Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously — at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos — even to a non-philosopher.
In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition.
De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.
A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion
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Arguments in natural theology rely to an important extent on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us. (p. xiii)
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…we have identified two puzzling features of natural theological arguments: they rest on intuitions that are untutored and, to some, appear obvious and self-evident. At the same time, there has been and continues to be disagreement about the validity of these intuitions. (p. xiv)
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The main aim of this book is to examine the cognitive origins of these and other natural theological intuitions. We will see that many seemingly arcane natural theological intuitions are psychologically akin to more universally held, early developed, commonsense intuitions. (p. xv)
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In recent years, cognitive scientists … have convincingly argued that religion relies on normal human cognitive functions. Religious beliefs arise early and spontaneously in development, without explicit instruction. (p. xvi)
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The received opinion on the unnaturalness of theology does not sit well with the observation that intuitions that underlie natural theological arguments are obvious, self-evident, and compelling. (p. xvi)
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Using evidence and theories from the cognitive science of religion and cognate disciplines … we aim to show that natural theological arguments and inferences rely to an important extent on intuitions that arise spontaneously and early in development and that are a stable part of human cognition.
See also: Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not
That religious belief comes naturally is no surprise given a theistic outlook. The findings seem to indicate that one has to be re-educated to reject religious beliefs. Could it be that it is atheism that is unnatural? Is it the denial of religious instruction to children that is the real child abuse?
There are two very different arguments from design. One is classical, the other belongs to Craig and seems to form the background of (or, the other way round, is derived from?) Dembski’s “science”. Here they are side by side to show how different they are.
Craig’s argument:
1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.
The classical argument:
1. All things have an order or arrangement, and work for an end.
2. The order of the universe cannot be explained by chance, but only by design and purpose.
3. Design and purpose is a product of intelligence.
4. Therefore nature is directed by a Divine Intelligence or Great Designer.
There are several notable differences here. One is that in the classical argument, “design” is distinguished from “chance”, whereas in Craig’s argument, “design” is contrasted with both “chance” and “necessity”.
“Necessity” in Craig’s argument means both logical necessity and the laws of nature. So, laws of nature are separated from “design”. This is the definition of the modern ID-type of design: If evolution didn’t do it, then it was/is “intelligently designed”.
The concept of design in the classical argument is completely different on this point, as it covers the laws of nature too. Laws of nature go under “order or arrangement” with which the classical argument is introduced. I.e. classical design equals broadly “structure”. Laws of nature are the order how nature/universe appears and the arrangement how it works.
Therefore, according to the classical argument, whatever works in a law-like manner, is/was designed – by definition. If life evolved according to the theory of evolution, then it was designed, because laws of nature are a manifestation of design.
To me the classical argument makes perfect sense. ID theory never did. Essentially, Demsbki removed everything design-like from design and he called “design” what was left. The problem is that nothing’s left. “Design” without structure, order, and law-like arrangement does not make sense. The “design” in ID theory is like a hamburger without the bun, beef, cheese, and ketchup, but in the classical argument it’s the complete hamburger.
Nice! 😉 This is one reason scholars have distinguished uppercase “Intelligent Design” from lowercase “intelligent design”, so as not to be forcibly confused by Discovery Institute rhetoric & public relations stunts. Mung, of course, loves the DI and is a hardcore IDist, so he follows their lead (e.g. Dembski’s 2004, particularly chp. 7, but throughout the book) in intentionally conflating uppercase & lowercase notions of ‘design’ by ‘intelligence.’
This recent statement by Craig, SUPPORTING that distinction is particularly a damaging blow for IDism: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/should-christians-accept-intelligent-design#ixzz3ZEUvk8mE
Is Discovery Institute IDism ‘natural’? No, it’s artificial, human-made. And it is an ideological disgrace to classical Christian, Muslim and Jewish thinking.
Agreed. And true of a lot of science these days, assuming “going of your way” means letting go of explanations based on intuitions which in turn are based only on everyday experience and our unexamined cognitive biases.
But what that have to do with being science providing a better explanation assuming you do not have a theistic prior?
“Masking” intuitions is not necessary pejorative.
Thanks for that summary; I found it very helpful. FWIW, I think the Craig argument, whether or not sound, at least has the virtue of being valid. The older argument, at least as you have stated it above, is not even that. Also, your use of ‘physical law’ above seems to me unorthodox: I’d think an apparent “order or arrangement” would be neither necessary nor sufficient.
Care to elaborate? Or are you holding details in reserve.
Anyway, looks like I need to pop some corn and then watch the fireworks.
Very helpful to what?
