donald@utcsrgv.UUCP (Don Chan) (08/25/83)
I also responded to Alan Wexelblat's argument for the existence of the
Eternal Is (abbreviated "EI"), but since I was not honoured in his
rebuttal, (ittvax.963) I assume my article didn't make it out. Anyway,
I think Alan's rebuttal missed most of the points of his respondents,
and contained many ill-defined concepts.
Firstly, Alan calls his First Cause the EI instead of GOD This is just
a semantic quibble. Although GOD is vaguely defined (logical
positivists would say undefined!) it isn't restricted to the
Judaeo-Christian deity. GOD is a usual term for a conscious Universal
Creator, so I think the EI has the minimal set of attributes to qualify
as a GOD.
Alan seems to differentiate between events that are caused by cognition
and events that are not (although he is not clear on the latter: the
EI argument seems to assume that all events can be traced back to a
primal cognition causing the first event, namely his EI).
He should state whether he thinks there are events that have causes not
traceable back to any cognition. Now, if he admits this, I can ask him
why the creation of the universe can't be one of these events not
traceable back to any cognition, thus eliminating the need for the EI.
I can even ask him if cognition can come out of non-cognition, i.e.
could life, and in particular human beings, evolve out of non-living
non-cognitive matter? If he admits this then the EI is also no longer
necessary.
However, Alan does make clear that he thinks cognitive causes are
themselves acausal. At one point it is stated that
"Until you can justify putting human action *inside* the laws of
physics, your argument doesn't hold water."
This is basically a vitalist stance. That is, consciousness is
somehow "special", and that there exist human desires and decisions
that are not causally connected to the outside world. This viewpoint
shows up again in Alan's tennis example (which is not as powerful as he
claims). Basically it breaks down to "you can't predict my actions on
the basis of the chemical reactions that constitute my living, so
therefore my actions are outside of causality".
The obvious fallacy in this is that it's true of everything! We can't
analytically explain most of the events in life: e.g. flipping a coin,
we can't tell why it landed heads instead of tails. However, we do say
that given enough information and a physical model of the world, we
COULD predict heads or tails (or would Alan deny this too?).
In the same way, Alan says that since we do not have an analytic model
of human cognition, there does not exist one! This is simply non
sequitor and a denial of the basic assumption of science: that the
universe may be explained in rational terms. Alan's belief that human
cognition is acausal is based on faith. As far as I can see, all human
actions have reasons (which may be quite complex, but that's different
than saying they have NO reasons)
But after all this, Alan still refuses to answer the question "why must
there be a first cause?" There is no first integer in the set { ...,
-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...}, and saying that there is won't make it
so!
Alan tries to bring quantum mechanics into the fray. I would caution
against that because Q.M. is a rather complex and nonintuitive
mathematical model of reality, and we should not depend on popular
interpretations of Q.M.to support our pet beliefs. The he goes of into
muddy waters: talking about things the EI being outside of space-time,
and time versus meta-time. Unfortunately, we cannot even discuss hazy
issues like this unless we're sure of the (dubious) meaning of such
concepts. In short, let's not talk about things that we know little
about (Q.M., "meta-time", etc).
So, Alan's articles of faith are essentially
1) cognition escapes the normal chain of causality
2) the universe must have had a first cause
3) the first cause of (2) must be cognitive
In my opinion, all three
are highly questionable, and certainly not deducible a priori, so I
must conclude that Alan is almost as bad the Christians that he
castigates!
(By the way Alan, have you ever read St. Augustine? His arguments
mirror yours pretty closely)
--
Don Chan, University of Toronto
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