Reading Rosenberg, Part II

We saw in part I of this series that Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is less about atheism than it is about scientism, the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality.  This is so in two respects.  First, Rosenberg’s atheism is just one implication among others of his scientism, and the aim of the book is to spell out what else follows from scientism, rather than to say much in defense of atheism.  Second, that it follows from his scientism is thus the only argument Rosenberg really gives for atheism.  Thus, most of what he has to say ultimately rests on his scientism.  If he has no good arguments for scientism, then he has no good arguments either for atheism or for most of the other, more bizarre, conclusions he defends in the book.

So, does Rosenberg have any good arguments for scientism?  He does not.  In fact, he has only one argument for it, and it is quite awful.

Crickets still chirping... (Updated)

Over a year ago, in the combox of a post on another topic, a reader asked for my opinion of Stephen Law’s “evil-god challenge” to theism.  In the same combox, I dashed off some brief remarks in response.  To my surprise, Law called attention to my off-the-cuff remarks over at his own blog, and offered a testy response in my combox.  He suggested that I read his article on the subject and told his own readers: “I have rattled [Feser’s] cage with a comment… Wonder if he'll respond?”

Well, I did read his article and I did respond both to the article and to his combox remarks, non-polemically and in detail.   Over a year later, I am still waiting for Law’s reply – a reply he said he would write.  Wonder if he’ll ever get to it?

Reading Rosenberg, Part I

I called attention in an earlier post to my review in First Things of Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  Here I begin a series of posts devoted to examining Rosenberg’s book in more detail than I had space for in the review.  The book is worthy of such attention because Rosenberg sees more clearly than any other prominent atheist just how extreme are the implications of the scientism on which modern atheists tend to base their position.  Indeed, it is amazing how similar his conclusions are to those I argue follow from scientism in chapters 5 and 6 of The Last Superstition.  The difference is that whereas I claim that these consequences constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that lead to them, Rosenberg regards them as “pretty obvious” and “totally unavoidable” truths about an admittedly “rough reality,” which atheists should embrace despite its roughness.  How rough is it?  Writes Rosenberg:

Science -- especially physics and biology -- reveals that reality is completely different from what most people think.  It’s not just different from what credulous religious believers think.  Science reveals that reality is stranger than even many atheists recognize. (p. ix)

and

The right answers are ones that even some scientists have not been comfortable with and have sought to avoid or water down. (p. xii)

Magic versus metaphysics

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Larry Niven

Some atheists are intellectually serious.  Some are not.  There are several infallible marks by which an atheist might show himself to be intellectually unserious.  Thinking “What caused God?” is a good objection to the cosmological argument is one.  Being impressed by the “one god further” objection is another.  A third is the suggestion that theism entails a belief in “magical beings.”  Anyone who says this either doesn’t know what theism is or doesn’t know what magic is.  Or (no less likely) doesn’t much care one way or the other – it’s another handy straw man, useful for those who want to believe that theistic arguments are manifestly fallacious or otherwise silly, or who find it rhetorically useful to pretend that they are.

Tollefsen channels Rawls

Over at Public Discourse, Chris Tollefsen has replied to my most recent contribution to our ongoing exchange over the death penalty.  (Go here for links to the earlier parts of the exchange.)  Tollefsen claims that I have not adequately addressed his arguments against capital punishment.  Echoing liberal political philosopher John Rawls’s conception of justice as “political, not metaphysical,” Tollefsen insists that just punishment, in particular, ought to be construed as political rather than metaphysical.  That is to say, it is a means of “restor[ing] a kind of equality between citizens that the criminal’s overly self-assertive act(s) of will had disrupted,” and not a matter of inflicting on criminals something that they “deserve… in some absolute sense.”  The trouble with my position, Tollefsen says, is that it is metaphysical, a matter of looking at justice “from the point of view of the universe, not of the state.”

