A gigantic book royalty check from nothing

Robert Lawrence Kuhn and John Leslie have written up a gracious and substantive reply to my recent First Things commentary on their anthology The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All?  It will appear at the First Things website soon, as will my response.

In the meantime, a reader asks about a less serious contribution to the debate: some remarks made recently by Lawrence Krauss in a video over at Big Think.  I’ve commented on Krauss in a review of his book A Universe from Nothing for First Things and in a couple of earlier posts, hereand here.  Is there anything new to be said?  Well, not by Krauss, that’s for sure.  It’s the same superficial stuff, presented with the same arrogant and uninformed confidence, and as usual barely acknowledging, much less seriously answering, the objections that have been leveled against him by atheists and theists alike.  But for that reason alone it is worthwhile exposing his errors now and again, as long as there’s a single benighted reader out there still inclined to take him seriously.

So let’s take a look.  And in good Lawrence Krauss fashion, he doesn’t hide his fallacies under a bushel but puts them on a pedestal for all to see.  This makes refutation not only easy but quick.  Consider, then, his very first sentence -- wherein, after urging us to be “careful” in our thinking he immediately flings carefulness violently to the ground and starts pummeling it.  Krauss asserts: 

[N]othing is a physical concept because it's the absence of something, and something is a physical concept. 

The trouble with this, of course, is that “something” is not a physical concept.  “Something” is what Scholastic philosophers call a transcendental, a notion that applies to every kind of being whatsoever, whether physical or non-physical -- to tables and chairs, rocks and trees, animals and people, substances and accidents, numbers, universals, and other abstract objects, souls, angels, and God.  Of course, Krauss doesn’t believe in some of these things, but that’s not to the point.  Whether or not numbers, universals, souls, angels or God actually exist, none of them would be physical if they existed.  But each would still be a “something” if it existed.  So the concept of “something” is broader than the concept “physical,” and would remain so even if it turned out that the only things that actually exist are physical.

No atheist philosopher would disagree with me about that much, because it’s really just an obvious conceptual point.  But since Krauss and his fans have an extremely tenuous grasp of philosophy -- or, indeed, of the obvious -- I suppose it is worth adding that even if it were a matter of controversy whether “something” is a physical concept, Krauss’s “argument” here would simply have begged the question against one side of that controversy, rather than refuted it.  For obviously, Krauss’s critics would not agree that “something is a physical concept.”  Hence, confidently to assert this as a premise intended to convince someone who doesn’t already agree with him is just to commit a textbook fallacy of circular reasoning.

Dutifully fulfilling his solemn pledge to give his readers “A fallacy in every sentence!”, Krauss goes on to say: 

And what we've learned over the last hundred years is that nothing is much more complicated than we would've imagined otherwise. 

So, “nothing” is complicated.  That implies that it has diverse parts, elements, aspects, or some such.  At the very least, a part or aspect A that is distinct from a part or aspect B.  But if A is different from B, then there must be something about it by virtue of which it is different.  In which case it isn’t true to say that there is nothing.  Indeed, Krauss goes on to describe “a kind of nothing” that might seem a “void” or an “infinite empty space,” when in fact “due to the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity, we now know that empty space is a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence at every moment.”  Hence “nothing” is really “full of stuff.”

Well, somebody’s sure full of stuff here, but it isn’t “nothing.”  Because “stuff,” “space,” laws,” “particles,” and the like are each something.  In which case, what could it possibly mean to describe these things as aspects of “nothing”?  Have you ever heard such self-contradictory gibberish before?  Of course you have, because you’ve read Lawrence Krauss before.   

The rest is another rehash of the same brazen bait-and-switch Krauss has been repeatedly called out on by friend and foe alike for almost two years now.  Here’s how physics gives you something from nothing, where for “nothing” read “the laws of quantum mechanics,” which are, of course, not nothing but pay no attention to that sophist behind the curtain… 

Yet Krauss does think he’s got an answer to this problem.  The laws aren’t nothing, you say, but something?  Well, try this on for size: 

But even there, it turns out physics potentially has an answer because we now have good reason to believe that even the laws of physics themselves are kind of arbitrary.

