Showing posts with label C. S. Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C. S. Lewis. Show all posts

Monday, 8 June 2015

Losing the will to review: Evidence Unseen or Arguments Unconsidered?


When I announced this book review project in September last year I made a proviso about reviewing James M. Rochford's Evidence Unseen:
...I've decided to read it and (if in my opinion it merits a review) to review it here on the blog.
I reviewed the introduction in March, and continued reading last weekend. Does it merit a review? It's going downhill fast. I had hoped for something substantial, but if the first chapter is typical I'm tempted to give it up as a waste of time. Rochford's arguments are ill-considered and sloppy, relying too much on emotion rather than logic. He refers often to atheists, "atheistic thinkers" and even an "atheistic ethical philosopher" as if they are a breed apart. I can only assume that atheists are not his target readership:
Yet, a certain tension of which they are unaware plagues them: While they are content in their atheistic worldview, they are not consistent with it... [Loc 325]
Basically telling atheists that they are psychologically defective. They are plagued with a tension — but they're unaware of it? This looks like classic projection.
If God doesn’t exist, is it possible to have a life that is ultimately significant? Unfortunately, it isn’t. [Loc 331]
Nothing unfortunate about that, as far as I know. Like many Christian apologists Rochford seems obsessed with ultimate absolute objectivity. It doesn't exist.
If the Christian God is real, then we have the hope of eternity. [Loc 368]
What is emerging here is a massive argument from consequences.
Of course, if the Christian God exists and all humans are made in his image, as the Bible teaches (Gen. 1:26-27; Jas. 3:9), then this would be both objectively true and truly important. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then human beings would hold nothing in common that could make them truly equal. [Loc 391]
This comes after a section trying to debunk "equality" — saying that people aren't really equal (when what he's actually saying is that people aren't all the same — which is true). But just because people aren't the same, that's no excuse for not treating them then with equal fairness, especially before the law.
But if everything in nature is only natural, then how can a naturalist call murder, rape, or genocide unnatural? [Loc 433]
I'm not aware that naturalists do call murder, rape and genocide "unnatural" — seems like he's setting up a straw man here.
...when we claim that morality comes from chimpanzees... [Loc 454]
Um ... we don't. More straw-manning.
Atheist Richard Dawkins argues... [Loc 455]
A Dawkins quote! (Just goes to show that Dawkins continues to rattle theists' cages.)
If morality is truly objective, then it is binding over people whether or not they agree to it. [Loc 501]
Now we're getting to the nitty gritty. Let's define "morality" and "objective", shall we? Apparently not — we're straight on to an argument with Sam Harris:
Why should we think that the flourishing of the human species is ultimately the greatest good? [Loc 508]
This is pretty easy if we're actually members of the human species ourselves (barring any quibbles over the use of "ultimately"). Then we get the seven dying patients in need of organ transplants versus one healthy person:
...wouldn’t it make sense to capture a healthy young man in the lobby to harvest his organs—the seven organs the dying people needed—to “maximize happiness”? [Loc 512]
Actually no, it wouldn't make sense — unless you're content to live in a world where you might be randomly killed so that your organs could be harvested.
While we might not know the right moral action, we still know that one must exist. [Loc 526]
By using the term "right" this is begging the question. There may be a preferable action, based on circumstances and consequences — an action that would be preferred by those affected by the consequences.
Many atheistic thinkers will openly admit that morality is not objective in a universe without God. [Loc 533]
It depends what you mean by "objective". If you mean independent of any single individual, then I'd disagree, because in a universe without God, morality can indeed be independent of any single individual. That's not to say morality is relative, or absolute. It has to be more nuanced than that (certainly more nuanced that a list of rules in a book).
“If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?” [Loc 564]
This a C. S. Lewis quote. But as usual with Lewis, his facility with words outruns his analytic capacity. What he's saying is circular, because trust and reason are part of thought. And even if thought is undesigned, it certainly isn't irrelevant to the one who's thinking. Naturally this comes back to the theistic aversion to determinism and lack of free will. There's quite a lot in this chapter about determinism and free will, and what the consequences are if they are true. Rochford uses them to illustrate the horror of naturalism, but I couldn't help reading that section as a likely true account of reality.

