Here’s a clarifying passage from Daniel Dennett on the idea that the findings of neuroscience prove that “free will” is a fiction:

Recall the myth of Cupid, who flutters about on his cherubic wings making people fall in love by shooting them with his little bow and arrow. This is such a lame cartoonists’ convention that it’s hard to believe that anybody ever took any version of it seriously. But we can pretend: Suppose that once upon a time there were people who believed that an invisible arrow from a flying god was a sort of inoculation that caused people to fall in love. And suppose some killjoy scientist came along and showed them that this was simply not true: No such flying gods exist. “He’s just shown that nobody ever falls in love, not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice — maybe even a necessary — fiction. It never happens.” That is what some might say. Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: “No. Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good — maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods.” The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those who believe that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.

Freedom Evolves, p. 222-223

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has written a fine post in response to a query from a reader about religious zealotry. The reader’s argument was:

Given that, as most religions claim —

1) There is an afterlife of infinite duration;

2) Those who live in strict accordance with the religion’s requirements and prohibitions will be eternally rewarded in the afterlife;

3) Those who instead violate the religion’s requirements and prohibitions will be eternally punished;

4) The quality of these rewards or punishments far exceeds anything we might experience in our brief mortal lives;

– does it not follow that it is irrational not to dedicate everything in one’s earthly life to the fulfillment of one’s religious obligations, with everything else taking a distant second place?

As Bill’s reader put it:

If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods—no matter how well they rank on the finite scale—when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.

The argument given, then, mitigates strongly against religious moderation as a rational approach. Here in the West, where we place paramount value on Diversity, inclusiveness, and religious pluralism, we regard religious “moderates” with far higher esteem than those we consider to be “fundamentalists” or “extremists”. But does this make sense? Given the stakes, why would any rational believer be moderate?

The discussion turns to epistemic limitations. Certainly the polyinfinite goods of the afterlife, if genuine, outweigh the transient goods of this one. But if we cannot know with certainty that the rewards of religious fidelity are real, and are guaranteed, then perhaps they don’t tip the scales against the known pleasures of the mortal world. How is one to balance the two?

As Bill acknowledges, this is a difficult question, and he doesn’t claim to have the answer. But he focuses the inquiry with his usual clarity. One thing that emerges quite clearly is that religious “moderation”, if it is to be rationally motivated, seems to necessitate doubt. Or, to put it another way: for anyone who would make no distinction between his belief and certain knowledge, religious moderation is not a rational choice.

Read the post here.

An unconfirmable truth: the unexamined life is not worth living.

The New York Times has introduced a philosophy-blog. It’s called The Stone. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

Our cyber-friend Jeffery Hodges has just published, and posted at his website, a thoughtful article on the intellectual and cultural requirements for productive discourse. The subject is of particular interest to Jeffery, who is a college professor in Korea — where, in keeping with Confucian social tradition, to question one’s superiors is to get above one’s station, and is often regarded as an insult.

Read it here.

Of all the conceptual tar-pits into which discussions of Darwinian naturalism often sink, none smothers its victims so prolifically as the concept of “design”. We reserve it jealously for the foresightedly purposeful efforts of conscious agents, which leaves us fumfering about for a word to describe the beautiful machinery of living things, and the powerful (but itself purposeless) process that has shaped them so perfectly to the uses to which they are put. Writers of books about evolution must squirm and fidget to avoid the word, lest they give the impression of telos in discussing natural selection’s mindless action. When they do use it — which is natural enough, as the raison d’etre of, say, a bird’s wing is obviously that it allows the bird to fly — they must baffle it with scare-quotes and disclaimers.

It’s a pity. This narrow, anthropocentric definition of “design”, a categorical relic of a prior era of human understanding, leaves us with no proper term for the difference between a rock, which obviously is not “for” anything, and an eagle’s eye, which obviously is.

My view (see here, for example) has always been that we ought to broaden the definition of “design” to include not only the products of conscious agency, but also the creations of the mindless, but stupendously productive, engine of natural selection. I unapologetically see the human heart, for example, as having been designed to pump blood (so unapologetically, in fact, that I can say so without scare-quotes).

Today, however, I ran across an article at American Scientist that, after a nod in the direction of the tar-pit, argues that we should not broaden, but further restrict our ascription of design. The authors suggest that even a great many of the things we uncontroversially regard as designed — can-openers, airplanes, and so on — are not really “designed” at all, but are themselves products of the same sort of selection-by-trial-and-error that generates the design of living organisms.

The argument is interesting in that if you carry it far enough, it really holds the materialist’s feet to the fire: if the human mind is itself the product of, and operates strictly according to, the lawful processes of the material world, then we may arrive at the conclusion that there is none of what we traditionally mean by “design” to be found anywhere. In other words, while I have been willing to make a conventional distinction between the products of conscious agency and the products of natural selection, but think that the meaning of the word “design” should be applicable to both, it can fairly be argued, if materialism is true, that the distinction is ultimately meaningless.

Read the essay here.

In a post over at VFR, Lawrence Auster comments on an essay by Stanley Fish in which Professor Fish remarks on the inability of pure “secular” reason, bereft of normative bedrock in the Divine, to provide any “oughts”. This is catnip to Mr. Auster, who is, despite having various admirable qualities, a crusading anti-Darwinist.

