In that silly debate, Bill Nye made a wise tactical decision: to focus exclusively on the specific topic of the debate, whether creationism was a viable scientific model, and to avoid getting bogged down in the question of whether there is a god or not. I think that was a smart move, simply because a “good” debate (it’s debatable whether there is such a thing) addresses a single clear point with rhetoric and logic. Outside of the arena, though, the question of the relevance to evolution is fair game, and unfortunately, some people give the wrong answer.
Phil Plait, for example.
So evolution is not anti-religion in general. But is it atheistic? No. Evolution takes no stand on the existence or lack thereof of a god or gods. Whether you think life originated out of ever-more complex chemical reactions occurring on an ancient Earth, or was breathed into existence by God, evolution would take over after that moment. It’s a bit like the Big Bang; we don’t know how the Universe came into existence at that moment, but starting a tiny fraction of a second after that event our science does a pretty fair job of explanation.
I can’t stress this enough. The conflict over the teaching of evolution is based on the false assumption that evolution is antagonistic to religion. This is why, I think, evolution is so vehemently opposed by so many in the United States. The attacks on the specifics of evolution—the claims about irreducibility of the eye, for example, or other such incorrect statements—are a symptom, not a cause. I can talk about how we know the Universe is old until the Universe is substantially older and not convince someone whose heels are dug in. But if we can show them that the idea of evolution is not contrary to their faith, then we will make far, far more progress.
Are orbital mechanics atheistic? Can we say, well, the orbit of a satellite is entirely compatible with the idea that a god is keeping it aloft — that we could imagine that this god is actually doing all the heavy lifting and flinging of the equipment about, but because he is so lawful, he’s doing it in a way that precisely mimics the movements that it would follow if it were obeying the laws of Newton and Einstein? In a trivial way, sure, you could pretend everything is being directly manipulated by a sentient and anthropomorphic (but invisible and intangible) god, but that’s mere philosophical wanking. We certainly aren’t launching satellites with prayer, and it’s anti-scientific to propose theological excuses for processes that are accurately and entirely explained by math and physics.
Conversely, if you believe that satellites are held aloft by god-power and Newton and Einstein are superfluous, then some astronomer or engineer asserting that the laws of physics describe and explain the motion of orbiting masses is making an anti-religious argument. We understand the forces; we have good descriptions of how they work; we have repeated, independently verified, empirical observations of the mechanisms at work; we make predictions and test them using our godless explanations, and adding a god factor to the equations does not help or explain anything.
Similarly, we understand the forces that drive evolution. We have our equations and measurements and collected observations, too, and nowhere in them do we have a god fudge-factor. Yet somehow, some engineers and physicists (and it’s almost always engineers and physicists; did you notice the background of the ‘experts’ Ken Ham flaunted in little video segments during the debate?) are perfectly happy to wave away the knowledge of biologists and declare, well say there, evolution takes no stand on the existence of gods, and is perfectly compatible with religious explanations … despite the fact that virtually every religion on the planet makes clear claims about the origin of biological organisms, and that virtually every religious person squawks in complaint when a biologist explains the actual processes and mechanisms that drive evolutionary change. Which never seem to involve a super-man nudging nucleotides or making organs out of mud. And also are so chance-driven that you can’t even argue that it was a process begun in a Big Bang that ineluctably led to us.
We have been living under a system in the US for decades, in which scientists have been bending over backwards to avoid bringing up the profound conflict between religious and scientific claims, in which public school classrooms have been stripped of solid scientific discussions of evolution by social and political pressures. And then every time this goddamn apologia for creationists comes up, someone has to lay the blame for why “evolution is so vehemently opposed” on people who point out the true and obvious statement that yes, evolution contradicts religious just-so story, despite the fact that with few exceptions, scientists, like Phil Plait, insist on making these invalid excuses for the compatibility of science and religion. Scientists have largely been intellectual cowards (with exceptions!) on the God issue for decades, and you can’t now blame the publication of The Genesis Flood on our aggressive forthrightness.
The excuses don’t help. The creationists are angry at us because they’re not stupid, and they recognize what is obvious that the accommodating scientists try to deny: that accepting the mechanical and unaware nature of the forces that have brought us into existence directly contradicts their paternalistic idea of a benevolent universe that loves them and created them with conscious intent. I can see through that bullshit, and so can they.
Stop treating everyone like five year olds who see the logical and physical contradictions in the Santa Claus story. We’re all grown ups here, I hope, so why do we have people who are aware of how science works trying to insist that maybe it doesn’t, all to appease people clinging to a cherished lie?
Evolution does take a stand on the origin of life and of human beings, and it is not god-driven, god-dependent, or even god-compatible. So if you’re one of those non-biologists who insists that biologists should just throw out their knowledge of how evolution works to make happy nice with people who are actively opposing science, I give you two choices: either learn some biology so you can actually make an informed contribution to the discussion about what the science says, or shut the fuck up.
If you can’t do either, I could start yelling at you that space travel is impossible because Jebus evolved us to live in a universe made of water, and I’ll sound just as ignorant as you do.
I don’t have physics envy. I have physics resentment, because I am beyond exasperated with being told what the implications of my branch so science are by people who have only a superficial knowledge of the background of biology.
Plait has always been a cowardly little kiss-up.
Yes! That’s the dividing point. Are the best explanations of science more compatible with with the workings of thermodynamic irreversibility and entropy to bring order from the basic randomness of the universe, or with a pre-existing order and intelligence playing with dolls and puppets? How are we ever to understand the universe, complete with an understanding of the conscious intent that we see in ourselves, our fellow humans and in other evolved life-forms, if we don’t even allow for the highly probable fact that consciousness is and must be part of that which evolves? An intelligent benevolent universe is so profoundly at odds not only with the current findings of science, but with the spirit of human inquiry, that the distortions of accommodationists like Plait are, to me, more breathtakingly wrong (and tragic) than is the ignorance of the likes of creationists like Ham.
“Evolution does take a stand on the origin of life and of human beings, and it is not god-driven, god-dependent, or even god-compatible. So if you’re one of those non-biologists who insists that biologists should just throw out their knowledge of how evolution works to make happy nice with people who are actively opposing science, I give you two choices: either learn some biology so you can actually make an informed contribution to the discussion about what the science says, or shut the fuck up.”
Badass quote of the day.
I do enjoy what Plait does, but it’s not his lunchbox that’s getting pissed on, is it?
If we spotted a asteroid on a collision course and the Xitans blocked all efforts at deflecting it because “It’s god’s will!” suddenly the story would be different.
Are we all grownups? Really?
The reason American scientists tiptoe around religion has nothing to do with rationality or evidence. It’s a matter of tribalism. Approximately 85% of Americans call themselves Christian; another few percent identify as Jewish, Muslim, or some other monotheism. Tell them that science is compatible with religion, and maybe the less fanatical among them will look into this science thing. Tell them that science has no room for their God, and they’ll side with their fanatical brethren, because they’re all Christians.
So the “philosophical wankery” serves as a sort of methodone for God junkies. With it moderate and liberal Christians may become Unitarians, and then Deists, and then agnostics. Without it they won’t even hear us out. They’d rather have a God that methodically conceals all evidence of his existence than no God at all. Without the existence of God, they’ve based their life and their world-view on a lie, and that simply cannot be.
Jason Rosenhouse would have me believe that the primary problem Creationists have with evolution is not that it fills explanatory gaps that they want to fill with God, but that the process hardly seems consistent with a loving god.
In this view, I could see evolution as more “atheistic” than orbital mechanics. On the other hand, I don’t understand why a sensible god would ever create a muon neutrino.
It’s not just a deeper understanding of biology that’s lacking; when a rhetorical question like “ever-more complex chemical reactions occurring on an ancient Earth, or was breathed into existence by God..” can come from a physicist, one wonders if he has any inkling of the violence that does to any understanding of physical chemistry!
My guess is that Phil Plait would say they’re not. God created orbital mechanics … if that’s what you want to believe. You don’t need to get detailed on the ‘how.’ Scientists agree that you’re MUCH better off if you just skip over the method, mechanism, and all the other pesky details.
The idea is that religious belief is fine — we have no problem with what people wish to privately believe for their own reasons — as long as they keep their supernatural explanations out of anything science can study. And politics. It’s the most important fact in the world, but keep it private. Because that works.
But there’s just too much of a disconnect in that sort of compartmentalization. Since when do atheists get to set the limits of where God can and cannot do things? The whole point of faith is that you get to break the rules and stop using science on an empirical claim. You have the Fact of all facts which allows you to know more.
Once someone is using an unscientific method to understand the nature of reality, whether they accept evolution or not won’t depend on the science: ultimately, it depends on their theology. Theology is a wild card: the whole point is that you DON’T play by rational, scientific rules at some place where a rational, scientific person would.
The accomodationist argument is a Little People Argument. It doesn’t pursue truth, it argues that atheists need to shut up for pragmatic reasons. Religious people are little people who are not like you and me. They can’t be reasoned with, they can’t change their minds, they don’t care about what’s true or not. No. They’re simple, weak, and needy, the victim of their upbringing. They can’t give up belief in God or they will just self-destruct. Their entire identity rests on their faith. Anything is preferable to atheism, a fate worse than death in their eyes, and they’ll reject science if they have to.
The main point of the accomodationist argument is that people who are religious can’t handle the truth. We can. But they can’t. And they are intractable when it comes to God.
So buy into their assumptions just long enough to soothe their fears of atheism (no, it’s not your fate) and let them know they can compartmentalize and KEEP GOD!!! Their simple minds will be overjoyed! In fact, if they compartmentalize they can keep God EVEN LONGER!!!
QFT.
There may be times to be accomodationist, but that can’t be our one and only strategy. It gives religion too much credit and religious people not enough.
Phil also said in that post that it’s only the “narrowest of fundamentalists” who have a problem with evolution, and then cites the Catholic church as a religion which accepts evolution.
But he is flatly wrong. Officially, Catholics do not accept biological evolution, they believe in theistic evolution, a bastardized version of evolution modified to fit around an extraneous god. It allows religion to pretend to be compatible with science, but it misses one of the biggest points of evolution, which is that no intelligence or divine intervention was necessary to create the diversity of life.
Not to mention that they seem to be calling it atheistic regardless of how accomodating we are…
They seem to feel free to attack, denigrate, and insult us. It’s a little strange that our response is to lie down and take it.
When I worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the 1960s my grandmother told me man would never go to the moon because Jebus (not her word) would never let evil leave our planet. Phil Plait needs to be able to explain how religious objection to scientific exploration of space is somehow compatible with hid desire to explore space.
Sastra says:
Maybe so, but I can’t help feeling that it’s too much like lying for Jesus. How much lying in the name of truth can you do before you are hopelessly mired in your own dogma and hypocrisy?
Once, at a public lecture by Eugenie Scott, where she gave her usual story about “methodological naturalism” making science and religion all cozy and reconciled, I tried to ask her whether naturalism, far from being a “methodology,” was not the most tested hypothesis in all of science. Unfortunately, the moderator of the meeting knew me, and knew just what I was going to ask, and avoided calling on me for a question in such an obvious manner that others nearby commented on it. I finally talked to her, one-on-one, at the front of the hall as everyone was leaving. She agreed with me. But she would not say so in public.
When I talk with religious people about evolution, I tell them “You don’t have to give up God to accept evolution”. I do that because I know that insisting that evolution is not inherently atheistic will allow them to think about evolution, learn about it, study it. Eventually, some come to the conclusion that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, but even if they don’t they will at least be part of a demographic that sees a little more of reality when they look around, and that is a good thing. Equating science with atheism scares too many of them away. Think about all those fundies who either won’t send their kids to college or only send them to “Christian” colleges because they have found that exposure to the evidence converts so many of those kids away from creationism.
In other words, the trick is to get them to look at the evidence. If they fear for their immortal souls, they won’t even look. Once they seen the evidence, if there is a tiny bit of intellectual honesty within them, they will figure out for themselves if evolution is true then the Bible can’t be.
I’ve always liked Phil Plait. I think what he does for physics and Astronomy in general really is good. However, he has become more and more “squishy” about the topic of religion/god lately. I don’t know if it’s because he’s trying to get a broader appeal or if he’s bowing to pressure from someone, but he’s definitely become more soft. The article he wrote in Slate about the debate I thought was pretty good overall, but one thing he said in it really got under my skin.
“There is more room for a god in science than there is for no god in religious faith.” – Phil Plait
This is so many levels of wrong I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve had so many religious friends throw this line out lately it’s been driving me crazy.
I guess that in a pinch, I would tell a religious audience that you don’t have to disbelieve in your 3O god to accept evolution. But I’d have to leave the room before they start sorting through the idea that the creator god sent multitudes of calamities killing off 99% or so of all the species that have lived on the Earth in order to set in motion the evolution of his chosen and beloved human beings.
The question isn’t whether science is compatible with religion but whether religion is compatible with science. And the those who are concerned with this and who need to address this are simply those who care about religion. This is of no concern to those who care about science.
Judging from what I hear from most progressive theists, they’ve determined religion *is* compatible. Oh, well. Whatever floats their boats, I guess. I guess they lose a just-so story in the process but … well, metaphor, reality, living in the modern world without blinkers and all that. Somehow it works for them. Well, maybe not all of them. There’s plenty of formerly religious atheist who just figure that without the just-so story there was no reason to keep the faith. But it’s not really my concern. Science is the way the world is and whether people can handle it or not is up to them, I guess.
However, I believe we can not have a scientifically ignorant public. There are a huge lay public that given a perceived conflict between religion and science will choose religion every time. And this public is being told there is a conflict. And this is why “evolution is vehemently opposed”. So while I agree we shouldn’t treat people like five-year olds and cater to their santa claus story (that’s the job of the religious; ha! but seriously, it is the job of the religious because they are the only ones who care whether religion is compatible with science) but I can see why its tempting to do so. We don’t want to lose this lay public and their need for a literal just-so story is so trivial and stupid and there are so many “good” (progressive) theists who twisted themselves in knots to make religion compatible, that it’s hard to not want to plead “you can do it too, please”. It’s better then losing them altogether. Or at least it appears so in the short-sighted view.
*clenched-tentacle salute!*
Scientismist #12 wrote:
No, Eugenie Scott has publicly agreed that naturalism is indeed one of the most well-tested conclusions of science. That is why she is a “metaphysical” naturalist. But she very sincerely believes that science cannot rule out the supernatural and therefore belief in God is outside of science.
To her credit, she’s not just being pragmatic — and she gets upset when people say she’s softpeddling her real views. We’ve argued this more than once. She believes that as long as theists can accept what science discovers in the natural world then there’s no problem with religion because science can’t deal with religious claims. “God” is not testable as long as believers don’t bring it into a science.
I agree 100% with your logic, but I wonder if absolute honesty is always the best strategy. Psychologists have amassed pretty good evidence that most people tend to dig in their heels even more strongly when faced with completely contradictory opinions.
In my personal experience, I tend to have much better luck in the long run if I pursue a “wedge strategy” of getting people to understand the logic and evidence for science and evolution (using the tools that God MAY have given us). After all, a truly loving God that most people want to believe in would surely be in favor of medicine and preventing starvation, etc.
