I’ve read the whole thing and it’s not worth it. Most of the articles, save that by Victor Stenger, are accommodationist or (in the case of the cringe-making Alain de Botton) the usual atheists-should-have-the-trappings-of-faith tripe. Stenger’s article, “”God is a testable hypothesis,” is very good, but overlaps substantially with his piece recently published on HuffPo, so you might not need to read it again. I do like his view (which I agree with, but P.Z. and others do not) that if you think God interacts with the real world, then his/her actions, at least, become a testable hypothesis.
Save for Stenger’s piece, the collection is pretty mushy and lame. If you want all the articles together, email me, as I have a file that someone sent me; but you can also register at New Scientist for free and read the issue there.
I was going to mention it but I thought pretty much the same as you that it was not very enlightening, and I was worried it might not do your BP much good!
I found the first article to be particularly lame. Short version: Children are inclined to see causal explanations for things that happen, so it’s perfectly natural for adults to seek religion.
Whatever happened to “when I became a man, I put away childish things”?
It is a relevant point as to the psychology involved. This is one of the things that makes having a small child fascinating: seeing every human cognitive bias at its fullest …
Basically I agree that religion is a relic of childhood’s belief system. When you’re small a lot of things have to be taken as it is, without explanation, otherwise you wouldn’t function well.
Later on we find it is not necessarily so, that’s what the article says about tooth-fairy and santa. Then it goes astray when it says adult retake religion later.
For most people taking religion is not a choice, it is force-fed by their parents, or as a prerequisite for making a living. The latter explained correctly when mentioned that co-religionists readily accept each other better. So religion is a kind of social-club membership required to do business with others.
This is very clearly defined even nowadays, among moslems and fundies xtians. It is also consistent with the statement that religionists hate atheist mostly because of trustworthiness (“in atheist we distrust”).
Agree with Jerry, that except for Stenger’s, the articles are bad. Some of the ideas are there, but the writers always take the wrong conclusion, or ignore certain facts. Dishonesty is all around.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to understand the child belief systems, relationship to adult life, sociological issues of religion as the binding mechanism for non-kins (creation of societies). The neurological aspects of concept-of-god. And the impact of such ideas in history of mankind.
Not that because there is a bearded (or non-bearded) deity up there who knows everything, but the impact of that idea to humanity as we know it now, in the past and in the future.
Study of religions is important not because their claims are (remotely) true, but because it was and is still a strong influence to a really lots of people. Like understanding the behavior of a malaria vector.
I was pretty disappointed with this issue. I am currently subscribed to their magazine as a way of keeping track with notorious scientific things going on in the world outside my field…
But this time it just made me want to unsuscribe…
I know it would be a slippery slope, but I just hope that the next issue talks about the “science of ghosts and the paranormal”
I’d like a copy of the issue, but I’m stupid and honestly can’t find how to email you. I’m sorry…
*hangs head in shame and slowly ambles out*
open this link: https://encrypted.google.com/
copy/paste (or type) exactly this into the search field: “jerry coyne” email
click the ‘search’ button & look inside the first search result
I’ve done the work for you HERE 🙂
I think Jerry should write an article titled:
“Are there any deists left in the world?”
Stenger’s point about God interacting with the world is an important one because virtually every religious person on the planet is a (mono)theist. Ergo, God MUST interact with the earth and its human inhabitants and lo and behold, there is no trace of his hand in anything. In other words, I find it distracting to even contenance deists because no one really believes it. Deism then is an empty claim–there is no evidence of his existence in the past or present nor can there be in the future because he would violate his non-intervention repose, making everyone de facto theists.
The few deists I know – liberal Christians – come from a strong committment to churches. Their deism is a way to keep the best parts of Christianity (humanism, basicially and its consequential social commitment) without quite letting go of religion (in some very abstract sense). It would be too much trouble to go right through their beliefs and decide which to keep and which to throw out, so it’s just conservation (in the lay sense) of theological energy.
I do like his view (which I agree with, but P.Z. and others do not) that if you think God interacts with the real world, then his/her actions, at least, become a testable hypothesis.
This is also essentially the position of Richard Dawkins.
I’m not sure if that’s true. Richard was on the Coyne/Stenger end of the axis, but said that he’s CONSIDERING moving toward the PZ end a bit. I don’t think there’s been a definitive statement by him.
As I recall, in the “God Delusion”, Dr. Dawkins’ position was that he considered the existence of god a scientific question which should be approached as any other scientific question. Given that he saw no evidence for the existence of god, his conclusion was that god did not exist, although he would reconsider if such evidence actually came to light. As I recall, he wasn’t too specific as to what might constitute such evidence.
Looking for God with a scientific approach is like looking for light with a flashlight. Literally.
Science = God??
