ANT5: No Explanation Necessary for the Lack of a Reason

ANT's first comment on ANT4:

Hi neopolitan,

The distinction between doxastic and epistemological is important, so I’m glad you brought that up. I thought you might be introducing doxastic uncertainty about self-existence through questioning the veridicality of your ‘selfhood experience’. But it seems this is not what you intended. You intended to introduce doxastic uncertainty with regards to the nature of self which I think is perfectly reasonable.

So in our last few exchanges, I have been asking a question like this – what explains how specific selves associate with specific biophysical conditions? You have interpreted this as presuming substance dualism. This question stems from abstract ideas in my head which are translated rather imperfectly to the world of words and sentences. And it was intended to be neutral towards theories of mind. It assumes that self is core feature of the mind. Therefore, we could replace “associate” with “emerge from” (emergent physicalism), “supervene upon” (supervenient physicalism), and so on. Suppose we tentatively agree on emergent physicalism. The inquiry, at least by intention, assumes that there is a reason why I (self) emerge from these biophysical conditions. What reason could be provided according to naturalism?

I am flirting with the idea that the naturalist could argue the reason is these occurrences are necessary. This would go along with necessitarian views of Laws of Nature. However, it raises a significant problem for the naturalist. The Laws of Nature may be entirely mathematical, but a Law of Self-emergence would add qualitative complexity to the universe, which may extend to infinity. This is rather inconsistent with the simplicity and elegance desired by the naturalist, and rather a bit like wizardry.

Another answer might be there simply is no reason because it is random. Barring the problems with randomness (i.e., may not exist, may require substrate), this solution is problematic. The addition of arbitrary qualitative complexity to the universe potentiates the fine-tuning problem. The stench of fine-tuning is so strong that some have gone as far as to reject Karl Popper’s demarcation criterion and adopt other criteria in order to upgrade multiverse from pseudoscience to science.

Finally, invoking uncertainty about the answer is intellectually humble, but it misses the point of the inquiry. The point is to find at least a hypothetical solution which is consistent with naturalism. The inability to find a hypothetical solution would be a deficiency of naturalism.

ANT

My response:

Hi ANT,

I'm not limiting myself to a presumption of substance dualism (on your part).  This is certainly one valid interpretation of your argument (at least from my perspective), but my major issue is the presumption of some sort of overarching metaphysical structure to the universe.  By this I mean an assumption that there is a meaning to everything that exists outside of our ability to create such a meaning.   This assumption is inherent in your use of the phrase "(this) assumes that there is a reason why I (self) emerge from these biophysical conditions".

I'm all for the idea of an investigation or inquiry to establish the mechanisms by which our sense of self emerges from our associated biophysical conditions, but seeking a reason for this emergence seems to be begging the question.  Even if we were to retreat to a less charged term, say we seek an "explanation" as to why our sense of self emerges from our associated biophysical conditions, this explanation will (generally) still be interpreted as "reason" by the theists and "mechanism" by everyone else.

Note that with any phenomenon or event we could ask for both an explanation (mechanism based) and a reason (intention based).  For example, someone could ask why there is damage to the back of my car.  I could provide an explanation, describing how a vehicle in reverse can be rammed into inanimate objects and going into detail about crumple zones, and I could provide a reason, that I have decided to not fully repair the damage because it's mostly cosmetic.  The thing is, however, that there while will always be an explanation (even if we might not know what it is), there are many cases in which there is no reason.  Is there a reason why the Hoba meteorite fell in Namibia and not in Iowa, or Lincolnshire?  No, there's no reason, but there's an explanation (based on the timing of the rock hitting the atmosphere and it's composition).

It might surprise you, but I don't actually worry too much about categories like "necessary" and "contingent" because I associate the distinction with the antics of apologists.  When in a more generous frame of mind, it occurs to me that that the choices of an intentional being are, by definition, contingent (otherwise no possibility of choice would exist), but even when there is no intention or choice made, I'm not absolutely convinced that any result is necessarily necessary.  (As a rather strong determinist, I am somewhat convinced though.  The doubt creeps in at the quantum level, if the universe really is indeterministic at that level, then if rewind the clock on apparently necessary results and rerun things, we might find that they are not fundamentally necessary.  This would still leave a sort of physical consequentialism: if these conditions and rulesets obtain, then this result will necessarily follow.  Conditional necessity, if you like.)

I don't understand your statement that "(s)elf-emergence would add qualitative complexity to the universe, which may extend to infinity".  I understand that "self-emergence" refers to the emergence of the sense of self from our associated biophysical conditions, but I don't understand what you mean by "qualitative complexity", how it would matter when we are talking about an entirely mathematical universe and what impact such a subjective take on things would have on the worldview of the naturalist.  I do think that the naturalist has no issue with the apparent messiness of, for instance, a tornado, even though that the macroscopic tornado emerges from quite simple and elegant interactions at the microscopic scale.  I don't think that's wizardry at all.

Similarly, I don't understand what you mean by "(t)he addition of arbitrary qualitative complexity to the universe potentiates the fine-tuning problem".  There are differences between indeterminism (which may be the negation of either hard or soft determinism), randomness and arbitrariness.  To me, arbitrary simply means without a reason, without an intent.  An arbitrary decision can be made randomly, but it's not necessarily the case - it can be a personal whim or the decision could be made on the basis of an irrelevant, but not random factor.  Nevertheless, you refer again to "qualitative complexity" and you've brought it in as your objection to both possible lines of reasoning that you ascribe to the naturalist.  By that aside, what do you mean by "potentiates the fine-tuning problem"?

Then you raise the issue of a "hypothetical solution".  A hypothetical solution to what?  The problem of "qualitative complexity"?  The "stench of fine-tuning"?  The lack of an answer to the question "why" in this instance?  Without knowing what our hypothetical solution is supposed to solve, I really don't think that the lack of such a solution is a deficiency on the part of naturalism.

