501. Is Christianity Good for the World? A discussion between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson

Comment #55781 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 8:50 am

Aaron, Comment 1

Surely you've been at the top of enough lists in your life...? ;)

502. The US map of faith

Comment #55776 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 8:26 am

Nice map. The easiest way ever to win at 'Pin Utah on the USA'.

503. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55775 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 8:14 am

Dr Benway,

1337
That was fascinating.

1338
With you all the way, here (and excellent work keeping track of the current status of the different arguments – you and steve99 in 1334). But I'm not sure about the bit about complexity. Whilst I agree that Dianelos's argument on this is all wrong, is it really and error 'of equivocaton between the map and the territory'?

It sounds to me like Dianelos is basically claiming that, in his theism, the territory (as you and I would understand it) doesn't fully exist. Only the bits of hit we actually directly experience exist at all. It's as though we're on a film set in which God is continually erecting matte paintings around us. So when you say:

The theist and atheist maps of the universe likewise do not list every quark. But the theist has God. The theist has more stuff!

…he'll say 'Yes, but my theistic actual territory doesn't include all that stuff. Only what we consciously experience'.

I suppose this means that his theistic universe will become more 'complex' (in his completely inadequate usage of the word 'complex') as more people are born and as they spread out into the universe, experiencing more and more things first hand.

Maybe I misunderstood you, Dr B. Anyway, it's a moot point. Dianelos still lacks a measure of complexity capable of dealing with his god, rendering the whole thing nonsensical. I've said what I think of this already.


SharonMcT, 1336

Aw shucks…! Oh, hang on, you've made me go waek in teh fngiers…

504. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55754 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:45 am

SharonMcT, 1276

I know you didn't continue for the praise of others […]

Actually – shamefully – getting you to say something nice about me has been my chief motivation for continuing to participate over the last week or so. I have been insanely jealous of Dr Benway and steve99.

Now, at last, I can get on with what I'm supposed to be doing before my life completely falls apart. Thank you, Sharon!

505. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55752 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:44 am

Downunder

Because it's been playing on my mind: I hope I didn't offend you in any way by playfully comparing your LIFE-conception to The Force yesterday. That wasn't intended as a criticism or a trivialisation of it. Just so you know!

506. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55751 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:40 am

Dianelos,

You're a busy chap and have had a lot of recent arguments to respond to. Rather than re-writing it, I'd just like to point you back to my long one to you yesterday: 1269.

Also, in a moment of calm:

1306 – I very much enjoyed and liked your description of introducing your daughter to life's mysteries.

1309:

The case of Jesus' resurrection is a special case: my guess is that God was so moved by the disciples' grief that he caused them to experience the bodily presence of Jesus for a few days after the crucifixion. You see God incarnated in Jesus had had the kind of personal relationship with the disciples that we humans have with each other, so that was really a special case.

This is sincerely now my all-time favourite theistic account of Jesus' reappearance. Though I am still unconvinced by your theism, it continues to impress me and to stand head and shoulders above any other theisms I know of. You may seem wrong to me, but you are admirable in the details of your wrongness!

(It's like seeing someone about to try to cut through a tree trunk with an emery board. 'No!', you shout: 'Take the saw!' But they reject your offer – and, to your amazement, they persevere and cut through the trunk with their little nail file. You can't help but be impressed – but you also can't help but muse 'Think how fast they'd have done it with the saw…')

507. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55750 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:38 am

Dianelos, 1321

a Mickey-Mouse Magical-Kingdom kind of environment is not the most efficient one for us to grow in virtue.

But one in which a god-concept fills all knowledge gaps is? Is striving to apply one's best-tested fact-finding methods to arrive at answers that will extend and improve people's lives and health not virtuous?

Herein, a problem with your:

If an intuition is strongly connected (or at least compatible) with a worldview that is coherent, has no gaps, no paradoxes, no hard problems, does not clash with other deeply felt intuitions, explains more than any other worldview, is more experientially and ethically useful than any other worldview – then it's reasonable to consider that intuition reliable.
(1311)

No conflict, no progress – stasis. This is a description of death.

508. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55749 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:37 am

Steve99, 1313

At the moment I am not questioning your anti-naturalistic stance, I am concerned about the apparent (in my view) invunerability of your worldview to reasoned argument, which to me makes it simply another form of irrational faith.

You and me, both.

509. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55748 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:36 am

Dianelos, 1304

Have you any idea how unreasonable it is when a theist is accused of cherry picking? Would you rather have a theist be dogmatic?

Most theists do both. They dogmatically believe in the existence of a god and they cherry pick their rationalisations. Your recent posts do nothing to differentiate you from such theists.

Then please explain what your method is for sorting crap doctrine from non-crap doctrine.

Coherency.

Coherency with what? All texts, fiction and non-fiction, are interpreted by the reader in such a way as to maximise their internal coherence and their coherence with the reader's opinions and feelings. This is as true of Harry Potter as the Bible.

Of course, your 'god made everything, so nothing can contradict him' automatically makes everything coherent. One wonders why it's necessary (or how it could even be an exercise that's both meaningful and coherent with your own worldview) for you to seek 'coherency' in the bible at all.

510. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55746 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:32 am

Dianelos, 1300

Once a gap has caused a paradigm shift it vanishes, yes. Moving from naturalism to idealistic theism is exactly like that: there is no gap anymore in one's worldview.

But god fills all gaps. 'I don't care about string theory, darling. Go to sleep and stop asking questions.'

2. Theistic worldviews are trivially and entirely compatible with scientific knowledge, because God, being omnipotent and all, could produce all the phenomena that science studies.

Can't have things both ways.

Oh, now I get it. I should have clarified that by "theistic worldviews" here I mean "theistic worldviews (except the most naive cases)". I thought that was kind of implicit, as I have been clarifying this since I presented my case in post 333, from which I quote:

[…]apart from the most primitive religious worldviews […] all other religious worldviews seamlessly and naturally absorb scientific knowledge by hypothesizing that the physical world that science studies is caused and sustained by the larger spiritual reality. This incidentally makes it impossible for any piece of scientific knowledge to contradict or be used as evidence against any of the non-fundamentalist religious worldviews

Dianelos, even those religions you call primitive and fundamentalist do this. In fact, this is an example of fundamentalism: to posit a truth that no amount of data can persuade you to abandon. If your belief is designedly immune to falsification, you are engaged in 'strict maintenance of a belief': fundamentalism.

I'm a bit surprised at you to hear you use this argument. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you at least blinked as you wrote it.

[…] theistic fundamentalism is self-contradictory.

When you've sorted out your definition of fundamentalism, I'd like to see you reconsider this statement.

511. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55745 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:31 am

Dianelos, 1280

Are you actually using subjective feelings as evidence in your reasoning? :-)

I have already clearly explained that we only ever have, at best, de facto 'objectivity' – subjectivity shored up by corroboration and repeated testing. Perfect objectivity is a myth indulged by children, fundamentalists, and people who prefer straw men to science.

a naturalist cannot coherently claim that their ethics describe properties of reality beyond their own opinion, for example cannot claim that gratuitous torture is wrong by itself.

I would not make this claim. Not put like that. At the very least, I'd give a clearer definition of 'own opinion' that isn't immediately apparent in those two words alone.

It's only in that sense that I wrote that naturalist ethics are arbitrary and base-less: they just reflect personal opinion with no relation to objective reality as naturalism understands it. Naturalism does have a problem of conceptual coherency here.

It's only a problem if naturalists use the same false understanding of 'objectivity' that you exhibit in the quote at the beginning of this post. Any intelligent user of the scientific method ought to realise that they are only ever in possession of working-practice 'objectivity' at best. Again, perfect objectivity is a myth. Hence, no conceptual incoherency.

I disagree with this stance.

Good, but:

For me atheists are as connected to God as anybody else,

…and this is David's problem, too. He thinks all value comes from god, which leads him to the belief that godless people can't have a similar sense of value. He thus constructs an appalling straw man of atheism, but one that is sadly quite consistent with his worldview. To break out of it, he has to recognise that what he sees as the only source of value isn't. Which means sidelining god. Tugging at the loose threads of his faith…

512. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55744 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:28 am

Dianelos 1278

We can judge Biblical morality by our standards of human decency, precisely because we are created in the image of God

Or because we have standards of human decency simply by virtue of being human, and have created God in our own image.

