… is for sale.
04/05/2011
Arguments from belief, design, morality and infinity
William Lane Craig and Lawrence Krauss debated. Who won? According to atheists, Krauss won hands down. According to Christians, Craig mopped the floor with Krauss.
I think neither won. I don’t want to go into depth here, but just make a few points. First, arguments from the actions of the witnesses does not prove anything except the belief of those who engaged in those actions. If somebody allowed themselves to be martyred, then it is probably reasonable to conclude that they believed in the cause for which they were martyred. But that doesn’t prove that belief to be accurate.
The argument from infinity has something going for it. Namely, the concept of infinity is not truth-apt. Take infinity, and subtract three. How many do you get? An infinity. If the set consists of actual objects, subtracting three would decrease the number. The fact that the number hasn’t suffered of loss of three proves that you aren’t working with truth-apt concepts. Put another way, infinity is indeterminate. But actual objects are determinate. Thinking of infinity as actually possible is a form of idealism.
The argument from objective moral values presupposes that which has yet to be established, and I would argue that objective moral values are impossible and we ought to know they are impossible. If moral values are subjective valuations (and I cannot imagine them as anything else) they are not objective. You value a welfare state. I value individual freedom. Who is right? Nobody. It’s like asking who is right, the man who likes the blue shirt or the one who likes the red shirt?
The argument from design is the meaningful, but the atheists don’t seem to get it. The idea is that something that has design has a designer. Call it inductive reasoning: Everything we encounter which has a design has been designed. This applies to computers, cars, houses, etc. But what of natural complex objects which serve are united in serving a purpose, as the leaves and the roots of a tree? Dennett argues that there is one design space; the rule of parsimony allows reject arbitrarily postulating more than one. But the one design space we know is the intentional one, the intelligent one.
No, Krauss, says, Darwin proved that there is no design in the universe. But Darwin proved no such thing. He didn’t even argue it. Let’s review what Darwin told us:
The Christians say that cars are magical creations of God. Darwin says they aren’t. He says they are built in a factory. The Christians say that the factory couldn’t possibly build cars. Darwin goes through the process step by step showing that the factory is perfectly capable of creating cars without help from magic. Long story short, a lot of evidence is discovered to prove that the factory is perfectly capable of building cars without human or Divine assistance.
So, yeah, the factory can build cars automatically. Darwin did not answer the question, Who built the factory?
How do we know if the factory was built by a designer, or if it was the result of random designerless events? Dennett, Dawkins and others cite a process of natural selection working on chance events. The key is the word “chance.”
Chance does indeed prove designerlessness, in one sense. Say I accidentally drop some spice into my omelet. I try it, and it tastes good. This is chance and it means I did not intentionally design the omelet to taste that way. Chance proves designlessness. But what is chance, again? It is the absence of intention. So when Dawkins says that chance (absence of intention) proves absence of intention (chance) be is arguing in a circle. He’s assuming precisely that which needs to be proven.
The other meaning of the word chance is “random.” Now, if random acts occurred, and they resulted in something complex which served a single purpose, we would indeed be in the position to declare that design does not need a designer. We could kick those Christian, Jews, Muslims and others to the curb without a second thought. But what occurred randomly and produced anything? The universe, you say? You’re equivocating. You’re using “random” or “chance” in the sense of “unintended” and you are assuming precisely that which needs to be proven. Surely you do not mean “random” or “chance” in the sense in which you need to use it – that it occurred outside of a causal chain of events. Nothing happened outside the causal chain.
What we need to do to put this all to rest is hook up a robot to a truly random command generator, and see what it builds. If it can build something complex which serves a single purpose, yippee, design without designer.
Now some people are bound to point in the direction of Conway’s Game of Life and say, that’s complexity resulting from randomness. It isn’t. The design is the algorithm. We can construct algorithms which take random acts and produce orderly results until we are blue in the face; what you need to do is get rid of the algo and run the program, and then see if something meaningful results. For instance, have random letters generated and see if a readable novel results.
All in all, the debate on both sides is disappointing and an insult to the intelligence of the audience. But then, the audience (online) is arguing that Craig is a “slime ball” because the Catholic Church killed a lot of people; perhaps an insult to their intelligence is in order.
08/20/2010
Conceptual Origination
David Hume, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, writes thus:
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
This passage seems odd to me. First off, Hume states, “it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses.” This would seem to be saying that the mind cannot exceed the original stock of ideas furnished by internal and external senses.
Now allow me to correct Hume – bring him up to date, so to speak. Sensations do not furnish passive minds with ideas. When we look out the window, we are not presented with the ideas “men,” “cars,” “bicyclists,” etc. Our vision presents us with a single image; our minds (not sensations) break that image down into different objects. We further create schema to accommodate those objects into our perceptual sets.
That minor correction aside, Hume goes on to assert that we have “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas.” Now here’s my question: If we have unlimited power of mixing and compounding, etc, then we are not limited to our “original stock of ideas,” are we? Hume seems to want it both ways; to deny conceptual origination while specifying precisely how conceptual origination occurs.
Let’s make this clear: If conceptual origination does not occur, we will not have any concepts in our minds that do not correspond with real objects.
05/16/2010
Feeble Child Theory of Man Repudiated
Jessica Watson sailed around the world. As she returned home, she was met by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who hailed her as “Australia’s newest hero.” “You do our nation proud,” he said. “You are a hero for young Australians … and young Australian women.”