ANT's second response on ANT4:

neopolitan,

I agree with you that “a true gift would be the provision of evidence that would support a belief. . .” Also, I totally agree with you that it is important to distinguish between beliefs and knowledge, and we could further subdivide based on the level of uncertainty as you stated.

What is imposed upon me is not the belief itself, rather a kind of internal evidence which must be weighed like all other evidences. This means intelligence is indispensible. So what I meant to contrast were two processes that lead to belief. One is dominated by acquiring data and analyzing it to make the best conclusion. It is meritocratic and favors the curious, wealthy, and socially apt. The other is dominated by provision from outside forces wherein the individual’s abilities are not a major factor. The important factor is the individual’s acceptance of provision. This is the difference between merit and grace in Christianity.

If the imposition were belief itself, I think we would run into the problems you raise. It would be strange discovering within oneself a new belief!

“I agree that a good belief would not lead to harm, but I note that ‘harm’ here is undefined. . .” and “What I am aiming at here is that belief as a good gift would not only be good in the moral sense, but it would also have to be veridical. . .”

All good points.

“I don’t really understand why this faith, which is the problem we started with, should be rewarded – because ‘faith’ appears to be no more than belief with insufficient evidence.”

By faith, I don’t mean doctrinal belief, rather faith defined as trust. Bottom line, if the Christian deity is as far reaching as they say, and demonstrating trust is important, there must be opportunities to demonstrate trust for all people of all worldviews.

“I could stomach the idea that your deity might reward people for what good they do in their lives, irrespective of what faith they have or whether they have faith at all, but as soon as you admit that as a possibility, the whole motivation for being a theist drops away. . .”

I don’t think this kind of belief will save anyone. This does dissolve the motivation to adopt religion in order to gain salvation. Or does it? I think it depends on what exactly God is calling the individual to believe. We all have unique life situations, and maybe some are called to be lifelong skeptics. For some, perhaps a good version of Islam. For some, perhaps a good version of Judaism. I don’t think this scenario diminishes the value of truth, rather it is a fact of living in an evil world with deceptions and yet God knows what to expect of individuals and can call us in unique ways.

My response:

Hi again,

I must admit that I don't comprehend this internal evidence if it isn't belief.  In your Letter to Atheists, you wrote:

"one night I was listening to a debate about the resurrection of Jesus and was somehow convinced Jesus really did rise from the dead and this event led to the rise of Christianity. Given the degree of skepticism that I had developed, a deep questioning of everything, I was greatly surprised by being convinced! This new belief in Jesus created a spirituality in me. On top of this, to make sense out of Jesus I believed in God. I partook in this spirituality unencumbered for some time."

Now you might say that this is "conviction" rather than "belief", but I don't think there is a huge difference between the two terms and it nevertheless sounds like you are relating a tale in which you had a belief (or conviction) imposed on you.  Perhaps I have misinterpreted your testimony here.

The grace you are talking about is pretty much precisely this imposition of belief that I question while noting that I don't actually believe that it is truly an imposition of belief at all.  I also note that some theists, or perhaps more accurately some Christians, tie themselves into knots about this grace concept - believing that even their belief in god, their faith, is itself a gift from god and that it is not belief that gets you into heaven but the grace of god.  (Danny was the proponent of this idea during a discussion one Friday evening.  I put to him that it was therefore possible that he, the believer, might possibly not go to heaven and I, the non-believer, might be taken instead.  He considered it technically possible, but stated blandly that he knew he was going to heaven.  Why?  Because he has faith.  Back then I just decided that there was no point in any serious attempt to progress the discussion and that I should be polite, resisting my urge to label this type of thinking appropriately.  Nowadays, I would point out that the point of theology that he had failed to mention was that faith in god is generally considered necessary but not sufficient to get into heaven, so infidels like myself can still be excluded.)

In a similar vein to my response to your first comment, the type of faith that you referring to is a major question beggar.  In Atheists are Evil, I took the unusual step of translating and transcribing the lyrics from a Swedish song, Du Måste Finnas ("You Must Exist" or "You Must Be There"), from the musical Kristina från Duvemåla.  In it Kristina is undergoing an existential crisis by proxy, a crisis of faith.  Something that strikes me in this song is that Kristina has placed her faith, your sort of faith - trusting faith, in a god.  A god that she is now starting to doubt the existence of.  This seems terribly back to front to me.  I have your sort of trusting faith in certain people on this planet, but I am pretty certain that they exist.  To have this sort of faith in your god, however, is secondary to what I consider to be the more standard sort of faith, doctrinal faith as you put it.  First believe that your god exists, then you at least believe that you have something to trust.

I understand the allure of some sort of universalism, in which believing a form of theism (does it have to be Abrahamic, or can we include Hindus and others in this club?) qualifies you for posthumous rewards.  But we are right back at the nature of a good belief again.  You noted that I made a good point when I said that "belief as a good gift would not only be good in the moral sense, but it would also have to be veridical", but a short while later you were tentatively espousing the benefits of non-veridical belief (because not all of Judaism and all of Christianity and all of Islam can be true simultaneously).

And, finally … an evil world?  Once more, I struggle with understanding you here.  What sort of god do you have in mind, one who is capable of making a perfect world but has failed to make it?  Or one who is not capable of making a perfect world?  As you have written elsewhere, the problem of evil is no small problem for the theist (although you see it as a challenge to the moral character of your god while I see it as evidence of the non-viability of the very concept of your god, in part because I think that your god fails the moral character challenge).

I resolve the problem of evil by removing intent from the consideration.  All the suffering in the world could only be evil if there were a divine being who is capable of preventing it yet doesn't.  With no god in my calculations, there is no evil.

ANT4 - Doxastic Uncertainty, Non-Contiguous Me and the Provenance of Belief

This is now becoming a series in its own right, hence the change of titles (with appropriate backdating).  The context should now be really easy to find, but just in case … ANT1, ANT2 and ANT3.

