Scepticism about Scientific Realism

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Dwight

What follows is in reference to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on scientific realism – http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

The article explains what scientific realism is (no easy task, given that the position has been formulated in numerous and diverse ways), and discusses various skeptical positions regarding it (dubbed collectively antirealism). And this brings up my first concern. As the article makes clear, “realism” is a term with two distinct meanings. In its first (and I would say primary) sense, it refers to the belief that there is a “mind-independent world”, and in this regard stands opposed to idealism. Very few philosophers today (including the majority who embrace the “antirealist” positions listed in the article) deny the existence of a mind-independent world. Nevertheless, it used to be a very common position to take – at the end of the 19th century idealism was dominant, both in the West as well as the East. Even today, outside of philosophic circles, forms of idealism are popular.

Furthermore, as we shall soon see, it is my viewpoint that the central problem with scientific realism is that it does not fully embrace the consequences of a mind-independent world. It infuses (one might say confuses) aspects of mind into the physical world in a manner more appropriate to idealism than to realism. All supernatural worldviews, in fact, have this same flaw simply as a consequence of postulating that the physical world is the product of intelligence. If we are truly going to embrace a mind-independent world, we must divorce intelligence and all its accroutrements from that world, and this is precisely what I maintain scientific realism fails sufficiently to do.

Let us then consider the second sense in which the philosophical term “realism” is applied. Here the term refers to the claim that our scientific theories and models provide true knowledge (or approximately true knowledge which science is continuously improving). The key word here is the term “true” and unfortunately (unless I missed it) the Stanford entry fails to define that word (though there is a reference to the correspondence theory of truth). I take it that scientific realism embraces the notion that “true” knowledge is a revelation about the actual nature of the mind-independent world. The term antirealism is applied to all positions which deny this possibility.

Thus antirealism has two contradictory meanings: (1) the denial of a mind-independent world; (2) the affirmation of a mind-independent world but skepticism about our ability to truly know its nature. As mentioned earlier, some of us who embrace this second position go further: our skepticism of acquiring true knowledge about the mind-independent world is a direct consequence of insisting on the mind-independence of that world. Because we think the physical world is fully mind-independent, it follows that knowledge can at best be a simulation (a simulacrum, in fact) tested by usefulness (i.e. the scientific method) and can reveal nothing inherently true about that world. We deny that the mind-independent world has a describable nature, for to assume otherwise would be to infuse mind into what is supposed to be mind-independent.

To call this antirealist simply creates confusion. It is to call antirealist a position which maintains that scientific realism is not adequately realist and aims to correct that.

Realism has become a philosophical term with too many meanings. From the article:

Traditionally, realism more generally is associated with any position that endorses belief in the reality of something. Thus, one might be a realist about one’s perceptions of tables and chairs (sense datum realism), or about tables and chairs themselves (external world realism), or about mathematical entities such as numbers and sets (mathematical realism), and so on. Scientific realism is a realism about whatever is described by our best scientific theories—from this point on, ‘realism’ here denotes scientific realism. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/  (captured June 22, 2014)

 Notice that none of the “realisms” listed include our first sense of realism, the existence of a mind-independent world, and this includes the example of “external world realism.” For to identify objects as tables and chairs is to define their “realism” (or their nature) by their meaning as objects, and that is not mind-independent. This is not clearly stated, but perhaps I can make it so. What makes an object a chair? Is it the fact that someone has sat on it? No, because we recognize chairs as chairs whether they’ve ever been sat on or not. (Beyond that, even large rocks and tree stumps can be chairs). A chair, like a table, is thus a conceptual object rather than merely a physical something or other. It would not exist as a chair if no species capable of sitting had evolved into existence and conceived of it as such an object. Although there are indeed real physical somethings or others which humans and other species can sit on, and we can fashion objects into shape specifically for sitting, these only become chair objects when we imagine them as objects that one can sit upon. This demonstrates the care that must be taken not to infuse concepts (or conceptual objects) into the mind-independent world.

By its nature, knowledge is necessarily infused with concepts and conceptual objects (such as the chairs and tables above). If there is a world that is truly mind-independent then we must take pains not to attribute such knowledge to that world’s nature. Instead, all knowledge must be placed on the “mind” side of the ledger rather than on the “mind-independent” side. Once we make this move, it becomes obvious that knowledge is not something “discovered” in the mind-independent world, but something invented by minds to be “about” the mind-independent world. Why would minds bother to invent knowledge about a world that lacks any inherent knowledge? Because those minds are actually produced by physical organisms that are themselves mind-independent and exist within the surrounding mind-independent world, and because creating a knowledge simulacrum of that surrounding world turned out to be useful for their survival and successful reproduction. Organisms which evolved a useful knowledge simulacrum have become populous (at least on Earth) because of this usefulness.

We are not warranted to say anything more than that knowledge has degrees of usefulness. When we declare a theory or model of the world “true” what we are really doing is declaring that it is more useful than any competing theories or models that we have so far invented. The method of science has been to make usefulness as observer-independent as possible (Victor Stenger calls this “point-of-view invariance”), and this has allowed us to sail far beyond the sensual simulacrum of a world created by our brains (the world we naively think we “observe”). But I don’t think this new-found capacity to generate models of “invisibles” (as the article terms it) through the use of extensive instrumentation and the application of point-of-view invariance fundamentally alters the nature of knowledge. It does not shift concepts to the mind-independent side of the ledger or result in models which are true representations of that mind-independent world.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Framing Free Will

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Dwight

When interactions occur between theists and atheists, our disparate frames of mind often cause confusion and misunderstanding. Behind these conflicting mindsets lie two incompatible worldviews: supernaturalism and naturalism. Understand these frameworks, and you will have a key to understanding our intellectual disconnects.

At the core lies a fundamental disagreement about the relationship between mind and matter. Someone with a natural worldview places the physical universe primary and posits that consciousness or mind arrived on the scene at a later time, once the first organisms with brains evolved into existence. Not so for someone with a supernatural worldview; for them mind/intelligence/consciousness is primary, and the primal intelligence (God) created the physical universe. For the latter, mental phenomenon can exist independent of matter; for the former, mental phenomenon is produced by and dependent upon organisms in the physical world.

This fundamental disagreement is important to keep in mind when it comes to how we understand ourselves. Are we bodies that evolved to experience consciousness and thought (as someone with a natural worldview sees it), or are we souls temporarily inhabiting those bodies (as someone with a supernatural worldview believes)?

