Clash of Worldviews: Free Will Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome to another edition of Clash of Worldviews, the show in which our guests cry out philosophical ideas in the wilderness. We’re joined this evening by biologist and determinist, Professor Sam Harrison Coyney, who believes free will is an illusion. Arguing against his position is Adam Garnett, noted liberal secular humanist and believer in the existence of human freedom. Professor Coyney, shall we begin with you? Tell us why you don’t think people are free.

COYNEY: Well, it’s obvious to those who understand the science. We think we’re free because we’re ignorant of all the causes of our actions that precede our apparent choices. Our so-called choices are forced on us by the prior physical state of the universe, and if you rewound the cosmic tape, as it were, we’d repeat exactly what nature forces us to do the first time. We’d have no choice in the matter. So the freedom to do other than what the laws of physics and the physical initial conditions compel us to do is the impossible miracle of one natural being’s act of negating all of physical reality. No one’s that powerful or transcendent. We’re stuck in nature, with no immaterial spirit inside us, so we’re forced to do what the universe causes us to do.

MODERATOR: Seems clear enough, Adam, no?

ADAM: No, I’m not free to destroy the universe, but I’m free to control myself a little. That’s because I have a brain. A rock does whatever the universe tells it to, because it can’t think about it and mull the options. Its weight will force it down a hill because it can’t do anything about gravity. But I can think about jumping even though gravity’s telling me to stay put. Also, people thought hard about how to fly and they built airplanes, so now we can go even further against that force of nature. Freedom comes from the brain, because the brain controls the rest of the body. A rock has no brain, so it’s not free.

COYNEY: No, no, no, Adam, you’re missing the point. You may think you’re free when you learn how nature works and exploit that knowledge in your behaviour, but your ability to learn is likewise the result of evolutionary processes which derive ultimately from chemical and physical regularities. The brain is blind to all of those prior causes, so it thinks the only relevant causes of its actions are those it seems to control, namely the mental ones such as its conscious thoughts and feelings. But mental states are themselves forced upon us by our past and by the environment which is governed by natural laws.

ADAM: I thought you said the lack of free will is obvious to those who understand the science.

COYNEY: Yes, that’s exactly what I said.

ADAM: So why are you talking about natural laws?

COYNEY: When you were younger, Adam, didn’t you sit in a science classroom and hear about how scientists discovered the laws that govern the universe?

ADAM: I did, but didn’t you once find yourself in an English class where you might have learned how a metaphor can become outdated? 

The Miracle of Modern Conservatism

It’s a miracle that conservatism survived in the West after the rise of modern free societies. To see why, reflect on the difference between two kinds of conservatives, the preservationist and the reactionary. The preservationist seeks to maintain the status quo as the culmination of favourable developments of certain traditions. For example, a preservationist such as this one here could approve of the rule of law, the separation of political powers, and the right to liberty as secular values that stem from ancient Greek and Roman innovations. By contrast, the reactionary draws a red line between two historical periods and calls for a reversion. Typically, the reactionary opposes the revolutions that began with the European Renaissance and that were largely fulfilled in the more recent civil rights movements. Thus, unlike the preservationist, the reactionary doesn’t approve of just any tradition in the names of social stability and continuity, but explicitly condemns modern culture.

Preservationist conservatism turns “tradition” into a weasel word and thus should be opposed merely by radicals who will accept a social order only if its origin is arbitrary and chaotic. Everyone else is “conservative” in the sense that we don’t think our beliefs and practices fall from the sky. We all demonstrate this when we complain about some governmental dysfunction, but are loath to actually change our social system. As flawed as the system may be, most people assume there are no viable alternatives and any establishment is better than none. Innate fear of the unknown makes all but the most adventurous and naively youthful among us conservative about the need to avoid pandemonium.

For just that reason, preservationist “conservatism” is uninteresting, since it’s irrelevant to our prominent social and political divisions. Indeed, by labeling the roots of Western secularism “traditions,” from the rise of democracy and reason-based ethics in ancient Greece, to the rule of law in the Roman Republic (which contrasted with the later arbitrary power of the emperors), to the rediscovery of those secular possibilities in the West’s period of modernization, the core principles of liberalism end up being consistent with this so-called conservatism. After all, liberalism is the relatively recent realization that we could break from the autocratic norm of human history that naturally also prevails more generally in social animal behaviour.

