The last superstition
But as Edward Feser shows in The Last Superstition, there is not, and never has been, any war between science and religion at all. There has instead been a conflict between two entirely philosophical worldviews: the classical "teleological vision" of Plato, Artistotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, on which purpose or goal-directedness is as inherent a feature of the material world as mass or electric charge; and the modern "mechanical" vision of Descartees, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, according to which physical reality is comprised of nothing more than purposeless, meaningless particles in motion.
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- > Can you explain the pattern?
Indeed. Subjective feelings of "contentment" or "satisfaction" are irrelevant, as this is a matter of having an explanation that holds up. And materialism or naive atomism don't. They fall apart very quickly under examination. This isn't some wishy-washy speculation of some schizophrenic time cube guy who thinks we live in the Matrix. This is well understood metaphysics.
(And I urge careless readers to pay attention to the use of "naive". I am not claiming atomic theory does not tells us something about matter. Naive atomism is a kind of unsophisticated interpretation of matter as essentially just a collection of highly desiccated, ball-like things bouncing around, full stop.)
> This is not a proof, right?
There is a great deal of magical thinking that likes to pretend it is "scientific" by dressing itself in scientific jargon.
> It's as if it doesn't exist (although everyone experience the phenomena every day).
It doesn't exist to the wrong methods, just as sound doesn't exist to the eyes or color to the ears. The insane denial of consciousness is well exemplified by eliminativism. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist doubles down and refuses to face the incoherence of his position, and proceeds to deny the very things he was supposed to explain in the first place.
> There is no room to talk about consciousness in this arrangement, so the problem is tucked away as "emergent" (other word is "illusion"). Meanwhile, there are phenomena that definitely happen (you feel conscious, don't you?) that would benefit from having an explanation, even terminology that is not poisoned.
Consciousness is one of those "the buck stops here" sorts of things.
For many phenomena, you can sort of get away with passing the buck by deferring to something else. By "getting away with", I don't mean you actually succeed in circumventing the fallacy that's being committed. I just mean there's a certain pretense of knowing that can be maintained in the face of criticism and demands for explanation. "Oh, it's really this other thing, see?" But when you hit one of these walls like consciousness or existence or knowledge, it all unravels. All the filth that's been swept out of sight is now piled up behind that last door. This is where performative contradictions surface with vigor. "I am aware that I am not conscious." "I do not exist." "No statement is true." The incoherence is often comical, so comical, in fact, that people might even refuse to believe they could possibly be guilty of committing something so silly, so it can't possibly be true!
Oh, but it is true...
>> Love to hear any suggestions for reading to challenge this viewpoint if it is obviously flawed in some way
As an intro, I might suggest Feser's "The Last Superstition" [0]. It's a book for philosophical beginners written during the height of the relatively brief but noisy New Atheist craze of Dawkins fame. The style is polemical (which is not typical of Feser's works; in fact, he didn't really want to write this book to begin with, and only wrote it to combat the obvious intellectual mediocrity of the New Atheists). Some of the polemic - a response to the polemical style of the New Atheists - might therefore feel a little dated, but perhaps not. What's good about it is that it surveys the basic philosophical errors Dawkins and co. commit and these intersect with what you seem to be interested in.
Feser has also written another beginner's guide to the "Philosophy of Mind" [1] which addresses mind questions more specifically than the first book. Both are very approachable.
He has also written two books of a more sophisticated nature on the philosophy of science [2] and on the notion of soul [3]. I would recommend these, along with his manual on metaphysics [4], to those with some more philosophical chops and interest. There are, of course, many other professional philosophers in this field who write about similar topics (Oderberg, for example, and his "Real Essentialism" [5]), but Feser is well known for his lucid style and clarity, as well as his pedagogical suitability.
- I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial.
In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here.
For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance.
[0] https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstiti...
- > It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher.
This hints of bigotry and poisoning the well. Focus on his arguments.
(Also, what does "extremely traditionalist Catholic" mean? He certainly doesn't meet that description as I understand it. He has been critical of both laxity and rigorism, for example.)