Free Will Is a Myth Because Our Neurons Control Us

For an example of how this difference in overall framework is key to understanding our intellectual disconnects, consider the debate about free will. For convenience, I’ll focus on a 2016 article in The Atlantic, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will – But we’re better off believing in it anyway” by Steve Cave. I will point out confusions which result from not taking worldviews (and their assertions about the relationship between mind and matter) into account.

The title of Cave’s article handily summarizes his argument, but let’s examine a few of his underlying points. He begins by noting the “agreement in the scientific community that the firings of neurons determine not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, dreams,” and concludes that our choices are not free but “determined” by those neurons. The argument appears straightforward and sound. But is it? Let’s step back and ask a framing question: what does the word “our” refer to in the phrase “our choices are not free”? Or to put it another way, why does Cave assume that neurons in our body are not also us?

He makes this assumption because, like most people, he is saddled with a two thousand year old concept of the self—one picked up from the supernatural framework: we are our minds, or more broadly we are “thoughts, hopes, memories, dreams” which make up our conscious experiences. Herein lies the central flaw of Cave’s article. He is trying to cling to a supernatural concept of the self in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that it’s not tenable.

The supernatural “I” must be something that can be split off from the body and exist (at least temporarily) bodilessly. This separability is required for belief in afterlife, since we see bodies rot in the ground. It is also required for the concept of God, who is defined as a kind of bodiless consciousness. Yet the message of modern neuroscience is that this can’t be: consciousness is a product of neurons, and neither the dead nor the divine have neurons. We see this again when Cave discusses Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the 1980’s which demonstrated that “conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.”

The conclusion I draw from Libet’s work is that “we” are not equal to our conscious will or conscious thoughts; rather “we” encompass our brains in addition to the thoughts those brains produce in us. Put another way, we are not souls encapsulated in bodies, we are those bodies. Yet Cave never abandons the supernatural framing of “we.” His framing leads him to the conclusion that “we” (those encapsulated souls) aren’t freely choosing our actions at all. Whereas a common sense framing based on a natural worldview would redefine “we” as “bodies with sensations,” not as “souls separable from bodies.”

If our neurons are controlling our sensations—so what? Our neurons as well as our sensations are part of “us,” and conceptually cannot impinge upon “our” freedom to act. Only when we cling to the supernatural premise that “we” are souls does a problem arise. For with supernatural framing, our bodies and neurons are something outside us, yet something neurobiology claims controls our actions. This leads to cognitive dissonance which can only be resolved by rejecting the claims of neurobiology or else switching to a natural frame.

We Lack Free Will Because We Are Predictable

We saw that adhering to supernatural framing of human identity results in “the problem of free will”; next we’ll see that supernatural framing regarding the relationship between physical existence and conscious knowledge is also problematic. Cave argues that because neuroscience “describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat,” it follows from this that “[i]n principle, we are therefore completely predictable.” This, he argues, shows that our choices are determined—that the physical world around us, including our genetic heritage, our evolutionary past, controls our behavior and makes it scientifically predictable—therefore we are not free. The syllogism here appears to be:

1. Our choices are predictable

2. Therefore they are determined

3. Therefore they are not real choices

It should be noted that this argument is not dependent upon defining ourselves as souls encapsulated in bodies. So long as there is a world outside of us (no matter how expansively we define “us”), if our choices in that world are predictable then they are determined by the world outside us.

But is it true that the predictability of our decisions entails that we are not actually making decisions? Within a supernatural frame, God’s foreknowledge of the world and its future implies that we can never make choices contrary to God’s expectations. If we could “surprise” God, it would throw into question his infallibility as well as his perfect knowledge of the world he created. Cave seems to believe that a similar concern applies to scientific knowledge. Admittedly, our scientific understanding of the world today is imperfect, but since perfect and complete scientific knowledge is possible it must follow that such perfect knowledge underlies existence (even though scientists have not got there yet). Just as God has perfect knowledge of the world he created, Cave’s reasoning is that there must be perfect scientific knowledge of the world, which scientists aspire to obtain, and that perfect knowledge entails an absolute determinism (like God’s foreknowledge) of physical events from which our actions cannot escape.

The parallel implications of determinism, rearing up in the context of God’s foreknowledge and in the context of perfect scientific knowledge, clue us in that we are stuck on a supernatural frame. When we step back and peer underneath the frame, we discover the unstated assumption that scientific descriptions and explanations are discoveries of some underlying intelligent causation that determines everything which happens in the physical world. Causation has to be seen as prescriptive for this to be the case, and in a supernatural world where mind is the ultimate cause, it is de facto prescriptive.

But prescriptive causation belongs to a supernatural worldview, not to a natural one. Within a natural frame, causal explanations are mental—they can only exist in consciousness—and therefore must be the product of brains. Given that naturalism posits the existence of a physical world prior to the existence of brains or minds, in a natural frame causation is necessarily always descriptive. It is part and parcel our scientific understanding of the world around us, which we create so that we may successfully predict events, and control them.

If you adopt a naturalistic worldview, the only things that can be deterministic are our explanations. The term cannot coherently be applied to physical reality—that reality doesn’t contain within itself inherent descriptions, explanations, or causes—not, at least, if we adopt a naturalistic frame. But it follows from this that our explanations of the world can never be perfect and infallible; those explanations are necessarily empirical and therefore falsifiable. In short, it requires a supernatural worldview to raise the scary flag of determinism. Once again, we see Cave tripped up by his framing fallacy.

Now, one might argue that it’s not a fallacy, rather just framing that some of us don’t like. But it is a fallacy in the sense of leading to an incoherent worldview and logical confusion. You can’t successfully fuse concepts which are logical companions of “mind before matter” with concepts that are logical companions of “matter before mind.” To wit, if prescriptive causation is embedded in the very nature of physical existence, how did it get there? Who or what “prescribed” it? What created those mathematical and logical connections at the moment of creating physical reality? Such presumptions are unavoidably supernatural (mind before matter). They do not fit with naturalism. They are not compatible with a “matter before mind” reality.

But We’re Better Off Believing in Free Will Anyway

The final part of Cave’s premise in his Atlantic article, is that even though there is no free will, humans are better off believing in it anyway. Specifically, he argues that there is scientific evidence that humans need to have a false belief in free will, or else will there will be disastrous consequences. “If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we be become morally irresponsible?” he asks. “And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all these institutions based on it?”

