My Oxford University Press blog post on Why Scientists Should Be Atheists generated an interesting discussion in the comments of my blog post here that linked to it. One issue that was raised was my use of the word ‘should’ and why I was singling out scientists with that imperative. Why should scientists apply the same standards they use in science to everything in life? Of course, no one can be forced to do so and people can (and do) compartmentalize their thinking to enable them to be scientists by day and believers in all manner of supernatural entities by night (so to speak).
But it seems odd for scientists to do so because in general scientists seek consistency across the board as part of their professional practice and that drive has been a major factor in generating scientific advances. For example, if we accept the theory of electromagnetism in some areas, then we think it should apply everywhere, unless there is a very good reason as to why it breaks down somewhere else. Ad hoc theories that are used in just one area are seen as temporary placeholders that will eventually be replaced by a comprehensive theory.
Why would we not apply those same principles in every aspect of our lives? As population geneticist J. B. S. Haldane explained in his 1934 book Fact and Faith:
“My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.”
As part of that scientific practice, it is essential for scientists to have ways of determining the existence and non-existence of entities and they have devised ways of doing so. For example, the entire structure of modern society is based on the existence of just two kinds of electrical charges. Using the logic of science, we do not believe in the existence of a third kind of charge. If that same scientific logic and the same methods and standards are applied to other entities such as vampires, fairies, and yes, gods, then we can rule them out too.
I discuss in greater detail the nature of scientific logic that leads to atheism in my book and gave a brief summary in my comment to the earlier post that I will reproduce here for completeness and for those who missed it.
Scientists frequently have to make decisions of whether any entity exists or not and have arrived at decision rules for doing so. In doing so, the default position is non-existence until such time as those arguing in favor of existence can produce a preponderance of affirmative evidence to support their assertion. Sometimes provisional existence status is granted in the absence of such evidence, provided the entity is necessary as an explanatory concept. But that provisional status can be withdrawn if theories change so that the entity no longer is necessary as an explanatory concept. That is precisely what happened with the aether and phlogiston, their provisional status being withdrawn following the introduction of the theory of relativity and the oxygen theory of combustion respectively. On the other hand, in the case of the neutrino and the Higgs boson, they too were granted provisional existence status for decades because they were seen as necessary explanatory concepts but then a preponderance of affirmative evidence (arrived at after over two decades for neutrinos and five decades for the Higgs) resulted in them being granted actual existence status.
If we think god is an entity and not just an idea, then scientists should apply the same standard for its existence claim that we do for every other existence claim, because that kind of search of consistency is a key aspect of scientific practice. Is there a preponderance of affirmative evidence for the existence of any god? Is it a necessary explanatory concept for anything? The answer is no to both. Ergo, scientists can and should conclude that gods do not exist, just like we have concluded that the aether and phlogiston do not exist. To shy away from that conclusion would be, as Haldane said, intellectually dishonest.
Suppose I were to say “I love my wife, Meg” and someone were to reply “I think you should apply the methods of science, or of reason, or rational thinking, to that, and see if your love for Meg evaporates.”
I would be justified, I think, in vigorously insisting on that someone’s absence. This would be viewed as an extremely weird, extremely rude, thing to say. And yet, when an atheist says precisely the same thing about a religious belief, it is, apparently, perfectly normal and acceptable.
This line of argument relates to the common confusion about science being descriptive or proscriptive. if we’re merely describing reality by proposing and testing theories, then atheism should be the natural “conclusion” of any scientist, to they extent that science allows conclusions. If you think science says what truly exists instead, then you’ll invent things like non-overlapping magisteria to “protect” religion from science.
@1 Andrew. I think your analogy would be valid only if A) you believe that your love for your wife explained some phenomenon in the natural world (other, perhaps, than your own behavior toward her) or B) the notion of god explained nothing in the natural world (in which case, I would think there is no difference between god and no god).
Haldane was an admirer of Stalin years after Stalin died. Steven Weinberg is a Zionist. But thank goodness for their intellectual honesty regarding religion!
dave@3 sure, you can parse this or that out, my point is simply that there are things in our life which we do not normally examine through the lens of rational thinking, scientific thinking.
To argue that one ought to extend this kind of thinking to *all* aspects of ones life is silly. If you want to start inventing rules that carve out, for instance, “love” as legitimately grounds for non-rational thinking, but “religion” as a region in which you *should* apply rational thinking, you are welcome to develop those ideas as you see fit, of course. I predict that under pressure such a system would acquire much of the character of the Ptolemaic model of the universe.
“Why should scientists apply the same standards they use in science to everything in life?”
Not everything; scientific standards do not make much sense when trying to answer the question whether to prefer Mozart (the Beatles) or Haydn (the Rolling Stones). However “there is a god” is a knowledge claim. So if you accept the scientific method, as most apologists claim to do, it makes sense to apply standards that are at least similar. How else can a claim like “there is a/no god” have credibility?
“Why would we not apply those same principles in every aspect of our lives?”
There is a German proverb that answers this: “Jeder Konsequenz führt zum Teufel” -- every (utter) consquense leads to the devil. It’s highly questionable if 100% consistency is desirable in ethics. It’s silly regarding esthetics.
Andrew,
‘Love’ is not a ‘thing’, an entity, to which we can apply scientific logic to determine existence or non-existence. It is not of the same kind as a neutrino or Higgs whose postulated existence led to specific predictions that could be tested.
