SDG here (still not Jimmy) with one more response to the first round of reader comments on the materialism posts.
[Reader 1] This is well presented so far, SDG. In my experience, the ultimate move tht materialists will make in the face of the sort of argument you’re developing is to bite the bullet and say, in essence, "Fine. If it turns out that the basic moral intuitions we start with turn out to be illusions and all we’re ultimately left with is subjective preference, then we’ll just have to accept that. What you can’t do is use this sort of argument to prove the existence of a God, because the structure of such an argument would be that if God does not exist then the moral situation would be intolerably bad. But that’s a fallacious structure. We have to follow the evidence, and if it turns out that there is no God, and if it turns out that in the absence of a God we have no objective ground for our moral notions, then I guess we have no objective ground for our moral notions." I actually think this is a fair response by the materialist. I believe there are, in fact, good reasons for theism (and Christian theism, in particular), but I’m not sure it’s fair to argue for theism based upon the need to ground morality.
[Reader 2] My point is – suppose that you are right about the consequences of naturalism. Suppose that our moral judgments have a naturalistic origin, this would render them meaningless. All we know about the real world is that we *think* our judgments are meaningful. So this argument that naturalism ultimately undermines these judgments is not really an argument for God’s existence because under both theories – the theory that God gave us morality and the theory that morality evolved naturally we might *think* our judgments were meaningful. It just turns out that if you’re correct about the consequences of naturalism, we would be mistaken in some deep sense in thinking that our lives have meaning (let me again point out that I don’t think this is the case!).
I think we can say something stronger than "we *think* our judgments are meaningful." I think that our apprehension of morality is itself a kind of evidence — not evidence that can be empirically tested or proved, but still evidence of a real sort.
I do think it’s important to accept the limitations of human knowledge — of all kinds. We are finite beings; with the arguable exception of Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am,") there are very few things we know so immediately that our knowledge excludes all logical possibility of doubt. To that we might also add apprehension of self-evident truths or logical axioms, such as "X = X" and "If A = B and B = C, then A = C.".
Even in those cases, though, there are schools of, um, thought, that essentially deny that consciousness itself has any real existence, that behavior alone is real, and that even the most universal of axioms are really only expressions of how our brains happen to work rather than any sort of meaningful insight.
I — I, I say — I have no use for such lines of thought. I can’t prove empirically that I exist, since anything empirical is merely a form of behavior. And the unprovability of axioms is itself, if not axiomatic, at least proverbial.
Yet this is not because the self or self-evident truths are too dubious for proof, but because "proof" and "evidence" are remote and clumsy ways of approaching knowledge less immediately accessible to us than knowledge of self or of self-evident truths. Empirical evidence is a secondary form of knowledge compared to self-awareness. I am more directly aware of my own self than I am of anything my senses apprehend. The phenomenon of consciousness is the one phenomenon I experience most directly and immediately.
I can’t prove, over against the skeptical epistomologist or even over against the wiseacre who says "I don’t get it," that "If A = B and B = C, then A = C" represents a meaningful insight rather than an arbitrary convention. I can’t prove that the words being formed as I type represent thoughts (true or false is another question entirely), that there is anything going on here other than twitching fingers on a keyboard and patterns of digital information of a certain complexity level being organized, stored and transmitted electronically.
Even to talk about "proving" such things is meaningless, if there is any sense in which any speech is more or less meaningless than any other. Any discussion of "proof" or "proving," even (I think) in the most abstract mathematical sense, by definition at least presupposes the reality of mind and thought and the validity of reasoning, if not the possibility of meaningful knowledge of reality through sense experience and inference and insight. These principles are antecedent to all possible proofs.
I suppose someone might say that mind, thought and reason are postulates that lead to useful conclusions, but I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way of putting it. It seems to me more meaningful to say that we are finite beings whose apprehension of reality is finite and imperfect, but real. Self-awareness, sensory perception, and logical insights are all finite and imperfect but real ways of knowing and exploring reality.
Then there’s the problem of other minds. As a self-aware being, I (substitute yourself here, if you are a self-aware being) am directly aware of myself; I am not directly aware of other selves, nor can I empirically prove their existence. It is possible to build a solipsistic philosophy that explains the whole world in relation to oneself, and this cannot be empirically disproved, for the same reason that I can’t produce an empirical proof that I myself exist.
This, in my view, is not reason to doubt that other selves exist; it is reason to regard empiricism as a limited and imperfect tool for understanding the world. To know other selves, to have relationships with other persons, does involve what could be called a leap of faith, but it’s a warranted leap, as nearly everyone recognizes.
It’s worth noting that solipsism, i.e., skepticism in regard to the existence of other selves, is not the default from which we escape into community only if we can satisfy ourselves by proof or argument that the leap is justified. Proof and argument mean nothing to a two-year-old, but if his mother loves him, the two-year-old implicitly knows it, and her. He has a knowledge of her reality that escapes the empiricist and solipsist who look only at behavior.
In regard to the knowledge of other selves, the leap of faith by which enter into relationships with one other, by which we love and are loved, is a more valid means of knowing the truth of one another than empirical squinting and tally sheets of what we can and can’t prove. No, I can’t prove it. I don’t think "proof" is the right measure here.
In my last post I quoted Lewis on the incompatibility of loving a girl and believing the totality of her being to be reducible to the movement of atoms. To know another person is a form of knowledge that exceeds the scientific method — either that, or else as Lewis says it is merely "a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes."
I can’t prove scientifically that Suzanne loves me — or, for that matter, that I love her. I can’t prove scientifically that "I love you" is a meaningful statement, apart from a very imprecise adducement of certain behavioral characteristics and physiological events that tend to correlate with accepted declarations of love.
