Stanley Fish is complaining about atheists again. As you might guess from the last time we went through this, his arguments are poor, and worse, are the same tired apologetics for religion we’ve all heard a thousand times before. Come on, Fish, I expect better from the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor than a warmed-over platter of scraps left by creationists!
In short, Fish’s argument is that if religion has no evidence, then evolution doesn’t have any either; if the religious rely on a Holy Book, then so do the biologists in Darwin’s Origin of Species; and everything is built on faith, science and religion alike, so criticizing faith undermines both. It’s a typical retreat into extreme relativism that we see in creationists and the religious whenever their indefensible assertions are attacked. It’s also the same strategy we all remember from grade school playgrounds, where “I am rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you” was considered an effective protective chant. At least the schoolkids didn’t usually try to back up their mantra with bible verses, though. And they have the excuse of not having earned a Ph.D. yet.
The one statement he makes that I will not entirely disagree with is that he argues that the religious also build their conclusions with reason and logic. That’s not true for the majority of religious people — the primary impetus for faith is usually indoctrination with traditions and a desire for wish-fulfillment — but I do concede that there are smart people who erect towering logical constructs to support their beliefs, and conveniently enough, it’s those clever theologians to whom the believers cling when us nasty, unsympathetic members of the reality-based community get ornery. I’m not going to waste time with that; neither was Dawkins, and one of the most common complaints against his book was that he failed to appreciate the elegant elaborations that saints and theologians had assembled.
Let’s cut right to the point Fish put in his title: the evidence.
Fish complains that people like Harris and Dawkins claim that we will someday understand the natural cognitive processes that underlie principles like altruism, but that since we don’t understand it all now, it is exactly equivalent to religious faith. In fact, his entire argument rests on this bizarre conflation of religious belief in things unseen with the confidence scientists have that they will puzzle out the unknown.
They are not the same thing. I can think of two key differences.
One is that scientific belief is not built on an acceptance of the invisible and unseen. It is the product of a demonstrable history of success, of near constant progress in increasing our understanding of the natural world. It has proven useful to dismiss the supernatural hypothesis in the lab and in fieldwork; so useful, in fact, that many of us are arguing that the antique hypothesis of supernatural entities has been an obstacle to human endeavor for millennia, and it’s time to dismiss it altogether. Meanwhile, the utility of religion has been demonstrably shrinking—it explains nothing, and has been reduced to the domain of hucksters and the traditionalists who cling to ancient hierarchies. The “faith” of scientists is not faith as Stanley Fish understands it at all: it’s more like confidence born of a distinguished record of success. Meanwhile, the faith of the religious is more like the pathetic and forlorn hope after ages of failure that some tiny scrap of vindication might be found by closing their eyes tightly and pretending that a god dwells in the darkest parts of our ignorance.
Another is that it does not postulate the invisible and unseen. When Harris and Dawkins say that someday we will understand how emotions work, or how we make moral decisions, they are not inventing homunculi that dwell in the brain, or claiming that we will track down the source of the soul — they are saying that we already understand that the brain is made of proteins and lipids and salt solutions, and that we can see how activity is modulated by its chemical nature, and that future understanding will be, must be, built on that foundation of fact. For instance, we know very well that movement is generated by patterned ionic transients across axon membranes that trigger contractility in muscles. We do not then propose that there are ghosts flicking open ion channels deeper in the brain; we propose physical mechanisms that form and vary patterns of connections between neurons in the brain, and that there are signaling pathways that affect gene transcription, and so forth. Neuroscientists have been successfully marching deeper and deeper into the operation of the brain using that assumption of physicality, and it works. The tools of the religious are dead useless and have accomplished nothing in improving our understanding, but have been handy in hobbling us.
Fish is playing word games, using an imprecision in the English language to tag disparate phenomena with the same label. He can claim that the “faith” of the scientist is the same as the faith of the pious only because he does not understand the former. Accepting religious faith is to stand still and imagine a journey through a fantasy land, while science is about walking forward on firm footing towards a destination to which we may not have arrived yet, but can see glimmering on the horizon. It simply doesn’t matter that the faith-head is using his reason and imagination to extrapolate and create his fantasy world, so exclaiming that he has a brain and is using it doesn’t rescue him. The scientist will discover something new—Fish considers that remarkable and a strong assertion, and unsupported by evidence, but it’s a commonplace consequence of using science and ignoring religion—but that isn’t a matter of “faith” at all. It’s about as remarkable as understanding that the sun will rise in the morning.
The link connects to a subscriber only page of the new York Times
[i]Fish complains that people like Harris and Dawkins claim that we will someday understand the natural cognitive processes that underlie principles like altruism, but that since we don’t understand it all now, it is exactly equivalent to religious faith.[/i]
…
[i]When Harris and Dawkins say that someday we will understand how emotions work, or how we make moral decisions, they are not inventing homunculi that dwell in the brain, or claiming that we will track down the source of the soul — they are saying that we already understand that the brain is made of proteins and lipids and salt solutions, and that we can see how activity is modulated by its chemical nature, and that future understanding will be, must be, built on that foundation of fact.[/i]
These to me are the most important aspects. The difference between science and religion in this regard is that while neither really understands the cognitive processes that underly altruism, religions pretend as if they do. Scientists say, “we don’t know, but given what we have learned, we have good reason to think we will figure it out.” Religions say, “We know that Goddidit”
To contend that these are similar is really lame.
That word, “belief,” and how easily it can be conflated with “faith,” has always been a stumbling block for me, when trying to explain or defend atheism or even secularism.