And, like BruceS, I’d like to know in what way you judge the classical argument to be invalid. The argument is copy-pasted from here http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/governance.shtml
from Erik’s link
Summary of the Argument from Design:
1. All things have an order or arrangement, and work for an end. (Again, note that the argument proceeds from empirical evidence of adaptation of ends to means of such natural processes as sensory organs, the food chain, the nitrogen cycle, the Krebs cycle, and so forth; hence, Thomas’ argument is à posteriori or inductive.)
2. The order of the universe cannot be explained by chance, but only by design and purpose.
3. Design and purpose is a product of intelligence.
4. Therefore nature is directed by a Divine Intelligence or Great Designer.
Well, I don’t know about validity (IEP says: A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid.) but all the premises seem, if not false, unfalsifiable, though I guess that matters not for a philosophical argument. I especially see 2 and 3 as specious.
Taking premise 2, nobody has an explanation for the origin and properties of the Universe. This is true whether one attempts an explanation including or excluding the words “design” and “purpose”.
Taking premise 3, we hit the worn-out trick of presenting “intelligence” as if it has some scientific or philosophical meaning. When someone succeeds in clearly stating what “intelligence” is, this premise may take on some coherence.
ETA and how did “divine” sneak in there? 🙂
Number three assumes its conclusion. It simply skips over the demonstration that natural processes could be sufficient.
My attempt to understand some of Gregory’s pigeon holes. I take it that the be-all and end-all of his concerns here is to stick (generally unpleasant) labels on posters he disagrees with because, as they say, you can’t tell the players without a program. You have helped me understand the program. (FWIW, I think Gregory should just go for his dream job and become a preacher already. Maybe he and Mr. Byers could purchase a small building and hang out a shingle. Damning others to hell is, as I hope we all know, a most noble profession.)
As any good Aristotelian should see instantly, there are terms in the conclusion that can’t be found in the premises (Alan notes one of them above). OTOH, it would be a very simple exercise to make it valid. I note here, though, that it is very easy to make a valid argument for the existence of God. Here’s a nice Murrayesque one.
(1) I want God to exist.
(2) If I want God to exist, God must exist.
(3) Therefore, God must exist.
Easier than pie. Soundness is the hard part.
This sounds like “I don’t have an explanation for the universe, therefore nobody has.”
In Latin (the argument is by Aquinas and was originally written in Latin), words like “order”, “design”, “purpose”, “intelligence” and “intelligibility” are cognates and the argument obviously relies on these semantic and etymological connections.
This sounds like “I don’t know what intelligence is, therefore the thing denoted by the word does not exists.” This is not even funny.
Simple: If small designs and purposes are the product of small intellects, then the universe is done by a great one, often called God. That it is God and none other, such as maximally great alien or some such, requires a separate argument of course. Aquinas has his Five Ways for that.
Anything other than the spurious term in the conclusion?
I think it’s safest not to use any terms not found above. So I’d lose “Great” and “directed” also –before we heard “explanation” not “direction.” The thing is to ensure that the conclusion follows in virtue of form alone, and the best way to avoid complaints is to use exactly the same words found in the premises.
But again, it’s easy to fix those things to make it spiffy.
And incredibly lucrative.
If I weren’t the honest decent human which I am, I would certainly have a well-timed come-to-Jesus moment and start raking in the donations like the heinous genocidal Craig.
walto,
I agree that validity is easy and soundness is hard. But I’m not sure that the Teleological Argument can be made valid, actually.
The Teleological Argument, if formalized, contains an illegitimate inferential move at its heart. It involves a transition from
and this is bad enough already, since Kant’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology — subsequently elaborated upon by Hans Jonas and Francisco Varela — shows that the move from (1) to (2) is incorrect — but anyway —
would seem to be the next move. But this can’t be right, because there is no legitimate inference from “for all X, there exists a Y such that” and “there exists a Y for all X”. That would be like saying that, because all human beings have (or had) a mother, there exists one mother for all human beings. It’s a permutation of quantifiers, and the argument cannot be made to work.
This criticism was, by the way, pointed out by Peter Geach in the 1950s — himself a formidable philosopher and a devout Roman Catholic. But his piety did not stand in the way of mastering the tools crafted by Frege and Russell, and then using them to notice that Aquinas’s argument is logically invalid. Contemporary Christian philosophers, like Plantinga, are not unaware of this — this is why Plantinga argues that a belief in God is “properly basic” (a technical term for him), not something that can be argued for.
I accept the challenge!
1. If the world contains a bunch of ordered things, something having a purpose ordered it.
2. The world contains a bunch of ordered things.
3. Therefore, something having a purpose ordered the world.
Peasy.
ETA: BTW, what’s the Geach citation?
