I like this. Larry Moran has the summary of a talk by Francis Collins, who asserts that science and religion are entirely compatible. Here are Collins’ last few slides:
[First Slide] Almighty God, who is not limited in space and time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.
[Second Slide] God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that plan included human beings.
[Third Slide] After evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a sufficiently advanced neurological “house” (the brain), God gifted humanity with free will and with a soul. Thus humans received a special status, “made in God’s image.”
[Fourth Slide] We humans used our free will to disobey God, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law. Thus we were estranged from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.
That’s it. A very simple but, I think, entirely compatible view that does no violence either to faith or to science. And puts them in a harmonious position …
Then Larry asks six simple questions that are basically, “where is the evidence for that claim,” or “how do you know that?”. I could break those slides down into more than six questions; if you listen to Collins’ whole talk, you know that every one of those claims for what his god did are simply phwooomfed into existence magically, with no supporting reason at all, other than the fact that he is a Christian who needs to believe in these miracles in order to continue being a Christian.
As for his final sentence … he’s wrong. He has done great violence to science. He might as well have dragged science into a dark alley and hacked it to bits with an axe.
Does that mean Palin, Bachmann and the complete staff of the DI, to name a few, are evidence against evolution ?
Btw, neurology is just the branch of science that deals with the nervous system, seems a bit silly to call the brain a “neurological house”.
So ehm, free will was built into the neurological house that god brought about in the first place, and it all went wrong, does that mean god stuffed it up? Collins might has a point there maybe !
And everyone lived happily ever after, yay !!
Oh, wait…
Thirty two thousand, billion, billion stars created (after, obviously, fine tuning everything) (and not to mention the 9 times as much again of invisible dark matter) so that 93,000,000 miles away from a single one of those stars, a bunch of badly-designed bipedal animals could sing ‘Holy holy holy’?
Go science accommodationists!
What puzzles me most is slide #4. Before even going into the business of “where’s the evidence?”, there’s another, more pressing question:
When and where exactly are “we” supposed to have done this?
Please, Dr Collins… Dr Collins who’s a scientist and fights creationists… Dr Collins who can’t be suspected to believe in a literal Adam and Eve… could you explain to us who is this “we”, and how they “disobeyed God”, and what specific orders they violated, and how these orders had been given, and when? Could you do that for us?
“Almighty God, who is not limited in space and time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time”
precisely tuned?? well than god is a clerk, a very skilled clerk to be precise. That does not answer the fine tuning problem. Why is it that god chose to use only those six numbers? their is something intrinsic about those six numbers that even god couldn’t escape.
not to mention the utter wastefulness of evolution in creating the beautiful diversity of life we see today. god the blood is on ur hands for killing the unborn! period!
God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create … human beings.
Collins doesn’t understand the first thing about science or evolution if he believes that. Even R.A. Fisher, one of the foremost contributors to evolutionary theory, and a self-described Christian, saw the obvious reason why a god cannot guide evolution or design: god’s efforts would be “futile and inoperative” in the face of both copying mistakes and selection. Fisher:
What a great mistake on the part of the designer to contain us on a mote of dust suspended in a sun beam after allegedly making the entire universe for us.
Really? I thought neurology has shown us that it’s highly unlikely that there is such a thing as a soul in our brain. Careful observations have shown us that humans don’t have any abilities that aren’t present in some form in animals as well. Souls are not compatible with science.
We humans used our free will to disobey God, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law.
What exactly was this wonderful moral law? Those hideous 10 commandments? The great advice about stoning adulterers? Repressing women? Killing homosexuals? Pardon me if I mistook those for the codified prejudices of a bronze age tribe running around the Sinai rather than the edicts of an omnipotent and benevolent god.
“Fine tuned?” Uh, I press on the “right” side of my “right” eyeball – and I see a blush of color on the “left” side of my field of vision.
We’re upside-down with a backward-wired nervous system and inside-out retinas with enough “editing” software to produce a heck of a lot of blind-spots and filler and eyes that requiring constant jiggling to keep them working – and we’re fine-tuned?
Wow.
So, essentially, we’re glorified “Junkbusters” projects – not “designed” to last, just cobbled-together, and more a proof-of-concept than anything else.
I’m actually thinking it’s more of a God-vs-Satan game of “Horse.”
“Okay, Lucy – off the Big Bang, through the web of Dark-Matter, over the Supernova, past the Gas Giant… nothing but net!”
Mark Twain, Was the World Made for Man:
“That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.”
defides #2
Indeed, God is not an efficient designer, for how many millions of species had to evolve and suffer and die (and go extinct) before, 3.8 bn years on, humans could arise to glorify God?
Why produce humans through a suboptimal, inefficient process that also produces genomic parasites, thousands of pseudogenes, and at least 75,000 mutations in 3,000 genes that cause heritable diseases, when he already demonstrated that he could just WISH the universe into existence, and later the soul and free will? Why not just wish it all into existence? On this point, creationist religious fundamentalist are more reasonable than theistic evolutionists.
Doesn’t even sound Christian. Sounds much more like a deist overall.
I enjoy the “For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.” But of course the entire concept of “estrangement” is very Christian, other religions don’t have a “solution” to it at all. I guess what he means is “mumble mumble Christian is the only true religion mumble mumble.”
that does not jive with this
Why is it every attempt at reconciling science and religion ends up sounding desperate?
Perhaps because it is desperate.
Seriously, people. Science = epistemology. Religion = make-believe. What’s to reconcile?
Noting again: the word “Science” has multiple related meanings. It is used to refer to the abstract philosophical discipline, the tangible body of anthropological practices that approximately instantiate that abstracton, and the body of knowledge that results.
Is it entirely compatible with the body of knowledge? No; at best, it merely does not introduce a (P AND (NOT P)) contradiction with science-BoK. Science as a body of knowledge speaks in terms of probabilities; as such, it says “possible but unlikely”. This, however, is probably is close enough to “entirely compatible” for his confusion.
Is it entirely compatible with the anthropological practice? No; no-peer reviewed physics or biology journal would accept this as a credible hypothesis. However, it is somewhat compatible, in that beliefs on such lines are not uncommon in human practitioners. This, again, is close enough for “entirely compatible” for the mistake to be comprehensible, if still an exaggeration — in that there while there are practitioners with such views, there also is at least an existence-proof (PZ) of a practitioner who vehemently rejects such an idea.
It it entirely compatible with the philosophical discipline? No. Although simpler than “Biblical Inerrancy”, it is a conjecture more complex than is required for descriptively explaining the extant evidence. To the extent it describes, it is redundant; to the extent it is not redundant, it either does not describe evidence, or simply names but does not describe. To the extent it is testable, the test fails.
Is it remotely compatible? Yes. Is it entirely compatible? No, no, NO.
I find it impossible to feel anything but contempt for people who take this sort of stance because, when you break it down, it amounts to this:
1. I believe that anything science discovers fits with God’s plan because I really need to believe in God but I can’t deny facts, so it must.
2. Really, it must.
3. Shut up.
They’re intellectual weaklings and, I regret to conclude, fucking eejits.
So what created the bible bogey, Francis Collins? We want to know.
I think in the strict sense of compatibility that Collins is talking about, you could argue his first three points fit the bill. The only evidence against those propositions is a lack of evidence — which, IMO, when you have a proposition for which you’d really suspect evidence, a complete lack of evidence is sufficient evidence that the proposition is false; but it does give Collins the teensiest bit of wiggle room. He can argue that his irrational choice to believe in those crazy things will never result in a conflict with what he believes rationally. It’s a weasely argument, but it has an iota of truth to it.
The fourth point is far more problematic. Though he seems to stop short of taking the philosophically bankrupt position that morality comes from God (a logical impossibility regardless of what theistic claims one accepts), he suggests that our *knowledge* of morality is a result of having disobeyed God. While it’s a difficult topic, science can say quite a bit of where our sense of morality comes from (I’m not touching Sam Harris’ contention that science can tell us about morality… but I think the assertion that science tells us about our own sense of morality ought to be uncontroversial).