But Watson said she had to disagree with Mr Rudd as “I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who had a dream. You just have to have a dream and set your mind to it.’’
Reading the comments on the blogs, we can see fairly clearly who is offended by the heroic theory of man and the accompanying repudiation of the feeble child theory of man.
05/13/2010
Bertrand Russell Not a Communist
In Bertrand Russell’s short essay, Why I Am Not a Communist, Russell provides two objections to Marx. First, Marx was “muddle headed,” and secondly “his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.”
Russell summarizes Marxism thus:
The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.
Russell could have gone a bit further back to look at the foundation of Marx’s claims – i.e., the moral theory of desert – but he doesn’t do that. Why? Perhaps because Russell himself wants to retain the use of desert in his own moral and political theories.
Russell then identifies another problem thus:
The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917, however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great majority being peasants. it was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultimately of one man – Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps.
…
But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous.
The idea is that if a larger percent of the population consented to the policies, they would be justified. But the dictatorship of the majority, as history has shown us, can be just as murderous as a dictatorship of a minority.
The history of leftism could be described as one long struggle against acknowledging a single fact. Leftism wants to impose collectivism on the people. This necessarily involves the forced surrender of individual sovereignty to the collective authority. This much is good, to the leftist. Now he can take your wages and distribute your earnings according to his morality. He can tell you who to employ, how to employ them and who not to employ. He can dictate that the your child’s education conform to his morality. He can force you to participate in schemes which serve his conception of the greater good. The leftist is happy.
The problem arises when the collective authority deviates from the leftist’s conception of morality. Modern liberals and communitarians in America denounce constitutional impediments to the exercise of popular sovereignty and democracy. Then they turn around and invoke individual sovereignty when the majority deviates from their morality.
A typical example of this hypocrisy is the invocation of popular sovereignty in the service of universal health care, and the simultaneous invocation of individual sovereignty when they attempt to combat referendums – the very epitome of popular sovereignty in action – which denied gays the right to marry.
The question for the leftist then is, how do we give collective authority to the majority without the majority abusing that authority? As I’ve argued before, it cannot be done. Once you’ve declared that “justice” is synonymous with the will of the majority; and “injustice” is synonymous with any act that deviates from the will of the majority, you’ve just justified any and all atrocities the majority can will itself to commit.
The collectivist, however, refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual. By this time, he probably knows in his heart that the collectivism will necessarily result in atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, but he thinks the benefits he derives from collectivism – primarily, coercive wealth redistribution and the ability to indoctrinate children in their beliefs – these benefits outweigh the risks.
And that is where individualists disagree. No benefits can justify collectivism. Even if torturing just one child could wipe out all illness social and physical for all eternity, it would not be justified. Justifying that which is intrinsically unjust is logically impossible.
05/06/2010
Private Property Contradicts Consent
Michael Sandel, the communitarian professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has a beginners level lecture series online.He covers the spectrum of moral philosophies and overall it’s a good series.
He is, however, a communitarian; communitarians define themselves roughly as “opposed to any variant of individualism.” They believe in group rights, not individual rights. As pluralists, they will respect your rights only in terms of your group membership.A horrid and oppressive ideology, if you ask me.
Anyway, watching the series I noticed that he is for the most part fair in his representation of libertarian philosophy. I did notice one “oops” moment, though. He mentioned almost as an aside that John Locke had contradicted himself by arguing for consent-based justice while at the same time allowing private property ownership. Sandel says, “This great theorist of consent came up with a theory of private property that didn’t require consent.” To Sandel, Locke has contradicted himself; Sandel refers to this as “the darker side of Locke.”
There is no contradiction. Locke didn’t demand that individuals secure the consent of others for everything they do; only acts which affect the property rights of others – property of self or property in land.
MEN being, as has been said, by nature all free equal, and independent. no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent…
Now, for Sandel’s implied claim of a contradiction to be meaningful, he would have to show that private property deprives others of their property somehow.
Now, I know what Sandel is thinking. All private property within a nation, to Sandel, belongs to everybody. When an individual claims part of it, he is depriving others of property without their consent. But that is nothing more than willful ignorance of Locke’s theory of ownership.
How could all the land within a nation belong to everybody in the first place? Did they mix their labor with the land? Then it’s theirs; and nobody else can claim it. The difference here is that Locke doesn’t recognize Sandel’s collectivization of the land in the first place. To Locke, the land is unowned. It has no owner, so when an individual mixes his labor with it and thereby claims it for himself, he has no deprived anybody of their land.
What I’d really like to see is Sandel’s argument for collective ownership of land that nobody has mixed their labor with.
05/03/2010
Libertarianism from A to Z
Libertarianism, from A to Z by Jeffrey Miron
Jeffrey Miron is a professor of economics at Harvard University and an outspoken libertarian. His new book, Libertarianism from A to Z, has just come out and is available at Amazon.
There are many defenses of libertarian thought out there. I dare say libertarians do not need any more of those. (See: Lomasky’s Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community and Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea)
Libertarianism, A to Z, is more of an exposition of applied libertarianism. Miron shows how libertarianism deals with problems as diverse as abortion, affirmative action, bank regulation, disaster relief, drug prohibition, drunk driving laws, false advertising, gun control, immigration, marriage, national defense, organ sales, paternalism, prostitution, public schools, religion and taxpayer subsidized sports stadiums, just to name a few.
Highly recommended reading for anybody who aspires to political literacy.
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