Book report: The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, by Edward Feser

Book report: The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, by Edward Feser

When I read “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, I had the definite overall feeling that he was wrong. Not just that I disagreed with his ideas, which I do, but that he was making actual mistakes in his reasoning and arguments. I pointed out some of these in my book report (http://dejesus.blogspot.com/search?q=delusion), but I knew there were more that I just couldn’t put my finger on. I’m just an old country theoretical physicist, not a trained philosopher, so I’m not up to the task of pointing out and refuting all his errors.

Luckily, Edward Feser is. As a professional philosopher, with special interests in Aristotle and Aquinas, he has the philosophical chops to expose the fallacies in the arguments of Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the others who make a pretty cushy living by mocking belief in God. Feser’s book “The Last Superstition” presents counterarguments that are essential if one wants to continue to pretend to be looking at the topic fairly and rationally.

Mind you, this book is tough sledding. It starts with an exhaustive review of the metaphysics of Aristotle, that is, Aristotle’s ideas about the concepts that underpin philosophical thought. Now, I’ve always had a pretty negative view of Aristotle, largely because so many of his scientific ideas have proven wrong. However, the guy *invented* logic (just think about that for a second), so he must be pretty smart. Luckily, Aristotle’s metaphysics are a lot better than his physics. Feser’s exposition is very clear, it’s just that a lot of the ideas are challenging. For example, there’s the concept of “forms” or “universals”. This is the idea that there are entities that are real, but nonphysical, such as “triangle” and “dog”. Real triangles and dogs are the physical manifestations, to greater or lesser fidelity, of their ideals. Scientists use such “forms” all the time, of course, when they talk about things like “electrons” or “species”. Indeed, there must be something like “forms” in order for communication to work. How else can you and I talk about things that are purely in our own minds, yet be talking about the same thing, unless there is something outside of our minds that we’re both referring to? Anyway, imagine about 40 pages of that.

But Aristotle is just the scaffolding to understand Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas used the metaphysics and logic of Aristotle in order to reason about and discuss things that interested him, including God. Among Aquinas’s accomplishments was the devising of the Five Ways, as they are called, and it’s tricky to define what they are. They aren’t exactly proofs of the existence of God. It’s more like he’s trying to show something about some of the characteristics that God must possess, or ways to think about God. Feser does a good job of explaining this reasoning, and I will do a poor job of sketching out one of them:

Consider something in motion, say, a kid hitting a ball with a bat. What causes the ball’s motion? Well, the immediate cause is the bat, but obviously the bat isn’t necessary in the process: it’s really the kid’s hands that cause the motion. So, what causes the motion of the kid’s hands? The muscles in the kid’s arms. And what causes the motion of the muscles? Presumably, nerve impulses to the muscles. And what causes the nerve impulses? No doubt, something in the kid’s brain. And what causes the action in the brain? Chemical reactions of some sort. And what causes these chemical reactions? Molecules and electrical forces. And what causes the molecules and electrical forces? Particles and the electromagnetic force.

Now, let’s stop here for a moment. Clearly, this line of reason can go only one of three ways:

1. You can keep on adding steps infinitely, each step explaining the step before. Nobody believes that this kind of infinite regress is true, though. If people think about it at all, they think that there is some one ultimate answer upon which everything else rests.

2. You draw an arbitrary line and say, “That’s it. This is the answer. Ask no further questions.” This seems arbitrary and unsatisfying, though, like an exhausted parent answering the 37^th “Why?” with “Because I say so!”

3. There exists an entity that can cause motion without requiring a cause for its own motion. We identify this entity with God. This is referred to as the Unmoved Mover.

Notice a few things about this sketch (and I really haven’t done justice to the complexity involved):

First, it has nothing to do with religious belief, faith, sacred writings, divine revelation, or spiritual experiences.

Second, it involves pure logic, based only on the occurrence of something moving. If you admit that a kid can hit a ball with a bat, the rest follows logically, like a geometry theorem.

Third, it has nothing to do with time. This isn’t tracking something back to the beginning of the universe, however that happened. We’re talking only about what’s going on in the moment of the kid hitting the ball with the bat. So, the big bang theory isn’t pertinent here.

Fourth, this does not depend upon any special knowledge of science. No new discoveries are going to affect this argument. All that any new discoveries can do is push the three-way decision back a couple of steps. You still come to the same decision.

Fifth, the other four “ways” are similar, in that they start from commonplace observations – things move – and result, through the application of logic, in a demonstration of some aspect of God.

Sixth, this suggests that the proper question to ask, if indeed you actually ask someone the question, isn’t “Do you believe in God?” but instead “Do you understand that God exists?”. Belief has nothing to do with it. Or is that too snarky?

Last, this is a pretty weird aspect of God, one you don’t hear much about.

