Searle's Chinese Room: Another Nail

[updated 2/28/2024 - See "Addendum"]
[updated 3/9/2024 - note on Searle's statement that "programs are not machines"]

I have discussed Searle's "Chinese Room Argument" twice before:
here and here. It isn't necessary to review them. While both of them argue against Searle's conclusion, they aren't as complete as I think they could be. This is one more attempt to put another nail in the coffin, but the appeal of Searle's argument is so strong - even though it is manifestly wrong - that it may refuse to stay buried. The Addendum explains why.

Searle's paper, "Mind, Brains, and Programs" is
here. He argues that computers will never be able to understand language the way humans do for these reasons:
  1. Computers manipulate symbols.
  2. Symbol manipulation is insufficient for understanding the meaning behind the symbols being manipulated.
  3. Humans cannot communicate semantics via programming.
  4. Therefore, computers cannot understand symbols the way humans understand symbols.
In evaluating Searle's argument:
  1. Is certainly true. But Searle's argument ultimately fails because he only considers a subset of the kinds of symbol manipulation a computer (and a human brain) can do.
  2. Is partially true. This idea is also expressed as "syntax is insufficient for semantics." I remember, from over 50 years ago, when I started taking German in 10th grade. We quickly learned to say "good morning, how are you?" and to respond with "I'm fine. And you?" One morning, our teacher was standing outside the classroom door and asked each student as they entered, the German equivalent of "Good morning," followed by the student's name, "how are you?" Instead of answering from the dialog we had learned, I decided to ad lib, "Ice bin heiss." My teacher turned bright red from the neck up. Bless her heart, she took me aside and said, "No, Wilhem. What you should have said was, 'Es ist mir heiss'. To me it is hot. What you said was that you are experiencing increased libido." I had used a simple symbol substitution, "Ich" for "I", "bin" for "am", and "heiss" for "hot", temperature-wise. But, clearly, I didn't understand what I was saying. Right syntax, wrong semantics. Nevertheless, I do now understand the difference. What Searle fails to establish is how meaningless symbols acquire meaning. So he handicaps the computer. The human has meaning and substitution rules; Searle only allows the computer substitution rules.
  3. Is completely false.
Because 2 and 3 are false, his conclusion does not follow.

To understand why 2 is only partially true, we have to understand why 3 is false.
  1. A Turing-complete machine can simulate any other Turing machine. Two machines are Turing equivalent if each machine can simulate the other.
  2. The lambda calculus is Turing complete.
  3. A machine composed of NAND gates (a "computer" in the everyday sense) can be Turing complete.
    • A NAND gate (along with a NOR gate) is a "universal" logic gate.
    • Memory can also be constructed from NAND gates.
    • The equivalence of a NAND-based machine and the lambda calculus is demonstrated by instantiating the lambda calculus on a computer.1
  4. From 3, every computer program can be written as expressions in the lambda calculus; every computer program can be expressed as an arrangement of logic gates. We could, if we so desired, build a custom physical device for every computer program. But it is massively economically unfeasible to do so.
  5. Because every computer program has an equivalent arrangement of NAND gates2, a Turing-complete machine can simulate that program.
  6. NAND gates are building-blocks of behavior. So the syntax of every computer program represents behavior.
  7. Having established that computer programs communicate behavior, we can easily see what Searle's #2 is only partially true. Symbol substitution is one form of behavior. Semantics is another. Semantics is "this is that" behavior. This is the basic idea behind a dictionary. The brain associates visual, aural, temporal, and other sensory input and this is how we acquire meaning. Associating the visual input of a "dog", the sound "dog", the printed word "dog", the feel of a dog's fur, are how we learn what "dog" means. We have massive amounts of data that our brain associates to build meaning. We handicap our machines, first, by not typically giving them the ability to have the same experiences we do. We handicap them, second, by not giving them the vast range of associations that we have. Nevertheless, there are machines that demonstrate that they understand colors, shapes, locations, and words. When told to describe a scene, they can. When requested to "take the red block on the table and place it in the blue bowl on the floor", they can.
Therefore, Searle's #3 is false. Computer programs communicate behavior. Syntax rules are one set of behavior. Association of things, from which we get meaning, is another.

I was able to correct my behavior by establishing new associations: temperature and libido with German usage of "heiss". That associative behavior can be communicated to a machine. A machine, sensing a rise in temperature, could then inform an operator of its distress, "Es ist mir heiss!". Likely (at least, for now) lacking libido, it would not say, "Ich bin heiss."

Having shown that Searle's argument is based on a complete misunderstanding of computation, I wish to address selected statements in his paper.
Read More...
Comments

Critiquing Calvinism

critiquing.calvinism
On the strength of David Allen's book "The Atonement", I bought a copy of "Calvinism". The book beings with a critique of the five points of Calvinism, usually known by the acronym "TULIP". Allen wrote the chapter on the doctrine of "Limited Atonement" and I found his work here to be as well done as in his other book. He "steelmanned" his analysis, that is, he looked at the doctrine of Limited Atonement as it is actually presented by Calvinists, instead of assessing a caricature, and did a competent job stating the case against it. In fact, I'm only aware of one additional argument for limited atonement that he did not address1. However, the chapters on Total Depravity and Irresistible Grace aren't as well done. They are target rich environments that, were they to accurately depict Calvinism, would deter me from being a moderate Calvinist. Yet, instead of a lengthy rebuttal, in the remainder of this post I want to address one, and only one, part of the response to "Irresistible Grace" in chapter 4 by editor Steve Lemke. He writes:
... the Remonstrants were concerned about the teaching that God forces his grace on sinners irresistibly. [emphasis mine]
...
Bending the will of a fallible being by an omnipotent Being powerfully and unfailingly is not merely sweet persuasion. It is forcing one to change one’s mind against one’s will.
...
God changing our will invincibly in irresistible grace brings to mind phenomena such as hypnotism or brainwashing.
...
Note the striking contradiction—God will “overcome all resistance and make his influence irresistible,” and yet “irresistible grace never implies that God forces us to believe against our will.” No attempt is made in the article to reconcile these apparently contradictory assertions.

I will try to reconcile these allegedly contradictory assertions. The idea that God forces the spiritually dead to awaken to life in Christ is common in Arminian arguments. But it simply isn't what God does. "Aha!" moments, "Eureka!" moments rise from the recesses of our minds and present to us a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking, and that new thing is so obvious that we wonder why we never encountered it before. Of course we embrace it. Why would we not? It has positively transformed a part of our life.

Lemke asks:

Why would there be a need to persuade someone who had already been regenerated by irresistible enabling grace?

God works through His word: written, oral, or otherwise. He gives sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf (Ex. 4:11). He gives transforming inspiration. Regeneration and persuasion go hand in hand. He regenerates through persuasion and persuades through regeneration.

I am reminded of the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy opens the door of her house and sees Oz in color. Before then, everything was in black and white. The external change of location which brought color into her life is a parallel to the internal change that brings new sight to the Christian. What Dorothy saw on the outside the Christian sees on the inside.

dorothy.oz



[1] The "marriage" argument. It is argued that Christ died for His bride, the Church, to "sanctify it, having cleansed it." [Eph 5:25-27].

There is an inseparable unity between Christ's death for the church and his sanctifying and cleansing it. Those from whom he died he also sanctifies and cleanses. Since the world is not sanctified and cleansed, then it is obvious that Christ did not die for it.
    – Edwin H. Palmer, "The Five Points of Calvinism".

I don't think this argument survives Isaiah 54:5:

For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; ...
    – NRSV

Which makes 1 Cor 7:15 all the more interesting.

Comments

Quus, Redux

[updated 3/20/2022 to add footnote 2]

Philip Goff
explores Kripke's quss function, defined as:

(defparameter N 100)

(defun quss (a b)
(if (and (< a N) (< b N))
(+ a b)
5))

In English, if the two inputs are both less than 100, the inputs are added, otherwise the result is 5.
Goff then claims:

Rather, it’s indeterminate whether it’s adding or quadding.

This statement rests on some unstated assumptions. The calculator is a finite state machine. For simplicity, suppose the calculator has 10 digits, a function key (labelled "?" for mystery function) and "=" for result. There is a three character screen, so that any three digit numbers can be "quadded". The calculator can then produce 1000x1000 different results. A larger finite state machine can query the calculator for all one million possible inputs then collect and analyze the results. Given the definition of
quss, the analyzer can then feed all one million possible inputs to quss, and show that the output of quss matches the output of the calculator.

Goff then tries to extend this result by making N larger than what the calculator can "handle". But this attempt fails, because if the calculator cannot handle
bigN, then the conditionals (< a bigN) and (< b bigN) cannot be expressed, so the calculator can't implement quss on bigN. Since the function cannot even be implemented with bigN, it's pointless to ask what it's doing. Questions can only be asked about what the actual implementation is doing; not what an imagined unimplementable implementation is doing.

Goff then tries to apply this to brains and this is where the sleight of hand occurs. The supposed dichotomy between brains and calculators is that brains can know they are adding or
quadding with numbers that are too big for the brain to handle. Therefore, brains are not calculators.

The sleight of hand is that our brains can work with the descriptions of the behavior, while most calculators are built with only the behavior. With calculators, and much software, the descriptions are stripped away so that only the behavior remains. But there exists software that works with descriptions to generate behavior. This technique is known as "symbolic computation". Programs such as
Maxima, Mathematica, and Maple can know that they are adding or quadding because they can work from the symbolic description of the behavior. Like humans, they deal with short descriptions of large things1. We can't write out all of the digits in the number 10^120. But because we can manipulate short descriptions of big things, we can answer what quss would do if bigN were 10^80. 10^80 is less than 10^120, so quss would return 5. Symbolic computation would give the same answer. But if we tried to do that with the actual numbers, we couldn't. When the thing described doesn't fit, it can't be worked on. Or, if the attempt is made, the old programming adage, Garbage In - Garbage Out, applies to humans and machines alike.



[1] We deal with infinity via short descriptions, e.g. "10 goto 10". We don't actually try to evaluate this, because we know we would get stuck if we did. We tag it "don't evaluate". If we actually need a result with these kinds of objects, we get rid of the infinity by various finite techniques.
[2] This post title refers to a prior brief mention of
quss here. In that post, it suggested looking at the wiring of a device to determine what it does. In this post, we look at the behavior of the device across all of its inputs to determine what it does. But we only do that because we don't embed a rich description of each behavior in most devices. If we did, we could simply ask the device what it is doing. Then, just as with people, we'd have to correlate their behavior with their description of their behavior to see if they are acting as advertised.


