Last week I highlighted an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Uncle Karl and Randall Stephens, decrying the unwillingness of evangelical Christians to accept the facts of science. Yesterday, big-time Baptist Albert Mohler utterly rejected Giberson and Stephens’s views, defending the literal truth of the Bible.
Over at Choice in Dying, ex Anglican priest Eric MacDonald also weighs in at length about Giberson and Stephens’s piece, emphasizing the inherent difficulties in reconciling the Bible with any form of evangelical Christianity, even those forms that take the Bible as part metaphor. I won’t summarize it Eric’s very nice piece, since that would not do it justice, but here are two excerpts:
The problem is — and Karl Giberson should be able to see this — that there simply is no reason to suppose, as evangelical Christians claim, that consulting the Bible is able to achieve any truth at all, let alone that there is a compatibility between the Bible and contemporary science. If Giberson and Stephens believes there is a way of reading the Bible so as to come to demonstrably true beliefs, they must show that this is so. Imagination will only take you part of the way.
Eric then discusses the accommodationist claim that atheists misunderstand religion as being, as Hume characterized, a body of beliefs subject to (Hume’s words) “argument and disputation”—in other words, a faith founded on propositional beliefs:
Of course, this is part of what the critics of the new atheism mean when they tell us that we do not understand religion, which is not, in the first instance, about propositional belief. Now, that may once have been true, but it is simply hopeless to make this claim of a religion all of whose speculative theories have been undercut by the discoveries of science. Since the days of the early Christian Fathers (as the early theologians are often called) philosophical-theological discourse has formed an integral part of the Christian religion. The formation of the core doctrines of the church — such as the nature of God, incarnation, redemption, promises of heaven and hell, etc. – was undertaken by men who instinctively thought in terms of Greek philosophical categories, and very soon membership of or exclusion from the church was based upon acceptance of beliefs formed on this basis.
For Christians to say, now, 17 or 18 hundred years later, that Christianity is not propositional is simply ludicrous. Early religion may have been totally unreflective, but the moment someone said that there was only one god the unreflective religion of myths and stories was inevitably replaced by claims to knowledge, claims which must, by their very nature, come into conflict with any other claims to knowledge, whether of other gods, or of the world itself. . .
Eric also drew my attention to a group of six letters in Monday’s New York Times disputing or supporting Giberson and Stephens’s piece. I want to put up two opposing ones, both from Massachusetts. The first is from a professor of neurobiology at Harvard:
To the Editor:
Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens would prefer evangelicals to embrace secular knowledge and science. This seems a tall order. For example, evangelicals should reject the notion “that humans and dinosaurs lived together,” while presumably holding firm to the central Christian tenet that humans have a life after death.
The secular status of both propositions is the same: There is no evidence in favor of the idea, and it conflicts with everything science knows about the nature of human life. On what basis should someone reject one of these notions and embrace the other?
Unfortunately, the only theology that doesn’t require daily contortions and contradictions is what the Op-Ed writers describe as “little more than a quiet voice on the margins”: to reject all supernatural fairy tales and superstitions, whether they come from an ancient book or not.
MARKUS MEISTER
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 18, 2011The writer is a professor of biology at Harvard.
I love to see distinguished academics going after accommodationism, and Meister’s point, while obvious, can’t be made too often: there is no rational basis for reading scripture selectively, so you take some things as metaphor and other things as non-negotiable truths. As Eric said in his piece:
There is no more scientific basis for the belief in life after death than there is for the outlandish suggestion that humans and dinosaurs once roamed the earth together. Indeed, the more we come to know about the relationship between brain states and mind, the more certain it seems that there is nothing that can survive bodily death except the elements of which the body is composed.
The second letter is from a theology graduate student, one of those misguided souls—I use the word metaphorically—who tries to drag science down to the level of religion by claiming that these are both reason-based ways of investigating the world:
To the Editor:
While I agree with much of what Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens wrote, I disagree with the implied conclusion that reason is something that is necessarily “secular.” Such an argument also implies that faith is something that is, so to speak, added on to the universal truth of reason.
On the contrary, many theologians and philosophers contend that what we commonly call “secular” is itself a worldview that is born out of a particular history, tradition and narrative — that is, “secular” reason is not reason itself, but simply another kind of reason, just as Christian faith is a kind of reason.
MARC LAVALLEE
Arlington, Mass., Oct. 19, 2011The writer is a doctoral candidate in practical theology at Boston University.
What on earth is “practical theology”? I don’t have the heart to look it up. At any rate, I’m starting to realize that one of the tactics accommodationists use to comport science and faith is to simply denigrate science by pretending it’s a form of faith, or no different from faith in how it investigates the world.
But there is a big difference between them, and not just in their historical origin. Secular reason, especially through science, tells us what’s true about our universe, while faith, based on revelation and dogma, tells us nothing. As Hawking put it, “Science will win because it works.” Practical theology, indeed!
GAAAAA!!!
Science is TESTABLE. Reason is TESTABLE. They are REPLICABLE. They produce PREDICTIVE VALIDITY.
Religion produces random results.
A course in basic statistics should be required of doctoral candidates in theology. How many of them could pass it? How many of them, if they passed, would still stay in a theology program? L
This.
Such an argument also implies that faith is something that is, so to speak, added on to the universal truth of reason.
That’s nice. Nice flowery language. Too bad I don’t know what the heck it means precisely. Lol.
“Leave them guessing what the heck we’re talking about, that’s our motto”. –Theologians
“On even the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers.”
(Huxley, T.H. 1894, Science and Christian Tradition)
“practical theology” aka “making my very very own magic decoder ring”.
hey, that’s what it is! and I didn’t even read the wiki article when I wrote that: “Practical theology is the practical application of theology to everyday life”.
I thought it was about how to pick up people in Church (well, of legal age at least)
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
Those aren’t propositions? Practically every single one of those sentences is there because of some sectarian “argument and disputation” over their truth. Indeed, actual wars were fought over some of those disagreements. The notion that religion does not involve propositional beliefs is absurd.
Ah, yes, but those people are performing religion wrong. Which is totally not a proposition either.