The argument made by both is that if the world is, as secular-humanist types are inclined to suppose, an elaborate causal clockwork and nothing more, then it is inconsistent for us to speak, in any context whatsoever, in normative terms. In their view, if I, a Darwinist, say something like “I really ought to get this sutured up” or “you shouldn’t fire that thing in the house”, I am being dishonest; I am “smuggling” in a teleological stance that is inconsistent with my metaphysics.

What both fail to grasp is that they insist upon a false dichotomy: that teleology either exists in the world absolutely, at the level of metaphysical bedrock, or it doesn’t exist at all. What they cannot, or will not, do is to consider the possibility that purposes can enter the world as an emergent property, or by-product, of living systems. This view is of course unavailable to Mr. Auster, given that the only mechanism yet proposed by which such emergence can occur is the one first described by Darwin — but it should be accessible, I should think, to Dr. Fish.

The problem, really, is definitional: both Auster and Fish will acknowledge that we are obviously motivated by normative dispositions, and will also agree that our artifacts, and indeed even the various parts of the bodies of living things, have purposes. The issue then, is what constitutes a “real” purpose, as opposed to a merely illusory, “smuggled” ascription of purpose. To both men it seems that only a purpose that exists distinctly from, and logically prior to, the purely physical manifestation of the system that acts upon it can be considered genuine. Ultimately any such “real” teleology must either repose, through us, in God, or exist as a brute metaphysical fact — or not exist at all.

But this is a mere convention, a definition, a habit of thought; I think it is what is sometimes called a “frame error”. Why must we accept it? Why insist that purpose must have a grounding, as purpose, prior to the physical systems that instantiate it? Why can it not be an emergent property of systems built out of purposeless components of the world, by purposeless processes, and relevant only to those systems? The objection appears to be that it is just obvious that purposelessness cannot give rise to purpose, that matter cannot give rise to intention. And if we accept that objection, as both Auster and Fish seem to, then indeed we do have only two choices: to deny the existence of all purpose, and to declare any normative assertion a sham and a fraud, or to insist on a transcendent grounding in some metaphysical foundation — either God or brute fact. On this view, when we look at the exquisite “design” of a bird’s wing, we must either say that some intentional artificer brought it into being for the sake of an Aristotelian final cause, or that, despite its many superb optimizations and aerodynamic features, we must not suggest that it is in any sense “for” flying. And because a bird’s wing so obviously is “for” flying, this is often presented, by Auster and others, as a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, and evidence in favor of this or that metaphysics, usually some sort of theism.

But, as others have pointed out (including me: see, for example, here, here, and here), there is another way we can look at this: that there is a process by which systems can arise that bring into existence their own purposes, purposes that exist only at the level of, and within the scope and context of, the systems themselves. I will not rehearse the arguments here; I’m sure they are familiar enough to readers of this website, and I have examined them in more detail in the links above.

So when a phototropic plant inclines itself toward the sun, it is perfectly sensible to say the plant is doing so for the purpose of gathering more light: despite being a purely physical system, as an evolved, living physical system it is a system that has interests. (Note also that it is not at all necessary for the plant to understand, or even be aware of, those interests; forming such representations is a costly, and largely unnecessary, luxury that only a very few living systems can afford.)

Now you may object by saying “No, that isn’t real purpose, that only looks like purpose!” And I will respond by saying that your intuition misleads you: that purpose like this is as real as it gets, and that your intuitive understanding of what “purpose” must be is at the very least arbitrarily restrictive, and misses what is, most likely, the true nature of all the purpose in the living world.

Simply put, living things are special. By virtue of their being the product of a natural engine of design, they are by their very nature purposeful — even though the process that generates them isn’t.

So where does this leave us in terms of normativity? It means that normative statements have no absolutely objective truth-value; they must be considered within a particular scope. In other words, any normative assertion must be evaluated in terms of the aim and purpose of the object of the assertion. Living things have an interest in survival, which requires feeding; therefore it is coherent to say that a hungry snake within range of a mouse “ought” to strike; it must be borne in mind that this “ought” applies only in the context of a snake that has an interest in surviving. It is what we would think we ought to do if we were in the snake’s position, given what we know about snakes, and about hungry animals generally. The snake need not be aware of any of this, or even conscious at all, but we, given the context, can predict the snake’s behavior because we understand what its interests are. We humans are in a far more complex position: we not only have interests, but we can think about our interests, evaluate and modify them in the light of other interests, and so on. But the principle is the same: any normative assertions we make are comprehensible only within the scope of our own aims and interests, which are in turn the emergent product of the processes that brought us into existence, and to our present situation.

I must make clear that all of this still leaves us a long way from anything resembling moral absolutes: as I have written elsewhere, I don’t think there is any such thing. The closest we can come, I think, is to acknowledge that moral systems are conducive to human flourishing in various ways, that we are by nature moral animals who are predisposed to condition our behavior according to such systems, and that we have no reason to reject this part of our nature. (Whether a naturalistic understanding of the non-transcendent nature of our moral intuitions is corrosive to their expression, however, is another question.)

Finally, it appears — surprisingly — that Dr. Fish overlooks the necessary role of emotion in forming normative valuations, and focuses only on the fact that reason alone cannot tell us what we ought to do. But we’ve had enough for tonight, I think.

