Thomas Nagel on rationality and the location problem for scientific naturalism

I've been discussing the different aspects of the so-called "Location Problem" for scientific naturalism. In this post I'll comment about one aspect: rationality.

Many atheists consider themselves "rationalists", and defenders of rationality. But it is evidence of their irrationality the fact that they don't understand that the basic premises of the impersonalistic naturalistic worldview makes "rationality" almost impossible, since rarionality requires at least two conditions:

1-Consciousness

2-Free will (in order to respect the laws of logic and evidence, and freely choose what's rational over what's irrational)

Both person-relative features are in variance with the impersonalistic fabric of reality essential to naturalism, and in fact provide good evidence for theism.

Moreover, contemporary naturalists are committed to evolutionary theory and this theory itself (independently of the two features mentioned above) support skepticism regarding our rationality and cognitive faculties. As Charles Darwin himself realized: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Darwin's letter to William Graham, July 3rd, 1881,)

As philosopher Alvin Plantinga, has argued in this article: "Now what evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behavior, (per-haps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that issues in survival and reproduction.

Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while natural selection rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and repro-duction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn’t, as such, care a fig about true belief. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, “Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents.

Since natural selection favors useful beliefs (for survival and reproduction) and not true beliefs per se (specially not true beliefs about sophisticated and highly abstract and theoretical topics not directly or indirectly related to survival and reproduction, like mathematics or quantum mechanics), there is not reason to think our cognitive faculties are aimed to the truth (instead of simply being pragmatically useful for crude survival purposes).

Serious and first-rate naturalistic thinkers have realized the problem of rationality in a naturalistic worldview. Leading naturalistic-atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his book The Last Word, wrote: "The problem then will be not how, if we engage in it, reason can be valid, but how, if it is universally valid, we can engage in it... Probably the most popular nonsubjectivistic answer nowadays is an evolutionary naturalism: We can reason in these ways because it is a consequence of a more primitive capacity of beliefs formation that had survival value during the period when the human brain was evolving. This explanation has always seemed to me to be laughably inadequate... The other well-known answer is the religious one. The universe is intelligible to us because it and our minds were made for each other" (p.75)

What Nagel calls the "religious" option, is more properly called the "theistic" option. In theism, the universe is intelligible because, both the universe and human beings, were created by a rational God. Therefore, it is not surprising that our limited and imperfect cognitive faculties (reason, logic, memories, etc.) FIT the real world in more or less accurate ways. In fact, the latter is precisely what we would expect IF theism were true, because in theism we're created in God's image (i.e. sharing, in a limited form, some of God's superlative personalistic attributes, like rationality, capability to knowledge, moral agency, free will, etc.).

But in naturalism, there is not reason to think that our beliefs fit the real world, instead of being only useful for survival and reproduction, specially if the Darwinian evolutionary theory about the mind is true. As naturalistic philosopher of science and biology, and hard-core defender of Darwinism, Alex Rosenberg recognizes "there is lots of evidence that natural selection is not very good at picking out true beliefs, especially scientific ones. Natural selection shaped our brain to seek stories with plots. The result was, as we have been arguing since Chapter 1, the greatest impediment to finding the truth about reality. The difficulty that even atheists have understanding and accepting the right answers to the persistent questions shows how pervasively natural selection has obstructed true beliefs about reality" (The Atheist's Guide to Reality . p.110)

Note carefully, the argument is NOT that natural selection favors only false beliefs. Rather, the argument (at least as developed by Plantinga) is that natural selection is INDIFFERENT to the truth-value of beliefs, provided these beliefs are useful for survival and reproduction (In Rosenberg's view, the problem is even worst because for him natural selection promotes false beliefs and tends to prevent reaching true beliefs. If Rosenberg is right, then it is very likely that most of the beliefs favored by natural selection be false. But let us be more charitable to naturalism).

And since the number of false beliefs which are pragmatically useful is greater than the number of true beliefs, is obvious that natural selection cannot be very good to choose the truth over falsehood.

