Most Philosophies Are Obviously False

Most major worldviews can’t handle our most basic intuitions.

There are, I think, some features of experience that just seem obvious. Some candidate examples include:

• That it is really wrong to teach your younger sibling to torture other people’s younger siblings for fun—and that you shouldn’t do so, even if you’re into that sort of thing (moral facts and obligations).

• That certain things—lots of things, in fact—could have been otherwise, or not existed at all (genuine contingent truths or realities).

• That certain other things could not have been otherwise (necessary truths or realities).

• That we have made at least one morally significant choice in our lives—one we are responsible or even culpable for (genuine agency, or call it libertarian freedom).

• That there is awareness—and that I am something that is aware: a genuine subject of qualitative experiences, one that endures over time (identity through time) and undergoes various modifications (real change).

• That there is order and stability in the world—reality is not completely chaotic.

• That there are substantial composite objects that are more than just the mereological sum of their tiny physical parts, including (most especially) ourselves.

• That there is knowledge and reason.

• That there is intuition—moral intuition, metaphysical intuition, logical intuition, etc.—a form of non-inferential seeming or apprehension, where something (a proposition or state of affairs, say) appears immediately to be true, without needing to be derived from prior beliefs or evidence.¹

• That there is love.

I don’t claim that everybody will agree with me that these features of experience are just obvious—though, if you were to sit down with me on my back deck and ask me what I really think as we turn kabobs on the Weber grill, I’d reveal my heart in saying that I think anyone who denies them is either being disingenuous or suffers from some serious cognitive deficiency.

My aim, however, is not to argue for these experiential data but simply to assume them, as I think the vast majority of people do. And then to say this, with respect to worldview selection:

Any worldview that can explain (anticipate, make sense of, account for) these features is preferable to one that either leaves them brute or must eliminate or radically revise them (for example, take anti-realist positions). From there, if multiple worldviews can explain these features, then we should opt for the one that is most elegant and unified—i.e., the least ad hoc. (In other words, I take it that if one is forced to deem any phenomenologically forceful seeming as somehow false or seriously misleading, that counts as a cost—especially if one lacks a good story about why such an intuition is faulty, and one that doesn’t immediately invite broader skepticism about other intuitions. Stated more positively, what we should want is a theory that makes the best sense of our best [strongest] intuitions. At minimum, that means finding a theory that can affirm, ground, or otherwise make sense of what these intuitions themselves seem to be affirming—moral facts, metaphysical intuitions [about causality, say], genuine agency, and so on.

Of course, I’m not saying that any one cost is immediately disqualifying—some costs can be borne [and sometimes must be], and they might be more than compensated for in other respects. But costs can also add up—often quite quickly—to the point of putting a philosophical price tag on a theory that is simply unreasonable for anyone to pay.)

If you agree with me thus far, then I think we can conclude certain things fairly easily—chief among them, that most philosophies (or philosophical positions, anyway) are obviously false.² Or, to put it a bit more carefully: most of the popular modern ones are.³

For example, physicalism—the view that there are no non-physical entities, and that whatever exists is, at bottom, just what physics (or a completed physical science) tells us about—is clearly out, since physicalism is quite obviously (indeed, often explicitly stated to be) incompatible with much of what’s listed above, particularly the reality of moral facts, genuine agency, and the existence of composite objects that are more than just the arrangement of their micro-physical components. The most natural physicalist position on these matters includes some combination of moral anti-realism, determinism about beliefs and behaviors, and the view that ordinary objects—what philosophers sometimes refer to as medium-sized dry goods (e.g., chairs, cats, people)—are entirely reducible to and determined by their microphysical base. Quite naturally, these positions are adopted to preserve the more rudimentary physicalist commitments of a scientistic epistemology (more on this in a moment), and—relatedly—the causal closure of the physical. But they come at what is, in my view, an absolutely disqualifying cost: the need to explain away or outright deny what seem to be many, deeply obvious features of experience.

No doubt, physicalists struggle mightily with the fact of awareness as well—the hard problem of consciousness, as it were—but I won’t press that issue now. (It’s been pressed enough.) And while I suppose physicalists can say something about contingency and necessity, I think the most plausible account of both is not even remotely plausible at all, if only because it invariably reduces to some powerfully arbitrary brute fact or other—declaring, for example, that some physical entity or segment of physical reality is somehow necessary, and then (say) invoking quantum indeterminacy to account for contingency.