Review of Rosenberg

My review of Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality appears in the November issue of First Things.  (Unfortunately, the review is behind a pay wall, or I’d link to it.)  If you want a sense of what the book is like, first consider all the ludicrous implications that I argue follow from scientism in chapters 5 and 6 of The Last Superstition; and then consider someone taking (at least some of) those implications, not as a reductio ad absurdum of scientism, but as a set of surprising consequences that every atheist should happily embrace.   Whatever else one could say about him, Rosenberg is more consistent than other naturalists.  For that reason the book deserves a wide readership.  Those beholden to scientism should know that they are committing themselves to a position that is absolutely bizarre, and indeed utterly incoherent. 

We have had reason to discuss Rosenberg’s ideas before (here, here, and here), when considering an essay of his that first sketched out the themes he now develops at greater length in the book.  We will have reason to consider them further, for I intend in a series of future posts to analyze the book in greater detail than I had space for in the review.  Stay tuned.

Weekend reading

A few articles worthy of your attention: R. J. Stove, conservative writer and son of the late conservative atheist philosopher David Stove, writes movingly of his parents and of his conversion to Catholicism.

Some Aristotelian metaphysics: David Oderberg’s article “Essence and Properties,” from the latest issue of Erkenntnis.  

More metaphysics: A review of philosopher Crawford Elder’s important new book Familiar Objects and Their Shadows, a defense of commonsense realism.

In his recent book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, atheist polymath philosopher Raymond Tallis takes out the “neurotrash” that passes these days for the scientific study of human nature.  One response to Tallis cited in the Chronicle article stands out for its sheer comedy value: 

Perhaps the harshest reaction comes from [Daniel] Dennett, an influential U.S. philosopher whose books square human life with science.  He sympathizes with Tallis's concerns.  But what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—"can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them," Dennett tells me.

"Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature," says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.  "He's not taking his opponents seriously.  He's sneering instead of arguing.  He's ignoring the complexities of the arguments.  So he's not really doing philosophy.  He's doing propaganda." 

Why, one would almost think Dennett was talking about the author of Breaking the Spell -- who, as someone once showed, has nothing to offer in the way of criticism of the philosophical arguments for theism except oversimplification and caricature. 

This sort of hypocritical whining is nothing new from Dennett.  He may just be the most self-unaware human being on the planet.

Tollefsen on capital punishment

My article “Punishment, Proportionality, and the Death Penalty,” a reply to Christopher Tollefsen’s latest piece on capital punishment, is now up over at Public Discourse.  (If you’re trying to keep track of the recent debate: Tollefsen’s earlier Public Discourse article on capital punishment can be found here, and I replied to it here, with a follow-up here.  Steven Long replied to Tollefsen’s earlier piece here.  I have also discussed Catholic teaching on capital punishment here and here.)

Upcoming conferences

St. Louis University will be hosting the American Catholic Philosophical Association annual meeting this year, on October 28 -30.  I’ll be presenting a paper on “The Medieval Principle of Motion and the Modern Principle of Inertia” at the session of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.

The Franciscan University of Steubenville will be hosting a conference on the theme Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?, on December 2-3.  Speakers include Stephen Barr, Michael Behe, William E. Carroll, Jay Richards, Alvin Plantinga, Benjamin Wiker, and me.  My paper will be on the theme “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not Natural Science.”

Harper on original sin

In the last of my recent posts on original sin, I cited Thomas Harper’s long out-of-print little book The Immaculate Conception as containing a very useful discussion of the doctrine.  The book is actually an edited excerpt from Harper’s larger 1866 work Peace Through the Truth, or Essays connected with Dr. Pusey’s Eirenicon.  A reader, FrH, has kindly alerted me that the section from Peace Through the Truth containing Harper’s discussion of original sin is available online here.  (Take note of the “Transcriber’s note” at the beginning of the passage.)