Cave refers to two scientific studies by Kathleen D. Vohs which show that when told that free will is a delusion, or that their actions are pre-determined, people are more likely to do dishonest things. But perhaps this only reveals what we already know about how most people frame human agency. As far as I can determine, Vohs’ studies do not attempt to find out the worldview or framing used by participants. This is a crucial point, since with natural framing the neurons which “determine” our behavior are also “us”; therefore agency still belongs with “us.” It is only the mistaken effort to mix supernatural framing with the science of neurobiology that leads to the feeling that we lack agency and therefore responsibility for our actions.

Easy solution: don’t make that mistake. This is because the determinism that Cave refers to is the increasingly strong biological evidence that our “thoughts, hopes, dreams” are produced by our neurons. The only way this denies us agency is if we define our neurons as “not us”. And that is an obvious framing fallacy.

Cave’s conclusion: “Believing in free will as an illusion has been found to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, less grateful toward one another.” If the research behind this is valid, then it would follow that atheists as a group should be less creative, more likely to conform, unwilling to learn from their mistakes, and so on. Based on my interactions with non-believers, I would say this is not the case. And though some atheists may cling to supernatural framing—most do not.

Nevertheless, Cave presses on with this dubious thesis. He quotes Saul Smilanski who “advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend: the idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.” This is because “[w]e cannot afford for people to internalize the truth,” says Smilansky.

“Promoting determinism,” Cave concludes, “is complacent and dangerous.”

Cave admits that not everyone agrees—and mentions Sam Harris. “From [Harris’] vantagepoint, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better,” Cave admits. “What’s more, Harris suggests as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate. Determinism, he writes in his book, does not mean ‘that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.’” Cave, goes on to explain that “[t]he big problem, in Harris’ view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism…. When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference.”

Although Harris is clearly looking at the subject from a naturalistic perspective, Cave does not seem to pick up on the importance of that perspective. We see this even more clearly when he discusses another scientist who takes a naturalistic frame—Bruce Walker.

“Walker,” Cave writes, “believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.” Cave admits that “Walker’s definition of free will is in keeping with how a lot of ordinary people see it….following their desires, free of coercion…”

But Cave does not recognize that Walker has re-framed the definition of “we”—that in Walker’s reframing we are bodies with consciousness and that it is as those bodies that we are free, even if our consciousness itself is a lapdog to the neurons in our brains. When “we” are framed as consciousness (“will”) , the problem of our freedom becomes acute in the face of what we are learning from modern neuroscience. But expand “we” to include all of what we are—bodies with integrated consciousness, and our neurons will no longer get framed as “outsiders” dictating our thoughts and behaviors, but as another aspect of ourselves.

In the end, Cave can’t break free of supernatural framing. He dismisses Walker’s reframing as “an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst.” Cave never recognizes that free will as a concept only fits into a supernatural framework. Walker and Harris, atheists and humanists in general, have switched to a different frame—one based on natural rather than on supernatural definitions and categories. Free will can’t fit into the new framework because it is premised on the concept of a conscious will independent of the body. In the new frame, we are those bodies.

Conclusion

Unfortunately for theists, supernaturalism is a framework chained to a definition of self which is incompatible with modern neuroscience. Its advocates must define “self” as an aspect of consciousness separate from the body, for otherwise the concept of afterlife becomes incoherent. After all, afterlife requires our “soul” or essential self to leave the body at death. Even if this self is reunited with a new or idealized body in afterlife, it must be separable in the first place in order to escape death of the earthly body. This commitment extends to the concept of deity itself—God (even when idealized as mind or intelligence or compassion) is necessarily bodiless.

What neuroscience reveals is that this essential premise of supernaturalism does not fit the evidence. Rather than discovering that the physical world is a product of God or of some disembodied mind or intelligence, scientists have uncovered something quite different: mind, intelligence, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams—these are the products of bodies, produced by neurons within physical organisms. Supernaturalism, the evidence indicates, has got the basic framework of existence backward.

The free will studies by Vohs and others, which so trouble Smilansky and Cave, demonstrate the importance of converting society to a natural worldview. If we don’t abandon the old framing that defines us as a soul trapped in a body, then exposure to the facts of neurobiology could indeed lead to immorality. This is the prospect which alarms Christian apologists, who seem incapable of imagining that something other than a supernatural frame is possible. For them, atheism is little more than a supernatural heresy undermining everything valuable.

Recognize, however, that we are body beings—not soul beings, not consciousness inhabiting bodies and capable of separation at death—and the problems which Cave, Smilansky, Christian apologists and others worry about dissipate into nothing. It only makes sense that attempting to combine supernatural premises with natural reality leads to incoherence.

There is an easy solution: don’t do that.

[Note: since publication this morning, I made minor updates for clarity.]

Posted in Ethics & Morality, Naturalism, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Framing Free Will

The Basics

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Dwight

For thousands of years philosophers have gotten the science of our existence wrong. They have mistakenly assumed that we know or perceive the world around us; we do not, we cannot. They have believed that our sense perceptions are direct (or indirect) perceptions of the existence outside us; they are not, they cannot be.

Instead we are organisms that bump into the world—and the world bumps into us. For many of these bumps our bodies send electro-chemical signals to its brain. These electro-chemical signals are not sensations, they are not experienced. From them the brain selectively (usually but not necessarily) creates sensations which we call sense perceptions, but which in fact are simulacra—experiences created by the brain to stand in for the world around us (and in some cases stand in for our own bodies).

In some vertebrates, and certainly in mammals, the brain creates a visual simulacrum with which all other simulacra are more or less correlated or integrated. This integration creates the experience of a world around us. However, it is not the world around us: it is an assembled, (more or less) integrated simulacrum of the world around us.

We do not perceive and we do not know the world, we experience and know this simulacrum, created by the brain, which stands in for and represents the world.

The ability to create simulacra from bumps with the surrounding world is something that has evolved as organisms have evolved. This includes the evolution of simulacra which do not stand in for the outside world, but rather represent the organism’s aims or state of being in the form of urges, feelings, or emotions. These aid decision-making in a complex world.

In some species, simulacra have evolved which simulate the brain’s other simulacra; these are sensations which we experience as meanings, and which form the basis of language and cognition in humans (and perhaps in other mammals). In humans, the brain attempts to integrate these sensations of meaning into simulacra of knowledge, overall models which we can experience as understandings of the world and of ourselves.

Because we are continually bumping into the world, we are constantly in position to test these understandings of the world for reliability. In general—despite unfortunate exceptions—we strive to develop knowledge-simulacra which provide adequate (if not maximal) reliability regarding our interactions with the world and other organisms. More recently, the human pursuit of science involves using careful observation and deliberate experimentation to create models which have what Victor Stenger called point-of-view invariance. This scientific process has turned out to be extremely useful to human beings.

