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…
