Video of Science and Faith Conference now online

Last month I gave a talk at the Science and Faith Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, on the theme “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science.”  The other main speakers were Stephen Barr, Michael Behe, William E. Carroll, Jay Richards, Alvin Plantinga, and Benjamin Wiker.  My understanding is that a conference volume containing the papers is planned, but video of most of the talks is now available online here.

You’ll find my own talk below.  (Keep in mind that the camera adds ten pounds.  Lots of gin and pizza can add a few pounds too.)  There’s a lot of new stuff in this paper.  I argue that it is impossible in principle to get from the world to the God of classical theism unless we affirm the act/potency distinction and (therefore) the reality of immanent final causality.  Along the way I deal with Greek atomism, Berkeley’s critique of matter, the nature of divine causality, the existential inertia thesis, the problem with Leibnizian cosmological arguments, the limitations of the Kalām argument, and some other stuff as well.  Jonathan Sanford also makes some important points in his reply, which follows my talk.

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TLS in the Telegraph

Christopher Howse of The Daily Telegraph on The Last Superstition: “God’s more than a watchmaker: How a misapprehension of the New Atheists has been exploded.”

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Smith, Tollefsen, and Pruss on lying

Last summer, theologian Janet E. Smith published an article in First Things defending the moral legitimacy, under certain circumstances, of telling falsehoods.  In September, Chris Tollefsen and Alex Pruss replied to Smith, and last month Smith responded to Tollefsen and Pruss.  I hate to disagree with Smith, whom I’ve long admired; and as longtime readers know, I’ve had my differences with Tollefsen.  But on this subject, I have to side with Tollefsen and Pruss -- though I also think that some of their arguments are weak, and that they are not entirely fair to Smith.

I have addressed the subject of lying at length in a number of earlier posts (which you can find here, here, here, here, and here), and it will be useful to summarize the main points before addressing the debate between Smith and her critics.  Following the classical natural law approach to ethics associated with Aquinas and other moralists in the Scholastic tradition, I have argued, on both philosophical and theological grounds, that:

1. Lying is always wrong, even if not always gravely so.

2. Broad mental reservations are not lies, and neither are obvious jokes nor polite expressions such as “You look nice today,” “I’m fine, thanks,” and the like, because the linguistic conventions governing these expressions entail that they are not generally intended to convey one’s actual thoughts and feelings in the first place, but function as mere pleasantries.  Certain kinds of stratagems in war, certain deceptive moves in games, etc. do not necessarily count as lies either.

3. What is essential to lying is deliberately speaking contrary to one’s true thoughts; whether the listener has a right to the truth is irrelevant.  

4. Hence it is wrong to lie even to the murderer who comes to your door demanding to know where to find his intended victim.  It is not wrong to refrain from telling him, or to speak evasively, or to use a broad mental reservation.  But if these ploys do not work, it would be wrong to lie to him.  Not gravely wrong, but still mildly wrong.

5. It is also wrong to lie in wartime.  That certain deceptive practices are justifiable in war does not show otherwise, because lying is not the same thing as deception.  Broad mental reservations, evasive speech, feints, etc. during wartime are fine, but deliberately speaking contrary to one’s true thoughts is always lying and thus always wrong.

6. It is also wrong to lie to children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc.  Not necessarily gravely wrong, but still wrong, and unwise too insofar as children who find that they’ve been lied to about these matters might reasonably wonder whether their parents have been lying to them about other matters too (religion, morality, etc.).

7. To the extent that Live Action’s methods in their sting operation against Planned Parenthood involved broad mental reservation, evasion, and the like, those methods may be defensible; to the extent that these methods involve actual lying, they were wrong (even if not gravely so) and should not be used. 

Please don’t bother commenting on these claims until you’ve read the posts in question, which deal with the stock objections at length.  I’m not going to rehash it all here.  The point is just to summarize my own approach to the issue in question before commenting on Smith, Tollefsen, and Pruss.  They cover a lot of ground in their exchange, but I will confine my remarks here to two issues: the teaching of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis lying, and the traditional natural law grounds for condemning lying as inherently immoral.

Catholic teaching

Tollefsen and Pruss give the impression that Smith is dissenting from official Catholic teaching on lying.  It is not clear whether they intend to give that impression, but such a charge would in any event be unjust.  Smith is no dissenter.  What the Church teaches is that lying is always wrong, and Smith, it seems to me, does not deny this.  What she defends is the claim that not all false assertion counts as lying, just as not all killing counts as murder and not all taking of another’s property counts as stealing.  (Certainly this is all her position commits her to, though I think she could have stated things a little more carefully at a couple of places in her reply to Tollefsen and Pruss.)  Smith appeals to the idea that for one’s false assertion to count as a lie, the person one is speaking to must have a right to the truth.  While I strongly disagree with her position, and while it has never gained a wide following among orthodox Catholic moral theologians, Smith is perfectly correct to hold that this minority view has historically been defended by some orthodox theologians and has not been condemned by the Church.