Once they understand that their religious authorities can be mistaken about some things, then it is a lot easier to convince people that their preachers might be wrong about a lot of things or perhaps even all of them.
Obviously, this approach only works when you have time to reason with someone. I understand that we must draw the line before any more religiously dictated laws are passed, but up until the voting booth is entered, gentle persuasion seems to be more productive.
I’m a cranky old fart and I hate putting up with ignorant bigots, but I’d rather spend a long time getting them to change their minds than having to put up with them forever.
Of course it’s a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, and while scientists always risk saying stupid things outside of their own field, I suspect Plait of knowing better.
I wonder, though, if this intellectual dishonesty could be justifiable as a temporary compromise. The “creation science” apologists *need* the support of knee-jerk religious creationists to wage their war on science education. If less people see evolution as a threat to their religion, and ease off for a bit, then education and generational turnover might do its part.
Though note that that’s taking a leaf right out of the Discovery Institute’s “wedge strategy” playbook, which has been ineffective to say the least.
I don’t think most people get that science is, at its base, strongly atheistic.
If there is a fundamental axiom of science it is that the laws of physics (and by extension chemistry and biology) operate the same for everyone, everywhere, at any time. I can replicate an experiment done a century ago, half a world away and get similar results as the original author.
This kind of world view doesn’t allow for supernatural creatures to come in and fiddle around with measurements at will. Furthermore, if such supernatural creatures did do such a thing, we would have noticed it with all the measuring and modeling we have done: we couldn’t fit a model to data points randomly messed with by supernatural creatures. Science would be worthless.
The creationists like trotting out god addicted engineers like the guy who invented the MRI machine. But none of those engineers built things using the god-theory, they built things using scientific models built on the understanding that supernatural beings don’t interact with your measurements. If instead of using the resonance of biological structures to an induced magnetic field, MRI-dude just prayed to god and sketched out your inner structure, and it worked, then he might have some credibility regarding his views on supernatural beings. But if his claim to fame is a machine built on a theory that requires that gods don’t exist or at least never interact with the world, then using that fame to promote god’s existence is pretty duplicitous.
I contend that they’re one and the same, and the former are just trying to disguise their views to weasel their way into education.
If it hasn’t already been done, I think you could do a lot more with the Santa Claus analogy. Maybe even interestingly: Sure we can do science (set up surveillance cameras) and see that it’s mum or dad who is delivering the presents and snacking on the cookies. But maybe Santa exists, and they feel Santa in their hearts, and is just acting through them…. I wonder, if someone had the time/energy to try, how a complete accommodationist interpretation of Santa would map onto accommodationist interpretations of God.
So say we go all accommodationism. Fight for a few years or decades, whatever it takes, and we convince the general public to accept some bastardized version of evolution and science a la Catholic Church. Great, now what? Do we say “Oh shit, everything we’ve been telling you is a lie” and try convincing them of a less-bastardized version? Or do we blithely declare “Mission Accomplished!” because everyone now believes a half-assed lie that we pretend is “evolution”? The epistemology is wrong, most of the facts are still wrong, it’s an utterly worthless for describing the world, useless in practicality, just plain wrong.
If the goal is to get everyone to accept what we can label “evolution” then we can all get behind the Discovery Institute, just call their slop “evolution” and bam, controversy gone. If out goal is to actually get people to, you know, accept what is true, then lying about the truth won’t help.
I used to support the accommodationist view but seeing success in another area I think full frontal assault is the best. I used to believe the “noisy” gay rights individuals were undercutting their cause, but, no, look what has happened. By demanding rights in direct contradiction to primitive religion the majority of the public now supports that. Accommodation is too weak, confrontation actually works better. People hear what you have to say, even if they don’t accept it this minute, when you say it firmly and with conviction. And ducking the complaints of the religious just validates them. Evolution is only one of the contradictions to the old myths from science and it’s only the easiest for the fundamentalist simpletons to scream about, but look how easily the Kochs used that same mentality to co-opt the religious into anti-AGW POV. Only sticking to the truth without sugar coating will win the day.
Well said, PZ, and good timing. I was a big follower of Phil Plait’s for 4 or 5 years, but I just threw up my hands in frustration a few weeks ago and walked away. Yeah, he’s always been an accommodationist, and that bugged me. But the last straw was that since the move from Discover to Slate, the comments are completely unmoderated, and Plait *never* puts in an appearance there. As a result, you have 2 or 3 trolls that appear only in climate change related threads and just shout down the rational/science-based commentors, even calling you names just barely disguised enough to get through the kiddy filter.
I’ve a pretty thick skin and can hold my own in arguments with most anti-science types, but… no moderation, no value. So I just left. Don’t even lurk there anymore. Also, the Slate comments are in a modal dialogue, so not even searchable by Google. Completely worthless. Virtual toilet paper.
“Evolution does take a stand on the origin of life and of human beings, and it is not god-driven, god-dependent, or even god-compatible. So if you’re one of those non-biologists who insists that biologists should just throw out their knowledge of how evolution works to make happy nice with people who are actively opposing science, I give you two choices: either learn some biology so you can actually make an informed contribution to the discussion about what the science says, or shut the fuck up.”
I agree, but I think tactically it’s OK and even wise sometimes (depending on the tonal choice of the individual making the argument) to massage (or philosophically wank) the argument, depending on the audience. All tones can be effective with different sorts of people, and some religious parents might be OK with their children learning evolution if they are convinced that it does not necessarily conflict with the idea of a deity. And, by utilizing such ‘philosophical wank’-y definitions of religion to include some sort of deist belief in an absent creator god (or something like that), we can say this without being dishonest.
So we can say “evolution does not conflict with the belief in a god”, with the unspoken small print “as long as that god is defined in an explicit and specific way that jives with evolution”.
That’s just one approach, and it’s certainly not the only one, in my view.
“Science is not in conflict with the belief in a god*”
… * so long as you define god as a being that never interacts with the universe
But nobody prays to a god that never interacts with the universe. They pray to a god that kills their enemies, a god that cures disease, a god that cares who wins the high school football game.
The pro-science side shouldn’t pussyfoot around the definition of god as bad as the theists. We should straight up say that the only god compatible with science is a god that never does anything. If your definition of god has it interacting with the universe in any way shape or form, then your god is at odds with science.
I see what you did there!
It was some years ago that I spoke to her; glad to hear that she changed her mind.. somewhat. But at least to me, the position described in the above paragraph is itself incoherent. A “well-tested conclusion” is reason for a scientific, not a “metaphysical” position. Evolution is also “well-tested”; is that too metaphysical, rather than scientific? Science cannot rule out the supernatural in the same way it cannot rule out such things as special creation. All science can tell us is that, unless our prior going in was equal to one (absolute certainty), then the accumulated evidence makes both the supernatural and special creation highly unlikely. Using lack of absolute certainty as an excuse to ban science from having anything to say about the probability of the supernatural is religious special pleading.
I know that the idea I champion (that scientific and supernatural claims are commensurable, that they can and must be judged using the same probabilistic criteria as is the rest of our common scientific knowledge), is unpopular, and many think that even mentioning it is dangerous and counter-productive to winning the PR battle — and they may be right, if PR is all you are interested in. But I expect that for the theists, the distinction probably doesn’t matter; and the distorted and self-contradictory ideas in philosophy of science that otherwise arise give me indigestion, and make me despair for the understanding of science, even (or perhaps especially) among scientists.
It seems to me some necessary distinctions are being elided here. Evolution, among other scientific findings, is definitely a threat to all religions whose teachings contradict those findings (yes, sometimes, they change their teachings to accommodate it but at the cost of a weakening of their authority). No question. (And, IMNHSO, a further battle is going to soon be fought over neuroscience, since it questions basic religious ideas like “soul”, “free will”, “immateriality of the intellect”, and so on.) There is absolutely no need to sugar-coat this under of the name of “accomodationism” or anything else. In this sense there is definite opposition between science and religion.
However the claim seems to be made by PZ here that atheism follows as a consequence from evolution (or, in fact, from the regularity observed in the universe; the example he gave was the motion of satellites). The argument seems to be, theism is predicated on a “God of the Gaps”, but with no remaining “Gaps” in explanation theism is irrational. There will always be gaps because, unless we accept modal collapse (this universe is the only possible one), there must be, at some level, somewhere, brute unexplained facts. And thus there will always be “Gaps” that theists can claim need God as an explanation. The right argument is that theism does not provide an explanation either; for instance they have no real answer for why God created this universe instead of another.
Regularities in nature were observed well before Newton and Einstein. If this is a compelling argument, then why isn’t it compelling to say that water freezes when it gets cold; this is compatible with God gluing molecules together only when it’s cold but not warm – but that’s just philosophical wanking. Your position appears to be that regularities in nature diminish the posterior probability of God – but that assumes knowledge (at least in a probabilistic sense) of what God (assuming he exists) would or wouldn’t do.
Phil and others of his ilk (probably including Bill Nye) are hoping to keep the horde of villagers with pitchforks and torches from burning down their telescopes, and they figure they can throw the bodies of atheist biologists off the ramparts to appease them.
Sure it can:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/30/we-dont-know-everything-but-we-know-enough/
#31
You’re just using The Courtier’s Reply. Been there, done that (a million times already).
PZ quotes Phil Plait as saying, “So evolution is not anti-religion in general. But is it atheistic? No. Evolution takes no stand on the existence or lack thereof of a god or gods. Whether you think life originated out of ever-more complex chemical reactions occurring on an ancient Earth, or was breathed into existence by God, evolution would take over after that moment. It’s a bit like the Big Bang; we don’t know how the Universe came into existence at that moment, but starting a tiny fraction of a second after that event our science does a pretty fair job of explanation.”
I don’t see anything wrong with that statement. It does no damage to Deism, for example, nor to Christianity as understood by Christians who don’t regard the bible as literally true. And I don’t think Plaits’s statement would offend many Reformed Jews. Then there’s Buddhists and all the others who would read Plait’s words then nod and shrug.
PZ seems to see “religion” as composed solely of the conservative, bible believing set.
Gods that have no effect on how things came to be, gods that never interfere with the universe, gods that never meddle in anything we can measure, aren’t gods worth worshiping. Why waste time praying to a god that can’t do a damn thing?
Deism was a way for atheists to avoid being burned at the stake many years ago. It is dead today: if a person gets to the point to admit that god has no effect on the universe, they will wind up assuming god doesn’t exist rather than engage in the metal gymnastics required to claim the most important thing ever has no influence on how things are.
Reformed jews are atheists that can’t let go of tradition and jingonism.
Buddhists are nearly atheists: the only supernatural elements of Buddhism come from the parent Hinduism (reincarnation) or from incorporating the rites of conquered people (the whole Mahayana branch).
neuroguy @31:
Yes. And such counter hypotheses are part of the history of science. The argument does indeed depend on assumptions about what God would or wouldn’t do. Human assumptions. Newton is as good a source for such assumptions, for testing, as anyone.
You know the famous LaPlace statement “I had no need of that hypothesis”. The hypothesis in question was one proposed by Newton, that his equations of motion could explain much, but only so much of planetary orbits, and that God would need to step in from time-to-time to prevent planets from wandering off. LaPlace did a more detailed calculation, and, indeed, found he had no such need. That fits right into the Bayesian model for how we make scientific progress. Assign any prior probability to the need for a God to interfere in the world. Finding that in this instance it was unnecessary doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist and will never be needed to explain anything, but it does establish that the fair estimate of the probability is now lower than you thought when you assigned your prior!
It’s not the regularities of nature that provide evidence for or against God — the God hypothesis provides regularity, too; with a vengeance. It’s the predictive value of the hypotheses that you postulate to explain those regularities. Is it Newton’s impersonal force of gravity, or is it the benevolent will of a loving God? Newton thought that a God was needed there, and that his mathematical explanation would eventually fail. LaPlace thought not, and demonstrated that the math did not fail (at least to the precision of the day). Count one positive point for Newton’s gravity, and one negative point for Newton’s God. Rinse and repeat.
Now, continue doing that for a few hundred years. The need for God is an ever-diminishing probability.
Replying to the argument in:
Bullshit.
Matt Dillahunty has said his working definition of “faith” is “faith is the excuse people give for believing in things when they don’t have a good reason”. The words “supernatural” and “metaphysical” are words just like that. They’re weasel words. By even allowing them in the conversation, we’re surrendering ground which we should not. “Supernatural” is a completely bullshit word. My working definition of “supernatural” is “supernatural is the excuse people give for not using science and rational thinking”.
I don’t care if some observable phenomena is “supernatural”. What matters is it’s observable. If it’s observable, I am going to collect data and form models of future behavior. That’s science. “Supernatural” is used as some sort of excuse or argument that this won’t work. Bullshit I say. Of course science will work.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke.
“Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!” – Girl Genius Webcomics
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205
-from Net of Magic, by Lee Siegel
So in other words, liberal Jews and liberal Christians wouldn’t be offended, and that somehow makes PZ wrong? It still contradicts their religion, they just don’t give a fuck (via the magic of selectively designated parts they don’t like to be “metaphors”). Also: rather telling that you didn’t give a Muslim example of liberals who view their creation myths as a metaphor, given that they share the same creation myths as Christians and Jews.
No, it doesn’t contradict Buddhism, nor Jainism. But it does contradict Hinduism, it does contradict many animistic religions (Shinto coming to mind), it does contradict Sikhism, it contradicts Scientology, it contradicts Zoroastrianism, it contradicts Taoism. NOMA simply doesn’t apply here. Many religions have creation myths that are explicitly contradicted by evolution. The fact that the most notable ones handwave that contradiction away proves nothing.
A student of mine had no problem accepting both Jesus and evolution… saw no conflict at all. We got to talking, and realized that he understood biology pretty well, but theology not so much. (Context: this was around the time of a CNN program on whether there was a literal Adam and Eve.) Seems the whole reason for Jesus’s bad weekend was dependent on original sin, which was dependent on a literal Adam and Eve (according to his particular version of Christianity, though not by all). He had no problems understanding that there was no literal Adam, no literal Eve, no literal Eden. But I got to watch him go through the mental gymnastics for the first time, realizing that this meant there was no literal original sin for the human sacrifice of crucifixion to atone for. If evolution was true, then whether or not Jesus existed, he was purposeless (again, by his Christianity).
The neat thing is, you could see it was actually kind of a freeing notion. He had no attachment to Eden, and no problem accepting evolution. But Jesus is (dunno if you heard this) kind of a central character in the whole Christianity thing. He needed (maybe wanted) a reason why evolution should have any bearing on the main dude. And he (to his satisfaction, at least) found it. He was utterly gobsmacked. Happily, actually.
What was his reason that god-in-mortal-body needed to have a bad weekend?
@anteprepro:
Science contradicts some religions. Science does NOT contradict other religions. Science does not contradict all religions. Therefore, science does not contradict religion.
As I assume you learned somewhere along about 4th grade, a statement that is not wholly true is false.
What about gods that have *every* effect, that *always* interfere, that meddle in *everything*, and do so in consistent and predictable ways?
