What Is "Science?" (And thanks to Dr. Harold I. Brown)

(Dr. Harold I. Brown)

I am now reading through the best philosophy of science reader I've yet to find: Philosophy of Science - The Central Issues, by Martin Curd & J.A. Cover of Purdue University. Though 10 years old, is there a better text than this? What would make this even better would be to add seminal essays written in the past 10 years.

Here we have it all - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend and many, many more. I was introduced to the philosophy of science as an undergraduate, studying with Harold I. Brown. The three texts Dr. Brown had us read were Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (of course!), and Imre Lakatos's Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. This was heady stuff for a young undergraduate like myself. But a lot of it stuck with me, thanks to Brown's excellent and passionate teaching. (Note: Of Brown's Perception, Theory, and Commitment Kuhn said “The best and most original aspect of the book is its overall conception.”)

Curd and Cover give us the big, important essays. Then they provide extremely valuable, in-depth commentary on the readings. What distinguishes science from pseudoscience? Is scientific change a rational process? In what sense is science objective? What are natural laws, and what do they describe? Are scientific theories to be understood as offering a true account of the world? These questions and a lot more are addressed. I find myself wanting to learn more and more, and wish everyone who uses the word "science" would have these readings under their belt.

It's 1300+ pages long. For me, it's like reacquainting with an old friend who still has much to say to me today.

The Fear-Virus & Swine Flu

Fear is a lie. Most fear, that is. By far, most of the fears I've experienced in my life have never materialized. I've laid awake at night listening to it storm, fearful that a tornado would strike. It never has. I knew a few people who were afraid to check their mailboxes because they might have envelopes containing anthrax. Those envelopes never came. Y2K inserted the fear of global, chaotic breakdown into the hearts of many people. Their fear was real, while Y2K was a non-event.

Fear is the emotion we feel when facing an uncontrollable harmful event. That event can be either known or unknown. When confronted with the known, fear is reality-based. That is, one not only fears, but the fear corresponds to an actual threat that is either impending or now actualized. Most fears are fears of the unknown. Fears about, not the actual, but the possible. These events mostly never happen. The fear is real but irrational.

Today's fear is about getting swine flu. It's about one's own possible demise, as well as the demise of family and friends. Possible scenarios are of an "outbreak," an "epidemic," and a "pandemic." Now insert "global" before each of these terms. Add "unseeable," since we're talking about a virus. Mix in some "unstoppable" and legitimate concern morphs into panic.

Some people are just flat-out more fearful than others. Their hearts and minds are fertile soil for anxiety and worry, and they pass these things on to others. For some, maybe many, maybe most, the swine flu will come and go. But the fearful heart that so debilitates remains unless it is cured. Which is worse, getting the swine flu and most likely surviving, or living constantly with irrational fears that never materialize? While I pray we won't have a flu pandemic, every week I see a "fear pandemic" in the souls of people, and on occasion I've caught this virus myself. Fear breeds more fear like a virus. I think that, if we could cure the globally fearful hearts of people, we'd deal with the physical virus better. Panic shuts people down, distracting and hindering them from being proactively precautionary.

The cure for fear is trust. People who trust don't fear. Fear and trust are like oil and water: unmixable. Trust is a relationship. One trusts in someone or in something. One leans on someone or something. A trusting heart has a foundation; a fearful heart is adrift. I've met trusting people. They are not naive or gullible. If a tornado warning is given they take shelter. But they do not live filled with fears that never materialize, and in that sense they experience a freedom fearful people do not have. They don't put their trust in Twitter, but in God. Proverbs 3:5 says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him. And He will make your paths straight." Psalm 62:6 says, "He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken."

God doesn't want you to live in fear today. Wash your hands. Fold them and pray. Open them to heaven. Let God heal your fearful heart.

Another Atheist Converts to Theism

Former atheist A.N. Wilson's "Why I Believe Again" appears here in The New Statesman. Wilson describes how he left Christianity for atheism, and how he has come back. He's a very good writer, and has some nice quotable sentences and ideas to ponder.

For example:

"My doubting temperament... made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced."

"But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers."

"A life like Gandhi’s, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?" (Now that is funny...)

"The existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat."

"For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness."

"When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue."

"Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct."

"My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God “a category mistake”. Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings."

The Coming Out of Atheism (& "Free Thinking" as Oxymoronic)

Yesterday's nytimes.com has an article about the coming out of atheism. I see this as potentially exciting for the reason that my philosophy of religion classes could be more lively.

