Responding to Counterarguments--The Special Case

This is part one in a theoretically indefinitely long series of posts about how philosophers respond to counterarguments and counterexamples to their claims. This post is about the Special Case response.

Suppose you are arguing for your favored thesis, claim P. It turns out that there is a clear counterexample to your claim that, if correct, renders your claim false. For example, you claim, as Socrates did, that all virtues are wisdom, that to be good is to know how to act. In response, someone says, "I knew that it was morally wrong to have sex with that intern, but I did it anyway." Thus, there is a clear counterexample to your claim.

You might now be tempted, with your favored claim shown definitively to be false, to back off that claim, to revise your view or reject it altogether. If so, I recommend a career in accountancy for you are clearly not made of the stuff of great philosophers. Overwhelming evidence of the falsity of one's claims is not a reason to change one's mind; it is only a test of one's mettle. Don't revise, attack.

There are lots of ways to face down such a counterexample, but, before talking about them, we need to make one thing clear. Do not ignore a counterexample or pretend it does not exist. You are much better off bringing it up yourself than having some reviewer think of it. But don't worry; this doesn't mean you need a real response. All you have to do is frame something in the form of a response whether it is meaningful or correct or not.

Today's example: The Special Case.
Amie Thomasson, writing in her anthology Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Mind (edited with David Woodruff-Smith), discusses the topic of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge has often been understood on a semi-perceptual, introspectionist, model, but there are significant problems with this approach. So, an alternative account would be particularly useful. Thomasson suggests that Husserl has already presented such an account, an account she calls a Transformationist account. On this account knowledge of one's first person mental states is a logical transformation of a statement about the external world into a statement about one's internal state. So, if the original state is "I perceive a tree," the transformed state is "There is a perception of a tree."

There are some obvious problems with the account. For example, suppose I make the statement when I have no conscious experience of a tree and am looking at a fire hydrant. In this case, my statement is not true and cannot be used to justify a claim that I have knowledge of my own internal state of perceiving a tree. So, how do we know to apply the Transformation, what renders some transformations acceptable as indicating self-knowledge and others not? Some transformations are based on conscious awareness (hint, hint: knowledge) of our internal states. So her account seems to presuppose self-knowledge rather than illuminate it. But that's not my point.

My point is to discuss a counterexample she considers. Some forms of self-knowledge clearly do not fit the model of transformation of perception of external object to internal state. For example, we make statements about our experiences, such as, the claim that one's vision is blurry, that are directly about internal states not external stimuli. Thus, some self-knowledge is possible without this transformation. And, significantly, this shows that we have not avoided the problems with the quasi-perceptual account of self-knowledge.

Her response is not to deny that these cases are possible but to describe them as a special case. This response, however, is as unjustified as it is irrelevant. First, it's not relevant. One's theory of self-knowledge should not be a theory of self-knowledge except in special cases in which cases one needs another theory. A theory of X ought to include all cases of X; if it doesn't, you haven't really got a theory of X.

Second, it's not justified. We can sometimes say when something is a special case of a more general theory. One way this can happen is if you can explain how the special case follows the general theory but appears not to do so because it applies only to a limited domain or involves certain conditions. For example, Newtonian mechanics is a special case of Einsteinian, relativistic, mechanics. The case still falls under the Einsteinian theory (hence, indicating something as a special case does not relieve you of the responsibility of explaining it) but it turns out that the parameters (here, low velocity) are such that we can make adequate predictions without using the full apparatus of the theory. We have an approximation that is good enough. In any case, in order to say something is a special case, you need a theory of all the cases and show why in this case your theory appears to be violated (e.g. it does not appear to involve time dilation). You cannot identify something as a special case of X unless you have a comprehensive theory of X that is confirmed by independent means. Otherwise, how do you know that this counterexample constitutes the special case rather than the standard one whereas your examples constitute the special case? Indeed, you cannot.

It is, as I said, possible to show that some example is a special case, but you need to have an independent analysis of that case that shows that, in fact, it really does fit under your theory but appears not to do so because of some constraints or simplifications in the description of the case. In Thomasson's case there is no independent explanation that provides this. So, remember that the "Special case" response is the last desperate act of a flailing philosopher (rather than the first act of Henry the Fifth), so use it sparingly.

