Antony Flew

Antony Flew apparently died on April 8 at age 87. The Internet Infidels have a good selection of some of Flew's atheistic work online. Flew's most famous work is probably his argument that reasonable presumption favors atheism.

Other notable things by Flew that are available online:

Interview with Gary Habermas discussing how he came to give up his atheism

Flew's brief (and a little bit angry) review of Dawkins's The God Delusion.

Wind and String

Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find, that with regard to the passions, 'tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music, which in running over all the notes immediately loses the sound after the breath ceases; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays. The imagination is extremely quick and agile; but the passions are slow and restive: For which reason, when any object is presented, that affords a variety of views to the one, and emotions to the other; tho' the fancy may change its views with great celerity; each stroke will not produce a clear and distinct note of passion, but the one passion will always be mixt and confounded with the other.

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Section IX. One of my favorite Humean texts; both striking and insightful.

Thomism and ID II

Ed Feser recently criticized intelligent design theory (ID) in a post at his blog; VJ Torley responded at "Uncommon Descent". In the process he reiterates a number of the standard confusions ID theorists make when they talk about Thomism; I'm short on time, but a few hurried points.

(1) Torley says that ID is compatible with the view "that living organisms have built-in ends, and that their biological functions are inherent to them." But he goes on to say:

The point that Professor Dembski was making in The Design Revolution was simply this: that the inherent tendencies which define living organisms and make them what they are, do not in any way explain how the first living organism came to be. To explain this occurrence, an act of external agency is required: in other words, a Designer who created the first life. Neither chance nor the laws of nature can explain the emergence of life, because they are unable to generate the functional complex specified information which characterizes life.

This means that living organisms do not have inherent ends qua living, because it is the claim that the ends that characterize life must be imposed by an act of external agency independent of the laws by which the natures organized into living organisms act. This is to say that life is an artificial form rather than a natural form; and artifical forms are accidental forms rather than substantial forms. Thus the biological functions are only inherent to an organism in the sense that shape is inherent to a sculpture, or a particular interrelationship of springs and gears and pendulum is inherent to a clock. That is, it has them; but there is nothing here that actually counts as entelechy in the way an Aristotelian would understand it.

(2) Torley seems to confuse intentio in the Fifth Way with 'aboutness' and claims that the Fifth Way suggests that laws of nature are 'prescriptive' rather than just 'descriptive'. But this is not at all right. Intentio in the Fifth Way means an order or disposition or orientation to something; the arrow is given an (extrinsic) intentio to a target by an archer, for instance. This does not mean that the arrow is given any 'aboutness'; the arrow is not about the target, it simply is disposed to have one effect (hitting the target) rather than some other effect. On a Thomistic view some intentio is necessary for there to be any causation at all. 'Laws' of nature are neither 'descriptive' nor 'prescriptive'; they aren't even properly laws at all. They are merely a metaphor for talking about order. On a Thomistic view, moreover, God gives intentio not merely extrinsically, but intrinsically: the disposing of natural is an act internal to the natural things. No extrinsic agency is required; to think that there is, is to confuse the natural with the preternatural.

(3) Obviously Thomas Aquinas holds that it is possible for God to do "something to natural things in a different way from that to which the course of nature is accustomed". Torley, quoting a passage in which Aquinas discusses this, says that these acts sound like the acts of an artificer to him. These acts are called miracles. It is precisely the point, which Torley does not see, that the sort of conflation of ideas Torley is suggesting would, if taken seriously, commit an ID theorist to claiming that ID is the scientific study of miracles, and that its central thesis is that many biological systems were the results of divine miracles. (And Torley surely cannot have failed to realize that this passage was about miracles, because the very next sentence in the book, the first sentence of the next chapter, is " Things that are at times divinely accomplished, apart from the generally established order in things, are customarily called miracles.") If ID wants to pretend to be a 'big tent' and a theory of natural science, it cannot read Aquinas here as positing anything like the same sort of intervention it posits; if this passage shows that a Thomist should be sympathetic to ID, it can only do so on the assumption that ID forfeits its claim to be doing anything other than claiming the occurrence of divine miracles. The only other option here is that any resemblance is purely superficial, and that the passage does not do what Torley claims.

(4) Throughout Torley continues to treat the analogy between art and nature as if it meant that there was no fundamental difference between the two [e.g., in how the quotations from Aquinas are used]. It is precisely this conflation that makes it impossible for there to be any real and lasting rapprochement between Thomism and ID.

