Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis

751. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53723 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 11:10 pm

Dr Benway (post 1039, or #53710):

Thanks. I quote from that article:

Thus, metaphysical naturalism entails the belief that nature is in fact all that exists, [snip] What all metaphysical naturalists agree on, however, is that the fundamental constituents of reality, from which everything derives and upon which everything depends, are fundamentally mindless. [snip] any mental properties that exist (hence any mental powers or beings) are causally derived from, and ontologically dependent on, systems of nonmental properties, powers, or things.

That's my understanding of the naturalist position too. I see the writer tried to use the most careful language possible, and leaves the meaning of "nonmental" somewhat vague, but clearly the general idea is that "nonmental" is the "physical"; after all the concept of "physical" describes what naturalalism believes is the "fundamental constituents of reality, from which everything derives and upon which everything depends". So far so good then.

[methodological naturalism] makes the methodological assumption that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes, without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural, and so considers supernatural explanations for such events to be outside science.[snip] methodological naturalism entails the belief that for one reason or another empirical methods will only ascertain natural facts, whether supernatural facts exist or not.

Well, under that definition I am a methodological naturalist. I think exactly that: That all observable events in nature (i.e. physical phenomena) are explained only by natural causes through the use of science and the scientific method (and of course without recourse to anything supernatural), and I agree that such methods will only explain physical phenomena, even if supernatural facts exist.

So this distinction is useful to know, because, as in my case, it's possible to believe in methodological naturalism without believing in metaphysical naturalism too. But I don't see how I may be confusing the two. Even though I did not know of the technical term "methodological naturalism", in many posts in the past I have made clear that I believe that all objective phenomena can be explained by science without recourse to anything supernatural, as well as that I fully expect science to solve as yet unanswered questions such as the origin of life, or how our brain produces intelligent behavior. (Indeed I find it difficult to imagine any educated person today with some freedom of thought who disagrees with methodological naturalism.)

So, thanks again, it's good to know that I am not only a idealistic theist and a logical positivist but also a methodological naturalist :-)

752. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53709 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 6:43 pm

Dr Benway (post 994, or #53566):

So, if naturalism allows for non-mechanical explanations then maybe I am wrong about the limitations of naturalism.

You may be confusing scientific naturalism with metaphysical naturalism.

I may. So, what's the difference between scientific naturalism and metaphysical naturalism?

753. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53707 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 6:34 pm

Phil rimmer (post 1030, or #53685):

So what group of things have the capacity for conscious experience in your opinion? What are the necessary ingredients of a suitable ..er.. receptacle(?)?

Beats me. That's a question for naturalism to answer. It's naturalism that claims that consciousness is a property that some material systems have, and it's therefore naturalism that must explain the sufficient conditions that a material system must fulfill to have that property.

754. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53706 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 6:26 pm

Steve99 (post 990, or #53545):

Anyway, I think it's clear that quantum phenomena may be produced by a deterministic (and hence mechanical) reality while at the same time be impossible to model mechanically. So there is no contradiction between the two.

No, this simply isn't the case.

What exactly is not the case? It's a fact that there are several interpretations of QM (i.e. descriptions of reality that would produce quantum phenomena) that are deterministic. And it's also a fact that QM's modeling of quantum phenomena is not deterministic: it only assigns probabilities.

I suggest you get a good book by Brian Greene and read up on the Bell Inequality. It is actually a deeper result than quantum theory, and has a lot to say about what may or may not underlie quantum theory. Although Epeeist may well consider what I am to say simplistic, if you take the findings of tests of the Bell Inequality along with more recent studies, I don't think it is reasonable to claim that a mechanical deterministic reality is beneath it all.

The Bell Inequality opened the way for one of the most dramatic experimental validations of QM, namely that there exist non-local phenomena, or in other words that there exist what Einstein derisively called "spooky actions at a distance". But I don't see how that relates to our discussion of a deterministic reality producing quantum phenomena that cannot be modeled deterministically.

Incidentally I would like to make a clarification. When I wrote in previous posts that "Science has nothing to say about the reality that causes the phenomena we observe", I meant "Science has nothing positive to say about them". Of course science has much to say in the negative sense. So, for example, science tells us that reality cannot be such that would produce the phenomena of two large moons orbiting the Earth, because no such phenomenon exists and hence no such reality. Similarly, reality cannot be such that gravitational phenomena are not produced, because they in fact exist. Similarly, reality cannot be such that no non-local phenomena are produced, because they in fact exist. And so on.

To use Plato's analogy of us living in a cave on the walls of which we observe the shadows cast by the real world outside of the cave: Science studies the shadows which implies that whatever exists outside the cave is such that it casts exactly these shadows. A big problem for ontology (and that's everybody's problem and not just naturalism's) is that many different real worlds outside the cave can cast exactly the same shadows. That being the case we must find indirect (albeit reasonable and when possible objective) criteria for deciding which understanding about the real world outside the cave is the most reasonable one to believe. Whichever one's beliefs about reality (theism, naturalism, or whatever) I don't see any other way to ground that belief on reason.

755. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53703 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 6:03 pm

BAEOZ (post 989, or #53542):

Now, I'm not a QM expert, much less aficionado, but! (there's always a but). The Cophenhagen interpretation is just scientists being honest and following the evidence. It's what you get when you say, well, the experiments showed this, at this point in time we can only propose this interpretation if we wish to be true to the evidence. Can you say the others follow the evidence and therefore imply determinism?

No I can't say that. The Copenhagen interpretation is indeed the most obvious one. But, again, some naturalists did not like what that interpretation said about physical reality, because they preferred physical reality to be deterministic. So they went out and designed not one but two completely different descriptions of a deterministic physical reality that would produce the (at face value) random quantum phenomena we observe. Interesting how it works, no? And most naturalists believe that naturalism is basically objective.

756. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53701 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 5:52 pm

_J_ (post 1029, #53684):

There is a naturalistic view, called panpsychism, according to which all material systems that interact with their environment (down to individual atoms) are conscious beings...

That counts as a naturalistic hypothesis? Unless some evidence has been presented for all of these quasi-consciousnesses, it sounds a lot like Just Making Things Up.

And who selects the units here, anyway? If the heart has a degree of consciousness, does the left ventricle have half as much? How about the aorta? Does my fingernail have a little less consciousness after I clip it? This all sounds totally arbitrary.

Oh I agree, but panpsychism is a naturalistic view alright. It's one of the many ways that naturalists try to respond to the problem of consciousness. As for you finding it arbitrary and made-up, I wished people learned more about naturalism's various suggestions about how reality actually is, instead of just believing people like Dawkins that it's all fine and well in naturalism's house where don't you know everything is very objective and scientific, whereas theism has all the subjective and implausible and unscientific theories driven by peoples' wishful thinking.

(P.S. My post 988 describes two rather well-known naturalistic descriptions of reality).

757. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53699 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 5:32 pm

Phil rimmer (post 1025, or #53677):

But for me your arguments of science defeated [snip]

I never spoke of "science defeated"; I spoke of "naturalism defeated". There is a huge difference between the two.

The zombie argument is a deeply flawed one for me. It presumes you can posit a world where consciousness is removed, yet all behaviours remain the same. Truly, in a thought experiment you can do this. But is it realistic? I contend it is far from realistic.

I agree. It's not realistic. And neither does Chalmers's argument claim it is. His argument only claims that it's possible to imagine that universe, which evidences that there is not one single piece of third-person (i.e. objective) knowledge we have about our own universe that would contradict and therefore make it unimaginable to visualize a universe just like ours but without consciousness.

I believe we behave the way we do in part because we are conscious.

On what piece of objective/laboratory/scientific evidence you justify this belief?

To remove [consciousness] is to remove an essential mental mechanism.

Of course. But to remove consciousness does not appear to affect our brain mechanism, and our brain mechanism fully explains our objective behavior.

Perhaps [snip a hypothesis of the role of consciousness, indeed a hypothesis as good as any]

Right, but why couldn't the same useful stuff be performed by our brain's physical processes without the benefit of consciousness?

How can you tell if he's one of us, a conscious human? Well, at about the same time, Turing had a pretty good answer.

The Turing test does not test for the presence of consciousness but for the presence of intelligence. Intelligence is an objective phenomenon, and Turing has suggested an objective test for human level intelligence. But it's completely irrelevant to the question of consciousness, after all virtually everybody thinks that cats are conscious beings and cats would certainly not pass the Turing test. As wouldn't, say, three months old babies, who again few people doubt are conscious beings (one notable exception is naturalist Dennett who thinks that human babies are not conscious beings).

Consciousness is meaningless without meat.

Au contrair, meat is meaningless without consciousness. If you disagree try to explain what "meat" means without any use of concepts that relate to consciousness :-)

Maybe its like that Greek philosophers problem (I forget who)- Before you can get there you have to get half way, and before you get there now, you have to get half way again…etc.

