Church Voices

3 Responses to “The Black Box of Humanity”

1. Chad McIntosh Says:
   September 26th, 2005 at 7:50 am

   J P Moreland has a good section on this in Scaling the Secular City. Strict determinism espoused by naturalistic evolution can’t even account for simple rationality in which takes place to reach certain conclusions. Moreland calls these “rational oughts”, meaning, given certain forms of evidence, one ought to believe some things. He then gives the classic example: “if one accepts the propositions ‘all men are mortals’ and ‘Socrates is a man,’ and then one ought to believe ‘Socrates is a mortal.’” Failure to do so makes one irrational.

   “But if physicalism [inherent within such a notion of naturalistic evolution] is true,” Moreland asserts, “it is hard to see how one mental state (the state of believing the first two propositions) could stand to another mental state (the state of believing the last proposition) in an inferential relation which prescribes that one ought to have the last mental state. Physical states simply are; they are not things that “ought” to be. The connection between premises and conclusion is not a physical relation of cause and effect. It is a logical relation of inference.”

   Then he quotes Stephen Clark, who puts it this way:

   “Any merely materialistic or naturalistic metaphysician must have considerable difficulty in accommodating any rules of evidence. If what I think is the echo or epiphenomenon merely of material processes, so that my thought is what it is because my neural chemistry is what it is, it seems very difficult to see how that thought can be one that I ought to have or ought not to have. It might of course be better (because more accurate?) if I did, or if I did not, but I can be under no obligation to have it, whether because it is true or because it ‘follows’ from other thoughts of mine, any more than I have an obligation to cause my heart to beat. My thoughts ‘follow’ from other thoughts only in the sense that the causal processes which accompany them, or which (on the strictest materialist interpretation) we misdescribe as ‘thoughts’, take place in ways that can be duplicated in test-tubes, and partially understood. True and consistent materialists ought not to claim that their arguments are ones which anyone ought to accept, or which anyone has any reason to think are true-in-fact. Materialism generates pragmatic relativism, and this in turn renders the materialist hypothesis a mere fable.”

   If this weren’t enough, the abover is just the beginning of the problem materialists face in this regard.

2. steve Says:
   September 28th, 2005 at 3:42 pm

   He’s published a book on the topic, probably by the same title, which I haven’t taken the trouble to snatch up. Though thinking about it makes my mind drool….ok, but he sends this thesis to several representitives from diverse worldviews and has them try to dice it up. Then he answers them in the last chapter.

   Naturalism asserts something along the lines of-
   Natural selection has had enough time to provide myraid diverse scenarios where those who were deceived in one neutral/advantageous instance would fail in another. Basically, it is more advantageous overall to be right, which would result in the right genes for perception sorting through the cheese-grater of natural selection.
   The same general principle applies to logic as the physical example. There may not be a “higher” explination for why a conclusion follows from two valid premises, but it simply does work in real life logic. And to live otherwise is insane, so we may as well embrace it. If the cosmos had happened to be constructed another way then we’d all be using that logic, but to think that way now approaches silliness.

   Some problems with the above…
   They both argue in a circle, but it’s entirely necessary when we call consciousness into question (how would you externally verify it, after all). This still doesn’t give the worldview any offensive weight, but merely raises the possibility that perhaps it’s internally consistant. Second, the mechanism with which natural selection operates (technically “mechanism” is a contested word concerning said idea) isn’t clearly deliniated. Exactly HOW does this sort through all or most troubles? Third, many things are inconsequential to survivability, such as leaf shape for certain species of oak trees. How can we be sure our minds aren’t consistantly wrong with respect to these, and, of course, much more pressing, though nonfatal, issues?
   What do you guys think?

3. Chad McIntosh Says:
   September 28th, 2005 at 5:19 pm

   Plantinga or Moreland?

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