Article 31 of 36

Subject:      Re: Difficulties with "Miracles" - no quantum mechanics
From:         Sam Dodsworth <sam@aristos.demon.co.uk>
Date:         1997/02/10
Message-Id:   <N+vFzBA2Fy$yEwLQ@aristos.demon.co.uk>
Definition:   there is an assumption that the regularities we observe are
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>So far as I understand it, by Naturalist Lewis means one who believes
>that:
>
>a: Nothing exists apart from the material universe
>b: All phenomena can be described an explained in terms of this one
>enormous process
>
>Every time Richard Dawkins is invited to appear on television, he
>asserts exactly this: by examining the more-or-less closed system of
>competing organisms, everything about human nature can be explained and
>understood. Anything which cannot be explained in these terms (ethical
>questions, questions of value, questions of purpose) are strictly
>meaningless. Desmond Morris has made a career out of making the same
>point less convincingly. I understand that the behaviourist
>psychologists took this to the point of almost denying that human beings
>had minds at all. Freud did believe in the mind, but thought it could be
>completely explained in terms of upbringing and environment, and that,
>once this was done, everything else (art, language, religion,
>philosophy) would be explained -- or one might say, explained away.
>Marx, Durkheim, the post-structuralist movement, Don Cupitt, Stephen
>Hawking...one could multiply examples almost infinitely.  
>
        None of your examples except Hawking are trying to do more than
explain some part of nature in terms of other parts: to be a Naturalist
you have to believe that _everything_ is part of one enormous process.
What Hawking seems to be trying to produce in "A Brief History Of Time"
is very close to Naturalism, but he still requires the laws of physics
to be basic and original: that's why he has a problem explaining why we
have these laws and not others. The scientific approach can be misread
as Naturalism (and I believe that Lewis did just that) but I'm not of
the opinion that one follows inevitably from the other.
>>
>>        The second difficulty is Lewis' assertion that "everyone will
>>have seen" that Supernaturalism is the same thing as Theism. 
>
>I agree that this is a big jump, and it is a classic example of Lewis
>turning a "maybe" or a "have you considered" into a "we've definitely
>proved this." However, I think more can be salvaged from it than you
>think.
>
>I have come across some theologians who say that "God" is the code-word
>in our culture for 'the ultimate reality, whatever that might be'. They
>will say "The Mind is God" or "The Universe is God" and mean, not "The
>Mind is the thing which walked in Eden" but "The Mind is the One Real
>Thing". I do not agree with this usage, but one can see where they are
>coming from. (Is this what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said that
>the final human understanding of the cosmos -- that which you could not
>get beyond -- would be "the mind of God"?) Joseph Campbell, more
>promisingly, says that God is one of a number of *metaphors* for the
>final irreducible Thing. The Universe, the Unconscious and Space have
>all served as metaphors for this "X" at one time or another. Campbell is
>basing his argument on Kant, who I have never read but Lewis
>(presumably) had, so I wonder if what Lewis is giving us is muddled
>Kant? The claim "Everyone will see that, if the Christian God exists, He
>would be the Final Thing that I am here postulating" would be a much
>less drastic claim. 
>
        Yes, but it's not the claim Lewis is making. He's jumped from
"some things are basic and original" to "there is one basic thing" to
"that basic thing is what we call God", and he's (explicitly or
implicitly) adding attributes at each step without even admiting what
he's doing. When we think of a god we give it attributes (consciousness
and volition, for a start) that do not neccessarily follow from the idea
of "One Basic Thing". If God is a metaphor then it's a bad metaphor
because it leads us to make unjustified assumptions.