Reddit reviews Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
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Oxford University Press USA
I am about to fall asleep but wanted to link you to old post of mine where I discuss this. I am a former skeptical nihilist atheist myself. It isn't just a miserable philosophy (though I wasn't really all that miserable as one), but it is utterly anti-intellectual and just flat wrong. Even atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel says so. But it takes a lot of reading, study, prayer, and grace for these truths to reveal themselves to you. Please be patient and trust in him.
Awesome, thanks for waiting, I appreciate it. First off, I am neither a pastor nor classically trained in any way regarding this stuff, just another guy searching for the truth (although I bet I'm a little older so maybe I have been through some of the questions you have).
Before I jump in, I want to kind of set the stage a bit, if you don't mind. First, what does it mean to be a Christian or to be a follower of Jesus? Does it mean believing in a worldwide flood? Does it mean believing in a Young Earth Creation? Does it mean we can't believe in evolution? I think you will find that Christianity tolerates a wide variety of viewpoints, even though specific denominations and adherents may not. There are some things that are pretty central to Christianity, what we might call Mere Christianity, which falls along the lines of the Apostle's Creed. Whenever you hear critiques of Christianity, it is nice to go back to this foundational belief set and see if the critiques actually chip away at the bedrock (which is expressed in the creed) or just at the periphery. I find that they rarely do.
Second, when we look at stories written in the Bible, I want to state that it is wrong to just pick and choose what to believe but it is right to pick a consistent model of interpretation and apply it. This means that I don't have to take things literally (like the "trees clapping their hands" when alluding leaves brushing together in the wind) but I do have to be consistent. We should also read the Bible with the genre of each book in mind. Obviously the poetry of Songs of Solomon should be treated differently from a letter of Paul or a book of laws like Deuteronomy.
Let me try now and respond to some of your specific problems.
> However many Creationists say that I have to believe in a literal interpretation
As William Lane Craig says, the creation story allows for "all manner of interpretation". Even the great church fathers like St Augustine discussed how the world possessed potencies created by God that would unravel over time. The Catholic Church has explicitly said "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation". So, I think this is an example of something that is on the periphery. Believing in evolution (or not) isn't central to being a Christian. The only part of evolution that would be unacceptable to the Christian would be that it is wholly unguided which is a metaphysical questions which Science, in principle, could not discern.
> Noah's ark
There are a lot of ways to address this. Are you open to the existence of miracles? Did the writer of Genesis mean the whole world or the known world? Are there far fewer "kinds" of animals (which Genesis refers to) rather than "species"? Is the believer committed to a global flood and not just a flood of the known world? I think answers to these questions invite a number of responses that give Christians a broad spectrum of beliefs.
> Evolution
As I mentioned before, Theistic Evolution is a commonly accepted belief. I happen to think that evolution is both wildly improbable and did happen. I believe it was guided or superintended by God.
> God is omni benevolent, omnipotent and omniscent then how can evil be allowed
This is a really big question to which there are several responses, all of which combined, IMHO, make a pretty strong case that we would actually expect there to be evil. The first and foremost response is the Free Will defense. It wouldn't do justice to the problem for me to try and rehash the arguments here, so I have linked to another place where I have discussed this issue and I am happy to discuss further if you follow up with more questions.
> Why is it that a woman is "unclean" for longer if they have a baby girl than if they have a baby boy? That seems a bit sexist to me.
I don't know, but I generally believe that the law of the OT was created to allow a society to survive. Because of Free Will, mankind had to progress. We learned. We weren't ready for everything all at once. This is one of the areas where I struggle the most (I have 3 daughters). If anything, it pushes my position on Biblical Inerrancy. And even if I had to abandon that doctrine, it wouldn't mean that I couldn't still come to believe in Mere Christianity.
