There are some constants in the Atheist / Naturalist [1] worldview, some givens that resemble absolute truths at least within the limits of their worldview. One of these is that the only valid path to knowledge, at least reliable knowledge of any value, is through the empirical scientific process. For them, knowledge from any other source is suspect or worse. This position leads directly to another level, which is the reverence for the principle of Cause and Effect as a universal truth, and as the basis for science, which, in turn, somehow leads them to Atheism. If there exists no supernatural ontology, then everything that exists is just as we see it in the universe – that is the basis of Naturalism and Atheism. It is a big “if”.
As a consequence of the dependence of Naturalism and Atheism on the universal validity of principle of Cause and Effect, certain corollaries become necessarily true, in order to support that conclusion. That these corollaries are true cannot be in doubt under this thought process, because the conclusion which they support has been declared true, an exercise in rationalization. Some of these corollaries follow.
First, life is not a definable substance, and is not different in any way from the individual components that comprise the thing that is said to live. “There is no essence of life, unless it is [the existence of ] DNA”: Massimo Pigliucci. Life is not exceptional to purely material existence, and is fully defined by material causality.
Next, in humans as in all material substance based constructs there is no exceptionality from other material substances. Cause and effect applies to all substances, including humans. This means that every aspect of human functioning is a material effect which has a material cause.
This in turn means that the human does not exhibit any action that is not pre-determined by a chain of causes that go back to the Big Bang. So there is no human ability to decide anything, because every action is determinate beyond the ability of any self-agency to modify. And self does not exist either, because for one thing, there is no reason for a non-agent to be an independent entity, a self. A rock is not a self any more than the boulder from which it split was a self. Self is not a material substance; it cannot exist under the materialist decree.
So humans are without self, without agency, and without intentionality in their actions. If humans think that they have – or are – these things, then they are harboring an illusion or delusion. (Delusion occurs if one believes an illusion). If you doubt that this is a consequence of Atheism / Naturalism, then read the sources at the end of this article.
The typical Atheist response to this state of non-Agency is that the delusion of self and agency works just fine, and is a fine way to live, believing that we have agency in the face of being saddled with Fully Causal Determinism. Some Atheists and Naturalists even claim that there is a small bubble of non-determinism which is available to us, even though Causal Determinism is a universal principle; this allows us a small degree of agency within the constraints of our environmental and genetic histories.
If these ideas are valid, what would be the consequences? Are our actions fully predetermined and without recourse for modification? Or conversely, do the laws of Cause and Effect stop at some short-field locus that actually allows us to have some very limited agency?
Living Fully Causal and Without Self, Except for Self-Delusion.
How can we be self-deluded if there is no self to delude? To self-delude a self, requires a self, and the idea is therefore non-coherent. So that can’t be.
But maybe we are deluded, not by ourselves which do not exist, but by circumstances. What is it that gets deluded? There is no self; the conscious mind merely gets informed of the predetermined, fully caused actions of the neural electrochemical discharges. If the conscious mind is only a register of what has already happened deterministically, yet the conscious mind thinks that it performed those actions, then the conscious mind is, in fact, delusional. And that is necessarily true of all conscious minds. Every mind is delusional regarding its self and agency. And by necessary extension, all the products of the self and agency.
But then the question of self arises again. Something has happened that causes non-entopic activities to occur in the wake of the activities of human mental faculties. If there is no core being that causes those non-entropic activities for which living things are known, then how are they caused (or are they delusions too)? And can I not think, consciously, in a manner to design, to create, to cause things to happen that could not otherwise happen without an agent’s causal force? And things which would not have happened without intentionality? Is the existence of these agent-caused intentional products not real (because there is no agency)? Exactly how delusional are we? And why would we be expected to share the same delusions with countless others, say when we board a plane or ride an escalator, or engage with communication devices? How are universally common delusions implemented - what is their cause? Is it more parsimonious to consider that we share a common, universal delusion, or that we share a common, universal reality?
