What to believe II (still against relativism, and then some)

Guys, I recognize I left so many strands of argument open in my last post (which was some time ago, wasn’t it? Life is busy sometimes) that it is hard to try to re-weave them all in a coherent tapestry. I’ll try to recap so we are all in the same page as we move forward from the first ontological commitments I enumerated towards the practical consequences of having those beliefs (and remember I took a firm stand, and drew a clear line in the sand: those beliefs were the only rationally coherent, logically possible, most parsimonious ones about the ultimate nature of reality and our place in it: you choose not to have them, you place yourself outside of rational discourse, and I really don’t know what else to tell you). The three basic elements of reality are, condensed to the core:

·         The universe has been designed (by a mind outside it): it shows an underlying, intelligible structure that reveals it being the product of a conscious intent, thus we can assume it is endowed with a purpose

·         There are other minds in it (apart from our own and that of the designer/ creator)

·         Our minds are “attuned” to reality: they can discern the regularities and causal connections within reality and differentiate true from false (the universe is rational, our mind -and presumably other’s- is in some way similar to that of the designer in that it can identify the rules said designer applied when shaping matter, space and time into an ordered whole, a cosmos)

I now want to flesh out the consequences of holding such beliefs which, again, I consider evident enough, so much so that I cannot avoid thinking that not holding them amounts to a conscious decision of being irrational, and would require some explanation beyond what rationality entails (I strongly suspect in the end it is always something along the lines of “the consequences of such beliefs are too theistic, too redolent of admitting the existence of a ultimate reality above and beyond my own, and I, the potential believer, am too invested in the rejection of the idea of there being a supreme architect, or God, for me to give it a fair hearing, rationality be damned”). I intend to do it in two sections; in the first one I will review (as fairly and dispassionately as I can) some of the most common counterarguments to the three aforementioned beliefs; in a second one, I will develop what those basic beliefs entail (albeit with diminishing clarity), and thus what consequences we can deduce from them. Some of those consequences will have an immediately practical application, some less so.

Part I – Response to common objections (tryin’ to be even-handed here, man!)

Although I’ve been accused of being an arrogant asshole by so many people as to have lost count (and being of a cheery disposition, and not prone to hold grudges, I’d rather forget those accusations, based on some residual truth as they may be), some humility is called for in those weighty matters. I’ve just used strong words (“utterly irrational, and voluntarily so”) to describe the basic tenets of the worldview of intelligent, well-meaning people, people that have reached the top of their respective fields in academia and in the eyes of public opinion and that are universally reputed to be gentle, kind, humane and attentive to the needs of their fellow-beings. And they have done so, and lived apparently unimpeachable lives, while denying some of the basic statements I’ve presented as indubitable.

The people I’m thinking of have stated that either there is no designer at all, or if there is he is entirely absent from his creation, and pays no heed to its development (including the little worries and going about of such tiny and puny creatures as ourselves). To name but a few: Epicurus, Benedict Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, the Baron d’Holbach, Friedrich Nietzsche (I’m not so sure about the humaneness and kindness of that one, but he was at times, if not entirely clever, at least brilliant, albeit in a somewhat twisted and tortured way), Martin Heidegger (ditto), Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker. Of course, we also have the most vocal defenders of atheism, new or otherwise, whose passionate denial of any organizing principle outside the blind forces inherent in the material universe seems to require them to attack similarly vocally any whiff of stablished religion (or vestigial theism), from my much-studied Sigmund Freud to the ones which most immediately come to mind when discussing these matters: the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Of late we probably can add Yuval Noah Harari. These last ones (ol’ Sigmund included) I consider neither especially clever nor markedly kind (and one at least I find morally repugnant, if I have to be candid, which in my own blog I should), so I will entirely ignore them from here on.

