Friday, October 30, 2020

On Medium: Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation

This article is about science's promethean ethos and the question of what the world must be like, ontologically speaking, to make atheism coherent.

15 comments:

  1. Thoughtful essay.

    Science's restless search for explanations underlying explanations reminds me of the stubborn old woman who insists that the world rests on the back of a turtle. If you ask her, rhetorically, what then does the turtle rest upon, she will reply that, obviously, it rests on another turtle. If you keep pressing her, eventually she'll throw up her hands to exclaim: "Don't you get it? It's turtles all the way down!" The only evident rebuttle to this infinite regress is to tell her that the world really rests on nothing. In other words: there are no real explanations, just stories -- turtles -- we create to to fill the void.

    If 'God' is the explanation behind all explanations, the cause behind all prior causes, then God could only be the law of causation itself, or the principle of sufficient reason. Only causation is without cause. Only reason needs no prior reasons to justify its existence.

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    1. "Only causation is without cause. Only reason needs no prior reasons to justify its existence".

      I agree with your statement. But it doesn't follow from it that in the empirical realm, in theory at least, we can't infinitely extend a causal chain. Cassirer makes this point in "Determinism and indeterminism in modern physics".

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    2. It's a pretty deep problem, I think. Once we accept something like that answer to the old woman, that we're offering stories more than adequate theories, as in the second and third options in the article's last section, we're poised to see the normative, Luciferian motivation behind the scientist's brand of story-telling. It strikes me that that could be the ultimate source of the endlessness of naturalistic explanations--not the nature of reality in any metaphysical sense, but the hubristic, parasitic or predatory character of scientists, engineers, consumers, and modern folk in general.

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    3. I think an infinite series of events in a "causal chain" would be like the theory of everything that posits an absolute, self-explanatory foundation. In both cases, the explanations wouldn't be as rational as we'd ordinarily think. The causal power of events in an infinite series would be drained, as it were, by the lack of foundations.

      We intuit that one thing causally explains another, on the assumption that there's some end to the causality. My head, at least, starts to spin when I entertain the thought that there's no first cause. The notion of causality itself becomes suspect if the series of events in question is assumed to be infinite and without foundation. That kind of world becomes absurd and we should switch to thinking of causal explanations as useful fictions that preserve our sanity, at least, as opposed to being rationally adequate to the magnitude of the events.

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    4. You know, for me it's the opposite. I couldn't wrap my mind around a 'first cause'. I would immediately ask, well, how did it came to be.

      I think of causality as the necessary relation between two states of matter (in the broadest possible term), when one state necessarily produces another, and so ad infinitum.

      I know it sounds crazy when you really think about it, but I think the notions of a first cause or of a creatio ex-nihilo are even crazier! To me, it makes more sense when we don't presuppose an absolute beginning nor an absolute end, just changes in the 'substance'.

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    5. I wasn't trying to refute the idea of an endless causal series; it was just a fun (and somewhat humbling analogy).

      The idea of a first cause, though incoherent, is I believe based on human psychological blind spots. On the one hand, we evolved on this planet where, due to gravity, every moving object requires a constant supply of energy to remain in motion. Combine this terrestrial prejudice with the fact that, for practical purposes, humans tend to think in terms of absolute motion so, when something is not moving in relation to us, we say it is at rest. Of course, neither of these assumptions are true. Objects moving at a given velocity will continue at that velocity forever unless acted upon by a countvailing force. Furthermore, motion is a relativistic quantity. In reality, every speck of matter is in motion at all times -- if it seems to be at rest to us, that's only because we're also moving at its precise velocity. Once it's accepted that energy, of which motion is just a manifestation, is an inherent property of matter & in fact could not exist seperately from it, then the idea of a first mover is exposed as not only incoherent, but unnecessary.

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    6. Kevin, both options seem crazy to me. It's like the question of whether we're the only intelligent life in the universe: either way has mind-blowing implications.

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    7. Sybok, I agree that that kind of ultimate explanation is supposed to be intuitive, which means it calls upon our evolutionary prejudgments. The more technical, scientific ways of explaining nature are more about measurement, prediction, and control than understanding. As Kant said, we understand by projecting the human form of mentality onto stimuli. The scientific or at least pragmatic question is whether we should be looking or expecting to understand anything other than ourselves.

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    8. That's a good question; but it already presupposes that there is something outside of ourselves to be understood. But is there?

      Take matter for instance: what is it? We can assign predicates to it like 'extension' and 'mass', but in doing so we're only playing a word game. So even the most solid, least abstract thing supposedly 'out there' amounts to just another idea in our minds -- some Aristotelian essence that we attach predicates to. I could just as easily expound upon the three hypostases of the Godhead as I could on the three phases of matter and make just as much sense doing it. True, I can experience matter as well as think about it; but a mystic can experience the Godhead in a non-conceptual way as well. In both cases, we just have a human mind trying to make sense of its nonrational experiences. So is matter more real than God? Both could be nothing more than projections of the human mind -- erroneous conclusions arrived at from insufficient data or faulty premises.

