Jerry Coyne and Mistaking the Definition of Science for a Conclusion of Science

Sometimes an author puts two things together that make it clear what is going on in his project. Jerry Coyne, while discussing the nefarious influence of the Templeton Foundation's money on science (p. 20), tells us this:

The notions of ultimate purpose and "teleology" (an external force directing evolution) are simply not part of science: this mixing of the scientific with the metaphysical is characteristic of Templeton's approach.

Then, on page 23 while quoting L.R. Hamelin, we are informed that:

Centuries of scientific investigation show that the best scientific theories, testable by observation, include nothing like a personal God. We find only a universe of blind, mechanical laws, including natural selection, with no foresight or ultimate purpose.

In the first quote, we are told that the exclusion of purpose is part of the definition of science; in the second quote, the exclusion of purpose is presented as though it is a conclusion of science, as though "ultimate purpose" was something science in principle might have found, but just didn't as it turned out.

Foresight and purpose, of course, don't need to be discovered by science to be known as real. They are manifest to common sense and, indeed, their denial makes a hash of science itself (see my first post on Coyne). Coyne had a purpose in writing his book, you have a purpose in reading this blog, and I have a purpose in writing it. That's just the data. A theory can either account for it or not - or perhaps, define it out of existence to avoid the uncomfortable problem of dealing with it.

Jerry Coyne and the Miracle of Atheism

I'm reading the hot New Atheist book by Jerry Coyne, Faith vs Fact: Why Science and Religion Incompatible.

We Christians, obviously, believe in miracles, and in particular the miracle of the Resurrection. Indeed, the miracle of the Resurrection is front and center in Christian faith. That centrality is, in fact, one of the reasons I find Christianity attractive. There is truth in advertising: The Resurrection is not (or should not be) an easy thing in which to believe - it is, according to St. Paul, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23). Every week at Mass we Catholics repeat the Nicene Creed and remind ourselves that being Catholic means believing in the staggering event of the Resurrection. But once that truth is accepted, everything else becomes easy: The entire Catholic Faith makes perfect sense in light of the Resurrection. The Church does not hide the stumbling block; it tells you up front that being Catholic means believing in something so difficult to believe as the Resurrection.

I find the opposite to be true of secular worldviews. Such worldviews are typically advertised as following from reason and skepticism, supposedly never demanding belief in anything that cannot stand the test of rational investigation. But as you examine the worldview in more depth, you inevitably discover some belief smuggled in that is at least as incredible as the Resurrection, and probably more so. Unlike the Resurrection, which is highlighted by the Church just to make sure you don't miss it, the incredible aspects of the secular worldview are passed over quickly, perhaps in the hope you won't notice them, or maybe because the advocate of the worldview hasn't even noticed them himself.

In Coyne's case, he tells us the following on page 15:

In other words, the notion of pure "free will", the idea that in any situation we can choose to behave in different ways, is vanishing. Most scientists and philosophers are now physical "determinists" who see our genetic makeup and environmental history as the only factors that, acting through the laws of physics, determine which decisions we make. That, of course, kicks the props out from under much theology, including the doctrine of salvation through freely choosing a savior, and the argument that human-caused evil is the undesirable but inevitable by-product of the free will vouchsafed us by God.

Of course, determinism kicks the props out not only from theology, but a lot of other things as well - including science and Coyne's book project itself. For if genetic makeup and environmental history are the only factors that determine which decisions we make, then Galileo's decision to believe in the heliocentric rather than geocentric model of the solar system was determined by genetic makeup and environmental history acting through the laws of physics just as much as any religious individual's belief in a savior. But of course Coyne doesn't really believe that - he thinks Galileo accepted the heliocentric universe because it is true, that truth having been discovered through science, genetics be damned. And what is the point of Coyne's book but to convince us through argument to decide for science against religion? I can only do that if the truth of Coyne's arguments is a causal factor in my decision to believe him or not. Truth, however, is not a causal agent in genetics, environmental determinism, or physics. The only possibility is that science, and popular books about science like Coyne's, somehow provide a miraculous or magical exception to the rule that our decisions are determined only by genetics and environmental history.

And in that case, the miracle at the center of Coyne's worldview is more incredible than the Resurrection, for the Resurrection is at least in principle possible in a theistic worldview. But Coyne's worldview explicitly excludes the possibility that our decisions might be determined by something other than genetics, environmental history, and physics. That's pretty much the definition of magic - an event that in principle cannot be rendered intelligible in terms of a principled understanding of the world.

Commentary on Waking Up by Sam Harris, part 2

On pages 12 and 13, Harris makes some good points about happiness and the variability of existence (points that are standard fare in classical philosophy) but are well-made nonetheless:

We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?... is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified, in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pin, old age, disease and death?

This is well-said, and Harris goes on to draw out the logic of the situation:

If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying one's desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.

The first thing to note is that Harris is looking for merely psychological well-being. But what of well-being simpliciter? We are more than merely our psychology, and the question may be asked if psychological well-being is a good when our overall human well-being is not. Tony Soprano, for example, sought help from a psychologist to overcome his panic attacks. It turned out that treating the panic attacks involved a more comprehensive psychological analysis of Soprano's life - the life of a mafia boss and killer. Can a mob killer be "psychologically healthy" yet remain, and be comfortable with, his life of crime? This was the question that bedeviled Soprano's psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, and raises the question of the relationship of the psychological sciences to an evaluation of human character.

In the book Artificial Happiness, physician Ronald Dworkin discusses the widespread use of psychotropic drugs to give people a feeling of well-being they don't really deserve. While such drugs are appropriate in some cases of genuine psychological illness, they are increasingly administered to people who are simply unhappy, and often for very good reasons. They are unhappy because they have messed up their lives through poor choices, alcohol, simple irresponsibility or unfortunate circumstances (e.g. a woman staying with an abusive husband.) Their feelings of unhappiness could be a spur to a reconsideration of their lives. Instead, they seek and are sometimes granted drugs that merely make them feel better, derailing any motivation they had to change themselves or their situations. The man who can't keep a job because he's too lazy to consistently get to work on time feels just cool with that; the woman with the abusive husband abandons any plans she had to leave him and thinks things are fine because she feels content with what is going on.

Psychological well-being is not a good thing if it doesn't reflect genuine well-being. Why does Harris focus on it? It is because he is captured by the scientistic mindset that does not permit a deep philosophical analysis of human nature. Such an analysis presupposes that some views of human well-being are better than others and, even more significantly, that they can be objectively ranked through philosophical investigation. And that implies that the truth about human nature, including its end or purpose, is also a philosophically available truth. The Enlightenment tradition of which Harris is a modern exemplar holds that such truth simply isn't available to us. We can pursue "happiness", but of what happiness consists - in terms of desires and their fulfillment - isn't something that can be objectively determined. We cannot say precisely in what absolute human well-being consists; but we can at least say in what psychological well-being consists.

The classical philosopher, as exemplified by Aristotle, is not afraid to rank desires or to insist that the truth concerning human nature, including its end, is a philosophically available truth.  That truth is that man is by nature a rational animal, and that fulfillment for him involves ordering his being to reason. Psychological well-being is not the primary goal here, it is merely a by-product of a deeper transformation, a transformation of character. Well-being for man means well-being in terms of virtue. The good man (the man who is truly "well") is courageous, temperate, just and wise, all virtues conditioned by reason. Man will experience pleasure at the result - psychological well-being - but that well-being is simply delight in the true good he possesses. Pursuing psychological well-being as an end in itself is, on this view,  to mistake the by-product for the product.

Modern thinkers are wary of speaking of human nature classically understood - that is, in terms that go beyond the restrictions of science to a philosophical consideration of man as such. Psychological well-being has the advantage that it sidesteps questions of the nature of man in terms of man's end or purpose, but for that very reason, will not turn out to be what an unsatisfied man is really looking for.

Commentary on Waking Up by Sam Harris, part 1

I'm reading Sam Harris's new book Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Harris, you may remember, is one of the New Atheists and is the author of, among other books, the popular The End of Faith. Less well-known is that Harris is an advocate of Buddhist meditation, and in this book he discusses meditation in terms of its benefits and its relationships to religion in general and atheism. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Harris is a pleasant author to read because of his straightforward style and obvious sincerity. I think he is sincerely wrong about many things, but one of his virtues is that he has the courage of his convictions and tells you exactly what he thinks in plain language. As I was reading along I noticed that he wrote so many things of which I felt the urge to respond that my space in the margins filled up. So instead of writing there, I'm going to write here. This will not be a book review or essay on Harris's work, simply my comments on Harris as I read through the book.

