Physics Lies!

I've been bashing the theists for a while, so I'm going to take a break and bash an atheist for a change.

Nancy Cartwright is the author of How the Laws of Physics Lie, and is apparently an influential philosopher. Kitcher mentions her in his Mind and Cosmos review, she is regularly included in anthologies of important papers in the philosophy of science, and her term "Dappled World" (borrowed from Manley Hopkins, according to Kitcher) seems to have become a sort of rallying point for modern philosophical views of science.

I think her work is shoddy and unconvincing.

OK, choosing that title for her book is like waving a cape in front of a bull, I suppose. But I really tried to give her a fair hearing, honest I did. Readers of this blog can, I suppose, judge how good I am at giving a fair hearing to views I disagree with. But let me try to present her argument before I tear it apart.

The Laws of Physics Lie

In Essay 3 of the book, Cartwright lays out the case that the laws of physics are not true, or, to the extent they are true, they are not interesting. In fact, they are not even approximately true. Why?

She illustrates with Newton's law of universal gravitation. For the definition of this law she quotes Feynman:

(NG1) The Law of Gravitation is that two bodies exert a force between each other which varies inversely as the square of the distance between them, and varies directly as the product of their masses.

Then she asks, and answers:

Does this law truly describe how bodies behave?

Assuredly not.

Why not? Well, she says, two bodies may have electric charges, and so the force exerted by one on the other is given neither by NG1 nor by Coulomb's law of electric force, but  by a combination of the two. Therefore

These two laws are not true: worse, they are not even approximately true.

For instance, in an atom, the law of gravitation is swamped by the Coulomb force and so the former is not even approximately true.

Notice that she is not complaining about extreme cases where Newtonian gravitation must be replaced by General Relativity. Her complaint is that the law doesn't state a fact: except, perhaps, in a universe completely empty except for two uncharged objects.

She considers an alternate version of NG1 that uses a prefatory clause to correct the deficiency:

(NG2) If there are no forces other than gravitational forces at work, then two bodies exert a force between each other which varies inversely as the square of the distance between them, and varies directly as the product of their masses.

This, she allows, may be a true law, but it is not a very interesting one, for in reality objects have both kinds of properties (mass and electric charge) and so NG2 has no (or very few) applications in reality.

From a physicist's point of view, this is all very wrong-headed. First of all, since she is talking about combining  different influences, the law she ought to be talking about is Newton's second law of motion:

(NA) The acceleration of an object is proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to its mass.

Somehow, she completely avoids mentioning this law anywhere in the chapter (though she mentions it obliquely in considering a related objection, as we will see below). Since she doesn't mention NA, I don't know whether she considers this one of laws that is not even approximately true. But you can't talk about gravitational and electric forces combining without it. With this framework in mind, there is an obvious alternative to NG1 and NG2:

(NG3) For two massive bodies, there is a contribution to the net force that varies inversely as the square of the distance between them, and varies directly as the product of their masses.

With this change, I submit, we have a law that is at least approximately true, with no further need of ceteris paribus clauses.

This is such a simple solution to Cartwright's difficulty that it's hard to believe she missed it. However, she does go on to discuss the law of vector composition of forces, and then to consider a suggestion of Lewis Creary that is similar to NG3. Let's consider what she has to say about these issues.

Vector Addition

Cartwright admits that physicists have an answer to the question of combining forces: she calls it the "vector addition story."

The vector addition story is, I admit, a nice one. But it is just a metaphor. We add forces... when we do calculations. Nature does not 'add' forces.For the component forces are not there, in any but a metaphorical sense, to be added....

For Cartwright, the individual component forces are not real. Only the net force is real.

But this is quite obviously false. Consider, for example, a spring that is subject to equal and opposite forces on its two ends:


The net force is zero, so the center of mass of the spring doesn't accelerate. But the spring is compressed - the component forces have a real, physical effect.

Try telling this guy that the component forces aren't real:


Cartwright is essentially saying "'two apples plus one apple equals three apples' can't be true, because if the two apples and the one apple are real, and the three apples are real, then I would have six apples, not three." But this is just silly: two apples plus one apple equals three apples because that's simply what addition means, when applied to apples. Similarly, in the vector addition of forces, two real, occurrent forces can be added to make a real net force, because that's simply what it means to combine two forces.

For this, Cartwright deserves an award for Worst Misuse of Mathematics By a Professional Philosopher Not Named Craig.

Causal Action

Cartwright then turns to Creary, who claims that there are two types of physical laws: laws of causal influence and laws of causal action. Though she doesn't say so, in Newton's mechanics, the law of causal action is good old F = ma (NA).

On Creary's account, Coulomb's law and the law of gravity come out true because they correctly describe what influences are produced.... The vector addition law then combines the separate influences to predict what motions will occur. 

 This seems to me to be a plausible account of how a lot of causal explanation is structured. But as a defence of the truth of fundamental laws, it has two important drawbacks. First, in many cases there are no general laws of interaction... In fact, classical mechanics may well be the only discipline where a general law of action is always available.

Apparently Cartwright doesn't know about quantum mechanics, where Schroedinger's equation gives a general law, or quantum field theory, where the Lagrangian path integral does the same.

Anyway, it makes no sense to claim that there are no true fundamental laws of physics, except for those few cases where the laws are both fundamental and true. Naturally, if there are general laws of action, and if physics is a more or less unified subject, then we would expect the general laws to be few. The fact that there are only a few such fundamental laws actually shows the strength of the reductionist thesis rather than the opposite.

On the other hand, if her point is just that most of the time, working physicists are not dealing with the fundamental laws, but with some approximations to them, or phenomenological laws that are not fundamental, then I would agree with her, but find the point trite and uninteresting. These physicists wouldn't ever claim that their approximations are true in all cases.

Actually, Cartwright does know about quantum mechanics, because in the very next section she discusses a quantum example: the spectrum of a carbon atom. What she says here is so pathetic that I can't bear to grind through it point by point. Essentially, she again ignores the general law of action (Schroedinger's equation) in order to make her point that there is no general law of action.

At first I thought Cartwright had simply not bothered to understand the physics before she began drawing philosophical conclusions. But later in the book she shows a detailed understanding of some much more difficult areas of physics, so that doesn't seem to be the problem.

The only other explanation I can think of for these egregious errors is that Cartwright is working with a pre-conceived agenda, such that all the examples are contorted so as to support her thesis.

This is no way to ground a philosophical world view.

A Natural Reduction

One of the great advantages of the naturalist world view is how it all hangs together. The workings of the mind can be explained in terms of the workings of the brain, which can be explained in terms of the workings of the brain cells, which can be explained in terms of the electrical and chemical properties of molecules, which can be explained in terms of the physical properties of the particles of which those molecules are composed. And the same goes for anything else in the universe: stars, moons, clovers....

