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| Of God and Teapots(I said only one argument per week, but I've nothing else to do. I'm also irritated that my xanga posts are becoming more apologet-icky)
Everytime I see Celestial Teapot's page I'm reminded to make a post about this. I keep pushing it off, but maybe I've the chutzpah to finally talk about this. Bertrand Russell was the guy who first came up with the comparison between God and Teapots. Each generation after him has enjoyed making their own version, like the Pink Unicorn (this is from atheists of the 60's, no doubt), Invisible Hamsters, and most recently (and most creatively) the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They're all used in a general context nowadays though, rarely used in the way Russell used his Teapots. Let's see how he used it.
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
He begins saying nothing controversial. Basically, because a proposition hasn't been disproven doesn't mean it is proven or that it's reasonable to believe in it. That the existence of aliens hasn't been disproven doesn't give their existence any credence. (The opposite is true too: because the existence of aliens hasn't been proven, their non-existence hasn't been proven.) Then he applies this to God. It's a bit hard to unpack his rhetoric here; it's so thick I'm not actually sure if there's anything more to this than that one bit of logic that the absence of a disproof does not constitute a proof. He adds in a reference to the Inquisition for good measure, seems to take a jab at blind faith. But nowhere here does Russell remotely suggest that it is essentially irrational to believe in a celestial teapot. If that's the case, then nowhere does he imply that it's irrational to believe in a God.
Some people try to make this passage out to say that it's just as plainly irrational to believe in God as it is to believe something like an invisible unicorn. But that's not implied by the text, at least from how I'm reading this. And I'm not sure what's by-default irrational about believing in an invisible unicorn. If one inferred indirectly the existence of a particular thing that is horse-like and has exactly one horn, what's irrational about believing in it? Now, I think it's just plainly untrue that God (whether or not one exists) is on the same par as an invisible pink unicorn or invisible teapot. The reason is that God, unlike a unicorn, if he exists, can be inferred from general states or patterns in the universe. If he exists, he "unifies" all other contingent facts. (I might be getting this idea from Bill Valicella). Other people say that because God is invisible, there's no evidence you can possibly use to support his existence. That's just silly. Alot of things are invisible, or close to invisible, and we infer their existence indirectly from what we can see and from logic. The existence of atoms was inferred from abstract reasoning before it was inferred from empirical research. So I'm not sure if there's anything else to this. What's your take? | | |
| making of mescoops of sun stream over the
plastic hemisphere.
i watch them melt across the sky
and melt into me.
He stirs the solution
and firmament bubbles up from
the swirling void.
he carves out from the
still baking earth creepers and
flyers that breathe him in.
i see the greens
embedded round the cake.
cleft-lipped crust form the surface.
and there am i at the center of the dance-
the stuff of breaded, bleeding, earth -
spirited
in the garden
that grows inside of Him. -----------------------------------------------
God, I love you so much. You are the heart of my heart. You fill this room with your glory. | | |
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I don't consider myself a superstitious person. I am, contrary to what you may presume, skeptical of all things supernatural. I credit a small chunk of it on my own religious beliefs. My beliefs about Jesus, my understanding of the miracles and providence in the bible, all indicate to me that miracles occur in the turning-points of history. Certainly, God's providence is involved in every dull moment, churning the events forward. But to need to see his fingerprint in everything, it's sorta like our wanting to catch all the pupeteers and stage directors from below the stage. The reminder that life is a play is needed sometimes. It creates distance between the audience and the actors ruining everything before them. "Well, at least there's Act II, an opportunity to do-over." But to expect to be told, at every moment of the play, the meaning of the hero's death and the widow's miscarriage, to be told how they'll all be remedied in Act III with the son's return, that's just awful. Sometimes, we don't need to know the answers to all the questions ringing out of our hurt. Sometimes, we shouldn't get those answers, because those answers alter the whole teaching experience. It makes the play, makes life, meaningless. It's sometimes better to be kept in the dark, to endure the questions to the end and see what became of all of it. You'll have your answers when the Playwright's word expressed by the characters finally shows the good intentions of the Director.
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It's weird how I began this post intending to talk about hopeless romantics, and instead talked about God. | | |
| Why the Mind is Not a Brain(I said I'd make an argument every week. This is not my own. I credit Plantinga and Searle)
A physical thing has size and mass. If the materialists are right and our thoughts are physical, they might be located in neuronal firings. From their viewpoint, thoughts and beliefs have neurophysiological properties. Thoughts just are these neuronal firings. But each event, if it is a belief or thought, also must have a sort of content. This event is a belief about something. A belief points beyond itself. My belief that I am wearing pajamas late in the day has a content. Its content is the proposition "I am wearing pajamas late in the day." According to Plantinga, its content is what enables the belief true or false. It is either true or false that I am wearing pajamas.
Here's the problem. How can an assemblage of neuronal firings make proposition-carrying beliefs? It seems to me that no matter how we measure out neuronal firings or weigh or read them, we'll never have the faintest suggestion of a thought or belief. A physical thing is not about anything. It doesn't have propositional content. A physical thing is neither true nor false. It doesn't "rise to the dignity of an error."
Maybe we can think of a mind as a software program determined by the "hardware" of the brain. But the two are wholly distinct. "Since programs are defined purely formally or syntactically and since minds have an intrinsic mental content, it follows immediately that the program by itself cannot constitute the mind." (Searle, "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?") The symbols, rules and operations of a program (which represent the structure of a brain and the laws of physics that govern it) do not guarantee any semantic content. So a mind cannot be inferred from observing a brain. Since minds do exist, they cannot be one and the same thing as brains. | | |
| The movement comes in slow. It's a tune we both should know.
But the walls are thin so we keep our voices low. | | |
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