Here goes.

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In the first chapter, pages 4 and 5, Harris describes the results of his experimenting with the drug MDMA (Ecstasy) in 1987:

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal - and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love - I love you because... - now made no sense at all. 

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what was common to them all. 

The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of it no longer being obscured. Love was - as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages - a state of being... It would take many years to put this experience into context... I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.

Harris writes that what happened was a shift in "perspective" and not driven by "any change in the way I felt", but its significance is calculated in terms of how felt about his best friend, and how he would feel about a total stranger walking through the door. And at the end of the passage, he understands that he found an important psychological truth. Love, then, for Harris is a psychological experience and the state of being he mentions is a psychological state.

We may contrast that with the traditional Christian understanding of love, which is not so much a feeling or psychological state but an action. When Christ teaches what it means to love your neighbor as yourself, he teaches it in terms of parables like the Good Samaritan, a story that tells us what the Samaritan did and very little about what he felt. Harris and his friend take Ecstasy and sit around having warm feelings for each other and the world in general. All very nice, but where does that get Harris or anyone else?

Love, for the Christian, involves a state of being, but that state is much more than psychological and is dynamic rather than static. "Being" is an action word, and a man who is actually in a state of love must actually be doing something based on it. In fact, from the Christian perspective, simply having warm feelings about others that does not issue in action is very dangerous, since it invites one to mistake a mere psychological experience for the genuine state of love.

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On page 6, Harris notes that:

Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

Admissions like this are one of the things that makes Harris worth reading, since he doesn't deny the obvious as many atheists do. For them, religion must be a malignant force through and through with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. If it were, why have so many people followed it? There must be something about religion that accounts for its persistence over millennia. The typical atheist response here is to account for religion in terms of evolution or some reassuring but false consolation it provides. This isn't good enough either, as it is obvious that, whatever else may be said about it, religion has produced some remarkable people who have managed to transcend the ordinary human condition in some way - the Buddhist monk serene in his contemplation being an example. 

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page 9:

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience - self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light - constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call "I" is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is - the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at ta world that is separate from yourself - can be altered or entirely extinguished.

It's clear that Harris arbitrarily limits experience here. For example, while Harris does not accept revelation, there is nothing logically impossible about it. Someone could experience a private revelation from God through which God reveals certain truths to him inaccessible by other means. That experience being private, of course, means that it need not carry cognitive weight for anyone else, but that does not rule out the possibility that it could be genuinely meaningful for the person who experiences it. But in any case, Christianity has always depended on public witness rather than private revelation. The Apostles proclaimed the Gospel based on their witness of the risen Christ, a witness that involved him speaking to them, touching them, and eating their food. Subject experiences of ecstasy or love have nothing to do with. Today, the Church carries on the public witness of the Resurrection of Christ that was handed on to them through the ages starting with the Apostles. Now you may not buy that witness - as many did not buy it in the first century - but that is where the game is, not in subjective experience.

The doctrine that the self is an illusion involves profound consequences, and it will be interesting to see where Harris goes with it.

Craig, Law and the Evil God

I've been listening to the William Lane Craig - Stephen Law debate on the existence of God. Against the existence of God, Law deploys the evidential argument from evil in the form of the evil god hypothesis. The point of the evil god hypothesis is to force theists to re-examine their assumptions about good and evil in the world and what it means for God by flipping the argument on its head. Craig summarizes the argument like this:

The claim of the argument is that given the existence of an evil god, it is highly improbable that the goods in the world would exist (Pr (goodsevil god << 0.5)). By the same token, given the existence of God, it is highly improbable that the suffering in the world would exist (Pr (sufferingGod << 0.5)). So just as the goods in the world constitute overwhelming evidence against the existence of an evil god, the suffering in the world constitutes overwhelming evidence against the existence of God.

A hidden assumption of the argument is the metaphysical symmetry of good and evil: Good and evil are equally fundamental metaphysical principles (yin and yang, so to speak) and therefore can be substituted for each other in an argument like this. I expected Craig to attack this symmetry but was surprised to see that he in fact agrees with it. His response to the argument is:

I suspect that Law thinks that theists will try to deny the symmetry between these two cases. But that would be a mistake. The two situations strike me as symmetrical—I would just say that in neither case would we be justified in thinking that the probability is low. Just as a good Creator/Designer could have good reasons for permitting the suffering in the world, so an evil Creator/Designer could have malicious reasons for allowing the goods in the world, precisely for the reasons Law explains. My initial response, then, still holds: we’re just not in a position to make these kinds of probability judgements with any sort of confidence.

So Craig thinks that no conclusions about the moral nature of God can be known from reflection on the natural world. This is the price he is willing to pay to defuse the atheist's argument from evil. How, then, does Craig argue to the moral nature of God? He argues that the reality of objective moral values requires a good God as its metaphysical foundation.

I'm not going to address that latter argument here, because I think Craig's concession on the metaphysical implications of good and evil in the world is not only much too high a price to pay to defuse the argument from evil, but is not necessary. Furthermore, St. Paul tells us in Romans 1:18-21 that not only God's existence, but also that He is worthy of worship (and therefore good), are things that can be seen from creation. So if we are to concede that God can't be known to be good from philosophical reflection on nature, we are not only engaging in poor philosophy but contradicting St. Paul.

What about the metphysical symmetry of good and evil that lies behind the evil god hypothesis? It just isn't so. As explained by the classical philosophers from Socrates to Aquinas, good is the more fundamental metaphysical principles, as evil is parasitic on the good. In The Republic, Socrates uses the example of a gang of thieves. The gang may act in an evil manner to its victims, but to the extent that the gang members are evil to each other - lying, cheating, killing each other - the gang itself loses its effectiveness as a criminal force. In other words, the only way they can be evil is if they are to some extent good. Or, the way Socrates puts it, the only way the gang can effectively be unjust to others is if they are just with themselves. But the converse doesn't hold; a just association of men (which distinguishes the city from a gang) doesn't need to base its justice on a foundation of injustice. The city can be honest and non-murderous with other cities as much as it can be internally within itself. (This isn't to say that the real city won't involve some injustice or sometimes act unjustly with other cities; the point is that such actions are not a necessary precondition for the city to be at all.)

Or consider a standard item in the catalog of horrors in the argument from evil: Childhood disease. In order for there to be childhood disease (the evil), there  first must be a child (the good).  The evil is parasitic on the good and cannot exist without it. But a child can very well live without disease (and, indeed, we hope he does), which shows the prmary metaphysical nature of the good and the secondary nature of evil.

In the actual debate, Stephen Law brought up the case of lizards who incapacitate their victims with venom then eat them alive. Craig's response to this was to point out the necessity of predation in a balanced ecosystem; without the predators, the system would collapse and even the victims Law feels sorry for would end up disappearing along with the predators. This is a reasonable answer, but we can go further and more deeply than that. Even if we could show that the removal of predators would not unbalance an ecosystem, would this be something we would want to do? We can solve the problem of lizards eating live prey by driving the lizards to extinction. Is this something Law would favor? I suspect not, and this shows that despite their mode of life, the existence of lizards is a fundamental good, and driving them to extinction would simply be throwing out the more fundamental good (life) with the lesser evil (predation). The environmental movement, in fact, spends a lot of effort to save from extinction predators (wolves, sharks, eagles, etc.) that would otherwise perish, and not simply from the point of view of ecological balance, but because a world with eagles in it is better than a world without them.

Let's turn to the evil god himself. The hypothesis is that this god creates just enough good that he can maximize evil. But we need to make a distinction between the evil this god does to others and the evil he does to himself. Surely this god is not intent on maximizing the evil he does to himself - he could do that by killing himself and being done with it. What he wants to do is maximize the evil done to others while maximizing his own good.

As a creator god, he creates beings with certain natures, ends and purposes. He then commits evil on those creatures by violating their natures and purposes. But in doing so, he's only violating the natures and purposes he himself put into those creatures. So in the end, he's only frustrating himself in performing evil on his creation; in othe words, in being evil to his creation, he's also being evil to himself. And this contradicts our hypothesis about him, that he want's to do evil to others but not to himself.

