Having granted the non-purposeful, accidental explanation for our senses, one can argue that it is just as irrational to think that those senses give us any reliable information about the world as it is to think that those stones which accidentally were found in a certain arrangment gave any reliable information about the world.
Thus, the metaphysical naturalists are caught in a trap. Their whole enterprise is undermined by their presuppositions. Either we have no reason to believe that what they say is true, or we must suppose something other than random, non-intentional forces as the cause of what is. The Christian belief in a personal, rational God who created man in his own image provides a ground for believing what our senses and reason tells us.
This argument has been batted about for many years, in many forms. First, a reply using a counterargument: Michael Martin's TANG. Martin uses the existence of God to show how the theist lives in a sort of "cartoon universe", one in which logic, objective morality, science (and thus any sanity or surety) are metaphysically subjective. How could Martin arrive at such a diametrically-opposed position to Carey's, given that Martin grants evolutionary development of the mind?
Next, a defensive probing of the question --
Are our senses "truth-directed" or "survival-directed"? First, we must presuppose the reliability of our own minds, for to do otherwise is self-refuting. How can one trust the conclusion... that one's mind is not trustworthy?
I'm a pragmatist, and so, to be honest I don't spend a great deal of time on abstract philosophical debates. What I know is that science is a method by which we test our faculties against the uniformity of nature (a presupposition that pays us off quite handsomely). When we do this, we find that there is reliability to the mind, in its capability to manipulate the physical world for physical needs. Its conclusions must be considered with epistemic skepticism, but, they are always testable (within the realm of science).
In the same way that ants have social structure, and chimps have empathy, we have reason. Reason is not an automatic truth-detector, though, now is it? It is a tool. It is something we use to form (what we THINK are) logical conclusions based on the evidence we find in our perception of reality.
As Kant pointed out, we have no real way to confirm our truth values, only within certain frameworks. Our transcendentals cannot, themselves, be proven. But what do we conclude from this? We cannot distrust our own minds, and we cannot prove that our reason is infallible. So what next? My answer? We do what we can to ensure the survival of our species, and help one another, and keep using the power of science to filter out the worthwhile ideas from the untestable and unfalsifiable. And as we go on into the future, perhaps we'll understand more about the mind, and how the brain came to develop these capacities that it displays.
I think that language will prove to be the sort of "singularity" -- an indescribable and irreducible component of our logic, and the language center of our brain is what enabled us to pass on concepts and knowledge within our culture (see here for more details of this). As I said, though, I'm no philosopher -- I'm a chemist. What I do every day is work on problems that no one else has solved. I figure things out that no one has yet figured out. I rely heavily upon the foundation built by those before me, and yet every premise of theirs, and mine, is tested rigorously.
That's all we can do.
Our minds were not produced by a Person. Should we then conclude, as Voltaire did, that doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd? I think so. Should we go further and conclude that in our state of doubt, we cannot form any worthwhile conclusions, or even tentative knowledge (science)? Why would we? Should we descend into the self-refuting stance of nihilism? Or should we have a little faith...but not too much...? ;)
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Technorati tags: Philosophy
Consider logic. Logic presupposes that its principles are necessarily true. However, according to the brand of Christianity assumed by TAG, God created everything, including logic; or at least everything, including logic, is dependent on God. But if something is created by or is dependent on God, it is not necessary--it is contingent on God. And if principles of logic are contingent on God, they are not logically necessary. Moreover, if principles of logic are contingent on God, God could change them. Thus, God could make the law of noncontradiction false; in other words, God could arrange matters so that a proposition and its negation were true at the same time. But this is absurd. How could God arrange matters so that New Zealand is south of China and that New Zealand is not south of it? So, one must conclude that logic is not dependent on God, and, insofar as the Christian world view assumes that logic so dependent, it is false.Indeed, as Martin aptly points out, the Euthyphro Dilemma extends further than just objective morality -- it extends into the uniformity of our universe and logic itself. Is logic/morality/a rational universe contingent upon God's existence/creation thereof, or are these preconditions of God, restraints out of which even God cannot break?
Next, a defensive probing of the question --
Are our senses "truth-directed" or "survival-directed"? First, we must presuppose the reliability of our own minds, for to do otherwise is self-refuting. How can one trust the conclusion... that one's mind is not trustworthy?
I'm a pragmatist, and so, to be honest I don't spend a great deal of time on abstract philosophical debates. What I know is that science is a method by which we test our faculties against the uniformity of nature (a presupposition that pays us off quite handsomely). When we do this, we find that there is reliability to the mind, in its capability to manipulate the physical world for physical needs. Its conclusions must be considered with epistemic skepticism, but, they are always testable (within the realm of science).
In the same way that ants have social structure, and chimps have empathy, we have reason. Reason is not an automatic truth-detector, though, now is it? It is a tool. It is something we use to form (what we THINK are) logical conclusions based on the evidence we find in our perception of reality.
As Kant pointed out, we have no real way to confirm our truth values, only within certain frameworks. Our transcendentals cannot, themselves, be proven. But what do we conclude from this? We cannot distrust our own minds, and we cannot prove that our reason is infallible. So what next? My answer? We do what we can to ensure the survival of our species, and help one another, and keep using the power of science to filter out the worthwhile ideas from the untestable and unfalsifiable. And as we go on into the future, perhaps we'll understand more about the mind, and how the brain came to develop these capacities that it displays.
I think that language will prove to be the sort of "singularity" -- an indescribable and irreducible component of our logic, and the language center of our brain is what enabled us to pass on concepts and knowledge within our culture (see here for more details of this). As I said, though, I'm no philosopher -- I'm a chemist. What I do every day is work on problems that no one else has solved. I figure things out that no one has yet figured out. I rely heavily upon the foundation built by those before me, and yet every premise of theirs, and mine, is tested rigorously.
That's all we can do.
Our minds were not produced by a Person. Should we then conclude, as Voltaire did, that doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd? I think so. Should we go further and conclude that in our state of doubt, we cannot form any worthwhile conclusions, or even tentative knowledge (science)? Why would we? Should we descend into the self-refuting stance of nihilism? Or should we have a little faith...but not too much...? ;)
________________
Technorati tags: Philosophy