Consider this statement from Fr. Francis J. Connell’s Outlines of Moral Theology -- a typical pre-Vatican II manual of moral theology published in 1958 and carrying the Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat:

A lie is a statement contrary to what a person believes to be true.  It may be in word, in writing, or in deed.  It is forbidden explicitly in Sacred Scripture, and also by the natural law.  Some theologians base their argument on the fact that the purpose of speech is to manifest what one believes to be true; and hence it is against the primary purpose of this faculty to tell a lie.  Other theologians argue that the primary purpose of the faculty of speech is to promote the welfare of mankind by mutual communication of ideas, so that a lie is wrong because it tends to disrupt the spirit of trust and confidence among human beings.  However, they say, when a person is unjustly trying to force me to reveal a truth which I have a right to conceal, I do not sin if I say something to the contrary.  In that event, I am telling a falsehood, but not a lie.  This opinion is truly probable, but those who accept it must be very careful not to abuse it. (p. 158)

Or consider Fr. Thomas Slater’s 1925 Manual of Moral Theology.  After arguing that lying is always and intrinsically wrong, even if done to save a life, Slater writes:

Some of the Greek Fathers held a different view from the above, and thought that lying was not wrong under all circumstances, but that it was occasionally allowable, like medicine, on account of inevitable necessity.  English moralists have very commonly held a similar opinion, that a lie is only told when what is false is said to one who has a right to the truth.  Some modern Catholic theologians have also adopted this opinion, which places the malice of lying in the denial of the truth to one who has a right to it.  (Vol. I, p. 292)

Slater goes on vigorously to criticize this view for failing to make the nature of this right clear, for construing lying in an implausibly narrow way, and for failing adequately to answer the arguments for the more traditional and stricter view.  I agree with his criticisms, and most of the manuals of the day also firmly reject the more lax view in favor of the stricter traditional view, according to which a listener’s right to the truth is irrelevant to whether something counts as a lie.  But the more lax position was a view that had a small number of defenders within the tradition, and Slater does not question the orthodoxy of those who hold it.  (Smith provides some other citations in support of her position in her reply to Tollefsen and Pruss.)

It is this minority theological opinion that seems to have influenced the original edition of the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, which stated:

To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth. (par. 2483)

Now the revised Catechism altered this passage, deleting the reference to a person’s right to know the truth.  And as I noted in an earlier post, apparently the change was made by then-Cardinal Ratzinger at the request of theologians concerned to maintain continuity with the more traditional view defended by the majority of orthodox theologians.  Since I think the minority view is not only wrong but seriously problematic from a theological point of view, I am glad the change was made.  But it is only fair to acknowledge that the fact that the less strict minority view made it into the first edition of the Catechism at all only lends support to Smith’s claim that the Church has not officially condemned that view, and regards it as at least defensible and within the bounds of orthodoxy.

(It is also a bit rich for Tollefsen to be citing Scripture and tradition against Smith.  After all, Tollefsen takes the view, not merely that capital punishment should not be used -- something a Catholic can certainly hold -- but that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral, a claim that not only has no support from Scripture and tradition but is manifestly in conflict with Scripture, tradition, and even the teaching of the current Catechism and of Pope John Paul II, which disfavors capital punishment but acknowledges that it can be legitimate at least in principle.  I’ve discussed Catholic teaching on capital punishment here, and Tollefsen’s views on the subject here, here, here, and here.) 

The “perverted faculty” argument 

As I’ve indicated, Smith’s defense of telling falsehoods under certain circumstances rests on an analogy with lawful killing and the lawful taking of another’s goods.  Aquinas and other traditional natural law theorists agree that not all killing counts as murder, because it is only the taking of the life of an innocent human being that is intrinsically wrong, and killing in self-defense, in a just war, and in executing those guilty of serious enough offenses involves taking the lives of people who are not innocent.  (See the articles and posts on capital punishment just linked to for more on this issue.)  They also agree that not all taking of another’s property without his consent counts as stealing, because the natural law does not in the first place give us so strong a right to our property that we can justly withhold it in all circumstances, including cases like those where a person lost in the woods will starve to death unless he takes some food from someone else’s cabin.  (See my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation” for more on this subject.)  Similarly, Smith argues, Aquinas and those influenced by his natural law approach to ethics should allow that not every case of deliberately telling a falsehood counts as a lie, since some people do not have a right to the truth from us.

The problem with Smith’s argument is that the cases of murder, stealing, and lying are simply not parallel in the way she supposes, certainly not from the point of view of the classical approach to natural law theory represented by Aquinas.  For Aquinas and the classical natural law tradition that informed the thinking of the Scholastic manualists, deliberately telling a falsehood is intrinsically immoral, whether or not the listener has a right to know the truth, because it involves acting contrary to the natural end of our communicative faculties.  It is in this respect like contraception, or deliberately vomiting up a meal so that one can gorge oneself indefinitely.  Their argument is thus a species of what is known as a “perverted faculty” argument.  Murder and stealing do not involve the perversion of a faculty; they are immoral for other, more complex reasons.  Hence the analogy Smith needs in order to make her case does not hold.  (Smith also appeals to the difference between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian conditions of the human race, but I don’t think this is relevant.  Like contraception, deliberately telling a falsehood involves the perversion of a faculty as much after the Fall as before.)

“Perverted faculty” arguments are very widely misunderstood, and routinely dismissed on the basis of these misunderstandings.  This is no place for a full defense, but the basic idea can be spelled out fairly briefly.  Classical natural law theory presupposes certain elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics, namely its essentialism and affirmation of the reality of immanent teleology.  The idea is that natural substances have essences, and that these essences entail certain ends toward which a substance is naturally directed.  In the case of living things, the realization of these ends will constitute the thing’s flourishing as the kind of thing it is.  So, for example, a tree will, by virtue of its essence, have a natural tendency to sink roots into the ground, to grow branches and leaves, and so forth; and to the extent it successfully does so, it will flourish as a tree, while if it fails to do so (e.g. if because of external factors or internal defects it is unable to sink roots very deeply into the soil) it will atrophy.  A squirrel, by virtue of its essence, will naturally tend to gather acorns, scamper up trees, and so forth; and to the extent it pursues these ends it will flourish qua squirrel, while to the extent it fails to do so (again, whether because of external circumstances or internal defects) it will not flourish.

