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

Pointful bloggery

My unannounced six-month experiment with one-blogpost-a-day has come to an end. At the beginning of the year I resolved to put up one blogpost for each day, and soon discovered that it wasn't always convenient to make that one blogpost on each day. I got over this inconvenience by catching up later and back-dating blogposts, which made the archive nice and neat, but was hampered by the necessity of maintaining a kind of fiction (by not posting about things which I would not have come across before the date of the post). During the last month I've become more relaxed about this self-imposed regimen and I'm now happy to let things slide as they sometimes must, but I've decided to maintain the schedule on the basis of an average: what I'm aiming for is at least one blog post for each day, but not necessarily on each day.

This should not be hard; with Burnee links taking up two days, that's five substantial (200 words or more) posts per week. When I was writing my novel (The Plitone Revisionist — available in audio format for free from Podiobooks.com, in case you were wondering), towards the end of 130,000 words I managed 1200 words per day, seven days a week for several months (and I have a day job).

I've already written about why I blog so I won't reiterate that here. Suffice to say I continue to enjoy it, so I'll continue to do it.

Burnee links for Thursday

There Are 10 Times As Many Atheists as Mormons: When Will Non-Believers Become a Political Force? | Belief | AlterNet
Adam Lee (of Daylight Atheism) now writes for AlterNet. This is his first piece.

Unequally Yoked: Guestblogging Challenge: Take the Ideological Turing Test!
This is a fascinating idea — the results will surely be instructive to both "sides".
(Via Daylight Atheism.)

Ungodly News: The Periodic Table of Atheists and Antitheists
Competition or reinforcement for Crispian Jago's Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense?

Times Higher Education - Research Intelligence - Alternative outcomes
Professor Edzard Ernst is retiring. This is a loss to the critical analysis of alternative and complementary medicine, but by this account it's not been easy for him.
(Via Stephen Law.)

Roman Catholic Cynicism and the Inhumanity of Religion II « Choice in Dying
Eric MacDonald on Roman Catholic willful misrepresentation of assisted dying. Read him, he knows whereof he writes.

It's always good to go straight to the source : Pharyngula
P. Z. pwns the creationists (again).

The Rants of Cherry Black » Blog Archive » The Last Resort
You are reading the Rants of Cherry Black, aren't you? Trish (of Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub) is currently in Nepal, and sending back awesome reports.

Do you think there may be a leprechaun?

Following on from my recent post concerning the existence of the supernatural, I've pondered some more about how I view classifications of certain types of entities — particularly entities of agency. First, here are some supposed entities that I would class as natural or material: extraterrestrials; artificial intelligences; computer consciousness. And second, some I would class as supernatural: fairies; ghosts; gods. (Neither of these lists is intended as exhaustive.)

Natural or material entities are entities for which we have, or can expect, evidence. Supernatural entities are those for which evidence is, by definition, not possible. Supernatural entities are not susceptible to science and reason (though their supposed effects might be), so if you need to affect supernatural entities directly, you might try magic spells or other invocations instead.

If these are the only two categories available for entities of agency, then some people will accept that both categories are "real", while others will accept only one. Personally I think that the material realm is real and the supernatural isn't.

During a debate I attended on 29 November 2009 at Wellington College, on the motion "Atheism is the new Fundamentalism", the tentative wording of the Atheist Bus Campaign was brought up, and Anthony Seldon, moderating, interjected to Richard Dawkins, "Does that mean there may be a God?"

Dawkins replied, "There may be a leprechaun."

Lord Richard Harries took extreme offence at this. "You can't let Richard get away with that. That's a ridiculous remark. You cannot confuse the God of classical theism, which has animated the whole of western philosophy, with a leprechaun."

"Why not?" asked Dawkins. "Why not?"

The video clip is here (there's a general discussion of agnosticism vs atheism, and the wording of the Bus Campaign, but the above exchange begins at about 6'50"):
http://youtu.be/ea1r2FIW6xQ


Harries' umbrage illustrates the fundamental conceit of theological thinking. By taking the existence of the deity as an unquestioned presupposition, theology has built up an intricate and largely impenetrable cat's cradle of obfuscation. However many billions of words have been written on the subject, at bottom there's no evidence that the object (God) of the subject (theology) actually exists. It's all so much hot air, with a degree of reality exactly on a par with a leprechaun.

Is the intelligent designer a prankster?

This is a quote from "Panning God — Darwinism's Defective Argument against Bad Design" by Jonathan Witt — Chapter 23 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God:

In an interview for The Philadelphia Inquirer, biologist and leading Darwinist Kenneth Miller said, "The God of the intelligent-design movement is way too small . . . . In their view, he designed everything in the world and yet he repeatedly intervenes and violates the laws of his own creation. Their god is like a kid who is not a very good mechanic and has to keep lifting the hood and tinkering with the engine" (1). Miller is a Roman Catholic, but notice how blithely he equates the designer's ongoing involvement in creation with incompetence. Why? What if the creator prefers to stay involved? What if he doesn't intend to wind up the watch of the cosmos and simply leave it to wind out everything from supernovas to sunflowers? What if he wishes to get his hands dirty making mud daubers? (p 116.)

Well, what if he does? Is there any way of knowing what the creator's wishes are? No, it's all pointless speculation. Or if it has a point, that point is to try by any means possible to refute Darwin's theory of evolution by random mutation and natural selection. In that effort it fails. The entire chapter is a claim that the intelligent designer works in a mysterious way, and evolutionists' challenges regarding the inefficiency of certain evolved parts of living organisms are invalid because evolutionists don't know what was in the mind of the designer. Well neither does anyone else — the creator, you see, is ineffable.