Best book titles ever

Well, the best of those I see around me on the bookshelves in my study, anyway.  And by “best” I don’t mean “most profound” or “most helpful in conveying the book’s contents.”  I mean “funniest.”  But I don’t mean funniest among the titles of books that are themselves intended to be funny.  I mean funniest among the titles of “serious” books.  The list is surprisingly short.  Serious writers, it seems, just don’t give funny names to serious books.  Go figure.

On rehabilitation and execution

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should take a look at Steven Long’s response to Chris Tollefsen’s recent arguments against capital punishment.  Tollefsen has now replied to my own criticisms of his views, and I will respond to his latest, and address some of the issues Long raises, in a later post.  In this post I want to respond to some questions raised by a reader of my article on Tollefsen.

In defense of capital punishment

I have a new piece up over at Public Discourse responding to a recent critique of capital punishment by Christopher Tollefsen.  (In earlier posts I have defended the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment from the point of view of traditional natural law theory and Catholic moral theology.  In this post I criticize the failure of some churchmen to present the entirety of Catholic teaching on this subject, and to convey thereby the false impression that the Church’s attitude toward capital punishment is “liberal.”  In this post, I criticize an earlier piece by Tollefsen.)

Modern biology and original sin, Part II

In part I of this series (and in a response to critics of part I) I addressed the question of whether monogenism of the sort entailed by the doctrine of original sin is compatible with modern biology.  I have argued that it is.  In this post I want to address the question of whether modern biology is consistent with the claim that the ancestors of all human beings transmitted the stain of original sin to their descendents via propagation rather than mere imitation.  The correct answer to this question, I maintain, is also in the affirmative.  Critics of the doctrine of original sin often suppose that it claims that there is something like an “original sin gene” passed down from parents to offspring.  And this, of course, seems highly dubious from a biological point of view.  They also suppose that to say that Adam’s descendents inherited from him the stain of original sin is like saying that Al Capone’s descendents somehow inherited from him his guilt for the crimes he committed, and deserve to be punished for those crimes.  And this too seems absurd and unjust.  But both of these objections rest on egregious misunderstandings of the doctrine.

Pop culture roundup

Two or three of my readers have expressed interest in my posts on movies, popular music, and pop culture in general.  And I’ll bet at least twice that many are interested.  So, for you fans of pretentious pop culture analysis, here’s a roundup of relevant posts and articles.  For the most part I’ve included only those that are fairly substantive.

Some varieties of atheism

A religion typically has both practical and theoretical aspects.  The former concern its moral teachings and rituals, the latter its metaphysical commitments and the way in which its practical teachings are systematically articulated.  An atheist will naturally reject not only the theoretical aspects, but also the practical ones, at least to the extent that they presuppose the theoretical aspects.  But different atheists will take different attitudes to each of the two aspects, ranging from respectful or even regretful disagreement to extreme hostility.  And distinguishing these various possible attitudes can help us to understand how the New Atheism differs from earlier varieties.

Monkey in your soul?

Before we get to part II of my series on modern biology and original sin, I want briefly to reply to some of the responses made to part I.  Recall that my remarks overlapped with points recently made by Mike Flynn and by Kenneth Kemp in his American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis” (which, I have since discovered, is available online).  If you haven’t yet read Flynn and Kemp, you should do so before reading anything else on this subject.  As they argue, there is no conflict between the genetic evidence that modern humans descended from a population of at least several thousand individuals, and the theological claim that modern humans share a common pair of ancestors.  For suppose we regard the pair in question as two members of this larger group who, though genetically related to the others, are distinct from them in having immaterial souls, which (from the point of view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and Catholic theology) are a necessary condition for the possession of genuine intellectual powers and can be only be imparted directly by God.  Only this pair and their descendents, to whom God also imparts souls and thus intellects, would count as human in the metaphysical and theologically relevant sense, even if the other members of the original larger group are human in the purely biological sense.  As Kemp writes:

Ten years on

I had been out of grad school for a couple of years, but I was still keeping grad school hours.  Having stayed up very late the night before and not having to teach that day, I was exhausted and intent on sleeping in.  So when my wife tried to wake me before leaving for work, I barely registered what she was telling me.  World Trade Center?  Airplanes?  What the hell is she talking about?  Doesn’t she know I’m not going to get anything done today if I don’t get some rest?  I rolled over, weariness, irritation, and confusion drowning curiosity, and fell back asleep.

