Aquinas follows Aristotle in utilizing the interplay of potentiality and actuality to explain substance and change. And the idea that the actual is prior to the potential, which I got a bit hung up on when reading Edward Feser’s book Aquinas, is from Aristotle as well.
The relevant discussion appears in book Θ of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; a summary is included in Marc Cohen’s SEP article (section 12).
First, Actuality is prior in sense of logos (account or definition), because we cite the actuality or actualities in describing a potential (something is fragile because it is capable of being broken). I think this is a good point, as it relates to everyday examples we can describe. However, if you think there is novelty in the world, then latent potentials exist which we cannot so define. A novel actuality may very well be described after the fact in terms of potentials which were previously unknown.
Next, Aristotle also views the actual as prior in a temporal sense: while an acorn’s potential to be a tree is prior to its actually becoming one, actual adult trees had to exist beforehand. This seems like a chicken and egg situation.
Finally, Aristotle argues that the actual is prior “in substance” because the actuality is the end or telos, and the potentiality exists for the sake of the end – actuality is the final cause of the potential.
An added argument is that Aristotle looks at the bigger picture and sees that potentials may or may not be fulfilled, therefore they are perishable. On the other hand, something eternal would have to be imperishable, hence actual. Since the eternal can exist without the perishable, but not conversely, this is another way to see that the actual is prior in substance. Just to be devil’s advocate here, though, I can easily conceive of eternal potentials: if potentiality is truly a mode of being.
These points about the priority and eternal nature of actuality lead us into the territory of the unmoved mover being seen as pure Act, utilized by Aquinas in arguments for God. I have been entertaining the different idea that if there is an ultimate being it should encompass both (infinite) potential and the power to act. But we’ll see how this holds up with further reading.
Showing posts with label Theism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theism. Show all posts
Friday, September 09, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Thoughts on Edward Feser’s Aquinas
I recently read Aquinas, by Edward Feser (home page, blog). I would recommend the book; it is an excellent introduction to the thought of Aquinas (it deals with his philosophy – it is not a biography of his life and times, nor does it cover all the theology). It is very accessible to the non-expert, but is best suited for those with some background knowledge of philosophy. In about 200 well written pages, Feser both presents and advocates for Thomist positions through 4 chapters devoted respectively to metaphysics, natural theology, psychology, and ethics.
I think Feser‘s greatest success is in his arguments for a re-consideration of Aquinas’ Aristotelian metaphysical ideas, especially with regard to causation, but also with regard to an ontology of potency and action, and hylomorphic (form/matter) dualism.
My main criticism is that while Feser’s assumed role as Aquinas’ champion is usually a benefit to the reader, as Aquinas is presented in most sympathetic light, he is inclined to insist that all of Aquinas' ideas are equally meritorious. In some cases this leads him to present arguments which seem to go beyond what would have occurred to Thomas himself.
But, with plenty of references for further reading, Feser has given the reader a roadmap for further study to follow onto his fine introduction.
Below are somewhat scattershot notes and comments I made while reading the book. To briefly summarize my own views: I'm attracted to some of the metaphysical elements of Aquinas/Aristotle as they relate to causation and mind, and I'm even sympathetic to some of the cosmological arguments. On the other hand, I was unconvinced by significant parts of the Thomist package, including arguments by analogy for some of the divine attributes, God's nature as pure act and his separateness from matter, and the special nature of the human soul.
I think Feser‘s greatest success is in his arguments for a re-consideration of Aquinas’ Aristotelian metaphysical ideas, especially with regard to causation, but also with regard to an ontology of potency and action, and hylomorphic (form/matter) dualism.
My main criticism is that while Feser’s assumed role as Aquinas’ champion is usually a benefit to the reader, as Aquinas is presented in most sympathetic light, he is inclined to insist that all of Aquinas' ideas are equally meritorious. In some cases this leads him to present arguments which seem to go beyond what would have occurred to Thomas himself.
But, with plenty of references for further reading, Feser has given the reader a roadmap for further study to follow onto his fine introduction.
Below are somewhat scattershot notes and comments I made while reading the book. To briefly summarize my own views: I'm attracted to some of the metaphysical elements of Aquinas/Aristotle as they relate to causation and mind, and I'm even sympathetic to some of the cosmological arguments. On the other hand, I was unconvinced by significant parts of the Thomist package, including arguments by analogy for some of the divine attributes, God's nature as pure act and his separateness from matter, and the special nature of the human soul.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Limiting Possible Evils
1. Multiverse Theodicies
Why would God, assumed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, create a world which is suffused with gratuitous suffering? There are many responses given by theists, but I’ve thought the most persuasive one was an appeal to a theistic multiverse. I was reminded of this strategy by reading Bradley Monton’s draft paper titled “Against Multiverse Theodicies” (warning – Word document). It was a helpful paper to review because in it he describes various approaches that have been taken in the literature, on his way to formulating an argument against them. There are many variants, but a typical version of the theodicy says that God maximizes total value by creating infinite universes, not just the one we observe, and all we need to accept about our own world is that it is minimally worth creating by the deity -- perhaps the good it embodies just barely outweighs the bad. Then can imagine that the countless superior worlds of which we can conceive also exist. Terrible worlds unrelieved by sufficient good would not be created.
Now, Monton’s paper argues the strategy doesn’t work: The key to his argument has to do with God’s ability to create duplicate and near duplicate universes (without end). To greatly simplify, he says that instead of creating a world with a given amount of suffering, God could create duplicates of better worlds and create more aggregate good. (A counterargument, he says, would have to involve a successful defense of Leibniz’ principle of the Identity of indiscernibles).
I recommend the paper, although I’m not going to engage his argument here. Rather I bring this up because, while I’m not a theist, the issues raised in this discussion bear on concerns I have about my own views.
2. The Modal Realist’s “Problem” of Evil
Why would God, assumed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, create a world which is suffused with gratuitous suffering? There are many responses given by theists, but I’ve thought the most persuasive one was an appeal to a theistic multiverse. I was reminded of this strategy by reading Bradley Monton’s draft paper titled “Against Multiverse Theodicies” (warning – Word document). It was a helpful paper to review because in it he describes various approaches that have been taken in the literature, on his way to formulating an argument against them. There are many variants, but a typical version of the theodicy says that God maximizes total value by creating infinite universes, not just the one we observe, and all we need to accept about our own world is that it is minimally worth creating by the deity -- perhaps the good it embodies just barely outweighs the bad. Then can imagine that the countless superior worlds of which we can conceive also exist. Terrible worlds unrelieved by sufficient good would not be created.
Now, Monton’s paper argues the strategy doesn’t work: The key to his argument has to do with God’s ability to create duplicate and near duplicate universes (without end). To greatly simplify, he says that instead of creating a world with a given amount of suffering, God could create duplicates of better worlds and create more aggregate good. (A counterargument, he says, would have to involve a successful defense of Leibniz’ principle of the Identity of indiscernibles).
I recommend the paper, although I’m not going to engage his argument here. Rather I bring this up because, while I’m not a theist, the issues raised in this discussion bear on concerns I have about my own views.
2. The Modal Realist’s “Problem” of Evil
Friday, September 17, 2010
Necessary Being(s)
I think there’s a good case to be made for a necessary being (NB), driven by an argument from contingency. But what else can we say about the NB?
I think a lot about the nature of this NB, and have been oscillating between different conceptions. At one pole is a conception of a chaotic and indifferent mega-cosmos which contains every non-contradictory thing as an actual or latent part. Then, I consider incrementally “tamer” NB’s which are shaped by additional necessary features.
To start, it certainly seems plausible that a broad range of logical and mathematical truths are necessary. Perhaps all reality must contain some minimum degree of order, so it can be grasped by reason (although I don’t see why our local physical laws should be thought specifically necessary). Much more controversially, my study of the mind/body problem leads me to suspect all concrete existence is necessarily experiential or proto-experiential in character. And, going further on a limb, where there is experience, there is value: perhaps value and morals are somehow grounded in the nature of the necessary being.
But this project of “taming Chaos” gets increasingly problematic.
Coming at this from the other direction, most people who posit an NB are theists who believe in a personal God with various attributes who sometimes acts as an agent within the world. I don’t see right now how I’d ever get to this conception.
What seems most clear is that the NB must be the maximum instance of existence. Any more specific or idiosyncratic depiction of God runs the risk of being inconsistent with this. (I thought Mark Johnston, in his book Saving God, is good on this point, when he argues that if God is the “highest one”, any devotion to a more specific and hence lesser deity can be seen as idolatry.) This is where “divine simplicity” breaks down, too: the only arguably “simple” NB is the metaphysically maximal one.
Once you layer God with attributes which are derived from human properties, and most obviously if you make God an actor in an earthly drama (rather than him “in whom we live and move and have our being”), it seems clear you’re no longer talking about the NB.
Comments welcome -- this is difficult stuff!
I think a lot about the nature of this NB, and have been oscillating between different conceptions. At one pole is a conception of a chaotic and indifferent mega-cosmos which contains every non-contradictory thing as an actual or latent part. Then, I consider incrementally “tamer” NB’s which are shaped by additional necessary features.
To start, it certainly seems plausible that a broad range of logical and mathematical truths are necessary. Perhaps all reality must contain some minimum degree of order, so it can be grasped by reason (although I don’t see why our local physical laws should be thought specifically necessary). Much more controversially, my study of the mind/body problem leads me to suspect all concrete existence is necessarily experiential or proto-experiential in character. And, going further on a limb, where there is experience, there is value: perhaps value and morals are somehow grounded in the nature of the necessary being.
But this project of “taming Chaos” gets increasingly problematic.
Coming at this from the other direction, most people who posit an NB are theists who believe in a personal God with various attributes who sometimes acts as an agent within the world. I don’t see right now how I’d ever get to this conception.
What seems most clear is that the NB must be the maximum instance of existence. Any more specific or idiosyncratic depiction of God runs the risk of being inconsistent with this. (I thought Mark Johnston, in his book Saving God, is good on this point, when he argues that if God is the “highest one”, any devotion to a more specific and hence lesser deity can be seen as idolatry.) This is where “divine simplicity” breaks down, too: the only arguably “simple” NB is the metaphysically maximal one.
Once you layer God with attributes which are derived from human properties, and most obviously if you make God an actor in an earthly drama (rather than him “in whom we live and move and have our being”), it seems clear you’re no longer talking about the NB.
Comments welcome -- this is difficult stuff!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Fine-Tuned for Pantheism?
In his book, Immortality Defended, John Leslie argues (in his Chapter 5) that the characteristics of our world can serve as evidence for his model of pantheism. Recall that Leslie thinks our world is one of many called forth from possibility into actuality by the creative power of the Good. These worlds can also be characterized as those worthy of being thought about by a divine mind.
This position can be thought of as intermediate between a non-theistic concrete modal realism (David Lewis’ model), where all metaphysically possible worlds exist, and classical theistic models where a personal deity creates our world alone (although some modern thinkers allow for a personal God to create many worlds, too.)
This position can be thought of as intermediate between a non-theistic concrete modal realism (David Lewis’ model), where all metaphysically possible worlds exist, and classical theistic models where a personal deity creates our world alone (although some modern thinkers allow for a personal God to create many worlds, too.)
Saturday, July 10, 2010
John Leslie: Immortal Pantheist
I read philosopher John Leslie’s Immortality Defended (2007). It is an admirably brief book (supplemented with many suggestions for further reading) which outlines and defends a model of pantheism. The discussion of immortality is actually only a small part of the story (the fourth chapter of a five chapter book) and Leslie’s ideas about that topic follow fairly naturally once the pantheistic stage is set. My summary and comments are below (also to be continued in a follow-up post), but note they only capture a small portion of the rich and provocative arguments to be found in the book. FYI, a good NDPR entry on the book is here.
Friday, December 04, 2009
This Just Doesn’t Ring True
Karen Armstrong is a prolific writer about religion, and stakes out a conciliatory position in contemporary debates between "new" atheists and theists. I have not read any of her books and I don’t claim any expertise on the subject matter! But nonetheless her take on religious history as presented in this op-ed piece bothered me. Perhaps someone more familiar with her work and/or with history can set me straight.
Here are excerpts:
Here are excerpts:
In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence…
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Spinoza: Are Finite Things Contingent After All?
I’ve never studied Spinoza in any depth, so have been ignorant of the many subtleties/ambiguities in his work and the competing interpretations put forward by scholars on many points. I enjoyed reading two articles by Samuel Newlands: first, his SEP article “Spinoza’s Modal Metaphysics”, and the recent preprint, “Another Kind of Spinozistic Monism.” The latter paper argues that the various forms of metaphysical dependence employed by Spinoza (causation, inherence in, following from, etc.) are each connected to a broad notion of conceptual dependence, which is the key to understanding their role. This paper, interesting in its own right, helped me understand Newlands’ work in the modal metaphysics article, which is directly about the aspect of Spinoza I’m most interested in at the moment.