But regarding the first thinkers I listed, having read them extensively and recognizing their intelligence in many cases ranks above mine, a word of caution is called for. If they have pondered the ultimate nature of what exists, and reached conclusions diametrically opposed to my own, that should require a certain level of humility, and grants at least some doubts and some extra consideration about the soundness of the reasoning that has led me to my own conclusions. It is that spirit of doubt about my own reasoning powers and respect for theirs that I’ll try to summarize what I understand as the three main objections to what I expounded in my previous post that can be gleamed from those luminaries’ writings:

1.       The most brilliant and profound thinkers within philosophy (Spinoza, Hume, Kant) have substantially weakened the stronger argument for the existence of the traditional God (creator of the Universe) by refuting the argument from design: the short answer would be “Refuted, my foot!”. Let’s unpack such extended opinion to see what merit it may have.

o   For Spinoza the greatest good man could aspire to (and what he should orient his actions to achieve) was literally “amor dei intellectualis”, an intellectual “love of God” made equally of acceptance and knowledge. And yes, I know his concept of God was entirely equivalent to “the whole of nature, shorn of emotions, volitions or strivings” (all of which he understood as deficiencies), which to his contemporaries was as perfect an expression of atheism as could be thought of. I don’t really car of what his contemporaries, or his modern exegetes (like the uber-fawning Johnathan Israel, for whom the whole Enlightenment almost starts and stops with Spinoza), have made of his thought, it is clear as water that he deeply understood, and marveled at, the intelligibility of the ordered world, and extracted the conclusion of that intelligibility and order requiring a mind to both guide it and understand it. He just identified that mind with the whole of matter (immanent to the universe, not transcendent), and declared it complete and, for that reason, free of desires or impulses. Which is fair enough, and entirely understandable, although it leaves some aspects of the cosmos unexplained (it may reveal why there is a design, but not why we can identify/ discern it).

o   As for Hume, I’ll just quote verbatim what the cleverest, most sceptic character (Philo, most likely the one closer to Hume’s own ideas) has to say at the end of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (in Part XII, page 116 of the Oxford World’s Classics edition):

…[talking about himself] no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems as at all times to reject it.

“A purpose, an intention, a design”… copying those words from my much underlined and commented and worn out edition of Hume’s work makes me realize to what extent he has contributed to my own ideas, as it nicely summarizes what I find undeniable about the cosmos just by looking around myself… interestingly, Hume leaves open the possibility of being “so hardened in absurd systems” as to some times reject the purpose, intention and design so apparent when contemplated dispassionately, as he himself, as we will see, had seemed to reject them in other pieces of his writings

Indeed, the piece of Hume’s writing that is frequently adduced to undermine the design argument, is most clearly the one contained in Section XI of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (pages 131-148 of the Selby-Bigge edition), “on a particular providence and a future state”, where he declares the impossibility to judge the merits of the “good design” argument, as we do not know of other universe with which we could compare the actually obtaining one we see around us, further weakened by its obvious improvability (described, in somewhat nonchalant and difficult to take seriously terms, as the result of a not very experienced creator, or may be of a multiplicity of them acting not entirely in unison). I’ve analyzed that segment minutely in another place, and won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that it is a) philosophically much less persuasive (playfulness being usually opposed to soundness in reasoning) and b) much less indicative of Hume’s deepest convictions (as betrayed by him resorting to the artifice of presenting it as “some arguments he heard from an skeptical friend”, a transparently dissembling move that reflects his internal uneasiness with the solidity of the arguments therein presented).

