Pope Ratzi is getting ready to get medieval on the Catholic church—he’s meeting this week to prepare to smack down those uppity scientists.
There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of “intelligent design” taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.
If this happens, there will be much rejoicing in Seattle. The Discovery Institute hasn’t made much headway with actual scientists, but they seem to be doing OK with the Big Hat cabal. Pope Ratzi has already falsely claimed that “science supports a reliable, intelligent structure of matter, the design of Creation,” so I suspect the deck is stacked in ID’s favor at this meeting.
A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US National Catholic Reporter that this week’s meeting was “to give a broader extension to the debate. Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so.” In 1996, in what was seen as a capitulation to scientific orthodoxy, John Paul II said Darwin’s theories were “more than a hypothesis”.
Last week, at a conference in Rimini, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria revealed that evolution and creation had been chosen as the subjects for this year’s meeting of the Pope’s Schülerkreis – a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s. Apart from Cardinal Schönborn, participants at the closed-door meeting will include the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster; the conservative ethical philosopher Robert Spaemann; and Paul Elbrich, professor of philosophy at Munich University.
God seems to have afflicted George Coyne with cancer just in time to keep him away. All I can say is that I look forward to the outcome: they’re just going to give me more ammunition with which to condemn the idiocy of religion.
Oh no, everyone knows that the pope is one of the greatest scientific minds out there, this would change everything and make ID less religious!
Being a religious cynic, I suspect that the RC church recognizes, much as the fundies on this side of the ditch have, that accepting evolution casts doubt on the truth value of the Bible. If the followers doubt some parts of the good book, what’s to keep them from questioning it wholesale? After a few steps on the slippery slope, the obvious conclusion is that there will be fewer people dropping cash in the collection plate and, well, I think that I’ve made my point.
Schönborn is quite an interesing person. He succeded Cardinal Groer as the Archbishop of Vienna after it came out that Groer used to f*ck little boys. Schönborn was considered a liberal, but after the death of John Paul II he captured the conservative zeitgeist and showed his real face.
He also published various catechesis where he called the DNA double helix “Darwin’s ladder” and compared it to some old testament scripture…really weird stuff.
I am hoping for a good speach from Peter Schuster. He is a theoretical chemist at the University of Vienna and editor in chief of the Journal “Complexity”
Pi Guy: since Rome hasn’t put serious emphasis on Bibilcal literalism for a very long time (if indeed ever) I don’t think Pope Benny’s motivation is as simple as that. I think it’s a more fundamental theological concern, that evolution is seen (rightly or wrongly) as relegating God’s role in creation to irrelevancy or non-existence. ID is seen as a way to ensure God’s continued employment, thereby preserving a historically popluar class of argument for God’s existence.
It will be an interesting spectacle. I am curious to see which, if any, actual scientists get invited to this meeting. I believe Ken Miller Catholic, for example.
Would this make much difference here? American Catholics are already a pretty unruly lot, as least as far as obeying the hierarchy goes.
Watch the religious types here that pan or flat out ignore what John Paul II said jump on Pope Ben’s bandwagon once the official mandate comes down.
Frankly, I’m very disappointed with the Guardian’s coverage of the news. Dominique Tassot, a literalist hack whose Ph.D. is in philosophy, is called “A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist.” Nowhere is it stated that evolution is part and parcel of the biological sciences and that all biologists accept it, unless you consider Michael Behe a biologist. Creationists’ opposition to John Paul II’s acceptance of evolution is described using a passive construction.
Pi Guy –
In fact, Biblical literalism is a big no-no in the Catholic Church – much of the Bible is meant to be taken allegorically or figuratively. Of course, the way that you decide which is to be taken figuratively and which is to be taken literally is based on Tradition and by the guys in pointy hats at the Vatican telling you which is which. But the idea that the Bible is supposed to be taken literally is a heresy in Catholic doctrine.
And, of course, the Church has tried to stay out of scientific arguments outside of the whole “when life begins” arguments because they’ve had a history of picking the wrong side and being PROVEN WRONG in the past. Its embarrassing when it happens and it leads to more folks leaving the Church and moving to other Christian denominations (or just leaving altogether). The Church has tried for the last century or so to stick with arguments that can’t be refuted by science – like when your “soul” appears, or what happens after you die – rather than jumping into a position where they can be proven wrong.
Personally, I think that this is just simple arrogance on Benedict-Ratzinger’s part. He seems to have missed out on the whole idea that the Pope really has no power in the modern world – he’s not the old-style Imperial Pope that existed up through the 1800s who could make world leaders jump with a nod. The modern Pope influences through “moral authority” not by decree, and that means he has about the same level of influence as the singer Bono, and he has to cultivate it the same way. Ratzinger wants an old-style papacy where folks jump and do things he says just because he’s the Pope – that ship has sailed, but he’s too arrogant to think otherwise. Simple hubris is coloring his decisions, and if you’re a “Pope-watcher” its easy to see this as just another step in that direction.
I think a more appropriate nickname for the pope should be Joey the Rat
So, not only do you gloss over the fact that your previous post about Coyne being fired appears to be completely wrong, you jump into further wild speculation that will most likely prove to be incorrect. I have no problem with criticizing religions when they do stupid things, but criticizing them for things they didn’t actually do or probably won’t do seems to be borrowing a page from the creationist handbook. You really need to take a step back and apply appropriate skeptisicm to claims made about religion.
Perhaps they should reconsider the heliocentric model of the solar system as well, for consistency’s sake.
As a Philosophy-Ph.D Candidate at Munich University, I would like to point out that Paul Elbrich is not affiliated with Munich University, but with the Jesuit School of Philosophy, which happens to be located in Munich.
Like Alon Levy, I’m disappointed the Guardian didn’t put more effort in.
NonyNony:
First of all, there is some power the Catholic Church has. The Church runs a lot of hospitals and medical services in the developing world, and its stance on birth control and abortion can be seen to contributing to these nations’ problems with AIDS, overpopulation, women’s issues and the like. The UN and other NGOs who want to address these issues can’t always call the Church on the carpet, because the Church provides so much basic medical care in these areas. btw, this information is a couple of years old, I think obtained from the Catholics for a Free Choice website, so take it as you will.
Secondly, I don’t think Ratzi cares if he drives people away from the Church. I think that’s his agenda. He’d rather have a much smaller Church of Opus Dei-style zealots than an inclusive one of “cafeteria Catholics”. He and JP II did their best to stigmatize liberation theology in Latin America, driving so many Catholics into Pentecostal Churches. (Liberation theology: the Church should assist the poor in this world. The Holy See: Let them wait for the next one.)
which is more then absurd when one considers the theological differences between US fundamentalists and the catholic church
Looking at this as a power grab in a conveniently open forum, albeit one populated by fellow traveling loonies, I think that while Ratzi may have his share of arrogance- it seems to be a prerequisite for the job- he views the ID mess as opportunity with no downside. Given that a prime method of extending the tyranny of belief is to demand ever wilder confessions of dogma, this seems to be custom made. ID fits into the foggy, open-ended, interpretation-rich, evidence-devoid vagueness wherein pleas to stop thinking and start believing lend themselves to laziness on the part of the followers. So you have a necessary mass of chanting fools. It also secures the authority of those privileged to interpret the new spiritual insight, so you have a further mysticism, further distance, and further elitism, which also can be contemplated by the chanting masses. If we’re talking about the propagation of the faith, this is how it’s done.
It has been my observation that the conservatives and liberals have more in common with their like-minded brethren in other denominations than either have with with the opposite pole of their nominal affiliation (for an even more unlikely example, consider the apparent rapprochement between American Protestant creationists and the Islamist Harun Yahya. Birds of a feather….)
Remeber the Guardian is a UK newspaper. They probably don’t see any need to state the obvious. At least what is obvious to their readership.
Bob
It seems risky for the Catholic church to align its self too closely with a weak psudoscience. Facts have a way of being obstinate, will come out, and will undermine the churches credability. As soon as the church makes such a determination as to support ID, something will be discovered that discredits ID, the congregation splits into believers in evolution and believers in ID, and a new kind of wingnut is born.
If you’re going to be in Mr. Ratzinger’s line of work, you are necessarily committed to the proposition that Someone Out There is behind it all and wanted it to shake out the way it did. That is not, strictly speaking, a scientific proposition, and many scientists do fine science while believing it, at least on Sunday. It is certainly true, however, that being immersed in science correlates rather strongly with not believing the Someone Out There theory. The real question is whether Mr. R. simply tries to put scientists into what he regards as their “place,” or whether he signs onto dubious science. His simply having raised the issue is enough to raise concerns and suspicions about the direction he plans to go.
“As soon as the church makes such a determination as to support ID, something will be discovered that discredits ID”
I don’t think so. Remember, the biggest problem with ID is that it says nothing that could be falsified or disproved even in principle. Sure, we’ll keep finding explanations for specific things that the IDiots insist must be intelligently designed, and they’ll simply move on to something else. That’s the way it’s always been with the argument from design.
For practical purposes these people are uncomfortably close to being IDiots anyway…they’re required to believe God Designed man’s soul and consciousness, that there was a Purpose and a Plan to it all so that if you started the clock out again you’d still get people and Bibles and Adams and Jesii and such, that God “used” evolution to design life (whatever that means) and so on.
So Ratzi’ll go that much further. No-one’s ever going to prove that he’s a blithering idiot any more than anyone’s going to show that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (PBUH) isn’t real.
Up front, let me say that I am a practicing Roman Catholic. I hope that won’t lead you all to just ignore what I have to say in the following.
For what it’s worth I also accept the evolutionary explanation of the origin of species in general and of the human species in particular. At the same time I believe that the universe was created by a loving God and that there is purpose, and in this sense “design” in the universe. But God didn’t just create the universe and let it develop on its own — God’s creative activity is involved at every moment of the universe’s existence. This is “intelligent design” only in a sense that, I think, is completely compatible with the evolutionary explanation of the origin of species.
Anyway, I wanted to share some reasons for doubt that the Pope is about to make the sort of doctrinal pronouncement that you seem to think is likely.
First, some facts about the upcoming meeting.
Ken Miller won’t be invited because this is a meeting of Ratzinger with some of his former students. He has been having these meetings for years.
The meeting is not meant as some sort of council to define church doctrine. It is more of a get-together with former students to kick around ideas on an important topic. I wouldn’t expect a doctrinal pronouncement to come out of it.
Second, some facts about Cardinal Schonborn. He’s actually been back-pedalling for a while; in his recent speech at Rimini he said, among other things that his NYT piece was “too much crafted with a hatchet,” that “the church teaches that the first page of the Book of Genesis is not a page of science,” and that Darwinian theory and the faith can coexist. (http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0604812.htm) He also said some unfortunate things, saying that while evolution should be taught in schools as scientific theory, teachers should emphasize the “missing links” etc.
But his main point seems to me to have been lost in all of this, which is that the truth of evolutionary science just isn’t incompatible with a faith in a providential design for the universe.
Finally, something from Ratzinger himself on the same point:
“there is no either-or here. We cannot say: creation *or* evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God… does not in fact explain how human persons came to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological development. But in so doing it cannot explain where the “project” of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary — rather than mutually exclusive — realities.” (Ratzinger, ‘In the Beginning…’: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of the Creation and the Fall, Wm B Eeerdmans Pub. Co., 1995, p. 50.)
There’s a lot that could be talked about in this passage and others by him, and I don’t expect all of you to just accept what he says here, but my point is that his position as there expressed is not some sort of simple-minded creationist rejection of evolutionary science.
God did it. zzzzzzz. Wake me up when you snap out of it.
Well, the simple test will be whether respectful references to IDiocy come out of that meeting. That would go way beyind anyting JP II said, in very much the wrong direction.
