Episode #051 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I apologize for the late episode this week. I’ve been really sick lately. I’ve never been sick for this long before. I don’t really like this new direction I’m heading in. I’m starting to feel better. I’d like to apologize for my voice not being as big and beautiful on this week’s episode. But I didn’t want you guys to have to wait any longer than you already have. I tried my best. I hope you guys love the show today.

So, as you’re all well aware, the last several episodes of this show have consisted of me rambling on about some island, something about a shipwreck. Somehow, we’re all stranded on the island. For some reason we can’t get off the island. We need to play make believe all day, imagine all the different ways our island society would look if we just applied ideas present in various thinkers during the Age of Enlightenment. Well, you considered the good ideas, the bad ideas. And for six seasons of your life, I’ve been alluding to some climax. I’ve been telling you about polar bears and a smoke monster and telling you it’s all going to come together in the end. Just wait for the finale! It’s all going to make sense. Well, now it’s the finale, and I’m giving you nothing.

Look, all kidding aside, I realized something this week, you guys. There’s no clear end to this extended island metaphor that we’ve been using on the show. It’s not like, oh, you just talked about some Adam Smith, then you talked about a little Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And all of a sudden, you know everything there is to know about how to build a society from scratch. No, as you’re probably well aware, political and economic thought doesn’t just abruptly end during the Age of Enlightenment. It keeps progressing. And unless if this podcast is going to be one where we just ignore any philosophy that doesn’t concern itself with nation building—which we’re not going to—then we run into a very real predicament here. There’s going to have to be a point in time when we decide to step away from the island temporarily. There’s going to have to be a time that we talk about all the breakthroughs that were going on in other areas of philosophy during this time: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics.

I guess what I’m saying is, this island is going to have to be something that we keep referring back to. It’s going to have to be a mainstay in Philosophize This! And as avid listeners of the show, you’ll all know about it. The people tuning in for the first time will be completely confused. But it’ll be great! We’ll talk for a while about our place as a member of this society on the island, and then we’ll take a break from that. We’ll think about ourselves in terms of being, say, an individual or in terms of being a thinking thing at all. Then, after we do that, we can return back to the island and continue thinking of ourselves in terms of being one cog in this tremendous machine that we call society.

So, David Hume. I feel it’s necessary for me to say before we start that David Hume is one of my favorite philosophers of all time. And it’s not because I agree with everything he has to say, necessarily, but just because of how timeless his brilliance is. Like, whenever a philosopher comes out with an ambitious treatise laying out all sorts of new ideas, once history gets done with it, it almost becomes like the carcass of a dead animal laying on the ground, because every philosopher that comes after them, every commentator, comes up to it and they just take their little piece out of it. They’re like hyenas. They write their responses to the treatise. They oftentimes make good points that the original guy can’t respond to because, well, he’s dead. And eventually it gets picked at so much that it starts to resemble one of those dead animals that vultures have picked clean in the middle of the desert. David Hume’s work is surprisingly different, though.

We often talk favorably about movies that stand the test of time. And what we’re talking about when we refer to these movies is the idea that even after 20, 30, 40 years, this movie endures as something that holds people’s interest. So, as we continue for the next few episodes talking about the philosophy of David Hume, just remember that his ideas stand the test of time not for 20 or 30 years but for 250 years. Just keep that in mind as we go along.

So, there are very few issues out there that are as integral to contemporary discussions of ethics than the one we’re about to talk about. And it’s funny because, in the context of David Hume’s work, it really was a small point, maybe even a throwaway point to him. And it’s one of these things that’s going on around you all the time, but you never really notice it. And then once you hear David Hume say it, you start to see it everywhere around you. You start to see when people make weak arguments all the time. And what I’m referring to is David Hume’s problem of is versus ought. Let me explain what I mean with an example.