For classical natural law theory, such natural teleology grounded in the essences of things entails an objective standard of goodness and badness.  A tree with strong roots and branches is to that extent a good tree, while a diseased tree with weak roots and withered branches is a bad one; a healthy squirrel which likes to scamper about and gather food is to that extent a good squirrel, while a squirrel which has through injury lost the ability to climb trees and because of genetic defect does not enjoy the taste of acorns is a bad one; and so forth.  So far this is not a moral sense of “good” versus “bad”; it is rather the sense operative when we describe something as a “good specimen” or “bad example” of a kind of thing.  But it is an entirely objective sense.  When we say that the healthy tree is a good tree and the diseased squirrel a bad squirrel, we are not expressing our own preferences but simply stating what follows, as a matter of objective fact, from the nature or essence of a tree or squirrel.  (There is no “fact/value distinction” from an A-T point of view; so-called “values” are built into the facts from the get go.)  Moreover, distinctively moral goodness or badness falls out as a special case of this more general sense.  Moral goodness or badness is just the kind of goodness or badness manifested by rational agents, who (unlike plants and animals) can freely choose whether or not to pursue what is good for them given their nature.  A rational agent who chooses to pursue the ends that his essence determines are good for him is to that extent morally good, while a rational agent who chooses to pursue that which is contrary to these ends is to that extent morally bad.  (For a more detailed treatment of the metaphysical foundations of classical natural law theory, see the first half of my article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” linked to above, or chapter 5 of Aquinas.)  

Now, the way this gets worked out so as to provide us with moral guidance on specific issues is complicated, and much depends on various concrete details of human nature and the physical, cultural, and historical circumstances in which human beings find themselves.  (I discuss the implications for private property and related issues in the article linked to, and the implications for sexual morality in chapter 4 of The Last Superstition.)  But “perverted faculty” arguments for certain moral conclusions fall out as a natural consequence of the general principles already described.  The basic idea is that when some faculty F is natural to a rational agent A and by nature exists for the sake of some end E (and exists in A precisely so that A might pursue E), then it is metaphysically impossible for it to be good for A to use F in a manner contrary to E.  For the good of a thing is determined by the end which it has by nature.  F exists for the sake of E, and agents like A naturally possess F precisely so that they might pursue E.  Hence (given the underlying metaphysics) it cannot possibly be good to use F for the sake of preventing the realization of E, or for the sake of an end which has an inherent tendency to frustrate the realization of E.  Hence (to cite the best-known applications of this reasoning) it cannot possibly be good to use our sexual faculties in a way that positively frustrates their procreative end.  And it cannot possibly be good to use our communicative faculties in a way that positively frustrates their truth-conveying end.

None of this entails that F cannot have more than one natural end, and neither does it entail that it cannot be good for us to use F for an end other than E.  For “different from E” and “other than E” do not entail “contrary to E.”  Hence there is nothing inherently wrong with married people having sex for the sake of expressing affection or merely because they feel like doing it, or with their sexually stimulating each other in various ways during foreplay, as long as they do not act in a way that positively frustrates the procreative end of the sexual act.  And there is nothing wrong with using our communicative faculties for all sorts of purposes other than conveying truth -- for entertainment, expressing one’s feelings, or what have you -- as long as this is not done in a way which is contrary to the truth-conveying end, as deliberate falsehood is.

Nor does any of this entail that we have to use F at all.  Hence it is legitimate for someone to refrain from sex for the sake of the priesthood or the religious life, or even just to avoid pregnancy; and it is legitimate to refrain from using one’s communicative faculties at all so as to avoid conveying a truth one does not want others to know.  Indeed, it can even be legitimate to destroy F if this is the only way to preserve the agent A, as when one has cancerous reproductive organs or vocal cords surgically removed.  But if one is going actually to use F, it cannot be good to use it in a manner contrary to the realization of E.

Nor does any of this entail that we cannot use F when we know its end won’t in fact be achieved; for in that case we are not using F for the sake of frustrating the realization of E, and we are not ourselves attempting to frustrate the realization of E in the course of using F.  To foresee that F’s end E won’t in fact be realized is not the same thing as using F in a way that will prevent E from being realized, any more than foreseeing that something will happen is the same as causing it to happen.  Hence there is nothing inherently wrong with sex during pregnancy, or during infertile periods, or with a sterile spouse, or after menopause.  And there is nothing inherently wrong with using broad mental reservations -- which do not actually convey falsehoods but merely express truth in an oblique way -- even though one knows that one’s listener will in fact probably draw the wrong conclusion.

Nor does anything said here entail that man-made devices are per se contrary to nature in the relevant sense.  The reason contraception is objectionable from a natural law point of view is not because it involves the use of drugs in the case of the birth control pill, or artifacts in the case of condoms.  The use of drugs to treat impotence, or of eyeglasses to improve vision, are not “unnatural” in the relevant sense, despite the means being artificial, because they do not involve using a faculty contrary to its natural end.  Indeed, these means restore or enhance the faculties’ power to realize their natural ends.  By contrast, the “withdrawal method,” though it does not involve the use of any artificial devices or drugs, is unnatural in the relevant sense, because it does involve using a faculty contrary to its end.