There may be an infinite number of universes, and in each universe that's been created, the laws of physics are different. It's completely random. And the laws themselves come into existence when the universe comes into existence. So there's no pre-existing fundamental law. Anything that can happen, does happen. And therefore, you got no laws, no space, no time, no particles, no radiation. That's a pretty good definition of nothing. 

End quote.  What Krauss is referring to here is, of course, his preferred variation on the currently faddish “multiverse” idea, as set out in A Universe from Nothing.  But on the multiverse scenario, it is not precisely correct to say that “there’s no pre-existing fundamental law.”  By “not precisely correct” I mean “false.”  For as Krauss himself says at pp. 176-77 of A Universe from Nothing, a multiverse might exist “in the form of a landscape of universes existing in a host of extra dimensions,” or it might instead take “the form of a possibly infinitely replicating set of universes in a three-dimensional space.”  It would be governed by “the general principle that anything that is not forbidden is allowed.”  Though “we don’t currently have a fundamental theory that explains the detailed character of the landscape of a multiverse,” to make progress in such theorizing “we generally assume that certain properties, like quantum mechanics, permeate all possibilities.”  And it could turn out that there are “millions of layers” of laws.   

Needless to say, “extra dimensions,” “three-dimensional space,” “general principles,” “the detailed character of a landscape,” “properties,” “quantum mechanics,” and “millions of layers of laws” are not nothing, but a whole helluva lot of something.

Recently we had the wood floors in one of the rooms of our house redone.  Naturally we had to empty the room before work could start.  Suppose that when the wood floor guy showed up to begin, everything had been moved out except for one large bookcase.  Annoyed, he asks me why I didn’t empty the room as I had agreed to do.  Suppose I haughtily replied: 

No beds, no floor rugs, no chairs, no lamps, no bookcases.  That’s a pretty good definition of an empty room.   

My wood floor guy would no doubt reply: “No it’s not, dumbass.  You have, by your own admission, still got one bookcase in there.  Therefore it’s not empty.  I thought you taught logic?”   

Of course, the room might be close enough to “empty” for some purposes.  We might even speak loosely of there being “nothing” in it.  That’s fine for most everyday contexts, where we needn’t always use terms precisely.  But of course, it’s not good enough for every context, as the wood floor example shows.  And it certainly isn’t good enough for philosophical and scientific contexts, where we need precision.  Krauss, a prominent physicist whose work drips with contempt for the philosophers and theologians he regards as sloppy thinkers, and who urges us to be “careful” in our use of language, can’t see what the wood floor guy can.   

The reason, of course, is that the wood floor guy doesn’t have a vested interest in denying the obvious.  He hasn’t spent two years loudly shooting his mouth off about how stupid people are who think that a room with a bookcase in it isn’t really empty, and he doesn’t have a New York Times bestseller, lectures, debates, or a Big Think video devoted to confidently promoting the view that a room with a bookcase in it is empty.  Ergo he doesn’t face the utterly humiliating prospect of having to admit that since a room with a bookcase in it isn’tstrictly empty, the people he’s derided as stupid actually have a point, and the book, lectures, video, etc. have all been a waste of time.   

The irony is that admitting the pickle Krauss has gotten himself into would be the one thing that might save him.  For Krauss has managed to parlay a set of completely worthless ideas into fame and fortune.  He’s gotten a big chunk of the “reality-based community” to swallow the notion that a book-length exercise in committing the fallacies of equivocation and red herring counts as Big Thinking.  He’s gotten an army of Dawkins Youth seriously to believe that while the rigorously worked out metaphysical demonstrations of an Aquinas or a Leibniz are really just loose “god of the gaps” speculations, the “multiverse” theory that is notoriously untestable and which Krauss himself admits lacks a “fundamental theory” is hard-headed empirical science.  Krauss might present his own recent career as the surest proof of his thesis: “You think something can’t come from nothing?  Just look at me!” 

