I'm extremely preoccupied with my trip at the moment, but I've downloaded and replied to sntjohnny's posts in this thread during some of my spare moments. Here is my reply:
The Flew-Wisdom "Gardener Parable" not only presents the 'presumption of atheism$(B a(Brgument in a potent form but also provides the reasons for its own inadequacy. You see, under the 'presumption of atheism$(B y(Bou have the notion that one has as much reason to reject theism as one does leprechauns and fairies, two examples that we theists have to hear frequently from atheists constantly thinking they are being clever. The idea is that one can invent all sorts of entities that cannot in principle be detected, and God is not much different than any of them.
Flew's argument is true under the general principle that there is a presumption of falsehood in any unsupported claim. The slam at atheists' "constantly thinking they are being clever" is nothing more than an ad hominem attack.
Burden of proof remains the same for all positive claims, and it matters not whether the person demanding it has a personality flaw of some kind.
In the Wisdom-Flew Gardener Parable two men, a believer and a skeptic happen upon a clearing where there was $(Cgr(Bowing many flowers and many weeds.$(D (BThe believer posits a gardener, the skeptic disagrees. Through various contrivances the believer$(Bs (Bgardener, if it is to exist, must exist in such a qualified form as to be indistinguishable from no gardener at all. But what this parable illustrates in crystalline form is that it is not the definition of the gardener that we begin with at all, but rather a clearing "growing many flowers and many weeds." Not only that, but our skeptic does have an obligation, a burden of demonstration (I$(Bm (Bnot willing to follow Flew in his use of the word 'proof$(B e(Bven with caveats).
OK, but
why does the skeptic have an obligation to show anything? His position is that the place in question is no different from untended landscape. The believer has to show that it is different, because it was the believer who initiated the claim.
One supposes from the parable that there is something about this particular clearing that gives us the impression that this clearing is, in fact, a garden. In other words, what meets both men$(Bs (Bsenses is that they are in the presence of a garden, with the intuition that where there is a garden, there is a gardener. Our believer need not go any further then he is portrayed as going.
Wrong. Flew is not saying that the garden exists, only that the landscape exists which the believer wishes to call a "garden". There is no intuition on the skeptic's part that the spot constitutes a "garden", which carries with it the presupposition of a gardener. You are engaging in presuppositionalism at a very early stage in the argument.
...He could simply point to the $(Aga(Brden$(B a(Bs prima facie evidence of a $(Aga(Brdener.$(B (BOur skeptic has an obligation to show how whatever peculiarities gave rise to the suspicion that it was a garden in the first place are better explained via processes that don$(Bt (Bintuitively call for an intelligent agent. But note that in coming this far, we are very far from the notion that the beginning of the beginning is obtaining and operating with a $(Ale(Bgitimate concept which theoretically could have an application to an actual being.$(B (BIn truth, it is the clearing in the wood we appear to be starting with.
You jump back and forth between expressions like 'garden' and 'clearing'. The skeptic is not buying off on the classification of the spot as a 'garden'. You miss the point. You assume an agreement on the term 'garden', when no such agreement exists.
Our parable is not helpful in telling us whether or not there are suitable reasons for describing this clearing as a garden in the first place. Are there geometric arrangements of flowers, for example? Are there piles of weeds strewn about the ground, but flowers are untouched? Perhaps there is a shovel nearby? These are all elements that smack of Paley$(Bs (BWatch and beg the question that the one inferring the existence of a watchmaker or a gardener is acting on a prima facie argument that does not in the slightest require a $(Apr(Besumption of atheism.$(B (BIf one stumbles upon a book in the wood surely the presumption is on the skeptic to show that this particular book does not arise from an author. It is not the believer$(Bs (Bjob to delineate the characteristics of the author in order to justify the mere inference that there is an author. This all assumes that there are reasons for thinking our clearing gives signs of being a garden- and our parable is silent on this point.
Gardens exist, and both sides can come to an agreement on what licenses use of that term to describe the spot in question. In the above paragraph, you seem to acknowledge that there might exist criteria that license the term. If so, then the garden-believer wins the argument. First, however, the believer must meet his burden of proof by showing that the licensing criteria obtain. Flew is not arguing that we should fail to believe in gardens. He is arguing that we should fail to believe in gods.
Obviously the garden is our own universe, but upon further examination we find that the universe itself is still not the proper starting point. It is still not the proper 'beginning of the beginning. (Flew's parable illustrates this, as well. The proper starting point is in fact the invididual, himself. The believer and the skeptic both go to the clearing and they make their judgments based on their own experiences about clearings that are gardens and clearings that are not gardens. They do not only go to the clearing with this set of experiences, but also with their own self-consciousness, their own awareness and self-awareness, their own thoughts and thinking about their own thoughts. How can one even begin to make inferences about the universe or clearings or God until one has come to some settled acquaintance with their own minds?
There is an assumption that the believer and non-believer think alike and have come to agreement on basic terminology--what counts as a 'garden'. If not, then it is pointless to argue that a garden exists. We are left with the so-called 'cognitivist' position that the word 'garden' lacks meaning, and it is pointless to affirm or deny the existence of the 'garden'.
And it is not simply that we have minds, but also the question of how and why our minds can be trusted to give us true conclusions about what our senses perceive in the first place. Yes, we must trust our minds or else we slip into solipsism, but that doesn't in the slightest mean that our minds do not require explanation for the honest inquisitor. What is the best explanation? What makes the most sense from a prima facie point of view? The position (espoused stridently and arrogantly by Dawkins and Dennet) that our minds are nothing more than manifestations of arrangements of matter built up by small accretions over time, so that the universe produces something near the end which it did not have in the beginning, or the view that one can only give of what they already have, ie, raw matter begets raw matter, and mind begets mind?
