Defining the Debate: The Great Divide
Defining the Debate: The Great Divide
The argument from reason begins by defining two worldview types: mentalistic worldviews, according to which mental states are basic causes, and nonmentalistic worldviews, according to which no mental states are basic causes. To understand the idea of basic causes, the following account from Keith Parsons is helpful:
Hence, for Swinburne, to say that a law of nature is unexplained is to say that there is no explanation of why a certain material body possesses the particular powers and liabilities that it has. Of course, the powers and liabilities of one body may be explained in terms of the powers and liabilities of the constituent bodies and those in turn by even more fundamental entities. Presumably, though, rock bottom is eventually reached. At present, rock bottom would be the powers and liabilities of such entities as quarks and electrons.…To say that there is no explanation of why a quark, given that it is a fundamental particle, has the powers and liabilities that it has, seems tantamount to saying that there is no explanation for why a quark is a quark. Surely anything with different powers and liabilities would not be a quark.1
Basic causes are causes at rock bottom, in the sense that no underlying explanation is to be found. Christian theism is a worldview according to which basic causes are mental. If God chooses to create the world, there is no underlying nonmental explanation for this creation. God, it is supposed, creates the world because doing so is good, and there is no underlying explanation in terms of blind causes.
Let us take a different case—that of rocks falling down a mountain in an avalanche. When the rocks fall, they do not miss my head because they don't think it would be nice to hit me or hit me because they think I have it coming to me. Rather, the rocks blindly fall with no regard to the interests of the people who may or may not be hit. On nonmentalistic worldviews the world is at bottom as blind as a bunch of rocks falling down the mountain. However, through the pressures of natural selection, perhaps we find things in the world that imitate what we would ordinarily ascribe to a designer. If we hold to a non-mentalistic worldview, we might say that“the purpose of your eye is to see” but what we mean is that features of the eye were selected because of their visual advantage. A mentalistic explanation is on the surface, but dig deeper, and“mind” is analyzed out. By contrast, on a theistic worldview, even if the falling of the rocks in the avalanche was not specifically preordained by God, at least the physical laws and physical objects are the product of intelligent design.