An Immaterial Mind Causing the Universe

Last updated on: July 29, 2020 at 7:48 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

The other day, I was sent an argument by a commenter on my video discussing the Kalam Cosmological Argument. For the full details of his arguments, please see my post here. William Lane Craig uses an extension to his Kalam Cosmological Argument to conclude that this an immaterial mind, qua God, is necessary to explain the causation of the universe. Today, I am going to concentrate on a couple of paragraphs where the commenter sets out his main position against Craig. Here they are:

P1. Either an abstract object or an unembodied mind caused the universe.

P2. It’s not an abstract object.

C. Therefore, it is an unembodied mind.

There is only one small problem with this: I reject the Platonist and Dualist views that abstract objects and minds are immaterial. I accept Nominalism about abstract objects and Physicalism about minds. Thus, there are no actual examples at all of immaterial (or non-physical) entities that fit that description.

This entails the cause could be any logically possible inanimate entity we don’t know about and perhaps could never understand. This follows because we have no reason to believe Dualism or Platonism are true. So, there is no example of any entity that could play that role. Minds, according to most philosophers (see, PhilSurvey) and scientists, are not real immaterial entities.

Although I, too, accept nominalism as a worldview that better explains the universe, what I’m looking to do today is see what possible counter-arguments that apologists could use to defend their position.

In the first paragraph, it is worth noting that although we have no examples of an immaterial mind existing completely disconnected from matter, and even depending entirely upon matter, that is not to say that such a thing is logically impossible. This is an inductive argument depending entirely upon observation (although I might call this into question next).

In fact, this is the Problem of Induction. All swans that we see are white; therefore, all swans are white. This holds until we find a black swan. This is merely dependent upon observation and it is not logically impossible that there are black swans. In the same way, it is not logically impossible that we have matter-independent minds, immaterial minds.

If I was a theist, this is what I would use to defend from such an argument and I think the commenter who proposed this argument was happy that, because there are no examples of an immaterial mind, it is in some sense an impossible concept. However, there is an interesting area here concerning logic. This is an inductive argument as opposed to a deductive argument. A deductive argument looks to prove a conclusion based entirely upon valid premises where the conclusion is logically necessary. It is not a probabilistic argument. One that is often used is as follows:

P1: Socrates was a man.
P2: All men are mortal.
C: Therefore, Socrates was mortal.

Putting aside issues concerning deductive arguments and tautology, it is worth noting here, and I talked about this in my book Did God Create the Universe from Nothing? (UK), that the opening premises are in fact an inductively derived conclusion in itself. In other words, we are observing that Socrates appears to be a man and we only know that all men are mortal by our sense data. We have issues about a priori against a posteriori knowledge here.

If there are certain a priori necessary building blocks that are fundamental at the basis of our universe, then it might be the fact that things necessarily fall into place as a direct result. I’ve already argued elsewhere that, if God creates the universe from a position of being outside of time, and God is a necessary entity, as William Lane Craig would agree, then the universe is equally as necessary as God. And, arguably, the building blocks of our universe are necessary. And if the logic is at the basis of our universe in a way that, perhaps, it underwrites mathematics, then it could be argued in some way that certain real and material things are logically impossible. In other words, it could be the case that an immaterial mind is as impossible as a square circle. Perhaps it is necessarily monastic or supervenient on matter (as it most certainly is in this world here).

Now, I would have to look into exactly how to establish this. And, to some degree, I am thinking out loud here; but I think this is an interesting area to look into. In reality, it will depend on the a priori/a posterior distinction, and I am actually inclined towards the view that there is no a priori knowledge, that even the Law of Non-Contradiction is inductively derived from empirical examples.

But then, this comes full circle to being a criticism against Craig’s position because, I would argue, you simply can’t have a priori knowledge – you need experience of actual things. Could an immaterial mind imagine all the things it could possibly create without having ever really experienced anything, in a timeless existence? Can you even imagine without time? I think this kind of idealism is bordering on incoherent.

I think it is perhaps dangerous to argue that if you can conceive of something, then it is in some sense logically possible. What does it mean for me to say that I can conceive of the Law of Non-Contradiction not holding, or that 2+2 can equal five? Can these things, then, actually exist? Can we break logic like this? Could it be that this is in some way equivalent to saying you can have an immaterial mind? And by immaterial mind, I mean, absent of absolutely anything material or physical, whether this be wave functions, particles, energy, atoms, anything. I mean, nothingness, other than some kind of mind that is not kept together or defined by anything else. Some kind of free-floating, not even floating, some kind of thing without any framework or rules that keep it together. I can make absolutely no sense of this thing: that you could have a mind that is coherent and operates to some kind of rule-based nature without there being any rules for it to adhere to. Why it wouldn’t just dissipate.

So, although the theist could pick a hole in these first paragraphs of this argument, there is perhaps a defence against that defence. Perhaps it is simply logically necessary, when we look to the necessary building blocks of the universe, that minds require matter, and that to have an immaterial mind is to have a square circle.

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Criticising Craig’s Personal Mind As Causing the Universe

Last updated on: July 23, 2020 at 11:47 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

Here is an argument that a commenter on one of my recent YouTube videos on the Kalam Cosmological Argument gave me. It’s actually something I have argued elsewhere (possibly even mentioning in that Kalam series itself). Before I hand over to him, let me remind you of the KCA:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

I will lay out his argument here before analysing and commenting on it in a future post. Here is the argument from the commenter (Ψ):

Craig frequently presents one argument for the cause of the universe being personal. He has said:

“Moreover, it must be personal as well. Why? Because the cause must be beyond space and time, therefore it cannot be physical or material. Now there are only two kinds of things that fit that description: either an abstract object, like numbers, or else a personal mind. But abstract objects can’t cause anything. Therefore it follows that the cause of the universe is a transcendent, intelligent mind.”

Source: Hitchens vs Craig.

This argument can be formalized in the following way:

P1. Either an abstract object or an unembodied mind caused the universe.

P2. It’s not an abstract object.

C. Therefore, it is an unembodied mind.

There is only one small problem with this: I reject the Platonist and Dualist views that abstract objects and minds are immaterial. I accept Nominalism about abstract objects and Physicalism about minds. Thus, there are no actual examples at all of immaterial (or non-physical) entities that fit that description.*

This entails the cause could be any logically possible inanimate entity we don’t know about and perhaps could never understand. This follows because we have no reason to believe Dualism or Platonism are true. So, there is no example of any entity that could play that role. Minds, according to most philosophers (see, PhilSurvey) and scientists, are not real immaterial entities.**

Craig cannot claim it is a mind or an abstract object because it has not been established that these things actually exist. So, even though the cause may well be immaterial, this doesn’t entail it must be a mind or the number five. In my view, just like that of most scientists, what dualists call “mind” is just an abstraction of a process. That is to say, dualists are looking at a material process — electro-chemical reactions — and asserting it is an immaterial substance. The same applies to abstract objects, by the way. So, we have zero actual examples of immaterial things (it is just a made-up concept). Plus, if potential (not real) immaterial things can be used as examples, then I can also take the concept of fluidity of a liquid, for example, and say there is an immaterial and more powerful version of it outside of our universe. The only difference between this speculation and apologists’ is that nobody wasted their time trying (and failing) to prove the existence of my transcendental fluidity. Both the “mind” and “fluidity” are just made up concepts, abstracted from physical processes.

Therefore, even though the cause of the universe may be immaterial, we know it can’t be a mind or an abstract object (in the way non-platonists and non-dualists define them). Hence, the first premise is false because there is no evidence minds and abstractions are immaterial (thus, the immaterial cause must be something other than minds and abstractions).

Let me just add a possible objection to this is that Craig can use the alleged fact that the cause is immaterial to increase the probability of it being a mind. That is, rather than saying “It is either a mind or an abstract object” Craig could say “the fact that the cause is immaterial increases the probability of theism, because it postulates the existence of immaterial minds.”

But, then, I would point to the fact that it doesn’t have to be immaterial but only Minkowski-less (i.e., other types of non-spiritual universes we can make up right now). Anyway, this would be another argument. The goal of my argument is to show that Craig’s bifurcation (i.e., mind or abstraction) is not valid. It is no different from saying ‘Either the cause of the universe is fluidity or redness. It is not redness. Therefore, it is fluidity.’ This is obviously a bifurcation fallacy. What is the justification for thinking these made-up things are the only options?

Further, Craig could try to defend Dualism in order to save his bifurcation, but then his argument would depend on the validity of other arguments for God! Then, why use the Kalam in the first place when you can simply prove the existence of a mental world?

Let me make a final point here. Craig concludes by saying that abstract objects cannot be the cause of the universe since they “can’t cause anything”, but the right response to that should be: abstract objects cannot be the cause of the universe, not because they don’t have causal power, but because they don’t exist in reality. What we call abstractions, are just descriptions. The same applies to “minds”.

[JP:

Thanks so much to the commenter for providing the material here for this post.

* I will respond to this in the next post as this is perhaps the Problem of Induction.

** I will respond to this in the next post as the theist would reject this, or at least claim of conceptual possibility.]

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“Hating God”: Atheism as Rebelling Against a Father-Figure and Other Nonsenses

Last updated on: July 22, 2020 at 12:23 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I have just had this levelled against me:

I rather doubt there is such a thing as atheism. When atheism manifests itself, it appears to be no more than a mixture of confusion and father issues. Most professed atheists seem to live as if there is a god, despite their rejection of him, and a great many expend a great deal of anger towards this thing they claim does not exist. This is probably why you can’t draw them in on an argument. No matter what you say, they’re fighting with their fathers and they’re going to stay out later after curfew no matter what the old man says: “Hey, screw you Dad!” is what you get.