To make this point clearer, think of the creator god on the analogy of an artist. His creation is his Mona Lisa; he puts all his talent, knowledge and effort into creating a beautiful painting with the enigmatic smile. He does this so that his later evil will be all the greater. Then, at the end, he destroys the work by painting Groucho Marx glasses and mustache on it. He's done a great evil to the painting, to be sure, but he's done an even greater evil to himself. He's thwarted his own native artistic efforts that found expression in the painting before he ruined it. He's ruined himself even more than the painting. This result is simply a consequence of the metaphysical primacy of good and the parasitic nature of evil.

A good god, on the other hand, does not contradict himself by doing good. Rather, he expresses his glory in his work, of which da Vinci expressing his nature in the Mona Lisa is but a poor analogy. And just as we can know something of da Vinci by meditating on the Mona Lisa, we can know something of God by meditating on his creation. Closing off this road to the God's good nature is much to high a price to pay to neuter the evidential problem of evil.

Sam Harris and Free Will

I just finished reading Sam Harris's Free Will, a brief defense of Harris's view that free will is an illusion. Harris is worth reading because he is an excellent writer, with a clear and succinct style. He doesn't hedge or avoid the more disturbing logical implications of his position, but addresses them head on and with confidence.

Free Will is also worth reading because Harris, unintentionally, reveals the weaknesses of the modern understanding of free will while leaving the classical understanding entirely unscathed. In fact the classical understanding becomes all the more attractive in comparison to Harris's conception. (By "classical" I mean mainstream philosophy up to roughly St. Thomas Aquinas, with Aquinas representing the pinnacle of the classical tradition).

The key to understanding the classical conception is that it is inextricably linked with the intellect. The intellect and will in classical philosophy are almost two sides of the same coin, and it is difficult to make sense of one without the other. Freedom is found in the interplay between the two.

Harris writes at the start of his chapter "Changing the Subject:"

It is safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea. The endurance of this notion is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms). Thus the idea of free will emerges from a felt experience. (p 15)

The fact that Harris is likely true about this says more about the poor state of contemporary popular philosophical reflection than any failure of the promise of free will as an abstract idea. The old notion of free will did not arise out of any felt experience, but simple empirical observation, and it issued in an idea (aren't ideas by nature abstract?) straightforwardly intelligible. Men observed that inanimate objects  like stones are acted on but have no interior principle of action. In that sense they are entirely unfree. They also noticed that plants, unlike rocks, can initiate their own actions like sinking roots into the soil or growing toward the sun, and so are in that sense freer than rocks. Animals, beyond plants, have the ability to perceive their environment and pursue their desires as well as flee from their fears. An oak tree can't move itself to better soil or run away from a forest fire, but a wolf is free to find better hunting grown or flee a conflagration. In that sense, the wolf is yet more free than the oak tree.

Man, alone in physical nature and by the power of his intellect, can know the truth about himself and the universe, and so perceive his own good through that truth and pursue it as such. The wolf will devour raw meat because it perceives it as desirable and it reacts on that basis. Man also perceives meat as desirable, but he also knows the truth that meat is good for him because of its nutritional value, and the end of nutrition is health, and so he may not devour meat even if his animal nature desires it if he decides it is not healthy for him (e.g. he is cutting down on red meat to lower his cholesterol). Man, then, is free in a way that no other earthly creature is because freedom for him means the power to act in light of the truth and in pursuit of the good as such.

It's easy to see why the classicals stressed the relationship between intellect and will. Free will in the classical sense means a will enlightened by the intellect with truth; absent the intellect's knowledge, the will has no object and becomes impotent. It becomes reduced to an animal or plant will that merely responds immediately to perceived desire or fear.

We can also see that the classical conception of freedom is dynamic. It depends on knowledge, and as our lives move between the poles of ignorance and knowledge, so our will moves between the poles of slavishness and freedom: A philosophically primitive barbarian is in a very real sense not as free as Socrates, but may become so to the extent that he is educated. Thus the classical aphorism that "the truth shall make you free."

The classical conception also recognizes that our behavior is derived from both rational and non-rational sources. I may conclude that it is good for me to lose weight and so begin a diet (a rational cause). But I may have difficulty staying on it because my desire for cheesesteak subs (a non-rational cause) overwhelms my rational determination to diet. The moral life consists, in part, in training the non-rational side of our nature to follow the rational side.

Finally, it is important to see that the classical conception of freedom does not involve rescuing free will from a chain of causation. The free will is caused just like everything else is caused. The difference is that the will becomes free when it is moved in the chain of rational causes rather than the chain of non-rational causes. Why did I write "4" to the answer "What is 2+2?" Because it is true, and mathematically provable, that two added to two is four. This is an explanation in terms of rational causes. There is a parallel explanation in terms of non-rational causes as to how that "4" got written: My brain sent an electrical signal to my hand which moved a pencil to write a symbol of the shape "4." But no matter how detailed this account, it has no bearing on the truth of the account in terms of rational causes that is the basis of freedom: I wrote "4" because 2+2=4.

The modern version of free will differs from the classical insofar as it separates the will from the intellect. This had its origin in the early modern's dazzlement by the advances of science. Science seemed to provide an account of the world entirely in terms of dumb matter and irrational causes - Newton's clockwork universe. Rational causes - Aristotle's formal and final causes, and which are at the heart of the classical understanding of free will and intellect - were not so much refuted as simply left out of the account, having lost respectability in the non-rational account of nature provided by science. The classical intellect and will simply disappeared from view as invisible to modern science.

The result was that free will, which was not particularly mysterious for classical philosophers, became an impenetrable mystery for modern philosophers, for what could freedom mean in a clockwork universe devoid of rational causation? The issue of causation becomes the central focus of modern thinking about the will because the only way moderns can conceive of freedom is as some sort of escape from the chain of non-rational causation (which is why free will can only be felt rather than demonstrated, because demonstration necessarily involves an account in terms of causes, and for moderns free will is a mysterious uncaused cause).

Sam Harris puts great stock in experiments like the Libet experiments that detect neural evidence of our decisions before we are actually conscious of making the decision:

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a "clock" composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person's decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it. 

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. (p. 8-9)

They are certainly difficult to reconcile with modern attempts to find some space for freedom within the clockwork universe thought to be heralded with the advent of modern science. Those attempts, e.g. those of Descartes or Kant, attempted to save freedom by removing it to a realm beyond the reach of science, either in an immaterial soul mysteriously attached to the body (Descartes), or another realm beyond the reach not only of science but of rational inquiry altogether (Kant). They are all, in the end, attempts to rescue free will as some sort of spontaneous uncaused cause. It is not surprising that this conception of freedom would fall apart as soon as human choice was shown to be susceptible to physical causes (something, incidentally, the classical philosophers never denied because they had no need to.)

But experiments of this type say nothing about the classical understanding of free will. I am free to the extent that I act in light of the truth. Suppose I take a math test, and write down the answer "0" to the question "What is the limit of 1/x as x goes to infinity?" I am free because the answer to the question "Why did I write down 0" is "Because it is true." It is entirely irrelevant that Benjamin Libet could detect my impulse to write the answer down a few milliseconds before I actually decided to move the pencil. And it means nothing that someone could predict with 100% accuracy what my answers will be to a simple math test before I take it. They can safely predict that I will get nearly all the answers right because I am educated enough to know the answers to simple math questions.

It is fascinating, and revealing, that all the examples Harris cites in his book to refute free will involve non-rational decision making, i.e. they do not involve the engagement of the intellect with the will that is the foundation of the classical conception of freedom. In the above cited case, subjects were asked simply to press a button based on a visual cue; in other words, a test suitable for a monkey. That the resulting decision is something that might be explained in terms of purely physical causation is nothing that would surprise Aquinas or Aristotle, for it is only when we consciously act in light of rational causes that we are free in the sense of human freedom.