@1 Andrew
Why on earth would you suggest that the phenomenon known as “love” should be somehow exempt from being examined scientifically? Research has been done on the subject; books have been written. We can see from the natural world that pair-bonding in many species of mammals, particularly for raising children, clearly has evolutionary benefits. Social evolutionary theory would suggest that cultures that promote concepts like love in its members will likely have competitive advantages against societies that don’t. Even that reviled field of evo psych could probably come up with good reasons why your brain might be wired to produce higher levels of serotonin and ocytocin around a particular person — particularly if it happens to be a person with whom you share offspring.
It isn’t as if there’s any question as to whether the phenomenon called love exists. If you feel like collecting data to show the influence it has on the behavior of humans, you won’t come up short. You’ll find both positive and negative results — eg. people staying in abusive relationships. It does what people claim it does. I would suggest that a similar examination of the claims made by believers in a “god” phenomenon would not yield similar results.
Also, why would you worry that studying the phenomenon would make it seem less real? Does understanding things necessarily destroy them? Wordsworth says
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect
but I don’t believe that any more.
@1 AndrewM: in the first place the phenomenon love can be scientifically researched indeed. In the second place abusers also say “I love you”. Your “it’s so rude” rebuttal suddenly becomes quite inappropriate.
Also there is a difference between “I love a fictional entity (in my case Pomme from La Dentelliere)” and “this exists”. Pomme definitely does not.
Mano@7 Proselytizing atheists seem to often take the tack that the root of the thing is whether or not God Exists in the same way that Ham Sandwiches Exist. While this is certainly relevant to some folks who hew to religious beliefs, this is by no means the only view. There are also religious people for whom their religious belief far more resembles their love for another, or their fondness for a song, than it resembles a “God Exists, just like a Ham Sandwich, and he Gives Me Stuff.”
brucegee1962@8 Sure, one *may* examine love as a phenomenon scientifically as much as one likes. One might even *choose* to examine ones very specific feelings for another in such a way. There are two relevant remarks here:
1. Choosing to do so is quite different from being admonished to, being told one “should.”
2. None of these will really seriously encompass the experience of love.
Dylan Thomas refers in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” to a book about wasps that explains “everything about the wasp, except why” which might be a useful touchstone here.
It would probably be helpful to keep in mind that I’m not talking here about whether anything exists or not. Mano did an excellent job on that discussion, and I have no difficulties with that internally. My remarks are addressed (as Mano has correctly identified, thank you, Mano!) to the question of whether his discussion is relevant.
@ AndrewM: “”And yet, when an atheist says precisely the same thing about a religious belief”
“there are things in our life which we do not normally examine through the lens of rational thinking, scientific thinking.”
What you’re carefully omitting is that it’s not the atheists who started to talk about those things. In the first half of 19th Century Feuerbach and Kierkegaard pretty much closed the debate. What happened is that first Alvin Plantinga and then WL Craig and Richard Swinburne started it all over again. One famous blog is called “Reasonable Faith”.
It’s so much easier to complain about those pesky unbelievers than about the members of your own tribe, isn’t it?
Just for reference: I am agnostic, and do not practice any religion.
But you must have practiced the apologetics a bit, right? I mean, nobody would just randomly blurt that shit out.
@1 AndrewM:
Scientifically examining “love” would take a great deal of effort, so might not be worth it.
Scientifically examining religion takes very little, so probably is.
Besides, what is the downside?
One thing to remember is it takes time and effort to become competent in a new field. Expertise in one area of one subject doesn’t lead to expertise in another area of even the same field. Look at Nobel Prize winner James Watson.
Oh come now, rationally examining love is not difficult.
List the top few things you want out of a love relationship, and then score your partner on how well they do. If they don’t sum up to some minimum threshold, why, simply stop loving them. I see no difficulty here whatsoever.
Not only COULD you do this, but you SHOULD.
Religion might not be an interesting enough subject to invest the effort.
Andrew Molitor
it’s been 15 years and I can’t do that.
Once again @Andrew disingenuously manages to move the goalposts in the discussion. Mano explains why scientifically, gods don’t exist because there’s no evidence for them, and scientists would do better to hold themselves to higher standards than to believe things without evidence, even outside their work. But Andrew compares the existence of a god to the love of eir wife. This is a nonsensical comparison.
If you want to compare, compare like with like: compare mental states like love and faith, or compare entities like a god and a person. Comparing apples and a liking to eat oranges is either ridiculous to the point of stupidity, or just downright dishonest.
Be warned Andrew, once again I’m not going to pull my punches here. You want me to be respectful when I argue, but I see nothing to respect.
I am not and would not defend religion in the science lab, but Ken Miller’s presentation on human and primate chromosomes shows that he knows his stuff and is willing to separate his religion from science.
If theists are willing to adhere to rules and ethics, they may be able to do proper work. But because they believe, there will always be that niggling doubt about them.
Well, let’s see now: this is me@10
“It would probably be helpful to keep in mind that I’m not talking here about whether anything exists or not. Mano did an excellent job on that discussion, and I have no difficulties with that internally. My remarks are addressed (as Mano has correctly identified, thank you, Mano!) to the question of whether his discussion is relevant.”
Would it be helpful for me to repeat that a few more times, or will once be enough for you?
From your previous posts, I deduce that you are attempting to be satirical here. Otherwise, I would assume you were simply describing a common process which, if the divorce statistics are to be believed, happens approximately every 36 seconds in this country.
