Zeno & Infinity

Posted on September 19, 2006 by Dwight

Pivotal moments in one’s intellectual development come unexpectedly. For me the key moment arrived in 9th grade English class when Miss Blumenstock gave a brief run-down of Zeno’s “theory of motion” [see footnote] and asked us to write a paper supporting or refuting him. Never could I have guessed it would lead to atheism.

That is exactly where it led, though it would take 5 1/2 years to get there.

Zeno’s “theory”, as she presented it, was that motion was not continuous but rather consisted of discrete segments. The path of an arrow shot across the horizon would actually, according to Zeno, not be smooth (although it might appear so to our eyes) but would in fact jump from segment to segment.

Why didn’t Zeno think motion was smooth and continuous? The answer is mathematics. Zeno realized there could not be an actual infinity of numbers between point a and point b on a numberline: numbers by their nature were inherently finite and countable, and therefore the path of an arrow across the sky had to consist of finite, countable steps.

If we think about it, we realize Zeno’s arrow was an early call for the Cosmological argument, which hinges on the assertion that there cannot be an actual infinity. There can’t be, per the Cosmological argument, an infinite regress of physical causes and there can’t be, per Zeno, an infinite number of steps in the motion of any object.

Just as there are two types of infinity — the macro infinity of going on and on to higher numbers and the micro infinity of more numbers between any two numbers on a number line — so there are two types of physical infinities which one can deny in the world. Zeno denied one, the Cosmological argument denies the other. Continue reading →

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Theism’s Rose-Colored Glasses

Posted on August 13, 2006 by Dwight

Atheists often find it difficult to understand why theists continue to believe in God despite lack of evidence and the nearly insurmountable problem of evil. But the theist position isn’t difficult to understand once we recognize that the divide between theism and atheism results from radically different premises about the nature of knowledge.

In his excellent book, The Existence of God (Cornell University, 1965), Wallace I. Matson distinguishes between “crude” and “subtle” versions of the Cosmological argument for God’s existence. It is the suble version that interests me here. Put very briefly, it is this:

If the world is intelligible, then God exists. But the world is intelligible. Therefore God exists. — Matson, The Existence of God, page 62

What is meant by intelligibility? It means, briefly, that the world is explainable in terms of causal relationships, scientific laws, “sufficient reason” (“There is a Sufficient Reason why everything that is, is so and not otherwise.” — Leibniz). In investigating the world, says the theist, scientists uncover this underlying causality and framework, that is to say, scientists tap into and thereby discover the intelligence with which the world is imbued. That it is so imbued is unquestionable; that the source of the imbuing is God is obvious, even if not strictly provable.

The atheist position is that the theist has made a basic mistake. Like the kid who puts on rose-colored glasses and sees a rosy world and concludes that the world is rose-colored, the theist fails to realize that the human mind necessarily imparts a patina of intelligibility to everything it illuminates. The theist sees causal relationships and a blueprint of scientific laws imbued in the physical world, whereas the atheist avers that these are only artifacts of the human mind, the currency itself of human intelligence shining on the world.

Intelligence, says the atheist, isn’t out there, it’s in here. And it got in here as a product of evolution, nothing more. We evolved to have minds, and our minds are essentially information-colored glasses which impart — unavoidably — a patina of information, properties, and relationships upon everything we think about.

Intelligibility is in us, not outside us, but no matter: it is just as useful either way.

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Ingersoll’s Birthday

Posted on August 11, 2006 by Dwight

Robert Green Ingersoll, one of the most famous progressives of the 19th century, was born August 11, 1833. Following in the tradition of Paine & Jefferson, Ingersoll spent his life as an advocate for progressive causes, becoming arguably America’s greatest orator at a time when oratory was practically the national pastime.

Had he not openly rejected Christianity and God, Ingersoll’s speaking skills would have taken him a long way in the political arena, perhaps to the highest office in the land. Few could match his ability to appeal to both heart and intellect at once.

His books and speeches are still impressive today; they are intelligent and eminently quotable despite the patina of more than a century between his time and ours. Continue reading →

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Intro to Thomas Aquinas

Posted on July 29, 2006 by Dwight

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) sought to find a workable fusion of Aristotle and the Church; nonetheless he strongly objected to Plato’s formulation of man as strictly a thinker and the Platonic abandonment of matter. In particular, Plato’s program consisted of separating “being” from “becoming”. What exactly is meant by being as opposed to becoming — who knows?1

It is the kind of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that drives people away from philosophy. Whatever the distinction is supposed to be, it’s probably a poorly chosen one. But let’s see if we can figure it out. Being, one must suppose, refers to abstract Form or Ideas existing in our minds (Plato was enamored of mental talk like this) while becoming must refer, in the Platonic canon, to material things: always changing, growing, decaying and generally being messy (something Plato wanted nothing to do with).

