1. The definition of 'magic' is not special pleading. It is a definition, so by definition it cannot take the form of that logical error.
The act of redefining an existing term in such a way that it only pertains to a single thing that you wish to associate with the generally accepted definition, and excludes other things that you don't wish to associate with the generally accepted definition is useless at best, and special pleading at worst. So call it what you want.
2. "Magic" meaning that something organized occurs in this world without a possible explanation is just the way that most people do use the term, so I am not supplying anything special here. A magic penny works by doing something organized -- like granting a wish, etc. It fits precisely the same pattern.
Ah, but that was just another little change in definition. Your comment to which I was responding was:
Magic describes unexplainable interactions between two realms of substance where one of those substances is 'mental'. Every use of the word 'magic' that I have ever seen involves the idea of an agent behind the mysterious interaction.
Of course, you only added the word "organized" to your definition later on in order to exclude quantum randomness, which is indeed special pleading. From
Wikipedia:
Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves. Essentially, this involves someone attempting to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exemption.
If magic pennies caused random subatomic particles to arise, we wouldn't call it magic.
For no apparent reason? I'm not sure we wouldn't.
It could be that quantum weirdness is magic by this definition, that there is some organized force behind the world responsible for it. But there is no way that we could know that. We distinguish between the random, stochastic occurrences at this level and 'magic' because the latter includes the idea of either organization or intentionality or both.
So is gravity "magic" then? It seems to be organized (non-random). Or are you saying that gravity is unexplained, but explainable?
3. Mind-body dualism consists of two entities -- mind and body. We cannot see mind. We can only see its effects on body.
Sure, like we cannot see gravity -- only it effects.
So, the only way to distinguish between a material monist and dualist account of "mind" is to provide a causal account of how it works. By definition, dualism cannot provide a causal account, only material monism can; that is how we distinguish them. If dualism could provide a causal account, then it would not be dualism. This is a fundamental definition issue, not an issue of what we currently know and don't know.
I'm really not concerned with definitions so much. It is possible that the natural is made up of the same substance as the supernatural (either property dualism, neutral monism, dual-aspect monism, or something else). That said, I have yet to see a definition of dualism that precludes a causal account. In fact, Wikipedia specifically lists
dualist views of mental causation.
4. Dualism that involves the spiritual has the same feature. If it interacted through a describable mechanism, then it would not be dualist (which, by definition cannot work through causal, describable mechanisms since that is material monism), it would be monism.
See above.
5. I never once said that a god interacting with the world is impossible. In fact, I said the opposite.
It's hard to tell exactly what you're responding to here, but I don't think I suggested that you said that a god interacting with the world is impossible in the post to which you're responding.
What I said was that we could not provide a mechanism (causal account) for how a personal God worked in the world because that is what dualism means (and I used the word 'magic' to denote this interaction problem).
Nobody but you has suggested that a personal god had to operate via dualism. You'll need to provide evidence that no other model is possible if you want to base your argument on that assumption. Once you've provided that evidence, you'll need to provide further evidence that a causal account would be impossible if dualism was true.
If God is made of the same material as us, then there is no issue, but that is not dualism, that is monism. If God acts in the world we could use that as evidence for the existence of God, but we could not, by definition, understand the mechanism by which He did it because God is not material, so does not work by means of causal/material action. His action in the world would be magic, a miracle.
OK, so you have admitted that if a god were to act in the world it would be evidence for the existence of the god. So, then evidence of the existence of a god IS possible. Are you suggesting that even if we have compelling evidence for the existence of a god it would still be irrational to believe in its existence?
6. A personal God is defined by theists as immaterial, hence dualism, if we accept that there is a material world. If you want to argue with their definition, then I suggest you take it up with them.
I'd be interested in hearing your definition of "matter" in this context. Do you include scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, or the curvature of space as "matter"? I suspect you're using a different definition of "material" than theists are.
But I would support the contention because divinity is considered something "other". 'Fundamentally other' means more than one substance. If God is made of the same stuff as us, then there is no problem by definition. That's just monism.
It is possible that we are made of the same stuff as God but that we have different properties than God (which would account for God being "fundamentally other").
7. Property dualism (and neutral monism) suffers from the issue of an unexplainable way for differing fundamental (not mechanistic, like differences between iron and cobalt, which does have an explanation) properties to show in one thing and not another.
There's the word "unexplainable" again. Evidence please.
Once again, if a mechanism were explainable, then it wouldn't be property dualism; it would be different attributes of a single fundamental substance (like iron and cobalt differing because of their atomic number, etc.) in a straight monism.
