A reader writes to inform me of Alex Rosenberg’s very interesting essay “The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality.” Rosenberg’s thesis? That naturalism entails nihilism; in particular, that it entails denying the existence of objective moral value, of beliefs and desires, of the self, of linguistic meaning, and indeed of meaning or purpose of any sort. All attempts to evade this conclusion, to reconcile naturalism with our common sense understanding of human life, inevitably fail. Naturalism, when consistently worked out, leads to a radical eliminativism. Says my informant: “Why, it sounds shockingly similar to some things you once wrote in a book that was all about sperm, does it not?” Indeed, except that when I said it I was a “religiously inspired bigot,” whereas when Rosenberg says it he gets a respectful link, complete with a fanboyish exclamation point. Odd, no?
Not really. Because in The Last Superstition I argue that the implications in question constitute a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, whereas Rosenberg (who is himself a naturalist) regards them instead as a set of depressing truths we must learn to live with. As you’ll see from Rosenberg’s combox, not all naturalists agree with him. But naturalist religionists are an ecumenical bunch. They’ll allow you to draw any absurd conclusion you wish from naturalist premises, as long as (naturally enough) you never under any circumstances question the premises themselves.
As TLS argues at length, the position Rosenberg rightly takes to follow from naturalism is not only depressing; it is incoherent. Therefore, naturalism is false. Furthermore (and as I also argue at length in TLS) there are no non-question-begging arguments for naturalism in the first place. Its hegemony over contemporary intellectual life owes entirely to a mixture of philosophical muddleheadedness, ignorance of philosophical history, and anti-religious animus. (Again, see TLS for the details.)
Rosenberg’s essay only bolsters the already ample evidence for these claims. Let’s take them in order:
1. Naturalism is incoherent: Suppose (as I argue in TLS) that Rosenberg is right about what naturalism implies. In that case there are no beliefs or desires, nor is there any such thing as the “original intentionality” or meaning that common sense says thoughts have, and which it takes to be the source of the derived intentionality exhibited by language. But then, Rosenberg rightly concludes, there’s no such thing as “the” real or actual meaning of a work of art, a human action, or indeed of anything else. There is simply no fact of the matter about what anything means. So far so good, and so far what Rosenberg is doing is simply noting that Quine’s famous thesis of the indeterminacy of meaning is not some eccentricity on Quine’s part, but follows from the naturalistic assumptions Quine shares with most contemporary academic philosophers.
The trouble is that if this is correct, then there is in particular no fact of the matter about what Rosenberg or any other naturalist means when he puts forward a naturalistic thesis. Objectively speaking there is no more reason to think that their utterances express a naturalistic position than that they express a Cartesian one or an Islamic one, or indeed that they are anything more than empty verbiage. The choice is purely pragmatic, or determined by social or economic forces or toilet training, or by Darwinian selection pressures, or by whatever it is this year’s clever young naturalistic philosophers are saying determines it.
Now this is absurd enough, but naturalists have already long inured themselves to accepting such nonsense. Writers like John Searle have been pointing out the paradox for years, to no effect. It doesn’t phase the average naturalist, any more than the hardened criminal feels even a twinge of guilt upon committing his 345th felony. The mental calluses are too thick. You see, if naturalism leads to absurdity, then it must not really be absurdity; because, kids, naturalism just can’t be wrong. Only those dogmatic religious types think otherwise.
But it’s worse than all that. For it won’t do for the naturalist to say: “OK, so we’ve got to swallow some bizarre stuff. But we’re just following the argument where it leads!” What argument? There’s no fact of the matter here either – no fact of the matter about which argument one is presenting, and in particular no fact of the matter about whether one’s arguments conform to valid patterns of inference. In the case at hand, there is simply no fact of the matter about whether Rosenberg’s own arguments (or those of any other naturalist) are sound or entirely fallacious. So why should we accept them? I suppose Rosenberg could always do what any serious philosopher would when dealing with those who stubbornly disagree with him – start a petition to pressure the APA to settle the question in his favor. But until that happens, we’ll just have to wait on pins and needles.