Here is another example of free will in terns of non-rational causes that does not survive Harris's deconstruction:

I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea - sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have 'changed my mind' and switched  to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. (p. 8)

But as we have seen, the really relevant distinction crucial to free will isn't between conscious and unconscious causes, but between rational and non-rational causes. From the classical perspective, the decision to choose tea over coffee (unless it involved a rational deliberation about the good) was never really an instance of free will in the first place. It was on the level of a dog choosing which bowl of food from which to eat; something entirely explainable in terms of the physical chain of causes involving non-rational desires and stimuli.

Here are some of the other putative examples of free will Harris examines:

"For instance, I just drank a glass of water and feel absolutely at peace with the decision to do so. I was thirsty, and drinking water is fully congruent with my vision of who I want to be when in need of a drink.  Had I reached for a beer this early in the day, I might have felt guilty; but drinking a glass of water at any hours is blameless, and I am quite satisfied with myself. Where is the freedom in this? [Nowhere, because there is no freedom in water buffalos going to the watering hole, which this essentially is. DT] It may be true that if I had wanted to do otherwise, I would have, but I am nevertheless compelled to do what I effectively want. And I cannot determine my wants, or decide which will be effective, in advance. My mental life is simply given to me by the cosmos. Why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to m. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? [italics in original] Of course not. (p 19)

Harris has essentially described the life of a bear or a fish. Animals are driven by their desires, not rational consideration of the good, and so are not free. What's interesting about this example are the words in italics at the end, which present the possibility of recovering something of the classical understanding of freedom. The will cannot choose that which is not presented to it as an object; the will cannot choose that which we do not know. So the more we know, the more freedom we may have as the range of our options increases. This, again, is why knowing the truth can make you free - and why the best way to keep someone a slave is to keep him ignorant.

Again:

Thoughts like 'What should I get my daughter for her birthday? I know - I'll take her to a pet store and have her pick out some tropical fish' convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. (p. 32)

and:

For instance, in my teens and early twenties I was a devoted student of the martial arts. I practiced incessantly and taught classes in college. Recently, I began training again, after a hiatus of more than 20 years. Both the cessation and the renewal of my interest in martial arts seem to be pure expressions of the freedom that Nahmias attributes to me. I have been under no 'unreasonable external or internal pressure.' I have done exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop training, and I stopped. I wanted to start again, and now I train several times a week. All this has been associated with conscious thought and acts of apparent self- control. 

However, when I look for the psychological cause of my behavior, I find it utterly mysterious. Why did I stop training 20 years ago? Well, certain things just became more important to me. But why did they become more important to me...?" (p. 43)

and the final and clearest example of an attempt at non-rational free will:

In fact, I will now perform an experiment in free will for all to see: I will write anything I want for the rest of this book. Whatever I write will, of course, be something I choose to write.  No one is compelling me to do this. No one has assigned me a topic or demanded that I use certain words. I can be ungrammatical if I pleased. And if I want to put a rabbit in this sentence, I am free to do so. 

But paying attention to my stream of consciousness reveals that this notion of freedom does not reach very deep. Where did this rabbit come from? Why didn't I put an elephant in that sentence? I do not know. I am free to change 'rabbit' to 'elephant,' of course. But if I did this, how could I explain it? It is impossible for me to know the cause of either choice. (p. 65)

This is a perfect example of the muddle into which modern thinking about free will has gotten itself. The search for a truly free act is seen as the search for an act immune to any intelligibility; somehow an act can only be free if we can't find any reason for it, rational or otherwise. This is freedom as the Uncaused Caused, i.e. a freedom only God could possibly have.

Thomas Aquinas would be baffled at this understanding of human freedom. Surely the best evidence of Harris's free will would not be the random insertion of words into the text - again, something a well-trained monkey could do - but rather the intelligible content of the book as a whole. Harris's freedom is expressed in his attempt to grasp the truth about free will and communicate it to the rest of us, something monkeys, trees and rocks are not free to do.

Free Will is a relatively short book (82 pages), but then the case against freedom in the scientistic worldview of Harris is straightforward and brief:

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. (p 5)

This is surely true if you only recognize as causes non-rational efficient causes. But if the reality of rational causes (Aristotle's formal and final causes) is acknowledged, then we can be responsible for our actions, and our actions be free, even if they occur within a chain of rational causation. Socrates made the distinction a long time ago in the Phaedo:

I felt very much as I should feel if someone said, 'Socrates does by mind all he does'; and then, trying to tell the causes of each thing I do, if he should say first that the reason why I sit here now is, that my body consists of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints between them, and the sinews can be tightened and slackened, surrounding the bones along with flesh and the skin which holds them together; so when the bones are uplifted in their sockets, the sinews slackening and tightening make me able to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I have bent together and sit here; and if next he should give you other causes of my conversing with you, alleging as causes voices and airs and hearings and a thousand others like that, and neglecting to give the real causes. These are that since the Athenians thought it was better to condemn me, for this very reason I have thought it better to sit here, and more just to remain and submit to any sentence they may give. For, by the Dog! these bones and sinews, I think, would have been somewhere near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried by an opinion of what is best...

Maximizing Life... or Minimizing It

I recently discovered an excellent atheist website, The Thinking Atheist, and listened to several of Seth Andrews's (The Think Atheist) podcasts. The Thinking Atheist is very easy listening (he is a professional broadcaster and has an excellent voice) and free of the hard edge found in many outspoken atheists; he is, for instance, willing to admit that most Christians are genuinely good and loving people even if he thinks they are gravely mistaken about the fundamental nature of things. This is clearly a sincere man who is following the truth as he knows it.

What interests me here is an extended exchange he had in one of his podcasts with a Christian named Erin. Erin wondered how Seth could find meaning in life without a hereafter; Seth gave the answer, common among atheists, that the lack of a hereafter makes this life all the more important, since it is the only one we have. As Seth put it, we must "maximize every moment" we have, since we will have no more once we are dead. He mentioned how much he enjoys learning about science, history, etc.

I have always had a great deal of sympathy for this view, and it may constitute the greatest temptation I face as a Catholic. And it is a temptation. For though I would like to maximize every moment of my life, I have come to be quite certain that the meaning of life cannot be found by maximizing it, but only by minimizing it. In fact, it was through years of attempting to maximize life that I finally came to face the fact that it was a fool's errand, although I believe I suspected such a thing all along.

When I was in high school, my friend Joe used to chide me about my "kicks". I would throw myself passionately into something - ping pong or chess, for example - for a month or two, then give it up and move on to something else. Eventually I might come back to the same things. Meanwhile I also spent a lot of time playing tennis, reading history and Agatha Christie novels, or playing the fiddle, among other pursuits. I knew the reason I never stuck with anything too long. It was opportunity cost. On the one hand, I envied the sort of person who was passionate about one thing, and stuck with it long enough to master it or make something of it. I wished I could feel that way about something. And I would, for a time. But eventually whatever I was doing would become stale, and I would move on to something else. More than this, I could never shake the feeling that I was missing out on something by being dedicated to one or a small number of things. Other people were passionately pursuing something else, so there must be something to those things as well, right? How did I know it was better to pursue this thing passionately rather than that thing? My answer, as it turned out in practice, was just to pursue things in rotation (which should bring to mind associations for Kierkegaard fans.) I knew even at the time what was happening, but didn't know what else to do. If life isn't about doing stuff, and I had always been told it was, then what was it about? I didn't want life to pass me by.

For all intents and purposes, I was a case study in Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage of existence. I was even self-aware enough to have an inkling of what was going on, although nothing like the revelation that Kierkegaard gave me when I later discovered him. And SK accurately diagnosed the alternative I faced (which I vaguely understood at the time), which was either to change my mode of life at its root or continue down a path which was essentially one of despair. My decision to join the Marine Corps was finally based on the recognition that I needed to believe in something, not in a theoretical sense, but in the practical (existential) sense of actually submitting whole to something greater and grander than myself. The alternative to trying to find things to put into your life is to put your life into something. In SK's terms, it was the decision to become ethical and not merely aesthetic.

The essence of the ethical life is that one no longer tries to "maximize" his own life; instead, the individual sacrifices his own "maximization" for the sake of "maximizing" something worthy of the sacrifice - nation, God, Corps, family or, perhaps, his neighbors (as George Bailey does in It's A Wonderful Life). The ethical life has its own deep struggle, just as does the aesthetic life. The struggle at the heart of the aesthetic life is to keep at bay the despair that is at its core; the struggle at the heart of the ethical life is to perform the sacrifices demanded by duty (and this is why someone in the ethical stage of existence may not always seem "ethical" outwardly; the ethical stage of existence doesn't mean one is always good, it only means that life is lived in terms of duty and its fulfillment, even if there is an occasional failure to fulfill the demands of duty.)

