Absolutely misguided: theism's mental block

That Facebook thread mentioned in my previous post has been growing, but it's become clear to me that the author of the Original Post has some serious misunderstandings about atheism, materialism and naturalism. In this she's far from unique, and since the mental block she's exhibiting is one that other theists apparently share I thought I'd jot down some explanatory notes about such notions that I can refer to if (when!) such brain-jams come up in future.

The first, exemplified in the OP referred to above, is the notion that without God everything is pointless. The theist is saying that if God does not exist there's no point to anything at all — that if human beings are "merely" matter, then they don't … matter.

This misconception is tied up with the theistic idea of absolutes and ultimates (as are most theistic misconceptions, I might add). In this case the theist maintains that there must be God-given purpose for human life to have any meaning. This idea is so ingrained into religious thinking that many theists (the OP author cited above included) cannot see beyond it. To them, the idea of a world without God is simply too alien to be entertained. Some even suggest that if God didn't exist, they would resort to crime, and care nothing for their fellows.

This scary prospect is evidence of the second, related, theistic preoccupation with absolutes — that of objective morality. Many theists claim that morality is impossible without a transcendent moral law-giver. They claim their own morals come from scripture, and that even an unbeliever's morals are based (or borrowed) from the same scripture. Faced with an atheistic insistence that morality can be derived from circumstances and consequences, theists will often ask, "But why should you care what is good or bad? What makes one action 'better' than another, if there's no ultimate objective morality?" So, absolutes again. But what makes scriptural morality — rules written in a book — any better than moral guidelines derived from careful consideration of the likely outcomes of moral decisions? The answer of course is that it isn't better, it's actually worse. Personally I'd rather be subject to a moral code derived from analyses of circumstances and consequences, than to the arbitrary moral edicts of a Christian with a crib-sheet.

It seems to me that moral philosophy, neuroscience, cosmology and indeed physics in general are moving steadily in the direction of materialism and determinism and away from outdated concepts of dualism, the soul, free will and absolutes. Yet theists cling desperately to these notions because without them their faith makes no sense at all.

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This week's Jesus and Mo is apposite:
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2013/08/21/soul/

Cartesian dualism assumed; proximate metaphor discouraged

In his Thought for the Day this morning Akhandadhi Das commits the linguistic infelicity I've noticed far too often recently (noticed presumably because we're getting so much Olympic coverage at the moment), that of using a metaphor from sport to describe something in ... sport. The "level playing-field" is its most prevalent form, and to me it shows laziness. It's inappropriate because it's confusing. If you use a metaphor from sport (such as "a level playing-field") to describe something else in sport (such as methods of ensuring sporting contests are fair), how are we to know that it's a metaphor, and that you're not talking about the actual — rather than metaphorical — thing?

If you refer to a "level playing-field" when talking about ensuring fairness in sporting contests, the fairness aspect of a level playing-field is likely to get lost in concerns about whether the sport in question actually takes place on a playing-field. If it does, and the slope of the field isn't what you're talking about, your meaning will diffuse into uncertainty. If the sport doesn't take place on a playing-field, people will — for at least a moment or two — wonder what on earth you're talking about.

In summary, if you want to be understood clearly and quickly, don't use metaphors that are too close to the actual subject you're explicating. But that's not why I'm writing about Thought for the Day (again).

Akhandadhi Das refers to research done at Bristol University on "innate fairness" in young children. This is fine — I'm all for looking at the science when considering such questions — but Das immediately takes an unjustified leap to talk about "psychological traits which arise from the physical embodiment of the soul." He bases this on nothing more than religious dogma, going on to make more bald assertions about how the soul is affected by which particular body it's embodied in. Somehow he connects this to scientific explanations of thoughts and motivations, but claims that science cannot explain altruism, sacrifice, love or fairness. If he did a bit more research he'd find that science has quite a lot to say about all four. (Indeed he's already mentioned a scientific study of fairness.)

Das refers to the Hindu belief that "ultimate fairness" is a "spiritual insight", and then goes off into uncharted woo-woo land, talking about "the soul's remembrance of its own spiritual origin", and "the dual nature of our existence".

Never mind the level playing-field — Akhandadhi Das isn't even in the same ball-park.

