UPDATE: Eric MacDonald has posted a longer piece on Stannard’s column at his own site, Choice in Dying.
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It always sickens me to hear theologians, or other religious folk, say that we scientists need more humility. As if we aren’t already humble—at least compared to the faithful!
While scientists worry about problems in the faster-than-light neutrino experiment, try to find ways to test string theory, puzzle over dark matter, and argue about why animals reproduce sexually rather than asexually (a big problem for evolutionists!), theologians claim that they know not only that God exists but also know some things about his nature: he’s infinite, loving, omniscient, omnipresent, has always existed, is present as a single entity rather than as multiple deities, and so on. They know that Jesus was resurrected, that the path to heaven demands accepting him as a personal saviour, or that the Qur’an was dictated by Allah. And they know there’s a soul, and that we live on in some form after death. There is of course no evidence for any of this, but we don’t hear much doubt about it. Which Imam says, “There is no God but Allah—I think“?
So who are the humble ones, and who are arrogant? Who admits that they don’t know for sure, and that their truths are provisional, and who claims inerrancy and possession of the absolute truth?
Russell Stannard is a nuclear physicist in the UK who has published a piece in HuffPo called “Science: A call for humility.” A call from a scientist for other scientists to be humble immediately sets off alarm bells. And, indeed, looking up his bio, one finds this:
He is a Licensed Lay Minister in the Episcopal Church, and has spent a year at the Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton. He has carried out research at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, and at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley. Among his numerous awards he has received the Bragg Medal from the UK’s Institute of Physics, the UK Project Trust Award of the John Templeton Foundation, and has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by The Queen, and a Fellow of University College London.
Oh, and Wikipedia adds this important bit of information:
In 1986, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for ‘significant contributions to the field of spiritual values; in particular for contributions to greater understanding of science and religion’.
In other words, brace yourself for a homily on how science doesn’t know everything, that we can’t truly understand the world because it’s filtered through our imperfect senses, and so on. Although Stannard doesn’t say it explictly, I suspect he claims that there are other ways of knowing that help us understand the things that science can’t. Guess what, given the bio above, those other ways of knowing might be?
It doesn’t take long for Stannard to bring up the s-word (my emphasis):
According to [Stephen Hawking}, scientists will in time be able to explain everything and there is no need for other kinds of thinking (which, it should be noted is in itself an expression of the philosophical position known as scientism).
Hawking, in particular, claims to have solved the age-old problem: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” His answer? M-theory. M-theory spontaneously created the universe out of nothing. It created this universe and countless others. He concludes that M-theory is “a candidate for the ultimate theory of everything… the only candidate.”
But even if the M-theory hypothesis is correct, does it in fact answer the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It would certainly account for the existence of the world. But would it not raise a fresh question: “Where did M-theory come from? What is responsible for its existence?”
This brings us up against what one suspects is a fundamental limitation of the scientific enterprise. The job of science is to describe the world we find ourselves in — what it consists of, and how it operates. But it appears to fall short of explaining why we are presented with this kind of world rather than some other — or why there should be a world at all.
If there turn out to be multiverses, and that in only some of them would the evolution of sentient life be possible, then that would answer Stannard’s question. (The Big Bang tells us “why there should be a world at all.”) Or maybe we won’t know. But physicists are trying. I’ll tell you an answer that is a science-stopper, though—and probably Stannerd’s answer—”God did it.”
He goes on with a common “anti-scientism” trope:
Indeed, there is cause to wonder whether science even gets as far as describing the world. For instance, what is the world made of? One might answer in terms of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up atoms. But what are electrons, protons and neutrons? Quantum physics shows how they are observed to behave like waves as they move about. But on reaching their destination and giving up their energy and momentum they behave like tiny particles. But how can something be both a spread out wave with humps and troughs, and at the same time be a tiny localized particle? This is the famous wave/particle paradox. It afflicts everything, including light.
. . . We said earlier that the job of science is to describe the world. In order to do this, we have to observe it to find out what kind of world it is. But having made the observations (done the experiments) what we write down in our physics textbooks is a description of the world itself, regardless of whether one happens to be observing it. Bohr, and other adherents to his so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, claimed that this was not so. What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. — they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.
Of course our understanding of the world is filtered through our senses, but it’s a damn good assumption that there’s a world out there that really can be described, and that our senses, refined via science, can give us a good description of it. We know our descriptions are good because they make testable predictions: they enable us to fly to the Moon, to cure smallpox, and to measure the speed of light. That’s good enough for me. If the world is an illusion, it’s an illusion that we can really understand in meaningful ways.
Religion, in contrast, helps us understand nothing about the universe. Different religions give different descriptions of the exterior “reality” (and yes, both theologians and the garden-variety faithful often describe religious claims as “realities”), so which one is right? We can’t do tests to see if the claims of Christianity are better than those of Islam. And anyway, the predictions drawn from religion are either false (“if God is omnipotent and beneficent, there would not be evil”), or unfalsifiable, and hence can be ignored.
And here’s a base canard from Stannard:
. . . Finally we ask whether the scientific enterprise, even in this more limited domain of describing only interactions with the world rather than the world itself, might one day achieve complete knowledge. I think not. After all, what do we do our science with? Our brain. But how come we have a brain? It is something that evolved in response to the need of our ancestors to find food, shelter, and avoid predators. It enabled them to survive to the point where they could mate and pass on their genes. The brain was part of their survival kit. Why therefore should anyone think that such an imperfect instrument should be capable of mastering all knowledge regardless of whether it has any relevance to survival?
This is straight out of Alvin Plantinga: we have a brain evolved for survival, not for truth, so why should we rely on it to find truth? (Plantinga’s answer is that God gave us a truth-finding sense, and it’s this sense we use to perceive His Divine Wonderfulness).
The scientific answer is that we could survive only by perceiving the truth about the world. Are there predators around? Where can I find gazelles, or roots? Is it likely to rain? Does that hominin over there intend to hurt me? It is that complex, evolved neurology that we can co-opt through science to study things our savannah-dwelling ancestors never dreamed of.
And yes, our “common senses” are sometimes fooled, which is why we develop scientific instruments to refine and extend them. And the existence, and success, of quantum mechanics shows that we’re perfectly capable of wrapping our brain around things that are counterintuitive and would have been completely alien to our ancestors.
There is no scientist I know who thinks that we’ll be able to answer all the questions about the universe. Some answers require knowledge that simply isn’t available to us (this is common in evolution, since many questions demand knowledge about the past that we don’t have); others simply might elude our limited brain (as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose). To be a scientist is to know that you’ll forever live in doubt.
