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?
I don’t agree with that assessment, Bruce. I think the religious attitude comes from the beautiful pantheistic result of his “geometry.” You get an impersonal God that is identical to the universe, immortality, support for a mystical union of ideas with what they’re of, etc. For those who want all the comforts of a magnificent religion but without the stories, and a facade of mathematical proofs every step of the way, you simply can’t beat Spinoza. Plus he was a saintly man, excommunicated by an angry personalistic faith.
The philosophical advances you mention above result in (deserved) respect from the academy and the intelligentsia in general. But not religious fervor.
It’s not that simple. “Why” questions can be answered by science, depending on the context, eg the reason the question was asked. See, eg, Bas C. Van Fraassen The Pragmatic Theory of Explanation (pdf).
Just because he has two a’s in his last name does not mean he is not intelligent.
But I do agree that the nature of scientific explanation is a question for philosophy.
BruceS,
I think it’s intersting that ‘the quintessential philosophical question–‘Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?”–seems to have two interpretations that correspond with the differences between Aquinas’s 2nd and 3rd Ways. One, regarding ‘efficient causes,’ seems a scientific question: How did all this come about. The other is modal–‘Could it have been otherwise? Did all this HAVE to happen the way it did?’ The latter seem to me not to be questions for science. As Aquinas suggested, they seem to be about essences and accidents (I.e. necessity and contingency).
Does his religion really offer “comforts”. I thought it was more about giving up on comforts, at least comforts like personal immortality or divine sources for morality, and instead letting go of personal identity by broadening it to accept your role as part of a deterministic universe.
I don’t see this as aligned with the attitude of most religious people, except maybe for the tiny number of “God=ground of being”-style religious philosophers
Of course, all my knowledge of Spinoza is second hand from sympathetic commentators. And popular commentaries to boot.
This means that “religious fervor” does not deserve respect?
There’s The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change by Thagard I haven’t read it and don’t plan to do so anytime soon; it’s not relevant to what I’m working on. But it looks interesting, no question!
I see. But I think that that definitely was part of Kant’s view. Yes, his conception of synthetic a priori judgments is one that the positivists forcefully rejected. But notice what Kant does with synthetic a priori judgments. Firstly, he notes that all of scholastic and rationalistic metaphysics consists of synthetic a priori judgments. (In Kant’s terms, if they were analytic they would be tautologies, and if they were a posteriori they could be overturned by future science.) Secondly, he argues while there is genuine synthetic a priori knowledge, it consists entirely of the necessary conditions for possible experience. In other words, all the synthetic a priori knowledge that there is (for us) is about us, and not about the things in themselves.
That’s why, in the Transcendental Dialectic, he goes through every argument in scholastic and rationalistic metaphysics for the existence of the soul, free will, and the existence of God — and all the skeptical arguments as well — and shows that none of those arguments can be resolved on the basis of reason alone. For any metaphysical claim P, he argues, there exists a valid argument establishing that P and also a valid argument establishing that not-P. Reasoning alone cannot tell us which metaphysical claim ought to be accepted. And this conflict of reason against itself is only removed, Kant thinks, if we take the “Copernican revolution”, reject all attempt at knowledge of things in themselves, restrict all knowledge to the spatio-temporal domain, etc. (Of course Kant also has a complicated argument for why we are rationally obligated to believe in God, free will, and immortality.
So I think the positivist move, of saying that you can’t get to metaphysics through logic alone, is already there in Kant. Yes, the positivists rejected the synthetic a priori, and the concept/intuition distinction, and once the concept/intuition distinction is dispensed with, so too is the all-important Kantian distinction between “cognition” (Erkenntnis) and “thinking” (Denken). And Kant needs that last distinction in order to argue that God, free will, and immortality are thinkable even though they are not knowable. So the Kantian critique of metaphysics get turned up to 11.
But how far can science take us in answering the question?
For example, best current science, eternal inflation, can be read as predicting an infinite number of universes which varying laws, but still with many (at least potentially infinite) with the same laws as ours. Further, if uncertainty in QM means only a finite number of states can occur, then infinite universes with the same laws means an infinite number of those with copies of me and you.