Some time later I woke up again.  The edge had been taken off exhaustion and curiosity took control.  As I lay there rubbing the sleep from my eyes I tried to remember.  What was it that she had said?  Something weird.  I got up and turned on the TV. 

Modern biology and original sin, Part I

Our friend John Farrell has caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with his recent Forbes piece on modern biology and the doctrine of original sin.  Citing some remarks by Jerry Coyne, John tells us that he agrees with Coyne’s view that the doctrine is “easily falsified by modern genetics,” according to which “modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals” rather than just two individuals.  Those who have responded to John’s piece include Michael Liccione, Bill Vallicella (here and here), James Chastek, and Mike Flynn. 

Several things puzzle me about John’s article.  The first, of course, is why he would take seriously anything Jerry Coyne has to say about theology.  (We’ve seen ample evidence that Coyne is an ignoramus on the subject -- some of the relevant links are gathered here.)  The second is why John seems to think that the falsification of the doctrine of original sin is something the Catholic Church could “adapt” to.  (John’s article focuses on Catholicism.)  After all, the doctrine is hardly incidental.  It is de fide -- presented as infallible teaching -- and it is absolutely integral to the structure of Catholic theology.  If it were wrong, then Catholic theology would be incoherent and the Church’s teaching authority would be undermined.  Hence, to give it up would implicitly be to give up Catholicism, not merely “adapt” it to modern science.

Movies, comic books, and sequential art

I had occasion recently to take a few of the kids to see Captain America: The First Avenger.  As a lifelong movie, comic book, and science fiction fan I was preprogrammed to like it so long as it met the minimal standards a comic book flick is expected to live up to these days.  And I think the movie not only met but exceeded them.  Characters like Captain America and the Red Skull can look striking on a comic book cover, if you’re into that sort of thing.  (Some nice examples from over the decades can be found here, here, and here.)  But getting them to look anything but ridiculous in flesh and blood is very hard to pull off.  Yet the filmmakers did it.  Indeed, what I found most remarkable about the movie was just how gorgeous the thing looked up there on the big screen.  Its art deco, pulp magazine aesthetic conveys an almost completely convincing science-fiction version of the 1940s.  (I say “almost” only because I thought the Hydra agents’ uniforms and weaponry could have been given a somewhat more retro look.)  Similar things have been done in the Indiana Jones movies, The Rocketeer, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but Captain America raises the bar.

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism, Part III

Bill Vallicella and I have been debating Aquinas’s hylemorphic dualism (HD).  Earlier posts (here, here, here, and here) have focused on Aquinas’s motivations for combining hylemorphism and dualism.  As we continue Bill and Ed’s Excellent Adventure, the discussion turns to questions about the internal coherence of the view.  In a new post, Bill summarizes what he takes to be one of the main problems with HD.  Give it a read, then come back.

Development versus decay

A reader asks an interesting question: 

You write often of the loss of Aristotelian metaphysics (specifically as adopted and developed by St. Thomas) and all the modern philosophical "problems" that have arisen as a result. Discussions of God's existence, the mind-body relation, ethics, etc. all become "problematic" when we remove formal and final causality.  I find this amazingly effective in answering modern arguments because it is often their metaphysical presuppositions that cause problems in the first place.

My question is: were the concepts of final and formal causality present in the Patristic era?  As I understand it, most of the Church Fathers were only marginally (if at all?) influenced by Aristotle, and were typically more dependent on Platonic or Neo-platonic metaphysics.  Does this mean that up until the time of Aquinas, when Aristotle is "rediscovered" in the West, that Christian philosophy was incoherent because it depended more on a Platonic metaphysics than an Aristotelian metaphysics? 

