Edward Feser takes on an atheist philosopher who argues for a strong form of scientism to the effect that physics is the only form of certain knowledge and all other purported knowledge (including not only freewill but any form of human consciousness or intentionality) is illusory.
This is a very interesting piece and certainly applies to some of our local pet atheists who proclaim that naturalism/materialism is self-evident and arguments against it can just be ignored. One point that strikes me is that although (let us say) Richard Dawkins devotes a great deal of effort to denouncing postmodernist scepticism when it challenges the truth-claims of science, in fact the arguments he uses against religious belief are remarkably similar to those of postmodernism and literary theory. The view that all narratives are illusory constructs which we project onto the chaos of reality is exactly characteristic of this mindset, and it starts by taking it for granted (as beyond argument) that God does not exist and therefore there can be no ultimate reality. The difference between the postmods and the scientificists is that the former take this to the logical absurdity of denying that we can know anything a all, whereas the latter, seeing that we do know some things through the scientific method, try to exempt this from the critique while still presenting its assumptions as beyond question.
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/10/reading-rosenberg-part-i.htmlEXTRACTS
...What these answers amount to is nothing less than a pretty thoroughgoing “nihilism,” though a nihilism that Rosenberg assures us is of “a nice sort,” or at least can be made bearable given that “there’s always Prozac.” Part of what he has in mind is what you’d expect any atheist to claim -- that there is no God, no life after death, and that neither the universe as a whole, nor history, nor any individual human life has any point or purpose. He also has in mind claims that some atheists try to resist or qualify but which many of them would allow are at least hard to avoid given their metaphysical assumptions -- that free will and morality (including any secular system of morality) are illusions.
But Rosenberg goes well beyond these familiar atheist themes. In his view, when followed out consistently, scientism entails that introspective consciousness does not give us genuine knowledge of our own nature or of the causes of our behavior. Indeed, it entails that the self is an illusion. It entails that meaning and purpose are illusions even at the level of the individual human mind -- that none of our thoughts is really “about” anything at all, and that no individual human being ever really forms plans or has any purposes of his own. And it entails that history, the humanities, and much of social science, to the extent that they presuppose that there are selves with meaningful thoughts who plan and act purposively, give us no genuine knowledge about the world -- they are, at best, mere entertainments. In general, narratives or stories of any sort (including allegedly “true” narratives or stories, and including allegedly true secular narratives or stories) are sheer fictions. Only the “formulas, wiring diagrams, systems of equations… geometrical proofs” and the like of scientific discourse give us actual knowledge.
What Rosenberg is committed to, then, is the claim that the scientism upon which modern atheism rests entails a radical eliminative materialism (though he doesn’t employ that term in the book, perhaps so as to avoid too much technical jargon in a work aimed at a largely non-philosophical audience). Common sense takes it to be obvious -- indeed, so obvious that it seems that only philosophers ever bother calling attention to the fact -- that the things we say and the thoughts our words express have meaning, that they are about or refer to things in the world. That is to say, they have intentionality, the philosopher’s technical term for a thought’s meaningfulness, “aboutness,” or “directedness toward” an object or referent. Eliminative materialism (or the version of eliminative materialism Rosenberg endorses, anyway) holds that this is an illusion, that intentionality is not a genuine feature of the world and ought to be eliminated from our picture of reality. Much (though not all) of what Rosenberg has to say rests on this fundamental thesis...
Rosenberg comes across as a paradigm case of the sort of person the atheist philosopher of religion Quentin Smith had in mind when he judged that “the great majority of naturalist philosophers have an unjustified belief that naturalism is true and an unjustified belief that theism (or supernaturalism) is false.” Their naturalism, Smith says, typically rests on nothing more than an ill-informed “hand waving dismissal of theism” which ignores “the erudite brilliance of theistic philosophizing today.” Smith continues:
If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that “no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith,” although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.
Due to the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist… the vast majority of naturalist philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism. They may have a true belief in naturalism, but they have no knowledge that naturalism is true since they do not have an undefeated justification for their belief. If naturalism is true, then their belief in naturalism is accidentally true. [“The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy (Fall-Winter 2001)]
Now Smith, unlike Rosenberg, actually has expertise in the philosophy of religion. He also has expertise in areas of philosophy for which Rosenberg no doubt has greater respect (such as philosophy of science and metaphysics) and in natural science as well. Nor is Smith by any means the only prominent naturalist to regard many of his fellow non-believers as prone to just the sort of ignorance and dogmatism of which they accuse theists. (See the passages from the likes of Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Tyler Burge, and William Lycan quoted at the end of [another] recent post [on Feser's blog].) Rosenberg can hardly accuse such thinkers of ignorance of science and philosophy, or of having a theological ax to grind. Yet if they are right, then atheists cannot pretend to have a so strong a presumption in their favor that they needn’t bother engaging the arguments of the other side. And even if they are wrong, the atheist has to show that they are wrong, not simply assert that they are.
