Re: Original Sin

(Again, just a short commentary related to God's will while I work
through your older November 2006 post)

On Dec 8, 3:07 am, Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaug...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

[SNIP: scientific naturalism and theistic idealism both leave
some things unexplained -- why the laws of physics are as they
are, or why the will of God is as it is.]

That wasn't exactly what I meant. Rather I meant that it's reasonable
to accept that both ontologies at some point would fail to answer a
"how" question, namely in one case "How do physical laws manage to
affect the physical state of reality?" and in the other "How does
personal will manage to affect the experiential state of reality?".
(Indeed one could use that property as a definitional property:
physical law is what affects the physical state of reality, and
personal will is what affects the experiential state of reality.)

But while scientific naturalism can't indeed answer the question of
why the laws of physics are as they are, idealistic theism can in
principle answer the question of why the will of God is as it is: One
foundational premise of theism is that God is a perfect person, which
entails that God is a person of perfect character, which in turn
greatly restricts what one can reasonably believe about how God's will
is. So, to say "that was God's will" far from being an ad-hoc
explanation must in fact fit coherently in a theist's description of
reality: The God hypothesis entails that the ultimate explanation must
be given as the description of what a perfectly good and perfectly
intelligent and perfectly sane (in the psychological sense) person
would want to do. Indeed the God hypothesis entails that the ultimate
explanations are psychological [1], but this in no way implies that
therefore theism can be based on arbitrary claims. Quite on the
contrary, theism restricts what is in principle possible much more
than non-theism [2], and hence is intrinsically more falsifiable.
(That's, after all, why the argument from evil makes sense as an
argument.) So clearly theism has the *potential* of having more
explanatory power than naturalism; it remains to be demonstrated that
theism does in fact have more explanatory power, and how these
explanations can be tested.

[1] By a "psychological" explanation I mean an explanation that must
be given in terms of personal experience.

[2] Specifically, both scientific naturalism and idealistic theism
posit the existence of mechanical laws that govern our experience of
physical phenomena. (By "mechanical" I mean "algorithmic".) But
idealistic theism on top of that also posits that these laws were
designed by God who is perfect in all respects, and hence these laws
must at the very least be compatible with such a person's ultimate
purpose in designing them.

[big snip]

If I say "the universe proceeds according to the will of God",
then it's debatable whether this theory is simpler or more
complicated than the first one, but it is vastly less specific;
nothing that happens can reliably count against it. (The will
of God is ineffable.)

I disagree on both counts (and in this perhaps I differ with many
theists). I don't believe that God's will is ineffable: We have more
direct/intuitive knowledge of personal will than, say, of matter, and
hence we can reason on a much more secure footing about God's will.
Further the claim that the order we observe in our experience (both in
the objective *and* in the quite independent subjective part of it) is
purposefully designed by God adds specificity, and so gives us more
data to reason about God's will.

Incidentally, by "objective" I mean that part of our experience that
is public and concerns itself with physical phenomena. So I can point
to my wife and tell you that's my wife; or I can put a CD in a player
and tell you that that's the piece of music I meant. By "subjective" I
mean that part of our experience that is private and concerns itself
with how it like to experience something, including but not restricted
to our experience of physical phenomena. So a subjective part of my
experience is how it is like for me to see my wife, or how it is like
for me to listen to a particular piece of music. A case of a
subjective experience unrelated to the experience of some physical
phenomenon would be how it is like for me to think about God. Now
above I am also saying that the subjective part of our experience is
*independent* from the objective part. By this I mean that no matter
how much knowledge I have about the objective part of my experience
(i.e. how many facts or how general the patterns I discover in my
observations of physical phenomena) - or in other words no matter how
far scientific knowledge can possibly go - will not add anything to my
knowledge of the subjective part of my experience, for example will
not add anything to my knowledge of how the color red looks like. I
suppose you disagree about this independence really existing; perhaps
you believe that if we knew sufficiently more about our brain we'd
also know more about the subjective part of our experience.
.

Relevant Pages

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