Fundamentalists don't need a bible, or any holy text. Fundamentalism, in my dictionary and in my opinion, is defined as 'strict maintenance of a belief' – ie, believing something to be unalterably, definitely ('objectively' perhaps) true, and resisting changing one's mind about this.

I'm not going to start shouting 'fundamentalist' at you, Dianelos, because it's such a loaded term given the appalling antics of our highest-profile fundamentalists. And you are open to debate and you do consider your opinions. But there is just a faint whiff of fundamentalism in the strong desire to see morality as 'objective' and god-given, and the flat rejection of the possibility that it could be produced by a community of living creatures.

Is it possible to imagine a way in which you could be convinced otherwise – in the way that I proposed a giant floating glowing diamond Testimony that would convince me of god? (You have, perhaps tellingly, already indicated that one can't even imagine evidence that would change your mind on the hard problem of consciousness…)

513. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55743 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 6:26 am

Dianelos, 1277

This information from the retina would be of no use if it were not then transmitted to the brain. […]

No, I think you are wrong in this. […a] keyboard is quite complex […]. But the information content of what you type is really very little.

The point was: what's the point in having a keyboard if you aren't prepared to plug it into your computer?

And the broader point is that, once you have accepted a material basis for visual information (rods and cones) you have bought into the entire visual context that that basis (rods and cones) relies upon to operate: ie, the material universe. If you discount all this, then why not just discard the rods and cones too? Somewhere along the line you are binning material bases for consciously perceived information. Doing so outright would at least make a consistent argument.

Here's why: when you compare the complexity of worldview (physical X) and the worldview (N persons directly experiencing X + G) then it's impossible for the former to be less complex than the latter […]

Tommyrot! You are using an inadequate definition of complexity, which amounts to 'stuff I can count'. Since your god is immaterial and uncountable, he can't be part of a sensible equation. Even giving him a 'generous' value in the trillions of trillions is just time wasting.

Look. Your idea of complexity sounds rather like Lego. You say: 'Naturalists use more Lego to make their universe than theists do, because god only uses enough Lego to create people and their conscious experiences, whilst naturalists have to make all that plus the entire universe'. And you demonstrate this simply by making a (highly questionable) count of the pieces of Lego in both options and calling the one with the most pieces the most complex.

This is like saying that the Lego in a big toyshop is more complex because there's boxes and boxes and boxes of it, whilst a few thousand pieces of it that have been used to build a fully-functioning anti-gravity machine, plus the child genius that built it, are less complex. You have no way of counting the complexity of a child, since it's not made of Lego, and no way of explaining how anyone could make an anti-gravity machine out of Lego. But this doesn't register in your concept of complexity, because all it counts is bricks.

'Stuff+god' will never be less complex than 'Just stuff', even if god only uses seven bits of stuff whilst the amount of 'Just stuff' approaches infinity. God' complexity is inestimable by any measure yet proposed. This whole bit of pseudo-mathematics has been pointless.

(I can't believe I wrote the word 'Tommyrot'.)

But if you _J_ want to have a good argument in favor of naturalism you should […read…] the most knowledgeable [authors]

I can't argue with you there! And hopefully I gradually will. But my feeling is a bit like this: David Robertson has repeatedly exhorted me to read his book in our discussions. And yet, in pages and pages of text – even in his 9-minute video advertising his book - he has failed to give the impression that it contains a single good argument. I'm getting enough of a flavour of knowledgeable naturalists' books from your comments to think they sound very interesting, Dianelos, but I'm yet to hear anything that convinces me that there really is some gaping problem that I urgently need to look into.

Still, there's no finite limit to the potential size of an Amazon wish-list, is there?

514. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55721 by _J_ on July 12, 2007 at 4:12 am

Jiten 1275

Umbrella is already the plural, don't you know that guys? The singular is umbrellum.

Nonsense. The singular is 'brolly' and you know it.

515. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55474 by _J_ on July 11, 2007 at 8:14 am

PaulEmecz, 1270

I never appealed to God's wrath.How would that work??

No you didn't. I was giving a more broad response. It would work by presenting a disincentive from acting immorally. Heaven and hell, carrot and stick.

I also don't get how you move from "Mr. X. wants Y and doesn't want Z." to "I should not bring about Z and I should bring about Y." It's an odd logic. It sounds like "I'll scratch your back, if you scratch mine".

It would only really be 'I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine' if you change your restatement to this:

"Mr. X. wants Y and doesn't want Z." to "I should not bring about Z and I should bring about Y - because then Mr X might give me what I want in future at some point"

- which isn't what I said. Nevertheless, this sort of reciprocity is doubtless a significant factor in our morality (it certainly features heavily in our understanding of evolution), though I (perhaps naively) think that morality doesn't reduce to this.

I don't see why you think mine to be odd logic. I dislike pain. I do not wish to be caused pain. I can discover (through empathy, observation, innate theory of mind, and communication) that other people don't want to be caused pain either.

I suppose you are suggesting that I could recognise all this, but still not give two hoots about hurting other people, except that I am thinking ahead and hoping that if I'm nice to them, they won't hurt me.

It seems to be the case that people instinctively empathise and instinctively avoid causing unnecessary pain to one another (although this instinct is easily overridden in many situations). The existence of people who lack such empathy (such as sociopaths) shows both that it is a common human characteristic, and that it is not universal. It is not an 'objective fact' that acts upon us all equally. It is something that follows from the way our minds work, except in this minority of cases where our minds work differently.

That's not morality, that's pragmatism. There's no 'should' here.

So you can only have morality if someone or something tells you what you should do? It's not morality if you work out what's right and wrong from an observation of people's needs and feelings?

My morality may sound like reciprocity to you, but yours sounds a lot like authoritarianism to me.

EDIT - Wow, Dr Benway sure beat me to that one - and was, as usual, inimitably punchy. Well done, Dr B.

516. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55453 by _J_ on July 11, 2007 at 6:42 am

I've got to step back from this debate, so just one post today.

Downunder, 1261

Nice to hear from you!

Irish blood?

About a sixteenth, or a thirty-second, I gather, on my father's side!

Your LIFE sounds nice. I'm not sure I fully understand it (and I'm afraid I haven't kept up with your debate with Dr Benway properly, so I don't know the implications for defining the inception of life) but I don't see anything to complain about in it in what you say to me. In fact (if you'll forgive me):

LIFE just "is; everywhere, in everything, outside everything, needs no earth, no universe it IS the universe, holes do not apply, particles do not apply, it is in the holes, in the particles. We can prove its presence or absence in live or dead matter but we cannot see it come and go. Science is destined to fathom it out, but unlikely in the near future if ever completely.

…it sounds a little bit like The Force! :D ('Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter!') That's no bad thing (I reckon!) – but do watch your fingers on those lightsabres… ;)

Consciousness and your material stuff fits my LIFE concept.

Excellent!

Okay, then:

Dianelos, 1262,

[…] all naturalistic worldviews will remain as-yet-scientifically-unproven in the future.

Yes. We have de facto facts. Any theory could topple tomorrow. Just as I could spontaneously combust, due to currently unrecognised forces. Naturalistic worldviews are very good at identifying what works and what can be relied upon to work with high degrees of certainty. Total certainty is a myth and the province of fundamentalism. But of course, you wouldn't aspire to total certainty, since you are 'not defending theistic fundamentalism here.' (That one is a quote.)

[…]the number and implausibility of the different naturalistic descriptions of reality will only continue to grow as it has been growing for the last 100 years or so.

A highly selective interpretation. Once again, the measure of 'implausibility' is 'What Dianelos finds incredible'.

And if there are worldviews that offer such a "feel good" factor then the more people adopt them the better of course.

Because people suffering from sleeping sickness will do so with a smile on their face if they believe in Dianelos' God?

I think I gave an atom bomb example too. Unaccountably, you seem to have ignored it. So you continue to gambol in inconsequentialities, avoiding the question that has now been posed twice. Here it is for the third time running: Result, please.

Dianelos, 1263

You regard 'ability to be conscious' as the precondition of all of the activities of consciousness.

Yes, isn't it obvious?

No. It may seem obvious, but it is not obviously true. I think this is a big mistake you, and perhaps many others, are making.

