Barr: Dawkins, Unfortunately
Oct 20, 2006
Stephen Barr
A small price that I have paid for the privilege of writing book reviews for First Things is that I have ended up reading four of Richard Dawkins' books. That is more than anyone should have to read, for though Dawkins writes extremely well, his repertoire of ideas is quite limited. Indeed, everything that Dawkins has to say about the world, aside from his popular expositions of science, could be explained to an intelligent person in a few minutes; it doesn't take a whole book, let alone all the books he has written. Having nothing new to say, he has decided to say the old things with increasingly unrestrained boorishness. Surfeited as I am with Dawkins' highly polished put-downs and elegant sneering at his intellectual foes, I am happy to be able to experience his latest book (The God Delusion) at second hand through the philosopher Thomas Nagel's incisive review in the New Republic.
Nagel is not impressed by Dawkins' "attempts at philosophy." One of Dawkins' pet arguments against God as an explanation of design in the world is that it leads to an infinite regress: "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right." As Nagel points out, this argument would only have force if theists conceived of God as a complicated brain rather than as an incorporeal being.
It is true that we have no experience of minds that are not associated with complicated brains. And from this fact materialists like Dawkins infer that mind is just a feature of matter that emerges when matter is organized in certain complex ways. As Nagel notes, this inference is also encouraged by the great explanatory success of the physical sciences:
Nagel is clearly correct about this. Physics is ultimately about quantities—quantities that are calculated through equations or quantities that are measured with instruments. However, from matter in motion through space and time, and from the equations that describe it, such things as consciousness and sensory experience cannot arise. So, as Nagel says, the project of "physicalist reductionism" is "doomed."
It may be that minds of the sort we encounter in living organisms arise as a consequence of the activities of complex physical structures. However, that "consequence" cannot be one that is physically explicable, in the sense that it follows logically from the mathematical laws of physics. There must be other kinds of explanations in the world than the kinds theoretical physicists are able to give. As Nagel puts it,
Dawkins regards belief in God as a "delusion." In my judgment, physicalist reductionism such as his is not a delusion but an illusion caused by a trick of perspective. If one's knowledge of nature remains at the rather superficial level provided by "natural history," one can easily get the impression that everything is built (or builds itself) from the bottom up; in other words, that the most basic level of reality is the ontologically simplest and most trivial, and that everything emerges somehow out of that. For example, we have learned that swirling clouds of gas and dust gradually formed themselves into galaxies, stars, planetary systems, and other orderly structures. On those planets there was some primordial soup or ooze or slime, the atoms of which combined into larger and larger molecules and finally into self-replicating ones. Simpler organisms evolved into more complex ones, and eventually sensation and thought made their appearance. It may seem that science is telling us that the arrow always goes from lower to higher, from simpler to more sophisticated, from chaos to order, from matter to form, from body to mind—mind only emerging at the very end.
However, the deeper understanding provided by the more fundamental branches of science presents us with a very different picture. That order which appeared to "arise spontaneously" from chaos or slime did no such thing. It arose from profound principles of order that were there from the very beginning. The wonderful structure of the solar system emerged because the dust and gas from which it formed obeyed the deep and beautiful laws discovered by Newton. Those laws in turn flow from the deeper and more beautiful laws of General Relativity discovered by Einstein. The slime from which life arose was made of atoms that had all the structure and intricacy and potentiality that chemists devote their lives to studying. Those laws of chemistry are themselves the consequence of the beautifully elaborate laws of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, which in their turn come from the even more profound structures studied in "quantum field theory."
As one moves deeper into nature—to levels about which the natural historian and zoologist can tell us nothing—one encounters not less and less form but increasingly magnificent mathematical structures, structures so profound that even the greatest mathematicians are having difficulty understanding them. This is what Pope Benedict was referring to in his Regensburg lecture when he spoke of "the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, . . . the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature." It is what the great mathematician Hermann Weyl meant when he said, "[I]n our knowledge of physical nature we have penetrated so far that we can obtain a vision of the flawless harmony which is in conformity with sublime reason." It is what the great astrophysicist James Jeans meant when he said, "The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."
At the foundations of the natural world, we do not find merely slime or dust or some dull insensate stuff. We find ideas of sublime beauty. Dawkins looks at mind and sees atoms in motion. Physicists look at those atoms, and deep below those atoms, and see—or, at least, some of them have seen—the products of "sublime reason," "a great thought," a Mind.
In other words, in nature we see a different arrow: It moves from Mind to ideas and forms, and from ideas and forms to matter. In the beginning was the Logos, St. John tells us, and the Logos was God.
