences. Sure. But then, casinos don’t have guarantees, just the odds. And yet, the house tends to win…

The fact that the house tends to win does not stop people from going to casinos with the idea of making a quick buck, and a few people actually do succeed. Now, if you’re saying that the odds are against you with the casino approach to making money, or the antisocial approach to obtaining happiness, then I agree with you. Nevertheless, the odds aren’t so great that failure is guaranteed. If someone actually manages to get rich at a casino, or to lie, cheat, and steal their way to happiness, then I don’t see that you have a valid post-fact criticism to level at them, because they got away with it. They took a risk, and it paid off.

The Christian view is very different, because nobody is getting away with anything in that view. (That’s the bad news. The good news is that grace and forgiveness are possible.) That brings us to your next comment.

So that’s one problem. But then there’s the other problem, the one I specifically mentioned when I brought up Hannibal Lecter back in #175.

Has there ever been a sociopath without any empathy who nevertheless believed in God and tried to be good because of that? I mean, like, ever?

Possibly. I might even put myself in that category at certain times of my life. But your “problem” misses the point. You seem to think of morality as the question of how to make people well-behaved. That puts the cart before the horse. In order to answer that question, we must first determine what it means to be good. Allow me to remind you of the response I already gave to you in #176.

The job of objective morality is not to restrain, but to provide a standard against which behaviour is judged — to make statements like “X is good” or “Y is evil” a matter of fact rather than opinion. Morality is like the law, not like the police force or the courts who administer the law. The law itself does not constrain anyone’s behaviour: it simply means that some behaviour is properly classified as either lawful or not. Likewise, objective moral truths do not restrain anyone: they just make it possible to properly classify behaviour as “good” or “evil”.

Coming back to you again, in #205, you say the following.

It’s kind of hard to accept, as a fatal problem, you pointing out an instance where the sort of scheme I’m proposing might fail… when the scheme you’re peddling doesn’t handle that case well (if at all) either.

You’ve misunderstood what I see as the failure of your system. It’s not about making people be good: it’s about making good and evil matters of fact rather than matters of opinion, taste, or personal preference. It’s about “good” being a pattern of behaviour to which we ought to conform, not because of the consequences of doing so, but simply because of what “good” is. If you point to consequences, then you’ve simply pushed back the preferential nature of the issue one more step, because you then rely on certain consequences being preferred over others, and appeal to intuition to back up that preference.

So I think you’re missing my point, but, as it happens, I also think you’re wrong in the point that you’re trying to make. Secular behavioural management science can learn a thing or two from Christianity.

Back to you, Ray.

TFBW – We’ve certainly hit a point of diminishing returns somewhere along the line here, but I’ll tackle another several page essay as soon as possible. I do appreciate discussing this stuff with someone who takes it seriously.

G. Rodrigues – The parallel postulate is, in fact, illustrative. It took well over a dozen centuries before anyone took seriously the idea that a non-Euclidean geometry was even possible. Euclidean geometry is intuitive to us non-Relativistic humans, and our mathematical presuppositions have rather strong tendency to fit with the way we think. Non-Euclidean geometry was considered interesting, but impractical, until until Relativity came along.

There may be testing in mathematics, as when a mathematician says “testing a conjecture”, but this has nothing to do with the “gather experience and test their predictions” done in the empirical sciences.

See Ramanujan, who had (literally) prodigious mathematical intuition. But his intuitions were sometimes wrong – he still had to test his conjectures, as you say.

It’s not empirical in the sense of testing things in the real world, but if you really believe in forms, it’s not unlike exploration.

The crux of the resistance to the proof of the 4-color problem [is] that it is a brute-force proof communicating no understanding, which is what mathematicians are after: understanding.

Which actually circles back to the point of the parallel postulate. There are so many special cases to check in the 4-color problem that it simply doesn’t fit in the human mind. We have to get ’empirical’ in such cases. The areas of mathematics we’ve ‘explored’ are precisely the ones humans can examine unaided. The (rather few) exceptions – things like the 4-color problem – prove that rule.

But I’ll tell you what. Let’s grant you everything you ask for, anyway. I will reformulate my claim to avoid your objection:

“When it comes to the real world, to causal things, humans are demonstrably terrible at reasoning and extrapolating outside the areas where they can gather experience and test their predictions. Even when they reason with exemplary rigor, like Aristotle.”

Programming is a wonderful demonstration. You say, “*EVERY* compiler optimization carries with it a proof of correctness.” That’s perfectly true. But there are bugs in optimizers, too. Consider how problematic the Java memory model has been… let alone the security model.

Mathematics – formal mathematics, the kind that gets published – isn’t supposed to rely on heuristics. (Although heuristics might be studied formally, or be used when developing conjectures to test.) Programming uses heuristics all the time, every day. Every microsecond, in fact. Every way humans interact with the world involves heuristics. Including the basic way we see.

Humans need heuristics in the real world because human formal reasoning is so limited.

I never claimed that human reasoning was perfect in the sense of always reaching true conclusions. Equivocating again?

Yes. You are equivocating again about what my claim was.

@Ray Ingles:

The parallel postulate is, in fact, illustrative. It took well over a dozen centuries before anyone took seriously the idea that a non-Euclidean geometry was even possible.