But most probably naturalist philosophers and scientists who are working on the problem of consciousness will try any imaginable way.

Spot the dismissive tone! 'Those naturalists, trying anything to answer a question that they just can't.' Why this absolute scepticism? Because you are quite certain that naturalism is incapable of answering your question, because you have stated the question in such a way as to rule scientific observations out entirely. This is exactly the same practice as less intellectually formidable theists who say 'My God doesn't need evidence', except that you have hidden this claim in a deceptively-reasonable-sounding statement of a highly complex question. You've merely buried it deep enough so as not to notice your own fallacy.

So, yes, the clock will keep ticking and one iota of progress will never be made so long as you automatically define any scientific hypothesis about the formation of consciousness as being merely about (and I'll quote you this time, so you can't just object to my paraphrasing again):

produc[ing] intelligent behaviour

and

[…] physical process[es] that tak[e] place in our brain, but nothing more than that.

How can you be sure that consciousness – the ability to be conscious – is not actually the result of many complex physical processes taking place in our brain? Your attitude is like regarding the ability to fly as independent of all of the constituent parts of an aeroplane, which are all just 'physical processes that take place in an aeroplane, but nothing more then that.' The ability to see as a precursor to the physical eye, the characteristics of which are merely 'physical processes that take place in an eye, and nothing more than that'. And, though I quite understand why you would balk at the analogy: describing the ability of a roof to provide shelter as independent from its supporting walls, which are just 'physical processes that take place in a working shelter, and nothing more than that'.

:-P If that's how I sound like I should probably take a break and revise my communications skills.

Your communication skills are second-to-none, as I'm sure you realise! But I wish you could appreciate what I'm trying to suggest, here – even if only to put me properly straight on it.

Do you believe in evolution, Dianelos? If so, you'll know that we have evolved our way from pre-cellular simplicity to our present level of sophistication.

– Oh, and as an aside, it occurred to me in the night that this is another complaint against your Naturalism vs Theism over Occam's Razor formula: it has no way of recording this type of complexity in its straightforward counting of atoms and their positions. Organasational, informational complexity is ruled out entirely, yet the existence of complexity in the form of life is one of the chief reasons people seek the explanations of theism in the first place. –

Now, perhaps you think all life has always had 'ability to be conscious', and simply the expression of that ability has changed as our brains have evolved in sophistication. Or perhaps you think that 'ability to be conscious' is something that was only conferred upon us when our brains had hit such a point as to be able to express it in a particular way.

No, hang on, I'm getting this wrong. You've said that you regard matter as patterns in consciousness, haven't you? So consciousness has been hanging about the while, shaping the process of evolution as patterns within itself, and has jumped on board (so to speak, associating itself with physical brains at some point when those brains became sufficiently complex to express consciousness in particular ways…?

Well, I'm not handling evolution very well from your theistic perspective. I dare say you can do much better. My point is this. We've stacks and stacks of evidence for evolution now. As a methodological naturalist (ish), I daresay you'll concede that. This shows us how we and our brains have increased enormously in sophistication. In particular, the advancing size and sophistication of our brains in recent aeons has been striking.

What is there that leads you to the confident assumption that the advancing complexity of our brains could not confer the ability to be conscious? If we take away from our notion of consciousness all the observable things that you call 'physical processes that take place in our brain, but nothing more than that.', what are we left with? Perception and interpretation of all the senses – gone. Emotional states – gone. Memory – gone. And so on, and so on. What is the irreducible core of consciousness? What is the ability to be conscious if you strip away all of the characteristics by which we define it?

I'd say it's an aeroplane with no wings, fuselage or engines: ie something that doesn't fly.

Suppose for a second, just to humour me, that I am actually right and consciousness is indeed the product of these many, many different process working together in sophisticated ways in the brain. How would you be able to tell this was not so? You will never have experienced consciousness of any other sort. Nor will you ever be able to. How would your situation be different from what it currently is?

I don't see the Mary's Room thought experiment (is that what it was called?) presenting any problem with this. As for the zombieverse one, I still don't really follow. But perhaps now you can see why I get the impression that that thought experiment is false. From the perspective I'm giving, ability to be consciousness arises from the many things we observe to be conscious activities, it is the consequence of those characteristics existing together in the way they do - so of course the notion that unconscious zombies would behave in apparently conscious ways – as Chalmers seems to suppose reasonable – is completely nonsensical to me.

So is the question now down to whose incredulity do we go with, mine or Chalmers'/yours? Well, in that mine is wholly consistent with a worldview that does not demand us to assume the 'existence' of immaterial unknowns and supports our most reliable methods of problem solving, whilst Chalmers' contradicts the latter and demands the former, I would think that most rational impartial observers would incline in my favour. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…?

Dianelos, 1265 (to Dr Benway)

(Incidentally this is not new but was known to naturalist philosophers from Heraclitus to Nietzsche.)

Occasionally, just once in a blue moon, philosophers actually get things wrong.

Money has no objective value. Everyone in a society agrees on its value. In all practical terms, it 'has' that value.

Our atheistic morality is much stronger than this because it doesn't just have money's arbitrary basis. It is founded in our common emotional and sensory experiences of the world, on our mutual empathy and on our communication.

So:

no ethical proposition, not even obviously true ones such as "gratuitous torture is wrong", can make any claim about reality beyond the reality of peoples' opinion.

Sure.

Hypothetically, we could find a society of people who absolutely loved gratuitous torture. They had, perhaps through continuous exposure to it, come to regard pain as life's foremost pleasure. They didn't consider the life-shortening damage done by torture a problem, because they considered life without torture bland. In this society, the actions we would regard as 'gratuitous torture' could hardly be called wrong. Anyone who dissented from torture would find themselves in a minority of one.

You can argue that the words 'gratuitous torture' don't apply in this situation because, whilst the actions might be the same, the effects are all different: it's not 'torture' because it's pleasurable, it's not 'gratuitous' because it's desired, even required.

If you do so, you admit that the meaning of 'gratuitous torture' is contingent on the sensory and emotional responses of those involved in it. It doesn't describe an 'objective' action that is the same in all contexts, but the subjective effects of that action – the way in which it is intended and received. (Like all 'meaning', in fact.)

Well, welcome to exactly the same position as naturalists (or metaphysically non-aligned methodological naturalists) like me. I regard gratuitous torture as bad firstly because the word 'gratuitous' more or less defines whatever follows it as 'bad' (it's begging the question, rather), and secondly (and mainly) because it wilfully causes people pain for no good reason – and I know that I dislike pain, and I know from my observations of other people and what they tell me that they dislike pain, too.

What's your position here, Dianelos? In the society of torture-lovers, would you be the one man standing on a street corner screaming 'You're all wrong: gratuitous torture is objectively bad!'? Or do you accept that actions such as those we would commonly perceive as 'gratuitous torture' derive their ethical value from their intent and reception – and therefore join atheists in understanding that morality is subjective?

I'm not sure why so many theists regard this revelation as so upsetting, by the way. It simply seems to me that we agree between us, based on our intuitions, our reason, our communication and whatever else we've got, what is good and what is bad. We all have a say in this – it's innately democratic. Surely this is infinitely better than thinking someone somewhere has it all written down in stone (or glowing floating diamond) and that whatever you or I think of as the rights of humanity may actually be Objectively Wrong.

The remarkable consensus about morality among the world's cultures is, from my perspective, a testament to our common nature as humans. But please note the huge differences between what different people see as clearly right. In some cultures, people eat other people. In others they circumcise or even castrate them. In the early decades of the twentieth century, it was widely held to be clearly right that 'inferior' races were messing up the gene pool (with no good evidence at all) – clearly, strongly and 'objectively' enough for eugenics programmes and research to spring up around the western world. Racism to some degree had been intuitively obvious for pretty much all time before that. Sexism, too. Homophobia is still regarded as an objective moral 'right' by many – but thankfully many people today recognise any trace of this intuition in themselves as unfounded, and they consciously work against it.