So, have you ever walked into a 7-Eleven, and you get your Gatorade and your Funyuns and you walk up to the counter, and you start talking to the guy that’s working there? And maybe the guy behind the counter is particularly sociable. Maybe you bring up something from the news. Maybe you ask him his opinion. Maybe you guys get talking about the state of affairs in the world. Maybe the guy behind the counter decides that he’s going to tell you all about his own personal philosophy that he lives by day after day. For example, what if this guy said, “Look at the world filled with violence and destruction. Just look at the perpetual state of war that we’re in. Just look at the genocide that’s committed on a regular basis. Look at all the terrorist attacks that go on.” What if this guy behind the counter said, it’s obvious to him that the reason people are doing all these terrible things is because they just didn’t have parents or friends that loved them enough when they were a kid? So, because of that, his personal philosophy is to live each day spreading as much love as he can, giving as much love as he can to each person that comes through his 7-Eleven getting their Doritos and Mountain Dew. What would you say to that?

Well, let’s dissect this a little bit. What is this guy doing at the core of his statement? Well, on one hand, why would you ever question his statement at all? I mean, wow, what a great guy! He just wants to spread as much love as possible to everybody he can until he kicks the bucket one day. How could you hate that? But, on the other hand, what he’s doing here is taking some observation that he’s made about the way that the world is, and then using only that observation as a basis, he’s making a blind inference about how he ought to be acting because of it.

Now, many of you are probably saying, “Well, who cares? I mean, come on, give the guy a break. He’s not hurting anybody. He just wants to love people.” And that’s true. And in this example, there’s probably no harm that’s ever going to come from him making this sort of assertion. But David Hume looked around him during his time period, and he noticed that people make these sorts of inferences all the time. And as sweet and innocent as this one example of it is, David Hume would say that when you honestly take a look at it, honestly, it’s really based on absolutely nothing. And people use this sort of mistake all the time to justify doing terrible things.

For example, I look out into the field. I see that there are people out there working—manual labor—that look completely different from me. They are far more physically capable than I am. And when I go up to them and talk to them about math or science or any of these intellectual things, they can’t hold a conversation with me. Therefore, they ought to be my chattel slaves. Here’s another example. Women are born with the inherent ability to grow a human being inside of them. They’re great nurturers. They’re very emotionally intelligent. Therefore, they ought to just spend their entire lives pumping out kids because things like business and politics probably don’t interest them that much. Do you see how fast this can go downhill?

And people weren’t just drawing ethical conclusions from these observations during David Hume’s time. They weren’t just using this to justify loving people or to justify the role someone ought to be playing in society because of it. People were doing this all over the place—chemistry, medicine. This faulty argument had been used in practically every field of inquiry. And David Hume saw this very clearly. People were even doing it to make inferences about nature itself. Like, they would point to some way that the universe currently is and make a judgment about how it ought to be from that observation. Same logic applies. Just because the world is some way right now, does that mean that if the universe decided to send an asteroid our way and destroy the earth that we should be mad at the universe? No, that’s ridiculous.

There’s a famous line from David Hume’s work “Of the Will and the Direct Passions” where he says, “‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me.” Now, let’s keep in mind what David Hume’s getting at here. He’s not saying we shouldn’t care at all about the destruction of the world. He’s attacking a dishonest inference that people sometimes make by looking at the way that the world is and then pretending that the way things ought to be naturally follows from it. People do this all the time. And like I said before, just keep your eyes open around you; you’ll see just how often people talk about how they ought to be behaving, and they found it in a statement about what the world is.

Now, again, like in the case of the guy from 7-Eleven, there may be good conclusions that come from this mistake in thinking. Nobody’s disputing that. But David Hume wants us to acknowledge that they are in no way true beyond any criticism. And we owe it to ourselves to be mindful when we make this is/ought judgment. But if you’re still wondering why this matters to you, if you’re still wondering how this is/ought distinction is relevant to discussions that we have with each other in modern times, just consider for a second that in today’s world, right now at this very moment, there is an entire community of people dedicated to the task of acquiring a progressively more and more accurate view of what the universe is.