Nagel is not impressed by Dawkins' "attempts at philosophy." One of Dawkins' pet arguments against God as an explanation of design in the world is that it leads to an infinite regress: "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right." As Nagel points out, this argument would only have force if theists conceived of God as a complicated brain rather than as an incorporeal being.
It is true that we have no experience of minds that are not associated with complicated brains. And from this fact materialists like Dawkins infer that mind is just a feature of matter that emerges when matter is organized in certain complex ways. As Nagel notes, this inference is also encouraged by the great explanatory success of the physical sciences:
This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.
Nagel is clearly correct about this. Physics is ultimately about quantities—quantities that are calculated through equations or quantities that are measured with instruments. However, from matter in motion through space and time, and from the equations that describe it, such things as consciousness and sensory experience cannot arise. So, as Nagel says, the project of "physicalist reductionism" is "doomed."
It may be that minds of the sort we encounter in living organisms arise as a consequence of the activities of complex physical structures. However, that "consequence" cannot be one that is physically explicable, in the sense that it follows logically from the mathematical laws of physics. There must be other kinds of explanations in the world than the kinds theoretical physicists are able to give. As Nagel puts it,
We have more than one form of understanding. Different forms of understanding are needed for different kinds of subject matter. The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal.
Dawkins regards belief in God as a "delusion." In my judgment, physicalist reductionism such as his is not a delusion but an illusion caused by a trick of perspective. If one's knowledge of nature remains at the rather superficial level provided by "natural history," one can easily get the impression that everything is built (or builds itself) from the bottom up; in other words, that the most basic level of reality is the ontologically simplest and most trivial, and that everything emerges somehow out of that. For example, we have learned that swirling clouds of gas and dust gradually formed themselves into galaxies, stars, planetary systems, and other orderly structures. On those planets there was some primordial soup or ooze or slime, the atoms of which combined into larger and larger molecules and finally into self-replicating ones. Simpler organisms evolved into more complex ones, and eventually sensation and thought made their appearance. It may seem that science is telling us that the arrow always goes from lower to higher, from simpler to more sophisticated, from chaos to order, from matter to form, from body to mind—mind only emerging at the very end.
However, the deeper understanding provided by the more fundamental branches of science presents us with a very different picture. That order which appeared to "arise spontaneously" from chaos or slime did no such thing. It arose from profound principles of order that were there from the very beginning. The wonderful structure of the solar system emerged because the dust and gas from which it formed obeyed the deep and beautiful laws discovered by Newton. Those laws in turn flow from the deeper and more beautiful laws of General Relativity discovered by Einstein. The slime from which life arose was made of atoms that had all the structure and intricacy and potentiality that chemists devote their lives to studying. Those laws of chemistry are themselves the consequence of the beautifully elaborate laws of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, which in their turn come from the even more profound structures studied in "quantum field theory."
As one moves deeper into nature—to levels about which the natural historian and zoologist can tell us nothing—one encounters not less and less form but increasingly magnificent mathematical structures, structures so profound that even the greatest mathematicians are having difficulty understanding them. This is what Pope Benedict was referring to in his Regensburg lecture when he spoke of "the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, . . . the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature." It is what the great mathematician Hermann Weyl meant when he said, "[I]n our knowledge of physical nature we have penetrated so far that we can obtain a vision of the flawless harmony which is in conformity with sublime reason." It is what the great astrophysicist James Jeans meant when he said, "The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."
At the foundations of the natural world, we do not find merely slime or dust or some dull insensate stuff. We find ideas of sublime beauty. Dawkins looks at mind and sees atoms in motion. Physicists look at those atoms, and deep below those atoms, and see—or, at least, some of them have seen—the products of "sublime reason," "a great thought," a Mind.
In other words, in nature we see a different arrow: It moves from Mind to ideas and forms, and from ideas and forms to matter. In the beginning was the Logos, St. John tells us, and the Logos was God.
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Comments:
10.21.2009 | 9:47pm
Cesar Caro says:
Whether or not Dawkins is the appropriate agent to defend the philosophical tenets of materialism is not my pursuit. However, if we are going to quote a philosopher arguing about the philosophical merits of a scientist, isn't it fair that we should also have a philosopher to play opponent (or a physicist who dabbles in philosophy)? I believe the philosophical perspective missing from Dawkins ought to be expounded.
It is true that the seemingly arbitrary set of parameters, constants, and laws governing nature--whether physical, chemical, or physiological--points to the fact that our Universe is one of but many possible Universes. There is the somewhat naive yet sensible observation that we don't necessarily need God or some divine thought to be invoked, but we may also consider alternatives. Multiverse theory is one. This is not my main concern, however.
