Implications of atheism

[cih1355]

One of the implications of atheism is that the personal and the rational come from the impersonal and the irrational. Can anyone explain why the personal and the rational cannot come from the impersonal and the irrational?

 

[davidsuggs]

It cannot for the same reason that nothing can come into being by itself. From a state of nonexistence, nothing can, on its own, cause itself to come into existence because there is nothing to come into existence. The irrational must stay irrational unless altered by something rational. Now matter how many plants exist, they simply cannot cause a human to come into existence. Neither can the evolutionary procedure lead to rationality. Rationality is abstract and the physical simply cannot create something purely abstract. Metaphysically, they exist in two separate realms and though one may have an effect in the other, it cannot create something within the other.

I know this is confusing and I am sorry I cannot explain it more basically. You asked a really deep question and the philosophical basis of it crosses many fields of study. Someone more learned than myself might be able to explain better.

 

[Christlicher Soldat]

As a grad student in Behavior Analysis (the psychological science that grew out of radical behaviorism), I'd say that the consistent naturalist's only answer to this argument would be to redefine "rational" as a class of "private events" -- unobservable internal behavior. And this is essentially what B.F. Skinner and Arthur Staats do with all cognitive constructs. The painful thing about reading G. H. Clark's criticism of behaviorism from memory is that he really doesn't get the name of the game here; to the behaviorist, "memory" is just what we commonly call that which in reality is a class of internal conditioned responses. In other words, the consistent naturalist would have to say that there is no such thing as rationality qua rationality. Man is essentially irrational matter that behaves in a way that appears rational -- the word "rational" being merely a label we apply to certain classes of behavior.

So from my perspective, cih1355, your particular criticism begs the question. It kind of works with the naturalist who hasn't thought his philosophy of mind the whole way through. However, I don't think it works against behaviorists, who, in my assessment, are more consistent as atheists.

The obvious problem that the behaviorist's escape valve creates, though, is that even concepts of right and wrong and of truth and falsehood become completely arbitrary. If those things are just classes of behavior, with no external existence that imposes itself on us, then science is no more intrinsically valuable than mysticism. Using science to help people is no more intrinsically moral than wallowing in ignorance. It may be that, in the external world, naturalistic evolution is what we might call "true." But who cares that theists are wrong? Why write books about how they're ruining the U.S.? The universe is what it is, and there is no "should" about it.

 

[CatechumenPatrick]

As a grad student in Behavior Analysis (the psychological science that grew out of radical behaviorism), I'd say that the consistent naturalist's only answer to this argument would be to redefine "rational" as a class of "private events" -- unobservable internal behavior. And this is essentially what B.F. Skinner and Arthur Staats do with all cognitive constructs. The painful thing about reading G. H. Clark's criticism of behaviorism from memory is that he really doesn't get the name of the game here; to the behaviorist, "memory" is just what we commonly call that which in reality is a class of internal conditioned responses. In other words, the consistent naturalist would have to say that there is no such thing as rationality qua rationality. Man is essentially irrational matter that behaves in a way that appears rational -- the word "rational" being merely a label we apply to certain classes of behavior.

So from my perspective, cih1355, your particular criticism begs the question. It kind of works with the naturalist who hasn't thought his philosophy of mind the whole way through. However, I don't think it works against behaviorists, who, in my assessment, are more consistent as atheists.

The obvious problem that the behaviorist's escape valve creates, though, is that even concepts of right and wrong and of truth and falsehood become completely arbitrary. If those things are just classes of behavior, with no external existence that imposes itself on us, then science is no more intrinsically valuable than mysticism. Using science to help people is no more intrinsically moral than wallowing in ignorance. It may be that, in the external world, naturalistic evolution is what we might call "true." But who cares that theists are wrong? Why write books about how they're ruining the U.S.? The universe is what it is, and there is no "should" about it.

I don't see how the only consistant response a naturalist could give would be to redefine "rational" as a class of "private events." It seems they have many other avenues, and in any case most naturalists are not behavioralists today anyway, so many probably do not take that line of response.

You say that "It kind of works with the naturalist who hasn't thought his philosophy of mind the whole way through." Do you think it works with naturalists who may not be behavioralists but have thought through their philosophy of mind, such as Dennett or Tye?

 

[Christlicher Soldat]

I don't see how the only consistant response a naturalist could give would be to redefine "rational" as a class of "private events." It seems they have many other avenues, and in any case most naturalists are not behavioralists today anyway, so many probably do not take that line of response.

You say that "It kind of works with the naturalist who hasn't thought his philosophy of mind the whole way through." Do you think it works with naturalists who may not be behavioralists but have thought through their philosophy of mind, such as Dennett or Tye?

The term, friend, is "behaviorist," and I admit I was unclear when I said "the only consistent response." Radical behaviorism is to psychology what Darwinism is to biology. To the naturalist, the eye is not created (or even evolved) in order to see, but rather it evolves by chance and gives the organism a selection advantage. In the same way, to the radical behaviorist, the rat does not press the lever in order to receive a food pellet, but rather he presses the lever by chance and the contingent reward of the food pellet selects for that behavior's reocurrence. B. F. Skinner wrote extensively about this parallel between Darwinism and radical behaviorism, and he very often characterized cognitive psychology as creationism. When asked why cognitive science was so popular despite being wrong, Skinner responded,

I believe I gave a correct answer by pointing to evolution. My questioner might have asked Darwin, "If natural selection is so powerful, why have people believed so long in the creation of the species according to Genesis?" The myths that explain the origin of the universe and the existence of living things, especially man, have been extremely powerful and are not yet displaced by a scientific view. Mind is a myth, with all the power of myths.(Skinner, 1976)

So in my assessment, a consistently naturalistic worldview, though technically impossible short of becoming a nihilist, would need at least to be radically behavioristic. The radical behaviorist goes one step further than the Darwinist. In addition to destroying God as Creator, he destroys man as creator. (And for the record, I'm only a methodological behaviorist, in case you were concerned about my faith.)

As for Dennett and Tye, I haven't read their stuff extensively, so I don't know which school of psychology they favor. I suspect Dennett is a cognitivist, but again, I confess I've only read a handful of his less famous articles. The easy way to tell, though, would be to analyze whether they believe human behavior to be teleological. If so, it's a safe bet that they fall on the cognitivist side of psychology.