Maverick Philosopher

But Dawkins, Dennett, & Co. are not in a very good position to complain given their constant use of cheapshots and cartoonish mischaracterizations (the flying spaghetti monster, etc.) in their polemics against theists. What we have here is an ideological struggle, not between science and religion, but between opposing philosophical positions, scientism and naturalist metaphysics on the one side, theism on the other. Since it is an ideological struggle it is at least arguable that it is justifiable to answer cheapshots with cheapshots, polemics with polemics. It is a matter of self-defense. One has to elicit support from 'the folks' and they cannot be expected to muster the attention or have the background required to follow the subtle arguments of sweet reason. When I saw the film, the audience clapped vigorously at the end, which showed that Stein reached that particular audience with his message. Did he persuade them rationally? Maybe not. But he persuaded them, which is all that counts politically. Do militant atheists persuade people rationally with their cheapshots? No, but they persuade them.

Each side has doxastic commitments that go beyond what can be strictly proven or even supported by empirical evidence. It is crucial to appreciate that the debate is not beween science (natural science) and theism but between a scientistic metaphysics and theism.

But suppose you disagree with what I just said. Suppose you insist that it really is science versus religion: that science alone gives us truth about reality, religion nothing but comforting illusions. (Strictly speaking, 'religion' and 'theism' are not coextensive terms, as witness Pali Buddhism; but their conflation is innocuous for present purposes.) Then you are in effect subscribing to something like the following Incompatibility Thesis:

IT: Science are religion are incompatible: only one of them is 'cognitive' or revelatory of reality.

But surely (IT) or your favorite reformulation thereof is not a proposition of natural science. It is a philosophical proposition accepted by some, and rejected by others, with competent scientists on both sides. The same goes for the negation of (IT), according to which science and religion are compatible. It would be folly to think that either (IT) or its negation could be established by empirical methods. This issue, then, is a philosophical issue.

Let us return to the Ruse segment. Stein presses his question about how life arises out of non-life. Ruse becomes impatient snd somewhat churlish. "I just told you,' he repeats two or three times. But of course Ruse's answer is no answer at all. It does nothing to render intelligible the transition from nonliving matter to the first cells. It is at most a gesture in the direction of a possible avenue of research which one hopes will lead to an intelligible naturalist explanation. In effect, Ruse is just insisting dogmatically that life arises from the inorganic. It just can't be any other way. It happens SOMEHOW whether or not we can explain the 'how.' Intelligible or not, it happens as a matter of brute fact. It cannot be any other way since it would violate the rules of the natural-scientific game to admit any explanation that invoked a factor that was not itself ingredient in the material world. There is just one world, the material world, and everything in it has to be explained in terms of other things in it, simpler things and temporally antecedent things, with no recourse to anything 'supernatural.'

Now there is nothing wrong with scientific methodology. Indeed it is wonderful! May it be pursued as far and as deep as possible! Trouble starts when it hardens into a metaphysical dogma according to which nothing can exist that is not an occupant of space-time. It is this dogma that is in necessary conflict with religion. Not science. Science is open-ended, exploratory, patient, and non-dogmatic.

The context of Krauss's remarks is the theory of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' where 'dark' signifies presently unknown and possibly forever unknown. The idea is that the universe ". . . is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe" is composed of dark matter.

So far, so good. I have no objection to cosmological theorizing, no matter how outlandish, though I am curious about what sorts of experimental data could be taken as confirmatory of the dark matter hypothesis. When physicists talk physics, I humbly listen; I do not presume to know better than they how they should proceed with their work.

But when they or popular expositors draw crazy philosophical inferences from physical theories then I feel entitled to speak out. To quote from the NYT piece:

If so [i.e., if 96% of the matter in the universe is 'dark'], such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

The thesis being presented is that we human beings are "completely irrelevant," insignificant, and of no value in that "We're just a bit of pollution." Is this supposed to follow from the fact, if it is a fact, that we are not made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything? To think so would be to embrace a breathtaking non sequitur.