So, that’s one fatal problem, and there’s more to be said about it. If you simply cannot bear the thought of helping to fund the purchase of my next martini or holy card by ordering a copy of TLS, then at least read James F. Ross’s unjustly neglected article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”
There are other incoherencies too. For example, Rosenberg keeps telling us that this or that commonsense feature of human nature is an “illusion” – despite the fact that illusions themselves are intentional phenomena, and thus the sort of thing which, on Rosenberg’s account, naturalism entails doesn’t exist. Rosenberg also seems to think that blindsight phenomena give us a reason to be eliminativists about phenomenal consciousness. But this is incoherent too, because the only reason we judge something to be a case of blindsight in the first place is that we have phenomenally conscious experiences to compare it to. Furthermore, Rosenberg assures us that the mind is merely the product of a long process of selection which favored those who were skilled at detecting other people’s motives. But since “motives” are themselves intentional mental phenomena, they can hardly coherently be appealed to in an account of how the mind originated. (Nor will it do to suggest that Rosenberg means only that our more complex minds evolved in order to detect other people’s motives; for it is the existence of any intentionality at all which poses a uniquely difficult problem for naturalism, not merely the existence of complex minds like ours.)
Of course, these are very old and very well-known problem with eliminative materialism, and eliminative materialists typically pooh-pooh them or (more commonly) simply ignore them. Even non-eliminativist naturalists do the same. What none of them do is actually answer such objections, except with “solutions” which also presuppose intentionality and/or consciousness and thus simply raise the same difficulty at a higher level. The problem is obvious, and obviously fatal, and yet amazingly, it is rarely addressed (Rosenberg’s essay completely ignores it). Victor Reppert and William Hasker have put forward what I think is the correct explanation of this bizarre state of denial: Even naturalists who are not eliminative materialists suspect that their position may inevitably lead them in an eliminativist direction, and they want to keep the option open. Precisely because the obviously fatal objection to eliminative materialism is so obvious and so fatal, the typical naturalist pays it little or no heed, lest he be forced by it to give up naturalism itself – a position which is, as Hasker puts it, something like “a theological dogma” for those philosophers committed to it. Like children, they hope the problem will just go away if they pay it no attention.
Let’s move on to the second claim I have said is given some further confirmation by Rosenberg’s essay:
2. There are no non-question-begging arguments for naturalism: Rosenberg’s thinks we have to accept the depressing consequences he outlines because he thinks naturalism is clearly true. Why?
The only argument he gives – implies, really – is the standard, tired “heroic age of science” argument: Modern science implies naturalism, so it must be true. But why accept this conditional? It would certainly come as news to Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, and many of the other founders of modern science and philosophy who (given that they were theists and/or dualists of one stripe or another) rejected naturalism (not to mention the many non-naturalist scientists and philosophers who have succeeded them, down to the present day). It also comes as news to us reactionary Aristotelians and Thomists, who hold that an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and philosophy of nature is perfectly compatible with the findings of modern science.
But Rosenberg assures us that 17th century scientists and philosophers of the stripe just mentioned “purged” or “ruled out” Aristotelian formal and final causes and the like. If what Rosenberg means by this is that they decided simply to ignore formal and final causes, then he is right. But if what he means is that they somehow refuted the claim that formal and final causes exist, or even cast the slightest doubt on their existence, then he is most definitely wrong, as I have argued at length in several places, including TLS and Aquinas. Indeed, as I argue there, the reality of formal and final causes is in fact rationally unavoidable.
But even if we A-T types are wrong, that would do nothing to show that naturalism is true, because there is still the non-naturalistic interpretation of science defended by dualists, idealists, and representatives of other modern schools of thought which accept the broadly mechanistic or non-teleological conception of nature endorsed by naturalists, but deny that nature so conceived is all that exists. True, their position is currently a minority view. But X is the majority view among contemporary academic philosophers does not entail X is true or even X is the only view worth taking seriously. Indeed, by itself it does not even entail X is plausible.
