Move over, Professor Richard Dawkins. Atheism has a new champion.
Dave Mullenix has recently come up with not one but two philosophical arguments for atheism. Mullenix’s arguments, unlike Dawkins’, aren’t based on inductive inference, but on the unassailable facts that (i) a certain minimal amount of information (usually several bits) is required to represent a proper name; and (ii) a very large amount of information is required to represent all of the rules we follow, when speaking a language. Any Being that knows your name must be able to keep your name in its mind. That means its mind must be able to store more than one bit, so it can’t be the simple God of classical theism. Moreover, any Being that knows all the rules of a language (as God does, being omniscient) must be extremely complex – much more so than the first cell, say. And if it’s very complex, then its own existence is inherently even more unlikely than that of the living creatures whose existence it is supposed to explain.
I believe in addressing arguments for atheism head-on, especially good ones, so here goes.
Commenting in response to a question which I had previously posed to Dr. Elizabeth Liddle, “Why does a mind require something brain-like?”, Dave Mullenix argued as follows:
I would ignore brains and say instead that any mind needs billions of bits of carefully organized information to exist because a mind is, essentially, huge amounts of information interacting with each other. That’s what thoughts are – information acting on other information.
Think of it this way: Does God know your name? Just “vjtorley” is about 56 bits, although it could probably be compressed to half that. But just to give every one of the six billion plus people alive today a unique identifying code would take over 32 bits per person or several hundred billion bits of info total.
Or think of language in general: If He can understand English, He will need millions of bits of information just to cover the words, let alone how to put them together and do all the other processing that’s associated with understanding a language and that information needs to be “on line”.
This is the single biggest weakness in ID – ID in practice treats the existence of God as a given when in fact any thinking being at all, even a human-quality thinking being, requires so many gigabits of precisely ordered information that the unlikelyhood of that being “just existing” totally overshadows the relatively small information requirements (probably only a few hundred bits) of first life. And once you have first life, evolution can account for all the rest. Just ask Rabbi M. Averick.
I’ve taken the liberty of trying to make Dave Mullenix’s arguments against theism as philosophically rigorous as possible, and this is what I’ve come up with.
Argument A. An argument against the existence of the God of Classical Theism (an absolutely simple and omniscient Being)
1. Any entity that knows someone’s name has a representation of that name within his/her mind.
2. Proper names (e.g. Sam or Meg) have a minimal representation in excess of one bit.
3. If God exists, God knows everyone’s name. (By definition, God is omniscient, according to classical theism.)
4. Therefore if God exists, God’s mind contains representations whose length exceeds one bit.
5. A representation in excess of one bit is composed of multiple (two or more) parts.
6. Therefore if God exists, God’s mind has multiple parts.
7. But if God exists, God’s mind does not have multiple parts. (By definition, God is simple, according to classical theism.)
8. Therefore God does not exist. (If P->Q and P->not Q, then it follows that not P.)
This argument will not trouble all religious believers. Some of them might be tempted to say: “We can jettison classical theism but still retain our belief in God. Maybe God is omniscient, but complex.” But Dave Mullenix’s second argument discredits even this fallback position.
Argument B. An argument against the existence of an omniscient God who created life
1. If God exists, God knows each and every human language. (True by definition of omniscience.)
2. Any entity that knows a language has a representation of all the rules of that language within his/her mind.
3. Rules have a minimal representation in excess of one bit. (A rule contains several words; hence you can’t represent a rule using only a single bit.)
4. Since the rules of a human language include not only phonologic rules, morphologic rules and syntactic rules, but also semantic rules and pragmatic rules, the total number of rules in any given language is vast.
5. Therefore any entity that knows a language is capable of holding a vast number of bits of information (let’s call it N) in his/her mind.
6. Therefore if God exists, God’s mind contains an extremely large number of bits of information. In fact, this number is much larger than N, as N is the number of bits required to specify the rules of just one language, and there are roughly 10,000 languages in existence, to the nearest order of magnitude.
7. However, the number of bits in the minimal representation of the first living cell is smaller than N. (A living cell is complex, but it cannot be as complex as the total set of rules in a human language – otherwise we would be unable to describe the workings of the cell in human language.)
8. Indeed, it is probably the case that the total number of bits required to explain the existence of all life-forms found on Earth today is smaller than N. (Many ID advocates, including Professor Behe, are prepared to assume that front-loading is true. If it is, then the number of bits in the minimal representation of the first living cell is sufficient to explain the diversity of all life-forms found on Earth today.)
9. The more bits an entity requires to specify it, the more complex it is, and hence the more antecedently unlikely its existence is.
10. Therefore God’s existence is antecedently even more unlikely than the existence of life on Earth – the difficulties of abiogenesis notwithstanding.
11. An explanation which is antecedently even more unliklely than what it tries to explain is a bad explanation.
12. Hence invoking God (an omniscient Being) to explain life is a bad explanation.
A brief comment about the wisdom of choosing names
Before I go on, let me just say that the choice of names was a very clever one on Dave Mullenix’s part. Traditionally, Scholastic philosophers have maintained that God’s mind can store a vast number of concepts, in virtual form. How does God know what a dog is, what an E. coli bacterium is, and what an atom of gold is? The Scholastic reply has been that each of these entities must possess a kind of unity, or it wouldn’t be an individual. Therefore God, who knows all things in the most perfect manner possible, must have a unified concept of each of these kinds of entities. What’s more, God doesn’t even need to have separate and distinct concepts of each of these creatures. He only needs to have a concept of Himself as the possible cause of all these creatures, since He is able to create them all. Hence, simply by knowing Himself as a perfectly simple Being, God’s mind implicitly or virtually contains the concepts of all the various kinds of creatures which He is able to create.
Now, even if you buy that solution to the question of how God can have concepts of natural kinds, it certainly won’t work for names. Names don’t belong to any natural kind; they’re a human convention. And even if you were to maintain that God implicitly knows all names by knowing all possible combinations of letters or sounds, that wouldn’t explain how God knows your name – or how God knew Samuel’s name when He called him three times: “Samuel, Samuel.”
Argument A
OK. Let’s go back to argument A. What’s wrong with it? The problem, I believe, lies in premise 1: “Any entity that knows someone’s name has a representation of that name within his/her mind.”
At first blush premise 1 seems obvious: surely all knowledge has to be in the mind of the knower. However, I’d like to challenge this assumption. Why should this be so? A clue to why this seems so obvious is contained in Dave Mullenix’s words, “that information needs to be ‘on line.'” If we picture God as having a conversation with us in real time, then of course He will need to be able to access relevant information about us – including our names – from one moment to the next. In other words, He will need to keep it in His mind. And since a name, being inherently composite, cannot be compressed to a single bit, there can be no room for it in the simple mind of God.
But God is not in real time. God is beyond space and time. This is true regardless of whether one conceives of God as atemporal (totally outside time) as classical theists do, or as being omnitemporal (present at all points in time) subsequent to the creation of the universe, as Professor William Lane Craig does. On either analysis, God is not confined to a single location in time. In that case, God does not have to store information about our names in His mind for future retrieval; it’s always immediately there for Him.
“All right,” you may answer, “but if God is talking to me, and He calls me by my name, then the information about my name must still be in His mind, mustn’t it?” Not so. I would maintain that all God needs is to have access to your name; it doesn’t need to be “in” His mind. I would suggest that God knows facts about the world (including individuals’ names) simply by having access to the states of affairs which make them true (their truthmakers, in philosophical jargon). These facts don’t need to be “in God’s mind”; He just needs to be able to access them. The fact that grounds my having the name I do is that my parents gave it to me, shortly after I was born. God, who holds all things in being, was certainly present at this event: if He had not been present, my parents and I would not have been there, for “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). If God has immediate epistemic access to the occasion when I acquired my name, then He automatically knows my name. It doesn’t need to be in His mind.
God, who holds all things, past, present and future, in existence, has immediate epistemic access to all events in the past, present and future. That’s how He is able to know my name.
Argument B
Now let’s have a look at argument B. Here, the critical premise is premise 2: “Any entity that knows a language has a representation of all the rules of that language within his/her mind.” Now, this is plausibly true for a computer that can speak a language. However, it is not true for human speakers, and it is certainly not true for God.
Consider the English language. It certainly contains a vast number of rules. However, most speakers of English don’t know these rules. Many people don’t know what a preposition is, for instance. And even if a well-educated child were aware of all the phonologic rules, morphologic rules and syntactic rules of a language, he/she could not possibly articulate all of the semantic rules and pragmatic rules. Yet virtually all children manage to learn their native tongue and speak it with ease.
It may be objected that we have an implicit knowledge of the rules of a language, even if most of us seldon need to make this knowledge explicit. Moreover, it could be argued, nothing is hidden or “implicit” to God. If He knows things in the most perfect manner possible, then He must have an explicit knowledge of each and every rule of a language.
But this objection assumes that the most perfect way to know a language is to know the rules, and then to apply those rules when making sentences. That’s roughly how I speak Japanese, for instance – but then, Japanese is not my native language. To know a language properly is to be in possession of a certain set of habits, which are properly acquired from being around the native speakers of that language for a certain length of time (usually a few years). Sentences produced as a result of this natural exposure have an authenticity that can never come from reading a grammar book.
“All right,” I hear you say, “but what about God? How does God pick up the habits of a language?” The answer, once again, is that God has epistemic access to all events – past, present and future. He was present at those points in history when each human language was in the process of being created; and He is present wherever mothers pass their native language on to their children. By having access to all these events, God can legitimately be said to possess all of the habits that an authentic native speaker of any human language possesses. Indeed, God has had more linguistic exposure than any one of us could possibly hope to experience. God has seen it all. That’s why God has no difficulty in producing perfect sentences in English, Hebrew or any other human language.
Notice that these habits do not have to be “in” the mind of God. They are “out there” in the course of history, as human languages are being created, and as they evolve over time. God, who has immediate epistemic access to all events in the past, present and future, has a perfect knowledge of these habits, without them being “in” His mind.
I will conclude by saying that in order to mount a successful argument against God, an atheist would have to show that the notion of a Being who has immediate epistemic access to all events in the past, present and future is an incoherent one. This has not been done to date, and there are even atheist philosophers who contend that the notion of such a Being is defensible. David Misialowski, a self-described “agnostic atheist,” is a case in point. His articles on God’s foreknowledge (see here, here and here) are highly entertaining and well worth reading, whatever your theological perspective.
I would like to congratulate Dave Mullenix for putting forward two highly ingenious arguments against the existence of God. They are much better and more interesting than the arguments recently put forward by the New Atheists.
Arguing against a God mind that would exist beyond the c-boundary by using laws confined within the c-boundary is arguably worse than Dawkings Boeing 747
Perhaps that’s why God had Adam name all the animals. Adam even named Eve. But was Adam a name?
A name – that by which a thing is called? God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.”
The use of personal names is not unique to humans. Dolphins also use symbolic names, as has been shown by recent research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name
I’m sorry, but so far (that is, reading just the “above the fold” portion of the post, I don’t see a good argument. I see misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) what “divine simplicity” means.
In the end, all that Dave Mullenix ended up proving is the veracity of the statement.
“The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.”
… aaand … I still don’t see a good argument. What I see is, “If you will kindly grant me eliminative materialism (suitably translated into “mental talk”), then you will find that you have agreed that God cannot exist.”
Well, d’oh!
As to God being omniscient, i.e. infinite and perfect in knowledge, I would say that a single ‘simple’ photon coupled with quantum teleportation ‘proves’ this:
notes:
How Teleportation Will Work –
Excerpt: In 1993, the idea of teleportation moved out of the realm of science fiction and into the world of theoretical possibility. It was then that physicist Charles Bennett and a team of researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. — As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica was made.
http://science.howstuffworks.c.....ation1.htm
Quantum Teleportation – IBM Research Page
Excerpt: “it would destroy the original (photon) in the process,,”
http://www.research.ibm.com/qu.....portation/
Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves – April 2011
Excerpt: In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost.
http://www.popsci.com/technolo.....-computing
Explaining Information Transfer in Quantum Teleportation: Armond Duwell †‡ University of Pittsburgh
Excerpt: In contrast to a classical bit, the description of a (photon) qubit requires an infinite amount of information. The amount of information is infinite because two real numbers are required in the expansion of the state vector of a two state quantum system (Jozsa 1997, 1)
http://www.cas.umt.edu/phil/fa.....lPSA2K.pdf
Single photons to soak up data:
Excerpt: the orbital angular momentum of a photon can take on an infinite number of values. Since a photon can also exist in a superposition of these states, it could – in principle – be encoded with an infinite amount of information.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/7201
But alas, the catch is that ONLY GOD has access to infinite information! 🙂 But proof of principle was achieved;
Ultra-Dense Optical Storage – on One Photon
Excerpt: Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.
http://www.physorg.com/news88439430.html
etc.. etc… etc…
… and, by the way, there are no “events in the future.”
I wonder what his basis is for assuming a “mind” even exists, which is implied in 1st argument, premise 1.
And it’s almost as if he assumes a non-material, extra-dimensional mind exists. Then, he just arbitrarily assumes that God’s mind would have to be subject to quantifiable units of information measurement. Does Mr. Mullenix have some insight about God and the spiritual realm that we do not?
In fact, I think his argument is most certainly not against the Judeo-Christian God, but of some other god of his own imagining. Here is why.
The Judeo-Christian God is described as being omniscient. Omniscience implies that all is known. Information is part of all that can be known, including names.
Since names are part of what is all that can be known, and God is described as knowing all things, and man is not God, then it follows that it is man who is limited by information unit quantification, not God.
On the alleged complexity of God, Mr. Mullenix should first examine the complexity of his own argument. Check it for unfounded assumptions, contrivances et etc…Then compare it to the description of the Judeo-Christian God…immaterial, independent of all matter, energy, space and time, unchanging, just, loving and truthful. Of the two, Mr. Mullenix’s argument is, by far, exceedingly more complex than God Himself.
Bantay: “I wonder what his basis is for assuming a “mind” even exists, which is implied in 1st argument, premise 1.”
Actually, Mr Mullenix asserts — though Mr Torley fails to capture this assertion in his attempt to cast Mr Mullenix’s argument into the form of a syllogism — that minds do not even exist:
“I would ignore brains and say instead that any mind needs billions of bits of carefully organized information to exist because a mind is, essentially, huge amounts of information interacting with each other. That’s what thoughts are – information acting on other information.”
For this reason, I summarized Mr Mullenix’s argument as: “If you will kindly grant me eliminative materialism (suitably translated into “mental talk”), then you will find that you have agreed that God cannot exist.”
Bantay: “Since names are part of what is all that can be known, and God is described as knowing all things, and man is not God, then it follows that it is man who is limited by information unit quantification, not God.”
Further, the knowledge possessed by even a limited a human mind is not known — nor “stored” — in the form of bits/parts, but rather holistically. Thus, it is theoretically possible — and known cases do exist (Mrs O’Leary has even linked to some) — to excise half or more of a diseased human brain and yet not destroy the memory nor personality of the human person.
Brains are not minds, and minds are not “essentially, huge amounts of information interacting with each other.”
Ilion
Thank you for your clarifying additions. And I agree. It appears as though Mr. Mullenix has made his argument on unfounded assumptions.
If they are uncaused, they can be in the future.
What is the cause of an event in the future? Future events have no cause.
See how it works?
… nor effect, else they would be past (or present) events.
Still, you’d think that Aristotlean-Thomists, of all persons in the world, would be able to immediately grasp the fact that there is no such thing as “the future,” and thus, no such things as “events in the future.” You know, that whole potential-vs-actual thing they have going on.
Hell, if we kindly grant eliminative materialism, then we will find that we have agreed that *we* cannot exist.
Actually, there’s a more serious problem with both of these argument than the ones you pointed out, even if we accept the argument that for God to know names requires that He be “complex”. I’ll highlight the quote that contains it:
And if it’s very complex, then its own existence is inherently even more unlikely than that of the living creatures whose existence it is supposed to explain.
The problem is, when we say that complex things are “unlikely” or “improbable”, what we actually mean by that is that it’s unlikely for an object possessing the complex pattern in question to have come into existence by chance. So what these arguments actually show (assuming we accept the argument that God must be complex), is that it’s very unlikely for God to come into existence by chance. I trust I don’t need to expound on why such a conclusion isn’t exactly earth-shattering.
That’s a good catch, Deuce.
google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.....747_gambit
Can we turn the argument around?
Is the critic buying in to any ID position?
Actually dmullinex also formed a moral argument (of sorts) against the existence of God in the thread concerning why science cannot determine what is evil.
(If anybody can find a link to that thread I’d appreciate it just for reference).
In that thread dmullinex made a rather blanket statement that since most Christians he encountered seemed to operate under what they considered an absolute and objective set of moral codes, this implies that Christians in general accept that there exists a set of moral codes – i.e., a complex system whereby one might be able to determine what is right and what is wrong – a complex rule book.
I pointed out in the course of several posts that Christianity simply didn’t operate that way, because Christian morality is based in the perfect loving character of God as exemplified in human terms as a woman/man giving up his/her life for a friend or neighbor; the antithesis of which would be preferring one’s self interest above others. So evil is simply the negation of the perfect love of God, or that which goes against God’s perfect love. So in human terms, God’s character is a pole of reference for morality, and human evil goes in an opposite direction to a polar opposite of love – self interest.
Now the way I see it, what we perceive as necessitating complexity is perfectly represented in something very simple, and it seems to work when one considers morality. There is no reason to suggest that it couldn’t also work for primary knowledge in the same way. Of course there are rules that we can follow, which direct us towards perfect love rather than self interest, but ultimately, if we are loving God (The sh’ma Yisrael) and we are loving our neighbors as ourselves (the golden rule), we are being moral; i.e., we are obeying the law of God. Even Christian scripture confirms this.
So it’s quite reasonable to assume then that the “mind” of God encompasses all knowledge by His omniscience (yes it’s a tautology, but hear me out); however it is unreasonable to suggest that such a “mind” as we think of minds must be so complex as to contain all complex bits of knowledge that could exist. Perhaps there is a prime knowledge that is also characteristic of God, which encompasses all possible complex bits of knowledge, just as there is one morality which encompasses all possible circumstances regarding what is good and what is evil.
I think we need to think more in terms of basic laws of logic in determining where to go with arguments regarding God’s “knowledge” (I put that in quotes because it is not clear that what we understand as knowledge is the same for God). He knows what is true because He is truth. Truth is not a separate entity from Him. Any antithesis of truth, which goes against His perfect character is immediately known to him.