Nor is it any objection to “perverted faculty” arguments to point out that some people have very strong desires to use their faculties in a way contrary to what natural law theorists claim to be their natural ends, even if these desires have a biological basis.  That something has a biological basis doesn’t by itself make it “natural” in the relevant sense, since some biologically grounded traits are defects.  For instance, color blindness and Down syndrome have a genetic basis, but that hardly makes them “natural” in the relevant, A-T metaphysical sense.  By the same token, even if it turned out that homosexual attraction or a compulsion to lie had a genetic basis, that wouldn’t show that these desires are “natural” in the relevant sense.

Most objections to “perverted faculty” arguments rest on a failure to make distinctions like the ones just spelled out.  Another objection sometimes raised is that such arguments are objectionably “physicalistic” in that they purportedly reduce morality to brute physiology -- making sex (for instance) a matter merely of plumbing, the placement of fluids, and the like.  But the charge is unjust.  First of all, no one claims that “perverted faculty” arguments address the whole of morality, or even the most important part of every moral question.  For example, traditional natural law theorists typically regard the perversion of our communicative faculties involved in lying as in itself only venially sinful.  Gravely sinful lies involve elements beyond merely the perversion of a faculty.  (Here the listener’s right to the truth would be relevant.)

Second, even “perverted faculty” arguments themselves do not merely concern brute physiology in the first place.  In the case of sexual morality, the point is not just that female and male sexual organs fit together like lock and key, etc.  For we have psychological faculties as well as physiological ones.  Hence the male sexual passions are by nature woman-oriented, the female sexual passions are by nature man-oriented, the longing men and women naturally have for one another includes more than just a desire for sexual release but also a yearning for completion and companionship, and so on and so forth.  The “complementarity” of men and women is as relevant to the “perverted faculty” approach to sexual morality as it is to purportedly “deeper” approaches like personalism.  (Again, that some people’s sexual desires are not like this is irrelevant, just as the existence of three-legged dogs is irrelevant to the question of how many legs dogs have in their natural state.)  In the case of lying, it isn’t just the physiology of speech that is relevant; our spiritual nature as rational animals is even more important.  In general, for the traditional natural law theorist, it isn’t merely our physiological faculties that are perverted in lying and in sexual immorality, but our higher faculties as well.

Obviously there are various ways in which this position might be challenged.  But it seems to me that Smith’s objections to Aquinas’s condemnation of all deliberate falsehood do not address the crucial, “perverted faculty” approach to the issue that underlies his view and that of natural law thinkers influenced by him.  For one thing, Smith’s appeal to the “postlapsarian” condition of man is, as I have said, irrelevant.  Given the nature of the considerations the “perverted faculty” argument appeals to, the circumstances of human life after the Fall can no more make deliberate falsehood good than they can make contraception good.  And as I have also noted, the parallels she attempts to draw with murder and stealing do not hold up, because the wrongness of murder and stealing do not stem, as the inherent wrongness of lying does, from using a natural faculty in a manner contrary to its natural end.

For another thing, many of Smith’s objections are aimed at a straw man.  She points out that it is legitimate to use our communicative faculties for purposes “other than” conveying truth, as if this conflicted with Aquinas’s position.  But as I have indicated, defenders of the “perverted faculty” argument agree with her that this is legitimate.  It simply doesn’t follow that using our communicative faculties in a manner “contrary to” their truth-telling function is also legitimate.  Smith also insinuates that defensible practices like “dissimulation designed to smooth over awkward social situations,” “pretending to enjoy a meal that doesn’t please,” certain deceptions during wartime, and the like, are incompatible with Aquinas’s position, when in fact (and as I have also indicated) they are commonly regarded by traditional natural law theorists as legitimate exercises in broad mental reservation rather than lies.  In general, Smith fails to address the arguments of those moral theologians who refined Aquinas’s position over the centuries, and fails to draw careful distinctions of the sort that are common in their writings.

Unfortunately, though I agree with their main conclusion, the arguments of Tollefsen and Pruss are not much better.  As Smith rightly notes, their approach is “more Kantian than Thomistic,” grounded not in the classical natural law theory of Aquinas but in the so-called “new natural law theory” of Germain Grisez and John Finnis.  (Or at least Tollefsen’s is; I don’t know how far Pruss would go in the “new natural law” direction.)  Eschewing the A-T metaphysical foundation of traditional natural law theory, the “new natural lawyers” affirm the “fact/value distinction” and reject “perverted faculty” arguments.  But the arguments they would put in place of the traditional ones are, in my estimation, notable only for their pretentious obscurity and deviation from traditional natural law conclusions.  (Like Tollefsen, other “new natural lawyers” typically condemn capital punishment as always and intrinsically immoral; and their position on lying also tends to be more rigorist than that of traditional natural law theorists, ruling out certain kinds of broad mental reservation that some traditional natural law theorists would allow.)  But I have already criticized Tollefsen’s “new natural law” approach to the ethics of lying in an earlier post.  What I said then applies to his latest piece as well.

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Hitchens, Dawkins, and Craig

As I have said, I never thought it was realistic to expect a deathbed conversion from Christopher Hitchens.  But for all his ill-informed ranting and raving on the subject of religion, Hitchens was capable of showing a manful, basic decency toward the other side in a way some other New Atheists are not.  Consider these remarks by Hitchens about William Lane Craig, prior to their debate:

And compare them to the cringe-makingly dishonest tactics employed by Richard Dawkins in avoiding the public debate with Craig that he so obviously fears, and to these remarks:

(Hat tip to Peter Byrom for calling my attention to Hitchens’ comments.   Peter is the guy in the second clip asking Dawkins the question about Craig.)