That break occurred in early modern Europe primarily when the rediscovery of North America fired the European imagination with thoughts of radical change and when mercantilism and democracy replaced the feudal order. But there were forerunners to this transition in ancient Greece when rationalists worked out esoteric philosophies such as Plato’s, which offered intellectuals respite from the prejudices of the masses. By exploring their rational potential, Hellenic philosophers paved the way for the Enlightenment principle that the individual’s right to liberty is based on everyone’s capacity for rational self-control. Likewise, in ancient Rome, when pragmatists confronted a version of the global practice of tyranny in the rule of the Etruscan kings of the city of Rome, and worked out a proto-American form of government that used checks and balances and the rule of law to prevent natural forms of corruption, this was a radical means of protecting and empowering the majority, which foreshadowed the liberal’s ideal of social equality.  

Thus, by speaking of any status quo as the completion of a certain tradition, including the Western tradition that ushered in modernity and its corresponding liberalism, the preservationist uses a rhetorical trick to attempt to marginalize her opponents. By glossing periods of historical progress as continuations of some culture, the preservationist would turn moderate liberals into inadvertent traditionalists so that the ideological options would include only preservationists (conservatives) and radical outsiders and anarchists. 

The Wistful Quest for Honour

As in The Walking Dead, the protagonists in the wonderful postapocalyptic movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, wrestle with the question of whether to hold on to ethical principles and fight for something greater than themselves or to regress along with the world and act as narrow-minded animals. A quotation at the end of Mad Max reads, “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.” The heroes search, then, for honour despite the futility of that effort. Their honour is at best tragic, although perhaps the world’s indifference to our struggles is a precondition of moral value. There would be a worse sort of absurdity to the lack of impediments in heaven, since in that deathly state of bliss there would be no need for improvements nor any desire at all since a desire entails a lack of fulfillment.

In our hypermodern culture, though, honour itself is outmoded.

What is Honour?

Honour isn’t just about moral reputation or respect for someone’s high moral standing; it’s not just a matter of performing deeds of renown. An honourable person has integrity and so honour is opposed to hypocrisy. This means that an honourable person has no inner conflict, so that he doesn’t wear different faces, as it were, in different companies. He’s discovered his deepest self and honours that self in his actions and beliefs, regardless of the circumstances. So honour is a virtue, not just a matter of obeying moral laws.

Still, honour is a masculine preoccupation, which is odd because the interest in morality is universal. Moreover, honour is a mainstay of tribal societies as opposed to those ruled by law. A society that can’t afford the governmental institutions to guarantee a monopoly on the use of force within its borders relies on a code of honour so that its members don’t descend into anarchy when an opportunity arises to take advantage of each other. Desert tribespeople, for example, feel honour-bound to shelter travellers, and lords of medieval Europe would back up their word by pledging their estates “on their honour.” These prescriptions, that strangers in need should be assisted and that oaths should be kept are implicit rather than codified, because there’s no institution that could enforce such prescriptions in pre-industrialized societies. Honour works by an appeal to prestige that depends on how the rest of a population feels about each of its members. If you have honour, you enjoy society’s goodwill towards you, if not necessarily any protection by an all-powerful government. If you’ve committed some dishonor and your shameful act is discovered, you’ll be shunned, at a minimum, rather than automatically punished in some regulated fashion.