I guess I kind of loved my dog, when it wasn’t being a total pain in the ass, but it died 30 years ago. Is that sort of what it’s like with the love relationship a person is supposed to have with zombie Jesus? Maybe I should add (in case anyone is wondering) that my dog never did anything remotely thaumaturgical. However, I’m sure it was real.
In reply to @Andrew #21:
Andrew said #1:
I said #19:
Would it be helpful for me to repeat that a few more times, or will once be enough for you?
You see Andrew, you can’t throw up bullshit and then exempt any argument against it by giving yourself an escape clause by saying “of course I don’t have any issues with the thrust of the argument itself, I’m just arguing about whether it’s relevant“.
You want to talk relevancy? Is the search for truth relevant? Is the belief of falsehood relevant? Are we going to woo our way around implying the science isn’t a search for truth or that reason is what you make it?
Mano explains how scientifically the non-existence of gods is beyond question. Ey then goes on to say that scientists should be atheists. Because? Because an atheist is someone who knows the non-existence of gods is beyond question. So why should scientists believe that? Because science is the search for truth and if you don’t accept scientific consequences then you’re not doing science. Aha, but we can wiggle out of this by drawing a line between science, which sounds like a work thingy, and private life, which must be private so none of my business.
Andrew would have us believe it’s perfectly proper for scientists to splice genes at work while decrying evolution and staging unicorn hunts in their spare time. “Oh wait, I never said they should decry evolution blah blah”. It’s falsehood Andrew, the believing of falsehood, and that’s not merely inappropriate for scientists, it’s inappropriate for any rational mind.
Would it be helpful for me to repeat that a few more times, or will once be enough for you?
I never quite know what to do when someone reaches that pitch of desperation when they quote me, and then assign some bizarre and obviously wrong meaning to my words.
Does this mean I win? Where do we go from here? Clearly I can write anything whatever, and file thirteen will simply claim it means whatever they want it to mean to “prove” me wrong. Should I parse out my statements and explain in agonizing detail what the words actually mean? That never seems fruitful, and anyways, see above. It’s just more grist for the “it actually, secretly, means *this*” mill.
I’m not new to this, I have had this gambit rolled out on me many many more times than I can recall, but there never seems to be a satisfactory conclusion.
I guess I’ll just say that, since there is no reference, even oblique, to the existence of god in what of mine f13 quoted, there’s no way their reading of it can possibly be correct. Also, I win. I guess. Whatever that means.
Very ironic that you should write that Andrew. Guess one explanation wasn’t enough for you after all.
Im curious what tests have been applied to prove or not prove the existence of God , scientifically speaking.
You may be able to disprove specific claims that a particular religion makes but what was the test(s) conducted to prove/disprove God ?
Most of the arguments against God are philosophical , not scientific. (A fact that amuses me no end when some Atheist scientists diss philosophy)
@deepak #27
Actually, over the course of human history the existence of gods has been proposed many times as a reason for some facet of reality that humans couldn’t explain. Admittedly human records often show fait accompli conclusions (eg. that the earth was created in seven days by a god) so that we have to beg the question, but such questions are not difficult to form and we have yet to find an answered, testable question, that requires a god.
It doesn’t look good for the gods hypotheses that they keep being presented and then eliminated as solutions when accurate solutions are found. Instead, as humans discover ever more about the universe they live in, the proposed gods have had ever smaller gaps in our knowledge in which to hide. Perhaps it’s finally time to admit they don’t.
…to admit they don’t *exist.
@10 Andrew Molitor
I really do think you moved the goalpost in this post with
I mean, sure there are folks who go to church because they like the music, or they want to keep up social appearances, or they feel pressured by their family, or whatever. I am actually one of the latter group. Sure, there are folks who would say “When I use the word ‘God’ I really mean a metaphor for what I conceive of as goodness.” But I’d be hard pressed to call them a majority among churchgoers — the vast majority do really seem to believe that there is some conscious, invisible being watching their every move. It sounds like you’re saying that when you mention believers, you don’t really mean believer believers. It’s just quibbling.
As I just mentioned, I am a church-going atheist due to various family obligations. We go to an extremely liberal, tamborine-shaking, social-justice-loving church. Yet still, if I had to estimate that maybe 20% of any given service is about “do nice things for your neighbors” and the other 80% is made up of talking about stuff that happened in the bronze age and fiddly doctrinal matters.
As Benjamin Franklin said about the time he was prevailed upon to go to church: “At length [the minister] took for his text that verse of the fourth chapter of Philippians, ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things.’ And I imagined, in a sermon on such a text, we could not miss of having some morality. But he confined himself to five points only, as meant by the apostle, viz.: 1. Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the Holy Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the public worship. 4. Partaking of the sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God’s ministers. These might be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from the text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more.”
You haven’t really responded to the point that mnbo@6 made, that belief in God in a knowledge claim. I think Mano makes a perfectly valid pint, as file thirteen paraphrases @19 that “scientists would do better to hold themselves to higher standards than to believe things without evidence.” Anyone who calls themselves a scientist, yet then proceeds to go on about cryptids or ghosts or the memory of water won’t get much respect as a scientist, and I think the same thing is true about god-beliefs.
Quite right, brucegee, good observation.
Yes, I have been dancing around a little about what is or might be “actually really real” for the religious believer. I have declined to use the word “faith” or to characterize religious belief as entirely a figment of the imagination, some sort of failure of brain chemistry.