Addendum

I want to call my readers' attention to Eric MacDonald’s blog post of earlier today, and in particular to the combox discussion it has generated.  As you will see from the latter (scroll down to my exchange with him), MacDonald has graciously and honorably offered to bury the hatchet, and I very happily accept his offer.  As you will also see, he and I and some of his readers have been having a fruitful discussion. 

A final word on Eric MacDonald

That Eric MacDonald’s criticisms of my book The Last Superstition are devoid of any merit whatsoever is clear from the evidence adduced in the two posts I have devoted to him already (here and here).  If there is any lingering doubt, the present post will dispel it.  A slightly chastened MacDonald has now himself admitted (in what he says will be his final word on my book) that he “was not comfortable with [the] conclusions” he had drawn after his first attempt to deal with the substance of my arguments, that he has “misunderstood” at least some of those arguments, and that his contemptible Himmler comparison “was perhaps over the top.”  Yet he commends to us his final feeble effort to respond to my arguments, still appears to cling to for the most part to his earlier criticisms, and retracts none of the nastiness he has relentlessly directed towards me personally.  (To be sure, he thinks this nastiness is justified by the polemical tone of my book and by my aggressive response to his nastiness.  It is not, for reasons I will get to presently.) 

Eric MacDonald’s assisted intellectual suicide

Having embarrassed himself by answering serious philosophical arguments with cheap ad hominems and other blatant fallacies, Eric MacDonald has now back-pedaled and decided that maybe he ought to address the substance of those arguments after all.  Unfortunately, he has succeeded only in further discrediting himself.  For MacDonald’s treatment of my criticisms of Daniel Dennett in my book The Last Superstition is an absolute disgrace.  He can be acquitted of the charge of grave intellectual dishonesty only on pain of conviction for gross incompetence.  Indeed, it is quite clear that MacDonald simply doesn’t understand the philosophical arguments he is dealing with.  Hence he prefers instead to criticize a few sarcastic quips of mine while ignoring the substantive arguments that occur in the passages from which he took them.  When that ploy doesn’t work, MacDonald “translates” my arguments into something he thinks he can handle, in the process mangling them beyond recognition.

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism, Part II

Bill Vallicella has kindly replied to my response to his recent post on hylemorphic dualism.  The reader will recall that Bill had suggested in his original post that, given the apparent tension between hylemorphism and dualism, Aquinas’s hylemorphic dualism seems ad hoc and motivated by Christian theological concerns rather than by philosophical considerations.  I argued that this charge cannot be sustained.  Whether or not one ultimately accepts hylemorphic dualism, if one agrees that there are serious arguments both for hylemorphism and for dualism, then -- especially when we add independent metaphysical considerations such as the Scholastic principle that the way a thing acts reflects the manner in which it exists -- one should at least acknowledge that hylemorphic dualism has a philosophical rationale independent of any Christian theological concerns.  It seems Bill still disagrees, but I do not see how his latest post gives any support to his original charge.

Argumentum ad Himmlerum

Want to be a New Atheist blogger?  It’s easy!  Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Launch an unhinged, fallacious attack on your opponent, focusing your attention on arguments he has never given.

Step 2: Studiously ignore the arguments he actually has given.

Step 3: Declare victory and exchange high fives with your fellow New Atheists, as they congratulate you for your brilliance and erudition.

Step 4: When your opponent calls attention to this farcical procedure, accuse him of making unhinged, fallacious attacks on you.  Throw in the Myers Shuffle for good measure. 

Step 5: Exchange further high fives with your fellow New Atheists.

Step 6: Repeat 1 - 5 until your disconnect from reality is complete.

The metaphysics of Vertigo

[T]here are six people involved in every encounter: the two people as they see themselves, the two as they are seen by the other, and the two as they really are, whatever that is.