This seems to speak directly to questions of how does this (particular universe) come about and could it be otherwise.
It still does leave open the question of how multiverse and its laws came about.
Here’s an article with a taxonomy of 27 answers Why this universe?.
I also enjoyed Holt’s review of scientific and philosophical answers to the question:
Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.
We all agree that there are no noncontroversial assertions!
So isn’t that a noncontroversial assertion?
Bruce:
Yes, which is why I’m somewhat sympathetic to “first cause” arguments (where cause is understood non-temporally).
I do think that there must be either a first cause or an infinite regress, but I don’t think that a first cause need be God or anything Godlike.
This leads to my one complaint about Sean Carroll’s otherwise excellent performance in his debate with William Lane Craig. Here’s how I put it at the time:
I was thinking about the perpetual conflict between Spinoza and Kant that goes on inside me, and it struck me that one of the deeper philosophical questions is something like, “how is science possible?” or (alternatively) “why is nature intelligible to us at all?” There are, generally speaking, three responses to this question in the history of Western philosophy: the theological response, the naturalistic response, and the constructivist response.
The theological response says that nature is intelligible to us because the intellect and nature have the same source — God — and it is because of this that the intellect and nature have the same structure, which is why reality is intelligible to us. (This is why theists claim that atheism is incompatible with science — because, if you think you need theism in order to explain how science is possible in the first place, then removing theism undermines the very possibility of science.)
The naturalistic response says that nature is intelligible to us because the intellect is a proper part of nature, is subject to the same general forces and relations, and that ultimately the relation between intellect and nature is nothing more than (and so no more mysterious than) the relation between organism (more precisely, a part of the organism) and its environment.
The constructivist response says that nature is intelligible to us because the intellect has its own structure that it imposes or projects onto nature, and so nature is intelligible to us because the intelligibility of nature is really our own intelligibility.
When I say that I’ve been shifting my philosophical center of gravity away from Kant and towards Spinoza, I had in mind all of the points that BruceS mentioned (and I didn’t know there were insane Spinoza cultists on-line!). But I also had in mind the shift in emphasis from the constructivist response to the naturalistic response. I think that Adorno is perfectly right when he argues that the constructivist response leads to “the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity”, or a conception of the subject as generating all of its own experiences and so lacking any guarantee of being in touch with reality. It is not only solipsistic, it is narcissistic.
The pragmatist alternative, as I’ve come to see it, consists in integrating the constructivist and naturalistic responses. Although there is an a priori dimension to our cognitive experience, and some aspects of it are under our control (what Lewis calls “the pragmatic a priori“), we can also understand the a priori dimension of cognitive experience as the consequence of evolutionary forces at work.
In short: Darwin allows us to reconcile Spinoza and Kant, and Dewey was the first philosopher to realize this.
Agreed!
It seems to me that there is a fourth response:
The world isn’t intelligible. Or, in more detail, the world is only partially intelligible. We only pay attention to what we do find intelligible, so we have no idea what it is that we are missing.
Everyone agrees with that?
I never said that only the actual matters. I said that logical considerations offer us a very loose constraint. Logic can show us which propositions are compatible and incompatible with each other; in that way it can show which worlds are impossible, possible, and necessary. And that’s not nothing. But it’s a lot less than what we might want, because logic alone can tell us nothing about what is specific to this world, the actual one.
They are connected because the resolution of a problematic situation requires the use of intelligence in inquiry, and over the millennia we have gotten better at inquiring by developing, among other things, methodological principles for better inquiry — such as the methodological imperative mentioned above.
I’m not sure if these are questions about motivation or about justification. But it’s not entirely clear to me that we need answers to these questions. In the case of particular explanations, we can tell very detailed stories about how we came to that explanation and why it works, and also examine the various ways in which the explanation is partial, one-sided, inadequate, gives rise to further questions, needs to be tested further, is incompatible with other lines of evidence or other explanations, and so forth.