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Hitting Bottum

By now you may have heard that Joseph Bottum, reputedly conservative Catholic and former editor of First Things, has assimilated to the hive mind.  People have been asking me for a while now to write more on “same-sex marriage,” though I’ve been waiting for the publication of the full-length version of my new article on natural law and sexual morality -- of which the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly recently published an excerpt -- before doing so.  The reason is that I don’t think there’s much point in discussing the marriage issue without situating it within the context of the traditional natural law approach to sexual morality in general.  And all the usual, stupid objections to that approach are dealt with in the forthcoming piece.  Best to have it to refer to, then, when commenting on current events, so that time need not be wasted endlessly repeating myself answering the same tired canards. 

But I can’t help commenting briefly on the subject anyway, because Bottum’s article is just too much.  And it’s too much because there’s nothing there.  Or rather, while the article is verbose in the extreme, what’s there is almost entirely stuff that completely undermines Bottum’s conclusion.  Yet he draws it anyway.  Matthew Franck at First Things nails it:

At one point in this bloated, interminable essay, meandering hither and yon, Bottum allows as how the authors of the Manhattan Declaration were chiefly thinkers and not writers.  Never was it more obvious that the reverse is true of Bottum.

Though Bottum’s conclusion is entirely un-Catholic, un-conservative, and contrary to natural law, what is most remarkable is just how very thoroughly he still accepts the substance of the Catholic, conservative, and natural law positions on this issue.  To be sure, when you see that he starts the article with some personal remarks about his bluegrass-playin’ gay friend Jim, your eyes cannot help but swivel back in their sockets.  You expect at first that it’s going to be yet another of those ghastly conversion stories, long on celebration and short on cerebration, that have become a staple of the “strange new respect” literature.  “Yes, fellow right-wingers, I too once opposed gay marriage -- until a long heart-to-heart over lattes with my central-casting gay [son, dentist, fellow bluegrass aficionado] convinced me that deep down we’re all just folks.”  The conservative as the dad in Heathers.

Yet that isn’t quite how it goes.  For one thing, by the end of the piece, Jim comes across not as a patient dispenser of homespun, tolerant wisdom, but as a thoroughly repulsive ideologue -- humorless, paranoid, intellectually dishonest, seething with hatred, and even totalitarian in his desire juridically to force the Catholic Church to take on board his pseudo-moral prejudices.  For another, Bottum never quite affirms “same-sex marriage” as per se a good thing -- though he does make a half-hearted attempt to see the empty glass as half-full -- but mainly as a fait accompli he thinks it is counterproductive to oppose anymore.

Hence Bottum acknowledges that there is an argument from principle for opposing “same-sex marriage” however dismal are the prospects for success and the political repercussions of such opposition.   He agrees that opposition to “same-sex marriage” does not necessarily reflect hatred of homosexuals, and that the accusations of bigotry flung against those who oppose it are often politically calculated.  He affirms that advocates of “same-sex marriage” can be “insipid,” “self-righteous,” “uncritical,” and ignorant of the law and of the relevant arguments.  He also allows that some of these advocates of are driven by hatred of Christianity, and of Catholicism in particular.  Indeed, he admits that “one Catholic fear about same-sex marriage with force [is] the fear that the movement is essentially disingenuous,” less about allowing homosexuals to “marry” than it is an excuse to curtail the free practice of traditional religion.

And that’s just for starters.  Bottum laments “the turn against any deep, metaphysical meaning for sex in the West,” sees the push for “same-sex marriage” as part of the general collapse of sexual morality and of the sanctity of marriage, and regards its juridical victories as the “logical conclusion [of] the great modern project of disenchantment” that also led to legalized abortion.  While he criticizes the “new natural law” arguments of Grisez, Finnis, and George, he does so because he regards them (quite correctly, in my view) as metaphysically desiccated, too deferential to modern assumptions, and unconvincing.  Instead he affirms “the thicker natural law of the medievals,” characterizing Aquinas’s natural law theory in particular as “a grand, beautiful, and extremely delicate structure of rationality.”