Comments

On Rasmussen's "Against non-reductive physicalism"

After presenting his thesis in the first section, that mental properties are not physical properties, nor are they grounded in physical properties, he carefully defines what he means by physical properties. Broadly, a physical property is something that can be measured. But nowhere does he define what a mental property is. This will turn out to be important, since mental property could mean something not physical that we think about, or it could mean how we think about something. I will use mental property for something non-physical that we think about and mental state to refer to the act of thinking, whether thinking about physical or mental properties.

It should be without controversy that there are more non-physical things than physical things. By some estimates there are 10^80 atoms in the universe. There are an unlimited number of numbers. We can't measure all of those numbers, since we can't put them in one-to-one correspondence with the "stuff" of the universe.

The first thing to note is that if the number of things argues against the physicality of mental states, then mental properties aren't needed, because there are more atoms in the universe than there are in the brain. If the sheer number of things argues against physical mental states then this would be sufficient to prove the claim. But as anyone who plays the piano knows, 88 keys can produce a conceptually infinite amount of music. And one need not postulate non-physicality to do so. Just hook a piano up to random number sources that vary the notes, tempo, and volume. The resulting music may not be melodious, but it will be unique.

Rasmussen presents a "construction principle" which states "for
any properties, the xs, there is a mental property of thinking that the xs are physical." Here the confusion between mental property and mental state happens. The argument sneaks in the desired conclusion. After all, if this principle were true, then the counting argument wouldn't be needed. Clearly, there is a mental state when I think "my HomePod is playing Cat Stevens". But whether that mental state is physical or immaterial is what has to be shown. By saying it's a mental property then the assertion is mental states are non-physical and the rest of the proof isn't necessary. It's just proof by assertion.

Rasmussen then gives what he calls "a principle of uniformity" which says, "The divide between any two mental properties is narrower than the divide between physicality and non-physicality." To demonstrate this difference between physical and non-physical, he gives the example of a tower of Lego blocks. His claim is that as Lego block is stacked on Lego block, that both the Lego tower, and the shape of the Lego tower, remains physical. He asserts, "if (say)
being a stack of n Lego blocks is a physical property, then clearly so is being a stack of n+1 Lego blocks, for any n." This is clearly false. A Lego tower of 10^90 pieces is non-physical. There aren't enough physical particles in the universe for constructing such a tower. Does the shape of the Lego tower remain physical? This is a more interesting question. A shape is a description of an arrangement of stuff. The shape of an imaginary rectangle and the shape of a physical rectangle are the same. Are descriptions physical or non-physical? To assert one or the other is to beg the question of the nature of mental states.

So we have a counting argument that isn't needed, a construction principle that begs the question, and a principle of uniformity that doesn't match experience.

Having failed to show that mental states are non-physical, in section 3 Rasmussen tries to show that mental states aren't grounded in physicality. The bulk of the proof is in his step B2: "if no member of M
PROPERTIES entails any other, then some mental properties lack a physical grounding." He turns the counting argument around to claim that there is a problem of too few physical grounds for mental states. This claim is easily dismissed. First, consider words. The estimated vocabulary of an average adult speaker of English is 35,000 words. There is plenty of storage in the human brain for this. But if we don't know a word, we go to the dictionary to get a new definition and place that definition in short term reusable storage. If we use it enough so that it goes into long term storage, we may forget something to make room for it.

In the case of "infinite" things, we think of them in terms of a short fixed description of behavior, so we don't need a lot of storage for infinite things. The computer statement

10 goto 10

is a short description of an endless process. We don't actually think of the entire infinite thing, but rather finite descriptions of the behavior behind the process. [1]

Rasmussen's proof fails because the claim that there needs to be a unique physical property for each mental state doesn't stand. Much of our physical memory is reusable and we have access to external storage (books, videos, other people). In fact, as I wrote in 2015, "man is the animal that uses external storage". [2]

Since the final sections 4 and 5 aren't supported by 1, 2, and 3, they will be skipped over.



[1] See "
Lazy Evaluation" for some ways to deal with infinite sequences with limited storage.
[2]
"Man is the Animal...". Almost seven years later, this statement is still unique to me. Don't know why. It's obvious "to the most casual observer."





Comments

On Limited Atonement

[updated 5/9/2023 to fix link]

The scope and application of the Atonement is an issue, it seems, that is a fairly modern development. Up until the 9th century, the writings of the Church fathers showed agreement that the scope of the atonement was universal -- for everyone -- but that its effect was limited to those who believe[1]. Many (but not all) Calvinists affirm that the Atonement is limited in scope and limited in effect. And this is clearly important to some Presbyterians.

John McLeod Campbell was a Scottish minister and highly regarded Reform theologian. A number of his writings are still available on Amazon. He allegedly disagreed with the Westminster Confession of Faith regarding the doctrine of limited atonement by teaching that the Atonement was unlimited in scope, was charged with heresy, and was removed from the ministry. Campbell might have been able to raise a defense if he had had a copy of Grudem's Systematic Theology[2], where Grudem writes:

Finally, we may ask why this matter is so important after all. Although Reformed people have sometimes made belief in particular redemption a test of doctrinal orthodoxy, it would be healthy to realize that Scripture itself never singles this out as a doctrine of major importance, nor does it once make it the subject of any explicit theological discussion. Our knowledge of the issue comes only from incidental references to it in passages whose concern is with other doctrinal or practical matters.

Alas for Campbell, he was born some 180 years too soon. To add insult to excommunication, as mentioned in the
previous post on limited atonement, the Confession was written by a committee. And the committee consisted of members who held to both interpretations of the scope of the Atonement. The wording of section VI of chapter 3 was such that both sides could sign the confession[see also 3]. Section 3.VI of Westminster states:

As God has appointed the elect unto glory, so has He, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto.[12] Wherefore, they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, are redeemed by Christ,[13] are effectually called unto faith in Christ by His Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified,[14] and kept by His power, through faith, unto salvation.[15] Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.[16]

I happen to agree with this. It says:
  • God has ordained the means of salvation
  • Those whom God has foreordained for salvation will be saved.
  • Only those foreordained for salvation will be saved.
But the commentary on this section at reformed.org states:

In this section, then, we are taught, ... That Christ died exclusively for the elect, and purchased redemption for them alone; in other words, that Christ made atonement only for the elect, and that in no sense did he die for the rest of the race. Our Confession first asserts, positively, that the elect are redeemed by Christ; and then, negatively, that none other are redeemed by Christ but the elect only.

So while I agree with 3.VI, I don't agree with this commentary!

The commentary wonders how anyone could read 3.VI any other way:

If this does not affirm the doctrine of particular redemption, or of a limited atonement, we know not what language could express that doctrine more explicitly.

I would reply that if you don't know what language would be more clear, perhaps you should talk to those who find the language opaque. Specifically adding, "Christ died only for the elect" would make the section more clear. Or "the atonement precedes God's call and guarantees election". More on this last point later.

The positive case for universal atonement can be made from two passages of scripture: Romans 5:6 and 3:23-26:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
     -- Romans 5:6, NRSV

... since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.
     -- Romans 3:23-26, NRSV

Grudem nowhere references Romans 5:6, and Romans 3:23-26 are not found in his discussion on the extent of the atonement. Berkhof [4] references neither. To me, that's a telling omission in any argument attempting to limit the scope of the atonement.

So where does the doctrine of limited atonement come from? The argument from Berkhof will be examined.

In VI.3.b, Berkhof claims that “Scripture repeatedly qualifies those for whom Christ laid down His life in such a way as to point to a very definite limitation” and points to John 10:11 & 15 as the primary proof texts. "I lay down my life for the sheep" is read as if Jesus said, "I lay down my life
only for the sheep." Now this is an odd way to read this statement. If I say, "I give money to my children," it in no way precludes my giving money to strangers. Why Jesus' words are read this way is a mystery, but I can make two guesses.

First, the declarative statement is read as a conditional: "If I lay down my life then it is for a sheep." If read this way, then simple logic shows that this is equivalent to "if not a sheep then I do not lay down my life." [6] Voila! Limited atonement. But you can't validly turn a declarative statement into a conditional.

Second, the passage is read as if it is the act of giving money that makes someone a child. The payment is taken from the outstretched hand, the legal paperwork is completed, and the person actually becomes a part of the family. The offer guarantees the reception. But that cannot be found in this verse. It has to be found elsewhere. Berkhof makes the attempt to show this and his arguments will be addressed in turn.

Reading John as if Jesus said, "I lay down my life
only for the sheep" has a cascade effect throughout scripture. The following passages would have to be changed. The changes are in underlined italics.

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the elect in the world!”
     -- John 1:29, NRSV

and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the elect in the whole world.
     -- 1 John 2:2, NRSV

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the elect ungodly.
     -- Rom 5:6, NRSV

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all of the elect, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
     -- 2 Cor. 5:14-15, NRSV

This is not an exhaustive list of the changes that would have to be made. Yet changes of this type are what is argued. In VI.4.a, Berkhof writes:

The objection based on these passages proceeds on the unwarranted assumption that the word “world” as used in them means “all the individuals that constitute the human race.” If this were not so, the objection based on them would have no point. But it is perfectly evident from Scripture that the term “world” has a variety of meanings...

Granted. But at some point the addition of epicycle upon epicycle turns the perspicuity of Scripture on its head. Eventually we have to say, "Enough!". Grudem as much admits this when he writes:

On the other hand, the sentence, “Christ died for all people,” is true if it means, “Christ died to make salvation available to all people” or if it means, “Christ died to bring the free offer of the gospel to all people.” In fact, this is the kind of language Scripture itself uses in passages like John 6:51; 1 Timothy 2:6; and 1 John 2:2. It really seems to be only nit-picking that creates controversies and useless disputes when Reformed people insist on being such purists in their speech that they object any time someone says that “Christ died for all people.” There are certainly acceptable ways of understanding that sentence that are consistent with the speech of the scriptural authors themselves.

Having dealt with VI.3.b and VI.4.a, we next look at VI.3.c, where Berkhof writes:

The sacrificial work of Christ and His intercessory work are simply two different aspects of His atoning work, and therefore the scope of the one can be no wider than that of the other. ... Why should He limit His intercessory prayer, if He had actually paid the price for all?

Note that no Scripture is referenced to support the claim "the scope of atonement can be no wider than the scope of His intercessory prayer." Instead, the proposition is "supported" by a rhetorical question. But the answer is really simple. In John 17, Jesus prays that He would be glorified (17:1 [5]), that His disciples would be protected and united (v. 11). For those who are not yet His disciples, He calls out “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” [Mt. 11:28] and "Follow me" [Lk 9:59]. The Psalmist wrote:

Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep; you save humans and animals alike, O LORD. How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
     -- Psalms 36:5-7, NRSV

Note the universal scope of God's love in the Psalm. All
may take refuge. 2 Cor. 5:14-15, which has already been cited, likewise shows universal scope but limited effect:

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

If the atonement was only for the elect, it should have been "all," not "those who live" and "will live" not "might live".