If it is illustrative, it is not illustrative of what you are claiming. For even if it took a long time, it was by dint of the power of reason, not by observation of the “real world”, that it came to be recognized that not only there are models of non-Euclidean geometry, that the theories are equiconsistent with Euclidean geometry.

Euclidean geometry is intuitive to us non-Relativistic humans, and our mathematical presuppositions have rather strong tendency to fit with the way we think.

Euclidean geometry is intuitive because it accords with our daily experience. Why should we find “intuitive” things that have little to no bearing to our common day-to-day experience? And what exactly “mathematical presuppositions have rather strong tendency to fit with the way we think” means exactly? I have a somewhat vague idea of what you are trying to convey here, and assuming I am right, it suffices to say that you are wrong and are letting your ignorance do the talking.

Non-Euclidean geometry was considered interesting, but impractical, until until Relativity came along.

There are several problems with this claim. First, presumably by “practical” you mean with applications to physics or engineering. But since the job of mathematicians, qua mathematicians, is not to produce “practical” mathematics but (interesting) mathematics, it is irrelevant. Second, it may have been impractical, but if no one had worked on it there would be no General Relativity in the first place as Einstein was not a mathematician and learned (pseudo- or semi-) Riemannian geometry from, among others, his friend M. Grossmann. Third, you are actually wrong on the claim. I would have to check the historical literature, but non-Euclidean geometry is at least implicit in say, the Hamiltonean formulation of classical mechanics.

It’s not empirical in the sense of testing things in the real world, but if you really believe in forms, it’s not unlike exploration.

In other words, you are equivocating as I said. You may call it “exploring”, “testing”, or whatever, but (1) it is the work of the powers of reason (2) unaided by any sort of empirical observation. And if you do want to expand the sense of the words to cover the case of mathematics, then your whole claim is little more than a tautology and falls flat on the ground, because then anything — theology included — fits the bill.

There are so many special cases to check in the 4-color problem that it simply doesn’t fit in the human mind. We have to get ‘empirical’ in such cases. The areas of mathematics we’ve ‘explored’ are precisely the ones humans can examine unaided. The (rather few) exceptions – things like the 4-color problem – prove that rule.

The 4-color theorem proof is by contradiction, arguing that if there were such a coloring map, there would be at least one map with the smallest possible number of regions that requires five colors. It then proceeds by finding a set of unavoidable (*every* coloring map must contain it) reducible (a minimal counter-example *cannot* contain it) sub-colorings or arrangements. The reducibility part of the proof is where the computer does the work, but algorithms had to be devised (recent work even improves upon their efficiency) as computers don’t do anything “by themselves”. To suggest that the computer somehow has gone where no human had gone before, or helped humans going, is simply the ravings of an ignorant imagination. Neither is this “exploration” in any sense relevant to your claim. And it does not “fit in the human mind” in the same sense that say, Graham’s number, or some proof with it as length, does not fit the human mind — a rather trite and irrelevant sense.

Finally, you simply do not know how Mathematics unfolds or how mathematicians work so stop saying that mathematicians “have to get ‘empirical’” or have to do this or have to do that.

And while I am at it, let me address this directed at TBFW:

What G. Rodrigues wants out of mathematics – understanding. If you grasp why he has a problem with the extant proofs of the 4-color problem, you’ll be on your way to grasping my problem with supernatural ‘explanations’ of consciousness.

Are you suggesting that “supernatural ‘explanations” while true provide no understanding? Maybe you just want to keep the lack of understanding part in the analogy with the 4-color proof. But since you hardly understand say, hylemorphic explanations of the mind (as witnessed by your insistence in asking meaningless questions), your “problem” is exactly that, *your* problem. And since you seem to be having difficulty knowing what I mean by “understanding” as it pertains to the 4-color proof, maybe you should refrain from using it as ammo in your argumentation?

“When it comes to the real world, to causal things, humans are demonstrably terrible at reasoning and extrapolating outside the areas where they can gather experience and test their predictions. Even when they reason with exemplary rigor, like Aristotle.”

First the way you formulate it, it sounds nearly tautological. I mean, if your beef is with the sort of reasoning that produces predictions but then does not test them, who can quibble with that? Second, assuming what you are aiming at is not a tautology and I am understanding it correctly, it is false; there is absolutely no “demonstration” that humans are “terrible at reasoning” in any given area or under any given (non-pathological) conditions. This is just an invention that you irrationally cling to. Neither is the hallmark of good reasoning, producing predictions. Mathematicians laugh at predictions; historians have no need of it. Third, the cure to “terrible reasoning” is not “testing predictions” but better reasoning. No amount of testing can help you if the reasoning is fatally flawed. “Gathering experience” is exactly that; describing the explanandum or, slightly more intangibly, but also irrelevant to your claim, getting a feel for the lay of the intellectual land. Finally, it is self-refuting. For not only is this piece of alleged knowledge not testable or verifiable, the bases of the empirical sciences themselves are not testable or verifiable. And since a conclusion is only as certain as its premises, it follows that you are contradicting yourself.

Programming is a wonderful demonstration. You say, “*EVERY* compiler optimization carries with it a proof of correctness.” That’s perfectly true. But there are bugs in optimizers, too. Consider how problematic the Java memory model has been… let alone the security model.