Charles Barr on Hitchcock’s Vertigo

I may be a hopeless reactionary when it comes to politics, philosophy, and theology, but I’m pretty conventional when it comes to movies.  What I think is good is pretty much what everyone else thinks is good.  Well, to a large extent, anyway.  Star Wars?  Sorry, can’t stand it.  David Lynch?  Ugh.  But Citizen Kane, Blade Runner, The Third Man, The Godfather and its first sequel, High Noon, even 2001: A Space Odyssey, ending and all -- yes, they deserve the hype.  And then there’s Vertigo.  The mystery genre may be the greatest of film genres, and Vertigo is certainly the greatest of mystery flicks.   AFI says so, so there.  (On the other hand, they put Lynch on the list.)   And as everyone knows, the reason it is the greatest mystery movie is not because of the murder, but because of the woman.

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism

Hylemorphic dualism is the approach to the mind-body problem taken by Aquinas and the Thomist tradition more generally.  (The label may have been coined by David Oderberg, who defends the view in an important paper and in his book Real Essentialism.  “Hylemorphic” is sometimes spelled “hylomorphic,” though the former spelling is arguably preferable since it is closer to the Greek root hyle.)  The view holds both that the soul is the substantial form of the living human body (that is the “hylemorphic” part) and that it is unique among the forms of material things in being subsistent, that is, capable of surviving beyond the death of the body (that is the “dualism” part).  Our friend Bill Vallicella has recently put forward the following criticism of the view:

HPR on TLS

In the latest issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Fr. Kenneth Baker kindly reviews my book The Last Superstition.  From the review: 

Feser offers a brilliant, careful analysis of the New Atheists’ position and shows that it is based on old philosophical errors and manifests a high degree of intellectual dishonesty, philosophical shallowness, and massive ignorance in the fields of history and theology.

Edward Feser knows what he is talking about, since he used to be an atheist.  But after studying the arguments of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas he came to see that materialism and naturalism cannot survive serious rational analysis…

If you are concerned about the increase of atheism in America and would like to understand the false arguments for it and how to refute them, I suggest you give yourself a treat by reading this challenging book.

On some alleged quantifier shift fallacies, Part III

We’ve been looking at alleged cases of the quantifier shift fallacy committed by prominent philosophers.  We’ve seen that Aquinas and Locke can both be acquitted of the charge.  Let’s now look at the common accusation that Aristotle commits the fallacy in the Nicomachean Ethics.  Harry Gensler tells us that “Aristotle argued, ‘Every agent acts for an end, so there must be some (one) end for which every agent acts.’”  But what does Aristotle actually say?  And need it be interpreted the way Gensler interprets it?

Kenny on TLS in TLS

Sir Anthony Kenny very kindly reviews The Last Superstition in the July 22 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.  From the review:

Edward Feser’s book The Last Superstition sets out to give a definitive death blow to all of [the New Atheists] at once.  

In this good cause he does not hesitate to use the same weapons as his atheist adversaries: tendentious paraphrase, imputation of bad faith, outright insult.  Fortunately, the book contains far more argument than invective, and in order to keep the reader’s attention Feser has no need to descend to vulgar abuse, because he has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable.  The book fascinates because of the boldness of its metaphysical claims combined with the density of the arguments offered in their support.  One of its major merits is to present a forceful revisionist picture of the entire history of Western philosophy.

Rosenhouse redux

In fairness to Jason Rosenhouse, I want to call attention to some comments he makes in the combox of the recent post of his to which I replied earlier today.  First, in reply to some comments by Vincent Torley, Rosenhouse makes some remarks which include the following:

I intend to read [Feser’s book].  For what it's worth, I've actually enjoyed some of Feser's purely philosophical posts in the past.