I have laid out a bit of the basic science of our existence. We need to understand these basics before we can build a coherent philosophical model which fits the world and our existence within it.

 

4-22-2016 > this was edited for clarity since its initial posting

Posted in Atheology, Evolution & ID, Meaning & Value, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum | 3 Comments

Naturalism and Knowledge

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Dwight

We are living at the crossroads between supernaturalism and naturalism: the world is gradually abandoning the first for the second. Conservative Christians like to say there is a culture war going on, and there is. But it has more than one focal point. Religious vs secular, Islam vs the West, even believers vs non-believers are minor conflicts in comparison to the major focus: supernatural vs natural worldview.

We all have a secular side, even the most religious among us. Separation of state and church is about creating public space for this secular side of us. This benefits not just atheists but theists as well. In fact, the need for secular space is the direct result of religious diversity. (The absence of such space corresponds with religious monopoly. No surprise then that the West is better at making public space for the secular aspects of our life than are most Islamic countries.) So long as there are a variety of healthy but diverse religions practiced in a population, there will be a strong need for separation of church and state.

Although separation of religious power from government power is an essential battle, it is not specifically a battle fought between the religious and the non-religious. It is instead about preventing the monopoly of a particular religion’s viewpoint being imposed through the power of government. Although an important issue, this is one that is political (a matter of basic freedom) rather than one that is strictly cultural (a matter of worldview).

It becomes cultural as well as political, however, when the majoritarian religion which attempts to dominate government embraces theocracy. All too common in Islamic nations, theocracy has its adherents in the United States as well. For example,

Cover of "Visions of Reality: What Fundam...

Cover via Amazon

So let us be blunt: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberties of the enemies of God.
—Gary North, quoted in quoted in Albert J. Menendez, Visions of Reality: What Fundamentalist Schools Teach (Prometheus Books, 1993)

The best method of forestalling theocracy is through the expansion of religious diversity. The goal must be to reduce the dominant sect to minority status. This would not be necessary in the United States if the Supreme Court consistently embraced the principle of separation of church and state. But it does not, and so the doctrines of Christianity necessarily become politicized, and appropriate targets for those who love religious freedom. Christianity will have enemies so long as Christians take advantage of government to impress their religious practices on all.

But the key cultural transformation of the age lies elsewhere: educated people around the world are converting from a supernatural worldview to a natural one. The former is inherently monotheist/polytheist/deist; the latter inherently atheist/adeist. Freethinkers tend to gravitate toward atheism or agnosticism because they see the crevasses in the various supernatural worldviews popular today. But I would assert that atheism doesn’t really work in a vacuum: it requires, or at least belongs to, a naturalistic framework.

Atheists, in other words, should not only be saying that supernaturalism is false; they should also be asserting the logical corollary: naturalism is true. I find modern atheism frustrating sometimes because many atheists seem to back away from this obvious step. They are eager to declare that theism doesn’t work, but strangely afraid to step beyond that.

What does embracing a natural worldview mean? It means more than merely saying there is insufficient evidence of a God. If atheism stops dead in its tracks there, at “insufficient evidence,” then it amounts to nothing more than doubt about some forms of supernaturalism. Like Galileo backtracking out of fear, it is equivalent to admitting “naturalism is where the evidence points, but I’m afraid to go there: let me play safe and just say there is insufficient evidence for God.”

In stopping early, atheists leave the underlying premises of supernaturalism intact and often uncontested. I must admit that doesn’t sit well with me. I became an atheist not because the evidence for theism was insufficient, but rather because I saw that the underlying premises of supernaturalism had to be false and, in complementary fashion, that the underlying premises of naturalism were sustainable and even compelling. “Supernaturalism must be false, naturalism is sustainable, therefore there is no God.”  Compare that to “There is no evidence for God or gods, therefore supernaturalism is unsupported.”

It is time for atheists to move fully to the other side of the divide between the worldviews. Too many atheists and agnostics (so it seems to me) still have a foot on the supernatural side. They hang balanced between irreconcilable worldviews for no reason at all. Except this: their misunderstanding of the underlying incompatibility of the two worldviews. Rejecting one ought to go part and parcel with embracing the other.

Perhaps the fundamental difference between them concerns the place and role of intelligence and its accoutrements. Supernaturalism places intelligence beyond the brain; naturalism places it within. Supernaturalism sees knowledge as something basic which underlays God’s creation like a blueprint: information is out there in the world, waiting to be discovered by us. Naturalism, in contrast, sees knowledge (and information) as something we create on the inside (within human consciousness) and apply to the world around us to our benefit.

For the theist, then, knowledge is something present from the beginning of the world which our minds can pluck like an apple from the tree of existence. For the atheist, knowledge is a faculty which came into existence only after millions of years of natural selection: not an apple to be plucked from the world, but an inborn capability of our species most beneficial to pursue.

Mull that distinction if you want to understand why theists and atheists so often talk past each other.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Christianity, Naturalism, State & Church, Supernaturalism | 2 Comments

Secular Solemnizing Statement

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Dwight

Atheists don’t do invocations or prayers. We recite no magic words, beseech no deities, invoke no figments of imagination for public worship. But this doesn’t mean that atheists are incapable of language of the sort appropriate (according to SCOTUS) to solemnize a session of federal, state or local government.

Without such solemnizing language to evoke our most cherished illusions—apparently—government might fall apart. So say the Christians who have controlled such solemnizing for the past 200 years, though one might suspect they are more concerned with creating a public aura of authority for their particular religious practices than abetting democracy.

So in the spirit of providing a secular alternative to religious invocations and prayers, I submit the following for use at government functions.

Life, wrapped on each end by oblivion, is all we have.

Pale Blue Dot

There is nothing else. Let us therefore not drop our heads, but raise them and look at the world bravely and honestly.

As Carl Sagan wrote in his wonderful book, Pale Blue Dot…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

In the vastness of the universe, earth is small and insignificant and temporary. Sagan continued…

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

So it is. Life is a bright and wonderful season between walls of enveloping darkness. For one transient moment we have our day.

Like sparklers we transit the darkness, flashing into the bright rich colors of this brief day.

We each travel our short distance lit with the quiet insouciance of life, between vast walls of oblivion.

In this brief moment exists all our hopes and dreams, our pleasures and pains, our joys, our sadness, our love for one another.

In this brief and transient sparkle across the darkness, we have our all.

We live, and then we pass the brightness on to others before our own extinction in the dark.