There is a certain trendiness in the current "atheism." I've seen this in some students who take my philosophy classes. Most of the atheists I meet are "village atheists" analogous to nominal "Christians." They claim to not believe in God while borrowing much from Christian theism. Some of their atheism is a reaction to the deadness of nominal, hypocritical "Christianity." Some of it is a tiney "bandwagon" effect.

The article says that "local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by outrage over the Bush administration’s embrace of the religious right. A spate of best-selling books on atheism also popularized the notion that nonbelief is not just an argument but a cause, like environmentalism or muscular dystrophy." While of course not being a reason to become an atheist, perhaps ths has brought some atheists out of the closet. Most of the students I have are intellectually ignorant of the "religious right" but viscerally put off by it, as they should be, since the real Jesus spoke against the legalistic, judgmental, militaristic-nationalistic-political stuff that often characterizes it.

I think it will always be hard to find a really good, long-term committed atheist. One reason may be that atheism qua atheism is not for anything but against (a-) the existence of God. Hence "humanists," or "freethinkers" as alternative titles. This last phrase, to me, is especially funny, since philosophical naturalism finds "free will" and therefore "free thought" questionable. On real atheism "free thinking" is oxymoronic.

Richard Foster on Life With God #1

(Wyandotte, MI)

Last evening Linda and I went to Wyandotte - I picked up a coffee at my son Dan's favorite java place ("The Grind") and Linda got a Tahitian smoothie. We sat, talked, and read at Wyandotte's riverfront park that looks over the Detroit River to Canada.

I brought Richard Foster's Life with God: Reading the Bible for Spiritual Transformation. What a sweet book this is! Foster says the main God-thread running through scripture is a promise followed by a question; God says to us, throughout the ages, "I am with you, will you be with Me?" Foster writes: "This dynamic is the absolute unifying center of the Bible. Every story in the Bible, no matter its twists and turns, whether the human characters are trustworthy or untrustworthy, whether the story is sad or happy, is built on this clarion call to relationship. "I am with you. Will you be with Me?"

As I write this I'm now thinking of Bernard Ramm's commentary on Exodus. Ramm taught that the hermeneutical key to Exodus was the God-relationship. New Testament scholar Gordon Fee, in his massive commentary on the Holy Spirit in the letters of Paul, defines the "Holy Spirit" as "God's Empowering Presence."

As I read Foster last night I now only thought about how God has been and now is with me and Linda, but experienced God's presence. This ongoing experience (some, maybe much, of which is non-discursive) is but one of the things that assures me of the reality of God.

Embryo: A Defense of Human Life

Philosopher and jurisprudential scholar Francis Beckwith's Defending Life is the best book I've read re. the personhood of the conceptus. And, if you want a good read on the logical nonsense of philosophical relativism, Beckwith's book is for you.

University of S. Carolina philosopher Robert George has written Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. Beckwith gives it a review on amazon.com. Beckwith writes:

"This book, authored by two of my favorite philosophers, is perhaps the most sophisticated and clearly written defense of embryonic personhood that has come out since the onset of the biotech revolution.

George and Tollefsen are conversant with the scientific issues as well as the deep philosophical questions of nature and personhood that percolate beneath the surface. They are also well-versed in the arguments of those with whom the disagree. One of their adversaries, Lee Silver, a colleague of George's, is singled out for special treatment. What makes this analysis particularly enlightening is how it exposes how little care Silver takes in crafting his moral and metaphysical arguments. But Silver is not alone. This sort of philosophical negligence is symptomatic of an academic culture that churns out wonderfully smart technicians, like Silver, who have floated through their professional lives blissfully unaware of the cluster of moral and metaphysical beliefs they take for granted and make their projects possible, but for which their scientism can provide no grounding.

George and Tollefsen also critique Cartesian dualism as well as philosophical materialism, arguing for a Thomistic hylomorphism as the best account of the human person.

This is a wonderful book that should be in the library of any one who is serious about bioethics and the future of what it means to be human."

---Francis J. Beckwith, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University. author of Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Boyd's S.I.N. Hypothesis - A Link

Here's a link to a number of posts Greg has made re. his argument that, on Christian theism, "natural" evil is mis-named because it's best understood as caused by Satan. Go to the 7 links that begin with "The Argument..."

Philosophy of Religion Oral Exam #3

For my MCCC Philosophy of Religion students:

Oral exam #3 will be held 4/27 & 4/29.