Michael Kremer – my quibbles with you and the paragraphs you quote would be largely in the same spirit as similar quibbles I’d have with a deist or a unitarian or agnostic or something – of mild interest, but irrelevent. At least on the science front you sound like you want to keep ID out of schools and universities, and that’s good enough for me.
I just hope ratzi et al don’t change official policy. Such murmers and silences as have issued from the vatican on the subject since JPII died are far from encouraging.
Steve_C: I had hoped not to get a response like that. I wasn’t, after all, arguing that God did it. I was simply pointing out reasons for thinking that it was unlikely that the Pope would come out with the sort of pronouncement predicted by the Guardian article. Surely your disagreement with me over whether God did it is not a reason to ignore the substance of what I said. But anyway, my view about what will come out of the Pope’s meeting with his former doctoral students is going to be verified or falsified soon enough.
Steve Labonne: The problem is, the Pope will very much want to come out with statements like this: the universe is the product of “intelligent design” — meaning, that there is a discernable purpose in the natural world as we find it, and that this purpose can be attributed to the Creator of the universe. In short, the Catholic Church does teach that there is a God who created the universe, and it would be a real surprise if it stopped teaching that. But if he uses words like “intelligence” and “design”, this will then be interpreted as support for what you call “IDiocy” — but I don’t think it will really be support for that. (I think Schonborn has to some extent fallen into this trap, but I don’t think Ratzinger will.)
Well, I hope somebody tells the Pope that he needs to be very careful in using those words, lest he, like Schonborn, give himself a black eye for apparent support of pseudoscience.
Your argument is that god does it all… including evolution.
I could careless about what the pope thinks about science.
Let me know when he endorses contraception.
Steve_C: You are correct that my belief is that “God does it all, including evolution.” But I haven’t argued for this here. My argument concerned “what the pope thinks about science,” which is, after all, what PZ Myers’s original post was about. If you’re not interested in that question, why are you bothering to respond on this thread?
Remeber the Guardian is a UK newspaper. They probably don’t see any need to state the obvious. At least what is obvious to their readership.
That doesn’t change the fact that their coverage is extremely he-said-she-said.
My point is even if he comes out against ID (which would be the strategic thing to do) he’s still the head of a religion that’s just protecting itself.
If he was such a lover of science he would endorse contraception and not shun homosexuals. They too are part of “god’s creation”.
I will be very surprised if anything unambiguous comes out of the papal gabfest. Things tend to happen very, very slowly in the Vatican and many Catholic reactionaries are already disappointed that the pope didn’t immediately re-institute the Latin mass and banish altar girls. Benny Hex is not likely to do more than tease the ID people. Popes can be such flirts, you know.
Michael Kremer: Would you like to expand on your statement that “God’s creative activity is involved at every moment of the universe’s existence”? Do you see this as a testable hypothesis (if so, what kinds of data would be useful?), or is it something you accept on faith, while (presumably) accepting limits on the scope of that involvement consistent with (expanding) scientific knowledge?
“”As soon as the church makes such a determination as to support ID, something will be discovered that discredits ID”
I don’t think so. Remember, the biggest problem with ID is that it says nothing that could be falsified or disproved even in principle.”
In principle, if the RC specify ID’s designer by accepting it under their image of their gods, it would be predictable and falsifiable. It seems they will adopt the Cosmic Cheater variant, it has been mentioned several times.
“But God didn’t just create the universe and let it develop on its own — God’s creative activity is involved at every moment of the universe’s existence.”
“The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God… does not in fact explain how human persons came to be but rather what they are.”
Outright denying evolution and promoting the infamous Cosmic Cheater theory – bad theology (lying gods hiding behind seemingly natural explanations), bad philosophy (no parsimony, level errors) and bad science (supernaturalism necessary, doesn’t use simplest theories). Is that the best RC can dream up after using scores of manyears on the task? What a waste, and how typical for a major religion to hurt good people or good science without hesitation. Better keep on dreaming.
Michael Kremer:
I sympathize. You were trying to provide your impressions as a Catholic as to what new developments, if any, might be forthcoming with respect to the Church’s position on evolution. You were hoping to get feedback and questions on that topic. Instead, you’re being asked to defend your faith.
Hey, join the club. If I had a dollar for every time this happened to me at Pharyngula, I’d have to give PZ a piece of the action. It’s just the way things are here. You would’ve been better off not even mentioning your beliefs, since they really weren’t central to what you were saying and simply identified yourself as someone who has been following the issue closely.
BTW, I appreciated your post for its intent, and hope that your appraisal is correct. The late John Paul II’s endorsement of evolution is a fine talking point for me as a high school teacher, to the extent that I put the big quote up on the overhead and ask students if they can guess who said it. It would be a shame if his successor attempted to undermine him.
Sincerely….Scott
Uh… Monday temper tantrum. I completely forgot PZ’s new policy!
Well, then:
“The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God… does not in fact explain how human persons came to be but rather what they are.”
Pardon me, friend, but are you suggesting that the Roman Catholic church will outright deny evolution? And isn’t the suggestion that “God’s creative activity is involved at every moment of the universe’s existence” instating the Cosmic Cheater argument instead ? Can you expand on this as a deeper theological, philosophical and scientific point?
(Whew! This is hard when you are grumpy and impatient. Now, where did I stack the empty bottles for headbashing…?)
The problem sadly, Michael, is that if you make any statement more vague than, “God might sort of, somehow, be involved.”, you start making testable predictions. Ones that have failed to bear any fruit in the past. At best, any statement sufficiently vague as to *not* place oneself in the position of having to defend “how you know” God is doing anything, must be so inspecific, vague and pointless as to render it meaningless from the perspective of ID (and especially to science), **or** is lends support to the unbelievable bad non-science involved, which basically says nothing other than, “We don’t like your interpretation, so we think its our right to throw out any theories, facts, evidence or research that might annoy us and replace it with, ‘God did that!'”.
There is no middle ground. Either you are saying something that has no possible meaning to scientific investigations, which doesn’t deal with vague statements about 100% undetectable things “nudging” stuff along, but only in what is observable, or you are attacking science “for” its refusal to include things it **can’t** observe, on the grounds that somehow accepting them as a possibility will tell you one single bloody thing about how something actually works.
To put it simply, I don’t need to know, believe or even be aware that some guy named Fred Johnson helped build my car, so long as I can figure out, based on the car itself, why the engine won’t run. Knowing who built it probably won’t help me figure it out anyway, especially if I have **no** way to reliably ask them, or they won’t reliably provide an answer that’s any less vague than, “I hit it with a hammer.” (the equivalent of all the making people from clay stuff…). Further, it doesn’t even matter if Fred is still building cars for other people. What matters is what is directly in front of me, and “if” I can understand how it works. This wouldn’t change one bit, even if Fred was every place at once, invisible, inaudible, but personally holding every molecule of the engine together, but for some stupid reason, not fixing what is wrong with it.
ID, in its purest and least offensive form, worthless. In any form where it isn’t completely worthless, its the equivalent of someone trying to find their way through science, as though they where navigating the insides of a natural gas field, at midnight, using matches. At best, it doesn’t show you anything useful, while at worst, it burns modern biology to the ground, leaving nothing but ashes in its wake.
Its hardly a suprise that this fact makes people that recognize this either wonder what the point of mentioning ID is at all, in the meaningless form of it, or would ask you do defend why the heck you actually think it is even remotely useful, in its destructive form.
Of course, this is what the strongest backers fear. Religion doesn’t provide “any” useful information to science. Its not even all that likely to provide moral guidence to it. Thus, its much easier to claim that evidence “must” exist, and keep pulling things out of the hat and going, “This irreducibly complex right?”, and blaming every stupid thing imaginable on atheists, than admit that the hat isn’t bottomless, nothing pulled out of it has been the least bit useful to them, that nearly everyone misusing science, or that a majority of those bulding the stuff being misused, are not atheist. Its much easier to simply deny the failures, claim that its all the fault of unbelievers and rant about vast, nonexistent, conspiracies to undermine the believers. Its like a strange form of high stakes poker, only.. in this case, we have people that are not even at the table, claiming that “they” have a royal flush, and that everyone at the table is lying, because they refuse to “see” the protestors invisible cards, and “insist” that the cards needed to make a royal flush have already been played two rounds earlier anyway.
Dishonesty, even if you are merely the guy standing next to the real culpret and saying, “I don’t know why he would lie!”, is a damn good way to find yourself being asked to defend your beliefs, either in his invisible cards, or why you think he might, despite all evidence to the contrary, be telling the truth.
Michael Kremer:
This is not “Intelligent Design” (TM). It is probably theistic evolution or directed evolution. Here’s a nice tabulation at the NCSE.
As for the rest, I hope you are right that His Royal Popeness does not make any unfortunate official-sounding pronouncements i the ID direction coming out of this. It would seem dumb to me if they didn’t invite any real scientists. What’s the point of a bunch of non-scientists sitting around talking about what real science is? I do not share your religious beliefs, but I would prefer that the world’s largest Christian* organization doesn’t lead the way back into the Dark Ages.
* You may or may not be aware that some Protestants, notably some Southern Baptists I have met, do not consider Catholics to be Christians. That’s a different topic though.
Fred Denison: I am not going to try to expand in detail on my claim that “God’s creative activity is involved at every moment of the universe’s existence”? I don’t think that this is the place for me to try to write a theology textbook, and anyway I don’t have the expertise. But I will answer your other questions. You ask if I see this as a testable hypothesis, or if it is something I accept on faith. I would say that it is not an empirical hypothesis to be tested as scientific claims are tested. I would also say that I accept it on faith. But I would deny that this means I can have no evidence for it, or that I have to deny my reason in order to believe it.
You suggest that if I accept this claim on faith, I must accept “limits on the scope of that involvement consistent with (expanding) scientific knowledge.” I don’t know why you think that. It is not as if I am talking about a limited involvement here, one which amounts only to the bringing about of miracles. What I meant is that God creates and conserves in being everything that there is. Including everything that science can explain. My reasons for thinking this have nothing to do with “gaps” in scientific explanation.
And that’s based purely on faith. We only know what god let’s us know.
Fabulous!
Torbjorn Larsson: I don’t understand much of what you say.
You quote from Ratzinger: “The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God… does not in fact explain how human persons came to be but rather what they are.” You say that this involves “outright denying evolution.” I think you’ve misunderstood Ratzinger. The “story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God” is the Genesis story, and he is saying that that is not a scientific account, that it is up to science to determine the correct story of the origins of life and of the human species. He is saying that the Genesis story nevertheless communicates truths to us about the human condition, that we are dependent beings, also material beings, but nonetheless conscious and alive, and so capable of becoming aware of our dependence and responding to this awareness, etc. So how, here, is there a denial of evolution (you boldface “the story of the dust of the earth” as if that were a reference to evolution, but it isn’t).
You mention the “Cosmic Cheater” argument — I am not sure what that is — and then go on to accuse me, or Ratzinger, or both of: bad theology (lying gods hiding behind seemingly natural explanations), bad philosophy (no parsimony, level errors) and bad science (supernaturalism necessary, doesn’t use simplest theories).
I don’t understand these charges. I never said that God lies or hides behind seemingly natural explanations. The Genesis story is metaphorical and communicates truths. That does not make it a lie (it was no lie of Romeo to say that Juliet is the sun rising in the east). Natural explanations are perfectly adequate on their own level but that does not mean that God hides behind them. In my view God is manifest in his Creation. But this is not a scientific hypothesis. I don’t think I commit the levels error you attribute to me, and Ratzinger’s whole point is to distinguish levels. I certainly don’t make a claim for the necessity of God as a scientific hypothesis, so there is no question of introducing supernaturalism at the level of empirical science. As to parsimony, you need some argument to establish this as a basic ontological principle, rather than a good methodological principle within empirical science.