I’d submit, then, that honour arose prehistorically as a modification of the power dynamics that stabilize groups of social animals. Alpha wolves are more respected than betas in their packs, but that respect is little more than fear, because wolves lack the self-control to be interested in questions of what they should do as opposed to what they must do. Human societies are still defined by their dominance hierarchies, and there’s a sense of “honour” that captures the animalistic origin of this only-slightly-more-sophisticated form of social interaction. After all, honour can apply to rank rather than merit, so that an unscrupulous aristocrat, for example, can have more honour than a Christ-like peasant, because the aristocrat has access to more privileges in his society. The “respect” shown to such a high-ranking individual is akin to both fear and jealousy, whereas that shown on moral grounds is a kind of awe that something as virtually unnatural as morality could break into dismal nature. When the morally-compromised masses bow before a monk who always obeys a stringent moral code rather than succumbing to the natural course forced on creatures that lack autonomy, their reverence indicates that they recognize that the monk stands apart from nature and has even miraculously reversed its flow, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

In any case, the hypothesis is that moral hierarchies function like dominance ones or crude, power-based pecking orders, in that they stabilize a social group by dividing it into classes whose members feel obligated to maintain their place rather than upset the social order. When animals first became people, they acquired self-control through language, reason, introversion (self-reflection), curiosity, and creativity, and so they sought to set themselves apart from the “lower” animals, by making their societies meritorious rather than necessary or naturally compelled. Beta animals rally to their alphas for protection from the elements, and fear of the alpha’s wrath is the mechanism that solidifies their social arrangement. Again, human groups are still largely shaped by the same mechanism, but we’ve supplemented it with another hierarchy befitting our freedom and the emergent choice we face, of what we ought to do now that we needn’t necessarily do anything (because we have sufficient control over our actions). In the interim between animalistic dominance hierarchies and lawful civilizations, we used morality and the mechanisms of ostracism and fame to maintain a social order. 

Clash of Worldviews: God and the Devil

MODERATOR: Welcome, viewers, to an astounding edition of our philosophical show, Clash of Worldviews. This evening, we’re graced by the voices of God and the devil themselves. I say “the voices,” because those personages aren’t physically present in the studio—and perhaps we should begin the discussion by asking why they chose not to be more fully here with us. God, would you care to take that one on?

GOD: You’re asking why we’re not there with you in the confines of your studio? It’s too cramped for my taste.

DEVIL: You see how he jokes? Such a kidder is the devil’s creator. But to address your question, we’re not there with you because we’re not natural beings, so our full, essential selves don’t belong within those paltry dimensions. To attempt to manifest in your studio would entail the undoing of your universe; your solar system would dissolve like a bad dream. Also, and speaking just for me now, I’m rather busy at the moment reengineering several galaxies at once—or “corrupting” them, as the moralists would have it; that is, I’m multitasking. As for God, who can say what else he’s up to? Crying in his beer would be my guess. Anyway, you’ll have to settle for just our voices.

MODERATOR: Ah, well, fair enough. I wonder what to discuss next: the choices are endless, I suppose. Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I mean, I’m the envy of all interviewers.

DEVIL: Isn’t that just like a human? Confronted by infinite, unhuman powers and he’s got to talk about himself. You’ve got your exalted creator on the line and you can’t help remarking what a big man you are, how you’re the envy of your peers. Ah, the demonic pride you find nestling in the genetic code of all natural creatures: survive at all costs, even though to God your entire cosmos is an unfinished rough draft written on a scrunched-up, coffee-stained sheet of paper he’s since tossed into a waste bin.

GOD: You and the other demiurges created their cosmos, not I.

DEVIL: Yeah, but we were your agents at the time.

MODERATOR: Uh, I suppose we should turn next to clarifying, then, exactly who you two are. Which god and which devil, for example? 

GOD: Yes, that is a sticky wicket. You should think of me as the fellow at the center of all Being…

DEVIL: [to the moderator] Is that all you’re going to get out of him? What a gyp! I could enlighten you, but you may not like what you find: inquiry ends in light—issuing from the fires of hell.

Who is the devil? you ask. Your world’s religions are mixed up on the subject, let me tell you. Zoroaster called me the destructive mind, Angra Mainyu, creator of the daevas or demons who deceive humankind due to the demons’ ignorance or self-deception. The Gnostics identified that malign mentality with Yahweh, with the sole, tyrannical god of the priestly class of ancient Jews, identifying me with the Christ-like provider of gnosis, with the Promethean, redemptive knowledge that frees your species from its bondage to this shadow-world. Orthodox Christians side with Zoroaster and demonize all sources of subversive knowledge, so I become the evil rebel against truth, beauty, and goodness, destined to perdition along with those I corrupt.