Some context first. I mentioned formal proofs of correctness to tone down the misleading “I’m not sure anyone has ever written a program of more than 20 lines that didn’t contain at least one error in the first draft.” Then, while I conceded that as far as proving correctness the methods have limitations (and we know that by fundamental results of the formal theory of computation), they also have other practical off-shoots such as compiler optimizations.

The problem of managing the complexity of programs and reducing the number of bugs are Engineering problems (*the* Engineering problems in the software industry) and there are various (partial) remedies for it: code reviews, unit testing, agile methodologies, you name it. What is not, what *cannot* be a cure given the nature of the problem, is to go out into the world and “test” or “make observations” in the style of the empirical sciences, so emphatically, programming is *not* a demonstration of your claim.

Finally, I note that when it comes to getting the proof of the 4-color problem employing computers is great and all, presumably because they help us “explore” what otherwise we could not, and then next, when it suits your argument, optimizers may be riddled with bugs for all we know. Right.

Mathematics – formal mathematics, the kind that gets published – isn’t supposed to rely on heuristics.

The process of developing mathematics, even what gets published, is more complex than your naive description pawned off from some brochure directed at 7-year old kids. And what gets published is not what mathematics consists of, in the same way as formal reasoning, of the sort mathematicians do, does not exhaust the forms of human reasoning — I used Mathematics as a *counter-example*.

Humans need heuristics in the real world because human formal reasoning is so limited.

And pray tell me, what has *this* got to do with “When it comes to the real world, to causal things, humans are demonstrably terrible at reasoning and extrapolating outside the areas where they can gather experience and test their predictions”? Nothing, absolutely nothing. You are just equivocating. Where did I even hint that I disagreed with the particular claim that humans “need heuristics”? Of course we cannot approach the world in a blank state, with no expectations, intuitions, heuristics or whatever you want to call it. It is also a psychological impossibility; and the peripathetic axiom is true. This is even more bizarre because, according to your narrative (and I do not disagree on this particular point) heuristics are a major source of human error, since they are the extrapolation of the known to the unknown.

If you have nothing to add, I think I will stop here. There would be much more to say on this topic: your implied, controversial (I would say false) theory of cognition, the failure to distinguish between imagination and conception or the implied naive view of the empirical sciences (failing to take into account the limitations of observation and how observation is theory-laden, the under-determination of theories, the untold horror stories of science casting doubt on its supposed cognitive advantage, how many times the empirical sciences advance by conceptual reasoning and clarification, etc.), but I chose to restrict myself to a rather more modest claim. A demonstrably true claim.

TFBW –

Different enough to stop normal relationship building, but not different enough to stop science, I take it.

I didn’t say “stop normal relationship building”. If there are alternate means of communication, then you can develop a relationship. For example, I haven’t met you, seen you, or talked to you on the phone, but we’re having some pretty extended conversations anyway.

So I tried the alternative presented – prayer. Without success.

Your statement looks like an attempt to justify that activity by framing it as God’s fault for not responding to your prayer. This strikes me as a counter-productive approach to relationship-building.

Ah, but note the progression. My wife has a sibling she doesn’t see anymore. They pretty much separated themselves from that whole side of the family. She’s only seen them a few times in the last several years – funerals, major surgeries of common family members, etc.

Sometimes people reject a relationship with you. You can make yourself available, try to start a conversation, but they can refuse to answer. I did, in fact, attempt to establish a relationship with God. And yeah, I assert that I was sincere, and I assert that I’m qualified to judge my sincerity.

If you try to communicate with someone, and get no answer, what are you supposed to conclude?

On the subject of prayer not working for you, have you documented the approach you took?

You missed the part where I said I’d use science where possible. Have to use weaker approaches when it comes to fuzzier subjects like interpersonal communication and relationships. And note that I tried the ‘relationship’ approach first. Seriously, what if I don’t fit your picture (caricature?) of a ‘scientismist’?

if it’s true that there’s a God, what consequences follow for your approach to knowledge?

I don’t think they’re the consequences you claim.

none of your responses actually counted as refutations — ways which could detect God unambiguously.

We can’t even detect the Higgs boson ‘unambiguously’. Technically, I haven’t detected you ‘unambigiously’. You might be a sock puppet for G. Rodrigues (though I doubt it; you’re much more polite) or the product of a committee. I didn’t ask for incontrovertible evidence – humans don’t get ‘incontrovertible evidence’ – just good evidence. Seriously, what if I don’t fit your picture (caricature?) of a ‘scientismist’?

if God were to intervene in a detectable way, then, in the absence of a means to attribute the action to God unambiguously (and you have now agreed that methodological naturalism offers no such means), naturalism would still dictate that God not be used as the explanation.

Take a look at this short excerpt from Roger Zelazny’s “Lord of Light”: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/323371-then-the-one-called-raltariki-is-really-a-demon-asked

Science couldn’t confirm that something is supernatural, sure. But it could detect many, many kinds of influences that affect the world. Those footprints appearing in the grass with no one to make them might be a ghost, or a person wearing a suit made from light-bending optical metamaterials, but either way we can see the footprints. That’s how we deduced neutrinos – the particles we could detect were behaving in ways that displayed interaction with particles we couldn’t.

