Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to id the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome back. This is Jay Richards with the Discovery Institute, and I am joined today by doctor James Barham, who is editor of a new edition of Thomas Reed's lectures on natural theology. Thomas Reed is an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, but not a lot of people know him, so I'm very excited about this new volume. But let me tell you a bit about Doctor Barham. James Barham received his BA in classics from the University of Texas at Austin, his MA in the history of science from Harvard University, and his PhD in the history in philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame. For those of you that listen frequently to id the future, you will be very interested in the title of his doctoral dissertation, which was teleological realism in biology, which argued that eminent teleology, value, and agency are real things. They're objective realities and living systems. Barham is currently editor in chief of influencerpublishers.com. He's working on a book called the Emergence of the Sciences and the Human spirit after Darwin, which he promises will offer a comprehensive refutation of scientism. Much of his work is accessible for free download at James barham.com. Now, with that background, let's turn to this new edition of Thomas Reed's lectures on theology. But first, James, thanks for joining me today.
[00:01:30] Speaker C: My pleasure, James.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Well, so tell me a little bit about this. For people that don't know Reed, let's really start with him. Who was Thomas Reed?
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Well, Thomas Reid, as you already mentioned, was a scottish philosopher, one of the leading lights of the great Scottish Enlightenment. He lived from 1710 until 1796. He was friends, or at least corresponded with all the other major figures, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson. Francis Hutchinson is a somewhat earlier member of that same group, just an incredibly outstanding group of thinkers that appeared on the scene in Scotland in the 18th century. Surprisingly enough, such a small country has really contributed to history, philosophy out of all proportion to its size. Reed was ordained a presbyterian minister. He only practiced the ministry for a short time. He was interested in pursuing an academic career. His best known book is probably his inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense, which came out in 1764, which is the same year that Adam Smith stepped down from the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. And Reid was invited to take over that chair. So he spent basically the rest of his career at the University of Glasgow. He retired, I think, about a decade before he died in order to concentrate on his writing. But basically he was a professor for the bulk of his life. One thing I really feel strongly about Reid, it makes him so attractive.
Many of the english philosophers are far more readable than, say, their german counterparts. But Reed is among the most readable in the history of english philosophy. Almost anyone could sit down with a volume of reed and enjoy it. He had this unique philosophical temperament. I think it was equal parts analytical acumen. He was a very careful thinker, but at the same time, he had a knowledge of traditional philosophy, the ancient and medieval philosophy that was beginning to be forgotten by his time. And then on top of that, he had this respect for common sense, for the everyday experience of the average person. So I just have always enjoyed, I'm not a Reed scholar per se, but I've always enjoyed my whole life dipping into his work, seeing what he had to say on this, that, or the other subject, and it just never fails.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: To enlighten, well, it's sad that, you know, he's not better known. American listeners, may some of them have heard of the Princeton theology, which was the early founders, first of Princeton University and then Princeton Theological Seminary, who were strong proponents of the common sense philosophy that Reid came to be associated with. And yet he's not, of course, nearly as well known, certainly as Smith or of Hume. But I think he deserves to be better known, which is why I'm excited about this new edition. But tell us about his lectures on natural theology. What are these?
[00:04:26] Speaker C: Well, one of the manifestations of the very recent Renaissance, really of interest in Reed, I'm happy to say, is a collection of his collected works that has been published recently, and unfortunately, there's nothing on religion in them. He never completed an original treatise on the topics covered by this book that we're discussing. So what are the lectures on natural theology if they're not a book written by Thomas Reed? What they are are student notes. He gave a series of lectures as a chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1779 to 1780 is the year, the academic year in question here. And he covered many, many topics. But in the spring, February and March of 1780, he covered natural theology. And he calls it, that is the title that he gives to it. And what I have edited together with Jake Akins is a set of notes taken by one of Reid's students, a fellow named George Baird, not otherwise known, I mean, as you might think. Well, how does that work? Surely student notes are not very helpful. Well, it's interesting. Apparently, at that time, it was commonplace for students to take shorthand notes of the lectures, then go back home and write them out carefully in longhand form, and actually share them around to their friends and actually put them up for sale, because professors tended to give the same lectures year after year.
So you could make a little money on the site as a student by selling these notes. And that's what we have.
The manuscript that I dealt with was produced by George Baird, but it's all based on his careful notes that he took from listening to Reed lecture at the front of the room. So it's very close to Reed's own thinking, I think it's.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So this explains why they're called lectures. And, of course, I mean, this is what we have of Aristotle's works, or essentially. Yeah. So that's an illustrious company.
[00:06:31] Speaker C: It reads a little easier to read than Aristotle.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yes, that's for sure. Or Hume, for that matter.
[00:06:37] Speaker C: Hume could be.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Why do you think. Yeah, why do you think? A new addition.
