naturalism

Book Review: The Recalcitrant Imago Dei by J.P. Moreland

This is the first of what will probably be many book reviews. Yes, it is indeed just another way to put easy content up on my site. Since school started I have less time for this, but I’m still reading as much as I can. Any feedback would be wonderful. I’ll post the review criteria at the bottom of this review, and probably make an individual post about it so the criteria can be easily accessed. Also, any suggestions for other categories to review would be appreciated (or suggestions to remove categories).

J.P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei is a work that outlines a case against naturalism based on what a Christian would define as the “image of God.” These recalcitrant (as far as naturalism is concerned) facts include consciousness, free will, rationality, a substantial soul, objective morality, and intrinsic value.

J.P. Moreland has, I believe, outlined a rather magnficent critique of naturalism in this work. Chapter by chapter, he lays out philosophical defeaters for naturalism that are based on some of the most basic facts of human life. Each chapter contains clear, though often intellectually challenging, arguments against naturalism based on such things as consciousness or free will.

The chapter on Consciousness was, I believe, great, but I’ve read almost all the material in other works (specifically, J.P. Moreland’s Consciousness and the Existence of God and William Lane Craig/Moreland’s Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology). I believe that current apologists are certainly on to something when they consider the argument from consciousness, which I would consider a rather impressive defeater of naturalism. Moreland’s version of the argument is actually an argument for theism, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it even better.

The next chapter considers the case of the freedom of the will. I believe that Moreland is correct in suggesting that naturalism generally, and physicalism specifically are almost certainly defeaters of the freedom of the will. Morelands argument in this chapter is again similar to some of his other works (here it would be Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview), but there is some material here that is both not recycled and very useful. I believe that this is a chapter I will continue to open to in my debates with physicalists.

One argument that continues to pique my interest is the argument from rationality. In this chapter, Moreland doesn’t so much employ an argument from reason for the existence of God as he uses the existence of reason as a defeater for naturalism. I believe many of the aspects of the argument from reason tend to mirror some of the teleological argument’s claims, and because of this I generally am biased against it, but I find Moreland’s methodology of using it against naturalism rather than as a proof for God quite interesting and will probably use it in application.

The chapter on the substantial soul is, I believe, less useful as an argument against naturalism (I think naturalists who argue that the soul is a physical object are, well, generally ignored nowadays), but the chapter contains several pages of highly useful definitions. It’s another chapter I will almost certainly continue to open to in order to clearly outline my responses.

Objective morality is a continual problem that I don’t see naturalism having any way around. I’m a huge advocate of the moral argument, and while Moreland doesn’t advance any specific moral argument in this chapter, he uses the idea of objective morality as a defeater for naturalism (and vice versa). Further, he argues that naturalism has no way to give humans intrinsic value, due to the idea that, according to naturalism, humans are merely animals and have no significant differences between them and, say, a dog as far as the physical world is concerned. His discussion in this chapter and the previous chapter on the errors of various philosophers using species relations when they should be discussing genus relations is highly interesting, though I’m unsure of the applicability.

The appendix has a few useful things, but it is mostly just Moreland observing various philosophical trends. He does offer an argument against naturalistic dismissivism that I will probably make use of in the future.

Overall, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei is a fantastic work. Although some portions of it are clearly recycled, including almost an entire chapter, it is a work that I will almost certainly use again and again. Moreland’s style of writing is almost always clear, but he sometimes suffers from an overuse of philosophical terms that are usually obvious in meaning, but could probably have been better said in a simpler fashion (like qualia, desiderata, etc.). I got this book hoping it would have some good arguments in it to help formulate a general critique of naturalism and I was not disappointed. I recommend this book highly, but be aware of the fact that it is certainly not easy reading.

Contents:

Naturalism, Theism and Human Persons: Identifying the Central Crisis of Our Age —1

Naturalism, Consciousness and Human Persons —16

Naturalism, Free Will and Human Persons —41

Naturalism, Rationality and Human Persons —67

Naturalism, a Substantial Soul and Human Persons —104

Naturalism, Objective Morality, Intrinsic Value and Human Persons —143

Appendix: Dismissive Naturalism: Responding to Nagel’s Last Stand —165

Scores:

Quality of Arguments (if it applies): 8

Overall Content: 9

Difficulty: 7

Clarity: 9

Theology/Doctrine: N/A- other than fairly fundamental Christian belief, this doesn’t really have enough to judge the work based on Doctrinal or Theological stances

Value (price): 8- Amazon has it for around 30-40$ The book’s actual material (before the notes/index start) comprise 180 pages. Normally I think this is a little low for a 40$ book, but there is no wasted space here.

Relevance: 9

Review Criteria:

The Quality of arguments is just what it says. Obviously this is subjective. Do I think the arguments presented in the book (if there are any) are valid and/or useful?

Overall Content is a general judge of how good I felt the book is.

Difficulty is the amount of work it takes to get through the work. Higher values don’t necessarily mean the book is better, just more difficult to read.

Clarity simply outlines how clear I believe the author was.

Theology/Doctrine is my judgment, clearly based on my presuppositions, of how good I felt the author’s theological or doctrinal content was (if there is any).

Value is a determination of whether I believe the book is worth the asking price.

Relevance outlines whether I think the book has real-life applications. A low score in this doesn’t necessarily mean the book is bad, just that I believe there may not be much to use. In other words, a book could score low on this criterium, but I might still find it quite good.

Physicalism: Does it really have explanatory power?

