The Zombie Problem of Evil

Perhaps the most famous argument against the existence of God is the "Problem of Evil". Although formalized by famous philosophers such as David Hume, many people have come to atheism on the basis of reasoning in line with the argument, without ever even reading academic philosophy. The basis of the argument is the apparent tension between the concept of God and the existence of evil. Formally, the argument takes the following form:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

It may come to a surprise to some atheists, however, that many academic philosophers, even sympathetic atheistic ones, believe that the argument has been refuted. Those who believe this to be the case, often point to Alvin Plantinga's "Free Will Defense" (FWD) as a sound refutation.

In fact, FWD is as an instantiation of a broader response to the Problem of Evil. The response essentially contends that it cannot be logically demonstrated that the existence of evil is unnecessary for the existence of a greater good (an argument which I will now refer to as PGG, as in Possible Greater Good). Because it is possible that the greater good could not be logically disconnected from the permission of evil, and God could not break the rules of logic, God and the existence of evil do not necessarily contradict each other. Plantinga's argument has given this argument force by actually providing a seemingly plausible example of a greater good that cannot logically be untied from allowing evil. This has led atheists to construct probabilistic arguments from evil which aim to show that the best explanation for the existence of evil is that God does not exist.

I contend, though, that the (logical) Problem of Evil can be resurrected (hence the title of the essay). The argument is designed to undercut FWD but I will defend one of the premises with a further argument that aims to undercut the broader response to the problem of evil, the PGG.

First, we must flesh out Plantinga's argument to see how it undercuts the Problem of Evil as it is traditionally stated. The argument makes of heavy use of modal logic or the idea of possible worlds. I'll articulate the essence of the argument without using the technical jargon.

FWD attacks premise two of the Problem of Evil as articulated above. Plantinga believes that God strives to make the best possible world, however, he is constrained by the freedom of his creation. The best possible world would be one in which everyone would freely choose to do good. However, God, logically, does not have the power to ensure that this world become actualized because that would mean the moral agents would not have free will, and thus not live in the best possible world. Instead, God creates the best feasible world (or the best world possible without eliminating free will). Thus, evil exists in the world ( as a result of the free choice of moral agents) and yet God, as classically conceived, exists.

To respond, I first want to table the question of so-called "natural evil", that is the suffering created by natural events. To simply reach for this response is to make a concession that I don't think needs to be made, which is that free will and the elimination of human evil is at odds.

Traditionally speaking, there are three schools of thought on free will: Libertarianism, Compatibilism, and Hard Determinism. Both Libertarianism and Combatabilism affirm the existence of free will, however, the former rejects determinism while the later accepts it. Hard Determinism affirms determinism, but contrasts with Compatibilism on the basis that it rejects free will. Plantinga's argument is predicated on Libertarianism. My argument affirms a species of determinism and thus can be conceived as an argument affirming compatibislm. But instead of merely assuming compatibilism, my argument purports to show that God could prevent evil without eliminating what I think everyone should call free will, thus making the argument immune from the FWD. Here is the argument:

1. If God exists, God would prevent agents from committing acts of evil, if free will could be preserved.
2. All agents have their free will preserved if they retain the capacity to act on their desires.
3.If all agents had their desires to commit an evil act replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts, their free will would be preserved.
4. If all agents had their desires to commit an evil act replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts, no agent would commit an evil act.
5. If God exists, God would replace all desires to commit an evil act with desires to commit non-evil acts.
6. All desires to commit an evil act have not been replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts.
7. Therefore, God does not exist.

Premise one is based on the same logic found in the original problem of evil. This premise concedes to the FWD, however, that free will is a good that God would not want to eliminate. It also assumes that there isn't some other greater good that God would want to preserve, only made possible by the allowance of evil (a point made by PGG proponents). This, then, is the premise that I have said I will defend from the PGG later on. For now, I will focus on the premises that specifically work to rebut the FWD. If premises two through four are sound, then evil can be eliminated without eliminating free will. These are the premises which I will now turn.

Premise two is the most fundamental of the premises. To me it is self-evident that a free agent must maintain their capacity to act on their desires. Reflect on what if would mean for an agent to not have this capacity. By necessity, any action committed by such an agent would be coerced. It is by conceptual necessity then that a free agent must be able to act on his desires.

Now, some may respond that this concession isn't enough. They may say that in at least some circumstances, when people act on their desires they are not acting freely. In other words, it may be a necessary condition for freedom to act on one's desires, but it is not a sufficient condition. One may point to addicts (of any kind) and contend that these people feel compelled to act on their addictive urges, which stand in contrast to their more deliberate desires, such as being financial stable or making their family proud.

This example, however, does not rebut the premise. We may grant that people experience competing desires that vary in their natures, some more immediate or urgent and others that are more abstract and exist upon reflection. But despite the differences, they are all desires. Crucially, those who act upon their addictive urges, are not being compelled in a literal sense, as they are acting in accordance to their will, despite their actions often being in contrast to their long term well-being.

The crucial point is that it is unclear what it would mean for free will to necessitate more than the capacity to act on one's desires. The phenomenological basis of free will is precisely the experience of this capacity. It is thus more plausible than not that this premise is true.

