Tagged: christianity
The Modified Meager Moral Fruits Argument Against Theism
By R.N. Carmona
A seldom discussed argument in theistic/atheistic circles is Paul Draper’s Meager Moral Fruits Argument Against Theism (MMFA). The reason this argument does not get as much attention as other arguments is unclear, but I will go out on a limb and say that it may have something to do with its source. Not only was the argument offered 25 years ago, but it was put forward as part of a cumulative case Draper presented in his 1997 debate with William Lane Craig. Another factor drawing attention away from the argument is that it was not formulated in premise to conclusion deductive form. The argument is an informal argument and one would therefore, have to do the work of putting it in deductive form. Draper’s argument, like his cumulative case, is probabilistic in nature and as such, the language of a formulated argument has to acknowledge this. A deductive version of Draper’s MMFA will appear tentative. This is not surprising given that he described himself as a practicing agnostic. Atheists might prefer that an argument to be more forceful in its language. That may be yet another factor drawing attention away from the argument.
I think the lack of attention the argument gets is unwarranted, in any case. I also think that a deductive formulation makes clear what Draper was attempting to get at while also making manifest the possible issues the argument has. Prior to putting the argument in deductive form, I will reproduce what Draper said in the aforementioned debate:
The first red bean is the fact that the moral fruits of theistic belief are meager, at best. Any objective observer, if asked whether or not theists are morally superior to non-theists (to atheists and agnostics), will have to admit it’s really too close to call. I want to emphasize that I’m not claiming that theists are morally inferior to atheists and agnostics (Ibid.).
Draper goes on to qualify what he means by arguments attempting to show that theists are morally inferior to non-theists. He talks about how atheists point to the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, in addition to citing that a lower percentage of German Christians opposed Hitler than German secular humanists and German leftists who were irreligious. He wants to be clear that his argument differs markedly from such arguments. He states that “if [he’s] right that theists are not noticeably morally superior to the rest of us, then the question is: why is this fact a red bean? Why does this support naturalism over theism? Because on the assumption that theism is true, one has reason to believe that theistic belief would have significant and noticeable moral fruits — that worshiping God would be an abundant source of moral strength. So the absence of such moral fruits is surprising on theism” (Ibid.). Conversely, if naturalism is the case, this is not surprising because given that God does not exist, theistic beliefs would not be expected to improve moral character. With this in mind, we can now turn to a deductive version of Draper’s MMFA:
P1 If theism is true, worshiping God would (probably) produce significant and noticeable moral fruits in theists.
P2 Worshiping God does not produce significant and noticeable moral fruits in theists.
C Therefore, theism is (probably) not true.
I think this deductive formulation is true to Draper’s informal presentation. Furthermore, it sidesteps difficulties that crop up if one were to instead say “if theism is true, theistic belief would (probably) produce significant and noticeable moral fruits in theists.” As Rauser points out: “According to Christian teaching, the demons believe in God too (James 2:19), but demons are not known for their moral fruit (unless we’re talking about stinking durians). So no, Christian should not think that merely believing in God is a sufficient criterion to ensure any increase in moral living” (Rauser, Randall. “What if I stumble? Arguing against Christianity from the lives of Christians”. RandalRauser.com. 7 Aug 2012. Web.). This is not to say that there are not objections one could level against Rauser. If God exists and demons are fallen angels, then it is clear that they do not merely believe in God. Unlike humans, they know God exists seeing as though he created them and they once worshipped in his presence. But I digress.
Worshipping God, devotion to God, or serving God go beyond merely believing in God. There are many nominal Christians in the United States who seldom go to church, read the Bible, pray, fast, and so on. Draper does not have these kind of believers in mind because their belief in God is more like a force of habit rooted in their upbringing or the dominance of Christianity in America. Draper qualifies the kind of theistic belief he is calling into question: a devout kind of theistic belief that engages in worship of God. Paul says of these individuals: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ (Galatians 3:27).” Paul stipulates that such Christians meet the following criteria: “But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:20-24). Paul clearly believed that followers of Jesus, who exhorted his disciples to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37), would demonstrate significant and noticeable moral fruits. This is not what we find. Draper’s argument cuts sharply against the arteries of Christian theism, but such considerations can be mapped onto Islam or Judaism as well.
For whatever reason, atheists do not seem drawn to this argument. Perhaps it is because it focuses much too heavily on individual Christians. Even Draper jokes that he was going to include a picture of Jimmy Swaggart crying, but decided not to because it is a low blow. Technically speaking, even if we can establish that the MMFA is a non-fallacious ad hominem, the argument seems to rest on the laurels of personal attacks on this or that believer. To circumvent this issue, I think a modified version of Draper’s argument is needed as a steel man. In fact, I think the modified argument results in what I call a logical handcuff, the proverbial rock and hard place. Theists will be damned if they do and damned if they don’t, as they say.
P1 If theism is true, religions established by or inspired by God himself would produce significant and noticeable moral fruits.
P2 Religions established by or inspired by God himself do not produce significant and noticeable moral fruits.
C Therefore, theism is not true.
This Modified Meager Moral Fruits Argument (MMMFA) brings Draper’s observation from the individual to the collective level. It is not just that some Christians have abysmal moral fruits; in other words, it is not enough that some Christians have a proclivity toward immoral behaviors. Joel Olsteen, Cardinal Pell, Jimmy Swaggart, Ravi Zacharias, and the long list of Christian public offenders do not prove anything about theistic belief on their own. Rather, it is the very institution they subscribe to that condones and even enables their behavior. How many people left Lakewood Church after Justin Cauley, a plumber working for the church, discovered a significant amount of money suspected to be the $200,000 in cash and $400,000 in checks that was reported stolen in March of 2014? (Welch, Monique. “$600K theft from Lakewood Church went cold for 7 years. Now, a radio caller reveals he found it in bathroom wall”. Houston Chronicle. 4 Dec 2021.) More importantly, why is it that scandals like this might drive a Christian to leave a specific church but not the church more generally? The MMMFA acknowledges that these behaviors are not peculiar. These are not queer actions committed by a handful of Christians. Whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, the entire institution seems to be consistently embroiled in scandal. More than just an issue at the individual level, this is very much a pervasive problem on the institutional level.
This is even more surprising on theism because the Church, the collective body of Christ’s elect, is the bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:22-23). For over two thousand years, the entire edifice has been committing adultery, as it were. Draper almost landed precisely on this square when he mentioned the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and so on. Christianity’s violent history, a means to forcibly publish the Gospel to the nations, is powerful supporting evidence for the MMMFA. The following should be enough not only to indict the entire institution but to prosecute it:
As soon as it was established, the Inquisition instigated a series of harsh measures in an effort to root out Hinduism in the Portuguese-controlled areas. Seven years after arriving in India the Inquisition had destroyed almost all Hindu temples in the Portuguese territory. Edicts were issued ordering all Brahmans to sell their property and leave the territory. Those Hindus left behind were forbidden to perform many of their religious ceremonies and ordered to attend preaching on the Christian doctrine. An edict instructed that all public posts should be reserved for Christians. Orphans (defined as children whose fathers had died but whose Indian mothers were often still living) were seized by the Church and brought up as Christians. In response, Hindus deserted Portuguese India en masse.
Collingham, E. M. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 64. Print.
Those who remained were forced to convert to Christianity. In 1550 only one-fifth of Goa’s population had converted, but by 1650 two-thirds were Catholic.
Far from being surprising on theism, if any worldview were true, it certainly would not look like this! It would not resort to such drastic measures to spread its influence. The history of Christianity is rife with institutionalized behaviors of this sort. This lends more credence to the MMMFA.
The MMMFA also has a particular advantage over Draper’s version. A Christian cannot take the No True Scotsman route. On Draper’s account, it is enough for a Christian to point out that they bear noticeable moral fruits regardless of what someone like Ravi Zacharias has done. That response just does not work for the MMMFA. A Christian would have to engage in historical revisionism or deny that the problem of meager moral fruits is an institutional issue. This puts their wrists in a tight logical handcuff. If they agree with the MMMFA, it is incumbent on them, if they are truly a moral person, to renounce Christianity. If they object to the argument, they are case in point: they condone or enable the institutional behavior I highlighted. They might as well be complicit when yet another Priest molests a child or when yet another theist philosopher, like Edward Feser or Robert Koons, votes for someone like Donald Trump. That Christians threw their support behind an authoritarian with extreme Far Right views is not a peculiarity. For Christians, this is an instance of history repeating itself. As Draper alluded to, more Christians supported Hitler than not and the anti-Semitism that informed Hitler stemmed from eminent Christian theologians like Pope Leo and Martin Luther (see here).
The institutional evil that sprouts from Christianity can be elaborated on and fill dozens of books. I have not mentioned how Christianity commonly finds itself at the center of prohibitive abortion policies that perpetuate poverty and puts women’s lives at risk. I have not mentioned how Christians resorted to censorship, going as far as destroying texts that did not agree with their beliefs (e.g. the works of Democritus). There are many routes one can take to show the institutionalized behaviors of the Church, generally speaking. Of note, when I speak of the Church, I am not intending to invoke Catholicism. In addition to Catholicism, I very much intend to include Protestant and Orthodox denominations.
Anticipating Objections
1. The Pros of Theism
As Catholics are fond of doing, Christians can point to the good that has been done in the name of Christianity. Catholics, for instance, will talk about the many charities established by the Catholic Church. Related to charitable work, they can mention coat drives, soup kitchens, the hospitals they have built. I acknowledge that a lot of good has come from theism as well. That cannot be glossed over.
However, not only could these deeds have been done despite theism, one can, in the main, question the motives for doing these things. In ethics, there are conversations about why we do the right thing. Is it to make ourselves feel good? Is it to get credit? Is it to gain favor with the person we are doing good toward? In the case of Christian missionaries, are they doing good in order to increase the likelihood that the people receiving their favors accept the Gospel? The Evangelical motive appears to be impure, if not entirely misguided. In fact, there is exegetical support for the conclusion that such acts are done out of self-interest. There are greater rewards in the afterlife for Christians who multiply their talents (Matthew 25:14-30).
Moreover, aside from insincere motivations for doing good, Dennett’s words come to mind: “You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion or no religion at all, does better” (Dennett D. C. Breaking the Spell : Religion As a Natural Phenomenon. Viking 2006.)
2. The Improvement of Institutional Theism
Theists could accuse me of committing a kind of genetic fallacy. They could point out that institutional behavior has improved dramatically. This is true. Christians, for the most part, no longer execute non-Christians. They do not imprison heretics and blacklist entire books. They are certainly not invading foreign countries and putting the torch to non-Christian places of worship.
Of relevance here are the reasons for this improvement. Did the Church outlaw execution of non-Christians by way of edict or mandate? Did the Church ask its members to stop blacklisting books? I think that reasons are much more complex than the erred belief that the Church experienced a dramatic 180 with respect to its imperialist behaviors. Given the United States’ Constitutional emphasis on religious freedom, for instance, a slew of hate crimes against non-Christian places of worship will be prosecuted heavily. Secular laws have acted as a deterrent against the Church’s imperialist agenda. This applies in the UK and Canada as well. I offer that this is not so much a moral improvement, but rather a logical fear of legal repercussions. The Church did not choose to cease acting immorally; it is deterred from committing various immoral acts by laws that have greater jurisdiction over those of the Church. The Muslim World is home to a number of modern theocracies that do not exhibit moral improvement. Would modern Christian theocracies look like Muslim ones? I will not qualify this here, but I can think of no reason to believe that Christian theocracies would be dissimilar to theocracies in the Muslim World.
3. The Corruption of Theism has no bearing on the Existence of God
This is a line of thinking I am all too familiar with. A Christian will engage in tu quoque. In other words, they grant that there is widespread corruption in the Church, but identify this corruption across all human institutions. From corporations to universities to governments, corruption is a sign of human frailty and actually confirmation of core Christian doctrines (e.g. original sin).
This retort, to my mind, is an example of having one’s cake and eating it too. The MMMFA is careful to single out religions that were established or inspired by God himself. In the case of Christianity, God became human, in the person of Jesus Christ, and laid the very foundation of Christian orthodox beliefs. He laid out an entire blueprint and yet, the Church is indistinguishable from corporations, universities, and governments that have been embroiled in scandal. The contention falls on the horns of the argument because these other institutions were not established or inspired by God. The moral fruits of the Church should easily surpass those of the average corporation provided that God exists. The difference between these two institutions should be palpable. That is not what we observe.
4. Philosophical Pedanticism
The theist can very well ask the following question: what do you mean by “institution”? A stronger objection will point to the fact that there is difficultly when distinguishing an institution from the people who subscribe to it. I admit that this is a fair point and that my attempts to distinguish between the people and the institution was painstaking; furthermore, I also recognize that the lines are blurred. I think that actually helps my case notwithstanding.
The relevant question is whether scripture(s) endorses a set of institutional behaviors. Is there, for instance, exegetical support for anti-Semitism in the Bible? Is there a clear biblical position on homosexuality or abortion or non-belief? I think that scripture lends itself to institutional abuse and corruption. This makes for a separate argument against theism, but if God established or inspired these texts, this confusion is surprising on theism. Scripture is not at all clear about where a Christian should stand on various issues or how a Christian should behave. This is how a Christian can deploy the following verse to justify something like the Crusades:
34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Matthew 10:34-36).
In the end, it is not surprising that an institution is comprised of the general attitudes of the people who adhere to it. It is also not surprising that such a reification is tenuous. It is also not surprising that believers draw authority from religious scripture. This contention, unfortunately, does not qualify as a defeater because the Church, even under the theist’s definition, has engaged in immoral behaviors. Moreover, despite Christians not participating in these behaviors, it was not enough to prompt them to turn their backs on the Church or, at the very least, demonstrate remonstrance toward these behaviors, demanding and pushing for these abuses to end. Pedanticism among respective churches has resulted in x amount of denominations and endless exegetical treatments of various passages; it has also led to infighting that saw some groups of Christians aiming the kind of abuses discussed here at other Christians. Primarily, therefore, the institution we have today, call it the orthodoxy, paved its way by doing violence to its competition, labeling them heretics and blasphemers, destroying their works, and murdering them.
Ultimately, I think the MMMFA is more forceful than Draper’s version and more definitive in its conclusion. As such, it will prove more attractive to atheists and foster more discussion. I do not think the above contentions prove to be decisive defeaters of the MMMFA. The argument still has Christians tightly bound by the wrists. Admitting its strength makes it incumbent on them to renounce their faith. Challenging the argument risks falling in the broad category of Christians who condone and enable the institutional behaviors of the Church. For the atheist, this is either an attractive argument that stands on its own or one that can be included in a cumulative case for naturalism. For the theist, they need a way of challenging the argument that succeeds at cutting the handcuffs. The other option is, figuratively speaking, to serve their sentence; this would require them to admit to the institutional abuses of their religion and renounce it on those grounds. If there were a version of Christianity that could succeed without the bloodshed, abuse of power dynamics, fraud, and so on, we would have it comfortably couched within the annals of human history and still bearing noticeable moral fruits till this day. We do not. This makes the case for theism significantly harder to come by.
A New Argument From Suffering in Light of COVID-19
By R.N. Carmona
This will likely be as close as it gets to a personal post from me. I recently tested positive for COVID-19. At the moment, I do not know whether I am still positive. I will be getting another test on Wednesday. My hope is that I can go back to business as usual. I need to work; bills have to be paid. My focus here is a new argument yes, but it goes beyond that as we will see. Rather than the string of symptoms I have encountered, I want to focus on the mental aspects of my experience.
I have two lovely children that I have not been able to hug for almost six days now. I have not been able to kiss them. I have not been able to show any affection to anyone I love. I have not been able to receive any affection either. Because of this, I have been dealing with a lot of loneliness.
My father, who passed away in 2017, although no longer the voice of my conscience, is someone I think of often. I miss him dearly. His lessons still weigh on me and not a day goes by without me thinking whether he would be proud of the man I am today. One of the lessons that I consistently observe is to not get in the habit of letting myopia set in. In other words, yes, I tested positive and I am dealing with symptoms, on top of anxiety, loneliness, and grappling with questions about my mortality; however, other people have had it much worse. It is these people this argument has in mind.
I can easily imagine waking up last Thursday morning at 3am to the same cold sweat and terror I felt. Moreover, I can imagine the object of my terror turning out to be my experience. My mind was racing. I asked, what if I get pneumonia? What if I have to be intubated? What if there is an underlying issue that will pull the rug from under me? In all of this, I could not turn to a loved one. I needed a hug but could not get one. I needed someone to sit close to me and help me relax. Turning to a loved one at this time would put them at risk, so I had no such option.
Over the past few days, my symptoms have gotten progressively better. I am not a priori grateful. My gratitude is after the fact. I am grateful that I will probably have more days with my loved ones. I am seeing the light at the end. Soon I will be able to give my kids a warm embrace. I will be able to feel them in my arms again. My life has, for now, been prolonged and I can be a father to them. But the thought has occurred to me: what if my symptoms got progressively worse? I have not been able to show or receive affection for six days; six days could easily have been 15 to 30, or however long a hospital stay would have lasted.
Then it dawned on me. For many people, including Christians, this was their exact experience. They were isolated at home, probably hoping to be better within a few to several days; the Christians, no doubt, prayed to God for healing, to keep them company in their time of isolation and loneliness. For many of them, the prayers fell on deaf ears. Their symptoms got much worse, many developing life-threatening pneumonia. They were rushed to ICUs and intubated where they would spend more time away from their loved ones. The lucky ones, got back to their families. The Christians, thankful to God, were happy to be back with their families. But what of the people who had not embraced their loved ones for a month and never regained consciousness? What of the people who passed away? Where was God? Where was his comfort when they prayed? Where was his omnipotent power, fully capable of delivering them from a virus some of them did everything in their power to prevent? Why didn’t God answer?
I cannot imagine being my daughter, at an age where my affection can get annoying but also at an age where they are able to appreciate my love. I cannot imagine the fear they would feel seeing me stretchered out the door, to hear news that I had to be intubated, to have to wrestle with the idea that daddy won’t be coming home. They are at an age where losing a parent will be a lucid memory, an enduring pain, a massive loss. This would shape my daughter for the rest of their life. While I am grateful that they will likely not endure this pain, I think of the children who have. Good parents are not replaceable. I do not care if they are a Christian parent and while I am firm in my belief that they teach their children erred beliefs, I know that there are Christian parents who provide for their children, love them deeply, take care of their emotions, protect them, nurture them, and help them grow. I cannot imagine the pain of being orphaned in this way, especially when believing that God has all the power, mercy, and love to ensure that such suffering does not happen.
This is when one hears the old adage that sometimes God puts us through things so that we can better relate to people who go through similar experiences. I ask, how many people have to endure the same experience so that we can better relate to others? It was enough for me to deal with six days of this, to feel as though I was at the brink, to have more than enough time to contemplate my own fragility and mortality. It was enough to realize that others have had it worse and that for many, their story did not end the way they hoped; what’s worse is that the stories of their loved ones continue without them. For the many who survived the people we have lost, they have had to actually live through the devastation I had the privilege of merely worrying about.
