Despite my repudiation of the claim, Jerry Coyne continues to argue that I think that there are “ways of knowing” other than science. I have said, and will say again, if it’s any use, that the locution ‘way(s) of knowing’ is not clear. The point of using it seems to be to rule out certain claims to know, or to be able to establish some things as items of knowledge, and others as mere subjective suppositions, but no one, so far at least, has proposed a definition of what a “way” of knowing might be. In fact, as earlier commenters have pointed out, we know all sorts of things which do not obviously come within the ambit of science, stretch the meaning of the word ‘science’ in whatever way you please. Indeed, the argument that knowledge is confined to what can be confirmed scientifically, broadly construed, is merely a way of settling the disagreement over scientism by fiat. Let’s take some of the uses of the word ‘know’ that Tim Martin Harris suggested some weeks (or is it already months!) ago: knowing how to ride a bike, knowing how to play an instrument, knowing a language, knowing someone (as against not knowing them), knowing a character in a novel or in a play, knowing what it is like to be in an accident, or to have the special knowledge that only those who have been there can have, of fighting in a battle, say, or knowing what it is like to live in poverty, or being told that you have only two weeks to live. It does not seem to me that any of these describe “ways” of knowing, a such, though each of them, in a reasonable sense, may be said to delimit spheres or items or realms of knowledge that are very different and to the achievement of which very different types of experience are necessary. And nothing very useful regarding the nature or the limits of knowledge have been determined once we have done this.

First of all, it seems to me, we must try to understand why it is that some people want to restrict knowledge to the scientific “way of knowing,” whatever that is, and so far no one has given a very satisfactory definition of why people want to make this restriction, and what making it accomplishes. This is especially true if the qualification is added about the scientific way of knowing, broadly construed. This looks very much like an effort simply to stretch the meaning of the word ‘science’ in such a way that any claim to know will automatically be entered under the column labelled “Science.” And the advantage of doing so is presumably that science, given the remarkable and admirable achievements of science over the last four centuries or so, gives a special “cachet” to the claim to know. Thus, when neuroscientists bruit about the claim to have detected, in the brain, the moment of decision — as in the famous experiments by Libet (and successors), which have been taken to prove that we make decisions before we become conscious of them — it is taken as settling, once and for all, the very contested philosophical issue of free will, even though there is as yet no reason to identify brain events as detected by neuroscientists with conscious decision making. What would support this much desiderated identification? So far, the answer to that question is unclear, which hasn’t detained neuroscientists for very long in their rush to judgement. It’s a bit like those neuroscientific experiments designed to locate the centre of spirituality in the brain, by using nuns as experimental subjects, because they, it is apparently assumed, are — if anyone is — more likely to be having religious experiences than others who do not wear their religion on their sleeve. The presuppositions underlying these assumptions are obvious, but I have yet to see a justification for making them. This is not, to be frank, much more reliable than taking individuals’ introspective accounts of their experiences as somehow above question, but so long as the label “Scientific” can be applied to the results, we are somehow lulled into the questionable belief that the results are more reliable than asking people what their experiences are like.

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This is just to assure readers that I have not simply abandoned you to discuss amongst yourselves. So many questions have been raised by my last two posts (including a post by Jerry Coyne in response), and I am involved in some things that I need to continue to do — which is why I abandoned choiceindying.com briefly — that I need to reflect upon these questions a bit more seriously. I have to say that I am not the odd man out in respect of the question of scientism, since this has been dealt with by a number of top flight philosophers, and I am not sure the point has been well understood. So, back to the drawing board on that question. We will see what comes out in due course. I do need to say a couple things about Jerry’s response. First, I did not say, nor do I say, that the new atheism has been a failure. This is an important qualification. That does not mean that new atheists are always right, however, and it is worthwhile being self-critical about its achievements as well as about its shortcomings. Another thing that I want to stress is that my characterisation of some arguments against religion in terms of “Such-and-so, ergo Jesus,” is not in any way addressed to Jerry, though, now that he mentions it, he has said comparable things before. But it has been such a widespread characterisation of religious argumentation — sometimes justly so characterised — that it was the form in which it came to me. We can be too simplistic in our responses to religion, and, while it may be that not everyone needs to explore the arguments of philosophical theology in depth, it is something that has been done by many atheists, and this argumentation needs to be better known. What it does show is that sometimes atheist argument is lacking in sophistication, and it is important to know that there is very sophisticated atheist argumentation available, which is why I referred to Martin, Mackie and Nielsen. Flew’s God and Philosophy is also highly recommended. And of course there are many others. While I do not think much of Alvin Plantinga’s arguments, especially his idea of god being properly basic (in his language), it is important, notwithstanding, that atheists be alive to the real arguments of philosophical theology, because, as Flew found out (though I still think he was taken advantage of when he was at his weakest), it is always possible that considerations can arise which may lead one to change one’s mind. It may be thought impossible, since these arguments would not be scientific ones, that such should be the case, but I do still insist that there are realms of knowledge that are not beholden to the scientific method. That is one issue that I need to explore further.

