Choosing The Best Answer

Probably the most significant difference between my approach to answering life’s biggest questions, and the approach of the materialists I know, is that I’m interested in the most reasonable option on the table–as opposed to proof or disproof of a single idea.

Essentially, I agree with such people that no position is perfect. While we try to get as close as we can to the truth, it will always be possible to attack positions. But it is for this very reason that I think the fact that we can attack a view does not give us cause to reject it. Rather, one needs to present a more plausible view for consideration.

This has a clear parallel in science, of course. It is not enough to make criticisms of, say, relativity. Even very good criticisms (such as the claim that, as it is, it cannot be unified with quantum mechanics) is not enough to dislodge it as the standard theory until a better view is presented.

This is of great relevance to the question of God’s existence, of course. The fact that human reason is finite seems to mean that we can’t prove anything beyond all criticism. But, that is not enough to reject all knowledge. Rather, it must be shown that there is a view which is more probable than theism before belief in God should be rejected.

Of course, much of this blog has been dedicated to the idea that materialism (which is the position of the overwhelming majority of atheists) is not as good a fit with reality as theism is. In starting it, I’d meant to address the arguments in favor of materialism, but have found very few.

And this is significant. If there are no good reasons to accept materialism, then it cannot be said that it is a more realistic approach to life than theism. Rather, it seems that theism is more in line with reality as one experiences it.

That being the case, the interesting question is not “Is there a God?”, but “Which God is there?”.

Why Should You Believe in Thought?

Alex Rosenberg, as has been pointed out, rejects the idea that people can think about things.

The basic neural processes going on in conscious thought have to be just the same as the basic neural processes going on when the brain nonconsciously thinks. These processes are the only things neurons and sets of neurons do. Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process. (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, pp. 192-193)

Of course, this does boil down to a belief that people don’t have beliefs. But what is interesting here is not Rosenberg’s personal eccentricities. Rather, it is the fact that he’s simply following the logic of what is claimed by a great many people.

It is not uncommon for people, in defense of materialism, to insist that tangible evidence is the only factor to be considered in the discussion. To use the now infamous sound byte “that which is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. I don’t accept this approach myself, but it is not insignificant that those who do should reject the idea that thoughts are about things. Certainly, no one has been able to present physical evidence for the “aboutness” of thoughts.

Of course, I’d say that there is evidence that thoughts are about things–quite a bit, actually. But this would require taking a broader definition of evidence than the typical materialist would allow.

And that would, of course, open the door for all kinds of evidence that runs counter to materialism. This doesn’t show it to be false outright, but it would immediately cost its proponents their central argument (that there is “no evidence” for theism).

So materialists find themselves in a precarious place, wanting to insist that evidence is always physical on the one hand, but not wanting to deny thought on the other. Rosenberg’s sentiments aside, it seems obviously true that there is far more reason to believe in thought than to believe that all evidence is physical.

It is also important to remember that this argument holds even for those who take thought to be a physical process in the brain. For, we are not discussing whether or not the mind is physical (though it is not), but whether there is physical evidence for the idea that we think about things.

And there is not. No amount of physical data about the brain gives us evidence that thoughts are about things. For that, we’ll simply have to take the test subject’s word for it (or, better still, our own experience of thinking).

But, if we’re willing to accept inner experience and/or testimony as evidence, materialism has a number of very difficult challenges facing it. And, personally, I don’t think it can hope to answer these challenges.

Explaining the Universe

If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God.

This statement is actually much less controversial than one might think. In fact, it is simply a restatement of something one often hears out of atheists. Steven Hawking, for instance has said that the universe will not have an explanation, but “simply be”. Bertrand Russell has suggested that the universe is our terminus of explanation. Many others have made the same intimation.

These men are saying that, from their atheistic perspective, the universe has no explanation. This is equivalent to saying that the universe is either explained by God, or by nothing.

Of course, it is not simply that this is what is being said, it is the fact that there is good reason to say it. Certainly, the materialist is convicted that everything which exists is composed of matter. If this is true, there can’t possibly be an explanation of all the matter and energy that exists (which is how “universe” is being defined in this argument).

I won’t discuss the much longer (and much less relevant) arguments against non-materialist atheists here. Rather, I’ll point out that the most common move I’ve encountered among atheists is off topic.

