Dancin' in the Ruins

Sorry for the long absence. Was just reading a very worthwhile paper by James A. Keller - "The power of God and miracles in Process Theism" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63:1, 1995). Keller's piece leaves, correctly I think, fairly little room for miraculous occurrences in the philosophical framework of process theism. Whitehead's God is a God who rules by "persuasion", rather than "force": as immanent in the universe, it may entice each particular event to develop one way or the other, but each individual event remains constrained by the past that has gone before.

I've argued at some point that there is no tension at all between assenting to a belief in the lawful behaviour of nature on the one hand, and to a belief in miracles on the other. Science necessarily deals with regular occurrences and patterns which might be encapsulated by natural laws - Peircean "thirds". A miracle is by conceptual necessity a singular, unrepeatable event (a Peircean "second"), and thus can never be claimed to invalidate our scientific knowledge of how nature works. Only if miracles themselves were a regular occurrence would this be so (but then we would either want to establish some regularity concerning the miraculous events themselves, which would mean subsuming them into a scientific worldview - they would no longer be miracles). I still think this is correct, and so I do not believe that a scientist who, say, believes in the resurrection holds contradictory beliefs.

The evolution of my own religious beliefs over the past few years proceeded from some (mainly philosophical) theism-minus-Jesus to strongly considering that the Galilean rabbi was qualitatively more than just a Galilean rabbi, to my current, somewhat grudging, understanding of Jesus as in some unique fashion both human and divine. Which is where I stop: I have no set beliefs on the Trinity, or on whether Jesus was God incarnate from the outset or whether He gradually became so (and became aware of it) during His mission, or what precisely happened on the cross (except that He experienced suffering and indeed death). But it's here where I run into a brick wall.

First, I can't well harmonize my philosophical beliefs (which are very sympathetic to some kind of Peircean/Whiteheadian process theism) with my religious ones. I used to think that a handy way to conceptualize the Son was to be as some kind of incarnation of Whitehead's consequent aspect of God (the immanent, loving and suffering, and evolving aspect of God) with the transcendent Father as Whitehead's primordial aspect. But I find this meshing poorly with the New Testament: Jesus regarded himself arguably as the Son of God, but not as God. There's the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and there's many other clues that Jesus was under constant temptation to flee from His fate (Matt. 16:21-23).

Second, there's the resurrection. I'm fairly agnostic about the other miracles. There's the wonderful story about Jesus walking on water - and Peter coming to meet him, but sinking when he starts thinking about it too much and becomes very nervous (Matt. 14:25-33). There's an allegorical meaning here that is so obvious that it doesn't matter very much to me whether Jesus really walked on water. But the resurrection is a very different thing. I can make sense of the last supper - the symbolic sharing of Jesus'/God's being (His body and His blood) in the form of bread and wine among his disciples and among the future Kingdom of God, and of the crucifixion - as of God sharing the burdens and ultimately the bitter fate of mankind, but only in the light of the resurrection. Suffering and death are not just undergone, but also conquered by God.

And I can't really make sense of it except literally. Jesus was encountered at Emmaus by his disciples, who were turned by that event from a group of hiding, cowering and very disappointed disciples to the apostles who went on to proclaim the Kingdom of God in a hostile world. (I can think of some kind of probably fanciful way in which the events after the resurrection were somehow simultaneously happening there-and-then and were a foreshadowing or vision of the far future in a rupture-in-time kind of way. But this does not help me).

And this I cannot square with my philosophical beliefs. Jesus is the black hole at the edge of my philosophical universe, so to speak. And perhaps this is the way it should be. I've come to find the effort to build an event like the death of Christ and His resurrection into a particular philosophical framework somehow strangely distasteful. The cross should still be a "folly to the Greeks".

Perhaps the efforts to harmonize reason and faith are and should be ultimately Sisyphean. We scaffold our views on the world and on God with some kind of reasonable framework, with all the arguments and musings on necessary and contingent existence, primordial and consequent aspects and all that, to meet the mocking challenges of modern-day Greeks, only to find the whole building gloriously crashing down when confronted with the events of one particular weekend in Roman Palestine. And then start all over again.