Podcast of Thought for the Day available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/thought

Direct link to mp3 audio available here:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20120905-1038a.mp3
(available for 30 days)

Dualism misfiled as science — just like intelligent design

Angus Menuge's contribution to Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God appears to have been misfiled. As Chapter 24 it's in the section titled The Question of Science, when it's clearly philosophy. Perhaps the editors were misled by the title, "The Role of Agency in Science" — it's got "Science" in the title, so if you hadn't read the essay you might put it in the science section by default. It's quite densely written, so a hurried perusal might give the wrong impression.

Menuge talks a lot about materialism and intentionality in his attempt to make the case that materialism doesn't explain agency, and — vice versa — agency refutes materialism. I don't buy it. He seems to be proposing some kind of dualism at the same time as arguing (like John Searle with his Chinese Room thought-experiment about intelligence and consciousness) that brain activity does not equate to free will, though he never uses the actual term free will. But to claim that humans have intentions and are capable of agency is to say that they have free will, and I think he's on dodgy and unproven ground implying all these are independent of the brain.

The transitions of neural activations are completely impersonal and in no way involve a point of view. But there is no doubt that there are subjects, individuals with distinct points of view. This has always been recognized by folk psychology since it seeks to provide personal reasons for an agent's actions. Jack does not (ultimately) open the fridge because Jill believes it contains a beer. Note that it will not help the eliminativist to claim that points of view are illusory, since only something with a point of view can be subject to an illusion. (p 121-2.)

I think he's making a mistake when he says that transitions of neural activations don't involve a point of view. He seems to be implying that they must be caused by a point of view that's separate from the brain, when to me it appears far more likely that the point of view, along with the experience of intentionality, free will and the rest, are manifestations of the neural activity rather than the cause of it.

The rest of the chapter appears to be claiming that materialism is self-refuting, but without the references to back up mere assertions, it's difficult to tell if there's anything to it. Menuge's dense prose isn't exactly helpful in this respect.

He mentions the work of Paul and Patricia Churchland. I've no idea if he's representing their views accurately when he disagrees with them, because he provides no references to them. The only reference he gives is to his own paper in which he claims to critique something Daniel Dennett has written. If he's so sure his thesis is correct, why isn't he citing his sources? He finishes with this:

Agency is the Achilles' heel of scientific materialism. If the materialist eliminates agency, he undermines the rationality of science. But agency also fails to reduce to materialistic categories. So, if we want to preserve the rationality of science and follow the evidence wherever it leads, we must conclude that agency is an irreducible causal category. And that is precisely the claim of Intelligent Design.

Yep, it's dualism.

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4truth.net
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952943

Subjective thoughts on the matter* of consciousness

Much of philosophy and theological or religious discussion seems to revolve around the idea of dualism — the mind/body problem. It's a debate that may shed some light on the true nature of consciousness.

I have an experience of my own self that it is something apart from my body, something separate, distinct from my flesh, bones and blood. It's more than likely, I feel, that my "self" is a psychological construct that my brain has created in order to process information in a way that it can perceive as a whole.

Where am I, in my body? Although I sense that I'm in my head, somewhere behind my eyes, I am also in my fingertips as they type on this keyboard. It seems that my brain has created an entire conceptual model of my essence — of "me" — that is at once the sum of all my parts, yet more. I have a concept of who and what I am, which is this entity — this identity — that I call "me", yet this is probably no more than the aggregation of a complex series of perceptual messages that are constantly being processed in my brain.

Back to the example of the keyboard: when I type, I move my fingers in a certain way to achieve the words that appear on screen. But do I, really, move my fingers? What I am in fact doing is flexing the muscles clustered around my wrists, and those muscles, being attached to the bones of my fingers (some distance away, anatomically speaking) cause my fingers to move. But am I doing even that? What causes the muscles around my wrists to flex? What I'm actually doing is sending nerve impulses from my brain to the nerves connected to those muscles.

So how far back must I go to find out where I actually reside in my body?

The answer, I suspect, is that the further back one goes, the more conceptual and abstract the process becomes. The "mental model" of the body that the brain creates — in order to operate the body — is probably just a complex synaptic relationship in some unspecific, diffuse area of the brain. This model is what gives us our sense of identity, of conscious self, when in fact there's nothing there.

No "me", no self, no soul.

I, myself, am an illusion.

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*Irony, ha!