To which another interlocutor, Guy, (both of these commenters have featured in articles here though don’t comment here) opined in obsequious agreement:

perfect – a straw God easily dispensed with and knocked over with a feather. Never a willingness to posit what a real omniscient and omnipotent God *would* be (whether he exists or not) and how absurd his creatures making demands that he ‘prove’ his existence to them would also be. Basically it’s a prejudice that never honestly entertains a question it affects to be examining. It’s just the imposition of a prejudice as opposed to an honest examination of an issue.

The first commenter was the person who claims Christians are the most persecuted. A very simple assertion that took me a big old article to analyse and debunk. I claimed his point about fatherhood was a really common myth about atheists that it didn’t really warrant a response. He then stated:

But if the point I make is as tired and commonplace as you say, it would be very easy for you to bring up a CONCISE and satisfactory response to it.

Okay, what annoys me about climate denial, science denial, bald assertions, Trump’s lies, lies in general, is that they are very easy to say and one can be very concise. But just because you can state them concisely, it doesn’t mean you can unpick them concisely. Indeed, this is precisely the gripe. It takes so much more effort to build than to destroy, to build up cases using evidence and robust methodology than to destroy such edifices with lies and bald assertions.

This is the big shame about skepticism: it requires far more effort to be right than it does to be wrong.

The annoying thing is the burden of proof should be on the claimant. So, here, I should demand robust argumentation and evidence from him to support his initial claims. Instead, I come here to put down my thoughts in greater detail. More fool me. More fool me for even engaging with such silly comments.

Hey ho. Here goes. Slightly out of order:

The denial of God and anger at him

Most professed atheists seem to live as if there is a god, despite their rejection of him, and a great many expend a great deal of anger towards this thing they claim does not exist. This is probably why you can’t draw them in on an argument.

Russell Blackford (with whom I used to blog), a few years back, wrote a super book “50 Great Myths About Atheism” with Udo Schuklenk because they got tired of the same old naive assertions made by theists. Three of the chapters are pertinent to this:

Myth 3 Atheists Believe in God but are in Denial 14
Myth 5 Atheists Hate or are Angry with God 21
Myth 6 Atheism is a Rebellion Against God’s Authority 24

These chapters are well worth reading and put these sorts of claims to bed.

Michael Martin wrote a 1996 response (“Are There Really No Atheists?“) to Van Til, who in 1969 claimed there were no atheists (as well as greg Bahnsen). Go read it.

Part of the problem is the phraseology here with the commenter. It is a straw man. Indeed, most of that thread is an army of straw men. Let’s fix the statement:

Most professed atheists live as if there is no god, including in their rational rejection of the idea of it or arguments presented for its existence.

Part of the problem with arguments of God is the gendered pronoun usage. God is best described as an “it” (I often make this point by calling God she). This possibly underwrites the erropneous claims that come later concerning the rejections of father-figures.

Back to the denial of God issue – I think the commenter needs to be more specific here in exactly what he means (Martin sets out two interpretations in his refutation – the strong and weak theses). This simply appears not to apply to any atheist I know, As for being angry with God, we literally can’t be angry with something we genuinely think does not exist.

It’s a clever ruse that ends up being an unfalsifiable claim. When I provided some atheists, such as Blackford, in defence of the original accusations made, Guy stated: “By appeal to people who reject theism, comically”. So I cannot use atheists to defend atheism? Because not only is this an insane argument, it can be used to invalidate defences of theism by theists, too. Oh dear.

I am just wondering, though, can we claim that Christians hate Muslims on account of the same logic? Do they then have tacit admission that Allah exists? How about Zeus, or…or…?

As Blackford states (p.21-22):

It might suit Jensen and like-minded religious figureheads if we were not sincere or serious in our view that God does not exist. Robert T. Lee is one critic of atheists who makes this quite explicit. He argues that atheists ‘‘think since they deny the existence of God, they cannot hate Him. But it’s really the other way around: they know He exists, that’s why they hate Him’’ (Lee, 2004). It goes without saying, perhaps, that this kind of logic is question-begging. From an atheistic viewpoint, the various gods worshiped by Christians and others are essentially fictional or mythological characters. Why hate them?

Of course, that does not prevent atheists from viewing the Abrahamic God, as depicted for example in various books of the Bible, as a most unattractive character. It is easy to see this being as loving vengeance and warfare, as being prurient in its obsession with matters of sex, and as especially repulsive in its demands for endless praise and worship and in its requirement of blood sacrifice before forgiving sins. For that reason, many atheists are glad not to live in a world that contains this being. Such a world is clearly not the same as one created and ruled by a truly benevolent deity. Unfortunately, we appear not to be living in that world either.

Thus there is a religious cottage industry devoted to explaining (away) the evil that exists in our world despite the presence of a benevolent God, who supposedly created it. Theologians call this the theodicy problem (often referred to as the problem of evil). How can it be that there is so much evil existing in a world they believe has been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent deity? The obvious answer is that there simply is no such deity.

Atheists tend to find the religious answers to such questions contrived or unsatisfying. That is not, however, the same as hating an actual being – God. Nor do atheists tend to hate historical or legendary figures, such as Jesus, any more than other such figures about whom little is known with certainty. Some atheists are critical of the moral character of Jesus as depicted in the traditionally accepted Gospels (e.g., Tooley, 2009), but that should not be confused with hatred. More generally, there is a tendency for religious apologists to blur the distinction between harsh criticism and expressions of hatred.

For example, Alister McGrath comments, not exactly in a charitable spirit, on Richard Dawkins: ‘‘Dawkins preaches to his god-hating choirs, who are clearly expected to relish his rhetorical salvoes, and raise their hands in adulation’’ (McGrath and Collicutt McGrath, 2007, p. x).

I could quote the whole chapter, but expediency, right?

However, I will leave you with some, er, data. You know, actual evidence. Blackford, again:

Interestingly, and not surprisingly perhaps, surveys suggest that religious believers are often angry with the God they believe in. A study undertaken by Julie Exline and colleagues found that between one-third and two-thirds of religious people surveyed in the USA conceded being angry with their respective gods. The reason most frequently mentioned is that they feel let down by God, usually in the aftermath of a major health scare or other personal tragedy that he did not prevent (Exline et al., 2011).

When atheism manifests itself, it appears to be no more than a mixture of confusion and father issues.

“I know you are, you said you, but what am I?”

We have two forms of atheism: strong atheism and weak atheism. Let’s start with weak atheism – a lack of belief in a god or gods. You can’t really get clearer than that – a belief you just don’t have. But with either position, as with all positions, it is about several things: psychology and rational argument. I agree that psychology is always at play when we come to bel;ieve things, I just disagree that the psychology here involves the rejection of a father. Either way, the pyschology does not invalidate the rational arguments, even if it can, with post hoc rationalisaiton, involve the scrabbling around for those arguments to defend an intuitively-taken position.

I accuse many Christians and right-wing commenters of doing that here (see the endless discussions on the Second Amendment, conceptual nominalism and natural rights).

When it comes to rational argument, atheists really are clear. It might revolve around the problem of evil, or the inherent contradictions and confusions in arguing for OmniGod under classical theism, or the nonsenses of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The clarity is there. There is no confusion. I am very clear: I am Certain of My Atheism. I’ve Said All I have to Say. Or Have I?

The confusion from theists comes from a top-down appraoch. Rather than buil;ding to a conclusion, they start with God and the Bible and attemt to build backwards. It’s a messay and very, very confused affair. Heck, christian theologians the world over disagree with their theologies. Thoedicies abound. So no, I would certainly posit, instead, that theism is far more confused. Necessarily so. Here is the huge hypocrisy.

When you have to apply an ancient, parochial book to history, science and philosophy, the mental contractions and rational gerrymandering you have to do is quite astounding. It is even why I have argued previously that presuppositionalist biblical literalists are far more logically consistent than almost all Christian theists of the modern, more liberal UK persuasion, even if their starting premises are broken. Trying to allow a liberal understanding of, say, homosexuality to jibe with the Bible and theology is embarrassing to watch, at times.

See my segment in the Skepticule podcast episode 51 for more details on this: Counter-apologetics on Original Sin, Adam and Eve, the Westboro Baptist Church etc available now! (I thought I’d written an article on it – turns out that will be my next piece).

Those father issues

No matter what you say, they’re fighting with their fathers and they’re going to stay out later after curfew no matter what the old man says: “Hey, screw you Dad!” is what you get.

As Blackford again opines, this issue is one that has been around for some time. At the beginning of his chapter “Myth 6 Atheism Is a Rebellion against God’s Authority”, he refers to the seminal work of George Smith (p.24):

As George H. Smith mentions, atheists are often accused of being in some sort of neurotic rebellion, especially if the atheist concerned is young. Smith notes, however, that atheists cannot win once this approach is taken – a middle-aged atheist can be accused of such things as ‘‘the frustration of daily routine, the bitterness of failure, or… alienation from oneself and one’s fellow man.’’ If the atheist is old, the accusation can relate to ‘‘the disillusionment, cynicism and loneliness that sometimes accompany one’s later years’’ (Smith, 1979, p. 24). All of this is question-begging since neither youth nor old age is evidence of any kind of neurotic response to the God question. Speculations about states of mind get us nowhere.

Indeed, as Smith himself says in Atheism – The Case Against God (p.19):

Contrary to what many theists like to believe, atheism is not a form of neurotic rebellion or mental illness. The religionist cannot rid the world of atheists by committing them to an isolated asylum where they can be ignored. To label atheism as a psychological problem is a feeble, almost laughable attempt to evade the fundamental questions of truth and falsity. Is theism true? What reasons are there for believing in a god? These are the important issues, and these are the issues to which the theist must address himself if he wishes to confront the challenge of atheism.

(There is further discussion on p.160 of this.)

It’s not that God represents an authoritarian father-figure that all, every single one of us atheists have had some issue with, it’s that God is a parochial and outdated invention with parochial and outdated moral strictures.