One other thing, before I leave this short post to its own devices, is to point out that, in one instance, Jerry Coyne is simply wrong. Jerry says this:

Well, science can’t tell us what we ought to value, for that’s a subjective judgment. But it can help us determine what we do value, simply by surveying people or examining their behavior.

This still won’t get him to values, however. Indeed, he had just said something about Enlightenment values. Indeed, the answer, he suggests is

science combined with humanism, a humanism that comes from adopting Enlightenment values.

Of course, we know that, were we to examine what people value, many would not necessarily be seen adopting Enlightenment values; and, while I think there are good reasons for adopting Enlightenment values, I do think we need to show that they  are to be preferred to other values, religious values, the perfect society as Islam or Christianity envisage it, for example. I think these are things that we can know, in a fairly straightforward sense of knowing that is not at the same time scientific.

I should mention one other thing… (see, this is how things go for me!). Jerry mentions my remarks about the structure provided by the religions, mainly, the national churches of Scandinavia. I say this is something that is an aspect of Scandinavian culture, even when people don’t notice. It’s the background to a whole lot of things that people do, even though it may not be referred to by many people in Scandinavian society. All I am saying — and I want to stress this, lest there be a misunderstanding here — is that I am talking about the socio-cultural background to our activities. It’s a point made by Michel Onfray in his <I>Atheist Manifesto</I>. We don’t get away from the epistemology and ontology of religion simply by giving up our personal belief, because the epistemology and ontology of religion are deeply embedded in most cultures, whether we notice this or not. A completely godless culture is something completely unknown, so at least it is not obvious that the eradication of religion would bring about a better state of things than before. This is something that I hope we would be modest about, since it is really unexplored territory. But with that, I will leave things, and come back to these issues at a later date. I am trying to read through Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West and Said’s Orientalism. Whether this produces anything of value you will just have to wait and see.

Oh yes, and one thing more (added later): I do not speak in terms of “ways of knowing.” That, I think, is the wrong way to frame this issue. There are different methodologies, but these do not constitute ways of knowing. To know something we must be able to provide reasons or evidence for our beliefs. Sometimes the reasoning will be scientific, but at other times we may use different types of reasoning. In morality, for example (and this I understand imperfectly for now), there are ways of reasoning to fairly stable moral conclusions that depend upon providing reasons for action, which may have to take empirical aspects of being human into consideration, but are not determined by that evidence. But this is just a blank cheque for now.

I began writing this as a response on the previous post, but it kept getting longer and longer, and so, in the end, it needed to find more space in which to stretch its wings, and to breathe more freely. So, here it is as a post, though bearing the stamp of its lowly origin.

I won’t go into the detail of the arguments (or non-arguments) presented in this thread. That was not the focus of my concern, which remains even when everything said here has been said. Certainly, for example, to say that Mozart is a greater composer than Hummel requires evidence, and the people who would be the best judge of what constitutes evidence in this case would not be scientists, but experts in music, composition, direction, performance, and appreciation. I don’t think that a study of the structure of music as related to brain structure or response would tell us very much. I may be quite wrong about this, but I think there is more going on here than simply those things discoverable by science. And that is precisely my problem with what I am here calling “scientism.” It is, basically, a “faith” position, since it is not in fact based, and cannot, in the nature of the case, be based on empirical evidence, for it is, essentially, a meta-claim about such evidence, and the belief that only those beliefs based on the kind of evidence in question constitute knowledge.

