"Imagine some vitalist who says to the molecular biologists:
"The easy problems of life include those of explaining the following phenomena: reproduction, development, growth, metabolism, self-repair, immunological self-defense, . . . . These are not all that easy, of course, and it may take another century or so to work out the fine points, but they are easy compared to the really hard problem: life itself. We can imagine something that was capable of reproduction, development, growth, metabolism, self-repair and immunological self-defense, but that wasn't, you know, alive. The residual mystery of life would be untouched by solutions to all the easy problems. In fact, when I read your accounts of life, I am left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch."
This imaginary vitalist just doesn't see how the solution to all the easy problems amounts to a solution to the imagined hard problem. Somehow this vitalist has got under the impression that being alive is something over and above all these subsidiary component phenomena. I don't know what we can do about such a person beyond just patiently saying: your exercise in imagination has misfired; you can't imagine what you say you can, and just saying you can doesn't cut any ice."
The suggestion is that in the fullness of time--when we have a much much better functional understanding of how brains work--consciousness might come to look a lot like life. And just as we're happy thinking that whether or not something is alive can be kind of a matter for stipulation (do viruses count?), likewise it might be that we should say the same thing about, eg, whether nematodes are conscious.
(BTW, I'm the first person thanked in the acknowledgments of Ross's book. We co taughr a class on the material with him as the religious one and me as the atheist.)
The analogy just doesn’t work for me. Life is not mysterious in the same way, any more than a vehicle in motion is from the constituent parts of a car. Consciousness feels deeply different.
I agree life isn't mysterious *now*. But I'm not so sure it might not have seemed comparably mysterious in the past, before we had the biological knowledge we do now.
Reading a perfect description of a mouse would not convey a direct experience of what it is like *to be* a mouse. You can describe in ever finer detail what something looks like on the outside and the mystery of what it feels like to be that thing on the inside would remain. It’s not a scientifically addressable question.
Consciousness is one of the reasons why scientific materialism just can't be true. Mind isn't reducible to matter. We just know that. We have free will. We can interact with non-material entities such as numbers and ideas. Scientific materialism is just too impoverished an ontology to fit lots of things, like numbers and ideas and consciousness and free will and right and wrong and beauty, that we know are real. More in the linked chapter.
It doesn't follow from that that Christianity is true. And yet if you reject scientific materialism, you still need to somehow make sense of things. Of human nature. Of history. What I think it leads the wisest people to, at the end of a long road of reflection, is what I call pre-Christianity, the common sense theology of creation and fall. We live in a world that is amazingly good and wonderful and full of beauty and order and design. But we also live in a world that is wounded, deeply vitiated, unraveling, falling apart. What on earth are we supposed to do with this intolerably schizophrenic character of reality, this weird riddle, this counterintuitive and contradictory life? If there must be a creator, else where did everything come from, why did he let the world run down like this? Why let this masterpiece of nature be doomed to mortality and heat death?
That is the riddle to which Christianity is the answer. And it's when you recognize that the riddle needs such an answer that the historical evidence for the resurrection -- which is in one sense overwhelming, namely in the sense that it would be historically absurd to doubt it except as a function of rejecting miracles on principle -- comes into its own. The weirdness of creation and fall should open the mind to look for something else to make the big picture cohere, and it's when you've risen to that challenge that the resurrection, at the joyous center of salvation history, becomes the eureka moment of ultimate discovery.
"Mind isn't reducible to matter. We just know that. We have free will."
Um, "we" don't know that. In fact, there is no evidence for an immaterial "soul" or any similar ghost in the machine. And there is plenty of evidence from neuroscience that free will is an illusion. (Subjective experience is not evidence for anything, by the way.)
The "weirdness of creation" is only weird to those who lack knowledge of biology and physics.
I’d be curious if you would follow this thought experiment.
You walk into a space station. This is a very isolated environment and every atom is tracked by a planet sized computer on the exterior. You were scanned at a fine level of detail before you entered. In short time scales, you’re a completely deterministic agent. The computer is running a simulation of what is happening in the space station including you. You turn on a computer monitor that displays an image some number of seconds into the future. What has to be true of what the computer screen shows you in a perfectly deterministic universe?
I strongly disagree and recommend Chalmers: The Conscious Mind (first half). I mean once you cut through what Dennet is saying here it's just 'nah, I still don't believe in qualia'. I mean he isn't actually countering the form of the argument only pushing back on the suggestion that it's coherent to seperate material form (atoms etc) and qualia'.
Ok maybe that can seem plausible with zombies but Dennet needs to reject the coherence of idealism entirely. On his picture there is no property that isn't logically reducible to material properties so it doesn't even make sense to ask if experience could be fundamental.
Yes, if you thought that you could in principle have two functionally (in senses listed above) identical entities which differed in whether they were alive the argument above would work. But that would mean postulating some extra property that was required to be alive over and above all those ones and that twists the analogy. The vitalist was never claiming that some things might perfectly appear to be alive but weren't really they were offering a theory that predicted when those agreed upon indicia of life would occur.
Ultimately this doesn't advance the argument it just says that the action occurs in whether to accept the kind of conception of qualia necessary to be an idealist.
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Really Chalmers argument is no different than the reasoning we use to distinguish the properties of inertial and gravitational mass. Our ability to imagine cases those diverge proves that part of our best scientific theory must specify their equality in the actual world. Nothing different with consciousness. If you want to reject the conclusion you really need to reject the premises which requires rejecting the coherence of idealism.
I agree that "the action occurs in whether to accept the kind of conception of qualia necessary to be an idealist." It seems like you're presupposing that of course we should accept that kind of conception, that it's a kind of embarrassment if your view says the alternatives aren't even coherent possibilities. But I don't think that's obvious at all. Especially in the present context, where we're discussing theism. Many versions of theism say atheism is deeply incoherent; God is the necessarily existing ground of all being. Paradigm idealists (e.g., Berkeley), rejected the coherence (not just the truth, but the coherence) of materialism. In debates this fundamental, what's at issue is which kinds of distinctions ultimately make sense; I don't think it's embarrassing for Dennett and other materialists that on their view, idealism isn't a coherent possibility, just as for idealists like Berkeley, materialism isn't a coherent possibility, and for classical theists, atheism isn't a coherent possibility.
I'm not sure why you say the Dennett line doesn't advance the argument. I think when you hit this kind of bedrock, all you can do is offer intuition pumps. Chalmers thinks his readers will be persuaded that p-zombies are a logical possibility. Dennett is trying to convince his readers not to go along with their hunch that Chalmers has described a genuine possibility. How to do it? Offer examples of errors--ones you could have imagined yourself committing in a different historical/scientific context--that would be similar to the error you might be committing now in accepting the coherence of p-zombies.
That's not the *only* thing to say. He also tries to convince you that your interest in consciousness--in the pre-theoretical, ordinary language sense--is intimately bound up with the sort of stuff that we *can* imagine neuroscience explaining:
"What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all "merely" the "performance of functions" or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of "qualitative content" bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything."
I'm not sure what the better approach is if you want to convince somebody that they're making a mistake in taking some feature to be fundamental, when it's actually an amalgam of a bunch of other stuff.
It was great. He's an intellectually curious, broadly read, thoughtful person, so lots of fun to discuss the material with. And because the class was organized as a seminar, it felt mostly like a series of discussions (along with students) rather than a more organized effort to impart knowledge to students (as you might have in an intro survey class).
I've struggled to make sense of Dennett's views on consciousness and free will. I respect Dennett, but in his extended discussions with Sam Harris, it's Harris who has the deeper, more accurate view in my judgement.
I haven't seen his discussions with Sam Harris. I do feel a bit weird recommending Dennett; I find him very persuasive, but I know lots of people read "Consciousness Explained" and it leaves them absolutely cold, so I'm not sure what the best way--if there is one--of making the case for his sorts of views is to people with very different sensibilities than mine.
For me, the overall simplicity and elegance of the materialist, reductionist worldview is great enough that it strikes me as much more likely that stuff that can initially seem hard to fit into it (e.g., consciousness) is just stuff where we're still relatively ignorant (as we *certainly* are when it comes to understanding how the brain works).