That concludes my "review" of Chapter 1. It's not deep, but then the chapter reviewed is ridiculously superficial. And I should probably come clean and say that this concludes my review of the entire book. From the introduction and first chapter I infer that the rest of Evidence Unseen will be more of the same — not worth the bother.

Saturday, 1 September 2012

Christian faith is like soup*

Mark Vernon
In the Guardian, Mark Vernon comments on new books by Rowan Williams and Francis Spufford, beginning by asking, "What's it like to be a Christian?" He expands this to mean, "...what is faith as experienced?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/aug/19/rowan-williams-francis-spufford-christian

On Spufford's Unapologetic:
A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that "it fits the human heart".
As if "fits the human heart" means anything. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the fan of metaphorical language. But metaphor (along with simile, its more straight-talking cousin) is useful only up to a point. Great for feelings, intuition and opinion, but not much cop at conveying fact. Metaphors and similes are useful for pointing out near equivalencies, but unless one is aware of the inevitable mismatch between the metaphor and the thing for which it is metaphorical, one can be easily misled — or unknowingly uninformed — as to the actual nature of the thing being discussed.

On Williams' The Lion's World:
None of this proves the existence of God in the way a science would demand because its evidence arises from the inner lives of individuals.
Evidence of what? Indigestion? More imprecise mystery-mongering.
It does, though, reflect a strand in the philosophical discussion of God, often forgotten today. Pascal drew attention to the problem God has in revealing himself to creatures he has made to be free, because if God were to offer irrefutable evidence then that would force a relationship of coercion, not love. God's solution, Pascal proposed, is to "appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and [to remain] hidden from those who shun him".
How very … convenient.

Williams' book is largely about C. S. Lewis, so the preponderance of what Daniel C. Dennett calls deepities should not be a surprise.


*You didn't notice your soup bowl is directly under a leaking roof. No wonder it takes you so long to finish it, and no wonder it's so … thin.

Sunday, 17 May 2009

The myth of "explanatory power"

A few weeks ago I watched a BBC TV programme entitled "The Narnia Code" in which Dr. Michael Ward, a C. S. Lewis expert, expounded his theory that Lewis's Christian allegory series of children's books, The Chronicles of Narnia, contain disguised references to medieval cosmology. It was fascinating stuff, as far as it went, though blown out of all proportion to its somewhat peripheral literary significance. But Dr. Ward has a book to promote, so I don't blame him for opportunistic hyperbole.

The TV show is due to be repeated tomorrow (May 18) at 7:30 pm on BBC Four:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPQmoyzXx8



Unfortunately the final ten minutes of the show goes unnecessarily god-cute, bringing on such dubious luminaries as John Polkinghorne, who beamingly mumbles some trite non sequiturs – in particular the irrelevant notion that the idea of God as Creator is more "explanatory" than the naturalistic model.

What, pray, does the idea of a creator-god explain? The naturalistic thesis attempts to propose mechanisms of how things happen (or happened), to suggest explanations in terms of scientific knowledge we already have, in an effort to further that knowledge. How does saying "Goddidit" explain anything? At all? Tell me, please – I really would like to know.

Polkinghorne and other god-bods often use the phrase "explanatory power" when contending that the god hypothesis is more useful than scientific uncertainty, but it's high time such vacuous buzz-wordology was challenged and sent packing. I've no objection, in philosophical terms, to people of faith holding to their idea of a first cause for the universe – I think there's no evidence for such a view, though I appreciate some people subscribe to it. But if anyone says such a view offers any kind of "explanatory power" my response will be, "give me an explanation."

Saying that for whatever reason we can't possibly understand the supreme transcendent complexity of God's act of creation does not offer even a scrap of "explanatory power", and theists should stop claiming it does.