I think that's one of Zeno's paradoxes.

758. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53698 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 5:05 pm

_J_ (post 1023, or #53670):

I can similarly imagine a universe in which we are all giant oranges, or any of infinite other variations.

Right, but you missed an important bit there. Chalmers points out that it is possible to imagine a universe that is identical to ours in all third person data but has no conscious experiences happening in it. Of course a universe in which are all giant oranges does not apply, because there are plenty of third person data in our universe that shows that we are not giant oranges.

A zombieverse in which everyone behaved as though they shared these qualities with us, but in fact did not (as unconscious, unfeeling zombies) doesn't make a jot of sense and directly contradicts our understanding of how our universe works.

That argument has been around for more than 10 years now, and nobody has found any such contradiction.

Chalmers somehow has no problem imagining a zombie world in which consciousness is absent but all of the actions that proceed from it are not, and does not consider this a contradiction of the world as we understand it

What actions are these? The very point of the argument is that the zombies in the zombieverse would act exactly like we do without breaking any physical laws but rather by exactly following them. The entire history of natural evolution from the most primitive cells up to Beethoven would take place, bit by bit, exactly like in our universe following exactly the same physical laws. That's why the problem of consciousness is considered so hard: consciousness is clearly a huge fact, but naturalism appears incapable of explaining what it's good for from the point of view of evolution. Some naturalists have proposed some kind of role for consciousness to play, but are always unable to answer the question of why the same role can't equally well be performed by the underlying brain processes without the benefit of consciousness.

By 'metaphysics', people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. [snip] The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

Yes, sounds good, doesn't it? But is also quite wrong. After all by its definition that metaphysics is about truths you recognize just by thinking about them and without the benefit of a laboratory, math too becomes metaphysics, which it certainly is not.

The difference between physics and metaphysics is that physics concerns itself with objective phenomena, whereas metaphysics concerns itself with all of objective reality. For most practical purposes "methaphysics" means the same as "ontology". You arguing for naturalism, I for theism, and Bohm for his particular interpretation of QM: we are all doing metaphysics.

759. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53683 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 2:55 pm

Phil rimmer (post 1020, or #53661):

Do you think there are degrees of consciousness? Does a mouse have a little, a dog more, bonobos yet more and possibly us most?

No, I don't think there are degrees of consciousness, but rather that given consciousness there are degrees of conscious experience.

That's a semantic issue, but I find it most useful to talk of consciousness as what gives us the capacity of having conscious experiences. So, to use naturalist language, a material system has or hasn't that capacity, in other words either has the capacity of having conscious, or else does not have that capacity. If it has that capacity then we call it a "conscious being" (e.g. a small boy is a conscious being, but his toy drums are not). And if it has that capacity then there are many degrees of actual conscious experience it may have depending on its complexity and on its current state. (Some care must be given to the possible confusion between the concept of consciousness and the concept of states of consciousness and unconsciousness, as the latter concepts make sense only in the context of conscious beings).

There is a naturalistic view, called panpsychism, according to which all material systems that interact with their environment (down to individual atoms) are conscious beings, albeit atoms have a very very tenuous conscious experience, cells a somehow less tenuous conscious experience, cell mitochondria have conscious experience somewhere in between, our heart a higher degree of conscious experience, and so on. Which implies that each one of us carries around a huge number of conscious beings having an entire range of degrees of conscious experience. It's a strange naturalistic hypothesis, but again one that nobody knows how to test or to falsify on naturalistic grounds. And it's a hypothesis that does not help solve the mind-body problem anyway, even though it has one thing in its favor: It eliminates the problem of actually detecting the presence of consciousness, as per that hypothesis consciousness is everywhere.

760. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53675 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 1:49 pm

Dr Benway (post 964, or #53367):

When you defend your God you defend the God of the fundamentalists as well, unless you have an argument explaining why the basis for your belief is valid and theirs is not.

Well, the basis of my belief is that after applying several criteria, including objective criteria, I find that my theistic worldview works better than naturalism in each case. Fundamentalists' basis of their belief in the Bible. Do you think the two bases are comparable? In fact can you suggest any other reasonable basis for deciding one's worldview than the one I used?

But let's suppose the fundamentalists' epistemological basis and mine are equally valid. Even then, in what sense when I defend my understanding of God I also defend theirs? They are very different, aren't they? But maybe you mean that by using a similar language I am somehow defending their worldview. If so, would you say that the astronomers who speak of planets, orbits, and forces, by doing that defend astrology, because astrologers use the same kind of language?

the secondary and tertiary deaths as a result of an era of perpetual war

Surely you are not saying that wars happen all the time because of theism, or even because of fundamentalist theism. But maybe you mean that wars happen because people are irrational, and fundamentalism helps keep people irrational. You may have a point there, but it seems to me that wars primarily happen because of greed and because of nationalism – and I think theistic worldviews on average work against both.

761. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53663 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 12:42 pm

Phil rimmer (post 1011, or #53640):

A lot of detail about the hows and whys can (or at least might) be answered.

Yes.

It is only the last question that may always defeats us.....Why is the experience of beauty..of love..of consciousness the way it is? Why are the Qualia the way they are?

But that's the question, Phil. That's precisely what distinguishes the hard from the easy problem of consciousness. And, to be precise, the easy problem of consciousness is not really about consciousness, but about adaptive behavior in general and intelligence in particular.

Also, I am not sure that's a case of "defeat". Goedel's theorem was not a defeat for mathematics, but actually made mathematics more interesting (not to mention saved mathematicians a lot of time that would be wasted trying to find something that was not there.) So if good arguments were put forward that show that naturalism does not work as an explanation for the whole of our experience, far from seeing this as a defeat I would see this as opening up much more interesting avenues for reason. A defeat of naturalism is really not a defeat of reason :-) The same way that a defeat of our dream of an complete formal system was not a defeat of mathematics. Reality is much more interesting than that.

762. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53658 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 12:24 pm

Dr Benway (post 997, or #53587):

The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You can't understand and describe the behavior of a bird by looking at its atoms.

It's not practical, no. So, as is the case of most understanding, we build levels of abstraction, which can each be reduced to the level immediately bellow down to the level of individual atoms. Indeed, atoms are not irrelevant: individual atoms play an important role in the information recorded in the DNA, and the genes of the DNA play an important role for explaining a bird's behavior. So the point is that you can reduce our understanding of the behavior of a bird to the atomic theory of matter. In fact I personally feel confident that you can reduce the behavior (indeed all behavior) of people to knowledge about physics.

Which brings us to a fundamental problem of naturalism: We have two kinds of data, third person and first person data. Third person data are objective observations, such as how people behave, what they say, how their brain is organized, and so on – the data that science studies. First person data are subjective and private; one famous example is how red looks like. All people of normal vision know that (even though, curiously enough, they don't really know that what they know is what other people know – precisely because that's private data). The fundamental problem of naturalism is how to explain these private data. It's even worse: it's not clear how naturalism can coherently speak about these private data. The reason is that naturalism's language and epistemology is that of the hard sciences, and the hard sciences speak only of third-person data. So the so-called problem of qualia (which is a subset of the so-called mind-body problem) represents a deep problem for naturalism.

Now some naturalists claim that not only objective behavior but subjective mind too can be reduced to physics. David Chalmers has produced a famous argument against that: the argument about zombies. Chalmers points out that we can imagine a universe exactly like ours in all third-person detail. So in that zombie universe you, I, and the other posters here are debating consciousness in this forum typing exactly the same posts and so on, but we are all zombies. That means that the lights inside are dark, we are not really conscious, but only behave as if we were conscious. When somebody hits us we cry "ouch" but don't really feel any pain, exactly the same way that when somebody beats the drums they make a lot of noise but do not feel any pain. Ok. So, why should it be so relevant that we can imagine such a zombie universe? Because we have a lot of scientific knowledge about how our universe is, and the fact that we can imagine such a universe without encountering any conceptual problems proves that there is nothing in the huge amount of knowledge we have about our own universe that contradicts the possibility of that zombie universe existing. Now it is conceivable that we may yet discover something about our own universe that would make it clear that such a zombie universe is not possible. But this hope confronts two problems: 1) The more scientific knowledge we gain without discovering such a piece of knowledge (and we are quickly gaining scientific knowledge on all levels, including neurophysiology) the less probable it looks that such a piece of knowledge will be discovered, and 2) Nobody knows what form such a piece of knowledge might have – which is really remarkable again considering the depth and breath of our scientific knowledge. So, counterintuitively, the more scientific knowledge we gain the harder the mind-body problem becomes. For Chalmers the writing on the wall is clear: It's not reasonable to keep assuming that consciousness can be reduced to physics. Rather one must posit that consciousness, at par with matter, represents a fundamental principle of reality, in other words one must posit that reality is dualistic: it consists of matter and consciousness.