But that’s okay, because the doubt diminishes in proportion to how much stuff we find out, and we’re always finding out stuff. Yet there will always be unanswered questions and, as string theory shows, answers that we might not be able to verify.
But none of this justifies “other ways of knowing”—most especially religion. If science has its limits, and it might, religion doesn’t even get off the starting blocks. Since there’s no evidence for a divine being, there’s no reason to pay attention to any of it.
So scientists are humble. If you read Feyman, for instance, you’ll hear over and over again the refrain, “I don’t know.” Same with Carl Sagan. And we continue to live in ignorance: what is all that dark matter, for instance? We have no problem living with doubt or admitting ignorance, but our goal is to dispel them.
Scientists’ humility is the admission, “We don’t know—maybe that’s just the way things are. But we’ll try to find out why.” Religion’s arrogance is to claim that “This ignorance is evidence for God.”
Do note that Stannard’s piece appears in the HuffPo Science section.
“Humility is the first of the virtues – for other people” (this is a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Professor at the Breakfast Table.
The trope ‘scientists / evolutionists are lacking ‘humility’ is dear, not only to religious people but also to many academics ‘doing’ science studies or cultural studies of science.
Humility is overrated anyway – some of the best scientific discoveries were produced by people who were far from humble, from Isaac Newton to James Watson.
My favorite application of humility is when a student tried to argue that science and religion are not really distinct; they had to go hand in hand because God will continue to ALLOW us to make scientific progress as long as we remain humble. Again, I thought of Watson …
Well, since we have references to Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Watson on humility, this obviously cues a quote from “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”, with Sherlock Holmes talking to Doctor John Watson:
I had the same thought… while its important to question and test, and to be thorough, there comes a point where you have to have confidence in your results, because sometimes you’ll find things that contradict the findings of others. The trick is getting to an Evidence Based Confidence and not letting it blind you to other problems in your work.
But I also see humility, as it is used by religious people, as meaning less ‘being measured in the confidence of your assumptions’ and more ‘don’t question what our church says, ever’.
When you’ve got it, flaunt it.
I don’t insist that this entire universe was created especially for me and the bunch of apes that I’m a member of. How’s that for humility theists?
I actually think it was created for the Bonobos, but something went amiss…
No no no, for the organisms that thrive best – the bacteria. Multicellular organisms were created by them as artificial environments.
So, God is a bacterium? That’s more than I give him credit for.
Nah, he just as an inordinate fondness for them.
Well, as Brother Behe has noticed, the Almighty did see fit to install little outboard motors on some of them! And here we are, walking around on legs like a bunch of idiots.
No, it was created for the mice, to find the ultimate question.
+42
Surely, “What is 0+42?”?
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The universe was created to give hydrogen a place to play.
Na, it was made for all that very cold vacuum.
And look what hydrogen made!
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I agree with the position of this post: the theists are the arrogant ones.
I would suggest that the vulnerable soft spot for the position of science is this: we give the neo-Platonists too much credit. This is especially true of the Hume-to-Popper discredit of induction.
Neo-Platonism, even stripped nearly bare, still contains a seed of belief (as opposed to a seed of doubt) in the supernatural. It equates to: don’t be so sure that the Aristotelean “this world of particulars” is the only world. It also pulls from the notion that only an advanced elite of cognoscenti can discern things in themselves with special ways of knowing and the rest of us are positioned somewhere in the cave with finite and faulty senses.
With that said, praise is due for these two paragraphs….
“The scientific answer is that we could survive only by perceiving the truth about the world (is it really an illusion that there are predators out there, and that when we sense their presence we have a physiological reaction?). It is our complex neurology that we can co-opt through science to study things our savannah-dwelling ancestors never dreamed of.
And yes, our “common senses” are sometimes fooled, which is why we develop scientific instruments to refine and extend them. And the existence, and success, of quantum mechanics shows that we’re perfectly capable of wrapping our brain around things that are counterintuitive and would have been completely alien to our ancestors.”
Theists arrogant? I’m not so sure. They mostly believe that they are infinitely (?) inferior to a higher being, who requires them to grovel in prayer or worship. For me, the grovelling is the unpalatable bit.
But the higher being — the infinite creator of the universe — exists only to look after you and tweak your behaviour. How cool is that? It’s like having Angelina Jolie as your own personal nanny!
It’s a “Stannard error” to think humility = law giver. In other words, be humble and insert your unfalsifiable variable with empirical impunity.
If you read the paper, it is an honest exposé about the limits of science and our senses. Nowhere he talks about a law giver or scientism. Is it that hard to admit that science has limits and that our senses may not be able to have access to an absolute answer?What is wrong with:
“All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. — they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.
Not that there is anything new in this. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had long ago asserted that one could know nothing about the thing-in-itself. (So much for the death of philosophy).”
-Stannard
“Science is limited in its application -> Religion picks up where science leaves off -> ergo god (law giver)”
And “scientists should embrace humility” can be translated as “just fricking go with it when I say that religion can answer certain questions and science can’t.”
You seem to have missed the last step in Stannard’s flow chart, which is the same flow chart used by any who bandy about the term “scientism.”
Also, Jerry quoted a portion from Stannard’s piece which includes a reference to scientism.
Because of Stannard’s past articles, Jerry lends to the paper a lot of things that it doesn’t say. That article could have been written by an atheist and certainly an agnostic. There are legitimate questions raised that I think could be addressed more seriously.
Popper himself acknowledged that scientism is a real thing, not just a theist fantasy. As you know, this is the same guy who brought the concept of falsifiability…
But are we arguing for scientism every time we suggest that science has limits? If the answer is yes, well I would say this is a soft scientism. And if the answer is yes, Stannard is definitely right about humility…
the solution to this is to reject Kant and Popper.
ding on sich is a deliberate attempt to sustain Platonistic idealism. Platonism is incompatible with science.
All there are are dinge.
Of course, as Heisenberg knew when not on “philosophical holiday” of course we can talk about the world in itself. You do that any time you use a scientific theory that makes no reference to human beings. That one does so forever imperfectly and through concepts we invent is besides the point.
What’s the alternative to the scientific method? Sitting around, waiting for a revelation? Finding answers in an ancient tome written by people who believed that diseases were caused by demons?
apparently that works for 42% of Americans.
The funny thing is, even theists agree that revelation is a ridiculously stupid method and there’s no reason to expect its results to be correct…when it comes to anyone else’s revelation. It works for me, but not for thee.