Simply put, it strikes me that at every significant point where a genuine explanation is needed, the physicalist is either forced to leave the matter dissatisfying brute or to radically revise—or outright eliminate—the actual data because their theory demands it. In such cases, they’re not explaining the data so much as explaining it away (this is most obvious in the cases of nihilism or eliminativism about consciousness). It’s a clear case, I think, of allowing the theory to determine the data rather than the other way around. Now, that’s not always pernicious—but in this case, I think it definitely is.

And so, if we’re giving physicalism a Rotten Tomatoes score in the realm of philosophy, I’d say… solid 3%. Only because I’m in a good mood.

Something quite similar could be said about naturalism, which is rather difficult to define these days. Broadly, it’s a commitment to rejecting anything supernatural (gods, fairies, etc.) and to maintaining “continuity” with the natural sciences. Once again, it’s largely—if not entirely—motivated by a scientistic epistemology: the idea that the only things we can really know, or at least confidently know, are the sorts of things delivered through the scientific enterprise (not just physics this time, but certainly including it). And this applies not only to what counts as knowledge, but also to what gets admitted into our ontology.

The problem, of course—aside from the not-insignificant and often-raised issue that scientism seems either self-undermining or guilty of special pleading (e.g., “the only things we can know with confidence are those delivered via the hypothetico-deductive method”… OK, but is that claim itself delivered via the hypothetico-deductive method?)⁴—is this: to the extent that naturalism tries to accommodate what physicalism can’t, it tends to become implausibly contrived—importing elements that clearly go beyond what a strictly physicalist ontology allows (or should allow).⁵ Things like strongly emergent properties, non-reductive mental states, or whatever other “queer” entities (moral facts). But all of this ends up just seriously discrediting, if not completely undermining, the very scientistic epistemology that supposedly motivates naturalism in the first place. And without that—that is, without the claim to offer a clear, superior explanatory paradigm where science (or even just the promise of some ideal, completed future science) is the end-all-be-all—we’re left with little reason to take naturalism seriously.⁶ Said differently, to the extent naturalists allow for richer (ultimately, necessary) explanatory postulates, they ultimately break their own internal logic, as it were, and simply wind up excluding God (or anything supernatural) for no principled reason at all.

(Not to mention the persistent lack of clarity over what exactly counts as a “natural” thing. A not-too-exaggerated illustration: “Only natural things exist.” OK—but what’s a natural thing? “Whatever science tells us about.” And what does science tell us about? “Natural things!” ...Right.⁷)

My (hopefully not too bald) assertion at this point is just this: naturalism is either obviously not sufficiently explanatory, or it’s not sufficiently naturalist. Pick one.

I pick not-naturalism, of course, which means we begin looking at various forms of theism. However, I think framing the issue merely in terms of “theism”—whether classical theism, pantheism, deism, or what have you—is actually a bit misleading. What really matters is the wider metaphysical system from which these theisms either emerge or within which they are properly situated. (Apart from a proper metaphysic, the concept of God almost inevitably becomes malformed; certainly, you’ve heard me beat that drum before!).

And so here’s my second (hopefully not too bald) assertion of the day: if you look toward the kind of metaphysical program that can actually make sense of all the stuff of experience listed above—then, for my money, it’s a broadly Aristotelian paradigm or Big Tent Platonism that does the job. One where substances—formally unified centers of activity—are fundamental; where there are real forms—organizing principles—out in the world; where being and knowledge come in many ways (a kind of ontological and epistemological pluralism); where finality and teleology are rather enthusiastically embraced; and where contingency and possibility are grounded in the actual essences or powers of substantial things. (All of this, by the way, is just the explanatory paradigm laid out by Lloyd Gerson, which if often best presented as an outright rejection of most of what defines modern philosophy. It’s a paradigm, in other words, that is decidedly anti-materialist, anti-mechanistic, anti-reductionist, anti-relativist, anti-skeptical, anti-nominalist.)

Follow that out, and I think classical theism is where you most naturally—if not inevitably—wind up: as the ultimate ontological foundation for that entire descriptive and explanatory metaphysical program.

