Aww, I got mentioned in a paper published in Philosophia Christi. I’m only an afterthought, brought in at the very end — the paper is primarily a criticism of Richard Dawkins — but it’s always nice to be remembered.
It is, however, a rather strange paper. Erik Wielenberg’s argument is basically that The God Delusion was not written by David Hume, and that everyone ought to go read Hume instead of Dawkins. Which is fine; Hume is devastatingly thorough. But then why am I wasting my time reading Wielenberg? Just go read Hume instead. (It’s easy, too: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is available online, and it’s shorter than The God Delusion.)
Let’s recognize it for what it is. Wielenberg is providing a brief synopsis of Hume using the hook of criticizing Dawkins. Dawkins wrote an approachable, popular treatment of part of Hume’s arguments. These are perfectly reasonable things to do. It is not reasonable to argue that we ought to just reduce every effort to communicate to a single source text. Let’s just go all Darmok and when someone recites Christian apologetics at us, we’ll all just reply, “Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes in Edinburgh.”
But OK, I’m happy to concede that Hume is an authoritative source, and I bet Dawkins would, too. Here’s Wielenberg’s summary.
We have now considered three versions of the God Hypothesis:
(GH1)There exists a contingent, physical, complex, superhuman, supernatural intelligence that created the universe and has no external explanation.
(GH2)There exists a necessary, nonphysical, complex, superhuman, supernatural intelligence that created the universe and has no external explanation.
(GH3)There exists a necessary, nonphysical, simple, superhuman, supernatural intelligence that created the universe and has no external explanation.
Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion includes critical examinations of all of these hypotheses. Taken together, these arguments suggest that (GH) is improbable, (GH2) is unnecessary, and (GH) is at best obscure and at worst incoherent. In The God Delusion what we find is essentially a fragment of Hume’s overall attack on the rationality of theism. Because Dawkins offers only the fragment of Hume’s critique that focuses on (GH), theists can easily defuse Dawkins’s Gambit simply by pointing out that traditional monotheists have typically endorsed (GH2) or (GH) rather than (GH). Therefore, Dawkins’s Gambit is not a convincing argument against the existence of God.
And then he mentions The Courtier’s Reply.
The reply does nothing to blunt the criticisms offered in this paper. A central element of my critique is that Dawkins’s Gambit provides no reason at all to doubt some of the most widely-held versions of the target of his attack, the God Hypothesis. I do not know exactly how much theology one needs to know to disprove the existence of God, but one needs to know at least enough theology to understand the various widely-held conceptions of God. In general, in order to argue effectively against a given hypothesis, one needs to know enough to characterize that hypothesis accurately. Furthermore, if one intends to disprove God’s existence, it is hardly reasonable to dismiss criticisms of one’s putative disproof on the grounds that God doesn’t exist anyway.
Eh, philosophers. He doesn’t get it. I’m not arguing that it’s a disproof, or that we should simply dismiss all theology because God doesn’t exist, but that there ought to be at least some evidence that the phenomenon under discussion actually exists before we get all tangled up in arguments about its details. Build your foundation before you start picking out the color of the shingles.
Look at his three versions of the God Hypothesis. Notice anything? He’s left off the initial premise.
(GH0)There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence that created the universe and has no external explanation.
That’s the bone of contention. Before you start wrasslin’ over whether god is contingent or necessary, complex or simple, it would be worthwhile to have some evidence that a superhuman, supernatural intelligence exists at all.
Imagine that I write a grant proposal to NIH in which I postulate that there is a global signaling molecule that controls all of development, and what I propose to do is isolate and sequence it, and identify its receptors. I could get quite grandiose in describing ten years worth of experiments, all using proven technology, and wax eloquent in explaining the importance of finding the One True Global Regulator of All Development.
And the reviewers would be all baffled and would reject my proposal. “I don’t know of any reason to believe such a molecule exists,” they would say, and “Where is your preliminary data supporting your core premise?” If only they were philosophers who could appreciate the elegance of my hypotheticals and the depth of my reasoning, instead of tedious bean-counters who care about evidence and data and mundane details.
Hume is essential if you want to address various excuses to justify belief in a deity — he’s very good at tearing apart the hypotheses about the nature of god. But sometimes you just have to sit back and demand that the other guy produce some reason to even think they’ve got a valid hypothesis in the first place, and I’ve never seen that done. God just is, they want to say, and now you have to listen to my explanation for what he wants you to do with your life, and what he looks like, and what his goals and motivations are.
I don’t accept your initial premise. Justify that, first.
Hume’s weakness is that he had no other hypothesis to explain the great variety of species on Earth. He did a good job showing us the problems with believing in God as the explanation for th variety of life on Earth. Darwin did do the bang-up job , explaining what Hume never could.
What’s with the reversed L’s? Is that a philosophy thing?
This is pretty much my approach to the subject as well. Talk is cheap, show me a reason for assuming there is a god in the first place.
The concept of a god (and not just any god but the right one) is something you have to be told. The evidence for evolution can be found in nature. If I fell from the sky without any prior knowledge of the world and didn’t meet any other humans, how would I ever discover the Cristian (or any other) god? I could study the natural world and end up with the same conclusions as Darwin and Wallace, but how would I ever come up with the exact same concept of a deity as the different religions out there?
