I’m so glad that Eric’s website, Choice in Dying, has taken off in a big way. He regularly posts thoughtful commentaries, and, unlike most of us, can’t be accused of theological naivité (he was, after all, an Anglican priest). And although his website was originally designed to defend assisted suicide, he’s gone far beyond that, into the ambit of religion in general. (It’s hard for some of us to adhere to our stated missions: I originally intended to limit my posts to new evidence for evolution, and to write only rarely.)
Eric has now started doing what somebody had to do: defending Dawkins’s The God Delusion, which he sees as the most influential of Gnu Atheist books. At the evolution meetings in Banff last week, I heard the book dissed twice by biologists—and for no good reason. When you press fellow atheists for the reason they don’t like it, they either say that they learned nothing from it (of course, they were atheists when they opened the book!), or they hem and haw and mutter something about Dawkins’s failure to engage “sophisticated” theology—a really dumb criticism given the book’s mission and audience.
Eric is defending the book in a series of posts, critic by critic, and will show, I suspect, that their criticisms don’t hold water. He certainly does this in his first post of the series, in which he dissects Alvin Plantinga’s attack on The God Delusion in his book The Dawkins Confusion. (Many attacks on Richard’s book have dire and unfunny titles, demonstrating once again that accommodationists have no sense of humor). It’s a long piece, and I won’t summarize it here except to say that it’s good and you should read it. I particularly like Eric having to instruct Plantinga on how science really works, and why it’s foolish to maintain, as Plantinga does, that god is “maximally probable.” (How does Plantinga, whom Eric describes as perhaps “the foremost Christian philosopher writing in English,” manage to get famous writing such tripe?)
I do want to take issue, though, with two minor points of Eric’s analysis.
1. You can’t prove a negative. This is one of the most common defenses of God, and it’s simply wrong—or at least incomplete. “You can’t prove that God—or anything—doesn‘t exist,” they say. Eric agrees:
And, in any event, as Plantinga already knows, an argument purporting to demonstrate the non-existence of something is bound to fail.
But that’s wrong. If there should be empirical evidence for the existence of something, and thorough investigation finds no such evidence, one can reasonably conclude that it doesn’t exist. We can prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, and we can prove that the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist. Both apparitions should leave detectable evidence, but there is none. (I use “proof” here to mean “evidence of nonexistence so strong that any reasonable person would accept it”. Science, of course, doesn’t really “prove” anything—even positives—in the sense of proof as “existence beyond doubt.”) If you claim that Jerry Coyne doesn’t have a Ferrari, you can prove that, too, for there are no records of Ferraris being sold to me, no evidence that I’ve ever withdrawn money to pay for one, and no observations that I’ve ever driven one.
And, like the Loch Ness Monster, a theistic god should have left traces of its existence. But we don’t have any. Prayer doesn’t work, there’s no evidence for true miracles or an afterlife, and the world doesn’t look like it was organized by a loving and omnipotent god. Of course we can’t prove that a deistic god, one who does nothing, doesn’t exist. But that’s true of anything that doesn’t affect the world in empirically observable ways, so assertions about those entities become uninteresting.
2. Supernatural explanations aren’t part of science. I may be misunderstanding Eric here when he talks about how the hypothesis of god is unnecessary in the scientific theory of Darwinian evolution.
No, people like the pope and Plantinga are doubtless entitled to go on thinking that, despite everything, the process is attended by a designing intelligence, but the effects are just the same whether you assume this or not, and if you do assume it you’re no longer doing science. In other words, things will remain as they are; the religious believer simply adds an irrelevant explanatory hypothesis which is not a part of science.
Well, divine intervention is irrelevant to our understanding of evolution, but one can’t say that the hypothesis of a god or designer in general is “not a part of science.” For it’s possible that there could be certain empirically detectable phenomena that would require us to provisionally invoke a deity. If prayers to Jesus worked, but not prayers to Allah, that would raise the spectre of a Christian god. I believe Eric aligns with P. Z. Myers, Anthony Grayling and others in thinking that there can be no evidence for a god, but I disagree, and I believe Dawkins does too. As always, I maintain that if the god hypothesis predicts certain phenomena that can be measured and studied, then it’s a hypothesis that can be tested. (Accommodationists, too, claim that one can’t test the supernatural, for they have a vested interest in keeping believers happy.)
Eric may be referring here only to the theory of evolution, in which case my comment is irrelevant. I suspect he’ll clarify it below.
And I hope that, in future installments, Eric deals with my ex-student Allen Orr’s review of The God Delusion, a misguided attack that appeared in The New York Review of Books. Orr, sadly, got entangled in The Courtier’s Reply:
The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins’s cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.
The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?). Instead, Dawkins has written a book that’s distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow.
“You can’t prove a negative” really means that you cannot prove something is not untrue without having evidence positively proving it. It’s a scam really, because it’s a way of saying “You have no evidence that my claims based on no evidence are false.” It’s important to make people realise that they cannot use a lack of evidence AGAINST the notion of god as an attack, and at the same time proclaim the existence of their god despite a lack of evidence of their own.
By the way: Just because you yourself don’t know that you own a Ferrari doesn’t mean you don’t own one. You might have an obscure relative who left you one in a will and you just don’t know about it yet 🙂
Schrödinger’s Ferrari?
Yep. Which makes Hitchens syllogism “what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof” so very correct and corrosive to the stupidity of “you can’t prove a negative”
” That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. ”
Carl Sagan
Assume that you are offering JC a new car AND a new relative!
The real kicker is that somehow a lack of evidence translates into an increase in probability that something exists. Evidence for existence must be positive. Lack of evidence simply equals non-existence.
You can easily prove some negatives – there is not a(n) (living, flesh-and-blood) elephant in this room. Bounding the conditions makes it easy.
You can’t prove others – there are no (naturally) purple kittehs. Kittehs are small and could be anywhere.
The thing about proving the non-existnece of God/dess/es is the definition. An intangible, intelligent (omnipotent? omniscient? omnibenevolent? omnipresent?) entity…?
“That’s not the God that I believe in!”
Well dammit, define the God/dess/es that you believe in and then we can talk.
“You can’t prove a negative” is, itself, a negative. And it’s poppycock, as any logician will tell you.
“Jerry Coyne doesn’t have three arms.”
Hah! Can’t prove it!
Well he has a left arm, a right arm & a right to bear arms (or is that bare arms?), so perhaps he is Kali-like! (There was a family guy episode that used that old joke.)
Bear arms? Furry, with claws?
Jerry’s a motie? That would explain a lot.
But which caste?
Whichever one can drive a Ferrari?
Can we add Lewontin to the Eric, PZ camp? He said this now famous quote about science having an a priori commitment to materialism which I think is spot on.
Yes, I think you can given the context of Lewontin’s remarks, but I’m not sure that quote, taken in itself, supports the “no supernaturalism in science” stance. We have a commitment to material methods of INVESTIGATION, but I don’t think we have a commitment to material methods of “causation,” at least in the sense that god-causations are non material. (They must, of course, be manifested materially to be subject to investigation.)
Well, he said this:
“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”
Look for example at the ultraviolet catastrophe. It was a blatant violation of the known laws of physics. They could have said it was God, couldn’t they? But they decided to investigate more. Same thing goes for the prayers to Jesus example.
If I say “Jesus, give me a pie” and a pie magically appears in my desk, then science doesn’t work anymore, Revelation does. You can ask “Jesus, solve this theorem for me”, “Jesus, give me the cure for cancer”. But in our worlds science just happens to work, while revelation does not. It’s how it is, there’s no way around it. The day Jesus starts responding, we will be able to abandon science and embrace revelation as a way of knowing.
Exactly — once one allows miracles, one can’t do science, as all bets are off and anything is possible.
But we can still investigate anything that is possible, as long as it is anything (happening).
I think that is what JC is claiming.
If literally anything is possible, then one can’t investigate it, because investigation itself is unreliable. It’s like trying to do science in the Matrix — you can’t trust any result, because your the reliability of your very methods of investigation are in question.
Why wouldn’t unreliability be the very pattern we can observe?
Indeed that is precisely what we would expect from dualism; sometimes objects would follow natural law, sometimes they/other objects wouldn’t.
I am sorry, but the espoused line of analysis sounds like accommodationism NOMA theology. We can do this what I can see, we would have done this if it had not turned out 500 years ago and on (as someone noted) that natural law is all what is observed. Science would have worked less efficiently, and we would have settled for OMA right off the bat.
He. Now I would go “you can’t prove this negative of yours” if I was Eric MacDonald.
(Well not really, EM is more nuanced & specific. But I could certainly have used it.)