This community is very well funded. We’re all very familiar with this community because it substantially improved the lives of people over the course of the last couple hundred years. I mean, children go to school for decades dreaming of one day becoming a member of this community. You may have heard of this community before. It’s called science. Through unbiased, falsifiable experiments attempting to arrive at empirical evidence, science aims to understand what is. So, any further distinction you could make there—like, “No, science is about how things work,” or “No, science is about causes and relationships in the natural world.”—all of these distinctions are ultimately just science fully understanding what the universe is.

Now, if we look at that fact through the lens of Hume’s is/ought distinction, then that leaves science with certain limitations that we just have to accept. And when you say that word “limitations” typically as humans we have a negative connotation that comes with it. To talk about the limitations of something is to put the thing on blast, as the kids say, right? But just think of how ridiculous that is. Everything has limitations. If something didn’t have limitations, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from anything else. It’s the limitations of something that give it meaning at all.

So, what are these limitations that I’m talking about? Well, there’s tons of philosophy dedicated to this. We’re going to be talking about it in time on this show. But how about this for a start? No matter how extensive science gets, even if science understood nearly everything there was to know about what the universe is, it can never tell us what we ought to do with all of this highly valuable information that it’s given us. Now, whenever you talk about the limitations of science, I’ve noticed that oftentimes you’re met with this bizarre hostility from people who are proponents of science. And they’re nice people with good intentions. But ask yourself something. Where does that hostility really come from? Personally, I think it comes because of the time period we live in. I think it’s a defense mechanism because of the culture that we live in.

I’ve said it on this show multiple times before. But I think people are born into the world today, and they think they have a choice between two things: you can believe in monotheistic religion—the answer to any question you could ever possibly raise is written down in this book that is the codified word of the creator of the universe—or you can believe in science. But the problem with that is that science never claimed to do everything that religion claimed to do. In fact, I think that’s one of the biggest flaws in religion. It was so ambitious in what questions it claimed to have answers to. Why is it fair to project that expectation onto science?

Look, if science was a person, if you could walk up to science and shake their hand and say, “Hey, I really like the work you’re doing. I love all these experiments that you’re conducting. They’re giving me a much more accurate, rich, and full sense of this incredible place that I live in called the universe. But if I had one criticism for you, if I had one bone to pick, I’d give you four out of five stars on iTunes. Because although you’re doing such a great job when it comes to telling me about what the universe is, well, you never tell me what I ought to do once I have all this information. What’s that all about?”

If you told this to science, she would look at you and say, “I know! Look, man, I never claimed to be the moral arbiter of the cosmos. I’m good at giving you the information. What you do with that information is not what I’m concerned with. In fact, to be concerned with it might affect my ability to perform unbiased science, wouldn’t it?” Science is fantastic at doing certain things. It’s fantastic at telling us about what the universe is. It’s the best thing we got so far. But in the inference you make about how we should act in light of that information or how the universe ought to be because of that information is exactly that, a human inference. We should understand it as that and know that it’s subject to flaws.

This is actually an argument in favor of science. Understanding the limitations of science helps us do better science. This is why people over the years have taken their scrutiny of science so seriously. Science is like the baby of truth seekers. It’s wrapped up in a pink blanket. And sometimes you got to change the diaper of that baby, or it starts to cry. Aw, man, I’m terrible.

Alright, so, this begs the question, if the limitations of science precludes it from ever telling us about ethics, what should fill in that gap? I mean, we still need to make ethical considerations, right? Well, it seems very clear that David Hume thought it was philosophy’s job to fill that void. And he has, in my opinion, a highly, highly underrated work on ethics, and we’ll probably be spending an entire episode on it. But I guess the important point here is that David Hume didn’t think that this responsibility fell onto the shoulders of religion. He was a huge critic of the religion of his time, primarily Christianity. He has a very famous and illuminating quote where he says, “Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy are only ridiculous.”

