8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics

I have another philosophy class tonight. The module is on metaphysics or the question of what is real. Here is a fuller version of what the conversation will likely be. Previous posts at bottom.
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1. From the time of Thales in the 500s BC to Kant around 1800, metaphysics was one of the three great preoccupations of philosophy. There was of course ethics -- very practical most of the time. Then there was epistemology -- very foundational.

Then there was metaphysics, the question of what is real. 

I'll go through a brief history of "Western" metaphysics in the next section. Let's just say that a lot of that story seems like a lot of made up stuff. With the dawn of the scientific age, the conversation changed substantially to things like atoms and particles.

But before Kant around 1800, the conversation largely wavered between matter and ideas as the ultimate basis of reality. We've already wandered near this conversation in the last section. We talked about the long standing debate over whether our minds or our experiences were the surest path to knowledge.

That debate of the rationalists versus the empiricists maps to some degree to the core debate of metaphysics -- are ideas most real, or is matter most real? The rationalists leaned toward ideas, and the empiricists leaned toward matter. [1]

In the previous unit, we learned that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) broke this tie with regard to how we know what we know. He suggested that the content of our thinking came through our senses, but the organization of that content was a matter of our minds. We thus do not know the world as it is (das Ding an sich). We only know it as our minds process that input from our senses.

2. That moment was one of the biggest turning points in the history of philosophy. It was not a point of skepticism for Kant because he believed God guaranteed the general truthfulness of the way our minds process the world. But he nevertheless thought it implied that we only know the world as it appears to us, not as it actually is.

This conclusion led him to write, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic. It is basically a warning -- it puts a real damper on classical metaphysics when we stipulate that you can't really know the answers to questions about what reality is apart from us observing it.

Accordingly, metaphysics has fallen on somewhat hard times these last two centuries. There have remained those who have continued either as idealists (Hegel) or materialists (Marx). But the key question has much more shifted to what we can know for certain at all and whether we can speak of reality at all.

In a couple sections, I'll put in a word for a version of critical realism. It goes hand in hand with the "pragmatic epistemology" I suggested at the end of Unit 7. Critical realism holds that the world I experience (which can include the spiritual realm) is real. However, my apprehension of that world is always limited by the finitude of my understanding and my fallen potential to misapprehend it. 

Similarly, as we have argued, my organization of the world involves paradigms and pictures. Some paradigms and pictures "work" better than others.

3. Most of us as Christians would probably characterize ourselves as something like dualists. That is to say, we believe that matter is real, and we believe there is a spiritual realm as well -- two realities and two realms. This "works" at least as a construct. We can say with the Gospel of John that "that which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit" (John 3:6).

But we don't necessarily have to take this imagery as a literal metaphysic. It's a picture. It works. It gets us "around town." It expresses reality without necessarily committing us to it as the actual science of reality. We can see it as a kind of figurative way of talking about reality that captures fundamental truths about the world. The literal of reality is a mystery.

Body/soul was one way one slice of the ancient world formulated its metaphysic. And some New Testament authors drew on it to picture reality. But there are arguably other metaphyical models in Scripture too, such as the Old Testament's dust/breath. All of these work as true expressions of mysteries.

[1] As we saw back in 7.3 and will see again in the next section, George Berkeley (1685-1753) was the big exception. He saw our senses as the truest path to truth, and he believed that ideas were the most real thing.
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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

2.1 The Structure of Thinking?
2.2 Three Tests for Truth

3.1 Faith and Reason

7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics (this post)
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics
8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism

Gen Eds P6: What is real?

This is my fifth philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) to be a generally educated person (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first four philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science

1. In the post on "epistemology," we mentioned Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) sense that the input we receive from our senses gets processed and shaped by our minds. So I cannot really experience some "law of cause and effect." I experience two individual moments, and my mind glues the one to the other as cause to effect.

The bottom line is that I do not exactly know the world as it is. I know the world as my mind processes it. I know the world as it appears to me. I know the world from a finite, inevitably somewhat skewed perspective. [1]

One way that Kant put this conclusion is that I cannot know the "thing-in-itself" (das Ding an sich). I cannot know a tree apart from the way my mind processes the sensory information that comes into my mind through my senses. The work in which he especially develops this situation is called, A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

The title suggests, more or less, that metaphysics is now dead. We have no point of reference to know what the nature of reality is. We know how our minds process it, but we cannot see the world in an unfiltered way.