It depends if we’re talking about rare miracles, or something like occasionalism, where a god actively keeps everything going through magic (or, as an alternative example, the Matrix). In other words, it’s possible for the world to appear to obey “natural” laws, but only by supernatural intervention. If miracles are possible, it may very well be that the constancies in our world are the miracles, supernaturally imposed upon chaos and disorder. Once you grant miracles, literally any situation is possible, and no data are reliable.
I am prepared to agree with this — in a qualified sense. Lewis Wolpert, in his debate with Craig, suggested that a few miracles would lead him to reconsider his commitment to disbelief. And I suppose, if it could be shown that a miracle had actually occurred — that is, that something contrary to natural law is shown to have occurred — then we would be forced to reconsider our understanding of what exists. The problem is that, in many cases, god is so defined as to make it questionable whether it would make sense to suggest that it could have a caussative effect on the natural world. As soon as you say that god does not exist, but is existence itself, for instance, the question of the relationship of god to existence is brought into question.
I think Hume’s rule is still a good one. To demonstrate a miracle (a supernatural effect in the natural world) you would have to show that the claim that it was a miracle would have to be more improbable than the supposed miracle itself. This is a condition that can seldom if ever be met. And if there were so many miracles that this condition was fulfilled, would we not be in a situation where we should be looking for natural causation as an explanation. It would lead us to revisit the conclusions of science.
But how could we ever show this to be the case, since we can never have a perfect understanding of what “natural law” is? Quantum phenomona are certainly contrary to what was once thought to be “natural law”, but we don’t consider such to be miraculous. Aristotle thought that moving objects “naturally” came to rest without an external applied force, but we don’t think that objects moving forever in frictionless space requires supernatural intervention.
We can never know that our understanding of the world is complete — that is an epistemic impossibility. Given that, how can we ever say that an apparently miraculous phenomenon isn’t merely the result of “natural” laws we have yet to discover?
Well,Tulse, that is effectively what I have said. A supernatural occurrence would have to satisfy what we might call Hume’s law of the miraculous. In order to do this it would have to be frequent enough that we could not simply hold the claim more miraculous than the event. This would, as I suggested, lead us to revist the conclusions of science.
There is that unwarranted absolute “perfect” again.
We certainly have a much better constraint of physical laws since Noether’s work – it is based on symmetry or symmetry breaking, giving rise to conserved quantities. (Such as in your momentum example, btw.)
So we do as we always do, we look for patterns. If there is a pattern that can’t possibly be explained on the basis of conserved quantities, it is not natural. It is something else.
I don’t buy that out-of-the-blue “miracles must be rare” proposition, there is no law for miracles – and that is the very point IMO.
That is the understanding we currently have. It is an induction we make based on our past set of observations. But we cannot rule out that we may make observations in the future that require revision of that understanding (e.g., some physicists have suggested that some “constants” aren’t so constant, and actually may change over time and/or space).
The point I’m making is simply based the limitations of empiricism — we can never have all possible data, or even know how close we are to having all possible data. Given that, although we can make inductions based on the data we have, we can’t rule out the possibility that such inductions may wrong.
Perhaps I’m missing something crucial here, however.
Some scotsman I read about years ago wrote on this. I think he applied it to omniscience.
Premiss 1: We believe that we know about everything.
Case A: There is something we don’t know about.
Case B: There is nothing we don’t know about.
It would be difficult for us to know which case is true. Knowing that A is true would be incompatible with the premiss. Knowing that B is true would be compatible with the premiss. So could we know that B is true, and that A is not true?
Hume’s underlying principle — in its modern formulation usually stated as “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” — can, as it applies to purported “miracles” (which are, by definition, extraordinary claims), be recast as a specific case of Occam’s Razor: Is the claim that a miracle occurred so well supported that for this support to turn out to be wrong, it would itself be tantamount to a miracle? If so, then the question is, as between the original claimed miracle and the miracle that the claim is wrong, which constitutes the larger miracle? As between two competing, mutually-exclusive miracles, prefer the smaller. Call this the principle of the parsimony of lesser miracles.
If the claimed miracle satisfies this test — if negation of its support would be the larger miracle, and its acceptance the smaller — I for one would be willing to accept the miracle (as provisional fact, of course, but as fact nonetheless).
+1.
Zero evidence showing something is true, combined with overwhelming evidence supporting the opposite conclusion, is good enough for me. But I’m not a scientist. That’s how we get Dawkins “There probably is no god.” Without any evidence, I’m not going to base living my life on that miniscule possibility, I’m going to live like there isn’t one.
I thought Eric had a blog, but I guess it’s a website.
Then whose Ferrari is that parked out in front of JC’s place?
“You can’t prove a negative” is itself a claim that there is no such thing as a nonexistence proof; the most obvious response is, “Can you prove that?”
Nonexistence proofs are trivial. All you have to do is establish one of two things: that the entity being considered has one or more logically impossible properties (meaning the entity is undefined); or that no evidence is present where the entity’s existence demands evidence be found.
“There is no ‘largest prime number'” was proven millennia ago. There never has nor will exist a Turing-equivalent computational device that can solve the Halting Problem. There is not a herd of angry rhinoceroses stampeding through my office as I type these words.
Similarly, there are no entities with both the ability and the desire to substantively ease human suffering. Since pretty much every god people worship these days is supposed to at least meet that description, we can rule out all of them.
If any of the events described in the Gospels had happened, the people who were in and around Jerusalem at the time would have noticed — after all, that’s the whole point of the stories: everybody, including the priesthood, the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and even Roman footsoldiers had their lives turned umop-ap!sdn by Jesus and the events he set in motion. However, not a single one of the copious volumes — the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Pliny the Elder, the Satirists, and on and on and on and on — contains even a hint of a breath of a passing reference to a mention of anything that could vaguely remotely be mistraken as being tangentially related to the events the Gospels describe. Therefore, we know that Jesus didn’t exist.
I could go on, but I should probably stop here before I slip up and mention Jesus’s botched appendectomy. Oops….
Cheers,
b&
First of all, the inability to prove a negative does not mean that we can’t prove that something might be self-contradictory, or logically impossible. There is no largest prime. Not being able to prove a negative has to do with existential/inductive claims. Certainly, from the historical point of view, the absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, though it may be, and, certainly, where it should be expected, we will take it as that. Historians must deal with what they have.
And, while the problem of pain seems decisive to me, it is always possible to push the purpose of pain off into a never-never world in which gods reward the sufferer, and where suffering can be seen, in retrospect, to have been worthwhile. It’s not convincing to me, but it’s certainly not a logical impossibility, and many people believe it and find it compelling.
Negative existential claims can always ben questioned by simply dreaming up situations in which they turn out to be untrue. That doesn’t mean that we can never reasonably deny the existence of anything. But Craig is depending on ‘no existential claim can be logically disproved’ in the debate in question. He has in mind the simply logical impossibility of proving a negative existential claim absolutely. But of course we demonstrate inductively the nonexistence of things all the time.
I do hope Ben will respond to your response, as I’m sure he could do a better job than me.
Nevertheless, I write.
“There is no largest prime” is clearly a statement about the non-existence of something, and it has been proven.
The reason you cannot prove the non-existence of god is because it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis, not because such uses of logic are impossible. What would falsify the existence of god? He’s immaterial, invisible, supernatural…. The only way you could detect him would be by his effects on the world, and believers are always coming up with explanations for why we haven’t detected this or that.
But you can prove the non-existence of something – if its existence entailed something to begin with.
No, the non-existence of the largest prime is a statement in mathematics, and follows from the presuppositions of mathematics. It is not, as such, an existential claim. The status of mathematical entities is rightly disputed. Negative existential claims cannot be logically demonstrated. That’s the point.
Except, of course, that mathematics carries directly over into the “real world” far more often than most people realize or are even willing to admit.
For example, there are no pieces of paper which have figures on them drawn with ruler and compass that have a square and a circle with equal areas. (There are, of course, some remarkable approximations, including many that fall within the margin of error represented by the width of the pen.)
There also aren’t any radiant objects which emit light that fails to observe the inverse-square law (though there are, of course, many objects that can be placed between the radiant source and the projection destination which will result in an apparent violation of the law).
The ultimate problem with disproving the existence of gods is that they are sorely ill-defined. They have essential properties that are their own self-contained contradictions (such as “omnipotence” or “omniscience”), and their proponents shamelessly re-define their gods at the drop of a hat into more and more nebulous and less and less meaningful entities. These days, theologians often don’t even pretend to offer definitions that amount to more than a passing thought that gives somebody a warm chubby.
