The Question of Starting Point Premises, and the Burden of Proof for Non-Naturalism

From: Chris Cogan (ccogan@telepath.com)
Date: Sun Jul 02 2000 - 19:27:10 EDT

  • Next message: Richard Wein: "Re: Two alternatives to theistic design theory, etc."

    One common view of reason is that, though reason can prove a conclusion on
    the basis of given premises, and it can prove those premises on the basis
    of still more premises, we eventually arrive at premises that cannot be
    proved on the basis of any further premises, and that *these* premises are
    simply *assumed.*

    The assumption is that, a proposition is either rationally proved or it
    cannot be validated at all in any serious way. Thus, if Phillip Johnson
    accepts different starting point premises than does a naturalistic
    evolutionist, there may not be much, given this view of reason and proof,
    that can be said about either his set of starting point premises or those
    of the naturalistic evolutionist.

    But this view of reason is not entirely uncontroversial. One problem shows
    up almost instantly: Suppose we challenge the person with this view of
    reason to prove that it is true, rather than *merely* his opinion based on
    premises that he has simply *assumed* and which therefore may have no
    cognitive status at all. If this view of reason is correct, then, whatever
    premises he introduces to support it are themselves subject to the same
    challenge. If he is challenged over and over again until he eventually
    arrives at premises that he takes as starting points, as ultimate premises,
    we may say, "Well, what about *those* premises? If *they* are simply
    assumed, then the conclusion that reason or rational knowledge ultimately
    rests on premises that are simply assumed has no more to be said in its
    defense than those premises. Since those premises are simply assumed, the
    conclusion itself is no better than a mere assumption."

    That is, if this view of reason is true, it makes any argument supporting
    it essentially unsound, because the premises are not first established as
    true but are merely *assumed* to be true.

    This demonstrates that there is definitely something wrong with this view
    of reason and the supporting argument for it. But knowing that it is
    unsound and knowing *why* it is unsound are two different things. In what
    follows, I will show exactly what is wrong with this view of reason, and
    will offer a rational alternative.

    The flaw is in the *assumption* that there is no way to cognitively
    establish the truth of a proposition other than by logic applied to prior
    *premises*. This is the typical and narrow logician's concept of proof. But
    such proof is not the only way to cognitively validate propositions. I'm
    using the concept of validation as a broader concept than that of proof
    (even broader than proof as fully sound argument for a conclusion).

    Let's start with a simple example. Suppose that one day something suddenly
    happens to your right foot, such as a ten-pound sledge-hammer falling on it
    from a height of several feet ö but without your knowing that this is what
    has happened. You scream, and someone shouts, "What's wrong?!" and you say,
    "My *foot* hurts!!!"

    Now, we might argue that you don't know that the pain is arising from your
    foot (if your brain was rewired, you might experience injury to your hand
    as injury to your foot, or, conceivably, you might be having some kind of
    brain seizure that is triggering the same neurons as those that we would
    expect to be triggered if your foot were injured. But this doesn't matter
    to the point.

    The point is that you have identified a certain fact as pain ö and you did
    so without premises and logical argumentation from those premises.

    Another class of examples would be the identification of ordinary objects
    of perceptual awareness. We know that we can misidentify objects
    conceptually, but we know this only from further perceptual observation.
    Thus, the branch that I saw in the back yard that looked to my mind like a
    very large snake was determined by further perceptual observation to be
    merely a branch. Thus, even at this early point in the discussion, we know
    that there are severe limits to the old saws about the fallibility of the
    senses.

    But, my *senses* never told me the branch was a snake to *begin* with.
    *That* was a conclusion arrived at by my post-perceptual mental processes.
    In fact, my senses did not tell me that it was *any* particular thing at
    all. *That* question was left *completely* up to my interpretational abilities.

    What, then, *do* the senses tell us? They tell us that there is *some* kind
    of world and that it *somehow* is yielding certain perceptual experiences
    in us. They tell us that there are *perceptual* objects (which may or may
    not correspond to what we normally think of as objects), they tell us that
    these perceptual objects each has an *identity* of some sort (not
    necessarily the identity we conceptually attach to them), and they tell us
    that *we* exist and are aware of a world and "objects" in it. *What* that
    world is, is up to us to figure out.

    Thus, except for the types of facts mentioned here, the senses do not give
    us *propositional* information at all. The idea that a given perceptual
    object is a snake is *not* inherent in any perceptual experience.