o   Finally, Kant, famously averse to any pretended irrefutable demonstration of the existence of God (and, according to some of his biographers, dismissive of the idea of there being one in the first place, and doubly dismissive of revealed religion in particular), who (again, supposedly) showed the essential unsoundness of the ontological argument (in a nutshell, by refuting that existence is something additional that can be enunciated of some entity over and above denoting it, thus making said entity more real -and thus better- than if it were not enunciated of it). Fine, I’ll give you he was no great fan of the ontological argument, but he had much less to say about the argument from design. We do know that given his inclination towards the physical science of his day (an inclination hampered by the very incomplete mathematical education he received in the Collegium Fredericianum, where his teachers were more worried in turning him into a good pietist than into a good scientist) he was keenly aware of the regularities and underlying simplicity of nature’s working (which allowed him to enunciate some wonderfully advanced -for his time- insights, like the probable origin in the geometry of space of the by then very mysterious gravitational attraction at a distance), but he resisted extracting the most immediate consequence from that simplicity and regularity (a designed cosmos) for a surprising reason: for Kant, distrustful of any consequentialist morality (of any attempt to justify how we should behave attending to the consequences of our actions), being certain of the existence of a supreme judge that would reward or punish us in the hereafter was incompatible with us being truly virtuous. And as one of his firmest beliefs was precisely the possibility of such virtue, he instinctively rejected any apparently irrefutable proof of the existence of God (the obvious design of the universe included). Because if the existence of God was certain, and we could then be certain of the consequences of our acts, and be sure of the eternal reward or punishment meted out by an incorruptible, all-knowing judge that admitted of no appeal to a higher instance, we would not be able to act right, because acting right requires us, nay, consists in, acting for the right reason (fear of punishment not being the right reason in any case).

Which is certainly well and good, and I’ll be the last one to contradict the important and meaningful insight of Kant on that area. But I think that the argument from design stops short enough of what the designing mind of the creator intended and willed as to leave almost entirely indeterminate how we should act in order to be properly rewarded/ to avoid the likely punishment. Which, in turn, means that we can accept the existence of a creator, even of a benevolent one, without risking the loss of the ultimate rule of what acting right consists in (i.e. acting for the right reason, which implies both respect of the law in the form of the categorical imperative and the recognition of our own freedom).

So we can safely conclude that the design argument, far from having been refuted, is still alive and kicking. A possible explanation for the popularity of the (misguided) assumption of its refutation has to do with its reduction to the realm of living beings. The most popular instances of design at the beginning of the XIX century was contained in William Paley’s Natural Theology, and the clearest examples he could provide of nature being designed by a benevolent creator came indeed from the natural world: the admirable adaptation of any living organism to its particular environment. Not many years after the edition of Paley’s tract came another book by a certain Charles Darwin (one of the few works of which it can be said without exaggeration that it would be difficult to overstate its importance), On the Origin of Species, that provided an alternative explanation for how organisms came to be so tightly fit to their peculiar ecosystems: natural selection had molded them by accentuating those random variations (random in their appearance, but able to be transmitted to their descendants) that gave them some differential advantage in their ability to reproduce themselves. With just that simplest of mechanisms, voila! You could have the appearance of design without a designer, and just get rid of the whole annoying argument that theists kept propounding to substantiate their outmoded superstitions!

Of course, the intricate regularities in our vast (and admirably ordered) cosmos are not exhausted by the wonderfully varied forms of living organisms in our tiny speck of blue. The minutely precise values the different constants of nature have to take (things like the gravitational attraction between lumps of mass, the electric charge of the proton and the electron, the average duration of the elementary particles, and so on and so forth) for a universe like ours to develop, and successive generations of stars to give rise to planetary systems endowed with complex enough atoms to form in turn the molecules required for the whole evolutionary process to be possible, are as difficult to explain without them being selected by some mind, without them being chosen for a purpose as the opposable thumbs of human beings (and of the Panda) were back in the day.

And, predictably, the same successful strategy that proved so fruitful back then in the XIX century is being used today to explain away such “design”: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so maybe universes (in plural) also evolve. Maybe there is some mechanism that from one universe can produce “offspring” universes with little random variations, that are differentially successful in reproducing themselves in turn. That would give a valid explanation for the almost miraculous attunement of nature most basic constants towards the production of a universe with the precise balance of variation and uniformity as to allow the appearance of conscious (maybe even intelligent, but the jury is still out in that one) life.