The idea that the world is natural but god is supernatural seems a relatively new one. It seems through most of history we’ve either believed *everything* was supernatural (we don’t know what the fuck is going on) or everything was natural (there is a purpose for everything). This new god is supernatural but the world is natural (you can’t make god dance to a tin whistle) seems to be deliberately anti-science out of fear and desire to control.
or maybe that’s an oversimplification.
It’s a human nature catch-22. God is not incompatible with science but the assumption of a need for god is. Can God exist without a need for him? Do we *want* him to?
If you make your god vague, small and inactive enough it can be compatible with any scientific discovery. The Christian one is far too detailed, powerful and intrusive to be compatible with anything we know about the world.
Science contradicts MOST religions. Ergo, saying science contradicts religion is true. Saying science contradicts ALL religion is false. And saying science DOESN’T contradict religion…also false.
As I assume you learned somewhere in real fucking life, as a real fucking adult, people don’t write their arguments in syllogisms. And if you are going to brag about making someone’s argument wrong on a technicality, you really aren’t arguing very well. At very least I hope you would have learned, but you never know.
jenny6338a #42 wrote:
Here is where the crux of the issue lies:
Is God an explanatory hypothesis?
If so, then the bottom-up understanding of evolution — that life, agency, mind evolved slowly from elements without those characteristics in a process which was also mindless and without goals — undercuts the supernatural. Does mind come from matter (naturalism) or does matter come from mind (supernaturalism)? Evolution shows that it’s the first. Mental things (intention, intelligence, love, beauty, fairness, morals) came as the result of a long slow process of gradual development within an environment.
But all the religions begin with one or more of them.
This does not fit.
Try applying our understanding of evolution TO God and the inherent contradiction always appears. If you use science (and reason) on the God hypothesis, it is now diminished in a way which goes beyond losing a gap to explain. The explanation itself is out of order. In order to remain religious AND accept modern science, you have to draw an arbitrary line on where the fundamental magic of which the cosmos is composed starts …and stops.
Well put as always, Sastra.
woozy #43 wrote:
My understanding is that the division between spiritual/magical causes (ancestor ghosts cast an evil spell on your yams)) and mundane physical causes (your neighbor came over and stole your yams) has been pretty much understood. What’s new is the concept of “faith.”
Faith evolved as an immunizing strategy against doubt. In the ancient past when one’s world was small, the supernatural was just obvious. Everyone knew it, nobody debated it, you learned it from your elders, it appealed to your intuitions, that was that. For a long time the fact that other tribes had different gods wasn’t worrisome either.
But the concept of a universal spiritual explanation and critical thinking introduced skepticism, and that required the introduction of faith. You can’t see or know mystical truths unless you believe.
Oh rly? They’d drop “faith” in a minute if they didn’t need it. It’s not really intrinsic to religion. It’s an apologetic, an attempt to defend not “the faith,” but the hypothesis.
#43
To quote Epicurus – “Then why call him God?”
If your god always acts consistently with the human-discovered laws of nature, then why worship him, why pray to him, why even give a thought to him? None of it would make a gnat’s whisker’s worth of difference.
#42, jenny6833a
Which ones? Be specific.
I suspect that the only ones you’ll name are vague, non-institutionalized things that might be religion in name only.
Science contradicts all religions that presume supernatural interventions, that claim there is an objective purpose to your existence, that claim humans are somehow special relative to all other creatures on earth, that talk about an existence of the mind independent of the body, that invoke metaphysical nonsense like karma, fate, or destiny, or that give individual people privileged status because they have access to magical sources of information or power.
That pretty much wipes ’em all out.
* slow clap *
PZ Myers quotes me: “Science contradicts some religions. Science does NOT contradict other religions.”
PZ then asys, “Which ones? Be specific.”
See my first post. A partial list is there.
Deists, Christians, and Jews who don’t believe in their bible are what you hold up as ‘religions’?
Granted, the eightfold path is pretty valid whether or not the supernatural exists, but would anyone have cared about it if the four noble truths were recognized as bullshit?
Religion throughout time needs the supernatural to threaten people to do the non-supernatural things they require of them.
I thought your first list was about contradicting evolution, not science in general? Because if those are your examples of religions that don’t contradict science in general, PZ’s number 50 nailed it. And you also wrong, because while Buddhists don’t have origin myth per se, there is definitely some supernaturalism involved.
What kind of Buddhism?
@jenny6833a
Rather than engage in what will surely be “moving the goalposts” by you, I’ll attack it like this. Science (combined with skepticism, rationality etc.) and religion are different and competing ways of knowing about our shared reality. The non-overlapping magisteria crap of Gould is crap.
Maybe you can find a religion which doesn’t contradict science because it’s retreated so far from everyday experience that we don’t have evidence against it – yet – but that also means it’s retreated so far that it’s effectively content-free.
Also, simply looking at the track record, never, not once, has the religious mindset advanced human knowledge. Throughout human history, we see time and time again of science advancing and taking space from religion. Even if I cannot point out a specific instance now, even allowing some religion as “it’s not harmful” promotes the idea that the religious way of knowing is anything but rubbish, which will surely cloud their mind and affect their reasoning skills in some way in some circumstance in the future. At best you have “it’s not harmful or wrong at the moment”, but if history is any guide, it will be wrong and harmful in the future when science advances far enough to have something to say on the topic.
Even then, protecting this bullshit way of knowing will surely do damage to their reasoning capability in the here and now. Humans do not have perfect compartmentalization. Having religious beliefs is not side-effect free. It will affect their beliefs and consequently how they believe, even if it’s minor.
#55 is for jenny6833a.
Science contradicts all religions that presume supernatural interventions, that claim there is an objective purpose to your existence, that claim humans are somehow special relative to all other creatures on earth, that talk about an existence of the mind independent of the body, that invoke metaphysical nonsense like karma, fate, or destiny, or that give individual people privileged status because they have access to magical sources of information or power.
That pretty much wipes ‘em all out.
I totally agree, but I will reserve the right to use a ‘philosophical wanking’-y argument when engaging people (like some parents) if I think such an argument will be more likely to allow their children to be educated properly.
So, non-literal Christians, reformed Jews, and buddhists. You know those groups all have supernatural beliefs that contradict what we know from science, right?
Well, to answer your question *literally* because we haven’t determined/proven the prayer and worship do not affect the laws of nature which, in my scenario (and in my scenario only), are synonymous with the will of gods. My point is, I think this distinction of “supernatural” vs. “natural” is a very bizarre one from the point of view of theology. Any world that we inhabit, whether created and acted upon on a regular basis by gods or not, will be by definition the “natural” world to the inhabitants. To expect a division between natural law stuff that seems normal, rabbits don’t turn into waterfalls and I don’t sneeze babies (unless that *is* the world I live in), and what is merely *obscure*, planets follow gravitational laws– who knew, and to expect some “supernatural” act which doesn’t obey the laws (if it doesn’t obey the laws then the laws wouldn’t have been laws in the first place) seems arbitrary and silly.
Basically one person claiming God making the planets obey gravity and holding them to it, and another objecting that if it’s a natural law then god isn’t needed, both seem to beg the question. In either world, the planets will move and the process will be “natural”.
Although Sastra and PZ make good points. Sastra distinguishes natural from supernatural in that natural is matter first; thought later and supernatural is thought and purpose influencing matter. PZ in post #50 defines supernatural as claims of manifestation of objective purpose to existence [on rereading I see he actually didn’t but he did point out good specifics on what are key elements to religion that are not compatible with science; The most important being an objective purpose to the existence of natural phenomena.]
However if religion is compatible with science, then it’s religion’s responsibility and not science’s to find the compatibility. Modern progressive theists seem to be able to, at least as for as they are concerned. Or so I thought. I’m not sure how they respond to PZ’s objections in post #50.
Oh, c’mon. Even Deism (my first example which you somehow contrived to leave out) has a god-belief of sorts. You know, something started it all, and that something then either went away or stuck around as a passive observer. I don’t see how Deism conflicts with anything science has demonstated yet.
Someone, not you, talked about Deism being a dead religion as if that made some kind of difference. But, they’ve got a web site and hold meetings and there’s that Declaration thing with its natural rights that is still rather influential.
While I agree that science conflicts with most religions, it was an overstatement to say that science and religion conflict.
BANG!
But they are WAFFLY about it. WAFFLY!!! That has to count for something! Otherwise they are still wrong, even if they are less wrong than those icky conservative, literalist types that no-one ever likes ever.
@jenny6833a
I fail to see any meaningful reply to anything I wrote which does show the inherent contradictions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Translation: Sure, I’m wrong about those other three, BUT YOU LEFT ONE OUT SO I WIN!!!
Mostly because Deism is the most bare-fucking-bones of a position on the matter that you can possibly take. It doesn’t conflict with science because it isn’t even a religion: it is one idea, one thought, one belief, one argument. And that one belief is virtually identical to Russells’ Teapot. It is the ultimate refuge of “well, you can’t prove it ISN’T there”. But you are right. NOMA does actually apply to Deism. And pretty much only Deism. Congratu-fucking-lations, your argument is still wrong.
jenny6833a @ 35
“Christians who don’t regard the bible as literally true” is a negatively-defined group. It tells us nothing about what their actual beliefs are.
You could certainly have a Christian who didn’t have any truck with all this “God” and “souls” and “Heaven” and “Jesus” stuff, but I am at a loss as to what distinguishes them from an atheist, aside from a self-applied appellation. I agree their religion, such that it is, is perfectly compatible with science, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to anything at all. Do any of these people actually exist? And what makes their beliefs a “religion” rather than, say, a “hobby”?
On the other hand, you could have a “Christian who doesn’t regard the bible as literally true” who still believes in immortal souls being the origin of consciousness, or the existence of an omnimax entitiy who dispenses justice by selectively curing and causing cancer, handing out winning lottery tickets and inducing weird dreams. They’re most certainly incompatible with science – at the very least, with neurology and oncology.
So what do you mean by “Christians who don’t take the bible literally”? It seems to be a category too large and variable to make any meaningful statements about.
Swans are not black
Thsi swan is black
yes but not all swans are black so my statement is still true
If you take an extremely narrow interpretation of evolution and an extremely limited definition of “god,” you might just barely be able to squeak through the claim that evolution does not explicitly disprove the existence of a god, or even that he/she/it had a role in the origin of life.
However, no matter how you manipulate the definitions, evolution does explicitly and unequivocally disprove the claim that humans are special or that our existence was inevitable, or that a god had anything to do with our creation specifically, and most religionists care more about believing that humanity is supernaturally privileged than that a god exists per se.
Woozy #61 wrote:
I think PZ’s (implicit) definition fits with mine and we’re saying very similar things. Purpose and goals are mental things, they come from minds. If there is “objective purpose to your existence” which is structured into the nature of reality, then reality is fundamentally mind-like. It cares, it relates, it responds, it evaluates, it desires, it behaves like an agent — or like your own mind. The transcendent “ghost in the machine” becomes a Transcendent Ghost in the Universe.
Even the Deist God which is not supposed to conflict with specific discoveries of science (whatever science discovers, that’s what the Deist God wanted to happen) does conflict with specific discoveries if you pay attention to what it IS instead of just looking to see what it DOES. A mind which did not evolve to fit in with any environment whatsoever — let alone the kind of social environment which was necessary for the evolution of moral purposes and positive relationships — does not fit into what we learned about minds from evolution.
It doesn’t matter if it “used evolution” to achieve its goals (whatever they were.) The fact that you’ve got some disembodied nonmaterial Transcendental “Purpose” (category error alert!) existing (beyond existing!) in a timeless state (beyond time!) for no reason at all (beyond reason!) other than “It MUST exist” is inconsistent (*beyond inconsistent!) The Deist God is a fundamental contradiction with evolution and neurology — at the very least.
It’s not compatible with science at the basic level.
Sastra:
Wow, that’s a good angle. Should’ve realized that was a possible approach (since you’ve mentioned the fact that God is basically a super disembodied mind/soul in the past, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t stuck with me!).
The “shh, you’ll scare off the religious moderates” argument is so insulting to the very moderates it’s supposed to be courting.
The implied premise is that folks who are sufficiently principled and evidence-minded that they have spent years — in many cases, a lifetime — carefully constructing and redefining their version of “god” so that it (mostly) avoids conflict with science, will suddenly abandon that approach when confronted with an argument from some uppity atheist.
Something like this:
Biologist: “Here’s a whole bunch of evidence supporting evolution…..”
Moderate Christian: “Yep, I agree, that’s a lot of evidence. Evolution must be true. How fascinating!”
Creationist: “But, but evolution contradicts the Bible, therefore it is a lie!”
Moderate Christian: “Nah, dude, the Bible isn’t a science textbook, it isn’t all supposed to be literally true. Look at all that evidence Biologist has! If your interpretation of the Bible is contrary to the scientific evidence, then you must be interpreting the Bible wrong! Blah blah metaphor blah blah Ken Miller blah blah. There’s absolutely no contradiction whatsoever between science and religion.”
Biologist: “Well, actually, there is a conflict, because [reasons].”
Moderate Christian: “What! I can’t accept that! And rather than simply disagree with you about this one point, I shall now abandon my respect for evidence and my entire epistemology! Evolution must be false, because I don’t like some of the implications of some of the things said by some of the people who say it is true!”
Sastra,
Your penultimate paragraph was beyond masterful — bravo!
Sastra:
Exactly. Well put.
So, speaking (disclaimer alert) as one of those crazy theists, a couple of quibbles:
1. Science is an atheistic enterprise, but on methodological grounds that exclude all manner of things, not merely supernatural claims. (Sitcom voice). Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
2. The fact of evolution and the marvelous research program attached to it are the best explanation for the diversity of life, but acceptance of their validity as scientific models, even (as in my case) enthusiastic acceptance, does not compel any particular stance on life’s origin. Any account of abiogenesis has to be consistent with evolutionary principles, the same way that any proposed new cosmology has to be consistent with some version of gravity…but there is no requirement that such an account be based on evolution itself.
That’s very eloquently put (although on further thought I’m not sure an “objective purpose” for existence is necessary for religion, although I do believe a conscious god mind is) and I pretty much agree with you, but is a belief in such really incompatible with a belief in scientific facts? The question isn’t “is holding religious beliefs a compatible practice while practicing good science methodology”. It’s “are scientific facts compatible with religious beliefs”? In other words can a person consistently hold the two beliefs “life evolved from earlier life forms; cool, I can dig it” and “There’s a God and he cares what happens to me; awesome, I can go with that” at the same time. I’m a bit loathe to say one can’t. We can argue why the second idea is silly and unscientific but is it incompatible with fact (not incompatible as theory and methodology but as simple fact)?
At any rate, it is not the responsibility of science to defend science in view of religion but the responsibility of religion to defend religion in view of science. A scientist says “this is what we’ve found about how the world is”. Any conclusion or meaning must be found elsewhere.
The real mystery to me is how a guy as brilliant as Ken Miller can buy into the BS, perhaps it can be pegged as successful Jesuit conditioning. Francis Collins – that I can see, given the multiple stupidities he has expressed over the years.
What kinds of things and why does it matter in terms of determining facts about the real world.