Obviously these issues could be discussed at greater length, but I don’t think this is the time or place (and anyway I have other things to do).
Kagehi:
I am not sure what to make of most of what you say. I don’t see how it has anything to do with me — or even with the Pope. I certainly never backed ID (the pseudo-scientific theory called “ID” I mean). But why should I, or the Pope, allow the pseudo-scientists to hijack the terms “intelligence” and “design” when referring to my own belief about the origin and purpose of the universe? Does the fact that some cranks have made up a bad “theory” and called it “ID” forbid all discussion intelligence or purpose in the universe?
You say that my claim is either meaningless or a piece of bad science. This amounts to the false view that every meaningful assertion must involve empirically testable predictions. That’s just bad philosophy of language. It is perfectly meaningful to claim that Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti are beautiful pieces of music, and yet that is not an empirically testable proposition.
You seem to claim that I am either dishonest, or aiding and abetting dishonesty. I would like to see some evidence for this.
quork:
I agree that my view is in some ways a version of what’s called “theistic evolution” at the NCSE site you link to. According to them, that’s the official Catholic position, so it’s not surprising it’s my view.
But the point I made above is this: Just because some folks have labelled their own view “ID”, it doesn’t follow that there can be no other view holding that the universe exhibits design and purpose. Any Christian is going to have to believe in the intelligibility and purposiveness of the universe. Even an evolutionary theist.
This is my last post, I promise. I wish I had more time for this, but I do have responsibilities calling me away…
Steve_C: It was nice discussing things with you too. Thanks for your insights.
You’ve witnessed for it. You’ve also stated that such is your belief, then argued for the idea that you’ve accepted science.
You don’t even know what science is.
Not much different from M Petersen who couldn’t even pereceive the glitch in their perception.
On a new track –
Actually, favoring ID would be quite problematic for the RC Church on religious grounds. Let’s think about this logically:
– The notion of “irreducible complexity” is central to ID. This notion posits that there are features in living things that *could not* have got there via accretion of changes, i.e., evolution. The “could not” part of this notion is vital; if reduced to “did not” or “likely didn’t,” then it is obvious we’re just talking about opinions, not a tool that, it is claimed, is capable of demonstrating evolution (or “macro” evolution, or “Darwinism,” or what have you) cannot be true.
– Yet it is this very “could not” that is the undoing of irreducible complexity on religious grounds. If God created the Universe, including living things, then saying various features of living things *could not* have occurred through evolution is the same as saying that God was incapable of creating a Universe in which these features evolved. Thus, the truth of irreducible complexity depends entirely on a less-than-omniscient, less-than-omnipotent God.
Somehow I doubt the Pope wants to declare a not-too-bright, not-quite-all-powerful Deity to be in charge of Creation.
Caledonian remarks (with reference to Kremer):
“You don’t even know what science is.”
Pretty strong words, podhuh! So I have questions: is there evidence for that claim in this thread? If so, what is it? If not, is there something outside of this thread that leads you to that conclusion? If so, what is it?
Skeptically…Scott
Jud- exactly, ID is almost as pathetic theology as it is science.
The Pied Poper
Michael:
“Torbjorn Larsson: I don’t understand much of what you say.”
I’m sorry, I will try to make a better effort now that I have more time.
“I think you’ve misunderstood Ratzinger. The “story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God” is the Genesis story, ”
Yes, it was, and he unequivocally states “And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological development.” I’m sorry, I made a blindingly stupid mistake, apart from being unnecessary grumpy at first. Mea culpa!
But Ratzinger also states “But in so doing it cannot explain where the “project” of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature.” So instead it is a lot of question begging here, such as teleology, about development, and soul dualism. Ie, what does that mean, why does it apply for humans as apart to say monkeys, and are teleology and souls necessary in any explanations of what we know?
“You mention the “Cosmic Cheater” argument — I am not sure what that is”
That is the argument that behind what we can observe and find out as laws of nature hides gods that continually works to “create and conserve”. The question then is why they would make such an effort to fool us, ie lie to us about how nature works.
“I don’t think I commit the levels error you attribute to me”
It seems so when you claim things such that “But God didn’t just create the universe and let it develop on its own — God’s creative activity is involved at every moment of the universe’s existence.” and “God creates and conserves in being everything that there is”.
That seems to be claims that gods continually affects the universe by supernatural means, which is the level where we usually look for scientific theories and natural means.
“As to parsimony, you need some argument to establish this as a basic ontological principle, rather than a good methodological principle within empirical science.”
If we are discussing science and its areas the analog area in philosophy is epistemology, not ontology. Parsimony is a principle in epistemology.
To summarise, your language makes it seem like you are making the larger claims of continuing supernatural intervention and teleology in the universe, while you also say “that God creates… in being everything that there is” which is the smaller cosmological creationist claim. It is still encroaching onto science though since we have several cosmologies that obviates we need for creationism, and in fact both the current Lambda-CDM cosmology and string theory has as trivial extensions the same such cosmology.
Finally I will cite a cosmologists view on your discussion of origin, purpose and “that God … conserves” and how they are debunked as level errors in the science you say you accept.
“From the perspective of modern science, events don’t have purposes or causes; they simply conform to the laws of nature. In particular, there is no need to invoke any mechanism to ”sustain” a physical system or to keep it going; it would require an additional layer of complexity for a system to cease following its patterns than for it to simply continue to do so.” ( http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/nd-paper.html )
One scientist will be at Pope Benedict’s seminar to discuss evolution. He is Peter Schuster, a molecular biologist who is the President of the Austrian Academy of Science. There is an interview with him about the upcoming meeting here.
Torbjorn Larsson:
You accuse Ratzinger of question-begging — on the basis of one paragraph which I excerpted from a longer work only to prove the point that you’ve now granted, namely that it is unlikely that he will be arguing that evolution is not established science.
Let me note now (I didn’t say this before) that the passage I quoted came from a *sermon* — it wasn’t intended to be an argument set out to persuade skeptics, but rather a meditation on the meaning of the Genesis texts for believers. As such it is pretty unreasonable to accuse Ratzinger of question-begging on the basis of this one passage.
But furthermore — what exactly is question-begging in bringing in talk of “teleology” for example? You ask — are teleology and souls necessary in any explanations of what we know? It sure seems so to me — for example, if you explain my recent behavior on the basis of my intent to hide from myself the falsity of my religious convictions, you’ve appealed to teleology (my purpose in doing what I did) and I don’t think this explanation can be reduced to a non-teleological one. I admit that there is a level of description of what I did at which you can explain everything without reference to teleology, but that is to replace one explanation with another, not to show that no explanations need teleology. Moreover I don’t think the non-teleological explanation would explain exactly the same thing.
I hold nothing like your cosmic cheater view. It is not part of how nature works that God creates and conserves it. It is rather a presupposition of there being any nature to work at all. The laws of nature are true descriptions of how the nature, that God creates and conserves, works. There is no hiding of anything — we are given the means to discover the laws of nature, and we are also given another level of description — the level at which we describe ourselves as persons. At this other level we are given the ability to speak of God — and God does reveal himself.
It is you who insist on confusing levels, thinking of God’s creating and conserving the universe as if it was a matter of God’s “affecting” the universe.
As to parsimony: the principle is, I suppose, not to multiply entities beyond necessity (Ockham). This can be read methodologically (I think this is the same as your claim that it is an epistemological principle). There are a lot of questions here, but the basic one is why should I accept this as a general epistemological principle governing all knowledge? (In my view this is in the end to raise the principle to an ontological one, but we can leave that aside.) I agree that for purposes of scientific investigation this is a good methodological principle, but on what grounds do you claim that every search for knowledge must be constrained by it?
I also don’t think that my claim concerning creation encroaches on science or scientific cosmology. Suppose that the multiple-universe cosmology is correct — there is no special fine-tuning required to explain how our universe, which supports the development of intelligent life, came to be chosen over the many other possible universes, since they all exist, and of course we find ourselves in this one. (Like the fact that large cities tend mysteriously to be located on rivers.) This doesn’t matter at all to me, because my original claim is not based on any sort of fine-tuning argument. I would say, if this multiple-universe cosmology is true, so much the better — so much more Creation to praise the Creator for.
The Carroll quote seems to me to make the levels error itself, again. Yes, sure, “from the perspective of modern science” there is no need to postulate a God. But a postulated God wouldn’t be my God anyway. The perspective from which I find faith in God compelling is not the perspective of modern science. This does not mean that I reject the perspective of modern science. It simply means I don’t accept any claim (itself necessarily extra-scientific) for the intellectual or epistemological hegemony of modern science.
Which believers? Genesis has many meanings to many different groups of religious believers. How do you know yours is the correct version?
Which God and what version?
What other method are you going to use?
Which creator? What version?
This is a nonsensical paragraph. Exactly what does make your version of God compelling and how do you distinguish that version from all the other versions now and throughout history?
Hi Michael–
I seem to be late to this interesting party. It’s been a long time. I share your hope that the pope will not hitch his horses to the (thoroughly mired) ID wagon.
I’m a little puzzled, though, about the epistemic commitments lurking behind your defense of religious belief as founded in something more than faith. I see science as a refinement and extension of common sense, whose success as an explanatory picture of the world has been surpassed (some time since) by the concepts and methods of science. Consequently, I’m at a loss (from my own perspective) to see where a set of standards that still have teeth and could justify any religious beliefs (let alone the particular beliefs on one particular religion) would come from.
I gather from some of your remarks that our commitment to teleological talk is important to your views. This brings to mind something Sellars wrote (somewhere in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, as I recall), to the effect that (in broad) teleological talk is the last remaining temptation to metaphysical dualism… but it was a temptation he resisted, without becoming a reductionist and without rejecting teleological talk. For myself, I find his approach to these issues much more attractive than any dualism, let alone any doctrinal religion, could be, and I do think that I smell some kind of dualism in the position you’ve hinted at here.
Michael:
“I admit that there is a level of description of what I did at which you can explain everything without reference to teleology, but that is to replace one explanation with another, not to show that no explanations need teleology.”
I don’t understand this. Replacing a dubious concept with a more basic and welldefined, for example here a neuroscientific description of the mind, is exactly to show that the construction was unnecessary. When one constructs models in science one has to use welldefined concepts et cetera.
“It is you who insist on confusing levels, thinking of God’s creating and conserving the universe as if it was a matter of God’s “affecting” the universe.”
I was directly responding to your claims of “God creates and conserves in being everything that there is” et cetera. If you are making them, you are confusing levels.
If we now have moved on to souls or NOMA, I would say of the first that I consider that a dualism, which is debunked by neuroscientists theories of the mind. Nature is nature as observed, not as imagined. Our descriptions of our minds are still just descriptions.
NOMA is a failed concept. If we have a consistent worldview that explains what we see and puts a premium on parsimony in the process, it is impossible to have another alternate one alongside it, while keeping the science intact. It is a compromise any religious may do anyway, but it isn’t without sacrificing some of what science has lead us to trust.
But I feel we are mowing in a direction that Scott mentioned as you “being asked to defend your faith”. That is not my intention. Perhaps you should not take the discussion as such and phrase it differently?
“There are a lot of questions here, but the basic one is why should I accept this as a general epistemological principle governing all knowledge?”
That is a good question. I believe many philosophers, especially philosophers of science, use it. Here I’m trying to argue the science view, so I took the liberty of pointing out what I thought would be a philosophical weakness. OTOH if you don’t use it you are probably, dare I say it, begging the question. (In the sense “raising the question”.)
“I also don’t think that my claim concerning creation encroaches on science or scientific cosmology.”
