Article 14 of 14

Subject:      Re: Difficulties with "Miracles" - no quantum mechanics
From:         Andrew Rilstone <andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk>
Date:         1997/02/05
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In article <GbcXKBAxOn9yEwpf@aristos.demon.co.uk>, Sam Dodsworth
<sam@aristos.demon.co.uk> writes

Comments on the first sections of Sam's challenging essay on "Miracles". 
>
>1) Naturalism, Supernaturalism and Theism.
>
>        There are two difficulties here: the definition of Naturalism
>and the jump from Supernaturalism to Theism. To understand the first,
>think of the scientific worldview. Scientists believe that the things
>and events we observe are the result of physical laws, but also that the
>universe is a consequence of these laws and not vice-versa. The
>scientific worldview, then, is a Supernaturalist one by the terms of
>Lewis' definition, with the laws of physics serving as the "one basic
>Thing"; and atheists who believe in the scientific worldview are Super-
>naturalists. 

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.

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. 

>        Who, then, are the Naturalists? As far as I can see, almost
>nobody. 

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.  

>
>        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. 

>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.

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. 

More later, maybe. 


-- 
Andrew Rilstone  andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk   http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/
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             "The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
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