Thanks to Jerry Coyne for the reference to the YouTube priest, Fr. Robert Barron. You can watch the whole of his “take-down” of the New Atheists here. It’s the old odd complaint. The New Atheists aren’t serious enough. We should be, as Jerry says, lugubrious, ready to blow ourselves away because life is so meaningless. After all, says the YouTube priest:
This is really a cock-and-bull story! We do have a longing for truth, justice, peace, love, meaning, purpose, etc. etc. — no doubt about that. But this is not pace Barron, a thirst for a god or a god like being. Certainly, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, used to feel a tension between their atheism and their search for meaning. Of course they did. Going without god is a relatively new thing, and belief in a god or gods is so deeply interwoven with the texture of a culture that it is hard to distinguish the one from the other. So, of course there was a tension, a serious concern about whether it was possible to retain the value of things while letting go of god or gods, in which value had been vested for so long.
As a consequence, the first people who began to take atheism, complete non-belief in god or gods, with deadly earnestness, not only felt the tension, but expressed it in their lives and in their writing. Seriousness was a problem. How could you be serious without god? That used to be a deeply felt problem, since seriousness itself was somehow all wrapped up in religious vestments. That’s why Robert Barron can come out with the nonsense represented by the short video clip above. And it is a nonsense, almost as nonsensical as it’s possible to be, a bit like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. That’s also why he misrepresents one of the most sceptical of the Jewish scriptures. He calls it “Qoheleth,” which is usually translated by the English word ‘preacher’ – though it is more familiar to most English speakers as the book of Ecclesiastes. For the writer of this piece of Wisdom literature, as it is commonly called, amongst which are usually included the Song of Songs, Proverbs, Job, and the Psalms (as well as the book of Sirach in what Protestants call the Apocrypha, since the Protestant Old Testament included only the books recognised in the Jewish canon of scripture, the Tanach) — life is ephemeral, and so are all the joys and accomplishments of life. The end of all, wise or foolish, is the same, namely, death. There is simply no sense, in the book of Ecclesiastes, that the writer recommends trusting in the Lord. Indeed, it is clear that he cannot ascribe eternal meaning to life at all. It all ends in death, regardless of the effort put into living life well. Of course, this is what he recommends, but part of wisdom is to live life as fully as it is given us to live. But, he says, there is a season for everything, for marriage, for peace, for war, for planting, for harvesting, for destroying things, for building things up. In the end, the only significance lies in the things themselves, and what meaning we can give to them. Barron’s claim that the preacher is a firm believer is nonsense. There is no sign that, for Qoheleth, there is any transcendent meaning to life. Life is what it is, and it comes as it comes, and we must live within the moment, and for the moment, because, in the end, as Wordsworth says in his poem on the French revolution, this is the only life we have, and the only place we will find our happiness, or not at all.
Indeed, Qoheleth was very much like the a New Atheist. He knew that this is the only life, and though, in the end, it would all come to nothing, while living it there are many opportunities for finding meaning and purpose. The important thing is to recognise how temporary and fleeting life is, so that we can make the most of the seasons of life as they come. Barron is a bit like Dylan Thomas, who, in his poem to his father, wanted to be blessed by his father’s fierce tears: “Curse, bless me now, with your fierce tears, I pray.” He wanted his father to tell him, I think, that life is important, that it has a value beyond its seeming. By striving against the dying of the light, his father would be showing him how valuable, how precious life is. But for the dying, life very quickly loses its value, and it is hard to see, at that point, that there really had been a point to all the “Sturm und Drang” of life. Indeed, at that point, for many people, faith itself is not important, and they wonder why they have spent so much time at it, when it is as hollow as life quickly comes to seem to have been.
The people that Barron wants the New Atheists to emulate are the existentialists, like Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. Camus expressed his sense of the seriousness of the existentialist decision in face of the meaninglessness of life, by asking the question (and suggesting that it is the only philosophical question) whether to commit suicide or not. This says Barron and Haught and Bentley Hart, and so many others, is what serious atheism is like. Roger Scruton gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, in 2010. The book that resulted is entitled The Face of God, and in it, he explores the question, as he puts it, of “what we lose, when we lose that belief,” namely, the belief in God. (1) Serious atheism, according to people like the YouTube priest, is like that. It takes the loss of god seriously, not only seeing it as a loss, but recognising it as in some sense a life transforming loss, as if we cannot live fully without either belief in a god or gods, or the recognition of the immensity of the loss that we endure if we do not believe in a god or gods. Putting it in terms of “a god or gods” has a tendency to short-circuit the problem, because most of those who think that we should take the loss seriously are those who cannot themselves imagine what it would be like to live without God (with a capital ‘g’). They think not believing would turn their lives upside down, and when people put placards on buses saying that there is probably no god, and that people should enjoy life, they think, with Barron and Hart and Eagleton and Ruse et hoc genus omne, that the New Atheist must be a shallow fool, not to recognise that they have, to use Nietzsche’s words, “swallowed up the sea.”