Dawkins is a petty man.  Hitchens was not that.

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Reading Rosenberg, Part V

In the previous installment of our look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, we began to examine what Rosenberg has to say about biological phenomena.  This time I want to take a brief detour and consider some of what Rosenberg says about the subject in his book Darwinian Reductionism.  I noted that while Atheist’s Guide pushes a generally uncompromising eliminative materialist line, Rosenberg resists the “eliminativist” label where issues in the philosophy of biology are concerned, and presents his views in that field as reductionist.  Darwinian Reductionism (a more serious book than Atheist’s Guide, and of independent interest) explains why.

I have emphasized that though Rosenberg offers no serious criticisms of theism, though his own positive philosophical claims are preposterous, and though his core argument for the scientism on which his entire position rests is worthless, he is nevertheless a more serious thinker than the likes of Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or other New Atheists.  The reason is that Rosenberg is more consistent than these other writers, and he is more consistent because he understands (as they do not) the grave philosophical challenges facing naturalism.  In particular, he understands that a consistent naturalist must take a radically eliminativist line vis-à-vis intentionality -- that the naturalist must deny that meaning of any sort exists, even at the level of human thought and language.  And he understands that the reason why the naturalist must take this line is that it follows from the claim that there is no teleology or final causality inherent in the natural order.  Or at least, once you make that anti-Aristotelian move -- a move which (as I have argued at length) was definitive of modern philosophy -- and you affirm also that the natural order is all that exists, there is no way consistently to affirm that intentionality is a real feature of the world.  For intentionality essentially involves “directedness” toward an object, as a thought is “directed” toward what the thought is about or a word is “directed” toward what the word means.  And to deny that there is any teleology or final causality immanent to the natural order just is to deny that there is any “directedness” of any sort in it -- that there is anything that points beyond itself to some end, goal, or object.  (For more on intentionality, see the relevant posts among my many posts on the mind-body problem.)

The intentionality of words is commonly said to be derived, insofar as, apart from human interpreters and their linguistic conventions, the sounds and ink squiggles we think of as words would be entirely devoid of meaning.  “The cat is on the mat” would, apart from us, have no more semantic content than “blah blah blah.”  The intentionality of a thought, by contrast, is commonly said to be original insofar as it is inherent to our thoughts in a way it is not inherent to words.  We use otherwise meaningless ink squiggles and noises to convey meaning, but no one is using our thoughts as instruments to convey meaning.  They just have it, and are the source of the meaning of words and the like.  The eliminativist is committed to the claim that not only what we think of as words, but even our thoughts are really as meaningless as “blah blah blah” is.  For if original intentionality exists, then there exists something irreducibly “directed” toward an object, which there can’t be if there is no teleology in nature.  And without original intentionality, no derived intentionality can exist either.

This position informs Darwinian Naturalism, where Rosenberg writes:

The problem of naturalistically explaining the original intentionality of the human (and infrahuman) brain is perhaps the most serious fundamental challenge facing neuroscience and its philosophy.  No one has yet solved it…  Indeed, if human intentionality turns out to be derived from some evolutionary process as yet unimagined (and it will have to be unimagined so far, if it is to prove “unmysterious”), it will turn out that both artifacts and genomes will be on a par, neither of them deriving their intentionality directly from something with nonderived intentionality, and both tracing their intentionality back to evolution by natural selection.  Of course, as I indicated above, I am dubious that natural selection can actually produce original intentionality in the brain or anywhere else, and so it cannot produce derived intentionality either.  Both will, on my view, turn out to be illusions, like the purposes we overlay on nature and that natural selection has dispelled. (p. 108)

As I have said, I think this eliminativist position is the one a consistent naturalist has to take.  For to say that “directedness” is real but external to the natural order is essentially to adopt a Cartesian position; while to say that it is real and intrinsic to the natural order is essentially to return to an Aristotelian position.  And either way, naturalism will have been abandoned.  A serious naturalist, then, either has to find some way out of this dilemma -- the dilemma of having to choose either eliminativism or some form of anti-naturalism -- or follow Rosenberg in adopting eliminativism and then try to find a way to make eliminativism something other than the incoherent mess that I (and many others) have argued that it is.  Whatever his faults, Rosenberg faces up to the problem in a way that ignorant hacks like Coyne do not.

Or at least he does where the mind is concerned.  While his position also entails (as I suggested in my previous post) a kind of eliminativism about organic phenomena, Rosenberg in general tries, as I have said, to hew to a less radical, reductionist line in the philosophy of biology.  Not that even that line isn’t radical.  Rosenberg’s complaint in Darwinian Reductionism is that most of his fellow naturalists are not sufficiently reductionist.  Like him, they tend to be physicalists, holding that the physical facts fix all the facts; but unlike him, most of them resist reductionism in biology.  Rosenberg (rightly, in my view) regards this position as incoherent.  But rather than taking that as a reason to abandon physicalism (which is what it is), he takes it as a reason to endorse reductionism (committed as he is to physicalism -- though there is even less in the way of argument for physicalism in Darwinian Reductionism than there is in Atheist’s Guide).  His aim in Darwinian Reductionism is to argue that biological reductionism does not have the unhappy implications that have led other naturalists to resist it.  

