tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-384368162024-03-07T12:18:07.727-08:00Dangerous Idea 2A blog to discuss the argument from reason.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.comBlogger252125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-2321202006752739792021-05-24T19:28:00.001-07:002021-05-24T19:28:03.105-07:00The weaker and the stronger Anscombe claims<p> I think everyone working on the Anscombe essay (that includes one Victor Reppert) has been making a mistake in not distinguishing between Anscombe criticizing Lewis for, for example, not making the distinction between GC and CE on the one hand, and saying, and making this claim at the end of her piece:</p><div>I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the “naturalist” hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.</div><div><br /></div><div>That seems to imply a refutation, and a claim that once Anscombe's distinctions are drawn, the naturalist is off the hook. Lewis comes back and says "OK, I see your distinctions, but you're actually making it worse instead of better for the naturalist." At the end she goes from saying "You didn't refute the naturalist for these reasons," to "You can't refute the naturalist this way." It's more than just a correction. McGrath, who sees the whole thing as a win-win on both sides (just a friendly correction), overlooks this passage. But she doesn't repeat the more ambitious claim. </div><div><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;" /></div>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-17044383902294164762021-05-09T12:56:00.003-07:002021-05-09T12:56:44.058-07:00Does Darwinian biology explain the mind? <p> <span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">The whole thrust of Darwinian biology, which is the big naturalist selling point, is to replace mind explanations with mindless ones, rendering mind explanations perhaps useful but not literally true. If Darwinian biology explains the mind, therefore, it explains it away. It explains it in such a way that mental explanations are not literally true. So, if Darwinian biology is comprehensive, then it follows that it is not literally the case that Darwin inferred his theory of natural selection from the evidence, of, for example, finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands. So, you have to be the kind of naturalist that says that Darwinian biology does not explain the human mind. I know of someone who says this who doesn't believe in God or anything like God, but last I checked he had made a lot of people in the naturalist camp really mad for saying this sort of thing. Do naturalists want to include Nagel in their club, or keep him out?</span></p>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-57144539915403148292021-05-08T20:02:00.002-07:002021-05-08T20:02:50.379-07:00What, exactly qualifies as naturalism? And what did C. S. Lewis think he had refuted? <p> In defending the central argument in the third chapter of Miracles, we have to ask exactly what Lewis meant by naturalism when he said that naturalism is self-refuting. David Kyle Johnson thinks there is a standard definition of naturalism--an entity is natural if it is part of the universe, and naturalism is the view that only the universe exists. It has nothing to do with whether mental states are fundamental to the universe or not. Hence an argument that shows that there must be basic mental causes would not be sufficient to refute naturalism, since there are versions of naturalism where this is not denied. </p><p><br /></p><p>David Kyle Johnson, "Retiring the Argument from Reason," <i>Philosophia Christ</i> Vol 20, no. 2., (2018). </p><p>But, in fact, the difficulty in defining naturalism is widely noted, and so far as I can tell, there is no standard definition. Alvin Plantinga defines naturalism as the view that there is no God, or no being like God. But what is God-like enough to be a problem for naturalism? </p><p>Rickabaugh and Boras state that naturalism is a thesis about ontology, but is also a thesis about explanation. They note: </p><p>The distinctively scientific mode of explanation is subpersonal and
mechanistic.16 To give a mechanistic explanation of some phenomena (for
example, change in location) is to cite a property of an object (for example,
the mass of a body) together with a natural law (for example, Newton’s inverse-square law) describing how things with that property regularly behave.
Such laws describe the most general patterns of variation in nature, based
on the inherent tendencies of things. Mechanistic explanations thus tell us
what we can expect to happen automatically (deterministically or probabilistically) and, as it were, of its own accord. That is, whether prior events
strictly necessitate or fix the chances of a future event, still that event is the
automatic result of nonrational causes. Deterministic laws predict a fixed
outcome for phenomena that fall under their jurisdiction. Probabilistic laws,
by contrast, assign a probability to all possible outcomes, and leave it to
chance to resolve which comes to pass. Mechanistic explanations thus tell
us that some phenomenon occurs because the state of the universe and the
laws of nature necessitate it or make it somewhat likely. Here is our point:
the central idea of naturalism (at least with respect to explanation) is that
mechanistic explanation is in principle complete, that is, sufficient to explain
everything that needs explaining.</p><p>16. The account of scientific explanation in this paragraph and the next follows Richard
Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26–35,
which is in turn based on the classic exposition in C. G. Hempel and P. Oppenheim, “Studies in
the Logic of Explanation,” Philosophy of Science 14 (1948): 135–7</p><p>Brandon Rickabaugh and Todd Boras, "The Argument from Reason and Mental Causal Drainage: A Reply to Peter van Inwagen," <i>Philosophia Christi </i>vol 19, no. 2, 384. (2017). </p><p>Lewis presents naturalism and supernaturalism as two options, so based on that you might think that he would be happy with Johnson's definition. However, Lewis also has a chapter on "Christianity and Religion" in which he argues against pantheistic views, and there he does not use an argument from reason. These pantheistic views include a position he once held, and the position he adopted once he became persuaded that naturalistic views "leave no room for an adequate theory of knowledge." That is, he became an Absolute Idealist. According to Absolute idealism, God is not distinct from the universe, and so by Johnson's definition, it qualifies as a form of naturalism. </p><p>In any event, in the name of naturalism many people hold a position that says that the base level is mechanistic (in the sense described), the base level is causally closed, and whatever else there is supervenes on the base level. Most of them call the base level physics, which makes them physicalists. If these positions are refuted by the argument from reason, then it is hard to call the argument from reason a failure, even if it leaves space for people to depart from that position without embracing theism. After all, that is