If the ‘interactions’ were continually consistent with a Christian model and not other models, that would make the Christian model much more plausible. You might still have to take a ‘leap of faith’ out of naturalism, but you’d have some reason to give it a shot. (Even more if, y’know, your prayers got answered.)

But we don’t see things that would be explained by “a powerful being that actively wanted to interact with humans and was generally well-disposed toward them”, let alone “a supernatural powerful being that actively wanted to interact with humans and was generally well-disposed toward them”. To get to the latter, you kinda have to go through the former.

Perhaps you could clarify that point, and specify what sort of miracle or communication would count as sufficient evidence for something supernatural, and why that particular thing would be sufficient.

We can detect things like dark matter, neutrinos, and so forth by their effects on what we see. For example, spontaneous healings are taken to be evidence of supernatural influence. Recall that I said back in #173 that “We look for patterns when trying to detect agency (like, say, an odd pattern of deaths when a particular doctor is in charge of the ward), and it’s funny that such patterns are not in evidence when it comes to ‘miracles’.” If God exists, then I’d expect to see a pattern that indicated agency in such miracles.

If God exists, then it’s not like it’d be hard to provide evidence of something beyond current human capability. (Indeed, always beyond human capability.) E.g., these days a few factorizations of some 10,000-digit numbers would be awfully convincing. You could check that on a 1980’s-Macintosh… but generating it would take more computing power than Earth has right now. That’d sure get my attention – I’d be willing to admit that something well out of the ordinary was going on there.

And, again, a divine revelation would be awfully useful in that regard. If God exists, then I’d expect a response when I prayed to begin a relationship.

Well, either my essay didn’t get through the spam filter, or it got lost when the site was down. Either way, I don’t have time to try again today.

Update from Tom: I released it from spam at 5:27 EDT. I have no idea what caused it to get sent there.

@Ray Ingles, #234:

To quote from #201: “No, it’s an explanatory pattern that makes use of science where possible. Judgment and trial-and-error have their place, too.”

That’s a qualification, but not a refutation. The point still stands: you assert that “science says” is the best basis for assent to a proposition, without regard to the quality of the science, because it’s still better than anything else in those cases where it’s possible. I’d be interested to hear you elaborate on those cases where science is not possible, just to get a feel for how large a gap that leaves.

I suspect that the main issue is that we have different ideas about how much science is weak, and to what degree. E.g. common descent, or plate tectonics.

Indeed. You seem to think that whatever theory is current is pretty solid. I’m much more reserved than that. In far too many cases, I think that current theories suffer from confirmation bias, gravitating towards whatever evidence supports them, rather than taking a sober evaluation of all the facts. But I’ve already discussed this at fair length in my previous post, so I won’t belabour the point at this time.

Recall (#167) what my main justification was for picking my philosophical bases. Some prospects are self-defeating. The big three were (a) my senses bear no relation to any external reality, (b) my reason is unable to reach any kind of truth, and (c) entities in a hypothesis should be multiplied indefinitely.

Recall (#168) that I agreed that we can disregard self-defeating ideas, so it’s not like I ignored you. For the purposes of discussion, I’m happy to embrace the negation of these ideas. To wit, (a) my senses bear some relation to external reality, (b) my reason is able to reach some truth, and (c) entities in a hypothesis should not be multiplied indefinitely. Note, however, that the last point is relevant only to the modelling of a system. If we are concerned with truth, then the entities in a hypothesis must correspond precisely to whatever entities actually exist, or the hypothesis is false. If we are simply modelling a system, however, then fewer entities is better, all else being equal.

I note that scientism, such as you embrace, doesn’t follow from any of these principles, or all of them as a conjunction. Part of the problem, it seems, is that you aren’t embracing the negation of these ideas, but rather some opposite extreme — something like (a) my senses correspond closely with reality (so that which can not be sensed probably does not exist), (b) my reason is particularly good at drawing true inferences from sense evidence, and (c) entities beyond that which is hypothetically necessary probably do not exist. Scientism (and philosophical naturalism) would seem to follow naturally from these premises, but I reject them as unsound.

So I disagree that my “preference for experience is largely grounded in intuition.” It’s not intuition that drives me to accept Ockham’s Razor, for example.

If your preference for experience is not grounded in intuition, then what is it grounded in? Experience?

Also, are you using Ockham’s Razor as a filter for truth, or a filter for utility? I agree with its use in the latter mode, but have reservations about its use in the former, as mentioned above. Simple models have clear advantages from the perspective of human understanding, but what non-question-begging basis can we have to suppose that reality always lends itself towards the most “parsimonious” state of affairs?

For example, we cross-reference fossils with radiometric dating, known deposition processes, known chemistry, etc. What’s interesting is how remarkably consistent they all turn out to be.

I’m afraid I won’t take that as given. I can appreciate why you would find it compelling, but I’m deeply suspicious that the data actually correlates in the way you say. One of the difficulties here is that there’s little room for candid admission of ambiguity or inaccuracy on this subject in mainstream science. Refer my comments in my previous post about the hot ideological war going on, and the social pressure to toe the party line. Truth is always the first casualty of war.

