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<\/a> As I\u2019ve been blogging Keith Ward\u2019s recent book The Big Questions in Science and Religion<\/a><\/em>, I\u2019ve also been reading Naturalism<\/a> <\/em>by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book, in essence, argues that strict naturalism is opposed not merely to a dualist view of human beings, but to theism<\/em>.<\/p>\nMany of the same issues that plague Ward\u2019s discussion of this topic appear here, only in far worse form. At one point the authors, after quoting Jaegwon Kim on mental causation of bodily movements, write \u201cFor the most part, we will simply assume in this chapter that causation of physical events by teleologically explained mental events, which is the ultimate target of the causal closure argument, is causation by events involving souls\u201d (p.29).<\/p>\n
Their argument seems to me to be the equivalent of arguing that a computer must have a soul, because the computer can open the CD drive. Of course, they would probably respond that in such a case the computer has been programmed<\/em> to be able to do that. But isn\u2019t there good reason to believe that the human brain, which has some abilities \u201chardwired\u201d at birth, is capable of being \u201cprogrammed\u201d \u2013 what, in popular parlance, is referred to as learning<\/em>?<\/p>\n The questions of interiority, qualia, experience, and spontaneity are important ones, but they are not the same as the question of causing motion through \u201cmental events\u201d.<\/p>\n The analogy between the soul and God plays a key role in the book, and the authors are concerned that, unless one leave room for the human soul, then a divine personal agent acting in the world will lose its plausibility at the same time. As I said in an earlier post, it seems better to reason from the known to the unknown, and to use our (clearly rudimentary, partial and inadequate) understanding of the human \u201cmind\u201d in thinking about God, rather than vice versa.<\/p>\n The authors are quite correct in highlighting our uncertainty about key issues: \u201cWe remain radically in the dark about how consciousness might emerge as something physical from nonconscious, nonmental parts\u201d (p.76). The key question at this stage cannot be \u201cHas science explained subjective human experience?\u201d but only \u201cHas science provided evidence that strongly suggests that our subjective experience arises as an emergent phenomenon from brain activity?\u201d<\/p>\n The book\u2019s attempt to begin with consciousness as the fundamental, ultimate reality has a long history in both Western and Eastern thought (pp.83-85). But all those systems of thought were formulated before our modern understanding of the brain, and it should not be surprising if new information required longstanding notions to be rethought. Nonetheless, the authors\u2019 point seems fair when they write that \u201cThe conflict between naturalism and theism is not a matter of different scientific theories of events within the cosmos<\/em>, but of conflicting overall philosophies of the cosmos itself<\/em>\u201d (p.102).<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve been blogging Keith Ward\u2019s recent book The Big Questions in Science and Religion, I\u2019ve also been reading Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book, in essence, argues that strict naturalism is opposed not merely to a dualist view of human beings, but to theism. Many of the same issues that plague […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a>Finally, I have reached the conclusion that positing the existence of God does not help much with moral reasoning<\/a>. The fundamental problem in ethics is how one gets from \u201cis\u201d to \u201cought\u201d. And if there is a personal God who is eternal and has certain values, it would seem that this is still only an is<\/u> statement<\/em>. The deity in question may have the power to punish all who fail to adhere to the divine values, but they are still values that merely happen to be the values of the deity. There is nothing that turns them into values one \u201cought\u201d to hold to, unless the desire to avoid punishment is felt to be a sufficient basis for adhering to a certain morality. Positing either God or the soul may or may not help us make sense of our own experience, but neither allows us to sidestep the Euthyphro dilemma, which asks whether right and wrong are defined by the gods or are universal principles to which the gods themselves are subject.<\/p>\n