If we think more in terms of binary code then, I think we are closer to (but perhaps still inadequate) to understanding God’s “knowledge.” Since He is truth, He knows what truth is not, just as since He is love, He knows what love is not. All bits of knowledge then can be incorporated into what is ULTIMATELY or PRIMARILY true. So it would seem that it is humans who need bits of knowledge to understand a whole just as humans need laws to understand what is moral. God is not so.
Of course dmullinex objected stating that my argument was “mystifying,” however, he gave no rebuttal other than that assertion.
2. Proper names (e.g. Sam or Meg) have a minimal representation in excess of one bit.
So no proper name can consist of a single symbol? What is a bit? What is the proper name of a bit? Is a bit a representation? How many bits does it take to represent one bit?
4. Therefore if God exists, God’s mind contains representations whose length exceeds one bit.
How does one measure the length of a representation? Is God a proper name? Does God know his own name(s)?
5. A representation in excess of one bit is composed of multiple (two or more) parts.
What is a representation? Do representations have parts? Are representations composed of bits?
A proper name tells us which thing is in question.
Is God not sure which name applies to who?
Is “Meg” or “Sam” a proper name? There are many Megs and many Sams. I say that neither Meg nor Sam is a proper name.
I’d deny that premise. But what does it mean to know a language?
Can I know English without a representation of all the rules of English within my mind?
Any omniscient entity that knows a language has a representation of all the rules of that language within his/her mind.
CannuckianYankee:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....-for-evil/
Mung,
I think it’s vital here to point out what Wiki referenced from Alvin Plantinga in the article you cited re Dawkin’s Ultimate 747 Gambit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.....747_gambit
“Plantinga concludes that the argument, to be valid, would require materialism to be true and, since materialism is a vision not compatible with traditional theology, the argument turns out to be a fallacy of begging the question – in order to accept the argument as valid and the conclusion of the non-existence of God, you must require His non-existence since the beginning, in the premise.”
Thanks jdnafl. (A very complex name simplified). 🙂
To turn your question round, vjtorley, how could a mind not require something brain-like?
It seems to me that this is what Dave Mullenix has done – has demonstrated that if we release God from the requirement of storing and accessing information (which is at least one of the properties of a brain), then in what sense are we left with a mind?
I’d put it differently, myself: I’d say, if we release God from the requirement of simulating the outputs of actions ahead of time, and deciding on actions in the light of those simulations (which is how I would define “intention”) then in what sense can the God we’d be left with intend anything?
Of course the rebuttal to that is: if God is omniscient, then no forward model is required, and if God is beyond time, the concept is irrelevant anyway.
That’s essentially the answer I gave for about 50 years, minus my earliest ones (I was quite early on to the concept of infinity though!).
Then it dawned on me: what am I actually saying here? Does the God that describes mean anything at all?
I’m not convinced it does. It seems to me that all I’ve done is described God as nothing. My description exists – but is there left any sense in which God does?
(Yes, is my answer, but Not-As-We-Know-It :))
Once again, an atheist’s contribution to theology is to demonstrate that he is a very poor theologian.
His argument that God, by virtue of being more complex than life, cannot be an acceptable explanation for life, is merely his own opinion. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has rebutted this notion: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
The theist need demonstate only that atheism contradicts what we observe.
I think Dawkins does argue thet God is an inadequate explanation for complexity becaued a designer must be more complex that his design. I think that this holds true in the cosmos we live in. Christian theists hold that God does not inhabit our cosmos, our cosmos subsists in Him. We cannot apply rules of cause and effect to someone outside our rule based cosmos, and more than a character in a computer game can apply the rules of the game to the humans outside cyberspace.
sorry for the typos
Since God can, pretty much by definition, do six impossible things before breakfast, arguments purporting to show the impossibility or unlikelihood of gods are rarely good arguments. There is invariably a way around them (God exists outside of Time, God is omniscient etc etc).
I find that atheism doesn’t need an argument. It is the default position until it can be demonstrated that any gods exist.
Lizzie,
“how could a mind not require something brain-like?”
When a mind is more than simply the internal workings of a brain. If you assume that only brains provide awareness, then you are back to Plantinga’s (see 24) issue with the a priori assumption of materialism.
You and dmullinex require materialism to be true for your arguments to be true. I hate to point this out, but that is a question begged to the extreme.
Driver,
“I find that atheism doesn’t need an argument. It is the default position until it can be demonstrated that any gods exist.”
I find that a person making such arguments hasn’t done much thought on why atheism is true, let alone on why God can’t exist. If you can’t demonstrate atheism to be true, it isn’t a default argument.
as to this statement:
‘We cannot apply rules of cause and effect to someone outside our rule based cosmos’
Actually inferring to a ’cause’ is very important for the Theistic position:
============
notes:
This following experiment extended the double slit experiment to show that the ‘spooky actions’, for instantaneous quantum wave collapse, happen regardless of any considerations for time or distance i.e. The following experiment shows that quantum actions are ‘universal and instantaneous’:
Wheeler’s Classic Delayed Choice Experiment:
Excerpt: Now, for many billions of years the photon is in transit in region 3. Yet we can choose (many billions of years later) which experimental set up to employ – the single wide-focus, or the two narrowly focused instruments. We have chosen whether to know which side of the galaxy the photon passed by (by choosing whether to use the two-telescope set up or not, which are the instruments that would give us the information about which side of the galaxy the photon passed). We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles “have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy,” so to speak. Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago. So it seems that time has nothing to do with effects of quantum mechanics. And, indeed, the original thought experiment was not based on any analysis of how particles evolve and behave over time – it was based on the mathematics. This is what the mathematics predicted for a result, and this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory.
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bot.....choice.htm
And of course all this leads us back to this question. “What does our conscious observation have to do with anything in collapsing the wave function of the photon in the double slit experiment and in the universe?”, and furthermore “What is causing the quantum waves to collapse from their ‘higher dimension’ in the first place since we humans are definitely not the ones who are causing the photon waves to collapse to their ‘uncertain 3D wave/particle’ state?” With the refutation of the materialistic ‘hidden variable’ argument and with the patent absurdity of the materialistic ‘Many-Worlds’ hypothesis, then I can only think of one sufficient explanation for quantum wave collapse to photon;
Psalm 118:27
God is the LORD, who hath shown us light:,,,
===========
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Max Planck – The Father Of Quantum Mechanics – Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944)
Colossians 1:17
“He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
=====================
Does God Exist? – Argument From The Origin Of Nature – Kirk Durston – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4171846/
The First Cause Must Be Different From All Other Causes – T.G. Peeler
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-358648
Einstein’s general relativity equation has now been extended to confirm not only did matter and energy have a beginning in the Big Bang, but space-time also had a beginning. i.e. The Big Bang was an absolute origin of space-time, matter-energy, and as such demands a cause which transcends space-time, matter-energy.
“Every solution to the equations of general relativity guarantees the existence of a singular boundary for space and time in the past.”
(Hawking, Penrose, Ellis) – 1970
In conjunction with the mathematical, and logical, necessity of an ‘Uncaused Cause’ to explain the beginning of the universe, in philosophy it has been shown that,,,
“The ‘First Mover’ is necessary for change occurring at each moment.”
Michael Egnor – Aquinas’ First Way
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....first.html
I find this centuries old philosophical argument, for the necessity of a ‘First Mover’ accounting for change occurring at each moment, to be validated by quantum mechanics. This is since the possibility for the universe to be considered a self-sustaining ‘closed loop’ of cause and effect is removed with the refutation of the ‘hidden variable’ argument, as first postulated by Einstein, in entanglement experiments. (A. Aspect) As well, there also must be a sufficient transcendent cause (God/First Mover) to explain quantum wave collapse for ‘each moment’ of the universe.(J. Wheeler)
It is interesting to note that materialists, instead of honestly dealing with the obvious theistic implications for ’cause’ as to quantum wave collapse, will many times invoke Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation, also referred to as decoherence, when dealing with quantum mechanics. Yet this ‘solution’ ends up creating profound absurdities of logic rather than providing any rational solution:
Quantum mechanics
Excerpt: The Everett many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a multiverse composed of mostly independent parallel universes.[39] This is not accomplished by introducing some new axiom to quantum mechanics, but on the contrary by removing the axiom of the collapse of the wave packet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
Perhaps some may say that Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation of infinite parallel universes is not so absurd after all, if so,, then in some other parallel universe in which you also live, Elvis just so happens to be president of the United states, and you just so happen to come to the opposite conclusion, in that parallel universe, that Many Worlds is in fact absurd! For me, I find that type of ‘flexible thinking’, stemming from Many Worlds, to be completely absurd!!! Moreover, that one example from Many Worlds, of Elvis being President, is just small potatoes to the levels of absurdity that we would actually be witnessing if Many Worlds were the truth for how reality was constructed.
=======================
Logic also dictates ‘a decision’ must have been made, by the ‘transcendent, eternal, infinite information’ from the primary timeless (eternal) reality ‘It’ inhabits, in order to purposely create a temporal reality with highly specified, irreducible complex, parameters from a infinite set of possibilities in the proper sequential order. Thus this infinite transcendent information, which is the primary reality of our reality, is shown to be alive by yet another line of evidence besides the necessity for a ‘first mover’ to explain quantum wave collapse.
The First Cause Must Be A Personal Being – William Lane Craig – video
http://www.metacafe.com/w/4813914
=========================
God of Wonders – music video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CBNE25rtnE
CY: indeed, but the reverse is also true: for mind-brain duality to be true you require that it is possible for mind to exist independently of brains!
In other words, there isn’t really an objective way of deciding whether mind-brain duality is true or not.
So we are reduced to Occam’s Razor – or faith.
Brains seem to explain minds.
Why posit anything else?
CY: most atheist don’t assert that God doesn’t exist, but that there is no reason to believe God does exist.
My position is actually “strong atheism” – I assert that God (as usually described) doesn’t exist. That’s because the only meaningful answer I could provide to the question “why is there anything rather than nothing” would require that something intended there to be anything rather than nothing. And intention seems to me to require material processes.
So, if the placeholder entity that I sometimes call “theta” that is the answer to the question “why is there something rather than nothing” cannot have the property of being intentional, then I don’t recognise it either as anything that I would want to call “God”.
Because “God”, if worthy of worship, has to be good, right? And how can a non-intentional entity be good?
Good, on the other hand, does exist in the world, and is worthy of worship IMO 🙂
CY, I don’t believe in things which have not been demonstrated to exist. That is a default epistemological position. I’m not much interested in proving that gods can’t exist. Nor am I very much interested in someone showing that gods are possible. I would become interested in the question once someone could show that gods do exist.
My position on gods is the same as yours on all other things that have not been demonstrated to exist. In fact, my position on gods is probably the same as yours on most gods.
as to:
‘Brains seem to explain minds.
Why posit anything else?’
Really??? well let’s see why,,,
Quantum mind–body problem
Parallels between quantum mechanics and mind/body dualism were first drawn by the founders of quantum mechanics including Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, and Eugene Wigner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.....dy_problem
Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger by Richard Conn Henry – Physics Professor – John Hopkins University
Excerpt: Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist). (Dr. Henry’s referenced experiment and paper – “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007 – “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.html
The Mind and Materialist Superstition – Six “conditions of mind” that are irreconcilable with materialism:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....super.html
Genesis 2:7
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
,,, as well quantum non-local information, which is not reducible to any space-time matter-energy cause is found to be ‘inside’ (if it be proper to say that) our brains:
Mind-Brain Interaction and Science Fiction (Quantum connection) – Jeffrey Schwartz & Michael Egnor – audio
http://intelligentdesign.podom.....8_39-08_00
Quantum Coherence and Consciousness – Scientific Proof of ‘Mind’ – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/6266865/
Particular quote of note from preceding video;
“Wolf Singer Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Frankfurt) has found evidence of simultaneous oscillations in separate areas of the cortex, accurately synchronized in phase as well as frequency. He suggests that the oscillations are synchronized from some common source, but the actual source has never been located.”
James J. Hurtak, Ph.D. – Ph.D. on non-local consciousness
f/n;
Study suggests precognition may be possible – November 2010
Excerpt: A Cornell University scientist has demonstrated that psi anomalies, more commonly known as precognition, premonitions or extra-sensory perception (ESP), really do exist at a statistically significant level.
http://www.physorg.com/news/20.....ition.html
Scientific Evidence That Mind Effects Matter – Random Number Generators – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4198007
I once asked a evolutionist, after showing him the preceding experiment, “Since you ultimately believe that the ‘god of random chance’ produced everything we see around us, what in the world is my mind doing pushing your god around?”
and quantum non-local information, which is not reducible to any space-time matter-energy constraints, is also found to be in every DNA and protein molecule of our bodies:
Quantum Information/Entanglement In DNA & Protein Folding – short video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5936605/
The ‘Fourth Dimension’ Of Living Systems
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1Gs_qvlM8-7bFwl9rZUB9vS6SZgLH17eOZdT4UbPoy0Y
It is interesting to note that this quantum information which is found on a massive scale in our body, and which is not reducible to matter-energy time-space, is ‘conserved’:
Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time – March 2011
Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
http://www.physorg.com/news/20.....tally.html
Thus giving very strong support to this ‘transition’ from the 3-Dimension lower dimension to the higher ‘eternal’ dimension:
It is also very interesting to point out that the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, reported in many Near Death Experiences(NDEs), is also corroborated by Special Relativity when considering the optical effects for traveling at the speed of light. Please compare the similarity of the optical effect, noted at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape around the direction of travel as an observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, with the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ reported in very many Near Death Experiences:
Traveling At The Speed Of Light – Optical Effects – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5733303/
The NDE and the Tunnel – Kevin Williams’ research conclusions
Excerpt: I started to move toward the light. The way I moved, the physics, was completely different than it is here on Earth. It was something I had never felt before and never felt since. It was a whole different sensation of motion. I obviously wasn’t walking or skipping or crawling. I was not floating. I was flowing. I was flowing toward the light. I was accelerating and I knew I was accelerating, but then again, I didn’t really feel the acceleration. I just knew I was accelerating toward the light. Again, the physics was different – the physics of motion of time, space, travel. It was completely different in that tunnel, than it is here on Earth. I came out into the light and when I came out into the light, I realized that I was in heaven.(Barbara Springer)
Near Death Experience – The Tunnel, The Light, The Life Review – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4200200/
============
“I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.”
Albert Einstein – The Einstein Factor – Reader’s Digest
“The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality. Light, you see, is outside of time, a fact of nature proven in thousands of experiments at hundreds of universities. I don’t pretend to know how tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday. But at the speed of light they actually and rigorously do. Time does not pass.”
Richard Swenson – More Than Meets The Eye, Chpt. 12
Experimental confirmation of Time Dilation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.....nfirmation
It is very interesting to note that this strange higher dimensional, eternal, framework for time, found in special relativity, finds corroboration in Near Death Experience testimonies:
‘In the ‘spirit world,,, instantly, there was no sense of time. See, everything on earth is related to time. You got up this morning, you are going to go to bed tonight. Something is new, it will get old. Something is born, it’s going to die. Everything on the physical plane is relative to time, but everything in the spiritual plane is relative to eternity. Instantly I was in total consciousness and awareness of eternity, and you and I as we live in this earth cannot even comprehend it, because everything that we have here is filled within the veil of the temporal life. In the spirit life that is more real than anything else and it is awesome. Eternity as a concept is awesome. There is no such thing as time. I knew that whatever happened was going to go on and on.’
Mickey Robinson – Near Death Experience testimony
‘When you die, you enter eternity. It feels like you were always there, and you will always be there. You realize that existence on Earth is only just a brief instant.’
Dr. Ken Ring – has extensively studied Near Death Experiences
Driver:
what about minds?
do they exist? as in, what are you using to interact with us? why should we take what you type in seriously, if it is a product wholly produced and controlled by the chance and necessity that made you a jumped up bit of pond scum by way of some ape with a bigger brain than necessary to forage, then by unconscious psycho-social forces that are generally delusional? are you anything beyond one more delusion?
if only brains exist, reason dissolves into absurdity. why
then, look at the evidence of mind beyond and behind the cosmos.
next, do rights exist?(if you answer no, we already know you to be a menace to civil society.)
if so, duties exist as a right is a legitimate expectation that others have a duty to one with rights, to respect life, liberty, reputation, etc.
evolutionary materialism has in it no foundational is that can ground the ought implied by duties. it is absurd through being inescapably amoral.
the only is that rises to that level, is the good God who is author of the cosmos. why
Atheism — despite the clever talking point that the Darwin zealot, new atheist fever swamp drums beat out so intoxicatingly — is not the default, it is a key part of a worldview subject to comparative difficulties on factual adequacy, coherence and explanatory power.
one that is incoherent, factually inadequate and severely lacking in explanatory power.
one that is severely challenged to ground virtue and even civility.
g’day
GEM of TKI
Driver,
What is your basis for the charge that God has not been demonstrated to exist? “Demonstrated” is a rather loaded term. If you’re going to say that God has not been demonstrated by natural processes to exist, then you’re still begging the question.
To say that atheism is the default position or argument is to brush over the arguments for theism.
I think that what you’re really saying in not so many words is that “a priori materialism is my preferable position.” Fine, but you have not “demonstrated” that such a position is warranted.
But nor, Driver would no doubt say, CY, have theists.
Why should theism be a priori?
Why should either?
The thing is, that those who think that mind-body duality is evidenced by our own experience of mind have reason to think the duality is supported by evidence.
But, equally, those who think it isn’t, think there’s no reason to think that mind doesn’t arise from material forces.
In other words, argument really doesn’t get us anywhere!
Or, not this one.
Similarly:
kf thinks (and I understand why) that because mind could arise from Chance and Necessity, then our own experience of existing must be a delusion.
But that argument can easily be turned round: if we experience existing, and we have no evidence of any processes in the universe other than Chance and Necessity, then we can infer that Chance and Necessity can create the experience of existing.
My own position is that the idea that materialism is reductionist is flawed. Positing that we are the product of material processes (including energy of course), does not, IMO, require that we are no more than those material processes.
A whole can be greater, and have very different properties, than the sum of the parts.
Or, if not, why not?
KF,
Thank you for your considered post.
So what is your evidence that a god or gods exist? That you take me seriously? I’m flattered.
That you are incredulous of natural processes producing humans does not persuade me to abandon my atheism. You know what a God of the gaps argument is, of course.
I think the pertinent part of the text you linked to is this
This makes the assumption that accurate reasoning about the world perceived by our senses is not beneficial. I think we can safely grant that accurate reasoning would be beneficial!
I’m sorry – that’s a long text you linked to and I couldn’t see evidence of a mind there. Could you summarise this evidence of a mind?