I’ll assume that you’ve read all the material by radiometric dating sceptics, and have dismissed them as cranks and/or liars. Suffice it to say that I’m doubtful that the evidence is as clear and unambiguous as you suggest it is. The use of fossils for dating is based on the premise of long ages and gradualism in the first place, and I’m not convinced that the methods of radioactive dating are sound. I’m not sure how much of the “consistency” you cite is forced out of the inherent latitude in the measurements in order to fit the model. Meanwhile, creationist geologists like Andrew Snelling do research showing just how wildly inconsistent radiometric dating can be. Are you telling me his data is faked? It does seem that your position requires you to categorically dismiss any dissenting views.

One of the problems with science as it is currently practised is that we rarely if ever get to see the raw data from which the results are cooked. Things always look so much more neat and tidy once the data has been interpreted appropriately, the outliers thrown away, and the results published in their final form. I suspect that the old aphorism about laws and sausages also applies to science: they cease to inspire respect in proportion to our knowledge of how they are made.

@Ray Ingles, #236:

If I were to write a thorough response to your post, I would wind up asking multiple questions for each sentence you wrote. Given how much time I’ve spent on the other issues in this discussion, I think I’ll have to mostly shrug this one off for the time being, and just pick a few key points.

The way I put it is you can’t derive an ought from an is, but you can derive an ought from an is and a goal. (And a goal, you’ll note, is just a specific kind of ‘is’.) I think human nature puts constraints on goals.

So you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”, but you can derive an “ought” from an “is” and… another “is”? Either the product of what you are describing is not an “ought”, or there is another “ought” lurking inside your second “is” (the goal), which means you’re deriving an “ought” from another “ought”.

The question that goes begging in this case is, “why ought I share your goal?” Human nature may put practical constraints on human goals, but they have enough variance to be at loggerheads with each other much of the time on many subjects. Whose goals count when determining “morality” of this kind? Perhaps you can demonstrate by showing how this moral calculus evaluates the abortion issue — a perennial source of moral disagreement.

The problem is that there are good goals, and there are bad goals. An “ought” is only a moral good when its aim is a good goal. You’re equivocating on “ought”, using it in the sense of an effective strategy (e.g. “if you’re thirsty, you ought to drink water”), and presenting the result as a moral claim.

They took a risk, and it paid off.

Like this driver?

Only if he got paid a million dollars or something for doing it — and I assume he didn’t, so no, nothing like that. Don’t be obtuse.

Secular behavioural management science can learn a thing or two from Christianity.

Ah, the parable of the hawks and doves.

Um, no. The thing starts out with the observation that people want to feel good about themselves and also benefit from dishonesty, and that we rationalise in order to do both. It notes that rationalisation becomes easier with increasing psychological distance: it’s obviously wrong to steal cash, but not so obvious when you’re manipulating interest rates to make cash, even if the net effect is the same (you gain at someone else’s loss). They ask how can we make rationalisation go down, and they note that reminding people of the Ten Commandments causes them to cheat less, even if they’re atheists. They make similar observations about how Catholic confession also improves honesty.

Hawks and doves is something else entirely. You’re seeing the concept you’re familiar with in that context, not the concept that’s actually being presented. This is somewhat emblematic of our conversation to date.

That’s all for now.

TFBW – Next installment.

You seem to think that whatever theory is current is pretty solid.

Nope. For examples, psychiatry and economics. We don’t understand the brain and consciousness well enough to have any really comprehensive theory – we’re still at the ‘heuristics’ stage. Same with economics. Some science is possible there – at least on the level of evaluating heuristics – but we’re still waiting for the Newtons of those fields. (See my comment #139 – sometimes “I don’t know” is the correct answer.)

If we are concerned with truth, then the entities in a hypothesis must correspond precisely to whatever entities actually exist, or the hypothesis is false. If we are simply modelling a system, however, then fewer entities is better, all else being equal.

But, absent divine revelation, humans have to model the ‘system of the world’. We don’t get direct access to Truth!

If our models were inaccurate with respect to Truth, but accurately modeled all we can encounter, we would never be able to tell. It would make – literally – no practical difference.

Now, we’re not in that case yet – our models of reality are woefully incomplete in many areas. I just listed two examples above. But – again, absent divine revelation – all we can ever do is refine our models.

something like (a) my senses correspond closely with reality (so that which can not be sensed probably does not exist), (b) my reason is particularly good at drawing true inferences from sense evidence, and (c) entities beyond that which is hypothetically necessary probably do not exist.

Nope, I just think that, in the absence of divine revelation, we have to deal with sense data, reason, and our models – however imperfect they may be. And, again, I’m ‘scientismist’ only to the limited extent that I prefer science where possible – because “When it comes to the real world, to causal things, humans are demonstrably terrible at reasoning and extrapolating outside the areas where they can gather experience and test their predictions. Even when they reason with exemplary rigor, like Aristotle.”

If your preference for experience is not grounded in intuition, then what is it grounded in? Experience?

Reason plus experience, inductively. Assuming that my reason can reach justified conclusions doesn’t mean it will. Ergo, I should look to test my conclusions when possible. Such testing has, in fact, shown that I (and others) frequently make mistakes. Which confirms the hypothesis that testing is needed.