So, what's so bad about dualism? Why do so many naturalist philosophers find Chalmers's inference unacceptable? Well, first it represents some serious epistemological problems; it will require a transformation not only in the hard sciences but also in the scientific method itself. Secondly, there are some well-known ontological problems with dualism, particularly about how such two different aspects of reality as matter and consciousness can actually interact with each other. Thirdly, matter-mind dualism is the traditional theistic understanding of reality, and many naturalists are understandably reluctant to accept anything that looks like ontological good news for theism. Fourth, because consciousness by itself is too powerful. For example a basic property of conscious experience is will, and will has causal agency. Is then a naturalist to accept that physical change can be caused by non-material personal will? To accept that would bring one even closer to the theistic understanding of reality. Indeed one could argue that only matter and its properties can reasonably be called "natural" and that therefore the presence of non-material consciousness with the causal power to affect material systems amounts to supernaturalism.

763. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53615 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 8:57 am

Epeeist (post 999, or #53600):

Unattainable in the days of Newtonian mechanics and even less attainable in the light of Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle.

Right, but I think the deeper question that _J_ discusses in post 995 is this: Suppose reality is mechanical - one way or the other and always within science's findings, whatever these may currently be or whatever limitations to our modeling or predictive capacity for physical phenomena there are. After all there will always be at least practical limitations in that department. So beyond all that, what does the mechanical nature of reality imply for our capacity for understanding ourselves? Does it make it impossible for us to understand, say, beauty?

764. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53611 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 8:45 am

_J_ (post 995, or #53577):

I greatly enjoyed this post. Very interesting, especially considering your previous clarifications that you are "not here" :-)

I will seriously mull this over, and will certainly comment on it.

765. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53548 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 2:25 am

Epeeist (post 987, or #53538):

How else can a naturalist explain your experience of the sheer glory of her music but mechanically in the end?

One uses the appropriate viewpoint. One might use a mechanical viewpoint if one was investigating the acoustic properties of a hall, a doctor would presumably use a different mechanical explanation if the divine Emma developed throat problems. What would the musicologist use to look at the structure of the music or the music critic of the performance? I wouldn't be sure that these are mechanical. The person enjoying the performance is almost certainly not listening mechanically.

One is struck by the fact that people want to reduce this multivariate, uncertain world to singular certainty. You can see it in theism, but you can also see it virtually everything else that impinges on humans - climate change only caused by sunspots, the breakdown in society only caused by liberals, the reason for Britain not doing well at fencing is solely caused by rule changes that don't benefit us, etc.

Maybe I did not phrase my question correctly. I am not asking how a naturalism explains the glory of music we experience. It would be unreasonable to expect or demand that naturalism explain everything in detail right now and here. I am only asking what form such a naturalistic answer would have. In other words, what I am asking is this: According to naturalism's basic understanding of how reality is, do events exist that are not mechanical? Or, more precisely: The ultimate explanations that naturalism might give some day would be completely mechanical, or else need not be completely mechanical? And if not, what other causal or explanatory principle is acceptable in naturalism's understanding of reality?

You write "I wouldn't be sure that these [i.e. explanations about the glory of music] are mechanical." But if you doubt about that, then you must be thinking of some other possibility, no? I wonder, what kind of possibility? What else besides mechanical explanations might there be?

766. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53539 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 2, 2007 at 1:28 am

Steve99 (post 973, or #53408):

Naturalism asserts that reality is fundamentally mechanical which implies that at bottom all explanations must be mechanical too.

Just a while back you claimed that QED was an accurate theory because reality was uncertain. Now you claim it is mechanical. Which is it?

There is no contradiction between the two. Here is why:

Phenomena are data; science deals with phenomena as they come. According to QED it's impossible to predict future quantum phenomena based on our knowledge about current phenomena (e.g. it's impossible to predict which of two slits a photon will be observed to pass through). And hence QED's models are probabilistic and therefore not mechanical. But QED does not say anything about what kind of reality produces the phenomena it models. It doesn't care. In fact it doesn't even say whether such a reality exists. So far so good. Now how do we "interpret" what QED is saying? Specifically, if we hypothesize the objective existence of a physical universe out there causing all the phenomena we observe including the ones QED models and makes predictions about, how might that objectively real physical universe be? Well, one answer – indeed the most obvious answer – is that the universe itself is random: nothing objectively real causes the photon to choose this and not the other slits to pass through; physical reality is at bottom random and all order we observe is an emergent phenomenon of that randomness (the same way that if you randomly toss coins the order of about 50-50 distribution between heads and tails will emerge.) That's basically the so-called Copenhagen interpretation. But some naturalists disliked the idea of a random reality; they felt that a clockwork universe a la Laplace is much more preferable. And so, lo and behold, they did design at least two interpretations of quantum mechanics that describe a deterministic physical universe (notwithstanding what quantum mechanics at face value says about phenomena). These two interpretation are the many worlds interpretation, and Bohm's interpretation.

Many worlds is kind of a cop-out. It says that it's not that a photon randomly passes through one or the other slit, but rather when one performs that experiment the entire universe is split in two copies and in the first universe the photon passes through the left slit and in the second universe the photon passes through the right slit. Of course, in that process each one of us is split in two copies also, and if we happen to observe the photon pass through the left slit then it only evidences that we happen to be in the left-slit universe, while there is an otherwise exact copy of ourselves in the right-slit universe observing the photon pass through the right slit. Sounds like a crazy not to mention a completely "made up" worldview, no? Well, it turns out that the many-worlds interpretation is the most popular interpretation right now between quantum physicists. And, crazy or not, the many worlds interpretation of QM works: It does describe a physical reality that would exactly produce the phenomena we observe, with the added bonus that it is a fully deterministic and hence an incontrovertibly mechanical reality.

Bohm's deterministic interpretation is different. It basically hypothesizes the existence of a "guiding wave", which is something that objective exists but is also fundamentally unknowable (the term used is "hidden variable"). So, according to Bohm, there is only one physical universe but there is a deterministic (albeit unknowable) wave that guides all quantum phenomena, no matter how random they may appear to us. This works for the following reason: it is fundamentally impossible to verify whether a sequence of events has been produced by a random source and not by a deterministic source. Here is why: Take any sequence of events (maybe all quantum events since the beginning of the universe) and codify that information in the form of a long sequence of decimal digits. There exists a natural number N so that this entire sequence is only the decimal expansion of the number pi after the N'th position. But the expansion of pi is deterministic. So we have identified a deterministic source for that sequence of events. This, by the way, does not imply that it is even in principle possible for us to exactly predict quantum phenomena and therefore falsify quantum mechanics, because N is so large that it literally does not fit in the physical universe and therefore is fundamentally unknowable and unusable by us.

A third deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is that all phenomena we observe are produced by two schoolchildren running primitive universe simulations in their home computer, maybe as part of an assignment on experimental ethics. Their computer is of course deterministic and only simulates randomness using a PRNG (pseudo random number generator). But we, here, are not clever enough to decipher that generator, and therefore believe that the phenomena we observe are fundamentally unpredictable, when in fact they aren't.

Anyway, I think it's clear that quantum phenomena may be produced by a deterministic (and hence mechanical) reality while at the same time be impossible to model mechanically. So there is no contradiction between the two.

767. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53526 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 11:26 pm

Epeeist (post 972, or #53405):

I am writing this while listening to a CD of Emma Kirkby singing "Dixit Dominus" from the Monteverdi Vespers. The voice is the production of breath from the lungs and movement of the vocal chords. If she developed problems with her voice then this is one would probably look. But nobody would want to interpret the singing, the phrasing or the sheer glory of the music mechanically.

That's very interesting. How else can a naturalist explain your experience of the sheer glory of her music but mechanically in the end?

That's an important question because maybe I'm doing naturalism injustice. Maybe there are versions of it that work better than what I think. It seems clear to me that mechanical explanations can go only so far. So, if naturalism allows for non-mechanical explanations then maybe I am wrong about the limitations of naturalism.

Now I can only conceive of explanations that are ultimately mechanical (event E1 is caused by event E2 respecting mathematical law L) or else of explanations that are ultimately personal (event E is caused by personal will W respecting personal character C). The mathematical law L is precise even if it only assigns precise probabilities. In contrast the personal character C is intrinsically creative and therefore fundamentally unpredictable. A reality based on L is in a sense static: at its most basic level it follows mechanical – and therefore blind – laws. A reality based on C is not limited in that sense. I thought there are only these two possibilities (mechanical or willful); do you see another possibility?

I keep quoting Richard Feynman, but I make no apologies for this: "Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate. "

Why should you make apologies for that? Feynman was one of the brightest minds of the 20th century. As for his quote, it's not really about "God watching our struggle", but my main comment is this: I understand that his theistic explanation seemed inadequate to Feynman and this does count as a very small piece of evidence that theism itself is objectively inadequate because up to a point it is reasonable to take into account other peoples' opinion. But for me the far greater piece of evidence is that my theistic explanation strikes me as very adequate, indeed objectively speaking as much more adequate than the strongest version of naturalism I know about. (But maybe there are versions of naturalism that are stronger than my strongest one.)

768. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53402 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 9:33 am

Dr Benway (post 874, or #52890):

Humans are creatures of relationship. Love trumps mere things, at least for most people. No God required to appreciate this.

I agree and have never claimed the opposite. What I said is that my theistic worldview helps me appreciate humanity more than if had adopted naturalism.

The map of reality I carry around in my head has large sections labeled, "I dunno." In some cases, I could fill in the details with a little study. In other cases, I've got to wait for others to chart their way further into the unknown. I could change the "I dunno" to "God handles this." But why? Why prematurely assert certainty where none exists?

I am not asserting certainty, I am only explaining why I find that idealistic theism works better than naturalism under all criteria, including the criterion of explanatory power.

Naturalism asserts that reality is fundamentally mechanical which implies that at bottom all explanations must be mechanical too. Theism asserts that reality is fundamentally personal which implies that at bottom all explanations must be personal too. I find that theism's stance works much better because it avoids explanatory problems such as "How does matter produce consciousness?" and is able to answer questions such as "Why are we here having consciousness at all?", "Why is the environment we experience physical?", "Why do we experience pain like we do?" etc. Now atheism's answers are not (or at least need not be) "Because God's done it this way", but rather "Here's why God's done it this way" in a manner that is consistent with God's fundamental properties.

I can imagine that from your point of view all that sounds made-up. It may even sound unfairly easy, as the principle of "God's will" is much more malleable than the principle of "nature's laws" that naturalistic explanations must accord with. On the other hand if a worldview does explain more, and avoids conceptual problems and problems of coherence, is it reasonable to reject it because such a worldview has some built in advantage that makes it easy for one to make it work? All worldviews about reality are made up, because, even though at first it sounds counterintuitive, it's relatively easy to see that we don't have direct access to reality, we only have direct access to our experience of reality and it's a fact that very different possible realities could produce exactly the same experiences including all the phenomena that science studies. So, one way or the other, we must find criteria for choosing which of the possible worldviews is more reasonable adopt. Would you say that "it's easier to make it work" is a negative criterion? I don't, for I don't see why. I am not some kind of cognitive masochist, so if a worldview strikes me as more natural and flexible then so much the better. (You may ask: How can theism be more natural than naturalism? Well, naturalism – not to mention "scientific realism" - may have the nicer sounding name, but the fact is that a reality that is just like we are is much more natural than a reality that is entirely different. Naturalism has trouble accounting even for something as natural as our experience of will.)

If evidence comes my way indicating God is there, I stick Him/Her/It on the map. If evidence favors another explanation, that goes on the map. I can't lose either way.

Right. I have a question: Do you think that the fact that a worldview about reality works better than another does not count as evidence, or do you think it does but that the worldview of naturalism works at least as well as my theistic worldview?

But look at all the theists who wrongly put God on their maps as the explanation for plagues, sickness, the appearance of humans on the planet. Not a big problem if the map makers wrote "God" in pencil. But most used a permanent ink pen, and boy were they screwed.

Agreed. So the problem is that they used a permanent link, and not so much that they erred. Scientists have erred all the time but they have had the freedom of thought to recognize and correct their errors. Theologians, especially theologians working within religious institutions, didn't. But surely this does not evidence that theism is false, does it? It only evidences that dogmatic theistic institutions win the meme game.

Human super-duper-meta-theories about everything have been more wrong than right over the centuries.

I am not sure that's an entirely fair evaluation. Indeed, arguably, they have been right in their most central theses: that there's more to reality than what meets the eye, that reality is fundamentally good, that there is a deeper meaning in our life here and that our good actions are central to realizing this meaning, that personal life continues after death, and some even the existence of one creator God.

Things aren't likely to change soon.

My bet is that things are likely to change soon. Better education and the free access and exchange of ideas over the Internet will help bust the remaining myths, and therefore move people to recognize what failure really naturalism is, indeed a naked emperor who thinks he is wearing the splendid clothes of science. People will then naturally enough search for a better worldview. We shall see.

769. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53390 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 8:08 am

_J_ (post 867, or #52812):

If I am understanding you correctly you are pointing out that a theist who believes in the eternal damnation of all atheists and the salvation of all theists would rather save the life of one atheist rather than the life of ten theists, because the theists are going to heaven anyway so it's more important to save that one atheist's chances for salvation later on. You may be right; I mean there are very strange theistic worldviews. There are even theistic worldviews that in conjunction with the perception of great injustice motivate some people to blow themselves up in crowded cafes or to fly airplanes into buildings. But I am not here to justify the truth of these worldviews; after all I too think they are wrong. I am not even here to justify my own worldview, but only the claim that my worldview (idealistic theism) works better than naturalism under all criteria, including under the criterion of ethical empowerment.

770. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53371 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 4:55 am

Steve99 (post 832, or #52233):

I overlooked that bit:

I stand by my claim, and invite you to point out any physical phenomenon we normally observe (except for gravity and some nuclear phenomena) that according to our knowledge so far Quantum Electrodynamics does not exactly model.

Easy. A single photon double-slit experiment. Quantum Electrodynamics will precisely give you the range of the uncertainty, but it can't predict which which detector a photon hits.

Right, because reality is such that it is unpredictable. Which QED exactly models. The idea of a model is to represent reality as it is, so if reality is unpredictable the model must describe that unpredictability, which QED to our knowledge does perfectly well over the entire range of relevant physical phenomena.

771. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53369 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 4:49 am

Alovrin (post 959, or #53361):

I think the world would be a better place if more people had the same understanding of reality I have

Is it just me or does anyone else find this statement obnoxious

Doesn't Dawkins claim the same? Would you call him obnoxious?

Also, please observe that I made that statement in response to Dr Benway's claim:

Dianelos, you won't make the world a better place by persuading the nice folks here that theism is a good thing.

In that context then I think my statement above is entirely appropriate. And is justified by my arguments elsewhere in the sense that my worldview is ethically empowering.

772. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53366 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 4:34 am

Epeeist (post 850, or #52574):

Well, I can state an empirical validation of theism versus naturalism: that we shall continue having conscious experience after death.

False dichotomy. It would probably invalidate theories about brains and minds being synonymous, but this does not mean to say that it would validate theism.

I see your point, and that's why I didn't write "empirical validation of theism", but rather "empirical validation of theism versus naturalism". But that I mean that such an empirical validation would reinforce our confidence in all theistic worldviews that entail personal survival of death, and would falsify all naturalistic worldviews that entail that death is the destruction of the person.

First of all "the feel good factor" is no small matter. We build beautiful houses, or look out for interesting friends, or listen to music, or marry a gorgeous wife or husband, for this very reason.

I wouldn't disagree with this. However, you don't need to be a theist to appreciate these. I enjoy music by Josquin, Tallis and Byrd and like some of the photographs my daughter brought back from her time at Dharamsala. Are you saying that my appreciation is inferior to yours because I am atheist? Does your Christianity allow you to appreciate the beauty in Aztec masks or Islamic music? Is your appreciation of these less than my atheistic one, is it less than a Moslem would have?

These are important questions, but before trying to answer them let's be clear that you are raising a separate issue. The original context was your comment in post 824:

What value does a theistic world view add in the above? Little, if any, I would suggest. Apart from the feel good factor [snip]

And my argument was that there is nothing "little" in the "feel good factor". Most if not all of the things we do in life are related to "feel good factor". I mean I brush my teeth because of this factor, be it short term or long term. So if theism compared to other worldviews offers important experiential gains then that's a big advantage of theism. At this juncture a naturalist may argue that however important the "feel good factor" may be, what we are discussing here is what is true and not what makes one feel better. Now we are stepping into deep waters, because I am not sure whether the concept of "truth" retains any meaning if you divorce it from the "feel good factor". I mean I understand that a person dying from some incurable disease may feel better believing that prayer will cure him even though it's not true, so of course the "feel good factor" is not a sufficient condition for truth. I wonder though if it's not a necessary condition of truth. I find that almost everything I believe is true does make me feel better, and the more I think about reality the more everything I believe is true tends to make me feel better and strike me as beautiful. Of course that experience is exactly consistent with my worldview according to which all reality is exhausted in a benevolent God.