> science and logic seem to be so in favour of atheism
Here is where I am confused. I have found Christian Theism to be eminently more consistent with the data of experience and our logical understanding than atheism and naturalism. On Atheism there is ultimately no foundation, everything is just a giant brute fact. The Universe just exists for no reason at all. IMHO, Atheism and Naturalism are permeated with philosophically undercutting problems.
If you get a chance, I would highly recommend you read two things, one by a Christian philosopher and one by an atheist philosopher. I would be happy to purchase you a copy of the latter's book if you cannot afford it yourself. The first is available in PDF and is Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism which shows that if Naturalism and Atheism are true, one cannot rationally believe in them, because one must admit that our mental faculties are selected for survivability and not truth. The second is a stunning book by the widely regarded atheist thinker Thomas Nagel called Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Reality is Almost Certainly False. Before you do anything else, I would read these two books, really dig down and spend some time with them, looking up terms and making sure you understand the arguments. I think you will find, like I did, that the atheist, naturalist philosophical stance is only superficially superior, and that there are great, unworked faults that lie at the center of a matter-first model of philosophy.
> when I pray, I feel nothing
I'm right there with you bud. I don't recall ever feeling the direct presence of God when praying. I feel God mostly in his discipline of me. Hebrews 12:16 "because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son."
My belief in God is only loosely supported on what most people could call an experiential event. I believe in God with all my heart, soul, strength and mind. I am just straight up convinced.
Please feel free to ask any more questions you might have!
I'd like to suggest this book to you. It's a controversial work by a very famous and well-regarded philosopher. He lays out a case for the view that Darwinian evolutionary theory is at best incomplete, and that a materialist conception of the universe is inadequate to explain some data (e.g. the subjective character of consciousness). The book is very controversial but, if you feel that you've a good handle on the theory of evolution, you should probably read it for yourself and make up your own mind rather than reading a review/response piece. At worst you get an interesting introduction to some of the problems that evolutionary theorists are grappling with today.
EDIT: I should clarify something for the sake of your topic. Theories rarely fall on the basis of how well they deal with the cases that the theory was specifically developed to explain. Evolution, for example, was developed as a theory for explaining apparent trends among the diversity of life on Earth. It does this well, most think, in that it adequately explains all the data that you mention. Where evolutionary theory will run into hiccups - as most do - is in dealing with new explananda ('things to explain'). Newtonian mechanics were largely abandoned in the light of new observational evidence (e.g. new astronomical observations). If Darwinian evolution will face a serious challenge it's likely going to come from a new datum.
>Science doesn't explain everything
Nor should it even purport to, because not all knowledge is scientific knowledge. That's called scientism, and pretty much every philosopher and plenty of scientists reject it as an absurd, and indeed pseudoscientific propostion.
>I just think that materialism is a slippery slope
Slippery slopes are a slippery slope to bad arguments, usually straw-men. If you're going to arguing your case intelligently, I suggest they familiarise yourself with the intelligent propenents of what you are seeking to criticise.
First of all, materialism has been dead and for over a century and displaced by physicalism and neutral monism, the latter view also being held be theists, pantheists/pandeists like William James (who wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, and atheists like a Bertrand Russell, David Chalmers, and Thomas Nagel of "What is it like to be a bat?" and Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False fame. Then there are still idealists who are ontological naturalists like Hegel, as well as atheists like Schopenhauer. For supernatural theist idealists, I suggest you check out Charles Taylor, who is influenced by Marx, as well as the other communitarians.
There are also dualists who are atheists, like Jains who are so committed to non-violence that they refuse boil water because it might cause unnecessarily violence to bacteria and a practice a morality more demanding and rigorous than any Christian since Jesus, as well a certain atheistic conceptions of Buddhism.
There are many ways of seeing beyond the false dichotomy of you percieve as being on the top or the bottom of your metaphorical slipper slope which completely fails as comprehensive account of the multitude of views that billions of people hold, atheist and theist alike.
> humans are just sacks of meat and bones
Unfortunately the are plenty of angsty, philosophically ignorant r/atheists and their scientistic heros all too eager to play that role, but I don't have to look far for idiotic theists either.