It’s all a glorified soap opera, of course, a personification of certain natural processes. For example, the myth of the fallen angel derives from Isaiah’s remark on how the planet Venus, the brightest “morning star,” appears to be submerged by the mighty sun’s rays each morning, before it can attain the highest point in heaven. You see, your institutional religions began as hopelessly anthropocentric astrotheologies, poetic musings on the comings and goings of local planets and stars. Those musings took so many childish notions for granted that it’s very hard for those in the know to take them seriously even for the briefest moment. What can the path of one wandering planet say about God’s chief rival, even on a metaphorical level, when the universe contains trillions of other such planetary paths? Of course, your ancients thought they were at the universe’s center so that even the gods in heaven revolved around them. Again, the arrogance of humans is breathtaking. But you’re babies, after all, which is why I’ve got all your candy.

GOD: But just which sort of creature would steal candy from a baby? 

Clash of Worldviews: Sex and Love Edition

MODERATOR: Good evening, viewers, and welcome to a spicy edition of Clash of Worldviews, the financially unlikely show in which philosophical disputes take center stage. This week, we turn to questions of sex and romantic love. Is sex shameful? Is love the meaning of life? To discuss these and related matters, we’re fortunate to have with us the ebullient sexologist, Sexy Nerd Cassandra, whose podcasts and workshops promote sex positivity. Joining her is Heather Fogarty, renowned postmodern cynic who considers herself antisexual. Ladies, welcome! Heather, why don’t you get us started by explaining what on earth could be wrong with sex.

HEATHER: Thanks, Mr. Nameless Moderator. I’m amused to serve again as gadfly of the modern social order. Your question sounds rhetorical, which means you’re assuming that antisexuality, that is, the opposition to sex, is obviously wrongheaded. But if that’s so, if sex is obviously right, why don’t you share your sex life with the world by presenting our viewers with recordings of what goes on under your covers? I’m talking photographs, movies, descriptions—the works. Why keep something so wonderful a secret?

MODERATOR: I must say if I understand it correctly, your request isn’t entirely professional.

HEATHER: That’s exactly my point—which comes across despite your dithering. Sex is animalistic. It proves we’re animals. So it falsifies our delusions of grandeur, including our prejudice that by donning a power suit we become a “professional.” You and virtually everyone else find public dissection of their own sex life distasteful, because you’re embarrassed by your sex acts. You think disgust with sex is ludicrous, whereas the sex act itself is plainly asinine. Most people’s worst fear is to be caught in the act of having sex. And yet they condescend to virginal loners and to those who abhor sexuality and the body, calling them losers or omegas or mentally ill. But how can antisexuality be disordered when we’re ashamed of the norm in question? If the behavioural standard itself is dubious and must be kept private, for fear of being blackmailed by evidence of the nonsense we get up to when we’re naked and otherwise savage with our partners, how can dissent from that standard be wrong, let alone pitiful? Indeed, how can the presumption be against outsiders like me who choose not to do what most people implicitly agree is foolish, namely hump each other like the animals we think so poorly of that we routinely dine on them or hunt them for sport? Sure, many species evolve an instinct to seek shelter in the wild while copulating, because animals are vulnerable to predation when they’re in the middle of the sex act. But we can have sex behind locked doors and still be embarrassed about what sex reveals about us even long after the farcical act is accomplished.

MODERATOR: Uh, Cassandra, why don’t you jump in here?

CASSANDRA: Gladly! I’m delighted to be here. Heather, I’m fascinated by your audacious case against sex, but I must say that if you’re missing out on sex and love, your life is passing you by. These are such important parts of being human that I fear your over-analyses are only making you miserable. While it’s often our choice whether to be happy or depressed, I question your attempt to cast aspersions on something so central to our wellbeing. Even if your pessimism were to become widespread, what would you have accomplished other than to prove the aphorism that misery loves company? 

Eighth PDF Installment of RWUG

Here's the eighth eBook installment of this blog. For the other installments, click the eBook label in the Labels section or the eBook tab at the top, between Satirical News and Videos (if you're reading this on a desktop computer). Otherwise, just click here for them.

