The road from atheism

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism.  I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition.  A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14.  Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good.  Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.  Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that.  Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends. 

Cosmological argument roundup

A year ago today I put up a post with the title “So you think you understand the cosmological argument?”  It generated quite a bit of discussion, and has since gotten more page views than any other post in the history of this blog.  To celebrate its first anniversary -- and because the argument, rightly understood (as it usually isn’t), is the most important and compelling of arguments for classical theism -- I thought a roundup of various posts relevant to the subject might be in order.

Classical theism roundup

Classical theism is the conception of God that has prevailed historically within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Western philosophical theism generally.  Its religious roots are biblical, and its philosophical roots are to be found in the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian traditions.  Among philosophers it is represented by the likes of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna.  I have emphasized many times that you cannot properly understand the arguments for God’s existence put forward by classical theists, or their conception of the relationship between God and the world and between religion and morality, without an understanding of how radically classical theism differs from the “theistic personalism” or “neo-theism” that prevails among some prominent contemporary philosophers of religion.  (Brian Davies classifies Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and Charles Hartshorne as theistic personalists.  “Open theism” would be another species of the genus, and I have argued that Paley-style “design arguments” have at least a tendency in the theistic personalist direction.)   

Oderberg updated

David Oderberg has revamped his website and given it a new location.  Update your bookmarks accordingly.  Take note also of his new Metaphysica article, “Hume, the Occult, and the Substance of the School.”  Here’s the abstract:

I have not been able to locate any critique of Hume on substance by a Schoolman, at least in English, dating from Hume's period or shortly thereafter.  I have, therefore, constructed my own critique as an exercise in ‘post facto history’.  This is what a late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century Scholastic could, would, and should have said in response to Hume's attack on substance should they have been minded to do so.  That no one did is somewhat mysterious.  My critique is precisely in the language of the period, using solely the conceptual resources available to a Schoolman at that time.  The arguments, however, are as sound now as they were then, and in this sense the paper performs a dual role—contributing to the defence of substance contra Hume, and filling, albeit two hundred years or so too late, a gap in the historical record.

Barr on quantum mechanics

Over at Big Questions Online, physicist Stephen Barr addresses the question of the relationship between quantum physics and theology.  Take note of the discussion board attached to the article, to which Barr has contributed.  (And if you haven’t watched Barr’s lecture on “Physics, the Nature of Time, and Theology” from the Science and Faith Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville last December, you should.)

Atheistic teleology?

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and elsewhere about former atheist blogger Leah Libresco’s recent conversion to Catholicism.  It seems that among the reasons for her conversion is the conviction that the possibility of objective moral truth presupposes that there is teleology in the natural order, ends toward which things are naturally directed.  That there is such teleology is a thesis traditionally defended by Catholic philosophers, and this is evidently one of the things that attracted Libresco to Catholicism.  A reader calls my attention to this post by atheist philosopher and blogger Daniel Fincke.  Fincke takes issue with those among his fellow atheists willing to concede to Libresco that an atheist has to reject teleology.  Like Libresco, he would ground morality in teleology, but he denies that teleology requires a theological foundation.

Answering Atheism in Australia

The Catholic Adult Education Centre of the Archdiocese of Sydney is kindly hosting me for a week-long speaking tour from July 23 - 29.  You can find more information here and a YouTube promo here.

Reply to Steve Fuller

As I noted in a recent post, the Spring 2012 issue of Theoretical and Applied Ethics contains a symposium on Ethics, Atheism, and Religion, with a lead essay by atheist philosopher Colin McGinn.  I wrote one of the responses to McGinn’s piece, and one of the other contributors, Steve Fuller, wrote an essay with the title “Defending Theism as if Science Mattered: Against Both McGinn and Feser.”  What follows is a reply to Fuller.  (Readers who have not already done so are advised to read McGinn's essay, mine, and Fuller’s before proceeding.  They're all fairly brief.)

Sentient plants? Part II

Gene Callahan responds to my recent criticisms of his view that plants are sentient.  (Some plants or all?  Gene seems to think all of them are, though the evidence he appeals to would show at most only that some of them are.)  Recall that I had noted three reasons Aristotelians deny that any plants possess conscious awareness.  The first is that plants lack the specialized sense organs we find in animals.  The second is that plants lack the variability of response to stimuli that animals possess.  And the third is that sensation together with appetite and locomotion form a natural package of capacities, so that since plants lack locomotion they must lack sentience as well.

Sentient plants?

