To the Arguments Then
Ed Feser has got a very kind comment up at his blog thoughtfully entitled “Argumentum ad Himmlerum,” which suggests, falsely, that my reference to Himmler was central to my concerns in my last post, which it was not. However, I do think there is a similarity between Catholic morality, which tends to hold its nose, and then goes straight ahead acting brutally towards other human beings, and the kind of hardness that Himmler approved in his chilling speech in Poland in 1943, and Feser has certainly not given me any reason to recant that belief. He thinks that what I said was extreme, and suggests that I must have taken to smoking crack, but, like so many of his “arguments” this is just hand waving of a vigorous sort, and not a response to the things that I said.
And yes, I was aware that my words would be received with a kind of disbelief by those who, like Feser, think it’s alright to force raped women to bear children, or to force dying people to suffer the pangs of hell while they die, or to force women to die, when their pregnancies, if continued, will cause their deaths, and abortion cannot be permitted under any circumstances. This kind of insufferable authoritarianism is simply an integral aspect of Catholic morality, and as Feser has shown, follows logically from what Catholics think is the natural law, and follows from the essence of what they think it means to be human. I still do not think it is farfetched to compare this with the kinds of inhumanity practiced by the Nazis, who had their own ideal of what was essentially human, an ideal which prescribed the most inhuman treatment of other human beings, just as Catholic natural law morality does. If Feser thinks this is a crude “argumentum ad Hitlerum”, that’s fine; I can live with that. But the cruelty and inhumanity of Catholic ethics still strikes me as disturbingly close to the kind of ethic that the Nazis practiced and enforced. The Nazis did it, of course, in order to bring about an earthly paradise, as they conceived of it; the Church does it to ensure a heavenly one; but it thinks that everyone without exception should be bound by its morality, and influences laws around the world to that effect, spreading its inhumanity around as widely as possible. I leave it to the reader to judge whether either the Nazi paradise or the Catholic heaven is sufficient to justify inhumanity and cruelty.
I also think, for what it’s worth, that the fact that the Catholic Church went to enormous lengths to cover up the sexual abuse of children by priests and religious, and seems to be doing so still, is connected to the fact that sexual abuse itself does not engage the Church’s authority regarding matters of Christian doctrine, whereas matters such as women’s ordination, gay rights, or abortion do. So, while the Church will use its power openly to constrain priests who differ on the matter of women’s ordination or the acceptance of gay people (which are matters of doctrinal authority), it went to inordinate lengths to conceal the sexual abuse of children, and, given the response to the Cloyne Report in Ireland, apparently still does so, because the sexual abuse of children does not touch the church’s authority at any sensitive point, but does concern its reputation and public image.
As to the question of Feser’s argumentum ad verecundiam. I think I showed a few cases in which he did actually use it. Even if he later goes on to criticise Dennett, his use of Zawidski and Ruse is simply a straight appeal to authority. As for his accusation that I didn’t consider his later critique of Dennett, part of the problem is that that critique is, in a sense, as poorly supported as is his claim about the general consensus regarding Dennett’s philosophy.
So let’s consider at least one part of his critique of Dennett. The claim is that biology cannot be understood without Aristotelian final causes. This is a very different use of the idea of causation than is common today, which, in general, is equivalent to what Aristotle called “efficient causation,” that is, something’s producing or bringing about something else, as when a billiard ball “causes” another ball to move and drop into a pocket. Modern philosophy and science tend to think of causation in relation to “events” of this sort. One event brings about another event — a ball hits another ball which rolls across the billiard table and lands in a pocket. The first ball is “caused” to move by the use of a cue, and that in turn is caused …. — well, we’ll get back to causal chains another time.
Aristotle, however, thought about causes differently. Causes, for Aristotle, were in a sense principles of explanation, and are not necessarily thought of in terms of temporal series of events linked together in the relationship of one event bringing about another event which brings about another, and so on. In Aristotle’s scheme a complete description of a thing would include not only efficient causes of this sort, but also, material causes, that of which things are made, formal causes, the form or shape of the thing made (this pertains to the essence of the thing or substance), and final causes, the end or purpose of the thing, that for the sake of which it is made or has come into being.
In Greek the word for end is telos, and it is from this that we get our word ‘teleology.’ Now it is principally this that Feser thinks is missing in and is necessary for doing or understanding science, and his criticism of Dennett concentrates on this point. For Dennett argues, most notably in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that evolution is not directional. In other words, things do not evolve for a purpose or with a specific end in view, but are simply the mechanical working out of an algorithmic process which includes random mutation and the selecting process of the environment. (Feser claims earlier that material processes cannot be algorithmic, but we will leave this aside, though I daresay Feser will think I am leaving out something vital at this point.)
To which Feser’s reply is:
And there you go; we’ve thereby shown … that teleology is ”reducible” to efficient causes after all. Another victory for Enlightenment, secularism, and all-around niceness, and all made possible, as usual, through the intercession of St. Charles of the Galapagos. [250]
Besides giving us the general tone and temper of his book, it is hard to say what Feser has in mind here. Remember his claim, though, in his latest post:
As anyone who has actually read it knows, I do not rely on arguments from authority in The Last Superstition.
If so, why so quickly onto the attack at this point? He follows from “Another victory … through the intercession of St. Charles of the Galapagos”, with this:
Or at least it would be if it so obviously were not. One rather absurd implication of this theory is that you can’t really know what the function of an organ is until you know something about its evolutionary history. [251]
(Note the ‘obviously’. A lot is obvious to Feser.) And he then quotes John Searle [-- sorry, got my Johns and Jerrys mixed up -- Jerry Fodor] to the effect that we can make a shrewd guess as to what hands, hearts, eyes or livers are for without knowing how they evolved. And then he says:
Another absurd implication [of evolutionary theory] is that nothing that didn’t evolve could possibly have a biological function; indeed, the first kidneys, according to this theory, didn’t have any function, because, being the result of a random genetic mutation, they hadn’t been “selected for” by evolution. [251]
Of course, needless to say, this is just another version of the irreducible complexity argument (although he later denies this – see 255). For kidneys didn’t happen all at once, but in stages, each of which was selected for in succession, and each having a survival function in the organisms in which those mutations were found, just as eyes evolved from light sensitive surfaces, and then through increasing complexity to the incredibly complex “camera” eyes of many species of animal today.
So, what has Feser shown? Nothing really, aside from the fact that he has misunderstood the process of evolution by natural selection. We may be able to make shrewd guesses, as Searle claims, about the function of some of the major organs of the body. Eyes are for seeing, legs for walking, mouths for eating, etc. But when did it become obvious that the heart was for pumping blood, the lungs for aerating blood, the brain for thinking — or the liver for performing so many vital fuctions: filtering out harmful substances, storing vital nutrients, producing bile for the breakdown of fats, etc., and that all of these functions were somehow built-in from the beginning as the end or purpose for which the liver evolved? When and how did we learn about the functions of different chemicals within the brain, and how these are related to feeling and thought? Why is it that, based on evolution, biology is one of the most active areas in science just now? For the simple reason, of course, that evolution has been such a rich resource for discovering how and why things work the way they do, for discovering the function of different features and organs in aiding survival.
After considering evolution and function for a moment or two Feser then feels strong enough to enter the twilight zone. The purpose, he suggests, of the theory of evolution, is simply to get rid of final causes, of teleology: “that,” as he says, “is indeed the very point of appeals to natural selection.” (251) But the effect of this, he suggests, is to deny the use of the words ‘function’ or ‘purpose’ to the evolutionary biologist, and when they go on using these words they are in fact hiding the fact that there is a contradiction at the heart of their theory. The purpose of the theory was to reduce everything to efficient causes, but once they do this, they can no longer make use of the ideas of purpose or function, but, since they do, the illusion is created that they have — though this criticism is addressed directly to Dennett himself — “given a ‘naturalistic’ account of purposes and functions.” (252)
But this is simply a misunderstanding. Purpose and function can exist without teleology, that is, without precisely these purposes and functions having been somehow “intended” all along as ends that were aimed at. The purpose of a bird’s wings are, speaking generally, to fly, though some birds have evolved in situations that did not require flight (to escape predators or acquire food), and so their wings have lost this function. Feser thinks that what biologists have done is to relocate teleology in DNA. After expatiating for a bit on programming and software and information, Feser finally gets to the point:
So, what modern biology reveals to us is the existence of a physical structure that “points to” or “aims at” something beyond itself and yet is entirely unconscious. Where have we heard that before? Why, in Aristotle, of course. [255]
St. Aristotle of the Lyceum, perhaps? The problem with this argument – if that is what it is – is simply that, in the process of natural selection, there is nothing specifically to which DNA points as the end to which the process is directed. (It would be strange, for example, to think that the end to which a flying bird’s DNA pointed was flightlessness.) In order to get there, Feser would have to hold that every mutation was purposeful, and that each mutation had an end in view and an environmental niche into which it would fit, and that all of this was somehow inherent in the first instances of DNA. But one of the reasons that evolution is a process requiring millions and billions of years is that mutations, though not rare, rarely contribute to survivability. To suggest that the final cause (or the end for which it took place) of a mutation far back in evolutionary history, where the evolutionary line leading to, say, rhinos, broke off from its most recent common ancestor, lies in rhinos as they exist today, is simply a misunderstanding of evolutionary processes, and makes no sense. In fact, since each evolutionary lineage branches many times, there is no one final end that they could be about. Certainly, biologists can trace out the evolutionary ancestry, but there is no reason to think that animal or plant species living today were somehow prefigured in that ancestry as the final cause. For there is every reason to suppose that rhinos, as well as humans, and other animals, will, supposing that we don’t destroy the life world, go on evolving unpredictably, in response to mutation and environment — as Dawkins indeed points out in The Ancestor’s Tale (5).
Feser says, in italics:
Remove the teleological element in the description of DNA and genes and you strip them of everything that makes them explanatorily useful in biology. [256]
And then a moment later he has a long quote from the physicist Paul Davies, from which I select the following:
So we are left with the contradiction that we need to apply concepts derived from purposeful human activities (communication, meaning, context, semantics) to biological processes that certainly appear purposeful, but are in fact not (or are not supposed to be) … [A]t the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature. … Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even subcellular level? [quoted 256-257]
Feser, of course, answers that last rhetorical question with a yes; but is he right to do so? I don’t think he has made his case. In fact, I don’t think he’s even tried to make a case. And if he hasn’t made a case, and shown the point of it, then he hasn’t shown that teleological language is essential for an adequate account of DNA. We may use the language of coding, but DNA doesn’t use any language at all. We use intentional language all the time, even of things that are obviously not intentional — like a car’s GPS system. And it is hard not to use intentional language, so hard that one can understand Davies’ feeling that perhaps, deep down, the universe is about purpose. But this doesn’t make it so.