But consider for a moment the price we pay if we accept such alternative explanation for what we may call the “evident (in the non-biological realm) design of the reality that surrounds us”, also known as the “fine tuning argument”: a multiplicity of universes (we don’t really know how many, or with what frequency they may appear, or through what mechanism -the singularity within black holes has been proposed, but it’s far from certain) that, given how precise the tuning is, must have been created in untold, incalculable numbers without us ever being able to notice them. Whose existence is, strictly speaking, indemonstrable and untestable. Sorry, but I’m too enamored of my ol’ razor (named after a medieval Franciscan friar you may have heard of: Bill of Ockham) to accept for a moment such possibility. If the alternative to believing in a designer is to embrace an almost infinity of universes beyond our senses and our ability to ever notice them, I’ll stick to my theism.

2.       OK, so the key to theism is recognizing that a universe existing all by itself shows clear signs of having been designed, planned, crafted, made with some purpose in mind (or, which is the same, created by a mind). But such signs (which point to a conscience that, absent any alternative possibility, we assume to be like our own one) may be an illusion, which has itself an evolutionary explanation. In what seem relatively recent (in evolutionary terms, we are talking tens of thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands, or even millions) a species of monkeys in this planet of ours found it advantageous (i.e. something that allowed them to have more descendants) to “tell stories”, to narrate events that had some sort of internal consistency (that seemed to have a special kind of connection between them, that of some being “causes” and other being “effects” of the former), regardless of them referring to things that had actually happened or not. Probably the sharing of those stories allowed them to coordinate better the actions of members of the same tribe and enhance their survival prospects in a changing environment, or whatnot (Ah! The unavoidable “just-so” character, in Stephen Jay Gould’s fortunate description, of this peculiar form of “explanation” of human behavior). From this ability to dissemble and rationalize “ex post” what we do and why we have developed a number of additional adaptations (exaptions), not necessarily advantageous per se, that we now call consciousness. It is that illusion of consciousness which lays at the foundation of that supposed appreciation of the wonderful regularities we (erroneously, as it happens) think we notice in the world around us. But there is, or so the proponents of this idea would have you believe, no such thing. Your own consciousness (let alone other people’s) is just an illusion.

To which I can only answer: “yep, sure, by the way, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’m willing to sell, wouldn’t you be interested?”. Look, I love just-so stories as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t compromise my fair evaluation of probabilities of what is out there because I had found a “plausible” explanation of how something came to be that requires not one, or two, or three, but a gazillion bazillions of extraordinarily unlikely events millimetrically chained one after the other to produce the wonder that is my mental life, or yours. As Hume said regarding miracles, the evidence of them should be stronger the more unlikely they are. So, for us to consider that consciousness is “an illusion”, something that is not really “there”, we would need fairly overwhelming, irrefutable, undefeatable evidence. But such evidence amounts to little more than “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”, albeit stated by a very respectable philosopher that looks the part of avuncular sage to boot (that would be my much beloved Daniel Dennett, with whom I disagree in almost everything he has ever written, down to the commas and question marks, but whom I respect a lot nevertheless).

Because if there is one single thing we can be solidly certain about, one thing that we can use to construct our whole epistemical outlook, is the fact that we are conscious, and that such state is somehow different and distinct from the whereabouts of the lumps of matter that surround us. It may very well be also different and distinct from the lumps of matter that constitute us, a position quite out of fashion nowadays (see my For Dualism I and and II and finally and III (a bit of carried away in this one, folks, be patient)). But fashion and plausibility are entirely different matters, and  we don’t need to busy ourselves again with that abstruse discussion (as the one we are dealing with is certainly abstruse enough without having to complicate it with additional arguments). The fact that we can lose ourselves in our thoughts, and we recognize that as being radically and essentially different from losing ourselves in the narrow streets of our city, and that we can easily imagine somebody else in the latter situation, but in no way in the former (they can lose themselves in their own thoughts, sure, but they would not be the same, even if they managed to have the same generic “content”), which we denote by a number of terms like “preferential access” (the one I distinctly have to the contents of my own consciousness, so preferential indeed that it doesn’t matter with how much detail I try to convey it to others, I recognize I can only make them participate in a tiny fraction of what it was “being myself” during the time those same contents were being experienced by me) or “undefetability” of the reports I may make of those contents (if I declare, truthfully, that I’m sad, or in pain, or distressed, there is no piece of information about the world that anybody could give me that would make me reconsider the correctness of my original statement) that are not shared by any other aspect of reality.