Why is that a desirable thing to have?
[00:06:44] Speaker C: There were two previous editions of these notes, but there were problems with both of them. We felt. So just for example, we just discovered mistakes. My favorite example, I don't think you mentioned John Witherspoon by name, but you mentioned the Princeton connection. And there's a word that occurs in Witherspoon in connection with the problem of theodicy, or the idea that we have to try to justify the existence of God in light of the existence of evil. The word is baltistian. Now, this word occurs in a slightly variant form, Baltiston, in Reed's lectures. Well, the first editor just copied it down wrong. It didn't make any sense at all. And he admitted in his footnote that he had no idea what it meant. And the second editor got it right, but then he didn't know what it meant either, and he speculated, well, maybe it's from a province in China.
Well, what it really is, Beltistan, in other words. But what it really is is simply an adjective, an english adjective taken from the greek baltistos, which means best.
So it's the greek form of the latin optimum. And throughout the 18th century, the Leibnizian philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds with the accent on the word possible, was widely discussed and accepted in many places as the best account of the odyssey, the justification of God, disposal of the problem of evil. And he just simply used the greek form for optimum, which is beltistos.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: So he's using somewhat of a.
That is too.
[00:08:30] Speaker C: I mean, but I won't go into that. But also one other thing, not just to make fun of the previous editors, they did very careful work. So please let me stress that I have the greatest respect for both of the previous editors, but their work, both in both cases, is clearly aimed at a scholarly audience, and we wanted to do, it was more aimed at a general audience to make it more user friendly. And Reid could simply assume a vastly higher level of education among his undergraduates than we can assume among our undergraduates today, for a variety of reasons. And so what I did is I went through and I took all the names, of which there are hundreds, and I just basically created a little, you know, guide as to who they are. I gave their dates, what their contributions were, why they're being cited in the context, so that anybody with any background, you don't have to have any background in philosophy even, or certainly in natural theology, to sit down with these and profit from them, because I've tried to do as much work as possible for you in the footnotes.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: That's great. Well, of course, these are lectures on natural theology. And so since this is id the future podcast, what does he say in these lectures about the argument from design specifically? I know he's famous for this, but I'm wondering, in these lectures, if it comes up.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. It's one of the main things he talks about. I mean, the lecture series of the whole academic year, I think I already said, covers many, many topics. The sequence, I think it's about 15 or 16 lectures specifically on natural theology cover three main topics. The cosmological argument for the existence of God, the teleological argument, and the theodicy problem, which I've already talked a little bit about. Okay, so you're asking about the teleological argument, which is basically the old term for what we call the argument from design.
And basically, the argument from design, as most of your listeners probably will already know, is just the idea that throughout the living world, certainly, and even the natural world, there are phenomena which show that one thing is adapted for the benefit of another thing, or that the parts of a whole thing fit together with such a precision as to benefit the whole thing, which could not exist without them.
And we, as human observers of these phenomena, are at a loss to explain this class of phenomena in any other way than through intelligence of some sort or other. Now, what that intelligence is, is still up for debate. Certainly such phenomena cannot be explained through sheer chance pace darwinists. And that would be a whole other discussion, which I'd be happy to have, but we'll pass on that. Nor natural law kind of intricate design that we're talking about really is never seen as the result of natural law either. And William Paley, a few years after Reid's death, of course, publishes his famous book, Natural Theology, which begins talking about, if he found a watch lying on the ground, how would you explain how it got there? And naturally, the only way to explain it would be through human contrivance. So by parity of reasoning, we look at the universe, those aspects of the natural world which seem to show the same kind of adaptation of the parts to each other in order to support the whole. And we infer then that there must be a mind somehow or other behind the natural world as well. That, in a nutshell, is the argument from design. Now, what Reid does, passing over the cosmological argument, which is a separate set of issues, and the theodicy problem, and just focusing on the design argument, or what he calls the teleological argument, what he does is he, he organizes the bulk of the lectures according to the concept of kingdoms. So the idea that the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom. And so for the mineral kingdom, he shows the kinds of what we would call fine tuning arguments. And, of course, he didn't know most of our modern 21st century fine tuning arguments from cosmology, advanced cosmology, but there are others that he was able to refer to. But he places most of the emphasis on life, and he has a beautiful section on the parts of plants and then several lectures on the parts of animals. And then he places the most emphasis on human beings, the fabric of the human body, the way the human body is contrived to support human life. And also, of course, then he looks at the human mind and how in the world could you ever explain that? Something like that.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Curious, though, I've heard people that don't quite know the sequence will often say that somehow Hume sort of refuted Reed on the design argument. And, I mean, how would you sort of handle those things? Because I think it's very much overblown, and they tend to get the sequence of these things wrong. But, you know, how do you think it's, how does it relate to Hume's?