Anyway, whenever Rosenberg or some other naturalist tells you that “Science has shown such-and-such,” what he really means is “Science as interpreted in light of a naturalistic metaphysics has shown such-and-such.” And when he is telling you specifically that what science has shown is that naturalism is true, what he is doing, accordingly, is begging the question. Nothing more. Which brings us to:
3. The hegemony of naturalism over contemporary intellectual life owes entirely to philosophical muddleheadedness, ignorance of philosophical history, and anti-religious animus: We’ve already noted a fair bit of muddleheadedness. Rosenberg’s implicit assumption that realism about the mental entails the view that a thought is a kind of inner “representation” is a possible instance of ignorance of (a big chunk of) philosophical history. As I have noted in several earlier posts (e.g. here), this “representationalist” conception of thought is a modern, Cartesian, and entirely contingent assumption that classical and medieval thinkers would have rejected (rightly, in my view).
In general, contemporary naturalistic philosophers – or at least those whose naturalism is “scientistic,” as Rosenberg’s self-consciously is – tend to have little or no knowledge of the many deep differences between modern, Cartesian versions of dualism and classical (Platonic or Aristotelian-Thomistic) ones, between modern rationalist and empiricist arguments for God’s existence and classical (Neo-Platonic or A-T) ones, and so on. They assimilate the classical theories to the modern ones and thus falsely assume that refuting the latter suffices to refute the former. (Even then, their understanding of modern forms of non-naturalism is often laughable; e.g. they often claim that Cartesian dualism involves “positing” the existence of “mind-stuff” or “ectoplasm.”)
How about the animus against religion? Well, Rosenberg tells us that a belief in meanings and purposes is what puts us on a “slippery slope” to religion. About that he is, I would say, absolutely right. But of course, that gives us a reason to endorse Rosenberg’s rejection of purposes and meanings (as he seems to think it does) only if we already know that no religion is true. Naturalism, we all thought, was supposed to show us that religion is an illusion; now, it turns out, naturalism merely assumes this.
Beg the question much?
UPDATE: Rosenberg has now replied to his critics (scroll to the bottom of his combox) and I comment on his reply here.
Comments (22)
MacIntyre was right after all: Aristotle or Nietzsche.
Look, you know you're in trouble when the organ you employ to discover that there is no purpose in the universe is part of the universe that has no purpose and thus cannot even be trusted to tell you that the universe has no purpose.
Posted by Francis Beckwith | December 2, 2009 12:56 PM
Hi Ed,
I was hoping you'd post on Rosenberg's argument--and I hope that Lydia, Tim, and Steve Burton would add a word or two, as they're also trained philosophers.
That said, I've only skimmed your post very quickly, but do your criticisms of naturalism affect anti-naturalists like Brandom, Sellars, et al.? Is theistic supernaturalism really the only alternative to the dispiriting, incoherent mess that is now the dominant worldview among the well-educated?
Don't get me wrong--I hope it is. I was just wondering.
Posted by Bobcat | December 2, 2009 1:58 PM
Interesting stuff... it is a bit hard to evaluate the incoherence charge. For example: you, who are not a naturalist, nonetheless argue on the supposition that naturalism is true that certain things would follow:
I assume you mean this statement to express a valid argument. The strategy is this: Let's assume that naturalism is true and show that its truth entails absurdities. But, if it is possible to argue validly from the premise that naturalism is true to some conclusion, it would seem that your charge that naturalism is incoherent cannot be true.
As you write:
If you think this about naturalism, then how could you suppose that naturalism was true and then argue validly on the basis of that supposition that it is incoherent?
The charge of incoherence seems to me to run the risk of being self-defeating... at least if argued for by supposing the truth of naturalism and then drawing the conclusion that naturalism is self-defeating.
Or maybe I am confused....
Posted by Alex | December 2, 2009 2:42 PM
Dear Bobcat,
Yes.