But as George Bailey discovered, a life of duty is a kind of death. One sacrifices one's own hopes and dreams, one's own goals and pursuits, for others. It is a minimization of the self and feels like a slow dying. There is anxiety and despair in such a life because, on the one hand, the individual sees all the wonderful things out there that are genuinely worthy of pursuit, and on the other, he senses that the nature of things just is that he must sacrifice those things for the sake of others.

The answer to this dilemma (an existential answer, not a theoretical one) is religion; specifically the Christian God who "minimized" himself for the sake of mankind and promises the strength of grace to do the same to all who ask for it - "for my yoke is easy and my burden is light." In this light Christianity and atheism aren't competitors, because atheism isn't an answer to the existential question for which Christ is the answer:  The question isn't "Is there a God?", but "Who shall save me in the duty I must perform yet that is extinguishing me?"

Rosenberg on Intentionality

Edward Feser has been reviewing Alex Rosenberg's book The Atheist's Guide to Reality in parts over on his blog. I checked the book out from the library and have been reading it as well. Rosenberg's Ch. 8, "The Brain Does Everything Without Thinking About Anything At All", is Rosenberg's defense of eliminative materialism with respect to intentionality. (Intentionality, as a philosopher's term, refers to the way in which something can be "about" something else, like a finger pointing at the moon is about the moon.) Hardcore materialists, of which Rosenberg certainly is one, hold that intentionality is an illusion. Nothing is really "about" anything else, since the only thing things that are truly real are the elements of physics, and an electron or gravitational field isn't about anything at all. It just is.

What interests me here is the analogy Rosenberg uses to get across his view of how the brain might produce the illusion of intentionality without there really being any intentionality at all. I think Rosenberg's analogy is actually a good way to show why intentionality can't be completely an illusion. Here is the analogy:

A single still photograph doesn't convey movement the way a motion picture does. Watching a sequence of slightly different photos one photo per hour, or per minute, or even one every 6 seconds won't do it either. But looking at the right sequence of still pictures succeeding each other every one-twentieth of a second produces the illusion that the images in each still photo are moving. Increasing the rate enhances the illusion, though beyond a certain rate the illusion gets no better for creatures like us. But it's still an illusion. There is noting to it but the succession of still pictures. That's how movies perpetrate their illusion. The large set of still pictures is organized together in a way that produces in creatures like us the illusion that the images are moving. In creatures with different brains and eyes, ones that work faster, the trick might not work. In ones that work slower, changing the still pictures at the rate of one every hour (as in time-lapse photography) could work. But there is no movement of any of the images in any of the pictures, nor does anything move from one photo onto the next. Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving, and the actors were moving. But all the movement that the movie watcher detects is in the eye of the beholder. That is why the movement is illusory.

The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory in roughly the same way. Think of each input/output neural circuit as a single still photo. Now, put together a huge number of input/output circuits in the right way. None of them is about anything; each is just an input/output circuit firing or not. But when they act together, they "project" the illusion that there are thoughts about stuff. They do that through the behavior and the conscious experience (if any) that they produce.

The sentence "Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving..." is written in passing put it points out a consideration fatal to the analogy. Without the actual motion of the projector and the photons, there wouldn't be any illusory motion through the film. The projector stops, the illusion stops. So the illusory motion in the film, far from providing evidence that there is no actual motion, is conclusive proof that there is actual motion in the world. Yes, the viewer may be mistaken as to the actual nature of the motion, but Rosenberg's point with the analogy is that there is no intentionality at all in the world. For the analogy to support such a conclusion, it must support the analogous conclusion that all motion is an illusion. It does just the opposite.

The standard fallback here is to say that all analogies are limited. True, they are, but in a good analogy, those limitations arise only when the analogy is pushed beyond the limited point it is designed to make. The fact that in Rosenberg's analogy the illusory motion of a film proves rather than refutes the actual reality of motion is not an irrelevant point, but is the point. And it is not an accident. There is no way to design an analogy showing the illusion of motion without also establishing the actuality of motion.

The deeper point is that we can't be mistaken about fundamental categories like motion (or change). 
This is Aristotle's answer to Parmenides.  Change is an undeniable metaphysical reality, for if there were no such thing as motion, then we couldn't possibly know it, since thought itself is a kind of motion. (And if you say that thought is an illusion, and the underlying matter is unchanging, then you need to explain how a non-moving projector can produce the illusion of movement in a film). We may be mistaken about the content of change, but the fact of change is literally self-evident.

Neither can we be mistaken about the fact of intentionality. It is really as simple as saying that if there were no intentionality in the world, there wouldn't be any intentionality, and we wouldn't experience any. For the illusory intentionality must have a source in some real intentionality, just as illusory motion must have a source in real motion. If there weren't some real intentionality somewhere, neither would there be any illusory intentionality anywhere. "Intentionality" would be something that simply didn't exist in the world even as an idea. The discovery of counterfeit money is not proof that there is no real money, but that there must be real money, for there is no sense in counterfeiting something that doesn't exist. Are you in any danger of falling for a counterfeit Martian dollar?


From the subjective side, we are only subject to the illusion of motion in the film because it mimics actual motion in the world. If there were no actual motion in the world, just what would illusory motion in the film mean to us? We are receptive to the illusion of motion in the film because it appeals to a part of our nature that is receptive to actual motion. Animals who live for generations in the darkness of a cave or the depths of the sea gradually lose their sight as it is of no use to them. Eventually they are unable to detect light at all. It disappears for them. At this point, they are in no danger of falling for "fake light" (whatever that might be) because they can't detect any light at all. The creature loses his ability to fall for the illusion as he loses his ability to detect the reality. The fact that we experience intentionality at all is proof enough that there is something "intentional-like" in reality.

Death as a Release

Andrew Stuttaford comments on a man with locked-in syndrome over on the Secular Right blog here. The syndrome is a horrifying state described in a quote from Stuttaford like this:

The man, known for legal reasons only as Martin, suffered a severe stroke three years ago, which left him unable to move. His only method of communication is by using his eyes.

Stuttaford is outraged that the British state does not allow Martin to commit suicide, and it is impossible not to sympathize with Martin's wish to end it all. But my purpose here is not to argue whether Martin should be assisted to commit suicide, or what the involvement of the state should be.

My point here is to remark that Stuttaford's post sets off my philosophical alarm bells. He is not arguing formally, of course, so it isn't fair to hold him to strict definitions, but there is nonetheless significance in the way we frame a discussion. The title of the post is "Shut in by the State", and Stuttaford repeats several times the notion of the "release" of Martin from his dismal condition. But Martin is not "shut in by the state"; he is shut in by an unfortunate act of nature. The state can't do anything about "releasing" him one way or the other. Surely a prisoner recognizes a distinction between being released from prison to go on with his life, and being "released" from prison in the sense of being put up against a wall and shot. Either way he is no longer in prison, but it is at best a euphemism to call the latter case a "release." Now it may be that a person prefers to be executed rather than remain in prison; but that is not a choice for "release."

No one can release Martin from his condition. But it is possible to do away with Martin altogether. Again it is not my purpose here to argue whether this is morally justifiable in this case. But, if the case is as morally self-evident as Stuttaford supposes, why must he resort to euphemism? Why not state plainly that for which he advocates - the death of Martin?

Euphemism is a misdirection used when we do not wish to state directly what we mean. It is sometimes justifiable, e.g. when sexual matters must be discussed in the presence of the young. Otherwise, and generally, it is simply a way to misdirect a reader away from the consequences of one's position, and is a philosophical "red flag." I see no legitimate reason for euphemism in the discussion of assisted suicide; in fact, the use of euphemism seems to me to be an indication that even assisted suicide advocates cannot face directly what they advocate.

The state is not "shutting Martin in." At most it is "forcing Martin to live," a proposition that more transparently carries the moral weight of the issues involved.

