I claim these are two illustrations of the same principle. I don’t claim they should be called analogies, I’m not saying X is like Y, I’m saying these are examples, where we can see the principle I am presenting, in action.
I have addressed these explanations, each one, and you all are the ones coming up with more explanations for me to address (the latest one being tree-rings), without responding to what I say in reply. I repeat these illustrations because they are valid examples where we apply the principle that we should reject reasoning caused by nonreason.
So tell me, is a delirious person being reasonable? Why or why not?
All right, call it a proposal. But you didn’t address the objections raised, to start with a light-sensitive patch is to assume too much, to ignore genetics and just talk about morphology is to skip over critical aspects of development which need explaining.
I think it’s appropriate to mention that the problem occurs in two different areas, as in Darwin focusing on brain development, and Haldane focusing on brain operation.
And again, I mention it only as one evidence that people have had this concern, respected scientists have had it. Indicating their concern was a valid one.
First, God is a good option if we need our reason to come from a self-existent reason. There just aren’t any other candidates for that. But getting to know God, if he exists, is important, since we need to know if he has good intentions, and is not out to give us invalid powers where we just think we are reasoning. And no person is the only fount of good reasoning, we do need correction from each other, so certainly conclusions can differ due to bad reasoning, or bad premises, and so on. But everyone engages in argument in order to come to correct reasoning, and good conclusions. But all this would be essentially pointless, if we can’t basically trust human reasoning. So the problem here is yours, not mine.
But you skipped my example of writing on the sand, somehow. And I say quoting others is evidence, and presenting evidence is part of making an argument.
I do notice that no one but you have taken up your example, and defended it. You seem to be the lone voice on this one. If this is a convincing refutation, I expect I would be hearing from all sides that I have been refuted. But I repeat, boxes are not scales, no one would think boxes are a reasonable substitute, or a proper way to make conclusions about overweight people.
I’ve given several examples, actually, such as a phobia of snakes keeping people from being bitten by venomous ones, or a fear of heights keeping people from falling off of cliffs.
But the claim is that survival necessarily results in correct perceptions. Counterexamples are sufficient to disprove that. Now if you are saying survival usually results in correct perceptions, I’m going to say that now we are again being pragmatic. This provides no fundamental reason to trust our reasoning, though I’m not saying our reasoning has to be flawless! I am saying we need a better reason to trust it than saying, “Well, it works pretty well, and some of what I conclude is likely due to good perception.” I could say this as well of the madman! He no doubt has some correct perceptions, as he walks around his house, and concludes how to get to the kitchen. But we do still call him insane, since his reasoning is seriously flawed. We discount what he says in general, because we see his reason is unbalanced. “Good enough” is not good, when it comes to solid reason to trust what we think.
But they aren’t the same principle, just the same linguistic trick. And in fact your analogy (and yes, it’s an analogy even if you don’t understand that) invalidates your claim that we can trust our ability to reason because we are the product, supposedly, of a reasoning being. How do we know God isn’t insane or delirious?
You confuse me with someone else. No, you have not addressed those explanations, not really.
Presumably not, by definition. But natural selection isn’t delirious, so why should we care?
More of a mathematical demonstration.
You raised no objections. You just quoted an anonymous creationist. Those objections merely claim that Nilsson and Pelger should have produced a model that explains everything. In order to explain the evolution of the eye you must, apparently, explain how their starting point arose, and if they did that I suppose they would have to explain how the previous state arose, on back to the origin of the universe. And they would have to go into detail on what genes were involved, and what mutations would have occurred in those genes, and so on back again to the origin of the universe. But if all that were required, we would never be able to do anything. Nilsson & Pelger make a couple of reasonable, simplifying assumptions in order to be able to proceed. Feel free to attack their assumptions. The first is that some light-sensitive cells exist, as they do throughout life. The second is that enough genetic variation exists in natural populations to allow for small variations in size, shape, composition, etc, which we do observe. Given that, the model works. So what’s the problem?
But the fact that several people had such a concern doesn’t indicate that the concern is valid. There’s your problem.
Why would we? And “self-existent” is only a device to keep us from having to ask where God came from.
Why not? Is natural selection self-existent? Why or why not?
How would you know if he had good intentions if you can’t first know that you have valid powers of reasoning? How do you know that good intentions can’t lead him to give you invalid powers of reasoning? Your bootstraps are showing.
So we can’t trust our reasoning. You can’t even know if you’re delirious without external validation. Given that you may be delirious, shouldn’t you lack trust in your own reasoning? Might as well forget about your arguments.
