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Anselm, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, ibn Rushd, intelligent design, nonhuman animals, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Rāmānuja, Śaṅkara
In my intro religious studies course last semester, I taught a unit on theism and evolution. This was the first time it really hit me that God had once been considered a verifiable – and confirmed – scientific hypothesis. Until he made his famous voyage, Charles Darwin, just like so many medieval philosophers, had looked at organisms’ suitability for their environments and concluded it must have been the work of an intelligent designer. The particular theory that had best fit the available empirical evidence, Darwin and most of his contemporaries thought, was Charles Lyell‘s view that there were “centres of creation,” different places on earth where divine creative activity had been focused. In an era of rapid-discovery science like our own, that had been the best available hypothesis.
Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.
In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. The worst of these is the “First Cause” version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, that you need to have something setting the world in motion. Even if that argument works, it proves nothing like the existence of any God that has been ever worshipped. A mere First Cause is no more significant than any other cause. If God is a mere Divine Watchmaker who sets things in motion and then goes away and is no longer involved – as this hypothesis would suggest – then the universe with him is hardly different from the universe without him. This is not a God that matters.
Rather, nowadays, if you’re going to get rationally to anything like the traditional Abrahamic God, you need to keep science at arm’s length. This is one of the beauties of Anselm’s argument – it has nothing whatsoever to do with empirical evidence, it is 100% a priori, and therefore natural science simply can’t touch it. If it is wrong, its wrongness can and must be demonstrated without reference to natural science. The same seems to be true for ibn Rushd’s First Explanation cosmological argument when properly understood, though not for First Cause arguments in the usual sense. For here the question is not “what caused everything?” but “how can there be causation in the first place?” It is an explanation going much deeper. Unlike Anselm, it doesn’t necessarily get you to an omnipotent or omnibenevolent God; but it does seem to get you to something like the brahman of Śaṅkara’s or Rāmānuja’s Vedānta, a cosmic principle underlying everything, and such a principle does a lot to change the way we see the rest of the universe.
To me it’s been clear for a long time that any attempt to find God must go a priori, must not try to look in the empirical world. But looking back on Darwin’s story, it’s easier for me to realize that many people don’t see it that way. And that helps me understand contemporary views that have always struck me as a little curious. Not just the intelligent design movement, but the arch-materialistic atheists of contemporary analytic philosophy, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, who look at neuroscience and conclude that consciousness and free will don’t exist. They actually think that consciousness and free will are empirical hypotheses whose existence can be refuted with empirical evidence. Once upon a time, they, like God, might even have been exactly that.
Could you unpack your last few lines a bit more? I’m assuming you’re saying that the Churchlands’ view of free will and consciousness is analogous to intelligent design arguments made before Darwin. If so, then what plays the role of evolution in this analogy? That is, what idea/theory/evidence renders the Churchlands’ views obsolete?
Yeah, I don’t think I spelled that out well enough. My point is that, for the Churchlands, we can look at experimental evidence and find that the concept of consciousness has little predictive power, therefore we ditch it. Dawkins and Hitchens would want to do the same with God. After evolution, however, the experimental evidence has done little to find God for us now, and there’s little reason to think that it ever will. The best hope is as a first cause at the Big Bang, but even if conclusive, all that would give us is a dried out, emaciated, deist Divine Watchmaker that doesn’t answer prayers, give us meaning in life, or really do anything whatever beyond creating the universe and then going away and having a beer. That’s no God worthy of the name. Whereas the God of the design argument might have been, at least for those who believe in natural law.
Now is there an event comparable to the discovery of evolution in the case of consciousness or free will? Not exactly. I’m thinking more of the fact that psychologists have not found it effective to use those concepts and draw predictive power from them in experiments. Consciousness (or even belief, let alone free will) isn’t confirmed by empirical testing in the way that other hypotheses are. So, the Churchlands conclude, obviously it doesn’t exist – it’s a superstition of “folk psychology,” as a flat earth is “folk physics.”
And my point is that they’re looking in the wrong place. Before psychology had begun its researches, one might have imagined that consciousness, like God, would have been a testable and confirmable hypothesis. (Free will is a bit trickier, I suppose, since scientific research tries to assume that everything has causal laws.) We haven’t found these things in empirical evidence. But I would contend that we don’t have to: if they exist, they exist a priori. They stand or fall on logical argument (like Anselm’s proof of God or Kant’s argument for free will), not on examination of the physical world. In the case of consciousness I am pretty convinced that it does exist and must exist no matter what any experiment tells us, for it’s one of the foundations necessary for such experiments to make any sense at all. I argued for that point in two posts last year: scientific research is meaningless unless understood through consciousness.
Dialetheism has theism in there in the occilation between the relative and the absolute, the vyavaharika and paramarthika (Sankara), the empirical and the metaphysical. What is true for the one may be false for the other. Proof as demonstration and proof as way or an element in a ‘converging and convincing argument’ may appear to conflict if you only accept a single level of meaning. A ‘way’ may require that you sharpen your own metaphysical focus which leads one to consider whether the Churchland view might not be wilfully obtuse.
The Churchlands might well be willfully obtuse. (It’s pretty clear that Dawkins and Hitchens are that.) But one can be willfully obtuse and still be right.
Amod:
I was thinking more of their abrogation of consciousness if that is what it is. Here they line up with Dennett of Consciousness Explained and perhaps Ryle of The Concept of Mind. It contrasts with wisdom traditions in which the presence of consciousness becomes more intense the less the mental business obtrudes.
