Not so Bright
The following book review appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of The Latin Mass magazine, as part of a symposium on the "New Atheism" of Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris. (Incidentally, as Pope Benedict XVI prepares to issue his long-awaited motu proprio extending the use of the traditional Latin Mass, some readers might want to check out this fine journal of Catholic culture and tradition to get up to speed.)
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking, 2006, 448 pp.)
Reviewed by Edward Feser
Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that a complete understanding of any natural phenomenon requires the identification of each of its four causes: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the form or essence that stuff has taken on; its efficient cause, that which brought it into being; and its final cause, the end, purpose, or function it serves. This doctrine was (and is) central to Scholastic philosophy and theology, but modern philosophy, inaugurated by the likes of Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke, is largely defined by it rejection of two of Aristotle’s four causes. For the moderns, there are no formal or final causes, no fixed essences or purposes in nature. The world is rather a gigantic machine, all the diverse phenomena it exhibits being entirely reducible to inherently meaningless causal interactions between material parts.
The history of modern thought, and of modern civilization, is the history of the gradual working out of the moral, political, and cultural implications of this idea. Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book might be characterized as an attempt to work out its consequences for religion. For when he proposes interpreting and explaining religion as a “natural phenomenon,” it is, of course, the modern mechanistic-cum-materialistic conception of nature he has in mind. (No Scholastic would object to seeing at least certain aspects of religion as “natural” in the older, Aristotelian sense; man’s formal cause is, after all, an immortal soul, and his final cause or natural end is God.)
Specifically, Dennett’s aim is to show how religion – its existence and its nature – can be accounted for in terms of Darwinian biological evolution, or some cultural-evolutionary analogue of biological evolution. That is to say, he wants to argue that religion, just like (Darwinians claim) all other aspects of human life, can be explained entirely in terms that make no ultimate reference to objective ends or purposes in nature, including divine purposes. As an apologia for atheism, this project has one glaring defect: it rather shamelessly begs the question against those (such as contemporary followers of Aquinas, among many others) who deny that it is possible even in principle to give a complete explanation of natural processes, and especially human nature, in the purely mechanistic terms that Darwinians claim to limit themselves to. Purporting to engage in a critical dialogue with religious believers, Dennett is in fact merely preaching to the choir (or rather, to whatever it is atheists put in place of a choir).
The human mind is only the most obvious example of a phenomenon that is impossible to explain mechanistically. It is of its nature purposive; scientific materialism denies purpose; hence scientific materialism cannot explain the mind, and in claiming to do so in fact implicitly denies its existence. Dennett, who made his reputation as a philosopher of mind, clearly manifests this tendency. He is well-known for his theory of the “intentional stance.” (“Intentionality” is a philosopher’s term for the directedness the mind exhibits when, say, we refer to or think about something beyond ourselves, when we reason, or when we seek to fulfill a purpose or goal.) On this doctrine, many complex physical systems, whether natural or artificial, can usefully be described as if they had beliefs, desires, purposes, and rationality, even though objectively they possess no such features. For example, in explaining the behavior of a chess-playing computer, we tend to describe it as if it “believed” that the French defense would be a good opening move and “decided” to act accordingly – even though, being a lifeless machine, it does not really believe or decide anything at all. We take the “intentional stance” to the computer – treating it as if it had a mind – because this allows us to predict its behavior far more efficiently than we could if we had to describe it at the level of software or electrical engineering. Its “mind” is a useful fiction. But even when we describe ourselves as thinking, reasoning beings, we are merely taking the “intentional stance” toward a complex physical system – the human body and especially the nervous system, with the unimaginably complicated series of events taking place within it – that it would be inefficient and indeed practically impossible to describe in brute electrochemical terms. Our minds too are, at the end of the day, convenient fictions.