Actually, traditional monotheists endorse the view that a big magical being is their personal friend and cares intimately what we do with our genitals. What theologians talk about typically have very little to do with what the common believer accepts and how religion behaves as a social institution.
I wish religion was all about people sitting in leather chairs, mentally masturbating over their favorite definitions of obscure terms. I wouldn’t have any problem with it if that was all it was.
LykeX
Perhaps we should call that GH4:
(GH4) There exists at least one invisible[1] magical[2] person[3].
[1] In the sense of “Can’t reliably be detected or observed”.
[2] In the sense of, “Possesses capabilities beyond that of most other known persons”.
[3] In the sense of, “Has a subjective/intersubjective experience, including desires, opinions, emotions and relationships”.
Most actual religious practice I have experience with makes this assumption, as opposed to the above God Hypotheses.
And the looks, goals, motivations, indeed the very definition of god can differ wildly over the course of a single conversation about god with one single believer. Don’t get me started about the differences in definitions between believers themselves.
Forget proof of existence, first start with a concrete definition.
PZ, in your example you are already a step further then the goddists. A correct comparison would be if you wrote a grant proposal in which you postulate that there is a gobbledygook that controls all of development. And then you refuse to define what a gobbledygook is.
Oh, that’s easy. Gobbledygook is development. Development is gobbledygook. Gobbledygook transcends being. It has to. Because it is developing. Always and ever.
AAAAARGH! Why can’t this forum use something like classic BB-code? Or at least provide a comprehensive guide to using tags? I can never get them right, and I refuse to accept it’s my fault :-)
In the 13th Century Thomas Aquinas presented various very sophisticated proofs of god, all of which presuppose that god, specifically the Abrahamist god, exist. That’s the problem with theological “proofs”, they all, without exception, rely on logical fallacies or on semantics. Philosophy even recognizes its problem with semantics when it differentiates an argument as being valid from the argument being true. “Socrates is a man. Socrates is dead. Therefore all men are dead” is a valid argument but is not true.
As PZ notes, Wielenberg assumes that god exists in his various god hypotheses. Theologians and religious philosophers (I’m looking at you, Alvin Plantinga) like to discuss whether angels dancing on the heads of pins are waltzing or doing a hornpipe when they haven’t established the existence of angels in the first place.
Al Dente @ 10: Possibly you mean “Socrates is a man. All men are dead. Therefore Socrates is dead”, since your syllogism, as written, is neither valid nor true. (My syllogism is valid, in that the conclusion follows from the premises, but it’s not sound, because the second premise isn’t true.)
And yes, there’s a serious dearth of arguments for the existence of any god that don’t assume their conclusions. The argument from design and the ontological arguments are probably the “best”, though they’re both still seriously flawed.
Erlend Meyer
Tags open, tags close, no-one can explain that.
///////
Snoof @11
Thank you for the correction. I got a little sloppy which I attribute to lack of caffeine and not at all to poor thinking on my part.
I’m not even sure what is meant by “supernatural” anymore.
“Completely unpredictable”?
@F.O.
Tourism British Columbia (BC’s provincial government’s official department for promoting tourism into and around BC) uses the slogan:
I kinda like it. Takes the nonsense apart and repurposes it to something intelligible.
Al Dente and Snoof, the Socrates’line as Al Dente originally stated it is directly from the great philosopher Woody Allen.
Nearly all proofs of the existence of God rely upon the Aristotelian premise that there must be an uncaused cause. This premise is an easy, intuitive leap from our awareness that everything in the universe must have a cause, but quickly breaks down when we see how much physics defies our intuition at quantum levels.
My wife’s uncle is a Catholic monk (really) who teaches at St. Vincent College in western Pennsylvania. This past Christmas we were visiting some of her relatives and we picked Uncle Monk up because he is an old monk and doesn’t drive much anymore. Uncle Monk is 86 and not quite as sharp as he once was. On the drive the question came up about what courses he currently teaches. He said that he taught theology mainly. Being an atheist (Uncle Monk knows this and we have a truce of sorts) and it being a long, boring drive through coal country, I couldn’t help myself and fired off an impertinent question.
I asked, “I have a theological question. Where is god’s brain?”
Uncle Monk’s head spun around and he replied in confusion, “What?”
I repeated the question and added, “I keep hearing that he is all-knowing, all seeing, can read one’s thoughts, and can communicate with people if he wants to. This presupposes a high level of complexity. He must have a way to absorb and process stimuli, think, create memories and so forth. This means that he must have quite a powerful brain. Where is it? We’ve been looking at the universe for centuries now and there’s no sign of it anywhere. Can your theology help?”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the car for about half a minute. My father-in-law, who was driving, scowled at me in the rearview mirror. My wife stared out the window with a look on her face that said, “Oh, Bob, please don’t. Not here.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I knew better than to ask “Where is god?” because the answer is always a variation on “He is everywhere. He’s in the sunset. He’s in a baby’s smile. He’s in a flower. Etc.” So, I’ve learned to ask for specifics.
Uncle Monk finally answered by paraphrasing from Genesis “God said, I am who I am. That’s all anyone needs to know. He is.”