Plato’s attitude toward bodily things strikes me more as the product of mental illness than of a rational thought process. Only a diseased mind, cut off from the rest of the self or warped by infection or chemical imbalance, concludes that mental imaginings alone are real, that the body is nothing. Indeed there is something very unreal about such an attitude, something pathological. Nor is the foolishness of the Platonic attitude difficult to show even relying strictly on reason — which brings us back from parenthesis to Aquinas.

Aquinas understood the distinction Plato was trying to make between being and becoming, and he strenuously objected to it. Plato had to try to wash matter — the material world of bodies — out of the picture as if it didn’t exist. But it does exist, Aquinas said, and Plato’s philosophy can’t account for why.

If I understand him correctly, Aquinas maintained that Plato’s abstract ideas (the abstract idea of a tree, for instance) have in themselves (whether held in our mind or in God’s) absolutely no power to bring real, material trees into existence. The particulars of the world can’t be thought into being by thinking universals, no matter who is doing the thinking. But not being able to explain how matter comes to exists is only part of the problem. In the Platonic system, Aquinas saw, there could never be a satisfactory explanation of why matter exists. Continue reading →

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Aquinas and the 2nd Way

Posted on July 29, 2006 by Dwight

I was first exposed to Aquinas’ 5 proofs of God’s existence as a college freshman — a strongly religious theistic freshman, at that — yet immediately I saw that his proofs were flawed. They didn’t work to prove God at all. My thought at the time was that if you substituted the human mind for God in the proofs, they worked just as well. The general conclusion I came at the time was that the type of God the proofs addressed was wrong: that our concept of God was too tainted with, too similar to, the human mind itself. The solution had to be in finding a better definition of God than the traditional one.

Surprisingly, at the time rejecting God never occurred to me as an option. Instead, I determined that the nature of God had to be quite different than traditionally conceived. God was not a creator-God, not a logos-God, but had to be some other kind of entity. I spent the next couple years trying to figure out what that entity might be.

Eventually I resolved the difficulty: by becoming atheist.

The Cosmological Argument

To give an idea of some of the stumbling blocks I perceive in the idea of God, let me quote Terry Miethe, himself paraphrasing Aquinas’ “Second Way” or second proof of God’s existence. Continue reading →

Posted in Cosmological, Existence Arguments, Non-Existence Arguments | 4 Comments

God’s Physical Problem

Posted on July 29, 2006 by Dwight

In the Warren-Flew Debate* on God’s existence, which took place in the North Texas State University Coliseum from Sept 20 to 23, 1976, Anthony Flew identified 4 ways in which the existence of a postulated being might be challenged.

The first way, he said, is to declare that the being in question is simply not to be found anywhere. This is how most questions of existence get addressed. Are there wolves in Manitoba? Is there a sea monster in Loch Ness? Well, let’s do an exhaustive search and find out.

This is not a useful approach, Flew observed, for settling the question of God’s existence. And the reasons are obvious. For one thing, God doesn’t have a specific locale that we can go to and search; for another, God lacks an observable body. Both those who believe God exists and those who disbelieve would expect the same result from any such search: nada.

The second way the existence of a being can be challenged, Flew explained, is by asserting that it not only can’t be found anywhere, but that it’s existence is biologically or physically impossible.

The third way which Flew presented involves a different kind of impossibility: asserting that the being in question is logically impossible: a round square or married bachelor, for example.

Flew’s forth way to challenge the existence of a being will also sound familiar. It is to claim that the being in question has been qualified to such an extent that it’s existence is untestable. By way of explanation, Flew presented the claim that prayers are always answered. Yet when presented with a situation in which a prayer does not seem to have been answered, the believer replies, “Oh the prayer was answered, but you know, sometimes the answer is ‘No’.” When all possible evidence (whether negative or positive) supports a proposition, that proposition has been rendered meaningless.

In his debate with Warren, Flew challenged God’s existence using the 3rd and 4th approaches above. But what I want to examine here is an argument based on the 2nd approach. Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Debates, Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments | 8 Comments

Atheism & Morals

Posted on July 9, 2006 by Dwight

In 1966 the Christian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre gave a lecture at Columbia University called “Atheism and Morals” (later published in a book titled, The Religious Significance of Atheism, Columbia University Press, 1969) which is remarkable for laying out in clear language the moral catastrophe that has befallen Western civilization over the past few centuries. MacIntyre has continued to write on the subject since, of course, but it is this lecture which I have in my hands now and will summarize.