ROOM: Z-271 (La-Z-Boy Center)

THE QUESTIONS:

1. Nietzsche
2. Bertrand Russell
3. Alvin Plantinga
4. William Lane Craig's metaethical argument for God

EXTRA CREDIT

The modal argument for the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.

See you next week!

Defending Premise 2 Of the Metaethical Argument for God's Existence

DEFENDING PREMISE 2 OF THE METAETHICAL ARGUMENT FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE

William Lane Craig’s metaethical argument for the existence of God can be stated this way:

P1 – If there is no God then objective moral values and duties do not exist.

P2 – Objective moral values and duties exist.

C – Therefore, God exists.

When I present this argument in my Philosophy of Religion classes P1 is mostly if not entirely accepted. P2, however, is challenged. One reason for this is that I have not been able to present the argument as clearly as I should. In an effort to do this I’m drawing not only on Craig but on Paul Copan’s excellent essay “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality.” I am very impressed with this essay, and find Copan to be a clear writer. (Copan’s essay is in The Future of Atheism, 141-161)

Do objective moral values exist? Copan argues that they do. He writes: “We are wise to assume that our senses, our powers of reasoning, and our most fundamental moral instincts are not systematically deceiving us.” (142) Note these three: 1) our senses; 2) our powers of reasoning (Plantinga calls this “our belief-forming mechanisms); and 3) our fundamental moral instincts. They are all to be trusted in the absence of a defeater. Copan points out that even the most radical skeptic trusts in his sense experience and in logical reasoning. Thus statements like “I perceive a world external to myself” and “If P, therefore Q. P. Therefore Q.” are “properly basic.” While it’s certainly true that we can misperceive things and make logical mistakes, “such mistakes hardly call into question the general reliability of our sense or reasoning powers; indeed, they presuppose it. The ability to detect error presumes an awareness of truth.” (142)

We assume sense experience to be veridical. We cannot evidentially “prove” it to be so. That would require using our sense experience to “prove” its own veridicality. Likewise, we assume, e.g., modus ponens to be logical. We can’t prove it to be so by using logic, since that would require we trust in logic to “prove” that we can trust in logic. Copan’s claim (and Craig’s) is that we are to view our apprehension of objective moral values in juts this way.

Just as we can be mistaken re. our senses and our reasoning, so also we can by mistaken re. the making of moral judgments. In spite of this Copan says “there still are certain moral truths that we can’t not know unless we suppress our conscience or engage in self-deception. We possess an inbuilt “yuck factor” – basic moral intuitions about the wrongness of torturing babies for fun, of raping, murdering, or abusing children. We can also recognize the virtue of kindness or selflessness.” (142-143) What about people who can’t tell the moral difference between Mother Teresa and Joseph Stalin? “Those not recognizing such truths as properly basic are simply wrong and morally dysfunctional.” (143) It particularly this last statement that causes anger in some students when I make it. I’ll explain why I think this is so and why there’s no real need to be upset about this below.

Are moral values, like sense experience and logical reasoning, properly basic? Is our moral awareness epistemically foundational and “bedrock?” Some atheists think so. Copan cites atheist David O. Brink, who states: “Our commitment to the objectivity of ethics is a deep one.” Atheist Kai Neilsen writes:

It is more reasonable to believe such elemental things [as wife-beating and child abuse] to be evil than to believe any skeptical theory that tells us we cannot know or reasonably believe any of these things to be evil… I firmly believe that this is bedrock and right and that anyone who does not believe it cannot have probed deeply enough into the grounds of his moral beliefs.” (143)

If this is true, then basic moral beliefs are “discovered,” not “invented.” To explain this is to get at students’ complaints about the claim that, just as a person who cannot understand the logic of a disjunctive syllogism is logically dysfunctional, and just as a person who is skeptical that they are now eating breakfast when they are, so also are persons morally dysfunctional who cannot see that torturing and raping little girls for fun is objectively wrong. In my experience the person who protests against this usually does so because they think we have not discovered but invented moral values. The common explanation of the inventing of moral values is that of evolutionary theory.

Here Craig cites atheist Michael Ruse, who states that “morality” has evolved as an aid to survival and allows our species to perpetuate itself? (The Future of Atheism, 89) Craig says:

þ At its worst, this kind of reasoning is an example of the genetic fallacy.
þ At its best it only proves that our subjective perception of objective moral values has evolved.
þ Craig – “If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual, fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm.
þ Many of us think we do apprehend objective moral values.
þ Even Ruse writes: “The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2+2=5.” (Ib., 92)

Further, what if there are objective moral values, and we evolved, without God guiding the process, to apprehend these moral values? Craig rightly says that such an idea is “fantastically improbable.” The odds of blind evolutionary processes evolving creatures that perceive objective moral values is hard to believe. It is more reasonable to believe we are created by God to apprehend moral values. (Ib.)