And that was that. I said, “Right” and dropped the subject. To everyone’s relief. They could all breathe again.
That’s how it always goes. When pressed for proof from believers about god all you get is meaningless a priori reasoning. And a measure of resentment for even asking such things.
observer @17:
It only breaks down if you insist that ‘probabilistic’ can somehow be interpreted as ‘uncaused’, which strikes me as an abuse of language, at least.
The question of causality/first cause is interesting, but I fail to see why that implies any deity. I can accept it’s a huge blank space, but filling that space with wishful thinking isn’t productive.
But there is evidence! Look at all this design… circles are round, squares have sharp corners, fire burns! And… and morals and ethics must come from something superhuman if they’re supposed to be true! And… hmm.. love?
See, look at all that evidence! Oh, you want evidence that can’t be explained better than materialist explanations? Well that’s cheating… this is theology, not science. Can’t overlap that magasteria, no sir.
PZ:
You are mistaken in a couple of ways.
First, you need to address the actual arguments in their strongest form. GH3 are the strongest arguments.
Second, you are mistaken to believe that the cosmological arguments (in GH3) form presume God’s existence. They do not. They do the opposite–they presume a few basic observations about nature, make a few metaphysical inferences (mostly definitions), and deduce God’s existence from there. They most certainly do not presume God’s existence. They demonstrate it.
I discussed Aquinas’ First Way (Aristotle’s Prime Mover argument) here:
http://egnorance.blogspot.com/2011/08/aquinas-first-way.html
I’d be interested to know your critique of it.
Nope, there are no arguments, just wishful mental wanking. What is needed loser is solid and conclusive physical evidence, physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Something equivalent to an eternally burning bush. What do you have? Zero, zip, nil, nada, nothing. An empty set.
My problem with the whole thing is just the inexplicable intelligence bit. Better or worse than humans, or better or worse than what humans find in nature doesn’t matter. What we do find that relates to the ever-so-humanly-defined (or not) term “intelligence,” has all evolved through random mutation and natural selection. So theists can get back to me when they have evidence for an unevolved intelligence.
It strikes me as even more abusive to posit divine causation in quantum randomness (as some theists indeed do). I prefer the Copenhagen view, but even if you accept Bohm over Bohr, the point (IMHO) is that the “hidden variables” are truly hidden. Whether the tautomeric shift of an electron in one of the bases of my DNA that causes a genetic disease is a Copenhagian local random event, or if it is rooted in a causational entanglement with an electron that is at this very moment bouncing around in a thunderstorm in the Crab Nebula, the reality of that shift is not known, was not known, and according to QM cannot in principle be known to any intelligence (human or otherwise) as anything other than a probability until it happens and is “observed” and given thermodynamic permanence by a replication enzyme.
And that’s OK with me. If theists would just all admit that their understanding of God’s plan for our lives is as well grounded as their quantum-level knowledge of the dynamics of climate change on a planet (many planets — all planets) many light-aeons away, then maybe they could have the humility to keep their fantasies of a direct phone line to the causational future of life, the universe, and everything, to themselves.
@#18:
[When pressed for proof from believers about god all you get is meaningless a priori reasoning.]
The reasoning is not a priori, and the reasoning isn’t meaningless.
There are meticulously reasoned deductions of God’s existence, in which the only premises are simple observations about nature and a few reasonable definitions. If you are to cogently disagree with them, you must understand them. The Courtier’s Reply is a lazy man’s trope. If you’re blind, you can’t see if the king is naked.
Understanding them takes some work. Ed Fesers’ “Aquinas” makes it easier, and there are many more detailed treatments if that’s your taste.
If your disagreement with the arguments for God’s existence are to be taken seriously, you need to know what those arguments really are.
I think that’s why your in-laws were rolling their eyes.
Eeeeeeexactly.
Thanks for cutting through that so swiftly and effectively.
Though I’m pretty sure “simple super-intelligence” is incoherent…
So theDukedog7, you’ve actually got nothing then. Not even the start of a proof for a supernatural deity. Let alone any proof of why that deity is you catholic god-monster.
@14 F.O.
No it isn’t about predictability. See these two articles and comment sections:
Defining the Supernatural
Defining the Supernatural vs. Logical Positivism
Basically, think of Dualism. It has a natural component and a supernatural component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism
Fixed that for you loser. One can’t find a need for your imaginary deity unless one presupposes it. It is nothing but useless baggage. You know that, if you would only show reason and EVIDENCE.
You have no evidence. Ergo, you deity is imaginary, existing only as delusion in your mind.
QED.
FO #14:
I’m not even sure what is meant by “supernatural” anymore.
Obviously, it’s about cute boys who make terrible decisions. Demons are involved.
theDukedog7 @ 22:
I read over your post, briefly, and I wanted to clarify a point or two here, if I could. You said:
Given that an acorn can’t become an oak tree except under fairly specific circumstances – and that the vast majority of them don’t achieve it – would it be fair to say that an acorn has only part of the potency to become an oak tree?
Leaving aside what Aquinas was ignorant of in terms of current knowledge, does the entire acorn have potency to become an oak, or only part of it? If the former, a partial or damaged acorn can’t become an oak – obviously untrue. If the latter, then any thing has potency only based on how you are dividing it: any atom in an acorn has the potency to become a very wide variety of things, many very un-oak-like.