But suppose we now turn to meta-explanation: we want to explain what explanations are, and how explanations work. At the meta-explanatory level, I think pragmatists can be and should be Humeans: “Why do we expect inquiry to succeed?” Because it has in the past. “But how do you know it will succeed this time?” We don’t.
That kind of editorializing comes across as fairly obnoxious.
There are no magical neurons in the brain that allows us to download concepts from the universal mind-server into the neocortex. And while there are fairly serious philosophical issues in the conceptual framework of cognitive science, the non-existence of magical neurons isn’t one of them. Could we, someday, discover that there are magic neurons anyway? It’s logically possible but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Empirical concepts are concepts are applied to objects that we can experience.
Firstly, I know philosophy and logic extremely well. The fact is that I’m an expert in 19th and 20th century Western philosophy, including Continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, and pragmatism. Granted, I don’t know Aquinas or contemporary scholasticism, but just because you don’t know the areas of philosophy in which I am expert doesn’t mean that I am not an expert in those areas. I don’t agree with scholasticism, but I acknowledge your expertise in it. I challenge you in order to learn from you. I would have thought that obvious.
Secondly, as I’ve already made pretty clear, anti-foundationalism is a core commitment of mine, so appealing to science in order to explain how science is possible, or revising a conception of philosophy in light of science, is not a problem. It’s not circular reasoning in the traditional (and fallacious) sense. There is a sense in which science depends on philosophy — and there is also a sense in which philosophy depends on science. (In quite different respects — and this is more clearly true in ethics and political theory than in epistemology and metaphysics — philosophy depends on art.)
The idea that there is any foundation to knowledge, or that there is any absolute certainty, or that philosophy is foundational to culture — those are all ideas that philosophy has inherited from theology, and which have no place in my philosophical practice.
Oh, it absolutely provides comforts. There’s immortality–in a kind of Eastern sense of fusing with all the other minds into the Mind of God. There’s mystical bliss before one dies, too. It’s a veritable wonderland of comforts. And, since the God isn’t bearded or human-like in any way, it seems like it’s OK for smarty-pants. Buddhists are welcome. Finally it’s all derived in more geometrico. You know, it’s all sciency and mathematical–no stories.
Seriously, it’s a beautiful picture. I’d love it if it were true, myself.
FWIW, I would say that all that argumentation is both metaphysical and not “purely logical.” That is, indicating the boundaries of sense is a metaphysical endeavor that can’t itself be reduced to logic.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here, Bruce. I.e., I can’t tell whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with what I said about the two Aquinian Ways–one (perhaps) resolvable by science, the other definitely not.
walto:
I am bearded and I was made in God's image. So there, Mr. Smarty-Pants.
Why do you think there couldn’t be an infinite regress of contingent causes?
walto,
I don’t think that. I was laying out the alternatives: either a) there is a first cause, or b) there is an infinite regress of contingent causes.
Either way, I think Carroll is wrong to say that the question is incoherent.
I was thinking of this from your post
Multiverses are predicated by a scientific theory and do answer the these two questions: Yes, it could have been otherwise, although we might not have been around to see it in that universe (weak anthropic principle). No, it did not have to happen this way. In fact it does happen every other way that is consistent with science underlying eternal inflation.
Now I do admit that multiverses, although they are predicted by a popular but far from consensus theory, would not be considered science by some, including some of those who hang around these parts.
keiths,
BruceS,
Aha. Thanks.
I agree that it can’t “reduced to logic” if by that you mean formal logic, because it does turn on a rich set of semantic and epistemic considerations. But that doesn’t make it ‘metaphysical’, does it?
Kantian Naturalist,
I’d say so myself, but I guess those labels don’t matter so much.
I don’t think the question is incoherent, but I think it is irrelevant. The more we learn about physics, the less certain we are that we understand causation.
Physics is not philosophy, but philosophy must be consilient with physics.
Our notions of causation is derived from ordinary experience, and we have learned that ordinary experience is not a reliable guide to the way the world works.
One simple problem with first cause is that it relies on a rather naive concept of time. A concept that implies that time is independent of space and matter, that there is a before creation and an after. If there is no before, there is no first cause.
