As an empirical matter, it is difficult to deny that there are many who have earnestly sought to know God but have been unable to believe for rational reasons. And yet, by my count, most Christian apologists insist that the earnest seeker who follows the evidence will ultimately be convinced of the reality of God and of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In two of his recent podcasts, William Lane Craig addresses this issue: first, in response to a questioner who, by his own account, had honestly investigated the claims of Christianity but could not believe (“Evolution and Skepticism“, Nov 30, 2009); and second, in dealing with the phenomenon of some well-known deconversions (“Questions about ‘Ex-Christians’ and Molinism“, Dec 10, 2009). Though Craig recognizes atheism as a rational position, in these instances, instead of conceding the reality of sincere unbelief, Craig posited the power of self-deception in the first case and of moral failure in the second. I don’t discount the power of moral considerations, including self-deception, in belief formation. Indeed, virtue epistemology has well articulated an extensive catalog of moral obligations relevant to justified belief. Nonetheless, there seem to be cases in which the seeker’s quest has been bona fide and not impeded by an unwillingness to obey God. Kenneth W. Daniels’ spiritual autobiography, Why I Believed, recounts the story of his painful loss of faith in spite of his desperate desire to continue to believe the story that gave his life meaning and animated his vocation as a Christian missionary. If you read his story carefully, it is exceedingly difficult to attribute his deconversion to anything but the sway of arguments as he appraised them. And my experience suggests that his is but one of countless similar stories that are undocumented. But what, then, are we to make of a God whom is believed to have promised that he who seeks, will find Him. If sincere and virtuous unbelief is a reality, it presents a unique challenge to the Christian conception of God as described in the Bible. If trust, and thereby belief, in God and Christ is the eternally decisive matter it is claimed to be, how could a good God hide himself from those who seek him?
Go
The most exasperating and disconsolate
impasse in the history of philosophy is, for me, the standoff between
compatibilists and incompatibilists. As one who takes reason to be the indispensable means of our understanding, this apparent conflict of
intuitions undermines the role of reason as a toolset to which we can mutually appeal in
discovering truth. The intuition in dispute in this case is not as basic as the principle of sufficient reason or the law of
non-contradiction, but it is close. If it were more tangential, this
apparent divergence of intuitions would be less alarming. But, the
incompatibilist intuition, at least, is felt as an analytic and
necessary truth. Describing a proposition he considered not just improbable but "unbelievable", C.S. Lewis once wrote: "the act of believing [that] is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape..." For many an
incompatibilist, compatibilism is on that order. It is inconceivable.
And yet, for their part, compatibilists seem to regard it as perfectly
coherent, determinism being entirely amenable to our sense of ourselves as free and
morally responsible beings. I find myself wondering an impolite question. Do compatibilists in fact have such an intuition? Or, is compatibilism an antinomy, a forced conciliation entailed by two non-negotiable theses with little or no inherent coherence? On the basis of compatibilistic argumentation itself, there is reason to suspect that it is. Some compatibilists admit as much, conceding that the conjunction of determinism and moral responsibility is paradoxical, a mystery. Other compatibilists are determined to persuade us that not only is compatibilism intuitionally coherent, but that only determinism preserves moral responsibility, and to boot, it engenders compassion where indeterminism does not. For them, deterministic freedom is the only kind "worth wanting". By attending closely to several articulations of compatibilism, I hope to give reason to think that the incompatibilist intuition is not as unevenly distributed a deliverance of reason as one might have feared.