For God—at least on the classical view—just is the one and only truly ontologically independent reality: the auto-explicable explainer of everything else, whose essence just is His existence, and who therefore exists necessarily. And through a genuine act of free will, God produces everything apart from Himself—thus grounding the contingency of created things, their could-have-been-otherwise-or-not-at-all-ness, within a stable and orderly network of beings (i.e., a universe). And what God creates includes substances of many different grades and kinds of being, including creatures with intellect and will, ordered toward good ends (ultimately, God), and who resemble Him in perhaps the most significant way of anything He brings into existence. (Though, of course, everything—even the lowly lima bean—resembles God in some way or other.)

Said differently, classical theism offers an essentialist project of explanation—not merely one of empirical adequacy. It terminates in the divine essence but, along the way, provides an impressively robust account of necessary truths, laws of nature (and thus the intelligibility and success of scientific inquiry), and irreducible or systems-level powers and properties—the kinds that clearly can’t be fully explained in terms of their smaller parts alone. All of this, again, is cashed out with respect to the essences or natures of things, which themselves find their explanation—both in terms of efficient cause and exemplar—in the the very nature of being itself, unrestricted and purely actual. In a word, the Godhead.

Of course, there’s much more that could be said about how all these explanations are cashed out—that is, the specifics of how essences help make sense of everything from the laws of nature to the laws of logic. And admittedly, I haven’t even touched on other basic features, such as change, and how classical theism can help make sense of that (though, notably, one of the most traditional metaphysical arguments for God just is the argument from change⁸). I’ve said quite a bit about such matters elsewhere, as have many others (see, for example, two excellent recent books here and here), for those interested in going further. But for now, since this post has already gone on long enough, I’ll just finish with this.

If you look at the stuff of experience outlined at the beginning and agree that it would be nice to have a worldview that makes sense of all of it—without requiring radical revision or elimination—then you have good reason to give serious attention to the classical metaphysical tradition, and classical theism in particular. There’s a rich and compelling story here: deeply rooted in tradition, fully compatible with contemporary science (indeed, the kind of story in which we should expect the scientific enterprise to be fruitful and reliable, with stable natures open to empirical investigation), and, frankly, majestic in both beauty and scope. It’s a story that not only secures the most phenomenologically forceful of our intuitions but also makes those intuitions rather unsurprising—as generally reliable, if not infallible, indicators of truth—given that we are rational substances made in the image of the divine.

(For more details, see my book).

1. We needn’t—nor should we—declare all such intuitions to be infallible, but they are certainly phenomenologically forceful and often serve as starting points or default constraints in our reasoning.

2. Some (probably needless, but let’s avoid pedantic objections) qualifications: I’d call physicalism a philosophy—a big-picture worldview, a totalizing take on what’s real. Nominalism, by contrast, is more of a philosophical position—a narrower commitment usually included as part of a larger system like physicalism or naturalism.

3. While I’ll focus mostly on physicalism and naturalism, I’d say the major points in this article apply equally to a range of other philosophies or philosophical positions—things like behaviorism, functionalism, epiphenomenalism, computationalism, quietism, the bundle theory of the self, mereological nihilism, radical or global skepticism, materialism, reductionism, nominalism, and so on. In one way or another, these positions rack up too many costs against basic features of experience—features they simply can’t accommodate without radical revision or elimination.

Once again, naturalism and physicalism often include many of these positions, though which specific ones are adopted varies from thinker to thinker. Some naturalists are functionalists, others are computationalists, and so forth.

4. The other alternative, of course, is just to expand the definition of science until the self-defeat or special pleading problem dissolves—but the trouble there is that any such expansion inevitably starts to look a lot like philosophy. And once you let happen, you then make available the kinds of arguments and considerations that make a very plausible case for the existence of God.

5. My land, is that a clunky sentence. Oh well!

6. Well, maybe the problem of evil?

7. On a more serious note, certain theists—Joshua Rasmussen, for example (see his debate book Is God the Best Explanation of Things?)—have seized upon more liberal or expansive understandings of naturalism to make a theistic case within naturalism; that is, by arguing that God could count as a natural entity.

8. For a contemporary development, see Robert Koon’s essay in this volume.