We are on our own. If God existed, the extent of periods of isolation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, in addition to having horrible symptoms (in my case, losing most of my sense of smell, a fever, congestion, a loss of taste), would not be necessary to help us relate to others, i.e., soul-making theodicy. For human beings, the thoughts alone are horrifying enough. For a parent, to die too soon, to not see their children become adults, to not dance with their daughter at her Sweet 16, to not walk her down the aisle, to not attend their son’s next baseball game, and so on, the mere thoughts are terrifying enough. The thought of my absence in their life sends shivers down my spine. I do not need to experience the reality of it; I do not need to develop life-threatening symptoms and to settle on my life likely being over. More importantly, my children do not need to experience a reality in where I am dead. They do not need to see me in a suit, hands folded over my stomach, lifeless in an open casket that cost the people who survived me x amount of hundreds or thousands. They do not need to see me lowered into the ground.
Yet this was the reality many, including Christians, faced. Where was God? Where is God? The idea that God would create a social species to “test” them with periods of isolation, loneliness, anxiety, depression, and for some, suicidal thoughts, is puzzling. Especially when considering the damage these things do to people’s mental health, it is more perplexing still. Even if I granted the idea of sin, unrepentant sin is recompensed in Hell; whether eternal conscious torment or something else is for the theologians to argue over. A punishment for sin would not risk impairing someone mentally. What good is someone’s piety if they have lost their sanity?
I am not interested in formalizing this argument. I think the force of it is stronger rhetorically, written informally for readers to take in and think over. I think COVID-19, as Rieux in Camus’ The Plague conveyed about the Black Death, brings theism to its knees. A god that permits pandemics to take so many lives indiscriminately, leaving so many other lives in peril after such loss, either does not exist or is not the god theists so desperately want to exist. This is not about whether atheists/naturalists have an ontologically objective standard of evil because this argument does not focus on the existence of evil. This argument focuses on suffering, specifically mental health. If your beliefs are so biased that your first reaction is to change the topic or overlook the suffering of fellow human beings, including some of your own brethren, you may have to wonder whether you are a sociopath. Only a person with a severe lack of empathy will overlook what the last two years has looked like for our species as a whole. God is not powerful enough to replace a loving father or mother, to replace a son or a daughter.
Ultimately, I think this new angle on the Argument From Suffering is forceful and makes a powerful case against theism, but if it has not been clear, that has not really been my focus. My focus has been to humanize the experience of so many people throughout the pandemic, to get us to think about the severe pain some people are going through and have gone through over the past two years. A theist might respond that everyone will be reunited in the afterlife and while that may be comforting for some, that does nothing to change the reality some people are facing. The holidays just passed and a chair usually occupied by a loved one was empty. Somewhere in the world, a father enters his daughter’s room wishing he could kiss her goodnight and tuck her in. Elsewhere, a wife sleeps in a queen-sized bed hoping that the emptiness beside her is just a bad dream. I might be one of the lucky ones. Time will tell. But I am not taking this for granted and I am not taking it lightly. People have suffered a lot over the last two years. I mourn for them and I wish I could do more to bring them comfort.
The self-righteous will overlook this and find solace in the notion that atheism/naturalism offer no hope. At least with theism we can imagine life after death and seeing our loved ones again. In response to this, I maintain that this leads to one taking one’s short days for granted. One might as well procrastinate on affection, on spending quality time with loved ones if eternity is guaranteed. On naturalism, it is incumbent on us to be more mindful of how fleeting time is; one morning your daughter, just born, is being fed her first bottle and it feels like a blink before she’s in middle school. A defeater for this belief in an afterlife is that it allows some, if not most, believers to forgo finding ways to be there for people who are suffering; it is enough to give a person false hope and move on. A naturalist knows that more can be done and love in the present goes a longer way than a false promise in the future. If only I can sit in that empty chair next Thanksgiving and hope to remind a person of their deceased loved one; if only I can be there to wipe their tears away. People do not need the promise of comfort tomorrow; they need help today, a lot of them being suffocated by their pain at this very moment.
I’ll end with this. While your loved ones are here, hug them, let them know you love them, try to put into words why you value them so much. Belief in the afterlife is a lofty expectation that regrettably will not be met with a loftier disappointment. “Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”
Argumentative Strategies Series: The Negation Strategy
By R.N. Carmona
Every deductive argument can be negated. I consider this an uncontroversial statement. The problem is, there are people who proceed as though deductive arguments speak to an a priori truth. The Freedom Tower is taller than the Empire State Building; the Empire State Building is taller than the Chrysler Building; therefore, the Freedom Tower is taller than the Chrysler Building. This is an example of an a priori truth because given that one understands the concepts of taller and shorter, the conclusion follows uncontroversially from the premises. This is one way in which the soundness of an argument can be assessed.
Of relevance is how one would proceed if one is unsure of the argument. Thankfully, we no longer live in a world in where one would have to go out of their way to measure the heights of the three buildings. A simple Google search will suffice. The Freedom Tower is ~546m. The Empire State Building is ~443. The Chrysler is ~318m. Granted, this is knowledge by way of testimony. I do not intend to connote religious testimony. What I intend to say is that one’s knowledge is grounded on knowledge directly acquired by someone else. In other words, at least one other person actually measured the heights of these buildings and these are the measurements they got.
Most of our knowledge claims rest on testimony. Not everyone has performed an experimental proof to show that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Either one learned it from a professor or read it in a physics textbook or learned it when watching a science program. Or, they believe the word of someone they trust, be it a friend or a grade school teacher. This does not change that fact that if one cared to, one could exchange knowledge by way of testimony for directly acquired knowledge by performing an experimental proof. This is something I have done, so I do not believe on basis of mere testimony that Newton’s law holds. I can say that it holds because I tested it for myself.
To whet the appetite, let us consider a well-known deductive argument and let us ignore, for the moment, whether it is sound:
P1 All men are mortal.
P2 Socrates is a man.
C Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
If someone were completely disinterested in checking whether this argument, which is merely a finite set of propositions, coheres with the world or reality, I would employ my negation strategy: the negation of an argument someone assumes to be sound without epistemic warrant or justification. The strategy forces them into exploring whether their argument or its negation is sound. Inevitably, the individual will have to abandon their bizarre commitment to a sort of propositional idealism (namely that propositions can only be logically assessed and do not contain any real world entities contextually or are not claims about the world). In other words, they will abandon the notion that “All men are mortal” is a mere proposition lacking context that is not intended to make a claim about states of affairs objectively accessible to everyone, including the person who disagrees with them. With that in mind, I would offer the following:
P1 All men are immortal.
P2 Socrates is a man.
C Therefore, Socrates is immortal.
This is extremely controversial for reasons we are all familiar with. That is because everyone accepts that the original argument is sound. When speaking of ‘men’, setting aside the historical tendency to dissolve the distinction between men and women, what is meant is “all human persons from everywhere and at all times.” Socrates, as we know, was an ancient Greek philosopher who reportedly died in 399 BCE. Like all people before him, and presumably all people after him, he proved to be mortal. No human person has proven to be immortal and therefore, the original argument holds.
Of course, matters are not so straightforward. Christian apologists offer no arguments that are uncontroversially true like the original argument above. Therefore, the negation strategy will prove extremely effective to disabuse them of propositional idealism and to make them empirically assess whether their arguments are sound. What follows are examples of arguments for God that have been discussed ad nauseam. Clearly, theists are not interested in conceding. They are not interested in admitting that even one of their arguments does not work. Sure, what you find are theists committed to Thomism, for instance, and as such, they will reject Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) because it does not fit into their Aristotelian paradigm and not because it is unsound. They prefer Aquinas’ approach to cosmological arguments. What is more common is the kind of theist that ignores the incongruity between one argument for another; since they are arguments for God, it counts as evidence for his existence and it really does not matter that Craig’s KCA is not Aristotelian. I happen to think that it is, despite Craig’s denial, but I digress.
Negating Popular Arguments For God’s Existence
Let us explore whether Craig’s Moral Argument falls victim to the negation strategy. Craig’s Moral Argument is as follows:
P1 If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
P2 Objective moral values do exist.
C Therefore, God exist (Craig, William L. “Moral Argument (Part 1)”. Reasonable Faith. 15 Oct 2007. Web.)
With all arguments, a decision must be made. First, an assessment of the argument form is in order. Is it a modus ponens (MP) or a modus tollens (MT)? Perhaps it is neither and is instead, a categorical or disjunctive syllogism. In any case, one has to decide which premise(s) is going to be negated or whether by virtue of the argument form, one will have to change the argument form to state the opposite. You can see this with the original example. I could have very well negated P2 and stated “Socrates is not a man.” Socrates is an immortal jellyfish that I tagged in the Mediterranean. Or he is an eternal being that I met while tripping out on DMT. For purposes of the argument, however, since he is not a man, at the very least, the question of whether or not he is mortal is open. We would have to ask what Socrates is. Now, if Socrates is my pet hamster, then yes, Socrates is mortal despite not being a man. It follows that the choice of negation has to be in a place that proves most effective. Some thought has to go into it.
Likewise, the choice has to be made when confronting Craig’s Moral Argument. Craig’s Moral Argument is a modus tollens. For the uninitiated, it simply states: [((p –> q) ^ ~q) –> ~p] (Potter, A. (2020). The rhetorical structure of Modus Tollens: An exploration in logic-mining. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 3, 170-179.). Another way of putting it is that one is denying the consequent. That is precisely what Craig does. “Objective moral values do not exist” is the consequent q. Craig is saying ~q or “Objective moral values do exist.” Therefore, one route one can take is keeping the argument form and negating P1, which in turn negates P2.
MT Negated Moral Argument
P1 If God exists, objective moral values and duties exist.
P2 Objective moral values do not exist.
C Therefore, God does not exist.
The key is to come up with a negation that is either sound or, at the very least, free of any controversy. Straight away, I do not like P2. Moral realists would also deny this negation because, to their minds, P2 is not true. The controversy with P2 is not so much whether it is true or false, but that it falls on the horns of the objectivism-relativism and moral realism/anti-realism debates in ethics. The argument may accomplish something with respect to countering Craig’s Moral Argument, but we are in no better place because of it. This is when we should explore changing the argument’s form in order to get a better negation.
MP Negated Moral Argument
P1 If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties exist.
P2 God does not exist.
C Therefore, objective moral values and duties exist.
This is a valid modus ponens. I have changed the argument form of Craig’s Moral Argument and I now have what I think to be a better negation of his argument. From P2, atheists can find satisfaction. This is the epistemic proposition atheists are committed to. The conclusion also alleviates any concerns moral realists might have had with the MT Negated Moral Argument. For my own purposes, I think this argument works better. That, however, is beside the point. The point is that this forces theists to either justify the premises of Craig’s Moral Argument, i.e. prove that the argument is sound, or assert, on the basis of mere faith, that Craig’s argument is true. In either case, one will have succeeded in either forcing the theist to abandon their propositional idealism, in getting them to test the argument against the world as ontologically construed or in getting them to confess that they are indulging in circular reasoning and confirmation bias, i.e. getting them to confess that they are irrational and illogical. Both of these count as victories. We can explore whether other arguments for God fall on this sword.
We can turn our attention to Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):
P1 Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
P2 The universe began to exist.
C Therefore, the universe has a cause. (Reichenbach, Bruce. “Cosmological Argument”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021. Web.)
Again, negation can take place in two places: P1 or P2. Negating P1, however, does not make sense. Negating P2, like in the case of his Moral Argument, changes the argument form; this is arguable and more subtle. So we get the following:
MT Negated KCA
P1 Everything has cause iff it begins to exist. {(∀x)[(C)x ↔ (E)x]}
P2 The universe did not begin to exist.
C Therefore, the universe does not have a cause.
Technically, Craig’s KCA is a categorical syllogism. Such syllogisms present a universal (∀) or existential quantifier (∃); the latter is introduced by saying all. Consider, “all philosophers are thinkers; all philosophers are logicians; therefore, all thinkers are logicians.” Conversely, one could say “no mallards are insects; some birds are mallards; therefore, some birds are not insects.” What Craig is stating is that all things that begin to exist have a cause, so if the universe is a thing that began to exist, then it has a cause. Alternatively, his argument can be considered an implicit modus ponens: “if the universe began to exist, then it has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause.” I consider this a much weaker formulation and since Craig or anyone else for that matter doesn’t come across things that didn’t begin to exist, interpreting his first premise as a biconditional makes more sense. Hence, the negation works because if the universe did not begin to exist, then the universe is not part of the group of all things that have a cause. This is why my original formulation began with Craig’s P1 because I consider it a biconditional. Notice that even if p and q are false, Craig’s P1 is still true. One way to make a biconditional true is if p and q are false. All that’s said by the Negated or anti-Kalam is that the universe is not within the domain of things that begin to exist. Therefore, the universe does not have a cause.
Whether the universe is finite or eternal has been debated for millennia and in a sense, despite changing context, the debate rages on. If the universe is part of an eternal multiverse, it is just one universe in a vast sea of universes within a multiverse that has no temporal beginning. Despite this, the MT Negated KCA demonstrates how absurd the KCA is. The singularity was already there ‘before’ the Big Bang. The Big Bang started the cosmic clock, but the universe itself did not begin to exist. This is more plausible. Consider that everything that begins to exist does so when the flow of time is already in motion, i.e. when the arrow of time pointed in a given direction due to entropic increase reducible to the decreasing temperature throughout the universe. Nothing that has ever come into existence has done so simultaneously with time itself because any causal relationship speaks to a change and change requires the passage of time, but at T=0, no time has passed, and therefore, no change could have taken place. This leads to an asymmetry. We thus cannot speak of anything beginning to exist at T=0. The MT Negated KCA puts cosmology in the right context. The universe did not come into existence at T=0. T=0 simply represents the first measure of time; matter and energy did not emerge at that point.
For a more complicated treatment, Malpass and Morriston argue that “one cannot traverse an actual infinite in finite steps” (Malpass, Alex & Morriston, Wes (2020). Endless and Infinite. Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):830-849.). In other words, from a mathematical point of view, T=0 is the x-axis. All of the events after T=0 are an asymptote along the x-axis. The events go further and further back, ever closer to T=0 but never actually touch it. For a visual representation, see below:
Credit: Free Math Help
The implication here is that time began to exist, but the universe did not begin to exist. A recent paper implies that this is most likely the case (Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement. The Physics arXiv Blog. 23 Oct 2013. Web.). The very hot, very dense singularity before the emergence of time at T=0 would have been subject to quantum mechanics rather than the macroscopic forces that came later, e.g., General Relativity. As such, the conditions were such that entanglement could have resulted in the emergence of time in our universe, but not the emergence of the universe. All of the matter and energy were already present before the clock started to tick. Conversely, if the universe is akin to a growing runner, then the toddler is at the starting line before the gun goes off. The sound of the gun starts the clock. The runner starts running sometime after she hears the sound. As she runs, she goes through all the stages of childhood, puberty, adolescence, adulthood, and finally dies. Crucially, the act of her running and her growth do not begin until after the gun goes off. Likewise, no changes take place at T=0; all changes take place after T=0. While there is this notion of entanglement, resulting in a change occurring before the clock even started ticking, quantum mechanics demonstrates that quantum changes do not require time and in fact, may result in the emergence of time. Therefore, it is plausible that though time began to exist at the Big Bang, the universe did not begin to exist—thus, making the MT Negated KCA sound. The KCA is therefore, false.
Finally, so that the Thomists do not feel left out, we can explore whether the negation strategy can be applied to Aquinas’ Five Ways. For our purposes, the Second Way is closely related to the KCA and would be defeated by the same considerations. Of course, we would have to negate the Second Way so that it is vulnerable to the considerations that cast doubt on the KCA. The Second Way can be stated as follows:
We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
Nothing exists prior to itself.
Therefore nothing [in the world of things we perceive] is the efficient cause of itself.
If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results (the effect).
Therefore if the first thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, then there would be no things existing now.
That is plainly false (i.e., there are things existing now that came about through efficient causes).
Therefore efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.
Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God. (Gracyk, Theodore. “Argument Analysis of the Five Ways”. Minnesota State University Moorhead. 2016. Web.)
This argument is considerably longer than the KCA, but there are still areas where the argument can be negated. I think P1 is uncontroversial and so, I do not mind starting from there:
Negated Second Way
We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
Nothing exists prior to itself.
Therefore nothing [in the world of things we perceive] is the efficient cause of itself.
If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results (the effect).
Therefore if the earlier thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, then there would be things existing now.
That is plainly true (i.e., efficient causes, per Malpass and Morriston, extend infinitely into the past or, the number of past efficient causes is a potential infinity).
Therefore efficient causes do extend ad infinitum into the past.
Therefore it is not necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
Either the theist will continue to assert that the Second Way is sound, epistemic warrant and justification be damned, or they will abandon their dubious propositional idealism and run a soundness test. Checking whether the Second Way or the Negated Second Way is sound would inevitably bring them into contact with empirical evidence supporting one argument or the other. As I have shown with the KCA, it appears that considerations of time, from a philosophical and quantum mechanical perspective, greatly lower the probability of the KCA being sound. This follows neatly into Aquinas’ Second Way and as such, one has far less epistemic justification for believing the KCA or Aquinas’ Second Way are sound. The greater justification is found in the negated versions of these arguments.
Ultimately, one either succeeds at making the theist play the game according to the right rules or getting them to admit their beliefs are not properly epistemic at all; instead, they believe by way of blind faith and all of their redundant arguments are exercises in circular reasoning and any pretense of engaging the evidence is an exercise in confirmation bias. Arguments for God are a perfect example of directionally motivated reasoning (see Galef, Julia. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. New York: Portfolio, 2021. 63-66. Print). I much prefer accuracy motivated reasoning. We are all guilty of motivated reasoning, but directionally motivated reasoning is indicative of irrationality and usually speaks to the fact that one holds beliefs that do not square with the facts. Deductive arguments are only useful insofar as premises can be supported by evidence, which therefore makes it easier to show that an argument is sound. This is why we can reason that if Socrates is a man, more specifically, the ancient Greek philosopher that we all know, then Socrates was indeed mortal and that is why he died in 399 BCE. Likewise, this is why we cannot reason that objective morality can only be the case if the Judeo-Christian god exists, that if the universe began to exist, God is the cause, and that if the series of efficient causes cannot regress infinitely and must terminate somewhere, they can only terminate at a necessary first cause, which some call God. These arguments can be negated and the negations will show that they are either absurd or that the reasoning in the arguments is deficient and rests on the laurels of directionally motivated reasoning due to a bias for one’s religious faith rather than on the bedrock of carefully reasoned, meticulously demonstrated, accuracy motivated reasoning which does not ignore or omit pertinent facts.
The arguments for God, no matter how old or new, simple or complex, do not work because not only do they rely on directionally motivated and patently biased reasoning, but because when testing for soundness, being sure not to exclude any pertinent evidence, the arguments turn out to be unsound. In the main, they all contain controversial premises that do not work unless one already believes in God. So there is a sense in which these arguments exist to give believers a false sense of security or more pointedly, a false sense of certainty. Unlike my opponents, I am perfectly content with being wrong, with changing my mind, but the fact remains, theism is simply not the sort of belief that I give much credence to. Along with the Vagueness Strategy, the Negation Strategy is something that should be in every atheist’s toolbox.
Skeptical Theism and New Arguments For Atheism
R.N. Carmona
Skeptical Theism is overtly present in Plantinga’s Ignorance Defense. It must be noted here that he does not call it that. The monicker makes sense because it relies on human ignorance in order to work. In other words, the defense states that since human wisdom is incomparable to God’s, we cannot know why he allows evil. Moreover, since it is reasonable that he has some reason, unbeknownst to us, for allowing evil, we cannot reasonably blame God for the evil in the world. Of Plantinga’s explications, Kai Nielsen says the following:
Plantinga grants that, as far as we can see, there are many cases of evil that are apparently pointless. Indeed there are many cases of such evils where we have no idea at all what reason God (if there is such a person) could have for permitting such evils. But, Plantinga remarks, from granting these things it does not follow that “an omnipotent and omniscient God, if he existed, would not have a reason for permitting them” (Plantinga 1993, 400). From the fact that we can see no reason at all for God to permit evils, we cannot legitimately infer that God has no reason to allow such evils. It is not just, Plantinga continues, “obvious or apparent that God could have reason for permitting them. The most we can sensibly say is that we can’t think of any good reason why he would permit them” (Plantinga 1993, 400)
Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom and Evil. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 58. Print.