On the theological side, Bottum acknowledges that Catholic teaching, including that of Pope Francis, “grants the faithful Catholic little room to maneuver on same-sex marriage.”  He agrees that “we should not accept without a fight an essentially un-Catholic retreat from the public square to a lifeboat theology and the small communities of the saved.”  He tells us -- exactly on the money as far as I am concerned -- that “the goal of the church today must primarily be the re-enchantment of reality” (i.e. a defense of the traditional metaphysics underlying natural law) and that it must thereby “start rebuilding the thick natural law.”  And he respects the conservative worry about the unforeseen consequences of radical social experiments like “same-sex marriage.”  Though it’s obviously not what he has chosen to emphasize in this piece, it seems pretty clear that Bottum has for the most part not given up the conservative, Catholic, and natural law moraland metaphysical objections to “same-sex marriage.” 

Yet for all that he recommends that Catholics drop their opposition to “same-sex marriage” as a civil institution.  Why?  As far as I can tell he has four reasons.  They’re all bad.

First, Bottum seems to think there is no common, non-theological intellectual ground on which the opponents of “same-sex marriage” can conduct their arguments with its proponents.   For despite his praise for the natural law tradition represented by Aquinas, he says that its “premises may not be provable, but they are visible to faith.”  That is precisely the reverse of what Aquinas and other traditional natural law theorists maintain, the reverse of what the Catholic Church teaches, the reverse of what scripture teaches, and the reverse of the truth.  A natural law that rests on “faith” is not the natural law.  Natural law arguments rest essentially on what can be known from a purely philosophical analysis of reality in general and human nature in particular -- not a popular philosophical analysis these days, to be sure, but certainly one that need make no reference to divine revelation or ecclesiastical authority.  What Plato and Aristotle knew without revelation, desiccated modern liberals can also come to know without revelation, albeit with a lot more work.  

And as I have shown at length in The Last Superstition, Aquinas, and elsewhere, the most basic metaphysical ingredients of the classical, “enchanted” metaphysical picture of the world, and even some of the moral ones, are in fact already being rediscovered by contemporary secular philosophers.  Anyone who thinks that the moderns cannot be brought around by rational argument to reconsider essentialism, teleology, the notion of the good as what fulfills our nature, and other elements of traditional metaphysics simply hasn’t been paying attention.

Like David Bentley Hart, Bottum seems to be conflating philosophy with theology, and the natural with the supernatural.  That is not a position consistent with Catholicism, given the Church’s condemnation of fideism.  Nor is it consistent with scripture, given St. Paul’s teaching in Romans 1 that those without divine revelation are “without excuse” -- not only for their idolatry, but also for what Paul specifically refers to as their departure from what is “natural” vis-à-vis sexual relations.

I am well aware, of course, that the liberal proponent of “same-sex marriage” does not accept natural law, Catholic teaching, or scripture in the first place.  The point, though, is that Bottum still accepts them -- and that since he does, he hasn’t a philosophical or theological leg to stand on in abandoning the fight against “same-sex marriage” on grounds of fideism.

Bottum’s second reason for recommending acquiescence to “same-sex marriage” is juridical.  He writes:

[U]nder any principle of governmental fairness available today, the equities are all on the side of same-sex marriage.  There is no coherent jurisprudential argument against it—no principled legal view that can resist it.

If what Bottum means here is that the jurisprudential arguments that have won the day in recent decisions are obviously compelling ones, then as Matthew Franck says, this is simply a “howler.”  But perhaps what Bottum means -- given the qualifier “available today” -- is that the despotic legislating-from-the-bench that has become the trump card of even “conservative” justices like Robertsand Kennedyessentially makes a victory for opponents of “same-sex marriage” impossible.  Maybe so, and maybe not.  But such an argument would in any case prove too much.  It would “justify” caving in not only on “same-sex marriage,” but also on abortion, health care policy, and pretty much everything else.  It amounts to a recommendation that judicial despotism not be resisted if the despots are sufficiently ruthless.  What is conservative, Catholic, or even remotely sane about that? 

Bottum’s third reason also involves capitulation, this time to secular culture.  He opines that:

Campaigns against same-sex marriage are hurting the church, offering the opportunity to make Catholicism a byword for repression in a generation that, even among young Catholics, just doesn’t think that same-sex activity is worth fighting about.