Consider also that Rosenberg’s sword cuts both ways -- that the move he makes could be made against atheists themselves. Suppose a theist wrote a book called The Theist’s Guide to Reality, but devoted no attention to answering any atheist arguments against theism. And suppose he tried to justify this by suggesting, first, that everything that needs to be said against atheism has already been said by others, and indeed was pretty much said by Thomas Aquinas; second, that the fact that atheists don’t acknowledge this shows that they are not going to be convinced by arguments anyway; and third, that theists are accordingly better advised to devote their attention to spelling out the implications of their position rather than arguing against atheism.
Rosenberg would no doubt regard this as delusional. But of course, we theists regard his own refusal to engage the other side as delusional. There is no way rationally to break this deadlock except to do what Rosenberg refuses to do -- actually to examine the arguments for both sides of the dispute between atheism and theism, rather than shamelessly to beg the question in favor of one of the sides and simply declare this farcical procedure to be the “rational” one. (Any atheist reader tempted at this point to deploy the Myers Shuffle by shouting “Courtier’s Reply!” should know that that would simply be to beg the question yet again, since whether the arguments for theism are really comparable to those of a naked emperor’s apologist is precisely what is at issue.)
[THIS IS EXACTLY THE STALEMATE PRODUCED BY HAZELIRELAND AND CO WHEN THEY USED TO POST HERE AND DEMAND THAT THEY BE SHOWN "EVIDENCE" FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE WITHOUT EXPLAINING WHAT THEY WOULD ACCEPT AS EVIDENCE, AND THAT THEY BE ALLOWED TO REJECT EVIDENCE PUT FORWARD BY THEIR OPPONENTS WITHOUT GIVING REASONS FOR THAT REJECTION - HIB]
Writes Rosenberg:
[T]his book is written mainly for those of us who are already deniers, not just doubters and agnostics. Although we will address the foibles and fallacies (as well as the wishful thinking) of theists, we won’t treat theism as a serious alternative that stills [sic] needs to be refuted. This book’s intended readers have moved past that point. We know the truth. (p. xii)
“We know the truth.” Replace “deniers” with “believers,” and “theists” and “theism” with “atheists” and “atheism,” and Rosenberg sounds exactly like Jerry Falwell (or at least like what liberals think Jerry Falwell sounded like). This is not philosophy. It‘s a shout-out to an amen corner, an appeal to the mob. That those in the mob have advanced degrees and Darwin Fish on the trunks of their cars doesn’t make it any less so.
END OF EXTRACTS
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/11/reading-rosenberg-part-ii.htmlEXTRACTS
We saw in part I of this series that Alex Rosenberg’s new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is less about atheism than it is about scientism, the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality. This is so in two respects. First, Rosenberg’s atheism is just one implication among others of his scientism, and the aim of the book is to spell out what else follows from scientism, rather than to say much in defense of atheism. Second, that it follows from his scientism is thus the only argument Rosenberg really gives for atheism. Thus, most of what he has to say ultimately rests on his scientism. If he has no good arguments for scientism, then he has no good arguments either for atheism or for most of the other, more bizarre, conclusions he defends in the book.
So, does Rosenberg have any good arguments for scientism? He does not. In fact, he has only one argument for it, and it is quite awful.
What is scientism?
Before we look at the argument, let’s consider how Rosenberg characterizes scientism:
“Scientism”… is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when “complete,” what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today. (pp. 6-7)
[ONE OBVIOUS POINT IS THAT IN THE LATE C19 PHYSICS SEEMED TO BE "COMPLETE" BUT THEN DEVELOPED IN ALL SORTS OF SURPRISING DIRECTIONS...]