Spinoza is widely seen as a necessitarian (everything which exists does so necessarily), and for good reason: he has passages which explicitly affirm this. But evidently if you dig deeper there is a subtlety with regard to the status of “finite modes”, the ontological category which would include everyday concrete things. (Please note the use of “modes” here is unrelated to the “modal” dimensions of necessity and contingency). The one substance (God) and its infinite modes are absolutely necessary, but finite modes don’t follow from God in the same way as infinite modes. On the one hand, Spinoza affirms that God created everything, but elsewhere he specifies that finite modes follow only from other finite modes. What does this mean for the modal status of finite things (and how can he affirm both of these statements?)
Spinoza is widely seen as a necessitarian (everything which exists does so necessarily), and for good reason: he has passages which explicitly affirm this. But evidently if you dig deeper there is a subtlety with regard to the status of “finite modes”, the ontological category which would include everyday concrete things. (Please note the use of “modes” here is unrelated to the “modal” dimensions of necessity and contingency). The one substance (God) and its infinite modes are absolutely necessary, but finite modes don’t follow from God in the same way as infinite modes. On the one hand, Spinoza affirms that God created everything, but elsewhere he specifies that finite modes follow only from other finite modes. What does this mean for the modal status of finite things (and how can he affirm both of these statements?)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Stenger vs. Quantum Gods, Part Two
As I mentioned at the outset of the last post, Victor Stenger’s second goal in his book Quantum Gods is to critically examine “quantum theology”. This refers to attempts to rework traditional notions of God’s role as creator and/or intervening agent given modern physics. My review of this part of the book is below.
The Demise of Classical Deism
Trying to accommodate belief in God with a scientific worldview is not a new endeavor of course, and Stenger includes a discussion of “enlightenment deism” in the book. Newtonian physics provided a good foundation for the view that God created and planned the universe, but doesn’t further intervene (the clockwork universe). The theory of natural selection strengthened the case for deism vs. theism by weakening the perceived need for special divine action in the biological world. Quantum mechanics, however, made enlightenment deism untenable by introducing irreducible indeterminism; it appears God could not have ensured his planned outcomes in an essentially chancy world.
What About Emergence?
Stenger has a good discussion of the topics of complexity, chaos and emergent phenomena. Some have argued that emergence introduces “something more” into the makeup of the world beyond the basic physical entities. Some theologians think emergence may leave an opening for God to act in the world. Reviewing a few examples of emergent behavior (e.g. thermodynamics and fluid mechanics), Stenger argues all are cases of what he labels “material reductive” emergence. His main point is this: he says the fact that macro-principles cannot be deduced from microphysics is true and notable, but they nevertheless follow from, and thus are implicit in, the microphysics. The demonstration of this comes with the increasing power of computers to simulate emergent phenomena from the micro-facts: nothing “extra” is needed to do this. There is not a reasonable basis for “top-down” causality between levels of nature based on the phenomenon of emergence. Thus no opening is left here for theology to improvise a story about divine action.
I have found this topic to be difficult in the past, but I think Stenger’s position is well defended. My opinion is that the only really persuasive instance of ontological emergence is the crystallization of actual outcomes from the set of possibilities represented in a quantum state. (But while I don’t see a good case for further levels of ontological emergence or top-down causality once we’re dealing with larger (decohered) macroscopic systems, it is still highly suggestive that so many remarkable phenomena manage to be implicit in the micro-realm.)
Special Divine Action via QM?
In his Chapter 14 (“Where Can God Act”), Stenger reviews attempts to locate divine action in the world of modern physics. He briefly summarizes a number of articles from a Vatican/Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) multi-volume book series which address this and related issues.
Some authors think quantum indeterminism allows scope for subtle interventions, which, when combined with chaotic amplification, might lead to undetectable yet significant effects. Stenger first notes a common observation about such interventions: it seems that this kind of action is “God acting against God,” since the advocates of this idea also view God as the creator of the universe and its physical laws. Also, given the attribute of omnipotence, why should God restrict himself in this way? And it’s not clear this would work anyway. Stenger points out the time lag involved with chaotic amplification: given continued micro-chanciness, how can God be sure he’ll get the macroscopic effect he wants? If he acts to guarantee the outcome, then we’re back to wondering why he doesn’t just use his power to orchestrate all micro-processes to being with? Then, of course, we wouldn’t have indeterminism after all. (And this causes the additional problem of undermining the case for indeterminism-based free will, which is also advocated by some theologians).
I’m obviously oversimplifying the discussion in this summary, but I’ve read a number of these accounts over the years (many from my subscription to CTNS’ Theology and Science) and I agree with Stenger that attempts to implement special divine action with modern scientific tools seem fraught with difficulties.
Quantum Deism
In Chapter 15 (“The God Who Plays Dice”), Stenger notes that the problems with models of divine action do not rule out the possibility of a deist creator God. Perhaps God endowed the universe with indeterministic law as part of this creative plan. Of course, then, there was no guarantee humans would arise – so we couldn’t have been a part of a special plan, could we?
Stephen Jay Gould used to argue that evolution lacks any necessary directedness toward complexity or sophistication: if we “replayed the tape”, we might get a completely different outcome with no guarantees of intelligent life. Stenger notes that Simon Conway Morris is a recent advocate of a contrary view, however. Conway Morris argues, based on observed cases of convergent evolution, that humankind (or something very close) was inevitable. Is he right?
Stenger quotes Elliott Sober’s critique of Conway Morris, which centers on the fact that one can’t show the probability of evolutionary events: we only know the numerator, not the denominator (we unfortunately cannot run additional trials). Stenger adds that since out of the millions of species on earth, most are microbial, “intelligence would not seem to be very high at all on the universe’s agenda.”
Still, we could have a deist God if we accept that God created a cosmos with lots of chancy potential, and was willing to let the chips fall where they may. Such a God, of course, isn’t very attractive to those who yearn for a more traditional deity.
Is there an adequate basis for believing in the existence of (at least) this new kind of deistic God? Stenger doesn’t think so. He spends his last chapter (“Nothingism”) exploring his favorite ideas for a naturalistic account of the universe’s origin. I’m going to skip over these speculative ideas in this review. I think in the coming years work in cosmology and quantum gravity research will be offering new scenarios for how the observable universe arose from a pre-existing context (see for instance here). The point for Stenger is that if a naturalistic account of the universe’s origin is available, then we don’t need a deist God either. And he would answer the question: “who created the laws” by responding that laws are human inventions to describe regularities we observe. This is also a very defensible position.
What about the Multiverse?
Stenger doesn’t devote significant space to the idea of the multiverse apart from his brief section on the Many-Worlds Interpretation. But in addition to interpretations of QM, an increasing number of physical and cosmological theories motivate the possibility of a multiverse. There are also independent philosophical reasons for postulating that our universe is a subset of a larger reality.
I agree with most of Stenger’s criticisms of the various conceptions of God. However, the multiverse is the one conceptual place where I see the potential for a naturalistic worldview to make contact with a notion of God (albeit one which is non-traditional and impersonal): a transcendent and creative entity of which we are but a small part.
The Demise of Classical Deism
Trying to accommodate belief in God with a scientific worldview is not a new endeavor of course, and Stenger includes a discussion of “enlightenment deism” in the book. Newtonian physics provided a good foundation for the view that God created and planned the universe, but doesn’t further intervene (the clockwork universe). The theory of natural selection strengthened the case for deism vs. theism by weakening the perceived need for special divine action in the biological world. Quantum mechanics, however, made enlightenment deism untenable by introducing irreducible indeterminism; it appears God could not have ensured his planned outcomes in an essentially chancy world.
What About Emergence?
Stenger has a good discussion of the topics of complexity, chaos and emergent phenomena. Some have argued that emergence introduces “something more” into the makeup of the world beyond the basic physical entities. Some theologians think emergence may leave an opening for God to act in the world. Reviewing a few examples of emergent behavior (e.g. thermodynamics and fluid mechanics), Stenger argues all are cases of what he labels “material reductive” emergence. His main point is this: he says the fact that macro-principles cannot be deduced from microphysics is true and notable, but they nevertheless follow from, and thus are implicit in, the microphysics. The demonstration of this comes with the increasing power of computers to simulate emergent phenomena from the micro-facts: nothing “extra” is needed to do this. There is not a reasonable basis for “top-down” causality between levels of nature based on the phenomenon of emergence. Thus no opening is left here for theology to improvise a story about divine action.
I have found this topic to be difficult in the past, but I think Stenger’s position is well defended. My opinion is that the only really persuasive instance of ontological emergence is the crystallization of actual outcomes from the set of possibilities represented in a quantum state. (But while I don’t see a good case for further levels of ontological emergence or top-down causality once we’re dealing with larger (decohered) macroscopic systems, it is still highly suggestive that so many remarkable phenomena manage to be implicit in the micro-realm.)
Special Divine Action via QM?
In his Chapter 14 (“Where Can God Act”), Stenger reviews attempts to locate divine action in the world of modern physics. He briefly summarizes a number of articles from a Vatican/Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) multi-volume book series which address this and related issues.
Some authors think quantum indeterminism allows scope for subtle interventions, which, when combined with chaotic amplification, might lead to undetectable yet significant effects. Stenger first notes a common observation about such interventions: it seems that this kind of action is “God acting against God,” since the advocates of this idea also view God as the creator of the universe and its physical laws. Also, given the attribute of omnipotence, why should God restrict himself in this way? And it’s not clear this would work anyway. Stenger points out the time lag involved with chaotic amplification: given continued micro-chanciness, how can God be sure he’ll get the macroscopic effect he wants? If he acts to guarantee the outcome, then we’re back to wondering why he doesn’t just use his power to orchestrate all micro-processes to being with? Then, of course, we wouldn’t have indeterminism after all. (And this causes the additional problem of undermining the case for indeterminism-based free will, which is also advocated by some theologians).
I’m obviously oversimplifying the discussion in this summary, but I’ve read a number of these accounts over the years (many from my subscription to CTNS’ Theology and Science) and I agree with Stenger that attempts to implement special divine action with modern scientific tools seem fraught with difficulties.
Quantum Deism
In Chapter 15 (“The God Who Plays Dice”), Stenger notes that the problems with models of divine action do not rule out the possibility of a deist creator God. Perhaps God endowed the universe with indeterministic law as part of this creative plan. Of course, then, there was no guarantee humans would arise – so we couldn’t have been a part of a special plan, could we?
Stephen Jay Gould used to argue that evolution lacks any necessary directedness toward complexity or sophistication: if we “replayed the tape”, we might get a completely different outcome with no guarantees of intelligent life. Stenger notes that Simon Conway Morris is a recent advocate of a contrary view, however. Conway Morris argues, based on observed cases of convergent evolution, that humankind (or something very close) was inevitable. Is he right?
Stenger quotes Elliott Sober’s critique of Conway Morris, which centers on the fact that one can’t show the probability of evolutionary events: we only know the numerator, not the denominator (we unfortunately cannot run additional trials). Stenger adds that since out of the millions of species on earth, most are microbial, “intelligence would not seem to be very high at all on the universe’s agenda.”
Still, we could have a deist God if we accept that God created a cosmos with lots of chancy potential, and was willing to let the chips fall where they may. Such a God, of course, isn’t very attractive to those who yearn for a more traditional deity.
Is there an adequate basis for believing in the existence of (at least) this new kind of deistic God? Stenger doesn’t think so. He spends his last chapter (“Nothingism”) exploring his favorite ideas for a naturalistic account of the universe’s origin. I’m going to skip over these speculative ideas in this review. I think in the coming years work in cosmology and quantum gravity research will be offering new scenarios for how the observable universe arose from a pre-existing context (see for instance here). The point for Stenger is that if a naturalistic account of the universe’s origin is available, then we don’t need a deist God either. And he would answer the question: “who created the laws” by responding that laws are human inventions to describe regularities we observe. This is also a very defensible position.
What about the Multiverse?
Stenger doesn’t devote significant space to the idea of the multiverse apart from his brief section on the Many-Worlds Interpretation. But in addition to interpretations of QM, an increasing number of physical and cosmological theories motivate the possibility of a multiverse. There are also independent philosophical reasons for postulating that our universe is a subset of a larger reality.
I agree with most of Stenger’s criticisms of the various conceptions of God. However, the multiverse is the one conceptual place where I see the potential for a naturalistic worldview to make contact with a notion of God (albeit one which is non-traditional and impersonal): a transcendent and creative entity of which we are but a small part.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Stenger vs. Quantum Gods, Part One
I read Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness, by Victor Stenger. Stenger is a physicist who is in the popular-book writing business with a focus on the science vs. religion debate. I found the book to be thought-provoking and worth reading, although I have a couple of substantial criticisms.