Recently Bill Vallicella excerpted, and I commented briefly upon, some passages from philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative. Wishing to refresh my memory of a few points, I opened it up again today — and was impressed once more by what a fine piece of writing it is, and by how well it limns the conservative disposition.

Here’s another meaty and nourishing morsel:

The idea of innovation … is improvement. Nevertheless, a man of this temperament will not himself be an ardent innovator. In the first place, he is not inclined to think that nothing is happening unless great changes are afoot and therefore he is not worried by the absence of innovation: the use and enjoyment of things as they are occupies most of his attention. Further, he is aware that not all innovation is, in fact, improvement; and he will think that to innovate without improving is either designed or inadvertent folly. Moreover, even when an innovation commends itself as a convincing improvement, he will look twice at its claims before accepting them. From his point of view, because every improvement involves change, the disruption entailed has always to be set against the benefit anticipated. But when he has satisfied himself about this, there will be other considerations to be taken into the account. Innovating is always an equivocal enterprise, in which gain and loss (even excluding the loss of familiarity) are so closely interwoven that it is exceedingly difficult to forecast the final up-shot: there is no such thing as an unqualified improvement. For innovating is an activity which generates not only the ‘improvement’ sought, but a new and complex situation of which this is only one of the components. The total change is always more extensive than the change designed; and the whole of what is entailed can neither be foreseen nor circumscribed. Thus, whenever there is innovation there is the certainty that the change will be greater than was intended, that there will be loss as well as gain and that the loss and the gain will not be equally distributed among the people affected; there is the chance that the benefits derived will be greater than those which were designed; and there is the risk that they will be off-set by changes for the worse.

The passage in boldface above gets right to the heart of the matter, the essence of conservatism, the very crux of the biscuit.

Oakeshott continues:

From all this the man of conservative temperament draws some appropriate conclusions. First, innovation entails certain loss and possible gain, therefore, the onus of proof, to show that the proposed change may be expected to be on the whole beneficial, rests with the would-be innovator. Secondly, he believes that the more closely an innovation resembles growth (that is, the more clearly it is intimated in and not merely imposed upon the situation) the less likely it is to result in a preponderance of loss. Thirdly, he thinks that an innovation which is a response to some specific defect, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is more desirable than one which springs from a notion of a generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection. Consequently, he prefers small and limited innovations to large and indefinite. Fourthly, he favours a slow rather than a rapid pace, and pauses to observe current consequences and make appropriate adjustments. And lastly, he believes the occasion to be important; and, other things being equal, he considers the most favourable occasion for innovation to be when the projected change is most likely to be limited to what is intended and least likely to be corrupted by undesired and unmanageable consequences.

Michael Oakeshott was born in 1901; he wrote this essay in 1956, the year I was born. He died in 1990. Imagine the changes he saw in his lifetime, and reflect on how the world has changed even since his death. Yet here we are still, voting for “change”, as if we weren’t getting it fast enough already.

I guess some things never change.

Lawrence Auster is a very smart fellow, and I admire his formidable presence on the ramparts of Western culture. But he has curious blind spots, for one so intelligent, and one of them has to do with Darwinism.

Have a look at this exchange with a reader, one who patiently tries to explain, as I have often done myself (see, for example, here, here, and here), why biologists use the language of intentionality when discussing evolution. We speak, without any qualms, about the “purpose” of the various “designs” of evolved organisms: a wing is “for” flying, a fang is “for” injecting venom, etc. The point is that designed things have purposes — a proposition with which even Mr. Auster would agree — but what he and others refuse to accept is that the rationale behind the existence of a wing or a fang need not be anyone’s consciously conceived or represented rationale: that there is in Nature a process from which design can emerge without the need for any teleological agency at all. Yes, there is a rationale for the existence of a wing, but it is not the bird’s, or even evolution’s, rationale; it is what Daniel Dennett has called a free-floating rationale. But it seems that Mr. Auster and like-minded like others simply cannot conceive of design — real, functional, finely tuned design — arising in the absence of a conscious and purposeful Designer. I am reluctant to psychologize, but perhaps their intuitions are simpy too irrevocably conditioned by their embedding in the world of human agency.

Mr. Auster’s reader, Richard Hoste, quotes a long passage from Daniel Dennett’s book Kinds of Minds, in which Dennett explains what he calls the “intentional stance”: the fact that it is easier to predict the behavior of a goal-seeking system by understanding the goal. The example Dennett uses is that of a skillful chess-player: if the situation on the board is such that there is only one move that will avoid checkmate, we can predict with near-certain confidence that the chess-player will make it. What is more, this is true whether or not the player is human: the behavior of a chess-playing computer is every bit as predictable, from the intentional stance, as that of a person.

Mr. Auster, during this exchange, shows promising signs of “getting it” — but then, just as we think he is about to grasp the nettle, disappoints us once again with this stupendously question-begging assertion:

[Darwinians] are stuck with a contradiction that they cannot escape, namely that it’s inherently impossible that organisms whose bodies carry out millions of highly purposeful functions came into being by a radically purposeless process.

What a pity, and how mistaken. Of course we can escape it; indeed, on our view, natural selection’s “radically purposeless” process is the only plausible account of how such purposeful functions can arise that doesn’t just “kick the can down the road”: to an invisible, immaterial agency whose own origin and purpose is simply left unaccounted for.