For many of us, the moral norms advocated by morally conservative theists do not look like the edicts of a superlatively wise and benevolent being, but more like relics from a less enlightened era. At best, some of them may have made sense as standards of behavior in earlier social circumstances, even though they make little or no sense now. Once we reach that point, holy books, traditional teachings, and official pronouncements from religious organizations appear unlikely to be divinely inspired. That, in turn, casts doubt on their authority in other matters such as claims about the existence and character of supernatural beings. (p.26)

Perhaps he is referring to the nonsense that is Paul Vitz’s Faith and the Fatherless, but I don’t think so: this isn’t about absentee fathers, but about reacting, psychologically, to some kind of authoritarian father-figure rooted in somehow in the atheists’ experiences. Perhaps, then, it is taking the thesis of James Spiegel in his The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. You would hope not, as this is a book and thesis that atheists have taken serious issue with (by all accounts it’s drivel). He makes such claims as:

We may summarize the biblical diagnosis of atheism as follows. The atheists’ problem is rebellion against the plain truth of God, as clearly revealed in nature. This rebellion is prompted by a morality, which diminishes understanding, and a genuine ignorance results. This is not a loss of intelligence so much as a selective intellectual obtuseness or imperviousness to truths related to God, ethics, and human nature. But the root of this obtuseness is moral in nature.

It follows from the biblical diagnosis that atheists’ arguments are an intellectual ruse masking their rebellion. The recent spate of new atheist books, like the entire history of atheistic publications, amounts to little more than a literary subterfuge. The flaws in their arguments are easily exposed – whether matters of bad logic or faulty presuppositions. These are further symptoms of their wilful disbelief, which takes both this active form (presenting atheistic arguments) and the passive form of ignoring the myriad evidences for God, to which Paul briefly refers and which atheist apologists, from Plato and Aquinas to CS Lewis and Peter Kreeft have tirelessly illuminated. (p.56)

Holy moly. This is just nonsense. I wouldn’t take this seriously in any form, and yet Spiegel seems to be one of the main “rebellion against God as father” proponents. Sadly, his case is built largely around biblical exegesis rather than any serious psychology. And to think that somehow Thomists and CS Lewis and Kreeft have somehow closed the book (when Thomism is arguably at loggerheads with other theologies) is village theism.

Thus, the choice of the atheistic paradigm is motivated by non-rational factors, some of which are psychological and some of which are moral in nature.

The hardening of the atheistic mind-set occurs through cognitive malfunction due to two principal causes. First, atheists suffer from paradigm-induced blindness, as their worldview inhibits their ability to recognize the reality of God that is manifest in creation. Second, atheists suffer from damage to the sensus divinitatis, so their natural awareness of God is severely impeded. (p.114)

I just don’t know where to start with the sheer hypocrisy of this last quote. If my interlocutor wants to take these arguments seriously, have at it. they are laughable assertions.

So, really, this goes back to supposedly rebelling against God’s authority as if we just don’t like those house rules that God has imposed, that we staying out beyond curfew.

Or is it that, in God’s house, you get executed for being gay, stoned for adultery (in the Portsmouth Diocese, on the decree of the Diocese, our primary schools were responsible for teaching that moral edict to Year 1 children when I worked in faith schooling – 6 year-olds), that slaves are okay knocking about the house, being dehumanised, so on and so forth. And if we go to war, it’s okay to rape enemy families.

From my own experience, I have no issue with my father in this way. Despite the fact that he, as well as my interlocutor, voted Brexit, the gay relatives I have are safe in his house, and he doesn’t keep slaves. We might disagree a lot on politics right now (a very recent thing), but he and my mother live around the corner and we’re just fine, thank you very much,

But no, me rejecting God is definitely because I just want to rebel: “Aw, Dad! C’mon! Please, do I have to murder my mixed-race neighbours to keep God’s people pure?!” (Numbers 25:6-13)

I mean, these ten biblical passages I reject solely on account of mere father-figure rebellion (Dan Barker’s list), right?

10. God destroys a good family ‘for no reason.’

(Job 2:3 New Revised Standard Bible)

9. God destroys the fetuses of those who do not worship him.

(Hosea 13:4, 9, 16 New International Version)

8. God approves the massacre of a peaceful people so one of his tribes could have a place to live.

(Judges 18:1–28 NIV)

7. Babies are slaughtered and wives raped.

(Isaiah 13:9–16 NIV)

6. A mixed-race couple is murdered by a godly priest to keep God’s people pure.
The righteous priest Phinehas murdered a loving couple for the crime of miscegenation. Then he was praised by God and rewarded for the hate crime with a perpetual priesthood for keeping the nation racially pure.

(Numbers 25:6–13 NRSV)

5. A daughter is burned as an acceptable sacrifice to God.

(Judges 11:30–39 NIV)

4. The cannibalistic God makes people eat human flesh.

(Leviticus 26:27–29 King James Version)

3. God threatens rape, then takes credit for it.

(Jeremiah 13:15–26 NRSV)

2. God threatens sexual molestation.

(Isaiah 3:16–17 KJV)

1. God wants you to be happy to dash babies against the rocks.

(Psalm 137:8–9 NRSV)

Finally…

Let me return to Guy’s point:

perfect – a straw God easily dispensed with and knocked over with a feather. Never a willingness to posit what a real omniscient and omnipotent God *would* be (whether he exists or not) and how absurd his creatures making demands that he ‘prove’ his existence to them would also be. Basically it’s a prejudice that never honestly entertains a question it affects to be examining. It’s just the imposition of a prejudice as opposed to an honest examination of an issue.

Well, I have written an ebook on entirely this problem. It’s not a straw man, it’s classical theism.

The Problem of “God”: Classical Theism under the Spotlight (UK). He’s welcome to read it. At any rate, we’re not asking that “he” (God) proves “he” exists, we ask his followers prove it, the god-entity, exists, or at least provide compelling enough arguments, just as they would ask of Muslims, climate change, unicorns, UFOs, etc.

What’s good for the goose, and all that.

Essentially, silly rhetorical nonsense.

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William Lane Craig vs Alex O’Connor on the Kalam

Last updated on: June 24, 2020 at 10:55 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

Alex O’Connor is a bit of a star in the atheist world right now, with a huge internet following, getting invited to conferences and getting huge names to discussions, from Richard Dawkins to, now, William Lane Craig.

So here he is talking to William Lane Craig. And I am sure as hell O’Connor has read my book on the Kalam because he uses my conceptual nominalistic analogies of chairs and species.

About three-quarters of the way through, he uses my argument on the circularity of the KCA as set out here and elsewhere:

Kalam Cosmological Argument: Causality and a Circular Argument

I have never before seen WLC give so much ground as I did here. His approach to mereological nihilism (similar to conceptual nominalism I often talk about) was initially (as it is elsewhere) to be incredulous and mocking of such an anti-realist approach. But as O’Connor goes on, he almost seems to understand it more and take it more seriously.

Which makes me think that WLC needs to do some more work on the Kalam and properly investigate some of the bigger criticisms against it. Personally, I think O’Connor should have really pressed WLC on this subject.

He can start with my book: Did God Create the Universe from Nothing?: Countering William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (UK).

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Statues, The Sorites Paradox & Slippery Slopes

Last updated on: June 15, 2020 at 10:00 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

It’s my favourite philosophical thought experiment. There is a reason that I find the Sorites Paradox compelling, insightful and very important: it is everywhere and has ramifications right across the board. I’ll get onto it later.

In my opinion, it goes hand in hand with conceptual nominalism – the belief that universals and abstract ideas do not exist “out there” but exclusively in our minds, constructed by them, whether agreed to by consensus or not. But before we get onto these matters, let’s rewind over the last week or so.

Colston

In the UK recently, we had our own Black Lives Matter moment when the statue of Edward Colston was ripped down in Bristol. We had many people saying “about time” and many others questioning this very “un-British” act of rebellion. Many of this latter group had never heard of Colston, much less knew the horrors he caused or represents. His plaque reads:

“Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city AD 1895.”

For those of you who don’t know, Bristol is the main UK port that is closest to America, and so it became a crucial trading spot for centuries, most notably concerning the trade in slaves. The FT’s excellent article from a few years ago explains:

Edward Colston’s past was no secret. He had risen to the highest levels of the Royal African Company, which then held the British monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade. During his time there, some 84,500 people were forced on to the RAC’s slave ships from west Africa to the Caribbean.

Conditions on board were so poor that, according to research by historian Roger Ball, about a quarter died en route. Yet the city continued to celebrate the slave trader until as recently as two years ago. He has been called the “father of the city” and its “patron saint”. In 2016, schoolchildren were preached a sermon in which his family motto was quoted: “Go, and do thou likewise.”

It is only now, more than 200 years after the abolition of the slave trade, that the anti-Colston movement has gained momentum. Lake, 38, is part of a new protest group energised by global efforts to bring down symbols of racial oppression, from statues of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa to Confederate statues in the southern United States. Bristol campaigners have won significant victories, such as persuading the city’s biggest music venue, the Colston Hall, to change its name. Their current target is the statue of Colston, which still stands. But the campaign has exposed deep divisions. For many African-Caribbean Bristolians, the dethroning of Colston is a first step in recognising both their contribution to the city and the continuing discrimination they face: according to a report last year, the Runnymede Trust think-tank found that Bristol shows a greater disparity between white and minority ethnic groups than any other part of the UK outside London on measures of education, employment, health and housing.

Parts of the white population are infuriated by the anti-Colston movement. “When you talk to a lot of Bristolians, like I do, you find they want to move on, they don’t want to keep going on about slavery. They don’t want to be made to feel guilty or ashamed,” says Mark Steeds, a pub landlord and anti-Colston campaigner. “But the problem is, it hasn’t been addressed.”

There are many connections to poverty, Brexit, tradition and so on with these debates, and the article does a good job at presenting them. For many, Colston’s abhorrent slave trading is balanced with him being a philanthropist. Well, he was a sectarian one at that, and being a mass-murdering philanthropist still means you are a mass murderer.