Yes it does, insofar as life has a common origin . Hence why any stance that involves humans and animals and plants being generated separate from one another (as in most creation stories) are inaccurate.
As always, this argument boils down to how high or low of a standard you want to use for “consistent” or “compatible”. As Sastra’s argument shows, they are inconsistent, but you have to look deeply to see that, so you could say that at a superficial level, they are “consistent”. They seem to be “consistent”. You can understand why the average person on the street wouldn’t immediately notice a contradiction. But I think that’s about as far as you can defend it. Ultimately, the muddy little “God” concept isn’t consistent with much of anything. Mostly because it is attached to all sorts of bits of dogma that aren’t even consistent with itself. I find it comparable to asking whether unicorns are compatible with logic.
Well, to play theist’s advocate, it needn’t be a human mind nor even a mind that exists independently without observer interaction. Since I live in California, land of the flakey whack-jobs, I have to posit the “collective consciousness” idea that is quite popular here. Likewise the “giant book” idea that god, like a giant book, does not contain any conscious or organic component yet none-the-less communicates with a human when it is being “read”.
Now that I’ve actually I’ve actually let such words excrete from my fingers, I need to step into the shower and wash my brains.
=====
Yes. I do very much agree with this.
But then we have to ask what *is* religion anyway. I mean what *is* it that otherwise intelligent people think they believe when they claim to be religious? It’s easy to say what fundamentalists believe (delusional dogma) but what of the progressives? If God is compatible with getting up and taking the BART to work and lying awake at night wondering what where your youth went, then why isn’t it compatible with planetary orbits and evolution?
We keep saying “superficially compatible” as in “so and so is an evolutionary biologist at such and such a credible university and he is a practicing christian so it’s superficially compatible” as though that isn’t enough, but isn’t it? Isn’t there a point where we should say “if you’re that worried that it’s incompatible why don’t you tell me *specifically* what your concerns are? An origin myth taken literally? Well, you gotta toss that out, I’m afraid, ’cause it’s just bullshit. Concern about what evolution says about your purpose in life? Well, you’ll have to tell me a little bit more about what you want *religion* to say about your purpose in life. A fine point of Aquinian theology? Um, maybe you should talk to theologian rather than me. I just know that the human ear evolved from gills…”
Unicorns are well defined. I’m never entirely sure what people mean when they talk about God. The sky-fairy Jehovah, sure, but “cosmic yearning of the mind to give birth to its own realization”, um, fine, you know, whatever floats your boat.
There’s a difference between what the religion says and what the people believe. I went to church every Sunday growing up and I’m convinced that most of the people went to church because they liked the rituals and being part of the group. The only supernatural part of it that they kinda believed is that when you die, you go to heaven and get to hang out with loved ones that died before you. All of the rest of the stuff was stuff you needed to know to be part of the group. They paid lip service to it to stay part of the group.
Evolution doesn’t contradict this vague type of religious belief. Most polls I’ve read say that fundamentalists are about 20 percent of the population. That leaves a lot of people who call themselves Christians who have a much more vague touchy feely type of religion.
It is necessary to challenge fundamentalists. Challenging the more touchy feely types may just push them into being more religious.
Snoof says, “Christians who don’t regard the bible as literally true” is a negatively-defined group. It tells us nothing about what their actual beliefs are.
Snoof continues: So what do you mean by “Christians who don’t take the bible literally”? It seems to be a category too large and variable to make any meaningful statements about.
Christians who don’t take the bible as literally true is certainly a negatively defined group, but there are so many subgroups that that’s the easiest way to describe them.
Most of the comments in this thread are by people who have read widely, thought deeply, and don’t have much experience in the real Christian world where reading widely and thinking deeply aren’t all that common.
As one example of a rather ordinary Christian, I’ll describe a relative of mine. She’s in her 30’s, was raised in a firmly fundie family, and attended Christian schools from age 3 through a four-year Christian university. She calls herself Christian.
Is there a god? “Oh yes, yes, at least I hope so. I very much want there to be a god. I pray to god every day.” Is that god the Christian god? “I hope so. That’s the god I pray to.” What are the attributes of that god? “Well, …. …..” She can’t really put it into words. She admits that she hasn’t read up on the theology stuff. Did Jesus actually exist as described in the bible? “I don’t know. I think so.” Assuming this Jesus guy did exist, was he divine? “I can’t know for sure, of course, but I hope he was. It wouldn’t make much sense if he wasn’t.”
I could go on — we’ve had some long chats on the topic — but you get the point. She’s vague. She hasn’t tussled with any of the topics, and won’t.
Does she believe the A&E story. No, not literally. Does she believe the virgin birth, the rough weekend, the assent to sit on god’s right hand? Well, she thinks those are likely more than a bit exaggerated.
She divorced her first husband when he went ‘I’m the BOSS’ on her. She’s since remarried, has three kids, and is happy as can be. She goes to church about once per month, but hasn’t settled on any one sect. She doesn’t go to the sect she was raised in, because they got all pissy about her divorce (and her reasons for it) and refused to marry her to husband #2.
She’s an RN now, top of class from the best nursing school, and had first to take all the biology courses (at a state university) she hadn’t taken in her Christian schooling.
She hasn’t had, and wouldn’t have an abortion under any circumstances, but thinks others have the right to do so. She supports death with dignity laws. She thinks gays should be left alone to do their thing, and she supports their right to marry. Hey, it’s no skin off her behind.
She’s no scientist, and has almost zero understanding of philosophy of science, but she accepts science. Science deals in evidence, and that’s as it ought to be. She’s not about to claim science is wrong.
Is she Christian? ABSOLUTELY!
Is there any tension between science and her Christianity? NOPE!
the process hardly seems consistent with a loving god.
Supernovas and black holes hardly seem consistent with a loving god, either.
There’s another problem (one of the litany!) with theistic evolution:
Why do we assume we’re the stopping point?
Perhaps god created humans as an interim step, to immanentize the advent of silicon-based life.
If your god always acts consistently with the human-discovered laws of nature, then why worship him, why pray to him, why even give a thought to him?
If your god is indistinguishable in action from the human-discovered laws of nature, then your god is the human-discovered laws of nature.
You worship “reality” – which is, ummm, a bit self-referential. That’s one of the reasons deism fails – since, to prevent it being disproved, the deist god is pushed so far back into the weeds that it’s indistinguishable from The Big Bang – deists may as well be said to worship The Big Bang. Because they’ve not only protected their god from disproof, they’ve protected themselves from ever knowing anything about it.
it doesn’t contradict Buddhism
Please present evidence for samsara, karma, or rebirth.
There are people who claim buddhism is non-theistic but I don’t think they are being honest with themselves and others. Even if you subtract the supernatural aspects such as samsara, you’re left with a revelation – an authoritarian bunch of statements that are considered to contain more than average truth because they came from a super special smart dude. There’s damn little supporting “philosophy” there, compared to Kant or Epicurus. It’s revelation, it’s religion, and it’s also bullshit.
The de-religioning of buddhism is natural because being religious is embarrassing. You hardly have to ask yourself why, in this thread.
“Are orbital mechanics atheistic?”
To Islam, yes ,indeed–the theology rejects even the concept of Natural Law as it “ties the hands of god” as all things occur because Allah wills it, not from any natural mechanism
(questioning whether a distinction I earlier raised is meaningful) anteprepro writes:
“What kinds of things and why does it matter in terms of determining facts about the real world.”
Subjective experience and anything else that is difficult or impossible to objectively test. Scientists typically will not consider these things, not because we know them to be false, but because they may not be subject to potential falsification. Religious/supernatural claims are just a sub-set of a larger group of non-falsifiable claims, all of which are typically excluded in science. Why does it matter? Well, I would think the practice of excluding such claims provides scientists with both an essential constraint that guards against pseudoscience, but also promotes a healthy epistemic humility.
(speaking of the necessity of evolution providing a stance on abiogenesis) antepropro writes:
“Yes it does, insofar as life has a common origin . Hence why any stance that involves humans and animals and plants being generated separate from one another (as in most creation stories) are inaccurate.”
Sorry, I don’t agree, and (at the risk of playing ‘Aristotle says’) I don’t think Darwin would agree, either. Darwin asserted both common descent, and evolution by natural selection as an alternative to ‘special creation’ to explain the diversity. With the rest of biologists today, I certainly accept both of these propositions, but it is worth noting that they are distinct, but related items in Darwin’s thought. At the same time, Darwin wrote nothing publicly about abiogenesis itself, about how the whole thing got started. He did allude to it in his private letters, but in a characteristically cautious way that shows that he understood that the matter was distinct from evolution itself, and much more speculative.
My point is not that abiogenesis can not be explained on naturalistic terms. I believe it can. My point is that, even if natural, abiogenesis models can not begin with selection on existing molecular variation. It must begin with the probability of a self-replicating system emerging from stochastic processes, given the appropriate initial conditions. The former is an event that, if high, must occur in other places in the universe where those conditions are present given sufficient time and chance. Thus, abiogenesis as a general process permitted in a universe with certain physical laws is separable from the particular instances of how life, once begun, has evolved. Common descent is not necessarily implied, and in fact the base of the ‘tree of life’ may be a messy bramble, rather than a single trunk.
@75
scotthatfield
i’m kinda confused about this too. i don’t see science as atheistic in an a-priori way. it just so happens that “natural” causes are what we found for phenomenon, rather than god influences.
@78
anteprepro
one thing i have said before to people is that any reliable method for determining something to be true is what i call science. is that kind of what you’re trying to get at, anteprepro?
though of course i should be careful what definition i claim is right to use, because i’m not exactly very much of an expert in science or the philosophy thereof…
jenny6833a @82
Very well. I agree.
If someone who does not engage their critical faculties on the topic of their religion will not find any conflict between their religion and the body of scientific knowledge.
In the same way that if I take my glasses off, I can’t tell the difference between a horse and a donkey from 500 metres away.
(Just because a belief is unexamined does not make it nonexistent, and just because you don’t perceive a conflict doesn’t mean there isn’t one.)
jenny6833a @ 36:
But if the bible isn’t literally true, Jesus was not divine. Can you call yourself a Christian without believing that?
To put it another way, if you don’t accept the bible story, on what other authority would you base your worship of Jesus?
People who do not believe in at least parts of the bible being literally true are, by definition, not Christians.
miller:
<blockquote cite="Jason Rosenhouse would have me believe that the primary problem Creationists have with evolution is not that it fills explanatory gaps that they want to fill with God, but that the process hardly seems consistent with a loving god.
In this view, I could see evolution as more “atheistic” than orbital mechanics. On the other hand, I don’t understand why a sensible god would ever create a muon neutrino."
In a sense, all of science is by necessity atheistic, since no scientific theory, almost by definition, can have "and then a miracle happened" as part of it. So I definitely agree with the general claim that science and religion aren't compatible, if what you are trying to do is shoehorn one into the other as Creationists and theistic evolutionists try to do.
I think the reason Creationists have a problem with evolution is not so much that it makes a mockery of the notion of a loving god – they mostly seem to prefer a wrathful OT version of god rather than the namby-pamby loving Jesus. Their problem with evolution is that it undermines the Garden of Eden, gets rid of Original Sin, and hence removes the necessity for the sacrifice of Jesus and their redemption.
It undermines Christianity as a whole.
That having been said, pace PZ Myers, evolution does not take a stand on religion in the abstract, any more than any science does. They are crude oil and water, and no amount of egg is going to make a palatable mayonnaise out of them. It is only specific instances of religion, specific religious claims that can be disproved by evolution and other sciences.
You can have versions of deism that needn't contradict any claim or prediction of evolution. Myers has dismissed those as hardly religious or some similar phrase, but then if you assume that a religion must contain a belief in miracle-performing deities, then you can exclude beliefs that go beyond science or philosophy, but do not assume a tinkering deity.
Evolution doesn't demand any theology or philosophy to be true. It is objectively true, in as much as any scientific theory can be objectively true. It doesn't support any theology or philosophy, either. It is incompatible in the sense that you cannot mix them, or derive philosophy or theology from the fact of evolution, or by its denial. But they are not incompatible in the sense that a single person can have scientific, philosophical and religious views.
Anri @92
I think you mean “if every single part of the Bible is literally false”. Otherwise, that doesn’t actually follow. It’s like saying, “If Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter isn’t literally true, then Abraham Lincoln wasn’t president!” You can have a fictional narrative which contains elements of or references to the truth.
(And for the record, chunks of the NT don’t describe Jesus as being God. It’s not a particularly consistent set of texts, after all.)
brianpansky @89
Science is a-theistic to the extent that any pursuit of scientific research has to exclude miracles and gods a priori. If it doesn’t, it ain’t science. This is because miracles cannot be tested, at least not if they are real. One can always try to debunk fraudsters and other scoundrels.
At the top of hundreds of years, and billions of people-hours of work, no miracles have emerged to explain any natural phenomenon. Atheists stand on pretty solid ground.
Scotthatfiled @88
Darwin was indeed modest, and realised there was a lot he didn’t know. While I agree that evolution as we know it couldn’t start until replicators arrived, I wouldn’t place abiogenesis in a completely separate category. Biochemistry is still chemistry, and selection of a sort can work to determine which chemical reactions occur in a given environment and which do not.
We are a long way from figuring out abiogenesis, but I don’t think the basic rules are going to be staggeringly different from those of natural selection today.
I am not at all sure that there is a clean separation chemically from reactions “before” life emerged to reactions “after” life emerged. In fact, I strongly suspect there is not going to be any really clear distinction. Life is chemistry by other means.
I regrettably agree that the Tree of Life is probably an outmoded metaphor, much though I like it, and however it may represent post-Cambrian evolution. Evolution is definitely messier than a tree, hopefully not as messy as a bramble or briar patch!
Anri @92
Suppose someone believed that the teachings of Christ were philosophically valuable – the sermon on the mount, for example, or the command to love one another – and determined to follow those teachings, without believing in the divinity or even necessarily the historical existence of Christ.
Would it be impossible to describe them as Christian, if Christ is their spiritual and philosophical guide?
Snoof @91
Indeed, but why should critical faculties be engaged in religion? Only science requires testing. Religion is more in the realm of philosophy these days. Except for Creationists.
I do not bring the same critical faculties to bear in the perusal of science papers, the choice of restaurants, or the choice of concerts. De gustibus non disputandum. So much is a matter of subjective taste, and that is where I would leave religion and philosophy. No more or less inportant than a choice of cuisine.
Only science is amenable to objective testing, the disproof of hypotheses. But there is a lot more to being human than science.
To be honest, if a Christian doesn’t follow the Nicene Creed then they are of a spectacularly divergent sect.
I’m all for Christians self-identifying (to avoid the whole “No True Scotsman” strain of argument) but without the supernatural component I think that they’d be incorrect.
Christ-as-philosopher is fine, just not what we’d call “Christian” in any useful context. And you’ll have to define “spiritual”….
Plenty of people have problems with JC’s teachings anyway so it’s not like he’s perfect or anything!
Sastra @ 47:
I must disagree. God, at least if he is conceived of as omnipotent, cannot be an explanatory hypothesis, since every possible piece of data is consistent with it. The hypothesis is impossible to falsify. Planets moving in a nice orderly fashion is consistent with an omnipotent God; as is planets moving in a haphazard fashion. Life arising via evolution over billions of years is consistent with an omnipotent God; as is life poofing into existence 6,000 years ago.