There are reasons why self-awareness has evolved in moving organisms. All animals have evolved brains, because natural selection favors moving beings that can avoid danger. Self-awareness conveys the advantage of being aware of damage to one's own body and one's immediate environment. Reason allows one to predict future events and avoid potential hazards. Hence, beings that have heightened self-awareness stand a better chance of surviving and producing offspring, which is what drives evolution.
Dennet and Dawkins are neither strident nor arrogant in pointing out that science has established a dependency of minds on physical brains. It is a fact that every mental function can be tied to physical events in a brain. The conclusion that minds therefore cannot exist independently of brains seems quite reasonable, and there is absolutely nothing arrogant or strident in taking that position. Moreover, if it is true that minds cannot exist without physical brains, then that is a powerful argument against religion. It appears that all religions start from the assumption that minds can exist independently of bodies.
I for one consider the Dawkinan and Dennetian view dead on arrival: their position comes to the clearing, admits it looks very much like a garden, but then strives to show how gardens can form irrespective of gardeners. That is all well and good, except for epistemologically speaking it leaves it impossible then to detect an actual gardener, for any and all evidence is $(Atr(Banslated into Darwinian terms$(B w(Bhich makes their confidence that there is no actual gardener fairly unimpressive in my mind. Flew does not take the same view on that score, at least not explicitly, but we instantly see from how all three men handle the question that we are not starting at all with a $(Apr(Besumption of atheism$(B o(Br an $(Aap(Bplicable$(B d(Befinition of God. All are starting from the realm of experience.
Again, you misconstrue the argument in a very crucial way. Your definition of 'garden' is not equivalent to theirs, because yours presupposes a gardener. I actually agree with you that the analogy is poor, because it is easy to corrupt it in the way you do here. It is begging the question to assume that everything which appears to be a garden (i.e. something created by a gardener) at first blush actually is a 'garden'. One really needs to show that it is a real "garden" in the sense that you are using it. What the atheist position really argues is that you have mistaken a clearing for a garden. Given evolution by natural selection, one can explain all the features of that clearing without assuming the intervention of a gardener to create those features.
More to the point, our own self-consciousness and our own apparent awareness of our selves and our own ability to reasonable detect agency by analogizing from our own being satisfies,T (Bdefeats,T (Bthe presumption of atheism,T (Bbefore it has legs to move. It is not that it is irrational; it is that it has been met. Now that we have established that the $(Abe(Bginning of the beginning$(B i(Bs our own person before it is anything else, our next question if whether or not we are justified in trusting our own inferences regarding agency. While a complicated proposition in its own right, nonetheless there is no room left for the $(Ane(Bgative atheist$(B t(Bo wiggle. Even the $(Ane(Bgative atheist$(B h(Bas a burden of demonstration: he has to show how things normally understood as prima facie evidence of agency, even super-agency, can be and actually is (ie, evidence is produced to show it), the result of non-agency processes.
I don't disagree on the point that the atheist has to address positive arguments in favor of a given god's existence. Here you are mainly raising the 'design' argument against skepticism. That is a type of evidence that we have an actual 'garden' in the sense that you are using the term. I think that all the available evidence points to the fact that the design process was really brought about by agentless natural selection. I know that you disagree, but we've been down this road before. You have offered nothing new in this thread to change anyone's mind.
...Shall the people who believe that it is more reasonable that Mind begets mind bow to those who think it more reasonable that matter can beget anything more than matter?
There is a wide range of evidence that material processes beget minds. Minds can be defined as collections of mental processes, and every single mental process that we have observed in animals and humans--perception, memory, learning, descision-making, etc., can be shown to depend on the physical state of a brain. Nowadays, we can even use MRIs to take pictures of physical changes in the brain that correspond to specific thoughts. But you can even infer from the way alcohol affects a brain that there is a correlation between the physical world and our mental world. So humans have been in possession of this kind of evidence for thousands of years. The idea that a "mind" is needed to beget a "mind" simply has no evidence at all in its favor. None that you've presented, anyway. Whether or not you choose to "bow to" the materialist approach is irrelevant. Nobody asks you to humiliate yourself.
The question is empirical, and its answer does not depend on whether it makes you feel good or bad.
In my view, my mind is prima facie evidence for a greater mind: I do not in the slightest believe that atheists have no burden or obligation to show otherwise. Quite the contrary, they very much do.
And how does that greater mind come to exist without landing you inside an infinite regress of greater minds? We both know that you consider the 'greater mind', i.e. God, to be the end of the regress. God represents an unbegotten mind. So we know immediately that there has to be an exception to the rule "mind begets mind". A much more reasonable position is that minds are emergent properties of brains. We know for a fact that children's minds are much less complex than adult minds. They contain less information, and they use different strategies to acquire information. So we have concrete evidence that minds develop or "emerge" as humans mature. We can use physical means to shut down minds (general anesthesia), and we can use physical means to start them up again. The evidence seems overwhelmingly conclusive to me. Minds depend on brains for their existence.And I don't need to worry about the problem of infinite regress with that conclusion. You do with yours.
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Topic: Refutation of Antony Flew's 'Presumption of Atheism' - atheist's burden of proof (Read 3118 times)