And along similar lines to the example above there are lots of examples from the history of science where people thought it was intuitively obvious that some or another phenomenon couldn't be explained in broadly mechanistic terms, and as science progresses, those claims no longer look intuitively obvious. E.g., Descartes, who's more responsible than anybody else for the idea of a sharp distinction between minds/souls on the one hand, which are not subject to lawlike, mechanistic explanation, and bodies on the other (which are), thought that it wasn't just consciousness, but language use, and complex behavior more generally, that needed minds for their explanation. Now in the age of AI, the idea that you couldn't have language use or complex behavior without a disembodied, immaterial soul looks quaint, even to people who still insist that you couldn't have genuine consciousness without a disembodied, immaterial soul. So the track record of insisting that *this* phenomenon can't be fit into a mechanistic, materialist worldview, is not good. Our intuitions about this stuff are much more contingent, and sensitive to the background state of scientific knowledge, than we tend to think.
We do understand a great deal about the brain already and are learning more all the time. If we knew absolutely everything, would we understand consciousness? The materialist, reductionist view explains the physical world, but doesn't touch consciousness at all. We can't measure anything about consciousness or even observe it except in ourselves. We can measure all kinds of things about brain activity, and self reporting of consciousness experience seems to correlate well, but whether brains "cause" consciousness can't be demonstrated. I think Spinoza had it right, "The mind cannot determine the body to move and the body cannot determine the mind to think." Perhaps there is some deeper cause that determines why the mental and physical worlds proceed in parallel.
I'd disagree that we understand a great deal about the brain already, at least if we're talking about functional understanding. An analogy I like is LLMs. We clearly understand how these work at the fundamental level; we know the algorithms we designed them to run. But there's a reason "Explainable AI" is a buzzword; it's generally agreed that we can't explain why they produce the answers they do; we know the basic rules they're following, but we don't have a humanly graspable explanation of how those rules at the fundamental level give rise to intelligent prose at the emergent level.
And we understand LLMs much better than the brain--we designed them, after all. That is to say, we understand how cellular activity at the neural level (which I admit we have some understanding of, though not as much as we have of the basic architecture of LLMs) gives rise to intelligent speech, action, and all the rest at the emergent level even worse than we understand the analogous process in LLMs. That's what I mean by saying we're relatively ignorant about how the brain works.
And as for the idea that all the neuroscientific knowledge we could get will leave consciousness untouched, that sounds to me just like Descartes saying that if you explained all the mechanistic stuff about bodies, of course you'd leave mental stuff like language use untouched. Maybe when we actually do get around to explaining "short-term memory, long-term memory, autobiographical memory, the nature of representation, the nature of sensori-motor integration, top-down effects in perception not to mention such capacities as attention, depth perception, intelligent eye movement, skill acquisition, planning, decision-making, and so forth" (list from Churchland), it won't seem so obvious we've left consciousness out, just as already that has turned out to be the case with language use, and life.
When it comes to metaphysics, you have to go back to the very beginning before you can say whether anything is really plausible or not, whether, and to what extent, it is supported by evidence of different kinds etc.
Which is very difficult to do, I don't think I've really done it! But I do, I think, understand that the metaphysical question of what the universe is really made out of cannot be answered by marshalling evidence in a way that already presupposes what it is made out.
So, for example, to note that mental states are associated with brain states, which is certainly true, will not persuade a metaphysical idealist (of which there have been and still are many) that materialism is true.
For the idealists, brains--and neurons etc., this goes "all the way down"--are not material because--nothing is. Which strikes a materialist as crazy of course but is it? By the materialist account itself, brains etc. only take the form we observe them to take "in the mind," itself supposedly material, and we have no direct access to the "material substance" that is "the thing in itself."
Now it is the difficulties with that account that lead many people to become idealists or just skeptics, or "neutral monists" in the terms of philosophy (a neglected option I'd say).
I'd say "the original error" is dualism, commonsensical and reflecting everyday experience as it does, and materialism never escapes it, it's just dualism with mind left out (and then smuggled back in various implausible ways).
More parsimonious and elegant is that view that the universe is: 1) all mind, in which case "the hard" problem etc. and the skepticism that materialism seems to point to cease to be problems; 2) my preferred option because it is more defensible, "neutral monism": the universe is not made out silly putty but we don't know what it is, and why would we?
Ross' characterization of quantum mechanics where a conscious mind collapses the wave function is nonsense and not implied even by the standard Copenhagen interpretation (from which it is inspired). It's woo BS not taken seriously by most physicists.
I’m reading his book now (about half way done) and so many stretches of his conversation on science is just Christian Apologetics copypasta. Lots of quote mining and stuff
Christian Apologetics how to: find tenuous scientific idea which is plausible but involves logical leaps and gaps in explanation and then use that idea to amplify ideas with even larger gaps of explanation.
Agreed it was clumsy and my guess is that his understanding is distant from things like “the observer was the collision with another atom.” But in the ultimate philosophy of science sense you can’t remove the human observer.
Yes, I think he sort of stumbled on that point. I sum up a variety of physics-based Christian apologetic arguments in my chapter 7. Quantum mechanics is slightly helpful for the defense of the faith because it refutes old-fashioned determinism as an attack on free will. More important are the "fine-tuning" arguments that fundamental natural laws are demonstrably fine-tuned to make the universe suitable for life. That line of argument is actually so powerful that it is driven many physicists into the crazy "multiverse" cul-de-sac of believing in infinite numbers of universes that we can't see, in order to avoid believing in one God that we can't see! :)
If anyone is interested in questions of free will/consciousness and quantum mechanics, I highly recommend this essay by Scott Aaronson, which takes a deeper and more scientific approach to the issue and touches on a lot of really cool ideas: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
>into the crazy "multiverse" cul-de-sac of believing in infinite numbers of universes that we can't see, in order to avoid believing in one God that we can't see!
Physicists don't sit around conjecturing theories in order to "avoid believing in one God", this is a typical religious brand of cynicism on par with Jordan Peterson saying "You say you don't believe in God but you believe in beauty so you actually believe in god you just don't know it". Stop with the dishonesty.
If you can point directly to where Stephen Hawking says that the anthropic principle and fine tuning has anything to do with the many-worlds interpretation of QM, you should. Because I'm not aware of any connection. And while LLMs are fun I would not consult them in an argument (c'mon man)--I've tried asking current leading LLM models on basic linear algebra questions and they make stuff up.
Well, you could check out A Brief History of Time, chapter 8. That's one place I read it. Also Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe.
I don't quite see how the anthropic principle can be separated from fine tuning. The whole point of the anthropic principle is that there's some feature of the universe, like the balance of momentum and gravity emerging from the Big Bang, or the ratio of the fundamental constants, which turns out to be extremely well suited to fitting the universe for life, in a way that seems prima facie improbable, then the "anthropic principle" can explain why-- but only if there are many universes. If there are many universes, and ours is fine tuned for life, maybe that's because of the anthropic principle, that is, because the one fine-tuned for life is the one we appeared in. What would motivate the anthropic principle other than something like fine-tuning?
I’d read God is not great next. That should dispel the myths.
Sadly, Hitchens is not around any more to be interviewed. Humanity’s loss.
My basic approach is to subject theism (any of them) to the scientific method. In the face of any “god” hypothesis, I accept the null, unless and until sufficient verifiable, falsifiable, and repeatable, evidence of any god’s existence is provided so as to allow the null to be rejected.
Ross Douthat also lies about Bart Ehrman's journey. The discover of contradictions in the gospels, did not convince Ehrman to leave Christianity, just to embrace a less fundamentalist Christian worldview.
" I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives of different authors living at different times in different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs. But the problems of the Bible are
not what led me to leave the faith. These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny. I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.
Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known
since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.
The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered— some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago
I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church."
If you want to circle back to this topic sometime, I would love to jump on a podcast and defend the Christian faith, to you or anyone else, anytime, any venue, against any critiques, attacks, or doubts that anyone may have.
My comprehensive apologetics is in my long book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity https://a.co/d/2lffcFA. Compared to Ross, my approach is considerably more rationalist. Ross didn't like your probabilistic question, but I love that kind of exercise. I go full Bayesian. I argue like Descartes, taking nothing for granted. The first few chapters are preoccupied with epistemology. How can we know anything, to begin with? And then, with that settled, how can we know that Christianity is true, in particular?
Descartes was a theist of sorts. Spinoza, who came shortly after, sounded the initial death knell for superstitious belief. If your book delves into Spinoza, I will buy it.
I would also sort of recommend God is Not Great, but for the opposite reason. Like Bertrand Russell and others who have been brash enough to attack Christianity head on, Hitchens makes a bitter and hysterical fool of himself. I think the book would push you towards faith.