To play devil’s advocate, while those are propositional beliefs, they are not the entirety of the foundation.
In terms of Dale Cannon’s “Six Ways”, such a creed and other philosophical propositions would fall in the demesne of the Way of Rational Inquiry — which is indeed a part of several religious traditions. However, in an anthropological sense there are five other Ways — Sacred Ritual, Right Action, Shamanic Mediation, Devotion, and Mysical Quest — that also are part of what religion “is”.
Varying parts of these other ways can be cast as propositional beliefs as well (though perhaps with more “ought” than “is”). Other parts are not so easily cast, where the foundation is more the ways that humans react to experiencing the world. (Perhaps less propositional and more operational; that is, not so much the software but the hardware environment.) The sense that religion is “about” the propositional part may thus be debatable from an anthropological vantage.
That said, I don’t think it helps the religious stance that much. Perhaps a counter with “So, you’re willing to concede that the purely propositional components of religion are utterly unable to stand by themselves?” might help. Then again, that would probably get a response on the lines of “and that’s why FAITH is so important”, and a digression into the difference between using the word to refer to taking a proposition without justification versus the emotional sense of self-righteous certainty, and how the latter can be on occasion not merely unjustified, but objectively wrong.
But those other parts make no sense except in the context of the propositional beliefs. Why does one do Sacred Rituals? Because one has certain propositional beliefs about the need or utility to do so. Why does on practice Right Action, or go on Mystic Quests? Because one has certain propositional beliefs about the need or utility to do so.
When one does these things without possessing the requisite propositional beliefs, one says that they have become “secularized” (e.g., an atheist who gives Christmas presents is not engaging in religion).
On one level, yes; as I noted, parts of these other ways can be cast as propositional beliefs as well. On another… my impression is no, a sacred ritual may not have a “why”, beyond “no-one ever stopped to think ‘why not'”. It may just be Something That Is Done. Humans do sacred rituals because ritual is something humans have been evolutionarily wired to produce, like randomly fed pigeons.
Now, the reflexive instincts may be translatable to reflectively rational propositions, but that doesn’t mean people do Sacred Rituals because of those propositions any more than you pull your hand away from a hot stove because you think it will be detrimental to your survival to keep it there.
Again, I don’t think this helps the religious stance much.
But what makes something a Sacred Ritual, rather than just a Ritual? Isn’t it precisely because of propositional content, the belief that the ritual is connected to the supernatural in some way?
There are towns that have annual tomato fights — is that ritual “sacred”? There are societies that, every year, race wheels of cheese — presumably these rituals are not “sacred”, right? My point is simply that a Sacred Ritual is called Sacred for a reason, and that reason is tied to propositional beliefs about the supernatural.
…associated with “ultimate reality” in a very specialized sense, yes. However, that’s not necessarily the same thing as the supernatural; from a materialist/scientific framework, the mundane real world is the ultimate reality.
Maybe – or maybe the belief that the ritual is connected to the supernatural is a post hoc explanation for something they were already doing.
Religion, the socially accepted form of OCD.
Only some parts of religion… but yeah, pretty much.
Well, yes but most actual Christians don’t think of it like that. The Nicene is something that they mumble through in church services and don’t think too much about and would be at a loss to explain what any of it means. But historically the exact wording of the creed did cause wars. The great schism between the Roman Church and the Orthodox Church was over the “Filioque” dispute. This was whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or whether he proceeds just from the Father (Filioque = and the son). An interesting experiment is to sit a Roman Catholic and an Orthodox Christian down and ask them precisely what proceeding from the Father is and what difference it makes if the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well. Their ancestors may well have been prepared to kill each other over this so it would be reasonable to expect a good answer. My experience has been that questions like this are an almost certain way of eliciting complete gibberish!
Here is a not-so-simple test to see if religion is made of truth: Throw out all that you know and all that is written about everything in the universe, and start again from scratch.
How much of the bible or any other holy work will still come out the same? How many testable theories and observations, equations and facts of science will come out the same?
I put my money on science being able to establish facts about the universe, and those facts would pretty well match up with what we know now. The probability of the bible being re-established as fact would be very, very small. Which shows the joke of it, namely that the bible is supposed to provide an objective guide to reality for humans to work with, yet it is one of the most subjective works ever written, based on the untestable and even indescribable hypothesis of god and his* existence.
*I gather that plumbing is very important, apparently.
Oh please, if you started from scratch, science would use different names and symbols for everything. The constant relating the radius of a circle to its circumference might even wind up a linear multiple of Pi, e.g. 2Pi or Pi/2 or something!
So you see, science and religion really are equal! Er, um…
Many people argue that redefining pi to be what we now call 2*pi would make more sense (i.e. ratio of circumference to diameter), as it often appears as 2*pi in equations etc.
It would make Euler’s equation less neat, though.
There’s already been a proposal to replace pi with tau = 2*pi. Hasn’t really caught on yet though.
Aye, that’s what I was referring to, but couldn’t remember what they wanted to call 2*pi.
Yes, unfortunately “tau” hand-written typically looks like “pi” with one leg so I think the “tau” idea is actually a really bad one because of the possible ambiguity. 2*pi is not the least bit ambiguous and is conventional.
Science and math are rife with suboptimal formalisms that would take more effort to undo than it takes to just deal with them. Salient xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/567/
Tau wouldn’t really help mathematics anyway, given the number of times that 2pi isn’t used (such as calculating the area of a circle).
I’m of the mindset that if you peel back the layers of the onion far enough, there is at the core of reason/science a nugget that could be called “faith”: namely, I think that Hume’s problem of induction is intractable, and that we are forced to effectively cut through it by simply granting the validity of inductive reasoning sui generis. I know this is a controversial notion (many solutions to the problem of induction have been offered by many very smart people, but I can’t say I’ve found a single one convincing) but the point is that even if you grant this point to the accomodationists, what have you really given up?
Nothing. If somebody wants to take the extreme nihilistic position of denying that inductive reasoning can ever be valid, they are welcome to do so — but I think then they have already lost the debate, for they can’t assert anything of any meaning either.