It is not for nothing that Revelation is by far the craziest part of the Bible (quite an accomplishment, that). Undiluted insanity.
It also doesn’t work too well for them when it comes to their day-to-day lives. Faith in revelation is fine for determining the infinite fate of your eternal soul, but not for buying a used car.
I think this great divide started when our ancestors still sitting in the caves at night. One group routinely going out and finding things like gazelle, yams etc. The other prefer to ponder where gazelles come from inside the cave.
The second group might make it right once in a while, and joined by the elders.
Later they control the distribution of yams and gazelle meats inside the group, and demand obedience “for the good of the group”. It is still happening now. God question is mostly a matter of social power and how to achieve it. Religions are social ladders, those who can climb it be rich, those who can’t (supposedly) grovel ..
I think, as social evolution goes, something like religions definitely has to occur, and once it did occur, it will cling to (social) power with nails and claws. That’s exactly what happened.
Religion is an arsenal in human social struggles, a very successful one. The other part of it, like the stories, the book, the revelations, are just accessories to the main goal as social weapon.
» Russell Stannard:
Why therefore should anyone think that such an imperfect instrument should be capable of mastering all knowledge regardless of whether it has any relevance to survival?
Incidentally, this is another instance of justificationism: the idea that knowledge needs to be derived from some authoritative source and only then becomes ‘justified true belief’. But all sources of ideas are fallible, and it is only by rational criticism that we can arrive at what can properly be called objective knowledge—which is always subject to revision in the face of new evidence, new problems, or simply better explanations.
Stannard’s comment also seems to be heading toward the cliff of solipsism, the last resort of a theist. He wants to claim we can’t know things “perfectly”, which leads right to this. If we can’t be sure of reality by our brains in large part, Stannard should have no problem in holding a white hot piece of iron since he can’t be sure it’s real and second, surely his magical god should protect him.
Oh no, for you see, his God is afraid of iron!
” And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron – Judges 1:19 “
I first read that as “God is afraid of irony” … made me think of The Name of the Rose:
But that quotation ⇒ God is not omnipotent. Or was it just that Judah’s faith wasn’t strong enough?
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When I first began reading this post I thought maybe we would see a real, scientific plea for humility, something we genuinely need. In 1900 Lord Kelvin announced that we understood everything in physics except for “two little clouds on the horizon”. Those clouds led to quantum physics and relativity and overturned the ontology of classical physics. Today we stand at an even more difficult moment in time, as we find that we still cannot reconcile those two theories, QM and relativity, and worse, the universe seems to mostly consist of a class of material (dark matter) that we know nothing about! There are plenty of good reasons to be humble. But then I saw the word “Templeton”….
Still, I wouldn’t overdo the humility. What we already know is pretty amazing, given our recent origins as savannah-dwelling savages. The Standard Model in physics, the Theory of Evolution, our knowledge of chemistry, etc., etc. What has religion ever produced that can light even the smallest of candles to this?
Yes, the extent of our knowledge is staggering even compared to just 100 years ago. And the contribution of religion to this advancing knowledge is actually negative.
Have you guys read the paper? Nowhere the guy says that religion can compete with science. He doesn’t even talk about religion. He roughly says that science has limits due to our senses and our language. Even an atheist could believe that…
Stannard is a high energy nuclear physicist. He worked at the CERN. I think he knows about science…
But Jerry quotes him as mentioning “scientism”, ergo religion.
this is sort of what you hoped for.
http://edge.org/conversation/a-philosophy-of-physics
Thanks very much Matt for pointing to that very thoughtful interview. I liked this part, which is relevant to past discussions here about L Krauss and philosophy:
“But even Maxwell, Boltzmann, I mean, all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical mind. He says in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading of him that allows him to construct this fantastically new physical theory, scientific theory, which is quantum mechanics.
The divorce between this strict dialogue between philosophers and scientists is very recent, and somehow it’s after the war, in the second half of the 20th century. It has worked because in the first half of the 20thcentury, people were so smart. Einstein and Heisenberg and Dirac and company put together relativity and quantum theory and did all the conceptual work. The physics of the second half of the century has been, in a sense, a physics of application of the great ideas of the people of the ’30s, of the Einsteins and the Heisenbergs.”
“This is a standard idea of how science works, which implies that science is about empirical content, the true interesting relevant content of science is its empirical content. Since theories change, the empirical content is the solid part of what science is. Now, there’s something disturbing, for me as a theoretical scientist, in all this. I feel that something is missing.”
I think the thing he senses that is missing in this world view is a justification for his paycheck. 😉
“Need of humility” is not a testable proposition, so no, we don’t have that nor ever will.
“The ontology” of classical mechanics, whatever that is, didn’t change since classical mechanics didn’t. What changed was only a recognition of an area of applicability, which is a very testable property.
QM and relativity is famously reconciled in quantum field theory. I think you mean that, while you can quantize an effective theory of gravity, you can’t do it sanely for high energies. This is doable in string theory though, which describes gravity more fundamentally than say general relativity, so there is no fundamental problem.
The universe matter-energy consists mostly of dark energy in fact.
And we know a great deal about dark matter, it is already as thoroughly unambiguously observed by gravitational lensing as atoms were by brownian motion at the time they were accepted.
This “imperfect instrument” demonstrates its imperfection precisely due to the development and acceptance of superstitions, religions and other delusions. The current scientific method was developed over time in order to overcome exactly the limitations that exist in our minds; we know that it is possible for the human brain to be fooled into thinking and remembering things that are not true, so science does its best to not allow us to be fooled. Religion, faith and “other ways of knowing” does exactly the opposite.
It is tragic that the authors of such essays describe science as being flawed due to our limited mental capacities, however these same flawed mental capacities are seen as virtues though the prism of Faith, allowing the unreal to be seen and believed. Truly a “different way of knowing.”
Speaking of an `imperfect instrument’, referring to a single human brain, in order to limit our understanding is, rank dishonesty. We owe it to thousands (maybe millions) of human brains working in a trans-national, trans-linguistic, trans-historical-era consort: science. This transcends what that `imperfect instrument’, a single human brain can learn about the world.
Exactly this. While it is true we all have deficiencies; it is untrue that we all have the same ones. My unique inability to understand x is no limitation on anyone else’s ability to do better at it than I myself can do. And even more is this the case when we construct methods of testing and analysis to defeat our limitations.
Excellent point! Yes, one brain is limited and fallible. Millions using similar techniques to overcome their limits and flaws? Freaking limitless in their potential.