Go
The most unrelenting and debilitating deficiency of the Libertarian account1 of agency is its inability to explain the inner workings of the very will it insists upon. Robert Kane has called this issue the question of “intelligibility.” He claims priority for this issue, suggesting that often Libertarian arguments for supplementary theses, such as the incompatibility of determinism and freedom, are largely derailed because lurking in the back of the compatibilist’s mind is the conviction that the concept of Libertarian Agency (LA) is incoherent anyway. The compatibilist generally believes that LA is, at the least, “essentially mysterious or terminally obscure.”2 Kane argues, then, that the Libertarian project will falter as long as it fails to provide an intelligible analysis of the will itself. The alleged unintelligibility of LA springs from its insistence that free acts are undetermined. Given an exactly similar set of desires, reasons, impulses, and deliberations, a free agent has the capacity to choose either of several alternatives. But, if none of these factors are determinative, it is difficult to see how the agent’s free choice is anything but a fluke. Can we conceive of an action that is rational, intentional, and voluntary and yet neither determined nor random? Roderick Chisolm asks this very thing. “Our conception of action should be neither deterministic nor indeterministic. Is there any other possibility?”3 One version of this problem points out our apparent ability to assign probabilities to the actions of persons individually and as groups based on factors external to the will. Sociologists, for example, might predict with accuracy that 90 of 100 school children will cry when the animal crackers are depleted. But if a person’s will is undetermined by such factors, the children should just as easily have been able to receive the news with a stiff upper lip. There should be no such predictability.4
Brain states qua physical states exist and mental states exist.
Mental states possess properties that physical states and systems do not.
Brain states are not identical to mental states.
The Indiscernibilty of Identicals
Statements of identity are usually analyzed as follows: for any entities x and y, if x and y are really the same thing, then for any property P, P is true of x if and only if P is true of y. Note that, with respect to mind/brain identity, the principle is indifferent to whether mind is inseparable from the brain and whether the mind is correlated to the brain in a law-like fashion.
Properties of Physical Things
Resistance (traditionally, hardness or solidity)
Mass
Velocity
Charge
Possibly Unique Properties of Mental States
Qualia and Secondary Properties
Self-Presenting Properties. Privacy and Incorrigibility.
The Subjective Nature of Experience
The Existence of Secondary Qualities
Intentionality
Self-Awareness and Personal Identity through time.
Indexicals. Irreducibility of third-person to first-person.
Functionalism and Computers
Ironically, after half a century of creating devices to mimic and extend human operations and purposes, many now think that it is we who are created in the image of computers, not vice-versa. We are basically organic computers, and because noone thinks computers are one part circuits and one part souls, we likewise are neurons without souls. But, does the operation and analogous functionality of computers suggest that we are like computers? Are any of the above properties exhibited by computers? Might they be?
The computer analogy is basically a modern version of functionalism. In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the view that the mind should be defined in terms of causal inputs and outputs. Just as a kidney or carburetor is defined in terms of its function, so also the mind should be defined strictly by a certain kind of causal inputs and outputs. Anything that outputs 4 when fed 2+2 is a mind.
The Chinese Room Argument
The most famous objection, by far, to the human/computer analogy is John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (Scientific American, C2, Searle 1990, 26-27).
Consider a language you don’t understand. In my case, I do not understand Chinese. To me, Chinese writing looks like so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose I am placed in a room containing baskets full of Chinese symbols. Suppose also that I am given a rule book in English for matching Chinese symbols with other Chinese symbols. The rules identify the symbols entirely by their shapes and do not require that I understand any of them. The rules might say such things as “take a squiggle-squiggle sign from basket number one and put it next to a squoggle-squoggle sign from basket number two.”
Image that people outside the room who understand Chinese hand in small bunches of symbols and that in response I manipulate the symbols according to the rule book and hand back more small bunches of symbols. Now the rule book is the “computer program.” The people who wrote it are the “programmers,” and I am the “computer.” The baskets full of symbols are the “data base,” the small bunches that are handed in to me are “questions” and the bunches I then hand out are “answers.”
Now suppose that the rule book is written in such a way that my “answers” to the “questions” are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. For example, the people outside might hand me some symbols that, unknown to me, mean, “What is your favorite color?” and I might after going through the rules give back symbols that, also unknown to me, mean “My favorite color is blue, but I also like green a lot.” I satisfy the Turing test for understanding Chinese. All the same, I am totally ignorant of Chinese. And there is no way I could come to understand Chinese in the system as described, since there is no way that I can learn the meanings of any of the symbols. Like a computer, I manipulate symbols, but I attach no meaning to the symbols.
