How to animate a corpse

One of the downsides of being a philosopher is that it makes it harder to suspend disbelief when watching horror flicks.  Plot holes become more glaring and speculations seem wilder when one’s business is looking for fallacies.  On the other hand, there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it; hence there’s no one better placed to find a way to make even the most preposterous yarn seem at least remotely plausible.  A case in point, submitted for your approval: My take on a segment from Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, adapted from H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Cool Air.”  (You can find it on Hulu and YouTube.)  Watching it for the first time recently, I was annoyed by what at first seemed to me an obviously nonsensical twist ending.  On further reflection, there is a way to make sense of it, if one makes the appropriate metaphysical assumptions.

Cal Poly Pomona seminar

This coming Saturday, February 25, I’ll be speaking at Cal Poly Pomona at a seminar on the theme “Does God Exist?” sponsored by the Cal Poly Pomona Catholic Newman Club.  The other speakers are Dr. Ronda Chervin and Fr. John Bullock.  More information is available here.

The metaphysics of romantic love

Traditional natural law theory is often accused of reducing sexual morality to mere anatomy, the proper fitting together of body parts.  The charge is unjust.  To be sure, because we are animals of a sort, the natural ends of our bodily organs cannot fail to be partially definitive of what is good for us.  But because we are rational animals, our bodily goods take on a higher significance, participating in our intellectual and volitional powers.  These goods, the rational and the bodily, cannot be sundered or compartmentalized, because man is a unity, not a ghost in a machine.  Even eating participates in our rationality -- food becomes cuisine, and a meal becomes in the normal case a social occasion.  Sex is no different, and the ends toward which it is aimed by nature are as rational, as distinctively human, as they are bodily and animal.

John Hick (1922-2012)

The Prosblogion reports that philosopher of religion John Hick has died.  I knew Hick twenty years ago, during his final semester at the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University), when I took the last course he taught there.  He was a kind man and one of the best teachers I ever had.  He was also a good, clear writer, and his work in philosophy of religion was informed by a deep knowledge of the history of Christian theology and of the world religions.  His book Evil and the God of Love is one of the most important works on the problem of evil in recent philosophy and theology, and made a great impression on me when I first read it as a young man.

Review of Atkins and Feyerabend

Readers of the Claremont Review of Books may want to look for my review, in the latest issue, of Peter Atkins’ On Being and Paul Feyerabend’s The Tyranny of Science.  Feyerabend’s book (which would more accurately have been called The Tyranny of Scientism) is a small gem.  Atkins’ book, not so much.  At the moment the review is behind a pay wall, but my understanding is that the content will eventually be made available online for free.  So you could wait.  Or you could do the fine folks at CRB a favor and subscribe.

Contraception, subsidiarity, and the Catholic bishops

By now you may have heard that the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic, has issued a mandate that will require Catholic hospitals, universities, and charities to pay for contraceptives, including abortifacients, for their employees -- despite the fact that the Catholic Church teaches that contraception and abortion are intrinsically gravely immoral.  The United States Council of Catholic Bishops has vigorously denounced this act of tyranny, and is working to reverse it.  That is good, and we Catholics should support their efforts.  But it would have been better if the bishops had been equally vigorously upholding Catholic teaching on contraception and subsidiarity over the last several decades, and disciplining Catholics in public life who obstinately promote policies that the Church regards as inherently gravely evil.  Had they done so, it is unlikely that this outrage ever would have been perpetrated in the first place.

Reading Rosenberg, Part VII

Pressing on through Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we come to Rosenberg’s treatment of morality.  Followed out consistently, Rosenberg says, scientism entails nihilism.  As Rosenberg is keen to emphasize, this is not the same as moral relativism or moral skepticism.  It is not the claim that moral truth is relative, or that it is real but unknowable.  Nor is it the claim that everything is morally permitted.  It is a far more radical and disturbing claim than any of these views.  Nihilism, as Rosenberg understands it, is the view that there is no such thing as being “morally permitted” or “morally prohibited” in the first place.  For there is, given Rosenberg’s scientism, no intrinsic value in the world of the sort that is necessary for morality to be intelligible.  Morality -- not just commonsense or traditional morality, not just religious morality, but all morality, morality as such, including any purported secular, liberal, permissive morality -- is therefore an illusion.  

Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics

The long-awaited anthology Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, edited by Tuomas Tahko for Cambridge University Press, is now available.  The good news is that you can save over $7 by ordering it from Amazon.  The bad news is that it will still set you back $91.49.  (Hopefully a paperback version will appear at some point!)  Anyway, you can find the CUP page for the book here, and you can check out a preview via Google Books here.  (Gotta love the symbolism of the cover: A new days dawns as the sunlight of sound metaphysics illuminates the barren wasteland of modern philosophy. Well, that’s my take anyway -- I don’t know if that’s what Tuomas intended!)

