Edward Feser reviews John Leslie’s and Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? over at First Things.  Fifty Shades of Nothing  While Kuhn does not settle on a particular position, he does indicate that he thinks that either the existence of things is a brute fact without explanation, or there is something that is self-existent in the sense that its essence entails that its non-existence is inherently impossible. The only remaining question in the latter case would be what else we could say about this self-existent reality (e.g., whether we ought to ascribe to it the standard divine attributes). For the reason given by Gerson, though, I think that if Kuhn is willing to Read More ›

In my last post, I discussed the problem of split-brain cases, which was first raised by KeithS in a post over at The Skeptical Zone titled, Split-brain patients and the dire implications for the soul (June 22, 2013). I began by distinguishing three varieties of dualism (leaving aside property dualism, whose inadequacies from a theistic standpoint have already been ably exposed by Professor William Dembski – see here and here), which I referred to as substance dualism, thought control dualism and formal-final dualism. I then examined the six assumptions used in KeithS’s split-brain argument from the perspective of each of these versions of dualism. What is a split-brain operation? Before I go on, I’d like to provide a brief scientific Read More ›

A battle royal over split-brain patients has been raging on a post at Uncommon Descent for the past four weeks. I was unaware of this vigorous debate until a couple of days ago, as I’ve been working on several posts of my own, which will (hopefully) be up soon. However, after having viewed the comments on the split brain thread, I’ve decided to make my own contribution to the debate, as someone who has a long-standing interest in the mind-body problem. How it all started Over at The Skeptical Zone, KeithS threw down the gauntlet in a post titled, Split-brain patients and the dire implications for the soul (June 22, 2013). I’ll quote a brief excerpt here: There is a Read More ›

Over at the KF blog, we have recently been entertaining some ghosts from our civilisation’s past, who are concerned about its present and now sadly likely future in light of the sad history recorded in Acts 27, of a sea voyage to Rome gone disastrously wrong because the voyagers were manipulated into venturing back out at Fair Havens, when they ought to have been wintering. That is, while democracy is obviously better than realistic alternatives, there is nothing sacred or necessarily sound and wise about majority rule (even when minorities are heard out, respected and protected — as seems increasingly to be fading away . . . ), especially when the majority view has been manipulated by agenda driven interests. Read More ›

Reading through a recent article by KeithS over at The Skeptical Zone, I was reminded of the following lyrics from the musical Annie Get Your Gun: Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything Better than you. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. No, you can’t. Yes, I can, Yes, I can! The article, which is entitled, Things That IDers Don’t Understand, Part 1 — Intelligent Design is not compatible with the evidence for common descent, argues that evolution guided by an Intelligent Designer fares much worse – in fact, trillions of times worse – than unguided Darwinian evolution as an explanation of how living things arose in all their Read More ›

This morning, CH has by implication raised the issue that has been hotly debated recently: getting a cosmos out of “nothing.” I thought it would be helpful to headline my comment: ______________ >>  . . . “Something from nothing” is always problematic. Now, I know I know, here is Ethan Siegel of Science Blogs in partnership with Nat Geog, inadvertently illustrating the problem: It’s often said that you can’t get something from nothing. And while this may be true for most practical applications of your life, it isn’t true for our physical Universe. And I don’t just mean some tiny part of it; I mean all of it. When you take a look at the Universe out there, whether you’re Read More ›

There is currently a discussion going on about Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos between Ed Feser and Jason Rosenhouse. Feser takes Rosenhouse to task pretty well but there’s one thing that I think he overlooks – Rosenhouse actually winds up conceding the entire argument at the end.
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In the past, Intelligent Design has been accused of being tied to a “watchmaker” model of the cosmos. In today’s post, I’m going to look at four different metaphors for the cosmos, all of which are highly relevant for Intelligent Design, and discuss their strengths and limitations. 1. Why Professor Dembski considers Paley’s watch to be a bad metaphor for the world, and why he thinks the lute is a better one Left: A Renaissance-era lute. Unlike a watch, a lute does not do anything unless a human being is playing it. For this reason, Professor William Dembski, a leading proponent of Intelligent Design, thinks that the lute is a much better metaphor for the world than a watch. Right: Read More ›