You think your worldview explains morality. I don't see how, when you look at the full and complex picture of people's actual moral positions, now and over time. On the contrary, I think naturalism accounts for it perfectly. But it deserves to stand alongside the [bangs head on table] Hard Problem of Consciousness because it's so very, very complicated. Morality, to me, is derived from the net result of our conscious experiences, the opinions that we draw from them and the complex interactions we have with other people. Again, demanding a top-down explanation for morality is simply choosing to state the problem in a science-defeating way. There is nothing to necessitate this perspective. We know we have evolved, we know we have increased in mental and societal complexity. Take the bottom-up explanation, and regard the continuing explorations of psychology, sociology, biology, neurology, philosophy, theology and the rest as exciting, ongoing attempts to describe and explain our own continuing adventure in morality.

(As a last note: I trust you read my long post 1227? I am very serious about this.)

And you must concede that the fact that this gap is God-shaped is kind of neat.

And you must concede that the way it has shrunk over the centuries to a fraction of its former size, changing shape the while, and still accommodates many different 'gods' around the world, is kind of suggestive. God seems to be made of something like jam.

517. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55416 by _J_ on July 11, 2007 at 3:50 am

Goldy, 1260.

You are right. I concede defeat.

518. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55363 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 7:50 pm

Goldy, 1257

You're right. Clearly, it's 'umbrelli'. ;)

519. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55360 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 7:29 pm

...make just one more post, I can die a happy man.

520. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55359 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 7:28 pm

PaulEmecz, 1250,

Well, there being a multiverse is compatible with the unlikelihood of intelligent life existing in the universe. However, it doesn't explain the existence of cosciousness (discussed at length on this thread) or the experience of moral truth.

It must be abundantly clear from the (long) discussion on this thread that I don't find either of these arguments persuasive.

In fact, I reject the morality one with something approaching contempt (though that could be because it's very late and I'm very tired!). I regard morality as hugely important and think moral behaviour to be a great challenge, and inspiration, and responsibility, for all of us.

But I think 'God gives us a reason to be moral' is one of the worst, and wrongest, arguments I've ever heard. You can find reasons as to why in answers from myself, Dr Benway and others within the last couple of pages of this thread.

In spite of having never met you, Paul, I can make reasonable assumptions about what would please or pain you from the basic knowledge that you, like me, are human. I can refine these notions by asking you and learning more about you. I can, through the simple principle of the Golden Rule, and from my atheistic belief that this life that you and I currently have is all we have - there is no consolatory afterlife - convince myself with burning urgency that it would be grievously wrong to cause you unnecessary harm or to bring about your debilitation or death.

I need no superior being to dictate rules to me, and I have my own (completely atheistically logical) guilt to function in place of his wrath.

Interestingly enough, Dianelos' recent description of his god and afterlife concepts suggest that his motivations are near-enough identical to my own, and to those of other non-believers. He regards virtue as its own reward, but extends our ability to attain it by our virtuous actions into other, future, lives. This pleasing detail is not a belief of which I am currently able to convince myself, but I agree with him about virtue and about the need to behave well by others.

* - * - *

Ah, post 1255. This is off topic in the most contentless of ways, but with this post, we have equalled what I think to be the previous longest thread: The God of the Bible is No Delusion!

Which means that if I...

521. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55358 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 7:24 pm

Dianelos, 1247

Thanks for the link to 135. Gosh – this discussion has been going round in circles for a long time, hasn't it?

That's an example of equivocation. "Consciousness" has to quite different meanings, see post 1053, or #53833 about this.

Sorry, yes. I think my mind may have been wandering, there. And while I'm apologising: no, not everything I put in inverted commas is a quote from you. Usually I'll make some attempt to show which things in inverted commas are quotes from you, at least if they are substantial or significant. Some other bits in inverted commas are paraphrases, or words that I feel a certain scepticism about in the context in which they are being employed. Apologies for any confusion.

Given that you have defined all of the physical processes of the brain as only accounting for operational details of consciousness (ie how we experience what we experience), that impossibility follows necessarily from your assumptions.

I am not sure I follow you here. I was just pointing out the various experiments and cases of brain injury etc can only justify a naturalist's belief that what we are conscious of is the physical processes in our brain.

I think maybe you haven't followed through the implications of your arguments here. You fundamentally regard 'ability to be conscious' as separate from 'physical structures through which consciousness is carried out'. Whenever an observation of equivalence between brain activity and conscious awareness is raised, you object that that's just the brain going about the business of being conscious, and nothing to do with its ability to be conscious. The result is that it is completely impossible for anyone to raise a physical explanation for consciousness, because you have tacitly shoved 'origin of consciousness' to a place where physical explanations cannot reach it. You will always be able to dismiss matter-based hypotheses by classifying them all as merely showing the processes that consciousness engages in.

How do you know you haven't just got the question upside down? You regard 'ability to be conscious' as the precondition of all of the activities of consciousness. You regard everything we observe about consciousness in our reality as simply matter-based manifestations of our 'ability to be conscious', and only incidental constituent parts of the expression of 'ability to be conscious' in our present reality. This means that you require an explanation of consciousness that is total and that leapfrogs every matter-based observation you can make about it. It is far from clear to me what consciousness is when we rule all of these observations out.

Couldn't it work the other way round? You know the phrase 'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts'? Try concentrating on those constituent parts of consciousness – the ones that are observable through their physical expressions. Is it not possible that consciousness isn't the precondition for those abilities, but the result of all of these abilities working together and relating to one another? Which, over evolutionary time, have grown in sophistication and interrelation to become what we recognise as human consciousness?

This is how I see it. I expect it is how most atheists on this thread will see it (though that is a presumption). It seems to me to bypass your hard problem entirely, and to present consciousness as perfectly researchable within science. Can you accept this view of the problem?

I'll give an anology of how your position strikes me (apologies for the absurdity – I'm not trying to have a go at you). I know you may object that no analogy is appropriate for 'the mother of all gaps' – but I give this as a way of showing you how, from my perspective, it doesn't look like 'the mother of all gaps' at all.

We are standing under a shelter in a rainstorm. 'Gosh', you say, 'I'm glad of this roof.' I agree. Thoughtful sort that you are, you say: 'I wonder how it works.' 'The roof?' I ask. 'Yes', you reply, 'how does it stay up there, keeping the rain off us…? Ah! I've got it!'
'The walls?' I ask.
'No, not at all. A common misconception', you correct me.
'They do seem to be keeping the roof up…'
'Merely a manifestation of roofness – or shelter – within our physical realm! Roofness is obviously a quality conferred by an immaterial realm of pure roofness, which has the inherent quality of blocking out rain. When roofness manifests itself in our physical reality, it takes the form of a roof like this one, complete with supporting walls to connect it to the earth and conform with the force of gravity. But the walls cannot explain roofness. There is nothing about the walls that makes it possible to block out the rain. This ability is the quality of roofness, and must exist prior to these secondary expressions of roofness in our world.'
I nod.
You continue:
'Clearly, when this rainstorm ends, we will move away from this physical expression of roofness into a reality in which roofness is manifested in a immaterial way and shelters us at all times from the immaterial rain. Given this, I think it clearly evident that we must be good to our fellow creatures in order to accrue virtue as the roofness wants us to. It has clearly provided this roof, and the storm, as an opportunity for us to gather together in communal shelter and to accrue virtue by being really nice.'
'You're sure the walls aren't just keeping the roof up?', I ask, like an idiot. 'You know – someone built the walls, then placed the roof on, and as a result there's a dry area?'
'Of course not! You are again confusing the ability to provide shelter – which is only possible for a roof – with the trappings of actually providing shelter within our physical reality!'
'I've never seen a roof without walls…'
'Which proves nothing. Just because roofs cannot be physically observed to exist without walls within our physical realm says nothing about the inherent qualities needed to provide shelter. Physical observation is not the only reliable source of knowledge, you know! The hard problem of roofs – how rain can be prevented from falling – is not touched upon by walls. Walls are plainly only consequent from shelter rather than a necessary precondition for it. It is clear that no wall-based – and thus no recognisable physical-construction-based – explanation can account for roofness. Naturalistic wall-and-construction theories can therefore never explain roofness. Indeed, it seems impossible to imagine what such an explanation could look like, since it is completely clear that walls are secondary to the function of roofs in providing shelter, and therefore not essential to this function. Only a realm of pure roofness could account for this. This is a serious problem for your naturalistic attitude to architecture in general, by the way, since even in this rudimentary hut it can't account for the existence of the only thing that is giving us shelter – the primary function of all architectural constructions. I am surprised that I have to keep repeating myself.'
I fall silent, and eagerly anticipate the end of the storm.