And what we know tells is us that our sense of morality sure as shit didn’t spring into being sui generis because of some disobedient act that happened after humans were uniquely endowed with a soul and free will (whatever that means). We know this because we can see a limited sense of morality developing in other species, particularly other apes. Did God else endow them with a sort of “training wheels” version of free will, so that they could disobey Him and thus discover a portion of the so-called “Moral Law”?
No no no. The first three propositions are evidenceless, and while it’s profoundly silly and unscientific to believe those things, there’s no contradiction with scientific knowledge per se. The fourth proposition, however, is provably false. And not only that, IMO it’s the one most likely to lead to warped actions in the real world. Nobody’s really suicide-bombed anybody over a deistic God that I am aware of, which is really all point 1 necessitates, for example. But plenty of people have killed each other over disagreements about this “Moral Law” bullshit.
If Collins would drop the last point, I’d be at least sympathetic to his argument. But then again, I suppose the last point is kinda fundamental to Christianity, isn’t it?
How fortunate for us that we’ve been…er…BLESSED with someone who knows god “plan”!!!!!!!
I apologize to those who were right about the inappropriateness of this guy for the NIH directorship. I was dead wrong. He’s a disaster.
Ah, more proof that science and religion can exist in harmony – if the scientists would only accept the religious claims and stop demanding some goddamned proof! Once again religion begs to be allowed to trump science by being excused of reason.
So that God fellow (or gal?) is so clever that he (she?) created a universe that appears to operate entirely independently of him (her). Wow, that is clever! But then this God person (thing?) bumps into Occam’s razor (how careless of God to let that exist) and gets shredded. Ouch!
All part of the plan, I’m sure.
If all Christians thought evolution was real and the universe was 13.7 byo, it would be a huge step in the right direction.
Honestly, the whole “everything is so complex, so there must be a god” argument has never made any sense to me. Complexity doesn’t strike me as a feature of design. Or, at least, a lack of unnecessary complexity is a sign of good design. And, if you are an all knowing, all powerful being, any complexity seems unnecessary. Why all the messy reproduction, and DNA entanglement, and eating, and so on. Why not just perfect forms that require no nourishment, that aren’t subject to entropy, that have no need for a Krebs cycle?
If we were the products of a god, why doesn’t everything look like magic? Why does it look like stuff that jury-rigged itself out of what was available? If I were a god, everything would be made out of play-dough. Quick, simple, efficient. The bible says god made people out of clay, so why are we full of blood and guts? Isn’t magical, animated clay so much easier? Why does it look like stuff that jury-rigged itself out of what was available?
I guess my dog probably has a soul and is made in god’s image — because I know damn well he has free will…
And the infinitely movable goalposts of god go farther downfield….
Sam Harris’ forthcoming book The Moral Landscape – How Science Can Determine Human Values will advance the argument that religion is not the (only/main) source of human morality.
I forget the link, but PZ made the assertion that humans should be proud of the fact that we lifted ourselves out of the muck and got ourselves where we are by our own bootstraps. I think that is a second front that should be advanced, in addition to the god-given morality mistake.
The idea that we should be proud of ourselves for our own bootstrapping will undermine the whole idea of being fallen, and therefore in need of redemption.
Heeeeeeeere’s Frankie!
It was bad enough that Collins saw god in frozen water, but to know that he believes in souls (3rd slide) is just plain sad. There are no excuses for holding that belief by a man who led the mapping of the human genome, a man who intimately knows human biology and understands evolution fully and knows we are not the pinnacle of organisms to be produced by this natural process. What can it be other than another case of lying for Jesus? Either you lie big time, like Collins did, or you have to say that all the phwooomf of religion does not accord with science.
I haven’t realized that.
Gotta love “science plus.”
The difference between a young earth creationist and a religious moderate is that the YEC hasn’t realized that saying the universe is 6000 years old is embarrassing, and the religious moderate realizes that it is embarrassing, but hasn’t quite grasped WHY it’s embarrassing.
The first thing that hits me is that Collins seems to have the unspoken assumption (esp. in Slide 4) that the listeners are monotheists, probably Abrahamic monotheists, or at least think as Abrahamic monotheism as the only or most relevant form of religion. What if I’m a neo-pagan (or a Hindu, or a Buddhist — there’s lots of options here) who doesn’t believe humans realized morality by disobeying God and discovering that violates some rule?
I mean, if Collins wants to be honest, he’s talking about his religion, with some sops to other non-literal Christians/Jews/Muslims.
This is closer to “a dog giving birth to a cat” than anything evolution has ever predicted. He’s saying that one generation did not have souls or free will, and the next had both.
This big Ensoulment, I assume it made our ancestors noticeably different. I’m guessing Collins doesn’t believe that just before it they were p-zombies* behaving in every way like they had souls but in some spooky “essential” way lacking. The Christian soul *does* stuff (unless it’s a very heretical sort of Christian). For example, the Catholics reclassified South Americans from “field animals” to “souls for savin'” on the basis of them behaving in obviously human ways.
So this is a scientific claim! Apes suddenly getting human should have left some sort of mark. A very quick flourishing of artifacts or Big Black Rectangles, or something.
*Well “soul-p-zombies” or whatever. I get the impression souls and consciousness aren’t always identified by the more thoughtful believers but I’m buggered if I can work out the difference is meant to be.
That is really pathetic. It is really just disgusting that this guy has been appointed director of the NIH.
So, any of you folks who thought it was fine to have this guy running the NIH having any second thoughts yet?
I don’t get it. Why? Because you feel sorry for him? In your post you sure try to make it seem as if the ideas Collins is babbling forth are deep and complex in some way when actually my six year old son would find them ridiculous and wonder how anyone could believe such things.
Engaging this kind of infantile crap at the level you are only lends it legitimacy. Of course if you really believe his ideas are deep and complex, and are worthy of serious engagement, well, carry on by all means.
OT, but “phwooomfed” is my new favorite verb.
How long until the Colgate Twins pick up on this and have a Circle Pearl Clutching?
The saving grace is the fact that his position is administrative and therefore the damage he can do is limited. He hasn’t been hired to do actual science. He’s been hired to manage those who decide where to send the money.
Science and religion are compatible only if every religious statement is proceeded by the assumption that there is no need for it being consistent with anything already discovered through science — and the need for consensus is to be spat upon as contemptable.
Collins Compatible Points could be re-written into Incompatible Points.
Claim #1: Mental things proceed and act on the physical: mind does not have any developmental history or explanation, it can exist without a brain, and psychokensis and extra sensory perception are real “forces.”
Claim #2: There is good reason to think that evolution has a direction, and living things show evidence of intentional design.
Claim #3: Substance dualism is true, souls exist, and there is no normal continuum between human brains, and “animal” brains.
Claim #4: There are no good secular explanations for how we evolved a moral sense, and there are no good reasons to follow a morality based on concern for human beings.
Claim #5: There is something very noble and respectable about intellectual dishonesty, and making passive aggressive attacks on the methods and principles of science is a justifiable attempt to seek harmony through doublethink.
I think those claims are all open to scientific investigation.
… but only after several billions of years of other forms of life dominating the planet, all being callously wiped out, some branches of the evolutionary tree just abruptly ending as if the designer saw no purpose in their continued inhabitance on the earth… and finally, but only just in the last 200,000 or so (hardly a moment in time), humans with even the capacity to conceptualize “god” evolve. Oh, but wait… it takes 197,000 years, give or take, of “trying out” different gods and religious beliefs before some of the population settles on the christian god. Apparently ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Norsemen, etc, had not “evolved” enough for god to “reveal” himself to mankind yet.
Yes, yes… I see now… how very precise and obvious.
How can a person be that stupid… that credulous, that insultingly moronic and be in charge of any science-based institution??