Consider the other claims of Atheists and Naturalists, specifically the claim to be rational. If they claim universal delusion on the one hand, how can they claim rationality on the other? If they have no self, if they have no intentionality or agency, if their actions are fully causal with their conscious minds merely informed post hoc, how can they be rational? Even if the neural electrochemical discharge is declared the source of rationality, that also is fully caused, deterministic, and without any agency or intentionality, and moreover, why should a material mass of molecules have any non-deterministic capability, much less rationality and self-hood? The Atheist / Naturalist argument must apply to the neurons as well as to consciousness.
So unless the Atheists / Naturalists can produce an argument that provides an exception to their primary argument which universalizes determinism, an argument for a non-deterministic haven which endows themselves with agency even while surrounded with a fully caused and deterministic universe, then their argument fails. And paradoxically, if they do provide an argument for excepting themselves from determinism in order to allow their own rationality, then universal determinism cannot be a valid principle. Either way, full causal determinism fails.
Moreover, if we are merely deluded into the belief that any non-deterministic agency exists, then the reality that we think we have created is also a delusion. Therefore, if the principle of delusion of agency is valid, then delusion becomes a constant and consistent necessity, a state which we cannot differentiate from actual reality if there is any actual reality. Once again the Atheist / Naturalist claim of rationality cannot be valid if we all are deluded. The argument from delusion prohibits rationality.
Empiricism and the Question of Self, Agency and Delusion
Empiricism is an intentional activity; it is the sole source of valid knowledge according to the proponents of universal determinism, the Atheists and Naturalists. Yet that pairing of concepts self-contradicts. Again, without agency to design and perform the experimental analysis which characterizes empirical activity, there could be no meaningful knowledge product issuing from empirical activity. Once again there must be an exception to the principle of universal determinism in order for meaningful information or knowledge to come out of empirical activity. And once again, the principle of universal determinism cannot be valid if knowledge or meaning exists due to the exceptionalism of agent driven empirical activity. Unless of course, empiricism and its products are delusions. So either determinism does not apply to empiricism, or empiricism and knowledge are delusions. Either way, Atheism and Naturalism fail as rational worldviews, since they require both fully causal determinism AND empirical knowledge both to be valid simultaneously.
Why is delusion a part of the Atheist / Naturalist worldview? What are the rational (or non-rational) logic steps that produce the necessity of delusion?
The conclusion comes first by decree: There can be no non-material existence. The support for this conclusion is winnowed and selected for those items which do not contradict the conclusion.
For example the basic conclusion, full materiality of existence is decreed, not observed. Under the decree, certain things cannot exist, things which would invalidate the decree. So when those certain things are seen to exist after having been denied, they must be declared to be delusions.
This process is both non-rational and non-empirical. It is the product of a belief system, one that specifically denies parts of reality that conflict with the basic tenet of the belief. Any invalidating observations are thus delusions, especially if they cannot be defeated empirically.
So in this sense, both Atheism and Naturalism are religious-types of non-empirical belief systems, which actually deny certain aspects of observable reality as delusions, and which are based on faith in concepts derived by rationalization rather than valid logical processes. The fundamental concept – all existence is material only - is decreed rather than observed and it is not even observable, yet it is declared both true and the basis for what is called a rational worldview.
The belief in Atheism / Naturalism is not based in empiricism or rational analysis, it is based in something else: a desire for it to be true.
[Note 1] I use the term "naturalism" here, despite its confusing meanings. While I prefer "philosophical materialism", naturalism is commonly used in some of the "mind" literature, so I will use it here, too.
Sources For Further Reading:
Pinker, Steven; “How the Mind Works”; 1997, WW Norton & Co.
Schwartz, Jeffrey and Sharon Begley; “The Mind and The Brain”; 2002, Harper.
Clark, Thos; “Encountering Naturalism”; Center For Naturalism, 2007.
Huemer, Michael; “Skepticism and the Veil of Perception”; Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Martin, Michael; Atheism, A Philosophical Justification; Temple University Press, 1990.