Of course, if you read someone like Richard Holloway, you’ll recognise that some people will feel a sense of loss, and sense of being hollowed out, from the inside, by the loss of faith. In his wonderful book about religion, Wings of Illusion, John Schumacher points out that, to a certain degree, religion is like a hypnotic drug, and that, without its aid, many people would not be able to face the fact that they will die, and be no more. And if faith has somehow defined life for you in this way, and touched everything you value, then doubtless there will be a sense of loss, and, for some people, a crippling sense of loss, so severe, sometimes, as to lead to despair. So, when people like Barron or Bentley Hart criticise the New Atheism for being unserious, they have in mind people like this. The loss of god is not so great for those who have never had very much invested in religious belief, nor should it have. It’s a way of saying that you can’t take life seriously without thinking about god. And that’s nonsense. This, of course, does not mean that it’s wrong to be serious about religious belief in this way, or to see your life, as an unbeliever, as somehow defined by rebellion against religious belief, as people like Nietzsche and Sartre and Camus, to a certain extent, certainly did. There were good cultural reasons for this residual emphasis on religious belief, and for seeing one’s life as an unbeliever as in some sense defined as a response to, and a determination to shape a meaningful life within the confines of the only life we will ever know. We can even feel a bit sorry for religious folk who put so much into religious belief, and sacrifice so much on its account, believing, as we do, that religious belief is a grand deception.
So this kind of seriousness is not a necessary feature of disbelief, though it is an aspect of disbelief for many of those who have, after years of belief, found themselves no longer able to believe. And they may, like Richard Holloway, feel not only a sense of loss, but also a sense that there are dimensions of religious belief that are not only still meaningful, but can contribute to the living of a meaningful life without belief in god. I think we need to acknowledge that there are as many ways of being unbelievers as there are ways of being believers, and allow that some people will find the dismissiveness of some atheists troubling and perhaps even unserious. But this is something that the New Atheism can take in its stride, for the whole point of the New Atheism is to steal the thunder of the religions, so that they cannot lord it over people in ways that they had become so accustomed to doing. New Atheism is not a belief system. It is an acknowledgement that, while some people still seem to need religion as a support for their own lives, they simply have no right to intrude their beliefs into the public space; and it is also a claim that those who now believe will find much more in life to celebrate if they can only give up their hopeless beliefs in non-existent beings who are thought to watch over us. It is an appeal to people to recognise their humanity, and, in recognising it, to leave divinity behind. We are created from animals, and, like animals, we only live for a time.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Coleridge Shelley – thank you for the correction TPP — of course, was referring to Ozymandias, King of Kings. But that is all that remains of god as well — a colossal wreck. Even many of those who believe now, will come to see that in the end.
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I agree that Fr. Robert Baron puts a positive spin on the atheism of Qoheleth, but he is right on target about Sartre being a more intelligent atheist than the New Atheists. In the following quote Sartre admits that human life is meaningless. He also doesn’t deny that God exists. He only says that the concept of God is contradictory. The concept of God is indeed contradictory, just as free will is contradictory. Free will is contradictory because we can’t explain or define what free will is. This is the quote:
“Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, New York: Washington Square Press, p. 784)
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That’s quite laughably simplistic. Difficult to count the number of inane fallacies contained in Barron’s video. I’m so happy being an atheist it’s ridiculous thank god.
I have some better quotes:
Jack Parlabane in Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning
Words by Lee Hays (1979) Music by Pete Seeger (1979)
David (#1): “he is right on target about Sartre being a more intelligent atheist than the New Atheists.” Well, no, he isn’t. Sartre’s philosophy is not so intelligent or profound either. But you’re missing the point. We can be intelligent, but intelligent in a new way, by not taking religion seriously, or agonising about its loss. The whole point of the New Atheism is to try living in a new way, without even the thought of god, and that’s more intelligent than foolish agonies over nothing, because it helps us to concentrate our attention where it belongs, right here in this life, right now where we are. Gods are all of them a distraction from life. That is the New Atheist insight, and it’s an important one.
I suppose the lives of all the dead species that have ever lived and ever will live were all pointless too? Wolfe might have thought Ecclesiastes the greatest bit of literature ever written. Seems to me it’s codswallop written by a nihilistic control freak.
Thank you! This needs to be pointed out more often.
Eric (#4). Does this mean New Atheists don’t believe our purpose in life is self-realization?
Barron’s claim that the preacher is a firm believer is nonsense. There is no sign that, for Qoheleth, there is any transcendent meaning to life.
Really? How’s this for a direct quote:
The sum of the matter, when all has been considered:
Fear G-d and keep His commandments, for that is man’s whole duty. (Kohelet 12:13)
I fail to see how it is more-intellectual to consider a proposition in an emotional state of dourness (if that’s a word). Why should “serious” be conflated with “sadness” or “unhappiness”?
I’m very serious about the things I study…but I don’t consider them to be a source of sadness or unhappiness. Far from it. I find it exhilerating, joyful, awesome (in the non-woo sense) to consider evidence, parse arguments, learn things. Nothing sad about that state of seriousness at all.
Nor (at least not since about the age of 13) have I considered my atheism a source of angst. It’s what it is. A reasoned conclusion that has not the slightest chance of being overturned except by the most extraordinary evidence.
I think it once again harkens back to the Christian-cultural notion that enjoying oneself at any endeavor is somehow improper.
I don’t know about Camus and Sartre… I don’t think much of them as philosophers, but these comparisons to Nietzsche always really bug me. Just for starters, ‘not measuring up to Nietzsche’ is like not measuring up to the Beatles, or to Shakespeare. So what?