>with no spirit or consciousness
Again, "spirit" is an assumption which simply by doesn't imply what you think it implies by necessity. Besides the examples above, pre-Babylonian exile Israelites had no concept of an immortal and immaterial soul, and assumed that death was oblivion until their contact with Persian and Greek philosophies.
As far as "no consciousness" goes, it should be obvious by now that hardly any philosophers agree with this. Listen Daniel Dennet's takedown of "atoms in the void" accounts of consciousness anti-realism over at philosophy bites or read one of his dozen or so books on the topic.
>you can't have a political revolution without a spiritual one
It's already been established that both political and spiritual revolutions have material antecedents. As for revolution we desire, that requires pardigm shift in mass consciousness, which, if you are not deterministic, may or may not require something like a "spiritual" revolution. Gramsci will fill you in on why it is so difficult for that to happen.
> Are atheist borrowing from the Christian worldview?
Yes! And hear's how: theists philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have painstakingly done the hard work to show that logic, morality and even science are justified in a theistic framework. However, most atheists just assume/adopt this same logic, morality and science without going back and painstakingly working out if atheism can justify these same hallmarks of theism.
One reason they are wrong to assume is the much of the greatest philosophers of all time have admitted materialistic atheism cannot justify these things, from Nietzsche to Kant to recently Nagel. (So this is not an isolated admission) Nietzsche even went so far as to confess:
> only if we assume a God who is morally our like can “truth” and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.
So yes, atheists just adopt while being ignorant of their own worldview's incompatibility with these principles that can be justified by theism. But ignorance is bliss I guess. :)
BTW, every time I listen to a lecture/debate from John Lennox, I walk away with more books to read. Here's my list so far:
I would suggest: Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel.
Here is the first few paragraphs of the summary/synopsis excerpt from Amazon if you are interested:
>The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.
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>Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.
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>Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
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>In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
And on Thomas Nagel, per Wikipedia:
>Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher. He is University Professor of Philosophy and Law, Emeritus, at New York University,[1] where he taught from 1980 to 2016.[2] His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.[3]
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>Nagel is well known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness.
A highly interesting and influential work on consciousness, which seems to be exactly what you're looking for. Let me know what you think!
> The only plausible explanation would be that the fish struggled onto land with it's fins due to a shortage of food in the water and the fins eventually changed into walkable stubs.
This is basically right. A missing link between fish with fins and "fish" with legs would have looked something like the mudfish. The fins do indeed evolve to function more like legs, and these animals then start to look more like lizards. The important thing to keep in mind about evolution is that these changes are really minuscule from generation to generation, but that these marginal changes eventually add up to large functional differences.
It seems like much of your argument revolves around a poor understanding of evolution, that it is somehow consciously directed. This is in fact not at all the case. There are several mechanisms through which adaptive changes in hereditary traits occur, and not one of which is conscious willing for bodily change. A quick glance at the wikipedia article on evolution should avail you of some of these misconceptions. I know that abiogenesis and evolution can seem mysterious, but it's actually not, and this really doesn't seem to be a good argument for incompatibilism. You might be interested in an argument that seems related, presented in Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, which argues that consciousness itself cannot be explained by evolution and the naturalistic world picture, determinism included. This argument is highly controversial and in my opinion not at all convincing, but it's there and Nagel presents it.
> Well, it's important to first understand where the burden of proof lies.
Question is if it indeed lies with theism.
The burden of proof does not always fall on people who make a statement about something existing.
For example if I claim "the world is not real but just an illusion" or "the laws of nature do not exist they are only illusions", etc... I am rejecting the existence of something, but I thing common sense would lead us to think that such statements are not the "default" and thus the person denying the existence of the world has the burden of proof.
Atheists are quick to put the burden on theism, but atheism and hard agnosticism make several statements, some positive some not, that DO imply a certain view of the world that really are really problematic.