He adds that the clergy sex scandals have undermined the Church’s moral authority on matters of sex anyway.  Perhaps Bottum would also have advised the early Christians to just lighten up and offer a little incense to Caesar -- the young people, after all, couldn’t see what the big deal was, and anyway all that martyrdom stuff was just making Christians look like fanatics.  Perhaps he would have told Athanasius to knock it off already with the Trinitarianism, since it was just alienating the smart set.  Besides, most of the bishops had caved in to Arianism, so that the Church lacked any moral authority on the subject.  And maybe Bottum would have advised the Christian warriors at Spain, Vienna, and Lepanto to get real and learn to accept a Muslim Europe.  After all, these various desperate Catholic efforts were, as history shows, a waste of time -- the Roman persecutors, Arians, and invading Muslims all won out in the end, right? 

But to be fair, those analogies aren’t quite right.  A better analogy would be Bottum suggesting that a little emperor worship might actually serve the causeof monotheism; or that giving Arianism free reign might advance recognition of the divinity of Christ; or that submitting to dhimmitude might be a good way of restoringChristendom.  For here is what Joseph Bottum, prophet of a re-enchanted reality and rebuilder of Aquinas’s natural law, sees, if only murkily, in his crystal ball:

In fact, same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in chastity in a culture that has lost much sense of chastity. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in love in a civilization that no longer seems to know what love is for. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in the coherence of family life in a society in which the family is dissolving.

I don’t know that it will, of course…

No, of course the level-headed Bottum wouldn’t claim to know that it will.  Just like we couldn’t, you know, have been absolutely sureat the time that offering incense to the emperor might somehow undermine idolatry, or that denying Christ’s divinity would lead people to embrace His divinity, or that ceding lands to the Jihad would lead to new church construction therein.  Hey, it’s all a crap shoot, but we can hope!

If this sounds like good old-fashioned American optimism ad absurdum, that’s only natural given the fourth, and apparently main, reason for Bottum’s surrender:

 We are now at the point where, I believe, American Catholics should accept state recognition of same-sex marriage simply because they are Americans.

It’s all about “old-timey Americana, the stuff we all still share.”   Good sportsmanship.  Consensus.  Compromise.  Tolerance.  Affability.  The things that can bring a Catholic Republican together with his gay buddy Jim for a burger and some bluegrass in Gramercy Park.  You know, the stuff that really matters at the end of the day. 

Uptight teachers of the faithful are always setting father against son and mother against daughter, but that’s no way to win over the youth demographic.  The modern Catholic will find a surer guide in Modern Family.  If the kids aren’t down with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, let’s try William James’s Gospel of Relaxation.  So take it easy, fellow Catholics.  Go with the flow.  Chill out.  It’s all good.  Not exactly the Beatitudes, but mind you it is all so very American.  I would say that Bottum isn’t being true to his religion, except that I suspect that he is. 

Anyway, as a famous non-American once said, no man can serve two masters.  And by Bottum’s own admission, people like his pal Jim aren’t likely to be satisfied with back-slapping bonhomie, or with the Church being a good loser.  They don’t want Catholics merely to quit the field.  They want them to obey -- to pay for contraceptives, to photograph same-sex “weddings,” to keep their opinions about sexual morality to themselves if they know what’s good for them.  If you’ll forgive more pop culture references -- perhaps the only “stuff we all still share” any more in this One Nation Under Compulsory Genial Tolerance -- Bottum starts by channeling Sally Field, but will end up on the floor alongside Kevin Bacon. 

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Out on the links

I called attention recently to the special issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly devoted to the theme “Critiques of the New Natural Law Theory.”  The issue is now available for free download.  (Keep in mind that my own contribution to the issue is an excerpt from a forthcoming longer article.)

I notice that Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics, the anthology I edited for Palgrave Macmillan’s Philosophers in Depth series, is at the time of this posting selling at a whopping 40% discount on Amazon -- $57, down from the steep $95 list price.  Prices may change, so buy now!

The Catholic Center at New York University will be hosting a symposium this November 9 on the theme “Thomas Aquinas and Philosophical Realism.”  The speakers are James Brent, OP, John Haldane, William Jaworski, Candace Vogler, J. David Velleman, Edward Feser, and Thomas Joseph White, OP.  The event begins at 11 am.