To Steve Cheung, I would ask: what sort of imaginable evidence could possibly be sufficient, verifiable, falsifiable, and repeatable evidence for the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good God? If you find there's no answer, haven't you ruled out God by an arbitrary ex ante assumption? But that doesn't seem very satisfactory, does it?
Old person and a younger one descend from the heavens. Subject themselves to DNA test and show that they are genetic twins. One (or both) of them turns some water into wine. That would be a start.
Yes….it’s ridiculous….just like all “god” claims are.
I haven’t “ruled out” the possibility of god. But that’s not my job. It’s the job of theists to show sufficient evidence to allow the god hypothesis to be ruled in. They’ve failed the test so far. Until they do, I continue to accept the null.
That wouldn't prove the existence of an almighty, all-knowing God! That wouldn't even be a very reasonable conclusion to draw from such an event. The event you described would actually be inconsistent with Christian theology, which does not represent God the Father as having a body. The most reasonable conclusion to draw would be that some alien race with superior technology was trying to trick us by simulating certain venerable human stories.
Try again if you like, but I warn you you're barking up the wrong tree. There just isn't any simple observable event from which large theistic claims could be validly inferred. The setup is all wrong. With a lot of reflection, the whole natural order in all its beauty combined with the Christian account of salvation history can be the basis for an inference to God. But magical parlor tricks just can't do that at all.
“There just isn't any simple observable event from which large theistic claims could be validly inferred”
Lol. At least you’re honest, if only by accident. But you’re correct: god claims are so vast, and non-sensical, that they may well be unprovable even in their composite parts, let alone in their insane entirety. Fortunately, that is a problem for theists like you; it’s not a problem for folks like me. I’m taking the null until you come up with something better….and it looks like even a theist like you is pretty bearish on those prospects.
Which is why theists like you should really steer away from any fact-based discussions on the topic. Look, it’s your faith…which by definition requires complete trust (diametrically different from “proof”). Have your god, and keep believing in it cuz you want to, and/or have to, and/or need to. Your beliefs are your business. It’s only when theists start making “truth” claims where anyone who’s heard of the scientific method will say “what have you been smoking”. Or in your parlance, “what have you been reflecting on”.
Since you’re a Christian, I’ll leave you with this: A Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim walk into a bar…and they can’t all be right. Hitchens was hilarious in this section.
Essentially, your position is that you adopt atheism as an arbitrary unfalsifiable assumption, and that's where you stop, like a stick in the mud. That won't do if you have any aspirations to a rationally based worldview.
To repeat, there isn't any *simple* observable event from which large theistic claims could be validly deduced. Your asking for one is merely a crude fallacy. The question of God is as rationally settleable as any, but it will take a much longer intellectual journey, and a lot more philosophical reflection, to rise to the challenge of it.
Huh? How is atheism unfalsifiable? Show me god, and it is instantly falsified. That you can’t, is not my problem. It is, however, yours. But you seem to lack the capacity to recognize or acknowledge that. You’re not alone in those failures. It befalls basically any theist of any stripe. You should note that Hitchens, for example, subscribed to more of a “positive assertion” atheism (that there is NO god), by my understanding of his position. Otoh, mine is simply an accepting of the null hypothesis…if you say there is a god, then prove it…and since you can’t, or haven’t, then there isn’t one, for the time being, as far as I’m concerned. Hitchens would say you’re wrong to believe in god; I say you can believe in god just as you can believe in Santa Claus, with the same degree of confidence in your truth claims, to date.
“Rationally settleable”….”intellectual journey”…..”philosophical reflection”….IOW, motivated reasoning and navel gazing. That’s fine for hallucinations within the confines of your noggin, but is insufficient for external reality. Sorry.
But what proof would you be justified in accepting? What would actually justify an inference to the existence of an almighty, all-knowing, perfectly good Being?
If you can't answer that, then your atheism is just an arbitrary unfalsifiable assumption, as I said. And it's hard to answer than you think. You clearly haven't put much thought into it.
I could give my explanations or the evidence for God, but you'd need to raise your game a lot before there'd be reason to hope you'd understand. I'm trying to help you do that.
Richard, I appreciate your scientific approach to analyzing claims of the existence of god(s). I am of the same mindset. I think there is certainly much we don’t understand about the nature and mechanics of the universe and consciousness. But I don’t think a higher power is a reasonable explanation. It is conjecture at best.
There is a rumor you’ve become interested in Objectivism recently. So I’ll leave you with an insight from Leonard Peikoff that has informed my perspective on this topic:
“What is meant by “the supernatural”? Supposedly, a realm that transcends nature. What is nature? Nature is existence—the sum of that which is. It is usually called “nature” when we think of it as a system of interconnected, interacting entities governed by law. So “nature” really means the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What, then, is “super-nature”? Something beyond the universe, beyond entities, beyond identity. It would have to be: a form of existence beyond existence—a kind of entity beyond anything man knows about entities—a something which contradicts everything man knows about the identity of that which is. In short, a contradiction of every metaphysical essential.”
What's interesting about this conversation is that Douthat loses unless he completely crushes it. After all, on his theory it must be that the evidence for god is sufficiently strong as to make it blameworthy not to accept it -- otherwise all non-belief is excused as 'invincible ignorance.'. His view that faith is ever rewarded is incompatible with the position that the evidence for god isn't so weak as to excuse all non-belief.
Indeed, Douthat's got a very high bar to leap: not just rejection of metaphysical materialism (which I find implausible too though Douthat argues against it badly, as a kind of dualist rather than idealist or neutral monist), but theism, and not just theism but Christianity, getting less plausible as he goes on.
Which is why discussions of the Big Questions need to be freed from this format, I'd say. There are plenty more options than Christianity and what might be called post-Christian atheism.
Excellent stuff Richard! Tbh, I’ve found most atheist polemics, including the Dawkins-Hitchens ones, not very compelling, despite being an atheist myself. I think the best argument for atheism is to simply look at all existing human knowledge in totality. We know about astronomy and quantum mechanics. We know about eco-psych and anthropology. We know about genes and quantitative history. We know how religions evolve and about the materials conditions that are conducive to its flourishing. If you still feel attracted to the idea of the supernatural even after all of this, you probably can’t help it. Cheers and thanks again to you and Ross Douthat!
Oh my goodness! "We know about how religions evolve?" You think it's crystal clear why first thousands and then millions of people came to believe, or claim to believe, that a certain Jewish carpenter had to come back to life, so firmly that they were willing to die horrible deaths by torture rather than deny it, if the resurrection never happened? And that these frauds, or lunatics, wrote the most profound and visionary ethical teachings ever written, so that a hundred generations in the most information-Rich civilization in history have been continuously impressed with them, more often than not sufficiently so to treat them as the ultimate source of ethical truth? There's nothing mysterious about that! And there's consciousness too, and fine tuning, and the philosophical problem of reverence... You are very greatly overestimating the coherence, comprehensiveness, and empirical success that has been attained by atheistic scientific materialism!
No, it isn’t crystal clear how religions evolve. But there is reason to believe that religious beliefs, and their accompanying mythology, do serve an evolutionary purpose. Humans have, just over the course of recorded history, created thousands of religious belief systems. You would be hard pressed to find any human gathering, on any part of the planet, that didn’t have some type of religion or mythology. Current speculation posits that shared religious rituals serve as something of a social glue for its participants. It encourages group cooperation, which seems to provide both psychological and temporal benefits. After all, human existence can be remarkably random and unpredictable. Seeking solace in the warm embrace of some beneficent, all-powerful entity can be incredibly attractive. All that is required is that their adherents believe that the myths are true. But for those of us skeptics, who view a historic landscape littered with abandoned or debunked religious traditions, who is to say one religion is truer than any other?
What is the evolutionary purpose of embracing martyrdom in the prime of life? As for "who is to say which religion is truer?" - you can look at the evidence for a start. We have four eyewitness accounts of the resurrection. But that's kind of a red herring anyway. Step one is to see why scientific materialism can't be the true worldview. Then we can study the alternatives.
I have a similar inclination towards atheism, but the recent trend around prominent intellectuals openly discussing their faith has led me to reread the Gospels, which I haven’t looked at since high school (I figure if it really is the Word of God then my soul should recognize it as such - or something like that). Tyler Cowen recommended a new translation by Sarah Ruden a few years ago and I have found it a really interesting intellectual exercise from a fresh translation point of view - but also haven’t converted yet either (but hey, I’m only through Mark!).