But it is clear, by now, I suppose, that there is little hope of rapprochement on this subject; the division between these two camps seems deep and unbridgeable. Each side thinks the other is in the grip of a delusional fixation upon axioms that are simply wrong, and as Luther said (and Bill V. recently reminded us): Contra Negantem Prima Principia Non Esse Disputandum — “One should not dispute with those who deny first principles.”

For years now I’ve been reading, and occasionally commenting, over at Bill Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher. Bill’s a grumpy old cuss, and an unrepentant dualist, but he’s the real deal, and an excellent writer to boot. A philosophical amateur and autodidact like myself can learn a lot there (which I certainly have). Bill’s blog was recently picked by The Times of London as one of the world’s 100 best.

What I have enjoyed the most at MP has been following, and often participating in, the discussions in the comment threads. The quality of the comments varies, as one would expect (and I have recently been guilty, myself, of leaving some irritatingly trite and unfocused comments there of my own, which I regret) — but at their best the comment threads have been a real glimpse of serious philosophical work being done.

I’m sad to see, therefore, that Bill, obviously weary of keeping up with a rising tide of mediocre interlocutors, has apparently stopped taking comments. It’s understandable, and there are other fine blogs (such as Norman Geras’s) where comments are not allowed, but it is, I think, a disappointment for Bill’s readers — who can no longer find, in one place, daily examples of the argumentative thrust-and-parry by which philosophical positions are refined and defended.

I have a feeling Bill must miss it too, just a little. I hope he changes his mind.

We have all had the harrowing suspicion, rising at times almost to a dreadful certainty, that the inanimate objects of the world are arrayed against us with bloodless and implacable malice. We pop the window open on a fine spring morning and it falls back down, shattering the glass. We grab the only pencil at hand in urgent haste to write down a number before it flies from our memory, and the point breaks off. We lift a jar of mayonnaise by its lid, which comes off in our hand; the jar smashes on the kitchen tiles. Our keys conceal themselves behind the toaster. The picture-frame leaps from the wall for no apparent reason. The doorframe interposes itself between our little toe and the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Leave it to the French, who have always understood that we are doomed, to build upon this woeful scaffolding an intellectual edifice, a school of philosophy. It is called Resistentialism, and has been described as being “largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning.”

You may learn more here.

In grappling with persistent questions regarding key aspects of human existence and the natural world — intentionality, free will, morality, and so on — it is very easy to become entangled in terminological difficulties. Here’s a particularly contentious example.

Reading the New York Times the other day, I noticed the following in an Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof about moral types:

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

“Professor Haidt” is the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has done extensive research into the orgins and underpinnings of human morality.

Here’s another quote, from Harvard’s Steven Pinker:

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design.

And here’s Stephen Jay Gould:

In the domain of organisms and their good designs, we have little reason to doubt the strong, probably dominant influence of deterministic forces like natural selection.

Here’s a biology text from the University of Chicago Press: The Evolution of Vertebrate Design.

From the abstract of a lecture given this month by the American Society of Cell Biology:

Familiar features help to elucidate the origins, functions and design parameters for the secretory pathway, endosymbiotic organelles, the cytoskeleton, and cell cycle control.

Here’s the title of a paper from the Journal of Mammalogy:

Allometric scaling of body length : Elastic or geometric similarity in mammalian design.

Here’s another scholarly paper, from the University of Bonn:

The biomechanical design and morphofunctional evolution of presacral vertebrae in Sauropodomorpha deduced from shape analysis and FESS.

What do all these quotations have in common? The word “design”.

When biologists use this word to describe the bodies of living creatures, they obviously have something different in mind than a pre-Darwinian speaker of English would. While both would use it to describe intricate assemblages of working parts that perform some function, the difference is that the modern, technical usage of the term carries no implication of teleology, of having been assembled by an intentional designer for a preordained purpose. In the evolution of life there are no Aristotelian “final causes”, no “skyhooks” lifting the process from above. In short: design sans Designer; design not by purposeful plan, but by natural process. But the use of the word seems apt enough otherwise; it certainly feels appropriate, for example, to look at an albatross’s body as an exquisitely designed flying machine.

To use the word in this way — even though those who do so quite explicitly understand that when they say “design” they have in mind a concept cleanly filleted of all teleology, as what is effectively an instance of technical jargon — remains nevertheless a source of philosophical vexation in some quarters. One of those quarters is the popular website The Maverick Philosopher, where the host, Dr William Vallicella, has devoted more than a few comments and posts lately to this very topic, for example this recent item.

This persistent inconsistency in the way the word “design” is understood is extremely unhelpful, and I see no sign of its being resolved anytime soon. (Another word similiarly fraught with confusion and disagreement is the word “for”; there are many intelligent and philosophically sophisticated people who maintain, for example, that our eyes, since they lack a conscious designer, and were shaped solely by evolution, are not “for” seeing.)

Daniel Dennett, who is himself rather a polarizing figure in these discussions, has made quite clear what “design” ought to mean in light of our radical new (and at 150 years old, very recent indeed, in the timeline of human thought and language) insights into the process by which living things, and indeed intentionality, have arrived on the scene. In a 2005 paper, Atheism and Evolution (which is well worth your time, and available here), Dennett writes:

A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or the artifact of a living thing[.]