I had always supposed that it was the standard position among atheists that the notion of God was meaningless and thus that therefore the idea of testing claims for His existence was meaningless too. I was quite surprised by the fuss people made about what PZ and Zara were saying – I just thought they were articulating the standard atheist position. It may be a generation thing as I was brought up on the writings of Carnap, Neurath and Ayer.
Perhaps I’m the one misunderstanding the issue, but I think the claim is not that god’s alleged interactions with our physical world are untestable. If these phenomena or events (whatever they may be) are real, then of course we can observe/test them.
The issue is what conclusions can be drawn therefrom. Is the best, most parsimonious explanation for those phenomena an anthropomorphic, theistic god? I think what P. Z. and others (me, too) claim is only that such an explanation will never be the best explanation, for a variety of reasons.
But of course I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth (least of all P. Z.’s). Apologies if I’ve misunderstood.
Thought I understand where you, PZ and Steve Sara are coming from with this, why bother? If the holy books and religions make testable claims then so much the better for showing these claims to be false.
Saying you still wouldn’t accept that there was a supernatural explanation, while reasonable would simply leave the atheist position exposed to even more claims that it is just as fundamental as the religious claims. We are dealing with people who have a simplistic view of the world, why bother taking an unnecessary extra step?
Well, I don’t think I was advocating an extra step so much as I was trying to clarify this matter of “testability.”
I don’t think anyone says religious claims just can’t be tested, period. Of course they can, and the fact that so many of them have been shown to be false is a large part of why many atheists are atheists.
Insofar as a theist makes an actual claim, it is probably testable. The point is that we can also do some ruling out of certain possibilities (or impossibilities, I guess) from a logical standpoint.
“…we can also do…”
I suppose that would be the “extra” step to which you refer.
Hmm. Additional, sure. Superfluous, I don’t think so.
The claims of some religions are testable, including the claims of early Christianity. But the claim that a supernatural intelligent being outside time and space and space can influence physics is simply not testable. Even if someone were proved to be able to turn water into wine by saying magic words, how could we distinguish the hypothesis that this was the result of divine intervention from the hypothesis that there is something in physics that we do not yet understand?
It is testable.
“Is what we see a natural evolution if the laws are constant?”
The being means laws are flexible at its whim. If what we see is consistent with the laws not changing, then the being does not exist, or, at worst, hasn’t done anything.
No, there is no way of distinguishing between a supernatural claim and a claim that we simply do not understand what the mechanism for something is. If, for instance, my intercessory prayer worked that would be an interesting fact but it would not follow that a god interceded on my behalf. It would be a puzzle but you don’t solve a puzzle by inventing any old rubbish.
I would have to disagree with this claim. For instance, if evidence surfaced that, in fact, the Sun stood still in the sky for a day, IMHO, we would have to give credence to the existence of some sort of supernatural being as the likelihood that a natural explanation could exist that would both cause the earth to stop spinning and cease revolving around the Sun with not of the physically predicted consequences occurring is effectively 0.
Well it depends on precisely what you mean. The vikings knew light traveled faster then sound and they knew that when you strike and anvil hard with a hammer you get sparks and a big bang. So, as far as they knew, thunder and lightening could have been caused by an 800 ft high guy with a hammer and an anvil. The could even calculate how far away he was. This was testable and turned out to be wrong.
Now what would I say if the sun stood still for a day. Well first the earth can’t just stop revolving for a day, not without us and all the surface water flying off into space, so your story will have to be fleshed out a bit. But even if I thought that the events must be caused by some super intelligence, it still isn’t evidence for the theologian’s God, maybe it would be evidence for some sort of super-Thor but it would be no more than that.
“Well first the earth can’t just stop revolving for a day, not without us and all the surface water flying off into space”
There’s this thing called gravity, you might want to look into it.
So what are you assuming here?
If I’m taking your comment correctly, I don’t think gravity is as strong as you think it is.
One of the laws of motion says that an object in motion stays in motion unless an outside force acts on it (and the same is true for an object at rest).
Think about when you’re in a car. While you’re sitting in a moving vehicle, it doesn’t seem much at all like you’re moving. But stopping the car proves that you are moving, and this is why seatbelts are needed. If you’re in the front, not wearing a seatbelt, and you get into a severe accident, you could very well go flying through the windshield.
It’s the same concept with the earth. We may not feel like it, but we are, in fact, rotating and revolving at the same speed the earth is. We just don’t feel it because we’re on the earth (in the way we don’t feel like we’re moving in a car, but we are).
If the earth suddenly just stopped… think of gravity like that windshield. Yeah, you *think* it should protect you, but it won’t. Every single animal (humans included), human-made object, probably most plants and trees, and any loose inanimate object would go flying into space at the speed (or faster?) that the earth was revolving around the sun *and rotating on its axis*. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if *everything* on earth, even mountains, went flying.
The earth can’t just stop moving. It would *not* be good.