Back to your questions above. First of all I would like to stress an important and often overlooked fact of our condition: That even though the objective part of our experience (i.e. physical phenomena) basically does not change throughout this life (and, surely, is basically the same for all people) – the qualitative/subjective part of our experience can and does change quite a bit (and therefore may be quite different in different people). The most conspicuous example I know of is listening to the sounds of a foreign language: before learning that language it all sounds like gibberish, but after learning that language it sounds meaningful and even beautiful. The sounds one actually hears (the physical phenomenon) does not change at all, what changes is the quality of one's experience of that phenomenon, and it changes through one's understanding of it, through one now knowing about patterns present in it. I remember another example from my own experience: I once ordered what I thought was a very good book about ancient Greek pottery. Well, when I got the book and looked at the pictures I felt disappointed: almost all of them looked quite unremarkable to me and some were pictures of shards. But then I read the book, learned about its subject matter, and the quality of my esthetic experience of the same pictures was transformed to such a remarkably degree that I wondered how I did not notice the same before. There are many such examples: A musician may listen to the same music but perceives it differently than a non-musician. A master chess-player may be looking at the same chessboard position but perceives it differently than a common chess-player not to mention a non chess-player. A mathematician perceives a set of equations as a thing of pure beauty, whereas a non-mathematician sees only some meaningless marks on paper. What all these examples show is that our experience of meaning or beauty is contingent on our learning something, on our discovering some deep pattern that was always there, even though before we did not know it.

Now if there is an overarching explanatory principle (the very deepest pattern) present in the whole of our experience and if one discovers it then, in the same way, one experiences more meaning and beauty in the whole of one's experience. This is not an argument for theism, by the way. It's possible that reality is incoherent in the sense that it consists of unconnected and only locally coherent areas – and that therefore no such overarching explanatory principle exists. Or maybe it exists but we are not capable to discover it. Or maybe it exists and it is possible to discover it but that overarching explanatory principle is mechanical (as naturalism holds) and not personal (as theism holds). But, given that I am a theist, the experience of an ever deepening meaning and beauty in the whole of my experience is one more piece of evidence for the truth of my worldview. I know that it's possible to fall for illusory patterns (such as, say, astrology), but illusory patterns do not cause such an evolution in the quality of one's experience, and of course do not stand for long the test of reason.

Which finally brings me to your question: Does my worldview allow me to appreciate the beauty in Aztec masks or Islamic music? Even though I know next to nothing about both, my worldview would certainly facilitate my appreciation of them. It certainly did facilitate my appreciation of Zen Buddhism or of Sufi poetry. It even makes it more difficult to me to feel disgusted by the worse of humanity's failures, or my failures for that matter. But your deeper question is: Does my worldview help me appreciate beauty (in whatever context) any more than naturalism does? I think so, yes. First, because my worldview does offer a complete explanation whereas naturalism is struggling with that. And secondly I think so because I think that idealistic theism represents the correct understanding of reality whereas naturalism doesn't. The worldview about reality one adopts is clearly not irrelevant to one's appreciation of reality.

773. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53365 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 4:15 am

Epeeist (post 958, or #53355):

When we put three beans in a cup then, with infinite precision, there are exactly tree beans in the cup.

Are these classical beans or quantum beans? Are they in the cup, or has some part of them tunneled through the side of the cup?

:-) I thought you'd argue this. Well, these are real and hence quantum beans. And they are exactly three as long as none tunnels outside or any other bean tunnels inside. Or, if you prefer, they are exactly three in the sense that I am willing to take any bet to the contrary.

One presumes that you actually meant the square root of two.

Right, thanks, I'll fix the original post.

This is an extremely easy proof to grasp in ones head, without writing anything down. This being so, my comment 912 applies (see also 893 and 896 if necessary). If mathematics needs a substrate then the brain, mind and consciousness must be coterminous. If you disagree with this and argue for dualism then this kind of mathematics is abstract and doesn't have any material requirements.

My meaning is not that mathematics "needs" a material substrate, but rather that all mathematical theorems can be interpreted as a material property, and that therefore mathematical truths are not divorced from reality (as understood by naturalism). Which is good, because to claim that a proposition is objective (and indeed objectively true) but also that it has absolutely no relation to reality at all is self-contradictory. After all we use the concept of "objective" to characterize reality and anything that is part of it. So for example the propositions "Dianelos thinks God exists", "Dianelos thinks Cindy Crawford is beautiful", and "God exists" are all objective propositions (which may be true or false). In contrast to that, whether the proposition "Cindy Crawford is beautiful" is objective or not depends on one's worldview – most would say that this is not an objective proposition, meaning that there is nothing in the reality of the particular spatial arrangement of the molecules of Cindy Crawford's body that by itself has the "beautiful" property.
I quote from your post 912:

An axiom is a valid string in the grammar of the formal system. The final result of a set of transformations (if done properly according to the rules of the formal system) is a theory, which is just another string in the language. They don't have any meaning.

I agree. On the other hand one can't reasonably claim that these axioms or theorems are true, unless one interprets them in a way that imparts meaning to them. Truth and falsity are properties of meaningful strings.

774. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53354 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 1, 2007 at 12:02 am

Steve99 (post 832, or #52233):

Physical reality does not have infinite precision.

Here are some counterexamples: When we put three beans in a cup then, with infinite precision, there are exactly tree beans in the cup. Science holds that the electrical charge of an electron has a value of infinite precision (even though we don't know exactly what that value is, but then again we don't exactly know the value of pi either).

Let me quote a definition of mathematics to you from wikipedia:

"Other practitioners of mathematics[3][4] maintain that mathematics is the science of pattern, that mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere.

Exactly right. As mathematics is the science of pattern (I completely agree with that), and such patterns are also found in science, then at least that mathematics cannot be completely divorced from reality.

"Mathematical concepts and theorems need not correspond to anything in the physical world."

I really don't see how this could be expressed any clearer: Mathematics can exist entirely as imaginary abstractions. Do you understand what this means? It means that there is no substance required.

Well, I don't think I disagree with any of that. My claim is that mathematics does in fact correspond to something in the physical world, namely at least one property of at least one material system. (Whether it "needs" that or not strikes me as quite irrelevant).

Now when I said that the material system can be a pencil and a piece of paper I did not mean anything as trivial as writing down the theorem in symbolic form, or even writing down the proof of that theorem. I mean that the truth of that theorem obtains when one does things with a pencil and a piece of paper following particular rules (which rules depends on the theorem in question), and therefore the truth of that theorem describes a property of the material system that consists of a pencil and a piece of paper. So, for example, the mathematical proposition that the square root of 2 is an irrational number describes the following property: Take a piece of paper and a pencil, imagine any two natural numbers A and B, and use the rules of longhand multiplication and division to calculate (A*A)/(B*B): The result you'll get on that piece of paper will never be 2. - So, here we have an objective property of that material system.

775. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53352 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 11:34 pm

Dr Benway (951, or #53234):

Which I do in believing in God, and which explains why I experience theism as ethically empowering.

The people who planted the car bombs in downtown London today say the exact same thing.

Yes, they say the exact same thing, but they mean something quite different, because their understanding of God is quite different from mine. The God I know about has a thing with violence: S/He disapproves of violence in all cases no matter the ends, in other words S/He is a radical pacifist.

If you don't fight with appeals to reason or law, you fight with force. Force confirms the zealot's sense of righteousness. The zealot requires an appeal to reason, strange as that sounds. Reason combined with overwhelming communal reinforcement.

I am happy we agree that force doesn't work, because it only confirms the zealot's worldview that they are fighting a war for righteousness. I also understand your point that if they get reason for justifying their belief their passion may only grow. But I am not giving them that reason, am I? After all the God I believe in is very different from theirs, and I think it's better not to believe in God than to believe in God with all the wrong properties. God with the right properties is an explanation, God with the wrong properties is, hmm, a demon – and belief in demons represents I suppose the very worse kind of superstition.

I want all religionists to say, "FAITH, OR BELIEF WITHOUT EVIDENCE, IS NOT SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION FOR HURTING PEOPLE."

FAITH, OR BELIEF WITHOUT EVIDENCE, IS NOT SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION FOR HURTING PEOPLE.

(Even though for me "faith" does not mean "belief without evidence", but I realize very many people use the word "faith" in that sense.)

But I'll go one better:

ONLY SELFLESS LOVE FOR THEM CAN POSSIBLY BE SUFFICIENT REASON FOR HURTING PEOPLE.

Here is an example: I have a three-years old daughter and my love for her moves me to sometimes hurt her or to sometimes allow her to risk hurting herself without interfering.

Dianelos, you won't make the world a better place by persuading the nice folks here that theism is a good thing.

I think the world would be a better place if more people had the same understanding of reality I have.

Go persuade the true believer to doubt.

I agree that doubt is a good thing. (Interestingly enough, Christians believe that Jesus was God incarnate, and therefore also believe that God incarnate himself/herself doubted while praying in the mount of the Olives – which kind of reminds one how one too is sometimes unsure about what one wants and therefore thinks: what is it that I really want?)