With this doctrinaire position I disagree, and I disagree with it because it is too narrow an understanding of what we may know, as the result of which the new atheism seems to me increasingly to lack depth. Unwilling to acknowledge different fields of knowledge and their importance to the human project, it impoverishes the human project by making rational discussion about it impossible. Aesthetic and moral knowledge, for instance, are simply ruled out by fiat. It may be, in the end, that we will have to acknowledge that there is no such knowledge, but it won’t do to rule it out on the principle that science alone works. Of course science works, but so, I think, do philosophy, music and literary criticism, moral analysis, and so on. If I did not think so, it would be a bit foolish of me to continue to speak about the rights of those who are suffering intolerably to receive help in dying. I believe this is an objective right that people have that is not being recognised by those who oppose assisted dying, mainly on religious grounds. I see nothing in science that can support this claim, and it makes a mockery of most humanistic disciplines to suggest that all we can know is comprised of the propositions of science. I see no reason to believe that, and I don’t think anyone has satisfactorily explained why knowledge claims should be so limited. And while I think that Persto is quite right to try to defend the rationality of religious belief, which does not necessarily depend upon scientific evidence, I do think that, in the end, all such attempts fail. I will not go into detail here, but one of the central problems for religious argumentation is to delimit what it is that “arguments for the existence of god” set out to prove, for no one has, so far, given a reasonable account of what a god might be. Indeed, to the extent that philosophical theologians are thrown back upon the expedient of apophaticism, they effectively abandon the claim that such propositions (i) make any sense, (ii) provide enough content to give substance to the arguments for the existence of the indescribable and ineffable being at the heart of the religious project. This is my reason for pointing beyond the popular new atheists to the more substantial philosophical works in which the case for the existence of a god or gods is more carefully and comprehensively argued. There are all sorts of very sophisticated works that do this, and it is a pity that people should instead base themselves on much less sophisticated argumentation, about which questions have been justly raised. While it may be true, as Pinkagendist says, that

Every religion that has proposed a god thus far has failed miserably in proving the alleged divinity of their alleged god,

the miserable failure involved takes some showing, and cannot simply be dismissed carelessly as some people are wont to do.

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I find that, despite myself, I cannot remain entirely silent, so if there are still some of you out there still interested, I will doubtless add slowly to the sum of my posts after all! Blogging gets into your blood, and when you can no longer express yourself, it seems that the urge to do so is overwhelming!

I am still concerned about Islam, and the misunderstanding that seems to be widespread about the dangers of this religion. Of course, I understand that some people, like Rahman, will immediately say that Islam is made up of as many different belief systems as there are Muslims, but this is a way of avoiding the subject of the religion itself, as some sort of a unity, despite its lack of a centre of authority. Indeed, the fact that it lacks a central authority, aside from the central role that the Qur’an, the Sira and the Sharia play in Muslim life and belief, may serve to make Islam more, and not less dangerous, precisely because there is no way of controlling the most extreme forms of the religion, forms which are, in fact, endorsed by those central texts and traditions. And while Rahman and Paxton continue to struggle over the proofs for the existence of God — a completely hopeless task which has no end, and no very clear parameters either — Islam carries out its nefarious business in the world.

Now, someone will doubtless suggest that speaking about Islam’s “nefarious business” is itself Islamophobic, but this would be simply to misunderstand the religion itself, which obviously includes a significantly large fundamentalist radical dimension, whether all Muslims share it or not. It has to be remembered that Muhammad was a warlord, and not a particularly nice one at that, commending all sorts of wicked acts against his unbelieving neighbours, and that it is this man who represents, for Muslims, an ideal of humanity. It should therefore occasion no surprise that this ideal is used by some Muslims to justify acts of suicide bombing and the contemptuous use of “kuffar” women. Indeed, one imam in Oxford states the problem with unusual clarity when he points out that in many mosques, this kind of treatment of “kuffar” women is actually commended by many imams. This is reported in the Telegraph:

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After much thought, I have decided, for the time being at least, to suspend operations on the blog. The blog posts will remain much as I have left them, although I have deleted some pictures, mainly of Elizabeth. This has been a labour of love, but it is not a permanent memorial to Elizabeth, and was never meant to be. So, for the sake of privacy I have decided not to include pictures of Elizabeth in what remains behind.

