Re: Causal determinism and non-materialist atheism

On Wed, 1 Jan 2025 11:01:26 +0000, MarkE wrote:

On 1/01/2025 9:19 am, John Harshman wrote:

To put it another way, even if we can't support reason in a material
universe, adding God or any other non-material entities does nothing in
addition to support reason. It does nothing to increase any expectation
that reason exists.

>
If the thing preventing reason is causal determinism (i.e. the billiard
balls will rebound where they must), then could not an interventionist
God impart the capacity to humans to override this material constraint?

Something not quite right here. Why would causal determinism
"prevent" reason? I don't think anyone is arguing this. What Lewis
and Plantinga argue is that a deterministic theory of the world
is "insufficient" to explain on its own the success of our
reasoning (or maybe something different from "success" as it is
normally  understood altogether, they are not very clear on this)
The billiard ball model has one immediate advantage here -
it explains a causal interlinkage between our mental representation
of the world and the external world. Photons really have to
bounce off external objects and then hit our eyes, which then
sends impulses to the neurons in the brain etc etc.
The more you weaken or downplay this causal connection, the
more you separate rather than connect reason and reality, and the
more you are at risk of ending up with a "brain in a vat"
scenario where the third party (designer, God etc) directly
causes the reasoning processes in our brain, and with
other words ensures that the illusion that we mistake for
reality remains coherent.
This may work for some versions of Vedic or Buddhist
religion (we are all just parts of Brahma
dreaming) but definitely not Christian mainstream

>
There remains the question of what is imparted exactly, and how does
this provide the ability to truly reason?

Indeed. The best you can get I'd say is that you replace one
deterministic causal agent with another - that is what
we think of as our reason is really just the way in which
the designer chose to run our collective  illusion.

>
Also, I'd be wary of pressing this to a kind of dualism, whereby
(crudely) our physical brains are just a front for the immaterial soul
which is the real brains behind the operation. Equally (as a theist),
I'd be wary of denying the existence of an immaterial soul.
>
You may have detected that I'm somewhat uncertain of these things.