This, in a nutshell, is the Ignorance Defense. Humans are, in other words, ignorant of God’s will and our wisdom pales in comparison to his. Nielsen’s contention, however, has the makings of a perfect defeater. All that is needed is to see his objection from the point of view of one of God’s attributes. Nielsen states that “it looks more like, if he exists and is all powerful and all knowing, that then he more likely to be evil” and adds that “we see that all the same he might possibly be, as Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions say he is, perfectly good. But we cannot see that he is. The Mosaic God looks, to understate it, petty, unjust, and cruel to us” (Ibid.). This defeater is perfected if we see this from the point of view of God’s omniscience. God would know that we would be incapable of seeing that he is good in light of natural evil. This evil is, in fact, gratuitous. God would have seen, by way of his omniscience, that the quantity of natural evil in the world would be enough to drive so many to doubt. This apart from contradictory revelations, the limited range and capacity of Christianity, i.e., its incapacity to appeal to people of other cultures, e.g., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and indigenous people across every populated continent, and the negative evidence against the existence of the Judeo-Christian god.
We are then asked “to stick with a belief in what we see to be some kind of possibility, namely that God is, after all, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, perfectly good” (Ibid.). This as an obstinate appeal to the very faith that needs to be substantiated. Furthermore, this appears to imply the superiority of faith over reason. Like Galileo, who no doubt said this with a different sentiment, I “do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use” (Galilei, Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615” (2013). Instructional Resources. 97.).
For a clearer explication of skeptical theism, McBrayer offers:
Skeptical theism is the view that God exists but that we should be skeptical of our ability to discern God’s reasons for acting or refraining from acting in any particular instance. In particular, says the skeptical theist, we should not grant that our inability to think of a good reason for doing or allowing something is indicative of whether or not God might have a good reason for doing or allowing something. If there is a God, he knows much more than we do about the relevant facts, and thus it would not be surprising at all if he has reasons for doing or allowing something that we cannot fathom.
McBrayer, Justin P. “Skeptical Theism”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web.
This matches Plantinga’s Ignorance Defense one-to-one. There is therefore, no need to belabor the point. My concern is twofold: the failure of skeptical theism should be clear and since this appeal to human ignorance is an obstinate roadblock borne of a reluctance to accept an atheistic conclusion, it is crucial to develop arguments that make use of its faulty intuition and arguments that leave no room for a skeptical theistic response. In other words, if the intuition can be turned on its head, in a perfect example of how to employ the double standard and outsider tests (see Galef, Julia. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. New York: Portfolio, 2021. 63-66. Print), perhaps the theist is not in a position to see the vast shortcomings of skeptical theism. This is what I want to do because I am at a loss when it comes to understanding why anyone would think such a response works when confronting The Evidential Problem of Evil and Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness Argument. For our purposes, I will set aside stating explicitly The Evidential Problem of Evil, as I think it is unnecessary review for the initiated. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness Argument, on the other hand, is not as familiar, even to the thoroughly initiated. Thankfully, Veronika Weidner has explicitly stated the argument accurately:
(1) Necessarily, if God exists, then God is a personal perfect being.
(2) Necessarily, if God is a personal perfect being, then God always loves all human beings perfectly.
(3) Necessarily, if God always loves all human beings perfectly, then God is always open to be in a personal relationship with all those human beings capable of such a relationship with God.
(4) Necessarily, if God is always open to be in a personal relationship with all those human beings capable of such a relationship with God, then God does or omits nothing which would prevent all those human beings to relate to God personally who are capable of a personal relationship with God and also not resistant to a personal relationship with God.
(5) Necessarily, a human being capable of a personal relationship with God who is not resistant to a personal relationship with God is only able to relate to God personally if she believes that God exists.
(6) Necessarily, if God does or omits nothing which would prevent all those human beings to relate to God personally who are capable of a personal relationship with God and also not resistant to a personal relationship with God, then it is not the case that there is a human being capable of a personal relationship with God who is not resistant to a personal relationship with God and yet not able to relate to God personally because she does not believe that God exists.
(7) There is at least one human being capable of a personal relationship with God who is not resistant to a personal relationship with God and yet not able to relate to God personally because she does not believe that God exists.
(8) Therefore, God does not exist. (see Schellenberg, 2015b: 24–25)
Weidner, Veronika. Divine Hiddenness. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Web.
Prior to discussing Schellenberg’s argument in some detail, it is crucial to understand why skeptical theism fails:
A) Even if we grant that unforeseen goods balance the scales, as it were, i.e. justifies the 1,800 cancer-related deaths of children per year in the United States, there is no way for finite human minds to causally connect these deaths with the goods whenever they arrive; the most we can do is callously reason that their deaths are akin to necessary sacrifices that enable us to eventually find a cure—which is related to minor problem (a) below and more importantly, is not something we should ever give God credit for; developing cures is a slow, painstaking process that does not involve anything like putative revelation or God whispering the secrets to a much needed vaccine in a doctor’s ear. There is also the issue that the goods may arrive well after our lifetimes, which segues into the next problem.
B) On exclusivism, many of today’s atheists are eternally lost because evil and hiddenness were just too persuasive and the goods never came due within our lifetimes. On universalism, this is all arbitrary. This can be conjoined to Street’s recent response to skeptical theism: we are free to indulge moral aporia because no matter what we believe or not, we will ultimately be saved (see Street, S. (2014). If everything happens for a reason, then we don’t know what reasons are: Why the price of theism is normative skepticism. In M. Bergmann & P. Kain (Eds.), Challenges to moral and religious belief: Disagreement and evolution (pp. 172–192). Oxford: Oxford University Press.). So talk of evil and hiddenness and unknown goods to account for them ends up being null.
I have a sneaking suspicion that theists feel the gnaw of these defeaters. Atheists certainly do. This then becomes an exercise of being overly charitable to a kind of argument that can never prove successful. If skeptical theism fails, it is a thread that should be cut and discarded. There are a couple of minor problems that are important as well:
a) It is utilitarian in its analysis. The evil and hiddenness we experience are lesser in magnitude when compared to the goods that await us, be it in heaven or by way of some earthly recompense. The greater good overtones are palpable. I cannot see how a being who is appealed to as the objective and perfect moral standard can subscribe to utilitarianism given its shortcomings.
b) It begs the question because it really is no different from someone saying “just wait and see!” Many people on all sides died waiting and seeing and per Schellenberg, honestly sought divinity their entire lives and came up empty. If God had a better track record of making do on past atrocities, then we would be able to inductively reason, as many of us do with science, in this manner. The thing is, it looks like the bills for the Holocaust and slavery are overdue and all of us, living ~80 and ~450 years respectively, after these atrocities happened, cannot even begin to causally connect potential goods that God has deployed with the intention of paying this debt. Perhaps it is too much to expect God to pay that debt because those were human crimes; but I can also think of disasters, diseases, pandemics, mass extinctions, and other natural evils that are overdue and again, I am not sure what goods are intended to repay the extinctions of all of our hominid cousins, for example.
c) The whole accounting that is done really puts a lack of value on human life that turns out to be nihilistic and even fatalistic. The Black Plague wiped out millions. Are we really to believe any good repaid that debt? Are we supposed to buy that the life of a child, whose loss emotionally crippled her mother, is worth so little that we can just make do with the fact that some future kid was saved from danger in her place? That does nothing at all to alleviate the suffering the child and her mother experienced, so that is another issue, one of currency: what is the value of this coin God is paying his debts with and how exactly does it exchange with the coin in the sometimes distant past?
Now to turn my attention to an argument that subsumes the observations of The Evidential Problem of Evil and The Divine Hiddenness Argument. This argument is novel, forceful, and to my mind, defeats the idea of not just perfect being, omni-god theism, but theism overall. Weidner already observes the following: “After all, the hiddenness argument, if successful, helps us see the deficiencies of personal perfect being theism” (Weidner, ibid.). My next argument should help one see the deficiencies of theism in general.
Infinity Entails Supererogative Capacity
Weidner’s next stop is to grapple with the conclusion of My Argument From Assailability: “if we find in any being, a characteristic that is assailable, then we have no reason to call it a god.” How is a non-perfect theistic being different from an alien, one might ask. Crucially, if per the hiddenness and evil arguments, God does not seem open to being in a relationship with all human beings and does not intervene when great atrocities happen, then we have located an assailable characteristic. How does an omnipotent or, at least, an incredibly powerful being succumb to bystander effect? Even if God is not all-powerful and could not snap the Nazis out of existence, if he is at least powerful enough to assume a disguise and poison Hitler and his top advisers, why not step in and prevent the Holocaust?
The reason Aquinas and others maximized God to have infinite capacities in all respects is because theists already saw the crippling limitations of a god with finite abilities. The question would immediately follow: what motivation is there to worship a being that is not perfect? Infinity entails supererogative capacity. God would be able to give an infinite amount of love, kinship, succor, power, knowledge, and presence and still retain an infinite amount of each. So why does he seem to blithely refuse to commit to this? Perfect and infinite personal being theism is defeated by the combination of Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness Argument, The Evidential Problem of Evil, and my argument from God’s apparent lack of supererogatory agency. What is left is non-perfect being theism.
That, however, falls on the horns of my Argument From Assailability and so, Theism is defeated in all its iterations. This is to say nothing about the fact that even a finite deity would be far more capable of supererogatory acts than we are. In any case, the intuition of my supererogative argument can be turned on its head. We can deduce something about God’s power given this lack. God must be much weaker than a hypothetical infinite being due to the fact that he remains a bystander, utterly apathetic to even the worst atrocities known to man—even ones we played no part in causing. This is an assailable characteristic. We therefore, have no obligation whatsoever to worship a being that is apparently weaker than ourselves. As Tracie Harris famously said: “If I could stop a person from raping a child I would. That is the difference between me and your God” (Bennett-Smith, Meredith. “‘Atheist Experience’ TV Host Shocked By Caller’s Statement About Child Rape (Video)”. Huffington Post. 9 Jan 2013. Web). Ultimately, if God appears to be this much weaker than human beings, who can potentially lose their lives when intervening on the behalf of another person, it is far more probable that God does not exist.
Notes on Necessity
The standard contingency argument looks something like the following:
- There exists a series of events
- The series of events exists as caused and not as uncaused
- This series cannot extend infinitely into the past
- Therefore, there must exist the necessary being that is the cause of all contingent being (credit: Queens Community College)
The intuition of skeptical theism, as I made clear at the outset, can be used to cast doubt on contingency arguments across the board. Aside from the fact that there is a chasm between a necessary cause, e.g., something like the Big Bang, and a necessary being, we can assert that we should be skeptical of our ability to discern what a necessary being is. How do we know that it is one necessary being as opposed to many? If a Triune god solves the one-many problem, then why not the Divine Septad of Zoroastrianism? Since we cannot know what the realm of necessity is like, we should refrain from making these kinds of arguments.
Contingency arguments only accomplish one thing: they point to the existence of metaphysical necessities, quite possibly something like brute facts, that can be explained by something more concrete like physical necessity. In my overview of Rasmussen’s recent contingency argument, I go over what this looks like and it is more plausible than crossing the infinite chasm between a necessary cause and a necessary being on blind faith alone. In any case, since we cannot know what necessity is really like and since we cannot visit the realm of necessity, it is best we accept our ignorance on this matter. The intuition of skeptical theism undermines what many theists consider one of the stronger lines of argumentation in favor of theism.
The Argument From Phenomenal Distance
This novel argument, not to be confused with Mander’s “Does God know what it is like to be me?” (see Mander, W.J. (2002), Does God Know What It is Like to be Me?. The Heythrop Journal, 43: 430-443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2265.00203) completely evades skeptical theism. It is an argument from analogy in where an observation about human behavior is mapped onto God. The argument has been alluded to before, but as far as I know, has not been formally stated or given a name.
RC*: The condition of the argument is as follows: there is a difference between the phenomenal experience of human beings and that of earthworms (if it is even appropriate to think that worms have phenomenal experience). Even if earthworms lack phenomenal consciousness, according to some philosophers, we certainly have phenomenal consciousness and as such, there is a distance between our experience and theirs.
RC1 Human beings have phenomenal distance from earthworms and therefore, are indifferent to them, e.g. we walk through a parking lot on a rainy day and probably trample dozens of them underfoot with no second thought.
RC2 An infinite god or even a vastly powerful deity would have an infinite or incalculable phenomenal distance from humans.
RCC1 Therefore, we should expect God to be indifferent to us.
This argument avoids the nauseating intuition of skeptical theism as it cannot appeal to any ignorance we have. One thing we are not ignorant of, as evil and hiddenness make clear, is that either God does not exist or if any gods exist, they are astoundingly indifferent to us. Camus, in The Plague, observes through the character of Tarrou that if God is not going to provide succor in times of great atrocity, it is up to us to take the helm and do something about our plights. Conjoined to his scathing criticisms of the religious propensity to prefer the abstract over the concrete is Camus’ clearsighted focus on God’s absence or indifference, for even as Jacques Othon dies in agony and Father Paneloux shouts out “My God, spare this child!,” the child dies writhing in pain and wailing across the halls of the auxiliary hospital (Camus, Albert. The Plague. New York: Vintage International Books. 217. Web.). This argument is yet another powerful blow against personal being theism because a friend is there in times of need and a father who loves his children, all the more so. No appeal to our ignorance, as my defeaters make clear, can be marshaled in to salvage the notion of the existence of a personal being who loves us and has our well-being and prosperity in mind. The absence or more tentatively, the indifference of God should disabuse one of the belief in a personal being who loves us infinitely.
In the end, I think the lines of argumentation I have pursued here are by no means exhaustive, in that a lot more can be said about evil, suffering, hiddenness, God’s lack of supererogative agency, and an indifference stemming from the incalculable, if not, infinite phenomenal distance he has from us. I defer to Rieux: “No Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture” (Camus, Ibid., 218).
The Futility of Labels
By R.N. Carmona
Isms abound and nuance is sorely needed. I think my readers ought to follow my lead and shed their isms. In place of these various isms, they should offer clear definitions of what they mean by these isms. I think definitions are more robust and are more capable of giving, especially detractors, an idea of what a label means in practice. I will now outline a few of my various isms and unpack them, so that people can start to see the absurdity of opposing some of them. In place of these labels, I will offer explanations for why I identity with these views.
I. Atheism
Atheism is not merely an epistemic stance concerning belief in god, but a robust philosophical position that contains an analytic component. Analytic atheism is concerned with what is meant by theism and what is meant by God. Atheists, however, will not always agree with the answers provided by theists. A theist may respond to the first question and say that God is existence. An atheist might object by saying that such a definition is inconsistent with what theists commonly profess and that what they usually profess is much more elementary. God, for example, is man-like. He is pleased or displeased; given the latter, he is prone to anger. Furthermore, he purportedly has properties that cannot be attributed to mere existence: he is omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, timeless. The atheist could also respond by stating that defining God as existence is much too vague. The aim of a definition is description; this definition, however, fails to describe what is meant by God.
Analytic atheism also attempts to answer the question: what is atheism? To accomplish this, however, the normative component has to be consulted. The analytic component will provide theories of atheism or more simply, accounts of what atheism should be, therefore providing possible answers to the question of normative atheism. The analytic component is therefore, responsible for determining which account best captures what atheism is or alternatively, what an atheist is.
What an atheist is, is perhaps best defined by the approach s/he chooses. The approach chosen or a combination of these approaches might help us to arrive at a better definition of atheism. There’s fallibilism, deductive atheology, and inductive atheology. The latter two are encompassed by evidentialism. This position is arguably most familiar to modern atheists:
[A]theists have taken the view that whether or not a person is justified in having an attitude of belief towards the proposition, “God exists,” is a function of that person’s evidence. “Evidence” here is understood broadly to include a priori arguments, arguments to the best explanation, inductive and empirical reasons, as well as deductive and conceptual premises. An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that atheists have not offered faith as a justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not presented non-evidentialist defenses for believing that there is no God.
McCormick, Matt. “Atheism”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ND. Web. 21 Dec 2014
A priori arguments fall in the purview of deductive atheology. Such atheists would argue that the traditional view of God is incoherent. Such a God is not possible on this view. The characteristics God purportedly has are contradictory either in and of themselves or when one attempts to reconcile them. Take for example J.L Mackie’s explication of the Omnipotence Paradox: “can an omnipotent being make things which he cannot subsequently control? Or, what is practically equivalent to this, can an omnipotent being make rules which then bind himself?” (Mackie, J. L. 1955. Evil and omnipotence. Mind 64 (254): 200-212. Available on web.). This is a more generalized version of the Omnipotence Paradox, which usually asks: can God create a stone he cannot lift? Therefore, the paradox can be viewed as an argument attempting to show that omnipotence is incoherent in and of itself. The argument attempts to accomplish this by dividing omnipotence into two components, which I call functional and physical. Functional omnipotence is the capacity to will anything whilst physical omnipotence is the capacity to do anything. Therefore, the argument attempts to show that it is possible that God could will something he cannot do, in Mackie’s case, will something that he cannot control or in the general case, will the existence of a stone so heavy that he cannot complete the particular task of lifting it.
Another route such an atheist takes is the attempt to show that any given attributes of God are irreconcilable.
The combination of omnipotence and omniscience have received a great deal of attention. To possess all knowledge, for instance, would include knowing all of the particular ways in which one will exercise one’s power, or all of the decisions that one will make, or all of the decisions that one has made in the past. But knowing any of those entails that the known proposition is true. So does God have the power to act in some fashion that he has not foreseen, or differently than he already has without compromising his omniscience? It has also been argued that God cannot be both unsurpassably good and free.
McCormick, Ibid.
Another route available to such an atheist is to argue that we have not been offered an adequate concept of god (see Smart, J.J.C. “Atheism and Agnosticism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 9 Mar 2004. Web. 21 Dec 2014.). Concepts of god are often relative to this or that religion or subjective to this or that individual. Such concepts often do not agree with one another.
Perhaps the final route such an atheist can take is to argue that the failure of theistic arguments entails atheism. In other words, since arguments for God fail, it is reasonable to hold that god does not exist. Such an atheist, for example, will argue that since the Kalam Cosmological Argument fails to prove that God created the universe, we should believe that such an agent did not create the universe. Alternatively, she will argue that since the Ontological Argument fails to show the existence of a necessary being, this being is instead impossible. Whether or not these arguments hold are of no interest at the time. This is, however, how such an atheist will proceed.
An atheist operating under inductive atheology has several possible approaches. Whether or not one can prove a negative is too tangential a topic to cover here, but assuming it’s possible, one could offer Michael Martin’s argument:
P1 [A]ll the available evidence used to support the view that X exists is shown to be inadequate; and
P2 X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then there is a presumption that would be evidence adequate to support the view that X exists; and
P3 this presumption has not been defeated although serious efforts have been made to do so; and
P4 the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined; and
P5 there are no acceptable beneficial reasons to believe that X exists.