The point of the thought experiment is this: if I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of running a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis. Digital computers merely manipulate form symbols according to rules in the program.
What goes fro Chinese goes for other forms of cognition as well. Just manipulating symbols is not by itself enough to guarantee cognition, perception, understanding, thinking, and so forth. And since computer, qua computers, are symbol manipulating devices, merely running the computer program is not enough to guarantee cognition.
This simple argument is decisive against the claims of strong AI.
The Implications
In your original response to my article, “The Captain of My Soul”, you said: “I can write a program that will discriminate between conflicting
desires on the basis of reason, desire, and beliefs, and then let it do
so. … The same is true for us. We have an internal deterministic faculty
which discriminates between external desires on the basis of beliefs,
reasons, etc.” I think this is a mistake. Just because we can make a computer take inputs and return outputs in the same way humans do, it does not mean that computers are doing what we do, unless functionalism is true. If we manage to create a perfect Turing machine, it would not mean that that machine would be “thinking” or had “desires” and “beliefs”. There is no reason to think that the flips and switches have any semantic or emotional content. But we know in our own cases that our reasoning and feeling do have such content.
Rush Limbaugh just said: “I know these liberals. I know these cockroaches.” Get the paddle.
Go
Recently, with reference to the cosmological argument, a friend suggested that quantum physics undercuts the presumption that every event must have a cause, the principle that drives the argument. I cautioned that the significance of the observed phenomena in quantum physics is a matter of such debate that drawing any such implication is tenuous at best, and in any case, quantum indeterminacy doesn't carry beyond the level of elementary particles. This move, he suggested, was typical of Christians and Objectivists, but not of scientists themselves. And ironically, I had just read Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland making this point: "Regarding quantum entities, there are at least eight different empirically equivalent philosophical models of quantuam reality and, at this stage, it is irresponsible to make dogmatic claims about the ontology of the quantum level."1 (20) My sense is that quantum physics, at least on the popular level, operates as a kind of Rorschach Test, amenable to whatever presuppositions one brings to the table. This is why one finds a whole host of viewpoints appropriating "the new physics" to their own ends, from libertarian naturalists to New Age mystics. The quantum level is sometimes described as a wonderland where none of the usual rules apply and anything is impossible. So, what should we infer from quantum physics? And what is its appropriate role in philosophical debate? Relying heavily on those who understand it better than I do, here are a few suggestions.
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss interview on tvo on their movie The Unbelievers. Lawrence Krauss struggles to understand being called strident right before calling believers fools.
It starts off with deontology and ends in radical consequentialism:
The reflective structure of consciousness requires that in order for me to act at all, “I”, the persistent I, must have a set of rules from which to endorse or reject possible courses of action.
Not only am I free to endorse or reject possible courses of action, I am also free to endorse or reject the very set of rules from which I choose to endorse or reject actions.
Such a set of rules will be obligatory for me only because I have chosen them myself, and
The only standard for whether a set of rules will be valid is whether I can reasonably choose them.
I should, therefore, only act on a rule if I can rationally choose it to be the rule I will always behave by.
But since the relevant domain of rules we are evaluating (possible acts) does not distinguish between agents
I should, therefore, only act on a rule if I can rationally choose it to be a universal law for all agents.
Since there is nothing irrational about willing that everyone acting to bring about the best results overall was a universal law, I am permitted to act in that way.
Moreover, since
(9-1) no other rule than “act to bring about the best results overall” does, in fact, bring about the best results overall, and
(9-2) I and all agents always want the best results,
The only universal law I can rationally will is that I act to bring about the best results overall. So,
I and all other rational beings are required to promote the best results overall, even if the cost to me is greater than the benefit, as long as the overall benefits are maximized.