But doubt is not always attainable/meaningful, for example I cannot really doubt that I am having conscious experiences right now; nor, frankly, can I doubt that my understanding of God explains the whole of my experience, because it does. What I can and do doubt is whether that explanation works as well as I think it does, and of course whether there might not be a better explanation. And that's one reason I am in this discussion: to see if people can find any holes in my understanding. And I've got some good challenges so far.

The life you save may be your own.

I assume you mean I might die in some terrorist attack by zealots. Right, but let's keep some sense of proportion here. The probability I might die from cancer is about a hundred thousand times greater than the probability I might die from such a terrorist attack – and I notice that the amount of money (and therefore human energy) that is spent on cancer research is a fraction of what's spent on the "war on terrorism". Kind of absurd, no? IRC the number of people who die from cigarette smoking every day is larger than the number of people who died at 9/11. The invasion of Iraq (a country unconnected to 9/11) has so far caused the death of about half a million innocent Iraqis, killed the same number of Americans as 9/11, and maimed many times more. My sense of security if far more threatened by the US government's insistence to downplay the environmental degradation, than by Bin Laden and Co's fanaticism. So, really, let's keep some sense of proportion here, as reason divorced from that sense becomes darkly and dangerously irrational.

776. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53227 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 7:27 am

LeeC (post 932, or #53180):

see you are a very busy poster and try to reply to your posts, so I will wait and look forward to your reply to my post No. 895

Right. I am trying to catch up with older posts and am right now at about 50 posts before yours. I can't do this any faster, English after all is my fourth language and I like to think before I write down something. Also with all the time I spend typing on the computer my wife has started complaining that unless we are in bed she only looks at by back.

777. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53222 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 7:16 am

Epeeist (post 840, or #52402):

Many years ago I used to work for a company that developed systems in Prolog, a language that uses Horn clauses to resolve goals.

Which reminded me that many years ago I used to teach Prolog, and even wrote a Prolog interpreter that I ran on the very first PC I had access to. Oh, well.

"If god made the world then who made god" !

Well to be precise God did not make the world, rather God is the world. All reality is exhausted in God. It's true that God made us having the kind of experiential life we have, but we and our experiences are part of reality too. (Incidentally it's interesting to note that by exercising our will we are co-creators of the world. I don't have a very good memory of movie quotes, but as it is said in The Gladiator: "What we do in this life echoes in all eternity.")

In short, as God is all reality, there is nothing that made God, because all that objectively exists is by definition part of reality and therefore part of God.

"Why did christians support slavery in the nineteenth century but don't support it now" !

Your answer is as good as mine. I suppose their sense of ethics and common decency caught up with their dogmatism and self-interest.

Naturalism does have its problems, but as you have said in a number of messages (and I have said in different ways) this is because it is a work in progress struggling to explain things. The theist position doesn't have problems because it can say "that's the way the god wants it/did it" which effectively invokes the cut operator to prevent any further discussion.

I understand what you are saying. I also understand that some naturalists will not find that theism works better than naturalism even after they realize that science has nothing to say about reality and after they apply the same comparative criteria I applied to compare theism and naturalism. As you say a naturalist may expect that naturalism will solve its problems. Or a naturalist may not find theism's explanations satisfactory (even though, as I clarified in post 905 the explanations I refer to have not the form "God's done this way" but rather "here's why God's done it this way" – a big difference.) Also my predictions about how humanity in general and intelligent computers in particular will decide for theism may take centuries to obtain. And my predictions of what happens after death are not of course particularly relevant in an argument during this life. Finally a naturalist may not value as I do theism's "feel good" factor or moral empowerment. I understand all that – but again, my argument here is only why I find theism more reasonable than naturalism, and not why everybody else should find the same. Even though, frankly, I do think it plausible that anybody who looks at all the evidence will be moved by reason to choose idealistic theism (because no problems are better than the expectation that problems will be solved, unsatisfactory explanations are better than no explanations, "feel good factor" is better than its absence, etc). On the other hand I am perfectly aware that a naturalist may think exactly the opposite: that anybody who looks at all the evidence will be moved by reason to choose naturalism. So, let's see which way things will move.

778. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53220 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 7:04 am

Downunder (post 835, or #52335):

Dianelos 819#52021; I quote from yours: "All of one's consciousness....etc....are produced by one's brain....destroyed at death. Therefore no personal survival after death". Assuming that you mean: " ....no continuation of the life once departed from this earth....",I wonder how you know that. Have you been there, done that? [..] may I be so bold as to humbly ask you: is the above quote your belief or is it a quote from somewhere?

Well, the above expresses the typical naturalist understanding. It is actually a quote of what I once heard Sam Harris say in an interview. Of course I have not "been there, done that" but I do think that from naturalism's point of view the reasonable assumption is that there is no continuation of conscious experience of oneself after death. Harris, in that interview, was careful enough to explain that he was not claiming that consciousness could not somehow survive death, but was quite explicit that personality does not survive death and that therefore one will not meet after dying one's long deceased grandmother, and so on.

Please tell me what you think is life. Where does life come from, where does it go to?

Life, understood as the very conspicuous physical phenomenon present in our current experience, is a particular kind of chemical reaction, a reachtion which has very interesting properties such as creating islands of decreasing thermodynamic entropy, the capacity of self-organization and evolution, the capacity of becoming intelligent, etc. Where does life come from? We don't yet know where life comes from, in the sense that we don't know the origin of life as a phenomenon on this planet or in the universe. Life of one particular organism comes from a particular organization of matter that starts the chemical reaction of life in that organism and which is nowadays pretty well understood. Where does life go? Well at the death of an organism the necessary organization of matter stops existing and therefore the chemical reaction that instantiates that organism's life stops. There is little doubt that life as a chemical phenomenon in the universe will some time stop altogether – at the latest at the very demise of the universe. (There is some super-weird naturalistic theories that life can continue for ever at the so-called "omega point", but I don't find such ideas very reasonable, even while wearing my naturalistic hat.)

Personal life, understood in the context of idealistic theism, namely life as we subjectively experience it, comes from God's creative love and ends when we attain perfection in goodness and therefore unity with God, at which point our personality is dissolved within God and we stop existing as individual people. In fact, I tend to think that before that definitive end in God we shall stop existing as individual people when we undergo unity with other human beings.

779. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53206 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 5:07 am

Steve99 (post 934, or #53186):

Observe that my case does not rest on the actual truth of theism, but just on the worldview a person has in fact adopted.

I feel exactly the same, which is why I have such a problem with theist worldviews in general. Because they have such a shaky foundation, and because they discourage doubt and uncertainty, I share Sam Harris' concern that they are becoming an increasing danger.

The case I was referring to above was concerning the ethical empowerment of the theistic worldview. My general case of why I find more reasonable to adopt a theistic rather than a naturalistic worldview rests on my application of all the comparative criteria I can think of to these two views and finding that idealistic theism works better than naturalism in all cases. I don't see anything shaky in my methodology, and I notice that most of my criteria are objective.

780. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53201 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 4:21 am

Steve99 (post 917, or #53107):

Berkeley proposed a theistic worldview based on idealism, which is roughly the same I am describing here.

I am glad you are explicit about that. This worldview was (in my view) eloquently dismissed by Samuel Johnson.

From Boswell:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

I am a Johnsonite.

I have always been very curious about that. How would you say does the demonstration of hitting with mighty force a large stone refute idealism?

781. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53176 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 1:36 am

Downunder (post 928, or #53172):

why the creation of a universe for such a small planet and recent mankind. Why do you limit the universe's existence as serving only mankind's planet? I do not know, but you may know, if there are other "occupied" planets.

I made that comment in the context of discussing the traditional theistic worldview, and in that worldview God created this objectively real universe only for us.

Now to answer your specific question about my own views on the probability of other occupied planets: I just don't know. Now, as far as understanding physical phenomena goes I am squarely scientifically minded (and naturalistically minded in the sense that I don't assume any supernatural influences). And even though we don't really have yet a clue about the origin of life, from what we do know the universe should be teeming with intelligent life (see in this context the Kurzweil's books, particularly "The age of spiritual machines"). But the universe we observe is not teeming with intelligent life, which is kind of annoying. Maybe the origin of life will turn out to be an event so extremely rare that the probabilistic expectation of it happening even once in a universe as big and old as ours is relatively small, or maybe there is some kind of physical law that causes all technological civilizations to quickly and irretrievably destroy themselves (maybe some unpredictable and solar system busting explosion happens when a particular kind of experiment is performed in a particle accelerator, or something like that.) Or maybe we are just very lucky to be the first or one of the very first civilizations in the entire cosmos. Who knows.

A commonly heard question is: why does nature/God allow such cruelty in the world and created as well such beauty?

My answer to this question is: Because this experiential environment is optimal for us to grow in virtue – or, as John Hick calls it, for "soul-making".

782. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53173 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 30, 2007 at 1:00 am

Eric Blair (post 830, or #52212):

That was a well written post, and humorous too. Of course there is bewildering range of theistic worldviews. Still I find it's plain that on average and all other personal parameters being the same a person who believes in life after death in which one's actions in this life have relevance will tend to behave more ethically than a person who believes that their life ends at death and that's that.