Considering the heat that has characterized our exchange, this is very gracious, and I appreciate the kind words.  Unfortunately, he also goes on to say:

Grow up or shut up

I’ve pointed out that the argument so many atheists like to attack when they purport to refute the cosmological argument -- namely “Everything has a cause; so the universe has a cause; so God exists” or variants thereof -- is a straw man, something no prominent advocate of the cosmological argument has ever put forward.  You won’t find it in Aristotle, you won’t find it in Aquinas, you won’t find it in Leibniz, and you won’t find it in the other main proponents of the argument.  Therefore, it is unfair to pretend that refuting this silly argument (e.g. by asking “So what caused God?”) is relevant to determining whether the cosmological argument has any force.    

I’ve also noted other respects in which the cosmological argument is widely misrepresented.  Now, in response to these points, it seems to me that what a grownup would say is something like this: “Fair enough.  I agree that atheists should stop attacking straw men.  They should avoid glib and ill-informed dismissals.  They should acquaint themselves with what writers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. actually said and focus their criticisms on that.”  But it would appear that Jason Rosenhouse and Jerry Coyne are not grownups.  Their preferred response is to channel Pee-wee Herman:  “I know you are, but what am I?” is, for them, all the reply that is needed to the charge that New Atheists routinely misrepresent the cosmological argument.  

New ACPQ article

My article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways” appears in the latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  Here is the abstract:  

The “existential inertia” thesis holds that, once in existence, the natural world tends to remain in existence without need of a divine conserving cause.  Critics of the doctrine of divine conservation often allege that its defenders have not provided arguments in favor of it and against the rival doctrine of existential inertia.  But in fact, when properly understood, the traditional theistic arguments summed up in Aquinas’s Five Ways can themselves be seen to be (or at least to imply) arguments against existential inertia and in favor of divine conservation.  Moreover, they are challenging arguments, to which defenders of the existential inertia thesis have yet seriously to respond. 

The article is a supplement of sorts to the discussion of the Five Ways contained in chapter 3 of Aquinas.  It sets out the arguments in a more formal manner and is concerned less with Aquinas’s own way of stating them than with the way they have been developed and refined within the broader Thomistic tradition down to the present day.  As the abstract indicates, the paper is particularly concerned to show how each of the Five Ways – or rather, how each of the general patterns of argument that the Five Ways represent – when followed out consistently implies that the world could not in principle continue for an instant without the conserving action of God.  In the course of defending this claim the paper also responds to the contrary arguments of writers like Mortimer Adler, John Beaudoin, J. L. Mackie, and Bede Rundle.

Does morality depend on God? (Updated)

Not the way many people think it does.  A reader asks me to comment on this post by Trent Dougherty over at The Prosblogion.  Dougherty notes that if someone accepts Aristotelian essentialism, it seems to follow that he ought to allow that morality can have a foundation even if there is no God.  For from an Aristotelian point of view, what is good for a human being, and thus how we ought to treat human beings, is determined by human nature, and human nature is what it is whether or not there is a God.  Well, I think Dougherty is more or less right about that much, though I would qualify what he says in ways I’ll explain presently.  And as I’ve argued elsewhere (e.g. in The Last Superstition), it isn’t atheism per se that threatens the very possibility of morality, at least not directly.  Rather, what threatens it is the mechanistic or anti-teleological (and thus anti-Aristotelian) conception of the natural world that modern atheists are generally committed to, and which they (falsely) assume to have been established by modern science.

So you think you understand the cosmological argument?

Most people who comment on the cosmological argument demonstrably do not know what they are talking about.  This includes all the prominent New Atheist writers.  It very definitely includes most of the people who hang out in Jerry Coyne’s comboxes.  It also includes most scientists.  And it even includes many theologians and philosophers, or at least those who have not devoted much study to the issue.  This may sound arrogant, but it is not.  You might think I am saying “I, Edward Feser, have special knowledge about this subject that has somehow eluded everyone else.”  But that is NOT what I am saying.  The point has nothing to do with me.  What I am saying is pretty much common knowledge among professional philosophers of religion (including atheist philosophers of religion), who – naturally, given the subject matter of their particular philosophical sub-discipline – are the people who know more about the cosmological argument than anyone else does. 