What Feser does is to quote from a lot of people with whom he agrees, and to treat with contempt those with whom he disagrees, but nowhere here do I see an argument. Just claiming that something is true, doesn’t constitute an argument, and so far, that’s all we have. In the course of his critique of Dennett on these pages he does not discuss Dennett’s arguments at all, not once, though he spends an unwarranted amount of time ridiculing him.† He quotes from people with whom he agrees, and answers questions in the affirmative which were left hanging suggestively. But he does not present an argument. He does not show that it makes sense to talk in terms of Aristotle’s final causes.
Davies suggests that given that humans have purposes, it seems that purpose may be an inherent part of nature (a final cause, if you like). But he gives us no reason to suppose that it is. So Feser takes that suggestive question and says that “[c]ontemporary biology gives us every reason to conclude that the answer to Davies’ … question is ‘yes.’” (257) And then he says that the only reason contemporary biologists refuse to accept this answer is because they assume that final causality had been refuted three centuries ago. But that is simply not true. The truth is, as Dennett points out in detail in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that evidence shows that mind, purpose, intentionality, is an effect of impersonal natural forces, and does not precede them (see DDI, 66). And Dennett actually has a response to Paul Davies on the same page! Davies had suggested (in his book The Mind of God, 232) that mind can be “no trivial, no minor product of mindless purposeless forces.” (The quote used by Feser is in the same vein — possibly a continuing theme in Davies thought?) To which Dennett’s response is:
Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn’t the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? [66]
There is no logical reason why this should not be so, and continuing to harp on about final causes won’t show why it is not. As Dennett suggests, it is indeed by a “strange inversion of reasoning” (65, words taken from an early attack on Darwin) that modern biology takes impersonal forces as preceding personal ones, and nothing that Feser says is sufficient to show that there is any final causality about the coming to be of life on this planet in all of its bewildering variety.
And, by the by, since we began on this note, we will end on it too. Feser suggests that I do not consider his arguments. I will come back again to consider his argument for the existence of God, which is pretty run-of-the-mill introductory philosophy of religion. But I want the reader to note that Feser’s way of dealing with arguments is often, as it is here, to ignore them altogether. He says that in adverting to his argumentum ad verecundiam regarding Dennett’s stature as a philosopher I neglected his critique of Dennett. But, as I say, he does not address Dennett’s arguments at all; it is not a real critique. Indeed, it is hard to tell, from Feser’s treatment of Dennett, whether Dennett made any arguments at all. (Feser doesn’t, so it’s hard to tell.) However, he does preface his dismissal of Dennett with this:
Take the currently most popular strategy for “naturalizing” teleology, which is associated with the philosophers Ruth Millikan and (another old pal of ours) Daniel Dennett. [250]
Now, Dr. Feser, please tell me that this is not a direct, misleading and contemptuous reference to, and dependence upon, your earlier argument to the authority of Zawidsky and Ruse.
___________________________
† A particularly egregious case is the following:
The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe once famously judged David Hume a “mere — brilliant — sophist.” Mr. “Bright Stuff” can take pride in the fact that he is almost in Hume’s rank as a philosopher, insofar as if you delete just the middle word in Anscombe’s description of Hume, you get a dead-on summation of Daniel Dennett. [254]
As I say, this kind of abuse is sprinkled liberally throughout Feser’s book, and marks Feser as pretty contemptible. I do not think this reminder of Anscombe’s abuse greatly improves her stature either.
Wow, Feser response on his blog was pretty bitter, defensive and even hateful. Not a surprising response at all, and this indicates that you have touched a nerve or the heart of the problem.
One rather absurd implication of this theory is that you can’t really know what the function of an organ is until you know something about its evolutionary history.
Actually, Ronald de Sousa says something similar in Why Think?. IIRC he defines the “function” of an organ as whatever it did which helped the present-day organism’s ancestral lineage survive this long (half-remembered, so don’t hold de Sousa responsible for my precis). As one who feels that it takes some careful work to disentangle “function” and “purpose” from transcendent concepts of teleology, I found it an interesting angle. I also suspect it does not reduce to the absurd quite as easily as Feser thinks.
Feser’s arguments against current evolutionary biology are truly arguments from ignorance.
I marvel at your tenacity Eric in exposing the intellectual arrogance of Feser and others who seem to imply that ‘Joe public’ must first fully understand Aristotle, Aquinas and Catholic teaching before he can fully appreciate what science is saying about how our world works.
I am aghast at how Feser can say: “The purpose of the theory of evolution is simply to get rid of final causes of teleology” and ” The purpose of the theory of evolution was to reduce everything to efficient causes etc”
My understanding is that the purpose of the theory of evolution is simply to be the best explanation of what is observed. The Theory of evolution by natural selection was the explanation that Darwin arrived at which best fitted the observations he had made during his lifetime. The observations that biologists continue to make year by year continually add to the evidence that the theory is both the only one in town and perhaps most beautiful elegant and awe inspiring of all scientific “theories”.
Shouldn’t the mere fact that mutations do not essentially strenghten the survivability of new individuals be enough to show that there are no intrinsic (final) purposes to mutations ?
Wouldn’t it be simply special pleading to claim that beneficial mutations have final purposes ?The understanding i have of evolution is that if there is a random shape changing sculpting machine running for enough time there is bound to be one sculpture to go trough the “survivability” shaped hole made of space time.
Teleology works only if you ignore everything that surrounds that hole ,in other words all the “flat” and the “death of lineage” holes .
I suppose one could argue that the purpose of all of science is as far as possible to find the efficient causes of all phenomena. If it turned out that there was some large class of phenomena that were stubbornly resistant to such reduction, then possibly you might have the beginnings of an argument that one of Aristotle’s other causal categories was relevant to the operation of the universe. But, ID/creationist misrepresentations to the contrary, so far there is no such resistant class.
Wow, Feser response on his blog was pretty bitter, defensive and even hateful. Not a surprising response at all, and this indicates that you have touched a nerve or the heart of the problem.
No, that’s Dr. Feser’s normal response style. When you really hit a nerve or the heart of a problem, he just stops talking.
De Sousa’s point about function makes a lot of sense, but this is not what Feser says. In a sense the function of any feature is, for evolutionary biology, what either ensures the organism’s survival or its extinction, but how it does this is vital. We may not, in fact, know, until it is actually functional, what function an organ or part of an organism serves, though we might be able to detect changes of function due to environmental changes, I suppose, by comparing it with the function of some part in other species. But if there is a feature that we don’t understand, looking at it from an evolutionary point of view may help to discern function — if, that is, it is not something due to genetic drift without any evolutionary significance. Whether it provides immunity to parasites, or speed in the face of predator, or attractiveness to males or females, each feature (with the qualification about genetic drift) functions as a survival mechanism. But it is also connected to other descriptions of the organism, whether chemical composition of bodily fluids (clotting mechanisms, for example), or locomotion, or speed, or camouflage, or what not: each feature is multiply related with other features, and this also provides an account of function. So function may operate on different levels since each organism, as a complex whole, may have internally many different complex interrelationships of its parts, and may be equally complexly related to its environment. And the more you learn about the evolutionary history of an animal or plant, the more you will understand about the function of its different parts or organs. Some features may be retained in the genome, but be in fact no longer functional, but the evolutionary history may provide an account of earlier function of parts now simply vestigial. But why Feser should think there’s a logical point to be made here about evolution and function simply escapes me. Nor can I see why we cannot speak about the parts of an organism and their function without invoking Aristotelian final causes; because that’s just what thinking does, taking things apart and trying to understand how they work, not because they were designed that way — though in some cases they have been (like Paley’s watch) — but because that’s the way they came to be by the operation the regularities (observed) in nature and formulated by us in terms of laws. Indeed, given his view of evolution, I am surprised that Paley is given such a hard time by Feser, because Paley’s view is Aristotelian through and through.
Two aspects of evolution that really seem to be problematic for teleology in Feser’s sense are co-option – when an organ used for one ‘purpose’ becomes used for something else instead/as well – and speciation – if one organism was ‘intended’ why the wasteful production of so many species that aren’t that organism? Neither of these things are apparent in the DNA.
The Baldwin Effect would be another instance of DNA defying teleology, plus the wikipedia entry has a nice Dan Dennett quote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect
@John Edwards, good point about the teleology of the theory of evolution!
One thing that I marvel at is the fact that Feser can present Aquinas’ arguments as though no one had ever critcised them before, as if Antony Flew or James Mackie or Richard Gale or Michael Martin or Kai Neilson, etc. had never written anything on the subject, as though the most substantive treatment that Aquinas has received since the dawning of modernity is Dawkins’. But Dawkins’ can afford to give the arguments a brief and dismissive discussion because they have been extensively dealt with otherwhere.
As for what Feser says about evolution: it’s simply laughable. If he thinks Dawkins’ ignorance is so vast, he ought to try to sound the vastness of his own. (The reference to Dawkins is deliberate. At one point Feser says this:
which just goes to show how indiscriminately abusive the man really is. Catholics got a bad bargain, I’m afraid, when they got him. Though, I suppose, when you stop to think, they’re not in a friendly contest) We are all, in a measure, profoundly ignorant. There is simply so much that we might know. I have a reading list that will take me well past my sell by date, and I keep adding to it too!
The religious want to diminish it all. If it doesn’t have “Grand Cosmic Meaning” it doesn’t have meaning. For them if it wasn’t God’s plan or directed it is meaningless.
Why can’t a kiss, a song, or art ‘just’ have meaning. It does to me.
The Nazis and the Catholic church were bedfellows: even after WWII was over. and the Church had nothing to fear from the Nazis, the Vatican excommunicated almost none of them, and even helped some of them to escape to South America. The Nazis were worse, on average, than the Catholics, but Eric’s comparison of the two isn’t farfetched. And, as far as Feser’s philosophy goes, I use an informal marker: If someone does not believe evolution is true, it is very unlikely that anything that person says on any other subject is worth looking at.