I think the walls are keeping the roof up. And I think you do, too. About roofs…

522. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55354 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 6:07 pm

Dianelos, 1244

No, I don't think that thinking about the nature of reality is a waste of time. But I do think that living in accordance with unnecessary and unprovable conclusions is. (For 'unprovable' read' impossible to show to be particularly likely to be true'.)

I'd like your specific opinion on my position as stated in a couple of posts you've read now: to simply dissent from choosing a metaphysical perspective (on the basis that I don't believe myself to have a reliable way of choosing between them) and simply to operate 'from the inside' in a manner consistent with methodological naturalism. I will be happy to adopt a particular ontological perspective when one somehow begins to seem overwhelmingly likely – or when some circumstance forces me to make a decision. Until such a point, I don't see that having a metaphysical perspective matters, so long as one has a physical one!

I am, perhaps, guilty of 'scientism' to some degree in my particular regard for scientific data. Perhaps this is a flaw – perhaps even a fallacy, as you seem to suggest. Yet I am only opting for what seems to work – for methods that get observable results. I don't think this is unreasonable. I owe my life, my health and my ability to have this discussion with you to the scientific method, after all. I'm not sure any non-scientific perspective can make such claims. Can you talk me out of my 'error'?

philosophers from Plato to Kant knew that you can't decide about reality based on objective observations alone.

I've already discussed, a while back (sorry, no post number off-hand!) the fact (as I see it) that we operate with de facto objectivity, rather than pure objectivity (ie with corroborated subjectivity). So I won't go into that again. As for Plato and Kant – I can't comment. I'm tempted to say that I'd no more expect a philosopher to argue against philosophy than I'd expect the Queen to endorse anarchy. But I think my position comes down to what I've just said above. Okay, maybe philosophical inquiry has a value above that which I readily grant it (which is not insignificant, by the way: generating hypotheses for science to test, checking that scientists have not committed fallacies, ensuring that our opinions and assumptions add up to a coherent whole, presenting us with enlightening perspective shifts, conjuring up possibilities beyond our means to prove but nevertheless interesting to speculate about – and doubtless more that I can't think of just now). But I need someone to show me that something is more reliable at uncovering facts than science is before I jump of the good ship 'Science' and start swimming for the horizon.

The fact that there are several mutually exclusive descriptions of reality that quantum physicists have proposed (the so-called interpretations of QM) is an extraordinary objective demonstration of that philosophical argument. [See above quote.]

No, it just shows that until we have something worked out, we don't have a single universally-accepted explanation for that thing. Give it a couple of centuries. QM'll probably be settled, but there'll be something neither you or I have thought of that will have all kinds of speculative, as-yet-unproven hypotheses buzzing around it. Go back two hundred years and change the theory names and you'll find the same thing. Steve99's already brought this up lately. Come on, Dianelos, this is a simple one.

Prove me wrong: produce a result, from your fabulously useful idealistic theism, that cannot be reduced to 'It Makes Dianelos Feel Better.'

See post 963 or #53366 about this popular naturalist argument.

Okay, I looked at 963. Thanks for the reference.

First:

The worldview about reality one adopts is clearly not irrelevant to one's appreciation of reality.

I can sympathise with that. It backs up my point about the chemical derivation of live being irrelevant to its value in 1227, for example. And also something I said in 1248: '[…] it increasingly seems to me that how one uses one's worldview is more important than what it is.' So I detect (not for the first time!) common ground with you, here.

Anyway, I read your points about the non-triviality of the feel-good factor. But not all profit is feel-good profit. And many of those worthwhile achievements that do feel good to some extent are not reducible in their value to one feeling good.

If I invested a big wedge of money in successfully eliminating sleeping sickness, I'd feel like the bees knees. But the good that I had done would not reduce to my being immensely impressed with myself. It would be quite evident to an observer in the life and health of people we could statistically have expected to have been sick or dead otherwise.

We don't even need to be talking about 'good' things, here – just accurate, productive ones. If Dianelosian Theism could tell us how to make atom bombs, and science couldn't, maybe no one would have the tingly feeling of self-righteousness, but we couldn't argue with the fact that DT (that's your theism now, by the way!) got results.

So: result please!

523. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55344 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 5:16 pm

Dianelos, 1243

But that's the only kind of science there is, so the expression "naturalistic science" is redundant at best and confusing at worse

Yes, I take your point. My attempts at clarification and emphasis may be, at times, confusing, particularly to someone used to operating in a vocabulary of philosophical precision like yours. I'm not really accustomed to wielding this particular discursive lexicon myself – and I have argued with people with whom it is advisable to use phrases like 'naturalistic, materialistic, stuff-based science that's concerned with physical things', so eager are they to seize any perceived gap as an opportunity to inject arguments for their faith. Please forgive me the occasional foray into tautology!

524. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55343 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 5:07 pm

Dianelos, 1242

Yes, the response in this post is as expected.

Your argument for your worldview now runs as follows:

1. My definition of consciousness precludes physical causation.

2. I find that no theory that relies on physical causation can account for consciousness as I define it. [Tautologous conclusion]

3. I therefore posit a non-physical causation for consciousness. [Nonessential supposition – see below]

4. I know nothing at all about this non-physical cause (being, as it is, unavailable for inspection), but its essential property is its ability to create consciousness – after all, that's why I posited it in the first place.

5. Since no one knows anything about this non-physical element I have posited, it can quite comfortably be called god and present an afterlife and a virtue-based ethics system that I find highly pleasant additions to my view of life. [Untestable speculation and wishful thinking]

My note to point 3 is this. You observed that:

[…] God, being a sufficiently powerful person, can affect conscious experience and organize it as a new conscious subject, thus creating a new person. To ask "how" that works is as meaningless as asking a naturalist how mass bends spacetime.

I contend that certain arrangements of matter give rise to consciousness. 'How', I decree, is a meaningless question. We are aware of matter; we are aware of consciousness. Additions are presumptions. It is possibly an irreducible fact of our universe that certain formations of matter simply can give rise to consciousness, just as matter bends spacetime.

Personally, I think we will come up with a 'how', which will involve our identifying a fuller, less oil-smeared and land-mine surrounded definition of consciousness than yours. But in the meantime, I appropriate your own logic as a defence of our present state of incomplete knowledge. (It should be unnecessary to do so, but you seem unconvinced.)

525. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55335 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 4:44 pm

Dianelos, 1239

Thank you, as ever, for your response.

Well the evidence I rely on and have presented here is not like that at all. So there is good evidence

Hmm, okay… What evidence is this, again? You'll see in my post 1233 that I think dismissal of naturalistic answers to the hard problem of consciousness seems to be based on a question-begging arrangement of the problem itself, in turn derived from assumptions about what consciousness ought to be. Your attitude to 'moral objectivity' seems to owe something to wishful thinking and personal incredulity – which latter error also informs your responses to non-theistic hypotheses about the nature of the universe (such as the multiverse theory). You solve an unknown by postulating another unknown – I quote you on this in the very post you are responding to. You have stated that: 'Compared to other evidence I have, scientific observations have a lower level of reliability for me.' – this doesn't strike me as standing you in particularly good stead as a judge of the quality of evidence, if you'll forgive me! Your evidence for god all seems to be 'hard to see' in a way that requires us to abandon our most reliable methods (those that have yielded results in dealing with hard problems in the past).

To put it briefly: would it stand up in court? If not, why not?

Simplicity is by far not the only, nor the most important criterion when comparing worldviews.

You are right and I shouldn't have suggested that. Lazy of me.

Explanatory power and experiential/ethical gains are far more important for me.

I'm not sure that your ethical gains are all they're cracked up to be. I see that your faith does support your ethics, but I also see that atheists also manage to support their ethics through their secular viewpoint. So long as a person hasn't fallen into one of the (many, many, many) faiths that demand ethical positions that clash with what an ontologically heterogeneous group would regard as desirable, it increasingly seems to me that how one uses one's worldview is more important than what it is.

As for explanatory power: the 'my worldview is as compatible with the discoveries that have been made by science as naturalism' point doesn't help us get anywhere. So: can you show any accurate predications that your idealistic theism has made that other worldviews couldn't have managed?

And, as I explained in post 1166 (#55061), I find that theistic idealism much simpler than naturalism anyway.