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Science = organic cloud computing.
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“A Christian misuses his scientific credentials, calls for humility”.
There. Fixed it for ya. 😉
Scientists thrive on ignorance. Not knowing engenders excitement and curiosity! When the results of an experiment or observation do not match what was expected, that is when the fun starts.
That may be one of the key differences between a beleiver mentality vs a non believer mentality. The unknown results in fear in the one, and curiosity in the other. Retention of juvenile traits? I know I am quite often juvenile.
+1
Scientists thrive on ignorance. Not knowing engenders excitement and curiosity!
Quite right! Boldly going and all that …
Although there’s something also to be said for periodically arriving at plateaus of sorts, even if only to consolidate and get one’s bearings …
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
I ask Russell Stannard why is there a God rather than no God?
Exactly. And why is God the way it is instead of some other way?
Our own minds have a history of development shaped within an environment. Agency evolved from things which were not agents. Desires make no sense unless you have needs, things necessary for existence.
But plop they stick God right at the beginning, with no explanation for why the substrate of all existence is a Mind-like being with values and desires and hey, even a sex! It didn’t GET that way — it always WAS that way.
Instead of something else.
Theism appeals to the intuition that the bottom-line form of existence is a conscious awareness of existing. No, that’s our bottom-line form of existence.
How does a theist determine that it was their god and not some other god what did it? How would our universe differ if it had been put together by the Greek pantheon or Mayan gods rather than by a Yahweh? They think their work is over when they come up with (start out with more like) the answer “god did it.” Okay, which one? Please show your work.
The is a God because without a God, Mr. Stannard would be left with uncomfortable questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” God is necessary to stop the thought process; “God” allows Mr. Stannard to pretend he has answers to such questions.
Why shouldn’t there be something rather than nothing?
All empirical data suggests that “nothing” is unnatural. Even the void is a seething mess of quantum.
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A classic example of Christian humility;
“I am in frequent contact and receive personal attention from the creator of the universe”.
+1
To which the response should be: “And I am Napoleon Bonaparte.”
+1 more
No, no!. I am in frequent contact and receive personal attention from the creator of the universe. You are an error-ridden heretic!
+1
Survival is truth enough.
I’ve got to commend you on this one Jerry.
Well said.
I agree with Stannard that scientists, particularly physicists, need to be more humble. The field is overrun with “Sheldon Coopers” who think their expertise in one narrow field of investigation means they are also experts in every other endeavor, to include epistemology, climatology, sociology, and every other “hard” or “soft” science. They seem to be governed by the credo, those of you who think you know it all are very annoying to us who do.
All physicists want to be Richard Feynman, who knew more about things that are not physics than most physicists, yet still was very open about his limits (see the quote above).
Michio Kaku strikes me as one of the least humble in this respect.
I know he’s telegenic, but I still find it od that Prof. Brian Cox is now filming a natural history program. It must rankle with some of the biology professors in Manchester… 🙂
*odd
As Konrad Lorenz wrote, “It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.”
Our scientific advancement in knowledge is predicated precisely on humility. We strip away implausibility almost every time we do an experiment. We do not pridefully cling to what is not supported unlike millions of devotees for thousands of years.
Feynman was wont to tell his grad students that they should NOT bone up on the literature as they were starting to think about a problem. He wanted them to think it through and out for themselves rather than risk adsorbing a bias from someone else. He was an iconoclast.
Beware — this is a “deepity.” It has two interpretations and switches between them at will, depending on which meaning suits the purpose of the argument. Jerry has only answered ONE version.
The first interpretation is that an imperfect brain can’t know anything at all with any reasonable degree of certainty. This radical form of skepticism is easily refuted. Jerry and other commenters jumped on it and smooshed it.
The other interpretation is that an imperfect brain can’t know everything perfectly, with absolute omniscience and no possibility of error. This assertion is of course true. And no scientist — even the physicists — say otherwise.
But look how Stannard slyly seems to go back and forth between meanings. Scientists think they will know “everything.” They think they will become God. Or, they think they will some day have good, well-established working theories to explain current puzzles regarding origins and states which are today being nonexplained by “God.” Why, it’s both: they’re the same thing.
The whole point of course is to try to keep scientists and other people from applying the scientific method ON God. Religion and spirituality are supposed to be special and exempt from that. “There is something rather than nothing because Someone wanted it that way” is supposed to be a profound insight which satisfies all questions.
Very nice comment. I especially like the last paragraph, and hadn’t really realized until now that the denigration of science by the faithful is intended to do more than simply show that religion does a better job than science at “knowing” some things. That denigration is also an implicit assertion that you can’t test religion with science. That is, there is no “God hypothesis.” God can’t be tested.
The assertion that religion cannot and should not be subject to empirical tests is increasingly common, despite the fact that religion does lay claim to empirical truths. The solution of believers is that revelation is the best way to determine religious “truths”. That is in fact the claim of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, a claim I found surprising in a Harvard psychologist.
And we all know the problems with determining truth by revelation. Look at the Mormon church, where the revelations (their main way of determining truth and morality) conveniently change when the social pressure grows too strong.
In some sense, we can’t test “the God hypothesis” because there isn’t one – there’s a near infinite number of them, all slightly different, and when one does not appear to fit the data, believers just switch to another. Science says the earth is old? Theist responds: young earth God is not the God I’m talking about. People point out there is evil in the world? Theist responds: God who can and wants a perfect world is not the God I’m talking about. And so on.
I call this the theologian two-step. Defend deistic God in the classrooma and on the debate podium; preach miracle-working interventionist God in the pulpit.
I also noticed this shell game (called it Janus apologetics after the two-faced Roman god).
It’s also remarkable how little sophisticated theology is preached in the pulpit even in quite liberal churches.
You’d think the priests could hardly wait to proclaim the newest findings of theology to their flock.
Bart Ehrman makes the same comment in his early books (I haven’t read the last one). He discusses how all seminarians learn all this stuff about the bible and history in divinity school…and then they go off to be priests, and ignore it. You’d think they’d be chomping at the bit to tell their flocks what they have learned about Christianity, but in the vast majority of cases, they actively avoid doing so.
Of course. They want to keep their flocks. If the only god you have is the weak, foggy haze of sophisticated theology, then you’d better have a solid social foundation, or your parishioners will leave. Solid social foundations are hard work. Much easier to feed them pap.
I’ve always said this, the sophisticated theologians and apologist act all reasonable with atheist and agnostics but I bet they race back to their temple and fall on their knees and beg their god not to burn them. Sad, sad losers.
