I should point out that, as an Orthodox Christian, I can't claim that it is possible to prove the existence of God by reasoned arguments, since knowledge of God is innate in humans and prior to any reasoned proof, according to Orthodox doctrine. So these studies in natural theology can't be interpreted as demonstrating a progression from lack of knowledge of God to knowledge of God. They can, on the other hand, be understood as an explication, through the application of reason, of that knowledge of God, which we already possess.
Indeed, the truth of the Orthodox doctrine is confirmed by the fact that, logically, none of the arguments for God's existence are completely successful. This has the interesting consequence that knowledge of God is not only the property of those intelligent enough to understand the arguments. The flip side, of course, is that none of the arguments against God's existence are successful, which leaves the honest student only to accept those arguments that are consonant with the knowledge he already possesses about God, which in turn, as the Orthodox Church maintains, is affirmative. However, free will is respected in acceptance of the proofs is not compelled by logic, and therefore the individual is free to mis-attribute his innate knowledge of God to some other entity, whether a non-physical being with properties different from the God of Orthodoxy, or some physical entity in the visible world.
Monday, May 7, 2012
FIrst report
All right, well I've read the first essay, which turns out to be relatively easy: it's an introduction to the field of natural theology by Charles Taliaferro, together with a critique of arguments against natural theology as a legitimate discipline that have been made by atheistic philosophers and scientists. I'm currently struggling through the second, on Leibnizian cosmological arguments, by Alexander Pruss, and it's extremely slow-going for someone like me who isn't trained in analytic philosophy. I suppose the main lesson I've learned is that natural theology is actually a rather technical subject, and simple statements about whether or not God exists are not trivial ones, despite the assertions of many of today's atheists.
I came across a critique of the essay on the Leibnizian arguments by an evolutionary biologist, and basically it seemed to consist of the following argument: I personally don't understand the argument, therefore it's pointless, and therefore it's false. My impression is that this is the opinion of many biologists, and other scientists, on philosophy in general, but I can imagine how philosophy being used to justify theism would particularly irritate them. But this says more about their prejudices than their capacity for reasoned argument. I can't conclude from my inability to understand quantum physics that quantum physics is false, and similarly one can't conclude from one's inability to understand cosmological arguments for God that those arguments are false.
I feel safe in extrapolating from examples such as this that most atheistic scientists, and the whole "new atheism" popular movement, have simply not engaged with rigorous arguments for God's existence, and that their atheism is merely a prejudice that they feel is superficially justified by evolutionary theory, even though they have never rigorously pursued their atheistic assumptions to their logical end. The prime fallacy in their reasoning, I think, is the following:
New atheists are physicalists, for the most part. They believe the mind has no intrinsic reality, but is merely an emergent phenomenon of the brain (itself a questionable assumption, even given all our current neurological knowledge). The brain itself is the product of evolution, and therefore ultimately all our mental faculties evolved under Darwinian conditions: basically, our minds have evolved to enable our reproductive fitness. The ability to survive is the important feature here, not the ability to apprehend truth. How do these atheists know, then, that our knowledge of biology, physics, or anything, is true? The best they can do is to say that the ability to apprehend truth of itself confers fitness, but many examples can be posited for how an inability to perceive truth might still confer fitness. I can dimly perceive a regress problem here, which I could elaborate on further if I had the philosophical training. However, the main point here is that the new atheists have not rigorously defended the logic of their position.
To conclude: a statement of belief or lack of belief in God is a non-trivial philosophical statement that only be satisfactorily treated within a rigorous philosophical system. It is not intellectually defensible simply to assert that no evidence from science points to God, since that is precisely what many trained philosophers dispute. The scientific disciplines in question, such as biology, are simply not equipped in themselves to treat these questions: the question of the existence of God is not a biological question. If atheistic biologists like Dawkins reject the opinions of those philosophers, they must be prepared to defend their position as a philosophical position, using philosophical tools. Otherwise they are in no better a position, intellectually, than creationists who simply deny the reality of evolution without engaging rigorously with biology.
I came across a critique of the essay on the Leibnizian arguments by an evolutionary biologist, and basically it seemed to consist of the following argument: I personally don't understand the argument, therefore it's pointless, and therefore it's false. My impression is that this is the opinion of many biologists, and other scientists, on philosophy in general, but I can imagine how philosophy being used to justify theism would particularly irritate them. But this says more about their prejudices than their capacity for reasoned argument. I can't conclude from my inability to understand quantum physics that quantum physics is false, and similarly one can't conclude from one's inability to understand cosmological arguments for God that those arguments are false.
I feel safe in extrapolating from examples such as this that most atheistic scientists, and the whole "new atheism" popular movement, have simply not engaged with rigorous arguments for God's existence, and that their atheism is merely a prejudice that they feel is superficially justified by evolutionary theory, even though they have never rigorously pursued their atheistic assumptions to their logical end. The prime fallacy in their reasoning, I think, is the following:
New atheists are physicalists, for the most part. They believe the mind has no intrinsic reality, but is merely an emergent phenomenon of the brain (itself a questionable assumption, even given all our current neurological knowledge). The brain itself is the product of evolution, and therefore ultimately all our mental faculties evolved under Darwinian conditions: basically, our minds have evolved to enable our reproductive fitness. The ability to survive is the important feature here, not the ability to apprehend truth. How do these atheists know, then, that our knowledge of biology, physics, or anything, is true? The best they can do is to say that the ability to apprehend truth of itself confers fitness, but many examples can be posited for how an inability to perceive truth might still confer fitness. I can dimly perceive a regress problem here, which I could elaborate on further if I had the philosophical training. However, the main point here is that the new atheists have not rigorously defended the logic of their position.
To conclude: a statement of belief or lack of belief in God is a non-trivial philosophical statement that only be satisfactorily treated within a rigorous philosophical system. It is not intellectually defensible simply to assert that no evidence from science points to God, since that is precisely what many trained philosophers dispute. The scientific disciplines in question, such as biology, are simply not equipped in themselves to treat these questions: the question of the existence of God is not a biological question. If atheistic biologists like Dawkins reject the opinions of those philosophers, they must be prepared to defend their position as a philosophical position, using philosophical tools. Otherwise they are in no better a position, intellectually, than creationists who simply deny the reality of evolution without engaging rigorously with biology.
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