The most common is naturalism (or worse, reductive materialism) which has a lot of problems which even leads some atheists to reject it (which raises a lot of problems if one wants to remain atheist) or accept the idea that we ourselves are illusions (or rather our minds) and other apparent absurdities, which again are problematic on many levels.
So yeah, accepting atheism to it's full logical conclusion, as Alex Rosenberg does in the book I link above makes atheism less of a default position than one might want to.
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>That being said, there are common proofs against the idea of a god. For example, in Euthyphro, one of Plato's dialogues,
Euthyphro dillemma is not a problem for Classical theism (which is what philosophers Aquinas fall under and what most Christian, Jew, Islamic and some others like some Hindu and Jainist have historically held and many still do). It works at best for certain moieties of theism, perhaps including some protestant "theistic personalism" views that are somewhat popular today.
Not to bog down the discussion I'd defer to philosopher Edward Feser (and the mountain of literature on the subject too) who aptly explains why Euthyphro dillemma is a false dilemma and not really problematic why raising Euthyphro dillemma is basically showing one has not done his homework regarding theism... and really an argument only pop-atheist make since it works against people who have no training in philosophy and theology.
Same goes with another pop-argument from evil which is today mostly an appeal to emotion and not a logical problem.
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>Likely the best proof against an omnipotent god is that there are metaphysical rules which go beyond god, and therefore god is not everything. An example of these rules is that the creation must abide by the laws of the creator.
What would be these metaphysical rules?
Such claims you make now again might work for "god as a mere being among other beings" view, but does not work for Classical Theism, where God is not "a being", but rather being itself, or Ipsum Esse Subsistens as Aquinas would have put it (althoug he was not the only or first one), hence it makes no sense to talk about "metaphysical rules which go beyond god" at all.
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> What I should have said is that it is inherently illogical to believe in god because all proofs are fallacious in nature.
Only they aren't and every single time I hear a refutation it's always some sort of lame strawman, like for example Dawkins "refutations" in "The God Delusion", where he only proves he does not even understand what is going on (like most of the book).
Also as I have said elsewhere, the five ways in the Summa are merely sketches. Aquinas goes in further detail elsewhere on some of the proofs but many other Thomists and philosophers in general have worked on them.
So the claim "because all proofs are fallacious in nature" is the equivalent of "if evolution real then why monkey exist?" that some anti-evolutionary crackpots raise.
More serious atheists like JL Mackie who dealt with them seriously were not so dismissive (and some of their criticism has been very useful to theists as well).
>If you believe it IS logical, then provide the argument and I will disprove it.
Problem is that just like you do not explain evolution convincingly in 1 page, arguments for God also require space.
Since I mentioned Feser above I would link to one of his books where he presents five proofs (which are not the five ways), including various objections and answer to such objections.
If you are really interested read through it (instead of just finding uncharitable reviews which anyone can do). If not, then there is no point for discussion.
More importantly, as I said elsewhere, to understand one must read the actual arguments of the people defending a certain idea, not just the second hand critique. You would not study an idea just by reading its critics.
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Finally I would say that even IF the proofs for God would fail as you claim (which I disagree) it doesn't make theism automatically irrational (seen the philosophical problems of the atheist position I mentioned above).
Thomas Nagel (a very capable philosopher, in my opinion) has a book coming out soon that you might find interesting. I haven't read it, as it's not out yet, but I've pre-ordered it and eagerly await its arrival. His fairly-famous article, What is it like to be a bat?, might also be of interest to you.
This is a very detailed working out of a kind of stoicism/epicureanism. I appreciate the thought you've put into this. Some books I've enjoyed on stoicism and philosophy of life:
Thought-provoking books that challenge naturalism from a secular perspective:
Perhaps this will help to explain where I am coming from. I take the Hard Problem of Consciousness very seriously, and believe it has implications for materialistic neo-Darwinism that are extremely important. In terms of scientific importance, this is on the same scale as relativity and QM displacing Newtonian physics. It's massive.