One of those implications is that reductionism would seem to conflict with the evident fact that where biological phenomena are concerned, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”  Rosenberg maintains that the sense in which this slogan is true is a sense perfectly consistent with reductionism.  He offers the wetness of water as an example of a feature that the parts of a whole do not have -- individual H₂O molecules are not wet -- but which is nevertheless reducible to relations between the parts.  And purportedly irreducible biological phenomena (Rosenberg implies) are no different.  

Now since it is the distinctively organic properties of biological phenomena that are supposed to pose a challenge to reductionism, appealing to the wetness of water hardly addresses the biological antireductionist’s concerns.  Moreover, the claim that even water and its properties are “reducible” to H₂O molecules and their relations is more controversial than Rosenberg (and many other naturalists) suppose.  (See e.g. Oderberg’s Real Essentialism and van Brakel’s Philosophy of Chemistry for discussion of the relevant issues.)  But let’s leave all that aside and consider Rosenberg’s response to the specific objection that the feeling of wetness isn’t reducible to relations between H₂O molecules:

But the feeling of wetness is a complex relation between the molecules and our neurological system -- more molecules, of course.  It’s not an isolated property of the water.  Reducing the feeling of wetness of water is another matter altogether different from reducing its wetness.  Reducing feelings, sensations, is one that science has yet to accomplish, owing to the incompleteness of our understanding of neurology.  But it would be blatantly question-begging to assert that no macromolecular -- that is, reductionistic -- explanation of our sensations can ever be provided.  Making such an unargued assumption is very far from taking on the burden of proof.  It is, in fact, a matter of shifting the burden of proof onto the reductionist, and demanding an impossibly high standard of proof: that science should complete the reduction of human neurology in order to show that the wetness of water is equal to the relations among molecules.  Although reductionists cannot accept so high a standard, they can and do argue that the whole history of science since the seventeenth century has been a continuing empirical vindication of reductionism. (p. 13)

Now, I do not necessarily have a problem with the suggestion that the feeling of wetness is a complex relation between water itself and our nervous systems, nor with the idea that the feeling is a material feature of the human organism (though my own, Aristotelian conception of “matter” is not the same as Rosenberg’s materialist conception, and “molecules” are certainly not the whole story).  But the rest of this passage reflects a delusion common in those beholden to naturalism, scientism, and (by extension) modern atheism -- the “picture that holds them captive,” as Wittgenstein might have put it.  

This delusion -- the delusion that “science has now explained everything else, and so it’s only a matter of time before it explains X (where X = qualia, or intentionality, or some other feature which poses a difficulty for naturalism)” -- is one I have elsewhere called “the materialist shell game,” and it works like this.  First, “science” is (implicitly if not explicitly) defined in such a way that no explanation that makes reference to irreducibly teleological or qualitative features of the world is allowed to count as “scientific.”  Second, seemingly irreducibly teleological and qualitative features of the world -- apparently goal-directed natural processes, say, or colors, sounds, heat, cold, and the like as these manifest themselves to ordinary experience -- are re-described as mere projections of the mind onto external reality and not allowed to count as truly “material.”  Teleology, color, sound, heat, and cold as we experience them do not (so the story goes) really exist in the material world itself, but only in our subjective mental representations of it; objectively there are only colorless, soundless, purposeless particles in motion, which by virtue of their motions cause us to experience them as if they had the characteristics common sense attributes to them.  (Color, sound, etc. as physical properties are accordingly also re-defined, in terms of surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and the like.)  Third, it then asserted that “science has explained” such-and-such external material phenomena in a way that makes no reference to irreducible teleological or qualitative features.  What is not acknowledged is that this claim is a tautology, since (again) nothing that made reference to such features would be allowed to count as “scientific,” and (again) no features that couldn’t be described in non-teleological and non-qualitative terms would be allowed to count as “material.”  Fourth, it is fallaciously inferred that since this methodological sleight of hand has “shown” that irreducibly teleological and qualitative features do not exist in the external material world, we have every reason to believe that it will also “show” that they do not exist in the mind either -- that they will either be reduced to non-teleological and non-qualitative features of the brain, or eliminated altogether.

This is like saying that since we have gotten rid of all the dirt in the room by sweeping it under the rug, we have good reason to think that the dirt under the rug can also be gotten rid of in the same way, and even for thinking that it never really existed in the room in the first place.   Such an argument would be doubly farcical.  For first of all, none of the original dirt has really been gotten rid of at all, but merely relocated.  And second, the “sweep it under the rug” method is for obvious reasons the one method that cannot in principle work when applied to the dirt under the rug itself.  Those naturalists -- and they are like the sands of the sea for multitude -- who confidently appeal to the historical “success” of scientific reductionism in providing “reductive explanations” of “everything else,” as evidence that the mind too is bound to yield to the same mode of explanation, are committing a fallacy no less egregious.  (And we have already seen why an appeal to the predictive and technological virtues of the methodological stipulations in question is no less fallacious if intended to establish the metaphysical completeness of the reductionist’s picture of the world.)

In Darwinian Reductionism no less than in Atheist’s Guide, then, the scientism that undergirds Rosenberg’s entire position rests on little more than an appeal to ill-founded contemporary academic prejudice.  But there are other problems too.  As I have indicated in earlier posts in this series, one problem with reductionist and eliminativist accounts of this or that natural phenomenon is that they fail to do justice to the irreducible causal powers (arguably) manifested by the phenomenon.  In the case at hand, a reductionist account of biological phenomena would seem implicitly to deny that there are any genuine causal powers at anything higher than the molecular level, and thus seems to entail eliminativism about the biological (as, in my previous post, I suggested Rosenberg’s position does).