Enjoy! Or rather shudder at my discernment of the undead god's monstrous non-intentions towards our piddling species!

Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress

Here's an article of mine that went up on Scott Bakker's blog. The article's called "Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress." It's about the full implications of thinking that the naive, quasi-dualistic conception of the human mind should be eliminated in favour of thinking that only material systems exist. Here are the article's first few paragraphs:

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As scientific knowledge has advanced over the centuries, informed people have come to learn that many traditional beliefs are woefully erroneous. There are no witches, ghosts, or disease-causing demons, for example. But are cognitive scientists currently on the verge of showing also that belief in the ordinarily-defined human self is likewise due to a colossal misunderstanding, that there are no such things as meaning, purpose, consciousness, or personal self-control? Will the assumption of personhood itself one day prove as ridiculous as the presumption that some audacious individuals can make a pact with the devil?

Progress and a World of Mechanisms

According to this radical interpretation of contemporary science, everything is natural and nature consists of causal relationships between material aggregates that form systems or mechanisms. The universe is thus like an enormous machine except that it has no intelligent designer or engineer. Atoms evolve into molecules, stars into planets, and at least one planet has evolved life on its surface. But living things are really just material objects with no special properties. The only efficacious or real property in nature, very generally speaking, is causality, and thus the real question is always just what something can do, given its material structure, initial conditions, and the laws of nature. As one of the villains of The Matrix Reloaded declares, “We are slaves to causality.” Thus, instead of there being people or conscious, autonomous minds who use symbols to think about things and to achieve their goals, there are only mechanisms, which is to say forces acting on complex assemblies of material components, causing the system to behave in one way rather than another. Just as the sun acts on the Earth’s water cycle, causing oceans to evaporate and thus forming clouds that eventually rain and return the water via snowmelt runoff and groundwater flow to the oceans, the environment acts on an animal’s senses, which send signals to its brain whereupon the brain outputs a more or less naturally selected response, depending on whether the genes exercise direct or indirect control over their host. Systems interacting with systems, as dictated by natural laws and probabilities—that’s all there is, according to this interpretation of science.

How, then, do myths form that get the facts so utterly wrong? Myths in the pejorative sense form as a result of natural illusions. Omniscience isn’t given to lowly mammals. To compensate for their being thrown into the world without due preparation, as a result of the world’s dreadful godlessness, some creatures may develop the survival strategy of being excessively curious, which drives them often to err on the side not of caution but of creativity. We track not just the patterns that lead us to food or shelter, but myriad other structures on the off-chance that they’re useful. And as we evolve more intelligence than wisdom, we creatively interpret these patterns, filling the blanks in our experience with placeholder notions that indicate both our underlying ignorance and our presumptuousness. In the case of witches, for example, we mistake some hapless individual’s introversion and foreignness for some evil complicity in suffering that’s actually due merely to bad luck and to nature’s heartlessness. Given enough bumbling and sanctimony, that lack of information about a shy foreigner results in the burning of a primate for allegedly being a witch. A suitably grotesque absurdity for our monstrously undead universe.

The Irony of a Natural Afterlife

Is a natural afterlife possible? Answering this depends on what we mean by a person, since that which is traditionally supposed to survive the body’s death is the personal self, or more specifically the individual’s innermost self. Mystical traditions in the world’s religions identify that self with God, so that the afterlife is thought to be the “union” of an individual’s mind with the ultimate source of all minds. This is a euphemistic way of saying that in the afterlife we’re all destroyed as we realize that only God is real.