As I’ve noted elsewhere (e.g. here, here, and here), the trouble with the claim that science is the only reliable source of knowledge is that it is either self-defeating or trivial -- self-defeating if we narrowly construe what counts as “science” (since scientism is itself a metaphysical and epistemological theory and not a view that physics, chemistry, or any other particular science has established) and trivial if we construe “science” broadly (since in that case philosophy, and in particular metaphysics and epistemology, count as “sciences” no less than physics, chemistry, and the like do). Rosenberg certainly avoids the second horn of this dilemma. For his construal of what counts as “science” is very narrow indeed:
If we’re going to be scientistic, then we have to attain our view of reality from what physics tells us about it. Actually, we’ll have to do more than that: we’ll have to embrace physics as the whole truth about reality. (p. 20)
To be sure, he does not deny that chemistry, biology, and neuroscience also give us knowledge. But that is only because he thinks they are reducible to physics: “The physical facts fix all the facts. [This] means that the physical facts constitute or determine or bring about all the rest of the facts.” (p. 26)
Now some naturalists will demur at this point, preferring a “non-reductive physicalism,” or “emergentism,” or some other such doctrine to Rosenberg’s radical reductionism. As a number of chemists and philosophers of chemistry have argued in recent years, it is at the very least debatable whether even chemistry is really reducible to physics. (For a useful overview of the literature, see chapter 5 of J. van Brakel’s book Philosophy of Chemistry. Also useful is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the philosophy of chemistry.) Reductionism in biology is even more obviously open to challenge. And of course, whether consciousness and human thought and action can be accounted for in physicalist terms is notoriously controversial even among naturalists themselves -- Fodor, McGinn, Searle, Nagel, Levine, Strawson, and Chalmers are just some of the prominent naturalistic philosophers of mind who have been critical of existing attempts by their fellow naturalists to explain the mind in purely materialistic terms.
Now I sympathize with such arguments, but I don’t think they establish an alternative form of naturalism. For what they show, I would argue, is that higher-level features of material reality are no less real than the lower-level features, that the lower-level features are not somehow ontologically privileged. And in that way they show (even if only inchoately, and even if their proponents often do not realize it) that something like an Aristotelian, holistic conception of material substances is correct after all. Talk of “emergence,” “non-reductive physicalism,” and the like fudges this, because it insinuates that the lower-level features described by physics are still somehow more fundamental than the higher-level ones, even though the higher-level ones are acknowledged to be irreducible. The latter, it is implied, somehow have to “emerge” from the former. Such views are bound to sound obscurantist precisely because they amount to an unstable halfway position between reductionistic naturalism of the Rosenberg variety and traditional Aristotelian anti-reductionism.
I would say, then, that one has either to go the whole hog for Rosenberg-style reductionism or chuck out the whole naturalistic framework altogether (along with “emergence” and other such half-measures) and return to a full-blown Aristotelian metaphysics of material substances. To that extent I think Rosenberg is right to hold that if someone is committed to scientism, then he should hold that “the physical facts fix all the facts.” (Obviously some will dispute this conditional, but since it constitutes a point of agreement between Rosenberg and me, I won’t pursue it further here.)
If Rosenberg avoids the one horn of the dilemma, though, he thrusts himself headlong onto the other. For how exactly has scientism been established by physics, chemistry, biology, or even neuroscience (if we allow for the sake of argument that neuroscience is reducible to physics)? Does scientism make predictions that have been rigorously confirmed? Is there something like a Michelson-Morley experiment [WHICH CONFIRMED CERTAIN PREDICTIONS WHICH eINSTEIN MADE IN HIS THEORY OF RELATIVITY] that scientism makes sense of in a way no rival theory does? To ask such questions is to answer them. The fact is that neuroscience hasn’t come close even to discovering exactly what it is that goes on in the brain when scientists form hypotheses, construct theories, make predictive inferences, develop experimental tests, write up their results, submit them for peer review, etc. That is to say, neuroscience hasn’t even explained the practice of science itself in purely neuroscientific categories, much less shown that no other practices can yield genuine knowledge. Scientism remains what it has always been -- a purely metaphysical speculation and not an empirical theory at all, much less a confirmed empirical theory.
No doubt we will be treated at this point to some hand-waving to the effect that even if neuroscience has not “yet” fully explained scientific practice, neither has it turned up any evidence that there are sources of knowledge other than science. But whether neuroscience is the only genuine source of knowledge about how we come to have knowledge is itself part of what is at issue in the dispute between scientism and its critics. Hence, to argue “We have no neuroscientific evidence that there is any genuine source of knowledge other than science, therefore there are no grounds at all for believing that there are any such alternative sources” would simply be to beg the question.
