Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around to hash out the following basic question: “So we don’t believe in God, what next?” How do we describe reality, how can we be moral, what are free will and consciousness, those kinds of things. Participants included Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Simon DeDeo, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Janna Levin, Massimo Pigliucci, David Poeppel, Nicholas Pritzker, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross, and Steven Weinberg.
Happily we recorded all of the sessions to video, and put them on YouTube. Unhappily, those were just unedited proceedings of each session — so ten videos, at least an hour and a half each, full of gems but without any very clear way to find them if you weren’t patient enough to sift through the entire thing.
No more! Thanks to the heroic efforts of Gia Mora, the proceedings have been edited down to a number of much more accessible and content-centered highlights. There are over 80 videos (!), with a median length of maybe 5 minutes, though they range up to about 20 minutes and down to less than one. Each video centers on a particular idea, theme, or point of discussion, so you can dive right into whatever particular issues you may be interested in. Here, for example, is a conversation on “Mattering and Secular Communities,” featuring Rebecca Goldstein, Dan Dennett, and Owen Flanagan.
The videos can be seen on the workshop web page, or on my YouTube channel. They’re divided into categories:
- Introductions
- Consciousness
- Emergence and Reduction
- What Is Real?
- Morality
- Meaning
- Free Will
- Philosophy and Science
- Final Thoughts
A lot of good stuff in there. Enjoy!
Owlmirror
‘So . . . what you’re basically saying is that there are gaps in our knowledge, and maybe God is
hiding out in one or more of those gaps?’
No, I’m not saying that. I don’t actually know anyone who is a Christian and does. Rather He’s behind everything including the mechanisms behind physical reality, of which we have a partial grasp.
I’m just pointing out that our grasp on physical reality remains very partial, and that I don’t see we are anywhere close to an all-embracing reductionist picture for the atheist to hang his cap up on.
@Simon:
[Re: God of the Gaps]
Interestingly, Wikipedia says that the phrase was coined by a Christian, and has been used by Christians.
Yet it nonetheless applies to what you wrote.
And how is “a partial grasp of physical reality” different from “we have gaps in our knowledge”? How is God being “behind everything” different from “hiding”?
You use different phrases, but the underlying meaning looks exactly the same as what I wrote.
Owlmirror
‘And how is “a partial grasp of physical reality” different from “we have gaps in our knowledge”? How is God being “behind everything” different from “hiding”?
You use different phrases, but the underlying meaning looks exactly the same as what I wrote.’
I disagree. I ‘m saying ‘There are gaps in our knowledge, proving to me our (mankind in general’s) reductionism enterprise is incomplete. I’m also saying, as an essentially separate statement, that God is behind, i.e. the ultimate author and cause of, all knowledge we’ll ever know, and then all other information too. (Not just these aforementioned, rather large, bits we currently find tricky).’
You are essentially saying, as far as I understand you, ‘There are gaps in our knowledge, and you Christians are postulating that your God takes care of what we don’t understand. What we do understand is self-evident truth not requiring an author or agent’.
Your (wrong) understanding of my theist position is indeed somewhat similar to that adopted by Newton at times and probably others.
@Simon:
But that’s not what you were saying before. Your specific list — “cosmology, certainly as we approach the Planck time, the absolute nature of the spatial metric, abiogenesis, macro-evolution, origin of consciousness” — carries the implication that our ignorance in those areas specifically is where God is hiding and “acting”.
If “God is behind […] all knowledge we’ll ever know”, why would ignorance in those areas even matter?
Indeed, your wording before the list supports my interpretation:
That’s not an “essentially separate statement”! You were saying that the areas of our ignorance; the gaps in our knowledge, has “a major bearing on the possibility of, and nature of, an intelligent agent being behind the cosmos.”
Can you at least acknowledge that your current statements are inconsistent with your prior ones?
Owlmirror
‘If “God is behind […] all knowledge we’ll ever know”, why would ignorance in those areas even matter?’
My reason for pointing out the present shortfalls in reductionism is to counter the assertion that reductionism is a near complete exercise, historically a line taken by atheists, implicitly or explicitly. This is I agree closely related to your point.
If by ‘room to hide for God’ you mean the possibility, as seen from this perspective of our present scientific understanding, for God to hide his existence and interventions from our perceptive experience, yes, you have a valid point. Sean and others have spent some time trying to assert that we know enough to conclude that reality as we generally experience it is impermeable to any hypothesised supernatural intervention. Feynman thought so too, I think. I disagree. To do that, we need a complete, closed system, behaving in a deterministic way with all variables known and all relationships known. Other great secular minds, like Penrose, would I think disagree with Sean’s conclusions here.