I had to have conversations recently with people close to me to explain this. They thought the tearing down of the statue was terrible. I asked, “If you were a Jew, how would you feel about having to pass a statue of Hitler or Himmler every day of your working life?”; so on and so forth. I explained the stats above and what he did, and the beliefs he had to have in order for him to be able to justify his activity. I explained that statues are idols, and that this man, his actions, were being idolized. I explained the context of Bristol to them, and its deep and divisive connection to slavery.

And yet, it was water off a duck’s back. They were unconvinced.

Cognitive dissonance, eh!

For me, this statue being torn down was a no brainer. I wonder what detractors felt about Saddam Hussein’s statue being torn down with the help of US Marines. And Hitler? Stalin? It’s well worth reading this article on the history of tearing down statues.

Woman upset by slave trader statues being taken down. pic.twitter.com/CNS1bqzMpi

— Rosie Holt (@RosieisaHolt) June 10, 2020

The Kaepernick Effect: “Don’t tear it down, do it peacefully and put it in a museum!”

These same people with whom I was arguing had never heard of Colin Kaepernick and presumed taking a knee, in the States, was all about Floyd. There’s a nice double-edged interpretation of the knee. I had to explain that Kaepernick peacefully protested police brutality by taking a knee during the national anthem at NFL games and was castigated for it, publicly by the POTUS and the VP and every conservative lawmaker and commentator you could think of. Remember Laura Ingraham’s gun with “stand” on it? That’s FOX News for you.

He lost his job and was publicly eviscerated.

Peaceful protest is what white people call for and promptly ignore, and then scream for in the face of large scale, less respectful protests.

This is what happened with Colston. Nothing happened. For a long time. And so the people took matters into their own hands, and, all of sudden, action is taking place regarding all number of statues and whatnot.

Confederate Leaders

Where getting rid of the Colston statue is obvious to me, the same logic should apply to the Confederate leaders. Think what they stood for – the breaking up of the Union, the sustaining of slavery and thus the slave trade, and so on. Why the US should have statues and military bases named after these guys is not only deeply inappropriate, but wholly bizarre. You would only commemorate the losers in such a way if they stood for something utterly noble and morally righteous.

Which they most certainly did not. Unless you are racist.

So these statues need to come down.

As a result, in London, the statue of Robert Milligan (merchant and slave owner – 500 at his plantations at his death) was proactively removed.

Now, there is talk about all sorts of statues. In the UK, there is talk of statues of:

Winston Churchill (who wanted his 1955 re-election slogan to be “Keep England White”)
Nelson’s Column (outspoken in his opposition to abolition, tried to stop William Wilberforce)
Sir Thomas Guy of Guy’s Hospital fame (amassed his fortune largely on selling slaves)
Jan Smuts
Robert Clive
Earl Mountbatten
Charles James Napier
William Beckford
Robert Geffrye

You get the picture. Go research the names to get more information on them.

We have also had Gone with the Wind temporarily removed from HBO Max until they can find accompanying material, as well as the “Don’t mention the war!” episode of Fawlty Towers due to the language/racial slurs and opinions of the Major in it (as well as other concerns). It gets messy because the point of the episode seems to be punching up at the opinions of people like the Major. It’s whether it’s necessary to even express it in those ways any more, I guess. This sort of behaviour is not unusual, just more marked in this day and age:

While traditional TV channels used to simply quietly stop repeating old shows that were no longer considered appropriate, the advent of streaming means catch-up services need to constantly reassess their back catalogues, attracting publicity in the process.

But where do we draw the line as to what is okay for a statue and what is inappropriate?

The Slippery Slope and Sand Dunes

My favourite philosophical thought experiment, if you can call it that, and as many of my readers might know of me, is the Sorites Paradox. It can be defined as follows:

The sorites paradox^[1] (sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.^[2] A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?^[3]

The paradox arises in this way:

The word “sorites” derives from the Greek word for heap.^[4] The paradox is so named because of its original characterization, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus.^[5] The paradox goes as follows: consider a heap of sand from which grains are individually removed. One might construct the argument, using premises, as follows:^[3]

1000000 grains of sand is a heap of sand (Premise 1)

A heap of sand minus one grain is still a heap. (Premise 2)

Repeated applications of Premise 2 (each time starting with one fewer grain) eventually forces one to accept the conclusion that a heap may be composed of just one grain of sand.^[6]). Read (1995) observes that “the argument is itself a heap, or sorites, of steps of modus ponens“:^[7]

1000000 grains is a heap.

If 1000000 grains is a heap then 999999 grains is a heap.

So 999999 grains is a heap.

If 999999 grains is a heap then 999998 grains is a heap.

So 999998 grains is a heap.

If …

… So 1 grain is a heap.

What this means is that there are no definite, objective lines of demarcation. When things exist on continua, we pragmatically invent lines to separate one idea from another. Baby, toddler, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, middle-aged, pensioner: test ideas and lines differ from time to time and from society to society. Abstract ideas, like such categorisations, and such as morality, personhood, heroes, chairs (as ideas), redness and so on, only exist in the minds of the agents who conceive them. There is no realm “out there” where these abstract ideas exist.

My idea of what a hero is will be different from yours and any other person’s. When I look at the chair, I get a sense of chairness from it and have an understanding of the idea of a chair. However, a chair might feel like a bed to a cat, or to an alien it could be something entirely different, or to someone from the Amazon Rainforest, yet again something different. this is because there is no objective idea of what a chair is that our minds tap into. It is not top-down epistemology but bottom-up mental construction. Definitions are usually functional so that a chair fulfills the idea of being a chair by fulfilling the function it provides to the people who are perceiving it.

What this means is that every single abstract idea is constructed by the conceiver.

This is what is going on with the statues. I can easily see where the statues at this end of the line are inappropriate – Colston – but it gets harder in the middle where we have an arbitrary and subjective line that demarcates the movement from unacceptable to acceptable. There is no definite right or wrong here. There are the personal opinions and offence taken by people subjectively, all of which need, or need not, be reflected in society around them and us, though laws, behaviour and culture.

We are seeing living evidence of these ideas of conceptual nominalism and issues of sand dunes and the fact that they are at least pragmatically and prima facie true. You might believe in some aether where these moral absolutes and categories exist, but no one can access that aether even if we did believe it existed (it doesn’t); so in the meantime, let’s assume it doesn’t and go about the wrangle in trying to achieve a consensus on these moral issues.

Who Gets to Define and Arbitrate Offense?

This debate has been raging for some time now, and both sides get very irate. Who decides if something is offensive or not? One online piece opines:

And that’s why the examples of Bettie Page, Marilyn Monroe, and Gauguin are such good ones. The professor could claim that these pictures are art, or inspirational, or kitsch and genuinely mean it, while the student could claim that the objectification or the overt sexuality is immoral, and hold to the belief with all his or her heart. Both genuinely believe their claims and both want the best for the other person, but this doesn’t resolve the issue, because one of them is going to have to give way. If it is the professor, than he or she is being “censored” and the student is being “intolerant,” but if the student has to endure the images, then he or she is facing a “hostile environment” and the professor is being “insensitive.” Certainly, someone has to win and someone has to lose, but a more interesting scenario is the possibility that one of them might be right and one of them might be wrong.

Which is it? Are there objectively offensive images and if so, who decides what they are? I’d love to read your thoughts below.

No there aren’t and this is the problem for many people who are trying to navigate these waters with abject certainty. The one comment to the piece nails the important questions in this debate, if it also misses the mark in places:

Who determines what is offensive and what is not, in my view, is perhaps the first question related to this issue. An offending act causes anger, resentment, or affront. In other words: being offended is an emotional reaction. In other, other words: “I’m offended” equals “My feeling are hurt.”

So the first follow-up question is: Who’s feelings matter more? Let’s suppose I say or do something that you find offensive. If my words or actions make me happy, but anger you, who’s feelings are “more important” ? My happiness, or your anger? The offending symbol or the offending word inflict no tangible damage, so it’s difficult for the offended to say they are hurt by the offense. This is not to say that emotional pain is not real, but strong words from one’s father, spouse, or boss is in a different category than a bearded stranger in the swamp quoting the Bible.

In today’s America if a person is offended, he or she assumes that they have the right to control the “offender”. So the next question we must ask is: What gives the offended the right to control the behavior of the offender? It goes like this: You offend me. I therefore have the right to control you and/or your behavior. Take down that flag; don’t say that word; don’t do what offends me. I’m offended so I’m in charge and I demand the you, as the offender, be fined, fired, or otherwise punished for something I don’t like. But you must stop because I say so! Don’t forget, I’m offended! I contend that offense assumes no rights. Remember, offense is really nothing more than a gripe and a more sophisticated, socially acceptable way of saying: “You hurt my feelings”.

Your next-to-last sentence is very telling about where we are as a society. To state that one of them is right and one of them is wrong assumes a moral standard. So perhaps a third question is: “How is right and wrong determined”? Our society purports that there is no moral standard – what is right for you is right for you. Without an objective source of morality, nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Absent of a moral standard, all we have is opinion. Without an objective moral standard tolerance is no better than intolerance, it’s just your preference.

So in summary – absent of a standard of right or wrong the only measuring stick we have are the hurt feelings of the offended which in turn grant him or her the right to control another person’s behavior. Tell me how this makes sense.

It’s all about consensus. There’s no other meaningful way of arbitrating this. But what if, using decent rational arguments, most of the people are “wrong”?

Education, education, education. Critical thinking. Logic. Rationality.

What about, say, Churchill, then? I guess the point is I don’t have an answer. It’s too tricky to say one way or another. He may annoy some people with his views, but the rest of his history will probably balance the argument for most people to keep statues of him. That’s how consensus works. Will that evaluation change over time for many? Who knows. The problem is that humans love certainty, but so much about this world is uncertain.