Now, I will admit that some of the links in that proposed chain of explanation are not as strong as others: the mind-brain link, for example. But the overall scheme seems sound, and the naturalistic world view can count innumerable successes as evidence of its truth: the technologies of transportation, agriculture, communication, medicine, and psychiatry, to mention just a few. Put this against the abject failure of alternative ways of thinking: what did Christianity (just to pick on one alternative) accomplish in the 1500 years before scientific thinking arose?

At any rate, even when precise explanations are lacking, there doesn't seem to be any strong argument why the gaps cannot be filled out in a naturalistic way.

It seems, though, that many atheist philosophers are no longer satisfied with this reductionistic picture.  The recent book Mind and Cosmos, by atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, argues that there are aspects of subjective experience that can't be explained by reductionistic means. (Short version here.) Another atheist philosopher, Philip Kitcher, whom I have the greatest respect for, disagrees with Nagel but seems to agree that the reductionist program has not accomplished the task it set out to do. "Unity fails at both ends," writes Kitcher.

For once, I agree with Professor Feser: if naturalism fails to give us a unified picture of everything, then it is time to abandon naturalism and seek a different explanation, rather than to cling to a failed program.

But I am not as pessimistic as these philosophers. Perhaps that's merely ignorance on my part. But some of the anti-reductionist arguments I've come across seem just silly, and, as I already said, there don't seem to be any good arguments for the impossibility of naturalistic explanation. I remain a hard-core reductionist, and I'm going to try to defend that view.

Next: Do the laws of physics lie?

Guest Post: Purity of Form and Function

While I'm gearing up for my assault on Mount Kripke, here's a guest post from Richard Wein.

Hi everyone. Robert's invited me to make a guest post on the subject of James Ross's paper "Immaterial Aspects of Thought". The resulting post is rather long, partly because there's a lot of linguistic confusion to be cleared up. I hope I can dispel a little of that confusion.

At the core of Ross's argument is his insistence that our logical thinking must involve "pure forms". He then argues that physical processes can't have such forms, and so logical thinking must involve more than just physical processes. I see no good reason to accept that we need any such forms.

Ross's concept of "pure forms" is hardly explained, and remains mysterious to me. He says, for example, that squaring involves thinking in the form "N X N = N^2". He doesn't seem to mean that we must think such words to ourselves. He seems to have in mind some unseen form, possibly Platonistic. In Section III, he talks briefly about "Platonistic definitions", and perhaps this example is one such.

It may help here if I briefly give my own physicalist view, so that I can consider Ross's in contrast to it. I say that the only verbal forms that exist are the sorts that we observe, such as those in writing, speech and conscious thought. These observed verbal forms are produced by non-conscious, non-verbal physical cognitive processes. Of course there's a lot more to be said about how this happens, and particularly about consciousness, but these are not issues that Ross raises. He is not, for example, making an argument from consciousness. Nor is he making an inference to the best explanation, where we must consider the relative merits of his explanation and a physicalist one. He is making a purely eliminative argument, and so the onus is on him to eliminate physicalist alternatives, not on me to elaborate on them.

The claim that our thinking must take the form of definitions in this sense seems to lead to a problem of infinite regress. If squaring is defined in terms of a more basic operation, multiplying, then how is multiplying defined? And so on. But I won't dwell on this point, because Ross's "pure forms" are so mysterious that I doubt I could make any specific positive criticism stick. My point is that we just don't need anything of the sort Ross is insisting on. He gives us no reason to think that the sorts of physical processes I've mentioned are incapable of producing everything that we actually observe. I don't think he even tries to show that. His only response to views like mine seems to be that, on such views, the actual processes we currently call "squaring" wouldn't be "real" squaring, but only "simulated" squaring.

This response is a confused use of language, mistaking an empty verbal distinction for a substantive one. First, regardless of whether we call such operations "real" or "simulated", if they're sufficient to deliver everything we actually observe--and Ross doesn't seem to argue the contrary--then there's no reason to think we need anything more. That in itself should suggest some confusion on Ross's part.

The distinction Ross was originally making was between processes that involve "pure forms" and those that don't. If the distinction he's now making between "real" and "simulated" processes is just a translation of the original distinction into different words, then the translation achieves nothing. He's just re-asserting his unsupported claim that we need such pure forms, but doing it in confusing new words. If, on the other hand, the new distinction were genuinely different from the original one, Ross would actually have to demonstrate that denying pure forms entails denying real squaring. He would have to make a substantive argument, and he wouldn't be able to do that without clarifying the meaning of his new distinction. In fact he makes no such argument (or clarification). He simply puts the words "we only simulate" into the mouth of the denier, as if it's indisputable that denying pure forms entails denying real squaring. So it's pretty clear that this is just a confusing terminological switch, masquerading as a substantive argument. The appearance of having achieved something arises through conflation of a weaker sense of the words (in which they are just a translation of the original claim) with a stronger sense (which has the appearance of a more irresistible claim). To accept Ross's conclusion on this basis is to commit a fallacy of equivocation.

Unlike Ross's denier, I don't say that we don't "really" square. Neither do I say that we do "really" square. The word "really" is misleading here. If denying that we "really" square is to be taken as just another way of saying that we don't think in "pure forms", then I prefer to say--more directly--that we don't think in pure forms.

There ends my main response to Ross's argument. But I'd likely briefly to address some other aspects of his paper which are liable to cause confusion.

Ross uses the term "pure forms" interchangeably with "pure functions", and I'm afraid this translation may have led to a conflation of these concepts of his own with the concept of a mathematical function in the ordinary sense of that term. Mathematical functions are purely abstract, and don't exist in anything like the sense that physical objects do. Pairs of mathematical functions like addition and quaddition are correctly called "non-equivalent". To call them "incompossible" would be a kind of category error, mistakenly implying that it makes any sense to ask whether they can co-exist. Ross's talk of incompossible pure forms/functions is further support for the conclusion that he sees these as having a more real sort of existence than do mathematical functions (in the ordinary sense).

I have no idea what it could mean for the process of squaring to take the form of a mathematical function. The messy, fallible real-world processes that we call "squaring" are quite a different thing from the abstract function that mathematicians call "f(x)=x^2". Talk of a process taking the form of a mathematical function seems to me like a category error, an attempt to transfer properties inappropriately between pure abstractions and real processes. Of course, during the process of performing an arithmetic operation, some definition of a function (some form of words) might be produced, e.g. in conscious thought. But that's a production of the process, and not the process itself or the form of the process. Moreover, simple arithmetic doesn't always involve giving ourselves any definitions, rules or instructions for how to proceed. The answers can come to mind (or speech) as the result of non-verbal non-conscious processes, without any verbal reasoning. That's why there's no infinite regress of definitions, rules or instructions.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned determinacy. Ross's argument is primarily made in terms of pure forms. But at times he translates into the language of determinacy, and his summary argument is expressed in such language. This translation into the language of determinacy serves no useful purpose, but creates further opportunities for confusion, because Ross's "indeterminacy" is easily conflated with other senses of the word, and Ross himself encourages such conflation by appealing to work on other sorts of indeterminacy (and even "underdetermination") which have little to do with his argument.