“Ought” is grounded in the community. Ultimately, moral duties and rights are grounded in our similarity, expressed through our capacity for reflexive thought, especially empathy.
Rights are certainly functional. The challenge for the theist is to demonstrate that they have a genuine transcendent existence.
Erratum (me at #42
ouch
Driver
You obviously have not followed out and worked through the linked.
Turnabout talking points are no answer in this context.
Do your homework, then come back on comparative difficulties, please.
GEM of TKI
Dr Liddle, please re-examine the linked, my point is that a materialist position can neither ground the credibility of mind nor the basis for morality. You may think and you may do moral things, but you cannot ground them in the system. G
CY,
The problem of inference to the supernatural and Hume’s problem of miracles are genuine problems in this universe, for sure. That is hardly an argument for the existence of gods.
It should be possible for any god to create a universe in which they could unambiguously demonstrate their presence.
KF, if you want to raise a specific point then please do so.
We all would love to have every word of our blogs read, but this is not the way to go about it!
In order to have a conversation it is necessary to be reasonably concise. If you don’t wish to further your points with less than 1000 words per point, then I understand, but I will have to step out of the conversation. I have no desire to research and write an essay at this time.
My hat’s off to Mullenix. He has refuted Plato’s God.
“Absolutely simple?” Please—show me the chapter and verse. And no babbling about “classical theism,” which is nothing more than a bad mixture of Classicism and Christianity. There is no Classicism in the Bible—none. You will not find any Greek concepts of value, including the notion that God is “absolutely simple.” You will not find one single verse that identifies intellect as “the good” or the essence of God (as does “classical theism”). You also will not find the divide between sense and intellect, immanence and transcendence, nothingness and being that naturally follows from equating intellect with the good.
God is made up of “bits”? Who says? Doug Hofstadter? How hard is it to understand that the thought you have in your mind right now—assuming you have one—is not made up of “bits”? Do we have to resurrect Spencer and have him paddle you all over again for your sloppy use of language? Nor is it “absolutely simple,” by the way. Terms like “bits” and “absolutely simple” are nothing more than symbolic representations of something that exceeds the capacity of intellect for description. You have not, as you and the other Doug seem to think, moved beyond the problem of symbolic representation—or bait and switch—by using computer language to characterize ideas. You have simply made it more hip, and therefore more trite.
Let’s take a look at “absolutely simple,” shall we? This characterization of God comes from the force of resistance to existence found in our unhappiness. Plato totalized this resistance as “the good,” which is how he arrived at the bizarre notion that God is absolutely simple—pure intellect, utterly devoid of the imperfections of matter, or “bits”; pure negation. His pupil objected to this characterization. He clearly understood Lizzie’s point that pure negation is nothingness, so he tried to save the equation of intellect with the good by using the concept of reciprocal “causes” to represent the good as pure action. Classical philosophy was divided between the idea that God is “absolutely simple” and that he is transcendently complex. And “classical theism” is divided in exactly the same way (Augustine and Thomas Aquinas).
Note to Doug: Nihilism happened. “God is dead.” Classical theism, with its foolish blend of theology and Hellenism, has been annihilated, never to return. So you can stop beating a dead horse now. Hey, I’ve got an idea: why don’t see what you can do with Ecclesiastes and Job. It’s only fair to warn you, however—you won’t find a God there that you can caricature.
kf:
I have read your blog post on your ideas about mind-brain duality, thank you for the link.
Although I find much to agree with, there are some points on which I profoundly disagree, but perhaps those would be best discussed on another thread!
Perhaps you could post it as an OP? Or have you already done so?
Cheers
Lizzie
EvilSnack: “The theist need demonstate only that atheism contradicts what we observe.”
Quite true.
And one of those demonstrations is that if we accept as a premise that God is not, then we arrive at the conclusion that we cannot know truth and we cannot reason … and, ultimately, at the conclusion that we ourselves are not (and cannot be) (see here and here). Yet, here we are, and we do know truth and we do reason. Thus, the premise is false; thus the denial of the premise is true.
It’s not at all difficult to irrefutably demonstrate that atheism is not only false, but cannot be true, And, since atheism cannot be true, then here never can be a good argument for it.
And thus, one can reasonably expect that most, or even all, arguments for atheism will contain within them their own refutation. The only interesting question about any argument for atheism is, then, how cleverly has its presenter hidden the self-refutation?
One problem, it seems to me, with discussions of this kind, is that we are not all talking about the same God.
So it is easy for theists (and I’ve done it myself) to respond: “oh, but that’s not what God is/is like/the God of Christianity/the Abrahamic God” or whatever.
The value in these conversations, it seems to me, is (to echo Aquinas) that it helps us see what God is not
As allanius says, dmullenix has refuted Plato’s God.
Perhaps we can consider Zeus, Thor and others refuted as well.
Which one remains?
Or rather, what is the God that remains like?
This is my problem – having gone through all the things that God cannot be, I ended up with nothing God-like at all.
But that’s because think that minds (and intentions) are caused by brains, not the other way round Yes, I know you disagree kf!
You say:
“Some materialists then suggest that consciousness is an “emergent” property of matter in the brain in action; one dependent on that matter for its existence and behaviour. But, “emergence” is itself immediately problematic: is “emergence” a euphemism for “Voila: poof!” . . . i.e “magic”?”
No, I don’t think it is a euphemism for magic.
I think its perfectly straightforward – the properties of whole things have properties that can be quite different from the properties of their parts. An ocean wave is an obvious example, but so is a living human brain, I would argue, and one of those properties is mind.
You simply start from the premise that reason cannot arise from material sources and then affirm that as your conclusion!
Driver: “You simply start from the premise that reason cannot arise from material sources and then affirm that as your conclusion!”
Foolish, foolish man! I do nothing of the sort; you simply assert as a premise that I do, and then affirm the premise as your conclusion; without, clearly, having read, much less tried to understand, the argument.
When you decide to be reasonable and rational, perhaps we can talk. But, so long as you hold yourself free to assert just anything, know that I do not waste my time with fools.
Driver “Since God can, pretty much by definition, do six impossible things before breakfast, …”
As I said before I’d seen this tidbit, the man is a fool — he is willfully ingorant; he will not receive correction of his ignorance; he is intellectually dishonest (which is worse than being merely a liar).
BA77: “It is interesting to note that materialists, instead of honestly dealing with the obvious theistic implications for ’cause’ as to quantum wave collapse, will many times invoke Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation, also referred to as decoherence, when dealing with quantum mechanics. Yet this ‘solution’ ends up creating profound absurdities of logic rather than providing any rational solution …”
Materialists/atheists will *always* retreat into absurdity and irrationality when pressed decisively, so as to protect their God-denial from serious evaluation. Their much self-touted commitment to ‘science’ and rationality is but a self-serving veneer; they can (and will) chuck it in an instant.
Ilion,
Your implicit premise here is that material sources are not capable of reason. The error is thinking that since a “change of state some matter” (actually electrical activity) determines that any entity thinks a thought therefore it cannot also be the case that the logical relationship between two thoughts prompts a thought. Not only is this assumption not necessarily true, by analogy we can see that it is probably false. For, it is very like saying that because a computer is material it cannot perform logic operations.
I love this site sometimes!
It is, for example, I will note, impossible to exist outside of space and time, unless you are a god.
Driver why should you consider the fact that you yourself exist to be any less ‘weird’ than the proposition that a highest transcendent Being (God) exists? Moreover Driver, to put your burden of proof in perspective, exactly which materialistic parameter is going to prevent God from existing???
notes:
,,,Using the materialist same line of reasoning for an infinity of multiverses to explain the extreme fine-tuning of this one we can surmise; If it is infinitely possible for God to exist then He, of 100% certainty, must exist no matter how small the probability is of His existence in one of these other infinity of universes, and since He certainly must exist, then all possibilities in all universes automatically become subject to Him since He is, by definition, All Powerful. To clearly illustrate the absurdity of what the materialists now consider their cutting edge science: The materialistic conjecture of an infinity of universes to explain the fine tuning of this one also insures the 100% probability of the existence of Pink Unicorns no matter how small the probability is of them existing. In fact a infinity of universes insures the existence of an infinity of Pink Unicorns an infinite number of times. Thus it is self-evident the materialists have painted themselves into a inescapable corner of logical absurdities in trying to find an escape from the Theistic implications we are finding for the fine-tuning of this universe.
The preceding argument has actually been made into a formal philosophical proof:
Ontological Argument For God From The Many Worlds Hypothesis – William Lane Craig – video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4784641
God Is Not Dead Yet – William Lane Craig – Page 4
The ontological argument. Anselm’s famous argument has been reformulated and defended by Alvin Plantinga, Robert Maydole, Brian Leftow, and others. God, Anselm observes, is by definition the greatest being conceivable. If you could conceive of anything greater than God, then that would be God. Thus, God is the greatest conceivable being, a maximally great being. So what would such a being be like? He would be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, and he would exist in every logically possible world. But then we can argue:
1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
7. Therefore, God exists.
Now it might be a surprise to learn that steps 2–7 of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God’s existence is even possible, then he must exist. So the whole question is: Is God’s existence possible? The atheist has to maintain that it’s impossible that God exists. He has to say that the concept of God is incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor or a round square. But the problem is that the concept of God just doesn’t appear to be incoherent in that way. The idea of a being which is all-powerful, all knowing, and all-good in every possible world seems perfectly coherent. And so long as God’s existence is even possible, it follows that God must exist.
http://www.christianitytoday.c.....ml?start=4
I like the following concluding comment about the ontological argument from the Dr. Plantinga video:
“God then is the Being that couldn’t possibly not exit.”
Ontological Argument – Dr. Plantinga (3:50 minute mark)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCXvVcWFrGQ
Here are some more resources outlining the absurdity of the multiverse conjecture:
The Multiverse Gods, final part – Robert Sheldon – June 2011
Excerpt: And so in our long journey through the purgatory of multiverse-theory, we discover as we previously discovered for materialism, there are two solutions, and only two. Either William Lane Craig is correct and multiverse-theory is just another ontological proof a personal Creator, or we follow Nietzsche into the dark nihilism of the loss of reason. Heaven or hell, there are no other solutions.
http://procrustes.blogtownhall....._part.thtm
EL: “In other words, there isn’t really an objective way of deciding whether mind-brain duality is true or not.
So we are reduced to Occam’s Razor – or faith.
Brains seem to explain minds.”
This is not actually true (and was shown false centuries ago). However, your faith-testimony is surely touching … at least, to other materialists/atheists.
There is a reason that people like Paul and Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett assert that minds and thoughts and consciousness are illusions (never mind, for now, that this assertion is its own refutation) — they *understand* what logically follows from materialism and God-denial, and they are simply asserting the inescapable conclusion of their premise, neverminding that the conclusion is patently absurd.
You, on the other hand, imagine that you can side-step the conclusion by simply denying that it follows inescapably.
===
IF “brains explain minds” THEN brains also explain thoughts and propositions and reasoning (*) about the same. In other terms, to assert that “brains explain minds” is to assert that physical brain states explain and cause thoughts and propositions and reasoning about thoughts and propositions.
IF “brains explain minds” THEN changes in physical brain states — and never the content/meaning of the thoughts and propositions — explain and cause one’s mental movement from ‘Thought A’ to ‘Thought B.’ That is, one does not, and cannot, “conclude” ‘Thought B’ by virtue of an understanding of the content/meaning of ‘Thought A;’ but rather, one has only imagined (another word that cannot fit into this materialistic world-view) that one has concluded ‘Thought B.’ For, as a physical brain state caused one to “think” ‘Thought A’ so too a different physical brain state caused one to “think” ‘Thought B’ — but, one might as readily have been caused to “think” ‘Thought C.’
Materialism/atheism *denies* that thought, and reasoning, are even possible (**).
(*) In truth, one needs to put scare-quotes around the words ‘thoughts’ and ‘propositions’ and ‘reasoning,’ for the assertion that “brains explain minds” denies that these things even exist.
(**) Mind you, EL, I am confident that you will not admit this truth; nor do I particularly care that you do not — I have no great objection to laughing at and mocking your self-chosen foolishness.
ba77,
The last time I responded to you, you replied by calling me a liar while failing to refute any of the points I had brought up. You yourself have closed the channel of communication between us. If you are serious about resuming the conversation then I trust you will show you truly wish to do so by actually responding in that other thread to my points in post 47.
Driver, the fact that you MAY believe your ‘excuses’ were coherent, does not make them any less of the superficial lies that they actually were.
Moreover Driver, if you were truly living consistent in your materialistic/atheistic worldview, you would deny that absolute transcendent truth actually existed, thus why should you be offended at being called a liar, when you, if you were consistent, would realize that truth does not actually exist and being called a liar would be meaningless???
notes:
What is the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism? (‘inconsistent identity’ of cause leads to failure of absolute truth claims for materialists) (Alvin Plantinga) – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yNg4MJgTFw
Can atheists trust their own minds? – William Lane Craig On Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byN38dyZb-k
“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” – Charles Darwin – Letter To William Graham – July 3, 1881
It is also interesting to point out that this ‘inconsistent identity’, pointed out by Plantinga, which leads to the failure of neo-Darwinists to make absolute truth claims for their beliefs, is what also leads to the failure of neo-Darwinists to be able to account for objective morality, in that neo-Darwinists cannot maintain a consistent identity towards a cause for objective morality;
The Knock-Down Argument Against Atheist Sam Harris – William Lane Craig – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvDyLs_cReE
“Atheists may do science, but they cannot justify what they do. When they assume the world is rational, approachable, and understandable, they plagiarize Judeo-Christian presuppositions about the nature of reality and the moral need to seek the truth.
As an exercise, try generating a philosophy of science from hydrogen coming out of the big bang. It cannot be done. It’s impossible even in principle, because philosophy and science presuppose concepts that are not composed of particles and forces. They refer to ideas that must be true, universal, necessary and certain.” Creation-Evolution Headlines
God does not need a brain.
God is not in need of being informed about anything.
EL: “The thing is, that those who think that mind-body duality is evidenced by our own experience of mind have reason to think the duality is supported by evidence.
.
But, equally, those who think it isn’t, think there’s no reason to think that mind doesn’t arise from material forces.
.
In other words, argument really doesn’t get us anywhere!
.
Or, not this one.”
Well, no.
The truth of the matter is that rational argument has long ago (as in, thousands of years) demonstrated the falsity of materialism … and there will always be persons who, some few due to ignorance, most due to intellectual dishonesty, refuse to acknowledge this truth.
ba77,
If I had lied, you would have been able to point out where I lied.
There is nothing more to be said between us.
But alas Driver, this is getting interesting, do you believe that absolute transcendent truth exists? If so, how do you justify it to your materialistic/atheistic basis? i.e. If you, if you were consistent, cannot explain the existence of absolute transcendent truth, how can you believe in the existence of lies? i.e. The very fact that you are offended at the notion of being called a liar testifies to the reality of a transcendent dimension which has precedence over this dimension.
Nuclear Strength Apologetics – Presuppositional Apologetics – video
http://www.answersingenesis.or.....pologetics
BRUCE GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – October 2010
Excerpt: The physical universe is causally incomplete and therefore neither self-originating nor self-sustaining. The world of space, time, matter and energy is dependent on a reality that transcends space, time, matter and energy. This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world. Neither is it the case that “nothing” is unstable, as Mr. Hawking and others maintain. Absolute nothing cannot have mathematical relationships predicated on it, not even quantum gravitational ones. Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency – a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them. This is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.,,, the evidence for string theory and its extension, M-theory, is nonexistent; and the idea that conjoining them demonstrates that we live in a multiverse of bubble universes with different laws and constants is a mathematical fantasy. What is worse, multiplying without limit the opportunities for any event to happen in the context of a multiverse – where it is alleged that anything can spontaneously jump into existence without cause – produces a situation in which no absurdity is beyond the pale.
For instance, we find multiverse cosmologists debating the “Boltzmann Brain” problem: In the most “reasonable” models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science.
http://www.washingtontimes.com.....arguments/
What Would The World Look Like If Atheism Were Actually True? – video
http://www.metacafe.com/w/5486757/
This following site is a easy to use, and understand, interactive website that takes the user through what is termed ‘Presuppositional apologetics’. The website clearly shows that our use of the laws of logic, mathematics, science and morality cannot be accounted for unless we believe in a God who guarantees our perceptions and reasoning are trustworthy in the first place.
Proof That God Exists – easy to use interactive website
http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/index.php
Can atheists trust their own minds? – William Lane Craig On Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byN38dyZb-k
Driver: “ There is nothing more to be said between us.”
That’s because you’re intellectually dishonest, such that you will not understand what has been said.
Or, perhaps, you’re simply intellectually deficient, such that you cannot understand what has been said. (Though I’m sure this isn’t the problem.) Still, if you want to go with this option, then it would be best if you stop torturing yourself by trying to dispute matters which are too deep for you.
The only other potential explanation is that you lack some key information, such that you fail to understand what has been said. However, in this instance, this isn’t a live option, since you are being given the information, yet clearly refuse to receive it.
===
There are no other options to offer as a general explanation for why any person persists to asserting what is false, but these three:
1) the person simply lacks the intellect to understand the truth of the mater;
2) the person misunderstands or lacks some logically prior necessary knowledge, possession or understanding of which would allow him to recognize the truth of the matter and so correct his error;
3) the person simply is uninterested in understanding (or stating) the truth of the matter.
EL said; “But that argument can easily be turned round: if we experience existing, and we have no evidence of any processes in the universe other than Chance and Necessity, then we can infer that Chance and Necessity can create the experience of existing.”
You mean, we have no evidence of anything other than chance and necessity if we first assume our own intention, which we directly and empirically experience, is nothing more than an illusion generated by chance and necessity.
Ilion said: “The truth of the matter is that rational argument has long ago (as in, thousands of years) demonstrated the falsity of materialism … and there will always be persons who, some few due to ignorance, most due to intellectual dishonesty, refuse to acknowledge this truth.”
Which serves to show the power of free will, in that obvious truth, overwhelming evidence and necessary logical conclusions can all be summarily ignored by the will that chooses to believe otherwise.
Exactly, Meleagar — everyone *chooses* his beliefs.
Some persons (not all of whom are materialists/atheists) prefer to believe that belief “just happen” to one, that one has no options in whether to believe or disbelieve a thing. Such persons are ignorant on the matter … and, generally, willfully so.
Hi everyone.
I’ve been rather busy, so I haven’t had time to post until now. I’ll be addressing what I see as the key objections, one by one.
For now, I’d like to make one request: can we PLEASE keep this discussion civil. Calling someone a fool, a liar or willfully ignorant tends to create a rancorous atmosphere, so I’d like it to stop. There’s just no need for it.
