It is generally believed that traditional or
commonsense beliefs that contradict scientific views must recede. I
will argue that such an opinion is not always justified. In
particular, I claim that the modern scientific notion of the
fundamental nature of the world and life may very likely prove to be
false, whereas some relevant «unscientific» folk
sentiments may prove to be essentially correct.
Science
and traditional common sense, which both seek truth, are not
adversaries. Science can even be regarded as a sophisticated and
highly disciplined form of common sense. Therefore it might seem that
we should always prefer scientific claims to traditional folk
beliefs.
It is undoubtedly true that folk sentiments
cannot compete by any means with most of what science tells us.
Scientific claims express the results of concerted efforts by large
communities of highly educated and trained specialists who use very
complicated technical equipment and apply intricate theoretical
methodologies. Consider, for example, such fields of research as
particle physics, cosmology, or genetics. The world is not, however,
a primitive entity and our epistemic situation therein need not be
simple. It is for that reason that untutored common sense can in some
respects be more rational than science. To understand how this can be
so, let us turn our attention to the perils inherent in our
scientific pursuit of truth.
It is natural that we wish
to ground our beliefs about the world on as firm data as possible. It
is also very reasonable that we attempt to avoid any logical
inconsistencies inside our belief systems. In these regards the
collection of folk sentiments is certainly much inferior to the body
of knowledge science advocates. Yet the lack of a clear factual basis
and the toleration of inconsistencies may give commonsense reasoning
definite advantages over scientific ratiocination.
THE
PERILS OF THE SCIENTIFIC QUEST FOR A FIRM BASIS OF EMPIRICAL
KNOWLEDGE
In general, the desire to found our
beliefs upon firm and clear empirical facts is commendable. It is
always reasonable to establish, if possible, a solid observational
basis for a definite belief rather than to hold to it relying upon
vague and ambiguous data. It is therefore understandable that science
applies certain strict criteria a fact must satisfy in order to be
accepted as a basis for reliable conclusions. However, using of such
criteria may prove detrimental to our search for truth. Our world may
be - and I will argue that it very likely actually is - of
such character that the picture of the world formed on the basis of
the most trustworthy empirical data we currently possess is
incorrect, and that some very basic properties of the world reveal
themselves in the specific kinds of facts which common sense
recognizes but science, in its quest for utmost certainty and
clarity, rejects.
Science acknowledges as truly
scientific only the so-called objective facts, i.e. the facts that
are publicly accessible (Hempel 1958). This class of facts consists
of data about the formal (abstract) structure and dynamics of the
physical world (Carnap 1969). On the basis of these data a conclusion
of paramount importance for our understanding of the world has been
drawn. In all cases the physical processes have been rigorously
investigated, their dynamics have proved lawful, either
deterministically or probabilistically, and it has been inductively
concluded that the dynamics of the world are thoroughly
law-governed. This claim is regarded as the main doctrine of the
scientific world-view, and from that it follows that the world is
ontologically mundane or, in common parlance, natural. Everything
that takes place is determined, in the final reckoning, by the laws
of physical dynamics obeyed by the fundamental constituents of
matter.
We ourselves are also regarded as thoroughly
material (though structurally extremely complicated) beings. In this
case our behavior, being determined by our cerebral dynamics, is also
entirely law-governed, i.e. subject to the combination of rigid
determinism and blind (quantum) chance. This in effect means that we
are not free in our deeds, that we have never been able to act other
than we actually did, or, more precisely, we could have behaved
otherwise only as a result of some purely random, indeterministic
quantum events.
It is doubtful, however, whether this
scientific doctrine is correct. It is in direct contradiction with
commonsense views. According to folk psychology, we are in command of
our voluntary activity. In everyday life people regard themselves and
others as creatures with free will who are able to have behaved
otherwise than they have in fact chosen to. It is for precisely that
reason that people are considered to be morally responsible for their
actions. Is such a common belief an «unscientific»
superstition without rational basis? No, it is not. Our belief in
possessing free will is empirically justified. We are able to clearly
discriminate between what happens to us independently of our will
(like heart beating, muscle convulsion, sneezing etc.) and what
happens due to our own efforts. The empirical information about our
possessing free will lies in the specific phenomenal quality of our
efforts of will, the quality we call «the feeling of
freedom.»