Ahh, if only the rest of the tedious preachers would accept that.
And Plantinga is factually wrong — as the real world evidence of people like me and millions of others show, a belief in god is not an inherent part of being human/having human cognitive abilities/having human morals/existing in the natural world.
So, poof, all their arguments evaporate.
They believe, because they want to believe, because when they were tiny children their mommies and daddies gave them pleased reactions when the credulous children asked if they could leave some carrots out for the reindeer alongside the cookies for Santa. When they grew older, they think they have put away childish things, but they’re still just putting cookies on a plate in hopes of that reinforcement of what a good boy (or girl, perhaps) they are for believing. The more adult, sophisticated, “intelligent” the arguments, the more elegantly arranged the cookies are. That’s all it is.
walto,
I don’t actually know. I heard this claim from another philosopher many years ago, and never followed it through. But a bit of on-line spelunking revealed that Geach has an essay in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Kenny), and also Geach and Anscombe did a book together on Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege. The argument I’m thinking of is likely to be in one of those.
Did anyone ever answer the question, why does it matter whether religion is natural?
Herpes is natural. Polio vaccine is not.
Kantian Naturalist,
Thanks.
I had a conversation with a former colleague of Plantinga’s who thought this (plus, of course, fear) was definitely the case with Al. We both thought that it was a great waste of technical skills.
I think it matters that religion is natural, because if we know religion is natural, we are forewarned about certain problems.
I regard science as being unnatural, in the sense that science requires attributes few people have instinctively, that have to be trained. It’s counter to human nature to be truly skeptical (that is, capable of following the evidence), to be properly tentative, to be willing to admit error as part of understanding, to discard the “intuitively obvious fact” that everything has an exterior purpose (“final cause”), to recognize that ideas must be susceptible to testing to establish validity, etc.
Religion and religious approaches, which come naturally to humans, are quite the opposite in every way. Religious claims are true by statement and affirmation, not by observation and test. Purpose is assigned because people do everything with one or more purposes, so there is obviously a purpose to everything. Religious explanations are “one size fits all”, and simple enough for small children to grasp. No real cause and effect applies, only Will and Purpose. Conclusions are assumed without any need for verification.
And all this matters, because religious approaches for nearly all of recorded history, and surely long before, tended to make for an uncomfortable lifestyle, where advances were mostly made by accident, and then jealously guarded. Where and when religious approaches dominated, the results are depressing. Where and when a scientific approach has been adopted, improvements are striking, overwhelming. It’s important because the human brain seems determined to lapse into religion, and the candles lighting this darkness are few.
I happen to be something of a short term pessimist. I think people are quick to see patterns and slow to relinquish them. I differ from many on the evolution side of the debate because I see superstitious behavior and counterproductive political ideas in every segment and faction of society.
There are denial clusters in every political party and movement, and adherence to irrational and counterproductive public policies in every corner.
In short, there are damn few people who agree with me on everything.
@KN
Your problem with quantifiers seems to belong to predicate logic and therefore has nothing to do with the original argument.
The argument is best defensible when the semantic and etymological connections between the words are acknowledged, but unfortunately those are easily lost in translation. As a result the argument looks merely like an analogy and not too rigorous for modern minds, because people these days try their best to reject any notion of teleology, while for scholastics teleology (the sense of purpose directed towards a goal) was indisputable.
I’m quite happy with teleology in biology, because I think that purposiveness is explained by the combination of organizational closure from an environment and thermodynamic openness with an environment. Any system of that combines an autocatalytic network of molecules with a semipermeable membrane will exhibit the kind of circular causality that it makes sense to call teleological.
However, the usefulness of the concept of teleology in biological explanations has little if any bearing on the Teleological Argument as Aquinas presented it. For one thing, if the teleological argument can’t be parsed in formal terms, I don’t see how it could be deductively valid. Deductive validity is what holds for all rational beings, whether they know Latin or not.
I would have thought that the “naturalness” of religion and the “unnaturalness” of science –assuming both claims are true — would tell us something very interesting about human cognitive architecture.
Apart from that, I would imagine that understanding how religious practices and institutions recruit deeply entrenched cognitive processes in order stabilize large-scale, hierarchically organized societies would tell us something important as to whether a completely secular society is cognitively & biologically plausible.
I doubt it is coincidental that the Scandinavian cultures, which at first blush have managed to function as wholly secular, socialist societies, are also racially and culturally homogenous. On the contrary, it might be that religion plays a really important role in establishing political and economic institutions that must transcend tribal affiliation.
Knowledge of formal systems is quite enough. When you translate the argument into *your preferred* formal system with the exact intention of making it appear invalid (I’m hinting again: quantifiers are inapplicable), you WILL succeed in making it appear invalid, but at the same time you are demonstrating your refusal to comprehend another man’s point.