Should I buy organic, local or seasonal? Well, there will be pros and cons to each, and it depends what metric you use as an axiom: carbon footprint, convenience, biodiversity, pollution? If I’m feeling biodiversity-y, then I’m lumping for organic. “But all the extra land needed means a lack of biodiversity elsewhere!” “Okay, but if that elsewhere will be built on, better an organic farm…”

Ad infinitum.

Answers are difficult to come by with any sort of obvious certainty and we don’t like a world without answers, a world with unknowns. Heck, that’s part of the reason gods were invented.

Conclusion

Right and wrong are arrived at by consensus, absent of any objective demarcations. Even if you did believe that God underwrites morality, this helps you not one jot in arbitrating this area because you would have to know what God thinks on the matter and then have to subjectively interpret it anyway.

But God is, as ever, silent.

So that leaves us. We need to decide what to do by consensus. This, pragmatically speaking, means getting out to vote for people who most represent our views.

Get out and vote.

Or spread the word and talk to people about these ideas. If you are offended, then you need to educate people as to why and persuade them to agree with you, and vice versa.

But many people are inoculated to reason, stuck in their ways. True. And they get to vote, too. In some lost cause cases, we have to wait for generations to pass before younger, fresher ideas come to fruition. If this takes too long, then expect some bumpy points in the road towards the future. But with every protest, there needs to be understanding and persuasion and a real will to change things (democratically) for the good to accompany them. In reality, though, this simply means that, often, a chunk of people in any given context are going to be annoyed (perhaps vehemently so) with a moral decision or evaluation. Someone will always be offended in some way. It would be nice to be on the right side of history, though. I don’t want to be someone who, viewed decades or centuries down the line, was seen to support Colston and slavery.

In the context of the US, this might look like Biden taking on board ideas from the left (which is already happening), more progressive ideals, whilst Trump bolshily solidifies in his rightist defiance. The polls will decide whose approach will win through. Times, they are a-changin’, one hopes.

In the marketplace of ideas, access to true and proper knowledge is paramount. This is what is so scary about the dictatorial tendencies of people like Trump who want to control the media. The media needs to improve, for sure, but not really in the way that Trump intends…

Life is messy, morality is messy, philosophy is messy. Statues and ideas fall into simple categories: ones that are A-okay, ones that obviously suck, and a whole bunch of those in the grey areas of thought that require a whole heap of arguing over. We can see a sand dune and label it, we can see a few grains and label them, but we get stuck when there is a duneish bunch of sand that could go either way. And more people are going to end up being annoyed at digital decisions regarding those ones in the middle, because, like Brexit, the population will be more evenly split.

My solution? Make abstract statues in future. Anyone can take anything from them, and there won’t be a right or a wrong for sure.

Actually, people will argue over anything. Why build a statue when you could fund a hospital wing…?

Life is tiring.

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Responding to Wilcox #5: When Is a Human a Human Being?

Last updated on: May 12, 2020 at 2:10 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

This is the fifth piece in series debating Clinton Wilcox at the Life Training Institute (a pro-life organisation) with the following chronology:

JP: Abortion: The Human/Human Being Distinction

CW: About the Alleged Human/Human Being Distinction

CW: About the Alleged Human/Human Being Distinction, Part 2

JP: Pro-Life Debate: Answering Criticisms on the Human/Human Being Distinction

JP: Responding to Wilcox #2: “An Embryo Is an Innocent Human Being”

JP: Responding to Wilcox #3: Human, Humans, Human Beings, the Sorites Paradox & Identity

JP: Responding to Wilcox #4: Eggs & Chickens, Acorns & Oaks, Embryos & Humans

This piece is arguably the most important so far, which is what I said last time, because it is where the whole human being debate ends up if you follow the axiomatic premises of my philosophy. I may even finish the series with this one because, once said, everything else defers to this. It’s fundamental, this one.

This is what Wilcox said in his initial rebuttal:

“Blastocyst” doesn’t meet the dictionary definition of “human being”. But neither does “infant”, so by Pearce’s own definition, an infant is not a human. Although, Pearce glosses over the part about how a human being is a child of the species Homo sapiens, focusing on the part about how humans differ from other animals and arguing blastocysts are not humans because they don’t meet the specific requirements about how humans differ from other animals.

Okay, this is where things get fuzzy, and humans do not like fuzzy. Let’s start with what Christians typically believe. It will be something like this:

A human fertilised egg has the rights of an adult because it is a human and human being. This is due to it having the essential properties of a human, i.e., essentialism.
At fertilization, the zygote somehow develops personhood, whatever this may entail.
A human egg is fertilised and is then “magically” ensouled. At this point, a zygote somehow embodies, or has attached to it, a soul.
All or some of the above in combination.

I have presented, over time, many arguments against these positions. For example, the ensoulment claim suffers from arguments from IVF and monozygotic twins, which can develop weeks after an ovum becomes fertilised. For any given IVF treatment implantation, there are often some dozen or so fertilised eggs in vitro. Where are the souls? And when a zygote splits weeks after supposed ensoulment into two, what happens?

So on and so forth. There are other arguments, not least a demand for the evidence for this, and the mind-body causality issue. See:

What Is a Soul and What Does It Do?
Argument against the soul – Stephen Cave
Arguments against the existence of a soul

As for essentialism, I will be dealing with this next, but these may be of interest:

Essentialism

Essentialism essentially (intended…) is a form of realism that states that there are properties about a human that are necessarily attributed to an entity. In this case “human being” is a very real concept that exists outside of human minds and this entity necessarily and absolutely has a core set of properties that allow it to be identified as “human being” (or “human”). I’m going to have to cover some old ground again here.

Firstly, a “human being” as a distinct entity sits on a foundation of the notion that a “human”, qua “homo sapiens”, is a distinct species.

Categorising stuff

We love to use categories. That’s a blue flower, that’s a red car, that’s an adult, that’s a child. It’s how we navigate reality in a practical sense – it provides our conceptual map. However, you shouldn’t confuse the map with the terrain. Essentially (there it is again), we make up labels to represent a number of different properties. A cat has these properties, a dog these. Red has these properties, blue these. Often we agree on this labelling, but sometimes we don’t. What constitutes a hero? A chair? Is a tree stump a chair?

The problem occurs when we move between categories. It is at these times that we realise the simplicity of the categories shows weakness in the system.

You reach eighteen years of age. You are able to vote. You are now classed as an adult. You are allowed to buy alcoholic drinks (in the UK). But there is barely any discernible difference in you, as a person, physically and mentally, from 17 years, 364 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds, and you 1 second later.

However, we decide to define that second change at midnight as differentiating the two yous and seeing you move from child (adolescent) to adult. These categories are arbitrary in where we exactly draw the line. Some countries choose sixteen, some younger, some older. These are conceptual constructs that allow us to navigate about a continuum of time. You can look at a five-year-old and the same person at twenty-eight and clearly see a difference. But that five-year-old and the same person one second later? There is no discernible difference.

And yet it is pragmatically useful for us to categorise, otherwise things like underage sex and drinking would take place with wild abandon, perhaps. Sixteen for the age of consent is, though, rather arbitrary. Why not five seconds later? Four days? Three and a half years?

Speciation is exactly the same. There is no real time where a population of organisms actually transforms into a new species. Because species is a human conceptual construct that does not exist objectively. We name things homo sapiens sapiens but cannot define exactly where speciation occurred. In one sense, it does not occur. In another, if you look at vastly different places on the continuum, it does (at least in our minds).

In philosophy, there is a position called (conceptual) nominalism, which is set against (Platonic) realism. This conceptual nominalism, as I adhere to, denies in some (or all) cases the existence of abstracts. These categories we invent don’t exist (a word that itself needs clear defining), at least not outside of our heads. Thus species do not exist as objective categories. We invent them, but if all people who knew about species suddenly died and information about them was lost, then so too would be lost the concept and categorisation.

When we look at two very different parts of a continuum we find it easy to say those things are different and are of different categories, but when we look in finer detail, this falls apart. There is a fuzzy logic at play.

Species do not exist. Well, they do in our heads. When we agree about them. And only then so we can nicely label pictures in books, or in our heads.

This is a version of the Sorites Paradox.

As I have shared several times, this image below sums it up with aplomb.

So essentialism invents these definite abstract categorisations and makes absolute claims to them. But questions arise:

How do they know which entities “exist” and which are just human constructions? (i.e., I can invent forqwiblex – does this now exist objectively with set essential properties?)
Who gets to decide and arbitrate these categorisations?
What happens at the “edges” of these categorisations?
What happens when instantiations of these essences cease to exist or come into existence?
What happens when these instantiations start to cease/begin to exist? (i.e, around the “edges”)

Evidence

The simple evidence of the world around us supports conceptual nominalism over essentialism. Most everything exists on continua, and we argue about definitions and categorisations of everything. From morality to language, we argue. There is, descriptively speaking, inarguable subjectivity. The fact that morality broadly changes around the world and that we can see it in evolved forms throughout the animal world points towards this being a construct of the natural world and not some objectively existing Platonic form.

Personhood

What these labels require are properties to be attached to. Because there is no objective fact that a given label applies to a particular set of properties, we need to agree on what ones attach to which properties, and agree by consensus. When we agree, we write dictionaries and encyclopedias codifying that agreement. But these things change. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has adapted to the needs of scientists, and the word “literally” is now a contranym whose meanings also include metaphorically, the opposite to what it traditionally means. “He was literally on fire on the football pitch” has become such a common use of the word such that it can now, according to some dictionaries, be used to mean the opposite of itself.

Personhood is the same. It means whatever we agree it to mean. The problem is that so many philosophers, politicians and laypeople thoroughly disagree on what constitutes personhood. And that disagreement, as with any other term (including morality), reflects the lack of objective facticity.

Can we find agreement? Undoubtedly not, because it is wrapped up with so many other things such as abortion, euthanasia, the afterlife and other ideas that have such strong cultural, religious and contextual draw that means you cannot separate it from these other frameworks in which it is set. Thus to objectively (as in neutrally) assess its meaning is almost impossible for many people.