In an eternal multiverse universe there need to be no ‘creation’. In fact, since that principle is both illdefined and supernaturalistic (in effect Last Thursdayism removed to the far past), cosmologies must and can do without it.
“The Carroll quote seems to me to make the levels error itself, again. … It simply means I don’t accept any claim (itself necessarily extra-scientific) for the intellectual or epistemological hegemony of modern science.”
Actually, if you follow the link you will see that he is very careful to first establish methodology for deciding between competing pictures, and to model the worldviews of science and religion. Of course, being a scientist and also seeing that the method works, he uses the method of science to describe and judge. But I am most interested in that it is a complete though naive model of science that constrains philosophy with the help of observations. It as usual constrains ideas by pointing out fallacious ones, but it also replaces philosophers metaphysics with the model and its interpretation. This reverses the usual idea of who begs whom questions or equivalently decides levels.
“This reverses the usual idea of who begs whom questions or equivalently decides levels.”
And my point here is that it at the very least problematices that idea. (But personally, I think he clinched it.)
And if you don’t have patience with my strong claims, I see that Bryson above have framed my view on teleology and dualism in a much more general way.
Uber:
I don’t think you’ve read the rest of the thread. Otherwise you’d know the answers to most of your questions. The initial post was about the Pope. Ergo, the believers he was addressing in the passage I quoted are Roman Catholic believers. Moreover, I pointed out in my original post that I was a Roman Catholic. Hence my “version” of God is the God of Christianity.
As to how I know that my version of Genesis is the correct one, why I find faith in God compelling, and so on, do you really expect me to answer all these questions in posts on a blog page, in a way that would really convince you? You might start by reading a real work on these matters — Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, for example.
I agree that my final paragraph was incomplete, but nonsensical? Just because I haven’t answered all possible objections, it doesn’t follow that what I said made no sense. Again, how much do you expect in such a post?
One last thing: You ask what kind of method there might be to find out the truth, other than the method of empirical science? The method needed is determined by the question whose answer is sought. If I wish to know whether Mahler’s music is beautiful, or whether a new colleague is trustworthy, or what caused the fall of the Roman Empire, or what cultural meanings attached to breastfeeding in the Middle Ages, or whether human freedom is incompatible with causal determinism, or whether virtue is its own reward, I will employ different approaches in each case, but in no case will I employ the methods which have been so helpful in discovering the laws of physics or the principles of genetics.
Bryson:
(For the rest of you — Bryson Brown and I were in graduate school in philosophy together. The rest of this post is really just for him, though of course you can read as much as you want.)
Yes, it’s been a long time — good to hear from you. I don’t want to get into a dialogue between the two of us about Sellars here — I suspect that this isn’t the proper place. And anyway, the time I can responsibly spend on this debate has already been used up.
So I will just say something rather unsatisfying here. My Christian faith is based in my experience that it “answers to my condition” (as a Quaker friend of mine is wont to say). This faith is for me more like trust in a friend than belief in a scientific proposition. I fully expect that readers here will pounce on me for “wish-fulfillment” and self-delusion as soon as I say this. But I ask you: what are the standards appropriate for determining whether to trust a friend, are they the same as the standards for determining whether to accept a scientific theory, and do they have any “teeth”?
Dualism and reductionism: As you can see, some of my interlocutors here are eliminativists about teleology in a way that Sellars avoids. (See, for example, the last post by Torbjorn Larsson, “Replacing a dubious concept with a more basic and welldefined, for example here a neuroscientific description of the mind, is exactly to show that the construction was unnecessary.”) I don’t think I am committed to a simple-minded dualism, say of mind and body. But clearly there’s a dualism in my view, that of Creator and creature. And I am putting teleology over on the Creator side. But here things get more complicated than I have tried to say in any of the above, for of course we don’t know what divine teleology or intelligence is like — these are terms that we can only use analogically based on our application of them to human purposiveness and intelligence. But now I am getting into deep waters, where I am not really very comfortable anyway and especially not in the context of a blog comment box. Let’s just say that the dualism of Creator and creature cuts much deeper than anything Descartes imagined. God isn’t anything like a big supernatural entity. But I do know that God loves me, cares for me, knows me — because I know that I am loved, cared for, known. (That is, I know the relation by being on one end of it.)
Well, this all gets pretty metaphorical and is not meant to convince anyone of anything. It isn’t meant as an argument for my beliefs. It is more of an attempt to articulate them a little in a very brief space (and with little time), and really just to satisfy Bryson’s curiosity a little. So, dear readers, please treat it as such, and don’t go accusing me of begging questions, and so on.
Anyway, I don’t intend to post further on this thread. Bryson, if you would like to be in touch with me about some of this, I think you know where to reach me.
Catholic church?
Hahahahahahahahah.
This is the same organization that got Galileo wrong.
Completely wrong.
What a bunch of morons.
Want to shoot down a catholic? Simply ask, “Say, Why did you get Galileo wrong?”
Watch their face turn red.
It works. Try it.
What a waste!
All those minds wasting time on a bunch of hokum, that’s what bothers me about these Catholics and their serious little conferences.
Endlessly making up b.s. about a deity and his “only begotten son” because they can’t think of anything more noble or more honest to do with their lives, never-ending propping up of the religion with conferences and mega-services and pronouncements, and then lying every weekend to a rapt audience of millions who are desperate to believe the b.s. the big hats spew.
I live on Planet Dumbshit.
Dualism and reductionism:
Yeah whatever. You believe a bunch of invisible stuff for no good reason.
As you can see, some of my interlocutors here are eliminativists about teleology in a way that Sellars avoids.
Whatever. Why not just be a deist then instead of being lucky enough to pick the right religon, hardy har har. Yer full of baloney. Have a nice day!
Biblical literalism is a big no-no in the Catholic Church – much of the Bible is meant to be taken allegorically or figuratively.
indeed, any systematic if not rational analysis of scripture as text cannot interpret it literally. for one thing, it contradicts itself. for another, hermeneutics or other allegorical interpretation gets around the unseemly passages said scripture contains. alas, doing hermeneutics or allegorical does not yield a unique gloss. y’need something like the imprimatur of Church officialdom or a Talmud to declare which is definitive.
i think it entirely possible that drawing media attention to this study meeting is a political thing, making some move in some Who Knows direction within the Church. being large and old and hierarchical, Church politics are, as i’ve written, turgid. i don’t think the papacy is a friendly place to be, considering it purely as an institution independent of any theology. i mean, y’got liberal people opposed to birth control who barely remain within the ranks, ultracons who want the liturgy in Latin and think the place is going to the dogs, devoted folks in Africa who helped elect Ratzinger who might want a quid pro quo, as some have suspected, getting the Church behind the use of condoms. there are all kinds of cross-currents.
this might simply be a way to slip across a treacherous part and, if so, it could go either way.
despite the Galilean controversy and the Church’s authoritative nature, it’s respected most scientific opinion and expertise, except for some of biology, and most of psychology and sociology. maybe this is a small step towards rectifying that. or maybe, it’s a step towards the Darkness.
Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man; self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.
The Buddha’s teaching does not support this ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, but aims at making man enlightened by removing and destroying them, striking at their very root. According to Buddhism, our ideas of God and Soul are false and empty. Though highly developed as theories, they are all the same extremely subtle mental projections, garbed in an intricate metaphysical and philosophical phraseology. These ideas are so deep-rooted in man, and so near and dear to him, that he does not wish to hear, nor does he want to understand, any teaching against them.
The Buddha knew this quite well. In fact, he said that his teaching was “against the current”, against man’s selfish desires. Just four weeks after his Enlightenment, seated under a banyan tree, he thought to himself; “I have realized this Truth which is deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand…comprehensible only by the wise…Men who are overpowered by passions and surrounded by a mass of darkness cannot see this Truth, which is against the current, which is lofty, deep, subtle, and hard to comprehend.”
~”What The Buddha Taught” by Dr.Walpola Rahula(1959)
And yet neither gods nor souls help anyone’s self-protection or self-preservation, suggesting that this psychological embedding perhaps isn’t as deeply rooted as you think it is.
What makes you think I haven’t? I just don’t think they are remotely sensible to anyone at all or that isn’t prone to believe Catholic BS.
And to say Catholics don’t take the bible literally is an equal amount of BS. The lack of woman, the passages on divorce(which language scholars will tell you they have had wrong for 400 years), and on and on. Just because they bail on Genesis doesn’t give them free reign to claim allegory.
This is the kind of BS people pull out when they don’t have a compelling or rational reason. Each and every one of those examples could be examined under the light of science. I’ll echo Caledonian here, you simply don’t understand science.
I do think there is a methodological difference between how we think about norms and teleology and how we think about descriptions and causal explanation. After all, the fact that someone doesn’t obey a rule in a particular case doesn’t show the rule isn’t in force and doesn’t apply to them. But the difference is not one that throws open the doors to just any interpretation. Talk of norms and goals is learned in the context of social interactions, where subtle, but very important distinctions are drawn– distinctions between feigned and real commitments, between consciously acting for a reason and accidentally doing something that serves that purpose, and so on. These distinctions are not always easy to make, but they are made, and without some method for making them, talk of teleology becomes entirely detached from evidence and standards.
Trusting a friend (Michael’s example) is something we may persist in doing even when the evidence seems to undermine that trust– but we have real experience of friends and their ability to act as friends should, even after things may seem to have gone pear-shaped. This trust can be earned, and it can be lost. So from my point of view there are standards that apply here, and they have teeth. Religious faith, in my view, doesn’t meet them. As I see it, fideism is the only defense of religion that works.
I agree with Bryson on this and have argued the fideism angle in the past myself.
OK, one last post. Probably no one will read it anyway.
Thanks to those people who responded to me in a civil manner. I notice that these are also the people who have posted under real names, not aliases. From the aliases I have gotten misunderstanding, insult, ridicule, and dogmatic pronouncements.
Why should I be impressed with a comment from someone named “Caledonian” or “Uber” who says that I don’t know anything about science? I don’t have any evidence to show that you know anything about anything at all, based on what you’ve said so far.
Bryson: we’re going to have to disagree. We can carry on the conversation privately if you like — but I don’t have more time to carry it on here.
Uber: (1) In response to my remark “You might start by reading a real work on these matters — Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, for example,” you say “What makes you think I haven’t? I just don’t think they are remotely sensible to anyone at all or that isn’t prone to believe Catholic BS.”
Well, actually, I have no reason to think you haven’t read such books. Maybe you have — that wasn’t my point. But, out of curiosity: have you? Which ones?
But in any case I wasn’t claiming you hadn’t read such books. I was only saying that you can’t reasonably expect answers to all of your questions in a blog comment box. It would be unfair to the readers and host of the blog for me to say all that would have to be said about this.
(2) You assert about my various examples of questions that “Each and every one of those examples could be examined under the light of science,” and conclude that because I don’t think so, I simply don’t understand science. But you give me no reason to think that you’re right. In short, you engage in dogmatic pronouncement. I find it curious how many such dogmatic pronouncments about the nature and scope of science I find coming at me here, given the essentially self-critical nature of science itself.
Again, out of curiosity, how do you propose to examine each of my examples — take the question whether Mahler’s music is beautiful, say — using the methods of science? I would venture to guess that your answer will involve substantially reinterpreting the question in at least several of my examples. (This is not to say that scientific investigations can have no relevance to these examples, but rather that they will have to be supplemented with other modes of inquiry.)
(3) You treat Bryson Brown civilly, and behave as if he has just simply agreed with you. As far as I can tell this is because he has agreed with you on the thing you seem to really care about — the rationality of religious faith. But in fact his first two sentences about teleology seem to me to support my view (the one that means I know nothing about science) that scientific modes of inquiry are not the only routes to truth. (As I understand Bryson where we disagree is over the claim that there might be rational grounding for religious belief, but we agree over the question of the epistemological hegemony of science. I stand open to correction by Bryson.)