I have yet to find a source that says that property dualism is unexplainable. Even if property dualism
is unexplainable, that does not seem to preclude the possibility of overwhelming evidence for the existence of such a being, which would certainly make the belief in such a being rational, just as the belief in quantum uncaused causes is rational.
8. Please stop confusing the not yet explained with the fundamentally unexplainable.
Please post a source that supports any of your claims of unexplainability. Until you provide evidence, it would seem that everything you have described are
unexplained, but not necessarily
unexplainable. Even if the interaction of a god with the universe
was unexplainable, there is the possibility for overwhelming evidence that such a being exists, which would seem to preclude such a belief from being necessarily irrational.
If something can be explained then it follows the laws of physics and is physically possible and is material. You are stuck on the level of attributes, not the fundamental. This is about fundamental properties/substances not the attributes of those substances in differing quantities/combinations/etc.
You need to define most of the above terms or phrases. Even the term "material" isn't very well-defined, particularly as it relates for forces. "Physical possibility" doesn't seem to be very meaningful. Anything that isn't physically
impossible would be physically
possible. If by "physically possible" you mean that it obeys the laws of physics, the laws of physics are of course based on observation, not the other way around. If there is compelling evidence that the laws of physics are wrong, the laws of physics would need to be changed. What I think you
may be getting at is that
unless there is compelling evidence, there is no reason to believe that something exists that violates the laws of physics. So you might say that something violating the laws of physics,
if there is no compelling evidence for it, in light of the fact that nothing is currently known to violate the laws of physics, might be evidence against it. I'm not sure how strong such "evidence" would be, but if you accept that, it's still evidence.
9. This is not just an evidence issue. We are not discussing proofs here, but beliefs. We believe based on justifications. We use four major criteria for this -- logical possibility, physical possibility, coherence of ideas and how they fit together, and physical evidence.
All of the things you listed either constitute evidence or are meaningless. Logical impossibility or incoherence of ideas (these seem to be the same thing) would be strong evidence against something (perhaps the strongest possible). Physical evidence is obviously a type of evidence. "Physical possibility" I already discussed above.
If something is logically possible but physically impossible we are inclined not to believe it even if there is evidence.
Not so. Whether or not we are inclined to believe it would depend on the nature of the evidence. We are not "inclined not to believe" quantum theory, even though uncaused causes were something that did not follow the known laws of physics at the time. Why were we inclined to believe something that seemed to violate the laws of physics? Because there was
evidence for it -- compelling enough evidence that we had to extend our ideas about physics.
Did you believe the photos that convinced Arthur Conan Doyle that faeries exist? But what if you saw an official NASA photo of a teapot orbiting Jupiter along with a story that someone thought it would be funny actually to put a teapot up there? I would consider that much better evidence to convince me to believe that a teapot was up there than a picture of a faerie whatever story went along with it. It will always take more evidence to convince me of faeries existence because they are, by definition, physically impossible (not an infinite amount of evidence, however, just more).
It's ironic that you're actually using
evidence to demonstrate that a belief in teapots orbiting Jupiter is more likely than faeries in a paragraph meant to convince me that it's something
other than evidence that distinguishes the two. It's not. In order to distinguish them, you introduced some fairly compelling evidence of a teapot orbiting Jupiter, and some fairly uncompelling evidence of faeries. If there's no compelling evidence of either one, there would be no reason to believe one more than the other.
Sure, it could be that we have the wrong definition of physically possible, but if that is the case, then faeries are physically possible, and we simply need to reorient our way of thinking.
Yep. If there was compelling evidence of faeries (assuming faeries go against the laws of physics) we'd have to change the laws of physics.
This doesn't change the fact that it is much more difficult for us to believe in the physically impossible than in the physically possible, given the same sort of evidence. If our picture of the world is wrong, then our picture of the world is wrong, and this predisposes us to errors.
In other words, it all depends on compelling evidence.
10. By definition, God is not in the category of the physically possible or impossible, but he is logically possible. It is not rational to believe in something simply because it is logically possible. Certain definitions of God are coherent too, so that's on His side. So, we are stuck back with evidence.
You still haven't convinced me that we can consider anything that
isn't evidence. But I agree, in the case of gods, we are stuck with evidence.
We need more evidence to think of God as existing than we do for something like life on extrasolar planets (just like we need more evidence to believe that faeries exist than to believe that there is a teapot circling Jupiter) because we can't discuss God as physically possible.
There are a number of things that are wrong here.
First, you haven't convinced me of this notion that we need more evidence to believe in A than B because of C where "C" is something
other than evidence. What would "C" be in this case, that would be unrelated to evidence?