At work, I have a coworker who’s on the opposite shift from me and has a Dawkins-related printout up in his cube, and has put some strongly pro-evolution statements on his whiteboard. I’ve never really had a chance to speak with the guy, but last week I heard two other coworkers talking about him. The pair of statements that brought me out of my chair were: “but, how can you be so strongly against something [god/religion] if you don’t think it exists?” and “well, it’s just another belief system.”
I think I acquitted myself fairly well in the ensuing rhetorical brawl, but it really is hard to get people around that “everything is a belief” idea, even when the two people I was speaking with could probably best be described as flighty agnostics.
Another difference is that what the scientist has “faith” in is the possibility of an answer to a given question. But they still accept that any specific answer must be supported by reason and evidence. In contrast, what the theist has faith in is typically the specific answer itself.
By the sound of it, Professor Fish is having difficulties in distinguishing between having faith in the proposition “This question is answerable” and having faith in the proposition “This particular answer is true”.
“Like shootin’ Fish in a barrel” takes on a whole new meaning.
Wait a second, it took on that meaning the last time PZ rebuffed this guy.
Everyone has “initial unprovable assumptions.” There is no way to PROVE logic works, because we must use logic to try. There is no way to PROVE that our senses are largely reliable, because we must use our senses to gauge that reliability. Even so, we do not toss away Occam’s razor by needlessly ADDING assumptions beyond what is needed.
Besides, there is nothing especially “faithful” about those initial assumptions. Yeah, we could endlessly speculate that we’re caught in a Matrix ala the movie, or that one of Descartes’s demons is feeding lies to our brains, but as we see a more-or-less plain reality, it seems sure that any organism that couldn’t figure out basic information about its environment would not survive. It only has to be “good enough” information, but nothing that thought that up was down and down up, or dry wet and wet dry, or whatever, would survive. The evidence that our assumptions are sufficiently correct is in the fact that we exist at all, and there’s no use speculating about trickster gods and the like because there’s not a damn thing we could do that stuff anyway.
So it is TRUE that we have to have some “faith,” in logic and sensory information. But that just does not compare to believing in the mythology of desert tribes and illiterate, prescientific cultures. It’s simply not on the same plane.
PZ Myers wrote as follows:
Ages ago in Internet time, at Jason Rosenhouse’s place, I said,
This post should be required reading for any shallow thinker who claims that science is “just another religion”. Science is the absolute furthest thing from another religion.
I don’t beleve for a second that Fish is being honest. I think he knows damn well the difference between religious faith and scientific belief.
The mind-numbingly dumb word-play seems more like a desperate try to belief it himself. Quite sad and silly.
“Belief” (like many abstract words) has many meanings. A huge part of the problem is that for many people they all come down to the same thing.
I believe in God
I believe I’ll take a nap
I believe you’ll keep your promise
I believe in the perfectibility of man
I believe in fair and honest elections
I believe in equal rights for all people
Are those the same? I think not.
Moreover, are these?
I don’t believe in God
I don’t believe in gambling
I don’t believe in pre-marital sex
I don’t believe in technology
When reporters said, after the Amish school-house shooting, “The Amish don’t believe in cell phones and helicopters. Now they’re relying on them,” what did that mean?
We have no problem understanding the sentence, because we know that the Amish acknowledge the existence of the things they “don’t believe in”.
Many religious assume that an atheist’s “I don’t believe in God” is the same as the Amish person’s “I don’t believe in modern technology” – it is tantamount to saying “God exists but I find no use or value in him.”
No wonder they have problems with it.
The other key difference is that scientists must use natural explanations, while religions utilize supernatural explanations. The key problems with any supernatural explanation is that: a) there is no way to tell which is correct (no universality or objectivity) so how is the “truth” ever determined among competing explanations, and b) they are susceptible to many meme tricks (such as unsupported promises and threats) that support their propagation. Naturalistic explanations have none of these fundamental problems.
At its most basic, the “claim” that we will understand altruism as a brain process means only that we’ll keep trying to find out in the only manner possible in these matters, that is, by scientific means. I think we all understand that there might actually be phenomena that could turn out not to be explainable by human means, in this sense, by science. But we’re not going to listen when told by Egnor or Fish to desist from using the only means we have for finding out what altruism “is” in its causes and its effects.
Suppose that we knew less about altruism than we do, that for instance we didn’t know that it can be changed by circumstance and chemicals, or that it at least roughly fits the expectations for the evolution of social organisms (or that plants sometimes exhibit “altruism”). We’d still express confidence that we’ll understand altruism scientifically analogously with the way that we claim that we’ll understand subnuclear particles and gravity more fully in the future.
We can say that simply because we have the investigative and modeling skills necessary to deal with both the known and the unknown in our lives. It’s the same sort of expectation as when we look at a crime scene and note that there’s enough evidence to confidently predict that the perpetrator will be caught. Perhaps Fish needs to learn a bit about what language means, that predictions that a given phenomenon will prove tractable has a range of confidence levels, that we’re not stupid enough to suppose that nothing will ever prove non-tractable, but that our understanding and intellectual tools yield reasonable predictions of success in many cases.
Fish has spent a career denying the sense of investigative tractability that scientists have based upon unquantifiable yet reliable conceptions of what is possible in science. Furthermore, he almost certainly doesn’t have the sense of physics as a whole and interconnected set of constraints that practically (though not absolutely) prevents altruism from falling outside of the physical, inclusive of thermodynamic, processes of brain, as well as biological processes like evolution.