Martin, Michael, 1990. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
What makes this argument inductive is P3 and P4. P3 and P4 hold hitherto and thus, there is the tacit assumption that they will hold going forward. In other words, that the future will resemble the past.
II. Naturalism
Naturalism is another argument available to an atheist operating under inductive atheology. This is, in fact, the prevalent approach among modern day atheists. Atheists may disagree on the details and therefore, espouse different sorts of naturalism. However, the more prominent forms are metaphysical and methodological. Methodological naturalism has two primary forms: constructive and deflationary. Deflationary is based on–not exclusively–the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA). Arthur Fine describes it as follows:
I certainly trust the evidence of my senses, on the whole with regard to the existence and features of everyday objects. And I have similar confidence in the “cheek, double-check, check, tripe-check” of scientific investigation…So if scientists tell me that there really are molecules and atoms, and…who knows maybe even quarks, then so be it. I trust them and, thus, must accept that there really are such things with their attendant properties and relations.
Arthur Fine as quoted in Ritchie, Jack. Understanding Naturalism. Stocksfield, England: Acumen, 2008. 97. Print.
NOA is an alternative to scientific realism and anti-realism. “Both realism and anti-realism add an unwanted philosophical gloss to science” (Ibid.). Therefore, the position neither agrees with scientific realism nor anti-realism. At first glance, NOA may sound exactly like scientific realism, but there are key differences that should be considered (e.g. the correspondence theory of truth doesn’t factor into Fine’s NOA). Constructive naturalism differs from NOA because it “involves commitment to a definite method for resolving ontological matters” (Ibid.).Such a naturalist may make use of, for example, Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology.
Metaphysical naturalism absorbs methodological naturalism. The view could be defined as follows:
Metaphysical naturalism seeks to explain every feature of our reality through only natural entities and causes, without the need of god(s) or the supernatural in any part of one’s worldview and life philosophy. In other words, a “big picture” explanation of reality can be reached without any appeal to religion, making religions such as Christianity unnecessary and extraneous to answering the big questions in life.
Ferguson, Matthew. “Thinking about the ‘Metaphysics’ in Metaphysical Naturalism”. Civitas Humana. 26 Apr 2014. Web. 21 Dec 2014.
Metaphysical naturalism is a robust worldview that often requires lengthy elucidation. This has been done by, for example, Richard Carrier who states:
[I]f you want to know what we believe on almost any subject, you need merely read authoritative works on science and history–which means, first, college-level textbooks of good quality and, second, all the other literature on which their contents are based. The vast bulk of what you find there we believe in. The evidence and reason for those beliefs is presented in such works and need not be repeated…
Carrier, Richard. Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. Bloomington, Ind.: Authorhouse, 2005. 67. Print.
Where such authorities are silent, metaphysical naturalism is capable of providing possible answers. Take, for instance, consciousness. Metaphysical naturalism can offer cogent explanations within the physicalist framework. For instance, with respect to consciousness, some naturalists have offered some version of supervenience. On fallibilism, an atheist can argue that a theist has come to a given conclusion because he hasn’t considered all the relevant evidence (McCormick, Ibid.). In fact, part of this attitude plays a role in discussions between theists and atheists. Theists, generally speaking, make it quite obvious that they are not aware of all of the relevant evidence. William Lane Craig, for example, employs a perfunctory or selective grasp of cosmology in order to support his KCA. It is reasonable to conclude that if he were aware of all of the evidence or if he did not omit counter-evidence, his conclusion would be different. Unfortunately, this might be too generous. Craig has been made aware of the evidence and regardless of the fact, he still chooses to endorse the KCA. So in some cases, it is not just that a theist’s knowledge is fallible, but it is that they disregard the fact and do not care to correct it. Even worse, apologists are in the habit of omitting evidence to the contrary.
Lastly, the definition “lack of belief in gods” is inadequate because it alludes to everyday beliefs. It is correct to say I lack or do not have the belief that Jesus died for my sins and resurrected three days later, and then ascended to the right hand of the Father where he now intercedes on my behalf. Religious beliefs of this sort are not properly epistemic beliefs, which are “the attitude[s] we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true” (Schwitzgebel, Eric. “Belief”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019. Web.). Atheists, therefore, have the epistemic belief that the available evidence makes it much more probable than not that there are no gods or spiritual entities whatsoever. Naturalism, whether some of us like it or not, is a framework that has imposed itself on us. Even in cases where we assume supernatural or paranormal explanations, thorough investigation renders a much more mundane explanation. For some people, it is difficult to accept that the world is not fantastical. Severed limbs do not regenerate in the name of Jesus, people do not rise from the dead when a spell is invoked, and our ancestors do not protect us from physical harm. Thorough investigations only yield naturalistic, reproducible explanations. So when someone proclaims a belief that does not speak to knowledge or truth, but rather, faith, I can definitely say I do not share or that I lack that belief. Now when speaking of properly epistemic beliefs, I have the attitude that atheism is the case; atheism is true in that the various claims of religion do not hold up to scrutiny and that moreover, gods are entirely absent in the scope of all of our explanations. In other words, star formation, planet formation, the arrangement of the earliest, simplest metabolisms, the evolution of species, and ultimately, every model of the universe’s origin do not require a god in order to make sense.
When atheism is spelled out in this much detail, detractors are given no room to disingenuously offer a definition they prefer, one that allows them to malign atheists and misrepresent what they stand for. The label of atheism is futile. The definition or perhaps better said, the practice clearly spells out what it is that I stand for. The same applies to naturalism. The label no longer applies. Instead, I prefer to make explicit what I mean by it. Kai Nielsen explains the intimate connection between atheism and naturalism best:
Religions, whether theisms or not, are belief-systems (though this is not all they are) which involve belief in spiritual realities. Even Buddhism, which has neither God nor worship, has a belief in what Buddhists take to be spiritual realities and this is incompatible with naturalism as is theism as well, which, at least as usually understood, is a form of supernaturalism. Naturalism, where consistent, is an atheism.
Nielsen, Kai. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001. 30. Print.
III. Feminism
The Fourth Wave may be the most powerful wave yet, but a glaring issue limits its power: there are people who not only misunderstand feminism, but also either stand against feminism or misrepresent feminism. The former and the latter are more related than one realizes. Those who misrepresent feminism are very often responsible for those who stand against it. Some Christians and Muslims believe that women are inferior to men and will therefore oppose feminism by default, but there are anti-feminists who do not have religious reasons for opposing feminism. Their reasons are based on the misunderstandings of self-proclaimed feminists.
To set feminism straight, a return to the basics is required. Once the different schools of feminism are made explicit, misunderstanding should be quelled. Misunderstanding occurs due to oversimplification of the thought of one school or another. I agree with Richard Carrier, who stated that, “Feminism is often badly understood by people who don’t study it well or don’t read widely among contemporary feminist authors” (Carrier, Richard. “A Primer on Fourth Wave Feminism”. Freethought Blogs. 5 Apr 2015. Web. 8 Apr 2015.). A successful movement, of course, has to move against some form of oppression or move toward some end, but it also has to stop and gather its fugitives. It, in other words, should not exclude people who want to identify with it. However, it should be responsible for ensuring that its members understand the movement. It is responsible for its reputation and since the reputation of the movement is based on its members, cohesion and continuity are a must. We are in a digital age in where people listen to someone on a YouTube channel or a blogger in the blogosphere. It is a readily accessible form of media. It is often short and sweet when compared to a book, so the more learned and educated in a movement have to stop to protect the movement from misunderstanding and mischaracterization. To do this, one must gather the fugitives, and to accomplish this, they have to be shown where they have gone wrong. They need to be corrected. Often what is needed is a return to the basics.
Fugitives are the people anti-feminists get these ideas from, young girls who are themselves anti-feminists or who identify a feminists and confess to things that are not at all in keeping with the movement: that feminists hate men; that feminists want to exclude them; that feminists seek female dominance and perhaps a matriarchy; that feminists are looking to devalue masculine attributes; that feminists ignore the effects the patriarchy has on men and that they, in fact, ignore men’s issues across the board. These ideas are not true to feminism, but there’s still the question as to why people think they are. Mackay has a succinct summary of feminism and not surprisingly, she alludes to common misconceptions:
Feminism is one of the oldest and most powerful social movements in history; it is a revolutionary movement, and that means change. There is so much wrong with the present system that we can’t just tinker round the edges, we need to start again; our end point cannot be equality in an unequal world. This is also the reason why feminism is not struggling to simply reverse the present power relationship and put women in charge instead of men (though this is a common myth about feminist politics). Feminism is about change, not a changing of the guard.
Mackay, Finn. “Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement”. Times Higher Education. 19 Feb 2015. Web. 8 Apr 2015.
What kind of change is the label of feminism about? Feminism concerns securing equality for women. Women should have the same opportunities men have. Women should have the same rights men have. Women should be respected in their careers the way men are; they should be paid equally. There should be no sex-based differences in academia, the workplace, at home, or anywhere else. When this is spelled out, it is an uncontroversial perspective. There should be no reason for anyone to oppose the affirmation that women should be equal to men.
IV. Black Lives Matter
Likewise, there should be no opposition at all when I say that Black people and minorities, more generally, should be equal to Whites. There is nothing wrong with saying that if a Black man commits a crime or fails to comply with police, he should not be gunned down. White men have committed crimes on a much larger scale and were escorted away in handcuffs. White men do not have to worry about police officers kneeling on their necks or shooting 41 rounds at them. Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people, including 19 children, in an act of domestic terrorism, and he walked away with his life (Gumbel, Andrew. “Oklahoma City bombing: 20 years later, key questions remain unanswered”. Guardian. 13 Apr 2015. Web.). That is because he was given the right to a fair trail. In this country, a Black man selling loose cigarettes on a corner can be the victim of extrajudicial execution. There is nothing controversial about saying that even the life of an accused Black criminal matters. Innocent until proven guilty applies to Black people or at least, it should apply to Black people.
The same applies to Asian Americans, who have recently become the target of hate crimes across the country. Implicit here is that I am opposed to anyone who endorses stereotypes about ethnic groups. So when the former President joked about the “Kung Flu” and blamed China repeatedly for the COVID-19 outbreak, that was one of the many reasons I opposed him, his administration, and his supporters. It is absurd to me that right-wingers in America are roundly opposed to racial equality. They are also opposed to women securing equality. There is a sense in which my political opponents are wholly aware of what these labels mean and yet, they routinely choose to ignore the definitions, no matter how clearly they are explained. It is not any lack of clarity or sense on my part, but rather an obstinate decision to oppose progress of this sort at every turn. Political affiliation should not keep anyone from accepting my definitions or identifying with them. If your political party prohibits you from even seeing the need for racial equality, abandon the party or admit to having abandoned your moral integrity. There are no two ways about it.
V. Leftist
In the past, I have used this term and I have done so to differentiate myself from Democrats. I am not a Centrist, a sycophant who condones incompetence and corruption on both sides while pretending that they are both exemplary. Neither political party in the United States is morally admirable. While it is the case that Democrats are marginally better, there is still a lot that they get wrong, hence my anti-Democratic, anti-Capitalist stances. I do not support the American idea of Democracy because, like Mbembe, I recognize that it has a nocturnal body: colonialism and every human rights violation that has followed from it from slavery to the Jim Crow era to mass incarceration of Blacks after a fabricated crack-cocaine epidemic. The United States is a hegemony, a pseudo-Empire precisely because it destabilizes entire regions by rightfully overthrowing despots and making the critical mistake of leaving a power vacuum in their place. Terrorist factions are just a small part of this country reaping what it sowed, but I digress.
Proponents of Capitalism are enamored with the idea of Capitalism. They, however, ignore the reality of it. Inequality the world over is perpetuated by Western ideas and interference. In the year that COVID-19 has wreaked havoc in the United States, workers have lost over $3.7 trillion to date while the wealth of top billionaires has increased by $3.9 trillion. This can be seen as one of the largest redistributions of wealth in history (see here and here). A lot more can be said about Capitalism, perhaps in a separate post for another day. The point I am making now is that the labels of Black Lives Matter, feminist, anti-Capitalist, and the like do not necessarily pertain to Far Left politics. Once these labels are made explicit, in that one makes clear what they mean in practice, it should strike anyone as absurd to be diametrically opposed to these positions.
That leaves open the question as to why people on the right see these positions as fundamentally opposed to their brand of politics. Again, if your political party imposes these discriminatory and even racist views on you, it is good sign that you should renounce it. There are ways to be fiscally conservative, a proponent of small government, and so on without subscribing to views that promote racial, gender, and wealth inequality. I fail to see how what I have had outlined is unclear or nonsensical. The isms, once unpacked, should not be as controversial. This is why I prefer stating my positions clearly, so that there is no room for misconstruing, misrepresenting, straw manning, and so on. There is, in my book, a difference between an opponent and an enemy. The enmity I reserve for my enemies has everything to do with the fact that they think their ignorance is better than my knowledge, their apathy superior to my empathy, their desire to oppress groups they dislike equal to my desire for equality. Opponents, by contrast, can have their minds changed. The omission of relevant facts is not the same as ignorance. My enemies intend to ignore that which disagrees with or defeats their views and more importantly, they intend to cause harm to people like myself, so they do so by weaponizing their right to vote to further marginalized groups they want to harm. Then they pretend to be innocent because they are not drawing a firearm. They might as well. Voting for a candidate that does not care about the plights of minorities, women, non-Christians, etc. is a deliberate attempt to harm these groups. You are not innocent.
Ultimately, labels in and of themselves are futile. We should do away with labels and instead flesh out what we stand for. This leaves little room for error and leaves our enemies fully exposed. This is not to say that people cannot disagree with atheism and naturalism, for instance. They are more than welcome to. What this does mean is that they cannot make the vacuous claim that I suppress God in my unrighteousness or that I hate God or that I choose to not believe because I prefer to indulge sinful concupiscence. These are comfortable things Christians say to avoid the fact that people have good reasons for not believing in God. My robust descriptions of atheism and naturalism leave no room for speculation of the sort. It gives them no space at all to go with a definition that allows them to slander people like myself. Labels do not accomplish this. Fuller descriptions of what is meant by a label go much further. Let us abandon our labels and instead, describe in greater detail what we stand for.
Rebuking Rasmussen’s Geometric Argument
By R.N. Carmona
My purpose here is twofold: first and foremost, I want to clarify Rasmussen’s argument because though I can understand why word of mouth can lead to what is essentially a straw man of his argument, especially in light of the fact that his argument requires one to pay for an online article or his book Is God the Best Explanation of Things? which he coauthored with Felipe Leon, it is simply good practice to present an argument fairly. Secondly, I want to be stern about the fact that philosophy of religion cannot continue to rake these dead coals. Rasmussen’s argument is just another in a long, winding, and quite frankly, tired history of contingency arguments. In in any case, the following is the straw man I want my readers and anyone else who finds this post to stop citing. This is decidedly not Rasmussen’s argument:
Rasmussen has no argument called The Argument From Arbitrary Limits. Arbitrary limits actually feature in Leon’s chapter in where he expresses skepticism of Rasmussen’s Geometric Argument (Rasmussen Joshua and Leon, Felipe. Is God The Best Explanation For Things. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 53-68. Print.). Also, Rasmussen has a Theistic conception of God (omnipresent, wholly good, etc.) that is analogous to what Plantinga means by maximal greatness, but Rasmussen does not refer to God using that term. Perhaps there is confusion with his use of the word maximal conceivable. While given Rasmussen’s beliefs, he implies God with what he calls a maximal foundation, “a foundation complete with respect to its fundamental (basic, uncaused) features” (Ibid., 140). He makes it clear throughout the book that he is open to such a foundation that is not synonymous with God. In any case, his maximal conceivable is not a being possessing maximal greatness; at least, not exactly, since it appears he means something more elementary given his descriptions of basic and uncaused, as these clearly do not refer to omnipresence, perfect goodness, and so on. There may also be some confusion with his later argument, which he calls “The Maximal Mind Argument” (Ibid. 112-113), which fails because it is relies heavily on nonphysicalism, a series of negative theories in philosophy of mind that do not come close to offering alternative explanations for an array of phenomena thoroughly explained by physicalism (see here). In any case, Rasmussen has no argument resembling the graphic above. His arguments rest on a number of dubious assumptions, the nexus of which is his Geometric Argument:
JR1 Geometry is a geometric state.
JR2 Every geometric state is dependent.
JR3 Therefore, Geometry is dependent.
JR4 Geometry cannot depend on any state featuring only things that have a geometry.
JR5 Geometry cannot depend on any state featuring only non-concrete (non-causal) things.
JRC Therefore, Geometry depends on a state featuring at lest one geometry-less concrete thing (3-5) (Ibid., 42).
Like Leon, I take issue with JR2. Leon does not really elaborate on why JR2 is questionable saying only that “the most basic entities with geometry (if such there be) have their geometrics of factual or metaphysical necessity” and that therefore, “it’s not true that every geometric state is dependent” (Ibid., 67). He is correct, of course, but elaboration could have helped here because this is a potential defeater. Factual and metaphysical necessity are inhered in physical necessity. The universe is such that the fact that every triangle containing a 90-degree angle is a right triangle is reducible to physical constraints within our universe. This fact of geometry is unlike Rasmussen’s examples, namely chair and iPhone shapes. He states: “The instantiation of [a chair’s shape] depends upon prior conditions. Chair shapes never instantiate on their own, without any prior conditions. Instead, chair-instantiations depend on something” (Ibid., 41). This overt Platonism is questionable in and of itself, but Leon’s statement is forceful in this case: the shape of the chair is not dependent because it has its shape of factual or metaphysical necessity that stem from physical necessity. Chairs, first and foremost, are shaped the way they are because of our shape when we sit down; furthermore, chairs take the shapes they do because of physical constraints like human weight, gravity, friction against a floor, etc. For a chair not to collapse under the force of gravity and the weight of an individual, it has to be engineered in some way to withstand these forces acting on it; the chair’s shape is so because of physical necessity and this explains its metaphysical necessity. There is therefore, no form of a chair in some ethereal realm; an idea like this is thoroughly retrograde and not worth considering.
In any case, the real issue is that chair and iPhone shapes are not the sort of shapes that occur naturally in the universe. Those shapes, namely spheres, ellipses, triangles, and so on, also emerge from physical necessity. It is simply the case that a suspender on a bridge forms the hypothenuse of a right triangle. Like a chair, bridge suspenders take this shape because of physical necessity. The same applies to the ubiquity of spherical and elliptical shapes in the universe. To further disabuse anyone of Platonic ideas, globular shapes are also quite ubiquitous in the universe and are more prominent the closer we get to the Big Bang. There are shapes inherent in our universe that cannot be neatly called geometrical and even still, these shapes are physically and therefore, metaphysically necessitated. If JR2 is unsound, then the argument falls apart. On another front, this addresses Rasmussen’s assertion that God explains why there is less chaos in our universe. Setting aside that the qualification of this statement is entirely relative, the relative order we see in the universe is entirely probabilistic, especially given that entropy guarantees a trend toward disorder as the universe grows older and colder.
Like Leon, I share his general concern about “any argument that moves from facts about apparent contingent particularity and an explicability principle to conclusions about the nature of fundamental reality” (Ibid., 67) or as I have been known to put it: one cannot draw ontological conclusions on the basis of logical considerations. Theistic philosophers of religion and unfortunately, philosophers in general, have a terrible habit of leaping from conceivability to possibility and then, all the way to actuality. Leon elaborates:
Indeed, the worry above seems to generalize to just about any account of ultimate reality. So, for example, won’t explicability arguments saddle Christian theism with the same concern, viz. why the deep structure of God’s nature should necessitate exactly three persons in the Godhead? In general, won’t explicability arguments equally support a required explanation for why a particular God exists rather than others, or rather than, say, an infinite hierarchy of gods? The heart of the criticism is that it seems any theory must stop somewhere and say that the fundamental character is either brute or necessary, and that if it’s necessary, the explanation of why it’s necessary (despite appearing contingent) is beyond our ability to grasp (Ibid., 67-68).