I’m as patriotic as any American, but I’m so tired of being ashamed of my country…
@24
That’s because it isn’t an argument at all, it’s a rationalization. If you want to believe in God it sounds like a convincing one. If you don’t believe in gods it sounds like “the universe is hard and I don’t want to think about it therefore Goddidit”.
Ah, but see once you’ve allowed yourself to postulate the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful creator, that question actually ceases to make sense. Why? Who knows? He’s all powerful and all knowing so He must have some reason, even if we pathetic goobers can’t figure it out. And thinking that you could have done it better is just Hubris.
Once you’ve decided “Goddidit” is an acceptable – or as Collins seems to have done preferred – answer to the question, critical thinking shuts off. It has to because the very idea of God runs counter to thinking critically about things. How can you search for a solution to a question if one of the “acceptable” answers is “God did it and we can never know why He did it because it’s a Mystery and no one can know the Mind of God”?
“Most especially, that plan included human beings.”
“Thus humans received a special status, ‘made in God’s image.'”
Asinine.
Celtic_Evoluytion #40 wrote:
And this is the same sort of reasoning behind the puerile sense that everything that happens, happens because it’s meant to make YOU into a better person. Pain, suffering, natural disasters, and human tragedies are simply toys in the Cosmic Playpen, tools put in place in order to allow YOU and others like YOU to learn and grow and love the Hand that put them there. As Christopher Hitchens points out, religious thinking allows people to combine the maximum of servility, with the maximum of solipsism.
And yet, they have the nerve to insist that it’s atheistic humanism which “puts man at the center of everything.”
Collins’ views are “compatible” with science in the same way A Tale of Two Cities is “compatible” with the French Revolution.
Another faithead who has not read Euthypro’s dilemma in Plato’s dialogues. The idiotic contention that god determines good and evil was logically gutted by Socrates around 399 BCE.
Equating “good” with “what god says it is” is a repulsive idea. God could, for example, order his priests to rape children – and it would be “good”. Socrates explains how “good” and “evil” necessarily pre-exist and are independent of god.
god either orders man to be good because it is good independent of his existence and say so or he arbitrarily makes rules up that must be obeyed because he said so and calls them “good”. If it is the former good must exist independent of god and if it is the latter “good” is the mere capricious whim of god.
see, Euthyphro’s Dilemma http://www.moralphilosophy.info/euthyphrodilemma.html,
Sastra #39:
Comment of the day.
This kind of leads in to something I was wondering. Is there evidence that Collins’ religious beliefs have done any damage to NIH since he got there? For example, has he withheld funding from a project because some religious group got a bug up their ass about it?
With the kind of “reasoning” Collins displays reconciling religion and science, it’s amazing that he hasn’t spiked something because of his love/fear of The Big Guy.
Slightly OT, but the next time a Teabagger claims that Obama is a radical liberal, point out Collins’ nomination. Between this and maintaining the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, it’s proof that the POTUS is at times closer to center right than far left.
Dr. Collins, please explain/answer:
What, then, scientifically, does it mean to be “not limited in space and time”? Give examples. But keep it scientific.
Do you realize that about half of your fellow Christians oppose this idea? (Vehemently!)
Explain how you know that God didn’t tweak those parameters over time. His Almightyness surely would have been capable of that.
Or why couldn’t those parameters have been, oh God forbid, self-tweaking?
And what do you mean by complexity? The complexity in ‘evolved’ forms is not due to fine tuned parameters, on the contrary: it’s due to imperfections in copying mechanisms, and subjection to natural selection. In effect meaning that SOME parameters in this process necessarily HAD to vary a bit over time. The ‘OTHER’ ‘complexity’ is just entropy. For disorder to increase, you don’t need that many finely tuned parameters!
What is so special about human beings, other than that you and I belong to that rather bizarre and often despicable species?
And exactly WHEN did that happen? Please humor us and say: “Oh, about 6 to 10 thousand years ago”, that would REALLY make our day!
Other animals, like, say, Bonobo’s, don’t have free will?
Placing God outside time and space, and then claiming we LOOK like him is just plain weird.
ESPECIALLY when you accept evolution. Are you saying evolution has reached its intended end point?
Or are we going to look even MORE like God in the future?
And right now, WHO of us looks MOST like God? The Chinese guy from around the corner? Someone from the Central Africa? Or the blond, bearded guy with blue eyes? (He surely doesn’t look like my mother in law, does he?)
And if you say this is an infantile question, then I agree. But that’s because the claim is infantile.
Just to hear you say it: All non-Christians are doomed How about catholics (if you’re protestant) or protestants (if you’re catholic)?
Granted. I agree. Although you violated Einstein’s principle to “keep things as simple as possible, but not simpler”.
How? Where is the harmony, and why is it more harmonious than, say for instance, Hinduism and science?
@Steven Mading #38:
I don’t think that’s to the point in the way he’s a disaster. He’s a figurehead people like to quote. He lends (perceived) legitimacy to ID and related religious garbage. He indirectly makes it easier for the ID lobby to raise money. I think he should be fired. He’s using the capital of his visible position on the national stage, funded by public dollars, to promote his religious views. His latest book of tripe promoting this view cites his position as NIH director. He’s not just naive and thoughtless, he’s consciously dishonest and unethical. Liars for Jesus, you have a new club member.
Well, this goes back to many being confused about the problem we have with Collins.
We don’t have a problem with Collins, the religious believer, as atheists, in his NIH position. We have a problem with Collins, the credulous, muddled thinker, as rational, free-thinking persons.
Collins is, in fairness, a good bureaucrat, and always has been. He’s a decent organizer and administrator. He’s not likely to make funding judgments based on religious zealotry, in my opinion. However, he will be counted on to make decisions where logical, rational, reason-based thought processes are critical, whether they have to do with religion or not. And the slides above show clear indications that he is not altogether capable of that function, in all things.
We would hardly have a problem with Collins were he a casual Christian that simply “believed in god” but didn’t try to apply god and science in the same thought process. There are several scientists who fit that description. Collins, however, proudly boasts his ignorance and preaches his god = science worldview to an already muddled-thinking general public.
For a person in his position, it’s dangerous and counter-productive to advancing science, in general.
Yet another proposition of a cruel god from the Christian side (I’m not even going to look closely at all the suffering involved with the evolutionary process and the predator-prey setup).
Let’s just focus on that ensoulment again for a moment. Exactly when would that have occurred? In the womb (so as to be consistent with today’s anti-choice advocates)? So momma ape is soulless, but her baby has da magic soul that makes it in ‘god’s image’ (and presumably the chance to ‘go to heaven’ or ‘be saved’ or something)? Is he saying she was just a couple of IQ points short? Is that just? A whole generation of ensouled human beings (everywhere on the globe at once, or did some families have individuals that reached the magic plateau first?) being raised by soulless animals? That sounds like a very bad situation for all parties involved. And what if the granddaughter wasn’t as smart (or whatever ‘sufficiently advanced neurologically’ means)? Would you have: ape->human->ape? Sounds pretty evil to me.
The whole thing is just nonsense, and is no different from Ray Comfort’s male searching for a mate.
It would appear that the “special status” of human beings will be to serve as a warning and an explanation of the Fermi Paracox should creatures who possess real intelligence evolve and discover our ruins.
Hopefully, the last human to die off will have the presence of mind to record a message telling the intelligent beings that this is what happens when you believe in woo rather than reality.
I believe this was actually covered on an episode of the Non-Prophets. I don’t remember exactly when since I’ve been listening to random episodes from all over their archives. It devolved into a giant 30 min. debate over whether Collins as the head of NIH is a good thing for science or not and I believe the consensus reached was that they couldn’t judge him on past actions and so long as this religious evangelizing stopped and didn’t intrude on his ability to do real science. Matt also opined that most of his points were above and accepting of current science and therefore weren’t relevant either.
Ibis3 #51 wrote:
I often run across ads promoting dance/movement/exercise classes for women which say something to the effect of it being “good for mind, body, and soul.” This tempts me to ask them if there are any discounts for people with no souls. I don’t have one. So I don’t see why I ought to pay full price.