Daniel Dennett has written that, given that we have evolved, ethical decision-making “holds out scant hope of our ever discovering a formula or an algorithm for doing right.” (Copan, 145)

Students who freak out, when I say that a person who can’t see that torturing and raping little girls for fun are morally wrong, do so, I think, because they view such acts as personally invented subjective preferences, such as “I like Pepsi.” Surely the affinity for Pepsi is a subjective taste and not some objective truth. Philosopher Thomas Reid “claimed he did not know by what reasoning – demonstrative or probable – he could convince the epistemic or moral skeptic.” (Copan, 144) As for me, when I meet a person who thinks torturing and raping are only subjective preferences, I won’t let them near my kids. Copan puts it this way: “Although basic moral principles – to be kind, selfless, and compassionate; to avoid torturing for fun, raping, or taking innocent human life – are accessible and knowable to morally sensitive human beings, some improperly functioning individuals may be self-deceived or hard-hearted sophists.” (144)

Copan concludes: “Thus, we should reasonably believe what is apparent or obvious to us unless there are overriding reasons to dismiss it – a belief that applies to our sense perception, our reasoning faculty, and our moral intuitions/perceptions.” (144) Just as we perceive a world external to us, and intuit certain laws of logic that are properly basic, so also we apprehend certain moral truths to be objective.

Chalmers's Nonreductive Explanation of Consciousness

Australian National University's Centre for Consciousness has a nice collection of essays by U of Arizona philosopher David Chalmers and others. See, for beginners, Chalmers's essay "Facing Up To the Probolem of Consciousness." Chalmers in one of the leaders in this whole discussion, and nicely explains the "easy problems" of consciousness and the "really hard" problem of consciousness.

Re. the latter Chalmers writes: "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field... If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience"."

Chalmers says: "An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining." He says, at this point, some just give up. it's the kind of thing that makes one think the problem of consciousness is in principle unsolvable. Chalmers is not so pessimistic. He writes: "This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice." He goes on to outline his principles for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness. Very interesting!

16 Murders In Zimbabwe & Good Friday

Last evening, in our sanctuary, I was with many friends as we worshiped God and listened to the story of Jim & Sallie Collins and their time in a Christian community in Zimbabwe. Then, we had the Lord’s Supper together.

Linda and I led worship, and John Collins accompanied my guitar-playing on the violin. There were times last night when I felt so moved by God, especially as we sang about what the cross of Christ means, that I could not sing. At one point I just told everybody that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this, so they should just keep singing. For me, it was one of those presence-of-God moments that was tangible and manifest and experiential. I’m thinking about this now, and I am thankful for it. Thank God that he sent Jesus. Thank God for the cross.

Then Jim and Sallie shared. They did such an excellent job! And, it was hard for them. Why? Because they served together with 16 white Jesus-followers for several months together, and this group called Community of Reconciliation helped the dirt-poor Zimbabweans in the area, raising crops, collecting water in a parched land, worshiping together, holding Bible studies, and any other things.

Then one evening, during a Bible study, anti-government rebels carrying guns and grenades and AK-47s invaded. And threatened to kill them all. At one point a rebel held a gun to Sallie’s forehead. Jim and Sallie were separated from their 4-year-old son Michael. The rebels did not kill them that evening. But they vowed to come back in a year. And they did come back in a year. That’s when they killed 16 Jesus-followers, including children and babies. They killed them, not with guns, but with knives and hatchets. They tied each one’s hands behind their backs with barbed wire. Then, one by one, forcing the others to watch, the rebels hacked them to death. They threw grenades in the buildings and burnt them. One little boy escaped. And one 12-year-old girl who was forced to watch the one-by-one torturing of her family and all her friends was given a note by the murderers and told to take it to the government officials. Which she did. She and the boy are alive today.

Jim and Sallie left before this happened. They had to return to their home in Kansas City. One day they got a call and were told the horrible story.

This slaughter in Zimbabwe was international news. I’ve put one of the New York Times articles about this below.

A memorial service was held. People came from afar to honor these slain, good people, who possessed no weapons to defned themselves, which was a rarity in Zimbabwe at the time.

The day after the memorial service the rains came and filled up the dams and ponds the Community had built for the people.