I remember reading a Mark Twain story years ago -- probably Huckleberry Finn -- that had a nice quip on the topic. Tom Sawyer or "Huck" described how they were in a classroom and wanted to test if God was real. So they closed their eyes, wished for a piece of cake and waved their arms about. As things would have it, someone else actually had a piece of cake in their hands at the time, and Huck or Tom took it away from them in passing. Ergo, "God exists".
Later, they tried the same trick and, of course, failed miserably. Ergo, "God does not exist".
Not sure that adults in general have progressed much past that particular "hypothesis", the only thing changing is typically immortality -- raisins or virgins or a table with The Big Guy -- or purpose instead of a piece of cake.
Atheists are so illogical! Obviously, the cupcake experiment couldn't cross-apply to hopes of the afterlife because you won't find that out until after you're dead. Adults might make that mistake about other things, like a car or a job, but it couldn't be about the afterlife, because that can't be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed while we're alive. (Near-death experiences are kind of rare, very limited exception to this rule, but never mind.)
In general, "thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test" can be sufficiently justified by a straightforward analogy with human friendship. We normally don't, and we shouldn't, deliberately put our human friends to the test either. Who asks for a favor from a friend just to find out whether they're a friend or not? If you did, any conclusions drawn from such an ill-conceived experiment would be quite invalid.
Well, God always knows your motives. He's a person with agency, not some sort of mechanical principle. It's perfectly compatible with divine love to leave some prayers unanswered because granting them would not really benefit you. That said, it does make sense to interpret what happens in the wake of prayers that are said with good motives and in genuine need as Bayesian updating events. More about that in my chapter 20.
A major problem with the way "the Big Questions" now tend to be discussed, in the West at least, is it assumes the only options are Christianity and atheism. That leaves out most of the positions most people have ever held, apart from anything else.
Also, "metaphysical" materialism tends to be assumed by atheists, and dualism by theists, when both are false, I think.
Dualism is the folk or common-sense metaphysics we develop pretty naturally, as we experience the world as a mix of our own, "subjective" mental states and "hard objects" that appear to be "outside" our minds.
Materialism is the next step: dualism with mind lopped off, everything is a "hard object" of the kind we interact with every day. But the original error remains. Not only does mind disappear, creating the "hard problem" and requiring it to be smuggled back in various implausible ways, but on a materialist account, phenomena are themselves ultimately made out of a "material substance" we never perceive directly, which points towards skepticism not "naturalism" (see e.g. Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality).
A much more parsimonious and plausible view is that we know the universe is not silly putty, but we don't know exactly what it's made out of ("neutral monism" as it's called in philosophy).
Now once the metaphysical dogmatism goes, well, more things become possible or plausible, but how plausible remains the question...
First, let me apologize for the condescending tone that crept into my last two comments. If you withdraw because that tone makes this exchange unpleasant, I promise not to interpret it as a concession.
Second, it might help to make my basic epistemological point in a less polarizing space.
Suppose I'm a psychologist with a theory that adult alcoholism is always caused by abuse in childhood. In support, I can cite many examples from my clinical experience.
Unconvinced, you point out that every time I encounter an adult alcoholic who was a victim of child abuse, I call it evidence for my theory, but I don't treat other alcoholics as evidence against it, because they might have been abused and we just don't know about it. So you object that my theory is effectively unfalsifiable, and challenge me to say what evidence could possibly prove my theory false.
Defending yourself, you say that the decisive counter-evidence would be a solemn affidavit from an adult alcoholic that they had never been abused. Have you vindicated the falsifiability of your theory?
Not really, for two reasons. First, the criterion is unreasonable since nobody normally signs any such affidavits.
But second, even if someone does, that's not really decisive evidence against the theory. People could swear they were never abused when they really were. Maybe they feel ashamed. Maybe they're afraid of stigma. Maybe they've forgotten. Maybe they're protecting parents whom they still love in spite of abuse. It's quite likely that there are adult alcoholics who say they weren't abused but actually were. So my falsifiability proposal fails, and my theory is unscientific.
In your example, an old man and a young man come down and change water into wine. One problem with that is that no theist thinks it will happen. God the Father didn't have a body. No such descent is prophesied, except something a little like that at the end of time, after many disasters that amount to a destruction of the world.
But also, if that did happen, it wouldn't actually falsify an atheist worldview at all. There could be alien beings of some sort, equipped with some sort of nanotech or biotech that we don't know about, who are able to transform water to wine like that. I suppose more details would be needed about how the operation is done, and possibly natural causes could be ruled out, and a miracle confirmed, But that would still fall far short proving that the beings had properties traditionally ascribed to God, such as omnipotence and omniscience. They might be capable of changing water wine, but not of healing, moving, mountains, etc.
So the example fails to vindicate the falsifiability of your atheism.
Real evidence for God starts with the existence and goodness of the whole world. Physics today admits that the universe had a beginning. We can trace its history back to the Big Bang. Who begin it? Who caused the Big Bang? Moreover, many studies have found that the universe is fine-tuned for life, such that for key features of the universe to be as they are by chance would be like shooting a bullet through the eye of a needle at 100 yards. The natural conclusion is that whatever initiated the universe intended the beautiful complexity of life, and prepared a delicate balance of forces that enabled that intricacy to emerge. If the Big Bang requires an originator whom we might as well call God, then fine tuning tells us something about the character and the plans of God. More can be understood about God's character and plans from the revelations and miracles described in the Bible, the whole panoply of salvation history, with the resurrection of Jesus, attested by multiple eyewitnesses who had no motive to lie, and we could hardly have contrived such a gigantic coax if they wanted to, at its heart.
You want to make the test of God observable and repeatable, as if God were a natural law. But God is not a natural law, He is a supernatural Person. And even ordinary people do not allow themselves to be tested like that. If you want to find out whether someone is good, and to that end, you arrange for them to be repeatedly put in situations where the survival of a human being depends on their performing a daring rescue, you can't expect them to tamely play along. You're a monster for putting so many people at risk for the sake of your experiment and if there really any good, and they figure out what you're up to, they'll try to stop you. God always knows what you're up to, and He can stop you. He won't be treated like a mere mechanical law of nature to be used for magical parlor tricks.
Plenty of Christians do report answers to prayer, sometimes verging on the miraculous, or in rarer cases, explicitly and uncontrovertibly miraculous, at least for those who witness them. You might get some for yourself. Miracles seem to come as both a reward and a rescue for those who are doing their very utmost in the service of the best thing that they know. But to ask that it be intersubjectively observable and repeatable is to ask God to write the story of the world in a different way, and a worse way, than He intends to do. There is an intentional hiddenness about God, and the Bible gives us some insight about why, for some people will react badly and become worse if His presence and will are made known, as the Pharisees did. And yet the overwhelming evidence is really there, after all, if you take a serious look.
I'm not sure how you can doubt the existence of the supernatural; just sleep on your chin/stomach (on the floor; no bed/pillow), keep your chin and shoulders up (and tailbone back and up) and stay there. The very fact the purpose of the chin is censored is in itself strong evidence there's something fishy here. This was undoubtedly known to the Imperial Japanese (thus their correct writing direction -top->down/right->left -and their correct script -katakana). You should start seeing the results partly in three days and fully in two months.
I have tried Catholicism for ~2 years; I later concluded the arguments against free will and against God's omni status were stronger than those in favor. Now I don't know which religion is true.
I respond to that in chapter 17 of my book. You're on the right track when you suggest that free will is the answer to the problem of evil. As CS Lewis said, there are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "*Thy* will be done." God finally lets us reject Him if we're determined to do so. And without Him, what do we have? We won't be allowed to torment others forever: not other people, not even other living things.
You mention a VR. Yes, probably some sort of VR could be given to the damned, but would that mitigate their damnation? I've never seen a VR that wouldn't bore me in 24 hours. Could anyone inhabit a VR forever without the boredom becoming a torment? There is ultimately no way for solitary evil to be happy. Hell is what's left to us when we reject God.
On consciousness, I'd recommend reading some dennett. Eg, this:
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/290/1/chalmers.htm
One of the main examples from the paper:
"Imagine some vitalist who says to the molecular biologists:
"The easy problems of life include those of explaining the following phenomena: reproduction, development, growth, metabolism, self-repair, immunological self-defense, . . . . These are not all that easy, of course, and it may take another century or so to work out the fine points, but they are easy compared to the really hard problem: life itself. We can imagine something that was capable of reproduction, development, growth, metabolism, self-repair and immunological self-defense, but that wasn't, you know, alive. The residual mystery of life would be untouched by solutions to all the easy problems. In fact, when I read your accounts of life, I am left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch."