Anyway, as I seem to be beneath your contempt, I won’t bother continuing this further. I do wonder, though, about the vehemence of some of the responses to my posts, given that my views seem to be thought of as so silly as to be not worthy of serious response. Given this, why respond at all?
Sorry, just started working again and hard to keep track of what I need to on the blogs. But, the above is an example of contextual error. We are talking about things that have a valid effect on everyone, not personal opinion. I discussed this, either here, or someplace else, once before. The merely fact that **you** think that, “Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti are beautiful pieces of music”, is meaningless to anyone else. I had a friend in highschool that was tone deaf and possibly had some other glitch, whose reaction to Bach would have been, “Ugh! What’s that noise?”, because he literally couldn’t understand the emotional context of “any” piece of music. There is some evidence to suggest that some people’s brains may be wired in such a way as to make it nearly, or even totally, impossible for them to experience an emotional sense of spirituality, in any context. Arguments for Gods to such people are as meaningless to them as music was to my friend. And of course, as with any variation in brain wiring and chemistry, if there exists someone on one end the the spectrum, you will generally have the largest number lumped some place in the middle, but also have some people who are so “spiritual” that they can’t stub their toe with seeing the divine hand of what ever gods/spirits they believe in at work.
Your stance is meaningless to anyone that doesn’t agree with it, since its has no non-personal context. While you don’t obviously subscribe to the nuttiest version of ID, you still inadvertently promote it by association, thus aiding and abetting the dishonesty. The problem, which you seem to miss, is that you can’t unhijack terms like ID. The most abnoxious and disingenuous definition “becomes” the definition for some terms. The existence of other forms is totally irrelevant to 99% of the people listening. Its like trying to argue with someone in the US that you mean “cigarette” when using the term “fag”. The fact that it doesn’t mean the same thing at all in some places is absolutely, completely and totally irrelevant, outside the context and location where it “is” used to mean something different. ID in the US, and most any place else that has been following the false controvesy and fake debates, means something **very** specific, and its *not* the more benign and generally pointless (to anyone that doesn’t subscribe to it) definition you *want* it be mean.
People are reacting badly because you are making two serious errors, 1) a category error, where you try to insist that what is “only” your personal experience has objective meaning to anyone else, in the same way science does and 2) an error of wishful thinking, in they you seem to think you can salvage the term ID, without invariably dragging all the baggage attached to it along with it, and thus keeping the version that even you agree is rediculous alive by proxy. Even if I could, from a personal perspective, accept the possibility that your spiritual definitions made sense, I would still have to label you a fool, for failing to see the blatently obvious consequece of re-using a term which already has a specific and entirely inappropriate definition, for your intended us of it.
Number 1 Michael if you are offended I apologize. This is an internet discussion board and I think your reading more into my words than I mean.
Having said that the fact that you like this or that piece of music doesn’t occur in a vaccuum. It is a result of your neurons and such responding to a stimulus. All very natural and while we don’t yet understand how all this works yet we are on the way. To suggest that it cannot be studied and that there isn’t a natural reason that science can find is simply wrong headed.
This is not dogmatic but rather an informed opinion based on evidence being produced from cognitive studies.
I don’t think you understand science as you susbscribe to one faith of 1000’s and dogmatically assert it’s ‘rational’ or ‘logical’ validity while ignoring the fact that their is zippo evidence for it.
I treated you civilly and still do, I apologized for any misconceptions above. I don’t think you can find ‘truth’ without evidence. I think Kagehi nails this angle down below. You are certainly not contempable.
(
The mere fact that you belong to a religious system who makes a requirement believing in things that contradict what we know of the world gives Bryson the win by default. If you can’t prove your assertions or that these beliefs have any reality behind them they are de facto irrational. Hence my agreement with Bryson on Fideism.
Just because I was relatively brief and direct due to time doesn’t mean I dislike you, heck man I don’t even know you. Be realistic.:-) I just find your arguments lacking a logical base.
From this article it does sound that Ratzi may go with the I.D. story.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9877&feedId=online-news_rss20
Just a matter of if he listens to scientists or philosophers.
Uber:
Looking over the past posts, I see that you were relatively civil in your responses to me, though I don’t see “This is the kind of BS people pull out” and “you simply don’t understand science” as the paradigms of rational discourse.
Your evidence that I don’t understand science is that I am a Catholic. As far as I can tell, that’s it.
I’m not a scientist. There are, however, Catholic scientists. For example: Stephen Barr, theoretical physics, University of Delaware, who has published a number of pieces criticizing Cardinal Schonborn on evolution. And Ken Miller, biologist, Brown, who has already been named on this thread. And many others. (I know some personally, but don’t want to name them without permission.)
I suppose none of them understand science either. I wonder how they got their PhDs and research appointments? Blind luck, I suppose.
On the beauty of Mahler’s music — “beauty” does not mean “what I like.” Quite possibly I am not sufficiently eduacted and like lots of ugly things. In my view, you have changed the question to make it fit the idea that it can be answered scientifically, just as I thought you would.
Micheal, as you know, I’m sympathetic, but I have to concur with kagehi’s point with respect to usage of ‘ID’. That well is hopelessly poisoned, and attempting to resurrect it in some fashion in a scientific context is vain.
As far as the aesthetic argument you raise, I have to agree with the others that in principle there is no reason why the effects of listening to music on the brain and on perception can not be studied scientifically. I do have my doubts that the quality of the experience is reducible in that way, and have on occasion been shredded here for that conviction. This skepticism should never be used, however, as the sole justification for not pursuing a research program, as a ‘science stopper.’
And, let’s be real, OK? Scientists have good reason to be wary of any pronouncements, Catholic or otherwise, that seem to cast the wretched ID movement in a favorable light.
Let’s not quibble about terms. Let’s recognize that appeals to supernaturalism has no place in science, draw the line and honor the boundary, regardless of one’s affiliation.
Sincerely….Scott
Fair enough, as mentioned I was being direct and was short on time. I felt your answers where simply not good hence the BS comment. I will try to be kinder in my hasty replies in the future.
No sir. That is incorrect. I think it is quite possible to be any faith and understand science. As I read your comments you seemed to be making statements to the effect that your faith could somehow be rational or even mesh with the processes of science. If I missread you that is my fault I was reading quickly but if not then I stand by mu assertion and agree with the fideism comment previously made. Your faith and what it asks are not possible without compartmentalizing.
Your moving the goalposts.
I have talked with Ken Miller and find his science quite good and his views on religion muddled and , well, goofy. But I like him a great deal and he practices good science.
No, I think they understand science just fine. But even they go off the tracks when they try to fit their childhood faith into the processes of science. All your doing is proving you can be a scientist and even do good science while practicing a faith. I agree with you here. But that doesn’t mean that science is helping the faith, but rather that they are seperate and distinct in the users mind.
Well your view is simply wrong. The question as mentioned is not out of the realm of science simply because your brain and it’s functioning components aren’t. Why do you think you like what you like? Because of an invisible fairy on a wheel in your head? No it’s because neurons and neural nets are wired a certain way and some things work for you and not others.
Scott Hatfield:
I in no way proposed a “science stopper”. I only wanted to provide examples of questions that might be answered by means *other* than scientific investigation (when I was asked “what other method is there?” I provided a list of questions that I thought would be most appropriately answered in some other way — even if they could be answered by science, if they can also be answered in some other way, then that proves my point, but in fact I really don’t see what scientific research program is going to be generated by trying to answer some of them — and I do think that, for example, operationalizing “trustworthiness” in order to study it scientifically ends up distorting the meaning of the concept of trust, just as the proposed approach to the question of beauty ends up distorting the concept of the beautiful, as I suggest below).
I agree completely that “there is no reason why the effects of listening to music on the brain and on perception can not be studied scientifically.” In fact, I am quite certain such investigations are going on as we speak. And they may — probably will — produce useful results.
However, I do not agree that these are investigations into the nature of beauty, or that they could help answer the question whether Mahler’s music is beautiful. Beauty is not, I think, in the brain of the beholder.
As to ID, perhaps you are right about poisoned words. However, the words “intelligence” and “design” had a meaning before they were hijacked by the ID crowd, and it must be possible to use *some* words to convey this meaning.
The worry I have is that in giving up the phrase “intelligent design” I will be seen to have given up the concept that *I* want to express using this.
Of course appeals to supernaturalism have no place in science. The argument has been about whether this means they have no place in meaningful discourse at all.
Thanks for your comments, Michael
Uber: I don’t think that the question of why I like what I like is outside the bounds of science.
I just think that isn’t the same as the question of what is beautiful.
On Ken Miller: as I understand him he *agrees* with me that faith and science can mesh rationally. He doesn’t think he has to compartamentalize. His book is titled “Finding Darwin’s God: a Scientist’s Search for *Common Ground* between God and Evolution,” after all. Ergo, by your argument, he doesn’t understand science. (I could say the same thing about Stephen Barr, or John Polkinghorne.)
Unless someone can show that anything “supernatural” exists as something other than a human concept what place does it have?
Michael,
I have discussed this first hand with Ken Miller and read his book. I would say to you the same as I said to him, he is compartmentalizing. I will also add in my conversations he didn’t say he wasn’t. He was answering the question of whether evolution fit into his theology not whether his theology was rational.
There is no way around this. If you think a dead man came back to life you are not being rational. There is nothing rational about it. If you think the Pope is magially infallible you are not being rational. If you think locals exist magically outside the realm of science you are not being rational.
good grief it’s exactly the same. You think something is beautiful based on the neurons and pathways in your brain. How else do you?
Steve Watson: The way I’d put it is that the current pope is illustrating how one can be a creationist and not a “biblical literalist”.
False Prophet: From what I can tell, the CC (and the nominally secular governments of many Latin American countries) still thinks of the liberation theologians as communists, amazingly. I heard a RC bishop from Guatemala speak here in Montreal once, and he said, with a smile, that he’d done X masses, and this and that for the church, but as soon as he asks about the poor being abused by multinational corporatitons, the military, etc. he is immediately branded a communist.
Michael Kremer: The continual creation view I’ve heard before. Unfortunately, it is probably formally (or was at least) heretical, because it makes god directly responsible for evil. (Of course, that’s in the bible – Isaiah 45:7 – but ignored by most Christians and Jews.) It also makes god wasteful, as 90%+ of all species who have ever been are extinct, etc. It is also scientifically dubious, because it makes no sense to speak of being “outside the universe”. That “discernable purpose” thing is also scientifically nonsensical – there is no such thing.
SteveC:
Your comment cuts to the heart of the matter. I agree with you in one sense, but I might disagree in another sense. Let me explain things as I see it. Clearly, appeals to the supernatural aren’t allowed in science; therefore, speaking as a representative of the scientific community it would be incorrect for a Ken Miller or a Frances Collins to claim that one can reason one’s self to belief in any god, much less the personal God of the Bible.
For the record, (and this is where we might part company), I think Miller(“Finding Darwin’s God”) does a good job of side-stepping that pitfall. His book does not so much represent nature as he understands it as providing evidence for God, but instead argues that it is consistent with his personal understanding of God. Collins, on the other hand, seems to argue from the insufficiency of certain scientific explanations to the supernatural, and I think that’s clearly a no-no.
Scott
I agree with you Scott. In my talk with him I got almost exactly that from him(Miller).