Even if we reduce love to physiology and make it subject to rigorously scientific examination, no one in fact has that kind of scientific evidence regarding even the behavior of his or her beloved. We take love on trust; we go above and beyond the available evidence, rather than, say, hiring a private investigator to tail our beloved 24/7 (to say nothing of lab tests to check our beloved’s physiological responses). Hiring a P.I. or getting a lab test might provide us with more data; it could not increase the knowledge of the beloved that we have on faith and love.
Having said that, it must be acknowledged that the knowledge of others that we come to by making this leap of faith can be in error in particular cases. The beloved we believed loved us in return did not; the one we thought faithful was not. In the Internet age, we may be deluded as to the sex, age, race and other characteristics of the persons we think we know. Someday I expect they may succeed in inventing computer programs capable of passing the Turing test, programs that can "pass" for sentient beings in conversation. (So far that hasn’t happened.)
Yes. We may be mistaken in what we think we know. Welcome to being a finite creature with imperfect apprehension of reality. On the other hand, the impossibility of logically excluding error doesn’t warrant refusing to make any leap. There are worse things than risking the possibility of error. A passenger on a sinking ship cannot then and there establish beyond doubt that the lifeboat will or even can successfully bear him to safety. A castaway on a desert island cannot do lab tests on the stream he finds to establish beyond doubt that the water is safe. That’s life. Do the best you can, pay your money and take your chances.
We apprehend logical axioms, such as "X = X" and "If A = B and B = C, then A = C," by a faculty we call reason, and we take these apprehensions for meaningful insights rather than just how our brains happen to work. We also have the experience of apprehending fundamental moral precepts such as "Do good and avoid evil" and "Be fair to others" by a faculty we call conscience, and take these also for meaningful insights rather than how our brains happen to work.
We don’t experience awareness of good and evil as emotive impulses like any other that may be indulged or ignored as we see fit. Nor do we experience conscience as something we accept purely on the authority of those who taught us. We experience it as binding, as obligatory, as authoritative. We are free to decide to ignore other impulses without regret; when we go against conscience, or even when we find that we have gone against what our conscience now tells us we should have done, we experience various forms of inner conflict such as guilt or regret.
I am convinced, and in the preceding posts I have argued, that if materialism is true, these seeming insights are fundamentally illusory; just as if solipsism is true, then knowledge of other selves is an illusion. If materialism is true, there is self-interest, there is instinct, there are irrationally conditioned feelings, and that’s all. None of these gets us to a moral worldview properly so called. Sometimes it will make sense to follow one or another of them, but none of them is finally binding.
To affirm materialism seems to me akin to proposing in effect that the human race lives in a black-and-white world, yet we all dream in color; we have a shared sense of a dimension of reality that corresponds to nothing real. As another reader put it, "If the universe really is meaningless, how is that we crave meaning? It’s as extraordinary as expecting sight in a universe without light."
In another forum, "Archie the bright," responding to Lewis’s comments about the impossibility of what we call love in a materialist universe, wrote:
Does a flower look any less pretty if you understand the chemistry of anthocyanins? Does a biochemist dislike the taste of filet mignon? And when I am near an attractive girl, I know that my olfactory centres are responding to her perfume and pheromones, but that doesn’t stop my heart beating faster just the same! Sure, that too is perfectly explicable, but explanation does not diminish the pleasure in the slightest!
Leave aside the fact that "Archie" seems to be describing precisely what Lewis meant by the "lowest animal sense" of love. The fact that a man’s hear beats faster in the presence of a pretty girl, while it is not the same as what Lewis meant by love, is still a notable fact in itself. It is evidence about what sort of species we are. As Lewis himself elsewhere wrote, it would be an odd thing if the phenemonon of "falling in love" (or even ordinary animal arousal) happened in a sexless world.
Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search For Meaning went so far as to argue, against Freud, that meaning, not the pleasure principle, represents man’s most fundamental need and desire. Frankl was in Auschwitz, and he has described his time in Auschwitz as an experience of the most ignoble and noble of humanity. On the ignoble side, the camp guards hustling prisoners into the gas chambers; on the noble side, prisoners going to their deaths with their heads held high, the words of the Paternoster or Shema on their lips.
I’ve indicated in previous discussion that belief in life after death is no sine quo non of my outlook on morality and meaning. But when I read Frankl’s description of the prisoners going to their deaths, something in me responds to that — something that I believe, I cannot prove, exceeds Darwinian calculations. My heart says: Yes. A philosophy that does not give one the wherewithal to die like that, if it comes to the point, is unworthy of the human heart.
It seems to me that the leap of my heart at Frankl’s anecdote is also evidence about what sort of species we are. The first movement of the heart is sexual; the second is spiritual.
Like falling in love with a girl, it is not a thing that can be reductionistically explained away to those who have experienced it. If the thing is real at all, it is real about something more than bio-electrical-chemical flutters in our brains.
I respect the consistency of a materialist who says that it is all an illusion, that morality, dignity and meaning are really only emotive reactions of aversion or attraction mistaken for truth-claims about reality. I respect the humanism of a materialist who says that morality, dignity and meaning really mean something. I cannot see that it is possible for a materialist to have both consistency and humanism.
Our apprehension of morality and meaning is immediate enough that even if we hold a philosophy that logically excludes objective morality, willy-nilly we find ourselves talking and behaving as if morality were real anyway (cf. Dawkins’ outrage and Hitchens’ frequent moralizing).
I can’t empirically disprove emotivism, any more than I can disprove solipsism, or any more than I can disprove the views of those who deny the existence of the self and the truth of logical axioms. That doesn’t make me distrust my apprehensions on any of these points. The apprehension itself seems to me a more persuasive indication of reality than the arguments or explanations of its illusory nature.