You can’t prove the nonexistence of gods not because it’s impossible to prove the nonexistence of anything, period. Rather, you can’t prove the nonexistence of gods for the same reason you can’t prove the nonexistence of furiously sleeping green lipmats: the words don’t even form a concept coherent enough to be able to address whether or not they might have meaning.
Might as well goo goo g’choo.
Cheers,
b&
Just bears repetition…
I am the Eggman.
Yes there are: black holes, for one. You neglected take relativity into account. The inverse square law is a 3 dimensional approximation of 4D space-time.
‘“There is no largest prime” is clearly a statement about the non-existence of something, and it has been proven.’
So… other numbers -do- exist? Show me the number two, then. Or, if the number two doesn’t exist, a proof of that would be rather interesting.
Barring either, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make any sense of the idea that numbers are things of which we can make existential claims…
You can’t see everything that exists. Two is the number of my eyes.
I leave the definition of “number” as an exercise for the reader.
It always irks me when theists trot out “numbers” as an example of the ephemeral and astract. “See! Numbers are intangible abstractions, and we all agree they exist – just like god!!!1!eleven!”
I’m no mathematician, but wouldn’t it be correct to say that numbers are a lot less abstract than many people think? They’d be pretty useless if they didn’t have at least theoretical physical referents, no?
‘“See! Numbers are intangible abstractions, and we all agree they exist – just like god!!!1!eleven!”’
Obviously my response would be to say, “No, numbers don’t exist.” This would leave me arguing against grammatical literalism (statements putatively about the existence of numbers are really about logical consistency) rather than arguing for some odd form of existence that applies to ideas.
Numbers are a reification of the process of counting.
Turning an “action” into a “thing” for convenience of expression.
This is where many folk get into a pickle, conflating the reification of an activity with the activity itself.
If I say “I have 3 goats”, it is really describing my activity of counting them.
Hi Eric – let me preface this by saying that I love your writing generally, and the post under discussion specifically.
And with that.. on to the “you’re wrong” part. 😉
Philosophy is not my area of expertise, but it seems to me that whether you can prove !P or not, depends entirely on the definition of P – particularly how narrow, clear or coherent the proposition is.
Firstly – lets be clear that I’m talking about an empirical proof here – not a logical one. (So I’ll ignore Ben’s largest prime argument and your response to it).
We’re talking empirically, and that means proving beyond reasonable doubt based on the non-existence of evidence we would reasonably expect to see given P. The more tightly defined P is, the more we can posit evidence we would expect see if P is true, and whose absence implies !P. The more vaguely defined P is, the less evidence is entailed by it, and the less we can disprove it.
Take black swans, for example. It seems to me that it is relatively trivial to prove that they do not exist in my office (provided I am allowed to make assumptions about the typical size, mobilty, and urban camouflage capabilities of swans). Expanding the domain of my proposition to the entire world… well, proving that they do not exist on our planet (forgetting for a second that we’ve already found them and the point is moot) is different only in degree. Swans exist, they are a certain size, they are limited to a certain speed, and they can be seen. You can imagine an experiment whereby you set out to, for example, simultaneously survey the entire earth (including all nooks, crannies, cupboards etc) for such swans, and definitely prove that they are not there. The size of the earth makes this a logistical impossibility, but not a logical one.
Similarly, scouring the space between Earth and Mars for Russell’s teapot is not logically impossible. Just really hard.
Now… if we then begin to assert other features of these swans – such as that they could be invisible, or maybe just really small, fast and well camouflaged – suddenly our inability to prove this particular negative goes from the practical-given-current-manpower-and-technology to the absolute. Fine. But then we have de-cohered the definition of the proposition (Swan = large, visible, aquatic fowl) into a mess (Swan = well, wtf exactly?).
Same is true of god. You can’t prove definitively that god does not exist if you are allowed to assume that god has any characteristic required – including the ability to avoid detection.
But you can prove (some) negatives, and you can prove that a sufficiently well-defined god doesn’t exist. And of course, Occam’s razor takes care of the rest.
“That doesn’t mean that we can never reasonably deny the existence of anything.”
Indeed – and there we totally agree. I am nit picking – but it’s an area that fascinates me.
Regards
Um… it looks like much more text when it’s actually posted!
You make a similar point that I made in #10.
Indeed – I believe you made it first and much more succinctly! I can waffle.
Ah, I see we’re talking about moot swans…
/@
Grroooaan!
🙂
Like button! Edit function!
You are totally stealing my lines.
mmmm. Jitlins.
It is surprising how often people fail to test their ideas by going meta when it is possible to do so.
“You cant’ prove a negative” fails since you can go meta on this nonexistence proof. Here logic alone suffice to fail logic.
Inductionism fails when you go meta on it because you have to justify induction inductively. It is a circular assertion so potentially empirically unsupported, and in reality it fails test (black swans).
But note that you now need empirical evidence to fail an empirical assertion. Circularity is no problem for theories. (If it was, a perfectly tested theory which is based on the observations it predicts would somehow self annihilate when it meets a philosophical logic bomb. Which is ludicrous. Or *magic*. =D)
As a contrast my often mentioned favorite: testing tests out as passing when going meta on it. But note that again we need observations to make it go through.
Excellent summary. To this I would add that physics sometimes can do empirical no go theorems, though they are notoriously difficult to test because of the many ways they can go wrong.
Bell test experiments showing that there are no hidden parameters in quantum mechanics is a famous example. It is also one of the best, since it is tested to 25 (!) sigma latest, and now have patches for change during the experiment (so no signals can pass unwittingly).
But I think you go into these when you pass from “logically impossibility” to physical impossibility of non-inverse-square laws for long range forces such as EM. As long as our main dimensions are 3D, long range interactions have to have inverse-square force as described by Gauss law.
Circularity is no problem for theories. (If it was, a perfectly tested theory which is based on the observations it predicts would somehow self annihilate when it meets a philosophical logic bomb.
It’s possible that I don’t entirely understand what you’re saying here, but I’ll go ahead and disagree anyway.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but theories are “based on” the observations they predict only in the sense that humans use observations to come up with them. The theory itself is, we conclude, true because of Ockham’s razor – it provides the best explanation for the most data. Any data we observe, whether we observed it before or after we had the theory, is logically entailed by the theory. There is no circularity there.
I think, in section 2, MacDonald is opposing the idea that you can add a “religious essence” to material explanations; doing so is wishful thinking, not science. For example, saying “evolution is true, but God directed it” is like saying “Copernicus was right, but the angels, in some very subtle theological manner, still push the planets around.” It’s not a scientific claim that can be falsified or examined, since the angels always push the planets around in exact accordance with what we know about the physical world.
In certain post-“Vampire” tabletop roleplaying games, there is a kind of “mythic world” or “spirit world” full of spirits, and the behavior of these spirits corresponds exactly to the behavior of the physical world. (Also, you can fight the spirits with your magic powers, and that’s pretty cool.) That’s what I picture when I hear that reality is “attended to by a guiding intelligence”: a sort of spirit world full of spooks and monsters that’s more or equally valid than the physical one. (I also have an axiom that the closer your worldview resembles a role-playing game, the more ridiculous you’re probably being.)
As for the notion of there being *possible* evidence for a theistic god, well, I think both the “there can be evidence” and “there cannot be evidence” camps are not addressing the historic context in which either of those claims could be made. There *could have been* evidence–back, like, 500 years ago when we were figuring out how everything was shaped. Galileo might have seen angels aflutter around Ganymede; he did not. If Jesus answered prayers but not Allah, we would already have noticed that in some bloodpath or another around Jerusalem. Theistic religion as it’s understood in that sense cannot be proven, then, because *it has already been disproven* to the satisfaction of any unbiased observer. Coming up with new “proofs” of the God of Genesis is like coming up with new “proofs” of the Dome of Heaven–“But what if, one day, we saw…” Those sorts of “what ifs” are so far removed from reality they’re not even thought experiments; they’re science fiction plots.
Precisely.
You are both right. 🙂
Where does one go if one wants a non-middlebrow approach to the issue of atheism? Does anyone have a candidate for the “next level up” writer whose work would resonate with the non-theologian?
I’ve said this before, and it’s akin to heresy, but Dawkins’ writing style isn’t my cuppa tea. I’ve read “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Greatest Show on Earth”, so I think I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt here. Based on that, I don’t really have any desire to read “The God Delusion”.
But what else is there?
Is Dennett’s “Breaking The Spell” worthwhile? I’ve read two of his books already and enjoyed them.
Grayling seems to start with the a priori assumption that his audience agrees there is no god. Or does he cover this somewhere?
