Article 9 of 29

Subject:      Re: Difficulties with "Miracles" - no quantum mechanics
From:         Sam Dodsworth <sam@aristos.demon.co.uk>
Date:         1997/02/10
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In article <p8WcwBA+uR+yEwWt@aslan.demon.co.uk>, Andrew Rilstone
<andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk> writes

Sorry it's taken me a while to get back with this one - good points need
good answers, and those take time to prepare. 
>
>If its true that believers in "the scientific worldview" believe that
>the laws of physics are the One Basic Thing, then I still don't think
>that this makes them supernaturalists in the sense that Lewis requires.
>Indeed, it seems to me that you are almost falling into a tautology. If
>one believes in anything at all, then one must by definition believe
>that something is the Ultimate Reality, the One Basic Thing: that Thing
>might be The Mind, it might be Mathematics or it might be The Universe
>as a Whole. (If you were to define God as "the greatest thing which
>exists" then it would be axiomatic that God must exist, although it
>might be hard to prove which thing he was.) Surely Lewis's whole point
>is that a Supernaturalist believes that the One Basic Thing is not part
>of the physical universe.
>
        Let's look again at Lewis' definition of Supernaturalism:

        "[The Supernaturalist] thinks that things fall into two classes. 
        in the first class we find either things or (more probably) One 
        Thing which is basic and original, which exists on its own. In
        the second we find things which are merely derivative from that 
        One Thing. The one basic Thing has caused all the other things 
        to be. It exists on its own; they exist because it exists. They 
        will cease to exist if it ever ceases to maintain them in 
        existence; they will be altered if it ever alters them."

        We could interpret the Naturalist position as a belief that the
universe itself is the One Basic Thing, but if Nature and the One Basic
Thing are isometric then it's difficult to describe one as being derived
from the other. This, for me, is the important part of Lewis'
definition: not so much that there is One Basic Thing, but that there
are things that are derived from it. This means that we don't have a
tautology: we can believe that Nature is derived from something more
fundamental or we can believe that Nature is basic in itself. It's my
belief that the scientific view of physical law is an example of the
former case, but more of that in a moment...

>I forget whether, in "Miracles" he specifically says that the
>Supernatural would related to the Universe rather as a Writer relates to
>his Book. You ask "How did this play begin?" and one man answers "Well,
>three witches came on and made a speech" and the other says "Well, a man
>named Shakespeare had an idea..." Physical laws do not have that sort of
>relationship to the universe. 
>
>I would have thought that most scientists believed that the self-
>existant thing was simply the universe as a whole. At any rate, I would
>seriously question the claim that "physical laws" exist prior to, and
>over and above the universe. Physical laws are descriptions of the ways
>in which we have observed matter behaving. I do not see how these laws,
>seperated from the phenomena which they describe, can be the Final
>Reality, let alone how they can be said to exist outside of the
>universe. 
>
        
        I don't share your view of science, although it's undoubtedly a
tricky question. It's true that physical laws are derived from our
observations, but there's more to the process than the simple
accumulation of rules of thumb. In particular, scientific laws are
expected to generalize and to have predictive power. 
        A "rule of thumb" system would tolerate exceptions without
having to modify its theories because there would be no theories in the
scientific sense, just a set of observed regularities. An exception
would be noted, but there would be no particular requirement to explain
it. Similarly, if physical law was regarded simply as a catalogue of
observed regularities then we would not use experiments to test our
theories: only to gather data and look for more regularities. The
failure (or success) of a particular experiment could just be a "special
case", after all. I think that what separates science from mere
cataloguing is precisely what makes it Supernaturalism within Lewis'
definition: there is an assumption that the regularities we observe are
evidence of a "deep structure" that explains our observations but is not
the result of them. We canna change the laws of physics.

>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.

>>Lewis makes
>>no attempt to demonstrate this and it is, in fact, not true. Platonism
>>(or at least a certain type of Platonism) is one possible counter-
>>example: the relation between our world and the World of Forms is
>>exactly that of the Natural and the Supernatural, but the World of Forms
>>is not the same thing as a god or gods. Since Lewis was undoutedly
>>familiar with Plato, this passage is probably best read as a rhetorical
>>trick - but it's one that leaves a distinctly false impression of what
>>Lewis is about to attempt to prove.
>
>It's clear from Lewis's arguments that the Greek Gods, if they literally
>existed, would not be the Supernatural Thing since they are part of the
>total process of the universe. The Gods have origins, and when their
>story begins, the Universe is already a going concern. Plato's "world of
>Forms" is as you say, exactly what Lewis has in mind when talking about
>the supernatural, but then Lewis would take it as read that "the form of
>the Good" -- Plato's final, irreducible reality -- was God. I think that
>anything which we could postulate that is final and irreducible and
>genuinely outside the universe could usefully be referred to as "God"
>and would have a good deal in common with the Christian conception. The
>rhetorical fallacy that Lewis falls into is, that, from his lips (in the
>context of a Christian book) we naturally assume that by God he means
>'Jehovah' or at any rate "an ethical being more like a human mind than
>anything else we have experience of." It is striking that in the
>'Abolition' he specifically avoids this by referring to the Tao.

        Plato doesn't (as far as I can recall) grant his "form of the
Good" any of the attributes we normally associate with God. For a start,
it has no desires or goals - it's not even really a being. That's
nothing like a god and, I re-iterate, it's not useful to assume that it
is.
>
>There is an interesting point here about the usage of the term "God."
>The Greek gods were not what Lewis means by "God" even though they had
>cults and rituals and a religion associated with them; The Form of the
>Good is a closer candidate, although it didn't. I seem to recall that
>Lewis remarked that he had know people completely convinced that the
>ontological proof established the existence of a necessary perfect
>Being, but that this belief had no *religious* significance whatsoever. 

        Lewis dismisses the Greek gods for the same reason that
Lucretius does: they're part of the universe, not "basic and original".
This was a big problem for the Greek philosophers, and it's one of the
issues that Plato was addressing with his theory of forms.
>
>More later, maybe. 
>
        The only other thing I really wanted to cover in my original
post was Lewis' (mis)conceptions about the nature of scientific laws,
but I've covered some of that in this post, implicitly. I'd be
interested in some comments on my reading of Lewis' arguments against
Naturalism, though.
 
Sam Dodsworth (sam@aristos.demon.co.uk)
"I think there should be more sex and violence on television, not less. 
 Both are powerful catalysts of social change, at a time when change is
 desperately needed."
                        -J.G. Ballard