His post-structuralist disintegration of the world we know works only in his abstractions, and has no bearing upon science. In the practical sense we know that altruism will be explained in its operations as a brain phenomenon because everything involved with altruism is tractable by scientific means. He doesn’t see the whole, so he can imagine that altruism could be an unknown operating upon the known. Until he actually knows science, he would do best to keep his mouth shut regarding scientific judgments.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
The “faith” of scientists is not faith as Stanley Fish understands it at all: it’s more like confidence born of a distinguished record of success.
Well, if you measure success by fannies parked in pews of a Sunday, the religious do have a distinguished record of their own.
In Dennett’s terms (Breaking the Spell), Fish sounds like he “believes in belief.” For those who haven’t read the book, one of his arguments is that the “faithful” mostly aren’t, but are mostly convinced that it would be a wonderful thing if they (and, by extension, everybody else) were.
Fish was notorious in the 1990s for his provocatively post-modernist pronouncements denying the possibility of escaping subjective, non-contingent interpretations of “truth.” It was for this that post-modernism in general came under attack just after 9/11, when pundits were declaring “the death of irony” and the “the end of relativism.” Fish responded with an op-ed piece in the NY Times defending post-modernism, and in turn, he came under attack among right-wingers and neo-cons for hawking what they perceived to be an insidious cancer eating away at the soul of American intellectuals in the academy and weakening the moral fiber of the nation, before and after the attacks.
Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution, for example, wrote the critique of Fish’s essay below, which appeared in the June 28, 2002, New Republic [it’s no longer available at NR, but is still in Google’s cache]. The last paragraph, ironically enough, is strong evidence that irony never dies.
http://tinyurl.com/2wehx9
“The only thing postmodern thought argues against [Fish wrote in his Op-Ed] is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies.” Apparently, postmodernism’s central teaching was now perfectly consistent with the idea of universal standards. The only price was banality, since postmodernism (as Fish was now presenting it) stood for the sensible though innocuous proposition that not everybody will always grasp what universal standards require.
Now, if this is what postmodernism teaches, it is hard to understand what all the fuss has been about, on the part of the critics and on the part of the postmodernists who have always seen themselves as bold, revolutionary, and indispensable thinkers. But, of course, Fish’s platitude–not everybody in the world can be made to see things our way, and we should try our best to see things other people’s way–is not in anybody’s eyes what postmodernism is famous for.
Rather, the guiding theme of postmodernism is that objectivity, especially in morals, is a sham–in other words, precisely the definition Fish was disavowing in the Times. Postmodernists take their lead from Nietzsche’s famous aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil, “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” They draw inspiration and sustenance from the many books of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who held that the quest for truth in the study of history is wrongheaded–that, instead, one should seek to grasp “how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.” And they (the postmodernists) consider as one of their outstanding contemporaries Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who asserts that “power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic”; that “there is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context”; and that “agency is always and only a political prerogative” [italics in original].
If these representative statements about postmodernism mean anything, it is that morality is created by human beings with no ground or sanction in reason or nature or heaven.
The only “faith” I see science as having is the view the universe does not lie and that with effort it will be possible to explain how it works.
Of course without that “faith” there would be no point in doing science. If there really is some omnipotent being that can intervene and change things on a whim then scientists might as well give up now.
Chris Pierson:
I think “postmodernism” (particularly if you want street cred in the Faculty Lounge) often carries the additional implication that the relativity of morals — the inability to find absolute answers to “ought” questions — is extended to “is” questions too.
As David Thorburn once suggested,
“It’s also the same strategy we all remember from grade school playgrounds, where “I am rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you” was considered an effective protective chant”
We didn’t have this mantra in the playgrounds of my youth in Britain, so I was rather confused when the first half of it played a significant role in The Secret of Monkey Island.
Don’t these people ever look back at history and realize what a horrible track record they’ve got?
Don’t they realize all the technological and medical progress that would not have been made if everyone had listened to people just like them in the past? Do they not see what a roadblock they are for even more advances that could do things like say…cure diseases and save lives?
Darn it! After reading the headline “Fish has faith…”, I thought one of your beloved Danios had strayed from the otherwise the sensible school.
“The only “faith” I see science as having is the view the universe does not lie and that with effort it will be possible to explain how it works. ”
Not really true, BTW. The universe could be lying to us all the time. However, as long as it keeps telling the same lie, then it doesn’t matter. We can use the information scientifically. Science isn’t concerned with truth. It is concerned with repeatability.
The only requirement of science is that there are observable, systematic patterns of actions. When that is the case, it acts to describe those patterns to a more and more detailed level so that they can be used to predict future actions. There is no assumption that everything must have a pattern, just that those actions do not have an observable pattern are not amenable to description by current science, and would require a more detailed or extensive model to describe the pattern (where it becomes more and more difficult to examine predictibility).
We would still have science even if the universe were chaotic without any apparent order or laws. It would just be that science would not be able to study that, and would restrict itself to those things that have apparent order or laws.
The reason we use science to describe the universe is because it works. There is no faith required.
Yes, there are a few tangled snarls of postmodern “thought.” Moral Relatavism owes as much to early 20th century Anthropology and Ethnography as to Nietsche and Foucault. (What was a good methodological assumption for field workers employing the new methods of participant observation entered the academy as an ideology.)
More pernicious is the “Social Construction of Reality” wing, whose proponents convince hoardes of humanities undergraduates every year that empiricism is a belief system and that “scientific truth” is a fabrication designed to support the prevailing socio-economic regime.
Particularly fun, if you enjoy poking holes in such drivel, is Sokal’s Fashionable Nonsense. I also recommend Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism.