Second, your claim is that "C" above is physical impossibility (which would imply that violation of the laws of physics isn't evidence, but let's ignore that question for now). Just above, you stated:
God is not in the category of the physically possible or impossible...
But here you are stating "we can't discuss God as physically possible." So, you've snuck in a little straw man there. Before you stated that physical impossibility (such as a faerie) would be a reason to consider a belief irrational, and now you've substituted it (with no explanation) with "not physically possible or impossible."
But we are discussing a personal God here, not a God that we can decide exists in monism.
Please provide some evidence that a personal God cannot exist in monism (neutral monism or some other form). Then tell me how monism is any more rational than any other possible theory.
The Drake equation argument is a category error. God is not in the same category as intelligent life on other planets, so the analogy is not appropriate.
Of course the analogy is appropriate, because it
is about evidence. As much mental gymnastics as you've gone through to paint this as something
other than evidence, you haven't made the case that there's anything other than evidence that would justify labeling a belief in a personal god as necessarily irrational.
11. Why in the world would any theist object to the idea that belief in a personal God is irrational? I thought one of the pillars of religious belief was that it is based in faith and not on logical argument and evidence.
Heh, that's funny in so many ways. First, there are logical arguments for God, so I assume that by logical argument you mean a logical argument for which there is compelling evidence of the premises, which would make the argument itself evidence.
Second, you're now implying that calling something "irrational" has to do with evidence, whereas you've spent all this energy trying to convince me otherwise.
Third, you're assuming that belief for which there is no compelling evidence (i.e. belief based on faith) is irrational. I have no problem with that, but then again I don't know why in the world would any believer in aliens would object to the idea that belief in aliens is irrational.
12. I have no clue what would lead you to believe that I think something random/stochastic is rational. The word does not apply to the random.
I don't know where I said that, but I suspect that I was referring to the belief in the existence of something that is random.
Similarly, it is not special pleading to suggest that mechanism or causal account does not apply to things that are random. By definition, if something is random, there is no possible causal account.
It is special pleading to suggest that belief in anything for which a causal account does not apply is irrational
except randomness.
13. Something unexplainable within materialism does not make materialism irrational. It means that there is something unexplainable.
You now seem to be special pleading for materialism. For anything
other than materialism, the unexplainable makes belief in it irrational, but not for materialism.
Not to mention the fact that the very term "matter" is ill-defined. In order to include things like gravity, it's often defined to refer to anything that can be directly observed or anything the effects of which can be observed. The problem is that the effects of the supernatural interacting with the natural could be observed.
We don't know for sure that quantum weirdness is unexplainable, though. We know that we haven't got an explanation, but that differs from things that, by definition, we cannot provide an explanation.
You have yet to provide a definition that states that we cannot provide an explanation for anything that isn't materialism.
So where does this leave us?
I may be completely misunderstanding, but this seemed to have been your original argument:
A personal god must be dualistic.
Dualism is unexplainable.
The unexplainable is necessarily irrational.
Never mind that you haven't backed up any of these assertions with evidence. When it was pointed out that quantum randomness is unexplainable, your argument changed to:
A personal god must be dualistic.
Dualism is unexplainable.
The unexplainable, if it is "organized," is necessarily irrational.
Again, never mind that none of these assertions have been backed by evidence. But then it was pointed out that it is possible for there to be evidence of the existence of such a god. Your argument then has to change to:
A personal god must be dualistic. Dualism is unexplainable. The unexplainable, if it is "organized," and is physically impossible, is necessarily irrational.
But of course there are plenty of problems with the phrase "physically impossible," such as what it really means, whether or not it really trumps evidence, whether or not it constitutes evidence itself, and whether or not it even pertains to a god.
So, 1) you don't have evidence to back up most of your assertions that a personal god must fit into a particular category (dualism) that you consider "irrational", 2) you don't seem to have a valid reason for considering only that category "irrational", 3) you don't have any particular reason for singling out something that's "organized" as being irrational, and 4) you don't really get around the possibility that there could be compelling evidence of a personal god.
Your argument seems to be taking on a pattern. You throw out a criteria for considering a particular belief irrational, I throw out a counter-example of something that you consider rational that fits the criteria, you throw out another criteria, and so on. The hope, I assume, is that after enough criteria are thrown out, only one thing will fit your definition of "irrational." Yet you insist that no special pleading is involved. A much simpler and more useful definition of "irrational" than the one you're working towards would be to tack on "or a belief in a personal god" to a generally-accepted definition and be done with it.
-Bri