Sociologists do it, psychologists do it, economists do it, anthropologists do it. Welcome to the social sciences! 😉 ‘Labels’ help to signify where people are coming from and what their ideologies are. They have ‘descriptive’ value in communication (isn’t that what happens on blogs?). They need not be interpreted as negative or offensive; except the easily offended often interpret them that way.
If someone says, “Mung’s an IDist” or “walto’s an atheist”, one option is to say “No, I’m not” and then explain why not. And it sure helps if one has an alternative self-categorisation to propose. Not an atheist, only an agnostic? Not an IDist, only a theist who accepts lowercase ‘intelligent design’? That helps people to understand what you are standing on. If you are not (actually, in real life) a disenchanted atheist, walto, then start positively communicating other views and the labels you so detest will change.
The problem here is, walto, that I don’t find you a persuasive, insightful or coherent ‘philosopher.’ Perhaps only atheists could be (ahem) ‘inspired’ by the analytic myopia you write here and of course that is exactly who you are pandering too with your anti-religious and anti-theology communication.
Mung & I can get along just fine on the bigger questions, beyond the ideology of IDism (which he may eventually realise is possible). Erik and I share the view that IDism doesn’t make sense, while we are (apparently) both theists. But with the unrepentant ‘rude, mean, insulting asses’ approach that a (small) few people here at TSZ take, intentionally, we’re simply not going to get along just fine. And you know what, walto, that’s ok too.
Fwiw, KN’s ‘philosophistry’ should always be taken in the light of the fact that he is (as he has told TSZ) a disenchanted (yet perhaps still searching?) Jewish atheist, who doesn’t himself believe in ‘higher purpose.’ That way, his (mixed analytic) arguments AGAINST purpose at least make more sense. And then his Sellarsian scientism rears its ugly head while he sells out his own (supposedly) home field of philosophy to natural-physical science.
I take the fact that you don’t appreciate my posts as a positive thing, Gregory. I think you might not be just an angry adolescent name-caller but actually crazy, so if you liked my stuff, well….you know.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that all you ever do here is try to wangle personal info from people and fling insults, but (i) that’s actually NOT all that economists, psychologists and other social scientists do; (ii) I’m pretty sure everyone else has noticed it; and (iii) it’s kind of stupid.
Are you this much of a nitwit everywhere, or just here?
Oh, forgot to add that Murray is not an IDist, but rather a proponent of ‘intentional design.’ 😉
Two questions for Erik, though anyone can answer:
Do you have an explanation for the universe?
Can you explain or give an operational definition for “intelligence”?
I have moved the Gregory/Walto spat to noyau.
Thanks. I breathe easier there. There’s like a sea breeze or something.
ETA: I think you might have missed the two posts that constitute the opening volley, though.
To some extent, this sounds as if I need to already understand the argument in order to understand it. That doesn’t sound good.
What you could have said is that the design inference has the status of an inference to the best explanation, rather than a deductive inference, which is why the argument isn’t affected by discoveries in 19th and 20th century logic. That does put the teleological argument in competition with other inferences to the best explanation as to the “omni-level” structure of the universe. (By which I mean there are high levels of structure at every level of observable reality, from the subatomic to the inter-galactic.)
In related news, I found this earlier: “Thomistic Response to the Theory of Evolution : Aquinas on Natural Selection and the Perfection of the Universe“. It’s on Academia.edu so I don’t know who does and doesn’t have access to it. Still, it might be of interest to a few of you here.
I was undecided on whether to move those. At least the first contained some other stuff (perhaps the opening of a spat with another member). And if I wasn’t moving that, I should also leave the first response.
It is true that my worldview is without “vertical transcendence”; it is a purely immanent metaphysics. I am a Spinozist, as was Nietzsche.
However, my considered view of the relation between philosophy and empirical science (including the social sciences, not just the natural sciences) is more complicated.
I regard philosophy as having an indispensable speculative dimension wherein it explores meta-paradigms or meta-frameworks (I borrow this language from Friedman in Dynamics of Reason). The speculative moment opens up new, very suggestive and tentative, possibilities for scientific inquiry. It’s not that scientific metaphysics is all the metaphysics we need, but rather than speculative metaphysics is always a future-oriented project that should always be measured against the limits of any presently existing scientific metaphysics. Nietzsche did this with regard to the science of the 1860s, as did Dewey with regard to the science of the 1920s, as did Deleuze in the 1960s. (In a distinct but I think suggestively similar move, the Frankfurt School of critical theory positioned itself as engaging in philosophical speculation beyond the limits of then-existing sociology.)
