Cool, where lies your disagreement exactly?
Well, first I should say I believe I’ve seen this species of argumentation advanced as far back as Locke. So, I won’t be intending to address every argument of this kind, just the one at the provided link.
The Argument:
- For an assertion to be capable of truth or falsehood it must come from a rational source.
- No merely physical material or combination of merely physical materials constitutes a rational source. (i.e. anti-panpsychism).
- Therefore, no assertion that is true or false can come from a merely physical source.
- The assertions of human minds are capable of truth or falsehood.
- Conclusion: Therefore, human minds are not a merely physical source.
- A being requires a rational process to assess the truth or falsehood of a claim (hereinafter, to be convinced by argument).
- Therefore, if humans are able to be convinced by argument, their reasoning processes must have a rational source.
- Therefore, considering element two above, if humans are able to be convinced by argument, their reasoning processes must have a non-physical (as well as rational) source.
- Rationality cannot arise out of non-rationality. That is, no arrangement of non-rational materials creates a rational thing.
- No being that begins to exist can be rational except through reliance, ultimately, on a rational being that did not begin to exist. That is, rationality does not arise spontaneously from out of nothing but only from another rationality.
- All humans began to exist at some point in time.
- Therefore, if humans are able to be convinced by argument, there must be a necessary and rational being on which their rationality ultimately relies.
- Conclusion: This being we call God.
My Response:
First, the argument isn’t logically valid. So, there’s nothing at all
illogical about accepting all of the premises and yet rejecting the conclusion. Still, the premises might afford good evidence of the conclusion, so we’ll need to evaluate whether they’re true.
The argument strikes me as extremely muddled, with vague terms (like rational source), and is replete with inconsistent, unwarranted shifts of modal operators.
For example, I find the word ‘assertion(s)’ in this argument extremely vague, but am inclined to interpret it not as propositions but as some kind of sentence-token thing. The former are abstract objects, the latter concreta, composed of ink, or pixles, or thoughts, etc. I think ‘assertion’ means sentence-token because (1) says assertion’s truth-aptness presupposes a
rational source, and (4) says assertions
of human minds are truth-apt.
But, such a notion seems eminently false. Look at
indexical sentence-tokens. e.g., ‘I like cheese.’ This
assertion is true or false depending on who ‘I’ refers to. Thus, it is true when I assert it, but false when someone else does. So, to think sentence-tokens can be true or false leads to the absurd position that some assertions are both true and false, or neither true nor false, violating the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction respectively.
So, (4) and (5) should be rejected. Further accepting (10) (which follows from nothing that precedes it) would render the rest of the argument completely superfluous.
(2) and (9) merely assume that materialism is false.
Finally, it’s simply special pleading to say a necessarily existent being can ‘just’ be rational by nature, but a being that begins to exist cannot ‘just’ be rational by nature.
(There are loads more objections I’d propose, but this might be getting cumbersome to read)
The dualism is like property dualism, Thomas Nagel’s dualism, except we don’t hold that higher order functions emerge from the brain but a function based on the very form.