I picked the example of the desert island that Dr Benway suggested to build an admittedly macabre and extreme situation of ethical challenge. I don't agree though that this situation is a "caricature" as Epeeist writes somewhere. Equivalent situations do obtain in real life, for example in war, or in general when one must weight one's own survival against another's. But I could have made the same point using less dramatic situations, such as a poor person finding a wallet full of money in a dark alley and considering whether to do the right thing and return it.

Observe that my case does not rest on the actual truth of theism, but just on the worldview a person has in fact adopted. As luck would have it yesterday I read of some actual laboratory research on ethical behavior that helps my position. See the July 2, 2007 Newsweek article titled "When does your brain stop making new neurons?", from which I quote:

But with the new millennium scientists were finding that brain wiring can change, even in adults. That got Shaver, a professor at the University of California Davis, and Mikulincer, at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, thinking: could they activate unused or dormant circuits to trigger the sense of emotional security that underlies compassion and benevolence? To find out, they gave volunteers overt or subliminal cues to activate brain circuitry encoding thoughts of someone who offered unconditional love and protection – a parent, a lover, God. The goal was to induce the feeling of security that makes it more likely someone will display, say, altruism and not selfishness. It worked. People became more willing to give blood and do volunteer work, and less hostile to ethnic groups different from their own.

Observe that what matters here is not whether a person of unconditional love and protection objectively exists, but only that one believes such a person exists. Which I do in believing in God, and which explains why I experience theism as ethically empowering. You may ask: Why then are theists in general and Christians in particular not perceptibly better people than anybody else? I guess there are many answers to that, but one part of the answer clearly is that none of the three great monotheistic religions (except maybe some smallish denominations in them) affirm anything like God offering unconditional love and protection. On the contrary, especially the more fundamentalist currents in these religions, describe a God whose love is very much conditional (or even arbitrarily pre-determined) and who far from protecting the people he himself created will send most of the them to eternal suffering in hell (a view not particularly conducive to emotional security it seems to me). Of course I think that view is utter nonsense, and I want to make clear that great Christian theologians both in the ancient world (Origen, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa) and in modern times (John Hick) have affirmed universal salvation. Of course they clashed with the Church's official dogma about damnation. How could such an obviously false (and, considering God's property of perfect goodness, even incoherent) dogma become official? I suppose Dawkins's meme theory goes a long way explaining that: memes that carry a stick have more reproductive success than memes that don't – or in short it's easier to occupy ignorant peoples' minds if you scare them shitless. Anyway, my worldview implies that we have an implicit cognitive capacity for recognizing objective truth (the whole of reality is similar to each one of us, remember), so I trust that people will ever so slowly follow the long and winding road towards truth. As for Christianity as an organization it will ultimately remain as relevant as the truth it embodies and as irrelevant as the falsity it embodies – both in dogma and in being.

783. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53169 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 11:21 pm

_J_ (post 829, or #52162):

Are you suggesting that therefore we should use objective experiments in all other cognitive fields also?

Actually yes, I am. But I would be using 'objective experiments' in a much looser sense than you. Sheer objectivity is, as far as I can make out, an unattainable Holy Grail. All we can do is try to water down our subjectivity. [snip] We all appeal to a 'making it as objective as we can' approach for dealing with most of the predictions we have to get through a day in the real world.

Maybe our difference here is semantic. I find you are using the concept of "objectivity" the way I would use the concept of "reason". "Reason" is an umbrella concept that covers all the properties (or methodologies) that characterize the kind of thought that is effective in producing useful results. The objectivity that the scientific method strives to achieve is therefore reasonable within the context of science. But it's unattainable in other cognitive fields (such as artistic creation for example – and I am not talking about artistic technique).

On the other hand please observe that the criteria I use to compare worldviews are mostly objective. I copy from my post 870 (#52864):

There are several criteria I find reasonable: explanatory power (which must go beyond what science explains because all of them are equivalent as science is concerned), absence of conceptual problems, internal coherence, experiential gains or ethical empowerment for those who adopt them, some subjective evaluation such as elegance/plausibility/economy. I find that idealistic theism works better than any other worldview under each one of these criteria, and that's what I was defending in this forum.

You write:

Of course, we all say 'bollocks to objectivity – I'm going with my gut on this' at times. That's justifiable in matters of little or no consequence or that only affect our individual selves. But 'Is there a god?' seems to me to be a more important, and more consequential, question. Our beliefs on this matter will effect the other people we interact with.

I agree, but have two comments: First what only affects our individual selves need not be of little consequence – but I get your point. Second, there is no way around using intuition sometimes. For example such a basic methodology of reason as the inductive method cannot be justified. (Why not? Because any justification of the inductive method depends on the inductive method, so it's impossible to justify the inductive method without begging the question.) There is even an explanation why there is no way around using intuition to some degree: Take any proposition and its justification. That justification will depend on direct experiences (which do not require further justification – they are part of reality by definition) and on some propositions we use as premises. Let's then try to justify these premises. If we avoid circular reasoning, as we must, there must come a point where a premise admits of no further justification, even though it forms part of a reasonable train of thought. We call such premises intuitive and we ground their use by the very overall success of the whole of our train of thought (or by the overall success of our so-called "noetic structure").

784. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53099 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 10:32 am

Quetzalcoatl (post 898, or #53039):

In response to post 870 (#52864) in which I wrote:

Three, idealistic theism (my own view), according to which God directly produces all our experiences (including our observation of nature) without the intermediation of an objectively real physical universe.

you now comment:

Dianelos- does this mean that you believe there is no physical universe?

No, there is a physical universe, but its existence consists of patterns present in our experience of physical phenomena. So, according to my worldview, there is no objective physical universe that is independent of consciousness.

If there is, does that mean God is controlling our experiences of it? If so, why bother, why not let us experience the Universe he created by ourselves?

God is causing our experience of it. But to be precise not all our experience. For example I am partially causing your experience of the physical universe by having written this very post you are now reading. Finally random stuff happens. But all content or change of our conscious experience that is not random is caused by personal will, either a human's or God's. Of course our will is pretty limited. So, obviously, it's not our will but God's will that causes the order that is present in physical phenomena, and which we call "physical laws".

Now the traditional theistic view is different. According to the traditional understanding God has created an objectively real physical universe, and placed us in it consisting of both body and soul (or mind). This is a far more complicated worldview, which moreover produces many conceptual problems related to dualism, to why the soul/mind can survive the destruction of the brain, to why the creation of such a big and old universe for such a small planet and young humankind, etc. Not to mention that the idea of an objectively real God virtually hidden behind an objectively real physical universe is quite unpalatable.

If there is no physical universe, then where are we? Where are our minds?

Physical space does not objectively exist. What exists is a space of conscious experience. That's where we are.

What are our minds?

That's the fundamental question, isn't it? :-) Well, our minds are we. So what are we? We are persons. And what is a person? It's a conscious subject, i.e. a subject capable of conscious experiences – our physical body is just a stable pattern present in our conscious experiences as is the physical universe perceived as existing around it. And that's the end of the road: personhood represents the most fundamental aspect (or if you prefer, organization) of reality. All of reality is a person, namely God, in which limited persons, namely us, exist. Hence reality is self-similar.

Why have Holy Books that speak in terms of the physical universe, rather than ones that tell us that there is no such place?

If you mean the Bible then why should the Bible be right in this particular respect? After all, it's wrong in so many other much more trivial respects. But, impressively enough, the Bible is right in one fundamental bit: that we are created in the image of God. Also I understand some Eastern religious scripture describes a worldview that is not far from idealism.

If I've misunderstood your viewpoint, I apologise. Just trying to get some clarity here.

Well, I am not sure how much clarity I gave you :-)

Idealism is not an easy worldview to understand. But once you get the knack of it, it really works very well. Of course idealism is not my idea. It started with Plato and his famous analogy that we live like in a cave on the walls of which we observe shadows cast by what is objectively real outside of the cave. I find his analogy very prescient, as 2,500 years latter quantum physicists discovered that many different physical realities can produce the quantum phenomena we observe, in the same way that many different objects can produce the same shadows. In the 18th century Kant made it pretty clear that we can't know anything about the external objective reality that produces the phenomena except that it exists, thus creating a deep epistemological conundrum for ontology. In the same century Berkeley proposed a theistic worldview based on idealism, which is roughly the same I am describing here.

785. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53085 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 9:27 am

Epeeist (post 904, or #53068):

It is a subtle piece of equivocation to allow you to dismiss all abstract mathematics as "non-meaningful"

But that's not what I am saying. Quite the opposite. I am saying this: Give me any mathematical theorem you like, no matter how abstract – and I shall give you at least one objective property of a material system.