The motivation behind the book is a good one. Stenger’s most recent prior book (he has written quite a few) was God: The Failed Hypothesis -- an entry in the recent mini-boom of books by materialist-atheists criticizing traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion. (I didn’t read this book having read Dawkins, Dennett and Harris in the genre). Quantum Gods is intended as a sequel which moves beyond traditional religion to criticize some newer and less traditional ideas about God and spirituality.
Stenger spends the first chapter looking at surveys on belief (including this Pew study), and notes they at least suggest that a substantial number of self-identified Christians have non-traditional ideas about God (in particular indicating beliefs more reminiscent of deism than theism). Also, he suspects that a significant portion of “unaffiliated” respondents have replaced traditional religion with various spiritual and/or paranormal beliefs (someone is buying lots of books by new age-type authors with these themes.)
With this as backdrop, Stenger explains that one strand which ties together some newer theistic/deistic ideas as well as the new age spiritual ones is their efforts to incorporate or accommodate modern physics (hence “quantum gods”). He identifies, then, two targets: the first, which he labels “quantum spirituality”, is the group of new age-type ideas which invoke quantum physics to support ideas about personal spiritual powers and/or cosmic consciousness; the second target, called “quantum theology”, is a set of attempts to accommodate God’s putative role as creator or intervening agent with modern science.
Before proceeding with more detail I need to mention one annoyance I had with the book: it felt somewhat padded to get to book-length. At 263 pages, about half (roughly the middle half) consists of encyclopedia entry-style sections on topics in the history of science. The content is unobjectionable, but this wouldn’t be the book you’d choose to read to learn about classical physics, relativity, or the history of quantum mechanics (QM) and the standard model of particle physics.
I thought the best part of the book were the late chapters criticizing “quantum theology” – i.e. some modern theological ideas about accommodating religion and science. I just wish he had a lengthier survey of these. A common objection to the work of the “new atheists” is to say that they haven’t grappled with more sophisticated modern theology but only criticize traditional beliefs (which are, of course, those held by the large majority of laypeople). Stenger has a good first effort to fill this gap, I thought. I will say a bit more about this section in a follow-up post. Below I will address Stenger’s criticism of new-agers and “quantum spirituality”, which I didn’t think was as effective.
Mind over Matter?
Let me quickly say that one of the reasons the chapters criticizing “quantum spirituality” aren’t as satisfying is not Stenger’s fault. Some of the ideas in books like those of Deepak Chopra and Gary Zukav, and movies like “What the Bleep Do We Know” just aren’t serious. Inspired by an apparent link between observation and the outcome of quantum measurements, a major claim of these folks is that quantum physics shows that human beings “create their own reality”: thus one can heal illnesses and become wealthy (or perhaps do some yogic flying) through the power of one’s mind. I personally think the details of QM could be implicated in the eventual scientific explanations of life, mind and freedom. However, to the extent that extrapolations from QM are used to portray humans as capable of paranormal powers, we cross into crackpot territory, and there’s not a lot more one can say (Stenger provides a section in Ch. 12 reviewing paranormal claims).
My main problem with Stenger’s discussion, though, is that his own opinion about the interpretation of quantum mechanics is highly idiosyncratic: he tries to hew as close as humanly possible to the worldview of classical materialism. As keen as he is to refute the quackery, he is as just as critical of the idea that the interpretation of QM might have any relevance to explaining the relation of mind to nature. He also is dismissive of the common notion that the ontology of QM or quantum field theory is suggestive of a more holistic cosmos than classical materialism. Here he is on less firm ground, in my opinion.
Saying No to Holism
With regard to holism, Stenger devotes a couple of sections discussing Fritjof Capra, one of the progenitors of the quantum new-age publishing genre with his book, The Tao of Physics (1975). In the book Capra stressed connections between QM and eastern philosophies, which he said both emphasize interconnectedness and process. Stenger points out that Capra was inspired by his work on a research program which was proposed as an alternative to quantum field theory called S-matrix/bootstrap theory. He points out that this program didn’t pan out, and this undercuts Capra. Stenger also has a brief discussion of quantum luminary David Bohm, who late in his career also espoused a holistic philosophy inspired by his work on the interpretation of QM (for instance in his book The Undivided Universe, written with Basil Hiley). Stenger notes the fact that Bohm’s “hidden variable” view is not widely embraced, and implies this undermines Bohm's philosophy.
It seems to me that most interpretations of QM and QFT, not just Capra's and Bohm's, can reasonably be taken to imply a more non-locally connected and hence holistic view of reality compared to the classical picture (what, if any, implications this has for the world beyond particle physics is a separate discussion). Prior to measurement, "particles" are spread out in space-time and systems demonstrate entanglement. The wave aspect of reality has a holistic element. However, it turns out Stenger doesn’t want to concede even something this modest.
Forget About Waves!
We learn more about Stenger’s own views in Chapters 12 and 13, where he discusses the interpretation of QM. He gives some brief sketches of Copenhagen, hidden-variables, and many-worlds interpretations. His own view, surprisingly, begins with a claim that there is no wave-particle duality; there are only particles. He has a section entitled “The Fictional Wave Function”. He says the description of the quantum state is an abstract mathematical entity. He spends a paragraph downplaying the Schrödinger representation of QM, preferring Heisenberg’s and Dirac’s formulations, which lack the wave function (he does remind the reader that they all give equivalent results).
So, if only particles exist, and no ontological status is given to the quantum state, how do we interpret experimental results? Discussing a single-electron double-slit experiment, Stenger’s idea, inspired by Feynman’s diagrams, is that the single particle, traveling backward and forward in time, can produce the interference pattern. I ask: how can it do this with no guidance from a wave? (Also interesting to me is that Stenger throughout the book is quick to dismiss anything that might imply violation of special relativity, but he’s OK with time-reversal). That’s the end of the discussion, so I can only infer that Stenger thinks QM can be successfully interpreted as a particle-only ontology with time-reversal. I’d never heard this view before and it isn’t defended at any length (it may be given more discussion in a previous book).
Can QM Explain Consciousness?
What about mind? Stenger does mention in passing that Von Neumann and Wigner suspected mind was involved in the phenomenon of quantum measurement. Beyond that he mentions the Penrose/Hameroff proposal for microtubule-based quantum coherence in the brain. He dismisses this with the standard reference to Max Tegmark’s 1999 paper calculating decoherence scales. I personally think Hameroff’s speculations are unlikely to be true, but recently it has been established that quantum coherence can be maintained and exploited by biological systems (see also here). While it still seems unlikely that anything as large as neuronal assemblies can maintain coherence, the science of tracing the role of quantum effects throughout biology is only getting started. I think it is quite plausible that distinctive features of life and mind may yet have at least a partial (non-trivial) quantum-mechanically-based explanation.
So, my main question for Stenger is this: why throw out the baby with the bathwater? We don’t live in a classical world, and we should continue to probe the implications of living in a quantum world wherever it takes us. Let’s not let the fact that New-age folks are making unsupported claims close our minds to the possibilities.
The motivation behind the book is a good one. Stenger’s most recent prior book (he has written quite a few) was God: The Failed Hypothesis -- an entry in the recent mini-boom of books by materialist-atheists criticizing traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion. (I didn’t read this book having read Dawkins, Dennett and Harris in the genre). Quantum Gods is intended as a sequel which moves beyond traditional religion to criticize some newer and less traditional ideas about God and spirituality.
Stenger spends the first chapter looking at surveys on belief (including this Pew study), and notes they at least suggest that a substantial number of self-identified Christians have non-traditional ideas about God (in particular indicating beliefs more reminiscent of deism than theism). Also, he suspects that a significant portion of “unaffiliated” respondents have replaced traditional religion with various spiritual and/or paranormal beliefs (someone is buying lots of books by new age-type authors with these themes.)
With this as backdrop, Stenger explains that one strand which ties together some newer theistic/deistic ideas as well as the new age spiritual ones is their efforts to incorporate or accommodate modern physics (hence “quantum gods”). He identifies, then, two targets: the first, which he labels “quantum spirituality”, is the group of new age-type ideas which invoke quantum physics to support ideas about personal spiritual powers and/or cosmic consciousness; the second target, called “quantum theology”, is a set of attempts to accommodate God’s putative role as creator or intervening agent with modern science.
Before proceeding with more detail I need to mention one annoyance I had with the book: it felt somewhat padded to get to book-length. At 263 pages, about half (roughly the middle half) consists of encyclopedia entry-style sections on topics in the history of science. The content is unobjectionable, but this wouldn’t be the book you’d choose to read to learn about classical physics, relativity, or the history of quantum mechanics (QM) and the standard model of particle physics.
I thought the best part of the book were the late chapters criticizing “quantum theology” – i.e. some modern theological ideas about accommodating religion and science. I just wish he had a lengthier survey of these. A common objection to the work of the “new atheists” is to say that they haven’t grappled with more sophisticated modern theology but only criticize traditional beliefs (which are, of course, those held by the large majority of laypeople). Stenger has a good first effort to fill this gap, I thought. I will say a bit more about this section in a follow-up post. Below I will address Stenger’s criticism of new-agers and “quantum spirituality”, which I didn’t think was as effective.
Mind over Matter?
Let me quickly say that one of the reasons the chapters criticizing “quantum spirituality” aren’t as satisfying is not Stenger’s fault. Some of the ideas in books like those of Deepak Chopra and Gary Zukav, and movies like “What the Bleep Do We Know” just aren’t serious. Inspired by an apparent link between observation and the outcome of quantum measurements, a major claim of these folks is that quantum physics shows that human beings “create their own reality”: thus one can heal illnesses and become wealthy (or perhaps do some yogic flying) through the power of one’s mind. I personally think the details of QM could be implicated in the eventual scientific explanations of life, mind and freedom. However, to the extent that extrapolations from QM are used to portray humans as capable of paranormal powers, we cross into crackpot territory, and there’s not a lot more one can say (Stenger provides a section in Ch. 12 reviewing paranormal claims).
My main problem with Stenger’s discussion, though, is that his own opinion about the interpretation of quantum mechanics is highly idiosyncratic: he tries to hew as close as humanly possible to the worldview of classical materialism. As keen as he is to refute the quackery, he is as just as critical of the idea that the interpretation of QM might have any relevance to explaining the relation of mind to nature. He also is dismissive of the common notion that the ontology of QM or quantum field theory is suggestive of a more holistic cosmos than classical materialism. Here he is on less firm ground, in my opinion.
Saying No to Holism
With regard to holism, Stenger devotes a couple of sections discussing Fritjof Capra, one of the progenitors of the quantum new-age publishing genre with his book, The Tao of Physics (1975). In the book Capra stressed connections between QM and eastern philosophies, which he said both emphasize interconnectedness and process. Stenger points out that Capra was inspired by his work on a research program which was proposed as an alternative to quantum field theory called S-matrix/bootstrap theory. He points out that this program didn’t pan out, and this undercuts Capra. Stenger also has a brief discussion of quantum luminary David Bohm, who late in his career also espoused a holistic philosophy inspired by his work on the interpretation of QM (for instance in his book The Undivided Universe, written with Basil Hiley). Stenger notes the fact that Bohm’s “hidden variable” view is not widely embraced, and implies this undermines Bohm's philosophy.
It seems to me that most interpretations of QM and QFT, not just Capra's and Bohm's, can reasonably be taken to imply a more non-locally connected and hence holistic view of reality compared to the classical picture (what, if any, implications this has for the world beyond particle physics is a separate discussion). Prior to measurement, "particles" are spread out in space-time and systems demonstrate entanglement. The wave aspect of reality has a holistic element. However, it turns out Stenger doesn’t want to concede even something this modest.
Forget About Waves!
We learn more about Stenger’s own views in Chapters 12 and 13, where he discusses the interpretation of QM. He gives some brief sketches of Copenhagen, hidden-variables, and many-worlds interpretations. His own view, surprisingly, begins with a claim that there is no wave-particle duality; there are only particles. He has a section entitled “The Fictional Wave Function”. He says the description of the quantum state is an abstract mathematical entity. He spends a paragraph downplaying the Schrödinger representation of QM, preferring Heisenberg’s and Dirac’s formulations, which lack the wave function (he does remind the reader that they all give equivalent results).
So, if only particles exist, and no ontological status is given to the quantum state, how do we interpret experimental results? Discussing a single-electron double-slit experiment, Stenger’s idea, inspired by Feynman’s diagrams, is that the single particle, traveling backward and forward in time, can produce the interference pattern. I ask: how can it do this with no guidance from a wave? (Also interesting to me is that Stenger throughout the book is quick to dismiss anything that might imply violation of special relativity, but he’s OK with time-reversal). That’s the end of the discussion, so I can only infer that Stenger thinks QM can be successfully interpreted as a particle-only ontology with time-reversal. I’d never heard this view before and it isn’t defended at any length (it may be given more discussion in a previous book).