Also remember: my example is, of course, a special case and philosophers nearly always reason perfectly and responsibly without resort to evasions.

Hugh Ross's Creator and the Cosmos, Concluding Remarks

As with most creationist literature, Ross's book consists primarily of a false dilemma. He presents problems with naturalist accounts of S (for any subject S) and concludes that God must be responsible for it. Yet he never supports his theory of divine creation with evidence. And he is quite coy about what his view even is. For example, he asserts that God created everything--anything that involves greater complexity than its not existing, presumably--since without God's creation the universe can only increase in entropy. No greater complexity can arise without God's intervention, and God has ceased to intervene after the first six periods of time indicated in Genesis (as Ross says on p. 103).

Ross, then, gets only one benefit from his supposed embrace of scientific evidence: he doesn't believe in a 6-10,000 year old universe. That's a big benefit since it's blatantly obvious for lots of independent reasons that the universe is much older than that. Still, he's got to deny the evidence for evolution just as irrationally as any other creationist. That means he's still in an evidential hole that he needs to dig himself out of. And he's still got the problem that, for example, the two Biblical creation stories are inconsistent with each other and with the evidence. (For example, the Seven Day Creation story has birds created before land animals--including reptiles--which we know, from the fossil record, did not happen.)

So Ross thinks the universe is approximately 14 billion years old, that the earth has been here for approximately 4.5 billion years and that life has existed on earth for approximately 3.5 billion of those years. And, I think, he believes the fossil record can be taken to indicate a temporal sequence of organisms. I would guess, then that this creation period from 14 billion years ago until approximately 60,000 years ago when the first homo sapiens appeared. All the evidence of a sequence of gradually developing species would then indicate only God's slow experiments with them as he alters them over time. It's not clear why God would need to spend so much time making so many creatures that are so similar to each other but most of which are now extinct. On the other hand, perhaps they could evolve during that time with God's help but they cannot evolve now. If that's the case, then it's fairly cruel of God to stop allowing evolution.

I'm not sure what's supposed to happen in that 14 billion years (less our last 60,000 years). Was there a kind of stasis in which God added his creations to the universe? If so, how could time have passed at all? Or did God add his creations at certain specified points (the various "days") and let the laws of nature govern his creations between those specific times until the next point when he would intervene again? If that were the case, one would expect new life forms to appear in the fossil record only at a few definable times, but they appear constantly throughout the fossil record. Or, most plausibly, did everything happen the way it does now except that God is somehow creating things at the same time? Were the laws of nature that now obtain also in effect and God violated them with lots of individual creations (that were not documented individually, of course)? Perhaps, but then God appears to be a tinkerer whose actions exactly mimic the development of the universe if he hadn't been there at all. So, I have no idea even when this creation is supposed to have occurred and how that could possibly fit the fossil evidence (even leaving aside the biomolecular clock evidence).

So, Ross tries to patch up one obvious problem with Young Earth Creationism, but he leaves lots of other problems in place and creates other problems for himself. However, because creationists are always free from actually providing testable claims that could be confirmed or disconfirmed by evidence, he never bothers to confront any such issues and focuses only on his own oversimplified and distorted views of his opposition's views.

In sum, Ross's book adds only a thin veneer of pseudo-sophistication to the disreputable work of the Young Earth Creationists. Nothing he has said really resolves the problems with their views. The only marginally compelling argument he presents is the cosmological argument, and that he bizarrely takes to indicate exactly the sort of God described in the Bible. He includes a smattering of other arguments, poorly explained and poorly supported, as though throwing as much at the wall in the hope that something will stick. And he considers some alternatives and counterarguments, but he does so so poorly that one could not have any idea what these other views are based solely on his explanation, and then he rejects these strawmen without seriously engaging any reasonable view or position. For variety, sometimes he seizes on totally irrelevant information (such as Hume's lack of an adequate alternative explanation for the appearance of design, or comments from Stephen Hawking's ex-wife) as though that constitutes a refutation of another's argument. Hence, The Creator and the Cosmos is only a slightly more sophisticated version of the same creationist nonsense that is as scientifically misguided as it is theologically simplistic.