I would like to bring up the following point. As Nagel brings up in "What is it like to be a bat?", how can one person know what another person feels or thinks or senses? This is the philosophy of mind question of qualia. The argument is that knowing the physical mechanism that gives rise to qualia does not give knowledge of it. However, think of the following example. If we know exactly how a machine works, and the processes and laws governing is motion, do we know what it is "like" to be that machine? No, we do not, but although under ordinary use of the term "know" we do not claim to "know" what it may "feel," we do know everything we can know about it. In order to be able to better understand the qualia the machine (for example a highly intelligent robot) may experience , we would have to be exceedingly alike. Just as people of similar temperament and experience tend to "understand" one another better than people from different cultures, there is relevance between a person's physical composition and its qualia.
That is pretty straightforward, I believe, but the consequences of this are sometimes less palatable. If we in the future posess all the knowledge of the human psychology and neurology, then, and we can predict all the behavioral and biological and psychological outcomes, we would have a complete scientific theory of the human mind. Yet still, the qualia argument remains -- we can still not "feel" what it is like to be someone else, a bat, a robot. I contend that there is no real extra "knowledge" we gain just by "being" that someone else, but that is not the point. The point is, just because there is the problem of qualia, of people having different subjective experience, it doesn't mean that our experience doesn't have its foundation in materialism at least as far as science is concerned. The question is analogous to aesthetics: we may question that Michaelangelo's "David" is the greatest sculpture of all time, but we do not question that it is marble or that it is kept together by its physical properties. I think it is silly to think that we need to know what it "feels like" to be the sculpture of David in order to get more information out of it, in order to say that materialism is somehow neglectful of some crucial information. I don't think any sensible materialist would say that there is no information contained in art, or that art can communicate certain qualia, but I think no sensible spiritualist in the modern age would claim that not all the information contained in art is contained in the structure of how it exists in the physical (or at the very least mathematical) world.
I believe this last point bears some belaboring. Would Shakespeare be any less great if it were read from a computer instead of a book, or a parchment? Words contain information that communicate certain "things," certain artful impressions, sensations, etc. It seems unlikely that anyone would get anything out of literature, e.g. Shakespeare, unless there is certain overlap between cultural history, linguistic familiarity, etc. I'm sure even the best Shakespeare scholars miss what contemporaries must have felt when they saw the plays live. No amount of research will give those scholars the pleasure the audiences felt in the 17th century, but the scholars have the potential to know even more about the circumstances and conditions present at that time than the people who actually lived it. Yet, aside from issues of interpretaion of the script and realization in the forms of set, costume, and actors, all that information is contained in essence by the words. Words are linguistic abstractions that can be codified into mathematics. It is not inconceivable that robots of superior intelligence may eventually be able to feel qualia of the sort we do, yet obviously all of the information contained in that qualia must be reducible or at least correlated with the programming of the brain and the physical state of its functioning. If we can describe, predict, and explain physically / mathematically what that robot is feeling, we know that those robots reading Shakespeare are having feelings caused by materialism alone. People may point out that we are not robots, that we have other, more complicated and more stochastic processes at work, but the principle is the same.
Yet all of this points to the fact that the beauty of the words is due to the great mind of its creator, Shakespeare, and that it is stasticially impossible in the time of this universe (contrary to popular belief) that randomly spewing out strings of letters will yield even one of the great plays. This is Barr's point, that great beauty points to intelligent design. But unlike counting the number of tries it would take monkeys to clunk out shakespeare, which must occur within our physical contraints, we have no way of measuring the Universes we aren't seeing. We have no idea what other Universes might give rise to, qualitatively. We can predict, possibly, their physical characteristics, but how can we even feign to imagine what another consciousness would create if we have no idea what it is? What about God? As in the Euthyphro problem, we have no idea if the random set of physical rules and constants we are observing points to some God or to nothing more than an arbitrary roll of the dice. If we can't observe God, and can't observe other Universes, what's the use of choosing one over the other?
It is true that the seemingly arbitrary set of parameters, constants, and laws governing nature--whether physical, chemical, or physiological--points to the fact that our Universe is one of but many possible Universes. There is the somewhat naive yet sensible observation that we don't necessarily need God or some divine thought to be invoked, but we may also consider alternatives. Multiverse theory is one. This is not my main concern, however.