In response to this sort of objection (which, as he notes, parallels what is called the “causal drainage argument” in the philosophy of mind, since reductionism seems to make causal power at all higher levels of reality “drain away” to the lowest physical level), Rosenberg tells us that “reductionism does not deny that biological kinds have causal powers -- the physical ones; it reveals them” since “’higher-order’ [functional] terms… name the same properties which ‘lower-order’ -- macromolecular -- terms name” (p. 196).  In other words, it’s not that biological phenomena lack causal powers; it’s that they have no causal powers over and above those of their molecular parts, no powers that are not “physical powers,” which are “the only causal powers there are” (Ibid.)  For biological or functional terms, Rosenberg claims, “do not identify distinct ‘higher-level’ kinds with distinct ‘higher-level’ causal properties.”

This is like saying that Feuerbach’s conception of God as a mere projection, or Freud’s theory of religion as wish-fulfillment, are not really forms of atheism, but are rather merely “reductionist” versions of theism which do not “eliminate” God but merely “reveal” the true nature of His causal relationship to the world.  Obviously, to say that a “higher-level” term like “God” does not “identify a distinct ‘higher-level’ kind with distinct ‘higher-level’ causal properties” but instead names “the same properties which ‘lower-level’ terms name” -- viz. human psychological properties like projection and wishful thinking -- would just be a roundabout way of saying that there is no God and that only the psychological processes themselves are real.  Similarly, to say that biological terms do not really name any kinds or causal powers over and above the molecular ones is just a roundabout way of saying that the biological kinds and causal powers do not exist and only the molecular ones do.  Rosenberg’s biological reductionism -- like the bogus Feuerbachian or Freudian “reductionist” “theism” just described, like reductionism in the philosophy of mind, and indeed like reductionism generally -- really is just a thinly disguised eliminativism.  

Except, that is, when it is a thinly disguised Aristotelianism.  In one of the more interesting sections of Darwinian Reductionism, Rosenberg addresses the question of whether genes really can be said to carry “information” and to embody “programs,” as they are commonly said to do.  As I emphasize in The Last Superstition, this sort of talk doesn’t sit well with the naturalist’s official rejection of immanent teleology.  Now, some philosophers of biology regard talk of “programs” and “information” (in anything but the thin Shannonian sense of “information”) as merely metaphorical.  But as Rosenberg indicates, the problem cannot be so easily evaded:

Molecular biology is, of course, riddled with intentional expressions: we attribute properties such as being a messenger (“second messenger”) or a recognition site; we ascribe proofreading and editing capabilities; and we say that enzymes can discriminate among substrates… Even more tellingly, as we have seen, molecular developmental biology describes cells as having “positional information,” meaning that they know where they are relative to other cells and gradients.  The naturalness of the intentional idiom in molecular biology presents a problem.  All these expressions and ascriptions involve the representation, in one thing, of the way things are in another thing…  The naturalness of this idiom in molecular biology is so compelling that merely writing it off as a metaphor seems implausible.  Be that as it may, when it comes to information in the genome, the claim manifestly cannot be merely metaphorical, not, at any rate, if the special role of the gene is to turn on its information content.  But to have a real informational role, the genome must have intentional states. (pp. 99-100)

But how can a naturalist accept such descriptions of biological phenomena as more than metaphorical -- especially a naturalist like Rosenberg, who takes an eliminativist line on intentionality?  

Rosenberg’s solution is to split the difference.  “The crucial question,” he says, “is not intentionality but programming” (p. 108).  What does this mean?  Rosenberg rehearses John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment, and allows at least for the sake of argument that it shows that running a program is not sufficient to generate original intentionality.  But even if the intentionality of a program is at most derived, the program can still be efficacious.  After all, Searle in the Chinese Room still gives out the right answers in response to questions put to him, even though he has no idea what the symbols he’s manipulating mean; and he does so by virtue of running a program.  Therefore (Rosenberg seems to infer), we can say that genes embody programs, and do their distinctive work by virtue of embodying them, even if we deny that they really possess original intentionality. 

The trouble with this is that it takes account of only half, and the less important half, of Searle’s critique of computationalism.  The Chinese Room argument shows only that computationalism cannot be the whole story about the mind.  But Searle’s later argument against what he calls “cognitivism” -- the thesis that the brain is a digital computer (as distinct from the thesis that the mind is the software run on the computer) -- is intended to show that it isn’t even part of the story.  If the Chinese Room argument succeeds, it shows that even if the brain is running programs, it could not possess original intentionality merely by virtue of running them.  The later argument purports to show that the brain is not in any interesting sense running programs in the first place.  For being a “program” is not (Searle argues) an observer-independent feature of the world; it does not capture anything intrinsic to the physics of a system.  A physical system “runs a program” only relative to an interpreter, who uses the system to run the program, just as ink squiggles and sounds count as words only relative to an interpreter who uses the squiggles or sounds to convey meaning.  And since no one is literally “using” the brain to run programs -- no one is literally saying of each of our brains “Let’s let this brain process count as such-and-such a symbol, let’s let that brain process count as such-and-such a transition between symbols, and so forth” -- the brain is not running them.