just what C. S. Lewis did when he was first convinced that naturalism as he understood it did not hold up. As he said "I didn't want there to be a God, I didn't want the universe to be like that." Oh wait, with a tense change, that's Thomas Nagel. I apologize for the confusion. </p><p><br /></p>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-52575062989296893852021-05-07T17:41:00.001-07:002021-05-07T17:41:56.350-07:00I have decided to renew this blog<p> I have been spending quite some time thinking and working through the argument from reason once again. Maybe there will be a sequel to my C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. In the last 10 years, I have been in an exchange with David Kyle Johnson which began in Gregory Bassham ed. (Rodopi-Brill, 2015), and followed that up with an essay called "Extending the Debate on the Argument from Reason," which came out in Philosophia Christi vol 20 issue 2. I have been doing some things on the related matter of the Anscombe Legend, and I am working on a response to Peter van Inwagen's critique of the AFR, and recently did an interview on the argument with Parker Settecase, found<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hprHhNNwRX4&t=3196s" target="_blank"> here.</a> </p>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-89676418217306055772011-04-26T19:42:00.000-07:002011-04-26T19:43:20.766-07:00Here is a discussion of a Menuge essay on DennettThe Menuge essay itself is <a href="ttp://www.iscid.org/papers/Menuge_DennettDenied_103103.pdf">here</a>.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-35732458665123378112011-04-20T22:35:00.000-07:002011-04-20T22:35:17.972-07:00Reply to Parsons on Mental Causation<h3 class="post-title"> <a href="http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2011/04/problem-with-metaphysical-naturalism.html#links" title="external link"> Parsons on Mental Causation </a> </h3><div class="post-body"> <div> <a href="http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2011/04/problem-with-metaphysical-naturalism.html#links">The Secular Outpost: The Problem with Metaphysical Naturalism (According to Victor Reppert)</a><br />
<br />
First, I do share Parsons' concern about getting definitions right. When I deal with a naturalistic view, I offer an account of what that is supposed to have in it, which includes the mechanistic character of the base level, the causal closure of the base level, and the superveniece of everything else on the base level. By mechanism I mean that we are excluding from that base level four properties: intentionality, purpose, first-person subjectivity, and normativity. Now someone might come along and say that they have a view that doesn't fit these characteristics but is still naturalistic in some sense, in which case we'd have to look at their theory to see in what sense they're calling it naturalistic and whether I think a version of the AFR can be advanced against it. Here, I am going to assume that Parsons agrees with this account, and move forward. <br />
<br />
Looking at this post, it seems to me that there are a couple of issues that we have to be careful about conflating. One of them is the claim that some version of nonreductive materialism can meet the argument from reason. In the combox, you get some discussion of that, and some responses to some exchanges with Clayton Littlejohn. However, the impression that I have had in discussion with Clayton is that he believes that mental events qua mental events do cause other mental states and physical states. Troubles with mental causation have been the focus of some of Jaegwon Kim's criticisms of nonreductive materialism, in particular the nonreductivism of Donald Davidson. Kim writes:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Davidson's anomalous monism fails to do full justice to psychophysical causation in which the mental qua mental has any real causal role to play. Consider Davidson's account: whether or not a given event has a mental description (optional reading: whether or not it has a mental characteristic) seems entirely irrelevant to what causal relations it enters into. Its causal powers are wholly determined by the physical description or characteristic that holds for it; for it is under its physical description that it may be subsumed under a causal law.</span><br />
<br />
Jaegwon Kim, "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation" ch. 6 of <i>Supervenience and Mind</i>, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 106.<br />
<br />
Now, of course, there can be a debate as to whether a case cam be made for mental causation in a non-reductive materialist framework. I think it can't. It's not that I don't think higher-level properties can be causally relevant. They can be if the are configurational combinations of physical states. If a bowling ball knocks all the pins down, this is perfectly possible even though basic physics makes no reference to bowling balls and pins. However, I take it if you add up the physical states and know what words mean, you can't avoid the conclusion that the bowling ball knocked down the pins. What I don't see is how you can add up non-normative states and get normative states, how you can add up non-intentional states and get intentional states, how you can add up non-first-person states and get first-person states, or how you can add up non-purposive states and get purposive states.<br />
<br />
Science always prefers the most tractable accounts it can get. Scientists are happy when they can analyze the movement of a bullet through space, and determine what kind of impact it would have to make given the speed at which it was traveling. But there is another type of explanation that we might be interested in with respect to the bullet. It was fired by someone who had some intention with respect to what he wanted the bullet to do. Perhaps, he fired the bullet to kill his mother-in-law, whom he believes to be the worst person he knows. That is an agent-explanation, and as such is less tractable to science than a ballistic explanation. However, it isn't a total mystery; we can understand the person's motivations, and perhaps not find the action totally unexpected. After all, we are talking about the motivations of a fellow human. Now, as action might be the action of a superior being of some kind, and there it is even less tractable. Still, I would not want to call it a pseudo-explanation, because we can have some understanding of a superior mind, even the mind of God.<br />
<br />
But it is a natural impulse in science to want to analyze the world in as tractable terms as possible, and hence we can understand why materialism is appealing from the point of view of science. However, at the same time, science described the activity of scientists in mentalistic terms. Scientists gather evidence, they form hypotheses, they perform logical and mathematical inferences, etc. It would indeed undermine the scientific enterprise if these mentalistic explanations of the behavior of scientists were simply untrue. Few people would be materialists if it weren't appealing from a scientific standpoint, but if mentalistic explanations are all false, then there are no scientists, and therefore no science. So, some kind of explanatory compatibility thesis must be defended by materialists. Scientists are, in the last analysis physical beings whose actions can be fully explained at the physical level as part of a closed mechanistic system, and their rationality, such as it is, must be some supervening property that emerges through evolution in a materialist world.<br />