Premise three, it seems to me, follows from premise two. If we contend that an agent retains his free will if he could act on his desires (that is, desires they experience), then his free will would not be eliminated if his desires were merely changed. People's desires change all the time. People work on a paper, until they experience a desire for food. They stay faithful to their wives, until an attractive secretary persuades them to discontinue such behavior. The replacement of desires needed in the argument is one initiated by Divine Command, but why would this make a difference?Outside of perhaps some people performing Pavlovian experiments on themselves, people are not the authors of their desires. In fact if God existed, given His sovereignty, it would be the case that He is the author of every desire that every agent has ever experienced. Thus, even though God has desires replaced, given that agents are allowed to act on the desires they do have, agents still have free will.

If one concedes that desires are a necessary condition for freely willed action ( a basis of premise two), then all that is needed for premise four is a certain account of evil; an account that is shared by philosophers and lay people alike. This account contends that intention is a necessary condition for an act to have moral properties. If intention is a necessary condition for evil, then this precludes the possibility that people can commit evil actions even if they had no desire to do so. In other words, to commit an evil act by accident is to not commit an act of evil at all.

This account of evil is widely shared by philosophers and lay people alike. It is the principle reason why "evil" is not attributed to mechanical entities such as cars. In fact, it is because of this account, that the phrase "natural evil" has always struck me as odd. It seems to me that the only way that acts of nature could become "evil" is if an agent caused or allowed it to happen. Absent technological advancement, then, this phrase seems to ironically presume theism. More to the point, this account of evil strikes me as more true to the concept then its negation.

Now that premise two through four have been established, we must return to premise one to defend it from the PGG. To reiterate, the PGG contends that there is possibly a good that is both necessarily connected to the existence of evil and is great enough to justify evil's existence.With the FWD out of the way, however, the proponents' job has gotten harder not only because they have lost a concrete "good" as a possible candidate. The argument implies a kind of determinism based on desires, and to the extent this is so, then the argument also functions as an argument for Compatablism. If one concedes this desire based determinism established in premises two through four, it no longer seems viable for one to say God merely allows evil. God is causally implicated in the existence of evil. Though the PGG still stands, the proponent must hold the position that God creates evil out of necessity for a greater good.

Typically, the first move for the proponent of the PGG would be to establish that they are in a better epistemic position than those who reject the PGG. Unlike God, we humans are not omniscient. We cannot see how human existence in its entirety fits together. Just like in some cases that an individual may suffer a short term pain or inconvenience, but in the long run actually have been made better off for it, so too can this be the case for the whole of humanity.

At first blush, then, the proponents of the PGG may seem to be more humble epistemically than the proponent of the Problem of Evil, as the proponent is saying the existence of a greater good is merely possible, while the denier rejects this. However, the framing disguises the fact that in order for the PGG to be sound, one would would have to affirm the bold claim that the world cannot be made better without the existence of evil.

In other words, the PGG proponent has to reject the following proposition(ENN), which is the implicit assumption of premise one of the Zombie Problem of Evil :

1. Evil is not logically necessary to attain a morally better world.(ENN)

It is clear to me that to affirm this proposition, one does not need to have access to the full timescale of human existence to make a judgment on whether evil is necessary.The point to remember is that conceptually, God is both omniscient and has the power to do anything logically possible. That includes endowing humans with a nature so as to not need the experience of evil for them to live a maximally good life.

This last fact,specifically, does great damage to the PGG. Responses such as "the existence of evil is necessary for the development of character "or "the existence of suffering leads people to God", are undercut by the fact that it is logically possible for people to have a different nature so as to not need the existence of evil to attain such goods.Given this consideration, coupled with the surrender of free will as the possible good, it seems to me that ENN is much more plausibly true than not true.

There is a consideration, however, that even granting ENN, can undermine the conclusion that God, if he existed, would have created a better world. The consideration is this: What if there is no such thing as the best possible world? This is plausible. Consider a streamlined version of Richard Swinburne's argument: All things being equal, a world is better with more people than less. It is always possible to add more people. Thus, a world that is the best of all possible worlds is impossible. So, is it possible that even though the world could be made better, God would not be obligated to make it so?

A few points in response. First, this consideration by itself, I would argue, actually constitutes a defeater for classical theism. As Lebniz responded to a similar line of argument, if there is no best possible world, then God would be forced to pick a world to create at random. This runs counter to the idea of God's perfection, which in Leibniz's view would mean God would do things for sufficient reasons. I sympathize with this line of reasoning.

Second, the sense of "better", I am referring to is a moral one. Yes, it is may be the case that a "better" world would be one with more people, but to actualize such a world would not have the same moral imperative as improving on a world with pointless suffering on a massive scale. If one concedes, the aforementioned points, this is the world that we are living in, a world that should not exist should there be a God as classically conceived. Thus, even if the world can always be made better, God can be expected to eliminate evil.

With these considerations, if ENN is sound then premise one is on firm ground. Given that premise five follows the previous premises and that premise six is self-evident, the resurrection of the Problem of Evil is complete. It is important to remember that though I do not claim to have demonstrated the truth of all the premises with certainty, that does not mean the premises and thus the argument fail. Such a standard is never applied to any other argument in philosophy, including those articulated by practitioners of Christian apologetics. Though each premise of the argument cannot be demonstrated with logical certainty, they all have strong, if not compelling, reasons to believe they are true, and this being the case, they add up to a persuasive argument that the existence of God and the existence of evil cannot be reconciled.