This imaginary vitalist just doesn't see how the solution to all the easy problems amounts to a solution to the imagined hard problem. Somehow this vitalist has got under the impression that being alive is something over and above all these subsidiary component phenomena. I don't know what we can do about such a person beyond just patiently saying: your exercise in imagination has misfired; you can't imagine what you say you can, and just saying you can doesn't cut any ice."
The suggestion is that in the fullness of time--when we have a much much better functional understanding of how brains work--consciousness might come to look a lot like life. And just as we're happy thinking that whether or not something is alive can be kind of a matter for stipulation (do viruses count?), likewise it might be that we should say the same thing about, eg, whether nematodes are conscious.
(BTW, I'm the first person thanked in the acknowledgments of Ross's book. We co taughr a class on the material with him as the religious one and me as the atheist.)
The analogy just doesn’t work for me. Life is not mysterious in the same way, any more than a vehicle in motion is from the constituent parts of a car. Consciousness feels deeply different.
I agree life isn't mysterious *now*. But I'm not so sure it might not have seemed comparably mysterious in the past, before we had the biological knowledge we do now.
Reading a perfect description of a mouse would not convey a direct experience of what it is like *to be* a mouse. You can describe in ever finer detail what something looks like on the outside and the mystery of what it feels like to be that thing on the inside would remain. It’s not a scientifically addressable question.
Consciousness is one of the reasons why scientific materialism just can't be true. Mind isn't reducible to matter. We just know that. We have free will. We can interact with non-material entities such as numbers and ideas. Scientific materialism is just too impoverished an ontology to fit lots of things, like numbers and ideas and consciousness and free will and right and wrong and beauty, that we know are real. More in the linked chapter.
It doesn't follow from that that Christianity is true. And yet if you reject scientific materialism, you still need to somehow make sense of things. Of human nature. Of history. What I think it leads the wisest people to, at the end of a long road of reflection, is what I call pre-Christianity, the common sense theology of creation and fall. We live in a world that is amazingly good and wonderful and full of beauty and order and design. But we also live in a world that is wounded, deeply vitiated, unraveling, falling apart. What on earth are we supposed to do with this intolerably schizophrenic character of reality, this weird riddle, this counterintuitive and contradictory life? If there must be a creator, else where did everything come from, why did he let the world run down like this? Why let this masterpiece of nature be doomed to mortality and heat death?
That is the riddle to which Christianity is the answer. And it's when you recognize that the riddle needs such an answer that the historical evidence for the resurrection -- which is in one sense overwhelming, namely in the sense that it would be historically absurd to doubt it except as a function of rejecting miracles on principle -- comes into its own. The weirdness of creation and fall should open the mind to look for something else to make the big picture cohere, and it's when you've risen to that challenge that the resurrection, at the joyous center of salvation history, becomes the eureka moment of ultimate discovery.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-grand-coherence-chapter-9-the
"Mind isn't reducible to matter. We just know that. We have free will."
Um, "we" don't know that. In fact, there is no evidence for an immaterial "soul" or any similar ghost in the machine. And there is plenty of evidence from neuroscience that free will is an illusion. (Subjective experience is not evidence for anything, by the way.)
The "weirdness of creation" is only weird to those who lack knowledge of biology and physics.
I’d be curious if you would follow this thought experiment.
You walk into a space station. This is a very isolated environment and every atom is tracked by a planet sized computer on the exterior. You were scanned at a fine level of detail before you entered. In short time scales, you’re a completely deterministic agent. The computer is running a simulation of what is happening in the space station including you. You turn on a computer monitor that displays an image some number of seconds into the future. What has to be true of what the computer screen shows you in a perfectly deterministic universe?
I strongly disagree and recommend Chalmers: The Conscious Mind (first half). I mean once you cut through what Dennet is saying here it's just 'nah, I still don't believe in qualia'. I mean he isn't actually countering the form of the argument only pushing back on the suggestion that it's coherent to seperate material form (atoms etc) and qualia'.
Ok maybe that can seem plausible with zombies but Dennet needs to reject the coherence of idealism entirely. On his picture there is no property that isn't logically reducible to material properties so it doesn't even make sense to ask if experience could be fundamental.
Yes, if you thought that you could in principle have two functionally (in senses listed above) identical entities which differed in whether they were alive the argument above would work. But that would mean postulating some extra property that was required to be alive over and above all those ones and that twists the analogy. The vitalist was never claiming that some things might perfectly appear to be alive but weren't really they were offering a theory that predicted when those agreed upon indicia of life would occur.
Ultimately this doesn't advance the argument it just says that the action occurs in whether to accept the kind of conception of qualia necessary to be an idealist.
--
Really Chalmers argument is no different than the reasoning we use to distinguish the properties of inertial and gravitational mass. Our ability to imagine cases those diverge proves that part of our best scientific theory must specify their equality in the actual world. Nothing different with consciousness. If you want to reject the conclusion you really need to reject the premises which requires rejecting the coherence of idealism.
I agree that "the action occurs in whether to accept the kind of conception of qualia necessary to be an idealist." It seems like you're presupposing that of course we should accept that kind of conception, that it's a kind of embarrassment if your view says the alternatives aren't even coherent possibilities. But I don't think that's obvious at all. Especially in the present context, where we're discussing theism. Many versions of theism say atheism is deeply incoherent; God is the necessarily existing ground of all being. Paradigm idealists (e.g., Berkeley), rejected the coherence (not just the truth, but the coherence) of materialism. In debates this fundamental, what's at issue is which kinds of distinctions ultimately make sense; I don't think it's embarrassing for Dennett and other materialists that on their view, idealism isn't a coherent possibility, just as for idealists like Berkeley, materialism isn't a coherent possibility, and for classical theists, atheism isn't a coherent possibility.
I'm not sure why you say the Dennett line doesn't advance the argument. I think when you hit this kind of bedrock, all you can do is offer intuition pumps. Chalmers thinks his readers will be persuaded that p-zombies are a logical possibility. Dennett is trying to convince his readers not to go along with their hunch that Chalmers has described a genuine possibility. How to do it? Offer examples of errors--ones you could have imagined yourself committing in a different historical/scientific context--that would be similar to the error you might be committing now in accepting the coherence of p-zombies.
That's not the *only* thing to say. He also tries to convince you that your interest in consciousness--in the pre-theoretical, ordinary language sense--is intimately bound up with the sort of stuff that we *can* imagine neuroscience explaining:
"What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all "merely" the "performance of functions" or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of "qualitative content" bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything."
I'm not sure what the better approach is if you want to convince somebody that they're making a mistake in taking some feature to be fundamental, when it's actually an amalgam of a bunch of other stuff.
What was having him as a teaching partner like, compared to a traditional academic/philosopher?
It was great. He's an intellectually curious, broadly read, thoughtful person, so lots of fun to discuss the material with. And because the class was organized as a seminar, it felt mostly like a series of discussions (along with students) rather than a more organized effort to impart knowledge to students (as you might have in an intro survey class).
I've struggled to make sense of Dennett's views on consciousness and free will. I respect Dennett, but in his extended discussions with Sam Harris, it's Harris who has the deeper, more accurate view in my judgement.
I haven't seen his discussions with Sam Harris. I do feel a bit weird recommending Dennett; I find him very persuasive, but I know lots of people read "Consciousness Explained" and it leaves them absolutely cold, so I'm not sure what the best way--if there is one--of making the case for his sorts of views is to people with very different sensibilities than mine.
For me, the overall simplicity and elegance of the materialist, reductionist worldview is great enough that it strikes me as much more likely that stuff that can initially seem hard to fit into it (e.g., consciousness) is just stuff where we're still relatively ignorant (as we *certainly* are when it comes to understanding how the brain works).
And along similar lines to the example above there are lots of examples from the history of science where people thought it was intuitively obvious that some or another phenomenon couldn't be explained in broadly mechanistic terms, and as science progresses, those claims no longer look intuitively obvious. E.g., Descartes, who's more responsible than anybody else for the idea of a sharp distinction between minds/souls on the one hand, which are not subject to lawlike, mechanistic explanation, and bodies on the other (which are), thought that it wasn't just consciousness, but language use, and complex behavior more generally, that needed minds for their explanation. Now in the age of AI, the idea that you couldn't have language use or complex behavior without a disembodied, immaterial soul looks quaint, even to people who still insist that you couldn't have genuine consciousness without a disembodied, immaterial soul. So the track record of insisting that *this* phenomenon can't be fit into a mechanistic, materialist worldview, is not good. Our intuitions about this stuff are much more contingent, and sensitive to the background state of scientific knowledge, than we tend to think.