Modern science does not acknowledge the
feeling of freedom as a scientific empirical fact. First of
all, the experiences of efforts of will are the phenomena of
consciousness and thus not publicly observable but may be witnessed
only privately - introspectively. Science is very reluctant to
regard introspection as a genuine scientific observation. Moreover,
the information about having free will lies in the phenomenal
quality of experiences, but the qualities of this kind -
qualia - are, unlike structural information, ineffable and
cannot thus be interpersonally communicated.
As
concerns access, verifiability and communicability, the facts about
qualia are not as «good» as the facts about physical
phenomena, and modern science does not recognize them. If they
contradict the accepted scientific beliefs, science claims them to be
merely deceptive feelings. Is the discarding of the «bad»
data reasonable? It is undoubtedly reasonable only if we have «good»
data which supply us with the same kind of information but of better
quality than the «bad» data. This might be regarded, with
reservations, as reasonable also if we were to hold real hope of
obtaining the relevant «good» data in the foreseeable
future. But this discarding is utterly unreasonable, if the «bad»
data provide us with essential information the «good»
data cannot do for being unobtainable, either practically or even in
principle.
Modern science, in its quest to rely only
upon the observational and experimental data of the most simple and
clear kind, ignores other kinds of empirical data which can
and very probably do contain extremely valuable information
that belies some of the main scientific doctrines deduced on the
basis of the data science recognizes.
COMMONSENSE
REALISM TOWARDS THE EMPIRICAL
Common sense does not
aspire to absolutely clear and firm grounds for its judgments and
does not apply stringent - and thus potentially unreasonable -
criteria for the acceptance of facts. It recognizes, for example, the
feeling of freedom, which accompanies our voluntary activity, as an
unquestionable and very important fact about the basic character of
our conduct. The advantage of common sense over modern science lies
in its greater tolerance of diversity: it does not restrict itself by
paying attention only to the «best» kind of data.
Moreover, as concerns the specific variety of the data in question -
phenomenal experiences - it has no significant disadvantages in
comparison with science because introspective observations, unlike
physical measurements, cannot be much enhanced by using sophisticated
technical equipment. For that reason folk psychology can even today
successfully compete with science in offering a sound basis for the
beliefs concerning the fundamental character of our nature.
One
can, of course, doubt whether it is reasonable to trust the
subjective feeling of being a creature possessing free will (and thus
not law-governed), as this conflicts with what science asserts. There
is, however, additional evidence that folk sentiments about our
nature are probably basically correct. This evidence issues from our
subjective knowledge of our tendency to seek pleasant and avoid
unpleasant experiences.
The qualitative character of our
experiences in many cases has a hedonistic dimension by being
pleasant or unpleasant to a certain degree. Consider various tastes,
smells, sounds, pains etc. It is obvious to common sense why
we seek pleasant experiences and try to avoid unpleasant ones. We try
to eradicate pain, for example, because pain has an intrinsically
awful character. And it is also obvious to us that the unpleasant
intrinsic character of the pain conditions our efforts
directed at eradicating pain. But the modern scientific ideology
maintains that intrinsic properties cannot have any effect
upon what takes place in the world. A property that could have a
causal power must be a relational property: a relation between
cause and effect. Phenomenal qualia, however, are not the properties
causing definite cerebral events necessary for inducing bodily
behavior: if this were so, then our consciousness of them would
consist in our being aware of the processes they evoke in the brain,
but this is clearly not the case. Phenomenal qualia as intrinsic
properties are, so to speak, things in themselves with no potency to
causally necessitate the occurrence of anything else. On this ground
modern science and materialistic philosophy even disclaim the
existence of phenomenal qualia. The existence of qualia is denied
either explicitly (Dennett 1991), or implicitly (see, e.g. Hardcastle
1996) by assigning to the word 'qualia' a meaning that has nothing to
do with phenomenal qualities but refers instead to definite
neurodynamical cerebral processes which can, in principle, be
described in formal-structural terms and observed publicly.
Folk
psychology holds firmly to the realist position regarding sensations.
After all, we have the least possible reason to doubt having
experiences: they are empirical data we are directly aware of. Common
sense, being theoretically unsophisticated, finds no reason to deny
that which is empirically given. Modern science and philosophy, in
contrast, give much weight to theoretical speculations and hypotheses
concerning conceptions of the world in deciding on the nature of the
world. And there is very probably something wrong with these
theoretical speculations and hypotheses other than the fact that we
do not in fact have phenomenal experiences. We can say that one of
the advantages of folk thinking over scientific reasoning is its
lesser regard for theoretical speculations and greater respect for
that which is empirically given.