<br />
Parsons' strategy for establishing explanatory compatibility is essentially the same as the one Elizabeth Anscombe, (not a naturalist herself, but surely the most famous critic of C. S. Lewis's AFR). The mentalistic explanations we need in order for science to be science are compatible with materialism because those explanations aren't causal explanations, while those offered by physics are causal explanations.<br />
<br />
Now Parsons, like Anscombe, points out that there are compatible explanations. Of course there are. For example, if we ask why the soda-can is sitting on the bookshelf, I might say "Because I put it there yesterday, since I am planning on recycling it," or "because it has a cylindrical shape, and is sitting on its base." But there are, certainly, incompatible explanations. Otherwise, there would be no hope that scientific explanations could ever supplant religious explanations.<br />
<br />
Parsons tries to establish the explanatory compatibility as follows, using as an example Sam's acceptance of Krugman's arguments that the Ryan budget is a recipe for disaster. <br />
<br />
<i><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span">When we say that Sam was convinced by Krugman’s arguments it seems to me perverse to attribute some very (I think in-principally) mysterious kind of causal power to the sense or propositional content of Krugman’s arguments. Attributing causal powers to Fregean Sinn (meaning), if this is what Victor wants to assert, just seems to me a straightforward category mistake. It is like saying that the set of all integers broke the deadlock between NFL players and owners. No, to say that Sam was convinced by Krugman’s arguments means that Sam considered Krugman’s claims, examined the supporting reasons, weighed them in the light of prior knowledge and norms of good reasoning, and judged that these were persuasive. However, considering Krugman’s claims, examining the supporting arguments, evaluating them, and judging them to be persuasive are things that Sam does with his brain, and happenings in Sam’s brain, being physical events, can cause things. </span></span></i><br />
<br />
Well, if Sam's considering and accepting Krugman's arguments is a brain process, it looks like we are going to end up attributing properties to Sam's brain that are going to violate the causal closure of the physical. If Sam finds Krugman's arguments persuasive, one of the things he has to be persuaded by is the logical connection between the Krugman's premises and his conclusions. To be aware of something is to be causally influenced by it. So, yes, my awareness of a stop sign causes me to stop, not the stop sign itself. If I don't see the sign, I'll barrel right through. But, the stop sign has to cause my awareness of the stop sign. And if the physical is causally closed, then everything that I am aware of has to be also physical, and by physical I take it we mean that it has a particular location in space and time. A logical relationship has no particular location in space and time, and so if I am aware of a logical relationship, and that logical relationship affects my brain, then the causal closure of the physical has been violated, because something that has no particular location in space and time is bringing it about that I think certain things.<br />
<br />
If I am aware that the cat is on the mat, then there is a causal connection between the cat and my brain, which occurs within space and time. If I am aware of the fact that, if a=b, and b=c and a=c, then in order for this awareness to be fitted within the framework of a causally closed physical order, that truth has to have a particular location in space and time. But it has not particular location in space and time, so, if the physical is closed, I can't be aware of it.<br />
<br />
Explanations have ontological commitments. If I explain the existence of presents under the Christmas tree by saying that Santa put them there, then I commit myself to the existence of Santa. If I say I believe something because I perceive a logical relationship, that means that there are logical relationships. But where is this logical relationship for me to be aware of?<br />
<br />
I don't see that you really resolve the problem naturalism has with rational inference by denying the causal character of these explanations.<div class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a href="http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/search/label/argument%20from%20mental%20causation" rel="tag">argument from mental causation</a>, <a href="http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/search/label/argument%20from%20reason" rel="tag">argument from reason</a>, <a href="http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/search/label/Keith%20Parsons" rel="tag">Keith Parsons</a>, <a href="http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/search/label/the%20argument%20from%20reason" rel="tag">the argument from reason</a></div></div></div>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-67485012909966044962011-04-15T18:04:00.001-07:002011-04-15T18:05:54.189-07:00From a Faith and Philosophy review of Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons ed. Kevin CorcoranJaegwon Kim’s essay “Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism” comes from a philosopher who operates out of the physicalist tradition. Unlike some in that tradition, however, he has been very serious about pressing difficulties for otherwise popular forms of physicalism in the area of mental causation. In this paper he presents some problems for dualism in the area of mental causation. He reconsiders the familiar objection to Descartes’ dualism that dualism is untenable because we cannot see how something nonphysical can interact with something physical. As Kim points out, this is often presented with no or almost no supporting argumentation. However, Kim does supply some argumentation to put some meat on the bones of the familiar objection, by generating what he calls the pairing problem. <br />
