Tuesday 5 June 2007

A rebuttal...



In responce to this: http://www.ex-atheist.com/6.html


The author’s descent into apathy/disillusionment with life is not a necessary consequent of embracing logic.
That she felt the need to attach some sort of cosmic significance to her life and actions, beyond embracing them for their own sake, probably says more about the pessimism inherent in religious belief than belief in logic and rationality. The notion that her life, the observable universe, is not beautiful enough, that there *must* be something ‘greater’ than that which we see, is not necessary to experience compassion, altruism and joy in one’s existence. The author is correct however in that science does not provide a moral code which religion does. Science merely tells us what probably is, not what ought to be.
For morality, one turns to philosophy (as she did at this point in the story) or religion.
She says that she tries Sartre and others and decides that “they were full of crap”. Why? This is an entirely arbitrary decision in this context which lacks any supporting evidence beyond the assertion that if something does not have a pre-defined essence, it can never have meaning.
Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism for example actually contains one of the most inspiring and optimistic outlooks on life. According to Sartre, being free from a pre-defined purpose means that we have almost unlimited potential to be whatever we wish to be.
The author makes a huge assumption - that moral relativism is a necessary consequent of a solely rationalistic outlook. This is blatantly untrue, in both a rationalistic ( as demonstrated with different results by Kant’s categorical Imperative and Mill’s Utilitarian philosophies ) outlook, and a mechanistic (Hobbes) view amongst others.
So the author turns against Christianity. Understandable given he lives in a country where the vast majority are adherents to what is ultimately an illogical faith. This is not a slight against believers, but a truth. The rationalist thinker cannot entertain the notion of faith which they seem to possess and with this removed, the belief becomes irrational, if understandable.
That the author found flaws in her own logic is indicative of a flaw in the author’s logic, rather than logic itself and demonstrates the flexibility of the rationalist perspective - that if a flaw is found, the view can be re-examined and a better conclusion arrived at. Not so with religious dogma.
There is some ironic foreshadowing at this point where the author wonders if “they (believers) so desperately want there to be a God that they had deluded themselves into thinking that there was one?”. This seems to be precisely the road she herself is on, given her inability to reconcile her view of reality, with atheistic philosophies.
So she beings to look again at the bible. The objections she raises and her reasons for discarding them seem particularly week. She finds an action of God morally objectionable (which presumably is impossible given her alleged moral relativism) and then dismisses this because “God made it, he must know what he’s doing” (my interpretation, not a direct quote).
The moment of revelation as described by the author is, understandably, baffling to a rationalist thinker.
The author doesn’t actually say what it was that triggered this epiphany. There is plenty of obtuse rhetoric but little substance. What exactly is “needing to be made complete by the perfect love of God” supposed to mean?! The kind of language surrounding the supposed epiphany is very different from anything a rational philosopher would use, suggesting the author had either never truly embraced philosophy (perhaps seeking it as a substitute for religion rather than an end in itself) or had long since abandoned its rigorous approach to ideas about the divine.

The result seems to be both fascinating and stomach-turning in equal amounts. This lost soul who has wandered through the atheistic wilderness discovers to her joy that “I sucked! Christianity wasn't what was wrong with the world! A lack of education wasn't what was wrong with the world! I was what was wrong with the world”. Her life has seemingly been given new purpose - to experience shame and guilt.
More consequences of her newfound belief involve equating premarital sex, abortion and homosexuality to acts of selfishness. While this is a debate in itself, the fact is that many human actions (Hobbes says all) are acts of selfishness. If being with a person you love is an act of selfishness, the homosexuals are going to hell. If not wanting to bring a severely handicapped child into a world of suffering is an act of selfishness, then mothers who abort are going to hell. If two people want to experience sex - something which probably brings us closer to our true nature than any religious tract - then they are going to hell.
She can no longer enjoy television because it is “offensive to God”. Any idea that she might have been possessed of a sense of humour at any stage of her spiritual development has now thoroughly evaporated.
Towards the end of the article, perhaps the author has realised that she has not really provided any actual examinable reasons for her conversion and seeks to do so. We are told “ For me, Biblical truth wasn't verified through historical accuracy, inerrancy or reliability of the Gospels, because my initial assumptions didn't include these things”. Why not? Any student of philosophy is aware of the inherent flaw in the proposition commonly known as “Pascal’s Wager.” If you discount (as the author admits she did) everything which verifies the authenticity of the Bible’s version of truth, then you have absolutely no guarantee that you are following the correct interpretation of God’s will, beyond the fact that the Biblical version is appealing to you (and why should this be enough?).
There is a fundamental difference between the concepts of “truth” and “biblical truth”. Presumably, if the author examined the holy book of any other religion, she would have been similarly converted.
her mind-boggling explanation concludes with “The fact that I, or anyone, was capable of understanding spiritual matters became my evidence for the soul.” That any student of philosophy could think this sentence is strong enough to stand on its own, without reference to Cartesian metaphysics or any philosophy of mind at the very least, speaks volumes for the author’s ability to articulate her point.

Monday 4 June 2007

Purpose and Function - a philosophical distinction.

(Disclaimer: This is by no means my attempt at a proper philosophical discourse, I merely wrote it on a whim in order to clarify a point during a separate debate.)

In what follows I will attempt to show the distinction between the ‘purpose’ of an object and the ‘function of an object.

Definition of purpose:

A purpose may be defined as ‘the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used etc.’ or ‘an intended or desired result, end, aim, goal’.