If you can think clearly, you should be able to see that our relevance, significance and value have nothing to do with where our bodies are in space, or how big our bodies are, or what stuff we are made of, or whether the kind of stuff we are made of is small or large in quantity relative to the kind of stuff the rest of the universe is made of.

To see the absurdity of Krauss's reasoning, ask yourself whether our 'relevance' would be greater if dark matter were only 10% or 4% or 0% of the total matter in the universe instead of 96%. Would we become more relevant, and less of a 'pollutant' if all of the matter was like the matter our bodies are composed of? Obviously not. The very notion is absurd.

Similarly, if the universe had a center and we moved closer to or farther away from that center, would our significance and relevance wax and wane accordingly? Again this is absurd. Whatever significance we have cannot vary with our position in space or with the relative magnitude of the star which is our sun, and like facts. The upshot of the Copernican revolution, roughly, was that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa. True, but so what? How could that possibly diminish our status? And if the 'ultimate Copernican revolution' show us to be made of an underrepresented sort of stuff, how is that relevant to our status and worth?

Much is sometimes made of how tiny we are in the cosmos. Well, suppose we got bigger and bigger and bigger until we filled the entire cosmos. Does getting bigger elevate one's significance? Are fat people more significant and less irrelevant than thin people? Can I increase my moral stature by putting on weight or by being stretched on the rack? Again, this is simply absurd. Size does not matter when it comes to significance.

And the same goes for time. An individual human life is vanishingly small on a cosmic scale, and the same goes for the life of homo sapiens. We are a flash in the pan, so to speak. But would our significance be greater if we existed at every time? Is the temporal length of an individual huamn life a measure of its value? In the words of an old cigarette commercial, "It is not how long you make it but how you make it long." Plainly put, length does not matter; quality of life matters. And quality of life is not something physical.

Let me be painfully clear about what I am saying. I am assuming arguendo that

1. The kind of matter of which human beings are composed is only 4% of the total matter in the universe.

Whether or not (1) is true is a question for physicists, not philosophers. As a philosopher I am concerned with the inference from (1) to

2. Humans beings are "completely irrelevant," "a bit of pollution."

My claim is that this inference is obviously invalid. (2) does not follow from (1) and (1) offers no support for (2). (1) does not even offer inductive support for (2). Furthermore, the words and phrases in (2) are evaluative which makes (2) an evaluative claim whereas (1) is a factual and thus non-evaluative claim. So one can tax the inference with the fallacy of deriving a value judgment from a factual judgment.

But it is not just that 'irrelevant' and 'pollution' are evaluative terms. It is worse than that. Relevance and irrelevance are mind-involving notions. No physical thing qua physical can be relevant or irrelevant to any other physical thing. Relevance and irrelevance are like indifference and the opposite. The universe cannot be indifferent to us; it is neither indifferent nor caring. Your not caring about me or what I think is a conscious stance you occupy vis-a-vis me. But the universe does not occupy any conscious stance towards human beings. Thus it makes no sense to describe us as irrelevant to the universe, or it as indifferent to us.

We are obviously relevant to ourselves. So if Krauss is saying that we are irrelevant to the universe, then he is just talking nonsense.

I hope I have convinced you that the quotation from Krauss is a non sequitur and scientistic blather. But it is not just blather but something more ominous in that it is indicative of nihilism.

What is really at the bottom of this scientistic nonsense is an attempt to discredit the Judeo-Christian notion that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Of course, this image and likeness is a spiritual image and likeness as I explain elsewhere. The message of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that we human beings are of great worth, at least potentially, in that we are candidates for participation in the divine life, not as animals of course, but as spiritual beings. The message of Krauss and company is the nihilistic denial of this: man is nothing, of no value, a pollutant. Well, if he is a pollutant, then 'the environment' needs to be protected from him. Better then that he not sully the face of mindless matter.

Now the Judeo-Christian view may be false, but it cannot be dislodged by the sort of shabby 'reasoning' we have just examined.