Explained in this book: r/https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
Now, if Nagel is right, and I firmly agree that he is, then there's a big question mark about whether evolution on Earth has been somehow teleological - that evolution was "always destined" to produce conscious beings, even if this teleology is "natural" rather than being the result of "intelligent design". Now also take into account the possibility that the cosmos is in fact potentially infinite, and that unobserved bits of it might be in a permanent superposition (ie they don't really exist - they don't become finite - until observed).
The picture I am painting here is one that is completely compatible with modern science, but in the context of a radically different metaphysical setup to the deterministic, materialistic one that currently prevails. And it has implications for the question we're discussing here, because if Nagel is right then the idea that life may only exist on Earth and nowhere else suddenly looks a lot more plausible. And what is key for this discussion is that this change in plausibility is the result of a change in metaphysical context rather than scientific data.
I'm not great for current consensus, though 'evo psych' doesn't have the best rep.
Here are a few places to start looking...
You might look at Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.
I think if you're interested in this topic Nagel's Mind and Cosmos would be essential to read. It's addressing an idea that what you're interested in is sitting on -- probably an at least partially unexamined assumption. It's more in the realm of philosophy of science rather than examples of science.
>I don't plan to continue this thread much further - this isn't a terribly good time or place to summarise a first year moral philosophy textbook for you, nor would doing so benefit you in the same way that reading that textbook and thinking about it would.
Weird you should drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode, because we're actually agreeing vehemently on everything of substance.
>There is no "moral reality" in the way that there are atoms or energy levels or other physical things.
Not quite. We haven't found one when we've investigated. It's worth remembering that even at the time of the Enlightenment, the field of moral philosophy started with a mixture of divine command and natural-law as its "informed priors" (the frame for its questions). Darwinian evolution dealt a major blow to natural-law/natural-teleology theories, as well.
The finding that we cannot locate an "atom of morality" or a universal optimization target (at least, one that fits our moral intuitions better than the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is a posteriori. Unfortunately, some people drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode and insist that their moral intuitions have so much epistemic value that naturalism must be completely wrong.
And these people have tenure!
>Yet almost everyone lives by some kind of moral code,
Well yes, of course.
>and almost everyone thinks something rather nice has happened over the last few hundred years as we drove back ignorance, racism, sexism, slavery, oppression and so forth.
With emphasis on the almost. There are still serious moral philosophers who may like modernity, but take positions that are technically opposed to it.
>Arguably civilisation couldn't work at all unless most people most of the time followed moral rules, or if it could work there would be massive overheads in policing everyone.
It also requires massive policing overheads when you try to run it very, shall we say, wickedly. It shouldn't be too unsupported to assert that nice rulers require more police than mean rulers.
>So how do we justify moral beliefs in a universe that hasn't been so kind as to give us an atom of evil or a wavelength of sin or anything similar? Well, if you want the long version then study moral philosophy. The very short version is we just make something up, or we do something reasonably sophisticated with game theory to get to a very similar place assuming self-interested agents capable of big picture thinking.
Yes, this is exactly what I said. We can take an anti-realist stance ("make something up"), or we can take a very sophisticated, reforming sort of realist stance that involves precise naturalistic grounding (game theory and psychology are aspects of nature too, you know).
But in either case, the Is/Ought Gap, or Moore's Open Question Argument in its other form, are simply not Hard Problems in the sense of demonstrating that the gap is impossible to bridge. In the a-posteriori absence of mystical moral particles, morality is left amenable to natural, empirical investigation via very precise theories of which empirical facts count as moral facts (or via outright anti-realism, which denies that there exists any gap between normative ethics and moral psychology, and thus denies the normativity of ethics in general). The problem is that some trained, professional academic philosophers remain actually committed to the position that the strength of their realist intuitions constitutes evidence against naturalism, or attempt to rationalize ways in which naturalism self-undermines.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the comments here are from staunch materialists who rely on the evidence of their 5 senses and seek to explain phenomena in terms of natural physical laws Atheism has nothing to say about consciousness but contrary to popular opinion there are many atheists who see consciousness as a property existing independent of what the 5 senses can describe and which must be accounted for in any theory of reality. A great and erudite book on this subject is Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.