ANT's first response (to my response to his comments at ANT3):

Hi neopolitan,

You said: “We’re not assuming selfhood (because we can only truly talk about our experiences of selfhood, without assuming that our experiences are veridical)...”

You want to introduce epistemological uncertainty, but I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about experience of selfhood. As I stated before, I think experiencing anything at all justifies self-existence, but I cannot think of a specific “selfhood experience” that we could choose to accept or doubt. Acknowledging selfhood is a matter of rational argumentation, not phenomenological experience.

You seem very troubled by the idea of self because it seems to relate to the soul even though it is material, emergent, and ceases to exist upon death (quite un-soul-like). The concept contained herein I feel is inescapable. Either you endorse eliminativism or the self must exist. But, I understand your concern here. Daniel Dennett and other naturalists have the same concern. He thinks self is an illusion whereas freewill exists as an emergent phenomenon (note: Sean Carroll also holds this view on freewill). What exactly is free to act though? We cannot both say that something has freedom and does not exist, this is a logical contradiction. That thing that performs the action, if we trace it backwards from the tip of the finger through nerve fibers to brain to electrical impulse to emergent thing to whatever, that thing we could label as self. Of course science doesn’t understand it, theists hijack it to argue for dualism, and it may be enormously complicated and dynamic. But, it seems to be a center of receiving input and giving output. Some naturalists have conceived of it as a processing system. I don’t think Dennett or Carroll would deny this kind of self. They are simply denying the kind that singularitarians are saying can be uploaded only a silicon chip or potentially transferred between human brains. BTW these guys are not theists either.

It must be ironic for you to hear that your reformulation of the problem begs the question for naturalism since you ask “by what causal mechanism” as if we know for certain that a causal mechanism is responsible for partitioning selves to genetic and local conditions. This is what we are inquiring about. When causal mechanisms are nowhere to be found, we can employ an old atheist debate tactic – absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Therefore, if the self exists, and mental states, intentionality, experience, and so on really do exist in some sense, then naturalism is an incomplete worldview. Or otherwise, what explains the connection between specific selves and specific genetic and local conditions?

Hope your writing is going well. Don’t ever feel pressured to respond soon, not that you would feel pressured. We can correspond over longer time intervals. Happy thinking

ANT

ANT's second response (to ANT3):

neopolitan,

True, the idea of gifts from a deity deserves more specification because it is distant from naturalism. Seeing your thoughts on the connection between gift and evidence, I think we might ultimately agree on this part. This is conditioned on whether we agree on what counts as evidence. If evidence is restricted to what can be published in modern science journals or what is permissible in law courts, then we have none. If evidence includes what is internal to the person, then some people might have evidence. For example, after I “reconverted” I analyzed the situation to the nth degree and found what really drove my belief was something internal and compelling. I cannot say what the force is or from where it originates. This is not what I wanted to happen! I wanted my worldview to be discovered by sheer power of intellect or an accomplishment worthy of respect, but what ended up happening was humbling.

Your point about the content of the belief is well taken. There are beliefs that are bad for the world, and we don’t have to search long to find examples. So a gift from a good deity would have to be a good gift, and if this were a belief, a good belief rather than one that leads to harm. Also, yes, it’s conceivable from my worldview that the light could go out so-to-speak and I could become an atheist. Job said it best, “The Lord gives and he takes away”. The point of this reality is not to homogenize human belief across the earth and not to create a futuristic superhuman or super-society. The point is to let people live and freely, both good and evil, and judge them, so that when evil and suffering are removed from the structure of reality at the apocalypse, only those who earnestly and humbly sought the good will be brought back.

There are two hypothetical deities we have compared here. The first rewards gullibility which makes the deity not good. The second rewards those who put their gifts to good use and demonstrate their faith in some way (not necessarily religious conviction). Though it does not nullify the problem of evil, this shows that we can be treated fairly with respect to the great cultural diversity on earth.

Does this go off track somewhere? I'll be interested to hear from you.

My response:

Do I want to introduce epistemological uncertainty?  Well, I suspect that I am a little uncertain about that, but I don’t know for sure.

I find it a bit difficult to parse the concept of epistemological uncertainty.  I’ve heard of “epistemic uncertainty”, but I am reasonable certain that you don’t mean that (neither in principle nor in practice).  I take it that you really mean doxastic uncertainty, which would cover both uncertainty with respect to the provenance of our beliefs and uncertainty as to what should be the content of our beliefs.  I would maintain that when we talk about knowledge there is a level of uncertainty built in (and that therefore epistemological uncertainty is a given).

What I mean here is that we can only truly know A if A is true (where the truth of A is necessary, but not sufficient).  However, as individuals, and maybe even as a species, we only have beliefs about what we think we know.  We’d know what we think we know if and only if what we think we know is true.  And we can’t know that, so … we don’t truly know what it is that we know and what it is that we only believe.

Housekeeping note: for the purposes of this discussion, I am going to try to maintain the distinction between epistemological (pertaining to a consideration about what we know) and doxastic (pertaining to a consideration about what we believe).  I’m aware that in most constructions belief is an element of knowledge, such as in the tripartite theory of knowledge alluded to above, but I am also aware that faith is thought to be tripartite by some believers – consisting of knowledge, belief and trust.

It’s possible to have doxastic uncertainty, I suppose, since people do sometimes find themselves in the position where they claim to not know what to believe, bringing us to evidence.  If I were to stumble upon evidence that challenged my world view, I could possibly be unable to decide as to what I should believe.  I’m reasonably cynical about human perceptions, including my own, so I’d probably solve any dilemma quite quickly by choosing to doubt my faculties.  But there are people out there who are far more confident about the accuracy of their perceptions and, in the face of world-view disconfirming evidence, they might be uncertain as to which they should abandon, their overweening perceptual confidence or their world-view, which one would assume they would also have considerable confidence in.