“but I bet they race back to their temple and fall on their knees and beg their god not to burn them. Sad, sad losers.”
No – those “sophisticated theologians and apologists” do not, in the main, believe any of the crap they preach. They made a career choice, they have an easy life with good social standing and perks.. And many of them believe their function is needed by society.
I have met and had open conversations with many senior church leaders who do not believe their ‘holy’ scripts, but preach these as truth – and believe that they are providing a needed function in society.. One extremely senior clergyman, when I exposed my doubts to him, candidly advised me that my belief was unimportant – that most really never believed, but staying in the ‘club’ was a good idea.
– He then showed me his collection of prayer books bibles etc.. some quite ancient – inside the covers were pornographic pictures! Apparently huge quantities of these have been printed over the years, to keep the ‘devout’ more interested in reading the holy texts (LOL), and to appear devout while enduring the sermon.
See PZ on Gawd v. Gwar.
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Yes, I remember reading it last year but thanks for linking it again.
Sean Carroll also observed this switching between the different god concepts several years ago:
The God Conundrum
I bet he isn’t the first one either.
But, science can test them all, at least in principle, until you whittle the squirmy little bastards all the way back to deism. Science has already revealed that all the theist claims are so unlikely as to be unworthy of consideration.
What usually happens is that the theist reaches a point where they just don’t concede that the science is correct and that their belief is wrong, long before they reach a deist position. I sometimes refer to this as checking out of reality.
Or, better yet, some paradoxically do concede that the science is correct, but they still profess to believe! This seems to be pretty common with liberal believer accommodationist types.
I’ve referred to it a few times as the ‘have cake and eat it’ principle of religion; they want a god who they can claim is outside of science when defending it against atheists, but one which also created the universe, performs miracles and came to earth as Jesus when amongst their coreligionists.
» Sastra:
The first interpretation is that an imperfect brain can’t know anything at all with any reasonable degree of certainty. This radical form of skepticism is easily refuted.
I’d say that’s solipsism, and as such is irrelevant. The more interesting observation, I think, is that an imperfect (i.e. fallible) brain cannot gain objective knowledge. That’s what we need a process of rational criticism for, the most specialised of which we call ‘science’.
One of John von Neumann’s most insightful ideas is that you can build a machine of almost perfect reliability out of components of poor reliability, provided you have enough of them and wire them in the right way. I would never trust a single scientist, but a large number of (independent) scientists is another kettle of fish altogether …
Same idea applied to other topics:
– You can have a conscious entity made up of components without consciousness.
– You can have a thing that has free will made up of parts that don’t have free will.
You mean free will can, like … evolve? No way.
Way! 🙂
That’s well put. I am often asked by theists why I trust scientists so much, and my response is pretty much the same. I also add that, although I usually don’t understand the science in-depth, I trust the findings because I trust the method, which I do understand.
Provided, of course, that they are not perfectly unreliable in their degree of unreliability.
“The more interesting observation, I think, is that an imperfect (i.e. fallible) brain cannot gain objective knowledge.”
Au contraire, it is because we have an imperfect brain, I would say mind, that we can look for objective knowledge. There wouldn’t be objectivity if it wasn’t of subjectivity. You just can’t have objective knowledge without having subjective knowledge. They both co-exist and feed each other. Without subjectivity, objectivity wouldn’t make sense!
>>“There is something rather than nothing because Someone wanted it that way”
To a mind that is infused with the Mind-first perspective, this actually is a satisfying answer.
As Dennett observed, Darwin’s dangerous idea is the inversion of the Mind-first reasoning. Evolution taught us that the Mind-first perspective is not always justified, although understandable given that we evolved (it has been advantageous to our survival to have) an agency-detector in our brains that causes us to ask “who did this and why”. Evolution shows that in fact the existence of Minds in our planet came after millions of years of the mindless process evolution.
We know the answer that “Someone wanted it that way” is most likely wrong given the lack of evidence. But the average person may be relying more on the instinctive feeling that the proposition evokes rather than really thinking about it.
Another set up for god of the gaps/argument from ignorance. How unsurprising.
How apologists love to use the word “why” to slip intention in where it does not belong. “Why is there a light switch here?” is a valid “why” question. “Why is there a valley here?” is answered in a way consistent with “How did a valley come to be here?”
Such a loaded question. How about “why are all theists immoral?”. Some questions you need to reject outright.
“What is responsible for its existence?”
I know! I know! It’s Tezcatlipoca! Or is it Kali? Maybe Anasi? Coyote? Ah, yes, Coyote would be the one to come up with brane theory.
In that we have no evidence for these gods or poor Stannard’s god, there’s no reason to think that their delusions. Oh the arrogance in his attempt to claim his little episcopal god is the only “right” one. Rather sad that all his argument comes down to is “We don’t know, so my god did it. And please don’t point out I have no evidence to support the lies I tell.”
I had no idea Peter Coyote came up with brane theory. Must’ve been all that acid he did in the 60s.
> Polkinghorne’s answer is that God gave us a > truth-finding sense, and it’s this sense we > use to perceive His Divine Wonderfulness
Pass … bucket … hmfph!
Not if it’s full of what I think it is!
Sub.
Did anyone find this guy’s Templeton paper? I can almost predict the contents, they really get rather formulaic after a bit. Sounds familiar, huh?
Some quibbling, quibbling, quibbling…
The answer to that is that mathematics is sufficiently powerful that it can describe any self-consistent system.
A marginally more interesting question is why it can be described with mathematics simple enough that humans can understand. However, it should be noted that the parts described with simpler mathematics tend to be recognized earlier; and that complex systems can result in simpler macroscopic approximations. Relatedly, I’d point out that the “inversely proportional to the square of the distance” is the Newtonian approximation; the Einstein field equations give a non-identical and more precise formulation involving tensor calculus, which reduce to the Newtonian at low speed.
It’s possible that more obnoxious math still may give a more precise answer.
My answer is that technically, this is taken as an assumption (considering “laws” as referring to the grammar underlying some pattern recognizable by some ordinal degree of hypercomputation); and that in fact there is a logically consistent alternative that results from taking the Refutation instead — in which case, any appearance of order is merely a local phenomenon in a sufficiently large Ramsey sea of chaos.
However, I’ve not encountered any theists willing to abide by that premise and its implications for their theology.
Technically, the potential for good description results as an inference of the existence of a description.