Now we can debate whether my dismissal of the many thoughtful solutions to the problem of induction is valid. But the point is that even if you grant this core of faith, you have given up nothing, because literally every idea in human discourse depends on this notion. Not a single human being really disputes it.
And I think the rest of reason and science follows cleanly from this single assumption. So the only way you can argue that “reason is just another form of faith” is to attack the validity of inductive reasoning, and well… good luck with that.
I once heard a joke that, in another galaxy, there are aliens who did not believe in induction. When the humans ambassadors reached them and saw how horribly they had suffered, making mistake after mistake after mistake, the humans asked the aliens, “Why?”
“Well, it never worked for us before, so….”
There are couple of vital differences between “believing in” induction and “having faith”. First off, Kant’s response to Hume is probably right, in that induction is simply a necessary foundation to know, well, anything — it is in a sense unavoidable if we are to have any notion of causation. It is a necessary belief to have to make sense of the world.
Which leads to the second point, which is that it really does seem hardwired into us, as even babies do induction.
And that’s related to the third point, which is that, unlike faith no one has to teach us the basics of induction. It’s not like a religious faith with specific, idiosyncratic creeds that have to be imparted — everyone does induction.
The basics, no; the nuances of when it is and isn’t correct, yes. When codified in the elementary curriculum, it’s called “science class”. =)
…there is at the core of reason/science a nugget that could be called “faith”: namely, I think that Hume’s problem of induction is intractable, and that we are forced to effectively cut through it by simply granting the validity of inductive reasoning sui generis. I know this is a controversial notion (many solutions to the problem of induction have been offered by many very smart people, but I can’t say I’ve found a single one convincing)…
Bayes’ Theorem is, I think, a sufficient response to the problem of induction. Bayes’ Theorem formally acknowledges that no amount of inductive reasoning on evidence can give you 100% certainty, but it CAN give you the probability that any given proposition demonstrated through inductive reasoning is actually true. For simple facts such as “gravitational acceleration near the surface of the earth is approximately 9.8 m/s” the probability is something like 0.9999999 with many more 9s. Once you give up the need for absolute certainty you give up the need for faith as well.
Also, Tulse is 100% (or should I say 99.99999%?) that we simply can’t help reasoning inductively. Wine tasters learn to distinguish vintages by tasting wine. Musicians learn to play music by trying to play music. People learn to drive by trying to drive. Even infants learn to move their limbs by trying to move their limbs. This is simply how the brain works.
Bayes’ theorem is only partially sufficient; you also need an assumption about the space of the probability distribution for the assigning of base probabilities.
Not really. You can assume any old distribution to start with and correct yourself as new information comes in. That’s essentially how scientific “revolutions” work: the Bayesian probability of your assumed distribution drops so low that you need to drop the assumption.
Not so much an assumption about what distribution as about the properties of the class of possible distributions.
Sorry I’m being thick, are you saying that under particular assumptions about the class of probable distributions Bayes’ theorem would seem like it was working (i.e. the probability is being updated according to the observed evidence) but actually isn’t (i.e. the updates to the probability are in the wrong direction as often or not)? Would it be possible to provide an example of such a mismatch between the assumption and reality (trivial will do — I’m not trying to argue, I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around it)?
The assumptions are needed to rule out incomputably random distributions, where an countably infinite amount of information is not necessarily going to distinguish which distribution you’re dealing with.
Essentially, you have to ditch insane pathological cases where there’s no chance to ever tell shit from shallots.
This usually translates as “don’t use the Cauchy distribution”, which is the exception to the standard result in many cases.
Oh, and what I was really trying to get at is that if induction really didn’t work then Bayes’ theorem would be able to tell you that by giving you nearly 50% odds for any event you care to investigate.
As I’ve suggested elsewhere before in your vicinity (or that of some other James Sweet), Hume’s problem of induction is not completely intractable in a philosophical sense. “Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity”, by Vitányi and Li (doi:10.1109/18.825807) indicates it can be partially resolved by taking a more basic axiom. (Vitányi and Li rely on the assumption that evidence has a pattern of recursively enumerable complexity; however, the proof extends if you instead assume a higher ordinal degree of Turing hypercomputation rather than a simple Church-Turing automaton.) Of course, in a theory of computation sense, the result is not merely intractable, but halting-problem hard; however, it still renders tractable in a philosophical sense using a greedy search among suggested inductions to see which is least likely to be wrong. The resulting algorithm has a non-trivial resemblance to science.
This, however, does not get around the need for a basic core of “faith” in the sense of a proposition taken without justification from philosophical priors. The basic assumption of Pattern may be taken as an axiom in Refutation just as easily as Assertion. (The catch being, the assumptions of refutation are even less palatable.) Furthermore, the underlying mathematical and logical axioms used for the theorem are also Axioms, taken without justification from priors.
Contrariwise, most of these assumptions are not exciting enough to be of interest. The choice of which axioms you choose for the construction of abstract mathematics is analogous to but less exciting than the choice of whether to discuss philosophy in English or German.
Of course, in a theory of computation sense, the result is not merely intractable, but halting-problem hard; however, it still renders tractable in a philosophical sense using a greedy search among suggested inductions to see which is least likely to be wrong. The resulting algorithm has a non-trivial resemblance to science.
I think this is what I was trying to say by my response to your comment above.
What is “recursively enumerable complexity” BTW? Sounds like a fractal structure whose dimensionality varies w/r/t scale in a predictable way?
Recursively enumerable is equivalent to “recognizable by a Turing machine” and to “generatable by a type-0 unrestricted Chomsky grammar”. It can be thought of as including problems so hard you can only tell if a given answer is acceptable, but not necessarily tell if a given answer isn’t.
Good introductions to computation theory include Sipser’s “Introduction to the Theory of Computation” and Linz’s “An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata”. An introductory discrete math course (covering basic logic, inductive proofs, and unexciting amounts of set theory) or equivalent should allow independent but painful wading through those.