“The Cambridge Companion to Atheism”; Michael Martin Ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2007.
“British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment”; Stuart Brown, Ed.; Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 5; Routledge, 1996.
Reason & Analysis; Bland Blanshard; Paul Carus Lectures Series 12; 1962; Open Court Publishing.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Anthropology Drops Its Claim to Science
According to the NY Times,
This now leads to internal turmoil even greater than before:
The Times mentions the issue of Napoleon Chagnon's studies of the Yanomamis, a primitive tribe of tens of thousands living in villages spread across the borders of Brazil and Venezuela. Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as being a "fierce" and violent culture, fighting each other for possession of the best women (an evolutionary precept). Others, including students of the Yanomami, claim that this is not the case, and in fact, such a characterization damages the Yanomami people:
Science is a self-limited endeavor. Maybe it has too much influence given its limitations. And maybe that influence has been envied by those engaging in other study methods, including the forensic and historical methods of investigation, which have their intellectual place but are not empirical in the experimental sense.
The "social studies" of my youth somehow morphed into the "social sciences". Perhaps that error is now being corrected.
"Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan."The change acknowledges that there are factions within Anthropology which are not scientific.
This now leads to internal turmoil even greater than before:
"Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the dropping of the references to science 'just blows the top off' the tensions between the two factions. 'Even if the board goes back to the old wording, the cat’s out of the bag and is running around clawing up the furniture,' he said."In recent times even the science aspect of Anthropology has again come under attack in a manner similar to those attacks on Margaret Mead's ideological interpretations of Samoa. The problem arises with three considerations. First, truly objective science does not change the characteristics of the object being studied. Second, human-derived structures are not the same as naturally occurring, elemental structures, especially in terms of consistency and adherence to deterministic cause and effect. Third, human subjects deserve respect. Anthropology tends to run afoul of all of these considerations, with some participants more egregious than others.
The Times mentions the issue of Napoleon Chagnon's studies of the Yanomamis, a primitive tribe of tens of thousands living in villages spread across the borders of Brazil and Venezuela. Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as being a "fierce" and violent culture, fighting each other for possession of the best women (an evolutionary precept). Others, including students of the Yanomami, claim that this is not the case, and in fact, such a characterization damages the Yanomami people:
"The ways in which anthropologists portray the societies they study have consequences, sometimes serious consequences in the real world. Indigenous societies have all too often been maligned in the past, denigrated as savages and marginalized at the edges of the modern world and the modern societies in it. It is not therefore a trivial matter to insist on the fierceness of a people or to maintain that they represent an especially primitive stage in human evolution. Chagnon has not done this inadvertently to the Yanomami. On the contrary, he has done so deliberately, systematically, and over a long period of time, in spite of the remonstrances of his fellow anthropologists."The study of humans is unlike the study of mass-energy. Intrusions into a primitive society are not without producing secondary effects which are hardly quantifiable, yet can be significant.
Science is a self-limited endeavor. Maybe it has too much influence given its limitations. And maybe that influence has been envied by those engaging in other study methods, including the forensic and historical methods of investigation, which have their intellectual place but are not empirical in the experimental sense.
The "social studies" of my youth somehow morphed into the "social sciences". Perhaps that error is now being corrected.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Source of Moral Authority
[Author's Note: Originally published September 15, 2009, this article remains appropriate.]
The question of the source of moral authority arises here. There is confusion in today’s society between ethics and morals. This has come about with the secularization of all public life. Today moral authority is extended to the alleged “wisdom” of temporal sages and wits.
Let’s examine the character of the object: morality.
Both morality and ethics are based on imperative statements such as “should” statements and “must” statements. The term imperative derives from imperare: to command, order as does the term imperial and necessarily involves the authority to enforce the statement with consequences. Imperatives are not derivable logically from any empirical investigation of nature. Imperatives are rules for guiding human behavior, not rules describing the behavior of natural phenomena. The behavior of natural phenomena is deterministic; human behavior is not (if it were, arguing the issue would be of no consequence). So human behavior is thought to be controllable through commands or rules.