In VI.3.d, a straw man argument against a slippery slope is made:

It should also be noted that the doctrine that Christ died for the purpose of saving all men, logically leads to absolute universalism, that is, to the doctrine that all men are actually saved.

Christ died that all might be saved and creation re-made, not that all will be saved. It must not be forgotten that because of the atonement there will be a "new heavens and a new earth". [2 Peter 3:13]

VI.3.e tries to make the case that the offer guarantees reception. Berkhof writes:

... it should be pointed out that there is an inseparable connection between the purchase and the actual bestowal of salvation.

He cites six passages to support this claim: Matt. 18:11; Rom. 5:10; II Cor. 5:21; Gal. 1:4; 3:13; and Eph. 1:7. The problem is that these passages don't speak to the scope of the atonement! Someone who holds to limited atonement will read these passages without discomfort, and someone who holds to unlimited atonement will also read these passages without discomfort! Try it. Read the verses. Switch sides. Read them again. If you find a problem, check your assumptions.

VI.3.f conflates two issues. For the first, Berkhof writes:

And if the assertion be made that the design of God and of Christ was evidently conditional, contingent on the faith and obedience of man...

This is a straw argument. Election is conditional, based on the sovereign choice of God. "For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy" [Rom 9:15-16].

Berkhof them claims:

... the Bible clearly teaches that Christ by His death purchased faith, repentance, and all the other effects of the work of the Holy Spirit, for His people.

He's repeating that which he is trying to prove. At this point, the argument becomes circular. Once again, the passages offered in support of this position: Rom. 2:4; Gal. 3:13,14; Eph. 1:3,4; 2:8; Phil. 1:29; and II Tim. 3:5,6 simply do not bear the weight of his case. They do not speak to the scope of the atonement. A possible explicit counter-example to Berkhof's might be 2 Peter 2:1:

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions. They will even deny the Master who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves.

This who hold to limited atonement might argue that "denying the Master who bought them" is equivalent to Peter's denial of Christ at His trial. But this is Peter writing about these false teachers and there is no hint of recognition that their denial is like his denial. One thinks of Hebrews 10:29. Perhaps the only question asked of everyone at the final judgement is, "what did you do with the blood of My Son?" Nevertheless, both sides have their explanations so this can't be considered conclusive.

Having looked at the positive case and found it wanting, Berkhof examines four objections to the doctrine of limited atonement. Reviewing the first three, VI.4.a, VI.4.b, and VI.4.c, would be redundant. But VI.4.d is important. Berkhof writes:

Finally, there is an objection derived from the bona fide offer of salvation

That is, under limited atonement, one cannot truthfully say, "Christ died for your sins." Nor, as Berkhof claims, is “the atoning work of Christ as in itself sufficient for the redemption of all men”. For it is sufficient only for the elect.

You cannot say, "well, the offer is only for the elect but, since we don't know who is and isn't elect, we can make the offer." For those who hold to the "third use of the Law," this is ignorant of what the Law says. Leviticus, chapter 4, deals with the atonement that must be made for sins committed in ignorance. "Ignorance is no excuse" is a Biblical principle. We cannot use ignorance as an excuse to do good. Under limited atonement, there is no bona fide offer of salvation to the non-elect.



[1]
The Extent of the Atonement, David L. Allen, pg. 61: "Important to note here is the fact that the question of the extent of the atonement had not been argued previously, and Gottschalk’s views are important 'because it is the first extant articulation of a definite atonement in church history.'"
[2]
Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem, 1994
[3]
The Extent of the Atonement, David L. Allen, pg. 23: "... some at Dort and Westminster differed over the extent question and the final canons reflect deliberate ambiguity to allow both groups to affirm and sign the canons."
[4]
Systematic Theology, Louis Berkhof, 1941
[5] Note that in John 17:2, Jesus claims that He has authority over "all people". But, clearly, His authority extends only to the elect, since the atonement extends only to the elect. If the Reformed want to be consistent, then they have to actually be consistent!
[6] The
contrapositive of a conditional statement is logically equivalent to the conditional statement.

Comments

Ravi Zacharias on Objective Morality

In this short video (5 minutes), Ravi Zacharias is asked the question, "why are you so afraid of subjective moral reasoning?" To which Ravi replied, "do you lock your door at night?"

This is an flawed answer, simply because people don't always do what they know they should do. That is, if morals are objective, people won't always act morally
1, and if morals are subjective, then people won't always act morally2. Therefore, this answer has no bearing on the question!

Ravi further states:

If morality is purely subjective then you have absolutely nothing from stopping anybody from being a subjective moralist to choose to just zing one through your forehead and say 'that's my answer.'" How do you stop that? If you're willing to say to me that moral reasoning can be purely subjective, I just say to you, "look out, you ain't seen nothing yet."

This answer fails for (at least) four reasons.

First, it's the fallacy of the "
appeal to consequences." That is, the desirability of something generally has no bearing on whether or not a statement is true or false. The statement "it is true (or false) that morals are subjective" is not proved by "subjective morality isn't desirable."

Second, it requires an
appeal to authority. After all, who says that "subjective morality isn't desirable?" Ravi? The listener?3 God? For an appeal to authority to have some credibility, everyone has to agree on the authority. Atheists certainly don't agree that God carries any authority.

Third, Ravi knows that governments wield the sword against "evildoers".
4 "Wield the sword." "Zing one through the forehead". Same difference. When Paul wrote this, the citizens didn't get to choose the kind of government they had or what the government thought was good and evil. Paul was imprisoned and eventually executed by that government.5

Fourth, and most importantly, Ravi should know the answer to "how do you stop that?" By preaching the gospel, that's how. God pours His love into the hearts of those who believe and "love does no wrong to a neighbor."
6

That this particular response does not adequately address whether morals are objective, does not prove that they are subjective. After all, there could be a better answer. One would have hoped that a renowned apologist would have had a better response.



[1] The initial course, "Introduction: First Five Lessons" in the Open Yale course
Game Theory, shows where students are asked to play a game. Most of them don't know, and therefore don't use, the optimal strategy when they first play the game. But after the instructor analyzes the problem and shows them the objective answer -- the right thing to do -- some of them still don't make that choice!
[2] See
Another Short Conversation...
[3] I once had a conversation with an Indian coworker. He didn't understand why the US didn't nuke Pakistan in order to take out Bin Laden. When I replied that the fallout would take out tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of his countrymen he responded, "So what? They're just surplus people." What horrified me was a desirable outcome for him.
[4]
Romans 13:4.
[5]
Genesis 50:20
[6]
Romans 13:10.
Comments

John Owen's Trilemma

In today's adult Sunday class on the parable of the wedding banquet (Matthew 22:14), the trilemma of John Owen was mentioned as an aside. Owen tries to show the doctrine of Limited Atonement -- formulated as Christ died only for the elect -- from this argument:

The Father imposed His wrath due unto, and the Son underwent punishment for, either:
  1. All the sins of all men.
  2. All the sins of some men, or
  3. Some of the sins of all men.
In which case it may be said:
  1. That if the last be true, all men have some sins to answer for, and so, none are saved.
  2. That if the second be true, then Christ, in their stead suffered for all the sins of all the elect in the whole world, and this is the truth.
  3. But if the first be the case, why are not all men free from the punishment due unto their sins?
You answer, "Because of unbelief."

I ask, Is this unbelief a sin, or is it not? If it be, then Christ suffered the punishment due unto it, or He did not. If He did, why must that hinder them more than their other sins for which He died? If He did not, He did not die for all their sins!"

I would argue that this argument fails because the correct answer is #3: Christ died for some of the sins of all men. In fact, I would propose a modified form of #3: Christ died for all but one sin of all men. This is, in fact, what Jesus Himself said in Matthew 12:31:

Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.

We might argue about what the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit entails, but I hold that it refers to unbelief, since Paul, in Romans 3:21-25, wrote:

But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.

Showing an error in an argument for something, of course, does not prove that thing and this post is not looking at the doctrine of Limited Atonement in general. However, in reviewing the doctrine of Atonement in the Westminster Confessions, I found
this discussion interesting, in that it said that the Amyrauldians present at the Westminster Assembly were not hesitant to sign the Confession. That argues for some ambiguity in the wording of the Confession.
Comments

Wright Runs Away -- Then Came Back

Update 9/17 @ 11:15am: This morning I looked to see if there had been any more comments on the below referenced post and I saw that my comment, which had been deleted, was now present. So I retract the statement that Wright ran away. Still, if he would only attempt to show me where I'm wrong in my argument...


Over the years I've had several fruitless, yet generally polite, arguments[1] with author, philosopher, and theist
John Wright. Fruitless, because neither of us is swayed by the other's arguments. I remain fully convinced that some of his arguments are wrong, even if some of his conclusions happen to be right. Polite, because we stick to the arguments.

But, yesterday, in Wright's
Parable of the Adding Machine, he deleted a response that I made to him.

My
initial response. His response. Here is the reply he deleted:



A stopsign written in Chinese only means STOP to someone who reads Chinese.
Drop me in the middle of China and I'll tell you which sign means "stop" after watching how the Chinese behave around them.
[The symbols] must follow arithmetic rules.
Sure. But the rules are labels for behaviors. Show me the behaviors and I'll tell you what the symbols mean.
The behavior of the gear train is a thoughtless therefore blind and meaningless motion of bit of matter in reaction to a clerk pressing a lever.
The behavior follows a pattern, a pattern which is the same as that performed with stones and pails. Since we've given labels to the latter behaviors, because the behavior of the machine matches that pattern, we can use the same labels.
... because the form of both the clerks calculation and the gears' motion share the same form
So you agree with the first sentence of the prior blockquote. Do you disagree with the second sentence? If so, why?
But the machine cannot count.
It implements the successor function for a finite set of numbers. The behavior is what matters.
It is not alive.
Define "alive". Is a virus alive?
The same symbols written in a different order on another part of the machine, or on a piece of paper, would have no meaning at all
Sure, if they can't be associated with behavior. But, just like watching Chinese behavior around a Chinese stop sign to learn what
means, if I could watch the behavior of whatever made the marks, I might be able to learn what they mean. Or find a Rosetta stone, which is just a shortcut for the same thing.