One might now think
that the folk-psychological position that we are able to respond to
our experiences in accordance with their qualitative character must,
nevertheless, be wrong, because the intrinsic properties of
experiences cannot serve as causes of anything. But folk psychology
has a quick answer to this problem. It holds that our reactions to
experiences are not necessitated by our experiences, but are
caused by our free will. Though experiences themselves cannot,
indeed, cause any effects, we, being aware of our experiences and, as
free creatures, being able to evoke our behavioral acts without being
causally necessitated to do so, can behave, being rational creatures,
in accordance with the content of our experiences. That the character
of our experiences does not strictly necessitate our behavior
is obvious to common sense from the fact that we can, if we wish,
behave irrationally, i.e. not in accord with the content of our
experiences.
Consequently, the fact that we are able to
adequately respond to the qualitative character of our experiences is
additional and very firm evidence that we possess free will.
THE
DANGERS OF INFATUATION WITH ELEGANT EXPLANATORY SCHEMES
Yet
why does science refuse so obstinately to recognize the intrinsic
qualitative properties of experiences? It is indeed utterly
counterintuitive to argue that having phenomenal experiences is
merely a deceptive illusion. The reason for this is that if science
admitted that we have phenomenal experiences, and are able to respond
to them adequately by using our free will, it would then also have to
admit that the world is at least partly non-natural or supernatural,
which means that the world cannot be described on the basis of an
elegant and simple model, as science nowadays does.
It
is natural that we like beauty and elegance. This is also true of
explanatory schemes in science. It is widely believed that a
mathematically elegant scientific theory has a better chance of being
true than a cumbersome ad hoc theory. This belief is very probably
basically correct.
Science, commanding vast
intellectual resources, is able to effectively realize its striving
towards theoretical elegance. And one of its most general and elegant
theoretical constructions is the modern scientific world-view -
the materialistic understanding of the world. According to the
materialistic image of the world, the world is by nature homogeneous
and simple. It consists, in final account, of only a few basic
physical constituents or fundamental physical fields. (Many
physicists even suppose that there may actually be only one such
fundamental component.) The behavior of these constituents is
causally determined: it obeys the fundamental laws of physical
dynamics. The multifarious richness of phenomena in the world -
including biological forms of life and social processes - is
combinatorial in character: simple constituents of nature can form,
being combined in specific intricate ways, various systems of very
different properties.
However, it is too optimistic to
hope that the basic nature of the world is so simple that we are
already able to comprehend it. The world may even be so complicated
that it will never be possible to discover its fundamental essence.
It is quite probable our understanding of the world represents only
particular general features of the world, as they appear to us on the
basis of the knowledge of the world that we have hitherto obtained.
The world-view must change with our acquisition of new knowledge, and
it is therefore unreasonable to demand that it should be elegant at
every stage of its development. This applies also to scientific
theories of a more limited scope. It is difficult to satisfy the
requirement of completeness and elegance during the process of
development.
It is difficult to introduce into the
modern scientific world-view any essential modifications without
marring its elegance. If we wish to admit that the functioning of
only definite systems in the world is accompanied by entities -
conscious experiences with their intrinsic qualitative properties -
which belong to an entirely different category than physical fields,
and that the behavior of only definite systems is determined by free
will rather than by causal necessity, we must subscribe to a
dualistically nonhomogeneous world-view that is aesthetically
unpleasing. Nevertheless, such an eclectic world-view is very
probably closer to the truth than the elegant materialistic image of
the world, for it takes seriously the empirical data to which we have
access.
Folk sentiments do not strive to form a complete
and elegant system. Ordinary people do not hesitate to admit that
only some systems in the world have experiences and possess free
will. The absence of a strong craving for elegance is, in some
respects, an advantage of common sense over scientific thought, for
it renders folk belief complexes flexible towards the admission of
various very different concepts. Science is more susceptible to a
temptation to apply simple and therefore potentially inadequate
schemes in describing and explaining non-mundane real
phenomena.
