RD's 747 argument or, keep it simple, stupid

Regarding Dawkins' central point, that a being that does all that God is supposed to do must be complex and therefore made by another and therefore not God.

I may have mentioned this before: in such a case, here we go again:

The adequate reply must show how that the arguments for God are arguments for a simple being. E.g., unmoved mover. Whatever that is, it can't be complex... otherwise it would be moved.

His likely rebuttal is that whatever a first mover is, it can't be a person. Persons make plans, deliberate, reason, hope, etc. and doing these things takes a lot of moving parts.

The reply to such an objection is to note that there is a kind of simplicity IN human beings that makes agency possible. We are agents only if we are not the sum of our parts.

The RD rebuttal would likely be that this is an appeal to dualism and that dualism is a kind of childish, pre-scientific way of looking at nature.

The reply to this might not be rhetorically satisfying but it IS, I believe, the correct one: that besides dualism and reductionism, there is a unity of the human person in a temporal, spatial multiplicity; that in virtue of which a person is ONE is not some ghostly thing that is an effect of the operation of the multiplicity of parts. Nor is it a shorthand for the multiplicity of parts. If it were either of these, then human agency would be an illusion.

RD's objection, I believe, would be that I am preaching a kind of Spinozan pantheism, which is fine with him, but it doesn't look like God.

My reply would be that I am not directly attributing to God the same sort of unity that is found in creatures. Rather, I am arguing that something analogous to created unity is found in God and that the study of the former is the best way to study the latter.. Furthermore, to deny the latter is to attack the former. That is, the very basis for one's denial of the unity/simplicity of God as understood by classical theists... that basis also undercuts other affirmations of unity.

Also worthwhile: to point out how there are relations IN nature where the simpler explains the more complex. The unity of consciousness (aka the bundling problem) is explained, at a certain point, simply by saying that the subject is one. To deny that God can be simple has as its repercussion the rejection of the unity of the person.

Finally, it is worth inserting earlier the possible claim that the laws of nature are simple... I know the rebuttal would be that they are impersonal hence irrelevant...but it still may be helpful to bring them up: a rational ontology includes simplicity.

How about including an analysis of the way we know first principles? Like the principle of non-contradiction? There's a kind of simplicity in knowing that this principle --nothing can both be and not be in the same way at the same time -- is true always and everywhere. Given the way RD looks at things, this must be an exceedingly complex thought. But actually it's simple -- especially in the way that it is actually used, as it were, in the background.

Finally, how about a Platonic approach to first principles themselves? Or even second/third... After all, when any two persons think of the Pythagorean formula, they think of the same formula.... but where is it? Come to think of it, how is it that any two people think of any concrete thing at the same time? If reductive materialism is what is being proposed by RD, then the last question is an embarrassment to his project. But if non-reductive..., then he faces another problem: how could he give an account without abandoning the bull-in-the-china-shop approach to issues that is his tradmark?

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

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 ...

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ]. Aquinas thus holds that it was not all death that entered the world through man's sin, but human death.

The Human Question

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