Of course, Leon is correct in his assessment. Why not Ahura Mazda, his hypostatic union to Spenta Mainyu, and his extension via the Amesha Spentas? If, for instance, the one-many problem requires the notion of a One that is also many, what exactly rules out Ahura Mazda? One starts to see how the prevailing version of Theism in philosophy of religion is just a sad force of habit. This is why it is necessary to move on from these arguments. Contingency arguments are notoriously outmoded because Mackie, Le Poidevin, and others have already provided general defeaters that can apply to any particular contingency argument. Also, how many contingency arguments do we need exactly? In other words, how many different ways can one continue to assert that all contingent things require at least one necessary explanation? Wildman guides us here:
Traditional natural theology investigates entailment relations from experienced reality to, say, a preferred metaphysics of ultimacy. But most arguments of this direct-entailment sort have fallen out of favor, mostly because they are undermined by the awareness of alternative metaphysical schemes that fit the empirical facts just as well as the preferred metaphysical scheme. By contrast with this direct-entailment approach, natural theology ought to compare numerous compelling accounts of ultimacy in as many different respects as are relevant. In this comparison-based way, we assemble the raw material for inference-to-the-best-explanation arguments on behalf of particular theories of ultimacy, and we make completely clear the criteria for preferring one view of ultimacy to another.
Wildman, Wesley J. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future For The Philosophy of Religion. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY. 2010. 162. Print.
Setting aside that Rasmussen does not make clear why he prefers a Christian view of ultimacy as opposed to a Zoroastrian one or another one that may be proposed, I think Wildman is being quite generous when saying that “alternative metaphysical schemes fit the empirical facts just as well as the preferred metaphysical scheme” because the fact of the matter is that some alternatives fit the empirical facts better than metaphysical schemes like the ones Christian Theists resort to. Rasmussen’s preferred metaphysical scheme of a maximal foundation, which properly stated, is a disembodied, nonphysical mind who is omnipresent, wholly good, and so on rests on dubious assumptions that have not been made to cohere with the empirical facts. Nonphysicalism, as I have shown in the past, does not even attempt to explain brain-related phenomena. Physicalist theories have trounced the opposition in that department and it is not even close. What is more is that Christian Theists are especially notorious for not comparing their account to other accounts and that is because they are not doing philosophy, but rather apologetics. This is precisely why philosophy of religion must move on from Christian Theism. We can think of an intellectual corollary to forgiveness. In light of Christian Theism’s abject failure to prove God, how many more chances are we required to give this view? Philosophy of religion is, then, like an abused lover continuing to be moved by scraps of affection made to cover up heaps of trauma. The field should be past the point of forgiveness and giving Christian Theism yet another go to get things right; it has had literal centuries to get its story straight and present compelling arguments and yet here we are retreading ground that has been walked over again and again and again.
To reinforce my point, I am going to quote Mackie and Le Poidevin’s refutations of contingency arguments like Rasmussen’s. It should then become clear that we have to bury these kinds of arguments for good. Let them who are attached to these arguments mourn their loss, but I will attend no such wake. What remains of the body is an ancient skeleton, long dead. It is high time to give it a rest. Le Poidevin put one nail in the coffin of contingency arguments. Anyone offering new contingency arguments has simply failed to do their homework. It is typical of Christian Theists to indulge confirmation bias and avoid what their opponents have to say. The problem with that is that the case against contingency arguments has been made. Obstinacy does not change the fact. Le Poidevin clearly shows why necessary facts do not explain contingent ones:
Necessary facts, then, cannot explain contingent ones, and causal explanation, of any phenomenon, must link contingent facts. That is, both cause and effect must be contingent. Why is this? Because causes make a difference to their environment: they result in something that would not have happened if the cause had not been present. To say, for example, that the presence of a catalyst in a certain set of circumstances speeded up a reaction is to say that, had the catalyst not been present in those circumstances, the reaction would have proceeded at a slower rate. In general, if A caused B, then, if A had not occurred in the circumstances, B would not have occurred either. (A variant of this principle is that, if A caused B, then if A had not occurred in the circumstances, the probability of B’s occurrence would have been appreciably less than it was. It does not matter for our argument whether we accept the origin principle or this variant.) To make sense of this statement, ‘If A had not occurred in the circumstances, B would not have occurred’, we have to countenance the possibility of A’s not occurring and the possibility of B’s not occurring. If these are genuine possibilities, then both A and B are contingent. So one of the reasons why necessary facts cannot causally explain anything is that we cannot make sense of their not being the case, whereas causal explanations requires us to make sense of causally explanatory facts not being the case. Causal explanation involves the explanation of one contingent fact by appeal to another contingent fact.
Le Poidevin, Robin. Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. London: Routledge, 1996. 40-41. Print.
This is a way of substantiating that an effect is inhered in a cause or the principle, like effects from like causes. This has been precisely my criticism of the idea that a nonphysical cause created the physical universe. There is no theory of causation that permits the interaction of an ethereal entity’s dispositions and that of physical things. It is essentially a paraphrase of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s rebuttal to Cartesian dualism: how does mental substance interact with physical substance? This is why mind-body dualism remains in a state of incoherence, but I digress. Mackie puts yet another nail in the coffin:
The principle of sufficient reason, then, is more far-reaching than the principle that every occurrence has a preceding sufficient cause: the latter, but not the former, would be satisfied by a series of things or events running back infinitely in time, each determined by earlier ones, but with no further explanation of the series as a whole. Such a series would give us only what Leibniz called ‘physical’ or ‘hypothetical’ necessity, whereas the demand for a sufficient reason for the whole body of contingent things and events and laws calls for something with ‘absolute’ or ‘metaphysical’ necessity. But even the weaker, deterministic, principle is not an a priori truth, and indeed it may not be a truth at all; much less can this be claimed for the principle of sufficient reason. Perhaps it just expresses an arbitrary demand; it may be intellectually satisfying to believe there is, objectively, an explanation for everything together, even if we can only guess at what the explanation might be. But we have no right to assume that the universe will comply with our intellectual preferences. Alternatively, the supposed principle may be an unwarranted extension of the determinist one, which, in so far as it is supported, is supported only empirically, and can at most be accepted provisionally, not as an a priori truth. The form of the cosmological argument which relies on the principle of sufficient reason therefore fails completely as a demonstrative proof.
Mackie, J. L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. 86-87. Print.
Every contingency argument fails because it relies on the principle of sufficient reason and because necessity does not cohere with contingency as it concerns a so-called causal relation. Mackie, like Le Poidevin, also questions why God is a satisfactory termination of the regress. Why not something something else? (Ibid., 92). Contingency arguments amount to vicious special pleading and an outright refusal to entertain viable alternatives, even in cases where the alternatives are nonphysical and compatible with religious sentiments. In any case, it would appear that the principle of sufficient reason is not on stable ground. Neither is the notion that a necessary being is the ultimate explanation of the universe. Contingency arguments have been defeated and there really is no way to repeat these arguments in a way that does not fall on the horns of Le Poidevin and Mackie’s defeaters. Only the obdurate need to believe that God is the foundational explanation of the universe explains the redundancy of Christian Theists within the philosophy of religion. That is setting aside that apologetics is not philosophy and other complaints I have had. The Geometric Argument, despite using different language, just is a contingency argument. If the dead horse could speak, it would tell them all to lay down their batons once and for all, but alas.
Ultimately, contingency arguments are yet another example of how repetitive Christianized philosophy of religion has become. There is a sense in which Leon, Le Poidevin, and Mackie are paraphrasing one another because, and here is a bit of irony, like arguments result in like rebuttals. They cannot help but to sound like they each decided or even conspired to write on the same topic for a final paper. They are, after all, addressing the same argument no matter how many attempts have been made to word it differently. It is a vicious cycle, a large wheel that cannot keep on turning. It must be stopped in its tracks if progress in the philosophy of religion is to get any real traction.
Philosophy of Religion Series: Introduction
By R.N. Carmona
You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006. 56. Print
Philosophy of religion needs an overhaul. Put another way, the discipline does not need a soft reboot. It is in dire need of a more diverse, inclusive hard reboot; let us blow up the entire universe and start over. The Christian setting and background that has informed the discipline hitherto, along with its White, predominantly male heroes, all but guarantee that the field is destined to go stale. I can go into specifics, showing how Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism is a paraphrase of C.S. Lewis’ Argument Against Naturalism, despite the former being more robust given that it uses the language of modern analytic philosophy. I can point out that Joshua Rasmussen’s Argument From Arbitrary Limits is nothing more than a rehash of the dead horse that is the Argument From Contingency, which has many iterations, none more cogent or persuasive than the other. There is also the issue that the argument makes use of Plantinga’s idea of a maximal being, which makes the argument more vulnerable than its predecessors. I will revisit Rasmussen’s argument in a separate post that is not tied to this current series.
The questions in the reader’s mind are, what’s the point? What would motivate anyone to seek a revamping of the philosophy of religion? The answer is bipartite and the first part of my answer is crucial to understanding the second half of it, which inheres why I am calling for a reformation of the entire field. In recent discussions about philosophy of religion and apologetics, even Christians were hard pressed to demarcate one from the other, with some biting the bullet and settling on the fact that they are virtually the same project. That is my initial problem. I will now reproduce a section from my recent book The Definitive Case Against Christianity: Life After The Death Of God, in hopes that this becomes a lot clearer.
Philosophy, long considered the handmaiden of theology, continues to confront the following problems:
- The philosophy of religion is Christian-centric, as is made painfully obvious by the myriad discussions about the elements of Christianity: the attributes of God; arguments for God, e.g., the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the Moral Argument, the Ontological Argument, etc.; the Problem of Evil.
- Related to the first issue, there is no proper demarcation between philosophy, generally speaking, and apologetics. Moreover, there is no proper demarcation between philosophy of religion and apologetics.
- The works of atheists mostly play according to the apologist’s rules in that Mackie, Martin, Nielsen, Ayer, and so many others have written refutations of popular apologetic arguments. Many atheist philosophers have largely overlooked the first two issues. I will therefore endeavor to right the ship.
In order to solve the first problem, the second problem needs to be solved first. Draper already identifies a glaring issue, what he dubs the paradox of apologetics. What Draper strongly implies is that the enterprise of apologetics is inherently circular. Draper also describes the philosophy of religion as “too partisan…,too narrow in its focus, and too often evaluated using criteria that are theological or religious instead of philosophical,” while adding that “the only viable forms of theism are Muslim, Christian, or Jewish” (Draper, Paul, and Ryan Nichols. “Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion.” The Monist, vol. 96, no. 3, 2013, pp. 420–446. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42751260. Accessed 24 Nov. 2020.). Furthermore, he notes that philosophers of religion are dismissive of pantheism, deism, and ietsism. Wildman notes that young philosophers of religion hoping to land a job wonder if they should “stop talking about philosophy of religion in order to avoid being misunderstood as covert theological apologists on behalf of a particular religious tradition” (Wildman, Wesley J. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future For The Philosophy of Religion. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY. 2010. xiii. Print.) For the Christian apologist, Christianity must be true, God must exist, and Jesus must have died and resurrected three days later. These biases are impossible for an apologist to disavow because doing so would result in losing his status and identity as a Christian. Keith Reich also identifies the circular reasoning of religious apologists:
Because of all of this language of logic, research, fact seeking, etc., it can seem as if apologetics and scholarship are the same thing. Yet, they are fundamentally different and the method of apologetics is fundamentally flawed in my mind. The problem with the apologetic method is its starting point. Apologetics starts with the conclusion. The conclusion is firmly fixed before any research begins. Therefore, for the apologist, the conclusion is the starting point which must then be “defended” through research.
Reich, Keith. “Scholarship vs. Apologetics”. Know Thyself Blogs. 4 Nov 2015. Web.
Draper adds that religious people, as well as Christian philosophers of religion, have an attachment to God the Father and a deeply rooted conviction that he exists and loves them. Being confronted by arguments concluding that their father figure does not exist prompts negative emotions and inhibits their capacity to weigh the counter-evidence in an impartial manner. This also results in unchecked confirmation bias, which readily explains the issue of circular reasoning among Christian philosophers.
Philosophers, on the other hand, do not proceed from immutable biases of this sort. While it is true that philosophy, like science, is concerned with truth and even with investigating the nature of so-called ultimate reality, philosophy does so using entirely different methodology and fulfills tasks that support science by clarifying the definition of theory or identifying what qualifies as speciation in the animal kingdom, to state a couple of examples. Philosophy is also tasked with securing basic assumptions scientists no longer pay mind to like whether or not the scientist himself exists and whether truth can be apprehended. Philosophy also has a number of aims that once identified make it easier to distinguish between it and apologetics. The overarching purpose is acquisition of truth, but what distinguishes philosophy from anthropology, history, and science is that is has an inherent self-awareness in that it has also attempted to accurately describe what truth is. Likewise, philosophers try to get to the bottom of what constitutes knowledge. Philosophy also investigates a number of propositions, in addition to clarifying distinctions between propositions and the mental activity involved in grasping them (Sokolowski, Robert. “The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions.” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 51, no. 3, 1998, pp. 515–532. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20130246. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.). Aside from informing science, philosophy informs other disciplines; for instance, an anthropologist examining the differences between a religion and a cult will offer a series of propositions delineating one from the other, i.e., the anthropologist will philosophize to arrive at the differences between a religion and a cult.
Philosophy also aims to discover the underlying foundations that are irreducible, necessary, and sufficient. It accomplishes this via a formal calculus or logic (“On Method.” Thoughts and Ways of Thinking: Source Theory and Its Applications, by Benjamin Brown, Ubiquity Press, London, 2017, pp. 1–4. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3s8tn7.4. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.). Logic, therefore, is one of the hallmark methods in philosophy. Wildman also observes that analysis is entitled in the process of inquiry and it guides “the elaboration, testing, and refinement of hypothetic explanatory models toward optimal clarity and consistency” (Ibid., 7). Similarly, Penelope Maddy observes “that a large part, if not all, of the philosopher’s job is the careful analysis of the content of concepts like ‘cause’, ‘freedom’, and…’knowledge’. Conceptual analysis led to the advent of analytic philosophy (Maddy, Penelope. What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 60, 62-63. Print.). As Reich observed, apologists also use the language of logic, but if they are doing so in a circular manner, then they are misusing the method. Draper’s solution to differentiate between philosophy of religion and apologetics is to require philosophers of religion to use argument construction to test their positions as opposed to using logical arguments to make a case for their positions. Given the issue of confirmation bias, he sees no other alternative (Ibid.).
To see the apologist’s misuse of logic, one need only consider their favorite mode of reasoning, namely deduction. Since apologists proceed from predilections that they confuse for axioms, a lot of them ignore that validity and soundness are not the same thing. That is because propositions do not emerge in a vacuum; nor do they stand alone. In fact, the apologist’s baseless foundationalism would fall victim to an infinite regress of epistemic justification. Take for instance, the observation that all men are mortal. We can now propose that since all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then he is mortal. If propositions stood alone, it would be impossible to refute the negation of this deductive argument. In other words, one would be able to argue that all men are not mortal and since Socrates is a man, it follows that he is not mortal. Both arguments are valid, but only one of them is sound. The manner in which one decides between the two arguments is through the realization that propositions, generally speaking, have a correspondence to reality.
Tangentially, it can be granted that a weak pluralism should be allowed if only because foundationalist axioms can apply to logical and mathematical theorems. There are pure or abstract logical and mathematical theorems that have no correspondence to reality and as such, correspondence theory of truth has limits. For example, when doing mathematical proofs, there are multiples sets N (the set of natural numbers), Z ( the set of integers), Q (the set of rational numbers), and R (the set of real numbers); there are also D (the set of decimals) and C (the set of complex numbers), which are less common in proofs. One may come across a statement that reads “n ∈ Z,” which states that n is an element within the set of integers. More specifically, one might be asked to prove the statement “∀n ∈ Z . n(n + 1) is even.” This can be done by assuming that some natural number n is either odd or even. Upon making n = 2m, one will find that 2(m(n+1) and 2(nm) are both even, which proves the statement. This mathematical proof does not rely on tangible reality in the way someone may point to a polar bear on television to prove that the proposition “polar bears are white” is true. There are also properties in mathematics that are true by definition, i.e., a priori, e.g., zero product property, associative property. In logic, the laws of logic are also generally considered to be axiomatic.
While foundationalism may have a place at the table of epistemic justification, the Christian apologist’s misuse of it is not tantamount to how it is employed in mathematics and logic. Consider, for example, the first premise of Craig’s Moral Argument: “If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.” There is simply something suspicious about this statement when compared to “If it is not raining, I will not take my umbrella.” A satisfactory deductive premise entails generally accepted facts. These facts are not controversial in any way. Any reasonable person would agree that if it is raining, they will take an umbrella or find other means to protect themselves from the elements. However, denying Craig’s first premise is not unreasonable and it is a premise that, in fact, has been and continues to be denied. Craig and other apologists may assert that the premises in their deductive arguments are true, but that does not make them true. The arguments for God continue to be batted around precisely because they start out with controversial premises that stem from an equally contentious foundational assumption.
The fact of the matter is that foundationalism has been largely abandoned. Foundationalists’ obsession with certainty, an infatuation that descends from Descartes, ultimately is not apt for mathematics, despite its limited application to the field. It is also unsuitable for science. Peirce, Dewey, Quine, and other pragmatists introduced a non-foundationalist paradigm know as fallibilism. This is implicit in Popper’s notion of falsification. This new approach assists philosophers in navigating philosophical inquiry for purposes of correcting hypotheses as opposed to instilling in them the confidence that the available resources are already enough prior to engaging in inquiry.
Draper’s solution, although noble, is unlikely to be implemented. Similarly, asking Christian philosophers of religion and apologists to adhere to Maddy and Wildman’s philosophical methods is futile. Nielsen’s solution, despite being more radical, is the only one that makes sense for anyone concerned with Draper’s reservations about the philosophy of religion. Nielsen suggests the following:
It is a waste of time to rehearse arguments about the proofs or evidences for God or immortality. There are no grounds — or at least no such grounds — for belief in God or belief that God exists and/or that we are immortal. Hume and Kant (perhaps with a little rational reconstruction from philosophers like J.L. Mackie and Wallace Matson) pretty much settled that. Such matters have been thoroughly thrashed out and there is no point of raking over the dead coals. Philosophers who return to them are being thoroughly retrograde.
Nielsen, Kai. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001. 399-400. Print.
So Nielsen’s radical solution is to end all discussions about arguments for God or other theological arguments concerning immortality. These matters continue to be discussed because most philosophers of religion and virtually all Christian apologists prioritize their propositions and underlying beliefs over the facts and evidence. Refusing to discuss these arguments further ends the stalemate between Christian theists and atheists that concerns Draper — a concern echoed in the third issue above — and will allow for philosophers of religion to consider the concepts of non-Christian, non-monotheistic religions.