This implies skepticism regarding our rationality and cognitive faculties. Philosopher Willliam Lane Craig has summarized this argument here:

And note that in this argument, we have assumed that the person-relative features of "consciousness" and "free will" are compatible with (and fit well in) impersonalistic naturalism. This concession is only for the argument's sake (in order to be charitable with the naturalistic project). But this concession is not justified in a large evaluation of naturalism: If naturalism is true, free will doesn't exist and determinism rules.

As naturalist Richard Dawkins strongly argues: "But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car? Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution."

Dawkins clearly perceives the problem of "responsability" and freedom of will (and other "mental constructs" like the "good" or the "evil"), which don't exist in reality, only in our brains. In Dawkins' naturalistic, impersonalistic worldview, we're mere automata governed by physical laws operating on our "physiology, heredity and enviroment".

As consequence, Dawkins' choice of accepting naturalism over theism is ALSO the product of deterministic physical laws, not of Dawkins' free decision to be rational. (Note the irrationalistic implication of Dawkins' own position to favor "reason").

Scientific naturalism is, ultimately, destructive of rationality. It appeals to "reason", "science" and "logic", but its basic impersonalistic premises undercut the possibility that such things do exist.

As consequence, scientific naturalism is essentially and intrinsically irrational.

John Searle on the location problem for scientific naturalism regarding person-relative properties and entities

In other posts, I've discussed the so-called "location problem" faced by scientific naturalists. As mentioned, first-rate naturalists have recognized the problem and, since they find theism wholly impalatable, they try hard to find a solution for the problem inside the naturalist framework.

Commenting on this, world-renown naturalist philosopher John Searle (one of the most important and influential analytic philosophers in the world) has written:

There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy...How do we fit in it?... How can we square this self-conception of ourselfves as mindful, meaning creating, free, rational, etc. agents with an universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?(Freedom and Neurobiology, pp. 4-5)

The key word in Searle's argument is "entirely". According to scientific naturalism (metaphysical naturalism), the natural world is ENTIRELY physical. And by "physical" we have to understand what physical science (the most basic of all the sciences) tells about matter: Physical matter is mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, mechanical, non-moral, non-ethical, non-conscious, etc.

But if it is what physical things are, and we're physical things, then we're necessarily mindless, meaningless, etc. But our self-perception is different: We are conscious (at least, it seems to be the case), rational, free, moral, etc. Therefore, scientific naturalism is and HAVE TO BE, false.

In order to remain consistent, naturalists have to deny the objective existence of these things (e.g. arguing that we "seem" to be free, but ultimately we're not; or moral values "seem to exist", but actually they don't, they're illusions of our minds projected into the objective world).

This is why scientific naturalists (and atheists who believe in this worldview, if are consistent) have to deny the objective existence of consciousness, free will, objective moral values, objective purposes or meaning and so forth.

Many people don't understand that, because their analysis is too superficial. They simply assume that given that they have strong moral beliefs, or a strong sense of their own rationality, then somehow these things have to be compatible with naturalism. They don't understand that the basic impersonalistic postulates and premises of naturalism implies the non-existence of these person-relative properties.

This is why many atheists don't understand, for example, the moral argument for God's existence. They misrepresent the argument as saying that God arbitrarily commands this or that, or that a moral statement like "Torturing little children is bad" is true, regardless of whether God exists or not.

They don't understand that in their naturalistic worldview, which is essentially impersonalistic, "bad" is a moral, and hence a person-relative property which cannot exist objectively in a world " that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles", and "little children" are conceived in non-personalistic ways as special configurations of matter (biological matter which essentially is not different than other physical things). So, arguing that torturing little children is "bad" or "wrong" (in any actual, ontological sense of the word) is clearly in variance with impersonalistic worldviews, and certainly the existence or non-existence of God is relevant to this problem, because if God exists, then the fabric of reality is ultimately personalistic and the person-relative properties like moral ones makes sense. If God doesn't exist, then is not clear that the fabric of reality is personalistic (even if contingent and accidental "persons", evolved randomly from brute matter, like you or me happens to exist) and in this case moral and other person-relative properties become inexplicable and the suspicion of naturalists regarding the existence of consciuousness, minds, free of the will, etc. become more plausible and justified.