Rosenberg’s Gem
All of this might seem moot if Rosenberg had a really powerful argument in favor of scientism. But he does not. David Stove once gave the ironic label “the Gem” to a Berkeleyan argument for idealism he regarded as especially bad. Rosenberg’s argument for scientism gives Berkeley a run for his money, for it is a real Gem. He states it several times in the book...
Rosenberg’s argument, then, is essentially this:
1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.
2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real.
How bad is this argument? About as bad as this one:
1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.
2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real.
Metal detectors are keyed to those aspects of the natural world susceptible of detection via electromagnetic means (or whatever). But however well they perform this task -- indeed, even if they succeeded on every single occasion they were deployed -- it simply wouldn’t follow for a moment that there are no aspects of the natural world other than the ones they are sensitive to. Similarly, what physics does -- and there is no doubt that it does it brilliantly -- is to capture those aspects of the natural world susceptible of the mathematical modeling that makes precise prediction and technological application possible. But here too, it simply doesn’t follow for a moment that there are no other aspects of the natural world.
Those who reject Rosenberg’s scientism, then, are not guilty of “special pleading or self-deception,” Rosenberg’s condescending bluster notwithstanding. Rather, they are (unlike Rosenberg) simply capable of recognizing a brazen non sequitur when they see it. Unfortunately, condescending bluster is all Rosenberg ever offers in addition to his favorite non sequitur...
According to Rosenberg, then, unless you agree that science is the only genuine source of knowledge, you cannot consistently believe that it gives us any genuine knowledge. This is about as plausible as saying that unless you think metal detectors alone can detect physical objects, then you cannot consistently believe that they detect any physical objects at all...Of course, “metallicism” is preposterous. But so is Rosenberg’s scientism.
Those beholden to scientism are bound to protest that the analogy is no good, on the grounds that metal detectors detect only part of reality while physics detects the whole of it. But such a reply would simply beg the question once again, for whether physics really does describe the whole of reality is precisely what is at issue.
I am being hard on Rosenberg, and he deserves it for putting forward such transparently bad arguments, and with such arrogance. But it is only fair to note that he is hardly alone in the delusion that his Gem is some kind of knockdown argument for scientism. One hears this stupid non sequitur over and over and over again when arguing with New Atheist types. It is implicit every time some Internet Infidel asks triumphantly: “Where are the predictive successes and technological applications of philosophy or theology?” [ONE PARTICULARLY CRUDE VERSION OF THIS WOULD BE THE JEER "SCIENCE FLIES YOU TO THE MOON - RELIGION FLIES YOU INTO BUILDINGS" - WHICH WOULD BE AS FALSE AS SAYING "RELIGION TAKES YOU TO HOSPITAL, SCIENCE TAKES YOU TO AN EXTERMINATION CAMP" - IN BOTH CASES A PART OR PARODY IS PRESENTED AS REPRESENTING THE WHOLE] This is about as impressive as our fictional “metallicist” smugly demanding: “Where are the metal-detecting successes of gardening, cooking, and painting?” -- and then high-fiving his fellow metallicists when we are unable to offer any examples, thinking that he has established that plants, food, works of art, and indeed anything non-metallic are all non-existent. For why on earth should we believe that only methods capable of detecting metals give us genuine access to reality? And why on earth should we believe that if something is real, then it must be susceptible of the mathematically precise prediction and technological application characteristic of physics? I submit that there is no answer to this question that doesn’t beg the question.
As always, earlier generations of skeptics were wiser than the intellectually backward Dawkins generation. For instance, Bertrand Russell was well aware that, far from giving us an exhaustive picture of reality, physics in fact gives us is very nearly the opposite, and is unintelligible unless there is more to reality than what it reveals to us:
It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure. We only know the intrinsic character of events when they happen to us. Nothing whatever in theoretical physics enables us to say anything about the intrinsic character of events elsewhere. They may be just like the events that happen to us, or they may be totally different in strictly unimaginable ways. All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13)
Moreover, physics’ tremendous success at prediction and technological application is precisely the result of its deliberate neglect of any aspect of reality that does not fit its mathematically-oriented methods. Early modern thinkers like Bacon and Descartes sought to reorient science in a practical, this-worldly, technological direction. Mathematics facilitated this; aspects of the world that couldn’t be mathematically modeled were a distraction. Hence they were relegated to the status of mere “secondary qualities,” or treated as features that are the proper study of metaphysics rather than physics. That was less a metaphysical discovery, though, than a methodological stipulation. If you set out to study only those aspects of reality that might be rigorously predictable and controllable, then you are bound to find that those are the only ones you discover. But it is preposterous to pretend that you have thereby shown that there are no other aspects of reality, just as it would be preposterous for the “metallicist” to pretend that his exclusive focus on those objects that might be detected electromagnetically shows that there are no non-metals...