To sum things up, there is no reason solid enough (and, given its prima facie implausibility, it would require, as per Hume, a massive dose of strong evidence) to consider we have no consciousness, and that other people have too. Only a commitment to monism (and a monism of a particular sort: materialist monism, as explained in the posted I linked before) that ends up going from a reasonable parsimoniousness to a pigheaded oversimplification can explain holding such idea. To put it more bluntly, may be resorting to a somewhat cartoonish expression, people that hold on to their monism in the face of its evident inability to account for what David Chalmers termed the “hard problem” sound to me like “well, the initial and simple set of ideas I started with to get rid of the hateful possibility of there being some essential aspect of reality that was not readily reducible to matter has somehow mutated in a convoluted rationalization that has painted me into a corner, having to assume that the most immediate evidence I have of my own mental life is somehow misleading and false… but if the alternative to holding those increasingly untenable beliefs is to accept some kind non-material essence on the same footing as matter (with the same claim of being “true”, “really existing” entities) I’m afraid that would justify, or validate, or make minimally reputable talking about souls and eternal beings and religion and in the end the Big Bearded Guy in the sky with all his hateful percepts that so evidently clash with all that Science has taught us. As I abhor and detest and despise all those ideas (from souls all the way to the BBG) I’ll just stick with my refusal to admit we have consciousness, and I’ll resolutely look the other way, saying there is not really anything to explain about the workings of our mind. Sorry, I of course meant of our brain”.

Of course, expressed in that (admittedly coarse and unsympathetic) way, such position doesn’t look very appealing. As I’ve already noted a thousand times, accepting a certain kind of dualism (that doesn’t go much further away than “dual aspect monism”) doesn’t commit us to accept immortal souls, a traditional deity or the tenets of any particular revealed religion. Whilst accepting materialist monism does commit us to accept that consciousness is indeed an illusion, and that the universe is just a fantastically unlikely succession of predetermined events, an enormous and senseless accumulation of “one damn thing after the other” with no purpose, no causes, no uncertainties, no values, no truth, no guilt and no merit, no freedom and no beauty, which we happen to (wrongfully) believe we take part in but in which, time being as much an illusion as free will (as in the Tralfamadorian metaphor of Kurt Vonnegut, it’s just a dimension we discover sequentially because of limitations of our cognitive and perceptual apparatus, as in a deterministic universe for all practical purpose “everything has already happened”, as there was only one way in which things could unfold, anyway, and any Laplacean demon worth his salt could have told you how everything would turn out from day one). Thankfully, consciousness is as real as it comes, and it is the monist outlook which we can discard as a fantastical but implausible fabrication.

3.       We have dealt already with the first two of the objections against the recognition of the universe as being designed (1. “there is no design, as the most brilliant philosophers were not swayed by it” and 2. “we cannot be conscious of a design because we are not conscious to begin with, both our consciousness and hence the design it perceives are fictions”). Time then, to turn our attention to the third objection, namely, what about all the innocent suffering? What’s the rationality of that?

But this post is already of a record length, well above 4,500 words, so I think the answer to that 

one, and the subsequent analysis of how all the three answers, and the justification of the basic beliefs they support, impinge on how we should act, will have to wait for my next post. But don’t suffer, oh patient readers! You will not have to wait for that one as much as you had to wait for this one, that I promise you…