Ernst Mayr, in talking about teleology in nature, pointed out that it was a posteriori rather than a priori. Design is emergent, the shape of a carnivore’s tooth for example is FOR ripping flesh, but how that design came about was a random mutation that meant the organism could get food more effectively and have more offspring. It really shouldn’t surprise us any more than that a serrated knife is good for cutting meat and the backside of a spoon is useless. Or if cutlery is going to get in the way of the analogy because people focus on the design part rather than the structure part, why are some rocks sharp while others smooth?
I posted the following at professor Feser’s blog:
Untenured (from professor Feser’s blog): “Again, this is being done for psychological reasons. Atheists are committed to a particular metaphysical view, but New Atheists are emotionally and personally invested in the epistemological claim that anyone who dissents from that metaphysical view is irrational. They are so emotionally and psychologically attached to that epistemological claim that counter evidence simply will not compute. They must deny it, distort it, lie about it, and confirm each other in their denials, distortions and lies.”
I have to agree with Untenured, though I suspect that in MacDonald’s case at least, there is little or no willful distortion. I may be wrong about that, but he strikes me as an honest fellow who is so blinded by his prejudices that he simply cannot read a book like professor Feser’s without seeing fallacies or bigotry everywhere. I mean, what else explains that “review” of TLS? MacDonald is not a stupid man, and I suspect, in most contexts, he’d have little problem identifying and distinguishing arguments from illustrations, explanations, references, factual claims, purposefully entertaining rhetoric, humorous elocutions, rhetorical jabs, remarks on the consistency of one thing with another, and so on. Yet if someone familiar with TLS but unfamiliar with MacDonald were to read his review, I suspect the sentence, “This man has no idea what an argument is!” would come to mind again and again.
I know of no better explanation for this sort of thing than Untenured’s.
“One thing that I marvel at is the fact that Feser can present Aquinas’ arguments as though no one had ever critcised them before, as if Antony Flew or James Mackie or Richard Gale or Michael Martin or Kai Neilson, etc. had never written anything on the subject, as though the most substantive treatment that Aquinas has received since the dawning of modernity is Dawkins’.”
Wow, I might have to take back the thing about your being honest. I’m sorry, but no one who is at all familiar with professor Feser’s discussions of Aquinas could possibly say such a thing.
I really don’t get, either, why anyone gives a damn what Aristotle or Aquinas said about teleology in nature.
So I read the last couple articles here, and the last few on Dr. Feser’s site, and the last few by Jerry Coyne over at his place.
What I don’t understand is why apologists with a philosophical viewpoint (as opposed to your standard fundamentalist liar for Jesus) such as Feser tend to be conservative Catholics, or even Christians in the first place.
I would think that their teleological arguments about First Causes and the like would only lead them as far as deism, as opposed to that someone came back from the dead, his followers had a cosmic truth revealed to them, etc.
Maybe he addresses that in his book, but it’s kind of at the very, very bottom of my reading list.
For a man obsessed with the ‘obviousness’ of things, Feser seems to have a rather passionate (not to mention illicit) affair with obfuscation. Everytime I read his posts, they seem to start at point A, take the scenic route to Digression B, take in a move from tangential director C, before ending at Conclusion D which looks less like the beach we set out for, and more like a rainforest. There’s still water and tiny little rocks around so as you can obviously see, they’re really exactly the same, and well, if you don’t believe me then clearly you need to read books geology to learn about plate tectonics, educate yourself on meteorology so you can learn that water from the ocean evaporates and rains down in the forest and until you actually agree with me I’m just going to keep on asserting that you are obviously not mentally capable of understanding this intricate, yet still obvious, explanation. And that this is why you’re wrong.
Oh god, now I’m doing it!
Seriously, I do wonder what it would take for Feser to concede that someone is educated enough (by his standards) to disagree with him, and somehow still hold a valid, opposing position. I also find it amusing to consider what would happen if Aristotle were to be resurrected, make a study of modern science, and then change his mind on the matters Feser holds so dear.
All this aside, I have noticed more and more of late the similarity in attitude, strategy and – I hate to say it – invective from both atheist and theist camps. At this point, everyone really is indistinguishable from each other. The details could be almost entirely unchanged if the topic was suddenly shifted from science vs theology to my local sports team vs your local sports team. Neither side looks or smells pretty right now though.
The battle lines have been drawn, people have picked their sides and now we’re both digging in for the long haul of attrition. We’re also both convinced that victory is inevitable for our different sides. At times, it really does look like we’re arguing entirely separate points, followed by alternatively celebrating our crushing victories, and raging at the opposition that they just don’t understand (and why can’t they accept that they’ve lost dammit! They’re intellectual cowards/dishonest/charlatans!). It may not be behaviour that everyone indulges in, but enough people do to taint everyone else with it.
Of course, a large part of it comes down to opinion. Normally I despise statements of the sort “You have to decide what’s true for YOU”, but when it comes to being convinced, your opinion is the contested ground being fought over. Arguments I find convincing bounce off of theists, their reasoning seems flimsy and weak to me, and vice versa.
You grant him credit for honesty that he does not necessarily deserve. There is a better than even likelihood that he is deliberately being deceptive. The knowledge of which Feser is supposedly ignorant is not so difficult to acquire; Dawkins literally provided it in 523 words.
This isn’t ignorance, this is fraud, something which many philosophers of religion have no doubt developed to a fine art.
Given what you posted on his blog I’m not at all surprised. What pomposity! Really!
So you and Feser are not committed to a metaphysical view?
It seems to me that the theists cannot afford to abandon teleology, most especially Catholics. Feser’s explanations are not only false, they are not logical based on simple observations of nature. Natural selection will continue as long as living things reproduce and seek energy replenishment. The genetic copying processes are imperfect, and being so there is only “Mystery” (which Catholic theologians always pronounce with a Capital M) to fall back on to explain how the genome ends up with the Special Creation That Contains Souls and has dominion over all things. And dies, and needs Salvation.
Without teleological explanations for evolution, the Catholic religion loses its own purpose.
What Eric M is attempting here is to show the weaknesses in Feser’s critique, but if you find it to be as tedious as watching tennis perhaps you should find a different game. One of the things that you could contribute, is perhaps, is a more satisfactory reasoning than either the atheists and the theists provide.
Eric, I appreciate your calm, reasoned, and systematic approach to arguing with people like Feser. Thanks for all the hard work.
I was evidently not clear in what I meant. How ironic. Let me be clear now – I am most definitely an atheist and I love reading articles such as this which dismantle religious dogma and arguments. I’m totally on Eric’s side here. I find Feser to be largely tedious and deliberately obscure. Why else would he have to spend so many posts clarifying what he means before eventually stating his positions in clear, simple English after much argument?
My only point was that the attitude and language of many commenters, on both sides, is becoming distinguished only by which side of the fence they sit on. Most of it has degenerated in to back slapping of allies and insults delivered towards the opposition. Much time also seems to be spent with people arguing completely different points.
Also, tennis is not what I’d call a tedious sport. It can be thrilling at times. I remember staying up watching Pat Rafter play Goran Ivanesevic in a Wimbledon final many years ago and being utterly consumed by it. Golf…now that’s boring.
I think it’s rather striking that someone who has so stridently complained about the atheists’ ignorance of theology turns out to be so thoroughly ignorant of biology. Perhaps it’s the inevitable consequence of being immured in the Thomist paradigm, convinced that every issue of which one can conceive must be resolved in the same interdependent explanation, which is necessarily God.
gammon,
Spot on. And I think we need to realize something has changed in our language, it’s no longer simply rational discussion. This is the new atheism that has changed the discourse, but we must realize this change is justified but an emotional one.
Among the many things that make Feser a pompous twit is the plain truth that he gets Aristotle just plain wrong (despite all his huffing and puffing about how no one else understands Aristotle and Aquinas well enough to even begin to address his own unassailable wisdom). To name just one thing Feser gets wrong, he consistently confuses Aristotle’s natural teleology — which was not about intentional purpose in any way, and does not conflict with modern evolutionary biology at all — with Plato’s cosmic teleology. The latter is the origin of all the rebarbative “nature’s divine harmony” cack that William Paley and other theologians blathered on about, eventually reaching the intellectual nadir of Tielhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point” twaddle, which I’m sure must be another one of those ideas Feser declares to be “obviously true.”
I encourage anyone who wants to know what Aristotle said about teleology in organisms — and why Charles Darwin explicitly and deliberately retained an Aristotelian perspective on teleology in On the Origin of Species — to read something written by an actual expert on Aristotle, teleology, and biology. See the chapter titled “Teleology” by James G. Lennox in Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd’s superbly useful book Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (1992, Harvard University Press). Lennox’s very succinct and clear discussion occupies just ten pages (pp.324-333), and one need only read those ten pages to find out how Feser is wrong about pretty much EVERYTHING he says on the subject.
gammon,
A perfect example of what you’re talking about: after asking for a reference for a basic summation of what Fesser needed to demonstrate in order to bridge the gap between the First Cause argument and his specific form of Christianity, I was either told by his fans to read his book … or told to read up on Thomism.
No, I don’t need a good backing in Thomist philosophy; I need to see the summation and see if it attempts to solve a problem without making too many absurd assumptions.
Eric:
>> Even if he later goes on to criticise Dennett, his use of Zawidski and Ruse is simply a straight appeal to authority.
Do you never cite anyone in your writings? Why is citing the opinions of reputable scholars objectionable in all cases?
>> For Dennett argues, most notably in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that evolution is not directional. In other words, things do not evolve for a purpose or with a specific end in view, but are simply the mechanical working out of an algorithmic process which includes random mutation and the selecting process of the environment.
Couldn’t one say that things evolve for the purpose of trying to maximize their survival in changing environments? Just because they often fail in this end due to mutations that decrease fitness or changes to the environment, for example, does not change this fact, no more than the fact that occasionally a knife gets dull, but it still has the end of cutting.
>> And he then quotes John Searle to the effect that we can make a shrewd guess as to what hands, hearts, eyes or livers are for without knowing how they evolved.
This is incredibly disingenuous.
You make it seem as if Feser offers no arguments, but only cites authority figures. After that quote, he offers three arguments.
First, he makes the argument, which you briefly cited, that in order to know the function of X, one must know the evolutionary history of X, which is false, because we knew the function of hands, for example, even before Darwin was born.
Second, he argues that if the function of X depends upon the evolutionary history of X, then if X has no evolutionary history, then X has no function.
Third, he cites “Swampman”, who is a bizarre creature that is similar to ourselves, but who suddenly came into existence in a freak chemical accident. Such an entity does not have an evolutionary history, but we can identify a number of functions of its organs, because they are identical to our own. This implies that function is independent of evolutionary history.