How will I achieve that? Well, first I will check to see what the theorem claims. It always claims something, even if what it claims is something completely abstract that has meaning only within some abstract mathematical space. Then I will produce a material system that consists of piece of paper and a pencil and claim that one objective property it has is this: that if you push the pencil to write down symbols according to the relevant abstract symbolic rules then something specific (namely what the theorem claims) will obtain in the end.

I fear we are being sidetracked here from the main issue, but I insist that there cannot be any objectively true proposition that is entirely divorced from reality. I stick so much with this point because I think that the very concept of objective truth is contingent on reality. If you allow even a very small window for people to pass claims of objective truth in a manner that is completely divorced from reality then you are opening a huge window to irrationality.

And if naturalism could not account for objective mathematical truths in a way not completely divorced from its own view of reality, then it would be really very bad news for naturalism. But I personally find that naturalism can account for objective mathematical truths.

786. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53076 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 8:34 am

Epeeist (post 892, or #53016):

No – both the axiom a * b = b * a and 123 * 15 = 15 * 1223 are both symbolic and have no relationship to anything material.

Right, but axioms themselves or any string produced by a formal system is not a proposition (and therefore is neither true nor false) unless one explains what it means. And I want to know how a naturalist can explain the meaning of any of the strings you wrote above, let alone justify their truth value, without recourse to anything material.

787. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53073 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 7:57 am

Downunder (post 888, or #53001):

I can use your "It is easy enough to brush away anything...." by adding : God's done it.

If you are saying that naturalists brushing away anything they can't explain with "it's an illusion" is similar to theists brushing away anything they can't explain with "God's done it", then I agree. I am also well aware that historically many people responded "God's done it" for explaining away phenomena that latter science explained without recourse for God. Indeed as far as explaining objective physical phenomena goes it appears that one does not need the God hypothesis at all (even though, as previously pointed out, the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental physical constants is rather problematic).

But the physical phenomena that science studies form only a smallish part of our experience. There is the entire qualitative and private aspect of our condition, the "how it is like to experience X" (be X=pain, beauty, love, etc). That's all data which does not correspond to the objective physical phenomena that science studies, and therefore science has nothing to say about such data. Indeed, the very fact of consciousness is not an objective phenomenon, but rather the means by which we become aware of objective phenomena. Theism does answer many of these questions: It can answer why we are conscious beings in the first place, why we experience and interact with a mechanical physical environment, why we experience will, why the experience of pain is like it is, why the experience of beauty is like it is, and much more. Naturalism cannot offer any kind of answers to these questions. Now it's true that theism's answer is basically "because God's done it this way" but, and that's crucial, not just that. If it only were that I would tend to agree that these are empty explanations, for one could equally well answer "because the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) has done it this way". Theism's explanatory power resides in its further capacity of explaining why God's done it like that. You see God is a person with particular properties, you and I are persons, and therefore have the cognitive capacity to understand God's properties. So we can check whether a person with God's properties would do what answers all these questions, and, indeed, what ultimately explains the whole of our experience. In short theism's answers are not just "because God's done it", but "because a person with God's properties would do exactly that".

788. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53064 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 7:18 am

Epeeist (post 886, or #52999):

Some mathematics can be used to describe material systems. But this does not make mathematics a material system. You are confusing the map with the territory.

I don't think I ever claimed that "mathematics is a material system". I claimed that all meaningful mathematical theorems describe a property of a material system (and therefore, in short, that math can be reduced to matter). Properties of material systems need not be material systems themselves. For example a property of a snow flake is that it is six-sided. That's a real and objective property of the material system "snowflake", but it's not like the property of six-sidedness is "material" itself.

I agree that one must be careful not to confuse the map with the territory. So numbers and theorems are concepts that form part of the map. But what numbers and theorems refer to are part of the territory: they are objective properties of material systems. Not of one particular material system of course, but of all material systems where the respective map applies.

789. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53010 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 2:17 am

Steve99 (post 889, or #53002):

I understand your idea, but what I don't understand is this: How can a naturalist know of objective facts that cannot be derived from naturalism? I have asked this before but I don't think I got an answer.

You got a very clear answer. We know of these facts because they are derived from manipulation of symbols (make of physical things) after we have set up the axioms and rules.

Are you saying that you know that mathematical theorems are objectively true because they are produced by a formal system of axioms and rules? If so you are clearly wrong because there exists a formal system of axioms and rules that produces theorems "1+1=1", "2+2=2", "3+3=3", "4+4=4", etc, which are all false.

So my question remains: How does naturalism justify the belief that some mathematical theorems are objectively true?

Or maybe you are saying that not all formal systems are acceptable, but only a few particular ones that mathematicians approve of. It turns out that this can't be the complete answer either, because as per the famous Goedel theorem, for any set of formal systems you might choose there will be at least one true mathematical theorem that cannot be produced by any of them. But let's overlook this point. The most relevant question still remains: How do these mathematicians know that these and not other formal systems produce true theorems?

I don't see any way around the problem, Steve99. All claim of objective truth is meaningful only if it can be tested, and for a naturalist the only place one can test propositions is the natural world. But if it is possible to test a proposition against the natural world such a proposition can be understood as describing a property of the natural world, indeed a property that obtains when one performs this test.

790. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53005 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 1:50 am

Epeeist (post 828, or #52142):

It might even be better to start from the Peano axioms which don't define any numbers apart from 0 or 1. The axioms are usually stated in a first order predicate calculus.

This being so, is the first order predicate calculus reducible to matter or is this (like the reduction of mathematics to matter) simply a nonsense statement?

My best naturalistic understanding is this: There are some formal systems (including the ones of arithmetic based on the Peano axioms) that we find to be useful because they produce theorems which after we interpret them as meaningful propositions turn out to be true. And we accept them as true because, as is the case with all meaningful propositions, we can (at least in principle) test them against reality, confirm that these tests are successful in all cases we try, and finally by inductive reasoning accept that they are successful in all cases.

So we take a theorem produced by such a formal system, say "a*b=b*a", and interpret it as the proposition that the result of multiplying two natural numbers is independent of the order of these two numbers. And, as any schoolchild empirically can confirm, to multiply, say, 123 times 15 gives the same result as multiplying 15 times 123. Which is a surprising result, considering that the process of multiplying two numbers by longhand is very different depending on their order, and still everything falls into place in the end and we always get the correct result. So the theorem "a*b=b*a" describes a property of material systems, for example (and this is only one example for this theorem) something that always obtains when we push a pencil around a piece of paper following the specific rules of longhand multiplication.

791. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #53000 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 1:13 am

Epeeist (post 884, or #52991):

You are switching horses here DG - I thought you were an idealist, not a positivist (or given other posts, a formalist).

Actually first and foremost I am a pragmatist/empiricist. I am an idealist precisely because I pragmatically find that idealism's hypothesis (i.e. that the fundamental aspect of reality is consciousness rather than matter) works best for explaining the whole of my experience (i.e. all empirical facts I have). As for logical positivism I find it a very reasonable theory of meaning, and I don't understand why it has fallen in disfavor in modern philosophy (both of the dominant naturalistic kind and of the less popular theistic kind). Indeed why should I care for a proposition whose truth value cannot even in principle affect my current or future experience in any way (which implies that neither can it be tested by me in any way)? And if I shouldn't care about such a proposition, in what sense does it carry any meaning as far as I am concerned?

I don't see, as an idealist, why you should be concerned about the nature of mathematics especially since Platonic idealism is one of interpretations of mathematics.

Ah, I was arguing that math can be reduced to matter as a materialist. I often think as a naturalist, because if I want to reason whether theism or naturalism work best then I have to use the most powerful naturalistic worldview I can conceive. In post 773 (or #51331) where I argued that math can be reduced to matter I was explicit about that encapsulating my argument between "putting on my naturalist hat" and "taking off my naturalist hat".

In my own idealistic worldview the issue of math is resolved very elegantly: All existents - be they apples, or matter, or physical laws, or numbers, or mathematical theorems, or other minds, or beauty, or God – are all patterns present in my conscious experience, and are therefore all epistemologically identical.

792. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #52997 by Dianelos Georgoudis on June 29, 2007 at 12:45 am

Steve99 (post 875, or #52904):

So for all practical purposes in the context of our discussion please consider that I agree with your belief that math cannot be reduced to matter.

It is absolutely central to your main point. If you concede that objective mathematical facts cannot be reduced to matter, then you are also conceding the general point that objective facts don't have to arise from any form of substance, and so they don't have to conflict with naturalism, even though they can't be derived from naturalism.

I understand your idea, but what I don't understand is this: How can a naturalist know of objective facts that cannot be derived from naturalism? I have asked this before but I don't think I got an answer.

Epeeist in post 862 (#52794) speaks of the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (a paper I haven't read even though I have read about the idea), but how does this answer my question? On the contrary,