Yes. Yes, you do. I've just had a go at that in my last post. I think you're kidding yourself on this particular detail, and I don't think that's helping your argument at all.

And I assure you that should you study how theistic philosophers justify theism it is nothing like "proper evidence for God is a silly idea" :-)

Well, I've no doubt that none of them put it quite like that! If there are strong arguments for the likely existence of god, I am astonished as to why they have not been more popularly advanced. They'd have sceptics like me converting in droves…

When one friend of mine, whose responses have thus far reinforced my impression of Christian habituation to poor evidence, has completed her training to become a vicar, I shall ask her about all this again.

Sorry, I am not defending theistic fundamentalism here.

Sure – not an intended implication.

I accept the possibility (raised in your next comments) that a god may just have made it so difficult to find him that we just haven't learned enough yet. But every argument I've seen for reasoning to a god from our current knowledge involves an abandonment of our most reliable methods of discovery. I'm not accepting this.

Well, finding the God pattern in the whole of our experience is not easy either, but once one finds it it explains the whole of our experience.

That sounds lovely. Interestingly, it very accurately describes how I felt as I learned about evolution and followed the arguments that led me to atheism.

And finally let's not forget that the intellectual path is not the only one nor necessarily the best path towards God.

No, I quite agree. But it's usually a good one for discerning factual truth. Wouldn't you say?

All of your remaining arguments in this thread helpfully refine your definition of 'consciousness' (as used in your statement of the notorious Hard Problem) into the form in which I have later identified it in post 1233. As expected, you have in fact defined consciousness in terms that presuppose its immunity to physical explanations, thereby rendering the whole 'come up with an explanation, you naturalists' challenge (and the succeeding observation that 'they can't') absurdly tautologous. You need to account for your assumptions, or stop entertaining false proofs of the impotence of naturalism.

That's ok. I figure this: If I am wrong then you are on the right track. And if I am right then you'll find out anyway.

One thing that I really, really like about your religion is that there's no threat in that at all! If I carry on believing, as I do, that we all ought to strive to do the right thing by one another anyway, I guess I'm accruing virtue. And if I keep giving the god question my best shot, I suppose s/he's not going to hold that against me either. Once again: whatever else I say, your religion is up there with the best.

526. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55331 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 4:13 pm

Dianelos, 1220.

[Totally missed the post! Just spotted it. Here goes…]

No, let's mind. I made clear that "we'll ignore the added complexity of elementary particles". If I hadn't ignored that added level of complexity then naturalism's worldview would have come out even more complex still.

I know you did, and it was a sly way of supporting your own argument without examining the details. My point is that there's plenty we don't know about fundamental particles. It's wholly possible that when we have learned more, our findings will actually simplify our understanding of the cosmos markedly. You are not in a position to make the assumption that you sneakily chalk up to your own generosity.

Why not? Science discovers such patterns, and indeed discovers that the visual information that our brain processes is limited by the number of cells in our retina.

Because you have already dismissed matter as incidental to the complexity of your worldview. Continue your own train of thought: rods and cones would be useless with a different cell-pattern, or a different molecular structure, or different alignment. You lack a meaningful way of counting the complexity of physical constructs. And:

Why should I break it down to their constituent atoms?

…you abandon the one you'd (arbitrarily) established for assessing naturalism! You are being completely inconsistent in your attitude to matter as a countable unit of complexity. It's like balancing the books by shifting a decimal place.

Because according to science the complexity of the light or of the objects the light is reflected from does not matter, whereas the number of rods and cones in our retina does matter.

You don't seem to understand my point, which was:

You take these cells as sufficient representation of our ability to see, making no mention of the 'complexity' represented by the light that they actually register, or the objects that that light has reflected off (if you regard these as unnecessary, then why bring up eyes and photoreceptors in the first place?).

So, you obviously regard rods and cones as necessary to part of our conscious experience, and thus to the total complexity of your worldview? Fine. Rods and cones would not communicate the information to our brain that they do were they not arranged in the way they are in the retina of a human eye. You therefore need to include the whole eye in your complexity count, otherwise it makes no sense to count the complexity of the rods and cones.

This information from the retina would be of no use if it were not then transmitted to the brain. Therefore, the optic nerve needs to be added into your equation – all of its cells and their arrangement.

This information then requires the brain to receive and process it, so the relevant brain structures also need adding up and counting. Don't forget the complexity that is their arrangement, too.

None of these organs would retain their spatial relationship to one another without a human head to sit in, so you'd better throw that in, too.

Also, they all require a blood flow and oxygen, or they simply don't work. Rods and cones without a supply of energy are non-functional rods and cones, and the same goes for all the other necessary structures mentioned thus far. Human body cells are powered by mitochondria and the energy source they need is provided by oxygenated blood. So you'll need a respiratory system and a pulse.

Furthermore, it's not just blood and oxygen that are required to keep all these units doing their jobs. They're used to receiving the range of nutrients we eat and digest. And, of course, you'll need a good system for providing the right amount of blood at the right rate, oxygenated to the right level. A human body is the known way of doing this. So you should really be adding in the whole human body to your equations. Alternatively, you could work out the things that are necessary to sustain the bits that are necessary to sight (eyes, nerves, brain areas) and supply some sort of mechanical equivalent. Can't help you there.

Then, of course, you have the other senses to go through. Pretty soon you may as well just go for the whole human body.

Back on sight: rods and cones are flat useless if they are not receiving anything. By requiring rods and cones, you've accepted the need for physical sensory input. That means light. And, for that light to be carrying the information that you want your rods and cones to be picking up, that light needs physical sources and physical reflecting surfaces.

If we follow this chain of reasoning, we're going to find that each physical provision requires its appropriate physical context. Ultimately, you're going to be stuck counting the atoms in the physical universe after all.

And don't spring the Argument from The Matrix just yet! Read on…

You have a clear way out of this. That way out is to give up on the rods and cones entirely and say 'consciousness doesn't require any physical stuff at all'. You can regard all physical organs as third-person data and exonerate them from your theistic information count. After all, you were already happy to do that with most of the physical universe – you were just making an inconsistent special case for rods and cones (and presumably other favoured pieces of sense organs). This would be more consistent: dismiss it all as 'consciousness generated patterns' and don't try to count it.

But what are you left counting, then? Your immaterial realm of consciousness is uncountable, isn't it? You have no way of assessing its complexity at all. You know it must have some complexity, otherwise it just wouldn't be anything, right? But you don't have any way of assessing that complexity. Certainly nothing you can compare with the atom count you used for naturalism.

Bingo. This is the problem you had all along. You just imported an arbitrary bit of physical countability from the naturalistic model to give yourself the feeling you were making a meaningful comparison. But you weren't. In fact, you don't have a sensible way of counting (or even defining, as far as I can see) complexity even in a naturalistic worldview, and you don't have any way at all of counting it in your theistic one. That's because you don't actually have the faintest clue of how your theistic worldview works. After all, you have posited it as a way of avoiding difficult explanations:

I am positing a worldview which does not require an explanation for consciousness.

Your theistic worldview is one big fat unknown. Do you see how nonsensical it is to try to make a mathematical comparison of the complexity of this with one of the naturalist's physical universe? Especially when your unit of complexity is arbitrary?

At the bottom of all this: you, I or anyone can always say 'I believe in a god who reduces the complexity of the universe by [any of an infinite number of ideas, from painting the stars on a velvet cloth to switching the cosmos off when we're not in the room]'. But these beliefs all rely on huge, swaying, crowd-terrifying behemoths of Unknowns. You can't cheat Occam's Razor by going 'This is much simpler – if you don't count the immeasurable dollop of unknowable complexity…'

All of which Dr Benway managed to say in two lines.

You've said lots of informative and illuminating things, Dianelos, but really, this line of argument isn't one of them. Really. It isn't. (Though I did enjoy reading it.)

Which may explain in part why God has created for us the experience of such an really huge universe: maybe so that theistic idealism would trump naturalism under any imaginable criterion ;-)

Well, that made me chuckle, at least!

527. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55293 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 1:20 pm

steve99, 1229

And I wish I had your ability to cut through nonsense and hit the point concisely. I don't know how you do it!

By the way, I enjoyed your words about atheism, here. We really should concentrate more on expressing these positives, and then perhaps people wouldn't get the impression that all we do is kick down sandcastles. (We also say 'Wow - look at all those sand grains!')