There is also no “need” for truth, is there?
The demand for “civility” is the demand by Stockholm-syndromed worshippers of “niceness” (and of getting pats on the head from those who despise them) that the worshippers of truth join them in being mental prisoners to those who despise them.
No thanks.
I have *explained* why “intellectually dishonest” is appropriate in the instance. Mr Torley demands that I treat dishonesty as though it were truth. Mr Torley will also later state that this or that materialist is not being intellectually honest – he just won’t directly use the term; he’ll dance around the explicit term, but in the end, he will have made the same accusation, but without backing it up, as I have.
Elizabeth Liddle,
I’ve decided to address your comments first. They get right to the heart of the matter. You write:
You also add:
All right. By “God” I mean a Being whose nature it is to know and love perfectly. These two attributes I regard as fundamental and necessarily inter-twined: perfect knowledge and perfect love. It is these which ground God’s other attributes, including omnipotence, and which enable God to maintain the universe in being.
Your earlier question about God’s intentions goes to the heart of what we need a mind for. Here are some things that only a being with a mind can do:
1. Make rules – including the laws of nature. There would be no laws of nature if there were no God.
2. Follow rules – including moral rules. Keeping a promise, for instance, requires a mind.
3. Select the best option out of a range, the first time round. Fine tuning is a good illustration.
4. Make something that can perform a useful function – like ATP synthase.
5. Display an ongoing commitment to promoting someone’s good – i.e. love someone. Despite the evils we encounter in this world, for reasons we are often unable to grasp, most of us are at least dimly aware that God loves us, throughout it all.
6. Explain your actions – which is something crows don’t do regarding their impressive tool-making feats. God is perfectly capable of justifying himself, if He wishes to.
7. Express yourself in a language and hold a conversation with someone. God can certainly do that.
There are at least seven tasks, then, that God can do, if and only if He has a mind.
Now I’d like to ask: which of these tasks necessarily requires forward simulations? I can’t see any logical reason why any of them do.
You ask: how can God be said to intend anything without the need to plan ahead of time?
First, even if God is outside time, God still needs to choose an appropriate means to achieve His ends. Thus there is certainly a logical order of priority in God’s actions, even if there isn’t a temporal one. And what is to prevent God from planning His actions outside time? “Forward” doesn’t have to mean “temporally forward”; it can mean “logically forward”.
Second, intention isn’t always about selecting the right means to achieve a given end. Sometimes we do make a choice of ends. Leonardo da Vinci could have chosen to devote himself entirely to art, or entirely to science, or to becoming a polymath. God could have chosen to make a very different world from ours – or no world at all.
The fact that God made a world in which human beings can exist – a world which, I might add, is still fundamentally good and beautiful, shows that God loves us, evil notwithstanding. But of course, there’s more to come – much more.
I imagine you’ll have something to say in response to this, but I won’t be able to respond for a few hours. Talk to you later, Elizabeth.
By the way, have you ever spoken to Dr. Edward Feser? He’d probably be able to straighten out your metaphysical and theological doubts better than I can. He’s an ex-atheist, I might add, and a very interesting guy.
Ilion:
But what of those who simply, and honestly, disagree with you? Do you consider the possibility that perhaps they may know something that you don’t, or that they may have spotted a flaw in an argument that you have missed?
Because I know I do, when people disagree with me. Obviously I start with reasonable confidence that I am right. As a friend of mine says: if I thought I was wrong I’d change my mind. But by the same token, I want to be able to change my mind if I find out I’m wrong. And I can’t do that if I don’t consider the possiblity that I might be.
Elizabeth,
I just remembered. Here is a good link to articles by J.R.Lucas on the immateriality of the mind – proving that the mind is not a computer:
http://www.angelfire.com/linux.....soul-godel
Feel free to peruse the other articles while you’re over there. There are more arguments against materialism here:
http://www.angelfire.com/linux.....-arguments
Meleager:
Right. It doesn’t matter whether you start off with the assumption of duality or a monist assumption – you end up with a circular arguments.
That should tell both sides, as it were, that there is something wrong with the problem statement.
But that argument can easily be turned round: if we experience existing, and we have no evidence of any processes in the universe other than Chance and Necessity, then we can infer that Chance and Necessity can create the experience of existing.
We have plenty of evidence of processes other than Chance and Necessity – and we have next to no evidence of “chance” in the relevant sense (unguided, unplanned, undirected by any mind, etc.)
Beyond that, the statement works in the assumption that ‘experience’ is something which needs to be created. But it’s entirely possible that ‘experience’ is itself fundamental. Or that the universe is, at rock-bottom, mind-like or even mental.
By your logic Driver, you have just proved God.
Driver: “It is, for example, I will note, impossible to exist outside of space and time, unless you are a god.”
The question becomes, what evidence do we have that anything exists beyond space-time? The answer is found in big bang cosmology. Where, as I’m sure you know, the universe had a beginning. The beginning of our universe is recognized as a singularity. Therefore the singularity event was the first cause of the universe, and thus the singularity event was outside space-time. By your logic, the singularity event is God.
Big bang cosmology refutes the materialist worldview.
As for the OP, I have to agree with those who aren’t too impressed with the original arguments.
I think classical theists will straightaway dismiss A1 as begging the question against them – the idea that God’s mind ‘represents’ or ‘interacts with bits’. Even William Lane Craig, who I’m pretty sure isn’t a classical theist, I recall as flatly objecting to the claim that mind/personhood requires temporality.
Likewise the same for argument 2: Casting God as an entity composed of bits is (as others have pointed out) making assumptions the theists and classical theists aren’t necessarily going to grant.
That said, I liked VJTorley’s replies – even as someone strongly sympathetic to classical theism, I admit there’s more varieties of theism out there, and I don’t dismiss all of them out of hand. I also recall Vox Day’s arguments against omniscience, for a position which seems close to VJTorley’s (in Vox’s case, basically, the idea that God can know what He wants to know whenever He wants to know it).
Ilion,
My reply to you (as opposed to my reply to bornagain77) was in post 57 above. Whether you want to engage with that post or talk about how intellectually dishonest you think I am is completely up to you. I fail to see what you gain from the latter course of action, but if it makes you happy then go for it.
Mung,
Thanks for your comments on the two arguments. I didn’t list all the criticisms that could be made of Dave Mullenix’s argument yesterday, for the simple reason that I ran out of time. You may have noticed that I often put my posts up at about 7:05 a.m. Japan time – which gives me just enough time to race downstairs, shave, have a shower, wolf down breakfast, and run like the wind for about 1.5 kilometers, to catch the 7:40 train. I’m pretty used to running straight after breakfast now – I’ve had years of practice.
Let’s get back to Dave’s Argument A.
Premise 2. Proper names (e.g. Sam or Meg) have a minimal representation in excess of one bit.
You write:
I thought about this objection too. You could have a one-bit name – but you couldn’t have one for each and every person on the planet. Most of us will be stuck with names of two or more bits.
A bit is just the smallest possible piece of information.
A bit is a representation. It doesn’t have a representation. It doesn’t have a proper name either, as far as I can tell.
Let’s continue with the argument.
Premise 4. Therefore if God exists, God’s mind contains representations whose length exceeds one bit.
You write:
I’m not sure whether all representations can or should be measured in bits. That’s an interesting question. Artistic representations don’t seem to be “bitty” (the Mona Lisa, for instance) – although one could make them so, if one wished.
However, names, I would say, require bits to represent them, regardless of which representational medium one chooses. There’s no simple way to represent each and every person’s name.
Is God a proper name? Personally, I don’t think so. I think it simply means a Being having a Divine nature – roughly, a necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Being.
Let’s continue.
Premise 5. A representation in excess of one bit is composed of multiple (two or more) parts.
You ask:
Concerning representations, see my comments above. Dave’s argument does not require all representations to contain bits; his argument only pertains to names. And no matter what medium we use – e.g. a sound file, a pictogram, or whatever – we’ll need to decompose it into bits in order to convert it into a name. Of course we could cheat and use a table – e.g. this tune stands for this name – but then we’d need bits to store the mappings in the table.
Names don’t have to be unique. They simply have to be suitably specific in ordinary contexts. We have a couple of Stephens on UD, but they usually distinguish themselves by adding an extra letter – Stephen A and Stephen B.
God is, of course, perfectly sure of everything. As I wrote above:
Now let’s have a look at Argument B.
Premise 2. Any entity that knows a language has a representation of all the rules of that language within his/her mind.
Your comment:
I agree, Mung. I’m sure I don’t know all the rules of English – there are surely some pragmatic rules that I’ve just never thought about. A typical speaker of a language knows the rules only by virtue of possessing the habits that speakers of that language have. However, he/she may not have drawn all the inferences that could be drawn from those habits. Often we know that something “sounds right” without knowing why. Some of us, of course, are fortunate enough to receive explicit instruction in grammar.
God, of course, cannot fail to draw implications, being omniscient, and must therefore know all the rules of any language, insofar as they have been clearly defined. There are of course many “gray areas”, such as the use of “they” for “he/she”, and so on.
EL: “But what of those who simply, and honestly, disagree with you? ”
But, of course! Simple, honest disagreement falls under option #2 (as listed in post # 70) “lack of understanding” or “lack of prerequisite knowledge.”
EL: “Do you consider the possibility that perhaps they may know something that you don’t, or that they may have spotted a flaw in an argument that you have missed?”
But, of course! Then *my* error would fall under option #2.
But simply asserting a flaw in my argument does not establish a flaw in my argument – all it establishes is the refusal of the asserter to follow the logic and find and acknowledge the truth of the matter.
To the general reader:
I do not explicitly put a name to someone’s intellectual dishonesty *simply* because he disagrees with me; the accusation follows after certain types of behavior. For that matter, I don’t even decide in my own mind that a person is intellectually dishonest absent behavior demonstrating it.
Look back over this thread and examine the behavior of ‘Driver’ toward the “theists” and the theistic arguments they have presented. Look at has first post directed at me (#53), before I had said anything at all to or about him.
It is his behavior which tips the scale from “honestly mistaken” to “intellectually dishonest.”
Deuce, Ilion and Mung,
This post is for you.
Deuce, you perceptively spotted an extra flaw in Dave’s argument (I was going to address it too, but owing to time constraints – see #85 above – I chose to focus my attack on the most critical weak point).
You focused on the premise:
You comment:
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and defend Dave. A very complex being wouldn’t be merely unlikely to come into existence; there is also a sense in which it is unlikely to exist, period. Why? Because it is contingent. Any composite being is contingent: it is fragile, and hence liable to break into parts. And a complex being would be all the more contingent – there are 101 things that could go wrong with it. Hence if God were complex, then His existence would be antecedently unlikely. Hence God has to be simple.
Well, it’s 7:05. Better stop now. Back in a few hours, everyone.
… to be more precise, his behavior tips the scale from the *presumption* of being honestly mistaken to the knowledge that he is intellectually dishonest.
Ilion: I’ll have a go at responding to this, as you have done me the courtesy of responding to my post.
You’ve referred to this several times – can you be specific? What was shown by whom several centuries ago?
Daniel Dennett does not assert that minds and thoughts and consciousness are illusions. Or, if he does, I’d appreciate a citation. Possibly the Churchlands do, I’m not so familiar with their work. If they do, then it seems to be a silly position to me because it would be, as you say, its own self-refutation.
Well, as I said, Daniel Dennett, to my knowledge, does not assert any such conclusion, and, IMO, that conclusion is not inescapable at all, for reasons I gave above, namely that the properties of a whole are often different from the properties of its parts. I think it’s idiotic and circular to call consciousness an “illusion”. How can something that doesn’t exist experience an illusion?
No, I’m not sidestepping it, but I certainly deny that it follows inescapably. I think the reasoning that leads to that conclusion is faulty. However, I think it’s faulty in a very fundamental way – I think the problem lies in the formulation of the problem itself, which is usually something like “how can material causes produce consciousness?”
I think the problem lies in regarding consciousness as a phenomenon rather than as a process. We tend to think of consciousness as a continuous stream of something (I think that is, indeed, an illusion, and demonstrably so), and as as a stream it is, indeed, very difficult to account for in material terms. However, if we let go the idea that consciousness is a stream of something – indeed, that it is a something at all, and instead regard it as a process by which we “become conscious OF something” then the problem suddenly becomes tractable. Note that I am not saying that consciousness is an illusion, but that the experience of continuous flow is, just as (my favorite metaphor) we could, if we didn’t know better, regard the fridge light as being on continuously. It is, effectively, because whenever we need it, it is on. I think it’s a good metaphor, because there is lots of evidence that that is just how consciousness works – because we are capable of being conscious of anything we need to be conscious of, without (mostly) having to search for the light switch, as it were, we can serially process the world while maintain the illusion that we are processing it in parallel. We summon the world, as it were, “on the fly” as and when we need various bits of it, but because all bits are available to us at all times, we are never aware missing the bits that we do not actually need at the present moment.
That’s a bit off-topic though. I’m happy to expand elsewhere sometime.
Yes. Although I would put it differently: brains make forward models of reality, and test those models against reality.
Well, no. In any case, I don’t think that “brain states cause one to think” exactly. I think the experience of thinking arises from brain processes, which is not quite the same thing. There’s a sense in which, if we consider brain activity as a Markov process, that any given brain state is determined by the previous brain state plus any additional input, but that doesn’t mean that the only cause of the subsequent brain state is the previous brain state plus new input. Those may be the proximal causes, but the distal causes run way way back. The reason “Thought A” leads to “Thought B” is not arbitrary. Thought A triggers Thought B for perfectly good reasons (Thought A might have been – “I wonder what time it is, and thought B might have been “yikes, I’m supposed to be somewhere else”) and those thoughts follow each other because they have been connected by the passage, if you will, of previous thoughts (Hebb’s Rule: What fires together, wires together). You are not the helpless passenger of your brain – you are what your brain does, and the thinking your brain produces are your thoughts, and they are yours because your brain is just as much a product of your thoughts and actions as your thoughts and actions are a product of your brain. The two things are not separate, but two aspects of the same thing – mind is what the brain does, and one of the things your brain “does” is “be you”! We even know which networks are involved in that process.
Well, no, it doesn’t.
No, it doesn’t.
Well, you can laugh all you like, but it remains my view that the conclusion that you think is inescapable from the proposition that brains explain minds is not, in fact, inescapable, but only seems so if you make what I consider the unwarranted assumption that the properties of a whole reduce to the property of its parts.
And, perhaps oddly, because I don’t make this assumption (which seems to me self-evidently false, if we look around us), it means that I have room, in my material world for all kinds of non-material things, including love, and justice, and even God.
I’ve sometimes described myself as a monist theist. It seems to work OK.
junkdnaforlife,
Thank you for your thought provoking point.
I meant that it was impossible for a being to exist outside of space and time. If you read my line again, that should be clear from the grammar I used (“It is impossible to exist…”).
A note on the singularity: most physicists subscribe to the view that the singularity thrown up by the equations means that General Relativity is not sufficient physics to describe the universe at the earliest times. That is, it is the maths that goes off into infinities, not reality. There was not necessarily a physical “singularity”.
The hypothetical models that cosmologists have come up with to try to explain the origin of the universe all presume the existence of space and time, not least because of the difficulty of envisaging physics without them.
Ilion (or anyone else)
Please explain what is intellectually dishonest about my post #53. I back up the point, demonstrating that I had read your article, in post #57. If you believe I am mistaken, then simply engage with post #57.
“Is God a proper name?”
Of course not, no more than ‘elohim‘ is.
Driver you state; ‘I meant that it was impossible for a being to exist outside of space and time.’
But alas once again Driver, you apparently believe that absolute, unchanging, transcendent truths exists outside of space and time, thus why do you ‘beg the question’ by inserting your ‘desired conclusion’ into your premise, by stating it is impossible for infinite God to exist outside of space and time. Or do you want to remain consistent as a atheistic materialist and now deny that absolute, unchanging, transcendent truth, exists???
Ilion at 86: OK, thanks for that.
Driver: There was not necessarily a physical “singularity”.
Yes. The singularity is just a place holder name. As you said, a place where the math goes to infinities. Nature is not thought of as having infinite properties. Therefore, the (place holder name) is not of nature. A supernatural event is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. Thus the (place holder name) that brought our universe into existence is definable as supernatural. Therefore, by definition our universe came into existence by supernatural means. Thus refuting the materialist worldview.
The question of God, gods, whether there is a purpose etc, is another topic. You have to drop the materialist first premise before you can really entertain those topics with objectivity.
I’ve sometimes described myself as a monist theist. It seems to work OK.
You described yourself as a monist theist, a pantheist, a strong atheist, someone who has no beliefs about God but only orientations… really, you seem to call yourself whatever you like, whenever it’s convenient.
Daniel Dennett does not assert that minds and thoughts and consciousness are illusions. Or, if he does, I’d appreciate a citation.
In the case of Dennett, what he does is take a position that adds up to the denial of these things, but he conceals it by – you should be a fan of this – changing the definitions of the words in question to make his position seem prettier.
From Galen Strawson’s Realistic Monism: “Some of them — Dennett is a prime example — are so in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or less (c)overtly, because they are committed to physicalism, i.e. physicSalism.”
And his footnote explaining this:
“Dennett conceals this move by looking-glassing the word ‘consciousness’ (his term for experience) and then insisting that he does believe that consciousness exists (to lookingglass a term is to use a term in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means — see Strawson, 2005). As far as I can understand them, Dretske, Tye, Lycan and Rey are among those who do the same. It seems that they still dream of giving a reductive analysis of the experiential in non-experiential terms. This, however, amounts to denying the existence of experience, because the nature of (real) experience can no more be specified in wholly non experiential terms than the nature of the (real) non-experiential can be specified in wholly experiential terms. In the normal case, of course, reductive identification of X with Y is not denial of the existence of X. The reductive claim is ‘X exists, but
it is really just this (Y)’. In the case of experience, however, to say that it exists but is really just something whose nature can be fully specified in wholly non-experiential, functional terms is to deny its existence. ‘But what is this supposed thing you say we’re denying?’ say the deniers. It’s the thing to which the right reply to the question ‘What is it?’ is, as ever, the (Louis) Armstrong-Block reply: ‘If you gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know’ (Block, 1978). It’s the thing whose deniers say that there is no non-question-begging account of it, to which the experiential realist’s correct reply is: ‘It’s question-begging for you to say that there must be an account of it that’s non-question-begging in your terms’. Such an exchange shows that we have reached the end of argument, a point further illustrated by the fact that reductive idealists can make exactly the same ‘You have no nonquestion-begging account’ objection to reductive physicalists that reductive physicalists make to realists about experience: ‘By taking it for granted that the physical is something that can (only) be specified in non-mental terms, you (reductive physicalists) simply beg the question against reductive idealists.’ It’s striking that the realist notion of the physical that present-day physicalists appeal to was thought to be either without warrant or unintelligible by many of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. Many were reductive idealists about the physical, and Quine famously compared belief in physical objects to belief in the gods of Homer (Quine, 1951, p. 44)”
I think ‘looking-glassing’ in particular is just such a useful concept here.
junkdnaforlife,
This does not follow.