Jim and Sallie shared this story last night, accompanied by many photos of the people, the Zimbabweans who were helped, the buildings and dams, and the aftermath of the killings to include a photo of a blood-spattered wall in a room where the executions were held. Then we took communion. During communion we played a tape that was made of the blacks and whites who loved Jesus with all their hearts worshiping together in their African dialect. I sat there, as did many of you last night, pondering what happened to Jesus on the Friday following the Last Supper. I thought of the Cross. Of sin defeated. Of Satan and evil and the spiritual battle we are in and the victory over evil we have in the Cross and Resurrection. I thought of death. As Paul said, now death has lost its sting.

For me last evening was a communion service I shall never forget. So today - remember the Cross. Worship God. Follow Jesus.

ZIMBABWEAN VOWS TO PUNISH KILLERS

Special to the New York Times

Published: Sunday, November 29, 1987

• • 
    

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/29/world/zimbabwean-vows-to-punish-killers.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Enos Nkala, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Home Affairs in charge of the country’s police force, today viewed the macabre scene at Olive Tree Farm near here where 8 of 16 murdered missionaries were hacked to death Thursday.

The somber Mr. Nkala stood in front of the small guest bedroom where the Christian missionaries, hands tied behind their backs, were killed by 20 anti-Government rebels.

Mr. Nkala left the room to walk among the acres of neatly tended vegetable and corn fields, commenting on the new irrigation pipes and new corrals and sheds for animals.

”This is so tragic,” he said. ”These religious people had really developed their farm, and they were working very much with the local peasants.” Helped Surrounding Peasants

He was told how the Pentecostal group, calling itself the Community of Reconciliation, held classes for the surrounding farmers. The members had allocated plots of their irrigated fields to black farmers who could keep the vegetables they grew.

”This land will never be so well cared for,” he said. ”A dark cloud of death has settled here.”

Then Mr. Nkala became angry. ”We are going to account for this,” he shouted. ”We are going to get these dissidents.”

”This Gayigusu is their leader, and he is still around here,” the Cabinet minister said, pointing to the granite hills surrounding the farm. ”Our men are out there now, all around, and we are going to get him. We want that Gayigusu, we want his head.”

Mr. Nkala’s vow of vengeance contrasted sharply with the nonviolent Christian spirit that pervaded the two homesteads, Olive Tree Farm and New Adam’s Farm, where the other missionaries were killed, about 30 miles south of Bulawayo. She Watched Helplessly

Esnath Dube, who had helped care for the children on the farms, told Mr. Nkala and other officials how she had watched helplessly as the victims were led, one by one, into the room where they were hacked to death, apparently because the rebels felt shots would alert nearby soldiers and policemen.

”They were peaceful, silent as they died,” Miss Dube said. ”They didn’t scream or cry. But I was screaming and crying. I vomited. It was awful.”

John Russell, 74 years old, had been living at New Adam’s Farm for five years but was away on vacation when the killings occurred. Two of his daughters and four of his grandchildren died.

”I don’t think I can come back here again,” he said. ”I love these farms and have been very happy here, but I just can’t come back.”

Mr. Russell said his daughters and their husbands had helped found the Community of Reconciliation to help bring Zimbabwe’s blacks and whites together after the 10-year guerrilla war to end white-minority rule.

”We all decided that we could not have armed guards and security fences to protect us from the dissidents,” he said, referring to the standard security measures taken by white farmers here. ”How could we live in a fortress and expect the people to trust in God? No, we couldn’t.” Squatters Are Denounced

Although the missionaries were highly respected by small-scale black farmers, they were not so popular among the poorest of the poor, the landless people forced by the shortage of land and the current drought to become squatters on the land of others.

”I hold the squatters responsible for calling in the dissidents against these missionaries,” Mr. Nkala said. He said that when the Government last week ordered squatters off the two mission farms, some of them issued threats.

There are thousands of squatters in the region, Matabeleland, and Mr. Nkala said the dissidents were acting on their grievances.

”These are problems we have in Zimbabwe,” Mr. Nkala said. ”The dissidents and the squatters are our own political and ethnic problems.”

”But we live in southern Africa, and all our problems are intertwined,” he said. ”You cannot separate them. South Africa is involved in backing these dissidents, just as they are backing Renamo in Mozambique and Unita in Angola.”

‘THOSE PEOPLE HAD A VISION’

KANSAS CITY, Nov. 28 (Special to The New York Times) - Members of the Community of Reconciliation knew the risks they were facing in Zimbabwe, according to the pastor of a Kansas City church that has helped support their mission.