For example, in her debate with William Lane Craig, prominent atheist moral philosopher Louise Anthony said "The universe has no purpose, but I do… I have lots of purposes…. It makes a lot of difference to a lot of people and to me what I do. That gives my life significance… The only thing that would make it [sacrificing her own life] insignificant would be if my children’s lives were insignificant. And, boy you better not say that!"

In reply to her, Craig responded, “But Louise, on atheism, their lives are insignificant.” Anthony interjected, “Not to me!”

Many people predictably misinterprets this exchange, because they're too superficial. They misunderstand Craig's reply as saying that "Atheists cannot consider their children's lives significant". This is NOT Craig's point. (In fact, I'm sure that mosts atheists, even the irrationalistic ones affected by Jime's Iron Law, consider their children's lives as significant, and probably Craig would agree with this).

Craig's point is NOT about the moral beliefs of atheists, but about the ontological foundation (in the fabric of reality) of those beliefs. If as Searle says, the world is entirely and essentially meaningless, then the belief that something is meaningful (e.g. the lives of Anthony's children) is FALSE. The fact that theists and atheists stick to this false belief won't change this objective fact, if naturalism is true.

This is why Craig's reply to Anthony has to be understood properly as saying: "In atheism (more specifically, in the most plausible and scientific form of atheism known as naturalism), given its essentially impersonalistic conception of everyhting what exists, the concept of "significant" or "meaningful" make no sense in any objective sense".

If Anthony were consistent, she would agree with Craig's point, because her worldview has exactly these implications.

In fact, note Anthony's inept objection. She concedes that there is not objective purpose or meaning in the universe (which is Craig's entire point!): "The universe has no purpose", but then she asserts her subjective purposes as if they're relevant to Craig's point: " but I do… I have lots of purposes"

Note the reference to personal subjects "I", "me", etc.

Note carefully that her reply doesn't refute the point made by Craig, since he is not arguing that atheists don't have subjective purposes. What he's arguing (in full consistence with the features of naturalism recognized by contemporary naturalists like Searle and Anthony) is that if naturalism is true there is not OBJECTIVE purposes or meanings. And this is perfectly compatible with Louise's subjective purposes regarding her children, with Marcus Borg's subjective purposes of destroying the exclusivistic view of Jesus on behalf of religious pluralism, with Kobe Bryant's subjective purposes of being the NBA MVP this year, with Jime Sayaka's subjective purposes of making clear my arguments for my readers, with the atheistic readers' subjective purposes of reading uncharitably and disagreeing with whatever I write here, or with William Lane Craig's subjective purposes of defending traditional Christianity.

The existence of a bunch of subjective purposes in people's minds don't imply the existence of objective purposes in the fabric of reality.

I'm astonished by the replies of first-rate atheistic moral philosophers when faced with a sophisticated defense of the moral argument for God's existence. They simply don't understand the argument, or they affect to misunderstand it (I'm sure some of them understand it, because in their books they themselves sometimes highlights the problems of objective moral values in a physicalist world... they simply affect to misunderstand the argument in order to make naturalism to appear stronger when debating with theists in front of audiences ignorant of their own academic work).

Their weak replies, which are incompatible with their own actual philosophical views, is evidence for the soundness of contemporary versions of the moral argument, as properly understood in its broad metaphysical context.

Shopping list metaphysics vs serious metaphysics, the location problem for naturalism and the metaphysical superiority of theism

Some naturalistic thinkers assume what we could call a "shopping list" way to do metaphysics (remember that metaphysics studies the nature and constitution of reality). This means that they assume metaphysical naturalism (roughly, the view that the physical world, and only the physical world, exists) and from this they begin his metaphysical "shopping". (In the above picture, you can imagine a list including "evolution", "planets", "intelligent design", "near-death experiences", and the naturalist marking only evolution and planets, but ignoring near-death experiences and intelligent design)

From the assumption of naturalism, they try to explain the facts of the world, selecting carefully only the facts that fit their worldview. Physical facts fit perfectly and easily in this naturalistic worldview, but other facts or putative facts like consciousness, intelligence, moral values, mathematical objects, paranormal phenomena, etc. don't fit well or easily in this worldview. As consequence, shopping list naturalistic thinkers are forced either to DENY the existence of these phenomena, or alternatively, accept them as BRUTE (unexplained) facts. (Note that in both cases, the naturalistic position cannot be refuted, whatever the facts. The facts are twisted, renamed, modified, redefined or altered in any way as to fit the naturalistic-atheistic worldview. This kind of naturalists are intellectual cowards).