Since I don't think we need any "realization" of "pure forms", and I would question whether the the concept is even coherent, there's no point in my addressing Section II of the paper in detail. But I think it would be useful briefly to give a clearer account of the addition/quaddition scenario and "indeterminacy". Ross employs a variant of Kripke's quaddition function, where the differentiating point (instead of 57) is set to a number of years greater than the lifetime of the universe. That example seems peculiar to me, as I can see no reason why a system can't calculate a number of years greater than that lifetime. So I'll take a slightly different example of my own. Let the differentiating point be a number greater than any that can be represented by a given calculator. Then there's a sense in which the calculator equally well "realizes" addition and quaddition. That sense is that the calculator gives the answers for quaddition as well as it gives them for addition. As long as we don't confuse ourselves with talk of "pure forms", there's nothing remarkable about this. Ross wants to say that the calculator can't realize two different functions, so it must realize neither. But in the sense of "realize" that I've just used, there's no problem with saying that it realizes both, and the fact that it realizes both has no substantive significance.

Given that we're not talking about epistemological or quantum indeterminacy, any indeterminacy lies just in the fact that often our categories are not sufficiently well-defined for us to be able to assign a given state of affairs to a single category. For example, for some people there is no fact of the matter as to whether they are best described as children or adults. That's just a limitation of language. Indeterminacy is significant for our understanding of how language works, and for making sure we use language in ways that don't cause confusion, but it doesn't have any substantive, non-linguistic significance. Some people are reading far too much into indeterminacy.

Grue Some More

The second point Ross brings up in support of the indeterminacy of the physical is Goodman's Grue Argument. This one is easily dealt with.

Goodman defines something as "grue" if it is first observed before Jan1, 2025 (say) and is green, or is first observed after Jan 1, 2025 and is blue. He uses this to make a point about induction: any evidence we cite as evidence for the proposition "all emeralds are green" is also evidence for the proposition "all emeralds are grue." Thus, the grue problem casts doubt on the rationality of inductive conclusions.

So we see that Goodman's point was about induction, not indeterminacy. But this is really unimportant for Ross's argument, because Ross doesn't actually use the grue argument in any essential way. Rather, he either cites grue as an example of the problem of limited data, or as an analogy to Kripke's quaddition argument. For instance, Ross writes:

A decisive reason why a physical process cannot be determinate among incompossible abstract functions is "amplified grueness": a physical process, however short or long, however few or many outputs, is compatible with counterfactually opposed predicates; even the entire cosmos is. Since such predicates can name functions from "input to output" for every change, any physical process is indeterminate among opposed functions. This is like the projection of a curve from a finite sample of points: any choice has an incompatible competitor.

 But the  problem of limited data, as we have seen, is irrelevant for the indeterminacy question. So the grue point devolves onto the Kripke/quaddition point, which I will consider next.

A Pointless Point about Data Points

I've been, and continue to be, busy with my real work, so I have to apologize if these posts dribble out slowly, a bit at a time, rather than in one long, well-thought-out post the way Prof. Feser does. But maybe it will actually be an advantage to try to clear up one point at a time.

Ross gives three main arguments to support his claim B: "No physical system is determinate." These are:

1. Kripke's addition/quaddition argument.
2. Goodman's grue argument.
3. The problem of limited data.

Kripke is the central point of Ross's argument, and it is the most difficult to tackle. I'm going to start at the other end, with (3).

The problem of limited data (PLD) is pretty easy to state. Suppose I have some system from which I can take data, and I am trying to determine what function the system is following in order to produce the data. If I take a limited number (say a finite number) of input-output pairs, there will be an infinite number of functions which fit the given data points. For example, suppose I have only three data points. Then there is exactly one quadratic function that will exactly fit those three points. But I could also fit the data with a cubic function, or a quartic function, or a polynomial of any higher degree, or an exponential function times an appropriate polynomial, etc.

Now, how does this help Ross establish his (B)? Actually, it doesn't help at all. The mere fact that I have a limited amount of data doesn't tell me anything about the process that is producing that data. Since the PLD applies equally to determinate and indeterminate systems, it can't. This seems completely obvious to me, but since it seems to be a point of contention, I will spell it out.

Suppose I get some set of N input-output pairs from a determinate process. (For Ross, this means having a human compute them.) Let someone else give me N input-output pairs from an indeterminate process that is simulating (in Ross's sense) the first process. (For Ross, this could be a computer.) Now, since Ross allows that the indeterminate process can simulate the determinate process very closely, the two data sets will be identical. (This is easy to see if we say the process in question is addition: the computer and the human will give the same outputs for the same inputs. Unless, of course, the human makes a mistake.)

Since the N input-output pairs are identical whether I get them from a determinate or an indeterminate process, there is obviously no way I can tell from the data which sort of process produced that data.

Now let's introduce the PLD. Clearly, it applies to both processes. So if (as Ross claims) the PLD provides support for the claim that the purely physical process is indeterminate, then it also provides support for the claim that the human-generated process is indeterminate. So the PLD strengthens Ross's case for B to the exact extent that it weakens his case for A (that humans are capable of determinate processes). In other words, it doesn't help him at all.

This is what I meant when I wrote that Ross's arguments don't go beyond epistemology. The PLD says I can have only limited knowledge about the process that produced the data. But it says nothing at all about the metaphysical properties of that process.

Goodbye, Hilda

I'd like to thank Prof. Feser for his continued patience in responding to my critique of Ross's argument. I've been very busy, but I finally had some time to look at his most recent response. He misconstrued the A,  B, C, of my previous post (understandably, since I hadn't spelled them out clearly), and I began a long post carefully laying out the logic of my argument and why Feser's response didn't answer it. Then I realized that it did answer it, in spite of the misunderstanding about A, B, and C. The "purely physical" assumption is indeed the critical assumption in Ross's argument that I wasn't taking into account, and it does eliminate the Hilda objection in a non-question-begging way. I apologize to Prof. Feser for the unwarranted and unnecessary snark in my last post. I am hereby giving Hilda the boot.

I hope to return to my original epistemological objection (as time permits), but I wanted to get this apology out in a timely manner.

Crow is a dish best eaten warm.

A Head Scratcher

Ed Feser has responded again, and it's a puzzler.

I will ignore the first part of his post, in which he is once again arguing against some argument that is not the argument I made.

Next, Feser points out that my objection, even if it worked against Ross, was irrelevant against Feser's own version of the argument.

For another thing, it is not just Ross’s views that are in question here, but mine.  And I can assure Oerter that what I am claiming is (2) rather than (1).  So, even if what he had to say in his latest post was relevant to the cogency of Ross’s version of the argument in question, it wouldn’t affect my own version of it.

