Tag: David Hume

Rational and evidential equivalence

RothkoMural4

I don’t usually chase popularity, but what I saw after my previous post was published gave me cause for reflection. Of the 94 posts on this blog, “An atheist creed” has certainly had the best first 24 hours, with more than 100 views during that period alone. It was also my most popular post by far, reaching 10 “+1s” within a couple of hours. On Twitter and Google+ too it was received well, which suggested that I had picked a good topic. Not only that, but on Google+ it also lead to a conversation that made me append an update to the original post.

And then three of the original +1s were revoked, still leaving a respectable seven but clearly signaling disagreement with the update’s content. After a day of trying to work out what might have lead to someone changing their mind (and if you are one of the three who did, I’d love to hear from you), I have decided to expand on what I said, with the hope of being more explicit than the update’s 100 or so words allowed.

While the initial post attempted a summary of Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and arrived at the conclusion that his position is one of unacknowledged belief, for the explicit variant of which he chides those who hold religious ones. At the end of the post I then admitted that, while I respect agnostic positions and hold a Christian one, I fail to see the honesty of atheism. After an enriching exchange on Google+ I then returned to the post and added an update in which I quote one of my atheist friends as saying that their atheism is a belief in there being nothing else out there beyond what we experience. Since this was the first time I have encountered atheism as a creed (my post’s title originally having been intended as a dig at Dawkins), I was surprised and felt like I needed to take a fresh look at it.

I suspect, although I am not sure (and, please, do correct me if I am wrong), that the following may have been the root of the discontent with the post’s update: “the nature of [religious or atheist] belief and [their] relation to evidence and rationality are, to my mind, equivalent.” While the original post was decidedly negative about atheism, the update may have looked like I have softened my stance and like I may even have devalued my own Christian beliefs. Let me therefore be more explicit about these two possible interpretations.

First, everything I have said in the post before the update still stands as is. The atheism presented by Dawkins, and many other militant, aggressive atheists like him, is to my mind rationally feeble and delusional. It claims to be a purely rational, evidence-derived position, while it cannot possibly be. This lack of honesty about the nature of such atheism is fundamentally harmful to those who hold it, since it endows them with an illusory sense of superiority that dramatically (and demonstrably) inhibits their capacity for dialogue.

Why do I claim that their position cannot be evidence derived? For a more detailed answer see this previous post, but in a nutshell it is this: All empirical evidence that I can ever have is in the form of my own experiences and not directly of entities beyond myself. I experience images, sounds, sensations of texture, pressure, temperature, etc. but in all of this I am only conscious of aspects of myself. When I have the experience of seeing an apple, my evidence is not of some external entity – the “apple” as separate from events in my stream of consciousness – but of an image formed in my consciousness. No amount of reference to others, method, measurement or anything else can possibly result in anything other than events that I can with certainty place anywhere other than my own consciousness. This is the nature of experience that has been well understood by philosophers for some centuries now (very clearly by Hume and Locke and to different extents also by many others in preceding centuries).

The only exclusively empirical position is to restrict oneself to making statements only about oneself. Anything else requires belief. A belief in a physical world that causes the experiences we have access to, or even a belief that there is nothing beyond oneself (or some of the more esoteric beliefs typically posited for the sake of exploring the nature of knowledge, like the idea that we are all brains in vats, being fed signals that give rise to the experience we have). A belief that the physical world is all there is or that there is something or someone else beyond it. Beliefs about what it is that lies beyond the physical world. All of these beliefs have the same relationship to empirical evidence – i.e., none! Empirical evidence can contribute to greater or lesser confidence being attributed to one theory or another that explains it, but its scope is only that of the empirical. Evidence cannot point one way or another when it comes to what is beyond it – whether it be nothing or something.

It is with this in mind that I said, and repeat, that an atheist creed has the same empirical and rational status as a religious creed (including my Christian one). The position that is rationally inferior is an atheism that considers itself to be derived from evidence and devoid of the necessity of forming beliefs beyond its scope.

Finally, let me also emphasize that this position is fully compatible with how Christianity understands its own beliefs – as a gift from God (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §153-154):

“Believing is possible only by grace and the interior helps of the Holy Spirit. But it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act. Trusting in God and cleaving to the truths he has revealed are contrary neither to human freedom nor to human reason. Even in human relations it is not contrary to our dignity to believe what other persons tell us […] or to trust their promises […] to share a communion of life with one another.”

My belief in God is empirically and rationally equivalent to another’s belief that there is nothing beyond the physical world and I look forward to learning from my atheist friends what it is like to hold the beliefs they do. Open, honest and charitable dialogue can only be enriching to all who partake in it and I am pleased that I can now count some atheists among those who appreciate it as much as I do.

Does the word “infinity” make you uncomfortable?