 ADDENDUM: Now that the defense is complete, I would like to now address what others may perceive to be a tension between two arguments I have made. Previously,  I have defended a position known as moral anti-realism, which contends that there are no moral facts. People may think that this position undercuts the Zombie Problem of Evil, because it is predicated on the existence of evil acts and desires to commit them. The problem with this is that even if you concede moral anti-realism, the Zombie Problem of Evil exposes a tension within theism. The theist is committed to moral realism as God is conceived as a perfectly "good" being. But this conception is in tension with another theistic commitment which is that evil acts, and the desires to commit them also exist. Thus, even a committed moral anti-realist can run the Zombie Problem of Evil and not contradict his own position. To add, I'm not convinced either of the position that moral realism necessitates theism, (reasons for which are outlined in the essay "An Argument for Moral Anti-Realism").

Personally speaking, I am not yet compelled to be a moral anti-realist, however, as a teen, an informal version of the Zombie Problem of Evil, that I myself concocted, did heavy damage to my belief in God and contributed to my abandonment of theism. I think the difference in the effect between the two arguments on my beliefs are largely due to the fact that I never had a strong conviction that God existed, independent of what I was told by authority, while I do feel committed to some sense of moral realism.

An Argument for Moral Anti-Realism

It's been more than two years since I've last made a post, but here I am again. Truth be told, my original posts (which ran about a year from 2014-2015), fleshed out what already was my most well developed thoughts in philosophy. There just wasn't anything more I wanted to say in the format of an essay.

With the exception of one provocative question:

Do moral statements have truth value?

In my view, this is the principal question in meta-ethics. Without an affirmative answer to this question other normative projects in philosophy, such as practical ethics, cannot get of the ground. Answering this question is absolutely crucial for making sense of moral discourse.

Given the ramifications of answering this question, I have been hesitant to put out a definitive statement on my views. Moreover, the topic has and continues to vex me. What I seek to do in this essay, then, is to articulate an argument that, as far as I could tell, is original to me (albeit with heavy indebtedness to Kant and G.E. Moore) in favor of answering this question in the negative. In other words, I defend a position known as "moral anti-realism". After flushing out what I believe to be a strong argument in favor of moral anti-realism, I add some thoughts as to how moral realism can be salvaged.

To begin, what is meant by "truth value"? A statement has truth value, if it could be true or false. For example, "2+2=4" has truth value since it could be said that this is a true statement. Moreover, "The sun is the size of a jelly doughnut" also has truth value, but in this case, the statement is false. These two statements run in contrast to statements of taste, such as "Wendy's breakfast menu is disgusting." Though the sentence structure is similar, the sentence does not have truth value, unless it is modified to be "Wendy's breakfast menu is disgusting to me".

In contrast to the aforementioned statements, there is great puzzlement on the status of moral statements in regards to truth value. What exactly is meant by a statement like "It is wrong to profit off the sickness of others."? Is it declaring a fact? A mere feeling? Various schools of thought have developed on both sides of the realism/anti-realism divide. This post, however, will focus on the divide itself, given its critical importance.

Before delving into the argument, however, I would like to briefly address the temptation to cast the "truth value problem" as a conflict between "objective" and "subjective" morality. Someone who believes in "subjective morality" may claim that yes, there are moral truths, but they are true only for the person who affirms them. Essentially, moral truths are statements of taste. My thought on this position is that it does incredible violence to the concept of morality. Moral statements contain a certain force, a force of obligation, that gets lost when statements are reduced to statements of taste. In my opinion, either moral truths are objective (are not matters of taste) or they do not exist at all.

Now onto to the argument. If it can be shown that moral statements do not have truth value, then moral anti-realism will be affirmed. The following is my argument for moral anti-realism:
1. Moral statements are not analytic statements.
(i.e. they are not synthetic statements).
2. If moral statements have truth value, then moral statements must be analytic statements.
3. Therefore, moral statements do not have truth value.

The argument is logically valid and therefore if both premises are true, then the conclusion logically follows. Before the premises can be defended, however, a brief exposition on the nature of analytic and synthetic statements is required.

Kant classified factual statements into to two basic categories "analytic" and "synthetic". An analytic statement is a statement that is true in virtue of the fact that it's subject is contained in the predicate and vice versa. Take the example, "All thinking men think". This is a logical truth as "think" is found in the subject "thinking men". This is also known as a tautology.

Synthetic statements are more substantive. In contrast to analytic statements, synthetic statements do not feature the subject as being a part of the predicate conceptually. Take the previous example, "The Sun is the size of a jelly doughnut". This is not a logical truth, but instead one established by empirical evidence.  With this classification as a basis, Kant launched his famous epistemological project in the Critique of Pure Reason: How are synthetic, a-priori(before evidence) statements possible? We do not need to get into this project here, but the distinction is crucial for the argument, and for that, the argument is indebted to Kant.(Ironically so, as Kant was the ultimate moral realist!).

Now on to the  defense of the premises; naturally I shall start with premise one. The best demonstration of premise one's truth is G.E. Moore's "Open Question Argument" (OPA). Through the argument, Moore shows that "goodness" cannot be said to be analytically identical with some non-moral property. The reasoning is as follows: If property X were to be identical to goodness, then the question "Is property X good?" would be a closed one. To explain, it would be like asking "Is a bachelor unmarried?". The question is analytically (logically) "Yes". However, for any given X "Is property X good?" remains an open one. Take the example of pleasure. It may seem reasonable to equate pleasure with goodness but it is also reasonable to deny this (consider the dystopian world of "Brave New World"). It cannot be said, however, that it is reasonable to answer "No" to the question "Is a bachelor unmarried?". This openness demonstrates that no property has intrinsic moral content, which means moral statements are not analytic.