I suppose one could say that an acorn is defined by it’s potency to become an oak tree, but that might lead either into a circular argument: (“What’s an acorn? The thing that has the potency to become an oak tree. What’s an oak tree? The thing that an acorn changes into.”) or into essentialism: (“What is an oak tree? That which has the essence of being an oak tree.”)
In practice, “supernatural” is defined as “anything that is exactly the right shape and size to precisely fill any gaps in scientific knowledge. It will change size and shape as does the knowledge near it, as convenient.”
Generally speaking, substituting the word “bullshit” for the word “supernatural” results in no change in factual content.
Please note that these are more what you call guidelines, than actual rules.
theDukeDog7 @ #25:
If they are so blinkin’ simple, why does the understanding of them take so much confabulation?
My simple observations about nature do not lead me to a god. For instance, noticing that every critter is slightly different from its parents leads to evolution, and noticing that most critters drastically over-reproduce leads to natural selection. Noticing that most of the universe is nothingness leads to thinking it came from nothing.
My simple observations about people, on the other hand, leads me to think that some folks are believers, not thinkers, and that philosophy isn’t a big help in clearing that up.
@32:
[Given that an acorn can’t become an oak tree except under fairly specific circumstances – and that the vast majority of them don’t achieve it – would it be fair to say that an acorn has only part of the potency to become an oak tree?]
A meaningless question. Potency doesn’t have parts. It’s a metaphysical concept, not a thing extended in space.
[does the entire acorn have potency to become an oak, or only part of it?]
The acorn has potency. The acorn remains an acorn as long as it has its substantial form, which is the set of intelligible principles that make it an acorn. A chip out of the acorn would still leave it an acorn, because its substantial form remains. Taking away 90% of the acorn would probably not leave its substantial form, so it would cease to be an acorn and cease to have the potencies of an acorn.
[any atom in an acorn has the potency to become a very wide variety of things, many very un-oak-like.]
An atom in the acorn is not an acorn, because it has the substantial form of that atom, not of an acorn. And potencies in nature refer to natural potencies, not artificial potencies (such as those endowed by human beings making the atom into something).
[I suppose one could say that an acorn is defined by it’s potency to become an oak tree]
Words are ‘defined’, not things, and an acorn is a thing, not a word, so it has no definition. That which makes an acorn what it is is its substantial form (its intelligible principle) and its matter (its principle of individuation).
Essentialism isn’t an explicit premise in Aquinas’ First Way.
@35:
[Given that an acorn can’t become an oak tree except under fairly specific circumstances – and that the vast majority of them don’t achieve it – would it be fair to say that an acorn has only part of the potency to become an oak tree?]
Potency means possibility. Acorns have the possibility to become oak trees. That few do become oak trees has no bearing.
An acorn is an oak tree in potency, not in act. An oak tree is an oak tree in act.
To elaborate on the concept of potency, an acorn is not in potency to be a potato.
A thing has things it can’t be, things it can be, and things it is.
theDukedog7:
Let me try to clarify my question: What the difference between saying “An acorn has potency to be an oak tree, it just needs water,” and “Water has the potency to become an oak tree, it just needs an acorn” ?
To put it another way, how do we strictly define what has potency and what are ‘circumstances’?
@theDukedog7 #36:
Sure it is, there are just a few more intermediate steps. An acorn is eaten by a squirrel, which dies. The acorn & squirrel decompose, and their nutrients are absorbed by a growing potato plant.
“But!” you object, “potency doesn’t have parts, like I said before, and only part of the acorn becomes part of the potato.” Sure. But only part of the acorn becomes an oak tree, too. What’s the difference? Both are statistically unlikely (any given acorn is far more likely to be eaten by animals than to germinate into an oak tree), both are contingent on other circumstances (does this mean that water and soil and carbon dioxide and sunlight also have the potential to become an oak tree?), and both require a number of intermediate steps (moreso the smaller your scales of size and time get). Why would we say that an acorn is in potency to be an oak tree rather than an acorn is in potency to be squirrel droppings? Or, for that matter, that an acorn is in potency to be squirrel tissue?
How do we establish what things a thing can’t be?
@37:
Potency is another term for matter (understood in the Aristotelian sense). Act is another word for form.
The acorn has potency. The water in the acorn does not have it’s own substantial form, so it is not a substance and does not (as a part of the acorn) have potencies of its own.
Water outside of an acorn (eg a raindrop) does not have the potency to be an oak tree. It has potency to freeze, splatter, fall, etc.
A substance (composite of form and matter) has potency.
Circumstances are accidents (quantity, location, etc) of substances.
@theDukedog7: Oh, okay. Words just mean whatever they need to mean for your argument to work. Petty concerns like “we know more about reality than we did in 322 B.C.E.” need not enter into consideration. Arguments need only be valid, not sound.
theDukedog7:
Sorry, that didn’t answer my question.
I’m asking how we strictly determine between the acorn having water as its circumstance (to make an oak tree) and water having the acorn as its circumstance (to make an oak tree).
Yawn, nothing but mental wanking without ONE IOTA OF PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. You lose loser.