I don’t see why that must be so. Why wouldn’t the first cause then just be that event which nothing came before?
Define before.
I don’t know if I can define it (that’s been notoriously difficult since long before Einstein), but I’m guessing I meant whatever you meant in your post when you wrote,
What did YOU mean by it?
I don’t know what time is. My layman’s understanding is that no one does. I find Hawking’s thesis intriguing, that there is no beginning of time. It may not turn out to be a viable theory, but it is as interesting as anything I’ve encountered in philosophy.
Since I have no idea what time is, and since, at the quantum level, things appear uncaused, I am unwilling to entertain any chain of reasoning that begins with a naive understanding of causation. I simply don’t know and am content to leave it that way.
I have an opinion that is unpopular here. It is that science has subsumed the great questions of philosophy. It hasn’t answered them, but it has taken the lead in generating entailments and testing them.
petrushka,
I don’t know if your view is unpopular here, but it’s quite popular both inside and outside philosophy depts, I think. I myself think that philosophical questions aren’t empirical, but the view that if they’re not, they’re meaningless, has been widely accepted for a long time.
ETA: I probably should have said “meaningless or analytic.”
petrushka,
Hence the qualifier in my statement:
I think that causality continues to make sense outside of time, but there was much debate over that in the Carroll-Craig thread.
Causality makes perfect sense in ordinary life. But when you try to stretch it to the beginning of time or to creation, it breaks down.
I’m just free associating here, but I find it amusing that philosophy seems to have the same problem as science.
Like Newton’s laws, philosophical propositions seem to get ragged under extreme conditions.
petrushka,
I disagree, but you can find my reasons in the Carroll-Craig thread.
That’s why philosophical thought experiments are often quite extreme. Example: a malevolent God gives you a choice — either kill your child or he will destroy the universe. What is the moral thing to do?
I find such artificial moral quandaries uninteresting. I don’t think they are moral questions at all, although they can reveal personality differences.
But you seem to be agreeing that philosophy needs to generate entailments and test them. If, by cause, you mean something that can be tested, then I have no problem.
You have a distinctive reductivist view of logic that I have noticed with other pragmatists. For them, logic is only about mutual compatibility of “propositions”. It’s as if propositions were to them out there somewhere, and we take them from there and we look if they are mutually compatible or not, just a proposition against another.
I do not have this reductivist view. Neither did scholastics have such a view. Propositions have a reason to exist. They are about something. And by analysing the propositions we are not looking only at if the propositions are mutually compatible. We are examining reality that the propositions are about.
Propositions do not exist in a vacuum. They imply an underlying reality. Even false propositions imply an underlying reality – they are false not only by virtue of contradicting some other statement (even so-called true statements contradict each other in that they are different from each other and about different things), but by virtue of distorting or failing to reveal reality.
No. The resolution of a problematic situation does not require the use of intelligence in inquiry (see animals, they get by just fine without it). It’s highly arguable if over the millennia we improved anything, except becoming more efficient at large-scale wars, destroying our natural habitat and deluding ourselves that this is progress.
So you don’t even see the point of the questions that the PSR answers? Then it’s obvious why you don’t see the importance of the PSR either. (See, how the PSR itself answers why not everybody accepts it. My editorialising is perfectly spot on.)
But you know that it will either succeed or not, and when it doesn’t, there’s a reason for it, and you can take precautions to be mindful of the chance of failure. The PSR really goes a long way. All the way, in fact.
Should there be? Looks like your cognitive science is sheer phrenology – for every thought, idea, experience, there must be a corresponding neuron.
And an example of a non-empirical concept would be….?
According to your knowledge, predicate logic has superceded the classical syllogism and the classical syllogism has ceased to be has ceased to be logic. Scholastic arguments need quantifiers in them in order to be considered “clear”. Your load of reading is impressive, but I consider your education tilted.
Interesting.
Yes, it’s been quite clear. And it’s unacceptable.
So, knowledge has no foundation. It’s not about anything. Why have it then? Why do philosophy?