The reasons here are twofold: 1. I don’t know (I am agnostic) and 2. I don’t care. It absolutely doesn’t matter to the central thrust of what I am saying, but there *is* a secondary thread that I am unwilling to let go of entirely. The first one, and the important one, is that science and rationality are not proper tools to apply to what are really emotional/social phenomena.
The second, though, is that if there is something mystical (either in religion or in love) then science continues to be helpless. What would “something mystical” even mean? It could simply describe the emergent properties of brain chemistry, it could describe genuine Magick of some style. Science would be equally helpless and inappropriate for either, and for anything in between.
As for “belief in God is a knowledge claim” well, I contest that. While there are people who treat the existence of god as precisely the same as the existence of ham sandwiches, there are plenty of religious people who treat the question much more squishily, much more mystically. In ways that specifically and definitely resist the efforts of science and rational thought to grasp. Again, that mysticism might be merely emergent properties of brain chemistry, full-on Magick, or something else entirely. I do not pretend to know. I do not personally think the distinction matters much for the current discussion, and additionally it is not a distinction I much care about myself,
Mano’s original essay does a nice job on “God does not exist in the same way a Ham Sandwich does” but there are vast swathes of material that fall outside that narrow point.
And now I have helpfully provided masses of text which can my misread, misquoted, cursed at, mocked, and so on! This should be fun. I expect at least one person to carefully mine my last few days of comments to locate an apparent contradiction. Don’t let me down, kids.
Woo.
Hope you don’t feel let down… kid.
Once upon a time, when my kids were younger, I was chatting with a pediatrician and we had a good laugh about the usual business about how babies don’t develop object permanence until such and such and age, and how a surprising amount of stuff takes a surprisingly long time to develop.
Then he said something like this: You know, it stands to reason that we could have similar cognitive blind spots. Why should we suppose that at age 16 or whatever that we’ve actually got to the end of it? Maybe we’ve just developed all we’re ever going to get, and there’s lots more that we simply lack the machinery for. We’re never know. Some alien dudes could be studying us “Check this out man! He sees my keys, right? Watch his eyes. See? Ok.. now I just zthrap them… and he thinks they’re gone! What a dumbshit! HA HA HA!”
Ever since then I’ve been a little more cautious about what we can and cannot figure out. It’s not at all unreasonable to suppose that there’s stuff humanity is never going to figure out, because we’re flatly incapable of getting it. What we can get might well be a fully self-consistent system that appears to be complete with no clues that there’s more. Or maybe it’ll have obvious holes that we simply lack the capacity to ever fill in.
It seems a bit strange, improbable even, that at some age we transition some border, some threshold, before which some things are simply unknowable to us, but past which all things which are knowable at all become knowable by us.
Just to get this out of the way, I am not an athiest.
Science works best when things can be redone, or at least checked. And tolerably well when things can be well-documented and partly checked. But religious experiences don’t fit in either category.
Why wouldn’t it be reasonable for one person to be religious because they have had religious experiences? Especially if these occur often enough to pass such tests as they can create? And for other people to be non-religious because they have not had religious experiences?
Of course some religions expect people to take someone else’s word for it, and *that* seems like a bad intellectual habit.
Sorry, did you just describe querying the physical existence or otherwise of God as a “narrow” point?
Marja, there’s a difference between religiosity and theism; one can be a theist without being religious, and one can be religious without being a theist. Or be a spiritualist, an animist, a deist, or whatever is not strict theism.
(And of course, theism encompasses polytheism, so this monotheism thing is a rather limited subset of the variety of theisms)
Or: it’s about being atheist, not about being irreligious.
—
PS re “Why wouldn’t it be reasonable for one person to be religious because they have had religious experiences?”, for one thing, there’s a class of entheogenic drugs that do that on demand.
So it’s no slam-dunk.
Andrew @33:
Gods are hardly such a thing, though. Lots of temples and churches and shit like that around. Holy books, revelations, miracles, all that stuff has been figured out — and all of it actually exists.
Basically, your basis for agnosticism about the supposed existence of gods is as good as that for leprechauns or the tooth fairy.
(Jesus Christ == Santa Claus == Bugs Bunny)
—
Alternatively, it’s not at all unreasonable to suppose that there’s stuff humanity has imagined but will never find, since it’s imaginary and therefore not real.
Like godlings.
file thirteen @24
Sorry, but as far as I am concerned the idea that scientists seek “truth” is quaintly naive, despite being claimed by some of my tribe. No, scientists seek theories with explanatory power but are always tentative and provisional. In the case of claims that gods exist there is no explanatory power, since “god did it” explains anything, everything, and hence nothing. Oh yes, and there is also the small matter of the lack of any credible evidence.
Holms@35 You could probably interpret it that way without straying too far from what I meant, sure.
@Andrew Molitor 31
I think it’s much simpler than this. I think that most people like to believe in the popular notion of God because it carries with it a bunch of other knowledge claims that they would prefer to be true, such as
1. All the crummy stuff that happens in your life is part of some big plan.
2. Some part of your consciousness will survive your death.
3. The people you love won’t really leave you forever, and you’ll be able to rejoin them eventually.
4. Your existence has value in the universe, regardless of your accomplishments or lack thereof.
And I get it, I understand why believing in things like this can be psychologically beneficial, regardless of whether there’s any truth to them. I also understand why some people who otherwise subscribe to a scientific worldview may want to just throw up their hands and say “There’s no way to prove or disprove any of this stuff, so I’ll just go ahead and believe in whatever makes me feel good.”