The Plausibility of a Natural Afterlife

In any case, most religions identify the self with a spirit, that is, an incorporeal substance. New Thought adherents attempt to explain this substance in terms of energy, vibrations or other such pseudoscientific notions, so that the self-help advice sold by leading members of that movement can appeal to a secular crowd (because that crowd has the most disposable income). If we assume the naturalistic, cognitive scientific picture of the self, though, this metaphysical dualism between mind/spirit and body looks as though it reifies higher-order thought. Reification is the concretization of something, such as treating a thought as though it were the same as that which only symbolizes it. In effect, Judaism’s ban on idolatry prohibits the reification of God, since the monotheist’s God isn’t supposed to be any particular being but the ground of all beings. Likewise, if the self is something sustained by the brain, the religious notion of the immaterial spirit is only a symbolization of that mostly hidden inner reality of consciousness flowing into particular thoughts and feelings. If we ask what the human brain does that distinguishes us from other species, the answer is that it thinks abstract thoughts. Those thoughts in turn allow us to use language and form meaningful social relationships and thus communities bound by cultures that include religious ideas; moreover, our abstract ideas can act as models or simplifications of our environments, which enable us to discover how natural processes work, to predict and to plan for events, and thus to technoscientifically control the wilderness by reshaping it according to our wants and needs.

The natural self, then, isn’t a thing that thinks abstract thoughts. To speak of a possessor of thoughts is to reify or to concretize the self, to mistake a symbol or other simplification, such as the Cartesian mental substance or the immaterial spirit, for the self’s reality. The human self isn’t identical even with the brain, as is clear from the computational, which is to say linguistic, aspect of thinking. Just as a computer program can be implemented in different devices, so too a pattern of thinking is multiply realizable. In any event, the person that we most wish to survive bodily death is just the stream of thoughts itself, including the appetites, fears, tastes, imaginings, fantasies, cogitations, and all the myriad other forms of thinking that make for the experience of being a human person. Some of these thoughts are more primitive or animalistic than others, but all are distinctly human to the extent that they have rich layers of meaning owing to their intellectual connections to background thoughts or worldviews that draw upon language and culture. For example, other species have appetites and fears, but animals lack personal selves if those mental states of theirs have only mechanical roles in causal relations as opposed to having higher meanings in a certain autonomous project, that being the creation of a coherent inner self through practice in introversion. Each self is different because we have different patterns of mental activity owing to our distinguishing artistic judgments about what sort of person we want to be. We practice being one sort of person or another by feeding our impulses so that we accumulate peculiar assortments of mental habits which individuate us.

The question of an afterlife, therefore, is about whether a pattern of thinking can survive physical death. To some extent, this question was answered long ago by Plato who distinguished between biological afterlife through procreation and intellectual afterlife through the survival of ideas. Plato lives on, in part, because the survival of his texts sustains Platonism, the system of ideas that reflects some of his mental habits. But this isn’t the survival of the whole self, since most of Plato’s mental habits aren’t recorded in Platonism. As science fiction authors have speculated since the invention of the computer, the whole self may be immortal, after all, as long as a computer can implement the entire pattern of mental activity that comprises the inner self. A computer program can be copied and stored on multiple devices, greatly increasing its potential longevity; in addition, the program would be immune from biological degradation or from the vicissitudes of the cellular or animalistic life cycles. Simulating a mind would require being able to predict how a person would respond to any situation, by weighting each possible thought in terms of its probability given either some sense impression or another thought. For example, someone who works at a zoo may be more likely to think of elephants in superficially non-elephant-related situations, since she’s liable to interpret her experience in terms that she considers important on the basis of her experience. If she loves elephants, she’ll be in the habit of wondering about their inner life or about how our modern activities endanger them. Again, someone whose parents smoke and who takes up that habit herself will have a high probability of thinking of smoking a cigarette when faced with certain stresses. With enough study, such habits should be predictable, in which case we could map out the relations between our mental tendencies, which amounts to laying out the blueprint for reproducing the personal self in question.

Clash of Worldviews: Islamist Terrorism Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome, viewers, to another clash of worldviews, the show that pits philosophies against each other. This evening, we’re joined by noted liberal secular humanist, Adam Garnett, self-proclaimed postmodern pessimist and cynic, Heather Fogarty, and influential conservative Muslim philosopher, Tariq Shadid. Recently, Islamist terrorists have been in the news for ISIL beheadings and immolations in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, shootings on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and the killing of Parisian cartoonists and Danish Jews and free speech supporters. Adam, why don’t you start things off by laying out the liberal’s case against those terrorists’ ideology?

