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An open letter to Heather MacDonald

Over at Secular Right, Heather MacDonald has added a reply of her own to John Derbyshire’s reply to my previous reply to her. Dizzy yet?

Anyway, here’s a response that I hope will bring this exchange, if not to a close, then at least into greater focus:

Hello again Ms. MacDonald,

If you’ll forgive me for saying so, it seems to me that you keep missing my point. On top of that, you are now trying to change the subject. If you will indulge me for a few minutes – and it seems that a more in-depth reply is, after all, what you are requesting of me – let me try to explain how.

The source of my dispute with you is the criticism that you (like Kathleen Parker and others) have been making of religion – not of this or that kind of religion, and not of this or that individual religious believer, but of religion per se – to the effect that it is irrational, and that this irrationality has something to do with its purported lack of scientific grounding.

I have said several times now that part of the problem with your position is that you assume – falsely, and certainly without any argument whatsoever – that the methods applied by the empirical sciences are the only rational methods of inquiry that there are. Yet you have failed to answer this criticism, or even, as I far as I can tell, to acknowledge it. Worse, you seem completely unaware that the assumption you are making is in fact a highly controversial one, and not just among religiously-minded thinkers. A great many secular thinkers would reject it. I gave the example of mathematics, the rationality of which no one denies, but which very few philosophers, mathematicians, or philosophically-inclined empirical scientists – including atheistic philosophers, mathematicians, and empirical scientists – would take to be an empirical form of inquiry.

Now I have claimed – as a great many other thinkers, both secular and religious, would claim – that philosophy, and in particular the branch of philosophy called metaphysics, is another form of inquiry which is both rational and at least in part non-empirical. It can be thought of as being similar to both empirical science and mathematics in some respects, and different from both in other respects. Like empirical science, metaphysics often begins with things we know via observation. But like mathematics, it arrives at conclusions which, if the reasoning leading to them is correct, are necessary truths rather than contingent ones, truths that could not have been otherwise. That doesn’t mean that the metaphysician is infallible, any more than the mathematician is. It means instead that if he has done his job well, he will (like the mathematician) have discovered truths about the world that are even deeper and more indubitable than the most solid findings of empirical science.

Indeed, many metaphysical issues are concerned precisely with matters that empirical science necessarily takes for granted. To take just one example, empirical science is concerned with investigating the relationships holding between observable phenomena, especially their causal relationships. But what exactly is causation in the first place? Is there more than one kind? Is it a real feature of objective reality, or only a projection of the mind? And what exactly are the things that are supposed to be related causally – objects, events, properties? All of the above? And what exactly is it to be “observable”? How can we be sure that our powers of observation adequately reveal to us the nature of the things we take ourselves to be observing? Note that these are all philosophical or metaphysical questions, not empirical scientific ones. And since they deal with what empirical science takes for granted, they are questions that empirical science cannot answer.

This is one reason why the view that empirical science is the only rational form of inquiry that there is – a view sometimes known as “scientism” – has been thought by many philosophers (and scientists too) to be incoherent and thus necessarily false. Indeed, the claim that empirical science is the only rational form of inquiry there is is itself not an empirical claim at all, but a metaphysical one, and thus it undermines itself.

Now, what does all of this have to do with the rational credentials of religion? Everything. For the traditional arguments for the existence of God – the sort given, for example, by Thomas Aquinas – are not intended to be exercises in empirical hypothesis-formation of the sort common in physics, chemistry, etc. But that does not mean that they are not rational arguments. Rather it means that they are rational arguments of a different sort, a philosophical or metaphysical sort. Indeed, they begin with facts about the empirical world that empirical science takes for granted – such as the fact that the empirical world exists at all, or that it undergoes change, or that it exhibits patterns of cause and effect – and they attempt to demonstrate that the only explanation of these facts that is possible even in principle is the existence of a divine First Cause.

Now, many readers, when they hear this claim, automatically think “Oh, I’ve heard all that before, but everyone knows that those arguments are easily refuted.” But in fact “everyone” knows no such thing. In fact, most people have no idea at all what the arguments as traditionally understood were really saying. What they do know are only the crudest clichés and caricatures of the arguments, as peddled in countless books of pop philosophy, pop atheism, and (yes) pop apologetics.