One may disagree with these arguments. I certainly do. First, the second argument is simply the logical implication of a well-known principle of Darwinism, which is not obviously absurd to me, and thus not a refutation at all. Second, the third argument is essentially a thought experiment, or “intuition pump”, that is only convincing if conceivability is indicative of factual truth, which I am suspicious of. However, it is disingenuous to claim that he does not offer arguments at all.
With regards to Searle, who he cites to illustrate the “main problem” (p. 251) with Darwinian evolution, Searle’s argument is that there is teleology involved in evolutionary processes, but it is imposed by the minds of intelligent observers, but does not exist as a part of nature.
Feser proceeds to argue against this position. He earlier argued that if teleology is not a part of nature, then all our talk about functions of organs only describes apparent functions, because these functions do not actually exist in nature. And if they do not exist in nature, then how can they be used to explain anything (“he’s essentially saying that nature’s purposes are non-existent, in which case they cannot explain anything” (p. 253))? He also argues that if our minds acquire their intentionality from the intentionality of Mother Nature, which then acquires its intentionality from our minds, then you are stuck in a vicious circle (p. 253). The ultimate point of all these arguments is that every attempt to eliminate teleology from Darwinian biology inevitably makes appeal to teleological notions in order to be coherent, which returns us to Aristotle’s final causes.
He argues that whatever plausibility an account, such as Dennett’s, may have is mainly due to equivocation. Whenever Dennett talks about purposes and functions in nature, his philosophical position is that these are secondary to our imposition of the design stance, which we utilize for its functional utility, but not necessarily because such teleology is actually present in nature. However, as Feser notes, if features of design are impositions by our psychology upon our experience and understanding of the world, then they are not part of the world, and thus unreal. And if they are unreal, then they cannot explain anything at all. This indicates a fundamental inconsistency and incoherence in Dennett’s system, which I actually agree with, and what saves his system’s coherence is that people substitute function1 (which exists in nature) for function2 (which is an imposition of the human mind) whenever they talk about function at all. This what Feser means when he calls Dennett’s position a “shell game” (p. 254).
Again, you may not find any of this compelling. I have my problems with some of it, but you cannot say that he simply cites authority figures and does not offer any arguments. Even bad arguments are still arguments.
>> Purpose and function can exist without teleology, that is, without precisely these purposes and functions having been somehow “intended” all along as ends that were aimed at.
First, whether the functions were originally intended to be those functions is irrelevant. The point is that the purposes and functions of biological entities are directed towards the fulfillment of those purposes and functions.
Second, it is not necessarily the case that such purposeful activity has an intentional component at all, and most teleological activity is unconscious. Feser writes: “there is a kind of goal-directedness that exists even apart from conscious thought processes and intentions. For Aristotle, our conscious thought processes are really but a special case of the more general natural phenomenon of goal-directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly totally divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence” (p. 70).
>> And it is hard not to use intentional language, so hard that one can understand Davies’ feeling that perhaps, deep down, the universe is about purpose. But this doesn’t make it so.
It is quite simple. Either function and purpose is a part of nature, or it is an imposition of our minds. If the former, then Aristotle was correct and teleology is a part of nature. If the latter, then there is no sense to talking about things having a function at all, because function is just a quirk of human psychology and not representative of anything real. That is the argument, and yes, it is an argument.
>> As Dennett suggests, it is indeed by a “strange inversion of reasoning” (65, words taken from an early attack on Darwin) that modern biology takes impersonal forces as preceding personal ones, and nothing that Feser says is sufficient to show that there is any final causality about the coming to be of life on this planet in all of its bewildering variety.
Again, teleology does not necessarily imply conscious intentions guiding the purposes of nature. It just involves the intrinsic presence of purposes and ends in nature. Even impersonal forces operate according to natural laws, and act to fulfill certain ends and not others. That is why gravity is predictable and why science is even possible. If there were no ends towards which physical entities were guided towards, then there would be utter chaos and anarchy. There would be no order or regularity at all. All of your discussion about the mind is utterly irrelevant to what Feser is saying here.
If people are interested, PZ Myers did a wonderful article describing the development of kidneys (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/the_basics_of_building_a_kidne.php), which goes through three stages, all of which serve a purpose, and may resemble earlier, simpler kidneys. Its a good illustration of how earlier, simple organs can still be quite adaptive and useful in their own right (in this case, they are still useful in a developing organism), while being slowly altered by natural selection to do things better, or differently.
He seriously needs to crack some evolutionary biology textbooks and just do some reading.
dguller. I do have a life. While your analysis is interesting, it is much too prolix. First of all, I have to say that what you are doing is making Feser’s arguments for him. He doesn’t make these arguments. He asserts the points which you have then gone on to analyse for him. That’s very kind of you, but Feser doesn’t do this. His quotation from Searle, for example, whose book I have not read, only functions as assertion. It can be part of an argument only if he explains the context it has in Searle’s book, and he doesn’t provide this. He just uses is, disingenuously, I might add, to lend substance to his asserttion. So it is not part of an argument. To suggest that this is incredibly disingenuous is a bit of a stretch.
As for what you say about Dennett, there is nowhere that Feser even suggests that Dennett is using ‘function’ ambiguously (indeed, it is not clear to me that he does). It is true that there is an ambiguity between teleology as inherent in things (Plato), and teleology as subsequently analysed by human intelligence (Aristotle), but this is nowhere even implied in what Feser is saying. He is relying on a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s teleology to do all the heavy lifting. In one sense, I suppose, we can say that he is arguing, but he is assuming so much that most of his premises, if there are any, are suppressed. He must do better than this in order to make an argument.
For example, just saying, as Feser does on page 253, that if we use intentional language to explain something, and those intentions are not actually there in nature, then using intentional language does not explain anything, does not really amount to an argument, since he has not told us what he thinks would provide an explanation. In order to make his argument he must say what is necessary in order to explain something:
To explain something is X.
Dennett (or biologists) use the intentional stance to explain, say, how genes function in natural selection. (Thus, Dawkins speaks of genes as selfish.)
This, however, does not do X.
Therefore, nothing has been explained.
Take this, which is supposed to be the argument:
(You can use blockquote commands, by the way, which would make what you are saying more readable.)
Which is as much as to say what you do say, that “he argues that if the function of X depends upon the evolutionary history of X, then if X has no evolutionary history, then X has no function.” But where is the argument, and how is stating this an argument? He must tell us first what is an explanation (since discerning function is to explain something). It seems clear that for Feser something is an explanation only if it discerns real purposes (whatever those are) in nature. But this is an unstated premise, and nothing constitutes an argument against Dennett unless he makes this clear. He merely states that “there is no way to intepret all this as as both genuinely explanatory and consistent with Dennett’s naturalism.” Why not? The conclusion is foreordained by his assumptions. This won’t do as argument. You say that bad arguments are arguments. That’s true. Invalid arguments are arguments. Arguments with false premises are arguments. But incomplete “arguments” are not really arguments at all; we call them assertions.
When you say, at the end, that “teleology does not necessarily imply conscious intentions guiding the purposes of nature. It just involves the intrinsic presence of purposes and ends in nature. Even impersonal forces operate according to natural laws, and act to fulfill certain ends and not others,” (my italics) I think you misunderstand the idea of purposes and ends, or the idea of acting to fulfil an end, as these have any application in, say, modern biology. This is importing intentional language to speak of the behaviour of certain things which have no intentionality, as Dawkins speaks of genes as “selfish”, but makes it very clear that he is not using the word to imply that genes have intentionality (and thus nothing in the way of intrinsic purposes and ends). So, there is no real presence (to use a nice theological expression) of purposes and ends in nature, or the fuliflling of certain ends and not others, which would require choice, but the operation of impersonal laws, which, when we look at their outcome are explained in terms of directionality and function (which is just what explanation is). But it is we who import the idea of ends, purposes, intentions, etc. It is we who say that something is there for the sake of some function, and when we do this what we are doing is explaining. But notice that Feser’s “arguments” (if that is what they are) work only because he leaves ‘explanation’ unexplained.
1. Obviously, Feser has a LOT of reading to do on evolutionary biology. If Coyne wants to take him on just on his misunderstanding of biology alone, it would reduce his little diatribe to nothing but childish whining.
2. Obviously, Feser is invoking “final causes” as a prelude to invoking a theological question, ie, the after-death experience. Obviously, Christian, and especially Catholic, theologians use “final” as a code word for “after death” all the time. Obviously, they’re obsessed with the size of their after-death apartment and whether or not they’ll get a kitchen upgrade. Obviously, they’re obsessed with death. As well as, obviously, with sucking every last bit of joy out of the only life they’ll get — and dragging the rest of us down to the exact same level of joylessness.
3. Obviously, Feser overuses the word “obviously”, and conflates it to mean “because I say so, that’s why”.
“the Catholic Church went to enormous lengths to cover up the sexual abuse of children by priests and religious, and seems to be doing so still,”
Here is my comment to an article posted on The McLuhan Galaxy, “Our Youth Need Education in Media Ethics” written by Michael Redfearn, “information technology consultant for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board.” http://tinyurl.com/3k4snkb:
“This the-sky-is falling-article is just another version of the today’s youth is going to the dogs cliché. Throughout history every new discovery, idea, or invention has had its critics, people who said that this discovery, idea, or invention will corrupt youth and ruin life as we know it.
It is ironic that “Michael Redfearn is information technology consultant for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board,”a board that maintains that its primary allegiance is to the Roman Catholic Church. Redfearn uses appeal to authority to assert that the Internet is dangerous: Marshall McLuhan “the late University of Toronto professor and Roman Catholic convert also referred to the electronic media as ‘an unholy imposter’ and ‘a blatant manifestation of the anti-Christ.’”
Whatever dangers the Internet poses, the advantages outweigh the dangers. The Internet has made it possible to expose the RCC as “an unholy imposter” that protected and lied about abusive priests. A perfect example is the case of a Catholic priest and former bishop who used technology and the Internet to indulge his perversions and was caught, charged and waits to be sentenced because the very technology he used made his arrest possible.
It isn’t just “our youth” who “need education in media ethics”; educators and people in authority need an education in ethics before they can begin to teach ethical behaviour to today’s youth.”
The Catholic priest and former bishop is Raymond Lahey, whose sentencing hearing has been delayed again and is scheduled for December 19.
http://tinyurl.com/44t3fmx
Citations required, I’m afraid. You appear to be making the error of imposing a “guider” into a natural process where none is required. You’re also assuming that physical entities have an “end”, ie, a purpose beyond their own existence. This seems to be your thesis, and it’s objectively wrong on several levels.