The maths of General Relativity leads to infinities at the earliest times of the universe. Therefore General Relativity does not give us a meaningful picture of the earliest times.
General Relativity also produces singularities inside black holes. This does not mean that the centre of a black hole is definable as supernatural.
What it may actually mean is that General Relativity as a theory is limited. Another theory is needed to describe extreme conditions such as at the beginning of the universe.
As it stands, the conditions at the earliest times of the universe are unknown. There is nothing in GR that tells you that it is a supernatural entity at the beginning.
Incidentally, this is the universe itself we are talking about. The idea that the universe is supernatural is pantheism.
vjtorley – not much time, but a few brief (cursory, not meant to be curt) thoughts:
I wouldn’t have any problem with the first two – it’s trying to tie the first two to the third that I think land us with problems. And I just don’t see why the third is necessary.
I’d go with 3, 5, 6, and 7. I don’t think you need a mind for the others (although something with a mind could do them).
I’d say 3, 5, 6 and 7 do!
OK. But it still seems an unnecessary complication to me.
Again, there’s a much simpler view: That what we call God didn’t make the world at all, that the world itself is morally neutral. Even pain is morally neutral – useful, but unpleasant as it has to be, or it wouldn’t be useful.
Except for us. We are not morally neutral because we have minds that can plan and choose and love. “Ye are gods”, didn’t Jesus say? And the god we should try to be, even if we fail, is the God that is Love. That’s the only God worthy of worship. Love is real enough, so is goodness. Why can’t we worship that? Why lumber Love with the job of making the universe as well?
Sorry to be so brief, and thanks for both your post and your concern 🙂
I appreciate it.
No I haven’t. I’d be dishonest if I claimed to have “theological doubts” – I actually don’t. The God I found myself with, after half a century of a more conventional belief, has the delightful and unexpected property of not actually requiring faith! While still having all the good bits.
Well, not the music. I do miss the music. And I’m still open to being wrong.
Will ponder your post further while I’m away, and thank you very much for the links.
Cheers
Lizzie
nullasalus:
They are all attempts at describing the same thing. I don’t have faith. I’m a monist – I don’t believe in mind-brain duality, or natural/supernatural duality – I don’t think they make sense. So in that sense I’m a strong atheist. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have something that the word “God” seems pretty appropriate for, as it does all the things “God” used to do, without requiring me to jump through what I came to regard as unnecessarily philosophical and logical hoops.
Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is recasting the problem so that it is actually solvable and gives a sensible answer. Often intractable questions (“how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?”; “how can an arrow have movement if at any one time it is in a single place?”) turn out to be only problematic because the problem itself is ill-posed. I think that is true of the consciousness question, and I think Dennett poses it properly.
Except that he doesn’t. I don’t know why people always say that Dennett denies the existence of experience. He doesn’t.
Well, I can understand that. But from my side of the looking glass it looks more like a barrier than a window 🙂
I mean, I’m aware of those criticisms of Dennett, and of his rebuttals, and as I see it, the rebuttals rebut. But it comes down to this question of whether the question itself is properly posed. If you think it isn’t (and I do think that, and I think Dennett does too), but the people you are arguing with think it is, then obviously both sides are going to think the other is missing the point, or even the elephant in the room.
I did myself for a long time, then, as I would put it, the penny dropped.
Anyway, off for a couple of days, nice to talk to you, see you later.
Cheers
Lizzie
Driver: “There is nothing in GR that tells you that it is a supernatural entity at the beginning.”
Correct, not an entity. The beginning is definable as supernatural, meaning not of nature. Our universe would be of nature if our laws of nature brought it into existence. But we know that instead, it was the (place holder name) in which brought our laws of nature into existence. Our universe is definable as supernatural not in the “Thor did it” sense, but rather “an event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.” This is the unavoidable conclusion of cosmic microwave background radiation.
To get to the what or why, purpose etc, requires a different argument.
Lizzie,
“Why should theism be a priori?”
It doesn’t have to be a priori. I think what should be a priori is “I don’t know.”
That’s where we should start. With that we can consider evidences without assumptions; which for us is perhaps dangerous territory, because somewhere down the line, we end up making certain assumptions.
But it doesn’t really help if we consider a certain a priori other than “I don’t know” as a default positions.
junkdnaforlife,
No, the singularity describes the fact that at t=0 the universe itself has infinite curvature and infinite density according to General Relativity. It is not that the singularity brought the universe into existence.
What I have been saying to you is that the singularity is not necessarily a thing that exists. It may well only exist in the equations of General Relativity, the problem being that General Relativity is not a sufficient theory to describe the early conditions of the universe. You see, all theories have a limited scope.
Here’s Steven Hawking:
“The General Theory of Relativity, is what is called a classical theory. That is, it does not take into account the fact that particles do not have precisely defined positions and velocities, but are smeared out over a small region by the Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics. This does not matter in normal situations, because the radius of curvature of spacetime, is very large compared to the uncertainty in the position of a particle. However, the singularity theorems indicate that spacetime will be highly distorted, with a small radius of curvature, at the beginning of the present expansion phase of the universe. In this situation, the uncertainty principle will be very important. Thus, General Relativity brings about its own downfall, by predicting singularities. In order to discuss the beginning of the universe, we need a theory which combines General Relativity with quantum mechanics.”
CY,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism.
Driver: “[Hawking] smeared out over a small region”
This is Hawkings I believe, first attempt to mathematically blur the beginning. And this is why, as Hawking states:
“Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention…there were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that time had a beginning.”
About Hawking’s own no-boundary idea, he writes:
“I’d like to emphasize that this idea that time and space should finite “without boundary” is just a proposal, it cannot be deduced from some other principle.” [emphasis Hawking]
This from brief history, in his newest works, he proposes the multi-verse, and that gravity, not God or any gods is all that is needed to explain the existence of the universe. That’s fine. But again, you can’t use laws of physics to explain the existence of the laws of physics. At some point, even the mult-verse must have a beginning. And thus the problem is just pushed farther back. Therefore the original premise still stands.
Ilion: if we accept as a premise that God is not, then we arrive at the conclusion that we cannot know truth and we cannot reason.
Driver: You simply start from the premise that reason cannot arise from material sources and then affirm that as your conclusion!
The initial premise, is that God is not.
If someone states his premise, and then in response someone says no, your premise actually is something else, that doesn’t make a good basis for discussion.
Rule 1: Accurately represent the actual argument that you are faced with.
junkdnaforlife,
Indeed, the laws of physics explain natural regularities. The existence of those natural regularities could be explained by the anthropic principle (In those universes which are irregular in behaviour, we would not be around to observe the universe) or they could be a nomological fact or they could have been programmed by a creator. That is, there is nothing in the fact that there are laws of physics that tells us whether gods exist or not.
Not at all. This is not a necessity.
There are, for example, cyclic as well as eternal models of the origin of the universe.
Let’s see if we can get to the nub of it.
The essential claim in both cases seems to be that God’s mind serves as an information store, whether to store names or to store the rules of a language.
God, in order to know something, must store a representation of that thing in his mind.
And then, I suppose, he calls it up or accesses it, if He wants to make use of it.
Information is stored in bits. Some information requires more than one bit to store. God stores information in bits. Therefore God’s mind must contain more than one bit.
Therefore God is not simple. Or some such.
Now I would deny in the first place that God HAS a mind, as a part of God where information is stored and retrieved.
That itself would mean God was composed of parts and give away the argument then and there.
Everything else is just fluff to conceal the basic underlying assumption.
Mung, I did accurately represent the argument as presented on Ilion’s blog. I was summarising the problem with the argument.
When Ilion questioned my interpretation, I followed up with post #57, with the relevant quotation from Ilion’s blog.
As the post remains unanswered, I’ll repost the substance of it here for convenience, should you wish to reply:
The implicit premise here is that material sources are not capable of reason. The error is thinking that since a “change of state some matter” (actually electrical activity) determines that any entity thinks a thought therefore it cannot also be the case that the logical relationship between two thoughts prompts a thought. Not only is this assumption not necessarily true, by analogy we can see that it is probably false. For, it is very like saying that because a computer is material it cannot perform logic operations.
They are all attempts at describing the same thing. I don’t have faith. I’m a monist – I don’t believe in mind-brain duality, or natural/supernatural duality – I don’t think they make sense. So in that sense I’m a strong atheist. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have something that the word “God” seems pretty appropriate for, as it does all the things “God” used to do, without requiring me to jump through what I came to regard as unnecessarily philosophical and logical hoops.
Yes, you do have faith. And here we’re back to the warm fuzzies again.
Why don’t you stop for a moment and ask yourself, “If I alternately describe myself as a theist, a pantheist, an atheist, lacking faith altogether, or having no beliefs but instead orientations, am I really attempting to describe something? Or is it that my thoughts on this matter are a jumbled mess, and possibly dictated more by what sounds good to me at any given time than a coherent underlying rationale?’
Yes, I know that you think you’ve found something that ‘does everything God used to do’, aka, ‘gives you the warm fuzzies and makes you happy’. The fact that you’re putting so much pressure on finding a belief (oops, it’s an orientation now) that ‘does something for you’ should throw up some warning signs to you.
But then again, maybe warning signs don’t give you the warm fuzzies.
Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is recasting the problem so that it is actually solvable and gives a sensible answer.
I love that your response to someone pointing out that Dennett operates by changing the definitions of words as he pleases him is to say ‘that’s one way of putting it’ and then to try the same thing in defense of Dennett.
But I’ll play the game. Here’s a third way of putting it: Dennett starts out with materialism as his non-negotiable premise, and then redefines all the terms in question such that they only can be things that are compatible with materialism – and surprise, Dennett finds if you do that, there really is no problem for materialism.
Here’s another way to reason: Look in your wallet. Count up how much money you have. Now, assume a framework where everything you want can only cost as much or less than what you have in your wallet. Surprise! You don’t have money problems anymore!
Except that he doesn’t. I don’t know why people always say that Dennett denies the existence of experience. He doesn’t.
Sure he does. Just as, if I define Bigfoot as ‘an illusion that people sometimes experience under certain conditions in this general forest area’, I’ve denied the existence of Bigfoot. You can turn around and say “But you never explicitly denied Bigfoot exists! In fact, you defined what Bigfoot was, and what you defined Bigfoot to be, does exist!” To which I’ll reply, “You’re pretty slow, aren’t you?”
Likewise with Dennett. You seem to think that so long as Dennett doesn’t explicitly say “I deny the existence of experience”, then Dennett hasn’t denied the existence of experience. That Denentt’s arguments, that his positions and metaphysics, can themselves add up to a denial of the existence of experience is something you gloss over.
I did myself for a long time, then, as I would put it, the penny dropped.
What really stands out to me when you roll out this particular chestnut is this: You were, by your own estimation, certain of the truth of your metaphysical beliefs. Eventually you realized you were utterly mistaken for decades. Now you’re certain of your new beliefs. The idea that maybe you’re pretty shoddy with reasoning on these subjects and perhaps should content yourself with ‘I don’t know, this is what I think but I’m not certainly committed’ doesn’t seem to register.
But I suppose that doesn’t bring out the warm fuzzies.
Finally,
And the god we should try to be, even if we fail, is the God that is Love. That’s the only God worthy of worship. Love is real enough, so is goodness. Why can’t we worship that? Why lumber Love with the job of making the universe as well?
Why can’t we worship hate? Why can’t we worship power? Why can’t we worship whatever we wish, whether it be death or L. Ron Hubbard?
“Love is real enough”? “Goodness is”? So is evil, apparently. So is hate, and so is power. And the universe is morally neutral for you – ‘goodness’ is just another word for ‘what we like’ or ‘what gives us the warm fuzzies’. There are no ‘oughts’ in your universe other than the ones we come up with, and can change at any time.
Time to let another penny drop, Elizabeth. “Worshipping love” is just a whim, a thing that makes you feel nice at this moment, in your metaphysics. That’s the extent of it. It’s only ‘worthy of worship’ insofar as you, personally, happen to like it, or what it makes you think of. And under materialism, what you happen to like is largely a product of contingent circumstances rather than reason.
Time to let it go.
And to drive the point home further, again from Strawson:
Dennett has suggested that ‘there is no such thing [as] . . . phenomenology’ and that any
appearance of phenomenology is, somehow, wholly the product of some cognitive faculty, the ‘judgment module’ or ‘semantic intent module’ that does not itself involve any phenomenology. ‘There seems to be phenomenology,’ he concedes, ‘but it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology’ (Dennett, 1991b, pp. 365–6). It is unclear what Dennett means by ‘phenomenology’, but whatever he means this move fails immediately if it is taken as an objection to the present claim that we can be certain both that there is experience and that we can’t be radically in error about its nature. It fails for the simple reason that for there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience just is for there to be such phenomenology or experience. To say that its apparently sensory aspects (say) are in some sense illusory because they are not the product of sensory mechanisms in the way we suppose, but are somehow generated by merely cognitive processes, is just to put forward a surprising hypothesis about part of the mechanism of this rich seeming that we call experience or consciousness. It is in no way to put in question its existence or reality. Whatever the process by which the seeming arises, the end result of the process is, as even Dennett agrees, at least this: that it seems as if one is having phenomenally rich experience of Beethoven’s eighth quartet or an Indian wedding; and if there is this seeming, then, once again, there just is phenomenology or experience (adapted from Strawson, 1994, pp. 51–2).
In denying that experience can be physical, Dennett and his kind find themselves at one
with many religious believers. This seems at first ironic, but the two camps are deeply
united by the fact that both have unshakable faith in something that lacks any warrant in
experience. That said, the religious believers are in infinitely better shape, epistemologically, than the Dennettians.
Strawson’s religious crack aside, he’s got Dennett and company dead to rights.
Driver:
Done the homework yet?
(If you have, you will know that atheism cannot properly be a default. Worldviews all inextricably embed faith points — of various types — and are best decided on comparative difficulties. In the case of evolutionary materialism, the relevant worldview for so-called “scientific” atheism, is is incoherent, unable to address the credibility of mind or to ground ought in any is in the system. Those are more than warrant enough to walk away from it.)
GEM of TKI
PS: On the original arguments, I would observe that our material cosmos is fine tuned for C-chemistry, cell based life, per the evidence. Even through a multiverse speculation [cf the already linked], that points to root cause in a necessary being that is intelligent, purposeful and powerful enough to create a cosmos. A being that is NOT made of the matter we have but is minded. And so we have good reason to infer that mind can exist independent o matter, and that mind needs not be constrained by material and temporal challenges. So the atrtempt to infer that names pose some sort of complexification challenge is at best ill instructed and distractive. In addition, were God enormously complex, what of that? If he is a necessary being, that would just be the way the cookie crumbles, But in fact we simply do not know enough to demand that the mind of God be this way or that to suit our whims, or to want to calculate the bit storage of the mind of God. And as a matter of fact the bit calculations already are conflating brains with minds, which is a big begging of worldview level questions. We don’t even know the limits of our minds, much less God’s. the argument, in the end, is empty speculation, a spinning of our own mental chains out of our own substance..
vjtorley:
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and defend Dave. A very complex being wouldn’t be merely unlikely to come into existence; there is also a sense in which it is unlikely to exist, period. Why? Because it is contingent. Any composite being is contingent: it is fragile, and hence liable to break into parts. And a complex being would be all the more contingent – there are 101 things that could go wrong with it. Hence if God were complex, then His existence would be antecedently unlikely. Hence God has to be simple.
So you’re arguing that a complex God is unlikely to exist because even if he didn’t come into existence by chance, he would’ve fallen apart by now?! I don’t believe that any of this is true. Within our universe, with its entropy, complicated physical things are especially liable to break into parts, but I don’t see why this should be assumed to be true outside the universe, and indeed outside time.
Consider the proposition “5 + 6 = 11”. It is a necessary, non-contingent, timeless truth – true before there were people, and true in any possible reality. And yet, it’s “composite” and requires multiple bits to encode. But despite that, I don’t think it’s in danger of “falling apart” any time soon.
Nevertheless,I’d also like to ditto what Ilion has said in his first couple of replies here regarding the supposed requirement for a complex God. Bits are what we use to measure the storage requirements of information when encoding it into a physical medium for later retrieval and interpretation by a mind. It’s not at all clear to me that content currently being conceived in a conscious mind consists of bits. This, as Ilion says, appears to assume eliminative materialism right off the bat.
Elizabeth:
Another way of putting it is recasting the problem so that it is actually solvable and gives a sensible answer.
What Dennett does isn’t to “recast” the problem so that it can be solved. It’s to dismiss it and substitute a different problem that he can solve in its place.
And the god we should try to be, even if we fail, is the God that is Love. That’s the only God worthy of worship. Love is real enough, so is goodness. Why can’t we worship that?
That’s quite an odd amount of reverence you have for increased levels of serotonin and dopamine in the brain.
Elizabeth Liddle…
You said “the question “why is there anything rather than nothing” would require that something intended there to be anything rather than nothing. And intention seems to me to require material processes.”
This was basically the only reason you listed for holding the strong atheist position. But it appears to be a purely volitional, even an emotional reason. It seems to me that what you are saying is that you simply don’t like it God could have a mind but not a brain. This is simply begging the question in favor of materialism. If your best argument against God is fallacious, then I think you have an opportunity to reassess your position, which under the circumstances, appears to enjoy less deductive and abductive support than the theist position.
As an aside, I think it is at least an interesting fact that we know that words are inextricably linked to the actualization of abstract concepts and ideas. It should come as no surprise then, that in the creation narrative in the Bible, God literally spoke the universe into being.
Gen 1:3 “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
Driver @109: “The implicit premise here is that material sources are not capable of reason. The error is thinking that since a “change of state some matter” (actually electrical activity) determines that any entity thinks a thought therefore it cannot also be the case that the logical relationship between two thoughts prompts a thought. Not only is this assumption not necessarily true…”
But (even aside from the fact that you don’t quite have the hang of it), even as you have expressed it here, it *is* true. If you want to establish that it is false, after all, and that the truth of the matter is that “material ‘sources’ [whatever that is supposed to mean] are capable of reason,” then you must do one of two things:
1) provide a concrete example;
2) provide a well-grounded theoretical rationale for the assertion.
