Maverick Philosopher

Kolakowski: No God, No Meaning

Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (Westview 1999), pp. 116-117:

. . . our reason naturally aspires to encompass the totality of being; and our will for order and our need to make sense of existence lead us instinctively to seek that which is both the root and the keystone of existence, and gives it its meaning. Even atheists, Nietzsche among them, knew this: order and meaning come from God, and if God really is dead, then we delude ourselves in thinking that meaning can be saved. If God is dead, nothing remains but an indifferent void which engulfs and annihilates us. No trace remains of our lives and our labours, there is only the meaningless dance of protons and electrons. The universe wants nothing and cares for nothing; it strives toward no goal; it neither rewards nor punishes. Whoever says that there is no God and all is well deceives himself.

Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also that of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers.  Man is  impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way. We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a middle eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another middle eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing.  We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only individual men, men  at war with one another and with themselves.  We are divided, divisive, and duplicitous creatures.  But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept

I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon.  The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion.

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006)  is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Hume: Occasionalism Without God?

I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.

Four Kinds of Ontological Argument

The essence of ontological argumentation is the inferential move from the concept/essence of F to the existence/nonexistence of F. We are all familiar with ontological arguments for the existence of God. They have been a staple of philosophy of religion discussions from Anselm to Plantinga. But there is nothing in the nature of ontological argumentation to require that God be the subject matter, or that the argument conclude to the existence of something. There are nontheistic ontological arguments as well as ontological disproofs. Thus there are four possible combinations.

Classical Theism and Global Supervenience Physicalism

This is a paper I read at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts,  August 10-15, 1998. It explains the notions of strong and global supervenience, notions which will serve as foils in getting a handle on the concept of emergence.

ABSTRACT: Could a classical theist be a physicalist? Although a negative answer to this question may seem obvious, it turns out that a case can be made for the consistency of a variant of classical theism and global supervenience physicalism. Although intriguing, the case ultimately fails due to the weakness of global supervenience as an account of the dependence of mental on physical properties.

Physicalism is popular these days, and to a lesser extent so is classical theism. It should therefore come as no surprise that a number of theists are bent on combining theism with physicalism. But could a classical theist be a physicalist? Is this a coherent doctrinal combination? The classical theist affirms the metaphysically necessary existence of a concrete, purely spiritual being upon which every other concrete being is ontologically dependent. The physicalist, however, is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties.(1) What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. These rough characterizations suggest that theism and physicalism logically exclude one another. If God as classically conceived exists, then the inventory thesis is violated: not every concrete entity is either physical or composed of physical items. And if God exists, it would also appear that the determination thesis is flouted: God's instantiation of his omni-attributes does not supervene on His instantiation of any physical properties: He has none. So at first glance it seems almost crashingly obvious that the classical theist cannot be a physicalist.

But this talk cannot end just yet. For when we get down to the details of formulating precise versions of both the inventory and determination theses, it turns out that there is a way to attempt the reconciliation of theism and physicalism. It is the viability of this way that I aim to explore. But first some background.

Positive and Privative Constructions and the Case of Causa Sui

God is traditionally described as causa sui, as self-caused. Construed positively, however, the notion appears incoherent. Nothing can function as a cause unless it exists. So if God causes his own existence, then his existence as cause is logically prior to his existence as effect. God must 'already' (logically speaking) exist if he is to cause himself to exist — which teeters on the brink of incoherence if it does not fall over.

So I suggest that causa sui be read privatively rather than positively, as affirming, not that God causes himself, but that God is not caused by another. This reading may gain in credibility if we look at some similar constructions.

Is God in Bad Taste? Some Anti-Searlean Remarks

In Mind, Language and Society, John R. Searle writes:

In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion. [. . .] Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

What has happened? [. . .] I believe that something much more radical than a decline in religious belief has taken place. For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified. . . . we no longer take the mysteries we see in the world as expressions of supernatural meaning. We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to the point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations. (pp. 34-35)

Deus Ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche

I have been searching the 'Net and various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy.  What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)?  When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging?  How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency?  Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Does anyone have any references for me?  Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.

Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn't Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists

One of the arguments against religion in the contemporary atheist arsenal is the argument that religious beliefs fuel war and terrorism. Rather than pull quotations from such well-known authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I will quote a couple of passages from one of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. His piece is entitled "Overcoming Christianity." After describing his movement from his evangelical Christian upbringing to a quietistic rejection of Christianity, Sinnott-Armstrong tells us how he became an evangelical atheist:

Multiverses, Possible Worlds, and God

A lawyer from Pennsylvania e-mails:

. . . I have a philosophy question.  Is it possible that cosmology generally, with its theory of multiverses -- all possible universes exist -- provides an argument, somewhat like the old
ontological argument, for a non impersonal God?  To wit:

1) Multiverses -- the set of all possible universes -- exist.

2) Each multiverse is different from the other as to the arrangement of
matter, time, space, etc.

3) In the set of all possible universes there exists a universe where a
personal God (the God of the Bible) exists, where Christ rose from the
dead, and where Christ was God.

4) That God of the Bible is omnipotent.

5) So if there is one such universe, with an omnipotent God, there is a
set of all universes with an omnipotent God, as an omnipotent God can
operate across boundaries of matter, time, space, etc.

6) A personal God exists in our universe as we exist in one of the set
of all universes.

I don't think this is a good argument for a couple of reasons. 

A. C. Grayling and a Stock Move of Militant Atheists

Since A. C. Grayling has surfaced in the ComBox here, it it will be useful for people to see just what sort of fellow he is.  So over the next few days I will reproduce  three or four of my Grayling posts from the old site.

Militant atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling writes,

Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies.

This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who have deep religious convictions and attachments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth is that everyone takes this attitude about all but one (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist.

No reasonably orthodox Christian believes in Aphrodite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh the Elephant God or the rest of the Hindu pantheon, or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on - and officially (as a matter of Christian orthodoxy) he or she must say that anyone who sincerely believes in such deities is deluded and blasphemously in pursuit of "false gods".

The atheist adds just one more deity to the list of those not believed in; namely, the one remaining on the Christian's or Jew's or Muslim's list.

What Grayling is saying above is often heard from atheists. It is a stock item in their repertoire. But is there an argument here, and if so, what exactly is the argument? The conclusion is clear enough: Religious belief of every sort is irrational, unsupported by evidence, and not intellectually respectable. (One wonders if Grayling has given any thought to the nontheistic religion of Buddhism, but let that pass.) A bold thesis indeed, very significant if true or even if rationally supportable. But what is the argument? Is there an argument?  If there is no argument, then we have gratuitous assertion which can be met with gratuitous counter-assertion.  But our man does seem to be trying to give an argument.  After all, isn't that what philosophers are supposed to do?  Or is Grayling just gassing off?  Let's be charitable and ascribe an argument to him.  It appears to be this:

 

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

It seems to me that there is a sort of 'disconnect' in theist-atheist debates. It is as if the parties to the dispute are not talking about the same thing. Jim Ryan writes,

The reason I'm an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn't the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.

This is a fairly standard atheist response. Since I picked up the use of 'boilerplate' in philosophical contexts from Jim, I hope he won't be offended if I refer to the quoted passage as atheist boilerplate. It puts me in mind of Russell's Teapot part of the drift of which is that there is no more reason to believe in God than there is to believe that "between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit . . . ."

Validity as a Modal Concept and a Modal Argument for the Nonexistence of God

'Modally Challenged' comments:

I've run into this argument on several occasions and while the author(s) insist theists will accept the premises, it's more the validity I'd appreciate your take on.

1) If God is possible, then God is a necessary being.
2) If God is a necessary being, then unjustified evil is impossible.
3) Unjustified evil is possible.
Therefore, God is not possible.

In this post I explain the distinction between validity and soundness, explain why validity is a modal concept, and then use this fact to show that the modal distinction between the necessary and the contingent applies outside the sphere of human volition, contrary to what followers of Ayn Rand maintain.  Finally, I demonstrate the validity of the above atheist argument.