Evidence is what separates thinkers from believers. You have no evidence. You must believe in your delusions without evidence, which is never found in philosophical wanking, only in physical evidence.
@40:
You necessarily have metaphysical predicates–things that you presume to be true about nature. You can have consistent, rigorous, carefully defined predicates that you understand, or you can have inconsistent, sloppy, poorly defined predicates that you don’t understand.
The latter is not a claim to deeper insight.
@41:
The acorn is inclusive of the water in it. Only as such is it an acorn.
The water in the acorn is not an acorn, and thus is not in potency to be an acorn.
Correction:
“…and thus is not in potency to be an oak tree.”
theDukedog7:
I’m not talking about the water in the acorn, but the water that combines with the acorn during the growing process. Without that water, the acorn can never become an oak tree. Likewise, air, light energy, minerals, etc.
I’m asking why the acorn must be considered to have the potency, and why the water and suchlike must be considered circumstances.
Anri @ 32:
I thought most acorns changed into squirrels ..or rotted into water, carbon dioxide, and dirt. And squirrels get eaten and become cougars, and dirt washes to the sea and becomes ocean..
Egnorance (also from his post about Aquinas, to which he linked):
Oops.
The problem here is that, in an argument that is supposed to lead to a conclusion that God exists, it is actually posited from the beginning that the “potency” of change depends upon intention — of what or whom? Why God, of course. Classic case of begging the question.
Double-oops. So if an acorn gets stuck in a rock pile, but a human hiker finds it, picks it up and takes it home and plants it in fertile ground, and an oak tree grows in the yard, this is impotency? Or an unnatural act and an abomination before the lord, or something? What does Aquinas (or Egnorance) have against change involving human action? Theology always seems to me to involve a denial, or misunderstanding, or maybe even a deep hatred of humanity.
And theDukedog7 . (Egnorance) later @36:
So acorns that end up composting into humus that ends up growing potatoes is not a case of acorns having the potency to become potatoes? No, of course not. That is a chain of action that probably involves humans (and so is not part of the stripped-down reality of Aquinas’ theology), and besides, at the point where the acorn begins to rot and become soil, it no longer has oak-potential, and so is no longer acorn-ish. What matters here is God’s intentions, and He has at this point assigned it a new soil-ish, or even potato-ish potency. (We must be careful, in this discussion that leads to God, to include God at every micro-step. We can’t get the right conclusions without first assuming the answer.)
In the beginning was the word, and then came the word games.
@46:
The water prior to combining with the acorn has the substantial form of water.
After combining with the acorn, the water is part of the acorn, and no longer has a substantial form of its own.
The acorn prior to combining with the water has the substantial form of an acorn.
After combining with the water, the acorn retains its substantial form.
A common error is to see form and matter as template and clay, which is not quite right. Substantial form is the intelligible principle of a thing that makes it the thing that it is. Accidental form is the intelligible principle of a thing that modifies it but is not essential to make it what it is. Matter is the principle of individuation that makes a substance a particular thing, and not just another thing that is similar.
Welcome to chemistry fool, which is scientifically explained. Just like develpmental evolution. All explained by science. You have nothing that needs your imaginary deity except in your delusional imagination….You lose again, having no evidence, just meaningless and ill-used words that say nothing except what YOU want to hear.
But an acorn doesn’t become an oak tree. Not even the acorns that don’t become squirrel shit.
An acorn only weighs a smidge or two, and an oak is mighty big. All of that potential ship has to come from somewhere besides a potential squirrel snack.
Even saying that an acorn becomes an oak, and ignoring the fuck out of the size issue, is philosophically unsound. See, the cap falls off the acorn, then the hard shell, so they don’t become the tree. The seed proper, inside the acorn, then sprouts a sprout, which is recognizably a tree-in-potential, but much of the seed is still there when the sprout is rooted and growing as a treeling.
It would be easier to say that the acorn magically produces a tree, and ignore the problem of how one thing can become another, especially when the other thing is a zillion times bigger, and is made from other things that must be present for the one thing to become the other thing.
Why? More specifically, why would we have these “metaphysical predicates” like your “potency” that do not actually correspond to anything in nature? Why would we presume “metaphysical predicates” that are 2300 years old are still valid?
I agree, which is why your nebulous “potency” is such a non-starter.
It’s oddly amusing to consider: given what we currently understand of physics and chemistry, you could, in fact, take the material bits of an acorn, and, in theory, make it into just about anything else of similar or lesser mass.
Now, granted, probably the only reason you’d bother with some of the more challenging arrangements (you’d need rather a sizeable budget to bang around the protons and neutrons involved to come up with entirely different attoms than those you started with, especially) would be to annoy certain creationists, but, then again, I guess there are probably worse motivations for science projects out there.
(/… and it also seems to me even the most exotic rearrangements, as expensive and time consuming as they might become, would still be rather less of a waste of time than have been the efforts of said creationists’ entire lives.)
@Menyambal #50:
This is precisely why theDukedog7 is relying on “potency”: the term is sufficiently ill-defined and disconnected from actual reality that it can be defined to include or exclude whatever properties are necessary to make his argument work. It’s the same problem as ontological arguments that just define god into existence, only moved back a few steps. He’s defined “potency” into existence, despite it being a wholly unnecessary concept, and wholly out of touch with reality.