Who else? What else? Seems to me that if you’re being criticized for not being highbrow, there’s a niche there that has quite probably already been filled.
50 Voices of Disbelief? Or is this also too “middlebrow” for the critics?
BTW: I just finished Hume as well, so I’ve delved back through 200+ years. I’ve also read about Diderot and other contemporaries of Hume.
Maybe this is a fool’s errand. The “highbrow” approach doesn’t appear to have swayed anyone (else I’d have heard about it), and the middlebrow approach gets slammed for being … well … middlebrow.
Which basically leaves us at Ben Goren and Jesus’ intestines.
I started with (by accident, actually) Harris’ “The End of Faith”. As it happens, I recommended it to my book club, we read it, and to this day, that is still the best meeting we ever had.
My gut feeling is you’re right…
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“Breaking the Spell” was very good, but I’m not a highbrow guy and can’t comment on that aspect.
Lowbrow (Löwenbräu?) Ray
Define “highbrow.”
There are a number of explicitly atheist philosophical works, though they are typically very expensive:
J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification
Nicholas Everitt, The Non-existence of God
Jordan Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism
As for ‘Breaking the Spell’, I found it to be a mixed bag. There’s some good information and speculation within, but it’s frustratingly structured: he introduces numerous arguments but then defers dealing with them in depth until later; this occurs repeatedly for at least 200 pages.
One interesting book that Dennett derives some of the ideas in ‘Breaking…’ from is Stewart Guthrie’s ‘Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion,’ which makes a strong case for anthropomorphism as the main ’cause’ of religion (because anthropomorphism, which he analyzes in great detail, is a basic or ‘root’ human perceptual strategy). I’m reading it now and so far it seems much better than Dennett’s book.
Kevin,
The first book mentioned by Chris, J. L. Mackie’s “The Miracle of Theism”, is excellent.
I read the “new atheist” books by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris during the process of deconverting from fundamentalist Christianity. I enjoyed all three but, like you, was looking for something a bit more philosophically “highbrow”. Mackie filled that gap.
The books listed by Sobel and Martin are also quite good, but highly technical. Sobel in particular reads like a textbook in symbolic logic at times. I personally found Mackie to be a perfect middle ground between the New Atheist bestsellers and these more arcane works of analytic philosophy.
Agree with the other posters. Mackie’s book is excellent. Tough in places, but really thorough.
Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am not a Christian”?
Just two simple points. You can’t prove a negative is a simple logical point. That means you can’t prove that goblins, ghosts, gods, gremlins and so on don’t exist with logical certainty. (It’s a logical point. a bit like the “All swans are white” argument. It just happens that there are black swans. Who knew? The point is that you can’t prove that all swans are white by simple enumeration. Same with negative existence. You can’t prove, by simple absence, that something does not exist.) When theologians use this argument they tend to forget that this applies to all heretofore imagined beings, as well as any beings that might be imagined in the future. That we can prove, because of the absence of any empirical evidence, that such beings don’t exist, goes without saying — which is why the argument is a non-starter. As a logical argument, it would justify belief in any imagined entity. As an empirical argument, it doesn’t even get off the ground. Plantinga’s argument is, as expected, just a logical point.
You make the same point with your second point.
Exactly, you can’t prove a negative, so it may happen that, in the end, because of empirical evidence, we need to accept the hypothesis of a designer. So far, however, no one has been able to show how this can be required — which is why ID is a wasted effort, and not, as James Hannam says, a noble endeavour.
Does that help to clarify my points?
Eric, could you take a moment to reply to my post #5? I believe you’re flat-out worng, and I think that post explains why as well as anything I could re-type here.
Cheers,
b&
“There are no married bachelors.”
Yes, I’ve been sloppy. You can’t logically prove a negative existential statement. Of course you can prove that something is a logical contradiction or a tautology. I guess I assume that people know what it means when you say you can’t prove a negative.
“There are no married bachelors” and “There is no largest prime number” *are* negative existential statements.
The reason why you can’t prove empirical negative existential statements like “There are no Abominable Snowmen” or “There are no ghosts” is because they’re empirical, not because they’re negative. You can’t prove positive existential statements either, really.
What would non-empirical existence be, then?
“Empirical” qualifies “statement”, not “existence”. A non-empirical existential statement would be, e.g., one about married bachelors or largest prime numbers.
Of course “exist” doesn’t mean the same thing in “a largest prime number doesn’t exist” as it does in “the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist”. But I think it does in “unmarried bachelors don’t exist”.
But a non-empirical existential statement is about non-empirical existence, right? If not, what is it about?
“Of course “exist” doesn’t mean the same thing in “a largest prime number doesn’t exist” as it does in “the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist”.”
I’m guessing that we’re talking about non-empirical non-existence, in the first case, and empirical non-existence in the second?
What I think that means is that you can’t prove the statement is true.
You can debunk it through a counterexample, I mean if the statement is false, you can prove that it is false no problem. Once you find a counterexample, the statement is 100% debunked forever and ever alright. But if it’s true, then you can’t really prove that it’s true.
Imagine for a moment that it were true that there are no married bachelors, but you don’t know it yet. So you start looking for a counter example, and all of them are single. You keep looking all your life. All single. You still may have missed some. Some may have got married after you checked on them. You don’t really know. The only thing you can say is “with all the available evidence, the most reasonable conclusion is to provisionally assume there are indeed no married bachelors.” You haven’t really *proved* it, but what I put on quotes is awkward and too difficult to say, so to make things simpler we just say that it is true according to science. This is why all scientific theories are provisional, always subject to further research.
“Married bachelor” is a classic example of a claim that is analytically false — there is no need to look in the world, because the very definition of the terms tells you such a thing can’t exist. (You also don’t need to empirically check if there are four-sided triangles, or do experiments to see if the number of eggs in a dozen always comes out even.)
We can likewise rule out analytically various characterizations of the Christian god, because in such cases the proposed properties are in conflict.
Oh. You meant bachelor as in single person. My bad.
The point still stands though, except for tautologies. If the statement is wrong, you can prove that it’s wrong. However, if it’s right, all you can do is collect evidence and make provisional conclusions.
Yes. Anyone with a scientific background and an interest in engaging theists in philosophical discussion should take some time to understand the opposite directions from which “critical rationalism” and “justificationism” come at things. A lot of people talking past each other results when no one notes the completely different ways logic is being used in each case.
Yes, it does clarify things. Many thanks, and great post. I hope you don’t abandon the series: there are many critics to dismantle!
Suppose you try to prove that there are no black swans, by observing that all the swans you’ve seen are white. This notoriously doesn’t work, but I think you’ve misidentified why.
You can’t prove anything *empirical*, be it positive or negative. (Suppose you see the Loch Ness Monster. That’s very nice for you, but it *could* be that you saw an elaborate fake, or hallucinated, or something.)
Negative things are often harder to get really good evidence about (e.g., three very careful observations might be enough to establish the existence of the Loch Ness Monster beyond reasonable doubt, but in the reverse direction you need a lot more observations — simply because a positive observation often gives you much more information than a negative one that took the same amount of effort.
But in the (non-empirical) domains where you arguably can prove things, you can prove negatives just as well as you can prove positives (there is no largest prime number). And in the (empirical) domains where you have to make do with strong evidence and probabilities close to 1, you can “prove” negatives just as much as you can positives, even though it’s harder to do. (There is no rhinoceros in the room I’m in right now.)
Yes, it is a logical point. But it fails to be an empirical point, precisely because of what JC and BG already said above – objects, whether they exist or are posed to exist, have dependences. They exist in a physical, causal universe, not in a logical, platonic universe where they can go missing without consequence.
I can prove, by simple absence, that there is no blob of water falling in the space below my ceiling above my head as I write this … still dry. The mere existence of such phenomena means your claim fail testing. It simply can’t be a fact of our world.
Oops. Reading further I see Greg Esres made precisely the same argument, if not the same point. I’ll raise his “it might be impossible in practice” to a claim that it happens (see “no go theorems”). So may point is that this stuff fails empirical testing.
What the hairy hell is ‘sophisticated theology’? Something like ‘advanced
fairyology’?
I was just thinking that Dawkins could perhaps address sophisticated theology once the theologians come to a consensus on the god question. It’s hardly fair to demand he address everybody’s pet theology.
“You can’t prove, by simple absence, that something does not exist.”
Pretty much depends on your premises, doesn’t it?
If the existence of something logically entails that something else be true, and yet that thing is false, then it disproves the existence of that thing.
For instance, if God exists, then prayer will always heal amputees. Prayer, in fact, does not always heal amputees, therefore God does not exist.