ADAM: Sure, but I wouldn’t call it a “case,” exactly. A case is an argument that supports a viewpoint in a rational context in which the listeners understand and assent to logic and the rule of evidence. Religious faith, though, has utterly overtaken the sanity of these radical Islamists. Debating their ideology would be like teaching quantum mechanics to a four year-old.

But let’s begin by familiarizing ourselves with some highlights of the history of how we got here. In the eleventh century, al-Ghazali, the jurist, Asharite philosopher and Sufi mystic refuted the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, in the name of Islamic theology. Whereas that philosophy was naturalistic, al-Ghazali’s book, Incoherence of the Philosophers, contends that nature entirely submits to God’s will, having no independent causal power. The laws of nature are just elements of God’s rationality, so that all the events we perceive are caused directly by God. When faced with the epistemological problem of skepticism about knowledge of the external world, al-Ghazali retreated to a kind of mysticism that substitutes God for that world and appeals to faith that God can do anything. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroes, the medieval polymath, defended classical philosophy, but while that defense led to the rise of naturalism and secularism in modern Europe, Averroism was rejected by most of the Muslim world, and so the way was cleared for today’s Islamist puritans who scoff at modern science and liberties. “God is great!” they chant, meaning that defiance of God is impossible because Islam is the one true religion that reflects God’s oneness and supremacy: the whole world isn’t just created by Allah but sustained, moment by moment, by him, so that when the radicals act out of intuition that they carry out God’s will, it’s God who acts through them. There is only illusory opposition to God, since everything must submit to the mightiest being, by definition. That’s the Asharite mysticism that al-Ghazali codified, which places revelation and mystical intuition before reason.

Later, in the eighteenth century, the Salafi reformer, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab, preached that Muslims should return to monotheistic purity. He made a political pact with Muhammad bin Saud, who used the fundamentalist ideology to conquer territory and establish the Saudi state that survives to this day, by funding Salafism but directing it outwards to alleged external threats to Islamic purity, thus protecting the decadent Saudi family. Salafis reject scholastic philosophy (kalam) as a foreign, ancient Greek import that encourages free-thinking and debate to make theology rational. Adhering to a minimalist interpretation of Sunni, that is, the equivalent of Catholic Islam, Salafis regard speculative philosophy as a heresy of arrogance, of setting us up as rival gods who can learn the truth through our rational powers, without divine guidance, whereas the Islamic imperative is to submit to Allah. Salafis thus preach that the Quran, Hadith, consensus of elite Muslim scholars, and traditions from the first three generations of Muslims provide sufficient guidance for Muslims. In essence, this Salafism, which dominates Saudi Arabia and the UAE and which is the source of most Islamist terrorism today, is about submission to dogmas.  

Moderate Muslims and milquetoast centrists like President Obama contend that these terrorists merely distort true Islam and that no major religion justifies their savagery. Invariably, they remind us that the vast majority of Muslims reject the terrorist’s interpretation of Islam as “extreme” and as a “distortion” of the faith. Of course, anyone saying this should drop what they’re doing, pick up the nearest whip and flagellate the flesh of their back for wasting their listener’s time with a fallacious appeal to popularity. It goes without saying that the “correct” theological interpretation needn’t be the one that most people accept. More importantly, this debate about whether today’s militant jihadists betray or practice their religion isn’t worth having. There is no correct answer to the question, because the debate is theological. It’s exactly like asking which interpretation of Christianity is correct, Catholicism, Protestantism, or Fundamentalism (Evangelicalism). Even in Christianity, which at least honoured classical wisdom in medieval scholasticism, leading to naturalistic, systematic theology which ironically opened the door for modern science, reason has a precarious position, because of the alleged rival sources of knowledge in revelation, faith, and intuition. As I’ve just recounted, Islam as a whole lacks even the pretense that its theology owes its worth primarily to reason. Of course, for Muslims, reason is supposed to be compatible with faith, but that’s only because reason—like the whole of nature itself—is assumed to submit to God in the sense of being nothing without the deity. Christians went as far towards rationalism as to entertain deism, the possibility that God created an autonomous world that operates according to natural rather than divine laws, which reason can discover. By incorporating Sufi mysticism, Islam left no such room for reason’s authority and thus no room for modernity.
 