I want to thank everyone who has read and followed the blog, and the many who have made the discussions so rich and rewarding. Over the last two years and six months (or so) I have written something over 840 posts. I have backed up all the posts which I wrote myself, including the quotes which were included in them. The words come in total, to 1, 386, 095  words. That is surely enough for now. I do need to do other things, which constant attention to the blog has prevented me from doing, including, if it is still possible for me to do this at my age, to write a book about assisted dying. I have already mentioned my renewed interest in photography, and we will have to see where this leads me. I suspect that the reason that I found my transfer to Freethought Blops so distressing was the fact (although I did not know it at the time) that I was coming to the point where I did not want to be committed in the long term to the blog.

Once again, my thanks to all those faithful readers who have followed the blog over the last couple of years. You have been a great community of people, and have shown yourself to be intelligent, alive to the difficulties facing us in the world today, willing to think passionately and clearly about issues that concerned me, and I am grateful for your participation, without which this would have been a very lonely exercise in talking to myself. I offer you my heartfelt thanks.

I do this with great trepidation, striking off in a completely new direction, and my hands are trembling as I type these words. I feel a great sadness, but I do feel the need, nevertheless, to move on towards an unseen and unknown destination. I would like to thank, especially, Ophelia Benson and Jerry Coyne for their encouragement and support. In adding the military last post as a closing flourish, I do so full in the knowledge that this is a major ending of sorts in my life. It is remarkable how blogging can define a person. I hope those of you who are disappointed will not feel any sense of betrayal at my decision to move on. Thanks, once again, one and all.

The Last Post

The following is deliberately short, punchy, and unqualified. Perhaps it will help move the discussion along, since it seems to have got bogged down.

On an earlier post two commenters have been duking it out over the argument from design. I do not intend to repeat their arguments and counterarguments here. There is a simple reason for this. The design argument cannot prove what it sets out to prove, and anyone who has thought about it for a moment must know why. According to one of the discussants, Rahman,

There must be a reason why the numbers are precisely aligned for life.

And, of course, no doubt there are — reasons, that is. But there is no obvious reason why we should think that there must be a — that is, just a single, quite overwhelming — reason why the numbers are precisely aligned for life. This is an illegitimate step in the argument.

Take the argument that the other discussant, Paxton, uses, to show that the argument from design is simply irrelevant to an explanation of how things are. AC Grayling uses this argument in his new book, The God Argument, and it basically goes like this. If you go back into the past and try to determine the reasons for things being as they are, you will come upon an entire series of quite contingent events. For instance, why are you here? In order to answer that question you will be taken on a long search though an unimaginably long series of quite contingent events, people being in the right place at the right time, being in the mood (or not) for sex, plus the completely chance occurrence of the sperm that resulted in you being born fertilized the egg instead another of the hundred or so thousand or million that might have, and that perfectly contingent event was in turn dependent upon similar quite contingent events going back, in an unbroken line, to the first denizens of early organic environments.

The problem is, quite simply, that the whole endeavour of a search for roots and reasons wouldn’t have started off unless you were here to set off on it. In other words, you are here. There are reasons why you are here, possibly many millions of them, and all of them quite contingent. You might well not have been here had one of the links in the chain have been slightly different. Someone else, or no one, might have been here in your place, and it would then be that person who would be (or perhaps not, since he or she might have different interests) setting off on the search for the …. Snark — is it?

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As anyone who has read here on choiceindying.com will know, I do not have a great deal of respect for Andrew Brown, who writes for the Guardian. So of course I was not surprised to read his little piece about Katherine Welby’s (the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter) depression. As a small taster, take the following words:

Katherine Welby’s remarkable blog post and interview about her depression rings true to anyone who has ever been ill in this way but it also illuminates the complex ways in which religious belief can twine round the condition, providing either a vine to tangle your feet in or a beanstalk to climb out on.

Now that, gentle reader, is all just puffery, nor is it clear in what way Katherine Welby’s “remarkable” blog post or interview (both linked in the quote from Brown) really does illuminate the complex ways in which religion helps or hinders those with depression. And that, I think, is perhaps the most telling thing about this. I certainly don’t wish Katherine Welby any harm, and hope she gets the help she needs for her depression, and if she finds hope in religion, well and good. But let’s not build this up into something of earth-shaking significance, please!