We do understand a great deal about the brain already and are learning more all the time. If we knew absolutely everything, would we understand consciousness? The materialist, reductionist view explains the physical world, but doesn't touch consciousness at all. We can't measure anything about consciousness or even observe it except in ourselves. We can measure all kinds of things about brain activity, and self reporting of consciousness experience seems to correlate well, but whether brains "cause" consciousness can't be demonstrated. I think Spinoza had it right, "The mind cannot determine the body to move and the body cannot determine the mind to think." Perhaps there is some deeper cause that determines why the mental and physical worlds proceed in parallel.
I'd disagree that we understand a great deal about the brain already, at least if we're talking about functional understanding. An analogy I like is LLMs. We clearly understand how these work at the fundamental level; we know the algorithms we designed them to run. But there's a reason "Explainable AI" is a buzzword; it's generally agreed that we can't explain why they produce the answers they do; we know the basic rules they're following, but we don't have a humanly graspable explanation of how those rules at the fundamental level give rise to intelligent prose at the emergent level.
And we understand LLMs much better than the brain--we designed them, after all. That is to say, we understand how cellular activity at the neural level (which I admit we have some understanding of, though not as much as we have of the basic architecture of LLMs) gives rise to intelligent speech, action, and all the rest at the emergent level even worse than we understand the analogous process in LLMs. That's what I mean by saying we're relatively ignorant about how the brain works.
And as for the idea that all the neuroscientific knowledge we could get will leave consciousness untouched, that sounds to me just like Descartes saying that if you explained all the mechanistic stuff about bodies, of course you'd leave mental stuff like language use untouched. Maybe when we actually do get around to explaining "short-term memory, long-term memory, autobiographical memory, the nature of representation, the nature of sensori-motor integration, top-down effects in perception not to mention such capacities as attention, depth perception, intelligent eye movement, skill acquisition, planning, decision-making, and so forth" (list from Churchland), it won't seem so obvious we've left consciousness out, just as already that has turned out to be the case with language use, and life.
When it comes to metaphysics, you have to go back to the very beginning before you can say whether anything is really plausible or not, whether, and to what extent, it is supported by evidence of different kinds etc.
Which is very difficult to do, I don't think I've really done it! But I do, I think, understand that the metaphysical question of what the universe is really made out of cannot be answered by marshalling evidence in a way that already presupposes what it is made out.
So, for example, to note that mental states are associated with brain states, which is certainly true, will not persuade a metaphysical idealist (of which there have been and still are many) that materialism is true.
For the idealists, brains--and neurons etc., this goes "all the way down"--are not material because--nothing is. Which strikes a materialist as crazy of course but is it? By the materialist account itself, brains etc. only take the form we observe them to take "in the mind," itself supposedly material, and we have no direct access to the "material substance" that is "the thing in itself."
Now it is the difficulties with that account that lead many people to become idealists or just skeptics, or "neutral monists" in the terms of philosophy (a neglected option I'd say).
I'd say "the original error" is dualism, commonsensical and reflecting everyday experience as it does, and materialism never escapes it, it's just dualism with mind left out (and then smuggled back in various implausible ways).
More parsimonious and elegant is that view that the universe is: 1) all mind, in which case "the hard" problem etc. and the skepticism that materialism seems to point to cease to be problems; 2) my preferred option because it is more defensible, "neutral monism": the universe is not made out silly putty but we don't know what it is, and why would we?
Ross' characterization of quantum mechanics where a conscious mind collapses the wave function is nonsense and not implied even by the standard Copenhagen interpretation (from which it is inspired). It's woo BS not taken seriously by most physicists.
I’m reading his book now (about half way done) and so many stretches of his conversation on science is just Christian Apologetics copypasta. Lots of quote mining and stuff
Christian Apologetics how to: find tenuous scientific idea which is plausible but involves logical leaps and gaps in explanation and then use that idea to amplify ideas with even larger gaps of explanation.
Agreed it was clumsy and my guess is that his understanding is distant from things like “the observer was the collision with another atom.” But in the ultimate philosophy of science sense you can’t remove the human observer.
Yes, I think he sort of stumbled on that point. I sum up a variety of physics-based Christian apologetic arguments in my chapter 7. Quantum mechanics is slightly helpful for the defense of the faith because it refutes old-fashioned determinism as an attack on free will. More important are the "fine-tuning" arguments that fundamental natural laws are demonstrably fine-tuned to make the universe suitable for life. That line of argument is actually so powerful that it is driven many physicists into the crazy "multiverse" cul-de-sac of believing in infinite numbers of universes that we can't see, in order to avoid believing in one God that we can't see! :)
https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-grand-coherence-chapter-7-physics?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bvjex
If anyone is interested in questions of free will/consciousness and quantum mechanics, I highly recommend this essay by Scott Aaronson, which takes a deeper and more scientific approach to the issue and touches on a lot of really cool ideas: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
>into the crazy "multiverse" cul-de-sac of believing in infinite numbers of universes that we can't see, in order to avoid believing in one God that we can't see!
Physicists don't sit around conjecturing theories in order to "avoid believing in one God", this is a typical religious brand of cynicism on par with Jordan Peterson saying "You say you don't believe in God but you believe in beauty so you actually believe in god you just don't know it". Stop with the dishonesty.
Also, I've never heard anyone argue that fine tuning has anything to do with many-worlds. Who have you heard argue this?
Stephen Hawking for one. Have a chat with AI using the phrase "anthropic principle" and you can get a list
If you can point directly to where Stephen Hawking says that the anthropic principle and fine tuning has anything to do with the many-worlds interpretation of QM, you should. Because I'm not aware of any connection. And while LLMs are fun I would not consult them in an argument (c'mon man)--I've tried asking current leading LLM models on basic linear algebra questions and they make stuff up.
Well, you could check out A Brief History of Time, chapter 8. That's one place I read it. Also Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe.
I don't quite see how the anthropic principle can be separated from fine tuning. The whole point of the anthropic principle is that there's some feature of the universe, like the balance of momentum and gravity emerging from the Big Bang, or the ratio of the fundamental constants, which turns out to be extremely well suited to fitting the universe for life, in a way that seems prima facie improbable, then the "anthropic principle" can explain why-- but only if there are many universes. If there are many universes, and ours is fine tuned for life, maybe that's because of the anthropic principle, that is, because the one fine-tuned for life is the one we appeared in. What would motivate the anthropic principle other than something like fine-tuning?
Oh, the multiverse you're speaking of is not related to QM, you're talking about some kind of cosmological theory.
Well the evolution of the wavefunction is still deterministic! I don't think many-worlds is crazy, it doesn't require any extra theory than just QM.
I’d read God is not great next. That should dispel the myths.
Sadly, Hitchens is not around any more to be interviewed. Humanity’s loss.
My basic approach is to subject theism (any of them) to the scientific method. In the face of any “god” hypothesis, I accept the null, unless and until sufficient verifiable, falsifiable, and repeatable, evidence of any god’s existence is provided so as to allow the null to be rejected.
So far, it’s been slim pickings.
This was horrible. Please don’t give Ross more air.
Ross Douthat also lies about Bart Ehrman's journey. The discover of contradictions in the gospels, did not convince Ehrman to leave Christianity, just to embrace a less fundamentalist Christian worldview.
" I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives of different authors living at different times in different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs. But the problems of the Bible are
not what led me to leave the faith. These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny. I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.
Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known
since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.
The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered— some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago
I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church."
If you want to circle back to this topic sometime, I would love to jump on a podcast and defend the Christian faith, to you or anyone else, anytime, any venue, against any critiques, attacks, or doubts that anyone may have.
My comprehensive apologetics is in my long book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity https://a.co/d/2lffcFA. Compared to Ross, my approach is considerably more rationalist. Ross didn't like your probabilistic question, but I love that kind of exercise. I go full Bayesian. I argue like Descartes, taking nothing for granted. The first few chapters are preoccupied with epistemology. How can we know anything, to begin with? And then, with that settled, how can we know that Christianity is true, in particular?
Descartes was a theist of sorts. Spinoza, who came shortly after, sounded the initial death knell for superstitious belief. If your book delves into Spinoza, I will buy it.
I would also sort of recommend God is Not Great, but for the opposite reason. Like Bertrand Russell and others who have been brash enough to attack Christianity head on, Hitchens makes a bitter and hysterical fool of himself. I think the book would push you towards faith.