The Masked Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | December 2, 2009 2:57 PM
This is a great, rip-roaring post. It happens to dovetail well with my recent leisure reading: I've just re-read C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. The character Frost is an eliminative materialist (and a demon worshiper, as it happens). In the end he is forced by the demons to commit suicide and is given (presumably by God) one last chance at salvation while he is dying if he will admit that a non-material self exists. He refuses and is damned. Very condign.
Posted by Lydia | December 2, 2009 3:19 PM
Golly. I've just been reading the beginning of the Rosenberg piece. (It's very long.) Someone should do us a favor and pick out some of the plums and quote them. Things to the effect that scientism has to ditch all real linguistic meaning, that morality cannot give meaning to life because our current morality is just what happened to get selected for. And on and on. Amazing. As you said, Ed, if a non-naturalist says that this is what naturalism leads to, he gets excoriated. That's an old phenomenon that operates in liberal politics, too: People who agree with me can tell the truth about me, but people who don't agree with me are bigots, crazies, etc., if they do so.
Posted by Lydia | December 2, 2009 3:28 PM
Alex:
Um, this argument, were it valid, would mean that all reductio ad absurdum arguments were invalid, not just the one Ed made against naturalism here.
Posted by The Deuce | December 2, 2009 3:56 PM
Dear The Deuce
I think you're wrong here. The problem depends on the particular kind of incoherence Feser claims to detect in the thesis of naturalism... hence the second quote.
Feser claims that the naturalist cannot (in good logical conscience) simply be following the arguments where they lead, since, if naturalism were true, then there could be no arguments -- or no good arguments, anyway. Naturalism is, according to my second quote from Feser, self-defeating in the sense that someone who accepts it cannot consistently take himself to be providing good arguments. He is claiming that simple logic shows that if naturalism were true, no arguments are good arguments.
If there were no good arguments (given the truth of naturalism) then there could be no good arguments (given the supposition that naturalism is true). Perhaps you disagree with this?
That Feser's argument is self-defeating in a certain way does not establish that naturalism is coherent -- by the way.
Posted by Alex | December 2, 2009 4:26 PM
But since “motives” are themselves intentional mental phenomena, they can hardly coherently be appealed to in an account of how the mind originated.
In a way he does appeal to biological "motives" in describing how the genes are geared towards certain social behavioral outcomes from natural selection. In any event, his rejection of free will is necessarily false.
Indeed, as I argue there, the reality of formal and final causes is in fact rationally unavoidable.
In Aquinas, what you did was use a version of final cause that is perfectly simultaneous with the efficient cause. If you want to restrict yourself to that view, a final cause should be described only through the efficient cause and no other source.
Posted by Step2 | December 2, 2009 4:58 PM
If one follows Naturalism where the arguments lead, one must arrive at a contradiction if Naturalism is false. If the falsehood is derived in this fashion, it is not a reductio ad absurdum, it is a proof by contradiction. This would make naturalism incoherent.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | December 2, 2009 5:07 PM
Hi Bobcat,
Well, I never say that the falsity of naturalism gets you directly to theism. What I do maintain is that the falsity of naturalism gets you (when all the lacunae are filled in) to some variety of classical metaphysics -- (Neo-)Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism or some other form of Scholasticism -- and that such a metaphysics (take your pick, but I pick Thomism) in turn gets you to theism. So the falsity of naturalism does get you to theism, but indirectly, in two steps rather than one.
Re: the guys you mention, they're all better than Quine, Dennett, and Co., but I think their insights tend to come off as obscurantist unless interpreted in light of some form of classical metaphysics, which none of them wants to go whole hog for.
Hello Alex,
I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, I'm starting from naturalism for the sake of argument and trying to show that it leads to absurdity, which absurdity includes the untrustworthiness of all arguments. But how does that make the reductio itself self-undermining? The naturalist assumption is only for the sake of the reductio after all, while the assumption that arguments are trustworthy is not. So why would I be forced to give up the latter and not just the former?