The Secular Right and Knowledge

I've always been perplexed by the ignorance otherwise intelligent atheists show with respect to Christianity, given the time they spend bashing it. Here is the latest post by Heather MacDonald, a writer I don't miss at National Review or City Journal. In those contexts, she displays an obvious intelligence, attention to detail, and dedication to getting her facts straight. You get a different MacDonald on the Secular Right, however; here she seems intent on hitting Christianity with any stick she can find, and doesn't let history or elementary logic get in the way. Spot the black hole in this passage:

That the Catholic hierarchy could be embarrassed by relic veneration, when nearly every Catholic Church in Europe proudly displays its lavish, silver and gold jewel-encrusted reliquaries allegedly housing this bit of Jesus’ femur or that bit of a saint’s bladder, shows how the religious practices that once filled out a world still untamed and unexplained by science grow ineluctably more remote.

As Mark in Spokane gently points out in the comments, it doesn't make much sense for an orthodox Christian to venerate a relic of Jesus' femur, given that the central event of Christianity is the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. In fact, Christianity is to that extent empirically falsifiable: The discovery of Jesus's bones would decisively refute orthodox Christianity and put the Catholic Church out of business for good. This was understood even at the time of the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:64).

The perplexing part of this is that conservatives generally understand that it is necessary to understand one's enemy to defeat him. This is why conservatives often understand Marxism and socialism better than many socialists do. Yet when it comes to religion, the Secular Right seems to hold on to religious ignorance almost as a badge of honor. I wonder who should be more embarrassed: The third world peasant with a second grade education who venerates the relics of a saint (but who understands the meaning of the Resurrection), or the North American, college-educated, cosmopolitan atheist who, despite decades of higher education, hasn't yet gained an elementary understanding of the religion she bashes?

The Secular Right

The relationship of conservatism to religion has been on my mind lately, sparked by posts such as this over at the SecularRight blog. Heather MacDonald typifies one sort of modern atheist, the kind that sees religious belief as obviously absurd. For her, the difference between Harold Camping (the force behind the recently unfulfilled prophecy of the apocalypse) and mainstream believers is trivial: It is only because Camping has made an empirically falsifiable prediction that he is distinguishable from mainstream believers at all.

What interests me is the conclusion that seems to clearly follow if we accept that the mass of men are in the grip of irrationality. If belief in God is patently irrational, and most men believe in God, then most men are irrational. How then, can they be trusted with political authority in the form of the vote or, even, authority over their own lives? Is it not reasonable to place an authority over them for their own benefit? The individual freedom involved in limited government only works if men are capable of governing themselves. It doesn't seem an accident that the New Atheists tend to be of a left-wing political persuasion (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Dennett).  What is unusual and, perhaps, ultimately incoherent, is the notion of right-wing atheism.

Belief in God as Wish Fulfillment

I picked up Chet Raymo's Skeptics and True Believers at the used book store today for a couple of bucks.

In the Introduction, Raymo divides the world into Skeptics and True Believers (no points for guessing which category Raymo prefers). Here is what he says about the forces pushing one to be a True Believer:

"The forces that nudge us toward True Belief are pervasive and well-nigh irresistible. Supernatural faith systems provide a degree of emotional security that skepticism cannot provide. Who among us would not prefer to believe that there exists a divine parent who has our best interest at heart? Who among us would not prefer to believe that we will live forever? Skepticism, on the other hand, offers only uncertainty and doubt. What keeps scientific skepticism on track, against the individual's need for emotional security, is a highly evolved social structure, including professional associations and university departments, peer-reviewed literature, meetings and conferences, and a language that relies heavily on mathematics and specialized nomenclature."

Raymo intends the questions in the middle of the paragraph to be rhetorical, but he doesn't seem to see that the questions cut both ways. A "divine parent" who has our best interests at heart, is also a divine parent who judges us and places demands on us. Anyone who prefers not to have his "freedom" restricted by Commandments or requirements to go to Mass and Confession, is someone who prefers not to have a divine parent. Who among us would prefer to have a divine parent judging us and demanding we obey his Commandments?

As far as immortal life, who would prefer to live forever if that life is damned to Hell? That's the downside to immortality; our actions in this life determine our eternal destiny, and that destiny is forever. Kierkegaard brilliantly (and horrifyingly) probes the psychology of eternal despair in The Sickness Unto Death. The soul in despair wants to die, but cannot. Who would prefer to believe that our deeds haunt us into eternity?

I see the "wish fulfillment" argument as a wash when it comes to God. Every theistic wish that might be fulfilled by the existence of God (the comfort of a divine parent looking out for us), has a parallel atheistic wish (the non-existence of God leaves me free to indulge my desires without guilt or fear of divine wrath.) The desire for immortal life is countered by the fear that it might mean having to endure the unendurable. The desire to believe in a guardian angel is countered by the desire to believe that evil spirits bent on our destruction are but a myth, etc.

I've always found the wish-fulfillment argument a non-sequiter in any case, since just because something fulfills a wish doesn't mean it isn't true. Sometimes your fondest wishes do come true.

Who would not prefer to believe that?

God, Prayer and Making a Difference III

The third part of this thread, the first two parts being here and here.

In this third part, I consider the proposition "The future of our society as one of honor, decency and virtue does not depend on religious faith." The more detailed version, from the Secular Right blog, is:

"We take for granted that parents will teach children manners, or assume that if they don't, schools will act as a back-stop. But what if neither the family nor schools perform the duty? I see no connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette. Rather, the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is, and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction."

How will this cultivation of manners take place? It must be the instruction of those without manners, by those who do have manners. But why should the unmannered take instruction from the mannered? The ill-mannered are, at least in that respect, poorly educated. So the question resolves itself into the general question of why the uneducated should submit to an education by the educated. Now even the uneducated can see the value of a technical education, for the products of our empirical sciences are manifest to the ignorant, but technical education is not at issue; the question is one of the education of manners and morals, or what was once the point of education classically understood. It is only the wise, however, who understand the value of wisdom. The most serious aspect of ignorance is that it is ignorant of the evil of ignorance - which is why the Socratic breakthrough, which involved not only the knowledge of Socrates' own ignorance, but his understanding of its deep significance, was necessary to the founding of true education.

There can be only one reason why the uneducated should submit to education: faith. If they could see and understand the benefits of education, see the connection between manners and the fragility of society, to that extent they would not be ignorant. Heather MacDonald has it backwards. It is not the cultivation of manners that rests on an understanding of the fragility of the social order, but the understanding of the fragility of the social order that rests on the the cultivation of manners.

Faith is a virtue. I am not here speaking of the supernatural virtue of Faith with which we may be infused by the grace of God, but of the ordinary, mundane virtue of faith. Faith is not an intellectual conclusion, or an arbitrary act of the will, but a virtue - a quality of character that contributes to the fulfillment of our nature. Faith is necessary to education because the ignorant cannot see the value of education prior to being educated. So they must believe that education is worthwhile until the point comes that they can see that it is worthwhile. Faith, even faith bordering on or passing over to religious faith, was the keystone of classical education. When Socrates heard that the Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed him the wisest of men, he was puzzled because he knew himself to possess no wisdom. Were he a man of no faith, he would have simply dismissed the Oracle as mistaken and forgotten about it. But his faith - his belief that the Oracle would not speak falsely - led him to hold in tension the Oracle's prophecy and the knowledge of his own ignorance. He embarked on a quest to resolve the tension by finding a man wiser than himself. Of course, the result of his quest was the discovery that the supposed wise men thought they knew many things they did not, while Socrates was not subject to this vice, this being the basis for the Oracle's proclamation. The faith of Socrates was not a consequence of the self-education that occurred on his quest, but a pre-condition of it.

Aristotle typically begins his works with a review of the history of thought on the question he is addressing. This is a testimony of faith, a record of the fact that Aristotle, like Socrates, researched all the wise men he could find in the belief that they had something to teach him, before assuming the audacity to add his own novel contributions. St. Thomas Aquinas, the apex of the the tradition of classical thought, began his career in an act of faith in a vow of obedience to the Dominican Order. He spent his life absorbing everything anyone could teach him, not just from Christian teachers like Albert the Great or Duns Scotus, but also from pagans like Aristotle, Jews like Maimonides, and Moslems like Avicenna and Averroes. In expanding and correcting the tradition, he spoke as the voice of tradition, a result of his original act of faith.