For example, it is very widely assumed that cosmological arguments of the sort give by Aquinas rest on the assumption that “everything has a cause.” But in fact, none of the major defenders of the cosmological argument – not Aristotle, not Maimonides, not Aquinas, not Duns Scotus, not Leibniz, not Clarke, not any other major thinker – assumes this at all. It is widely assumed that defenders of the cosmological argument are all trying to show that the world had a beginning, and that God must have been the cause of that beginning. In fact (almost) none of them are trying to show this, and most are happy to grant, at least for the sake of argument, that the world has always existed. It is very widely assumed that defenders of the cosmological argument say nothing to show that a first uncaused cause of the world would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and in general to have the various attributes definitive of the God of traditional theism. In fact all of them say a great deal to demonstrate this, and many of them devote dozens or even hundreds of pages of rigorous argumentation to show that a First Cause could not possibly fail to be anything less than a single all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, eternal and immaterial being. It is very widely assumed that the arguments are “God of the gaps”-style attempts at empirical theorizing, when, as I have said, they are not that at all. They do not stand or fall with any particular empirical observation, but are rather metaphysical demonstrations seeking to establish the essential preconditions of there being any empirical world to study in the first place. It is widely believed that the claim that the First Cause is itself uncaused is an arbitrary and entirely undefended assumption. In fact this is not “assumed” at all. The argument for a First Cause rests on a sophisticated theory of causation from which it is conclusively demonstrated, and not “assumed,” that no causal series could exist at all even for an instant unless there were an uncaused cause sustaining the world, and every causal series within it, in being at every instant. And so forth.

Hence when I denied that religion was “unscientific,” I did not mean that there were double-blind experiments or the like which could validate claims about magic pills, etc. I meant instead that there are serious rational arguments of a specifically metaphysical nature which show that the existence of God is a necessary condition of the intelligibility of science itself. You might disagree with this claim, but surely you can see that it is a serious claim which has to be met with a serious reply, a reply informed by knowledge of the relevant disciplines: philosophy, especially metaphysics and philosophy of religion; philosophy of science; theology; and, I would add, the history of ideas. It will not do simply to mock a few hapless unsophisticated religious believers, toss in a simplistic version of the atheistic argument from evil, and then pretend that one has more or less demonstrated that religion per se is an irrational enterprise. And as someone who has long admired your work on public policy, I know that you are capable of better than this.

It also will not do to try now to shift the ground of debate to the question of what sort of attitudes sophisticated believers have or should have toward less sophisticated ones. The claim that people like you and Kathleen Parker have been making is that religious belief per se, and not just the views of this or that religious believer, is irrational. I have been arguing that you have made no serious or well-informed case whatsoever for such a claim. Perhaps because you see that I am right, you now want to change the subject and discuss instead the topic of whether I ought to approve of the magic pill priest. Well, apart from the fact that, other than what you have told us, I have no knowledge whatsoever of this fellow, and no interest in finding out more, I have also already spent a good part of a week – and now all of a Saturday night I could have been spending on the couch with Ben and Jerry and the remote control – to pursuing the debate we started out having. I’ve no time for a second one, thank you very much.

Suffice it to say that if you think a sophisticated believer must either endorse every single oversimplification and/or superstition adhered to by his less sophisticated fellow believers, or attack every single one of them with the sort of outrage and contempt that you do, then you have just committed what logicians call the fallacy of false alternative. Some simplifications are just that – simplifications – and are harmless, or even useful as a way to convey difficult ideas to the less sophisticated. (Scientists do this all the time – think e.g. of the little stick-and-ball model used to convey the idea of a molecule.) Others are oversimplifications or even superstitions, and should be rejected, even harshly in some cases. We have to go case by case. Why you insist on taking extreme cases like Fr. Magic Pill and extrapolating from him to religion as a whole, or even to unsophisticated religion as a whole, I have no idea.

Anyway, perhaps you can see why I have insisted that there is little point in getting into these matters in a blog post – and, given my verbosity here, you no doubt wish at this point that I hadn’t said even this much. But the issues are complex, and the reams and reams of disinformation that a serious defender of religious belief has to overcome are many. It all has to be addressed at length or not at all. That’s why I wrote The Last Superstition.