Also, are you using Ockham’s Razor as a filter for truth, or a filter for utility?

How can we tell the difference?

I’ll assume that you’ve read all the material by radiometric dating sceptics, and have dismissed them as cranks and/or liars.

Long ago, and I haven’t seen anything since to disabuse me of that notion.

Are you telling me his data is faked? It does seem that your position requires you to categorically dismiss any dissenting views.

Not faked, just carefully (mis)selected and (mis)interpreted.

I’m not convinced that the methods of radioactive dating are sound.

Do you, like Snelling, propose that the rates of radioactive decay might have been different in the past? There are – ahem – a few problems with that. For one, there’s Oklo. For another, there’s the sun. Are you aware that, based on our current understanding of physics (which so far as I can tell you accept as pretty sound), the light we see from the sun was generated internally, and takes at least a few thousand years to reach the surface of the sun? If the nuclear constants had varied much in the past, the sun would look different today, right now!

Note also that both JAD (#51) and Tom Gilson (#204) have referred to the ‘fine-tuning’ argument for God. The idea is that if the basic constants of physics were different by even a tiny amount, the universe would be completely unrecognizable and uninhabitable. Shifting constants around to the point that 4.5 billion years of decay is scrunched into 10,000 years or so – that’s six orders of magnitude – is kind of a stretch. I mean, that’s like saying “Scientists are wrong about how wide North America is! They say it’s around 2,000 miles, but it’s actually just over twenty feet wide.”

You can either have wildly varying nuclear physics, or the fine-tuning argument. You cannot have both. Which do you pick?

One of the problems with science as it is currently practised is that we rarely if ever get to see the raw data from which the results are cooked.

I’ll agree that that’s a serious problem, along with how a lot of modern science is funded. This time I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill: “Science is the worst form of acquiring knowledge except all the others that have been tried.” I’m hopeful of the recent trends toward more open publishing. The more checks and balances the better.

TFBW –

So you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”, but you can derive an “ought” from an “is” and… another “is”?

You can’t derive an ought from one is. You need at least one goal and at least one constraint. Back in #175, I pointed you to this discussion; I really suggest you read it. If nothing else, note that the proposition that “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is'” is credited to Hume, and just ask G. Rodrigues about how much esteem Edward Feser has for that guy.

Human nature may put practical constraints on human goals, but they have enough variance to be at loggerheads with each other much of the time on many subjects

Indeed. Except back in #182 I noted, Goals, BTW, form a hierarchy. Lots of people get up every morning and undergo an unpleasant commute to get to their job. Then they perform a job they dislike to get a paycheck. Then they take their pay and use it to keep their family fed and healthy.

Some goals are subsidiary to others – they serve a more fundamental goal. A lot of that disagreement is at the level of subsidiary goals – e.g. in politics, where people generally don’t disagree that their country should have a strong military, but disagree over what level of funding is needed to achieve that and how it should be allocated.

There’s always going to be disagreement – in the Church, for example, it’s called “disputation”, and there’s a lot of room for ‘prudential judgment’. Even with similar goals, people come to very different conclusions about, say, economic policy.

I talked back in #179 about figuring out what actually makes humans happiest. It’s not always what people think they want – they can be mistaken about what strategies to use to reach the goals they want. A whole lot of crime is obviously in this category. I think when it comes to fundamental goals, there’s actually broad and deep agreement among humans.

And we’ve learned a few things over the hundred thousand years or so we’ve been human. To wit:

The thing starts out with the observation that people want to feel good about themselves and also benefit from dishonesty, and that we rationalise in order to do both.

The reason I referenced ‘hawks and doves’ is because it contains relevant lessons. A world of mostly hawks is a terrible one, for the hawks as well as the doves. A world of all doves is actually best for everyone, but it’s not stable – invading hawks get a disproportionate payoff. A world with a certain proportion of hawks vs doves (or hawklike and dovelike behavior) is stable, but not as good for everyone – hawk or dove – as all-doves.

One of the lessons is simple enough for a five-year-old to grasp (and I’ve raised four so far, so I speak from experience) – “What if everyone did that?”

The more subtle point is that small defections have short-term payoffs (the kind we rationalize toward) but lead to bad outcomes overall – like, say, interest-rate munging leading to bubbles and crashes. I explain to my kids that if nobody shoplifted, things would be cheaper because stores wouldn’t need security systems. One thing I think we need is a lot more awareness of those ‘hidden’ costs and consequences.

Humans aren’t like hawks and doves in one important respect – we can (and do) engage in ‘meta-evaluation’, taking into account other consequences and the behavior of others. In engineering, a whole lot of the devices and processes we use aren’t inherently stable, and need stabilizing mechanisms. We can hope to socially engineer situations that would not ‘ordinarily’ be stable.

See, for example, traffic lights. Most people obey them pretty darn well even if there isn’t a cop at every corner.

They ask how can we make rationalisation go down, and they note that reminding people of the Ten Commandments causes them to cheat less, even if they’re atheists. They make similar observations about how Catholic confession also improves honesty.

Indeed, and I’ll repeat ’cause you apparently didn’t see it: I’m actually on record as saying that there’s a lot of accumulated practical wisdom in religion. Sometimes you can be right for the wrong reason, just from accumulated experience. Making standards clear, and reminding people of them, has a good game-theoretic justification. And I’ve noted the importance of forgiveness before on Thinking Christian.