If they want, I could get a note from a metaphysician.
@BLOG “Almighty God, who is not limited in space and time, …” How can he say that and call himself “scientist”?
As evidenced above, it has not stopped. And this is not a trivial problem.
As the head of, and public face for, a national, governmental, science-based administration, it’s a serious issue.
This is why Sastra is one of my most favoritist peoples on teh interwebs!
[First Slide] Almighty
GodMagic Leprechaun, who is not limited in space and time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.[Second Slide]
God’sMagic Leprechaun’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that plan included human beings.[Third Slide] After evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a sufficiently advanced neurological “house” (the brain),
GodMagic Leprechaun gifted humanity with free will and with a soul. Thus humans received a special status, “made inGod’sMagic Leprachaun’s image.”[Fourth Slide] We humans used our free will to disobey
GodMagic Leprechaun, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law. Thus we were estranged fromGodMagic Leprechaun. ForChristiansRainbowists,JesusThe Promised Pot Of GoldTM is the solution to that estrangement.That’s it. A very simple but, I think, entirely compatible view that does no violence either to
faithcompletely made up shit or to science. And puts them in a harmonious position …A bit strong surely?
What Collins is doing is more like dressing science in a short skirt and a skimpy blouse and pimping it on the street (outside a Church)
Ken Ham now…
Fine tuning boils down to:
Humans exist therefore god.
@49:
This, exactly. It’s plenty bad enough even if he does his actual job in exemplary fashion (as I have no doubt he does.)
Collins is still pushing his anthropic theism. Essentially he’s saying the combination of physical constants that we observe in our universe is the only one capable of bringing forth life as we know it. Since we can conceive of other combinations of physical constants, some explanation is needed why our actual combination of physical constants exists rather than a different one. That explanation is given by the hypothesis that God, an all-loving, all-powerful and perfect being, created the Universe with constants “fine tuned” just so that human life could develop. No other hypothesis is as good as this one, so we can safely assume that God exists.
Why, if god is interested in humanity, did he create a Universe that needed 14.5 billion years to produce us? Why isn’t Earth, let alone the rest of the vast universe, more hospitable to us? It seems unreasonable that an all-powerful god would not have created us right at the start. Why didn’t god fine tune the universe better, so genetic mutations would generally be less harmful and more useful? Why didn’t he fine tune it better so that there would be fewer natural disasters on earth?
An indifferent or even evil deity makes more sense. This idea explains why the conditions on earth are not better fine tuned for humans. If this deity is indifferent towards human life, it would also explain why it took so long for humans to evolve.
But we don’t need anthropic theism. There are other explanations for fine tuning in the universe. These include the hypothesis that it is all just a huge coincidence, the hypothesis that the constants cannot be changed, the hypothesis that some values for the constants are much more probable than others, the hypothesis that there are many universes each with different constants, and even the hypothesis that the universe merely exists in our imagination (classical solipsism).
So Collins has to come up with some evidence for his assertions of anthropic theism. Wishful thinking just isn’t enough.
Or maybe he pretends to believe in these miracles in order to continue making tons of money selling his book to gullible Christians.
Or maybe he’s just nuts.
In the spirit of backpedaling the bible to accommodate science, why not go with Thomas Jefferson’s vision?
Of course, we’d have to slip in an editor’s note that slavery is wrong since TJ seemed to miss that point.
I remember a short piece by Richard Dawkins in last year’s issue of Free Inquiry on Darwin’s bicentennial anniversary in which he gave a simple reason why the theory of evolution is such a brilliant example of scientific thought: it needs to make very few assumptions in order to explain a great deal about the diversity of life on this planet. By that standard, the Collins account fails miserably – it piles a lot of new assumptions about the existence, nature and actions of a supernatural being on top of our established theories about the origin of the universe and the development of complex organisms, without explaining anything new. Truly scientific theories will never require a god, and trying desperately to cram him in does violate them quite seriously.
Tis Hiumself #62 wrote:
If God is all-powerful, then why was It forced to work within these constraints, and Fine-Tune a universe to meet the requirements which life needs? Where did the rules that “you can’t have life without X” come from — and why can’t God break them? If God put them there, then why make It so difficult for Itself? Showing off?
I think Fine-Tuning falls apart even before you get to the scientific arguments. It’ll also fail to even get off the ground if you refuse to pick out life as a special, significant, important feature, before you begin. There seems to be something suspicious about that first move, there. GIGO.
Sastra #54
You owe me one keyboard.
Sometimes,once in a while,someone comes along with a spot on comment that just sums it up in manner that leaves me totally in awe :
defides #2:
I am so stealing that one!
defides wins teh intermabob….
One is reminded, yet again, of what Douglas Adams had to say about the Anthropic principle:
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/index.html
The thing about the anthropic principle is that in it’s weak form, it is pretty much a tautology:
and in its strong form, it leads to absurdities
e.g. that God must not have loved the dinosaurs as much as he loves us.
that global warming can’t be happening because god wouldn’t allow us to pollute ourselves into oblivion
that somehow we occupy a special place in “creation”
As I said above, it really is a pity that whatever intelligent species comes after we are extinct will not fully appreciate just how stupid and deluded we were.
So, Collins is both a hack scientist and a hack salesman, plugging his brand of religion as the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. What utter tripe…
I like the part about homo sapiens waiting to become homo divinis (around 74:40).
“Until Adam arrived there was no human death become there were no real humans, they were not fully breathed by God into the image.”
He’s in deep.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space #69
My take on the strong anthropic principle is it should be called the strong egotistical principle. “The universe exists solely to give produce me.”
If I am not mistaken, prevailing studies in the brain are strongly suggestive that “free will” is a chimera with a spectrum of implications.
As others have commented, the evidence for a creator suggests a blithering idiot rather than an omnipotent God. Although one is almost compelled to appreciate the “logical and rational” contortions of believers perform to avoid accepting the non-existence of God.
ARGHHHHH!!!1!
I’ll be picking Rev BDC cooties off my typing for the rest of the day.
It seems to me what Collins is saying is that science and religion are entirely compatible so long as every time they clash, religion yields to science. There’s two problems with this: 1) it doesn’t, and 2) then what use is religion in the first place?
It’s just another way of saying religion is not a useful way of knowing things. Why try so hard to find somewhere for it to fit?
I wonder how Adam’s parents felt when they discovered they just missed being human, made in God’s image, ensouled and bestowed with free will and a shot at eternal life. I hope they at least got a nice plaque or something.
The beliefs outlined above are only “compatible” with science in the sense that, unlike the nonsense of the biblical literalists, creationists and intelligent design enthusiasts, they appear to be devised so as to be impossible to falsify.
This is actually a very old strand of accommodationism, one embraced enthusiastically by the modern Roman Catholic Church. It enables the scientifically literate believer to compartmentalize his beliefs, and with a little pseudo-scientific babble thrown in, even to reconcile and harmonize them with the findings of science.
In this sense alone is it compatible with science. It is a new “God of the Gaps” argument, and nothing more, postulating miraculous intervention to explain the gaps in our knowledge to date. As all such arguments, its god will adapt and, inevitably, shrink as science grows.
Yes, Collins unquestionably gives a very bad tone to “accommodationism.”
His first science sin, however, is his lack of skepticism. “Free will” is perhaps the equal of the worst woo ever in existence, nothing that any honest scientist could take seriously. Yet he takes it as a given, a fact that science really doesn’t understand (of course it doesn’t understand it, since it’s no fact).
Someone like Ken Miller may believe the same list as Collins, but he does so much better by leaving such claims in the realm of religion and “faith,” as they most certainly are.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: sakura10 | April 22, 2010 10:56 AM
Well, it wasn’t really missed, in as much that AFAIK the Bible only prohibits slavery in the specific case of Egyptians enslaving Israelites.