As a conservative, you are already familiar with this sort of phenomenon. You know all too painfully well that what “most people,” even most educated people, claim to “know” about (say) conservative approaches to poverty, or health care, or free-market economics in general, is a pile of worthless caricatures and clichés. You know how common it is for them to take the worst representatives of conservatism, or even people who are not truly conservative at all but represent only a distortion of conservatism, and present them as if they were paradigmatic of conservatism per se. And you also know how very difficult it is, accordingly, to get through the deeply entrenched prejudices of such people, which keep them even from understanding what a real conservative argument is, much less giving it a fair hearing.

It seems to me that, with respect to religion, you have fallen into the same trap these critics of conservatism have. And like them, it seems to me you are unwilling even to consider the possibility that you might be mistaken. (And please don’t bother trying to fling the same accusation back at me. I once had views very much like your own, having being an atheist, and a “secular conservative,” for many years before rational arguments persuaded me of the truth of theism and related doctrines. I have considered the very best arguments for both sides, and in great detail.)

Like the dogmatic socialist or welfare statist who insists that he needn’t bother reading a Hayek or a Friedman because he “already knows” what they are going to say, “already knows” that their conclusions must be wrong, and “refutes” them without reading them by spouting clichés the hollowness of which these writers would easily expose, if only they were given a fair hearing – like them, you, it seems to me, insist on repeating the same points over and over without realizing that what is in question are precisely the assumptions underlying those points.

If you have no desire to read my own book, fine – I could certainly understand why not, given the testiness of our exchange, on my side as well as yours. But please, please do your homework before making claims of the sort you have been making. And stop pretending that in the dispute between secularists and religious believers, only the former can plausibly claim to have reason and science on their side. It is not true, and it neither rational, nor scientific, nor conservative to pretend that it is true.

Best,
Ed Feser

(cross-posted)

Comments (19)

Ed,
What a gracious response on your part. Thanks so much for keeping a gracious spirit in these comments.

Ed,
Your case is clear, cogent, compelling, and gracious.

In others words, there's an 85% chance it will be completely misunderstood.

Where it's not misunderstood, it will be unscrupulously evaded.

It's a desperately fallen world, and it intends to stay that way.

But you've done your duty, no matter what response your argument gets. In that fact is no small comfort.

Cheers.

But like mathematics, it arrives at conclusions which, if the reasoning leading to them is correct, are necessary truths rather than contingent ones, truths that could not have been otherwise.

Mathematical truths are true because they are defined that way. It's not as if math is built into the structure of the universe. Math is a human invention. It is a precise language with precise rules. It is just a tool, like a ruler.

So are metaphysical truths true simply because they are defined that way? What are the axioms of metaphysics?

It seems to me the heart of this disagreement is that you think pure philosophical reasoning is a valuable tool or method of epistemology. It is not completely worthless, but other methods are far far superior.

Why try digging a whole in concrete with a pointy stick, when you can use a jackhammer instead?

Thanks, Ranger and Michael.

In fairness, I should note that MacDonald has given a gracious reply in the comments section of her post, and expressed her desire to end the exchange -- a desire I share!

Bocce, once again, you're just making assertions, contradicting what I said without answering it.

Ratios are built into the structure of the universe, and by abstracting that, you have an entire branch of mathematics which is not an exercise in self-definition, but the observation of true things, real things. Mathematics is a representation of that.

Everything we claim to know has its roots in empirical knowledge except language and instinctive behavior.

What I pointed our elsewhere and simply is that the same brain that tests a hypothesis and draws conclusions is the same mind that experiences God and draws conclusions using the exact same tools of reason and intuition.

But Feser's reply is a total "your face" slam dunk and will leave Ms. MacD hopeless in response. So, she will not respond, will change the subject, and deny the ground of Feser's reasoning.

That what I always encountered from militant atheists - a refusal to actually reason the argument out and sheer denial that 1+1=2. Their anger and rage at God leaves them sputtering sophistry as they flee the trial.

Atheism is not really rational, but an emotional response to existence and personal experience that is angry at God for not being there when they wanted him to be, so take that, monster God, I won't like you, love you, respect you, or acknowledge you. That'll show'im.

Atheism is pure infantile tantrum.