Having come quite a long way from Aristotle, we understand precisely what it is about an acorn that contains the potential for becoming an oak tree: its DNA. But that DNA alone cannot become an oak tree, it relies on cellular machinery and raw materials taken from its surroundings. We understand that nothing about the acorn’s composition is all that different from a potato; they’re both made of the same basic stuff in different amounts and arrangements, as are all things once you get down to it.
theDukedog7 @22
The post you link to claims that Aquinas’ First Way, the Argument from Motion; is irrefutable. I’m surprised you’re not embarrassed to make such a silly claim.
For those watching at home, the argument goes as follows: Aquinas, following some ideas of Aristotle, concludes from common observation that an object that is in motion (e.g. the planets, a rolling stone) is put in motion by some other object or force. From this, Aquinas believes that ultimately there must have been an Unmoved Mover. a god, who first put things in motion. The argument goes:
1. Nothing can move itself.
2. If every object in motion had a mover, then the first object in motion needed a mover.
3. This first mover is the Unmoved Mover called God.
This argument begs the question. Aquinas concludes that the first mover must be God. However, what motivates God to make the first move? Although motion cannot have infinite regression, this argument assumed that God had been either not moving from infinity or he has been moving ever since. What then is the source of his energy? If nothing can move itself, how then God was able to move himself? In short, this argument is based on the presupposition that God exists.
Cosmologically, it is valid that an impersonal, unconscious force or energy was the first unmoved mover. In the Big Bag Theory, all motions, space, energy and matter can be traced back to a singularity at the beginning of the universe. This theory is supported by measurable and verifiable parameters such as the rate of expansion of the universe, cosmic microwave background radiation, abundance of hydrogen and helium, and distances between galaxies.
Sorry, but you and Feser will have to try harder to show that Aquinas wasn’t talking out of his ass with the Argument from Motion.
Al Dente,
And then the big elephant in the room:
4. this god must of course be my particular brand of god. Like in the case of Egnor his catholic sky daddy.
I am sorry but an acorn is not a thing it is an event in time. In fact there are no things at all there are only events in time. The main problem arises from our subjective perception of time. We take for granted that what we experience as time is universal and constant and that the acorn is a distinct entity but it is nor more distinct than a small eddy in a stream and as ephemeral. as are all concepts of god.
god is made up of faith it’s proof is faith all attemps at reason are hubris.
uncle frogy
I look at theDukedog7 and I wonder…
1) How is it that you just define thing in vague terms and then think that you have accomplished something? Half of what you say is stuff I expect from a third grader and the other stuff is meaningless. Are you able to walk and chew gum?
2) Where will you go? You come here expecting us to just fall at your feet with what you consider to be some kind of sure fire philosophical argument… and then what. What happens when you are shown to be lacking? When your arguments are baseless? Do you learn? Of do you run? I am betting on run.
I think what theDukedog7 has done is rehearsed his arguments so many times that his mind just jumps through the sequence now, without any proper thought. I use the word “rehearsed” because it reminds me of my small repertoire on the ukulele – I can pick out a lively tune, but it took me weeks to learn, and if you interrupt me in the middle, I can’t recover.
So theDukedog7 is 9or at least, claims to be) the numpty Michael Egnor. How amusing.
Let’s take a look at the start of his presentation of Aquinas’s First Way:
Now if one of your premises is false, your argument may be valid, but cannot be sound: it cannot prove your conclusion. It is remarkable that Egnor doesn’t understand this elementary point. Of course it could be that the argument will go through whether you assume the past was eternal or that it wasn’t, but you’d have to consider both cases – and moreover, you’d have to be clear about what it means for the past to be eternal. For example, suppose time is circular (as, for example, Nietzsche believed). Does that count as the past being eternal, or not?
The odd thing is that none of (2)-(5) appear to be premises at all: rather, they are definitions. So for a starting point we have one premise that may well be false, and is in any case incompletely defined, and a bunch of definitions. Some of them rather… odd definitions, at that. Consider:
The example doesn’t actually appear to exemplify the definition. After all, the top book is not “held in existence” by the book underneath it – it won’t stop existing if the next book down is removed, or even vapourised. It is held in position by that next book – at one level of analysis. At another, it is held in position by the sum of forces acting on it, which include the electrostatic forces between the atoms in the top book and those in that below it, as well as the gravitational forces (which at yet another level of analysis are the result of the warping of spacetime by the presence of mass-energy – unless acted on by other forces, things follow geodesics through spacetime.
Which brings me to one of the fundamental flaws in the Aristotelian world-picture – and one of the reasons why actual scientists, as opposed to Thomist religious apologist pontificators such as Feser and Egnor, have abandoned Aristotelianism: Aristotle lacked the notion of momentum. This is usually explained in terms of physical motion: he thought that for an object thrown through the air to continue moving, there must be a continual “push” on it from behind. The failure of this notion to account for observation led to the medieval theory that an “impetus” was imparted to the thrown object, which gradually dissipated, but the idea that motion continues unless some force halts it, and the distinction between velocity and acceleration, were not formulated until early-modern scientists realised that they had to discard much of Aristotle and think for themselves (something Feser and Egnor have not yet managed). Moreover, while Egnor rightly notes that “motion” in Aristotle and Aquinas was not limited to movement in space, the move beyond Aristotle is just as necessary in this wider context: things do not, in general, remain the same unless acted upon by a distinct “mover” – change is inherent in them, although the form it will take depends on the environment – so “act” and “potency” are not separable, and the argument, stated in Egnor’s own terms, cannot even get started. Egnor complains that critics of the argment misunderstand it, but this misunderstanding is itself a symptom of the argument’s complete obsolescence: it cannot be coherently formulated in a way that is both faithful to the worldview in which it was devised, and compatible with a modern scientific understanding of the world – and that past worldview was (bit by bit) discarded for the very good reason that it was incompatible with the discoveries made as modern science developed.