In a recent post, entitled, Was Paley a mechanist?, I argued that Paley’s argument from design in no way presupposes a mechanistic philosophy of life, and that Paley’s philosophy of Nature was much closer to that of Aristotle than is commonly supposed. In today’s post, which is a follow-up of my latest essay, Building a bridge between Scholastic philosophy and Intelligent Design, I shall attempt to lay to rest a long-standing myth: the myth that the Intelligent Design movement is tied to a mechanistic view of life. I propose to lay the evidence before my readers, and let them draw their own conclusions. 1. What is a mechanist, and why does Professor Feser think that Professor Dembski is one? Left: Read More ›

This post is written for two groups of people: first, those who don’t know much about the philosophy of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) or the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages (which was influenced by his thinking) and who would like a clear, jargon-free introduction; and second, those who would like to understand why some Thomist philosophers have a problem with Intelligent Design. As my principal aim is clarity of exposition, I have endeavored to keep this post as free from polemics as possible. It is my contention that the philosophy of the Intelligent Design movement fits squarely within the broad tradition of Scholastic philosophy. If you’d like to learn why, please read on. What prompted me to write this post Read More ›

In this post, I shall attempt to get to the nub of a vital but often overlooked point of difference between Intelligent Design theory and some of its Thomist critics. The issue relates to precisely what it is that makes a thing a thing, and not just a virtual imitation of a thing. I’m also going to talk about Harry Potter, so stay tuned. What I shall attempt to argue is that the concept of “top-down creation” is unintelligible. Things have to also be made from the bottom up: in order to create something, de novo, you have to fully specify what it is that you’re creating. That means filling in all the details. More generally, what I’m claiming is Read More ›

Edward Feser reviews Michael Gazzaniga’s Who’s in Charge?  Free Will and the Science of the Brain in this quarter’s Claremont Review of Books (hard copy only available for now):  For those beholden to scientism, the only alternative to reductionism is ‘eliminativism,’ the view that if some apparent feature of the world cannot be reduced to scientific categories, it should be eliminated altogether. Hence the willingness of some advocates of scientism seriously to entertain the suggestion that free will, consciousness, and thought might simply be illusions. The trouble with Gazzaniga is that while he admirably resists such extreme conclusions, he is no less beholden than reductionists and eliminativists are to the fallacy that leads to them: the tendency to ‘reify’ abstractions, Read More ›

My intention in writing this post is to clear Rev. William Paley of two charges that have been leveled against him: first, that the God he argues for is different in certain vital respects from the God of classical theism, and second, that Paley’s design argument leads us to a false God: not a Creator, but a mere cosmic architect, who is a powerful but finite being, differing from us merely in degree. Both of these charges have been hurled against Paley by Associate Professor Edward Feser (who surely needs no introduction here) and by Professor Christopher F. J. Martin, of the University of St. Thomas, Department of Philosophy and Center for Thomistic Studies, in Houston, Texas. These are grave Read More ›

In my previous post on Rev. William Paley’s argument from design, I showed that the argument was carefully formulated to rebut Hume’s criticisms of design arguments that were current in his day. I also demonstrated that Paley’s argument was not (as is commonly believed) an argument from analogy; that it was not intended to be an inductive, probabilistic argument but a deductive proof; and that it was intended to establish the existence of a Deity Who is no absentee landlord or impersonal Force, but a living, personal Being Who continually maintains Nature in existence and keeps the various systems in the universe running, in addition to having designed them. In this post, I’m going to address another myth about William Read More ›

One of the clearest and most compelling arguments against materialism is that it is unable to account for the simple fact that our thoughts possess a meaning in their own right. As philosopher Ed Feser puts it in an online post entitled, Some brief arguments for dualism, Part I: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. The argument seems especially convincing when we consider abstract concepts. Consider the famous line, “Honesty is a greatly overrated virtue,” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It seems preposterous to suppose Read More ›