I think Mano’s point is just that, if your default attitude is “I refuse to believe in the existence of things unless there is evidence they exist, or else they make me feel good,” then your ability to describe your approach to the world as scientific is somewhat lacking.
Andrew Molitor,
Thinking back over my posts to you, I may have been a bit harsh. There are probably lots of areas where I agree with you. I agree that there are lots of Big Questions we all need to grapple with that science isn’t equipped to answer — questions like
“How can I find happiness when I’m surrounded by misery and injustice?”
“How should I understand my place in the universe and the inevitability of death?”
“What do concepts like Duty and Honor really mean?”
“What is the best way to strengthen a marriage and family?”
“What values should I pass on to my children?”
I would say (and you may also perhaps agree) that the best place to look for the answers to these questions is not in Science, but in the so-called Humanities. Read Shakespeare; read Wordsworth; read Austen; heck, read Tolkien or LeGuin if they float your boat. Listen to Mozart or Led Zeppelin. You’ll find better answers to all of these questions than you will in Religion — and none of those people will make any knowledge claims either. Don’t get sucked into a church that gives you plenty of easy answers to those questions based on premises that are overwhelmingly likely to be false.
The problem with Faith — or as Twayne defines it “believing things you know ain’t so” — is that it’s an intellectual dead end. And accepting its claims as Truth is very likely to establish bad habits of other forms of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception.
Bruce,
I think you are right and that we would find we agree on a lot of things, if there were preferred beverages and comfortable chairs involved. Such is usually the case, really.
To your characterization of Mano’s point in #40, I think you have to append this: “and as you are a scientist, I think you are obligated to hold this position in that portion of your life devoted to religion” which is precisely the part I objected to.
There are many horses you can ride to talk about the limits of science and rational thinking, I gestured at a few, and rode one of them pretty hard: It is both rude an ineffective to try to use rational arguments to persuade people to give up cherished behaviors.
You can’t even get people to give up obviously harmful behaviors with a rational argument: just stop drinking, because it’s bad for you! Just fall out of love with him, he’s an asshole! Just stop running up credit card debt, you’re destroying your future!
None of these things work at all, not even slightly, even when the person you’re trying to persuade actively wants to change their ways. Arguments like this are more likely to cause harm than to effect change. Being a scientist changes nothing. If your abused friend is a scientist, does that make it ok, or efficacious, to trot these arguments out on her? It does not.
How much worse is it when you attempt to apply such an argument to a behavior which the person does not want to change?! Religion is something that many people find value in, and you think rolling up with your rational argument is going to be either effective, or socially acceptable? Both of those are simply absurd, and yet atheists keep banging away at them.
To your point in #14, I personally do not look to the church for any kind of solace, or inspiration, and I agree with your list of better places to look. But I’m not going to run around trying to pry people out of churches with Rational Arguments.
@file thirteen
Humans have made errors , so what? That isnt a scientific reason to say God doesnt exist. Lets say some Bible Editor decided to modify some Jesus story to suit their political purposes and it could be proved that this story made up. Does it scientifically prove
a. that Jesus existed /didnt exist
b. that Jesus was / was not the son of God ?
All your arguments are philosophical in nature and logically flawed imo. If I and every human, henceforth, use the theory of Gravity to fill in every unknown gap and we are subsequently proved wrong , does it falsify the theory of Gravity ? The fact that a creator God has been used to answer every single unknown does not determine whether that God exists or not.
Which tests/experiments were defined and how was it determined that the results of these would either prove or falsify the proposition that God exists ? You need to show that if you want to claim that Science has made any claims about God.
Philosophy however has had a lot to say on that matter.
@John Morales
You are choosing an analogy to arrive at your desired outcome. I have always felt that Aliens is a closer analogy to God. They have never been observed so far -- They have been used to explain a variety of things that are almost certainly false -- There are a whole bunch of con men/women who have used Aliens to con people -- they are part of popular culture and books. Do they exist ?
Or would you also say Alien == Santa Claus == Bugs Bunny == Superman ?
@deepak #43
This reply is in three parts. Maybe I should have divided it into three comments, but I’ve instead given each part a label so you can reference the bits you want to talk about without having to quote it all again for context.
Part 1: Discarding obsolete hypotheses
The burden of proof is to show something exists rather than that it does not. This is a basic scientific tenet. Mano points out, quite reasonably, that it is also a tenet to discard obsolete proposals when they are replaced with correct solutions. Otherwise we continue to search for the ether.
The point is that the ether has shown to be unnecessary, hence continuing to believe in its existence and to make claims about its effect on our lives or the universe is simply unscientific. This is not a philosophical argument, it is a scientific one, and I put it to you that to label it as philosophical is just a disingenuous way of avoiding its conclusions.
Now replace “the ether” with “gods”. The argument remains the same.
Part 2: Testing the gods hypothesis
Once again you call for evidence of tests. If you propose an untestable hypothesis, that does not demonstrate the veracity of your hypothesis. As I said, the burden of proof is entirely on you.
But I will point out that a huge number of god-related hypotheses have been tested and shown to be completely lacking for evidence. Prayer working, karma happening, miracles, the creation of anything requiring a god’s input, “intelligent” design, geocentrism, those little lights in the sky being gods that live there.
Conversely, hypotheses have been proposed as alternatives to god-religious dogma that humans have found evidence for, and we now accept as truth. Relative ages of the earth and all that we can see, evolution, that dreadful heretical heliocentrism!