But worse is the idea that Nietzsche typifies existential angst at the death of god. This is just a terrible, shallow reading of Nietzsche. The heart of Nietzsche’s critique is that the worst thing about christianity is its life denial and its glorification of suffering.
Translation: I would be really gloomy if I didn’t believe in God. You don’t believe in God. Therefore you ought to be really gloomy.
It’s pure projection.
Well due to a bad connection, I’ve now lost two posts. Oh well.
What I was going to write was that this is a red herring. It’s not god that leads to a crisis (in the believer’s mind) but the loss of Christian morality, which is obedience.
Eric, I’m charmed that you referenced my two very favorite poems in the world in one essay: “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Ozymandias.” But the latter was written by Percy Shelley, not Coleridge.
That bit of pedantry aside, I absolutely agree. There are good contextual reasons — and frankly, no few personal reasons — that figures like Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre saw and felt unbelief in the way they did. But theirs was only one perspective on unbelief, and hardly the only perspective, or the only “serious” perspective, or even necessarily a particularly wise perspective. (All of those men were smart, to be sure, but the evidence of their lives reveals none of them to be wise.)
R.W. (#8)
Two things. First, it is not at all clear that these are the Teacher’s words. In the context they seem like the voice of the one who is speaking about the Teacher. Second, it comes at the end, and there is simply no relationship between these words and the rest of the book. They cannot overturn the scepticism of the rest of the book.
…. TPP. Of course it was! I’m sorry to have misattributed one of my favourite poems too. I’m afraid I was never taken with Sartre, and found his Being and Nothingness largely trite, borrowed and boring.
It’s always Catholics putting forth the line that atheists ought to be sad, never thinking how happy we are not having to worry about sin. The emphasis on the meaning or purpose of life may be the explanation; they fail to consider that we don’t consider ourselves as instruments of God’s will. Not being tools, we don’t have a defined purpose, or for that matter a part number or a list price.
Asking “What is the meaning of life?” is at best like asking “What is the flavor of dinner?”
If I’d had to face up to the fact that I’m not going to live forever (Jehovah Witness belief) at the same time that I accepted evolution is true and god is an uncertainty at best, then I probably never would have accepted evolution or my doubts about gods existence. The stark realization came years later, out of the blue. I guess it took me that long to completely emerge from denial. A type of cognitive dissonance in reverse, you might say. Just my experience
“…without its aid, many people would not be able to face the fact that they will die, and be no more…”
You quote this as if it’s an established fact; but is there really evidence that anyone has succumbed to existential despair after embracing atheism? Even Nietzsche died of syphilis, not distress. Its accuracy would be greatly improved by the insertion of the words [THINK that] in the appropriate location.
About Ecclesiastes, I thought there was a rather wide agreement that the reverent quotations at the end were later comments added by a scribe shocked at the impiety of the original.
There was an interesting piece posted on Richarddawkins.net recently, which was an appearance of Sean Faircloth on the Catholic Church’s propaganda broadcast ‘Catholic Answers Live’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=USUlfbn-spE
Although it was broadcast a few months ago, it shows perfectly well just how Catholic propaganda works.
If we have to make our own subjective meaning in life, then presumably Fr. Barron is doing the same thing by his criticism of atheism? Or doesn’t it work like that? Apparently, everything is subjective except the idea that “everything is subjective”, which we are supposed to believe is objectively true. Which, of course, means that there does indeed exist objectively valid concepts. This just goes to show the total incoherence of atheistic naturalistic epistemology. It’s self-refuting.
This is clearly seen in the following comment from the article: “it is also a claim that those who now believe will find much more in life to celebrate if they can only give up their hopeless beliefs in non-existent beings who are thought to watch over us.” Soooo… everything is subjective except the confident and assured claim that so called “religious” beliefs are a load of rubbish!
It seems that Mr MacDonald wants to have it both ways. How very existentialist.
Al G. Don’t get your point. I think it is pretty clear that there is no evidence for the existence of gods — good objective evidence, or at least the lack of any compelling reason (evidence) for belief. Thus, not subjective at all. So far as subjective meaning goes. We each are certainly responsible for giving our lives meaning. There is no overarching meaning that applies to everyone, though there are many things held in common as to what makes for a good life. Nor was I, as you seem to suggest, answering any questions about the good life. I was just suggesting that there is no basis for supposing that religion has the secret. So, no, I don’t want to have it both ways. You’re not reading carefully.
Michael Newsham. While I haven’t read a commentary on Ecclesiastes recently, it seems to me quite clear on reading them that the last few verses are written by someone who is conveying the sceptical message of the Preacher or Teacher to us. He thinks that obeying the commandments is the sum of our duty. I don’t think these words belong to the Teacher, as you suggest.
corio,
“It’s pure projection.”
That was my impression while watching the video.
What he is not doing is putting himself in the shoes of an athiest. He simply could not do so because he is so wrapped up his religion. On the other hand, most atheists have been where he is and can make the comparison from their own experiences of both being religious and non-religious.
I am one of these people and I felt completely liberated when I realised that the catholic religion into which I was born was bunk.
I think Fr. Barron missed the important point that those atheist philosophers he admires lived in societies where one still had to think oneself into atheism – it was necessary to justify a rejection of god and rationalise the loss of that which such a belief was assumed to provide.