Dostoyevsky wrote that “if God does not exist everything is permitted” [p. 31]*. MacIntyre maintains that this is mistaken and in fact turns it around, as we shall see. He tells us,

”My central thesis is the direct opposite of their view: I hold not that a loss of theistic belief produces a loss of moral belief and a change of practice, but rather that a change in the character of morality is at least partly responsible for the modern inability to accept theistic belief. That is, I wish to invert the Dostoyevskian contention about the relation between theism and morals.” [p. 38-39]*

Theism requires, MacIntyre maintains,

”a particular position with respect to morality: more specifically, if theism is to be coherent [it] must rely . . . upon an independently understood moral vocabulary. To this conclusion I now wish to add another and stronger thesis: namely that theistic practice depends upon the existence of independent moral practices.” [p. 39]*

Moral practices, he makes plain, which have ceased to be common today. But what exactly is he getting at? Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Ethics & Morality | 6 Comments

Beyond Atheism

Posted on July 9, 2006 by Dwight

Atheism is only the glitter on the surface of the sea of naturalism. Has the time come for atheists to dive below the surface and explore the depths?

Let’s face it, denying God’s existence draws the attention — negatively, of course — of those who are believers. Theists see atheists — with justification — as people who tear down the beliefs of others but don’t construct anything positive of their own. And most atheists agree that atheism is strictly a negative position.

As atheists, we see our job as throwing bombs at religion and God. “Think there’s a God, huh? Then what about this — ” and we toss the problem of evil at them. [Boom!] “Oh, you think the Bible is God’s word? Eat this –” [Blam!] It’s fun, and there are certainly plently of bombs to throw. More than that, we know we’re right and we’ve got a point – in fact lots of points — that religious people really ought to pay attention to. Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Atheist Culture, Naturalism | 6 Comments

Two Types of Knowing

Posted on June 13, 2006 by Dwight

If the world outside of our thoughts was of the same essence as the world of our thoughts, there would be only one kind of knowing. Yet philosophers have long recognized that knowing comes in two distinct varieties. There is knowing which is innate, Plato’s forms, Kant’s analytical knowledge—and there is knowing which is acquired through the senses, empirical knowledge.

Why should there be two types of knowing? Why should that be a feature of our existence? Yet it is. This is the key, the giveaway clue, perhaps the single most important observation in all of philosophy.

If the world and our thoughts were of the same basic stuff, there would only be one type of knowing. Yet we have a different kind of knowing for the world—one which is approximate, inexact, provisional—than we have for our thoughts themselves, and that means that the world and thoughts are different in essence. The domain of our thoughts is mental in nature, with an innate conceptual/rational/analytic framework. The world outside lacks any such framework. It is non-mental, non-rational, non-knowable in its essence.

The consequences of this are simple and significant.

We expect our thoughts to be rational and meaningful because that is appropriate for thoughts; but outside of our thoughts the world is not rational or meaningful because the outside’s essence is non-mental. Consequently it makes no sense to expect the outside world (the world outside thoughts) to have characteristics that pertain to thoughts, such as meaningfulness or rationality.

It is only common sense that the world outside our thoughts must be irrational and meaningless — otherwise we would never have developed two types of knowing.

To expect or wish otherwise is to be confused.

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Meaning & Value, Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments | 1 Comment

Mind, Matter & Divine Creation

Posted on June 13, 2006 by Dwight

Perhaps the greatest challenge to a naturalistic worldview is explaining consciousness. This difficulty has several aspects. How did experiencing and consciousness evolve? For that matter why would it have evolved? But more troublesome than the evolutionary question is the basic biological one. How can the brain cause sensations and subjective experiences as well as—to put it bluntly—create the mind? Many theists consider this last to be an insurmountable problem for advocates of naturalism.

The Theist’s Own Difficulty

The theist, however, faces an equivalent task. The problem of how mind and matter can interact with each other—much less one cause the other—does not disappear by adopting a supernatural worldview. In fact the difficulty the theist faces may be greater than that faced by the atheist for the simple reason that the theist is committed to a class distinction between spirit & body, mind & matter, to which the advocate of naturalism is not.

The natural scientist adopts the assumption that consciousness is some kind of physical phenomena. If it is a physical phenomena, then it should not be impossible for another physical phenomena to cause it. Understanding how this happens may still be quite difficult, but at least the relationship—between biological brain and physical phenomena of experiencing—is not conceptually impossible. (Of course, understanding how our thoughts can be “merely physical” remains a difficulty, but not an inherently unexplainable one.)

The theist, on the other hand, is committed to a fundamental distinction between matter and mind (or body & soul) that seems to make interaction between the two impossible to conceive. Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments | 2 Comments