Part 3: Falsification of theories
Lastly, you seem to have a misunderstanding of what a theory is. You ask what would happen if the theory of gravity was falsified. It has been, twice. Firstly people had the maxim “what goes up, must come down”, which is an elementary theory of gravity, but it was disproved when it was discovered that we live on a spherical planet and rockets can be sent to a point where they don’t come down, ever. Secondly, Newton came up with some very useful equations that were superseded by Einstein’s theories.
The point is that each time the superseding theory did not invalidate the old one, just refined it. Any future theory that replaced Einstein’s theories would be yet more refined and correct errors that Einstein’s’ had under particular conditions. But Einstein’s equations would not then be rendered useless. Newton’s equations have not been rendered useless, only shown to be insufficient for some calculations. And when “what goes up must come down” was shown to be simplistic, things didn’t suddenly start to fall up.
file thirteen @#45,
I agree with parts 1 and 2 but disagree on part 3. Philosophers and historians of science have come to a pretty wide consensus that the falsification of theories, however plausible it sounds, is not viable. Related to that is the fact that how one theory succeeds another is a complex process that is not entirely objective.
These are big questions and because of that my book discusses them in great detail, too much to succinctly summarize here.
@Mano #46
I disagree that we disagree. I was trying to explain what you said in your next sentence, that theories are not falsified; specifically, not in their entirety, only superseded by other theories (noting your next point that this is a complex point that is not entirely objective). If I made a mistake it was to state that the theories of gravity had been falsified, when I was only using that as a starting point for saying that they haven’t been really. But am I misunderstanding you still?
file thirteen,
Thanks for the clarification. I think we are pretty much agreed.
There is still some question as to whether new theories are always just refinements of the ones they replaced or whether they have to be considered distinct and incommensurable with the former. The most subtle case is the transition from Newtonian mechanics to special relativity. Thomas Kuhn argued that to view the former as a special limiting case of the latter is only possible if we reinterpret things like mass in the light of relativity. In other words, the limiting case idea is a post-hoc rationalization.
… atheism revisted.
Mr Singham swung again and missed. Bigly, as the great philosopher President Trump would say.
At least Mr Singham admits his concept of GOD is one of some material entity.
With respect to Singham’s concept of GOD, I am too an atheist. But then my concept of GOD is much more transcendental than Sigham’s concept of GOD.
In brief, my concept of GOD is the Primary Cause, Primary Cause of not only of matter but also of spirit (call it meta-matter, beyond matter).
The Primary Cause is like an elephant being probed by a set of blind people, each of them getting a different view/perception of the elephant.
Mr Singham has an incomplete hypothesis of GOD (in fact everyone has an incomplete hypothesis of GOD); putting an incomplete hypothesis to the test (what test??) is plain foolishness. Any such test will always fail; such failure implies incomplete hypothesis, not proof of non-existence of GOD,
Physical Science is limited to what we can perceive by our senses (vision, smell, taste, touch, and hearing).
It is true that emotions -- such as love -- does not have odor, color, or sound; however, hormone levels may effect the emotional sensations and the emotional sensations have effects on hormonal levels.
So there is mind-spirit interaction.
Just like a material particle, any material particle is affected by all fundamental forces of nature. The GUT is still a work in progress, and will be so for a long, long time.
I would not be surprised that an electron may have some spirit quality along with matter quality.
Physical Science can only investigate secondary causes: what causes A? B. What causes B? C. What causes C? D. etc. etc. etc..
Mr Singham reminds me of the La Fontaine fable “The Fox and the grapes”: The story concerns a fox that tries to eat grapes from a vine but cannot reach them. Rather than admit defeat, he states they are undesirable.
Mr Singham needs to write an essay titled “atheism re-revisited”.
william:
You sure about that?
Seems to me his concept of deities (cf. my previous about monotheism) is what he is told they are supposed to be (you know, being an atheist and all that), and he’s been told it’s a causative and explanatory and detectable entity of some sort.
It’s a silly concept, but it has the virtue of not being disprovable. And indeed it is atheist, though it is also Deist.
Sure. Booze makes one drunk, and hormones make you horny.
What’s to revisit? Imaginary friends and abstract first causes? Heh.
—
PS brucegee1962, very good comments.
Primary cause: Why is it needed? Maybe the Universe has always been here .
@42 Andrew Molitor
I think I’m getting into this discussion with you because I used to be very into the whole “non-overlapping magisteria” idea several years ago, and I’m trying to recreate how I got from where I was then to where I am now.
*shrugs* Well, it worked on me, didn’t it? This isn’t really the place to give all the steps of my entire deconversion story, but I can assure you that rational arguments definitely did play a role. There was a whole lot of “Well, but God is definitely the best explanation for THIS thing,” only later to read something that made me think “Umm, actually that really is a better explanation.”
I mean, religionists claim this all the time: that we’re only atheists because something happened that hurt us, so we emotionally get mad at God and blame him (and then reconvert at the last minute in a touching death scene). But I’m sure if you polled everyone at FtB who is a former believer, every last one of them would say they were primarily convinced by rational arguments.
I don’t remember where I came across it, but here is one that made a big impression on me:
1. There are two types of knowledge claims: those based on evidence (reason) and those based on no evidence (faith).
2. Almost every single advancement since the stone age that has improved the lot of humans — from the wheel and fire to bullet trains and indoor heating — has come about due to the first type of knowledge.