In particular, I think that the vast majority of philosophers who have studied the argument in any depth – and again, that includes atheists as well as theists, though it does not include most philosophers outside the sub-discipline of philosophy of religion – would agree with the points I am about to make, or with most of them anyway.  Of course, I do not mean that they would all agree with me that the argument is at the end of the day a convincing argument.  I just mean that they would agree that most non-specialists who comment on it do not understand it, and that the reasons why people reject it are usually superficial and based on caricatures of the argument.  Nor do I say that every single self-described philosopher of religion would agree with the points I am about to make.  Like every other academic field, philosophy of religion has its share of hacks and mediocrities.  But I am saying that the vast majority of philosophers of religion would agree, and again, that this includes the atheists among them as well as the theists.

Tom and Jerry

Let’s give Jerry Coyne credit.  He asked for advice on what to read in order to understand what theists take to be the rational foundations of their position, I gave him some advice, and now he says he’ll take it.  And so, Jerry Coyne will soon meet Thomas Aquinas.  True, on the subject of the cosmological argument, Coyne still misses the point, which is that the pat “counterarguments” hacks like Dawkins give are superficial and directed at straw men.  Nor did I say he “must read many books” to see at least that much: Just reading a book like my Aquinas would suffice.  The point of my other references was merely to indicate where he might look if he wants to pursue the subject more thoroughly than just relying on little old me.

Do I expect Coyne to become a theist after studying Aquinas, or even to admit that the cosmological argument is more formidable than New Atheist types give it credit for?  Not for a moment – any more than Coyne expects that “Intelligent Design” theorists (my longtime sparring partners) would concede an inch even after reading one of the “one stop” books Coyne cites as sufficient to establish Darwinism.   

But, again, Coyne deserves credit for at least going through the motions, which is more than Dawkins, Myers, et al. bother to do.  In New Atheist Land, that’s a kind of progress.  (And by the way, Prof. Coyne, I’m not the “Skeptic” in the little dialogue presented in my previous post.  I’m the “Scientist.”)

A clue for Jerry Coyne

A reader alerts me that Jerry Coyne, whose philosophical efforts we had occasion recently to evaluate, has been reading some theology – “under the tutelage of the estimable Eric MacDonald,” Coyne tells us.  And who is Eric MacDonald?  A neutral party to the debate between theologians and New Atheist types like Coyne, right?  Well, not exactly.  Turns out MacDonald is “an ex-Anglican priest” who has been “wean[ed]… from his faith,” and who claims that “religious beliefs and doctrines not only have no rational basis, but are, in fact, a danger to rational, evidence-based thinking.”

Give Coyne’s post a read, then come back.  Now, you might recall my fanciful dialogue from a few months back between a scientist and a bigoted science-bashing skeptic.  The point was to try, through analogy, to help New Atheist types see how they appear to others, and how irrational and ill-informed they really are.  (If you haven’t seen the dialogue, go read that too, then come back.)  To see what is wrong with Coyne’s latest remarks, we can imagine that that dialogue might continue as follows:

On some alleged quantifier shift fallacies, Part II

Continuing our look at alleged cases of the quantifier shift fallacy committed by prominent philosophers, let’s turn to an example from John Locke.  As we’ve seen, Harry Gensler accuses Locke of reasoning as follows: “Everything is caused by something, so there must be some (one) thing that caused everything.”  What does Locke actually say?  The relevant passage is from Book IV, Chapter 10 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

[Man] knows also that nothing cannot produce a being; therefore something must have existed from eternity.  In the next place, man knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right angles.  If a man knows not that nonentity, or the absence of all being, cannot be equal to two right angles, it is impossible he should know any demonstration in Euclid.  If, therefore, we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning; and what had a beginning must be produced by something else.