How can we find answers to life’s most important questions?

Allen HainlineReasonable Faith UTD

www.OriginsDiscussion.info

Today’s Plan

• Intro and Background about Reasonable Faith

• What is a worldview and why is it important?• Is there a truth about worldviews?• Methodology for discerning true worldview• Evaluate example worldview evidence

– God Gene– Free will

Guidelines for Discussion

• We welcome questions during presentations, but please stay on topic!

• Please stay afterwards and keep discussing/interacting!• Discuss in a friendly manner

– Argue for ideas not against people– Learn to disagree respectfully

• Exercise principle of charity– Give the other person the benefit of the doubt – you may have

misunderstood– Don’t assume bad motives– Ask questions to clarify

A worldview is a set of beliefs about the most important issues in life … a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality (Philosopher Ronald Nash)

1. Origins• Universe, life, laws of Nature

2. Meaning/Purpose3. Morality4. DestinyWhich worldview corresponds to reality?Which worldview provides a coherent answer to these key issues?

Don’t just make up your ownMany pick and choose elements of different worldviews based solely on personal preferenceTruthfulness is all that matters!

Don’t just ignore life’s most important questionsContrast with time spent studying trivialities in school

Do find the worldview that is most reasonableYou’re not going to be able to prove any of them!

What are the advantages and limitations of different sources of knowledge?

• Historical records• Logic/Math• Philosophy• Personal observations/experiences

– Religious experiences• Science

– Empirical or theoretical ?

• Do you agree with the claim that allKnowledge should be based on science?Why or why not?

What approach should be used for discovering the true worldview?

What approach should be used for discovering the true worldview?

• What epistemology (theory of knowledge) is best for ___?– What percentage of amino acid sequences form stable proteins?– Who shot JFK in Dallas ?– A satellite is orbiting a planet at an altitude 1 km higher than previously,

how much farther does it travel in an orbit?• What’s wrong with these approaches to determining worldview?

– Base solely on what smartest person believes– Base solely on parents, teachers or how raised– Base off of blind faith

• Biblical faith just means trust and should be based on reason (I Pet 3:15)• Nowhere in the Bible is anyone commended for “blind” faith

What approach should be used for discovering the true worldview?

Does your epistemology allow you to discover that a different worldview might be correct?

– Don’t make assumptions that preclude the possibility of discovering that you’re wrong

– It’s circular to choose a science-only epistemology based on your assumption of naturalism

• Some are blind to this circularity• Shows how a worldview is a “control belief”

Since a worldview affects everything, why not have a broad epistemology?

Our Initial FocusNaturalism vs. Theism

• If God exists, it changes everything else– Understanding origins is key

• Does God Exist Series

Case 1: “The God Gene”

Any preliminary thoughts on how valid this might be?

Carl Zimmer’s review in Scientific American:“would be better titled: A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.”“If someone comes to you and says, ‘We’ve found the gene for X, you can stop them before they get to the end of the sentence.” John Burn, director of Institute of Human Genetics Beware of popular media alone – do your own research!• Look at what supporting evidence is being offered• Note in this case, even if true, could have been

compatible with theism

Case 2: Examine Prediction of Naturalism: No Free Will

Many philosophers & scientists argue that under naturalism, libertarian free will doesn’t exist• If physical laws dictate everything, free will

cannot exist– The equations leave no room for anyone to have

chosen to do things differently– To do otherwise than what laws predict, I’d have to

change past states or violate the laws

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Do you think Free Will exists?

• Aren’t you doing experiments constantly in which you’re validating free will?

• Why do some scientists make such claims?– Primarily because it is a logical outworking of naturalism

• Can Crick’s claim be rationally affirmed?– He admits he arrived at his understanding only because of

blind forces and non-rational material causes– The rationality of accepting a theory presupposes freedom in

evaluating the theory against alternatives– Explore this JP Moreland video for further info:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYLnNPYT5pk

Case 2: Examine Prediction of Naturalism: Free Will

Why not just believe this great scientist?Do you think free will exists?

– What evidence do we have for or against free will?Has Neuroscience disproven free will?• Libet Experiments

Critique of Libet Interpretation

• Libet asked test subjects to "let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act"

– This is not a good example of a consciously caused/planned event– Only a problem for a naïve account of free will– Wrongly assumes that if something comes before an event it causes the event

• Correlation does not necessarily imply causation– Libet himself interpreted experiments as supporting “free won’t”

• Newer studies by Brass & Haynes– Found brain correlations as much as 7 seconds before reported intention but only at

correlated 60% of time (50% would be randomly selecting)• Marcel Brass’s interpretation:

– “There is not much evidence that free will doesn’t exist” (or that it does)– “First of all, I do not really think that neuroscience will solve the old philosophical problem of

whether free will exists or not and I’m even sure whether any science can solve this problem” – Naturalists frequently overstate these resultsSee a critique:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCM5BFU01YU&list=PLQhh3qcwVEWh0MdW-hlHBPyLRWgFjzhPT

Why is view of free will important?

