Tyler Durden

This is an extra credit report of a philosophy conference i attended a few weeks back. Feel free to savage, lambast, whoop up the crowd and howl against this proposal, however fair or unfair of a job i presented Dr. Audi's argument.


Ever since the dawn of the mutation of mechanistic sciences of Newton and the revolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, the advances of science has been a steady intrusion upon the traditional territory of religious knowledge. The success of the Age of Enlightenment is attributed to replacing outmoded religious notions with new science, which is the gradual shift of the privileged status of the authoritarian in modern society from the Church leaders to the scientists. This encroachment has led to the general consensus belief that those two candidates of knowledge were fundamentally incompatible. However, Professor Robert Audi of the University Nebraska-Lincoln presented a claim that it was possible to reconcile theology with philosophical naturalism, despite their historical segregation. Doctor Schmidt in his introduction proposed the possibility of a dialogue between these two different forms of discourse, a peaceful coexistence enriched by one another. Philosophy is in the business of locating a possible and logical rapprochement between oil and water, and in this case, naturalism and theology.

Naturalism entails two claims - the belief that the subject of the non-human and human sciences is all there is, and that there is no need to postulate any explanation that goes beyond or outside the Universe. The first claim privileges the natural world as the limit of knowledge, since the basic truths are the truths of nature. This privilege is an epistemological assumption about the primacy of scientific evidence and the sanctity of the scientific method. The second claim is often called the Stratonician presumption , that the postulation of a God automatically adopts the burden of proof.

Professor Audi attempted to rescue theology from the ruthless badlands of naturalism by appealing to a theory of personal identity. Personhood, according to Audi is the typical identification of a person with his body and his psychological characteristics. So, a person without a body is not exactly a person in the full, ordinary sense. A non-embodied person is a stretch, so Audi proposes that God has a body, which may be the universe. However, this is not to say that God is the universe, that He is identical to the physical matter in the universe. Rather, Audi attempts to argue that God is divinely embodied within the universe; much like a person is embodied in a physical body. So, the physical aspect of a person is not all there is to its identity and God’s personhood is not limited to the universe, like a pantheist believes.

Furthermore, Audi also suggested that mental phenomena do influence physical phenomena. That means the mental aspect of a person is causally interweaved within his or her physical behavior. This entails the claim that a materialism that does not suggest the possibility of mental causation cannot account for the existence of persons as defined above. So, a God, embodied within the universe, and had the possibility of metal causation, would be a person.

Audi concludes that with the definition of a personal identity, and the endorsement of mental causation, a theological version of God is compatible with naturalism, and describes it theological noncognitivism. He makes an analogy to ethical noncognitivism, which is a non-descriptivist and non-expressivist view consistent with naturalism. Noncognitivism is often a meta-ethical theory, the denial of all ethical properties, that any ethical statements are neither true nor false statements about the world. Since only propositional utterances are either true or false, ethical statements are judgments of attitudes, moods, emotions, desires or other prescriptive statements about the world. So, for theological noncognitivism, there are no religious properties, as in true or false religious statements. They are only the expressions of religious temper, of teleological beliefs about the world.

Audi did not mention that the term noncognitivism has had been already appropriated by atheists who thought the term God is literally meaningless. This positivist account of meaning excludes far too much, such as poetry, art, music, and other aesthetical, non-scientific aspects of human life. A theology of noncognitivism may be germane to the genteel ears of naturalists, but Audi’s attempt to reconcile natural phenomena with religion invariably watered down the notion of God to something esoteric.

I thought that Audi had succeeded in establishing a possible bridge between two incompatible discourse, but in the effort of doing so, he had to sacrifice the fundamental moorings of ontology of one for the other. And by subsuming religion to the philosophy of science Audi reduced God to a figurehead King of the Universe whose powers did not stretch beyond the laws of physics that regulated its own divine body. Noncognitivism is a nice attempt at leaving the backdoor open for God, but to a house full of scientists who may recognize the divine guest only at moments of social posturing.

Tyler Durden

....how about "A shotgun wedding of philosophy"?

Darkblade

(emphasis mine)

I know you already touched on some of this (corresponding to the modified parts of the quote):

Perhaps that would “explain” gravity’s existence, supposing that it was somehow the means that God’s “neurons” (either quantum particles or, “more” likely, atoms) were able to communicate with each other over massive distances instantaneously (or at a currently unrecognizably fast speed (which would be needed for this god's mind to properly operate))?

Unfortunately for Audi, this is an unsubstantiated assumption.

In the end, while Audi’s theological noncognitivism could “explain” the existence of the universe, at least inasmuch as why it is in this current state, it would have no real meaning whatsoever, as the existence of this god would not entail or uncover any usable (if any (respective to each of the following terms) moral, ethical, philosophical, or scientific discoveries or truths, or knowledge of any kind (that I can see). Add to that the ever-present problem that, like you said, there is no evidence for Audi’s god.