Now, to state my solution less provocatively and controversially, I think that intellectual reparations are in order. Christians need to let other philosophers who practice other faiths have a long turn at the mic. Christianity, for instance, has a meandering history with the problem of evil and virtually anyone can take note of the considerable difficulty Christians have had. All of their theodicies are problematic and there is no reconciliation to be had between a perfectly benevolent deity and the evil and suffering in the world, or with the notion that this is somehow the best possible world God could have created. As Dennett suggests, perhaps another religion can square this problem away. Perhaps Buddhism or Zoroastrianism have better theodicies to offer or some way of explaining evil and suffering that coheres with modern science and offers ways to solve this problem. This series will explore some of these issues. I have no pretenses of exhausting all possibilities with respect to what philosophy of religion can become.
The other, more pressing, issue is that I am not sure whether modern philosophers of religion are competent enough or equipped to start fielding non-Christian perspectives. The problem is akin to having me review some student’s econometrics homework. I have no idea what any of that is about and I am therefore, unfit to review his work. Likewise, if people write about esoteric topics in Near or Far East religions, how can I expect a predominantly Christian group of peers to review their journal submissions? This is perhaps one reason the so-called International Journal For Philosophy of Religion is rife with Christian articles right through this month’s issue. Here is a list of the articles in February’s issue:
- Kant’s religious ethics: the ineluctable link between morality and theism
- The ineffability of God
- God’s place in the world
- Whiteness and religious experience
- Progressive atheism: how moral evolution changes the god debate
- Truth is subjectivity: kierkegaard and political theology.
What are these reviewers to do with a viable submission concerning indigenous African or South American religions? I can go through this same exercise in one philosophy journal after the next; Christian Theism has an iron grip on the entire enterprise, a virtual monopoly. While there has been moderate effort to rectify this, the solution has been to segregate non-Christian perspectives. Someone might be content with the fact that Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion and Journal of Buddhist Ethics exist, but this is still exclusionary and not integrated enough. Never mind that college-level curricula also prioritize the Christian perspective.
Ultimately, to divorce philosophy of religion from Christianity and from Christian apologetics, a thorough demarcation is necessary. Apologetics is to philosophy what creationism is to science. Apologetics is not philosophy, plain and simple. It is an inversion of the philosophical process, a bastardization of its methods, and ultimately, devoid of sound argumentation and caters to cognitive biases like confirmation bias and fallacious reasoning like circular reasoning, special pleading, ad hoc rationalization, and non sequitur. It is pseudo-philosophy and must be recognized as such and eliminated as an academic field of inquiry. Any Christian who is concerned with this suggestion perhaps recognizes that much of Christian philosophy of religion is indistinguishable from apologetics. Proselytism simply has no place in an academic setting where religious freedom and more importantly, human autonomy is valued. I would not go as far as saying that all of Christian philosophy of religion falls to the wayside if apologetics is ousted in the same way Intelligent Design was. Perhaps there is a baby in the bath water, but it is not my duty to decide that.
Philosophy of religion needs to move forward and the best way forward is in discussing non-Christian perspectives and topics, and giving them ample time to gain traction in the field. I do not see these perspectives coexisting alongside yet another lengthy dialogue about the Kalam Cosmological Argument or yet another reiteration of a long-defeated argument like the Argument From Contingency. Nor can we allow the field to be dictated by Christians because they have controlled the narrative in the philosophy of religion since its inception. Foundationalism became evidentialism, and now both have given way to existentialist fideism on one side and an attempt to undermine scientific explanation with metaphysical explanation, specifically via neo-Aristotelianism, on the other. In truth, exercises of this sort are either not philosophical or if those involved can prove otherwise, these projects ought to be relegated to other specialized journals in philosophy, for sake of satisfying anyone interested in the niche topics discussed in those areas. So long as Christian perspectives monopolize the field, there is no real incentive for philosophers of religion to broaden their horizons and acquire competence with respect to these perspectives. It seems philosophers of religion are in a haste to perpetually rake the dead coals of the theism-atheism debate. There are other perspectives to consider and what better time than now in the 21st century, a period that will be defined by equality, inclusion, and diversity. Philosophy is no longer the handmaiden of theology, and that includes the philosophy of religion. This series will pave a way and show us how we can move on and move forward. The next entry in this series will focus on Buddhism and The Problem of Evil.
A Refutation of Bruce Gordon’s “Argument From The Incompleteness of Nature”
By R.N. Carmona
Before setting out to formulate Gordon’s “Argument From The Incompleteness of Nature,” a general note is in order. After years of dealing with the more common arguments for God, e.g., the Kalam Cosmological, Moral, Fine-Tuning, Teleological, Ontological arguments, I began to notice that such arguments collapse when the complexity of the facts are analyzed. For instance, P1 of the Moral Argument states that “If God does not exist, objective values and duties do not exist.” This has proved to be the most controversial premise of the argument, but analyses of what is meant by objective, values, and duties lead us in directions where we can apprehend morality along these lines without God being necessarily involved. What I’m noticing now about more complex Theistic arguments is that they collapse when the simplicity of the facts are put on the table, i.e., when simple considerations are taken into account. This also applies to Gordon’s argument. To see what I mean, it will be necessary, first and foremost, to frame Gordon’s argument.
G1 “Quantum mechanics reveals a genuine ontological indeterminacy and incompleteness present in nature” (Gordon, Bruce L.. The Necessity of Sufficiency: The Argument From The Incompleteness of Nature. Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project, Edited by Walls, Jerry L. & Dougherty Trent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 420. Print.)
G2 “Since all physical cause-and-effect relations are local, however, the completeness of quantum theory implies the causal-ontological incompleteness of physical reality: the universe is shot through with mathematically predictable non-local correlations that, on pain of experimental contradiction, have no physical explanation” (Gordon, 421)
G3 “Quantum theory raises fundamental questions about the coherence of material identity, individuality, and causality that pose a prima facie problem for naturalistic metaphysics” (Gordon, 423)
G4 (By way of inference) it is probable that all naturalistic interpretations of quantum mechanics contain conceptual shortcomings (Gordon, 423-429)
GC1 Therefore, “a theistic variant of the Copenhagen interpretation brings metaphysical completion to quantum theory so as to resolve the fundamental puzzle” (Gordon, 423)
GC2 Therefore, “God’s existence and continuous activity is the best explanation for the reality, persistence, and coherence of natural phenomena, and the account of divine action best meeting this explanatory demand is a form of occasionalist idealism” (Gordon, 436)
Gordon also condenses his argument as follows:
Now, in quantum physics we are confronted with a situation in which material causality falls irremediably short of explanatory demand, for there is no collection of physical variables jointly sufficient to the explanation of irreducibly probabilistic quantum outcomes. On pain of postulations to the contrary refuted by experimental violations of Bell inequalities, an ontological gap exists in the causal structure of physical reality that no collection of material causes can be offered to fill. So if a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism constrains us, no non-naturalistic (transcendent) explanation is available to bridge this gap, and we must embrace the conclusion that innumerable physical events transpire without a sufficient cause, that is, for no explanatorily sufficient reason. In short, Copenhagen orthodoxy, framed in a purely physical context, entails a denial of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) understood as the general maxim that every contingent event has an explanation. (425)
Right away, one can see how G1 through G3 hold insofar as scientific ignorance remains the case. But first, it will be useful to take note of what motivates Gordon to think that there is any truth to these premises. His primary motivations are informed by what he thinks is the inability of physicists to solve the measurement problem and that, at least from what he interprets is a fault of naturalism, quantum interpretations violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and/or are metaphysically implausible. If Gordon can draw his conclusions by way of induction, by ruling out particular interpretations yet to be offered on the basis of the shortcomings of six more general interpretations, then a naturalist has more warrant to rule out Theism by way of induction, by highlighting the many failures of Theism to square with scientific facts and its many more failures to offer sound philosophical arguments. God was once a local deity, intimately involved in matters far more mundane than quanta. It was widely believed that God created the Earth, not via the gradual work of physical laws, but as intimately as a potter forms his vase. Christians of the past even set out to prove God’s involvement in the world. Donald Prothero gives us a prime example:
Other geologists and paleontologists followed Cuvier’s lead and tried to describe each layer with its distinctive fossils as evidence of yet another Creation and Flood event not mentioned in the Bible. In 1842, Alcide d’Orbigny began describing the Jurassic fossils from the southwestern French Alps and soon recognized 10 different stages, each of which he interpreted as a separate non-Biblical creation and flood. As the work continued, it became more and more complicated until 27 separate creations and floods were recognized, which distorted the Biblical account out of shape. By this time, European geologists finally began to admit that the sequence of fossils was too long and complex to fit it with Genesis at all. They abandoned the attempt to reconcile it with the Bible. Once again, however, these were devout men who did not doubt the Bible and were certainly not interested in shuffling the sequence of fossils to prove Darwinian evolution (an idea still not published at this point). They simply did not see how the Bible could explain the rock record as it was then understood.
Prothero, Donald. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 56-57. Print.
Going over the litany of examples throughout history is not necessary because Theism’s lack of explanatory success informs the behavior of today’s Theists. Therefore, it suffices to point out that Theists have gone from asserting that God is intimately involved in every aspect of reality, in addition to positing that the Bible renders an infallible account of many historical events, including a global flood, to relegating God to the outskirts of human knowledge where the refulgence of science remains unfelt, as hidden somewhere before the Big Bang, active solely in quantum phenomena that evade the experiences of even the most devout believers, and as grounds for some explanation of human consciousness that allows for the continuance of consciousness after death, i.e., a philosophy of mind that entails the existence of the soul, e.g., Cartesian dualism, Aristotelian hylomorphism, panpsychism. Gordon’s argument is a prime example of this retreat to the far reaches of scientific ignorance, hoping with all his might that he will find God at the fringes of reality. If naturalism has pushed Theism this far, then it is safe to say that Theism is teetering on the edge, that any argument Theists put forth now are highly likely to fail, and that it is only a matter of time before Theism plunges into the abyss.
Before exposing glaring issues with Gordon’s conclusion, I will go over issues with his analysis of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber spontaneous collapse interpretation (GRWI). Then I will provide an overview of two interpretations that circumvent the measurement problem and one of its entailments, the observer effect. Prior to that, there are already issues with his analysis of the PSR that sound suspiciously like Plantinga’s EAAN or worse, Lewis’ Argument Against Naturalism. Gordon states:
Suppose, among all of the events that happen in the universe, there are countless many that happen without cause or reason. If this were true, we would have no principled way of telling which events were caused and which were not, for events that appeared to have a cause might, in fact, lack one. Our current perceptual states, for example, might have no explanation, in which case they would bear no reliable connection to the way the world is. So if the PSR were false, we could never have any confidence in our cognitive states. (425)
It is important to note that scientists are only concerned about causes inasmuch as they have explanatory power. If a cause does no explanatory work, then it does not help them to get a better understanding of a given phenomenon. Think of Nancy Cartwright’s $1,000 bill descending in St. Stephen’s Square. Scientists simply do not care to arrive at a model that accurately predicts where the bill will land and more precisely, about its exact movements through the air prior to landing. This particular example, that involves any number of difficult to quantify variables, e.g., bird droppings hitting the bill on the way down, dust particles slightly changing the bill’s trajectory, wind speeds, does not help scientists better understand drift, free fall, etc. Physicists already have general principles that help them understand how, for instance, a basketball succumbs to the magnus effect. A disposition of the ball, in particular its shape, makes it susceptible to this effect whereas the dispositions of the bill guarantee that it will drift wildly during the entirety of its descent to the ground.
Any event appearing to be caused does not immediately invite scientific scrutiny. Only events that do explanatory work or are suspected of having some explanatory power over a given effect, specifically in relation to a theory or model, are worth examining. In any case, it does not follow from the possibility that the PSR is false that our perceptual states have no explanation or cause. Therefore, that we can have no confidence in our perceptual states is completely non sequitur. Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists have done plenty of work to show that our perceptual states do have explanations, regardless of whether the PSR is true or not. Thus, if the PSR turns out to not be the case, our perceptual states are not among events lacking a cause or an explanation.
A general note of relevance is in order. Gordon’s citations are mostly decades old, which any peer reviewer in philosophy would immediately be suspicious of. Of the Many Worlds Interpretation, Gordon states: “So which way of building the universal wavefunction is to be preferred? This difficulty, known as the “preferred basis problem,” reveals that the branching process itself is completely arbitrary from a mathematical standpoint and therefore, from the abstract point of view presupposed by the MWI, not reflective of any physical reality” (427). Setting aside the non sequitur, “not reflective of any physical reality,” his primary authority informing this statement, namely David Wallace in 2003, no longer considers preferred basis to be an issue. Gordon would know that if he had read Wallace’s 2010 paper “Quantum Mechanics on Spacetime I: Spacetime State Realism,” in where he states:
We might sum up the objection thus: wave-function realism requires a meta-physically preferred basis… This objection is probably most significant for Everettians, who generally regard it as a virtue of their preferred interpretation that it requires no additional formalism, and so are unlikely to look kindly on a requirement in the metaphysics for additional formalism. Advocates of dynamical-collapse and hidden-variable theories are already committed to adding additional formalism, and in fact run into problems in QFT for rather similar reasons: there is no longer a natural choice of basis to use in defining the collapse mechanism or the hidden variables. We are not ourselves sanguine about the prospects of overcoming this problem; but if it were to be overcome, the solution might well also suggest a metaphysically preferred basis to use in formulating a QFT version of wave-function realism.
Wallace, David, and Christopher G. Timpson. “Quantum Mechanics on Spacetime I: Spacetime State Realism.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 61, no. 4, 2010, pp. 697–727. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.5294.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.
Lev Vaidman, Professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy in Tel Aviv, corroborates this: “due to the extensive research on decoherence, the problem of preferred basis is not considered as a serious objection anymore” (Vaidman, Lev, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Fall 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds/).
Gordon raises a second difficulty for the MWI: “The second difficulty lies in its treatment of quantum probabilities” (Ibid.). Worse than using outdated sources is Gordon’s misrepresentation of a source that actually disagrees with his statement. Simon Saunders, in “Chance in the Everett interpretation,” actually states: “To conclude: there is no good reason to think EQM is really a theory of over-lapping worlds. If questions of overlap of branches are to be settled by appeal to the underlying mathematics, in terms of vector space structure, then there is at least one natural mereology in terms of which worlds that differ in some feature, since orthogonal, are non-overlapping” (Saunders, Simon (2010). Chance in the Everett interpretation. In Simon Saunders, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent & David Wallace (eds.), Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality. Oxford University Press.). Saunders attempts to “solve the problem without introducing additional structure into the theory” (Vaidman, Ibid.) and yet Gordon tells his reader to “see Saunders et al. 2010 for extensive polemics regarding it” (Ibid.). This is an egregious level of malpractice that can only be explained by his desperation to prove his belief in God.
Turning now to his analysis of GRWI, the prospects for his argument do not improve. Gordon states of GRWI: “The problem is that it cannot be rendered compatible with relativity theory or extended to the treatment of quantum fields in this form” (Ibid.); “the theory remains radically non-local and has the additional drawback of eliminating the possibility of particle interactions and thus any physics of interest” (Ibid.); and “there are no versions of the theory in which the collapse is complete, with the consequence that all “material” objects have low- density copies at multiple locations, the presence and effect of which linger forever in the GRWI wavefunction” (Ibid.). The first and third concerns are not an issue for GRWI. The first issue simply restates the more general difficulty physicists have had with reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity; this would then be an issue for the entire enterprise of quantum mechanics, so we would essentially be tossing the bath water, baby and all! The third issue is an appeal to ignorance. That there is currently no version of GRWI offering a collapse that is complete does not mean that scientists ought to give up on the search for a version containing a complete collapse. This leaves the second concern, which is addressed in Tejinder Singh’s 2018 paper “Space and Time as a Consequence of GRW Quantum Jumps,” where he deploys GRWI to solve the measurement problem. Singh states:
This classical metric is in turn produced by classical bodies, according to the laws of general relativity. And classical bodies are themselves the result of GRW localisation. Thus it is not reasonable to assume space to exist prior to the GRW quantum jumps. Rather, it seems quite intuitive that space results from GRW collapses taking place all over the universe. Space is that which is between collapsed objects. No collapse, no space. This also helps us understand why the GRW jumps take place in space: it is because space in the first place is created because of these jumps.
Singh, Tejinder. “Space and time as a consequence of GRW quantum jumps.” TZeitschrift für Naturforschung A73 (2018) 923. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.01297.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.
Singh considers Hilbert space as more fundamental than classical space, so these GRW jumps occurring in Hilbert space give rise to the classical fabric of space we are accustomed to. He posits that the wave function is contingent on the configuration space where the particle moves through time, to potentially infinite degrees of freedom. This then results in a complete collapse of the wave function. Gordon’s hasty conclusion no longer holds if Singh has succeeded in offering a version of GRWI containing a complete collapse of the wave function.
This is setting aside the fact that Gordon overlooked what many consider an updated or even upgraded version of MWI, namely the Many Interacting Worlds Interpretation (MIWI). The MIWI differs from the MWI in that all quantum phenomena are the result of an inter-universal repulsive force acting on worlds in close proximity to one another, thus explaining any dissimilarity between them. Michael Hall, et. al. conclude that the MIWI can reproduce quantum interference phenomena, in addition to offering advantages with respect to computational modeling. They note that on the de Broglie–Bohm Interpretation, the wave function denoted by Ψ, even when it is a very large value allows computer modeling to focus on high density regions in configuration space, specifically regions where calculation errors have to be corrected to analyze convergence given norms of angular momentum (see Hall, Michael J. W., Deckert, Dirk-André, and Wiseman, Howard M.. Quantum Phenomena Modeled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds. Physical Review X, 2014; 4 (4) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041013).
There is also the Lindgren-Liukkonen Interpretation (LLI), championed by two quantum physicists that take Ockham’s Razor seriously. Given this, their quantum interpretation is a statistical interpretation that solves the observer effect. In other words, there is no logical reason, to their minds, why the results of a measurement are dependent on an observer. They dispense with the notion of a conscious observer changing the result of measurements. The LLI shows that any epistemological and ontological issues that stem from the uncertainty principle are solved given that the uncertainty principle is a fixed property of stochastic mechanics (see Lindgren, Jussi and Liukkonen, Jukka. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as an Endogenous Equilibrium Property of Stochastic Optimal Control Systems in Quantum Mechanics. Symmetry, 2020; 12 (9): 1533 DOI: 10.3390/sym12091533
Gordon not only failed to rule out enough interpretations of quantum mechanics to make his conclusion more likely, but he failed to rule out the best defenses of, at least, two of the interpretations he is skeptical about. The larger issue for Gordon is that even if he managed to rule out say, twenty interpretations in quantum mechanics, his conclusion simply does not follow and if it did, there are simple considerations that render it untenable. Recall: “God’s existence and continuous activity is the best explanation for the reality, persistence, and coherence of natural phenomena, and the account of divine action best meeting this explanatory demand is a form of occasionalist idealism” (Gordon, 436). It follows from this that God’s existence and continuous activity is the best explanation for the reality, persistence, and coherence of viruses, diseases, natural disasters, and pretty much any undesired consequence a Theist can imagine. Clearly, Gordon does not want to admit these natural phenomena into his conclusion, choosing instead to special plead for any cases he thinks suit his argument. In other words, one of his concerns fits better on his foot: Suppose, among all of the events that happen in the universe, there are countless many that happen without God’s continuous activity, e.g., pretty much all the bad stuff. If this were true, we would have no principled way of telling which events were caused by his activity and which were not, for events that appeared to have been caused by God, in fact, were not. It is far more probable therefore, that God has no hand in any event in the natural world, not even granting a retreat into the quantum realm.