This is the position of many online atheists, some writers for infidels.org website, popular atheist writers and, generally, unsophisticated thinkers. A fine example of this egregious intellectual unsophistication by a naturalist is Michael Shermer and his Shermer's Last Law (see my post about it here).

In contrast, serious and sophisticated metaphysical naturalistic thinkers, even if beginning also from naturalism, realize the shopping list approach makes their position largely unfalsifiable, and in order to avoid such self-delusion, they explicitly DRAWS the implications of naturalism and confront these implications with the facts. If the facts fit the implications, naturalism survives; if not, naturalism is refuted. These naturalists are honest enough as to put their worldview under empirical and philosophical test. They're intellectually honest.

These naturalists have used the concept "The Location Problem" precisely as a name for the problem of placing certain facts or phenomena in the naturalistic framework.

First-rate naturalistic philosopher and metaphysician Crispin Wright comments on this problem in this way:

"A central dilemma in contemporary metaphysics is to find a place for certain anthropocentric subject-matters—for instance, semantic, moral, and psychological—in a world as conceived by modern naturalism: a stance which inflates the concepts and categories deployed by (finished) physical science into a metaphysics of the kind of thing the real world essentially and exhaustively is. On one horn, if we embrace this naturalism, it seems we are committed either to reductionism: that is, to a construal of the reference of, for example, semantic, moral and psychological vocabulary as somehow being within the physical domain—or to disputing that the discourses in question involve reference to what is real at all. On the other horn, if we reject this naturalism, then we accept that there is more to the world than can be embraced within a physicalist ontology—and so take on a commitment, it can seem, to a kind of eerie supernaturalism". (Wright's brilliant contribution to the book Conceivability and Possibility. p. 401. Emphasis in blue added)

Please, read slowly and carefully again Wright's argument, because it contains a very powerful insight and goes straight to the core of the problem.

Let's comment it in more detail:

1-Wright realizes the problem of placing certain phenomena or facts (which he calls anthropocentric subject-matters, like semantic, moral and psychological facts) in a naturalistic worldview which, ultimately and essentially, is NOT anthropocentric. In a different terminology, I've discussed the same problem in a previous post about worldviews which are "person-relative" (like theism) and "impersonal" (like naturalism).

You can formulate the problem like this: in a world conceived by scientific naturalism, the world is essentially insentient, impersonal, mechanistic and hence NOT anthorpocentric (= non-personal). So, where are you to place in that worldview, person-relative (anthropocentric) facts and phenomena like consciousness, semantic properties, moral values, mathematical objects only known through rational minds, free will, the causal efficacy of intention, etc.?

Can you understand the problem? If not, please read again all the section above, because it is essential to the following argumentation.

2-Confronted with these problematic facts, the consistent naturalists have only two plausible choices (while remaining fully consistent naturalists), which put them in a dilemma:

a)Reduction: To identity the facts in question with physical facts (e.g. psychological facts with certain physical behaviours, or semantic properties with brain processes).

b)Denialism: To deny that those facts exist.

Note that the option "reduction" is very unlikely. Consider moral values like "honesty" or "impartiality". These values are not physical entities nor properties (even though they can be instantiated in persons and in personal situations). By themselves, they have not matter, energy, not location in space or time. If they exist, they certainly are not physical objects.

Or consider semantic properties that include "propositional content" and intentionality (=the property to refer to things outside themselves). The statement "Jime's blog is great" refers to Jime's blog (note that the statament is in your mind, but my blog is outside your mind, so your mind is referring to something outside the mind itself).

Physical objects don't "refer" to anything. They're connected simply in virtue of physical laws and causality, not by semantic relations of "reference" (reference being a property of concepts and propositions, which exist in people's minds; and causality and physical laws being properties of physical-mechanical objects).