Without the authority to enforce consequences for behaviors, imperatives are of no value. The entire weight of an imperative depends on (a) consequences whether positive or negative, (b) the desirability or revulsiveness of the nature of the consequences, and (c) the probability of actually incurring those consequences.
Ethics today are usually proclaimed by a theoretical philosopher or a professional bio-ethicist; his authority is himself. Ethics are derived pragmatically using logic, frequently to evaluate cost/benefit ratios of competing behaviors. The consequences for not observing the ethic could be as small as cost/benefit gains or losses, or as large as threatened global disaster scenarios predicted by the ethicist, with implied guilt for those who do not observe the ethic. When one hears statements declaring that “we MUST…” or “the nation(s) MUST…”, it is a human-derived ethical imperative statement [1].
Morals are considered passé by secularists because morals are derived not by human logic, they are rules pronounced on the authority of a supreme being that is declared non-existent. The traditional consequences for not observing these rules are declared to be too onerous for the value of the infraction. If such a being did exist, the moral authority of that being would be high, much higher than man-made authority, and the benefits and consequences would apply to all humans, universally.
Now for the question of the applicability of ethical authority. An example has been given of ethical behavior being driven by a political philosophy, in this case, Libertarianism. Assuming that the principles for Libertarianism are consistent across all Libertarians, what is the source of authority for declaring those principles to be unassailable, universal and valid ethics? The answer has to be the human mind, operating on principles thought to be logical.
So the human mind, or at least a subgroup of human minds, has declared an ethic. No matter how compelling the logic behind the ethic, what gives those rules or principles universal moral authority?
There are a couple of possible ways to achieve universal moral authority for human-derived principles. First is through the appeal to the collective conscience for voluntary righteous behavior vs. guilt for non-compliant behavior. This is not a likely source of universal authority for the machinations of human minds.
The second way to achieve universal moral authority for human-derived principles is through the use of force. And this is the way that is historically implemented.
It is easy to conclude that political philosophies are not actually imperatives without the injection of force into the equation. This realization is what drives Atheist/Materialists ever Leftward, regardless of their starting philosophy.
But the larger conclusion remains that personal absolutes are not the same as universal absolutes, and that principles that derive from personal absolutes are as likely to evaporate as any other personal opinion. As bedrock foundations for universal principles of behavior, personal absolutes or opinions won’t suffice.
Regardless of the Atheist and Materialist subpopulation that adheres to personal principles, the potential volatility of such principles suggests that they haven’t the persuasive force to be a source of universal voluntary submission or guide for universal conscientious righteous behavior. It is the weightless, empty nature of Atheism / Materialism itself that renders any adopted personal, man-derived principles to be of no weight in evaluating the character or potential behavior of the Atheist.
Certainly these arguments apply somewhat to Christians as well, and this statement always surfaces despite being a tu Quoque fallacy. With Christians, at least the principles are not volatile and can be found easily. And the same goes for Muslims. Whether or not a Christian or Muslim [2] behaves according to their universal principles does not remove the expectation that they would, and ordinarily do, and moreover the principles give a baseline for a metric of character evaluation that does not exist for Atheist / Materialists.
Interestingly a political philosophy such as Libertarianism does not allow the proponent to actually exercise those principles unless he is in power. Without the power to implement the political philosophy or authority to enforce its consequences, a Libertarian is just a philosopher, not a practitioner.
[1] Typically looking for enforcement power to help implement the ethic, and frequently expecting to gain from the implementation.
[2] Actually due to the internal contradictions in the Qu'ran, behavior rules are interpreted by local mullahs, rendering Islam to be a human-derived principle set as well.
The question of the source of moral authority arises here. There is confusion in today’s society between ethics and morals. This has come about with the secularization of all public life. Today moral authority is extended to the alleged “wisdom” of temporal sages and wits.
Let’s examine the character of the object: morality.