Bocce, once again, you're just making assertions, contradicting what I said without answering it.

In order for me to answer, I need some sort of ground rules with which to operate that you find acceptable. I'm still waiting for those laws of metaphysics.

How about the lessons of history? Aristotle used philosophy for physics, and he got everything wrong. Descartes used philosophy to study the mind, and he got everything wrong as well. Democritus came up with atomism, so he did get something right.

My point is that metaphysics and philosophy are not useless, but they are certainly unreliable and have a long history of colossal mistakes. So when you have a method that is unreliable, any conclusion you arrive at using that method will be unreliable, although you may get some things right. So perhaps you get a few things right in your 300 page book. But how will we know? We will never know for certain. But we will be closer to certain if we use a reliable method.

I suppose you could accuse me of question begging. You could say that I am using history and empiricism without first demonstrating the reliability of history and empiricism. In that case, you are right. That is why I am wondering on what generally accepted foundation you build your case? I'm still waiting for the book, but I'm curious what your basic a priori assumptions are. Sorry if you find me to be a pest. Your answer may be just read the book. OK, I will.

Bocce,

A lot of your positions sound just silly to many readers here. No doubt you're persuaded that they aren't, but simply reiterating them isn't going to move the discussion forward.

I appreciate your attempt on a previous thread to provide some backup for your claim that consciousness and purpose are emergent. From where I'm sitting, though, starling flocking isn't remotely on a par with consciousness and purpose. Flocking makes a nice 3-D screen saver; but it's not even a promising step towards an argument that if you take a large enough can of atoms (or any other sort of "meaningless matter in motion," to use your phrase) and shake it long and hard, consciousness (much less purpose) emerges.

I am quite familiar with the emergence literature. A few years ago, I had a colleague who was attempting to account for consciousness along those lines. His approach was a good deal more sophisticated than anything you've put forward here. But in the end he was unable to move it beyond the level of metaphors, and his research project fizzled. At present, I do not see much hope for a revival of this whole approach.

You've suggested that the problem with professors Bauman and Beckwith is, inter alia, that they don't believe that "mindless atoms can organize into stars and planets." They can speak for themselves, but modulo some physical laws (which are not human inventions), that strikes me as the easy part. The leap from there to the idea that random motions of mindless atoms can, by themselves, give rise to consciousness is, shall we say, non-trivial. The emergence literature has not, so far, provided any reason for sober, science-loving folks to take Lucretius's dream seriously. Hand waving does not count.

I am quite familiar with the emergence literature. A few years ago, I had a colleague who was attempting to account for consciousness along those lines. His approach was a good deal more sophisticated than anything you've put forward here. But in the end he was unable to move it beyond the level of metaphors, and his research project fizzled. At present, I do not see much hope for a revival of this whole approach.

Tim,

This is all very interesting, what you say, because from reading Bocce's posts, I would have thought that emergentism had long been clearly "demonstrated."

I think Mr Feser is not the right person to argue with McDonald. She does not want rigorous metaphysics.
What she is arguing is
1) Tests for Christian (ie loving) God eg experiments involving petitonary prayers. But such experiments are ruled out as one may not tempt God. Also as CS Lewis wrote

Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. . . . You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. . . . The experiment demands an impossibility

2) How to choose between Christian God, Moslem God, Hindu God et al-- this question is also frequently asked by Derbyshire. I have no idea how to answer this except it is a matter of style. The Christain story seems more plausible than others.

3) She jumps straight to the Christian God but one can have a Creator that does not love, a Creator that does not answer prayers, a panthesist type of God.
So Mr Feser is anwering the question of a generic God but she is questioning about Loving God so the whole thing is at cross-purposes.
Gian

Byronicman,

Given a reasonable definition of "emergent," it is not controversial that there are some emergent properties of certain sorts of systems. Stuart Kauffman's work on certain kinds of self-organizing systems illustrates this sort of thing well. You can see a toy example in Conway's (now rather old and quaint-looking) game of "Life." An older example from the early literature is the fluidity of water, a property that would be hard for most of us to predict from a mere chemical description of the properties of a single water molecule.