2. It is not entirely clear then what we should do with earlier debates over whether the universe was made up of ideas, matter, or both. It's not clear how we would ever answer such a question.

So materialists would argue that everything that exists is made up of matter. Epicurus, Lucretius, these are famous ancient materialists. Of course many individuals in the modern era have more or less been materialists in the philosophical sense, believing that nothing but what we see exists, matter.

There have also been idealists, who believe that everything that exists is basically idea. Perhaps the most bizarre, to us moderns, was Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753). He believed that we are all the thoughts of God, that "to be is to be perceived" by God, to be an idea that God has.

Of course, how would we tell the difference? We look around and see stuff. But we don't see what it is. How would we tell the difference between a "material" atom and an atom that was an idea in the mind of God? So the pure material versus pure idea debate seems impossible to resolve, perhaps even senseless.

3. On a popular level, most Christians are probably dualists, someone who believes that the universe is made up of two types of stuff, matter and say spirit. You might think of a person as a body and a soul. It is true that we cannot observe a soul, at least not from the perspective of our senses. No credible experiment has been able to detect such a part of us. For materialists, that is disproof enough.

However, dualists would not usually think of the soul or spirit as something that could be detected by our senses. Since the scientific revolution of the 1600s, it has been typical to think of the "natural" as that part of reality that we can explore with our senses by discovery. Then the "super" natural was understood to be that part of reality that is "above" or beyond that which we can see with our eyes. [2] Descartes thought of the spirit realm as "immaterial" in a way that was new.

Again, these are scarcely things that we can prove or know at this time, that is, of what "stuff" these things might consist. The Bible presents the nature of reality in the categories of its day. The Old Testament presents reality as the Semites thought of it. The New Testament presents reality at times the way the Greeks did.

These are different ways of picturing reality. They are not separate from what other people thought in the ancient world. They are not some distinct biblical worldview. They are the Greek and Semite worldviews, the truth of the Bible incarnated in the categories of the day.

So, as we have argued of science in general, these are pictures of the world that "work." When we say that we as humans have a body and soul or a body and spirit, we are saying that we will exist after death. The point is that those in Christ will exist forever. The point is that we will be conscious between our death and resurrection. The point is that those who are not in Christ will face a judgment after death. The point is not the literal form we will have when any of these things take place.

So there are Christians who are "non-reductive physicalists." They believe that all human existence is embodied, that no one can exist in a detached, spiritual form. They believe in resurrection. They may believe that we will have some sort of body between death and resurrection. In short, they believe all the essential orthodox things to believe. They do not believe that mere materiality is all there is. They believe in God and (embodied) angels.

And again, we have no way to know one way or another. It is a speculative question. We know the point. We don't know the literal nature of the reality behind the point.

4. The physics of the atom has created great uncertainty even for the materialist as to what material reality is. The world smaller than the atom would seem to be a fuzzy world of probability and uncertainty. Gone is the determinism of the 1600s to the 1800s, where many thought that the future was entirely a matter of following the equations out forever. Determinism means that the future is already determined, simply playing out the laws of cause and effect.

But now it seems that nuclear particles may not actually have fixed locations, speeds, spins, and so forth at all. Not determinism but uncertainty and indeterminism seem to characterize the subatomic world. There are still many questions about this most fundamental part of the material world, so we should not draw any final conclusions. But it would seem that material reality on its most basic level is far from solid.

5. With classical metaphysics more or less dead, there were some philosophers in the twentieth century who spoke of other kinds of "being" or existence. We will talk more about "existentialists" in the next post. They held that we create who we are, as it were, by defining ourselves, choosing a life.

For now we want to mention those we might call phenomenologists. If I am speaking "phenomenologically," then I am speaking as things appear to me. If I say that I saw the "sun rise," you know I am not saying that the sun goes round the earth. I am simply speaking in terms of how the sun appears. I know that, literally, the earth is rotating and has turned such that I can see the sun and it appears that the sun has risen.