David Oderberg will be delivering the George F. Hourani Lectures in Ethics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, on September 23 - 27.  The theme is “The Metaphysics of Good and Evil.”  He will also be debating Patrick Toner on September 26 on the subject of survival and immortality.  More details about both events are available through David’s website.

In a piece for The New York Times, Thomas Nagel offers a summary of the argument of his book Mind and Cosmos.

Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths in Translation is just out from Oxford University Press.  Mark Anderson, whom longtime readers will recall from his book Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One, is among the translators.

Finally, given the uptick I’m noticing in emails asking for detailed commentary on philosophical and theological matters, here’s a friendly reminder about correspondence sent to me.

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Mad dogs and eliminativists

As an epilogue to my critique of Alex Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” let’s take a brief look at Rosenberg’s recent interview at 3:AM Magazine.  The interviewer styles Rosenberg “the mad dog naturalist.”  So perhaps in his bid to popularize eliminative materialism, Rosenberg could put out a “Weird Al” style parody of the old Noël Coward song.  Or maybe he and fellow eliminativist Paul Churchland could do a re-make of ZZ Top’s classic Eliminatoralbum.  Don’t know if they’re sharp-dressed men, but they’ve got the beards.  (I can see the video now: The guys, electric guitars swaying in unison and perhaps assisted by Pat Churchland in a big 80s hairdo, set straight some benighted young grad student who still thinks the propositional attitudes are worth salvaging.  Romance ensues, as does a job at a Leiter-ranked philosophy department…)

Two passages in the interview call for special notice.  The interviewer notes that “in the rather heated response to Jerry Fodor’s provocations about natural selectionyour response was one of the few that recognized that he was onto something.”  Rosenberg replies:

When Fodor argued that natural selection can’t see properties, and can’t produce organic systems, for example brains—that respond to, represent, register properties, he thought he was providing a reduction [sic] ad absurdum of Darwinian theory… I believe that Fodor’s attempted reductio of Darwinian theory is a modus tollens of representationalist theories of the mind, theories that accord to the wet stuff, to neural states what Searle calls original intentionality. It’s an argument for eliminativism about intentional content.  So Fodor is totally wrong abut [sic] Darwinian theory, but his argument shows that we Darwinians (and all the physicists if I am right that Darwin’s theory is just the 2d law in action among the macromolecules) have to go eliminativist about the brain.

End quote.  See “Eliminativism without Tears” for similar remarks about Fodor.  This, my friends, is why Rosenberg gets paid the big money: to see more clearly than either his fellow naturalists or most theists what is really at stake.  Naturalists (such as many of Thomas Nagel’s critics) and ID theorists alike are endlessly farting around with questions about the probability of this or that biological phenomenon having arisen through natural selection, and other such relative trivia.  In the dispute over Darwinian naturalism, that is a side show at best.  The serious questions are not empirical but metaphysical, matters of what is possible even in principle rather than of probability.  It is not what can be read off from the empirical results of science, but rather what has been read into them philosophicallyfrom the start, that is both the source of naturalism’s apparent strength and in reality its Achilles’ heel.  And that is the dogmatic insistence that the natural order is utterly devoid of any immanent, built-in, Aristotelian-style teleology, finality, or directedness toward an end.  It is the ancient Greek atomist view of the world as a kind of vast clockwork, of all observable phenomena as entirely explicable at least in principle in terms of aggregates of particles in motion or the like.

Once you grant that supposition, even for the sake of argument, then you have conceded the naturalist’s key move.  He will always be able to come up with some far-fetched but seemingly possible account of the origin of any empirical phenomenon in these terms, the only remaining question being whether there is direct empirical evidence that things actually happened as the account says they did.  And once you’ve conceded the general correctness of his method, the naturalist will think even the most far-fetched and empirically unsupported specific applications of that method are more plausible than any alternative, on grounds of the general success of the method coupled with Ockham’s razor.  The alternatives will always seem ad hoc, god-of-the-gaps exceptions to the rule, destined to be superseded and thus not worth bothering with in the first place.  That is what the ID theorist fails to see.