In this way, and for the point of this, I don’t need to establish what personhood actually constitutes (for me) here. We construct it, and we disagree on it, but we could sign up to some kind of consensus if we had a decent enough definition and will for a consensus.

Thomism vs Personhood

I had a debate with a Catholic philosopher a few years ago and he fully admitted that trying to get a pro-life argument from personhood was pretty much impossible for these reasons, and so he opted for a Thomistic (i.e., essentialist) approach.

The issue here is that both approaches suffer from the same problem. Where personhood is difficult to assign to a developmental entity on a continuum over time, it is a form of essentialism. “Personhood” as opposed to “human” or “human being” is the entity that requires absolute properties. The same problem that exists for “personhood” here exist for the other two words, either from evolution and the species problem or from the development of “human being” or the fuzziness around the edges (whether connected to evolution or not).

You might exemplify this in the context of transhumanism and artificial intelligence, or look at it in the context of male and female as essential categories, and introduce hormones, gender fluidity, intersex, hermaphrodites, genetics, trans and psychology.

In short, essentialism struggles to solve the problems of personhood. If personhood or human being required 10 different characteristics or properties, what happens when one or more property is lacking or not in full existence?

What I believe

Personhood has no ontic existence: we construct the idea. Therefore, it doesn’t “materialise” (ha!) at any given point along the line of development from sperm and ovum to, say, soon-to-be-dead adult. None of them have personhood. Or some of them. Or all of them. It’s up to you and how you axiomatically ground your arguments and premises.

Personally, I prefer a collection of characteristics (a sort of bundle theory). But these generally don’t develop in full until quite far down the line, and for some people, never. In other words, under my position, infants, some children and some adults will not have personhood. I also think it is not digital; there is a continuum of personhood (that can be applied to the continuum of development). Some people will have more personhood than others, and some will lose it over time. And we might argue that when asleep or unconscious, we don’t have it.

Therefore, for me, the abortion argument is not solved easily by personhood arguments. It suffices to say that embryos most certainly don’t have personhood. And essentialism fails for all the reasons I have so often discussed.

But, for moral reasons, I don’t want chronically and fundamentally disabled people, infants and children to be killed under the belief that they are no more valuable than rocks or planks, or some such similar claim. I don’t want this argument to be used as ammunition to justify that. I have a whole load of other moral philosophy to add, and politics, and science. If I desire the world to be a certain way, then I set rules of thumb. Morality is, for me, goal-oriented. You need to set out what sort of world you want, first.

For me, one rule of thumb is: you can’t murder human beings. For some people who like capital punishment, they forego this, and even strip certain criminals of their personhood

But where do I draw the line? I could draw it right back at sperm or ova. But that’s ridiculous (or not, depending on how you couch it comparatively). How about zygote? Embryo? 3rd trimester?

Where I draw the line is, at the end of the day, arbitrary in the same way that the age of consent or drinking or voting is somewhat arbitrary and differs from nation to nation and state to state. But I don’t think that you should be able to have sex with children and vote at the age of four. So I accept that lines need to be drawn for societal reasons. It may be fuzzy, but there needs to be demarcation. This argument is recognised in the book “Sorites Paradox (Classic Philosophical Arguments)” by Oms and Zardini, p. 265-267.

In terms of abortion, this line, for me, is the generally accepted line informed by science. I would say that we use arguments to do with heartbeat, organ formation and pain. The term limits were reduced in the UK from 28 to 24 weeks in 1990. The arguments will rage (24 reasons to keep it at 24 and not reduce it further) and these will either concern the rights and situation of the mother, the physiology of the embryo, or both. I accept that there will be little or no difference between 24 weeks, and 24 weeks one day. Indeed weeks are themselves arbitrary constructions of time! That said, I am broadly happy with weeks (I actually think they should be moved to eight days, with three day weekend, one of which is in the middle – but that’s another discussion), and am broadly happy with somewhere around 24 weeks. But, again, that’s a whole other discussion.

in sum, there’s no such thing as personhood, so we invent it and ascribe it, as people in society, to differing entities along the line of development, to differing degrees. But I’m not so sure it is even relevant to the abortion debate. Embryos do not have personhood (either objectively or subjectively for me). Thus the abortion debate is a case of agreeing what rights there are (autonomy and bodily rights for the mother) that we can meaningfully construct, arguing that they have greater value than the rights of a clump of cells or a developing embryo, and going from there.

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Responding to Wilcox #2: “An Embryo Is an Innocent Human Being”

Last updated on: May 12, 2020 at 11:10 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

To continue the rejoinder to Clinton Wilcox over at the Life Training Institute, who took issue with one of my posts looking at the pro-life/pro-choice debate concerning abortion. I responded to the initial part of his first piece here. Today, I will look at his comments with regard to points 1-5 from my original post that formed the body of his riposte. Today, I have time for only the first point.

1. A blastocyst cannot be called innocent. It is no more innocent than a rock, because without consciousness or volition it can’t meaningfully be described as innocent. It is true that the early embryo lacks volition, but this is irrelevant. When pro-life people say an embryo is an innocent human being, what we are essentially saying is that this human being has done nothing to warrant being killed. Most people agree that it is wrong to kill human beings except in exceptional circumstances (the only people who would disagree are strict pacifists, who think it’s always wrong to kill a human being). As embryos are human beings, they are innocent, for the same reason that infants and the severely mentally handicapped are innocent. They are incapable of doing anything morally wrong, and they have not committed any act that would warrant capital punishment. Comparing a human blastocyst to a rock means that Pearce is guilty of committing the category error fallacy. The fetus is not non-conscious, like a rock. It is pre-conscious. Pearce is attributing a false category to the embryo.

Right, where to start. Okay, this looks to be about classic essentialism and thus potentiality and actuality; a foetus is potentially a human adult, so therefore we should treat it in the same way as a human adult. A rock is potentially a sculpture, or a seed is potentially a great oak, so we should treat a seed or rock in the same way we should a great oak or sculpture.

Except no. Full points for asserting that embryos are human beings, though.

Let me start with this glaringly obvious point, so obvious that Sophotroph had to point it out in the comments below:

For an “innocent embryo” to be a meaningful concept, the opposite must be equally meaningful. It can’t be “innocent” if it can’t, even in theory, be “guilty”.

That could be the end of the post, but I’ve written all this…

Blastocysts as innocent

His claim about children and the mentally disabled (always interesting to note word choices, eh!) is worthy of some thought. I would say someone who is without rational thought in terms of being severely mentally disabled or a very young child is neither innocent or not innocent, but is amoral (i.e., without morality) because they lack the understanding. This is why these people are treated differently by the legal system. Due to this being on a sliding scale, a continuum, we deal out arbitrary demarcations that differ over time and geography, as I have discussed elsewhere. See What Is Personhood? Setting the Scene. This then creates problematic scenarios, based on Sorites Paradox issues, that come about from having to draw such lines of categorisations for needs of pragmatism. There will be people who are categorised digitally and this can be seen as unfair, given everyone exists on a continuum: a digital judgement for a continuum of behaviour.

In England and Wales, children as young as 10 can be found to be criminally responsible. The UN wants this raised to 12. And these two sentences show the subjective and arguably arbitrary (a caveat use of the word) demarcation that these things end up being. In other words, what we experience in the world around us evidences my position and not an essentialist such as Wilcox, who argues for absolute rules and demarcations. This is all down to intellectual maturity (or capability).

As The Conversation points out:

What is the age of criminal responsibility?

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, requires states to set a minimum age “below which children shall be presumed not to have the capacity to infringe penal law”. The convention does not actually indicate what age level should be set as a minimum.

But in fixing a minimum age, the commentary on the United Nation’s Beijing Rules notes that: “The modern approach would be to consider whether a child can live up to the moral and psychological components of criminal responsibility; that is, whether a child … can be held responsible for essentially antisocial behaviour.”

In this regard all Australian criminal jurisdictions have a modern approach, with two age levels of criminal responsibility: a lower one under which a child is always presumed too young to ever be capable of guilt and can, therefore, never be dealt with in criminal proceedings (currently under the age of 10); and a higher one where the presumption that a child is incapable of crime (termed the presumption of doli incapax) is conditional.

Children in the higher age group, between 10 and 14 years old, can be convicted of criminal offences only if the prosecution can refute the presumption of doli incapax. This can be done by proving the child understood that what he or she had done was wrong according to the ordinary standards of reasonable adults. This requires more than a simple understanding that the behaviour was disapproved of by adults.

Changing views

The presumption that children lack capacity is not new. Its roots can be traced back at least to the time of King Edward III. But in recent years many have questioned it, mainly due to the perceived escalation in youth crime and the changes made to the criminal justice system for dealing with the young.

Indeed, criticism was so strong in England and Wales that doli incapax was abolished for 10- to 14-year-olds in 1998, following the outcry over the James Bulger case. This concerned the abduction, torture and killing of three-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys.

Now in England and Wales, as soon as a child reaches the age of ten, he or she can be convicted of criminal offences without any examination of his or her capacity to understand whether their behaviour is wrong.

This leaves England and Wales with one of the lowest age levels of criminal responsibility in the world and subject to ongoing criticism by the international community.

Wilcox argues: “As embryos are human beings, they are innocent, for the same reason that infants and the severely mentally handicapped are innocent. They are incapable of doing anything morally wrong, and they have not committed any act that would warrant capital punishment.”

The fact that children are not seen as universally innocent (particularly throughout their whole childhood – after all, what is his definition of a “child”?), and it depends what country you are in, undoes Wilcox’s argument. As a parent, I know that moral culpability grows from toddlers upwards – it is not digital in the way he erroneously suggests. Hence the arguments that abound as above. They are capable of doing things morally wrong to a differing degree, and one twelve-year-old may have a different level of brain mechanics and experiences that means they are more culpable than another twelve-year-old outside of legal definitions in any given place.