The “Falsification, if it occurs, always occurs from the inside” statement is ludicrous. Posted this over there yesterday:
God is a relic of our misguided efforts to magnify our own importance.
The sooner we are rid of him, the better.
I’m not holding my breath that pointy-hatted priests who parade around making idiotic pronoucements are going to falsify their own religion anytime soon. They’ve got too much invested in the scam.
I’m very glad (ecstatic actually!) that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and others are showing us the way beyond the mass idiocy we have engaged in for two thousand years.
It’s about time.
dog DAMMIT PZ! STOP USING IT’S AS A POSSESSIVE! “It’s” is an abbreviation of “it is”. The possessive of ‘it’ is ‘its’. NO APOSTROPHE. It’s been PISSING ME OFF of years.
I’ve had people pull this shit on me before and nowadays I tend to respond: ‘Well try stepping off the top of a tall building and see what effect your beliefs have on whether or not you hit the ground and how fast.’
Or, in the words of Billy Bragg: “The laws of gravity are very, very strict.”
The religious cannot comprehend the idea that someone doesn’t “believe” in their God. It’s like someone growing up in a free democracy with legal rights, civil rights, etc., and then moving to (or visiting) a totalitarian state without those things and not comprehending “you can’t say that” or “you can’t do that” or people “disappearing.” It is so far from their frame of reference that they cannot wrap their mind around the concept. For the religious, this is the case, how religious they are increases the difficulty by orders of magnitude.
When a very devoutly religious person hears “I don’t believe in God,” it is automatically converted to “I have not chosen God to be my savior.” For really pushy religious people “but work very hard to convince me” is tacked on at the end.
For me personally, I cannot believe in the interfering “win the ballgame for my kids,” or “give me that promotion at work,” God as seen by most religious people. I look at the horrors of the world, the Holocaust, the American Holocaust, war, famine, disease, all of the preventable things man does to fellow man, and can’t believe in their “all loving God.” If he is all powerful, watches over you all the time, day and night, sees everything, and allows those things to happen, then he can’t be a loving God.
So, I’ll stick to “I don’t know-ism.” Or my particular brand, “I’ll find out when I die-ism.” We split off from the “I don’t know-ist” church decades ago and haven’t killed one of those heretics yet!
Blake and CJ:
What I also find, well, ironic (and infuriating) is that the very wingnuts who wanted to blame po-mo for 9/11 were often the very same people who in November-December 2000 were loudly denying the possibility of getting an accurate vote count in Florida because objective truth is inaccessible. The bastards!
From Fish’s piece:
Yep, Fishie, it’s all just a PoMo game….If you think too long about the fact that he is invited to write this in the New York Times and you are stuck at your job reading this blog every day, your head will explode.
Ion channels are quite invisible, at least if you’re talking about forming images of them with light. Nor for that matter is all woo invisible; Kirlian photography will give you nice pictures of “auras”. I think you need to look elsewhere for your demarcation criteria. Personally I think a good starting point is rigor; you can make many observably true predictions from theories involving ion-channels without too many ad-hoc assumptions. The same is not true of ghosts.
It’s really disappointing to see Fish’s sort of argumentation elevated to the importance of serialization in the NY Times.
I did not see a single misuse of “its” or “it’s” in this post. Or even any of the comments.
Greg Peterson:
I’m not sure what you mean by “works.” Logic describes the formal systems we use. Like the rest of mathematics, it “works” on its own, or fails to, entirely by virtue of its own definitions and where those lead. It is an empirical issue whether any particular formal system is useful in modeling aspects of the broader world, subject to all the issues that such empirical questions entail.
It is true that we study the properties of logical systems using other logical systems. Much of the metamathematics of the last few decades has delved into the limits of that. It’s not clear to me that there is any fundamental epistemological issue here, beyond that of any mathematics. Euclid had no idea that his system of geometry was logically complete, and that his parallel postulate was logically independent.
CJ:
I found Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures (the UK edition of Fashionable Nonsense) to be a splendid dark comedy. It is a very macabre laugh riot and, incidentally, a very good book.
Chris Pierson:
To top that irony with whipped cream and a cherry, note that it was a senior Bush advisor who told the following to Ron Suskind, back in 2004:
It was Suskind’s piece in The New York Times Magazine which, I believe, injected the phrase “reality-based community” into the meme pool.
Reality has, much to our nation’s grief, turned out to be considerably more difficult to redefine than the senior Bush aide imagined.
Fish’s “post-modernist” tack is quite old. Bishop Berkeley used it in the 18th century (the following is from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive):
“Berkeley is best known in the world of mathematics for his attack on the logical foundation of the calculus as developed by Newton. In his tract ‘The analyst: or a discourse addressed to an infidel mathematician,’ published in 1734, he tried to argue that although the calculus led to true results its foundations were no more secure than those of religion.”
The most famous refutation of Berkeley’s overarching notion that everything was ideas and appearances dependent on human perception was by Samuel Johnson, and it was not unlike Matthew Young’s idea (#24). The following is from Boswell’s “Life of Johnson:”
“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it THUS.'”
Hm, I don’t see “its” or “it’s” used as a possessive anywhere in PZ’s post either; all the it’s are correctly used as contractions of “it is”… although there is a bit of a then/than issue.
You know, if we’re gonna nit-pick ;)
Ooh, there IS a possessive its in there, but used correctly.
Okay, I’ll stop now. Back to the faith stuff.