That example isn’t all that convincing, as it presupposes various aspects of the god’s character/personality/abilities. Perhaps the god is not omnipotent (could Ishtar heal amputees?). Perhaps the god is no omnibenevolent (certainly the Calvinist god isn’t). Perhaps the god is inclined to fuck with right bastards who try to prove its existence (c.f. the Babel Fish).
“as it presupposes various aspects of the god’s character/personality/abilities.”
Duh. That’s what the word “premises” means in my post.
Right, but my point was that a lot of the arguments around these kind of claims involve unstated premises. It’s not enough to simply say “God would do X, so absence of X means no God” — the god in question has to be explicitly characterized.
For example, this kind of failure to characterize fully is often at the root of disagreements over theodicy.
My overall point was to invalidate the claim that you can’t prove a negative. It depends on your premises. In principle, it IS possible to prove a negative, although it might be impossible in practice.
A large part of analyzing someone’s argument is making hidden premises explicit; once you do that, the arguments often self-destruct, or at least they will have to be reformulated to be far more narrow. If the conclusion is very important to the person presenting the argument, you aren’t likely to convince him this way; he will either change his premises or disengage the conversation.
“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.”
Matthew 17:20
I think we can test these premises. This particular god is clearly characterized, so if the bloody mountain doesn’t move, we can mark this particular god as proven to not exist…
For more on absence of evidence constituting (usually weak) evidence of absence, here’s a long but accessible and informative introduction to Bayes’ theorem:
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
If you expect to see an effect and don’t that is indeed evidence that there is nothing to cause it.
Yup. Or as I’ve read Stenger summarize it (Comprehensible Cosmos, I think) – “Absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence — at least when you can reasonably expect evidence.”
Bayes’ theorem has the advantage of telling you just how much evidence of absence is constituted by your absence of evidence.
Falsification is the special case where, given the truth of the hypothesis, a particular observation has a probability of very close to 1. If the predicted observation doesn’t come to pass, plugging the numbers into Bayes’ theorem gives a probability very close to 0.
But suppose the probability of the observation is only 0.6. Bayes’ theorem will still adjust the probability of the hypothesis downwards, just not nearly so close to 0. Repeating the experiment without seeing the expected result will continue to push the hypothesis towards a 0 probability — if there’s a 0.6 probability of seeing the effect given the hypothesis and you’ve run the experiment 100 times without seeing the effect, the hypothesis isn’t looking too good. Bayes’ theorem gives you a precise figure concerning how bad it looks.
Also, Plantinga and William Lane Craig use some rather suspicious Bayes’ theorem-inspired arguments. Understanding the result itself helps one determine where they’re going off the rails.
srsly?
* The End of Faith
* The God Delusion
* God is Not Great
Locke, you’re acting like a troll again. Those three books weren’t intended to have humorous titles; the anti-Gnu books have titles that are intended to satirize these, but the satire falls flat.
From Alan Orr,
“But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.”
He’s got, the boy’s got it! All religion IS unworthy of serious thought.
By George, I think he’s got it! “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” “All religion IS unworthy of serious thought.” 🙂
[Except insofar as religion is a serious impediment to the progress of civilization.]
IMHO, those who derogate writers who have clearly stated that their goal/s is/are to reach as many people as possible in the hopes of providing some enlightenment and hopefully some new thinking by those people, have simply missed the boat.
Those who derogate will in turn certainly be derogated.
I know everyone is typing out “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But I think what you are actually driving at is that we set up an expectation to see a certain effect. The lack of that effect, in turn, literally becomes evidence of absence. When it comes to god, some of the most perfect evidence of absence is that natural disasters affect the regional population without regard to their supernatural beliefs. Boom, evidence of absence.
Dismissal is what we would rationally do with “advanced fairyology” [thanks, nick] or “the lore of Harry Potter”. Why would religion warrant a different response? I will call this “specious pleading”.
On its own terms, that of knowledge of the world, The God Delusion indeed squarely faces its opponents. Unfortunately they turn their faces and speak to their sheep herd instead.
I need to amend that.
What I meant to put in between dismissal and response, is that we do not need to know the minutiae of Potter lore to know that it is a myth if taken seriously. The same goes for religious texts obviously.
But that’s wrong. If there should be empirical evidence for the existence of something, and thorough investigation finds no such evidence, one can reasonably conclude that it doesn’t exist. We can prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, and we can prove that the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist. Both apparitions should leave detectable evidence, but there is none. (I use “proof” here to mean “evidence of nonexistence so strong that any reasonable person would accept it”. Science, of course, doesn’t really “prove” anything—even positives—in the sense of proof as “existence beyond doubt.”)
While I largely agree with all of that and with most of the rest of your argument and while several others here have already commented on the “can’t prove a negative” [I like Fermat’s Last Theorem as a rebuttal] and although I don’t have any Ph.Ds to my name (yet, and am unlikely to get one now unless they come in cereal boxes) – much less three – on any of the related topics, I would suggest that there still seems to be a number of problematic issues or loose ends. For one thing it seems that your recourse to “any reasonable person” and “one can reasonably conclude” still leaves open the question as to what set of criteria define “reasonable”. It seems that the history of science is replete with cases where conventional wisdom – that set of criteria – has turned out to be wrong. I’m reminded of the case you mentioned here about the uphill battle that Lynn Margulis faced in promoting her theory of endosymbiosis which I gather is now current orthodoxy. And Lord Kelvin in 1900 “famously proclaimed that physics was over, except for two small clouds on the horizon” which turned out to be quantum theory and relativity [The Trouble with Physics; Lee Smolin].
Although I should most emphatically emphasize that I am not trying to suggest that we at all abandon any and all criteria for proof and open up science education to intelligent design. What I am trying to suggest, which you also allude to, is that “prove” and “proof” be used a little more circumspectly and be replaced in most cases with “highly improbable” – which I find to be a somewhat more unassailable position to be taking with religious fundamentalists and which tends to seriously tick them off (direct hits I guess). As Pigliucci points out – if that name is not a dirty word around here – with some justification I think, and with which you seem to concur, there is no “proof”, at least in the categorical sense, that Jehovah didn’t in fact create the universe last Thursday – just that it is highly improbable and terribly inconsistent with basic facts. As I believe Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, there have been some 100,000 gods that mankind has sacrificed to – frequently other humans – over the millennia and they have been shelved – like Puff the Magic Dragon at the end of childhood – and as Jehovah seems pretty much one like all of the others, probability would suggest that he too can be similarly dismissed.
But the other problematic issue is the definition and implications of the word “supernatural”. While, again, I’m not terribly familiar with all of the many details Wikipedia illustrates the problem, to my mind anyway:
One complicating factor is that there is no universal agreement about what the definition of “natural” is, and what the limits of naturalism might be. Concepts in the supernatural domain are closely related to concepts in religious spirituality and occultism or spiritualism. Additionally, by definition anything that exists naturally is not supernatural.
And from the last sentence it seems to me that “supernatural” is really a contradiction in terms – a square circle; very few philosophers, scientists and mathematicians waste much time with such concepts, although theologians seem to be horses of a different color – or maybe just a different end. But if Jehovah actually exists then, by that token, he would be entirely natural even if evidence or proof might not be readily forthcoming – like that for the Higgs boson or for string theory. It seems that a more useful criterion or frame of reference is to consider that there might be, probably are, real, natural, existent phenomena that are simply beyond the reach, or grasp, of current science – and possibly science of the foreseeable future. Although that shouldn’t open the door to those who Sagan [Broca’s Brain] and Nagel and Newman [Gödel’s Proof] and Heraclitus all referred to as night-walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.
Well, yes, there are. Consciousness, for example. It seems like it’s scientifically tractable, yet a real understanding of how consciousness arises from the brain — indeed, what consciousness is exactly — remains elusive. Leaving the field open, for now, for “supernatural” explanations.
I’m not sure, though, how useful a term “supernatural” is: it seems to be a catch-all for a number of things: “alternative natural” (natural things that just haven’t yet been shown to be natural), “contra-natural” (things which contradict naturalistic explanations — which break the laws of physics — Milton Rothman makes short shrift of this kind of thing here), and “supranatural” (things which are in some sense beyond natural explanations and naturalistic empiricism).
Is it the case that “God” began to be considered as supranatural when theologians realised that scientific inquiry would be able to disprove a deity that was part of the natural world?
(I suspect the answer may be, “no,” but I’d be interested in the rationale.)
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Well, yes, there are. Consciousness, for example. It seems like it’s scientifically tractable, yet a real understanding of how consciousness arises from the brain — indeed, what consciousness is exactly — remains elusive. Leaving the field open, for now, for “supernatural” explanations.