1232

This does raise an interesting question as to how one reviews a thread of this length.

True. I've had some free time, lately, but I can't really afford as much as I've been spending here. I tend to scan for stuff addressed to me, and to dip into other lines of discussion that look related or interesting. (I know, I know, I'm going to hell.)

Anyway, it's just a discussion thread. Mistakes are inevitable. And people can always refer back to old posts (as we increasingly are doing).

1234

I really like your thinking here! (Though this may be my irrational love of Arcadia, which manages to make iterative equations seem almost unfathomably meaningful, taking a grip on me again.)

528. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55286 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 1:12 pm

Dianelos, 1225

Thank you for writing this particular post. I have to say that, irrespective of not buying the thinking that supports your particular brand of idealistic theism, reading your account of it here I found it very positive and rather beautiful.

If I ever do become sufficiently disenfranchised with atheism to desire a faith of my own, I'll be doing well if I can come up with one as good as yours. (I may steal from it, in fact…)

529. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55283 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Dianelos, 1224

The presence of consciousness is not similarly observable or measurable (that's why no naturalist knows whether, say, cockroaches are conscious), so to suggest that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain is to plead for a special exception to that rule.

We may be a long way off with cockroaches, but we seem to be getting there with humans. I read in a recent New Scientist that medical researchers were able to identify signs of consciousness in a woman in what looked like a vegetative state from her brain activity when they asked her to imagine doing certain tasks – though she could not physically move, her brain activity was like that of a person actually doing those tasks.

No, they only indicate that, given that we have consciousness (i.e. have the capacity of having conscious experiences), what we are conscious of is basically what's happening in our brain.

(Doesn't this make you a dualist, in fact – if the physical nature of the brain is necessary to make our conscious awareness what it is and acts as a kind of filter for the immaterial spark of ability-to-be-conscious?)

Anyway, I supposed in 1199 that the question you were posing ('How can physical matter be conscious?') might be a bogus one, and here you have shown why this is indeed so. Here is the 'consciousness' that you regard as having so far proved impossible even to imagine a physically-based explanation for: 'the capacity of having conscious experiences'. Given that you have defined all of the physical processes of the brain as only accounting for operational details of consciousness (ie how we experience what we experience), that impossibility follows necessarily from your assumptions. Either your assumptions are wrong and the brain can be fully the source of consciousness, or your assumptions are right and something immaterial is going on. It is, however, nonsensical for you to challenge us – or anybody – to provide a 'physical stuff'-based account of consciousness when you elect to define it in this way, which logically rejects any such explanation.

It's about your assumptions, then. Why do you separate 'ability to be conscious' from 'machinery through which our consciousness operates'? What's the evidence that demonstrates that they cannot be one and the same? Feel free to refer me to an earlier post if you feel you've already covered this adequately.

(I have a horrible feeling Chalmers is going to emerge again…)

530. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55276 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 12:26 pm

Dianelos, 1221

As it turns out I have already commented on this in post 135 (or #47348).

I really have to stand in awe of the way you can do that, over 1,200 posts into this thread! Go on: who's doing your filing? ;)

(Actually, I think I touched on it in 821 as well, but even then I was late by nearly 700 posts. You is good.)

You don't want me to try to compare which worldview is more counterintuitive, do you? ;-)

Well, I don't particularly care: of the two of us, only one reckons intuition to be better evidence than scientifically derived observations, and it ain't me:

There are several kinds of evidence: objective experience […], subjective experience […], intuitions […], knowledge […] Compared to other evidence I have, scientific observations have a lower level of reliability for me.
---You, post 1131

As a matter of fact, I tend to take the intuitive rightness of theism (and it does have a good deal of intuitive rightness to me) as an additional reason to be sceptical about it. One should always try to be aware of one's biases, right?

EDIT - Ah - steve99 beat me to the intuition point by a country mile. Sorry for the repetition. Note to self: must review thread more carefully!

531. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55271 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 12:10 pm

Dianelos, 1219

In response to the whole post: nothing you have stated is news to me, I do indeed find the brain's simulation software fascinating and I am, quite happily, 'over it'.

I am sorry that you have to keep repeating yourself, but not as sorry as I am that you haven't worked out how pointless it is to do so yet. You say ('for the fourth or fifth time'):

[…] there are many worldviews, indeed many naturalistic worldviews, that could produce exactly the same phenomena, so you can't use scientific evidence to decide which worldview is more reasonable.

But what you don't see is that the rest of us regard your exercises in untethered speculation not as an edifying exploration of the nature of reality, but as a monumental waste of time. Very entertaining for sci-fi movie writers; utterly useless for piecing together an understanding of anything whatsoever.

Prove me wrong: produce a result, from your fabulously useful idealistic theism, that cannot be reduced to 'It Makes Dianelos Feel Better.'

[…] reality is more interesting than what we see around us since we were children.

I agree. But you seem to be chasing after the sort of 'interesting' that makes Father Christmas more 'interesting' than loving parents who tiptoe in to sneak presents into the stocking. In your own words (and I apologise for your tone): get over it.

532. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55269 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 11:55 am

Dianelos, 1212

What basis would that be? If life is nothing more than a planet-wide chemical reaction it's simply arbitrary (and hence base-less) to define any part of it as good and any other part of it as bad. That's the problem. Which does not imply that naturalists are therefore ethical-less people. It just implies that their worldview is kind of incoherent.

Here, Dianelos, I'm afraid I think you are not only wrong but badly and dangerously wrong. Up until now I have had no reason to object to your perspective other than to think it factually incorrect and questionably (though often very impressively) reasoned. However, this strand of thought is one of the most baseless and poisonous myths about atheism that theists promote. I really hope I can persuade of this even if you agree with nothing else I say. Doing so will not lessen your ability to support your idealistic theism.

Please bear in mind that naturalistic science (I am once again using this phrase in the way that actually makes sense; see post 1218) proceeds from observation. We feel good or bad, pleasure or pain, joy or misery. We observe our own behaviour when we feel these things and we observe the stimuli that tend to cause them. We also observe other people exhibiting similar behaviour in response to similar stimuli and we reason that they feel as we do. To cap things off, we can ask them, to make sure.

We can call things that make people feel pain or misery 'bad' and we can call things that make people feel pleasure or joy 'good'. There are lots of people in the world and lots of different situations for them to experience and in which they will interact, so things get complicated quickly. But there, in a the most basic of nutshell, is your observational basis for morality.

The 'it's all just chemicals' complaint is so backwards in its reasoning that I thought you would have been incapable of stooping to it, Dianelos. As I've said elsewhere to David Robertson, the building materials are as irrelevant to my conception of life's value as they are to yours. I say our conscious life is made out of material stuff; you say it's made out of immaterial god. Fine. We're both postulating theories to explain the existence of the same observed phenomena: living consciousness and all it entails. Our explanations proceed from our initial appreciation of the same thing. My naturalistic 'stuff'-based one does no more to cheapen it than your supernaturalistic 'god'-based one.

Quite the contrary, in fact, for the realisation that life is limited to one's functional physical existence inevitably makes life and the experiences we have through it far more valuable. This was concisely summed up in an episode of Six Feet Under I think:

Tearful lady at funeral Why do people die?

Pause.

Nate (undertaker) (after some thought) To make life important.

Dismissing life as 'nothing more than a planet-wide chemical reaction' completely (and rather wilfully) overlooks the complexity that a naturalistic perspective actually permits and anticipates. I tried to give some sense of this back in post 995 - a post which you said you had enjoyed and intended to comment on (though I guess you've had your hands full!). You really have no basis for suggesting that mere stuff doesn't allow sufficient complexity to account for the things that naturalists suppose that it will. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has – or ever will have, I expect – a complete knowledge of the complexity of Stuff. And the dismissive phrase 'a planet-wide chemical reaction' really is a grossly reductive caricature.

I'm going to labour this point because I feel very strongly about it. To explain why, I'm going to do some cutting and pasting from a discussion I've been having with David Robertson (the famous weeflea). He repeatedly claims that atheists cannot value life or have proper morals because they see all life as 'just chemicals', and he has apparently ignored my rebuttals of this notion every time I have made them. Given the harm this misconception engenders, I regard his behaviour as unforgivably negligent for a preacher. The effects can be plainly witnessed in the astonishingly twisted opinions voiced by some members of his church, who seem to regard physical death as a fantasy barely worth worrying about. It's a hop, skip and a jump from here to martyrs.