Can QM Explain Consciousness?
What about mind? Stenger does mention in passing that Von Neumann and Wigner suspected mind was involved in the phenomenon of quantum measurement. Beyond that he mentions the Penrose/Hameroff proposal for microtubule-based quantum coherence in the brain. He dismisses this with the standard reference to Max Tegmark’s 1999 paper calculating decoherence scales. I personally think Hameroff’s speculations are unlikely to be true, but recently it has been established that quantum coherence can be maintained and exploited by biological systems (see also here). While it still seems unlikely that anything as large as neuronal assemblies can maintain coherence, the science of tracing the role of quantum effects throughout biology is only getting started. I think it is quite plausible that distinctive features of life and mind may yet have at least a partial (non-trivial) quantum-mechanically-based explanation.
So, my main question for Stenger is this: why throw out the baby with the bathwater? We don’t live in a classical world, and we should continue to probe the implications of living in a quantum world wherever it takes us. Let’s not let the fact that New-age folks are making unsupported claims close our minds to the possibilities.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Contemplating the Deeply Strange
I watched this bloggingheads.tv dialogue between Robert Wright, whose latest book (The Evolution of God) I reviewed in the prior post, and Tyler Cowen, economics professor and prolific blogger at Marginal Revolution. They discussed Wright’s book but also expanded somewhat on each of their own views. One thing both men have in common is that they are non-believers, but take the challenge of responding to religious impulses seriously. I wanted to highlight here a good point made by Cowen. (The relevant parts of the dialogue span a couple of minutes beginning at 38 minutes in, then a few more starting at the 47 minute mark.)
Paraphrasing, Cowen says most non-believers should think more about religion and should specifically take the design/fine-tuning argument seriously: contemplation of this often leads to the concept of a complicated multiverse. He says we need to consider that our common-sense view of the world is wrong, and that there is room for a “deep strangeness” in reality. He mentions quantum mechanics and says one has to come to terms with a reality that seems absurd. He says his alternative to believing in God turns out to be believing something strange as well.
I would add that the multiverse concept in particular, is not only strange, but, if embraced, commits one to acknowledge something transcendent (a reality far beyond our observable universe). Investigations of our world have led to several ways to motivate the multiverse: in addition to the fine-tuning argument and the interpretation of QM, there are extensions of specific cosmological theories (eternal inflation, the string theory “landscape”), and there is the modal realism of philosophers. If a non-believer is motivated to explore deeper explanations of reality, he or she will almost surely end up somewhere well beyond a common-sense starting point.
Once you rule out the supernatural entities and interventions of traditional theism, there’s still a lot of hard work to do to explain what’s given to us: and the journey may lead to places one didn’t intend to go.
Paraphrasing, Cowen says most non-believers should think more about religion and should specifically take the design/fine-tuning argument seriously: contemplation of this often leads to the concept of a complicated multiverse. He says we need to consider that our common-sense view of the world is wrong, and that there is room for a “deep strangeness” in reality. He mentions quantum mechanics and says one has to come to terms with a reality that seems absurd. He says his alternative to believing in God turns out to be believing something strange as well.
I would add that the multiverse concept in particular, is not only strange, but, if embraced, commits one to acknowledge something transcendent (a reality far beyond our observable universe). Investigations of our world have led to several ways to motivate the multiverse: in addition to the fine-tuning argument and the interpretation of QM, there are extensions of specific cosmological theories (eternal inflation, the string theory “landscape”), and there is the modal realism of philosophers. If a non-believer is motivated to explore deeper explanations of reality, he or she will almost surely end up somewhere well beyond a common-sense starting point.
Once you rule out the supernatural entities and interventions of traditional theism, there’s still a lot of hard work to do to explain what’s given to us: and the journey may lead to places one didn’t intend to go.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright
Robert Wright is an intellectually curious journalist and a fine writer whose previous books I enjoyed (these days he is also editor-in-chief of bloggingheads.tv). In 1994’s The Moral Animal, he summarized and popularized ideas from the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology. In 2001’s Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny, he examined how game theory helps make sense of the development of human nature and human societies. In addition to presenting a digest of interesting research in these books, he laid out his own prism for viewing these topics: while our values can be explained entirely as natural phenomena, there is evidence of historical progress in the moral dimension of human affairs which seems to possibly point to something more transcendent. Wright’s new book, The Evolution of God, fits right into this theme: he explores the character of religion through history, and, by marshalling summaries of scholarly work, shows how religious ideas developed in response to changing social and political circumstances. The explanations make no appeal to the supernatural. But, as in his other books, Wright sees progress (however haphazard and intermittent) in the moral dimension of religion through time, which leads him to speculate that this phenomenon actually points to the existence of something worthy of being named divine.
The bulk of the book is an interesting run through research findings from anthropology, archaeology and textual analysis on the topic of historical religious ideas and practices. The tour begins with a look at hunter-gatherer style animism and the role of gods and religion in tribal cultures. Religious ideas in these milieus are seen to fit into and lubricate social organization. Then Wright examines the development of the various pantheons of gods in civilizations beginning with Mesopotamia and Egypt: the theme is how religion changed hand in hand with conquests, trade, and internal politics. In all cases there seems to be a plausible explanation of religious ideas (and the lineup of gods acknowledged) changing in concert with the “facts on the ground”.
This sets things up for the larger sections on the Abrahamic traditions. Wright, drawing on scholarly research, looks at the development of the religion of Israel from polytheistic roots, to monolatry (veneration of only one god), to the beginnings of true monotheism. The relationship of the tribe/nation of Israel to its neighbors through episodes of conquest, defeat, vassalship, and exile is seen as the prime driver of these developments. Christianity gets its turn in the barrel, as Wright sets out to show that its incorporation of the ideals of love and ethnic fellowship (and their backward projection onto the figure of Jesus) are best seen as an outgrowth of the mission to the gentiles in the context of a multi-cultural Roman empire. The expression of ideas in the Koran (including the fluctuations from tolerance to intolerance regarding infidels) is likewise tracked to the stages in the earthly career of Muhammad and his followers. (Eastern religions are left mostly undiscussed, but it is a long book as it is*).
The general theme is reinforced throughout: changes in religious ideas track earthly events. As nations make war, their gods intone contempt for non-believers. As empires digest conquests, they co-opt the gods of their new subjects. More positively, as societies enter into non-zero sum relationships with a wider circle of neighbors, their gods become more universal and more supportive of a broader moral vision.
I enjoyed these parts of the book and raced through 400 pages quickly. I found most of conclusions very plausible. I predict that one group of people who will have some problems with this material are the actual scholars who work in these fields: to them Wright’s account will surely seem superficial and far too quick to seize on conclusions which are the subject of significant debate and controversy. I think The Moral Animal could be criticized for confidently presenting plausible-sounding conclusions from evolutionary psychology that look shakier today. In any case, however, Wright has his eyes on the big picture, and the thrust of the ideas here was persuasive to me even if some of the details are in error.
In the last fifty pages of the book Wright presents his own thoughts on what it all means (some of these have of course been broached in previous chapters). Here the terrain became more difficult and I found some of his discussion to be repetitive. But watching him grapple with the ideas was nonetheless thought-provoking. First off (repeating the theme from Nonzero), Wright argues that with the passage of time, humans have expanded their circle of moral consideration, and that this constitutes an arrow of moral progress through history. I think he is on firm ground here: as we include more and more people (first extended family, then tribe, then nation, then international trading partners) in our field of empathy, we can see this properly as progress. However, I think it’s difficult to tie this to the main topic of the book: can we point to the evolution of our ideas regarding gods or God (more loving, less vengeful), and say that this adds anything to the story of moral progress? He does show that religion mirrors the state of play in the moral calculations of nations and peoples. But his analysis doesn’t provide evidence that religion drives moral progress – it seems to mainly reflect it.
In the final section (the Afterword), Wright proposes that the existence of an historical arrow of moral progress might be evidence for an objective moral order which transcends nature. He argues that even if the traditional idea of a personal God seems highly implausible given naturalism, it might nonetheless point (however imperfectly) towards truth. Maybe there is some kind of Logos of divine origin present in the temporal unfolding of human events. He draws an analogy between a traditional religion’s imperfect conception of God and a physicist’s imperfect conception of an electron (it’s not like a particle or a wave or anything else we can picture, yet we know it’s there from its manifestations).
Wright doesn’t commit to a conclusion that God exists, but he clearly wants to embrace the idea that our moral progress points to something transcendent. His arguments for this position aren’t strong, however, consisting as they do of analogies and a repeated appeal that something special must be going on to account for the moral axis of human affairs. I don’t think many traditional materialist-atheists will be convinced.
This is unfortunate because I think his intuition is sound. I think that any naturalist worldview needs to be expansive enough to account for first person experience and the meaning and values which arise from our engagement with the world. A purely third-person materialist description is incomplete. What’s missing from Wright’s argument (and it would take another book, of course) is a convincing metaphysical story of how this all fits together. Specifically, we need to account for how these first-person truths are rooted in the fundamental (pre-biological) fabric of nature -- a main goal of this blog. If we can do this, then we’ll build a foundation for Wright’s further story of how biological natural selection and cultural dynamics have shaped humanity.
Still, I admire Wright’s contribution in these books. And in particular I find his vision of moral progress to be inspiring. As he says, the forces of interconnectedness and globalization in today’s world offer the possibility that we can expand our circle of moral concern to finally cover the planet. As I’ve drafted this review over the past week, millions of people from all corners of the world have been morally identifying with protestors in Iran via the internet. A vision of progress toward a world of peace is right there before us.
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* I should also mention that there is a good appendix which examines the roots of our religious impulses in evolutionary prehistory. He doubts we’ll find a “god gene” but discusses how different aspects of human and primate nature set the stage for religious impulses.
The bulk of the book is an interesting run through research findings from anthropology, archaeology and textual analysis on the topic of historical religious ideas and practices. The tour begins with a look at hunter-gatherer style animism and the role of gods and religion in tribal cultures. Religious ideas in these milieus are seen to fit into and lubricate social organization. Then Wright examines the development of the various pantheons of gods in civilizations beginning with Mesopotamia and Egypt: the theme is how religion changed hand in hand with conquests, trade, and internal politics. In all cases there seems to be a plausible explanation of religious ideas (and the lineup of gods acknowledged) changing in concert with the “facts on the ground”.
This sets things up for the larger sections on the Abrahamic traditions. Wright, drawing on scholarly research, looks at the development of the religion of Israel from polytheistic roots, to monolatry (veneration of only one god), to the beginnings of true monotheism. The relationship of the tribe/nation of Israel to its neighbors through episodes of conquest, defeat, vassalship, and exile is seen as the prime driver of these developments. Christianity gets its turn in the barrel, as Wright sets out to show that its incorporation of the ideals of love and ethnic fellowship (and their backward projection onto the figure of Jesus) are best seen as an outgrowth of the mission to the gentiles in the context of a multi-cultural Roman empire. The expression of ideas in the Koran (including the fluctuations from tolerance to intolerance regarding infidels) is likewise tracked to the stages in the earthly career of Muhammad and his followers. (Eastern religions are left mostly undiscussed, but it is a long book as it is*).
The general theme is reinforced throughout: changes in religious ideas track earthly events. As nations make war, their gods intone contempt for non-believers. As empires digest conquests, they co-opt the gods of their new subjects. More positively, as societies enter into non-zero sum relationships with a wider circle of neighbors, their gods become more universal and more supportive of a broader moral vision.
I enjoyed these parts of the book and raced through 400 pages quickly. I found most of conclusions very plausible. I predict that one group of people who will have some problems with this material are the actual scholars who work in these fields: to them Wright’s account will surely seem superficial and far too quick to seize on conclusions which are the subject of significant debate and controversy. I think The Moral Animal could be criticized for confidently presenting plausible-sounding conclusions from evolutionary psychology that look shakier today. In any case, however, Wright has his eyes on the big picture, and the thrust of the ideas here was persuasive to me even if some of the details are in error.
In the last fifty pages of the book Wright presents his own thoughts on what it all means (some of these have of course been broached in previous chapters). Here the terrain became more difficult and I found some of his discussion to be repetitive. But watching him grapple with the ideas was nonetheless thought-provoking. First off (repeating the theme from Nonzero), Wright argues that with the passage of time, humans have expanded their circle of moral consideration, and that this constitutes an arrow of moral progress through history. I think he is on firm ground here: as we include more and more people (first extended family, then tribe, then nation, then international trading partners) in our field of empathy, we can see this properly as progress. However, I think it’s difficult to tie this to the main topic of the book: can we point to the evolution of our ideas regarding gods or God (more loving, less vengeful), and say that this adds anything to the story of moral progress? He does show that religion mirrors the state of play in the moral calculations of nations and peoples. But his analysis doesn’t provide evidence that religion drives moral progress – it seems to mainly reflect it.
