Playing the mystery card...

Philosopher Stephen Law is in the process of writing a book on "intellectual Black Holes". He put up a draft of the first Chapter here

Part 1 and part 2 of the introduction can also be read there.

Can "science" investigate the "supernatural"?

On Ophelia Benson's blog a recent post on scientifically measuring God elicited this comment from philosopher Russell Blackford:

"n principle, we can get evidence for or against the existence of a goddy entity in just the same way as we get evidence of very small entities (quarks), very distant entities (neutron stars), or entities that existed only in the distant past (trilobites). If these entities interact with the world of the senses and leave traces in some reasonably consistent way, we can infer their existence. If they fail to act as predicted, we can infer their non-existence and look for a better hpothesis. We could easily have evidence for or against the existence of certain gods, ghosts, or ghouls.

What we can’t do is make progress when the believers in these things claim that they exist but that they act capriciously, or deliberately act so as to elude us, and so on. If someone wants to go on believing in goddy or ghostly entities using these resorts, we can’t prove otherwise, but we can be very suspicious about what is really motivating them.

I don’t understand what’s so difficult about this. I’ve been abused on my own blog for pointing out that this is how it works, and have had a vendetta conducted against me across the internet by one person for saying it. But it’s perfectly logical. There seems to be a head-in-the-sand dogmatism around regarding the in-principle immunity of religion to scientific scepticism, and most of it seems to be coming from the people you’d least expect."

While it seems to be that many/most of the theists I've interacted with on the interwebs would not accept this stance as legitimate, I don't see on what grounds they're able to claim this is the case *sigh*

God and Morality: God as the source of ethics

Having participated in a some discussions of ethics, and specifically Divine Command theories recently (see here and here), I thought I'd write a brief outline of an argument against those theories which I recently read.

The details are from Erik Wielenberg's book "Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe". The argument is presented as Chapter 2, titled "God and morality".

Wielenberg starts out providing 2 thesis which he claims constitute the "God as the source of ethics" argument.

Control Thesis: Every logically consistent ethical claim, E, is such that God could make E true.
Dependency Thesis: Every true ethical claim is true in virtue of some act of will on the part of God.

From these he derives a strong and weak position in favour of the argument, the strong position being the acceptance of both the Control Thesis and the Dependency Thesis, the weak position being the acceptance of the Dependency Thesis alone. Though the general argument relies only upon the Dependency Thesis, Wielenberg includes the Control Thesis because acceptance of it suggests acceptance of the Dependency Thesis. Also, according to Wielenberg, demonstrating the Control Thesis as false is important in understanding properly the relationship between God and ethical truth.

After briefly pointing out the self-contradictory nature of theistic arguments about the valueless nature of the universe should God not exist, summarised in the statement "Without God there would be no value in the universe - and think how horrible that would be!", Wielenberg sets out to show that the strong position fails by demonstrating the Control Thesis as false.

Weilenberg does this in two ways. The first is demonstrating the ridiculous and strange results of accepting the Control Thesis. He uses an example:

"Imagine a contest in which the prize is omnipotence. There are two competitors in this contest. The first competitor hopes to win the prize and use his omnipotence for his own selfish, nefarious purposes. He plans to slaughter most of humanity and force the rest to live in excrement pits where they will work themselves to death as his slaves and be subject to torture at his hand for his amusement. As it happens, the second competitor wins the contest and becomes omnipotent. It seems clear that the worst has happened - a thoroughly vicious being has become all-powerful and the world in on the verge of being plunged into evil. Fortunately this does not happen. This is because the first use to which the winner puts his newly acquired omnipotence is to change certain ethical facts. He makes it the case that the slaughter of innocents is fantastically good, that undeserved suffering is just, and that a human life devoted to serving him has the greatest possible amount of internal meaning. He also makes it the case that he himself is a morally perfect being. He does this not by changing the nature of his character (his desires, motives, goals, and so on are just the same as before), but rather by changing the nature of moral perfection. He then implements his now fantastically good and just plan. He slaughters most of the humans, throws the rest into the pits, and so on. But because he changed the ethical facts first, the story has a happy ending. All is for the best. The film version of this scenario would leave you grinning like a fool as you left the theatre."

Noting that this scenario seems wrong, that power is exercised within an ethical framework, not to create it, Wielenberg admits that theists could accept the strange conclusions, and simply claim that is the way things are. This leads us to Wielenberg's second critique of the Control Thesis.

The problem of evil is used by Wielenberg as evidence against the Control Hypothesis. He illustrates proposals from Plantinga (the free will defense) and Hick (vale of soul-making). Each of these proposals of dealing with the problem of evil, Wielenberg generalises as:

"There is some thing, G, such that (a) G is a great good and (b) it may be (or is) the case that God cannot introduce G into the world without also permitting some evil in the world. Therefore, God may be (or is) justified in permitting some evil in the world."