      What if the only thing to understand is ourselves, via our mental projections and experiences? Even if there were an external, inhuman world out there, our very humanity would prevent us from knowing anything about it. An external world beyond our comprehension seems no more credible to me than some supernatural reality.

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    9. "but a mystic can experience the Godhead in a non-conceptual way as well"

      Which type of 'experience' are you referring to here? I think a Subject of Knowledge is presupposed whenever we speak about external objects, so the experience we have of matter in its variety of manifestations is inseparable from our mental and sensibility faculties (be they natural or artificially enhanced).

      But we don't have 'experience' of any supernatural being. If someone claims he has such experience, he or she is either lying or mentally ill.

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    10. Sybok, the question for me here is what kind of truth we're dealing with when it comes to our metaphysical stories. I took a stab at this in articles like "Reason, Attitude, and Ultimate Reality," "Life as a Dream: The Secular Myth of Objective Truth," "The Incoherence of Naturalism," and "The Strangeness of Ultimate Truth."

      The grand, metaphysical or religious explanations aren't the kinds of things that could be literally true, because they're all-encompassing. They're stories and should be judged on aesthetic and pragmatic grounds.

      However we describe the rest of the world, though, that world is independent of our conscious minds in various ways, which is why paranormal phenomena are dubious or at least rare. What may matter more than the truth-status of these absolute answers is our attitude towards the nonhuman world. Should we surrender to it or hubristically resist it? That's an existential, ethical question rather than an empirical one.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2017/12/reason-attitude-and-ultimate-reality.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2017/03/life-as-dream-secular-myth-of-objective.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/08/the-incoherence-of-naturalism.html

      https://medium.com/@benjamincain8/the-strangeness-of-ultimate-truth-343b59fce8ab?source=friends_link&sk=35f2c3c0c63cfb9562fb279cd2216a1a

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    11. Ben, I needed to be reminded that you reject theism on aesthetic grounds; not simply because its irrational (which would be my reason for repudiating it). I'll gladly concede that cosmicism is a far more satisfying narrative than theism. Lovecraft beats the Bible hands down.

      I didn't mean to suggest the world isn't independent of our minds; though I understand why it sounded that way. Rather, I was stating a variation of the Positivist criticism of concepts that have no basis in empirical fact (like 'God'). Basically, I'm saying that a truly inhuman reality, if it in fact exists, is still effectively non-existent as far as we are concerned. If humans were fish, that cold, inhuman universe would be like the Kalahari desert -- but even more alien. Space, time, matter, & even logic itself may very well be mere constructs in our brains that bare no direct relationships to the world outside of our skulls; but even if that's "true", we could never know it. Whatever world exists on the outside would need to be so distorted by our nervous system and conceptual schemes that we'd be effectively as cut off from it as a brain floating in a vat.

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    12. The reasons to reject exoteric theism are overdetermined. I reject these religions for being irrational too. My first article on religion here, "Theism: Does its Irrationality Matter?" goes through the standard problems with religion, showing that theism is irrational, and then I raise the deeper, existential question whether that irrationality is decisive, because no worldview is perfectly rational, including secular ones. In particular, our values, ideals, desires, and goals aren't strictly rational, at least not our most fundamental ones. (The others may be instrumentally rational or efficient.)

      Your Kantian point about our alienation from noumena or from the ultimate nature of things is consistent with the last two possibilities I consider in the article's last section. But even if we can't understand things at that level, because the attempt is paradoxical (humanizing the inhuman), we can suspect that that's our predicament, which means we can know negatively that such explanations are just fictions and that reality is alien and inhuman. This is the point of negative theology and of cosmicism.

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  2. Kevin, I was talking abut non-conceptual experience, but I don't limit that to the five senses. Just as sensory experience bypasses the intellect, so does the mystical experience. And just as science is an attempt to rationalize sense experience, so religion is -- in part -- an attempt to rationalize mystical experience. Now I personally reject theism as a rational explanation for such experiences because of its incoherence; but that doesn't mean I'm ready to dismiss them as illusory or inherently beyond rational understanding. I really do believe there is a rational explanation for everything, including mysticism. Whether such explanations are 'true' is a matter of semantics that I no longer trouble myself with.

    While some mystics may be mentally ill, I wouldn't say there is any essential connection between mysticism and mental illness. It all depends on how the mystic integrates his experiences into his life. If he fails, then you have mental illness. But if he succeeds, you have things like art, philosophy, and religion.

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    1. "Whatever world exists on the outside would need to be so distorted by our nervous system and conceptual schemes that we'd be effectively as cut off from it as a brain floating in a vat"

      "I really do believe there is a rational explanation for everything, including mysticism. Whether such explanations are 'true' is a matter of semantics that I no longer trouble myself with"

      With these ideas I think I understand your point more clearly now. The fact that reason and the conditions for objectivity come from a Subject of Knowledge (as idealist refer to that source, I don't particularly like that expression because I think it prompts confusion) doesn't mean that reason and objectivity become any less valid, even when we need to interpret such phenomena as mysticism.

      Maybe some of the great mystics and philosophers were in fact mentally ill (Socrates said he heard voices all his life), who knows?

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