Epistemic externalists and internalists can agree that having properly functioning faculties is relevant to knowledge and justified belief, though they will spell out the details of this agreement differently. Still, the agreement is not without significance. In March of 1984, the philosophy department at the University of Mississippi sponsored two debates between Kai Neilsen and me on the existence of God that were subsequently pub-lished.39 During both debates, we each presented arguments for our position and sought to defeat the others.
At one point, I introduced a consideration (that I carefully distinguished from a genetic fallacy) which introduced a second-order debate.40 I pointed out that we each had presented evidence for our side and against the other viewpoint, and we each believed our case was the better one. In this case, I suggested, we each could claim that the other was not seeing the evidence clearly or adequately appreciating its dialogical force. In order to prevent this from becoming a shouting match, I introduced the following claim: Atheists fit a tighter control group than theists in that the class of atheists are more homogenous, viz., there is a strong, if not universal trait among atheists according to which they have had difficulties with their father figure—he was harsh, stern and critical, or he was passive and embarrassing. I pointed to studies that supported my assertion.41
By contrast, I claimed that theism was the ordinary response of the human person to creation; it did not need to be taught to people (though culture could influence the direction it took), but atheism did. Moreover, the class of theists was so diverse that no single factor could be identified that unified the class, e.g. some were intelligent, others not, some emotional, some not, some wanted theism to be true, others not, and so forth. Thus, I could identify a factor that was, arguably, the faculty distorter that caused atheists to fail to see the evidence clearly and adequately appreciate its force, but no such factor could be identified for theists. Since I could identify a plausible psychological, sociological or spiritual distorting factor while Nielsen could not, then in addition to the presentation of my first-order evidence for theism, I had an objective, factual second-order argument against the atheist’s treatment of the first-order evidence.
More generally, if the issue of faculty reliability or proper function is epistemically relevant, then it is hard to see why this observation should be left there. It would seem to be epistemically relevant if one could actually make a case that a particular faculty relevant to a specific area of debate was not reliable or functioning properly. Whether or not such a case is persuasive in a particular instance, it is still correct to say that one who makes such a case is advancing an argument.
I believe the same thing is going on with respect to dualism and AC. Almost everyone agrees that dualism is the common sense view that virtually all cultures throughout history have embraced. Jaegwon Kim’s acknowledgement is typical: ‘‘We commonly think that we, as persons, have a mental and bodily dimension ... Something like this dualism of personhood, I believe, is common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions.’’42 Along similar lines, Frank Jackson says,
I take it that our folk concept of personal identity is Cartesian in character—in particular, we regard the question of whether I will be tortured tomorrow as separable from the question of whether someone with any amount of continuity—psychological, bodily, neurophysiological, and so on and so forth—with me today will be tortured tomorrow.43
Moreover, this advice from Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz seems both wise and applicable to the issue of dualism: ‘‘If entities of a certain kind belong to folk ontology [the ontological presuppositions of our common sense conceptual scheme], then there is a prima facie presumption in favor of their reality. ... [T]hose who deny their existence assume the burden of proof.’’44
Whether or not one accept the prima facie justification of folk ontology, it seems plausible that the fear of God, the cosmic authority problem supports the current popularity of strong physicalism and influences its treatment of dualism in a way that a parallel motivation does not inflict dualism. Dualism is pretty much commonsense. The same cannot be said for phy-sicalism. And even if one believes that at the end of the day, some version of strong physicalism is the best option in philosophy of mind, the fear of God could still have plenty of explanatory work to do. I believe that such a person, if he or she honestly examines the literature in philosophy of mind, will find that the lines of evidence listed in this chapter provide grounds for believing that the fear of God is what enables strong physicalism to enjoy such widespread and unflinching acceptance far beyond what the evidence for it will sustain.