Thus does Dennett hope to avail himself of the language of purpose without thereby committing himself to the reality of anything like Aristotelian final causes. And Darwinians desperately need that language. As was noted in Etienne Gilson’s unjustly neglected book From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again – and, more recently, in the philosopher David Stove’s Darwinian Fairytales – Darwinian “explanations” of biological phenomena are in practice as utterly suffused with the concepts of purpose and function as Aristotelian biology was, and no biologist could possibly do without these concepts. Yet the whole point of Darwinism is supposed to be to eliminate purpose. Can this contradiction be resolved? The assumption of Darwinian biologists is that talk about functions and purposes can always be translated into more scientifically “respectable” language that makes no reference to anything but purposeless chains of cause and effect. But as Gilson and Stove note, these biologists never seem actually to attempt such a translation, and philosophers (who have tried to do so) have found that the whole enterprise is fraught with philosophical difficulty. Dennett’s solution is to treat talk of nature’s purposes as just another application of the “intentional stance”: we treat natural selection as if it “designs” organisms, “seeks” to maximize fitness, and so forth; in fact it does none of these things, any more than anything else in nature does.
But there is a fatal difficulty with this move; perhaps the reader has already taken note of it. To avoid acknowledgement of irreducible purpose or goal-directedness in nature – including in the human mind – Dennett writes it all off as a mere fiction, a matter of taking an interpretative “stance” toward the world. Yet taking an interpretative stance is itself an inherently purposive or goal-directed activity, as clear an example of intentionality (and indeed, of Aristotelian final causality) as can be imagined. Thus the entire strategy is simply incoherent, a shameless sophism which reveals the absurd lengths to which the materialist must go in order to maintain his position in the face of the insuperable difficulties facing it. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “Those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.”
Nor is this the end of the paradoxes inherent in Dennett’s position. Central to the theory of cultural evolution in terms of which he hopes to “explain” religion is the notion of a “meme,” which he borrows from the biologist (and Dennett’s fellow atheist provocateur) Richard Dawkins. Memes are cultural phenomena – words, concepts, theories, fashions, songs, rituals, and the like – which (so the theory goes) reproduce themselves in a manner analogous to the replication of genes. And as with genes (at least on the Darwinian view), the “aim” of memes is to get themselves replicated as abundantly as possible, to which “end” they compete with one another for “survival,” with natural selection (or rather its cultural analogue) functioning to weed out the less “fit” memes. This, at the end of the day, is what the history of human thought and culture, and indeed the history of every individual mind, amounts to: a struggle between memes for domination of the brains which “host” or “infest” them.
The “meme” meme (as “memeticists” sometimes cutely refer to their big idea) has become something of a fad in recent years, but it has also attracted a lot of criticism, and for good reason. As the variety among the examples of memes cited above indicates, the notion is hopelessly imprecise. And the comparison with genes is inept, since ideas and the like don’t “replicate” themselves: when someone learns a new idea from a teacher, say, it isn’t that there are now two ideas where there was previously only one; rather, there is still just the one idea, which has now come to be grasped by two minds. Worst of all, though, the theory undermines itself. If the competition between memes for survival is what, unbeknownst to us, “really” determines all our thoughts, then we can have no confidence whatsoever that anything we believe, or any argument we ever give in defense of some claim we believe, is true or rationally compelling. For (if the meme theory is correct) our beliefs seem true to us, and our favored arguments seem correct, simply because they were the ones that happened for whatever reason to prevail in the struggle for “memetic” survival, not because they reflect objective reality. But this destroys the very possibility of rational belief and argumentation – including argumentation in defense of the theory of memes itself. (As noted by thinkers as diverse as C. S. Lewis and Karl Popper, this sort of difficulty plagues all materialist attempts to reduce rational thought processes to meaningless chains of cause and effect. The materialist, who initially presents himself as the paragon of rationality, is ultimately pushed by the implications of his position to deny the efficacy of reason.)