True, but the contradiction lies in other claims of religion, not in that of an omnipotent God. I simply don’t see how that claim is falsifiable.
When I was a christian, I would have defined christianity as the belief in the divinity, death and resurrection of Jesus as payment for our sins. So you may be able to get people here to agree that yours could be a possible definition of christian, but its a definition that most christians would have serious problems with. My mother would be damning you to hell for blasphemy right now.
>>If your god is indistinguishable in action from the human-discovered laws of nature, then your god is the human-discovered laws of nature.
Well… yeah. That was kind of my point. What’s wrong with that?
>>>You worship “reality” – which is, ummm, a bit self-referential.
Uh, why? Never heard the phrase “nature worship”? Don’t you think the alternative supernatural view, one worships God because he is *not* real, is a little bizarre and backwards?
>>>>“Are orbital mechanics atheistic?”
To Islam, yes ,indeed–the theology rejects even the concept of Natural Law as it “ties the hands of god” as all things occur because Allah wills it, not from any natural mechanism
And yet they believe Allah’s will can be studied and observed. Pragmatically is that any different?
In a way the conflict is inevitable. A natural philosophy in a theistic environment decides “I’m going to study how God does everything. I’m going to put him on the couch.” Well, what could anyone *expect* to happen? He finds “real” things and somehow people are surprised to find out that reality is really “real”. Somehow deep down we were supposed to believe that reality and god was somehow not “real”? Really? I suppose some were hoping to meet Mr. Theo and ask him what his favorite color was but …. really?
All right, the gyst is do we find “intent” or “design” when we look for Mr. Theo. And the more we look it seems we don’t (although we do find complexity and elegance.. and thoroughness). But is the degree to which we didn’t find intent or design and the degree to which we believe we never will incompatible with the requirement of intent and design that religious belief would need? I’m not sure we can say yes. Or at least we need to give religious belief the option to say “I don’t need it as much as you think I do”.
>>…You can have versions of deism that needn’t contradict any claim or prediction of evolution. Myers has dismissed those as hardly religious or some similar phrase,
…People who do not believe in at least parts of the bible being literally true are, by definition, not Christians.
…To be honest, if a Christian doesn’t follow the Nicene Creed then they are of a spectacularly divergent sect.
So we’re telling people how to be christians now? Is this like being told that if we believe in evolution we have to be materialist, and if we are materialist we can’t have any personal concept of morality and identification?
The question is “Do I have to give up my religion to believe evolution?”
Now you can answer “I, personally, think it’d be a good idea” and I can answer “How the hell would *I* know? It’s *your* religion” if we want, but I don’t think we can, or should, answer, “Yes! Unequivocally!”
Actually, I’d like to hear from the anecdotal reputable evolution scientist who is a christian in his private life who “superficially” accepts religion and science and how s/he responds to Sastra’s mind where mind can’t exist statement.
woozy
try this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
it makes what you are quoting stand out
it’s easier for people to read
@scotthatfield
No it’s not. Find us evidence of your god, and science will be all over that. It’s not science’s fault that reality has an atheistic bias.
You missed the point. The point was that evolution by natural selection is mindless forces producing species. Thus humans cannot be a special creation, and cannot have been designed and intended. Or so that argument goes. I don’t like it much personally, but that was the argument made.
@jenny6833a
Then her religion is compatible with science to the extent that her religion is empty. Her religion is incompatible with science to the extent that she actually believes it. You’re not making an argument that religion is compatible with science. You’re making an argument that most religious believers don’t really believe, which is something fundamentally different.
Dave @101
And when I was a Christian, so would I have defined it. More or less. Now, who gets to define who is or isn’t a Christian? You can define it broadly or narrowly, but is there really an objective definition that everyone agrees on? Not even Christians agree on what makes a “True Christian”. Hence all the wars between people who call themselves Christian.
Evolution doesn’t deny the validity of the sermon on the mount, whether you accept its validity or not. It doesn’t yet have anything to say about religion at all, unless one subscribes to the hypothesis that religiosity is an adaptive human trait, a way of codifying rights and wrongs in human behaviour to make it easier to teach them. Or of trying to find a purpose for existence. There may be something in that: all religions are bogus, but maybe there is some evolutionary social value in religiosity.
I wouldn’t know about that. Right now, it is just another Just So story to explain away the ubiquity of religion. However, I would like to take away from Christianity the principles that are good, while leaving the twaddle. I don’t plan to call myself a Christian, but I think that certain values and teachings attributed to Jesus are those that any decent human would want to live by, atheists included.
@95
leszekuk
it seemed to me that scotthatfield was implying that, by definition, there is this non-overlapping magesteria under which every god claim must fall, or something. i was trying to point out that such a position is not correct. (part of this has to do with the multiple definitions of the word “god”, sigh)
does that make sense?
as for what you said…i’m having difficulty wrapping my head around this. sure, using “magic did everything” is not a usable model of the world, but science could have uncovered evidence that strongly supported the conclusion “there is a god” and even observed such an entity using powers. so it seems we are talking about different things.
@leszekuk
Absolutely and unequivocally wrong. Rather than copy-paste, see my post at 39.
Hairy Chris @99
Spiritual is that feeling I get when I’m watching a starry starry sky (uncommon hereabouts), a spectacular sunset or sunrise (quite common), a phenomenal piece of art, an epic natural or artificial wonder that moves me emotionally. Nothing supernatural about it at all.
Christ as philosopher and teacher I can take. Not perfect? No matter, no philosopher or teacher is. You take what seems valuable and leave the rest.
There is an old joke about the Church of England that it is staffed by Christian clergy who are also atheists. The divinity wore off, but the principles remained. Are they really hypocrites? Maybe so, or maybe they have learned to distill the essence from the dross?
brianpanski @106
My prejudice is that “god” is not and never can be a scientific claim or hypothesis. It is ultimately untestable. Therefore science can never “disprove” all sorts of gods. At most, it can only disprove specific religious claims, such as a young earth.
@Leszekuk
No, miracles are not defined as operating beyond the detection of mundane science. If it had no effect detectable by mundane science, it wouldn’t be a miracle at all, would it?
Miracles are detectable by detecting their effects and ruling out natural explanations for those effects. Miracles, by definition, break rules. They would not be constrained by rules we codify – Jesus chooses when to walk on water, we don’t.
Find the effect, rule out natural causes [this may not have been possible before understanding quantum theory, but it sure as hell is possible now for sufficiently large effects], make a good faith effort to find a new rule that explains it. Fail to find a rule.
You now have arbitrary breaks in physical laws. You may not have found the source (is it a devi? is it the great juju of the mountain? is it Isis?), but you have identified a miracle.
Why is that so hard to understand?
@109
leszekuk
just no. you are starting with useless (possibly incoherent) definitions as the only true definitions. the exclusion of others is exactly what i was saying is an error.
EnlightenmentLiberal @39
I agree that religion is the abandonment of rational thinking, though theologians would disagree with me. To me, the “supernatural” is absurd. If there were a god or some being that created humanity, it would by definition be part of nature, not above or outside it. Theologians like to fantasize, but they have no evidence. Theology is mental masturbation.
Metaphysics is a different matter. In metaphysics we attempt to clarify how we perceive and know the world. Religions have their own metaphysics, as do the various types of atheism.
Science is empirical, but it has its own metaphysics, namely the belief that natural phenomena are amenable to rational analysis. You could never prove that every natural phenomenon can be analysed rationally, but without that belief, nothing in science would be possible. The metaphysics of science assume that rational analysis will work, and it has had an astonishingly good record of success.
And that is the most you can say for science. It can’t substitute for religion.
Crip Dyke @110
Good luck with that approach! No miracles have ever been verified, no matter what the Vatican claims!
@110
Crip Dyke
i’m not even sure i agree with that.
in the ancient past, i think the definition was just that it was done by god? just as a human lifting a rock is not breaking the rule of gravity, so too would jesus walking on water not be breaking the rule.
brianpansky @111
My point is that science cannot ever disprove “supernatural” claims. Every supernatural claim is incoherent. It is not testable, unless it makes observable predictions. And if it makes observable predictions, it stops being supernatural.
The entire essence of supernatural claims is that they cannot be tested by rational means. Religion doesn’t do tests. That is what makes it a religion.
brianpansky @114
He’s have to have inflatable feet.
@115
again, you are starting with useless (possibly incoherent) definitions as the only true definitions. the exclusion of others is exactly what i was saying is an error.
@leszekuk
No. There you go again, inserting a weasel word, “natural”. In this context, “natural” is a weasel word for exactly the same reasons that “supernatural” is a weasel word. You are wrong in the above quote. The correct rendering is that science is based on the premise that all observable phenomena are susceptible to rational scientific inquiry. When you include the weasel word “natural”, you are already giving ground and acknowledging the possibility that there is something immune to scientific inquiry.
You’re right that I cannot prove that scientific inquiry will work for all observable phenomena. This relates to the problem of induction and other related matters. I merely assert by fiat that it will. To the extent that people disagree, they are insane. You know the colloquial definition – Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result each time, and expecting a different result the next time. That’s just long-form for: Insanity: not practicing science.
i am sympathetic to EnlightenmentLiberal @39, that is definitely how things are used currently.
but i think maybe that current usage is a retreat/adaptation that has occurred because people don’t want to admit that those ideas (i think) did have a chance in science, and their chance is over (unless some serious black swan event happens).
Meh. It seems that it is more or less stuff that God does that other people can’t do, and that nature can’t do. God controlling the weather? Not a miracle. Jesus causing a fig tree to wilt? Not a miracle. Jesus chasing money lenders out of the temple? Not a miracle. Jesus multiplying food products? Miracle. Jesus rising from the dead? Miracle.
Or, as I always say, a champsosaur. Who ordered these?!?
We have a winner!!!
By no fucking means is that an axiom. Look, you’ve demonstrated it yourself:
It’s a falsifiable hypothesis!
Science really is testable hypotheses all the way down. :-)
Wow. That’s the point where stupidity turns into evil.
…Well, no. There’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relation: brute facts are caused by random chance, no god needed.
:-) Only Americans ever put CamelCase in their own names. There are no options other than La Place (with a space!) and Laplace, and this one is Laplace.
Of course that’s not a quote. Of course it didn’t occur to an Ancient Greek to wonder about the existence of a monotheistic god beyond asking “lolwut”. The way he put it was to ask whether something is pious because the gods like it or whether the gods like it because it is pious. Only much later did people notice it was possible to extrapolate from this.
I laughed so hard. :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Hi, Scott! :-) Haven’t read you in a long time! Sad to see you’ve abandoned your…
…blockquote tags.
I agree that the “methodological grounds […] exclude all manner of things”. Ockham’s Razor is quite the battleax.
That depends on your definition of “life”. As soon as there’s a self-replicator, descent with heritable modification kicks in, and the word for that is evolution. Do you count, say, an oligonucleotide with a threose/phosphate backbone as “life”?
I disagree with all of this.
Wikipedia lists the non-Trinitarians such as the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, various Unitarians, Oneness Pentecostalism, and the Iglesia ni Cristo which has several million adherents.
Blue.
No, yellow AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!
*from a distance* I’m colourblind!!!
I’d rather say science goes all the way into metametaphysics.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
jenny6833a: I could go on — we’ve had some long chats on the topic — but you get the point. She’s vague. She hasn’t tussled with any of the topics, and won’t.
EnlightenmentLiberal: Then her religion is compatible with science to the extent that her religion is empty. Her religion is incompatible with science to the extent that she actually believes it. You’re not making an argument that religion is compatible with science. You’re making an argument that most religious believers don’t really believe, which is something fundamentally different.
Good grief! I don’t understand what you’re so wrought up about. The lady wants there to be a god, believes that there is, hopes that there is, and assumes that she’s guessing correctly. She wants there to have been a Jesus, believes that there was, hopes that there was, and assumes that’s she’s right. She understands that she can’t support either claim, and won’t defend the biblical detail added by others decades (and centuries) later. She has no interest in adding detail of her own. She’s satisfied with what you and I would call a somewhat vague conception and distrustful of detail she can’t support. She talks to this god of hers and to Jebus. She’s absolutely, definitely a theist. She regards herself as a theist of the Christian variety.
She sees no conflict with science. In her case, neither do I. And, there are millions who are more or less like her.
Get off it.
@jenny6833a
What you described is someone practicing wishful thinking. It is willful ignorance and willful delusion. While her god belief might not be incompatible with any currently known material fact, the way she thinks is fundamentally incompatible with the methods and values of science and skepticism.
“She wants there to have been a Jesus, believes that there was, hopes that there was, and assumes that’s she’s right.”
“She understands that she can’t support either claim,”
That right here is what I’m talking about. She is holding beliefs about god, and knows that she cannot defend them, which almost by definition is incompatible with science and skepticism.
EnlightenmentLiberal @118
No. There you go again, inserting a weasel word, “natural”. In this context, “natural” is a weasel word for exactly the same reasons that “supernatural” is a weasel word. You are wrong in the above quote. The correct rendering is that science is based on the premise that all observable phenomena are susceptible to rational scientific inquiry. When you include the weasel word “natural”, you are already giving ground and acknowledging the possibility that there is something immune to scientific inquiry.
You’re right that I cannot prove that scientific inquiry will work for all observable phenomena. This relates to the problem of induction and other related matters. I merely assert by fiat that it will. To the extent that people disagree, they are insane. You know the colloquial definition – Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result each time, and expecting a different result the next time. That’s just long-form for: Insanity: not practicing science.
You can assert by fiat anything you want. Your fiat don’t make anything true. That’s the problem. You cannot prove that there is nothing immune to scientific inquiry. The best you can do is hope nothing is immune, and that is the way science works.
It’s been so successful I choose science over religion every time. But this doesn’t mean science is capable of answering every question. The best we can do is keep trying to answer questions. We cannot prove science can answer everything. All we can do is test how far it will go.
She talks to God and yet sees no conflict with science? You are taking her at her word that she is accurate in this assessment, while also acknowledging that she disregards facts and relies almost exclusively on wishful thinking?
You give the garbled theology of liberal Christians far too much credit. Just because they aren’t literalists doesn’t mean they make more sense.
You two, you and ELib, can’t seem to let go. And you keep making stuff up.
Her talks with god don’t conflict with her acceptance of science, just as watching cartoons with her kids doesn’t. Nothing she does when not watching cartoons relies on the content of the cartoons. As far as I can tell, it’s the same with her god chats. It’s her way of thinking stuff through.
She doesn’t disregard facts. She doesn’t rely on wishful thinking. She talks to god as I sometimes talk to the wall. Hey, and sometimes the wall talks back.
This whole thing has become a waste of time. Out of here!
Jenny6833a, compartmentalizing away a conflict is not the same as there not being any conflict.
Yes, it is. But she also believes she is talking to God while doing so. Otherwise she would call it talking to herself .
Now:
Then:
Now: She doesn’t rely on wishful thinking
Then:
I love how apologists for religion have a strange aversion to synonyms.