Uber: (1) On Ken Miller: Here is a quotation from the conclusion of his book — “Each of the great Western monotheistic traditions sees God as truth, love, and knowledge. This should mean that each and every increase in our understanding of the natural world is a step toward God and not, as many people assume, a step away. If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us. As a scientist and as a Christian, that is exactly what I believe. True knowledge comes only from a combination of faith and reason.” (p. 267)
So Miller thinks that faith and reason work *together* to produce knowledge. (Read on from there. He thinks science “can … be enriched and informed from its contact with the values and principles of faith.” etc.) I don’t see how he can do this and compartmentalize. This is not a NOMA view. I actually have met Ken Miller as well — I attended a two-day seminar on evolution and religion that he ran several years ago. I came away with the idea that he didn’t want to compartmentalize.
(2) On music and beauty: Of course I *think* something is beautiful based on the neurons and pathways in my brain. But that is not the same as saying that it *is* beautiful. Again, I might think that it is beautiful when it is actually ugly.
Really, your view depends on a subjectivism about beauty which is not a scientific claim but a philosophical one (the idea that beauty is relative to the beholder). You certainly wouldn’t propose investigating whether the earth’s orbit is round or elliptical by studying the neural circuits in my brain, would you? Yet of course, my thinking that the earth’s orbit is elliptical is a matter of the neural circuits in my brain.
So, what remains between us in a philosophical disagreement about whether beauty is objective or subjective.
(3) On the resurrection, etc: this raises another huge issue, that of miracles. I won’t try to address it here but only note that Christian tradition teaches that here we cannot rely on reason alone but also revelation. Whether my beliefs here are rational depends on epistemological issues about the relative epistemic value of experience and testimony, among other things.
Keith Douglas:
(1) The idea that God not only creates the universe but sustains and conserves it at every moment is not only not heretical, it is as orthodox as can be. The identification of conservation with continuous creation is theologically disputed, but I don’t think I exactly committed myself to it.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 301: “With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves. He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end.” See also Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 54 “God preserves his Creation in being and sustains it” and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 104, Article 1, “Both reason and faith bind us to say that creatures are kept in being by God.”)
(2) Of course this raises the problem of evil, another problem that is too complex to try to deal with here.
(3) The Isaiah passage you mentioned is translated using “evil” in the King James but in other ways in other translations (“adversity,” “calamity,” “disaster” etc).
Scott Hatfield:
You say “speaking as a representative of the scientific community it would be incorrect for a Ken Miller or a Frances Collins to claim that one can reason one’s self to belief in any god, much less the personal God of the Bible.” I agree if this means that it would be incorrect to claim that the methods of science lead to the conclusion that there is a god (let alone the God of the Bible). I disagree if the claim is that there is no sense of “reason” or “rationality” according to which one can rationally assert that God exists. I think in this I am in agreement with Ken Miller. Here is a quote from a 2005 op-ed posted at his webpage: “Like many other scientists who hold the Catholic faith, I see the Creator’s plan and purpose fulfilled in our universe. I see a planet bursting with evolutionary possibilities, a continuing creation in which the Divine providence is manifest in every living thing. I see a science that tells us there is indeed a design to life. And the name of that design is evolution.” (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/catholic/op-ed-krm.html My emphasis.)
Michael:
I think we’re splitting hairs here, but are essentially in agreement. Scientists do not rule out interpretations of data a priori that happen to be consonant with anyone’s religious understanding. They do, however, exclude from science (correctly) any claim that relies upon the supernatural.
Therefore, scientists can interact with the religious sphere as scientists, pointing to the degree or lack of consonance between the claims of one sphere and the other, as long as they do not attempt to enlist science as endorsing any religious claim.
And (in fairness to my skeptical friends) this should be a two-way street: the believer should be willing to consider the ways in which naturalistic explanations of phenomena and their investigation bear upon the truth claims of religion. The believer can interact with the scientific sphere as a believer, examining the nature of the interaction, but they should not attempt to invoke religion as a test for the validity of any scientific claim.
There is no way you can think reason and rationality lead you to the “creator”.
You’re no arguing the evolution leads you to god. That it is in fact god’s design.
That’s just flat out and completely backward.
Steve_C: Well, I am not alone in my backwardness — not even among the intelligent. At least one distinguished scientist seems to agree with me. It wasn’t I who said that evolution is god’s design. It was Ken Miller — I was quoting him.
Scott: Yes, we are essentially in agreement. Thanks.
I know you’re not alone, you were agreeing with him.
Doesn’t mean it’s any less backward.
Michael:
“So Miller thinks that faith and reason work *together* to produce knowledge. (Read on from there. He thinks science “can … be enriched and informed from its contact with the values and principles of faith.” etc.) I don’t see how he can do this and compartmentalize. This is not a NOMA view.”
No, it is not. Miller uses cosmological and teleological argument of the type we already discussed as being incompatible with science. A critical review of his “Finding Darwin’s God. A Scientist’s Search For Common Ground Between God and Evolution.” is found in http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Yin.cfm :
“As we see from the above quotations, Miller’s goal is beyond the simple thesis that one may accept the evolution theory and still keep religious faith – a thesis which is considered by scores of scientists and laymen alike as non-controversial – it is to provide arguments in favor of faith based on the veracity of evolution theory! In this ambitious endeavor Miller would probably find not too many co-travelers.”
I find attempts to base religion in science, such as Collins’ or Miller’s, fundamentally misguided. But as Rossow at talkreason I don’t see that there need to be any conflict between specifically evolution or religion either.
“Whether my beliefs here are rational depends on epistemological issues about the relative epistemic value of experience and testimony, among other things.”
Since rational ideas must be compatible with observation, it constrains rationality, not epistemology. The standard for observational knowledge is science. Testimonials aren’t admissible due to the errors. (Description, bias, generality, repetability, observability.) The practice that comes in closest contact with testimonials is the relatively neutral field of evidencebased medicine, and even here it is found to be useless. None of the level of evidence accepts it.
“In contrast, patient testimonials, case reports, and even expert opinion have little value as proof because of the placebo effect, the biases inherent in observation and reporting of cases, difficulties in ascertaining who is an expert, and more.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine )
He is simply wrong then. You have to compartmentalize. It simply isn’t possible to be rational any other way. And I didn’t just meet him but had a big discussion with him on this very matter.
You are misunderstanding my point here. Of course it’s subjective and that is why it’s not a factual claim. But the reason you find something beautiful is entirely within the realm of science. I can possibly understand the why and how of you liking a particular painting. But as to whether the painting is good or not it is subjective so we agree there. But this isn’t the same as religion and science being complementary and frankly I find it a weak attempt at reconciling an argument. Religion makes irrational factual claims.
Your beliefs here are entirely irrational. They don’t depend on the things you list at all. And even if I grant you your assertions both would work against you in this case.
Aren’t these also not good events? If one caused them could not one said to be evil and justly so? I think you have a weak apologetic attempt here, but there is no other kind as your defending an irrational idea.
This is simply a logical fallacy. Stating if so and so is smart and thinks like me then he and I must be correct. No, it means your both perhaps wrong. I could list the 90%+ of NAS scientists who are atheists but they wouldn’t make me correct either.
It is not rational to think locales exist that you can only go to when you are dead. That someone doing something wrong 2-3 million years ago caused man to need God to sacrifice himself to himself to fix it is not rational. That the pope is infallible is not rational. Only by an accident of birth can these things be made to seem rational and other religions false.
Almost, but not quite. Your next paragraph gets it right with “little” value, but the difference between “little” and “no” value is important. The types of articles you cite are considered lowest in the hierarchy of evidence, but they are present. In a best-evidence approach, if a clinician has a patient with a difficult condition (nothing else is working), and no solid evidence but a successful case study, she’ll often use the case study as a basis to try to replicate that individual success, but with no illusions that it is strong evidence with a high confidence level.
Torbjorn Larsson:
what I mean by “testimony” is accepting something because you have been told it by another, rather than because you have observed it yourself or confirmed it with observations.
Every time you read a report of an experiment and accept the conclusions drawn from the author’s observations, unless you repeat the experiment yourself, you have accepted something on the basis of testimony. This happens in science all the time and science couldn’t possibly progress without it. Of course the experiment is supposed to be repeatable, but in most cases you know whether the experiment is repeatable or not only the basis of others’ say-so as well.
Of course there are standards concerning what testimony to accept and what not to. But we haven’t really gone into that here.
Uber: On Ken Miller, the question is, does he understand science or not? Remember the way this bit of the argument started. You said I just don’t understand science. I said that if that was so, there are scientists, like Ken Miller, who don’t understand science. You said, no, he compartmentalizes. Now you say, OK, he doesn’t compartmentalize, and so he’s wrong.
Now: does he understand science or not? If he does, is it just possible that I understand science as well? If not, then mustn’t you admit that scientists can fail to understand what they are doing? And then — what privileges your understanding of science over theirs?
Same point about my “backwardness” — I am just trying to get you all to admit that not all scientists agree with you about what science can and cannot achieve.
Now — I want some sort of *argument* that you all are right about the scope of science. Without such an argument, your claims really are just dogmatic, as I said earlier.
Uber:
On Beauty:
We *don’t* agree that beauty is subjective. I think it’s objective. I think that’s part of the way our concept of beauty works. That’s why I keep saying I could think something is beautiful while it’s actually ugly.
And this isn’t a *scientific* dispute but a philosophical one.
Anyway, let’s leave that aside. You said all my examples earlier could be treated scientifically. I’m not convinced about beauty but we now know where the disagreement lies. I don’t see it for my other examples either. How do you propose to use the methods of science to determine:
What were the cultural meanings of breastfeeding in the middle ages?
whether virtue is its own reward?
I venture to say that you will engage in what (I will think to be) reinterpretation of “meaning,” “virtue,” “reward” etc in proposing methods to study these.
Explain to me how the supernatural is testable or how it interacts with the natrual world.
Anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists do this all the time. They look at what the evidence is, construct an interpretation based on the evidence, and proceed to debate conflicting interpretations, attempting to resolve them based on that evidence.
As a historian, one might look to see what written evidence on the subject exists; as an anthropologist, one might look at current cultural meanings in cultures that trace back to the Middle Ages in Europe, and see what commonalities and differences may imply about the basal culture, etc. It’s not a mysterious process, though it’s not one that lends itself easily to RCTs (randomized controlled trials), either.
I have never said he doesn’t compartmentalize. I said he does, your missreading me.
Oh gosh, He understands science when he is doing science. But he is not carrying it’s mindset over to other areas of his life, as an example his childhood religion. As such he makes irrational arguments to try and support one with the other. And it is clear he has no problem placing evolution into his belief structure. However this has no bearing on the nature or rationality of that structure.
Nothing in the field of science, but if they aren’t using the ideas and methodology of science in other areas it’s ok to call BS.
Of course, but it doesn’t matter what they say but what they can prove and how they go about this.
Actually I see you as making a claim here. I give you a point, albeit a weak one on the subjective nature of beauty, but I wouldn’t ever conflate that with a truth claim. But as mentioned we could find the how and why.
There is no dogma in the claim that you need evidence to support your claims. Religion is the exact opposite of this. I think your trying to conflate the two when in fact they are polar opposites in function.
Those kinds of questions bug me — they reveal a deep failure to understand what is meant by science.
Do they think the proper way to learn about medieval attitudes towards breastfeeding is to have a seance, eat some mushrooms and wait for your spirit animal to appear in a vision and explain it, pray to God to smack your cerebral cortex with a lightning bolt of revealed knowledge?
Of course the only reasonable way to get those answers is to ask the questions of the natural world and use natural methods.
That is absurd. I haven’t changed a thing. I think Raven T above answered this pretty well. I just can’t quite figure out why you think science has nothing to say on these ideas. Yet you think about them with an organic brain that functions entirely naturally.
To compare the ‘testimony’ that passes muster in religious circles to that as per peer reviewed science is simply ridiculous.
When people see the virgin mary in bread is that testimony worthy of respect?
What seperates that testimony from a Pope who says this or that because it was revealed to him?