People often question the utility of philosophy. One use of philosophy is to protect us from bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, the 'philosophy' of those who denigrate philosophy yet cannot resist philosophizing themselves and as a result philosophize poorly. Man is a philosophical animal whether he likes it or not. Philosophize we will — the only question being whether we will do it poorly or well.

The two paragraphs quoted illustrate the sort of pseudo-philosophy that the genuine article must combat. Since to spend much time criticizing writing as shoddy as the above is a poor use of time, I'll just make two brief remarks.

First, it was not Descartes who set human beings apart from the animal kingdom. This idea is a staple of the Judeo-Christian tradition and is already set forth in the Book of Genesis:

Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . . Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .

The idea is that God, a purely spirtual being, conferred upon man a spiritual nature that distinguishes him from the rest of the animals. In Imago Dei, I go into this at some length and ward off a common misunderstanding.

Second, the 'force' of Cogito ergo sum is in no way lessened by evidence that animals exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition found also in humans. The author betrays a complete lack of understanding as to what the Cartesian dictum means.

What it means is that there is something accessible to my experience that is indubitable. The existence of my thinking (in the broad Cartesian sense that includes perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, hoping, desiring, and indeed every mental act that displays the property that Brentano called intentionality) cannot be doubted. Given that I am conscious of a (putatively external) object (in whatever modality: perception, imagination, recollection, etc.), it is possible to doubt whether the object of consciousness exists apart from my being conscious of it. Presently gazing at Superstition Mountain, I can doubt the existence of the mountain, but I cannot doubt that a mental act of visual perception is now occurring, or that this act is of a mountain of such-and-such a description. Both act and object qua object are indubitable as to their existence; dubitable alone is the existence of the object in reality. If I try to doubt the existence of my present thinking, I find that my doubting guarantees its own existence: Dubito ergo sum.

If you understand this, then you understand that the author of the NYT piece is an ignoramus.

The logically prior question of what bullshit is was treated in an earlier post. Briefly: a bullshitter is not a liar, although both are engaged in the enterprise of misrepresentation. The bullshitter's intention is not to misrepresent the way things are in the manner of the liar; his aim is to misrepresent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows for some such purpose as impressing others, hearing himself talk, or turning a buck by scribbling.

Here is what John D. Barrow writes in Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (Oxford 1991), p. 47:

. . . for centuries philosophers and theologians have attempted to settle by pure thought the issue of whether the Universe could or could not be infinitely old. That is, some have attempted to show that there is some logical contradiction inherent in the notion of a past infinity of time. And some still do. Such ideas have some association with cosmological arguments for the existence of God, which not only seek to demonstrate that there must have been an origin to the Universe in time but go further in showing (or, in practice, assuming) that this requires there to have been an originator.

Let's pause here. Barrow raises the question whether the universe's past is finite or infinite. He then "associates" this question with cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Then he explains what cosmological arguments purport to do, namely, (1) show that the universe had an origin in time, and (2) show that an origin in time requires an originator. As a bonus, he suggests quite tendentiously that all such arguments are circular.

The fundamental mistake here is to think that a cosmological argument, an argument from the existence of the universe to the existence of God, must either prove or assume that the universe had an origin in time. This is false since some comological arguments remain neutral on the question whether the universe has an infinite past or a finite past. I'll expand on this point in a moment.

Barrow continues:

This [the cosmological argument] is a slippery argument . . . . A common form of this argument points to the fact that everything that we see has a cause, and hence the Universe must have a cause. But this argument has a dangerous bend in the middle of it. The Universe is not a 'thing' in the sense of all the other examples that are being cited. It is a collection of things, or as Wiggenstein put it, 'the world is the totality of the facts.'