Well, I never said I was arguing against Feser's version of the argument, I explicitly stated I was critiquing Ross's argument. And that is what I will continue to do here, though I may return to Feser's version later if I have the time and inclination.

Feser then goes on to explain why he thinks his version of the argument is actually what Ross intended anyway. Specifically, he addresses what Ross means by saying the calculator is not adding. Now, Ross makes a clear and consistent distinction in his paper between true adding, which he elaborates as carrying out the "pure function" of addition, and what the calculator does, which is only "simulating addition." This is a crucial distinction for him, because his basic claim is that humans can execute pure functions, while any purely physical system cannot.

In my posts I have consistently (I hope) been using "adding" in Ross's first sense. I didn't think it was necessary to spell this out: since I was critiquing Ross's paper, I was using Ross's terminology, except where I explicitly stated otherwise. But to be clear, I will henceforth use ETPFOA ("executing the "pure function" of addition") instead of "adding."

So when I said that Ross denied that the machine was adding, I meant it was not ETPFOA. Feser, on the other hand, wrote,

Ross is not denying, for example, that your pocket calculator is really adding rather than “quadding”....

So how does Feser respond? He quotes Ross's discussion of simulated addition, then writes:

So, Ross plainly does say that there is a sense in which the machine adds -- a sense that involves simulation, analogy, something that is “adding” in the way that what a puppet does is “walking.”  How can that be given what he says in the passage Oerter quotes?  The answer is obvious: The machine “adds” relative to the intentions of the designers and users, just as a puppet “walks” relative to the motions of the puppeteer. The puppet has no power to walk on its own and the machine has no power to do adding (as opposed to “quadding,” say) on its own.  But something from outside the system -- the puppeteer in the one case, the designers and users in the other -- are also part of the larger context, and taken together with the physical properties of the system result in “walking” or “adding” of a sort. 

In short, Ross says just what I said he says.

Now it is very strange for Feser, who is a professional philosopher, to sweep aside an crucial distinction like this, as if it were unimportant. It is not true that Ross says the machine can add in the ETPFOA sense that both Ross and I are using. It is true that Ross says the machine can do something like adding - but only something that has the name of adding, and gets that name by analogy to ETPFOA, not because it is actually ETPFOAing.

Moreover, I don't see anywhere Ross says that the machine "adds relative to the intentions of the designers and users," as Feser claims. And what exactly is Feser claiming here? That the machine ETPFOAs relative to the intentions of the designers? Or that it only simulates adding relative them?  OK, the machine taken together with the larger context results in addition "of a sort" - but of which sort? Again, Feser glosses over the crucial distinction.

You wouldn't think it possible, but there's actually worse to come. Quoting Feser again:

Oerter insists that I am misunderstanding Ross here.  As we will see in a moment, I am not misunderstanding him at all, but it is important to emphasize that even if I were, that would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether the argument for the immateriality of the intellect that we are debating is sound.  For one thing, and quite obviously, whether or not I have gotten Ross right on some exegetical matter is irrelevant to whether premises (A) and (B) of the argument in question are true, and whether the conclusion (C) follows from them.  So Oerter is, whether he realizes it or not, just changing the subject.  

Later on, he continues in a similar vein:

Evidently the reason Oerter thinks all this is worth spilling pixels over is that he thinks his “Hilda” example shows that Ross is being inconsistent, and he needs for me to have gotten Ross wrong in order to make his “Hilda” example work.  I have already explained, in my previous post, why Ross is not at all being inconsistent.  But even if he were, it wouldn’t matter.  The alleged inconsistency, you’ll recall, is that Ross treats Hilda as adding despite the fact that we can’t tell from her physical properties alone whether she is, whereas he does not treat the machine as adding despite the fact that we can’t tell from its physical properties alone whether it is.  Suppose he really were inconsistent in this way.  How does that show that premise (B) of his argument is false (much less that (A) is false, or that the conclusion doesn’t follow)? 

Answer: It doesn’t.  The most such an inconsistency would show is that Ross needs to clarify what is going on with Hilda that isn’t going on with the machine.  And there are several ways he can do this consistent with the argument.  First, he could say what I would say (and what, as I have shown, he does in fact say himself, despite what Oerter thinks) -- namely that the machine does add in a sense, but just not by virtue of its physical properties alone.  There is perfect consistency here -- both systems, Hilda and the machine, add (albeit in analogous senses), but neither does so in virtue of its physical properties alone.

This is just bizarre. Ed Feser, who revels in pointing out inconsistencies of the naturalists, is arguing that an inconsistency doesn't matter? Nor is this some trivial point of Rossian exegesis, as Feser implies: it's a basic contradiction in Ross's whole scheme.As I pointed out already, the distinction between ETPFOA and simulated adding is crucial to Ross's argument.

The logic of my Hilda example is straightforward. Ross says that humans can ETPFOA. Ross says that  A, B, and C entail that a computer cannot ETPFOA. I claim that A, B, and C are true for Hilda, too. So A, B, and C entail that Hilda cannot ETPFOA.

With this contradiction, the whole argument falls to pieces. Now, you can argue that I am wrong: that A, B, and C are not true of Hilda. Or you can argue that there is some D that I missed that is true of the computer but not true of Hilda. But you can't say this example is irrelevant to the soundness of Ross's argument.

What Does Ross Say?

Well, no, I'm not making the sort of trivial, "silly" argument that Feser likes to ascribe to me. But before I can clarify this, it is necessary to clarify just what it is that Ross is saying.

Feser writes:

Part of the problem here might be that Oerter is not carefully distinguishing the following two claims:

(1) There just is no fact of the matter, period, about what function a system is computing.

(2) The physical properties of a system by themselves don’t suffice to determine what function it is computing.

Oerter sometimes writes as if what Ross is claiming is (1), but that is not correct.  Ross is not denying, for example, that your pocket calculator is really adding rather than “quadding” (to allude to Kripke’s example).  He is saying that the physical facts about the machine by themselves do not suffice to determine this.  Something more is needed (in this case, the intentions of the designers and users of the calculator). 

What exactly does Ross claim? Here is Ross from his paper:

Adding is not a sequence of outputs; it is summing; whereas if the process were
quadding, all its outputs would be quadditions, whether or not they differed in quantity from additions (before a differentiating point shows up to make the outputs diverge from sums).

For any outputs to be sums, the machine has to add. But the indeterminacy among incompossible functions is to be found in each single case, and therefore in every case. Thus, the machine never adds.