And weren’t TJ’s views on slavery more along the lines of “Of course slavery is wrong and should be abolished, but not yet (its just not practical to do it now – where would they go? And I’d end up even more in debt than I am already).”
“He might as well have dragged science into a dark alley and hacked it to bits with an axe.”
LOL!!! Thanks, PZ. You made my day with this.
That’s what these apologists do not get with their “it was all set up in advance to look like it wasn’t set up in advance” arguments: If you use science you don’t need a god to explain the universe. And if you use a god to explain the universe, then any absurdity is possible, and the universe isn’t rational.
“He might as well have dragged science into a dark alley and hacked it to bits with an axe.”
Great line.
Francis Collins took an axe,
And gave cosmology forty whacks.
When he saw what he had done,
He gave biology forty-one.
That seems to me to be the logical consequence of the anthropic principle — if human life was so unlikely to come about by chance, how even more unlikely it was for my life to arise through happenstance. I don’t see how one prevents that reductio of the principle.
With regards to ensoulment, I find it bizarre in the extreme that the man most associated with the Human Genome Project seems to think that something other than genetics and its interactions with the environment make up human nature. How much of the human genome is needed before god will ensoul an organism?
Obama has always been closer to centre right than “far” left.
Exactly. It’s always sad to see someone as well educated as Collins fall into that fallacy. The “God of the Gaps” argument doesn’t fill the gaps in our knowledge, it clogs them with mythology, superstition, and wishful thinking. And just like a clogged drain, it requires effort to clear the hardened muck excreted by religions over centuries.
I don’t even think I would call this “God of the Gaps,” since that implies it’s actually filling some gap in our knowledge. Collins’ explanation isn’t doing that. Saying that we’re pre-destined to exist does not fill any holes in our knowledge of evolution, it just blatantly conflicts with it.
God’s Plan for the Universe:
“Whatever happens, however f’ed-up, He meant to do that.”
(God’s a cat…)
Honestly if God intended things to be this way he’s a sadist pure and simple.
Ned Flanders over here just can’t hack it!
Guys like Collins make me think that the naturalists and the godless actually have a tougher job existing in reality because we don’t have any of this kind of stupidity to satiate our yearning minds.
Jeez, it’s sad to see the theological corruption of what is clearly a fine scientific mind.
#51 and others- hey now, maybe there are intermediate forms of souley-ness. Mayhap our mammal ancestors had a cluster of mutated skin cells that excreted slight levels of soul fluid. A little soulishness is better than none, after all. After millions of years the soul cell clusters evolved into primitive soul glands, onward to the complex uterine soul glands of modern women with unwanted pregnancies.
…SCIENCE!!! and FAITH!!!! RECONCILED!
It’s amazing to think that ICP is as astute about these things as the director of the NIH.
Here are my simple questions:
1) Why is collective punishment OK?
2) If the alleged Eve doesn’t know the difference between good and evil, how does she go about evaluating and rejecting the alleged serpent’s claims? How does she know that obeying the Holy Order To Not Eat The Fruit is a good thing?
3) What kind of alleged deity presides over a “test” where the subject is not equipped to determine the correct answer?
4) If it’s all a metaphor for something else, WTF is the something else?
So Collins believes in the Lithic Principle and doesn’t know anything much about neurology… I have nothing to add, all has been said, especially in comments 77 and 86.
BTW, Sastra: psychokinesis. Ki-ne-sis.
Ibis3 @ # 51: Let’s just focus on that ensoulment again for a moment. Exactly when would that have occurred? In the womb (so as to be consistent with today’s anti-choice advocates)? So momma ape is soulless, but her baby has da magic soul that makes it in ‘god’s image’…
Thus raising the question as to whether souls are heritable (which implies Collins et al missed something while doing the Human Genomics Project), or if some extragenetic process is required for installation during each and every human gestation.
Would the NIH be willing to fund a major evo-devo research program to identify the mechanisms and effects of such insertions? According to the ensoulment literature, the first areas to focus on would be initial sperm-ovum contact, and forty or eighty days after (depending on fetal gender).
Science and religion are compatible the same way that my truck and a rabbit are compatible. There ain’t much left of the rabbit if it doesn’t get out of the way.
If the room had been filled with muffled giggles and occasional outbursts of laughter, that would have stuck a fork in it right there. Someone like Collins is obviously concerned about his intellectual credentials and being forced to realize that his peers think he’s a dumbass would have more effect than any kind of “framing” we can do in offline blogs.
Let’s see…
1) Evolution is true
2) Man was created in God’s image
… God is a MONKEY!!!!
God is a MONKEY!!!
Not quite. From the South Park thread:
http://www.weirdspace.dk/SouthPark/God.htm
Slide five: In the year 2081, God gives us the secret to Superluminal Travel!
Collins is like one of those school horses, going along fine until asked to jump the water hazard.
In this case, the water hazard is : “Why does your cosmology require any god or gods, and why does it require specifically the Abrahamic gods ?”
This point he cannot leap over, and so he balks and refuses. No matter how many times he is ridden up to the jump he just won’t take it. I find myself torn between (metaphorically) giving him an apple and putting him back in the barn and sending him to the glue factory of scientific obscurity.
So, Collins — why doesn’t Chronos fit your demand for a divine creator ?
In the Q&A there’s a question about pantheism. Collins responds by saying that it’s just not enough for him if there isn’t a god to reach out to, and one that reaches back to him. He also says that pantheism doesn’t accommodate the reality of Jesus for which he claims there is ample evidence that Jesus is who he says he is. Because if Jesus isn’t what he says he is, then he is evil or crazy.
So that’s the underlying motivation of the need for Collins to invent god. He didn’t respond to the part of the last question in the Q&A that describes the need for god as a crutch. But his need for god sure sounds like that is what it is.
The biologos.org website is up with its 33 questions. The mission statement is pretty narrow:
The leap from ‘god did it’ to ‘the Christian god did it’ is all based on the ‘Jesus can’t be evil or crazy’ assertion.
Because she does not know good/evil there is no way to judge or evaluate god’s command to not eat of the fruit of that tree, she is simply supposed to obey. Without knowledge of good and evil, it is meaningless to ask whether obedience is a “good thing”, it is just “expected”. And that is what made her vulnerable to “temptation” by the serpent. She had no ability to judge his statements as good or bad or that following its suggestion to disobey would be “bad”. [and so on]
I do not understand how anyone can possibly interpret the garden of eden story as any kind of narrative of actual events. It just does not make any sense at all as narrative. As some kind of allegory about how man’s moral sense and knowledge of our mortality is what seperates us from animals it is a pleasant enough myth that these are “gifts” (or a curse, actually) from god. But as literal narrative it is completely nonsensical, and so I can’t believe it was ever meant to be taken as narrative. And to do so now is just absurd.
You almost can’t tell that most of his views are cribbed from CS Lewis (as if Moral Law didn’t give it away…)
For those who didn’t watch the video, Collins says that his reading CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity is what essentially converted him.
I’m not clear exactly on how the story contained in Collins’ slides is a mangling of science. It seems to me that his position, bad theology though it I think it is, is perfectly consistent with holding that scientific investigation is the way we can generate theoretical knowledge about the world.
He also tells a story that extends beyond the limits of theoretical human knowledge, but this doesn’t diminish science in any way that I can see. This is just to acknowledge that there are some questions that empirical investigation cannot answer. Hume and Moore and Kant and many others have made this point very convincingly about value claims.
I want to be clear that I am not defending Collins’ theological views. Rather, my point is only that skeptics (myself included) shouldn’t make ungrounded claims either.
From the BioLogos site:
If God created the universe, what created God?
So, meaning and purpose is really the underlying motivator here.
As opposed to:
Because atheism is bleak and generates more questions than answers, it can’t be right. Lame.
This is just to acknowledge that there are some questions that empirical investigation cannot answer.