Kim maintains that a spatial framework is necessary for the existence of a causal relationship amongst objects. If two rifles are fired and two people are killed, what criteria would lead us to correctly pair the causes and effects? The answer, says Kim, is the spatial relationships between deadly bullets and the victims. Kim also points out that lack of a spatial relation between a suspect and the victim is often sufficient to ground an alibi in a murder case. But since souls are not spatial, spatial pairing relationships between souls and matter cannot exist. Kim considers the possibility that souls have spatial locations, but he finds some difficulties with that idea as well, but he thinks this is problematic as well. We need to locate souls at a particular point in space, and claims that it would beg the question to locate the souls in the brain. Second, he argues that to locate souls in space would require that not more than one soul could occupy a location in space, that is, something like the impenetrability of matter would have to obtain. But he asks, if this is so, “why aren’t such souls just material objects, albeit of a very special, and strange kind?” And he thinks the soul found in a geometrical point could not have a structure capable of accounting for the rich mental life that humans have. Finally, he is suspicious of any solutions to the problem dictated by “dualist commitments.” He says “We shouldn’t do philosophy by first deciding what conclusions we want to prove, and then posit convenient entities and premises to get us where we want to go.” <br />
First of all, it needs to be made clear just what it is for something to be a material thing. The book makes it evident that the concept of “materiality” and “matter” need to be made clearer than they are. This is especially imperative for Christians who want to go as far as possible in accommodating their faith to “materialism.” Orthodox materialism is a corollary of philosophical naturalism, and is typically committed to at least this: that the physical order is causally closed, and that whatever other states exist supervene on the physical; that is, there cannot be a difference without a physical difference. But what is more, physicalism is committed to the idea that the physical order is mechanistic, that is, purposive explanations cannot be basic-level explanations at the physical level. If the material is defined in this way, then it seems to me that something could have a spatial location, and it could also possess impenetrability, and still not be material in the orthodox sense. It could still be the case that the mental is sui generis and fundamental, and one of Foster’s dualist theses would still be true.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-55333571232822157632011-04-15T18:03:00.000-07:002011-04-15T18:03:32.276-07:00Gilbert Meilaender reviews Nagel's The Last WordI believe that Thomas Nagel's The Last Word is really a defense of the Argument from Reason that stops short of offering theism as the conclusion. Nevertheless it does attack naturalism as we know it. The is Lewis scholar Meilaender's review of Nagel's book.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-80986861791766792482010-05-04T13:14:00.000-07:002010-05-04T13:14:21.920-07:00Bees, used car salesmen, and misrepresentationSomething I did on DI2 on causal theories of reference. <br />
<br />
Now if we are working on the level of simple representation, the perhaps some solution to the problem of misrepresentation can be generated. Let us consider, for example the case of bee dances. Bees perform dances which “represent” the positions of flowers in a garden. The bees, based on this information, go out to the garden only to find no flowers, because in the intervening time between the bees’ discovery of the flowers and the time when the bees performed the dance, a child had picked all the flowers and taken them indoors. We might be able to cash out this fact of misrepresentation in causal terms: there is a normal casual relationship between the bees’ dance and the location of pollinated flowers, so the bees represented flowers in that location, but the representation was incorrect, because the flowers had been picked in the meantime.<br />
<br />
<br />
But other kinds of misrepresentation seem more difficult to deal with at the level of simple representation. Let’s consider the kind of misrepresentation that goes on in, say, a used car dealership. Can we really imagine a bee from a competing hive going “sneaking in,” giving a dance which would send the swarm of bees to a place where there are no pollinated flowers, in order to secure the real flowers for its own hive? This kind of misrepresentation seems to require that the fifth-columnist bee, like the used car dealer, know that the dance was misleading, in other words, understand what it is that their own dance and know that it was a misrepresentation. This seems to be beyond the capabilities of bees, and requires a radically different set of abilities. Can we account for the difference between being sincerely mistaken an lying in terms of causal relationships? I rather doubt it.<br />
<br />
There have, certainly, been causal theories of reference which have been advanced. But these do not suggest that causal relationships alone are sufficient to fix reference. Consider the following standard description of causal theories of reference.<br />
<br />
This is the wikipedia account of the causal theory of reference<br />
<br />
A name's referent is fixed by an original act of naming (also called a "dubbing" or, by Saul Kripke, an "initial baptism"), whereupon the name becomes a rigid designator of that object. later uses of the name succeed in referring to the referent by being linked to that original act via a causal chain.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In other words, what causation explains, according to this theory, is how references is transmitted once an initial act of naming, an intentional (both in the sense of being intended and in the sense of possessing “aboutness”) is performed. How such actions could be performed in the first place is accounted for in causal terms. It is true, that some have attempted to provide more radical accounts of reference which attempt to stay within the constraints imposed by physicalism; Devitt’s theories are a good example of this. However, I think this attempt has been shown to be a failure in Martin Rice’s essay “Why Devitt Can’t Name His Cat.”Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-17280209353796746292010-04-24T11:31:00.000-07:002010-04-24T11:31:19.376-07:00Reply to some questions from J on the AFR<em>Why can't matter...think, or possess intentionality of some type, to varying degrees ? (widely varying). </em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The problem is that something can count as material only if, at the basic level, there is no intentionality, no purpose, no normativity, and no subjectivity. If you want to tamper with that definition of matter, be my guest, but that seems to be built into the very idea. Remember Dennett's "no skyhooks" rule? Yet, somehow the truths about thinking have to follow necessarily from truths about what by definition MUST be nonmental. Such entailments, in my view, are bound to break down logically. We can hide the breakdown in pages and pages of neuroscientific analysis, but at the end of the day there is no entailment, no metaphysical glue that binds the mental and the physical together. Whatever glue we come up with, if we analyze it closely enough, has to come from a mind of some sort, and materialism fails.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>In comparison to say, ants, rats seem nearly conscious. </em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Which of the four relevant properties do they have, or do they lack them all? <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>Does a rose bush think? It does know when to bloom... At least a rose follows a routine (even if genetically determined).