Extending the outputs, even to infinity, is unavailing. If the machine is not really adding in the single case, no matter how many actual outputs seem "right," say, for all even  numbers taken pairwise (see the qualifying comments in notes 7 and 10 about incoherent totalities), had all relevant cases been included, there would have been nonsums. Kripke drew a skeptical conclusion from such facts, that it is indeterminate which function the machine satisfies, and thus "there is no fact of the matter" as to whether it adds or not. He ought to conclude, instead, that it is not adding; that if it is indeterminate (physically and logically, not just epistemically) which function is realized among incompossible functions, none of them is. That follows from the logical requirement, for each such function, that any realization of it must be of it and not of an incompossible one. [emphasis added]

Ross is quite clear: he is not saying (2) at all. Neither is he saying (1). He is saying something stronger than either (1) or (2): the machine does not add - period. It is not that the physical properties of the system alone don't determine what function it is computing, the system isn't actually computing any function at all. "... if it is indeterminate (physically and logically, not just epistemically) which function is realized among incompossible functions, none of them is."

I just don't see how Feser can write "Ross is not denying, for example, that your pocket calculator is really adding rather than “quadding”..." for that is exactly what Ross is denying. 

It is this denial I had in mind when I said Ross couldn't apply the same reasoning to Hilda without denying that Hilda adds, too. But rather than re-visit that argument I will wait for the professor to (I hope) clarify. 

Feser and Ross and me

Ed Feser has responded to my complaints about Ross's argument - sort of. Once again, I am flattered that Feser thinks my amateur philosophizing worthy of his attention. I always learn a lot from our exchanges, even if I am not ultimately convinced of his point. He (correctly) diagnoses my confusion between indeterminacy of meaning and physical indeterminism. But that confusion doesn't (I think) invalidate my main point: that Ross's argument never gets him beyond epistemological indeterminacy.

Oddly, Feser doesn't specifically respond to my critcism. Instead, he refers back to his American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article. But in that article, he doesn't specifically respond to the epistemology objection, either. Here's what he wrote:

Dillard also suggests that Kripke’s point is epistemological rather than metaphysical—that his argument shows at most only that the claim that someone is thinking in accordance with a certain function (such as addition) is underdetermined by the physical evidence, and not that the physical facts are themselves indeterminate. This is odd given that both Kripke and Ross explicitly insist that the points they are respectively making are metaphysical rather than merely epistemological. Indeed, Kripke says that “not even what an omniscient God would know . . . could establish whether I  meant plus or quus,” because for the reasons given above, everything about my past behavior, sensations, and the like is compatible (not just compatible as far as we know, but compatible full stop) with my meaning either plus or quus. Nor does Dillard say anything to show otherwise.

That is, Feser merely states that Ross says that his point is metaphysical, not epistemological. But Feser doesn't give any additional reasons for us to believe that Ross has actually established this. Well, I agree that Ross says that - but I don't think he has established it.

Here's why. Note that Ross's argument is just as valid when talking about what another person is doing when (say) adding. That is, when I am trying to determine whether Hilda is actually adding, or merely simulating adding, all I can do is investigate her physical actions and responses. If Ross's argument is correct, then from a finite amount of data such as these I cannot determine whether Hilda is adding or not. So (if Ross is right) I can never know whether another person is capable of addition.

But note that from the above it doesn't follow that Hilda is not adding. It may be that Hilda is in fact doing something perfectly determinate. I just can't know whether she is or not. So it is clear that Ross's argument doesn't get us past the epistemological.

This point ties in with my second complaint about Ross: the double standard. If I can't say for sure that another person is not adding, then by the same token I cannot say for sure that a machine is not adding.*

In  his article, Feser almost makes the same point. Kripke's original point (if I understand it correctly) was, not only can I not be sure what someone else means when they say something, I cannot even be sure what I mean when I say something. That is, even my own thoughts are indeterminate in meaning. Ross obviously doesn't want this conclusion - his own argument relies on one's own thoughts being determinate. Feser points out that (using Frege's conception of meaning) we cannot infer from the external indeterminacy that there is no internal meaning. He writes:

Frege emphasized that the sense of an expression is not a private psychological entity such as a sensation or mental image, any more than it is something material. Thus he would hardly take an argument to the effect that meaning cannot be fixed either by sensations and mental images or by bodily behavior to establish that there is no determinate meaning at all.

But establishing that there is "no determinate meaning at all" is precisely what Ross needs for his argument. So the argument fails.

* Though it is not directly relevant to the argument, I want to point out that the situation is actually worse with respect to the machine than it is with respect to another person. We can open up the machine, trace its circuits or it mechanism or whatever, and deduce what it will do for a given input. With another person, we can only investigate the physical outputs: we can't open up Hilda's brain and trace its circuitry. Well, not yet, at any rate.

Ross's Double Standard

Another problem with Ross's argument is the double standard he employs. It's obvious that humans are not nearly as accurate as machines when it comes to computations. But Ross doesn't take this as evidence that humans are not carrying out a pure function. On the contrary, he suggests that mistakes could be evidence that the human is carrying out the function. He writes:

This is not a claim about how many states we can be in. This is a claim about the ability exercised in a single case, the ability to think in a form that is sum-giving for every sum, a definite thought form distinct from every other. When a person has acquired such an ability is not always transparent from successful answers, and it can be exhibited even by mistakes. [Emphasis added.]

But when he talks about machine addition, he counts any error, even a potential error many years in the future, as evidence that the machine doesn't truly add.

This is a blatant double standard. Logically, if a mistake is evidence that X is not performing the function, then that is true whether X is a human or a machine.

Against Physicalism

Are humans more than just a complicated physical machine? Physicalism is the idea that the physical is "all there is" - everything that exists is either physical or is reducible to something that is physical. Thanks to Ed Feser's blog, I've come across an interesting argument from James Ross that physicalism cannot be true. Ross takes an approach that draws on Kripke, Goodman, and Quine to build a rather astonishing claim about physical systems. Ross's argument is very subtle and worth a close look. If it succeeds, it's truly an astounding accomplishment: one of the great philosophical debates of all times, solved. I don't think it succeeds, and I'm going to try to suggest why not.

Feser summarizes Ross's argument like this:

All formal thinking is determinate.
No physical process is determinate.
Thus, no formal thinking is a physical process.

Specifically, Ross refers to "pure functions" that humans can define but that cannot be implemented by any purely physical system. He gives examples like adding, squaring a number, and the modus ponens of logic.

Now, what makes Ross think that a physical system cannot add? Of course he knows that mechanical devices and computers are capable of performing sums, but he says they are only simulating addition, not truly adding. He writes:

 Whatever the discriminable features of a physical process may be, there will always be a pair of incompatible predicates, each as empirically adequate as the other, to name a function the exhibited data or process "satisfies." That condition holds for any finite actual
"outputs," no matter how many. That is a feature of physical process itself, of change. There is nothing about a physical process, or any repetitions of it, to block it from being a case of incompossible forms ("functions"), if it could be a case of any pure form at all. That is because the differentiating point, the point where the behavioral outputs diverge to manifest different functions, can lie beyond the actual, even if the actual should be infinite; e.g., it could lie in what the thing would have done, had things been otherwise in certain ways. For instance, if the function is x(*)y = (x + y, if y < 10^40 years, = x + y + 1, otherwise), the differentiating output would lie beyond the conjectured life of the universe.