And what he means when he says this is that because of the nature of religion, because of the way that it’s set up and structured, when you have 1,500 pages of cryptically worded sentences that claim to be the inerrant moral doctrine for humans to follow, it comes with certain consequences. Like, people can take two sentences here and arrive at a beautiful conclusion about how you should treat your fellow people with love and compassion and love thy neighbor as you love thyself. But then the other side of that coin is that people can take these two sentences over here and use them to justify the Spanish Inquisition. What he’s talking about is that when theologians or religions make a mistake in the realm of ethics, it can get very dangerous very quickly. But when a philosopher arrives at a wrong conclusion, well, he just gets proven wrong the next generation, and people laugh at him a couple centuries later. Much less at stake there.

So, there’s not much congruity with this episode, and I apologize for that. But I want to spend the rest of this episode talking about one of these criticisms that Hume had of the religion of his time that was so unsettling the echoes are still ringing to this day in the canyon, metaphorically speaking. No theologian, no philosopher has ever adequately addressed his criticisms that he was about to lay out. And now a whole subbranch of philosophy exists because of it.

So, we’ve all heard someone be asked whether they believe in God, right? If their answer’s yes, they’re commonly asked why they believe in God. One common answer to this question is some variant of the statement, “I look around me. I see what exists. And I just can’t imagine all this springing into existence out of nothing. I think about before the universe existed. These people say that nothing was there. And then, poof, magically something was. How do you explain that? How do you account for that? Something can’t come from nothing. Zero plus zero doesn’t equal one; it equals zero! Something must have brought all of this into existence initially, right?”

Well, whenever someone makes this argument, they’re doing it from a place where they’re making several assumptions, most notably a very easy assumption to make about causality. We know exactly where they’re coming from because we’ve talked about it on this show before. I needed a cause to come into existence. You needed a cause to come into existence. My parents and your parents needed a cause to come into existence. Every rock, tree, squirrel, moose, every blade of grass, even Oprah needed a cause to come into existence. And you can follow this causal chain that we’ve talked about all the way back to the very beginning. And you can say that, well, if everything inside the universe needs a cause, why should the universe itself not abide by the same rules? Shouldn’t it need a cause as well?

Well, both Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle had a similar line of reasoning—Aristotle talking about a prime mover behind it all. Why is everything in the universe moving? If nothing ever moved it to begin with, then matter would just be standing still, right? So, who moved it? Oh, it must be the initial unmoved mover. It’s using the same argument that people say, well, it must have been some uncaused cause at the origin of the universe that started it all off. His name is God, and boy, do you have a lot of explaining to do.

Well, for us to understand what David Hume is even arguing about here, we have to understand the way philosophers have largely been thinking about the cause of the universe for 2,000 years before he lived. We find this in Aristotle. So, as we know, when Aristotle talked about the cause of something, he wasn’t using that word in the same way that we use it in today’s world. Whenever he talked about the cause of something, he was talking about four different causes that explain any one thing: the material cause or what the thing’s made of, the formal cause or the form or internal makeup of the thing, the efficient cause or the initiator of the thing, and the final cause—the goal or the function of that thing.

Well, when Aristotle arrived at this method and he went out into nature and looked at the things around him, he realized something. Whenever something comes from nature, three of those four causes are always pretty much the same thing, all of them but the material cause. The formal, efficient, and final causes are always the same. For example, take one of those white, wispy seeds of a dandelion, floating through the air on a summer’s day. A dandelion is from nature, so it should abide by this rule, right? Let’s check it out. What is the efficient cause or the initiator of the dandelion seed? Oh, it was a dandelion. Okay. What is the formal cause or the internal makeup of that seed? Well, within that seed lies the potentiality to eventually become the form of a dandelion. Alright, what is the final cause or the function of that seed? To become a dandelion.

People over the years looked around them in nature, and they tried this with enough examples. And they eventually believed in the rule so much that they started using it to work backwards. You know, it was believed for a long time that if something came from nature, if you knew the formal cause of that thing, you could assume that the efficient and the final causes were the same. To know something, in this line of reasoning, is to know the formal cause of something, because by knowing the formal cause, we can infer the efficient cause. In other words, by knowing the effect of something in the natural world, we can infer the cause of that effect.