Now anyone who has studied the first page of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus knows that this is a misrepresenation of what Wittgenstein says. Wittgenstein, distinguishing facts (Tatsachen) from things (Dinge) says the opposite: The world is the totality of facts NOT of things. (Emphasis added) Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge. (TLP 1.1)

Barrow is not lying, but he is bullshitting: he is passing himself off as someone who knows what he is talking about when he does not. The fact that he does not give a reference to Wittgenstein shows that he is not particularly concerned about the truth of what he is saying, and that is a mark of a bullshitter. But wouldn't it be more charitable to say that Barrow made a mistake, rather than churlishly accuse him of bullshitting? Well, read on:

Our argument [the cosmological argument] is thus seen to be analogous to arguing that all members of clubs have mothers, and therefore all clubs have mothers.

What Barrow is saying in effect is that the cosmological argument commits the fallacy of composition. Suppose each member of a whole W has a property P. It does not follow that W has P. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of composition. So if it is true that each member of the universe has the property of being caused, it does not follow straightaway that the universe has the property of being caused. But no cosmological arguer worth his salt commits the fallacy in question.

Suppose the universe U always existed, and suppose that the universe is not something above and beyond its members, but is merely their collection. Suppose that every event in or state of the universe is explained by earlier states or events. Even on these three assumptions, a cosmological argument can be mounted. For one can still ask: Why does this universe, this particular collection of events, exist rather than some other collection, or no collection at all?

To say of X that it always existed is not to explain why it exists. (Compare: Why do you keep the hammer in the refrigerator? Because we have always kept it there.) And it is no better to say that the universe exists because each of its members is caused to exist by prior members, the universe just being the collection of these members. For this still leaves unexplained why there is anything at all, why there are any events to stand in causal relations.

Someone who seeks this ultimate explanation need not be arguing: each member of U is caused, so U is caused. There are much more sophisticated ways to argue. But they are too complicated to explain here. You will find one in Barry Miller, From Existence to God (Routledge, 1992) and there are others including mine.

My point for the nonce is that Barrow is bullshitting about the cosmological argument: blustering self-confidently about something he understands very imperfectly and in so doing misrepresenting himself as an authority.

A few comments are in order.

1. Let’s start with the parenthetical claim at the end. To say that two statements are (logically) consistent is to say that they (logically) can both be true, that there is a (logically) possible world in which both are true. But a statement cannot be true or false unless it possesses meaning: meaningfulness is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of having a truth-value. Now to be meaningful and to be intelligible are the same. It follows that Stove is wrong and that it is not the case that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible. Consistency is defined in terms of truth, and truth requires intelligibility.

2. Are The Word was with God and The Word was God unintelligible? Not unless you are a positivist who ties intelligibility to empirical verifiability. But the principle of cognitive significance that positivists employ (according to which every cognitively meaningful statement is either logical/analytic or else empirically verifiable in principle) is itself empirically unverifiable. And since it is not a truth of logic or an analytic truth, it is itself meaningless by its own criterion. Stove is hoist by his own petard, or cooked by his own stove.

3. To say or imply that no concrete thing in the world could have a proposition-like structure, and that anyone who thinks this is a lunatic, is itself a lunatic thing to say. I maintain that the world’s basic particulars are concrete facts and thus have a proposition-like structure, and I am no lunatic. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002). Closer to Australia, atheist David Armstrong, no slouch of a philosopher, and sane as far as I can tell, argues, quite sensibly, that contingent truths require truth-makers and that the latter are states of affairs, proposition-like entities. Stove’s suggestion that a view like this is insane shows that there is something deeply wrong with Stove. 'I am seated’ is true in virtue of the fact of my being seated. Insanity? Or common sense?

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. Positivism is to philosophy as Muzak is to music. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen. I pound on Stove further, here. Edwards gets smoked, here.