FWIW, I think the best way to take the position you’re endorsing here (which I myself find quite congenial, incidentally) is to do away with propositions entirely. Statements–OK. Expressing facts when they are true–also OK. But do we really need propositions as items that are expressed by statements that do not refer to facts?
Propositions are the sense-data of of the non-perceptual world.
Did the scholastics countenance propositions at all? I’m pretty sure that Abelard didn’t, and I’d guess that Scotus didn’t either. But I could be wrong.
petrushka,
Sure they are. The last sentence in mine is a clue:
If that isn’t a “moral question”, then what is?
Where it can, sure. But I see no reason at all why philosophy cannot address untestable propositions. They might become testable in the future, and even if they don’t, it is useful to examine ideas for logical consistency. Inconsistent ideas can be rejected despite being untestable.
petrushka,
When philosophy-bashers make this sort of argument, they tend to overlook a simple fact: when philosophical questions become testable, they are often reclassified as scientific questions.
If you define a question as scientific and no longer philosphical when it becomes testable, then of course science “takes the lead” in testing it. It’s true by definition, and not because of any weakness in the philosophical approach.
The boundary between philosophy and science is artificial (though it has its uses). Remember, science used to be called “natural philosophy”.
I’d agree that developments in science have outpaced developments in philosophy.
Is this what modern analytic philosophy takes propositions to be? I didn’t know it was that bad.
Logic texts generally take propositions to be what are underivatively true or false. Facts are obviously neither–they’re just….there. Statements don’t cut it, because different statements may say the same thing. ‘Il pleut’ and ‘It’s raining’ for example. So the truth values of statements seem derivative. Anyhow, propositions are handy if you want to do logic. And analytic philosophers have turned out to be MUCH better at that than any scholastics.
So, you aren’t really in any position to cast stones.
ETA: and (boo-hoo, Elizabeth). I wrote a comment agreeing with somethinf Erik wrote and asked him something about a subject he takes an interest in. He responded by attacking my field. Could you please ‘take a stand against aggressive theists on this site, Elizabeth.
I’d say philosophy is becoming a commentary on science.
FWIW, I have two papers circulating at present, and neither is a commentary on science.
And while I’m on this subject, I’d like to point out that KN has been having this long back-and-forth with Erik. KN is absolutely charitable, nice, accommodating, etc., etc. OTOH, Erik is consistently nasty, obnoxious, uncharitible, regularly mischaracterizes KN’s remarks, etc. KN never gets annoyed about this, but less nice, less mature folks (like me) find it really obno. And this I think, is one of the major differences between many of the non-theists and several of the (few) theists on this board. The theists feel THREATENED by any disagreements with their worldviews. I’ll speculate that they depend on their religion for their comfort in the world–especially for alleviating their fears of dying. So every disagreement is a crucial threat to their equilibria.
Meanwhile, since the non-theists don’t get that kind of psychological benefit from their views, most of us (there are exceptions) don’t really give a shit if somebody thinks we’re wrong about this or that. Our lives will go on pretty much as they have, regardless of whether we’re mistaken on this or that issue.
That’s why, IMHO, the theists actually tend to be the aggressors here–and, really EVERYWHERE.
Did it again, didn’t I?
Sorry.
I’m not sure how to interpret that; did you mean
1. Do we really need propositions, (and propositions are defined to be items that are expressed by statements that do not refer to facts?)
or
2. Do we really need propositions to just to have something to cover the case where statements do not refer to facts?
or something else?
Propositions are supposed to be what is expressed by both true and false statements. Many believe that the existence of facts or some other “truth-maker” makes the true ones true. The lack of existence of such facts makes the false ones false.
(Not sure if this answered your question.)
BTW, I think it is this psychological fact that is the real cause of the paucity of theists here. It is difficult for them to have to see posts that threaten stuff that is of paramount importance to them. It has nothing to do with the “aggression” of the non-theists, but everything to do with the views of non-theists being right there in their faces. At UD, the non-theists get gagged and/or banned, here the theists go away on their own.
Right, knew that. But is that what the quote Erik and I picked out is saying?
If it helps, of the two choices you gave me, I prefer door #2.