This seems almost exactly right to me, with one quibble: it is not quite general enough. This engine of design discovered by Darwin and Wallace will work with not only living things, but with anything that meets the essential qualifications: replication with variation, along with some sort of differential selection amongst the variants. It happens that living things are the only such replicators we know of at the moment, but the process does not strictly require life. (Indeed, at the close of Dennett’s article he talks about Lee Smolin’s provocative idea (see here) that universes themselves may be subject to such a process, replicating themselves by way of black holes.)

But the point is: a definition of the word “design” that does not include the process that created the staggeringly intricate designs of living things is simply inadequate. Such a definition rules out of court, by mere terminological fiat, nearly all of the design in the world, leaving only the tiny remnant, childishly crude by comparison, that we humans have managed. This absurd philosophical convention — and it is nothing more than that — is due, I maintain, to an atavistic, anthropocentric fixation on conscious agency, and in particular an obdurate resistance to the idea of intentionality as an objective feature of the natural world, and an equally dogmatic unwillingness to decouple the ideas of intentionality and consciousness.

Dennett continues:

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” was in fact a new and wonderful way of thinking, completely overturning the mind-first way that even David Hume had been unable to cast aside, and replacing it with a bubble-up vision in which intelligence — the concentrated, forward-looking intelligence of an anthropomorphic agent — emerges as just one of the products of mindless, mechanistic processes. These processes are fueled by untold billions of pointless, undesigned collisions, some vanishing small fraction of which fortuitously lead to tiny improvements in the lineages in which they occur. Thanks to Darwin’s principle of “descent with modification,” these ruthlessly tested design innovations accumulate over the eons, yielding breathtakingly brilliant designs that never had a designer — other than the purposeless, distributed process of natural selection itself.

The signatures of these unplanned innovations are everywhere to be found in a close examination of the marvels of nature, in the inside-out retina of the vertebrate eye, the half-discarded leftovers in the genes and organs of every species, the prodigious wastefulness and apparent cruelty of so many of nature’s processes. These departures from wisdom, frozen accidents, in the apt phrase of Francis Crick, confront the theist with a dilemma: if God is responsible for these designs, then His intelligence looks disturbingly like human obtuseness and callousness. Moreover, as our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution grows, we can sketch out ever more detailed accounts of the historical sequence of events by which the design innovations appeared and were incorporated into the branching tree of genomes. A voluminously predictive account of the creative process is now emerging, replete with thousands of mutually supporting details, and no contradictions at all. As the pieces of this mega-jigsaw-puzzle fall into place with increasing rapidity, there can be no reasonable doubt that it is, in all its broad outlines if not yet in all its unsettled details, the true story of how all living things came to have the designs we observe.

Dennett responds also to the pervasive prejudice that sees “mere” matter, and the “mindless” processes of Nature, as somehow too lowly to have produced something as exalted as we:

Between the richly detailed and ever-ramifying evolutionary story, and the featureless mystery of God the creator of all creatures great and small, there is no contest. This is a momentous reversal for the ancient conviction that God’s existence can be read off the wonders of nature. Anyone who has ever been struck by the magnificent intricacy of design and prodigious variety of the living world and wondered what–if not God–could possibly account for its existence must now confront not just a plausible alternative, but an alternative of breathtaking explanatory power supported by literally thousands of confirmed predictions and solved puzzles. Richard Dawkins has put the point crisply: “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (1986, p. 6).

Undermining the best argument anybody ever thought of for the existence of God is not, of course, proving the non-existence of God, and many careful thinkers who have accepted evolution by natural selection as the explanation of the wonders of the living world have cast about for other supports for their continuing belief in God. The idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, could never accept the full inversion, proclaiming that “the marvelous complexity of forces which appear to control matter, if not actually to constitute it, are and must be mind-products.” (quoted by [Stephen Jay] Gould, [The Flamingo's Smile,] 1985, p.397.) More recently, the physicist Paul Davies, in his book, The Mind of God (1992, p.232), opines that the reflective power of human minds can be “no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces.” This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. 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? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin’s inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of “mindless, purposeless forces.”

The community of evolutionary scientists and philosophers are already untroubled by the use of “design” in the broader sense that I am defending here; it might be seen, perhaps, as having been appropriated as technical language, in the way that many ordinary English words have been taken up in other technical fields. (Also, it is common for words to become more inclusive over time: for example, the word “guitar” once meant only what we would now refer to with the retronym “classical guitar” — the present argument over the use of “design” is rather like having a debate with a purist over whether my Stratocaster is really a “guitar” at all.) But so stubborn is the resistance to this broadening of the meaning of the word that I think we simply need a new one.

Any suggestions?

From E.A. Robinson, 1931:

“If a man is a materialist, or a mechanist, or whatever he likes to call himself, I can see for him no escape from belief in a futilty so prolonged and complicated and diabolical and preposterous as to be worse than absurd: and, as I do not know that such a tragic absurdity is not a fact, I can only know my native inability to believe that it is one.”

There you are, then. Take your pick.

We are still on vacation, but I did find some time for the blogosphere this evening. I spent it, though, reading and commenting on a fascinating thread about free will over at Bill Vallicella’s place.

Here.