3. In comparison, the second type of knowledge has done very little to improve human life. Oh, you can name some nice architecture and a few works of art, but you have to counterbalance those with the Crusades and people flying planes into skyscrapers. Sure, there’s been moral progress over the centuries — but those making faith claims have been just as likely to oppose that moral progress as advance it.
4. This dichotomy between the two types of knowledge ought to be evident to any rational being.
5. Anyone capable of creating a universe would have to be rational.
6. Therefore, the idea that a rational creator would insist upon irrational faith among his followers is absurd.
7. If God exists, at least since the Enlightenment he has undertaken considerable effort to cover up his tracks and leave no evidence of his existence (unlike in Biblical times, when he was miracle-ing and smiting all hither and yon.
8. Therefore, either God doesn’t exist, or for some reason he wants us to quit believing in him. (Some day I want to write a story where God is complaining “I went on vacation and quit answering you guys’ prayers back in 1652 so you’d grow the heck up and stand on your own two feet, and you still haven’t even realized I’m gone yet? Sheesh!”)
Reason and Unreason have been in a struggle at least since the Enlightenment (motto: anything that causes people to get killed over whether a cracker magically stops being a cracker is a bad idea). Your assertion that nobody ever gets their minds changed by rationality is, I think, flat wrong (and depressing as well). In every moment of moral progress since then, from the birth of democracy to the war against slavery to womens’ rights to civil rights, we’ve seen reasoned arguments work side-by-side with emotional ones to change peoples’ minds.
I came to this in my professional life as well. I teach a lot of freshmen composition, and I’ve come to see much of my job as getting them to try to back up claims with evidence (lots of scribbling “what is your source?” in the margins). I tell my students that part of the whole purpose of college is to make them question all their assumptions. If they question them and end up keeping them, great! But if they never question anything, then we aren’t doing our job.
@file thirteen
Since when ? It may be a rational/ reasonable ask but it isnt a scientific position. Science doesnt take a default position. If I say vaccines are safe is the default position they aren’t till I can prove it (but I could have said vaccines arent safe too!) -- the scientific position would be closer to lets withhold judgement till we find out no -- Here is what experiments we can run to find out etc. What is the scientific positions on aliens ? per you it should be they dont exist because no one yet has shown any proof that they exist.
Its not me who proposed this hypothesis -- neither am I claiming it to be true. There are many un-testable claims. That does not make the claim true or false. it’s you who are insisting that science supports one of the positions of an untestable claim. You are being asked a simple question though -- Assume a being outside of the universe created the universe in some way(which is probably the minimum common denominator of the various God claims) -- How would we find out -- What would be a test? You seem to be claiming that this is a un-falsifiable claim therefore God does not exist. Effectively you are claiming now that no universe could ever be created by a God because we couldnt come up with a test for this claim.
I think you misunderstood me. You commented along the lines that God has been assigned to explain gaps in human knowledge and we no longer assign God to those gaps and that to you is another thing that disproves God. Im countering that with if all the humans use a theory (say Gravity) to explain any and everything(why is there life on earth- Gravity! How did the universe form? Gravity! Why did Donald trump get elected? Gravity!) and we are proven wrong, does that disprove Gravity ?
My sole claim is use Science where its appropriate and use the rest of the tools we have developed where its not(Philosophy and Reason). its not entirely clear to me why some Atheists like to overreach on Science.
deepak @#53,
The burden of proof depends on whether one is making an existence claim or a universal claim.
In the case of an existence claim, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. So if I propose that there is a third kind of electric charge, that is an existence claim and it is up to me to provide a preponderance of evidence in support of that claim. If I can’t, we can assume that it is false.
In the case of universal claims however, the default position is that it is true, provided there is at least some evidence for it. So the claim that all electrons are identical is a universal claim and it is assumed to be true because the few electrons we have checked turn out to be identical and no electrons with different properties have been produced. The laws of science (like the law of conservation of energy) are all universal claims. To disprove a universal claim like the law of conservation of energy or momentum or whatever, one must produce a counter-example that violates it, and doing so requires making an existence claim that shows such a violation and the burden of proof is on the person challenging the law to do so. It is impossible to affirmatively prove a universal claim.
If vaccines have passed some tests of safety, the conclusion that all vaccines are safe is a universal claim that cannot be proven to be true. But in the absence of evidence that they are found to be not safe in some instances (which would require evidence in support of it and that is an existence claim), they can be assumed to be safe.
This is pretty standard reasoning in science and even in other areas such as law. How do you think we arrive at conclusions like that the Higgs exists or the law of (say) baryon number conservation?
I go into this in some detail in my book.
Bruce,
I dunno what to tell you except to point to the mountains of research on how people actually change their minds and their behaviors. Everything from addictions to spending habits to accepting a new process at work. Yes, I do recognize the irony of arguing rationally, from scientific evidence that doing so won’t work. If you’re interested, I think “Switch: How To Change When Change Is Hard” is probably a decent starting point. It’s a pop guide to this material, and, uh, I think it has some endnotes?
It is possible that the people on FtB are not a particularly representative sample of humanity.
I know I shouldn’t, and when it comes to @Andrew I really really shouldn’t, but it infuriates me so much when such a facile statement is trotted out and left unchallenged as if it contains some deep insight.
Of course people on FTB are not a representative sample of humanity. If you want to see decent representatives of humanity, look up “Human” on Wikipedia.