Both morality and ethics are based on imperative statements such as “should” statements and “must” statements. The term imperative derives from imperare: to command, order as does the term imperial and necessarily involves the authority to enforce the statement with consequences. Imperatives are not derivable logically from any empirical investigation of nature. Imperatives are rules for guiding human behavior, not rules describing the behavior of natural phenomena. The behavior of natural phenomena is deterministic; human behavior is not (if it were, arguing the issue would be of no consequence). So human behavior is thought to be controllable through commands or rules.
Without the authority to enforce consequences for behaviors, imperatives are of no value. The entire weight of an imperative depends on (a) consequences whether positive or negative, (b) the desirability or revulsiveness of the nature of the consequences, and (c) the probability of actually incurring those consequences.
Ethics today are usually proclaimed by a theoretical philosopher or a professional bio-ethicist; his authority is himself. Ethics are derived pragmatically using logic, frequently to evaluate cost/benefit ratios of competing behaviors. The consequences for not observing the ethic could be as small as cost/benefit gains or losses, or as large as threatened global disaster scenarios predicted by the ethicist, with implied guilt for those who do not observe the ethic. When one hears statements declaring that “we MUST…” or “the nation(s) MUST…”, it is a human-derived ethical imperative statement [1].
Morals are considered passé by secularists because morals are derived not by human logic, they are rules pronounced on the authority of a supreme being that is declared non-existent. The traditional consequences for not observing these rules are declared to be too onerous for the value of the infraction. If such a being did exist, the moral authority of that being would be high, much higher than man-made authority, and the benefits and consequences would apply to all humans, universally.
Now for the question of the applicability of ethical authority. An example has been given of ethical behavior being driven by a political philosophy, in this case, Libertarianism. Assuming that the principles for Libertarianism are consistent across all Libertarians, what is the source of authority for declaring those principles to be unassailable, universal and valid ethics? The answer has to be the human mind, operating on principles thought to be logical.
So the human mind, or at least a subgroup of human minds, has declared an ethic. No matter how compelling the logic behind the ethic, what gives those rules or principles universal moral authority?
There are a couple of possible ways to achieve universal moral authority for human-derived principles. First is through the appeal to the collective conscience for voluntary righteous behavior vs. guilt for non-compliant behavior. This is not a likely source of universal authority for the machinations of human minds.
The second way to achieve universal moral authority for human-derived principles is through the use of force. And this is the way that is historically implemented.
It is easy to conclude that political philosophies are not actually imperatives without the injection of force into the equation. This realization is what drives Atheist/Materialists ever Leftward, regardless of their starting philosophy.
But the larger conclusion remains that personal absolutes are not the same as universal absolutes, and that principles that derive from personal absolutes are as likely to evaporate as any other personal opinion. As bedrock foundations for universal principles of behavior, personal absolutes or opinions won’t suffice.
Regardless of the Atheist and Materialist subpopulation that adheres to personal principles, the potential volatility of such principles suggests that they haven’t the persuasive force to be a source of universal voluntary submission or guide for universal conscientious righteous behavior. It is the weightless, empty nature of Atheism / Materialism itself that renders any adopted personal, man-derived principles to be of no weight in evaluating the character or potential behavior of the Atheist.
Certainly these arguments apply somewhat to Christians as well, and this statement always surfaces despite being a tu Quoque fallacy. With Christians, at least the principles are not volatile and can be found easily. And the same goes for Muslims. Whether or not a Christian or Muslim [2] behaves according to their universal principles does not remove the expectation that they would, and ordinarily do, and moreover the principles give a baseline for a metric of character evaluation that does not exist for Atheist / Materialists.
Interestingly a political philosophy such as Libertarianism does not allow the proponent to actually exercise those principles unless he is in power. Without the power to implement the political philosophy or authority to enforce its consequences, a Libertarian is just a philosopher, not a practitioner.
[1] Typically looking for enforcement power to help implement the ethic, and frequently expecting to gain from the implementation.
[2] Actually due to the internal contradictions in the Qu'ran, behavior rules are interpreted by local mullahs, rendering Islam to be a human-derived principle set as well.
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