The modern world, which I will arbitrarily take as beginning in the sixteenth century, self-consciously removed the central place of faith in intellectual life, and, eventually, in life in general. In fact, it has come close to making faithlessness (for which it misuses the word "skepticism") its supreme virtue. Descartes can be compared to Socrates on this score. After receiving a modest education, Descartes, as a young man, concluded it was all drivel and dismissed the intellectual tradition at a stroke, an act of breathtaking intellectual pride. Instead he searched for a principle on which he could hang his life and thought with absolute certainty; in other words, in complete independence and without a scintilla of faith. Socrates embarked on a quest for the wise man, Descartes on a quest for the indubitable first principle of philosophy that would relieve him of any need for wise men. The result, of course, was the cogito ergo sum and, more significantly, the establishment of faithlessness at the heart of philosophy.

Descartes did not succeed in constructing his philosophy of certainty, as thinkers after him were soon to point out. But instead of concluding that Descartes was mistaken in his original act of faithlessness, they joined him in it, concluding only that Descartes had not been faithless enough. Since then, the story of modern philosophy has been the story of philosophers undermining each other, with each proclaiming a newly discovered set of "first principles" that undermine all prior philosophers, with succeeding philosophers returning the favor by dismissing that philosopher as "naive." Thus Kant undermines both Descartes and Hume, Hegel undermines Kant, and Nietzsche undermines everyone. Hobbes proclaims the sure foundation of civil order in the discovery of the "state of nature", only to be told by Rousseau that he didn't really discover the state of nature - a feat that Rousseau, naturally, feels he himself accomplished. What they all have in common is the original Cartesian principle that philosophy starts in faithlessness. Albert Camus distilled the modern tradition (if a tradition that is defined as a continual undermining of itself can really be thought of as a tradition) when he proclaimed in The Myth of Sisyphus:

After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of the professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

Camus, like Descartes, wrote this as a young man. This was how he started his career, not how he ended it. Socrates began his philosophical career by asserting his own ignorance and searching for the wise man;  the modern man asserts the ignorance of anyone who might teach him, and like Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and the rest of the dreary train, sets out to "revolutionize" thought by reconstructing Thought from the ground up, in his own image. Finally we reach Camus who does not attempt to reconstruct Thought - having surveyed the wreckage - and simply tries to find a way to live without thought. The modern thinker prides himself on his "skepticism", but he is not at all skeptical of the one thing needful - himself. Socrates is the philosopher so desperately needed by the modern world. 

It is easy to see the effect of all this on education and the transmission of manners and civility. It has taken a long time to play out, but destructive ideas held initially by an intellectual elite eventually filter down and through society as a whole. Finally we reach the point where the average person absorbs the faithlessness that was once an intellectual vice restricted to a few intellectual "pioneers", and massive cultural damage ensues. Everyone is a Cartesian ego now, a self-subsisting intellectual principle that demands that everything submit to it on its own terms. The decrease of civility is only a symptom for which modern philosophy is the disease; the cure is a return to faith at the center of culture.

We have lost the virtue of faith that is vital to education. Why should a student put faith in a teacher, when the teacher holds faithlessness as a first principle? A student will place faith in a teacher to the extent that the teacher has faith, and for that the teacher must relate himself to a being worthy of faith; for a grown man, that can only be God. That is the connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette.

"Criton, we owe a cock to Asclepios; pay it without fail."

 - the dying words of Socrates.

God, Prayer and Making a Difference II

This is the second part of this thread.

Here I consider the proposition: If there is a God, there might as well not be as far as this world is concerned. God might make a discernible difference in the hereafter, but makes no apparent difference in this one.

The proposition is often said in the context of petitionary prayer. One man prayers for his cancer to be cured, and the cancer disappears. Another man (or, perhaps, even the same man at another time) prays for a cure to his cancer and he dies. It looks like cancer sometimes takes life and sometimes it doesn't, and God doesn't make much difference either way.

I would first like to say something about the alleged results of petitionary prayer somehow proving that God is good. No one prays to God unless he already believes that God is good. That is why I pray to God and not Lucifer. We might say that some consequence of prayer reveals the glory of God, but the idea that the goodness of God is held in suspense pending our judgement of the results of prayer is, well, impious. It's like telling my wife that I will withhold judgement concerning her goodness pending what she gives me for Christmas. 

Atheists tend to think of prayer in a magical manner. You recite the words as an incantation, and the results should automatically follow, as though prayer involves a magic power to dominate the will of God. Petitionary prayer is exactly that, petitionary, as in we petition the King on some issue. Whether the King chooses to grant our petition is entirely up to him.

Anyway, to the main point: The proposition in question has it exactly backwards. Whether God makes a difference in the hereafter is a matter of faith and, admittedly, it is hard to discern what is going on in that realm. That God makes a difference in this world is clearly manifest. If God made no difference in this world, why would atheists bother about Him? Let us be clear: God must be something rather than nothing. If God were absolutely nothing, we would not be able to talk about him. Now it may be that God is only a fantasy, or an idea, or a meme, rather than the supernatural Ground of Being, but that is still something rather than nothing. The atheist says that Allah is but a fantasy, but that doesn't change the fact that the fantastical Allah seems to be having real effects in the real world, not the fantasy world. Santa Claus may be a fantasy but pointing it out does not change the fact that presents show up on Christmas morning. 

Similarly, Jesus Christ may be just a fantasy of Christians, but this fantasy has underwritten an institutional Church that has survived persecutions, the fall of the Roman Empire, inspired Catholic Knights to toss Moslems out of Europe, spread the Gospel to every corner of the world, and produced a Pope who brought down Communism. I am inclined to think that a fantasy so powerful may be more than just a fantasy, but that is neither here nor there at the moment. The point is that it is possible to deny that God is a substantial supernatural being, but ridiculous to claim that God has no effects in this world. Again, why would atheists care about God if God had little effect in the world? 

Western civilization was inspired by Christianity for most of its two thousand year history, only recently giving up on God and trying to make it on its own. Most everyone, atheists included, admit that Western civilization is in decline, not only politically, but morally and economically as well. How will that decline be arrested? We have already seen the power of the Christian God (fantasy or not) in the extraordinary growth of European civilization from 500 A.D. to 1900 A.D. What is the secular replacement for Him?

At the Secular Right blog, John Derbyshire describes the joys and motivations of his secular philosophy that he describes as Mysterian:

Naturalism has boundless pleasures for anyone with an inquiring mind and a sense of wonder... We're content to marvel at the truths that science uncovers, hope to understand more this year than we did last year, and... perhaps even writing books about them, if we can find a publisher willing to take us on.

The natural world's enough to keep my mind fully engaged; and I find I can live decently, honorably, and contentedly without any dependence on stories about improbable historical evens - miraculous impregnations and the like.

The Derb is famous for his pessimism about the future of Western civilization, and that pessimism, combined with the attitudes above, indicates that Derbyshire is essentially an Epicurean. He would fit right in at the late end of the Roman Empire, retiring to his villa to tend his garden and lament the manner in which the Empire has gone to pot. And here is the problem with atheism: It absurdly proclaims that God has no effects in the world, and is then impotent to reproduce the effects that God has obviously had.  Heather MacDonald writes that:

As for what will get us out of the economic crisis, believers will work out for themselves, why, if God is assurance of a brighter future, he didn't do something before hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. I'll bank on the powerful drive to trade, build enterprises, and the enjoy the fruits of human ingenuity.

Actually, God has done plenty. Two thousand years ago he suffered, died, and rose from the dead, and instituted a Church that persists to this day, a Church in which individuals may obtain the grace and learn the virtues that would underwrite a sound economy. That we do not avail ourselves of God's grace is our choice, not His. As we have turned our back on God, our government has become increasingly venal, self-serving and contemptuous of the people, and the people themselves all too willing to surrender their freedom and become slaves of the government. A free republic, as Adam Smith and our Founding Fathers understood, only works if men maintain the virtue to support a life of free men; lose the virtue, and slavery will return in some form or another, for men are natural slaves. We have seen how God supported freedom; how will atheism do it?

Heather writes that "the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction." Well, no. More than an understanding of the problem is necessary. In addition the virtue, energy, and inspiration to effect instruction and correction is required - the kind of energy and inspiration that sent Catholic missionaries across the Atlantic to risk their lives in preaching the Gospel to the Iroquois Indians in the eighteenth century. Where is such drive and energy in atheism? It's nowhere; the atheists have retired to their dens to ponder nature and write books. Atheism is plenty real but ineffective. Allah may be a fantasy but is terribly effective. I'm betting an Allah in that contest. 