QUESTIONABILITY OF THE REQUIREMENT OF
INTELLIGIBILITY
Science requires that the concepts
we use to describe reality must be intelligible - fully
understandable to a human mind. This demand is natural: our
understanding of the world is more profound if we clearly understand
what we are discussing when we use definite concepts to describe the
world. On the basis of this principle, modern science considers the
concepts of qualia and free will to be highly suspect. The phenomenal
qualia are ineffable and incommunicable; they can be neither analyzed
nor registered. It is impossible to comprehend how there can be a
third possibility in dynamics - free-will behavior - in
addition to deterministic and probabilistic dynamics, or a
combination thereof.
The requirement to use only
intelligible concepts in trying to describe the world is, however,
unreasonable. This demand would be sensible only if we were certain
that the world is so primitive that we can understand clearly
everything it contains. But this is not necessarily the case. The
world can contain entities and properties which are not mundane and
are for us «unintelligible.» And, if we are aware of such
phenomena, we must not deny their existence merely on the ground that
it is difficult to comprehend their essence clearly. Even time is
unintelligible in this sense: it is impossible to avoid circularity
in explaining the nature of time, its «passing» in the
course of which the present «moves» to the past. But this
gives us no cause to deny the reality of time. Thus though we cannot
explain the nature of the unpleasantness of pain, we are not
justified in denying the existence of pain. In the same way that we
have the faculty of comprehending directly and intuitively, without
any need for further analysis, that there is a time flow, so we also
have the faculty for comprehending directly and intuitively the
intrinsic qualities of experiences. And we are also justified in
trusting our intuitive grasping of our freedom of will,
notwithstanding that we are unable to analyze what that exactly
means. After all, such entities like time, experiential qualities and
freedom of will may well be fundamental entities, which are, in
principle, unanalyzable, i.e. not reducible to something more
fundamental and simple.
Common sense does not require
the concepts it recognizes to be intelligible. It trusts intuition.
Phenomena that may be grasped directly and intuitively - such as
time, experiential qualities and freedom of will - are
unquestionably recognized by common sense. Yet common sense tends to
acknowledge even phenomena that require subtlety in order to be
grasped intuitively. One such phenomenon is our possession of
souls.
THE POSSIBLE EXISTENCE OF IMMATERIAL
SOULS
By soul we mean our (possible) immaterial
«core.» It is difficult to define with precision the
basis of the commonsense idea that a person has an immaterial soul.
The possession of a soul is not a directly comprehensible intuitive
fact. Probably the main reason for introducing the concept of a soul
was the opinion that matter itself is lifeless, inert, inactive, and
that the source of our activity must be something immaterial. This
view is, of course, erroneous: as we know, complicated material
systems like robots can be very active. However, when introducing the
concept of an immaterial soul as the source of activity, people
probably kept in mind the specific character of their own activity:
that this is a genuinely freewill activity. And the source of
this kind of activity cannot reside in material systems -
that truth is also recognized by materialistic philosophy. But there
is probably also another vague intuition behind the idea of having a
soul: the intuition that one's personal identity can be guaranteed
only by one's possessing an immaterial soul.
An elderly
man is considered the same person as the young boy he once was. What
is the basis of this identity if he as a material creature is now so
different from what he was in his youth? Recent philosophical
investigations (Parfit 1986) have shown that, indeed, nothing
material can guarantee the personal identity through time. This fact
is most explicitly demonstrated by the so-called reduplication
paradox (see, e.g. Uus 1994): Imagine that your body will be
decomposed and thereafter reconstituted in two duplicates; which one
is then you? Such sophisticated speculations do not lie behind the
common sense belief in immaterial souls. Its grounds for adopting
this idea are rather indistinct. And this is probably the reason for
which the belief in our having immaterial souls has not in modern
societies withstood the pressure of the scientific ideology.
FOLK
SENTIMENTS DO NOT SUFFER FROM PRESTIGE COMPLEX
If
conscious beings have free will and immaterial souls, then the world
is not thoroughly natural. Modern science does not like this
possibility. Why? One reason is that the world's turning out to be at
least partly supernatural is disadvantageous to aspirations of the
intelligibility of the scientific description of the world. I think,
however, that there is also another more subjective reason for which
science dislikes any kinds of possible supernatural entities and
phenomena.