(What, does that not fit your entitled view of the race to which we belong?)
Strike that last line, it was unnecessary. I still have much to learn when it comes to not being rude or inflammatory.
file thirteen,
So, Bruce said: “But I’m sure if you polled everyone at FtB who is a former believer, every last one of them would say they were primarily convinced by rational arguments.” to which I replied: “It is possible that the people on FtB are not a particularly representative sample of humanity.” which, I dunno, doesn’t strike me as completely insane. And then you kinda flipped out, for reasons that are completely opaque to me.
Look, if you’re just having a really shitty week or something, you have my sympathy and best wishes.
Well, obviously there are believers here on FtB, and some wimps like you who are agnostic (in your case, apparently because not everything may be knowable).
How people don’t see just how silly is their goddism is one thing, but how some people who should get it yet daren’t commit is another.
I submit the position of provisional agnosticism (as opposed to epistemic agnosticism) is not just as silly, but cowardly as well.
Either you are a goddist, or you are not. Simple, really.
On topic, I think that had the subject been Why Scientists Should Not Be Supernaturalists, and the same argument presented for supernaturalism instead of goddism, many of the objections to the thesis would be vitiated.
Pretty obviously goddism is a form of supernaturalism — a culturally respected form of woo. So respected, that people claim to be agnostic about it.
Well, if you’re looking for a representative sample of atheists who respect science as a discipline, this seems like a pretty reasonable place to go.
We’re talking about a specific type of argument here: the “converting Christians to atheists” argument. Sure, there are other types of arguments like “This is why you should marry me” where reason probably has less of an influence. Heck, for the opposite, the “atheists to Christians” argument, the Christians say all the time that apologetics and arguments or reason rarely work (though come to think of it, my Mom was actually converted to Christianity in college by reading CS Lewis, so there’s that). “Just be a nice, kind, happy person, and those atheists will want to find out what you’ve got so they can share it,” is the message I hear them preaching. “You don’t even have to know to know much doctrine or what’s in the Bible. Just be a nice person, and that’s the best Witness.”
But for the other way? From Christian to atheist? I mean, let’s turn it around — how do you think it works? Do you think people deconvert because they say “Wow, those atheists look totally cool, I want to hang out with them?” Are we just being subtly influenced by all those amazing atheism-based works of art out there somewhere? Or what?
Bruce,
I will remark in passing as it were that your usage of FtB’s community as evidence relies on a series of assumptions, thus:
1. That they are representative
2. That they would, if polled, respond as you suggest, and
3. That their self-report would be in that case correct
You may be comfortable with this, while I choose to raise a dubious eyebrow at the idea all three are simultaneously true. I would prefer to agree to disagree on this point, as I don’t really see where it goes anywhere good or useful.
As for how conversion away from faith occurs? Well, I am not an expert and have spent literally zero time studying this specific issue in any general terms, although I have an anecdote or two.. So let me propose instead what I consider to be a credible path, perhaps one of many.
Essentially, the faithful one finds themself separated from their community of faith. Perhaps they simply move away for college or a job. Perhaps they simply find they like another social group better for reasons having nothing to do with faith. Perhaps they find the community of faith to be objectionable in some way. Maybe the pastor is an asshole, or maybe there are other social frictions. There might also be matters of doctrine, anything from being uncomfortable with, say “God hates fags” to some sort of Rational Argument about the Existence of God.
Separation, however it falls out, opens the door to other ideas, and eliminates reinforcement of the idea of faith. At this point, a rational argument might come in to play, I suppose? But is it causal? Absent a rational argument, faith can certainly just wither away, as well. Untended, it simple becomes, eventually, more or less absent.
I suppose you could argue that a serious rational argument is The Cause, at least sometimes? Which bits are merely “preparing the ground” and which bits are “the actual cause”? All of them, none of them? Behavior change is, as I have noted, well studied, and fairly complex.
And by the way, Bruce, I do appreciate this discussion.
The fact that I have not budged on my basic position should not be taken as evidence that your words fall upon deaf ears. While you may not have changed my fundamental ideas here, you have certainly added to my thinking, I have new angles to chew on. I am, at least a little, expanded.
I like to think that you find yourself in much the same position.
Andrew:
But you’re still agnostic about the existence of some god which is personal and knowable, because not everything can be known. Like the veridical existence of Santa Claus, about which you have no more and no less reason to be sceptical.
(Bloated doesn’t sound as good as expanded, does it?)
John, are you six? You style yourself as the smartest guy in the room, but all you can manage to do is insult me for being.. agnostic? What?
Do better.
Andrew, I don’t style myself anything. Just noting your basis for agnosticism about this claim works for Santa Claus. Or Apollo, or Thor, or Kali.
(heh)
As for you being insulted, nothing wrong with being an intellectual coward by not committing to not being a goddist. Just your nature.
Andrew @63
Oh, indeed. When I get in a debate with someone, I never end up saying “Aha, you are right, I am wrong, and I am switching over to your pov from now on.”
I just get into a similar argument five months later, and realize afterwards that I was using the same arguments that were used against me previously.
Which is part of the reason I believe rational arguments work. They may take months or years to sink in, and require reinforcement from a variety of sources — they may even operate at a subconscious level — but they do work.
I ought to look up the book you mention, though.
I consider myself poly-agnostic. All gods are unlikely; however, if any exist, then the least unlikely consist of one or more of the polytheistic pantheons. The world just looks like someplace that was designed by a committee.