(5) The ID advocates have repeatedly made the claim that ID is more accessible than Thomism. This may be true; as I said before, since it conflates everything with everything else there's less to keep track of. But to claim, as Torley does, that ID presents "an argument which is evident to most people and that practically anyone can grasp, even if their philosophical background is very limited" is blatantly false. Most people cannot follow the mathematical ideas Dembski with barely any explanation throws left and right in, say, No Free Lunch; even allowing that Dembski's argument is flawless, it's not an argument "evident to most people". What is evident to most people, due to their religious beliefs, is that things were created by God, and what most people simply assume, given what little bits and pieces they take away from ID explanations of the arguments, is that this is what ID theorists are really arguing for, even if not precisely under that description. The ease of acceptance is not based on any ease of understanding; most people simply do not understand the details of ID arguments (and surely any that do could put the same mental effort into understanding metaphysical arguments). The ease of acceptance is the ease of hitchhiking: they don't see any distinction between what ID describes and what their religion describes, and so ID gets past any suspicions they might otherwise have by blending in. It also fits with a number of metaphors and analogies that have come to be common in our society. This is a pretty standard sort of thing (e.g., most physicalists are physicalists not because they can follow any of the sophisticated physicalist arguments but because of a hodgepodge of associations and analogies), and so doesn't itself suggest any problems of ID. But the explanation for acceptance of ID is due to psychological association and sociological influence, not rational assessment.

Back

Well, I'm back from the workshop. I felt rather too tired to be thinking at my best most of the time, but it was still great fun. It's a bit, interesting, though, to think of what it says about our Era of a Hundred Myriad schools. What you had in the workshop was quite a selection of very intelligent people working very hard to present arguments to people who, by and large, did not and could not be expected to agree with the suppositions on which the arguments were based. In history of philosophy one would handle this by going back to the basics: HoP is evidence-based, and therefore you'd go back to the textual and historical evidence and work from there. It doesn't provide a full remedy for fragmentation, but it gives a clear shared beginning-point. But philosophy of religion, like a great many other areas of philosophy, starts in medias res; thus no one has anything in common except overlapping reading lists and related rhetorical methods of presentation. Good work gets done, but without some shared vector of progress it's difficult to see how most of it can avoid falling into the void. The workshop approach works fairly well to make it worthwhile in the short term -- people share ideas in progress, argue a bit about them, and go away with a bit more of an idea how to refine both ideas and arguments. If nothing else, people have a bit of fun thinking things through, and learn where they need to argue a bit more carefully. But it does leave one wondering, at least, it leaves me wondering as an outsider, if perhaps the field is entirely managing to overcome the grinding action of the sea, breaking it up into smaller and smaller bits whose connection to other bits is just that those other bits are in the vicinity.

Earth Transcended

Someone came here searching for the phrase "Superata tellus sidera donut", which is a typo I found to be somewhat funny. That's certainly a baked good you won't find at Krispy Kreme or Tim Horton's. I talk about the actual phrase, from the last poem of Book IV of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, here.

I will be off in San Antonio tomorrow and Saturday as I attend the Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion workshop at UTSA, so there will probably be no posts until Sunday.

Philosophy and the Humanities

Jason Stanley has an article at Inside Higher Ed called, "The Crisis of Philosophy," about the estrangement between philosophy and the other humanities. There's an interesting discussion of it at "Feminist Philosophers", where I left a comment; but I decided I wanted the comment over here as well.

I’m skeptical, I suppose, of the idea that philosophy as we now know it has ever been a natural fit to the humanities. Academic philosophy of the sort with which are familiar (whether analytic or not) came out of a reaction against the development of psychology departments; the psychologists were the people who held that mind should be studied experimentally, and philosophy departments, as stand-alone departments, grew up in response in places where it was assumed that this was not a suitable way to study the human mind. (This in fact, is the explanation for an otherwise curious feature of most philosophy from the early twentieth century to the present, namely that so much of it concerns epistemology, language, and philosophy of mind. Through most of the nineteenth century it had seemed that moral philosophy was absolutely and unassailably the dominant philosophical interest; even the debates in philosophy of science between Mill and Whewell were minor side-disputes in a larger skirmish over utilitarianism.) And since colleges began developing stand-alone philosophy departments, philosophy has gone its own way, usually interacting more with mathematics and psychology than with other disciplines in the humanities; it seems to me that at least a plausible case can be made that if philosophy has become estranged from the humanities, it has estranged itself by paying relatively little attention to topics of importance in other humanities disciplines. (One can sort-of imagine an alternate-dimension academic philosophy that would fit into the humanities well — it would be an academic philosophy where aesthetics, philosophy of history, and political philosophy are clearly the primary philosophical interests in the field, where Collingwood is read more widely than Russell and early modern classes focus on theories of taste rather than disputes over dualism and on Hume’s essays rather than the Treatise or the ECHU. That would be a very different academia.)

Gilman on the Problem of Evil

A Common Inference
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep;
Heavy with flowers; full of life asleep;
Thrilling with insect voices; thick with stars;
No cloud between the dewdrops and red Mars;
The small earth whirling softly on her way,
The moonbeams and the waterfalls at play;
A million million worlds that move in peace,
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves, and store of millet seeds.
They sleep beneath the sod
And trust in God.

A day: all glorious, royal, blazing bright;
Heavy with flowers; full of life and light;
Great fields of corn and sunshine; courteous trees;
Snow-sainted mountains; earth-embracing seas;
Wide golden deserts; slender silver streams;
Clear rainbows where the tossing fountain gleams;
And everywhere, in happiness and peace,
A million forms of life that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, crushed by passing tread,
Hath scarce enough alive to mourn the dead!
They shriek beneath the sod,
"There is no God!"