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Review Author(s): Richard Swinburne Review by: Richard Swinburne Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 406-408Published by: on behalf of the Oxford University Press Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2254946Accessed: 03-07-2015 13:49 UTC

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406 Book Reviews

together with an account of how to get a logic out of facts about direct confirma- tion and disconfirmation. What directly disconfirms "if p then q" is the truth of "p . _ q"; what directly confirms it is "the combined truth of (i) '--Ip . _ q' and (ii) 'p . q"' (p. 15). But this account of direct confirmation presents a problem. McLaughlin does not (and could not) mean by the quoted account that it is a con- tradiction which would directly confirm "if p then q". What he means is best grasped from the example he gives, namely, "if I startle Henry, he will swear". (Henry is hunched over a putt.) What directly confirms this conditional according to McLaughlin is the obtaining at one time of "I do not startle Henry and he does not swear", and at another time of "I do startle Henry and he does swear". He explains that when "if p then q" is directly confirmed, "-I p. _ q" and "p . q" hold "during different phases or segments of the single occasion of which the condi- tional is said to be true" (p. 16). The problem with this explanation is that it seems to require treating "if I startle Henry, he will swear" as an implicit, restricted uni- versal quantification rather than as a conditional-that is, as something like "for all t in the single occasion, if I startle Henry at t, he will swear at t (or soon after)". McLaughlin insists that he does not want to read "if I startle Henry, he will swear" in this way, but if he wants to read "-_ p . _ q" and "p . q" in such a way that they can be true together by relating to different times, he needs to do more explaining than he does. The reader is left without any clear guidance on the matter.

Department of Philosophy FRANK JACKSON Monash University Victoria 3168 Australia

Modern Biology and Natural Theology, by Alan Olding. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp. 181. ?30.00.

Alan Olding has written a fairly popular account of the philosophical and theo- logical problems raised by the Darwinian account of the evolution of animals and humans. Part I sets the stage, by giving an account of popular Darwinism, show- ing how science needs no teleological notions of divine creation or intervention, to explain how we got where we are. Part II raises the philosophical problems. Olding begins by pointing out that if reductive materialism is true, talk of "evo- lution by natural selection" is not talk of a basic force of nature, but a mere "heu- ristic device"; the real forces are those of physics. He then raises the difficulty, that while our beliefs about the physical world, including our scientific beliefs, may help us to survive, they need not be true in order to do so-they just need to "work" in the local environment. Darwinism cannot explain why we have true beliefs about the evolutionary process. He goes on to point out that the Darwinian apparatus is also unable to account for the evolution of consciousness, including our coming to have beliefs at all. Part III then investigates whether, after all, the orderliness of the Universe, including the recent discoveries of the extent of its "fine-tuning", allows scope for an argument from design to the existence of God. His final conclusion is that the disanalogies are too great, between the persons

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Book Reviews 407

who make mundane machines and the God who is supposed to make the Uni- verse, to render the existence of God at all probable.

Until we get to Part III, the argument is fairly loose. The question whether the fact that we have true scientific beliefs is an objection to Darwinism is raised rather than answered. And the inability of the Darwinian apparatus to explain consciousness is founded on an appeal to the evident distinctness of visual appearances from the brain events which underlie them, which-while I am con- vinced that it is correct-does need to be completed by some more thorough philosophical argument if it is to convince professional philosophers.

The climax of the book is however obviously meant to be Part III, and as my own arguments are a principal target there, I take this opportunity to defend myself. An argument from design has two main forms-an argument from temporal order, i.e. the regular operation of laws of nature; and an argument from spatial order, the occurrence of complex organisms, viz. animals and men. Given the theory of evolution by natural selection, there are organisms because of the operation, not just of any laws of nature but of certain rather special ones, and because of the initial conditions of the Universe at the time of the Big Bang. The recent work on "fine-tuning" has drawn our attention to the fact that only a very very narrow range of laws and initial conditions will lead (on Earth or anywhere else in the Universe) to the evolution of complex organisms. These data (laws in general, or such laws and initial conditions as lead to the evolution of complex organisms) are, the pro- ponent of the argument claims, a priori improbable, but much more probable if there is a God who brings them about, and hence are evidence for the existence of God. In my book The Existence of God I claimed that while the argument from temporal order had considerable force, the argument from spatial order did not. The recent discoveries of "fine tuning" have however subsequently convinced me of the considerable force also of the argument from spatial order.