My opening remarks, as harsh as they may seem, are justified by what Stove writes in The Plato Cult (Basil Blackwell, 1991) In the Preface thereto, Stove tells us that "the few pages of this preface will be sufficient to make clear what my view is, and even, I believe, to justify it." (p. vii) His view is "best called positivistic." (Ibid.) The "basic proposition of Positivism" is that "there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories." (P. xi, italics in original) Stove claims to "prove" this thesis. (Ibid. Italics in original) From Stove’s perspective, "what a spectacle of nightmare-irrationality is the history of philosophy!" (p. xi)

We are all familiar with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Process and Reality, p. 39). Whitehead meant this in praise of Plato. For Stove, however, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Berkeley, and a host of other philosophers deemed great, are "dangerous lunatics." (P. 184) They espouse views that cannot be taken seriously by any sane person. Let us consider what Stove has to say about Berkeley:

Berkeley held that there are no physical objects: that there was no right hand behind his ideas of his right hand, no wig behind his ideas of his wig, and so on. Indeed, he said, there is nothing at all behind any of our ideas of physical objects, except the will of God that we should have those ideas when we do. Yet Berkeley was a physical object himself, after all – born of a certain woman, author of certain printed books, and so forth – and he knew it. (p. ix)

Stove’s misunderstanding is so deep that it takes the breath away. Berkeley did not hold that there are no physical objects; what he gave us was a theory of their ontological constitution. That there are physical objects is self-evident, a datum, a starting point; what they are in their ontological constitution, and how they exist, however, are questions open to dispute. To deny the existence of physical objects would of course be lunacy. But to give an ontological analysis of them in terms of ideas, an analysis that identifies them with clusters of coherent ideas, is not a lunatic project. It is no more a lunatic endeavor than that of analyzing thoughts (and mental states generally)in terms of brain states as one kind of physicalist would.

Suppose we explore this comparison a bit. It is prima facie reasonable to hold that our thoughts are identical to complex states of our brains. (I don’t think this is true, but the reasonable and the true are two, not one.) Accordingly, my thinking about Boston is a state of my brain. Suppose a philosopher propounds the following theory: Every (token) mental state is numerically identical to some (token) brain state. Someone who holds such a token-token identity theory is obviously not denying the existence of mental states; what he is doing is presupposing their existence and giving us a theory of what they are in ultimate reality. What he is saying is that these mental states of which we are introspectively aware are really just brain states; they are not states of an immaterial thinking substance, or states of an emergent entity, etc.

Now if the project of reducing the mental to the physical avoids lunacy, then the same goes for the reduction in the opposite direction. If it is not ‘loony’ to say that the perceiving of a coffee cup is a state of my brain, why is it ‘loony’ to say that the accusative of such a state, the coffee cup perceived, is a bundle or cluster of ideas (to be precise: bundle or cluster of accusatives of mental acts)? Either both of these views belong in the lunatic asylum or neither do.

Note also that if one cannot analyze the physical in terms of the mental, or the mental in terms of the physical, on pain of going insane, then one also cannot analyze the universal in terms of the particular, or the particular in terms of the universal. And yet philosophers do this all the time without seeming to lose their grip on reality.

Take the obvious fact that things have properties. These two tomatoes are both (the same shade of) red. That things have properties is a datum; what properties ultimately are, however, and how they exist, is not a datum but a problem. It appears that our two tomatoes have something in common, namely, their being red. This suggests that redness is a universal, an entity repeated in each of the tomatoes. Some philosophers resist this suggestion by maintaining that, although both tomatoes are red, each has its own redness. Trope theorists, for example, hold that the properties of things are as particular (unrepeatable) as the things that have the properties. They then analyze the seeming commonality of redness in some other way, say, as deriving from a mental act of abstraction, or in terms of classes of resembling tropes.

Metaphysical reductions (of the mental to the physical, the physical to the mental, the universal to the particular, the particular to the universal, the modal to the nonmodal, the dispositional to the categorical, etc.) seem to be as meaningful as scientific reductions. The identification of lightning with an atmospheric electrical discharge; of a puddle of water with a collection of H₂0 molecules; of a light beam with a stream of photons – none of these identifications are intended by their proponents as lunatic denials of the phenomena to be reduced. There are of course interesting questions about when identifications collapse into eliminations; but the point here is that no denial of existence is intended. To analyze what exists is not to eliminate what exists.

Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.

I’ll have more to say about Stove later. He is dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece. One good thing about him, though: he seems to be politically conservative.