Just stamping your foot and insisting something like “it might be true that thoughts are material entities (*) (because I really need them to be)” simply will not cut it.
(*) As I’ve pointed out above, Mr Mullinex’s argument depends upon asserting that thoughts are material entities.
“… by analogy we can see that it is probably false. For, it is very like saying that because a computer is material it cannot perform logic operations.”
Silly, misinformed boy! Computers do *not* perform logical operations; they perform symbol manipulation.
Symbols are utterly meaningless entities, either material or immaterial, which are arbitrarily chosen by minds to ‘stand for’ (i.e. ‘symbolize’) other entities, which ‘stood-for’ entities may themselves be symbols. And, unless one knows the “code” — unless one already knows or has some method to discover meanings/concepts which the symbols arbitrarily stand for — then the symbols are (as one example) just ink-scratchings on paper.
We computer folk speak of computers as though they perform logical operations, because doing so vastly simplifies talking about them and their operations. It is just a metaphor, not the truth of the matter.
Driver:
So a computer is like a brain?
Do you agree that computers think thoughts because the voltage across a resistor can change?
Do computers actually think logically, iow, do they reason from true premises to a true conclusions?
Do you know how computers perform “logic”?
http://www3.wittenberg.edu/bsh.....cuits.html
Deuce: “Nevertheless,I’d also like to ditto what Ilion has said in his first couple of replies here regarding the supposed requirement for a complex God. Bits are what we use to measure the storage requirements of information when encoding it into a physical medium for later retrieval and interpretation by a mind. It’s not at all clear to me that content currently being conceived in a conscious mind consists of bits. This, as Ilion says, appears to assume eliminative materialism right off the bat.”
Deuce, thanks. While I am confident that you adequately understand the matter, I know from experience that many people do not. And so, I’d like to restate part of what you’ve said with somewhat greater precision and a bit more in-depth explanation. And then, from the point of that increased precision (and understanding), remove that (to me) troubling bit of tentativeness (that is, the “appears”) from your last sentence.
The term ‘bit’ refers to various entities, differing by context. For example, when referring to a hard-drive, ‘bit’ signifies either (and both, depending on usage) the magnetic polarization of a given linear length (which varies by distance from the center of the platter) across the HD surface, or to the linear length itself; when referring to a CD of DVD, ‘bit’ signifies a ‘pit’ burned into the ink-film or aluminum platter which is the recording surface; in the internals of the computer, ‘bit’ may signify an electrical charge; and so on.
Now, all these (and more) significations of ‘bit’ may be treated as identical – though, clearly they are not – precisely because ‘bits’ are symbols. ‘Bits’ are (generally) physical states, utterly meaningless in themselves, which human minds have arbitrarily and conventionally chosen to represent some “unit of information,” as the phrase goes.
To put is bluntly, a ‘bit’ doesn’t mean a damned thing: it is not information; rather, it may – or may not – represent information, generally ‘yes/true/present’ or ‘no/false/absent.’
So, when you say, “Bits are what we use to measure the storage requirements of information when encoding it into a physical medium for later retrieval and interpretation by a mind,” what you’ve said is true, though it does apply in some contexts and not in others. But, I suspect that it might also be misleading to some. I think a more precise way to put this idea would be something like: “The term ’bits’ signifies both a(n immaterial) measure of storage requirements and/or the (material) physical storage-space itself when we use a physical medium to *represent* some information or other, for later retrieval and interpretation by a mind.”
The major conceptual change I have made is to replace the word “encode” with “represent,” because I want it to be clearly understood that ‘bits’ are symbols, and that they do not, of themselves, mean or signify anything at all. ‘Bits’ are physical entities which are, themselves, utterly meaningless.
Then, once we firmly grasp the truth that ‘bits’ physical entities which are, themselves, utterly meaningless, we can examine the premises of Mr Mullinex’s argument in light of this understanding –
“I would ignore brains and say instead that any mind needs billions of bits of carefully organized information to exist because a mind is, essentially, huge amounts of information interacting with each other. That’s what thoughts are – information acting on other information.”
Let’s skip over the silly and false and absurd assertion that “a mind is, essentially, huge amounts of information interacting with each other ” so as to concentrate on:
1) “… any mind needs billions of bits of carefully organized information to exist …”
By ‘bits,’ does Mr Mullinex mean an immaterial measure of the storage requirements needed to represent some information or other via a physical medium? That is, does he mean a count of symbols? No, that substitution cannot even begin to make sense — “any mind needs billions of [immaterial measures of the storage requirements necessary to accomplish a representation] of carefully organized information to exist”
So, by ‘bits,’ Mr Mullinex must mean symbols; not a count of symbols, but symbols themselves.
He appears to mean “material/physical entities which are, themselves, utterly meaningless and which minds may arbitrarily and conventionally use to *represent* some information or other”. Thus — “[in order to exist,] any mind needs billions of [material/physical entities which are, themselves, utterly meaningless and which minds may arbitrarily and conventionally use to *represent* some information or other, in order to accomplish a representation] of carefully organized information [].”
If that is what he means, then is it not obvious that:
a) he has said that in order for a mind to exist, it needs (apparently, to ‘contain’) billions of utterly meaningless physical/material symbols which may conventionally represent information;
b) he appears, as per a), to be equating ‘minds’ with ‘brains’;
c) and thus, he does, indeed, “assume eliminative materialism right off the bat”;
d) he has said that in order for any individual mind to exist, some other mind or minds must exist – shades of a vicious infinite regress;
Ah! But there is one more way to try to make sense of Mr Mullinex’s premise. Recall, I said, way back when, that “‘Bits’ are (generally) physical states …” That is, a ‘bit’ might be a non-physical/non-material entity; for instance, certain concepts may be symbols, which, while meaningless in themselves, nevertheless stand for other entities or concepts. One example would be the concept of the letter ‘a’; the conception itself is not a proposition or an idea, it is not itself information, it does not mean anything, but it does refer to and stand for something else; namely, any of various physical entities with certain characteristic shapes.
So, using this third possible meaning of ‘bit,’ what do we have? “[in order to exist,] any mind needs billions of [non-material/non-physical entities which are, themselves, utterly meaningless and which minds may arbitrarily and conventionally use to *represent* some information or other, in order to accomplish a representation] of carefully organized information [].”
Well! If this is what he meant, then it seems to let him off the hook with respect to my accusation that he is assuming eliminative materialism. But, at what price?
a) he has said that in order for a mind to exist, it needs (apparently, to ‘contain’) billions of utterly meaningless non-physical/non-material symbols which may conventionally represent information;
b) in escaping the (hidden) assumption of eliminative materialism, he has not only allowed for, but has said that minds are immaterial entities;
c) he has said that in order for any individual mind to exist, some other mind or minds must exist – and we still have that vicious infinite regress;
c.1) but now the infinite regress can be ended by a slight modification to the premise — “[in order to exist,] any [embodied] mind needs billions of [non-material/non-physical entities which are, themselves, utterly meaningless and which ultimately an un-embodied mind (or minds) has/have arbitrarily and conventionally used to *represent* some information or other, in order to accomplish a representation] of carefully organized information [].”
The premise is still pointless, and I still reject it as false – for ‘bits’ do not explain minds. And I am sure Mr Mullinex will reject it.
2) “That’s what thoughts are – information acting on other information.”
‘Information’ doesn’t act upon anything, including other information. Rather, information is acted upon … my minds.
… see? there at the end? in searching for non-question-begging interpretation of Mr Mullinex’s premise, I confused myself? I falsely equated ‘bit’ and ‘symbol’.
A ‘bit’ is a ‘symbol,’ but a ‘symbol’ is not necessarily a ‘bit.’
Ilion (#14)
Thank you for your post. You wrote:
Careful. Aristotle would say that. I doubt that Aquinas would. We also have to bear in mind the words of Christ to Peter: “Before the cock crows thrice, you will have denied me three times.”
Thomas’ own views on God’s foreknowledge are controversial. Some (e.g. Garrigou-Lagrange) consider him to have been a predestinationist, a la Banez; Jesuit Thomists read him differently. If he was, then he would have said that God knows the future by determining it. That’s not my view; I’m more of a Boethian. I think God can see the future from His perspective; we, being time-bound, cannot.
Ilion (#10) and Deuce (#113)
Very interesting posts. Ilion, you write:
I’m not sure the two options are mutually exclusive. Redundant storage might be a good way of safeguarding the brain against memory decay.
Deuce, I was intrigued by your comment:
Hmm. You could be right. It still strikes me, however, that a name, being inherently complex, could not possibly reside “in” the simple mind of God. That’s why I locate the information outside God, but somewhere that He can immediately access it. But I could be wrong.
Driver: “There are, for example, cyclic as well as eternal models of the origin of the universe.”
These are attempts to get back to the steady state model of cosmology. Back to before a beginning, where many, like Hawking, were much more comfortable. This is done to avoid the first cause argument. To get to the God, gods arguments, you need to eliminate the materialist premise. If you are holding out on that one, then we are stuck here for now.
Deuce:
You may not have read my other posts (fair enough!) but a point I have been trying to make, consistently, is that things can be more than the sum of their parts, and have properties that are not shared with those parts (can even be travelling in a different direction!). I don’t have any reverence for “increased levels of serotonin and dopamine and dopamine in the brain”.
What I revere is what I am calling Love – the capacity to transcend the self-centred point of view and to see and feel the world from the point of view of others – to deprioritise the view from the self. The neuromodulators you mention are merely part of the almost unimaginably complex system that gives us the capacity to do this. At our best.
What I revere is what I am calling Love – the capacity to transcend the self-centred point of view and to see and feel the world from the point of view of others – to deprioritise the view from the self. The neuromodulators you mention are merely part of the almost unimaginably complex system that gives us the capacity to do this. At our best.
“At our best” according to your whim. And someone saying that power, or competition, or aggression, or otherwise should be revered, they have every bit as much standing. Really, probably moreso, since to see the world from the point of view of others is not to love. It may actually cause quite some hate.
As I said, time to let it go.
You may not have read my other posts (fair enough!) but a point I have been trying to make, consistently, is that things can be more than the sum of their parts, and have properties that are not shared with those parts (can even be travelling in a different direction!).
And yet, sometimes they can’t. Add as many 0s together as you wish, and you’re not going to get a 1 or a 2 out of them.
A comment about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts is not, in this context, A) Uncontroversial, or B) Going to get you where you want to go. Even Dennett realized as much – that’s why he had to looking-glass his definitions, as Strawson says. Because the actual definitions wouldn’t work out for him.
Nullasalus:
Well, I can understand why you might interpret my words that way, as I understand that you do not accept that objective morality is possible under atheism. I disagree. And because I disagree (I think it’s perfectly possible for human beings to figure out what promotes the common good and what doesn’t), then from my point of view, my point stands. I think the Golden Rule is fairly easy to deduce from first principles, I don’t adopt it on a whim”.
Not sure what the antecedent “it” is here.
But I’m not “adding zeros”. Nor am I “summing” anything – that’s my point. Merely adding together (listing, if you will) the neurotransmitters, the neuromodulators, the neurons, the dendrites, the axons, not to mention the ions, the atoms, the electrons, the protons, the hadrons, the leptons, of the human brain is not going to give you a human brain. It cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. That does not mean that without its parts it would still exist. That’s my point. Materialism need not be “reductionist”. The idea that it is must be is, I contend, false, and completely ignores the fact that organisations of material have very different properties from the material from which they are organised.
Ilion (#118)
Thanks for a very well thought-out post. You are perfectly correct when you write:
Having said that, I don’t think that Dave Mullenix’s argument presupposes any commitment to eliminative materialism. All he is assuming is that if an entity knows that P, then it must have a representation of P, in its mind. And if P is a complex state of affairs, then any adequate representation of P will also be complex.
If we wish to preserve the valid metaphysical insight from classical theism that God’s essence is simple (otherwise God could not be absolutely necessary), then I think it is wiser to deny the implicit assumption that God needs a representation of P in order to know that P. This assumption stems from a centuries-old philosophical view, which says that all knowledge must be “in” the mind of the knower. But perhaps we need to question this view.
If the knower has immediate epistemic access to P, then there is no need for an internal representation of P. Consequently God does not need to store our names in His mind.
Elizabeth (#99)
I only have time for a quick post right now. You write:
You seem to be acknowledging that music enables us to have genuinely transcendent experiences. And I would agree with you.
You still seem to retain a number of transcendent concepts in your philosophical system, such as truth, goodness and beauty. My question to you would be: can the meaning of these transcendent concepts be adequately described or characterized in materialistic terms?
Well, I can understand why you might interpret my words that way, as I understand that you do not accept that objective morality is possible under atheism. I disagree.
Who said it wasn’t possible under atheism? We’re talking materialism here. And your morality doesn’t become objective just because you feel really strongly about it, or on the grounds that “love emerges”. As I’ve pointed out, if you’re going to throw language around that way, then hate emerges too. Power emerges. Death emerges.
You talk about “figuring out the common good” – but what makes it good, and what makes it that we should figure it out? For a materialist, the answer is at best “because we want to, at the time”. Nor do I deny people can, individually or as a group, figure out ways to get what they want. Calling that objective morality is yet another “looking-glassing”.
Not sure what the antecedent “it” is here.
The word games. The looking-glassing. Certainly the pantheism, or at least cop to the fact that power, hate, death and more emerge from the world as well.
But I’m not “adding zeros”. Nor am I “summing” anything – that’s my point.
And my point is that saying “emergence!” doesn’t get you to where you want to go in and of itself, nor does saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” over and over. The sort of wholes you can get to is determined by the whole and the parts. Try to add up the 0s to get a 2 or a 4 and you’re out of luck. Try to add up the 1s, and now maybe you can get somewhere.
Materialism need not be “reductionist”. The idea that it is must be is, I contend, false, and completely ignores the fact that organisations of material have very different properties from the material from which they are organised.
Yes, if you tape a bunch of square-shaped blocks into a spherical formation, you get a composite that rolls even though square blocks don’t roll. Call that an emergent property if you want. Are you really going to say that’s irreducible? That it’s not a case of weak emergence?
Consider this from Strawson: ” I’LL SAY IT AGAIN. FOR Y TRULY TO EMERGE FROM X IS FOR Y TO ARISE FROM OR OUT OF X OR BE GIVEN IN OR WITH Y GIVEN HOW X is. Y must arise out of or be given in X in some essentially non-arbitrary and indeed wholly non-arbitrary way. X has to have something — indeed everything — to do with it. That’s what emerging is (that’s how liquidity arises out of non-liquid phenomena). It is essentially an in-virtue-of relation. It cannot be brute. Otherwise it will be intelligible to suppose that existence can emerge from (come out of, develop out of) non-existence, or even that concrete phenomena can emerge from wholly abstract phenomena. Brutality rules out nothing.
34 If emergence can be brute, then it is fully intelligible to suppose that non-physical soul-stuff can arise out of physical stuff — in which case we can’t rule out the possibility of Cartesian egos even if we are physicalists.”
And, as I said, that’s a pejorative version of saying something that in my view is valid: that if a question is intractable, the reason is sometimes that it is ill-posed.
And sometimes the question isn’t ill-posed. Sometimes intractable questions are, as a matter of fact, intractable given the assumptions in question – and what it’s time to do is get rid of the assumptions.
If we’d done that with Zeno, we’d never have got calculus.
Er, Zeno’s paradox remains.
On the other hand, dumping our assumptions about the world was essential in the transition from cartesian to quantum physics. Trying to find a way to reinterpret the findings in a way that fit with classical physics hardly helped.
We have good reason to ditch materialism. Or, like Strawson, radically revise it.
Liz: “I think it’s perfectly possible for human beings to figure out what promotes the common good and what doesn’t)”
Yes, the common good.
Rape culture in Japan:
What did a lawyer that represents rape victims in Japan say, about the slap on the wrists the rapist in that country receive:
“Our law says, protecting a persons property is more important than protecting a women’s sexual freedom.”
Key words: Our Laws
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....&NR=1
The narrator later says that a growing number of people are trying to change the treatment of women in that country. But what if they cannot? What if a growing number want to keep the laws the same? Where does the jurisdiction end on what you feel is good for the community, and the line begin for what another community feels is good? At the countries borders? The city borders? Neighborhood borders? Property lines? The soldiers in congo engage in government sanctioned rape that they feel makes them more patriotic. Do we interject, are we part of the Congo community?
junkdnaforlife,
The narrator later says that a growing number of people are trying to change the treatment of women in that country. But what if they cannot? What if a growing number want to keep the laws the same?
You can go even further. What if the community sees the problem with the victim, or denies there was a victim? What if they see the problem not with rapists being aggressive, but with their targets being unwilling? They can argue it’s a job for education. Frame it as ‘the problem with frigidity in Japan’.
Sure, we’d call it warped, we’d call it wrong. But then again, the advocates could just consider us to be yet more people in need of education. Standing in the way of the common good they’ve decided on. And if the common good at the end of the day is our feelings, or our preferences about models of society…
vjtorley:
Yes, is my answer. It’s pretty well my key point!
Thank for eliciting it so unambiguously!
Of course, I now have to support my answer, and I’m happy to attempt to do that, but yes, that is my position.
Ilion,
I do not need to prove that the premise is false. If you cannot prove it true then you cannot use it to demonstrate the truth of any argument. We do not know if the premise is true or false. It may be false. If one of your premises may be false then your conclusion may be false.
You are saying ‘It cannot be shown false that X entails Y, therefore X entails Y’
If you want to use the premise in an argument, you have the task of showing ‘X entails Y’ to be true.
Then, when a computer appears to perform the operation of adding two very large numbers, who does the calculation? The user?
Let us use your terminology and say that given inputs a computer performs symbol manipulation to output an answer. Thoughts can also be characterized as symbol manipulation of inputs to produce output.
It is certainly possible that we have different ideas of what is grown-up behaviour.
Nullasalus:
Well, on another thread a number of people (perhaps you weren’t one of them) made the claim that objective morality wasn’t possible under atheism. And I think it’s relevant. I’m not saying that “love emerges” because I “feel really strongly about it”. I think it emerges as a direct logical consequence of figuring out what benefits everybody – the Golden Rule makes logical sense.
Of course you could decide that “what benefits everybody” isn’t a Good. But it’s as good a definition of Good as I can find. I certainly don’t think theism has an objective alternative, and even Jesus told us to use our common sense rather than blindly follow a set of religious rules.
Well, you seem to have a box into which you place unpackings of concepts that you don’t like! I think concepts like “Good” are worth unpacking. I don’t think it’s “looking-glassing” I think it’s opening a black box and figuring out what is actually inside.