Very serious difficulties arise when one tries to extend these fascinating examples to wider matters -- the (self-)organization of biological life, for example, or the generation of things radically different in kind from unexpected physical configurations, properties, or functions. The extension of the language of emergence to things like consciousness or purpose is, at this point, simply a metaphor that, when pressed into an explicit argument, looks pretty lame: "You wouldn't have expected X' to arise out of X, but it does; you also wouldn't expect Q to arise out of X, but" -- and here you get various endings depending on the temerity of the speaker, ranging from the cautious ("... maybe it does") to the triumphal ("... it does!"). Roll this together with some talk of contingent identity, chaos theory, and strange attractors, and you can generate ... well, from what I've seen, a lot of excitement and splashy conferences without much corresponding illumination.

Well, Heather fled the field insisting her beef is with the Love and Justice God of Christians who can't get him to reveal himself by answering prayers.

Laws of metaphysics? Sure, there are such laws insofar as God has a nature. Discover his nature and you begin to suss it out. Meeting the Lawgiver is a good place to start.

One can hardly expect to understand the nature of prayer without knowing the One to whom prayer is addressed . . . Even at the human level -- I have many students who complain about how "hard" and "unfair" I am as a teacher. These are the ones who never bother to get to know me at all; they just hate my polilcies and decisions. The ones who get to know me learn to trust these even when they don't especially like them. If true between people, how much more so between the Creator and His creatures . . .

Tim,

Thanks for at least giving my posts a fair reading, and I appreciate the sober criticism, rather than simply calling me a troll, dropping an F-bomb, suggesting I'm a dog or a pig, calling me a lunatic, and finally attempting to ridicule me for admitting my own fallibility.

In my first post on emergence, I stated "Not that emergentism is necessarily correct", so it should be quite clear that I don't consider the hard problem settled. Qualia poses an explanatory gap, which in my view remains a chasm. Also in my view, if the chasm is ever crossed, it will be crossed using the methods of science, not appeals to mystery. But, I may be wrong about that too.

Thanks for at least giving my posts a fair reading, and I appreciate the sober criticism, rather than simply calling me a troll, dropping an F-bomb, suggesting I'm a dog or a pig, calling me a lunatic, and finally attempting to ridicule me for admitting my own fallibility.

A persecution complex now? When a fellow makes an initial post in a forum like this:

You know the stories of those Japanese soldiers they find on an isolated island who are still fighting a war that ended decades ago? You W4 folks are like that. Secular science HAS marginalized you because your methods are a failure. Medieval Scholasticism has been relegated to the trash heap of history, and rightly so. Meanwhile you superstitious magical thinkers are hiding in a cave with a death grip on your ancient holy myth books. It is time you came out into the light. But you won't. You like the special place in the universe your myth books place humanity. You can't give up your childish need for immortality.

he's painted a target on himself that won't be quickly washed off. It's due only to the good graces of the W4 hosts that you've even been allowed to post here at all after that. And I'd say you've received very fair treatment, considering the general arrogance of your tone and the stupidity of some of your comments.

Tim:

Given a reasonable definition of "emergent," it is not controversial that there are some emergent properties of certain sorts of systems. Stuart Kauffman's work on certain kinds of self-organizing systems illustrates this sort of thing well. You can see a toy example in Conway's (now rather old and quaint-looking) game of "Life." An older example from the early literature is the fluidity of water, a property that would be hard for most of us to predict from a mere chemical description of the properties of a single water molecule.

"Emergence" is one of the worst mischief terms in modern science and philosophy, imo. It's the modern stand-in for "magic", whenever some intellectual wants to hand-wave away some insurmountable logical inconsistency.

In reality, there are two types of events which might reasonably be called "emergence".

The first type of emergence is the way that a heap of sand "emerges" from individual grains of sand when a sufficient number of grains are piled up.

In this type of emergence, nothing is objectively, physically emerging. If you see 500 grains of sand and designate it a "heap", and I see those same 500 grains and say "No, I don't think that's quite enough sand to qualify as a heap", then neither of us is actually wrong, because "heapness" is not an objective physical attribute that emerges when you have enough sand. It's a subjective impression that emerges in our minds, not a physical entity that emerges in the outside world.

The second type of emergence is the way in which water "emerges" from a hole in a dam.