Agreed. Dawkins argues in his The Selfish Gene [pg 59] that “the evolution of … subjective consciousness [and] why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology”. Which I would largely agree with. Although I would, echoing David Chalmers, lean to a dualist conception rather than a “supernatural” one as I expect most conscious entities would see that state as an entirely natural one – miraculous, but natural.
I’m not sure, though, how useful a term “supernatural” is: it seems to be a catch-all for a number of things
Agreed. In a way it seems that for a rationalist to concede any reality to such a concept is to concede far too much to the opposition, to be playing exclusively on their turf and by their rules. As you suggested later (below).
Is it the case that “God” began to be considered as supranatural when theologians realized that scientific inquiry would be able to disprove a deity that was part of the natural world?
(I suspect the answer may be, “no,” but I’d be interested in the rationale.)
A very plausible argument. Evolutionarily speaking, sort of a case of an arms race between two competing memes. And the evolution – or rather the transmogrification – of creationism into intelligent design might also be considered a case in point.
Thanks. Although, to my mind, dualism is implausible: if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain, whence does it arise? (It smacks of the Catholic’s assertion the God slips souls into humankind at some point in evolution.)
Dennett (Consciousness Explained) had some interesting evidence — the slide-projector experiment — that suggested that consciousness was simply a very-near-real-time memory of subconscious perceptions and decisions.
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*that God
Why does a “memory” have any subjective component? Dennett is simply question-begging.
What do you mean by a “subjective component”? If you mean subjective versus objective, then my response would be that a memory in a brain must be subjective–that is, it will be unique to a particular brain in a particular context. If you are asking where the homunculus resides in memory, my answer would be that it doesn’t. Memory is just data; consciousness is the epiphenomenon of streams of memories interacting.
The illusions Dennett uses demonstrate that what we experience visually is not raw, despite it seeming to be available to us in real time, but rather calculated from the raw input and stitched together.
Any recorded measurement is unique to the particular recording device in a particular context. A weather station will record a particular temperature that is only for that locale, but I presume you don’t think that thermometers experience subjective feelings of warmth or cold. Our bodies also record various things that don’t have accompanying subjective experiences (e.g., one’s immune system can have a “memory” of earlier encountered pathogens, but presumably you don’t think your immune system “remembers” with any sort of subjective component).
No psychologist thinks that the content of our consciousness is unmediated, or that we don’t experience illusions. The issue is explaining why some kinds of “stitched together raw input” produces a sense of subjective experience, whereas others don’t. One can’t use the notion of “stitched together raw input” as an explanation in itself. More generally, if one’s explanation of consciousness is to invoke a phenomenon that requires consciousness, like illusions, then one is simply question-begging.
And the data a weather station has is unique to it. My point is just that calling something a “memory” has the tendency to import the very thing one is trying to explain, which is that some data seems to produce subjective experience, and other data doesn’t. It’s not the data per se that’s important.
I get the sense that we may be using the term “subjectivity” in different ways. I don’t mean subjective as “unique to the individual”, but as “part of the content/sense of conscious experience”, the “how things feel” aspect.
But that’s no explanation, since it doesn’t tell us how such things are different, what the relevant differences are that are responsible for producing subjective experience. What is it about being biological that is special? In any case, to be clear, my original objection was simply that saying consciousness is caused by “a very-near-real-time memory” wasn’t an explanation, since other things record data as well. Either a “memory” is just “recorded data”, in which case one needs to explain how some “memories” produce subjective experience and others don’t, or a “memory” is a subjective recollection of past experience, in which case it already has the feature one is trying to explain, and can’t itself be used as an explanation.
Sure, but no psychologist believes otherwise. Every cognitive psychologist will tell you that the contents of our consciousness is constructed by the perceptual and cognitive system, and is by no means a veridical “raw impression” of the world. But that tells us nothing about why we even have a sense of consciousness. Sure, the contents of our consciousness may be an “illusion” in some sense, but that doesn’t explain the existence of consciousness, that there is something that can actually experience such illusions.
Well, a brain has to have something to work with, and the data it has is unique to it. Feelings have nothing to do with that kind of subjectivity–that kind arises from the exclusivity of personal experience.
But we aren’t talking about just any instrument. We are talking about brains and other connected body parts which are biological organs and quite unlike thermometers in how they work.
I think the issue is really how not why.
Let’s not confuse what the visual illusions show. They show that what we experience has been altered from the raw input before we experience it.
The illusions show that consciousness is built on top of other processes in the brain, processes that run fast enough that we don’t notice them in normal circumstances. The illusions don’t explain how consciousness works but they do give insight. No question begging is occurring AFAICT.
This is to your comment starting with:
I guess I don’t have the same qualms about the word “memory” as you do. I was thinking of a memory as a piece or collection of information that is meaningful with regard to the larger brain system. Also, I personally doubt that there is anything special about memories in the brain other than how they are used (no qualia, and a specially built computer could be conscious). I’m sure you would agree with me that the subjective experience is temporal and can be turned off and on again, so it stands to reason that it is a process and not a static object with a special quality.
I believe it is the process that makes a large, fluid collection of memories into what we experience as consciousness, not a particular substrate that a memory is recorded on. Actually, I think that is what was meant by “a very-near-real-time memory”–a stream of these somehow work together to create the subjective experience. You halt the process and you halt the subjective experience.
Ant Allan:
Although, to my mind, dualism is implausible: if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain, whence does it arise? (It smacks of the Catholic’s assertion the God slips souls into humankind at some point in evolution.)
Good question. Chalmers in his The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory provides a somewhat amusing quote from one researcher in, apparently, The International Dictionary of Psychology as follows:
Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. (Sutherland 1989) [pg 3]
But I’ll agree that dualism as an explanation for it seems somewhat implausible and the arguments for it seem rather tenuous and obscure at best, a bit of a stretch. But I’m also reminded of a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle:
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
While there may be some similarity between the Catholic perspective on the source of the soul, I’m less critical of the basic concept behind that than the practical consequences, that because the Catholic Church has been the promulgator and source of such “wisdom” that it has not only exclusive claim to the moral high ground – not to mention some financial perquisites – but also to the concept, premise and principle themselves.
But relative to that concept and since you mention Dennett [haven’t read much of him though he’s on the list], I notice a quote of him on the topic in Chalmers to the effect that:
given the way that dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up
Apart from disagreeing with both his premise and conclusion there, that seems to me a basic reductionist philosophy and, assuming that is the case, I wonder whether or not the underlying premise there is that one can, in effect, keep chopping things up finer and finer – ad infinitum, forever continuing to explain the bigger “chunks” in terms of the smaller ones. Reminds me of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. And in this case, as a method of breaking free of that process, I have some sympathy, or think of some relevance, the Chinese philosophy on yin-yang which describes how:
… polar or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only exist in relation to each other.
For examples, I’m reminded of Chalmer’s own characterization of current physics, and its relevance to consciousness:
The trouble is that the basic elements of physical theories seem always to come down to two things: the structure and dynamics of physical processes. … But from structure and dynamics, we can only get more structure and dynamics. This allows the possibility of satisfying explanations of all sorts of high-level structural and functional properties, but conscious experience will remain untouched. No set of facts about physical structure and dynamics can add up to a fact about phenomenology.
Or, similarly, the theorems and the axioms of mathematics, or the laws and the initial conditions and the forces and particles of the Standard Model. Lee Smolin in his The Trouble with Physics says that There are about twenty such constants [that define the “initial conditions” in the Standard Model], and the fact that there are that many freely specifiable constants in what is supposed to be a fundamental theory is a tremendous embarrassment. [pg 13]
So. From those phenomena – and many others including the basic particle-wave nature of light – it would appear that duality may be a fundamental attribute of reality – at least as we currently perceive it – and that consciousness itself is but one irreducible side of the coin – the yin to matter’s yang. Not far removed from and related to an assertion by one of the progenitors of quantum mechanics – Eugene Wigner – to the effect that It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness. Although all of that, while entirely fascinating, is as Leon Lederman joked in his The God Particle, quite a bit outside of my salary range …
Particle-wave duality is not analogous to mind-brain duality: The existence of one kind o dualism says nothing about the existence of the other.
What’s more, particle-wave duality is really an artefact of our models of reality. A photon, electron, etc. is what it is. Sometimes it behaves in ways that we can best understand by treating it as a particle, sometimes a wave. But it is neither, nor both.
And the Standard Model isn’t supposed to be a fundamental theory, which is why we have, for example, “string theory”.