Good introductions to computation theory include Sipser’s “Introduction to the Theory of Computation” and Linz’s “An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata”. An introductory discrete math course (covering basic logic, inductive proofs, and unexciting amounts of set theory) or equivalent should allow independent but painful wading through those.
Actually, I should have known recursively enumerable — I did take computation theory in undergrad. You lose the vocab fast when you don’t use it. The “complexity” part threw me but now I guess you meant Kolmogorov complexity. And I majored in mathematics so I have taken the intro to discrete math class (and a few others besides).
Incidentally, I never found the computation theory stuff particularly painful. It was one of my favorite classes. Maybe because of the fluffiness of an undergrad treatment, though. Unfortunately, I think I sold my text (undergrads: never sell your texts; they will be worth far more to you later than you would ever get selling them back) so your recommendations are appreciated…is either one (or perhaps another) especially well-suited to someone who’s been exposed to the basic ideas and just needs a refresher before digging deeper?
My impression was that Linz was better as an introduction, while Sipser included some more advanced stuff.
Working through a textbook without the help of a class is rather harder than working through in a class.
Kolmogorov sense is close enough to the computational complexity sense I intend to convey; I may be using the terminology in a sloppy fashion.
Working through a textbook without the help of a class is rather harder than working through in a class.
True, but I have always learned more effectively from reading than from human interaction for some bizarre reason. The class helps mostly to have the supporting structure of problem sets and exams to convince myself that I actually am learning something. Anyway, I’ll probably try to track down the Sipser book in a store and flip through it to make sure I don’t need something more elementary.
Thanks much for the recommendations and answer to my question above.
Of course it is, induction on the existence of exceptions shows directly that induction is inconsistent. You don’t need to be a philosopher to check for consistency.
If we think about it, induction is one (rather good) method of discovering hypotheses, as is all pattern detection. But there are others.
As we all know science use testing not to “prove” a hypothesis but to discover if it can be valid among others and not utterly wrong. And testing is, as opposed to induction, consistent, because you can test if it works.
To such naive testing you need to add methods for rapid testing, such as parsimony. And of course the most essential: an observation of convergence. Really all we need is finite time, then we have a finite number of hypotheses, and success. Note that we didn’t use induction previously but especially not here, just observation (and testing).
And we know we have convergence now: The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood.
If you don’t do testing, but use induction or bayesian probability or something similar, you let go of a standard of certainty (as in testing) and you are left with a method of learning.
Learning is nice, but it isn’t science by itself. It is contingent your observations, as we saw above on induction and exceptions.
So we haven’t done anything here that haven’t been done before. What then do we need to get science going?
It is predictive theories combined with testing that, evidently, robustly finds the generalizable laws we now know are out there. (Laws from symmetries and other physical properties, not from a “Principle of Uniformity of Nature”.)
The difference being that secular reason reasons from premises that can be supported with evidence, while the “reason” involved in theology starts from premises that are assumed true without evidence, or just pulled from the most convenient orifice of the “reasoner.”
Though I don’t care for accommodationism myself, have we really thought this stance through. I mean how do hard core theists become atheists or agnostics. Surely it’s not a cold turkey process. I have never been a theists myself so I don’t now how the road to reality works with theist but it seems to me that it would be a long drawn out process.
Something like ‘well this bit of the bible can’t be true so maybe it’s a metaphor’ then they find another bit that’s unbelievable and so on. Until after a couple of years thinking rationally they give up the myths altogether. With the accommodationists already occupying the middle ground then the first step away from the literal reading of the bible might not be too daunting.
I still find the accommodationist stance untenable but are we not doing away with the ‘useful idiots’ so to speak.
One of the problems is that we can’t use our strongest arguments against religion without also targeting the moderate forms of religion. For example, moderate believers still base some of their beliefs on sources that we have good reasons to consider unreliable, such as scripture, revelation and personal experience. This is not conceptually different from what fundamentalists do, just possibly to a lesser degree. There is no way to challenge the reliability of these sources in such a way that it only affects fundamentalists.
Another factor why atheists can’t leave accommodationists alone, is because they don’t tend to leave atheists alone. Many appear to love to portray atheists as crude or dogmatic and as extremists. Sometimes it seems part of a deliberate strategy to make it seem like they are the “reasonable middle”. Maybe that is useful to them, and possibly even for converting some Christians, but there is no reason why we shouldn’t defend ourselves from such unfair character attacks.
Perhaps we can’t use our strongest arguments against religion without also targeting the moderate forms; on the other hand, it’s also possible that they can be phrased so as to be primarily targeted on the immoderate forms of religion, though they may deal lesser “splash damage” to the moderates.
As to the mis-portrayals by accommodationists on atheists, perhaps we might effectively counter those by insisting that if the accommodationists have any acceptance for science, they should back the portrayals with sociological studies from statistically representative samples of the population rather than cherry-picked instances. This, of course, is an underhanded tactic, in that such studies remain at present relatively few, and with significant limitations.
Contrariwise, atheists should be aware that some of the legitimate results of the few studies out there are less than perfectly flattering of atheists. For example, the ~2004 Hunsberger/Altemeyer study would seem to imply that on at least one plausible measure, activist atheists are indeed more dogmatic than inactive or moderately active believers (who are a bit over half of christians)… but a bit less so than regular 3-4 times monthly churchgoers, and much less than religious fundamentalists.
Nohow, most mathematicians tend to be fairly dogmatic about “1+1=2” being a theorem.
In my experience, if you take care to target your attacks only at immoderate forms of religion, members of the moderate forms will still interpret it as an attack on them and will rush to the defense of the immoderates they claim to have so little in common with.
I can’t speak for anyone else but my main reactions to accomodationists is not a criticism of their engagement with theists but rather a reaction to the standard method of this engagement which seems to be to position themselves as ‘moderate’. In doing so they almost inevitably criticize outspoken atheists (like Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens) as being extremists who are as bad as the worst religious fundamentalists.
Those accomodationists that seek common ground with the religious over a love of truth or religious freedom don’t have much to worry about from the gnus. Those whose preferred common ground is the hatred of outspoken atheism are another matter.
Thanks Deen and Sigmund.