Modern science maintains that all terrestrial
phenomena are natural, and that none are supernatural. Science argues
that this view should be accepted because we have no evidence casting
doubt on it. Is this indeed so? Of course not. The phenomenal qualia
do not fit into the causal fabric of a natural world. Our possession
of free will is not compatible with our being thoroughly natural
creatures. If modern science were ideologically impartial, it would,
on the basis of these facts, also be considering the possibility that
the world is not entirely natural. But science does not do this. It
uses all its power to downplay the importance of data which discredit
the doctrine of the naturalness of the world. Science prefers to deny
the existence of experiences than to acknowledge that not everything
in our world is natural. Modern science strongly dislikes the
possibility that the world may prove to be supernatural. One of the
reasons for which science has adopted such a stance is its striving
for high prestige.
If the world is natural, then
everything can, in principle, be fully understood and explained. In
such a world science would be an omnipotent intellectual authority.
But if definite terrestrial phenomena are supernatural and thus not
entirely transparent to a human mind, they cannot be fully, if at
all, scientifically explained. Scientists are then forced to admit
that they are powerless in the face of specific phenomena. They must
abandon the image of their potentially omnipotent understanding of
the world that they presently enjoy. Abhorrence of the supernatural
is a symptom of the prestige complex from which modern science
suffers.
Ordinary people do not suffer from such a
prestige complex and do not abhor the possibility that some
terrestrial phenomena may be supernatural. To the contrary, to many
of us the partial supernaturalness of the world is its positive
property - such a world is undoubtedly a more interesting place
to live in than a thoroughly natural world. Ordinary people are much
more tolerant towards various possible ontological essences of the
world than is modern science.
The best evidence that
people quite easily accept even the view that the world is highly
supernatural are widespread religious beliefs in the existence of a
very powerful supernatural being - God. And it is highly
probable that such a being indeed exists.
THE
TRADITIONAL BELIEF IN THE EXISTENCE OF GOD MAY PROVE TRUE
Modern
science, maintaining that the world is natural, is decidedly against
the view that God rules the world. And we must agree that traditional
arguments supporting religious views - such as the texts of the
scriptures, or various myths - are unconvincing indeed. Science
suggests that people advanced the idea of God because they were
unable to explain in natural terms the presence of life on Earth, and
ascribed the creation of life, and subsequently also the creation of
the entire world, to a powerful being. This is probably true, but I
think people also had another ground for introducing the idea of
there being an omnipotent supernatural agent. This idea can namely be
regarded as a relatively ordinary hypothesis: people, being
introspectively aware that they themselves are free agents of a
definite though rather limited creative power, assumed that there
might exist a being (or beings) of the same fundamental nature as
they themselves - freewill beings capable of creative acts -
but immensely more powerful.
The idea of a
superpowerful freewill being is the most outstanding of all ideas
people have had or can ever have. This idea is the basis of most
systems of religious belief. The belief in God is, or at least has
been, also one of the most widespread folk beliefs. Modern science,
however, is extremely sceptical of the possibility of the existence
of God. Who might prove to be right in this historical
confrontation - traditional religious and folk sentiments or the
modern doctrines of science? What can we say, on the basis of the
present-day level of human knowledge and reasoning, about whether God
exists or not?
In trying to answer from the
philosophical viewpoint the question of God's possible existence, it
is sensible not to regard God as an infinitely powerful
freewill being, but rather as an immensely powerful one.
First, the idea of an infinitely powerful being is probably
self-contradictory, and, secondly, in any practically important sense
there is no difference for us whether God is infinitely powerful, or
has sufficient immense power. To avoid terminological confusion, let
us call the immensely but not infinitely powerful being not God, but
Superpowerful Freewill Agent, SFA for short. And let us divide the
given problem into two parts: (i) How plausible is the hypothesis
that SFA can exist? and (ii) Do we have any arguments in favor
of the fact that SFA actually exists?
Let me
begin by emphasizing a fact of which unsophisticated common sense is
not aware but which is obvious to a philosophical mind: The
hypothesis that a Superpowerful Freewill Agent exists is a rather
«mild» further suggestion compared with the acceptance of
the view that we ourselves are freewill beings. When we maintain that
we have genuine free will incompatible with the thesis that we are
thoroughly material law-governed beings, we thereby reject the view
that the world is entirely natural. This claim is a very radical
qualitative claim, for it asserts that the world is not by nature
mundane, but contains something that is, to a certain degree,
definitely supernatural. Having accepted this view, the hypothesis
that there may exist freewill agents much more powerful than
ourselves is merely a quantitative one: we do not introduce any new
kind of fundamental properties into the world but only assume that
someone can surpass us significantly in respect of some of our own
abilities. The suggestion that we are not the most powerful freewill
beings in the world is much more plausible than the suggestion that
we are. We are not the largest, heaviest, «hottest» etc.
