Monday 19 October 2009

Swinburne: Arguments from Consciousness, Morality and Providence

Time to skip though a bit faster, so I'm taking the next two chapters together: Arguments from Consciousness and Morality, and The Argument from Providence. The form of the argument will by now be fairly familiar, so I don't need to rehearse it in such detail, even though the subject matter is different.

In Arguments from Consciousness and Morality, Swinburne makes the same general point, that he finds it hard to conceive of a way in which consciousness could have come about through natural processes. He accepts evolution as a means by which animals have come about, but finds it hard to understand why thought should have evolved. The only quotation he provides in the whole of the two chapters is from the 17th century philosopher John Locke

Divide matter into as many parts as you will ... vary the figure and motion of it, as much as you please ... and you may as rationally expect to produce sense, thought, and knowledge by putting together in a certain figure and motion, gross particles of matter, as by those that are the very minutest, that do anywhere exist. They knock, impel, and resist each other just as the greater do, and that is all they can do.

On the other hand, Swinburne thinks that human beings who think are just the sort of thing that God would make if he exists, and so he regards this as a good C-inductive argument for God.

He takes a similar line with The Argument from Moral Truth, which he comes to later in the chapter, that there is no reason for an awareness of moral truth to come to use by natural means, but implanting an awareness of them in us is just what God would do.

In essence, this is what Dawkins calls the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Just because Swinburne finds it hard to think of a way that these phenomena could have occurred naturally, he therefore assumes them to be extremely unlikely to be natural phenomena. This simply highlights the subjective nature of his assessments, since scientists with more knowledge of the subject are apt to regard the natural explanation as perfectly plausible and likely.

In The Argument from Providence, Swinburne regards it as wonderfully helpful of God to have created a world in which mankind can look after himself (feed himself, clothe himself) without apparent divine intervention every day. That the universe should have configured itself that way naturally he thinks to be unlikely, and so again it is regarded as a C-inductive argument for God.

Similarly, he is most impressed by the fact that the world offers us opportunities to help each other. he goes through various kinds of worlds that God might want to create, and settles on what he calls world-IV as being the most likely, in which there is exist humanly free agents who are born and die. In other words, he regards this is the best of all possible worlds, and therefore the one that God would most want to create. He argues

Given that ... we may expect God to create humanly free agents with a large degree of free choice and responsibility, subject to a limit of harm (that is, positive evil) they can do to each other, it is moderately probable that God will make a World-IV, including natural death for all and free agents having the power to cause death.

It seems to me that there is a glaring hole here (quite in addition to all the holes I've already identified in this general form of argument) and that is that we are not in a World-IV by Swinburne's description. We live in a universe where humans in fact have unlimited power to do evil to each other, to the extent of being able to use atomic weapons in such a way as to extinguish all life from the planet. So far we have chosen not to. But that doesn't change the fact that the power exists for us to do unlimited harm.

5 comments:

  1. Nothing to see here, then. It's pretty clear that Swinburne has lost any scintilla of intellectual credibility when he starts to put forward the conspicuous absence of God in everyday life as evidence for God's existence. By this reasoning the Purple People Eater is an even better candidate for universe-creator, since it has designed a world in which it is totally unnecessary and barely ever even mentioned.

    Many thanks once again for the analysis.

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  2. Yes, the arguments become sillier and sillier.

    What I wonder is why does S. generally rate God-explanations below natural explanations (here: non-supernatural, non-personal explanations)? He only resorts to a God-explanation when he feels the need to fill a (perceived) gap in our overall explanatory structure. But why doesn't he directly pit God-explanations against natural explanations as a matter of course?

    Take any ordinary event or state of affairs - say, the weather today or the shape of a pebble or the distance from the Earth to the Sun. One could reason, as Swinburne generally does in his arguments, that had God wanted to bring about such an event or state of affairs, he could not fail. Therefore, on the Goddidit explanation, the probability of the evidence in question is at least as high as on any natural explanation - it is exactly 1! So why doesn't he attempt to use God to explain ordinary observations? Why only stuff him into gaps?


    "That the universe should have configured itself that way naturally he thinks to be unlikely..."

    This seems to betray the traditional "mind-over-matter" view. Matter is seen as inherently dumb and chaotic; only mind exhibits sense and structure. Any regularity seen in matter must be credited to some mind.

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  3. ...subject to a limit of harm (that is, positive evil) they can do to each other...
    How nice that God is not so limited, our omni-benevolent creator can torture us for eternity for having the temerity to follow the (lack of) evidence and deny His existence.

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  4. It's very odd. As a trained philosopher Swinburne is clearly aware that the following is invalid:

    If God then X.
    X.
    Therefore God.

    (where X is the existence of a universe, of humans, of consciousness, of providence...) Yet he seems determined to believe that a big pile of such bad arguments somehow adds up to one good argument, and equally determined to abuse Bayes in the hope this will render such a crap-pile somehow acceptable.

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  5. "we are not in a World-IV by Swinburne's description. We live in a universe where humans in fact have unlimited power to do evil to each other, to the extent of being able to use atomic weapons in such a way as to extinguish all life from the planet."

    Comment:
    You have ignored a key point that Swinburne makes in Chapter 10, in which he lays out the argument from providence: the existence of natural death places a limit on the amount of suffering that can be inflicted on agents and other sentient beings.

    If Swinburne is correct on this point, then your counterexample fails.

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