On the simplest level, what is the “end” that a hydrogen atom is “guided” towards? Well, that certainly depends on where the hydrogen atom is located. If it’s on Earth, then it’s likely that atom will be bound with another hydrogen and an oxygen atom to become water. However, if that hydrogen atom in somewhere on the sun, then the “end” that the atom is “guided” to is becoming a helium atom in the gravity-driven process of nuclear fusion. Even worse, if that hydrogen atom is floating in the vacuum of space, its end mostly likely is decoherence — an end all of our atoms will eventually reach.
No where in that process is there a need to invoke guidance — the inherent property of the atom and the four forces of physics do that all on their own. And before you start with the teleological argument, there is nothing in our knowledge of nature that relies on a supernatural anything in order to set those forces going. In fact, modern quantum mechanics positively rejects such an idea as a “hidden variable” — of which we now know there are none.
So, you’ve offered bad theology buttressed by even worse science. Sorry.
[See how much easier this is to read?]
Eric:
Many thanks for your detailed reply. I do appreciate it.
Honestly, it all there in the book. On page 250, he describes a central idea in Darwinian evolution, i.e. that saying that X has function F is just shorthand for X was selected for by natural selection, because having F increased the population of organisms that had X with F. He then offers three arguments against the idea that the function of X depends upon the evolutionary history of X in the first paragraph on page 251. The arguments take the form of deducing alleged absurdities in that idea. I’m pretty sure that reductio ad absurdum arguments are considered legitimate arguments, and not just mere assertions.
Perhaps you should clarify exactly what you mean by an “argument”?
It is disingenuous, Eric. He uses Searle to illustrate what he perceives to be the central error in Darwinian evolution’s claim to have banished teleology from its framework. Searle argued that teleology is not in nature itself, but is imposed upon nature by intellectual beings, such as ourselves. This is the default position that Feser is using to argue against. What additional context do you want from this position? Either Searle adheres to it, or he doesn’t? And even if he does not, then if the majority of evolutionary biologists believe this, then it is a useful foil for a discussion. And the bottom line is that if one asserts this position, then one is stuck by the dilemma that Feser has identified, i.e. either Aristotle was correct and teleology is a part of nature, or Darwinian evolution is an empty theory, because all functions that it identifies are illusory projections of our minds.
Feser: “The thing is, Dennett never comes out and tells us exactly what he does mean. And this fundamental ambiguity, which absolutely permeates his writings, is the source of whatever plausibility his position has” (p. 254). It’s right there. A “fundamental ambiguity”. He doesn’t suggest this, but rather comes out an asserts this.
What is his misunderstanding? He clearly identifies what he means by “teleology”, which I quoted above from page 70 of his book. If you disagree with his definition, then perhaps explaining where he went wrong would be helpful.
Really? If I say that X depends upon Y, but it turns out that Y depends upon X, then it is not an argument to say that the circularity of this account actually undermines it? I think that’s a pretty reasonable response, actually. Furthermore, if our use concepts that do not refer to properties in the world, then how can we say that we are furthering out understanding of the world by using those concepts? It would be like saying that our understanding of Harry Potter is furthering our understanding of human flight. Similarly, if there is no teleology is nature, and it is all in our minds, then any talk of function or purpose in nature is bunk. You have not offered a single argument to undermine this position.
He has. That is one of the main points of his book, i.e. to demonstrate that an Aristotelian-Thomist framework avoids many of the philosophical puzzles and absurdities that a modern framework is prey to. And as you pointed out above, Feser would say that to explain something would be to understand it according to Aristotle’s four causes, which would have to include a final cause, or telos. This is not a problem for him, because he argues that teleology is an intrinsic part of nature, and so he avoids the dilemma altogether of coming up with a way to talk about function (or teleology) as if it is real while simultaneously saying that it is illusory.
Wow. The “unstated premise” is that something that does not exist cannot have causal efficacy in the world, and thus cannot be a part of any explanation of the world. If this is a controversial premise to you, then I would love for you to come up with a single counter-example. Interestingly enough, this is actually a key premise that atheists use as for why God cannot be an explanatory principle of the world.
If you accept this premise, then if “function” does not exist in the world, but only in our minds, then it may play a role in explaining our psychology, but it plays no role in explaining the world. That is why it is impossible for one to claim that functions are a part of any naturalist explanation of the world. After all, under naturalism, functions do not even exist except in our imaginations.
The funny thing is, you are actually agreeing with Feser while trying really hard not to. He never says that the teleology in nature requires a guiding intellect. He explicitly cites Aristotle who denied the claim that teleology requires intentionality (see quote from p. 70). In fact, Feser explicitly says that intentionality is parasitic upon the general teleology in nature. Teleology is just the directedness towards the completion of an unfolding process in nature according to underlying natural laws. That is all. There is no mind supervising it. There is no intentionality at all, except in minds. You and Feser actually AGREE with each other here. If you can agree that this type of teleology is part of nature, then we are done. Aristotle’s final cause is a part of nature, and then it is only a matter of dealing with the implications of this truth.
Kevin:
>> You appear to be making the error of imposing a “guider” into a natural process where none is required.
I am not. I have explicitly quoted Feser who says the exact opposite. Again: “there is a kind of goal-directedness that exists even apart from conscious thought processes and intentions. For Aristotle, our conscious thought processes are really but a special case of the more general natural phenomenon of goal-directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly totally divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence” (p. 70).
>> You’re also assuming that physical entities have an “end”, ie, a purpose beyond their own existence. This seems to be your thesis, and it’s objectively wrong on several levels.
Even if physical entities only have the purpose of their own existence, then they would have at least one purpose or end, i.e. their existence. I disagree with this. I think that physical entities are directed towards a sequential process operating according to natural laws towards the fulfillment of various ends. This is all that teleology is, and if you can agree that this happens in nature, then we have no disagreement at all.
>> On the simplest level, what is the “end” that a hydrogen atom is “guided” towards?
Well, a hydrogen atom is simply a proton, and so its end could be the preservation of its own existence, as you mentioned above through the annihilation and creation of quarks through the exchange of gluons. It also has a variety of other capacities that can be actualized in different contexts, such as binding with other protons to form other elements, acquiring electron shells that can interact with other atoms to form molecules, and so on. Since all of these regularities occur with law-like predictability, it can be argued that they are all the ends of these entities. What is THE end? I have no idea. Maybe it is to achieve the lowest energy state possible, given its interaction with other subatomic particles. Maybe there are a number of ends. I have no problem with that, actually.
>> No where in that process is there a need to invoke guidance — the inherent property of the atom and the four forces of physics do that all on their own.
That is right. There is no need to invoke guidance. The formal properties of the atom are sufficient to explain its behavior, which is an unfolding process.
>> And before you start with the teleological argument, there is nothing in our knowledge of nature that relies on a supernatural anything in order to set those forces going.
Agreed.
>> In fact, modern quantum mechanics positively rejects such an idea as a “hidden variable” — of which we now know there are none.
Untrue. All we know is that there cannot possibly be a local reality, which means that either there is an independent reality that is non-local (i.e. the speed of light limit is violated), or that has locality but no reality independent of observation (i.e. hidden variables). There are models and interpretations that are consistent with all empirical evidence that reject either locality or the independence of reality. A famous one that rejects locality but embraces hidden variables is Bohm’s pilot wave theory.
>> To name just one thing Feser gets wrong, he consistently confuses Aristotle’s natural teleology — which was not about intentional purpose in any way, and does not conflict with modern evolutionary biology at all — with Plato’s cosmic teleology.
Feser: “there is a kind of goal-directedness that exists even apart from conscious thought processes and intentions. For Aristotle, our conscious thought processes are really but a special case of the more general natural phenomenon of goal-directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly totally divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence” (p. 70).
Clearly, he says that ALL goal-directedness in nature necessarily involves conscious thought processes. Oh wait. He actually wrote the opposite.
>> Charles Darwin explicitly and deliberately retained an Aristotelian perspective on teleology in On the Origin of Species
If Darwin “explicitly and deliberately retained an Aristotelian perspective on teleology in On the Origin of Species “, then Feser is correct that it is impossible to eliminate Aristotelian teleology from Darwinian explanations of evolutionary processes.
Glad to see that you agree with him.
So you are claiming Feser is wrong when he states the purpose of sex is solely procreation because an infinite number of possible purposes exist and all are equally valid. These include bonding, pleasure, control, etc. Or as Steinbeck said through Preacher Casey in the Grapes of Wrath: “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”
Hah, this Aristotelian guff is catching on. Even IDers at telicthoughts are talking about it.
http://telicthoughts.com/cancer-evolution-ditching-natural-selection-for-aristotles-four-causes-and-hylemorphism/
http://telicthoughts.com/some-scholia-on-causality/
http://telicthoughts.com/some-scholia-on-the-accidental-mode-of-being/
http://telicthoughts.com/richard-dawkins-darwins-natural-selection-teleologist/
Quick, someone, knock the nonsense down before it becomes a meme!
This is clearly getting us nowhere, since, to put it plainly, I am not “actually agreeing with Feser while trying really hard not to.”
Let’s start from a different angle. You respond to PhilosophicalPrimate by using an invalid argument of your own:
This is obviously fallacious, since the fact that Darwin felt the need of this perspective does not mean that it is impossible to eliminate Aristotelian teleology from Darwinian explanations (unless you are restricting ‘Darwinian’ to Darwin himself), and this fallacy suggests to me that you have an ulterior motive for trying to mislead this conversation, by, for one thing, overloading your comments with responses, and then overloading responses with responses, until you can leave the field a victor, since we will simply get tired of responding to you.
You keep attributing to Feser claims which his whole book is designed to deny, for example, that
But the point of his whole argument is to show that not only does belief in a directing intelligence follow from Aristotle’s (and Aquinas’) premises, but that, without the exsistence of God nothing is intelligible. So there is, in fact must be, a mind supervising the whole process, otherwise it could all be explained by efficient causality, and this is precisely what he is denying.