I’m not suggesting that it would be appropriate to have doxastic uncertainty of this sort with respect to the self.  However, if you consider my base position, that is being cynical about human perceptions, to be signalling doxastic uncertainty, then yes, I am suggesting doxastic uncertainty with the proviso that it is a nuanced doxastic uncertainty.

My personal experience of self certainly suggests the existence of something that is undergoing the experience of self and that would be, to all intents and purposes, my self.  I consider it reasonable enough, therefore, that experience of self is evidence of self.  What it doesn’t tell me, however, is anything about the nature of self, other than it (whatever it is) is capable of experience.  It doesn’t tell me whether the experiences I have are veridical.  It follows, at least in my world view, that I should remain agnostic as to the nature of self … and I think we disagree significantly on the nature of self.

When I use the tools to hand to investigate the nature of self, in order to obtain a belief about that nature (not the existence) of self, all I am able to do is eliminate a few theories from contention.  The most reasonable theory among those that remain is that the nature of self is that of an emergent phenomenon that manifests in my physical brain, that self is categorically not an independent feature of that brain (or any other part of my body or of my “being”).

This doesn’t actually trouble me.  I’m quite comfortable with the idea that whatever self I have will dissipate on my death or the death of my brain and that, whatever it is, self isn’t even contiguous within my lifetime.  I sleep at night and like everyone I have episodes of microsleep.  Sometimes I drift off into my thoughts and become oblivious to the world around me while at other times I am so engrossed in a task that time will fly by as if I am being magically transported into the future, missing what transpires in the meantime.  I have had both general anaesthetic and something similar to propofol – which is administered immediately prior to unpleasant procedures which require the patient to be calm and relaxed but not necessarily unconscious or inert and it has the added benefit of preventing the laying down of memories for the short period that it is active.

Some version of “me” would have experienced the discomfort the procedure at the time but I don’t remember anything about it.  I just remember being wheeled into the surgical theatre, the anaesthetist putting a mask on me and asking me to count back from 10 to 1, me getting through a few numbers and then I was suddenly in the recovery ward.  Anything that happened in the half hour or so in between might as well have not happened as far as my self is concerned.

I would, however, have to say that the self who experienced discomfort in the surgical theatre was “me”.  But while I remember being the person who was going into theatre I don’t have any recollection of being a person for about half an hour after that.  Because of the nature of the drug, I know that there would have been a contiguous “me” in there, experiencing being a self in discomfort, but there is no chain of experience between the “me” I am today and that person.  In other words, there was some form of “me” in the past that is disconnected from the “me” of today, a “me” that bravely suffered and was no more, allowing another version of “me” to continue on without any sense of being inconvenienced or discomforted by minor surgery.

You want to tie me to eliminative materialism, which I suppose is okay if we limit that concept to the idea of the soul – so if we think of materialism eliminating the soul.  Just note, however, that there may be more to eliminative materialism than the negation of the soul and I am not signing myself up to an entire school of thought just because we have identified this one element of concordance.  The key question is whether I am being eliminative with regard to the self.  The answer would be no, not at all, so long as we permit consideration of an emergent phenomenon that we call “self”.

Could we simulate this emergent phenomenon in silicon?  I don’t know, I personally doubt it, but perhaps we will be able to and the transhumans and singularitarians will eventually have their day.  But I suspect that if I were ever to be “uploaded”, the upload would result in a “me in simulation”, not a “me in actuality”, because I consider being manifested by my own brain within my own body to be a key feature of the phenomenon of self that I refer to as “me”.  If an upload does happen in the future, I am quite sure that my simulation will have a different opinion and might consider that the silicon manifestation of “me” is just as much “me” as my wetware version is today.  The “me” of today will then become a little like the “me” on propofol, yet another non-contiguous version of my self.

I don’t know what you mean by “partitioning selves to genetic and local conditions”.  It seems like partitioning is the wrong word here and you are trying to find another way to say “attributing/designating/allotting selves to genetic and local conditions”, as if the causal mechanisms were distributing pre-existing selves to young humans on the basis of the genetic and local conditions.  That would be soul-like indeed, and I am quite convinced by the arguments against the soul concept.

Now on to gifts (the subject of ANT’s second response):

The first issue revolves around evidence for a deity.  I had said “a true gift would be the provision of evidence that would support a belief, rather than the mere imposition of that belief”.  What you seem to be focussing in on is the veracity of the belief and thus we seem to be blurring the line between the epistemological and the doxastic.  (I’m not sure how I should conjugate “doxastic” into a noun to mirror epistemology, I’m leaning towards doxasty but it could be doxastology or doxastemology.)  With the sort of imposition of belief that we are talking about here, do we know something that we believe or believe something that we know?  Or both?  Or neither?

You ask what counts as evidence and hint that if there is a deity, and that deity is an inherently good deity, then belief in that deity (as imposed on us by the deity) would be good evidence.  Well, possibly, but what would it be evidence of?  It can’t be evidence in support of the belief (other than mere existence of the belief, in the tautological sense that evidence is evidence of evidence).  Perhaps you mean as evidence for the existence of the deity.  But this doesn’t work, because the existence of the deity is a prerequisite for the belief to be good evidence.  You’d have to present a compelling argument that the only way you could come to such a belief, which you experience as imposed upon you rather than coming via intellect, must be from an existent deity – but if you are successful then you won’t need the evidence of your belief anymore.  So, as far as I can tell, it’s not really good evidence.

You apply similar thinking to the idea of imposed belief as a gift.  Let me try to unpack what you wrote: “a gift from a good deity would have to be a good gift, and if this were a belief, a good belief rather than one that leads to harm”.  This assumes the existence of a deity, and that the deity is good, and that a good deity cannot give any other gifts than good gifts.