Well, this was fine when it came to most things, but as we enter the Age of Enlightenment, we’re headed into an entirely different world. This is the age of Newtonian physics. Times are changing. So, Aristotle’s argument about the unmoved mover, that’s only necessary if the primary state of matter is to be stationary. But in Newton’s physics, it was to be in motion. Aristotle’s idea of things having four causes—the only cause in this Newtonian world is comparable to the efficient cause of Aristotle, though not identical. Much closer to the way we use the word cause in modern times. So, David Hume living in this world makes it abundantly clear through his work that he’s looking at the universe in terms of Newton’s worldview as opposed to Aristotle’s. He said, “All causes are of the same kind, and that in particular there is no foundation for that distinction which we sometimes make betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material, and final causes.”

So, this whole period is just a hotbed for advancements in philosophy, advancements in the natural sciences. And it’s only fitting that David Hume would apply the same sort of skeptical eye to this common assumption that people were making that we can look at the effect that we see in the natural world and assume certain things about the cause of that effect. This assumption that they were making ran deep even when it comes to the most seemingly obvious causes you can imagine. David Hume uses billiard balls as an example. Let’s say you had pool ball 1 sitting on one side of a pool table and a second ball, let’s call it pool ball 2, sitting on the other side of the pool table. You hit pool ball 1 across the table. It hits the second one, and pool ball 2 is launched forward.

Well, David Hume says it seems really obvious to us that pool ball 1 caused pool ball 2 to be launched forward. And it’s very human of us, isn’t it? I mean, we’re born into a world with all kinds of different stuff just swirling around us all the time. How can we ever make sense of it all? Well, the way we make sense of it—the way we make what otherwise would be a chaotic mess of unrelated phenomena happening all around us—the way we make it into an ordered universe that we can comprehend is by looking for causal connections between things. We see the pool ball hit the other pool ball, and we assume that the first caused the other one to move. We see a squirrel jump out of the tree, latch onto our face, and start ravaging our forehead and our eyes. And we assume that the squirrel caused that damage to our face. You know what, scratch that. Let’s stick with the pool balls.

What Hume would say is that when you really think, really think about the relationship between the pool balls honestly, you realize something. You realize that causality is not something you can see. Sure, you may say that the movement of pool ball 1 causes the movement of pool ball 2, but in reality, all you know for certain is that the movement of pool ball 2 followed the movement of pool ball 1. Big difference. Like, you can’t look in between the two balls when they hit each other and see the causal connection between them. I mean, how could you? There’s not some spark of light that goes off between them or something. And you could be saying right now, “Well, who cares? One obviously followed the other. Let’s just assume that they caused each other, right?” Hume would say, well, if you do that, you can never know for certain. For example, day always follows night. Night always follows day, but do the two cause each other? No. So, following each other isn’t enough.

So, we end up with a problem. On one hand we have this idea of cause. And it’s an extremely important thing to us. And we want to hang onto it because it’s truly one of the only ways we can make sense of the world around us. But then on the other hand, it can’t really be validated beyond a shadow of a doubt by experience or reason. in other words, it’s probably not the most solid idea to look at an effect in the world and say that we can assume any number of things about the cause of that effect. But nevertheless, when people argue for the existence of God as a creator of the universe using the cosmological argument, this is exactly what they’re doing.

David Hume makes a lot of arguments against this way of thinking, the first and most obvious of which is that there’s no reason to assume that the universe had a beginning at all and that just because it doesn’t make sense to you that something can’t come from nothing, how arrogant and lazy of you to project your own humanity onto the universe as a whole. Not to mention, most of the people making this argument have no problem conceiving of an uncaused being that exists eternally. It seems just as difficult to fathom the idea of a being never dying. But anyway, there are more interesting arguments by David Hume when he’s arguing against the cosmological argument. Quickly, let’s just go over what that is again.

The basis for the cosmological argument is that something must have created the universe.