But remember, he has already prefaced his remarks about Dennett with an assertion which he nowhere makes good, that materialists and naturalists have set themselves the impossible task of showing that “final causality” is really simply a form of “efficient causality.” As PhilsophicalPrimate says, however, referring to a paper by James Lennox, Feser misunderstands the role of the term ‘final causality’ in biology, and perhaps also in Aristotle. Perhaps, in fact, it would be better not to confuse ourselves with Aristotle’s “four causes.” Aristotle distinguishes four different types of explanation, explanation in terms of motion, essence, matter and goal. Motion/matter are clearly related terms, as are essence (form)/goal. This is what is misleading us, the idea that we have distinguished four aspects of nature and its explanation that can be simply distinguished and formalised. So, when evolution speaks of function, we can simply say that evolution only has to do with efficient causation, and has no right to the idea of function. Why not? Well, because, as Feser says at the outset, function (final cause) and evolution (efficient cause) are distinct forms of causation. This is assertion, not argument, and to the extent that he thinks he has performed a reductio, it was there in his beginning assumptions.
And notice, please the very important word ‘mostly’ in the quote that you take from page 70 — “… goal directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly [my italics] divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence.” In a moment he will say: “For it is only [my italics again] because a thing has a certain end or final cause that it has the form that it has …” This is precisely the kind of “backward causation” that the biologist wants to deny if use is made of the term ‘final causation’, but it is demanded by Feser’s theist presuppositions, for all of this is only mostly divorced from conscious mind or intelligence. In other words, we can examine the natural world as though it were not dependent on mind or intelligence, but this is only an expedient for heuristic reasons, for the truth is, when you really understand Aristotle and Aquinas, that there has been a supervising intelligence all along, and there must be, since if there were not, we would not be able to make sense of anything.
And now, since this particular conversation cannot monopolise my attention, I must bid you farewell. Try out your theist assumptions on someone else.
Eric:
>> This is obviously fallacious, sine the fact that Darwin felt the need of this perspective does not mean that it is impossible to eliminate Aristotelian teleology from Darwinian explanations (unless you are restricting ‘Darwinian’ to Darwin himself),
Fair enough.
>> and this fallacy suggests to me that you have an ulterior motive for trying to mislead this conversation, by, for one thing, overloading your comments with responses, and then overloading responses with responses, until you can leave the field a victor, since we will simply get tired of responding to you.
No ulterior motive here. Trust me.
>> But the point of his whole argument is to show that not only does belief in a directing intelligence follow from Aristotle’s (and Aquinas’) premises, but that, without the exsistence of God nothing is intelligible. So there is, in fact must be, a mind supervising the whole process, otherwise it could all be explained by efficient causality, and this is precisely what he is denying.
But that is a separate issue. Do you have to deny that reason is effective in order to forestall any possible inference to a divine creator? I think that one of Feser’s points, which I find to be a fair one, is that sometimes materialists and naturalists will avoid reasonable positions, because they worry that adopting those positions opens the possibility of a religious conclusion, even if such a rejection actually results in a number of philosophical paradoxes and puzzles. So, I see no need to reject Aristotelian teleology out of the worry that it may be used to infer the existence of God. Again, that is a separate issue.
I personally believe that one can embrace Aristotelian teleology and be an atheist, which means that I do not find the teleological argument compelling at all, especially since it relies upon an analogy between human intelligence and divine intelligence, which just begs the question.
>> So, when evolution speaks of function, we can simply say that evolution only has to do with efficient causation, and has no right to the idea of function. Why not? Well, because, as Feser says at the outset, function (final cause) and evolution (efficient cause) are distinct forms of causation. This is assertion, not argument, and to the extent that he thinks he has performed a reductio, it was there in his beginning assumptions.
But Feser does provide an argument against the idea that efficient causation makes sense without final causation. Efficient causation is always in a specific direction. A ball hitting another ball has only a single outcome that the interaction is directed towards. Telos is intrinsically related to the possible causal outcomes of various interactions in the world. To say that one can have efficient causation without final causation is to say that one can have a causal relationship without any specific outcome. I think that he is correct that this is incoherent, because means and ends are joined at the hip.
>> And notice, please the very important word ‘mostly’ in the quote that you take from page 70 — “… goal directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly [my italics] divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence.”
And he is correct. After all, human artisans utilize conscious intelligence to impose final causality upon their artifacts. And remember, if he was saying that accepting Aristotelian teleology necessarily implied a divine intellect, then he would not say “mostly”, but rather “all”. That indicates to me that he recognizes that these are two distinct issues, and that all he has established at this point is that teleology is a reality, and not an unreal imposition of the human mind. It would take a further series of arguments to bring God into the equation.
>> In a moment he will say: “For it is only [my italics again] because a thing has a certain end or final cause that it has the form that it has …” This is precisely the kind of “backward causation” that the biologist wants to deny if use is made of the term ‘final causation’
Yup. And that is precisely one of the moves that I object to, because it confuses “cause” with “explanation”. A cause must precede an effect, but an explanation can either precede or follow an effect. A final cause would be an explanation that follows the effect, or is simultaneous with it. God gets dragged into the equation when a paradox is postulated where it is allegedly impossible for a final cause to be present at the beginning of a causal sequence. This move only gets off the ground via equivocation.
>> but this is only an expedient for heuristic reasons, for the truth is, when you really understand Aristotle and Aquinas, that there has been a supervising intelligence all along, and there must be, since if there were not, we would not be able to make sense of anything.
But a theist can make the same argument against the atheist when they say that ONLY natural explanations can be admitted into any discussion of God, which automatically loads the conversation on the naturalist’s turf.
>> And now, since this particular conversation cannot monoplise my attention, I must bid you farewell. Try out your theist assumptions on someone else.
Thanks for the conversation, but I do not have theist assumptions. I am a card-carrying liberal atheist.
Anyway, take care.
Michael:
Yup. I think he is wrong about there being a single end to human sexual activity. It is a complex activity with a number of possible outcomes and purposes. I find it difficult, if not impossible, to identify that underlying and single purpose of something this complex.
Your response — almost here before I had finished my last response — came in just before I left, so I will just respond to one thing. You say:
But the atheist doesn’t say that only natural explanations can be admitted. What the atheist says is that evidence is necessary. So far as I know, all the arguments which purport to prove the existence of God by metaphysical argument presuppose the ontological argument. Besides that, there is no evidence, not because evidence of a non-natural kind is ruled out by definition, but because no one has provided any. All the claims yet made — about Jesus’ resurrection, the supposed miracle of the Qu’ran, etc. — are perfectly explicable in natural terms. Indeed, the scientific study of religion has given adequate explanation of religious beliefs. Without overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we must assume that religion and religious belief are the result of natural processes. And this is where Feser’s absurdities about evolution come into play, because we can talk about the function of religion in evolutionary terms, but it is hard to say that it has some specific final cause or purpose. Feser asserts that final causation cannot be eliminated, but in effect this is just what theory of religion does, and the functions of religion in evolutionary terms can be discerned by distinguishing the different systems that it hijacks. So means and ends are not joined at the hip, which, in any case, you have already acknowledged in what you say about sex. If means and ends are joined at the hip, then, as Feser assumes, there is just one end towards which sex is the final cause, but, since sex can actually perform many functions, means and ends are distinguishable, and do not follow each other with the kind of logical inevitability that Feser assumes. For, by Feser’s reasoning, it should be impossible to distinguish, on the basis of evolution, the different functions that sex or religion serve.
Eric:
Thanks for the response. I do appreciate the back and forth, especially given the constraints upon your time.
Agreed.
Just because efficient causes can have multiple possible outcomes, and thus multiple purposes, goals or ends, does not mean that efficient causes have no final causes at all. That would be like saying that because the roll of a dice has lots of influences upon it, therefore it has no influences upon it.
All I was trying to say it that efficient causation requires final causation, because without some directedness to the efficient cause, its outcome becomes random and chaotic, which is not what we observe at all. After all, you never see two billiard balls strike, and a rabbit appears. You see a fairly limited range of possible outcomes, which I would call the final causes of the interaction.
So, I think that means and ends, like efficient and final causation, are joined at the hip, but that a single efficient cause may have many possible outcomes and purposes, and we may be unable to decide which of the possible outcomes is the single underlying one.
Yes, I must enjoy to-and-fro-ing as well, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken a peek when I was doing something quite different.
However, once you say this –
– you are effectively backing away from Feser’s position, for, according to Feser, it is impossible to discern separate functions (final causes), on the basis of evolution, which he assumes (asserts), but does not show, is supposed to eliminate final causes and reduce them to efficient causation. I just think he is stumbling over the Aristotelian terminology. However, what Darwin’s theory shows is that purely material processes can have, in the sense required, final causes, and that they are, in a sense, reducible to what Feser is calling efficient causes (material processes), for there is no way that Feser will acknowledge that material processes can be in any appropriate sense directed, which is precisely what Darwin showed was possible. So of course Feser must support John Paul’s position that the “actual existence of the rational soul itself would have to come from outside the evolutionary process” (131) — which is simply to subvert the evolutionary project, which, in the event, he believes he can reduce to absurdity in any case.
Actually, this discussion has helped me to see that I did not see as clearly as I might have what Feser is trying to do, and it is, effectively, a ploy to get final causes back on the table in the very strong Platonic sense. For it is in fact clear that, if the end process of a process is an X, then the potentiality for that X was present in the causal processes bringing it about. But this is act and potentiality in a purely material process governed by laws.
However, it is important to remember the weight that Feser wants to put on the ideas of form and potentiality, when he says, for example, that
This is the meaning of final causality for Feser, and it pointless to deny it, even though it made no sense at all to suggest that rationality was present in potentiality in that brain-dead woman. On the very next page (131), he says:
I’m not sure how these material operations are relied upon in an indirect way in exercising rationality, and this seems to me to be in direct conflict with what he says about Terri Schaivo, because the matter in question, with regard to Terri, was not complex enough to sustain those material operations. Nor, I would add, has Feser shown that mental operations are not cerebral processes, or dependent on them. But that is another long story, and I really must restrain myself.
Eric:
I may be missing something, but I don’t think so.
Feser makes two claims, which are supposed to lead to a contradiction for the Darwinist.
First, he says that evolution by natural selection is permeated by teleological concepts, such as “function”, for example. He says that “contemporary Darwinists … constantly help themselves to teleological language in describing and explaining the phenomena with which they have to deal, and no one denies that it would be impossible for them to carry on their researches without it” (p. 248).
Second, he says that Darwinian thinkers claim that teleology is an illusion, because they reject final causality as a relic of Aristotelian thinking that was left behind in the Enlightenment.
The contradiction is supposed to occur between the fact that evolution necessarily involves teleological concepts to be even minimally coherent, and the fact that evolution supposedly banished teleology as completely unnecessary and outdated. That is why there is so much effort to explain function in terms of non-teleological formulations. Otherwise, what is the point of such efforts at all?