It has become a waste of time? It was obvious that getting you to actually change your opinion in the face of facts and logic was a waste of time from the very start. I mean, you’ve been corrected on enough subjects that you have gone on to completely ignore the corrections about. You really want to pretend that you are the one confronted with blind stubbornness, here?
@leszekuk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
The only sane option is axiomatic. The axiom of any sane person is that science works. I reject out of hand the “possibility” that science will not work on some observable phenomena.
Circular reasoning is circular. “I know the scientific method works because I have used the scientific method to come to the conclusion that the scientific method works.”
Not circular reasoning, it is reasoning from past sucess.
“I know the scientific method works because generations of humans before me have used the scientific method to create awesome new inventions while those pushing supernatural methods produce nothing but more requests for money.”
Many people carry around a cellphone that only works because the designers understood and utilized the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Without those scientific theories (which produce non-intutitive results), cellphones wouldn’t work. They work, ergo this science thing must have something going for it.
That is not so much an axiom as it is a null hypothesis.
And, IIRC, there actually HAVE been serious hypotheses proposed that certain laws/constants of physics, etc, have not been constant throughout time and space. Indeed, multiverse theory is the most extreme example that basically states just that. Calling the hypothetical regions in spacetime where the laws of science are different from the local spacetime multiple universes rather than different regions of the same universe is just semantics.
Again, it is the null hypothesis that any new phenomenon is accessible to scientific inquiry. This null hypothesis is based on an a priori likelihood that is a fair bit stronger than “hope”, and is fully testable.
EnlightenmentLiberal (with respect to the claim that science is an atheistic enterprise) writes:
“No it’s not. Find us evidence of your god, and science will be all over that. It’s not science’s fault that reality has an atheistic bias.”
Ha. Reality as we experience it has a bias towards what we can experience. That’s not science’s fault, either, but it doesn’t justify the conflation of reality with ‘what science can observe.’ You will never be able to observe the subjective emotional experience that I had when reading your comments, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
Anyway, the above statement is more of a symptom than the real disease. Here’s the real problem with your move, which you no doubt imagine unravels the Gordian knot. If I find evidence of some god, in order for that to be ‘evidence’ that passes muster in science, more is required than it be (to use your word) ‘observable’. We can ‘observe’ Uri Geller bend spoons on a television program, but that observation in and of itself could not serve as scientific evidence for the proposition that ‘Geller bends spoons with his mind.’ What is required is that it be tested, and tested in such a way that other ‘observers’ in different parts of the world could replicate that test.
Well, suppose we see some event that appears to be evidence for some god. Would this apparent evidence be blithely accepted as factual simply on the basis of mere observation? Of course not. So we must test it. But if we test the claim, we are not really testing the existence of some god. That premise is not scientific material, because it is not falsifiable. All we are testing is the claim that some particular observation points, in an unequivocal way, to the existence of some god. And, if and when we put this observation to the test, we only need demonstrate the possibility of a natural explanation for said observation to have falsified that claim.
So, I certainly agree that science is capable of testing observations that are claimed to provide evidence for this god or some other piece of supernaturalism. That’s what science does. I deny, however, that falsified claims about an observation amounts to falsification of what the observation is supposed to demonstrate. The latter is an example (it happens to be a ‘supernatural’ example) of something that is not amenable to scientific test.
To use Amphiox’s language, above, I think phenomena are likely to be accessible to scientific inquiry. The beliefs behind some hypotheses advanced to explain phenomena, on the other hand, are often not amenable to experimental test. I would also add that a failure of this or that group of scientists to provide a natural explanation for a phenomena does not mean that some other agency exists. The fact that I am stumped by some phenomena does not mean that some other’s interpretation of the phenomena is true; it simply means that it has not been falsified. That’s all that science can say.
Now I know a lot of folk will, at this point, be tempted to introduce arguments that are philosophical in nature. “The burden of proof should be on the person making the spectacular claim” “The supernatural is an incoherent concept” “Supernatural claims like the existence of some god are non-parsimonious” Etc. etc. For all I know these are valid objections that could allow anyone here to make a seamless garment for their own personal use. But they have no bearing on what science can, or cannot investigate. Science really is an atheistic enterprise, because we do not allow untestable entities as premises. The existence of some god is an untestable premise. We cheerfully test claims for action of some supposed ‘supernatural’ agent from time to time as they come up, but that does not make us either theists or atheists in doing so, because (by definition) we are neither accepting or rejecting the premise of theism in doing so.
David Marjanovic:
Yes, it’s been a very long time. I’ve gotten too lazy to use HTML, I guess.
brianpansky:
Actually, I have problems with NOMA. I agree that claims derived from supernaturalism are testable, and should be tested. I don’t like the notion that we should exclude any and all religious claims from scientific investigation, especially because they may lead to testable predictions that conflict with other testable predictions based on science. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would prefer a universe where every sort of claim is, in principle, testable. However, it seems that we don’t live in such a universe.
@132
scotthatfield
i notice a recurring bias colored by a history of failed claims of the so-called supernatural variety. you seem to spend very little time on the possibility presented by EnlightenmentLiberal: namely, the real deal.
it leads you to make this silly assertion:
you have no reason to assert that if some god did show up that it could not be subjected to some testing.
brain functions are observable.
i’m trying to think of something that is real that is not observable in any way. not sure.
@scotthatfield
Yes I can. I can observe the gross external behavior of your body, including speech, facial expressions, and so on. I can use an fMRI to examine your brain. I could use hypothetical future-tech to get a better fMRI and get an even better reading of your brain state. Your emotions are just particular brain-states, and brain-states are definitely a very real and very accessible and observable thing.
Unless you want to make the same idiotic argument about atoms. I’m pretty sure atoms are a real thing, but none of us has ever (directly) seen an atom. No human has ever (directly) seen an atom.
This is a gross misunderstanding of everything I wrote. I said that all observable phenomena are susceptible to scientific analysis. You are talking about what is the muster for a true or “verified” scientific model, which is simply another discussion.
I agree with what you wrote that we need to do testing to weed out cheats and such.
I think you had another point. I think you are arguing that I cannot tell the difference between a god and sufficiently advanced aliens. You are correct.
I am not a realist. I am a “shut up and calculate” guy. If the two models of “god” and “sufficiently advanced alien” produce equally good results, then they are equally true. There is no meaningful truth to scientific models apart from their predictions, and if their predictions are equally good, then they are equivalent models, and they are both true.
Of course, there are connotative differences between sufficiently advanced aliens and gods, which would lead to differing predictions. Perhaps we are not yet in a position with enough evidence to distinguish between the two. In such a case, I could say only that the evidence is currently consistent with both models.
Are you in a position where you can distinguish between the conventionally understood social structure, and you being the star of The Truman Show? Or being a brain in a vat ala The Matrix? Again, I’m not a realist. Such ideas are not interesting because they are not testable. As soon as they become testable, then I start caring.
If you find me a creature which can send information faster than light in controlled laboratory conditions, repeatedly, and on demand, and a host of other “superpowers”, then I would say that this is provincially consistent with a god. It’s also provincially consistent with sufficiently advanced aliens. (Ok, one difference might be that a god pre-existed the big bang, but even then, it might just be a sufficiently advanced creature from an earlier universe.)
You see – I don’t care about the special connotation of “god”. I outright reject the usefulness and meaning of the “natural” / “supernatural” dichotomy. In how I see the world, there is no meaningful difference between a god and a sufficiently advanced alien.
This is the move which you are making which is bad. You are saying that 1- gods might exist, 2- gods might have observable effect on our life, and 3- science has nothing to say about it. This is bullshit.
However, I don’t think you intend to make this move. I think that you are intending (but failing) to make some esoteric point.
However again, at the moment I can only address what you’ve said, and what you’ve said is equivalent to that 1,2,3, and that 1,2,3 is bullshit. If tomorrow the 300 ft tall Jesus comes down and starts blowing people up with its eye lasers, and if you come along and say “oh, it’s Jesus, so science has nothing to say”, I would call you a fool. At the moment, I think you are merely confused and do not realize the consequences of what you are saying. Alternatively, you may just be communicating very poorly.
Ack, sorry for the double post.
Consider this. Suppose tomorrow some researchers discovered a certain prayer in Latin, which, if recited aloud while holding a cup of water, turned that water into wine. Suppose that this was reproducible by everyone across the planet. This is definitely going to get into all of the scientific journals. People are going to make names for themselves as they start investigating this “miracle”. For example, how off can you pronunciation can be and have the miracle still work? What are the limits to the shape and size of the “glass” for it to work? Does it happen in such a way as to break the second law of thermodynamics, or is it obeyed? Perhaps this will be one of the new fundamental forces / fields of nature. You have the gravity field, the electric field, the weak nuclear field, and the “Latin wine prayer” force. Nobel prizes are sure to follow.
It might be that the prayer is simply a black box that will be utterly impenetrable. The study of its effects and such, the creation of models around it, is still science.
For comparison, if I ask you “how do you magnets work?”, you do not have an answer. You might be able to dodge for a question or two, bringing up scientific models like Maxwell’s equations, the electro-weak force, string “theory”, and so on, but very quickly you will run out of new models to use for your explanations. At some point, you will very quickly have to answer “I don’t know how it works. I don’t know why it works that way. I do know what it does, and I can predict what it will do with great accuracy according to this model.” Paraphrasing the great Feynman “I cannot explain it to you in terms of something you’re more familiar with, because I do not understand it in terms of something you’re more familiar with.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
The prayer would be a black box, exactly like magnetism is a black box. We could have very refined and very well supported models for both, but not a clue as to “how” they work and “why” they work. We would just know that they work, and they work according to these well-established models.
I’d suggest you also (re)read the particular Girl Genius Webcomic I linked above.
One minor point.
You equivalently are saying:
> (1) I want to use methods which will succeed in the future.
> (2) I will use the method, metric, and value of past successes to determine which methods are likely to succeed in the future. (This method, metric, and value is called variously inductive reasoning, evidence-based reasoning, science, scientific reasoning, and so forth.)
> (3) I have determined that the method, metric, and value of (2) has many past successes.
> (4) I apply the method, metric, and value of (2) on (2) to determine that (2) is likely to succeed in the future.
That argument is nakedly self-justifying, e.g. circular. Hopefully it is now made clear. Otherwise, I am at a loss.
There is a very real problem here – at least formally. The problem is called the problem of induction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
IMHO, we all solve the problem by fiat, by axiom, and we move along. It’s trivial, and it’s not very interesting, except when you make idiotic claims that you can justify science non-circularly.
leszekuk nails Christ, so to speak. Fundamentalist/creationist Christians are by far the religionists who seem to find evolution most profoundly problematic. The creationists clearly have the sense, if not the intellectual wherewithal to clearly formulate it, that science in general, but most especially evolution, totally collapses the fundamental notion of their religion. Evolution is an existential threat to any Bible believing Christian’s idea of Jesus and “Salvation.” Other religions, not so much. They and science can often comfortably ignore each other.
Ah, this drivel again. For anyone interested, EnlightenmentLiberal (*chuckle*) and I had a longish argument about his claim that science is an axiomatic system here. Oddly enough, he disappeared from the thread when I challenged him to: “specify what the axioms of science are, and show that science cannot be practised without accepting them.” He’s also remarkably fond of claiming – without evidence or argument – that anyone who disagrees with him is confused/incoherent/insane.
@140
Nick Gotts
i’m pretty sure if you just replace “science” with “induction” then what he is saying is not as extreme as you paint it.
@Nick Gotts
I left when the conversation got boring, repetitive, and inane, just like it’s about to be now. I try not to waste my time. I didn’t know what kind of bullshit semantic game you were playing then, and I still don’t know. I’m not going to play along.
I am no going to lay out the axioms of science. There is no need. It’s very straightforward to formally, mathematically prove the Münchhausen trilemma. (All you need to grant me is basic logic, a few simple definitions of terms, and that we can model justifications of beliefs by a directed graph. All of which should be nontrivial.) This applies to any and every belief, value, method, metric, etc. It’s applicable to all of knowledge. Thus there is no point to attempt to formalize the axioms of science, because that is completely orthogonal to my actual argument, as my actual argument applies to all of knowledge, not merely science.
Ack, fixed.
though i wish i didn’t have to point out that insinuating nonsense about “sanity” is not cool.
Except the ones about her religion being false.
Except when she does, as you yourself described.
Too bad, such a waste…. If anyone else can help me out, I just want to make sure I have this right.
Is talking to a wall compatible with science? And if so, what the fuck would that even mean?
I’m a phylogeneticist. I work on which phylogenetic hypotheses – which trees – are wrong, and why.
In phylogenetics, nothing can really be falsified unless all the evolution is happening in a lab and being observed. Anything can evolve any which way, anything can evolve convergently, anything can reverse… So we look for the most parsimonious trees.
As said above, science is not falsification alone.
That’s way too strict even by the falsification criterion alone. In history, paleontology and astrophysics there are pretty few experiments you can do; and yet they’re all science.
Only if the god is ineffable.
And even if it is, the premise is unparsimonious given the evidence known today.
Wonderful. ♥
I disagree. We simply accept that induction cannot prove, and that science cannot prove either. There’s falsification, which disproves, and there’s parsimony, which gives probabilities other than 0 and 1; and if you look closely, there’s a lot of parsimony hidden in falsification.
Catholicism has found a way around it: But of course most American fundamentalists can’t use that, because they believe Catholicism is of the devil…
Yes, but that’s the point: science isn’t induction. Induction is as fine a way as any other for generating hypotheses, but it can’t test them.
That’s about induction, not about science.
Science isn’t a search for the truth, you see. It’s the search for everything that is untrue, in the hope of narrowing the options down so that perhaps the truth might be the only thing left standing.
(Joke:) As your above quotes reference, yes talking to the wall is compatible with science. However, whether the wall talks back is a whole other question!
I wrote:
Perhaps especially if the hypothetical deity is ineffable. Suspending basic logic is a rather… huge assumption to make.
(Though Feynman’s explanation of why ice is slippery is outdated. Enough pressure can melt ice, but you can’t generate such pressures by just standing or jumping on it; it turns out that ice has a kind of surface tension that is slippery.)
@David Marjanović
I believe the wiki page has my counter to your argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Put another way, I’m looking for a method which is reliable and likely to produce working and reliable models of the future. If your science isn’t that, then it’s utterly useless and I want nothing to do with it.
For example, there is a difference between the “hypothesis” that I’m sitting on a chair, the “hypothesis” that Australia exists, the “hypothesis” that the number of gumballs in that jar of thousands of gumballs is odd, and the “hypothesis” that there is intelligent life on Rigel 7. Arguably, none of those hypotheses has been falsified. However, I’m willing to bet my shirt that I’m sitting on a chair and that Australia exists, but I’m not willing to bet anything that the number of gumballs in that jar is odd nor that there is intelligent life on Rigel 7. We operate based on what we perceive to be likely, and in that, we must use induction.
On this particular issue, you and Popper are simply wrong. What you describe is not science. Science includes induction.