In the final section (the Afterword), Wright proposes that the existence of an historical arrow of moral progress might be evidence for an objective moral order which transcends nature. He argues that even if the traditional idea of a personal God seems highly implausible given naturalism, it might nonetheless point (however imperfectly) towards truth. Maybe there is some kind of Logos of divine origin present in the temporal unfolding of human events. He draws an analogy between a traditional religion’s imperfect conception of God and a physicist’s imperfect conception of an electron (it’s not like a particle or a wave or anything else we can picture, yet we know it’s there from its manifestations).
Wright doesn’t commit to a conclusion that God exists, but he clearly wants to embrace the idea that our moral progress points to something transcendent. His arguments for this position aren’t strong, however, consisting as they do of analogies and a repeated appeal that something special must be going on to account for the moral axis of human affairs. I don’t think many traditional materialist-atheists will be convinced.
This is unfortunate because I think his intuition is sound. I think that any naturalist worldview needs to be expansive enough to account for first person experience and the meaning and values which arise from our engagement with the world. A purely third-person materialist description is incomplete. What’s missing from Wright’s argument (and it would take another book, of course) is a convincing metaphysical story of how this all fits together. Specifically, we need to account for how these first-person truths are rooted in the fundamental (pre-biological) fabric of nature -- a main goal of this blog. If we can do this, then we’ll build a foundation for Wright’s further story of how biological natural selection and cultural dynamics have shaped humanity.
Still, I admire Wright’s contribution in these books. And in particular I find his vision of moral progress to be inspiring. As he says, the forces of interconnectedness and globalization in today’s world offer the possibility that we can expand our circle of moral concern to finally cover the planet. As I’ve drafted this review over the past week, millions of people from all corners of the world have been morally identifying with protestors in Iran via the internet. A vision of progress toward a world of peace is right there before us.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* I should also mention that there is a good appendix which examines the roots of our religious impulses in evolutionary prehistory. He doubts we’ll find a “god gene” but discusses how different aspects of human and primate nature set the stage for religious impulses.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Ruminating on Theism and Personhood
As I’ve discussed in previous posts (see list below), one can try to put a theistic spin on my concept of the necessarily existing metaphysical “megaverse”: one can identify the megaverse with “God”. To be sure, it would be a non-traditional concept of God compared with that of our Western religious traditions – it would be a variety of panentheism (or perhaps panendeism). But perhaps this is simply stretching things too far, and using the label “God” is simply incongruous. Certainly there may be less room for confusion in communicating the ideas if one leaves “God” out of it (I think the historical reception given to Whitehead’s process metaphysics is a cautionary tale in this respect). While there are several considerations here, I think this decision of labeling should be driven in part by the question of personhood, which seems to be an important component of most conceptions of God.
I have a longstanding skepticism about the attribution of personhood to God -- if personhood means something similar to what it means in the human context. In the context of traditional religions, I always suspected anthropomorphism was at the root of this attribution. In outlining my version of the cosmological argument for a necessarily existing entity, I disliked even using the term “necessary being”, because it has the flavor of “human being”, and thus too readily invokes personhood.
Despite this skepticism, the panentheistic version of my view would say that human characteristics arise from the same raw materials which also constitute God, so there must be some essential affinity. Given my specific opinion that first-person experience is rooted in the most fundamental level of reality, I suspect that God might well be a subject of experience – a key aspect of human personhood.
On the other hand, when discussing Timothy O’Connor’s book (here and here), I disagreed with him on whether the necessary being (NB) needed to be considered an agent (and agency seems to be another key aspect of personhood). It seemed sufficient for the NB to be an impersonal font of creation without need of intentions, purposes, or discrete top-down decision-making. My thought here is that a human being moves within a sea of other beings or systems, and his/her agency arises in this context. The NB is the source and sum of all being, and does not operate in a larger context. This seems to me to be an important difference. To use an analogy: if a human being is an actor, then God is the theater, not another actor.
So, at this point I have a mixed verdict – our human essence is derived from the NB, but our status as a finite subset of the NB’s totality makes our nature very different. Whether the concept of personhood can be stretched to cover both situations is unclear, and I think the better option is to decline to consider the NB to be a person. And this may be a good reason to resist using the label God for what I have in mind.
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Note: I’m even less well-read in relevant literature in this area than in other subjects I discuss: any reading suggestions in philosophy of religion are welcome.
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Post Series (in chronological order): A Philosophical Path to Theism?
Modal Realism and the Cosmological Argument
Exploring the Borderlands
Panentheism
Whitehead's Philosophical Theism
Logos vs. Chaos, Part One
Logos vs. Chaos, Part Two
A Necessary Being or Just a Collection?
Why the Megaverse is a Unified Entity
Is the Megaverse a Subject of Experience?
I have a longstanding skepticism about the attribution of personhood to God -- if personhood means something similar to what it means in the human context. In the context of traditional religions, I always suspected anthropomorphism was at the root of this attribution. In outlining my version of the cosmological argument for a necessarily existing entity, I disliked even using the term “necessary being”, because it has the flavor of “human being”, and thus too readily invokes personhood.
Despite this skepticism, the panentheistic version of my view would say that human characteristics arise from the same raw materials which also constitute God, so there must be some essential affinity. Given my specific opinion that first-person experience is rooted in the most fundamental level of reality, I suspect that God might well be a subject of experience – a key aspect of human personhood.
On the other hand, when discussing Timothy O’Connor’s book (here and here), I disagreed with him on whether the necessary being (NB) needed to be considered an agent (and agency seems to be another key aspect of personhood). It seemed sufficient for the NB to be an impersonal font of creation without need of intentions, purposes, or discrete top-down decision-making. My thought here is that a human being moves within a sea of other beings or systems, and his/her agency arises in this context. The NB is the source and sum of all being, and does not operate in a larger context. This seems to me to be an important difference. To use an analogy: if a human being is an actor, then God is the theater, not another actor.
So, at this point I have a mixed verdict – our human essence is derived from the NB, but our status as a finite subset of the NB’s totality makes our nature very different. Whether the concept of personhood can be stretched to cover both situations is unclear, and I think the better option is to decline to consider the NB to be a person. And this may be a good reason to resist using the label God for what I have in mind.
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Note: I’m even less well-read in relevant literature in this area than in other subjects I discuss: any reading suggestions in philosophy of religion are welcome.
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Post Series (in chronological order): A Philosophical Path to Theism?
Modal Realism and the Cosmological Argument
Exploring the Borderlands
Panentheism
Whitehead's Philosophical Theism
Logos vs. Chaos, Part One
Logos vs. Chaos, Part Two
A Necessary Being or Just a Collection?
Why the Megaverse is a Unified Entity
Is the Megaverse a Subject of Experience?
Friday, September 12, 2008
Is the Megaverse a Subject of Experience?
My thanks to Justin, whose comment and question on the last post is prompting me to try to clarify some of my thinking.
Below I address his question of whether this “megaverse” I’ve discussed in the last couple of posts might be a cosmic-level subject of experience, given our shared endorsement of panexperientialism in the context of philosophy of mind. I tentatively think the answer is yes. Along the way I’ll try to better explain some of my reasoning and my use of terms.
The most common conception of the universe people have via science is that of a space-time container with matter/energy inside it. I’ve come to believe that this conception is wrong. I think it is likely that space-time itself is not a fundamental entity, but co-emerges with matter from a more fundamental level of quantum causal events. And the universe we see is only a slice of something larger (there are no boundaries – quantum gravity models imply that the big-bang was not a singularity, but arose from a pre-existing context).
So what we think of as the actual universe is an arbitrary slice of a larger reality, and it therefore doesn’t have a good claim to be a unified whole or a candidate for being a cosmic experiential subject.
What lies beyond our actual universe? Various motivations have led cosmologists as well as philosophers to propose the existence of many worlds or universes -- a multiverse. If these are completely separate worlds, then their existence would seem to have no impact on ours, but they might help explain the appearance of contingency and fine-tuning in ours. I’d note that the multiverse conception at first doesn’t seem to fit well with the idea of our universe as a cosmic subject – unless there is one such subject for every universe.
Again, though, what we call the actual world is not some space-time container with stuff inside, it is just the causally connected region or nexus we find ourselves in. So then it is wrong to think of the multiverse as a collection of distinct space-time containers. Even if we have not been in causal contact, these other parts of reality should not be thought of as completely separate realms. I’ve taken to calling this total reality the “megaverse” rather than the multiverse, given this way of thinking.
When thinking about the nature of this megaverse, I’ve connected it to my philosophical thinking on modal realism and causality. My modal realism leads me to identify the megaverse with the complete set of metaphysical possibilities (going beyond the multiverse motivations of physicists/cosmologists). My preferred model of causality leads me to see a close relationship between each actual event and the possible but not actual events which are also part of the megaverse. (Note also because “actual” just denotes “local” in this model -- actual is an indexical term -- what is an actual event vs. a possible event is not a fundamental distinction. All events are on an even footing.)
So, I’ve given the name megaverse to this largest conception of reality, and I see it as a holistic entity given the interdependence of its constituent-events. Let me come back, then, to the question of postulating a cosmic experiential subject: if all events have an experiential aspect, then it makes sense that the holistic network of all events is also the subject of (all) experiences. I’m not sure this makes the megaverse something which has consciousness or agency in a way analogous with the human variety. This is something to think further about.
Below I address his question of whether this “megaverse” I’ve discussed in the last couple of posts might be a cosmic-level subject of experience, given our shared endorsement of panexperientialism in the context of philosophy of mind. I tentatively think the answer is yes. Along the way I’ll try to better explain some of my reasoning and my use of terms.
The most common conception of the universe people have via science is that of a space-time container with matter/energy inside it. I’ve come to believe that this conception is wrong. I think it is likely that space-time itself is not a fundamental entity, but co-emerges with matter from a more fundamental level of quantum causal events. And the universe we see is only a slice of something larger (there are no boundaries – quantum gravity models imply that the big-bang was not a singularity, but arose from a pre-existing context).
So what we think of as the actual universe is an arbitrary slice of a larger reality, and it therefore doesn’t have a good claim to be a unified whole or a candidate for being a cosmic experiential subject.
What lies beyond our actual universe? Various motivations have led cosmologists as well as philosophers to propose the existence of many worlds or universes -- a multiverse. If these are completely separate worlds, then their existence would seem to have no impact on ours, but they might help explain the appearance of contingency and fine-tuning in ours. I’d note that the multiverse conception at first doesn’t seem to fit well with the idea of our universe as a cosmic subject – unless there is one such subject for every universe.
Again, though, what we call the actual world is not some space-time container with stuff inside, it is just the causally connected region or nexus we find ourselves in. So then it is wrong to think of the multiverse as a collection of distinct space-time containers. Even if we have not been in causal contact, these other parts of reality should not be thought of as completely separate realms. I’ve taken to calling this total reality the “megaverse” rather than the multiverse, given this way of thinking.
When thinking about the nature of this megaverse, I’ve connected it to my philosophical thinking on modal realism and causality. My modal realism leads me to identify the megaverse with the complete set of metaphysical possibilities (going beyond the multiverse motivations of physicists/cosmologists). My preferred model of causality leads me to see a close relationship between each actual event and the possible but not actual events which are also part of the megaverse. (Note also because “actual” just denotes “local” in this model -- actual is an indexical term -- what is an actual event vs. a possible event is not a fundamental distinction. All events are on an even footing.)
So, I’ve given the name megaverse to this largest conception of reality, and I see it as a holistic entity given the interdependence of its constituent-events. Let me come back, then, to the question of postulating a cosmic experiential subject: if all events have an experiential aspect, then it makes sense that the holistic network of all events is also the subject of (all) experiences. I’m not sure this makes the megaverse something which has consciousness or agency in a way analogous with the human variety. This is something to think further about.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Why the Megaverse is a Unified Entity
To continue the discussion from the last post, I sketch below some reasons why the metaphysical “megaverse” – the sum of all actual and possible events – should be considered a unified whole rather than a “mere” collection.
First, while I realize the field of mereology has been contentious for ages, I have always favored arguments that a whole is more than the sum of is parts (composition is not identity). I have several posts dealing with this in the context of trope theory: it appears that tropes cannot be bundled without an external unifier (I discussed Bill Vallicella’s arguments on this topic here and in the second half of this post). What could unify objects? The best answer IMO comes in terms of a theory which approaches composition via causation (see the paper discussed here for why this is a promising approach).