No. There are ill-formed questions that simply don’t have an answer as they are expressed. But that doesn’t mean that empirical investigation isn’t the only way reliably to inform ourselves about what those questions “are really asking.”
There just are no other ways of knowing, and claiming that there are, or that whole realms of reality are off-limits to science because conceptually confused people can be induced to utter ill-formed nonsense questions that science can’t answer because they have no answers, is an affront, if not to “science” per se, then to empirical epistemology.
I don’t think moral questions are in general ill-formed, just in virtue of their being questions about morality, but these are questions that empirical investigation cannot answer. This isn’t because I think that only God can answer them – I don’t think this – it is because of considerations like G.E. Moore’s open question argument: for anything that I desire, or that I desire to desire, or that has evolved, and so on, it is an open question whether that thing is good, in the sense that it cannot be settled just by the meaning of the word “good.”
I also am not a moral skeptic in the sense of thinking that there are no good answers to moral questions. So, here’s an area of inquiry that I hold is both unsettled by empirical investigation and an area where I think there can be fruitful inquiry.
My response here is too quick, I admit, and does not amount to a proof. But these are serious philosophical questions, and I hope that at least my position can be recognized as a not unreasonable take on them.
Fun trivia: that book came with a preface saying that the fact that there are different denominations of Christianity should never be mentioned in the presence of a non-Christian, to wit:
Yeah, that’s really the sign of someone concerned with intellectual honesty. And that’s before the actual content of the book that converted Collins gets started. It gets worse, like the analogy about how God cannot be a fact in the universe just like an architect cannot be a wall in his house…
Collins is being disingenuous.
I can’t for the life of me believe he doesn’t know that concepts such as free will/soul contradict neuroscience.
Ironically enough a good bit of work on this subject has been done at NIH.
Now what does “we disobeyed god” even mean, if he doesn’t believe the original actually happened? Disobeyed how?
This leads sort of off the tracks, but someone brought up Hume and I can’t resist.
Is anyone else absolutely baffled by the whole “Is-Ought” dilemma? Are you quite sure you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”?
A) To open a jar of peanut butter, one ought to unscrew the lid. –
Hey look, that wasn’t that hard was it? It’s as though the word “ought” simply requires an implicit qualifier. Gee, I wonder where else this applies.
B) To follow God, one ought to unscrew the lid. –
Oh, I get it now… statement B is more reasonable than statement A, because it requires faith. Hey look at that, I just invented religion!
That’s what makes them ill-formed. Define what you mean by “good” and it becomes answerable by empirical investigation. If you can’t define what you mean by “good”, then you don’t know what you’re asking for.
If it’s all a metaphor for something else, WTF is the something else? – robinsrule
Typical fundamentalist-athiest materialism! It’s not a metaphor for anything, it’s just, like, a metaphor – you know, deep, and spiritual and stuff.
tsg, it is exactly the account of goodness that I’m arguing cannot be provided empirically. You’re asking me to define goodness in empirical terms so that you can then do about investigating it. Ok, but where are we to get that account? Evolutionary theory? Let’s say that human beings have evolved to have attribute x (this can be whatever you want). Does it follow that “x” is a good attribute? No, of course it doesn’t. You might want to say, as I’ve seen said here before, something like this: any attribute that contributes to the life or health of the organism is a good one. But why hold this? It only works if we assume that my being alive and healthy is a good thing, which is then the value-claim that requires an account.
tgs also says that I need to define what I mean by “good” or I don’t know what I’m talking about. Really? This is a cop out – a way to avoid engagement. I can’t define, precisely, what I mean by almost anything. What is the definition of cow, or tree, or game? We can offer lots of descriptions, but it turns out to be really really difficult (maybe impossible) to give definitions of these that keep out everything that we want out and in everything we want in. (Imagine this: a population of cows evolves over time into a population of animals that we think are a different species. How do we determine the “moment” they became not-cows? There are clear cases of cows and not-cows, but there are vague cases in between.) Logical positivism tried to just this and failed spectacularly.
You don’t need to define something precisely (or completely) in order to reason about it. But you must provide a sufficient enough definition to adequately reason with.
If someone’s answer to “what is good?” is “I can’t really give a good definition, but God has something to do with it,” then forgive me for being unimpressed.
Etruscan,
Accounts of the “is-ought” problem vary, but I think what is at issue is the following: from a theoretical description (think: scientific, or empirical) of some state-of-affairs (a way the world might be), it does not follow that one ought to bring that state-of-affairs about (or, that one ought not bring it about). To answer this further question (of whether it ought to be brought about) requires us to bring values to the table so we can figure out whether the state-of-affairs is a good one – one that we consider worth bringing about.
You’re not a philosopher, are you? I’m not either, but it’s obvious how your example doesn’t generalize to the is/ought dilemma. “one ought to unscrew the lid” presumes that one is trying to open a jar of peanut butter. You introduced a value judgment already, that opening the jar is something that should be done. Try this:
There is a jar with a lid. One ought to open the lid.
How does the ought follow from the is?
Pete Murray #103 wrote:
Our point is that what you here call “tell(ing) a story” is what we call “generating a hypothesis.” This hypothesis can’t be beyond the limits of theoretical human knowledge, because people like Collins claim to know enough about it, to not just believe it, but find it a better hypothesis — better supported, and more explanatory — than bare naturalism.
Our point, then, is that Collins should either apply his scientific reasoning to the God-explanation itself, or admit that there’s nothing God explains, and that he only believes in it out of some sort of personal or cultural taste. In which case, he should not then try to pretend that having this taste confers some sort of special merit on the believer, or suggests that it demonstrates a virtue like humility, or the ability to feel things more deeply than others.
God isn’t a value claim, or like a value claim. It’s a fact claim; no fair blurring categories.
It doesn’t. But here, try this:
There is a God. One ought to worship him.
(which I assume means my problem is not with Hume specifically)
If you can’t provide it, then what is the question “is X good?” even asking?
My “you” was a generic “you”, not specifically aimed at you personally, and I didn’t ask you for an all encompassing definition of “good”. What I’m saying is that if you’re asking “is X good”, you need to define “good” in terms of X to get a meaningful answer. If you can’t, then neither science nor philosophy nor religion can answer it. What makes it “good”? Why is it “better” or “worse” than “not X” or “Y”?
Really? Because I can describe a cow or a tree or a game well enough that my five-year-old understands it.
Slippery slope. The definition just needs to be specific enough to make the question meaningful. It need not be exact in every detail.
Etruscan says,
I’d be unimpressed, too, but I suspect this is mostly a straw man. Plenty of people who believe in God can say quite a lot about goodness. I like Rawls on this though (from, “On My Religion”):
Paul #115 wrote:
If you WANT to open the jar of peanut butter, then you ought to unscrew the lid. This assumes that, as a fact of the matter, unscrewing the lid will open the jar of peanut butter (it also assumes that unscrewing the lid won’t result in something worse than the peanut butter, but that’s a complication.)
Goals can only be justified through more basic goals, until the goal is so basic that it can either be assumed universal, or something a reasonable person ‘such as yourself’ would want.
I am not a philosopher either but I would think that a better example is:
All these jars have lids, therefore jars ought to have lids.
The problem is trying to justify the “ought” from the “is” (or “have” in this case).
Is that correct?
tsg:
So, I think we’re closer to being on the same page now than I originally thought. When you tell your five-year old what a cow is, I assume you do something like point to a picture of a cow and say “cow.” Then, when the kid points to a horse and says “cow,” you say, “No, horse.” Or something like this. Ok, but what are we to point to when we’re talking about goodness? I’m claiming that with respect to anything “out there” in the world, it is an open question as to whether it is good (you can’t just read off the thing whether it is good, like you can just see that is yellow or big or whatever).
We can at least start by talking about what things we think are good, and why we think they are good, and possibly in the end discover some of our underlying commitments that explain these more specific cases; and, discovering these more abstract commitments can in turn lead us to revise our earlier, more concrete judgments, and so on.