Ultimately, if a Theist wants to continue to assert that God has a hand in the unification of quantum and classical phenomena, they need to take a different route than Gordon has. Gordon severely undermines his own project by using outdated sources, being completely unaware of the fact that one of the authors of one of his primary sources changed their mind and actually proved the opposite of what seemed to lend a hand to Gordon’s argument, and overlooking a number of interpretations that may provide a stable and complete collapse of the wave function, thus solving quantum paradoxes, like the measurement problem and related observer effect. More damning to such arguments is that if a personal, loving deity saw fit to retreat to the far reaches of metaphysical reality, then he can have no desire to be known or detected by even people who are hopelessly devoted and attached to him. Quanta lies so far outside of the everyday experience of human beings that the idea that God is asking us to pursue him into the microcosms of the quanta is, quite frankly, nonsensical. It makes more sense that retreats like Gordon’s, into profoundly metaphysical territory, has everything to do with Theism’s failure to square with science, in addition to offering philosophical arguments or proofs that are sound or, at the very least, cogent and without controversy. This is precisely the prognosis for Theism and the relentless advances of science and philosophy, closely in tow, do not look poised to provide any remedy. Gordon’s argument, while complex, completely collapses in the face of simple considerations, which is a happy irony given his claims about the quantum wave function.
A Refutation of Weaver’s “An Objection to Naturalism and Atheism from Logic”
By R.N. Carmona
Weaver’s argument, although robust, commits what I think is a cardinal sin in philosophy: “An objection from logical considerations against atheism is one which attempts to show that some deliverance of logic is at odds with atheism or something strictly implied by atheism” (Weaver, C.G. (2019). Logical Objections to Atheism. In A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, G. Oppy (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119119302.ch30). One should not get in the habit of drawing ontological conclusions on the basis of logical considerations and though Weaver makes a good attempt to justify his conclusion, there are too many areas in his composite argument that are vulnerable to attack. There are parts of his composite argument that are clearly stated in his own words, but other parts have to be sifted out from his discussions, specifically on logical monism and classical logical consequence (CLC). Also, the conclusion that atheism is false has to be gathered from his discussion following his claim that ontological naturalism is false.
A general note, prior to proceeding, is in order. Weaver’s paper is quite technical and not at all easy for the untrained eye to read, let alone understand, so I will endeavor to avoid technicality wherever necessary; I will only permit pursuing one technical element because I disagree with Weaver’s treatment of supervenience, how he conveniently begs the question regarding reductionist materialism (if only to ensure that his argument is not met with immediate difficulty), and the conclusion he believes follows. More importantly, I think that the domestication of philosophy within the ivory towers of academia was a critical misstep that needs to be rectified. While analytic philosophy has its use, its abuse makes philosophy the slave of academic elites and therefore, keeps it well out of the reach of ordinary people. Philosophy, therefore, if it is to be understood by laypeople, needs to be communicated in ordinary, relatable language. Since my interest is to, first and foremost, communicate philosophy in an approachable way, I tend to avoid technicalities as much as possible. With that said, it is not at all necessary to quibble with Weaver’s logical proofs of validity (especially because validity matters much less than soundness) or Williamson’s notion that contingentist statements can be mapped onto necessitist ones and vice versa, but that “The asymmetry favours necessitism. Every distinction contingentists can draw has a working equivalent in neutral terms, but the extra commitments of necessitism allow one to draw genuine distinctions which have no working equivalents in neutral terms. If one wants to draw those distinctions, one may have to be a necessitist” (Williamson, T.. “Necessitism, Contingentism, and Plural Quantification.” Mind 119 (2010): 657-748. 86. Web.).
Williamson and Weaver, following his cue, are both guilty of ignoring logical atomism, so ultimately, it does not matter if the validity of logical statements suggests that necessitism about mere propositions is probably true because ultimately, we are not talking about mere propositions but rather Sachverhalte, “conglomerations of objects combined with a definite structure” (Klement, Kevin, “Russell’s Logical Atomism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)). This is perhaps Weaver’s motivation for dismissing Carnap who was anti-metaphysical. It can be argued, therefore, that reinstating metaphysics or overstating its importance is necessary for any argument against naturalism and/or atheism or conversely, for Theism, to get any traction. The fact remains, however, that propositions comprising a sound logical argument are dependent on real world experiences via the senses. The proposition “there is a cat” may speak to the fact that either i) one believes they have seen a cat in whatever space they find themselves in ii) one knows and can confirm that there is a cat in their vicinity iii) there is presently a cat within ones field of vision. While I grant that propositions can speak to entirely imaginary or, at least, hypothetical entities, all propositions rely on entities we have identified in our common tongue. Therefore, statements like “there is a cat” will always rely on content not necessarily entailed within a given proposition. There is still a question as to the context of such propositions and the preciseness of what one is trying to say.
Weaver’s Composite Argument Against Naturalism and Atheism, and Its Problems
With these preliminary concerns in our rearview, I can now turn to Weaver’s composite argument and provide a few avenues for the atheist to refute his argument.
W1 Since situationspf do not exist (“I will therefore be entitled to reject…the existence of situationsPF” (Weaver, 6).), situationsC exist.
W2 Given situationsC , classical logical consequence (CLC) is the case.
W3 From W2, necessitism is true.
W4 “If necessitism is true, then ontological naturalism is false.”
W5 “Necessitism is true.”
W6 “Therefore, ontological naturalism is false” (Weaver, 15).
W7 From W6, “Necessitism is true and modal properties are indispensable to our best physical theories.”
W8 If W7, “then there is a new phenomenon of coordination (NPC).”
W9 “Necessarily, (if there is an NPC, it has an explanation).”
W10 “Necessarily, [if possibly both (atheism is true and there is an NPC), then it is not possible that the NPC has an explanation]”
C “Therefore, atheism is false” (Weaver, 18).
Setting aside that Weaver assumes that suitably precisified situations (situationspf) cannot exist and the problems he would face if just one instance of such a situation does exist, there is a way to show that even on the assumption that just classically precisified situations (situationsC) exist, it doesn’t follow that CLC holds. Weaver seems to think that CLC follows from a schema concerning mere validity: “A deductive argument is valid, just in case, there is no situation in which the premises are true and the conclusion false” (Weaver, 4). I think it is straightforwardly obvious that a typical non sequitur already violates this schema. Consider the following:
P1 If it is cloudy outside, there is a chance of precipitation.
P2 It is cloudy outside.
C Therefore, the Yankee game will be postponed.
The first two premises are true perspectively. In New York City, at this present hour, it is partly cloudy outside and there is thus, a chance of precipitation. However, the conclusion is false because the New York Yankees are not even in Spring training and it is out of the norm for them to have a regular season home game in late January. The above argument can prove true given not only at least one extra premise, but also the fact that it is not winter but spring, and that the MLB regular season is underway. This goes a long way in showing that propositions are usually missing crucial content and are true given specified context. Perhaps, then, Weaver should provide a different schema to ground CLC.
Weaver, unfortunately, does not give an adequate account of what he means by situationspf and what such situations would look like. It is enough to reiterate that the existence of even one such situation takes him back to square one. This is aside from the fact that a rejection of pluralism entails a rejection of arguments operating outside of classical logic, e.g., Plantinga’s Modal Ontological Argument, which rests of the axioms of S5 modal logic. A thorough rejection of free logical systems would limit Theists to the domain of classical logic, which will prove unforgiving since nothing like God seems operative in the real world.
Weaver’s dependence on situationsC and CLC proves problematic and is one place for an atheist to focus on. Another avenue for an atheist to take is W4 and W5. Is the notion that ontological naturalism is false conditional on necessitism being true? I do not think Weaver established that this premise is true. Furthermore, aside from exploring whether these clauses have a conditional relationship, one can simply ask whether necessitism is true. The jury is still out on whether necessitism or contingentism is the case, and there may yet be a synthesis or a handful of alternative positions that challenge both. Given the current state of the debate, I am uncommitted to either position, but I am suspicious of anyone siding with one for sake of attempting to disprove a position they already assume is false, which, in Weaver’s case, are naturalism and atheism.
In plain language, the perspective of necessitists falls flat or appears to be saying something nonsensical. Williamson outlines where disagreement lies:
For instance, a contingentist typically holds that it is contingent that there is the Thames: there could have been no such river, and in those circumstances there would have been no Thames. By contrast, a necessitist typically holds that it is necessary that there is the Thames: there could have been no such river, but in those circumstances there would still have been the Thames, a non-river located nowhere that could have been a river located in England. Thus the contingentist will insist that necessarily if there is the Thames it is a river, while the necessitist allows at most that necessarily if the Thames is located somewhere it is a river.
Williamson, T.. “Necessitism, Contingentism, and Plural Quantification.” Mind 119 (2010): 657-748. 9. Web.
Contingentists deny the necessity of the Thames, whether river or not. These identity discussions extend further when one considers people. Manuel Pérez Otero explores this and tries to synthesize these two opposing point of views (see Otero, Manuel Pérez. “Contingentism about Individuals and Higher-Order Necessitism.” Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, vol. 28, no. 3(78), 2013, pp. 393–406. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23926328. Accessed 25 Jan. 2021.). Though Otero’s synthesis is tangential for our purposes, it shows that this binary Weaver thinks exists is one of his own making, essentially a false dichotomy. Given the issues necessitism presents for ordinary language, and the likelihood of one of its alternatives being true, it follows that necessitism is probably false. An exhaustive defense of a position I am not committed to is not at all required to show where Weaver has gone wrong.
This takes us to Weaver’s treatment of supervenience and his New Phenomenon of Coordination (NPC), which states:
Why is it that modal properties and notions enter the verisimilitudinous fundamental dynamical laws of our best and most empirically successful physical theories given that modal properties do not weakly supervene upon the physical or material? (or) How is it that the material world came to be ordered in such a way that it evolves in a manner that is best captured by modally laden physical theorizing or dynamical laws given that modal properties do not even weakly supervene upon the material and non-modal? (Weaver, 17)
If necessitism is probably false, then ontological naturalism still has a chance of being true. This is despite the fact that Weaver failed to show that the falsity of ontological naturalism is conditional on necessitism being true. A stronger route for him to have took is to argue that ontological naturalism is false iff necessitism is true because even if turns out that necessitism is true, ontological naturalism can also be true. Weaver has not established that they are mutually exclusive. Therefore, an atheist can feel no pressure at all when confronted with NPC. This is setting aside that Weaver appears to be undisturbed by the incongruity of our scientific and manifest images. One would think a reconciliation is required before proclaiming that the material world is organized via modally laden physical theories and dynamic laws that supervene, whether strongly or weakly, on the material world.
The primary issue with Weaver’s assessment is the assumption that all atheists must be committed to reductionist materialism or physicalism to be a consistent ontological naturalist. There are alternative naturalisms that easily circumvent Weaver’s NPC because such a naturalist would not be committed to any version of supervenience. As an example, this naturalist can hold, to put it as simply as possible, that scientific theories and models are merely representations. Therefore, the modality of scientific theories need not supervene on the material world at all. Given a representationalist account of scientific theories, perhaps something like a reverse supervenience is the case.
∎∀𝑥∀𝑦(∀𝐹 𝐹𝑥 ≡ 𝐹𝑦 ⟶ ∎∀R R𝑥 ≡ R𝑦 )
Necessarily for any entity x and for any entity y, [(if for any material property F, (x has F, just in case, y has F), then necessarily, for any representational property M, (x has M, just in case, y has M)].
Scientific theories and models are, in other words, more akin to impressionist paintings than a group of modally laden propositions. This is a more commonsense view in that a scientific model is a portrait of the real world. While there is a feedback between the model and the material world, in that theories have to be tested against reality, theories and models are not conceived in a vacuum. Real world observations impose the postulates of a theory or render a portrait that we call a model. Ptolemy misconstrued planetary orbits and attributed their motions to invisible spheres rather than the ellipses we are familiar with. He was not far off the mark, especially given that there is an intangible involved, namely gravity, but his impression was inexact. This is what a representationalist account of scientific theories would look like and whether something like reverse supervenience is necessary does no real harm to the account.
The last route atheists can take is in Weaver’s conflation of atheism and naturalism. Though I am sympathetic to the conflation, like Nielsen, who stated, “Naturalism, where consistent, is an atheism” (Nielsen, Kai. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001. 30. Print.), the same need not apply in vice versa. In other words, the following statement need not be the case: “atheism, where consistent, is a naturalism.” While I am also partial to that statement, even going as far as defending it in Philosophical Atheism: Counter Apologetics and Arguments For Atheism, that gods do not exist does not entail that no immaterial beings can exist. It could be the case that no iteration of god exists, but that ghosts do. Weaver’s conflation seems to rest on the assumption that naturalism is the antithesis of supernaturalism. Naturalism is also opposed to paranormal phenomena, so there can be defeaters of naturalism that are not also defeaters of atheism. In other words, a definitive proof of the paranormal does not debase the thesis that gods do not exist. A definitive proof of one’s great grandma roaming the estate does not imply that God or any other god undeniably exists. Nielsen’s statement implies only that a disproof of atheism is also a disproof of naturalism, but this does not work in the other direction.
Ultimately, in light of the composite argument above, one that I think is true to Weaver’s overall argument, fails to disprove ontological naturalism and atheism. There is far too much controversy in a number of places throughout his argument to regard it as convincing. The argument needs to be critically amended or entirely abandoned because in its present form, it does not meet its end. My rebuttal provides fertile ground for further exploration with respect to necessitism, contigentism, and any possible syntheses or alternatives, in addition to what is required to contradict naturalism and atheism. God, whether the idea Theist philosophers defend, or a more common concept tied to a particular religion, is still resolutely resigned to silence, hiddenness, and outright indifference. Therefore, Theists have their own onus that must go beyond even a successful argument against naturalism and/or atheism.
Problems With “Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives On Contemporary Science: Dodging the Fundamentalist Threat”
By R.N. Carmona
Before starting my discussion of the first chapter of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives On Contemporary Science, some prefatory remarks are in order. In the past, I might have committed to reading an entire book for purposes of writing a chapter by chapter review. With other projects in my periphery, I cannot commit to writing an exhaustive review of this book. That remains undecided for now. What I will say is that a sample size might be enough to confirm my suspicions that the Neo-Aristotelian system is rife with problems or even worse, is a failed system of metaphysics. I am skeptical of the system because it appears to have been recruited to bolster patently religious arguments, in particular those of modern Thomists looking to usher in yet another age of apologetics disguised as philosophy. I maintain that apologetics still needs to be thoroughly demarcated from philosophy of religion; moreover, philosophy of religion should be more than one iteration after another of predominantly Christian literature. With respect to apologetics, I am in agreement with Kai Nielsen who stated:
It is a waste of time to rehearse arguments about the proofs or evidences for God or immortality. There are no grounds — or at least no such grounds — for belief in God or belief that God exists and/or that we are immortal. Hume and Kant (perhaps with a little rational reconstruction from philosophers like J.L. Mackie and Wallace Matson) pretty much settled that. Such matters have been thoroughly thrashed out and there is no point of raking over the dead coals. Philosophers who return to them are being thoroughly retrograde.
Nielsen, Kai. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001. 399-400. Print.
The issue is that sometimes one’s hand is forced because the number of people qualified to rake dead coals is far fewer than the people rehashing these arguments. Furthermore, the history of Christianity, aside from exposing a violent tendency to impose the Gospel by force, also exposes a tendency to prey on individuals who are not qualified to address philosophical and theological arguments. Recently, this was made egregiously obvious by Catholic writer Pat Flynn:
So what we as religious advocates must be ready for is to offer the rational, logical basis—the metaphysical realism, and the reality of God—that so many of these frustrated, young people are searching for who are patently fed up with the absurd direction the secular world seems to be going. They’re looking for solid ground. And we’ve got it.
Flynn, Pat. “A Hole in The Intellectual Dark Web”. World On Fire Blog. 26 Jun 2019. Web.
Unfortunately, against all sound advice and blood pressure readings, people like myself must rake dead coals or risk allowing Christians to masquerade as the apex predators in this intellectual jungle. I therefore have to say to the Pat Flynns of the world, no you don’t got it. More importantly, let young people lead their lives free of the draconian prohibitions so often imposed on people by religions like yours. If you care to offer the rational, logical basis for your beliefs, then perhaps you should not be approaching young people who likely have not had an adequate exposure to the scholarship necessary to understand apologetics. This is not to speak highly of the apologist, who typically distorts facts and evidence to fit his predilections, making it necessary to acquire sufficient knowledge of various fields of inquiry so that one is more capable of identifying distortions or omission of evidence and thus, refuting his arguments. If rational, logical discourse were his aim, then he would approach people capable of handling his arguments and contentions. That is when it becomes abundantly clear that the aim is to target people who are more susceptible to his schemes by virtue of lacking exposure to the pertinent scholarship and who may already be gullible due to existing sympathy for religious belief, like Flynn himself, a self-proclaimed re-converted Catholic.
Lanao and Teh’s Anti-Fundamentalist Argument and Problems Within The Neo-Aristotelian System
With these prefatory remarks out of the way, I can now turn to Xavi Lanao and Nicholas J. Teh’s “Dodging The Fundamentalist Threat.” Though I can admire how divorced Lanao and Teh’s argument is from whatever theological views they might subscribe to, it should be obvious to anyone, especially the Christian Thomist, that their argument is at variance with Theism. Lanao and Teh write: “The success of science (especially fundamental physics) at providing a unifying explanation for phenomena in disparate domains is good evidence for fundamentalism” (16). They then add: “The goal of this essay is to recommend a particular set of resources to Neo- Aristotelians for resisting Fundamentalist Unification and thus for resisting fundamentalism” (Ibid.). In defining Christian Theism, Timothy Chappell, citing Paul Veyne, offers the following:
“The originality of Christianity lies… in the gigantic nature of its god, the creator of both heaven and earth: it is a gigantism that is alien to the pagan gods and is inherited from the god of the Bible. This biblical god was so huge that, despite his anthropomorphism (humankind was created in his image), it was possible for him to become a metaphysical god: even while retaining his human, passionate and protective character, the gigantic scale of the Judaic god allowed him eventually to take on the role of the founder and creator of the cosmic order.”
Chappell, Timothy. “Theism, History and Experience”. Philosophy Now. 2013. Web.
Thomists appear more interested in proving that Neo-Aristotelianism is a sound approach to metaphysics and the philosophy of science than they do in ensuring that the system is not at odds with Theism. The notion that God is the founder and creator of the cosmic order is uncontroversial among Christians and Theists more generally. Inherent in this notion is that God maintains the cosmic order and created a universe that bears his fingerprints, and as such, physical laws are capable of unification because the universe exhibits God’s perfection; the universe is therefore, at least at its start, perfectly symmetric, already containing within it intelligible forces, including finely tuned parameters that result in human beings, creatures made in God’s image. Therefore, in the main, Christians who accept Lanao and Teh’s anti-fundamentalism have, inadvertently or deliberately, done away with a standard Theistic view.
So already one finds that Neo-Aristotelianism, at least from the perspective of the Theist, is not systematic in that the would-be system is internally inconsistent. Specifically, when a system imposes cognitive dissonance of this sort, it is usually good indication that some assumption within the system needs to be radically amended or entirely abandoned. In any case, there are of course specifics that need to be addressed because I am not entirely sure Lanao and Teh fully understand Nancy Cartwright’s argument. I think Cartwright is saying quite a bit more and that her reasoning is mostly correct, even if her conclusion is off the mark.