Once you grant the supposition, though, you have also implicitly committed yourself to a radical eliminativism.  If there is no such thing as teleology, finality, directedness, one thing “pointing to” another, etc. in the natural world in general, then there can be no such thing in the biological realm specifically or in the human realm even more specifically.  That means that the Darwinian naturalist has no business helping himself to notions like “function,” “selection for,” and the like.  These are irreducibly teleological.  Of course, many naturalists suppose that such notions can be reduced to non-teleological ones, but as Fodor argued, they cannot be.  All attempts to reduce them face intractable indeterminacy problems.  The naturalist also has no business helping himself to notions like “thinking,” “willing” (freely or otherwise), “meaning” (whether the meaning of thoughts, sentences, or anything else), etc.  All such notions also smack of “directedness” toward an object, so that intentionality must be as illusory as the naturalist says teleology is.  And all attempts to reduce rather than eliminate intentionality also face intractable indeterminacy problems, as Rosenberg notes.  Eliminativism is forced on you if you consistently deny teleology.  This is what most naturalists fail to see. 

That leaves the naturalist with two choices.  He can bring teleology back into the picture, which is what Nagel does -- essentially a journey “from Aristotle to Darwin and back again,” as Etienne Gilson prophetically put it.  Or he can bite the eliminativist bullet, which is what Rosenberg commends.  The trouble with that is that it cannot coherently be done.  Since science is as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will have to eliminate the very science in the name of which you are carrying out the elimination; and since philosophy (including eliminative materialist philosophy) is also as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will also have to eliminate eliminativism.  Eliminativism is a snake that eats its own tail.  The problem can be danced around, but it cannot be solved, for the reasons set out both in my recent posts on Rosenberg’s essay and in my series of posts on his book.

Not that the dummies who hang out in comboxes like Jerry Coyne’s or Jason Rosenhouse’s understand the gravity of the problem intentionality poses for their position, and thus the motivation for Rosenberg’s extreme solution.  This brings us to a second passage from the Rosenberg interview:

What is clear to me about the reception of The Atheist’s Guide was first how hard it is to get nonphilosphers to understand the problem of intentionality and aboutness, second how much harder to understand the eliminativist solution to the problem, and most all, the degree to which our emotional attachment to narratives—stories with plots, good guys, bad guys, agents with motives—gets in the way of our understanding science and applying it to these persistent questions.

Now I know how Berkeley must have felt when Dr. Johnson refuted him by kicking a stone, especially when I read the puerile self-refutation arguments against my eliminativism.

Of course a few theists have identified The Atheist’s Guide to Reality as correctly identifying the implications of demonic materialistic naturalism. But I am actually surprised by how few have done so. It’s no tribute to the intelligence of the rest of them.

And of course naturalists have pretty much ignored the arguments for the same reason. It gives naturalism a bad name with the public, whom they hope to win over to a humane and civilized point of view. I wish they had been able to succeed in reconciling science and the manifest image. Maybe they yet will. I doubt it.

End quote.  Note that, as we saw in our look at “Eliminativism without Tears,” Rosenberg is well aware that not all versions of the “self-refutation” objection are “puerile.”  Note also that if it’s “no tribute to the intelligence” of those theists who have failed to see the radical implications of naturalism, it is hardly a tribute to the intelligence of most naturalists that they have also failed to see those implications.  And note that if “stories with plots, good guys, bad guys, agents with motives” and the like are all fictions -- as they have to be on an eliminativist view -- then of course stories about bigoted religious believers (the bad guys, agents with bad motives) retarding the advance of science (a story with a plot) and resisted by intellectually honest naturalists (the good guys, agents with good motives) are also all fictions.  That Rosenberg either doesn’t see or doesn’t want to advertise this implication hoists him with the same petard he directs toward his more slow and/or intellectually dishonest readers. 

And then there’s this irony: The very scientism Rosenberg is pushing is, of course, what has made many of his naturalist readers too philosophically shallow to see the problems to which he is trying to call their attention. 

It’s a comeuppance worthy of a ZZ Top video!

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