The legal definition of “innocent” is simply not applicable to a blastocyst:

Innocent typically refers to a finding that a criminal defendant is not guilty of the charges, but may also refer to a finding that a civil defendant isn’t liable for the accusations of the plaintiff, such as being found not negligent in a personal injury case. It is synonymous with acquit, which means to find a defendant in a criminal case not guilty. The decision to exonerate the defendant may be made either by a jury or a judge after trial.

So Wilcox fails here.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it also as:

(of a person) not guilty of a particular crime

This then requires personhood. Exactly the debate we should be having. But he merely asserts that a blastocyst is a human being in order to, I assume, claim it has personhood so that it can be innocent is circular. So, a failure here, unless he is begging the question.

Cambridge add:

having no knowledge of the unpleasant and evil things in life:

She has such an innocent face that I find it hard to believe anything bad of her.

This is either the personhood argument again, or you can apply it to a rock, too. In which case, the claim of innocence is meaningless.

Infants not children

Perhaps Wilcox extricates himself from this problem by using the term “infant” as opposed to “child”, but we get the same demarcation problem here over the boundaries. When we are talking about a mentally disabled adult, at what point do we draw the line? Who gets to decide this? Again, the same problem exists.

I just get the sense that Wilcox hasn’t remotely thought this through. He is terribly naive, at least on what is scant justification here.

If he is arguing a blastocyst should be afforded the same rights as an adult human, then this should arguably apply to other scenarios. If killing an adult is murder in the same way as “killing” a blastocyst is (i.e., abortion is murder), a child or infant should then be equally as culpable as an adult, and then his blastocyst can be seen as meaningfully innocent in the way that an adult and child can be equally as guilty. But then, if a blastocyst or embryo causes the death of a mother in utero, we can have them up in court for manslaughter or something… We can then backwards apply all sorts of thing to children, infants and blastocysts that we do adults.

The simple fact is that we treat infants and children completely differently to adults in almost all aspects of society.

Blastocysts are meaningfully different to adult human beings. Therefore, to merely assert that a blastocyst is a human being is a pole vault of a mental jump that is not supported.

This is a whole quagmire of confusion on Wilcox’s part that is in no way explained or justified – it is, as ever, merely asserted.

Personhood

Wilcox merely asserts blastocysts are human beings, and thus brings into play personhood arguments. But personhood is a tremendously complex idea that no one appears settled on. Perhaps Wilcox takes another position, one that I have seen some Catholics do – that this is not an argument over personhood because that is admittedly a properly problematic argument. Thus, it becomes an essentialist one: that blastocysts are born with the essence of being human. That’s a whole can of worms to open, but probably what underwrites his approach. The problem is, he didn’t employ it here.

See Natural Law, Essentialism and Nominalism, or Criticising the Idea of Potential and Actuality in Natural Law Philosophy, or Natural Law Theory, Morality and Rational Beings. I’ve had this argument a number of times.

Rocks

Just to cap things off, let’s look at his final claim:

Comparing a human blastocyst to a rock means that Pearce is guilty of committing the category error fallacy. The fetus is not non-conscious, like a rock. It is pre-conscious. Pearce is attributing a false category to the embryo.

Obviously rocks and blastocysts are not synonymous, but analogous as far as is adequate for the example. Here, he claims a blastocyst is pre-conscious.

This is a typical claim.

Sure, in the right scenario, and with the right inputs from an external agency (the mother, or an artificial womb), a blastocyst can become conscious after it has developed as a result of those consistent inputs.

Like a rock can become a sculpture with consistent external inputs.

Of course, the blastocyst might also die naturally before development (most do) or after development (all others do), or become a psychopathic murderer (some do). Does that mean we should treat it like it is dead already, or like it is a psychopathic murderer already? What special pleading this is that Wilcox chooses one convenient characteristic to claim it is “pre-” so that he can apply the same treatment to the post- as to the pre-? There is a whole host of wrong here. See Criticising the Idea of Potential and Actuality in Natural Law Philosophy, or Act & Potency: Responding to a Critic, or Pro-Life Argument from a Zygote’s Internal Self-Organisation.

To have the gall to then insult my arguments is quite an affront when we have this type of philosophical naivety.

Because Wilcox ends his piece:

This entire article by Jonathan Pearce is just incredibly bad, relying on bad definitions, false claims of wanting to be precise in his language, and a poor understanding of human development.

I have to laugh at this excellent implicit instantiation of Danth’s Law with its own terrible grasp of the ideas about which he is merely asserting. This all comes down to ideas I am constantly banging in about: the ontology of abstracta. Not much more I should say about this other than Wilcox needs to go back to the drawing board.

EDIT: Clinton very, magnanimously commented on one of the threads that he was not being gracious, and has since edited his pieces. I thank him publicly for that. I will no longer refer to these initial more personal comments.

No doubt he is relying on an awful lot more philosophy in his claims, to be charitable. As was I, in my original piece. But if this is how he seeks to show my “incredibly bad” arguments, he has singularly failed in his intentions.

I’ll continue my answering in future posts.

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What Is Naturalism?, and Other Criticisms

Last updated on: May 3, 2020 at 9:50 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

– Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Jayman, a Thomist who takes his time to argue his case here (and for which I am grateful, because he is a lot more thoughtful and constructive than others) has recently written a short critique of my post discussing naturalism (Concerning Metaphysical and Methodological Naturalism). His piece can be found here.

His main points are as follows:

The Natural/Supernatural Distinction – defining naturalism
Methodological Naturalism Is Not a Presupposition of Science
Primary Causes and Secondary Causes Are Compatible
Methodological Thomism Works Too

I would need him to expand on 4. since he provides no detail there, so let me look at the other three. In this post, I will concern myself with 1. only.

The Natural/Supernatural Distinction

His point is:

The first problem is the division of the world into “natural” and “supernatural” things. The criteria by which it is decided whether a thing goes into the natural category or the supernatural category is rarely spelled out. It is also implied that a thing is either natural or supernatural, but not both natural and supernatural.

The self-described naturalist needs to define naturalism before we can discuss its merits. Pearce may label me a “supernaturalist” but I am under no obligation to defend this nebulous position.

This point has some merit; naturalism is often a term used intuitively, like we somehow just sort of know what it means without being able to robustly define it. And, indeed, the term has no exact definition as used in philosophy. It is an area that is open for debate. You can see this from the nebulous, if nice-sounding Sagan quote. The SEP recognises this:

The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003).

So understood, “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject “supernatural” entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the “human spirit”.

Most philosophers will describe themselves as naturalists, but leave the term open enough to act as a large and fuzzy umbrella. I have already talked here a number of times about the difference between methodological and metaphysical (ontological) naturalism, so I will assume a knowledge of both terms.

The SEP continues:

A central thought in ontological naturalism is that all spatiotemporal entities must be identical to or metaphysically constituted by physical^[3] entities. Many ontological naturalists thus adopt a physicalist attitude to mental, biological, social and other such “special” subject matters. They hold that there is nothing more to the mental, biological and social realms than arrangements of physical entities.

The driving motivation for this kind of ontological naturalism is the need to explain how special entities can have physical effects. Thus many contemporary thinkers adopt a physicalist view of the mental realm because they think that otherwise we will be unable to explain how mental events can causally influence our bodies and other physical items. Similar considerations motivate ontologically naturalist views of the biological realm, the social realm, and so on.

What is important here is that the mental world needs to be within the remit of naturalism (I will use this term to basically talk about metaphysical naturalism from henceforth). But the general situation here is that naturalists will either adopt some kind of monism, where mental is physical in some manner, or supervenience, where the mental depends necessarily on the physical. This can be in terms of property dualism, where a single physical substance may have mental and physical properties. This is opposed to substance dualism that suggests that there are two fundamental substances (i.e., matter and mind) that inhere two different sets of properties.

There is obviously a connection between the methodological and metaphysical varieties since one might claim that naturalism is all that can be found by the methodology of science, or methodologically finding out about nature. If you can’t test it, it’s not natural, so to speak. We might say that something that is natural is bound by the Laws of Nature (see my post Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #11 – Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?).

This is where methodological naturalism comes in because we might discover a new, unexplained physical phenomenon. Rather than think it might be supernatural, we assume it is natural and part of the natural fabric around us, and we do so based on inductive reasoning.

Steven Schafersman (in “Naturalism is Today An Essential Part of Science”, a paper presented at the Conference on Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific Enterprise) synthesizes many definitions, which he lists, to create his own (his paper is no longer on the internet, but I have a copy):

In my own definition, a synthesis of those above, naturalism is the philosophy that maintains that (1) nature is all there is and whatever exists or happens is natural; (2) nature (the universe or cosmos) consists only of natural elements, that is, of spatiotemporal material elements–matter and energy–and non-material elements–mind, ideas, values, logical relationships, etc.–that are either associated with the human brain or exist independently of the brain and are therefore somehow immanent in the structure of the universe; (3) nature works by natural processes that follow natural laws, and all can, in principle, be explained and understood by science and philosophy; and (4) the supernatural does not exist, i.e., only nature is real, therefore, supernature is non-real. Naturalism is therefore a metaphysical position opposed mainly by supernaturalism. It is not an ethical system, although a variety–pragmatic naturalism, a synthesis of pragmatism and naturalism–does develop ethical positions. Furthermore, naturalism is a subset of metaphysical realism….

Even though naturalism has two primary sources in philosophy, “materialism in metaphysics and empiricism [and skepticism] in epistemology” (Kurtz, 1990, p. 12), naturalism does not necessitate a commitment to materialism, a philosophy with which it is often confused (more on this below). Materialism recognizes the existence of non-material elements, but claims that they are unconditionally produced by or associated with material elements, that is, the non-material elements would not exist if the material elements did not exist. Certainly most philosophical naturalists today are materialists, and methodological materialism is probably universally adopted among scientists today, but idealism or dualism could be true and naturalism would still be viable.