According to today’s news, it appears Objectivism’s star is ascending lately, with sales of Ayn Rand’s books up sharply. Readers taking an interest in Randian thought should visit The Maverick Philosopher, where Dr. William Vallicella has for some time now been conducting a searching examination of Rand and her followers. Note also this post over at Mangan’s, in which we learn that Objectivists are not always so objective.

There is a characteristically penetrating conversation underway over at The Maverick Philosopher on the subject of whether mere thoughts can be morally wrong (Bill Vallicella says yes.)

I’m still mulling over the arguments made, and haven’t had time myself to read all of the latest contributions, so am reserving comment for now.

Go and have a look for yourself, here, at an excellent example of why blogging is perhaps, as Bill has argued, the best medium of all for the practice of philosophy.

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has written a series of posts lately about just what atheism is. In particular his aim has been to rebut the notion that atheists merely lack a positive belief in God, and that the burden of proof naturally falls upon the theist.

I am not going to take up the burden-of-proof argument here, other than to say that my sympathies do not coincide with Bill’s in this case: I see a natural world all around me, and no evidence of any gods, so it seems fair enough to me that the onus probandi lies with those who claim that such intangible entities are real.

But after reading this post and the ensuing discussion, I am left wondering: just what is “belief”, anyway?

In the post itself Bill, always thorough, sets aside some frivolous cases:

Some define atheism in terms of the absence of the belief that God exists. This won’t do, obviously, since then we would have to count cabbages and sparkplugs as atheists given the absence in these humble entities of the belief that God exists. But the following could be proffered with some show of plausibility: An atheist is a person whose psychological makeup is such as to permit his standing in the propositional atttude of belief toward the proposition that God exists, but who as a matter of fact does not stand in this relation, nor is disposed to stand in this relation were he to be queried about the existence of God. Note that it does not suffice to say that an atheist is a person in whom the belief that God exists is lacking for then the neonatal and the senile would count as atheists, which is surely a bit of a stretch.

In the post’s comment thread, philosopher Peter Lupu (who is also an occasional commenter here) argues for a distinction between having the positive belief that God does or does not exist and having no belief about God’s existence at all. He also refers to a “degree” of belief that may vary continuously between abject doubt regarding what is believed, and absolute certainty:

Those who are not dogmatists and attach some degree of probability short of certainty to their respective beliefs do see a point in offering arguments on behalf of their respective beliefs (and against their opponents) because if such arguments are deemed cogent, then they will increase the degree of belief in the respective propositions they already hold. Similarly, viable arguments against the proposition decrease the degree of belief in the respective propositions they already hold. But, (and this is the critical point to keep in mind) in all of these cases and regardless of your place in this epistemic spectrum, you either believe that a theist God exists (and, thus, you are a theist) or you believe that a theist God does not exist (and, hence, you are an atheist). The spectrum represents the *degree of intensity* with which you hold the respective beliefs. But in order to hold a given belief with an extremely high intensely (say up to certainty) or with much less intensity *you must have the belief* as part of your belief-corpus. “Misgivings”, on either side of the theist-atheist aisle, occur and perhaps with a reasonably high frequency; but unless they turn into all out skepticism, they simply change the intensity with which a belief is held (temporarily or permanently) and not the fact that the belief is held.

Now this, I am afraid, does not go down so easily — at least when the subject is not someone for whom the question of God’s existence has never even arisen, but is, rather, someone who is well aware of the issue, and realizes that the question “does God exist?” actually has an answer, regardless of whether we can ever know it with certainty or not. In the comment-thread I made the following remarks:

How would you characterize a person at position 50 in this epistemic spectrum, who really isn’t sure just what he “believes”? How is an “agnostic” at position 50 different, in any meaningful way, from a “theist” or “atheist” at position 50? In one place you speak of “degree of belief”, and in another you seem to treat belief as a binary attribute that is either wholly present or wholly absent. On this view, could you have an “atheist” with a position of 99 on the scale and a “theist” with a position of 1 (i.e. “believing” with only one-percent certainty)?

This all seems a bit too complicated to me; the only thing that matters, I think, is the degree of confidence one has in the truth of the proposition “God exists”. If you are far enough down the low end of the scale, it seems appropriate, in a common-sense way, to start referring to oneself as an “atheist”, while “agnostic” would simply mean that you are more or less in the middle. The difficulty of marking off exact regions (other than 0 and 100) is, I think, at the root of the terminological difficulties being discussed here.

In my own case, my confidence that God exists is so very, very low that “agnostic” seems misleadingly weak, but that confidence still hovers somewhere above zero. In other words, I wouldn’t say that I “believe” that God doesn’t exist — but I do think that’s where the smart money is, and I’d be very, very surprised indeed if it turned out that he did.

Peter is sticking to his guns:

1) Since we are talking here about believing, disbelieving, and having an agnostic posture, we are in fact talking in large part about the doxastic (epistemic) states of people. So let A be an arbitrary agent and P be any proposition whatsoever. We can now start by distinguishing three doxastic states:

(a)A believes that P: A’s belief-corpus (doxastic state) includes P;
(b)A believes that ~P: A’s belief-corpus includes ~P;
(c)A does not believe P and A does not believe ~P: A’s belief corpus includes neither P nor ~P.

The fourth state I have distinguished, the case of the ignoramus, is a case where A could not epistemically have either P or ~P as part of his belief-corpus because he cannot even understand these propositions. Let us keep this case in the background.