Now Olding claims that such arguments from design will lead at most either to deism (a God who starts the Universe going and then leaves it to its own devices) or to occasionalism (a God who is the sole cause of everything that hap- pens in the Universe, "laws of nature" being mere descriptions of the way God causes things regularly and predictably). Traditional theism has normally advo- cated a third view-that God conserves in natural objects the liability to exercise their powers regularly and predictably in the ways described by "laws of nature". Olding claims to be unable to make sense of this intermediate position. If there is a God, Olding claims, either the Sun makes the Earth move round it because God made the constituents of Sun and Earth with certain powers to begin with, or God makes the Earth move on the "occasions" of it being in a certain position relative to the Sun.

Olding's dichotomy has been posed before. Aquinas remarks (Summa Contra Gentiles 111.70) that "It seems difficult for some people to understand how natural effects are attributed both to God and to a natural agent". But, as Aquinas goes on to remark, "These points present no difficulty... Though a natural thing pro- duces its proper effect... the natural thing does not produce it except by divine

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408 Book Reviews

power". There are plenty of mundane near-analogies to this situation of some- thing having a power which is sustained in it by something else. The flow of elec- tric current gives a computer the power to generate; by my encouragement I may conserve in you the power to keep on running, and so on. Only near-analogies of course, because God conserves the power of natural objects as a basic action, not by relying on other things to transmit it.

Olding then adduces the criticism that there is no sufficient analogy between the basic actions of humans in bringing about bodily movements and the sup- posed basic action of God in conserving the powers of natural objects, because (p. 132) "it is not in general the case with humans that basic actions flow directly, as it were, out of their intentions... Quite ordinary basic actions involve complex causal chains involving the nervous and muscular systems". Human basic actions do indeed depend (in part) for their occurrence on the operation of scientific cau- sality; we succeed in moving our hands only because our nerves transmit impulses in certain ways. But the point is that we have a concept of basic inten- tional action ready to be applied to phenomena, wherever it fits, whether or not scientific causality is involved in making our choices efficacious. My moving my arm is a basic action because that is what I most immediately set myself to do; and my "setting myself' does cause the motion of my arm, even if the operation of nerves and muscles is physically (but not logically) necessary for my "setting myself' to be efficacious. So the concept of a basic action is ready for application by analogy to phenomena where no scientific causality is involved in making the basic actions occur e.g. the phenomenon of natural objects having and exerting their causal powers in the way described by the most fundamental laws of nature. Either their so behaving is an ultimate brute fact (and an enormous coincidence that they all behave in exactly the same way) or it has a further explanation in the action of God. In the latter case bringing about the phenomenon would be a basic act of God, one for the efficacy of which no scientific causality was needed because it consisted in the sustaining of all scientific causality. The grounds for believing that God is at work here is that God would have the power and reason to bring about such a phenomenon which otherwise would be an enormous coin- cidence. Olding's objections do not dent the force of this ancient and powerful argument, further strengthed by the recent scientific discoveries of "fine tuning".

Oriel College RICHARD SWINBURNE Oxford OX] 4EW UK

Propositional Attitudes: An Essay on Thoughts and How We Ascribe Them, by Mark Richard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. ix + 275.

In this fine book Mark Richard develops a theory of the semantics of proposi- tional attitude ascriptions. The book is rather more concerned with how we ascribe propositional attitudes than with the attitudes themselves, rather more philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. But there is much that should

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Article Contentsp. 406p. 407p. 408

Issue Table of ContentsMind, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Jul., 1991) pp. 325-435Front Matter [pp. ]Work and Text [pp. 325-340]Anti-Realism Untouched [pp. 341-342]Purposive Intending [pp. 343-359]The Limits of Thought--and Beyond [pp. 361-370]The Chicken and the Egg [pp. 371-372]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 373-376]Review: untitled [pp. 376-379]Review: untitled [pp. 379-381]Review: untitled [pp. 381-382]Review: untitled [pp. 382-385]Review: untitled [pp. 385-388]Review: untitled [pp. 388-390]Review: untitled [pp. 390-394]Review: untitled [pp. 394-397]Review: untitled [pp. 398-400]Review: untitled [pp. 400-403]Review: untitled [pp. 403-406]Review: untitled [pp. 406-408]Review: untitled [pp. 408-410]Review: untitled [pp. 410-412]Review: untitled [pp. 413-414]Review: untitled [pp. 415-416]Review: untitled [pp. 417-418]Review: untitled [pp. 419-421]Review: untitled [pp. 421-424]

Books Received [pp. 425-430]Announcements [pp. 431-435]Back Matter [pp. ]