Yes, they do abrogate consciousness – significantly more so than Dennett, actually. Where Dennett is a reductionist materialist – saying that consciousness can be reduced to, and explained entirely in terms of, brain states – the Churchlands are eliminative materialists, saying that consciousness is an illusion and there is really no such thing.
I’m not entirely convinced that the radical materialist position is inconsistent with the apparent a priori necessity of consciousness in order to make hypotheses. One version of their claim is that consciousness is illusory- that the sense of “experience” is an epiphenomenon, constructed after all the decisions have been made already. According to that version, the qualitative experience of hypothesis-making remains, yet it has no meaningful relationship to how we actually interact with the world. Consciousness is an illusion, and the idea of hypothesis-forming is part of that illusion.
Yeah, there is an awful lot of bullet-biting the radical materialists can do. If an opponent like me says “no consciousness means no hypotheses,” they can say “very well then, no hypotheses. Hypotheses too are an illusion.” Then one wants to ask in response: but on what grounds can you then speak of illusion? If we don’t have beliefs, then we don’t have false beliefs either. One would have to define “illusion” purely in terms of behaviour, in terms of actions made and words uttered. And is there then any distinction between an illusion and a lie – is there even such a thing as a lie at all? Can words even be said to have meaning in the first place?
I do clearly need to read more of the likes of Dennett and the Churchlands, as I imagine at least some of these questions are answered. I will be very surprised if they answer the relevant questions well enough to be actually plausible.
Amod:
It seems you may be missing the division between belief and behavior in the materialist approach. An absence of consciousness does not necessarily mean no hypotheses! What it means, is that the subjective experience of “forming a hypothesis” is related to some arrangement in our statistical/network learning and behavior mechanisms. But when we “test that hypothesis”, the mechanistic explanation provides a predictive and more accurate (and more truthful) account of what’s going on, as opposed to the conscious-thought level.
According to this materialist argument, consciousness is an “illusion” in that it gives a misleading account of the causes of our actions. It gives that account to our network-systems, and if our network-systems integrate that information as if it were true, those networks will perform worse (understand/predict the world less well) than if they integrated information about statistical neural networks.
As such, there is absolutely still meaning in words, in materialistworld. One might say that there is *information* in words instead, but that’s getting semantic: either way, even if consciousness is an inactive epiphenomenon, words still have factual (and manipulative) value, and claims still have a productive and meaningful relationship to the thing being described. An illusion contains bad information, a lie contains bad information because another network entity ‘intended’ to manipulate the listener.
Michael:
That claim in your first 2 sentences is precisely what the materialists are arguing against.
Ben wrote:
What I wrote was (a)Unless you’re sleep writing you are conscious.
The contrary of that is (1) you can be asleep and be conscious or (2) write intelligible sentences whilst asleep (3) awake or asleep there is no such thing as being conscious within the meaning that they are opposed to.
My second sentence was (b)Consciousness is not something running parallel to the writing, the walking, the coiling of a rope, whistling a happy tune, it’s there in the activity itself.
Now if the materialists are against that then they are for consciousness running parallel. No hardly that. It is just this that they are opposed to and which the main thrust of their argument is against. This is the dreaded dualism which Patricia Churchland deplores.
(From her paper WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS?
My latter point was that if you see the problem field in terms of matter/mind and strike out mind you are still involved in a reduction. You have allowed the Cartesian view to set your agenda. There are many other views which transcend that simplistic division.
Michael- it’s been a while since I read my Churchland, but your (b) is not the same as the dualism they have in mind. As your citation shows, they argue against the “dualism” of material vs. nonmaterial. They would disagree with your (b) by saying that consciousness is a purely physical process that does not (despite initial appearances) affect or control our behavior, but arises as an epiphenomenon from the true control processes.
Hmmmm. Yes… I’m beginning to think that the eliminative (and probably similarly reductive) materialists have thought things through well enough that their systems are not riddled themselves with internal contradiction. Where I suspect they’re more vulnerable is to dialectical argument about beliefs that are beyond their systems.
Especially, it seems to me that on such an account normative claims can’t have any meaning beyond pragmatic efficacy, since even truth has no meaning beyond pragmatic efficacy either. Happiness is right out as an ethical criterion, since that’s a factor of consciousness – it strains belief to think that one should act in such a way as to merely produce different chemical states and facial expressions. Similarly any sort of Kantian duty or obligation, which depends on the autonomy of the will.
And when all you have left is pure pragmatism, it seems like the only thing bad you can say about Hitler is that he lost the war – for in that respect his information was poorly processed for prediction and control. People who commit successful genocides have real access to truth, because they took in information in a way that allowed them to act on the basis of correct predictions. And such pragmatic truth, successful prediction and control, seems like the only standard on which goodness can be assessed – if there can be any such standard at all.
Ben:
Unless you’re sleep writing you are conscious. Consciousness is not something running parallel to the writing, the walking, the coiling of a rope, whistling a happy tune, it’s there in the activity itself. The abrogators of consciousness are concerned with a consciousness which is the dualist sort. One could say that they were repressed dualists themselves in that they have dismissed one wing of the body/mind dyad. The ghost in the machine has not wholly been laid.
I think an even more important question is if the concept of God could ever live up to what it is. Intelligent design, interesting perspective if you see God as something that is not separate from you, that is not apart from everything. When we view the world, we tend to forget what creates the objects of the world.
If I understand you correctly, this is one of the reasons I like the idea of a First Explanation rather than a First Cause. If God is the First Explanation, it’s much easier to think of her as being everything, some sort of pantheism – she is at the root of everything that is. God as the First Cause (which is very similar to the intelligent design God) can just set things in motion and then go away.