Some internet links: David Heddle reminds me why I have a began to foster a dislike for some varieties of skeptic/debunking discourse by pointing to a course description about ID and science at the SMU physics department, which looks like it has been put together by a fourteen-year old. You have to see it to believe it.

In the interests of equity, I cannot but refer to the hilarious latest offering from Jack Chick (hat tip: Dangerous Idea).

And finally. I sometimes find myself strangely ambivalent towards the "Chamberlain atheists". Though militant atheists like Dawkins and PZ Meyers may profess to mock religionists, the time they spend on polemicizing against religion speaks otherwise. Sometimes with their less militantly atheist protractors, I sense an actually much more patronizing attitude towards religion - it's all harmless tomfoolery, why bother with it? Aside from this, there is a tendency to call for common unity against ID or political Christianity which seems to unprincipledly subordinate philosophical differences to political aims (of course, I disagree with the very American liberal political viewpoint that seems to be current at Scienceblogs).

This said, I find a lot to agree with in this nuanced piece by scienceblogger John Wilkins. Including this paragraph:

One point I fully concur with the "angry atheists" about: there is no case for religious exceptionalism. We should not tread lightly because it's religion in our criticisms. There's nothing about religion that makes it less criticisable than other forms of public belief such as politics or ethics. It is, after all, a human activity, whatever else its adherents may think it is. But this likewise applies, tu quoque, to atheisms and humanisms and so on. If we assume that we are all errant on occasions, all human activities are equally to be critiqued.

PZ Meyers vs. Alister McGrath

PZ Meyers shows a somewhat tenuous grasp on philosophy of science while dealing with an interview with Alister McGrath. The nice thing about PZ Meyers and his Pharyngula blog is that he tends to be wrong in a remarkably clear and consistent way. No difference here.

McGrath remarks, quite correctly, that:

I think Richard Dawkins approaches the question of whether God exists in much the same way as if he’d approach the question of whether there is water on Mars. In other words, it’s something that’s open to objective scientific experimentation. And of course there’s no way you can bring those criteria to bear on God. I think Dawkins seems reluctant to allow that God may not be in the same category as scientific objects. That’s an extremely important point to make in beginning to critique him.

PZ Meyers proves his point by stating that:

He's actually right on one thing: we are approaching the question of god as a scientific problem, and the question of water on Mars is a pretty good analogy. We can't see it here, we aren't there, we have to build a case on inference from evidence and we have to design tests to evaluate the possibilities. That's been an eminently successful strategy for humanity. So why can't we bring them to bear on the god question? I've highlighted his answer: he says we just can't. He doesn't say why we can't, it's just a dogmatic assertion. Keep this in mind, though, because he's going to contradict himself in a moment.

Also, I'd like to know what he means by this category of "scientific objects". Everything is a scientific object, from distant stars to grains of dirt, from the first picoseconds of the Big Bang to pillow talk between lovers. If we can ask a question about it, it can be science. McGrath may think this is a useful strategy for a critique, but all it amounts to is setting up his premises as unquestionable. We simply do not have to accept that.

Later on in the interview, McGrath states that:

As someone who has studied the history and philosophy of science extensively, I think I’ve noticed a number of things that Dawkins seems to have overlooked. One of them is this: One of the most commonly encountered patterns in scientific development is seeing a pattern of observations and then saying, in order to explain these observations, we propose that there exists something that is as yet unobserved but we believe that one day will be observed because if it’s there, it can explain everything that can be observed.

Of course, if you’re a Christian you’ll see immediately that that same pattern is there in thinking about God. We can’t prove there’s a God but he makes an awful lot of sense of things and therefore there’s a very good reason to suppose that this may, in fact, be right.

At which point PZ Meyers charges him with a contradiction:

Whoa. What happened to "of course there's no way you can bring those criteria to bear on God"? What about "God may not be in the same category as scientific objects"? One moment he's claiming you can't study god like you would the possibility of water on Mars, and next he's claiming the validity of using observation and theory to justify the existence of the remote and directly unseen. How … inconsistent.