Definition of function:

The dictionary definition of ‘function’ describes “the kind of action or activity proper to a person, thing, or institution; the purpose for which something is designed or exists; role.”
In this exercise, I shall use a slightly modified form of this definition.
‘Function’ shall be taken to refer to a description of an actualised physical interaction of a substance or substances. Unlike the above definition, it shall not be taken that the function of a thing implies a purpose for reasons which will be explained later.


Natural and artificial substances:


For the purposes of this article, an ‘artificial’ substance shall be taken to refer to any inorganic object whose creation requires the application of sentient intelligence or which is causally derivative of such an input. Houses, nests, swords and shoes fall into this category.

A natural substance shall refer to an object which has been formed through exclusively physical factors. Cliffs, clouds, organs and so on fall into this category.

It is my intent to show that the only types of substances which can be possessed of a purpose are artificial substances.

The River And The Dam.

Consider a tree which has fallen into a river, and a manmade dam.
The functions of both can be said to be essentially identical, each serves to alter the flow of the water.
However, it seems counterintuitive to say that the purpose of the fallen tree is to dam the river.

This means that while we can derive the function of a substance from an observation of its physical characteristics and its relationship with other physical bodies, the property of ‘purposefulness’ does not seem to be predicated on any physical factor.

Consider a second tree, identical to the first, which has been deliberately placed by a man so as to dam the river.

From a purely physical account, we could not differentiate in this case, which tree has a purpose and which does not. It can be said then, that the purpose of an object is in fact predicated upon the intent of its creator.

Purposes and the external world.

If an object has a purpose, it is created in order to fulfil some intended functional role.
Since natural substances which are not possessed of intelligence are incapable of creating substances with reference to further external substances (such natural substances do not experience awareness) we can conclude that intelligence or intent is a necessary requirement for something to be created with a ‘purpose’.

A heart after all, cannot be aware of the blood it pumps, just as an ocean cannot be aware of the cliff it creates. We do not say that the purpose of an ocean is to erode, yet it seems odd to say that the purpose of a heart is not to pump blood.


Evolutionary Anthropomorphisms


A problem when considering the human body is the fact that it appears at first to have been designed. Our organs are part of a highly complex system, which surely cannot have simply accidentally arranged itself so as to make our existence possible.

However, consider the example of an animal who has razor sharp claws, green skin, and lives in a forest.
It is tempting to conclude that his skin is designed to blend in with the surrounding trees, that the purpose of his claws is to act as a weapon to defend itself or hunt for food or whatever.

Yet when we look a little closer, we understand that we must modify our language.
The animal’s claws are ideal for catching prey perhaps, its skin is ideally suited to its environment.
Imagine a scenario with two lizards, one with green skin and sharp claws, and one whose genes have mutated to give it bright yellow skin and no claws.
For obvious reasons one species manages to survive while the other is soon wiped out, not being able to catch prey, not being able to camouflage itself in the green forest.
Over billions of years such changes occur, leaving us with the species who happened to be the best suited to survival. We should not infer from this that anything about us has in fact been designed. The genes which turn the lizard’s skin green are unaware of the trees, the genes which trigger the growth of the claws are unaware of the animals they will be used to catch. It just so happens that the green lizards got lucky, they survive and pass their genes on to future generations and so on.

To return to the example of the human heart, perhaps now we can see that it is not so absurd to say that our heart has a function, but does not in fact have a purpose, being the product of billions of years of evolutionary change.

Conclusion:

If the function describes what something does, the purpose describes why it does it. We have seen that for the essence of something to precede its existence a purpose or intent is necessary. Such requires an intelligence to conceive of the future relationship or interaction between the object and objects external to it.

It follows from this that no natural substances can be possessed of purposes in contrast with artificial substances which are possessed of both.

Experimentation and Introduction


Good morning world. I am Brian and this is my blog.


Obviously I am not one for following trends, as my wardrobe will attest. Not in the pretentious way mind you (which is not to say I am not pretentious, I consider it self-evident as you are beginning to). Rather, I am possessed of the kind of laziness which has resulted in an overdeveloped imagination, an abundance of free time and a general ignorance of the inside of the Boole library at UCC.

With this in mind I declare that today, June 4th 2007, marks my initiation into the overpopulated and ego-inflated world of blogging.
Credit for my conversion can be largely attributed to my friend and occasional philosophical adversary Cian Boland. It would be remiss of me not to offer a plug at this point, so why not head on over to www.cianboland.com once you are done reading this and take a look at the indirect antecedent to what I hope will become a fairly adequate and accurate repository for my thoughts.
Don’t worry about the language either, I tend to have my multi-syllabic moods (read: pretentious). This can be contrasted with my ‘trying to be funny’ moods (read: overly sarcastic, bitter), and my ‘long nasty rant’ moods (that’s a pretty accurate description.) I am also fond of parentheses.

I have no idea as regards what the regular length or frequency of these blogs will be. I intend on posting some of the more philosophically/politically-themed diatribes from my profile on Bebo.com.
Comments are welcomed and encouraged. I am a fan of pointless exercises like debating on the internet and trying to name all fifty states (I always forget Delaware).

In any case, this initial entry is intended to serve as both an introduction and an exercise to see if I have actually managed to establish the webpage. Assuming you are reading this, there should already be some posts above which will hopefully give an indicator of the future content of this blog.

That’s all from me. Happy reading.