Now, I can go along with Ross as far as the epistemological aspect of his conclusion: no matter how many input-output pairs we examine, we can never know what function is being computed. But Ross claims much more: he says physical systems are not just epistemologically indeterminate but "physically and logically" indeterminate, too. That is, it's not just that we can't know what function the machine is computing, but there really is no fact of the matter about what the output will be until it actually happens.

The problem is, the argument Ross gives is not up to the task of proving that claim.

First of all, what does Ross mean by "empirically adequate"? He is not using this in the sense of van Fraasen, for whom empirical adequacy means agreement, not just with all past observations, but with all possible observations. For Ross explicitly mentions a "differentiation point", possibly at some remote future time, at which the outcomes disagree. Nor does he mean "agreement with all future observations", for the same reason. So he must mean merely "agreement with all past observations."

But having two hypotheses that agree with all past observations is not enough to tell us that the physical system is actually (physically) indeterminate. It only says that our information is insufficient to distinguish between the two.

Another example Ross gives is the problem of determining a function, knowing only a finite number of data points. He (correctly) points out that there is an infinity of curves that will agree on those finite data. But this just says we don't know what the function is that produced the data. It doesn't follow that there is no such function at all. But that's what Ross needs for his conclusion that physical systems are not just epistemically indeterminate, but physically indeterminate.  

Ross's other arguments draw on Goodman's and Quine's work. These, too, also only reach as far as epistemology. Goodman's grue problem suggests that we can never know for sure whether we are inducting on the right categories. But it is a long way from that epistemological claim to the claim that there are no correct categories for induction to work on. Duhem's claim about undertermination says only that we can't know what part of whole complex of assumptions, theories, and practices is at fault when an experiment disagrees with theory. Again, this is only an epistemological claim. True, Quine tried to extend this uncertainty to the whole realm of human knowledge - but this extension hardly helps Ross's claim that humans can add, employ modus ponens, etc. Thus,none of Ross's arguments, either in the article or in his book, Thought and World, take us beyond epistemological indeterminacy.

I have to say it is exceedingly odd to see Feser defending physical indeterminism here. In our discussions of quantum mechanics and causation he argued strenuously that there is no such thing as physical indeterminism - not even in the case of quantum mechanics (where nearly all physicists accept fundamental indeterminism). So I'm wondering how Feser can square real, physical and logical indeterminism with the principle of causality.

More Detuning

If my Fine Tuning Argument for Naturalism (FTAN) is going to work, it needs to be supported with examples. To recap: the FTAN notes that, because God is (by supposition) all-powerful, there are many ways he could have created the universe other than by naturalistic methods. If we assume that the probability of any of these methods is equal, then there is a very small probability that we will discover that God has chosen a naturalistic method. (The assumption that "probability is equally spread over the various possibilities" is analogous to the assumption made in the usual Fine Tuning Argument for God (FTA for short).) If we find that observations agree with naturalistic methods, then we have a strong presumption against theism.

I already admitted that the FTAN in its original form doesn't quite work, because many instances of God intervening in a naturalistic process would be indistinguishable from a (somewhat different) naturalistic process. So what I need is to show explicit examples where a miraculous intervention would be distinguishable from a naturalistic process, and where the evidence available points to the naturalistic process. I gave a few in the earlier post, here I want to add to the list. (I won't make any attempt to estimate the degree of detuning here.)

1.) Age of the universe - If life evolved through naturalistic processes, then the universe must be old enough for evolution to have happened. If God created the universe, this need not be the case: there is no reason the universe couldn't be, say, 6000 years old. God could have placed humans, animals, plants, etc., on a ready-made earth, and human history could have proceeded in just the way it has.

In fact, we know the universe has been around for about 14 billion years - plenty of time for evolution to have happened.

2.) Age of the earth - Even if the universe is old, there is no reason the earth itself needs to be more than 6000 years old. God could have inserted an earth into a pre-existing universe, complete with animals, humans, etc.

Naturalistically, of course, the earth must be old enough for evolution to have happened. In fact, we know the earth is about 4.6 billion years old - plenty of time for evolution to have happened.

3.) The earth is dateable - Actually, if the earth was created separately by God, there is no reason for it to be any age at all. What I mean is this: The age of the earth can be determined by comparing the ratios of different isotopes in radioactive decay cascades. If God created the earth out of whole cloth, as it were, then comparing these ratios for different cascades would not lead to a sensible determination of the earth's age. Those ratios could have had any values God chose. Unless God was trying to fool us by carefully adjusting the ratios to give a particular, consistent, age for the earth, those ratios need not point to a single particular age.

In fact, we find that the isotope ratios do point to a consistent value of about 4.6 billion years. Once again, naturalism wins.

4.) Age of life on earth - Even with an old universe and an old earth, God could have simply zapped life into existence. He could have done this at any point in the evolutionary history of life, and evolution could have proceeded from that point. Or, he could have simply created all species in their present forms.

The fossil record shows that life has been on earth at least a billion years, and likely as much as 3.6 billion years. Needless to say, this is consistent with the naturalistic evolution of all current life forms.

5.) Common descent - If God created life on earth, there is no particular reason all life forms would be related to each other. He could have created each species individually (as indeed Christians thought for centuries), in which case there wouldn't be any relationship-through-descent.

Naturalistically, it need not be the case that all life is descended from a single common ancestor, either. In principle, life could have arisen on earth more than once. (Here I need to assume that life can arise naturalistically, which we do not know for sure yet.) However, given what we know about evolution, we can be sure that, in time, many different but related species will arise. Think of Darwin's Galapagos finches - many different species but all descended from a single ancestral species that somehow found its way to the islands. So, under naturalism, we expect to find many different species that are related by common descent.

In fact, we have strong reasons to believe that all life on earth is related by common descent from some original self-replicating life form. The evidence comes through the study of the anatomy of living organisms, through the fossil record that reveals the slow modification of life forms over vast periods of time, and through genetics that confirms the relationships deduced from anatomy and the fossil record. This is of course consistent with naturalism, but highly unlikely under theistic assumptions.

I should say again that I don't think this is a very good argument for naturalism. What I hope is that, by turning the fine tuning argument around, I can get you to see the problems with it. In my view the main problem is the assumption that probability is equally spread over the conceivable options. In the FTA, these options are the various conceivable values of the fundamental constants of nature. In the FTAN, the options are the various conceivable ways God could have created life on earth. In neither case do we have any good reason to think the probability is equally spread among  the conceivable options.

Can you think of other examples of ways God could have chosen to create life, but didn't?