Onto Premise Two. To begin the defense, I contend that because of this "openness" any postulating of a property as the essence of goodness, will suffer from an element of arbitrariness, a potentially fatal problem for moral realism if unresolved. Without a solution, it cannot be definitely affirmed, even in principle, that either a certain property (ex. happiness) or type of action (ex. an action done out of duty) constitutes the essence of goodness. The arbitrariness that pervades theories of goodness enables the proliferation of contradicting positions. Different intuitions may point to one theory over an other, but the arbitrariness problem seems to indicate that intuitions are all there is. But no person worthy of being called a moral realist would claim this. It thus seems that the arbitrariness problem must be solved, if moral realism is to be rescued.

Now to the point of the premise: there would be no "openness" and thus no problem of arbitrariness, if moral statements were analytic. If properties such as love or happiness had intrinsic moral content, then questions such as "Is it good to love your neighbor" would be as closed as the question "Are bachelors unmarried?". It seems, though, that since such statements are not analytic, they could only be synthetic, which makes the arbitrariness problem more difficult to solve.

How could moral truths be synthetic? Could moral truths could be grounded on something "out there", as an empirical truth is grounded in what we call the "world". Moral facts however could not be empirical in the traditional sense. One may conduct studies, for example, on the negative impact of theft or what causes it to rise or fall.  But one does not conduct a study to find out if theft is wrong (unless one presupposes that other things are wrong (ex. suffering)).

There is, however, a live philosophical option that moral truths are "out there" and that is the position of Platonism. I will divide the Platonic take on moral ontology into two types: 1. Classic Platonism 2. Theistic Platonism. I will show that neither of these options are viable for moral realism.

Both Platonic views contend that moral truth is grounded in a transcendent reality. In my opinion, the best version of Theistic Platonism is one that makes the "character" of God the reference point for moral facts (see "A Response to Dr. Craig on Beauty"). Things are good to the extent they reflect God's character. Classical Platonism postulates that "the Good" is an abstract object which exists in the same way that numbers do in Platonic metaphysics. Things are good to the extent they reflect the nature of this abstract object.

For the purpose of this essay, the crucial problem with Theistic Platonism is that it does not meet the challenge posed by the Open Question. The ancient Euthyphro problem (found in Plato's Republic) demonstrates why. For those unfamiliar, let us grant Theistic Platonism and suppose that God's character is "loving" (thus making love "good" on this view). We can ask the following question: Is love good because it reflects the character of God or does God have a loving character because love is good?

To be committed to Theistic Platonism necessitates giving the first answer, as the later brings us back to the original starting point of looking for a ground for moral truths. Unfortunately,  the openness/arbitrariness problem rears its ugly head again. It does seem to be an open question as to whether God's character is good. (Think of His controversial behavior in the Bible). On this view, no matter what character trait God exemplifies, such a trait is by definition good. This is clearly arbitrary.

Perhaps Classic Platonism can triumph where Theistic Platonism failed. On the face of it, CP seems to do better in terms of meeting the arbitrariness challenge. It seems to be a closed question as to whether "the Good" is good. However, can an abstract object be the essence of goodness?

The belief in the existence of abstract objects(which is metaphysical view that goes beyond morality) suffers from conceptual difficulties beyond the prima facie strangeness. An abstract object is supposed to be a timeless/space less object, truly transcendent. But all instantiations of goodness are temporal. How can such an object capture whatever property that is related to goodness, such as happiness, love, or honesty?  The Theistic version is superior in this regard, as it seems to make sense that a person (God) can inhabit such concepts.

In addition to conceptual issues, CP does not map on to moral epistemology (or how we come to know moral truths), which as a disclosure is not a point original to me. Though we can and do reason about morality, at the foundations of moral views are assumptions that are based on intuitions as to what constitutes right or wrong. If "the Good" is an abstract object, then if we are to have valid knowledge as to what constitutes goodness, there must be a connection between our intuitions and the object. However, abstract objects are supposed to be causally closed (they don't effect the physical world) and thus there would be no way to connect our intuitions to the source of Goodness. This makes it possible that all our intuitions are systematically wrong, or even beliefs that are the opposite of what is the case. Given that our intuitions are the reason as to why we believe in moral truth, this position is not tenable.

Thus, CP has both severe conceptual and epistemological flaws. This stands in contrast to what would be the case if moral statements were analytic. If this were the case, for moral statements to have truth value, it would not be necessary to postulate a metaphysics with strange implications, but rather all that would be needed is the veracity of logic.

If the analysis is sound, the only way for moral statements to have truth value that both solves the arbitrariness problem and avoids conceptual and epistemological difficulties is if moral statements are analytic. But as we have seen with the exploration of the OPA, they are not. It is thus difficult to escape the argument's conclusion that moral statements do not have truth value which is the thesis of moral anti-realism.

Now that this argument has been flushed out, I want to disclose that I am more than sympathetic to the position of moral realism. I would like to say unequivocally that some things are right or wrong, and quite frankly I don't think I'm going to stop speaking in moral terms. I thus, would like to briefly comment on how my own argument could be rebutted.

The weakest premise is clearly premise two. It may be denied that moral statements need to be analytic, as it could be said that the arbitrariness problem does not need to be fully solved to affirm moral realism. Maybe the most fundamental moral facts are brute, but nonetheless true. It could be said there has to be a stopping point for an explanation somewhere.