On this fragile blue­-green planet. Alone in the vastness of the universe. Alone with each other amid the ever­stretching darkness.

But what brightness it is, this bit of life on earth! What sparkle and color and brilliance we have for our brief day! To share this with each other, to live it and joy in it together!

So we gather as members of this brief community of life, working together as we must.

Let us endeavor, collectively and cooperatively, to do our very best to preserve and improve the brightness of this transitory bit of existence. By our communal effort, let us enhance life on this small, pale blue dot we call home.

We have each other. There is nothing else.

Posted in Atheist Culture, Prayer, State & Church | Comments Off on Secular Solemnizing Statement

An Aura of Ownership

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Dwight

The purpose of solemnizing prayer before a legislative session is to create an aura of ownership over the proceedings which follow. Five Catholics on the Supreme Court find that permissible.

Although bringing church to work feels wholly comfortable to the Catholic conservatives on the court, no large corporation in the US would countenance invocations or prayers before business meetings: the inappropriateness would be more than obvious. It might even be seen as religious harassment, something the justices can’t imagine so long as the prayers occur in a government venue rather than a corporate one.

The court has made it clear that our Constitution is no barrier to the sense of ownership Christians love to assert over government meetings. From the beginning Christians have taken advantage of their majority status to push their particular religious practices (such as prayer or invocations to the Lord) into sessions of government at federal, state, and local levels. James Madison understood how pernicious such infringements can be. After issuing a proclamation for a national day of prayer during the war of 1812 (a war during which the British burned the white house), Madison came to regret it for “seem[ing] to imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.”

But the Catholic court has decided otherwise, and if we are to dislodge this sense of Christian ownership over our government, we must attack Christianity at it weakest point. What is this weakness? It is the barbaric morality and pagan doctrines that hang round its neck like rotting flesh. This 1900 year old religion is an ancient carcass preventing Americans from moving forward and taking care of human needs in the modern world. We will make that plain. Held back by the rot of their religion, many Christians have embraced torture, prejudice, and ignorance—a fact captured repeatedly in polls.

If we are to turn American government around, we must reduce Christianity to minority status. We must ridicule and attack and expose it. We must force believers to see their religion from the outside, and face its fundamental flaws and absurdities.

The Catholics on the court have left no other way open to us. They have enshrined a political role for their religion, and in doing so have made Christianity fair game.

Posted in Christianity, Christinsanity, Religion, State & Church | Comments Off on An Aura of Ownership

Moral Realism

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Dwight

I strongly recommend this post on moral realism by Geoff Sayre-McCord (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Posted in Atheology, Ethics & Morality, Naturalism | Comments Off on Moral Realism

Naturalism & Supernaturalism

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Dwight

One way of distinguishing supernaturalism and varying shades of naturalism is to consider them as providing different solutions to the “problem” of our lack of complete knowledge of the world. It is evident that we lack complete knowledge of the physical world, that is to say of “nature”. Why?

The supernaturalist says incomplete knowledge is inevitable because nature has its ultimate source in something which is beyond nature and (more importantly) beyond human knowability. This “beyond” is something immaterial (non-physical) and because of this it is something that lies outside the possibility of empirical knowledge. (There are different versions of supernaturalism which correspond to different claims about the “beyond.”)

Naturalism has to provide an alternate explanation for our lack of complete knowledge of the world, and there are different flavors of naturalism depending on the explanation given. I’ll touch on a few here.

1) Complete knowledge is possible, we just haven’t gotten there yet. This is the position taken by Bertrand Russell in Has Man a Future? Someday, scientists will know everything there is to know about the world – in a few hundred (or thousand) years, our knowledge will be complete. Advocates of naturalism who take this view today are often quick to accuse theists of a “God of the Gaps” fallacy. Sure, there is a lot we don’t know—yet. Give us time.

2) Complete knowledge is possible in theory, but not in practice. This version of naturalism maintains that although there are no theoretical limits to complete empirical knowledge of the world, there are practical limits that will prevent us from ever achieving the goal. Among other things, this means there will always appear to be room for a “God of the Gaps”.

3) Complete knowledge is impossible in both theory and practice. This is because knowing is an inventive process which in principle can be carried on ad infinitum. It is not a process of mining “facts” already embedded in the physical world because, quite simply, that’s not where facts exist (facts are sensations, aspects of animal/human consciousness). We don’t discover knowledge but invent it, and then winnow out what is most useful (i.e. “true”) by adopting point of view invariance (which provides objectivity) and by testing using the scientific method (which provides reliability). The world does not contain facts—we do.

This last version of naturalism maintains a view of knowledge that is far removed from that employed by supernaturalism. As a consequence, it can be difficult for people in one camp to understand the reasoning of those in the other. We live in different worldviews, if not in different worlds.

Supernaturalism assumes that the physical world is inherently knowable in itself, but that human knowledge will always be incomplete because there’s more to the story than just the physical world. My preferred version of naturalism assumes the opposite—that the physical world is inherently unknowable in that sense because it contains no mental substrate—no blueprint. But importantly, this is not so much a claim about the nature of the physical world as it is a claim about the nature of knowing.

Humans evolved with a capability to invent factual knowledge about anything we can detect and distinguish, and in that sense we absolutely do know the world. However, the physical world is other to that knowledge, precisely because knowledge is a simulacrum. The facts we know are experiences in consciousness, and like all aspects of consciousness they are nothing other than sensations we have. The physical world (exclusive of organisms) contains no sensations according to the natural worldview, and therefore contains no facts, no knowledge, no blueprint.

When we know the world, we do not know its nature. We know (at best) a useful model of its nature – thus our knowledge will always be incomplete. This is a consequence of the nature of knowledge—it evolved to be useful. But it is also a consequence of the inherent mismatch between knowledge and the natural world. Whatever the nature of the physical world is, it is not the same as the nature of knowledge, otherwise there would be no such mismatch.

The supernatural worldview paints an entirely different picture of these matters, so much so that it is a colossal struggle to explain the underlying concepts of a natural worldview to theists. Even among like-minded advocates of naturalism there is a great amount of confusion. This can be chalked up, I think, to the fact that we are all struggling to abandon the inapplicable terminology of supernaturalism—struggling even to recognize that it is now inapplicable—so that we may completely enter a natural worldview.

It is that different.

 

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism | Comments Off on Naturalism & Supernaturalism

Cartesian Doubt

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Dwight

Philosophy begins with science.