I’m unconvinced by Chalmer’s argument. One might make a similar assertion, that physical theories cannot explain the phenomenology of life, that there’s some kind of élan vital beyond physical structure and dynamics.
I just don’t see the need some to invoke any kind of “élan mental” to explain consciousness.
Oh. Holmes was wrong, of course. There may always be plausible answers that you haven’t yet formulated. Otherwise the quote is a shoo-in for “Goddidit!”!
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At last. Someone who seems to be conversant with the physics.
(Seriously)
Well, it’s been 25 years since I got my Ph.D. Although I left the field, I think I still remember a little. Aided by the occasional helping of David Deutsch, Brian Greene or Stephen Hawking.
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Ant Allan:
Particle-wave duality is not analogous to mind-brain duality: The existence of one kind of dualism says nothing about the existence of the other.
True enough. Sort of like “one swallow doesn’t make a summer”. But when there are whole flocks of them then the contention becomes a little more plausible. While I’ll concede that the particle-wave duality is probably an “artifact of our models of reality”, I would suggest that it might be that it will always be thus: reality on the one side and us with our consciousness and models on the other – even if we’re always in the process of refining those models.
In which regard, you may have read Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory [I haven’t yet myself], but it seems that just from the title he is likely to be skeptical of us ever concluding with one of those. And Wikipedia has an interesting quote from Hawking, among others, on the topic:
Stephen Hawking was originally a believer in the Theory of Everything but, after considering Gödel’s Theorem, concluded that one was not obtainable:
“Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind.”
Which ties in with the concepts of élan mental or élan vital and your previous comments about emergence. I think that Pigliucci neatly summarizes the issue and principles with this:
According to ontological emergence, on the other hand, a full understanding of complex systems in terms of their components is not possible in principle, not just because of practical considerations, because new levels of causality appear at higher levels of organization.
The issue is not with the basic laws of physics: everyone (well, except dualists) agrees that they hold at all levels. The question is whether there is new causality at higher levels, on top of the laws of physics.
While I’m not sure that I entirely follow or agree with all of that, it still suggests to me that if higher levels of causality emerge out of lower levels of reality which are ultimately outside of human abilities to discern and measure, let alone conceive of, then one might reasonably argue that those higher levels of causality could be considered as an “élan vital”, a law outside of the “basic laws of physics” and hence provide some justification for a dualist position.
So I don’t see that a vitalist or even a “Goddidit” philosophy is intrinsically flawed – the question is the biggest bang for the buck, how precise the theory needs to be for the task at hand. The problem that I see with the “Goddidit” version is that there are far too many people – religious fundamentalists, mostly – with a narrow-minded and highly idiosyncratic conception of that putative entity by which they seek to claim the moral high ground and to thereby impose that conception and related consequences on the rest of us – really a basic and entirely odious form of fascism.
I find very funny the argument that people like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc. portray religion in a childish, fundamental way, appealing to the extremists to make their points against religion in general and not really engaging the more sophisticated interpretations of any given religion.
It’s funny (and ironic) because all Dawkins, et al. are doing is appealing to the founding texts of the religions, so if what they say sounds childish, extreme, unsophisticated, etc., it’s only because those adjectives actually describe the religious scriptures themselves!
I don’t think anybody has said that a god hypothesis that “predicts certain phenomena that can be measured and studied” isn’t a hypothesis that can’t be tested. That would be absurd, Jerry.
What has been said is that calling it “magic” and “supernatural” and “ooga-booga” is misleading at best if we can actually handle it like any other scientific hypothesis.
“isn’t a hypothesis that can’t”
Edit to “isn’t a hypothesis that can”.
O, why are these things invisible until one hits “submit”?
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. P.Z., Grayling, and others have said that any “god hypothesis” is necessarily incoherent and cannot be tested. Have you read their writings on this issue?
I don’t think he’s really wrong. I understood his post to mean that PZ et al. consider all current god hypotheses to be incoherent and therefore untestable, but when you said:
“As always, I maintain that if the god hypothesis predicts certain phenomena that can be measured and studied, then it’s a hypothesis that can be tested.”
in your post, you seemed to be suggesting that even if such a god hypothesis existed, they would still claim it untestable.
I think what kharamatha was saying was that even PZ, AC, etc. would agree that such a hypothesis, should it exist, would be testable. They just happen to think it can’t exist.
Or are you saying that you DO think it is currently testable? If so, can you state what the hypothesis is? I’m still trying to come down on one side or another on this issue.
Agree. Jerry’s position on this continues to confuse me. He seems to be willfully misunderstanding PZ, AC, etc’s argument.
Then so do I.
If you would care to clarify the conundrum and inform the both of us as to what PZ’s argument really is I, for one, would be grateful.
I think John Salerno laid it out pretty clearly. All god hypotheses are either 1) incoherent and therefore not capable of being supported by evidence or 2) coherent, in which case PZ would agree with Jerry that evidence theoretically could exist. If the god hypothesis we are talking about is clearly defined, we can tell which of the two categories it falls into. If the hypothesized “something” falls into the second category, and one wants to call that something “god”, then we can all (PZ, Jerry, etc) agree evidence for that something could exist. On the other hand, evidence for an all-powerful, all-knowing being could not exist, because it falls into category 1.
I also agree with kharamatha when he said that it would be absurd for someone to hold the position that a hypothesis that predicts certain phenomena that can be measured and studied is a hypothesis that can’t be tested.
Jerry’s taking issue with this pretty much incontrovertible statement is what prompted my perhaps harsh “willful misunderstanding” comment. I find it totally baffling that Jerry could think that PZ would not agree with kharamatha’s comment about the absurdity of that position. PZ’s position is simply that the “god hypothesis” being discussed is NOT “a hypothesis that predicts certain phenomena that can be measured and studied”. If you think it is, I would echo John Salerno in asking that you please spell out that hypothesis.
Thank you.
I think that I “get” it.
PZ is saying that if the hypothesis is coherent, then we can understand and accept that there might be a god?
That is certainly not what I have understood from his many writings on the topic.
Are you able to cite where PZ has implied such a thing please?
P.S.
This is the logicaql fallacy of the false dilemma, as many other logically consistent gods might be posited, not just those who are defined as being intrinsically incoherent.
@ Michael K. Gray
“This is the logicaql fallacy of the false dilemma, as many other logically consistent gods might be posited, not just those who are defined as being intrinsically incoherent.”
Yes, they can be. For instance I could propose, purely for argument, that the Empire State Building, as it is, is a god. But we are all in agreement that different kinds of claims can carry that label. I and others would say that some of the actual claims are not of the coherent kind, and that the label alone doesn’t lend them coherence.
“For instance I could propose, purely for argument, that the Empire State Building, as it is, is a god.”
Yes, EXACTLY. Further, if Jerry did propose that the Empire State Building was god, it is totally ridiculous to think that, based on his past writings, PZ would disagree with Jerry that evidence for the existence of the Empire State Building could theoretically exist.
@kharamatha:
Hold it right there, Dick Tracey! I am certainly not in agreement, as I have outlined previously.
Your “argument” falls at the first hurdle, and needs no further contemplation.
Excuse me, then, Pruneface.
I inferred that you were also of the mind that both coherent and not coherent things can be in the “god” category from this part:
“… as many other logically consistent gods might be posited, not just those who are defined as being intrinsically incoherent.”
Only what’s been going around the blogs. Primary sources include P.Z., Blackford and you.
Am I correctly interpreting:
“P.Z., Grayling, and others have said that any “god hypothesis” is necessarily incoherent and cannot be tested.”
to mean that P.Z., Grayling, and others believe that adding the term “god” onto any hypothesis that can be measured and studied would prevent the measurements and studies from saying anything about what was measured and studied?
I’m ignorant of what the term “god hypothesis” means here, or maybe rather in what way it renders a claim incoherent, if the claim can despite this is one that can be measured and studied.
I ramble on a bit, but this looks like a case where a description of the entity would be a safer bet than a convenient and conventional term “god”, if only because it’s easy to forget what the hell all of us are talking about without constant reminders.
“if the claim can despite this is one”
Every time. Sigh. Cross out “can”.
The point PZ, Grayling and others are making is this:
Suppose we have this evidence of some god. Say if you do a raindance in some particular way you can guarantee rain in the next 15 minutes.
First of all, you now have a natural, testable phenomenon.
And second, what did you really prove? You didn’t prove there’s a god, you proved some particular type of magic works.
Any explanation other than a disenbodied invisible intelligence is more likely. Even if your ‘god’ responds to a name, isn’t it always more likely some aliens disregarded their prime directive and were messing with you?