Allowing this, one account of morality that seems plausibly true and seemingly affirms moral realism, is a kind of spin-off of John Rawls' Theory of Justice, using the idea of the "Veil of Ignorance". This is the hypothetical scenario where people choose the nature of the basic structures of their society without knowing their own characteristics (gender, race, ethnicity etc.). Instead of describing societal principles, however, the account would deal with actions on an individual level. This thought is not original to me and I won't be arguing the idea here in depth, but once I became aware of the "Veil of Ignorance" it struck me as a plausible ground for right and wrong as it captures the intuition that morality is impartial as evinced by maxims such as "the Golden Rule". The anti-realist rejoinder, however, could be that there is nothing incoherent with "egoism" an account of morality that places self-interest as the ultimate value. Interestingly, unless adjusted, the account itself can also be viewed as anti-realist as it doesn't outline an objective account of "the Good" independent of individual's conception of it.

Less plausibly, premise two may come under attack by a clever philosopher who could make the case that some property (perhaps happiness) really does have intrinsic moral content if you understand the concept deeply enough (undermining premise two). I doubt, however, such a strategy would be convincing to me.

In my opinion the argument I have outlined here for moral anti-realism gets to the heart of the problem for moral realism: It isn't clear as to what it even means for a moral statement to be true or false. Providing an answer that overcomes arbitrariness and avoids problematic metaphysical claims is the key to defending moral realism in a most convincing manner.

Why the Soul Does Not Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Despite the success of the hard sciences, there still seems to be an explanatory gap concerning the existence of consciousness; a gap coined by David Chalmers as the "Hard Problem of Consciousness". Of course, there are people who deny that consciousness needs more explaining, but I'm inclined to agree that there is in fact a "problem". Christian apologists, however, have used this explanatory gap as evidence for the soul; I contend that postulating the soul does not have the explanatory power that they claim.

The explanatory gap concerning consciousness was illustrated Gottfried Leibniz in his famous "Mill Argument". In it, he says to imagine a giant machine that was constructed to think, perceive, and sense. You could enter the machine and observe it all you like;however, you would find only parts pushing on other parts and never anything that would denote consciousness. Substitute Leibniz's machine with the brain, and you have the "Hard Problem of Consciousness". It seems that the only reason we have for believing in the existence of consciousness is our own experience.

Leibniz, like Christian apologists, however, makes the conclusion that materialism must be false. Christians, in particular, argue that by postulating the soul we can close the explanatory gap. God creates and embodies the soul, and this is why we exist as embodied, conscious creatures.

The notion that the soul erases the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", however, is a mistake. The "simple substance" does not pass Leibniz's own standard for an explanation. One can consider a simple substance, (think of its non-extension and lack of parts), but one could not find anything in the concept that would denote consciousness.

Another thought experiment, popular among dualists, illustrates my point:  One can imagine a perfect physical copy of oneself, down to the last atom. The copy looks and acts exactly like the non-copy. However, the copy is not conscious. (Such a being is referred to in philosophical circles as a "zombie"). Conceivable? Then, the dualist argues, consciousness cannot be explained by the physical or materialism.

The problem, however, is that it's equally conceivable for two simple substances to be equal in every feature except for consciousness. In fact, souls seem to share every feature with each other,(non-extension, lack of parts, ext...) except those related to consciousness/personality. Thus,such features are insufficient to explain consciousness. How, then, is the soul closing the explanatory gap?

What I believe this analysis exposes is that any third-person explanation of consciousness seems to lack sufficient explanatory power. Whether one considers complex neural connections or a "simple substance", the conceptual barrier between outer description and first-person experience is one that seems uncrossable. I am not exactly sure what a solution to the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" would look like, but postulating a simple substance isn't it.

Refuting Presuppositionalism

Presuppositional apologetics is a brand of Christian apologetics popularized by the late Greg Bahnsen. It defends theism by contending that God is a necessary presupposition of the veracity of logic, the scientific enterprise, and morality. In this post, I will focus on the contentions on logic and reason, as these contentions are what make presuppositionalism especially distinct and rhetorically effective. Ironically, these contentions are based on faulty presuppositions and are a result of shoddy reasoning.

If one runs into a presuppositional apologist, as I have,a variation of the following questions will probably be asked: "How do you account for the existence of absolute logical laws that have governed mankind/reality for all time?" and "How do you know that reason is valid?". The apologist will often ask "how do you know that?" to whatever a person says with the aim of getting to talk (or getting back to talk) about these bedrock epistemological principles. Broadly, presuppositionalism contends that God is necessary to account for the laws of logic and the fact that human reason aims toward the truth.

First, let  us examine the claims about logic. Presuppositioinalism argues that without God, the laws of logic would have no basis for their universal applicability(an essential feature of them). In order for this to be so, the laws would have to be referring to a transcendent entity, which like the laws themselves, are timeless and necessary (cannot fail to exist). In fact, the apologist would argue that the laws of logic refer to how God thinks. Thus, according to the apologist, because the laws of logic are referring to God's thinking process, we can account for logic's universal applicability.

I won't be articulating a robust philosophy of logic in order to refute the argument, however, I will expose three errors that the argument makes.. The first is that it assumes that there is no distinction between ontological realism and alethic realism. As discussed in my blog post "Reaction to William Lane Craig", "alethic realism contends that statements of a certain discourse have truth-values to them, while ontological realism contends that certain objects exist". One can affirm one realism and not the other. Using the same example from the post, one can hold mathematical statements, (such as 1+1=2), to be true or false without committing to the existence of numbers. With this distinction in mind, it's clear that an "object of reference" is not necessary to explain the laws of logic and their universal applicability.