The kind of “explanation” of religion Dennett favors involves concocting “just so” stories of the sort that are the stock in trade of evolutionary psychology and rational choice theory (two more current intellectual fads to which Dennett is beholden). He rehearses (without necessarily endorsing) several speculative accounts of what “costs and benefits” inherent in various kinds of religious belief might have led to some varieties’ surviving and thriving while others withered, where these costs and benefits ultimately reduce to some survival advantage conferred on those who adopt the beliefs in question. Pursuing these various reductionist strategies more thoroughly is, Dennett insists, what a rational and scientific approach to the study of religion must involve. Yet none of this is remotely plausible unless one first establishes that the general materialist picture of the world Dennett’s position rests on is correct, and as we have seen, there are serious problems with such a picture. One might expect, then, that to make his case convincingly (especially in a book devoted to banging the drum for atheism), Dennett would take pains to answer criticisms of the sort mentioned above, and critically to evaluate the traditional arguments of natural theology for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.
In fact Dennett says nothing in reply to the many critics of materialism (including critics of his own version), and next to nothing in response to natural theology. He devotes exactly one paragraph to the cosmological argument (the central argument for the existence of God), trots out some stock objections to the standard journalistic caricatures, and while admitting that there are more sophisticated versions, brushes them off with the remark that they can only ever be of interest to those with a taste for “ingenious nitpicking about the meaning of ‘cause’” and “the niceties of scholastic logic.” In general, Dennett pays no attention to the work of serious religious thinkers past or present, preferring to take aim at easy targets like televangelists and bogus “faith healers.” That someone with Dennett’s influence among philosophers should feel he can get away with such contemptible intellectual frivolousness says more about the current state of the profession than it does about the traditional arguments of natural theology.
In a notorious New York Times piece a few years ago, Dennett proposed that just as homosexuals have taken to calling themselves “gays,” atheists ought to call themselves “brights” – obviously in contrast to the dimwits Dennett takes religious believers to be. But given his manifest ignorance of the ideas he attacks, and the egregious fallacies he commits in the course of doing so, “bright” is hardly the first label the reader thinks to apply to the author of Breaking the Spell.
Comments
"For the moderns, there are no formal or final causes, no fixed essences or purposes in nature. The world is rather a gigantic machine, all the diverse phenomena it exhibits being entirely reducible to inherently meaningless causal interactions between material parts.
The history of modern thought, and of modern civilization, is the history of the gradual working out of the moral, political, and cultural implications of this idea."
I'm fairly new to all this, but if modern philosophy sees little or no final cause, does that mean they see me as randoming interacting for no particular purpose with whatever chances across my path?
And if they really believe that, do they have lots of problems with substance abuse?
What about pretend you have a purpose in life, whether you really do or not? Is that okay"
I worked as a therapist for a spell. Folks who had no purpose or meaning in life usually got a label to wear. It gave them meaning all right.
Then I charged them to explore it.
Posted by: cranky | June 28, 2007 7:02 AM
I am reading the Etienne Gilson Reader and have been reading and rereading a section on Aristotle and Descartes that that I find pregnant with meaning and that is opening to me in clear terms, in lucid outline form, an understanding of the relation of the two to science and modern political movements, so I find your reference to him gratifying and intriguing. I think your explication of the philosophical problems of materialism was compelling and concise. Along with Popper and C.S. Lewis, Edmund Husserl has similar observations about the absurdities which are apparently of the essence of materialism. His observations about Haeckel and othet materialists could easily be applied to Dawkins and Dennett- moralizing knights that undermine their basis for their enterprise which is purportedly one of reasoning. One thing I wonder is if the modern philosophy that was inaugurated by Descartes and Hobbes, etc. and that is, as you say, characterized by a rejection of efficient and final causes, is so because like many religions the answer is already assumed. The universe is assumed as an article of faith to be meaningless and also as an article of faith it is assumed that the universe is all there is, all there was and all there ever will be.
Posted by: David Alexander | June 28, 2007 4:30 PM
Little could be added to Mr. Feser’s excellent presentation. Dennett presents his inconsistent speculations, as serious thinking, and it is amazing that it is ever accepted as philosophical discourse. Those who do accept this ‘philosophical thinking’ are obviously not looking for reasonable explanations, but rather for justification of their basic beliefs. In this case, the common credo is atheistic materialism.