How do you know all this isn’t essentially pointless? (As far as I can tell, it is. I can generalize that to any discussion in which you are involved.)
It shares irrelevance with your previous example. It’s just another form of Paley’s watch, to which natural selection is an answer. Of course watches and messages in the sand don’t reproduce and are not subject to natural selection, so that’s why they’re irrelevant.
Two points, the view in the Bible is that God bears suffering, showing both his goodness, and that if he is good, there is reason to believe there is a purpose even in suffering. For example, if there was nothing to be borne, what would there be to reward? Sliding down a cotton candy slide into a pillow, there’s nothing there to say “Well done” about. There are other reasons that can be given for purpose in suffering, another one is to refine us. What do we call children who get everything they want, and never learn to deny themselves? We call them spoiled. Then Christians believe death is not the end, God will “make everything new,” a world without suffering or pain, for those who know him. So none of this will overturn the validity of reason, somehow.
I agree that natural processes do not guarantee reliable minds (did you mean natural selection by NS?). But I think valid reasoning ability is good, so it would be consistent to believe that a good God would give valid reasoning, if he gives any reasoning ability at all, which indeed it appears we have.
But that’s pragmatics again! Some more fundamental reason is needed.
Yes, it’s an act of faith, per Chesterton, we have to start out with that as an axiom. Every argument for the validity of reason has to start by making a tacit exception for the bit of reasoning I’m going to do for this argument (C.S. Lewis’ point). Once we’ve assumed we have valid reasoning, then we can start to examine the foundations. If we then are led to conclude that our reasoning has unreasoning underpinnings, we then have a problem.
But Hinduism denies that we exist, it also denies the tiger, and the universe, and so on! But this might provide a survival advantage, to get us to withdraw and meditate instead of going out to do stuff. Here is a quote from Plantinga: “Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.” Exactly, survival benefit does not necessarily result in correct perception of reality. It might! It might not. It’s not a good foundation.
No, I don’t say it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s not a necessary result. We can’t be sure our reasoning is valid, if that is its cause. I am indeed arguing that there is insufficient warrant here.
They were indeed remaining within the bounds of natural explanations, but postulating such rapid changes as they did, is outside the standard narrative.
But I addressed this when you made this objection before. Why do you not respond to what I said in reply?
Conferences are called to air questions, as well as to present results. That’s why they have peace conferences, for instances, it’s to try and find ways to arrive at peace, not to come to celebrate solutions.
I agree, that is what I have been saying. I did not contradict myself. And you skipped my whole point, you need to show me where in this paper they demonstrated that the EES concerns were not important. Not claims that they were! Demonstrations, that’s what you were saying were there.
Certainly we have to believe that, to have confidence on that basis, in our reason. And trust is based on evidence, how do you get to trust someone? By getting to know them. I hear God has a book out. I hear he’s come to us, to show us what he’s like. I hear he can be talked to, and answers prayers. He’s answered some of mine, some of them, dramatically. I recommend this approach.
Pragmatics again! But we need a better foundation, is what I have been arguing. Just because a bridge has been working up till now, is no reason to stop inspecting it.
But this works the other way, too, how can we trust our reason, if according to the naturalists, it fails dramatically in a ditch on the other side of the road? So this is getting us nowhere.
But I would say, indeed, we have problems due to the fall, and yet everyone agrees that we have to sort out good reasoning from bad reasoning, so the objection again applies to both views, and takes us nowhere. And the question returns to the basis for any good reasoning we have.
My view, based on scripture, is that unbelievers do not have free will (John 8:34), which would include Pharaoh and his reasoning, but those “the Son sets free are free indeed” (John 8:36), so those who believe have free will, real choices can be made within the will of God, and they are not slaves to sin, and their reasoning is also freed up too, in a real way. And I would add that I don’t believe God makes all the choices. That is not to say that unbelievers cannot do valid reasoning, or that only believers can do that. Every person is made in the image of God, which I think includes the ability to do valid reasoning. I do say if we are slaves to sin, and our desires, and so on, we’re going to come to various wrong conclusions, maybe not about mathematics and physics! But certainly about what we should do in life. The important stuff, it’s not going to end well, is the Christian view.
I think that the apologetic arguments is very poorly put as an epistemological argument.
From the epistemological point of view neither assumption can play any significant role in establishing that our reason is as reliable as it seems to be. First because they are assumptions and second because they require additional reasoning to get to the desired conclusion. But if we cannot adequately justify the conclusion of reliability we are in trouble regardless of which assumption we choose.