Nick Gotts @59 (quoting Egnor)
In my argument against Aquinas’ First Way @54, I used the Big Bang but not as an argument against the assumption of an eternal or infinite past. I used it to show that motion could be caused by some other means besides Aquinas’ and Egnor’s god. The “Unmoved Mover” must have made an initial shove to get things moving, so an infinite past is not necessary for the First Way argument. The infinite past is needed for other arguments that Aquinas made, the Second Way or Causation of Existence and the Third Way or Contingent and Necessary Objects, but not for the First Way or Motion. So Egnor’s dismissal of the Big Bang as a rebuttal of the First Way shows that he doesn’t understand the First Way argument.
Jumping ahead, (backward?) we now know that energy has always existed, in some form. While the Big Bang singularity may have been the start of our universe, it was not the start of Everything.
There’s Something rather than Nothing because that’s the way it is. Something, not Nothing, is the default. That seems counterintuitive to us, which is why Prime Movers and creator gods have been postulated. But there’s no need for a Prime Mover, let alone a conscious, personal one.
QFT
Many times in arguing with presuppositional fools, the concept that “you can’t disprove god exists” comes up. The answer is always, you make the claim, you supply the conclusive physical evidence or you are a confirmed liar and bullshitter. They all acknowledge, by their inability to supply positive evidence for their imaginary deity, it doesn’t exist. But they simply cannot/won’t acknowledge that fact. Which is why nobody here believes a word they say…..
Because it isn’t a forum, a bulletin board that would use Bulletin Board Code. It’s a blog. You need to become literate in just the uttermost basics of actual HTML: <blockquote>this</blockquote> automatically turns into
.
Michael Egnor, take note, too.
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
I disagree completely. To conflate “probabilistic” with “caused” is to conflate “allowed” with “caused”, to conflate “it isn’t forbidden from happening” with “it must happen right here right now”.
Radioactive decay isn’t prevented by the laws of physics, so it happens. It happens at probabilities that can be measured and calculated with amazing precision. But no power in the ‘verse can cause a particle to decay, or prevent it from decaying if it’s otherwise allowed to. You can freeze it, boil it, hammer it, put it in a hard vacuum, and it doesn’t give a flying or flightless fuck.
And this, laddies & gentlewomen, is why the first premise of the “First Mover” argument is completely wrong. Uncaused events happen all the time, and they have consequences from life & death all the way to plate tectonics.
This is nominalism.
@Al Dente:
This is missing the relation between a mover and an object in motion.
Can a mover set something in motion without moving itself?
If yes, then there’s no need of a “prime mover”.
If no, then the existence of a prime mover contradicts point 1.
theDukedog7 @ 35:
To return quickly to this, is your argument that the potency to become an oak tree (and not, say, a potato or cougar), lies not in the physical formation of an acorn’s DNA, but in a metaphysical space separate from it?
…and @ 48:
How did we decide that being in an acorn is not a substantial form of water? I missed where that was demonstrated.
David Marjanović @63:
This is just nonsense. What does “right here and right now” have to do with any of this? Where is it written that the inability to predict the exact time of a particular event renders it uncaused? You’re conflating “caused” with “deterministic”.
In my understanding, an event that has no cause does not depend on anything for it’s occurrence. Decays, whenever they happen, depend on the underlying interactions between particles.
You seem to be playing this semantic game solely for the purpose of countering a theist argument. Nothing better to do?
@theDukedog7 #48
Actually, water (H2O) continues to have it’s form after being absorbed into an acorn. It has to stay being that molecule (two hydrogen atoms attached to one oxygen) in order for it to be water. Otherwise it isn’t water at all.
It may cease to be water when it undergoes a chemical reaction, because hydrogen atoms will be taken away or whatever. But plenty of it will still be water. Otherwise your acorn is as dry as a rock and will be dead, not sprouting or anything (at which point it would no longer have the potential to become a tree).
A brief summary of theDukedog7’s performance thus far:
argumentum ad gobbledygook.
Al Dente@60, thanks.
Rob Grigjanis@66,
I think that whether event x is correctly described as “caused” can depend on how the event is described. That a particular atom of radium decayed is caused; that it decayed at time t rather than earlier or later is not.
Been there, done that. DCNR, while well-reasoned for its time, suffers from being published AD (afore Darwin). It contains arguments which are now known to be wrong.
Radioactive decay does not depend on interactions between particles, underlying or otherwise.