For the daughter of a priest, then bishop, then archbishop (a man who came to his religious vocation later in life), who herself read theology at university, it should not surprise anyone that Katherine Welby thinks in religious categories when she considers the ins and outs of the depression that has blighted her adult years. Having episodically suffered from depression myself, and even thought seriously about ending my life on several occasions, it does not surprise me that she has sought solace in religion, and in religious community. But the anodyne things that Brown says about Katherine Welby’s way of dealing with her depression — all of them gleaned from her blog – through Bible, faith, and church community, is pathetically shallow. Welby herself says that “the Bible is key,” because, as she justly points out, the Bible isn’t a story of perfect human beings in perfect accord with their lives, who go about praising god all day long. The Bible is unquestionably allzu menschlich, to use Nietzsche’s phrase — all too human. Entirely human in its questioning, doubting, failing, despairing … And to the extent that this can allow people to recognise and accept their humanity without condemnation, that’s all very well, of course. That’s a source of strength for Katherine Welby, as she says, and doubtless it can be.

But she acknowledges another side to this particular coin. If the Bible is all to human, it is also all too religious as well, and so it is not at all surprising that she has met with the shadow side of religion, where the accusing finger points at those who have not been able simply to fall back confidently into the supporting arms of Jesus. And, as Welby notes, this is not something that church people are particularly good at, that is, at being screwed up and depressed, without a rosy disposition and confidence in the future. But she doesn’t seem to see that she does the same thing, and her own words could easily be turned to the same purpose, and to box people in. Listen:

The bible is my key. Reading the psalms (that oh so regularly quoted ‘you can yell at God, look’ book) I find that I don’t need to have hope every second of the day. In my hopelessness I just need to acknowledge that God is bigger than my illness and he will come through – eventually. Not always easy, but always possible.

“He will always come through — eventually.” And that’s simply not so. Just because the book of Job ends up with Job being restored to health and good fortune, with daughters even more beautiful than the ones killed at the beginning of the story, doesn’t mean that Job ever sees a smidgeon of justice. Wealth is not an answer to disaster, nor is the declaration, ”I’m bigger than you — where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” a particularly comforting response to the fact that I am finite, fallible and faulty.

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I wasn’t aware that it was Holy Week until someone mentioned, on Thursday, that the next day was Good Friday. It’s strange that a week that was perhaps the busiest in the life of a priest should, without my having taken notice, almost have passed me by. It says a lot about my own position vis-à-vis Christianity and the things of faith; for, if you pay attention at this time of year, you can scarcely fail to encounter the reruns of the old, old story, of Jesus and his love. For me, however, the story that takes us from Palm Sunday, through Holy Thursday and the remembrance of the “agony in the garden,” and the service of Tenebrae, through the veneration of the cross on Good Friday, and the hiatus of Holy Saturday, to the joyful celebration of the resurrection on Easter Sunday when the great proclamation is made, “Christ is Risen!” – ”Christos Anesti” – to which the reply is made, “He is Risen Indeed!” — this celebration of the central mystery of faith, though certainly emotionally loaded, came to seem thin, insubstantial, empty. For I became aware, perhaps for the first time, by living so close to someone who suffered constantly over many years, that the torment of the cross was but a moment in the long history of suffering, and simply could not bear the load of significance that was heaped upon it.

Christianity tries to make the suffering of Jesus on the cross a recapitulation of all the suffering that there has ever been. In his journalistic nod towards Christian proprieties Andrew Brown speaks of the suffering of Jesus like this:

I can know what is meant by Jesus as the figure of all the suffering and butt of all the scorn in the world.

And this, I came to recognise more and more, is simply a rote figure, not a reality. No one can undergo all the sufferings. No one can even begin to sum up, in his own person, the totality of suffering, that long, relentless aching pain of humanity and the rest of the living world over millions and millions of years. It simply makes no sense. Jesus, according to tradition, spent all of three hours on the cross, a torturous way to die, no doubt, but not enough to sum up all the sufferings of all those who have ever suffered, or will suffer. And I used to tell myself, in those days, as we went through the liturgies of Holy Week, that Elizabeth had already suffered more, over her years of sickness, than Jesus ever did. It brought the events of Holy Week into human perspective. And it has to be seen in human perspective or it has nothing to offer to human beings, and I began to see, in those years, that this paradigmatic bit of suffering simply cannot bear the weight that people want to place upon it.

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This is just a note to say that, after a few days of vacillating over the issue, I have finally decided not to make the switch to Free Thought Blogs after all. I am very aware of the compliment that was paid to me in having been invited to join and having been welcomed to FTB, but I found myself, as I said, like a fish out of water. I have imported the Posts and Comments in full from FTB, and you will find them below. I said, in my last post “Like a Fish out of Water” that I was rethinking, and might even bring an end to my blog. I did not feel comfortable doing that, so, within  a day or so I will resume posting here.