I agree that a good belief would not lead to harm, but I note that “harm” here is undefined.  We might consider the condemnation of your immortal soul to be “harm” and not be overly concerned about the thousands of kafir, infidels and apostates you might have to kill and torture in order to preserve your soul.  A belief that it’s alright to kill people for not believing correctly would thus be a “good” belief.  A belief that it is better to live and let live could, in this context, be a “bad” belief, because even though you might be dedicated to minimising short-term harm you are enabling long-term harm.  You and I might shy away from this, but only because we don’t have this particular belief (and belief set) imposed on us.  We not only think this is morally wrong, but also factually wrong.

What I am aiming at here is that belief as a good gift would not only be good in the moral sense, but it would also have to veridical.  I think that this strikes at the heart of the beliefs held by religious universalists – the idea that behind all forms of theism (including polytheism and deism, but not atheism and probably not henotheism) is the one god (or a specific group of gods) making all the various faiths true, in a sense.  But surely an untrue belief cannot be a good belief – and even if it were good in some sense, such a belief would be suboptimal, given that there would exist a potential belief that is as good, if not better, and also true.

There seems to be some confusion about what I said with respect to rewarding gullibility.  (Note that I don’t see this as inexorably linked to the idea of imposed belief.)

I made the original comment in the context of the “evidence” that is supposedly provided by the standard Christian deity and the supposed rewards for belief based on such “evidence”.  I’d need more than the “evidence” that is currently available if I were to believe in the existence of this or any other deity.  Now, if belief were imposed on me directly by the deity or if some clarity of mind were granted so that the existing “evidence” became significantly more compelling, then I suppose that might be considered the “more” that I am demanding.  Until then, however, I am simply not inclined to “fake it until I make it”.

You do suggest, however, that the other type of deity, the good one that doesn’t reward gullibility, but instead “rewards those who put their gifts to good use and demonstrate their faith in some way (not necessarily religious conviction)”.  As someone outside of your worldview, I don’t really understand why this faith, which is the problem we started with, should be being rewarded – because “faith” appears to be no more than belief with insufficient evidence.  Therefore, as far as I can see, you’re just moving the problem back a step – no longer is your deity rewarding gullibility per se, but gullibility becomes an essential prerequisite for reward.

I could stomach the idea that your deity might reward people for what good they do in their lives, irrespective of what faith they have or whether they have any faith at all, but as soon as you admit that as a possibility, the whole motivation for being a theist drops away … unless faith in the (correct) deity is posited as some sort of shortcut to reward.  Even then though, this seems to be predicated on the idea that your deity benefits in some way from having humans believe in it and when we look closely at this, such a situation would imply that your deity is less than omnipotent (cue WLC argument with respect to necessary omnipotence).  It also makes the idea of heaven even less appealing that it is already.  There would be those who are there on the basis of their good works and then a group of people, some of them quite horrible people, who are there merely because they had faith.  That doesn’t sound like the game plan of a good and just deity to me.

ANT3 - A Snooker Playing God and Gametes

Hi ANT,

I’ll respond in blog format again and, again, here is the article you were responding to as context for other readers.

ANT's response:

neopolitan,

With very minimal qualification, I agree with your assessment of deism and theism. (BTW I really enjoyed the software glitch objection to miracles).

You said, “The question I would really ask is not ‘why do you credit the theory of Theistic Evolution?’ but ‘how do you rule out the Theory of (natural) Evolution?’”

This depends on how compatible the Theory of Evolution is with theism. An important question is, what features of evolution would be incompatible with theism? If any, it would be indeterminism. The opposite, determinism, would allow a deity to set the universe in motion with the intention to produce humans. It is not easy to prove that evolution is indeterministic. Some features of earth-like life are highly conserved which argues against indeterminism, and there’s also the phenomenon of convergent evolution which does the same. However, other features of earth-like life push the other way. In my last blog post, I showcased research which argues the complexity of human genome (and other multicellular animals) was predominantly generated by chance which favors indeterminism.

A fair assessment recognizes that chance mutations are constrained by varying degrees of natural selection, sometimes very highly, other times less so. Applying this to the question of theism, whether or not the Theory of Evolution is compatible with (Christian) theism depends on whether the conditions which produced humans were highly constrained (i.e., by predetermined environmental conditions) or left up to chance. Honestly, we cannot say either way without importing generalizations that, funny enough, both sides can supply.

You asked, “Is this pretty much what you mean by ‘self’ or do you have another idea of it?”

Like you, I would want to steer clear of mind-body dualism as proposed by Descartes that leads one to talk of an immaterial soul. Honestly, I’m not sure what can be said about the self beyond its existence. And now I can see we basically agree on this when you said “Clearly we exist, in at least some sense.” However, there still seems to be a problem for naturalism regarding the self.

Let me attempt to elaborate on this. Naturalism supposes the universe is composed of matter with well-defined properties moving around in space and generating fields and so on. Considering the sorts of structures that could arise, the self is strange. Counterfactuals can be used to highlight naturalism’s difficulty with the self. Why am I in this body rather than, say, Brad Pitt’s body? Or, why does this particular neural pattern correspond to me and not someone else? That is a question that emergentism is not equipped to address. Emergentism might explain how natural processes produce a novel complex structure, probably even whatever is “self”, but not these counterfactuals. Naturalism is great at handling counterfactuals such as why do dogs have lungs instead of gills? Or, why is Europe not in the Southern hemisphere? But, it is inadequate for answering counterfactuals of self. At the very least, unanswerable counterfactuals are a weakness, and at the most a sign of incoherence.

I’ll cut myself off here.