Tell me how you would define “Good”.
Yes, they do, but I don’t worship them. Incidentally, they also emerge from religion.
Well, I understand that you don’t think “emergence” gets me where I want to go to, but you need to do more than assert it. I think it’s a pretty important concept. Systems-level analysis is, by definition, not “reductionist”, and it tells us things that a reductionist approach can’t tell us. I assume you wouldn’t disagree with this?
Yes, it’s irreducible. If you omit the level of the organisation, you miss the property of the whole. It’s a fairly trivial example, of course, but it’s a fair example.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I guess I’d need to read the whole context.
Yes, that too. I think both are true in this case. I think one key false assumption, when considering consciousness, is that it’s a continuous stream. If we let go that assumption, I think we find ourselves with a better question (“How do we become conscious of things?”) and one which can be answered much more readily.
Er, it has a solution.
Exactly.
Oh, I’m all for revision. In fact, as I keep saying, I don’t think reductionist materialism works. And in fact, no-one actually uses it in practice. Everyone works at a systems level. And no-one tries to say that molecules don’t exist because it’s all just hadrons and leptons. Equally, I think it’s silly to say that mind doesn’t exist, it’s all just neurotransmitters and electrical depolarisations.
But that doesn’t mean that materialism is false, just that reductionist materialism is inadequate.
That’s why I prefer to call myself a monist than a materialist. It’s duality I reject, not the numinous.
junkdnaforlife,
Not at all. They incorporate the Big Bang model, at least in the essentials. For example, the ekpyrotic universe.
Cosmologists come up with models to try to explain the data, not to circumvent philosophers.
Besides, writing an involved scientific paper would be overkill for taking on the first cause argument. The refutation of the first cause argument is simply the plain English statement that if something can be uncaused then that uncaused thing could be natural.
Nullasalus (sorry, catching up in bits…):
I do, and my answer is “no”.
No. Please don’t attribute views to me I don’t hold.
Not really. If something works, it works. If it doesn’t it doesn’t. The warning signs come when something doesn’t work. Theism (traditional theism) comes with a whole host of problems that simply disappear if you drop the assumption that there’s a Big Guy In Charge. And, I’m delighted to find, you are still left with all the solutions to important problems you had in the first place (like how to behave, for instance). But no more Problem of Evil, no more nonsensical Atonement, no more arbitrary irregularities in the universe, no more wars over whose God has the right rules, no more Saved and Damned. No more fear of death.
Oh, but they do. When my spidey senses tell me something doesn’t make sense, I may not enjoy the sensation, but I’m certainly glad to get the message 🙂
OK, so we are still a long way apart. But perhaps at least we now have a better gauge of the distance 🙂
Bantay:
Yes, it’s based on the premise that minds arise from brains. And yes, that is “question-begging” but because I see no reason to think that minds don’t arise from brains (we certainly don’t normally attribute minds to things without brains, and we know that thoughts and neural activity are tightly correlated) then a proposition that requires me to postulate a brainless mind is not one I would readily embrace. If posed as the solution to the question I raised above, it seems only to raise more problems than it solves. Perhaps there is some First Cause that we can posit to answer my question, but it seems to me that we have no reason to attribute a mind to it, based on what we know of minds.
It’s a lovely passage. Even better is the first few verses of John’s gospel.
It seems clear to me that when many modern “atheists” and “materialists” argue, their position is really nothing more than an “anything but the god I learned about in Sunday School” mentality.
EL says: “But no more Problem of Evil, no more nonsensical Atonement, no more arbitrary irregularities in the universe, no more wars over whose God has the right rules, no more Saved and Damned. No more fear of death.”
Those are only issues for particular versions of God. It seems that like many atheists (myself a former one), your “atheism” and “materialism” was founded upon a particular view of god that you found to be unbelievable – as was mine.
When I found more sophisticated philosophical arguments for god (thanks to the ID community), and against atheism and materialism, I realized that my choice of beliefs was predicated upon improperly framed and incomplete options. It was like facing a choice between meals of hamburger helper vs a can of Pork ‘n’ Beans, never realizing there were fuller, more properly prepared meals out there to sample.
As you have said, one can assume monism or one can assume dualism; it’s our choice. No amount of argument or evidence can coerce one to believe one way or another; the mind is fully capable of defending virtually any position and permeating us with a sense of satisfaction that our position is logical, evidenced, and fully warranted.
I think the real crux of the issue is: what do you want to believe, and why do you want to believe it?
When I became an atheist, I wanted to believe in a world without any god that would allow innocent children to be harmed. That was really the crux of my position; no god that allowed such things IMO was worth having as a god, and since such things actually happen, then there was no god worth having. I thought it was a pretty good argument.
Materialism granted me release from any necessary higher commitment and responsibility; it indemnified me against any sense of failure since there wasn’t anything significant to live up to, and since I was really only the product of blind material forces. Materialism granted me a kind of deconstructionist perspective where I didn’t have to make sense of the world; I really only had to care about, as you say, “what worked”.
Atheistic materialism offered me a safe place by which I could defend against that which hurt my heart and mind to consider when I was a theist (problem of evil, religious wars, Heaven and Hell, condemnation, atonement – as you said).
Under my then-new materialist/atheist view, ultimately, nothing really mattered, and whatever I did was just what occurred, and it wasn’t judged by some transcendent set of values that were significant in any meaningful way. I and my actions were “good enough”, and not judged lacking by some transcendent arbiter I found to be unworthy of dispensing such judgement.
Yes, I’ve been there, and was there for almost 10 years.
Atheism and materialism offered a deconstructionist perspective by which I was self-authorized to simply dismiss anything that put me in a situation of heartfelt or mental angst, frustration, despair, or pain. IOW, it offered “happiness” and “it worked” to produce what I wanted – a functional life free of the pain of higher moral and spiritual obligation and purpose under a god obviously (to me) either callous or evil.
I made all the same arguments you’re making. They were not only all fully satisfying to me, they all seemed perfectly obvious and clear.
Now, of course, I see them as ignorant (not willfullly so, since I was unaware of better arguments for god) and my argument methodology to be nothing much more than deconstructionist defenses against something that, at the very root, was just something I didn’t want to believe at the time.
Once I came into contact with arguments for god that had nothing to do with heaven and hell, condemnation, atonement, etc., and characterized god in simple, necessary, first principle terms (as the ID argument does, and which introduced me to other such arguments), I realized I never had a problem with the existence of god per se; what I had a problem with was how god was characterized and explained to me when I was growing up.
What I also realized was: I actually wanted to believe in god, but up until then there there was no god (that I was aware of) worth believing in.
So to me, in the end, all the logic and evidence and arguments in the world don’t make a whit of difference when one wants to believe there is or is not a god, because the mind is so good at defending any position we wish to take.
Which is why free will intentions are so important.
The question, really, is what do you want to believe? That there is no god, or that there is a god worth believing in, worth worshiping, and worth being thankful to?
I’d rather have the latter, it was just that I didn’t see how it was possible, so I chose the former for a decade.
Fortunately, thanks to the good people of the ID community, I found the latter (truth be told, I never stopped looking for a god worth believing in, even though I would deny it, which is what drew me to the ID argument and sites like this in the first place, and is why I think so many materialist/atheists are drawn to sites that make these arguments), and now enjoy living in belief of a god that is truly worth having because I chose to accept that which I would actually prefer, that which my heart and soul actually cried out for, instead of stubbornly clinging to a position I had invested in as intellectually superior and heroically unpopular (as a means of escaping the fact that it was just the more convenient and less painful option available).
To borrow from Dawkins: Intelligent Design has made it possible for me to be an intellectually fulfilled theist.
When it is all said and done, it’s just a choice one makes. To me, when it’s framed that way – atheism/materialism vs a god & spiritual existence worth believing in – it’s an easy choice to make.
One might say, “I want to believe in what is true”, but then the question becomes, why? Why do you want to believe what is true? It matters if there is a god and a spiritual existence where truth matters in and of itself; but what does truth matter to a materialist/atheist?
This is why many atheistic materialists become pragmatic deconstructionists; “what works” is more important than “what is true”; in fact, “what works” becomes the definition of “truth”. Which is why what practical, applied science produces becomes the arbiter of “what is real” and consensus theories of science define “what is probably true”. This is also why philosophy, to materialist atheists, is demoted to a position below applied science.
So the choice of what to believe, when it comes to theism/spirituality vs atheism/materialism, cannot be based on “truth”, because “truth” can be defined subjectively by relativists and deconstructionists. The question they have to ask themselves is what they would prefer to believe; if believing in god “worked” for them in the sense that it made their lives better, would they prefer that to atheism/materialism?
If the answer is yes, then they are actually neo-theists in search of a god they can believe in; whether that god is true or not is largely irrelevant to them, because – as EL has said – they dispense with the god idea not because they find it to be untrue, but rather because they find it (from the god-options they have available) to be toxic.
Which is why so many react so virulently against ID; they see it as attempting to spread a toxin they believe is poisonous, because they equate it with the childish, toxic concept of god they are familiar with.
Meleager:
Interesting post. Yes, I agree that in some senses, at least in the absence of evidence, one believes what one wants to believe.
Which is why I think that the most important criterion for a belief system/worldview, whatever, is its utility.
Elsewhere on this blog, though, people talk about evidence for God. I’ve never bought that – it seems to me that God isn’t the kind of thing there could be evidence for. As models, theological models, I suggest, are normative, rather than predictive.
And I would also agree to some extent with what you say here:
Except that it wasn’t the case with me 🙂 I had an excellent theological rearing, and, having refused to swallow the substitutionary theory of atonement, solved the problem by adopting Abelard’s.
What “made me an atheist” as it were, wasn’t an unpalateable God, but the realisation (as I see it) that minds really can be accounted for in material terms. Previously, I’d maintained a lurking dualism, which also made it reasonable to supposed that if a mind had some reality beyond a brain, it could also have some reality (writ large) beyond a universe. But with that penny dropped, as it were, I no longer had good reason to posit a transcendent God (an immanent one, perhaps).
However, what I found was almost everything I’d previously had, with the possible exception of Life After Death, which I’d always been a but dubious about anyway, and find no great loss.
Yes, the mind is good at defending itself from positions it does not wish to take – but again, I’d say, this was not the case with me.
All I want is something reasonable, that makes sense. What I have now, is reasonable, and makes sense.
If someone can talk me into a more reasonable position – sure, I’d be delighted.
But arguments I don’t find convincing are those that try to persuade me that the inescapable conclusions from an atheistic/materialistic premise are amorality, reductionism, and the denial that consciousness or free will exist.
I don’t accept that those conclusions follow from the premise.
Meleager:
Yes, science is fundamentally utilitarian. We evaluate models on whether they work, rather than on whether they are true.
However, all is not as grey as it seems, because what “works” in science is what is “predictive”, and the better our models predict, the closer we can regard our model as a model of reality (aka truth).
And when it comes to normative models, the same is true, I would argue: selfishness “works” in a narrow way. But if we want a normative model that is universally applicable it must deprioritise the self. And so we arrive, logically, at the Golden Rule.
Utilitarianism may sound all grey cotton boiler suits and cloth caps, but it has a heart of Gold 🙂
EL:
Sorry for posting under another name, but for whatever reason I can’t post under “Meleagar” from work.
If we can agree that all such arguments circle back to their premises, and that all of us can justify to our own satisfaction the reasonableness and validity of our views, then what we are left with is a simple question, which I posed but you did not answer. Let me ask it more directly:
Given equal result in your immediate, ongoing sense of satisfaction and reasonableness, which would you rather be true:
1 – materialism/atheism
2 – An omnipotent, loving, benevolent god exists and we have an eternity of satisfying and enjoyable spiritual existence before us.
Ah, thanks for clarifying the question!
I guess the second. But I’m quite happy with the first.
Now I’ve got used to it 🙂
EL:
Why would you prefer #2 to be true? Since you identified your current belief as engendering a condition of “quite happy” on your part, it seems to me that you stated that in particular because “how happy your belief makes you” is important.
Do you “guess” that you’d rather #2 be true because, if it was true, you’d probably be even happier than your current state of “quite happy”?
Because I guess Pie in the Sky when I Die would be quite nice, as would a benevolent God who answered petitionary prayers and intervened to stop terrible things happening in the world!
But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. As I said, I’m pretty happy with “systems materialism” (my latest coinage, as opposed to “reductive materialism”) because it handles our higher selves and aspirations quite nicely, and doesn’t boggle belief!
Off for a couple of days – see you guys later:)
Cheers
Lizzie
I agree information does not act. Other entities act upon receipt of information. But I disagree that only a mind can act upon receipt of information, if that’s what you’re saying.
vjt:
How can God see something that does not exist? 🙂
You must either hold that God can see that which does not exist, or you must hold that the future does exist.
Elizabeth Liddle:
That sounds more like empathy than love.
Love acts.
According to Christian theology God is Love. Man has been separated from God. The Atonement is God’s way of joining man with Himself.
How is the Atonement nonsensical?
Meleagar:
One could deny God. One could take action upon seeing the plight. What does it take to demonstrate love, to participate in love?
Is love really just a nice feeling, or does it require something from us?
What would a world without Love look like?
So, EL:
We have established that you would prefer that #2 be true.
So, the question becomes: if you would prefer that #2 be true because it would make you happier, why not choose to believe it is true?
Mung:
As I said, I was constrained at the time by a rather limited conceptualization of god, good, evil, and available options.
I understand now that for good to exist in any meaningful way, not-good must be present to contextualize it. Anything that is everything is nothing in any significant sense, because it cannot even be seen or experienced as itself.
Identity requires both X and not-X, subject and context.
IMO, the only way good can exist in any meaningful way, is for not-good to also exist, even if it is in some sense an illusion. Perfect, uniform goodness is like perfect, uniform redness; if all there is is perfect red, the word “red” wouldn’t have any significant meaning. Red is a color, if it is the only color, then we cannot even invent the terms “color” or “red”, because they would have no referential context.
Well, on another thread a number of people (perhaps you weren’t one of them) made the claim that objective morality wasn’t possible under atheism. And I think it’s relevant. I’m not saying that “love emerges” because I “feel really strongly about it”. I think it emerges as a direct logical consequence of figuring out what benefits everybody – the Golden Rule makes logical sense.
First of all, I did not say that “love emerges” only because you “feel really strongly about it”. I said your morality does not become objective just because you feel really strongly about it. With regards to “love emerges”, I pointed out that “hate emerges”, “death emerges”, “power emerges” – the list goes on.
As for ‘making logical sense’ – the Golden Rule in question is ‘do unto others what you would have done unto you’, correct? But saying that ‘makes logical sense’ adds up to saying it isn’t self-contradictory in and of itself. So what? ‘Might makes right’ also makes logical sense. ‘Do as thou wilt’ makes logical sense.
Of course you could decide that “what benefits everybody” isn’t a Good. But it’s as good a definition of Good as I can find. I certainly don’t think theism has an objective alternative, and even Jesus told us to use our common sense rather than blindly follow a set of religious rules.
And here we go again. It’s ‘as good a definition of Good as’ you can find, because the measuring stick here is what makes you feel good or what you feel strongly about. You’re treating the objective in objective morality as a prize you award to whatever moral commands you favor the most – the winner gets to be called ‘objective’.
Nor did Jesus “tell us to follow our common sense” – plenty of Christ’s teachings arguably flew in the face of ‘common sense’ – nor is that the alternative to blindly following rules. Christ spoke against treating legalistic rule-following as a means of morality.
As for the comparison to theism, that’s false – but as another commenter said to you, you don’t save your moral system by insisting that theism is worse. If yours falls, yours falls. And I think it’s clear that your ‘objective morality’ isn’t objective, and is moral only in the sense that you like it and think others should subscribe to it.
Well, you seem to have a box into which you place unpackings of concepts that you don’t like! I think concepts like “Good” are worth unpacking. I don’t think it’s “looking-glassing” I think it’s opening a black box and figuring out what is actually inside.
No, I’m more than happy to engage concepts and unpackings I ‘dislike’. You, however, have a pink, sparkle-dashed box that you cram every concept you like into, whether or not it fits or is appropriate. So you take on a materialistic atheism and decide that, come hell or high water, you’re still going to call certain beliefs or ideas ‘objective morality’. You’re still going to talk about good and evil.
You’re welcome to it. I’ll just keep pointing out what ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are on your worldview: Things you like, and the labels you put on them. You get ‘oughts’ by saying ‘I think this is what we ought to do!’ – as if no one thought an individual could make up rules on their own, or that making up rules on one’s own becomes “objective morality” so long as the rules sound nice enough.
Yes, they do, but I don’t worship them. Incidentally, they also emerge from religion.
To the second, it depends on the religion in question and what’s meant by ‘religion’. First, of course you don’t – that’s your choice. And that’s literally all there is to the decision, ‘choice’ being such as it is for you.
But the problem goes beyond that. You’ve called yourself a pantheist, and one of the reasons you gave is because ‘love emerges from the world’. I’m pointing out quite a lot of other things that emerge from the world. The problem of evil still exists for the pantheist, unless the ‘pantheism’ is just a little bit of word glitter.
Well, I understand that you don’t think “emergence” gets me where I want to go to, but you need to do more than assert it. I think it’s a pretty important concept. Systems-level analysis is, by definition, not “reductionist”, and it tells us things that a reductionist approach can’t tell us. I assume you wouldn’t disagree with this?
No, a systems-level analysis is exactly that – a systems-level analysis. Questions of reductionism or anti-reductionism are questions about the natures of things – a person does not avoid reductionism merely by pragmatic analysis or use of useful fictions.
Yes, it’s irreducible. If you omit the level of the organisation, you miss the property of the whole. It’s a fairly trivial example, of course, but it’s a fair example.
Let me get this straight. You’re saying that, in the case of a bunch of cubes taped in a spherical formation and made to roll, that a complete microphysical description of the bunch of cubes and the sphere leaves something out? That if, say, we placed this on the side of a hill, we would not be able to get to the physical behavior of this construct by an exhaustive microphysical investigation/description?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I guess I’d need to read the whole context.
Fair enough.
In fact, as I keep saying, I don’t think reductionist materialism works. And in fact, no-one actually uses it in practice. Everyone works at a systems level.
Pragmatic decisions and useful fictions do not determine natures. There are materialists who admit that we may never have a complete materialist explanation for this or that – they do not become non-materialists just by admitting as much. And I’m willing to bet a number of scientists, particularly physicists, would deny that they only “work at the systems level”.
I do, and my answer is “no”.
Is this the reply from the pantheist, the strong atheist, the monistic theist, or the faithless? 😉
No. Please don’t attribute views to me I don’t hold.