Assumptions, Assumptions

So, I pointed out my FTAN (Fine Tuning Argument for Naturalism) to Alexander Pruss of Prosblogion, who was kind enough to respond in the comments of his post on fine tuning vs. the problem of evil. Alexander is not just some random blogger. All the folks at Prosblogion are Genuine Sophisticated Theologians - philosophy professors, no less. So, I was glad to get the opinion of an expert on my version of the fine tuning argument. Here's what he wrote (in part, I think I am fairly representing his responses with my excerpts here, but see the original post for his full remarks):

The FTA needs an assumption that there is a significant value to a universe that with very few exceptions, if any, follows orderly and elegant mathematical laws of nature. Such an assumption is compatible with miracles.

Now, this is exactly the sort of thing I was complaining about in my Purple Pachyderm post, and that Carl Sagan was complaining about in his Dragon in the Garage, and so on. For any argument against the existence of God, the theist simply introduces an arbitrary and unfounded assumption in answer.

So I pointed out that in a universe with any miracles at all, my FTAN would still work. For instance, on an earth that was too close to its sun for life to exist, God could prevent the excess radiation from reaching earth, thus allowing life to exist. The exception to energy conservation would be localized, satisfying the "few exceptions" assumption.

Alex responded:

Leibniz argued against Newton/Clarke that it would be inappropriate for God to rely on on-going miracles for the ordinary operation of the universe.
One way to defend this is to say that God has reason to avoid miracles. This reason can be overridden, of course.

OK, so now we have a new assumption: that miracles should not be on-going. Dragon in the garage once again.

 Unfortunately for Alex, this new assumption still doesn't answer the objection. Even with one-time miracles, there will still be infinitely more possible life-containing universes if there is an omnipotent God than if there is not. One example I pointed out was if the laws of chemistry don't allow for chemical evolution of life, but do allow for the existence of life. Then a single miraculous intervention by God could get life started. But there are infinitely many ways God could make this intervention, so there are infinitely many more possible life-containing worlds under the theistic assumption. So my FTAN still works.

Also, this new assumption flies in the face of an argument that theists have been making for centuries:  that it takes God's on-going miraculous intervention to sustain the universe. Here, for example, is Pope John Paul II discussing proofs of God's existence  (emphasis added):

Without such a supreme Cause, the world and every movement in it would remain "unexplained" and "inexplicable", and our intelligence would not be satisfied. The human mind can receive a response to its questions only by admitting a Being who has created the world with all its dynamism. and who continues to maintain it in existence. 

The theist wants to have it both ways. On-going miracles? Proof of God! No on-going miracles? That's proof of God, too!


Alex answered:

• 1. Dougherty and Poston in the paper I linked to argue that one can't consistently run both the FTA and ID-type biological design arguments. Your point is similar, though not the same.
• 2. I think both your and their point is somewhat weakened, but not destroyed, on the supposition that God would have good reason to minimize the number of miracles, subject to other desiderata.
• 3. But in any case, I think many of the proponents of the FTA would say that a number of the constants going into the FTA are such that not only need the values be "just right" (tough making sense of that rigorously, but there is an intuition there that many theists and non-theists find compelling) for life to begin, but for life to persist.

In (2) Alex is saying, I think, that God would prefer to create a life-containing universe without using miracles rather than one that requires miracles.Yet another new assumption. But Alex recognizes that that even this assumption does not "destroy" my point.

Anyway, isn't God supposed to want us to know about him? Wouldn't these miracles be evidence of a God? So why would God want to avoid them?

In (3), Alex is just saying that you can run the FTA (for God) on those parameters that allow life to persist. But this is irrelevant to my argument, which takes precisely the fine-tuned nature of those parameters as an argument against God.

So I have to say, I'm not too impressed with the Sophisticated Theologian's response to my counter-argument. Of course, with enough additional assumptions you can neutralize any argument. But the very need to make those logical contortions reveals how weak the theist's position is.

RP: Fine Tuning Supports Naturalism

The following seems worth re-posting, as some folks still seem impressed with the fine tuning argument. It seems like a fairly obvious point, yet I haven't seen it mentioned much in the fine tuning discussions I've read. I'd be grateful if anyone can show me the glaring flaw in the argument that I'm missing. At the Prosblogion link, Alexander Pruss kindly responded to my remarks; I'll have some comments on his response soon.

I should say again that I don't think the following is a very good argument for naturalism - it's just a way of showing why the fine tuning argument for God is hollow.

Originally posted on Thursday, October 13, 2011.

Garren's comments on the previous post got me thinking more about fine tuning. There are lots of reasons to dislike fine tuning arguments for God, but it occurred to me that we can turn the fine tuning argument around and show how it actually supports naturalism, not theism. Let me explain.

The usual fine tuning argument goes like this: Our universe is governed by natural laws that involve certain numerical parameters - the cosmological constant, the strength of the nuclear force, etc. Some of these parameters must lie in a very narrow range in order for life to exist:

PU = Possible Universes
FTU = Fine-Tuned Universes

So, given a naturalistic hypothesis (N) and general background knowledge (K), the probability of a fine-tuned universe is small:

P(FTU|N&K) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU)  << 1

On the other hand, given the theistic hypothesis (T), we would expect the universe to be suitable for life: P(FTU|T&K) is not small, or at least not as small as P(FTU|N&K).

One of the (many) problems with this argument is that we can't assert that the probability is given by the ratio of the areas without making many additional assumptions: that the values of parameters 1 and 2 are randomly chosen from the space of all parameters, for instance. But that's not the objection I want to pursue. Rather, I want to point out that the probability envisioned in the fine tuning argument is a sort of prior probability that ignores some of our background information: namely, the fact that life actually exists. That is, we have to take (K) to mean "general background knowledge not including the knowledge that life exists."

But we actually do know that life exists (L), and it is perfectly legitimate to include this knowledge along with our other background knowledge. If we add this knowledge back in, then trivially P(FTU|N&K&L) = 1: under the naturalistic hypothesis, the only way that life can exist is for the universe to have parameters that allow the existence of life.

But that is not true if God exists! Indeed, under theism, there is no reason to expect that the universe will be fine-tuned.

Remember that God is, by hypothesis, omnipotent. That means that God could  have caused life to arise by miraculous means, even in a universe that was not fine-tuned. Say, for example, that the universe had a value of the cosmological constant that caused it to expand too fast for galaxies to form. God could have prevented a galaxy-sized region from expanding in order to allow our Milky Way to form. Or God could have inserted a pre-made galaxy. Or he could have inserted an additional force that operated only within our galaxy and that countered the effects of the expansion. Or any number of other possibilities, because God can do anything.

So, under theism, the diagram looks like this:

That is, the probability of a fine-tuned universe under the theistic hypothesis is:

P(FTU|T&K&L) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU)  << 1

Conclusion: given that we know that life exists, the probability of discovering we are living in a universe with parameters fine-tuned for life is much higher under the naturalistic hypothesis than under the theistic hypothesis.