An isolated muon that doesn’t interact with anything will decay – and there’s no way to predict when beyond just stating the half-life of a muon, let alone a way to influence when it’ll decay (according to its own time – relativistic time dilatation does stretch the half-life as seen by outside observers).
In this case it’s not even Darwin, but such people as Cuvier 50 years earlier.
You mean the time of the decay of a particular atom (or muon, or whatever). But the indeterminacy is built in to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. You can only calculate cross sections, decay rates, tunneling probabilities, interference patterns, etc. The time of a particular particle’s decay, or of the collision of two particles are meaningless questions. Is the collision of two particles at the LHC uncaused? Is the striking of a particular detector in a double-slit experiment uncaused? Why not just say “QM, therefore everything is uncaused”?
Actually, never mind. I’m done with this stupid word game. Good luck with the theists though. Better you than me.
Charged leptons (of which the muon is one) couple to (i.e. interact with) the W boson and uncharged leptons (neutrinos). Part of a little thing called the Standard Model. See here, just below “To explain in a simpler way“. The W boson then decays to an electron and an electron neutrino (mostly). And this occurs because nothing is really isolated; particle fields are present everywhere, and can interact anywhere.
No, they are not meaningless. The theory says the time of decay cannot be predicted, but the question “When will this particle decay?” is perfectly meaningful.
I don’t know where you’re getting that from – it’s certainly not the scientific consensus. Whether the Big Bang could have been the start of everything depends somewhat on how you define it (including or excluding the period of inflation thought to have preceded the “Hot Big Bang”, during which the universe would have been extremely cold). Whether the “singularity” is real, or simply a sign that current theories don’t work once energy density is sufficiently large, is undetermined. AFAIK, it is still feasible that the Big Bang (in the broader sense) was the start of everything, although it would then still be the case that “energy has always existed”, since there would be no time before the BB. (And so, it would not have been the case, contrary to many theist claims, that “nothing” produced “everything”, because that implies that there was a time when there was nothing.)
Brian Pansky@67,
Yes, you have a good example there of why Aristotelianism has been abandoned except by Catholic apologists. The “substantial form” of water would be something like its “essential wateryness” (although I’m sure Egnor could quibble with this), which it loses when absorbed into something solid. But of course neither Aristotle nor Aquinas knew about atoms, or molecules, or changes of state, or chemical reactions; so unsurprisingly, their “metaphysics” doesn’t deal adequately with what we now know about the world. (The term “metaphysics”, which Egnor tries to impress us with, is just a fancy word for their world-picture, and derives from the fact that the collection of Aristotle’s works compiled in Alexandria some centuries after his death grouped together a number of treatises and placed them after his physics – hence metaphysics.)
Why the fuck are you so upset!?!
Here’s what I was trying to do:
1) Prime-mover arguments require classical or preclassical billiard-ball physics, where every effect has a cause in a very simple sense.
2) QM does not agree.
3) I picked one of the more obvious examples.
Do you feel singled out because the quote I used as a launchpad is by you? That was not my intention.
OK, OK; I shouldn’t have written “doesn’t interact with anything”. However, the field is present all the time; the decay isn’t initiated by a change in the field – it’s initiated by a spontaneous, uncaused interaction with the field.
Yes, of course.
You can still mess with those probabilities, though. The probability that two protons will collide so hard they’ll form a quark/gluon plasma increases drastically if they’re in a collider or in the core of a very large star. In other words, it depends on external forces; I’ll accept that as “it is caused”, even though that is (as you’ve pointed out) not as neat as in classical physics. Instances of radioactive decay, however, do not depend on the temperature or density or charge of the environment. They depend only on the half-life of the particle in question.
IIRC, you can squeeze the half-life a bit by interacting with the particle more often – by opening the lid more often, forcing Schrödinger’s cat to decide if it’s dead yet. But in such a case the question “with what probability will this particle decay within the next 10 minutes?” still depends only on its half-life, its modified half-life this time. There doesn’t seem to be a more direct way to influence the probability. (Other than trivial ways, like taking the muon out with an antimuon – if the muon isn’t there anymore, it can’t decay anymore…)
What have I overlooked? And, again, why are you so upset? I honestly don’t get it.
David Marjanović @76:
If I were really upset, I’d have said “stupid fucking word game” :). Anyway, I apologize for being cranky.
I’ll try to get to the rest of your comment later, time permitting.
:-)
David Marjanović @76,
As I explained in the last paragraph of #59, you don’t need to get as near the frontier as QM to demonstrate that Aristotelianism and the Prime Mover argument are incompatible with scientific findings. As soon as it was realised that objects have momentum as well as position, the argument was a busted flush.
David Marjanović @76: I’ll leave it at this;
Your use of ‘uncaused’ renders the term useless. In QM, you can have a well defined initial state, but more than one final state when an observation is made. So, ‘A causes B’ is perfectly coherent, even if B is a set of states with associated probabilities, possibly time-dependent. If, on the other hand, A is ‘muon plus ground state fields’, and B is ‘teacup’, then yes, B is uncaused (at least in the context of the Standard Model sans teacups).
But to label one of the possible final states ‘uncaused’ is nonsensical, because to be consistent you must then label any and all final states with probability less than 1, in any experiment , ‘uncaused’.
@80:
That is, you’ll see one of two or more possible final states, not all at once!