Pockets of Irrationality

Alex Byrne, "God: Philosophers Weigh In":

Stewart Shapiro observes that “among contemporary philosophers, the seriously religious are a small minority.” Dean Zimmerman, a notable member of the minority, has ruefully remarked that “although numerous outspoken Christians are highly respected in analytic circles, many of our colleagues still regard the persistence of religious belief among otherwise intelligent philosophers as a strange aberration, a pocket of irrationality.”

In fairness to religious philosophers, perhaps an even stranger pocket of irrationality is that containing secular compatibilists. I get belief in God -- I get how persons inclined to experience the world religiously could be motivated to forge a panic room in which to place cherished but epistemologically infirm beliefs.

What I don't get is how anyone inclined toward ontological naturalism could find the (or even a) concept of "free will" remotely plausible. Such a person grants that humans are all and only mechanism. On a mechanistic account of action, each and every "choice" is determined by something that is not a choice. Which is to say each and every choice is determined by something that cannot in any sense be said to be within an agent's control. Whence "freedom"?

QED, you'd think. Instead, we get the standard apologetics -- appeals to reactive attitudes, "elbow room," reasons responsiveness, and the like. To my ears, these strategies all strike the sort of defensive, desperate, typically equivocal posture one finds in your garden-variety Christian apologetics. ("Must...preserve...moral responsibility.")

Then again, my own views, like the views of everyone else, are just so much unconscious autobiography. Which is not beside the point.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)