All posts by Bill Pratt

Atheism, Existence of God

What Explains the Laws of Logic and Mathematics?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The laws of thought and mathematics are absolutely true.  The law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and the law of the excluded middle – the three fundamental principles of thought, otherwise known as the laws of logic – are all undeniable.  To deny them is to assume they are true.

They are true regardless of time, place, or who is thinking about them.  There is no possible world where they could not be true.  Likewise with mathematics.  2+3=5, and this is true regardless of time, place, or who is thinking about it.  There is no possible world where 2+3 does not equal 5.

So, any worldview which claims to explain all of reality had better have a good explanation of how this could be true.

How does atheistic naturalism explain the laws of thought and mathematics?  Since everything, on naturalism, must be reduced to physical matter, an explanation for the laws of thought and mathematics will be hard to come by, for these laws are clearly not made out of matter.

Naturalists take a couple different routes.  First, some of them say that there is no explanation for these laws; they just exist and that’s it; they are brute facts of the universe.  But surely these laws that transcend time, space, and matter, that existed before humans ever came on the scene, and will still exist after humans are extinct, are uncomfortable bedfellows with electrons, skin cells, and hydrogen atoms – the things of physical science.

How will the scientific methods of physics, chemistry, and biology explain the laws of thought and mathematics when they are built on them and rely on them? It’s like trying to explain the cinder block foundation of a house by appealing to a second-story window.

A second explanation is the following: some naturalists deny that these laws actually transcend time, space, and matter.  They claim that these are merely human conventions, laws that human beings have simply invented.  But this claim seems incredible.  Are we to really accept that 2+3 does not equal 5 unless human beings say it does?

I feel quite confident that even Klingons would agree that 2+3=5.  Can you imagine there being any dispute between a human and a Klingon over math? Of course not. The idea is absurd. This explanation just won’t fly because these laws are absolute; it doesn’t matter one bit whether any one of us ever discovered these laws, as they would still be true.  You can’t imagine a time or place where these laws aren’t true.

How does Christian theism explain the laws of thought and mathematics?  Instead of denying that these laws are transcendent, Christian theism affirms our basic intuitions that they are.  Christians identify the source of the laws of thought and mathematics with God, who is timeless, spaceless, and has always existed.

These laws are a part of God’s eternally existent nature.  They are built into God, in a matter of speaking.  So Christian theism not only provides an explanation for these laws, it also provides an explanation that makes sense of the absolute and transcendent nature of these laws.  They have always existed because God has always existed.

Atheism, Mind-Body Theory, Philosophy

What Explains My Enduring Self?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

I exist. I cannot deny that I exist without first existing. In addition, I seem to be a single, enduring self who has existed throughout my entire life.  My past memories belong to my same identical self.  I fully expect my same identical self to exist tomorrow and next week, assuming I don’t die. Not only do I think these things about myself, but I wager that everyone on the planet, excepting maybe those with severe mental illness, feels the same way.

Any worldview worth believing in should have an explanation for the existence of an enduring self. Let’s look at how atheistic naturalism and Christian theism explain the enduring self.

So how does atheistic naturalism explain the existence of my single, enduring self?  Honestly, it can’t.  Recall that naturalism explains everything in terms of matter – what physics, chemistry, and biology can describe.  According to these disciplines, each moment I lose hundreds of thousands of cells and other microscopic parts.

Every 7 to 10 years, most of my cells are entirely replaced.  Put another way, the average age of all the cells in the adult human body is 7 to 10 years. So, according to naturalism, I am virtually a new individual every 7-10 years.  Any sense I have of an enduring self that is the same through my entire life is an illusion, a trick of the human brain.

I may resemble the self I was last week, but I am not the very same self, for my body and my brain have lost parts and gained new parts.  Likewise, I will not be the same person next week or next month or next year.  In fact, in roughly 10 years, I will have very few physical parts in common with my current self.  On atheistic naturalism, there is no enduring self.

What about Christian theism?  This worldview posits each individual self as an enduring, immaterial, soul.  This soul persists from the moment of conception through death.  The reason we believe our memories of the past belong to us, and not some other self, is because our memories are unified by our single, enduring soul.

My exact same soul will endure next week and next month and next year.  I will exist in the future, not somebody else.  My physical body can be constantly changing, but my soul can persist unchanged.  The immaterial, unchanging soul of each human being explains why we believe we all think that our past, present and future selves, are one and the same, and not a series of distinct individuals.