Cheers,

ANT

My response:

I want to deal with “self” first because I think it can be put to bed reasonably quickly.  When you talk about “self” in terms of naturalism and “emergentism”, you still appear to be talking about it (“self”) as a thing, rather than an emergent feature.  Take the Brad Pitt example for example, your question resolves down to “why is the emergent feature that emerges from the body that is labelled as ‘me’ not emergent from the body that is labelled as ‘Brad Pitt’?”  Clearly it’s because the emergent feature that we are talking about is a feature that emerges from specific bodies (and the chemistry / neurology / genetics / circumstances associated with those specific bodies).  We would not expect you to emerge from a brain in another body, nor would we expect Brad Pitt to emerge from the brain yours.

To think “why am ‘I’ not resident in Brad Pitt’s body?” (at least for those of us who are not Brad Pitt) is to presume some sort of portable “self” that can be somehow plugged into different bodies, so I think you are still locked into a loose form of mind-body dualism.  The “problem” that you attribute to naturalism and “emergentism” disappears when you unlock yourself from mind-body dualism.  The complaint is akin to claiming that naturalism is false because it cannot determine the weight of a rainbow, although the contributing error is somewhat less obvious.

I also think that we have to be very careful with respect to “why” questions because while we often mean “by what mechanism” we sometimes mean “for what intent” or “for what reason”.  In other words, some “why” questions are actually “how” questions and science (which is what you seem to mean when you say “naturalism”) is the right tool for addressing these sorts of questions only.  Other “why” questions are, unfortunately, little more than examples of inadvertent question begging.  (I’m not suggesting that the question begging is always inadvertent, there’s an example of what appears to be intentional question begging in a series of “who” questions that rarely fails to irritate me – in the children’s hymn Who put the colours in the rainbow? I can at least console myself with the thought of an atheist, science-minded objector responding doggedly to each line with “Well, actually …”)

I’d suggest rethinking your questions and trying to formulate them without a “why” to determine whether you mean “by what mechanism” or “for what intent/reason”.  Do you mean:

·      By what mechanism am I in this body rather than, say, Brad Pitt’s body?  Or,

·      For what intent am I in this body rather than, say, Brad Pitt’s body?

I also want to make it perfectly clear that I am not conceding that the “self” actually exists, as indicated by my qualification when I wrote “(c)learly we exist, in at least some sense”.

Now to evolution and theism.

A metaphorical snooker playing designer god that just lined all the metaphorical balls up and played a perfect metaphorical shot which resulted in humanity emerging is not, I think, a theistic god.  This would be a deist god (one that apparently had to first make the metaphorical balls and the metaphorical table on which the balls rest and the metaphorical cue used to take the shot).  A theist god intervenes.

Think of the table above as the starting conditions arranged by a snooker playing god.  If it’s a deist god with long term design intentions, it takes one strike at the white ball, then walks away from the table while, amazingly, all the balls all go in the pockets in a sequence according to the rules (as determined by the god, using physics principles which are also presumably determined by that god).  If it’s a theist god, it might get a few balls in with a single strike, but it retains the right to set itself up for multiple strikes and it might knock a few balls in by hand.  Such a god might even change its mind midgame as to the order in which balls are to be pocketed.  It could also add balls when it felt like it (WCBWJB) and remove balls from the table if they proved inconvenient.

So, is the Theory of Evolution consistent with a theist god?  It really doesn’t seem to be so.  I do think that it’s consistent with a deist god, in part because we have the hubris to think that we are the metaphorical pocketing of the black ball, the main event rather the cannoning of two balls midgame on the way to some unknown finale, and we can look back and see what must have happened for us to have come about.  We can (metaphorically and with a certain level of uncertainty) trace the path of the white ball all the way to the Big Bang and we can see that this or that must have happened – or we would not be here*.  We can even marvel that if the path of the white ball were even slightly different at the beginning, or the balls were aligned differently on the table, then we would never have been (this is analogous to “fine tuning”).

However, if it were a theist god, with the habit of committing regular, intent laden interventions, we should be able to see hints of those interventions – and we don’t.  It simply gets worse if we presume that such interventions would be aimed at either making things better or preventing unintentional evils (and that the god would never intentionally create evils).  There are plenty of opportunities for meaningful intervention in history that simply did not occur – as simple and innocuous as letting the young Adolf Hitler scrape a pass on his art exam so he could have spent his life as yet another two-bit painter.  You could argue that the death of millions in the Second World War might be a necessary element in some grander plan, but that leads to two uncomfortable conclusions: either you are one of the beneficiaries of that plan (in which case all that blood is on your hands whether you wanted it or not), or you are just more filler whose inevitable death is just one more means by which your god is callously achieving its ends.  Perhaps there is an evil-god (as suggested by Stephen Law) that is doing its level best to maximise suffering, but such a god isn’t one cherished by the average theist.

So no, I don’t see evolution being consistent with a theist god.

(I do see evolution being consistent with theism, by which I mean belief in a theist god.  However, in this sense evolution is also consistent with atheism, polytheism, pantheism and any sort of ism that any human out there has ever clung to. That is to say, the existence of theism – and other isms – is consistent with reality, even if the content of the associated beliefs might not be.)

I’m not quite sure what you are getting at with your discussion of indeterminism, nor why you think indeterminism is inconsistent with theism while determinism is consistent with it.  I can think that perhaps you are considering determinism to mean that every effect has a unique set of constituent causal conditions which are collectively referred to as the cause and that you can think of your god (or the will of your god) as being a possible causal condition in each possible effect.  However, because your god (or the will thereof) is not detectable, the consequence of that god intervening would be that, as far as humans are concerned, determinism will (at least sometimes) be false.  We’d have to rewrite the laws to say something along the lines of “any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, unless a god intervenes, in which case we simply don’t know what will happen”.  Such a universe would not, strictly speaking, be deterministic – at best it would be “mostly deterministic”.

As for indeterminism (by which I mean the physics related concept), I would have thought that this is more consistent with theism.  If indeterminate interpretations of quantum mechanics are correct (yes, there are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics and there is even evidence for one variant), then there will be a palate of possible options for a god to choose from if it wished to intervene, at least until an observation is made.  This would, I would have thought, provided a lot of potential wriggle room in which a theist god could operate.  (Of course I lean towards a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics.)