The recourse to the “intentional stance” is a good example of a deceitful and catching stratagem to confuse and mislead readers. Surprised by a computer playing chess, we could say that it seems it has a mind, but of course we are fully aware that this is merely a manner of speaking and expressing our surprise. Dennett takes this situation and pretends it is analogous to human beings. Just as computers “seem” to think, so too do we. Following Mr. Dennett’s logic we could say that a thermostat seems to have a mind because it ‘reads’ changes in temperature; an amoeba ‘searches’ for nutrients; a magnet ‘attracts’ a piece of iron; the sun ‘follows’ its orbit; and so on and so on. Anything that moves (or doesn’t) in this world does so because it seems as if it has some kind of mind or willful desire. But of course this ‘mind’ is merely an illusion, a manner of speaking, and, according to Mr. Dennett, this include our own minds. In the perspective of a materialistic atheistic person, simply every thing in the world can be explained by science.
Dennett is right in the sense that it is certainly possible to describe things in the world consisting of matter governed by natural laws [certainly a very narrow and insufficient explanation]. The problem with this argument is not that we cannot describe all things by reducing them to the laws of nature [including what we call function of a physical system], but how these things got there in the first place. In other words, the problem is not as much with descriptive natural science, as with the science of origins. The combination of natural laws with chance, for example, cannot account for the origin of complex organic structures. It has been shown that the time necessary for the random assembly of even the simplest of structures of proteins exceeds the age of the known universe.
But the real problem with Dennett’s idea of the “intentional stance” becomes evident when Mr. Dennett reverses its direction and applies it to the mind that conceived it -his own. By doing this, he enters into an ironic and pathetic situation. After all, if his argument has any value, he would not exist as a thoughtful person.
Posted by: Fernando Ruiz | June 28, 2007 8:48 PM
Hello Dr. Feser,
Since so much ground was covered here, I will try to keep things short.
Functionalism does appear to involve one major similarity to hylomorphism, namely abstract patterns joined with the body functioning as the animating force for identity and intent. The primary difference is that souls are singular, while memes are partial. The secondary difference is that functionalism requires a massively parallel network to compute and store variables in a fluid and reinforcing manner, while souls require a metaphysical reality.
I don't know about Dennett's view, but Hofstadter does not consider identity a meaningless fiction, just a very inaccurate shorthand for the synthetic experience of symbolic perception.
Posted by: Step2 | July 1, 2007 10:36 AM
I have returned to your essay specifically to look at your discussion of Dennett's intentional status. I am very much interested in looking at the nature of this kind of displacement of agency onto parts of agency. It seems to me to be of the like ancient idolatry and it seems that there is a willful and "motivated suppression" of aspects of reality in Descartes's paradigmatic personality while at the same time a release from the error of Aristotle to a freedom to research the details of the material world better. I guess my question is if you would associate this kind of reflexive anthropomorphism with a kind of idolatry, or religious paradigm without the name of religion.
Posted by: David Alexander | July 2, 2007 11:33 AM
It is of its nature purposive; scientific materialism denies purpose; hence scientific materialism cannot explain the mind, and in claiming to do so in fact implicitly denies its existence.
This seems a strange conflation of the "purpose of a thing" with the "purpose for a thing." Dennett never denies that human minds can act with purpose; this is quite different from taking a stance which does not assume that the mind was created with a purpose.
A strange feature of your review, Mr. Feser, is that while you refute Dennett's notion that "religion - its existence and its nature - can be accounted for in terms of Darwinian biological evolution," you ignore most of the religions in the history of the world. Dennett lumps them all together, because he believes that all are explainable by natural phenomena. But if you are defending religion, you are in effect defending a religion or at most, a cluster of religions, because many religious beliefs contradict each other. If we take an historical viewpoint instead of a snapshot of the modern-era, we could even say that the vast majority of religions contain(ed) beliefs that refute the truth of other religions.