In other words, philosophy needs to be interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. When it becomes its own entrenched discipline, I think we have seen, it becomes rigid, ossified, and ultimately sterile.
From this position, my principal criticisms are directed against those who refuse to take science seriously when they speculate, or whose speculations are constrained by accepting as unrevisable the scientific metaphysics belonging to a previous stage of inquiry. My main criticism of Nagel (in Mind and Cosmos) is that he didn’t acquaint himself with the relevant science as much as he should have, nor did he acknowledge previous speculators in the same line of work, such as Schelling.
But I aspire to be no less critical of those who see the speculative dimension of philosophy as itself belonging to a previous stage of inquiry (e.g. Reichenbach in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Rosenberg in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, and Ladyman and Ross in Every Thing Must Go).
Sellars himself was, I think, quite badly confused. He saw, rightly, that the revisionary metaphysics of science has ontological priority over the descriptive metaphysics of everyday life. But he did not always keep in mind his own best thought: that the ontological priority of science strictly belongs to “finished science” (“Peirce-ish”, as he called it).
For us in the here-and-now, there is always plenty of room to negotiate between the manifest and scientific images.
On the one hand, we can (and should) revise the manifest image in accordance with the scientific image (when the results of scientific theory are supported by sufficient evidence). On those grounds I think we have enough evidence from cognitive neuroscience that we should reject libertarian freedom (incompatibilism about free will) and the immortality of the soul (which is the only reason anyone ever cared about establishing mind-body substance dualism).
On the other hand, we can (and should) pose new questions for science in those dimensions where the manifest image contains features that scientific theories have not yet explained — for example, consciousness, rationality, and morality.
One might think that the speculative task that belongs to philosophy amounts to smuggling transcendence in through the backdoor. In some sense this is true — but, to cite Rorty, I believe in the horizontal transcendence of the present by the future, not the vertical transcendence of time by eternity.
There are no rules permitting posts to be moved en mass to Noyau.
The argument rests on certain background assumptions, the terms have a specific meaning (the meaning should in this case be obvious, because they are interrelated), it’s written in its own language. It begins with order and arrangement, i.e. intelligibility, and concludes with intellect. The terms are semantically and etymologically connected and the argument states the connection. Understanding all this is understanding of the argument.
When you carelessly recast it into your preferred predicate logic and you take it to be the same argument, it shows how little you care about understanding. Translation is not lossless and this particularly applies to formal languages. “Tree” in English and “tree” in Russian is not the same tree. The four operations of arithmetic fail to convey the entire riches of geometry. In non-Euclidian space things are possible that are not dreamed of in Euclidian space, etc. Unerstanding all this is understanding. But you don’t care about understanding. You only care about quantification, but there is no role for quantification in that argument.
This would entirely change the nature of it. There are good reasons why the classical argument is different from the modern fine-tuning argument. The classical argument is a logical demonstration resting on the semantic connections of the terms used. Demonstration of logical necessity is the greatest certainty there is, but if you are not convinced by such certainty (no problem, it would be dubious if anyone were too easily convinced), the argument still works as a descriptive analogy.
In contrast, the modern argument is precisely an inference to the best explanation and therefore lacks the same level of certainty. Its terms fall on themselves, as design-like characteristics are removed from the concept of design.
Between the two there’s an intermediate type of design argument too – Paley’s. Paley’s argument is just an analogy really, so in this sense it borrows the genre of the classical argument. However, Paley describes God as a watchmaker, not as all-pervasive intellective power, so Paley departs from the omnipresent nature attributed to God in the classical argument. The modern fine-tuning argument goes even further and leaves God hardly anything to do.
I think it’s good to have these arguments side by side so everybody can see their different character. They talk about dramatically different designs and different designers.
I think Feser does a good job of showing the differences in many of his writings. I may even post the criticisms of ID that are presented in chapter 4 of the book I am reading, though that would be cause for another OP.
I was disappointed in that while they nodded towards the classical argument they took as their point of discussion Paley’s argument. I agree completely with your point that the arguments are very different on a quite fundamental level.
I don’t intend to get into the differences between the two in this thread, but the thread will go where it will go. Just see the Dogs and Triangles thread, lol! Getting ready to crack open Chapter 5. Stay tuned.
Join Feser & reject IDism, Mung. It makes sense & you don’t need to ditch (your) theology.
Mung, please be quiet; you’re so loud pro-Discovery Institute ideology in response! 😉
I agree that I could ditch IDism without having to reject my theology. Is there a compelling reason why I should do so.
I understand the difference in the arguments. I understand that the classical arguments make sense to those who understand the classical arguments. Right now that seems to amount to you and Erik (here at TSZ).