It isn't clear to me why Wright deleted this response. He's certainly free to do whatever he wants with his blog, but I didn't violate any of his conditions for posting. My guess is that this left him with a challenge he couldn't rebut. Wright very much wants to prove that immaterial things exist. That's easy. But he also wants to prove that they exist apart from material things. That's hard. It may be impossible to prove either way. What my response showed is that arithmetic is based on simple physical operations. Add a rock to a pail. Remove a rock from a pail. Determine if a pail is empty. Do something if a pail is empty otherwise do something else. These actions give you addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation over the non-negative integers. Attach labels to these actions and you have elementary arithmetic. Attach labels to collections of labels and you have shortcuts that hide a tremendous amount of physical activity. Wright doesn't know how to sever the ideas of math (which are basically just "potential actions," not unlike a high jumper who looks where he's going to make each step on his approach to jumping over the bar before he actually does it). This argument supports the idea that math is "matter in motion in certain patterns," which Wright very much does not want to be true.

This explains why, in a previous discussion, Wright was so opposed to the following observation about Euclidean geometry, by Marvin Jay Greenberg, from
Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries:

Ancient geometry was actually a collection of rule-of-thumb procedures arrived at through experimentation, observation of analogies, guessing, and occasional flashes of intuition. In short, it was an empirical subject in which approximate answers were usually sufficient for practical purposes.

This challenged his assertion that Euclidean geometry was purely non-physical.

Am I right as to why he deleted my post? I may never know, because he avoided the challenge.



A partial catalog of discussions with Wright:

DateTitle
9/8/2010Dialog With An Adding Machine
1/26/2011Materialism, Theism, and Information
3/24/2011Taking Ideas Seriously
4/16/2011Bad Arguments Against Materialism
5/8/2012My Instinct is to say the Morality is not Instinctive
4/29/2014The Cosmic Chessboard, or, ONCE MORE FOR OLD TIMES SAKE!
12/15/2014When Wright Is Wrong
5/17/2015The Notorious Meat Robot Letters – Expanded!
5/16/2015Man Is The Animal...
5/8/2019No Metaphysics, No Physics
Comments

The Trinity by Dale Tuggy : A Critique

[updated 8/22/19 to correct spelling of "Mermin"]

trinity.tuggy
A Unitarian friend of mine loaned me this book as part of our ongoing debate about the nature of God. The Introduction isn't bad, but it contains the seeds of two problems that the author will have to address when discussing the alleged shortcomings of the doctrine of the Trinity. The first is the actual Biblical evidence. Anti-Trinitarians, in my experience, tend to focus on the writings of Church Fathers, creedal statements and their origins, political infighting, and so on. Indeed, the introduction beings with:


Read More...
Comments

Dr. Larycia Hawkins and Wheaton College

[Updated 9/18/19 to use a link to an archived version of the Wheaton FAQ concerning Dr. Hawkins, and to remove a possible ambiguity from my initial paragraph.]


Wheaton College has initiated termination proceedings against tenured professor Dr. Larycia Hawkins who has been a faculty member since 2007 and who received tenure in 2013. Wheaton is taking this action because of her statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Apparently, this idea is counter to the Wheaton statement of faith. I note, for the record, that there is no explicit sentence in their statement of faith regarding which groups worship which God. Furthermore, in a FAQ published by Wheaton, question 7 asks "Is it true that Christians and Muslims worship the same God?" Wheaton lists doctrines which are distinctive to Christianity but are denied by Islam. But, note carefully, that Wheaton doesn't specifically answer the question with a simple "yes" or "no." For if they did, a bright undergraduate would then ask, "given this criteria, do Christians and Jews worship the same God?" I suspect Wheaton doesn't want that question to be asked.

But I digress. On December 17, 2015, Dr. Hawkins
wrote to Wheaton in which she explained the reasons for her position as well as her personal statement of faith.

Opinion is of course, split, concerning the question of whether or not Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
Dr. Edward Feser addressed the issue in the affirmative here. Vox Day, and many of his readers, answered in the negative, here. Last night at dinner, my wife initially said, "no"; this morning at breakfast, my reform seminary graduate friend Steve immediately said "yes."

I think Wheaton College is about to fall into a pit that they just don't yet see.

Let us consider two cases, one from literature and one from science. For literature, consider the two authors C. S. Lewis, who wrote the Narnia Chronicles, and Gene Roddenberry, who wrote Star Trek. Now suppose that there are two groups of people. One group asserts that humans owe their existence to having entered our world through a gate from Narnia. This is, of course, backwards from the way Lewis told the story in "
The Magicians Nephew" — but bear with me. The other group asserts that humans originally came from the planet Vulcan. And again, in the original lore, it was the Romulans who were the offshoots of the Vulcans — just let me run with this. The only thing these two groups have in common is the idea that we came from somewhere else. Everything else is completely different and they are completely different because they are solely products of human imagination. Fans may argue the differences between Narnia and Star Trek, or Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. No one takes them seriously (except themselves) because we know it's "just fiction." It doesn't make sense to argue about which imaginary world is right.

Now consider the realm of science which attempts to discern how Nature works. We believe that this Nature exists independently of us. It is not a product of our imagination. At one time, science advanced the theory of the
aether which was thought to be necessary for the propagation of light. But the Michelson-Morley experiments showed that this theory was wrong. Improvements to experiments to test Bell's inequality have shown that local realism isn't a viable theory of quantum mechanics. No discussion of misguided and incorrect scientific theories would be complete without mention of the famous phrase, attributed to Wolfgang Pauli, "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong." And let us not forget to mention String Theory, where some scientists say that not only is it not good science, it isn't science at all; while other scientists claim that it's really the only theory which can unite relativity and quantum mechanics. (As always, Lubos Motl is entertaining and instructive to read when it comes to String Theory).

In this case, we do not say, "you aren't studying the same nature we are." We say, "your understanding of nature is flawed."

If Wheaton continues down this path with Dr. Hawkins, whether they know it or not, they will be giving aid and comfort to those who claim that God is purely imaginary. And if they do that, then they are the ones who have betrayed their statement of faith.
Comments

Feser's Philosophy of Mind, #3

This chapter deals with materialistic views of mind, namely that reality, and therefore the mind:

consists of purely material or physical objects, processes, and properties, operating according to the same basic physical laws and thereby susceptible of explanation via physical science. There is, in short, no such thing as immaterial substance, or soul, or spirit, nor any aspect of human nature which, in principle, elude explanation in purely physical terms.

I note, purely in passing, that the second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first. In any case, Feser then proceeds to argue that it is difficult to see how things like cultural conventions, for example, are:

… hard to reduce to the properties of molecules in motion.

and

There seems to be no way to match up sets of logically interrelated mental states with sets of merely causally interrelated brain states, and thus no way to reduce the mental to the physical.

Here is how it's done. We have no problem understanding that there are quarks and electrons. We have no problem understanding that quarks combine to form protons and neutrons, and that protons, neutrons, and electrons form atoms. Atoms form trees and stars, bacteria and brains.

Instead of combing things into more things, consider the case where two things are "combined" into one of the two things. Consider the physical process where an apple and an apple combine to an orange, and apple and an orange combine to an apple, an orange and an apple combine to an orange, and an orange and an orange combine into an apple. Or consider the case where an apple and an apple combine to orange, while apple and orange, orange and apple, and orange and orange combine to apple. There are sixteen ways for these combinations to happen. We can demonstrate that repeated application of either of two of these processes can reproduce all of the others.

This is a purely physical process. Instead of using apples and oranges, we can use more or fewer electrons flowing through a wire. We can use variable resistors to make a physical process that combines more and fewer electrons just like we combined oranges and apples. Let's call this collection of variable resistors and wires a "device". These devices can be strung together into complex networks.
We can show that arrangements of these devices are equivalent to neurons and computer gates. Furthermore, and this is one of two key insights, arranging devices and wires one way gives one behavior; arranging devices and wires another results in a different behavior.

This is important, because we normally think of a computer as an arrangement of wires and devices that takes a program as input, performs the steps in the program, and produces a result. This leads us to believe that a computer cannot do anything without programming. Feser falls into this way of thinking when he writes:

A computer program is something abstract – a mathematical structure that can be understood and specified, on paper or in the programmer’s mind, long before anyone implements it in a machine.

While this isn't wrong, it hides the key concept that the arrangement of the wires and devices is the program. No external program is necessary. If it were cost effective, instead of writing abstract programs that run on a general purpose computer, we could custom build an arrangement of wires and devices for each program we wished to run.

Once we understand that the physical network itself is the program, we have to ask how we can get meaning out of networks of apples and oranges or high and low voltages. Consider the network that given an apple and an apple, or an orange and an orange, produces an apple and when given an apple and an orange or an orange and an apple produces an orange. This is equivalent to the question "are the inputs equal" with "apple" being assumed to be "yes". We could just as easily chose the network that takes apple and apple or orange and orange and outputs orange. The choice of which network to use is completely arbitrary, but networks that use this convention can now be constructed that can compare two things for equality. This is the second key insight. Meaning is achieved by building a network that uses one of the two inputs to answer the question "are these things equal?" And once you have that, you have the basis for constructing systems that can, for example, associate sights with sounds.

One network can wag a tail at the enjoyment of a bone, another network can contemplate the ontology of thought. Dogs don't discuss epistemology simply because their brain wiring is insufficient for the task.

So the question isn't "is thought a physical process?" It certainly is. Logic is built into the very fabric of reality. The "devices" are just logic gates. The astounding thing is that a network of these gates can recognize and describe themselves. Furthermore, our brains aren't capable of proving that logic can be separated from reality. Every attempt to do so changes reality such that we destroy our ability to think.

The real question is "how did these complex networks arise in the first place?" But with the current state of the art, the answer to that question depends very much on your philosophical assumptions.
Comments

Feser's Philosophy of Mind, #2

[minor update 3/11/2002]

Feser ends chapter one by introducing the "mind-body" problem which is this: if the brain is purely physical, how can something that is composed of atoms think and be conscious of itself and its surroundings? Are mind and "matter" two fundamentally different kinds of things ("dualism") or are mind and matter different forms of the same thing? In chapter 2, Feser presents three arguments for dualism, and one argument against it. The three positive arguments are the "indivisibility," "obviousness," and "conceivability" arguments, while the "interaction" argument is the negative argument. I will not consider the interaction argument here.

The indivisibility argument goes like this. Matter is one form of substance which can be divided into parts. Atoms can be divided into protons, neutrons, and electrons; protons and neutrons can be divided into quarks; quarks and electrons are made up of strings (assuming string theory is true), with the string being the fundamental indivisible unit of matter. What remains after each division is of the same kind — it's matter all the way down — and since it doesn't divide into something else, it's one "substance". A mind, however, is not divisible. The "I" is one (considerations of schizophrenia not withstanding). Therefore, the "string" and the "mind" are two fundamentally different things.