So, while Dennett can reasonably make a claim that all religious beliefs stem from natural phenomena, a reasonable critique of his claim is incomplete if you simply suggest that he's wrong.
You could agree that Dennett's claim is true in all cases. (Clearly, you don't.)
You could assert that he is incorrect in all instances, that not a single religious belief could be explained through natural phenomena. This is a strange, sweeping claim, much more paradoxical than you suggest Dennett's book to be.
Or, you could claim that Dennett is correct about a number of religious beliefs, but that certain religious beliefs must be exempted from his theory for a particular reason. A person who is a Catholic, for example, could still accept that the vast majority of religious beliefs in the history of the world are explainable by natural phenomena.
Posted by: Phil | July 3, 2007 12:29 AM
Phil, you seem to assume that if someone believes a religion to be false, he ought to hold that it is of natural origin. There have been plenty of Christians who have taken the view that false religions have arisen, for example, from the fact that man has a created desire for God and that, absent revelation available to specific groups, that desire may take strange and perverse forms as man makes gods for himself. A more radical view is that at least some false religions have their origin in demonic activity. Perhaps you would consider both of these ideas "paradoxical" and more so than Dennett's, but that isn't obvious to me. It's possible for some given religion to have (for the first of these) an origin that comes proximately from man and is in that sense "natural" but that ultimately arises from characteristics of human nature that God has created, and is in that sense not natural. As for the second, that all depends on what one thinks the evidence is for the existence of demons, a question that can be approached on its merits and investigated. One's evaluation of it will owe not a little to the evidence one thinks there is for a specific religion--such as Christianity--that includes belief in angels, fallen and unfallen.
Posted by: Lydia | July 3, 2007 8:59 PM
Phil, you seem to assume that if someone believes a religion to be false, he ought to hold that it is of natural origin.
Well, one of the options presented was "you can assert that he's incorrect in all instances," but you're right that I find that one a bit of a stretch.
Perhaps you would consider both of these ideas "paradoxical" and more so than Dennett's, but that isn't obvious to me.
There are so many possible religious beliefs, though, that it seems to be an almost unavoidable conclusion that some of them could easily have happened through natural processes. A man feels ill. He goes to the village witch doctor, who prays over him. He feels better. He associates the healing with the witch doctor's chanting. Etc.
At a certain level, the logical extension of your argument is that nothing, ever, can be explained through natural phenomena. Doubtless many people believe this. But science requires that we assume, at least for the sake of inquiry, that things can be explained naturally. If you're unwilling to make the assumption that some things _behave_ as if they are natural phenomena, then it makes no sense to, for example, go to a doctor or take medicine when you are ill-- the centuries of medical knowledge we've accumulated would be worthless were it not for experiments done by people who were willing to at least pretend that things can be explained naturally.
There are so many millions of possible religious beliefs that, to suggest that not a single one could be explained naturally seems to be an argument very closely related to the stance that nothing can ever be explained naturally, if only because it requires you to hold that beliefs you've never heard cannot be of natural origin.
A more radical view is that at least some false religions have their origin in demonic activity.
I'm having trouble separating this argument from the argument that "Nothing is explainable, ever." If we must allow for the possibility that false religions are demon-caused, then why mustn't we allow for the possibility that birth defects, melanoma, the later works of Jackson Browne, and cold sores are demon-caused?
Now, it's not that it's impossible to hold the viewpoint that "Nothing is explainable, ever." It just seems that, if you're going to take that viewpoint, why bother discussing...anything?
Posted by: Phil | July 4, 2007 3:11 AM
Phil, I can't for the life of me understand why you would think that holding that many or most world religions have directly or indirectly a supernatural origin, or holding that some things might be caused by supernatural activity such as that of an angel or demon, means that nothing is explainable.