«things» in the world, so why should we believe that we
are the bearers of the greatest amount of supernaturalness in the
world?
Given the high plausibility of the hypothesis
that there exists a Superpowerful Freewill Agent, there is reason to
wonder if we have any evidence that such a being actually exists in
our world. One of the basic philosophical claims of modern science is
that we do not possess any such evidence, and therefore the
hypothesis concerning SFA is purely speculative, without any
empirical support. Moreover, as science maintains that we ourselves
are purely natural beings, it does not see any reason for considering
this hypothesis tenable. And it is, indeed, true that if we consider
the data that science recognizes as genuinely scientific - i.e.
data about the structure and dynamics of physical reality -
there is not as yet the slightest hint of the possible activity of
some SFA. All scientific data obtained to date can be explained
entirely naturally, and if not yet actually then at least allegedly
in principle. Nor has common sense pointed to any facts that could
reveal the presence of an SFA in our world.
Common
sense has found no evidence of the existence of an SFA because it has
sought for it in the wrong place: in the realm of the same kind of
phenomena - in the structure and dynamics of the material
world - which is also the only field of research of modern
natural sciences. Folk imagination has sought for God's existence in
possible non-natural events in the physical world, the most drastic
of which could be the alleged creation by God of the material world,
in the course of which the principle of natural causation, with the
corresponding laws of conservation, would have been radically broken.
It is very difficult indeed for common sense to see the appearance of
the activity of the hypothetical SFA in our world, because this
requires sophisticated reasoning. Only modern philosophical
discussions have revealed such phenomena as cannot even in principle
naturally be explained.
It is obvious that the best
evidence for the existence of a Superpowerful Freewill Agent is
provided by phenomena that clearly cannot even in principle be
explained by natural causes or by actions of human-type freewill
agents. Are we aware of any such phenomena? Yes, we definitely are.
These phenomena are so common and so «close» to us that
hardly anyone suspects them to be puzzling. Here I refer to the
«evoking» by our brains of our experiences.
The
connection between mental processes and phenomenal qualia is
contingent: there are no logical or metaphysical reasons for which
given brain processes are accompanied by the qualia they in fact are
(see Chalmers 1996). It is impossible, for example, to provide any
explanation of why definite patterns of neuron firings give rise to
the experience of red rather than blue color. In the words of Thomas
Huxley, «how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of
consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue,
is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin
rubbed his lamp.» It is evident that non-phenomenal physical
entities themselves lack a causal power to evoke the phenomena of
consciousness. One might now suppose that mental processes need not
have this kind of power, for it is sufficient if there is a law of
nature according to which, whenever specific neuronal processes take
place, specific phenomena of consciousness also appear. But in that
case the causal potency of evoking consciousness must reside in this
law itself, which must thus exist over and above the physical world.
A merely abstract law cannot guarantee the
appearance of phenomenal experiences in response to mental processes.
What we need here is a very real «something» that
must have two remarkable properties. First it must have the power of
evoking certain phenomena - conscious experiences - without
any causal assistance, because mental processes themselves lack such
power. Secondly, it must itself select the law of correspondence
between mental processes and phenomenal qualia because of the
contingent character of such correspondences. Hence this «something»
must be a freewill agent. And it is no wonder that we require a
freewill agent to establish a connection between physical (mental)
processes and phenomenal qualia, because the psychophysical relations
of the opposite direction - from qualia to our bodily responses
thereto - are effectuated, as I explained above, by us as
freewill beings. The freewill agent, which provides us, as well as
other living beings, with conscious experiences, must be extremely
powerful. This agent must be able to create contemporaneously a large
variety of conscious experiences according to a definite regular law.
Such a being can rightly be called a Superpowerful Freewill
Agent.
In summary, we can quite confidently say that we
are aware of the phenomena only SFA can produce - these are our
experiences. We have a relatively sound basis for insisting that a
Superpowerful Freewill Agent truly exists and participates actively
in the functioning of the world. In the confrontation between
traditional sentiments and modern scientific doctrines on the issue
of whether a powerful supernatural being exists, it is therefore
highly probable that truth is on the side of traditional
beliefs.