Economist Gene Callahan (a friend of this blog) calls my attention to this article, which claims that plants are capable of “sensory” responses to their environments, and even that they “talk and listen to one another.”  Gene concludes that “contrary to Aristotle, plants are active and communicate to each other, with sounds among other methods” so that “neo-Aristotelians ought to drop the idea that plants lack sensations.”  And while Gene allows that “this certainly does not invalidate all of Aristotle's metaphysics,” it does in his view show that Aristotelians should be wary of once again “ma[king] the mistake of tying Aristotelian metaphysics to Aristotelian natural science.”

But (no disrespect to Gene intended) as usual with these breathless journalistic “Science has shown that…!” stories, the actual facts are far less exciting than the sensationalistic packaging would suggest.

McGinn on atheism

The Spring 2012 issue of Theoretical and Applied Ethics contains a symposium on Ethics, Atheism, and Religion.  The lead essay is by Colin McGinn and is followed by responses from me, Steve Fuller, Ted Peters, and Robert Sinclair.  All the essays can be read online, so go take a look.

Philosophy of nature and philosophy of [fill in the blank]

A reader of my recent post on the philosophy of nature asks some excellent questions:

I wonder, where does the philosophy of physics and in general the philosophy of science fall in between the scheme of metaphysics and philosophy of nature?...

Also, where does the discussion on the topic of the laws of nature belong?  Is that also philosophy of nature? 

Let’s start with the question of how the philosophy of science is related to the philosophy of nature.  Recall from my recent post that as the middle ground field of the philosophy of nature gradually disappeared off the radar screen of modern philosophy, the disciplines on either side of it -- on the one hand, metaphysics and on the other, empirical science (in the modern rather than Aristotelian sense of “science”) -- came to seem the only possible avenues of investigation of reality.  Recall also that the methodology of metaphysics came to seem a matter of “conceptual analysis,” while any study with empirical content came to be identified as part of natural science.  The very notion that there could be a middle ground field of study with empirical foundations but arriving at necessary truths, thus transcending the contingent world described by physics, chemistry, etc. and pointing the way to metaphysics -- as Aristotelian philosophy of nature claims to do -- was largely forgotten.

Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012)

When Ray Bradbury was twelve years old, he went to a carnival and encountered Mr. Electrico, a performer who sat in an electric chair with current running through him so that his hair stood up and an electrical sword he held would glow.  Touching the sword to the young Bradbury’s head, Mr. Electrico exclaimed: “Live forever!”  Alas, Mr. Electrico’s command has gone unheeded, for Bradbury died last Tuesday at 91 -- long-lived, to be sure, but well short of forever.

Oerter on motion and the First Mover

George Mason University physicist Robert Oerter has completed his series of critical posts on my book The Last Superstition.  I responded to some of his remarks in some earlier posts of my own (here and here, with some further relevant comments here and here).  In this post I want to reply to what he says in his most recent remarks about the Aristotelian argument from motion to an Unmoved Mover of the world.

Color holds and quantum theory

When figuring out how many human beings of average weight can be carried on an airplane, engineers deal with abstractions.  For one thing, they ignore every aspect of actual, concrete human beings except their weight; for another, they ignore even their actual weight, since it could in principle turn out that there is no specific human being who has exactly whatever the average weight turns out to be.  This is perfectly fine for the specific purposes at hand, though of course it would be ludicrous for those responsible for planning the flight entertainment or meals to rely solely on the considerations the engineers are concerned with.  It would be even more ludicrous for them to insist that unless evidence of meal and movie preferences can be gleaned from the engineers’ data, there just is no fact of the matter about what meals and movies actual human beings would prefer.

Natural theology, natural science, and the philosophy of nature

Physicist Robert Oerter has added some further installments to his series of posts on my book The Last Superstition, including a reply to some of my criticisms of his criticisms of the book.  I will respond to his latest remarks in a forthcoming post, but before doing so it seemed to me that it would be useful to make some general remarks about certain misunderstandings that have not only cropped up in my exchange with Oerter and in the combox discussions it has generated, but which frequently arise in disputes about natural theology (and, for that matter, in disputes about natural law ethics and about the immateriality and immortality of the soul).  In particular, they tend to arise in disputes about what we might call classical natural theology -- natural theology grounded in philosophical premises deriving from the Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, and/or Scholastic traditions.