I wouldn't argue with your witch-doctor scenario. And the world is of course full of scamsters. One question then might be at what level we "count" religions. It isn't, for example, "a religion" in the usual sense of the word to believe "the witch doctor cured me of X." But animism is "a religion." So it might make sense to hold that animism owes its origin proximately to scamsterism by witch doctors but ultimately that people's peculiar susceptibility thus to be scammed is at least partly owing to the desire for the supernatural (in this case, abused by scamsters) that God has placed in man. This would be fully compatible with holding that the belief in some individual instance was a result of the witch doctor's bamboozling the guy.
As for demons, if they exist, they're just another set of acting entities. Why say that "one can't explain anything" if one ever invokes them? You might say the same of invoking human agents. Yet I invoke human agents to explain all kinds of things, including the existence of particular comments on Right Reason. I should add that I don't have any particular events in my own life in mind that I attribute to demonic activity. The point is simply that I imagine one _could_ be justified in attributing _some_ events to such activity, depending on the specifics of the case, just as one is justified in attributing some effects to all sorts of human agents.
Posted by: Lydia | July 4, 2007 8:06 AM
Lydia,
"Nothing is explainable naturally" and "nothing is explainable" are two different conclusions, at least in the abstract. I might believe that they are materially the same (is that a pun?) but I don't expect you to believe that.
I can't for the life of me understand why you would think that holding that many or most world religions have directly or indirectly a supernatural origin[...]
If we assume that there have been more religious beliefs throughout history than you can conceivably have heard of, then ruling out such religious beliefs would mean that you rule out the possibility of natural explanations for beliefs categorically. Since religious beliefs can involve simple, observable phenomena or physical objects, this is tantamount to saying that nothing can be explained naturally.
I don't think that you personally are doing that, but I think it's the stance taken by someone who argues that Dennett must be wrong in all cases.
We probably are vacillating between "religious beliefs" and "religions" here.
As for demons, if they exist, they're just another set of acting entities. Why say that "one can't explain anything" if one ever invokes them? You might say the same of invoking human agents.
The theory assumes that human agents exist, and since you and I have chosen to discuss it, it seems we assume the existence of human agency.
Demons, on the other hand, are not assumed by both parties to exist; their possibility is assumed by adherents to a particular religious belief. I'm no evolutionary neurobiologist, but if you're saying "We cannot accept this theory until we disprove that X is demon-caused," without providing extraordinary evidence that demons both exist and may have caused it, then the burden you place on scientific research is phenomenal. You aren't providing a tool to separate demons from agents that other religions may believe in.
Thus, what's the difference between saying, "We must allow for the possibility that demons caused X" and "We must allow for the possibility that elves caused X" and "We must allow for the possibility that evil spirits caused X" and so on?
To assert that we must allow for the possibility of _specific_ supernatural agents seems similar to asserting that nothing is explainable.
If your child were kidnapped, you would probably not tell the police: "We must assume there is an equal likelihood that the kidnapper was a human or a demon." You'd just run with the theory that the kidnapping was human-based, absent extraordinary evidence to the contrary.
Posted by: Phil | July 4, 2007 4:10 PM
Let me try to be a little clearer, and then I'll stop:
I think there's significant evidence that Christianity is true. _Given_ that Christianity is true, then certain things follow, such as, e.g., that God made man. While it isn't one of the absolutely central creedal statements of Christianity that God made man to desire him, it's certainly something that is quite plausible once you accept the more basic tenets of Christianity. Similarly with the existence of angels and their counterparts, fallen angels. So my point would simply be that the statements, "God made man to desire him, and man sometimes perverts that desire" and "personal demons exist and sometimes try to deceive man" do have evidence in favor of them. Obviously, you won't agree. The point, however, is that _if_ there is other evidence in favor of these claims, then it makes some sense to invoke them as explanatory in the origin of false religions, because the existence of false religions is the sort of thing these propositions, if true, would lead you to expect.