Physicalism–the view that the human body is wholly physical–claims to have better explanatory power (and indeed, the only explanatory power) than other world views. Is this really true?

One way to defeat such a claim is to show that physcalism does not actually have such a monopoly on explanatory power. I believe that dualism offers just such a defeater:

The main argument I have against physicalism (and hence, for dualism) is that there are things in existence that physicalism cannot account for. These things include, but are not limited to:

1) There is causation. Physicalism essentially seems to claim that a thought or an idea, an emotion, is identical to the cause. In other words, touching part of the brain with an electrode, which triggers a sensation, IS the sensation. What physicalism then states is that things are not responses to emotions, they just are the emotion. But that is seemingly false, for all that is proven is that the mind is causally connected to the brain, not that they are identical. There is no part of the brain, for example, that is a memory. It may be shown that one can cause a memory to occur with stimulation, but that only proves that some memory (B) is caused by some firing of a neuron (A). But A is not B.

Take, for example, the idea within physicalism that love is the chemical reactions and neurological firings in the brain: love (B) is caused by chemicals (A). To say that the chemical is love is not true, for a chemical is ontologically different from an emotion—consider this example: if I conceive of a pink elephant, does that mean that whatever neurons need to fire in order to bring that thought into my brain are indeed a pink elephant (Moreland, 234)? Or do they merely cause the image of a pink elephant to appear? Likewise with any real object or imagining. These things are not physically contained in our brain, nor are they actually the chemicals or neurons themselves, they can simply be caused by such mechanical things. That does not make them identical. A may cause B, but A is not B.

2) Self-presenting properties. There are things that present themselves directly to the subject, and are considered wholly mental in nature. Things like love, the experience of red, thinking that three is an odd number—these things are directly present to a subject because that subject has them immediately in his/her field of consciousness. Two evidences exist for these properties: the first is that one can have private access to mental properties, but not physical properties… and the second is that one can know at least some of one’s own mental properties incorrigibly. People can know things themselves that they cannot be wrong about. In other words, I can know without question what the color green appears to be to me. No one else can know that.

3) The subjective nature of experience. This is called the “knowledge argument.”  This one is something that is hard to explain without using an example (ty to J.P. Moreland for this). Suppose there is a deaf scientist who is the single leading expert on the neurology of hearing. It would be possible for him to know and describe everything involved in the physical aspects of hearing… yet not actually have knowledge of hearing itself. This experience is essential and subjective. It is also outside of the realm of physicalism to explain.

4) Intentionality. We can have an ‘ofness’ or ‘aboutness’ with our action that is inexplicable through physical needs. “Mental states have a directness that is intrinsic to them (Moreland 237).” In other words, many mental states are of or about something: fear of something, thoughts about something, etc. Now, there doesn’t seem to be any way to reduce something such as a thought about something to a physical explanation. In other words, the ‘aboutness’ of a thought defies physical explanation.

These are just a few arguments against physicalism. There are a couple more that could be made, but that would make this longer than I think it needs to be. Further, each individual kind of physicalism is subject to a wide array of critiques.
Moreland, J.P. & William Lane Craig. “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.”

Hijacking Ockham’s Razor

It is interesting to me that whenever I speak of wielding Ockham’s Razor for the case of theism, people, including and not at all limited to theists, insist that I’ll only lose. I strongly believe this is due to a misrepresentation of Ockham’s principle.

William of Ockham was nothing if not a Christian. He did indeed recommend a rigorous empricism, but it should be recognized as to what kind of empiricism he was suggesting. Ockham believed “in God, father almighty; which I understand thus, that everything which does not involve a manifest contradiction is to be attributed to the divine power (Lawhead, 210).”  It is important to understand that this was Ockham’s presupposition in his empiricism: that God’s omnipotence was first and foremost.

I would suggest that William of Ockham would disagree completely with the idea that his principle, known popularly as Occam’s Razor or Ockham’s Razor, could be used to exclude God from any explanation. The principle itself states, according to Ockham, that “What can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlesssly by more (210).”

Anti-theists in general seem to reinterpret this as “A naturalistic explanation is the only one.” Now, I do not mean at all to disregard Ockham’s own empiricism, but would it not seem that his original statement would not, given his own presupposition, exclude theism in any account? Not only that, but it would seem to suggest that theistic accounts are better because they are indeed simpler, by virtue of less principles. “God upholds the universe” could be used to explain almost infinite systems within the universe. That statement seems at face value much simpler than naturalistic explanations of events such as the Earth’s movement, gravity, life’s origins, etc. Now, I am not suggesting the use of Ockham’s Razor to halt scientific inquiry, but I would suggest that the hijacking that has occurred goes entirely against the principle’s presupposition, which is that, barring contradictions (and a scientific explanation of an event does not contradict a theistic explanation, it merely explains how God may do something), things are to be attributed to divine power.

Scientific inquiry can only explain how things work, it cannot exclude God from any equation. Using a principle such as Ockham’s Razor to try to argue against theism not only goes against the very nature of the principle, but it hijacks it entirely. Naturalism, in my opinion, tends to do that with most things. If it can’t explain something, it changes the definition. This has been done in science as well. The definition of science was changed to be exclude any supernatural explanations. While that is a topic for a different debate, I just think it is interesting that when naturalism fails, as it inevitably does, proponents of it cheat. Ockham’s Razor is just another way in which they do so.

Source:

Lawhead, William. “The Voyage of Discovery.” 2007. Wadsworth Thompson Learning.