Stannerd also seems to be making too much ado with “not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world”. OK, if one is being pedantic, the description is of experience, and of how such experiences can be produced from a conjectured underlying framework, which description is (given the consequences of the aforementioned assumption of “some pattern”) more probably correct than other candidates.
So, yes, it’s not a description of the world, per se; it’s a description of an abstract system that is inferred to have a one-to-one correspondence to the empirically experienced world. This is an awfully, awfully thin hair to split, even in philosophy.
I would note bacteria collectively seem to do quite well at surviving with rather less perception of truth than humans.
I would note bacteria collectively seem to do quite well at surviving with rather less perception of truth than humans.
That really depends on what you mean by “perception”. They are certainly influenced by their environment, and their survival depends on having the “correct” responses to various external stimuli.
Exactly. Perhaps “perception” and “truth” should be clearly defined at the beginning, but the context is pretty clear. Clearly they don’t have nervous systems capable of modeling their environment as a human does, but they have evolved behaviors and responses to stimuli that are accurate enough that they continue to exist.
Awaiting moderation? Did I do something wrong?
Well, there is a deeper point here about the nature of quantum reality that you are missing. Heisenberg wasn’t just splitting hairs, he and later physicists were actually noticing something deeply disturbing about the nature of reality. This was brought to a head quite recently by Bell in his famous Bell’s Inequality. The existence of a real world (with certain apparently-reasonable properties) underlying our observations can be tested by this inequality, and experiments show that the inequality is violated–there is no local real world underlying our observations! Today I stumbled onto a website which explains Bell’s inequality by analogy with choosing pizza toppings! This is a must-read for philosophers:
http://physics.illinois.edu/outreach/saturdayphysics/2005/weissman.pdf
These inequalities yield one of the deepest insights ever into the nature of reality, or lack of reality. This is a remarkable union of mathematics and philosophy.
I am not sure that is the standard interpretation of Bell inequality
“violation”.* Bell’s inequality just gives gives us an empirical test to check if long range correlations predicted by quantum entanglement actually exist. The inequality just places an upper limit on the maximum correlation between two spatially separated systems that can exist under an appropriate definition of a classical “local” hidden variable theory. Experiments show that this upper limit is violated, and the actual observed correlation is (withing limits of experimental error) the same as that predicted by Quantum mechanics. If anything, Bell’s inequality gives us more evidence that our “real world” is indeed Quantum mechanical.
*Also, I am not sure Bell’s inequality is a recent discovery. I wasn’t sure of the exact date of the paper, so I looked it up: Bell proposed the test in 1964.
Sorry, I must be older than you. I began to study Bell’s inequality in the 1970’s, “recent” compared to Schroedinger and Heisenberg, but it is probably all ancient history to younger people.
No, Bell’s inequality is not really about QM, and that is the point of the pizza topping link I included. Bell’s inequality is a beautifully simple deduction about how certain kinds of variables must behave if local realism were true. It applies just as well to choosing pizza toppings as to observing photon polarizations. It is not violated by pizza-topping choosers, but it is violated by certain photons and other QM systems. The conclusion is that there is no underlying locally-deterministic reality. Heisenberg and Bohr were right, Einstein was wrong.
I agree with your last sentence– the violation of Bell’s inequality proves that the weirdness of QM is inherent in “reality” and not a matter of incomplete knowledge of classically-behaving hidden variables. But “reality” is very different from what any of us imagine.
Oh dear. I wasn’t even born in the 1970’s, and my parents were still in high school. 🙂
Yes, I agree. As I said in my comment, Bell’s inequality just gives an upper bound on correlations that can exist between classical systems obeying certain kinds of local hidden variable theories. However, it is still true that in experiments that violate the inequality, the correlations turn out to be the same as those predicted by QM; which is why Bell’s inequality is so important for the experimental validation of QM.
Also, at least in the computer science literature (which is what I am more familiar with), Bell’s inequality is almost always viewed in a player-referee game setting (the couples in your link acting as players, whose responses the referee evaluates), with the inequality being a statement about the possible game theoretic “value” of the game for the players (of course, this is typically done without the pizza :)). So I assumed that this was, at least currently, the more popular formulation of the inequality in physics circles too, and this in hindsight, appears to have been a hasty assumption.
That is an interesting take on Bell’s inequality. I had not known anything about this game-theoretic interpretation, but it makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
So when humans try to play games with the rest of the universe, some more obscure laws of physics act as referee.
This old Non Sequitur cartoon calls it a “designated driver” ….
Although I think one might reasonably argue that since “sound” includes the “sensations of vibrations” part of the argument presented isn’t entirely correct ….
Bell’s inequality, and QM in general, have *nothing* to do with realism. Rather, the question (as the orignal terminology makes clear) is over sharp/spread (or “blunt”). Classically, say, position is a single value; in QM it is in general a distribution. But this distribution itself has nothing to do with our knowledge or any other even more subjectivist notion. This has been made repeatedly and perfectly clearly since, at least, 1967. (See M. Bunge [ed], _Quantum Theory and Reality.)
Keith, Bell’s inequality has *everything* to do with realism. Violation of Bell’s inequality shows that Einstein’s definition of local realism (as expressed in his famous 1935 paper with Podolsky and Rosen) is false.
It took some time for people to understand the real meaning of the violation of Bell’s inequality. See Bernard d’Espagnat’s 1979 Scientific American article “The Quantum Theory and Reality,” and his excellent book “Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” (1976), for good discussions. And see the link I cited above, which clarifies its meaning by applying it to pizza topping preferences (which thankfully do NOT violate Bell’s inequality).
Sadly, d’Espagnat won the 2009 Templeton Prize….but he was still a key person in the struggle to understand and test Bell’s inequality.
Maybe d’Espagnat is a reasonable person after all…
But that debate over sharp/blunt or sharp/distribution is the point. This has, again, *nothing* to do with realism as understood by the philosophical tradition.
For example, take a momentum distribution for a quantum system. This is (as examining the theory carefully will show) is independent of any psychological entities and if the theory is stated cautiously enough one can definitely avoid them. This makes it a “realistic” theory in that sense. It doesn’t make it a true one (though contemporary quantum theories are very true) nor does it make it a classical one, where all properties are sharp (single valued). But distributions are common properties of systems – think Maxwell-Boltzmann – what is unusual, perhaps, in quantum theories is that single entities (though that’s vexed too) have them. Also what is unusual is that systems are in a certain way “non-separable” – this is what entanglement is.