Posted by: Lydia | July 4, 2007 7:23 PM
The exchange of opinions and arguments between Phil and Lydia has being interesting, and in a way, inconclusive. I agree that Christianity is true, and to me it makes a whole lot of sense. However, I feel, and know by experience, that I cannot demonstrate the Christian Truth to anyone closed to the presence of God (least of all the dogmatically opposed). My rational and good-willed explanations about the goodness of God and the works of the Devil are simply nonsense to these people. Philosophical demonstrations of God’s existence, for example, convinces only to those who already believe in God, or are close to believe.
It is a well known fact that we live in a time in which the most prestigious ‘belief’ is the belief in science. And there are good reasons for people to hold this creed -after all, the advances in science and technology are impressive. There are excellent scientific explanations about many things, such as medicine, astronomy, and chemistry. But at the same time, it is also clear that science does not provide complete and satisfactory explanations for many of the phenomena of daily human life (love, faith, Good, Evil, interpersonal relations, etc). Of course this is not to say that we cannot approach anything we want with a scientific naturalistic method, but we must keep in mind its limitations. And in this way we can also study religions following a scientific methodology, and get same results strictly conditioned to the method and assumptions utilized in this research.
I have the impression that people believe in physics, medicine, and chemistry because these scientific explanations provide a way to manipulate and change the immediate world we live in. If these explanations were simple rational speculations with no impact on human life, people probably would not pay them much attention. Anyway, the prestige generated by these ‘hard’ sciences has been extended to anything that presents itself with the name of science, and not only to those traditionally denominated ‘soft’ sciences.
The beliefs of human beings can be quite amazing. Many people believe in the weirdest and most ridiculous ideas. If the belief in God is lost, then the door is open to believe just about anything.
When we say that lightning, love, and religions are natural phenomena, we can mean that these are occurrence in our life -they show up in our existence. This is perfectly acceptable. We could also mean that these phenomena are capable of being studied following a strict scientific methodology, which is also acceptable. But if we mean that they are strictly limited to what we get in our scientific research, then we are stretching the power of the scientific approach. We reduce the explanations only to the results of the scientific endeavor, setting aside the assumptions involved in the method, and the premises from we begin our investigations. In other words, we leave science and its intrinsic limitations and enter in the realm of belief -- love is only what we get in our social or psychological research; religions are only what science can tell us about them, and so on and so on. Of course we can elaborate theories about anything, including religions, and call them scientific. But these theories are far from the power and effective knowledge involved the theories of the hard sciences, like physics. These speculations can better be described as secular beliefs than scientific theories.
In sum, science provides fairly good explanations for what we call hard sciences and no so good the soft sciences (at least incomplete and insufficient). Human beings seem to ground their life on beliefs: beliefs on science, on pseudo sciences, ideologies, and religious beliefs. Which are real true? Make your choice and thinks seriously about the absolute (reliable) foundation of your chosen beliefs to provide guide, sense and coherence to human life.
I hope you excuse these tangential comments, and the clumsy way in which my words are sometimes expressed.
Thanks for your attention.
Posted by: Fernando Ruiz | July 10, 2007 11:29 PM
Phil wrote: 'This seems a strange conflation of the "purpose of a thing" with the "purpose for a thing." Dennett never denies that human minds can act with purpose; this is quite different from taking a stance which does not assume that the mind was created with a purpose.'
A couple of thoughts:
1. Perhaps the move from a mind's having purposes to there being a purpose for a mind is not so absurd. There is, after all, something plausible about the medieval axiom that a cause can't give what it doesn't have. If we have no purpose, we can't create purposes, either. (This argument is closely related to the Kantian argument that persons are ends and have dignity: some things have market value which they receive from persons, while persons do not receive their value from anywhere else; thus, persons must have a deeper kind of value--they must be ends. Kant does not even consider the possibility that market value is created ex nihilo by beings that have no value.)
2. More seriously, the way in which mind involves purpose extends beyond the purposes we have in sense of goals we set. Thus, it seems of the essence of intellect to be directed at truth. Any entity that is not directed at truth, that does not have truth as its telos, is not an intellect. Therefore, if there is an intellect, there is an entity for which there is a purpose.
Posted by: Alexander R Pruss | July 12, 2007 8:55 AM