Moving specifically to my preferred event ontology, I think that participation in a larger causal pattern serves to unify constituent events into higher-level units (event complexes). Gregg Rosenberg’s theory on causation and natural individuals serves as an example of this approach (discussed here and here). To extrapolate, we can picture a hierarchy of causal patterns culminating in the largest one of all – the megaverse.
Further, because individual micro-level events in this model are actualizations drawn from a set of possible events, they simply cannot exist in isolation. The existence of an actual event presupposes a space of possibilities. I believe quantum physics provides a posteriori evidence for this feature of reality.
There are other possible arguments for the unity of the megaverse. For instance, the megaverse serves to ground necessary truths (such as those of arithmetic and basic logic). These truths extend throughout the megaverse, providing a unifying “shape” to events.
Also, the megaverse supports consciousness. In my preferred theory of mind, causation is inherently experiential, and the unification of constituent experiences is a defining characteristic of consciousness.
Much more can and should be said, but I think the case is good for considering the necessary existent to be a unified entity.
First, while I realize the field of mereology has been contentious for ages, I have always favored arguments that a whole is more than the sum of is parts (composition is not identity). I have several posts dealing with this in the context of trope theory: it appears that tropes cannot be bundled without an external unifier (I discussed Bill Vallicella’s arguments on this topic here and in the second half of this post). What could unify objects? The best answer IMO comes in terms of a theory which approaches composition via causation (see the paper discussed here for why this is a promising approach).
Moving specifically to my preferred event ontology, I think that participation in a larger causal pattern serves to unify constituent events into higher-level units (event complexes). Gregg Rosenberg’s theory on causation and natural individuals serves as an example of this approach (discussed here and here). To extrapolate, we can picture a hierarchy of causal patterns culminating in the largest one of all – the megaverse.
Further, because individual micro-level events in this model are actualizations drawn from a set of possible events, they simply cannot exist in isolation. The existence of an actual event presupposes a space of possibilities. I believe quantum physics provides a posteriori evidence for this feature of reality.
There are other possible arguments for the unity of the megaverse. For instance, the megaverse serves to ground necessary truths (such as those of arithmetic and basic logic). These truths extend throughout the megaverse, providing a unifying “shape” to events.
Also, the megaverse supports consciousness. In my preferred theory of mind, causation is inherently experiential, and the unification of constituent experiences is a defining characteristic of consciousness.
Much more can and should be said, but I think the case is good for considering the necessary existent to be a unified entity.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
A Necessary Being or Just a Collection?
In Chapter 7 of his Metaphysics (paperback, second edition), Peter Van Inwagen discusses the cosmological argument for the existence of a necessary being. He critiques traditional formulations which invoke the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), and then presents some versions which rely on premises weaker than the traditional PSR. He thinks some of these versions have more merit (but none support a truly compelling argument in his view).
Below I look at one of the versions he discusses, which I found interesting and helpful for the purpose of exploring an argument I’ve been favoring. A key premise in both arguments has to do with whether the sum of everything that exists is actually an entity or being in its own right.
The first premise of the argument from Van Inwagen’s book relies on the following principle: “Every being has this feature: the fact that it exists has an explanation” (p.125). If we accept this principle then, Van Inwagen argues, it is plausible to suppose that here are no beings which are both independent and contingent. To be independent means there can be no explanation in terms of other beings: therefore, given that we demand some explanation for existence, the only answer can be that the being’s non-existence must be impossible. Its existence is necessary rather than contingent. It follows that we can construct what might be called a Monist or Pantheist cosmological argument (my labels):
Monist or Pantheist Cosmological Argument (adapted from Van Inwagen, p.125):
1. There are no independent and contingent beings (premise)
2. There is a being which is the totality of all beings: the world (premise)
3. The world is an independent being (follows from 2)
4. The world is not a contingent being (from 1 and 3)
5. The world is a necessary being (follows from 4)
I think there are good reasons to accept premise 1, but I want to discuss here the fact that even if one accepts it, many would reject the second premise. As Van Inwagen explains, a naturalist typically has no problem seeing the contingent objects in the world as mutually dependent, without any need to postulate a world-being. Traditional theists also reject premise 2, since they see the necessary being as being distinct from its contingent creation. When it comes to our actual world, I also would reject premise 2: I don’t see a good reason to consider the totality of things an additional fundamental thing (I have a post related to this topic here).
The form of this argument, however, helped bring out an implied premise in my own modal realist version of the cosmological argument (first sketched here). This is the premise that the sum of all metaphysical possibilities is a kind of totality-entity in a way that the sum of all actual things is not.
Let me lay out the argument as follows (note that while I will use the term “beings” to be consistent with the discussion above, this would not normally be my choice):
Modal Realist (or Panentheistic) Cosmological Argument:
1. There are no independent and contingent beings (premise)
2. Modal Realism is correct: all possible as well as actual beings exist (premise)
3. There is a being which is the totality of all beings: let’s call this the “megaverse” (premise)
4. The megaverse is an independent being (follows from 3)
5. The megaverse is not a contingent being (from 1 and 4)
6. The megaverse is a necessary being (follows from 5)
So the question I want to ponder is this: is premise 3 here more defensible than the similar premise 2 in the earlier argument? I think so, but I haven’t argued directly for this before.
My preliminary thoughts go something like this.
Certainly, the megaverse is metaphysically exhaustive in a way that the actual world is not, and so has a better claim to independence and necessary existence. But could it just be a “mere” collection of possible and actual beings rather than a totality entity/being?
Recall that in David Lewis’ model of modal realism, the set of possible worlds is indeed a mere collection. For Lewis, each world is causally distinct (the actual world is simply the one we find ourselves in). In my preferred model, on the other hand, there is an intimate connection between the actual and the possible at the level of each individual event. Each causal event is an actualization of a possibility. So there is a continual closeness or adjacency therefore between what we see as actual and what is possible. The actual “world” is a causal network of events embedded in a larger framework of possible events (more related discussion here). So the “megaverse” is not a collection of distinct worlds, but is better seen as this transcendent framework which our ever-evolving actual “world” fits into.
Still, this doesn’t seem to rule out that at the level of events (rather than “worlds”); we could view the megaverse as a “mere” collection.
I’ve been scratching my head on this, and have some more thoughts, but I’ll save them for a follow-up post.
Below I look at one of the versions he discusses, which I found interesting and helpful for the purpose of exploring an argument I’ve been favoring. A key premise in both arguments has to do with whether the sum of everything that exists is actually an entity or being in its own right.
The first premise of the argument from Van Inwagen’s book relies on the following principle: “Every being has this feature: the fact that it exists has an explanation” (p.125). If we accept this principle then, Van Inwagen argues, it is plausible to suppose that here are no beings which are both independent and contingent. To be independent means there can be no explanation in terms of other beings: therefore, given that we demand some explanation for existence, the only answer can be that the being’s non-existence must be impossible. Its existence is necessary rather than contingent. It follows that we can construct what might be called a Monist or Pantheist cosmological argument (my labels):
Monist or Pantheist Cosmological Argument (adapted from Van Inwagen, p.125):
1. There are no independent and contingent beings (premise)
2. There is a being which is the totality of all beings: the world (premise)
3. The world is an independent being (follows from 2)
4. The world is not a contingent being (from 1 and 3)
5. The world is a necessary being (follows from 4)
I think there are good reasons to accept premise 1, but I want to discuss here the fact that even if one accepts it, many would reject the second premise. As Van Inwagen explains, a naturalist typically has no problem seeing the contingent objects in the world as mutually dependent, without any need to postulate a world-being. Traditional theists also reject premise 2, since they see the necessary being as being distinct from its contingent creation. When it comes to our actual world, I also would reject premise 2: I don’t see a good reason to consider the totality of things an additional fundamental thing (I have a post related to this topic here).
The form of this argument, however, helped bring out an implied premise in my own modal realist version of the cosmological argument (first sketched here). This is the premise that the sum of all metaphysical possibilities is a kind of totality-entity in a way that the sum of all actual things is not.
Let me lay out the argument as follows (note that while I will use the term “beings” to be consistent with the discussion above, this would not normally be my choice):
Modal Realist (or Panentheistic) Cosmological Argument:
1. There are no independent and contingent beings (premise)
2. Modal Realism is correct: all possible as well as actual beings exist (premise)
3. There is a being which is the totality of all beings: let’s call this the “megaverse” (premise)
4. The megaverse is an independent being (follows from 3)
5. The megaverse is not a contingent being (from 1 and 4)
6. The megaverse is a necessary being (follows from 5)
So the question I want to ponder is this: is premise 3 here more defensible than the similar premise 2 in the earlier argument? I think so, but I haven’t argued directly for this before.
My preliminary thoughts go something like this.
Certainly, the megaverse is metaphysically exhaustive in a way that the actual world is not, and so has a better claim to independence and necessary existence. But could it just be a “mere” collection of possible and actual beings rather than a totality entity/being?
Recall that in David Lewis’ model of modal realism, the set of possible worlds is indeed a mere collection. For Lewis, each world is causally distinct (the actual world is simply the one we find ourselves in). In my preferred model, on the other hand, there is an intimate connection between the actual and the possible at the level of each individual event. Each causal event is an actualization of a possibility. So there is a continual closeness or adjacency therefore between what we see as actual and what is possible. The actual “world” is a causal network of events embedded in a larger framework of possible events (more related discussion here). So the “megaverse” is not a collection of distinct worlds, but is better seen as this transcendent framework which our ever-evolving actual “world” fits into.
Still, this doesn’t seem to rule out that at the level of events (rather than “worlds”); we could view the megaverse as a “mere” collection.
I’ve been scratching my head on this, and have some more thoughts, but I’ll save them for a follow-up post.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Logos vs. Chaos, Part Two
This the second of two posts -- the first post is here.
So, according to Timothy O’Connor, there are two kinds of necessary being (NB, for short) which could provide the right kind of ultimate explanation for our contingent reality: a personal agent (Logos), or an impersonal primordial world generator (Chaos). In Chapter 4 of his book, Theism and Ultimate Explanation, he examines these options to see which provides the better explanation.
O’Connor considers several types of Chaos models. He distinguishes between single-stage (all creation at once) and multi-stage models. For single-stage models, he describes three versions: Immutable Chaos, Abundant Chaos, and Random Chaos.
In the Immutable Chaos model, the world is necessarily a product of the NB’s nature. On reflection, O’Connor finds this model hard to credit: it seems unlikely that our large, highly arbitrary and extensively structured world should need to follow from the NB’s nature. Also, the idea of a single world being a necessary product runs afoul of the need for the NB to provide a non-fully contrastive cause, as discussed earlier in the book.
In the Abundant Chaos model, many worlds are produced, including ours. Oddly, to me at least, O’Connor uses the same sort of objection he had to Immutable Chaos to argue against the plausibility of this model:
“For surely it is no explanation of why the nature of Chaos is ordered to this effect to say that it is because it is ordered to that entire range of effects, and this is one of them. Really, the situation is just made more problematic. How is it that a highly unified source could be causally ordered to just this effect, and also to just that one, and… (Emphasis original, p.94)”
This analysis seems wrong to me. If there are many worlds (perhaps an infinite number of them), then arguing from the highly particular nature of our world loses its force. It is, after all just our local neighborhood in a great expanse. In the extreme case, one might see the NB giving rise to (or, in the panentheistic mode, being constituted by) all metaphysically possible worlds. I’ll return to this point again below when I review O’Connor’s later invocation of the fine-tuning argument as a guide to choosing the correct NB model.
The third Chaos option is labeled Random Chaos. Here, the NB generates a world from its nature utilizing something like a random number generator. O’Connor sees this as having more merit than the other Chaos options. To me, however, this didn’t seem much different in a crucial sense from the Abundant Chaos model: myriad possibilities are viable and we find ourselves in one of them.
O’Connor also considers multi-stage versions of Random Chaos. For instance, perhaps at the termination point of a world (like Big Bang/Big Crunch points) a successor world is generated with random alterations from the previous entry. He says such models may have merit although the mechanisms are somewhat obscure to him (for a multiverse proposal with this feature, see physicist Lee Smolin’s first book). I didn’t find the single-stage/multi-stage distinction very important in all of this.
At this step in his discussion, O’Connor sees the Random Chaos model as the best alterative to the Logos (or agent) model. How might one choose between them? At this point, O’Connor invokes the fine-tuning argument. He believes that the fine-tuning argument fails as a stand-alone design argument for the existence of a NB, but given independent motivation of the NB from the cosmological argument from contingency, he thinks it can help choose between the options as to the NB’s nature.