Fellow pedants: I believe the misunderstanding stems from the missing article “a” in this phrase: “…but it’s commonplace consequence…”
Russel, your comments are very valuable; thanks. By way of partially excusing myself, I have this tendency to get pretty prolix, and I drafted my comments in Word and then edited out a lot. Originally I had a tad more sophistication in what I said about “using logic to establish logic,” but I decided to shorthand it. I don’t think the point is totally lost, though, that there is no escaping some basic assumptions which themselves cannot be proved.
Beautiful.
I’m glad that several people have pointed out that Fish is just arguing semantics (the study of meanings). Obviously Fish understands that words have subtle and different meanings, (depending on context and choice of definition) — however he is using semantics to make points that his logic cannot (which ironically is ONE of the definitions of semantics).
se·man·tics
3b. The language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meanings.
I don’t think I’ve posted anything anywhere yet that didn’t have a typo, misspelling, missing word, something. And I’ve written and edited for a living for two decades. I blogging is an artform that doesn’t require a colonoscopic obsession with writing perfection, or it could lose its immediacy. Could be Shakespeare would have sucked in a poetry slam.
CJ, whoever you are, I don’t have to post because you said exactly what I wanted to say. Especially your entire second post. It sounds as though you may have imbibed Marvin Harris’s “The Rise of Anthropological Theory.”
I don’t believe in the theory of evolution (gasp!), nor do I have faith in scientific method (moan of distress!).
I do however accept that the Theory of Evolution is currently the best explanation for the variety of life, and I accept that the scientific method is reliable. I would change my acceptance of the ToE and scientific method if more information or discoveries gave me reason to. My acceptance is provisional.
Religion on the other hand is based on belief and faith which (by definition) are not susceptible to challenge by reason. Faith is certain.
I could make a case that those religions/sects which produce apologetics based on logic are gradually collapsing under the weight of their own internal contradictions. The strongest religions/sects – the fundamentalists – are strongest because they will admit no reason to sway their deeply held emotionally based beliefs.
So that is why I don’t believe in evolution.
The Kingfish was framing with all his literary flim-flam and social construction of reality before framing was fashionable. See his recent frame for his fellow Israel firsters. http://www.nearista.com/nearista/2007/03/stanley_fish.html
There you are, empiricism is just a belief, criticizing Israel is a pogrom. We need people like Fish to tell us how this can be, since one could hardly figure it out based on rationality and evidence.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
I am surprised that nobody has taken Fish to task for his assertion that biologists take Darwin on faith. (At least, PZ claims that Fish said this, but that could be a paraphrase; I have no NYT account and so cannot read the piece firsthand.) I have read the Origin, and while it is a fine work, and while there is much in it that is true, there is also much in it that is false. Scientists tend to be honest enough to disregard any part of any text that strikes them as wrong (such as Darwin’s acceptance of inheritance of acquired traits). Anyone that claims otherwise (and especially people that claim that scientists regard any particular work as inviolate or worthy of reverence) just does not understand science.
I saw the headline, and expected some kind of LOLfish joke: “I has a faith” along with a cute fish picture.
PZ: “Accepting religious faith is to stand still and imagine a journey through a fantasy land, while science is about walking forward on firm footing towards a destination to which we may not have arrived yet, but can see glimmering on the horizon.”
We’ll always have that “glimmering horizon” to look forward to. Its wonder-generator without peer. The wonder of it is that it remains as a beacon, like a rainbow that always presents the same aspect to the shifting observer, to keep us on the road to reality (pardon, Dr. Penrose).
Even as we encounter new landmark discoveries continuously along the way expanding our sphere of experience and knowledge, the horizon reliably beckons us forth. It recedes as we approach, yet with diligent effort, a sharp eye, logic, a strong social ethic of sharing observations for cross-referencing, and an abiding interest in getting our interpretations right (‘truth’) we actually get to SEE what previous horizons have intriguingly hidden from us.
It works and it works magnificently.
The religious…well, they ain’t got any horizons except (they believe) the death/afterlife interface. Unfortunately for them, absolutely no one has ever been able to report from beyond this mystical boundary to confirm their quaint “hypotheses”. (Sorry, the fantasies of such that purport it simply don’t count…and a ‘faith-based hypothesis’ isn’t anything other than a wish begging to be believed). Faith is all they’ve got. That’s not enough for intelligent, curious and, yes, loving-and-caring human beings. Believe it or not at your peril…and your children’s future peril.
LOOK at that beautiful rainbow on the horizon – isn’t it spectacular???
More subtantively, here are two ways to contrast religion and evidence based thinking:
1. In principle, how would you choose between two competing religious ideas? I have no idea, except that the basis for religious belief seems to be either feelings or direction of some authority.
In principle, how would you choose between two competing scientific ideas? Of course you would think up and run an experiment that distinguishes between them.
2. How is believing in god different from believing (for example) that we will eliminate malaria? One (god) is something that either is or isn’t true but we have no way of knowing. The other (malaria) is something that currently is neither true nor false. It is a possibility. People fighting malaria are motivated by faith and commitment, but it is faith and commitment to a possibility, not faith in something supposedly here and now.
“I am surprised that nobody has taken Fish to task for his assertion that biologists take Darwin on faith.”
Well, given his equivocation on what is meant by “faith,” it is hard to really argue with it.
OTOH, you have a legitimate point. I often point out how silly it is that creationists like to act as if modern evolution is “Darwinism.” Evolution has come a long way since Darwin, and whereas Darwin is certainly historically relevent, it is not the ultimate source on evolution. I usually compare it to something like Pauling’s book “On the Nature of the Elements” in chemistry. Yeah, Pauling’s work is extremely insightful and useful, but there are a lot of things that we know are wrong. That Pauling was wrong doesn’t change chemistry as we know it today.