A problem with this is that "matter" is not the only component to the physical universe. Along with strings (or higher level particles), there is space-time, motion, energy, charge, etc… To hold to dualism is to say that mind is not only not any of these things, but is also not some form of combination of these things. If mind is some form of combination of these things, then the "indivisibility" of the mind might only hold when the combination of these things are working in concert. Break the synchronization of the parts and the mind ceases to function correctly (or at all).

The obviousness argument holds that just as oranges and apples are obviously different, mind and matter are obviously different. That is, because we perceive them differently, they are fundamentally different. Oranges and apples have different shapes, textures, colors, and tastes. But the indivisibility argument shows that apples and oranges aren't fundamentally different. They are just different arrangements of the number and kinds of atoms, which are just different arrangements of electrons and quarks. The dualist's perceived difference between mind and brain, like the difference between apples and oranges, could be explained by the operation of nature where the mechanism isn't immediately obvious. Someone who has never seen a modern phone might wonder at a symphony coming from someone's pocket. Humans are not violins and to hear the Brandenburg Concerto #3 coming from someone's pocket might cause no end of consternation and speculation as to its cause. Saying that mental stuff is different from physical stuff is to put a label on a lack of knowledge and put it in its own category.

The conceivability argument is as follows:


That is to say, it is entirely conceivable that one could exist as a disembodied mind, with one’s body and brain, and indeed the entire physical world, being nothing but a figment of one’s imagination. But then it is conceivable and therefore at least metaphysically possible for the mind to exist apart from the brain. Therefore, the mind is not identical to the brain.

The problems with this are manifold. First, the mind is not identical to the brain, any more than a symphony is identical to an orchestra. Therefore, this doesn't show that the mind can exist apart from the brain. Second, the conceivability argument can be used to show that solipsism is true. But in chapter 1, Feser argues against solipsism, thereby undercutting the power of the conceivability argument. Third, Feser himself admits the weakness of conceivability arguments in the next chapter by writing:

But conceivability arguments, if they prove anything…

Conceivability arguments prove nothing at all.

The indivisibility, obviousness, and conceivability arguments are so bad that professors who present them should be stripped of their degrees and run out of their supporting institutions.

And I say this as a convinced dualist
1. But I am a dualist who thinks that matter and mind are so entangled in a loop that they are impossible to separate without destroying our ability to think about them (cf. The Physical Nature of Thought).



[1] I am no longer a
convinced dualist. I haven't rejected it altogether, but I also haven't finished thinking about my counterargument.
Comments

Feser's Philosophy of Mind, #1

In the first chapter of Feser's Philosophy of Mind, Feser attempts to justify belief in a physical external world using Occam's Razor. That is, given the two hypothesis that either the external physical world exists independently of us, or that it is a simply some form of illusion, application of Occam's Razor justifies belief in the first option.

There are several problems with this argument. First, Occam's Razor is a heuristic. It is simply a guideline, a good guess, when choosing between alternatives. But anyone familiar with search techniques in artificial intelligence knows that even good guesses can ultimately lead to less than optimal or even wrong conclusions. If you don't end up in a dead end, there might still be an untried path to a more favorable outcome.

Second, and more importantly, Occam's Razor only applies when all other considerations are equal. That is, Occam's Razor should be used only when both systems give the same independently verifiable answer to the same questions. Both the
Ptolemaic and Copernican systems predict the same positions of the planets in the night sky. But the Copernican system is simpler and so is justified by Occam's Razor. So the use of Occam's Razor is therefore not applicable in this case, because the answers to the same questions can be wildly different in the Realist and Solipsist systems.

Third, we can't really tell which system is simpler. Since we don't ultimately know what reality really is, any argument that the implementation of reality in one form is simpler than the implementation of reality in another is dubious, at best. No one has any idea what it takes to implement the reality that appears to be external to us, any more than we have any idea that we know what it takes to implement a mind that thinks there is an external reality.

Fourth, if a system with an entity which manipulates our minds is more complex than an external reality, then Feser has justified disbelief in Theism in general, and Christianity in particular, since God is one more complicating factor in an already complex system. Given that Feser is a theist, he may want to reconsider this use of the razor.

So Occam's Razor fails as a means to justify realism over solipsism. Granted, Feser conditions this justification with “If all this is right…" but, still, an inauspicious start to this book. The correct answer is that we choose one or the other simply because we choose one over the other. Post hoc rationalizations as to why we made a particular choice will vary depending on which system we chose.
Comments

Grudem's Systematic Theology, #2

The following practice question in chapter 10 of Grudem ties together my major complaints, so far, of his text: namely that there is weak, to non-existent, development of the doctrines of epistemology and ethics. To be sure, Grudem has said correct things about each, but he is inconsistent in his application of those things. I've already mentioned one problem with his exposition of ethics in a previous post; this post looks at a problem with both epistemology and ethics.

How can we be sure that when we reach heaven God will not tell us that most of what we had learned about him was wrong, and that we would have to forget what we had learned and begin to learn different things about him?

     — page 152, question #2

The answer that I think Grudem expects, based on the contents of the chapter, would be something like: we can be sure that what God has revealed to us about Himself is true, because He understands that our knowledge of Him requires the revelation of Himself [Mt 11:7], He desires His people to "know him, the only true God", [Jer 31:34], He reveals Himself truly [Num 23:19], and that He would not deceive us, because He is Truth [John 3:33] and the ultimate good. [1 John 1:5].

But the correct answer is, "we cannot be sure."

Part of the problem is semantics. Grudem doesn't define the difference between "sure" knowledge and "uncertain" knowledge. I recently had a conversation at Starbucks about epistemology with an Emory graduate student concerning the question, "do you know that you are at Starbucks right now?" He ended up asking me this several times as we went back and forth trying to clarify various issues. While he always responded in the affirmative, my only answer was "I believe that I am." He based his answer on the assumptions that, first, there really is a reality that is external to us and, second, that our senses give us a (mostly) accurate indication of the nature of that reality. I have no problem with either of those two premises but, as anyone who has read Descartes or watched the movie
The Matrix knows, that might not be an accurate view of reality at all.

What are the differences between sure and uncertain knowledge? I claim that I know that two plus two equals four. I also know that if a plane is flat that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees, but that if a plane is curved, the sum of the angles will be more than 180 degrees if the plane is positively curved, and less than 180 degrees if the plane is negatively curved. I claim I know these things, because the results are self-contained. No connections to external things are needed for these statements to be true.

But the moment we consider objects external to ourselves, things become more complicated. If I physically measure the angles of a triangle, I get 180 degrees as the answer (within the margins of measurement error). This means that, locally, space is flat. But what result would we get if the sides of the triangle were thousands of light-years apart? That depends on the overall curvature of space which, in turn, depends on the total amount of mass. We think the mass is such that, overall, space is flat. This knowledge is less certain because it depends on a correspondence between a model and a measurement between the model and the thing being modeled. Here, the uncertainty is whether or not the mental model is in a one-to-one correspondence with the external object.

Then, if there is uncertainty whether or not a mental model corresponds to an external object, there is also uncertainty whether or not the right mental model is being used, since there is usually an abundance of mental models, but (supposedly) only one reality. Our hope is that we can find a mismatch between one of the models and the external thing, so that the number of models can be reduced, but even if that's possible, it's usually a painstaking, time consuming effort. But what happens if there is no known way to distinguish which of two explanations are correct? Is whatever I am in a place physically external me that serves coffee, or is this all just a simulation? I just don't really know, and while I am not a solipsist by choice, I cannot logically defend that choice against the alternatives.

In one sense, scientists, theologians, and philosophers face the same problem: a multiplicity of explanatory models. The scientist can test the model against Nature and hopefully converge on the correct model. If Christianity is right, then the theologian has no such recourse. While we can experience God, and we believe that God reveals certain aspects of Himself to us, we cannot experiment on Him. In fact, we are forbidden to do so: "Do not put the Lord your God to the test" [Mt 4:7]. Philosophers don't have either recourse.

At best, theologians can test what they think God has revealed for consistency, under the assumption that God is consistent. But then the problem of ethics arises. Grudem writes:

God's righteousness means that God always acts in accordance with what is right and is himself the final standard of what is right.

     — page 204

In particular, this means that God does not have to conform to our expectations of goodness. If, at the end of all things, God were to say "just kidding", He would be righteous in doing so.

This is actually an important thought experiment, because we learn that we cannot judge God according to our expectations, nor can we judge God by any external moral standard. All we can do is trust Him and if things don't happen the way we want them to, we have no other recourse than to say, "You, alone, are God."
Comments

Grudem's Systematic Theology, #1

Based on the recommendation of my Sunday School teacher, I picked up Grudem's Systematic Theology. I've gone through the first eleven chapters. While there are a few gems here and there, they are overshadowed by the egregious parts, such at this philosophical argument for the unchangeableness of God. Here, Grudem attempts to supplement the Biblical statements on God's unchangeableness with an argumentum ad absurdum:

At first it might not seem very important for us to affirm God's unchangeableness. The idea is so abstract that we may not immediately realize its significance. But if we stop for a moment to imagine what it would be like if God could change, the importance of this doctrine becomes more clear. For example, if God could change (in his being, perfections, purposes, or promises), then any change would be either for the better or for the worse. But if God changed for the better, then he was not the best possible being when we first trusted him. And how could we be sure that he is the best possible being now? But if God could change for the worse (in his very being), then what kind of God might he become?

     — page 168

The fundamental flaw with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that there is a fixed standard against which one or more of God's attributes can be compared. Furthermore, if God changes, and this standard does not, then this means that the measure is external to God. But this cannot be so, since God is not answerable to any external thing. So if God were to change, the standard itself would change — since God is His own standard of good and evil. The statement, "then any change would be for the better or for the worse" is wrong. Were God to change, both the initial, intermediate, and final states would all be perfect.

This lack of understanding of measures of good and evil permeates Reform theology. But that's a post for another time.

Update 10/5:

Grudem is woefully inconsistent. Later in the book, he writes:

He is therefore the final standard of good.

     — page 198

This is exactly what I said ("God is His own standard of good and evil"), but Grudem didn't integrate this with his argument on page 168.
Comments

When Wright Is Wrong

Author John C. Wright attempts to prove that materialism is false in his blog post The Cosmic Chessboard, or, ONCE MORE FOR OLD TIMES SAKE! In this post, I show how his proof does not work.

In mathematics, a proof is a sequence of steps that follow an agreed upon set of rules that results in an answer. In computer science, this same idea is called an
algorithm. Because Wright attempts to use both the technique of proof by contradiction and the technique of self-reference in his proof, let me begin by showing how these techniques are correctly used.