Since you, Dianelos, have an acute and laudable commitment to not doing harm or evil to others, I hope you will appreciate the importance of this point, and thus why I am extending this post to reproduce it. The following is an extract from a long post that I have not yet placed on David's website (because my last long post hasn't appeared there yet!). As a consequence, the 'your theism' that is often referred to is in some ways different from your own, Dianelos. However, it is of a type that is held by a great number of theists, and I'm sure you'll recognise that your continued use of the 'just chemicals' slander would lend to the problem. (I'm sorry that it's not very concise, but I dare say you can scan-read it and get the point.)

Following on from all this discussion of chemicals and so forth, I really have to return to one particular argument. I've been over and over this […] but it is probably the most important thing I have to say, because it regards certain behaviours that can seriously affect people's emotional (and even physical) wellbeing.

In Reply 18, I responded to your comment that

In my biblical view when I kill someone I am extinguishing the image of God. In my atheistic 'scientific' view I would just be getting rid of some carbon and water!

I hope you read that response, as it's the most important thing I said in that post. It's possible that I convinced you there. Since writing it, though, I've also seen Dina's Reply 16 (which appeared while I was previewing my post). In it, Dina makes comments like this:

What you seem to be saying is that what was a conscious, intelligent, living being (or the spiritual element of the human makeup if you like since it cannot be seen) within that physical body has no source (unlike the physical body) and is of no significant value or worth.

'No significant value or worth.' This in absolutely no way follows from what I was saying. As soon as I suggest that life is actually, as far as we can tell, mortal, these astonishing assumptions appear as though they are inarguable truths. How could any believer ever hope to question their belief system when they are so inured in the certainty that to do so would be to reduce their life to being of 'no significant value or worth'?

Sometimes a straw man is a trivial error. Sometimes it's wilfully negligent. And sometimes, whatever the cause, it is so serious a misunderstanding as to be actually life-endangering.

There is a complaint sometimes heard from theists about atheism leading to despair and suicide. I find it only too easy to imagine that some poor people have, at times, upon appreciating the illogic of their faith, felt plunged into despair. And yet it is not a despair that proceeds from atheism at all. We need to recognise the source of this despair so as to avoid leading other people into it.

We atheists are quite happy that life is of paramount importance and is full of joy, meaning and purpose. We recognise that our being alive is the precondition of our having any experiences at all, and that it is up to us to fill our lives and those of others with joy, meaning and purpose. This gives us rather a lot of responsibility, and means that we need to take life, and the experience of living it, very seriously.

You theists believe that our life on earth is only one part of an eternal, immaterial life, and that the value of life is something that is given to it by god. Meaning and purpose stem from accepting the mission allocated to us by god (ie to believe in him), and joy is something he gives us.

Now, if a person is persuaded by the logic of atheism, that person ought also to subscribe to the view of life that stems from that logic. They should find the same challenging and rewarding concept of life that I, and the other atheists I know, hold.

If a person is persuaded by the logic of a particular theism, again they should be subscribe to the view of life that follows from that logic, and perceive life in the way described by that theism.

The tragic condition of the stereotypical suicidally depressed atheist arises as a result of a confusion between beliefs and their consequences, whereby the logic of one system is recognised but the conclusions of the contradictory one are still applied.

The problem is that, whilst atheism has nothing to say about the effects of theism on the value of a person's life, theism makes extremely strong claims in the opposite direction. An atheistic conception of the world recognises all people to be equally valuable. If you convert into theism, your atheist friends and logic will still be telling you that you are just as valuable a person. Nothing is lost. Your life is every bit as meaningful as ever it was. And so will it be if you change your mind and rejoin them as an atheist.

Meanwhile, it is characteristic of theisms to maintain that all value and meaning of life is a consequence of faith, and that to abandon the faith is therefore to abandon value and meaning and to descend into futility and damnation.

Consequently, whilst the convert from atheism to theism is emotionally supported at all times by both systems, a deconvert from theism to atheism is in trouble. Whilst the logic of their new atheism undermines their faith, that faith still forcefully claims to be the only way to experience meaning and value. Whilst a person's life-view obviously ought to flow directly from the logic that underpins it, a person who is still emotionally habituated to theism risks experiencing grave existential despondency when their acceptance of atheistic logic flies on ahead.

Do you see the problem? A person who finds the logic of atheism persuasive must be allowed to understand clearly that that logic leads directly to the rich and complete view of life's value that atheists actually enjoy. It is simply immoral to taunt such a person with claims that the logical ideas they are exploring will lead to a horrific fate that only proceeds from the logic of the system they are rejecting. Immoral because it is completely intellectually indefensible in taking the utterly illogical step of applying the consequence of one argument to another totally opposing one. And immoral because, by doing so, it creates enormous psychological pressure on the poor person in question, who is emotionally bullied into a crippling fear of atheism and taught instead that they must embrace the system whose logic they no longer believe – theism – or face annihilation.

What does this mean for the poor soul who, following reasoned arguments as best they can, finds that they personally cannot deny the sense of atheism, but who also is totally emotionally invested in theism – through their friendship groups, their family, their habitual actions and thought processes? Of course this is a recipe for emotional catastrophe. But it stems not from atheism, which has done nothing more than present a reasoned argument leading to a perspective in which life is intrinsically valuable. It stems from the claims of theism, seeking to impose its own interpretation of value, with its inherent terrifying threats, on systems over which it has absolutely no authority.

This is the harshest thing I will say in this whole post, or in any of my posts, but it needs saying because the matter seriously affects people's lives. Please, please, please stop using the 'atheism says life is meaningless' or 'valueless' or 'just chemicals' argument. We can all see the little, hugely distorted, grain of fact within these claims and that's why I've spent so much time and effort trying to set this particular record straight. But those claims are, as I'm sure you can see, intellectually unsupportable and are the worst kind of emotional blackmail. It is a bullying approach to those people who are in most need of support. When the stereotypical suicidally depressed would-be atheist succeeds in taking their own life, the blood lies on the hands of those who insisted that they faced a difficult question not calmly and with support, but in the belief that in doing so they were throwing away their soul. This is shameful.

You are not a bully. Your tone is always pleasant and I have not a doubt in my mind of the sincerity of your good intentions. But I hope you can see the point I've been making and I'm sure that, if you do, you will absolutely avoid making these claims in the future.

I apologise again for the length of that, but not for posting it, because I think it important.

If you disagree with my reasoning, please reply, sharing your reasons. Believing this to be an important matter, I would hate to get it wrong. But I hope you will agree on this point, even if on no others.

533. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55217 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 9:14 am

Dianelos, 1212

There is no such thing as "naturalistic science". There is only science, full stop.[...]

Hold your horses, Dianelos! You've already acknowledged the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism, and even defined yourself as a methodological one (although some of your opinions - on evidence, for example - make me doubt this).

Please extend to me reasonable benefit of the doubt; when I may be saying one of two things and one of those things is clearly nonsense, at least acknowledge that I might be saying the other one. And please note that this 'myth' that you are so excited about may also proceed at least partially from a misunderstanding on your part of what people mean by naturalism. Philosophy is not everyone's first language.

(I wonder how you are going to respond to my later posts about methodological naturalism and metaphysical non-committal...)

534. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55210 by _J_ on July 10, 2007 at 8:55 am

Dianelos, 1214

Because it seems to me quite obvious that evil begets evil, so the inoculation analogy doesn't work at all.

As a general principle (cyclical revenge and so forth) I have no argument with you.

And perhaps inoculation wasn't the best of analogies.

My suggestion is that one can allow a system of great evil to build up by not doing anything about it, and therefore reach the point at which there is no painless way of diffusing it. To do nothing allows the situation to worsen; to act means accepting that it's not going to be a pleasant experience in the short term.

Please note that I am not advocating any specific action, here (you know, like 'Let's invade Iran' or something). The logic of the type of situation I am describing is not too difficult to appreciate, I think. I think it has some relevance to the Danish cartoons fiasco, but I wouldn't attempt to reduce that event to this simplistic model.

Please beware of falling into the myth o