> His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area
His academic background was originally in the tradition of analytical philosophy. The man was an atheist. It was only after he began teaching and rehashing tired caricatures of Aquinas's arguments that he took notice and began to find the real McCoy convincing. So, he is very familiar with what else is on offer and skillfully deals with those topics. Many of his writings, including blog posts, take these other views on their own terms, often to show where their weaknesses and errors lie.
I presume that by calling his views "niche", you mean "views held by a minority of philosophers today", or perhaps "fringe" in some pejorative, dismissive sense? Because the subject matter isn't niche at all. It's a full-blooded view of expansive scope (hello, metaphysics anyone?), and frankly, IMO, the most well-defended and defensible. .
Truth is not decided by majority vote.
> If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.
Again, not true. He writes in an eminently accessible manner. His book "The Last Superstition" is 101 material. Having some familiarity with basic Aristotelian notions can sometimes expedite understanding, perhaps, but you don't need to be a scholar to grasp much of what he writes. And often, he doesn't even make any explicit use of technical language from the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, only arguments using common language.
Of course, I am not averse to straining to learn something new. I have heard one philosopher say that he only began to grasp metaphysics in his 50s. Anyone looking for a royal road is perhaps ill-suited for philosophy, or any serious field of study.
- I hold that both of your positions lack basic metaphysical sophistication. I also submit that one source of potential error is a shared, but discredited metaphysical stance. However, if you have a sincere and humble interest in this subject matter, one open to correction, I would recommend "The Last Superstition"[0] as a starting point. There is no point in running in circles, because you can examine your presuppositions to discover the sources of your errors. And once you do so, you will see the intuitions you have absorbed through various cultural sources contain very serious errors.
- Again, all your objections can be answered, and if I were either rich or childless I would do so myself. But I'm neither, so all I can do is provide you with a book recommendation: check out Edward Feser's work, especially Aquinas and Five Proofs. If you want to see Dawkins refuted in his own tone, see The Last Superstition.
What research have you done up to this point to answer your questions?
- This is a start, but I think it doesn’t do hylomorphism justice. Many of us (as I was, before I overcame the inculcated bias) suffer from a kind of unsophisticated atomism. This is what happens in the vacuum of intellectual discipline and formation characteristic of our education systems. It is important to distinguish between physical models and metaphysical theory. Now, metaphysics doesn’t ignore physical models, but it does view physical models through the lens of physical methodology so that they are interpreted in a sound and responsible way. A naive reading of physical theory can easily lead to a mechanistic metaphysics, because while the physical sciences are not inherently mechanistic, the tradition does insinuate mechanism. In a mechanistic metaphysics, the artifact becomes the paradigmatic object, and pretty soon, reality becomes nothing but a shifting aggregate of atoms. Gone is the world of human beings, trees, cats, and dogs. Gone is the very intelligibility of the world and the very powers of reason that sought to grasp it. To say that mechanism, and especially materialism, doesn’t even get off the ground is beating a dead horse at this point (the obstinate still hanging on have doubled down to the point of embracing the patent absurdity of eliminativism, for example).
The renewed interest in hylomorphism (or hylomorphic dualism) is it seems related to the perhaps relatively modest, but certainly discernible resurgence of interest in Aristotlean metaphysics in the last decade or two. Speaking from experience, it is not easy to break mechanistic habits of mind, but it is possible. One way out, I find, is to begin with the realization that even if we accept a naive atomism, the atom itself is a thing, and to be a thing is to be an instantiated form. For if you truly have many atoms, as an atomist believes, then you have a plurality of things that are of like kind (the “matter” in hylomorphism is, first and foremost, prime matter, not something determinate as a kind of stuff, which itself requires form to be a kind of stuff; form is what causes a thing to be what it is). And if you happen to fall into the reductive mechanistic trap, you should recall that the further you go down that road, the more you undermine the very capacity of reason to know reality, the less you can explain the very possibility of reason, and the less your position holds weight as a result. We do not begin with atoms, but the world we experience everyday, and it is within that world that we perform scientific investigations and reason philosophically. Get something wrong, draw the wrong conclusion, and you can face a retorsion argument, a paradox of the sort skepticism generally faces (“there is no truth!” type of stuff).
I recommend some of Edward Feser’s books on the subject. “The Last Superstition” is a light read in that respect, but “Scholastic Metaphysics” is more of a proper manual.