Again, this is how religious people don’t understand science. It’s not a church that can be destroyed by discrediting one of the early Popes. Just as the PhD’s aren’t priests who all able to speak for God.
Greg Peterson says, “Everyone has “initial unprovable assumptions.” There is no way to PROVE logic works, because we must use logic to try. There is no way to PROVE that our senses are largely reliable, because we must use our senses to gauge that reliability. Even so, we do not toss away Occam’s razor by needlessly ADDING assumptions beyond what is needed.”
You’re focusinging on the theoretical end of things, neglecting the OTHER highly non-trivial half of science: observations and experiments are either reproducible or they are not (given the same conditions). If you are seeing what I said I saw, I’m going to feel a lot better about believing that I made no error in my observation, and you’ll have lot’s more faith in me as a fellow observer. Interpretation of data is a little more squirrely, but those get refined with time too. Just a single nay-say is enough to cast doubt on a result. But if scientists see the same things over and over again, that’s pretty powerful “PROOF”. The ONLY way to check our hypotheses and theories is by consulting nature. She’s the final arbiter, not any human notions of “truth”, “proof” or “faith”.
“Bunjo says, “My acceptance is provisional.”
I’ll try to stear clear of you as we meet at a 4-way-stop intersection.
Know what? I don’t believe you. For example: is your provisional acceptance stance provisional?
No one can tar and feather you, aye?
Gimme a break.
I’m getting tired of this rationality vs. pomo crap that I’m seeing all over the science blogs. I agree with you that Derrida or Foucault or even Barthes (and certainly Lacan) should not be taken too seriously. They are (often but not always) mumbo-jumbo babblers. This in no way disqualifies a pomo outlook in practice.
Let me try to be specific here: some of my favorite modernist novels were written by “anti-modernist modernists”. Say: Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch. Some of my favorite postmodernist novels were written by “anti-postmodernist postmodernists”. Say: Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Dave Eggers.
These are not novels celebrating relativism. If anything, they are the opposite. They are not novels celebrating irrationalism. These are novels mocking human stupidity and sentimentalism.
They are, however, novels that understand the fragmentary nature of human experience. They are novels that admit that one single human being cannot possibly consciously reflect upon and integrate all the things he will come across. So we’re presented with a life story as a somewhat disconnected series of thematically connected events. Events that often relate to (directly or thematically) bigger things that aren’t easy to analyze.
Trying to get to grips with these tings is, to me, good postmodernism. Claiming that describing these phenomena is somehow racist or chauvinist or purely cultural is, to me, bad postmodernism. Claiming that the erect penis equals the square root of minus one, well that’s just funny. (And yes: I think it was intended to be funny.)
Chris Pierson #14 says, “If these representative statements about postmodernism mean anything, it is that morality is created by human beings with no ground or sanction in reason or nature or heaven.”
Yeah, but I don’t trust anybody who uses that word even to REFUTE the CONCEPT.(Excepting you, very temporarily ;).
Its an academic idiocy of seemingly boundless proportions largely employed to demonstrate to the reader that the writers “know” WTF they are talking about. Its a bubble-foamed tissue of posture over substance, and its proliferation in “learned” articles makes me reach for my allergy medication.
If you happen to be affiliated with a university, you’re already subscribed.
Hey frodo? With all them ‘isms’ I’ve now OD’d on my allergy medicine.
You win by saturation bombing.
Geez
I’m sorry about that, AU. Glad you won by default, though. Should have mentioned: English is not my language, and I apologize for all my blunders and annoying loops.
I do realize that sarcasm was somehow involved, no? Here’s my Norwegian reply: “Du er verdens mest beundringsverdige menneske! Du er dyp, du er snill, og du er ganske flink til å bære ut søpla.”
Arnosium, I don’t disagree with you and that’s certainly the only way I know to live my life. But have you never had a conversation with someone who asks how we don’t “know” that we’re all just living in something like the Matrix from the movie, or being misled by a demon or trickster god? Well, we don’t “know” those things, and we can’t know them, and so there’s no reason to bother with them. I am one hundred percent behind the scientific method as the only way we have of approximating truth about the cosmos. I’m just saying that I know of no way to get started without a few initial assumptions. I’m reminded of how Hume took apart the notion of causation by demonstrating that the mere fact that B seems always to follow A does not prove that A caused B. The assumptions that rationalists make are, to use Daniel Harbour’s language from his “An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism,” a Spartan meritocracy, assuming as little as possible and adding to those assumptions only on the basis of evidentiary merit. Religionists, by contrast, employ a Baroque Monarchy, meaning they assume a great deal and do not allow assumptions to be challenged. But even the most Spartan of meritocracies must start out with a few brute assumptions, despite the power of reason and science to add to those assumptions only by dint of evidence.
Fish has faith;
such a great name to be associated with such tard.
what a pity.
*sigh*
Even before the ridiculous attempt to make science and religion equivalent Fish manages to be shockingly dishonest. Note the following progression (I’ve stripped away the distracting paragraphs) –
1
In reply [to Dawkins, etc], believers, like the scientist Francis S. Collins (“The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief”), argue that physical processes cannot account for the universal presence of moral impulses like altruism, “the truly selfless giving of oneself to others” with no expectation of a reward. How can there be a naturalistic explanation of that?