Naturalism is pretty much a case of Ockham’s Razor, in one sense, being that which is required to understand our physical environment, no more. We have no need of the supernatural hypothesis. There will be a lot of close connection to epistemology here, namely the coherence and pragmatist theories of truth (since there is no way of knowing indubitably whether the correspondence theory holds). Phil Rimmer, here, produced a pretty good working definition:

A good definition of natural is to say it is that which is bound by law, hence a Law of Nature.

All observed natural phenomena are seen to be lawful and lawfully consistent even if the laws are not known. Even radioactivity is statistically lawful.

The supernatural would be that which is not seemingly lawful and is often associated with imputations of unseen agency. Any phenomenon claimed to be innate magic possessed by objects, if seen to be lawful, would need to be re-categorised as natural. Thus sunstones and south-seeking stones.

A spurious claim of supernatural for that which is natural is a technique used by hucksters, often supported by the duped, who in their occasional slow counter realisations often double down for shame or for a little duping of their own.

Metaphysical objects are mental might-bes. These are just thinking tools that, like all mental objects exist in the natural space that includes brains.

Of course, one could defer back again to the example of a newfound phenomenon (any new scientific finding) – how would this fit here? Well, if the phenomenon was predictable, reproducible, observable in some way, then it would fall into the purview of naturalism. This is why, in my essay “The Argument from Format“, I argue that the universe and its laws qua naturalism must be deterministic. I can’t make sense of any other form of reality that gives rise to such complexity as we see around us if it does not work to lawlike behaviour.

Personally, I don’t rule out supernatural activity a priori. Everything outside of cogito ergo sum is an exercise in probability, and more accurately in probability inferred from observations of the world around us, inductively. The probability of the supernatural existing is, therefore, vanishingly small. Our whole worlds are combinations of sensory data collections and conclusions, and so probability is the soup du jour.

You might go down the rabbit hole of wondering whether rather a-causal mental or abstract domains are part of a naturalistic worldview, such as mathematics. I would argue maths is a conceptual language humans have developed to understand and navigate the physical world around us, and falls into the mental -> physical supervenience.

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Concerning Metaphysical and Methodological Naturalism

Last updated on: May 1, 2020 at 10:41 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

I was having a Tippling Philosophers’ debate concerning naturalism elsewhere and my friend stated this, which is worthy of debate and unpicking:

Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendent truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification…. Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond.

Let me set out my position concerning naturalism.

A thought experiment that I always find useful is imagining a disembodied mind at birth, if you will. Can you see that mind ever taking in more knowledge without any sensory input whatsoever? Can it access rational or non-empirical knowledge without recourse to any senses at all? And are rational sources of knowledge actually found within neural networks?

As a naturalist, and this is a pretty important point, I believe that the mind is supervenient on the physical matter of my brain and body. So at this source level, with the mind being at worst reflective of the physical brain, but certainly dependent on it, we have an issue for rationalism. Intuitive feelings or claims are still resultant from neurons firing and physical substrates and interactions within the body and brain. How does this affect the debate? If rationalism is the result of biological evolution and neural networks, what does this say about rationalism? Does it, in some manner, now become a sort of empiricism, or just because the innateness is sourced in biological systems, can we not still define something as rationalist?

AJ Ayers said of rationalism:

There can be no a priori knowledge of reality. For … the truths of pure reason, the propositions which we know to be valid independently of all experience, are so only in virtue of their lack of factual content … [By contrast] empirical propositions are one and all hypotheses which may be confirmed or discredited in actual sense experience. [Ayer 1952, pp. 86; 93–94]

What is intuition? How can it support a warranted belief? “Grasping” or “seeing” things is simply not good enough, arguably, in establishing epistemic warrant, and some will also claim (see David Eagleman’s Incognito for some interesting examples of intuition) that these intuitions are often actually previously embedded, nonconsciously experienced, phenomena. Knowledge, according to pragmatists, is only knowledge when it is reliable, and how can you test intuition without recourse to the external world in validating its reliability? As the SEP states:

What accounts for the reliability of our intuitions regarding the external world? Is our intuition of a particular true proposition the outcome of some causal interaction between ourselves and some aspect of the world? What aspect? What is the nature of this causal interaction? That the number three is prime does not appear to cause anything, let alone our intuition that it is prime.

It is true that we can never be certain about the external world. We could be living in The Matrix – there is always some non-zero element of doubt in any proposition. In a sense, that is the nature of empiricism: probabilities. But all reasoning is grounded using the Munchausen Trilemma, either in:

infinite regress
circular reasoning
an axiom

And, some might say, the soundest of the three is the axiom, as self-evident truth (though some don’t have a problem with circularity in principle). If you can’t give derivative reasons as to why something is true (i.e., that I am not in The Matrix), and can’t rely on empirical data, then where does this leave us? Perhaps we have to admit that there is no justifiable reason as to why we are not in The Matrix. However, this might be a neutral claim, since you could say that there is no justifiable reason as to why we are.

Certainly, self-evident truths are something that play into rationalist hands. Merely just understanding what such a claim says is enough for us to think it is true.

The idea that we have innate knowledge is, to me, problematic, given the disembodied mind hypothesis above. Knowledge flows out incrementally from brain development that goes hand in hand with knowledge acquisition. We learn. We are always learning, and this learning is done through taking things in from the outside world into our senses.

Methodological Naturalism -> Metaphysical Naturalism

Another friend in the initial debate in question here stated, as an adherent of metaphysical naturalism (MaN), which is here “the former”, talks of how methodological naturalism supports the metaphysical variety:

My case is that the latter so strongly demonstrates the truth of the former, there is no practical difference

Methodological Naturalism (MN), as a methodology of science, assumes that natural phenomena are all that we can use to do science, to work out the natural world around us. Why? Well, this is because positing anything else is, by definition, unobservable and untestable. As a result, such claims become mere assertion along the lines of “making **** up”. By this, I mean that if you come up with some causal explanation as to why something happens so, and it is supernatural, there is no way of being able to evaluate how reliable that claim is, and it becomes no more probable or improbable than me pulling an idea out of my arse and offering that.

This does not invalidate such a claim a priori. However, if naturalism has an explanation which is equally good in scope and power, then Ockham’s Razor would set preference for the simplest explanation.

Here are a few good reasons that MN is good: testability, the use of laws in explanations, fruitfulness, the promotion of agreement and cooperation, and the avoidance of blocked inquiry. Blocked enquiry is important because what using methodological supernaturalism (MS) does is prevent further enquiry from taking place. It’s God of the Gaps, and stops further enquiry.

As Richard Carrier states:

The cause of lightning was once thought to be God’s wrath, but turned out to be the unintelligent outcome of mindless natural forces. We once thought an intelligent being must have arranged and maintained the amazingly ordered motions of the solar system, but now we know it’s all the inevitable outcome of mindless natural forces. Disease was once thought to be the mischief of supernatural demons, but now we know that tiny, unintelligent organisms are the cause, which reproduce and infect us according to mindless natural forces. In case after case, without exception, the trend has been to find that purely natural causes underlie any phenomena. Not once has the cause of anything turned out to really be God’s wrath or intelligent meddling, or demonic mischief, or anything supernatural at all. The collective weight of these observations is enormous: supernaturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always lost; naturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always won. A horse that runs a million races and never loses is about to run yet another race with a horse that has lost every single one of the million races it has run. Which horse should we bet on? The answer is obvious.

Blind conviction?

…naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance…

Except, it is based on inductive reasoning. It has shown itself to be pragmatically useful and to work. The whole of science and technology is automatically dependent on it.

So, methodologically speaking, it is pragmatically useful and inductively evidenced to make the assumption or conclusion of naturalism. It’s not a blind conviction, but a conviction based on previous experience and evidence. But this doesn’t mean that supernaturalism can’t play some part, that metaphysical naturalism must follow, would be something one could claim. We shouldn’t shut the door entirely.

No, it’s not a Cartesian case of it being indubitably so – nothing but the cogito ergo sum does this. But what would the world look like if supernaturalism entailed? Well, we could test supernaturalism if it in any way causally interacted with our natural world, as this paper shows.

But my initial interlocutor is perhaps not thinking so much in terms of supernatural activity (a la God etc.) but in terms of meaning and metaphysics in general. Remember:

…a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendent truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification…

Of course, his position is…logically immune to verification as well. And empirically, too. Is this a possibiliter ergo probabiliter argument? It is conceptually possible, therefore it is probable. It could be true, so it probably is true?

I would really need an explanation of exactly what he means here. This could become a whole argument about truth theories. I prefer a whole set of theories – ideally the correspondence theory of truth, but you can never know (but this depends on epistemological theories and how we define “know”) whether a proposition is actually true or not. So we get on to pragmatic and coherence theories, amongst others. I can’t know I am not in The Matrix. Thus, I cannot know a truth proposition actually corresponds to reality and is therefore true. So I use probability, to the best of my abilities, which involves seeing how coherent claims are with other networks of perceived truth, and seeing how well they actually work, pragmatically speaking.

Does this preclude a transcendent truth? What does this really mean? This is perhaps also linked to conceptual nominalism (over which I am debating the same person in many other threads, so I think this is basically a debate about that), such that, without some aether of platonic abstracts, we can’t have ideas or layers of, I don’t know, meaning or metaphysics.

With conceptual nominalism (see my posts on Poetic Naturalism), I proffer that we conceptually construct these things, these networks, as individuals and societies. I’ll have to pursue this further with him to carry on the exposition here, but this should lay some of the groundwork down.

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Sean Carroll on His Poetic Naturalism

Last updated on: April 30, 2020 at 7:43 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I previously introduced you to Sean Carroll’s Poetic Naturalism, which I see as a naturalistic worldview entailing conceptual nominalism. Here are a few videos to explain his position:

Poetic naturalism:

The meaning of life:

Purpose:

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