Meditations, 1641 edition

How do we know this? We can try to begin with philosophy. We can start with Cartesian doubt. Unfortunately for the history of philosophy, Rene Descartes did not take his first philosophy far enough. He began his night of doubt by questioning the reliability of his senses and came to the recognition that a demon—perhaps beneficent, perhaps malicious—could be the source of all his sensations and thoughts. But all was not lost. Asking “do I even exist?” he noticed, entailed something existing to ask the question. Furthermore, that he experienced this something-asking-the-question as himself was enough to demonstrate that some sort of himself existed, even if produced by a demon. In short, thinking about his existence proved in some fundamental way—Descartes realized—that he must exist. In this sense his existence could not be denied, even by God.

That was easy enough. But there are other things to doubt. Descartes recognized the difficulty of determining whether dreams were more real than waking life—a problem famously presented in the inner chapters of the Chuang-Tzu. But here Descartes failed to recognize that there is an identity problem. The problem is this: my thoughts often go away—when I sleep and do not dream, when I am knocked out, when I am subjected to general anesthesia (although we can excuse Descartes for not being aware of this last). When my thoughts resume, how do I know I am the same “I”? Certainly I feel that I’m a continuing entity, but that could be a simple trick of Descartes’ demon.

And there is an even deeper identity problem. My thoughts are never the same. They are diverse, not just in subject but in content and feel. What connects all these thoughts into a single “me”? We must remember that for Descartes, the word “thought” encompasses not just our internal dialog of words, but all of our feelings and sensations. What unites a pain in the knee with a feeling of elation? What unites a smell of roses with an experience of blueness? What unites any of these with my thought “Cogito ergo sum”?

And there is a continuity problem. One moment I may be thinking about what I am and if I even exist, and the next moment I may be wondering where I should eat lunch. A moment later I feel a muscle twitch in my arm. Perhaps my arm, hunger and lunch are all illusions, but nonetheless I experienced these in succession without any way of explaining (if experiences are all I am) how or why one led to the next. That is the continuity problem, and it only increases the difficulty of identifying all these experiences as the same me. (Of course, I have a sense of them as “me” but that could be a trick by the demon.)

Furthermore, what separates my thoughts from yours? What makes mine belong to me and yours belong to you? It does not seem to be something that our thoughts and feelings themselves control. They just are, and in being seem to belong to me or to you. But why?

At first philosophy, all I know about myself is that I am a bundle of experiences. Or I seem to be. But what “bundles” these experiences together? What makes them mine? What am I—what can I possibly be—that I experience this bundle as myself? These questions need answers, but at this point it is unclear how we can answer them.

Descartes’ Error

Descartes makes a logical mistake here. “I am, I exist—that is certain; but for how long do I exist?” he asks himself. “For as long as I think,” he answers, “for it might perhaps happen, if I totally ceased thinking, that I would at the same time completely cease to be.” From this he draws the invalid conclusion that “[thought] alone is inseparable from my nature.” Yet, if thinking proves his existence, it doesn’t follow that thought alone is inseparable from his nature. And it certainly does not follow, as he writes shortly afterwards, that the

knowledge of my being does not depend on things whose existence is not yet known to me, and consequently and even more certainly, it does not depend on any of those things that I can picture in my imagination. …

But what then am I? A thinking being. What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms, which denies, which wills, which rejects, which imagines also, and which perceives. (All quotes from Second Meditation, Laurence J. Lafleur translation, 1960.)

In attempting to tease out his nature from cogito ergo sum Descartes has fallen into a trap. True enough, thinking about his existence is logically necessary if he is to have knowledge of his existence. But neither his existence nor the nature of his existence is logically dependent upon his having knowledge of his existence. Contrary to his claim, it is entirely possible that Descartes’ “knowledge of my being” is dependent on something whose existence is at this point unknown to him. Logically, for example, it could be dependent upon the actual existence of his physical body (even though he currently can’t be sure it’s real) since it could be his body which generates his thoughts. He has confused “knowledge of my existence” with “nature of my existence”—”I know I am” with “what I am.”

But accusing Descartes of a logical error raises the specter of another doubt. How can we know if our sense of what is logical and illogical is reliable? Where does “logic” come from? And whence my sense of what is logical? Perhaps the demon instilled me with this sense of logic—how then can I know it’s reliable? How am I to determine whether my claim that Descartes made a logical mistake has any truth value? And the same goes for my sense of “truth.” Is it anything more than a preference I have—a preference instilled in me willy-nilly by God or demon?

It seems that we are stuck. If our sense of logic and truth is not reliable, then our thoughts can never be reliable and we are at a dead end, as far as philosophy goes. We must give up on rational thought. So what next? How can we proceed? Or can we?

Of course we don’t know that logic and truth are unreliable. We don’t know if they have a universal basis, or if they’re just something locally instilled in us by the demon. And we don’t know the demon’s game—are its intentions beneficent or malicious?

Rationalism dies here. Analytic philosophy dead-ends. At this point we can only proceed with working assumptions. We are forced to be pragmatic and see where that gets us. And our first working assumption must be that logic is reliable enough, that the tools we have to determine truth are valid enough—at any rate our thoughts are useless (outside of social contexts) without these assumptions. And being pragmatic, we will try to maximize the usefulness of our thoughts. Let’s see where this approach gets us.

It doesn’t lead us to certain knowledge about our nature or the nature of the world—we’ve already seen that. Analytically, we can’t get to final answers. But we seem to have other tools—we can use our senses to study the world empirically, we can develop synthetic knowledge of ourselves and the world using the scientific method (which seems to be a method of maximizing the usefulness of our thoughts). How does this help? Well, we can lay down some possible world views—supernatural, natural, and so on—and see which one seems to fit best with what we discover. Our answers will never be final, since they will rely on empirical knowledge—but maybe this fact itself is an essential component of understanding ourselves.

Back to Identity

But let’s not get too far ahead. We still have an identity problem. Before continuing, it may be fitting to summarize where our Cartesian doubt has left us. Our senses are sometimes not reliable, but it may be that neither are our thoughts, even our sense of logic and truth may be something local instilled in us by a demon. We can know that we exist (at least when we ask the question), and we can presume that we exist whenever we have experiences, but we can’t say what we (as these experiences) are or where we (as these experiences) come from, or what (outside of the demon) provides identity to these experiences we think of as us, or what separates your experiences, dear reader, from mine.

We have not yet—but we must—push these questions to the demon. We will want to do this because if we are reliant on the demon for our existence and identity, then we have to seek the answers to our questions there. When we do so, we discover that if the demon also has thoughts and experiences—if it is through thinking and experiencing that the demon instills us with the same—then it also has an identity problem. Where do its thoughts come from, and what makes those thoughts belong to it? What gives the demon its continuity and identity? We could postulate a regression of demons, but that seems never-ending.