Reading Rosenberg, Part VI

Let’s continue our detailed critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In the previous installment, we took a detour to consider how some of Rosenberg’s problematic views in the philosophy of biology are developed more systematically in his book Darwinian Reductionism.  Here we return to the text of Atheist’s Guide and to the subject of religion, though we are not quite done considering what Rosenberg has to say about biological matters.  For he argues that Darwinism not only makes theism unnecessary (as he falsely assumes), but is positively incompatible with it: “You can’t have your Darwinian cake and eat theism too,” insists Rosenberg.  In particular, he thinks Darwinism is incompatible with the idea that God is omniscient.  How so?

Maudlin on the philosophy of cosmology

What’s the difference between a philosopher of science and a scientist who comments on philosophy?  The difference is that the philosopher usually makes sure he’s done his homework before opening his mouth.  I’ve had reason to comment on recent examples of philosophical incompetence provided by Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Stephen Hawking, and others.  (I’ll be commenting on further examples provided by Peter Atkins and Lawrence Krauss in some forthcoming book reviews.)  In an interview over at The Atlantic, philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin comments on Hawking’s ill-informed remarks about the state of contemporary philosophy.  Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow claim in The Grand Design that “philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.”  The gigantic literature that has developed over the last few decades in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of chemistry, and philosophy of science more generally, not to mention all the work in contemporary philosophy of mind informed by neuroscience and computer science, easily falsifies their glib assertion.  Says Maudlin:

Hawking is a brilliant man, but he's not an expert in what's going on in philosophy, evidently.  Over the past thirty years the philosophy of physics has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists, so the situation is actually the exact opposite of what he describes.  I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about.  I mean there's no reason why he should. Why should he spend a lot of time reading the philosophy of physics? I'm sure it's very difficult for him to do.  But I think he's just… uninformed.

Jokes, lies, and jocose lies

Many years ago, arriving at a party at a friend’s house, I noticed a Jaguar parked out front.  The guy who answered the door didn’t know me, but I happened to know through my friend who he was, and that he was the owner of the car.  So I decided to have a little fun.  “Who owns the Jag?” I said with mock distress; “It just got totaled!”  The only thing more priceless than the look of horror on his face was the “Who the hell is this guy?” expression that replaced it when I told him I was kidding.

Was I lying?  No, I was merely joking.  So what’s the difference?

Point of contact

Bruce Charlton identifies six problems for modern Christian apologists, and proposes a solution.  His remarks are all interesting, but I want to focus on the first and most fundamental of the problems he identifies, which is that the metaphysical and moral knowledge that even pagans had in the ancient world can no longer be taken for granted:

Christianity is a much bigger jump from secular modernity than from paganism.  Christianity seemed like a completion of paganism - a step or two further in the same direction and building on what was already there: souls and their survival beyond death, the intrinsic nature of sin, the activities of invisible powers and so on.  With moderns there is nothing to build on (except perhaps childhood memories or alternative realities glimpsed through art and literature).

Video of Science and Faith Conference now online

Last month I gave a talk at the Science and Faith Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, on the theme “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science.”  The other main speakers were Stephen Barr, Michael Behe, William E. Carroll, Jay Richards, Alvin Plantinga, and Benjamin Wiker.  My understanding is that a conference volume containing the papers is planned, but video of most of the talks is now available online here.

You’ll find my own talk below.  (Keep in mind that the camera adds ten pounds.  Lots of gin and pizza can add a few pounds too.)  There’s a lot of new stuff in this paper.  I argue that it is impossible in principle to get from the world to the God of classical theism unless we affirm the act/potency distinction and (therefore) the reality of immanent final causality.  Along the way I deal with Greek atomism, Berkeley’s critique of matter, the nature of divine causality, the existential inertia thesis, the problem with Leibnizian cosmological arguments, the limitations of the Kalām argument, and some other stuff as well.  Jonathan Sanford also makes some important points in his reply, which follows my talk.

TLS in the Telegraph

Christopher Howse of The Daily Telegraph on The Last Superstition: “God’s more than a watchmaker: How a misapprehension of the New Atheists has been exploded.”