I totally agree with both your posts as I’ve attacked their fallacious arguments myself many times, they are the very definition of a double edged sword. I’m also happy with the progress the new atheists (which I call myself despite being an old atheist,) have made in such a short time. Though now I think we are playing a numbers game and we simply need more freethinkers as we can see the ‘Arab spring’ could easily turn into a ‘muslin winter’ by using the democratic process. I’m just not sure if the same strategy can continue to make inroads with people who have hardcore beliefs (I hope I’m wrong.) I will never stop arguing for truth over myths but will it be a successful in the long term.
Generally agree with you, although I think it is incorrect to suggest that there isn’t truth in various myths – Prometheus and Sisyphus for two examples among many.
I like Greek myths better than the boring Christian ones so much more fun.
Especially if you get translations that haven’t been sanitized for those with delicate sensibilities.
I don’t know about fun, although being tortured for an eternity for eating some shellfish is definitely not my idea of it. But I will certainly agree that the Greek myths are much better for being broader and deeper. Although some authors [Steinbeck – East of Eden; Milton – Paradise Lost; among many others] seem to have done a passable job in finding some worthwhile symbolism in the Christian ones.
What truths would those be? Besides, whatever they are, those truths don’t come from the myths, they come from somewhere else. The myths only serve as an illustration of them.
Besides, whatever they are, those truths don’t come from the myths, they come from somewhere else. The myths only serve as an illustration of them.
Yes, I would agree that it is quite true that the myths “serve as an illustration of various truths”, but I think you’re missing the point. While one might reasonably argue that the truth in those myths first came out of the human psyche sometime during our evolution from beast to human it seems reasonable to assume that they first saw the light of day in the myths themselves. The “somewhere else” that you refer to seems to be, apparently, the great many modern interpretations that derive from those more ancient sources.
As for the truths themselves, those associated with, for example, Prometheus include:
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus”. This is a reference to the novel’s themes of the over-reaching of modern man into dangerous areas of knowledge.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound rewrites the lost play of Aeschylus so that Prometheus does not submit to Zeus (Shelley’s Jupiter), but supplants him instead in a triumph of the human heart and intellect over tyrannical religion. Lord Byron’s poem “Prometheus” also portrays the Titan as unrepentant. For the Romantics, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted all forms of institutional tyranny epitomized by Zeus — church, monarch, and patriarch. They drew comparisons between Prometheus and the spirit of the French Revolution, Christ, Milton’s Satan, and the divinely inspired poet or artist.
Prometheus Books, a publishing company for scientific, educational, and popular books, especially those relating to secular humanism or scientific skepticism, takes its name from the myth.
Ayn Rand uses Prometheus (as well as other characters from Greek mythology) as metaphors of her individualist ideology in Atlas Shrugged and Anthem.
The myth of Sisyphus seems to have similar value, although maybe not quite as many modern interpretations and uses.
Huh? On what basis is that a reasonable assumption? You can’t possibly mean that there weren’t any precursors to the Prometheus story. You can’t also seriously mean that nobody ever realized that what you do may have unexpected consequences, or defying the powers that be may get you into trouble (or whatever you think the main message of the Prometheus myth is), before someone wrote Prometheus. So what could you possibly mean?
Of course that’s not what I refer to. What I mean is that the lessons that can be taken from these classics can be learned simply by observing life around you. Where did you think the authors of these stories got those ideas from in the first place? Stories are just a successful means to transmit these lessons to others, but they are not the origins of those lessons.
Deen said:
“it seems reasonable to assume that they first saw the light of day in the myths themselves.” Huh? On what basis is that a reasonable assumption? …. So what could you possibly mean?
Well, sort of what I had in mind there was the birth of the idea, the meme; an encapsulation of what I called a manifestation of the “human psyche” and what you called “observing life around you”. But until those observations, those feelings and perceptions are put into a transmittable form they aren’t part of the storehouse, part of the inheritance of humanity, and don’t provide any lasting benefits.
It seems that the history of the evolution of religion is quite complex and intricate and stretches back over some 100,000 to 300,000 years, at least. And I may have been guilty to some extent in using the word “myth” in some ambiguous ways, although I’m not sure what a reasonable alternative is except to somehow qualify the word with “literal” or “figurative”. But my intent there was also to refer to the literal interpretations which I think preceded, by a very long time, the figurative ones. I think you would probably agree that the latter is the far more intricate and convoluted concept – which far too many even today seem to have some difficulty wrapping their minds around – and is likely to have followed the former, possibly in tandem with the development of language. Otherwise, it is a little hard to see how anyone is going to countenance sacrificing their children to fictional stories.
Of course that’s not what I refer to. What I mean is that the lessons that can be taken from these classics can be learned simply by observing life around you.
That some people might be able to learn the lessons of life “simply by observing life around” them doesn’t mean there isn’t quite a bit of value in learning from the experiences – and mistakes – of others; sort of a case of “standing on the shoulders of giants”. Otherwise there would appear to be no justification for all of the literature courses in all of our institutions of learning and for the books which are the subject matter for them.
Stories are just a successful means to transmit these lessons to others, but they are not the origins of those lessons.
Certainly agree with the first part – seems that many of the great works of literature – Homer’s Iliad for example, I think – existed only as oral records for a long time before being written down; probably a fairly common process. But regardless of the origins of them – intricately related to the development of religion and the evolution of consciousness by several accounts and theories, my point or argument is still that there is some significant value in them.
“my point or argument is still that there is some significant value in them.”
Value yes, just not to the extent that you seem to think there is. Certainly no more than can be found in any other work of equivalent age.
Microraptor said:
Value yes, just not to the extent that you seem to think there is. Certainly no more than can be found in any other work of equivalent age.
Quite possibly, but all pretty subjective, dependent on circumstances, and not easily, if at all, quantifiable. Unfortunately or not we don’t have any scales that can measure the relative “weight” of, say, the myth of Prometheus [800 BC] against that of Archimedes’ analysis of levers [300 BC]. And, in any case, it is not always the magnitude of an object’s “weight” that is the deciding factor – “for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of the horse the nation was lost”; frequently it can be a question of how much leverage it provides and where.