…
2
They [the reasons aren’t reasons attributed to Dawkins, interestingly enough, but rather things ‘one could suggest’ – a reasonable suspicion here is that Dawkins has and articulates better ones] are good Darwinian reasons; remove the natural selection hypothesis from the structure of thought and they will be seen not as reasons, but as absurdities.
In other words, the question is something like “how can natural selection explain altruistic behaviors?” and the objection Fish makes is “Dawkins is assuming natural selection when he answers the question”. It is true that if you remove natural selection from his answer the result is absurd – this is because his answer would be “natural selection explains such and such in the following way…”
The stuff about Harris is mostly thrown in, as far as I can tell, to distract from where he ends up going. It’s also worth noting that he, more or less, makes up a very strange version of natural selection. That is, he thinks that Dawkins has to say something like “we all want, unconsciously, to ensure the continued survival of our species and that is why we act altruistically”, or some other selfish motive of which we are unconconscious. But of course this is quite a lot of nonsense – Dawkins can (and I suspect does and is misrepresented) simply give explanations for how we come to act from altruistic desires. (The explanations are not reasons for us to act that way – the desires are reasons. Similarly, I do not need to cite the continuance of the species as my reason for kissing girls. My reason is that it is pleasurable. The explanation of why I (and others like me) would find it pleasurable is a different matter altogether.)
Greg Peterson says, “But have you never had a conversation with someone who asks how we don’t “know” that we’re all just living in something like the Matrix from the movie, or being misled by a demon or trickster god?”
Of COURSE I have. What makes you think that what OTHER people don’t understand or comprehend or otherwise are confused about should extend to us? When I encounter them I simply remind them that the “MATRIX” or “demons” or “trickster gods” or whatever else they dream up are constructions of our minds that distracts them from focusing on the preeminent issues at hand.
Empiricists/experimentalists – we don’t get everything either, but that doesn’t mean that we are as ill-informed or confused as those who have hardly ever been properly introduced to these disciplines. EVERYONE must necessarily begin with supposition. The question is whether the supposition matches the reality that nature represents, that’s all. That’s what the other half of science does: EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATION. The only ones that work are the ones that pose questions (based on “initial suppositions” or “hypotheses”) that are actually verifiable. In short, if you don’t have a good supposition, you aren’t likely to ask the right question of nature to begin with. Lots of bad hypotheses half fallen by the wayside like that, and nobody ought to mourn their passing just because some brilliant human mind concocted them.
You say: “Well, we don’t “know” those things, and we can’t know them, and so there’s no reason to bother with them.”
You betcha. Concur wholeheartedly.
You say: “I am one hundred percent behind the scientific method as the only way we have of approximating truth about the cosmos. I’m just saying that I know of no way to get started without a few initial assumptions.”
I don’t know how to get started any other way either, but that doesn’t prevent me from practicing a little “experimental dialog” with nature in order to keep me on the ball. No problem! LET the initial assumptions remain unanswered until such time as you may be able to ask a decent question of nature before she gives you an answer. By extreme contrast to us ignorant humans, she’s infinitely patient.
You say: “I’m reminded of how Hume took apart the notion of causation by demonstrating that the mere fact that B seems always to follow A does not prove that A caused B.”
This is obvious. But its also strictly part of the theoretical end of things. You cannot decide whether the theory is actually represented in reality until you consult nature…IF you can consult nature on the question.
You conclude, “…But even the most Spartan of meritocracies must start out with a few brute assumptions, despite the power of reason and science to add to those assumptions only by dint of evidence.”
Well, in large stably collective human affairs, what ISN’T based on merit? What have we got to start with that isn’t, as you characterize it, “brute assumption”? That “dint” of evidence is everything, and goes much farther to adding to those “brute assumptions” than you may realize. I don’t understand why you distrust evidence so, but you must acknowledge that any two or more “dints” of evidence that multiplies into a vast web of inter-corroborating and internally-consistent is rather larger than a “dint”.
Never mind Daniel Harbour. That’s all stuff that has largey to do with adopting an organized BELIEF SYSTEM called “atheism”. Just stick with the science. You know, the language with which we converse with nature. Can’t go wrong.
Good analysis, PZ.
However, I’m afraid he’ll be able to easily counter it with the always-crushing “I know you are, but what am I?”
Evolution: A fairy tale for those who believe that fairies only exist in fairy tales.
*
This is a very fine piece, Dr. Myers. It’s inspiring and quotable. Thank you.
Arnosium Upinarum,
You’re missing the point here. How do you know the observations you test the hypotheses and theories with accurately reflect reality in the first place?
That our senses are reliable, that we aren’t all just “brains in a jar”, is a leap of faith. Well, more like a hop of faith. Where pop-pomo goes off the deep end is in the assertion that all articles of faith are somehow equally plausible/valid–that’s just stupid.
#21
Thanks CJ
I’ve been looking for a couple good books to help offset the postmodern franko-psycho-crap that a lot of my grad students have bought into (I teach art and design). I’ll check these out.
Of course we can’t PROVE. But we can test each of these assumptions. They are all falsifiable. If they were wrong, we would find out.
But remember that every single observation in science is a test of the hypothesis that there’s some omnipotent being that does intervene and change things on a whim. There is no faith involved here whatsoever.
In other words: science is concerned with reality, and reality is the place where argumenta ad lapidem work.
Wow, thanks! This is the story where argumentum ad lapidem (“to the stone”) comes from.
Of course we can’t PROVE. But we can test each of these assumptions. They are all falsifiable. If they were wrong, we would find out.
But remember that every single observation in science is a test of the hypothesis that there’s some omnipotent being that does intervene and change things on a whim. There is no faith involved here whatsoever.