Anyway, I found this exposition of Aquinas’s ideas to be fascinating and appealing. It’s nice to have a presentation of an aspect of God that does not depend upon subjective personal experience, but only upon logic and reason. Very refreshing.

Of course, Dawkins gets this all totally wrong, which raises another three-way question:

1. Did Dawkins not actually read Aquinas before dismissing Aquinas’s demonstrations? This seems lazy, and not the kind of thing you want to see in someone championing some philosophical position.

2. Did Dawkins read, but not understand, Aquinas? This doesn’t give you a warm feeling about Dawkins, either.

3. Did Dawkins read and understand Aquinas, but deliberately misrepresent Aquinas’s ideas, the better to belittle them? This suggests a dishonesty about Dawkins, which is not unheard of among scientists, but is especially distasteful, since science depends implicitly on honesty.

Take your pick. It seems as if Dawkins is either lazy, stupid, or dishonest.

Getting back to the idea of this being a weird aspect of God, Feser actually presents a list that shows several levels of sophistication in thinking about God. I found this fascinating.

The first and most unsophisticated way to think about God is as a stern but kind magical old man with a white beard who lives in the sky. [Me: This is about the level of understanding of young children and the kind of Christians who appear on Fox News.]

The second level is that God doesn’t really have a body, and has thoughts and motivations in many ways different from our own. God is vastly more intelligent and powerful than we are, without any of our limitations. The universe is a thing God made, which now continues on its own, although God can tinker with it at will. [Me: This is a common way of thinking about God, and the second-favorite target of atheists.]

The third level suggests that God is not like any object or substance in the universe. God is being itself, is existence itself, utterly distinct from the universe, yet underlying and maintaining the universe at every moment. “The universe is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.” None of the concepts we apply to things in the universe apply to God, except as metaphor or analogy. [Me: I found this description thrilling, because this is how I picture God, when I find it necessary to picture God at all.]

You would think you couldn’t get more abstract than the last one, but there are actually at least two more levels of sophistication beyond this one. You can read about them yourself.

(Interesting aside: After a lifetime of contemplating God from a logical and rational point of view, Aquinas appears to have had a transforming religious experience. He stopped working on his book Summa Theologica and never wrote another word. When asked to continue, he replied that it all seemed as straw to him, possibly a reference to Paul’s idea that our works will be tested by fire, and those made of straw won’t survive that test.)

As much as I appreciate this book, I do part ways with Feser over what is called “natural law”. Natural law is the Aristotelian idea that, by observing what seems natural in the world, we can derive how we ought and ought not to behave. For example, we observe that there are men and women, and that together they can make and raise children. From this, we can derive that anything that goes against this natural order must be unnatural and, therefore, wrong. In this case, what’s unnatural and wrong includes masturbation, birth control, sex outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. Part of my beef with natural law is that it doesn’t give a reasonable morality. In the given example, there’s nothing to prohibit minors from marrying, for instance, and I don’t think minors should marry. But mostly my objection is that natural law is very much in the eye of the beholder. For instance, you could just as reasonably say that it’s natural for adults to love each other, and that this love might involve physical intimacy, regardless of their state of marriage. I think that Feser lacks a good sociological imagination. Unfortunately, his views, especially against abortion and homosexuality, crop up over and over throughout the book, which is wearing.

But back to the good stuff. Feser does a wonderful job of presenting various philosophical schools of thought, revealing both their positive aspects and flaws. A lot of it is very funny, such as his refutation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative (you should do only those things that you would want to be universal) – well, maybe you had to be there. He’s not shy about calling the New Atheists names while he’s exposing their philosophical errors, which helps keep things lively. He has a gift for creative ridicule.

The last section is a critique of science, specifically the materialistic and mechanistic view of the universe that says that everything that goes on is simply objects interacting due to forces, with no goal or purpose whatever. He makes it clear that such a view is not only not true, it is actually self-contradictory. How can science do its investigation without people purposefully and goalfully carrying out their investigations? Also, just try describing physiology, or evolution, or DNA – or a “selfish gene” – without using language expressing goals or purpose. He marvels at the cluelessness of the m-and-m folks who attempt to explain the mind and subjective experience in terms of materialism and mechanism: The very first step of the scientific method is to discard anything subjective or of the mind. Therefore, naturally, it’s impossible for science to explain the mind or subjective experience. Duh!

Although I read this book mainly for its views on science, me being a scientist, I have to say that by the time I got to that part of the book, I felt like a marathoner reaching the end of the race: just glad to be able to limp across the finish line. It’s that demanding a read.

All in all, this is a worthwhile book to read if you want to understand where the New Atheists go off the rails, and learn a good bit about philosophy in general as well. Do keep in mind that it’s a bit of a slog, and you need to take Feser’s pet peeves with a grain of salt.

Recommended

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Superstition-Refutation-Atheism/dp/1587314525/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337952772&sr=8-2