So, it is not that he says that it is impossible to discern teleology on the basis of evolution, but rather that it is utterly impossible to avoid using teleological concepts without being utterly incoherent. Of the two possibilities, teleology is real or teleology is illusory, he squarely plants himself in the former. “the biological presuppositions of natural selection unavoidably include teleological phenomena of the sort Darwin was supposed to have banished” (p. 255).
Feser explicitly states that material processes are directed by virtue of their final causes. He actually argues that it is inconceivable for them to occur without any goal or end, and so I’m not too sure where you are getting your idea from. Perhaps you think that when Feser writes about teleology, he necessarily must be talking about conscious and intentional direction of physical processes. That is his ultimate conclusion, but not his initial position, which actually seems closer to your own.
Again, you both seem to agree that there are final causes in nature, “in the sense required”. Feser’s sense is: “goal-directedness, purposiveness, something’s pointing toward an end beyond itself” (p. 69). He even agrees that the majority of such processes are unconscious and do not involve a guiding intelligence (p. 70). If you agree that these are present in all physical processes, then you end up agreeing with Feser after all. You may disagree with what he argues are the implications of this position, but the position is pretty clearly identical to yours.
Needless to say, I disagree with his position here. I think it is more plausible that the alleged immaterial processes of the human mind are emergent phenomena from the neurobiology of the brain, instead of being a separate ontological category from the natural world that somehow interacts with it. The former possibility also happens to be entirely consistent with evolutionary theory, which is always a bonus.
I don’t think that Feser is endorsing any type of Platonism. He clearly prefers Aristotle to Plato (see pp. 50-51). But you are right that he is arguing in support of the innate presence of teleology in the physical world, and against the modern framework that only allows material and efficient causes, ignoring formal and final causes altogether. Certainly, he wants to use this position as a staging ground to build a series of arguments to justify classical theism, and Catholicism in particular, but I can agree with the staging ground while rejecting the theist edifice built on top of it. In that respect, I agree with you that “this is act and potentiality in a purely material process governed by laws”. Feser would also agree with this claim, but would likely add arguments to say that the entire process is ontologically supported by God. But that is a separate issue.
All excellent points.
I like long stories! And I think restraint is highly overrated.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion. Take care.
Agreed on golf!
Addressing the individual arguments, as if the whole is less than the sum of the parts, misses the point of “The Last Superstition” – a point that a “serious” theological mind that “knows its onions” should have recognised at once.
The point of TLS was not to appeal to history or to tradition.
Dr Feser did not present isolated arguments, but rather an entire philosophical tradition. Now one may not be convinced by that tradition. I’m not sure that I can but into it (though I can learn from it). But what Dr Feser established (and he is dependent on a wide range of scholarship) is that the the early modern philosopher’s did not decisively refute scholasticism. The “modern mind” (a mechanistic view of nature and a rejection of ethical tradition) was not the inevitable result of intellectual progress. So the intellectual patterns that make atheism seem plausible are the contingent outcome of centuries of debate. And the intellectual fashions that make atheism popular have no intellectual force. So the moral and intellectual certainty of the New Atheists is unwarranted. A litlle historical sense goes a long way.
A second, neglected, observation made by Dr Feser is that God held a crucial place in the systems of the early modern philosophers. God’s existence kept scepticism at bay. God “coordinated” the world of the subjective phenomenal states and objective, mathematically quantifiable manner. This point was made several decades ago by Robert Adams in the famous article “Flavours, Colours and God”. In Locke’s philosophy God guaranteed human dignity and human rights. So here is a more subtle and powerful case for God’s existence.If the atheists rejects scholasticism he will find that he can only make sense of the world if he assumes, or presupposes, a religious worldview. In fact, although this fact sails over the head of internet infidels, Alvin Plantinga has pursued this very project over the last few decades. Atheism is, on Plantinga’s view, without foundation, and unable to make sense of mind, morality or knowledge.
Finally, you ignore that Dr Feser’s work is a popularisation. The views expressed are not idiosyncratic to Dr Feser, and they are not the ponderings of a few isolated Dominicans sheltering from the modern world in catacombs beneath the Vatican. For example Dr Feser references the New Essentialism and McIntyre’s seminal work on ethics, as well as analytic philosophy of Religion’s new interest in Aquinas. Specialists across a spectrum of philosophical disciplines are rediscovering old ideas about ethics, metaphysics and religion, and are producing interesting research.
I am aware that this does not settle the case for Theism one way or another. But the point of “TLS” was, primarily, to undermine new atheisms smug sense of intellectual and moral superiority. I’m afraid that this crude and shallow approach to the issues was evident in your previous post on “TLS”.
Graham Veale
Ah, yes, Feser’s book is a popularisation and mine is a blog post, so I should have taken more time to address myself to the whole of Feser’s argument, which is an historical one, and not have bothered with individual arguments. But my first point was to say that history is not an argument, despite Feser’s having made it into one by treating of a whole tradition which, in fact, he thinks was interrupted by the modern age, but not significantly affected by it. In other words, as MacIntyre says in After Virtue in a roundabout way, if not directly, the whole of modern ethics was a mistake, and if we had stuck with Aquinas and Aristotle we’d be farther ahead now than we are. And while I think that MacIntyre’s resurrection of the Aristotelian idea of virtues is a real contribution to ethics, I cannot see upending Locke and his concern for rights in the process, as I think MacIntyre would in fact do. But I did not miss or neglect this part of Feser’s position in TLS. I think it is simply a mistake to think that God’s regulative role in early modern philosophy and science is any more than a residual effect of the past, and that it’s a serious mistake to think that returning to the philosophical tradition in the way that Feser suggests can be anything more now than huge mistake. Feser keeps talking about the “secular” view of things. Well, if this is in any sense an appropriate use of the word ‘secular’, that’s precisely what science does: it dispenses with the god hypothesis, and runs quite well without it. Indeed, as Sean Carroll points out, most cosmologists are atheists. And scientists who are not atheists have the most awful time trying to make their religion consistent with their science. Why should this be, if in fact God is an essential part of the explanatory aparatus?
As for neglecting Feser’s point that God played an important role in the systems of the early modern philosophers, while I can understand the cultural function of the concept of God, for example, in Locke’s idea of the relationship between God and rights, and the regulative role that God may have played in early modern science, it is quite clear that by the 19th century God was being replaced by much more causal accounts of how order was achieved, as, for example, in Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is true that religion has enjoyed something of an intellectual resurgence in the last while, with MacIntyre, Plantinga, and the analytical interest in Aquinas (Geach, Anscombe, Kenny, etc.). I simply do not find any of this in the slightest interesting or compelling. I read Plantinga, on the few occasions on which I have done so, with a sense of disebelief. And I simply do not see the analytic interest in Aquinas. I was just reading Aquinas on marriage yesterday, and I wonder to myself how anyone can take him seriously — ie. whether marriage needs to be excused by means of certain goods. People tend to forget, when reading Aquinas, how completely foreign his world was to ours, a world in which it made sense, for example, to say that the heretic should be cut off from the world by death. Or how far away we are from Locke, who thinks that our being God’s property, while perhaps necessary at the time to get the idea of rights off the ground, has any bearing on the question of human rights.
I acknowledge, by the way, that in the particular post to which your comment is a reponse, I misunderstood a good part of Feser’s argument, as he was so kind to point out, which is why I went back at it again. So I agree with Feser in his comment that I missed the point of some of his argument. No problem there, so far as I am concerned. But there are several issues all tied up here. If Feser wanted to write a popular refutation of the new atheism, or any atheism, for that matter, since he does not really address himself to the new atheists specifically, then he needed to write a popular book, which did not bring in its train a whole lot of really extraneous detail. If he wants to make an argument that in fact materialism is false, and that we do need God in order to make sense of the material world, then he should not begin this process by trying to show — and I do not think he has been successful in showing — that, say, Dennett’s idea that the evolutionary process is an algorithmic process is somehow logically incoherent. Possibly, the fact that he has so much tied up in that last chapter, where he thinks he has vindicated Aristotle completely (than which it is hard to think of anything more quixotic), is what led to my misunderstandings in the first place. There is no point showing that Dennett’s or Millikan’s, for example, philosophy of biology are somehow incoherent. He must show — and I do not think that he does so — that physical processes cannot be alogrithmic, and must, therefore, point beyond themselves to God.
You say, for example, that “what Dr Feser established (and he is dependent on a wide range of scholarship) is that the the early modern philosopher’s did not decisively refute scholasticism.” No, they did not. Was this necessary? He hasn’t shown that “refuting” scholasticism — is any philosophy ever refuted in that definitive way? — is necessary in order for something else to be felt culturally necessary or important. As I say, history is not an argument, and someone would be hardpressed, I think, to show that it was simply a mistake to move on from scholasticism to other ways of looking at and understanding the world. But what Feser has not shown, though he purports to, is that scholasticism is necessary in order to understand science. I think that is a step too far.
That still does not grasp the substance of my complaints! I’m astonished, to be honest. You read Plantinga with disbelief. Should he be concerned? Why on earth would you mention that? What evidential force does that have? I argue that modern philosophical prejudices and assumptions should not be privileged just because they are modern. You argue that you just can’t take Plantinga seriously. Michael Tooley has managed to write an entire book with Plantinga in which he manages to make some substantial and interesting points. You might want to pick it up to see what the issues are.
My point about popularisation is that these are not Feser’s ideas. It seems established that the Early Modern’s did not hang on to God because God was culturally important, or due to some “residual effect of the past” (whatever that means).Take God out of Locke’s worldview and Locke’s basis for rights and tolerance disappears. It’s not at all controversial that the Early Modern philosophers made rather profound mistakes when criticising Scholasticism. These mistakes were pointed out at the time. And scholasticism was compatible with, and actually nourished, early science (James Hannam summarises this research in “God’s Philosophers).So we did not reject Scholasticism because it was obviously mistaken. Intellectual fashion played a part. That depends on social forces.
So the way we think today is not the result of intellectual progress. We cannot assume that technical mastery of the physical world (compatible with Theism and Scholasticism) means that modern metaphysical assumptions and fashions are intellectually superior to older views, So a little more intellectual humility on the part of “The New Atheists” is in order. (A substantial criticism with TLS could be that Feser’s put-downs, while very entertaining, do not gel with a book that argues that sophisticated world views should not be dismissed with soundbites. Whatever else we think about materialistic atheism, it is a sophisticated worldview. I’m not sure that “the New Atheists started it” is not much of a response.)