Cinematic representation

What makes it the case that a picture of Grandma represents Grandma?  That it looks like her, you might say.  But that can’t be the right answer, or at least not the whole answer.  The picture might look like any of several people; still, it represents only Grandma.  Or it might not look much like her at all -- consider a bad drawing, or even a photograph taken at an odd angle or in unusual lighting or while the subject is wearing a very unusual expression -- yet still represent her.  Indeed, that resemblance of any sort is neither sufficient nor necessary for representation is about as settled a philosophical thesis as there is.  (The reasons are many.  An object might resemble all sorts of things without representing them.  Resemblance is a symmetrical relationship, but representation is not: If a certain picture resembles Grandma, Grandma also resembles the picture; but while the picture might represent Grandma, Grandma does not represent the picture.  There are many things we can represent in thought or language -- the absence of something, a certain point in time, conditional statements, disjunctions, conjunctions, etc. -- without these representations resembling their objects, either pictorially or in any other way.  And so forth.  Chapter 1 of Tim Crane’s The Mechanical Mind provides a useful discussion of the issue.)

John Paul the Great Academy

John Paul the Great Academy in Lafayette, Louisiana is a fine Catholic college preparatory institution promoting the classical curriculum, the Thomistic intellectual tradition, and fidelity to the teaching of the Church.  Unfortunately, the Academy is suddenly facing the prospect of closure and is urgently in need of the prayers and financial assistance of those sympathetic to its mission.  Take a look at the school’s website to find out more about the Academy, and please consider making a contribution.

Oerter contra the principle of causality

The Scholastic principle of causality states that any potential, if actualized, must be actualized by something already actual.  (It is also sometimes formulated as the thesis that whatever is moved is moved by another or whatever is changed is changed by another.  But the more technical way of stating it is less potentially misleading for readers unacquainted with Scholastic thinking, who are bound to read things into terms like “motion” or “change” that Scholastic writers do not intend.)

In an earlier post I responded to an objection to the principle raised by physicist Robert Oerter, who has, at his blog, been writing up a series of critical posts on my book The Last Superstition.  Oerter has now posted two further installments in his series, which develop and defend his criticism of the principle of causality.  Let’s take a look.

Aquinas on audio

Your print copy of Aquinas is dog-eared.  You’ve worn out your Kindle reading the e-book version.  If only you could give your eyes a rest!  And avoid the car accidents you’re risking by flipping though the book on the way to work!  Well, you’re in luck: Aquinas is now available in an audio version. 

Review of Krauss

Something of a latecomer to the ecumenical Lawrence Krauss-bashing that has been taking place across the Internet, my review of A Universe from Nothing appears in the latest (June/July) issue of First Things.  You can read it online here.  More on this unusually awful book anon.

Oerter on universals and causality

George Mason University physicist (and author of The Theory of Almost Everything) Robert Oerter is writing up a series of posts on my book The Last Superstition over at his blog.  Oerter is critical but he engages the book seriously and in good faith.  He’s presented a couple of objections so far, and they merit a response.  So, here’s a response.

Kripke contra computationalism

That the brain is a digital computer and the mind the software run on the computer are theses that seem to many to be confirmed by our best science, or at least by our best science fiction.  But we recently looked at some arguments from Karl Popper, John Searle, and others that expose serious (indeed, I would say fatal) difficulties with the computer model of the mind.  Saul Kripke presents another such argument.  It is not well known.  It was hinted at in a footnote in his famous book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (WRPL) and developed in some unpublished lectures.  But Jeff Buechner’s recent article “Not Even Computing Machines Can Follow Rules: Kripke’s Critique of Functionalism” offers a very useful exposition of Kripke’s argument.  (You can find Buechner’s article in Alan Berger’s anthology Saul Kripke.)

New from Editiones scholasticae

I called attention some time back to Editiones scholasticae, a new German publishing venture devoted to publishing works in Scholastic philosophy, including reprints of works which have long been out of print.  Three new reprints are set to appear, which will be available in the United States this August via Transaction Publishers:

J. Elliot Ross, Ethics: From the Standpoint of Scholastic Philosophy

Michael W. Shallo, Lessons in Scholastic Philosophy

Maurice de Wulf, An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy: Medieval and Modern

Contemporary Scholasticism

Ontos Verlag, the international publisher in philosophy and mathematical logic, is pleased to present the new book series:

CONTEMPORARY SCHOLASTICISM

EDITED BY

Edward Feser • Edmund Runggaldier

ADVISORY BOARD

Brian Davies, Fordham University, U.S.A.

Christian Kanzian, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Gyula Klima, Fordham University, U.S.A.

David S. Oderberg, University of Reading, U.K.

Eleonore Stump, Saint Louis University, U.S.A.

Contemporary Scholasticism is a new book series providing a forum for the growing community of philosophers who are interested in applying insights drawn from the Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions to current philosophical debates.