”Those people had a vision,” said the Rev. Noel Alexander, pastor of the nondenominational Kansas City Fellowship Church, who has twice visited the missionary community with a team of supporters from his congregation.

”They knew the risks,” he said, ”because they had had confrontations with the dissidents before.”

His church was one of several that supported the little community of Pentecostal Christians. To give the community ”cash flow,” Mr. Alexander said, his church had helped them buy cattle. He said they had used some of that cash to buy blankets for Africans.

”They were a humble, selfless people who literally laid down their lives for their cause,” he said. ”That cause, as their name implied, was the reconciliation of man with God and man with man.”

Speaking of one of two Americans who were slain, David Emerson, 35, a native of Minnesota, Mr. Alexander said he was to have been married to Penelope Lovett, another victim. The other American was Karen Alice Sharon Ivesdahl, 34, a North Dakota native.

Report On the Craig-Hitchens Debate

William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens debated this past Saturday over the existence of God. Doug Geivett gives a thorough report here.

Other links are here.

Brian Boyd Tries to Squeeze Meaning Out of Meaninglessness

Brian Boyd, in "Purpose-Driven Life," claims that evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. He writes: "In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose." What does he mean by this? I'm now going to ramble on a bit about this. I think he tries very hard to get "meaning" out of an essentially meaningless context and "purpose" without a Purposer. As an evolutionary naturalist he doesn't need to do this. Because: a "mindless process" cannot coherently be said to "create" anything.

He states: "We think of purpose as something prior to decision and action: I want to raise my arm, and, unless I am paralyzed or restrained, I do. But in fact purpose emerges slowly, in the species and in the individual." What? Boyd equivocates on the word "purpose." With Boyd we have Purpose 1 and Purpose 2, kind of like Dr. Seuss's Thing One and Thing 2 except they are far from identical. Purpose 1 needs a "Purposer." Purpose 2 does not. P1 is prescriptive (a "design" in mind); P2 is descriptive (how it works).

Boyd tries to explain P2, which I'm calling "emergent 'purpose'." He writes:

"My capacity to move my arm in as many ways as I can depends on things like the evolution of forelegs into arms early in the primate line, the evolution millions of years later of a rotating socket in the shoulder of great apes, to enable swinging in trees, and the further freeing up of arm movements after early hominids became fully bipedal. Babies flail their arms uncontrolledly and purposelessly for months before they can direct them in a particular way for a particular purpose."

Fine. But that's not the P1 I am looking for. I think it's weird, and misleading, to use "purpose" in this way. What Boyd does is merely descriptive; real purpose is prescriptive. Boyd's explanation amounts to no more than saying something like this: the sidewalk's being wet depends on the rain that fell a few minutes ago.

Boyd writes: "Purposes can emerge only piecemeal; problems cannot even define themselves until many of the elements are already in place." Why use "purpose" here? Why not something like "adaptation." Boyd states that "purposes define themselves." "Purposes evolve, and Darwinian processes extend them." "Intelligence and creativity are purposes that have emerged over the course of life on earth." No, purposes do not define themelves. If that's what Boyd means by "purpose" then he equivocates on P1 and gives us a false hope.

I see Boyd as trying to hard to get purpose and meaning out of the purposeless context of evolutionary naturalism. His essay mostly gives us ideas of what evolution is and how it works and explains thing. But to explain something is not to speak of its purpose or meaning. I can explain how a fried egg was made, but to do so is not equivalent to stating its meaning. Desribing the benefits of human intelligence is not the same as stating the meaning or purpose of intelligence, just as stating the benefits of eating a fried egg is not to give its meaning or purpose.

Let me define "meaning" this way: fitness in a coherent context. No coherent context = no meaning. Like what? Like the leaf I'm now looking at in my back yard. What's its meaning? The answer is: it has no meaning. But perhaps the leaf will decompose and nourish the soil? Maybe. Upon discovering this should we then say the leaf has a meaning and a purpose? No, because function is not the same as meaning and not the same as purpose. It's odd to say that, e.g., a rock's meaning is as a shelter for an earthworm. But if I see a series of rocks that have been placed so as to raise earthworms, that's a coherent context in which these rocks have meaning and purpose.

So, on evolutionary naturalism, nothing has meaning and purpose. If these concepts are used as equivalent to a description of how things came to be and function, then I find it unnecessary and confusing to to try to squeeze meaning and purpose out of an essentially non-purposive context.

NOTE: If there's a God who created the mechanism of natural selection as a means of creating things, then Boyd's response is unnecessary, and we're back to the Francis Collins/Ken Miller ideas re. theistic evolution.