What explains the existence of an enduring self? Certainly not atheistic naturalism. Only something like the immaterial soul offered by Christian theism can explain it.

Existence of God, Philosophy

What Explains the Existence of the Physical Universe?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that the physical universe exists. I think we can safely ignore anyone who believes that the universe is just an illusion or that we are in the “matrix.”

But if the universe exists, what explains it? Why does it exist? Any worldview worth considering needs an answer to this question. Let’s look at how Christian theism and atheistic naturalism attempt to answer this question and see which worldview offers a better explanation.

Atheistic naturalism has commonly offered a few responses to this question, all of which I believe are unsatisfactory.  First, some naturalists will answer that the question itself is meaningless.  They say that it is a nonsense question that has no answer.  The universe just is and there is no explanation for it.  As an explanation, however, this is no explanation at all.  Everyone but the naturalist seems to know what the question means, so we can safely assume the naturalist simply doesn’t want to answer the question because their worldview has no answer.

Second, naturalists have answered that the universe is self-existent, and that it has always existed.  The problem with this explanation is that is has been soundly refuted by modern cosmology, by one of the very sciences that naturalists claim to be the arbiters of reality.  There is also a philosophical problem with this explanation.  Every physical object we observe in the universe is caused to exist by something else, so how can it be that the whole universe can be uncaused if everything in it is caused?

Here is an analogy.  Let’s say you see a perfectly smooth, 1-foot diameter, glass globe sitting in the grass.  You would conclude, without much thought, that something or someone caused that glass ball to come into existence.  Now take that glass ball, blow it up, and make it the size of Jupiter.  The Jupiter-sized glass ball still needs a cause, doesn’t it?

Now make the glass ball the size of the observable universe.  Wouldn’t you agree that the universe-size glass ball even more obviously needs a cause than the 1-foot ball or the Jupiter-sized ball?  Likewise, to say that even though everything smaller than the universe needs a cause, but the universe doesn’t need a cause, is simply implausible.

A third explanation is that our universe is merely one of an infinite sea of universes that exist.

How is this an answer that naturalists can offer?  Naturalists claim that only what the physical sciences can observe and describe constitutes reality.  But no universe except our own has ever been observed.  In addition, even if there were an infinite sea of universes, the question of what caused all those universes needs to be answered.  Instead of offering a cause of our one universe, the naturalist has multiplied by infinity the number of effects that need a cause, and thus makes the problem infinitely worse.

What is the answer from Christian theism?  Christians answer that the universe exists because a self-existent first cause (God) has brought it into existence and is continuing to hold it in existence.  Why is this a better explanation than what atheistic naturalists offer?

It seems obvious that physical objects in the universe need a cause to bring them into existence.  A thing cannot cause its own existence.  But, in order to avoid an infinite regress of causes, we need a first, uncaused cause.

Here is an analogy from movement.  We can say that a stone is moved by a stick, which is moved by a hand, which is moved by an arm, which is moved by a brain, and so forth and so on.  But eventually the explanations have to stop at something that is not in need of being moved. We need an unmoved mover, and that is God.

Christians recognize that the universe simply cannot be the cause of itself.  The cause must transcend the universe and it must be able to exist on its own, with no need of an outside cause for its own existence.  This cause we call God.

Heaven, Morality

Will Morality Always Be Expressed as Rights and Duties?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

It certainly seems that our moral and political discourse these days is always talking about rights and duties. Gay people want the right to marry. We tell people it is their duty to pay their taxes. These words seem to dominate the conversation.

George Mavrodes sees a day in the future when all of this talk of rights and duties will fade away. Morality will become something more beautiful.

I come more and more to think that morality, while a fact, is a twisted and distorted fact. Or perhaps better, that it is a barely recognizable version of another fact, a version adapted to a twisted and distorted world. It is something like, I suppose, the way in which the pine that grows at timberline, wind blasted and twisted against the rock, is a version of the tall and symmetrical tree that grows lower on the slopes.

I think it may be that the related notions of sacrifice and gift represent (or come close to representing) the fact, that is, the pattern of life, whose distorted version we know here as morality. Imagine a situation, an “economy” if you will, in which no one ever buys or trades for or seizes any good thing. But whatever good he enjoys it is either one which he himself has created or else one which he received as a free and unconditional gift. And as soon as he has tasted it and seen that it is good he stands ready to give it away in his turn as soon as the opportunity arises. In such a place, if one were to speak either of his rights or his duties, his remarks might be met with puzzled laughter as his hearers struggled to recall an ancient world in which these terms referred to something important.