To Steve Cheung, I would ask: what sort of imaginable evidence could possibly be sufficient, verifiable, falsifiable, and repeatable evidence for the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good God? If you find there's no answer, haven't you ruled out God by an arbitrary ex ante assumption? But that doesn't seem very satisfactory, does it?
Old person and a younger one descend from the heavens. Subject themselves to DNA test and show that they are genetic twins. One (or both) of them turns some water into wine. That would be a start.
Yes….it’s ridiculous….just like all “god” claims are.
I haven’t “ruled out” the possibility of god. But that’s not my job. It’s the job of theists to show sufficient evidence to allow the god hypothesis to be ruled in. They’ve failed the test so far. Until they do, I continue to accept the null.
That wouldn't prove the existence of an almighty, all-knowing God! That wouldn't even be a very reasonable conclusion to draw from such an event. The event you described would actually be inconsistent with Christian theology, which does not represent God the Father as having a body. The most reasonable conclusion to draw would be that some alien race with superior technology was trying to trick us by simulating certain venerable human stories.
Try again if you like, but I warn you you're barking up the wrong tree. There just isn't any simple observable event from which large theistic claims could be validly inferred. The setup is all wrong. With a lot of reflection, the whole natural order in all its beauty combined with the Christian account of salvation history can be the basis for an inference to God. But magical parlor tricks just can't do that at all.
“There just isn't any simple observable event from which large theistic claims could be validly inferred”
Lol. At least you’re honest, if only by accident. But you’re correct: god claims are so vast, and non-sensical, that they may well be unprovable even in their composite parts, let alone in their insane entirety. Fortunately, that is a problem for theists like you; it’s not a problem for folks like me. I’m taking the null until you come up with something better….and it looks like even a theist like you is pretty bearish on those prospects.
Which is why theists like you should really steer away from any fact-based discussions on the topic. Look, it’s your faith…which by definition requires complete trust (diametrically different from “proof”). Have your god, and keep believing in it cuz you want to, and/or have to, and/or need to. Your beliefs are your business. It’s only when theists start making “truth” claims where anyone who’s heard of the scientific method will say “what have you been smoking”. Or in your parlance, “what have you been reflecting on”.
Since you’re a Christian, I’ll leave you with this: A Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim walk into a bar…and they can’t all be right. Hitchens was hilarious in this section.
Essentially, your position is that you adopt atheism as an arbitrary unfalsifiable assumption, and that's where you stop, like a stick in the mud. That won't do if you have any aspirations to a rationally based worldview.
To repeat, there isn't any *simple* observable event from which large theistic claims could be validly deduced. Your asking for one is merely a crude fallacy. The question of God is as rationally settleable as any, but it will take a much longer intellectual journey, and a lot more philosophical reflection, to rise to the challenge of it.
Huh? How is atheism unfalsifiable? Show me god, and it is instantly falsified. That you can’t, is not my problem. It is, however, yours. But you seem to lack the capacity to recognize or acknowledge that. You’re not alone in those failures. It befalls basically any theist of any stripe. You should note that Hitchens, for example, subscribed to more of a “positive assertion” atheism (that there is NO god), by my understanding of his position. Otoh, mine is simply an accepting of the null hypothesis…if you say there is a god, then prove it…and since you can’t, or haven’t, then there isn’t one, for the time being, as far as I’m concerned. Hitchens would say you’re wrong to believe in god; I say you can believe in god just as you can believe in Santa Claus, with the same degree of confidence in your truth claims, to date.
“Rationally settleable”….”intellectual journey”…..”philosophical reflection”….IOW, motivated reasoning and navel gazing. That’s fine for hallucinations within the confines of your noggin, but is insufficient for external reality. Sorry.
"If you say there's a god, then prove it."
But what proof would you be justified in accepting? What would actually justify an inference to the existence of an almighty, all-knowing, perfectly good Being?
If you can't answer that, then your atheism is just an arbitrary unfalsifiable assumption, as I said. And it's hard to answer than you think. You clearly haven't put much thought into it.
I could give my explanations or the evidence for God, but you'd need to raise your game a lot before there'd be reason to hope you'd understand. I'm trying to help you do that.
Richard, I appreciate your scientific approach to analyzing claims of the existence of god(s). I am of the same mindset. I think there is certainly much we don’t understand about the nature and mechanics of the universe and consciousness. But I don’t think a higher power is a reasonable explanation. It is conjecture at best.
There is a rumor you’ve become interested in Objectivism recently. So I’ll leave you with an insight from Leonard Peikoff that has informed my perspective on this topic:
“What is meant by “the supernatural”? Supposedly, a realm that transcends nature. What is nature? Nature is existence—the sum of that which is. It is usually called “nature” when we think of it as a system of interconnected, interacting entities governed by law. So “nature” really means the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What, then, is “super-nature”? Something beyond the universe, beyond entities, beyond identity. It would have to be: a form of existence beyond existence—a kind of entity beyond anything man knows about entities—a something which contradicts everything man knows about the identity of that which is. In short, a contradiction of every metaphysical essential.”
What's interesting about this conversation is that Douthat loses unless he completely crushes it. After all, on his theory it must be that the evidence for god is sufficiently strong as to make it blameworthy not to accept it -- otherwise all non-belief is excused as 'invincible ignorance.'. His view that faith is ever rewarded is incompatible with the position that the evidence for god isn't so weak as to excuse all non-belief.
Indeed, Douthat's got a very high bar to leap: not just rejection of metaphysical materialism (which I find implausible too though Douthat argues against it badly, as a kind of dualist rather than idealist or neutral monist), but theism, and not just theism but Christianity, getting less plausible as he goes on.
Which is why discussions of the Big Questions need to be freed from this format, I'd say. There are plenty more options than Christianity and what might be called post-Christian atheism.
Excellent stuff Richard! Tbh, I’ve found most atheist polemics, including the Dawkins-Hitchens ones, not very compelling, despite being an atheist myself. I think the best argument for atheism is to simply look at all existing human knowledge in totality. We know about astronomy and quantum mechanics. We know about eco-psych and anthropology. We know about genes and quantitative history. We know how religions evolve and about the materials conditions that are conducive to its flourishing. If you still feel attracted to the idea of the supernatural even after all of this, you probably can’t help it. Cheers and thanks again to you and Ross Douthat!
Oh my goodness! "We know about how religions evolve?" You think it's crystal clear why first thousands and then millions of people came to believe, or claim to believe, that a certain Jewish carpenter had to come back to life, so firmly that they were willing to die horrible deaths by torture rather than deny it, if the resurrection never happened? And that these frauds, or lunatics, wrote the most profound and visionary ethical teachings ever written, so that a hundred generations in the most information-Rich civilization in history have been continuously impressed with them, more often than not sufficiently so to treat them as the ultimate source of ethical truth? There's nothing mysterious about that! And there's consciousness too, and fine tuning, and the philosophical problem of reverence... You are very greatly overestimating the coherence, comprehensiveness, and empirical success that has been attained by atheistic scientific materialism!
No, it isn’t crystal clear how religions evolve. But there is reason to believe that religious beliefs, and their accompanying mythology, do serve an evolutionary purpose. Humans have, just over the course of recorded history, created thousands of religious belief systems. You would be hard pressed to find any human gathering, on any part of the planet, that didn’t have some type of religion or mythology. Current speculation posits that shared religious rituals serve as something of a social glue for its participants. It encourages group cooperation, which seems to provide both psychological and temporal benefits. After all, human existence can be remarkably random and unpredictable. Seeking solace in the warm embrace of some beneficent, all-powerful entity can be incredibly attractive. All that is required is that their adherents believe that the myths are true. But for those of us skeptics, who view a historic landscape littered with abandoned or debunked religious traditions, who is to say one religion is truer than any other?
What is the evolutionary purpose of embracing martyrdom in the prime of life? As for "who is to say which religion is truer?" - you can look at the evidence for a start. We have four eyewitness accounts of the resurrection. But that's kind of a red herring anyway. Step one is to see why scientific materialism can't be the true worldview. Then we can study the alternatives.
I highly recommend, my article on how the Catholic Church has been an amaranthine enemy of freedom. I think I might soon write an entire article to counter a lot of Ross Douthat's thesis. https://jangolan.substack.com/p/catholic-church-the-amaranthine-enemy
I have a similar inclination towards atheism, but the recent trend around prominent intellectuals openly discussing their faith has led me to reread the Gospels, which I haven’t looked at since high school (I figure if it really is the Word of God then my soul should recognize it as such - or something like that). Tyler Cowen recommended a new translation by Sarah Ruden a few years ago and I have found it a really interesting intellectual exercise from a fresh translation point of view - but also haven’t converted yet either (but hey, I’m only through Mark!).