As an example of a proof by contradiction, let's show that √2 is irrational. By definition, a rational number can be written as the ratio of two integers, a and b, where b is not zero. Let's assume the opposite of what we want to prove, that is, that √2 is rational. That means that:

√2 = a / b (by definition)

Furthermore, let a and b be relatively prime (that is, they have no common divisors).

Then the proof proceeds as follows:
2 = a
2 / b2 (by squaring both sides)
2b
2 = a2 (by multiplying both sides by b2)

Since a
2 is of the form 2n, a2 is an even number. This means that a is an even number (since an odd number times itself results in an odd number). Since a is even, let's rename it as 2c. Then:

√2 = 2c / b (by substitution of equals)
2 = 4c
2 / b2 (by squaring both sides)
2b
2 = 4c2 (by multiplying both sides by b2)
b
2 = 2c2 (by dividing both sides by 2)

This means that b
2 is even and therefore b is even.
But since a and b are both even, they share the common divisor 2, which contradicts the initial condition that they be relatively prime.
Since the initial assumption leads to a contradiction, the initial assumption is wrong. Therefore, there are no integers a and b such that a / b = √2 and so √2 is irrational. QED.

Compare this elegant legal proof with invalid proofs. There are many ways a proof can go wrong. Suppose I want to show that I can drive from point A to point B. This means that I have to stay on the roads, follow all traffic laws, and I have to arrive at point B. If I have to drive the wrong way on a one-way street, while I might have arrived at point B, I didn't follow the rules, so the proof isn't valid. Or suppose the car runs out of gas. Running out of gas isn't considered a valid step (nor would be getting into an accident). Suppose I enter a traffic circle and can't get out and I drive forever in a loop. Since the proof doesn't end, it isn't a valid proof.

Driving in a circle — getting stuck in a loop — can still be a useful technique in proofs. It can be used to show that something is undecidable.

Consider the statement:

This statement is false.

If "this statement is false" is true, then "this statement is false" is false. But if "this statement is false" is false, then it's true. We're stuck in a loop. We say that we cannot decide the truth or falsity of the statement.

This statement can also be expressed as two statements:

The next statement is true.
The previous statement is false.

Again, we end up with an infinite loop so the truth of these two statements is undecidable.

Finally, for completeness, it may be that we simply do not know whether something is true, false, or undecidable.
Goldbach's Conjecture is a famous unsolved problem in math. Perhaps tomorrow someone will figure it out but, today, its status remains unknown.

With this as background, let's consider Wright's approach to his proof.

If mental states are material, then ideas are just arrangements of matter and a particular idea is one arrangement of atoms and another idea is another arrangement of atoms. Without loss of generality, we could use the number 42 as a label to the arrangement of atoms that corresponds to the idea "all glorps are fleems" and the number 6 as the label to the arrangement of atoms that corresponds to the idea "all fleems are blurgs". Whatever a "glorp", "fleem", or "blurg" is, those ideas would also have a particular material state and could be assigned their own numbers. So far so good. The material states that correspond to ideas have been informally mapped to numbers. 42 represents "all glorps are fleems".

But are all gorps fleems? That is, is "all glorps are fleems" a true statement, false statement, undecidable statement, or an unsolved statement, i.e. a statement that is not known to be true, false, or undecidable? If ideas are material states, what distinguishes a "true" material state from a "false" material state?

Wright doesn't say. But we can fix this deficiency. A proof is a statement about a statement. If something is true, then there exists a set of statements, constructed via agreed upon rules, that end with the label "true" (i.e. the computation that these things are the same) or "false" (the computation that these things are not the same). If we can label statements with numbers and have these numbers represent material states, we can likewise label statements about statements. We could, if we wanted, augment the number associated with a statement with the truth value of the statement. And this number would correspond to a particular arrangement of atoms in the universe. So we can number statements, true statements, false statements, etc.

Now, one part of Wright's proof that needs to be stated is that there should be only one mind in the universe. The arrangement of atoms in Wright's head is a small subset of all of the arrangements of atoms in the universe. When Wright thinks "all glorps are fleems," another sentient creature could, at the same time, be thinking "all glorps are not fleems," while yet another creature could be thinking "I want lunch." I would hope that Wright does not think that what happens locally in his head affects the entire universe, although his commentary on his proof may actually suggest he does. In either case, let's update the proof to say that the universe consists solely of the atoms in Wright's brain, a pencil, and the paper on which statements are written. The proof does not suffer if it ends up showing that there is something in his head that does not correspond to an arrangement of atoms.

So what Wright wants to do is to construct a true statement whose arbitrary number does not map to any arrangement of atoms. If he can do that, then there exists something which we acknowledge to be true, but which doesn't depend on atoms for its truth. It really is immaterial.

So let's now consider the heart of Wright's proof. He reasons as follows:

Statement G is “statement R is true.”

And statement R is “There is no number that represents Statement G.”

A paradox arises: Statement G is either false or true. In other words, either it corresponds to the physical conditions of the universe (the entire universe including all human brains within it[1]), or it does not.

If Statement G is false, then it does not correspond to the conditions of the universe, in which case the conditions of the universe are some number other than 07.

But if Statement G is false then statement R is false, and therefore there is a number that represents Statement G, that is, a condition of atoms whose positions on the cosmic chessboard, including those lined up in my brain, which represent Statement G. We have already said this number is 07. Since the universe cannot both be and not be in condition 07, it is impossible that Statement G be false.

But if statement G is true, then the universe corresponds to the condition that obtains when statement R is true. And if Statement R is true then the statement there is no number that represents Statement G is also true. If there is no number that represents Statement G, or my brain thinking Statement G, or even one of any possible arrangements of atoms in the cosmos, then materialism is false, because then something exists aside from what exists in the arrangement of atoms on our cosmic chessboard.

So what's wrong? A couple of things.

First, the assertion "Statement G is either false or true" isn't necessarily true. G could be undecidable or it could be unknown at this time. If you're going to claim something is true, you have to provide the proof (or take it as an axiom). To prove G, one has to prove "statement R is true". But watch what happens when we start substituting equal things:

G=“statement R is true.”
R=“There is no number that represents Statement G.”
Substituting for G gives: R=“There is no number that represents statement R is true.”
Substituting for R gives: “There is no number that represents There is no number that represents statement R is true is true.”

Trying to express R results in an infinite expansion. Using this technique, G is undecideable. Therefore, the claim that "Statement G is either false or true" is false. And the proof fails.

But we can approach the proof another way. Wright has a strange notion of "truth". He seems to think that "true" statements correspond to physical conditions in the universe (which is true) but that false statements do not. But a false statement is just as much an arrangement of atoms as a true statement is an arrangement of atoms. Clearly this is so. "
There are four lights" is a true statement and is an arrangement of atoms of ink on paper or photons emitted from a display. "There are five lights" is a false statement but it, too, is an arrangement of atoms.

Assigning arbitrary numbers to statements only serves to confuse the issue, so let's get rid of the numbers. And let's do this by showing that numbers aren't needed. We can certainly arbitrarily assign numbers to statements, as Wright did. But we can also encode the statements as if they were polynomials. Count the numbers in the character set and that will be the base. Map the first character in the alphabet to 0, the second to 1 and, finally, the last character to base - 1. Then treat each statement as if the letters were coefficients of a polynomial and evaluate it via
Horner's method. With this method, each statement can be converted to a number and can be converted back to the original statement. Since numbers and statements are equivalent, we can get rid of the numbers and just use the statements directly.

Then the proof becomes:

Statement G is “statement R is true.”
Statement R is “There is no statement that represents Statement G.”

Statement R is then clearly false, so statement G is false, and the proof falls apart.

Two different ways of looking at the proof give the same result that the proof is wrong.

QED.



[1] The arrangement of atoms in his head affects the entire universe? That some people believe this is not unheard of, as the quote from Gene Wolfe at the end of
this post shows.
Comments

The "Problem" of Qualia

[updated 13 June 2020 to add Davies quote]
[updated 25 July 2022 to provide more detail on "Blind Mary"]
[updated 5 August 2022 to provide reference to Nobel Prize for research into touch and heat; note that movie Ex Machina puts the "Blind Mary" experiment to film]
[updated 6 January 2024 to say more about philosophical zombies]

"Qualia" is the term given to our subjective sense impressions of the world. How I see the color green might not be how you see the color green, for example. From this follows flawed arguments which try to show how qualia are supposedly a problem for a "physicalist" explanation of the world.

The following diagram shows an idealized process by which different colors of light enter the eye and are converted into "qualia" -- the brain's internal representation of the information. Obviously the brain doesn't represent color as 10 bits of information. But the principle remains the same, even if the actual engineering is more complex.

Qualia
Figure 1

Read More...
Comments

On the Inadequacy of Scientific Knowledge

Having picked up an interest in Zen from reading Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, I started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Whether or not I learn anything about Zen or motorcycles remains to be seen.1 However, not quite a third of the way through the book Pirsig presents an argument for the inadequacy of scientific knowledge as a source of truth. He begins by observing that "the number of rational hypothesis that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite."2 He continues:

   If true, that rule is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!
   If the purpose of scientific method is to select from a multitude of hypothesis, and if the number of hypothesis grows faster than the experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypothesis can never be tested. If all hypothesis cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.
   About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has proved absolutely superior to all the rest," and let it go at that. But to Phaedrus
3 that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!
   But there it was, the whole of history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order to them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not a dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.
   He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the lifespan of the existing truth is the volume of hypothesis offered to replace it; the more the hypothesis, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypothesis to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude, you are
increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it. It is your application of scientific method that that is causing it to change!
   What Phaedrus observed on a personal level was the phenomenon, profoundly characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed here, and no one seems to pay much attention to the fact. The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories, and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience -- chaos.


There is a lot to consider and commend in this argument. Certainly, anyone who has uttered, "the more I know the less I know" understands that as knowledge increases the unknown also appears to increase. Every advance in knowledge pushes out the unexplored frontier. It is unclear how much there is to be known. Even if an argument to the boundedness of knowledge about the physical universe could be made based upon the number of particles therein, I suspect we will find limits to how far we can explore. We likely cannot know all that could be known. And this omits the field of mathematical knowledge, where Gödel showed the incompleteness of formal systems.

The idea that scientific knowledge is a function of time needs to be stressed. Now I happen to think
4 that the recent Opera claim of superluminal neutrinos won't stand upon further investigation, but if it does it will require adjustments to relativity.

Finally, if it is true that science produces antiscience then the resulting chaos can't be repaired by more application of the scientific method, unless scientific knowledge is finite.

