No. Computers also directly control airplanes, automobiles, nuclear reactors, etc – without the need for human “interpretation”. They are analogous to the naturalistic interpretation of human thought in that it involves nothing more than the interaction of “mindless” atoms, yet their results are generally deemed reliable – sufficiently reliable that every day millions of people place their lives in these computers hands.
The point is not whether computers form beliefs (an issue that is not relevant to the Argument from Reason), but whether relying on the interaction of “mindless” atoms renders a process unreliable – and nobody seems to have provided evidence on this latter point – those arguing for the Argument from Reason simply assume that it does.
I know you’re seeking clarification from @Paul_King and so perhaps I should stay out, but this is a subject I’ve talked about before and I think I do understand, and agree with, what he means, so let me have a go.
I have said that in principle (though not in practice), it would be possible to explain the War of the Spanish Sucession entirely in the domain of physics. Physics governs all of the factors at work, including the firing of every neuron in the Duke of Marlborough’s brain as he worked out the plans for, say, the Battle of Blenheim. If one had access to the data, an explanation of the war in terms of physics would be exhaustive of all of the causes, expressed in the terms of physics, of the war and its outcome.
But it is also possible to explain the War of the Spanish Succession in more humanly-accessible terms: the motives of the parties, the working-out of uncertainties and contingencies, the shifting alliances and interests of all concerned.
That the former explanation could, in principle, exist does not negate anything about the validity of the latter explanation. They simply occupy distinct explanatory domains, but describe the same facts.
To the extent you have a reason to believe something, that reason must in some way be embedded in the physical states of your brain and in the process of your brain proceeding through those states as cognition occurs. So to say you did something because the molecules were thus-and-so does not in any way negate the statement that you did it because you felt it was the best thing to do under the circumstances. Same causes, different explanatory domains.
I think that’s what @Paul_King means. Perhaps not; but it is certainly what I took him to mean.
I don’t see a reason to believe premise 2, but then I’m not sure how a non-rational cause differs from a rational cause. Nor do I see why, if we fail to accept naturalism, we then must accept whatever is the proposed alternative.
There seems no reason to accept this premise either.
That would seem to reject the notion of emergent properties. I can’t see a reason to accept that premise. It seems along the lines of “if a result has X, then the cause must have X”, and there are many values of X for which that is certainly not true. So why is it necessarily true for X = “has mental properties”?
This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Why are physical states that correspond to reasons not equivalent to reasons? Whatever is in your brain must be encoded or instantiated in some way; you seem to be proposing some direct access to the platonic ideal of an idea.
Not sure that your two-part conclusion follows. Is a thing with mental properties necessarily a personal being?
Not the important part of my objection. It appears that we are back to the difference between the encoding of ideas and the ideas themselves, which I don’t see as significant. Further, what would this “mental property” thing be? It seems merely an unnecessary framework built on top of the physical brain. It makes more sense if my reasons and my beliefs too are physical processes happening in my brain. So not thrilled here.
No brain state corresponds to the fossil evidence, only to one’s understanding of the evidence. Now of course one’s understanding of the evidence is caused, or at least influenced, by the evidence itself.
I would say that here, we are routinely treated to spectacles of understanding that clearly have zero evidentiary basis and can never be changed by evidence.
Not exactly. I am claiming that mental states and processes are not distinct from the physical implementation of those processes.
Of course the mental states representing the evidence for human evolution are not themselves identical to the evidence for human evolution in any model, so this objection is obviously looking at the wrong thing.
So, in this case I am saying that the internal processes that lead to the belief in human evolution are the same whether described in purely physical or purely mental terms.
The important point is not the conclusion itself, but how that conclusion was reached. If a supernatural entity implanted a false belief in your mind - even if it had rational reasons for doing so - that would not be a rational belief on your part, even if physicalism were false.
So, the conclusion would be rational if it were reached by rational processes on your part. I contend that it is those processes which are identical - although in principle, at least - there could be alternative implementations of the mental processes. That description is more abstracted than the purely physical implementation.
“If mindless atoms control my [x], then I have no reason to trust them.”
[x] was originally ‘thoughts’, but could equally well be ‘parachute’, ‘self-driving car’, ‘ladder’, ‘central heating’, ‘watch’, ‘rain gauge’, and myriad other items for which no-one would hesitate to reject that claim. If it’s accepted for ‘thoughts’ it can only be because that claim was invented solely for convenience, and its validity is irrelevant.
Let me clarify what I mean. I use ‘testing’ in the widest possible sense of a person interacting with the world and learning from that. A newborn baby has very little knowledge and very few abilites. All that she will learn from there on is through interacting with her environment via a process of trial and error - she tests her environment and learns from that.
If we were born with wel developed reasoning abilities I might see your point - from where do they come? But in reality they start from virtually zero and develop over time. This process works rather well (but not perfectly well) for developing beliefs grounded in reality, i.e. truthful beliefs. Instead of saying that our beliefs are ‘caused by our reasons for holding those beliefs’ (a bit of a strange statement which I don’t fully understand tbh) I would say that they are caused by what we have learned about out external environment through a long process of trial and error.
Thank you all for your criticisms. I now see that the argument from reason is probably flawed in two ways:
(1) There is no real way to draw a distinction between a concept and that same concept physically encoded.
(2) Computers are analogous to human reason in some ways, and since computers are entirely physical, it is possible that human minds are also entirely physical.