ALSO: Watch for more writing like Boyd's. I read his essay as expressive of his own need to find meaning and purpose in the ultimately meaningless and purposeless context of evolutionary naturalism. Again, there is "no real sense" in which we can say that evolution "creates" anything.

Are Moral Rules Written In Our Genes?

I'm referencing this nytimes essay on U of Virginia psychologist John Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Harvard's Steven Pinker says, “I’m a big fan of Haidt’s work.”

Haidt thinks evolution has equipped persons with two moral systems: 1) moral intuition; and 2) moral judgment. #1 is the sense that something is right or wrong. #2 is giving an explanation for what moral intuition has intuited ("decided"). Haidt "likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant."

That's a nice analogy, and interesting.

Mr Natural & the Book of Genesis

Way back in the 70s, when I was a pseudo-hippie, one of the great hippie-icons was R. Crumb's "Mr. Natural." From rcrumb.com: "Robert Crumb was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 30, 1943, to a Marine father and Catholic mother. His family moved frequently during his childhood, and moved to Delaware in 1956 when his father retired after twenty years in the U.S. Marine Corps. Robert’s mother often behaved erratically and was probably manic depressive. Robert was a faithful Catholic until he was sixteen. His biggest influence during his youth was his older brother Charles, who loved comics and who co-wrote many of the comics they produced as children. Crumb was anything but popular in high school and felt alienated."

Crumb writes: "I started taking L.S.D. in Cleveland in June of ’65. That changed my head around. It made me stop taking cartooning so seriously and showed me a whole other side of myself.” After a temporary breakup with [wife] Dana, Robert traveled to New York, Chicago, and Detroit during this acid-soaked period and created many of his future characters: Mr. Natural, Mr. Snoid and Angelfood McSpade."

"Except for the occasional expedition to Paris or America, Crumb has nestled himself in the south of France, where he is hard at work on a long-term project illustrating the book of Genesis."

See that? R. Crumb's book of Genesis is done. It'll come out in October 2009. See "R. Crumb Zaps the Bible." Crumb says, “It’s very visual. It’s lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people.”

God Is Back

There's an unsympathetic review of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's God Is Back in today's nytimes. "Religion is returning to public life," they report. This will, of course, be sad news for a few atheists. Not for all atheists I am sure, since there is a form of atheism that simply does not care how much religion there is in the world.

Micklethwait is editor of The Economist, and Wooldridge is The Economist's Washington bureau chief. Michiko Kakutani's review says "in arguing that “religion’s power” has “continued to increase,” they contradict considerable evidence to the contrary. (The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, released this month, found that “the U.S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.”)"

I haven't read the book. What do I think?

• The needs religion addresses cannot be addressed by science. Science qua science says nothing about value. The advance of science will raise even more meta-physical questions. That bodes well for "religion."


• If the religious impulse is hard-wired into us, guess what: it'll never go away, at least not in our lifetime or many lifetimes to come. I view most "internet atheists" as hopelessly mired in theism's noetic framework. Why such protest? Really, on atheism, who cares?


• In my very tiny world as a philosophy professor at a community college, the packed-out rooms in my philosophy of religion classes show me that students are hugely interested in "religion" and God and want to talk about this and study these things with someone who will listen, dialogue with them, and assert a strong religious worldview.
  
• I personally don't think "religion" is in great jeopardy. But I am defining "religion" to include the deep existential religious impulse that I continue to meet and see in people irregardless of the evangelistic atheists. So is God "back?" I don't think he ever left.

Michigan State University in the Championship Game

I am a Michigan State University fan. Linda and I watched them beat U-Conn tonight. My son Josh, one of the biggest MSU fans I know, watched it at some friends' house.

For eleven years we lived in a house across from MSU's campus where I worked as a campus minister. Even though I graduated from Northwestern I became an MSU fan, even when they played NU.

Last fall I took Josh to Ford Field to watch MSU play North Carolina. We got crushed, while playing a fourth game in a short period of time + without Goran Suton. Now it looks like there will be a rematch in the same building... for the national championship.

GO GREEN!

Doug Groothuis on Who or What Made God?

From the theistic standpoint the question of who or what made God is a nonsense question. Doug Groothuis addresses this in a piece called "WHO DESIGNED THE DESIGNER?: A DIALOGUE ON RICHARD DAWKINS’S THE GOD DELUSION."