The Dominoes Are Falling

I learned a lesson today: never read the parish newsletter before the start of mass. This morning I did and it just lead to regret as I spent the vast majority of mass being distracted1 by it and trying to reconstruct in my mind the reasons against an argument put forward in it. What is even worse is that this wasn’t just the regular newsletter that our parish priest prepares (and that has as yet lead neither to disappointment, nor elation), but a newsletter – “Our Faith on Sunday” – prepared by the company who provides the weekly mass sheets and who ought to know better.

The argument in question is that of Aristotle’s unmoved mover (or first cause), which is a form of the cosmological argument. The basic idea is the following: since all change (motion, temperature variation, …) is the result of a previous change, there are two possibilities: either a causal chain stretching back into an infinite past or a first, “unmoved mover” that triggered a finite chain of causal links leading to the present. The possibility of infinite regress is dismissed as ridiculous, ergo there had to be a first mover. So far Aristotle’s argument from over 2300 years ago, which at that time was unarguably brilliant and which has survived without chinks into the 18th century (this by itself being pretty impressive too!). So, Aristotle comes out pretty well from this incident. The same cannot be said about the nameless author, who not only sticks it into a parish newsletter in 2012 without attribution, but who – to add insult to injury – finishes the piece with saying that the “unmoved mover” is God.

No it ain’t! And that is just the start of a litany of complaints that flooded my mind this morning, with the following being the 800 pound gorillas:

  1. In this context, the gravest mistake is clearly to present a piece of philosophy (however good it may be) and to equate it with God. Not just to say: “Well, this concept gives us hints about some aspects of what God may be like,” but to say “Unmoved mover = God.” Not only is this entirely divorced from Christian theology (giving a false sense of being able to grasp God in His fullness, etc.) but it is positively counterproductive. In essence the argument postulates a God who is relegated to a distant past, who is far removed from us and who just plays the role of a snooker player, hitting the first ball that leads to a vast sequence of knock-ons – a true God of Gaps. This is not the God of Christianity. It is not the loving Father who sent his Son to become one of us and the Holy Spirit to guide us. It is not the God who’s three persons love one another to the point of being one and who invites us to partake in His innermost life. The “unmoved mover” is a cheap imitation and one that is rightly and thankfully the butt of atheist jokes.

  2. Next, taking a philosophical argument made over two thousand years ago and (presumably, hopefully!) not checking whether there have been any significant challenges made against it is pretty sloppy too. And an excuse of obscurity cannot be used here either as the cosmological argument (whose one variant this is) has been debated to death! Furthermore, its critics have included such giants of philosophy as David Hume, who challenged the notion of causation itself (arguing that our senses simply don’t have access to the necessary connection between supposed cause A and supposed effect B – instead, all we have are repeated experiences of event B following event A). With causation undermined, there is clearly no necessity for a “first cause.” Does that mean a disproof of God? No – just of the grotesque God of Gaps of the cosmological argument, and not a disproof as such (those live exclusively in the realm of mathematics or other formal systems – and even there are limited by incompleteness) but a counterargument instead.

  3. Finally, and this is a criticism that I cannot fairly level at the authors of the newsletter, there is also that recurring misunderstanding of infinity that hampers many a philosophical argument from centuries past. Before Georg Cantor’s groundbreaking work on set theory and the concept of cardinality and the subsequent advances in our understanding of infinite sets and their properties (with contributions by pioneers like David Hilbert), an arm-waving approach to infinity and blanket statements about its unintelligibility or impossibility (e.g., by Thomas Aquinas2) were all we could manage. Today these are just not good enough anymore. E.g., a good example of how the impossibility of an infinite sequence of causes can be refuted can be found in Peter Clark’s paper: “Consider the set of events with no first member but a last member: {… an … a4, a3, a2, a1, a0} [where] for every j (aj-1 causes aj). There is no logical contradiction in this supposition whatsoever. […] Every event in the above sequence is finitely accessible from each and every event preceding it.” What this means is that an infinite sequence stretching back in time does not imply the necessity for a member that is infinitely far in the past. No matter how far you go back in the sequence (i.e., an) – and remember that you can’t go back to the beginning, which does not exist – there is a finite number of steps that bring you to the present (i.e., a0). All the infinity of the sequence means is that there is no first member, without necessarily entailing members that are infinitely removed in the past. This may sounds counterintuitive, but presents no logical contradiction.3

So: lesson learned. Next time, I’ll defer reading the newsletter until after mass and especially its “Faith and Reason” section, where, ironically, Aristotle’s argument was plagiarized.

1 I almost missed this gem of a line from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “And this is my prayer: that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value” (1:9-10), again pointing to an induction of orthodoxy from orthopraxy.
2 “The existence of an actual infinite multitude is impossible. For any set of things one considers must be a specific set. And sets of things are specified by the number of things in them. Now no number is infinite, for number results from counting through a set of units. So no set of things can actually be inherently unlimited, nor can it happen to be unlimited.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 7, Article 4).
3 I realize this paragraph barely scratches the topic of infinity, to which I hope to return in the future … Also, please, note that I am not advocating an argument for the universe having existed infinitely – I am merely pointing to the objection to an infinite causal chain being outdated.