>The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy.
Indeed. Materialism/physicalism is still the dominant view in the west but it seems to be undermined more and more as time goes on. I think its about time we move on from such an ancient paradigm and go with the evidence. Nagel has some awesome work on this in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False as published by Oxford University Press in 2012.
For the lazy
Unless you like dense but vague prose with no obvious application, I can't recommend this one, at least from the beginning in the free kindle sample: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755/ref=la_B000AQ6R56_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520986930&sr=1-1
But the first taste is free and YMMV. There are lots of blurbs from prestigious publications so go figure.
>Things are made of behaviors that are made of behaviors
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>Well this claim is disputable. One might simply reply that science only observes behaviors but has a blind spot on ontological reality. This was a criticism even Russel (and others) raised.
I don't mind making claims that are disputable, as long as they are reasonable. Do you accept that it is possible that there are only behaviors, and that such a description is coherent and useful, if possibly open to being wrong? I am quite pleased that you see that this behaviors-only view is informed by and compatible with science - that was my primary goal.
Yes science only observes behaviors, and it is able to say a great deal about the world with just that. While it is good to keep an eye out for these blind spots, I am still waiting for the god or platonic object of the gaps to rear its head and be relevant. Do you claim to know there is actually something in the blind spot worth caring about?
>It highlights the world in a very different way... which might not fit the narrow mechanistic vision we all try to fit everything now, but there is no reason to think such mechanistic view is true, in fact there are good reasons to think it's not correct. Thomas Nagel (not a religious guy at all) presents a good case in his book Mind and Cosmos 1
Thanks for that source. I have added it to my audible list, but I can tell from the title and and little poking around wikipedia that someone is about to argue for the mind to somehow be special and magical and mystical, as separate from the rest of the cosmos. I have heard the name Nagel thrown around too much to not read this.
>First I think it's pretty clear that the distinction between a table and a tree does exist, since tree grow, but tables are something that are necessarily imposed by humans on a tree.
A tree and a table are different whether that table was made by humans or by natural forces. You can make a table that grows, at least in theory, just as you can have a brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. You could also just grow a tree into a table. If your metaphysics is limited by what humans do, it will have a built-in lack of imagination.
To contradict your point, the difference between the table and tree is just one of arrangement and behavior. A car that is running because it has fuel and spark doesn't have a magical life essence or a quality of moving - its parts are just moving because they are arranged right. A broken car behaves different from working one, as its arrangement is different. I will say it again - Any unique arrangement of matter has unique causal powers. What you are doing is drawing special importance to some arrangements and behaviors over others. To me they are all just arrangements. The difference between living and dead, conscious or not, thermonuclear or not, reactive alkali or not, radioactive or not, these are all important things to notice, but they don't exist in different worlds or different sets of descriptions. They are all behaviors that result from behaviors. You can fill libraries with the very important differences and details here, but you cannot claim that properties or consciousness or qualia are metaphysically special. All that is results from the mechanistic behavior of things. My additional claim beyond garden-variety materialism is that you can eliminate the mech and just say behavior.
>The "field view" seems to reflect what we observe experimentally, but this does not mean necessarily it is ontologically true ... Right about 120 years ago scientists thought their physical view of the world was complete and done
It sounds to me like two completely different topics here. One is accuracy of a model to fit data, either existing data or new data coming out. I just asked you to not confuse the map and the terrain, and here you are doing it. We went from a model that fit the data well under a materialistic paradigm, to a better model that fit better data well still under a materialistic paradigm. What has changed is map, what has not changed is science's continued confidence that the terrain is mechanistic and can be described ever better by only doing better and better models with better and better data. At no point was materialism upended, and it is materialism we are talking about here, not any one scientific model.