I have serious doubts that lack of familiarity with ancient texts is going to cause a person to suffer a great loss anywhere other than on Jeopardy without a great deal of contrivance, your attempts to quote Ben Franklin out of context notwithstanding.
Microraptor said:
I have serious doubts that lack of familiarity with ancient texts is going to cause a person to suffer a great loss anywhere other than on Jeopardy without a great deal of contrivance, your attempts to quote Ben Franklin out of context notwithstanding.
Thanks – I wondered where that quote came from and didn’t bother to search for it at the time I used it.
But I quite agree that, for example, knowing about Prometheus is not likely to “cause a person to suffer a great loss” during daily life and I certainly wasn’t arguing that was the case. However, I would argue that, in general, the fact that so many people think that the Bible is literally true in whole or in part is due, in no small way, to a complete and virtually total ignorance of the mythology and the religions of the past. Maybe if such knowledge was more of a common currency then the religious might be more circumspect about insisting on the literal interpretations of any particular myth.
How useful to atheists are these ‘useful idiot’ theists? Most of them believe that atheists are morally deficient & nearly all of them will not publicly condemn the harm caused by their own & other strands of theism. The entire spectrum of theists must be attacked at every opportunity.
Agreed except for the stepping stone bit on the way to atheism or being agnostic.
Does Practical Theology include Experimental Theology? For example this might involve designing experiments to decide between candidate gods. Group A blasphemes against Yahweh, group B against Zeus, group C against Quetzalcoatl, group D against all of them and group E against none of them (just random shouting). See which group(s) get(s) fried with lightning bolts.
Well, technically speaking, religious people already do these sorts of experiments all the time against Gods of OTHER religions.
Because nothing happens to them they conclude that those other religions must be false!
Actually church steeples get hit by lightning fairly frequently. For some reason the priests/pastors involved don’t draw any conclusions from this. Well, only occasionally, anyway.
One conclusion was, iirc, don’t store gunpowder inside a church — or, if you do, fit a lightning conductor.
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Experimental Theology mainly deals with Dust nowadays, though. Before that, we had anbaric power, and the like.
True story: I spent a year studying ancient languages at the University of Edinburgh. It so happens that those classes were then taught at New College, essentially the divinity school of the University. Someone must have assumed that since I liked ancient Semitic languages, I wanted to be a minister, and was enrolled in a class called “Practical Theology.” It was fairly horrifying. That class was, essentially, fieldwork for clergy. How do you deal with ‘real life’ situations X, Y, and Z? I remember very little, except they all seemed amused by the aphorism that “what a minister fears most is an engaged laity.” I don’t know if that’s still what Practical Theology means, but thankfully, I was only in for one class when I loudly complained that I merely wanted to study Ugaritic and was transferred out, thank non-existent heaven.
Nice. I’d love to have a context where I could say “I only want to study Ugaritic”.
Mind you, the guy in the office next door is into that sort of thing, so I ended up seeing which ancient languages have TeX/LaTeX character sets for them. The answer was loads of them.
Surely that’s Unicode support in TeX/LaTeX, rather than TeX/LaTeX character sets specifically…?
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Practical Theology is another word for evangeligical missionaries
i.e. how to get people to close their minds and open their mouths so you can ram your god down their throats
I’m confused. If religion says that they are but one of many forms of understanding how can they then demand that their flock have total obedience to the word of god and resistance to all temptation? It seems that the only way to resist temptation is to close their minds to any logical understanding of the real world under their feet. They seem to be trapped!
And even the ones that aren’t as obviously authoritarian about it still like to think that their way of knowing is preferable over all the others. But they can never really give you a reason why.
It can get really funny if you try asking someone making one of those arguments why they’re a Christian and not a Muslim or Hindu.
I fail to see how this saves theology from the dustbin. If there are multiple kinds of reasoning, I can still rack and stack them in terms of utility. When I do that, the religious kind of reasoning still comes out on the bottom of the list.
Religion does not become more useful merely because one is conceptually able to draw a Venn diagram circle which encompasses it and science. Playing word and categorization games won’t improve the properties of religion which make it a poor source of knowledge.
“I’m starting to realize that one of the tactics accommodationists use to comport science and faith is to simply denigrate science by pretending it’s a form of faith, or no different from faith in how it investigates the world.
That’s exactly right. In addition to research, I teach part time at the local community college. A close colleague in the anthropology dept. has this argument with me all the time and that’s exactly what he does – compares science to faith.
Specifically, he says that a few “articles of faith” are fundamental to science. Off the top of my head (I don’t remember them all but you’ll get the idea):
1) The universe is measurable
2) What measurements we make we assume hold true in the entire universe
3) Others I can’t remember.
All his point manages to convey is that we are required to use inductive reasoning a lot. So what? It is still completely different from faith for all of the reasons we routinely discuss. Requirement of evidence, ability to change views in light of new evidence, etc.
The question that more of us need to ask in these situations is: “Are you telling me you don’t make those assumptions as part of your own worldview? Then how do you know X?”
Atheistic worldviews (besides utter nihilism) typically do rest on some philosophical assumptions but I’d argue that these are a strict subset of the assumptions required for any reasonable Christian worldview (assuming there is such a thing). We need to challenge this line of argument with something like: “What is it that we assume that you don’t also assume?”
Well, but that plays into the comparison they’re making. “Because science assumes things too, science is like faith.”
But I think what you’re getting at is that we need to show something like what James Sweet said above:
“I know this is a controversial notion (many solutions to the problem of induction have been offered by many very smart people, but I can’t say I’ve found a single one convincing) but the point is that even if you grant this point to the accomodationists, what have you really given up?
Nothing. If somebody wants to take the extreme nihilistic position of denying that inductive reasoning can ever be valid, they are welcome to do so — but I think then they have already lost the debate, for they can’t assert anything of any meaning either.
Yes, I think I may have gotten on that groove as a result of James’ post. The crux of my point, though is the “strict” part of “strict subset.” That is, atheists don’t assume all the things that theists do but theists make all the same assumptions that atheists do.