That’s simply not the case today. Those who are raised with little or no belief have no need to justify or rationalise that absence. I don’t need to look into my own atheism because my own atheism is my default state and all I have ever known. So I’m coming at the question of God’s existence from completely the opposite direction from Fr. Barron. For him, as for his “serious atheists”, God is the starting point of the discussion and disbelief a proposition to be considered. For me, God is the proposition.
@Zedeeyen
The question you should consider before considering the existence of God is this: What is a human being?
Zedeeyen is correct. The only people who are going to feel an existential crisis are conservative and obedient in outlook. Realziing there is no master for them to obey, they’re thrown into the wilderness of freedom.
David (#24). Since religious anthropology usually follows from, and does not precede belief in god, asking the question “What is a human being?” will scarcely help a consideration of the existence of god. Anyway, we have a fairly good idea of what human beings are. We are animals which have come to be the way we are through the process of evolution by natural selection, and while our complex brains give us abilities which other animals do not possess, other animals possess abilities which we do not. For instance, our ability to smell is far inferior to that of dogs, and our sight is less acute than that of hawks and eagles. Reflexive consciousness has given human beings the capability of thinking about themselves, and being able to think of themselves from a point outside of themselves (as it were) — what Thomas Nagel calls the view from nowhere. And this complicates things considerably. What it has enabled us to do, however, is to think of the world as something “out there”, existing independently from us. The only confidently objective knowledge of the world out there is given to us be science. Everything else is deeply touched by bias. That doesn’t mean that science is not also touched by bias. Of course it is, that’s why we need so many checks, from so many points of view, to make sure that we are all talking about something that can be confidently claimed to exist. The problem with religious knowledge of the kind that you purvey is that there simply is no view from nowhere in order to check and recheck conclusions about our religious believing, so that, in the end, it comes down to authority plain and simple. If religious people would be content to start with the human being as a product of evolution, and then build from there, it seems very unlikely that they would come to religious conclusions. In debates about religious belief, religious believers come with the presupposition that god exists. The question is: If we lost our religious beliefs suddenly, overnight, as it were, and woke up the next morning without any, at what point (and why) would we begin to believe that we are sinful creatures in need of redemption? That’s the real anthropological test, and I suspect that that is a starting point that religious people would be unwilling to accept. Science, however, could give good answers to questions about our knowledge of the world, and why, for example, it is good to know about the natural mechanisms behind our being here, and having the characteristics that we do.
I will admit to a certain amount of existential angst right after I decided the Bible was an unreliable source and chucked it out, but it did not take too long for me to look up and realize that very little had in fact changed. The things I thought I had lost were never there to begin with.
I have to agree with those who call this idea out as a scare tactic to frighten believers away from questioning. Everyone who is not possessed of a god belief can only smirk as they are told they are not nearly as sad as they ought to be.
It struck me how similar Mr Barron’s argument is to the ‘Richard Dawkins doesn’t know enough thelogy to write a sensible book about God’ argument.
It’s almost a gnostic claim – “you don’t know our secret knowledge so you must be unserious/ignorant/not a nice person” etc. Damn cheek.
Its like John Haught saying only if you want to believe in a god will you experience the transcendence that will make you believe in a god – if unbelievers only put themselves in the right frame of mind, then they to would believe. I remember going to religious events in my youth and seeing others claim “transcendent” experiences and wondering why I never did. In those days, it wasn’t for a lack of effort; religion was something my family did – alot. I seriously thought for a long time that something was wrong with me.
My considered judgment based upon the evidence is that “reflective consciousness” is a mystery. How we can transcend ourselves and make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge is a mystery. I agree with Nagel that it is a “view from nowhere.”
Your characterization of this as a “religious judgment” reveals the bias that causes us to disagree about the evidence. The formulation of the mysteriousness of the human mind is that humans are embodied spirits. Also, one might say the human soul is spiritual. Another formulation is that humans are indefinabilites that become conscious of their own existence.
David, It is only a mystery because you want it to be a mystery; it is necessary to maintain your religious belief. Wishful thinking is not evidence.
David, you say: “My considered judgment based upon the evidence is that “reflective consciousness” is a mystery.” Well, what does it mean to say that in your considered judgement” or in your considered judgement reflexiveness (not reflective) is a mystery. A view from nowhere doesn’t so much make it a mystery, as to place the point of view outside of oneself. But once I can think about myself, and distinguish myself from other selves, of course I will be able own self as a self among other selves. What’s so mysterious about that? It’s no more mysterious than consciousness itself, but why should we simply stop at mystery? This is something to investigate, or to seek to understand, but calling it a mystery is simply to give up, and you haven’t given any reason why we should do that. Indeed, a great deal is now known about consciousness. You seem to want to give up and provide room for your goddy beliefs, but there’s no reason to do so. It’s just a cop out.
Thank you, Michael. Our comments crossed. I just take longer to say it.
@Eric
What is known about consciousness, asking questions, reflective judgment, and free will? We know alot about science because the scienfiic method always works. It is irrational to give up on scientific questions by calling them mysteries. But the mind-body problem is not a scientific question. It doesn’t come from our senses, it comes from “nowhere,” to quote Nagel.
What does it mean to…’have evidence that something is a mystery?’ If you replace ‘reflexive consciousness’ with ‘photosynthesis’ for example. You have to have some cheese to put on the table before you start disagreeing about what sort of cheese it is.