The second error concerns the idea that the laws of logic "govern" over reality, which is the idea behind the alleged need to ground logical laws in a transcendent entity. If one takes this view seriously, then there are absurd consequences. Consider the Law of Identity. An example of this law in action is the necessary truth of the proposition "A cat is a cat". If we are to understand "governing" as the apologist does, then the Law of Identity governs over all cats so that this proposition is necessarily true, and, moreover, this law is actually how God thinks. This may seem to make sense, but consider the proposition "God is God". If the apologist's view is true, then the Law of Identity governs over God. This entails, on his own view, that God's thinking process "governs" over God, in the sense that it's the reason why "God is God" is true. This is clearly senseless and absurd.

Thirdly, understanding logical laws as the nature of God's thinking is deeply problematic. In my blog post "Encounter with William Lane Craig and the Kalaam Cosmological Argument" ,(yes, it seems I engage with Dr. Craig quite a bit), I argue that God can't be both timeless and a mind, since thinking/consciousness is necessarily temporal. If I'm right, then God's thinking can't be the reference point for logical laws, because that would entail that the laws of logic are contingent on time, which contradicts the fact that the laws of logic are supposed to be necessary.

But it gets worse. Even if we jettison a critical piece of classical theistic theology (that God is timeless, at least without creation), we still have a problem with thinking, because it doesn't seem that an all-knowing God needs to think at all. A person thinks to reach conclusions that they previously did not know, but this clearly can't be the case with an omniscient entity. An apologist may respond that God thinks, just not like us humans. Well, if this is the case,  then God still can't be the reference point for logic because that would mean we humans never think logically! So,  the attributes of both timelessness and omniscience preclude the laws of logic to be about God's thinking process.

With the problems of presuppositionalism's argument from logic exposed, let us move on to its related but distinct argument from reason. When an apologist asks "how do you know reason is valid?", he is attempting to make the case that one needs God to affirm that our cognitive faculties can discern truth. The argument is that without an all-powerful/all-good entity guiding a thinking agent's cognitive faculties, he cannot be confident in the validity of his reasoning, because it's not a guarantee that the faculties have been aimed toward the truth.

The main problem with this argument is one that was more or less articulated by Elizabeth Anscombe in response to C.S. Lewis, who was developing an argument along these lines. The objection is that the questioning of the validity of reason is in fact non-senseical,  since in order to formulate the question one must apprehend the meaning of validity. Once this done, it is clear how discern whether one's reasoning is valid or not: analyze whether it conforms to the rules of logic.

"Truth" should get the same treatment as validity, though it extends beyond logic into the empirical. The point however, is that the meaning of these terms must be transparent in order to prevent them from being non-sense. The transparency precludes such radical epistemological concerns and undercuts arguments based on them.

The arguments from logic and reason are key parts of the presuppositionalist approach to apologetics. With the faultiness of these arguments exposed, presuppositionalism loses much of its force.

Determinism and Epiphenomenalism: A Clarification

The topic of "free will"  is one of  the most enduring and controvertial issues in the history of philosophy. I'm not going to attempt to settle the issue on this humble blog post, but merely bring attention to the fact that two issues can be easily blurred in the debates: epiphenomenalism and determinism. The two issues are related but are distinct and if we're ever to hope that this debate can be settled, the distinction between the two topics must be understood.

First, let's untagle epiphenomenalism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, epiphenomenalism means that mental events are caused by physical events, but mental events do not case physical events. An old, famous comparison is the relationship between the steam created by a locomotive and the locomotive itself. The steam contributes nothing to the action of the locomotive, but is merely a byproduct of it.

Determinism's meaning is more nebuolous. Using Stanford again, a world is deterministic if "given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law". In other words, everything that occurs( including human actions) can be explained by previous states of the world coupled with the laws of nature. If we rewind history and the conditions are the same, there is no wiggle room for people to do other than what they did.

The two issues are related (given the fact that both have an effect on human agency),  however, they are distinct. Epiphenomenalism entails determinism, at least with regard to human action. This is becasue human action is wholly governed by the laws of physics. Ephiphenomenalism, however, contends something further: that human action is in no way caused by human mental life. This is a particularly ghastly view. As philosopher of mind John Searle noted, if epiphenomenalism is true then we are very much mistaken about why we do things. We don't eat because we are hungry, drink because we are thirsty, or cry becasue we are sad. States such as hunger, thirst, or saddness are mental and mental events don't have effects on physical events such as eating, drinking, and crying. Besides the prima facie absurdity, there are a host of problems with the view that won't be addressed here.

A problem that will be examined, however, is that epiphenomenalism seems to be predicated on a dualistic premise; a premise not shared by determinism. In order for epiphenomenalism to be sound, it seems that there needs to be a real, ontological distinction between the mental and physical realms. The mental isn't identical with the physical, substantively.The motivation for this view, then, seems to be that its a way to avoid the problem of having mental events violate the physical closure of the world (the position supported by science that the rules of physics govern all of what we experience). But this violation only happens if you make the mental distinct from the physical! One could thus affirm determinism and the phyiscal closure of the world, and not affirm epiphenomenalism.

Take for example, the position of Spinoza. Spinoza was a hardened determinist. Spinoza believed that everything that happens, (including human actions), could not be otherwise because it follows necessarily from God's nature. However, from what I understand, he was not an epipheonomenalist. Spinoza was a monist, meaning that he believed in only one substance and this substance mererly had different attributes. The mind and the body, therefore, are identical in substance, and the only difference between them is that the mental is concieved under the attribute of thought and the body was concieved under the attribute of extension. Thus, on Spinoza's view, the mental has just as much causal power as the physical.