Note that "reduction" of semantic properties to neurophysiological processes won't work, because these cerebral processes (like any other physical process) is governed by physical laws of causality, not by "reference" or intentionality. So, instead of explaining reference, it is actually explained AWAY by the reductive naturalistic method.

As naturalistic philosopher Alex Rosenberg concedes: "It is of course obvious that introspection strongly suggests that the brain does store information propositionally, and that therefore it has beliefs and desire with “aboutness” or intentionality. A thoroughgoing naturalism must deny this, I allege. If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires"

A configuration of matter, just in virtue of its physical properties, cannot "refer" to anything. They can only be "connected" with something in virtue of physical laws. Hence, the actual relation of "reference" (in the samantic sense) cannot be accounted for by scientific naturalism.

The option of "denialism" is simply to say that such objects or entities like moral values, mathematical entities, etc. don't exist. We'd have a bunch of beliefs (e.g. moral beliefs) about a non-existent and purely illusory reality (e.g. a moral reality). This is the option taken, for example, by Keith Augustine, Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse, and other naturalists about moral values.

But note that, at the end, the method of "reduction" and the method of "denialism" have the same consequence: namely, they don't provide an explanation for the facts. Reduction only is a trick to appear to explain something, without explaining it really.

3-Finally, Wright considers the possibility that, confronted with these person-relative facts and having been unsuccesful with the methods of redution and denialism, we have to accept that naturalism is false and hence, some version of supernaturalism has to be true. (The word "supernaturalism" is disliked by many people, including many supernaturalists. If you don't like the word, you can substitute it by a "spiritualistic" or "personalistic" worldview, i.e. a worldview based on persons, not on mechanical matter).

The supernaturalism is implied by the existence of person-relative properties, because these properties prove that there is more to the world than can be embraced within a physicalist (naturalistic) worldview.

Theism as an alternative worldview:

Theism (the worldview based on God's existence) is a personalistic worldview which, if true, implies and predicts the existence of person-relative properties in the world:

1.It predicts the existence of consciousness (because God, the creator, is itself a conscious being)

2-It predicts the existence of intelligence and rationality (because God, the creator, is itself an infinitely intelligent and rational being).

3- (As consequence of point 2) It predicts the existence of semantic properties, because in order to be rational you have to think logically, and logic connects propositions which in turn have semantic content.

4.It predicts the existence of an universe which is rationally intelligible (because God, the creator of the universe, is rational)

5-It predicts the existence of spirits (because God, the creator, is essentially a spirit and his whole creation was intented to allow the spiritual evolution of the spirits created by God). So, spiritual phenomena fit perfectly in this framework.

6-It predicts the existence of objective moral values (because God, being the creator of all reality, is also the creator of the moral reality, and being greatest possible being, is also the greatest possible moral being and hence the locus and source of value, the paradigm of the "good", and his creation has an objective, mind-independent moral dimension for morally sensible, rational and free entities created in it by God).

7-It predicts the causal efficacy of consciousness and intention (because God, being the spiritual creator, actually created the world using his own intentions. It implies that in theism, the causal efficacy of intention and consciousness is a basic property of them. So we would expect that finite, imperfect creatures like us, sharing in a limited form some of God's properties, also enjoy of a limited portion of his causal powers). The placebo effect, bio-feedback and our common experience (e.g. lifting an arm at will) is evidence for this. Psychokinesis would be a more dramatic and less common example of this.

Note that naturalists could try to explain one problematic fact appealing to the other, but it wont' help them (because the explanatory fact appealed to is itself a fact implied by theism and at variance with naturalism).

For example, naturalists could explain morality appealing to rationality (e.g. morality is what a rational agent would do), but rationality itself is a person-relative property implied by theism, not by naturalism.

Naturalists could try to explain objective moral values appealing to sentience or consciousness, but sentience and consciousness are person-relative properties implied by theism, not by naturalism.

So, this strategy actually pushes the problem a step back and doesn't help the naturalist, because the explanatory entity used as explanation-(rationality, sentience, consciousness) are themselves evidences for theism and in tension with naturalism.

Clearly, theism seem to be a far better overall explanation for ALL the facts of our experience.