Well, David, have you read Nagel? Nagel thinks that the connexion between mind and body is too intimate for dualism to be true. And, of course, you are left with that problem too, the one that Descartes failed so completely to solve. If mind and body are two separate entities, it would make no sense, as became clear when Wilder Penfield was probing people’s brains (during surgery for epilepsy), why specific regions of the brain were associated with certain functions. The epilepsy surgery consisted in destroying cells in the brain where epilepsy originated. In order to minimise side-effects Penfield and his colleague Jasper would probe adjacent areas to see what effect probing them would have. Some patients (around 5%) reported vivid memory experiences. But if brain and mind are separate entities, how could physical stimulation produce responses that are not related to present sensory input?
In any event, if you are really interested in consciousness, a good introduction is Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: An Introduction or if you’re not up to something so complex, she has one in the Oxford Very Short Introductions series. Also interesting is her analysis of NDEs and OBEs in her book Dying to Live. But don’t give me mysterian nonsense. It is not that “we know a lot about science”, but that, by using scientific methods, we know a lot about the world, including ourselves. It’s all very nice to come here making statements of faith, but you realy have to do better than that.
Eric: You say you don’t get my point, but I am making a point about naturalistic epistemology, and whether there is such a thing as truly objective knowledge. You seem to think there is, and that it tells us that there is no evidence for the existence of God. That is actually a matter of opinion – an opinion with which I disagree, as does Fr. Barron. I would argue that there is copious evidence for the existence of a personal intelligent creator, but I guess it’s a matter of how evidence is interpreted, i.e. on what presuppositions. I find the naturalistic explanation for the emergence of human reason and ideation totally self-refuting. If reason and all human cognition and ideation is an emergent propery of natural selection, then it follows logically that it emerged for exactly the same reason as any physical property (in fact, in naturalism reason itself would have to be somehow “physical”). It would have to emerge as a mechanism that confers some kind of survival advantage. In other words, in this epistemology all ideas exist for purely utilitarian reasons, which, of course, tells us nothing about “truth” (after all, we know that some lies can be useful and can confer a survival advantage in certain situations). The only method of verification we would have is pragmatic: “does it work?” Then we would need to define what we mean by “work” in this context, and for what purpose. Thus a naturalistic origin for human reason and ideas has to be entirely subjective.
The naturalist then argues that only “science” provides us with objective knowledge, but this is total nonsense. The empirical scientific method cannot validate the idea that “all ideas should be verified empirically”. That idea itself cannot be verified by that method, in the same way that the claim of empiricism (all knowledge comes via sense perception) cannot be validated empirically. No scientific experiment or observation can exalt the role of science in this way. Furthermore, science relies on certain moral ideas, such as “why ought we to investigate the natural world?” Any “ought” concept cannot be derived from the “is” of nature. It’s an assumption.
So naturalistic epistemology is necessarily subjective. That is why your claim about theism cannot be objective by any rule of logic. And therefore your criticism of Fr. Barron is incoherent. Within your own epistemology, he has as much right to call your views nonsense as you have to return the favour.
@sirlancallot
The evidence that the mind-body problem is a mystery is that all the other attempts to explain it have hardly any evidence at all: dualism, materialism, idealism. Also, even though I haven’t read Susan Blackmore’s book, I would bet $25.00 that there is no reference in that book to the metaphysical answer to the mind-body problem: it is a mystery. This is the answer judged to be true by Catholic philosophers.
@Al G.
I think you are confusing philosophical naturalism with methodological naturalism. Which pretty much breaks your chain of logic.
Science, as methodological naturalism, uses naturalism as an axiom. It doesn’t need to validate the axioms to work, only change them if they don’t work. This is how mathematics works too. And garage mechanics. And anyone who relies on repeatable processes that produce coherent results.
The other area where you need to refine your logic is where you claim that a naturalistic origin for human reason and ideas has to be subjective. Does photosynthesis have a natural origin? Does the Krebs Cycle have a natural origin? Why should animal cognition be any different? That you put a special value on ‘ideas’ is your subjective choice, but the mechanism that produces them is natural.
Where have the apologists come from?
Just because something is “mysterious” it does not follow that is the work of a god.
A theory that makes successful predictions is not “just an opinion” the same way a theory that makes no predictions is. Science may not have absolutely objective answers, but it does a heck of a lot better than wild assertions about things that can never be verified.
I doubt there is anyone here who has not heard the arguments for god put forth in these comments. Spend your time elsewhere, you will gain no converts here.
The apologists are here to improve their rhetorical technique guys, they’re not here to learn any truths.
@ David
What is the evidence that there is a mind/body problem?
Saying whatever catholic philosophers judge to be true, or what is your ‘considered judgement’, doesn’t put the cheese on the table. It just smells of appeals to authority.
You have to show that qualia have a non physical substrate and provide a mechanism by which the non physical can interact with the physical.
@sirlancsallot
Humans have a drive to know and understand everything. When animals have nothing to do they go to sleep. When humans have nothing to do they may ask questions. One of the questions humans ask is : What is the relationship between myself and my body?
The fact that Catholic philosphers say that the answer is a mystery proves that it is a theory or solution to the question. If your response to this theory is that there is no evidence, then either you have bad judgment or Catholics have bad judgment.
But the fact is that most atheists are unaware of this solution. All they understand is dualism and materialism. They correctly see that there is no evidence for dualism, but they can’t see how little evidence there is for materialism. The only evidence for materialism is that atoms and molecules exist.