No Mundane Fairies

...for me.

Having forced myself to slog through Swinburne, I thought I could give the whole area of arguments for God a rest. Swinburne admits that there are no valid deductive proofs of God's existence, and all his "good inductive arguments" for God seem pretty weak to me. But I keep running across atheists who claim either  that there are reasonable arguments for God, or that the usual arguments for naturalism fail, or both. For instance, here's a curious article in Philo by atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. I like and respect Smith: he has published some very cogent counter-arguments to the arguments of William Lane Craig and other theists. So when he says that naturalists are naturalists for all the wrong reasons, I have an uncomfortable feeling that he's probably right.

Oddly, though, he doesn't (in this article) tell us what the wrong argument for naturalism is, nor what he considers the right argument. This he leaves to "other papers and books."

One book that is often mentioned favorably (by Smith, among others) is Arguing About Gods, by Graham Oppy. According to the Amazon reviews, Oppy - an atheist - concludes that neither side has arguments sufficient to convince the other.

To me, the naturalist arguments seem clearly superior. My questions are, what reasons do theists have to remain theists (it seems to me they don't have any), and why aren't the naturalist arguments strong enough to be convincing (as it seems to me they are)?

I guess I have to do some more reading....

Fine Tuning Supports Naturalism

Garren's comments on the previous post got me thinking more about fine tuning. There are lots of reasons to dislike fine tuning arguments for God, but it occurred to me that we can turn the fine tuning argument around and show how it actually supports naturalism, not theism. Let me explain.

The usual fine tuning argument goes like this: Our universe is governed by natural laws that involve certain numerical parameters - the cosmological constant, the strength of the nuclear force, etc. Some of these parameters must lie in a very narrow range in order for life to exist:

PU = Possible Universes
FTU = Fine-Tuned Universes

So, given a naturalistic hypothesis (N) and general background knowledge (K), the probability of a fine-tuned universe is small:

P(FTU|N&K) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU)  << 1

On the other hand, given the theistic hypothesis (T), we would expect the universe to be suitable for life: P(FTU|T&K) is not small, or at least not as small as P(FTU|N&K).

One of the (many) problems with this argument is that we can't assert that the probability is given by the ratio of the areas without making many additional assumptions: that the values of parameters 1 and 2 are randomly chosen from the space of all parameters, for instance. But that's not the objection I want to pursue. Rather, I want to point out that the probability envisioned in the fine tuning argument is a sort of prior probability that ignores some of our background information: namely, the fact that life actually exists. That is, we have to take (K) to mean "general background knowledge not including the knowledge that life exists."

But we actually do know that life exists (L), and it is perfectly legitimate to include this knowledge along with our other background knowledge. If we add this knowledge back in, then trivially P(FTU|N&K&L) = 1: under the naturalistic hypothesis, the only way that life can exist is for the universe to have parameters that allow the existence of life.

But that is not true if God exists! Indeed, under theism, there is no reason to expect that the universe will be fine-tuned.

Remember that God is, by hypothesis, omnipotent. That means that God could  have caused life to arise by miraculous means, even in a universe that was not fine-tuned. Say, for example, that the universe had a value of the cosmological constant that caused it to expand too fast for galaxies to form. God could have prevented a galaxy-sized region from expanding in order to allow our Milky Way to form. Or God could have inserted a pre-made galaxy. Or he could have inserted an additional force that operated only within our galaxy and that countered the effects of the expansion. Or any number of other possibilities, because God can do anything.

So, under theism, the diagram looks like this:

That is, the probability of a fine-tuned universe under the theistic hypothesis is:

P(FTU|N&K&L) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU)  << 1

Conclusion: given that we know that life exists, the probability of discovering we are living in a universe with parameters fine-tuned for life is much higher under the naturalistic hypothesis than under the theistic hypothesis.

Theists and Atheists Agree...

Alexander Pruss of Prosblogion seems to have found an argument that theistic and atheistic philosophers agree on. From the comments:

So it looks like there are a number of people who have published on this, and all the papers that I've so far looked at basically agree that the following are not all true:
1. Evolution occurred pretty much as science describes it.
2. Naturalism is true.
3. Moral realism is true.
4. We have moral knowledge.

I don't understand all the arguments that lead up to this conclusion well enough to know whether to agree with it or not, but it's rather a fascinating conclusion if true.

Alexander, being a theist and a moral realist, naturally takes (3) and (4) to be true, and so concludes that either (1) or (2) is false - he then opts for naturalism being false.

I don't know enough about the whole realism/anti-realism debate to have a firm position, but I'm leaning anti-realist at the moment, so the argument doesn't present a real problem for me. But it seems to be a real problem for someone like Sam Harris, who is a naturalist and a moral realist. I don't think he would want to deny (4), either. From what I understand, he thinks that science can discover moral truths. So I wonder how Sam would respond to this argument.

But then, Sam thinks that discussions of metaethics and deontology only add to the amount of boredom in the world, so probably he wouldn't bother.

On The Human

Thanks to Luke, I just discovered the humanist website On The Human. They have a number of very cool articles, and some interesting comments from readers. Here are two to whet your appetite:

A downer: The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality, by Alex Rosenberg, on why life is meaningless.

An upper: Morals without God? by Frans de Waal, on the evolution of morality.

Faculties of Other Experiences

"But I have wondered if there might not be colleges and faculties of other experiences than yours, and whether even now, in the far corners of other continents, powers not yours are being brought to fruition." Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that those three guys are right.

In Terry Pratchett's A Hat Full of Sky, a witch's cabin is inhabited by a invisible creature the witch calls Oswald. At least, she thinks it is. Whenever she puts a fork in amongst the spoons, the drawer rattles, pops open, and the fork leaps over into the correct spot.  If something gets dropped, a dustpan and brush appear and magically sweep things up. If Miss Level (the witch) mixes some salt together with the pepper, Oswald will happily (so she surmises) spend an afternoon sorting the salt grains from among the pepper.

Given the phenomenon Pratchett describes, it's hard to think of any hypothesis that would cover it, other than that of an invisible, intelligent agent. If we had numerous instances, well documented, of such occurrences, we would have to conclude that incorporeal intelligent beings exist.

But we don't.

In Williams's story, there is an uprising of Africans who wield powers not understood by European science. They are able to prolong life far beyond the normal human lifespan. They can exert a sort of mind control on others.

In Williams's day, it might have still seemed possible that some remote group in Africa had developed an alternate "technology," one based in supernatural rather than natural causes. Today, having made contact with numerous such remote groups all over the world, and having discovered no technologies that make effective use of supernatural forces, it's hard to believe that such skills exist anywhere.

It's not that "colleges and faculties of other experiences" don't exist: nearly all human groups make attempts to manipulate the supernatural forces of their systems of belief. It's just that they don't work: appealing to the supernatural is not an effective way of getting things done.