While I strongly disagree with the Theistic belief that God essentially created a perfect universe, I do maintain that Big Bang cosmology imposes on us the early symmetry of the universe via the unification of the four fundamental forces. Cartwright is therefore correct in her observation that science gives us a dappled portrait, a patchwork stemming from domains operating very much independently of one another; like Lanao and Teh observe: “point particle mechanics and fluid dynamics are physical theories that apply to relatively disjoint sets of classical phenomena” (18). The problem is that I do not think Lanao and Teh understand why this is the case, or at least, they do not make clear that they know why we are left with this dappled picture. I will therefore attempt to argue in favor of Fundamentalism without begging the question although, like Cartwright, I am committed to a position that more accurately describes hers: Non-Fundamentalism. It may be that the gradual freezing of the universe, over the course of about 14 billion years, leaves us entirely incapable of reconstructing the early symmetry of the universe; I will elaborate on this later, but this makes for a different claim altogether, and one that I take Cartwright to be saying, namely that Fundamentalists are not necessarily wrong to think that fundamental unification (FU) is possible but given the state of our present universe, it cannot be obtained. Cartwright provides us with a roadmap of what it would take to arrive at FU, thereby satisfying Fundamentalism, but the blanks need to be filled, so that we get from the shattered glass that is our current universe to the perfectly symmetric mirror it once was.
Lanao and Teh claim that Fundamentalism usually results from the following reasoning:
We also have good reason to believe that everything in the physical world is made up of these same basic kinds of particles. So, from the fact that everything is made up of the same basic particles and that we have reliable knowledge of the behavior of these particles under some experimental conditions, it is plausible to infer that the mathematical laws governing these basic kinds of particles within the restricted experimental settings also govern the particles everywhere else, thereby governing everything everywhere. (Ibid.)
They go on to explain that Sklar holds that biology and chemistry do not characterize things as they really are. This is what they mean when they say Fundamentalists typically beg the question, in that they take Fundamentalism as a given. However, given Lanao and Teh’s construction of Cartwright’s argument, they can also be accused of fallacious reasoning, namely arguing from ignorance. They formulate Cartwright’s Anti-Fundamentalist Argument as follows:
(F1) Theories only apply to a domain insofar as there is a principled way of generating a set of models that are jointly able to describe all the phenomena in that domain.
(AF2) Classical mechanics has a limited set principled models, so it only applies to a limited number of sub-domains.
(AF3) The limited sub-domains of AF2 do not exhaust the entire classical domain.
(AF4) From (F1), (AF2), and (AF3), the domain of classical mechanics is not universal, but dappled. (25-26)
On AF2, how can we expect classical mechanics to acquire more principled models than it presently has? How do we know that, if given enough time, scientists working on classical mechanics will not have come up with a sufficient number of principled models to satisfy even the anti-fundamentalist? That results in quite the conundrum for the anti-fundamentalist. Can the anti-fundamentalist provide the fundamentalist with a satisfactory number of principled models that exhaust an entire domain? This is to ask whether anyone can know how many principled models are necessary to contradict AF3. On any reasonable account, science has not had sufficient time to come up with enough principled models in all of its domains and thus, this argument cannot be used to bolster the case for anti-fundamentalism.
While Lanao and Teh are dismissive of Cartwright’s particularism, it is necessary for the correct degree of tentativeness she exhibits. Lanao and Teh, eager to disprove fundamentalism, are not as tentative, but given the very limited amount of time scientists have had to build principled models, we cannot expect for them to have come up with enough models to exhaust the classical or any other scientific domain. Cartwright’s tentativeness is best exemplified in the following:
And what kinds of interpretative models do we have? In answering this, I urge, we must adopt the scientific attitude: we must look to see what kinds of models our theories have and how they function, particularly how they function when our theories are most successful and we have most reason to believe in them. In this book I look at a number of cases which are exemplary of what I see when I study this question. It is primarily on the basis of studies like these that I conclude that even our best theories are severely limited in their scope.
Cartwright, Nancy. The Dappled World: A Study of The Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 9. Print.
The fact that our best theories are limited in their scope reduces to the fact that our fragmented, present universe is too complex to generalize via one law per domain or one law that encompasses all domains. For purposes of adequately capturing what I am attempting to say, it is worth revisiting what Cartwright says about a $1,000 bill falling in St. Stephen’s Square:
Mechanics provides no model for this situation. We have only a partial model, which describes the 1000 dollar bill as an unsupported object in the vicinity of the earth, and thereby introduces the force exerted on it due to gravity. Is that the total force? The fundamentalist will say no: there is in principle (in God’s completed theory?) a model in mechanics for the action of the wind, albeit probably a very complicated one that we may never succeed in constructing. This belief is essential for the fundamentalist. If there is no model for the 1000 dollar bill in mechanics, then what happens to the note is not determined by its laws. Some falling objects, indeed a very great number, will be outside the domain of mechanics, or only partially affected by it. But what justifies this fundamentalist belief? The successes of mechanics in situations that it can model accurately do not support it, no matter how precise or surprising they are. They show only that the theory is true in its domain, not that its domain is universal. The alternative to fundamentalism that I want to propose supposes just that: mechanics is true, literally true we may grant, for all those motions whose causes can be adequately represented by the familiar models that get assigned force functions in mechanics. For these motions, mechanics is a powerful and precise tool for prediction. But for other motions, it is a tool of limited serviceability.
Cartwright, Nancy. “Fundamentalism vs. the Patchwork of Laws.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 94, 1994, pp. 279–292. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545199.
Notice how even Cartwright alludes to the Theistic notion of FU being attributable to a supremely intelligent creator who people call God. In any case, what she is saying here does not speak to the notion that only the opposite of Fundamentalism can be the case. Even philosophers slip into thinking in binaries, but we are not limited to Fundamentalism or Anti-Fundamentalism; Lanao and Teh admit that much. There can be a number of Non-Fundamentalist positions that prove more convincing. In the early universe, the medium of water, and therefore, motions in water, were not available. Because of this, there was no real way to derive physical laws within that medium. Moreover, complex organisms like jellyfish did not exist then either and so, the dynamics of their movements were not known and could not feature in any data concerning organisms moving about in water. This is where I think Cartwright, and Lanao and Teh taking her lead, go astray.
Cartwright, for example, strangely calls for a scientific law of wind. She states: “When we have a good-fitting molecular model for the wind, and we have in our theory (either by composition from old principles or by the admission of new principles) systematic rules that assign force functions to the models, and the force functions assigned predict exactly the right motions, then we will have good scientific reason to maintain that the wind operates via a force” (Ibid). Wind, unlike inertia or gravity, is an inter-body phenomenon in that the heat from the Sun is distributed unevenly across the Earth’s surface. Warmer air from the equator tends toward the atmosphere and moves to the poles while cooler air tends toward the equator. Wind moves between areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure and the boundary between these areas is called a front. This is why we cannot have a law of wind because aside from the complex systems on Earth, this law would have to apply to the alien systems on gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. This point is best exemplified by the fact that scientists cannot even begin to comprehend why Neptune’s Dark Spot did a complete about-face. A law of wind would have to apply universally, not just on Earth, and would thus, have to explain the behavior of wind on other planets. That is an impossible ask because the composition of other planets and their stars would make for different conditions that are best analyzed in complex models, accounting for as much data as possible, rather than a law attempting to generalize what wind should do assuming simple conditions.
Despite Cartwright’s lofty demand, her actual argument does not preclude Fundamentalism despite what Lanao and Teh might have thought. Cartwright introduces a view that I think is in keeping with the present universe: “Metaphysical nomological pluralism is the doctrine that nature is governed in different domains by different systems of laws not necessarily related to each other in any systematic or uniform way: by a patchwork of laws” (Ibid.). I think it is entirely possible to get from metaphysical nomological pluralism (MNP) to FU if one fills in the blanks by way of symmetry breaking. Prior to seeing how symmetry breaking bridges the gap between MNP and FU, it is necessary to outline an argument from Cartwright’s MNP to FU:
F1 Theories only apply to a domain insofar as there is a principled way of generating a set of models that are jointly able to describe all the phenomena in that domain.
MNP1 Nature is governed in different domains by different systems of laws not necessarily related to each other in any systematic or uniform way: by a patchwork of laws.
MNP2 It is possible that the initial properties in the universe allow these laws to be true together.
MNP3 From F1, MNP1, and MNP2, the emergence of different systems of laws from the initial properties in the universe imply that FU is the probable.
Lanao and Teh agree that F1 is a shared premise between Fundamentalists and Anti-Fundamentalists. As a Non-Fundamentalist, I see it as straightforwardly obvious as well. With respect to our present laws, I think that FU may be out of our reach. As has been famously repeated, humans did not evolve to do quantum mechanics, let alone piece together a shattered mirror. This is why I’m a Non– as opposed to Anti-Fundamentalist; the subtle distinction is that I am neither opposed to FU being the case nor do I think it is false, but rather that it is extremely difficult to come by. Michio Kaku describes the universe as follows: “Think of the way a beautiful mirror shatters into a thousand pieces. The original mirror possessed great symmetry. You can rotate a mirror at any angle and it still reflects light in the same way. But after it is shattered, the original symmetry is broken. Determining precisely how the symmetry is broken determines how the mirror shatters” (Kaku, Michio. Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and The Future of The Cosmos. New York: Doubleday, 2005. 97. Print.).
If Kaku’s thinking is correct, then there is no way to postulate that God had St. Peter arrange the initial properties of the universe so that all of God’s desired laws are true simultaneously without realizing that FU is not only probable but true, however unobtainable it may be. The shards would have to pertain to the mirror. Kaku explains that Grand Unified Theory (GUT) Symmetry breaks down to SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1), which yields 19 free parameters required to describe our present universe. There are other ways for the mirror to have broken, to break down GUT Symmetry. This implies that other universes would have residual symmetry different from that of our universe and therefore, would have entirely different systems of laws. These universes, at minimum, would have different values for these free parameters, like a weaker nuclear force that would prevent star formation and make the emergence of life impossible. In other scenarios, the symmetry group can have an entirely different Standard Model in where protons quickly decay into anti-electrons, which would also prevent life as we know it (Ibid., 100).
Modern scientists are then tasked with working backwards. The alternative to that is to undertake the gargantuan task, as Cartwright puts it, of deriving the initial properties, which would no doubt be tantamount to a Theory of Everything from which all of the systems of laws extend, i.e., hypothesize that initial conditions q, r, and s yield the different systems of laws we know. This honors the concretism Lanao and Teh call for in scientific models while also giving abstractionism its due. Like Paul Davies offered, the laws of physics may be frozen accidents. In other words, the effective laws of physics, which is to say the laws of physics we observe, might differ from the fundamental laws of physics, which would be, so to speak, the original state of the laws of physics. In a chaotic early universe, physical constants may not have existed. Hawking also spoke of physical laws that tell us how the universe will evolve if we know its state at some point in time. He added that God could have chosen an “initial configuration” or fundamental laws for reasons we cannot comprehend. He asks, however, “if he had started it off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand? (Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time, New York: Bantam Books. 1988. 127. Print.)” He then goes on to discuss possible reasons for this, e.g. chaotic boundary conditions; anthropic principles.
Implicit in Hawking’s reasoning is that we can figure out what physical laws will result in our universe in its present state. The obvious drawback is that the observable universe is ~13.8 billion years old and 93 billion lightyears in diameter. The universe may be much larger, making the task of deriving this initial configuration monumentally difficult. This would require a greater deal of abstraction than Lanao and Teh, and apparently Neo-Aristotelians, desire, but it is the only way to discover how past iterations of physical laws or earlier systems of laws led to our present laws of physics. The issue with modern science is that it does not often concern itself with states in the distant past and so, a lot of equations and models deal in the present, and even the future, but not enough of them confront the past. Cosmological models, for purposes of understanding star formation, the formation of solar systems, and the formation of large galaxies have to use computer models to test their theories against the past, since there is no way to observe the distant past directly. In this way, I think technology will prove useful in arriving at earlier conditions until we arrive at the mirror before it shattered. The following model, detailing how an early collision explains the shape of our galaxy, is a fine example of what computer models can do to help illuminate the distant past:
Further Issues With The Neo-Aristotelian System
A recent rebuttal to Alexander Pruss’ Grim Reaper Paradox can be generalized to refute Aristotelianism overall. The blogger over at Boxing Pythagoras states:
Though Alexander Pruss discusses this Grim Reaper Paradox in a few of his other blog posts, I have not seen him discuss any other assumptions which might underly the problem. He seems to have focused upon these as being the prime constituents. However, it occurs to me that the problem includes another assumption, which is a bit more subtle. The Grim Reaper Paradox, as formulated, seems to presume the Tensed Theory of Time. I have discussed, elsewhere, the reasons that I believe the Tensed Theory of Time does not hold, so I’ll simply focus here on how Tenseless Time resolves the Grim Reaper Paradox.
To see the difference between old and new tenseless theories, it is necessary to first contrast an old tenseless theory against a tensed theory that holds that properties of the pastness, presentness, and futurity of events are ascribed by tensed sentences. The debate regarding which theory is true centered around whether tensed sentences could be translated by tenseless sentences that instead ascribe relations of earlier than, later than, or simultaneous. For example, “the sun will soon rise” seems to entail the sun’s rising in the future, as an event that will become present, whereas the “sun is rising now” seems to entail the event being present and “the sun has risen” as having receded into the past. If these sentences are true, the first sentence ascribes futurity whilst the second ascribes presentness and the last ascribes pastness. Even if true, however, that is not evidence to suggest that events have such properties. Tensed sentences may have tenseless counterparts having the same meaning.
This is where Quine’s notion of de-tensing natural language comes in. Rather than saying “the sun is rising” as uttered on some date, we would instead say that “the sun is rising” on that date. The present in the first sentence does not ascribe presentness to the sun’s rising, but instead refers to the date the sentence is spoken. In like manner, if “the sun has risen” as uttered on some date is translated into “the sun has risen” on a given date, then the former sentence does not ascribe pastness to the sun’s rising but only refers to the sun’s rising as having occurred earlier than the date when the sentence is spoken. If these translations are true, temporal becoming is unreal and reality is comprised of earlier than, later than, and simultaneous. Time then consists of these relations rather the properties of pastness, presentness, and futurity (Oaklander, Nathan. Adrian Bardon ed. “A-, B- and R-Theories of Time: A Debate”. The Future of the Philosophy of Time. New York: Routledge, 2012. 23. Print.).
The writer at Boxing Pythagoras continues:
On Tensed Time, the future is not yet actual, and actions in the present are what give shape and form to the reality of the future. As such, the actions of each individual future Grim Reaper, in our paradox, can be contingent upon the actions of the Reapers which precede them. However, this is not the case on Tenseless Time. If we look at the problem from the notion of Tenseless Time, then it is not possible that a future Reaper’s action is only potential and contingent upon Fred’s state at the moment of activation. Whatever action is performed by any individual Reaper is already actual and cannot be altered by the previous moments of time. At 8:00 am, before any Reapers activate, Fred’s state at any given time between 8:00 am and 9:00 am is set. It is not dependent upon some potential, but not yet actual, future action as no such thing can exist.
I think this rebuttal threatens the entire Aristotelian enterprise. Aristotelians will have to deny time while maintaining that changes happen in order to escape the fact that de-tensed theories of time, which are more than likely the correct way of thinking about time, impose a principle: any change at a later point in time is not dependent on a previous state. That’s ignoring that God, being timeless, could not have created the universe at some time prior to T = 0, the first instance of time on the universal clock. This is to say nothing of backward causation, which is entirely plausible given quantum mechanics. Causation calls for a deeper analysis, which neo-Humeans pursue despite not being entirely correct. The notion of dispositions is crucial. It is overly simplistic to say the hot oil caused the burns on my hand or the knife caused the cut on my hand. The deeper analysis in each case is that the boiling point of cooking oil, almost two times that of water, has something to do with why the burn feels distinct from a knife cutting into my hand. Likewise, the dispositions of the blade have a different effect on the skin than oil does. Causal relationships are simplistic and, as Nietzsche suggested, do not account for the continuum within the universe and the flux that permeates it. Especially in light of quantum mechanics, we are admittedly ignorant about most of the intricacies within so-called causal relationships. Neo-Humeans are right to think that dispositions are important. This will disabuse of us of appealing to teleology in the following manner:
‘The function of X is Z’ [e.g., the function of oxygen in the blood is… the function of the human heart is… etc.] means
(a) X is there because it does Z,
Larry Wright, ‘Function’, Philosophical Review 82(2) (April 1973):139–68, see 161.
(b) Z is a consequence (or result) of X’s being there.
It is more accurate to say that a disposition of X is instantiated in Z rather than that X exists for purposes of Z because in real world examples, a given X can give rise to A, B, C, and so on. This is to say that one so-called cause can have different effects. A knife can slice, puncture, saw, etc. Hot oil can burn human skin, melt ice but not mix with it, combust when near other mediums or when left to increase to temperatures beyond its boiling point, etc. One would have to ask why cooking oil does not combust when a cube of ice is thrown into the pan; what about the canola oil, for a more specific example, causes it to auto-ignite at 435 degrees Fahrenheit and why does this not happen when water is heated beyond its boiling point?
As it turns out then, Neo-Aristotelians are not as committed to concretism as Lanao and Teh would hope. They are striving for generalizations despite refusing to investigate the details of how models are employed in normal science, as was made obvious by Lanao and Teh’s dismissal of Cartwright’s particularism and further, in their argument against Fundamentalism, which does not flow neatly from Cartwright’s argument. For science to arrive at anything concrete, abstraction needs to be allowed, specifically in cases venturing further and further into the past. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of changes needs to be incorporated into our data. Briefly, when thinking of the $1,000 bill descending into St. Stephen’s Square, it is a simple fact that we must ask whether there is precipitation or not and if so, how much; we are also required to ask whether bird droppings may have altered its trajectory on the way down?; what effect does smog or dust particles have on the $1,000 bill’s trajectory; as Cartwright asked, what about wind gusts? What is concrete is consistent with the logical atomist’s view that propositions speak precisely to simple particulars or many of them bearing some relation to one another.
Ultimately, I think that Lanao and Teh fail to establish a Neo-Aristotelian approach to principled scientific models. They also fail to show that FU and therefore, Fundamentalism is false. What is also clear is that they did not adequately engage Cartwright’s argument, which is thoroughly Non-Fundamentalist, even if that conclusion escaped her. This is why I hold that Cartwright’s conclusions are off the mark because she is demanding that generalized laws be derived from extremely complex conditions. It is not incumbent on dappled laws within a given domain of science to be unified in order for FU to ultimately be the case. It could be that due to symmetry breaking, one domain appears distinct from another and because of our failure, at least until now, to realize how the two cohere, unifying principles between the two domains currently elude us. Lanao and Teh’s argument against FU therefore appeals to the ignorance of science not unlike apologetic arguments of much lesser quality. The ignorance of today’s science does not suggest that current problems will continue to confront us while their solutions perpetually elude us. What is needed is time. Like Lanao and Teh, I agree that Cartwright has a lot of great ideas concerning principled scientific models, but that her ideas lend support to FU. A unified metaphysical account of reality would likely end up in a more dappled state than modern science finds itself in and despite Lanao and Teh’s attempts, a hypothetical account of that sort would rely too heavily on science to be considered purely metaphysical. My hope is that my argument, one that employs symmetry breaking to bolster the probability of FU being the case, is more provocative, if even, persuasive.
The Philosophy Corner 