New Atheism and Edward Feser’s Thomistic Gambit

Imagine living in a country that’s been run by a dictator for decades. The dictator’s removed from power by progressive rebels, then humiliated and imprisoned. Instead of using his time in prison to reflect on the error of his ways and to repent, the dictator becomes bitter: holding the bars of his prison cell door, he excoriates the new administration’s progressive ideals and accuses his people of being fools for not allowing him to reign over them once more.

That’s an analogy for the uppity Catholic’s chutzpah. If you think the species of pompous, haughty Catholics is extinct, having been killed off in the last few centuries by skeptical hunters of dogmas, take a look at Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of New Atheism. To be sure, Feser, a philosophy professor, likely fills that book with disdain because he’s guided by the lex talionis, the principle that what goes around should come around: new atheists have sneered at and ridiculed Christians for long enough, so proud Christians should respond in kind. But this doesn’t entirely explain the tone of that book or of Feser’s blog in which he celebrates the absoluteness of scholastic theology. The question is how Christians today can find it in them to be proud of their faith, given that, like the dictator, the Church has lost its totalitarian control over Western life. How can a Catholic, in particular, examine Western history from the classical period to the modern one, and conclude not just that modern philosophy has been a farcical blunder but that the only solution is to return to the medieval way of thinking perfected by Thomas Aquinas?

The question is rhetorical, but this is exactly what Feser’s done and it accounts for the uncanny match between the style of his response to the current popularity of atheism, and the stereotype of modern Catholic apologetics as being mainly an expression of pretensions mixed with bitterness. In this respect, the Catholic polemicist is rather like a conservative Briton, exemplified by Niall Ferguson who admires the old British Empire. Not chastened but passive aggressive, these conservatives have the gall to side with the bully even after the bully’s disgraced himself. But whereas Ferguson does so for pragmatic rather than moralistic or philosophical reasons (Ferguson says the British Empire pioneered free trade and globalization, maintained global peace, and stood against the much worse empires of Germany and Japan in the last century), Feser argues that Thomism annihilates the philosophy of New Atheism.

You see, Feser isn’t merely playing a role, taking revenge against atheistic screeds for their hostility towards Christianity, or pursuing a marketing strategy. He seems genuinely furious because he thinks that New Atheism is so obviously false to those who know how to reason, that atheists are clueless about that fact, and that few recognize that Thomism is the supremely rational worldview. He’s thus very much like a resentful devotee to the imprisoned dictator, who labours under the delusion that his master was born to rule. The downfall of such a smug, sanctimonious institution as the Catholic Church is sublime, meaning that when the members of an institution become so powerful and thus naturally deluded and corrupt that an infinite abyss emerges between their inflated self-image and the reality of what they’ve become, their sudden fall echoes in that abyss like a mighty thunderclap heard around the world. Pride goes before the fall, but this is a secret recipe for the most exquisite comedy, because the greater the pride, the more monstrous the dupe who sets herself up for a pratfall, and we’d rather laugh at than be terrified by monsters. Not that all supervillains get their comeuppance, but when they do the comedy is poetically just. However, when the supervillains or their henchmen continue to curse those who’ve engineered their demise, vowing revenge even while wriggling beneath the superhero’s boot heel, there comes a moment when the impulse to pity them overtakes the urge to laugh at them.

Thomism’s Bastardization of the Perennial Philosophy

But let’s prepare ourselves to look at how Feser sees the world. Mind the lightshow now as we travel back in time to periods governed by strange, obsolete mindsets. According to Feser, the new atheist is hardly a superhero because she’s utterly blind to the nature of the conflict at hand. Often unwittingly, the new atheist subscribes to scientism, which is a form of idolatry in which science is regarded as the only source of knowledge. Thus, the new atheist mistakes all scientific progress for an intellectual development away from religion, whereas there’s no conflict between religion and science itself. Science is neutral on religious questions, because the terms of those questions are philosophical and theological. Science is only one kind of Reason, another being the philosophical evaluation of ideas which was developed long ago in the West by Plato and Aristotle and perfected by Augustine and Aquinas.