    That is: The senses cannot be fallible because they are not *saying*
    anything that they could be wrong about. Even if the "snake" perceptual
    object is the result of overdosing on coffee and Genesis, and the "snake"
    is purely hallucinatory, my senses cannot be wrong, because they never
    claimed that the snake was necessarily real and external to begin with.
    They simply provide the data. The data may originate proximally in my own
    Bible-deranged brain or from external reality or from electrodes inserted
    into my brain, but it's all *real* data, and it's all totally
    non-propositional (except as mentioned above). If we see a straight ruler
    resting at an angle in a beaker of clear water, we may say that the stick
    looks bent, but our senses are not telling us this. They are only giving us
    the data (including, in this case, the perceptual data that shows how light
    is affected by passing through water). Again, there is no question of the
    *senses* failing us if we mistakenly think that the ruler *is* bent; they
    have not; they have simply provided us with some data about the current
    relationship between our consciousness and the world. We are free to make
    of it what we will.

    Thus, if we stick to identifying the *experiential* material provided by
    our senses, we can only be wrong in choosing the wrong concepts for doing
    so. For example, we can call something yellow when what we are experiencing
    is what we would normally call blue. However, this does not seem to be a
    major area of error in human cognition.

    More commonly, we misidentify a perceptual *object* as something other than
    the object it actually is, as when a branch looked like a snake to me, or
    as when someone thinks he sees water ahead in the desert when it is
    actually a mirage.

    However, even this kind of error can be reduced, under favorable
    conditions, to as near zero as we care to make it.

    Thus, despite the intrusion of error at stages *after* the purely
    sensory-perceptual stage, we are able to establish with a *nearly* absolute
    degree of certainty a great many facts that depend on perception for our
    knowledge of them.

    This, then, is one category of starting point that we can *generally* rely
    on, especially when it is subjected to strong testing and scrutiny.

    However, above I mentioned that our senses tell us that a world exists,
    that things have identities, that we are conscious (and exist), and other
    facts of a similar nature. From a single instance of perception, we can, in
    principle, deduce that there is a world of *some* kind (that something
    exists), that we ourselves exist, that there are (perceptual) objects, and
    that perceptual objects have identities. We can even get change, time, and
    causation from such an experience (assuming that it had a beginning).

    That is, the basic facts of metaphysics, and epistemology are inherent in
    any perceptual (or other) experience we may have. Slightly more is
    necessary to give us the basis of a value system and a morality, but you
    get the point: The *true* starting points are not up for grabs. There is no
    choice about them. They are *not* merely *assumed* according to taste.

    They are axiomatic facts (as are contents of perceptual experiences, but in
    a different sense). Existence is an axiomatic fact. Even Phillip Johnson
    cannot deny that he exists and that *some* kind of world exists without
    blatantly contradicting himself in the process (since any statement one
    makes implicitly includes the statement "I exist," etc.). He also cannot
    logically argue for the falsehood of the law of identity. He cannot argue
    coherently that a thing is not what it in fact *is*. He also cannot deny
    coherently that he is conscious (at least in a primitive way).

    Now, within any subject area, two people may, clearly, start from different
    premises. But, *if* these premises are simply *assumed*, without prior
    argumentation or cognitive validation, they cannot be trusted. If Phillip
    Johnson is merely *assuming* the existence of God, or that non-naturalistic
    claims do not have any burden of proof above and beyond ordinary scientific
    claims, then not only may we criticize any invalid logic leading from his
    starting points to his conclusions within the subject area, we may reject
    the premises as unsound, not validated.

    In short, if Stephen Jones thinks he can excuse Phillip Johnson's
    egregiously bad arguments on the premise that Johnson is merely using a
    *different* set of initial premises from those his opponents use, Jones is
    seriously mistaken. *ALL* premises need to be validated, either directly or
    by logically strong argument from premises that *have* been validated
    directly. This applies even in a Popperian view of science, in that we may
    regard a theory as "validated" (for scientific purposes) if it has
    withstood sufficient testing (though it may *still* turn out to be wrong in
    some respect and have to be modified or replaced). This is why Gould and
    others agree that naturalistic evolutionary theory *could* in fact be
    wrong, but that, *given* the evidence and the testing, it is the *only*
    currently available theory (or class of theories) that we can reasonably
    accept. Gould is *not* merely starting from some arbitrarily *assumed*
    premises and then arguing to evolutionary theory as the conclusion. Phillip
    Johnson *is* doing this, precisely because he does *not* validate his
    premises. He does *not* show that the bizarre metaphysical claims of
    non-naturalist views can be accepted without proof or validation. He does
    *not* show that these premises are axiomatic.