Except that he's not. McGrath was talking here about an inference to the best explanation, or about what Peirce called an abductive inference - which by itself is only half the scientific method. The explanation would potentially fall within the domain of science if the explanandum could be observed and studied in an empirical fashion. But in the case of God, the kind of explanandum you'd be dealing with are not scientifically observable things but things which are the preconditions for us making any (scientific) observation at all - the existence of laws of nature (if indeed they are laws of nature - which in itself is not a scientific question); the problem of universals; the existence of mind, etc. There is no scientific proof for the existence of mind in addition to matter. It's highly reasonable to assume there is such a thing (as we have direct experience of mind, and only very indirect of matter, for one) but no empirical proof. Given a world-picture in which both mind and matter are co-existing, one could (reasonably- but without scientific proof) argue mind to be primary, and extrapolate from this to the existence of God. But this is not science.

For McGrath to argue that God is amenable to scientific study, he would have to argue not only the existence of God as the result of an abductive inference, but to argue empirical observables under the operation of regularities of nature - which are thereby falsifiable, and predictable. In other words, even a miracle would not do as a scientific observation, as miracles are pretty much by definition one-off breaches of the laws of nature. In natural science, of courses, empirical observables are automatically assumed to be subject to natural laws as the whole method (of prediction and experimental verification) depends upon it. So supposed empirical facts which, to the believer, call for the activity of God as an explanation, are by definition either outside the realm of science or, to an atheist, no proof of anything except the normal workings of the universe. However, it would not be a justification of atheism without a defense of some kind of empiricism as an underlying metaphysics.

Now, charitably, PZ Meyers could have used science in the sense of "natural science, the humanities, philosophy, and rational discourse in general" which does indeed just about envelop anything we can ask a question about. But he would be very wrong to do so - and I don't think he is.

What has happened here is that PZ Meyers bases his own reasoning upon a philosophical outlook - some kind of very naive, scientistic empiricism - without allowing for the possibility McGrath does not share that outlook. Which is a pattern I've seen a lot of atheists fall into. They start arguing that they are under no obligation to believe in God just as they are under no obligation to argue in the existence of a teapot circling Saturn. At which point one may counter that God is not a spatially and temporally bound object like the teapot, that God is not "in" the universe but rather the other way around, and that God is not subject to the laws of nature but rather the basis of them. And that, therefore, arguments on the existence of God need to take place in philosophical rather than scientific discourse. Usually the atheist will counter that there is as little need for him to acquaint himself with philosophy of religion as there is for goblinology or Saturnian teapotology - and we're back to square one. The atheist might even invoke the Courtier's reply which is another way of stating that the atheist is under no obligation to acquaint himself with what he's arguing against. When an atheist does this, it is of course a sign of the atheist's superior Reason. If a creationist fighting to remove evolution from the classroom were to make the same move, it would obviously be a symptom of the creationist's redneck anti-science idiocy.

Anyway. All this nicely illustrates the dangers of unconscious empiricism (an empiricism that does not know it is one).

And many principles which are quite appropriate for science and empirical inquiry are abused by cajoling them into philosophical service when used as arguments for atheism. Such as Occam's razor - which is just about unusable, as the relative parsimony of atheistic and theistic explanations is hardly statable. The explananda are often not even quite the same. Another is Sagan's claim that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence". Which tends to make my blood boil, as I've hardly ever seen appropriate use of it. In the normal process of science, scientists are usually quite justified to not abandon the theories they work with unless there is a lot of proof that they are indeed wrong. Suppose a well-argued and superficially plausible claim were to be made that the Americas were colonized out of Polynesia rather than the Bering land bridge. A "wait and see" approach would be very appropriate. This makes the scientific process somewhat conservative, which is probably a good thing.

The principle is, however, wholly inappropriate if used to evaluate "extraordinary" claims which do, in fact, contradict no established scientific theories. Which is the way it is commonly used by professional skeptics. The claim for the existence of ESP needs evidence, but no "extraordinary" evidence. Claims for the existence of God need argument (rather than evidence) but certainly no extraordinary evidence.