That is, many begin emphasizing at this point that this doesn’t prove the truth of any particular religion. But, of course, that is a separate discussion. Showing theism to be the most reasonable case precedes an argument for a particular form of theism. And claiming “but the Muslims might be right” does not support atheism.

Rather, the inability of materialism to offer an explanation as to why matter exists is a reason to move materialism off the table in this discussion. Unless, of course, the  materialist wants to argue that there simply is no explanation.

Personally, I don’t see how this last differs from an appeal to magic. Halting inquiry in order to conclude that there is nothing beyond the point where we halted is not a good way to get at truth, after all. I think it much more reasonable, and much more in line with inquiry, to take the view that things have explanations.

Of course, some will press the multiverse as an explanation of the universe. I’ll discuss that in a future post.

The All-or-Nothing Criterion

Of all the objections I’ve heard to the Kalam Cosmologial Argument, one of the most interesting is, surprisingly, that given by Richard Dawkins.

Even if we allow the luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress, and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of human attributes such as listening to prayers, forgiving sins, and reading innermost thoughts. (Dawkins, The God Delusion)

Usually, I don’t think it fruitful to interact with Dawkins, and I’ll limit my focus here. This is because he’s made, in many ways,  a poor objection. We’ve already seen why the idea of a cause of the universe isn’t at all arbitrary, and many of the attributes ascribed to God would be implied by such a cause. Still, I do think he makes a significant point: that quite a bit of what one thinks about, when one thinks about God, is not part of the conclusion of this argument.

William Lane Craig, in defending the argument, points out that the argument was never designed to do what Dawkins complains it does not do. He goes on to point out that this is more concession than rebuttal.

It would be a bizarre form of atheism, in fact an atheism not deserving the name, that believes that there in an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful, personal creator of the universe who may–for all we know–have all of the properties listed by Dawkins. (Craig)

I find that I agree with Craig that we’ve clearly left the materialistic atheist view promoted by Dawkins, and that Dawkins’ objection is no defense of that view. But these men agree that we haven’t shown the God of any particular religion to be the correct one.

We need to seek a balance here. First, it is true that the Christian cannot simply leap from this to the conclusion to her religion without additional arguments. But, second, this is no reason to dismiss the argument in the way that Dawkins does.

I’ve seen this pattern in many, and it seems to be a strange variation on the Plurium interrogationum fallacy (demanding a simple answer to a difficult question). At least, Dawkins seems to be reasoning that, if an argument can’t conclude to all the attributes of God, but only some, that’s a good reason to stop thinking about the subject.

Rather, unless something can be shown to be wrong with the argument, we’ve moved to a general affirmation of theism. The question has, therefore, changed from “Does God exist?” to “Which God exists?”.

It is also worth mention that, while this doesn’t show a particular religion to be true, it does point to a rather narrow range of concepts. Those who worry that there will be thousands of religions to sift through can rest at ease. The percentage of gods proposed in human history who fit the conclusion of this argument is razor thin.

So, though he fails to defend his atheism, Dawkins has correctly pointed out that we have further to go before arriving at Christianity. But, rather than use that as an excuse to halt inquiry, I think this is a reason to ask ourselves what further conclusions might be reached.

Why Does Anything Exist?

Though I’m new to defending the Kalam Cosmological Argument, I’ve long supported the argument proposed by Leibnitz. One difficult thing about this is the fact that these arguments are so often confused with one another.

That is, whenever I claim that God is the best explanation for the existence of contingent things, there is a very strong chance that my listener will hear “God caused the big bang”. In many conversations, I don’t tend to bother correcting people (as it is often beside the point being made). Still, I’ve been stuck many times trying to explain how references to modern cosmology don’t have any bearing on the libnitzian argument.

As I’m nearing the end of my discussion of the Kalam, I thought I’d spend some time on this argument.

It could be summarized as follows:

Premise 1: Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its being, or on some outside thing.
Premise 2: If the universe has an explanation for its existence, that explanation is God
Premise 3: The universe exists
Conclusion: Therefore, the explanation for the universe is God

This is logically consistent, meaning that the only real area of controversy is over the premises. The first point to keep in mind is that this argument is consistent both with the universe having a beginning and its being eternal. It is also consistent with a multiverse, or anything else cosmologists claim about the origin of the universe.

Rather, this argument is based on the idea that things, even eternally existing things, don’t simply exist for no reason at all. That is the heart of the first premise. And, in my experience, is the real area of controversy between theists and materialists.