Now as I argue in The Last Superstition, one could resist Searle’s conclusion here, but not in a way that helps the naturalist.  If we say that computationalist descriptions of the brain capture real, objective features of the brain, then we are implicitly committed to an Aristotelian conception of matter.  For the notion of a program is teleological; and teleology that is intrinsic to a material system is just Aristotelian, immanent final causality.  As Searle emphasizes, we could in principle attribute all sorts of programs to all sorts of physical systems -- to use one of his examples, there is a possible interpretation of the microstructure of the wall in his room on which it is running Wordstar.  To say that some particular attribution is privileged, that a physical system is, apart from our interests, running such-and-such a program and not the others, is to say that its states inherently “point” to the realization of that program rather than to the others.  (The Aristotelian implications of computationalist descriptions of nature have also been noted by James Ross and Valentino Braitenberg.)

This puts Rosenberg in a dilemma.  If he wants to insist that matter is utterly devoid of any inherent teleology -- his official general metaphysical position -- then (given Searle’s critique of cognitivism) he is not entitled to attribute programs of any sort to genes.  If instead he wants to insist that genes really do embody programs even apart from human interests -- his official position on this specific issue -- then he has to acknowledge that something like Aristotelian final causality is a real feature of the world after all.  

Rosenberg misses the Aristotelian implications of his position because he evidently thinks that the only alternative to reductionism and eliminativism in philosophy of biology is vitalism.  But vitalism is like Cartesian dualism in the philosophy of mind, or the extrinsic, “watchmaker” model of teleology represented by Paley’s “design argument” -- it is a corruption of the Aristotelian-Scholastic views the moderns sought to replace, even if a corruption that is sometimes mistakenly read back into those older views.  For the Aristotelian, the right way to think about the soul is in hylemorphic terms, as the form of the living body, not as a complete substance in its own right a la Descartes’ res cogitans.  The right way to think about teleology is as immanent to the natural order, on the model of organic phenomena rather than on the model of machines.  And the right way to think about life is also in hylemorphic terms, as the possession of a certain kind of formal cause, not as a spooky kind of “force” or elan vital.  

(Rosenberg also seems to think that intentionality-with-a-t entails intensionality-with-an-s, so that since -- he argues -- genes do not exhibit the latter, neither do they have the former.  As Tim Crane and others have emphasized, though -- and as I noted in an earlier post -- intensionality-with-an-s is not essential to intentionality-with-a-t.  What is essential is just directedness toward an object, which a thing can exhibit even if we can give a non-intensional description its directedness.)

So, Rosenberg’s attempt to find a reductionist middle ground in the philosophy of biology fails.  His position is unstable, equivocating between eliminativism on the one hand and Aristotelian anti-reductionism on the other.  But there is a lot more to Darwinian Reductionism than I have been able to convey here, and in particular much to make it a more serious and interesting book than Atheist’s Guide.  As a philosopher of religion, and as an apologist for naturalism, Rosenberg is hopeless.  But as a philosopher of science and an interpreter of naturalism, he is consistently interesting.  Both naturalists and their critics need to take him seriously.

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Links of interest

Kathrin Koslicki and Tuomas Tahko are two important contributors to the current revival of interest in neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.  Tahko’s commentary on Koslicki’s book The Structure of Objects is available via his blog.

Mike Flynn, hard SF writer extraordinaire and friend of this blog, is interviewed here.

David Goldman argues that, like Europe, the Islamic world is facing a catastrophic decline in population.  

An interview at Thomistica.net with the executive director of the winery that produces the Aquinas line of wines.

Robert Pasnau discusses Averroës, the decline of Islamic philosophy, and the revival of philosophy in the medieval West.

Metaphysician Stephen Mumford describes the influence superhero comic books had upon him.

New and recent books to watch for: 

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers

James Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness

 

Something new from the late David Stove: What’s Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment [Links to reviews here.  Scroll down.]

Steven A. Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith

Gregory T. Doolan, ed., The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations (HT: Thomistica.net)

Bruce Charlton, another friend of this blog, has recently published Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness. 

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Hayek and Popper

My paper “Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind” appears in the latest volume of Advances in Austrian Economics, a special issue edited by Leslie Marsh and devoted to the theme Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology.  The publisher’s web page for the volume is here.  You can find Marsh’s website devoted to the book here, the table of contents here, and Marsh’s introduction to the volume here.  Here’s the abstract of my article (which follows the publisher’s required abstract format):

Purpose – The chapter provides an exposition both of Hayek's causal theory of the mind (especially as applied to intentionality) and of Popper's critique of causal theories, argues that Hayek fails successfully to rebut Popper's critique, and shows how the dispute between Hayek and Popper is relevant to controversies in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Methodology/approach –The chapter elucidates Hayek's ideas and Popper's by situating them within the history of the mind/body problem and comparing them to the views of contemporary philosophers like Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, and Hilary Putnam.

Findings – Popper's critique has yet to be answered, either by Hayek or by contemporary causal theorists.

Originality/value of the chapter –The chapter calls attention to some important but neglected ideas of Hayek and Popper and examines some of their as-yet-unpublished writings.

What that last line is referring to, specifically, are Popper’s private letters to Hayek vis-à-vis Hayek’s book The Sensory Order and Hayek’s unpublished (and unfinished) draft “Within Systems and about Systems: A Statement of Some Problems of a Theory of Communication,” all of which receive substantive discussion in my article.  The article is an extended treatment of themes to which I was only able to devote the last few pages of my essay “Hayek the cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind” in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek.  It also contains material that should be of interest even to readers with no special interest in Hayek or Popper, since what it has to say about them is relevant to the more general question of whether causal theories of intentionality (which are at the core of attempts to “naturalize” intentionality) can succeed.  (I’ve addressed this issue in previous blog posts, such as this one, this one, and this one.  Obviously, my many other posts on the mind-body problem are also relevant.)

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