This talking of things as they appear has allowed us to speak of "being" in a new way. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), for example, spoke of "being there" (Dasein), of who and what I am right here and now. He did not mean who I am as atoms or material or ideas. He was building on the existentialist idea that we decide who we are. If we embrace who we are now, then we have an authentic existence. Reality becomes a personal thing rather than an objective, outside of ourselves thing.

6. So we return to the pragmatic realism and critical realism of an earlier post. It would be absurd and completely useless to live as if the world around us did not exist. [3] Belief that the world around us exists "works" (pragmatic realism). By faith we can go further. By faith we believe that the world outside us exists. As Christians we believe that God exists and that he created the world, even if our apprehension of the world is finite and inevitably skewed (critical realism).

We do not need to know what is behind the metaphysical curtain. In the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), "Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent."

Next week: Philosophy 7: What is a person?

Classic Reading

• Plato's Republic
• Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

[1] Kant's faith that God was trustworthy led him to conclude that we could see the world as it is because we can count on the software of reason, so to speak, that God has given us. After postmodernism, however, we should admit that our human perspectives are inevitably tainted with our own finitude and subjectivity.

[2] This was a paradigm shift in itself. Prior to the scientific revolution, reality was more seen as a continuum, a chain of being from God down to minerals. Angels were material, only much thinner material. But after the scientific revolution, God and spiritual beings are conceived as "immaterial," of a different kind of being altogether.

[3] Solipsism is the hypothetical perspective that only I exist. Only a truly bizarre or unhinged person could hold it.

My Metaphysic and Epistemology in Bullet Points

My philosophy textbook is out. It is, as far as I know, perhaps the only Christian philosophy textbook out there that privileges a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective (although normally the Nazarenes quickly copy Wesleyan ideas like this once they learn of them... give it a year ;-). It of course tries to present the gamut of philosophical voices fairly without undo bias.

Because it is primarily being used as an e-text, there are only 1000 paperback copies at an unfortunate price...


I thought I might do here, over a few posts, what I have done before with theology: my philosophy in bullet points. Again, the book is written to present options and is not like what I'm about to do, which is present my specific inklings as a quasi-philosopher.

So here is my epistemological and metaphyical sense of things...

Epistemology 1

• From a standpoint of absolute, rational proof, the only thing of which we can be 100% certain is the fact that something exists (a modified form of Descartes' cogito ergo sum).
• Everything we think we know, therefore, is based on some degree of faith. We cannot prove that we are not a "brain in a vat" or a computer program. We cannot prove that the world outside us is real.
• Nevertheless, some constructs of knowledge "work" better than others. Most of the time, it works to assume that the things I sense around me are real (except when it doesn't). It works to step out of the way of moving traffic. It is a sort of pragmatic realism.

Metaphysics 1

• "Critical realism" is a pragmatic working hypothesis. That is to say, it works to assume that the world outside of my subjective mind is real apart from my perception of it. Yet it also works to assume that my apprehension of that world outside myself is not objective and is likely to be skewed in ways of which I am not aware. We are all unreflective "pre-moderns" in ways we don't know (because if we knew them, we would not be unreflective about them).