Smith, Tollefsen, and Pruss on lying

Last summer, theologian Janet E. Smith published an article in First Things defending the moral legitimacy, under certain circumstances, of telling falsehoods.  In September, Chris Tollefsen and Alex Pruss replied to Smith, and last month Smith responded to Tollefsen and Pruss.  I hate to disagree with Smith, whom I’ve long admired; and as longtime readers know, I’ve had my differences with Tollefsen.  But on this subject, I have to side with Tollefsen and Pruss -- though I also think that some of their arguments are weak, and that they are not entirely fair to Smith.

Hitchens, Dawkins, and Craig

As I have said, I never thought it was realistic to expect a deathbed conversion from Christopher Hitchens.  But for all his ill-informed ranting and raving on the subject of religion, Hitchens was capable of showing a manful, basic decency toward the other side in a way some other New Atheists are not.  Consider these remarks by Hitchens about William Lane Craig, prior to their debate:

And compare them to the cringe-makingly dishonest tactics employed by Richard Dawkins in avoiding the public debate with Craig that he so obviously fears, and to these remarks:

(Hat tip to Peter Byrom for calling my attention to Hitchens’ comments.   Peter is the guy in the second clip asking Dawkins the question about Craig.)

Dawkins is a petty man.  Hitchens was not that.

Reading Rosenberg, Part V

In the previous installment of our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we began to examine what Rosenberg has to say about biological phenomena.  This time I want to take a brief detour and consider some of what Rosenberg says about the subject in his book Darwinian Reductionism.  I noted that while Atheist’s Guide pushes a generally uncompromising eliminative materialist line, Rosenberg resists the “eliminativist” label where issues in the philosophy of biology are concerned, and presents his views in that field as reductionist.  Darwinian Reductionism (a more serious book than Atheist’s Guide, and of independent interest) explains why.

Links of interest

Kathrin Koslicki and Tuomas Tahko are two important contributors to the current revival of interest in neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.  Tahko’s commentary on Koslicki’s book The Structure of Objects is available via his blog.

Mike Flynn, hard SF writer extraordinaire and friend of this blog, is interviewed here.

David Goldman argues that, like Europe, the Islamic world is facing a catastrophic decline in population.  

An interview at Thomistica.net with the executive director of the winery that produces the Aquinas line of wines.

Robert Pasnau discusses Averroës, the decline of Islamic philosophy, and the revival of philosophy in the medieval West.

Metaphysician Stephen Mumford describes the influence superhero comic books had upon him.

New and recent books to watch for: 

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers

James Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness

 

Something new from the late David Stove: What’s Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment [Links to reviews here.  Scroll down.]

Steven A. Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith

Gregory T. Doolan, ed., The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations (HT: Thomistica.net)

Bruce Charlton, another friend of this blog, has recently published Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness. 

Hayek and Popper

My paper “Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind” appears in the latest volume of Advances in Austrian Economics, a special issue edited by Leslie Marsh and devoted to the theme Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology.  The publisher’s web page for the volume is here.  You can find Marsh’s website devoted to the book here, the table of contents here, and Marsh’s introduction to the volume here.  Here’s the abstract of my article (which follows the publisher’s required abstract format):

My Christmas gift to you…

We’ve had some things to say about nothing (here, here, and here), or at least about how some people who themselves claim to have something to say about nothing in fact have nothing, or at least nothing of importance, to say about nothing.  Or something like that.  One thing’s for sure, and that’s that this is a subject about which one had better have a sense of humor.

So, for the blog reader who has everything, here’s a little more about nothing, and on the lighter side.  (Nothing can be pretty heavy, after all.)  For something on nothing written along philosophical but humorous lines, there’s nothing better than P. L. Heath’s article “Nothing” from the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards.  Something also worth reading about nothing is Jim Holt’s “Nothing Ventured,” from the November 1994 issue of Harper’s.  Holt’s book on the subject, Why Does the World Exist?, is due to appear (not out of nothing, presumably) next year.  I’ll no doubt have something to say about it when it does.  (Holt’s little book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, about which I’ve long been meaning to write up a blog post, is terrific.)

No need to thank me.  It was nothing.

The phenomenology of spirits

Human life is tragic.  And while there are, without question, a great many evils we would all wish away in a heartbeat if only we could, to wish away all of them would be to wish away much of what gives our existence depth and meaning.  Every grownup knows that life would lose its savor if it entirely lost its bite.  (Of course, a certain kind of atheist thinks that a really loving God would have made the world a 24/7 Disneyland.  But I was talking about grownups.)  

Nor are the pains always extrinsic to the pleasures.  Some of them are built in; indeed, the greatest earthly delights are never without a sharp sting.  Examples are all around us: Tobacco.  Women.  And whiskey.