I agree with your point that the “supernatural” and the “not yet understood” look identical, which is the meat of the P. Z./Zara claim.
But this claim doesn’t necessarily entail untestability, as I tried to elucidate above.
Theist’s claim: Prayer is an effective method for achieving an objective.
Well, that can certainly be tested. The issue is what conclusions can be drawn from the results.
The point is not that the claims look identical – the claim that something has supernatural origins is incoherent whereas the claim that I don’t understand something is perfectly coherent.
Yes, granted, agreed, all that.
Perhaps I should’ve avoided the (marginally) poetic phraseology.
What I meant was that if a theist points to something and says “that there is supernatural”, I’d respond (referring to the very same thing) “no, we just don’t know how it works yet.”
That’s what I meant by “identical.”
The claim “a supernatural intelligent being outside time and space can influence physics” is not consistent with what we know about intelligent beings — and how ‘beings’ come to be and how they get intelligent. I think this REALLY ups the burden of proof on the claim.
Qhat we do or do not know about consciousness is irrelevant. The theologian’s claim that God is outside space and time is a very strong claim. It is more than the claim that God is outside the known universe is the way that some other member of a multiverse might be. God is supposed to be outside that too. I.e. the claim amounts to the claim that God is outside reality itself. In other words it is incoherent. The question of whether there could be evidence for it is meaningless.
Oh, I agree that any X which is supposed to be “outside of space and time” is in a very dicey situation indeed. However, I know enough about physics and cosmology (virtually nothing) to know I can’t –and shouldn’t — make any blanket pronouncements on what physics and cosmology might eventually come up with regarding the possibility of an outside to space and time and what sort of thing an X in that situation might be. Reality is often counterintuitive … and they get to use math.
But minds are familiar things, and I think we can be much more confident that minds and intentions and persons and “creative forces”(bleecch) are NOT going to be capable of being “outside of space and time” in any coherent way whatsoever.
I don’t think any theist really means anything too specific (or scientific) when they say “God is outside of space and time.” Instead, they think thoughts/emotions/abstractions and God exist in some parallel mental-reality bound by no laws except the imagination. “Outside of space and time” is like newage “energy.” You slide around it by considering analogies and figure you get it ‘well enough.’
First, it wouldn’t supernatural if it exists. It would just be super natural.
Second, if you believe in the absoluteness of time and space, you’ll have problem finding God because time and space are precisely what puts a veil between you and God. Or him and him if you prefer.
Third, God doesn’t influence anything, he is the process itself. The reason why you can only see its natural manifestation is because the eyes you are using to look at the creation are God’s eye. But you ignore it because you believe in the absoluteness of time and space.
It is a vicious circle. The eye can’t look at itself. Well it can, but it takes another perspective. The oriental traditions are all about getting that perspective…
Exactly how did you come to know so much about God?
Oh yeah, you simply defined God that way.
Please answer this question: Is Jesus God?
The reason they are not testable is that the concepts are incoherent. There is no “God Hypothesis” there are a lot of irreconcilable “notions” that, scientifically speaking, are not even wrong.
I actually found the first two articles (the tendency people have to see agency and the “evolutionary” arms race between belief systems tending to make them larger and more all encompassing, quite interesting. As both said, there is no evidence for God there, but there are explanations on why it is hard to shake the idea off.
I actually found Stenger’s the least interesting, but I don’t like his style much, which may account for it.
While I haven’t read the articles you mention, I’ve never understood why we’re supposed to take evidence that the human brain has a seemingly innate tendency to anthropomorphize, invoke teleology, think magically, and categorize things in terms of essences … and then assume an accomodationist stance on science and religion.
Instead, this line of evidence seems to me to be a formidable part of the gnu atheist arsenal: not only do we have no good reasons to believe God exists and many good reasons to think it doesn’t, but we ALSO have a good explanation for why so many people — including intelligent people — believe it exists even though it doesn’t. Anthropological, psychological, and neurological evidence for the tendency people have to see agency and the evolution of religion help falsify the theory. God must exist because so many people think it does? No. Here is what is happening …
The only reason accomodationists think this comes out on their side is that they apparently assume
1.) natural = good, so if superstition and supernaturalism are “natural” and a normal part of human development then they must be a necessary and vital part of what it means to be human.
2.) Once you’re approaching religious belief from the standpoint of psychology or anthropology you’re no longer allowed to tell anyone they’re “wrong.” Good therapists understand where the subjects are coming from and step back in respect for their needs and identity. No interfering.
Both assumptions seem silly to me. And wrong.
Agreed.
New Scientist continues to find new ways to disappoint me.
Yeah. I gave up on them years ago.
I gave up when they devoted the lead article to uncritical coverage of some hocus-pocus spacecraft propulsion system. The so-called “EmDrive” blatantly violated conservation of momentum, despite them confidently explaining to the reader that it was fully supported by known physical principles.