If I were able to present the classical arguments in a way that people here at TSZ would find them compelling, IDism would indeed become superfluous.
Until then, it seems to stick in the craw of the atheists and far be it from me to resist aggravating that particular irritant.
Erik,
I’m not entirely averse to your approach here. I do think that can be a class of arguments that have the following two features: (i) they are necessarily valid; (ii) they are not purely formal, or put otherwise, they are not valid by virtue of syntax alone. (I am not sure what your precise objection is to predicate logic, but it is true that predicate logic is a formal logic, so meanings don’t enter into it.)
And you are quite correct to point out that Aquinas intended for his Teleological Argument to be a deductively valid argument, and not an inference to the best explanation, which marks a key point of contrast with Paley. Hence — if this is right — Paley’s argument is vulnerable to Darwinian objections in a way that Aquinas’s argument is not.
However, my worry about Aquinas’s argument here is that everything depends on one’s having the same semantic intuitions that Aquinas does. (Needless to say, I do not share Aquinas’s intuitions.)
If semantic intuitions are doing the heavy lifting here, then now begins to look as follows. Consider:
The Thomist, as portrayed here, looks like someone who holds that (1) is an analytic statement — a statement true by meaning alone. Is that the position?
(We are now at the brink of our previous conversation about semantic shift over time.)
I can readily see how someone might use the words “order” and “intelligence” in such a way that this statement is analytic, roughly as how “if X is a bachelor, then X is an unmarried man” is analytic. But I don’t see how there is anything obligatory about using those words in that way, and hence nothing irrational about denying that (1) is analytic.
I do not even think (1) is true, because I use the words “order” and “intelligence” differently from how the Thomist does. Our semantic intuitions are too divergent.
ID doesn’t stick in my craw because it implies theism; it sticks in my craw because (1) it’s actually not a scientific explanation, but design theorists act as if it is and (2) it doesn’t imply theism, but a lot of people in the design movement act as if it does.
I’d much rather talk about classical theism myself. Heck, I read Hart’s The Experience of God cover to cover (with underlining and everything!) just so I’d know what classical theism was supposed to mean!
I’d also be more than happy to get back to talking about the cognitive science of religion. I read Boyer’s Religion Explained years ago and decided to give a pass to Dennett’s Breaking the Spell because it didn’t seem different enough from what Boyer does. Presently I’m reading Big Gods because I’m interested in the evolution and history of cooperation. Norenzayan’s book seems like a natural sequel to Sterelny (The Evolved Apprentice) and Tomasello (A Natural History of Human Thinking), both of which put a lot of emphasis on the role of cooperation in hominid cognitive evolution.
Hehe. Well, I almost bought that book myself when I read you were reading it. But I am trying to control myself. 🙂 So I can’t really speak to what he says about classical theism.
I got my starting point in understanding the divide between modern and classical philosophy (yes, there’s a connection there to design arguments) first from Feser’s The Last Superstition and then his Scholastic Metaphysics.
Those gave me the tools to understand the differences, but I am still working out how to translate the classical arguments into “modern” terms. Until I feel I can communicate the ideas I don’t much see the point.
otoh, the modern ID argument seems to be something everyone present can understand, even if they disagree.
They introduce three versions of the cosmological argument, and I think that’s worthy of attention in itself, so I will try to follow up with those.
I have no objection to predicate logic. I object to your flawed attempts to translate the classical argument into it. And here you are doing it again:
It’s not about “an intelligent being” either. It’s about intellect or intelligence regardless of embodiment.
You say you have read a book about classical theism, but somehow you err against its central points at every attempt to paraphrase this argument.
Logical necessity remains logical necessity regardless of semantic shifts. Basically, you are saying that 2+2 might become 5 some day due to semantic shift. I say no, it won’t ever.
I don’t see how this translation is flawed, or even how it is a translation at all.
I didn’t identify “being” with “body”. I wrote “intelligent being” rather than “intellect” because I was thinking that intelligence is a property of some entity, not an entity in its own right. Is that mistaken? Is intelligence itself a thing or substance?
Hart doesn’t address the Teleological Argument in any detail. His arguments for the existence of God are drawn from the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways. As Hart puts it, it all seems to come down to the impossibility of complete ontological contingency. Somewhere along the way, contingent beings must be grounded in a necessary being. That might be right, but that seems quite different from the Teleological Argument.
Hart claims that “a good argument can be made that only a single infinite cause can account for the perfect, universal, intelligible, mathematically describable order” (p 39). Is the Teleological Argument supposed to be this “good argument”? (Obviously Aquinas himself would not have said “mathematically describable” but we leave that aside.)