I should like thank a number of you for writing to me about my apparent “dark night of the soul.” It was very kind of you to be concerned, and it was reassuring to feel your warmth and concern.

You will notice that I have changed my theme. This one is a bit more bold, and I will stick to it for awhile. It is like a new blog, so I needed to start afresh.

Once again thanks for your support. I will be posting again soon.

If you have ever fished before, you will know what it looks like (though not how it feels) to be a fish out of water, flopping around helplessly as you drown in the air. It’s one thing that convinced me that fishing is as cruel as hunting, and calling it a sport needlessly turns human beings into callous killers who are unresponsive to the despair of other creatures with which they share the planet. The fact that we can think this way, even if many do not, and hold ourselves responsible for the misery we may cause by our decisions, is a vital aspect of what it means to be human. Yes, I know, other animals can feel distress at the misery of their fellows, and domesticated pets, like dogs, seem to have a second sense to catch the moods and miseries of their masters. But only humans, so far as I know, can think that causing such misery is wrong, something that, if avoidable, ought to be avoided.

As I think about these things the farther and farther I get away from the determinism that seems to underlie many of the theories of human action that seem to be favoured by those who take science as foundational for our understanding of the human, and the more I feel like a fish out of water myself, floundering around with ideas that are foreign to me, and that I find increasingly rebarbative and unintelligible. I also feel that the apparently self-contradictory attempt to empty of significance all the words that refer to our ability to make decisions and in some sense to be the originators of our actions, despite the fact that in explaining this we inevitably use words that are redolent with the same ideas of agency and decision, really represents a sort of floundering of its own. Determinists like Sam Harris think that if we were to “give up” the notion of “free will” and instead think of what we normally think of as actions, originating with us, as merely occurrences in the chain of cause and effect, we would “recognise” a number of things, but especially that the language of responsibility, praise and blame, punishment and reward, is based on nothing more than illusion, and that, by “giving up” these illusions we will, in the end, become more humane, and “create” kinder societies, since we will “see” that people are not really responsible for what they do, for either the “good” or the “bad” things that they do, and that “recognising” this will lead us to “treat” them with more gentleness and consideration.

At the same time, though, we think that “freedom” is a great “value”, that people should be left to make “decisions” about their own lives, that they should not be limited and circumscribed by laws, unless such laws are “designed” merely to make sure that when people are making “decisions” they do not limit the ability of others to do the same. But yet the making of “laws” for “purposes” which we can “entertain”, and thus “control”, by mechanisms “designed” to channel people’s energy in “socially approved” directions, implies the ability to make decisions and to originate acts which the deterministic theory itself seems to deny. Indeed, when you stop to think about it for a moment or two, the whole business of “theory construction” in this connexion and its consequent deployment in “arguments” “designed” to “convince” others by “reasons” is in fact directly contrary to the theory itself, which thus undermines itself. Because there can be no reasons, as such, in such a deterministic world, but simply causes, and if we cannot choose, because choice implies that we are somehow freely able to do so, we cannot really give reasons either, for what are reasons, if they are not meant to provide justification – and not merely a causal theory of why one behaviour occurred instead of another – why one course of action would be preferable to another?

Now, mind you, I don’t know how to argue for the kind of freedom which seems to underlie our language, and perhaps, in the end, the determinists are right, and language is no more than a system of causal triggers that prompt people (well, members of the species H. sapiens sapiens) to respond in certain predictable ways. I do not even know whether we have to have incompatibilist and not merely compatibilist free will, though I tend to agree with Derek Parfit that only the latter is necessary for morality (see On What Matters, vol I, 258-263). (I want to stress, lest I be misunderstood in what follows, that, when I speak of determinism, I am speaking of the kind of determinism that does not even provide room for compatibilist free will or free choice, something that, in fact, simply makes no sense to me.) But when an individual instance of this species “argues” that this is all that there is — that is, that “we” are deterministic systems through and through, merely skin bags of molecules that are in some sense higher level billiard balls in complicated causal interaction with their environment — no “reasons” can be thought to be being “given” for “believing” that the world is composed in such and such a manner. On this bare bones determinism all that the language of “argument” can contain are stimulus patterns “designed” to evoke particular responses.

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