Wielenberg notes that both of these proposals rely on the assumption that there are ethical facts which God has no control over. Freely chosen good/right action being greater than determined good/right action in Plantinga's case, and that it is better to grow towards "goodness"/"rightness" rather than being initially good/right in the case of Hick. Were the Control Thesis maintained, God would be able to modify ethics such that the previous relations no longer held, and therefore the proposals for the problem of evil are incompatible with the Control Thesis.
This implies that a theist accepting these solutions to the (logical) problem of evil would need to reject the Control Thesis. Wielenberg (correctly I feel) assumes that any reasonable theist would do so, and so the Control Thesis is shown to fail.

Now, having dealt with the Control Thesis and by extension the strong position, Wielenberg moves on to the weak position, and the Dependency Thesis.
According to Wielenberg, it is a common theistic strategy to respond to these kinds of objections by maintaining that due to some part of God's essential nature being to have a certain type of character (to be loving, for example), there are some things such that making them good or right is incompatible with this essential nature. This entails the obvious rejection of the Control Thesis, though continued acceptance of the Dependency Thesis.

Wielenberg notes that the Dependency Thesis claims that nothing distinct from God is intrinsically good or evil, and claims that this is problematic due to some things distinct from God being intrinsically good and/or evil. In doing this he uses an argument from Chisholm's "The Problem of the Criterion":

Chisolm's topic in that book is epistemology, and he suggests that if we must choose whether to accept some philosophical principle about knowledge or to accept some obvious truth such as that I know I have hands, we should accept the obvious truth. Similarly, it seems to me that if we must choose between the Dependency Thesis and the claim that pain is intrinsically evil or that falling in love is intrinsically good, it is the Dependency Thesis that should go. An epistemology that leads to the conclusion that individuals cannot know that they have hands should be rejected; similarly, a metaphysics that leads to the conclusion that falling in love is not intrinsically good, or that pain is not intrinsically evil, should be rejected.".

Wielenberg quotes approvingly from Neilsen:

"God or no God, the torturing of innocents is vile. More generally, even if we can make nothing of the concept of God, we can readily come to appreciate...that, if anything is evil, inflicting or tolerating unnecessary and pointless suffering is evil, especially when something can be done about it...Can't we be more confident about this than we can about any abstract or general philosophical point we might make in ethical theory?"

Having made the point that some things are intrinsically right (wrong), Wielenberg concludes that the Dependency Thesis should also be rejected:

"If this is correct, then God as the source of ethics argument, because it is based on the claim that the Dependency Thesis is necessarily true, fails."

Having demonstrated that both the Control Thesis and the Dependency Thesis fail, Wielenberg concludes that the "God as the source of ethics" argument also fails.

Following this, he begins to show an alternative account of the relationship between God and ethics, which I'll cover in a subsequent post...

World View?

During a long and tedious attempt to pry a believers reasoning for belief in the immaterial here, the blog owner stated:

"I originally asked your to defend your world view and as yet you cannot. You have been on this blog for over 2 years and it has always been my world view. Man up mate and answer."

Well, apart from the fact that I've defended my "world view" on his blog, though perhaps not in direct enough manner for my acuser. I figured I'd post this to keep him quiet.

So, what is my world view?
I'd describe myself as a provisional naturalist. As far as I can tell, there seem to be no good reasons to believe in the "immaterial", the "supernatural", what have you, and so, after considering the arguments and evidence which I've found, by no means an exhaustive list, I reject the claims that there exists a "supernatural" realm apart from this reality, that there is an immaterial God, etc.

So, what is meant by "Natural" and "Supernatural"?
These have, I think, proven difficult to nail down, with each term often being taken as the negation of the other - the supernatural is that which is not natural.
The definition I'm going to go with here comes courtesy of Richard Carrier:

"In short, I argue 'naturalism' means, in the simplest terms, that every mental thing is entirely caused by fundamentally nonmental things, and is entirely dependent on nonmental things for its existence. Therefore, 'supernaturalism' means that at least some mental things cannot be reduced to nonmental things.

Now, I'm not saying that I know, for certain, that this is the case, or that this is an apriori assumption that ensures that I need to rationalise away or ignore evidence which goes against this position. It's simply that I'm unacquainted with any convincing evidence that fundamentally things are non-mental. This position seems to be a reasonable and conservative one to hold to at present, pending further evidence.

Now, I've been accused of being closed to any evidence which would disconfirm this position, due to what I feel are reasonable requirements on reasons and evidence. Apparently, asking for some objective or intersubjective reasons is unreasonable and closed minded. This is ridiculous. As Fishman states:

The crucial question is not, Is it science? or Is it supernatural?, but rather, Is there any good reason to believe that claim X is true? Whether the entities or phenomena posited by claim X are defined as ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’ is irrelevant to the scientific status of the claim. If the fundamental aim of science is the pursuit of truth - to uncover, to the extent that humans are capable, the nature of reality - then science should go wherever the evidence leads. If the evidence were to strongly suggest the existence of supernatural phenomena, then so be it.

That sounds pretty good to me.

So, while this is not an indepth defence of my world view (which often run to book length), it's a start.