This is, I believe, what heaven will be like. Rights and duties will be alien concepts that will simply disappear with our earthly life. We will simply do the good because it comes to us naturally. We will want to share whatever good we receive with everyone around us. I don’t know about you, but that sounds absolutely wonderful to me.

Existence of God, Love

Are Knowing Facts about God Enough?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Since I write an apologetics blog where we frequently discuss theology, doctrine, philosophy, science, and reasoning, it may seem like my view is that all a person needs is the facts about God, and that is all. Let me straighten this misconception out: I believe facts are not enough.

God, as a personal being, as THE personal being, is not satisfied with someone who knows a bunch of facts about him. That’s nice, but more is needed. If your spouse knew several important facts about you, but didn’t love you, would you be satisfied with that relationship?

David Baggett and Jerry Walls describe Paul Moser’s insightful views on this subject:

God both reveals and hides himself, and Moser argues, consistent with Christian theology, that the reason for this is that God’s purposes aren’t just to generate propositional knowledge of his existence, but a more deeply personal sort of knowledge. God is a loving Father who, in his filial love, speaks to us all but in different ways and at different times, in an effort to invite us into a loving personal relationship with himself.

Moser argues that a relational God of love is not content merely to provide discursive evidence of his existence in order to elicit cognitive assent or function as the conclusion of an argument; rather, God desires to be known for nothing less than this robust end: fellowship and morally perfect love between him and human beings.

So what are the implications for a person who believes that mere facts or evidence should suffice in their search for God?

Moser . . . suggests that evidence for God cannot be mere spectator evidence, but something both more authoritative and volitional than that. God, on Moser’s view, hides from those who do not desire a relationship or life-changing knowledge of him. God conceals himself from those who do not recognize the existential implications of belief in God, whereas he does reveal himself to those who recognize and desire to live with the implications of knowing God.

Baggett and Walls add:

A theistic conception of reality fundamentally alters everything. For if God is the ultimate reality, our quest for wisdom is a quest for him, a personal being, not just principles or platitudes. And if the context in which we find ourselves involves God drawing us into loving relationship with him, then a logic of relations more than a logic of propositions reigns.

As C. S. Lewis put it, “If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this.”

Your search for God must not only include facts about him, but a relationship. At the very least, while you’re collecting facts about God, you must be genuinely open to having a relationship with him. God will reveal himself to you if that is your approach. If not, he may stay hidden.

Atheism, Morality

Is It Always Rational to Act Morally?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If you are a dictator, and you have complete control over your nation, and you have good reason to believe you will remain in control, why should you not take whatever you want from whomever you want in order to bring yourself pleasure? Why would it be rational for you to be moral?

In certain cases of truth telling or repaying a debt or keeping a promise, and in those rarer cases where the performance of a duty risks death or injury, why do the moral thing? In an atheistic world, there may be instances where doing the moral thing does not advance my goals and desires for my life. In other words, doing the moral thing may not be the rational thing for me to do.

David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in their book Good God: The The Theistic Foundations of Morality, offer this choice to the atheist:

Either affirm that morality and rationality sometimes dictate different things and then either infer that we should do the moral, irrational thing anyway, or do the rational thing and ignore the dictates of morality.

How does this differ from the theist?

Notice how sharp is the contrast here between the theist who believes in ultima facie prescriptively binding moral obligations and the skeptic who rejects the existence of such duties or their rational authority. The theist affirms that there are such duties, which are in our ultimate self-interest because loving God and doing right are always in our ultimate self-interest. So it’s always rational to do such duties and acknowledge their authoritative force. The skeptic denies this, saying instead that morality seems to lack rational authority or perhaps authority altogether, for sometimes it’s just too costly.

Baggett and Walls continue:

Now, both thinkers could be said to be thinking in a way that’s rational in at least one sense. Each is thinking through the implications of their worldview in a way that is not obviously unreasonable or irrational.

What this shows, then, is that the meta-ethical question about morality and rationality is inextricably tied to ultimate questions of ontology and metaphysics. The right ultimate view of reality is plausibly the one that will be most likely to produce the right analysis of the relationship between morality and rationality. Both the atheist and the theist are predicating their approach on a fundamental axiom: that the world makes sense.

Why does it matter if the world makes sense and what does that have to do with morality?

It wouldn’t make sense if the world required us to do what isn’t in our ultimate self-interest. We think this was Kant’s insight when he suggested that the moral enterprise needs, in a deep and radical way, the postulate of a God who can, and will, make happiness correspond to virtue. Morality fails to make sense when that correspondence fails.