Is the Existence of God Entailed by Alternative Ways Natural Things Might Have Been?

This post is a sequel to Ayn Rand on Necessity, Contingency, and Dispositions.  There we were examining this quotation:

What do you mean by "necessity"? By "necessity," we mean that things are a certain way and had to be.  I would maintain that the statement "Things are," when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym of "They had to be."  Because unless we start with the premise of an arbitrary God who creates nature, what is had to be. (IOE, 2nd ed., p. 299)

Rand's argument may be set forth as follows:

1. If there are alternative ways non-man-made things might have been, then an arbitrary (free) God exists.

2. It is not the case that an arbitrary (free) God exists. Ergo,

3. There are no alternative ways non-man-made things might have been.

I rigged the argument so that it is valid in point of logical form: the conclusion follows from the premises.  But are the premises true?  A more tractable question: Do we have good reason to accept them?

Why God Cannot be the Creator of the Universe

Leonard Peikoff writes, "Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing."

Peikoff is arguing that God cannot be the creator of the universe because creation is creation of something out of nothing, and there is no nothing.  Is this a good argument or a bad argument?  Justify your answer.  Be clear and concise.

Existence, God, and the Randians

This is a follow-up to yesterday's  Rand and Existence Again. The following is by Leonard Peikoff:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . .

Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.

Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

In this passage we meet once again our old friend 'Existence exists.'  And we note the sort of linguistic mischief that Rand/Peikoff engage in.   It cannot be denied that existing things exist, and only existing things exist.  This is entirely trivial.  Anyone who denies it embraces a contradiction:  There are existing things that do not exist. We should all agree, then, with the first sentence of the second paragraph. So far, so good. 

But then Peikoff tells us that to postulate something supernatural such as God is "to postulate something beyond existence."  Now it may well be that there is no God or anything beyond nature.  It may well be that everything that exists is a thing of nature.   But the nonexistence of God does not follow from the triviality that everything that exists exists.  Does it take a genius to see that the following argument is invalid?

1. Existence exists, ergo

2. God does not exist.

One cannot derive a substantive metaphysical conclusion from a mere tautology. No doubt, whatever exists exists.  But one cannot exclude God from the company of what exists by asserting that whatever exists exists.  Now it is not nice to call people stupid, but anyone who cannot appreciate the simple point I have just made is, I am afraid, either stupid, or not paying attention, or willfully obtuse. Here is an example of a valid argument:

3. Nothing supernatural exists

4. God is supernatural, ergo

5. God does not exist.

For Peikoff to get the result he wants, the nonexistence of God, from the premise 'Existence exists,' he must engage in the linguistic mischief of using 'existence' to mean 'natural existence.'  Instead of saying "only existence exists," he should have said 'only natural existence exists.' But then he would lose the self-evidence of "Existence exists and only existence exists."

Conflating a trivial self-evident thesis with a nontrivial controversial thesis has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell said in a different connection.  It would take a certain amount of honest philosophical toil to construct a really good argument for the nonexistence of any and all supernatural entities.  But terminological mischief is easy.  What Peikoff is doing above is smuggling the nonexistence of the supernatural into the term 'existence'  Now if you cannot see that that is an intellectually dispreputable move, then I must say you are hopeless.

It is like a bad ontological argument in reverse.  On one bad version of the ontological argument, one defines God into existence by smuggling the notion of existence into the concept of God and then announcing that since we have the concept of God, God must exist.  Peikoff is doing the opposite: he defines God and the supernatural out of existence by importing their nonexistence into the term 'existence.'  But you can no more define God into existence than you can define him out of existence.

There are other egregious blunders in the above passage.  But if I were to expose every mistake of the Randians, I might attain the age of a Methuselah and still not be done.  Or perhaps I should liken it unto a Sisyphean labor, one of endless and futile toil.  Futile, because the Randians I have so far encountered seem quite unteachable.

 

 

Which Is More Certain: God or My Hand?

A reader inquires, " I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hand or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question seems ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God?