NYT atheism blog post

I happened to notice there was a New York Times blog post on, not actually atheism, per se, but on the question of an omnipotent god allowing evil in the world and its effect on various religious and areligious philosophers. Or the ye olde "Why do bad things happen to good people?" question (isn't the reverse question just as interesting?).

It's an amusing exercise, but if you're arguing about atheism, it's absolutely the wrong issue to be hung up on. Sure, it's one nail in the coffin of theistic reasoning, but it's only one nail, and frankly, I don't even think it's that compelling. As several of the authors on both sides of the argument eventually, circuitously realize, "good" and "bad" are subjective words that depend on some kind of moral framework that just ends up begging the question. Where do our morals come from? How do we judge that which is good or bad?

The kook Flew decides that this question is the damning indictment of atheism and, apparently, has based his "magical transformation" from an atheist philosopher into some kind of born-again weirdo on it. Frankly, I think if you spend your life trying to make obsessively clean logical arguments on either side of the issue, there is probably something basically wrong with you from the get-go (and no, I don't think the occasional blog post qualifies). But, that's beside the point.

Anyway, the argument that Flew brings up is basically, "Where do you get your morals from? Doesn't the fact that you have some moral compass at all suggest something transcendental about the notion of morals in the first place? More generally, how can notions of truth, justice, morality, etc. arise from a purely materialistic world? What is the thing (i.e., you) that's making moral judgments anyway? Aren't you just a collection of chemicals?"

...which brings us to the _actual_ question we're apparently talking about, which has very little to do with morality. It is the venerable mind-body problem, and it has a long and distinguished history. It amounts, basically, to, "How do minds arise out of bodies?" Which is to say, where does the "you" that's sitting behind your eyes, perceiving the world and making judgments, come from?

And, you know, it _is_ a problem. At some fundamental level, I don't really have an answer for it. I think it's telling that you can get very compelling materialistic explanations out of brain research. How can you maintain the notion of a soul when damaging various parts of people's brains (don't do that purposefully, incidentally) can result in drastic personality differences? Look at the case of Phineas Gage, whose personality became _drastically_ different when a pole went through part of his brain. Doesn't that suggest, at the very least, that some piece of what we consider the "mind" does indeed arise out of the material, physical structure of the brain? And doesn't that drive a similar pole through the idea of an eternal soul? What are you if I can, in some fundamental way, change that you by changing your brain?

At the same time, I don't think even those experiments can explain you to _yourself_. Maybe it can tell you about other people, but on some level, it can't tel you about you. In other words, I perceive myself: there's some kind of personality behind these eyes looking at the world, making judgments, etc. Where does that come from? Objective observation fails here, because in this case the observer and the observed are inseparable. I can't objectively observe myself. It's quintessentially and philosophically impossible. There's always going to be some piece of me that is playing the part of "observer," and fundamentally that observer cannot observe itself. Sure, you can be introspective about your emotions, your thoughts, wonder to yourself, "Why do I keep thinking about pop tarts?", etc., but the point is, there's some part of you observing those thoughts, and it's that part...whatever it is...that cannot be observed by itself.

So, the scientific method reaches its limits here. Just because that's true, however, doesn't mean that materialistic philosophy is damned. It just means that there's something it has trouble answering. Note that it doesn't give a _wrong_ answer (as theists have so often historically done...irrefutably proved wrong, incidentally, not by their own reasoning processes but by scientists)...it just has a hard time coming up with one. I'm okay with that. Maybe it's a fundamentally impossible problem. There are lots of things that are impossible in the world. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes to mind: you can't, no matter how hard you try, figure out both the position and the momentum of a quantum particle no matter how what. Maybe the same is true of you figuring out yourself.

I still think that it's better framework to reason about the world than magical, unjustifiable thinking. Sure, religious people have an answer to this question ("well it's your _soul_, silly!"), but, let's be honest, that's retarded. Or, less inflammatorily, it's unjustified. It's an explanation pulled out of a hat that's true because someone, probably in Rome, wearing that silly hat, said it's true.

And that's a ridiculous and stupid basis for any kind of understanding of the world.