While I think that much of this argument has merit, I put it in the
Bad Arguments category, not because I necessarily disagree with the conclusions, but because the premise that "the purpose of the scientific method is to select a single truth from many hypothetical truths" is wrong. The scientific method is not "when I repeatedly do this I get that result therefore this result can always be expected". That's observation and induction, no different from "the sun rose yesterday, the sun rose today, therefore the sun will rise tomorrow." We know there will come a time when the sun won't rise the next day. Induction is not a sure means to truth, even though we often have to rely on it.5 As Einstein said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."6

The power of the scientific method comes from the logical equation: (A
B) ¬B ¬A. In English, "if A implies B, and B is not true, then A is not true." Experiments don't establish theories, they show if a theory is wrong. The scientific method doesn't establish truth, it establishes falsehood. Consider a piece of paper as an analogy to knowledge. Let the color gray represent what we don't know. Let white represent truth. Let black stand for falsehood. The paper starts out gray. We don't know if the paper is finite or infinite in extent. Science can turn gray areas black, to represent the things we know are not true. But it can't turn gray areas white.

And yet, the earth revolves around the sun and E=mc
2. Even if superluminal neutrinos really do exist, atomic weapons still work by turning a little bit of matter into a lot of energy. How we go from gray to white is another topic for another day. But with the correction of Pirsig's premise, much of his argument still follows.


[1] In the Author's Note, Pirsig writes "[this book] should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles either."
[2] Pg. 559. I don't know why I bother with page numbers, as they vary from e-reader to e-reader.
[3] Phaedrus is the author in an earlier stage of his life.
[4] I'm no expert. Don't wager based on my opinion.
[5] See
On Induction by Russell.
[6] This appears to be a paraphrase. See
here.
Comments

Response to James

James commented on my post Bad Arguments Against Materialism a month ago and it deserves a response. I appreciate every reader and, while I may not respond to every comment, I do want to engage in dialog. "Many eyes make short work of bugs" can be as true here as it can be with software (but don't get me started on "code reviews" that miss even the simplest mistakes!)

My only comment - and I'll leave it at this - is that, despite a very well worded argument, you seem to forget the very basis on which your argument stands. That being, using your own abstract allusion, though information (of any type, not just software of course) can be coded in zeros and ones, does not record itself. There needs be a CODER.

Under materialism, the coder is the universe itself. That is, the motion of the particles, operating under physical law, gave rise to the motion of electrons in certain patterns that make up our thoughts. Whether or not this is the true explanation is hotly contested. One side will argue that this is such an improbable occurrence that it couldn't be the right explanation. The other side will argue that improbable things happen. Both sides tailor their argument according to their preconceived notions about the nature of reality. Synchronously, John C. Wright has a droll take on it
here.

It may be transmitted one way or another, either zeros and ones, or brain waves, or goal-seeking algorithms, but itself is something rather more transcendent. If you doubt that, then why would more than one person get upset over the same wrong? (Say invasion of a country you don't even live in) or be offended when you step on the foot of an elderly woman whom you don't even know?

This is a topic that I hope to get to this year. There is an explanation for this, see Axelrod's "
The Evolution of Cooperation." For an idea of how the argument will go, see Cybertheology.

And if we "call steps leading toward a goal good" then that simply means any goal is good. Including, say, a despot's systematic murder of an entire people. There are few goals as effective as that for survival of a people, state or regime.

First, whether or not a goal is good depends on its relationship to other goals, and those goals exist in relationship to other goals, and so on. That's one reason why morality is such a difficult subject -- the size of the goal space is so large. It's much, much bigger than the complex games of Chess and Go.

Second, there may be times when it's necessary for one group to die so that another may live. We don't like that notion, because we may think that the reasoning that leads to the deaths of others could one day be used against us; on the other hand, listen to the reasons given for the necessity of using nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II. That there is no universal agreement on this shows how difficult a problem it is.

You also note that Axelrod's game theory shows how the golden rule can arise in biological systems. Well, if that happens so "naturally," why hasn't it happened in any of the (numerous beyond count) organisms that have, on an evolutionary scale, been here longer than Man? Say, for instance, the shark? Or the ant, which has a complicated social system?

It has happened, and Axelrod (with William D. Hamilton) gives examples of this in chapter 5:
The Evolution of Cooperation in Biological Systems.

We are not necessarily walking conundrums, BTW. …

Then you're a better man than St. Paul, who wrote:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? [Rom 7:15-24]


Which leads me to the last point: No, the Bible doesn't teach that Jesus died because of man's inability to follow any external code.

Actually, it does. Again, St. Paul wrote, "I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing." (Gal 2:21) and "For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law." (Gal 3:21).
Comments

Atheism: It isn't about evidence

[Updated 5/7/2011, 10:49:05 PM; then 5/13/2011, 8:03:53PM. 7/18/2019 changed "otherwise" to "others"]

On the first of the year I wrote "
Cybertheology" to begin the long process of using science, particularly computer science, evolutionary biology, and game theory to give evidence for and provide understanding of God. After all, I believe that the God who reveals Himself in the spoken and written Word also speaks through nature -- and that the message must be the same in both. In 2009 I wrote "Evidence for God" which gave my reaction to one atheist's claim of the lack of evidence for God. Over at John Wright's blog, another atheist commenter recently claimed again that there is no convincing evidence for God.

I have now come to the conclusion that a consistent rational atheist cannot claim that evidence, or the lack thereof, is the issue at all. The proof is really very simple and builds upon ideas in the earlier post "
Bad Arguments Against Materialism."

Every argument should have well-defined terms. Defining "God" is surprisingly hard. Traditionally, Christianity has said that God is immutable and omniscient; however, an
Open Theist would disagree with these characteristics. Some argue that God is inherently good; others would say that the existence of evil disproves this notion (and this latter group is wrong, but that's not the topic of this post). The notion of "creator" is sufficient for now. Materialism has to conclude that matter in motion is the source of the idea of God -- "god" is an emergent property -- just like the number i is an emergent property (to the best of my limited knowledge of physics, one can't point to the square root of -1 apples or protons). Theism holds that matter is an emergent property of God and, therefore, God must be immaterial. One side holds that God is the product of man's imagination; the other says that man's imagination is the product of God.

Tangentially related to this is the question of how to recognize the existence of and the reason for singular events, such as Creation or the Resurrection. As will be shown, this reduces to differences in brain wiring.

If a creator God does not exist, then nature must consist solely of matter in motion. In particular, our thoughts arise from the movement of matter in certain patterns and our thoughts must obey the laws of physics. The laws of physics themselves are simply descriptions of how matter moves in relation to other matter. A description is just matter in a different dynamic relationship to other matter. Some theists may reject this idea and state that there is a supernatural aspect to thought, but the atheist has no such recourse. Computers, goldfish, and human minds work via electrons in a silicon, or carbon, matrix. The complexity of thought depends on the arrangement of atoms in the brain (or CPU).
1

The key insight is that evidence is simply atoms that are external to the brain; different brains process the same data differently. There is a reason why we don't discuss theology with goldfish, golden retrievers, or computers: their brains don't have enough particles in the right configuration. The same principle applies to the atheist and the agnostic. When they say, "the evidence isn't convincing," what they really mean is "the atoms in my brain don't process the external data the way yours does."

The observation that brain states can be changed due to external factors (memory is "simply" state changes in the brain) doesn't help. Either the brain actively causes brain states to change based on how the brain processes the data, or there is some effect where the brain is passively changed. In the first case, the brain's wiring affects the brain's wiring, so the data is irrelevant, because different brains process the same data differently. The external data just shows how the brain is wired. In the second case, the external data changes the brain. The brain isn't evaluating evidence in the sense of the claim that the "evidence isn't convincing." Instead, the correct view is "my brain is/is not capable of being changed by the external world in the same way as other brains."

Since the external evidence is the same for both theist and atheist, the difference is in the way brains process that data. Given the way most human brains work (cf.
The Mechanism of Morality), we ask "which arrangement of atoms is better?"

The rational atheist must answer, "that which results in reproductive advantage." The problem for the atheist at this point is that theists have more children than atheists. Even though atheism appears to be on the rise, population in general is on the rise. In relative numbers, the atheists are losing ground. Writing in "
The Source of Evangelism" (atheist evangelism), Vox Day said, "... their own children are converting to religion faster than religious children are converting out of it."

We have evolved to think in teleological terms. As
this study showed, people with Asperger's typically don't ascribe intention or purpose behind the events in their lives. Atheists, on the other hand, can reason teleologically, but they reject those explanations. It isn't evidence -- it's wiring. The atheist can't come out and say that their brains are wired better than the theists, for at least two reasons. First, it isn't supported by the demographics. Again quoting Vox Day, "But the demographic disadvantage means that the atheist community has to keep all of their children within the godless fold and de-convert one out of every three religious children just to keep pace with the growth of the religious community." Second, it isn't supported by reason. After all, materialism is a strict subset of theism. The theist can think everything the atheist can -- and more. The theist has a bigger "universe" in which to think.

One explanation for this demographic disparity may be found in the difference between brains wired to recognize the existence of a creator God and those that are not. In the Abrahamic religions, the creator God is strongly identified with life. For example, the Jews were told by God, "Choose life so that you and your descendants may live..." [De 30:19]; Jesus said, "... have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” Christianity asserts that death is an "enemy" -- the last enemy to be overcome [1 Cor 15:26]. Certainly, one doesn't have to reject the idea of a Creator God to reject life; but in my limited experience it sure seems that social battles of abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia, are drawn with a line generally between secular and religious. The side that places a premium on reproduction will outproduce those that do not.

If the atheist can't say that their brains are wired better than theists, they also won't say that their wiring is worse. That would totally defeat their arguments. Therefore, they adapt a form of protective coloration wherein they deflect the issue to be external to themselves -- the evidence -- when it clearly isn't. Adopting protective coloration against one's own species may be another reason for the reproductive disadvantage of atheists. After all, this is a form of defection against the larger group and, as Axelrod has shown, an evolutionary strategy to maximize reproductive success is to defect in turn.

