Dawkins speaks of our reading personal agency into nature as the source of the delusion of a personal God. But earlier in this blog I pointed out that the very basic notions used by science, such as causality, are not perceived in nature but interpreted on the basis of an analogy with our experience of our own agency. In other words, the interpretive pattern that leads us to think of nature as involving causality also leads us to regard a personal Being as its source. And one who attacks the latter as Dawkins has done may well undermine the former.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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