[00:13:46] Speaker C: It's interesting, but we need to put it into a larger context.
Reid? I don't think Reid felt extraordinarily threatened by Hume, because, frankly, at the time, I don't think a lot of people took Hume that seriously.
Reed himself mentions the fact that the argument from design is very ancient. It goes back to Plato. You can find it in the timaeus, the way the demiurge is active in the timaeus. You can find it in Cicero on the nature of the gods. You can find it in the church fathers. Reed himself is planning out his lectures and following fairly closely the plan made by Francis Hutcheson and his synopsis of metaphysics from 1742. So I think the first thing to say is that, is that Reid felt that he had the weight of opinion on his side. The second thing to say is that Hume's main discussion in the dialogues concerning natural religion had only just come out. Hume died in 1776, and he didn't dare publish this book in his lifetime, or his friends prevailed upon him not to, actually. And three years after his death, it did come out in 1779. Now, Reid had definitely read it because he refers to it to a posthumous edition book by the late mister Hume. But he does not delve into it deeply. He doesn't try to answer specific issues raised by the Philo character. He was the skeptic in the dialogues, standing back and looking at it in a more general way. What is Hume's actual argument? It's basically just that there's two things. There's the skeptical argument that when it comes to the origin of the universe as a whole, we don't have any experience to go by. There's only the one case to go by. And there are passages in the reed lectures where Reed dismisses that type of skeptical argument. And this is where he brings in common sense. He says, first of all, you know, there are cases that are analogous to the case of the whole, where the parts are supporting the whole, and the analogy does appear to hold. And secondly, there are cases where all you need is one exposure to a phenomenon to see for yourself just through your native equipment, your innate human capacity to know that this thing must be designed or intelligence of some sort must be the explanation. So he simply doesn't take Hume seriously. The other thing I find personally interesting is that Hume, he's one of the first to kind of highlight the issue of there being a principle of growth in order that's innate to the cosmos, that's distinct from the kinds of laws that Newton describes that are the transcend mechanical laws.
Now, Hume discusses this in several different places, and, you know, the exact meaning of this is perhaps disputable, but it seems to me that he is, one might argue that he's gesturing towards some kind of self organizational principles which are talked about so much today so that you could potentially put Hume in conversation with Reed in the context of imminent teleology versus transcendent teleology in today's id terms, although Reid, of course, doesn't do that because, like I said, it's just not on his radar.
Hume is a skeptic, and Reed in general feels that common sense trumps philosophical skepticism. Hume did not loom large in his mental universe in the way that Hume looms large in our mental universe.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: That's right. I mean, that's why very often people that don't know the history of philosophy will think, well, you know, Reid gave his argument and then Hume refuted Reed. Well, no, the sequence wasn't right. I mean, contemporaries, just that, yeah, they're doing two different things. And people sort of treat humean skepticism as if it's some kind of inevitability. But in fact, you know, there's always the question of, look, you know, for most uses, this, this skepticism, it's not like it's, you know, unimpeachable. There are good reasons at some point to sort of, to reject it. And so that's why I'm wondering, what do you think, would you say is Reid's relevance, not the relevance of just reed himself, but these lectures on natural theology? And this, of course, is posthumian and post darwinian time in the early 21st century with, especially with the raging debate about intelligent design and the design.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: Well, first of all, I would say there's little doubt in my mind that if Reed were alive today, he would be part of the intelligent design movement. He was totally sold that this was the correct way to understand the evidence of teleology in nature. I mean, the evidence is there.
Now, he would obviously have to confront Darwinism and so forth if he were like today. But at the end of the day, the argument still boils down to one that you could find in Cicero that, you know, a hog rooting around in the earth is not going to be able to create Virgil's aeneid. I forget exactly how it goes, that metaphor, but Reid is just convinced that that's true. And actually, it is the common sense view that in order to understand, if you believe that the appearance of teleology in nature, especially in living nature, is objectively real and not just a projection of the human mind, then you have to believe that intelligence was involved in some way or other in bringing that about, because chance and law and any combination of the two just are insufficient explanatory factors to give any kind of a real, in depth scientific explanation to the phenomena that we observe, the observable phenomena.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Well, you know, I mean, looking around us culturally, we're at these sort of bitter ends of radical skepticism, I think, and we're starting to the fruits of it. And so, honestly, I'm hopeful that people will start to reassess Thomas Reid's work. And I'm just excited for this new edition of the lectures on natural theology and the work that you've done on it. So thanks for doing it.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure, Jay.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: We've been joined by James Barham, who is the editor of a new edition of the scottish philosopher Thomas Reid's lectures on natural theology. I'm Jay Richards with the Discovery Institute. Thanks so much for joining.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id the future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit intelligentdesign.org and idthefuture.com.