Greene on Nozick on nothing

Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality surveys the various speculations about parallel universes on offer in contemporary physics.  Toward the end of the book, Greene discusses a proposal put forward by Robert Nozick in chapter 2 of his book Philosophical Explanations.  (Turns out that Greene took a course with Nozick at the time Nozick was writing the book.)  Greene notes that even if any of the multiverse theories currently discussed by physicists -- those inspired by quantum mechanics, string theory, inflationary cosmology, or what have you -- turned out to be correct, one could always ask why the world is as the theory describes it, rather than some other way.  (This is one reason why it is no good to appeal to such theories as a way of blocking arguments for God as an Uncaused Cause of the world.  We had occasion recently to note some other problems with this atheist strategy.)  But Nozick put forward a version that Greene regards as not subject to this question -- what Greene calls the Ultimate Multiverse theory.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

Christopher Hitchens, who had been suffering from esophageal cancer for over a year, has died.  I think I first came across his work around 1990, at the time his book Blood, Class, and Nostalgia appeared.  (My copy is still around here somewhere.)  I recall seeing him on television -- grilling some George H. W. Bush administration official, perhaps -- and being very impressed by his forceful and formidable intelligence.  I have always been conservative and have usually disagreed with him, but I followed his work with interest from that point on, long before he started to please right-wingers with his well-argued criticisms of the Clintons and support for the Iraq war.  He was almost always smart, funny, and interesting even when he was wrong.

Except on religion, where he was a complete bore and an insufferable hack.  There is no use sugar-coating that fact now that he is gone, and Hitchens was not in any event a fan of the polite obituary.  Religion is the last subject about which to have a tin ear or a closed mind, and Hitchens had both.  Some Catholics seem to have gotten it into their heads over the last year that he might convert -- as if someone who is overtly so very hostile to Catholicism simply must be compensating for a secret longing for it, and is sure to be moved by the prospect of imminent death to let his inhibitions fall away.  This struck me as romantic fantasy, born of too steady a diet of happy “crossing the Tiber” stories.  Sometimes a man has mixed feelings about you, but will accentuate the negative, loath as he is to acknowledge the merits of an adversary.  And sometimes he just hates your guts, and that’s that.  As far as I know, Hitchens was no closer on his deathbed to becoming the next Malcolm Muggeridge than he had been when penning his decidedly un-Muggeridgean book about Mother Teresa.   I very much hope I am wrong.  

The Hitchens jokes in The Last Superstition are the only ones with any affection behind them -- well, some of them have it, anyway.  (No one who knows me or my work could think I regard a crack about one’s affection for the sauce as a serious insult.  Which makes it ironic that the one joke my publisher demanded I remove was a certain jibe about Hitchens’ boozing.)  Of the four horsemen of the New Atheism, Hitchens was the only one I found likable, and the only one possessed of a modicum of wisdom about the human condition, or at least as much wisdom about the human condition as one can have while remaining essentially a man of the Left.  While there was rather too obviously something of the champagne socialist about him, I do not doubt that he had real concern for real human beings -- rather than merely for grotesque abstractions like “the working class” or “humanity” -- and that he showed real moral and even physical courage in defense of what he sincerely took to be the best interests of real human beings.  But love for one’s fellow man, however genuine, is only the second greatest commandment.  

May God comfort his family, and may God have mercy on his soul.

Reading Rosenberg, Part IV

Alex Rosenberg’s dubious use of physics was the focus of the previous installment of our look at his new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In this post we’ll look at his dubious biological claims.  “When physics disposed of purposes,” Rosenberg tells us, “it did so for biology as well.”  Now as I’ve noted before, in fact modern physics has not “disposed” of purposes at all, if what Rosenberg means by this is that physics has somehow established the metaphysical claim that the material world is devoid of objective teleological features.  All it has done is to make the purely methodological move of confining itself to non-teleological descriptions of the phenomena it studies.  This no more shows that teleology doesn’t exist than the fact that I am confining my comments in this post to Rosenberg’s work shows that no other philosophers exist.  Moreover, the non-teleological methodology of modern physics rules out irreducibly teleological explanations in biology only if you buy into Rosenberg’s “physics or bust” brand of scientism, which he has given us no good reason to do.

Radio Free Aquinas

I’ll be on The Frank Pastore Show on KKLA Radio on Thursday, December 8 (tomorrow) from 5 - 6 pm PST to discuss The Last Superstition and Aquinas. 

UPDATE: It was a great show.  The podcast is now available on Frank's site.