The most that could be said — as attributed to J. B. S. Haldane — is that the creator has "an inordinate fondness for beetles". But using Witt's logic, one could just as easily speculate that the creator wasn't overly fussed about them, but wanted entomologists to be fully occupied because ... well, they might otherwise spend their time doing crossword puzzles instead of catalogueing all the different species of cockroach (and the creator thinks crossword puzzles are frivolous). Yes, it's a daft suggestion, but you can't prove it's not correct, in the same way you can't prove that the creator didn't give the panda opposable thumbs because he likes a bit of joke  — yes, Witt actually suggests this in his essay — p 117.

After complaining that metaphors are often stretched beyond breaking point, Witt then uses Shakespeare as a metaphor for God  — "the god of the English canon" (p 118.) and proceeds to show how criticisms of Shakespeare have since been shown not to be fully understanding of the Bard's oeuvre. Shakespeare, however, was not a god, he was a jobbing playwright and actor who was not above including things in his plays for popular or political effect. Witt's comparisons are spurious.

What Witt misses in this whole chapter is that without his and other ID proponents' insistence on "design", evolutionary biologists would have no need to speculate on the inefficiency of the designer. Darwinian evolution by random mutation and natural selection provides a sufficient (and magnificently elegant) mechanism that explains the evolution of living things on Earth through undirected natural processes. It doesn't matter whether their criticisms of the "designer" are thorough or deep, because they aren't even necessary.

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4truth.net
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952945

No supernature = no God

In recent months I've often had cause to consider what it would take for me to believe in God. And each time I consider it, I come closer to the notion that there probably isn't anything that would convince me that God exists.

To be clear on this question, I should explain what I understand by the two particular terms, "God" and "exists".

"God" — for this purpose — must necessarily be defined as the God of Abraham, or something very like it, by which I mean it must have the characteristics usually attributed to the supreme creator of the Universe: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence, and having an existence somewhere and somewhen at least partially outside of what we understand as time and space. I don't include such woolly definitions as "God is energy" or "God is love", as these are neither specific nor useful.

"Exists" — for this and indeed most purposes — I take to mean having some causal relationship with at least some aspects of physical reality. For something to exist it must be perceivable (preferably measurable) in the same realm of existence in which we, the beings doing the perceiving, perceive it. And it must be physical reality, not some notional concept that "exists" only as an idea in a brain — such existence would be better termed "imagination". (I can imagine lots of things that don't exist in physical reality. The fact that I can imagine them does not confer on them any physical existence other than patterns in my brain.)

That's really as far as I need go. The notion of God described above is clearly incoherent. It's a concept that cannot exist in, or affect, the physical realm in which we reside.

Take omnipotence: can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Can he create a square circle? I've often heard theists maintain that God can do anything that's consistent with the "laws of logic" — which those two actions are not. Fair enough, but then those same theists claim that their God created the laws, so all I need to do is reframe the question: can God create laws which even he can't break? There's no satisfactory answer to this that's consistent with the idea of an omnipotent God, so he fails the coherence test at the very first hurdle.

But never mind that, let's see how he stacks up in omniscience. This is the idea that God knows everything there is to know. All knowable knowledge resides in the mind of God. But that knowledge, to be complete, must also include the knowledge of the knowledge in the mind of God, which if it is itself to be complete, must also include the knowledge of the knowledge of the knowledge in the mind of God, and so proceed ad infinitum. We have here an infinite regress, rather like a subroutine which calls itself, and once more we're well into the realm of incoherence.

Omnibenevolence and omnipresence need hardly get a look-in — they are obviously incoherent. Omnibenevolence is shown to be nonsense by the fact that theologians twist themselves into knots making excuses (theodicies) for a God that (if it exists) clearly isn't all-good. Omnipresence is another nonsensical property, probably invented to reinforce the idea that God watches everything you do. (It's also a superfluous property — what need of omnipresence has an omniscient God?)

It's clear to me, therefore, that God has been defined out of existence. The only way these properties could be true characteristics of a being, would be if that being was entirely imaginary. Such a being would be a supernatural fantasy — it would not, could not, exist. My definition of "existence" above is necessarily restricted to the natural world. Anything supernatural, therefore, cannot  exist.

Burnee links for Sunday

Skewer Mouth by Dan Savage - Seattle Music - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
Excellent (but too short) interview with Tim Minchin, during his current US tour.

A message from... - Simon Singh & Ben Goldacre - e-mail & badscience.net - RichardDawkins.net
Where now for the Libel Reform Campaign? (Also, listen to my brief interview with Simon Singh on the next Skepticule Extra.)

When evidence is powerless | Salman Hameed | Comment is free | The Guardian
If you've built your whole life around a set of beliefs, you're going to be particularly resistant to any evidence that calls them into question.

I think the creationists would rather just forget about Expelled : Pharyngula
P. Z. wants to claim the relics of Expelled as a trophy, and make the unused footage available. It would be a fine thing to salvage something good from the fetid remains of this execrable production.

Why atheism surely must be a kind of faith - steve's posterous
Steve Zara attempts to get inside someone of faith attempting to get inside someone of no faith (if you see what I mean).

You cannot prove me wrong! - steve's posterous
Here's Steve Zara again, on how the above claim is, in effect, self-refuting.