Because the problem in the latter cases is that we have no scientific grounds to state that a given claim is extraordinary. Based on the scientific consensus concerning the origins of Native Americans, and the chronology of the colonization of Polynesia, a proposed Polynesian origin would be very extraordinary. However, whether one finds ESP or God extraordinary depends on one's philosophical presuppositions. ESP may well fit easily in the philosophical framework of a dualist or a panpsychist, but would be somewhat more troublesome for a philosophical materialist. Similarly God.

Using heuristic or pragmatic principles such as Occam's razor or Sagan's "extraordinary claims" as principles to evaluate philosophies, world-outlooks, or things quite beyond current science, usually shows some kind of underlying naive empiricism. The problem with philosophical outlooks that are hidden from view is that they cannot be evaluated, and they cannot be criticized. In this sense, the explicit, reflective theist is usually in better intellectual health than the "pro-science" atheist.

Chris on Metaphysical Pragmatism

Chris at Mixing Memory has a worthwhile post criticizing what he calls "metaphysical pragmatism", the idea that, because of the successes of science, philosophical knowledge can be based on scientific knowledge in a way which obviates metaphysics. A commenter makes the point that the pragmatism involved was not the pragmatism of Peirce. Based on my (limited) knowledge of Peirce, I agree - and in one passage he minces no words in criticizing the metaphysical pragmatists of his day:

"The psychical sciences, especially psychology, are, if possible, even more necessitated to assume general principles that cannot be proved or disproved by their ordinary methods of work. The philosopher alone is equipped with the facilities for examining such "axioms" and for determining the degree to which confidence may safely be reposed in them. Find a scientific man who proposed to get along without any metaphysics - not by any means every man who holds the ordinary reasonings of metaphysicians in scorn - and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle, if only to avoid philosophizing. Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not allowed to run loose. A man may say "I will content myself with common sense." I, for one, am with him there, in the main. (...) But the difficulty is to determine what really is and what is not the authoritative decision of common sense and what is merely obiter dictum. In short, there is no escape from the need of a critical examination of "first principles"." (CP 1.129)

It's coming from the feel that it ain't exactly real

(Or it's real, but it ain't exactly there).

Something is bothering me. I've been working on a paper dealing with historical linguistics and Whitehead's process philosophy. It's something I've been working on for some time: I had a go at it in my Ph.D. thesis but looking back, the idea seems quite half-baked and impressionistic as I presented it there. Things are a lot more clearer right now.

The attraction to the idea is that it might enable one to hold both a Platonistic view on linguistic structure with a thoroughly diachronic, historical view on language-as-such. The basic dichotomy Whitehead draws is between universals or "eternal objects" which are, in and of themselves, pure potentials, and events or "actual occasions", in which universals may actualize. Space and time is not given: an actual occasion or event gains its spatiotemporal location during its "becoming", during which it essentially relates to its whole relevant universe (past events, universals inferred from those, etc.).

Whitehead has been applied to language by, to my knowledge, only Michael Fortescue (2001, "Patterns and Process"). He basically regards language as a complex "eternal object" and defines the linguistic equivalent of an event with a "moment of linguistic cognition". I happily follow him here. Fortescue's book is a bit smorgasbord-like, though: virtually all of linguistics from discourse studies to language change and acquisition is dealt with, and historical linguistics relatively briefly.

Now, the problem.

I think there are compelling reasons to hold some kind of linguistic Platonism, either a Whiteheadian version, or a non-Whiteheadian one as has been developed by Jerrold Katz. By doing so, we avoid hypostasizing grammar, i.e. regarding the work of theoretical linguistics as relating to a "language organ" or to linguistic cognition, etc. Autonomous linguistics would be autonomous linguistics; neurolinguistics would be neurolinguistics. We would avoid subordinating linguistics to some kind of "first order" discipline. Also, I think there are very good reasons to hold that language is a normative system analogous to mathematics, logic, etc.: it's about "correct" and "incorrect" rather than "is" or "not-is".