It appears that the atheist cannot win. If God does exist, they are wrong. If God exists only in man's imagination, evolution has wired man so that the idea of God gives a direction toward reproductive success. The attempt to remove God from society will result in demographic weakness.
Shiny secular utopias simply don't exist.2



[1] After posting this in the morning, in the evening I started re-reading
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Via seemingly different paths we have come to similar conclusions. On P-4 he writes:
  As I see it, the only way of overcoming this magical view of what "I" and consciousness are is to keep reminding oneself, unpleasant though it may seem, that the "teetering bulb of dread and dream" that nestles safely inside one's own cranium is a purely physical object made up of completely sterile and an inanimate components, all of which obey exactly the same laws as those that govern all the rest of the universe, such as pieces of text, or CD-ROMs, or computers. Only if one keeps on bashing up against this disturbing fact can one slowly begin to develop a feel for the way out of the mystery of consciousness: that the key is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of a brain.
  This is a liberating shift, because it allows one to move to a different level of considering what brains are: as
media that support complex patterns that mirror, albeit far from perfectly, the world...
[2] On 5/12, CNN.com posted the article "Religious belief is human nature, huge new study claims". In this article, Oxford University professor Roger Trigg, is quoted as saying "The secularization thesis of the 1960s - I think that was hopeless."
Comments

Bad Arguments Against Materialism

Lately I have read, or participated in, several arguments against materialism: John C. Wright in Dialog With An Adding Machine and Taking Ideas Seriously, Job's Goat and Babelfish, and Rusty Lopez and Morality: a stowaway, onboard for the entire journey. In Taking Ideas Seriously I found myself arguing against Wright's objections to materialism, and arguing against another reader's arguments for materialism. That is, I find the typical theistic arguments against materialism to be flawed yet I find the typical atheistic arguments for materialism equally flawed.

I want to examine and expose bad theistic arguments against materialism, which generally reduce to the idea that materialism cannot explain abstract thought in general and morality in particular.

As a software engineer, I know that software -- which is abstract thought -- can be encoded in material: zero's and ones flowing through NAND gates arranged in certain ways. Wire up NAND gates one way and you have a circuit that adds (e.g.
here). Wire them up another way and you have a circuit that can subtract. Wire them up yet another way and you have memory. A more complicated arrangement could recognize whether or not a given circuit is an adder (i.e. one implements "this adds," the other implements "that is an adder"). If something can be expressed as software, it can be expressed as hardware. The relationships between the basic parts, whether they are NAND gates, NOR gates, or something else, and the movement of electrons (or photons), between them encode the abstract thought. Yet Lopez wrote:

For example, while electrical impulses may occur when a person has particluar [sic] thoughts or feelings (or propositional qualities, per Greg Koukl), the impulses themselves are not the thoughts or feelings.

For this to be true, those thoughts have to exist independently of the hardware which is our minds. They have to exist in the mind of God. But he hasn't shown that this is the case nor do I know how to prove it, even though I think it true ["in Him we live and move and have our being." -- Acts 17:28]. Just as the materialist cannot prove his position that the thoughts cease when the electrons stop moving (see my post Materialism, Theism, and Information where I have this argument with a materialist), the theist also hasn't made their case. It's one thing to cite Scripture, it's quite another to show why it must be so independently of special revelation.

That thought can be encoded in hardware should be familiar to Christians. After all, the Word became Flesh. Where the theist and materialist differ is in the initial conditions. The materialist will say that matter is made of atoms, and atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons; and protons and neutrons are made of up quarks. One overview of the "particle zoo" is
here. String theory offers the idea that below the currently known elementary particles lie even smaller one dimensional oscillating lines. Do strings really exist? We don't know. What we do know is that simple things combine to make more complex things, more complex things combine to make even more complex things. The greater the number of connections between things, the greater the complexity. Perhaps this is why the human mind tries to reduce things to their most simple components and this is what drives the search for strings in one discipline and God in another. Whether it is clearly revealed in Scripture or not, there has certainly been the idea that God is immaterial, irreducible, and simple. The materialist will say that at the bottom lies matter and the ways they combine. This combining, recombining, and recombining again eventually resulted in self-aware humans. Genetic algorithms, after all, do work. The theist says that at the bottom lies an immaterial self-aware Person who created matter and, eventually, self-aware people. In one camp, self-awareness is emergent; in another it is fundamental. After all, when Moses asked God to reveal His name, He said, "I am who I am."

If the existence of self-aware thought is one way theists argue against materialism, likewise is the existence of morality which theists claim cannot be explained by science. Lopez also wrote:

Indeed, if our entire essence - the totality of who we are, was reducible solely to particles in motion, then what justification would there be for any concept of an objective morality? What grounding** would there be for any application - or imposition - of morality from one human being to another? Survival of the fittest? Perpetuation of our species? The selfish gene?

The materialist answer is fairly simple. Morality is what we call the goal-seeking algorithm(s) in our brain (see my article The Mechanism of Morality). Basically, we call steps leading toward a goal good, and steps leading away bad. Robert Axelrod, in his ground-breaking book The Evolution of Cooperation, showed how strategies such as cooperation, forgiveness, and non-covetousness could arise between competing selfish agents. Morality is then objective the way language is objective. If language is the means whereby a community uses arbitrary symbols to share meaning, morality is the means whereby a community shares goals. The grounding for the imposition of one moral system over another would then be whether or not it leads to greater reproductive success, in exactly the same way that English is currently the lingua franca of science, technology, and business.

If morality is a property of the goal-seeking behavior of self-aware beings, and the goal is reproductive success, then certain strategies will be more effective than others. Axelrod used game theory to show how something like the golden rule can arise in biological systems. There is one sense in which the "game" of life is like the game of chess -- both have state spaces so large that it is impossible to fully analyze all strategies. Life, like chess, requires us to develop heuristics for winning the game. It's a field that's wide open for research via computer simulation. But even if we can say with confidence which choices ought to be made, this leads to the next issue.

I am puzzled the theist's insistence on the existence of and necessity for an objective morality: something written in stone which solves the "is-ought" problem, to which all mankind (and extraterrestrial life, if it exists) must agree "this ought to be," i.e. "these are the goals toward which all must strive, whether freely or not."
The materialist isn't bothered by moral relativism any more than he is bothered by the fact that there are different languages. It's the way our brains work. The goal-seeking algorithm in our brain tends to reject fixed goals. We are walking conundrums that want to choose yet aren't satisfied by the choices we make. John McCarthy recognized this in Programs with Common Sense, Axelrod found it via computer simulation in The Evolution of Cooperation, Hume exposed the problem, but not the cause; St. Paul made it the basis of his exposition of the Gospel in the book of Romans and drove the point home in his letter to the Galatians, and it's central to the story of the creation of man in Genesis (see What Really Happened in Eden). After all, the central claim of Christianity is that Jesus died and rose from the dead because of man's inability to follow any external moral code. To say that the need for an objective external standard is an argument against materialism completely misses the point of Christianity. We know that our brains are wired for teleological thinking; people with Asperger's have been shown to be deficient in this area (People with Asperger's less likely to see purpose behind the events in their lives). The theist says that God represents the ultimate goal, the ultimate purpose, the solution to the is-ought problem; the materialist will say that this is just something that minds with our properties wished they had. It's how scientists say we're wired, its how Christianity says we're wired. Arguing that materialism can't support an objective moral standard won't change that wiring.

In summary, then, neither abstract thought nor morality are a problem for a materialist, as currently argued by theists.
Comments

For I Am Not Ashamed...

Romans 1:16 says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

One of my pet peeves is when Christians, well meaning though they may be, make a connection between the lifestyle of the one who proclaims the gospel and whether or not the hearer will receive the message. The argument can take many forms: “we have to walk the walk so that we can talk the talk,” “our actions speak louder than words,” “our lifestyle must be consistent with our message,” and so on.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Should our lifestyle be consistent with the message? Of course. As St. Paul wrote, “Shall we continue in sin so that grace may abound? May it never be!” But to say that our actions help or hurt the reception of the gospel is to deny both the grace and the power of God. We readily give lip service to God’s grace toward the hearer; we rightly say that without it no one would ever believe the message. But we forget that God’s grace is likewise bestowed on the speaker. God’s grace overcomes the sin of both the receiver and the sender. In addition, God’s power overcomes our weakness. It is not my place to speak of the sins of others, but the person who was instrumental in presenting the gospel to me wasn’t living what is typically considered to be “the Christian life.” When God took a 2x4 to me, the behavior of someone else didn’t even enter my mind. He demolished all of my objections in an instant.

Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God--not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” We forget that “not of your own doing” also applies to those whom God uses to proclaim the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
Comments

Materialism, Theism, and Information

Over on John C. Wright's blog, there is yet another discussion in the continuing series on Materialism vs. Theism, this one titled Return of the Robot Zombie Slaves.

In one corner, is John Wright, a theist, who holds that there is more to man than just a collection of atoms in a certain pattern. In another corner is Dr. Rolf Andreassen, who is a strict materialist. I'm in the third corner.

Andreassen is trying to argue that one could, in theory, make an exact atomic copy of a man, and that this copy would act identically to the original. Wright is arguing that this isn't the case, because he holds that symbols cannot be reduced to atoms. I think that both of them are wrong. Wright is wrong because symbols can be reduced to atoms (all software can be expressed as NAND gates, for example). Andreassen is wrong, because even though symbols can be encoded as atoms this doesn’t mean that atoms are required for symbols (“in the beginning was the λογος”).

One of the interesting things is Andreassen's attempt to support his position. He wrote:
... I was saying that this proposition (more accurately, the underlying proposition that meaning arises from matter) I believe simply on the grounds that it seems reasonable to me, that my intuition, wisdom, or experience tells me it is so. There is some supporting evidence, such as the disruption of meaning caused by a bullet or a concentration of alcohol to the brain; but how one interprets this is a question of wisdom, as you put it, or intuition, as I prefer.

I observed that his evidence didn't necessarily support his position:
You filtered this evidence through the lens of your worldview. That is, you couldn’t come to any other conclusion without abandoning your materialism. For example, I can put a bullet though a computer and disrupt the working of its software. But that doesn’t say anything about the existence of me, the programmer, who put the software there in the first place. As a materialist, you will automatically exclude the idea of a Programmer for this universe.

Andreassen then went on to say:
You are your body, neither more or less. If I damage your body I damage you; if I destroy your body you cease to exist; I cannot make you cease to exist except by damaging your body.

To which I replied,
Nonsense. You’re letting your materialism control your evaluation of evidence. We exist first and foremost in the mind of God. This body is just a vessel, as it were, for our software.

Andreassen proposed an experiment:
This at least offers itself up to experimental test. I suggest you volunteer to be shot, and we will see whether you still exist after the bullet has passed through your brain. If you wake up in Heaven (or even Hell – the dispute is not about anyone’s virtue), I will admit I was wrong. If your consciousness is snuffed out like a candle, you still won’t admit you were wrong, because you won’t exist. So, clearly, it’s a win-win scenario for you.
Or to put it another way: Your god does not exist, therefore we do not exist in its mind, either primarily, secondarily, or otherwise.

Note what he did. He proposed an experiment where he could not observe the results! The scientist was reduced to bogus science! And so, this becomes the blog entry to receive the “Bad Arguments” tag. There will be more to come.
Comments