You don’t buy Theism – fair enough. Some of your arguments seem to depend on “we don’t take such ideas seriously in the modern world”. That’s not an argument. Acknowledge that, and we’re fine. Refuse to acknowledge that, and we end up arguing about taste.
Graham
I’m not quite sure what you want from me… a refutation of Plantinga? I have read bits and pieces of his work, and have found it quite hopelessly biased. His notion that the idea of God is properly basic seems to me to be silly, and simply imports his religious presuppositions into philosophy, as though they did not themselves have to be justified. Perhaps I misunderstand, but the whole “reformed epistemology”, based as it is so largely on individual religious experiences, while it may seem to justify fairly straightforward Christian beliefs, scarcely qualifies as philosophy, in my view. However, I am not going to write a “refutation” of his work. It simply, from what I have read, does not engage me. There is enough being written in philosophy alone to take up several lifetimes to read, so we must make our choices where and as we can, and Plantinga is not one of them. As to your scornful “should he be worried?” well …, let that be enough.
You say that these are not Feser’s ideas. Well, perhaps not, but they are identifiable as those of a very conservative Catholic, and I am not aware that these have as much space in the philosophical literature as you suggest. And as for this book being a popularisation of these ideas — quite the contrary. This is not a popularisation at all, since he keeps referring throughout to his other books, where we will really find out what it’s all about, but, trust me, this is as logically tight as it gets. The issue in the philosophy of biology that he addresses is a fairly marginal one, and is by no means settled, so why it should figure in a popularisation of contemporary scholasticism is beyond me.
As for intellectual progress. Yes, I do think we have progressed intellectually and socially from the horrid rule of the church. We have, as Kant said, put away our gängelwagen, and have removed ourselves from the tutelage of the church. I think a comparison of society in most Western democracies now with those same countries in the 16th or 17th century would convince any reasonable person that important advances in social morality and social order have occurred.
You suggest that Hannam’s book is a good basis for understanding the role of religion in early modern science. I doubt it. It is certainly meeting the criteria set by the new field of “Science and Religion” (which I think should be called “Religion and Science” since science as such need have no particular concern for the vagaries of religious belief), but these criteria are laid down largely by Christians, and the object of the game is to show that religion, specifically Christianity, coheres with science. I do not think that it does very well, though we can play jiggery-pokery with some theological ideas so that they look roughtly coherent with science. I notice that Hannam’s ideas have been sharply challenged by Charles Freeman, and I suspect that Freeman probably has the better of him, but that is not a deeply informed position. I read and reviewed Thomas Dixon’s Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, which you can find over at Butterflies and Wheels, but I was not impressed by it, and did not think that it really showed there was any considerable “field” here, aside, of course, from issues that can be dealt with by intellectual history, that need detain us long.
As for John Locke’s theory of human rights depending on the idea of God, I think it would be better to say that Locke simply couldn’t think of anything else, and that God is probably a place-holder for what Hume would later call the problem of turning ‘ises’ into ‘oughts’. Yes, there does seem to be a gap between our moral ideals and their ground, but religious morality, or natural law morality, is no better off, which is why the idea of natural law ethics is so incoherent as well as so cruel.
As I come to the end of this I’m not at all sure what the substance of your complaint was. Yes, the post you are commenting on is not a good one in many ways, which I now recognise, and, as Feser says, I should probably have slept on it first. However, it did get the conversation started, and that has helped me, but I can’t say for sure that I do understand what your complaints are, and if this doesn’t satisfy, then you are going to have to be much more clear.
Finally, I agree with you that Feser’s “put-downs” (as you call them) badly mar his book. If it behoves the new atheists to be modest, perhaps a little modesty from Feser might have shown them why. But when you begin by saying that anyone who disagrees with you is deeply irrational and immoral, then I think we have to worry that someione has jumped over the edge of his reason. Feser’s work is pompous and bad-spirited from start to finish, and I am afraid he got under my skin. I have had enough experience with pretentious twaddle from believers, and find it hard to take seriously someone who is so obviously unhinged in his attitude towards the world that he seems to imagine modern times is a cesspool in comparison with — what? — the high middle ages. He should go and live there. Is he really aware of what it was like to live in those times?
So the problem with the new atheists is they are just not humble enough? If they would just give a shout out to their theist forefathers, then all would be well with the world. And of course admitting that they are wrong about everything important. What It comes down to is there any evidence for gods and is there any need for them? Are they necessary for the world? That there are people like Plantinga, Tooley and Hannam who believe in gods doesn’t make it true. Authority is not an argument. How is theism compatible with science? What do these gods actually do and how do they do it? Even if we accepted scholasticism as a forerunner of science, does it mean we need to accept theism too?. Aquinas took a non-Christian philosophy from Aristotle and made it Christian – should Aquinas have rejected Greek gods? Are you claiming that Aquinas’ view was not superior to Aristotle’s – it was not a result of intellectual progress?
Eric
This is truly terrible. The idea that the History of Science is a field dominated by Christian theology is absurd. It betrays a lack of intellectual seriousness on your part. You note that Freeman criticised Hannam’s book, but neglect to mention Hannam’s detailed reply, in which Hannam demonstrated that he was not engaging in apologetics. Generally, critical reviews of Hannam’s work approved, or argued that Hannam didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t know already. This was the response of atheist and theist alike.
I also did not recognise the argument that you attribute to Dr Feser. I could recognise the issues that Dr Feser raises from Sterelny and Griffith’s “Sex and Death: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology”. Whether or not genetic information should be construed as causal or semantic is has a relevance outside the debate about ID. (For example, it plays a part in deciding whether or not we should prefer “gene selectionism” to other accounts.)
You end by asking “is he really aware of what it was like to live in those times?” Are you suggesting that you have some privileged insight? Are you suggesting that Feser would want to undo scientific advances, for example, or modern democracies?
Your treatment of Locke makes me want to weep. Can you let the man speak for himself? For the sake of novelty, if nothing else…
This is all very entertaining propaganda- rather like a good sermon actually – but I cannot see how you can pretend to be taking Feser seriously. You are not engaging with Feser at all, and you are not engaging with me. It is an act of intellectual responsibility on Jerry Coyne’s part.
Graham Veale
Sorry, it is an act of intellectual responsibilty to hand over a review of Fesers work to someone else, then report that their hatchet job has settled the matter.
Graham
Tooley is an atheist, Michael.
For the love of goodness, what a waste of time. Ken Ham’s more open minded.
So what – what does it change? An atheist wrote a book with a theist and the theist is correct?
This really is truly terrible, as you have not responded to one thing that I said. I did not, for example, say that the history of science is dominated by Christian theology. I suggested that the relatively new field of “Science and Religion” is so dominated, a very different thing The view you attribute to me on the basis of what I wrote is contemptible. And as for Hannam having responded to Freeman, Freeman responded to Hannam again. What is this about? Are we playing a game of name your authorities? Or is there something you want to discuss?
It’s nice that you recognised Sterelny and Griffith’s book. I am not sure what point you want to make by saying this. Feser doesn’t have a bibliography, and the name does not appear in the index, so, is this an “I’ve read this book and you haven’t” kind of sport? Since I had said that I realised that I had misunderstood some of Feser’s argument here, I am not sure why you think it appropriate to address me as though I thought my argument was still sound. However, on the broader issue of whether or not natural selection as a natural process is incohererent, while it has its challenges, I do not think that Feser makes his case. Can you tell me how he does?
My remark about “is he really aware … etc.” was simply an expression of frustration with the suggestion you made that there has been no intellectual progress, and Feser’s idea that we live in a moral cesspool. As for the question whether Feser would like to undo modern democracy. Yes, from what I have read of his book, I fancy that, like the pope, he would like to revise the functioning of democracy is fairly major ways. That is the impression I got from his slighting remark about giving everyone with a pulse the vote (didn’t note the page number, so if anyone knows where it is, I’d appreciate it), as well as his remarks about respect for authority. Respectworthy authorities seem to be thin on the ground just now, which makes it even more important that such respect not underlie our social arrangements. Democracy may not be the greatest system of social order, but it is the best one we know so far, and Feser’s writing gives me a definitely uneasy sense that he would be prepared to qualify democracy is serious, and I think, destructive ways. The religious intervention in politics generally aims at such ends.
As for my treatment of Locke making you want to weep… Well, what can I say? Is this supposed to be a response to what I said? After all, God does come into Locke’s philosophy as a kind of deus ex machina. The idea that we should not die by suicide because we are God’s property is weak at the knees. What sense does it make to suppose that we are the property of a god, however understood? Or that we can base our rights on such a proposition? And that “however understood” contains the major problem with any religious belief. Since there is no clear understanding of what God is, or how we could identify him, her or it — since there are gods and lords many — or what our relationship might actually be to such beings, how strong is this claim? It seems to me better, as in fact has happened, that we think of rights as having stronger grounds, though what grounds rights have is still under dispute. I suggested, and I think I am not far off the mark, that God in Locke’s moral philosophy in effect stood in for grounds that he otherwise did not know how to identify. If you think that contemptible, and if it makes you weep, and if you want me to let Locke speak for himself, that’s fine, but that’s what I said and what I think. I do not know why you should weep at that. In fact, this is an ad hominem remark, and unworthy of what you purport to be doing.
As for this being entertaining propaganda, I don’t think you find it in the slightest entertaining, and neither do I, but, since you speak so knowingly, I’m sure you can solve all my problems and I need do nothing but sit back and watch the magic. I still have no idea what your problem is, so perhaps we’ll just have to let it go.
I think what he wanted to say, Michael, is that if Michael Tooley the atheist takes Plantinga seriously enough to write a dialogue book with him that I should take Plantinga seriously too. However, having read bits of Plantinga, I am still not convinced, though the book may hold good things. One has to choose, and, unless there is a very compelling reason to choose this book, I won’t.
You meant irresponsibility perhaps? But this was not the post that Jerry Coyne referred to,.
It is still an argument from authority. I am sure I can find plenty of atheist philosophers who haven’t written a book with Plantinga and wouldn’t write one with him because they find his ideas uninteresting. What does it prove? If Graham can’t tell me why Plantinga is so compelling, then why would I bother reading the book. As you say Plantinga’s argument boils down to his God just has to exist. Also it is one thing to say modern science arose in a Christian culture, but it is entirely something else to claim it needed to arise in one.