I suppose, if you still feel like going on, it’s your turn again. 🙂

@Ray Ingles, #243:

If our models were inaccurate with respect to Truth, but accurately modeled all we can encounter, we would never be able to tell. It would make – literally – no practical difference.

Fine. Just be consistent about it and don’t assert any relationship between science and the Truth. Don’t assert that science shows there is no God. Don’t even assert that science shows that there is such a thing as an electron. Be satisfied in asserting that we have an immensely useful set of models surrounding the behaviour of theoretical particles like electrons, and the utility of those models is not at all dependent on the statement “there is such a thing as an electron” being true.

But you don’t do that. While you deny that humans have access to The Truth, you grant science the place of Next Best Thing. I can’t argue against an ideology of this sort, because it has no rational basis: it’s just what seems reasonable to you.

I’m getting pretty sick of this. I’d love to offer a more concrete rebuttal of your position, but every time I try to do so, I have to navigate back through a chain of half a dozen messages to try to find the original point you were making, versus the rabbit-trails that it has taken in response. I’m about ready to reach the empirical conclusion that your position isn’t well-defined enough to actually be refuted. I’m therefore going to give the rest of your response short shrift and then conclude.

You can either have wildly varying nuclear physics, or the fine-tuning argument. You cannot have both. Which do you pick?

Unless you can show how they are logically inconsistent alternatives, I’m quite prepared to suppose that both are possible. It seems to me that either of them is fatal to your position anyhow: if fine tuning points to divine intervention, or non-constant radioactive decay shows that science can be deluded about the past by orders of magnitude, then scientific atheism is based on so much rot. As such, it doesn’t really matter which I choose.

#244:

But nothing unusual happened, then or in the next few days or weeks. Nothing to indicate an agent trying to communicate with me, anyway.

I’m reminded of Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, asking God for a sign, and then immediately getting annoyed by the truck carrying a load of warning signs that gets in his way. I’m not saying that you did that — only that I can think of more than one possible reason why your test turned out the way it did, even if God exists, etc.

Now, if a human had the power to stop that, and didn’t, we’d call that evil. But because God is “unknowable in part” It gets a pass. No matter how terrible, how evil something is that happens, that “unknowable in part” trumps any possible negative evaluation of the consequences. Quite literally anything can be judged to be ‘ultimately good’, just in some way we can’t see.

You’re constructing a lousy argument using “God is unknowable in part” as one of its premises. That does not prove that all arguments involving “God is unknowable in part” are fallacious. Nor does it prove that all responses to the argument from evil are based on that premise. In fact, I can’t see anything remotely related to a valid argument in that pile of illogical nonsense.

That’s what I mean by ‘dividing by zero’. In math, it let’s you reach any conclusion. And in physical and moral reasoning, “unknowable in part” also lets you reach any conclusion.

Saying that science is the ultimate authority where possible and then arbitrarily deciding where is is and isn’t possible has a similar result. You can then justify anything in terms of science, and back off that stance when it doesn’t suit you to do so. It facilitates rationalisation, where you choose your desired outcome, then pick the prior conditions which facilitate reaching that conclusion.

It seems to me that first we have to agree that there are gaps, before we can argue about whether they are filled or not. As I said, “In order to explain something, first you have to have something to explain!”

There are gaps in our ability to explain, such as for the miracle of consciousness. In those cases, however, you are happy to conclude that science is able to fill the gap, based on nothing more than an argument from historical trends. You have persisted in this argument despite our pointing out that nothing in all of known physics or mathematics can even in principle provide the necessary basis for consciousness. You are appealing to a trend when you need a saltation — a quantum leap.

This is the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero. You can either appeal to a lack of phenomena which require explanation, and thus avoid the need for God, or extrapolate scientific progress to the point where any arbitrary phenomenon can be explained without God, and thus avoid the need for God. Furthermore, you can always defend this position as refutable in principle by appealing to some arbitrary, unobtained situation, like Jerry Coyne’s 900-foot Jesus, or whatever, and claim that thing would satisfy the condition of “unexplainable by science” (although even then it’s not clear that this would imply “requires God in order to be explained”).

#245:

You can’t derive an ought from one is. You need at least one goal and at least one constraint.

Yes — where a goal is a thing you ought to do, and a constraint is a thing that you ought not to do. You’re just concealing “ought” inside other words. If that were not the case, I’d be able to apply your reasoning to arbitrary goals like “destroying all life on the planet”, and arbitrary constraints, like “without stepping on a crack”. Obviously, however, there is nothing morally laudable about succeeding in destroying all life on the planet without stepping on a crack. Indeed, it would be obviously morally reprehensible — all the more so for thinking that “without stepping on a crack” was any kind of appropriate restraint.

The reason I referenced ‘hawks and doves’ is because it contains relevant lessons.

Really? Because it looked for all the world like you were referencing it because that’s what you saw in the “Truth About Dishonesty” video. And that’s why I then gave a precis of that video to demonstrate that the concept was not contained therein. But why would you even be referencing it for “relevant lessons”? Relevant to what?