In other words: Any reductio argument assumes both (A) that logic is trustworthy and (B) that the claim to be refuted is true (for the sake of argument). It then shows that A and B together entail an absurdity. This requires that we give up what led us to that absurdity. This will of course be (B) since by definition no sane person wants to give up (A), though of course someone could always dig in his heels and reject (A) rather than (B). He just couldn't do so in the name of rationality, science, etc., nor could he claim to have any rational grounds for his position.
So, in the case at hand we could understand the argument as claiming that, where (B) is the claim that naturalism is true, (A) and (B) together lead to absurdity, so that the naturalist would have to give up one or the other. And if he chooses to give up (A), then he should no longer claim that naturalism is the most rational view to take, the one with the best arguments in its favor, etc.
Now, how is this reductio argument hoist on its own petard? Again, the reductio doesn't force us to give up (A), only either (A) or (B). If you think it does force us to give up (A) too, then it seems you are subject to Deuce's objection.
Posted by Edward Feser | December 2, 2009 5:21 PM
No. *All* reductio ad absurdums involve showing that a position implies one thing, and then that it implies another thing that contradicts the first thing, and that therefore the position is absurd and doesn't actually state a logical possibility at all. You could object to *any* reductio ad absurdum by saying "Well, if the position is really incoherent and doesn't describe any actual logical possibility, then it couldn't have any of the logical implications that were shown to be contradictory, so the argument that it's incoherent because it has contradictory implications fails."
I'll leave it to you to figure out why that reasoning would be erroneous.
And besides, Alex, if Ed's argument *really* implies, as you say it does, both that naturalism has and doesn't have logical implications, then Ed's argument is incoherent and so doesn't actually imply anything at all. Which means that it doesn't imply those two contradictory statements after all, so your objection that it contradicts itself fails :-)
Posted by The Deuce | December 2, 2009 5:34 PM
Ok, ok... I take it back... Ed has induced enough uncertainty to warrant a retraction. Thanks.
The Deuce wrote:
That would be an error, since even logical impossibilities have entailments. However, my argument that Feser's argument is self-defeating did not depend on the premise that logical impossibilities don't have entailments. ...or not obviously so.
Also: I heart The Deuce's argument at the end of the comment at 5:39.
Posted by Alex | December 2, 2009 6:04 PM
Here are some of the great moments in the history of science.
1) Archimedes inferred from the principle of bouyancy that the King's crown wasn't solid gold.
2) Galileo calculates the orbits of the planets and shows that Copernicus was right, and the earth really does move.
3) Newton develops calculus and infers the three laws of motion.
4) Darwin infers natural selection as the explanation for different beak sizes in the finches on the Galapagos islands.
5) Einstein develops his Theory of Relativity, based on Maxwell's equations.
Yes, science marches on. But if there no propositional mental states that cause other propositional mental states, none of the above statements are literally true! If it is a consequence of naturalism, and I think it is, that none of these statements is literally true, then these events don't support the case for naturalism, they undercut it decisively.
Posted by Victor Reppert | December 2, 2009 6:46 PM
I can't restrain myself. Rosenberg's essay, as far as I've read it, reminds me irresistibly of this famous quotation from Bertrand Russell:
And as the Bluffer's Guide to Philosophy adds, "Have a nice day."
Posted by Lydia | December 2, 2009 8:17 PM
Ugh. Even if I were convinced that there was some sort of weird merit in this point of view of nature and of man, I would consider that a firm but utterly baseless and unsupportable faith in meaning would be more sane, more worthy of adhering to, than such blatant nihilism and despair. Give me a stupid, unlettered, inelegant but joyful peasant any day over an erudite, aesthetically refined, sneering and despairing nihilist philosopher.
Posted by Tony | December 2, 2009 9:29 PM
I was recently reading a scholarly paper that repeatedly referred to "nihilist thinkers." It was clearly intended as merely descriptive, not as pejorative per se. I had previously been unaware that there is literally a school of thought filled with people who describe themselves as "nihilist thinkers." Is this a widespread phenomenon? Does Rosenberg now consider himself a member of that group?