Also, @John_Harshman pointed out – rightly – that something with mental properties may not necessarily be personal. So this is a bad argument for a personal God.
Is that a misquote? Surely Haldane did not think his brain was not made of atoms.
The cause cannot be God, because God is unchanging. Causation, however, requires change in the causative entity. So, sorry, but that argument does not work.
Assuming the quote is accurate and in context, I read this as Haldane arguing how absurd the anti-science arguments that begin something like “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain…” are. Haldane surely did not believe brains are not composed of atoms, he likely believed statements like "I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true " are inane.
If an immaterial mind controls your thoughts, do you have any more reason to trust them?
In recent years I have been witness to severe mental decline due to physical disease of the brain. Their thoughts are far from trustworthy. If the mind is not emergent from the brain, I see no reason that the mind should deteriorate just because atoms in the brain are not arranged normally.
Note that Pruss does offer arguments that the first cause has various attributes of God, so this is not an entirely unsupported premise in his article. WLC’s argument that the first cause is personal also involves more than just inferring that it must act indeterministically - e.g., your suggestion of a “necessarily existing quantum field” doesn’t exactly work, because a quantum field is spatiotemporal, and (WLC argues) the first cause is not spatiotemporal. So instead you can say we are looking at some vastly powerful, indeterministically acting, immaterial, timeless (*), spaceless, causeless being, and trying to determine whether it is personal or impersonal.
For me, other arguments come in here to augment the cosmological argument and the case that the first cause is personal. These include the cosmological fine-tuning argument, the argument from reason, and even a version of the ontological argument.
(*) Some nuance skipped over for brevity here: what WLC actually argues is that the first cause is timeless in the absence of creation, but temporal if he creates (due to his concomitant relation to the temporal creation).
On the argument from reason:
(1) is false. It is certainly possible to draw this distinction, in the same way we can draw the distinction between the meaning of the sentence “snow is white” and a particular instance of the text “snow is white” written on some paper somewhere. (2) is reasoning by analogy, which sometimes works, but in this case it is fairly weak.
Against these conclusions and the arguments that have been given for them here, I will point you towards some of Ed Feser’s writings: here, here, and here. Afraid I don’t have time to elaborate on them, though.
Responding to @Faizal_Ali on an argument against the first cause being God:
Some theological views hold that God is literally immutable - completely unchanging in all intrinsic properties whatsoever - and all such views openly reject your premise that causation requires change in the cause. (Do you have any arguments for that premise, by the way?)
Other theological views hold that God can in fact change in the strictly literal sense; such views would interpret verses like Malachi 3:6 as referring to God’s character (which fits well with the context). These views would have no problem with your premise about causation, but of course they reject your premise about God’s (literal) immutability.
That’s how I would have read it. But the universe rarely provides us ironies as delicious as that which would have resulted if @lee_merrill had cited such a quote in earnest. Do I dare dream?
If these apologists want to engage in special pleading and say there is one incident in which an entity can cause something without itself changing, then there is no reason to accept their premise that everything must have a cause, since that is also based on nothing more than observation.
If God can change, then that raises a number of further problems for how he is usually conceived. For instance, change would entail that he is a temporal being, not a timeless one. The more the apologist tries to accomodate to arguments, the more their god is diminished. Now he is just some kinda powerful guy who can do lots of stuff, but is constrained by time just like the rest of us.
Or in the case of IDcreationism, he’s a tinkerer who rarely invents new stuff. He is incapable of designing split proteins, which humans do without much exertion and are out of reach of known evolutionary mechanisms.
So he’s not even that powerful. Why do people want to diminish God so?
Oh, there’s far more going for premises like the causal principle / principle of sufficient reason than mere observation. If you’re curious, Pruss’s article on the LCA (linked in my earlier post) details some of that; here’s another good article on the subject, as well as a blog post discussing it (which mentions as well a couple further arguments for such premises, which are expanded upon elsewhere).
Nevertheless, I agree that there is some support in observation and intuition behind the idea that causing a change involves some kind of change in the cause itself. I myself lean towards the view that God is not immutable in the strictest sense, in part for that reason.
Isn’t this vastly overstating the theological problem? If there is a necessarily existing being with maximal power, complete knowledge, and moral perfection, who created everything else in existence - it would be a pretty shallow atheism to complain that he wasn’t God because he had the kind of mutability entailed by being able to be the cause of other things.
Well, OK, if someone wants to change their conception of God so that a favourite argument can work, who am I to argue? To me, however, it strengthens my conviction that he is just a fictitious being imbued with whatever properties his believers want him to have.
Sure, if we already knew a being existed with all those properties. But the post to which I was responding was on which treated first cause as a standalone argument. That is a problem, however, with such arguments. People tend to think by demonstrating a being likely exists with one of the attributes of their god, they have demonstrated that he has all the other attributes they also ascribe to him. No, sorry, they still have to do all that heavy lifting as well.
The predominant conception of God as timeless - at least in the Western tradition - originated from philosophical arguments, not religious dogma, nor because believers decided they felt like timelessness was a good fit for divinity. Updating your conception of God because you find one philosophical argument overturns another isn’t capricious or wishful thinking. It’s merely an instance of adjusting your beliefs in accordance with the reasons you see for holding them.
No one that I can see is disputing that here. I was responding to your exaggerated assertion that postulating temporality rather than timelessness diminishes one’s conception of God. I take it you concede that it actually doesn’t.