Understanding entanglement is not easy, and I have made my mistakes on that from time to time. But again, an entangled system has its non-local properties independent of any “mind” or similar entity. So the subjectivist interpretations are wrong, and realism is once again vindicated.
Einstein himself is partially to blame for the departure from tradition, who (given what he knew about philosophy) apparently should have known better. EPR’s paper is important, and brings up some important questions which are important for the foundations of physics, but unfortunately philosophically it still muddies the waters. If you have access to the volume I mentioned in the last message there are quite a few papers which make this perfectly clear or to Bunge’s _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_, volume 7 of that has a very handy chart which translates the “physicist speak” from the early-mid 20th century into traditional philosophical speak (including the notorious “observer”).
None of this detracts from Bell and Aspect’s respective accomplishments – they are of profound importance.
Keith, I unfortunately don’t have access anymore to that volume; I live in a remote Andean village.
I never said anything about a subjectivist interpretation of QM. I never said anything about an observer. I said local realism as defined by EPR is ruled out. Surely you agree with that.
From the perspective I’m working from, this just means that particles and other local phenomena aren’t “real”; rather, it’s the probabilities (or, more accurately, probability amplitudes) of particles that is closer to “real”.
Though string theory probably comes closer still; however, I’ve not had the time to wade through enough of the math to follow it.
That is absurdly wrong. As I commented below, Deustch shows how reality is tested by every mechanics proposed (classical and quantum).
Bell test experiments confirm relativity and deepen its sense of locality – spacetime is emergent. Maybe that is what you mean, that spacetime is known by relativity to not be fundamental (even before Bell tests).
If this is a response to my post, could you explain? I did not say that the violation of Bell’s inequality disconfirms relativity. I said it disconfirms the concept of local reality as defined by Einstein in his EPR paper. I stand by that. This is the standard interpretation as well.
If your comment wasn’t directed at me, “Nevermind.”
I was about to make the same points.
Nature doesn’t conform to models. Our models conform to nature.
Jerry’s response that M-theory “comes” from Witten is a good response. Models and theories don’t exist on their own, waiting for an explorer to stumble across them, as if they’re geographical locations.
Clear, penetrating thinkers simply look at facts about the world, and try to relate them in a conceptual framework. The theories don’t “come” from anywhere aside from the scientist’s mind.
…to a point. A slight difficulty is that mathematical models are abstract relational entities, just much as the number 65536 is. Both exist abstractly whether or not they have instantiated existence — say, instantiated by human recognition of their having correspondence to some property of experiential reality.
Further, it’s philosophically possible to indeed stumble across theories by nigh-geographic exploration; essentially, brute force throwing a data set at each of the countably infinite set of recursively enumerable computation models in turn. (Diagonalized so you don’t spend an infinite amount of time at the first non-convergent or otherwise non-halting model you encounter.)
In practice, absolutely no-one in their right mind even tries doing this, because it takes too much computation work.
More quibbling:
The answer is actually that we developed math to be useful and we use it because it proved to be useful. Other, more arcane maths (say, not based on integers) are possible.
I have always believed in Powers Greater Than Myself. My favorite? gravity. Every single time I have dropped something, it has always fallen… down! Every single time! Makes it so much easier to find things. Reliability! I LOVE THAT in a power!
But Dr. Coyne’ s list of going to the Moon, curing smallpox, and knowing the speed of light, that’s cool, too.
Bell’s inequality tops all of those.
Christian humility? Read this letter from a loving Christian father on PuffHo.
Lastly, I can speak on this subject very clearly as I am the Father of a child that has chosen the homosexual lifestyle. Even now as I’m writing you this email, my son is lying in a hospital bed dying from his acts of homosexuality. His Mother and I raised him to know Christ, but as a young man he took up this lifestyle against our counsel. Because of his lifestyle and nothing else, he is now facing death. Just know that our sins are forgivable and God is a gracious and loving God, but he is very, very clear about the penalties, especially homosexuality. We are saddened and heart broken that our baby son is going to die such a horrible death and is suffering because of his decision to live the homosexual lifestyle. But we also know and knew what God say’s about the wages of sin. The wages of sin are DEATH.
The article writer (Mark Osler) then goes on to perform the No True Scotsman dance.
These people are very, very sick.
what a horrible horrible person that “father” is. Sad that this hateful man is anywhere near his son, with his claims that the only reason that the son is dying being becuase this god hates him.
It seems that this “father” would have had absolutely no problem sacrificing his son to his bloodthirsty god if he thought it wanted that. “Religion poisons everything”.
If this “father” were a real bible believer, he would have had his son put to death. It’s right there in his holy book. So he’s not a complete monster, just a hypocritical one.
If, for the sake of argument, one accepts the view (implicit in this letter) that homosexuality is a deliberate choice, then it’s highly likely that Junior chose to be gay in rebellion against his overbearing parents. Thus making Dad substantially responsible for Junior’s sad fate.
I suppose finding this irresistibly ironic marks me down as a truly evil person. 🙂
From the way this father formulated his letter one could suspect that he consciously chose the heterosexual lifestyle, i.e. because his religion and society expected it and not because he felt any attraction to women.
You probably can estimate how often they had sex with each other by her number of pregnancies.
The quarter-(at most!)-truth that motivates a lot of talk like this was the point of many novels by the subject of yesterday’s post, Ray Bradbury! Our technology (which should be distinguished from science) has outstripped our moral ability to to use it properly. (Note that a lot of public anxiety about science emerged write after the atomic bomb, just as anxiety about religion increased after 9/11).
But a lot of rhetoric which begins this important truth then does a kind of bait-and-switch and then pulls the audience into Stannard’s point of view.
In a separate note,
A cousin of mine once tried to convince a mutual uncle of ours of a miraculous healing he claimed to know of. When my uncle expressed skepticism, my cousin pulled out the old Shakespearean chestnut “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet to Horatio). My uncle replied, “There’s more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, but that’s not one of them!!”
I can’t think of anything more arrogant than claiming to have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe, thinking that he took human form to die for you, and you can live forever in his presence after death. Well, nothing other than thinking that you yourself are the creator of the universe.
Anyone who believes that stuff really has no ground to accuse someone else of lacking humility.
And what I find really interesting is how religions always cloak themselves in the language of humility while building giant palaces and cloaking their clergy in finery. They justify it as being ‘for the glory of God’, but its more for their own authority. Its important for you, the parishioner, to feel humble and weak, not the churchmen, and certainly not religion.
Don’t forget the Feuerbach-Durkheim point that the putatively celestial society is a delayed representation of the relevant one on Earth …
Got news for you. In Mormonism, you will eventually become God of your own universe.