So let us say that we have adequately justified the idea that our reason is as reliable as it seems to be. In that case, weak arguments based on imponderables- at best - can’t do much to undermine it. Plantinga’s argument is especially feeble, The reasoning he gives is rather bizarre, seeming to assume that beliefs are the direct product of evolution or that human depth perception could easily reverse near and far for tigers - and nothing else. Further, he amended his argument to admit that the probability of reliable reasoning faculties was low or inscrutable given naturalism and effectively destroyed it. An inscrutable probability cannot undermine our conclusion of reliability. It could only do that if the conclusion were based on the assumption of naturalism - and that can’t be the case, as I argue above.
Indeed we can argue that the evidence is consistent with evolved reasoning faculties. Reasoning ability seems to offer clear advantages in communication and planning. In the development and use of tools. And humanity has become hugely successful based on those. Further, the human brain is a large and expensive organ - by evolutionary principles it must be earning its keep by contributing to fitness - and providing reliable reasoning faculties seems a reasonable explanation. Only Plantinga’s argument attempts to address this line of thought but as I point out above it does so very poorly and offers too weak an objection to undermine our - guarded - trust in human reason.
The naturalistic view also does better to explain the limits of our reasoning. Why are there seductive fallacies, like the gambler’s fallacy? Why is quantum mechanics so difficult to understand? Oh, the vagueness of the theistic explanation lets it cover those - but that vagueness is a weakness, just as the vagueness that allows Creationism to “explain” the nested hierarchy of life is a weakness.
So I do not think that this apologetic has any real value.
So what if we reject their reasoning? Maybe they are insane, or started with flawed assumptions, (or we are out to get them,) or for any other cause reached a flawed conclusion. Call it bad reasoning if you like, but it is still reasoning.
Take any two people arguing from different assumptions and they will inevitably disagree, even though both may have applied sound reasoning.
I think delusions are beside the point; they are “not reasonable”, but they are still “reasoning”. A person running from a hallucinatory tiger is executing sound reasoning from a flawed premise. Reality is the basis on which we should judge the validity of assumptions. It’s good to cross check reasoned conclusions with reality too, if possible.
I think you are sane, and I expect you consider your ability to reason to be intact. But given your demand for trust beyond the pragmatic, I am curious. On what basis do you believe it is you, and not some other that you have portrayed as unguided, who is not stark raving mad?
And that, according to what you have said, means that there can be no reward in heaven either, because “if there was nothing to be borne, what would there be to reward”. I hope you aren’t going to claim that pain is necessary now so that we can appreciate its absence later.
Also, of course, maybe it’s necessary that we be really bad at reasoning now so that we can appreciate our new, improved reasoning powers in heaven. This way lies madness.
Why would you assume that single exception without making it general? How could that be justified?
Why would you think that it’s a problem? It seems you are on the verge of declaring that it’s turtles all the way down.
It’s a great foundation because it accounts for many failures of perception, for example optical illusions. Whereas God, as you claim, would have made our perception perfect, reasoning as well as perception. What natural selection produces is perception and reasoning that are good enough, enough of the time.
But you have also said that we have to start by assuming that our reasoning is valid, as an axiom. So it’s enough that valid reasoning is a possible result of evolution; it doesn’t have to be a necessary result because we already know, or have assumed, the result. Given that reason is reliable, how could it have come about? Evolution is, you tacitly agree here, a valid answer. You might argue that God is a more probable answer, but you haven’t tried that. And if we have no warrant from evolution to believe that we are capable of valid reasoning, we likewise have no warrant from God.
One problem here is that you know neither what Eldredge and Gould postulated nor what the standard narrative would be. Eldredge and Gould 1972 would tell you the former, though it presents a strawman of the latter. Still, worth looking at if you actually are interested in learning.
Ah, but are any of these actually true? The book exists, but there are questions regarding its authorship. The idea that he’s come to us is from the book, so see previous sentence. A rock can be talked to, it’s getting answers that’s the trick. Now, if your prayers were answered, nice, but are you quite sure? Can we distinguish answered prayers from natural events?
No problem. My view, based on reality, is that nobody has free will. In fact, it’s an incoherent concept.
You seem confused. We’re talking about this post. Do you never click links?
I responded to that already in the post it is now clear you haven’t even read. Go there and read it.
No, that isn’t the claim. First of all we’re talking about reasoning ability (the ability to make logical/rational inferences), not perception. Though my argument would apply just as well to questions concerning the reliability of the senses.