And this strikes me as very strange. The idea that nothing comes from nothing is a vital part of the foundations of science. To claim that things can exist for no reason at all seems to be an abandonment of all inquiry and appeal to what philosophers call a brute fact.

As a lover of inquiry (both scientific and philosophical), I can’t bring myself to accept this idea. It seems far more reasonable that there is indeed a reason why the universe exists. So, the interesting premise, in my view, is the second one.

But I’ll explain why I accept it in a future post.

Babies aren’t Bathwater

Once again, Alex Rosenberg almost perfectly enshrines modern prejudices about science and the search for knowledge:

Cognitive neuroscience has already established that many of the most obvious things introspection tells you about your mind are illusions. (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, p. 148)

That science has found surprising things is not in dispute; I love reading on these as much as anyone (as my wife can attest). Rosenberg’s mistake, in my view, is to leap from this conclusion to the idea that we should reject introspection completely. He boldly declares:

The notion that thought is about stuff doesn’t even approximate what is going on in the brain. (ibid, p. 208)

This is, of course, both unwarranted and self-contradictory in at least two ways. I’ve already discussed the idea that the thought about the idea that thoughts can’t be about things is incoherent. But it is no more so than the idea that neuroscience can invalidate introspection as a source of knowledge about our minds.

That is to say that neuroscience relies on introspection. It maps brain-states, and correlates them with what test subjects tell the scientists about what they are experiencing internally. In short, introspection is a foundational tool of neuroscience.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that introspection is perfect any more than our sensory perceptions are perfect. But, as with the physical senses, science is a tool to correct our mistakes and sharpen those perceptions, not simply reject them.

This unwarranted jump from “introspection isn’t perfect” to “introspection is completely worthless as a source of knowledge” seems fairly common, and I think we need to be careful about it. Rosenberg himself criticizes others for trying to take an overly simple approach to philosophy, and I think his warning applies here.

It would, after all, be very easy if everything that existed were observable through science. It would give us the comfort of certainty about what life is like, and clear-cut answers to its biggest questions. Part of me suspects that this is the reason why materialism is so appealing to many.

But, whether or not I’m right about that last, it is too simple–too easy to say that we can simply wave off our basic experience of life. We can’t simply reject introspection, as Rosenberg suggests.

Of course, I would argue that refusing to reject introspection means rejecting materialist accounts of the mind. And this is precisely why Rosenberg is so interested in discrediting introspection; he knows it is inconsistent with his materialism.

As much has been said, I’ve still not touched on all the ways in which Rosenberg shows how materialism breaks down into self-contradiction. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that his book has done more to convince me of the falsehood of materialism than anything I’ve read from a theist.

Is a Neuron’s Firing About Paris?

In examining consciousness from a materialist perspective, Rosenberg concludes that there is no such thing. This is because neurons simply by firing can’t really be about anything outside of themselves, in the way we think of our thoughts as being about things.

In using the example of thinking about Paris, he writes:

The Paris neurons aren’t about Paris in the same way, for example, that a picture postcard or a diorama or pop-up book’s three-dimensional layout is about Paris. (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, pp. 174-175)

He goes on to consider the idea that some other neurons might interpret those neurons as being about Paris (the way we interpret language). But this leads him to the problem that the neurons doing the interpreting would first have to know what Paris is. That is, they would have to have a thought about Paris. Thus, he adds:

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted— by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)— as being about that stuff outside the brain. (ibid, pp. 178-179)

There is simply no way of doing this while adhering to materialism.

Rosenberg is so convinced of materialism that he concludes that humans don’t actually have thoughts about anything. Now, if you find that a long list of objections to this conclusion forming in your mind, you are not alone. Many issues have been raised here, but space only permits me to address the most basic two:

First, the existence of one’s own thoughts is undeniable. It is not simply that it is better evidence than materialism, but that it is something we cannot even doubt without assuming it to be true. What is doubt, after all, if it doesn’t involve thinking about an idea outside of one’s neurons?

Second, because we cannot doubt our thought without assuming it, Rosenberg’s argument is actually logically incoherent. Though it follows from his materialism, this argument undermines itself. If neither Rosenberg nor the reader can think about, say, the idea that our thoughts might be illusions, there is no reason at all to believe it is true.

So, if materialism contradicts the idea that we have thoughts, then, so much the worse for materialism.