The case you make is that the shared assumptions are necessary to any worldview (substitute an appropriate and less squicky-making noun as desired), but that theists have a set of assumptions over and beyond the necessary ones. That would make the atheistic case strictly stronger (easier to defend) than the theistic one.
This is by no means an assumption of science. It is widely recognized, for example, that the observable universe is not the same as “the universe”, and that due to expansion there are parts which can in principle never access through any means.
Also not true, or at least not necessary for science. There are various cosmological accounts that argue the laws of physics may vary in different locations in the universe, and certainly most multiverse concepts presume that physical laws can change across the various universes.
A pedantic way of putting it is that those are only approximate expressions, and inferences of more basic assumptions rather than assumptions themselves.
If “measurable” is instead more exactly phrased “describable by mathematics”, it’s pretty close to an actual assumption, although that’s leaving out some nuance about the type of mathematics. Science is thus also dependent on Mathematics’ fundamentals of faith — the ZF axioms being the current gold standard.
Perhaps, although one could then argue that “describable by mathematics” is just “describable”, period. In which case we get back to Kant, and what is essentially a priori necessary to make sense of the world.
…er, not quite, due to those nuances I left out of that about the type of math.
However, you can at the least insist that if someone rejects the universe as describable by mathematics, they not attempt to describe it using anything describable by mathematics. Since language is one of the things that can be shown to be so describable, this boils down to “shut up and go sit in the corner”.
Right, that’s pretty much my point – anything that is describable is, essentially, describable by math.
Although would you agree that not everything that exists is describable by math? I always like to trot out an aphorism by Jacob Bronowski [The Ascent of Man] that mathematics is the most colossal metaphor imaginable, but I expect that that is a bit of [forgivable] hyperbole; it is no doubt a very powerful tool, but in that fact it still has its inherent limitations.
No, I’d say it’s much more the other way around: not everything that mathematics describes actually exists. The main limits on mathematical description are of efficiency, not of effectiveness.
BTW, “The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination” seems to be where Bronowski detailed that view. A very fast skim of some parts available via Google Books leads me to conclude I would disagree with several premises and the resultant conclusions.
abb3w said:
No, I’d say it’s much more the other way around: not everything that mathematics describes actually exists. The main limits on mathematical description are of efficiency, not of effectiveness.
So, we have at least 4 portions of a set: that which exists and is describable by math; that which exists and is not describable by math; and that which is describable by math and does not exist. And, rounding out the combinations I think, that which is not describable by math and does not exist. [Probably requiring some wisdom to know the differences, not to mention deciding which phenomena might fall in which classification.] But complete? A reasonable summary?
Thanks for the reference to “The Origins of Knowledge” – will look into it.
#2 is not an assumption, it is a hypothesis that we regularly test as a matter of course when doing other experiments. For example, spectra from distant stars are consistent with QM predictions – they have spectral lines, in the predicted “correct” wavelengths, etc… which leads us to believe QM holds thousands and millions of light-years away.
Or the much more mundane: you do an experiment. I do the same experiment 4,000 miles away. We get the same result, leading us to conclude that some measure of universality holds.
I think there are only two fundamental assumptions of science:
1. The behaviour of the universe is orderly – it is not capricious, chaotic, or spontaneous. This is not only essential to science but to human reason. We wouldn’t be able to function if this assumption wasn’t true.
2. Every event can be explained by causal laws – every natural event has an explanation that may be eventually discovered by intelligent and diligent effort.
Your number 2 is essentially the principle of sufficient reason, which is instrumental to a lot of first-cause arguments for God’s existence. Atheists do routinely argue that it doesn’t seem to be the case, i.e. an atom dropping to a lower energy state doesn’t seem (always) to be caused by anything in particular. (Theists typically respond by pointing out that hidden variables theories haven’t been conclusively ruled out by modern physics.)
I think it comes down to what you mean by “explanation,” but by itself number 2 is arguable (and frequently argued about).
Wouldn’t a scientific approach have to assume, at least in theory, that all events have a cause? Sub-atomic events might look “uncaused,” but this could simply be a function of our lack of a complete understanding of the process. It could even be that our biology prevents us from ever fully understanding it.
As for the principle of sufficient reason as a basis for a first-cause argument, we don’t have any control over the abuses theology inflicts on science. Theists continually confuse reasons (i.e. intentions) with causes when attempting to explain events.
Nope.
It could be, but it isn’t necessarily the case. The consensus opinion among physicists is that they really are uncaused, although the idea you raised has not been eliminated as a possibility.
Leaving aside sub-atomic physics for the moment, can you give me an example of an event that is uncaused?
That is a completely useless question.
This is a completely useless comment.
If you had followed the exchange above, I suggested that a basic assumption of science is that every event can be explained by causal laws.
Truthspeaker said “nope,” so I asked for a counter example. Why is that useless?
Actually, I’ve been following your exchange with truthseeker from the start of the thread, and the reason it’s useless is because where or not truthseeker can come up with any examples has absolutely zilch to do with his point, you’re just moving the goalposts.
I suggested that a basic assumption of science is that every event can be explained by causal laws. Truthspeaker said “nope,” so I asked for a counter example.
Two questions:
1. How is “nope” a “point”? It’s all that truthspeaker has said in response to my suggestion.
2. Why is asking for an example “moving the goalposts”?
Well according to the Wiki, Practical theology is the practical application of theology to everyday life. Richard Osmer explains that the four key questions and tasks in practical theology are:
What is going on? (descriptive-empirical task)
Why is this going on? (interpretative task)
What ought to be going on? (normative task)
How might we respond? (pragmatic task)[1]
In other words, as a ‘minister’ how to develop your flock bamboozling skills, or as an ‘academic’, how to strengthen your job retention skills.
Or, as a philosopher or writer, how to get your hands on some fat wads of Templeton cash as a reward for sucking up to Jesus.
As practical as it is intellectually dishonest.
To disparage reason and reduce it to the status of faith is a constant theme of the pious approach. They come at it in a variety of ways, but they all seem to understand that reason is the enemy. So long as reason isn’t defined and defended in the general culture, religion can and will continue on its merry way.