The first volume of this new series, Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, has now been published.  Edited by Lukáš Novák, Daniel D. Novotný, Prokop Sousedík, and David Svoboda, the volume is the fruit of the conference of the same name held in Prague in 2010, and contains many of the papers there presented.

Rosenberg roundup

Having now completed our ten-part series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, it seems a roundup of sorts is in order.  As I have said, Rosenberg’s book is worthy of attention because he sees more clearly than most other contemporary atheist writers do the true implications of the scientism on which their position is founded.  And interestingly enough, the implications he says it has are more or less the very implications I argued scientism has in my own book The Last Superstition.  The difference between us is this: Rosenberg acknowledges that the implications in question are utterly bizarre, but maintains that they must be accepted because the case for the scientism that entails them is ironclad.  I maintain that Rosenberg’s case for scientism is completely worthless, and that the implications of scientism are not merely bizarre but utterly incoherent and constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that lead to them.

Reading Rosenberg, Part X

And now we reach, at long last, the end of our detailed critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In this final post I want to examine what Rosenberg has to say about a set of philosophical arguments he regards as “among the last serious challenges to scientism” (p. 228).  The arguments in question all entail that the realm of conscious experience -- what common sense says we know only “from inside” (p. 238), from a point of view “somewhere behind the eyes” (p. 222) -- cannot be accounted for in terms of neuroscience or physical science more generally.  In his treatment of these arguments, we get Rosenberg simultaneously at his best and at his worst.

McInerny on TLS

D. Q. McInerny very kindly reviews my book The Last Superstition in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly.  From the review:

In his previous publications Professor Feser has shown himself to be a philosopher of the first rank, and in this work he has given us a document of singular importance.  Of all the books written in response to “the new atheists” … this one has to be counted among the very best. There are three principal reasons why this is so.  The first has to do with the style in which the book is written; it is direct, clear, forceful, and—no small matter—witty.  Secondly, the arguments which carry the substance of the book are of the highest quality; they are tightly constructed, masterfully controlled, and compelling.  Thirdly—and I take this to be the book’s strongest feature—there is the manner in which Professor Feser sets the phenomenon of the new atheism in a larger historical/philosophical context, and thereby gives it sharper identity and makes it more fully understandable.  He shows that the new atheism, and the secularism of which it is a particular manifestation, did not come out of the blue, but that it has its roots in our philosophical past; to know that philosophical past is to have a firmer grip on the philosophical present.

As I say, very kind, as is the rest of the review.  One correction, though.  Of the expression “New Atheists,” Prof. McInerny writes: “that designation, I believe, originates with Feser.”  In fact I cannot take credit for it.  I believe I first came across the expression “The New Atheism” in the cover story of the November 2006 issue of Wired magazine, around two years before my book appeared. 

Steng operation

I recently linked to philosopher of physics David Albert’s take down of Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe From Nothing.  (My own review of Krauss will soon appear in First Things.)  A reader calls my attention to this blog post in which Victor Stenger -- Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, and author of several atheist tomes -- rides to the rescue of Krauss against Albert.  (If only the other philosophically incompetent New Atheists had such a knight in shining armor!  O Dawkins, where is your Stenger?  O Coyne, where is your Victor?)

Review of Atkins and Feyerabend now online

You can read my recent Claremont Review of Books review of Peter Atkins’ On Being and Paul Feyerabend’s The Tyranny of Science here.

Bruce and Van der Vossen on private property

I recently called attention to my essay “Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Private Property,” which appears on Liberty Fund’s Library of Law and Liberty website.   Prof. James Bruce and Prof. Bas Van der Vossen each kindly wrote a critical response to my essay.  (Their responses can be found here and here.)  They raise important questions, and in what follows I want to reply to their objections.  (Naturally it will be helpful if you first read the three original essays before moving on to what follows.)

Links of interest

Over at Public Discourse: William Carroll on chance and teleology in nature.

25 years later, Andrew Ferguson looks back on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.

An excerpt from Roger Scruton’s new book The Face of God.  And a Wall Street Journal interview with Scruton on the subject of conservative environmentalism.

Commenting on a recent post of mine, Matthew Anger discusses Fr. Ronald Knox’s views on paganism and Christianity.

Forthcoming in September from secular philosopher Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

James Franklin on “Aristotelianism in the Philosophy of Mathematics.” (See also Franklin’s earlier piece “Aristotelian Realism.”)

Yet more on “the neuro industry” and its pretensions and dangers.  And more.

Reprints of several volumes of the Leonine edition of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas are now available. 