From my viewpoint, I do agree with the statement of yours I just quoted; it makes little difference to actual final reality what man knows if there is a supreme God and he knows everything anyway. Science is about attempting to determine objective reality.
I’m inclined to think everything we see and perceive, scientifically or otherwise, is just a partial manifestation of God’s realities; a contextual simplification manifesting as a high degree of compliance to our known physical laws under certain conditions.
I asked, above (or on the previous page, now) what definition of “supernatural” Sean and the group had in mind, and I put to you the same question: What does supernatural mean? Would you agree that supernatural means something mental that is not caused by anything nonmental?
I still think you’re being inconsistent, here. Even if we had that, wouldn’t you still insist that God was “behind” all that?
Owlmirror
‘Supernatural’ I think I’d define as ‘having causes or manifestations beyond what is readily or normally attributed to naturalism’. Of course ‘naturalism’ is a moving target because our understanding progresses. The definition is a little unsatisfactory because you might thereby consider consciousness to be supernatural. It depends on what you admit to the category of natural phenomena.
Would God be behind a finally successful reductionism programme performed by humanity? A hypothetical question for me. I don’t anticipate such a programme. I’ve said round here that I don’t see how reductionism expects to ‘arrive’ and I think Sean has said he thinks it will always need some ‘brute facts’.
When I think about these things I don’t model it expecting a closed system. I think an existence has been granted to us from the many possibilities God had available to use. However, we won’t get to see the possibilities available to him. Instead, we are able to deduce certain laws at work, within certain domains, within what God has granted us to experience and know at present.
But then what does naturalism mean?
Since you didn’t check, I’ll copy and paste from the previous comment:
Richard Carrier summarized it as: Hence, I propose a general rule that covers all and thus distinguishes naturalism from supernaturalism: If naturalism is true, everything mental is caused by the nonmental, whereas if supernaturalism is true, at least one thing is not.
This lets you avoid the “moving target” problem of defining naturalism.
If you think that supernaturalism is true, then you think that at least one consciousness can exist that does not depend on anything nonmental, or nonconscious (and you might further think that all consciousness is not dependent on anything nonmental). Under naturalism, consciousness is an emergent process of a non-mental or nonconscious substrate (more specifically: atoms forming the molecules composing cells, all acting under the laws of physics).
Do you disagree with the definitions? If so, why?
You’re still being inconsistent. Your previous answers implied or stated outright that you would think God would be behind everything, no matter what humans found out. Have you changed your mind on that or not?
Owlmirror
‘You’re still being inconsistent. Your previous answers implied or stated outright that you would think God would be behind everything, no matter what humans found out. Have you changed your mind on that or not?’
No, I haven’t changed my mind. I see God as behind everything, i.e. if God had not ordained it, the universe would not exist. Also I don’t think we will get to a closed solution for the universe, i.e. a successful reduction to closed mathematical physics.
@Simon Packer:
I think at this point we are at an impasse — you don’t seem to see the inconsistency of presupposing that God exists and is behind everything, and the fact that whether or not humanity ever gets a “closed solution for the universe” is irrelevant to that presupposition.
So can you at least address the question of the definition of “supernatural” that I posted above? You don’t say whether you agree or disagree with the formulation.
Owlmirror
‘I think at this point we are at an impasse — you don’t seem to see the inconsistency of presupposing that God exists and is behind everything, and the fact that whether or not humanity ever gets a “closed solution for the universe” is irrelevant to that presupposition.’
There’s no inherent inconsistency between your presupposition and your stated fact.
I presuppose God exists and is behind everything.
Whether or not humanity gets a closed solution for the universe is irrelevant to that presupposition.
I agree with those two separate statements.
But…I don’t think man will get a closed solution.
Regarding the definition of ‘supernatural’, your definition is obviously not the same as mine. If you define naturalism primarily in terms of the matter-mind relationship, it certainly also makes sense to define supernaturalism in the way you mention. Both words are frequently defined in other ways.
But what is that definition? I don’t think you can stick with the one you wrote above — “having causes or manifestations beyond what is readily or normally attributed to naturalism” — because that’s completely vague. What is naturalism, such that supernaturalism is beyond it? What does “beyond” even mean? If, as you also wrote, “‘naturalism’ is a moving target because our understanding progresses”, are you seriously trying to imply that phenomena that were not understood were supernatural in the past? Thunderstorms, volcanoes, and earthquakes were all supernatural until meteorology and electromagnetics and geodynamics were understood?