2) It is important to see that there is a sharp difference between the case of (c), on the one hand, and cases (a) and (b) with respect to the pair of propositions P and ~P. While in the later cases A’s belief-corpus includes either P or ~P (we assume not both), in the case of (c) A’s belief-corpus includes neither. So if we imagine an assignment of degrees-of-belief (or intensity of belief) to the propositions in a belief-corpus, then in the case of (a) we will have a certain positive assignment to P (depending on how intensely A believes P) and ~P will receive 0. So suppose that both A and B belong to case (a). We can now compare the degree-of-belief they have in P. In the case of (b) exactly the opposite will happen. But in the case of (c), both P and ~P will receive 0 degree-of-belief (or degree of intensity), since neither P nor ~P are present in A’s belief-corpus. Therefore, (c) is not somewhere in between cases (a) and (b) as you seemed to suggest. (c) is a totally separate case where both P and ~P receive the value 0.

One point that I think it is important to keep in mind is that this is a “zero-sum” situation. If we are certain that either P or ~P, then to the extent that we doubt P, we must affirm ~P. The two do not, despite what Peter suggests, move along separate axes. In other words, and despite Peter’s suggestion that the issue is simply a matter of logical “scope operators” (for which see here), nobody who understands the problem can give both P and ~P a simultaneous degree-of-belief of 0.

I replied as follows (this comment, however, did not make it onto the first page, and I think was seen by nobody, because the TypePad blogging software that Bill uses makes it easy not to notice that there are further pages of comments):

Regarding the proposition G (“God exists”): we will all agree, I think, that any informed and rational person should, regardless of his belief about G itself, believe with 100% certainty in the truth of the metaproposition I’ll call X: “Either G or ~G”. I think it is safe to say that *nobody* is in a position of witholding belief in X; i.e. nobody is “agnostic” regarding X.

I am interested in distinguishing these three cases:

1) The person who is “agnostic” regarding G. He is equally, and symmetrically, disposed toward accepting both G and ~G, but has no doubt that one or the other must in fact be the case. He simply does not feel that he has sufficiently compelling reasons to move to one side or the other.

2) The “atheist” who “believes” ~G, but with 50% confidence (“degree-of-belief”). He too knows with certainty that X, but the lack of truly convincing arguments against G leaves him in the middle.

3) The similar case of the “theist” who believes G, but also with only 50% confidence. Like the others, his confidence in X is certain: he believes, absolutely, that God must either exist or not exist, but the lack of any evidence, or even compelling arguments, for G leaves him right at 50 also.

Each of these three knows (because, remember, they all believe confidently that X) that to the extent they lack confidence in G they must have confidence in ~G, and vice versa. They know for sure that either G or ~G must be true.

Given that belief is a psychological disposition, how do these people differ? In particular, how is the agnostic at the middle of the scale meaningfully different from the theist or atheist in the middle? Both are disposed in the same way towards both propositions G and X.

Simply put, I think the word “belief” is losing, on the philosopher’s logic-chopping block, some of its connection with what really goes on in people’s heads. And we should bear in mind that there is nothing more to belief than what goes on in people’s heads. In other words, is there really anything more to our “belief” in G than our relative levels of confidence in G versus ~G?

Any thoughts?

Number 47, in the Krailsheimer edition:

Justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly. If they do make contact, they blunt the point and press all round on the false rather than the true.

In commenting on a recent post, our reader and commenter Addofio, parsing the distinction between truth and opinion, says that “it all depends on what we mean by ‘true’”. Kevin Kim takes a good preliminary poke at the question over at his place.

Or, as my friend Anthony Bouza once explained it, in closing a commencement address:

Beauty is Truth,
and Truth is Beauty;
Rooty-toot-toot
and-a-rooty-toot-tooty.

As Addofio says, it all depends.

In a challenging and thoughtful comment on our recent post about tolerance, our reader Addofio chides me for the disdainful tone I have taken in some of my criticism of religion. She recommends that we discuss ideas, however preposterously absurd, in emotionally neutral terms, as a gesture of respect for the people who hold them. Should we try always to do this when discussing any idea, no matter what the idea, or the context? Is it even possible to do so? What are emotions for, anyway? And is everyone entitled to this sort of respect?

I must point out first of all that it is quite impossible to make any selection between competing ideas without involving an emotional valuation. Every choice must be weighed in accordance with some aim, some goal, which it advances or impedes, and at bottom is always some affinity or aversion. And even the simplest of evaluative terms — “right”, “wrong, “good idea”, “bad idea” — carry this emotional luggage. Even “correct” or “mistaken” do, though they bury them a little deeper: “correct” means simply “with the right”, and the message of “mis-taken” is obvious enough.

Addofio is quite right that there is a range of language we can use: to say that an idea “may be mistaken” certainly seems gentler than to say it is addle-pated rubbish. It also has the effect, however, of flattening the scale. Some ideas are Good Tries that happen to be near misses, while others actually are addle-pated rubbish — and English has a range of words and expressions that allows us to make this distinction. To narrow the permissible range of expression so as to describe the truly worthless ideas in the same way as their betters may leave more feathers unruffled, but it also may give the counterproductive impression that the worst sort of foolishness is worth far more than it actually is. Some ideas are more wrong than others. To pretend that, for example, young-Earth creationism is a “respectable” position, on an intellectual par with our modern scientific understanding of the facts of life’s history, is to give it more standing than it deserves. It is for much the same reasons that civilized governments do not negotiate with hostage-takers.