What do you mean by ontologically true, anyway? It doesn't sound like it matters how accurate the latest model is to the latest observations of reality. Is a better map more ontologically true to the terrain? Or are you talking about some feature of reality that cannot be described by an infinitely precise model, because it really works by magic? If so, no level of precision or completeness of science will sway you.
I think essentialism is another attempt to add meaningless dualism with another name attached to it. I would check out this "Real Essentialism", but 50 bucks for a paperback is steep.
I'm a scientist and former atheist and thought the theory of evolution was simple unassailable overwhelming science. When I became a Christian I continued to have that belief, but curious about the young earth creationism (YEC) I took a couple short courses on YEC. Both were compete and utter garbage. Then I went on to study down into the science-based and philosophical-basis for intelligent design or rejection of neo Darwinism, in come cases written by atheists such as this one by Nagal. Without an aim to persuade you to accept my religious beliefs, it would be interesting to talk to you about the major problems there are with Neo Darwinism, many of which are now becoming recognized by evolutionary biologists. I don't conclude that Neo Darwinism is utterly false, but I'm convinced it is at least incomplete.
Cheers!
The OP was articulate, intelligent and well-researched and in the comments well defended. Your position is also cautiously noncommittal and does, I think, stand up very well under the tribunal of impartial reason.
I do not expect you to agree with anything that follows but: Therein I think lies the explanation for the conduct of many, though of course not all, atheists in the comments.
In evaluating an argument with theistic implications many nonbelievers are going to feel the sudden force of massive paradigm pressures and often this will be proportionate to the quality of the argument; i.e., the better the argument, the more obstreperous and unreasonable some of them may become. Even more so if the poster is flaired agnostic and so, from their point of view, innocent of religious indoctrination.
I think this general point is terribly important and terribly under-represented in religious debate. Theism, as N. T. Wright puts it, is a "self-involving hypothesis." Faced with a potentially plausible argument for the existence of God (and remembering Socrates' policy that we must, "Follow the argument wherever it takes us") a man already greatly indisposed to the idea of God faces three choices:
>1. Follow the argument and possibly have to change his life. (He is indisposed to this.)
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>2. Follow the argument and, worse case scenario, refuse to live according to his principles. (Most will be indisposed to this.)
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>3. Defy Socrates and refuse to follow the argument.
It is easy to see why some nonbelievers may prefer to take a hint from the Sophists and ignore the deliverances of rational intuition in preference for a post hoc rationalisation of something they have already decided on nonrational grounds.
Thomas Nagel, for example, has famously said this. Admirably, he admits his bias and seeks to overcome it in giving an impartial account of the mind which, he says, is recalcitrantly nonphysical. In the book just linked he himself makes the same point I am making and offers it as an explanation for the monomaniacal, neurotic physicalism in the philosophy of mind and the dull refusal to look beyond the embattled physicalistic paradigm. (From pneumatophobia, Moreland has suggested, a man naturally takes refuge in hylomania.)
Apologies for the rant. :D
After flirting with nihilism and existentialism for a long time I, personally, came to the conclusion that the notion that all of this is here without any sort of explanation or without any direction or purpose runs directly against common human intuition. It seems to me to be a belief on par with properly basic beliefs such as the reality of the past, reality of the external world, etc. Perhaps it's a step up, and not quite that basic, but I digress.
Now, some (see Thomas Nagal's "Mind & Cosmos") argue for natural teleology, in which purpose is inherently embedded in the universe and does not need a transcendent mind such as God to give it purpose. Personally, I agree with a very hefty amount of Nagal's positions, but find his critique of the theistic explanation lacking.
For a theistic perspective on the issue, I highly recommend William Lane Craig's following article and podcast episode that addresses this.
You may like this book by Thomas Nagel: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755/
He describes the unity of the self as something so obviously true that materialism can't be true.