Or even more so something said to someone 1000’s of years ago?
RavenT:
I don’t disagree with you about the kinds of methods that might be used to answer the question about breastfeeding’s meanings. I certainly don’t think the processes involved are mysterious, and I never said so.
But I do want to avoid too close an assimilation of these methods to those of natural science. I think a lot is covered up by way of important differences in calling history a “social science.” You make part of my point for me at the end. Look at what you say more carefully.
First you paint a picture that makes it look as if historians are doing something really closely analogous to natural scientists:
“They look at what the evidence is, construct an interpretation based on the evidence, and proceed to debate conflicting interpretations, attempting to resolve them based on that evidence.”
Then you proceed to the example. But in this example: what kind of data do you have? Where do they come from? And how are conflicts adjudicated?
Data: “written evidence” — but this can only be understood via a process of interpretation and translation from a language not in current use (even if related to current languages) — a process that is not really very much like observation in a controlled experiment.
“current cultural meanings” — very similar point.
Adjudication of conflicts: certainly not through formulating theories and making testable predictions, in many cases.
PZ Myers: I don’t know what you mean by “natural methods” or by “asking these questions of the natural world”. It seems to me “natural methods” is being stretched pretty thin here.
Of course I don’t think you’d answer these questions by holding a seance. You’d answer them using *historical* methods, and again I see in some of the discussion above — to which I was responding — too facile an assimilation of all methods to the methods of natural science.
In any case, your view about methods of inquiry is a *philosophical* view — it’s just positivism — and our disagreement is not a scientific one, but philosophical.
It’s the glitch. It’s gotta be the glitch.
How can the supernatural be perceived?
Uber: if you call BS whenever someone says something on other than scientific grounds, you should be prepared to call BS a lot of the time.
Your dogmatism is precisely in your being willing to call BS in this way without giving any argument for why it’s OK to call BS.
I wasn’t trying to argue here that religious faith is based on reason(even though I think that’s true to some extent). I just wanted to get a foot in the door, so to speak, to get you to admit that *something* could be based on reason without having been arrived at by “scientific methods” (a concept on which I am now losing my grip since it seems to be identified by some of you with “all rational methods” whereas I simply don’t see the overarching unity of all the things that look to me like “rational methods” — of course it’s a tautology that rational beliefs are reached by rational methods). If you give me my foot in the door we could begin to discuss when it’s OK to call BS and when not.
Oh, and on Ken Miller: I thought you admitted he wasn’t compartmentalizing when you said “He’s wrong then. You have to comparmentalize.” That was too quick of me. But at least in the passages I’ve quoted above he seems to me be *saying* that he doesn’t compartmentalize and doesn’t have to. The review quoted by Larsson confirms me in this.
So my only point is that scientists can disagree about this issue, and that you haven’t really argued for why compartmentalization is necessary.
Steve_C: “How can the supernatural be perceived?”
By becoming incarnate.
Hey folks, it’s been fun, but I have to stop now and get back to work.
And PZ, thanks for hosting this in spite of our disagreements. I wish your daughter a happy birthday and wish you best of luck with your basement.
Wow. Incarnate. That’s your answer. Seriously?
So how do you know when it’s become incarnate?
Michael,
With all do respect this makes me doubt alot of what your saying:
If you can’t see the obvious fallacy in that or this:
Then it’s time this discussion wraps up.
And I told you why calling BS is acceptable. No evidence to the contrary. It’s not dogmatic at all.
I would consider reason a tool of the scientific process and not seperate from it. Hence you can base ideas on rationality but in this area the majority religion fails to meet even the remostest of criteria.
Oh yes I have. It is not possible to think locales exist that you can only visit after you die and then pretend your being A. rational B. scientific in your mindset.
There is not one shred of evidence for these locales. None, nothing. Not one shred of evidence that says humans can live on after they die.
To believe such ideas or that your faith out of 1000’s is the correct one requires you to set aside the methodology of science and reason and accept ideas that have no rational validity.
If you think the Pope is infallible you are not rational. There is no way that can be made rational without giving oneself over to a myriad of unproven and frankly silly notions.
I agree with the rest here. You don’t understand science. The historical methods use methodology much the same as do the methods of natural science. Science is a process and this is where you seem to get lost. It reduces the probabilities of what is true from what is not about the world using a particular methodology and a very effective one at that.
RavenT:
“Your next paragraph gets it right with “little” value, but the difference between “little” and “no” value is important. The types of articles you cite are considered lowest in the hierarchy of evidence, but they are present.”
Hmm. This is confusing. The Wikipedia article says:
“Systems to stratify evidence by quality have been developed, such as this one by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force:
* Level I: Evidence obtained from at least one properly designed randomized controlled trial.
* Level II-1: Evidence obtained from well-designed controlled trials without randomization.
* Level II-2: Evidence obtained from well-designed cohort or case-control analytic studies, preferably from more than one center or research group.
* Level II-3: Evidence obtained from multiple time series with or without the intervention. Dramatic results in uncontrolled trials might also be regarded as this type of evidence.
* Level III: Opinions of respected authorities, based on clinical experience, descriptive studies, or reports of expert committees.”
Certainly Level III cites case reports (clinical experience) and expert opinion, but neither this nor you mention patient testimonial. Testimonial was that I was discussing.
Michael:
“Every time you read a report of an experiment and accept the conclusions drawn from the author’s observations, unless you repeat the experiment yourself, you have accepted something on the basis of testimony.”
This isn’t testimony as in hearsay, this is documentation and analysis. You can’t conflate them.
“Of course the experiment is supposed to be repeatable, but in most cases you know whether the experiment is repeatable or not only the basis of others’ say-so as well.”
It is part of a method. No man can repeat all of science himself. Accepting teaching, documentation, analysis, peer review, and consensus are parts, sometimes for convenience, of methods of knowledge, they aren’t hearsay.
“Now — I want some sort of *argument* that you all are right about the scope of science.”
In so far that you or Miller are using cosmological and teleological argument you are discussing supernatural action, or evidence for it, which are considered not to be part of science. (And so you are compartmentalizing.) This is so since it has been found to be useless or harmful to include such hypotheses. Other dualisms, such as vitalism or souls, have been debunked instead. There is nothing dogmatic about these processes, since nothing was assumed apriori.
“We *don’t* agree that beauty is subjective. I think it’s objective.”
Beauty is commonly attributed to theories of science. However, no one seems to be able to come up with a clear definition even on such welldefined objects.
Michael, I have to thank you for the best laugh I’ve had in quite a while. I have often heard the social sciences criticized as too “soft”; you are the first person I have ever heard argue that they are too “hard” sciency for your taste.
Heh. That’s a good one.
Hi, Torbjörn–
By “testimonial”, I considered you meant a case study. Certainly some outcomes are more measureable than others, but if a patient reports pain relief, absent a Pain-O-Meter(TM) to give a reading, we just have to accept the patient’s word for it. So a case study can be as little as “the patient reported improvement in symptom X by treatment Y”, with, of course, the corresponding low confidence in the results.
I was going by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine’s hierarchy, which has 5 levels, including your III as their V. That’s the beauty of standards, you know; there are so many to choose from.
RavenT: I have no idea how you would get that out of what I wrote. I must learn to write more clearly.
My point was that (a) those who criticize the social sciences as too “soft” are right that they are (sometimes) “soft” but (b) they are wrong to think this is a criticism — the soft can be as reasonable as the hard, in its own way.
Uber: you wrote that “if they aren’t using the ideas and methodology of science in other areas it’s ok to call BS.” As far as I’m concerned that’s false. You say you’ve given me reason for this: they don’t have any evidence for their views. False again — not all evidence is scientific evidence.
We disagree. OK, you’re right about one thing, it’s time to wrap up, as this going nowhere.
GH: I’m not lost on the point that science is a process. And so is history a process. And they are each methodical. That doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Never answered my question of how something “becomes” incarnate?
Or how you would know that something is incarnate.
Here’s where I got that:
There is an important distinction here, and an unimportant distinction, and in my opinion, you are giving too much weight to the wrong one, and not enough weight to the right one.
In that they have to deal with facts that can be verified by other researchers (“Informant X reports that the cultural meaning of breastfeeding in her culture is Y, Informant Z agrees with Informant X, Informant A considers both X and Z to be totally wrong, and Dr. B confirms my interpretations of the informants’ reports after reviewing the tapes), there is an audit trail in the social sciences. Just because it isn’t a prospective RCT doesn’t mean that there is no audit trail for an independent examiner to look at and trace how they came to their conclusions. Certainly, it weakens the evidence in comparison, but it does not render it therefore random and meaningless. If Dr. B. said the first anthropologist was totally misinterpreting the informants, the burden of proof would be on Dr. B. to show the first anthropologist’s error to bolster B.’s interpretation. B. doesn’t just get to say “Is not!” without having to show why. You totally deprecate that connection between the social and natural sciences, in my opinion.
In my opinion, you then conflate two different things by privileging the fact that we can’t do RCTs. By saying that we can’t do Level I evidence in the social sciences, and therefore everything is up for grabs, you conflate it with religious belief, where it is perfectly legitimate for you to say Jesus is God’s son, and me to say “Is not!”, and neither one of has to–or even can–produce an independent audit trail verifiable by an external observer for how we came to our respective and conflicting conclusions.
Then I think you devalue evidence to the point that is has no meaning whatsoever. A religious person has not one iota of evidence that would A. to support their claims and B. to preference their belief over that of another religion.
There is however plenty of contrary evidence which works directly against their claims.
To conflate that type of ‘evidence’ with what is necessary to be taken seriously as evidence in any scientific endeavor is beyond understanding.
But what type of evidence wouldn’t be scientific? If it’s not is it evidence of anything at all?
And please answer Steves question, as I am curious to see your response as well.
Also I’ll ask do you find it reasonable to find the man who is the Pope infallible?
I don’t see the difference between:
1. Someone find a new bug, classifies it and describes it, then someone else looks at the same bug, or finds another of hte same type and looks at it, etc.
2. Someone finds a clay pot, classifies it and describes it, then someone else later looks at the same pot, or finds another of the same type, etc.
Because no one is going to make new pots, the later process is invalid? No! It the same process, with the same odds of error and the same correction.
Now, theological ‘research’ is not the same process. Case in point Rhamsis + Moses. The connection can be summed up like so:
1. Rhamsis had to the the right pharoe, because its the only one that made sense.
2. We are pretty sure of the dates, so the Exodis had to happen in that period.
3. We are sure no one would want people knowing they messed up that bad, therefor there must have been some big conspiracy to erase all the evidence.
4. Everything that happened had to be a miracle, but if not, maybe someone forgot to buy a vowel and it was the “reed sea” instead.
Um.. Ok..
But then there is the special (which has some of its own sloppy thinking in it..) a few nights ago. The process for it goes like this:
1. Lake Nyos – Blue lake turns blood red, white vapor comes off it, everyone low to the ground dies. Things like frogs tend to try to get away as soon as they water starts to go funny.
2. It was common practice in early Egypt for most family members, including girls to sleep high in the houses, on shelves, etc. Only the priviledged, such as first born got cots low to the ground.
3. During at least on period, which no one bothered to look at, the nobles and the peasant types lived in radically different areas. A bit more mixing happened later. The place the nobles lived what near the water. The others lived beyond the point where carbon dioxide would reach before settling.
4. Looking at the geology of the period, now that you are looking at the right period, you have quakes, volcanic activity and a sea wall breech. Hmm. Volcanos produce mixed fire/ice in some cases and a big enough sea wall breech would create one heck of a psunami, possibly a big enough one to let people walk across the exposed shallows.
5. This new date **doesn’t** contradict the genetic and archeological evidence suggesting that Moses’ people where in the ME centuries before Rhamsis, but it does muck up other “Biblical” dates.