I would like to bring up the following point. As Nagel brings up in "What is it like to be a bat?", how can one person know what another person feels or thinks or senses? This is the philosophy of mind question of qualia. The argument is that knowing the physical mechanism that gives rise to qualia does not give knowledge of it. However, think of the following example. If we know exactly how a machine works, and the processes and laws governing is motion, do we know what it is "like" to be that machine? No, we do not, but although under ordinary use of the term "know" we do not claim to "know" what it may "feel," we do know everything we can know about it. In order to be able to better understand the qualia the machine (for example a highly intelligent robot) may experience , we would have to be exceedingly alike. Just as people of similar temperament and experience tend to "understand" one another better than people from different cultures, there is relevance between a person's physical composition and its qualia.
That is pretty straightforward, I believe, but the consequences of this are sometimes less palatable. If we in the future posess all the knowledge of the human psychology and neurology, then, and we can predict all the behavioral and biological and psychological outcomes, we would have a complete scientific theory of the human mind. Yet still, the qualia argument remains -- we can still not "feel" what it is like to be someone else, a bat, a robot. I contend that there is no real extra "knowledge" we gain just by "being" that someone else, but that is not the point. The point is, just because there is the problem of qualia, of people having different subjective experience, it doesn't mean that our experience doesn't have its foundation in materialism at least as far as science is concerned. The question is analogous to aesthetics: we may question that Michaelangelo's "David" is the greatest sculpture of all time, but we do not question that it is marble or that it is kept together by its physical properties. I think it is silly to think that we need to know what it "feels like" to be the sculpture of David in order to get more information out of it, in order to say that materialism is somehow neglectful of some crucial information. I don't think any sensible materialist would say that there is no information contained in art, or that art can communicate certain qualia, but I think no sensible spiritualist in the modern age would claim that not all the information contained in art is contained in the structure of how it exists in the physical (or at the very least mathematical) world.
I believe this last point bears some belaboring. Would Shakespeare be any less great if it were read from a computer instead of a book, or a parchment? Words contain information that communicate certain "things," certain artful impressions, sensations, etc. It seems unlikely that anyone would get anything out of literature, e.g. Shakespeare, unless there is certain overlap between cultural history, linguistic familiarity, etc. I'm sure even the best Shakespeare scholars miss what contemporaries must have felt when they saw the plays live. No amount of research will give those scholars the pleasure the audiences felt in the 17th century, but the scholars have the potential to know even more about the circumstances and conditions present at that time than the people who actually lived it. Yet, aside from issues of interpretaion of the script and realization in the forms of set, costume, and actors, all that information is contained in essence by the words. Words are linguistic abstractions that can be codified into mathematics. It is not inconceivable that robots of superior intelligence may eventually be able to feel qualia of the sort we do, yet obviously all of the information contained in that qualia must be reducible or at least correlated with the programming of the brain and the physical state of its functioning. If we can describe, predict, and explain physically / mathematically what that robot is feeling, we know that those robots reading Shakespeare are having feelings caused by materialism alone. People may point out that we are not robots, that we have other, more complicated and more stochastic processes at work, but the principle is the same.
Yet all of this points to the fact that the beauty of the words is due to the great mind of its creator, Shakespeare, and that it is stasticially impossible in the time of this universe (contrary to popular belief) that randomly spewing out strings of letters will yield even one of the great plays. This is Barr's point, that great beauty points to intelligent design. But unlike counting the number of tries it would take monkeys to clunk out shakespeare, which must occur within our physical contraints, we have no way of measuring the Universes we aren't seeing. We have no idea what other Universes might give rise to, qualitatively. We can predict, possibly, their physical characteristics, but how can we even feign to imagine what another consciousness would create if we have no idea what it is? What about God? As in the Euthyphro problem, we have no idea if the random set of physical rules and constants we are observing points to some God or to nothing more than an arbitrary roll of the dice. If we can't observe God, and can't observe other Universes, what's the use of choosing one over the other?
6.19.2010 | 1:38pm
Puh-leeze says:
I like george's drive-by response three years after this item was posted. Classy.
george, if you had paid attention while reading, you would have seen that
1.) Barr has read four of Dawkins' books
2.) He recognizes Dawkins "arguments" as presented by Nagel from the earlier work, which means that Dawkins' new book is not new.
Also, Thomas Nagel is not surnamed "Nigel".
george, if you had paid attention while reading, you would have seen that
1.) Barr has read four of Dawkins' books
2.) He recognizes Dawkins "arguments" as presented by Nagel from the earlier work, which means that Dawkins' new book is not new.
Also, Thomas Nagel is not surnamed "Nigel".
We don't do much fact finding or searching outside of our wee little bubble now do we?