Definite selling point there. No wonder they are a fast growing religion.
I think the fine print says something to the effect that all of those universes exist on the extra dimensions postulated by string theory and that each of them is about a Planck length across …
Never ceases to amaze me that Joseph Smith was supposedly visited by the Angel Moroni – seems likely that someone was having sport with the hapless Mr. Smith … either that or he was the L. Ron Hubbard of his century and wanted to tweak his followers after his death …
Is it better to rule in a Plank width universe than to serve in Heaven?
On the choice of the name Moroni, I vote B.
Welcome to the so called Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. The basic premise of this school is that the “Self” is indistinguishable from the Universe, and its creator, and hence, bingo, you are the creator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta#Mahavakya
This is also the source of a somewhat popular joke in India about three different kinds of yogis (believers of different schools) reaching heaven and standing in front of God’s throne. I’ll let the fine folks at Uncyclopedia take over from here:
“who claims inerrancy and possession of the absolute truth?”
The person who titled this blog, for one.
Ooooh. Zing!
Come on. Even you have to agree there are certain things so thoroughly demonstrated by all kinds of different, objective evidence that we can claim to be inerrant about them.
Earth is round, Sun is the center of the solar system, evolution is true, etc…
I believe Dr. Coyne would be willing to admit that the current model of Evolution is not absolute truth, but merely a close approximation; and that other models will almost certainly be developed to supplant it that are closer approximations still — but maintaining that the current model also well-approximates those models, and that those models are likely to closely resemble the current.
Science has some uncertainties (in physics it’s mostly incredibly small – see the estimated errors in physical constants on the NIST website) therefore science doesn’t know, but god knows it all even though he won’t share that knowledge – isn’t he wonderful?
It’s really perverse when “I’m not 100% sure about this” = arrogant and “I’m absolutely sure and will kill you if you say otherwise” = godly and humble.
Templeton poisons everything (even scientists.)
Remarkably unsophisticated. Suprised about the part where he talks about the brain being just a survival instrument because it evolved for survival, therefore it shouldn’t be useful for anything else, especially anything better than mere survival. We have voices that can sing, fingers that can play guitar, feet that can dance…
That idea comes from an ultra-adaptationist view of evolution according to which every organ and body part is fit for one and only one purpose, its intended function. Darwin discussed (and disproved) this already in The Origin.
What do you expect from a physicist, they are not as sophisamecated as us biologist:-)
Oops sorry, I had Plantinga in mind when I wrote that! He’s one of those sophisticated theologians ^_^
He could have just said this, done the proverbial mike drop and walked away. Nice writeup. Dang, the day I decide to cut out the sites from my reader to focus more on my studies and work, you go and rope me back in.
Found this and thought of all the talk about why American’s don’t accept some science. This has some info on the psychological reasons why we don’t like non-intuitive truths.
” Religion’s arrogance is to claim that This ignorance is evidence for God.”
Absolutely – I’m so sick of religious people saying cause science doesn’t know something that it is evidence of a god! All too often a lovely nice Christian god too that loves us all etc etc. Such nonsense demonstrates their incapacity for logical thought!
Let anyone who believes in God have the humility to say they believe because they want or need to believe and for no other reason.
Then they can warn about scientism.
New slogan:
***Science: A call for realism.***
Btw, Deutsch in his “The Fabric of Reality” gives a good prediction for how science build in realism in mechanics (“constrained reaction on constrained action”) that is generalizable to quantum mechanics (“constrained observables after constrained observation”).
He also efficienty skewer the solipisism (“a description of acts of observation made on the world”) that religious belief want to use as a “science stopper”.
Small typo:
OK, so you say that Stannard wrongly calls people out on scientism. Without really saying why it’s wrong, although perhaps you’ve addressed that elsewhere.
I doubt that science is all the thinking we need because it’s so unclear how science could resolve humanistic issues. Related to the physics-to-human problem, there’s a much tighter micro/macro issue. Currently, although we have physical theories that work for pico things, they haven’t been connected to micro things. For example no one has derived familiar properties of water from QCD, and it’s not clear how to do so.
A further problem with what you’ve said is that, whilst you resist the misinterpretation of science, you interpret “religion” as “making predictions” which happen to correspond to a problem from Aquinas. That’s reducing many, many religions onto a tiny surface (one fallacious proposition).
The logical problem of evil is obviously resolved against the claim of joint omnipotence and omnibenevolence. But that problem doesn’t come from Christ’s teachings per se, rather from a centuries-long project of the Catholic Church to harmonise Hellenic logic with Christian faith. If you don’t believe me–try to find a word like “omnibenevolence” or “omnipotence” in the teachings of Christ. The concepts neither enter the letter nor the spirit, and with good reason: even the idea of omnibenevolence is illogical without modal restrictions. I’m not sure how non-Christian religions (or even the array of Christian religions) deal with omnibenevolence/omnipotence but I would guess that . For example CS Lewis said something to the effect of “Theologians ruin religion.” There’s a nice BBC 4 podcast about William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience that touches on this. (James did not profess a religion) Is religion about theological propositions? Maybe — some would like it to be so. But head over to the Religious Studies department of your local university and you’ll find religion defined as customs, culture, community, … things that have very little to do with “stated belief in Proposition X”. Sure, there may be both mystics and doctrinists influencing and circumscribing the bounds of a faith/practice/religion, but reducing All Religion to just the doctrinal aspects is totally unfair within the scope of your argument.
Then go ask a reasonably close Catholic friend: if X = not just the Nicene Creed but something ridiculous, like X includes literal transubstantiation, you may find quite a lot of mental resistance to X. People may state that they agree to proposition X because they believe that’s what they’re supposed to think. But imagine we could use an fMRI to tell whether a person ACTUALLY THINKS that transubstantiation is going on, or actually sees the face of Christ in the wafer, or something that the doctrine tells them they should do. I bet you would find many/most modern cafeteria Catholics don’t actually think so. Contrast that with an fMRI that registers whether they are experiencing “a variety of religious experience” in some private moment — and I bet you would find that it’s sincere.
Oh, maybe I should have also noted that omnibenevolence is not logically well-defined either. Does that mean Pareto optimal? In what sense can a state-of-the-world be Pareto optimal in conjunction with an unlimited supply? (due to omnipotence)
As I said, these are crude logics that doctrinal theologians have tried to force into Christianity, but I would be wary about equating them with religion, especially when you are expecting respect from the other side.