6. Some artifacts from the new time period imply they event did happen, though they are a few in number.
7. There is some suggestion that not everyone crossing the red sea followed Moses into the desert, but may have ended up in other place (maybe they didn’t fall for the, “I warned pharoe something bad would happen and look frogs!”, story).
So, by ignoring all contradictions, constantly looking in the wrong places for evidence of a vast conspiracy to erase the evidence, and generally scoffing at people trying to find natural explainations for the things that happened, the religious archeologist got “no where”. Someone looks at real geological evidence, scientific explainations for what might have really happened, etc., then starts doing real arhceology on artifacts from what **everyone** insists is the wrong time period. Bam! Suddenly they find something… Not that it helped the people living near Nyos, who “might” still be alive if Moses had known about water turning blood red, carbon dioxide gas, drift patterns of such fumes and what every frog in the region deciding it didn’t want to stay in the water meant, instead of just telling everyone that lived a mile or more from the source of the poison to paint bloody marks on their doors to protect them from something that simple geography kept them from being exposed to in the first place.
In the end, none of it is outside scientific explaination and the only grounds to claim that it wasn’t coincidence is if you “assume” he predicted the specific events, then wrote about what really took place, instead of doing what “every” modern prophet and psychic does today, and instead claim, once they are sure no one can prove otherwise, that it happened the way they claimed. Its real easy to make prophecies “after the fact”, especially when the only witnesses are either dead, or on the other side of a large body of water.
In the end, the science proves the history, the religion couldn’t even point in the right direction to look and none of it proves that it was anything more profound that if someone had made up some story today about Mount St. Helens and claimed their “predictions” where divinely inspired, well after the event, and with them as the sole source of proof about what was said.
Reproducible doesn’t just mean “through experiment”, it means, “some sort of secondary evidence, whether it be a repetition of the experiment, or simply other evidence of the veracity of the prior evidence.” Though, such “soft” evidence generally requires more alternative sources, since its not more or less immediately reproducible. But it “is” still something that can be touched, not purely subjective opinion or experience, which can’t generally be verified outside the person that had it. Two different people can examine the same scroll. Two different people can run the same test. Two different people “can’t” describe, without some collusion and prior discussion of what it is “supposed” to look like, the three inch invisible pixie they claim is standing on the top of a book case, nor anything else that lies outside of the tangible world.
This is why science has on occation had the entertaining effect of proving some Biblical places and events, but invariably manages in the process to invalidate some specifics, fails to prove acts that people “claim” to perform, but no evidence can be found for and sometimes blows huge holes in any literal interpretation of it, while the Bible has, at best, been about as useful in identifying specific historical places and details as the mythology of the city of Troy, the Seer at Delphi, etc. It an point you at something to look for, but its often completely useless at anything other than confirming you found it, once you start looking. Which, places it on “identical” footing with literally every other theological work ever written, which includes “anything” about the geography of places they describe. And not one of which, by the mere finding of the place, automatically prove Zues, or anyone else.
Uber: I think we should stop this discussion. If my views are beyond understanding there is no point in continuing with you.
As to Steve_C’s question, answering it will no doubt raise another one. The infinite loop has to stop somewhere. I’ve got other things to do, I don’t know about you.
So I will answer the question briefly and then STOP. I *won’t* respond to the next one. If that means you and Steve_C “win” this little debate, OK.
Mind you, you never answered my question about what works of theology you’ve read (when you said “what makes you think I haven’t”). So you can answer that one and we’ll be even.
Steve_C: You asked how I would know if God was incarnate.
Seeing is believing: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1: 14) (Seeing: Like looking into another’s eyes and seeing — knowing — his concern for me.)
In my own case I encounter God in the flesh in his Church, the community of believers, which is the mystical Body of Christ.
How would God become incarnate? Well, that should be no problem, He’s omnipotent after all. But in fact he accomplished this in the birth of a little baby boy more than two thousand years ago.
(So there: a real nut case, you’ll say. Well, I wonder why you’ve bothered with me all this time in that case.)
So, again, I absolutely promise not to answer any more posts on this thread. Bye!
Oh ok, I somehow owe you and answer? I was educated at a Baptist university. I read and had to study more theology than I care to remember while there. I also have more than a few titles here on my bookshelves. How is giving you my bibliography going to matter a wit? Or are you one of those types who thinks if only people would read this or that theology they would understand? The answer is no, I find logical holes and vacous arguments in any and all that I have read. But I’ll continue reading anyway.
This is about what I figured passed as revelant evidence to you. Words on a page written by a stranger 1000’s of years ago. Exactly how, by listing that verse, does it prove anything at all. Even to another believer it doesn’t prove anything, you have to have faith in the book that has the words and then the concept itself.
And it’s the same for muslims, jews, hindus, zeus worshippers, and on and on. Only the name of the diety changes.
The fact that you call that a ‘fact’ is more telling than anything else you have written in this discussion.
I don’t think your a nut case at all. In fact we may share some common beliefs but I just don’t think it’s possible to hold a rational belief in much of what we call religion. As mentioned a fideist approach is another matter.
Uber: A number of commenters here have suggested that my views smack of fideism, perhaps because I never explicitly attempt to argue that reason unaided can lead a person to God, etc. (I think that argument is vulgar)
With that in mind, let me ask you this: in your opinion, what role (if any) could be retained to reason within religion by a fideist?
Good question Scott. My own views smack of fideism so I actually agree with you.
As to your second question, presuming I actually understand your meaning(and I’m not sure I do), are you asking what role reason plays in the religion of a fideist?
I’ll try and if I get lost please redirect me. I think most religion is irrational. I think it has plenty of emotional appeal. If I choose to believe it is with the understanding that I am doing so despite what I know to be true of the world. Anything in my religion that conflicts with what I know of this world is most likely false and not worth bothering with. When a conflict arises between my faith and reason/science I choose the latter as the former is based on little to nothing in the way of substance. But it has emotional appeal to me nonetheless.
Now reword it because I’m sure I missed it.:-)
Uber: I promised no more posts, but I did want to clarify that my last comments (about thinking I’m a nutcase) were directed at Steve_C, not you. I was answering him. Now I’ll resist temtation and not post anything substantive.
You can find much the same conception of a god who is actually the reification of an entire human community in, for example, the Albion of Blake’s personal mythology. So by what defensible intellectual standard do you decide to accept the orthodox Christian version as true and reject Blake’s? Antiquity? Popular vote? (Certainly not artistic quality, as Blake was a far better writer than St. Paul.)
RavenT, Michael:
“So a case study can be as little as “the patient reported improvement in symptom X by treatment Y”, with, of course, the corresponding low confidence in the results.”
Okay. After commenting I figured it could be something such, since the patient must have some say in what constitutes a good treatment. And now social sciences has been mentioned, something I didn’t think of. Of course, if we are discussing use of testimony, soft sciences must be considered.
Well then, in these cases testimonial are accepted. But to get back to Michael’s reasoning, which was my motivation for the comment, it is placed at the lowest (or next to lowest, it seems ;-) level of value.
And as described the use is severely restricted to constitute a basis for specific observations. It is as RavenT describes it traceable. And it is due to that we don’t have alternatives. Yet, at least in the case of EBM, we ethically and practically must arrive at an answer.
Testimony isn’t used in an openended manner to constitute a basis for general observations. Here we have much better means for evidence, and testimonial is excluded by comparison.
You got that exactly right, Torbjörn. We are coming up on the second anniversary of the death from cancer of a friend of mine. He had a particularly aggressive form of cancer, one that tends to be found in transplant recipients years after the transplant as a result of the immunosuppressive regime.
Anyway, there are about 40 or so reports total in the literature, and there are only 2 reports of any kind of survival longer than a year. So naturally when he was sick, he and his doctors chose the kind of chemotherapy that worked for those 2 people, even though 2 case studies is effectively no evidence in real terms.
But the urgency of the situation meant that he had to go with something, and in this case, 2 case studies was the best evidence available. As you say, the pressure to arrive at an answer to relieve a patient’s suffering often means you can’t wait for high-level evidence, even if such evidence is theoretically possible (it isn’t always).
Someone should say them to cast a glance on the views of reciprocal use of astrophysical-biological evolution and the mindful creatures in it, e.g.
http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/a_palindrome.htm
It is called “Palindrome view of evolution” or TTT for “The Tango Theory”, as it comes from Argentina. I think it provides a valuable route ahead in the circumstances.
…
Shermer answered the way I thought he would. No surprises.
Not a nutcase but irrational. Just like the rest of “believers”.
All you need is the bible.
So if the “virgin” mary showed up… how would she appear? Being that it
would be a supernatural occurance and one that has happened before apparently.
What other ways would the supernatural become apparent?
By the way I was raised Catholic. Confirmed and everything.
Steve, the issue is a political one: a political misreading of the known facts of nature. Correcting the misreading is serviceable to most of us, I think, save weapon-sellers maybe.
This is why I’m pointing to such “Palindrome view of evolution” or TTT, uncommented before. Late scientific developments seem de-potentiating the factual controversy, leaving political motivation in plain light.
Besides evolution, a cognate development on brain-mind relationships is summarized in
http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/Effects.htm
Such advances seem me shaking the floor to all these debates, save the politically-motivated ones.
Michael Kremer: I have it on the authority of two readers of Hebrew (including one by an Orthodox Jew) that the translation is as accurate as one could hope – it might be slightly nuanced, but the KJV is essentially correct there, they tell me. As for the orthodoxy, well, the sustaining view does make god directly responsible for evil. This is admitted in the Islamic atomist tradition where it is held there is no causation at all in the world other than the direct, repeated intervention of god to “poke” the atoms along at each time slice. This is not a problem in Islam, since as I understand they have bitten the bullet and claim that God is not good in our sense of the word, which makes the claim of omnibenevolence worthless. I suspect you will find this “occaisonalist” position formally condemned at least at some point in the past, regardless of the current claim of orthodoxy. Finally, I might add that the position in both Christian and Islamic versions is scientifically absurd, since it implies that matter is not eternal and self-perpetuating, as all science suggests it is. It is also absurd in the Islamic version because it implies a non-relational view of time, which is false. (I think a case can be made that the Christian version has the same problem, but I won’t do it here.)
And yes, scientists very often misunderstand what they are actually doing – i.e. that the writings in the philosophy of science by many practicing scientists are full of “philosophical holidays” as Bunge has called them. Of course, many philosophers have said crazy things on the same subject, too. The trick is to analyze practice, not words.
RavenT: The claim that the social sciences shouldn’t be sciencees is actually a fairly common one in many schools of thought, including various post modern positions and other views (“Wittgensteinian”, etc.) which claim (stupidly, in my view, but there you are) that scientizing leads to barbarism, etc. Even someone like Hilary Putnam apparently claimed as much, and he’s not a pomo.
It seems that at least I was right about what would come out of the Pope’s meeting with his former students:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=A0608743660C09FEB35A28905143A085
“Pope Benedict and his former doctoral students plan to publish the proceedings of their weekend seminar on evolution to promote a dialogue between faith and science on the origins of life, participants said.
The minutes, to be issued later this year, will show how Catholic theologians see no contradiction between their belief in divine creation and the scientific theory of evolution, they said after the annual closed-door meeting ended on Sunday.”
etc.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-09-03T164629Z_01_L0398191_RTRUKOC_0_US-POPE-EVOLUTION.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage3
this is funny
“Schoenborn and Benedict have said several times over the past year that intelligence in the form of God’s will played a part in creation and that neo-Darwinists who deny God any role are drawing an ideological conclusion not proven by the theory.”
“They say they use philosophical reasoning to conclude that God created the world, not arguments which intelligent design supporters claim can be proven scientifically.”