“What is the relationship between myself and my body?” It’s to be hoped that it’s a close and loving relationship. Be kind to your ass, for it must bear you. Take care of your knees as well. And your feet. Brush your teeth, and floss.
David: The fact that Catholic philosphers say that the answer is a mystery proves that it is a theory or solution to the question.
Actually David, it does nothing of the sort. All it does it demonstrate that Catholic Philosphers thing that the explanation is a mystery.
And since I’m not convinced that you’re accurately representing the Catholic position on this, your claim that “mystery” is the explanation becomes even more suspect.
And then we have the sorry state of your explanation – it’s not so much an explanation as an admission of ignorance. Yet you seem to want to promote this admission of ignorance as if it were the final word on the subject.
I’m sorry, but that just seems to be nonsense
David: The only evidence for materialism is that atoms and molecules exist.
Actually, it goes a little further than that – basically everything that has an actual explanation requires little more than “atoms and molecules”.
Claiming, as you are, that because we don’t have a complete explanation for X, X must be a mystery which has and can have no explanation, is more nonsense. It becomes even more nonsensical when we realise that many parts of X actually do have partial explanations (in the case of the mind – we have various mechanisms of memory, information processing, emotions, all backed up by reference to brain processes and brain processes alone).
How can admitting you don’t know the answer to a question be the answer to the question? Oh, I know — it’s a ‘mystery’.
It’s irksome that pragmatism is so little respected. The world is so well understood that barely discernible forces are described to extraordinary levels of precision, such that the role of supernatural influences can be simply dismissed. The means of this method of inquiry are available to anyone who chooses to use them, and its results are more robust and productive than than any means ever employed before.
It’s far from obvious that it requires some other sort of validation. Perhaps it’s like democracy, a mess, but preferable to any alternative – or equally, once you’ve had it, why would you want anything else?
Reason forms the foundation of the practical sciences and naturalism. It’s because there is a separation or gap between contemporary philosophy and science, rather than understanding them both as natural philosophy, that we’ve lost touch with natural philosophy.
@David
You’re saying that according to eminent lactosophers milk becomes cheese because it is stirred in the night by the invisible tiny fingers of incorporeal rennetons?
It’s doesn’t even get to theory status, never mind solution. You need a testable hypothesis for your theory. My bet is that you haven’t got one.
What you are doing is confusing mystery with property.
If qualia don’t have a physical substrate, then how does knowledge of them get into the brain cells so that you are able to type about them on the internet?
Oh, and please have the courtesy not to tell us what we do or don’t understand.
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@sirlancsallot
All hypotheses are testable because of the structure of the human mind. Humans make observations. Then humans ask questions about the cause of things they observe, the relationship between them, and the unity between them. At this level, humans invent answers. The next level is to marshal the evidence to decide whether the answer or educated guess is true. In science, humans perform controlled experiments.
What caused the Big Bang? One theory is that God did it, but there is no evidence supporting this. People who think God caused the Big Bang have poor judgment. That the testability of a theory determines whether a theory should be considered only works in science. It does not apply to questions that arise from our transcendence. That the human mind is a mystery can’t be tested, but it is the only theory supported by the evidence.
@David
Your comments perfectly illustrate the tragedy of religious faith. By presupposing mystery a thing becomes forever mysterious. If Louis Pasteur presupposed that infection was a mysterious action caused by demons then where would we be now?
I can perfectly model in my mind the working of an internal combustion engine or an electric circuit. Why can’t I model my own mind?
All that the theologians do at their looms is to weave thicker and heavier and more obscuring cloaks to cover what can be plainly seen if you just lift it and look.
@Kevin Alexander
What is your model of your mind? I can’t create a model of my mind.
But who decides what questions ‘arise from our transcendance’? And who decides what constitutes an ‘answer’? And what happens when theists disagree — as they always do — not only on the ‘answers’ but also on the ‘questions’?
Science exists and prospers because it is useful: it allows us to do things, and have things, that we couldn’t do or have without it. The day it stops working is the day we abandon it. And the day that supernatural ‘explanations’ START working — that is, they allow us to do things we couldn’t do before — is the day it will make sense to start believing in them.
@corio37
The questions that arise from our transcendence, that is our ability to make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge, fall into four areas:
1) Knowlege: What is knowing that this page is black and white? What are images?
2) Inquiry: What is causality? What is intelligibility? What are concepts? What are dreams? What is past and future?
3) Reflective judgment: What is truth?
4) Free will: What is the relationship between ourselves and our bodies?
I’m curious as to the properties of the yardstick that distinguishes good from poor judgement.
@sirlancsallot
People admit that have bad memories, but no one admits they have bad judgment.
Take, for example, the theory that free will is an illusion. There is very little evidence for this. People who think this is true have bad judgment because of the large number of people who think humans have free will.
If Mr. Atheist thinks free will is an illusion, I can go to all of his friends and familly and explain why he has bad judgment. His friends and family will say, yes, we know that about him. He has bad judgment.
@David
I can describe a model internal combustion engine in a few paragraphs. The model of my mind would take volumes and others have described it better than I can.
Start with some V S Ramachandran. Steven Pinker does agood job too.