What Rosenberg and others beholden to scientism have done, then, is simply to confuse method with metaphysics (an occupational hazard of post-Galilean science and post-Cartesian philosophy, as E. A. Burtt warned in his classic book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science). The fallacious blurring of epistemology and metaphysics is, of course, also a feature of many idealist arguments, which is why Stove thought they merited our scorn. All the more appropriately, then, might we label Rosenberg’s argument a “Gem.”
Scientism versus teleology
Among the features of the world physics deliberately ignores for its purposes are those that involve final causality. As Rosenberg writes:
Ever since physics hit its stride with Newton, it has excluded purposes, goals, ends, or designs in nature. It firmly bans all explanations that are teleological… (p. 40)
As the words “exclusion” and “ban” indicate, though, this is, yet again, merely a methodological stipulation. By itself it tells us nothing at all about whether teleology is real. Again, if the designer of a metal detector says “For purposes of metal detection, let’s ignore every feature of the objects we’re after except their electromagnetic properties,” then he is naturally going to pay no attention to whether this or that object is a coin, or a key, or a thumbtack, or even whether it is made of iron as opposed to nickel. But it obviously does not follow that the only real properties of the objects the metal detector finds are their electromagnetic properties, and that we should be eliminativists about coins, keys, thumbtacks, iron, and nickel. Similarly, since teleological features cannot be modeled mathematically, the early moderns – thinkers who, following Bacon and Descartes, wanted to turn science in a practical, this-worldly direction and thus toward a focus on prediction and control – decided to ignore them. But (as it cannot be repeated too frequently) it simply doesn’t follow that such features do not exist.
Rosenberg no doubt thinks an appeal to Ockham’s razor justifies such an inference...
The implication is that since physics hasn’t ever needed to postulate final causes, we can infer with confidence that it will not need to do so in the future; and if it does not need to do so, the principle of parsimony should lead us to conclude that final causes don’t exist.
But there are several problems with such an argument. For one thing, Rosenberg’s main reason for denying the existence of teleology, plans, purposes, designs, intentionality, and the like at the biological level and even at the level of the human mind, is that physics has ruled teleology and cognate notions out of science altogether. But in that case an appeal to Ockham’s razor of the sort just considered would lead Rosenberg into a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. He will be saying, in effect: Physics can explain everything that exists without appealing to teleology. So, by Ockham’s razor, teleology must not be a real feature of the world. Of course, biological functions, human thought and action, and the like cannot be understood except in teleological terms. But that just shows that they must not really exist, because teleology doesn’t exist, because physics can explain everything that exists without it!
Another problem is that something like teleology is necessary to explain the facts that physics describes, at least if we regard any of them as embodying genuine causal relations. That is, in any event, the view of a number of contemporary philosophers of science and metaphysicians – George Molnar, C. B. Martin, John Heil, and other “new essentialist” writers – who have no theological ax to grind, but who regard dispositions as “directed at” their manifestations and thus as exhibiting what Molnar calls a kind of “physical intentionality.” This is (as historian of philosophy Walter Ott has noted) essentially a return to an Aristotelian-Scholastic understanding of final causality as a precondition of the intelligibility of efficient causality. Unless we suppose that an efficient cause A inherently “points” beyond itself to its typical effect (or range of effects) B as toward an end or goal, we have no way of making sense of why it is that A reliably does in fact generate B rather than C, D, or no effect at all.
Rosenberg doesn’t see the possibility of such a view because he has only the crudest conception of teleology -- he evidently thinks that a teleological explanation is one that simply postulates that “God designed it that way.” No one familiar with the Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions would make such a mistake, though someone who supposes that teleology and natural theology stand or fall with Paley-style “design arguments” is likely to. (As I have noted before, Rosenberg’s knowledge of natural theology seems to derive mostly from whatever was in the anthology his undergrad PHIL 101 teacher was using.)
So, Rosenberg has no good arguments for scientism, and thus no good arguments either for atheism or for the other, more bizarre conclusions he derives from scientism...