SIGNIFICANCE OF TRADITIONAL FOLK SENTIMENTS
IN MODERN SCIENTIFIC ERA
It is usually believed that
in our modern scientific era traditional folk beliefs, if they are
not in compliance with what science teaches, are anachronisms which
should best be abandoned. It may seem that we need to know them, like
the philosophical ideas of past times, only in order to possess an
overview of how human thought has evolved over the centuries. These
old folk sentiments and philosophical ideas are deemed unable to
compete with modern scientific views.
It is
unquestionably true that the achievements of modern science are
tremendous. Due to science-based technology our everyday life is
today entirely different from what it once used to be. The huge
amount of concrete knowledge about a great variety of natural
processes has been obtained, and could only have been obtained, by
means of the very intellectually demanding efforts of many
generations of scholars. Traditional folk beliefs contribute
virtually nothing to the development of modern science, and in many
cases these beliefs are unjustified prejudices hampering the
dissemination of true knowledge.
However, the opinion
that it would have been better for people to abandon all folk beliefs
that are in contradiction with modern scientific teachings is deeply
erroneous. All of the remarkable achievements of modern science are
due to the exploration and exploitation of only one particular kind
of phenomena - the physical processes of lawfully regular
dynamics. The investigation of such phenomena requires the
application of only one particular kind of experimental and
intellectual methodology. In the wake of immense practical profit due
to the application of such methodologies to such processes,
unjustified ontological and epistemological generalizations have won
scientific approval: that all phenomena in the world are
law-governed material processes, and that all processes taking
place in the world can be studied by applying the so-called objective
scientific research methodology. But it is very likely, as I have
attempted to argue in this paper, that the fundamental nature of the
world is not so primitive. In order to be able to understand this
truth, we must dare to doubt whether the highly prestigious modern
scientific world-view is correct. We should also master, at least to
a certain degree, definite concepts and ways of reasoning
(intellectual activity) not used or even recognized by modern
science. And it would also be conducive to our attempts to comprehend
the presence of non-natural processes in the world if we have some
ideas, albeit rather vague, about possible supernatural phenomena.
Knowledge of the history of philosophy and familiarity with
present-day philosophical debates is most favorable to this end. But
this kind of knowledge is the privilege of a very few. For most
people, and for all young people, the only practically available
source of unorthodox ideas are «unscientific» folk
sentiments, such as beliefs in having (libertarian) free will and an
immaterial soul. Modern science attempts to erase such sentiments
from the minds of people. The most insidious tactic used to achieve
this is to redefine the meanings of ordinary words which have
traditionally been used to refer to phenomena science nowadays does
not recognize. Thus, for example, by freewill activity modern science
usually means the autonomic but entirely deterministic, complicated
activity of material systems (such as robots) and biological
creatures. That kind of «free will» (Dennett 1984) has
nothing to do with the true, incompatibilist, libertarian freedom of
will (Van Inwagen 1983). The meanings of crucial words being
redefined, people are robbed of language necessary to express
«heretical» thoughts. If modern materialistic science
were to succeed in eradicating from people's minds the ideas it
abhors, humankind would for a long time remain blind to the facts on
the basis of which the non-mundane nature of the world is
evident.
CONCLUSION
Contemporary
science can be likened to a totalitarian regime that applies in its
judgement doctrines that are highly successful for practical life. .
Dissident folk sentiments appear very puny in comparison with the
majesty and achievements of the scientific empire. But in the long
run the ridiculed dissident ideas may, however, turn up to be right.
And, as I have attempted to argue, this is very probably what will
happen. It is therefore desirable that traditional folk sentiments,
unless they are pure superstition, not die out. As they cannot be
explicitly advocated in the present scientific-ideological situation,
their implicit propagation under the pretext of teaching the history
of folk beliefs should be very much
appreciated.
For exact view, here is a pdf version of this article,
science.pdf, size 183 kb.
I acknowledge
the support of the Estonian Science Foundation (grant
1742).
References
Carnap, R. 1969. The
Logical Structure of the World. Pseudoproblems in Philosophy.
Berkeley. Dennett, D. 1984. Elbow Room. Oxford. Dennett,
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1996. Functionalism's response to the problem of absent qualia.
Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4), pp. 357-373. Hempel,
C. G. 1958. Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical
Science. Chicago. Parfit, D. 1986. Reasons and Persons.
Uus, U. 1994. Blindness of Modern Science. Tartu,
Estonia. Van Inwagen, P. 1983. An Essay on Free Will.
Oxford.