Well, most of these arise from the misuse of language which arises from an over-simplistic worldview, and the correct answer to most of them is “lots of different things”. Asking ‘what are concepts?’ for instance, is like asking ‘what is the use of the English language?’, or ‘what are mountains for’? — it misses the point so spectacularly that it’s hard to even know where to begin to explain.
If you get your questions right you will generally find that the answers arise in due course. But if you ask incoherent questions you can’t really pretend to be surprised when you get incoherent ‘answers’.
@corio37
What is incoherent about the question: What is a concept? and What is an image? You just don’t like to think about this type of question.
@56
Srsly? R U just having a laugh here?
Oh…ok….I get it:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thecommission/2011/09/16/the-condition-of-the-church
My ‘considered judgement’ from that is that you are just here to dispel our ignorance, not to explore what may or may not be true. You already have a fixed viewpoint and you are here to proelytise. Is that poor judgement?
@David,
What is a question ?
What is a mystery ?
@sirlancsallot
I must say that the spoken DR comes across as even crazier than the written one, if that’s possible. The only part of that broadcast that made sense was the Purina cat chow commercial at the beginning.
@steve oberski
A question is something humans ask and animals don’t. A mystery is a question without an answer. Example: What is a question?
Thanks for the link, Clod, to DR’s radio interview. The beginning, I’m afraid was enough to put me off. ‘Abortion and euthanasia are wrong because life is good and meaningful!’ Give me strength! This is as stupid as Aquinas’ claim that suicide is contrary to a law of nature, for all living things strive to preserve themselves in life. Not true, as a matter of fact. Suicide is a perennial and distinctive aspect of being human. Not that other animals will not die protecting their kin, but only humans decide to take their own lives and die by suicide. Life is not always good and meaningful, and to suggest that this is a universal truth is simply crazy. Anyone can describe situations in which they would find it intolerable to live — that is, if they have any imagination of compassion at all — which religious people often lack.
David, let’s get serious, shall we? ‘What is a question?’ is not a mystery.Here, for example, is the dictionary.com answer to that question:
You are welcome to comment here, but do at least try to make sense.
Shame on you Eric! It was the apex of coherent logical discourse! Tch!
@ Eric
You finally answered my question about whether our purpose in life is “self-realization.” You apparently don’t think this is our purpose in life.
According to all religions, our purpose in life is to serve God in this world inorder to be with Him in the next. Hindus and Budhists have a different terminology for the transcendent reality we call God in the west. The alternative theory is that life has no meaning. The way Sarte puts it is the “man is a useless passion.” We finally found something we agree about.
Just because you keep repeating this doesn’t mean it is true. It is not god(s) = meaning; no god(s) = no meaning. We make our own meaning with or without belief in god(s). The god-stuff is just post-hoc rationalization.
Not only are your conclusions dependent on the existence of god(s), they are also based on an utterly simplistic understanding of biology which only makes sense if humans are fundamentally different than other animals. They aren’t; all the same building blocks are in other animals that are in humans. It is much more likely that anything humans can do, at least some other animals can also do. If humans have consciousness and free will, then likely there are animals that do also. New scientific findings bring humans and animals closer and closer together.
Let me ask this question, if a human is unconscious – either due to a birth defect or an injury or old age, do they lose their “souls?”
@Michael Fugate
You are quite right that the existence of an infinite being (God) and the belief that God revealed to us that our purpose in life is to get to Heaven depends on the idea that humans have spiritual souls. That humans have souls is a biological fact because evolution does not apply to the human mind. The following quote proves this:
“Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this statement, for whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue.” (Natural History, March 1997, 13th paragraph)
Gould’s “private beliefs about souls” is probably that the soul is just an idea. Catholics, because of the indefinability of free will and conscious knowledge, consider the human soul to be spiritual.
@ Eric
The human mind is structed like the scientific method. At the lowest level is observations, which requires paying attention. Humans have a drive to understand what they observe so they ask questions, which requires intelligence. Asking questions can’t be defined because it means defining what you mean by the term “understand.” You can’t define “understanding” by looking it up in a dictionary. It is like trying to define “being” and “causality” by looking it up in the dictionary.
Another way of expressing the insight that humans are embodied spirits is by saying humans are indefinabilites that become conscious of their own existence. We can comprehend what a human being is because we know everything that a human does and every thing that happens to humans. But, we can’t explicate or define what a human being is.
If this is nonsense to you it is because you have a blind spot when it comes to religion.
David, blindness is the inability to see what is there. I have 20/20 but I still can’t be expected to see someone else’s hallucination.
John K.: “Spend your time elsewhere, you will gain no converts here.”
Oh dear. As the Queen of Hearts said, “Off with her head!” (or “his head” in my case), at which point I take my leave of Wonderland, and leave the inhabitants to their “inter-subjectivity” (i.e. utilitarian self-reinforcing naturalistic and self-refuting epistemology).
Al G. I think you misunderstand still. You said:
If cognition, ideation and reason are emergent properties of natural selection, which doubtless they are — that is certainly the best explanation so far — it does not follow — indeed, given the nature of these capablities, it cannot follow — that they can be employed solely for the purpose of giving ourselves survival advantage. This they obviously do, because they have enabled humans to colonise practically any environment — though “water world” is some way off, I suspect! But they have enabled us to do so because, aside from adaptive advantage, they provide a good basis for affirming some things as objectively true about the world. This may be a perspectival thing — that is, only true from our particular persepctive on the world — but that is increasingly doubtful as we explore aspects of reality that are not limited by our senses. We use instruments to extend the reach of our senses, and so to see things, and know things, that are not simply subjective, since they pertain to things we cannot experience subjectively. Thus we can duplicate what bees see when they approach flowers, since their sight allows them to see into the ultraviolet end of the colour wavelength spectrum, whilst we cannot.