Why is certainty a requirement? Given our known biases, etc, it would seem unreasonable to expect certainty as to the validity of our reasoning. Such guardrails as Formal Logic and the Scientific Method can improve our confidence, but certainty is never there. That is part of the reason why science is provisional.
If we’re down to quibbling about whether brains’ reasoning are “reliable” then all I need note is that for a polychaete worm “reliable” means the brain does enough to keep it alive enough and enable it to reproduce enough to have its genes well-represented in the next generation. And as to whether it can “reason like us”, if the worm saw a predator go behind a rock, it would be of great selective advantage if its brain could come to a state where it was worried about what might still be behind that rock.
And as to the problem of ditches and the fall, yes, that is a problem: I’ve fallen into ditches myself.
Except Lee, I was not talking about your “concern” but about Darwin’s – and you never articulated what specifically Darwin thought his concern was:
A quick bit of hand-waving about Henry Ford is insufficient to demonstrate this.
I would deem you a ‘cognitive essentialist’ in that you appear to have a core, irreducible belief that ‘reason cannot arise from reason’. You appear to view reason as an essential quality, that cannot be introduced where it did not already exist. You appear to view this viewpoint as a self-evident truth – which is perhaps why you have been unable to explain to the rest of us, who do not share this core belief, merely offer (uncompelling) analogies/“illustrations”.
This is also clear from the fact that you seek a “fundamental reason”. A fundamental reason is only needed if reason is an essential quality.
That you are not also an ‘automotive essentialist’ does not alter this.
No, but as you never presented Lewis’ thoughts on the subject, we are left to assess them based on what we know of him.
Lewis was a Literature expert not a philosopher (let alone an expert on cognition), he was known to be fairly conservative and anti-progressive in his views, even for his day. It is therefore not unreasonable to suspect that he would hold onto viewpoints that were outdated, even in his time (and he died more than 60 years ago).
I would also note the vast amount of research into non-human cognition that has come into existence since Lewis’ time.
I restored my full response – it makes it perfectly clear that I was not conceding your point. This renders your question more than a little dishonest.
No Lee, you have not. You have repeated variations of the same unsubstantiated claim – that examples of disordered cognition are somehow relevant. They are irrelevant.
No Lee.
My point here is that your claim that there is a single, homogeneous category called “unreason” is WRONG!
My point here is that you cannot validly generalise from disordered cognition to non-cognitive mechanistic processes. They are two very different things, with very different properties.
That you would conflate the two is part of why I view your viewpoint as essentialist.
I didn’t say that they do. I said that they are viewed as reliable. They are different from the utterances of insane people, which is viewed as unreliable.
This in turn indicates that “disordered cognition” and “non-cognitive mechanistic processes” are not the same thing and have different properties. That was my point.
Let me summarise my key points of disagreement Lee:
I do not accept that ‘reason cannot arise from nonreason’ (in main part because I do not accept ‘nonreason’ as a valid homogeneous category).
I do not accept that disordered cognition (be it “insanity”, “delusion” or otherwise) provides any relevant information about non-cognitive mechanistic processes.
Given that your argumentation to date seems to have consisted of little (nothing?) except (often incoherent) ad nauseamrepetition of these two, rejected, points, and content-free name-dropping (of the likes of Lennox, Lewis and Darwin), I don’t see how you can expect to make any progress.
I would agree that it demonstrates calculated artifice. I would not however agree that its flaws are not obvious. It seems obvious to me that it misrepresents both evolution and naturalism:
If, for example, behavior isn’t caused or governed by belief, the latter would be, so to speak, invisible to natural selection …
This is false, as selection only requires correlation, not causation.
But then (since the probabilities of P1 and of P2 (the two forms of epiphenomenalism) would be fairly high, given naturalism …
This claim is implausible, bordering on being outright false.
Plantinga establishes no basis for naturalism privileging either form of epiphenomenalism, nor does that seem a consensus conclusion outside his argument.
Most adherents of naturalism reject either form of epiphenomenalism.
It would appear that Plantinga simply looked for the viewpoint that best helped his argument and ‘stuck it on’ naturalism.
[Both quotes from ‘Naturalism Defeated’, 1994 – though I think “Naturalism Defamed” would be a more apt title.]
Invalidating either statement invalidates the whole argument.
The argument would seem to work in that it is aimed at an audience with little understanding of, or sympathy for, either evolution or naturalism – so are either unaware of, or uncaring about, its obvious flaws.
I would agree. I am coming to see Analytic Philosophy as more of a competitive sport in which competitors vie to see who can make the most absurd conclusion seem reasonable, rather than as an honest attempt to reach valid conclusions.
