What is Philosophical Skepticism?

"Skepticism" derives from the Greek word for "doubt." The Skeptic is one who doubts. But, doubts what? Here we should distinguish between "ordinary skepticism," and "philosophical skepticism."

In ordinary language and circumstances, a skeptic will doubt that something exists or is true. For instance, he will, if he is a (ordinary) "religious skeptic," doubt whether God exists. Or, if he is a (ordinary) moral skeptic, he will doubt whether anything has any moral value (whatever he may mean by that.)

But a philosophical skeptic directs his doubts against knowledge. He will, unlike the religious skeptic discussed above, say, "I can know whether or not God exists.” But this is compatible with not being an ordinary religious skeptic: For the philosophical religious skeptic (unlike the ordinary religious skeptic who doubts the existence of God) may, consistent with his philosophical skepticism still believe in God! He says he knows there is a God, but that doesn't prevent him from believing in God.

The great 18th century British philosopher, David Hume is, I believe, best understood as a philosophical skeptic. He believed many things he thought it was impossible for anyone to know. For instance, he believed that there was an "external material world" beyond our senses, but also held that it was impossible to know such a thing.

Could a Computer Behave as a Person?

In certain respects, possibly all, a computer could behave as a person. It couldn't be a person though. The human mind may have developed because of need. But perhaps also because of desire to continue to live, individually and collectively. Could a computer have such a desire? Maybe (think of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But consciousness would be essential to a desire for survival and I don't think self-consciousness is programmable.

And even if a computer could behave like a person, it couldn't be a person as there is more to a human than determinate programmable input can create. How can we program in the ability to love, for instance? We can't even define it.

What is Moral Relativism?

'Moral relativism' is one of the responses you sometimes hear people give in cases of ethical conflict. For example the Romans fed Christians to wild beasts and kept slaves as gladiators, whereas we do not, and regard it as wrong. You can either respond that we are morally more enlightened than the Romans were, that we today have got it right; or you can opt for the relativistic line that there is no answer to these kinds of question. So moral relativism is a denial that there is any single moral code that has universal validity.

Relativists need not deny that there is such a thing as moral truth, although their account of truth will be very different from an absolutist like Kant. Moral truth, to the relativist, is relative to factors which are culturally and historically contingent. So you can be an ethical relativist about truth and justifiability. The wide variety of ethical beliefs in the world is perhaps a point in its favor. How do you even assess the truth of something outside of your own background, language and community?

You can also be a relativist in a slightly different, 'normative' way. This would be to say that we ought to hold that the values of others are as valid as our own. Anthropology has thrown up an exotic array of practices from distant cultures which we simply cannot relate to and even find distasteful (infanticide, cannibalism, head-hunting etc). A moral relativist might claim that we have no normative grounds for judging these kinds of practice by our own moral standards.

How Did Religion Evolve?

There are many theories which try to explain why there is religion. Freud understood it as a kind of universal psychosis. Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist tried to understand it as performing the function of uniting a community. Karl Marx understood is as "the opiate of the masses." He argued that the ruling class provides it to the working class to keep them subservient. I think that, at least in part, religion developed as an attempt to explain natural phenomena (earthquakes, thunder, etc.); a kind of primitive science. The easiest explanation for anything is always that "someone did it." Of course, the rise of science has tended to pull the explanatory rug out from under religion since what science can explain, religion doesn't have to. It is because of that there is an important conflict between religion and science, that some (mistakenly, in my opinion) tend to downplay.

Do We Need a Government?

People feel a need for a government — I include dictatorships here — because the alternative is anarchy and the lack of organization implied would be difficult to accept in an advanced culture.

A government is also able to maintain relations with other states, so that in advanced cultures we are able to take advantage of cheap workforces, goods and raw materials from less developed countries. This seems to be becoming a global goal which the international anarchist movement is trying to put an end to. It is this goal, rather the concept of a government, which is wrong.

The role of a government is to maintain a legal system, impose taxes and distribute wealth in a way the people think is just.

I think this is John Locke's view. Locke thought that people want a government because of the inconveniences of a state of nature which is lawless. It can be argued against this that the impositions and restrictions maintained by government are not actually preferable to a lawless state of nature, but unless we are able to live in small self-sufficient communities — which we do not seem to want to do — then government is necessary.

How Could Nostradamus Have Seen the Future?

What we really are asking is whether there can be knowledge of the future which is not grounded on observation and memory. If Nostradamus genuinely foresaw events that were to happen in the future — that is to say, if he possessed the power of clairvoyance — what we are saying is that his state of belief was caused directly by something happening in the future, rather than by events preceding the formation of that state of belief. In other words, for his state of belief to be anything other than a lucky guess, a cause would have to occur after its effect.

You don't have to go along with philosopher David Hume's analysis of causation, or his account of belief, in order to find the concept of 'clairvoyance' problematic, on the grounds that we simply cannot understand what it would mean for a cause to occur after its effect. Suppose I discovered that whenever I say 'Humpty Dumpty' three times as my daughter is walking up the driveway towards my house, I receive a letter containing five dollars. But when I fail to say 'Humpty Dumpty' no such letter arrives. Then it looks as though, by some mysterious process, saying 'Humpty Dumpty' three times brings it about that yesterday someone put five dollars in an envelope and sent it to me. Isn't that weird? How could that possibly happen?

One answer would be, 'We just don't know how a cause can occur after its effect, but still we can — for example, in the Humpty Dumpty case — know that it does. I am very unhappy with that answer.

The point is that we seem to understand the idea of a capacity to see the future. The question, which I leave open for discussion, is whether any sense at all can be made of that idea.

Can God Make a Rock Bigger Than He Can Lift?

God could make a stone heavier than he could lift, but if he ever did, he would be able to lift it. — What we have stumbled upon is a kind of paradox in the whole notion of omnipotence.

We see that some people have more power than others. This leads us to believe, quite rightly, that there is a scale of 'powerfulness'. We then infer that this scale has absolute limits, i.e. powerlessness and omnipotence.

But omnipotence is not a coherent concept. This is so despite the genius of Aquinas and the other theologians who have tried to show that it is. In the same way that Plato saw horses and concluded that there must be something that is 'horseness', theologians have seen power being wielded and have concluded that there must be omnipotence. Both rest on a confusion.

Reason is a powerful tool. But we should see to it that it does not blind us from the obvious.

'Power' can be explained by giving examples of things that have power. But there are no examples of things that are omnipotent, except of course God. This might work if it weren't necessary to define God by his omnipotence. Seeing as though it is, we are trapped in a vicious circle.

I read somewhere that arguing about the attributes of God (what God can and can't do), is like blind men arguing about the color of the sunset. Leaving aside the literary merit of this analogy, I think the point was that we should either have faith, or leave it all alone. It is not the place of science or logic to define what God can do and what He can't do. Faith must be blind. And where there is faith, there can be no philosophy.