Craig Reed video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iUWV1zBrh5Y&feature=sharec
My video: https://youtu.be/x2GYy-HjVn0
The Christian apologist and thinker Craig Reid posted a video a few months ago of which I have only recently become aware. Titled “What is the Status of Immaterial Objects Given Atheism”, he presents a challenge to the twenty or so smartest atheist thinkers, of which he includes me, although seemingly as an afterthought:
Happy to be included, I don’t consider myself primarily to be an atheist thinker, but a thinker who is an atheist. My focus is on how to bring about a post-metaphysical approach to reality, not on theology. I lost interest in the question of god long ago. Moreover, I hold philosophy of religion in low regard and wouldn’t necessarily suggest seeking the answers from its practitioners, who largely remain remote from the most urgent thinking of today.
Craig starts his video with this:
Craig starts off with the question: What is the status of immaterial objects given atheism? I find this an odd question. It starts with the non-compelling presumption that there are immaterial objects, and then tries to make this into a theological question. This question properly concerns metaphysics, not just theology. As we will see, his chosen example of an undeniable immaterial object turns out not to be as applicable as he thinks. He goes on to further clarify:
….
He focuses on the laws of logic as his example of lack of verifiability, immaterial, invisible, and transcendent, and therefore not consistent with atheism at all. Actually, his description of logic is neither consistent nor inconsistent with atheism, as he actually concedes at one point:
It remains possible for an immaterial truth to exist without a god, but that isn’t the most salient issue at play here. What this all turns on is the ontology of logic. Craig claims to make an ontological argument, but in his argument ontology is diminished to the simple question of does it exist or not. But that question omits the all important ontological issues of what and how? Despite his claim, nobody doubts the existence of logic. The question is: what is it and how does it work? Central to this is the applicability of logic to reality. (And of course, we would need to explore the question of what is real.)
Craig seems to naively adopt the rationalist belief in the transcendental existence of Ideas independent of a thinking subject – a view long since dismissed among most serious thinkers. By the way, the philosopher Bas C Van Frassen gives an accessible account of the failure of science and philosophy to show a sure relation between logic and reality other than as a purely utilitarian tool for survival, and not ultimate knowledge, in his essay “The False Hopes of Traditional Epistemology. But the point here is that Craig is wrong to claim that critics of rationalism simply deny the existence of logic, but rather the question centers on the what and how.
What follows is a grossly abbreviated and simplified response, but should anybody wish to go more deeply into this, either in conversation on this channel, or privately, I would be happy to do so.
Craig reprises the no longer important debate between rationalism and empiricism and mixes a position from both sides. In assuming innate knowledge of transcendental truths he hearkens back to Plato’s remembered Ideas. His focus on logic draws on the empiricist tendency of Aristotle to reason from physics, which supposes a rational universe and the infallibility of reason. Both, however accept logic as a valid method for understanding the universe. Rationalists employed deduction from primary transcendent ideas and empiricists primarily employed induction from observation, but until Hume came about there was little question of the ability of logic to describe the world as it is. Craig himself appeals to this necessity to describe the world as it is, so let’s start there.
The first mistake is to assume we have a stable and correct view of the world as it is, which even a brief overview of philosophy and physics should easily correct. Because no such thing is possible it is necessary to understand that past philosophical views arise historically according their contemporary state of scientific understanding. Aristotle is remarkable for his thought within the best scientific understanding of his day, which was his own physics; but his physics has necessarily become obsolete over millennia. That means we need to formulate our positions today on what is known at the edges of quantum physics and relativity. To that point, I find amusement in the efforts of those attempting to rescue Thomism, for example, from current knowledge rather than acknowledging that if Aristotle were writing today his works would be entirely different from what we know of him. Aristotle was a man in time doing the best possible with what he had, and his philosophy is not timeless truth. And so is the case for thinkers today. For me, modern physics is most fascinating for what it cannot answer.
Kant’s attempt to rescue objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism necessarily conceded so much ground that metaphysics itself finally foundered. Reason and its subordinate categories of the understanding, along with the intuitions of space and came to be seen as innate a priori structures of human consciousness. Their purpose was to make a representational order out of the jumble of sense date we receive from our surroundings. This representational world was something drawn in our imagination, and not reality in itself, but it sufficed for us to maintain ours survival. The ontology thus appears: 1. Existence? Yes. 2. What? Innate structure common to all human subjects. 3. How? Reduction of chaotic sense data into recognizable representations somewhat obedient to our logical manipulations.
Implication? Reason is empty without sense data. Intuition without reason is blind. Thus transcendental reasoning falls by the wayside as groundless and necessarily leads to transcendental illusion, or the illusion of reason, which Kant illustrates in the four antinomies.
But this leaves us in existential quandary. How good is our vision emerging from reason applied to sense data? Hume started us on the necessary skeptical inquiry concerning the applicability of our reasoning to reality as it is. Kant compromised by considering our representational creation as our proper world, where we live forever oblivious to the noumenal.
This position reached a crises mid 20th Century with quantum mechanics. Philosophers such as G.E. Moore and Hans Reichenbach strove mightily to save science from this chaos, much as Kant tried to secure if from Humean skepticism, and as Thomists try to rescue Aristotle. But others, such as Wigner and the later Wittgenstein were already acceding to the inevitable. Wigner’s Epistemological Law of Empiricism describes all rational/mathematical systems to be approximate, arbitrary as to chosen events, and bounded tightly to limits of space and time. Once we transcend those limits the logic of these apparent system pulls apart. Even worse, drawing from Poincare, multiple systems can equally describe the same spatial/temporal events. In a similar manner, Wittgenstein’s neatly ordered world of atomistic facts in logical relationships exploded to bits, and came back to together as commonly-shared word games.
Kants representational world finally showed itself as a useful, pragmatic fiction, but one that formed the basis for survival. And so today we look at the ontological question for reason from the viewpoint of our best science. From evolutionary biology, logic is an evolved trait that was largely responsible for our successful adaptation. From neuroscience, it is largely as Kant described, an innate structure to order the confusion of sense data and enable more or less intricate reasoning of probabilities in order to anticipate and plan. From physics, it is our reductive capacity that somehow participates in wave collapse – the only known mechanism for the reversal of entropy, which creates our world. This capacity reduces information, but complexity is then reintroduced into the environment over time, fueling the inescapable and relentless increase in entropy by which we approach the fundamental chaotic state of nature. Or as Carlo Rovelli explains in his relativistic interpretation, the blurring of reality to a minuscule subset we view as a subsystem in space and time – a creation through ignorance in the most literal sense.
No, nobody is claiming logic doesn’t exist, and we all necessarily use it because that is the innate mechanism of our consciousness. But it fails your test of describing world as it occurs. It creates the representational world we know, but is useless in the face of ultimate reality and has no existence outside of our thoughts, much as the color red only exists as our sensation. In any case, it has nothing at all to do with the question of god.
Too Late for the Gods 