Can you think a little more deeply about the subject and context?
it would be good if people who say that free will is *in*consistent with determinism would notice that determinism is consistent with the definition of “free will” Robin gave. Short explanation. Longer one.
Owlmirror
‘Regarding the definition of ‘supernatural’, your definition is obviously not the same as mine.’
Defining to everyone’s agreement ‘supernatural’ or ‘natural’ will not be an easy task as they are subjective ideas.
Certainly as you strip back phenomena like volcanoes, you find a degree of understanding of mechanism, and in the reductionist paradigm, you are simply seeing the outworking of the ultra low entropy state at the big bang. That and us giving things names, also presumably seen as further meaningless outworkings of the universe.
I would suggest that with many of these phenomena, we would be disputing whether there is personal agency behind the manifestation in the physical, and therefore behind the ultimate mechanism.
At what point a person such as myself who believes in God might choose to invoke him as a cause is obviously a different question to whether he invokes God at all; theism vs. deism vs. atheism. I’d also point out that atheism is not a new thing; see Psalm 14v1 and Romans 1v18 on. So in ancient times many people would presumably have dismissed volcanoes etc. as simply materialist phenomena.
Seems Paul Torek has something relevant to point out regarding freewill or ‘agency’. I’ll have a look. I think philosophers would call my belief ‘libertarian’ freewill rather than ‘compatibilist’.
Paul
I agree Robin’s view can be seen as physics-deterministic if you take the view that human (or divine) freewill conflates with the associated (deterministic) evolving physics-defined state of the universe , in such a way that you can’t logically arbitrate on which is the real ’cause’ of the future. I think that may be the hub for a lot of different perspectives.
My above thinking ascribes a governing reality to both a situational present time and the continuing unidirectional progression of time simply in order to ascribe time-wise ‘agency’ to ’cause-effect’. This is the normal way to think of human freewill as it relates to time.
Your first linked article throws doubt on the ‘current time’ perspective of human consciousness having much validity and therefore significance.
On all this I take the freewill-consciousness-present-time-constrained paradigm to have the most significance and importance, for prior religious reasons. If physics maintains determinism, it does so as a servant and not a master. On time, I would say physics is God’s servant but our master.
@Simon:
The words “nature” and “natural” have many definitions, which leads to it being very confusing when trying to make a distinction between natural as distinguished from supernatural. But the attempt to offer the definition of supernatural as something “fundamentally mental uncaused by the nonmental” is an attempt to reduce the confusion.
Why aren’t you willing to reduce confusion?
But “personal agency” is what directly implies “something mental that is not caused by anything nonmental”. Regardless of your unwillingness to engage with the definition, you’re actually implying that the definition I offered is actually correct and what you mean by “supernatural”.
Do you think that those verses are talking about a vague “personal agency”, or about the specific God of the bible?
Do you think the specific God of the bible, or a vague “personal agency”, is obvious?
@Simon — since I see that I could have been clearer, I’m adding to my second response.
But the whole idea of a “personal agency behind the manifestation in the physical” is what directly implies “something mental that is not caused by anything nonmental”. That is, you’re positing an agent, God, which is not itself “physical” — that is, it has no basis in the nonmental realm of subatomic particles and their interactions in time and space — that is “behind” the manifestation of those same subatomic particles and their interactions in time and space.
Owlmirror
‘Why aren’t you willing to reduce confusion?’ (in regard to defining ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’).
Because no-one gave me (or anyone else in our context) authority to define words. I gave my loose definition, you gave me yours, and I understand yours.
‘But “personal agency” is what directly implies “something mental that is not caused by anything nonmental”. Regardless of your unwillingness to engage with the definition, you’re actually implying that the definition I offered is actually correct and what you mean by “supernatural”.’
‘Personal agency’ may or may not imply attendant physicality, depending on the metaphysics beliefs of the person using the phrase. When used of God, the same might apply, though the physicality of God, and what that phrase might mean, is a complete unknown. Obviously I think God is able to influence our realm. We can be heard in his.
I take my view of our existence partly from Hebrews 11v3, implying to me that there is a least one realm beyond our view.
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
(Hebrews 11:3 KJV)
So there’s more than our existence, and then there’s the manner of existence of God himself. I guess these may be the same thing but I don’t know. I don’t claim any understanding here. Whether they have physicality in the sense we might try and define it is an open question for me.
I’ll take the Bible for it’s explanatory powers regarding the spiritual condition of man. I’ll take the scientific method as a good way to look for mechanisms behind the creation. I’ll take the long range, deep time conclusions of mainstream scientists with a pinch of salt.