    Scientifically, we know that there is a natural world, the world of daily
    experience for most of us, the world of rocks, trees, people, a long past,
    stars, galaxies, subatomic particles, and so on. We have amassed a *very*
    large amount of evidence for the existence of this world and for certain
    factual claims about it. Where is Johnson's *similarly* strong and massive
    evidence for a non-natural realm outside of the natural world?

    Stephen Jones criticizes me for what he apparently regards as my attempt to
    "tilt" the "playing field" in favor of naturalism. Apparently he wants us
    to start from the supposition that the natural world is not known to exist,
    and then pose the following "leveled" version of the issue:
    Is there a natural world? Is there a non-natural world? Given some
    phenomenon, shouldn't we look for the cause in both the natural and the
    non-natural world?

    In this way, Jones seems to feel, we can "level" the playing field and
    demand that the naturalist provide proof for the existence of the natural
    world as well as demanding it of the non-naturalist.

    But, empirically, where would we look for evidence of a natural world, if
    not in the natural world to begin with?

    Besides, as is often the case with the challenges and demands of Stephen
    Jones, the demand is made disingenuously. He already accepts the existence
    of the natural world, so why is he demanding proof of its existence? If he
    is merely demanding proof of evolution as a natural phenomena, and wants us
    to think that the theory that there is a non-natural explanation for it is
    just as tenable as the naturalistic one, then *he* is the one attempting to
    "tilt" the playing field, because he *first* must show that there *is* a
    non-natural world before he can start referencing it as a plausible basis
    for explaining the phenomena of life.

    Basically, he wants us to accept his metaphysical claims without
    validation, or as axioms. But, while a naturalistic view of Existence can
    be regarded as a "natural" conceptual development of the axiomatic fact
    that *some* kind of world exists *and* our life-long experience of that
    axiomatic world, the existence of a *non-natural* world cannot be so
    justified. It is *not* merely the filling in of details of "some" kind of
    world, thereby gradually making it into "this" kind of world, as naturalism
    is. The non-natural realm is not subject to knowable perception (that is,
    *if* we were to perceive it, we would not be able to distinguish that
    perception from a mere perception of some aspect of the natural world (such
    as our own brain state, perhaps). This is the big problem with all
    metaphysical claims made on the basis of mystical or religious experience.
    There is no *conceivable* experience that would not be instantly absorbable
    into a naturalistic view of the world.

    Naturalism is minimal; it assumes only the already-known natural world.

    Non-naturalism is *maximal*; it claims *both* the existence of the natural
    world *and* the existence of *another* world, a world *beyond* the natural
    world.

    And *that*, ladies and gentlemen, is why *it* has a special burden of
    proof, and why all of Jones' and Johnson's whining claims about
    "unfairness" is propaganda. *They* have chosen a position that requires a
    special burden of proof (because, unlike the natural world, no such proof
    of its existence has been pre-established). If I claimed that Santa Claus
    was literally *real*, would you let me get away with demanding that you
    prove that the non-Santa Claus world exists, and that we should look,
    instead, for non-Santa Claus explanations for the phenomena of Christmas?

    No. We reject the Santa Claus explanation because: a) we have an adequate
    non-Santa Claus explanation, and b) there is no proof of the existence of
    Santa Claus *at all*, let alone proof for the particular claims of the
    Santa Claus explanation of Christmas phenomena, so that, even if we did
    *not* have an adequate non-Santa Claus explanation, we would not seriously
    consider the Santa Claus explanation.

    If Stephen Jones wants us to accept his "Santa Claus" theory of the origin
    of the Universe, of life, and of the development of life on Earth, *HE* has
    the burden of proof. And he has this burden even if evidence showed that
    life *was* in fact designed, because, *rationally*, we'd be bound to take
    *only* naturalistic variants of design theory seriously until some evidence
    was found that had no *conceivable* naturalistic explanation.

    Why? Partly because of the general burden of proof of non-naturalism as a
    metaphysical theory, and partly because all difficulties that might be
    attributed to a naturalistic theory would *also* necessarily apply to any
    non-naturalistic theory with the same claimed explanatory power.

    Coming up in my next major post (probably): On the questions of the origin
    of the Universe, of Existence in general, and of God.

    --Chris



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 02 2000 - 19:28:30 EDT