Wikipedia states Goodwin’s Law as: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
There needs to be an analogous law for perverse reference to Galileo. The last letter at the NYT site equates Galileo with global warming deniers.
I would equate “practical theology” with “practical astrology” (my own term) Astrology is the study of how the positions/motions of the stars, moon and planets affect us as individuals. But “practical astrology” is when we actually read our daily horoscope to find out whether or not we’re going to have a good day, average day or a day to stay in bed. In other words, another way to waste one’s time.
Cheers!
“At any rate, I’m starting to realize that one of the tactics accommodationists use to comport science and faith is to simply denigrate science by pretending it’s a form of faith….”
That is certainly a ploy they use. So is the use of the term world-view, which implies that science or secularism is one of a set of equal, competing belief-systems that are based on a prejudiced set of assumptions.
At the same time I’ve also observed that there seem to be folks who can’t conceive of a non-religious perspective. These are the folks who think atheists are mad at god, and actually think champions of science and rationalism have faith in the prophets of science.
To the extent, therefore, that accomodationists are actually trying to prevent a breakdown between science and religion, they are, in fact, undermining their own efforts by reinforcing literalist opinions of science.
The second letter is from a theology graduate student, one of those misguided souls—I use the word metaphorically—who tries to drag science down to the level of religion by claiming that these are both reason-based ways of investigating the world
Definitely seems to be a common trope or meme within the religious mind, championed by those from top to bottom of the hierarchy. For example here is Edward Feser from his The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism [which it most certainly is not, although he does have a few good points, but it is mostly an exercise in self-delusion]:
Now of course Christianity does not teach that every believer must be able to make some fancy philosophical case for the existence of God, the resurrection of Christ, and all the rest. Most people probably couldn’t even understand the arguments. Their belief is based on what they have been taught [indoctrinated into] by some authority – the Church, or theologians or philosophers, say – in the sense that it is based on faith rather than reason. …. Most people who believe that E=mc^2, and who believe almost any other widely known and generally accepted scientific proposition, do so on the basis of faith in exactly the sense in question here. [No, they don’t; that proposition undergirds everything from atomic bombs to nuclear energy, all tangible results – not some entirely speculative Easter-Bunny crap; serious “category error”] They believe it, in other words, on the authority of those from whom they learned it. Everyone acknowledges that this is perfectly legitimate; indeed, there is no way we could know much of interest at all if we weren’t able to appeal to various authorities. But if this is legitimate in other aspects of life, there is nothing per se wrong with it in religion. [pgs 157-158]
Horse-feathers; crap; not even wrong; disingenuous if not fraudulent. Betrays an incredible and mind-boggling ignorance of the processes of and bases for science. Entirely different kettles of fish. In the case of science there are whole mountains of facts, figures, and empirical results with tangible benefits which can be, and have been, corroborated by an army of researchers; while in the case of theology there is a bunch of wild and unsupported conjectures and hypotheses – despite Feser’s insistence that what he was providing was a “metaphysical demonstration” on par with that of the Pythagorean Theorem and not some not “probabilistic empirical theorizing” – with not a verifiable fact in a shipload of ordure.
Quibble: while E=mc^2 underpins the atomic bomb, Feser’s point is that most people don’t know or understand the reasoning which shows how you get from the equation to H-bombs, and why it isn’t E=(0.7)mc^2 or E=mc^3 instead.
That said, Feser is falsely equating lazy trust with blind trust (and neither of which I would call “faith”). The fundamental difference is that science is potentially willing to show how to go step by step down the trail of reasoning and let you look at each detail, without relying purely on authority at any particular step. Which was one of the points of the PBS miniseries “The Ring Of Truth” back in the 1980s — following some of that trail. As I recall, they didn’t actually manage to do an E=mc^2 before-and-after weighing; they did, however, look into what would be needed. And checking Google, it turns out that almost thirty years later someone came up with an experiment to do it.
Tragically, unlike Cosmos, the Ring Of Truth is not currently available on DVD or Hulu. =(
That said, Feser is falsely equating lazy trust with blind trust (and neither of which I would call “faith”). The fundamental difference is that science is potentially willing to show how to go step by step down the trail of reasoning and let you look at each detail, without relying purely on authority at any particular step.
That distinction between blind and lazy trust is probably relevant and descriptive, at least in many cases, and I quite agree about the “step by step down the trail of reasoning” – adding the feedback of tangible results. Although Feser’s “faith in exactly the sense in question here” seems to go quite a bit further in equating blind faith in religious dogmata with, as you put it, “lazy trust” in various “scientific propositions” where there is not a shred of evidence to justify the former but mountains of it in the latter case which seems quite a bit more than just lazy trust.
You’re probably right about that documentary no longer being available, unfortunately, although I see that the companion book is still available from Amazon and probably worth taking a look for the next time I’m through a library.
Well, yeah, but even so there’s a big difference. In the case of relativity you can just point out the design decisions in a GPS that wouldn’t make sense if relativity wasn’t true and then demonstrate that the GPS works. That is, we can empirically test E=mc^2 regardless of whether we understand it from first principles.
So it’s not merely human authority. Actual evidence can be adduced for the truth of relativity. Still waiting on actual empirical evidence for God, Jesus, or the resurrection.
This is only a test for someone who can understand (or at least come to understand) the design of a GPS. Also, the design of the GPS deals more with the distortion of time with gravity; while the theory of general relativity relates the two, someone would have to understand how this relates to E=mc^2.
Again, most people don’t know or understand the reasoning from how to get from “GPS works” to “E does equal mc^2”. They just take it on lazy trust.
But if they were to go to university to learn the reasoning, they would get the same answer wherever they went, and they would eventually have the tools to verify it for themselves. The same certainly can’t be said of theology.
Practical Spidermanology: is there anything actually useful we can learn from studying Spiderman?
Well, I think that there’s something about a correlation between power and responsibility.
Unless you’re talking about the movies, where the correlation appears to be between power and angst.
Practical Batmanology