@Simon:
I am baffled that you think that anyone needs “authority” to define words. People coin words, and use them, and they have meaning based on common understanding. But that understanding can be confused.
I still don’t understand yours, because it is hopelessly confused.
Either you believe that God is made of particles (atoms, or other particles like atoms) which have no minds of their own, or you believe that God is not made of particles, or anything like particles, in which case the mind of God exists without depending on anything else.
I assumed that, as a religious person who believes in a personal God that created all things, you actually believe the latter (that is, you believe that God created particles and cannot be comprised of the particles created).
Are you seriously trying to say that you actually believe that God might in fact be made of particles, and that the very concept of God as creator is therefore false?
Owlmirror
‘Are you seriously trying to say that you actually believe that God might in fact be made of particles, and that the very concept of God as creator is therefore false?’
Starting from our perspective, reality for us manifests as waves and particles, or at least that is the way we have come to think of it. As Hawking said, ‘there is no model-independent view of reality available’. It also manifests as a space time fabric which conflates with the matter-energy within it. In the final analysis, the two paradigms will not meet in the middle and won’t give the same results (or indeed anything remotely close to the same results as you approach the Planck scale). Therefore my assumption is that we really don’t know too much about the ultimate nature of reality (even supposing our own reality is a closed system, which I don’t believe).
You are assuming that I see the nature of God is to be viewed in the same sort of general way, i.e.’ particulate’. I find that slightly comical, I must admit. The answer is, I just don’t know. There are plentiful cues in our reality that we are handing off to something way beyond us when we probe nature. My wife’s relative Charles Read, who was a Trinity Maths fellow and a Christian, pointed out, in essence, that infinity and nothing are both concepts we cannot really grasp, either mathematically or in the imagination. They are probably just indicators of other realities we just cannot begin to grasp from our present realm. A big problem with QFT is handling infinite results.
I find much science fiction pretty lame for these sorts of reasons. We imagine from within our own zone of familiarity.
Owen Flanagan would like to see a community develop which he somewhat facetiously described as “a Mosque of Mattering.”
Without realizing it, he illuminated the ancient constant: whatever you believe, if you’re “sure” about it, you Will turn it into a religion.
Because you’re human.
@Simon:
What’s comical is that your reading comprehension or writing ability is so poor that you wind up claiming that I stated that I assumed the exact opposite of what I actually stated.
How about this: I am not asking what you know, I am asking what you actually believe; what you think is true. Can you answer yes or no specifically to the following questions?
Do you believe that God is a zebra that lives on Iapetus, the moon of Saturn?
Do you believe that God is a Boltzman Brain that coalesced from cosmic dust in a prior universe before creating this one?
Do you believer that God is an intelligence; a mind that is not made of any kind of substance or particles, even though this mind was able to create energy that could become particles, and can act on energy and particles in our universe?
If you cannot answer “no” directly to the first two questions and “yes” to the third (with any modifications necessary if there’s something I missed), then we are at another impasse: You are so confused that you don’t even know what you actually believe.
Collins
I think you’re right, because in reality we have a human need to believe in something outside ourselves and bigger than us. The issue is, do we get in right? People speak in hushed, awed terms about the explanatory and creative power of Darwinism or the Big Bang in a way I find entirely ridiculous.
Owlmirror
I have essentially orthodox evangelical beliefs, and my beliefs about God are close to those stipulated in the Nicene Creed or Westminster Catechism; themselves distillations or inferences from the Bible. I have rational reasons to believe them, including historical evidence and their explanatory power in regard to human behaviour. In that regard, they are a far better fit than Darwinism.
I’m not confused on these points, but I’m acknowledging my ignorance about a lot of other things, which is not the same thing.
I may have slipped up in my following of your arguments, or in my logic, if so I apologise.
I’m more interested in what point you are trying to make or what you want me to answer, in order to close this off hopefully politely.
Owlmirror
I read your post again
‘Do you believer that God is an intelligence; a mind that is not made of any kind of substance or particles, even though this mind was able to create energy that could become particles, and can act on energy and particles in our universe?’
God is more than a mind, he is a being, a Person, and for us, a transcendent being, with powers among which are the ones you suggest above. Why would we ‘get’ everything? Why do we seem to have to kid ourselves we will or can? You can’t and won’t really get the nature of his existence because, to put it bluntly, you and I are too thick and blinkered for now. I don’t see the confusion you are talking about. I’m just acknowledging my limitations. Something I think humanity needs to do a bit more often. 1 Timothy 6v16.