I’ll skip reviewing some of O’Connor’s discussion of the fine-tuning argument, which would be familiar to those who have spent time on it (a nice summary is on these posts at Parableman). He concludes that it does succeed in elevating the Logos option over Chaos. He thinks the particular nature of our world argues for a NB which is an agent acting on purpose-driven intentions in creating our world. I disagree with this conclusion because I believe the (independently motivated) existence of a multiverse removes the force from the fine-tuning argument. O’Connor, on the other hand, concedes that the multiverse idea dilutes the force of fine-tuning, but he doesn’t think it eliminates it.
O’Connor does say that the strongest multiverse concept (for the purpose of countering fine-tuning) is one which invokes the existence of myriad metaphysically possible worlds as opposed to the cosmological models offered to-date by physicists (I agree). In evaluating whether the multiverse defeats the fine-tuning argument, he first offers the objection that positing the multiverse is less parsimonious then positing a NB designer -- however he concedes this is not obviously persuasive. Then he offers a second objection, which I found dubious, saying that a multiverse option would be but one of many “totality” possibilities, many of which may not contain intelligent life. But if the multiverse is the complete metaphysical manifold, then this objection is ill-founded. I conclude that O’Connor does not find a compelling objection to the metaphysical multiverse model as a defeater for the fine-tuning argument (discussion takes place on pages 107-108). Therefore, the fine-tuning argument fails to provide a basis for preferring Logos.
Further, we should recall the rationale we used for positing some kind of NB in the first place, which is to ground real modal truths of necessity and possibility. Given a robust modal realism (which O’Connor and I both endorse) I think we should conclude that the NB is the source for (and should perhaps even be identified with) the full manifold of metaphysical possibilities. (By the way, I don’t think it matters for this discussion whether the other possibilities are concretely realized or abstract.) So, I conclude that a “Chaos” model of the NB is the preferred model. I judge this on the grounds of parsimony, since the personalized Logos model needs to have the same metaphysical scope, but also adds extra features (purposes, intentions) which are unneeded.
For now, I will not be blogging about the last two chapters of O’Connor’s book. Chapter 5 deals with the matter of how many worlds a Logos NB would create and discusses how this applies to the problem of evil and other matters. Finally Chapter 6 is of less purely philosophical interest as O’ Connor discusses issues in Christian theology and the problem of reconciling the God of metaphysics to the God of the Bible.
So, this concludes my discussion of O’Connor’s though-provoking book. I will be following up, though, with some additional reflections on this topic of inferring the nature of a transcendent necessary entity from what we know about our world. Also, I understand that Peter Van Inwagen discussed this Chaos/Logos topic in his Metaphysics, so I may have some thoughts after reading the relevant passages (which I intend to do soon).
[UPDATE: 2 September 2008] In the paperback 2nd edition of Van Inwagen’s book (linked above), he concludes that the multiverse objection is decisive against the fine-tuning argument. He says: “It is the possibility of an interplay of chance and an observational selection effect that is the undoing of the teleological argument in the form in which we are considering it (p.158).” When subsequently discussing the options of Logos and Chaos, he therefore sees no reason to prefer one over the other:
“As far as our present knowledge goes (aside from any divine revelations various individuals and groups may be privy to), we have no reason to prefer either of the following two hypotheses to the other:
• This is the only cosmos, and some rational being has (or rational beings have) fine-tuned it in such a way that it is a suitable abode for life.
• This is only one among a vast number of cosmoi (some of which are -- a statistical certainty -– suitable abodes for life) (p.161).”
To be sure, he does not give any credence to my argument that the chaos option is preferable to logos on grounds of parsimony.
I might also mention some context for those who haven’t read the book: Van Inwagen, while being one of our most prominent philosophers who is also a theist, finds none of the traditional philosophical arguments for theism (ontological, cosmological and teleological) compelling.
So, according to Timothy O’Connor, there are two kinds of necessary being (NB, for short) which could provide the right kind of ultimate explanation for our contingent reality: a personal agent (Logos), or an impersonal primordial world generator (Chaos). In Chapter 4 of his book, Theism and Ultimate Explanation, he examines these options to see which provides the better explanation.
O’Connor considers several types of Chaos models. He distinguishes between single-stage (all creation at once) and multi-stage models. For single-stage models, he describes three versions: Immutable Chaos, Abundant Chaos, and Random Chaos.
In the Immutable Chaos model, the world is necessarily a product of the NB’s nature. On reflection, O’Connor finds this model hard to credit: it seems unlikely that our large, highly arbitrary and extensively structured world should need to follow from the NB’s nature. Also, the idea of a single world being a necessary product runs afoul of the need for the NB to provide a non-fully contrastive cause, as discussed earlier in the book.
In the Abundant Chaos model, many worlds are produced, including ours. Oddly, to me at least, O’Connor uses the same sort of objection he had to Immutable Chaos to argue against the plausibility of this model:
“For surely it is no explanation of why the nature of Chaos is ordered to this effect to say that it is because it is ordered to that entire range of effects, and this is one of them. Really, the situation is just made more problematic. How is it that a highly unified source could be causally ordered to just this effect, and also to just that one, and… (Emphasis original, p.94)”
This analysis seems wrong to me. If there are many worlds (perhaps an infinite number of them), then arguing from the highly particular nature of our world loses its force. It is, after all just our local neighborhood in a great expanse. In the extreme case, one might see the NB giving rise to (or, in the panentheistic mode, being constituted by) all metaphysically possible worlds. I’ll return to this point again below when I review O’Connor’s later invocation of the fine-tuning argument as a guide to choosing the correct NB model.
The third Chaos option is labeled Random Chaos. Here, the NB generates a world from its nature utilizing something like a random number generator. O’Connor sees this as having more merit than the other Chaos options. To me, however, this didn’t seem much different in a crucial sense from the Abundant Chaos model: myriad possibilities are viable and we find ourselves in one of them.
O’Connor also considers multi-stage versions of Random Chaos. For instance, perhaps at the termination point of a world (like Big Bang/Big Crunch points) a successor world is generated with random alterations from the previous entry. He says such models may have merit although the mechanisms are somewhat obscure to him (for a multiverse proposal with this feature, see physicist Lee Smolin’s first book). I didn’t find the single-stage/multi-stage distinction very important in all of this.
At this step in his discussion, O’Connor sees the Random Chaos model as the best alterative to the Logos (or agent) model. How might one choose between them? At this point, O’Connor invokes the fine-tuning argument. He believes that the fine-tuning argument fails as a stand-alone design argument for the existence of a NB, but given independent motivation of the NB from the cosmological argument from contingency, he thinks it can help choose between the options as to the NB’s nature.
I’ll skip reviewing some of O’Connor’s discussion of the fine-tuning argument, which would be familiar to those who have spent time on it (a nice summary is on these posts at Parableman). He concludes that it does succeed in elevating the Logos option over Chaos. He thinks the particular nature of our world argues for a NB which is an agent acting on purpose-driven intentions in creating our world. I disagree with this conclusion because I believe the (independently motivated) existence of a multiverse removes the force from the fine-tuning argument. O’Connor, on the other hand, concedes that the multiverse idea dilutes the force of fine-tuning, but he doesn’t think it eliminates it.
O’Connor does say that the strongest multiverse concept (for the purpose of countering fine-tuning) is one which invokes the existence of myriad metaphysically possible worlds as opposed to the cosmological models offered to-date by physicists (I agree). In evaluating whether the multiverse defeats the fine-tuning argument, he first offers the objection that positing the multiverse is less parsimonious then positing a NB designer -- however he concedes this is not obviously persuasive. Then he offers a second objection, which I found dubious, saying that a multiverse option would be but one of many “totality” possibilities, many of which may not contain intelligent life. But if the multiverse is the complete metaphysical manifold, then this objection is ill-founded. I conclude that O’Connor does not find a compelling objection to the metaphysical multiverse model as a defeater for the fine-tuning argument (discussion takes place on pages 107-108). Therefore, the fine-tuning argument fails to provide a basis for preferring Logos.
Further, we should recall the rationale we used for positing some kind of NB in the first place, which is to ground real modal truths of necessity and possibility. Given a robust modal realism (which O’Connor and I both endorse) I think we should conclude that the NB is the source for (and should perhaps even be identified with) the full manifold of metaphysical possibilities. (By the way, I don’t think it matters for this discussion whether the other possibilities are concretely realized or abstract.) So, I conclude that a “Chaos” model of the NB is the preferred model. I judge this on the grounds of parsimony, since the personalized Logos model needs to have the same metaphysical scope, but also adds extra features (purposes, intentions) which are unneeded.
For now, I will not be blogging about the last two chapters of O’Connor’s book. Chapter 5 deals with the matter of how many worlds a Logos NB would create and discusses how this applies to the problem of evil and other matters. Finally Chapter 6 is of less purely philosophical interest as O’ Connor discusses issues in Christian theology and the problem of reconciling the God of metaphysics to the God of the Bible.
So, this concludes my discussion of O’Connor’s though-provoking book. I will be following up, though, with some additional reflections on this topic of inferring the nature of a transcendent necessary entity from what we know about our world. Also, I understand that Peter Van Inwagen discussed this Chaos/Logos topic in his Metaphysics, so I may have some thoughts after reading the relevant passages (which I intend to do soon).
[UPDATE: 2 September 2008] In the paperback 2nd edition of Van Inwagen’s book (linked above), he concludes that the multiverse objection is decisive against the fine-tuning argument. He says: “It is the possibility of an interplay of chance and an observational selection effect that is the undoing of the teleological argument in the form in which we are considering it (p.158).” When subsequently discussing the options of Logos and Chaos, he therefore sees no reason to prefer one over the other:
“As far as our present knowledge goes (aside from any divine revelations various individuals and groups may be privy to), we have no reason to prefer either of the following two hypotheses to the other:
• This is the only cosmos, and some rational being has (or rational beings have) fine-tuned it in such a way that it is a suitable abode for life.
• This is only one among a vast number of cosmoi (some of which are -- a statistical certainty -– suitable abodes for life) (p.161).”
To be sure, he does not give any credence to my argument that the chaos option is preferable to logos on grounds of parsimony.
I might also mention some context for those who haven’t read the book: Van Inwagen, while being one of our most prominent philosophers who is also a theist, finds none of the traditional philosophical arguments for theism (ontological, cosmological and teleological) compelling.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Logos vs. Chaos, Part One
Timothy O’Connor has written an interesting book full of meaty metaphysics (plus some theology): Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency. In this post I will focus on the sections of the book which were of greatest interest to me, but I enjoyed reading the whole thing. The central goal of the book is to present an up-to-date cosmological argument from contingency for the existence of a transcendent necessary being.
Like O’Connor, I’m interested in pursuing the quest for ultimate metaphysical explanation, and I agree with him that it is the apparent contingent nature of our world which demands an answer (“why this?”).
Unlike O’Connor, however, I don’t come to this quest as a traditional theist. I’ve long thought that the purposes and activities of a personal god cannot provide an explanation without raising equivalently difficult questions. So, an intriguing part of the book is where O’Connor discusses and compares two models of a transcendent necessary being: the personal and the impersonal. Or as he labels them: Logos and Chaos.
Before getting to this point, O’Connor lays the groundwork. In the first two chapters of the book, he discusses the case for modal realism and sketches a theory of modal epistemology. I agree with him that our concepts of possibility and necessity are so fundamental to explanation and reasoning (as well as to everyday life) that they are grounded in real modal truths. With regard to his account of how we come to know such truths, I found the discussion interesting, but tentative, and will leave this aside for now.
In Chapter 3, we begin to look at where the quest for explanation will take us. If the contingency of the world is acknowledged, and the necessities we come to know (if imperfectly) are real, what explains this situation? After commenting on the tendency for many philosophers to dismiss this sort of question as unanswerable, O’Connor turns his attention to the options on offer (I would note that Graham Oppy, in his review, disagrees with O’Connor in that he counts “contingent world as brute fact” as one of the options).
First, O’Connor discusses the common naturalist option which asserts that there is an infinite causal chain of contingent things, and that no further explanation is needed. O’Connor says even if the infinite causal chain is the right model, we can still coherently ask for an explanation of why THIS chain of things, and not another. The rejoinder at this point is to point out that a fully contrastive explanation of why this chain is as it is, if it existed, would convert the contingent chain to a necessary one. But O’Connor responds by saying that we can still seek a complete explanation, even if it is a non-fully-contrastive one. He says the only way to do this will be to ground contingent reality in a transcendent-cause explanation that is non-contrastive.
But how can a necessary being (NB, for short) provide the right kind of explanation? The necessity of the cause would seem to “prove too much” and convert the contingent chain to necessary status. Indeed, this is a standard critique of the Leibnizian version of the cosmological argument, which features the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). O’Connor concedes the effectiveness of this critique, and points out that his version will not invoke the PSR. But isn’t the PSR or something like it implied by the desire for an explanation of the contingent world?