Maybe we are thinking about this wrongly.

The problem with thoughts, we saw earlier, is that they are never the same. Because of this simple fact, there is a problem of continuity and identity. And we must remember that when we talk of “thoughts” we are talking about consciousness—about everything we seem to experience. The smell of cinnamon, the redness of a cardinal flying past the window, the taste of garlic, the dull throbbing of a headache, the excitement of winning a poker hand, thoughts about existence, even thoughts about gods and demons—these experiences are so diverse, so unlike each other that we are hard pressed to identify anything they have in common. (Note that we are not talking about what these experiences reference, but about their internal content. It doesn’t matter to the point at hand whether their references are valid or invalid, exist or do not exist.)

Now, one thing that seems to unite them is that they are all sensations of one sort or another—they are all experienced, yes. But what provides continuity from one to the next, what unites them into my experiences, my sensations? Perhaps I can point outside myself to the demon. But if I attribute these experiences which make up me to an external demon—how does that demon go about creating the experiences that become me, and separating them from the experiences that become you?

Of course, the demon faces the same dilemma—if it also experiences thoughts and feelings.  It seems, logically (and therefore provisionally, given our uncertainties about logic), that the only way to resolve this without an infinite regression of demons, is to assume that the demon does not have thoughts and feelings. Whatever the demon is, it is not like us. It is not experiential. Making this step allows us to have a demon who is our source and accounts for our identity, yet does not have to face its own Cartesian doubt. This move, it seems to me, brings clarity.

In fact, it seems that the only good way to resolve the continuity and identity problems which exist when we consider experience by itself, is to postulate a source for our experiences which—whatever it is—is not experience. If this source is our demon, then it is a demon that does not think or feel. This doesn’t mean we know what the nature of the demon is, but we do know what it is not. And that is a start.

However, one thing we can say about the demon’s nature is this: whatever that nature is, it encompasses the capacity to create our experiences. We must still ask how the demon distinguishes my experiences from yours—the answer, perhaps, is that it doesn’t have to. Perhaps we are products of different demons, since nothing forces us to conclude that there must be a single demon. This thought raises the interesting prospect that Descartes’ demon—and ours—is none other than the body itself. By postulating physical bodies, we have a potential (and common sense) resolution to the continuity and identity issues that have been raised. It would follow that the nature of our bodies must encompass the capacity to create the sensations (including thoughts) which we experience as us.

Previously we saw that when Cartesian doubt is followed to the end, we reach a point where we must abandon rationalism. Even our sense of logic and truth can be questioned, and our only resort is to embrace them with reservations. Like our senses, we cannot be sure of their reliability. Nevertheless, we seem to have no other tools with which to know the world. We have no other manner of addressing our doubts. Answers with rational, logical certainty are beyond us. But we have the usefulness of the scientific method and that is the next best thing. It allows us to move forward from our Cartesian doubt in a pragmatic manner—by postulating alternative world views (naturalism, supernaturalism, etc) and seeing which one best fits the evidence from science and fits the results of our attempt at first philosophy.

I said at the beginning that philosophy begins with science. Perhaps that is not correct. But Descartes’ method has demonstrated, if nothing else, that philosophy must end with science.

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum | 5 Comments

Are Atheism & Morality Compatible (part 2)

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Dwight

We ended part one with three barriers to postulating an  evolutionary source of human morality—obstacles which Henderson considers insurmountable. First, he claims that evolution is incapable of leading to the development of animals who are altruistically unselfish or compassionate. He argues that if morality evolved through biological processes, it would have to be because humans needed it to survive. But, he continues

If this were true, for any claim to be moral, it would have to serve the practical purpose of advancing the human race. So compassion for the dying would be immoral, and killing mentally handicapped children would be moral. Perhaps the most moral action would be men raping many women and forcing them to birth more children.
Morality, in this view, can only mean those actions that are helpful to make more fit humans. It does nothing to help us grapple with the truth that it’s always wrong to torture diseased children or rape women.
—Pastor Rick Henderson: Why There Is No Such Thing as a Good Atheist

He then introduces a second obstacle. Namely that

…morality was developed to ensure the success of societies, which are necessary for human survival and thriving. Like the rules of a board game, morality is contrived to bring us together for productivity and happiness. If this were true, there is nothing to which we can appeal when we find the behavior of other societies repugnant and reprehensible. Because morality is the construct of a social group, it cannot extend further than a society’s borders or endure longer than a society’s existence. —Pastor Rick Henderson: Why There Is No Such Thing as a Good Atheist

Like most theists, Henderson is convinced that a single, objective morality is absolutely needed, and since evolution can’t yield a moral code that is objective, a natural worldview is a non-starter. Without an objective source for morality outside of us, so the argument goes, we lack the necessary foundation for moral judgments about the actions not just of other individuals, but also of other social groups outside our own.

Henderson’s third obstacle, takes this a step further. Without this external source of morality, he argues, social reformers would have no leg to stand on.  Since a culture’s values represent the preferences of the majority and are important for social cohesion, it follows that under a natural worldview the most immoral citizens would always be “not merely the ones who transgress [a particular moral] code but the ones who intend to change it”. Abolitionists such as James Oglethorpe and William Lloyd Garrison would have to be considered immoral for opposing the values of their society—albeit once the abolitionists succeeded in changing attitudes about slavery their opposition becomes praiseworthy. But (and this is Henderson’s point) without an objective morality, whether social reformers are doing good or doing ill depends entirely on whether they are successful or not. And this will not do.

Is Objectively Morality Possible?

Henderson’s argument, in short is as follows: (1) morality must have its source in something objective and outside of us in order for morality to work as needed; (2) God is the only possible objective source for human morality.

But as we will see, both points are wrong. We will see that objective morality simply can’t work—not even within a supernatural worldview. And it can’t work for God because, as it turns out, God is in the same boat we are when it comes to morality. If you remember, I pointed out in part one how different beings in different places must have different values to drive their behaviors. But now let me draw your attention to a more fundamental problem.

Theists say that only when there is an objective set of moral values existing outside of us, does it becomes possible to judge our actions by their rightness (that is to say, to make valid moral judgments). They reason that if values exist within us then they are subjective, not objective, and consequently we cannot prove that they are right—that is, we cannot prove they are preferable to the subjective values claimed by someone else.