Does atheism guarantee that morality will correspond with ultimate happiness?

It’s the atheistic world in particular, however, that introduces the failure of this correspondence. Reality itself must be committed to morality in some deep way for morality to make sense. Morality really must be a very deep feature and fixture of reality in order for its demands to retain their authoritative force. In an atheistic world there just doesn’t seem likely to be the sort of ontological foundation to morality that renders it always rational to both believe in and do what’s morally binding. The picture is very different for a theistic world of a certain sort.

On Christian theism, is always rational to act morally. On atheism, it is sometimes rational to act morally, but in certain cases atheism can give a person no guarantee that their moral actions will ultimately lead to their happiness. Surely atheism, then, weakens the dictates of the moral law.

Morality

Are Moral Facts Independent of God?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many people know that it is wrong to rape, but know nothing about the goodness of the Christian God. How we come to know moral facts is often different from how we come to know theological facts. Based on this truth, many skeptics claim moral facts must be independent of God. This conclusion, however, is simply mistaken.

An illustration may help to explain. The following is adapted from philosopher John Milliken.

Imagine a language called Twing someone makes up and sets down in an official manuscript. Suppose, years later, a person named Tim learns Twing indirectly from some friends who speak it. Suppose further that one day he stumbles upon the official manuscript, reads it, and exclaims about the official manuscript, “This thing is written in perfect Twing!”

Tim is here making a substantive statement. Tim learned Twing from his friends, without ever knowing anything about the official manuscript. But then, when he came across the official manuscript, he recognized that the manuscript was “written in perfect Twing!” His discovery of the manuscript was completely independent of his discovery of Twing through his friends.

Even though Tim came to know Twing separately from how he came to discover the manuscript, it would be ridiculous to say that perfect Twing is independent of the official manuscript. For without the official manuscript, it would be impossible for perfect Twing to exist. The official manuscript is the source of Twing.

Christians claim we can discover moral facts without knowing about God, but when we do discover who God is, we can identify moral goodness with God. This is not some slight-of-hand move by Christian theologians. John Milliken explains how this works:

It is clear that, in order to make a substantive ascription of goodness to God, our conception of it need only be epistemically independent and not ontologically so. In other words, it is only necessary that we learn what is good from instances other than God. It would be a real and important discovery for us that what we antecedently understood as the good is exemplified in God, even if He is ultimately its source.

God is the Good, and so moral facts are not ontologically independent of God, even though we may come to know God independently of moral facts.

Mind-Body Theory

Why Is There a Mind-Body Problem? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In part 1, we learned that thinkers in the seventeenth century proposed to divide up reality into that which could be quantitatively described by mathematics and that which could not.  Philosopher Edward Feser, in a blog post, argues that this move by Galileo and Descartes was a massive blunder and compares it to the following analogy:

Suppose someone is cleaning the house and carefully sweeps the dirt out of each room into a certain hallway, where he then proceeds to sweep the various piles of dirt he’s created under a certain rug.  You tell him that that’s all well and good, but that he has still failed to get rid of the dirt under the rug itself and cannot do so using the same method.  He replies:

Are you kidding?  The “sweep it under the rug” method is one long success story, having worked everywhere else.  How plausible is it that this one little rug in this one little hallway would be the only holdout?  Obviously it’s just a matter of time before it yields to the same method.  If you think otherwise you’re just flying in the face of the facts — and, I might add, the consensus of the community of sweepers.  Evidently you’ve got some sentimental attachment to this rug and desperately want to think that it is special somehow.  Or is it some superstitious religious dogma you’re trying to salvage?  What do you think it is, a magic carpet? 

The sweeper thinks his critic is delusional, but of course he is himself the delusional one.  For the dirt under the rug is obviously the one pile which the “sweep it under the rug” method cannot possibly get rid of, and indeed the more successful that method is elsewhere, the more problematic the particular pile under the rug becomes.  The sweeper’s method cannot solve the “dirt under the rug problem” precisely because that method is the source of the problem — the problem is the price the method’s user must pay for the success it achieves elsewhere.

Feser explains explicitly how his analogy of sweeping dirt under a rug works:

Human beings are like the hallway in my example, and the human mind is like the rug.  The “mathematically precise quantitative description” of the natural world provided by modern science has been as successful as it has been only because those aspects of the natural world that don’t fit that method — irreducibly qualitative features like color, sound, etc. as they appear to us (as contrasted with scientific redefinitions of color, sound, etc. in terms of such quantifiable features as surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and the like); and final causes, teleology, or purposes — were swept under the rug of the mind, re-characterized as purely “subjective,” as mere projections that only seem to be features of the external world but are really only aspects of our perceptual representation of it.