O’Connor says he can avoid this as he isn’t offering a contrastive explanation (e.g. why this world instead of any other?) He says he can do this by invoking an explanation based on a model of the NB as an agent:
"In the context of an agent who exercises a capacity to freely act for a purpose, explanation is grounded in an internal similarity relation of the content of the prior purpose to that of the effective intention. To understand why an intention is freely generated, one need only identify its reasons-bearing content. This contrasts of course, with a mechanistic model of intentional action on which an agent’s purposes or desires or beliefs explain the choice, or formation of an intention, solely in terms of an external, causal relationship to it. But it is readily understandable in its own terms. (p.83)"
So the NB-agent’s creative activity of forming an intention, based on reasons (which is then satisfied by the creation of a contingent world), need not be seen as a necessary sequence of steps:
"And it would be a confusion to suppose that we needed a further explanation of the generation of the intention – for that is just the agent’s exercise of control over his state of intention and its product. (p.83, emphasis original)"
But still we want to ask: why intend contingent world C instead of C*? Well, we can’t ask this question, because an answer would provide for C being inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t given an explanation at all, according to O’Connor. The buck stops with the (contingent) intentions of the NB-agent.
To me, this seems a difficult stance. A naturalist might ask why we can’t stop the explanation at an earlier stage (before invoking the NB); O’Connor wants to stop the discussion at a later stage – but either way we eventually reach a “conversation-stopper”. Do the extra steps add enough value to prefer this NB-agent view, especially given all the (controversial) extra apparatus of intentions, purposes, activity, etc.?
Well, we need to recall the NB view’s main advantage, which is that it helps underwrite the reality of modal truths (there exists both contingent and necessary aspects to reality). But, do we really need the agent apparatus to provide this advantage?
To his credit, O’Connor sees the existence of another alternative (or set of alternatives). He starts by noting that, in addition to his agent model, there are many instances where we accept causal explanations even when they are not fully contrastive ones. Specifically, we do this in cases of “indeterministic mechanistic causal processes in the natural world, and the kinds of scientific explanations that may be given for them.” He gives the example of a disease which, when untreated, leads to a debilitating outcome 27% of the time. If the indeterminism here is fundamentally irreducible, we still have a good explanation for the outcome (the untreated disease) even if not a fully contrastive one (we can’t say why the outcome manifested itself this particular time).
So, the question becomes: could the necessary being be an impersonal “fount” of creative possibilities, which generates one or more contingent worlds?
{End of part one}
Note: I’m skipping over some sections along the way – for instance I’m leaving aside the discussion of the Spinozan view here (could our single world be the necessary being?). Also, O’Connor mentions in passing that it is hard to rule out a model of multiple NB’s -- although there seems to be no good argument for it either.
Like O’Connor, I’m interested in pursuing the quest for ultimate metaphysical explanation, and I agree with him that it is the apparent contingent nature of our world which demands an answer (“why this?”).
Unlike O’Connor, however, I don’t come to this quest as a traditional theist. I’ve long thought that the purposes and activities of a personal god cannot provide an explanation without raising equivalently difficult questions. So, an intriguing part of the book is where O’Connor discusses and compares two models of a transcendent necessary being: the personal and the impersonal. Or as he labels them: Logos and Chaos.
Before getting to this point, O’Connor lays the groundwork. In the first two chapters of the book, he discusses the case for modal realism and sketches a theory of modal epistemology. I agree with him that our concepts of possibility and necessity are so fundamental to explanation and reasoning (as well as to everyday life) that they are grounded in real modal truths. With regard to his account of how we come to know such truths, I found the discussion interesting, but tentative, and will leave this aside for now.
In Chapter 3, we begin to look at where the quest for explanation will take us. If the contingency of the world is acknowledged, and the necessities we come to know (if imperfectly) are real, what explains this situation? After commenting on the tendency for many philosophers to dismiss this sort of question as unanswerable, O’Connor turns his attention to the options on offer (I would note that Graham Oppy, in his review, disagrees with O’Connor in that he counts “contingent world as brute fact” as one of the options).
First, O’Connor discusses the common naturalist option which asserts that there is an infinite causal chain of contingent things, and that no further explanation is needed. O’Connor says even if the infinite causal chain is the right model, we can still coherently ask for an explanation of why THIS chain of things, and not another. The rejoinder at this point is to point out that a fully contrastive explanation of why this chain is as it is, if it existed, would convert the contingent chain to a necessary one. But O’Connor responds by saying that we can still seek a complete explanation, even if it is a non-fully-contrastive one. He says the only way to do this will be to ground contingent reality in a transcendent-cause explanation that is non-contrastive.
But how can a necessary being (NB, for short) provide the right kind of explanation? The necessity of the cause would seem to “prove too much” and convert the contingent chain to necessary status. Indeed, this is a standard critique of the Leibnizian version of the cosmological argument, which features the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). O’Connor concedes the effectiveness of this critique, and points out that his version will not invoke the PSR. But isn’t the PSR or something like it implied by the desire for an explanation of the contingent world?
O’Connor says he can avoid this as he isn’t offering a contrastive explanation (e.g. why this world instead of any other?) He says he can do this by invoking an explanation based on a model of the NB as an agent:
"In the context of an agent who exercises a capacity to freely act for a purpose, explanation is grounded in an internal similarity relation of the content of the prior purpose to that of the effective intention. To understand why an intention is freely generated, one need only identify its reasons-bearing content. This contrasts of course, with a mechanistic model of intentional action on which an agent’s purposes or desires or beliefs explain the choice, or formation of an intention, solely in terms of an external, causal relationship to it. But it is readily understandable in its own terms. (p.83)"
So the NB-agent’s creative activity of forming an intention, based on reasons (which is then satisfied by the creation of a contingent world), need not be seen as a necessary sequence of steps:
"And it would be a confusion to suppose that we needed a further explanation of the generation of the intention – for that is just the agent’s exercise of control over his state of intention and its product. (p.83, emphasis original)"
But still we want to ask: why intend contingent world C instead of C*? Well, we can’t ask this question, because an answer would provide for C being inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t given an explanation at all, according to O’Connor. The buck stops with the (contingent) intentions of the NB-agent.
To me, this seems a difficult stance. A naturalist might ask why we can’t stop the explanation at an earlier stage (before invoking the NB); O’Connor wants to stop the discussion at a later stage – but either way we eventually reach a “conversation-stopper”. Do the extra steps add enough value to prefer this NB-agent view, especially given all the (controversial) extra apparatus of intentions, purposes, activity, etc.?
Well, we need to recall the NB view’s main advantage, which is that it helps underwrite the reality of modal truths (there exists both contingent and necessary aspects to reality). But, do we really need the agent apparatus to provide this advantage?
To his credit, O’Connor sees the existence of another alternative (or set of alternatives). He starts by noting that, in addition to his agent model, there are many instances where we accept causal explanations even when they are not fully contrastive ones. Specifically, we do this in cases of “indeterministic mechanistic causal processes in the natural world, and the kinds of scientific explanations that may be given for them.” He gives the example of a disease which, when untreated, leads to a debilitating outcome 27% of the time. If the indeterminism here is fundamentally irreducible, we still have a good explanation for the outcome (the untreated disease) even if not a fully contrastive one (we can’t say why the outcome manifested itself this particular time).
So, the question becomes: could the necessary being be an impersonal “fount” of creative possibilities, which generates one or more contingent worlds?
{End of part one}
Note: I’m skipping over some sections along the way – for instance I’m leaving aside the discussion of the Spinozan view here (could our single world be the necessary being?). Also, O’Connor mentions in passing that it is hard to rule out a model of multiple NB’s -- although there seems to be no good argument for it either.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
3 Links
I'm currently reading Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency by Timothy O'Connor. I'm very interested in the cosmological argument from contingency, and this book is an up-to-date take on that and related metaphyical issues. I hope to have a post on this at some point but in the meantime here is a review from a naturalist's perspective by Graham Oppy (HT: sideblog at FQI).
I really enjoyed this insightful cartoon posted at Cosmic Variance along with the comments by Sean Carroll (the original source for the cartoon is here). No offense to cosmologists, but for purely philosophical reasons I think it is best to identify the actual world with the observable or causally connected universe (not that I think that's all there is, but because the regions we assume exist beyond the observable have a different ontological as well as epistemological status - see a related post here).
Finally, I want to post a friendly link to the discussion forum at Panendeism.org. Panendeism, as I understand it, is meant to be like Panentheism, but with the "deism" label stressing that this is a worldview arrived at through reason, without reliance on authority or revelation.
I really enjoyed this insightful cartoon posted at Cosmic Variance along with the comments by Sean Carroll (the original source for the cartoon is here). No offense to cosmologists, but for purely philosophical reasons I think it is best to identify the actual world with the observable or causally connected universe (not that I think that's all there is, but because the regions we assume exist beyond the observable have a different ontological as well as epistemological status - see a related post here).
Finally, I want to post a friendly link to the discussion forum at Panendeism.org. Panendeism, as I understand it, is meant to be like Panentheism, but with the "deism" label stressing that this is a worldview arrived at through reason, without reliance on authority or revelation.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Sam Harris on Religious Experience
Over the holidays I watched most of the video of a dialogue among Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (the “Four Horsemen” of the recent mini-boom in books criticizing religion by atheists). There was a brief discussion near the beginning led by Harris which I wanted to highlight (the transcript is here). One thing I have liked about Harris, who is pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience in his day job, is his respect for the challenge that the “hard problem” of first person conscious experience poses for a conventionally materialistic worldview. In the video, he discusses an obstacle to the ability of the atheists to win the hearts and minds of believers: the phenomenon of what is traditionally referred to as “religious” experience.
Here’s the excerpt:
I agree with the spirit of that last comment by Hitchens – I find it extremely implausible to think that someone who has not been exposed to Christianity will ever have any vision or experience specific to it. People have experiences marked by powerful positive feelings of transcendence, unity, etc. and then interpret them through the familiar conceptual lens which appears to do justice to them.
Where I go further than Harris does here is that I see this as a special example of the general problem of first person experience. People mostly don’t think experience is an accidental part of an essentially non-experiential reality. They think experience is something fundamental, and I agree. The trick is to see that one can have a worldview which privileges experience in this way without otherwise embracing supernatural entities or interventions.
Here’s the excerpt:
[Harris] Well. I think there's one answer to that question which may illuminate a difference, or at least the difference that I have, I think, maybe with all three of you. There's something about … I mean, I still use words like "spiritual" and "mystical" without furrowing my brow too much and, I admit, to the consternation of many atheists. I think there is a range of experience that is rare, and that is only talked about without obvious qualms in religious discourse. And because it's only talked about in religious discourse, it is just riddled with superstition. And it's used to cash out various metaphysical schemes which it can't reasonably do. But clearly people have extraordinary experiences. Whether they have them on LSD, or they have them because they were alone in a cave for a year, or they have them because just happen to have the neurology that is particularly labile that allows for it, but people have self-transcending experiences. And people have the best day of their life where everything seemed, you know, they seemed at one with nature. And for that, because religion seems to be the only game in town in talking about those experiences and dignifying them, that's one reason why I think it seems to be taboo to criticise it, because you are talking about the most important moments in people's lives and trashing them, at least from their view.
[Dawkins] Well, I don't have to agree with you, Sam, in order to say that it's a very good thing you're saying that sort of thing, because it shows that, as you say, religion is not the only game in town when it comes to being spiritual. It's like it's a good idea to have somebody from the political right who is an atheist, because otherwise there's a confusion of values which doesn't help us. And it's much better to have this diversity in other areas. But I think I sort of do agree with you. But even if I didn't, I think it was valuable to have that.
[Harris] Right.
[Hitchens] If one could make one change, and only one, mine would be to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural.
[Dawkins] Yes.
[Harris] Right.
[Hitchens] You had a marvelous quotation from Francis Collins, the genome pioneer, who said, while mountaineering one day, he was so overcome by the landscape, and then went down on his knees and accepted Jesus Christ. A complete non sequitur.
I agree with the spirit of that last comment by Hitchens – I find it extremely implausible to think that someone who has not been exposed to Christianity will ever have any vision or experience specific to it. People have experiences marked by powerful positive feelings of transcendence, unity, etc. and then interpret them through the familiar conceptual lens which appears to do justice to them.
Where I go further than Harris does here is that I see this as a special example of the general problem of first person experience. People mostly don’t think experience is an accidental part of an essentially non-experiential reality. They think experience is something fundamental, and I agree. The trick is to see that one can have a worldview which privileges experience in this way without otherwise embracing supernatural entities or interventions.
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