At this point I have to dig back through the thread: #236, #227/#228, #205… okay, I’ve completely lost the plot. I have no idea why we are even discussing this, or what point you were trying to make. Another rabbit trail. What a waste of time.

Right, so that’s about all there is that’s even worth mentioning. Everything else is just a merry little dance down some dubious rabbit trail of no clear relevance to anything. Here’s my final summary,

1. Your argument is mostly so ill-defined that it can’t be refuted. It’s like trying to dissect a puddle.
2. To the extent that your argument is not ill-defined, it suffers from the same sorts of problems that you consider to be present and fatal in the arguments of your opponents.
3. And, to the extent that you have presented the arguments of your opponents, they have been straw men.

Thanks for the argument, but I don’t feel that any further progress can be made with the material at hand. The kind of material that I would require, in order to make progress, is a formal logical argument of some sort. If you can present one of those, then I can critique it. Those, at least, have somewhat clear boundaries and rules.

Fine. Just be consistent about it and don’t assert any relationship between science and the Truth.

We’ve been batting this around since #184 at least. Look, I’d love to be clairvoyant, to directly apprehend the causal world without having to go through my limited senses. But so far as I can tell, I’m not.

But believing that we don’t get direct access to Truth is not the same thing as believing that we have no way of getting at Truth. Maybe we can’t open the black box, but we can probe it in various ways to get a handle on what’s inside. If nothing else, we can winnow away false ideas about what’s in there.

And if we get down to a point where we can’t make any further progress… well, that’s a chin that Ockham’s Razor was made to shave. By definition, all the remaining theories cover the ground perfectly, so pick your favorite.

I’m about ready to reach the empirical conclusion that your position isn’t well-defined enough to actually be refuted.

Or, just possibly, you want it to be of a particular form so badly that you’re not processing where it doesn’t meet your preconceptions. Just throwing that out there, “Bruce Almighty”-style.

Unless you can show how they are logically inconsistent alternatives, I’m quite prepared to suppose that both are possible.

The fine-tuning argument claims that changing the physics we observe in the universe by even minuscule amounts would alter the universe’s behavior drastically, making life as we know it impossible. Whereas the notion that radioactive decay rates varied in past, making radiodating (wildly) invalid, requires changing the decay rates by six orders of magnitude. (That’s what you need to compress 4.5 billion years of decay into a few thousand years.) And yet, somehow, this altered physics still allowed human life to exist.

At most one of those propositions could be true, not both. If physics can change wildly while leaving the universe habitable for humans, then the fine-tuning argument is perforce invalid. Whereas if physics can’t change much without destroying the universe’s habitability, then nuclear decay rates could not have changed enough to make the Earth a few thousand years old. (And that’s ignoring how you ignored all the notes about how varying decay rates is not consistent with data we see right now, today.)

(Yet you accuse me of not taking a concrete position!)

Nor does it prove that all responses to the argument from evil are based on that premise

Where did I say that that was the only possible response to the argument from evil? I’m quite aware of multiple responses. This is an example of your failing to read what I actually write, apparently due to it not fitting your preconceptions.

What I was pointing out is a concrete case where allowing unknowable features short-circuits any possibility of a conclusion. Can you come up with an example of an evil so terrible that, if it happened, it would be inconsistent with a god cleverer than you working toward with an unguessable ultimate good, someday?

You can then justify anything in terms of science, and back off that stance when it doesn’t suit you to do so.

A concrete example would be helpful here…

You have persisted in this argument despite our pointing out that nothing in all of known physics or mathematics can even in principle provide the necessary basis for consciousness.

What is consciousness, exactly? You yourself have claimed it’s “beyond human understanding” (emphasis in original). Can you even define it in more than a superficial way? If not, how can you claim to know enough about it to know how it might or might not be explained?

Yes — where a goal is a thing you ought to do, and a constraint is a thing that you ought not to do.

Is there an emoticon for ‘heavy sigh’?

I will quote from the link you won’t read – note, these are not my words, but those of First Things contributor Brandon Watson – “We use the word ‘ought’ when we’re talking about decisions, plans, strategies — practical matters. So it makes sense to see ‘ought’ statements as identifying solutions to potential problems. If the problem is to build a bridge that won’t collapse in the wind, it follows from the claims of material science and engineering that there are things you ought to do and things that you ought not to do. Faced with the problem of designing an experiment that will test a hypothesis, a good scientist can derive from available facts how the experiment ought to be designed. When you are faced with the problem of how to act rationally, there are facts about reason that undeniably force the reasonable person to draw conclusions about what he or she ought to do.”

A goal and an ought are different things. I dispute that “you can’t derive an ought from an is” – and so do the Aristotelian-Thomists, BTW – and I will simply note at this point that you have not actually argued for that point but simply asserted it, repeatedly, in the face of explanations and arguments to the contrary.

And that’s why I then gave a precis of that video to demonstrate that the concept was not contained therein.

And then I gave a precis, in the very comment you’re responding to, about why the ‘hawks and doves model’ is relevant. I’m totally at a loss to understand why you felt any need to follow any ‘rabbit trail’…

The kind of material that I would require, in order to make progress, is a formal logical argument of some sort.

Huh. Of the six or seven topics we’ve been going over, can you pick a particular one you want to discuss?