Groothuis writes: God is understood in monotheism as self-existent. God does not depend on anything outside of himself for divine existence. That is, God is the ultimate explanation for the universe and its form, but to ask where God came from or who designed God from this perspective is a nonsense question, something like: ‘What is north of the North Pole?’ or ‘What word do you use when no words will do?’ So, Dawkins and Anthony to the contrary, this is a perfectly good concept. There is no infinite regress such that nothing gets explained. There is, rather, a finite regress to an infinite being; that is, a self-existence being. The technical term for self-existence is aseity. The Apostle Paul spoke of this when he said to the philosophers of Athens in Acts, chapter seventeen: ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else’."

And, "there is a significant tradition in Christian theology that claims that God’s existence is simple. That is, God has no parts. So, while God is the ultimate being in existence, God is not composed of discrete sections or aspects, so to speak. If that view is correct, then God would not be complex at all, but perfectly simple." An absolutely simple being would not need "to be explained on the basis of something simpler than itself."

Neuroscience & Philosophy

Linda and I are taking a much-needed day off together today. We're in Ann Arbor, and began with a lunch at one of our new favorite restaurants, Jerusalem Garden. We love eating this kind of food! I began with a bowl of lentil soup w. fresh lemon squeezed in it. Delicious! Linda, who is a grape-leaves-addict, thinks their vegetarian grape leaves are some of the best she's ever had.

Then we walked downtown Ann Arbor - I got a cup of Espresso Royale coffee. When we lived in East Lansing I drank a lot of this stuff and acquired a taste for it. It's a unique flavor that I like a lot. We walked on U-M's main campus "quad" area by the main library - professors were holding classes outside, students were all over the place sunning and talking and being glad for the spring weather.

After a lot of walking we came to Ann Arbor's downtown Borders. The original Borders store was in Ann Arbor. I came down to that great store many times before they grew into lots of stores.

So I'm sitting here in A-A's Borders now drinking Starbuck's and reading Neuroscience & Philosophy: Brain, Mind, Language. The authors are neuroscientist Maxwell Bennett and philosophers Peter Hacker, Daniel Dennett, and John Searle. These are four very big names in the current neuroscience discussion. In this book it's a tag-team match: Bennett & Hacker VS Dennett & Searle. B&H think a lot of current cognitive neuroscience is wacked out. D&S think that philosophical psychology is being "superannuated" by scientific breakthroughs in the study of "mind." Should psychological attributes be ascribed to the "mind" or the the physical "brain?" Is the "mind" "a peculiar, perhaps immaterial, substance distinct from the brain," or is the brain identical with the mind?

Consider this physicalist-reductionist quote from Francis Crick:

"What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there... Your brain makes the best interpretation it can according to it previous experience and the limited and ambiguous information provided by your eyes... The brain combines the information provided by the many distinct features of the visual scene (aspects of shape, colour, movement, etc.) and settles on the most plausible interpretation of all these various clues taken together... What the brain has to build up is a many-levelled interpretation of the visual scene... [Filling-in] allows the brain to guess a complete picture from only partial information - a very useful ability." (16)

Bennett and Hacker say, from this kind of reasoning that Dennett and Searle mostly agree with mutatis mutandis, that "brains decide, or at least "decide," and initiate voluntary action."

Bennett and Hacker question the intelligibility of ascribing psychological attributes to the brain. Using Wittgensteinian-type reasoning they believe that those who think it is the physical brain that "decides," "estimates," "interprets data," and so on, are commtting the "mereological fallacy." "Mereology is the logic of part/whole relations." (22) The mereological fallacy is to ascribe attributes of the whole to the parts. This is the equivalent of the informal logical "fallacy of division," which states that it is an error to assume that what is true of the whole is also true of the parts. Quoting from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: "Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a human being can one say: it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious." B&H state: "This epitimizes the conclusions we shall reach in our investigation." (19) Bennett is the only actual neuroscientist among the four, and in a technical essay concludes that "claims that synaptic networks, whether of the biological kind or after useful reduction to an engineering device, possess psychological atributes struck me as extraordinary." (66)

Dennett and Searle rebut B&H. Dennett, at times, is really funny. He writes: "When Hacker lambastes me, over and over, for failing to appreciate the mereological fallacy, this is a case of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. I am familiar with the point, having pioneered its use. Did I, perhaps, lose my way when I left Oxford?" (77)

I am now turning to Searle's essay "Putting Consciousness Back In The Brain: Reply to Bennett and Hacker."

B&H then reply back.

It makes for good reading, and a good albeit very technical introduction to one of the discussions of our day.