Strong naturalism/physicalism has been in a period of Kuhnian paradigm crisis for a long time, and physicalist epicycles have multiplied like rabbits in the last two decades. Moreover, the various versions of physicalism are in a period of stalemate. No progress seems evident. In spite of dismissive rhetoric to the contrary, I believe that some form of substance and property dualism represent the most plausible view of the constitution of human persons. Admittedly, I have not been able to argue for this claim directly in this book with anything approaching the thoroughness such a task would require. But I have been at pains in this chapter to show that the widespread preference for physicalism coupled with the loathing of dualism can be significantly explained because of the fear of God.
The truth is that naturalism has no plausible way to explain the appearance of irreducible, genuinely mental properties/events in the cosmos, nor do mysterian, panpsychic or emergentistic monist explanations when compared to the rich explanatory resources of theism and AC. Ned Block confesses that we have no idea how consciousness could have emerged from nonconscious matter: “we have nothing—zilch—worthy of being called a research programme. ... Researchers are stumped.’’45 John Searle says this is a ‘‘leading problem in the biological sciences.’’46 Colin McGinn observes that consciousness seems like ‘‘a radical novelty in the universe’’;47 he wonders how our ‘‘technicolour’’ awareness can ‘‘arise from soggy grey matter.’’48 David Chalmers asserts that ‘‘No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.''49
Responding to the question of why consciousness (construed dualistically) emerges, David Papineau acknowledges: “to this question physicalists ‘theories of consciousness’ seem to provide no answer.’50 Papineau’s solution is to deny the reality of consciousness as a genuinely mental phenomenon.51 He correctly sees that strong physicalism is the only real alternative for a naturalist.
The inexplicability of consciousness for physicalist naturalism has been noted for a long time. As Leibniz argued:
It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions. And, supposing there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we might enter it as a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.52
While our conception of matter has changed in certain ways beyond the mechanistic depiction of Leibniz's day, his assertion is as applicable today as it was then. If naturalism is construed as a worldview and a naturalist so inclined embraces genuinely emergent mental properties, then he or she has really admitted defeat as Frank Jackson acknowledges: ‘‘Our primary concern is with physicalism as a doctrine of the kind of world we are in. From this perspective, attribute dualism is not more physicalistically acceptable than is substance dualism.’’53 Supervenience in general, and emergentism in particular are only names for a problem to be solved and not solutions, they are also consistent with substance dualism, double-aspect theory, certain forms of personalism, and epiphenomenalism. This is not a result most naturalists will want to accept.
He or she also risks being professionally ostracized. U.C.L.A. neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz bemoans the fact that there is so much social and professional pressure to conform to the naturalist, physicalist culture of the academy:
that to suggest humbly that there might be more to mental life than action potentials zipping along axons is to risk being branded a scientific naif. Even worse, it is to be branded nonscientific. When in 1997, I made just this suggestion over dinner to a former president of the Society for Neuroscience, he exclaimed, ‘‘Well, then you are not a scientist.’’ Questioning whether consciousness, emotions, thoughts, the subjective feeling of pain, and the spark of creativity arise from nothing but the electrochemical activity of large collections of neuronal circuits is a good way to get dismissed as a hopeless dualist. Ah, that dreaded label.54
Jaegwon Kim notes our ‘‘seeming inability’’ to understand consciousness in an ‘‘essentially physical’’ world.55 He also observes that ‘‘if a whole system of phenomena that are prima facie not among basic physical phenomena resists physical explanation, and especially if we don’t even know where or how to begin, it would be time to reexamine one’s physicalist commit-ments.’56 For Kim, genuinely non-physical mental entities are the paradigm case of such a system of phenomena. Not long ago, Kim’s advice to fellow naturalists was that they must simply admit the irreality of the mental and recognize that naturalism exacts a steep price and cannot be had on the cheap.57 If feigning anesthesia—denying that consciousness construed along commonsense lines is real—is the price to be paid to retain naturalism, then the price is too high. Fortunately, the theistic argument from consciousness reminds us that it is a price that does not need to be paid.