@Sastra
Thanks for elaborating, that’s actually what I was getting at. You need a goal to justify wanting to open the jar (which I deliberately left out of my example, and Etruscan left in his).
is/ought fallacy. We don’t know whether God is one who likes being worshiped, or smites puny humans who think they are worthy of worshiping him/her/it.
Sastra,
I agree with you, when people are making out the question of God’s existence to be the kind of thing that can be empirically investigated (which many do, especially those of a fundamentalist stripe). But, others don’t interpret the question this way. Some really do interpret it as a question that resembles a value question. But, note that other sorts of questions are like this too. How are we to justify our use of inductive reasoning (where we infer that the world will continue on in a uniform, or at minimum, a predictable way)? We might say, well, induction has been really successful in the past – but this is question-begging because it is using induction to justify induction. (This, by the way, is Hume’s famous critique that I am probably not doing justice to).
Anyway, the point is that there are a whole bunch of things that can’t be grounded empirically, including one of the most basic presuppositions of our best method of empirical investigation itself. Because, I take it, lots of scientific activity is inductive (or maybe its abductive (Inference to the Best Explanation), but this suffers from the same foundational problem).
Okay, red flag.
Yes, this is an “is/ought” fallacy. No, not for the reason you’re stating. It doesn’t matter if God wants us to praise him or not. God could have parted the heavens and told us, explicitly, that he commands our praise. You are no closer to deriving what “ought” to be done.
My problem is not with the formulation of Hume’s argument, but the use of Hume’s argument to defend religious morality. Saying that “God wants it” brings us no closer to logically closing the gap between truth statements and normative claims.
Ultimately you must pick a set of values (goals, objectives, whatever) from which you can derive all the “oughts” you would like. Religion attempts to conceal this point through the concept of a “divine mandate,” and many people let them get away with the claim. It’s just bad logic.
More or less, yes.
Again, we’re back to what you (or anyone) mean by “good”. Good is not an absolute term, and if you are treating it like one, you aren’t asking meaningful questions. Good is relative. What may be good in one set of circumstances may be bad in another.
Etruscan says:
Nicely put.
Paul #123 wrote:
Agree: being “worthy of worship” is something theists often try to smuggle into the definition of God, when, if you look at the concept itself, that would have to be at least in part an empirical matter.
Thought experiments can often be revealing — particularly with the connection between God and morality. You can shake a theist up with this one:
Consider this possibility; God exists, but, the more you understand God, the more you experience God, the closer you become to God, the more disappointed you are. Contemplating it fills you with boredom at best — and horror at worst. All the good things you thought came from God, turn out to be sins: all the cruel, harsh, evil things you thought were ‘man-made distortions of God,’ turn out to be God’s essential nature.
Now:
1.) Would you change your understanding of what is Good, to try to meet God’s standard — because, after all, He made the universe, and he’s the moral boss over what He made?
2.) Is this hypothetical God a hypothetical evil God, and you’d judge it unworthy of your worship, and reject it?
3.) Is this thought experiment impossible to contemplate, because God’s nature of Goodness IS, by definition, identical to what you, yourself, find good? Thus, this scenario is, in principle, illogical nonsense.
Only that first one places morality firmly only in the hands of God, and removes it from humanism. But, there’s a price.
tsg,
I’m not sure what you intend with the absolute/relative distinction you use, but there’s at least one way of understanding it on which I agree completely: whether some particular state-of-affairs counts as a good one depends on some kind of contextual factors. I disagree if what you mean is that there are no objectively true or false value claims.
I also want to point that I suggested a method of coming to agreement on moral questions. I don’t see how some purely empirical method (even “Do what God says when he parts the clouds and gives us commands”) could work. Instead, I suggested a method of reason-giving, back-and-forth, where we investigate the commitments we already have and try to understand what rational basis we might have for those commitments. It is not immediately obvious what answers we’ll come to, but I’m not sure what other method is really available to being like us.
Pete Murray #124 wrote:
I disagree; I think that, when you tease apart what people really mean when they talk about “God,” even the liberal and sophisticated,* are making what is basically a fact claim. They cover it up with emotions and experience and meaning, but they’re pulling an odd sort of bait ‘n switch here. What they want, is for a fact claim to then be treated as if it were a value claim. This grants their belief a credibility and protection it wouldn’t otherwise have. They’re making what amounts to a category error.
* the very liberal, and the very sophisticated, often have a view of God that is too obscure to be teased apart or analyzed, and it might very well be nothing more than a metaphor for “values” or “love.” Or not. They don’t care what you think it is, as long as you’re in awe of God — and, coincidentally, of them.
Unless I misunderstand what you mean, value itself is inherently subjective.
If your intent was that we both engage in this exercise, I misunderstood. As it is you who are claiming there are questions science can’t answer, perhaps you ought to provide one you think satisfies you’re criteria of “good” that can’t be empirically investigated.
tsg,
I think that some things are objectively valuable- they are things that everyone ought to value, and when people don’t value them they are making a mistake. (My reasons are basically Kantian ones, but this comment thread may not be the place to go to into depth. If you’re interested, I can recommend Paul Guyer’s commentary on Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics Morals.” The Groundwork itself is a difficult book, though short, that I’m still actively trying to understand.)
But, to address your later question, are you asking for me my account of what is good, so that you can see if it is the kind of thing that can be empirically investigated? I think I haven’t been clear: my claim is that there is no account of goodness that can be empirically investigated. Let’s say you hold that pleasure is the only good thing, so what we should is produce as much pleasure as possible. Well, surely science can help us figure out what actions will produce more or less pleasure than others, but science cannot tell us whether that foundational claim – that pleasure is the only good thing – is true. How could it? What would a “good detector” measure, such that pleasure would set it off? This goes for any claim about the fundamental nature of the good.
Sastra,
I guess I can agree that they can making a fact claim, without agreeing that the existence of God must be understood as an empirical matter. I think some philosophers and theologians – smart ones who really tried to give arguments, not Ken Hams – have thought of the question of God’s existence as more like the claim that 1 and 1 is 2, in the sense that this is, I take it, in some sense a “fact” claim (it is held to be objectively true), but it isn’t an empirical claim that is justified by reference to experience. (This example depends on your accepting that mathematical claims and theorems are non-empirical. If you don’t substitute something else that you think is non-empirical.)
I take your point, still, and it might well be that at least some are using a bait-and-switch, but I just can’t accept that all thinking religious people act in such bad faith. (And no, I don’t believe that a “thinking religious person” is a contradiction in terms… it’s not just me that sees that quip coming, right?)
smart ones who really tried to give arguments – Pete Murray
Like Plantinga?
*chortle*
Making something compatible where there aren’t specified parameters isn’t really that difficult. Does it matter to a boundless omniscient entity whether it creates humans through special creation or through an evolutionary process? Of course not. See, science and religion are completely compatible.
All this demonstrates is how vague religion actually is.
Pete Murray #133 wrote:
I still think that most theology (no, I don’t mean Ken Ham) does rely on a God based on empiricism, in that the description of God, and the premises used to arrive at God, are all ultimately derived from common experience, or facts that “everybody knows.” Even the Ontological Argument — which seeks to establish the existence of God by looking at what God’s “nature” is supposed to logically entail — still posits a God whose existence has observable consequences in the world.
I agree that many theologians will claim that God is a mystery beyond mysteries, or totally outside of human experience, or He Who Must Not Be Defined — but then they go on to talk about this God, and use it, and deal with it as if it’s knowable enough, and familiar enough, and empirical enough, that the earlier language seems like more of a game than anything.
When they start comparing God to things like numbers, or emotions, or values — and that’s why we can’t just investigate it like an ordinary thing — I think the proper response is to ask if God IS a number, or an emotion, or a value. Otherwise, I don’t know what it would be like for something to exist the way the number 5 exists, say — but it’s as if the number 5 could care about you, and inspire you, and put 2’s and 3’s together as an act of agency.