God, Prayer and Making a Difference

The Secular Right has three recent posts about which I wish to comment.  The posts are Civility and Order, New Mysterian Plants Marker, and Please Explain.

The posts can be summarized in three propositions:

1. Good things that happen do not prove God's beneficence, because bad things also sometimes happen that God could have stopped. If you are going to count one, you've got to count the other.

2. If there is a God, there might as well not be as far as this world is concerned. God might make a discernible difference in the hereafter, but makes no apparent difference in this one.

3. The future of our society as one of honor, decency and virtue does not depend on religious faith.

First, let us take the first proposition, drawn from the post Please Explain. If Bill O'Reilly thinks that the safe landing of Flight 1549 was due to miraculous intervention (I don't know that he does, I only know what the Secular Right has written), then he is simply a fool. The safe landing of Flight 1549 was obviously due to the training, experience and coolness of the crew. No miraculous intervention needed. God was not the immediate cause of the safe landing of the plane.

But God can be considered a remote cause of the safe landing of the plane (taking it for granted that God exists.) God created a world in which people like pilot Sullenberger are born, grow to be outstanding pilots through training and the development of virtues like courage, prudence and decisiveness, and so are on hand at a critical moment like the emergency on Flight 1549. So we can say it illustrates God's beneficence in the sense that God was a remote, though perhaps not an immediate, cause of the safe landing of the aircraft.

I was careful not to write that the safe landing of the plane "proves" that God is good. The conclusion that God is good comes from a consideration of being and creation as a whole, not a utilitarian toting up of atomized events, as though we conclude that God is good because N+1 good events have happened in the universe and only N bad events. This is what the secularist seems to want to do; she wants to put God on trial and serve as the prosecutor, and the religious believer as defense counsel. She calls her witnesses and we call ours. 

God created the world and saw that it was good. This means it is better that Flight 1549 and the crew and passengers existed than that they were never born. This is true whether or not pilot Sullenberger succeeded in making a safe landing. It is on the basis of the existential goodness of Creation that we proclaim that God is good. Flight 3407 ended in tragedy, but the only reason it is a tragedy is because something existentially good - the crew and passengers - perished in the crash. We lament the tragedy of Flight 3407, but does it make sense to conclude that God is not good as a result? If God is not good, then His works are not good, including Creation. It follows that existence is an evil, should be fled and, perversely, that tragedies like Flight 3407 are really good things since they release people from the horror of existence.

If that sounds like a horrible thing to say, the thought is not original with me, and pessimistic philosophies throughout history have drawn similar conclusions. The medieval Cathars, for example, held that material Creation is an evil, and therefore considered procreation a sin and suicide a moral example to be followed. Many of the modern existentialists like Sartre have found existence to be repulsive, although they can't quite bring themselves to commit suicide.

Life is good despite the evil things that befall us. I say this as a matter of natural knowledge, not faith. I can praise God for the safe landing of Flight 1549 because God is the remote cause of airplanes and courageous flight crews. What about Flight 3407? To denounce God as evil because of this tragedy is self-contradictory, because it is a tragedy only on condition that God's works (in the form of airplanes, crews and passengers) are good things and should be preserved. We live in a world that is fundamentally good but in which some evil is allowed to occur.

Why does God allow evil? I will risk the wrath of Heather MacDonald by saying this is a mystery. What is not a mystery is that the existence of evil does not constitute a refutation of the goodness of God, which was the point of the above. It should be remembered that all thoroughly thought-through philosophies - religious, atheist, or otherwise - necessarily have elements of mystery to them. If someone tells you that she has no elements of mystery in her thinking, that everything is clear as daylight, or even potentially clear as daylight, they are at best confused. Probably the most serious attempt to generate a philosophy of pure clarity was that of Descartes in his bid to ground philosophy on the indubitable truth of his own thinking - cogito ergo sum. Despite what he thought he was doing, what Descartes actually did was to turn his own mind into an impenetrable mystery, a mystery that haunts the philosophy and sciences of the mind to this day. Descartes simply transplanted the essential mystery from God to his own ego. 

Science is no way out here. Science explains mysteries by positing other mysteries. Newton, for example, explained the motions of the heavens in terms of mass, force and acceleration, three elements no one had heard of before, at least the way Newton used them. Newton never explained what exactly mass or force is, and how it is that a force can act on a mass and produce yet a third type of thing called an acceleration. What he showed convincingly is that these three mysterious elements do interact the way he said they do. Newton transferred the mystery from the solar system to his mechanical elements, and is rightly renowned as a genius for doing so. We have benefitted greatly as a result. Unfortunately, the exchange didn't work out so well in the case of Cartesian philosophy, which has made man an alien in his own world.

The point is that mystery is always the terminus of human thought, whatever it is. Condemning a philosophy because it ends up in mystery is, in the end, a refusal to think things through to their end.

I will take up the other two propositions in coming posts...

Atheism and Kierkegaard's Way to Religion

I had high hopes for the new Secular Right blog, which promised to defend conservative principles from a purely secular perspective. I think this can be done, and should be done, since our political arrangements are a matter of the natural virtue of prudence. Religious principles may inform political principles, but they are not reducible to them, and it should be possible to arrive at and defend sound political principles from purely natural reason.

Unfortunately, the secular right blog has turned fairly quickly into just another atheist religion-bashing venue. Now I have no problem with atheists bashing religion, or with Christians bashing atheism, for that matter. But there are already plenty of blogs and websites dedicated to that noble purpose. Just when does the atheist leave off telling us how ridiculous religious belief is, or spending all his time fending of the slings and arrows of his religious adversaries, and start telling us how one may find and pursue the path of "human flourishing?"

For this is ultimately what politics is about - organizing our common life for the common good. And the common good is really a collection of individual human goods. This brings me to my real problem with atheism.

I believe the existence of God can be defended as a matter of philosophy. But it is rare that anyone comes to believe in God purely as a matter of intellectual conclusion. God may be the answer to certain metaphysical questions, but those questions only have weight for us if God is also the answer to other questions, questions that bear more on the will than the intellect. What I mean is that God may be the answer to the question: How can I become the man I know I was meant to be, or should be?

When I ask this question in the way (I think) Kierkegaard meant it, I am no longer interested in defending myself or defending my principles. Instead of questioning God and finding Him wanting, I have questioned myself and found myself wanting. I know I can and should be a better man than I am. The skepticism becomes subjectively rather than objectively directed. The locus of danger has shifted; instead of being worried primarily about objective errors (i.e. that my metaphysical beliefs might be in error) I am worried about subjective errors (that I may fail to become the man I should be). I have become a "subjective thinker" rather than an "objective thinker."

The subjective thinker sees God as a possible answer to the subjective questions he asks himself. Yes, he is concerned with the objective question of the existence of God, but the weight of the objective question is not absolute. Is it better to be a bad man but be "right" about the objective question of God, or be a good man but be "wrong" about the objective question of God? Yes, yes, I know that many atheists are good men. In fact, just about every atheist I've met has been a better man than I am. That is the point. Atheism seems to be a club for men who are naturally good. It's not primarily about the question of becoming better men, but about defending the fact that we already are pretty good men. What, then, does it have to say to the man who is convinced that he is not a pretty good man? I ask for bread and they give me a stone.

I don't intend irony in those last points. I hold no brief for those Christians who denounce atheists as necessarily bad or doomed to some kind of evil existence. Atheists are quite right that the run-of-the-mill atheist is probably a better man than the run-of-the-mill Christian. This is because your typical atheist is well-educated and well-brought up, while the vast majority of Christians are poor and poorly educated. But it wasn't atheism per se that made them good, but their education and their upbringing - which, more times than not, has been Christian. 

But all that is by the board. "For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." One way to interpret this is that Christ is calling those who are thinking subjectively and not objectively. Kierkegaard goes into this in wonderful detail in the Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. For the man approaching Christianity in Kierkegaard's way - subjectively - the very fact that Christianity is speaking to him in a way that atheism won't or can't, is reasonable subjective grounds to believe in it. But don't try to defend this objectively with an atheist!