At the end of this process of reviewing Ross's book, I must ask myself why I did it. I didn't really learn anything new, and, while I tried to remain open-minded about it, I don't think anything changed my mind. I can only hope that anyone who had questions about Ross, or thought there might be some substance to Ross's view has more reason for his/her own final evaluation, and, it is devoutly to be hoped, rejection, of his views.

Hugh Ross's Creator and the Cosmos, Chapter 16

Ross's chapter 16 is devoted to constructing outlandishly large numbers for the improbability of individual cells or biomolecules occurring by chance. And then he concludes that these events are so improbable that a God must have miraculously intervened to create these things. For example, he claims, following Harold Morowitz who is not a creationist, that the probability of a single cell forming randomly from its constituent parts is 1 in 10 to the 100,000,000,000. Surely a cell forming from basic constituents randomly is highly improbable, so it's a good thing that no one thinks any such thing happened. (Ross cleverly uses the phrase "under ideal natural conditions" [p. 138] as though he is not arguing from the random assembly of parts but from any possible natural assembly of parts.) Instead, those, such as Morowitz, who are interested in this issue think that smaller biomolecules formed from a prebiotic soup by small stages, and, that these molecules then formed increasingly complex molecules until a simple self-replicating molecule formed from them. This self-replicator would then provide the basis necessary for evolution to get going, and real living organisms could then result.

This is standard creationist claptrap, implying that evolution, biogenesis, or whatever could only have occurred randomly over some improbably large item. I could argue, in similar fashion, that Hugh Ross's existence requires the direct intervention of a divine being. Suppose I imagine that all Hugh Ross's constituent atoms were sitting around in a prebiotic soup and suddenly, with a flash of lightning, they spontaneously assembled themselves into Hugh Ross. I'll conservatively estimate the probability of this happening as one in a googol. (See, I can make up probabilities too.) Since this probability is so fantastically low that this could never occur randomly in the course of a billion universes, I think it's safe to say that Ross was created by a divine being in his present form. Now, I suppose Ross might say that he has a "causal history" and "genealogy", that he did not arise by random chance from a set of unrelated constituents, that his genesis resulted from a series of causal stages of earlier beings whose existence we can know from the "traces" they have left behind. Of course, there is a difference between the Spontaneous Ross Generation case and the living-cell case in that we do not as yet have any way to show directly that these causal intermediaries existed on earth before the first fossils formed. But we can make inferences about the nature of that early earth and construct laboratory experiments to test these inferences. That, of course, has been done, for example, in the case of the Stanley Miller and Harold Urey experiments. These experiments are not the end of investigation of this question, but they provide a start to such investigation, and they show conclusively that it is possible for bio-molecules to arise from some form of prebiotic soup by entirely natural means.

What can Ross say about such cases? Apparently, at some step in the process from ammonia to RNA bases, or from RNA bases on up to the cell, one or more step is physically impossible. Perhaps Miller cheated, or God intervened in Miller's (or others') laboratory. And the same thing occurred in every confirming experiment.

The point is that we have seen that complex biomolecules can arise from conditions that plausibly could have obtained on earth, yet Ross's position is that this is effectively impossible because its probability is vanishingly small. Ross's position here is simply falsified by the experimental evidence; there must be an error in his probability calculations (or, more specifically, one of his key assumptions) because in fact something he claimed to be impossible actually occurred. It is clear what the problem is. Ross assumes that large scale assembly must occur purely at random from the smallest constituents (much like our Ross arising spontaneously from his constituent atoms) when it is more likely that life arose by a series of stages each of which, plausibly, could arise from the increasingly complex molecules of the stage before. It is not really surprising, then, that Ross never mentions the Miller-Urey experiments in a chapter devoted to exactly the problem they set out to investigate. Actual evidence would undermine the point he is trying to make.

I am not asserting that there are no problems with the Miller-Urey experiments (such as the existence of both right and left-handed isomers that Ross emphasizes) or later experiments, or that no further investigation is necessary. All I am saying is that increasing complexity of macromolecules is possible given initial conditions that might have obtained on earth, so there is no compelling reason to think we could not have ultimately derived from a prebiotic soup. And Ross's claim that this is impossible is not plausible.