Posted by Lydia | December 2, 2009 10:03 PM
Well, I may as well join in the fun. Here's an excerpt from my forthcoming article in the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy, "How to Be an Anti-Intelligent Design Advocate" (For those lurkers out there, the article not only includes the reasons why I am not an ID advocate but also why I think final and formal causality are better. This article is going to show definitively that certain philosophers are out and out fabricators of what I actually believe. In this way, I feel like Newman; I mean John Henry Newman, of course) (citations omitted):
Posted by Francis Beckwith | December 2, 2009 10:42 PM
Regarding ID theory, Thomas Nagel wrote a sympathetic commentary about ID theorist Stephen Meyer's lastest book "The signature in the cell":
Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6931364.ece
Posted by Jime | December 4, 2009 12:49 PM
I was reading through The Corner, and came across this post by Derb, in which he talks about "the evolution of religious belief" and links to a Bloggingheads discussion on the topic between David Sloan Wilson and Razib Khan. Anyhow, this excerpt from Wilson reminded me of Ed's post, since I had read it recently:
So, so clueless. It's just beyond me how a person can not only espouse naturalism, but also recognize the implications that naturalism has for rationality and truth, and use those implications to deconstruct beliefs that the person doesn't share and even belief in general, and not have it be immediately obvious to them that this deconstruction applies to their own position and renders it incoherent. How do you not notice that? The conclusion seems to me so obvious that a person would have to be unbelievably dense or put forth deliberate, prodigious effort not to see it.
I don't think that Wilson (or Razib or Derb) is stupid, but what is he thinking here? Is science, as opposed to everything else, supposed to have sprung from some magical part of the brain that *isn't* a product of natural selection and actually *was* made for truth rather than survival, unlike everything else? I've seen this sort of claim many times, but it never stops surprising me. I can't explain how any reasonably intelligent individual can spend a moderate-to-large amount of time thinking about these things without noticing this problem.
Posted by The Deuce | December 7, 2009 3:07 PM
Amazing too, how much they "study" and "research" why "religion" "evolved". Of course based on assumptions that there is no God.
Honestly paraphrased, they want to know why people believe in myths.
Of course if they want to know why people believe in myths they should study themselves.
--aec
Posted by Alan | December 13, 2009 4:59 PM
"Naturalism is incoherent: Suppose (as I argue in TLS) that Rosenberg is right about what naturalism implies. In that case there are no beliefs or desires, nor is there any such thing as the “original intentionality” or meaning that common sense says thoughts have, and which it takes to be the source of the derived intentionality exhibited by language. But then, Rosenberg rightly concludes, there’s no such thing as “the” real or actual meaning of a work of art, a human action, or indeed of anything else. There is simply no fact of the matter about what anything means. So far so good, and so far what Rosenberg is doing is simply noting that Quine’s famous thesis of the indeterminacy of meaning is not some eccentricity on Quine’s part, but follows from the naturalistic assumptions Quine shares with most contemporary academic philosophers.
The trouble is that if this is correct, then there is in particular no fact of the matter about what Rosenberg or any other naturalist means when he puts forward a naturalistic thesis. Objectively speaking there is no more reason to think that their utterances express a naturalistic position than that they express a Cartesian one or an Islamic one, or indeed that they are anything more than empty verbiage. The choice is purely pragmatic, or determined by social or economic forces or toilet training, or by Darwinian selection pressures, or by whatever it is this year’s clever young naturalistic philosophers are saying determines it." This sounds very fishy to me, seems like a purely semantic debate. My impression is this conflates "meaning" in the sense of 'objective meaning' intrinsic in the universe and meaning as in the subjective interpretation of someone is trying to get across. I don't see the the argument you sketched out as providing evidence that the naturalist must excise the latter. You needn't, practically or logically, believe that when when you refer to a chair that there is an "objective meaning" in the word chair, or whatever. It is just something you decide to call it. No need for complicated metaphysics of language here. Symbols aren't reality. Obviously, regardless of the metaphysics of semantics, ideas are expressed to others in exactly the same way. Seems a meaningless argument to me ;-).
Posted by Matthew | January 15, 2011 1:37 AM