Even though one might not adopt the percise language of Spinoza, a monism regarding the physical and the mental seems to solve the problem that motivates epiphenomenalism. If the mental really is just upper level brain actvity, then the mental is in fact causal. Just like a hurricane is an upper level phenomenon that causes things, brain activity causes things such as eating, drinking, and crying. Thus, we can have mental causation and the physical closure of the world.

This distinction is important because the issue of free will becomes difficult when the two issues are blurred. One commentator who I believed did confuse the issues is Noam Chompsky. After being asked his position on free will, he responded that he must affirm its truth becasue if weren't true then nobody would do things for "reasons". This position, which Chompsky claims to be shared by William James, seems to be based on the idea that to deny free will is to affirm epiphenomenalism. Since rational inferences belong to mental states and epiphenomenalism entails that the mental doesn't actually cause people to act, people don't do things because of reasons.  Though denying free will entails determinism, its denial does not entail epiphenomenalism. Thus, Chompsky's concern is misplaced.

Now, there are people who would deny that the mental and the physical can be of the same substance. My point here, however, is not to defend monism; it is to draw a distinction between epiphenomenalism and determinism, which, again, I beleive goes a long way in preventing confusion in the free will discussions. So if you intend to talk to someone on this topic, make sure they read this post!




Note 1: Arguments for monism can be found in the first entries of this blog, which critiqued Cartesianism.

Note 2. On reviewing Chompsky's comments on youtube, I think he's even more confused then I orginially thought. He said that we can have free will even though our decisions are mostly unconcscious! It's hard to see what he then means by free will. Moreover, this seems to be in tension with his concern about the lack of causal power of "reasons", which I think presupposes epiphenomenalism. Check out his comments yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3fhKRJNNTA

Reaction to Hume's Enquiry

I recently read David Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"  in its entirety and wow, did it pack a punch.  I only read pieces of it in college and didn't have the same familiarity with philosophy as I do today, so I couldn't appreciate it as much as I do now. It's clear why it's a must read for anyone interested in philosophy, particularly metaphysics. In such a short book, Hume does such things as establish an influential empiricist epistemology, found the compatabilist school of free will, and torpedo religious dogmatism.  It's also very readable for anyone who took a couple of intro philosophy courses. The following is a reaction to a couple of aspects of Hume's work.

1. On the Origin of Ideas and Necessary Connection

Hume establishes his empirical epistemology by arguing that all ideas get their source from experience. Even with concepts that are not in their entirety found in experience,such as a unicorn, the parts of such a concept come from experience (in this case the horn and  the body of a horse). This strikes me as correct, however, this point seems to undermine another. Hume makes the case that "necessary connection" is not found in experience, as any event that follows another can conceivably not occur. (It's conceivable that a ball remain suspended in the air when dropped; we know this won't happen only from experience.) Given the epistemology, Hume dismisses necessity as a legitimate concept, unless necessity is concieved as meaning "constant conjunction".

I would respond, however, that the position that ideas come from impressions in experience seems to rest on a kind of necessary connection, though perhaps not strictly logical. Would Hume confirm a "looseness" regarding the connection  between experience and ideas as he does with the connections found within our experience. Though it may not contradict logic that ideas can come from something other than experience, there seems to be a deep connection between the two, though I'm not sure about the precise nature. It is the strength of this connection that Hume's empiricist epistemology is largely founded upon, thus creating a tension between his two points.

That being said, it may be the case that Hume's point about the "looseness" or lack of "connection" between phenomenon  may be under-appreciated in light of modern physics. If I understand correctly, at bottom, the rules that govern atoms are time symmetric (can be run both forwards and backwards), but on the level of the day to day, events are manifestly time asymmetric. (Eggs crack and yolk spills out; yolk doesn't come together and return to the egg). However, this apparent asymmetry is only a matter of chance, since if the atoms happen to move in the correct order, events like yolk forming into an egg could happen, though with only a very low degree of probability. This statistical atomic movement is the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy or energy dispersal (practically) always increases in a closed system. States of high entropy and low entropy, however, are in fact merely states of higher likelihood and lower likelihood of atomic arrangements (Using the egg example, a whole egg has a lower entropy and a splattered egg has higher entropy). Thus, according to physics , the causal relations we see in our day to day experience is not reflective of necessary connections, but rather the statistical probabilities of atomic arrangements. I'm not sure exactly what to make of this apparent corroboration between Hume's observations and modern physics, but I find it striking.

2. The Problem of Induction

What has been called the "Problem of Induction" is perhaps the most commentated on legacy of the Enquiry. Given that necessary connection isn't found in experience, Hume asks what is the rational basis for believing that similar appearances would have similar powers and that the future would be like the past.

He gives the example of bread and how it has "secret powers" in contributing to the nutrition of humans. However, these secret powers, can conceivably not exist in the next piece of bread we eat, as these secret powers are not found in the concept of the appearance of bread. Why should we expect that when we eat our next slice of bread, it shall have these secret powers.

I would like to note that given Hume's empiricism and the fact that towards the end of the book he dismisses excessive skepticism as unhelpful, I don't think Hume meant to create a puzzle for generations of future philosophers to solve. A point he did want to make, however, was the importance of "custom" or natural inclination in our behavior. When people postulate some metaphysical view like theism or idealism to justify induction, they miss this point. Hume points out that animals and babies act on the principle that the future will be like the past and similar appearances will have similar powers. Are animals and babies consciously aware of a metaphysical principal that would permit them to act this way? Of course not. These actions are automatic and instinctual.