This type of emergence is objective. There is water physically emerging from the hole in the dam. If I deny it, then I am objectively wrong. However, in this type of emergence, there is always a factor beyond the known system that accounts for the emergence. The hole in the dam doesn't itself account for the water that is emerging from it. The emerging water is accounted for by a factor besides the hole that we can't see: the water already gathered on the other side of the dam.

If you look closely, all real-life examples that we designate as "emergence" fall into one of these categories, or into some combination of the two. The fluidity of water is an example of the second type, for instance. Given a simple description of the chemical properties of water, you may be unable to predict its fluidity. However, water is reliably fluid nevertheless, owing to factors not contained in that description.

If philosophers and scientists would stick by a logical, rigorous definition of "emergence", there would be no problem with the word. Instead they just use it as a fig-leaf when they want to make an end-run around the rules of logic and get something for nothing.

It's most abused in attempts to account for the conscious mind using only the laws of physics and computation. Let's look what happens when you try to account for the "emergence" of the mind using the two actual types of emergence.

Obviously, the first type won't work. You can't explain the conscious mind as a subjective impression that arises in the conscious mind.

And as for the second type of emergence, well sure. Maybe you could explain the existence of the conscious mind via unknown factors outside the laws of physics and computation. However, that's precisely what the materialists are trying *not* to do.

Instead, they observe the fact that the laws of physics and computation don't logically entail consciousness, but rather than reach the logical conclusion that there must therefore be additional factors at work, they simply say "Emergence!" as if that actually solves anything. In fact, among "emergentists", the word "emergence" hardly has any real meaning at all, beyond "something that magically removes my logical difficulties for me without my having to actually give any sort of real explanation or modify my metaphysical viewpoint in any way that would make me uncomfortable."

A good analogy would be two scientists observing a house. Two people enter the house, and a few minutes later, three people leave it.

The realist scientist says "Logic tells us that there must have been an additional person already in the house that we didn't see before".

The "emergentist" scientist says "No way! Ockham's Razor tells us that it's far more likely that three people emerged from two people!"

Deuce,

The main point of my post was to bury emergentism, not to praise it, so I suspect we have a wider area of agreement than of disagreement. I'm simply trying to give the emergentists their own definitions -- often the definitions trade on some notion of of "unpredictable features," with variations on the notion of (un)predictability being invoked -- so that when I argue that it fails, the no one can plausibly say that I have misunderstood what emergence was supposed to involve in the first place.

There are some surprising and beautiful features of aggregate phenomena; no harm is done in acknowledging this. But to go back to the example Bocce gave on another thread, the flocking behavior of starlings, there is more chance that flocking will generate an emergent raspberry popsicle than that it will produce consciousness and purpose.

In many an atheist conservative I correspond with it is easy to see the final result of having their understandings realized would be identical to what they are presently fighting.
They are not one bit more capable of seeing this than the liberal is of his folly.
The atheists who are not plauged with those attitudes are people like Dalrymple. The missing ingredients are humility, and the lack of hesitation and wonder.
The Einsteins of the world eventually lose their young atheism through hesitation and wonder. Perhaps there is not so much in other disciplines to moderate great intellects from their egos.

M. Butterworth said: "Ratios are built into the structure of the universe, and by abstracting that, you have an entire branch of mathematics which is not an exercise in self-definition, but the observation of true things, real things. Mathematics is a representation of that."

Reminds me of a math professor I had many years ago. In the textbook there was a short chapter dealing with Fibonacci numbers. The professor asked us to find something true about those numbers that wasn't in the book. They are fascinating numbers, and it didn't take long for me to figure out something or other having to do with patterns in the cubes of Fibonacci numbers derived from a pine cone. When I presented it to the professor he asked "Do you think the pattern is real or do you think it is merely an imposition of our minds." I thought, but didn't say, "Idiot, it's in the pine cone, of course it's real".

"Mathematical truths are true because they are defined that way. It's not as if math is built into the structure of the universe. Math is a human invention. It is a precise language with precise rules. It is just a tool, like a ruler."

This is utterly ignorant and untrue. Never have falser statements been written. While there is a "language" - a set of symbols and vocabulary - used to express mathematical truths, mathematics itself is not a language. The universe as we know it would not exist without the mathematical laws that we know.

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