Agree with review. I hope Dawkins or someone similar writes a critique on that issue, or of certain articles. Has NS been co-opted by the wishy-washy middle that wants science and religion to overlap?? I enjoy NS a lot but am not sure how reader friendly it is, albeit providing a fun last page. I wrote once suggesting some discussion, on the use of animals in research – never a reply word. Which is OK. I did suggest that I wished when a medical discovery or research result was introduced, the media fanfare would include a salute to the animals used in the process. Not necessarily to condemn or applaud the use, merely to acknowledge it, with respect. Don’t think NS liked that idea.
Which all has nothing to do with the topic. Sorry….infatuation with sound of own words department.
New Scientist has sucked for a decade or two now, going shallow in the search for an audience.
… & larger audience = increased ad revenue
It was never the same after Daedalus left.
I agree that it was a very weak issue, but not for the reasons you cite. The first article, on the psychology of how children assign agency to events, was actually fairly interesting. The Stengler was the nadir, since it promised to offer some science but gave nothing but claims without data. A cheerleading cheer for the atheist viewpoint.
New Scientist always disappoints me when they take on anything having to do with faith, God, and science. The editorial bias toward atheism is so strong, they simply seem unable to engage the subject objectively.
The biggest mistake people of science can make is to assume that people of faith are simplistic and stupid. Or that they’re the enemy. If that’s the position you take, you become part of the problem, not the solution.
I’ve commented at somewhat greater length on my own forum (under my name, above).
I don’t think the ‘people of science’ assume that the ‘people of faith’ are simplistic and stupid. On the contrary. They assume that the ‘people of faith’ are capable of understanding and approaching their beliefs objectively — from a scientific approach. And that they will be interested in the results.
Don’t you think the scientific approach to the God hypothesis is the most objective approach?
I would neither classify myself as a “person of science” nor as a “person of faith”, but I do know this: some people believe the most stupid rubbish imaginable.
I’m new to this website, so you people may already know this, but there is a scientific experiment that can be used to test the existence of God. See First Kings 18:20-39. We tried it out at last year’s neighborhood barbeque and I won ten bucks.
That reminds me: have you heard Mendelssohn’s Elijah?
It is phenomenal.
What do you think of Stainer’s Crucifixion?
I’m in favour of it.
It’s a solid piece. Maybe could’ve benefited from more variety, i. e., some contrapuntal writing. It’s almost all homophonic, and it’s a long piece.
I referenced Elijah since it contains the scene in which Baal and Yaweh are “tested.”
I usually get the New Scientist from the public library but I saw the God edition in the supermarket and picked it up. A flyer fell out: “Go mad with the New Scientist!”
I knew Monte Lloyd, I studied with Monte Lloyd- a good visual memory can be a key gift for good times with evolutionary ecologists, Monte Lloyd was a friend of mine. Jerry Coyne is no Monte Lloyd. And some would say, thank god for that.
However, he is correct. Alain de Botton is “cringe-making” and the usual atheists-should-have-the-trappings-of-faith is in fact tripe.
However statements like this from VS: “No doubt, science has its limits. However, the fact that science is limited doesn’t mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits.” ORLY. That is like saying Yoga, Tai Chi, Kung Fu or Zen meditation, …, do not have insight and power beyond the limits of science and reason.
OK, I’ll bite. What insights do they have beyond the limites of science and reason? (The only way I can see for this statement to be true is for you to be using specially-circumscribed meanings of “science” or “reason”.)
What insights lie beyond the limits of science and reason? Are you kidding me? The Victor Stenger statement is that not only religion but ANY alternative system of thought (religion is not defined as a system of thought by the way) can provide insight beyond the limits of science. That does not strike you immediately as a ridiculous statement, an absurdity? Where do I begin. Yes, love, music, art, literature, …, have no insights outside the limits of science. Or there is no knowledge outside of science and human reason out there. Ever encounter the concept of ignoramus et ignorabimus and the famous reaction Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen! which is on Hilbert’s grave? That is the slogan of a hungry scientific ghost. Veeeee villlll knooooow….Veee muuuuust knooooow!! You want specific examples from Yoga things Chinese do with Chi or do I really have to proceed?
How about this howler from the same article:
“Religion has destroyed our trust by its repeated failure. Using the empirical method, science has eliminated smallpox, flown men to the moon, and discovered DNA. If science didn’t work, we wouldn’t do it. Relying on faith, religion has brought us inquisitions, holy wars, and intolerance. Religion doesn’t work, but we still do it.
Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.”
Uhh, brilliant logic there Professor. You know, where the conclusion is contrary to the point you want to make. Apparently Religion DOES work and really well. Enough to motivate some of us to fly us into buildings and be the most serious menace to world peace we now have. Good god, how can anyone take such shoddy reasoning and writing seriously? Embarrassing.