(Pragmatic) Epistemology 2

• Strictly speaking, therefore, all tests for truth reduce to the pragmatic test. Good truth "models" are those that predict future events under certain circumstances and thus, "work."
• In this sense, the correspondence test more or less reduces to the pragmatic test. The correspondence test "works" if a truth model seems to account for past, present, and especially future events and the data of realia in an "elegant" and useful way.
• A truth model is an ideological model that means to account for the realia or sense data of the world. These work best in relation to small pockets of realia rather than as large systems. They are abstractions of realia.
• Large ideological systems tend to be overly simplistic and reductionistic and tend to deconstruct upon detailed examination. Universals can be useful if they are aggregates of particulars. Otherwise, presuppositionalism and typological thinking are particularly "violent" epistemologies.
• The coherence test is thus of limited value when it comes to large systems. It is most helpful when it extends a useful model into other areas that "cohere" with the model and prove to work in those new areas.
• The most useful truth models conform to Occam's Razor, that are "as simple as possible without being too simple" (Einstein). Truth models are technically heuristic devices.
• We do not experience the world-in-itself, but our minds organize our sense experiences (Kant) according to certain patterns that are part of the structure of the human brain. These patterns were built to work in the world. That is to say, the innate categories of our brain are designed to operate according to pragmatic criteria. They are not arbitrary.
• Ideological systems and paradigms tend to change over time and are significantly impacted by culture and sub-culture. (Kuhn) We absorb a certain way of looking at the world growing up and are unaware that individuals from other cultures see the world differently. The default state of a human being is as an unreflective pre-modern and to a large extent we inevitably remain pre-modern.
• Even "modern" paradigms tend to deconstruct and change. Scientific paradigms also have a tendency to shift over time as "naughty data" gives rise to major shifts in theories (Kuhn).
• Divine revelation does not by-pass human paradigms (unless one would hypothesize some pre-verbal, unreflected intuition), but God reveals himself within human categories. Otherwise we would not understand him. Revelation is "incarnated truth." The notion of a "biblical worldview" is largely a pre-modern ideological construct that almost always involves the significant impact of a cultural viewpoint at a particular time and place.
• The Bible is not an independent path to truth in the sense that "inputting" the content of the Bible does not by-pass human reason. Our reason and experience are inevitably involved in our processing of biblical content. Like our senses, the Bible provides content that is inevitably organized by (and thus limited by) the patterns of our minds as interpreters.
• The meanings of words are a function of the way they are used (their language game) in a particular form of life (Wittgenstein). Past meanings of words have no necessary connection to present meaning. One meaning of a word has no necessary connection to another. 
• In keeping with pragmatic epistemology, the primary function of words is not to represent things in the world. Rather, words do things (Austin). 
• The best working epistemology for a Christian is, "faith seeking understanding." Begin with faith and pursue further understanding from there. Given the epistemological predicament in which we find ourselves, however, such faith should be potentially revisable.
• By faith, I believe that God knows what is true and what is real in an absolute sense. God knows all the data, all the realia of existence and non-existence. He knows all the relationships between all the data and realia. 
• An appropriate Christian working model for exploring what "works" in terms of knowledge is thus, "All truth is God's truth."

Metaphysics 2

• Belief in God is reasonable, although from our current capacity of understanding, it does not seem provable.
• The idea that the universe was designed and initiated by an Intelligence is as reasonable as the notion that some other unobserved material reality beyond this universe has generated the universe as we know it.
• The idea that, amid the contingency of existence as we know it, there is an entity with necessary existence seems reasonable. This line of thinking may actually prove God's existence as a Necessary Being, but we are not intelligent/informed enough to know it at this time.
• While at the time of Newton, scientific thinking seemed to point toward a determined universe, the current climate seems to imply a "freedom" or indeterminism to the universe.
• The biggest challenge for faith in a benevolent God is the question of evil and suffering. Why does a good God allow the righteous to suffer?
• The best suggestions are the free will theodicy and the soul making theodicy. The soul making theodicy (Irenaeus) suggests that suffering provides a context in which we can grow morally and become mature people. 
• The free will theodicy (Augustine) suggests that a world in which we can choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we all choose good by nature. But if God allows us to choose, some will choose badly and, thus, we will have evil in the world.
• Others, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard would suggest that we cannot hope to fully understand such things. Lack of clarity creates a context in which faith can thrive.
• It seems likely that many things that we think of as contradictory to goodness (e.g., death, suffering) are actually not and should not be thought of as incompatible with a good God.

Epistemology 3

• Items of faith are, in principle, reasonable to believe. They may not be obvious and certainly may not be provable (that is to say, the evidence will rarely "demand" the verdict of faith). Christian thinkers like Aquinas were overconfident in how much about Christian faith is more or less provable. 
• At the same time, items of faith are not, in general, irrational. God is not a trickster with evidence. Christian thinkers like Tertullian and Kierkegaard go too far in their sense of "blind faith." Similarly, presuppositionalists like van Til and even Barth give us the impression that Christianity can't survive in an evidentiary world, which seems problematic for the long term survival of Christianity. 
• Therefore, Christian epistemologies that cannot survive the Enlightenment have the whiff of failure.

More to come some other day...