As Nagel says, it was precisely this methodological revolution that created the mind-body problem, just as the “sweep it under the rug” method in my example creates a “dirt under the rug problem.”  If you essentially define the physical in such a way that it excludes color, sound, purpose, etc. as they appear to us in ordinary experience, and define the mental in such a way that it is the repository of these qualities you have removed from the physical world, then you have carved up the conceptual territory in a way that rules out from the get-go an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical.  Far from constituting a desperate resistance to the implications of the scientific revolution, dualism of this essentially Cartesian sort was a consequence of that revolution.

In other words, there is a only a mind-body problem if you accept that all that exists is that which can be mathematically quantified. If you do not accept this highly dubious contention, then the mind-body problem disappears.

Mind-Body Theory

Why Is There a Mind-Body Problem? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Contemporary philosophers often refer to the “mind-body problem,” which is roughly the following: how is it that the physical body interacts with the seemingly non-physical mind? Many philosophers answer this question by simply denying that the mind is non-physical. They claim that the mind is a manifestation of the brain and the chemical processes going on in the brain.

But this answer is also quite problematic. As atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel writes,

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.  The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.  If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture.

Why is it that philosophers are so concerned about where the mind (consciousness) fits into reality? According to Nagel, this entire mind-body problem stems from our philosophical forefathers.

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution.  Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them.

Subjective appearances, on the other hand — how this physical world appears to human perception — were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers.  It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind — as well as human intentions and purposes — from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.

Philosopher Edward Feser argues that this move by Galileo and Descartes was a massive blunder and in part 2 we will see why that is.

Atheism

Why Is “Scientism” False? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1, we saw Edward Feser’s analogy of the metal detector, which helped us see why scientism is false. In part 2, we examine atheist Alex Rosenberg’s complaint against theists who deny scientism. Rosenberg believes that unless you believe that science (physics, in particular) is the only source of knowledge, then you cannot believe science gives us any kind of knowledge. Here is Rosenberg:
“Scientism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their theistic cake and dine at the table of science’s bounties, too.  Opponents of scientism would never charge their cardiologists or auto mechanics or software engineers with “scientism” when their health, travel plans, or Web surfing are in danger.  But just try subjecting their nonscientific mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to scientific scrutiny.  The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “scientism.”
As Feser explains,

According to Rosenberg, then, unless you agree that science is the only genuine source of knowledge, you cannot consistently believe that it gives us any genuine knowledge.  This is about as plausible as saying that unless you think metal detectors alone can detect physical objects, then you cannot consistently believe that they detect any physical objects at all.

Feser, in keeping with his metal detector analogy, offers the Metallicist’s Guide to Reality:

“Metallicism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their stone, water, wood, and plastic cakes and dine at the table of metallic bounties, too.  Opponents of metallicism would never charge their metal detector-owning friends with “metallicism” when they need help finding lost car keys or loose change in the sofa.  But just try subjecting their nonmetallic mores and norms, their music or metaphysics, their literary theories or politics to metallurgical scrutiny.  The immediate response of outraged humane letters is “metallicism.”

Of course, “metallicism” is ridiculous, but so is Rosenberg’s scientism.

Those beholden to scientism are bound to protest that the analogy is no good, on the grounds that metal detectors detect only part of reality while physics detects the whole of it.  But such a reply would simply beg the question once again, for whether physics really does describe the whole of reality is precisely what is at issue.

Feser also notes that Rosenberg is not alone in making these kinds of arguments for scientism.

One hears this stupid non sequitur over and over and over again when arguing with New Atheist types.  It is implicit every time some Internet Infidel asks triumphantly: “Where are the predictive successes and technological applications of philosophy or theology?”  This is about as impressive as our fictional “metallicist” smugly demanding: “Where are the metal-detecting successes of gardening, cooking, and painting?” — and then high-fiving his fellow metallicists when we are unable to offer any examples, thinking that he has established that plants, food, works of art, and indeed anything non-metallic are all non-existent.

For why on earth should we believe that only methods capable of detecting metals give us genuine access to reality?  And why on earth should we believe that if something is real, then it must be susceptible of the mathematically precise prediction and technological application characteristic of physics?  I submit that there is no answer to this question that doesn’t beg the question.