Some memes are such toxic pollutants of the human mind that to dignify them with a neutral affective response is entirely unwarranted — and when confronting them, a negative emotional valuation is not only justifiable, but arguably ought to be made quite explicit. It is not the case, after all, that a religious system that encourages suicidal martrydom for the sake of slaughtering infidels is simply an idea with certain logical weaknesses. It far more than that: it is a bad idea, a dangerous idea, an abhorrent idea, and to pretend otherwise to avoid giving offense is not to be polite; it is to be supine.

Addofio makes a distinction between an exchange being on the level of feelings or on the level of ideas. But that we are having a dispute in the first place is only because we have feelings about ideas. We react to ideas with the full range of emotions: some are repugnant, others threatening, while others arouse strong, or even fanatical, approval. We make no objection, after all, to expressing our feelings about ideas — to describing them in emotionally charged terms — when they are “brilliant”, or “wonderful”, or “promising”, etc. So if the point of our criticism is forcefully to dissuade others from adopting the idea in question, it is quite understandable that we will use aversive language in addition to parsing its logical weaknesses. It may be, as Addofio suggests, that using such language will serve only to provoke a defensive reaction in those who hold the views we disparage, getting in the way of our bringing them round with the cogency of our argument. But it is rare that those in the grip of absurd religious views are ever argued out of them anyway. The target audience is those who have not yet succumbed, and sounding the alarm with strong language may alert them to their peril.

We may disagree about what, exactly, “respect for humanity” entails. In virtue of what, exactly, are humans worthy of respect? Simply for being born? Any beast can manage that. So what is it that sets us apart? I would say, if it to be anything more than mere convention, that it is that we are capable, unlike any other animal, of free choices, of being responsible for the selves we become. If this, then, is the basis of respect, then the respect we accord others will depend on the choices they have made, and the selves they have created.

Some, more than others, have the freedom and cognitive capacity to take greater responsibility: we do not disrespect children for believing fairy-tales, precisely because, due to their immaturity, ignorance, and undeveloped critical-thinking skills, we understand their responsibility to be diminished. The same applies to the mentally retarded, the insane, and those who, due to the circumstances of their lives, have had their possibilities circumscribed. I would hardly blame a Sentinelese Islander for having a primitive and superstitious worldview; if I were given the task of explaining the wider world to him, I would feel no inclination to chide him for his ignorance. The same does not apply, however, to a creationist school-board member from Kansas, who ought to know better. If you are an ostensibly mature and responsible adult, one who expects the full measure of respect we grant such people, then you should expect to be judged on the basis of what sort of self you have created — responsibility for which is the foundation of such respect in the first place. If you have chosen to be an otiose layabout, a repulsive boor, a child-molester, or a flim-flam artist, you should not expect to be widely admired. This extends to the ideas we hold: most people in these parts don’t “respect the humanity” of white supremacists, Nazis, or anti-Semites; in the left-leaning districts where I make my home the same withering contempt is directed toward Republicans, laissez-faire capitalists, opponents of gay marriage, and so forth. All this is because of the memes they have chosen to populate their minds with: because of the selves they have made. As I have pointed out before, it is not at all unusual to hear George W. Bush’s supporters excoriated in the most pejorative terms; neoconservative Republicans are publicly referred to as “idiots”, “morons” and so forth. Nobody seems particularly concerned about respecting their humanity — precisely because, as mature humans, they are held responsible for being what they are, and espousing the views they do. Whether they made themselves into something worthy of respect was up to them, and they blew it. They are not respected because in the opinion of their critics they could have, and ought to have, done a better job.

But although we are well accustomed to hearing harsh reviews in the arena of politics and culture — reviewers of books or movies, for example, are often downright contemptuous, and quite untroubled by any obligation to “respect” the author or auteur responsible for the work at hand — the rules seem very different when the topic is religion. For some reason, although we would have no qualms about describing a poorly-conceived political scheme as foolish and ignorant policymaking, or some awful novel as trite and badly written, we must stop short when considering religious beliefs, some of which happen to be among the weirdest and most pernicious notions ever to hijack and befuddle the human mind. In the unique case of religious ideas, suddenly we must, out of “respect” for the minds that harbor them, address these ideas not with the scorn and contumely they deserve, but with bloodless and value-neutral dispassion. This deeply entrenched taboo against stern criticism is nothing more than a clever mechanism that religious systems use to defend themselves against the erosive effect of skepticism — and we have indulged it, at immense cost, for far too long.

I’m afraid I have probably, with this prickly and provocative post, just bought myself a peck of trouble, and given some of you the impression that I have no interest in civil discourse. I hope that regular readers will know that this is hardly the case. But I will not refrain from speaking frankly: the stakes are too high. There are in this world a great many ideas competing for sovereignty among human minds — some that are of great and ennobling worth, others that are seductive and dangerous narcotics. There are decent, respectable people, and there are swaggering, ignorant bullies. There are good and wise men and women, and there are swindlers, mountebanks and fools. There is truth, and there is arrant nonsense. I am going to call them as I see them.