Incidentally, this is very similar to Bart Ehrmans arguments about miracles described in the bible. For a historician any explanation is by definition more likely than a miracle. A miracle is defined as inexplicable, so how can it ever be offered as an explanation?
I have a peeve with the alien bit here. If X creates world 1, X is likely to be alien to world 1.
There could be a few other cases, such as X both being from world 1 and creating world 1 in a form of Grandfather Paradox.
My suggestion is that many creator gods, as described, are definitely aliens, whether they are also divine or not.
“Thank you.
I think that I “get” it.
PZ is saying that if the hypothesis is coherent, then we can understand and accept that there might be a god?
That is certainly not what I have understood from his many writings on the topic.
Are you able to cite where PZ has implied such a thing please?”
I don’t think he’s ever said that, exactly. But what we’re suggesting is that he *would* say that any hypothesis which is testable, falsifiable, etc. would be valid, even if it happened to be a god hypothesis. He just argues that a god hypothesis *can’t* be those things.
Jerry’s comment seemed to suggest either that PZ would never admit that a testable, falsifiable hypothesis would be valid for providing evidence for god, or that the current god hypothesis *is* testable and falsifiable and PZ refuses to acknowledge it as valid.
“Jerry’s comment seemed to suggest either that PZ would never admit that a testable, falsifiable hypothesis would be valid for providing evidence for god, or that the current god hypothesis *is* testable and falsifiable and PZ refuses to acknowledge it as valid.”
Good summary. For the third time, if someone thinks that the “god hypothesis” (whatever that means) *is* testable and falsifiable, please spell out that hypothesis here. I may be wrong, but I think it will be trivially easy to determine whether any clearly spelled out hypothesis falls into 1) the category that PZ, et al would find to be insupportable by any imaginable evidence or 2) the category for which even PZ, et al would admit it is easy to imagine evidence that could, theoretically, but does not, in fact, exist.
Consider the following testable god hypotheses: (for example)
* The Sun
* Emperor Hirohito
* Prince Phillip
* Mesopotamian Stele
These are concrete objects that are or have been considered very real gods by many folk.
In which of the false dichotomies presented do these fit?
This question usually leads to the “no true god” fallacy.
(c.f. “No True Scotsman” fallacy)
This necessary invocation very neatly exposes the failed nature of this false dichotomy.
These would appear to be, as presented, the coherent examples, that are not the incoherent examples, and do not lend their coherence to the incoherent examples.
Eh?
Michael, why “Eh”? Do you really not understand what kharamatha is saying here? The two of us have only argued that 1) some definitions of god are incoherent, 2) some definitions of god are coherent, and 3) evidence could only theoretically for the latter of these. All of the examples you gave are coherent, and PZ would therefore agree that evidence for their existence could, in theory, exist.
make that “…could only theoretically *exist* for the latter…”
These are concrete objects that are or have been considered very real gods by many folk.
Interesting discussion that you and several others have been engaged in here on the topic, not that I follow it all that well.
But it seems to me that that statement of yours speaks to the crux of the matter which I see as the definition of god that one is using. And without an adequate one of those it seems the debate bears some resemblance to a dog chasing its tail – entertaining and maybe good exercise, but otherwise not terribly productive. But as you seem familiar with the terms and concepts of logic you may have read a book by Nagel and Newman – Gödel’s Proof – which in the discussion on “Russell’s antinomy” makes what I think is a relevant and cogent observation:
This fatal contradiction [in the antinomy] results from an uncritical use of the apparently pellucid notion of class. [pg 24]
While Russell’s formulation used infinite sets – classes – there are variations that use finite ones and from which one can conclude, I think, that if such fatal contradictions can occur in finite sets then how much more likely is that to occur in infinite ones – “God” apparently qualifying as such – where the relevant attributes seem far less quantifiable.
So, my impression is that, as you suggest, one needs to provide an example of the general case that one is endeavoring to refute or justify. And as the context, in one view, seems to be that god is some intentional being that created the universe some 6000 years ago, it would seem appropriate to quantify that definition a little further and see if it holds any water. In which regard, Dawkins in his “The God Delusion” quotes Weinberg’s somewhat testy, though entirely appropriate, observation:
If you want to say that ‘God is energy’ then you can find God in a lump of coal. [pg 33]
In which case that would be at least somewhat coherent and potentially consistent with the assertion or claim that “God” created the universe – energy slopping back and forth in a quantum well between big bangs and big crunches. Although it does raise the philosophical speculation as to whether energy is innately or intrinsically conscious and in affirmative support of which one might tentatively offer Stuart Hameroff’s discussion which argues that quantum mechanics is the essence of consciousness in providing or undergirding the mechanism of choice. Consequently, I would say a coherent definition of a god hypothesis and somewhat consistent with traditional ones and one which may even have some utility.
However, I think the more problematic question or issue is the fact that religious fundamentalists have their own narrow-minded and highly idiosyncratic conception of that putative entity – a largely incoherent one to boot, in my view – by which they seek to claim the moral high ground. And from which they apparently wish thereby to impose that conception and various moral and political consequences on the rest of us – really a basic and entirely odious form of fascism.
Michael, what on Earth are you talking about? None of these are false dichotomies, and no one claimed that they were. These fit into what I’ve been calling “category 2” and, as I predicted, it is trivially easy to categorize them as such. For example, PZ would be in complete agreement with Jerry that evidence for the existence of the Sun could, in theory, exist. Am I still misunderstanding what you are asking? I’m once again confused.
Sorry, I misunderstood your use of “false dichotomy” (because, frankly, it never occurred to me that “coherent” and “incoherent” could be construed as a *false* dichotomy – apparently you think there is a third way…).
Anyway, the extremely short answer is that, of my two categories or, if you insist, dichotomies, they quite clearly fit into #2.
I think that you have discovered the essence of my objection.
Yes: coherent and incoherent DO represent a false dichotomy.
Another entirely plausible choice would be “unknown”.
This artificial restriction to only 2 categories is the very definition of a false dichotomy! There are additional options.
This is speculation in your part, specifically denied by PZ in a recent podcast (beastcast 8).
A problem with naming it a false dichotomy is that it isn’t a dichotomy, for the case presented has not been that there are only coherent claims and incoherent claims, but the case presented has been that there are coherent and incoherent claims.
Do you perceive the difference?
As for P.Z.; if I have read you correctly, and you in turn have heard P.Z. correctly, then in my view P.Z. might rightly be called nuts.
I’ll be waiting for a transcript to judge for myself.
See my correction beneath for the true audio link.
Judge for your-self as to which of us is “nuts”.
He specifically denies the provenance of my above-listed gods, and only allows into his pantheon those of the Jewish/Xtian/Muslimetc faiths.
No exceptions considered, in fact he explicitly rejects them.
I might be persuaded to produce a transcript were one hearing impaired.
No, your distinction may be so subtle that it has eluded me.
I have parsed the above statement, but to no effect.
Is there anyone else out there who might translate this for me, please?
I’m sorry for being opaque, Michael.
Speaking at least for myself, I don’t deny other categories than “coherent” and “incoherent”. Nor do I confirm these other categories. I have no particular interest in them. That there is a category “incoherent” is enough for most of what I have wanted to say.
Beyond that I’m more interested in semantical points.
@kharamatha
I hear what you say.
Whereas I am more interested in reality.
Michael, thank you (sincerely) for replying to my comment about the Sun – now we may be getting somewhere! Can you please provide a more specific link to “beatcast 8”?
I’m absolutely gob-smacked (sp?) to learn that PZ Myers thinks evidence for the existence of the Sun is impossible as a matter of principle!
My apologies. I typed it incorrectly.
The file is named:
“beastcast_8_pz_myers.mp3”, and is available via “beastcast.libsyn.com/beas-tcast-8-pz-myers”
Call me naive, but I believe the creation of a god or gods and the religions that derived from it(although by now religions have taken a life of their own) were originally based in an enormous defense mechanism fabricated by humans when they became aware of the fact that eventually everything that lives has to die. It had to be incredibly shocking for those first humans to learn that that no matter what, there would always be and impending end. This still remains a VERY UNCOMFORTABLE part of life. It is not hard to imagine how shocking it must have been for those that first became aware, that those around them that were dying, were not ever coming back. Religions have survived because that fear cannot be conquered. For some it may simply be a way to ease the painful fear, believing something or someone can make it easier at the end.I was raised Catholic and there was always a big emphasis from my ex church to reassure its participants that everything would be alright at the end.
I assume,(correct me if i am wrong) NO ONE is exempt from that fear, we just have different ways to try to deal with it.