But isn’t that a red herring? Arithmetic is a formal language; it doesn’t change because concepts in a formal language are not subject to vagaries of use, culture, context, history, etc. We’re not talking about formal languages here; we’re talking about natural languages.
It might help if I made explicit two different (but related) claims I’m willing to make about natural languages.
Firstly, meaning and use are inseparable: there is no principled distinction to be drawn between what a term means and how it is used. (This is highly controversial among philosophers of language!) This doesn’t mean that meaning is use, but that how words are used and what they mean can’t be teased apart neatly. (As Brandom puts it, “semantics must answer to pragmatics”.) On my view, meaning is constituted by reference and by inference, but the patterns are inference and criteria of reference are themselves instituted by social practices. There’s no such thing as an ontologically distinct realm of meanings, whether Platonic or Fregean, to which we magically have access.
Secondly, moderate semantic holism. If meanings are partially determined by inference, then the meaning of a concept is inseparable from its inferential relations with other concepts. This has quite far-reaching ramifications, because the semantic web includes scientific theories. Hence our concepts of “purpose”, “order” and “intelligence” cannot be those of Aquinas, because our use of those notions has been shaped by Darwin and Piaget (among countless others).
I’d like to shift topics slightly. A few weeks ago you described yourself as — if I’m remembering this correctly — someone who finds more intellectual comfort in a pre-Enlightenment philosophical vision. I should have followed up with you about this then. I find this — shall we say — deeply puzzling. What did you mean by this? How do you understand the difference between a pre-Enlightenment and an Enlightenment (or post-Enlightenment) philosophical vision, and what makes the former preferable to the latter?
Yes, you are mistaken. Yes, intelligence is itself a substance. On classical theism, hylemorphic dualism and spiritual monism (non-dualism), it is THE substance.
Intelligibility in every sense is directly due to (or to do with) intellect, that’s right.
As with everything else, the difference between formal and natural languages is not what you think it is. 2+2 can also be viewed as no more formal than “apples and oranges”. “Two” and “plus” are ordinary English words and therefore conceivably subject to everything that English words are subject to, including semantic shift. By the way, have you seen 2+2 written in Chinese? If you saw it, would you recognise it? Would you seriously say that 2+2 in Chinese writing which you cannot read is not subject to vagaries of use, culture, context, history, etc?
It’s been clear to me pages ago that what you think of the differences of formal and natural languages does not stem from comprehension of them. There is really no essential difference between them. Formal language is essentially a grammar without exceptions. The fact that it has no (or aims to have no) exceptions does not change the fact that it’s a grammar (a list of rules).
In this case, the classical argument from design builds a formal structure where the semantics is determined by mutual contradistinction. Therefore, in this sense, nothing ever changes in this argument. Just like in arithmetics the concepts are defined by mutual contradistinction and the meanings are therefore always recoverable to the one who comprehends the “grammar” of arithmetics.
Besides, an argument in philosophy is a formal presentation, so do not underestimate it. Unfortunately you do not know the relevant grammar and therefore your attempts at translation are flawed. You think you are translating it from natural to formal language, but no, it already has its form and the translation must be true to the form.
Well, this question can be answered in many ways. In too many ways actually. For now, it should be enough to say that I whole-heartedly affirm the principle of sufficient reason and that I prefer the holistic perspective, i.e. that ontologically everything is connected to everything and in the proper context everything has a reason. Chance is a word for the occasions when we don’t know the reason, but this does not mean there is no reason.
The contrary view, that things may pop into existence out of nowhere for no reason (a la Kraussian universe or the physicalist thesis of origin of life) has always existed, before Enlightenment as well as after (there are such theist views too), but has been gradually gaining upper hand since Enlightenment. Post-Enlightenment there are still some rationalist philosophers with rigorous and insightful dialectics, for example Kant, but in the Anglo-Saxon world the greater glory is attributed to empiricists, such as Hume who saw no way out of inductive reasoning, denied causality and said that morality was based on feelings.
That’s a nice point I hadn’t considered. But wouldn’t a spiritual monist say that the substance is Mind, which has Intellect as one of its attributes?
That’s because my understanding of the difference between formal languages and natural languages is shaped by my reading of Frege and of Wittgenstein.
I disagree, because “apples” and “oranges” are concepts that refer to objects, where “2”, “+”, “=”, and “4” do not refer to objects — they are pure concepts.
I would say that the Chinese symbols used to write “2+2=4” certainly are subject to such contingencies — as are the Roman and Arabic symbols used to represent that conceptual relation.