Why important?– Affects morality, legal justice system etc.– “But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the

nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment.” Dawkins

– Scientific studies indicate belief in free will shown to affect morality

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Consciousness also unexpected and unexplained under naturalism

“No explanation given wholly on physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.”--David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 93.

“It is not that we know what would explain consciousness but are having trouble finding the evidence to select one explanation over the others; rather, we have no idea what an explanation of consciousness would even look like.”--Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 61.

Next Week:Cosmological Arguments for

God’s ExistenceSU 2.508 Allen Hainline

Reasonable Faith UTDwww.OriginsDiscussion.info

Does God Exist?

Why is there something

rather than nothing?

Is the universe eternal?

Backup Slides

Opposite ideas cannot both be true at the same time and in the same

sense.

THE EARTH IS ROUND

THE EARTH IS NOT

ROUND

THE LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION HELPS US DISCOVER WHAT IS FALSE

THEY CAN’T BOTH

BE RIGHT!

THE LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION

Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins

God Does NOT Exist!

Oxford Professor John Lennox

God Exists!

“Is that true?”

“There is no truth.”

The Road Runner Tactic

“It’s true for you but not for me!”The Road Runner Tactic

“Is that true for everybody?”

Compatabilism: 1-way freedom• Physics -> desires -> actions • But how does physics produce desires? Is that even

possible? At least FT required– Freedom comes in only in desires->actions– But then no purpose in illusion of free will– No advantage to consciousness – that could be favored

by NSLibertarian free will• [Physics ->] desires -> physics -> actions (freedom

flows out of desires) 1st part minimal

If this theological assumption is correct, there would be no scientific evidence for God but the laws themselves might point to God

“I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.“ Agnostic physicist Paul Davies

• Maybe bring the following next week

Predictions of Worldviews

• Naturalism– Nothing to favor life or humans– All phenomenon can (eventually) be explained by the laws of physics

• Theism– God creates universe and life– In order to make predictions, tentatively assume broadly Judeo-Christian God– 2 possibilities creation models

1. One-time creation model– Laws setup to eventually result in creatures made in image of God

» Intelligence – given dominion over creation as a steward» Free will» Moral» Conscious – not just robots, thus capable of love

2. God intervenes/interacts to bring about full diversity of life

• Is there anything wrong with the following?– Any potential evidence for God from science is simply a “God the gaps” argument?– Positing God as an explanation makes no explanatory progress since it leaves God

• Science often posits entities that raise new questions• Compare with SETI

– An atheist discounts the possibility that the fine-tuning of the laws of Nature points to God because much of the universe is uninhabitable

• You could miss detecting ET by not having broad enough expectations

Or previous chart like this

• Compare SETI and search for God– Detecting things improbable under naturalism– Don’t call everything a gap– Appropriate epistemology– Don’t discount evidence because it raises further

questions about origin/nature of ET’s– Don’t discount because it doesn’t match our best

explanations (for natural laws)

Look at predictions of different worldviews

• Key is asking what evidence would look like under hypothesis …– E.g. if God exists, there might be what look like gaps in science

• Consciousness, free will, origin of life, origin of universe

– Distinguish between expected gaps and unexpected– What are trends?– Category error …

• Mistakes skeptics can make– Not being open to certain types of explanations– Who made God? As a response to evidence for a transcendent

cause with no physical alternatives

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Philosophy of Mind

“The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false….[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states…are routinely denied by many…of the advanced thinkers in the subject.”

-- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

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Materialism in Critical Condition.

“We don’t know… how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience. This last is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don’t bet on anyone ever solving it.”

--Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 83.

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How about the scientists? “if mental phenomena are in fact nothing

more than emergent properties and functions of the brain, their relation to the brain is fundamentally unlike every other emergent property and function in nature.” --B. Allan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 136.

No other emergent property (e.g. liquidity) has subjectivity.

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Is consciousness reducible to matter?

“Nowhere in the laws of physics or in the laws of the derivative sciences, chemistry and biology, is there any reference to consciousness or mind.”

--John Eccles and Daniel Robinson, The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York: Free Press, 1984), 37.

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Is consciousness localizable?

“No single brain area is active when we are conscious and idle when we are not. Nor does a specific level of activity in neurons signify that we are conscious. Nor is there a chemistry in neurons that always indicates consciousness.”

--Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 109.

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Mind-Body interaction.

Materialists point out that brain damage affects the mind (bottom-up causation).

This does not show that the mind reduces to the brain: compare dropping a phone when someone is speaking. The phone does not generate the voice, it transmits it.

The brain is necessary to transmit thoughts. It does not follow it generates them.

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Cognitive Therapy for Neural Disorders.

“willful, mindful effort can alter brain function, and...such self-directed brain changes—neuroplasticity—are a genuine reality... In other words, the arrow of causation relating brain and mind must be bidirectional.”

--Jeff Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain, 94-95.

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Problems addressed by mind-based therapies, verified by brain-scans.

(1) Depression and sadness. (2) Tourette’s syndrome. (3) Stroke rehabilitation. (4) Focal hand dystonia. (5) Dyslexia. (6) Panic disorder. (7) Spider phobia. (8) Stress reduction. (9) Follow up care for cancer patients.