There's a bit of a snag, though, when we try to account for (historical-)linguistic labels such as "Uralic", "Indo-European" or "Finnish" on such a conception of language as a Platonic object. Because "Finnish" refers to a determinate spatiotemporal location. OK, so we regard the phonology, morphology, etc. of Finnish as a Platonic object which exists eternally (as a potential or in some kind of Platonic realm) but state that it becomes Finnish only due to its actualization at a certain time and place in the actual world of events. Problem with that it of course that "Finnish" as a historical, linguistic entity has a lot of "temporal smear", has undergone quite a bit of change during its history, and the issue of genetic identity, i.e. on what grounds do we issue a label such as "Finnish" or "Uralic" on a spatiotemporally extended community of "linguistic events" which does not embody exactly the same structures through space and time?

An obvious solution would be to use Popper's World 3 - but I dislike it. It's too obvious, and I can't help thinking that regarding historically specific things as for instance Mozart's requiem (and by extension, a given language) as World 3 objects is a bit confused. (Rather, Mozart's requiem would be a Platonic object which happened to be discovered and actualized by Mozart, as well as in subsequent performances, etc.). Also, I believe it merely displaces the problem of genetic identity and genetic relationships.

I think Whitehead referred to this problem when he wrote that:

"(...) the complex nexus of ancient imperial Rome to European history is not wholly expressible in universals. It is not merely the contrast of a sort of city, imperial, Roman, ancient, with a sort of history of a sort of continent (...). The nexus in question does involve such a complex contrast of universals. But it involves more. For it is the nexus of that Rome with that Europe." (Process and Reality, p. 324).

A "nexus" in Whiteheadian is a spatiotemporally extended community of events, which exhibit the same universals through their relationships with each other. It's also part of my currently favoured solution to the problem mentioned above. Linguistic structures would exist Platonically but without any reference to their "togetherness", not to speak of labels such as "Finnish": this togetherness emerges in actual usage, and in the presence of linguistic events "in" each other (my comprehension of an utterance by another person would be a past linguistic event immanent in a present one: and the diachronic dimension created in such a manner, with the actualization of the same linguistic structures in both events, would account for genetic relationships).

However, it seems to me intuitively difficult to hold a Platonic view on linguistic structure with an emergentist view on language as a social, historical system of rules, which emerges from linguistic usage, with language learners relating to their language as they would to rules, etc. I think the intuitive difficulty is only apparent, though, and resulting from somehow unconsciously holding Platonic objects to be more concrete than they really are. There seems to be no real contradiction between linguistic structure being a Platonic object; and it's actualization in space and time to emerge from language usage.

But this leads to something else, and quite unrelated to the specifically linguistic issue above: is the relationship between Platonic objects and their actualization in space and time something to be explained? Does it need an explanation?

Individual languages of course have a great deal of contingency due to the arbitrariness of the relationship between meaning and phonological form: it is only within a linguistic system in which we "cannot doubt" that a cat is called a cat and in which calling it tac would be wrong (in others it might be kissa, katt, mácska, etc.). But the impossibility of even conceiving 2 and 2 to be 5 is I think, an important ground for holding mathematics to be Platonic.

The thing is that mathematics, logic, reason all appear to be working very well in making sense of the world. Peirce seemed to feel this was worth mentioning a number of times, at one point regarding the validity of abductive reasoning as conditioned upon the "hope" that "there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature" (CP 1:80), at another point stating that "(...) every scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous; and that it really is so all the successes of science in its applications to human convenience are witnesses. They proclaim that truth over the length and breadth of the modern world. In the light of the successes of science to my mind there is a degree of baseness in denying our birthright as children of God and in shamefacedly slinking away from anthropomorphic conceptions of the universe." (CP 1:316).

The issue is, obviously, religiously relevant. Nagel, in "The Last World", mentions that while he remained a metaphysical materialist, the irreducibility of reason does make us be more at home in the universe than secularly comfortable. But it should be handled carefully: the irreducability of Platonic objects (to which we respond normatively) to the empirical, physical realm says nothing about the impossibility or possibility of, for example, human cognition and all that evolving naturalistically. It would seem to me to be eminently possible for the normative (such as language) to emerge in a community of people predisposed to look for it - though I think mind itself (with intentionality, valuation, etc.) would be presupposed.