Again, this is not quite how modern philosophers influenced by Frege and by Wittgenstein understand this distinction. Rather, philosophers under those influences think that there is an essential difference between natural and formal languages. Natural language is object-oriented, that it involves no Fregean concepts (with sharp boundaries), while formal language concerns only Fregean concepts and has no objects. Natural language is inherently world involving; it speaks of the sensory things around us. Formal language is not world-involving; it is about the relations between concepts, considered purely as such.
This is right, insofar as any semantics, whether formal or natural, will be (in my terms) an inferential semantics, where meanings are determined by mutual contradistinction (relations of compatibility and incompatibility). But that seems to elide, from my point of view, the fact that natural languages, as world-involving and object-oriented, are subject to contingencies of history and society in ways that no formal language can be, since formal languages are not world-involving and object-oriented, but purely conceptual. (Which does not mean that they cannot be used to make claims about the world — on the contrary!)
I understand that. I don’t agree, but I do understand it.
We might disagree on some subtleties of our readings of Hume, but I see the point you’re making.
I think there’s a more general point lurking about here — is reality rational? might be a way of putting it. If one is committed to the PSR, then one is committed to saying that reality has a rational character, which is precisely why it is intelligible (and that we know a priori that it is rational).
By contrast, a thoroughgoing naturalist-cum-empiricist would say that reality has no propositional structure, no categorical structure, and does not conform a priori to our standards of reasonableness. Hence the naturalist/empiricist can treat the PSR as a methodological imperative for inquiry — “whenever you can, try to look for an explanation of observed regularities!” — but not as an ontological principle.
If he’s a monist, the why would your change of words matter (since as per monism, all is one)? But if words matter, then why would you phrase it your way, instead of trying to comprehend the way the monist put it?
And these are the two guys who have said absolutely nothing relevant to philosophy of language, even though Anglo-American world curiously seems to think otherwise. From the point of view of philosophers of language, Frege was an unknown mathematician and Wittgenstein’s “language is use” has been safely ignored as inapplicable to anything that philosophy of language deals with. Everything you say based on them is erroneous.
“Pure concepts”? I didn’t expect you could say such a thing.
Your point is “elided” because it is artificial, has no substance, and is really no point at all. The potential to distinguish between “world-involving-object-oriented” and “purely conceptual” usage is present in any vocabulary and syntax worth the name.
Surely you have noticed that formal languages and natural languages are made of the same stuff. They consist of the same elements put to different usage. The difference is not really between formal language and natural language, but between rigorous definitions and loose definitions. And this is all there is to it.
But if the PSR has no ontological bearing, then why does it help in figuring things out? If it has no ontological bearing, then why should we have any commitment to it for any moment at all? When it appears not to be working, then what is it really that is not working – the PSR or our comprehension of it? What is it that we are understanding (or not) and why are we trying to understand it? If not everything can be explained, if there are things without reasons, then why attribute any value to e.g. scientific inquiry and education?
If these questions seem legitimate and require reasoned answers, then the PSR is central to expanding the horizon of knowledge. It’s how we behave, and since it works, we cannot help but continue behaving accordingly. The PSR is the light on reality and, as such, reality owes everything to it. This is how the PSR is an ontological principle.
One can believe that there is only one substance and yet attribute multiple properties to it. Doesn’t Berkeley’s God possess both intellect and will?
That’s a pretty sweeping generalization. I’d supposed that Frege’s impact on Russell, Carnap, Godel, and Cantor was rather substantial. And I’d also supposed that Wittgenstein had exercised quite an influence on Sellars, Putnam, Cavell, Brandom and other philosophers. But perhaps do not care too much about them because they are “analytic” and/or “Anglo-Saxon”?
Very well: which philosophers of language do you consider important?
I’m full of surprises!
What are the objects — not the concepts! — of pure mathematics?
Of course I agree that in doing philosophy, we should do everything we can to make explicit the implicit inferences we would otherwise ordinarily make. And in doing so we often revise meanings and make distinctions in order to resolve ambiguities and incompatibilities. The goal, we hope, is improved communication and cooperation.
But that’s not what I mean by a formal language — by a formal language I mean a system that abstracts away from all objects and treats concepts as such. In other words, something like modern symbolic logic, pure mathematical logic, classical first-order logic, or any of the various non-classical logical systems. What are the objects — as distinct from the concepts! — of relevance logic or paraconsistent logic?
I also think that the concepts in formal languages — concepts like “set”, “function,” “variable”, “operator”, “quantifier” — have precise, determinate and fixed boundaries. They lack the ‘fuzziness’ and open-texturedness of concepts in natural languages, which are structured around prototypes that grade off into indeterminate cases.
I’ll consider your remarks about the ontological status of the PSR and respond later on. Till then!