Sastra,
I’m not sure that anything about the Ontological Argument itself implies empirical consequences of God’s existence, but apart from that I just think your analysis is pretty interesting. I guess I’ve been trying to push at the distinction between knowable and empirical – I still think it’s at least potentially consistent to hold that God is one but not the other, depending of course on the specifics of the argument. Now, let me also say that every argument for God’s existence I’ve ever seen has, in my view, failed. But many have failed in interesting and non-obvious ways, and some people say that even if an a priori theoretical proof of God’s existence (or non-existence) is impossible, there still can be some other reason for assuming God’s existence (though I’m not convinced by any of these arguments, either, at least the ones I know of).
‘Good’ could then be defined as anything that produces X levels of Y hormone/activity in a particular part of the brain (assuming you’ve defined pleasure this way – if you can’t use your definition to separate things that exist (like horse vs. cow) then te definition isn’t good enough to talk about in a meaningful way).
At that point, you can then evaluate everything to determine whether or not it fits in the category of ‘good’ – as you can with a suitable definition of cow. At which point you can empirically determine what you ought to do, based on what is.
My two cents, anyway.
Pete Murray #137 wrote:
Perhaps, but I don’t think you can use a non-empirical argument on a definition of God which meets a reasonable minimum criteria for being “God.” That is, you might claim you’re reasoning your way to a First Cause without relying on any evidence — just working from concepts like “cause” and “foundation” — but in order to bring in attributes which make God “worthy of worship,” I think you’re going to be drawing from analogies to experience. The Transcendental Argument — which purports to be completely non-empirical — turns out to be completely pointless: not so much an argument, as a scold. And, of course, the Calvinist God is anything but a “Symbol that points to Transcendence.” It’s almost aggressively anthropomorphic.
At any rate, Collins’ God — and his reasons for believing in God — turn out to be both knowable and empirical. Back at #39 I tried to take his Power Point apart and explain where he was making claims which were, in fact, right in science’s territory.
So, any of you folks who thought it was fine to have this guy running the NIH having any second thoughts yet?
please, PLEASE make a stink about that on the Panda’s Thumb.
I argued with those dolts for weeks prior to Collins’ confirmation, and they simply refused to acknowledge the damage such statements as those under discussion here actually cause legitimate science representation.
http://pandasthumb.org/
…and then take it up on the NCSE forum.
it’s time accomodationists SEE how inevitably their position will actually DAMAGE science education.
..and Collins is the very icon of that.
Then how do you convey to a five-year-old, to take our previous analogy of describing a cow, what good is? How did you learn what good is? And if you can’t describe what good is, what does the question “is X good” even mean? Until you can do that, the question may as well be “is X blarnf”. In other words, it’s not meaningful.
Moran said on his blog:
Collins goes on to describe this view as “Theistic Evolution.” It could also be called the “New Creationism.”
holy crap, that’s it!
if the accomodationists and people like Collins and Miller can call us “New Atheists”, then I will henceforth call them “New Creationists”.
surely this label has been thought of before??
Francis Collins reminds me of Douglas Adams’ “TV argument” retold by Dawkins in his lament for Douglas:
A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”
@140
But if we take evolution out of the body of science, more religious people will believe in science! The important thing is that we score high on science literacy so we don’t look like a bunch of dumbfucks when compared to other countries, right?
The important thing is that we score high on science literacy so we don’t look like a bunch of dumbfucks when compared to other countries, right?
I assume you’re being sarcastic here?
my meter is in the repair shop.
Jerry Coyned the term. I think it’s a good one, too.
Naturally. It was of course a reference to the recent issue regarding removing knowledge of evolution from comparative science knowledge tests. I don’t hold the view espoused, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find people that do.
It did amuse/scare me as a possible compromise the accommodationists could decide on in the future. They’re already halfway there, telling people evolution doesn’t have any bearing on their special creation beliefs and not calling out the head of the damn NIH when he continues forwarding his special evolution ensoulment garbage (indeed, atheists are seen as shrill and unreasonable by accomodationist atheists if they complain about it). Just how much would they be willing to compromise?
Just how much would they be willing to compromise?
it depends, I think, on whether any particular one views the end result of protecting science from anti-science is a tactical battle that needs be fought on various small battlefields, or whether there is a more long term strategic view that leans towards critical thinking and rationality as being the thing we are fighting for, not just science itself.
people like Mooney and Nisbet have lost sight of the long term goals, and think the only thing important is winning the small tactical fights that prevent places like Kansas and Ohio from encoding things like redefinitions of the word “Science”.
To be sure, I understand the value of winning the battles, but most of the accomodationists appear more than willing to cede the real war.
For some accomodationists, perhaps it’s become a case of “forest for the trees”, which I can also understand. If one’s personal turf is threatened, that does tend to make one forget about the bigger picture.
I rather think in Nisbet’s case, he is actually attempting to carve a niche for himself, and really doesn’t give a shit about what is really at stake here.
I am starting to think the same of Mooney.
I don’t care how smart Collins is.
That lot proves beyond all doubt that he is off his trolley.
Barking Mad.
Loopy.
A Nutcase.
Quoting PZ
Is it even possible for a prominent scientist who is also a theist to gain your admiration, PZ? If a scientist is spotted gracing the doors of a place of worship or if he or she answers questions in public about his or her personal beliefs being compatible with science, does that place him or her into the having “done great violence to science” category?
So did Collins’ Great Ensoulment precede or follow the Great Vowel Shift?
Only if they then go on to make claims about reality based on their faith. Or start an organisation that quote mines.
I just wonder how Francis Collins justifies his opposition to Ken Ham style Creationists. Does he realise that any arguments that he is likely to make against them can equally be applied by atheists to his reasoning?
Oh, but that would be so strident!!!(faints, clutching pearls for all they’re worth)
/mooneybaum
Is it even possible for a prominent scientist who is also a theist to gain your admiration, PZ? If a scientist is spotted gracing the doors of a place of worship or if he or she answers questions in public about his or her personal beliefs being compatible with science, does that place him or her into the having “done great violence to science” category?
It’s certainly not a matter of attending religious services or one of merely being a theist. But “answer[ing] questions in public about his or her personal beliefs being compatible with science” does violence to science in exactly the ways discussed here. Beliefs not justified by evidence aren’t compatible with scientific thinking in any way that defines “compatibility” other than trivially.
Now, my father was a church-attending Christian theist, and a capable and well-regarded ecologist. He considered evolution compatible with his Christian beliefs. When he “answered questions in public” about the matter, it was likely to be in class, helping some fundamentalist student approach the material in a way that didn’t oppose it to his or her faith. Some variation of ‘if God created life, evolution was the means he used.’ So, there’s some gray area in my mind, where this kind of needless opposition exists to understanding and accepting incontrovertable scientific facts. It does not do violence to scientific thinking to help someone embrace it in the face of religious and cultural opposition, but note that this all runs the other way: my father had no interest in convincing non-believers that Christian beliefs were any more compatible with evolution than any other beliefs, including atheism.
Thank you CJO #155 for your thoughtful response. I really do appreciate it. Your father sounds like a man I would personally admire. He apparently answered questions in a mostly classroom setting when asked by students to help them understand the scientific facts despite their cultural or religious barriers. If he had he ventured out of the classroom to speak or give talks about his beliefs, is that the point at which the violence to science (scientific thinking) happens?
Is it at the point when someone is perceived to be evangelizing for one particular set of beliefs that the violence to science begins? I have heard it argued that certain scientists are evangelizing for atheism as they speak publically against religion and answer questions. Is that doing violence to science also?
I know PZ has stated that he does not push his atheism in the classroom and I do applaud that. The classroom should be a neutral zone as much as possible. What about the world outside the classroom? Collins was invited to give the talk at The Veritas Forum. Did he not go far enough in stating that these were his personal beliefs or that not everything he talked about was scientifically verifiable? No one is obligated to believe as he does. How is this really any different than when PZ goes to speak at an atheist convention?