This sounds sensible, until we attempt to apply it to God. And it is appropriate to test it by applying it to God. After all, God must be a moral agent too—else it cannot be claimed that God’s actions are good. Let’s look at this more carefully.

If something is good because it is what God dictates (because it comports with God’s values), then God’s goodness is just whatever God prefers. In other words, God has no way of knowing if His chosen values are truly good; all He can confirm is that they are his values. And likewise for us. We have no independent or objective source for determining the goodness of God. We can’t rely on the Bible (or any other holy book) because first we need some objective way of determining if the moral advice in that book is good or bad—i.e. was the holy book inspired by a good God or by a devil falsely claiming to be a good God?

If the Christian insists on reliance on the Bible no matter what, it means that they are declining to judge the goodness of God’s set of values (versus, say, the Devil’s set of values), and instead have decided to arbitrarily defer to God’s power—or at least, to the power of whatever being inspired the Bible, and hope it’s the “one righteous God” the Bible claims.

The problem here is that without a source of morality that lies outside the Bible—and in fact lies outside of any holy writ—we can’t know the true source of that holy writ. But actually, we are in even worse shape than this. Even if we can somehow determine that the morality of the Bible came from God, we have no way of knowing if that morality is actually good or bad. We have got to be able to judge it independent of its source in order to really know whether that source is to be trusted. Is the God behind the Bible really good?

God is more powerful than the Devil, a Christian might argue, therefore his values should be preferable to us. But clearly this is not right. First, how can we ever be sure that the values of the Bible are from this God unless we have an independent way of judging goodness. And second, if we do have an independent way of recognize the goodness of certain actions and the badness of others—then it follows that goodness is not good because it is what is dictated by God, or because God is all powerful and we fear God’s wrath, but rather because we contain our own moral compass to judge what is good and what is bad.

It follows that for objective morality to work, it’s source must be something independent not just of our personal desires and wishes, but also independent of any words written in a particular book—and independent of God himself.

Furthermore, consider this. If an action is good because God dictates it, or because the goodness of that action depends simply on the fiat of the values instilled in us by some greater being, then we have no independent way to know if those values are truly, objectively good. Perhaps the devil instilled them in us rather than God. Or perhaps the being we think is God is really devil, and the being we think devil is the “True and Righteous One”. We are incapable of brokering such questions unless we have an independent source for determining goodness. But what independent source can we have, if not something from within our own nature? We have no manner of determining the reliability of anything else.

Put another way, all that we have to go on is our own sense of goodness and justice. But that is not reliable to judge between God and devil—and specifically not reliable to determine the goodness or badness of the being we worship—unless it provides us a basis which is independent of that being to use as a reference point. But morality based on something within our nature cannot be independent of the creator of that nature. And yet, if there is goodness within us, or a moral sense within us, we have no choice but to rely on it.

This means, for the theist, that we cannot judge whether the values instilled in us by our creator are objectively good. They are simply the values given us. And that has to be good enough. If it happens that those values are objectively evil, that our creator was imperfect, we cannot point to a set of objective values lying outside both us and God to broker the question (and if we could, it would follow that our God is not the true God.)

Perhaps this becomes clearer when we look at it from God’s point of view. Where does God get his sense of right and wrong? If it is from a source outside himself, who created that source? Is there a God beyond God? And how can God answer the question of the actual goodness of the values coming from this outside source? Only by referring to the sense of morality he has within himself. But whence did that come?

To summarize: for God to objectively judge the true goodness of his actions, there must be some referent outside himself. Yet how can he judge the correctness of any outside referent? Only by comparing it to his own internal sense of values.

As we have seen, what applies for God applies for us as well. Morality must stop at a source inside of us. And this solution—the only one which can possibly work—is applicable whether or not our worldview be theist or atheist. It applies whether God or evolution is the source of our human nature.

Thus Henderson’s plea for an objective source of morality is unworkable, It fails no matter the worldview. Morality must be subjective; it must stem from something inside of us. It must be a product of our human nature.

This should make it clear that a natural worldview is at no disadvantage regarding morality—at least, no disadvantage that does not also affect theists and their worldview.

What is Needed for Morality to Work

In order for morality to work in a manner that allows us to legitimately use it to judge individual behaviors as good or bad, or to judge the mores of our society, or to make valid judgments about other cultures and societies, three features are absolutely necessary.

(1) there must exist a difference (at least potentially) between what individuals desire to do and what is right to do.

(2) the source for determining what is right to do must be independent of our individual desires.

(3) this source for determining what is right to do must be the same for all human beings.

Working backwards, if we examine point 3 we notice that the source does not have to be objective; that is, it does not have to come from outside of us. It it perfectly fine if the source lies within us, within our common human nature. As we saw earlier, an outside source doesn’t work anyway—neither for God nor us.

We know already, if we think about it, that morality is species-specific. What is right behavior for a lion differs from what is right for us. We know that we cannot morally condemn a hungry lion for pouncing on a child. We will curse the lion and kill it if we can, but we cannot fault it on moral grounds. It is not human; it is not bound by human  values.

The lesson here is that morality is not and need not be absolute and universal. We can state it this way: the source of human morality must be broad enough to include all human beings, but not so broad that it includes lions and other non-human species. The first part of this, of course, is necessary if we are to legitimately be in a position to condemn a human being who kills a child. From this analysis, it becomes clear that morality is species-specific. We don’t condemn the praying mantis that eats its mate after copulation, but we would certainly be morally shocked if a human being did the same.

Point 2—that the source for determining what is right must be independent of our individual desires—is really the crux of the issue we are facing here. That is because if 2 is present then 1 follows necessarily. And without at least a potential difference between the choices we make and the choices we should make, there can be no valid judgments about human behavior. This is so whether we are a product of divinity or a product of evolutionary history. There must be some way for us to compare what we did to what we ought to have done.

So the question is a simple one, really. Is it possible for a species (specifically us, of course, but more generally any species) to evolve so that there comes to be this potential difference between what an individual member of the species desires to do and what is right as a member of its species for it to do? Is there a potential gap between the decisions an individual actually makes and the decisions the individual should make? Can a species evolve with a decision-making process which allows for this kind of disjoint between actual behavior and behavior that should (or should not) have been carried out?

Henderson can’t imagine it possible, at least not within a natural worldview. Most atheists (and I would suggest most scientists who study the subject) don’t see any theoretical problem in this regard. In part three, I will try to explain why.

Posted in Atheology, Ethics & Morality, Naturalism | Comments Off on Are Atheism & Morality Compatible (part 2)