</em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Does the thermostat in my house know how hot or cold it is? <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>either way the mere fact of intentional processes--or consciousness-- does not suffice as proof of monotheism...</em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Monotheism is one of a few options left over once naturalism is eliminated. As Lewis recognized, it is not the only one.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-73728816067636182492010-04-23T18:10:00.000-07:002010-04-23T18:10:15.893-07:00On The Necessity of Mental CausationThis is from my reply to Keith Parsons in essay "Some Supernatural Reasons Why My Critics are Wrong" (a title that was given to my essay by someone else), in Philosophia Christi (Volume 5, no. 1, 2003). <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>But think for a moment about what it is to be persuaded by an argument. If we are thinking in common-sense terms, we would hve to say that what goes one when we are persuaded by Parsons's argument that Arizona State will not be in the BCS this year is that we conisder the epistemic strength of the premises, the grounding relation between the premises and the conclusion, and then accept the conclusion as a result of conisdering the evidence presented in the argument. To be convinced by an argument is for the reasons presented in the to play a causal role in the production of the belief. If the argument is causally irrelevant to the belief, then we cannot say that the argument was persuasive. This can often be cashed out counterfactually: If I really am persuaded by Parsons's arugment, then it cannot be the case that I am such a partisan of the Arizona Wildcats that I would think the worst of the Sun Devils' prospects even if the Sun Devils had a Heisman trophy candidate at quarterback, oustanding and experienced running backs and wide receivers, a rock-solid offensive line, and was returning everyone from what had been the stingiest defense in the Pac-10 the previous year. </em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
On the one hand, the reasons have to persuade me in virtue of their being reasons. The logical force of the argument has to have a causal impact on belief. It has to make a difference as to whether I form the belief or fail to form the belief in question. And that, by the way, is bound to make a difference as to what I do with my body. I am going to behave differently if I think the Devils have a good chance to take the Pac-10 title than if I don't. And that is going to affect what the particles in the physical world do. But if the physical is causally closed, that means that only the physical can affect where the particles in the physical world go, and, the physical is defined as lacking, at the basic level of analysis, the central features of the mental. So the only way this kind of causal relation could possibly exist, would be if we could analyze the mental in physical terms as a kind of macro-state of the physical. Just as the word "planet" is absent from physical vocabulary, but a whole bunch of particle-states add up to there being a planet, perhaps "S's belief that P" can be added up from a set of physical states. But that seems to me to be just impossible. Add up the physical all you like, and you aren't going to get "S's belief that P." The physical leaves the mental indeterminate. Yet, if science is to be possible, is has to be determinate whether, for example, Einstein is plussing or quussing when he is adding numbers in the course of developing his theory. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
So, I argue that you need mental causation for the possibility of science, but you can't get that without affirming what seems to be an implausible reductionism, that conflicts with the indeterminacy of the physical.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-92044309304095040812010-04-19T17:41:00.000-07:002010-04-19T17:41:12.832-07:00J. P. Moreland on Supervenient physicalism<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><span lang="EN"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><span lang="EN">Perhaps the supervenience theorist can simply accept the supervenience relation as an unexplained brute fact. However, as J. P. Moreland argues, this is also deeply problematic for the supervenience theorist: First, he highlights the claim made by supervenience theorist Terence Horgan that in a broadly materialist the truths of supervenience must be explainable rather than <i>sui generis</i>. As Horgan points out, if there are going to be any brute unexplainable givens in a materialist universe it must be the the physical facts themselves, not some fact concerning inter-level supervenience.<sup>70</sup> Second, the truth of supervenience does not look like something science could possibly have discovered, and so to accept supervenience as a brute fact would be to accept the idea that there are truths about the world that can be figured out by philosophical, rather than scietnfic means, and this is anathema to most contemporary naturalists.<sup>71 </sup>Also, this position begs the question against people like Swinburne and Robert Adams, who maintain that the supervenience of the mind stands in need of a theistic explanation.<sup>72</sup></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><span lang="EN">Second, debate about just what kind of supervenience holds between physical and mental states is not a scientific question, and cannot be settle by scientific theorizing. Further, supervenience theory involves terms and concepts that are not the terms and concepts of natural science. As Moreland puts it: </span></div><br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span lang="EN">Naturalists criticize Cartesian dualism and its problem of interaction between radically different sorts of entities. In my view, the dualist has the resources to answer this problem because of her commitment to entities, relatiosn, and causation that go beyond those in the physical sciences. But the same cannot be said for naturalism, and what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Naturalists have the very same kind of problem that they claim as a difficulty for the Cartesian. And given the philosophical constraints that follow from accepting the naturalist epistemology, etiology, and ontolgy, it is more difficult to see how a naturalist could accept menta;/physical supervenience than it is to understand how a Cartesian without those constraints could accept mental/physical interaction.<sup>73</sup></span></div>VR: This is based on J. P. Moreland's essay "Should a Naturalist be a Supervenient Physicalist?"Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-1167540000104949362010-03-29T16:22:00.000-07:002010-03-29T16:22:59.897-07:00Searle on intentionalityA redated post. <br />
<br />
Wednesday, July 19, 2006<br />
<a href="" name="115336400424517795"></a><br />
From John Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind on physicalist reductions of intentionality<br />