Then you suggest that evolution itself might be indeterministic.  Evolution (at least biological evolution) doesn’t work at the level at which physical indeterminism holds sway, which leads me to think you might be talking about a lack of predestination.  If so, then I would agree that we don’t have any evidence that proves conclusively that evolution is not predestined – and we could even be sceptical of that evidence even if we had it (because, due to some ineffable plan on the part of the evolutionary predestinator, it could have been predestined that we would eventually find evidence that evolution is not predestined even if it is – it would be like programming an artificial intelligence to “know” that it is not an artificial intelligence).

My argument with respect to this is that if we have been placed in a universe which, on careful inspection, appears to be completely natural in origin with no inherent purpose and no creator, then it makes sense to treat it as completely natural in origin with no inherent purpose and no creator – even if it does happen to be a simulation or a plaything created by some sort of god.  If there’s an upgrade which imparts knowledge that we are simulations or the owner starts giving better, more convincing clues as to its existence, then I think I would be justified in reconsidering my position based on the new evidence.  At the moment the only “evidence” available seems to be testing us for gullibility, such as very sketchy reports of a resurrection by people with a vested interest in such reports being believed.  If gullibility truly were the feature most favoured by the owner-operator of the universe, then I guess I would have to accept the fact that I am a substandard product of its creation.

You appear to be overly impressed by considerations of chance, which is a common feature of the more active theists, especially apologetic theists.  If your parents had to put one egg and one sperm together, both being selected at random with the express intent of creating you then, yes for sure, the chances of them being successful would be near enough infinitesimal.  Your mother had between one and two million immature eggs at birth while your father, if within the normal human range, likely produced about a billion sperm a month, maybe more during his heyday – with average human sperm production being a little over half a trillion over a lifetime.  That means the likelihood of you being produced – given the existence of your parents, their desire to create you and the assumption that all they needed to do that was connect the right sperm to the right ovum and that they had their lifetime supply of gametes to choose from – is in the order of 1 in half a quintillion (0.5x10¹⁸) which is pretty the age of the universe when expressed in seconds**.  If your parents could tell immediately that the right combination of egg and sperm had been found just before fusing them, and could make their random selections and check each combination in one second and they were somehow prevented from retrying unsuccessful combinations, and they started just after the big bang that would mean that they would have been able to recreate you by now.  (Of course we are ignoring issues of age and fertility cycles.)

The thing is though that this scenario is rather unrealistic.  Your parents didn’t just select an egg and a sperm at random.  And they weren’t specifically aiming for you.  If any two fertile humans throw gametes at each other regularly enough without taking precautions (please don’t visualise that), then inevitably some sort of child will eventuate and no matter who that child turns out to be, it will be only one out of a truly staggeringly huge number of potential outcomes.  In other words, you need to focus more on the likelihood of a child resulting from sexual congress, which is substantially higher than on in a sextillion, and just be happy that one of those children ended up being you.

Finally, you talk about “the question of theism, whether or not the Theory of Evolution is compatible with (Christian) theism depends on whether the conditions which produced humans were highly constrained (i.e., by predetermined environmental conditions) or left up to chance”.  I guess you meant to presuppose the veridicality of theism here?  Otherwise you would be guilty of question begging to the same extent as in that execrable hymn.

And you raised this in a paragraph which was notionally addressing the question “how do you rule out the Theory of (natural) Evolution?”  I don’t think you actually answered the question, unless your answer is “theism comes first, anything I consider incompatible with theism is thus untrue”.  I don’t think you mean that though … um, do you?

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* This looking back to see what must have happened for us to be here is, perhaps, the most valid use of the anthropic principle.  We can’t justify presenting a scientific hypothesis if an inevitable consequence of that hypothesis being true is that it would be impossible for life to exist in this universe.  Similarly, we can factor in our existence when trying to work out what happened in the history of the universe – for example, we know that there is a lot of carbon on our planet (which is essential for our type of life) and therefore something must have produced that carbon.  Therefore, our star must be a second generation star that formed from the debris of first generation star that was responsible for all our carbon (inter alia).  We’d know that even if we hadn’t looked at the spectral lines of the sun and noticed that it contains heavier elements that a main sequence star cannot have generated.

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** This is not a coincidence.  I looked for a figure that was in the order of a quintillion.  I was looking at grains of sand on the planet (estimated as 7x10¹⁸), stars in the universe, the volume of the Earth and the mass of the Earth before selecting the age of the universe in seconds figure.  I could have used the volume of the Earth’s oceans in cubic metres (about 1.3x10¹⁸), or the number of insects currently alive on the planet (about 10x10¹⁸), or the number of cells in the bodies of a crowd at Centre Court Wimbledon on slow day (one third capacity at 5,000 times 100 trillion = 0.5x10¹⁸).  Time is good for this purpose though because a length of time can be divided in a multitude of ways, allowing multiple shots at an order of magnitude that fits (seconds, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades and so on), and if the age of the universe hadn’t fit, I could have used the age of the earth, how long ago the dinosaurs were around or any one of a number of eras selected to suit my purpose.  If the number were larger, I’d have simply talked about number of lifetimes of the universe, or used stars as my example.

ANT2 - Theistic Evolution and Selves

Hi ANT (I hope this acronym doesn’t offend),

I was going to respond to this comment in comment format, but it got a bit long and involved, so I’ll respond in article format.  I’m more than happy to continue to tic-tac back and forth this way and perhaps you might want to do the same at your blog.

For the benefit of other readers, here is A Naive Thinker’s comment to this earlier response:

Hi neopolitan,

Thanks for the long term follow up, you brought up interesting issues to explore.