That being said, I don't think that because there is nothing strictly in logic that would justify induction, it is rationally groundless. I think the rational ground is essentially the Principal of Sufficient Reason (PSR for short), which is "If something is one way, rather than another, and it doesn't necessarily have to be the way that it is, there must be an explanation for the way that it is". Take the bread example again. If we affirm PSR, then there is an explanation as to why bread has these nutritional powers. Likewise, if there is a piece of bread that does something entirely different, such as turn our skin pink, there would have to be a new explanation formulated for this new phenomenon, which has replaced the old (nutrition). However, if every piece of bread resulted in vastly different results, the PSR would essentially be a vacuous principle given the narrowness of any explanation and ,even more fundamentally, the impossibility of discovering any explanations.  This impossibility stems from the fact no explanation could be subject to any predictive test.

Essentially, the possibility of induction is based on the assumption of the intelligibility of what we called the world. In other words, the assumption is that the world is explicable. Though this assumption isn't grounded on pure logic, it isn't necessary for it to be justified in order for it to be rationally affirmed. In fact, as Hume actually implied, it's a presupposition of the possibility of justification (at least regarding non-conceptual truth). It is a prime example of what Reformed Epistemolegists call properly basic beliefs, beliefs that are rational but do not have arguments for their truth.

3. On Miracles

I actually don't have much to say on this section, mostly because I find its principle argument to be sound; however, I would like to say I found it downright amusing. It was written during the first half of the 18th century and yet it sounds like something written by one of the New Atheists. At one point it sounds like a comedic routine. ( He essentially asks " Did you ever notice that as you read the history of nations, miraculous events seem to dwindle as you arrive towards modern times, at which they virtually disappear?). I am not surprised that this section was so controversial as to prevent him from having a university post.  I am surprised the reaction wasn't even stronger considering that he wrote that religious beliefs aren't meant to withstand the scrutiny of reason, but rather are merely articles of faith. This is considered harsh even today. As a non-believer, though, I just found it funny.

Encounter with William Lane Craig and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

About a month ago I got to attend a lecture and Q&A by William Lane Craig at Rutgers University. The lecture was remarkably dry ( like much of this blog), but anyone fascinated by the Kalam Cosmological Argument would have been satisfied. Dr. Craig defended the premises of the argument and then further argued that only theism could satisfy the argument's conclusion. At this particular lecture, the Kalam Argument he presented varied slightly from the one he usually gives, but for the purpose of this post I will present the usual one:

1. Everything that has a beginning has a cause
2. The universe had a beginning
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

I have heard his defense of the argument before, so I spent a lot of my time formulating the question I was going to ask in person. My question concerned an issue of inadequacy; in other words it concerned whether "God" (as described in classical theism) could be the "cause" in Kalam's conclusion. The Kalam Argument requires that the cause in the conclusion to be timeless without the space-time universe. However,  just as Dr. Craig argued that naturalistic entities could not be the cause of the space-time universe because they themselves must be temporal, my point was that God, as a thinking/conscious entity, must necessarily be temporal.

Dr. Craig responded to my question (which I articulated quite well I may add) by saying that he had addressed such an objection of inadequacy in his book Time and Eternity. He said that a timeless person may not be your "garden variety" person, but it could still be a person nonetheless. Summarizing his own position, Dr. Craig said temporal features of person hood, such as memory, are inessential and thus the objection can be defeated.

Even though I haven't read what he wrote in Time and Eternity, from what he said to me, I doubt that his response could defeat the objection. Something like memory may be inessential to person-hood,  but consciousness and thinking, I would say, are essential. In any case, classical theism cannot deny such properties to God, so if these properties are irreconcilable with timelessness, then classical theism has a serious problem.

Perhaps, however, I should elaborate on why these properties are irreconcilable. Consciousness seems inherently be a flow of mental states. I cannot conceive of a "static" consciousness.  Perhaps, the inconceivability stems from the fact that I can't tease apart my thinking from my conscious states. But this only goes to show the intrinsic temporal nature of thinking. As evident by the "ing", thinking is necessarily a process, one that contains different mental states. It seems then that a timeless entity wouldn't be able to have any kind of train of thought.

To make my point clearer, ask yourself this question: Without the space-time universe, could God count to ten? It's clear that he couldn't, since counting would indicate the passage of time. First, this seems to make God's omnipotence contingent on space-time, but more importantly it shows that God isn't even able to think without space-time. Without thinking, God is robbed of one of his essential features, as one could no longer call him a mind. I don't know how Dr. Craig would respond to this illustration of counting, but I think it effectively demonstrates that a mind can't be timeless, and hence not capable of being the cause of the space-time universe.

As interesting as this point is as a defeater for Kalam and perhaps classical theism, it's also indicative of how difficult it is to grapple with non-space time reality. Can we conceive of any entity that exists beyond space-time? From what I remember from Dr. Craig's critiques, what he has to say about the inadequacy of naturalistic causes seems to hold up as well as my critique of God. Does this failure of our cognition point to a Kantian thesis where space-time are faculties of the mind?  It may sound absurd, but maybe there's an element of truth to it. I hate to be a mysterian, but Kant's conclusion on the impossibility of conceptualizing the beginning of the universe seems to be on the mark.

I hope to encounter Dr. Craig again, but I will likely approach him with a different topic. Probably less cerebral...