I remember reading a Mark Twain story years ago -- probably Huckleberry Finn -- that had a nice quip on the topic. Tom Sawyer or "Huck" described how they were in a classroom and wanted to test if God was real. So they closed their eyes, wished for a piece of cake and waved their arms about. As things would have it, someone else actually had a piece of cake in their hands at the time, and Huck or Tom took it away from them in passing. Ergo, "God exists".
Later, they tried the same trick and, of course, failed miserably. Ergo, "God does not exist".
Not sure that adults in general have progressed much past that particular "hypothesis", the only thing changing is typically immortality -- raisins or virgins or a table with The Big Guy -- or purpose instead of a piece of cake.
Atheists are so illogical! Obviously, the cupcake experiment couldn't cross-apply to hopes of the afterlife because you won't find that out until after you're dead. Adults might make that mistake about other things, like a car or a job, but it couldn't be about the afterlife, because that can't be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed while we're alive. (Near-death experiences are kind of rare, very limited exception to this rule, but never mind.)
In general, "thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test" can be sufficiently justified by a straightforward analogy with human friendship. We normally don't, and we shouldn't, deliberately put our human friends to the test either. Who asks for a favor from a friend just to find out whether they're a friend or not? If you did, any conclusions drawn from such an ill-conceived experiment would be quite invalid.
Well, God always knows your motives. He's a person with agency, not some sort of mechanical principle. It's perfectly compatible with divine love to leave some prayers unanswered because granting them would not really benefit you. That said, it does make sense to interpret what happens in the wake of prayers that are said with good motives and in genuine need as Bayesian updating events. More about that in my chapter 20.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-grand-coherence-chapter-20-on?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bvjex
A major problem with the way "the Big Questions" now tend to be discussed, in the West at least, is it assumes the only options are Christianity and atheism. That leaves out most of the positions most people have ever held, apart from anything else.
Also, "metaphysical" materialism tends to be assumed by atheists, and dualism by theists, when both are false, I think.
Dualism is the folk or common-sense metaphysics we develop pretty naturally, as we experience the world as a mix of our own, "subjective" mental states and "hard objects" that appear to be "outside" our minds.
Materialism is the next step: dualism with mind lopped off, everything is a "hard object" of the kind we interact with every day. But the original error remains. Not only does mind disappear, creating the "hard problem" and requiring it to be smuggled back in various implausible ways, but on a materialist account, phenomena are themselves ultimately made out of a "material substance" we never perceive directly, which points towards skepticism not "naturalism" (see e.g. Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality).
A much more parsimonious and plausible view is that we know the universe is not silly putty, but we don't know exactly what it's made out of ("neutral monism" as it's called in philosophy).
Now once the metaphysical dogmatism goes, well, more things become possible or plausible, but how plausible remains the question...
First, let me apologize for the condescending tone that crept into my last two comments. If you withdraw because that tone makes this exchange unpleasant, I promise not to interpret it as a concession.
Second, it might help to make my basic epistemological point in a less polarizing space.
Suppose I'm a psychologist with a theory that adult alcoholism is always caused by abuse in childhood. In support, I can cite many examples from my clinical experience.
Unconvinced, you point out that every time I encounter an adult alcoholic who was a victim of child abuse, I call it evidence for my theory, but I don't treat other alcoholics as evidence against it, because they might have been abused and we just don't know about it. So you object that my theory is effectively unfalsifiable, and challenge me to say what evidence could possibly prove my theory false.
Defending yourself, you say that the decisive counter-evidence would be a solemn affidavit from an adult alcoholic that they had never been abused. Have you vindicated the falsifiability of your theory?
Not really, for two reasons. First, the criterion is unreasonable since nobody normally signs any such affidavits.
But second, even if someone does, that's not really decisive evidence against the theory. People could swear they were never abused when they really were. Maybe they feel ashamed. Maybe they're afraid of stigma. Maybe they've forgotten. Maybe they're protecting parents whom they still love in spite of abuse. It's quite likely that there are adult alcoholics who say they weren't abused but actually were. So my falsifiability proposal fails, and my theory is unscientific.
In your example, an old man and a young man come down and change water into wine. One problem with that is that no theist thinks it will happen. God the Father didn't have a body. No such descent is prophesied, except something a little like that at the end of time, after many disasters that amount to a destruction of the world.
But also, if that did happen, it wouldn't actually falsify an atheist worldview at all. There could be alien beings of some sort, equipped with some sort of nanotech or biotech that we don't know about, who are able to transform water to wine like that. I suppose more details would be needed about how the operation is done, and possibly natural causes could be ruled out, and a miracle confirmed, But that would still fall far short proving that the beings had properties traditionally ascribed to God, such as omnipotence and omniscience. They might be capable of changing water wine, but not of healing, moving, mountains, etc.
So the example fails to vindicate the falsifiability of your atheism.
Real evidence for God starts with the existence and goodness of the whole world. Physics today admits that the universe had a beginning. We can trace its history back to the Big Bang. Who begin it? Who caused the Big Bang? Moreover, many studies have found that the universe is fine-tuned for life, such that for key features of the universe to be as they are by chance would be like shooting a bullet through the eye of a needle at 100 yards. The natural conclusion is that whatever initiated the universe intended the beautiful complexity of life, and prepared a delicate balance of forces that enabled that intricacy to emerge. If the Big Bang requires an originator whom we might as well call God, then fine tuning tells us something about the character and the plans of God. More can be understood about God's character and plans from the revelations and miracles described in the Bible, the whole panoply of salvation history, with the resurrection of Jesus, attested by multiple eyewitnesses who had no motive to lie, and we could hardly have contrived such a gigantic coax if they wanted to, at its heart.
You want to make the test of God observable and repeatable, as if God were a natural law. But God is not a natural law, He is a supernatural Person. And even ordinary people do not allow themselves to be tested like that. If you want to find out whether someone is good, and to that end, you arrange for them to be repeatedly put in situations where the survival of a human being depends on their performing a daring rescue, you can't expect them to tamely play along. You're a monster for putting so many people at risk for the sake of your experiment and if there really any good, and they figure out what you're up to, they'll try to stop you. God always knows what you're up to, and He can stop you. He won't be treated like a mere mechanical law of nature to be used for magical parlor tricks.
Plenty of Christians do report answers to prayer, sometimes verging on the miraculous, or in rarer cases, explicitly and uncontrovertibly miraculous, at least for those who witness them. You might get some for yourself. Miracles seem to come as both a reward and a rescue for those who are doing their very utmost in the service of the best thing that they know. But to ask that it be intersubjectively observable and repeatable is to ask God to write the story of the world in a different way, and a worse way, than He intends to do. There is an intentional hiddenness about God, and the Bible gives us some insight about why, for some people will react badly and become worse if His presence and will are made known, as the Pharisees did. And yet the overwhelming evidence is really there, after all, if you take a serious look.
Again, who caused the Big Bang?
I'm not sure how you can doubt the existence of the supernatural; just sleep on your chin/stomach (on the floor; no bed/pillow), keep your chin and shoulders up (and tailbone back and up) and stay there. The very fact the purpose of the chin is censored is in itself strong evidence there's something fishy here. This was undoubtedly known to the Imperial Japanese (thus their correct writing direction -top->down/right->left -and their correct script -katakana). You should start seeing the results partly in three days and fully in two months.
I have tried Catholicism for ~2 years; I later concluded the arguments against free will and against God's omni status were stronger than those in favor. Now I don't know which religion is true.
I respond to that in chapter 17 of my book. You're on the right track when you suggest that free will is the answer to the problem of evil. As CS Lewis said, there are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "*Thy* will be done." God finally lets us reject Him if we're determined to do so. And without Him, what do we have? We won't be allowed to torment others forever: not other people, not even other living things.
You mention a VR. Yes, probably some sort of VR could be given to the damned, but would that mitigate their damnation? I've never seen a VR that wouldn't bore me in 24 hours. Could anyone inhabit a VR forever without the boredom becoming a torment? There is ultimately no way for solitary evil to be happy. Hell is what's left to us when we reject God.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-grand-coherence-chapter-17-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bvjex
I think you replied to the wrong person, poster.