You said, “When we compare the wealth of hints against two hypotheses, we are either emergent beings from an entirely natural process or designed constructs, it simply seems to me that emergence is far more coherent (if less comprehensible) than design.”

My criticism for this thought is I don’t think it reaches far enough back. Natural processes themselves could be designed. For example, the view of Theistic Evolution is that the conditions and laws were created such that the universe would produce intelligent, free creatures. So, I wonder how do you rule out the view of Theistic Evolution?  You would probably ask me the same in reverse, so I’ll give it a go in a minute.

You said, “To know if our selves actually exist, we’d have to slow down and painstakingly make the effort to actually observe ourselves – and when we do that, as in meditative practices, the experts queue up to tell us that the self doesn’t actually exist.”

I reject this criterion for knowledge of self-existence because I think observing oneself is logically impossible. This is because observing is by definition taking in data external to oneself. I submit to you Descartes’ criterion: “I think, therefore I am.” Or, we could conjure up other criteria such as experience. To have experience necessarily entails that one exists.

It’s not just that nonexistence of self is contrary to common sense, it is flat out absurd. Learning that, say, taking showers causes cancer would fly against common sense, but learning that I don’t exist dissolves everything into absurdity. I mean who is reading this? Who is typing this? That’s the reason I think we can only talk about this as an abstract theory and no one truly believes it. The naturalist denying self-existence is conveniently avoiding a very difficult feature of reality. And at the high cost of nihilism which is probably why orthodox naturalism cannot tolerate denial of self.

So, I said I would take a swing, I’ll make it fast. I think self-existence, the desire for good outcomes, conscience, freedom, love, beauty, hate of evil, are among features of reality and experience that are better explained by us existing and living for a purpose. The purpose seems to be a gift to us from a creator deity who has in mind to save those who love life. Add this with scientific theory of evolution and you get Theistic Evolution.

My response:

I don't rule out Theistic Evolution in entirety, by which I don't mean to be so flippant as to simply dismiss the word "Theistic" from the concept without any justification.  I believe we have good reason to dismiss the theism.  As I said before, I am willing to grant (for the purposes of the argument) a deist god, and such a god might well have either designed the universe such that the natural processes we observe would manifest or designed the natural processes themselves - it's a subtle difference, but I consider the natural processes of the universe to be the universe, rather than to be something running on a separate substrate that you might call "the universe".  We also have to be careful when talking about "laws", since all we really have are observations from which we intuit consistencies within the universe - again it's a subtle difference, this time between one situation in which someone says "this is the way things shall work" and another in which someone else says "this is way things appear to work".  Laws are "created" in a theist paradigm but not in mine.  If you wanted to posit a god that set up the conditions for the universe, got the requisite processes running and left no later than a few fractions of a second into the commencement of the Big Bang, then I have to grant that to you as a possibility with the proviso that, as an explanation for how the universe commenced, I consider it entirely equivalent to a hearty refrain of "we just don't know".

But the "Theistic" version of this is more problematical, because the god of the theists is an interventionist and we don't seem to have any convincing evidence of the interventions that would reveal the presence of a theistic god.  Everything seems to work just fine on the basis of natural processes (which we could put down to a deistic god, if we were so inclined).  So far as I know, no-one is pointing to any event in natural history and saying "Look here, this event is not just unlikely or unexplained, it's known to be utterly impossible, therefore god".  (Even if they did, it's still possible for some objections, such as "No, that's not proof of god, that's evidence of a software glitch and is a strong indication that we are operating within a computer simulation.")

Think about that possibility for a moment (the god proof version).  If it did happen, what would it mean?  It would mean that this god, which is purported to be perfect, made a mistake, or was restricted in its design efforts thus necessitating the miracle to achieve its inscrutable objectives.  I doubt that any theists are seriously looking for errors committed by their god, but are there?

(I'm aware that some claim to have "evidence" of intervention in the form of their bible.  But then again, there are plenty of holy books around which they likely consider to be works of fiction while I include the bible in that corpus.)

The question I would really ask is not "why do you credit the theory of Theistic Evolution?" but "how do you rule out the Theory of (natural) Evolution?" (if indeed you do).

And then selves.  This all comes down to what we mean by "self" and what we mean by "existence" in respect to "self".  When I say that the self is an illusion (and I think this is what the contemplation experts mean by “self” in a similar context) I am referring to some sort of independent, discrete unit that is “me”, perhaps akin to a “soul”.  Is this pretty much what you mean by “self” or do you have another idea of it?

There’s a problem with experience, you say that experiencing necessarily entails that one exists - which I read as meaning that there is no experience if there is no self.  But what is this experiencing? And how, from our viewpoint, is this distinguished from existing?  It seems to me that they are basically the same thing, which makes your claim that "(t)o have experience necessarily entails that one exists" true, but only trivially so.  Do you have a way to eke out the difference between "existing" and "experiencing", as it is known to us?  I’m fully aware that we ourselves can observe other things to exist, while being aware that they don’t experience anything at all – such as rocks – I am trying to limit this to consideration of the existence of self and self-dependent experience.

That in mind, I am not suggesting total non-existence which is, as you point out, absurd.  Clearly we exist, in at least some sense.  But in what sense is that claim to existence unassailably true?  For example, I don’t think that asking the question "who is writing this?" necessarily mandates that there really is a "who" in the sense that I suspect that you might be considering it – that is that some form of homunculus or soul might be thought to be sitting inside my head guiding the actions of my body (and indeed my brain).  Instead, I think that it is possible that there are a whole bunch of processes going on (natural processes), two ramifications of which are that some words are being typed out on this computer and that I have an (emergent) sense that I exist as a "self" – excusing the inevitable confusion brought about by referring to myself as "I" (and as "myself").

I do think that naturalism is denying "self" as "soul", but not "self" as "process" (or emergent feature).  Would you not agree, or do you have a different perspective?

neopolitan