Obviously there is much to be said about all of these points, but so far this is the most compelling answer I’ve found to the normative question. Propositions 8-11 are Kagan’s, and I’m much less sure about them, but Kant’s original argument, 1-7 seems only to grow more convincing as I think about them.
What do you think on first look? Although I’m sure I’m doing a bad job representing it, it’s honestly one of the most brilliant and compelling arguments I’ve ever seen.
So as of late I have been obsessing over the apparent attractiveness of Kant’s answer to the normative question, i.e. “Why be moral?” Have you encountered such an approach seriously before? I hadn’t, and it’s blowing my mind. Today I had some time to synthesize my latest understanding, though it’s simply a sketch. It’s taken completely from Shelly Kagan, Christine Korsgaard, who all rely on Kant.
Thoughts
Two ironies immediately come to mind. First, that far from being an analysis that does away with the need for God, Kant saw his own ethic as an argument for God’s existence. Second, as you note, that Kant’s deontological ethics are seen as a rival to consequentialism, not an antecedent to them. So, it’s ironic that Kant’s own thinking led in exactly the opposite direction as your own. What is intriguing then, will be to understand how the categorical imperative fits within the context of his other views and yours. One argument in particular that comes to mind is Kant’s view that categories, like space and time, are features of human consciousness, not of the world in itself.
Kant’s Moral Argument for God
Moral behaviour is rational.
Moral behaviour is only rational if justice will be done.
Justice will only be done if God exists.
Therefore: God exists.
What do you think? Can moral behavior be rational if there is no ultimate justice? If Kant is right, his categorical imperative would be necessary but not sufficient for the rationality of moral action.
In your premise (8), you may be smuggling consequentialism into Kant’s argument where it doesn’t belong.
The theist may step back a level to the Argument from Reason.
The quote from Mark: “Some of you, God hates you. Some of you, God is sick of you. God is frustrated with you. God is wearied by you. God has suffered long enough with you. He doesn’t think you’re cute. He doesn’t think it’s funny. He doesn’t think your excuse is meritous <sic>. He doesn’t care if you compare yourself to someone worse than you, He hates them too. God hates, right now, personally, objectively hates some of you.”
The handful of Fred Phelps’ family members who comprise Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas have garnered national notoriety with a simple message: God hates gays, soldiers, you, me, and basically everyone. Their message is carefully crafted to maximize offense, as are the venues they choose, very often funerals. Their knack for inflammatory rhetoric and self-promotion has earned them almost universal disapprobation. Nevertheless, the Phelps take themselves to be God’s prophets. Their website is replete with biblical references. Their biblical rationale is clearly highlighted. I find myself asking a troubling question. Biblically and theologically, is their gospel of hate defensible? After all, I hear echoes of their theology elsewhere. The Phelps are extreme exemplars of a virulent strain within Calvinistic theology whose mission is the proclamation of what I will call a “gospel of condemnation”. Pickets, placards, and bullhorns are very often their preferred prophetic tools. (Is the medium the message?) God’s imminent judgment in Hell is the predominant theme. Like the Phelps, they are more than eager to play at blblical prooftexting with any and all comers. Indeed, they are especially fond of picketing “Laodicean” Christian events where they can expect to be rifling through scripture with a host of challengers and onlookers. They’ll be chomping at the bit at any mention of John 3:16. And so again, I ask, are they faithfully representing the Bible? Does God hate people? Does God hate wrongdoers? Recently (October 7, 2011), Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church sounded similar notes in his thoroughgoing series on the gospel of Luke, stating and restating that “God hates you”, before doubling back confusingly to reassure the listener that “God loves you”. Driscoll is not at all marginal. He is a gifted and highly influential exegete and pastor within Reformed circles. He does his homework and cares about accurately teaching the Bible. Hearing a similar theology of God’s hate from the likes of Driscoll makes it clear that the theology itself cannot be dismissed out of hand. If you had thought, like me, that the Christian gospel was one of God’s boundless, unmerited love for sinners, this theology of God’s hatefulness must be considered on its own terms. So, what does the Bible say?