a brainy argument against determinism (and also materialism)

For some beach reading, I picked up a two-dollar paperback survey of metaphysics by William Hasker, part of the IVP series Contours of Christian Philosophy. My goal was pure curiosity: I wanted to see what topics the author included under this heading. I will probably blog something in dialogue with this book again in the near future. But, for now, it includes an argument against determinism (and, by extension, against materialism) worthy of reproduction against future forgetting. From pages 47-48, italics rendered as in the text:

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"It is clear . . . that rational thinking must be guided by rational insight in the light or principles of sound reasoning. That is to say, one must "see," rationally, that the conclusion is justified by the evidence--and one is helped to see this by principles of reasoning, such as the laws of inductive and deductive logic and the like. Furthermore, and this point is crucial, one accepts the conclusion because one recognizes that it is justified by the evidence. It is this recognition which brings about the acceptance.

"Now let us suppose that all human thinking is physically determined in the following sense: (1) Every thought or belief accepted by a person is a result of that person's brain being in a corresponding state. (2) We assume, provisionally, that the physical indeterminacy which exists at the quantum level makes no perceptible difference in the overall functioning of the brain. So that (3) every brain state, and therefore every thought and belief of the person, is fully determined by the physical functioning of the brain in accordance with the deterministic laws of physics.

"Is it not evident, on this supposition, that rational thinking is an impossibility? It cannot be true, on this assumption, that anyone's thinking is guided by rational insight; rather, it is guided entirely by the physical laws which govern the brain's functioning, which proceed with no regard to whether the thought processes they generate correspond to principles of sound reasoning. Occasionally, to be sure, it may happen that the thought processes generated by the physically determined functioning of the brain will arrive at a conclusion which is correct. But this, when it happens, is simply a fortunate accident--and to say that a conclusion is reached by accident is incompatible with the claim that that conclusion was reached by rational thinking .Therefore, if all human thought is physically determined, then no one ever thinks rationally.

"Nor is the situation changed if we modify our assumptions (and our definitions of "physically determined") so as to allow that sometimes random, physically undetermined events within the brain have a perceptible effect, so that a different conclusion is reached than would have been the case without the random event. For such a random event is no more responsible to rational insight than was the physically determined brain process of the previous model. What is needed for rationality is not simply an injection of randomness into the physically deterministic brain functioning, but rather an infusion of rational insight as a factor which guides and directs the thought processes. But to accept this is to give up physical determinism altogether. And so our conclusion: If physical determinism is true, no one ever thinks rationally."

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The summary of the above is simply this: that a car, acting according to its own structure, cannot take you where you want to go. Even should it, somehow and by your good fortune, deliver you safely to a desired address, the result says nothing about the cause. Rational insight, one's reason, and in this metaphor the driver, must come from elsewhere.

What this means for emergence, I'm not wholly sure. Emergence theorist assert that the driver emerges from the complex and perhaps ineffable workings of the machinery, subject as it is to physical laws. If that is the case, doesn't this but shift the problem? In that case, the emergent property becomes our metaphorical car, and we are left asking how it knows where to go.

Some time ago, I wrote a post akin to this one called "Plantinga Pulls a Sampson." In it, Alvin Plantinga invokes natural selection, whereas William Hasker, who wrote the above, was addressing the debate between free will and determinism.

As I consider both posts, I can begin to see my own outline. I see a skepticism of reductive materialism, scientism, and "nothing but" physics--no surprise there. What is embraced is more interesting: a qualified dualism:

• the mind as not the same as the brain but connected, perhaps as an emergent property
• the self as a (qualified) free agent [not theologically free, but naturally so]
• a humanity that, though subject to material laws, transcends them
• reason/ethical judgment, the derivation of which could be the community or someplace altogether mysterious in origin

Note: this post does not well address the point of the quotation itself which is epistemology, which is about determining what is true.

What Jody is After

So jumping right in for the initiated: What is Jody after? What is his point? (And i may have to lump my cousin into it as well.)

Examining his statements carefully, here's my restatement. He'll have to tell me if I'm off the mark or not.

Jody cares because he wants liturgy to matter.

He says that the liturgy matters because we are material beings who worship. Worship requires a grammar because it communicates meaning. This grammar is not meaningless, but communicates the values of its culture--the church, the family of God. The church is the family that God has called into being, he says, and it is the subsequent sacrament of the first sacrament, Christ.

This grammar isn’t concerned with what things are. It is a passive sentence that tells the story of an active God. It is concerned with what things are for. In the performance of its grammar the community confesses God’s acts and interprets what they mean to itself. Misconfessing this at the very least spoils the message and at most is blasphemous!

The words and prayers of the church are traditions that affect real change. Blessing is a way the grammar sets something apart to be what it is for. Ordination is a way the grammar sets someone apart to play a role in the corporate performance. And there is also a reordering of the thing's identity, where identity is ontologically dependent upon use.