I’m not – unless you changed your views in the past view days, I’m pretty much quoting you on what you quoted. Yes, your view does ‘give you the warm fuzzies’, and yes, it does ‘give you everything God did’.
Theism (traditional theism) comes with a whole host of problems that simply disappear if you drop the assumption that there’s a Big Guy In Charge.
The fact that you think traditional theism amounts to a ‘Big Guy in Charge’ itself indicates a confusion on your part. And every view has ‘problems’. It’s whether the problems have solutions that is key.
And, I’m delighted to find, you are still left with all the solutions to important problems you had in the first place (like how to behave, for instance). But no more Problem of Evil, no more nonsensical Atonement, no more arbitrary irregularities in the universe, no more wars over whose God has the right rules, no more Saved and Damned. No more fear of death.
No, you still have a problem of evil if you’re a pantheist, so long as that term is more than glitter and stickers, or unless you don’t mind worshipping something which is partially evil, or deny that there is good and evil – in which case theism has no problems either. Fear of death? On Christian theism? Insofar as you have doubt, perhaps. Wars over whose God has the right rules? Funny, I didn’t know that was an intrinsic part of theism, much less Christianity, as opposed to a largely secular outcome! Arbitrary irregularities? You mean “the actions of an agent for a purpose”? (It’s doubly amusing you throw the ‘arbitrary’ comment out against theism, since the arbitrary is ultimate under materialism.) The atonement makes plenty of sense, and the question of the saved and the damned is multifaceted and itself is not a ‘problem for theism’ but an open question.
Finally, I think there are plenty of problems for materialism. But I do give credit where credit’s do: How to behave? That’s an easy question to answer on materialism: “However you like and/or however you will.” Very simple.
If I deny the existence of God, can’t I pretty much believe whatever I want, and even change those beliefs at will, and care not one whit about consistency and coherency?
Heck, I could even believe in god one moment and not believe in the next.
I bet I’d be fun to argue with. 🙂
Mung:
That was actually the point of my deconstructionist tactic. I’ve never met an atheist that said they didn’t want to believe in a perfect, good, benevoluent god; in fact, every one of them said they wanted such to be true. I said that, too.
But if one is a materialist atheist, what is to stop you from believing in just that very thing?
One might say, it’s not true – but then, what does true mean? What difference does it even make if it is true? Unlikely? With infinite time and universes, all unlikely things come to pass. Unreasonable? With infinite time and universes, what does ‘unreasonable” mean?
If one is only concerned with “what works” or “practical results” in terms of “what make one experience a happy and more satisfied life”, I don’t see how it can get much better than the theistic premise I offered above.
Evem materialist pragmatism leads to theism.
Another thing to keep in mind, so long as we’re touching on the topic of emergence: The fundamental parts do determine what can be done with them, even on a ‘systems level’, whatever that may be. I gave the example of taping the cubes into a sphere shape. Try arranging a collection of exclusively black cubes and getting a rainbow color.
WJM,
With infinite time and universes, all unlikely things come to pass. Unreasonable? With infinite time and universes, what does ‘unreasonable” mean?
Great insight.
“Try arranging a collection of exclusively black cubes and getting a rainbow color”
I love that. And I’m stealing it.
And, how do we successively traverse the infinite, again?
Driver: “Cosmologists come up with models to try to explain the data, not to circumvent philosophers.”
Agreed. But the their own personal philosophical cravings will buoy existing models. As you said, and I agree, that these models are attempts to unify QM and GR, but there is an ideological lust at work here also, and it has been well documented since the initial interpretations of the red shift. Hammered home by the catholic priest/physicist who proposed the expanding universe. Resistance to the expanding universe was not due to scientific objection, but rather philosophical:
“In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state Universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory.[81] This perception was enhanced by the fact that the originator of the Big Bang theory, Monsignor Georges Lemaître, was a Roman Catholic priest.[82] Pope Pius XII declared, at the November 22, 1951 opening meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that the Big Bang theory accorded with the Catholic concept of creation.[83] Conservative Protestant Christian denominations have also welcomed the Big Bang theory as supporting a historical interpretation of the doctrine of creation.[84]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang
Back to the unified field theory. It is possible that this problem was also solved, by Feynman and Weinberg’s quantum theory of gravity. The issue was in this case, that in the same way a particles position and momentum cannot be determined, that there is also no ultimate equation. There simply is no Theory of everything. This naturally plagued poor Feynman and Weinberg. And ever since, physicists have been chasing the elusive unifying field theory. And after decades of research, they have accumulated an untold amount of papers. String theory alone boasts 10 500 different variations. Not to mention countless other non-string proposals, hypothesis etc.
So it seems, if Feynman and Weinberg were to make a prediction based off of their equations it may have been something like, “since no ultimate equation can exist, physicists will fail in finding any ultimate equation.”
They never made this prediction. They too were disgusted by the implications of their own work. But as of today, it the implication stands. I guess we will have to stay tuned.
Mung @145 “I agree information does not act. Other entities act upon receipt of information. But I disagree that only a mind can act upon receipt of information, if that’s what you’re saying.”
The *only* entities which can receive information are minds.
It seems that you’re confusing (and, infact, conflating) the symbolic representation of information for information itself.
A signal/message contains no information, rather, it is an inherently meaningless symbolic representation of information.
Wow! My very own thread! Thanks, VJ!
Unfortunately, I just spotted it, I’m 159 comments behind and I have a tone of work to get caught up on after the holiday weekend, so I’ll have to save my comments for tomorrow.
There is one thing I have to write now: None of my ideas are original, though I don’t have a cite for where I read them. But I want the world to know that if the choice of names was a very clever one, the cleaverness is not attributable to me.
Because it is self-evidently not true. I mean, there might be Pie In The Sky When I Die, but there certainly isn’t an omnibenevolent omnipotent god who does anything much up till that point. Petitionary prayer clearly doesn’t work, and God clearly doesn’t intervene to prevent suffering, even of entirely innocent children. Indeed, to postulate a God who deliberately created and designed all living things requires that we postulate a God who deliberately set on earth organisms who cannot live without destroying the health of human beings.
That is not what I call a benevolent God.
I’d be quite happy to believe in a benevolent God who was not omnipotent, or even an omnipotent God who was not benevolent (except i wouldn’t worship it) if there was any evidence to support such a thing, or any benefit to the mere fact of postulating such a thing.
But I see none.
Elizabeth, there is plenty of evidence for God. That you fail to see it is irrelevant.
It’s very relevant!
How could it not be?
If I’m supposed to believe in God on the basis of the evidence, then the evidence is surely relevant?
What is your evidence for a God who is both omnipotent AND benevolent?
Because as I see it, if God is omnipotent he is not benevolent (why did he design human parasites, for instance?) and if he is benevolent, why does he not intervene to stop terrible things happening? If he works only through our hearts, why does he not change the hearts of those about to do terrible things? And if the excuse is that he will not deny us free will, why not at least deny us the Onchocerca volvulus?
And if what we think is good is not necessarily what God thinks is good, how do we know that God is good?
And if the answer is that God is the authority on what is good, why is that argument not completely circular?
Sorry for the late reply, but vacation, catch up and lack of sleep have slowed my response. And I’m still half asleep…
Your response to “Argument A”: “I would maintain that all God needs is to have access to your name; it doesn’t need to be “in” His mind.”
Interesting. It kind of redefines “omniscience” to “having access to a really good library.” By that redefinition, I know the names of every telephone subscriber in New York City if I have access to a New York City Telephone book. But let’s accept that for the sake of argument.
The water in a stream has access to every pebble in the stream bed. And that means absolutely nothing because the water is unintelligent and thus can’t DO anything with that access. It can’t even tell you how many pebbles there are. To do even that simple a thing requires an internal mechanism for knowing what a pebble is, discerning pebbles from the mud they lie on and counting them. Just discerning the pebbles from the mud requires a complicated mechanism that embodies a rather large amount of information. (I think philosophers have a name for that problem – figure/field or foreground/background or The Framing Problem or something like that. It’s one of the “hard” problems.) Where did the information that allows God to see your name, comprehend it and use it come from?
“God, who holds all things, past, present and future, in existence, has immediate epistemic access to all events in the past, present and future. That’s how He is able to know my name.”
More on this later.
Your reply to “Argument B”: I think you’re a little confused on “rules” that are in our minds and “rules” that we devise by studying language from the outside. But it doesn’t affect the argument.
The problem with God is, “Where did the information that allows Him to comprehend the language he observes come from?” Let me try to clarify that: My cat can observe people using language. If he was a Super Cat, he could even observe the internal workings of our brains as we use language. If he was a Timeless Super Cat, he could observe the internal workings of the brains of the first people who started to develop the very first languages. But unless he has the internal information necessary to understand what he observes, those observations do him no good. Where did God’s internal information come from?
Now there are possible answers to these questions. From my very limited knowledge of the Mormon religion, they appear to believe that humans can develop into sort of gods with sort of god-like powers. Maybe the Judeo/Christian/Muslim God “evolved” that way. Any takers? I know I don’t believe it.
Now about God being outside time: that’s another, VERY interesting problem. God is often presented as being omniscient – knowing everything. Most people think that God’s omniscience includes being able to see the future. Calvin certainly did. But there’s a problem: to know the future, the future must be fixed.
If the future is variable – for instance, if you might wear a blue tie OR a red tie tomorrow, then no one can know if you will wear a red tie or a blue tie tomorrow in advance because you might wear either one – your choice is not fixed until you make it. Even God can’t tell. Even a God outside of time can’t tell.
The only way the future can be known is if the future is fixed. Therefore, if any entity can know the future, then the future is fixed. But if the future is fixed, then your thoughts are fixed and you have no real free will. You may feel like you have it, but the minutest details of every nuance of your mind’s operation, both consciously and subconsciously are fixed and were fixed before you were ever born.
Your cites to Mr. Misialowski are very interesting. He makes a big error regarding modal logic. Can you spot it before Monday morning?
EL:
Is there a difference between adopting #1 and having faith that somehow materialism can produce phenomena unlike itself as a matter of necessity – consciousness, reason, identity, and will; and adopting #2 and having faith that somehow pure benevolence necessarily produces an emergent quality unlike itself – evil?
I don’t really see the logical difference. Perhaps you could explain it to me.
Let’s face it, there’s no rational reason to believe this is possible let alone plausible.
Why don’t you try asking whatever God there might be to reveal “himself” to you. How much time have you spent doing *that*?
Liz, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. –Jeremiah 29:13”
Now, the dude who wrote that was either bluffing or he wasn’t.
Too many people making difficult work over a simple matter. Not necessarily easy. But simple.
Science can only take you so far. Sometimes you have to set sail and see where it takes you.
Mike 1962:
Oh, quite a while 🙂
As I’ve said before, Mike, I have a God. It’s equating that God with the creator of the universe that I have a problem with.
The “still small voice” God, I’ve always had, and still do. I just no longer see any reason to locate that God outside the universe, or, indeed, hold its owner to account for the horrors that universe sometimes inflicts on its creatures.
So it seems a little misleading to call it the voice of “God”.
Hi Dave,
Thank you for your very thoughtful comments. Concerning my solution to argument A, you write:
There is a significant difference between God and you-with-a-telephone-book. The difference is that God’s epistemic access is immediate. In your case, there is a small distance between you and the telephone book, and the information reaching your eye has to travel up your nervous system to your brain, so that you can process it. But I would put it to you that if the distance in space and time between you and the information were zero, that’s as good as having it in your head.
You also write:
I agree. Having immediate access to information does not mean the same thing as knowing that information. That’s why I stipulated: immediate epistemic access.
You ask what the mechanism of God’s knowledge is. The traditional answer is that God needs no mechanism, by virtue of His privileged position with respect to creatures, space and time. With respect to creatures: God is their creator and sustainer. With respect to space and time: God is outside them (the atemporal view, which I favor) or at all points in space and time (William Lane Craig’s view). On either view, it seems to me, God is able to have “knowledge of vision” of what we call future events.
Concerning Argument B, you raise the example of your cat observing but not comprehending human conversation, and you write of God:
I would reply that God does not merely observe sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings. He also observes thoughts. God is observing your thoughts even as you think now. When you come to think about it, He could hardly make a universe in which He was unable to do this, could He? As an observer of your thoughts, God can observe the propositions you are mentally contemplating.
Concerning God’s foreknowledge, you write:
What do you mean by “fixed”? And fixed from whose perspective? I would agree with Misialowski in denying the necessity of the past. I would also deny the necessity of a future that God can see.
Finally, you write:
I’ve been re-reading Misialowki’s paper at http://www.galilean-library.or.....stid=43827 where he outlines his own favored solution to the problem of free will and foreknowledge. I have to say that I don’t see any obvious errors here.
I’ve just stumbled upon a critical review of Misialowski at http://academy.galilean-librar.....-6217.html . I’ll have a look at it today.
Hi Victor,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. What goes into “knowledge” and how God allegedly acquires this knowledge is one of the most interesting questions in philosophy – and also one of the hardest to put into words, at least for me. My thoughts are still forming and discussions like this help bring them into shape.
Going back to the beginning, I said this:
“ID in practice treats the existence of God as a given when in fact any thinking being at all, even a human-quality thinking being, requires so many gigabits of precisely ordered information that the unlikelyhood of that being “just existing” totally overshadows the relatively small information requirements (probably only a few hundred bits) of first life. And once you have first life, evolution can account for all the rest.”
Now you claim that God can extract phone numbers from the universe and recognize them for what they are – He can distinguish them from my house number or my social security number or my favorite color, which is blue, and He also knows what a phone is and how to use the telephone system. You also say that God can read minds, which means extracting thoughts from the cacophony of neurons firing and He doubtless has lots of other fantastic talents.
Ok. But you also say he has no mechanism for doing this and sorry, but that’s impossible. Phone numbers don’t separate themselves out from the rest of the universe, they have to be separated and that does require some sort of mechanism, whether the mechanism is a part of God or external to Him. You just can’t have unsorted information and get anything out of it, regardless of your powers – unless you have a lot of internal information that lets you do the sorting and arranging.
Theology keeps trying to evade this requirement by saying that God is simple (impossible if He can do what He’s reputed to be able to do) or he has epistemic knowledge (impossible without some way to separate facts and organize them) or that he has some sort of privileged position with respect to space and time (which wouldn’t replace separating and organizing facts) or that He created the universe and thus knows all about it. (then where did that knowledge come from?) or that He has always existed and He’s always been that way. (The more complex He is, the greater the odds that something simpler would have always existed instead.)
In short, theology presents no way for God to have the properties imputed to him without His having vast amounts of highly organized information and also presents no way of accounting for the existence of that information.
Science, on the other hand, has no problem answering those questions for humans: life started out so simple that chance could produce it (think of a single short polymer whose only ability is to reproduce itself) and grew in complexity through Darwinian evolution with chance changes adding information and natural selection weeding out the useless info and keeping the useful.
Note that I’m not saying it’s impossible for God to have that information. Mormon theology apparently allows for humans to gradually develop into at least demi-Gods, but frankly I don’t think that we’ll ever get to be God gods that way.
Or, if the odds against having God always exist with the needed information all neatly arranged are eleventy gazillion to one, then let there be eleventy gazillion times eleventy gazillion different universes and maybe one of them will have a God god who’s always existed. But then you’d be asking, “What are the odds that THIS universe is the lucky one?”
Now, concerning knowledge of the future – thank you for bringing up this ever fascinating topic. Let me start by saying I envision the universe and time like this:
Take the (presumably spherical) universe at some particular instant and squash it flat into a disk.
Now take the universe at the next instant, squash it into a disk and put that disk on top of the first one.
Take the universe at the third instant, squash it into a disk and put it on the first two.
Continue until you have a cylinder made of stacked disks, with each disk representing the universe at one particular instant. If you examine one disk from, say, five minutes ago, you’ll find both of us in it, you a dot in Japan and me a dot in Wisconsin. Neither of the dots will be moving because that disk represents just one instant of time. However, if we are walking around, our dots will be in different positions on different disks. Nothing original here, it’s a standard way of representing the universe and time.
God would be outside the disk by most accounts, but capable of examining any portion of any disk or all the disks at once if He wants to. William Craig’s God would presumably be permeating all the disks at all times or something like that. I’m not familiar with his thoughts in this area.
If we could look at that cylindrical universe from the outside, I personally think that the very top disk would represent the present and a new disk would be stacked on top of the cylinder every instant with each new disk representing “now”. In my view, the future does not yet exist and is not entirely predictable, so there are no disks beyond the present.
Some people would stack disks representing the future above the present disk anyway. If that case, the “present” disk would constantly move upwards through the stack as the instants passed. All of the disks below the “present” disk would be still and unchanging because the past is fixed and unchanging. Some people think the future is also fixed and thus the future disks would also be unchanging. Some people think the future is not fixed and their disks would be ?? I don’t know. Blurry maybe? Or maybe the dots on the future disks would be constantly in motion as events in the present change the future? Got me. That’s why I just leave them off the stack.
Misialowski, as I read him, is trying to prove that God’s foreknowledge of the future does not entail the future. He’s trying to prove that if God knows Misialowski will strangle his neighbor at a certain time, His knowledge does not force Misialowski to kill his neighbor. I agree with him. I don’t think that God’s knowledge or anybody else’s knowledge entails the future. If I had a time machine and saw him strangle his neighbor, my knowledge would not force him to do it.
But I DO think that the only way God or anybody else can KNOW the future is if the future is FIXED and if the future is fixed then Misialowski’s actions in the future are also fixed and so are everybody else’s. And if your actions (which would include your thoughts) are fixed, then free will is impossible.
In other words, it’s not the foreknowledge that entails the future and kills free will, it’s the fact that in order to have foreknowledge the future must be fixed and the latter kills free will.
Misialowski tries to get out of this by using modal logic – distinguishing between things that are true in any one world and things that are true in all possible worlds. This works if the future is not fixed. At that future time Misalowski can decide to strangle his neighbor in one world and let him live in another. But if the future is fixed, there is only one world – the world in which he strangles his neighbor and there is absolutely no way for him to not kill him. The possible worlds where he doesn’t kill him don’t exist because the fixed future makes them impossible.
So the atheists are right that if God knows the future then free will is impossible, but it’s not God’s knowledge that does the dirty work, it’s the fact that the future can only be known if it is fixed.
dmullenix:
I disagree 😀
Therefore God.
Or, at any rate, therefore moral responsibility.
As Peter O’Toole said in “The Ruling Class”, “Everytime I pray, I find I’m talking to myself.”
Therefore, I’m God.
So I’ve unfixed the future. You’re now morally responsible again.