As for converts. That’s not what this blog is about, as such. However, approaching questions from a purely ideological point of view is unhelpful, because it is not allowing the evidence to lead you where it goes.
DR. When you say this:
I have no idea what you mean. And, indeed, I do not have a blind spot about religion. Indeed, I can see why religion is attractive to so many people, but I can no longer believe that religion approaches anywhere close to the truth about reality. Read someone like Richard Holloway on religion, and you can see both a fully developed religious imagination, but one that has been schooled to approach the more positive conclusions of religion with scepticism. Philip Kitcher’s “symmetry” argument is too powerful to continue believing, though it might allow people to use religion as a kind of psychological self-help tool. The symmetry argument is basically this. People believe what they are brought up believing. Most Muslims have been brought up in the faith, just like most Roman Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Zoroastrians (Parsees), Sikhs, etc. These religions are in conflict, and there is no way of resolving the conflicts between the various beliefs, and only a vanishingly small chance that one of them happens to be true. Thus, all religions are, in themselves, implausible hypotheses about a transcendent world. It might be possible, of course, to salvage something from the wreckage, like ways of life, and communities of support, but the beliefs themselves are now almost certainly only understandable as a form of wishful thinking.
Pot/kettle. The most dismaying aspect of the religious is their incapacity for humility, to simply say ‘I don’t know’. Closely followed by ubiquitous confirmation bias and pious back-slappery and closed mindedness. Atheists are open to the truth, whatever that may be. The same cannot be said for the religious who already know the answers and seem ever more desperate, in their holier than thou certainty, to force their beliefs on everyone else and to punish those who will not accept them or even have the temerity to question them….off with their head…..literally, or burn them, or stone them, or shun them, or put them in gaol…yeah, whatever…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/03/indonesia-atheists-religious-freedom-aan?INTCMP=SRCH
Eric says,
“If cognition, ideation and reason are emergent properties of natural selection, which doubtless they are — that is certainly the best explanation so far….”
In the first place, the human mind has four levels, not three: cognition (observations), ideation (asking questions and inventing explanations), reason (marshaling evidence and deciding whether an explanation is true), and free will (deciding what to do with our bodies).
The first step in getting an explanation of the human mind is to grasp or understand all possible explanations. You cannot say what the “best” explanation is unless you can grasp all of the other explanations. This is a list of five possible explanations in order of the amount of evidence. No. 1 has the least amount of evidence and No. 5 has the most: 1) The mind is something God created. 2) There is a spiritual substance in the brain (dualism). 3) The mind is an illusion (materialism). 4) The brain is an illusion (idealism), and 5) It is a mystery.
Most atheists don’t grasp the difference between # 1 and # 5. They see that there is more evidence for # 3 than for # 2, but they don’t see that there is more evidence for # 4 than for # 3.
Eric, do you not think that reason is a by-product of language or culture and not evolution?
5) It is a mystery. Then what?
@ sirlancallot and Egbret
Since the human mind is a mystery, a human being is one too. But other humans exist, so humans are finite beings. Assuming or hoping that the universe is intelligible, an infinite being must also exist.
Human language means that humans can create and understand an infinite number of sentences. It is a product of the human mind.
The human mind is a mystery therefore god therefore no mystery?
@sirlancsallot
There is still a mystery: What motivated an infinite being to create finite beings?The only thing that could motivate God would be self-love. Thus, God loved Himself as giving. But God could just as well love Himself without giving. In the latter case, there would be no finite beings, only an infinite being.
But since god is a mystery, finite minds must be unintelligible and sentences can’t exist.
Self-love motivated the infinite to create the finite therefore no mystery. What makes god love himself?
Don’t feed the troll!
@sirancsallot
That is correct. Our minds are unintelligible to ourselves. However, the universe is intelligible because of the success of science and the scientific method. Also, we know the universe includes many human beings who are different from one another. So, finite beings exist, and the universe is intelligible.
A finite being is a composition of two principles: essence and existence. God is a pure act of existence. An infinite being must exist because a finite being needs a cause. If all beings in the universe needed a cause, the universe would not be intelligible.
We know that God loves by analogy. Human beings love and human beings exist. God exists, hence God loves. But what could God love? The only being God could love is Himself. But why did God create finite beings? The answer is that God loved himself as giving. In the case of humans, we like to express ourselves. But God could just as well love Himself without giving. Hence, the existence of finite beings is a mystery.
Sorry Egbert….just trying to understand.
I’m wondering if there’s a version of monism going on here a la spinoza?
Do NOT watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PyclBRebNW8#!
David. Time for preaching is over. Say something intelligible or say goodbye.
Al G says: “If reason and all human cognition and ideation is an emergent property of natural selection, then it follows logically that it … would HAVE TO emerge as a mechanism that confers some kind of survival advantage.”
This is patently false, and reflects a poor understanding of the ToE. But oh well.
And word to the wise: do not engage with David Roemer unless you wish to be led by the nose in ever-smaller circles.