We’ll call that creative mechanism God. And this God must have certain qualities. It needs to be, A, nonphysical because if it was physical, you could just break it in half. If it possessed the quality of extension, you could break it into reliant parts. And you could just ask, well, what created those parts? B, God needs to be eternal. Again, this God needs to be outside the bounds of time and space, or else you could just ask, well, what happened one day before God was created? God can’t be confined by time. C, God needs to be uncaused or necessary. Because to be caused raises the question, who caused God?

So again, operating from the premise that the universe had to have been created, philosophers through the Middle Ages were deducing what qualities this thing that created the universe must have. It needs to be nonphysical, eternal, necessary, uncaused. And then, from here, they started tacking on all sorts of other things to God. Like, God is infinite. God is wise. Then, from there, it’s a short jump to applying human characteristics to God. You know, God is good. God is just. And from there, it’s not too far away from saying that this is the God of the Old Testament, which is what they were going for the whole time.

But what are people doing when they make these assumptions about what the cause of the universe must be and they found it in an observation about what the universe is? What they’re doing is, they’re looking at an effect in the natural world—the universe—and they are assuming things about the cause of that effect—that this God must exist and that he has these qualities. Well, when people were thinking like this back in David Hume’s time, it was grounded in Aristotle’s four causes. By knowing the formal cause of the universe, we can assume certain things about the efficient cause of the universe. So, in other words, like causes produce like effects. But David Hume argues that even if we grant that we can make inferences about the cause of an effect by only looking at the effect, and even if we realize how incredibly tumultuous that whole process is, we got to be really certain that we don’t overstay our welcome here. I mean, after all, if like causes produce like effects, then aren’t we still assuming a lot about what God has to be in that example?

For example, Hume would say, a basketball hoop is a finite creation. It was created by a finite creator, after all. Like causes produce like effects, right? Well, if the God of the cosmological argument exists, then the universe is finite. There has to be a place where God ends and the universe begins. So, shouldn’t we assume that the cause of that effect is finite as well? Shouldn’t we assume that God is finite? You could do this with most qualities people assign to the creator of the universe.

The point is, there’s a big difference between saying that some thing created the universe and saying that that thing is also infinite, wise, good, you know, any adjective you want to tack onto it: that it loves you, that it knows you by your first name, that it wrote a book of rules for you to follow, that it wants you to get that job that you just applied for. You know, if you’ve listened to the show, you’ve heard this all before. But David Hume, once again, brilliantly shows in another area of human thought that if you’re not careful, just how many assumptions you can make that are completely unqualified about an issue this important.

He gives an example like this. Let’s say that I went to McDonald’s. And I sat down, and I ordered a hamburger. I can assume certain things about the creator of that hamburger. I can assume certain things about the cause of that effect. I can assume that they are really good at making hamburgers. I can assume that they’re being paid to make that hamburger. But I can’t assume some things. I can’t assume things like, this person made this hamburger with me in mind, or this person has red hair, or this person is a fan of disco music that made this hamburger. All those things would be completely unqualified assumptions that it’s my job to validate. Now, the problem here, obviously, is that in the case of the McDonald’s worker, I can just go back and shake the guy’s hand, get to know him. In the case of the creator of the universe, well, he’s kind of playing hard to get.

A good place to end the show today is this. In David Hume’s eyes, we were making a myriad of assumptions about the origins of the universe. Maybe the universe is eternal. Maybe it spontaneously arose by chance. Maybe it didn’t need a cause. But either way, his larger point here is that we owe it to ourselves to think critically about this and not project our own humanity onto the universe. Whether you’re religious or not, you believe that a lot of people throughout human history have gotten the answer to this question wrong because they were willing to hastily assume things, right?

It may seem intuitive that something can’t come from nothing because we look around us and we see evidence of that in everything that exists in this macrolevel of existence that we operate in. But then again, our flawed human minds—your mind that one day just arrived at this confident opinion about how it doesn’t make sense that something can’t come from nothing; case closed!—our imperfect human minds may not be the most qualified things to make suppositions about the causality of the universe. We may need to be willing to accept that.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.