Reading Rosenberg, Part IX

Our long critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality now brings us at last to that most radical of Rosenberg’s claims -- the thesis that neither our thoughts nor anything else has any meaning whatsoever.  To the reader unfamiliar with recent philosophy of mind I should emphasize that the claim is not merely that our thoughts, actions, and lives have no ultimate point or purpose, which is hardly a novel idea.  It is far more bizarre than that.  Consider the following two sequences of shapes: “cat” and “^\*:”  We would ordinarily say that the first has meaning -- it refers to animals of the feline sort -- while the latter is a meaningless set of marks.  And we would ordinarily say that while the meaning of a word like “cat” is conventional, the meaning of our thoughts about cats -- from which the meaning of the word in question derives -- is intrinsic or “built in” to the thought rather than conventional or derived.  What Rosenberg is saying is that in reality, both our thoughts about cats and the sequence of shapes “cat” are as utterly meaningless as the sequence of shapes “^\*:”  Neither “cat” nor any of our thoughts is any more about cats or about anything else than the sequence “^\*:” is about anything.  Meaning, “aboutness,” or intentionality (to use the technical philosophical term) is an illusion.  In fact, Rosenberg claims, “the brain does everything without thinking about anything at all.”

Upcoming symposium

The Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D. C. is hosting the Thomistic Circles Symposium on Creation and Modern Science on Saturday, April 14.  The speakers are Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, William E. Carroll, and me.  I’ll be speaking on the topic “Neuroscience and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”

Easter Triduum

I wish all my readers a holy Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Those who have not seen them might find of interest my posts on “The Meaning of the Passion” and “The Meaning of the Resurrection.”  Also relevant to Good Friday are the themes of my post “Putting the Cross back into Christmas” and of a recent post on original sin.

Fine on metaphysics and common sense

3:AM Magazine interviews metaphysician Kit Fine.  Fine remarks:

I’m firmly of the opinion that real progress in philosophy can only come from taking common sense seriously.  A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made.  If you like, common sense is the data of philosophy and a philosopher should no more ignore common sense than a scientist should ignore the results of observation.  A good example concerns ontology.  Many philosophers have wanted to deny that there are chairs or numbers [or] the like.  This strikes me as crazy and is an indication that they have not had a proper understanding of what is at issue.  By recognizing that these things are crazy we can then come to a better understanding of what is at issue and of how the questions of ontology are to be resolved.

Naturally, I agree, as any Aristotelian or Thomist would.  But why favor common sense?  Is this merely an ungrounded prejudice, an expression of bourgeois complacency, of discomfort with novelty, or a failure of imagination?  Or are there principled reasons for taking common sense seriously?

What is a soul?

To be more precise, what is a human soul?  Or to be even more precise, what is a human being?  For that is really the key question; and I sometimes think that the biggest obstacle to understanding what the soul is is the word “soul.”  People too readily read into it various erroneous notions (erroneous from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, anyway) -- ghosts, ectoplasm, or Cartesian immaterial substances.  Even the Aristotelian characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead.  When those unfamiliar with Aristotelian metaphysics hear “form,” they are probably tempted to think in terms of shape or a configuration of parts, which is totally wrong.  Or perhaps they think of it in Platonic terms, as an abstract universal that the individual human being participates in -- also totally wrong.  Or they suspect that since it is the form of the living body it cannot coherently be said to subsist apart from that body -- totally wrong again.   So let us, for the moment, put out of our minds all of these ideas and start instead with the question I raised above.  What is a human being?

Radio Free Aquinas (Postponed)

I’ll be on The Frank Pastore Show on KKLA radio on Friday, March 30 (tomorrow) at 6pm PST to discuss Thomas Aquinas.  (You can find a podcast of my earlier appearance on the show here.)

UPDATE: Sorry, Frank has had to postpone at the last minute -- I'll announce the new date of the interview once it's rescheduled.

Kitcher and Albert on Rosenberg and Krauss

In The New York Times, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher is critical of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In the same paper, philosopher of physics David Albert takes apart Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing.  I suppose it needs remarking, for any ill-informed, kneejerk ad hominem-prone New Atheist types out there, that neither Kitcher nor Albert is known for being an apologist for religion.  (I reviewed Rosenberg’s book in First Things a few issues ago, and have been going through the book with a fine-toothed comb in a series of posts since then.  My review of Krauss’s book is forthcoming.) 

Scruton on “neuroenvy”

We’ve had several occasions (e.g. here, here, and here) to examine the fallacies committed by those who suppose that contemporary neuroscience has radically altered our understanding of human nature, and even undermined our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, rational, freely choosing agents.  In a recent Spectator essay, Roger Scruton comments on the fad for neuroscientific pseudo-explanations within the humanities, labeling it “neuroenvy.”