In other words: science is concerned with reality, and reality is the place where argumenta ad lapidem work.
Wow, thanks! This is the story where argumentum ad lapidem (“to the stone”) comes from.
Here’s why people believe in God: No matter how confident you are in the lightning-quick explosion of human understanding, there will always be something else to learn. There’s always going to be something unknown, and that’s where God lives. As utterly fantastic, supernatural, and ghost-like as God is to some people, I find it equally inconceivable that science will discover and explain everything about everything. Of course God’s role is different now, or shrinking, or whatever, but even if there’s a sliver of unknown in the universe, people will cling to that zany, wacky God.
For me the best dividing line between science and pseudoscience (religion) has always been the falsifiabiltity principle. If there is a way to refute the theory being presented, then it’s more likely to be science.
Religious people are notorious for continuously presenting evidence that they say shows the workings of god (especially those of the intelligent design persuasion). The question ID people have never been able to answer for me is what experiment or observation would refute ID.
In the gaps? That’s a curious abode for a god.
“No matter how confident you are in the lightning-quick explosion of human understanding, there will always be something else to learn. There’s always going to be something unknown, and that’s where God lives. ”
So…the God crowd is populated with folks who have a deep desire for learning?
You can find the article in question here:
http://screwsubwalls.blogspot.com/2007/06/stanley-fish-think-again.html
Arnosium at #54, I may not have made clear enough that every word after the tinyurl was Peter Berkowitz’s, not mine. I don’t agree with Berkowitz about anything other than finding Fish to be confused and slippery.
I’m not sure which word you had a reaction to–I think it may have been “post-modernism?”
Wrong?? No, no, you are supposed to interpret that part metaphorically! ;)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the “postmodernists” mostly debating this relativity of morals in the context of literary criticism?
Not as a prescription for amoral behaviour.
weren’t the “postmodernists” mostly debating this relativity of morals in the context of literary criticism?
Originally, maybe. But as narcisistic crypto-Marxists, many of them believe in the primacy of the dialectic, which precedes trivialities like “reality” and “the universe” which are social fabrications designed to stroke the phallus of the military-reality TV complex.
In the mind of the committed postmodernist, science is a form of literary criticism. (I did use the word narcisistic before, right? –oh, good.)
If anybody thinks I’m kidding, I invite them to attend a few lectures of a Sociological Theory course at Berkeley.
Don’t be so hard on Fish. After all, admitting you don’t know something is Satanic, and I’ve had an actual believer make this claim to be; it’s apparently mainstream belief. No, really. Matthew 5:37 – [Jesus said] “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘no’, anything beyond this comes from the evil one”.
I mean, wow, y’know?
Andrew Wade says, “You’re missing the point here. How do you know the observations you test the hypotheses and theories with accurately reflect reality in the first place?”
I fully realize “the point”. Nobody can be absolutely certain of anything they see or think they see or think they think they see…
For crying out loud, so what? That’s an old and incredibly repetitious drumbeat. Like worshiping wallpaper patterns.
I’m just pointing out the antidote to this endless hand-wringing that quickly begins to resemble attempts to determine how many dancing angels you can stuff into nested Russian dolls, or whatever. (How can we be sure of that????).
Come on. One of our most effective means of understanding is the simple question: “Whoa, did you see that?” It simultaneously embodies our innate individual uncertainty and seeks confirmation from independent observers. We’re not as “individual” as you might think. We are – science is – a social enterprise too. Understanding and meaning is maleable, and we DON’T have to demand absolute certainty in anything. All we have to do is keep watching. Go with the flow. Nature is fixed, but that doesn’t mean our conceptions are or need to be.
How many confirmations or refutations would you require before you give up and unequivocally accept the weight of the evidence – yes, OTHER people’s observations? The acceptance of the evidence at any particular time CAN be unequivocal AND be entirely provisional with future discovery. There’s not a midge’s worth of contradiction in saying that, unless you insist that every thought or notion you posess must be chiseled into the diamond-hard ediface of certitude.
I submit no one can get very far on those stringent self-absorbed philosophical criteria.
On a more direct bearing, we CANNOT HELP but interact with reality EVEN IF our questions are stupid, our observations are course, our interpretations are lousy, our notions are confused or our conclusions are false. However we deal with nature, the ONE shining light we have is that she is consistent and never malicious…unlike us.
Frodo says, “”Du er verdens mest beundringsverdige menneske! Du er dyp, du er snill, og du er ganske flink til å bære ut søpla.”
Thank you for the kind words. I shall endeavor to live up to them. Seriously. ;)
Chris Pierson says, “I’m not sure which word you had a reaction to–I think it may have been “post-modernism?””
I have the same reaction to it as PZ has to the word f-f-ffr-[slap]fraaame. Now another dose of allergy meds, pardon me.
Greg Peterson: True, [re: basic assumptions] but they are also revisable based on their consequences and consilience with others. This is important to mention, as without it one falls into the “presuppositionalist trap” which both pomos and the religious right have been using.
And yes, as to Marxism, some of the pomo stuff comes out of (bastardizations of, I think, but that’s another story) Marx, sort of. Ludwig Fleck I believe it is is the one cited in this context.
Weyken, Assignment of truth values based on knowledge derived of evaluation of observations, preferably via the emergent processes of the scientific method; is a useful differentiator from belief: Acceptance as true in the absence of compelling, or the face of contradictory, evidence.
Definition at : http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki/weyken
Discussion at: http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=53;action=display;threadid=34034
Kind Regards
Hermit