Mats Wahlberg

Reshaping natural theology : seeing nature as creation

Is nature creation or merely the product of non-intentional, natural processes? Mats Wahlberg argues that our perceptual experiences of nature can settle this question in favor of creation. He sugg ...

Why isn't faith a work? An examination of Protestant answers

Protestant critique of the Catholic idea of inherent righteousness has, since the time of the Reformation, given rise to counter-questions about the status of faith in Protestant theology. Is faith ...

Bursting Descartes’ Bubble

To perceive is, according to a natural understanding, to ‘let the world in’. Another natural characterization is in terms of outreach. In perception, we reach out mentally to external things and make cognitive contact with them. A very common theory of how perception works implies, however, that these natural characterizations are misleading. According to the common theory, what happens when we see is something like the following.

Seeing Nature as Creation

It is time to draw together some threads from the preceding chapters. Human behavior appears to us as expressive of mind. It seems to us as if we see people acting and expressing feelings, not just bodies moving and emitting sounds. The common-sense view is that we really perceive such psychologically loaded facts. Mainstream philosophy has, however, taught us that there are serious problems with taking this picture of our epistemic relations with respect to each others’ minds seriously. One problem is that human behavior is a natural phenomenon, and as such it cannot — given the modern, disenchanted conception of nature — have any intrinsic properties other than those that figure in natural scientific descriptions of things. Expressive properties are not natural properties in this sense. So behavior, as a natural phenomenon, cannot be intrinsically expressive of mental states. Behavior can at most constitute symptoms of mental states.

Perception and Concepts

In the previous chapter, I have elaborated on the first two claims constitutive of the ‘Open Mind’ (OM) view: (1) Mental states with representational content are constitutively dependent on the subject’s relations to the extra-mental environment (externalism about mental content). (2) Mental activity is not the manipulation of ‘representations’ in an ‘organ of thought’. Rather, the mind is a system of essentially world-involving capacities.

Perceiving Other Minds

In the previous chapter, I argued that the idea of factive perceptual reasons/evidence is intelligible and very reasonable. I also clarified the dialectical situation. If we indeed have factive perceptual reasons to believe that nature (or some aspects of it) is expressive of mind, then we do not need any additional evidence in order to know that nature is expressive of mind. Our perceptual evidence does all the positive epistemic work.