So far no attempt at naturalizing content has produced an explanation (analysis, reduction) of intentional content that is even remotely plausible. ...A symptom that something is radically wrong with the project is that intentional notions are inherently normative. They set standards of truth, rationality, consistency, etc., and there is no way that these standards can be intrinsic to a system consisting entirely of brute, blind, nonintentional causal relations. There is no mean component to billiard ball causation. Darwinian biological attempts at naturalizing content try to avoid this problem by appealing to what they suppose is the inherently teleological [i.e., purposeful], normative character of biological evolution. But this is a very deep mistake. There is nothing normative or teleological about Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Darwin's major contribution was precisely to remove purpose, and teleology from evolution, and substitute for it purely natural forms of selection.5454 Searle, John, Rediscovery,. 50-51.<br />
posted by Victor Reppert @ <a href="http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/07/from-john-searles-rediscovery-of-mind.html" title="permanent link">7:50 PM</a> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=10584495&postID=115336400424517795" title="Email Post"> </a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=10584495&postID=115336400424517795&quickEdit=true" style="border-style: none;" title="Edit Post"> </a><br />
<a href="" name="comments"></a><br />
1 Comments:<br />
<a href="" name="c115346250869325571"></a><br />
At <a href="http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/07/from-john-searles-rediscovery-of-mind.html#c115346250869325571" title="comment permalink">11:15 PM</a>, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/7246451" rel="nofollow">Blue Devil Knight</a> said…<br />
Searle is led, by his logic, to the claim that statements in biology like "The function of the heart is to pump blood" are not objectively true. I don't think he has quite grasped that natural selection's teleology is not the teleology of the theist (where something is consciously guiding evolution). The teleology in evolution is blind, but pushes phenotypes to hills in fitness landscapes. That is, evolution solves optimization problems.Searle has some nutty claims. For instance, he believes in a causal but not ontological (whatever that is) reduction of consciousness to neuroscience. But, he adds, he thinks consciousness is just another biological property like bile production. But no other biological property is immune from 'ontological' reduction to the cellular level.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=10584495&postID=115346250869325571" style="border-style: none;" title="Delete Comment"> </a>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-1169142230902355942010-01-19T15:57:00.000-08:002010-01-19T17:17:03.780-08:00Possibility and Necessity in arguments from reasonA redated post. <br />
<br />
Steve Esser, who has in general been skeptical of the argument from reason, think that our ability to think in terms of necessity and possibility is something that is difficult to explain naturalistically. The idea might go like this: if our reasoning is based on an interaction with the environment, presumably the environment is actually in one state. How is it possible for us to think in terms of possibilities, if all we interact with is the actual world?Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-84755553978735019412009-10-13T10:35:00.000-07:002009-10-13T10:36:11.988-07:00A simple statement of the argument from reason<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">You take all the physical descriptions and put them in the left-hand side of the equation. On that side, there can be no intentionality, normativity, subjectivity, or teleology. Add them together, and it looks as if they can't entail anything on the right hand side, the "mental" side of the equation, where we do find intentionality, normativity, subjectivity, and teleology. There is always room for indeterminacy, or, for that matter, room for zombies. The physical works just fine, but there's just no there there. </span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Yet the naturalist cannot deny that there is determinate reference. The arguments of the philosophers, the observational reports of the sciences, and the equations of the mathematicians must have determinate meanings. Otherwise, science is impossible, and the case for naturalism collapses. </span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Therefore, if naturalism is true, the very things that are supposed to support it, such as argument and reason, aren't real. Only in a universe where the marks of the mental are metaphysically fundamental are these things possible. </span>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-55048313808434818172009-10-10T18:23:00.000-07:002009-10-10T18:24:32.401-07:00Hasker on Ham-fisted empiricismA redated post. <br />
<br />
Ham-Fisted empricism: Hasker on externalism and the AFR<br />
It is of course true that a belief, in order to be justified, needs to have been formed and sustained by a reliable epistemic practice. But in the case of rational inference, what is the practice supposed to be. The reader is referred, once gain, to the description of a reasoning process given a paragraph back. Is this not, in fact, a reasonably accurate description of the way we actually view and experience the practice of rational inference and assessment/ It is furthermore, a description which enables us to understand why in many cases a practice is reliable—and why the reliability varies considerably depending on the specific character of the inference drawn and also on the logical capabilities of the epistemic subject. And on the other hand, isn’t it a severe distortion of our actual inferential practice to view the process of reasoning as taking place in a “black box,” as the externalist view in effect invites us to do? Epistemological externalism has its greatest plausibility in cases where the warrant for our beliefs depends crucially on matters not accessible to reflection—for instance, on the proper functioning of our sensory faculties. Rational inference, by contrast, is the paradigmatic example of a situation in which the factors relevant to warrant are accessible to reflection; for this reason, examples based on rational insight have always formed the prime examples for internalist epistemologies. There is also this question for the thoroughgoing externalist: How are we to satisfy ourselves as to which inferential practices are reliable? By hypothesis, we are precluded from appealing to rational insight to validate our conclusions about this. One might say that we have learned to distinguish good reasoning from bad reasoning, by noticing that good inference-patterns generally give rise to true conclusions, while bad inference-patterns often give rise to falsehood. (This of course assumes that our judgments about particular facts, especially facts revealed through sense perception, are not in question here—an assumption I will grant for the present). But this sort of “logical empiricism” is at best a very crude method for assessing the goodness of arguments. There are plenty of invalid arguments with true conclusions, and plenty of valid arguments with false conclusions. There are even good inductive arguments with all true premises in which the conclusions are false. There are just the distinctions which the science of logic exists to help us with; basing the science on the kind of ham-fisted empiricism described above is a hopeless enterprise. William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Cornell, 1999), pp. 74-75. From the chapter "Why the Physical Isn't Closed."Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-16370201796082445442009-06-26T19:45:00.000-07:002009-06-26T19:48:45.094-07:00C. S. Lewis and the Empty UniverseA redated post.<br /><br />This is a passage from C. S. Lewis's The Empty Universe, which was a introduction Lewis wrote to a book entitled A New Diagram of Heaven and Earth by a man named Harding. It parallels some of the comments I have been putting up on DI2 about the "siphoning off" argument is Swinburne and Feser.<br /><br /><em>The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance gradually empties this rich and genial universe, first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account:classified as out sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls” or ‘selves” or “minds’ to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods, that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the Dryad is a “ghost,” an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing. And just as we have been broken of our bad habit of personifying trees, so we must now be broken of our habit of personifying men; a reform already effected in the political field. There never was a Subjective account into which we could transfer the items which the Subject had lost. There is no “consciousness” to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colours, and concepts. Consciousness is “not the sort of noun that can be used that way.”</em>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-2219539342567650702009-06-21T18:38:00.000-07:002009-06-21T18:39:22.265-07:00A review of Devitt and SterelnyKelley Ross argues that the phenomenon of language has anti-physicalist implications, which the authors treat dismissively.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-1168903544640969292009-06-16T19:30:00.000-07:002009-06-17T19:30:51.254-07:00Balfour and the Evolutionary Argument Against NaturalismA redated post.<br /><br /><br />This post is a repost of one I did a few months back on the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. Follow the link back and you can read the 38-comment debate it sparked.<br /><br />Balfour and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism<br />The Argument from Reason did not originate with Lewis. Something like it can be traced all the way back to Plato, and Augustine had an argument that said that our knowledge of eternal and necessary truths. Descartes maintained that the higher rational processes of human beings could not be accounted for in materialistic terms, and while Kant denied that these considerations did not provide adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, he did think they were sufficient to rule out any materialist account of the mind. However, naturalism or materialism as a force in Western thought did not become really viable until the 1859, when Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species. The earliest post-Darwinian presentation of the Argument from Reason that I am familiar with, and one that bears a lot of similarities to Lewis’s argument, is found in Prime Minister Arthur Balfour’s The Foundations of Belief. Lewis never mentions The Foundations of Belief in his writings, but he does say in one place that Balfour’s subsequent book Theism and Humanism is “a book too little read.” According to Balfour the following claims follow from the “naturalistic creed.”1) My beliefs, in so far as they are the result of reasoning at all, are founded on premises produced in the last resort by the ‘collision of atoms.”2) Atoms, having no prejudices in favour of the truth, are as likely to turn out wrong premises as right ones; nay, more likely, inasmuch as truth is single and error manifold. 3) My premises, therefore, in the first place, and my conclusions in the second, are certainly untrustworthy, and probably false. Their falsity, moreover, is a kind which cannot be remedied; since any attempt to correct it must start from premises not suffering under the same defect. But no such premises exist. 4) Therefore, my opinion about the original causes which produced my premises, as it is an inference from them, partakes of their weakness; so that I cannot either securely doubt my own certainties or be certain about my own doubts. Balfour then considers a “Darwinian rebuttal, which claims that natural selection acting as a “kind of cosmic Inquisition, will repress any lapses from the standard of naturalistic orthodoxy. The point was made years later by Antony Flew as follows: [A]ll other things being equal and in the long run and with many dramatic exceptions, true beliefs about our environment tend to have some survival value. So it looks as if evolutionary biology and human history could provide some reasons for saying that it need no be a mere coincidence if a significant proportion of men’s beliefs about their environment are in face true. Simply because if that were not so they could not have survived long in that environment. As an analysis of the meaning of ‘truth’ the pragmatist idea that a true belief is one which is somehow advantageous to have will not do at all. Yet there is at least some contingent and non-coincidental connection between true beliefs, on the one hand, and the advantage, if it be an advantage, of survival, on the other.However, Balfour offers this reply to the evolutionary argument: But what an utterly inadequate basis for speculation we have here! We are to suppose that powers which were evolved in primitive man and his animal progenitors in order that they might kill with success and marry in security, are on that account fitted to explore the secrets of the universe. We are to suppose, that the fundamental beliefs on which these powers of reasoning are to be exercised reflect with sufficient precision remote aspects of reality, though they were produced in the main by physiological processes which date from a stage of development when the only curiosities which had to be satisfied were those of fear and those of hunger. Interestingly, Balfour’s argument here finds surprising support from Darwin himself. In a letter to William Graham Down, Darwin wrote: the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? As can be seen Balfour’s presentation of the argument, and his consideration of counter-arguments, anticipated much of the debate on this issue that is still going on a century after his book was written.