Iron spikes and materialism
In his most recent article, Michael Egnor argues that materialism requires us to be nihilists about morality and determinists about free will. Below, I will outline his basic argument and show how he is conflating several ideas together and forcing false dichotomies. His article covers two topics: first, the connection between the material brain and the immaterial mind; second, the relationship between free will, morality and the mind. This post covers the first topic (to which my criticism above does not apply).
Material Brain / Immaterial Mind
You can read the original at the link above–what follows is a distillation to premises. I’m using Egnor’s terms, but you’ll see he’s not always clear about what he has in…mind, if you pardon the pun.
P1 Matter and ideas share no properties
Implied P2 For x to “completely cause” y, x and y must share properties.
P3 Brain matter cannot be the complete cause of ideas
Where Egnor says “completely cause”, I assume he means that x cannot be a sufficient cause for y. I assume he believes that the brain is a necessary cause for ideas, but that it is not sufficient to cause them, without an immaterial agent.
P4 Ideas can “influence” matter via the brain
P5 The brain can “influence” ideas
P6 The mind’s existence requires immaterial causes
This is what he was arguing in the previous article, but fine-tuned slightly. In my earlier post, I criticized his argument for the fact that it falsifies the major tenet of intelligent design: that an immaterial being / designer created the material world. In this revised version, it would appear that he could now argue
The immaterial designer is a necessary but not sufficient cause for the material world.
In this case, it means that the designer (who am I kidding?) God is required in order to cause the existence of the world, but by himself he isn’t sufficient. He needs a God-sized hammer and some nails, perhaps? More seriously, this formulation would put Egnor into the theistic evolution camp: God can influence the material world (like the brain influences ideas and vice versa), but it is the material mechanism of evolution that does the heavy lifting.
The question is whether this could also be a satisfactory formulation of the intelligent design position. On the Discovery Institute’s website, they define intelligent design as holding “that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” This does fit better with Egnor’s reformulation, in that evolution is the material mechanism and an immaterial cause (with the properties of design, purpose, etc) directs it.
Of course, the question is whether evolution requires such an immaterial director, or if self-selecting paths, bounded by genetics and physical laws, could result in the diversity we see today.
Reluctantly, I have to admit that Egnor has wiggled out of the self-refutation that his earlier article implied (leaving aside for now the question of whether his premises described above are true). However, does materialism require nihilism and determinism? That is the next question I’ll take up.
Image of Phineas Gage’s skull from NIH.
Update: I couldn’t resist. Below is an image ripped off of the lolcats….