@146
David Marjanović
well i’m glad i’m on the right track sorta.
but about that science =/= induction part…is there some common ground? would a venn diagram of them have the edges of the circles overlapping? or would one circle (not sure which) be inside the other, similar to a sunny side up egg?
hmmm. you said in that post that testing is not the only thing…
but also, i’m not sure what you mean that induction can’t test hypotheses. of course you can’t always use induction from your armchair to test ideas, but if you go and actually test something, surely i would think you use induction to say that the falsification you found (or whatever result) will be important in the future, rather than something that just happened once…?
Scientismist @ 13, Exactly! “I tried to ask her whether naturalism, far from being a “methodology,” was not the most tested hypothesis in all of science.” That’s my point, too. People have been tying to do magic, by prayer and a host of other procedures, for centuries: if it produced results, we could study it. We study only the natural and not the supernatural because the supernatural never shows up to be studied. It is the farthest thing possible from an assumption or an arbitrary decision.
I will spring it too, if I have a chance.
The idea that we have to pay lip service to religion is how it has survived this long: people encased in the culture don’t hear any other viewpoints. Coddling them by never contradicting or challenging their ideas treats them like infants.
I’m no artist, but I felt compelled to try anyway to convey my feelings on the Ham on Nye affair.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/118460346@N08/12695742275/
leszekuk @97:
Well, first of all, one of the primary teachings of Christ is that he was the son of god, come to save mankind, and was the only path to salvation. So, disbelieving that ignores a large section – and every claim to authority – of what Christ taught.
Secondly, if I am reading it correctly, your definition of Christian could include someone who was Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or even atheist. If your definition of Christianity includes people who actively hold to different faiths, or no faith at all, may I suggest it’s not a very useful definition.
No, parsimony.
For instance, in order to make the assumption that there’s life on Rigel 7, you first have to assume that Rigel has at least 7 planets in the first place. That’s unparsimonious – is there any reason to think it does?
As I keep implying, Popper massively underemphasized parsimony, and as I keep saying, he overlooked how much parsimony is hidden in falsification. But induction is not used to evaluate hypotheses in science, only as one of several ways to generate them (and no more privileged than Kekulé’s dream).
The idea that the result will hold up is itself a testable hypothesis.
Couldn’t agree with you more on these points, David. A hypothesis can come from any source. What matters is whether we can test it. A continuing pattern of negative results derived from some claim that is not in itself directly testable, can, on parsimony grounds, be used to exclude the non-testable claim from science. Right.
Enlightenment Liberal:
I appreciate the fact that you are willing to suspend belief on which of my alleged shortcomings are in play.
I am astounded that you believe that either observations of external behavior or a hypothetical future MRI image of brain states would be directly mappable to a particular subjective emotional experience. Consider just a few of the following possibilities: amusement, anger, attraction, boredom, disagreement, enthusiasm, irritation, pique, pity, etc. I might have felt some combination of any number of these or other emotions when reading your last post. Do you really imagine that, given genetic variation within our own species and the complexity of our emotional experiences, that anyone would ever be able to reliably say just what emotions I experienced in this scenario?
I am also surprised that you seem to be unfamiliar with the fact that atoms have been observed:
http://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0
As for my 1,2,3 bullshit, allow me to correct that for you:
1- gods might exist, but this is an untestable claim
2 – if gods exist, then there might be observable consequences of their existence that are testable
3 – the role of science is to test claims which are testable, and to build explanatory models based upon claims that repeatedly survive such tests
By the way, within science, I have very little use for topics that can’t be tested, either. I just think that a little epistemic humility goes a long way. I don’t think that’s an esoteric position.
@154
David Marjanović
i’m still not sure what you mean when you say that induction can’t test hypotheses.
still, thanks for the heads up there about parsimony. i’ve known that fallibility wasn’t the last say for stuff, but didn’t really know where else to look…
@156
scotthatfield
-i don’t think observation is the same as interpretation.
-you seem to also require an arbitrary level of nuance in the interpretation before it counts as an observed phenomenon.
-your “we can’t EVER figure this out” stuff just seems like special pleading to me. you presented good reasons to think it will be difficult, nothing more.
@scotthatfield
Do you think that emotions are hiding somewhere else? Do you think that they’re part of an immaterial soul? Of course emotions are encoded in brain states.
I do not know if we could ever in practice measure brain states and gets emotions out. Of course it could be done in principle. Of course there is a reductionistic approach that would work in principle, although in practice it may be forever beyond our reach. The alternative is that emotions are magic.
Further, of course I can measure your emotions by looking at your actions, including your facial expressions and speech. I do not believe you addressed this.
I fail to see how this is logically consistent. Either the existence of a specific god hypothesis is testable, or it’s not. “Direct” or “indirect” observation is a red-herring.
As far as I can tell under your choice of terms and framework, atoms are untestable, but there may be observable consequences of the existence of atoms. What I just said makes no sense, just like what you said about gods makes no sense. Help me out here.
I really want to reach out to Sagan’s garage dragon parable as something which you should read again.
@David Marjanovic
I thought you might go there.
When the people at CERN announced that they reached 5-sigma confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, this was not science? Are you saying that this vast undertaking (of several independent projects) – which won a Nobel prize – was not actual science? I think everyone at the project would be amazed at that claim.
I thought about it a little, and I think that your story of “falsification and parsimony” is equivalent to my story of “induction”. However, I feel that your story lacks rigor. By parsimony, do you mean Bayesian reasoning or something similar? Because that would be rigorous enough for me. However again, that would just show that we’re using different words to describe the same thing.
When you say that the hypothesis that there are aliens on Rigel 7 is unparsimonious because it rests on an unsubstantiated premise that there are at least 7 planets around Rigel, why do you think it’s unparsimonious? Is the hypothesis that there are 7 or more planets around Rigel more or less parsimonious than the hypothesis that there are 6 or less planets around Rigel? Would you decide such a question based on your prior background knowledge in a Bayesian way? Or is the existence of any material object less parsimonious than its nonexistence? (I hope you do not answer “yes”.)
Are you at all concerned about how likely a proposition is?
Let’s consider my parade case, gambling, and especially the usual carnival guessing the number of gumballs in a jar. Let’s consider the case where we know that someone has screened the gumballs and ensured that the number of gumballs as an integer is well-formed. With the limited amount of information, we can reach the conclusion that the number of gumballs is as likely even as it is odd, right? For just this paragraph – I don’t care whether we reach this by parsimony and falsification – or by induction. We better agree on this, otherwise you are not doing science.
If someone offered a bet with a net payout of -$1 if the number is odd and +$1 if the number is even, then I would not take the bet because it’s not worth my time. My expected outcome is +$0. However, if they changed the gambling-odds to a net payout of -$1 if the number is odd and +$2 if the number is even, then I would take that bet because my expected payout is +$1. Right? There is a very natural and compelling story with “induction” that explains how I reached this conclusion. How does your “falsification and parsimony” story reach this conclusion?
Let’s suppose someone was willing to make a similar bet about the number of planets around Rigel, and they had a spacecraft already en route, and a signal was expected the next which would reveal how many planets there were. He would then offer a bet with a certain net payout if the number of planets was 6 or less, and a different net payout if the number of planets was 7 or more. It’s very easy and intuitive to explain how we might calculate what are likely good bets by appealing to our background knowledge of astrophysics, stellar formation, accretion, etc., with the story of “induction”. How could you do a similar explanation with the story of “falsification and parsimony”? I suppose it’s possible, but it seems that you have a lot more mental work to do in order to reach the same conclusion. It seems as though we’re both practicing the same method by different names, but your particular names have a lot of baggage which obfuscates what we’re actually doing.
Going back to what I said earlier, suppose our best knowledge of astrophysics and cosmology was that most stars have 7 or more planets? Does that change what you said about my hypothesis that there is intelligent life on Rigel 7? Is it still unparsimonious? Is it still unparsimonious because the most parsimonious model we have is that most planets do not have life? I assume this is the wording you would choose. I’m trying to think like you. You would say that other models have been falsified (we found one planet with life, and we found a great many other planets without life). Still… without using induction, or more specifically more formal statistics and/or Bayesian reasoning, how could you ever arrive at a conclusion about how likely something may be? It seems unintelligable to talk about propability and odds under your model of mere falsification and parsimony. You need to introduce Bayesian reasoning or some other method of using known evidence to construct probabilities, and that is evidence-based reasoning, and IMHO that is induction.
This is all off the cuff. I’m curious what you think, and if I’m missing something.
PS: Regardless, it does nothing to dodge the earlier problem. I mentioned the Münchhausen trilemma. The short of it is (IMHO) that all logical and sane beliefs are in an axiomatic framework. Science cannot justify science because that would be circular. Of course science can be consistent with science, and of course you could construct a circular argument that science justifies science, but in terms of our epistemological grounding, we do not recognize the correctness of circular arguments.
Under my story of science of “induction”, there is the problem of induction. Under your story of science of “falsification and parsimony”, there exists an entirely equivalent problem: Why should we expect that parsimonious models which survive falsification are good models of future events? Attempts to justify it with “falsification and parsimony” is circular, and you should reject circular justifications out of hand. The only option is to assert it by fiat, to hold it as a self-evident axiom.
No, I don’t mean “exclude from science”. I mean “consider most likely wrong“. That’s what I do when I compare how parsimoniously different phylogenetic hypotheses account for the same data.
I’ll have to catch up with the rest of this thread later, no time right now.
EnlightenmentLiberal,
@149:
@160:
*chuckle*
Remember “joey” and his months-long campaign (at least, it seemed months long) to persuade us that he was a pro-choice atheist? I’m beginning to think “EnlightenmentLiberal” is an undercover agent for Sye Ten Bruggencate. After all, if he can persuade us (or rather, bludgeon us into accepting by constant repetition) that assertion by fiat of “self-evident axioms” is the way to attain “a method that is reliable and likely to produce reliable working models in future”, we’ll already have conceded Bruggencate’s main point.
@Nick Gotts
Name calling now? You can do better than that. As I see it, two options: 1- dispute Münchhausen trilemma, 2- dispute that the axiomatic solution is the only acceptable solution to the trilemma.
Background: In an earlier thread, were you the guy who advocated that we should abandon thinking formally about beliefs and justifications, and thus dismantling the proof of the trilemma? As I said in the other thread – that’s just stupid. I am not concerned about the thought processes of the actual human brain and modelling them. I am concerned about providing a model and framework of correct thought and epistemology, and that framework is that beliefs can be modeled as nodes and justifications can be modeled like edges in a directed graph. Throw on some basic logic and math, and assume a non-empty belief system, and then the trilemma immediately follows in a formal, mathematical way (proof omitted).
I’m rather unimpressed with your antics. There’s a reason I didn’t continue in the last thread. Shape up, or I’ll just ignore you in this one too.
@160
EnlightenmentLiberal
haha, ya. reminds me of a convo i had on youtube where a theist was using “occam’s razor” to say that god is more likely than aliens because there is just one god but there would have to be a whole species of aliens!
i eventually got them to confess that, yes, this version of “occam’s razor” dictates that distant planets probably contain previously undiscovered molecules that are larger than ours, because there would be fewer of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilEQHIS54zk&google_comment_id=z13mglkyitjshrh3r22zudibcserfhe0x
by the way, recently just read this exploration of occam’s razor type stuff from a wikipedia citation:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simplicity/
Enlightenment Liberal@142:
FIFY. Obviously, if you could, you would. If X is an axiomatic system, then the specific axioms of X are clearly of primary importance. You can’t specify the axioms of science because it’s not an axiomatic system.
@163
No, teasing someone who’s making himself ridiculous by his pomposity. And the teasing is based on the fact that you admitted (in our previous argument already referenced) to being a presuppositionalist, like Sye Ten Braggencate.
No. But we should recognise that science is, for the most part, not conducted in a formal language, and neither has nor requires a foundation set beyond the possibility of revision.
1) We can’t model justifications of beliefs by a directed graph, for the reason I already pointed out in our previous discussion: no belief can be understood, let alone assessed, except in the context of other (in fact, indefinitely many other) beliefs, including beliefs that are tacit andor inchoate.
2) Of course there’s no solution to the Münchhausen trilemma, if by “solution”, you mean a way of arriving at justifiable absolute certainty. Such a thing is just not available.
Well, I’m glad you admit your vapourings have fuck-all to do with actual thought or science, but the rest of this is just another of your bald assertions by fiat. Meanwhile, real science continues on its fascinating and productive way, completely unconcerned with its lack of a secure foundation. That’s because it doesn’t and couldn’t work in the way you want it to. It doesn’t have any “axioms” – assertions that are declared beyond the possibility of revision – not even those of formal logic (consider the idea that quantum mechanics requires the use of a “quantum logic” – I disagree, but the proposal can’t be ruled out by fiat).
Think a lot of yourself, don’t you? I’ve yet to see any justification for this self-assessment.
Oh, it would be complicated, no doubt. How complicated exactly, however, is a largely unanswered question. So far it does look like similar emotions look similar on fMRI images of different people.
Well, how could it?
Of course it was science; what makes you think it was induction?
The prediction that the Higgs boson exists and that its mass lies within a certain range was made decades ago, it was deduced from a theory. To make a particle with a mass in that range, you need a collider the size of the LHC, which didn’t exist until recently. Now that it exists, it is possible to test the prediction – ordinary falsification at first glance.
If you’re not happy with that first glance and point out that the observation of a particle in a detector in a collider is a rather indirect thing, laden with hypotheses on how the detectors work, great: how parsimonious is the idea that an unknown cause creates such a narrowly consistent (5σ) result?
Induction would have been to start with the LHC, smash stuff together systematically, noting the results, and then coming up with a theory to explain the observations. What was done was the opposite: a theory was already there, and it was tested.
I guess it’s possible that you’ve misunderstood what induction is… :-)
I refuse to get into the Bayesian/frequentist debate because I haven’t looked into this matter enough to form an opinion. I’m not comfortable with the concept of Bayesian priors, but maybe that just illustrates what I just said! What I mean by parsimony should be obvious by, say, Wikipedia.
As far as known today, many stars have a few planets, but few have that many. So, it’s more likely than not that Rigel isn’t one of the far outliers.
Both the premise and the conclusion could turn out to be wrong, and both are testable. The conclusion is testable by gazing hard enough. The premise is testable by gazing at a statistically significant sample of stars hard enough.
To return to the original question, the speculative 7th planet would also have to lie in the habitable zone, yadda yadda… additional factors such as these make it less likely that life exists there, so I’m pretty confident in saying that life probably does not exist on Rigel 7. I won’t express more certainty than that, because I don’t and can’t have it (for now).
Extremely so! Given the same dataset, a phylogenetic hypothesis that requires 1 more step than the most parsimonious alternative is a lot more likely than one that requires 20 more steps!
…We haven’t even reached science yet. So far it’s pure math.
…I’m sorry, there’s no induction in your story at all! It’s just math!
It’s also really, really bad math. The number can only be odd or even, it can’t be some kind of average that would get you + 1 $. You have a 50-% chance of getting + 2, a 50-% chance of getting – 1, and a 0-% chance of getting + 1.
Yes. It would raise the probability.