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-22372710171991486832009-06-08T13:01:00.000-07:002009-06-08T13:04:22.181-07:00A brief critique of Plantinga's EAAN from Clayton LittlejohnI found this in the combox of a very old post of mine, from 2005. I would like to see some discussion of it, pro and con. I am linking back to the initial post.<br /><br /><em>CL: In some discussions (I believe Plantinga's, but I don't have a text at hand), it is said that the probability that we would have reliable faculties given evolutionary theory and naturalism is either low or inscrutible. The argument for this is that selection pressures don't favor such faculties.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em> I think this overlooks something important--selection pressures operate on populations where organisms have various traits already. So while selection pressures might not favor certain things across the board (except perhaps things that confer survival value), selection pressure might favor reliability for certain creatures with certain features under specified conditions. We might argue that the probability of organism having reliable faculties (R) is low given evolution (E) and naturalism (N) but as we fill in further details of that organism, their continued survival may in fact show the conditional probability of R and this extra information on E and N is quite high. </em><br /><em></em><br /><em>So while we might be able to conceive of creatures who can survive without reliable ways of informing themselves about their surroundings, that is very very different from imagining how we might fluorish given our equipment, needs, and surroundings without reliable faculties.</em>Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-90426931850747510962009-06-03T17:13:00.000-07:002009-06-03T17:16:16.793-07:00An early statement of Lewis's in response to Russellian Naturalism<em>In his [Bertrand Russell’s] “Worship of a Free Man” I found a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty -- that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole. The Promethean attitude would be tenable only if we were really members of some other whole outside the real whole: wh[ich] we’re not. (Saturday, 5 January, 1924; before he was a Christian)</em><br /><br />The idea is that if you say the universe is bad, and the universe produced you and the very thought that the universe is bad, isn't your thought tainted at the source?<br /><br />The link is to Jim Slagle's blog.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-92227129616599782782009-06-03T17:10:00.000-07:002009-06-03T17:11:46.998-07:00Arthur Balfour's Dangerous IdeaBalfour is one of the early forefathers of the argument from reason, and we know that Lewis read and recommended Balfour. It was my dissertation advisor, Hugh Chandler, who discovered the connection between Balfour and the AFR, and later game me a copy of The Foundations of Belief he found in England. This post, by Jim Slagle, who wrote his master's thesis on the AFR, links to an online edition of Balfour's first philosophical book, A Defense of Philosophic Doubt, published in 1879, and my be the first post-Darwin version of the AFR to come out.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-9276271694021201512009-06-01T15:48:00.000-07:002009-06-03T17:17:24.379-07:00A Stanford Entry on ContradictionHorn seems opposed to dialethism.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-20029285463645202742009-04-06T23:18:00.000-07:002009-04-05T23:18:23.717-07:00Is scientific thought truncated?From Chapter 6, Answers to Misgivings, in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">C. S. Lewis's Miracles: A Preliminary Study</span>, pp. 41-42.<br /><br />C. S. Lewis: <span style="COLOR: rgb(153,51,153)">All these instances show that the fact which is in one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, maybe precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is some remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten. The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s thinking cannot be a merely natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness. But this absent-mindedness is in no way surprising. You do not need—indeed you do not wish—to be always thinking about windows when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes when you are reading. In the same way the proper procedure for all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your own thinking, and concentrate on the object. It is only when you stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete philosophy that you must take it into account. For a complete philosophy must get in all the facts. In it you turn away from specialised or truncated thought to total thought: and one of the fact total thought must think about is Thinking itself. There is a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious fact of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of men have been increasingly turned outward to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialized inquiries in which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the “scientific” habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. But no other source was at hand, for during the same period men of science were becoming metaphysically and theologically uneducated.</span><br /><br />VR: This is an old post on the claim that scientific thought is truncated. I want to focus on that claim, rather than on the claim that if we think about our thinking, it is obvious that the AFR is correct. I am linking back to the original DI discussion.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38436816.post-441970174972611522009-03-13T21:01:00.000-07:002009-03-13T21:03:05.089-07:00A Bayesian AFRIt seems to me that a version of the argument from reason confirms Bayesian-confirms theism even if a naturalistic explanation of the mind is perfectly possible.<br />P(FE)=<br />P(EF)P(F) over<br />P(EF)P(F) + P(EF')P(F')<br />E= Creaturely minds exist.<br />F= The fundamental causes of the universe are mental in nature.<br />F'= The fundamental causes of the universe are not mental in nature.<br />Since we are trying to determine whether the argument confirms theism, we have to assume a subject that is on the fence between F and F'. In other words we have to assume that that F = .5.<br /><br />Now, how likely is it that minds should exist on the assumption that the basic causes are mental. Pretty likely, it seems to me. If theism is true, then from what we know of ourselves as rational creatures, we should expect that a rational being in charge of everything would create rational beings with whom He or She could communicate. But what if God does not exist, and the basic causes were non-mental. How there can be minds is at best difficult and at most impossible to explain. A lot of things had to happen just right in the development of the human brain in order for reason to be possible, if it is even possible at all. It looks, therefore, like the existence of creaturely minds confirms theism even if we cannot show that, for example, dualism is true. The existence of creaturely reason, therefore, confirms the mental character of the universe.Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.com5