Dawkins vs. Dawkins (Updated)

During my Catholic Answers Live interview last Monday, I noted that Richard Dawkins refuses to debate philosopher William Lane Craig.  Dawkins’ representative Sean Faircloth, who was also on the show, did not contradict this.  On the contrary, Faircloth defended Dawkins’ refusal to debate Craig.  Still, after the interview, Patrick Coffin, the host of the show, received the following email from Dawkins:

Dear Mr Coffin

Contrary to what was repeatedly said on your show, I HAVE debated William Lane Craig, in a nationally televised debate in Mexico in 2010, and he was DEEPLY unimpressive.  I hope you will correct the record in your next show.

Richard Dawkins

Now, I certainly want the record to be correct.  But if it isn’t true that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, where could anyone have gotten the idea that he does refuse?  Well, for starters, from the fact that Dawkins published an article in the Guardian just this past October with the title “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig” -- an article reprinted on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and widely discussed online.  That does rather give the impression that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, no?  So, perhaps Dawkins should send himself an email demanding a correction.  And if, in future, he doesn’t want people to get the idea that he refuses to debate with William Lane Craig, he might consider not saying -- loudly, publicly, online and in print -- things like “I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.”

TLS in TMR

The Montréal Review kindly runs a précis of The Last Superstition in their latest edition.  While you’re over there, do browse through TMR’s website -- lots of interesting pieces on philosophy, religion, politics, history, science, literature, you name it.

TLS on radio

I’ll be on the Catholic Answers Live radio show tomorrow at 7 pm ET to discuss The Last Superstition.  (You might be able to find podcasts of earlier radio interviews by following the links you’ll find here, though I believe most of them are no longer available.)

UPDATE: The podcast is now available here.

Palmer on libertarianism

My review of Tom G. Palmer’s recent book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice appears in the latest issue of Reason Papers, now edited by Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja.  (For the full contents of the current issue and of archived issues, go here.)

TLS and formal causes

The website Apologetics 315 kindly reviews my book The Last Superstition.  I’ll let you check out the nice things said about the book for yourself and cut to the reviewer’s main criticism:

Feser convincingly shows throughout the book that Final Causation is inevitable.  Even if someone might say they don't believe in it, no one can really escape it.  But once the Final Cause is firmly established, Feser tries to sneak in the Formal Cause as well, by piggybacking on top of it.  This seemed insufficient.  Based on what Richard Dawkins in particular has written, evolution itself undermines the Formal Cause.  He claimes [sic] that there is no static 'Form', because life is constantly and mindlessly changing.  Although Feser tackled the Final Cause aspect of this line of thinking extremely well, this reviewer would have liked to hear more about why Dawkins and others are mistaken about Formal Causality specifically.  Especially since so much rests on it.

What part of “nothing” don’t you understand?

While we’re on the subject of bad cosmological speculations:  A reader asked me some time back to comment on this little video from New Scientist, which summarizes some of the claims made in an article from the July 23 issue on the theme “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  The magazine has been sitting on my gargantuan “to read” stack for a few months, and I've finally turned to it for some light reading.  And boy is it ever light.  Could anything possibly be as bad as the cringe-making pseudo-scientific amateur philosophizing on this subject we had reason to examine a few months ago?  Oh yes.  Oh my goodness, yes.

Broken Law (Updated)

So, a year after promising a reply to my detailed critique of his “evil god challenge,” Stephen Law’s long-awaited response (see the combox remarks he links to) mostly comes to this: You just don’t get it.  Go re-read my paper and this article by Wes Morriston.

“Courtier’s reply,” anyone?

Though he dismisses them as “awful,” Law does not respond in any substantive way to the points I made in my critique.  He does offer a few brief remarks intended to clarify his position, but they serve only to reinforce, rather than answer, my objections.  I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve said before -- if you haven’t already, go read my original post on Law (since which I’ve written a few other relevant posts, which I’ve linked to here).  But you might recall that the problem with Law’s position is as follows.

Reading Rosenberg, Part III

Continuing our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we come to Rosenberg’s treatment of the question “Where did the big bang come from?”  As serious students of the cosmological argument for the existence of God are aware, most of its defenders historically (including key figures like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibniz) are not arguing for a temporal first cause of the world.  Their claim is not that God must have caused the world to begin (though some of them believe that He did, for independent reasons) but rather that He must continually be sustaining the world in existence, and would have to be doing so even if the universe had no beginning.  But there is a version of the cosmological argument that does argue for a temporal first cause of the world, namely the kalām cosmological argument.  Rosenberg does not explicitly address any specific version of either argument, but he is, in effect, trying to rebut them both.

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.