It would still be more likely than not that there’s no life on Rigel 7, because for the 7th planet to be in the habitable zone requires that Rigel is in a certain size range (don’t know which one) and, probably (we could look this up), that the planets are rather crowded. And if you ask about intelligent life, we have a whole lot of additional factors to consider; life is a lot more likely than specifically intelligent life, however defined.
“Parsimonious” and “unparsimonious” isn’t an either-or thing. It’s not a probability of 1 or 0.
Please explain how any of that is induction.
You did, and I explained why I don’t care.
I doubt that. It’s possible that all logical beliefs that express absolute certainy are in an axiomatic framework – but I strongly doubt that they’re sane!
If you really need an explanation for why parsimony works well, a commenter named abb3w has linked to a mathematical proof of that several times over the years. I don’t understand it, though.
If you don’t begin from the most parsimonious hypothesis, where do you begin? At the most munificent hypothesis?
(You can’t even find the most munificent hypothesis, but I digress…)
This expectation, you see, is not an axiom. It is itself a testable hypothesis you can deduce predictions from: wait for future events, and see if the expectation has held up!
Münchhausen has powerful wings. And so does his horse.
:-)
I’m doing the third: explain why the trilemma is simply irrelevant. It completely misses the point. Münchhausen is a strawman. :-)
(With wings. …Sorry, I’m getting my metaphors mixed up here. :-þ )
If by “correct” you mean something about absolute metaphysical truth, just snap out of it. That’s not what science is about. Hey, even solipsism can’t be disproved; you could validly preface every hypothesis by “Unless I’m the solipsist,” – that would just be boring and useless.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Digression: it may even be important to remember that logic isn’t primary, isn’t God-given. It’s an abstraction and generalization about how mathematics behaves, and math in turn is an abstraction and generalization about how empirical reality behaves.
(That’s something I’ve first seen expressed somewhere on Pharyngula. Can’t remember who wrote it.)
@165
Nick Gotts
it sounds to me like maybe you reject the entire notion of there being axioms of any sort at all?
also, i don’t think our minds can actually hold “indefinitely many” beliefs…
*perhaps indefinite doesn’t mean infinite in this case…
@166
David Marjanović
i’ve been told that induction is something we use every second for everything from language to predicting the continuation of the existence of natural laws from one moment to the next. so basically i’ve been led to believe there isn’t much that it isn’t involved in.
also i thought maybe there were only 2 types of reasoning, deductive and inductive (and i think deductive is rarely possible) but now that i look it seems maybe “abductive reasoning” is what is used. honestly it still looks inductive to me, i’ll have to look into the differences.
eh? induction on wikipedia does have baseian inference…
i don’t think so. i actually read a link from there. it kind seems to me that this “parsimony” stuff is a mysterious answer to a mysterious question.
well…
@166
David Marjanović
i don’t know where you are getting that from. i don’t think enlightenment liberal is saying anything of the kind.
@David Marjanović
First, thanks for your time.
Side note: I am not trying to start up the frequentist vs Bayesian debate.
I think we’re getting hung up over the word “induction”. What do you mean by the word?
To give my definition of induction, let me first give the goto definition of insanity. Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result each time, and expecting a different result the next time. I argue that induction is merely the opposite. Inductive reasoning: Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result each time, and expecting the same result the next time.
I want to focus on the CERN case, because I think I can best make my point there, and/or understand our differences. I would think that if all CERN was trying to do was falsify theories and find the most parsimonious remaining theory, they would not have behaved as they did. This model of science is not a good story for how they actually behaved. Surely, if they were just concerned with falsifying the prediction of the Higgs boson, they could have just stopped at 3-sigma or 4-sigma. Why go all the way to 5-sigma when you’re merely trying to falsify? Surely they were trying for something better: they were trying to get (non-absolute) verification or confirmation, right? The story for their behavior is that they were gathering evidence to test a theory, contra your claims. I do not see how the story of merely falsification and parsimony can explain the behavior of these actors.
Shifting of the burden of proof. Why do you start with the most parsimonious explanation?
Wait… what? What the hell did you just do? Look at what you just did. You just said you could confirm a “theory” by induction! Didn’t you just spend several posts saying how you should never do this?
And even then, why do you think that a “theory” which has multiple confirmation and no disconfirmation is a good indicator of the future? This is the textbook definition of the “problem of induction”. What justification do you have for this?
Sorry I forgot about this thread.
From your link:
“Peirce argues that good abductive reasoning from P to Q involves not simply a determination that, e.g., Q is sufficient for P, but also that Q is among the most economical explanations for P.”
…where “most economical explanations” is a link to “Occam’s razor”. In short, “abductive reasoning” is a long-winded way to express the principle of parsimony.
I’m not sure what it’s doing in this article, actually. “We begin by committing to a prior probability for a hypothesis based on logic or previous experience, and when faced with evidence, we adjust the strength of our belief in that hypothesis in a precise manner using Bayesian logic.” The part before the first comma is induction, and the part after it is what you do when induction fails – when you’re “faced with evidence” that the “prior probability” of your hypothesis isn’t the same as the posterior probability. Science: you make a hypothesis by any means, including induction if you’re so inclined, and then you test it by means other than induction. Bayesian inference “just” formalizes this process and puts hard numbers to it.
Ooh, that article is so long because it treats the entire history of the idea, plus the entire history of justifications for it. It’s an article about philosophy and at the same time an article about history of philosophy.
For most practical purposes, it’s enough to condense it to “the fewer assumptions you need to make to explain the data, the better”.
Yes, and also watching the same thing happen again and again with the same result, and expecting the same result the next time.
Er, no. They were trying to falsify as many alternatives as possible, including ones nobody has actually thought up yet.
<blockquote<The story for their behavior is that they were gathering evidence to test a theory, contra your claims.
That’s exactly what I claim, and I’m not sure where our misunderstanding is.
…One reason is that that’s a testable criterion. Hypotheses should be stated as strongly as possible, so they’re as easy to falsify as possible (Popper).
Another is, as I said: where else would you start? Why assume complexity that you don’t need?
The opposite. :-) I said I could falsify a theory by observation. Hasn’t been falsified today? Perhaps it’ll be falsified tomorrow. As long as it hasn’t been falsified and lacks a more parsimonious alternative, we’ll build on it and see if that leads to something falsifiable.
That’s after all what we want to do. We want to falsify all that is falsifiable.
:-)
…Sorry for not expressing that last part better last time.
What you said is wrong. It is not good enough that “hammers fall when released” has not been falsified. No one cares. It’s not good enough if it’s the most parsimonious explanation. What we care about is that it has been demonstrated to be true. – You said that the people at CERN were gathering evidence to falsify other hypotheses. Which hypotheses? All of them? What is the difference between falsifying everything but X, and demonstrating X is true? Really?
Your method does not have an obvious option which can arrive at the conclusion “I don’t know”. As formulated, it sounds like you’ll often employ arguments from ignorance. It is not right that you should use the most parsimonious explanation. All of the explanations might be crap – the most parsimonious explanation would be the least crappy but still crap. You have to be able to recognize when you do not know.
I have no doubt that you can contort the meanings of “falsification” and especially “parsimony” to dodge most of my complaints. However, I have met many young Earth creationists who deny basic rationality and skepticism by employing philosophy exactly as you hold. They dodge their burden of proof by appealing to bullshit indistinguishable from yours. When I challenge them on gods, instead they put forth these quasi-“logical” proofs, and they attack Naturalism. What do you say to them if you cannot demand positive proof for their claims? That their model of reality is unparsimonious? How do you measure parsimony? What units is it in?
You can dodge both of those criticisms by contorting “parsimony” to become Bayesian reasoning. However, once you do that, you arrive in my camp, and the only difference between us is linguistic, e.g. no difference at all. (However, even then, I would complain loudly because your choice of words is highly misleading and confusing.)
If you go that far, you are in my camp IMHO. However thus, I arrive at another problem: I think you have understanding of induction which is a strawman. I’ve recently got you agree to my definition of induction. From that, Bayesian reasoning, Occam’s razor, “parsimony”, and the rest, follow as conclusions, which then guide our future induction. The only way that I can make any sense of what you’ve said if you haven’t thought this through too deeply and haven’t realized that induction is just an isomorphic way to think about science, or you have a strawman understanding of induction. (Or worse – you think that they are isomorphic, but you still continue on as you do, which I would label as flagrantly willfully dishonest.) I ask again – what is the practical difference between someone who practices science ala induction, and someone who practices science your way? What is the difference in the experiments that they do? What is the difference in how they determine how “likely” true their beliefs are (Bayesian) / how “confident” they are in their beliefs (frequentist)? I don’t see one. If there is no difference in their actions and no difference in how they apportion “confidence” in their beliefs, then there is no difference.
Speak for yourself.
Nothing has been demonstrated to be true. Nothing can be demonstrated to be true. Hey, it’s not even possible to disprove solipsism, which says that all of reality is not true; all you can do is make an argument from parsimony against it.
You need to learn to live with this.
Good luck finding everything but X, so you can falsify it.
…It’s extremely common, especially in my field, for different unfalsified hypotheses to be exactly equally parsimonious.
In that case you must have misunderstood me on a massive scale – which is scary, because it means I have failed at explaining myself.
Yes, to the extent it hasn’t been falsified. (…Again, there’s parsimony hidden in falsification, but often it’s good enough for this purpose.)
As far as the comments on the ScienceBlogs version of Pharyngula still exist, go ahead and search them – you’ll find me arguing with creationists a lot since 2006. Even here you’ll occasionally find me arguing with a creationist in the [Thunderdome].
In my field (phylogeny), the unit is the step – the evolutionary change of one state of a character to another. The more of these you have to assume to explain a given dataset, the worse. Of course it isn’t always that easy elsewhere, but surely you can agree that the existence of a creator is a massively unparsimonious clusterfuck of hypotheses?
I haven’t noticed you asking this before:
An example may be what was called gradualism in geology and paleontology. After Cuvier’s catastrophism was resoundingly disproved in the 19th century, people came to think that nothing extraordinary ever happens, no such thing as a mass extinction, at least not a mass extinction caused by a “catastrophic” event such as an asteroid impact. This worked beautifully to explain the majority of the history of the Earth, so people expected it would always work – inductive reasoning. But it wasn’t parsimonious enough. Asteroids exist, they fly around, and sometimes they bump into things. When an asteroid that is big enough hits the Earth, especially if it does so in a particular spot that gives off dangerous gases when suddenly vaporized, a geologically instantaneous mass extinction is inevitable. All the way to the early 1990s, amazingly few geologists and paleontologists managed to wrap their heads around this.
Enlightenment Liberal,
The reason you go with the most parsimonious hypothesis that explains the data adequately is because it has been demonstrated to have the greatest predictive power. If all one were interested in doing were fitting points on a curve, we know that n parameters can fit n points exactly every time. And it will tell you nothing about the next realization of the experiment.
Are you familiar with Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaike_information_criterion
What we learn from this is that a more complex model must do an exponentially better job of explaining the data than the simpler model. And the reason you go to 5 sigma is because that is the threshold for “publishable” in particle physics. It really isn’t 5 sigma of significance because of the computer power (and number of plots) one expends to extract the signal.
@David Marjanovic
This is exceedingly frustrating.
This is an obscene caricature.
Your example basically is: Well, we haven’t seen a meteor hit the Earth yet, so no meteors ever hit the Earth, according to induction.
That induction works only by ignoring all of the other known evidence. I strongly implied if not outright stated that proper induction is Bayesian reasoning. You don’t just get to ignore other facts if they’re inconvenient. A better analysis would be:
We have two competing hypotheses, A- meteors sometimes hit Earth, and B- meteors never hit Earth. Well, we’ve never seen a meteor hit Earth, and so that’s good evidence against the first proposition. However, we have things consistent with impact craters which is good evidence for the first proposition. We know meteors are out there, and that their orbits are (roughly) Newtonian, and thus eventually our orbits will intersect. We know the physics of meteors going through the air and we know that a big enough meteor will not burn up in the atmosphere. So, we can apply estimate numbers to these facts, plug in the numbers into Bayes formula, and we conclude that “A- meteors sometimes hit Earth” is the correct answer.
I suggest that you pick up “Proving History” by Richard Carrier. It can be argued that Bayes theorem more or less is the definition of ratioanlity, and I will argue that to the extent that your ill-defined “parsimony” is not crap, it is identical to Bayesian reasoning.
This is a dodge. I ask again: What about where we have an unfalsified hypothesis which is slightly more parsimonious than alternatives?
Earlier, you said before that you should always go with the most parsimonious known explanation. I say that is crap. Sometimes the corerct answer is to go with nothing and say “I don’t know”. I still have not seen you try to explain the method you use to decide when the best explanation is “crappy enough” that you should say “I don’t know”.
We in the real world need to take actions to achieve our goals. To achieve our goals, we need to know which facts and models of the real world we can rely on, and to what extent we can rely on them. This is the basis of risk analysis and all rational actors. “to what extent we can rely on them” is a measure of the confidence that we have that the beliefs are true (frequentist terminology), and it is a measure of how likely the beliefs are true (Bayesian terminology). We need to do this. To the extent that your “parsimony” is not ill-defined and crap, it is effectively Bayesian reasoning or some fascimile.
And who decides this? You? Why you? Fiat? How did you decide this? Again fiat? Are you saying that every specific domain of science is going to have a different and unrelated definition and measure of parsimony? Surely you can see how this is crap. You need a definition of parsimony which works for all of the sciences, and which has a common metric / measuring unit across them all.
…
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaike_information_criterion
(Emphasis added)
Which is one of the same problems that I’m having with David Marjanovic.
Sorry for taking so long.
Well, no: we haven’t seen an asteroid cause a mass extinction yet, so we should start from the assumption that no asteroid ever causes a mass extinction.
From what I’ve seen, that’s just basic science theory for historians, intended to reduce the problem of “the closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets”.
Uh, this is not a contradiction. The answer is “I don’t know, but this is the most parsimonious explanation, so we should start from there till further evidence shows up”.
The principle of parsimony doesn’t give you metaphysical certainty. Nothing does.
You seem to assume a binary “I know” vs. “I don’t know”. Do I really need to explain that that’s not how it works?
Seriously, read up on that.
…Count the assumptions. Atomize them, and then count the atoms. That’s what you and I do every day, at least in the form of rough estimates.
Accusing me of having invented half of science theory all by myself is just… funny.
How does induction do that, then?
Enlightenment Liberal,
Why do you assume all the candidate models fit poorly? That is an indication that we don’t understand the phenomenon under study–that we need further investigations before we can arrive at a satisfactory model (or models) that would guide future investigations.
Parsimony is not that difficult to define–the number of parameters in the model, the number of contributing factors deemed significant, etc.–they are all measurements that are used. And there is no need for parsimony to be the same across all fields of science, just as there is no need for all models to be of the same type.
Likewise, goodness of fit can also be measured in a variety of ways. I recommend to you a book called “That Nature of Scientific Evidence.”
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Scientific-Evidence-Philosophical-Considerations/dp/0226789578
I would also recommend to you Ed Jayne’s excellent text on Bayesian probability: “Probability Theory: the Logic of Science.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_6?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=jaynes%20probability%20theory&sprefix=jaynes%2Cstripbooks%2C242&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3Ajaynes%20probability%20theory