In baptism and ordination, this ontological change is called an indelible mark, which changes the individual to reorient them toward Christ. It doesn't mean they are super-people, but it is a testimony to the activity of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit and the incarnation make all of this more than a (Wittgensteinian) parlor game. The incarnation, because matter is rightfully part of the divine plan. It is useful and necessary. The Spirit, because it affects creation of world and word and so gives direction and structure to the community itself. (This last paragraph is a muddled mess of theological gobbledygook.)

At this point, Jody gestures toward "the power of language to reorient and redefine." We're both boxing at Wittgenstein's speech-acts now.

At any rate, I think he’s hearing me say that liturgy does not matter. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the liturgy is a family custom, and like all family customs, it occasionally does things that are a little crazy--but that’s okay.

I'll add more to this post--this is just half-written. It is a draft to get something out there.

GEB 1: stumble trip

Douglas R. Hofstadter, now a professor of cognitive and computer science at Indiana University, wrote Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in the late seventies. Today, it is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning book and something of a cult classic. Reading it gains one admission to a worldwide fraternal order. I hadn't known that. What I did know was that it asks questions about the self, about what “I” means, and about the origin of meaning and thought—and that it suggests answers. “In a word,” write Douglas R. Hofstadter, “GEB [Goedel, Escher, Bach] is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.”

epistemology; Douglas R. Hofstadter; materialism; subjectivity

Plantinga pulls a Samson

Alvin Plantinga throws out a nearly adorable argument against naturalism, or reductionism, in the July/August 2008 issue of Books & Culture. It is quite a straightforward move, almost syllogistic, and it goes like this: "Naturalists say that science proves their position, and in particular evolution. Plantinga disagrees. “Evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows,” he writes. “One can’t rationally be an evolutionary naturalist.” Now why does he say this?

Here’s the critique: if the mind has arrived by means of evolutionary processes, forces conditioned by history and the larger cosmological context, then how do we know that what it thinks is true is true? Plantinga quotes Darwin:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[1]

He goes on to say that for the naturalist, beliefs, along with other mental states, are caused by neurophysiology. And evolution says that this equipment has been adapted, and is still adaptive for the purpose of genetic reproduction. I like his quote from Francis Crick, “Our highly developed brains . . . were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents” (from The Astonishing Hypothesis). Natural selection doesn’t care about truth, it cares about sex, and if false beliefs mean more sex, then that is fine.

Plantinga, with the help of a math buddy, asks, then, what is the chance that any one proposition is true? Out of one hundred beliefs, how many will be false and how many will be true. Answer: not even a handful, and there’s no way to tell one way or the other.

Evolutionary naturalism, then, is self-refuting. Or, as he says, “One who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it.” What this means is that evolution spoils naturalism of its epistemological power. The reductionist is the one in danger of falling into an unholy skepticism (although Plantinga points out that Aristotle, the Stoics, and Hegel managed to be atheists without simultaneously embracing naturalism.) And what about the Christian? Well, is there any need to explain it? Get thee, saint, to Augustine and read his de Magistro, and get thee to the imago Dei, the doctrine of the logos, of creation, and of general revelation.

POSTSCRIPT: August 2019

Discussing the hypothesis of emergence, author Russell Howell writes, "This approach has been debated extensively. For example, Alvin Plantinga's celebrated essay, "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism"[2] claims that rationality is very unlikely a quality produced by survivability. Plantinga's approach, as he acknowledges, is similar to that found in C. S. Lewis's Miracles. (Lewis's argument, incidentally, was recently enhanced by Victor Reppert in his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.) The thrust of their thinking here is that you cannot get (or are very unlikely to get) rationality out of a causally closed system that works solely on the basis of blind chance physical interactions operating in accordance with a "survival of the fittest" paradigm.[3] (cf Pattern 83: Opening a Closed Circle.)

[1] Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." ~ Albert Einstein

[2] This essay has appeared in various forms. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 12. Fruitful research can be made in to the Naturalism debate between C. S. Lewis and G. E. M. Anscombe. Considered along a timeline, Plantinga's argument is either a repetition of or a development of the Argument from Reason. See Lewis's Miracles at http://stefangillies.wordpress.com/c-s-lewis-2/

[3] Russell W. Howell "Does Mathematical Beauty Pose problems for Naturalism?" Christian Scholar's Review 35:4 (Summer 2006): 498-499. Also Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001). Howell: "Any theory that would combine evolutionary explanations for rationality with naturalism "would still run up against the arguments of Mark Steiner . . . Strictly speaking, Steiner's argument attempts to refute "non-anthropocentrism" rather than naturalism. But if Steiner is correct, the naturalist should not take comfort. For any form of naturalism, Steiner muses, is ipso facto non-anthropocentric, n that it would disallow a privileged status for humans in the scope of the universe. If, as Steiner argues, the success of mathematics can be shown to put humans in some sort of privileged position, then naturalism has some problems to sort out. . . . mathematicians and scientist . . . rely on human notions of beauty and symmetry in the development of their theories. In fact, such activity has been a longstanding and consistent strategy" (500).